Rip Lunge gives a masterclass – listen up you MOFO’s

Hi

My name is Rip Lunge and I am in THE WRITING BUSINESS, see, I was shouting there, just

to wake you up, cos that’s what you guys need. You need to wake up, so that you can benefit from my STAGGERINGLY AWESOME  insights into writing. GET IT? Are you awake now? Listen up ladies of the Upper Dicklington Ladies Writing Circle, I’m speaking to you!

I wasn’t always a best-selling author; hell no. You’d never believe it now, but I used to work in insurance. Yeah, you may well shake you heads, I can hardly believe it either.  And you know what? I never read anything; books always bored my ass off. But one day I was taking the elevator late on a friday night when there was a power outage. We were stuck there for twelve hours, during which I was so crazed with boredom that I borrowed a novel from this preppy college type. It was by some chick called Virginia Woolf. With a name like that I guessed she was American and that this was some kind of woeful ‘how to catch your man’ chicklit crap. Boy, was I wrong! By the time I got out of that elevator, I was a different man. I wanted to write!  I wanted to write so bad, it made my teeth ache. Although I was busting to get started right away, I knew that was wrong and it wouldn’t get me anywhere. So, I thought about what I’d do if writing was a REAL job, you know, like insurance. So, before I even thought about scrawling one word, I set about making a complete statistical analysis of all book sales in English- speaking countries. I read everything I could on writing structure. Then I made a deep analysis of plots  and possible structures. You know what? I looked at all this information for weeks before I  wrote that single word. The difference is, that

when I did start writing, I knew exactly which would be the right plot, with precisely the right amount of threat, sex and violence to make a bestseller. That was the easy part. Guess what I did next? I put together a comprehensive analysis of literary agents and assembled an infographic of all their hit rates with debut novelists. In the end I built myself a killer power point presentation of my aims and the way I would achieve them and watched it every night before I went to sleep. And you want to know what was the result. Dontcha? OK. I’ll tell you. Yes, I  found the perfect agent, who put my book with the perfect publisher and we both stood back, to avoid the recoil, and watched it slam into the Amazon Best Seller list and stay there kicking butt for the best part of a year.

So now, ladies of Upper Dicklington Writing Circle, you want me to do the same for you, dontcha? Of course you do, that’s why you invited me here to your quaint village hall.

I’ve been reading  samples of your work, so that I can give you the feedback you requested and I have to ask some questions. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Has any one of you made a statistical analysis of anything?  If you care about your writing you better get real, otherwise you can shove this stuff up your boom-shalla and nobody, but nobody will ever read it.

When did any of you last check  the Amazon top ten?

Hallo?

Erotica, savage teen violence, rom coms,  that’s what’s selling! Publishing is no different to any other business, it’s the law of supply and demand and no one, Audrey, is demanding poetry.  Sorry, did I wake you up?

Equally, Felicity. A history of life in the Anglo-Saxon Settlements of East Sussex. Well 50 Shades of Grey, it aint. Not to say those Anglo-Saxons didn’t get a little rough but baby, you could use this stuff instead of novocaine during a root canal job.

Libby, what made you think that anyone gives a flying e-reader for a novel about toothless farm hands  operating steam threshing machines? I felt no threat, no peril, nothing made me want to turn a page of your manuscript. Yes, I know the main character falls into the machine, but that felt like a blessed relief. I didn’t care.

Ursula, I have one question for you. Graveyard Lichens; why?

So here’s what I’m doing for you.  If you guys follow the Rip Lunge Step-by-Step Statistical Approach to Writing with 36 Point Plot Analysis.  Rise at five a.m. and don’t take your butts off your chairs until you’ve written two thousand words without using a single adverb , or some flowery damned metaphor for at least six months, then I promise to return to Upper Dicklington for a lower fee and whip those manuscripts into shit that you can submit. Capische? Is it a deal? Thank-you and goodnight.

‘No Biggy’ – says Tarquin Overbite on literary fame aged ten

Maison Overbite, Primrose Hill

Primrose Hill on a beautiful afternoon in May is beguiling. The discreet houses of the rich are camouflaged behind cascades of wisteria and flowering shrubs. The illusion of an English village in the centre of  London is maintained. And within one of these multi-million pound Georgian houses, I caught Tarquin Overbite relaxing after a day at school. Concentrated on invading a developing country in the company of elite special forces,  Tarquin racked up an impressive body count  on his games console, as we spoke.

Tarquin, congratulations on the publication

of     ‘They F**** You Up’.

Thanks

It’s an extraordinary achievement to be published at such an early age. It must have changed your life, tremendously.

It’s no biggy

Really?

My mother or Mrs  Overbite, as I call her, has been regularly published since she was an undergraduate at Oxford and Mr Overbite is, as you doubtless know, my father and a publisher. What’s more, two of my aunts, three uncles, as well as several grandparents, were apparently published too. So, you could say that in my family, you have to actively resist in order to avoid publication.

I believe you had a rather extraordinary education.

If you mean Mrs Overbite reading me Petrarchan Sonnets ‘in utero’ …

Actually I meant the languages thing.

Oh yes, she only spoke to me in Ancient Greek during the week and my father addressed me in Latin at the weekends.

That must have been a little er, restrictive?

Apparently, it was an experiment, like the non-aligned sexuality thing.

Yes, I read that your parents brought you up to be gender neutral.

That’s right.

When did you find out that you were, in fact, a boy?

I’m sorry, I don’t find that question meaningful.

Orlando, the tree surgeon

So you’re not bitter?

It’s no biggy.

I suppose  that  writing your novel may have expunged some of your …feelings?

It’s entirely fictional.

Of course.

The fact that the main character is a nine year old boy can be deceptive.

But all authors tend to draw on their life experiences.

Well, it’s true that the household in the book does bear a passing resemblance to ‘Maison Overbite’.

Really? I noticed that the father in the book seems rather er, pre-occupied.

Mostly with young female novelists.

Yes.

Our house was always full of weirdos, apart from Orlando, I liked him.

Orlando?

He used to hang out in the garden, gave me the odd spliff. He’s a tree-surgeon.

I see.

A female novelist

The Esteemed Lord Bragg, broadcaster & author

The house was always lousy with female novelists;  always in the kitchen, often in the bathroom and occasionally in my father’s bedroom, where they always claimed to be looking for aspirin or borrowing a pillow or something lame – didn’t fool me. During the week it was OK because I was at school, but the weekends were the worst. Endless lunches and dinner parties, during which my mother displayed her total lack of understanding for the basics of cookery and fooled herself that she was one of the wittiest women in London. The litterarti, the clitterati and the zipperarti;  lit types, journos and TV people, all reviewing each other’s bloody shows and novels, it was sick.  Meanwhile, I was starving to death waiting for the fabulous Mrs Overbite to cook my bloody vegan sausages, watching her gargle down enough Chilean Chardonnay to float Melvyn Bragg, whilst burning a leg of lamb.

Ah yes, the vegan sausages, they figure largely in the book, I took them to be representational of  some kind of family dysfunction.

A Vegan sausage

No – they are just bloody tasteless.

You mean, in the food sense?

Er- yeah?

When did you decide to go vegan?

Never. Mrs Overbite just got it into her head that I was. Consuelo used to smuggle cold meat into my lunchbox.

Consuelo?

The cleaner.

I see

The vegan thing was good copy for her;  everything was good copy for Mrs Overbite. Once I nearly severed my finger  whilst chopping up a line of coke for Orlando, in the garden. I ran in, spouting blood everywhere, looking for my mother and all she did was shove my finger under a tap while she tweeted about it to her 50,000 followers.  Then, there was her column in the Daily Post. Every week, something amusing, idiotic or misguided that Tarquin did or said. Later the whole thing became a bestseller when my father decided to publish it as a Christmas stocking filler. You probably remember it.

Oh yes, someone bought me a copy for Christmas. ‘Tarquin’s Tarradiddles’

Not a good title IMO.

But very funny. I love that thing you said about Father Christmas.

You have to understand that in context. I’d just come home from my school’s Christmas party, where I’d been traumatized by a weird bearded man in fancy dress who’d promised to pop down my chimney.

And you said, ‘ Mummy,  I know Father Christmas is a  pernicious capitalist myth used to manipulate the proletariat, as well as a transparent Freudian archetype with worryingly pederastic overtones; but can he bring me an Xbox?’

She never answered my question on that, or any other occasion, but instead ran into her study, cackling and spilling wine all the way to her laptop, in order to write down what I’d said.

 Very funny.

It just happened to be my life.

Quite.

Julia Overbite before her fall from grace

In your book Tarquin, there is a character very much like Mrs Overbite, I mean , your mother.

I know.

She comes to a rather nasty end.

Yes, it’s fiction.

But your mother doesn’t live with you anymore.

That’s right, but unlike my plot,  she wasn’t pushed by her son, under a pulping machine as it was recycling her remaindered books.

Of course not,but she and your father did get divorced?

Yes.

You are still in contact with her?

She keeps on calling me. I don’t pick up.  She’s on the dole and  living in a council flat in Yeovil with Orlando.

The tree-surgeon?

The same.

And your father? After your book was published by a rival publisher, I believe he lost a lot of clients?

Went flat broke. He’s become a born-again Christian, hands out leaflets at railway stations.

Some critics have said that  your novel was a thinly disguised and cruel attack on your parents.

It’s just a novel; a best-selling one.

And now you are living in the family house alone?

With my advance I was able to buy the house from the bank. Les Parents won’t come back. My brief got me a restraining order on them both.

Aren’t you lonely?

I have Consuelo; she is now my legal guardian.

It is at this point that Consuelo , a lovely South American woman with a large smile bustles into the room, with a plate laden with kebabs, sausages and chops. She apologises for interrupting the interview, but it’s their time to watch TV. Tarquin immediately puts down his games console, picks up a sausage and snuggles down into the sofa next to Consuelo.

The television drowns out my words of farewell and I let myself out of the house.

Thank-you for your manuscript. Here is your in-depth report.

We, at the Glossy-Smarte Literary Consultancy thank-you so much for sending us your manuscript of  ’ The Indistinguishableness of Indistinguishability’.  Please find your report attached.

 In-Depth Editorial Report

‘ The Indistinguishableness of Indistinguishability’ is a very unusual book in many ways, not least of which, is the title. The plot is complex, involving  a dense weaving of themes of betrayal, sexual confusion and guano. The structure of the book is split  into historical and contemporary time periods. The section of the novel which deals with the !870′s Patagonian Guano Scam was interesting historically, if perhaps a little bewildering. This is a part of history which, oddly, has passed me by and I found myself wondering about the feasibility , although I appreciate the symbolism, of an opera house being built out of guano, despite the four chapter digression into the history, chemical composition and significance to world history of  accumulated bird waste. The eventual destruction of the opera house by the hysterical Welsh choir was exciting, but I question the accessibility of a  scene  written exclusively in the Welsh/ Patagonian argot.

La Cucaracha & Brandon the Guano King

The romance between the Russian ballerina, Svetlana aka ‘La Cucaracha’  and the chief guano smuggler ‘Branson’, although touching, sometimes invited incredulity, especially when they were  caste adrift on the ice flow by the syphilitic choreographer. Would she really have been able to dance the ‘Dying Swan’ in a beaver fur coat and snowshoes? Could Branson really have flung himself into the jaws of a walrus when she revealed her trans-sexual nature?

Chipping Sodbury

As the action returns to the contemporary and, may I say, amusingly bleak, lives of the elderly volunteers in a Chipping Sodbury charity shop, I feel that we are on safer ground. However,  the discovery of the very self-same beaver fur coat belonging to La Cucaracha in a bag of old tracksuits,  does seem to stretch co-incidence to its very farthest reaches. The plot device of their love story being scrimshawed onto a whale’s rib and  sewn into the beaver coat, only to be discovered by some old biddy, who turns out to be the grand-daughter of the love-child conceived on an ice floe by the unfortunate ballerina and her guano smuggler, was, I ‘m afraid, both contrived and predictable. The ensuing conflagration that burns down the charity shop and the volunteers following the automatic combustion of the fur coat, with or without your additional explanation  of the ‘inflammatory desires and passions that had soaked into the coat’ was, in novelist’s terms, playing with magic realist fire and coming away with third degree burns.

Marketability and Conclusion

The Start of the First Guano War

Does it have to be guano? By this I mean that  the introduction of a grand historical theme such as the Great Guano War of 1872, although a colourful backdrop, does have the effect of  suffocating the rather thin love story. (I could positively smell the  ammonia).  Branson and La Cucaracha could make rather a compelling and successful subject for women’s commercial fiction, stripped of the Patagonian Welsh choir and if  Branson could have some other career; a travelling saleman perhaps? Although I applaud the historical sweep of your ambition, perhaps it would be wiser to narrow down your vision. The contemporary section of the novel in the charity shop could, with much work, be developed into …something.

I am afraid as the novel stands, I cannot recommend it to any agents. Without much re-writing and the excising of  certain digressions, such as the chapters containing the syphilitic choreographer’s monograph on the rendering of penguins for lamp oil,  I   cannot,  in any conscience, recommend  that you continue to work on this project in its present form.

If however you would like to join our course on writing successful Romantic Fiction, we can offer you a special customer’s discount.

Thank you for allowing us to read your book

Fabia Glossy-Smarte  & Hilly (unpaid intern)

The Glossy-Smarte Literary Consultancy Newsletter

Hi and welcome to our Spring Newsletter!

Here at the Consultancy we are springing around like lambs in the sunshine, excited by the many quality manuscripts that are being submitted to us. For those of you who are thinking of submitting,  I am writing this little aide-memoire for your benefit and ours!

Before submitting your manuscript for an editorial report ask yourself a question. ‘Are you really sure that you have written and re-written to a point where you are absolutely satisfied with your work ? (because 90% of the manuscripts that we are sent are crap. Either because they are the single-spaced  leakage of someone who has failed to notice the utter indifference of the world  to their unique neuroses, or that the author has a mistaken belief that they are the love-child of  an unnatural three-way coupling between James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Jack Kerouac, thereby absolving them of the need for punctuation, spelling or sense). I am asking you this because we want to be able to help you to find the right place for your work (probably in the re-cycling) We’d love to guide your writing (and collect an introduction fee) in order to recommend you to an agent, (if you are anywhere near half-sane)

I am continually asked by writers ( hysterical monomaniacs who simper in that disingenuous way, which barely conceals the fact that they are screaming inside);  ‘How can I get someone to read my work?’  Often they grasp my arm in supplication (and let’s face it, there’s something about an unpublished writer’s grasp which is second only in desperation to that of hydrophobic octopus).

In reply I tell them that I, or one of my large team (actually, Hilly, my unpaid intern) will do so for a reasonable price *see our Fees page* based on how many pages you send (but actually based on the price of  a  Spa Weekend in a boutique hotel ;and what could be fairer than that? Although I won’t be sending Hilly, who although having a PhD in Restoration Comedy wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate the nuances of a rub down with Himalayan Salt and Maple Syrup – yum- I digress)

We aim to match your work closely to one of our varied team of experienced writers, ( basically, if you have written something hot, like Mummy Porn, anything Scandawegian involving sickening violence, or a Y.A. Crossover, then I shall give you my personal attention. If, however you have written some sad account of your pathetic life events in a misguided hommage to Anne Tyler, then you get Hilly) whose insight into your particular genre can be invaluable. (We have a list of genres pinned behind the towel on the office toilet wall). So rest assured that your manuscript will be assessed by an expert in as short a time as possible. (Hilly doesn’t mind working through lunch hours, I think she’s a vegan or a free-gan or possibly a no-gan, although she did turn terribly pale  the other day, and would have fainted all over a very promising Dystopian Norwegian Y.A Crossover featuring erotic trolls, if I hadn’t whipped it away in time!)

The old Himalayan Salt & Maple Syrup Treatment

This report in no way guarantees future publication. If you want to re-submit, we’d be happy to look at your manuscript for a reduced fee  commensurate with our time (or a Tibetan Hot Acorn Massage). We’d love to hear from you soon, (ideally in time for me to take advantage of that special offer on a De- Luxe Spiritual Eco Retreat to New Guinea with the Duk Duk Tribesmen; all penis sheaths and so on, but absolute sweeties and totally enlightened, apparently), so start buffing up that manuscript until it shines (and if Hilly is still inconsiderately hospitalized, then there’s a steady supply of Oxbridge Geography Graduates that I can call on) and we shall read your manuscript and guide it in the way it deserves.

Keep Writing!

Best

Fabia Glossy-Smarte

Lucky Seven – Seven Lines from New Works

Once again- apologies to those expecting the usual ‘Essential Guide’. This week, luckily for me (perhaps unluckily for you) Isabel Costello has kindly tagged me  in  Lucky Seven – Seven Lines from New Works. These are the rules:

My Novel

Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript

· Go to line 7
· Post on your blog the next 7 lines, or sentences, as they are – no cheating
· Tag 7 other authors to do the same

This is an extract from a work in progress called ‘The Romantics’.  I have to laugh as I write this because it has been in this state of  ’progress’, like a disoriented Galapagos turtle with one leg shorter than the other, for more years than I am willing to admit.

White Heat; not written by me

It concerns a group of friends who meet in the 1960′s  and are reunited in the present after  long estrangements based on the usual stuff; misunderstandings, love, betrayal, toxic lemon curd. Those currently watching the BBC production of  ’White Heat’ written by Paula Milne, may find this theme a little familiar. It is always one’s worst nightmare as a writer, that someone will write your book before you. Luckily Ms Milne hasn’t (no lemon curd for instance).  On the other hand when I submitted this novel to a Literary Consultancy for an ‘In-depth Editorial report’, it was said, that readers wouldn’t be much interested in a bunch of university educated baby-boomers cracking smart dialogue back and forth. Perhaps, I thought, now that hippies are objects of derision and that generation are being accused of being the authors of today’s woes, no one will want to read my little book.  Then  ’White Heat’ came along. I also started reading  Linda Grant’s latest novel ‘We Had it So Good’ which covers the same time period, tracing a couple and their friends through to the present. I began to think that maybe there had been a market for  ’The Romantics’. The transformation of flower children who eschewed capitalism and were kicking out the old order, into pillars of today’s existing order is perhaps a little hackneyed, but I still find it fascinating. Whether anyone still has an appetite for this subject or if that joint has been smoked, is up to you, dear readers. Please feel free to let me know! Meanwhile if the thirst for things 1960 have been quenched, I’ll blame it all on that lumbering bloody turtle which has been going round in circles for too many years!

The Romantics is more like this

On turning to Page 7 line 7, I find that it is the moment when main character Bryony (aged 17 in 1968) is just reeling from being kissed by the gloriously Byronic and ironic Edmund March; a boy whom she has previously considered to be so out of her league, as to make this intimacy an absolute impossibility. Edmund has just finished his second year at Cambridge, he is glorious to look at and hitherto has been the permanent boyfriend of someone else. Bryony is a naive   girl who has flunked her education and  settled for a drab job in a provincial town. Just before kissing her, Edmund tells  Bryony that she is bright and should go to university. He suggests she comes to Cambridge to take her A levels at the F.E . College. When she asks why, he says that if she was there, it would give him something to go back for.

His words tumbled in her mind, a candied elision of syllables, which she fought to shake into any kind of sense. Was it an actual invitation or a piece of dialogue straight from one of her most saccharine fantasies? Either way it was absurd. But Bryony attached herself to the absurdity with limpet madness and sucked out every sweet possibility. Maybe she wasn’t simply the sum of her estimations; not a fairly ordinary girl, with an ordinary mind in a plump body, but a girl who could belong, who should belong, in the rarefied world of Edmund March.

‘I’m sorry’, she asked, ‘what did you say?’

So now according to the ‘rules’, I have to tag 7 other lucky writers. here’s my list:-

Wendy Storer

Ms C

Lesley Walker

Greg Moodie

Cathy Dreyer

Pixi Peters

Cathy Lennon

Meet Gladys Meakin ~ 76 Years on the Slush Pile

Gladys in her prime in 1930

Gladys Meakin flashed a slightly wicked smile at me and winked,

‘One minute I’m playing bingo with Peggy & Daphne in the day room and the next I’m slinging back Pol Roger at The Ivy.’

She laughed naughtily. ‘I’ve even had to buy one of these,’ she said, waving an iPhone at me. ‘I’ve just downloaded that drawing app, it’s  quite compulsive, I’m playing it with my literary agent Chaz, and of course, I can’t help checking my Amazon listing every now and then. Not bad for a 98 year old eh?’

At this point Gladys’ ring tone, which I  recognised  as ‘We’re in the money’, drowned out the tea cups in ‘The Golden Meadows Care Home’ and she broke off our conversation to talk to her publicist;  fine tuning some details of her  book tour.

I reminded myself that I was gazing at the  publishing phenomenon of 2012.

Born in 1914,  Gladys wrote from early childhood, but it wasn’t until 1936 that she  submitted her second full length novel ‘Lift Not the Painted Veil ‘, to a publisher. The rest has been history, quite literally; her meteoric rise up the hardback best-sellers list and her domination of the top spot since, has become  the oddest publishing story of 2012. The novel which has famously highlighted a previously hidden aspect of country life in the 1930′s has caused a sensation.

‘I can’t think why people were so surprised, although I knew that it was pretty racy stuff when I sent the manuscript to Hudson & Ledbetter all those years ago.’ Gladys said.

‘Seventy six years ago, to be precise.’ I couldn’t  help adding.

‘Funny isn’t it, to think of it sitting there at the very bottom of that slush pile all through those years, you know they  discovered that it had because wedged beneath a radiator, sort of holding the whole thing up, that’s why no one threw it out.’

Gladys thoughtfully spat an olive pit inaccurately towards a sanitary receptacle.

‘But, in a way, it was a mercy, if it had been published I think my father might have shot me, he’d tried it before y’know.’

‘Your father tried to kill you?’

Gladys nodded vigorously as she topped up my glass with vintage champagne.

‘It happened when I was beating on a pheasant shoot. The night before, I had told Daddy that I quite liked the Quakers and he’d flown into a rage, very light on the trigger, Daddy. Of course, Mummy would have died of shame, she didn’t even want people to know that she bought her underwear at the Home & Colonial Stores, so god knows what she would have made of our  sexually deviant branch of trained anarcho-syndicalists.’

Some of the 'Godalming girls'

‘Tell me about that training’

‘We all went to Godalming’

‘Was that code for something?

‘No I mean literally, Aurelia Blythe-Goodman the founder of our movement lived just outside Godalming.’

‘And did she teach you personally?’

‘Only if she fancied you’,

Aurelia Blythe-Goodman

Gladys chuckled and rummaged in a pocket of her voluminous cardigan, pulling forth a packet of cigarettes and covertly showing them to me.

‘I bought these off the caretaker’, she said, ‘he gets them in from Albania.’

So saying, she stuffed the packet back into her pocket while I tried to regain the train of my thoughts.

Letitia demonstrating the technique on a rather muscular girl known as 'Bill'

‘What did the training consist of?’

‘We had to be able to fight off fascists in hand-to- hand combat, naturally. In order to improve our fitness Aurelia devised a particularly aggressive form of lacrosse, in which the objective was to ram your opponents head into the net of the lacrosse stick. She also gave every girl a small stipend to buy herself a bicycle. We were trained to use the bicycle as a potential weapon. We also knitted balaclavas, pretending that they were for Grimsby trawlermen, but really they were intended for our night raids.’

‘But what did you raid?’

‘Well that was a little disappointing, the girls in the towns had a better time of it really, radicalising factory workers, but we did our bit; we infiltrated dairies, forges, creameries and once smashed up a tea shop, gosh we laughed about that for months, cream horns flying, Spode hitting the deck, women in fur-trimmed coats and feathered hats fleeing up the High Street; how I miss those days.’

Aurelia and the gang 'on raid' in Surrey cunningly disguised as Mexicans

‘

And were you all Lesbians?’

‘Good Gracious yes, I should say so,’ she said dreamily.

Gladys charged her glass once more and then fell into a fitful doze, so I left her, re-enacting her Anarcho-Syndicalist triumphs in the by-ways of Surrey. I had meant to ask her how it felt to have spent a lifetime tryng to get published, only to succeed as a nonagenarian. But in a way I didn’t need to ask, all the answers were there on Gladys re-juvenated face.

It’s poignant to remember Gladys asking me to explain again what her publicist had meant when she’d said that  ’Old was the new young’. But since Gladys’ sad demise on the eve of her book tour, this phrase had taken on the weight of prophecy. In publisher’s offices, all around London, interns have been developing dust allegies from turning slush piles upside down, in hopes of finding another of Gladys Meakin’s racy series of novels concerning the sexy and political antics of a bunch of 1930′s girls, because she submitted them to every publisher she could find. So far no more have turned up and dear Gladys will not be supplying any more.

A Real Character – or in this case,me.

Isabel Costello ’s latest blogpost  concerns  character in fiction.  It is the characters in any book that hook us, perhaps even more than a plot. We want to empathise with them , even love them a little.  And in order for us to do that, the writer must convince us of the credibility of their characters. We will suspend our disbelief if we recognise something true. (Although if you check out Jake Barton ‘s latest blog post you’ll read an interesting case to the contrary)

We know ourselves to be a mass of inconsistencies and contradictions, no one is straightforward. But we aint art. As writers, we just have to do enough to imply all this psychological baggage, unless of course we are writing Mrs Dalloway.

 As a small example of this, Joni Mitchell gave me a small but telling insight into the way that all of us can suffer from cognitive dissonance. In the song ‘Hejira’, she sings;

‘We all come and go unknown/ Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone’

It’s so simple. Yes, we can be and mostly are both deep and superficial.  As always, I was  impressed by her  elegant concision and the absolute truth of the statement.

Getting back to the purpose of this exercise, Isabel crazily put herself forward as an example of  character and Susan Elliot Wright followed, as did Janet O’Kane, and Kristin Celms. So despite the fact that I hate exposing myself, I feel I owe it to you chaps who have read my blog and said such nice things about it, to do  the same.

 Genes/Inheritance

I am the youngest of five children brought up in a Catholic family in a village in Kent. So ‘Catholic’ was my experience that not only did all my brothers and sisters go to Catholic schools, but our house served as the local mass centre for the parish. This meant that every Sunday we had Mass said in, what was laughingly known as, ‘the billiard room’. Even worse I had three aunts who were nuns and two uncles who were priests.

Despite the fact that hordes of people trooped to our house on a Sunday, our family fostered a weird bunker mentality of  ’us’ against ‘them’. My father never wanted any of us to leave home and most of us agreed with him, because he had made it such a very nice place to be. My mother was a consumate carer of children, cook, gardener, always putting everyone before herself.

Environment

I live in the country with three dogs, two cats, chickens, my husband and a lot of dog hair.I have to live in the countryside. I need nature and feel that it feeds me, keeping me sane. I love to go to London for the day and soak up all that energy, but if I had to stay overnight, I’d get very depressed. Man-made ugliness oppresses me terribly, mind you there is a bit of that out here in the countryside too.  The bad side of living in the country is finding compatible people. I am not ‘horsey’, I am not posh, nor do I vote Tory, like most of my neighbours.  When we first moved here, I kept getting invited to ‘Coffee Mornings’ and assumed them to be ironic ‘Coffee Mornings’, then was sadly disabused of this notion.

Habits

I am a little bit chaotic. I have a tendancy to stop doing ‘my thing’ in favour of other peoples’ things.  When I was young that meant dropping education or jobs in order to follow men. In the last twenty years it has meant devoting myself to my kids, who are grown up now.

I have to write or I get miserable. I am interested in everything and am therefore constantly distracted by the radio and TV, books and papers. However, spreading myself so thinly, I have ended up with a great deal of muddled knowledge, spread across a lot of topics but only veneer deep. This does not, however, stop me from pretending I bloody know everything.

Correct attire for country coffee mornings

 

Personality

I am shy but I love talking, although I can’t do small talk. Years ago I used to dream of having perfect dinner parties where important and fabulous conversations took place. My attempts to make these a reality were always a disappointment. That’s why I love Twitter; at last, one can make inconsequential remarks or even attempt profundity and there are people out there who might understand and perhaps respond. I used to love parties, but now I hate them and my daughter has told me that, even worse, I have become socially awkward. It’s true, I don’t know what to do with my arms!

I don’t fit in, anywhere. I never have. I like the company of women as well as  men, but I can’t do the girly thing. I always was a bit of a loner and a tomboy. I am irritatingly cheerful and have a compulsion to crack jokes that I laugh at heartily myself, to others dismay,  while all the time thinking how I’m wasted on these people!

I love wild weather and the sea.

I consider myself to have been a sensitive/pathetic child who was traumatised by the Catholic church, big time. I have wounds, let me tell you and they still show. I apologise for myself all the time, feel guilty about even the good things I do (which are rare)  And although I have been a confirmed agnostic since I was thirteen, I love church music (not hymns). I’m with Alain de Botton on this one, the good things that flow from religion can be enjoyed without signing on for the dogma.

Skills

I’m a good cook and I can garden pretty well. I think I’m O.K. at listening to my kids and trying to help them. I used to sing in a band but

This is not me

can’t play a musical instrument and I wish I could.

And one more thing…

I was married to a Canadian, for visa purposes only, on a trans-Canadian train by a punk musician (lately of the Sex Pistols) who was a licensed preacher of the Church of the Fiery Pillar, Georgia. The marriage wasn’t consummated and it didn’t help me stay in Canada but it was the best wedding reception ever. We fused all the lights on the train and brought it to a halt in the Prairies.

If you’d like to take part in #realcharacter, just blog about yourself as we have, then tweet a link, using the #realcharacter hashtag. You’ll be found and retweeted.

‘Writing is a business! (You Schmuck).’

‘Are you lost?’

You have hurried late into Zerena Littlemercy’s class, ‘Writing is a Business! (You Schmuck).’  She is looking at you as if you had slaughtered a goat on the wrong altar. You look around. The rest of the class are staring at you.

‘No, I’m not lost’ you answer.

‘The decoupage class is down the hall.’

‘But I’ve signed on for your class.’

‘Then you have already exhibited your lack of professionalism by being four minutes late,’ says Zerena with the clipped finality of a guillotine.

You consider decoupage. It might be better than writing, it’s just a lot of cutting out with scissors and glueing. Do you really want to be published this badly? You hover between sitting down and standing up, looking all the while at Zerena who appears to have arranged this class between board meetings at Goldman Sachs.

‘Let us resume,’ she says sighing deeply.

Within five minutes the realisation dawns that you have never understood a single thing about being published.

‘Are you the kind of writer who is still drooping around in their dressing gown at 11.30 in the morning looking out of the window, sipping coffee with the pretence that you are writing in your head?’  Zerena asks.

You laugh and then realise that you shouldn’t have. ‘If the answer is yes; ask yourself  a question. If you don’t take yourself seriously,why would anyone else?’

That wipes the smile right off your face.

‘You should work office hours,’  Zerena continues, ‘ Don’t answer the phone, don’t answer emails, the door or anything else. This is your job. You must have discipline.’

Nothing else? Nothing else at all? This  is counter-intuitive stuff. Does she really mean that you should dispense with your vital pre-writing rituals of flicking through catalogues or rescuing drowning insects from the sink? Can she really mean that you shouldn’t re-organise your sock drawer, even when its distressing disorder is disturbing the equilibrium of your universe?

‘You have a product,’ Zerena continues, strutting in her power suit, ‘Decide what it is and market it clearly to the right people. In order to do this you must study the market, read everything you can about publishing trends’.

You would bet your last Credit Default Swap, that before turning to writing, Zerena ran a successful little business selling sand to Saharans.

‘And the best way to sell your novel is to identify your USP.’

Your USP? Perhaps you are in the wrong class after all. Is this ‘Easy Steps to being an Estate Agent’?. Many years ago you remember one of that brotherhood identifying the Unique Selling Point of your house. When it turned out to be, ‘ being within 5 minutes walk of a mainline station’, you had felt insulted.  Now your novel must have a USP. Could you use the same one?

‘Network!’. Zerena commands.

Now listen. You have always been a withdrawn type, From early childhood you have had sociopathic tendancies. This is why you kept those secret diaries of everything you hated, that the psychiatrist made you burn. This is why all these years later, your only effective form of communication is writing. If you could talk why would you bother to write?

Zerena’s class is gathering speed as she name checks the ‘New Trinity’- Twitter, Facebook, Blog.

‘Have you thought about getting yourself a YouTube Channel?’, she asks provocatively.

‘No, why?’, you want to answer, ‘what would I have to do on it? Strip while reading my synopsis?’

‘Have you Googled yourself?’ Zerena raises a perfectly dyed eyebrow into a quizzical parenthesis.

You were explicitedly told by Mother Alphonsus, a kindly soul in a whimple, never to do such a thing, but instead wait until you were married.

Now Zerena hits you with the goods. What publishers want is someone who can be a career writer, preferably in a genre that is easy to sell. They want someone who is articulate, has an easy and engaging manner, an attractive personality and a physical presence that doesn’t make people want to scream.

If you fill this requirement then consider yourself hired as the head of your very own PR company. Now you can go out and promote yourself; be invited to literary festivals and into every alleyway and denizen of the media.

In short,you may have written the best novel of 2012, but if you have the sexual magnetism and easy grace of Quasimodo, coupled with the networking skills of a medievil anchorite and the after-dinner style of a Trappist monk, you may as well forget it. You ease yourself out of your seat and slip unnoticed from the room and down the hall to the next door. Through the glass you see people happily cutting pictures out of magazines with scissors. You sigh and open that door.

The Vestibule of Literary Hell

You are an aspiring writer who, halfway through your life, has woken to find yourself lost in a dark wood. You are in the Valley of the Unpublished. It is dismal and you are terrified at being so alone. You wander until you come to a hill bathed in sunlight. But when you start to climb, you find your way blocked by three fierce beasts; a leopard in the form of a literary agent, a lion in the shape of a publisher and  Mariella Frostrup.

The Shade of Margaret Atwood

They fill you with fear and drive you back down into the sunless wood. At that moment a figure appears. Oddly, it turns out to be the shade of Margaret Atwood and you beg her for help. Atwood tells you that you cannot overcome the beasts that stand in your path. They must remain until a ‘greyhound’ (or Paris Hilton’s enraged chihuahua) comes to drive them back to HELL.  

Rather, by another path will you reach the sunlight, and Atwood promises to guide you through Hell and Purgatory and, ‘ mebbe lead you to Publishing Paradise’.

So, skipping a couple of Cantos; you enter a glass-filled atrium full of specimen trees in expensive pots. People rush past in a mild frenzy.

‘Is this a Walmart Sale?’ you ask in fear.

‘No’, says Atwood inconsequentially, as if ordering a  Chef Salad,  ’This, my dear,  is the Vestibule of Literary Hell.’

‘Who are all these people?’

‘Rejected writers’, says Atwood, chuckling sadly and shaking her head. ‘Their punishment is to follow a banner, at a furious pace, forever, and to be tormented by flies and hornets.’

‘Banner?’ you say, ‘what is this banner?’

‘It is known as Twitter and as you can see, it is advertising a hundred different opinions on how to get published.’

You watch blogs popping up to the right.

You listen to the Twitter people  alternately howling  and shouting witticisms.

The blogs look interesting, you are tempted to read one,

‘These people are nowhere.’ Atwood says, in her inimitable drawl while putting a firm hand on your arm,  ’C'mon I’m taking you to meet the infernal boatman’.

‘No, I’m not ready Ms Atwood,’ you say pulling against her strange gravity. ‘I haven’t yet abandoned  all hope.  I still want to be a tiny bit like you. Surely, there’s still a chance of publication, if only I can find the right course.’ And with one great tug you pull yourself free from her grasp and run to catch up with a group of desperate wannabees, flailing your hands all the while at the flies and hornets.

Next thing you know, Margaret has faded away and you have woken up in a queue for another writing class.

This one is called, ‘Writing is a Business (You Schmuck)’ and is being run by a woman in a severe but sexy suit called, ‘Zerena Littlemercy’.

Reading her promotional materials you find that, for a minor king’s ransom, she is promising to make you exactly what the publishing industry wants. You sign up.  Of course.

with apologies to to Dante Alighieri, ( translator M. Musa)  The Shade of Margaret Atwood, and Mariella who is a cultural institution in the U.K. and not a She-Wolf at all.

Pimp that Plot

Drusilla Lockheart-Leary has given you a grammatical drubbing. (see previous post) Your misuse of the comma was only the beginning. She has dragged you through English grammar by your nose; administering irrigation to your colon and semi-colon,  snipping your dangling participles, and ram-raiding the Oxford comma. This has resulted in you being so terrified of  grammar that you decide not to use any at all. You have begun to write as one afflicted by unmedicated logorrhoea. In short, you have become the Home Counties Kerouac.

The Story so far

You are an aspiring writer whose desperation has forced you into the arms of those that run writing courses. It’ll only end in tears.

Terrified of turning up to Drusilla’s next class with your  grammar-free writing assignment, you linger in a college corridor ,where your eye is taken by a poster for a rival class.

‘Pimp your Plot!’ is run by  writing course magus, Bart Zeidegger. He guarantees you publication in ’10 Kick-Ass Stages’, or your money back. You practically run into his class.

Bart is terrifying in a wholly different way to Drusilla. He’s pepped, he’s stoked, he’s wired. He is either high on Adult Education coffee or he’s been snorting cocaine off a hooker’s stomach. You sit there feeling your pupils dilate while Bart expounds ‘Plot Pimping’.  You learn that you will have to earn ‘the right to write’ and you do that only by understanding ‘structure’.

Today’s exercise is to condense your plot into a short paragraph, in your head.

‘If  your plot cannot be described in one lucid paragraph then it’s not strong enough, if it’s not strong enough,  basically  it’s crap-ola,’  says Bart.

The startled class obediently begin their task, looking as though they are trying to overcome longstanding constipation, then Bart springs in front of an unsuspecting student and asks them for their paragraph. Before they can start he holds up a hand.

‘Make that a couple of sentences,’ he says.

We contemplate this. It’s impossible surely?

‘If you can’t summarise your plot in a couple of sentences, then what is it?’

The strange word ‘Crap-ola’ echoes silently around the room.

‘So how about you giving it a try?’

Bart Zeidegger has turned his bloodshot gaze on you and is lifting a quizzical eyebrow. You think about the plot of your novel. It is  hopelessly complex and multi-layered, taking place in flashbacks with split narratives and multiple viewpoints. It’s a rambling, picaresque mess of a thing,  about a group of friends, who  just keep bumping into each other, over several decades, while stuff happens to them. You know that you can’t say this to Bart. He’ll take you down. You have been working on this novel for three years, and you’ve only just realised that you don’t know what the hell it’s about.

‘Come on now,’  Bart says, ‘ A literary agent would have called in his next appointment by now .’

Bart’s tone is taunting, impatient. He’s obviously ‘coming down’. You’ll  have to think of another  plot. But why, you wonder, does it have to be like this?  You think of the great works of literature; how many of them would have passed Bart’s scrutiny?  You  imagine him asking Proust to pitch  ’À la recherche du temps perdu’  in a couple of sentences.

‘How many volumes Monsieur Proust? I’m sorry, not in this current economic climate, have you thought of Indie publishing?’

Or:

‘Mr Joyce, this day in Dublin, not exactly a plot is it? And can’t you make Bloom a more likeable character?’

Or:

‘Count Tolstoy;  Anna Karenina is hot, Vronsky is a dude, but this business with the train, can’t you make the ending a little more positive?’

‘I’m still waiting.’ Bart wakes you from your imaginings with his  other quizzical eyebrow.

In desperation, inspiration arrives. You look Bart in the eye and begin.

‘ Within the framework of just one day, beautiful Anna, unhappily married Russian aristocrat falls in love with Bloom, a shabby Irishman. Their love must die with the day, until they meet Marcel, a coughing Frenchman, who with the gift of a simple French cake offers them the means by which to escape time.’

Bart looks at you for a long time, then slowly nods.

‘Mmnnn, that’s high concept. Mixed genre. Now, that’s a book I might wanna read’

‘