Iain Banks – Edinburgh City Reads December 30, 2009

My two favourite things about living in Edinburgh are the sky, which is sometimes blue or pink, often grey, but always luminous, and the huge number of literary events happening throughout the year.

A new addition to Edinburgh’s programme of book related events is Edinburgh City Reads, where an author comes to discuss his or her work and answer questions from the audience. Recently I went to hear Iain Banks talk about his latest book, Transition.

Banks describes the novel as “49% science fiction.” Closer, then, to literary fiction because the plot is “technically more scientifically plausible” than those of his science fiction novels which he publishes under the name Iain M Banks. (The inclusion of the middle initial, he explains, “sounds more American” and “gives the books more of a science fiction feel.”)

The premise of Transition is that there are an infinite number of parallel realities which certain people can move between with the help of a drug called septus. Agents of an organisation called The Concern exploit their ability to flit between realities by interfering in important events to control the outcome. The concept of a multiverse is something which Banks finds “mind boggling” and he jokes that he would one day like to write a letter to Nature to put forward his own theory on the matter (something to do with onions and layers, and the letter would of course be long and written in purple ink.)

The novel is told from the point of view of a number of different characters and Banks brushes off praise for making each voice distinct, saying: “if you are a writer it’s the kind of thing you have to do. It’s part of your job to get inside the heads of your characters.” He admits to particularly enjoying being inside the head of the terrifying Madame d’Ortolan. “She was great to work with. Often the really bad characters are.”

The advantage of a novel with multiple narrators, according to Banks, is that by switching from one viewpoint to the next you can avoid all the boring bits in each character’s life. If you are following only one character it is a bit risky to jump from one point in time to another past the boring bits.

Banks typically spends six months thinking about each book before he begins writing. “I do quite a lot of preparatory work. You could start with an idea like [the one in Transition] and just write and see where it takes you but that could take years,” he says, explaining that you could write yourself into a corner and have to backtrack. “If you plan the novel out in advance you make all the mistakes in your head rather than on paper.”

A good ending is crucial for Banks. “I’m a sucker for a surprise ending- a bit of twist in the tale. I couldn’t write a book … without a proper ending.”

Banks finds that the writing process varies from one novel to the next. “Some books are more laborious and more of a chore than others. Transition went almost too smoothly in a way. A month after it was finished I couldn’t remember writing it.”

The one novel that he really struggled to write was Canal Dreams, which he eventually got through “under the influence of a lot of whisky.” He describes it as the book he is least proud of. “I took on too many degrees of difficulty with that one,” he says, referring to the fact that the main character is female and Japanese so has little in common with him, and that the novel was set in Panama and Japan, places he had never been. The book was “intimidatingly difficult to write” and Banks distracted himself with displacement activities, laughing as he says, “My flat had never been cleaner. It was spotlessly perfect.”

Banks learned his lesson from Canal Dreams and tends to write about people who have something in common with him, “a middle class Scottish chap,” and who are of a similar age. He describes writing books set in Scotland as “a kind of laziness. I hate doing research.” Although he is famous as a Scottish author, he points out that there is “no sort of great burden of Scottishness” in his novels.

His next book will be based on the same template as his first novel, The Wasp Factory: “short, sharp and horrible and nasty.” His only concern is that he might come off as “an increasingly elderly writer trying to impress the kids. I’ll be 58 by then. I’m not sure if I can pull it off.” But, as he points out, “[Writing is] a late maturing craft. You’re always getting better and better up to a point. You have fewer ideas when you get older but you are better at writing them.” So he should pull off the next book just fine.

Writing Horror – Adele Hartley December 10, 2009

Way back when I was still in the clutches of my short story competition addiction, I wrote a horror story. It was a twist in the tale affair about a man who spends a night in a haunted house as part of a television game show. He is convinced that the spooky noises and manifestations are special effects and manages to keep his cool – until the director phones him and says they will have to reschedule the filming because there has been a power cut. It was entertaining to write but it didn’t make me want to get up and put all the lights on, which, according to Adele Hartley, is one of the criteria of a good horror story.

Hartley drew on her experience as the editor of several horror story anthologies to give the Edinburgh Writers’ Club some tips on how to write good horror:

Know the genre well. “The audience has been reading and watching horror since they were children. They know all the conventions and have certain expectations.”

There are six types of horror story:

• Possessed – a house, a car or a toaster
• Vengeful spirit
• Zombie
• Vampire
• Phobias – snakes, spiders
• Evil children

If possible, steer clear of the types that are particularly oversubscribed. “If the world gets any more zombie in it, it might just implode.” Avoid jumping on any bandwagons, like the current trend for vampire fiction, because you will just be “contributing quantity, not quality.” Come up with a fresh approach to one of these story types. “I’m not looking for new ideas, I’m just looking for a new perspective or voice to tell it.”

Don’t try to second guess what the reader will find frightening. “Write about something that really does bother you. Horror is subjective but if it is personal and frightening for you there is a good chance someone else will find it frightening.”

Write from your own experience. “There’s all manner of vulnerability in ordinary situations.” For example, walking alone at night and thinking that you are being followed or being on the last train home in a carriage with a stranger. A good horror story could be inspired by a time when you have experienced “panic, loss of control, or the knowledge that you made a bad decision and there’s no way to take it back.”

Blood and guts are not requirements of good horror. “I would rather see a horror story induce fear by discomfort than horror by revulsion. I want horror that unsettles people and makes them feel slightly disturbed and not know why.” A good way to do this is to set up the atmosphere well but be sparse with details of the action. You don’t need to describe every blow of the axe.

Try crippling the senses of your main character to heighten the fear. An evil creature that you can’t see is much more frightening than one that you can.

Don’t overwrite the ending. “With horror it is so much better to leave something unsaid and unshown. If you spoon feed people you take away all the horror. Most people have a worst case scenario trigger in their head anyway.” Hartley cites the 1963 film The Haunting as an example of the perfect structure of a horror story because “everything is set up but not really paid off.”

Character is crucial. “For me plot is kind of secondary to character. If you have someone that you really care about, it’s terrible when something bad happens to them.”

Ready for publication? To find out if your horror story is frightening, “get someone else to read it by torchlight.” Look at ralan.com for a market – “it is a fabulous website.” If you are sending your story to a journal with a short submission window, “send your work at the end.” Hartley confesses that in the past she has looked more favourably on submissions that arrived close to the deadline because they tended to come from writers who had read the guidelines and written a story specifically for the anthology. The quality was better than that of stories that came at the beginning of the submission window from writers who simply sent in stories they already had that had been rejected elsewhere.

Inspired? Get Writing November 30, 2009

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT declares the neon blue sign emblazoned across the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. My sister says that on a bad day, seeing that message makes her feel warm inside. Having read Fleur Adcock’s persuasive argument in Mslexia on why “all right” is two words and not one, the sign just makes me feel irritated.

Last week while visiting the gallery, a teeny newspaper clipping pinned to the noticeboard caught my eye. The National Galleries of Scotland are running a competition for short stories or poems inspired by one of the works in their collection. Entries can be up to 1000 words and the deadline is 22nd January 2010. Don’t worry if you are unable to get to Edinburgh to view the collections; many of the works are displayed online.

My favourite works in the Gallery of Modern Art were the Cindy Sherman photographs and the Liechtenstein painting. Funny though, that the work that sticks most strongly in my mind is that bloody annoying neon blue sign.

BBC Opening Lines November 17, 2009

The BBC is taking submissions of short stories to be broadcast on the Afternoon Reading Slot on Radio 4. Guidelines are here, deadline is 30th November. I only just found out about it so I won’t have time to write anything new but I’m blowing the dust off some old short stories to see if any of them might meet the criteria.

Interview with Daisuke Takahashi November 13, 2009

Daisuke Takahashi explains how a childhood book inspired a life of adventure.

We all know that childhood reading is important, that it feeds the imagination. No one knows this better than Daisuke Takahashi, whose love of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe inspired him to travel the world as an adult. In his twenties, Daisuke backpacked throughout the world, drawn to the wilderness of Himalayas, the Antarctica, the Amazon and the Sahara. His fascination with the Earth’s most remote regions stemmed from his love of Defoe’s classic novel. “For me Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was a kind of bible. It tells how one can manage to survive in a remote part of the world.”

He had always regarded Robinson Crusoe “as a fiction of the 18th century, just the imagination of author.” When he learned that the novel is thought to be based on the experience of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), Daisuke determined to find out everything he could about Selkirk’s story and how it related to Robinson Crusoe’s. “What was the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Everything started from this question and provided me with my inspiration.” Daisuke documents his pursuit of the answer in his book, In Search of Robinson Crusoe.

A large part of the book is concerned with Daisuke’s stay on Robinson Crusoe Island (formerly Más a Tierra), off the coast of Chile, where Selkirk was marooned for four years and four months. Daisuke, a seasoned traveller and explorer, used his survival skills to live off the island’s resources as Selkirk had done almost 300 years previously, with no modern tools or equipment. Daisuke believes that this experience was crucial to enable him to understand how Selkirk must have felt during the years he spent alone on the island. “I spoke to the island’s rocks and trees to relieve loneliness. Without this experience, I could not write about [Selkirk’s] castaway life.” Daisuke hoped that by living like Selkirk for a short time on the island, he would uncover evidence of the castaway’s existence. “Trying to find water and edible fruit or catching fish on the island like Robinson Crusoe was not for fun but to find Selkirk’s campsite.”

Daisuke draws on historical documents in In Search of Robinson Crusoe to give an account of Selkirk’s life. “We know about his castaway life from A Cruising Voyage Round the World by Captain Woodes Rogers. Rogers was a buccaneer and rescued Selkirk from [the island]”. In the small town of Lower Largo in Scotland, where Selkirk was raised, Daisuke gained access to documents from the local church which shed light on Selkirk’s personality. The church’s records of disciplinary action taken against Selkirk led Daisuke to draw the conclusion in his book that Selkirk was “hot-headed” and “prone to think with his fists.” This perhaps explains why, after one too many quarrels with the captain of the Cinque Ports galley, Selkirk was set ashore on a deserted island. To understand Selkirk’s role as sailing master on board pirating ships, Daisuke researched navigational history and explains that this information on the lives of pirates in the 18^th century lends authenticity to his writing. “Many parts of my book rely on this indirect but historical background, however, I write the whole story as my personal journey and experience.”

Daisuke’s advice for aspiring travel writers is to gather as much information as possible on location. “Notes and photographs are essential; hand drawn rough maps and sketches too.” To recreate a landscape for a reader, Daisuke says that it is important to pay attention to all your senses. “How does the air smell? Is it dry or humid, hot or chilly?” Sometimes he takes sound recordings while he is travelling and tries to get a feel for the local language. “I write my emotional feeling too. I want to tell the readers how I feel about it, so the reader may feel what it is like to be there.”

For his next adventure, Daisuke hopes to delve into the background of another work of fiction and travel to the Guiana Highlands of South America. “They say that it is a prototype of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. How did Conan Doyle write the novel?” Daisuke aims to find out.

In Search of Robinson Crusoe is available to buy on Amazon.

Blogoversary October 31, 2009

I was sure “blogoversary” was a real word but I’ve just checked on dictionary.com and it’s not listed there, although “blogosphere” is. Anyway, today is My Writing Life’s blogoversary and once again I am preparing to take part in NaNoWriMo, which kicks off tomorrow. In marked contrast to 31st October 2008, however, my cupboard is bare and I’m freezing sitting at my desk. I’ve been too lazy to go food shoping and I’m trying not to run up a huge gas bill so I haven’t turned the heating on. Other differences between then and now: I haven’t planned my novel at all, although there are three scenes in my head that I will write tomorrow, hopefully hitting the required 1 667 words; I am working full time now so I really will have to squeeze the writing into an evening slot; I’m in Scotland this year (I was in Spain last year) so I won’t be able to sit on a balcony enjoying the sun while dreaming up adventures for my characters.

All in all I feel like I have taken a rather reckless approach to NaNoWriMo 2009. It might just work for me though; we’ll see if I have a novel out of it in a month’s time.

Rodge Glass – Edinburgh Writers’ Club 2009 October 30, 2009

Rodge Glass is the author of two novels and a biography, Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, for which he received a 2009 Somerset Maugham Award. He recently visited the Edinburgh Writers’ Club to talk about researching and writing about the life of his mentor.

Glass was tutored by Gray while doing his MA in Creative Writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde universities and subsequently spent three years working as Gray’s personal assistant. Glass felt compelled to write the biography so that other people would know what it was like to spend time in Gray’s company. “He was a complete nutcase, worth writing about.”

Although Glass had been in close contact with Gray for several years before beginning work on the biography, he says, “At no point did I feel like I knew Alasdair better than anyone else. I felt I could contribute something in a way that someone with a pile of books and good reviewing skills couldn’t do.”

Gray supported Glass with the project, providing him with contact details of friends and acquaintances he could talk to and allowing him to read his unpublished writing. “If my book’s worth anything it’s because I had access to all the things I wanted to.” Gray’s personal poems were particularly revealing, giving Glass an insight into his subject’s mind. “For a biographer it’s gold; all the masks disappear. The narrator is the poet.”

One challenge that Glass faced with writing the biography was to communicate the facts while making the book an entertaining read. He was conscious that he should try “not to make Alasdair into a cartoon  - not to make fun of him – and also not to make the book dry.” Glass’s solution was to include anecdotes and diary entries from the time he spent working for Gray to give an impression of the subject as a person. He describes the resulting book as “a portrait of the artist as an old man.”

Glass points out that writing a biography of a living person has its drawbacks and advantages. “It’s incredibly inconvenient to write about someone you can bump into in Iceland because they can complain about [the book] but it makes it easier to make it vibrant.”

When asked if he will add chapters to future editions of the biography to cover later years of Gray’s life, Glass responds that he has no plans to do so. “[The book] was never supposed to be an absolute truth. It’s an intense emotional engagement over a particular period of time. There’s an honesty to that that I’m proud of.”

For anyone interested in writing a biography, Glass has this to say: “Immersing yourself in someone else’s life comes highly recommended by me but don’t immerse yourself to the extent that you neglect everything else. It’s a quick way to the insane asylum.”

Overheard October 24, 2009

I began my course in shorthand a few weeks ago and today I started a new job so I’m finding that I have less and less time to work through the items on my to-write list.  That’s why I thought I would cheat a little today and give you some quotes from talks and author events that I’ve been to recently that didn’t make it into other blog posts. Just for a bit of light relief, you understand!

“Dickens couldn’t write about sex for toffee.” – Joanna Trollope

“You have separate eggs to make the omelette but once it’s made you can’t treat it as separate eggs.” – Jenny Joseph (on combining meaning and form in poetry)

“I am not a fan of Sayers. I find her writing overblown and I find Lord Peter Wimsey insufferable. He’s a man whose face you’d never grow tired of slapping.” – Val McDermid

“From the Chalet School books I learned that there were three institutions of higher learning: The Sorbonne, Oxford, and the Kensington School of Needlework.” – Val McDermid

“I didn’t want to write ever again. I wrote too much too quickly after Behind the Scenes – that’s why I wrote the short stories. I felt it was very important to write short stories to train myself not to finish everything.” – Kate Atkinson

“If you’re an author of a series of novels and you tell your editor you’ve come up with a radical new idea, their sphincter tends to tighten a bit.” – Ian Rankin, turning to stare intently at the sign language signer.

“Georgian houses are very rational, very square. They’re big and they’ve got lots of light – and I like red brick.” – Sarah Waters on why she chose to model Hundreds Hall on Georgian mansions.

“The Little Stranger is my first novel that doesn’t have a gay element. I was apologising to lesbian audiences months in advance of publication.” – Sarah Waters

“I’ve just never done an event in Cambridge because I’m so worried people will come out and say, ‘why did you write that about my town?’” – Kate Atkinson, on Case Histories.

BBC Writersroom Roadshow – Dundee 2009 October 15, 2009

Can you get a hernia from coughing too much? I have come down with a stinking cold and my cough mixture is only offering temporary relief. It tastes foul, too. I wish I were a kid again and medicine tasted like banana milkshake or strawberry Ribena. I am constantly too hot or too cold and my veering body temperature seems to be completely independent of whether or not the central heating is on. As I walked shivering through the streets of Dundee yesterday to go to the BBC Writersroom Roadshow, I had no idea if the abundance of people in t-shirts was due to uncharacteristically warm weather or to the hardy nature of Dundonians.

The roadshow kicked off with George Aza-Selinger telling us a little bit about the Scotland Writes competition. After that, Paul Ashton ran through some advice on what the BBC Writersroom is looking for in the first ten pages of a script.

I’ve already blogged about the Scotland Writes launch event and the Edinburgh Screenwriters meeting where we heard more about the competition so there’s not a lot of new information to add to that. Regarding the synopsis, they are looking for “a two page summary, just to give you that chance to add in information at this stage that we don’t know yet from reading the first ten pages.” You don’t need an episode or character breakdown in your synopsis – “If you need to describe the characters outside the script then the script isn’t really working”. You do need to say what the story is about and why you are telling it - “People need to know the whole feel of the story rather than the details.” About the impending postal strikes: “We will blog about it on our website and let you know. You can always send us an e-mail if you want to know your script has arrived.”

Now for the BBC Writersroom Guide to the First Ten Pages:

• Start the story on page one, grab the reader’s attention straight away. Don’t preface, set-up or introduce story or characters.
• Format is incredibly important. Master the format and make it your own. Watch drama, see how the stories are structured. “Too many people try to subvert the format before they’ve mastered it.”
• Direct the action and the story. Write what an actor can show. Don’t direct the camera.
• Know your world and story, genre and tone. There should be a focused way in to your story, “don’t try to set up too many storylines at the beginning.”
• “Character is the most important thing.” Characters have to be compelling on an emotional level. Avoid cliche, subvert stereotypes. “Come up with people you want to spend time with. You don’t have to like or admire them, you just have to want to see what they are going to do next.” Your characters have to make the reader sweat, cry, laugh and cringe. “We spend a lot of time reading scripts that are really well crafted, well turned, but it doesn’t make you feel anything.”
• There are only a finite number of stories so you need to have a fresh, unique perspective.
• “Good dialogue expresses character.” Don’t write on the nose, use subtext.
• “You need that desire to tell a story – that’s got to be there or you can’t do great writing.”
• “We need a sense, when we get to the end of a script, that the ending is inevitable but not predictable.”
• Be yourself. “We’re looking for writers; we’re looking for people.”

Further advice on creating your best possible first ten pages can be found on the BBC Writersroom Website.

Sam Kelly and David Bishop Q&A October 12, 2009

You may remember that over the summer I went to a couple of writing workshops, one on Experimentalism for Beginners and the other on Writing for Graphic Novels. The workshop leaders, Sam Kelly and David Bishop, have recently taken part in a question and answer session with the Scottish Book Trust, which you can read here. Their advice on what gets them excited about writing and what puts them off is particularly useful.  Just for the record, my favourite word is “curl”.