Chart / March

March 23, 2019

Here’s a dilemma-but-not-really: I’m never sure whether to take my writing with me when I go on holiday. Poor me! On the one hand it feels as though being in a completely different environment should stir up the imagination soup in my brain bowl nicely, leaving me with the sole task of ladling it onto the page and giving it a bit of seasoning. On the other hand, when I’m out of this apartment - where I’ve spent approximately 75% of all the time available to me for the past four years - all I want to do is forget about the tiny wooden desk (that’s actually a bedside table) and the armchair that I’ve dug my feet into so much that the upholstery resembles a piece of gauze slapped over a war wound. What usually happens is that I stress out for the first few days of the holiday because I’m not writing anything, meaning that I’m unable to fully relax and give myself up to the new environment, and then, when I do finally find an hour or two to sit down to write, I ask myself what I think I’m doing. I didn’t fly 10 hours on a plane* to sit in a hotel room, hunched over an oil-tanker-slow laptop/tablet hybrid, and tap out a story about, I dunno, a Burmese monk who reads out fortune cookies to passers-by (I did this).

All this to say that at the beginning of March I went to Oman, a country of mountains and deserts and valleys and oases and beaches and nearly vacant highways that roll ever outward like bolts of grey cloth over a scrubland sea. Being there is like having one foot in a post-apocalyptic movie and the other in the Garden of Eden, its sense of emptiness tempered by an overwhelming natural beauty. It is a place of inspiration and desolation, supersonic winds, dirt tracks on mountains with hairpin bends and drop-offs into the void, abandoned villages, 4G in the desert, smugglers ferrying contraband to Iran, significant migrant populations and few tourists. It’s a good place to gain inspiration.

Also for those two weeks I only listened to 80s electronica, so the songs below were a good palate cleanser when I got back to hey-remember-the-rain-well-look-forward-to-twelve-days-of-it Berlin.

*Moaning all the time about climate change and yet I still fly to places on holiday. What a hypocrite.

Revising a Novel and Building your Zen Rock Garden

March 15, 2019

Like Jeremy Usborne’s soundtrack to a Honda advert, revising a novel fills me with a powerful sense of dread. Some writers edit as they go along, which I don’t understand at all. Editing while writing a new story slows the process down, stifles ideas that are screaming to be put down on the page, makes me forget what the point of writing is at all if I can’t even craft one goddamn paragraph properly without returning to it for the next three days in a row. Instead I do as many writers do and work on a draft-by-draft basis. Generally speaking, Draft One is the only time I’m having fun, because I’m free to do what I like. I can experiment, go off on tangents, crowbar in unsuitably outlandish vocabulary, introduce characters on a whim, dunk my brush into the pot and paint passages of purple prose, sprinkle in arcane references to history and literature and geography and music like they’re cardamom pods in a curry. Nobody cares what I’m doing. I’m not beholden to anyone. I have no reader in mind. It’s brilliant. When I’m done, I tuck the manuscript away in a subfolder and forget about it (and by ‘forget’ I mean go up to literally anyone and say, “yah, so, I’ve finished my novel, yah”).

The problem starts with Draft Two. As the date to commence editing approaches, I imagine the manuscript as a wasteland in a post-apocalyptic movie, all skeletal ideas, narrative threads that have frayed and broken, words that are twisted and ugly and need to be cremated before the stench becomes too much. And I can already see the outlines of Drafts Three, Four, Five and Six on the horizon, an army ready to chop through my defences, invade my plain of confidence, break me down and prevent me from ever creating anything worthwhile ever again. The psychological impact of the drafts overpowered me for my first novel, and that’s why it’s a miserable ugly duckling with more than a few typos still in there despite my having read it through 14 times. For By the Feet of Men, I knew I had to do something different if I was going to offset that powerful sense of dread. And that’s when I decided to visualise the draft process as a 15th century Japanese Zen rock garden.

Ryōan-ji is a Zen temple in Kyoto which is home to one of the best examples of a Japanese rock garden in the world. The garden is so celebrated that it has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. It’s also the product of hundreds of hours of care and diligence. Each day, monks rake the white gravel to form ridges and valleys that surround the boulders sitting at intentionally asymmetrical angles to create something that is simple, refined and aesthetically breathtaking. Writing a novel isn’t so different: you put in the effort day after day, you grapple with the material you have, and you keep coming back until it’s as close to perfect as you can get it at that point in time. Like I said, though, it can become a slog. The constant tailoring can grind you down. It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come already and to cut corners or give up entirely. So here’s how to visualise your novel as a Japanese rock garden:

Draft 1 – Set out your rock formations

Fifteen boulders rise from the sea of white gravel at Ryōan-ji. They anchor the garden, make it unique, give the viewer something distinctive to contemplate while they’re observing its majesty from a bench. Your first job is to set out your own rock formations. In novel terms, these are your characters and major plot points. All you have to do is get the words down on the page. Give it a beginning, middle and end and early incarnations of the people and events that will anchor the story. Nothing else matters at this stage except for those big old rocks.

Draft 2 – Buy a ton of white gravel, shovel it onto the barren earth

This is where the heavy lifting starts. Where you break a sweat. Where you come away from your work with blisters on your hands and tears in your eyes because it hurts so much. The white gravel is structure. It is connection. It surrounds the boulders, clothes them, makes them look larger, grander, more imperious. You need that gravel. If you didn’t spend time shovelling it onto the barren earth, you’d just have a bunch of rocks. And nobody travels far and wide to see a bunch of indefensible rocks. This is the most difficult stage. It’s when you look around at the uneven gravel and wonder just what the hell it is you’re doing. Surely nobody can make something beautiful out of this? But keep slinging. Because the next stage is where things start to take shape.

Draft 3 – Rake the gravel into patterns

So here we are. You’ve got the rock formations (characters, major plot points) and the gravel (everything else). Now it’s time to make the transition from landscaper to monk, from the slog to the spiritual. You have to tease the gravel into patterns that are desirable to look at. Pick up your rake, hold it in both hands and drag those teeth across the ground, meticulous, slow, precise, until stiff white ridges appear. It’s not simple by any means; Zen masters spend countless hours raking the gravel until the lines are perfect. But it’s worth it. When you step back and wipe your brow, you’ll see the difference. It’s far from finished, but no longer is it just a pile of stones of various colours and sizes. Be a little proud. You’re halfway toward creating your own Zen rock garden.

Draft 4 – Vary the patterns

Those (almost) perfectly straight lines look great, don’t they? Rank after rank, file after file, an army fit to rival the Terracotta gang over in Xi’an. But wait. What if you take that trusty rake of yours and change a few of those straight lines into curved ones? Look at that: instant variation. How about doing the same thing around a couple of the boulders to help them stand out even more? You could even carve out a full circle. Literally revolutionary. You don’t want to go too far, of course. If the curves outweigh the straight lines, they lose their ability to attract attention and gimmickry reigns. So rake with care, but with confidence. This is your garden now. You control it (even if it still feels like you don’t). And when you’re done adding your flourishes, make sure to give yourself a chance to admire your handiwork. After all, if you’re not building your garden for yourself, who are you building it for?

Draft 5 – Pick out the errant stones

Ah, the nitty-gritty. Just look at that garden. Sweeping lines, majestic boulders, patterns that demand attention. You created that. Good job, you. Now that the overall picture is looking so promising, it’s relatively simple to pick out the bits that don’t belong. Pebbles that refuse to conform no matter how many times you rake them, for example. If you notice them, everybody else will too, so pick them out and pop them into your pocket. That swirling pattern over there: it seemed like a great idea last time around, but now you’re thinking it might be a touch too rakish. It’s drawing too much attention. No, you don’t want to go to the shed again for the rake, but it’ll be worth it. Tame that last bit of gravel.

Draft 6 – View your finished garden

Now, this isn’t a science. Not every novel is going to be finished with the sixth draft. Some may take fifty. Others may only take one. Everybody’s Zen garden is different. Those gravel lines can be tricky, and while they may seem wonderfully uniform one week, they might be chaos incarnate the next. Six drafts is just a rule of thumb. However many it takes, at the end you’ll have your garden. Pristine, ordered, essential. Now it’s time to take a seat on the stone bench and contemplate what you’ve created. Take it all in, macro and micro. The boulders, the gravel, the ridges, the patterns. Is everything working in perfect harmony and does it all belong? If the answer is yes: you’re done. At least, you’ve gone as far as you can go right now. In time, you’ll create other gardens and view gardens created by others, and when you return to this one the imperfections will jump out like a sign for a Vegas casino. But don’t think about that. And if the answer is no? Then keep tending to your garden. It’ll probably never be perfect. But just remember this: Ryōan-ji has been around for nearly 600 years and the monks still go out with their rakes every day. You don’t have to ask them if they think it’s worth it.

actually a Burmese monk, but I like the photo

Chart / February

February 22, 2019

When does unseasonable morph into seasonable? When will 14 degrees in mid-February be greeted with a shrug and August forest fires become the norm? George Monbiot and Daniel Pauly say that shifting baseline syndrome takes place over the course of a single generation. It’s also one of the greatest obstacles preventing a wide range of environmental issues from being properly addressed. For example, fish stocks in the North Sea in 2019 are low compared to fish stocks in 1970, but fish stocks in the North Sea in 1970 were already critically low compared to the period fifty years before that. Our perception of what is normal shifts. We compare only to the generation before, and allow our collective memory to be wiped.

We have turned the environment into a zoo - we demarcate a section of land and allow the few animals that are already there to thrive. Meanwhile, we raze everything outside that demarcated section until there is nothing left alive. But we point to the zoo and say ‘Look, there are 10 more animals living there now than there were when we put the fences up around it. Our method is working.’ Over a generation, we accept that this is how we ‘save’ the environment. The process becomes normalised.

Music for an unseasonably warm February:

Writing fiction: crawl until your knees hurt

February 13, 2019

As a rule, humans are impatient. It’s in our nature. We don’t want things later on; we want them now. Like, right now. If we join a karate class, we want the sensei to stop the lesson halfway through, come over to us with their jaw sagging like a shopping bag, tell us they’ve never seen anything like it and bump us straight up to a brown belt. Of course, things like that rarely happen. A wunderkind is called a wunderkind because what they’re doing is nothing short of a miracle. The rest of us Beta-Minuses have to grind away at the things we want to become good at day after day, year after year, until eventually somebody does come up to us and tell us how good we are—and by that time we won’t even believe them, because now we’re deep, deep into it, and we’re aware there is so much we don’t (and will never) know.

If patience is a virtue, then writers are sinners. I didn’t have any patience when I started writing. I thought that by making the decision to write like a maniac each day, I’d be rewarded for my discipline within, say, six months at the maximum. Having a couple of short stories published in semi-professional journals was my goal, along with a semi-finished version of my first novel (a kind of Last Exit to Brooklyn palimpsest that makes every mistake and misstep imaginable). How impetuous that guy was. He jumped out of the blocks, arms swishing back and forth, legs pumping like mighty pistons, one eye on the finish line all the way over there in the distance, another on the crowd he was sure was in attendance just for him. And for a few sweet ignorant strides, everything was perfect. But before long he realised he was coming no closer to the finish line. He was, in effect, running on the spot. All that energy, all that sweat, all those winks to the crowd. For nothing. No publications. No interest. No glory.

So I stopped running and did what I should have done in the first place: I fell to my knees and started to crawl. I jettisoned all my preconceptions, stopped thinking recognition was owed to me, and turned my back on the concept of glory (a terrible reason to ever do anything anyway). I wrote for months and months and months, churning out terrible short stories and working on a second novel. The skin on my knees rubbed away and became bloody. Gravel became embedded in the palms of my hands. My back ached. I spent countless few evenings wondering whether it was worth it. And then, a year later, I had a piece accepted for publication. Five hundred words buried somewhere in an online-only zine. The most modest of modest triumphs. But it was enough. And as I continued crawling, I realised a few things: the skin on my knees had healed. My back didn’t hurt as much. My hands relished the gravel that bit deep into the meat below my thumbs. I kind of liked being down there on the floor.

Now, it’s not easy to remain on the ground. But there are three things you could do to make the experience less painful from the start:

1. Don’t tell anyone you’re writing a novel.

I did the opposite of this. I told family, I told friends, I told anybody who would listen. They questioned me, shouted words of encouragement, laughed, told me they’d ‘definitely buy it’ once the novel came out (because all you have to do is write it, yeah?). Those family members and friends told other people—strangers at parties, in bars and at gatherings, usually when the conversation hit a lull—and there’d be more questions and encouragement and smirking. At some point I found myself thinking that if I failed to produce a freshly bound masterpiece with a foreword by Irvine Welsh and multiple glowing reviews soon, all those people would call me a fraud. Which is bullshit, obviously. The only person who cares what you’re doing is you (and to a lesser extent your partner if you have one, and that’s 80% out of a sense of duty). Your friends don’t care, your family doesn’t care, and the strangers definitely don’t care. They might clap you on the back and grin and cause you to bow your head and stare at the tabletop while the twin flames of pride and embarrassment singe your cheeks, but they’re not thinking of you while you’re battering the hell out of your keyboard or making a breakthrough with a character you’ve hated up to now or sitting in a bath of lukewarm water telling yourself over and over that you’re worthless. They have their own stuff going on. Your drama is a solo performance. Unless you’re George R.R. Martin (or Stephen King when he was writing The Dark Tower), nobody is desperately expecting anything from you. But if you don’t want to feel like they do, stop telling people you’re writing a novel.

2. Give yourself time.

Yeah, it’d be nice to have the same luck as Brett Easton Ellis or Francois Sagan or S.E. Hinton and find an agent and a contract with a publishing house when you’re still in your teens. And it is luck, regardless of how good the writing is. Exactly the right person has to see your words on the page at exactly the right time in their life, in the lives of the prospective audience and in the life of the publishing house that agrees to take a chance on it. Those are some star-aligning odds. What most of us simply have to do is give ourselves time. Time to make every mistake, take dramatic U-turns, leave the manuscript to one side for months at a time, churn out short story after short story until you finally happen upon an idea that is not a dead loss, one that glows, one that—in time—you can tease and turn into a living, breathing piece of readable fiction. Also: Think twice before sending off your query letters to agents. Is it genuinely the right time to do it? Have you actually spent long enough on your art or are you inflating those seven months of graft into something greater? Have you cut any corners along the way? Did you rush that last draft a bit because you just wanted to get it finished? Is your belief in yourself justified or unrealistic? If any of the answers are negative, it would be wise to bury that manuscript for a few more weeks (before giving it another read-through), close that query template file and stop trawling the agencies and publishing houses. They’ll (probably) still be there when you’re actually ready.

3. Don’t be so quick to throw it out there on Kindle.

There are thousands of articles on how the publishing industry has changed and how self-publishing is fashionable, wise and lucrative, all at once. That’s great if you’ve written 18 fantasy novels in the past two years or you’re good at tapping into the werewolf shifter erotica market. But I have the suspicion that self-publishing isn’t actually quite as attractive as people make it out to be. I have another suspicion that most writers would probably chop off a limb to get a traditional contract with a publishing house, but wouldn’t go so far as to cut their hair if self-publishing required it. I wrote an ugly little book with literary aspirations and when I wasn’t able to find an agent I slapped a cover together and put it on Amazon. That, in itself, felt like a failure. I then spent the next six months or so doing virtually nothing to promote it. What I did do every day was look at the book sales and watch how I sold fourteen copies, then five copies, then two copies...one copy...one more...flatline. A few encouraging reviews from friends, but little beyond that. And why should I have expected anything different? I didn’t spend long enough on it and it wasn’t good enough to attract attention, but I was deluded enough to think it would somehow find a cult audience in, I don’t know, Detroit or Calcutta or Tangier. All I managed to do was use up some goodwill among friends by pestering them to buy the book and waste the time of those agents who actually went so far as to read my query letters. Impatience controlled my actions entirely. Instead of crawling along, getting somewhere, I was out of breath miles from the finish line. And that neither feels nor looks good.

So those are the three rules I wish I’d known back at the start of all this. I’m now in my fourth year of being a ‘professional’, as Steven Pressfield refers to it, which is no time at all. And yet I’m writing a blog post about writing. The reason is because I know now that it’s okay to crawl and it’s where I belong, and that gives me the confidence to believe in what I’m writing. Above all, I’m no longer gripped by impatience. There’s no reward for finishing quickly. There are no short cuts. Writing takes as long as it takes, and that’s that.

SELF, SELF, SELF