Andrew Blackman » Writing

The ingredients of fiction

Andrew Blackman — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:06:48 +0000

Writing fiction is not really about making stuff up. It’s more about making sense of what you already have stored somewhere in your memory or subconscious, dusting it off, ordering it and making it intelligible to the rest of the world. The hope is that the things you write about will also resonate with other people, not by teaching them something new, but by helping them to see in a new way the things they already know.

What that means for the process of writing is that things often take me by surprise. Dialogue and details appear as if from nowhere. Sometimes I don’t recognise them at all, which makes me fascinated by Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious (but that’s a subject for another post). More often, I recognise them as things I have come across in life and been affected by in some way.

Photo by Daniel Greene

Here’s an example. When you live in London and travel by Underground train, you’ll hear fairly regularly the announcement that services are being delayed “due to a person under a train”. In order to live in London and function effectively, you have to have a “normal” reaction, i.e. sigh or tut at the delay to your service, look at your watch, perhaps text the person you’re meeting to let them know you’ll be late. What you can’t do is the thing I always do, which is to think about the human being whose life was so painful that they jumped in front of a train and let their body be slammed by the metal and sliced apart by the wheels, to wonder why they did it, what it was like, whether they made eye contact with the train driver, whether in the last second when it was too late, they might have changed their mind.

To me that announcement and the reaction to it say so much about life in London, about the way we block out things that are too painful or difficult, about how disconnected we are from each other. As I said, the “normal” reaction is the one that lets you live in a city, or perhaps even in the world, in a more healthy, happy way. If you think about every suicide, every beggar, every person in a city of 8 million people who gets their hopes trampled on and their dreams destroyed, it can really get you down sometimes. But it seems I am incapable of having the “normal” reaction, and so I am stuck with these thoughts about people I don’t know, and the way I often deal with them is through fiction.

The following is a short extract from my next novel (still in progress), which shows how that particular “person under a train” issue bubbled up from my unconscious mind one day while I was writing a scene.

I willed the train onwards, and it responded by grinding to a halt. A deeply depressed driver announced over crackling speakers that we were being held at a red signal; a few minutes later he returned, slightly more animated, to say that there was a person under a train at Euston, and we wouldn’t be moving for a while. Tuts and sighs escaped briefly from pursed lips. Newspapers were shaken and rearranged, seats creaked and the soles of shoes scraped on the floor. All of this activity seemed to come not from individual people but from the train itself, as if it were a strange animal emitting various noises before finding a comfortable place to settle down. Finally the noises stopped and all that remained was the low throb of the diesel engine and the soft pitter-patter of thumbs on keypads. I had no keypad, so was at a loss. I somehow passed the time – I have no idea how long it was – by staring out of the window at a nineteenth-century brick wall. I felt a strange affinity for the anonymous person under the train; I knew how he had come to that place. On another day, perhaps, it would be me, or the train driver, or the red-faced man opposite. One day the urge would be too strong, the promise of release too tempting. One day the finger that had hovered for so long over the Escape key would spasm, and the program would end. The data would be erased, the disk formatted ready for the next user. The mess of a life would end in the greater, but mercifully short, mess of being sliced apart by two hundred tonnes of steel. Not today, though. Today it was someone else’s turn to be a service disruption.

What do you think? If you are a writer, do you relate to what I’m saying about things coming to you rather than you thinking them up? If you’re not, then what do you think about all the painful things you see as you move through the world? What techniques do you have for coping with them?

Life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda

Andrew Blackman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:39:33 +0000

Jack Kerouac in 1962. Credit: Associated Press

Came across a good little article in the LA Times on author self-promotion. It seems that a letter from Jack Kerouac has just turned up at a literary auction, and it bears an interesting quote:

I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a “bulging briefcase” rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town … a whole gray career of proving himself to others, to as many as can hear him, that he was right … till finally people say: “Here comes the self-prover again, O dear … bring out the papers and the canapes.” This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers, TV appearances, radio interviews and start arranging with reviewers and critics who want information and my books through me, a great long lifetime in a briefcase proving my work and my work itself stopped dead at the level where I took to proving myself. So, I say, life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.

The writer of the LA Times piece, Carolyn Kellogg, guesses that “his thoughts have got to resonate with today’s authors”, and as far as I’m concerned she’s absolutely right. As she says, authors today have so many more ways of promoting themselves, and publishers increasingly expect us to use them all. Yet the reason I became a writer was to escape from previous careers that had often made me feel fake. I wanted to write, to express myself, to tune the world out for a while and just “enter my page”, as Kerouac puts it.

It’s a struggle to balance two conflicting interests – the desire to be “pure” and just write what you believe in, and the desire to sell books. For a while after On the Holloway Road came out, I’d say that I became a bit obsessed with selling books – this was also the time at which I had more events organised, and did sometimes feel like Kerouac’s shabby literary man with the bulging briefcase, rushing from town to town trying to prove myself. Now, though, I’ve got a better balance. I spend most of my time writing, and only a small amount on self-promotion. To be honest, though, that’s largely because I’m not Jack Kerouac and I don’t have the TV networks phoning night and day to get me on the air. A quick spot at the local library or bookshop is more the league I’m in at the moment. Perhaps the moment when my next book comes out will be more of a test of whether I can resist the lure of self-promotion.

Sometimes, of course, the lines are blurred. This blog, for example, was created originally to record my thoughts on the books I am reading, but since I became a published author it has also become a vehicle for self-promotion at times. I enjoy writing it, and I don’t consciously try to “prove myself”, but if I’m honest I can’t say that I have the courage to quit self-promotion entirely. Yes, I want to enter my page, but when I’ve finished I want people to read what’s on it. I don’t need to get rich, but I would like to support myself. So I compromise, and probably become the sort of man Kerouac would have despised.

A Virtual Love

Andrew Blackman — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:08:57 +0000

Hmm, this site seems to have been on autopilot for a while now. What’s going on? Well a few things.

First, summer. It’s a fleeting thing in England, and you have to grab every sunny day you can get. I’ve been outside a lot, enjoying London. Now that I’m starting to hunker down for the long, dark winter, I’ll have more time to spend sitting in front of a computer.

Second, family. Visitations from abroad, summer holidays, outings, events. All good fun, especially as I lived across the ocean from my family for quite a few years.

Third, writing. Whenever people ask me how my next book is coming, I say “Almost finished”. I’ve been saying that for months now, and it’s been true every time. The last rewrites really are the hardest. Only about 5 or 10% of my book has changed at all in the last six months. But it’s a really important 5 or 10%, the 5 or 10% that wasn’t working before. I think it is now. There will be more changes, I’m sure, from agent and publisher. But I’m happy with it, anyway. Happy enough to talk about it on here for the first time, and even to share the title: A Virtual Love. You’ll hear more about it in the coming months I hope…

“Becoming a Writer” by Dorothea Brande

Andrew Blackman — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:25:39 +0000

This is a wonderfully lucid book. I would not hesitate to take writing advice from Dorothea Brande, for the simple reason that her own writing is so elegant and clear. As I was reading, I was reminded of George Orwell’s dictum that good writing should be like a window pane. Brande’s book, written in 1934, is a perfect exemplar. It does not draw attention to itself, but simply communicates the author’s ideas in a clear, pleasing manner.

Brande states from the outset that she will not deal with issues of technique. Even in 1934, there were plenty of books and writing courses to give advice on plot, pacing, etc. In any case, her belief is that in most aspiring writers, the problems holding them back are not technical, but psychological. The reason people turn up to workshops and classes and buy endless books is not to learn the craft, but to discover the secret of being a great writer.

In almost every case he will be disappointed. In the opening lecture, within the first few pages of his book, within a sentence or two of his authors’ symposium, he will be told rather shortly that genius cannot be taught; and there goes his hope glimmering.

The aspiring writer may not believe that he/she is looking to acquire the secret of a writer’s genius, but that’s really what it is, even if only unconsciously held – an idea that there is some kind of magic about writing. And Brande agrees: “I think there is such a magic, and that it is teachable. This book is all about the writer’s magic.”

The rest of the book contains a lot of practical advice on setting schedules, etc., all of which is good. But the part that really stood out for me was her discussion of genius. For her it is not a rare gift owned only by the likes of Shakespeare; rather it’s something that anyone can access, but most people don’t know how to. She says that writers should think of themselves as split personalities: a hard-working, sensible artisan, and a free-spirited, spontaneous, sensitive artist. Both sides must be in balance: too much spontaneity and the writing never gets done; too much sense and the writing gets done but is no good.

Having recognised this need for a split personality, it is then important to cultivate the sensitive “unconscious” side even as your workaday self gets you to your desk on time. One idea I loved was not talking about your writing until it is done. This is something I have always done without really knowing why – it just seemed to work better for me that way. Brande’s view is telling a story to friends before writing it down is very dangerous:

Your unconscious self (which is your wishful part) will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large… Afterward you will find yourself disinclined to go with the laborious process of writing that story at full length; unconsciously you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

In addition, the unconscious is very sensitive to criticism, and the damage done by talking too freely can be severe:

Send your practical self out into the world to receive suggestions, criticisms or rejections; by all means see to it that it is your prosaic self which reads rejection slips! Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling which go to make up a story.

There’s so much other valuable advice in this book that I can’t summarise all of it. In fact, I feel as if I should read this book on a regular basis. So many of the ideas resonated with me, but they’re the sort of thing that are easy to forget when you’re mired in the routine of writing. So this is definitely one to keep on the shelf, and pull out at regular intervals, especially when things are getting tough and inspiration is hard to find.

“Aspects of the Novel” by E.M. Forster

Andrew Blackman — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:44:02 +0000

I read this book a couple of years ago now, before I had this blog. As I was clearing out stuff this weekend I came across my handwritten notes, stuffed into the bottom of a box where I would never have read them again. This is why I started blogging. I’m typing the notes up so that I have a record of the book that I can access easily, and so that I have one less piece of paper cluttering up my flat. It’s not going to be a well-shaped review – these are just notes on what I found interesting or useful as I was reading through.

Forster proposes that chronology is irrelevant in literature; he prefers to think of novelists from all periods sitting in a room with pen in hand all writing simultaneously. I suppose the idea of that is to get away from focusing on the trends and styles of particular periods and look instead at the underlying commonalities, the vital “aspects of the novel” that are shared by almost all novels in different places and times.

First is what he calls the “primitive” aspect of the story moving forward in time: “and then this happened, and then that happened.” I seem to remember he used the example of cavemen telling stories around the fire. A good novel has to have more than this, but all novels have a good basic story at the centre, something to get the reader’s attention and keep them following along.

The second aspect is people, but people in novels are not like those in real life. We can see their inner life if the novelist chooses to show us, and so we can know them better than we know anyone in real life. Even people we are intimate with we know only by external signs – what they say or do, the expressions on their face. In a novel we can go inside their head, know everything about them and their life history. It gives us a certainty or perfection that we never have in real life. Forster says it gives us solace, making humans seem more understandable. Fictional characters also tend to be more sensitive than people in real life, and more attention is given to things like love than to the other basic facts of life – birth, food, sleep and death.

Fictional characters can be flat or round. Flat characters are ‘types’ or caricatures, people who can be summed up in a phrase. They have one function in the book and consistently perform that function exactly as expected. This can sometimes be effective – they are recognisable and consistent; most of Dickens’s characters are flat and yet he is one of the best novelists. In general, though, flat characters are best for a limited or comic role – tragic figures must be round.

The test of a flat character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round.

Forster doesn’t like writers who betray too much interest in their own method, or “draws readers into his confidence” by showing them how the novel works. This was in 1927, long before the flourishing of postmodern metafictional writing – Forster would probably hate a lot of today’s most admired literary novelists.

The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and has summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results.

The next aspect of the novel is the plot. This is a higher form than the story, because it deals with causality:

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The queen died and no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king” is a plot.

The reader in this case must have not mere animal curiosity about “what happened next” but memory and intelligence, to be able to fit together facts from different parts of the novel and see how they all connect by the end. Plot and character can often be at war, particularly towards the end of a novel, when the writer is trying to pull the plot together into a suitable denouement, and sometimes characters who would have developed in another direction have to be corralled into serving the purpose of the plot. In a good plot, everything happens for a reason. It can have mysteries, but not mislead.

The plot maker expects us to remember; we expect him to leave no loose ends.

Sometimes characters have to be subservient to the plot, for example we don’t see a character developing for a while, until suddenly they do something unexpected and we realise they’ve changed while we weren’t looking. It’s less faithful to character, but better for the plot to have a surprise element rather than revealing things gradually.

I’m old

Andrew Blackman — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:07:19 +0000

It was one of those moments when you realise you’re old – or at least no longer young. I am working on editing the draft of my next novel, and decided to go to a cafe – somewhere I hadn’t been before, a fresh location for a fresh perspective on the manuscript.

All was going well as I got an enormous fry-up and mug of tea for £4. But then as I settled down to work, the music in the place just started driving me crazy. They had the radio on, and it was all the latest pop music, and it just drove me crazy. It was impossible to form good sentences while listening to Rihanna singing “Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?” or 50 Cent saying “Have a baby by me, be a millionaire”.

So I took out my iPod, put on Andrea Bocelli and felt like an old man sitting in a cafe listening to Andrea Bocelli. The worst of it was that in the quiet moments, some of the jangly pop music came through, and so I had to turn up the iPod louder and louder, and in no time I got the dreaded “Low battery” message which, in the case of my iPod, means basically no battery at all – a couple of minutes later it switched itself off, and I was left with the radio.

Here’s the thing, though – I stayed, and in the end it wasn’t so bad. Most of the stuff didn’t really grab me, but it wasn’t unpleasant either. I managed to turn it into just background noise, and focus on my work, and in the end I got quite a lot done. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways and impatient when it comes to hearing new stuff. Pop music was never high art, but I could always listen to it before.

Is it just me, though, or is some of the latest stuff a new level of nastiness? According to MetroLyrics, the parts I couldn’t hear were even nastier than the parts I could. For example, in 50 Cent: “I bet I’ll get you open, I’ll leave your headboard broken”. Or in Rihanna, “Tonight I’mma let you be a rider, Giddy up, baby, giddy up, giddy up babe.”

Let me clarify: it’s not that they’re singing about sex, I have no problem with that. It’s the violent imagery, the emotionless, loveless, animalistic nature of it, that just makes me sad. Broken headboards and horse-riders and breaking you off and getting you open and pull my hair and touch me there and give it to me baby like boom boom boom. God I feel old right now.

2010 writing/reading goals

Andrew Blackman — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:23:50 +0000

I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a book a week. I think I do this already, but have never really tracked it for a full year to find out if it’s true. So this year I want to make a note of every book I read, and also review it on this site, and I’m aiming for 52 books for the year. I’ve added a new page on the top menu, 2010 reading, where I will post updates.

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Update

Andrew Blackman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:05:43 +0000

All is well, despite the silence. I’ve been putting all my energy into winning a short story contest. With a £25,000 prize and a star-studded judging panel, I’m expecting the competition to be fierce. To win, I think I’ll have to write something better than anything I’ve written before.

The deadline is next Monday at 5pm, and at this rate I’ll be taking a taxi across London and hand-delivering it at 4:59. But I will finish, and I will enter the contest. Winning or not winning is out of my hands, of course, but I have promised myself that I will at least enter, and I will take the time to produce a story I am truly proud of.

I’ve also been trying to make a lot of progress on my next novel before taking a long Christmas break. So in other words, I am in a ‘manic phase’. Blog posts (and also email, for those of you who’ve emailed me) have had to be sacrificed for now, along with many other things. It’s not a very sensible way to live, but it’s only for a while. I’ll write more when I next come up for air.

“The Writer as Migrant” by Ha Jin

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:09:51 +0000

These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul.

In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual and the collective, and asks to what extent a writer can ‘speak for’ his nation or people, especially if he has abandoned them to live in a new country. I was interested in his initial desire as a young writer to write “on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese”. He makes it clear that he later abandoned this position, but I would have liked to know more about how and why.

In fact, throughout the whole book I would have liked to know more about Ha Jin’s thoughts on migration. His journey, after all, was an interesting one – from an uneducated teenage soldier in the Chinese army during the Cultural Revolution to a professor at Boston University and author of five novels, a couple of which I’ve read and greatly enjoyed. I would have liked him to draw on his own experience of migration, but he does so only rarely, in small glimpses like the one mentioned above. Mostly what we have is a survey of other writers and their thoughts on migration – quite interesting, but for me ultimately unsatisfying because there was no clear overall argument or point of view to draw the whole thing together.

In any case, it was interesting to learn about Solzhenitsyn’s life in America, how he lived in rural Vermont but never really settled, never took citizenship, was always waiting to go back to Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union he got his chance, but the interesting thing was that after moving back home, he struggled to speak effectively on behalf of the new Russia, as he had spoken on behalf of the old while in exile. His later books Russia in Collapse (1998) and Two Hundred Years Together (2001) were coldly received, and he was seen as out of touch. Even his radio show was cancelled due to low ratings. Ha Jin’s point is that he was loved for his earlier masterpieces, but even that did not give him the right to speak on behalf of the people – when his views no longer matched theirs, they rejected him.

The second essay, The Language of Betrayal, deals with the decision to write in another language. Again, Jin does not speak of his own decision to write in English and whether he feels this is a betrayal — instead we hear about Joseph Conrad being criticised for abandoning the Polish language, and Nabokov’s difficulty writing poetry in English even though he was a master of prose.

An Individual’s Homeland explores the difficulty of returning home — the way that Odysseus initially didn’t recognise Ithaka when he returned after his twenty years of exile, because both he and the land itself had changed. As Jin says, “One cannot return to the same land as the same person.” He talks of using art to survive, as the character Max Ferber does in W.G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants. He ends by referring to the Greek poet CP Cavafy, who positions ‘Ithaka’ as a destination for life’s journey, but not necessarily a return to the homeland. The homeland becomes a part of the past that can be used “to facilitate our journeys”.

As you’d expect from an English professor, the analysis of writers and books here is astute and interesting. I just got the feeling sometimes that he was talking about other writers to avoid talking about himself. Using literary examples is a good idea, but I’d have preferred them to be used to support a clearer argument from Ha Jin himself, drawing on his own experiences to give us his unique, original perspective instead of a summary of other people’s.

New York, New York

Andrew Blackman — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:27:15 +0000

I had a wonderful trip to New York. The book-related reasons to go were to sign copies at the Columbia Alumni Book Fair and to give a speech at the Jack Kerouac Literary Group, both of which went very well.

Outside of the scheduled events, it was great to spend some time in New York City, where I lived for six years before moving back to the UK in 2006. I managed to catch up with friends from my various incarnations: a corporate banker at Citigroup, a student at Columbia and then a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. And then I spent time just wandering down memory lane. Of course things have changed, but most of the old favourites are still there. As I list them, it’s interesting how many of them are food-related! Anyway, in my old neighbourhood on the Upper East Side: hot pastrami on a poppyseed bagel from Tal Bagel (I used to live in a little apartment upstairs), breakfast at the old-fashioned Mansion Diner, and little choux pastries filled with custard from the Choux Factory. Further downtown, brunch at Danal’s was a must. Then there was Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the various riverside walks in Manhattan, and of course a lazy, sunny afternoon lying on the Great Lawn in Central Park reading a book and trying not to get hit by frisbees. And visiting friends in New Jersey gave me an excuse to rent a Corvette for a day and hit the gargantuan American highways.

I realise that holiday snapshots are usually more interesting for the person who went on the holiday than for everyone else, but I’m posting a few of them anyway

Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx. Just around the corner there was a cricket match going on - not quite what I expected to find in the Bronx, but I spent a very relaxing afternoon watching it.

Columbia University. The bouncy castle wasn't there in my day - standards must be dropping...

Lower Manhattan as seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. 111 Wall Street, where I used to work, is the squat dark building just left of centre. It looks small here, but at 24 storeys it would be one of the tallest buildings in London.

The Great Lawn in Central Park. It didn't stay this empty for long.

Sometimes you just have to get out of the city...