The beauty and power of words Part 1: If you want to be creative you need to keep to the word limit and hand your work in on time
When I was studying Creative Writing at Brunel University and I was working in the Brunel University Library, I was asked if I’d like to sit in on a meeting. The Liaison Librarian for English Literature wanted some help from a Creative Writing student to answer questions about, “What Creative writing students want from their library.” I went along to the meeting, chipped in and chipped in some more and found that I was chipping in to the point where I felt that they could, at the very least, write a chapter based on what I’d given them. I cheekily told them, “I could write this for you.” And that’s how I got to have a chapter published in an academic book about Creative Writing. Then life got in the way and I never followed that up. I Never had a second chapter in another academic book.
I’ve never read the book. I do have two free copies, one hardback and one paperback. I’m pretty sure from the royalties I get each year that it’s probably sold five copies. To my credit, none of my friends or family have bought a copy or have been forced to buy a copy. I am however proud of the advice I gave. I surprisingly enjoyed the process of being edited and having meetings with the editor and discussing my work. There was some sort of vindication in writing for someone else and it being a paid job. In that situation I found myself writing to the Mantra of, “Get the job done.” It reminds me of something that Celia Brayfield once told me in one of her seminars. If I’ve remembered the story correctly, on handing in her first piece of journalism to be published, her editor read her work and told Celia that she’d done a great job keeping to the word limit and handing it in on time. So much for the beauty and power of words. There may be times when you want someone to gush over your writing but instead the response you get is, “Well done. Job done.”
I got that a lot in class from my lecturers. There was not much in the way of gushing over anyone’s work. There wasn’t much in the way of explaining how and why you’d succeeded in any set task. There was simply an acknowledgement that you had completed what you’d been asked to do. I like to think that the response to Celia’s work was because the style and content was expected to be good if you’re writing for a living. As we’re talking about old school journalism, I’d like to think that you couldn’t hand in any gibberish and then be praised for handing your gibberish in on time and under the word count. Sadly, I’m not sure in the digital age that is true anymore. I say this because I was recently on a website reading reviews of vacuum cleaners and saw a little bio at the end of the article, in which information was given about the writer. I guess the content was checked for grammatical errors, then fact checked to see that no one claimed the vacuum cleaner could fly or that it has mystic powers. What I am sure of is that no one gave a thought to the beauty and power of any of the words used to describe any of the vacuum cleaners mentioned in the article. It was essentially a list of what a vacuum cleaner does. But, someone has to be credited with writing the article and take payment for getting the job done. Will you ever meet that person down the pub and say, “You wrote that article about hoovers? The way you wrote about the Cordless Shark Upright, that was genius.”
In my one and only experience of writing professionally I feel I was lucky to be able to get the job done and produce a chapter where I approve of the content. I was happy with what I wrote and the way I wrote it. I had wanted to be sure that I was doing something more than listing all the things you should know if you want to study Creative Writing. I probably wouldn’t feel the same way if I’d taken my editor’s advice and urged writers to practice being descriptive by looking at inanimate objects and writing descriptively about them. I draw the line at “describe a pebble” largely on the grounds of – Why would you do that!? I thought that I’d be bored if I was a writer and someone asked me to write descriptively about a pebble. It is possible to do it. I just wouldn’t be me if I went around telling people that they could find inspiration in writing about pebbles. Of course, as soon as I say that, I want to write a whole book in which I do nothing but write descriptive passages and maybe poems about pebbles, stones, rocks and boulders. I’d much rather anyone who was trying to work out how to be a writer concentrated on how to think in writing (something I will go on about more). I like to think we stuck with my wording in the hope that readers would see the world and find words to describe how they see what goes on around them. I had in mind writers writing in their heads, describing everyday scenes and events as they lived their lives. I wanted to get across that something as simple as their walk to the local shops can provide anyone with opportunities to describe what they see and how they see it and what it means to them. I also think what I wrote sounds better and sounding better usually resonates more. (Having not read my chapter since it left my laptop and went to print, I thought I’d better check and see that no one edited me without my knowledge. Thankfully, no one edited in a paragraph about how the true test of writing is how you can describe a pebble. I was half expecting to read, “If you think you’re a writer, find yourself a pebble. What do you see?)
The first thing you get told in a Creative Writing class is that there are no rules … “BUT, here come the rules”. There is no one way to write. There’s a lot of ways to write and the more of them you know the better writer you’ll be. I’ve read on more than one occasion that you know an inexperienced writer because they always write in first person narrative and in the present tense. It’s said like it’s a bad thing. I’m not sure it is. It’s certainly easier to write like that for a lot of people. I do think that one reason it’s seen to be easier is that it's one step removed from how we tell stories in everyday life. For example, “I’m down the pub when this bloke walks in. I recognise him but can’t think where from.” Maybe it’s seen as being too simplistic.
Another accusation that gets thrown at inexperienced writers is that they make their work unnecessarily autobiographical. And? Does that matter if it’s well written? Perhaps the thinking there is that again it’s too easy, cheating. I think we border on a mindset that says, “This is really interesting. But did you only write it because it happened to you? If so, I’m not sure I like it as autobiography. If you made up a few things that didn’t happen, then maybe I’d buy it as fiction.” Why even ask if it’s fiction or autobiographical?
One way around this is to claim your work to be a memoir and then you can skip right past the, “How autobiographical is your book” stage – Unless your name is James Frey. Poor James Frey. Whilst most new writers suffer through being told their work is too personal, he got caught out not being personal enough. Here was a previously unheard of writer being shamed, not because his novel was your typical “newbie oh so autobiographical”, but because it was packaged as memoir and was vastly not true in a way that a memoir is supposed to be. Readers were happy to excuse away any writing that they thought was weak in his memoir A Million Little Pieces because it was the content, the story of his drug addiction and recovery, that they were interested in. And for many readers the content was a lot more interesting for being true. Content and context won over the quality of the writing. And then when the content and context was revealed as a lie, that the author’s drug addiction was greatly exaggerated, people went ape-shit. Readers wanted to believe that Frey had gone through all the horrors of addiction and withdrawal. As a reader I find that reading about a trip to the dentist where the protagonist goes drug free through painful dental surgery is pretty darn nasty whether it’s a memoir or a work of complete fiction. (In hindsight, if anyone in your everyday life told you they’d been to the dentist, refused drugs and went through a painful dental procedure and that any dentist was OK with this you’d never believe them. How no one questioned this is the real mystery here).
I don’t know how anyone can condemn any writing based on how true it is or isn’t. For all we know what was written by Frey was exactly what he remembered. You’d have to get into discussions about reliable-unreliable narrators to work out what was really going on. I’d have accepted it if Frey lied about it and said, “Look, it’s as true as I remember it to be.” When it came to the film version they came up with a very clever promotion of the story being “maybe true”. That’s smart because you can then blur the lines between what was true, what the author might think was true, what might be exaggerated and what is knowingly a lie. This also allowed the film to feed off the fame or infamy (Your choice) that the memoir or novel (again, you decide) gained through the whole debacle surrounding the work.
The success of A Million Little Pieces (It sold plenty, although I’m not sure anyone bothered with the film) stands as a prime example of content winning out over style. It’s either written well or it isn’t. Don’t excuse away anything you might view as poor writing just because you think it’s interesting or because you think that what you’re reading did happen to the author. Equally, give a new writer a break and say, “So what if they’re writing based on their limited life experience? I don’t care because it reads so good.”
Biographical or not? You could argue that it’s a question only for anyone deciding which shelf the book goes on in the bookshop. I’ve read about how Thomas Hardy felt that he married the wrong woman and as a result a lot of his work is all about his protagonists being torn between who they are with and who they think they should be with. Did anyone say to Hardy, “Thomas, we like it, but do you mind me asking, before we go to print, is any of this just you writing about your feelings about your wife?”
Bret Easton Ellis was often asked if his debut novel Less Than Zero was autobiographical, largely on the flimsy basis that Ellis, like his protagonist Clay, was a West Coast guy who moved to the East Coast and then back again. I like that he would respond saying that American Psycho was more true to how he felt as a person in that time. It reflected, a grotesque caricatured world of the 1980s that he saw around him. An interesting question would be: Is the grotesque world he saw a true reflection of what was going on in the 80s? “Is it true? Did it really happen?” They’re just not relevant questions. It’s more a case of, “Was the world he was writing about really truly that horrible that it deserved his interpretation of that time and place?”
Truth be damned. With American Psycho Ellis is not writing a shopping list. If reviewers of vacuum cleaners could write as descriptively about the latest Dyson cleaner I’d have bought five of them by now (having first re-mortgaged our house). Content is never king. I know that journalism is different to fiction and I remember from the time I was nineteen years old being told about the inverted pyramid style, where you start the article with all the good stuff, don’t bury the lead, and start with the most important facts. Maybe that’s true for the news but not so much for features writing. If we are tied to that model then it would very much explain why I struggle to get to the end of any article I read. Content without style is dangerously close to a shopping list.
I stand by my advice of, “…if you want to practice writing then pick something mundane and write about it well.” It’s my way of saying that the content is there, the damn pebble on the beach is there, your walk to the shops is there, but if you’re going to write about it then think in writing. Think of what you want to say and how you want to say it. And then you are already writing, if only in your head.