This week I have an article published in The New Writer magazine. It's about the awkwardness I felt after writing my novel 11:59 when I showed it to the family for the first time. It has sexy passages, you see. For those of you who do not subscribe to the magazine I have reproduced the article below, but I would urge you to subscribe to the magazine anyway - my article aside, it's always an excellent read and often provides good opportunities for writers.

Not in front of the family

Exactly fifty years ago barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked, ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ The book, of course, was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on trial for obscenity along with its brave publisher Penguin.

Much has changed since 1960. For one thing, not many of us (not even top lawyers) have servants. Most of us deplore sexism, and we are much more relaxed about sex; aren’t we? That was my bland assumption while I chiselled away at the hundred-and-odd-thousand words that became my novel 11:59 published this summer.

So why my sudden anxiety when I handed the finished draft over to my wife Paula? Why the weird vision of my three children, two grandchildren, my six siblings and my eighty-five-year-old mother-in-law all lining up in an imagined future, open-faced and eager to receive their copy of David’s/Dad’s/Granddad’s new book? Why did my palms feel clammy?

As many writers do, I subject my wife to the first reading of any manuscript that I persuade myelf I have completed. My son Joe is another useful proof-reader and critic. No problem in the past with exposing my loved ones to the outpourings from my brain. The difference with 11:59 is its generous use of explicit language and a couple of frank sexual scenes. Prior to this, my strongest published cuss word was shit and my only sex scene a ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ exchange between two curious nine-year-olds. Quite a leap from there to 11:59. The novel is written in the first person and my central character twice visits a brothel as well as having vigorous casual sex in a van with a schoolgirl. It never occurred to me, in the heat of writing, that ‘How did you do your research?’ might be a valid question.

Until that hand-over moment. For the first time embarrassment kicked in. Why? It’s not autobiographical, for goodness sake. I can justify content and diction on the basis of both theme and character. A major sub-plot in the novel is human trafficking; the story delves into the dark and secret places of the city where criminals and low-lifes lurk. How else are these characters supposed to talk and act? There is nothing gratuitous, nothing sexed up purely for the purpose of titillation... and yet, as I emerged from my writing room having briefly and solitarily enjoyed the afterglow of completion, I suddenly felt as shifty as Marc in my novel when he returns to his partner Sam, his senses overwhelmed by the stink of his still-warm adultery.

We are a liberal-minded family. We have laughed together at uninhibited post-watershed comedians on TV, enjoyed the full-frontal frankness of many modern movies. Paula and I did not blanch when each of our children at a certain age decided the time was right for current partner to stay the night, eventually move in; but my anxiety about her reaction to the manuscript crystallized when she passed it back to me a couple of days later with a brief but telling, ‘Very good. Really moves along. I hate to think what Mam will make of it.’

Could I have written the story without the expletives? Could I have resorted to euphemism, replaced letters with asterisks or dashes? During the redrafting process for 11:59, and even while the book was being prepared for printing, I had plenty of opportunity to tone down the descriptions of sex, which were brief but graphic, but I didn’t. Certainly my editor seemed comfortable with everything, and there was no adverse reaction on publication. Why would I expect otherwise? This is 2010, not 1960. Anything goes, doesn’t it?

What will not go from me is a foolish, lingering sense of shame about those dirty words, those few blue pages. Not before the world at large, but in the face of friends and family. I continually find myself making excuses for the book, preparing the ground for anyone of my acquaintance about to read it, in some cases warning them against... you know it might not be your sort of thing... and even being grotesquely thankful for my mother-in-law’s near-blindness. When people I know are reading my novel, I worry that their perception of me will change for the worse, that they will begin to suspect me of harbouring gross desires, of clamping my mouth with difficulty against a torrent of filth ready to spring from my mouth like a man in the grip of Tourette’s. The veneer of respectability stripped away, I feel as if I am watching my relatives from the dock. I have not only put myself on trial, but pronounced myself guilty. Caught in the act.

When I was ten, the year of the Lady Chatterley case, my junior school teacher snatched up my hinge-top desk to catch me flicking through a slim paperback called The Strip-tease Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee. He gave me a lecture and  a hearty strapping in front of the class, then spent the rest of the day reading the book under cover of his big desk while we sweated over long division. I had found this pearl of pulp fiction, complete with lurid front cover, abandoned on my big brother’s bed. Until I sat down to write this, I had forgotten all about the incident. Now I’ve finished, I’m going to gather up all my personal copies of 11:59 and stow them away. After all, this is not the kind of book I want lying around the house for the kids to read.

11:59 by David Williams is published by Wild Wolf Publishing. ISBN 9780956373359  

Detective Googling

I don't suppose I'm the only person on the internet who indulges in the guilty pleasure of Googling my own name every now and again. Actually, with a common name like mine it's fruitless merely to search under my own name. I tend to add one of my published titles, just to see what comes up.

I promise you, this is not just a vanity exercise, though I can't deny a frisson when there are a fair number of hits. I do it mainly to try and keep track of a) where my books and other works are being sold online and b) any reviews or snippets that I might have missed, as these can be recycled for promotional purposes. I've recently found a third level of usefulness in the activity, checking on unauthorised use of one's material.

A few weeks ago I was Googling specifically to check if one of my published plays was still in circulation. (I'm going to be deliberately vague on the details from now on as I think it would be unfair to point a finger too directly on a case of abuse that may have been accidental.) The search brought up a pdf document which, on opening, I found to my surprise contained a full reproduction of one of my one-act plays as part of a college examination paper. The college is not in the country where the play was published. The mystery deepened when I scrolled to the foot of the play to find my authorship fully acknowledged, but with reference to an anthology I had never heard of, published by an overseas branch of my original publisher.

My memory is pretty good, and my wife and partner in our writing business also keeps good records. Although the play was published quite a few years ago we still have records going back to that time. We could find no record of permission given either for the college examination paper or the publication referred to by the paper, and no record of fee paid for anything but the original publication in the UK, which did not cover overseas rights in a separate publication.

My next step was to contact the Rights department of my original publisher with all the information I had discovered relating to the college use and the overseas publication. In fairness, my publisher was promptly on the case, I was kept informed about the progress of the investigation, and eventually contacted by the individual dealing with the issue in the overseas office. The upshot was that I have just received an apology from the overseas publisher  who has agreed with me a reasonable fee retrospectively.

In this case, with a highly reputable international publisher, I believe that a genuine mistake was made, an oversight, but I had no qualms about accepting a fee even though the book is now out of print, because I'm only getting what should have been mine in the first instance.

The moral of this story, for writers and others with intellectual property, is that the internet is a very powerful medium, virtually free to use, and it can be worth spending a little bit of time every now and again checking what might be going on in your name or with the fruit of your efforts. It's true that even if you find something you are certainly not guaranteed to be financially rewarded for your detective work (the law of the internet being in many places like the law of the wild west) but at the very least you can make a nuisance of yourself to the discomfort of the plagiarists.   

Recycling material

During the years I ran my own training and management development company I changed my writing focus, producing material mainly for trainers and facilitators, and learning resources for the business reader. These were normally produced in interactive DVD format and, while they sold well in the market, were never really generally available on Amazon and the like (not least because of the high price point). Now, with the advent of Kindle publishing I have been able to rewrite and recycle some of this material in the Kindle format. Although, of course, it loses the advantage of high resolution graphics and interactivity, the nub of the learning material is still there, and because it has only cost me time to produce I have made it available almost free. In fact, that's what I've called the new Kindle mini-book series. Over the last two or three months I have published in this format:

Almost Free: Creativity A-Z

Almost Free: Murphy's A-Z

Almost Free: 20 Change Exercises for Group Workshops

Almost Free: 20 Ice-Breakers & Inclusion Activities

Almost Free: 20 Vision Exercises for Group Workshops

I don't write training material anymore, dedicating myself exclusively now to my novels and short stories, but I'm pleased I put some time aside to make earlier published material in this field available to new users in this way. It's not really a commercial venture - I don't expect to earn much from these 99p minibooks (though I see I've sold a few already) - but it means that work I spent a fair proportion of my working life developing and producing can reach out to more people than was possible in the original format.

As I've said before in previous posts, I am a fan of this new way of publishing, although I acknowledge generic concerns people rightly have about quality control and the risks of confusing the market through saturation. The truth is, exactly those doubts  were expressed about the internet itself in the early days, and where would we be without it now? Not writing or reading this post, that's for sure.

The anti-social writer

It’s getting to me now. We have had ten staying over for Christmas. Every room in the house filled with people – my younger son even burst in while I was on the loo yesterday. Nowhere to hide. Don’t get me wrong: it’s been great seeing everyone, exchanging gifts, drinking, playing games; then after a few days my brain starts to suck at itself, seeking something to ingest. There’s a grating at my temples. These are the early signs of a craving to engage once more with ideas, with material, with writing, or at least thinking around the writing.

It is a need rather than a wish. The sloth in me simply wants the easy, flop-around-the-house style of living, but I have to write, like a heroin addict has to shoot up. I guess the addict has no relish for the needle, and I do not relish my return to the keyboard   - we are both drawn by the craving. It hurts if we try to resist it. And just as the addict slinks away to some hidden corner to get on with the business, so does the writer, equally furtive. I’d be embarrassed if someone walked in on me now, while we’re still officially festive.

Even the most gregarious of writers are anti-social for long periods. Some have to be forced into solitary – Dylan Thomas was famously locked in a BBC studio by a producer to finish a radio play, and again by his assistant Liz Reitell to complete a rewrite of Under Milkwood – while others have to tear themselves away: “Close the door, give out that you are not at home, and work” is what the French writer Joseph de Maistre advised.

Mostly though, it’s the craving that gets you here. I’m feeling easier already, writing this. As good as a glass of Christmas malt.

Write wit

For Christmas: some quotes and quips about writers and writing.

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Anonymous

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Gene Fowler

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

Write as if you are dying.

Annie Dillard

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

John Steinbeck

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

A writer is someone for whom writing is much harder than it is for the others.

Ken Laws

I write when I am inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

Peter de Vries

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.  Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

Franklin P Adams

Writing is easy.  All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Gene Fowler

There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

W W ‘Red’ Smith

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.

Burton Rascoe

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson

That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time.

Charles Caleb Colton

Never use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.

 Murphy says

The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.

Anonymous

Editors don’t reject writers;  they reject pieces of paper that have been typed on.

Isaac Asimov

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Edna Ferber

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than read

Sinclair Lewis

 

Punctuation is the sound of your voice on paper.

Joseph Collignan

English spelling is weird...or is it wierd?

Irwin Hill

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Anais Nin

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E M Forster

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

William Thackeray

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by then I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O’Connor

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.

Stanislaw Ulam

We do not write in order to be understood;  we write in order to understand.

Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.

Sir Kingsley Amis

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.  You must write every single day of your life, you must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.  You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.  I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.  I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.  May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories.

Ray Bradbury

POSTSCRIPT: See also my April 2012 post: Write wit 2 and my December 2012 post Write wit 3.

The page of dreams

Tara’s comment on my last posting, where she told us that her dreams were an important source for her creative ideas, got me thinking about how dreams influence my own writing. I realised that I have waking dreams, edge of sleep dreams and deep sleep dreams, which all work their spells in different ways.

The waking dreams are those I get when I deliberately move away from my computer screen or blank sheet and lie down (usually on the floor) to steep some subject or story line in my head for a while. What I’m intending is to concentrate without distraction so that I can work something through, but what really happens seems to be the opposite of concentration; my mind drifts, not in an entirely uncontrolled fashion, but as if I’m taking a leisurely flying carpet ride over the world I’m imagining, without a known route or destination. I apprehend rather than ‘see’ what I come across along the way, and more often than not the journey ends with a start, like an abrupt waking. Sometimes it makes me literally jump, and within moments I’m back to the page with something new to say, some direction to go in, without having consciously ‘worked it out’. A magic carpet ride. 

  

Van Gogh's The Starry Night

I suppose what I’m experiencing is what Vincent Van Gogh meant when he said, I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. Judging by Van Gogh’s output (over 2,000 works), he must have put in a lot of dreaming. I put in a good deal of this kind of dreaming too; not nearly so much output, though I genuinely believe I do more writing when I’m not writing.

The edge of sleep dream I get at night in my bed, and almost always it’s a troubled dream that replays some problem or difficulty I am having in my writing. It nags at me like a toothache, and stops me from sleeping properly. At its worst, chillingly, it convinces me to give the whole thing up as a bad job. It’s no good. You’re no good. Blagh.  These edge of sleep dreams are worryingly frequent.

Fortunately, they are usually followed by the deep sleep dream. Without being aware of it, I find that whatever the problem was seems to have resolved itself by the time I’ve woken up. It’s as if I needed the nagging rehearsal of the worry so that the deep brain can process and work on it while the consciousness has a rest. Occasionally, a deep sleep dream is capable of delivering a whole story idea apparently without the collusion of the conscious mind – a Eureka moment that is rare and precious as a new-born (and more vulnerable; the mortality rate on Eureka moments is so high the World Health Organisation really should look into the matter).



Steven Spileberg

You could of course argue that everything a writer does is the product of dreaming; certainly that seems to hold for the fiction writer, and for the screen-writer – Steven Spielberg says he dreams for a living, and he has enshrined the idea in the name of his film studio, DreamWorks.  

I wrote a moment ago that I dream, then write, but, no, it’s not so clear-cut. I think every writer would agree, when the work is in full flow, there is a trance-like quality to the state we’re in; and we are in that world we are creating, unconscious of any other, as fully as we are in the deepest dream. The world is somehow already there for us. Our pen is like a torch beam revealing more, as we press on, of the roads, the turns, the travellers, the details on the page.

Where do you get your ideas from?

It’s the most common question asked at the end of a talk, and the most difficult to answer. Or rather, there are so many different answers.

·         An abiding memory or recollection (the starting-point of We Never Had It So Good)

·         Something heard or read that starts the mind turning (my interest in reading about the railway Stephenons would not have given me the urge to write a novel had I not been intrigued by the dramatic decision of young Robert to go off on a risky venture in Colombia only months after his father had installed him as managing director of their locomotive-building company – this became the main impetus for writing Mr Stephenson’s Regret).

·         A stray thought that occurs while doing something else, with some loose association (the inciting incident for 11:59 came from listening to a late night radio phone-in while driving, and thinking, ‘What if...?’).

·         A headline in a newspaper (started the sub-plot of 11:59).

·         An evocative word or phrase (the theme for the stories I’m currently writing emerged from thinking about the folk definition of a Geordie as one born within the smell of the Tyne).

There are a dozen more possibilties. I suppose most could be generally grouped under the notion, ‘Life happens: something sticks.’ The trick is to pin it down when it does. I have always kept an Ideas File, and I make a new entry when anything remotely promising occurs to me – I write a note in the form of a provisional title and anything from one sentence to three paragraphs about the appropriate casing for the idea (a story? a play? a novel? an article?) and how it might develop. 99% of these ideas will never go beyond those few sentences, but I get them down quickly before they disappear altogether, and because I never know which is the 1% that I may eventually husband and grow into a capable creative life form.

As with any gardening, some plants seem to start well, then unaccountably wither and die. Others, that you thought were flowers, turn out to be weeds. (How frustrating that is for the writer/gardener; all that labour spent.)To continue the metaphor, one flower does not a garden make. It is not enough to have one idea to sustain your piece of work; you must germinate others along the way. Some of them come from the scoping and planning before you get deep down into the soil, but I’m always amazed by how much takes root and spreads right there beneath your fingers as you work, nudging with impatience as you dig channels and clear paths trying to bring some sense of order, some coherence of colours.    

Stephen King, writing about writing, has also described the process as like digging, but he sees it less like a gardener than as an archaeologist slowly uncovering the bones of a huge fossil – dinosaur, or whatever – that is already there. It’s an interesting notion, that somehow the story is already there, waiting to be found. Where do you get your ideas from? The question seems to imply that there is a bank of ideas you can tap into, but what if King is right, that somewhere in our collective unconscious there are whole stories awaiting discovery? It would help explain the phenomenon descibed by many writers, and that I have experienced myself, of our characters telling us where we must go next, as if there were indeed some pre-determined track to follow.

Maybe the reason so many people seem to be fascinated by the source of ideas is that they have felt something there themselves, something tantalisingly out of reach as they have not the tools to excavate. Maybe the real answer to Where do you get your ideas from? is that they are universal, lying somewhere in all of us.