It's always a revelation when you had assumed for years that everyone was agreed on a certain point and then it turns out not to be so! Being a writer, reader and one-time teacher of writing, I have always assumed that when readers come across the story ending "and then he woke up and found it had all been a dream", they do what I would, ie hurl the book across the room, curse the author for wasting their time and cross him/her off their reading list. Even if - especially if - I have enjoyed the story up to then, I feel cheated by the fact that nothing has changed, indeed nothing has actually happened and my time and emotions have been engaged to no purpose.

So it's a surprise, in a facebook discussion of John Masefield's The Box of Delights, an otherwise fine children's book which pulls this unworthy stunt in the last sentence, to find not just people who can forgive this because they like the book otherwise, but some who like this ending anyway. It has of course been taboo with writing gurus for years, but that's not just because of fashions in teaching, rather it's because this ending is perceived as so unpopular with readers as to be a commercial killer. I have always assumed indeed that editors and publishers have the same attitude to it, on the same grounds, but am I wrong there? (Re Alice in Wonderland, btw, yes, it has that ending, but (a) that doesn't make it right and (b) the device was at least a great deal newer then.)

EDIT: See steepholm's comment below for a link to a fascinating fact i didn't know about the ending of Masefield's book...

Can we figure out how to do a poll, perchance?

Poll #1485330 It Was All A Dream
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

"It was all a dream" endings are

There's an article in the current issue of The Author (the magazine of the Society of Authors) which at first sight looks like bad news for those wishing to sell books... but I'm not so sure. It's by lifelong author Roger Williams, who like most lifelong authors wasn't making oodles of money and who had decided to seek "a market that would drive sales". He devised a cunning plan (well, I expect it seemed so at the time) to write a book of fact-based short stories all set in the 200 or so hotels around the world that happen to be called the Hotel Bristol. The idea was to sell them direct to the hotels to put with the Gideon bibles as light reading. He self-published High Times at the Hotel Bristol, at a cost of about 60p a copy for 2000 copies. That meant he didn't have a publisher's marketing dept to rely on. But I doubt any publisher would have gone the length he did in marketing.

He sent copies to the local press and targeted the city of Bristol. The local Waterstones and Blackwells took copies, as did the tourist office, it went up on Amazon and he went on local radio (BBC) to talk about it.

This resulted in some sales in the city but not one outside (he knew, as all orders came to him). Then the Mail on Sunday named it their travel book of the week. That brought a grand total of one new order. However this was better than the result of exposure on Radio 4 (he'd sent a copy to the producer of Excess Baggage; again classic author marketing strategy but not a single order resulted.

So he went online - set up blogs, put chapters online, made podcasts. He reports "barely a sale" as a result. Then his luck seemed to turn - the Wall Street Journal picked up on it and he got 29 column inches and a mugshot in both the US and European editions. Total extra sales? One.

So where's the ray of light for writers in this sad story? I think there might be two. One: before you market your idea you must have it, and if it's a dud it'll be a dud however good you are at the marketing. I think a collection of stories that just happen to take place at various hotels called Bristol was just not a very fascinating idea to start with. Neither do I see why the inhabitants of Bristol should have been likely to buy it just because it name-checked their city. (I do think he might have done better to home in on cities outside the UK called Bristol; "exiles" tend to have a more sentimental attachment to old-country names etc than those of us who live there).

And the other thing that's interesting is that he chose the idea not because it fascinated him but because he thought it would sell. The fact that it didn't suggests that at least for writers, who tend anyway not to know much about what sells and why, it might be better to write what pleases them, as well as they can, and hope it also pleases others. Do the marketing afterwards, by all means, but don't create your product with marketing principally in mind; it may work for beans but on this showing at least, it doesn't for books.

I used to have a random poem generator. Actually it still exists, over here at Geocities but it won't for much longer, because Geocities goes down the tubes on 26th October. I moved my site ages ago, in fact it's been in two incarnations since then, but few hosts can cope with javascript as Geocities, for all its faults, did.

I made it because I wanted to see if I could, really. I don't write javascript, but an intelligent man adapts; I had a sample generator and it struck me that with a basic knowledge of html it should be possible to work out which was the javascript and which the actual bits of fixed and random text, and insert one's own in place of this text, which worked fine. It was a very long job actually thinking up all the bits of text, putting them in and then changing ones that didn't work well in practice.

After that, however, one had only to hit reload to bring up half a dozen or so new lines of more-or-less sense. I'd say six out of ten were duds, another three had lines worth thinking about and the tenth would be really interesting. Sometimes images would accidentally work together, sometimes I'd get a contradiction, like the sun shining at night, that could actually be more interesting and that I'd maybe not have thought of by other means. What I liked about it was that it'd sometimes kick-start poems for me when ordinary methods didn't, yet because I'd created all the text in the generator, any poem that came out of it was still All My Own Work.

Anyone who fancies doing this as an aid to composition, and has somewhere to host it online, can right-click on the generator page, hit View Source and copy the script when it comes up, so they can then alter the relevant text. I've kept the script too, and also some of the results that came up lately. The words in bold in the first example are the only fixed text, all else was random. As you can see, you don't get masterpieces out of it; you get some odd juxtapositions of words and images that just might set something off.
( examples behind cut )

I’ve blogged before about analysis of poems and how they work, and how some love it while others avoid it. Here’s another dip into the same pool, occasioned by a Facebook discussion of the way a poem featured on Woman’s Hour had given rise to wide discussion, all, apparently, centred on the issues it raised, rather than on the way the poet used language. Someone defended the right of readers not to care about the way a writer uses language, but instead to value a poem solely for what it does to their emotions, and of course they do have that right. Indeed you could argue that the better a poem, or any writing, is, the less its craft should be noticed by the reader, just as you don’t expect to see the scaffolding once the roof’s up.
( But... )

(and no, the answer isn't che sera, sera, third on my list of most hated songs). It's a writer thing.)

If I call someone a German poet, or a French novelist, I tend to mean someone who writes poems in the German language, or novels in the French language. The person in question might actually hold a Swiss or Canadian passport, but by and large I don't think birth nationality has anything like the impact on a person's writing that language does; we do not think of Joseph Conrad as a Polish writer. In that sense I am and will always be an English writer, though I'd probably phrase it a writer in English, because my reaction to "are you English?" would always be "no, I'm bloody not!"

Having said that, where you live, whether out of choice or necessity, is always going to affect your writing if only by osmosis. It's possible that one's sense of heredity affects it too, though myself I don't think that can go farther back than your own parents and grandparents, who will pass on their sense of who they are to you. And if you never actually go the length of travelling to your supposed roots, I'm not sure they really exist; I've met so many people who professed to be proud of their Irish or Welsh descent and yet had never set foot in the places concerned. That's at best a sentimental pseudo-attachment. But environment, whether chosen or compelled, is different.

I am by birth half Welsh, half Irish if you go by heredity, all Welsh if you go by environment, given that my mother, though wholly Irish by descent, was born and brought up in Wales. I wasn't born in Wales but I've been living, writing and publishing in Wales for 40 years and calling myself a Welsh writer. Being called one too, by most though not all -for some, writing in English is enough to disqualify you from the title, others would contend you needed to be born here and/or have the matter of Wales as the main concern of your writing; others would say you need to live and publish here while some few would include anyone born here but living elsewhere and publishing with a non-Welsh house.

"Living and publishing in Wales", which applies to me, works for most though; it does for instance qualify you for Welsh writing awards. My friend Matthew Francis the poet, who moved from Winchester, was surprised to find he at once qualified as a Welsh poet, rather in the way that football players with an Irish great-uncle used to find Jack Charlton on the phone. (At the time it might have seemed a bit daft; these days, Matthew having been some years in Aberystwyth, it seems natural). One could of course reject any kind of localism and just be A Writer, but the administrative mechanics of the trade don't really work like that; where you live determines which arts body hands out the dosh for one thing. And people do like to have a pigeonhole to put you in.

So what if you move? At the moment I'm shuttling between Cardiff and Shetland, but from next year, though for family reasons involving a Very Old Cat, I will still have a Cardiff address as well, I'll be living in Shetland and visiting Cardiff. What am I then: a Shetland poet, a deracinated Welsh poet? If someone's work takes him from Birmingham to Swansea to Glasgow he can't be an English, Welsh and Scottish poet by turns, can he? How long does it take to become something, or stop being something?

Oddly enough I've always been fascinated by deracination and changing one's identity, and I know a lot of my friends, including several writers, have done it. Any views on the above?

The Guardian book blog discussion on The Damned United took an interesting turn when Johnny Giles unexpectedly joined in, somewhat bitter about having been used as a character in an RPF. I could understand his point of view, to some extent, but then someone else posted this:

It's a prime example of "fan fiction" really, and as such leaves that uncomfortable taste in the mouth whenever the facts are glibly massaged and scenes and conversations written to fit a self-serving tale.

- and that "self-serving" got so far up my nose that I felt obliged to jump in and point out that fan fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction in not feeling constrained to stick to the bare facts. I daresay I shall regret it...

"Where do you get your ideas from" – the perennial question writers get asked at readings or workshops. I used to try to give an answer to the question asked (though it generally came down to "from the world around me"). But I think now that I should have been saying "it isn't about ideas at all; it's about what you do with them". And if I were still giving workshops, I might use the two Ozymandiases to illustrate.
( cut for length )

On Jo Preston's poetry blog, A Dark, Feathered Art recently, I had a difference of opinion with a poster who said she couldn't be doing with criticism that focused on the technical stuff about poetry, rather than its inspirational, emotional side. And now I think maybe I can demonstrate why I do want criticism to do just that – because, paradoxically, I am currently quite emotionally overwhelmed by a particular poem. It's one heavy with nostalgia and loss, freighted with unreachable back-story, that leaves you - well, me - with that weight-pressing-on-lungs feeling of utter sadness and emptiness, plus a strong desire to read it again immediately and get the fix repeated, that one only gets from a really good angst-fest. Like the end of HDM, though for my money the angst there isn't fully earned, or the end of Renault's The Persian Boy, where it is. Or many an angsty fic I can think of.

Many poems do it too; one that's been giving me the angst fix for years is a French poem by Francis Jammes called "Clara d'Ellébeuse", which I might write about later. And I don't need commentary to tell me what the poet is doing; I know. What I want to come at is how he does it. As a writer, obviously I want to know his techniques so that I can pinch them but I would think non-writing readers too would be interested in exactly how someone is managing to mess with the inside of their head.

So, behind the cut, my thoughts on a poem in the latest issue of the journal Agenda, "Penllain" by Paul Henry.
( cut for lengthy wittering )

People are always asking me where they can find new poets, by which they generally mean where online, i.e. without finding somewhere to buy a book or magazine. Well, this poet hasn't got a book out yet so about the only place to find some of her work together in one place is online here (the site of a big competition she got shortlisted for). There are a few errors on it, which I hope'll be removed soon; site editors have real problems with getting poetry up right, specially anything with unconventional/individual layout.

And as you'll see from the first poem there, "I love you, Sheila Mackenzie!", Rosie is nothing if not individual. For one thing there's the joyous freedom with which she uses the entire page, not just the left-hand side of it, but almost more unconventional than that is the strong narrative element. A lot of poets fight shy of that in fear that it'll end up sounding too like prose. Mind you, with the sort of stories that happen in her head, there's not much chance of that. I'm very fond of Mr and Mrs Jarvis, in "Syzygy", flying past the second-floor window in that matter-of-fact way that is somehow so much more dislocatory than astonishment. Characters come strongly through these little narratives (the woman who voices the poem to Bernard, for example) and that's often not what people think Poems Are For either. I've got nothing against the poem as lyric moment (Rosie does those too, now and then) but reading some mags, and indeed collections, you could easily come away with the idea that the lyric moment is all poems can do. Rosie's are a good corrective to that. I love the humour too.

So... I've picked up a cold somewhere and am quite incapable of concentrating on writing, or anything much else except feeling sorry for myself. Might as well do that post on line breaks, then!

Which are actually fascinating little beasts, IMO. In formal verse, rhymed and/or metred, line breaks come where they have to - after the rhyme-word or the requisite stress or syllable. Which is not to say that poets don't take care over which word comes on the break, since it inevitably attracts more emphasis, even if the break is a run-on.

But in free verse breaks come into their own. They could, potentially, come anywhere, so they really are the poet's choice and hence say a lot about what he/she is after. They shouldn't, ever, be arbitrary, though they sometimes are.

At the simplest level they can mirror the rhythms and punctuation of speech, coming where one would normally make a pause in speaking. Some poets indeed use them as punctuation - the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert used no conventional punctuation at all except, IIRC, capital letters; otherwise the breaks are the only indication of how to read his sentences and he made this work well, often using it to introduce fruitful ambiguities into the reading. (Made him a bugger to translate, though.)

A good example of the ambiguity that can be gained by punctuating with line breaks is in Edwin Morgan's "Strawberries" ( under cut )

Look at the lines

the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

If they were punctuated conventionally, we could tell whether the phrase "in my memory" belonged with the previous line or the next one. Is it "the taste of strawberries in my memory" or "in my memory, lean back again"? It matters a lot, because in the first case, the love affair is here and now; in the second, it is in the past, only able to be recalled. He wants both possibilities, and can have them by using the breaks as punctuation.

Breaks can also use the fact that poems are read with the eye as well as the ear. Because there is an involuntary pause at the break, they can briefly mislead and then surprise the reader - eg Jack Gilbert in "Looking Away From Longing". This poem is set in the Far East and in it he has

on the stones by the river a woman is beating
an octopus

We'd surely expected clothes, and the surprise of the octopus (presumably she was tenderising it; one can only hope it was dead) emphasises how far away from home we, and the poet, are.

But my favourite creative line breaks are a pair in the poem "A Marriage" by R S Thomas. This poem is about his own 50-year marriage, written after his wife's death, and has the lines

He kissed with his eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.

He could so easily have put the breaks after "closed" and "them", where they would follow the rhythm of the sentence - and indeed when he read aloud, this was how he read it, straight across the breaks. But the breaks were there to make that wonderful visual pun: a line that opens with "closed" and closes with "opened", and, in the process, imitates exactly the "blink of an eye" in which this man and his wife seem to him to have grown old. Brilliant.

This is in response to vilakins's question in the comments on the previous post.

First, caps. In present-day poetry, there are several possible conventions: some poets capitalise the first letter of every line and some don't. Many use capitals where prose would, i.e. to start a sentence or for proper names, and some few, of course, follow the e.e. cummings line and don't use them at all.

The caps-on-the-first-letter-of-a-line brigade are generally held to be traditionalists (or dinosaurs, depending on your camp) but it's by no means clear to me how old this tradition is. It isn't obvious in mediaeval manuscripts; possibly it came in with printing, but those authorities who say it has "historically" been the custom don't say when exactly in history they mean. But the "modern" tradition of capitalising by the rules of prose did, I think, come in (or back in) with free verse. Without the formalities of rhyme and metre, the capital first letter convention looks artificial - indeed to me, it looks so even on formal contemporary verse.

Next, vilakins was saying "I am also sometimes puzzled about breaks between verses in some poems, often within sentences or thoughts". Well now, I ain't no expert on prosody, but as far as I know, epic poetry, like Homer's, intended to be recited, didn't have a verse structure. It was narrative; it had regular metred lines, which acted as an aid to memory before the days of writing, but it moved from one thing to the next as a story does.

Verse structure was the preserve of lyric poetry, and certainly in ancient times, this was meant to be sung. Whether the music was composed before the words or after, a tune, at least in western music, is a repeated pattern of notes, again I'd guess for reasons of memorability, and lyric poems - songs - presumably fall into verses to match that pattern. Indeed it's a habit of folk song, from mediaeval to modern times, that new words are constantly fitted to recycled old tunes, sometimes with odd results - the tune to which we sing "Ilkley Moor" is said to have been written for the carol "While shepherds watched", and the humorous words written later. It does work with the carol if you repeat the third line once and the fourth twice, as a refrain. Indeed, verbal refrain, echoing the musical, is one of the clearest markers of lyric poetry,as is rhyme, and they both impel it toward the non-narrative verse structure of a repeating pattern.

Later came a divide between song and written lyric poetry; Keats and Shelley weren't supposing anyone was going to sing their odes. But by then the verse structure, presumably, served to organise the poet's thought; it does seem natural that each verse would be a separate unit of thought, though leading from the last and on to the next. And mostly they are, in the nineteenth century anyway. It must be very rare for either Keats or Shelley to end a verse on anything but a full stop (or equivalent). Browning, who even in strict form has a more conversational voice, sometimes does. His "Two in the Campagna" has a verse break on a comma. It's still on a sense break, in that the next verse begins a subordinate clause, but it's close to a run-on, and it may be no coincidence that he also uses run-on lines within verses more than they do - at least in narrative or conversational form poems like "My Last Duchess". But when he's being musical, as he also often is, his verses too are songlike and self-contained.

You'd think it might be free verse, again, that changed things, but I'm not sure it did. Whitman, though he mostly abandons rhyme, does still divide poems into verses and the verse breaks are also sense breaks. Carl Sandburg, another early American free-verse poet, is the same. Yet Humbert Wolfe, writing rhymed verse in the early 20th century, has "The Grey Squirrel":

Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

Now the break between verses 2 and 3 is clear, and you could argue that the one between 3 and 4, though in the middle of a sentence, also comes on a sense-break, but the one between 1 and 2 is pure run-on.

I don't know the date of writing of this poem, but Wolfe published one collection in 1916. I think, myself, that the Great War had a quite massive effect on the use of poetic form of all kinds; in a world where chaos reigned supreme, excessive striving after order in words must have looked a mite artificial. Not everyone stopped using rhyme and form, but most people started using it more loosely - eg Owen with his half-rhymes and pararhymes instead of full rhymes. It's after this, I think, that you more often find run-on verse breaks (as well as line breaks, but I'll do a separate post on them).

But this is just my take on it, and I'm no expert; in fact I have never studied poetry as such. I just write and read a lot of it for fun...

A while ago I blogged about why a writer might choose a particular tense to tell a story in; this time I'm interested in the choice of person and voice. Why does a story, or poem, end up in the first, second or third person, in an outside narrator's voice or character voice?

The I voice first, because it's arguably the greatest minefield. As I know both from email and experience with students, if you tell a story in the first person, many of your audience will at once assume (a) that it's true and (b) that the "I" is the author. For a people too cynical to believe a word politicians tell us, we seem to be incredibly gullible when it comes to the professional liars who are authors. Even when readers know it can't be so. I have had a reviewer assume automatically that the first-person narrator in an historical novel was female, simply because he knew the author was, though even a half-close reading should have made it clear it was a man.

I never use the I voice unless I'm in persona, pretending to be someone else and speaking in that voice. If I were writing about me, I would surely use the third person - and probably change the protagonist's sex - just to get more distance from the subject. And when I'm reading, being a writer, I assume that, as the phrase goes, "I is a lie". I have met students, and others, who dislike this, and indeed any authorial technique that makes the narrator unreliable. They want to be able to trust the narrator to be telling the truth, and they feel the I voice is a pledge of that. That's a point of view I can't understand, because to me unreliable narrators are not only the most interesting from a fictional point of view but, I would have thought, the most like real life - how often do real people tell each other the whole truth, or even know it?

I used to use the I voice, in persona, a lot, because it's fun to try out other voices. I've used it less lately; in my new book, the only first-person poem I can recall is in the voice of a tortoise, who had a viewpoint that couldn't really be interpreted through anyone else's voice. The third person gives not just more distance but more universality. It also, however, has the major disadvantage of introducing gender into the equation. Last time I brought a book out, some (male) reviewer with a lot of time on his hands thought it worthwhile to count the number of male and female protagonists, as if it mattered. In most cases, of course, it didn't; the poem had nowt to do with the gender of its protagonist.

In love poems this can be an especial annoyance if one's aiming for universality or ambiguity. Edwin Morgan, writing gay love poems back in the sixties and seventies when that wasn't legally safe, used to avoid gendering the protagonists, mostly by using the second person. But it's interesting that now, with no legal or social barrier to worry about, he still does it, and he says himself that it's because he doesn't want the poems pigeonholed as being for a particular audience; they're love poems, full stop.

The "you" voice does away with gender; it also introduces a lot of ambiguity. Does "you" mean one individual, or the reader, or mankind in general, or "you" as in the I voice talking to itself? This ambiguity can be fruitful, though not when the writing itself seems to vacillate between those possibilities. I know a writer who really hates "you" poems addressed to an individual (usually a dead one) because he feels they tell said individual what, in the nature of things, he must already know.

He has a point, but personally the voice that bugs me is first-person plural - the "we" voice. Again this is ambiguous; "we" can be mankind as a whole, or the writer and the reader, but as often as not it's the writer and his/her unidentified friends, and I dislike that, as a reader, because it makes me feel like an outsider; the "we" feels cliquish and exclusive.

( Just for fun, here's my first-person tortoise )

Whenever a novel starts with the character of a writer sitting in a Hampstead kitchen. struggling to finish a novel, I throw the book straight in the bin

- Mark Ravenhill: The Guardian

Oh, me too, sir! I've been thinking lately about what hooks me, in a poem or a novel, for two reasons: (i) I've been judging a poetry competition and (2) when I left work, I left my colleagues a bunch of books to give as presents/prizes to students, and a lot were modern novels I had read once and simply knew I would never read again. And that wasn't necessarily related to writing quality. Julian Barnes' Arthur & George was well written; it certainly wasn't a waste of my time but it didn't hook me enough to make me re-read it either. Ditto Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Whereas Will Self's The Book of Dave, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Pamuk's My Name is Red are no better written, in fact all three have factors that annoy me - Self's is Riddley Walker lite, Ishiguro's plotting is laughable even to me, the worst plotter in the universe, and if you're going to do futuristic science and politics it helps to have a basic understanding of both, and My Name is Red is marred for me by what seem inappropriate Americanisms in the translation. But all push some button or other that means I shall re-read them.

It may be partly the fact that I react better to historical or futuristic settings,and to places that are unfamiliar to me - I want literature to be a window, not a mirror, hence my aversion to anything set in a contemporary seat of learning - perhaps, now I no longer work in one, that'll change! But that doesn't always work. I am a sucker for Polar settings, which is probably why the only novel of Magnus Mills that I re-read is Explorers of the New Century. But Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Peter Hoeg) doesn't cut it for me, despite my Arctic obsession.

With the poetry competition, in fact, I could feel myself setting the bar higher for poems that looked as if they were about to push my buttons; there was a danger of expecting more of one with a form, theme or setting that was congenial and then being unreasonably disappointed. OTOH, button-pushing does get an entry noticed as you go through the pile. I honestly believe the winner I've chosen was the best poem in the comp, but it did have a title that, for all sorts of reasons the writer can't have known about, would appeal to me. (The comp was of course judged anonymously, but I know who the winners are now, and have never met them, that I know of. I only recalled having met one person on the shortlist, even.)

Apart from the Ravenhill quote, this one from George Eliot's story "Janet's Repentance" says a lot about what hooks me in a novel. Mrs Linnet likes biographies of famous preachers, but reads them quite selectively;

"Wherever there was a predominance of Zion, the River of Life, and notes of exclamation, she turned over to the next page; but any passage in which she saw such promising nouns as 'small-pox', 'pony', or 'boots and shoes', at once arrested her."

Been re-reading a little book called Five Essays on Translation (ed Katja Krebs & Christopher Meredith, pub. University of Glamorgan, ISBN 18405411202) which arose from a conference on the politics of literary translation at my uni in 2003. There's an essay in it called "Sleeping with the Enemy" by the writer and translator Grahame Davies, in which he talks both about the ethics of translating from a minority language into a majority one and about the effect bilingualism, and the act of translating, have had on his own writing.
( more behind cut )
I've never been as bilingual as Davies; I have translated mostly out of other languages into English. The influence of translation on me has always been to make me look more closely at my own language and what can be done with it by those who look at it fresh. I have done a little translation from English into German, and once while living there for a while I did actually get the length of writing a published poem in German. It was also a pastiche of the style of a particular German poet, Stefan George, and I've never been sure that this wasn't really the deciding factor that caused it to come to me in German. Never happened again though....

I translated it into English later, but it wasn't really the same poem. What's interesting is that I can still recall the German version but not the English one. Here's the original for anyone who's interested (complete with slightly archaic syntax and uncapitalised nouns because that's George's style). I'll try to hunt up the English version later and put it in, just to see what happened to it on the way.

( Rapunzels Hexe )

I knew going on holiday would help me start writing again. But I was sort of prepared for the eventuality that, surrounded by stunning scenery, I would be writing not about Shetland but the poem about my home town that I'd been trying to write for months... it nearly always happens. Famously, it happened to the rather better-known writer RLS, who spent a lot of his time on Samoa writing about Edinburgh. He did write about the South Seas too, some lovely short stories like "The Beach of Falesa", but it's a fact that distance lent his memories of home an extra sharpness. No doubt if he'd ever made it back to Scotland he'd have written novels about Samoa.

A witter occasioned by the fact that one of my writing friends resolutely refuses to go online, simply because, she says, she knows she would become addicted to it and waste too much potential writing time. This is a statement that tends to resonate ruefully with most writers, certainly me because I am the world's champion procrastinator and user of other activities as distraction techniques - ie the only time I suddenly find it essential to vacuum the carpet is when I ought to be writing instead.

It's a fact that going online for ten minutes to do necessary research tends to morph into hours spent enjoyably doing nothing very productive, and another writer I know told me recently that he spends ages bouncing between about half a dozen sites - email, blog, mailing lists, forums etc - on the ground that something might have happened on one of them during the 10 minutes he was away. Again this is all too familiar and I think we all tell ourselves that were it not for the internet we'd probably be about two books ahead of where we are.

Curiously enough, though, the friend who told me that is currently a very productive novelist. I've also found that when away from home and the internet I don't necessarily do that much more work; instead other activities, like taking exercise or learning Norwegian, suddenly demand priority. I'm coming round to the suspicion that you are either in the mood for writing or you aren't; if you are, not much can stop you but if you aren't, almost any distraction technique will do. (Unless there's a deadline on the horizon; they have no effect on some people but they do work for me.)

I'm really not sure whether the internet has been good for me as a writer or not, but I tend to think on balance it has. I have certainly written poems I would not have written without it, either because the research would have been too difficult by other means or because the internet itself was the background and inspiration (eg a set of "Webcam Sonnets" which were all about online interaction).

OTOH, the two novels I've managed to write were different, I researched the first in books and via travel (spending days in an archivist's office copying from microfiche). The second started from a book but then went into the country of the imagination; I more or less invented a place and time for it to happen in and I think it was the better for that. And a lot of my poems have started from travel, from getting out and about, even if the last sequence I wrote was inspired not by the actual weekend I spent in Dublin but by the book I bought at the airport. I once thought I might be able to get a novel out of my then-addiction to The Sims, but decided in the end that a protagonist who did little but sit in front of a screen would need a hell of an active inner life not to bore the reader.

Just for interest, two of the Webcam Sonnets are behind the cut - they appeared first in the mags Poetry Wales and Seam, and will be in my next, Long-Haul Travellers which I hope will come out in autumn.

( Webcam Sonnets 2 and 3 )

Bang on the nail, madam. Right on every count.


She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. "You're too young!" she cried. "You couldn't have written that book - you weren't there." It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. "Then none of this happened to you?" she said. "Nothing. I made it all up. It's fiction."

One of the worst things about misery memoirs (apart from the fact that they're unreadable; so the writer had a lousy childhood, why should I give a damn?) is that they seem to have confused readers about what to expect from fiction, particularly when they encounter the "I" voice, which against their apparent expectations is almost always a lie. Not only that, there seems to be a feeling in some readers that fiction based on truth is intrinsically superior to invention, which has always seemed to me if anything the reverse of the case.

I sometimes get queries from A-level students along the lines of "in your poem about the sandman, who's the woman on the beach?" If I reply; well, she's the poem's protagonist, I get the comeback "no, I mean who is she in your life, is it you, your mother, a friend?" When, like Grant, I reply "she's someone I made up for the purposes of the poem", I sense disappointment, as I do if I explain that even when poems are partly based on truth, writers monkey around with the facts, change he to she, set it in a different place, write a better ending than real life did.

The poem I get the most queries about is ( this )

Kids invariably want to know who was who; was the grandmother yours (one asked if I was the grandmother!); was the boy your brother. I explain, patiently, that the whole point of the poem is that you can't ever know; the writer is a liar and you have to accept that, because the lie is the way into the kingdom of story. But I sense that they want desperately to pigeonhole things, perhaps because exam questions are slanted that way.

- "Man Bits and Woman Bits: the discourse of sex in fanfic and litfic", for anyone who's interested. I put the papers from the other two SSD's up on my site but I don't want to do so with this one, because by its very nature it contains a lot of what my granny would have called Language. My site gets a lot of GCSE-student visitors and while I doubt they'd mind, their parents and teachers might.

I toyed with the idea of sending it to the OTW mag but they wanted too much done to it, including "lose a load of examples" (well now, I kinda thought the examples were what it was about) and "add images". That did baffle me - the whole thing is about how words work. And what would these images be exactly - willies at the ready? I can't imagine what else would be relevant and didn't fancy googling them.... Anyway it sounded like Hard Work of an Academic Nature and let's face it, we come into fandom to get away from that sort of thing. So in case anyone does want a print version, it's behind the cut. I haven't yet found a way to import the footnotes but will try to later. ( adult themes and language, but you knew that already )

- or, part 2 of why would anyone do that? Here's a poem by Catherine Benson, published in The North issue 37, a story told almost entirely in the negative:

Invergordon: Denial

She did not live with her grandmother;
did not have a mother somewhere else.

She did not go with her grandmother
to talk to her dead grandfather.

The wind was not from the mountains,
was not bitter, was not in her face.

She did not hear those words about
the mother who could come and take her.

She did not kiss her Gran goodbye each day
when she left for school, just in case.

*

Five years later, her grandmother did not
stand on the corner of the street

asking when the bairns were coming back,
when the bairns were coming back.

---
This is a great example of using the apparently neutral means of sentence structure and grammar to do what might otherwise have involved a lot of emoting at people. The repetition in the last verse, conveying the old woman's state of mind and the fact that this happens (or will happen) every day, the negatives causing the reader to think about the state of "denial" the kid must have been in, and perhaps still is, far more so than if it had been told straight. (I must admit, were it mine I'd have been tempted to leave out the asterisk-break and the "five years later", so as to leave it uncertain whether the separation in the last 2 verses had actually happened or was just a scary possibility in the kid's mind.)

And there's a shedload to be said about that last verb, "were coming", one of very few verbs not in the negative. Of the others, one is "could come and take", which is conditional. But "were coming" is both interrogative and reported, and because of this the apparent tense is interestingly misleading; it too is really, in reported speech, conditional (when would the bairns be coming...) but "were coming" looks at first sight like something that has happened, or been in the process of happening regularly (which it was). What she actually said was "When are the bairns coming back?" or "when will the bairns be coming back?", and it's the first verb to which the answer really is negative.

What's also undeniable is that it's much more memorable this way; it resonates more, precisely because you've had to ask the question, why did she choose to tell it this way?

Benson has a pamphlet, It Must Have Been A Sunday, see here

I've been reading some posts recently about writers' style choices, with particular reference to tense and voice. The debate in sallymn's lj was on fan fiction but the comments could have come from any litfic list too - especially the folk who shy away from first person narrators (not to mention second person ones). I might get around to posting about that later, but this post is about tense and why a writer might choose to do something other than the default. Because there was a tone about some comments that, again, I've heard in litfic contexts, of vague injury, as if the writer had used some stylistic device purely to be awkward - or clever. And I really don't think that is usually the case. If a writer decides to tell a story (whether in a novel, poem or story) backwards, or with unreliable narration, or entirely in interrogative mode, or in an unexpected tense or voice, it's usually because something about that story seemed to demand that technique. You can't always tell why when you're doing it; it just feels right, but a bit of analysis later will sometimes tell you why.
( more behind cut )
Maybe I'll go on with this tomorrow....