Me-Ow!

My dear friend, Mental-as-a-Fork has produced this purrrfect profile picture for me. What do you all think? My goodness I have a lot of pictures on here today.

I've got to admit I'm getting better, a little better all the time

Considering I don’t have Sgt. Pepper on CD it was perhaps a mistake to put that song in my head. I shall have to buy a copy now, dammit. When I sat my GCSE English Language exam I wrote a story that began, “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins.” and was basically the story of the girl in the song converted into prose. Don’t tell anyone - it just happened. Like when I had to label two muscles in a biology exam and the only sort of muscles I could remember the name of were the biceps. So I labelled one lot the biceps and the other lot the forceps. Come on, it sounds right, doesn’t it? Don’t even get me started on my Philosophy exam in which I managed to prove the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator God. Yeah I know. And then afterwards I promptly forgot how and because it was a formal university exam I didn’t get my paper back to have a look. Suffice to say that the course closed down the next year because all the faculty staff had left to join the Church. Not really.

Anyway, I am getting better. Much better. I have been keeping reasonably productive all weekend. I suddenly only need nine hours sleep in every twenty-four, which I consider perfectly tolerable. And although my brain keeps timing out every fifteen minutes or so, I have fifteen minutes! And then after a little while, another fifteen minutes! And then a bit later another fifteen minutes! And so on throughout the day. This is a good life.

I made this face (above) out of my sock and two Ibruprofen tablets. [...] still insists he's going to talk to the doctor about me - I think this may have made matters worse...

Hoping to go out tomorrow but I have to think of something fun to do. It is a beautiful day here today but it is cold. Look this (right) is my view from where I sit all day. I shouldn't show you really because I won't get so much sympathy while I'm stuck at home all the time. Obviously the weather's not always this nice. Of course currently the sun sets exactly opposite my window which is a plus. I know, I know. Sorry. In another direction I have a view of The Grand Turk which played the role of The Victory in the Trafalgar reinactment. And the railway line is also opposite my window and for some reason we've been getting steam trains all weekend. Oh and then there's the seals and the swans and everything. Okay, I'll shut up now.

Lessons I have learnt about writing novels - Avoiding Stereotypes

I wanted to write about this because it is one area that has caused me great trouble and yet is something which people don’t often talk about when they talk about writing books. The use of a stereotype is, to me, a mortal sin of literature. This is for three reasons.

The first is a moral reason. If my main ambition in life was to change the world for the better, I would have learnt to use a .338 Lapua Magnum, but I would much rather write. And as you have probably gathered from this blog, I am hardly a convincing polemicist. So the changing the world bit has to be subtle. Very subtle.

I am an egalitarian sort and passionate about the idea that in order to fulfil oneself, one must take responsibility for the creation and maintenance of a situation where others can fulfil themselves as they see fit. One obstacle to self-fulfilment is social prejudice and naturally stereotypes contribute to this.

It may seem obvious, but the stereotypes which do the most harm are probably ones that seem either harmless or even sympathetic in the eyes of those who perpetuate them. For example, having rejected the old stereotypes about them all being sinister, predatory or even paedophilic, modern authors and film-makers don’t seem the harm in repeatedly having Gay male comic characters*. To a man they are vain and flamboyant, hilariously bitchy, shallow and promiscuous but bizarrely sensitive when their straight female friends are in trouble. Black people in American films suffered a similar fate (minus the empathy) that they’re only just getting over.

Similarly, physically disabled** people are very rarely presented as anything sinister (except as the occasional comic book villain). But it is not exactly helpful when every other portrayal is either some heart-warming tale of triumph over adversity or a straight forward tragedy. Sympathy and admiration are all very nice, but not necessarily conducive to these minority groups being regarded with respect and treated as equal.

The second objection to the use of stereotypes is simply that real life is not like that. For example I have only ever met one Gay man with truly horrendous taste in music***. The first time I listened to Pink Flyod’s The Wall, lying on the floor of my sister’s student digs, this rock masterpiece was interspersed with such gems as Brown Girl In The Rain, Mamma Mia and Lady Marmalade courtesy of her young housemate. Talk about crimes against humanity…

Okay, just a little pin-prick,
They’ll be no more
Giuchie giuchie, ya ya, da da
But you may feel a little sick.

However, sexuality does not actually dictate anything more than... well, who you might want to go to bed with. Look at the three most significant homosexuals in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing. Compare to the stereotype. Compare these men to each other. Picture them doing the YMCA dance. See the problem?

The third reason is artistic integrity. Stereotypes about minority, ethnic or religious groups are often applied when an author does not know enough about what they are talking about. They are often accepted by an audience that doesn’t know what they are reading about. But is that as high as you wish to aim?

Stories that accept stereotypes wholeheartedly are usually vaguely comic. Genres of fiction often described as “Lad Lit” or “Chick Lit” about single people in their thirties, play on the ideas of men and women being members of different species; straight women all obsessed with dieting, shoes and marriage, straight men obsessed with sport, competitive drinking and sport-sex – although these are basically romances so somehow these seemingly incompatible preoccupations shift and warp such that everyone can live happily ever after. Gay men are these exotic comedic creatures described above and such authors usually adopt Queen Victoria’s take on lesbianism. In my opinion, very few of them pull this kind of thing off because anyone who convincingly complies to these stereotypes is a very irritating character and since such books rarely conclude in a blood bath, they leave one unsatisfied.

So what can we do about it? If you think about books and films which turn a stereotype completely on its head, the consequences are almost always funny. Most non-Curtis British film comedies work in this way; the former steel workers who become male-strippers (The Full Monty), a middle-aged, middle-class widow who becomes a drug-dealer (Saving Grace), the son of a miner who becomes a ballet dancer (Billy Elliot) etc. In fact, this sort of thing has been done so often now that I personally find it all a bit tedious and often quite patronising towards certain groups (chiefly all working class people and middle-aged women), but it seems to be a popular formula.

Of course there is a difference between describing a typical situation and making a caricature. For example, many corner-shops in the UK are run by Pakistani families. Statistically, most Pakistanis are Muslim. Most corner-shops are open very long hours, often seven days a week and therefore anybody running one has to have a pretty firmly entrenched work ethic. Thus, most of us don’t have to look very far around us to find a hard-working Pakistani Muslim shopkeeper. Real life is like that. Where we have to be careful is with what other attributes we might give such a person.

Personally, I am aware that I can be pig-headed on this sort of issue. When I first started on the book I heard a discussion on Open Book on Radio 4 which discussed an American phenomenon called Christian Romance. All this pappy Mills & Boon stuff, except where the heroine finds God as well as romantic love. The folks discussing this concluded that this would never work in Britain because it was fundamentally impossible to make a Church of England vicar look sexy… and I think it was the words fundamentally impossible that irritated me. I am not a member of the God Squad and I don’t have a thing for men in dresses, but I turned my romantic hero into a C of E curate and then before I realised what a stupid stupid idea that was (rather like the one about him being a crip) it became inextricably entwined in the plot. Doh!

At the end of the day, I suppose the secret lies in putting yourself deep inside the characters. Folks talk about authors having Godlike control over all events, as if they are playing with the characters like dolls. But I believe that in order to represent fictional characters realistically you have to step inside them and see how it feels. That way you know it’s all authentic, because you are authentic. There is nothing autobiographical about my book and yet every character represents a part of myself even though they are, I hope, a fairly diverse bunch. I suppose I must be immensely arrogant to imagine I have the capacity to do pull this off, but I have already suggested that writing books is insane and this is only one small aspect.


* I’m not objecting to ‘camp comedy’ or comedy as part of Gay Culture. Just the idea that homosexuality is in itself a joke.

** I talk about ‘physically disabled people’ because folks with learning difficulties and mental ill health are still often treated in a fairly appalling way in mainstream film and literature.

*** I did actually agree to marry the guy who ruined The Wall as his name was O’Kelly, thus our double-barrelled surname would have been the fantastic Kelly-O’Kelly. The other Gay man with whom I considered marriage was a chap of Egyptian origin and had the surname of Deb. So I would have been Deborah Deb. How cool is that? I was only sixteen...


Bloody hell. Did anybody read down this far? Sorry folks for the longest blog-entry in history of rambling.

Comments and Visual Impairments

I am getting regularly spammed now and it's on the increase. I can't spend all day going through and deleting every one, but I don't want to put the word verication in place if this renders the comments inaccessible to people with visual impairments, dyslexia etc. I have enough trouble with it myself. How are others finding it?

Ideally, I would password-protect the comments facility but put the password conspicuously on the blog. Unfortunately, I doubt the blogger technology will allow that, but I'm going to have a play anyway. In the meantime does anyone have any hot ideas as to how we can protect ourselves from spammers without becoming partially inaccessible?

I am the screen, the blinding light, I'm the screen, I work at night

Today (Tuesday) has been a much better day. I feel better. I look miles better. I must admit to a morbid fascination with my ghastly appearance over the last few weeks. My self-portrait was not as far from the truth as you would like to believe. I am shocked by how white I have been and how blue bits of my face appear, like the shadows under my eyes. But today there is at least some red pigment in complexion, I am a less white shade of pale, less puffy too. My acne has calmed right down. Rare are the days when I am pleasantly surprised when I catch myself in the mirror. Today was such a day. I look like a member of the human race.

Unfortunately, I didn’t wake up until noon and then I slept on and off most of the afternoon. Thus at something past midnight I am totally disorientated and not at all ready for more sleep. However, I am fully and properly conscious. My headache has gone. My concentration leaves a lot to be desired and I have been flitting between activities. But I feel all right.

Sorry for being a right moaning-minny of late. I really don’t cope very well with this stuff. I have no grace whatsoever. Thanks again for all your support.

Update: All this having been said at 12:33am, it is now 1:15am and I need to sleep again. Ho hum. I still feel all right I am just shocked at my capacity for zeds.

Monday Monday

I am in a foul mood. I seem to be picking up but it isn’t happening quick enough. So much of the day, I am literally going round looking at hard objects with a view to knocking myself unconscious. Worry not, I am not going to do this because I know it could only possibly make matters worse when I came round, but I do not wish to be awake at the moment.

Well, at this moment it's not so bad, because my brain is kind of working. My head aches and I feel like I am looking at the screen through a thick black veil. But I get about two hours a day of this – bizarrely the first half hour of the day and the last ninety minutes before sleep (solid sleep at night that is, I sleep on and off all day). The rest is mostly an in between state where I am not actually asleep, but nothing sticks in my mind for more than a few seconds. Which wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t remember that I was thinking about something else a moment ago. I can’t read, I struggle to follow films or radio programmes. I would be better off sleeping for twenty-two hours a day. I would be better off being asleep twenty-four hours a day for a week or so or however long it takes for my body to get over this thing.

Bad things that happened today.

1. I felt like shit.
   
2. Amazon refunded me claiming my latest order was undeliverable even though they had the right address and it’s not as if I have left the house at any point during the last month. I was looking forward to this order which included the famous Skallagrigg – a book so good, I’m told, that you may want to tattoo its title to your thigh.
3. Both bulbs in one of our standard lamps blew again about three weeks since they did this before. [...] asked me how I had turned it on, like it was my fault. This is bad. Despite my firm belief that inanimate objects have no mind of their own, I have in the past suffered the delusion that I have the power to cause electrical equipment to malfunction with my negative vibes.
4. There was an annular eclipse – or at least a partial one in the UK but I slept through it.
5. I am in a complete muddle as to which painkillers I took and when. I stagger the dose so it is unlikely that I should take many more than I ought to, but I hate the confusion.
6. I read a thing about 50 years of photojournalism on the BBC News website. The photographs were pretty harrowing. I was interested in the subject matter but I shouldn’t have looked today. I shan’t link to it for this reason.
7. It was my great uncle Albert’s funeral. I didn’t know him well and he had a decent innings, but I meant to call my Mum as he was a favourite uncle of hers and it must have been a hard day. It’s too late now.

Good things that happened today.

1. I received a CD case in the post from Marmite Boy and two Time To Get Equal pins for us. Thanks Marmite, anyway! I have pinned mine to my trenchcoat on the offchance I may one day go outside.
   
2. Angry Alien released their 30-second Bunny Re-enactment of War Of The Worlds (1953).
3. Tesco delivered our groceries with no substitutions and so far I haven’t thought of anything I forgot to order. I do have three spare boxes of Earl Grey Tea though.
4. When looking at eBay I found this indescribable item of clothing. I must have one now! Not! Apparently it’s genuine rabbit-fur. That was some sick rabbit.
5. I got an e-mail from Agent Fang who I haven't heard from in ages and she sounds okay. She's moved house and only just got back on-line so I guess she'll be updating the blog soon.
   
6. None of my limbs fell off.
7. None of my vital organs failed.
8. Nobody I know died.
9. Ai Ai the chimpanzee gave up smoking.

So I suppose more good than bad... As I was coming round I did listen to two good radio programmes which you can listen to too if you have a decent connection. One was called Separate But Equal which was about ending segregation between black and white children in the American South. I thought that situation had very strong parallels with the situation of disabled children in the UK today. The other was called Still Here about a poet who speaks to people with Alzheimer’s Disease and talks about meaning and metaphors people come up with when they began to lose language skills. Not as depressing as it sounds and today, I related big time.

Lessons I have learnt about writing novels - Planning

I feel vaguely human again today - or at least vaguely fish. Certainly animal as opposed to vegetable. And I was going to write about planning...

When it comes to any creative project you can name, there are some of us who plan meticulously so that everything is perfect first time and there are those that rush in and spend the time perfecting things later on. Both methods have their merits and their pitfalls. Sometimes it is necessary to do a little bit of forward planning – if you’re painting on a canvas in oils, you can paint over any mistakes, but with watercolours, slip up bad and you’re in trouble. At other times, it helps to get hands-on as soon as possible. If you have never used clay before, you’re going to have to have a few practice-runs before you get the final piece so you might as well get on and get your fingers dirty.

When P D James talks about the way she writes her detective novels, she explains that she has the whole thing planned out to the last detail before she sits down and writes. She does however, admit that even then things don’t always turn out the way she imagined. Minette Walters on the other hand openly confesses that she never plans anything and three-quarters through a book she’s writing she won’t yet know who did the murder (or whatever). The books of James and Walters are quite different – although they often appear on the same shelf in the library – and I think if you’ve read some of each author, you can probably see how each method lends itself to the sort of story each author writes, at least to some extent.

The point I’m trying to get to is that it strikes me that, when it comes to fiction, planning is an entirely personal thing. For me, I always rush in with stuff, but then there are certain points where I have had to stop and organise myself better with, for example, a timeline of events to help me keep a hold of the order of things. Next time I will probably be much more organised.

There are only a few tips I would give from my experience.

1. Like the advert says, Just do it. There is an argument that claims procrastination is part of the creative process, and indeed there are many times where anybody else would think you are doing very little when in fact you are making leaps and bounds of invisible progress. However, for every person who has actually written a book – published or not – there are probably a hundred people who have written two pages or have this really good idea that they’re waiting to come together. The creative process – any creative process – is a bit like love. There is a certain amount of magic involved, but you’ve got to do your fair share of work in order to keep the magic going.


2. Whatever happens you are going to have to edit and re-arrange things a little – probably quite a lot. So don’t worry about getting every word right the first time. It is far more important to believe in the characters and events you are describing. Realistically, a first draft should attempt to be a good story badly told. You can worry about the telling later. At the end of the day, people can forgive lazy, clichéed and uninspired writing if the narrative is compelling enough. Unless you are Laurie Lee or Virginia Woolf you will not get away with beautiful prose slung around a poor or non-existent story.


3. Be prepared for the long haul. I am very fortunate in that my impairment has adjusted me to the concept of having to pace myself and achieving goals over a long period of time. Clinically, I am described as having poor mental stamina, but in another sense I have a lot. Most popular authors produce one book every year and that’s when they’re healthy people working full-time at it. So whatever your circumstances, it will take time and you need to be prepared to stick it out.


4. When approaching the next book, I am going to keep a ring-binder containing;

A timeline – which I can build up and perhaps revise completely as I go along

Character profiles, as and when they arrive. Characters develop and change as you go along. Their names might change. Their back-story might change. Little details like what car they drive might change. It would have been so much easier if I had had this written down and not relied on my memory to keep a hold of it all.

Notes about research. You think you can remember it all because it seems so interesting at the time, but you don’t. Also I have discarded information thinking I didn’t need it only to find it crops up again later on.

Pictures. Pictures of people, places, interior design, food and anything else I think of. The novel is a bit like a dream; certain things come vividly – like the faces of my main characters. I don’t know anyone who looks like them; they are purely my invention. However, the minor characters are kind of fuzzy, certain rooms of certain buildings are vague and I am just rubbish when it comes to food.

Things that make me feel good about myself and my ability to write. Doubt has truly been my worst enemy throughout this exercise. Even now, despite anything I might say, my heart would give fifty-fifty odds on it never getting finished.