Victory, Dagnammit.

I've been trying to write a script. It's about politics and secrets, and may end up being a bit like a thriller, but also probably not. (All praise me, King of Synopses.) When I was hammering out the concept initially, I deliberately chose a quirky format. I figured that having constraints would require me to be more imaginative when I came to writing.

Having set these rules, I then found that I had very few available ways to give the script an interesting cold open. And I wanted it to have an interesting cold open. This has basically been vexing me for a month, with the feeling that the whole script is up in the air until I come up with a good idea.

And I think I just solved it.

I shall now engage smug mode. Do excuse me.

Final Scores (Back from the Cabin)

Well I got some of it wrong. Although Lawrence and I most likely had gone out for tonic water, we managed to magically return from this trip to the shops with KFC. Which rather sounds like us. No doubt absorbing vast quantities of fried chicken was entirely essential to the creative process. Also, after the many hours of talking and thinking, I was typing up all of these notes with Lawrence crashed out unconscious on my floor. It's these charming little details that I forget.

The above did not occur.

Good weekend, all told. It managed to be both productive and very fun, and we managed to see some other friends in and around all the writing.


Some Facts & Figures:

90,000 - Words at current count (I was previously a bit off, apparently).
2,000 - New words written by me over the weekend.
5,000 - Words transcribed by Lawrence from various notebooks/napkins/pieces of human skin.
∞ - Very useful and important decisions and clarifications regarding the novel.
31st December 2012 - The date by which we will have a first draft. This will happen.
125 - Days in which we have to complete the above feat.
800-1000 - Approximate words we'll need to be writing per day (each) to achieve this.
Murray Gold - Composer of this weekend's Writing Music of choice.
4 - Disrupting intruders Lovely friends who we saw for dinner.
16 - Cups of Tea/Coffee.
4 - Glasses of wine.
5 - Pints of ale.
12 - G&Ts (with lime - so yay, vitamins).
Bombay Sapphire - Writer's Gin of Choice.


And no, I don't drink this much when writing alone. It wouldn't be sustainabible.

(Hic).

Off to the Cabin in the Woods

It is a source of deep sadness that I do not have an actual cabin. Picture by  Kathy Jennings 

Figuratively.

One of the projects I'm working on at the moment is a series of fantasy novels. It's a joint project with my friend Lawrence (my best old buddy old pal); it's all planned out, with a detailed breakdown for the first volume and a rough outline for a series arc. We refer to it as Sundered, so that'll probably do for a non-spoilery* codeword.

Work on Sundered has been pretty stalled of late, through a combination of us both working and being easily distracted. Him, probably by the magical and mystical powers of girlfriend lady-parts. Me, by the trying to write 12 other things. Also by normal human interaction, by procrastination, and by a general need to imbibe large quantities of Genre television.

(Look, new episodes of Breaking Bad are important, dammit).

So with this extended Bank Holiday weekend we are shutting ourselves away in a Mind Cabin. This is like Sherlock's Mind Palace, only less impressive. It also bears a distinct resemblance to my house. But we'll be writing in it. See the similarity?

Ahem.

There will be many words written and much progress shall be made. If I keep saying this it will eventually become true.

*

Sundered was first dreamt up whilst  Lawrence and I were at Oxford together. (I suddenly hate to think just how many past enterprises could be introduced with that sentence. The list probably includes a number of highly prized tech firms, half a dozen shadow cabinets and the odd war.) We got drunk one evening and started talking about fantasy books - what we loved about them, what we hated. The usual hubris of twenty-somethings who're convinced they can do it much better, really easily, if only someone only gave them the chance.

So we decided, like you do, to write a book.

There was a lot of talk about tropes in fantasy we wanted to avoid, and wanting a weird world concept. It needed to not be post-Tolkien hackery, that was a baseline. No orcs, no elves, no magic from wands and speaking a bit of cod-latin. It also needed to be coherent, properly thought through. There would be none of the obvious inconsistencies that seem to plague fantasy books. A big interesting world in which we could do mature things. And if we could ever draw  a favourable comparison to Steven Erikson... then yes, our cups would runneth over and we just might start jumping up and down excitedly like the Erikson fanboys we are.

Steven Erikson (aka God). If we end up writing a 200,000 word fantasy novel and it is dreadful, blame him.

I remember being struck by a slightly crazy notion for a fantasy universe and pitching it to Lawrence. This got us both fairly excited, and proved such fertile ground that we basically talked about it for the next four or five hours. A big chunk of this conversation occurred walking down Holywell St and Broad St in Oxford from where we were living to a Newsagents. I have a sneaking suspicion we had run out of tonic water (we're both obsessive G&T drinkers). Knowing Lawrence he probably bought Haribo (because sugar helps the creative process, dontcha know).

Before I went to bed I typed up a lot of notes, the following morning I typed up many more. I believe I named it Sundered.doc, sent it to Lawrence, and that same file has been pinging back and forth through the internet ever since.

*

Co-op writing is bloody odd really. At times it's great, because I have a half-formed idea, get stuck, send it to Lawrence and a few weeks later I get a fleshed out version with a load of extra cool ideas stuffed in. Apparently the subconscious will work on a problem that's puzzling you whilst you go away and do other things, so sometimes you can come back to a problem and solve it straight away. A co-author can be a bit like that sometimes. I.e. They're amazing.

That said, we disagree over really unimportant things. Our most recent argument boiled down to:

"I think [character] would be very good at Poker."
"No no no. He'd be quite good at Poker."
"But look at his character! He'd definitely be very good."
"No. Definitely not. Look at chapter 4..."

The rest of the time we seem to think in a reasonably symbiotic fashion. Thank God.

*

Anyway, this extended weekend is all about a writers' retreat. I thought it might be interesting to note down words written, number of cups of coffee consumed, and such like. So that will appear... at some point. I'll also ask Lawrence if he remembers how we dreamt the whole thing up and see if his story is wildly different.

I think the current story file is at about 35,000 words. I'm about to add another 15,000 and Lawrence says he has similar. Which takes it to about 65,000 and about a third done. There will be much progress by the next post.

There will.

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

* - Get me. Worrying about spoilers in an unfinished, uncommissioned, unpublished book. I'm nothing if not hopeful.

Some Observations from Wednesday Night

(or Sushi on the Sidewalk, Mythical McDonalds and Learning about Liverpool Street)

Amanda Palmer by @SAHFENN via The Village Underground

Observations from the night of Wednesday 20th June:

1. Kimonos are cool.
2. Trust Amanda Palmer to find (who must be) the only hot bagpipist in London.
3. Running across the full length of a station, just in time to see the rear red light of the train that you were so vainly chasing snaking away into the night is every bit as dispiriting as it is made to look in the movies.
4. Liverpool Street Station closes on a Wednesday at 0103 precisely. I do not know why it does so, but I also kinda love it.
5. Many organisations (including the City of London) erect public information maps around London that do not orientate North. On the one hand, I understand that most Londoners always know the relative directions of the landmarks around them. On the other… why would you do that? Just why? In the name of Elaine*, why?
6. The City of London is really quite beautiful at night.
7. The City of London is really quite beautiful when nobody is in it.
8. Points 5 and 6 may be, to a large degree, connected.
9. There is an entire breed of night workmen in the City of London who come in after business hours and redecorate through the night. Watching this is somewhat surreal.
10. If you’re in a McDonalds for long enough (and late enough) they will offer you free fries.

*See my next blog post, On Swearing.

*

[Transcribed from scribbled notes on a pad of Tescos paper]

It’s been an eventful evening – and I’m choosing that word with care – so here’s hoping that it will not become more so. You can probably gather as to why from the above.

Casting my mind back…

My evening began when the phone rang – not a common occurrence, as everyone I know just seem to text constantly and never bother with that whole human contact thing.

“Hi,” says a friend. “I’m at the underground place. Where are you?”

The underground place? Well that’s very nice for him. Has he watched too much True Blood and found a Vampire bar?

“The underground place?”

“Yeah, what are you up to?”

“Just getting ready to go meat a friend for a drink.” I say this in total honesty.

There is a confused pause.

“A friend for a drink? Aren’t you coming to Amanda Palmer?”

Amanda Palmer? I think, now standing in the centre of my room and pivoting. Amanda Palmer… I am looking at the pair of tickets which I have placed conspicuously in the centre of my bookshelf so that I can, under no circumstances, miss or forget them.

Ah, I conclude. Amanda Palmer.

In 105 minutes I got ready, ditched my friend (apologies, Artur), jogged to the station, got  a train, ran through Shoreditch, bought an extortionately priced can of Becks Vier, and squeezed my way through The Village Underground (Ah-ha!) in time to cheer Amanda Fucking Palmer to the stage.

So the evening started with success.

The Village Underground (courtesy of The Village Underground). A pretty cool space.

I won’t review the gig here, but needless to say it was awesome. There is a grand total of two bands who I enjoy when they play a set full of new material, and Amanda Palmer isn’t one of them. But she did, and it was great. Luckily, it seems that through attending lots of gigs and some mildly obsessive online stalking youtubage there were only two of the “new” songs that were actually new to me.

Anyway, I heard Half Jack for the second time in my life, loved it just as much, and was blown away by just how well AFP’s new band can rock with the old Dresden Dolls material. I saw Neil Gaiman sing about murder and was struck by just how much he conforms to my mental image of the BFG. And I was slapped in the face by my wallet with the very serious point that a can of Becks is never, ever, in any scenario, in all possible worlds, worth four quid.

[Amanda Palmer interlude ends]

*

The last train to Liverpool Street had already slipped quietly into the night before I even arrived, and on examination my Android train app wasn’t playing ball.

"Is there another train to Cambridge from Kings Cross tonight?” I ask the gentleman at the information point. He checks his computer and nods.

“You have… fifteen minutes exactly." A pause. "It’s possible."

I love him for that, just a little.

So I run. I count stations as they go by on the tube. The poster at Liverpool Street said the tube is nine minutes to Kings Cross, but surely that has some lee-way? It’s midnight, the trains must surely be faster…

Nine minutes later I arrive at Kings Cross, run through the warren of tube tunnels, jog across the station to watch my train pull slowly away and fade from sight. There is something about this that is oddly crushing, so I go and buy a coffee with lots of undeserved sugar in it.

The earliest train back home leaves Liverpool Street at 05:20. So I swing back onto the Circle line in the direction I had just come. It’s at times like these that I wish the Circle line was still an actual circle. And that it didn’t close. There would have been something oddly fitting about circling London endlessly until morning.

On arriving back at Liverpool Street Station I did the only sensible thing: I bought take-away sushi and sat on the steps outside, drunken-people-watching, and consuming prawn and salmon nigri.

*

Train stations are literally plastered in information. Departure details, arrival info, timetables, updates, schedules of engineering work, tube maps, train maps, bus maps, street maps. Numbers to call for train times, numbers to call for tourist help, numbers to call for tickets and others for lost property. And signs, in all directions, for everything.

At 00:45, however, I am required to ask when it is that this particular station closes. At 0103, I am told. For reasons that passeth understanding.

Still, only five hours to kill until home time.

*

With my phone dying, relief comes in the form of a late-opening Tescos (pad of paper – check, pack of biros – check) and a map to the nearest 24-hour McDonalds pasted to the side of a different, derelict McDonalds, near the station I set off.

The map, it turns out, wasn’t orientated North.

I didn’t realise human beings did that.

Being tired and grumpy I simply looked at the thing and went “Go north, over the road, left then right” and didn’t really think much more about what it was that I was doing. This added a night time circuit of the City to my evening’s tour, as I realised that I had wandered in entirely the wrong direction (30 St. Mary Axe being the clue).

As I walked (humming Gilbert and Sullivan) I was struck by how many of the buildings had people working inside them, refitting shop floors at 01:30 in the morning. I found myself wondering whether there were builders (and indeed whole firms) who dedicate themselves to this sort of night-time, guerrilla decorating. Sneaking in and out after hours, making sure everything is done before the following morning comes.

The episode of Fawlty Towers with the dodgy builders leapt to mind, and I imagined oblivious mid-ranking employees arriving at work to find their offices now part of a squash court, or that the stationery cupboard has mysteriously vanished. Better still, builders who perhaps got the wrong address, so that a seasoned tailor, proud of his century-old bespoke business, arrives at work to find that it is now a Starbucks.

So anyway, I’m still in McDonalds, renting a table by the hour for a cup of coffee a go, being chased from seat to seat by a pair of night-builders, who are amicably leavering up split beige tiles from the cracked floor, and replacing them with new, slightly lighter beige tiles, which do not match.

Currently on page seven of the notepad, I will let you know how the word count goes. If you are reading this I got home somehow…

Music: Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

(Being the only piece of decent music played in McDonalds for four hours, I was very grateful for its timely appearance.)

And for reference: The Dresden Dolls, Half Jack and Neil Gaiman singing about murder.

The Naming of Things

So my blog has a silly name. Sure, I could have followed suit with two of my favourite bloggers (Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman) and had chrismccartney.blogger, but let's face it, I don't have a whole lot of name recognition. And my name is certainly much less memorable than a weird phrase. It's also a reference that almost nobody will get, so, without further ado, it's time to G(r)eek out.

If you've ever studied Classical Greek at Oxbridge (I'm aware that this is unlikely to be the largest group in) it's quite likely that you've come across Epigram II by Callimachus, also known as Heraclitus. It seems to be a favourite for verse translation practice. Teachers show it to their students because their teacher showed it to them, and so it shall be forever until the end of time. Or until Oxbridge Classics modernises. (Hah.)

Anyway, if you've ever studied the poem you will most likely have also come across across the verse translation of William Cory:

II.

THEY told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember'd how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, 
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, 
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; 
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take. 

*

Odd man, William Johnson Cory (1823-1892). Studied at King's, Cambridge, taught Classics at Eton, beloved tutor of a number of Prime Ministers. Also part of a Classics-obsessed poetical movement known as The Uranians. Proto-homosexual before they'd come up with a word for it, they, amongst other things, continued the classical Greek tradition of praising the adolescent male form. Corey was forced to resign from Eton after a letter to a student, which the student's parents deemed "indiscreet", was made public - yes, I know what you're all thinking. He did marry and have a kid though, so speculate away.

Anyway, he published a collection of verse called Ionica. It includes the translation of Heraclitus, a variety of poetry written in Latin, and a number of - rather good - poems about male beauty. I got a little fascinated after some minimal research and scoured the internet for a copy of the aged little volume. It currently sits on my poetry shelf; yes, I have a poetry shelf.

For those who like their book porn. (It's the slim blue-grey volume in the centre.)

A few things always get me about the poem. Most immediate is that it speaks so easily and directly to grief from ca. 2,500 years ago. I know this shouldn't be a surprise, at least not really, but I never get tired of seeing the extent to which humans, in all times and all cultures, are always very much human. I think that's very worth bearing in mind as a writer too.

Next, it rhymes. Which I'm a sucker for. I very rarely rhyme my personal poetical scribblings, and if I do it's for the odd couplet here or there. That's mainly because rhyming is hard to pull off in a modern context without looking silly; AA, BB, CC, DD is something that we appear to have abandoned as a bit childish. But in a simple way it gives the translated epigram a touch of elegance.

Thirdly, Heraclitus was a poet (or a singer). This is art, not just between friends, but from one artist to another. I wince at the concept of bromance, but there is something compelling about the dynamic. Everyone has read a dozen poems about loss, poetry loves it, but they are invariably lost loves. The loss of an equal and a friend is just as failair, just as compelling, but even today feels like much fresher ground.

And lastly, line 4. "[You and I had] tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky".

Now. I could probably start an argument in an empty room with the air-conditioning unit  (to misappropriate Dead Ringers). If I go see a film, or a play, almost the best part for me is discussing it afterwards. (Which drove my ex-fiance Ed up the wall.) If someone says something very silly at a party, I'm the one who will break self-control and say "But why do you think the EU is a bad thing?".

To me the vital and best part of human interaction is verbal. So I don't like clubs very much, on the grounds that you can't hear a word anyone says. Give me a long chat over a couple of pints any day, and I will very happily talk the sun down the sky.


PS. It has just occurred to me that another way of looking at this blog's title is "I will waste a lot of your time". I think I'm good with that.

It is also quite appropriate that I'm drafting this at 5am.


Music: Andrew Bird, The Naming of Things

A Brief Note On the Occasional Importance of Ideas

Politics isn't really about ideas any more, or at least that's how it seems. David Cameron spent years attempting to detoxify the Tory brand, not by laying out a sequence of coherent non-evil-Thatcherite policies, but by drawing and redrawing his personal portrait.

"Hug a hoodie", "Vote Blue to go Green", "We are the party of the NHS". And so on.

None of this ever signified anything, but he cut the right sort of a figure. Brown, on the other hand, was doomed because when he smiled he looked as if someone had touched electrodes to his cheeks and made his face twitch. That and the imploding economy.

The Origin of the Gordon Brown Smile?

When Darling Nick burst triumphant onto the scene at the debates his sudden surge could be traced back to no concrete proposals, only to the hazy idea that he was an Alternative. He offered a "New Politics" (a campaign phrase that  is, to me, about as vile and conspicuously empty as "Change").

To an extent, this is all that a reasonably happy electorate is going to be interested in. The recession was unpleasant at the time, but we were not seeing the great pain of the 80s or of past periods of struggle and austerity. When people are happy, they don't pay that much attention to the minutiae of politicians fiddling around the edges.

Newspapers too can get a nice easy narrative out of such nebulous thumbnail sketches. How do you film a sexy report weighing up the pros and cons of two competing education plans? Much better to write a piece about how Nick Clegg has vowed to rebuild the British public's trust in politicians. (Oh how we can laugh.)

Policy is something relegated to a quip, shouted by people who have already lost and are standing on the sidelines. It is cited by Lib Dems, desperate to enumerate just how many bits of their manifesto made it into the Coalition agreement, hoping that this justifies the appalling things they're now agreeing to that weren't in their manifesto. Indeed, "It wasn't in the manifesto!" is now often appended to any criticisms of government policy, like a colourful adjective. Nobody thinks it's a serious political point, but the cry is faintly nostalgic.

"This gay marriage proposal wasn't in our manifesto!", the Tory backbenchers cry.

As if it matters.

Except sometimes it does.

George Galloway is not a man who can claim a good personal brand, his history is surrounded by scandal, sleaze and embarrassment. Some of it was libel, some of it we'll never know the truth, and some of it (*cough*CelebrityBigBrother*cough) was terrifyingly masochistic, but all in all he was man who (up until six months ago) was politically dead. The charisma was still there, but win a seat? No chance.

He's like a cuddly, somewhat sleazy Santa Claus.

In a 42% Asian, North-England, solid Labour community, who do the laws of personality politics say should win?

1. A local, Labour, Pakistani Muslim, and deputy-head of the local council.

or 2. A Scottish, white, independent, who doesn't even live in the area?

Seems like a no-brainer. Independent candidates struggle to get any votes at all, even when they have something as motivating and unifying as rampant, terrified racism to spur them on (poor old BNP), and Galloway trounced his competition.

The Tories collapsed -23%, the Lib Dems lost their deposit, and Labour bled out -20%.  A majority of 10,000 votes, replacing a former Labour Majority of 5,000.

Now, I'm not a local of Bradford West. I'm a horribly privileged middle-class guy from Cambridge. So I'm not going to presume to know the in and outs of this by-election. But a man like Galloway, a man as politically and personally damaged as Galloway, wasn't going to win just by being charismatic. Certainly not against a confident local from the incumbent party, who ticked lots of the right ethnic boxes in Galloway's key demographic. The point is that Galloway had something to say.

(As a side bar I will note that Imran Hussain was by no means a slam dunk candidate. The Asian community in the area has apparently been long frustrated by the fact that the majority of major local Labour positions  have been divided up between Pakistani Muslims of a certain geographical heritage - of which he was one. He was vulnerable then, but also he had nothing to offer.)

What Galloway, born in Dundee, did, was to go to the community and reconfirm his original opposition to the Iraq War, he voiced his support for Palestine, and declared that all of our troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan  immediately. This was, apparently, most of what he campaigned on. (EDIT: Also tuition fees, which considering the significant young and unemployed popluation is not surprising.) On issues that really mattered to much of his electorate, Galloway was proposing a piece of policy that his base  agreed with. How often can any of the other parties say they do that upon any subject? At all?

(Well there were Lib Dems with the students, except then there was this whole "Being in Government" thing...)

None of this of course is to say that parties must all pander to their base constantly, nor does it deny that Galloway is conveniently placed as an independent to promise the moon to his constituents, but it would be wise of Labour - which has for almost twenty years taken its base entirely for granted - that sometimes, just sometimes, policy does actually matter.

Writing Like a Hack

So anyone who knows me well has heard that I'm trying to write a novel - if you know me really well, that I'm, madly, writing three novels simultaneously - and as I am one of these "plagued by self-doubt" types, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about writing.

In particular, I've spent a while thinking about bad writing, and what makes it bad, and thus how to avoid doing any of these things myself. Which to me is oddly more useful then writing a list of things *to* do. Here are the traps: Avoid them.

So these are my thoughts. I've mainly written them down for myself, but others may find them interesting/helpful/feel impelled to send me a long email explaining just how and why I am completely wrong.

I'll state now that I'm talking about prose and dialogue, not plot construction or character development. Which is a whole other ballgame.

1. Kitchen Sink

Word selection creates mood, of course it does. You just have to read Titus Groan to see Mervyn Peake using oppressive vocabulary and intricate syntax to turn the unprepared reader into a gibbering wreck. He creates an ancient, suffocating, tradition-laden castle, and hammers the prose into an appropriate shape.

However this does not mean that those wishing to create a moody atmosphere ought to resort to:

The jaundiced, choleric moon hung leeringly in a stark, affronted sky. Stars pocked its face like scars, and with the aching slowness of a leper, the moon passed in and out of fetid clouds, as a man would pass, stumbling, blind and sickly, through a voluminous fog of fetid, poison gas.

Must... throw... ALL... literary... techniques.. at... paragraph.

Note: All terrible examples are being made up by me, because to actually go find examples would be (1) Effort and (2) Mean.

2. Error: Dialogue Failure

'There is a monkey in the conservatory,' Alice said.
'My goodness. Is there?' Anna said.
'There is! I can see it through the glass,' Alice said.
'But how can it have got in here?' Anna said.
'Through the window, one assumes,' Alice said.
'No, Alice,' Anna replied. 'I mean into the country? It certainly couldn't apply for a Visa.'
'Maybe it's a Polish Monkey - that's the EU for you,' Alice said.

Yes, there are entire pages of dialogue in Dickens written like this, but that doesn't mean it's good. Writing has moved on. Sometimes you can do it deliberately, to create the feeling that a conversation is tedious or repetitive, but then you're being bad for effect.

3. You just said that.

To turn around the old George Orwell point about concision: Good writers aren't redundant. The easiest example is again dialogue:

'Why won't you all just leave me bloody alone? I hate you all, you've ruined my life, I wish you were dead!' he shouted angrily.

Basically, the adverb at the end of the paragraph makes everything exponentially less effective, even approaching ironic. If a person is clearly angry in their dialogue,  then adding "he said angrily" is not only pointless, but condescending to the reader. As if they're so thick they won't get the idea without the word "angry" being in the paragraph.

4. In Fact, Just Kill the Adverbs

Sometimes adverbs are necessary, sometimes they are a great addition to a sentence, but regularly using adverbs is like surviving on a heroin addiction, or trying to keep awake through caffeine. Each shot might achieve the purpose you want, but each also becomes steadily less and less effective, until eventually your life - and your prose - is a sordid, wretched, toneless mess.

(Well okay, perhaps not sordid.)

Suddenly the door was pulled open and Alejandro stepped rapidly inside. Had they followed him? He didn't know. Nervously he looked around and then quickly crossed the room. Clearly he needed to think fast.

Charlie Anders over at io9 has a personal crusade against adverbs, so I'll defer to her.

5. BANG!

Now, this is a bit of a wibbly one, but I'm going to go for it anyway. Very rarely, in a good novel, will you ever find "!". The way that I always end up thinking about it is that there is something fundamentally cartoonish about the exclamation mark. Like the cards in the old Batman TV series that went "BIFF!", "THWACK!", "KAPOW!" with Pop art garishness. Indeed, the old secretarial term for an exclamation mark is a "bang". They are just too exaggerated to take seriously.

As a result the places where exclamation marks work well  are normally (1) In dialogue, as said by a slightly over-the-top character, (2) in certain kinds of fantasy, sci-fi and comedy where characters are often slightly larger than life (I get the feeling I could be in so much trouble for saying that).

So this works (I think):

The professor was head deep in the pile of papers, leaning ever further forwards, as if he might at any moment topple in and swim in the sea of loose-leaf journal articles.
'Give up, sir. You're never going to find it.' His tired assistant looked dispiritedly at the man's disappearing torso.
'Diligence, my boy. Diligence!' The professor's voice came from somewhere deep within the pile. 'If at first you don't succeed, then try, try... Ah! I appear to be stuck.'

However:

The door swung open with terrible slowness, to reveal at last a ravaged body, swathed in blood. She was dead!

Just makes me snicker. Again, perhaps its a taste and period thing, because you get it in Poe and Lovecraft, but it looks damn silly if you ask me.

Note: Cash prizes will be awarded, however,  for use of an interrobang, the most awesome unused piece of punctuation in existence:

‽

6. Fictionland

This is often more of a problem in TV, but you see it in books too. We are now so overwhelmed by fiction that they have their own Lexicon, and increasingly you see people behaving in ways, or saying things, that you never do in real life. Whole emotional and dramatic beats have now become familiar to us, but that nobody ever actually does. The characters are living in Fictionland, not the real world.

As Mike was leaving the room, he suddenly turned and looked back.
'Oh, and by the way Tom,' he said. 'Thanks for everything.'

Have you ever done this? No.
Would you ever do this? No.
Why is your character doing it? I don't know, but he's the reason I'm about to stab you.

This one I've basically wholesale lifted from The Writer's Tale by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook. Essential reading.

7. Dropping the Curtain

We're probably all familiar with the old Wizard of Oz concept of "the man behind the curtain", and writing is fundamentally that sort of a trick. You're getting someone to believe in a world that you're creating, in people who aren't real. The author should never be apparent, floating around like some form of God moving the story into position.

If this happens:

'Oh, this damned door,' Gale said, pulling at the handle exaggeratedly, as if to deliberately draw the reader's attention to the fact, 'It's always sticking.'

Then you know that inside of half an hour someone is going to get stuck because, at a vital moment, the door won't open. If you're in a horror film then you can write most of the scene without any more context than that.

Which leads to...


8. The Idea-Success Gap

Developing point 7, I would probably go so far as to say that being able to see the writer is basically the worst mistake of the lot. A reader can survive a dull passage of dialogue, or an overly-wordy few pages, but breaking the spell you've created really screws you up.

The worst iteration of this, then, is when you as the reader can see what the writer is trying to do, and can also see how s/he's failing.

'Oh John, I do declare that you've spent the last hour daydreaming and not listening to me at all.'
He looked at his companion with a wry smile. 'But how could I be day dreaming, Mary? It's two in the morning.'
She laughed. 'Oh John, you're just so funny.'

What the writer wants to do is demonstrate that their character, John, is a terribly witty person, so he dashes off a retort and then his companion tells us - just in case we missed it - just how funny it was. The writer has explicitly stated that s/he wants to create a certain effect and has clearly not done so - this is one of few cases where I will look at a book or script and be willing to declare that a writer has abjectly failed.

(That said: They're published and I'm not, so how do you like them apples, Mr McCartney?)

Basically, if your main character is supposed to be a modern day Oscar Wilde, you'd better be funny. Your  witticisms may take you half an hour to construct perfectly - and that is after all the secret, that you can create characters far smarter or more interesting than yourself through the magical ability to edit - but at the end of the day they need to be good enough to support the story and the characters.

Of course, regarding John and Mary, the other option is that Mary is just a hopeless sycophant who's trying to get into John's boxers, and would probably laugh at him singing the Birdie Song. With actions.

To Absent Friends

Most blogs open with a mission statement, an attempt to define what it is that has impelled the person to start blogging. Sometimes it's a person having a bonkers idea and then the tenacity to follow it through (I'm looking at you, mad guy who decided to watch Julie & Julia every day for a year). Sometimes its a person who's decided to use a blog as a diary and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - so help him, blogosphere.

Perhaps you see where this is going - I don't have a plan. I have simply, for the last three years, continually gone "That's a good thought, if I had a blog I'd do a post on that." And then I'd meticulously, thoughtfully, artfully, not write a blogpost.

So here's to all of those potential words that never made it. You would have been amazing if I'd ever written you.

And now...

Go.