Linky time

First, I found an excellent summmary of how and why authors should remain invisible, in a blog post called Writing vs Blathering, which discusses both why authors (particularly inexperienced ones) tend to blather, and what are the effects on their story. It also underlines why every writer, inexperienced or not, should have their work thoroughly and professionally edited.

Second, a prominent book reviewer, author and blogger asked me some questions about my approach to the writing process, satire and publishing in general, and he posted the results here.

Who’s a pretty boy, then?

One of my maxims is that bad writing draws attention to the author, and good writing draws attention to the content. The corollary is that writing which draws attention to the writer is bad; that which draws attention to the content, and where the hand of the author is invisible, is good.

This is not an original thought. Stephen King wrote that: “The object of fiction is ….to make the reader … forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.” Garrison Keillor talks about “keeping your fine sensibilities out of it.”

Elmore Leonard said: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.”

The more an author pushes themselves and their message forward in a story, the less effective the story, and the message become. This isn’t very different from real life; the harder you try to persuade someone that they’re wrong, the less convinced they are, and the harder you try to be funny, the less amused your audience is.

To my mind, there’s nothing that pulls a reader out of a story quicker than the author trying to muscle into the action, and saying: “Hey, readers. Look at me, how clever and amusing I am!”

This is very common in journalism and the media these days. If you have ever tuned into BBC World, for example, you are bound to run into the field reporter who says: “Next week, tune into Forgotten World with me, Droopy McFlaccid, when we’ll examine raffia basket-weaving amongst the Congo pygmies.”

In truth, I don’t need to know the reporter’s name. But the tendency is to make the reporter bigger than the story. Much mainstream journalism is often opinion disguised as news.

In fiction writing, this is of crucial importance. Nobody is going to wade through 300 pages of wincing self-promotion by an author. Authors must absent themselves from their work, as Evelyn Waugh famously pointed out.

“One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.

“Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dust-bin haphazard and emptying it in another place.”

My opinion, and damn the facts

What makes an Internet forum worth visiting? When anyone can give their opinions an airing at the click of a button, it’s not surprising that the forum sections of general-purpose media are awash with bile, illiteracy, irrationality and attention-seeking. Too many people with too little to say, simply trying to be noticed.

Of course, they end up getting noticed for reasons other than those they intended. Bad writing draws attention to the writer; good writing draws attention to the content. That is as true of a novel or a newspaper article as it is of an forum post.

The forums which work are those that have an agenda separate from, and bigger than, the egos of their members. That often means a niche forum, where the members share a common interest and where their reason to visit the forum is to both contribute and learn.

Examples are language forums such as WordReference.com or Thai-Language.com, some technical forums, or very specific forums such as Scamwarners or 419Eater, which exist for the single purpose of combating online fraud. Who could imagine posting narcissistic look-at-me nonsense in a thread titled “Proto-Germanic developed in South Europe?”

On the other hand, the general forums and the community forums which lack a clear focus or agenda are fertile ground for vapid posts which rapidly overwhelm the original point of the forum.

A recent blog in a (fairly) respected U.K. newspaper entitled “What’s your TV show of the noughties?” tells the story. It is a dead-end subject, where nothing of value can be contributed or learnt, and so the newspaper should share responsibility with the army of mainly illiterate posters who cover pages trashing each other’s television viewing tastes.

In the Buddhist notion of right speech, a speaker is required to consider three things concerning what he or she is about to say: is it true; is it necessary, and does it hurt anyone? Far too many posts on far too many forums fail those requirements either partially or totally, and the Internet would be a better place if that changed.

In an age where anyone can air their views, the need for writing standards, both in concept and form, is greater than ever.

Writing when you feel like it

This is the most dangerous concept in writing. It’s an approach which has sunk more writers than self-doubt or poor daily discipline, I believe. If you only write when you feel like it, you’ll never complete anything substantive, and even if you do, it won’t be any good.

In Patricia Highsmith’s excellent novel The Talented Mister Ripley, one of the main characters (Marge) is writing a book, though she keeps up an active social life as well. One day, she is absent from the group, and one of the other characters explains that Marge is in the middle of a “streak” on her book.

“The book must stink, thought Tom. He had known writers. You didn’t write a book with your little finger, lolling on a beach half the day, wondering what to eat for dinner.”

Indeed not. Writing when you don’t feel like it is an especially valuable exercise. It helps eliminate the romantic notion that writing a book is an easy or glamorous process; it instils the notion that writing is a job, like carpentry, that has to be done, and it provides a writer with direct and vivid insight into themselves and their way of working.

As Garrison Keillor said: “You can write comedy when you’re sick, when you’re lonely as a barn owl and your head hurts and your friends are mad at you. It’s just work, that’s all, and you go do it if you need to.”

As you sit there, saying to yourself “I don’t feel like writing today”, and you hear the disciplinarian voice that says “You will write today.”, examine the thoughts that tumble through your mind. Often they will be of the self-doubting kind, “I’m no good at this”, “I can’t do this”, and so on.

Following the disciplinary voice, you go and do it anyway, and gradually those awful self-doubting fears subside, you do your 1,000 words, and end up feeling better than before. You’re a stronger writer for having overcome your doubt and unwillingness.

It doesn’t matter if you’re writing dross, that’s what first drafts are for. In fact, some of your best writing can emerge from these sessions when your brain doesn’t want to cooperate and every word is dragged out of you like a decayed tooth. It gives you a different perspective on writing, and on the project you’re working on.

The famous tennis player Martina Navratilova was once asked about her philosopy of the game, and is said to have replied: “What matters is not how well you’re playing when you’re playing well, but how well you’re playing when you’re playing badly.”

The same, of course, applies to writing. Anyone can write when they feel like it.

What separates the professional from the amateur, the successful from the failures, is the guts to push ahead when you would rather be doing almost anything else.

Break on through

I’m willing to bet there are far more unfinished novels sitting in desk drawers than will ever be finished, let alone published.

The whole process of writing a book is a winnowing out; for every 10 people who have an idea for a book, only one starts in earnest, for every 10 who start, only one finishes, and for every 10 who finish, perhaps only one goes on to look for a publishing deal. And the odds get much worse from there on.

Perhaps it is the magnitude of the task that is daunting. A typical novel runs between 70,000 and 100,000 words, which is a lot to create from that manic spark which says :”I’ve got a great idea for a book.” Even George Orwell could only find 30,000 words for Animal Farm, although he topped 100,000 in 1984.

How many words can an author write each day? It varies enormously, as do authors’ methods of work. Tom Sharpe said he wrote Riotous Assembly in four weeks, and also revealed his working schedule: early morning to midday and 3pm to 7pm. It works out at about 3,000 words per day over an eight-hour day.

Another fan of the early start is Jackie Collins. No matter what you may think of her prose, she has completed over 25 novels and so presumably has some insight into writing discipline.

“The most difficult thing is starting. And this is the secret. You don’t do anything first. You don’t even get dressed. You go straight there and you start to write for half an hour, and then you get dressed,” she said once in an interview.

To confirm that we can learn even from writers whose work we may not personally admire, Jeffrey Archer admits to a rigid writing schedule: “I get up by 5am, write for two hours between 6am and 8am and again between 10am and 12 noon and between 2pm and 4pm and between 6pm and 8pm. You have got to be self-disciplined. Nobody gets anywhere without working hard. Lazy people will get killed. You have got to love what you do.”

Garrison Keillor also agrees with the notion that if you don’t start early in the day, you probably won’t start at all.

“The best time to write is first thing in the morning, and you simply plow in and go as long as you can, and then take a coffee break, and resume. When the spring of inspiration dries up, usually sometime in the early afternoon, one simply shifts over to editing, which is an unending job and one with its own pleasures, and when that begins to fade, it’s time to close up shop.”

I wish I had the facility with words of these writers. My maximum is usually 1,000 words per day, including editing, as I am one of those writers who goes back and tinkers with sentences as I write them. That takes me from early morning to somewhere around lunchtime, after which I will ponder what the next day’s writing is liable to be.

Under ideal circumstances, that means I should complete a 90,000-word manuscript in three months. In the event, FOP‘s first draft took five and a half months, during which time I backtracked several times after losing confidence in my approach.

So I don’t think it’s the discipline which stops most writers; it must surely be a lack of confidence in what they’re writing. If they had the belief that they were progressing every day towards a worthwhile end, they would continue. But for many first-time authors, this is the biggest hurdle. How do they know that what they are writing is worth anything, especially if they’ve had a bad day at the keyboard?

Some writers never have bad days. Stephen King, for example.

“For me, not working is the real work. When I’m writing, it’s all the playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent there were still pretty damned good,” he wrote in his book On Writing.

We’re not all Stephen Kings, though, and most authors face moments of significant self-doubt. It is very liberating to discover the depths of despair that a great writer like George Orwell could sink into while writing his novels.

While writing 1984, he wrote to his agent: “I am struggling with this book, which I may finish by the end of the year — at any rate I shall have broken the back by then, so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn. It is a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely.”

The turn of phrase is interesting. Orwell writes of “breaking the back” of his book, as though it were some hostile beast he was wrestling with, which is probably an accurate reflection of how many authors view their novels. Some, like Collins and Archer, seem to sail through their work without a backward look (although Archer does admit to multiple rewrites).

For the rest of us, though, the task is to plough on, to crash through until the day we can write “The End“. Then we must go back and grapple with the “dreadful mess” we have created.

The wrong agenda

Just as the best satire occurs when an author makes themselves invisible, so the best journalism happens when the reporter describes the facts in a neutral fashion.

Conversely, the worst journalism happens when the journalist’s agenda is to the fore, and the events or facts are adjusted to fit that agenda.

An article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald talks about a research report which posits that sadness and depression may have evolved as a defense mechanism among early humans.

This however, is not enough for the journalist, who seizes on a minor portion of the report to inform us that research students asked to play a shoot-’em-up computer game gunned down a higher proportion of black figures or those wearing turbans than white ones. The journalist even drags in Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot by London police after he was mistaken for a terrorist.

What the journalist is up to is clear. Desperate to broadcast her inclusivity credentials, she spends the first four paragraphs wagging a censorious finger at this implicitly ‘racist’ performance by the research students, and their “subconscious negative stereotype[s].”

Only then does she say “This was not the main point, however, of the research,” before going on to describe the report’s main findings, which are detailed and instructive.

This is rank bad journalism, neutrality abandoned in the service of personal ideology, and symptomatic of much writing today.

As Garrison Keillor said about writing in general: “You keep coming back to journalism, which is continually hard work, to describe action, to narrate a sequence of events and somehow keep your own fine sensibility out of it, to simply say how the game progressed.”

Words to write by.

The Invisible Man

“Richard Condon was a cynic of the upbeat type…his belief that everything is basically shit did not get in the way of his pleasure in making fun of it.” – review of The Manchurian Candidate.

That seems to be the ideal stance for a satirist to adopt. Satire is fuelled by anger and a sense of injustice, but if the satirist becomes too involved, and loses the ability to maintain a lofty perspective, then the satire deteriorates into simple rhetoric and even abuse.

As the great Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun observed: “The artist and the polemicist need to be separated if both are to thrive.”

As an example, take the work of the American satirist Carl Hiaasen. His first solo novel, Tourist Season, published in 1986, was a comic treasure. He managed to keep the reader’s sympathies evenly divided between the dull, plodding hero and the flamboyant, larger-than-life antagonist (who also happened to be a mass murderer, in the service of ecology).

His second, Double Whammy, and his third, Skin Tight, were a little more black-and-white, baddies versus goodies, but still excellent fare. As was his fourth, Native Tongue, but there was a growing feeling that his characters were dividing into two camps — the corporate greedheads, who were vile in every aspect, and the valiant environmentalists, whose sex lives were as healthy as their ethics.

The harder that Hiaasen trumpeted the green message, the more obvious it became that he was pushing this barrow, and the less effective his satire became. The trend continued with Strip Tease (remember the awful Demi Moore/Burt Reynolds film?), Stormy Weather, Lucky You and Sick Puppy. You could spot the baddies a mile off, because not only were they anti-green, but their entire characters were vile, from personal habits to lack of intelligence.

Hiaasen seemed to realise this, after 15 years as a novelist, and changed the formula somewhat in 2002’s Basket Case, which dropped much of the polemic and reintroduced Hiaasen’s high-energy style. Sadly, he returned to type in Skinny Dip and to awful effect in the appropriately-named Nature Girl, which even his greatest fans couldn’t find many good words about.

“Hiaasen has written 11 novels, and this isn’t one of the best 10,” an Amazon reviewer wrote.

In part, Hiaasen was a victim of his own success. When interviewed about his early work, he said: “The stakes are so low when you start — you’ve got nothing to lose — so you just cut loose and have fun.”

Satire in fiction is the art of delivering a message without seeming to deliver one; the more the author’s hand is visible, the less effective the satire.

As Elmore Leonard said, he makes an “attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.”

The writer has to get out of the way and let their words do the talking.

Are satirists an endangered species?

Not that we are running out of targets — the world is awash with humbug, pomposity, narcissism and blind arrogance, and we have more access to it than ever before.

But satirists are becoming unpopular for a simple reason — we fail the inclusivity test. Nowadays, the highest moral code to subscribe to is inclusivity; everybody and every idea must be included. There can be no us and no them; that is to be exclusive, elitist, and potentially a whole lot worse.

This stance has been described as post-modern or politically correct, terms I will leave to others to discuss, but its central core is inclusivity, particularly, but not limited to, issues of race and gender.

As David Burchell writes in The Australian today: “In our era there is nothing so virtuous or high-minded as exhibiting a higher degree of cultural ‘sensitivity’ towards other peoples and cultures than your rivals.”

What has this to do with satirists? Simply, satirists live on a diet of exclusivity. Humour, and especially satire, places us in contrast to them and finds amusement and insight from studying the differences. Humour is a matter of comparing and judging, which is why the greatest fund of casual jokes are of the ethnic variety, jokes about personal relationships and sex, or village idiot/blonde jokes. In inclusivity-speak, this is called ‘perpetuating stereotypes.’

Even that most gentle and moral of satirists, Garrison Keillor, has as his pet butts the Norwegian bachelor farmers who supposedly inhabit the American Mid-West, famed far and wide for their stinginess, brusqueness and poor social skills. PG Wodehouse famously resorted to satire to gain revenge on children’s author AA Milne, who had accused Wodehouse of collaboration with the Germans in World War II.

Satire offends; that is its raison d’etre. But the inclusivity movement is dead against offending people. Indeed, now enshrined in British law is the definition of an offensive remark as one that may be deemed by anybody who heard it to have caused them offence. There is no attempt at maintaining an objective view on what is or is not offensive. It’s purely up to each individual to decide. This is inclusivity in action.

Inclusivity, and giving offence, are inimical to one another. We cannot satirize anybody if we’re all the same, or at least if we are obliged to consider everyone as the same. This, in passing, is why post-modernists and the politically-correct are so humourless. Their own stance makes it impossible for them to laugh at anybody or anything, from morbid dread of failing the inclusivity test.

But if we don’t satirize, if we don’t judge and compare, the result is that anybody can get away with anything.

Last week, an ally to former British prime minister Tony Blair said openly about Blair’s ambition to be elected the first President of Europe: “He wants it, but he does not want to be humiliated by failing to get it.”

It’s the kind of statement which, containing so much arrogance, pomposity, narcissism, and self-aggrandisement, that in the normal way it leaves me speechless, so leaving me with only one avenue to express my disgust — satire.

Explore your mind

I got a timely reminder from this blog that writing is a two-way process. In other words, in the act of writing you are not only explaining things for your readers, but you are discovering stuff about yourself.

One thing most writers (well, creative artists of any kind) face is their self-doubt, as the musician David Gray explained in an interview about his newest album:

“Fear and doubt are huge obstacles. In terms of your own work you have to try to overcome them. It would have been so easy to get freaked out but I’m really delighted that I didn’t. I did lose the plot at times in some ways, as you do when you’re immersed in something and you’re kind of craving it stopping, but you can’t let go of it either.”

You have to be awfully confident of your own ability not to feel something of what Gray describes.

That’s a premise

Lajos Egri. That’s the man.

It was he who said you must always believe in what you write. If you don’t, he says, how can your writing have any feeling of authenticity? And if you are not authentic, the reader will find out very quickly.

As I write satire, the temptation is always there to stick in some outrageous barb aimed at my satirical target. But, thanks to Egri, I have learned that jokes have to have a purpose (if not, they are what Ricky Gervais calls ‘decapitated jokes’), and they also have to be true to the story. If they’re not, they have to go.

“Kill your darlings,” said William Faulkner. In other words, don’t ruin your consistent voice for a the sake of a snappy phrase.

Egri had an even more direct rule, which is simply:

“Every story must have a premise.”

Say what?

Egri said that if you can’t sum up your book in 10 words or less, then you don’t know what your own book is about, so how can you expect to write consistently?

“If there is no clear-cut, active premise, it is more than possible that the characters were not alive. How could they be? They do not know, for instance, why they should commit a perfect crime. Their only reason is your command, and as a result all their performance and all their dialogue are artificial. No one believes what they do or say.”

I was about one month into writing Forward O Peasant when I came across this advice, and it stopped me in my tracks. What was my story about?

Following Egri’s guidelines, I was eventually able to sum my book up in the premise: “Greed contains the seeds of its own downfall.” Suddenly, I knew what my book was about, and all the characters’ actions began to make more sense.

Egri, by the way, never wrote plays or novels, and was a true nuts-and-bolts writing mechanic. He wrote two famous books: The Art of Dramatic Writing and The Art of Creative Writing, snippets of which can be found lurking on the Web.