May

25

Swiss Toni’s Guide to Writing Short Stories

Filed Under Writing | 23 Comments

swiss_toniI was recently very honoured to be given the job of editing the Verulam Writers’ Circle’s first anthology for getting on for twenty years, and – quite reasonably – one of our number, the über-talented Jenny Barden –  has posed the question of what I am actually looking for. I did try to write an answer as a comment to her original post, but then I realised that if I did this properly, it would end up as long as a post in its own right. So here is that post.

Readers in the UK will probably be familiar with Swiss Toni from the Fast Show, played by comedy God Charlie Higson. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the character, Swiss Toni is a bouffant-haired used car salesman whose shtick is to liken everything to making love to a beautiful woman – and it struck me that maybe this is the way to explain what I’m looking for in a short story. Because, after all, isn’t writing a short story like … well, maybe not, but it set me thinking. Now this could get a little cheesy, but stick with me, because I think it might be a metaphor that’s worth working with.

Reading a novel is like getting into a long-term commitment, even if sometimes you feel the need to break it off early on because you know it’s not working out (I’m looking at you, Umberto Eco’s “Island of the Day Before”). You’ll probably take a good look before becoming involved in the first place – perhaps you ask your friends if you think it will work for you, or maybe you just study the blurb on the back. Either way, by the time you get to the end of the book, you will have spent a considerable amount of time in its intimate company.

The kind of relationship you have with a short story, on the other hand, is more like a one night stand with a stranger that you happen to pick up in a shady downtown bar. It’s a far more risky proposition, and yet one which can be just as exciting. So I hear, anyway.

So let’s for the moment pretend that I’m not an unprepossessing middle-aged beardie bloke and imagine instead that I’m that beautiful/handsome editor sitting a couple of stools away from you. How are you as a short story writer going to make this a night to remember? Here are a few suggestions.

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Dec

11

Bits and Pieces

Filed Under The Literary World, Things I like, Writing | Leave a Comment

I’ve been away and otherwise busy over the last two or three weeks – hence the rather sporadic posting. So here are a few random sweepings from the floor …

1) On Tuesday night this week, I took part in the NYC Midnight “Tweet Me a Story” competition. Basically, I got a word at midnight UK time and then had five hours (yeah right, I said midnight UK time) to write three twitter stories using it. The word for group 19 was “attack”, which could have been a lot worse. Anyway, I threw my three together in half an hour. I find out next Tuesday if any of them are going to go forward to the next stage of voting.

2) I’ve just sent my story off to Jim Wisneski’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas” project; I’m one of the ones doing “Eight Maids a Milking”. It’s a rather odd piece altogether. I’ll let you know when it appears.

3) I’ve decided that the perfect in-flight movie is “GI Joe – The Rise of Cobra”. Why? Because it’s full of action (read “guns and explosions”), has an idiotic plot and (crucially) you don’t need to be able to hear any of the dialogue in order to follow it. There is no excuse for watching it outside a plane, however.

4) Weirdly, two out of the five writers shortlisted for the National Short Story Award (Sara Maitland and Jane Rogers) were judges in competitions where I won prizes this year. Following this logic, if Zoë Heller wishes to make an impression on the NSSA next year, she knows what to do. OK, Zoë?

5) By the way, well done to both of them for getting onto the shortlist, and especially to Sara Maitland for getting the runner-up prize. I read her collection “Far North” earlier this year, and I can strongly recommend it – especially the title story, which is quite extraordinary.

Nov

19

Clueless About Writing

Filed Under The Literary World, Writing | 5 Comments

This week I have been thinking a lot about Romola Garai. Now don’t get me wrong – she’s very pretty, no doubt about that, but she’s not really my type. No, it was this extraordinary interview in Sunday’s Independent that set me off. There’s loads of stuff about her acting and all the wonderful people she’s worked with, which is all jolly interesting – and then she moves on to talk about her burgeoning writing career. This is what she says:

While acting is what she wants to do for now, she nonetheless hankers after writing, for which, she says, she needs to spend time in London. “I need to interact with the city,” she says, “to meet people, to have strange things happen to me – otherwise what would I write about?” She writes more and more as she gets older, feels that she’s improving and may end up doing the Open University’s creative writing MA when she can afford to take a year off.

What?! Did she really say “otherwise what would I write about”? Yes, I’m afraid she did. I have a feeling that she may have taken on board the “write about what you know” dictum a little too literally. Although to be honest, I would have thought that even at her tender years, as an international actress she’s probably had a few more unusual experiences and met more peculiar people than the rest of us who have spent our long working lives in open-plan offices and cubicles.

No, the crucial point about writing that she seems to be missing is that it’s all about imagination. Unless she can learn to put hers to good use, however many bizarre things that happen to her as she “interacts with the city”, chances are that the end result is going to be a more than a little flat. But I wish her luck anyway – I hope I’m proved wrong.

Curiously, you could say that it was in many ways a failure of imagination that resulted in the recent BBC adaptation of “Emma” (in which Ms Garai took the title role) being so uninspiring. Everyone involved seemed to be under the impression that it should look as much as possible like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie of a few years back, rather than something new. By contrast, the most interesting adaptation of “Emma” in recent years remains “Clueless”, a film that remained 100% faithful to the source material and yet created something completely original out of it.

Nov

2

The Problem with Poetry

Filed Under Writing | 6 Comments

I had this post lined up for last Saturday to coincide with Every Day Poets announcing their November schedule, including an interview with yours truly. However it got bumped to make room for those competition results. Anyway, there doesn’t appear to be anything else looming on the horizon, so I can now let it go out. (And if you really can’t wait until November 23rd to read an interview with me, the one I did for Small Stories a while back has just gone back up again.)

Here’s a thing. I can write all manner of unpleasant stories involving things like murder, cannibalism and brain transplants, and my family will read them quite happily – even if they sometimes give me a bit of a funny look afterwards. But if I mention that I’ve written another poem, there’s a fair chance that I will be shunned for up to a week. My daughter actually went so far as to say that if I ever call myself a poet, she would refuse to speak to me ever again.

You could say that poetry has a bit of an image problem. A lot of the problem lies with free verse, which is essentially the conceptual art of the poetry world. If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s often hard to see the craft in it. It’s like “my four-year-old could have written that.” The other problem is that it genuinely is a lot easier to write a bad piece of free verse than it is to write a bad story. So there’s a lot of really bad free verse out there.

Even writers have issues with poetry. We’ve been having a discussion recently in the on-line forum of my real-life writers’ group, the Verulam Writers’ Circle, about supposed non-poets being worried about critiquing poetry put up by other members. Notice I said “supposed” there. I know all about this. I’ve been there. Up until very recently, I would most definitely have described myself as a non-poet. So I know exactly where they’re coming from.

Poetry is scary. I’ll qualify that: free verse is scary. It’s scary because you have to make the rules up yourself as you go along, and trust that you can give the reader enough hints as to what those rules might be. Every single word counts. (See where I’m going here?) Actually, it’s more than that. It’s not just every single word that counts – it’s where every single word goes that counts. It’s where you break the sentences, where you break the lines and where you break the verses.

Or to put it another way: it’s all about how you write it.

Which is why I think that anyone who wants to write anything really well needs to get to grips with poetry. Because if you can learn to control the flow of a free verse poem, imagine the power that will give you over a piece of prose. And it is of course also possible that, like me, you will get completely sucked in. But I’m still not calling myself a poet quite yet.