Tag: prose

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Second chance saloon.

In 1951, the acclaimed novel From Here to Eternity was published. Many readers were unaware that James Jones fought to keep in sexual content and profanity, but he was forced to give in to the demands of his publishers.

It was only in 2011 that the deleted content was restored by e-publisher Open Road, who also released his book To the End of the War for the first time. Unfortunately, it came too late for Jones as he died in 1977.

In the same month in 2011, Kate Bush was allowed to use text from Ulysses in an album, having originally been refused permission in 1989. A little-known Tennessee Williams play from 1983 was also given its premiere.

Perhaps it was just a golden year for second chances. But attitudes and standards are constantly reshaping, editors come and go, and even individuals change their minds. What was unacceptable or clichéd several decades ago might be in fashion right now.

Major delays are extremely common in the screenwriting industry, where ideas can knock around for several years waiting for the right producer and director to pick up the project, not to mention the protracted process of re-drafting the script – often dozens of times – plus the actual filming.

Phone Booth (film)
Phone Booth (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the 1960s, Larry Cohen first had an idea for a film set entirely inside a phone booth and he pitched it to Alfred Hitchcock. At the time, neither of them could think of a good reason to keep the character in the same place for an entire movie. When Cohen revisited the idea in the 1990s, he had the idea of using a sniper; the mobile phone had also been invented by then, and this is a major plot point. Within a month, he’d written the script for Phone Booth.

I’m aware that last week I discussed when to let go of work. But if you’ve had a manuscript languishing in a drawer or an unopened computer file from years ago, bring it out. Can you look over it with more experienced eyes? Have those who rejected it now moved on? Is the subject matter acceptable today, or perhaps even more pertinent than when it was written?

If you’ve answered yes to these, it might be worth another shot.

A minor word of warning, however. If Victor Nabokov had written Lolita today, it’s unlikely any publisher would have taken it on. And when an uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in that aforementioned golden year, many critics felt it inferior to the original.

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You are here. ↓

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, you’ll know that Sheldon Cooper is particular about which seat he chooses, particularly in his own apartment. Writers can be similarly picky about where they pen their works.

Among my writer friends alone, there is one who writes better with absolute silence and another who penned most of her novel in a noisy student pub. There is no right or wrong way. For my own part, I’m typing this entry in one of my favourite places: at the bottom end of my bed, standing with my back to the window. But when I’m stuck on a project, I sit on the mezzanine floor of a particular cafe in town and it usually unblocks my flow.

On Saturday, I was given the opportunity to attend a one-off writing group at the secluded Barry Mill near Carnoustie to raise funds for its restoration. After a tour and a demonstration of its working waterwheel and machinery, the nine or so attendees followed the stream back to the weir through acres of wild flora.

The tranquillity, location and history of the place was supposed to serve as inspiration for a poem or prose piece – and it worked. It took me some time to put something together, but I managed to write three verses, using the mill as a starting point, and nearly everyone had written something for reading out. It didn’t help, however, that it was raining onto our notepads for much of the visit, or that two of the chairs collapsed – mine included – before the session even began.

So if you feel your writing is becoming a little stale, try going somewhere else. Not everyone is able to escape to the countryside, of course, but it might work even to move location within the same general area or even the same building. Before I discovered my current spots, I experimented with a number of places before finding one that felt just right.

I’ll leave you with an electronic postcard of Barry Mill.

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Do you know who I am?

Last week, I had the opportunity to show my published and soon-to-be published pieces to my work colleagues. Some of them were aware of my writing through reading this page, while it was news to others.

I don’t talk about my fiction writing much when I’m doing my day job. Although it certainly isn’t a secret, I believe there is a time and a place for promotion, and I was given that time and place on Thursday lunchtime, so I took advantage of it.

On Twitter and Facebook, it’s particularly important to keep a balance between ordinary updates and promotional copy. How often have you seen an account post exactly the same message four or five times a day? It makes people switch off, like that one individual you avoid at the party as you know they’ll talk about their pet subject ceaselessly. Besides, if you say everything upfront, what is there left to have a conversation about?

Two great places for advice about promotion – and there are dozens of others – include the writer Rayne Hall, and the marketer Wilco Wings whose advice can be adapted for writers.

And now I have your attention through our implied conversation, it’s time to launch into the self-promotion.

To date, three of my short stories have appeared in the following anthologies: Because of What Happened by The Fiction Desk, FourW Twenty-Four by Booranga Writers’ Centre (I’m not credited on the website, only in the book), and Alternate Hilarities by Strange Musings Press. While looking out materials for my work event, it seems I’ve misplaced my copy of Because of What Happened, so I’ll have to hunt it down like JR Hartley and his book about fly fishing.

 

I’m also due to have two poems published in an upcoming anthology called Seagate III when the last tranche of funding comes through, and one in a promotional leaflet for the MLitt Writing Practice and Study programme at the University of Dundee.

By coincidence, I received an e-mail last week from Giovanni Valentino, editor of Alternate Hilarities. In each of his anthologies, he likes to run a reprint from the magazine of the same name from the 1990s, but it’s becoming harder and harder to find the authors.

To this end, he’s asking the Internet for help. On the off-chance that you’re one of the following people, or that you know their whereabouts, please e-mail him forthwith at giovanni.valentino@strangemusingspress.com.

Issue 2

  • Alex MacKenzie, The Elvis Wars
  • Dana Cunningham, The Man Who Could Communicate with Animals
  • Buzz Lovko, The First Dinosaurs (a near Myth)

Issue 3

  • Dan Crawford, X-0001
  • Ken Goldmen, The Devil and Myron Rabinowitz
  • Michael Eugene Pryor, Irreconcilable Instructions

Issue 4

  • E. Jay O’Connell, Until the Tuna Runs Out
  • Alex MacKenzie, The Real Me

Issue 5

  • Tomas Canfield, Learning the Ropes
  • Leonard Jansen, Old ’99

Issue 6

  • Greg Costikyan, They want our Women!
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The Finish Line.

Every April, there’s a contest called Camp NaNoWriMo, an offshoot of November’s National Novel Writing Month. In November, the aim is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Camp, by contrast, allows participants to choose a word goal starting at 10,000 and to work on any type of writing.

I intended to do more work on one of my unpublished novels, which is mostly written but needed extra scenes. I did write a few thousand words of it, but I didn’t feel the same enthusiasm as I did when I edited it a couple of months ago. Rather than bore myself stupid with it, I changed focus.

A piece of advice often given to new writers is Finish what you start. It’s rare that I don’t finish work, but I did have a few short stories that had gone nowhere. I therefore used the opportunity to finish two of them.

One had started off as a little self-indulgence but rereading it after this time allowed me to work out and deliver the message I was trying to convey. The other one should have been written in one session, but I was interrupted and never went back to it. I now have a satisfactory ending for both pieces and they’re ready for a second redraft – and a ruthless reduction in their word counts. As for the novel, I will redraft it when my enthusiasm returns.

Camp NaNo is traditionally done without a group leader and without meet ups in person. In Dundee, however,  we’ve been fortunate enough to have active members who have met up every Tuesday in April to work on their respective pieces. I set my own target at 10,000 words as I also had a university paper to hand in around the same time, but thanks to these meetings, I managed to reach the goal.

If you’re also in Dundee, by the way, there’s a new monthly Literary Lock-in at the George Orwell up the Perth Road. There are no speeches or readings, just an opportunity for writers to mingle and speak with each other. The next one is on 25 May.

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L’étranger.

For those of you who enjoyed the main event in November, we’re now nearly a week into Camp NaNoWriMo. This is an offshoot project where you have a free choice of what you want to work on, and you can set your own word target from 10,000 upwards. However, this is not what I want to discuss today.

One of our group members keeps a WordPress blog about her experience of moving to Scotland, from eating ice cream on a cold day to voting in last September’s independence referendum. Indeed, we boast a number of members from other countries.

There’s a joke often repeated that there is no such thing as American English, there is English and then there are mistakes. Joke or not, I find it difficult to agree with this statement, as there are so many variations of English even as you travel within the same country. For proof of this conjecture, just ask people on your favourite social media site what they call the end slice of a loaf of bread and watch the arguments come to a head.

The Stranger (collection)
The Stranger (collection) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Regular readers will know that I’ve so far been published in three countries: England, Australia, and the USA. Sometimes when I send to US publications, I change the spelling and grammar appropriately, with guidance from Microsoft Word and my own knowledge of Hollywood movie dialogue. This isn’t, I admit, a perfect system. And yet the one story published there is written in British English, and that’s because the protagonist is obsessed with acronyms, and changing the location would mean rewriting those acronyms, so the Britishisms stayed accordingly.

I know virtually nothing about Australian English, so I stick with my usual spelling and syntax. Here’s where to buy FourW Twenty-Four containing my story, although they’ve omitted my name from the website. I made reference to a motorway, whereas a quick Internet search suggests that highway or freeway might be more appropriate. The type of road is not a major plot point in this piece, nor does the action take place in a specific locality, but I know a few expats who can advise me for next time.

While looking up these links, I discovered that another Gavin Cameron wrote a non-fiction book in 1999 about the threat of nuclear terrorism. So if that’s a subject that interests you, it’s the other guy you want to speak to.

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Immediacy.

Sometimes an idea for a piece strikes after hearing about a topical event. Last week, for instance, I posted a poem I wrote on the day of the solar eclipse. Back in November, I was also inspired to write a short story prompted by the BBC’s coverage of the Ferguson riots. Since last week’s entry was posted, the world has been talking about the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps. That also inspired a poem in the same form as the eclipse one.

Neither the Ferguson nor the Germanwings pieces have been posted online as I might send them to a publisher in the future. I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for their contents, which I discuss later on.

When writing a response to current affairs soon after they happen, the details are fresh in everyone’s minds as they’re analysed in the papers and on TV. However, the danger is that specific incidents from the wider event are sometimes forgotten as soon as a week after they occur; in some cases, the entire event might not survive in people’s memories. It’s hard to tell which events might stick around and which won’t. The piece you’ve written in response might therefore contain details that need to be explained in future readings.

Regarding the three pieces in the first paragraph, my solution to this problem was not to focus on the incident itself, but the thoughts and feelings generated by it. To find the universal truth, if you will. It’s not necessary to know that the eclipse took place in March 2015, nor that anything happened in Ferguson, nor that a certain plane crashed in a certain place.

The alternative is to make the piece self-contained, giving the reader enough of an insight about the event for them to understand why you’ve responded to it in a particular way.

A good example comes from the Billy Joel hit We Didn’t Start the Fire. In the lyrics, he makes reference to around 100 world events that happened between his year of birth (1949) and the song’s release (1989).

Many of the earlier events, such as Bob Dylan’s career and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, had already stayed in the public consciousness. However, a modern listener might wonder the meanings behind Hypodermics on the shore and Rock-and-roller cola wars in the late 1980s, as these haven’t been widely retained in our collective memories. There’s no way Joel could have known this, of course, nor that the Berlin wall – after having its construction noted in the song – would be knocked down just two months after its release.

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Keeping In Touch.

Last week, an editor wanted to make unsolicited contact with me, but was unsure of the best way to approach it. She settled for asking me via Twitter to e-mail her. This started me thinking.

There are several ways to reach me publicly: leave a comment below, send a Twitter message to @LadyGavGav, or post to me on Google+. Yet I hadn’t previously thought about how people could contact me privately. In the case of the editor, it meant putting her e-mail address in the public domain, which I’m keen to avoid thanks to the risk of spam.

So I’m interested in how you manage to maintain contact with others? A ‘disposable’ address that forwards to your real one? A website form? Or some other method I haven’t thought about?

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Press play.

Recently, I’ve rediscovered the art of playwrighting. National Novel Writing Month used to have an offshoot called Script Frenzy. In 2012, its last year, I wrote my first and only full-length script: a stage play for two actors. Since then, I’ve become more comfortable with dialogue in prose, and how it can be used to imply action, or indeed how an action can omit several lines of speech. I haven’t yet edited my Script Frenzy work, but I imagine I could tighten up the dialogue and cut out many of the directions.

One thing that strikes me about penning a play is that you must have a clear idea of where it’ll be performed, not just which venue, but where in the world. A radio drama, for instance, will be radically different from a screenplay, and done on a vastly different budget. Even taking a stage play from London’s West End to Broadway will require the script to be laid out in a different format. But once you know where it’ll be set, the rest falls into place.

Scrivener, for instance, offers several different templates, including all the ones mentioned in the last paragraph, and any that aren’t shown by default can probably be downloaded. You tell the program your next action by pressing Enter or Tab at the end of each line. I’ve found this software a joy to work with for novelling, and just as good for scripts.

It’s most important, however, to remember that playwrighting is not for control freaks. The moment you give it to a director, he or she will have different ideas about how your words should be presented to an audience. You might imagine your characters sitting opposite sides of a table dressed formally, but the director might see them in jeans cuddled up next to each other. The writer has limited input in this process. The only way to guarantee it goes the way you want is to become a director yourself.

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Back Referencing.

Sometimes after posting an entry, I decide or realise I should have added some more information. To that end, I have addenda for two recent posts.

 

After putting together last week’s top tips for public speaking, I think I should slot an extra one after Think about your introduction.

Avoid too much alcohol and/or a heavy meal before speaking. Both of these slow down the thought process. I recognise the meal often comes before the entertainment so try to leave sufficient time for it to digest. Being drunk at an organised event rarely makes a good impression on the audience, and is inexcusable if you’re paid to perform. I often have one coffee before I speak, which speeds up the thought process.

 

A few entries ago, I also discussed how to set or avoid setting a story in a particular era. Yesterday, I finished the Anthony Burgess classic A Clockwork Orange, written in 1962 and set in a near-future society relative to that year.

To avoid the problem of including dated slang, Burgess opts instead to invent his own jargon partly based on Russian. It’s easy to see why he chose that language, as the Cold War was at its height then. Many of the words have to be inferred through their context, as most editions deliberately omit a glossary.

He does, however, also use English words in an uncommon manner. A couple of these words have made their way into modern slang and these passages read as though they’ve been written recently. A case in point is like, with which the main character Alex peppers his speech not only as a comparison but when he’s struggling to remember the words he means.

There is another example, but I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, when he describes a stereo, “playing a very sick electronic guitar veshch,” the last word meaning thing or stuff. There is only one instance of it in this context, and it sounds as though it has the modern slang meaning that’s used alongside wicked and cool. For the rest of the book, Alex only uses the word sick when he’s feeling physically ill, and the Wikipedia appendix doesn’t list it.

 

Finally, yesterday marked the birthdays of three very famous writers. Robert Burns is the most obvious – I read To a Mouse to an audience in honour – but Virginia Woolf also burned candles on 25 January, and one of my major influences John Cooper Clarke turned 66.