The beauty and power of words Part 4: There are no rules, but people are still going to ask, “How do I become a writer?”
Remember, there are no rules. I cannot tell you how to write. I’m now going to tell you how to write. Removing tongue from cheek now, I suppose I mean that I am going to tell you what I think has always been important about writing.
When I was seventeen, and retaking GCSE English at sixth form college, I wrote a short piece entitled, My Room. I would know nothing of Hemmingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But thinking about it now, it had a sense about it of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place as written by seventeen year old me looking back at fourteen year old me in the safe refuge of my childhood bedroom. All I can remember of it now is the end of it, in confessional fashion, telling the tale of how, in my bedroom, I had to stay up all night to write a school project. The History of Medicine was the title. I had done no work on it at all and was bound to fail but I needed to try to produce something to hand in. My room was where I tried to write a school project in one night but fell asleep whilst trying to do so. My room was also where I spent the next morning trying to think up a million excuses as to why I had nothing to hand in.
I can’t remember it word for word but that was the gist of it and, as the teacher read out loud to the class, finishing on the words, “My room was also where I spent the next morning trying to think up a million excuses as to why I had nothing to hand in,” he looked up from what he’d read and asked the class for any thoughts. I clearly remember one classmate being the first to comment, saying, “Instead of staying up all night trying to write the school project, he’d have been better off staying awake all night trying to think up excuses.” There’s that fixation on the content of anything. The teacher didn’t specifically ask about the content or how believable the plot was. The teacher didn’t read it like a list of things to do in your bedroom. The reader isn’t supposed to be solving a puzzle here. It’s not like the story should be rewritten so that the boy never found himself in that situation. Perhaps I can think of it to my credit that anyone in the classroom was involved in the story to the point that they had put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist to work out what they’d have done in the same situation. I know the feelings connected to the story of the child who knew he couldn’t write his whole school project in one night but tried anyway. To convey that you need to provide so much more than the content, the factual report of what happened. Any good narrative has layers. Beyond the factual report there’s the thoughts and feelings of a boy in his place of refuge and what it takes to be stupid enough to think that you can overcome all your academic failings in one night.
As a footnote to that anecdote, the thing I will always remember most about the episode is that the teacher liked what I’d written to a point that he said that it should go into the college magazine. Only when I asked the next week what was happening with my short story, I was told that we didn’t actually have a college magazine. Although I do not remember the teacher’s name, I do remember that the last thing he said to me was, “piss off.” What I do know is that all of what happened there gave me content, something to write about, but I had to think of how I want to convey it all. I had to write more than the facts of what happened. Writing should not be a shopping list of facts.
“What do I write about?” isn’t a thing. That’s the whole point of this venture. A writer writes anything and everything because, first things first, you write. In pitching this idea to a friend their response was, “I’d never read anything if I wasn’t interested in the subject matter.” Much later, hours removed from the conversation, I thought, “How does anyone get into anything new then?” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just stupid to think that people will read anything if it’s well written. Maybe it doesn’t matter how engaging your words are because they are never going to be enough. But, you gotta try, otherwise we just keep saying the same things in the same way.
I think of the tale of Ridley Scott saying he’s going to film Blade Runner using the iconic Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, and being told that everyone’s filmed there and knows the Bradbury Building. His response was, “I’m gonna use it and I’m gonna shoot it in a way you have never seen before.” Isn’t that what we want, someone using their art in a way that no one else has in order to make it memorable?
My approach is in direct opposition to the William Faulkner notion of, “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” It is the idea that if you have written something, a sentence or a passage or a delicious slice of dialogue, and you’ve fallen in love with it, then unless it is necessary to the story it has to go. As an example, if I really did love the term, “a delicious slice of dialogue,” I’d have to edit that out because, as much as I might like it, it’s not needed. I think there must be some academic debate about the whole darling killing mindset. Someone surely had to at least think, “Kill your darlings? What all of them?!” I have fun imagining anyone editing Faulkner.
“Bill, Bill, I was just reading this, and I thought it was lovely. It’s the bit that goes, ...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it….. Wow, Bill. I really do like it. But I was thinking. Would you not say that that’s a darling and needs to go?”
The advice I’d love to have given in a chapter about how to write fiction, is that you shouldn’t write anything unless you are willing to defend it in a duel. Readers would remember that. You don’t even have to be grammatically perfect if what you’ve written sounds right. Some of the most memorable words are grammatically incorrect. I can think of more than a few examples of times when getting it grammatically wrong has given us the most memorable jumble of words. If it wasn’t for Ringo Starr we wouldn’t have A hard days night. It was just something nonsensical he said. Andrew Ridgeley of Wham had written a message that read, “Wake me up-up before you go-go” and that song was born.
Oasis had an album called Standing on the shoulder of giants. It’s memorable for being grammatically wrong, unless we’re talking about a minimum of two giants with one shoulder between them or a tribe of shoulder-less giants, where only the leader has a shoulder and the motto of the tribe is, “In the land of the shoulder-less the man with one shoulder is king.”
Legend has it that the title of Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs came about because someone was talking about the Louis Malle film Au Revoir Les Enfants and what someone misheard was the words reservoir dogs. My favourite rendition of the myth is that Tarantino’s girlfriend came home to her drunk boyfriend with a video tape of Au Revoir Les Enfants and the drunken Tarantino said, “I don’t want to watch no Reservoir Dogs.” One theory is that the meaning behind the name of the film is that reservoir in the title refers to a container and dogs is some sort of slang for prisoner. What you got there is a container of prisoners. I guess Reservoir Dogs sounded better than Container of Prisoners.
There are better examples but those are a few of my favourites off the top of my head.
I came up with the title Introspective Kills from this passage at the start of the first novel I wrote.
It was the crazy notion that everything went somewhere that hurt us all. Good things happen. Bad things happen and I don’t know if they lead us anywhere. This is existentialism, life removed of any point, life taken too seriously. If we didn’t take it so seriously maybe we’d just be Nihilists. We give so much importance to the meaninglessness of it all and we think about it to the point of preoccupation. Hedonists have got it right. Natural hedonists have it best. The ability to mindlessly have fun without consideration is where it’s at. I declare that thought is bad for you. Being introspective kills. It’s also a beautiful way to die.
A friend pointed out that the grammatically correct version would be, “Introspection kills.” But it didn’t sound as good to me. Nor did I want to call it Being Introspective Kills. It might explain why it never got published. There’s that and the typical accusation that I‘ve already mentioned that it was all too unnecessarily autobiographical and it’s written in first person present tense. What an amateur! Every writer has to hear it at some point. The choice of words, Introspective Kills, like Reservoir Dogs or a Hard Days Night makes art and literature engaging. Does that message get across enough in life. I once was asked in class how my writing manages to flow, how do I do such good dialogue? Part of it is reading it aloud and seeing how it sounds. A bigger part is, and this I didn’t say out loud in class, I like to think in words. I like the way things sound. And there is no setting in Microsoft Word, not that I’m aware of, for beauty. Has there ever been a time where a computer corrects your writing to emphasise that there are times when the grammatically incorrect sounds better?
If people are always going to ask how to be a writer, then what do we want to tell them? Keep to the word limit and hand your work in on time is always good advice. Engaging content is only as engaging as the way it’s conveyed. That’s good advice too. Don’t ever let anyone know if your work is memoir or fiction. James Frey learned it the hard way. Read a lot. That’s one thing everyone says. And yes, be so much more grammatically more good than me. I thoroughly endorse that. I think that if I boiled it all down to one thing it would be a love and fascination of words and an unstoppable urge to use them and make them count. Otherwise, gone is the Beauty and power of words and we reduce narrative to interesting content and I’m not sure that’s enough to keep us all reading.