prose – Page 21 – Gavin Cameron

My Struggle.

I’ve been keeping a log of all the books I finished in 2014. Note that these were finished in the last year, and that the top one or two might have been started in 2013. Here’s that list in full:

Number	Author	Title
1	Ella Cheever Thayer	Wired Love
2	Nethergate Writers	If Stones Could Speak
3	John Twelve Hawks	The Traveller
4	Nethergate Writers	Whodunwhat?
5	Rachel McCrum	The Glassblower Dances
6	Jenny Lindsay	The Eejit Pit
7	Luke Wright	Mondeo Man
8	Various authors	Alternate Hilarities
9	Adam Gopnik	Paris to The Moon
10	Virginia Woolf	Mrs Dalloway
11	Carson McCullers	Ballad of The Sad Café
12	Jayne Anne Philips	Quiet Dell
13	Raymond Carver	Elephant and Other Stories
14	Kohta Hirano	Hellsing

Not all of these were traditional novels. Numbers 5, 6 and 7 were poetry chapbooks, 9 was a collection of essays, while 14 is my first foray into reading graphic novels.

My favourite of these had to be number 1. It was published in 1880 and was ahead of its time both in terms of the technology used in the story and that the main characters are all women, with the men in supporting roles. My least favourite was number 10. This choice will rub up two of my lecturers the wrong way, but while the quality of her writing is high, her books never form much of a story. I had to wait until page 168 for anything major to happen.

Since I became a writer, I’ve tried to finish any book I’ve started even if I find it hard going. I’m currently trying to plough through the abstract concepts in Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, and I tackled Crawling Round South Oakwood by Stephen Slaughter a couple of years ago although it read like an unedited first draft. Before then, I would give up after a short time; I didn’t make it past the first few pages of Road to Mars by Eric Idle, nor A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg has developed a formula based on the latter of these books called the Hawking Index to estimate how far people are reading before giving up. It uses the five passages in each book most highlighted by Kindle users. However, in the time since the publication of the formula, the title of least-read book is no longer Hawking’s masterpiece, but Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. You can read the full list here.

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A Time and a Place.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Sleeper’s 1996 track Sale of the Century, and the following lyrics jumped out at me:

Let’s take a photograph
We’ll burn all the negatives

These days, very few photographs are taken on film, but that’s how it would have been done at the time of the CD’s release nearly 19 years ago. As we fast approach New Year, it started me thinking about how the language we use can inadvertently place a piece of writing in a particular era.

For instance, I own a computing book published in the late 1970s or early 1980s in which the author writes, “When I was a young hacker…” But he’s not talking about accessing any systems illegally; the term hacker originally meant someone who was merely proficient at using computers.

I’ve just finished reading Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips. The story is part fiction, but based on a series of murders that happened in the 1930s. She uses newspaper sources from the period. One of these talks about the matrimonial bureau the killer used, and another mentions a colored porter working at a hotel. Although the actual date is mentioned at the beginning of each chapter, this sets the action in a social context. These days, of course, there are no matrimonial bureaux left while the latter term has become widely unacceptable.

It’s very difficult to know how language will change and it’s therefore difficult to adapt accordingly. You might write a story today about a character who watches a Netflix film on her tablet device, but within a decade, she might have it streamed directly into her head by BrainMoviez. Indeed, the word film itself is an anachronism, as it was part of the same technology mentioned in the Sleeper track.

One way around this potential obsolescence is to mention that a character is, for example, listening to music or driving a car without mentioning the source of the sound or the type of car. Yet that can deprive the reader of a sense of location. Even when a writer tries to create a sense of timelessness, there are often hallmarks that signal when the piece was written. Most readers will realise this and take it into account.

I’m now going to back up this entry to a floppy disc, dial into the Web, and post it.

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How Low Can You Go?

Until 25 January 2015, Dundee Contemporary Arts are showing an exhibition by time-based artist Jim Campbell. Whereas a TV or computer screen has a resolution up to about two million pixels, he uses software to reduce the quality of a normal video to no more than around 1000 pixels. The viewer is expected to fill in the gaps; fortunately most viewers are particularly good at this.

Imagine all the triangles…

Look at the graphic on the right, for instance. There are only three small black circles with notches cut out of them, but your brain imagines a large white triangle just from the information it’s given.

Using this principle, his work Home Movies 1040-3 presents amateur footage so the figures are recognisable as people, but the faces are deliberately obscured. Tilted Plane gives the impression of birds or bats flapping overhead by lightbulbs momentarily switching off in sequence. Meanwhile in Gallery 2, pulsating lights reflect the emotion behind the fragments of text displayed around the walls, and those fragments tell a story.

Telling a tale in just a few words is a long-established challenge among writers. One of the most famous examples is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. The reader must infer what happened to the baby and why the shoes are being sold. With the advent of SMS and then Twitter, limits of 140 to 160 characters are also popular. My very first writing prize was a £20 Odeon voucher for the following: “Get down from there,” said his mum. For the first time in his life, he listened to her, the noose tightening around his neck as he jumped.

Even with slightly longer works, pulling back the word count or simplifying the action can make for a better story, as the reader has to do some of the work. In one case, I’d written a 1000-word story starting with a man being woken up by a noisy neighbour, him going to the door to investigate and finding the police there, then the police interviewing the woman and her son. The first two thirds of the story just weren’t working, so I eventually removed them. The result was a much tighter story that made the twist ending more shocking as we didn’t see the events leading up to it.

And with all that in mind, I’m going to shorten this entry by letting it end abru

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Binge Reading™.

You were expecting an entry on Monday, weren’t you? Douglas Adams commented, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

While I normally frown upon such a laissez faire attitude, I completed National Novel Writing Month on Sunday 30 November at 1:13pm with 50,123 words. As Municipal Liaison, I wanted to set a good example, but I was keen to stress to the members that there’s no shame in not reaching the target.

From there, it was straight into the folio for my MLitt module, comprising two short stories, two poems and a poetic monologue, representing a variety of styles. I’d done most of the work, so it was a matter of pulling together the threads into one document. I submitted that at lunchtime yesterday, the day it was due.

Which left today to craft an entry, and I’ve had plenty of time to do so, as I’ve been awake since 1:50am after approximately four hours’ sleep.

This will be my blow-out weekend before I dive straight back into other projects and catch up on my reading. On my coffee table lies Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips and Raymond Carver’s collection Elephant and Other Stories, both of which need to be returned to the library in under a fortnight. The former is a weighty volume, but I shall tackle it before that deadline.

For this, I’d like to introduce Binge Reading™. It’s similar to the more familiar binge drinking or binge watching, but better for you than both of these activities. Use Binge Reading™ as you please, but remember to mention you read it here first.

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Diagnosis: Literature.

I’d never been a fan of diagnosing fictional characters with mental illnesses until I started on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Septimus seems to have some combination of what we would now call schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and autism. As this was 1925, before treatments became available, his doctor merely recommends rest as remedy.

I mentioned this to a friend who also writes, and she told me that OCD runs in her family. Having thought about the stories I’ve written, I’ve realised I’ve created characters who probably have this particular condition.

For instance, one of my published pieces, Amending Diabolical Acronym Misuse, focuses on a man who is obsessed with acronyms. Every day, he scours the newspapers looking for acronyms. When he discovers one that he considers incorrect, he writes to the person or company concerned. Another features a woman who carries out set tasks at set times every week, and can’t cope with any change to it. Even the example piece I knocked up on 1 September to demonstrate editing techniques concerns a man who needs to repeat an action over and over again.

Tonight, I’m heading to an event in town where Life Sciences students from Dundee University will be performing factual and fictional pieces based on their studies. Their work has been edited and guided by students on the MLitt course.

My student is Greek, although she has an excellent grasp of English. Once we’d worked out the story structure, I only needed to change some of the grammar, particularly the tenses. I’ve realised that tenses in English are not always straightforward. For instance, If I was is sometimes correct, while If I were is sometimes required.

If I were able to, I’d tell you in this entry how it went, but I’ll come back to it next week.

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Just a Moment.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, National Novel Writing Month kicked off. As I’m the organiser for Dundee, I’ve been in the thick of it since then, and I’ve had other work on top. It’s left me little time to compose a full WordPress update.

So far, we’ve held our Kick-Off Event and our first meet-up, and our word count continues to rise. When I checked it at 4:30pm tonight, we’d managed to register 168,000 words. My own words make up about 0.5% of that.

So I’m going to crack on with this, and aim to come back with a fuller entry next week.

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News, and Other Four-Letter Words.

When you’re a writer, and one of the country’s best literary festivals is on your doorstep, you can’t help but pop your head around the door. The Dundee Literary Festival closed yesterday after five days of events.

The highlights included Dundee International Book Prize winner Amy Mason, BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor choosing his favourite books, the STV Digital Spark Award to develop a Web-based project, topped with off with Sonny Carntyne performing ‘alt echo rock’ and novelist Zöe Venditozzi with her hilarious antidote to a hypnosis CD. For a more in-depth flavour of the programme, visit their Twitter account, Facebook page, and the Dundee University Review of the Arts (DURA) blog.

If you only look at one thing, make it The News Where You Are by James Robertson (below). I had a debate with one of the DURA bloggers over whether it was a story or a poem, but it’s a hilarious satire about what is implied when the national newsreaders hand over to the local newsrooms.

This year, I’ve become Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month in Dundee. I arranged our Kick-Off Event to coincide with the festival. It’s impossible to tell how many people will come to a given event, but we ended up with ten members altogether, and we listened to last year’s MLitt graduates each reading his or her magnum opus. Our regular write-ins will begin on Saturday, and I’ll no doubt write more about these throughout November.

In between all that, I found time to see Avenue Q, the show that’s broken out of Broadway and crossed the Atlantic. The actors stand on stage and sing alongside the puppets, but this soon ceases to be a distraction as they settle into the story of a new graduate coming to town, Kate Monster’s fight to have monsters recognised in society, and Rod’s reluctance to admit his sexuality. Content-wise, there is very little actual swearing. If this was a film, it’s the adult concepts that would probably earn it a 15 classification.

It’s also hard to see why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I also caught this week, was given a 12A rating, when I could find nothing that would it earn it any more than a PG.

I don’t often swear in my own writing. The intention is often to shock, but when everyone does it, the words lose their impact. Comedian Bill Bailey summed it up nicely when he compared effing and jeffing to road humps: one or two isn’t an issue, but a constant barrage is. By contrast, Quentin Tarantino takes the view that, “I’m a writer, no word is in jail,” but from watching his films, I do see the F- and C-words being given more parole than any other.

That said, I’m not above including blasphemy, as that’s commonly used and – generally speaking – is no longer thought of as swearing. There’s a 90-page study from Ofcom on the matter if you have the time, but the relevant sentence is: “There were a small, but vocal number of participants who found the use of holy names unacceptable.”

But in the right hands, swearing can be done well. I’m thinking mostly of John Cooper Clarke’s Evidently Chickentown, in which the F-word appears 83 times to produce an onomatopoeic effect of a chicken’s squawking. When he recorded it in the early 1980s, though, he had to replace 80 of these with bloody.

I was going to end this entry with a word that sounds a bit rude, but I shan’t.

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The Blooper Reel.

I promised in my last entry that if I had the opportunity, I would memorise one of my poems and perform it the following Friday. Speakerbox is a new event for writers and poets at Dundee University union. During a chat with the organiser, she told me she hopes to hold it every month. She has also been to the existing Hotchpotch meetings to share her material.

I was asked to read first, and I have some footage of how it went. The purple mood lighting made this stage look fabulous in person, although not so much through a camcorder.

That’s right, I fluffed my lines. However, I managed without any further cock-ups in, “Take two,” along with another piece from memory, and two others from notes. I like to use an e-reader to save paper. I was followed by several other acts, mainly poetry but interspersed with prose and music. There were innovations I hadn’t seen before: one man walked between two microphones while delivering a monologue, another gave out chocolate bars to whomever he dubbed, “awesome.”

I hope this event continues, as I plan to be back next month. During the week, I also had a much rarer opportunity to be in the audience at a recording of a Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas episode. Although the story is set in Ireland, it’s filmed in Glasgow.

In many respects, it’s a standard sitcom, except that many of their bloopers and ad-libs make it into the final programme. There were a number of these during the three hours we were in our seats. Many scenes were recorded twice in succession. I found I was watching the monitors rather than the action on the set, so I deliberately tried to keep my eyes away from them to catch the full experience.

Agnes Brown is played by Brendan O’Carroll who also writes much of the material, but it’s accessible scripting that doesn’t require the audience to understand any particularly Irish references, so it plays very well to a BBC1 viewership. It’s less well-known that he is also a novelist. In 1999, his book The Mammy was made into film called Agnes Browne, starring Anjelica Huston as the eponymous character. Unlike the sitcom, these take a sombre tone.

Also worth a look is What We Did On Our Holiday, starring David Tennant and Billy Connolly. It’s written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins, the force behind Outnumbered, although I’ll always remember them primarily for satirical comedy Drop The Dead Donkey. The duo have found a particular niche in giving the child characters all the best lines, often relentlessly, while the adults fumble for an answer.

The coming week is a busy one for me. Not only is the aforementioned Hotchpotch happening tonight, the Dundee Literary Festival also begins on Wednesday and runs to Sunday. At the same time, I’m organising the first meeting of the local National Novel Writing Month group, finishing my library books, and still taking time out to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the cinema.

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I’m With You In Rockland.

WordPress informs me that I’ve been writing on this site for exactly a year now. Thank you very much for joining me over the last twelve months. I’d like to start today with a little more recent history.

Two weeks ago, I watched a TED lecture about the techniques anyone can use to improve their powers of recall. It seems that humans are kitted out with excellent spacial and visual memory, and it’s much easier to remember something when it’s associated with a journey or the layout of a building. TED lectures themselves are traditionally delivered without notes.

You might remember that I discussed plausible and implausible coincidences, but it so happens that I was walking home that evening when I decided to listen to Allen Ginsberg‘s iconic poem Howl for the first time. His recordings are available on Spotify.

I’ve read it several times but that is the first and only occasion I’ve heard the recording so far. Yet a fortnight on, I can recall the journey.

I remember where I was when
I heard the best minds of his
generation destroyed by madness.
I remember where I was when
the saintly motorcyclists appeared.
I remember where I was when
Moloch! appeared over and over.
I remember where I was when
I was with him in Rockland.

One piece of advice often given to writers is to keep a notepad by the bed for good ideas. I’ve done this for years and I can still count on one hand how many flashes of inspiration I’ve had at 2am. What works for me is being active, particularly going for a walk.

I think the spatial memory concept is part of the reason why walking works wonders for ideas. As you amble, the brain is observing everything around you, which makes associations and triggers off memories. Please do ask for a second opinion about that theory from someone who’s qualified in these matters.

One of the great elements of being a poet – or indeed a prose writer – is that you aren’t normally expected to memorise your work. A rock musician doesn’t look at the chords as he’s performing to Wembley Stadium, a dancer on the West End stage doesn’t refer to the steps in her hand, but a poet is permitted to read from the page.

I have seen poetry recalled successfully from memory many times, but the occasion that stands out most was Alan Bissett. He not only performed two or three pages of a play without prompting, but acted out both parts by just the tone of his voice. Last place goes to Labour Party leader Ed Milliband MP, who forgot to mention immigration or the deficit in a recent speech.

I know only one of my poems by heart, but it’s the manageable length of eight lines with eight syllables each. My longest poem is a 120-line free verse piece called Anatomy of a Party.

In the first draft of this post, the last sentence of that last paragraph was, I could, and probably should, learn it using the Memory Palace technique as described in the TED talk, but there seems little point as I’d usually have it in front of me. But then I took a second thought. There’s an event on Friday where I plan to read Anatomy of a Party and two much shorter pieces, time permitting. I wonder whether I could memorise one of the shorter pieces for that day.

I offer no guarantees, but I think I’ll make an attempt. I’ll report back next Monday.

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Das Experiment.

From Thursday to Saturday this week, Nassim Soleimanpour’s experimental play White Rabbit Red Rabbit will be performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Siobhan Redmond, Phill Jupitus and Ewen Bremner will have had no direction, no rehearsals, and no idea of what their lines will be. Instead, the script is placed in an envelope that will be opened in front of the audience just before the performance begins.

The play’s structure was influenced by the sanctions against the writer. He is a conscientious objector against military service in his native Iran, and is not allowed to leave that country. A symbolic empty seat is left in the front row of each performance.

I’m in the habit of listening to The New Yorker fiction podcast, where authors perform other authors’ short stories and are interviewed about why they like what they’ve just read. A couple of months ago, I encountered Donald Bartheleme for the first time through his story Concerning the Bodyguard. This piece is experimental in a different way, narrated through a series of questions, repeating nouns where a pronoun would normally suffice. Salman Rushdie read it, lending an extra edge through his measured baritone voice.

It took until the post-reading interview before I really understood what the story was saying, although the penny might have dropped had I listened to it one more time. It’s very much snagged my interest in Bartheleme, and if I encounter his books in my travels, I will definitely place them on my reading list.

It’s a safe bet that many of us have one or two pieces that don’t conform to the accepted norms, and it can be difficult to find a suitable home for these.

One of mine is a work called The Executive Lounge which takes the form of a list of statistics describing a place, but that place only becomes clear in the last two lines. I don’t know whether to classify it as prose or poetry, as a list usually contains line breaks like a poem, but this has the metre of a prose piece.

Whichever way you consider it, it’s most definitely for the page, not performance. My only public reading of it so far was in front of an audience who are accustomed to my work, and it’s the only one of my pieces they didn’t understand until I explained it. To date it’s been rejected by several publishers. Regardless, I consider it to be a completed work in which I still have faith.

However difficult it is to find a home in a mass-market world, never be afraid to experiment. With an ever-increasing number of small publishers springing up, at least one of them is bound to be on your wavelength. The next time I identify an editor who might appreciate The Executive Lounge, I’ll send it straight to them. If nobody took a risk from time to time, we’d all be reading bland and unchallenging literature.

Incidentally, the place I read out that piece was Hotchpotch, an open-mike night for writers rather than musicians. If you live in or near Dundee, the next event is on Monday 20 October at The Burgh Coffeehouse on Commercial Street from 7pm to 9pm. Bring along your best work, experimental or not.

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