Not The One

This much I know.

I remember Janine; like me fresh liberated from a provincial home town. I remember a weekend in Brighton; two young nervous lovers. I remember a grey mundane drizzly day without promise….and watching a glorious sunset from the pier. I remember as the sun gradually began to brush behind the sea, how Janine’s hand gradually began to brush against mine. I remember that night, how we swept from bar to bar, our talk jumping from subject to subject. I remember crashing into my bed, lapsing into sleep immediately. I remember waking next day as the sun crept up…and Janine crept into my room. I remember making love to her for the first time, and I remember how we collapsed into each other’s arms and into sleep.

That much I know for sure, the rest is conjecture.

Dearth of the Author.

 Stewart Lee has been in trouble recently. This not news. Stewart Lee is generally in trouble for something or other he is supposed to have said. When you are as articulate and intelligent as Stewart Lee and take your work with the same amount of seriousness; you are bound to upset people. The latest upset has been played out in the media as ‘Stewart Lee says comedians don’t write their own jokes’ (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/stewart-lee-accuses-highprofile-comedians-michael-mcintrye-jack-whitehall-and-frankie-boyleof-using-writers-8718101.html) with of course specific mention of Michael McIntyre. This led to a number of predictable rebuttals of something he never said “What about Frank Sinatra – how many songs did he write?” “Morecombe and Wise” etc.

You don’t need me to tell you that this is all the usual nonsense. The substance comes from a talk Stewart Lee (http://www.youtube.com/embed/IrXVaytvJtQ) gave discussing the idea of ‘Stand-up’ as a piece of writing. He gave a fascinating history of the art form and pointed out the difference between the Milton Berle/Bob Hope model of delivering a number of finely honed ‘zingers’ with a defined beginning and end, with the model pioneered by Lenny Bruce of  ‘riffing’ around a subject matter, in which presents a stand piece as unified whole, building throughout with a number of call-backs. In the UK, stand-up comedy up until the 70s seemed to rely largely on the ‘zinger’ model with working men’s club comedians drawing their material from a shared pool of jokes – when ‘The Comedians’ was filmed; jokes were written up on a blackboard so everyone knew which ones had been taken and which ones could be used. The ‘Alternative’ model drew its inspiration from the Lenny Bruce ‘riff’ model and featured comedians such as Alexei Sayle and Jerry Sadowitz giving what appeared to be an intently personal world view in a manner which was uniquely their own.

(Slight digression; there is of course a massive difference between form and content. As late as 1991, I remember seeing a comedian whose name escapes me delivering a five minute monologue on a daytime TV show and seeing the exact same monologue being delivered by Mike Reid on a late showing of his stand-up act. The monologue consisted of that kind of low-level endearing xenophobia common to the club comedian (“I see the Gulf War started – the Italians surrendered just in case…the Germans went in first..and put their towels on the beach) but were delivered in almost totally opposite ways. Comedian Whose Name Escapes Me delivered it with a huge grin and the implied complicity of his audience; Mike Reid with an embittered world weariness, angered beyond belief that the appropriate response to a sanction busting invasion would be to concentrate on beach wear, which arguably served the material better. Anyway, as my producer said to me…….).

The alternative ‘riff’ model seemed to depend on an almost puritan idea of the comedian as writer; every word out of their mouth had to have come from their own consciousness. Lee’s point is that throughout the eighties and nineties, Stand-up was almost the only ‘authored’ piece of theatre that could be found in a world where revivals and tribute acts seemed to make up most of what was passing for live entertainment. However, as comedy once again became more mainstream; the ‘zinger’ model became more prominent; comedians were expected to sit on panel games such as “Have I got News For You’ and ‘Mock The Week’ and pretend to instantly deliver finely honed bon mots. The constraints of having to generate amusing material week after week has led to the phenomenon of the ‘Programme Associate” – the writer who dare not speak their name. Lee’s point is that the idea of the stand-up comedian as author is once again being eroded rather than any shock horror revelation of a hitherto unspoken truth.

Of course the tension between the ‘writer’ and the ‘author’ of a piece is a long standing one. 19^th Century French literature saw two contrasting models of ‘authorship’ with Alexandre Dumas churning out reams of material with the aid of collaborators on the one hand; and Gustav Flaubert spending months on a single page of ‘Sentimental Education’ on the other. There is no doubt, however, that Dumas was able to speak with his own voice whatever the contribution of Auguste Maquet. Perhaps more controversially, the idea of ‘auteur’ versus ‘writer’ has seen many bloody battles fought in the world of cinema. In an essay ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’; the writer William Goldman sought to dismantle this idea by pointing out that a film is the creation of many different individuals; the actor, producer, cameraman. writer, editor, composer and designer as well as the director so how can the director possibly be referred to as the ‘author’ of a piece of cinema. However, Goldman’s undermines his own argument when discussing how the auteur theory destroyed the career of Alfred Hitchcock –

“Hitchcock, from ’54 to ’60 was on a truly wondrous streak; glorious entertainments. Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest and Psycho...Following Psycho in ’63 came The Birds. Some nice shock effects, period. And from then on it really got bad – Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy – awful, awful films”.

I am by no means the world’s biggest Hitchcock fan, but, at this point we need to reply

“Just a minute, when you say these films were awful, what do you mean? In each of them, was the editing uniformly awful? Did the script writer coincidentally take a downward fall along with Hitch? Was the photographer deciding to phone it in as well? If Hitchcock was not the ‘author’ of these films and film is just a group effort, is it a coincidence that all members of a group had a decline in their powers at the same time?”

Goldman appears to have confused the idea of the author as ‘sole begetter of all material” (and incidently with the idea of author as creator of material of consistent artistic worth).

Which is of course nonsense. Anyone who sets out to create anything creative is either implicitly or explicitly engaged in a dialogue with all that has come before them in that field as well as the environment in which they create. Try to write, draw paint or compose and you will find echoes of what is around and what has gone before entering your work; the question is whether to deny or openly acknowledge these influences. Much of the language of ‘Bed of Crimson Joy’ is taken directly from William Blake…but I hope I am doing something more than merely taking Blake’s lines and paraphrasing them. ‘West Side Story’ is quite definitely NOT Romeo and Juliet in modern language and with music; it is a specific 1950s American work addressing itself to 1950s American questions of racial versus national identity and youth culture…but of course it would not have been written without an awareness of Romeo and Juliet.

Which of course, brings me not at all neatly to the ‘Shakespearean Authorship Question’ (which has been partly responsible for my absence from this blog for the last few months). One of the most unintentionally amusing scenes in Roland Emmerich/John Orloff’s pisspoor Anonymous is that of the Earl of Oxford rummaging through a selection of neatly bound plays on his bookshelf only to hand Ben Jonson a copy of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The authorship question does depend in part on the idea of ‘author as sole begetter’ and if you are inclined to think of the author as sole begetter, sat alone in a garrett, going through a painful labour before giving birth to a whole work, then of course it will seem ridiculous that a shoe-maker’s son in a provincial Midland’s town could produce the Canon as we know it. Of course he didn’t. The contributions of writers such as Middleton, Wilkins and Fletcher to the works are now no longer a matter of controversy but the lesser contributions of comedians such as Will Kemp and Robert Armin (the lead clown in the later plays and a writer himself) may be a fruitful area for study. And of course, Shakespeare was engaged in a constant dialogue with those that came before him names such as Holinshed, Greene and Ovid. And of course Shakespeare was writing at the time of one of the greatest literary explosions in London with theatre becoming big business. Writers such as Fletcher, Dekker, Marlowe, Jonson and Beaumont (among many others) wrote either alone or in collaboration, communicating with, commentating on and attacking each other over their works. Allied to this, there was a scientific revolution in London, of which Holger Syme says the following

“Want to learn about botany? Walk over to Lime Street and talk to the Dutch And French apothecaries there, part of an international network of naturalists. Want to see what the rich and fashionable are into, or what exciting spices and luxury items can be had elsewhere in the world? Take a walk around Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange. Want to know more about fencing, or smoking, or speechifying, or what have you? Hang out in the aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral, swarming with hustlers and gossips — a veritable real-life Wikipedia of early modern pop culture. Need to know about Venice? Why not talk to one of the many Italians, some of them glassblowers from Venice, who lived and worked near Bishopsgate, where they would gather to gossip in the evening during what a visiting Italian observer described as their “Rialto hour”?
And want to figure out a bunch of legal terms? Why not talk to some of the legal professionals crowded into the neighbourhoods just outside the West gates of the city, Ludgate and Newgate — or chat to them before or after one of the many plays Inns-of-Court students liked to frequent?”
(http://www.dispositio.net/archives/538)

So how could a mere shoe-makers son know details about law, medicine or court etiquette? He asked someone.

On Dialogue

Thinking honestly, these are probably among my favourite lines of dialogue ever;

"The nominees are "The Gay Divorcee," 

"Here Comes the Navy," "The Barrets 

of Wimpole Street," "One Night of 

Love," "The Thin Man," "Cleopatra" --"

"Overrated!"

         "You are going to miss your plane"
         "I know"

         "Birdy Edwards is hear. I am Birdy Edwards"


What do these snippets have in common? None of them are in themselves particularly funny, brilliant or memorable. I don't you find any of them in books such as '1001 Memorable Movie Quotations' or hear them on 'Channel Four's 100 Words From Movies that Stuart Marconie likes'. No one would endlessly parrot them at parties. And this is what I love about them. None of them have any relevance outside their own context; but in their own context, all are immensely powerful.

Take the first snippet. It is said by a woman to herself when she is working late at night and listening to the Oscars on the radio. However, the line's power comes from the fact that earlier in the film; this woman lost her only son almost certainly to a serial killer and then been falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum for refusing to accept a homeless boy as her son. The line tells us that the woman has not only come through the ordeal; but is still able to take an interest in trivia again...in other words we have a woman no longer content to define herself as victim, which is nearly a rarity in these 'true life tales'

The second snippet comes from the end of the utterly heartbreaking/warming duo of films 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset'. It's hard to express just how much it encapsulates the culmination of the emotional journeys of the two leads, while the third snippet is from the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Valley of Fear' and is probably the most thrilling line of dialogue I have ever read in a novel.

What I am trying to say is that dialogue is simultaneously overrated and underrated at the same time. Overrated because of the immense importance reviewers tend to put on single lines as witnessed by the way they will take a single line and use it as to point to the failure of a film as a whole. For example, Peter Bradshaw took the fact that the film of "The Fellowship of the Ring' featured the line 'By night these hills will be swarming with orcs' as showing the film was a failure. Yet without context this proved nothing; after all surely the success of a film is not dependent on whether it contains such a line but how the line is placed; how it is said; what leads up to it and down from it. There is nothing in itself wrong with the line 'Lisa, you are tearing me apart'.

And yet we consistently underrate dialogue that we simply don't notice because it is doing its job. We notice the funny lines; the dramatic lines; the melodramatic lines even. We don't notice the lines that just do their job and do not stick because they are so in character and so natural.

Stewart Lee writes of his desire to produce a piece of stand-up that simply does not work in the page because every single word and sentence is dependent on context and performance for its meaning. Which is not a bad goal to aim for.

More good advice on the writing process

More excellent advice on the writing process and on the responsibilities of the writer to the reader.

Sort of Review - Impro by Keith Johstone

 I can remember an incident from primary school. We had all been given an outline picture of two hands shaking and asked to colour them in. Most of the class coloured their pictures in various shades of pink, yellow or brown. I coloured the two hands in red and green because....well why not? I liked strong primary colours. The teacher congratulated everyone on the class for the work but I was told off for being stupid because 'no-one has red or green hands' (The fact that no-one has hands that just float by themselves in the ether didn't occur to her. There was a lot of this at my primary school. A later teacher expressed her opinion that speech bubbles in strip cartoons were stupid because people didn't have big bubbles containing their words in real life, conveniently ignoring all the other non-naturalistic aspects of strip cartoons)* 

I don't want to trace my complete lack of any visual artistic ability whatsoever is as a direct result of this incident; it may be that I am just one of those people who are naturally shite. However, I am always irresistibly reminded of this incident everytime I read Keith Johnstone's book, 'Impro' and his short section on his art teacher Anthony Stirling

"Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child and it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad...' "

Johnstone's argument all through his book is that too often education is a destructive process which crushes creativity and destroys spontaneity and his aim throughout his book is to try and discover this spontaneity.

"Most schools encourage children to be unimaginative. The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their children. Torrance gives an eye-witness account of an 'exceptionally creative boy' who questioned one of the rules in the textbook...She was also upset when the boy finished the problems she set almost as quickly as it took to read them"

Much of his book discusses games his uses with his students to try and restore this lost creativity. It is a fascinating process; upon presenting a box to a student and asking her to describe its contents; he notes that she goes to say 'orange' but pauses and says 'cabbage' instead feeling that 'orange is too ordinary.'. Too often, people asked to say an object are scared of what this may reveal about them and resort to the safe and the ordinary. Much of the improvisation process is devoted to trying to remove this self-censorship and get people to trust in their instincts.

I've been thinking of this in connection with the writing process. Much of my problem with the process seems to stem from exactly this self-censorship. This is, I suppose, why games are so useful to the struggling writer; as well as sparking inspiration, they also absolve you from the blame. "The random sentences I drew out MADE me do a story about a secret service officer importuning a journalist in a dark alley. It wasn't me". One of the most interesting passages in Johnstone's book is the section where he gets a supposedly uncreative student to produce a post-apocalyptic story about giant ants destroying buildings - all the while convinced that the story was coming from outside of her.

Later on in this blog, I may well review the hilarious book "How not to write a novel" which sets out a number of rules that any beginning novelists (or writer of any description) would be wise to follow. Does it contradict what I've said above about spontaneity? No, and if you're very good I may even explain why not.

For anyone interested in improvisation, writing or even just human nature; Keith Johnstone's Impro is a must buy.






















* If this story seems vaguely familiar to you, it may because it turns up in a modified form in 'Bed of Crimson Joy'. Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief etc. v

So here's the plan.

Writers have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. On the one hand they are, of course, deadlines and are a pain in the bum to meet. On the other hand, at least the actually force you to produce something. Trying to write the perfect paragraph goes out of the window, but at least you produce a paragraph. That absolutely brilliant plot twist that would make the reader gasp in awe eludes you...but at least you have a plot. Your writing doesn't stay as the perfect platonic novel in your imagination...it is something that is imperfect but at least it exists.

Self-imposed deadlines have never worked for me; the one time I have produced something tangible was when forced to be an outside deadline from a publisher. So here's my plan. I have bought a copy of   'Writing Magazine' with a special supplement on writing competitions. Armed with this, I plan to enter at least one short story competition a month. If I win; brilliant. If I don't, well at least I have a short story which I can either enter elsewhere or try and publish as an e-book. 

In the mean time; a couple of links.

Firstly, to prove I am an actual proper published; here's a review of the short story compilation that my story was featured in by the legendary D F Lewis. http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/book-the-inkermen/

And possibly the best advice I've ever heard on writing can be found in this song by Paul Simon. 

Quite simply

"If you want to write a song about the moon.....then do it, write a song about the moon"

Experiment 1

My first bit of writing done using an exercise from the Writer's Toolkit. It was written 'on the hoof' in about an hour with very little pausing and no editing or revising. I think there's definitely some ideas here worth exploring - both characters could well stand up to more development and I'd love to know more about Max's motivations. Let me know what you think.


  There I was…just standing there, when what I wanted to do was forbidden. I wanted to end it all, destroy my family, my entire career, my whole life, everything I had worked up to at the point with just one futile gesture. One magnficient, empty, pointless act. “Come on Max, we’ve come this far. Pleased hand it over” It was a small object, no bigger than the palm of my hand. But handing it over to the pale blasted man standing next to me would be the final action I ever performed. “And you won’t identify me?” I asked (or was it pleaded with) with Spencer? “There’ll be no comebacks for me?” “Absolutely not. You know us journalists. Seal of the confessional. We’re like priests. Or plastic surgeons.” I passed him the memory stick. There, it was done. I expected to feel relief, instead I just felt emptiness. I was a fool. I watched Spencer leave the café with the memory stick. The instant I saw him leave, I immediately regretted my actions. I decided the only solution was to seduce him. “Spencer” I cried running after him. “Wait there a minute” “If you want me to stop publication now, Max, you’re too late” “No wait” I said. “I know you’re running with the story. I know I can’t stop you now. I just want to know, why?” “Why?” asked Spencer; the wrinkled skin on his brow becoming even more wrinkled in surprise? “Yes, why?” I said. “You’re doing a story on the British Intelligence complicity in torture. I’ve given you everything you need; names, dates, times. You’ll completely blow apart dozens of operations with what I’ve given you; you’ll expose just about every dodgy act we’ve ever committed. And what will be the result? There’ll be inquests, inquiries, royal commissions. There’ll be recommendations, sackings. The British Intelligence Community will become subject to the most intense scrutiny in its history. And who are you selling this story to? The most right wing tabloid in Britain. Your readers don’t care about some foreigner somewhere having his fingernails pulled out in some foreign country the know little about. They just care about being able to go at home at night and sleep without worrying their pretty little heads. So why are you doing this?” “Excellent speech Max. So why are you doing it?” “Because I’m like you” “Pardon?” exclaimed Spencer? “You’re, what, 40? You’ve got no wedding ring or engagement ring on. You’ve never mentioned an ex-wife or children. And you’re working in one of the most notoriously homophobic industries. Well, for all our PC talk of diversity and inclusivity, the intelligence industry is hardly better. We’re full of ex-squaddies and the old boys network, mouthing the approved sentiments but you just know they’re looking at you wondering if their arse is safe. It makes you want to destroy the whole bleeding edifice; set yourself alight; become a human hand grenade” “You’re mental” he replied “You’re fucking mental” “Come on” I said. “We’re both outsiders. That’s why we connected. That’s why you approached me. Isn’t it?” “I’m leaving mate. I’m off”. He turned his back on me. “Wait” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Please. Something else I noticed on you. On your coat lapel. The cross. You’re a catholic as well, same as me” “Oh for fuck’s sake” “You said before about the seal of confessional. You must know what the confessional is like. The feeling of being absolved. It’s almost post-orgasmic isn’t it. Especially for young men going through puberty. Opening your mind and everything you’ve done to a stranger. Telling them every last dirty thought you’ve ever had. How can you possibly break that bond.” Spencer was still now. Rigid with shock. I made my final move. “Come on Spencer. It’s seven in the morning and we’re in a back alley. There’s no-one around.” I moved in closer. Spencer was still. “It’ll be alright. I promise. No one will ever know. I was close up to him now. I could feel his breath. “Christ!!!!!!!!!!” The punch was a swift one, a blow to the solar plexuses which swiftly knocked the wind out of him. He collapsed on the floor. I administered a few swift kicks; to the head, to the chest, to the groin. Nothing serious. Just to show I meant business. I bent over him and whispered in his ear “Disorientation. Always works. Speak bollocks to someone; throw them off-guard. Then seize your opportunity. Now look Spencer Smith, I know every single thing about you. I know where you live where your two ex-wives live and where you daughter lives. In fact, the day Lillian passed her driving test; we sent her an anonymous congratulations card…ask her about it. We’ve been watching you and, I warn you, we hate little shit-raking turds like you who want to destroy every last thing we do to keep this country safe so that arseholes like you can sleep safe in your shitty little beds. So go back to the office and write up a nice story about a cat up a tree. And never try to contact any one of us again” He didn’t reply, but I felt my point had been made. So I turned and walked away. My career was safe. The moment of madness had passed. There was no danger of me ever being discovered. So I have no idea why, as I walked back to work, I decided to take a detour past the offices of The Guardian and post my memory stick through its letter box.