Jolie-Laide

Thoughts on the York Festival of Writing

I admit I was apprehensive about going to the festival. For a start the ticket and travel cost money. Around £500, which even for someone in a well paid job is a lot to fork out for one person on a long weekend.

Secondly, people you meet at writing events are either a) really lovely, intellectual, funny, honest folk, or b) deluded egomaniacs trying to publish a shocking didactic tract full of grammos. I was terrified that all the attendees would fall into the latter category. (This is rather hypocritical, as my book is a huge rant about power, money and sex and has more typos and clichés than you can shake a stick at!)

Welcome to the machine

The big realisation at these events is always the fact that writing is very much a business. Yes, one may spend many hours in a garret hunched over a typewriter with a mug of coffee and a cigarette, pouring ones heart and soul onto the page, but at some point a salesman enters the picture.

What I found really enlightening, was to hear publishing executives and literary agents talk about their work. I would recommend this to any aspiring writer. Yes, writing is a very personal form of expression, but it’s also about communicating with other human beings. The reader is as important as the writer. Maybe more important. The agent’s job is to find work that people will enjoy reading. Whether is it pulpy and proud, or the most challenging “Literature”*.

This isn’t to say that one compromises ones art. See it more as a Venn Diagram. The segment where “artistic” and “readable” coincide.

What surprised me about the agents is the warmth they had, and how passionate they were about good literature. This sounds obvious, but I had expected them to be a lot more cynical. One especially interesting point for any aspiring writers put there, is that they all agreed that they will only represent a book that they personally connect with. The reason being that sales is hard work, and you can’t sell a book that you’re not really really enthusiastic about. They all admitted to turning down brilliant pieces of work because they simply didn’t ‘get’ the writing. This is encouraging in some ways. Agents have their own tastes, so the rejection slip doesn’t automatically mean “you are a talentless scumbag, go, craw away and die”. But it also highlights the challenge of finding the right agent, not just someone who thinks your work is polished enough, but someone who genuinely enjoys it.

We love the machine

One of the most striking aspects of the event was the positivity of all the attendees. I chatted to about a hundred different people, none of whom were negative or blasé about writing.

They described it as challenging, intense, infuriating, exhausting, all-consuming. And then they spoke about the challenges of finding an agent, getting rejection letters, getting harsh critiques, getting more rejection letters, trying to secure a publishing deal, trying to secure a good publishing deal**, receiving negative reviews, trying to juggle writing and a day-job, trying to juggle writing and raising a family……….but in the midst of all this, I never heard anyone say that they were ready to throw in the towel.

I spend a lot of time lampooning the white collar world. This is because if you chat to most white collar workers for any length of time, they will, after a few minutes, or glasses of wine, start making offhand comments about quitting and becoming a surf instructor. Or a painter, or a coffee-shop owner, or a butcher. I’m not judging anyone for being a dentist / solicitor / actuary / merchant-banker / vet / insurance salesman / whatever. But I am scornful of anyone who works as a top flight divorce lawyer, when they’d actually rather be running a small flip-flop shop in Cornwall.

At risk of sounding slushy and inspirational, I really felt that each person I spoke to at York was following their heart and doing what mattered most to them. We live in cynical times, so it is extremely rare to be surrounded by four-hundred human beings who are so passionate about what they are doing.

A high point was chatting to someone else who loved Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, and meeting another female writer who works in financial securities (I am not unique, shock-horror). I am not the only person in the universe who is trying to appease both the Financial Services Authority, and The Muse.

In conclusion…….

I would recommend the festival to anyone who is serious about their writing. (I felt the £500 was money well spent, and I am fairly stingy about such things!!) The other attendees struck me as thoughtful and very hardworking, and I also noticed that people were very willing to learn more about the technical side of writing, and receive feedback on their work. (My fears about spending the weekend with four-hundred egomaniacs were completely unfulfilled!).

The £500 included the accommodation, which was in the modernist concrete halls of residence. They were a bit retro, but comfortable enough. Some people complained that they were kept wake by the honking of the geese who live on the artificial lake there.

The catering was Yorkshireian, but very nice, and the wine was cheap and tasty.

Overall I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the workshops. All the speakers had prepared the classes well and were charismatic teachers. If fact I learnt so much from the workshops that I actually said in my one-to-one meeting with a literary agent, that my manuscript had lots of faults in it, and that I would prefer to send her my next piece which will be much better…………

(NB this is a very high risk tactic when pitching your work to a top literary agent).

One of the biggest (personal) realisations of the weekend, is that there are a lot of people out there who are going through the same things as me. I was slightly worried that the event might be very competitive, but actually, once you get past the very amateur level, most writers have their own unique style, and their own niche in the market. I didn’t meet a single person who I would consider a direct rival. At the dinner for example, I sat next to a man who was writing about NLP, and a lady who is writing thrillers. I didn’t bump into another modern literary gothic novelist wannabe. (This was one of my biggest paranoias about the event; what if I meet the uber version of myself, and she laughs at my pathetic attempts!!!)

Meeting so many likeminded people really solidified my writing in my own head. Up until very recently it had been a rather left-field pipe dream, which I worried might be taking me away from sensible grown up things like office work and mortgages. Speaking to a few people towards the end of the conference, I feel it had been a huge turning point for a lot of them , both in terms of gaining insight into their own writing, and in taking their writing more seriously. There aren’t many events you can go to that will change your outlook in that way.

Maybe it was just the comedown after a really fab weekend, or maybe I’d come back from the festival a slightly different person. On my first day back in the office I did a rather rash thing. I came out as a writer……………

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*This word should always be pronounced with a deep, booming, Shakespearean tone.

**There is a big difference. In fact, one of the workshops was about Getting Published Well. It was fascinating.

Depression in the Press

An attack on Janet Street Porter (roughly analogous to shooting fish in a barrel)

I have just noticed, via a facebook link, an article by Janet Street Porter in The Mail. Her thesis (if such a word can be used in relation to such a person) is that Depression is the new trendy illness. She goes on to attack suffers of the illness, and even takes a swipe at the suicidal. If you feel like getting enraged, a link is at the bottom of this article. While the article doesn’t surprise me, it has annoyed me, and got me thinking about the illness, and how it is perceived by society.

Her suggestion that depression is a ‘new’ illness is ridiculous, is she totally uneducated? Depression has been around for donkey’s years, it was just called melancholy, or despair. Such illnesses appear in the oldest literature. There is an episode in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus sits on a beach crying endlessly, and the subdued Anne de Burgh in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to name two examples off the top of my head.

She makes a claim that people of her mother’s generation did not suffer with depression (apparently they threw themselves into wholesome things like housework!?!?) This is simply untrue. Many people of her mother’s generation were on valium type drugs, or treated with electroconvulsive therapy. I know The Mail is a pretty retarded newspaper, but I’m still shocked that she would be allowed to publish such an un-researched piece, especially on a sensitive topic.

In an attempt at sympathy, she says that she is not attacking people with “clinical” depression. Forgetting of course that there is not a clear dividing line between what she calls ‘real mental illness’ and simple unhappiness. Even very mundane day to day unhappiness changes the brain’s chemistry, so there is no simple pigeonholing of depressive conditions. I recently read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, a very frank account of her own experiences of depression. She states quite plainly, that although her initial unhappiness was based on quite solid events, such as her father abandoning her, by the time she was treated it was very definitely a clinical illness. This is a popular book, easily available, has JSP not even read pieces such as this before writing her article?

It is true that some forms of depression involve negative cycles of thought, which the sufferer indulges, but she doesn’t actually address this, and these people are still vulnerable and in need of compassion. If those thoughts are potentially threatening someone’s life, they need to be taken seriously.

What has changed in recent years, is that depression is less taboo, so more people are talking openly about it. This may be why it looks like a ‘trend’. We don’t say that there has been a pandemic of homosexuality in recently years, because the people who would have hidden their sexuality in the past are now free to come-out. Or we don’t say that there has been a spate of agnosticism, there have always been people who doubted God, they just didn’t talk about it for fear of being burnt to death in a witch-hunt. Historically, it was very hard for people to admit to even mild spells of depression, for fear of being labelled ‘insane’, and being carted off to a madhouse, and having all their basic freedoms and human rights removed. I would suggest that the increase in cases in depression may stem from the fact that we no longer forcibly trepan anyone who shows hints of this illness.

Perhaps I am wrong to respond to the article at all. She is an offensive, reactionary piece of trash, who really needs to be ignored. But what I am really writing about is the fact that someone such as that should not be allowed to write in a mainstream paper, on a delicate topic. Has no one proofread the piece and red-penned all the errors and un-supported claims? This is unprofessional, and highly unethical. Fair enough, The Mail is not a highbrow publication. But surely that makes it all the more important for the writing to have some level of accuracy. Their readers are less-educated, impressionable people, who might actually believe something they read in a newspaper.

Publications such as this work hard to maintain a level of un-enlightenment and misery in society. What I find particularly perverse about this piece is that The Mail is criticising depressives, yet it is probably one of the biggest propagators of unhappiness in the western world.

　

　

Enjoy-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1278510/Depression-Its-just-new-trendy-illness.html



Drugs for the Ego

For research I recently found myself reading a selection of rather grim books. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. They are all worthwhile reads if you can steel yourself for an emotional ride. I have a relatively short scene in my current story where the heroine is taken to a psychiatric clinic. It is very much a fantasy piece, but I wanted the scene to have some semblance of truth so I found these three texts which are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical accounts of young women living in psychiatric hospitals.

The older texts, by Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen are disturbing because they hint at a world where any unusual behaviour in young women was labelled ‘mental illness’ and treated with strong pharmaceuticals and electroconvulsive therapy. I often wonder if the mediaeval witchcraft trials had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with searching out intellectual, non-compliant young women and publicly demonising them. One of the symptoms of Esther Greenwood’s ‘illness’ in The Bell Jar is the fact that she does not want to learn shorthand and become a secretary. Why are we so threatened by women with brains? – but that is another rant.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation is brilliant but problematic. It is worth noting that she was in her twenties when she wrote it, considering this, the prose is very impressive and I can forgive the occasional clunky bit of text.

While it may be understandable given that the autobiography describes her life throughout her teens and early twenties, often a very self-absorbed age, Wurtzel has often been criticised as egotistical. In fact The New York Times Book Review says she has “the ego of Madonna”.

Not to make light of her very real suffering, she was genuinely very ill and very unhappy, there is a definite ego presence in her writing. It made me think of the work of German Guru Eckhart Tolle. He is a rather eccentric figure, but if you can ignore the annoying hype surrounding his work, he does make some interesting points. (Often he is rephrasing much older philosophical ideas from Buddhism and Taoism.) One idea of his is particularly poignant to me: the notion that much unhappiness is caused by the ego. It is a constructed sense of self which craves attention and affirmation. Do we really need it? Perhaps. There may be some situations in life where a certain degree of assertiveness and self preservation is important. But does this have to come from the ego? Could it not just be a practical, rational action?

I don’t want to over criticise Wurtzel. I enjoyed her book and I imagine she would be lively and likeable were one to meet her in real life. But my point is that a lot of her deep unhappiness may have been caused or aggravated by her egoism.

As an experiment I tried being aware of my own ego during an average day, going to the office, socialising with friends, interacting with whoever I may bump into on that day. There isn’t much that fazes me, but the few incidents which did upset me were things said or done which attacked my ego. Someone talking-down to me, implying that I was less important, clever, special, than they were. Someone correcting me, suggesting that I was wrong about something. Someone failing to acknowledge something I had done.

I started to see the ego as a monster that needed to be fed. It craved glory and attention. It needed other people to love it. And it made me deeply unhappy.

“If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me – the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that I can’t live with.” – Eckhart Tolle in The Times, October 21^st 2010.

What then is the answer? Is true happiness to be found in the annihilation of the ego?

Perhaps. But maybe the answer is to tame the ego, make it work for us. Perhaps it should be the pushy agent-manager to our shy self-critical creative self.

Post Project Snail

So, having moved house, and given away most of the trash that was in the old house, am I happier? The simple answer is yes.

The re-sale value of things

It is a pleasure to give things away to friends and family, strangers even. I have realised that much of the stuff I hoard is of a good quality, and therefore may be a welcome gift. But, even the best things don’t necessarily retain their fiscal value.

Unless you are going to get a lot of use out of it, it is basically just dead money.

Sorting through my possessions for Project Snail, I have been very aware of how much I initially paid for each item, how much use I have got out of it, and what (if anything) its re-sale value would be. I don’t feel too bad, because I am good at finding bargains, and I do tend to use the things I buy. But I still feel a sense of unease and wastefulness. Post Project Snail I shall be acutely aware of the rationale behind every new purchase. I have already found myself considering purchases more carefully than before. For example I am in need of some summer clothes, and have been trying to find pieces which sit in the optimum between price, style, fit, longevity, quality etc.

I have also been trying an experiment which I saw years ago on a TV show; paying for day to day items, like groceries, with cash instead of a card. This is supposed to make you more aware of the price of things, and therefore more thrifty. So far it has been working.

The joys of shredding

It is shocking how much paper piles up around me. Folders of notes, sketches, documents, cuttings, etc etc. Some of them important, eg contracts, some of them meaningless, eg old Tesco’s receipts.

Unchecked these mountains get bigger and bigger. The frightening thing is that important documents are mixed in with waste paper, making them impossible to find.

I go through phases of feeling very sentimental, and struggling to part with anything. But at the moment, I feel really ruthless. I desperately want to get rid of anything I don’t need, I am cross with myself for hoarding things, and I have a sense of clarity; I can see what needs to go.

The great thing about clearing out is that the stuff you do keep feels more precious. Owning one old teddy is nice, owning a festering musty pile of them is rather creepy.

While sorting through the papers, I have been shredding old notes, (bad) drafts of projects, lame ideas, clichés, and only keeping those which are worthwhile. This has really helped me get a clear picture in my head; all the current and future projects which seemed very chaotic are beginning to take shape.

Shredding is hugely satisfying, I have heard of a Buddhist ceremony, which is similar to ‘confession’, where the sins or regrets are written of pieces of paper and then burnt. Shredding feels a bit like this, anything pointless is destroyed, and can be recycled into something new.

I wonder where all the paper will end up, what it will become in its next cycle.

Death of Toys

Anthropomorphism and entropy, a difficult combination. We have a tendency to see human faces and characters in inanimate things, there is maybe some evolutionary reason for this. Perhaps it builds empathy and communication skills.

Toys. Especially all those soft toys (or plushies if you are American). They have the weight and features of a human baby. They take on a cloying, emotionally human quality. And then we name them. In some early writings the name and the soul are almost synonymous.

So as part of my huge clear out aka Project Snail, I am throwing away the few soft toys that are still around. This isn’t as evil as it sounds. They are genuinely very moth-eaten (literally), and the one or two who have names are allowed to stay.

The upsetting moment was when one, who did have a name, was discovered to be almost totally destroyed by moths.

I thought about repairing the toy, but wondered if the Ship of Theseus solution was really the answer. Then I had the idea of copying the pattern pieces of the toy, and remaking it from scratch, the theory being that a Platonic Blueprint of the toy exists, and one destroyed was merely a shadow of that. Or perhaps if I retain the character or soul of the toy by reusing its name. Or maybe I can console myself that he lives on in the moths who ate him.  

These are all ways of fighting impermanence. The difficulty with attachment to physical things is that they are very transient.

Borges works in mysterious ways

The Gospel According to Mark, a tale by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, appears in Chris Baldick’s The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.

This is a fantastic anthology, which gives a really comprehensive view of the history of Gothic Literature, through short stories. The introduction and end notes mention the longer Gothic works such as The Monk and The Castle of Otranto, giving ideas for further reading once you have eased yourself into the genre via the short stories.

Gothic Tales can be a difficult genre to read, as they explore some very dark themes, with a rather humorous (sardonic) slant. I do enjoy their honesty, they do not shy away from unpleasantries, and they give some very frank character sketches of the darker aspects of the human psyche.

Reading Borges’ tale The Gospel According to Mark I felt quite disappointed. I have high expectations of his fictions, but this piece seemed like an unconnected series of needlessly surreal events. It struck me as pretentious, which his work never does, and I thought it may just be an experimental or lazy piece, a wanton foray into Gothic literature.

Except that it isn’t. The second I finished the piece I understood it completely. Every line is written for a reason. It is a work of genius. It may actually be one of the cleverest stories ever written, even by Borges (which is saying something). I read it in my lunch hour at work, then spent the afternoon pondering the character of The Baffled Christ. I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, hence the rather cryptic style of this post, but I will say that it is well worth reading. It is only about five pages long, and you will get far more out of it than you would most novels.

In Praise of Jane Austen

I tried reading Jane Austen’s books as a teenager, and found them difficult to get into. The prose was enjoyable, and I could see that they were well constructed pieces, but having spent far too much time reading Homer and Terry Pratchett, I had little patience with any book which didn’t feature dragons, monsters, wizards, Gods etc. I was not convinced that drama could happen in someone’s drawing-room*. Many of the subtleties of the conversations which took place in the novels were lost on me, as I had too little experience of life to really grasp them. Her work is very delicate and needs to be read with a willingness to learn about human relationships.

In my twenties, with some experience of life and human behaviour, I came back to her work, and found it subtle but fascinating. Of all our writers, I think she perhaps has the most acute understanding of human behaviour, and the complex morals of social interactions. (I have recently read many older works of English literature as part of my research, and while many of these pieces are excellent, they do not have the refinement of Jane Austen’s work, especially as far as characterisation is concerned.)

It is also pertinent to note that she was writing at a time before our welfare state, and when social mobility was possible but difficult. So while the scenes appear safe and gentile, many of her characters are just on the edge of destitution. The friendships and marriages which are negotiated in those drawing rooms are not superficial, they tie the heroines to the respectable classes. It is not a coincidence that she chooses to write about characters just on the border between the upper-classes and the underclass. My own experiences of working and trying to provide for myself have given me a deeper understanding of the issues she explores. This is why I would recommend her writing to anyone who has spent some time in the world of work, reached that age where everyone is being married-off, had to care for needy relatives, or gone through some financial struggles and uncertainty.

Jane Austen’s work is about the human. Do not expect dragons or demons, other than the ones which crop-up in polite society, perhaps they are the most insidious of all.

*Unless it was Lovecraftian and somehow pan-dimensional, or the scene of a demonic pact, like in Faust.