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Erasing and Rewriting

I’ve talked before on this blog about the art of the retcon, or retroactive continuity. This is where a sequel to a story rewrites or disregards a detail in a previous instalment to drive the plot of the sequel. It commonly happens in film franchises, but can also be done in literature.

There are a number of bad ways to introduce a retcon, such as ignoring a previously-established character or writing off an entire story as non-canon.

One writer who did it well was Gregory Maguire, in his novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Here, he takes a character from the L. Frank Baum original, renames her Elphaba Thropp and gives her a fleshed-out backstory.

I’m reminded of retconning this week after hearing that Richard Osman will be changing a detail in his novel We Chase Shadows. The original scene in the hardback edition depicts a swift eating a worm, but it has been pointed out that these are not part of the bird’s diet. The paperback edition is expected to have a character now being unsure what species it is.

I guarantee this change is not a solo decision. There will have been many discussions behind the scenes to make even this small change happen. From a cataloguing point of view, the paperback edition needs to have a different ISBN from the hardback anyway, so it shouldn’t cause too much trouble in that regard.

At least it’s only a short passage at fault there. Once he found out how they behave, Peter Benchley regretted his portrayal of sharks in his most famous novel Jaws. After the success of the book and then the film, however, no amount of retconning could fix that.

Instead, he spent the last decades of his life campaigning for shark conservation.

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Accidental Community Art

For the last few months, the appearance of 18 yellow towers in the Port of Leith has caused a stir among the locals. The towers are only there on a temporary basis and will eventually form part of an offshore wind farm.

Had they been painted battleship grey, I doubt we would be talking about them. Bright yellow, by contrast, is a difficult colour to ignore, placing them somewhere between infrastructure and public art. As such, they’ve inadvertently become a creative prompt.

Yellow Towers self-describes as a community art project in progress. At the moment, it exists only as a website, but the organisers are searching for an exhibition space to house the work these structures have inspired.

In common with most open-access projects, the prompt has captured people’s imaginations in different ways, with no dominant style. Some contributors have submitted stylised photographs or paintings. Others have written poetry, given the towers alternative names, or even made sound recordings.

Because none of this was intentional, it’ll be interesting to see how long the structures stick in the collective memory once they’ve been moved offshore.

Even if no exhibition goes ahead, I hope the website remains available for a year or two, if only to fossilise this brief period in 2026 when yellow invaders temporarily occupied the skyline of Leith.

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Too Late and Too Early

Long-time readers will know I’m in a poetry circle called the Wyverns, where members critique each other’s work on a monthly basis.

The pieces are typically written especially for each meeting, often around a theme agreed at the previous one. Because I write mine quite quickly, it’s not unusual that I’ll submit mine the week before we meet.

By Friday of last week, I had no ideas for the October prompt of wonder, at least until I happened to walk past the house of a former friend. A ten-line verse quickly began to emerge and I submitted it the same evening.

I try to avoid rewrites because we keep in touch via an email distribution list, which makes it difficult to track multiple versions, but I made a rare exception. It’s already received some good feedback, but the best critiques come at the meetings themselves, where members read in front of the others, offering an extra angle that a poem on the page often doesn’t convey.

That’s not the only piece I created over the weekend.

On Sunday, I made a last-minute decision to see two exhibitions at the V&A Dundee, followed by one at Dundee Contemporary Arts. During the last of these, I was struck with another idea for the Fun a Day challenge held every January. It’s early days, but this is already beginning to exist inside its own self-contained universe.

The challenge for this coming January is already in the can and will be revealed towards the end of December this year, so this current idea will need to wait until 2028. Maybe the real challenge will be to keep it under wraps until then.

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Rediscovering a Dream Journal

Around two months ago, I rediscovered a dream journal I’d kept on another blogging website for around 2½ months in 2011. At present, all the entries are locked away, but the pinned entry suggests that mutual friends were welcome to follow it, and there’s an overview of my motivation.

I was inspired by a blogger friend who often experienced called WILD, or Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, and how she found it a great source of inspiration for writing. This would have been less than a year after I started with the former National Novel Writing Month the previous year, so I was keen to try anything.

I did talk in the pinned entry about general techniques for falling asleep and how to check whether you’re in a lucid dream. At the time, I didn’t seem to realise there is a specific technique for learning how to induce WILD that would only have been a Yahoo! search away. What a missed opportunity.

I didn’t intend for the project to last any specific period; I didn’t set a time frame at all. It was just to there to store the material for use at a future date.

From the first entry on 27 July 2011, I made 11 regular updates – excluding the pinned post – with fragments of dreams I’d had over the last few days. One phrase that appears a lot is Forgotten on Waking, and that became the subtitle for the blog.

So what of the actual contents?

I need to be selective about what I post because some people referenced are still around. Other fragments have been tagged NSFW, or Not Safe for Work, whereas this WordPress blog is firmly PG. But there are some repeatable gems, reproduced here with the original grammar intact:

  1. 24 July: 1 saw round poles about 100mm wide and 1m long, with a large, “knob,” at the end of each, with an eight- or nine-letter word beginning with H word stamped on the handle. They were placed in a bucket in a white room like an art gallery. Still in the art gallery, I was impressed by a stand that held six posters – two wide and three tall – being folded up into a box shape about 50cm cubed.
  2. 31 July: I was arranging with a friend to pick up a crisis loan of £100 on my behalf and him asking via text message if he could use some of the money to travel back to give it to me. He replied, “If I don’t enjoy it, I’ll go away and never speak to you again.”
  3. 12 August: Dream 1, fragment: I learnt that the two men who operated the puppets on The Sooty Show were Army reservists, so they could only film when they weren’t required to be on duty.

Reading these again after 15 years, I can see why I thought they might eventually prove useful. The Sooty Show fragment in particular feels like the sort of premise that might make for a good short story, although I’d fictionalise the TV show. Even the objects in the art gallery objects might worm their way into the description of a scene.

While writing this entry, I intermittently thought about restarting the journal, maybe for a limited period, but it’s not a reliable method of generating writing prompts, Eleven entries across 2½ months isn’t exactly a production line, particularly when so many of them amount to Forgotten on Waking. The process also requires the will and the means to make notes immediately after waking up.

Rather, the value of this collection is closer to keeping a box of miscellaneous electrical wires. Most won’t have any practical use, but you might occasionally need one for a particular project.

Perhaps that’s enough reason to keep the journal as a fossil: you never know when you’ll need a mysterious art installation, a crisis loan, or an Army reservist puppeteer.

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A Least Favourite Book

A couple of weeks ago, I answered one of the daily prompts that WordPress provides, talking about the book Room by Emma Donoghue. Today, I remembered I had another one stored for future use, and here it is:

Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?

If you don’t want to know what happens in the novel Crawling Round South Oakwood by Stephen Slaughter, then stop reading here.

This book was released in 2012, and I first heard of it in Writing Magazine after it won an award for cover design. The words become fuzzier as you read down the cover, and they’re interspersed with pictures of beer glasses gradually emptying. I thought it deserved the award, but it proved the old maxim of Never judge a book by its cover.

It’s an tried-and-tested technique to hook the reader with immediate action. Just as Romeo and Juliet opens with a street brawl, I expected to see it all kicking off down the pub. Instead, we’re presented with the overwritten opening sentence.

Although I was more interested in the thought of a weekend break for two in Paris, which was the first prize of a competition in the local paper, the attention of my colleagues was firmly gripped by news which had not been reported in the paper and which was unlikely to ever reach its pages.

This sets the tone for the entire novel: dense with unnecessary detail and light on plot. We have to sit through pre-drinks at the narrator’s house, some uninteresting description of their favourite TV show So You Think You Know What You Are Talking About, and then a turn-by-turn account of how the group walks to the pub.

I don’t regret reading the book per se, but I do regret carrying on past the first chapter. Some authors can skilfully do virtually nothing with their characters, but not Stephen Slaughter.

The closest we come to any interesting action is a scuffle that breaks out in the middle of the book. There is no foreshadowing, no build-up of tension, just two characters who seemed like friends until they decided they had some sort of problem with each other.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another book with as few redeeming features. The plot is so banal that that I can’t even remember how it ends, and I’m not buying another copy just to find out. It’s likely some idle chatter about their beloved TV show.

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Murder She Floats

At the recommendation of a few people, one of them Richard Osman, I started watching The Good Ship Murder a few weeks ago. All the episodes are available on the Channel 5 website, provided you’re within the UK.

As the title suggests, it’s a crime drama set on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship. This is the real-life MSC Virtuosa. Although the name is widely publicised online, it’s never mentioned in the programme except for the credits, presumably to avoid contravening product placement rules.

I’ve become a fan of the programme, but I could see through the formula from the start. In short, it’s like Murder She Wrote, but at sea. Shayne Ward plays Jack Grayling, a cabaret singer who was once a detective. He ends up informally investigating the suspicious deaths that occur on the ship and in port.

The production also receives incentives from the Malta Film Commission. I’m conjecturing here, but with its close proximity to Italy, I wonder whether that’s why we frequently see Italian supporting characters and locations.

But what about the other leading characters? The real strength of any script lies in what it does with these.

Grayling needs the help of Jamil Al-Rashid, his colleague in Housekeeping who can gain access to areas of the ship that a cabaret singer can’t go. He also has the trust of Kate Woods, the ship’s First Officer and his own romantic interest, who can act as lookout.

The contrast between leading characters is the bedrock of any ensemble piece. The A-Team, for instance, would never manage with four characters like Hannibal Smith or B A Baracus.

As for antagonists, an honourable mention must go to Geoffrey Breton as Staff Captain Piers de Vreese. He’s so well-written that I find him insufferable, and I often wish he would be pushed into the sea under cover of darkness.

The series was created by Mike Benson and Paul Matthew Thompson, who have written a lot of British TV dramas and soaps between them, but this appears to be their first collaboration. There is a further credit – Based on an Original Idea from Ben Frow – referencing the long-serving Director of Programmes at Channel 5.

Importantly, it never pretends to be highbrow or realistic. Viewers are taken to sunny far-flung locations and asked to suspend their disbelief while the former cop manages the friction between his crewmates and goes on to uncover the vital clue that the serving police have overlooked.

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Rewriting the Ending of an Award-Winning Novel

There’s nothing more intimidating to a writer than a blank page, so WordPress provides a daily question to help out. I don’t often answer these, but I liked this one from a few weeks ago because I had an immediate answer.

This entry will, by necessity, contain major plot points about the Emma Donoghue book Room. If you don’t want to know what happens, skip over this entry. The question is:

If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?

Continue reading “Rewriting the Ending of an Award-Winning Novel” →
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Listening Over Lecturing

Many years ago, I volunteered at a community radio station in Glasgow. As well as turning up for my shift, however, I made a point of showing up at their other events.

At one of these, I was introduced to someone who was supposed to be some big deal in radio, even if the details of his background are now hazy. I can’t even remember whether he was actually a professional or just an enthusiastic amateur. In any case, I was starting out with presenting and he knew more than I did, so I asked him whether he had any advice.

This turned out to be a mistake. Rather than first asking a few establishing questions, he talked at me non-stop for about ten minutes. I’m trying to remember even one of the points he made, but all I can recall is the wide-eyed enthusiasm in his face.

I subsequently learnt there can be something of a ‘wannabe culture’ in community radio, and it’s likely he was part of that. Many volunteers are genuinely there to make a difference to the listeners, but a few believe they could have been on Absolute 90s if only their luck had turned out differently.

I was reminded of this incident recently when I was asked by two different people for general writing advice. I could easily have launched into my own ten-minute speech. I could have reeled off all the times I’ve been published, that I took over National Novel Writing Month for Dundee & Angus, how I used to run an open-mic, what is the best time of week to post a blog, and a hundred other topics.

But what use would it have been? Writing advice is only effective in response to a specific problem.

So instead of channelling that wannabe, I find it more useful to ask some establishing questions, starting broad and narrowing it down. These questions could include, but are not limited to:

  • What’s your current project?
  • Which part are you stuck on?
  • What solutions have you tried so far?

That way, everyone saves time and the person asking gains a much more useful insight than hearing the other person trying to prove their vast knowledge.

Whether the other person takes that advice, however, is another matter.

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The Formatting That Went Out of Date

A rare Wednesday entry, but I couldn’t let this lie. You might have read yesterday’s entry The Story That Went Out of Date, which includes a short story at the end.

It has become apparent that the formatting only appears correctly on https://gavincameron.co.uk. The first line of each paragraph was supposed to be indented like a novel; instead, anyone viewing on the Reading page or the Jetpack app would have seen a wall of text, and nobody likes a wall of text.

It seems I haven’t quite yet cracked the coding on this site. As such, I’ve gone back and edited it, so the formatting should show correctly everywhere.

Thank you for your co-operation.

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The Story That Went Out of Date

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the challenges facing writing with the advent of generative text software. Much of the discourse has become dull and repetitive, and what I haven’t seen discussed much is how new technology can quickly make an existing story obsolete or dated.

Pick up any novel from the 19th century or before, and the characters will travel by horse or on a ship with sails and rigging. Enter the 20th century and characters will use home phones or call boxes to speak to each other. Readers are quick to make allowances for the age of the text. But what happens when the piece is more recent?

I was reminded this week of a story I wrote in 2015 called Film Star Reanimation Ltd., where the plot revolves around resurrecting two dead actors for a feature-length film.

It’s something that was possible at the time, but involved a lot of manual input and guesswork. It was inspired by, and makes reference to, an advert for Galaxy from 2013 which starred an electronic replica of Audrey Hepburn. Here’s an article from 2014 about how this was achieved.

Now, 13 years on, this sci-fi idea is edging closer to reality, rendering the plot less outlandish than it appeared on its first outing. As such, I can’t foresee this being published professionally now, unless I wait a few decades and present it as a historical piece.

I can find three versions in my files: two from February 2015 and one from December 2015. The last one is the version I’ve included under the cut.

It’s only 1,352 words and I’d like to edit it properly because there are enough plot points in there to unpack it to twice that length. Nonetheless, I’ve left the words unchanged, only the formatting to make it appear correctly on WordPress.

For anyone keeping tabs on my WordPress awards, by the way, the site today awarded me two badges while fixing that formatting:

  • CSS Sorcerer. You’re a developer now. Basically.
  • Perfectionist. Edit a single post over and over again. It’s still not right, is it?

Film Star Reanimation Ltd.

Continue reading “The Story That Went Out of Date” →