Chart / June

June 17, 2020 in writing

A confession: despite all my best intentions and the conviction that I would not get carried away with myself in the wake of having a novel published….I got carried away. I allowed myself to be swept up in the wind of hubris and ended up wasting two months on writing dead-in-the-water pitches. How? Because I wrote an 165,000-word story, which I cut down to 132,000 over subsequent drafts, and I believed this was a reasonable size for my Serious Novel. I thought – just because I’d sold a few copies of a sci-fi book and seen it in a couple of brick-and-mortar stores – that I could go to literary agents and say “hey, look, you don’t know me at all, but I have this difficult-to-sell satirical thriller which is at least 10,000 words over the upper limit for such novels”, and they would respond with “Wonderful, Grant, sign here”.

This has not happened. I want to say ‘unsurprisingly’, but until the middle of May, this came as a surprise to me. I was 100% convinced this was a reasonable expectation on my part. Seriously. Unknown writer, 550 pages, satire. I only understood how unrealistic this was when I received 11 query rejections in a row stating “Yeah, we can’t sell this (in the current market)” or “I don’t have any contacts for this”.

What was I thinking? I suppose I wasn’t. I was plotting too far ahead, and I overlooked the fact that you only get to do stuff like this if you have a track record to fall back on. I do not. And so: I have spent the past month cutting and cutting and cutting. And I am still cutting. It’s therapeutic. Every word I delete is a reminder that I am no way near as good at this as I sometimes think I am and that taut & twisty is better than prodigious & prolix. And at some point I’ll be finished with it and I can move on.

MUSIC! FOR THE SUMMER SOLSTICE LOVERS AMONG US

Nick Drake - One Of These Things First
Perfume Genius - Leave
Pretty Things - Sickle Clowns
Tony Allen - Koko Dance
keiyaA - I! Gits! Weary!
Rosie Lowe - Birdsong
Janet Jackson - He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive

The Gutter and the Stars

June 05, 2020

Last Saturday I watched two events unfold online showing two very different sides of humanity. In one, a rocket successfully blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It marked the first time a crewed mission had left Earth using a US-built spacecraft since 2011. I found it awe-inspiring to watch and spent a long time afterwards thinking about what it represented. Belief, imagination and dedication. Unity between thousands people working in pursuit of a common goal. Courage, not least by the two astronauts sitting in an explosive tube called ‘Demo-2’ as it hurtled into space. I couldn’t feel anything other than pride and love at our ability, as humans, to achieve such a feat.

In another event, also in the US, everyday people exercising their right to protest were fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets, beaten to the ground, arrested. Three unlucky souls — a man in Omaha, one in St. Louis and another in Oakland — were killed. Fires were set. Property was destroyed. Violence was compounded by more violence. Rolling coverage showed hatred and fear and powerlessness and aggression without respite.

On the one hand the gutter, on the other the stars.

I find it difficult to accept that we are capable of putting human beings into space, yet many of us are still incapable of giving human beings space to coexist. I don’t want to talk about fringe groups or politicians or fundamentalists here; I want to focus on us. The good old everyday kind of folk. The ones who watch the news and shake their heads and change their Facebook profile photo to a black box. The ones who don’t believe themselves to be party to any deeper, more systemic societal problem because, well, they don’t think one exists.

The problem with systemic (or institutional) discrimination is that — by its very definition — it takes much more subtle forms than, say, a white man leaning on a black man’s neck until he dies. It is everywhere, permeating everything, but if we aren’t the ones being discriminated against then we don’t see it.

Thankfully, there is one institution we can turn to in order to observe it: that of language. In conversation, our tendencies toward systemic discrimination occasionally bubble to the fore. It’s in the jokes we make about persons less physically or mentally able than we are. It’s in the deliberately edgy use of racial, homophobic or misogynist slurs in conversations behind closed doors (common among groups of heterosexual males). It’s in the preference for a word like ‘migrant’ over ‘refugee’. It’s in passing remarks about body types, clothing, appearances. It’s in memes and posts published on social media. It’s in xenophobic rants disguised in the form of moral outrage.

I have experienced all of these examples from people I know — family, friends, acquaintances — in the past few weeks alone. I have been guilty of many myself at one time or another. Why? Because it’s easy to do it. It’s a cheap laugh, a way to draw attention, a chance to be contrarian. It’s something we barely think about (if at all). We don’t consider it part of a wider issue, and we certainly don’t connect it with more obvious examples of social persecution on show in the world. Best of all, if somebody takes offence, we can brush it off with ‘it was just a joke’. But in trivialising the remark we made, we trivialise the person(s) against whom we directed it. It works to reinforce the foundations of hatred and negativity, weaves this mistrust of the Other (whether genuine or played for laughs) into the fabric of who we are.

After the rocket launch I watched an episode of Deadwood and I realised something: though they lived nearly 150 years before us in extremely different, much more primitive physical conditions, those frontier settlers held the exact same spiritual-intellectual perspectives as we do today. Theirs was a world governed by fear, selfish gain, mistrust and hatred of the Other. So, it turns out, is ours. Despite our technological advances, our improvements in living standards, our progress in providing different groups with fundamental human rights, our exploration of world cultures and peoples, and our access to information, we have the same primitive mindsets as we did when life was much more insular. We’re still mean, suspicious, defensive and judgemental.

I would say that makes it about time for us to grow up. What we need is a revolution of the mind.

This starts and ends with ourselves as individuals. No matter how much we may want to change another person’s beliefs to fit our own, we cannot; what we can do, however, is make our views as well-informed, well-rounded and socially sensitive as possible. In many cases, this means stepping outside our echo chamber and grappling with some uncomfortable realities (such as accepting the existence of systemic discrimination). Of course, the experience may serve purely to cement our original convictions, in which case we can reasonably feel we are on the right path. Alternatively, we may find the beliefs that were once so important to us have lost their lustre or become unpalatable. We may even learn the skill so few people possess: admitting we were wrong.

In a related vein, no matter how much we may wish to help others, we can ultimately only help ourselves. This is not help in a material sense — wealth, possessions, climbing the social ladder, etc. Nor is it about the passive consumption of news and entertainment online. It is about actively nourishing the mind, engaging our imaginations, trying to recognise and understand and evolve every part of our being. That means talking to others on a level that goes beyond the superficial, reading as widely as possible, retaining knowledge rather than relying on the Internet to fill in the blanks, turning away from the vainglorious side of social media and the endless negative cycle of the mass media (the more we’re told the situation is bleak, the less inclined we are to push against it). It also means thinking twice before making a destructive remark or joke, or using certain words. I wouldn’t call this self-censorship. More like self-contemplation.

If we can help ourselves, we may have a chance at collectively lifting ourselves from the gutter.

I don’t meant this to sound like a liberal agenda or manifesto; the current battles fought between partisan political and moral philosophies are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. This is about the highest, most enlightened form we can achieve as modern humans — a primordial compulsion that has driven us from the swamps to the trees to the cities to the Moon. This is our ultimate purpose, yet by and large we still gaze in any direction other than the one to which we should be aspiring.

In her 1974 novel The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuinn wrote, “You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere”. To bring about our Revolution — one in which life is characterised by love over fear, familiarity instead of Other, common ground rather than entrenchment — we absolutely have to start being better. For inspiration, we can always look up to the stars.

5 in 5: lessons learned about writing

May 27, 2020 in writing

It was approximately this time five years ago when I was ambushed by a minor breakdown following yet another 11-hour day working for peanuts at a translation agency. Like a confident French marshal during the early days of the Napoleonic Wars, the breakdown had been amassing its forces for some time, and when it struck, it tore a hole through my paltry defences and sent me spinning to the sofa, where I was to remain for some hours. After the screams had ceased and the smoke cleared, I was left with a single word echoing in my head: Quit. I did so the next day, and I’m still pretty certain it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

What I’m not so certain about was my next decision: to write for myself instead of translating other people’s words. Actually, it wasn’t even a decision; it was a need. Have I enjoyed it? Sort of. Does it frustrate me? Constantly. Can I do without it? No, unfortunately not. I shape my entire life around it. It influences the way I structure my day, how I speak and listen to people, what entertainment I consume, whether I feel halfway satisfied or like a fraud in the evening. It has been responsible for my greatest sense of achievement—seeing my novel on a bookstore shelf—and my lowest ebbs. Five years in, I still don’t feel qualified to talk about writing in any capacity beyond offering the broadest of sketches. But I’d like to mark the occasion, if only for myself, by offering five lessons I’ve learned about writing.

I will never be satisfied and will always beat myself up

This one is hardly a newsflash. It may be endemic to all people who create something they believe in both 100% and 0% and tend towards the self-critical rather than the self-aggrandising. I did hope, though, that at some point my level of satisfaction at my work might increase from ‘modicum’ to ‘pinch’ (or maybe a punch). Alas not. It’s funny, because up until the moment a piece is published, I can declare to myself that ‘this is the best I can do and the best it will be’. The moment after publication is when my other set of eyes automatically takes over and I can only see poor word choices, verbose description, repetition, similes that don’t work (like the Napoleonic one above) and clunky dialogue. By that point, though, it’s too late to take the work back and attack it with a red pen. But then I suppose this is for the best: if I always saw what I wrote through my other set of eyes, I wouldn’t have the confidence to throw something out there in the world. And in a way it’s good to be this critical, because it means I’ll hopefully never release the literary equivalent of Be Here Now.

Having your book published is not fun

Getting By the Feet of Men published turned my hair grey. Not all of it, just some at the sides. Chalk it up to discovering a typo in the epigraph in the weeks leading up to publication, fighting for every single review, worrying about sales and hating the cover I was saddled with. There’s very little to enjoy about any of the promotion side of it. And even though my sales figures were way better than I ever expected them to be, realising how many hours had been required to sell a few hundred copies was pretty sobering. What the whole foray into the world of publishing taught me, though, is to enjoy the time when I’m sitting at my desk, bringing a story to life. Because that’s pretty much as good as it gets. The rest is crazy amount of behind-the-scenes work and disappointment and factors beyond your control.

I think I’ve found a writing style that works for me

I didn’t realise this until the first reviews came in for By the Feet of Men, but over the past five years I’ve developed a writing style, and the best way I can summarise it is: storyboard prose. By this I mean when I write scenes I visualise them as movie storyboards and then describe what I see in as few words as possible. I was recommended to do this ten years ago by a guy I used to work with in Amsterdam; I gave him a long, messy chapter of a terrible novel I was writing at the time, and he ripped it to threads before rewriting one scene using the storyboard method. It was all the more impressive given he was (and probably still is) Dutch, and wrote in a far clearer, sparser way than I did. His advice has remained with me ever since, and my writing has gradually shaped itself around the format. I’m not saying it’s instantly recognisable (Pricesque? Prician? Maybe I should change my last name), but it at least gives me something to work with.

The short story format is brutal

Here’s how many short stories I’ve written each year since I started doing it ‘professionally’:

2015: 17 stories

2016: 28 stories

2017: 18 stories

2018: 13 stories

2019: 11 stories

2020: 2 stories

Since that heady peak in 2016, when I was churning out approximately one short story every two weeks, the amount has fallen year on year to a stunning low in the first half of 2020. This isn’t due to laziness, though: it’s because I don’t think the amount of effort that I put into the short story is balanced out by the payoff if (and that’s a big if) it gets published.

A typical cycle for me would be this: I spend a week or two writing the story, then put it aside for a few weeks, revise it, put it aside for another few weeks, then revise it once more. Then I send it off to a publication calling for submissions, hear nothing for six months, before ultimately receiving either an acceptance or (more likely) a rejection. If it’s accepted, I wait another three to six months until the short story is published – online, in print or both – and a handful of people read it. And then it’s gone, into the ether, never to be read again.

That’s a great deal of energy I could be putting into something more worthwhile, which is why, starting in 2018, I switched my focus to writing essays. For whatever reason, essays seem to be read and green-lit quicker by online publications and there’s usually no fee to submit them. Plus, I have the feeling that the marketplace for creative nonfiction, critical analysis, personal essays and so on is much less crowded than for short stories – each of the five I wrote last year quickly found a home. Of course, this might just mean I’m not very good at writing short stories.

Realising which formats work for me has taken the edge of desperation out of my fingers when I sit down and replaced it with a dash of assurance. Now, instead of asking myself, ‘How am I going to get this published?’, I think ‘this is what I want to say’.

And finally…the fear of failure doesn’t go away

My greatest fear at present—within the context of writing, that is—is that I won’t be able to find a home for my next novel, Mekong Lights. After a year of promotion and sales and reviews for By the Feet of Men, I’m back to querying agents and receiving either rejections or no response at all. What if it doesn’t get picked up? That’s two full years of effort for nothing and I’ll be a failure. Or, at least, that’s how I think each time I open up an email containing the line “Not one for me, I’m afraid”. But that’s not true. Yes, I will have ‘failed’ to sell the novel and yes, realising nobody is interested in reading what I’ve written is a miserable feeling, but that doesn’t make the endeavour itself a failure. It most certainly isn’t a waste of time, because if nothing else it was two years of practice. I juggled with more perspectives, tackled a more complex plot, tried my hand at social commentary, loosened up a little with my dialogue. Most importantly of all, I enjoyed it while I was writing it and, like I said above, that’s pretty much the most a writer can hope for. Or maybe it isn’t; maybe five years is too soon to be drawing any conclusions. I’ll check back in in 2025 and let you know.

Chart / May

May 08, 2020

I was reading the introduction to the collected works of Calvin & Hobbes the other day, in which Bill Watterson describes how he dealt with the failure to attract any kind of interest in his work:

“Unemployed with no prospects, I drew up a comic strip about a loudmouthed spaceman and his dimwitted assistant, based on characters I’d drawn for a German class in high school. I sent the strip off to the newspaper syndicates, and about six weeks later, as my savings continued to dwindle, I opened the form letter rejections of my work. By the fall of 1981, I was living with my parents again, trying to come up with a different comic strip. At this point I had four years to go before drawing Calvin and Hobbes.”

Four years to go. That is an extremely long time when you’ve created so much already and don’t have any recognition to show for it (if that’s what you’re striving for, which in this case it was). And I can imagine how he must have felt: like it would never happen. Like the worlds he was creating weren’t worth a thing to anybody. Like he should give up and channel his energies into something more ‘productive’.

But that’s the thing: you don’t give up. Because you can’t. Deep down, you have a diamond-hard core of belief in yourself that this is definitely what you should be doing and that no matter how many rejections you get or how frustrated you become, that core will never be eroded.

I’m saying this because the past few months have been more than a little weird, and I struggled to motivate myself to hack out some words at the computer. The rejections started to flood in for Mekong Lights, my progress stalled on my current project, and sales of By the Feet of Men dwindled to virtually nothing. I didn’t see the point in writing short stories, and I had nothing to add to the ‘new normal’ conversation. I did wonder if my core of belief was still there. But I rode it out and now, today, I’ve just finished the first draft of my fourth novel. It’s rough as hell and full of half-formed ideas and uneven character development - just as it’s supposed to be. The point is that there’s no need to worry about whether that desire is still there. If you’re serious about what you’re doing, then it is. What’s essential is to accept that there will be times of rejection, just as there will be times of recognition and satisfaction. Just got to keep putting in the hours.

In other (somewhat related) news, I had a short story accepted by the people at Kallisto Gaia Press. I think it’s a print-only magazine. No idea when it’ll be out, but I’m pleased because I wrote the story three years ago and received perhaps twelve rejections during that period. Unlike other stories, where I put it aside after a certain number of rejections, I kept revising this one and tweaking it because I really did believe it was good. The acceptance is all the sweeter, because this is the first short story I’ve had published since last spring (though I did all but cease submitting due to By the Feet of Men requiring all my time).

Funky music for May: