Publication day!

Happy publication day to 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear', my hybrid book of poetry/prose/fiction/non-fiction, with the gold cover! Published today by Guillemot Press, and inspired by particle physics, it asks: ‘What does it mean to be in pieces? What might it mean to be whole?’

To find out more and buy a copy of the limited edition, click here: https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/tania-hershman

And in a lovely coincidence, here I am reading a letter to my younger self, on the same day my 8th book is published! "The biggest thing I've learned: create community. Lift others. You may be lifted as a consequence, but don't make that your plan." You can listen here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/tania-hershman-lys/

And what if we were all allowed to disappear

‪I never dreamed I'd have a book with a gold cover! The amazing Guillemot Press have made my particle-physics-inspired hybrid book, 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear', into this gorgeous sparkly object! It's a limited edition - for more info about the book and to pre-order, click here 

Writing & Place with Melissa Harrison

It's been a while since I've invited anyone to fill in my Writing & Place questionnaire, but when Melissa Harrison's new book came out, I realised that it was the perfect thing to ask her to do - her novels are so much about place and nature, and I wanted to delve a little deeper! (Ok, to be honest, all writers have something interesting to say about writing & place and I am always wanting to delve a little deeper! More W&P guest blogs coming soon...) You can catch her in person at the Hay Festival this Monday, May 25.

Mel and I met as writers-in-residence at Gladstone's Library just over a year ago (and I believe I introduced her to the delights of flash fiction, which she proved rather good at!) Her first novel, Clay (Bloomsbury, 2013), had just won the Portsmouth First Fiction award and was chosen by Ali Smith as one of her Books of the Year, a rather ringing endorsement, eh! It was because of Mel that I started thinking about reading more nature writing, something that I think I'd not been attracted to - and this led to me reading/devouring H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald, which I am immensely glad about.

Mel's second novel, At Hawthorn Time, has just been published by Bloomsbury, and listen to what the Financial Times said! “Her skill is such that she has produced a vigorous and affecting hybrid… If Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald were to co-author a book with John Burnside and Adam Foulds, it might end up something like At Hawthorn Time." Nice, eh? So, here's the lowdown on this beautiful book, before we get to Mel herself:

Four-thirty on a May morning: the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the East. A long, straight road runs between sleeping fields to the little village of Lodeshill, and on it two cars lie wrecked and ravished, violence gathered about them in the silent air. One wheel, upturned, still spins. 

Howard and Kitty have recently moved to Lodeshill after a life spent in London; now, their marriage is wordlessly falling apart. Custom car enthusiast Jamie has lived in the village for all nineteen years of his life and dreams of leaving it behind, while Jack, a vagrant farm-worker and mystic in flight from a bail hostel, arrives in the village on foot one spring morning, bringing change. All four of them are struggling to find a life in the modern countryside; all are trying to find ways to belong.

Building to an extraordinary climax over the course of one spring month, At Hawthorn Time is both a clear-eyed picture of rural Britain, and a heartbreaking exploration of love, land and loss. It is out now, published by Bloomsbury, and has earned the admiration of Helen Macdonald, author of the multi-award-winning bestseller H Is For Hawk.

A limited-edition 10″ record is also available, featuring two pieces of music produced in response to the book and with an individually silk-screened and stitched sleeve by artist Lucie Murtagh.  Buy a copy here -->>

So, I asked Mel to respond in any way she liked to my four standard writing and place questions, and this is what she said:

Tania: Where are you?

Mel: I’m sitting in my garden in

Mel's Garden in Streatham

South London, in the sunshine, with my laptop on my lap. There’s a blackbird singing in the sycamore above me, and a smart little goldfinch helping himself to my bird feeder. My dog Scout is lying on the grass behind me, soaking up the sun. In a few minutes she’ll pick herself up reluctantly and move into the shade for a few minutes, then she’ll collapse again in the sun.

Although my rented flat is a little ramshackle around the edges, having a garden – being able to plant things and see them grow, being able to feed the birds and see them nest – has been transformative for me. It also meant that we could get a dog, which got me out exploring London’s green spaces – something that really fired me up to write my first book, Clay.

T: How long have you been there?

M: My husband and I have rented this flat for a decade now; I’ve lived in London for 18 years, always, with the exception of my first six months in the city, south of the river. I much prefer south London to north; there’s less money swilling about, which feels healthier to me, and by and large there’s a good mixture of nationalities and social groups, which to me is important. I’m worried that this is changing right across the Capital, though; Brixton, just up the road from me, is undergoing very rapid and very depressing gentrification.

I go through periods of wanting to leave London and live in the countryside (wherever that is) and then realising I’d miss the city. I grew up in a semi-rural area, and I spend a lot of time walking in places like Cumbria and Dartmoor; I write about nature, so I suppose it’s inevitable from time to time. I don’t think I idealise rural life, at least I hope I don’t; my second novel, At Hawthorn Time, is about the clash of narratives that we can fall prey to when it comes to “the English countryside”, which is a very complex, very powerful and often quite exclusionary idea: the dream of country living that a lot of people have is in stark contrast to the reality of a lack of jobs, lack of affordable homes, rural pubs closing and farms going under at a terrifying rate. But I would like to live among woods and fields and hear owls in the evenings and see water voles and adders. Each August I look after a friend’s house in Dorset for two weeks where I can do exactly that, and while I’m there the idyll can seem close enough to touch. But I know that I’d miss London, and I’d probably talk about it all the time. Being a Londoner is part of my identity now.

Being pulled in two directions, though, can be a productive state for a writer. Balancing differing ideas (and ideals), learning not always to look for certainty or resolution but to tolerate doubt, is a good exercise for the imagination. Life isn’t simple, and people are full of contradictions.

T: What do you write?

M: So far, I write long-form contemporary fiction. I have written a few short stories – and I love reading them – but I’m not convinced they are my natural métier. Perhaps with practice mine would improve.

I’ve also written a short non-fiction book about rain, which is in the pipeline. And I do quite a lot of journalism; I’m one of a team of five that writes the Nature Notebook in The Times each Saturday, and I review books for The Times and the Weekend FT, and do some other odds and sods.

In my twenties I worked as a copyeditor and proofreader, and now I am a production editor and sub, so the critical part of my brain is overdeveloped when it comes to being creative; I find it very hard to let ideas just flow, as my sentences are already being critiqued on the journey from brain to page. But it has a few advantages, one of which is that I’m good at the sort of focus and discipline writing for newspapers requires. And I turn in a very clean manuscript.

T: How do you think where you are affects what you write about and how you write?

M: What I write is steeped in place, and also in the seasons. I couldn’t start something without knowing what time of year it was, because that would affect everything that was living and growing, and would fundamentally affect the setting. As for place, I need to know things like the soil type (so I know what kinds of woodlands it will have, or example, and what kind of agriculture). But I don’t have to be in a place at the time when I’m writing about it; it can be somewhere I know well, like Devon or Shropshire, or somewhere I have visited specifically in order to write about it, for instance the Cambridgeshire fens; I take a lot of photos when I’m out, and use them to put myself back in a landscape. Clay, though, was mostly written in south London, and very much inspired by the streets around my home – though I decided not to specify which city it was in the text, because I wanted people to imagine it taking place in their city, wherever that was, so that the book’s underlying message about the value of nature could have the widest possible reach. And it seems to have worked; I had people asking me to confirm it was set in both Birmingham and Manchester.

I write a lot at my desk at home, which is in our bedroom (I dream of a room of my own!) I also write on my laptop, sometimes at The Social in central London, just for a change – though when it’s fiction I struggle to write outdoors: it’s just too distracting! When I’m really wrestling with a scene I’ll often abandon computers altogether and sit with a notebook and pen and write out my thoughts longhand. It slows my brain down and forces me to focus; it also feels less ‘serious’ and more jotty, which can sometimes free me up.

Shilling Cottage, highly recommended by Mel!

I go on writing trips a couple of times a year, as my day-job allows (I work in-house at a magazine for three weeks a month, but every so often I get a two-week break because of how the calendar works). As well as the housesitting arrangement in Dorset there’s a tiny cottage in Devon that I
’ve rented three times now, off season when it’s cheap. Being totally alone for two weeks is intense. Sometimes it’s gone really well, and been incredibly productive; at other times I’ve found myself in an unpleasant mental state. I was at the Devon cottage in January this year, trying to start something set in that actual location. The work petered out and died, which was painful; but the time I spent there was valuable in other ways, and the things I did – climbing a hill at 5.30am to watch dawn rise, visiting a dairy farm and watching the milking – are turning out to be useful for something else.

As research for At Hawthorn Time I walked a section of the A5 north out of London, alone, for four days and three nights. It’s a trip one of my characters, Jack, who is a vagrant, makes, and I wanted to see what it was like – which turned out to be very different from how I’d imagined it. It was also a really valuable insight into how exhausting it is always to be an object of curiosity, never to fit in. One of my jobs, as I see it, is to defamiliarise the English landscape (which includes cities); to help people see places anew, and to jog them out of the anthropocentricism which we’re all of us guilty of, and which presents the world to us only in terms of human priorities. Relating differently to the natural world is key in finding ways to protect it, as well as being personally transformative; so for me, not fitting in – not taking place for granted – is vital.

Thank you so much, Mel - and for some more inspiring words, here she is giving the recent Coleridge Lecture for Bristol's Festival of Ideas, which got me thinking about my surroundings  - that tree in front of my house, the birds - in a way I am ashamed I never had before.


You can purchase At Hawthorn Time (Bloomsbury, 2015) at all good bookshops, in hardback, and Clay, in paperback. Mel is very active on Twitter, follow her at M_Z_Harrison, and check out her website & blog!And go say hello to her at the Hay Festival this Monday, May 25.

Some thoughts on story, plot, life and philosophy

I haven't done this for ages, this blogging thing. It seems that Twitter has satisfied my need to express myself, in tiny chunks. Or maybe I was only thinking in tiny chunks. Anyway, there's something that's been mulling around my head for a long while and I think the time has arrived for me to try and get it down here. I, as often happens, plan to figure out what I think through the writing of it, so this may be less than coherent - but whatever happens I probably won't edit it much because this is my blog, not an essay or an article, so I'm allowed to waffle and ponder! I welcome your comments, thoughts. I am expecting to raise more questions than answers.

I am already being an unreliable narrator because I have been doing a substantial amount of writing over the past few months, I wrote around 50,000 words as my half of the forthcoming Book of Short Story Writing: A Writers & Artists Companion  - co-written and edited with Courttia Newland - that will be published in December. Yes, you read that right, I, the short story writer, the flash fiction writer,  wrote 50k words, and in about 8 weeks. I didn't know I could do that. But what made me able to do it was the fact that it was about what I love - short stories and writing. What I hadn't expected was how much I would learn about myself through the writing of it, and not just about my own writing. I think I may have learned about how I can best approach this thing called life, too.

What prompted me to start writing this tonight (who knows when I will finish it) was going to see the National Theatre production of the play War Horse which was shown in a local cinema. National Theatre Live, it's called. I'd heard brilliant things about the play. I vaguely knew the story - there may be spoilers here, so look away if you haven't seen it - boy and horse form strong bond, horse goes off to WWI, boy goes off to WWI in search of horse. So, what do we want, what are we rooting for? For the boy to find the horse, of course.

Now, we get onto the technical stuff. The way I see it, there are two things at work here: plot and story.

Plot = boy meets horse. Boy loves horse. Boy loses horse. Boy finds horse again.

That plot (especially if you substitute other things for "horse") ain't new, right? So why, when I was 100% sure that boy would be reunited with horse, was I weeping at the end? Actually, I started premptively tearing up in the first half. Why? What was going on here?

Story.

Story is the stuff that is wrapped around Plot to make you FEEL something. This plot happened to have a story wrapped around it that involved war, friendship, family, reconciliation. But you can see how this plot could have had maybe an infinite number of stories - the boy could have been living on Venus and the horse might have been a robot horse that turned evil, see what I mean?  What made me cry wasn't, clearly, the surprise and joy that, oh yippee, boy and horse are beautifully reunited. It's because I cared - about the boy and about the horse. They'd become real to me. I empathized.

This, says philosopher Martha Nussbaum, quoted in an article I read this week on Brainpickings, is the power of story:

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. 

I want to stop to clarify something for a moment: When I use the word "story" I am definitely not just referring to the short story, or even to fiction. I have been writing poetry now for the past few years, tentatively at first, but in the past weeks much much more. And what I am discovering is that through poems I am able to write about my own life, my experiences, directly in a way that I can't through fiction, it has always made me deeply uncomfortable. Something about what I think a poem is - something about the language and the rhythm - is allowing me to "storify" real experiences enough to banish that discomfort with autobiographical writing. And, as several people mentioned to me this week, no-one else will know which parts of what I write are taken from my own life and which are not. 

I read the most fantastic interview yesterday in the New Yorker with American writer Lydia Davis, Long Story Short. She writes what she calls short stories -often very very short -  but which other people sometimes try and call other things, and, thrillingly, she won the 2013 International Man Booker Prize. I have been a fan for several years - she has a new collection out this year, get hold of it.

Anyway, back to the interview. What struck me most forcefully was how Davis seems to have "trouble" stopping herself turning everything she writes into a story. The article starts:

Somewhere in the files of General Mills is a letter from the very-short-story writer Lydia Davis. In it, Davis, who is widely considered one of the most original minds in American fiction today, expresses dismay at the packaging of the frozen peas sold by the company’s subsidiary Cascadian Farm. The letter, like many things that Davis writes, had started out sincere and then turned weird. Details grew overly specific; a narrative, however spare, emerged. “The peas are a dull yellow green, more the color of pea soup than fresh peas and nothing like the actual color of your peas, which are a nice bright dark green,” she wrote.  

The interview, Dana Goodyear, says Davis' stories "have very little in the way of plot; sometimes people get indignant and ask her why she doesn't call them poems or fragments. (She prefers the deeper associations of the word 'story.')" Goodyear doesn't explain what these deeper associations might be, but perhaps what I'm writing about here is touching on it.

Then, (spoiler alert) the article ends thus:

"I have to guard against the tendency - I could make anything into a story," Davis told me. Several years ago, she started writing a long note to her literary executor, but had to stop when it began to take on a life of its own. "I was trying just to write instructions, you know, 'My notebooks should go here,' ... But it began to get too elaborate, too detailed, too opinionated and too irrational. ... I didn't really want it to be a story, because I needed it to be an actual letter to my executor".

This tendency to create story/narrative even when we really don't want to, although maybe not as extreme as Davis, speaks to something I've been wondering for a few months now - how do PLOT and STORY relate to our "real" life? I've been formulating a sort of new philosophy: what if everything that happens to us, all external events, objects, people, is just plot, it has no inherent story at all? We are the ones who wrap it - or a series of events - in story, to make it fit a pattern, to try to understand it, to help us make choices for the future. In short, we need stories in order to try and deal with life's uncertainty. 

But - and it's a big but - if we're the ones telling the stories, can we just change the story we tell about a particular plot? And it it possible to have plot without story? (Scarlett Thomas' excellent novel, Our Tragic Universe, really inspired me, with its thread of the storyless story.) By which I mean something that is fairly akin to Stoic philosophy and/or Buddhism - some/all of the stuff that happens doesn't actually mean anything, we give it meaning and then we feel something about the story/meaning we have given it.  That feeling might be sadness, happiness, fear etc...

What I've been attempting to do over the past few months is try a new approach - notice what stories I am starting to create about things I actually don't really know about (what's going on in other people's heads is really the main thing), and then think, Do I need that story?

What I want to do is ditch the stories I tell myself that create stress. Sounds simple, eh? It's not. Clearly. Otherwise we'd all be doing it. But I am getting much better and faster at noticing when a story is starting up. Mindfulness, right? (Learning to meditate 11 years ago was a great thing, although bloody hard to actually put into practice, I've found).

Another thing I've been thinking about is our tendency to want to persuade people of our stories, because we are pretty wedded to them. And I'm noticing that a little more too - I can say to myself "That's X's story, which is great for them, they can have that, but I don't have to take it on." Now this is MUCH much harder than it sounds. I keep finding myself stuck in other people's - or society's - stories. Society needs its stories too - and conveys them to us through adverts, say, and other media, of course. (see excellent book and blog, Rewriting the Rules, for more on the difficulty of being in conflict with society's stories). They are all around us. I passed an antismoking billboard on my way home today and it's the campaign that has a child talking to a parent who died from lung cancer, wishing they were still around. Not just "Stop smoking - it's bad", but a fully-formed story.

If it is possible to have storyless plot - stuff happens - is there plotless story too, something that makes us feel without in some way "happening"? I've been thinking about this too (yes, I think a lot. A lot.) I think music is plotless story for me. My favourite song makes me instantly happy, can completely change my mood. But is it an event, per se? Perhaps all art is plotless story in this respect? Is art's "aim", if it has an aim, to make us feel something? (Regarding "making yourself happy", an interesting TED talk on "synthetic" versus "natural" happiness).

I think I should wind up now, I have a lot more thoughts, this is very much a work in progress (perhaps for the rest of my life), and I am very conscious of not wanting to try and persuade any of you to "take on" my story about story. All I will say is that I seem to have managed to dampen down my stress-creating mechanism considerably. I have found a way and a language that speaks to me - the language of fiction-writing, of plot-and-storyness.

It seems my own stories, and my own writing, have been telling me something it has taken me years to listen to. My own work has become more minimalist and surreal over the past few years, and I have felt for a long time that I was giving the reader more authority over the story, I wasn't demanding it be read a certain way. I was letting go, saying, Here, take it, make of it what you will.

I think that's what I'd like to do in my life, too. Loosen my grasp. If we are all storifying creatures, I won't try and stop it, but it helps me to notice it. To say, Oh look at me and that story I am starting to tell myself about X! And it often now makes me laugh, the amazing stories I started weaving around the most tenuous of plots! What an imagination we have!

Do you have any thoughts on this, anything comments, any critique? I welcome it, as I've said this is work-in-progress. Let's discuss!

Aliens aliens aliens... and Mrs Darcy

There are some books that I know I am going to love reading. There are other books I pretty much know that I won't. And then there are the third and possibly most delightful kind, the unknown unknowns, the ones that come at you from left field and - BAMM - you are smitten! Such a book is one Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens  by one Mr Jonathan Pinnock, just published by Proxima Books, an imprint of Salt Publishing. I thought "mashups", I thought "aliens", I thought, "oh my goodness, no!".

I was wrong.

I giggled. I chortled. I couldn't stop reading. Not only is this an utterly wonderful story and oddly fitting with Jane Austen's characters (Lady Catherine‎ de Bourgh, an alien? Of course, silly me for not knowing that). I can't help but feel that Jane would be quite pleased.

I am delighted to have the alien...um, sorry, author here today. Let me tell you a little about Mr Pinnock. He studied Maths at Cambridge University (a fact that endears him to me already, without the aliens). Then, as his bio says, "he drifted into the world of software and has remained there ever since. He has written one book on software development and co-authored a further dozen, most of which are now almost entirely obsolete. In the last few years he has turned to writing fiction and poetry and has won a number of prizes and has had work read on BBC Radio 4. Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens is his first full-length novel."

I already knew I enjoyed Jon's short stories, having (anonymously) highly commended his story, Advice re Elephants, when I judged last year's Sean O'Faolain short story competition and was part of the judging team who shortlisted his story rZr and Napoleon for the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize. It's clear from these that he has a rather wicked sense of humour and a sly wit. So, I have asked him a few tricky questions, on your behalf:

Tania: Welcome, Jon. I recently met a very interesting biologist, Rachel Rodman, who also writes, and she has come up with a whole theory about literary mash-ups, of which I believe your book is one. Her article is published in LabLit. She calls you and your kind (!) "literary geneticists" and, using Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as her example, says: 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in this sense a genetically modified organism, derived from the ancestral Pride and Prejudice by the introduction of new (genetic) material taken from the unrelated "monster" genre. A small-scale comparison of the two texts supports this idea: all Grahame-Smith's modifications have parallels with genomic modifications performed (or harnessed) by laboratory scientists. Here, I examine six classes (Insertions, Duplications, Insertions with Duplication, Replacements, Over-expression, and Gain-of Function Mutations) of these modifications, and draw parallels with biological examples.

Her thesis is lengthy and erudite! So we will skip to her final thoughts:

These six sections consider only a few of the classes of Grahame-Smith's modifications. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is also marked by DNA inversions (in the form of transposed words and phrases), silent mutations (in the form of synonym replacements), and missense mutations (in the form of deliberately misspelled words), and so on. The molecular techniques used by Grahame-Smith have also been applied to other works, enabling the production of a range of genetically modified texts: Android Karenina, The Meowmorphosis, Jane Slayre, and others. These modified texts possess new phenotypes. Some are merely new twists of humor, curious for their own sake, like a mammal engineered to possess fluorescent skin. Others, more utilitarian, render the text appealing to new audiences, like a plant engineered for cold-resistance, enabling it to grow at new latitudes. The success of these variants – some commercial, some aesthetic – sets the stage for a new generation of literary geneticists, whose experiments will force the field in new directions. This new dynamic, converting the writing desk to a laboratory and the classic text to a model organism, may in addition pose its own ethical questions. We exist in a new era, exciting and disturbing, in which neither text nor genome is immutable, and in which humans, armed with new technologies, can force their evolution. [My emphasis]

Any reactions to this?

Jon:  Right, here goes...*deep breath* Firstly, a confession: I've never actually read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This was partly because I was miffed about its unexpected appearance at a time when I was struggling to find a way into my own book and also because I didn't want to be accidentally influenced by it. I did feel obliged to refer to it in my book, because it would have felt odd not to acknowledge its presence, and it did provide an opportunity for going off at an interesting tangent with Jane Austen herself featuring as a disenchanted writer of cheap zombie novels. And I swear I never knew there were ninjas in P&P&Z until I read that article, although one of Jane Austen's supposed novels that I refer to also has ninjas in it!

However, having read the article, I am actually quite tempted to buy the book now because it makes it sound like an avant garde literary exercise worthy of Georges Perec or Tom Phillips. I like to think that what I'm doing is slightly different, because what I've written is an entirely logical sequel to the original book, rather than a mash-up of it. I originally described it as the bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand between Pride and Prejudice and the X Files, which I guess in genetic terms means that it's less the result of gene splicing than the outcome of some dubious experimental breeding programme.

T: Dubious experimental breeding, love it! Entirely logical sequel? Ha! Okay, we'll keep this short: I couldn't stop laughing when I read the book, did you have that problem while you were writing it?

J: You're far too kind! Well, I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but I did let out the occasional guffaw, usually when something completely unplanned emerged. Or at one of Lord Byron's double entendres. I have a weakness for those, I'm afraid.

T: And: I know you wrote it Dickens-like (or soap-operatically) in instalments, do you think your process/the end product would have been different if you'd attempted to do it all in one go, whatever that might mean?

J: Good question. It's a bit hypothetical, because I can't really think of any other way to write. I didn't have any sort of plan at all when I started writing the serialisation - although a plot of sorts did present itself once I'd got a chapter or two in. The thought of having a pin board with colour-coded timelines on it - well, it's just too weird to contemplate. Some of my favourite bits of Mrs Darcy... came about because I found myself at midnight on the day before the next episode was due to go live with nothing to publish. However, as a way of working it can be more than a little stressful.

T: Well, stress keeps us going, doesn't it? I say, Whatever works!

Thanks so much for stopping by, Jon. To whet your appetite, here's a pic I took of the book in the horror section of Waterstone's in Cork... Find out more, including how to buy it, excerpts and other crazy stuff, at Mrs Darcy And the Aliens and more about Jon and his other writings at jonathanpinnock.com.

Revising short stories discussion Part II

(This blog post is very long, so I thought I'd turn it into a PDF too. See it here - please come back and comment afterwards! PDF with Parts 1 &2 here)

This began here...and it's become such an interesting discussion, focussing mainly on revising short stories, that I have been mulling it over and reading more about how different writers "do it", a kind of informal survey. I've asked members of my writing group, and there are brilliant comments on the first blog post, and I've been reading Paris Review interviews. I think what results is that there is no one way to do this. Revising/ reworking/re-dreaming your story is as much art as science.

Here's a selection of views on the subject - it's a long blog post but incredibly useful, for me at least. I am going to try a selection because I haven't found the way for me yet. I'd love to hear more from any of you - what works, what doesn't, any other ideas!

Here's what various writer friends said, on this blog and elsewhere:

I think too much and usually want to incorporate everybody's comments and suggestions, and the process becomes too analytical instead of heartfelt. I actually end up becoming sick of the whole thing and losing whatever emotion or soul I initially had, going into it ... I myself find that my best work are always written in white heat and rarely need to be tinkered with after the first draft. White heat...writing in the zone...lucid dreaming...starting with a fresh page...seems all very "right brain" to me. Left brain = editor head, while right brain = creator head? (Michelle Tandoc-Pichereau)

There is a state that I have on occasion got into (not very often, I wish I could) in which the words just flow: I come up with a sentence and it just leads to another and another and I look at the words on the page and think, where did that come from? Like I said, writing doesn’t often work like that for me. But when it does, I find it really hard to revise what I’ve written. It is what it is: either it comes out perfectly formed (I wish!) or I find myself completely at a loss as to how to fix it. The thing I can’t get back is the voice, the fluency. I also have a different way of writing, much more usual for me, which I don’t especially recommend, which is tortuous and painstaking and slow. But when I write like that rewriting is not a problem: getting the first draft out is the hard bit, and after that I feel like I know what I’m doing. (Emma Martin)

Robert Olen Butler does suggest that before revising anything substantially one should go into 'lucid dreaming' mode. I do do this before I put even one word on a first draft following an impulse of a story, and also before revision. Especially if something struck me as very off during a read through. I don't know if my experience revising a novel is of any value...perhaps it will open up the discussion, but since I am revising in chunks, perhaps talking about process might demystify it a bit.

E.g. I just went through one of the chapters in my novel yesterday. It's about 11,000 words. It's a very long chapter. There are some huge problems with it. The altercation between father and son sounds 'off', stilted, a little unreal. Also, I wanted to work in a couple of other threads that had been swimming and surfacing in various other sections and which I wanted woven more tightly in here. The chapter hadn't remotely done that.

In the past, a read-through with these many flaws engendered an overwhelming disgust, which I was then unable to swim past. It usually ended up with me partially chucking the story. For me, I'm not sure there's much of a difference between revising for a short story versus novel, except that in a novel, you can't afford to chuck it away. That would mean chucking away almost two years of consistent work!

The difference now is perhaps that I do make immediate mental notes as to the concrete things I think are not working. Then I go away. Let those feelings of disgust fade away. Usually takes about a week or so, during which I do other things. Read, chase my kids around, that sort of thing.

When I go back to read through again, if those same mental notes I made still ring through, I trust them. I revise based on that map. I almost without fail never think about craft elements. I don't do the checklist of plot/voice/structure etc. that there's some inordinate slippage into when I read someone else's story. So I think this is one fundamental difference between being a reader of my own work versus others. Having said that, I don't think craft elements don't work its way into revision. I think they become an organic part of a flaw. They are manifestations of a disease, not the underlying cause. Fix the underlying cause, the manifestation through 'voice' or weak plot etc. also goes away.  (Elaine Chiew)

Early on in a serious writer's life, the taking apart of a piece and reassembling it, following advice from peers is absolutely crucial. It's key to developing an instinctive grasp of craft, and allows us to be analytical in our stride rather than stop-starty, editor head v creator head. We need to learn to prevent those two modes of approaching work from being at odds with each other.

After a while I've found they work alongside each other invisibly, and when they do, that pulling apart and adding here and there will make a story less fluent, because when it was first written, the two were engaged, and if we revise with one head on, the story gets lopsided. ...So there comes a time when this is no longer the best mode for reworking pieces. It may work for some stories, but others need to be written again from scratch, to achieve that fluidity and unity.

There's one story in my collection that I rewrote, from scratch each time, about twenty times - different settings, different story telling modes. The version I ended up with was the only one that didn't feel clunky though it didn't get half way towards what I wanted it to say. But fiddling around with early versions led nowhere. It just had to come from a new sheet of paper.  (Susannah Rickards)

Oh goodness, I absolutely know what it is to write a story - a decent but still a little saggy story - and post for critique, come away with lots of useful, thoughtful suggestions and then use said thoughts and suggestions to KILL my story forever....Revision takes away the heart beat, the life of the story, and replaces it with coldness. But it shouldn’t have to meant that. It's to do with lightness of touch maybe. So as not to disturb the magic that's there whilst cleaning/shining lightly? (Sara Crowley)

I am really into walking ... as were the Surrealists, because it concentrates your thoughts, focuses them, and frees them up at the same time, your head has space and there's a rhythm.I find myself dipping in and out of ideas while I'm walking, I get so tuned in that ...I am practically a danger to myself and I don't notice anybody! It's all very routine, I choose virtually the same route every day, and I feel like it's just me and my creative process. I am not great when it comes to revision, I can get it all down on the page to begin, and then I go through and edit all the basics and then I get stuck. Very stuck.

And I'm so glad this has all been brought up here because I thought I was on my own with this. The more I dilute a piece with unsparing editing (which I something I am not averse to with my poems) the more I can't be bothered with it anymore. I have so many stories that I've done nothing with and probably never will, or maybe even can't do anything with, it's a shame. And ... I've had work taken apart by peers and haven't been able to mould it back together... it is weird, with the poetry I absolutely brutalise it sometimes. And that feels ok, maybe I have better instincts with poems because I'm more confident with them? I think a writer's main strength is instinct, trusting instincts and intuition, editing as you go along, getting caught in the heat of the moment. After that, there's a sober period where you look back on what you've done and doubts creep in... I think that by avoiding that hangover period after a first draft maybe that's key to seeing again with fresh eyes.(Melissa Lee-Houghton)

I find it hard to explain because it's more about (warmly) feeling something is right on the page rather than (coolly) cerebrally ascertaining something is right. It's a difficult question to answer because our feelings are ultimately produced in the brain and so, even though I say I'm revising by using my feelings, it is actually the brain that is doing it. When I write or revise it definitely feels more like an intuitive act rather than something that is consciously being controlled or directed. I also tend to revise as I write (as well as after I've 'finished' something) so the writing mode/editing mode are not too different for me. I hope this makes sense! (A J Ashworth)

I sort of think that if there are going to be changes then the whole thing has to start again - else, it's all a bit like trying to untie veins and plonk them somewhere else - the circulation gets messed up, and worse! (Rachel Fenton)

For me, some stories begin with an idea or mood. Words develop around that, but the original seed has to stay. Other pieces begin as bits but gradually acquire a heart. Others begin with a character in search of a plot. I don't think it's always right to re-trace one's steps when re-writing (a story can start on one track and end up on a completely different one) but it's worth remembering what made you want to write the piece in the first place. And not just remembering - keeping those early sketches and drafts. (litrefs)

Because of my sporadic writing schedule I tend to write in short bursts and can sometimes rewrite a paragraph twenty times from scratch. It always boils down to whatever works for you though I guess. One time I wrote a novella and after an edit I got a 3000 word story out of it (that one still stings a little) but as long as you get something you're happy with at the end I don't think it matters how you get there. I don't mind working for months to get perfection. (Alex)

I'm rubbish at working on/revising short stories. There's something in me that insists on the flow of the piece in its entirety, so every time I edit a part of the story I go back to the beginning and read it through again until I hit another part that 'doesn't work' according to the vision I have for the piece. Edit, and repeat. It takes far too long I'm sure, there must be a better way. (Clare King)

I am very jealous of anyone like [David] Vann who can write a first draft as a final draft. My process tends to involve writing in excess of what the story requires and then a trimming back to a shape that best fits the story revealed in the first draft. This can mean cutting out a third to a half of what I've written, shaping the rest as I polish.

This not to say that extra writing is wasted. The extra work gives me a deeper understanding of the characters, while the trimmed sections go into files for use later. I trawl through them from time to time for character stuff and description that will serve the story I am drafting or as a spring board for a new piece.

A little time consuming but the whole process is kind of like writing a block of text then scuplting it into shape, knocking chunks of it off as I go.

An interesting method of editing is Andrew Cowan's, I have heard him in interview explaining that he writes his first sentence, then redrafts that until perfect then writes his next and redrafts that until perfect and he continues this process for whole novels. Now that's what I call time consuming. (Dan Powell)

My method of revising/editing is as chaotic as my creative process. I was taught that you write (the first draft) for yourself, and revise with the reader in mind. But (for me) it's not that simple and there may be many drafts because it's in the process of writing, that I find a sense of my story and the revision process is about making sense of that story. Even if it's a short story, this often turns out to be a long process, especially when my thoughts on what I've written shift, which is inevitable over time. On my blog, I've been likening the process of revising/rewriting/editing to knitting; being prepared to unravel, pick up dropped stitches, rework the pattern, but really I think it's more instinctive than that, more like the creative process involved in painting. I know it's right when it feels, looks and sounds right. (Diane Becker)

What works for me is leaving it for a long time and then entering the text in a new creative headspace, almost rewriting it even if I might just change one paragraph to get it right. Dreamy creative is better than analytical in my world ... You have to leave your FEELINGS in even if you're clutching the red editing pen at the same time  (Louise Halvardsson)

Appreciating the strength of analysing the craft and applying that analysis to the editing process is fine. However - I do think we need to be flexible - and not slaves to any method at all. I think we need to embrace as many ways of doing this thing as we can, and understand that what will work one day, on one piece of work, may not be right for another, on another day.

I guess that when we get a way down the track, our understanding of our own drafting process can encompass some of the 'revision' process, as we go. So what comes out, has already been subconsciously smoothed.

I also think that might work for short fiction, flashes, shorter short stories - but the more complex a piece of becomes, the less likely it is to work well. So consideration of structure, how far it is working to deliver the end product you want, arches over the craft elements within. Thats how I approached revising my longer work recently. I think...(Vanessa Gebbie)

The received view seems to be that you are in a creative/right brain state for stage one (writing) and in an analytical/left brain state for stage two (revising) – there should be an unconscious creative burst followed by an analytical going over. But I think in reality it's more complex than that, as this discussion shows. To be honest, I don't feel such a big difference between the two stages. Maybe I'm just doing it 'wrong' - but when I write and also when I evaluate what I've written, I try to think it and feel it at the same time. (Emma)

I used to be all about the emetic first draft – I just got it all out on the page, beginning to end, before I edited a single word. Then I'd look at the thing as a whole and make big changes. Then the next rewrite would be smaller changes, and smaller and smaller until I'm just fiddling with individual word choices.

I've slowed down a bit over the past few months, both in terms of my overall output and how quickly I write each sentence. Now I find that my first drafts are slower, but with each draft I change fewer things. Maybe one day I'll get to the point where I perfect each sentence before moving on, but I doubt it. I prefer to find my way through the story as I go, rather than plan it all out beforehand.

That said, I love editing and rewriting. The blank page still scares me a little, and there's comfort in knowing that I have the framework of a story already there. (Kirsty Logan)

And here are quotes from other writers and an editor, most from Paris Review interviews, about what they do - and don't do:

Marilynne Robinson:

If I write something and don't like it, I basically toss it. And I try to write it again or I write something else that has the same movement. But as far as going back and working over something that I've already written -- I really don't do that. I know there's a sentence that I need, and I just run it through my mind until it sounds right. Most of my revision occurs before I put words down on a paper.

Truman Capote:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I am lying down.... I don't use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also i longhand. Then I type a third draft on yellow paper, a very special kind of yellow paper. No, I don't get out of bed to do this. I balance the machine on my knees.... When the yellow draft is finished, I put the manuscript away for a while, a week, a month, maybe longer. When I take it out again, I read it as coldly as possible, then read it aloud to a friend or two, and decide what changes I want to make and whether or not I want to publish it. I've thrown away rather a few short stories, an entire novel and half of another. But if all goes well, I type the final version on white paper and that's that.

Hemingway:

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped.... I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied. 

 Jorge Luis Borges:

Interviewer: When you wrote your stories did you revise a great deal?

JLB: At first I did. Then I found out that when a man reaches a certain age, he has found his real tone. Nowadays I try to go over what I've written after a fortnight or so, and of course there are many slips and repetitions to be avoided, certain favourite tricks that should not be overworked. But I think that what I write nowadays is always on a certain level and that I can't better if very much, nor can I spoil it very much, either. Consequently I let it go, forget all about it, and think about what I am doing at the time. 

 William Faulkner:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. ...

Sometimes technique charges in and takes command of the dream before the writer himself can get his hands on it. That is tour de force and the finished work is simply a matter of fitting bricks neatly together, since the writer knows probably every single word right to the end before he puts the first one down. ... The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it. Since none of my work has met my own standards I must judge it on the basis of that one which caused me the most grief and anguish, as the mother loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest.

Georges Simenon:

Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence - cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut. 

Interviewer: is that the nature of most of your revision?

GS: Almost all of it.

Interviewer: It is not revising the plot pattern?

GS: Oh, I never touch anything of that kind. 

 

Gary Fisketjon, editor-at-large at Knopf. He has edited the works of Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Tobias Wolff, and Haruki Murakami.:

[I]t all starts with the editing, which is when I see most clearly what distinguishes this particular book. […] In my comments, what I hope to do is akin to giving the author a fresh look at something that has been labored on so long that certain things have become invisible. Countless thousands of decisions factor into the writing of any book, and it defies mathematical odds that each and every one was the best decision; but after someone has rewritten sentences and chapters or whatever God knows how many times freshness is hard to come by[… That] can occur when the book is finally set in type, as opposed to whatever computer typeface was used on earlier drafts: suddenly a writer will say, Well, that looks funny, or doesn’t read right, or whatever. This is another means—though merely visually—of getting a fresh or different look at something one has looked at so many times before.

Dorothy Parker:

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven. 

Eudora Welty:

Often I shift things from the very beginning to the very end. Small things - one fact, one word - but things important to me. It's possible I have a reverse mind and do things backwards, being a broken lefthander. Just so I've caught on to my weakness.... I do [rewrite considerably.] Some things I let alone from the first to the last - the kernel of the story. You know enough not to touch something if it's right. The hardest thing for me is getting people in and out of rooms - the mechanics of a story. ...I find that very challenging, especially to describe an action that I don't do very well myself, like sewing.

Alice Munro:

I don't grasp it very readily at all, the "it" being whatever I'm trying to do. I often get on the wrong track and have to haul myself back... I could be writing away one day and think I've done very well; I've done more pages than I usually do. Then I get up the next morning and realize I don't want to work on it anymore. When I have a terrible reluctance to go near it, when I would have to push myself to continue, I generally know something is badly wrong. Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I'm going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It's sort of like a love affair: you're getting out of disappointment and misery by going out with some man you really don't like at all, but you haven't noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I've said, No, this isn't going to work, forget it.

 ...The whole process might take up to a week, the time of trying to think it through, trying to retrieve it, then giving it up and thinking about something else, and then getting it back, usually quite unexpectedly, when I am in the grocery store or out for a drive. I'll think, Oh well, I have to do it from the point of view of so-and-so and I have to cut this character out, and of course these people are not married, or whatever. The big change, which is usually the radical change...

I don't know if it makes the story better. What it does is make it possible for me to continue to write. That's what I mean by saying I don't think I have this overwhelming thing that comes in and dictates to me. I only seem to get a grasp on what I want to write about with the greatest difficulty. And barely. ... I can see the ways a story could go wrong. I see the negative things more easily than the positive things. Some stories don't work as well as others, and some stories are lighter in conception than others. They feel lighter to me. 

Just in compiling all this I feel better, better about not knowing what I am doing, how I do what I do when it works, how to fix something when I feel it just isn't working. I especially feel heartened by that last quote from Alice Munro. I think perhaps it in some way this and other people's comments validate my feeling that I need to not focus too hard at the thing I am working on - although I "look away" by playing online scrabble rather than going for a walk or to the grocery store! Well, I am still working this out. Anything that you do that no-one's mentioned? Let's keep this discussion going.


Addendum:
I was pointed towards Wells Tower's revision process, here's a quote from an interview in the Iowa Review:

Sarah Fay: You revised these stories for eight years. Is that right?

Wells Tower: Something like that. I did such violent revision to the stories that my editor started to worry about me. To some extent the revisions were informed by trying to make the story better, but it did get to a point where I would just keep revising and revising and revising not out of any real editorial intelligence but just because I wanted to be a better writer than I am. My feeling about revision is that we don’t really know what our stories are about even after the fifth or sixth draft. It’s not until I’ve got some distance from a story that I can look at it and see that there is actually a real emotional problem that the story is hinting at. Then the process of revision is about choosing characters, and scenes, and moments, and style that will get at that emotion in the most effective way.

SF: You’ve said you revised the story “Retreat” kamikaze-style.

WT: It was originally published in McSweeney’s from the point of view of the younger brother. The younger brother is this smartass who is pretty sympathetic, and his older brother is this terrible blowhard. The older brother behaves badly and continues to behave badly and is ultimately punished for his bad behavior by ingesting a possibly lethal bit of rotten moose meat. To me, that seemed like a flat line on the moral complexity curve. When I revised it, I thought it would be such a better story—a more interesting assignment—to try to tell it from the standpoint of the unsympathetic character. So that’s what I did.
SF: Do you treat all of your revisions as “assignments”?

WT: I did similar things with a lot of the stories. Often I didn’t look at the first draft when I went back to revise. “Revision” was writing a new story, trying to germinate a new story from the initial bit of inspirational DNA.

Short Story Collections on TV?

So, I'm at home today with bad sinus pain across one side of my face, and to take my mind off it all I watched the wonderful Culture Show episode for World Book Night about 12 debut novelists, including the excellent Jenn Ashworth. It was wonderful to watch a whole hour celebrating first-time novelists, hearing about their books, about their stories. But all the way through, that little voice in my head which is rarely satisfied kept whispering "What about debut short story collections? Where are the short stories?" Now I understand that this was a programme about novels - but the phrase "literary fiction" was used several times, and the novel is not the only form under that heading.

Several of the new novelists featured write short stories - Deborah Kaye Davies' short story collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful (reviewed on the Short Review here) won Wales Book of the Year in 2009 and she is also a published poet. I think it was Evie Wyld who mentioned in her interview on the show that she wrote short stories but wrote this novel because she was told that "publishers don't want short stories". No surprise there then.

Instead of grumbling and moaning too much, I wrote a tweet on Twitter asking who would like to see a similar TV show about short story collections - and the roar of response was deafening! It really cheered me up, and fuelled by this I fired off 3 emails to people I know with BBC connections, and also to John Mullan, the host of the Culture Show episode and very well known for the Guardian Book Club. As I write this I remember that he was the person who interview short story goddess Lorrie Moore last year about her must-have Collected Stories, an event I went to and which will stick in my mind as one of my short story highlights. So I have no doubt at all that he appreciates what an amazing short story can do.

I am writing this blog because doing all this in 140-character bursts on Twitter is rather restricting, and also to canvas more opinion. There was one tweet in reply which seemed to think there was quite enough short story coverage on radio and TV but I don't think those of us who disagree are just being paranoid. What do you think? Please comment below, perhaps I might need a petition in order to get the BBC - or another TV channel (Sky Arts? Mariella?) on side, so don't hold back!

James Salter's Last Night

I was just listening to a New Yorker Fiction podcast while doing many other things - writing the previous post, playing online scrabble stuff, but the short story that they were reading, Last Night by James Salter, was so incredibly powerful, even in the snatches I heard, that my heart started beating much faster. I was just commenting on the stories I was critiquing about how a reader is liable to stop reading a short story at any point, if they aren't gripped, if they are bored, confused. Well, this is the amazing illustration of that point: I couldn't not listen to this story, it is so gripping that it tore me away from all distractions. Stunning. Click here to listen to the podcast.

To Plot or Not

So, I've taken the plunge. I've signed up for NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don't know what this is, it may sound like torture. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the original idea was to stimulate writers who don't think they can write a novel, setting them the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. The point is that these are not 50,000 good words, they are just 50,000 words. This is to show people they can produce quantity, and give them a rough draft to work on. You upload your daily writing to the site, which counts them automatically (no-one else sees your writing) and keeps a tally. Anyone who makes it to 50,000 is a "winner".

I signed up two years ago. Me, who has never written anything longer than 6000 words. I wrote a few hundred, and spent all my time in the forums moaning about how I couldn't write anymore. Now, when I seem to be comfortable with stories of less than 700 words, I decided it was time to push myself.

This time, though, I have a support group: six or seven of my fellow Fiction Workhouse members are taking the plunge together and egging each other on. We don't start til nov 1st, but already I feel calmer.

I actually have a main character already, someone from one of my short stories who intrigues me. But that is as far as I get. I have no plot, no novel-length story idea. And that terrified me. I found a few others on the NaNoWriMo forums who are in the same position but most people seem to have plotted their novel out. I was panicking a little.

Until this morning.

Until this morning I was firmly in the camp of the non-plotters. I've never plotted a short story before writing it. Hmm, but then I've never written more than 6000 words. However, today, I was shown a whole new way of working. I am taking an online screenwriting class, with the idea that we all write a full-length screenplay. I have had an idea in my head for a few years - but just an image, a beginning, a concept. Nothing else. One main character. I've tried over the years to just start writing the script and seeing what happened. But that just didn't work.

Today, however, I read the 2nd lesson that the instructor posted online, and in half an hour, following the guidelines, wrote an entire synopsis/Story Map of my film, with beginning, middle and end. The story unfurled as I wrote. Now I have the plot. And it may well be that the plot will change radically as I write the actual script, but I have somewhere to start.

I thought this might help with the novel, as well. I don't know - since I have never written a novel - which parts of this are specific to films, but I have a feeling it's quite similar, just adjust the terminology accordingly. So, tomorrow I will have a go. We'll see if I get anywhere.

Drinking Vodka in the Afternoon on Radio 4

My short story, Drinking Vodka in the Afternoon, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow, Wednesday October 3rd, at 3.30pm UK time.



It's very exciting - my third story on the radio in three years! And the first story that I wrote for radio. We'll see if it worked. Always slightly nerve-wracking, I never get to hear it in advance. Fingers crossed! It will be available on the BBC Radio 4 website for 7 days afterwards, and then, I hope, I will upload it to my website too, so you can still hear it if you missed it.