My Notes on Ian McEwan’s Views on Writing

I thought I would like to share with you my notes on watching Melvyn Bragg’s conversation with Ian McEwan on the South Bank Show Originals series. In the interview Melvyn himself comments on Ian’s ‘focused zeal’ for and on writing. I was struck again by how relevant his words are for any experienced and aspiring writer in the modern world of writing and publishing..

Here are my notes verbatim

‘Writing tells you how the writing it fitted into the novel.’

(Melvin comments on McEwan’s ‘focused zeal’.  They talk about ‘the facts of the streets.’)

Ian talks of being the only student on the first Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. His weekly tutorials consisted on meeting Professor Malcolm Bradbury (‘a superstar professor who gave me a sense of readership.’)Bradbury would read this week’s story and simply ask Ian for the next. 

In this year Ian McEwan wrote twenty five short stories* which were the launching pad for his literary and professional success.

Ian mentions, in later times, of ‘writing himself into a corner.’ And ‘having closed down for years.’  And feeling ‘locked down’. He mentions ‘writing myself into silence.’ And 'The act of writing demands that one ‘Engages with the world.’

 In later years he began to free his voice in writing libretti and screenplays before beginning his more recent novels.

Writer and critic DJ Taylor shares his views in the programme. He says - talking of the short novel Yesterday’ - ‘It’s quite an old fashioned book – an issue novel.’ But he admires his writing. ‘He writes brilliant sentences.’

Some brilliant thoughts from Ian McKewan on Writing

 ‘Happiness and anxiety rubbing along together.’

‘How does matter become conscious?’

He speaks of the material view of life being rich and human.  ‘In the material view of life there is a beauty and grandeur.’

‘It is the actual, not the magical that should be challenged.’

‘We have not yet bettered a device like the novel to find out what it might be like to be other people.’

‘Even poetry cannot tell you what it’s like to be an individual moving through time.’’

‘Think of novels like minestrone soup…’

*One would like to see such high literary productivity among the students emerging from the plethora of Creative Writing MAs now being commodified and pushed across Britain these days.  One hears troubling accounts of the lack of literary product in the maze of sub-Eng Lit exercises, and of promising writers who stop actually writing their short stories and novels for years after completing their degree. Of course the graduaes might ‘teach’ Creative Writing, or nibble the edges of literary journalism with reviews and criticism. Good luck to them.

But I think Ian McEwan had a much better deal, sitting in the pub talking to Malcolm Bradbury knowing he had an audience for the next short story. And the next.

My Own Advice to Aspiring Writers Regarding Further Study

Option One

I do encourage writers to study for further degrees if they fancy that. But urge them to make it history, politics, art, physics: any field that makes it an authentic academic experience that toughens the mind and develops the senses.

During that time, I will say, you can write your novels and short stories in the evenings and week-ends. After a year or so you will have a Master’s Degree in a valid subject with substantive content which could inspire a body of creative work that reflects your unique writing self and will find its readers.

Option Two.

Equally I might say to these aspiring writers - go off and work on a building site, in a factory, in a café in a forest or a bank. Or go travelling for a couple of years. And still write your short stories.  poems or novel at the evenings and weekends. In this way you will have enriching, valid experiences and a body of creative work that has substantive content emerging from your working life.  This will reflect your unique writing self and will find its readers.

There is a good argument for each of these options.

Option One will furnish you with an alternative career while you are making your way in the challenging world of writing and publishing. It might make a hole in your bank balance but ultimately it would be worth it.

Option Two will not leave you in debt and allows you to live in the real world as you develop your writing. You will move among people outside the slightly precious world of acadême. It’s always a good thing for a writer to get inside the lives of people different to yourself.  As Ian McEwan says, ‘We have not yet bettered a device like the novel to find out what it might be like to be other people.’

Any of these experiences will develop your material view of life. As Ian McEwan says   ‘… the material view of life [is] rich and human.’ And also:   ‘In the material view of life there is a beauty and grandeur.’

.

Setting about High Quality Self Editing for Short Story Competitions

You have drafted your story and transcribed it onto your computer. What next?

What follows is accumulated wisdom emerging from judging many short story competitions related to what I didn't find in the less good  entries and what characterised good entries.

You have drafted your story
 and transcribed it onto your computer.

Give your story the best chance by presenting it well

Layout – How it looks is the first thing the reader  sees when they handle a manuscript.

Don’t forget that your computer may be automatically formatted for business reports, brochures, and letters. (Like this page) You need adapt your layout  to make it  suitable for fiction. There’s nothing worse than trying to read a short story laid out like a business report.

Some guidelines for tackling layout.

1.            Line spacing  I.5  

2.            Indent every paragraph except the one at the beginning, when you place the first line at the margin.

3.            If you change place, time or action within a story, leave a double space and place the first line of the new paragraph on the margin and then continue indentation as before..

Laid out in this fashion your original drafted, transcribed manuscript begins to look professional. Now you’re looking at it more like the reader - or judge -will see it..

This will help you for the next stage of editing which is –

Passionate Substantive Editing –

Some tips:

1.Read the text out loud  right through. Just mark anything that sounds lumpy or doesn’t flow. Scribble in self suggestions. Have - and enjoy – a reader’s dialogue with the text. Insert amendments that enhance your meaning or improve the flow of your text.  

2. Sort out the paragraphs.

Paragraphs can be a puzzle. I meet good writers in workshops who haven’t yet got paragraphs nailed. It’s a bit of an ambiguous area. To a degree, paragraphing can be a matter of taste and style. Paragraphs in modern literature are distinctly shorter that those written in novels – say – before 1946.

If we aim for High Quality Self Editing we have to make our own choices regarding paragraphing.

Me? I’m of the opinion that white space on the page makes text more accessible and helps it flow forward.

So here are my useful rules of thumb.

·         New speaker, new paragraph

·         New idea, new paragraph

·         (As stated in Layout, above). If you change place, time or action within a story, leave a double space and place the first line of the new paragraph on the margin and then continue indentation.

·          

3 That sorted, you can now move onto other things

·         Carry out a computer spell and grammar check to iron out residual mis-spellings, expressions and extra spaces that have escaped your eagle eye.

·         Read the whole text again (I know! I know! But after all this is still High Quality Self Editing Skills.

·         Now get your notebook and make list of the names you use in your story. Check back through your story and make sure they are consistent.

·         Turn a page in your notebook.  Now go through your story  and check the physical characteristics of your characters (hair eyes etc). Are they consistent?  Make tiny amendments to remind the reader of these characteristics as the story unfolds.

·         Spell/grammar-check any changed sections. Or the whole story again if necessary.

Hooray! Now you have your complete well written, well edited story, well laid out and easy to access.

So now give your story to a trusted writing buddy to check it out.  

Then one final and rigorous spelling/grammar check on your computer and you have what I call a story in Good Heart.

So it is near perfect. This is your final chance to look at your novel as a near-perfect whole and you can ask yourself some useful questions,

·         Look at the beginning and end of your story.. Are there valid connections here in terms of words, phrases or ideas? If not, think about inserting some. It could be a single word or phrase.

·         Look at your paragraphs in sequence. Is there forward movement? Is there flow? Is there some energy on the forward movement?

·         Consider again the first and last paragraphs Do they convey a kind of symmetry, however ambiguous?  I don’t mean here cute resolutions. Endings are not about explanation or expiation. However there should be a valid connection that momentarily gives the reader (however subliminally) a sense of the story as a whole.

·          Think whether  you have made your characters live and breathe and whether the end of a story is just the end of a beginning,

·          

Now …er… one last mechanical spelling and grammar check. Ouch! Don’t hit me!

But now your story has really benefitted from your High Quality Self Editing Skills. You have become an editor as well as a writer. Your story is now endowed a professional identity to launch it into any competition,   including the

Room to Write Short Story Competition

Check it out under 'Compeition' at    http://roomtowritepublishing.wordpress.com//

C. Wendy Robertson

Now in Paperback and on Kindleon Amazon and in County Durham Libraries.

Happy Writing!

An Extraordinary Woman for International Women's Day: The Muse At My Shoulder

I have been putting together twenty six of my short stories for publication, to be called Forms of Flight (See sidebar here...). 

As I re-read the stories and decided how to arrange them in the volume it dawned on me how much of my writing, in short and long form,  is concerned with people who face their fears and take on the world but also some  people who take flight from difficult lives - in reality and also in the interior world of  imagination   fantasy and even madness,

At the same time I have been casting around for someone to write about on International Women's day. 

In my search for such a heroine I ended up very close to home with a post written by me  on my mother's birthday in 2008. Although she lived in a small town and, becoming widowed,  lived a hard life,she was always acutely aware of the world outside her narrow window, of the international scene represented by the globe in our small front room.* 

So for International Women's Day  here is my post about an extraordinary woman who has always been the muse at my shoulder.

In her prime, with G.

'...Although we were (are?) very different personalities, I have inherited many things from my mother Barbara ...

There is this desire to run away, expressed in the delight in travel. For her, with a family of four to bring up on her own and no resources, this was confined to books, maps and the globe of the world. Then things became just a bit easier and in her fifties she went to Denmark on her own. After that, year by year, she travelled further and further.

I was in my thirties when I started. Paris first. Then Moscow, (The location of my new novel  Journey to Moscow: The adventures of Olivia Ozanne. Barbra would have approved of Olivia...)

Then different parts of America. Then Italy. Then the far East. Then New Zealand. Then Poland.

Then back to France. Always France.

Being imbued with the Puritan work ethic Barbara would have approved of the fact that much of my travelling has been about the writing of novels. Evidence for this would be the working titles for some of my novels: for example, The Russian Novel (Journey to Moscow: The Adventures of Olivia Ozanne  ; the Singapore Novel (Long Journey Home); The Polish Novel (The Woman Who Drew Buildings); The London Novel (The Lavender House). Honesty’s Daughter was, for a time ‘The American Novel’. And The French Novel (An Englishwoman in France)

Sadly, Barbara was only here on earth to read my first novel Lizza in printer’s proofs. But in all these travels - in all this writing – she has been at my shoulder.

Although it is fiction, Lizza is based on a fragile sliver of Barbara’s young life.‘I stayed up all night reading it, love,’ she said, when she read the proofs. ‘Couldn’t stop. Do you know that foreman? Well his real name was …’

I had invented him, name and all.  It seemed that much of my pure invention was real. 
Which brings me to another of my bequests from Barbara: some kind of psychic acuity. Her oldest sister was a full blown medium but Barbara herself was highly sensitive. 

This psychic acuity probably explains why - as I write - I hear my characters talking, see them walking.  It could explain the fact that when I’ve written about a place – even a place thousands of miles away - and checked it out later, I find that it’s already there, in my drafting book.

This psychic predisposition is there as a kind of ‘sleeper’ in many of my novels, and with my  ‘French Novel’ An Englishwoman in France I have come out and centred the narrative on the psychic predispositions of my character Stella and the way she relates to space and time. New departure! It’s been great to write.

I’ve benefited from other bequests from Barbara –a love of the realities of history, a cherishing of the resonance of the spoken word, an innate story telling gene – all these would merit further stories here.

But an important bequest worth mentioning has been Barbara’s role model as a working mother with little regard for the domestic side of life. This has allowed me to write rather than dust, to make stories rather than make the bed. It has stood me in good stead all my working life and been instrumental in the production of so many novels.

However for now the greatest bequest to me is her continuing presence around me and her pleasure, through time, at what has happened in my life – my new novels and stories , my good teaching, my extraordinary family...'

Perhaps for International Women's Day we should all celebrate and honour those precious heroines close at hand.'

(*I have also written elsewhere on LTT about that globe ...) 

Knives, Short Stories and Supporting Your Libraries

 Rat-tat! Postman at the door with bulky parcel. I am delighted to see my copies of the Audiogo edition of my short story collection Knives.

This is the second edition, a  large print edition published by Audiogo. The book looks very smart - mainly white with touches of black. This is interesting, as the first edition, published by Iron Press, was mainly black with touches of white.

Audiogo Editiion

Both cover designs reflect the dramatic element of these stories.

In looking this collection again  I find myself surprised at  how much on the edge they seem: on the edge of society but also on the edge of darkness.

Some might say I have been influenced by three years working in prison with people who are on the margins and are consummate experts on the darker side of human experience. It’s not that simple.

Iron Press Edition

 The better truth is that I was drawn to work in prison because my own lifetime experience of living on the margins, of knowing my own edgy shadows.

Dark as these stories may appear they reflect my view of the shining recoverability of the human spirit and the qualities of stoicism, wit, humour and irony that aid survival and can bring about recovery and growth.

(I have written more extensively about this book  in 2009 here on myblog)

This new edition will also be available in libraries so please order it if you feel inspired. Using your library like this is one way to support this threatened resource.  The present day saying   ‘use it of lose it’ really does apply to libraries.  It applies to your own library. 

(I am pleased to see from the PLR record that all of my books ares still being borrowed from British libraries – last year 90,000 times. Like all writers I love my library readers out there across Britain...)

Enjoy your library

Happy reading.... W

Writing Competitions Are Wonderful

Hooray for my writing buddy Avril ! She has just been shortlisted in the imaginative  Doire writing competition. An Irish competition, it has an international entry, so this is a satisfying achievement even so far. As I say to Avril, the Irish certainly know what they’re doing where the English language is concerned,! Their judgement will be true. I just want her to win it now! Cross your fingers.

Writing competitions, whether you win them or not, are a very good discipline for a writer. They give you a deadline, a clear brief, a growing sense of audience that some stranger – not your sister, your brother, your best friend - out there really rates your words on the page. Whether you win it or not when you write for a competition you are practicing for  strangers.  This forces you to write at the top of the game: you can’t expect strangers to read your mind and know what you intended to mean, how you intended to say it.

Having judged many national writing competitions I will tell you that the cream tends to come to the top. If you keep trying and improving you will get there.  Being placed in competitions should boost your self esteem, increase your self confidence as a writer and make you write more and better. And I will also tell you -  the more you write the better you will get! (Seems like common sense, doesn't it?)

It is –as Avril and I have proved  – delicious to talk writing over a glass of wine, or brainstorm in your writing group. But if you want to grow as a writer there is no substitute for writing on and on,  for writing with creative discipline. Writing competitions are one  good way to sustain that growth.

If you want to sample Avril’s winning  style (almost wrote smile…) download her book

Susie Drew and other Stories.

Avril says:  Susie Drew and Other Stories is the second in the series Beyond The Mask - stories of prison life. Susie Drew Susie Drew has the habits of a jackdaw, stealing bright objects, little bits of nothing that shine. She steals food too, coffee from the Nescafe jar in the staffroom. She’s your cleaner, the best cleaner you’ve ever had. Puts the coffee in screws of paper, buries it under the mattress in her prison cell…
Heroin Trees – Roxanne and Me Roxanne is a working girl. Nita is her friend…I wasn’t long out of prison after the first time and things weren’t going well. Despite all my promises I was back with Sonny and using again, our money heated up in spoons: liquid money shot into our veins and laid out nodding on the couch. We managed alright for a while because he was dealing, but when Sonny got sick and I started wondering what the hell we were going to do for money that was when Roxy rang…
Pink Passion Marie is looking for love - I met him at the Pineapple, one Thursday night. I used to go there most weeks looking for something. I suppose then I might have called it love, although I barely knew it. You can’t know what you’ve never had. Can you? And I never had much of it when I was growing up…

Writing Competitions and How Not To Shoot Yourself in the Foot

The short story can be as diamond bright as a poem – although it’s often more accessible; it can be as epic as a novel, although it’s a much shorter read. My own first publication was a short story and I have published various short stories among the novels ever since. Last year Iron Press published a collection and this winter - at rest between two novels - I have been gathering another dozen in the hope of another collection.

In addition to this,  for the last fifteen years or so I’ve been involved in sifting, evaluating, adjudicating and  judging short stories entered into competitions by writers hoping to launch their own writing careers. Some writers who have drifted to the top of my various story piles  have gone on to have writing careers; to publish novels; one winning story went on to be a film.

One consistent experience,  as an evaluator faced with a pile of hundreds of scripts, is the reassuring certainty that the cream of the writing does generally rise to the stop. The  eye and the mind are  arrested by crisp  imaginative writing,by  innovative notions and by glorious language. They are heartened by powerful renderings of authentic emotion - from pathos to panic, from passion to murderous hatred, from despair to delight – all  in fresh modern prose. Great writing has such qualities stamped through it like Blackpool through rock.

Although the ‘fresh modern prose’ must be a constant, one has to admit that it is rare indeed to find all of the above named qualities in a single text.  But any story that rises to the top of the judging pile will demonstrate at least two or three of these qualities.  And every top class story showcases a unique voice, that story-print that defines any successful writer.

On the other hand, through the years I have been increasingly haunted by potentially talented writers who could end up nearer the top of the pile, but instead they shoot themselves in the foot by submitting their precious stories  in a form and style that stops a judge seeing through the jungle of infelicities to the good story at the core.  There should be no barrier between the  reader and the meaning. A judge ,who should not even have to think about the presentation, has to deal with creased, over-used paper; indistinct, ill photocopied text;  and single-spaced text instead of easy-to-read double spaced text.

In terms of style I’ve been amazed to encounter some highly inspirational writers who don’t have a handle on syntax. Sometimes paragraphs are used as spacers rather than a framework for meaning. I’ve met one or two cases where the writers  just abandoned the problem of paragraphs and presented  their story in Soviet blocks of print.

And I am sympathetic with - but disappointed in  - writers who avoid the vivid and life-giving energy of dialogue and retreat into telling and exposition – to the detriment of both style and story.  The fact is,  dialogue dresses the page with white space and allows the reader to breathe her or his imagination into your story. It makes them listen as well as read…

I know from my workshops that some new writers struggle with dialogue. However, to  make a story live it is seriously worth studying good modern writers. How do they achieve good dialogue without exposition? How do they breathe sound and life into these speakers.?

Finally a word about themes.  Many – even most - writers dig into their own lives to excavate themes and incidents for their stories. Death, birth, lives in retrospect, love, betrayal in the family- all these themes come up again and again on these piles. Where this works it can be brilliant. However, much that one encounters is very thinly disguised autobiography - as appetising as thin soup.  It’s more akin to therapy than literature. One’s own experience needs to be re-imagined, re-located, objectified and universalised in a  powerful fashion to make it work afresh for others. (This is why some stories based on ‘the child’s eye view’ can  work well – here time, transformation and distance come to the writer’s aid in re-imagining experience).

I think that if some of the good, competent writers who end up in the middle if the pile would take notice of any or all of these points then the possibility that their work might rise to the top in their next competition would be very much enhanced.

Happy writing

wx

PS  Don’t forget to look out for The Woman Who Drew Buildings  – Just out in paperback.

Notes on Long and Short Fiction

This Wednesday night, at the Hexham Book Festival I have agreed to give a talk about ‘The Long and The Short of It’. I will read from my novel Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker, and from my short story collection Knives to illustrate the differing challenges of writing long and writing short. Rather conveniently both of these books are just out this week.

I have to admit that, in the main, the focus in my writing has been towards long fiction, (sometimes very long fiction). I love writing my novels. But I have always written - and from time to time published - short stories.

Among serious and aspiring writers the short story is now very fashionable. As well as being a distinguished, discrete literary form in itself, the short story can be a showcase for writing talent. Beda Higgins' success in the recent Mslexia Short Story competition, for instance, has led her into discussions with an agent and a major publisher. These conversations, I feel, will veer towards talk of a novel...

Up until a year ago I was co-director, with Gillian Wales, of a national writing competition which ran for ten years. Our first winner was Jonathan Tulloch whose clever story Season Ticket later exploded into a novel and was then made into a film called Purely Belter. Another success in one of our competitions was Beda Higgins herself. It was very nice to see Beda at the launch of Knives last week.

Such showcasing of talent is surely one reason for the increasing popularity of short story competitions. However I have found that in the competition stakes the novel surely loses out. In our national competition we alternated each year between short stories and three-chapter novel samples. It was always extremely difficult to judge a novel with so little access to its essential architecture and true outcomes. In the light of such difficulty, judging a short story was a gem of a task: a short story is a whole thing in itself, its language, architecture and outcomes were visible to the judges.

Herein lies the charm of the short story. Like a poem, it is a prime example of economy - the right word in the right place implying multiple layers of meaning. A short story may present a whole life in a coherent slice of it; or it may present an encounter which defines two lives and their intersecting energies; or it may present us with bright fragments that we readers must make into our own whole thing. A short story can bring people and places to life with a few strokes of a pen. It can show us tragedy, comedy, misery or irony with a single allusion or a clever metaphor. It may reflect our lives back to us or take us into strange new interior or exterior worlds.

Short stories are like those scrunched up Japanese paper flowers I loved as a child. Tight, rolled up nuggets when dry, when you put them into liquid they would open up into technicolour glory. For me, the reader's imagination is that liquid. We writers give the readers our tight flowers and they open up and blossom in unexpected and unique ways to deliver the story.

Perhaps, word for word, the short story has more screwed up power than the novel - that more languorous form which twists and turns in our minds like a great bolt of silk. A novel demands of the reader diligence, and a certain indulgence so that our story can unfold and take a proper shape. We invite our readers to live with us through time and space. We make them wait for our explanations, our outcomes, our illuminations. With them we celebrate our resolutions, our epiphanies.

Readers, of course, are quite capable of enjoying and responding to both our long and short writing. I only hope they don't just prejudge these two distinct forms as a fast read or a slow read. Each form brings with it, its own literary enjoyment.

As a writer and a fan of both literary forms I have more usually leaned towards the luxuriant expanse of the novel. I love playing with the multi-layers, inventing a large cast of players, and relishing the sheer literary manipulation of a large idea. But an equally pleasurable challenge is the encapsulation of a hot idea in the short story form. For certain inspirational notions the pure form of the short story is the only way to tell it.

So here you have it: ‘The Long and the Short of It’, two different but – I trust - equally exciting reading experiences for my readers. If you are one of them, I hope you enjoy both Sandie… and Knives, equally but in different ways.
What do you think?

Wendy <

Wendyx