Dogsbodies and Scumsters by Alan McCormick

A short while ago I was asked by Roast Books to review their new publication, Dogsbodies and Scumsters by Alan McCormick. I tend not to do "normal" book reviews, but if I like a book I do like to have a chat with the author -- we writers are such weird and interesting creatures! And I really did enjoy this book of short stories. Perhaps "enjoy" is the wrong word. They are often surreal, sometimes downright creepy, but they are well-written and full of fascinating characters. Some of the stories are responses to the very imaginative drawings of Jonny Voss, and that I found to be quite refreshing as well.

illus by Jonny Voss

Alan worked in a psychiatric hospital in the 1980's and some of the stories are inspired by this. He was recently Writer-in-Residence for the stroke charity, InterAct Reading Service.  His short stories have won numerous prizes and have been widely published and performed. Here then is the latest of my blog's great conversations:
Sue: Many of the stories in your collection were written as a result of your being Writer-in-Residence at InterAct Reading Service. I am fascinated by this newish role of “Writer-in-Residence” in various institutions and organizations. Could you tell us a bit about InterAct, how you came to be involved with them, and whether you think the idea of being a “Writer-in-Residence” is a good one, in general, both for the writer and the organization.

Alan: InterAct’s first Chief Executive, the theatre director Caroline Smith, had nursed her sick brother, a psychiatrist, throughout a terminal illness. Although an avid Radio 4 listener when he had been fit and well, he much preferred to be read to when he became ill. Seeing its benefits first hand, she began reading herself on a voluntary basis at her local hospice and then used her theatrical expertise and contacts to set up InterAct Reading Service. Established in 2000 and working in six hospitals, the charity is led now by the playwright Nijay Mahindru and employs a team of 200 actors and works in fourteen London hospitals as well as hospitals in Birmingham, Brighton, Manchester, Stoke on Trent, Hayward’s Heath and Oldham.

Nirjay explains InterAct’s therapeutic role and contribution better than I can: “We take professional actors into hospitals and stroke clubs to read to stroke patients. There is now a growing body of evidence to support the view that stimulation via reading and conversational interaction stimulates the neural pathways of the brain. This helps improve mood and allay the depression suffered by 71% of stroke victims.”

In 2008 I won InterAct’s first story competition, judged by Ruth Rendell, and became their first Writer in Residence. Over the next year I visited various wards and stroke clubs and saw their actors at work.  InterAct are a fantastically inspiring and supportive organisation to be involved with, and being their Writer in Residence was a privilege.

I was asked to write five more stories over the year of my residency. With Nirjay’s backing and support I decided not to tailor my work, or in any way over-simplify the way I write or lighten my choice of subject matter – my work tends to the darkly comic and I can’t shy away from that. From my past experience of reading stories at live events I knew dialogue and  some unforced humour where appropriate worked better for listeners than dense plots or long passages of  descriptive-heavy writing.  My brief then to myself was merely to keep the stories reasonably short – attention span of stroke patients can be diminished – and to make the writing lively. I’m not sure if my work in practice is particularly therapeutic but the act of writing  stories to be read aloud, both for InterAct and for live events, has really helped me as a short story writer, in honing material and attempting to keep things accessible and alive.

I remain in contact with InterAct and with Nirjay in particular. I helped produce a shortlist for their subsequent bi-annual story competition in 2010 and I’m lucky to have of their two fantastic actresses read at my book launch on June 7. At  Faye Dayan from Roast Books’ instigation, half the proceeds of the book will be given to InterAct.

Sue: One of the reasons why I was particularly drawn to your work is because of the connection with stroke victims. I have written a play called “The Bistro Down the Road” which is in development and whose central character is a stroke victim. Can you tell me what drew you to this particular ailment for your work, and what you learned about it from your own interaction with stroke victims and your writing?

Alan: Good luck with your play.
         My mother suffered a number of strokes at the end of the last Millennium. I watched her struggle with their effects, and though she had other serious health problems, the strokes not only hastened her end but caused her to suffer greatly in the process. All her life she had been an avid reader of literature, and it was music and company that gave her comfort in her final months. In the eighties I had trained to be a nurse – not a career I was really cut out for – which involved some kind of wish or need to help people who are ill. There must be some link to these experiences in my desire to become a writer for a stroke charity but in all honesty I wasn’t overtly conscious of it when I submitted my story to their competition; my main aim was to further my writing and have the opportunity to work creatively with what appeared to be, and definitely turned out to be, an ethical and innovative organisation.

 Life though can be pitiless at the same time as revelatory in its coincidences and finalities. A few months after I became Writer in Residence, my father, who had happily re-married after my mother died, suffered a startling and serious stroke. When I saw him in Brighton hospital the day he was admitted a pretty actress from InterAct was coincidentally reading to patient at the next bed. My Dad was old and never regained full movement or most importantly to him, full and normal speech, despite his own efforts and those of highly-skilled Speech & Language therapists. He fought his condition with honesty, grace and great humour but in the end after eighteen months it got the better of him. Visiting wards and seeing people read to was a bittersweet yet inspiring and moving experience, and though my Dad didn’t seek being read to, what rallied him through his ill health, as through his life, was interaction with people: good company, jokes and conversation.

   In the end then I can vouch for the fundamental and beneficial effect of human contact – a visit from a friendly InterAct actor reaching out with a story or someone sitting next to a stroke patient and talking to them as a normal person – on people suffering from stokes. It can be very isolating and frustrating condition that ravages body and soul and it means a lot to me to have been involved, even in a small way, with an organisation that seeks to make a positive difference.

--------------------

Thanks so much for this honest and generous insight into your work and life. And thanks to Faye Dayan of Roast Books for the opportunity to read it and "meet" you.

Noel Duffy: In The Library of Lost Objects

I'm thrilled to be able to chat today with Noel Duffy, novelist, poet and screenwriter. I had the pleasure of  meeting him recently when I was in Dublin over Easter. It's always a bit scary to meet a fellow writer, especially when you admire their work as much as I have come to admire Noel's. But I'm happy to say he's all that a talented, professional and fun contemporary writer should be. And now he has a new poetry collection published by Ward Wood called In The Library of Lost Objects.

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971, which puts him just a few minutes younger than I am (ahem). He'll divulge more about his background in our discussion below, but professionally so far he has co-edited, with Theo Dorgan, Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland/Poetry Society,1999) and has also published a collection of two novellas, The Return Journey & Our Friends Electric (Ward Wood, 2011).  Noel has also discovered the joys of blogging. You can follow him here.

Noel and I share a tendency towards the cross-genre, if you know what I mean, and so I was eager to hear his thoughts on the whys and hows of writing in as many genres as he does. He has also done an MFA in Creative Writing, and I was eager to hear his thoughts about that, too. He's also a fellow science nerd, so our chat got a bit long, but stick with it. You won't be sorry:

Sue:  Some writers concentrate on one genre, others like you and me, write across several. Although you are just now launching your first full length poetry collection, you have already published two (wonderful) novellas with Ward Wood. So I’m wondering, did fiction come before poetry or did you always write both at the same time?

Noel: Poetry came first. Most definitely. I studied Experimental Physics and did well, and after graduation I joined a PhD student doing research as part of the Human Genome Project. To be honest, that’s not as special as it sounds as nearly every university department was doing some form of research related to this global project (there was a lot of funding made available at the time). I realised very quickly that the laboratory wasn’t my natural habitat. Like most young people at a loose end, I decided to do teacher training. I also very rapidly realised that wasn’t for me either and the only thing that kept me going was that I had started writing poetry, which I had read through my time in college but not written. This was in 1995. I suppose my progress was quite fast as I published my first poem, ‘Apple’, in the autumn edition of Poetry Ireland Review in the same year. That was a big moment, made bigger by the fact that Seamus Heaney had just won the Nobel Prize and his first published poem after the big event was in the same issue. For a brief period at least, writing poetry seemed a realistic thing to do with your life. Obviously, I continued on writing poetry since that time, though my progress has been painfully slow till the last couple of years, when I’ve learned to be more relaxed about it.

The writing of prose was really unexpected. I went to do an MA in Writing at NUI, Galway, much later in 2003, with the main hope of making serious progress on my poetry collection. The irony was the one field of writing I made the least progress with was poetry. In some MA courses – such as Trinity’s – there is a more singular focus. So, if you go in as a prose writer you mostly do that. The philosophy in Galway was to encourage us to try our hand at every form of writing. Most people on the MA were, indeed, prose writers so when I took that course I had no expectations whatsoever. I think that really helped. Our tutor asked us to write a short story and when I tried I ended up writing a first draft of ‘The Return Journey’, one of the two novellas in the book. It was a deeply liberating experience. Having focussed so much on poetry, and having been a student of poetry so to speak, writing prose felt like stepping from a small room (almost like a monk in his cell) into a much larger one. I was extremely surprised at how at home I felt in the form, particularly writing in the first person. I think the key is finding a clear voice for the character, then rigorously following where it takes you. I’ve yet to write prose in the third person, and I suspect I might face some challenges in doing so. I also took a course in Non-Fiction with Prof Adrian Frazier and wrote a long piece about my grandfather which was later published in the Dublin Review. So by the end of the year, I’d produced fewer poems than I’d hoped, but discovered I really enjoyed writing prose.

As a final, general point, for me poetry is a tap that is not always running. Before the MA that led to a lot of frustration for me. By writing in other forms (prose, film, theatre) I started to write more regularly and I really enjoy the variety that offers. The one thing I find is that I can’t easily move from one form to another, so if I’m working on a screenplay I’m not thinking about anything but film. The same is true of poetry and fiction.

Sue: You also write screenplays in the way that I also write stage plays. What has drawn you to that medium? Is it the visuality of it, or the dialogue, or the chance of fame and glory?

Noel: In the same year that I did the Higher Diploma in Education, someone gave me a copy of John Berger’s novel To The Wedding. I was becoming interested in film and found the book very cinematic, so I decided to adapt it for screen purely as an exercise to try learn the craft of screenwriting. I read about three-act structures and so on and had cards for every scene which I rearranged on a wall, using pink ones for important plot points. Again, this exercise was mostly to keep me sane during the teacher training where I was mostly teaching maths. In any case, a couple of years later, someone told me that there was a new (and, in fact, the first) screenwriter agency in Dublin and they accepted my adapted screenplay straight away. For a moment I thought film was a real future for me. Sadly, nothing came of that and I really only came back to film seriously in the last five years. I do think that the fact I’d written a couple of screenplays before the MA probably helped me as a prose writer, as I understood the principles of storytelling and characterisation and how to write dialogue and so on. However, the one thing that’s difficult to do in cinema is to create an interior voice, so first person prose is very attractive for that reason. You can climb into someone’s head and explore their thoughts, as well as their actions and what they say.

I suppose a small part of starting to write films is the excitement of cinema, certainly. You might even say the glamour! It is, also, I think the dominant narrative form of our time really, so yes there is a certain urge to be part of it. Knowing what I know now, though, it’s also one of the hardest fields to break into as a writer. I’ve also come to realise that the writer takes so much risk in the film. You write a script on spec and put hundreds of hours in and then hope you can find a producer. If money is sought and got, it’s only then that most of the other key players enter. So, you can put a lot of work in and never know if you’ll get a payday or see the film on screen,  even if it’s good. Films quite simply cost a lot of money to make. In a way, it’s quite frightening to think that something you write might require one and a half million pounds to realise on screen, if not more (and that’s considered low-budget in today’s market). Obviously, convincing people to give you that kind of money isn’t easy.

Someone gave me some very good advice when I started out with this. They said, don’t be the guy with one screenplay in his bag going from producer to producer for years; keep writing them and maybe one will eventually get made. I took this advice and have written five features, with three that are in the shop window, so to speak. That leaves you options when you do meet producers. I’m finally getting to the point where I have relationships with a number of them and there is a possibility of getting things off the ground, but in this business nothing happens quickly so you have to be very patient. I also know now that in film, the writer generally doesn’t receive the credit they deserve. If a film works it’s usually the director and the cast we’re aware of – certainly not the writer!

To answer your question more directly, what really attracts me to screenwriting is that in the same way I love reading poetry and prose, I love watching movies. Like fiction, you are working in the dramatic form with characters, a premise, and dialogue to try bring a world and story to life, but screenplays are more stripped back and exacting in a certain way. You have to understand that you are doing this for the screen and not the page, so that leads to differences in emphasis. In that sense, a screenplay only really exists when it’s projected by light. You need skill and imagination, say, to create a scene in 18th century Dublin in a novel. The same is true in film, but that scene might cost 100,000 euro to realise! So words are free. Celluloid isn’t.

Sue: I know that you have gotten an advanced degree in Creative Writing. At the risk of  being too controversial here — do you think it was worthwhile? Is it really just a way to make contacts?

Noel: I think from what I’ve written above, the MA in Writing was very useful for me and helped me to become a prose writer more than anything else. When I took the course it was only in its second year, though I was probably one of the most experienced writers on it as I’d published poetry for nearly eight years in journals and so on. I think a lot depends on the dynamic of the group of people involved, as well as the tutors. Our group was very supportive of each other in the main and, as I pointed out earlier, the philosophy of the programme was to try as many forms as you could and see where you were at the end of the year as a writer. It was also great to have so much feedback from tutors.

At the same time, I do think there is a danger in the emergence of more and more MAs of this kind. When they started in the States in the late 50s they were centres of excellence in writing with very high standards. Now, nearly every university in the States has one and you can’t help but feel that those standards don’t always apply and that they are a money-making exercise for some institutions (the same is true of screenwriting courses, I should add).  The other problem over there, is that I’ve heard some publishers won’t look at your work if you don’t have one (or one from a particular university), which is simply ridiculous. In the end an academic qualification isn’t the measure of a writer, the work is. The true qualification is to be published.
One thing I’d add as a final note. For me the year after the MA was my most fruitless as a writer. In a sense you’re in a lovely bubbly of creativity, but when you leave that bubble is gone. You face the harsher world of publishing houses and agents, sending manuscripts out and so forth, and waiting months to hear back and most often receiving rejection letters. After all the attention you received on the course, that’s a difficult transition. Overall, though, for me it was a great opportunity to step out of my normal life (trying to write while making a living etc) and to just ‘be’ a full-time writer for a year. That was wonderful, really.
    I just want to add a final thanks to Sue for inviting me onto her excellent blog for this interview. Answering her thoughtful questions has been a real pleasure. I hope they may be of some use to others also working at the writing coal face or those thinking about it.

Sue: Thank you, Noel. It's been great chatting with you. Best of luck with both of the recent publications. And to all my friends out there reading this, I urge you to check out his work. You'll be happy you did.

Are We Dead Yet?

If you're reading this, then I guess the answer is, thankfully, no.
I was all set to write a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek blog about this weekend's "rapture" hoo ha. Yes, it's the end of the world - again. And I was having a swell time in the shower - where I do all my best thinking -- imagining all the funny quips I could write about the apocalypse etc etc. But then when I was towelling off I started to reconsider.  "No, maybe this isn't such a good idea," I thought. "Mr D has a business trip this week in a decidedly dodgy part of the world, and I better not make fun, just in case." Well, well, well.  So much for my place in the rational world.

But to be honest, I'm full of superstitious rituals that I adhere to "just in case." Every time I take off in an airplane, I close my eyes and say a little chant of safe passage to myself that I learned a decade ago in a yoga class. There have been plenty of times when I've spoken out loud about something that I was hoping might happen, only to joke about wanting to swing a chicken around my head to ward off the evil eye. Okay, I don't actually do it, but I do always make the same joke. So who am I to ridicule the poor bastards who believed the end was nigh?

We live in a world that is out of control, in many ways.  So much is happening to us and around us now that we don't understand, it's not surprising that so many of us are grabbing whatever tentative chance for an explanation or control that we can find. Stevie Wonder, one of my favourite philosphers, proclaimed "Superstition ain't the way," and of course he's right. But that doesn't stop us from performing our rituals, believing the unbelievable.  Did I think the world was going to end this weekend? Of course not. But I won't claim that there isn't a host of other things that I believe, or am too afraid to completely disbelieve. I come from a culture that is firmly steeped in superstition. I carry the sound of my grandmothers' pooh poohs and tsk tsks forever in my ears. So although I may not believe in the rapture or the imminent end of the world, I'll keep saying my little chant to myself until Mr D gets home.

But what's a chant without music? Here you go......

Novel Writing Tips: Plot Plotting

I'm committed to sharing the process of writing Novel 3 with you all. I already wrote about diving into the first draft and some tips I have remembered here. But now I find that I have entered a new mini phase that I want to discuss.

I have indeed written over 20,000 words in a very short time and before I went any further, my editor and I decided it would be best to take a breath and take a look at what I was doing and how I was doing it. She's a wise woman, that editor of mine. Luckily, things seem to be going well. I'm now fairly convinced that my scheme for alternating 1st and 3rd person chapters will work. But there is a  trap that I am teetering on the brink of falling into. I need to forget that A Clash of Innocents was ever written. Novel 3 will share some characters with that book, and it will also be set in Cambodia, although in a different part of the country. So although it will complement Clash, it will not be a sequel. You will not need to have read Clash first and, indeed, I can imagine that many will enter this world I'm creating through Novel 3 and then go on to read Clash after. That means I have to beware of the temptation to give updates on what my characters had been doing during the intervening time between the two books. I have to make sure I slowly introduce the characters just as I did before, without assuming that the reader has any prior knowledge. I have to let the story and the characters unfold at their own pace without interrupting them with flashbacks or too many interior monologues or semiconscious reminiscences. And I think we found a way for me to do that.

Although I had plotted out the book to an extent before I started writing, the framework was a bit nebulous. I basically knew where I was going, but the pace was unclear and I didn't always understand what was going to follow what. So I have done something which I actually love to do -- I've brought out the index cards! My, how I love index cards. They're so neat, so tidy, so compactly there. And this is what I've done:
    * On each card I wrote the name of one possible episode. Underneath, I wrote some notes about what would happen and who it would happen to. For example, one card says: Srey and Fred walk to Clinic for First Time  Then underneath I wrote (1) Description of street scene, women selling etc  (2) street people tease Srey, misunderstanding who she is and who is Fred
    * After doing that, I found I had 34 cards. I then began my favourite part: the index card shuffle. I grouped the cards according to theme, time frame etc until I had 10 stacks, each stack representing a chapter.
    * Within each stack, I put the cards in order so that one episode followed another. Then I wrote one more card serving as an overview of how many chapters, what each chapter is generally about and, to make sure the chapters aren't too lopsided, the number of episodes (so far) in each chapter. And here they are:

  Now for Plot Plotting Step 2. In my notebook, spread across two pages, I made a chart with seven columns: Chapter. Voice (because they alternate a bit). Episode. What Happens. To Whom. Themes. Word Count/# of Pages. 
For each chapter, I filled out the chart listing each episode. This serves two purposes, firstly to help my increasingly failing memory to remember what happened where. But more importantly, it allows me to actually see where the climaxes fall, where troubles are introduced and resolved, where characters are included. In other words, it sets up the pacing, which is crucial. And the chart looks like this (actually, there are 3 spreads of these):

  So there you  have it, my Plot Plotting all done and dusted. Now, of course, I have to be flexible, allowing myself to make changes, shuffle things around, add and delete. But I can do that easily because everything is written in pencil and I bought myself an excellent new eraser -- of course, every big task needs a purchasing opportunity. 
    I know that some novelists out there may be horrified by this and I'm not saying that this incredibly anal approach is for everyone. It is actually based on a format called the Snowflake Method, which I posted about here. But it works for me, and now I'm ready to start writing again, methodically making my way from episode to episode, and knowing that with my plot structure in place, I can allow my imagination to go as wild as it wants, within the 6"x4" parameters of each index card's notes.

Novel Spaces

Today, I am a guest over at the terrific literature blog called Novel Spaces over here, talking about the experience of bringing A Clash of Innocents back to it's beginnings. Novel Spaces is an eclectic group of authors bound by a singular passion: writing. If you love reading great stories from across the broad spectrum of tales to be told, then their blog is definitely the right space for you. Thanks to them for giving me the opportunity to meet some more readers and writers. Do drop by and say hi.

Life Changes

Given all the craziness with blogger this week, I think I'll just post this again. See you again in a few....



I have been a bit preoccupied over the past two weeks. I know I've talked about my trip to Asia, writing novel three, reading and writing poetry, and even grammar, but it's time to 'fess up to what's really been on my mind, namely The Big Move.

I have lived in central London for over twenty years in a wonderful, small terrace house on a lovely tree-lined street among other young families and aging surrogate grandparents. I have loved it. Although it is a part of town easily joked about -- there is even a new tv show about it -- I have found it to be a great place to raise my family, a sort of village within the vast variety that is London. We never thought we'd leave, even when a few months ago we decided it might be time to sell the house and downsize. The assumption was that we would just find something smaller in the same neighbourhood.

But you know what they say about "never say never." Over the last Bank Holiday, Mr. D and I decided to take a stroll in a part of town we love and rarely get to. We were told that there was one flat left in a new development right by the river, with views of St Paul's, within a short walk of Borough Market, The Globe and The Tate Modern. We knew we didn't want to live there but we thought looking at it would be a fun outing.  Well, let this be a warning to you. Don't go looking if you're not prepared to find. Within five minutes of walking around the development we were sold, both on the flat itself but just as much on a possible new lifestyle. The move from postcode SW1 to postcode SE1 is about as big a move as you can make here in London, sociologically and psychologically speaking. The more we walked around and discussed it the more excited and energized we became. Here it was, a new lifestyle for this new life chapter we are most definitely in, whether we wanted to admit it or not. After a year of rattling around the empty nest we began to realize that this is a time for us to focus on us, on our new needs and desires, maybe even to be the "yuppies" we were too poor to be the first time around.

So we bought it. Pretty much on impulse. Although we probably won't be moving in until the autumn -- there's the minor sticking point of needing to sell the house first (ugh) -- we are already imagining ourselves there, living it in our minds.  And I'm so excited. I do believe it fits us and where we are now in our lives.  Somehow in someway, it also feels connected to my own new commitment of spending a month or so a year in Cambodia.  I haven't quite figured that out yet, but I think it may have to do with me allowing myself to imagine myself stepping out into the greater world and taking my place in an environment beyond my family.  For my entire writing life I've felt as if I've been leaving bits of my heart here and there all over the place. Perhaps this move will give me the freedom to come and go, picking those pieces up and gluing them back together in a new way.  Plus Mr D gets to walk to work. And I have a new fantasy of sitting in my apartment, a notebook on my lap, gazing at Christopher Wren's finest.

Which is That? Grammar Rules!

My innate nerdiness is most evident in my love of grammar. Does anyone out there remember parsing, those intricate diagrams of sentence constructions that use to be at the core of grammar lessons? Probably not, but I remember learning how to do it and loving the way I could draw a sentence with its different parts as if it was a subway map. Hours of fun :-)  And that's probably why I haven't disabled the auto-grammar checking thingey on my computer. When one of those dotted green lines appears under a word it brings out the grammarian in me. But there is one construction I am continually getting "told off" about: that vs which.  I had to admit that I didn't really know the difference and although I'm all for breaking rules in writing -- especially when writing fiction and dialogue -- I do believe you at least have to understand the rule you are deciding to break.

I am taking an enormous leap of faith here, but I am assuming that most of you don't know the rule of usage for that vs which, and that there are even some out there who find it interesting. So on behalf of all of us, I have done some studying up and here are the results:

The difference seems to lie in the idea of restrictive or limited meaning. If the clause you are writing is about to give information that is key to a specific noun then you use that. Here's an example:
  1.  The sentence that I wrote is true.  In other words, of the millions of sentences written in the world, the true one is the one I wrote.
  2.  The sentence, which I wrote, is true. In other words, there are many true sentences which have been written, but the one I am referring to now was written by me.

The use of that in sentence 1 limits the noun to one specific thing within a galaxy of similar things. The use of which in sentence 2 adds interesting information about the one thing I am talking about.

But notice... my beloved little commas separate the clause beginning with which from the rest of the sentence. This is key to the use of the word and a surefire way to know if the usage is correct or not. The word that is part of the same clause as the noun and so does not need to be cordoned off by commas.  And as if this wasn't exciting enough, here's another rule: the word that is used for inanimate objects and not people. When discussing people, who is correct ie
   The boy who stole my heart is now in prison.
   The boy that stole my heart is now in prison might be a lyric in a country western song, but it is not to be used in formal prose.

And that brings us to the real heart of the matter. Does it really make a difference? Although I do believe that most grammatical rules do make a difference, this one I am less rigid about. But that is because I am no longer writing theses or technical reports. I'm writing fiction and poetry and much of my writing uses dialogue, and let's face it, people speak the way they speak, whether it is grammatical or not. So in the final analysis, I will continue to break the rule when it makes sense to do so. But I must admit, it feels better knowing the rule that I am breaking -- or should I say, it is better knowing the rule, which I am breaking.....


   

Joyce Carol Oates Gives Some Advice

Every now again, especially when I'm in the midst of a big writing project like I am now, I like to trawl through the achives of YouTube for nuggets of wisdom from big-time writers. Joyce Carol Oates is definitely one of those, if only for the sheer volume of work she has produced over the years. Here are some words of wisdom from her. I think what she has to say about not giving up is especially interesting:




And while we're on the subject of not giving up,  let me encourage you to cast your eyes upwards and to the right where you will undoubtedly notice the return of the Purple Writing Meter. I'm enough of a nerd to constantly keep track of my word count as I write -- perhaps I've studied too much Anthony Trollope -- but I confess that updating the Purple Meter is pure joy! So far, so good.

Whence Inspiration?

         This is a question that every writer gets asked, I think. It always surprises me how difficult some people find inspiration to be. Where does it come from? Well for me, I have to say it comes from everywhere, and often (and most delightfully) from the most unexpected places. Case in point:

I am now in the midst of writing the first draft of my third novel. This is an exciting and terrifying place to be. My head is constantly full of ideas. I'm constantly plotting and thinking about my characters, where they're going and how they're getting there. That's the exciting part. The terrifying part comes from wondering if I can remember all these fevered thoughts when writing (despite all the notebooks and midnight jottings), and if I do, will my writing do them all justice? But that's for another blog. The reason why it is pertinent now is that I find that when I 'm in this state, all my senses are on high alert. It's not that I'm constantly looking for inspiration. It's more that I allow it to come up and land a big sloppy one on my face whenever it feels like.

  And so this morning I was doing the daily purge of my junk file when, for some reason, I stopped to read an email sent by BlogCatalog, a site I joined God-knows-when and God-knows-why.  I get these every so often and I usually ignore them. Generally, I don't like to be told what to write about and more and more I am getting suspicious of all these sites. But this email was a call to support International Day of Compassion and talked about "The Real Dr. Patch Adams" -- remember the old Robin Williams movie? Again, if I was in a different state of mind, I would have rolled my eyes and pressed the big dele button. But novel 3 is likely to be the most difficult book I've written to date -- thematically speaking. It will deal with difficult issues and seemingly good people doing bad things. But I know the book won't work unless I can make these characters people the reader will want to engage with. I need to find some compassion for these characters, whether I like what they are doing or not. And that's not easy. But this BlogCatalog campaign reminded me that it is possible, and actually, crucial. The fact that my new novel will be set in a newly built health clinic and has something to do with the politics of healthcare delivery makes Patch Adams and his ongoing campaign for a new kind of medicine all the more interesting to me.

I say that my writing, whether it is fiction, poetry or plays, is ultimately about hope. But there can be no hope without compassion and that idea in itself is inspirational. So where did my inspiration come from today? My email junk pile. You never know.....