My Top Three Writing Quotes (part one) - Joint Post

Karen Bush - visit website

I make no apology for offering all three of my top writing quotes from a single source: Terry Pratchett, who is, quite simply, a genius.

“To be a writer you’re going to have to read a lot – shitloads in fact. So many books that you’re going to overflow. You’ve got to keep your mind open to all sorts of influences. You’ve got to sit down for hours at a time in front of a computer. And you must make grammar, punctuation and spelling a part of your life.”

“There is one thing that I get asked all the time by aspiring writers who contact me. They say ‘I keep starting things; I don’t know how to finish them. I don’t seem to be able to find the time to write. I don’t seem to be able to get my ideas down on paper.’ What I always say is ‘Consider, just consider for a moment, that although you want to be a writer, being a writer may not be where your particular genius lies.”

“I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.”

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Lynne Garner - visit website

I use quotes in my creative writing teaching all the time. I've discovered someone else has already said what I want to say, so why try to reinvent the wheel. Here are my three of my most used quotes:     

"Write the book you want to read"
From the book 'Steal Like An Artist' by Austin Kleon

"When writing about war, write about one man's war; when writing about peace, write about one man's war."

Anon

"The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don't mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it's simply true. The The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning"

Joyce Carol Oates 

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Dennis Hamley - visit website

"How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" 

(EM Forster) 

"Writing is a struggle against silence." 

(Carlos Fuentes)

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

(Leonardo Da Vinci)

Or, if you prefer:

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

 (Paul Valery)

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Susan Price - visit website  

I love Terry Pratchett! - But I'm also a huge admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and was always

struck by how accurately he nailed his descriptions, his characters' reactions, everything. And then I came across this quote by him, which I always try to remember:

And for a last word: in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make failure conspicuous.

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Do You Want an Agent and Publisher? – Chris Longmuir

You’ve finished writing your book. It has an original plot with plenty of twists and turns. It’s well written. It’s a page turner. You’ve put your heart and soul into it, and it’s as good as it’s possible to be. Plus you’ve had it professionally edited, and critiqued.

          After climbing down from cloud nine, you start the hunt for an agent and/or a publisher. You consult the Artists and Writers Year Book, and make a list of editors and publishers who handle your type of book. Then you send your baby off with a professional covering letter. In fact you’ve done everything by the book, followed all the advice, so you’re bound to be successful sooner or later. Yes?

          Well, I’m afraid in most cases, unless you are exceptionally lucky, the rejections will start to bounce back. If your book is as good as you think it is, these will most likely be what are known as rave rejections. You know the kind of thing – “We love your book but I’m afraid . . .”, “Loved it but not what we’re looking for”. I’ve even had, “Loved it, but not 101%”. It’s that last 1% that’s impossible to achieve.

          So, what’s going on? Well, it’s simple really. Publishers are businesses, and the accountants are probably the most influential people in these businesses. So, what they do is look at the potential of your book to make money. If you’ve published before they look at your sales figures, and I’m afraid in these hard economic times, unless you’ve sold trillions, you’re on a loser. If you are a new author, they look to see if you are a public figure, someone with a name famous enough to sell books. That’s why there are so many celebrity biographies and cookbooks. After all, everyone’s heard of Jamie Oliver, and Katie Price AKA Jordan. And of course the agents follow suit. They know that no matter how good a book you’ve written, the publishers aren’t going to offer for it, for the reasons I’ve stated above. Besides, they’re all overloaded with submissions from the hopeful writers out there, who seem to be increasing year by year.

          So what hope do the Joe Bloggs, writing their first magnus opus, have in the profit seeking business of publishing. The publishers and agents know that a first book, no matter how good, is unlikely to sell many copies. Someone in the publishing industry told me that the majority of first books don’t sell more than 300 copies. That’s not a money spinner for the publishers, nor the agents, so invariably the result of the submission is either a common or garden rejection, or one of the rave variety. If you get the rave one, don’t fall into a pit of despair (sorry for the cliché), look on it as validation that your book is good and worth reading.

          Luckily, over the past couple of years, authors have had another avenue for publication, the ebook. So take your courage into your hands, invest in a professional edit, and cover, and leap into this brave new world of epublishing. I know I did it, and I’ve never been sorry.

Chris Longmuir

http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

Falling In Love (All Over) Again by Catherine Czerkawska

San Sebastian, La Gomera

I'm working on a new version of an old back-list novel. I began by thinking it would involve typing up the manuscript, revising as I went along, but it soon became obvious that it needed more than that. Major changes were in order. The book was originally bought by The Bodley Head and published by Random House a long time ago. I think the central story is fine, but I’ve matured as a writer. Just as well, really. When I reread it before starting work on it, my chief emotion was a sort of horrified embarrassment and NOT, I might add, embarrassment at the significantly erotic content. It was more a question of writing technique and not the other sort. What, I kept wondering, was I thinking about? More to the point, what was my editor thinking about?

Happy days on board Simba

When I look at the novel now, I can see so many elements of it which need work, not least a confused and confusing perception of point of view. It began as a tale told from a limited third person point of view.

It’s a story about Margaret Sinclair, in her thirties, newly divorced, shy, rather innocent and a little depressed. Desperate to get away from Scotland, she secures a job in property sales on the Canarian island of Tenerife. My editor at the time suggested that we also needed to see things from the perspective of the other main character, a Canarian called Luis. She may have been right about that (I'm still thinking about it) because (a) this is a story about a cross cultural relationship and we need to know what is going on in the head of the other half and (b) musician Luis comes from the small island of La Gomera which is central to the story, so his background is both interesting and important to the plot.

Back then, and although feedback after publication was good, I don’t think I did it very well. To be fair, it isn’t easy. It’s the kind of thing I wrestled with in The Amber Heart where sometimes we needed to be with Maryanna and sometimes with Piotro, but not both at the same time. I think, eventually, I got it right in that novel, moving between the two without too many clunky changes, but learning how to handle it was a steep and very long learning curve. Now I need to go back to my Canary Isles novel with all the benefit of experience.

I reckon I also didn’t do it very well because we were in something of a hurry. If the novel had been published by the (old, distinguished) Bodley Head, there might well have been a modicum of nurturing. But because the publisher was immediately bought over by Random House, it was published differently and with a garish cover. The novel was and will remain a sexy read. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it was a bit OTT, a bit too ‘80s’ – like the cover - in no good way. And why did I spend so much of it telling the reader what people said instead of having them actually say it? Beats me!

A close friend, a whole generation older than I am, has said to me that the central story is still good and vividly filmic. I hope she’s right. But I knew immediately I started working on it that it needed to be retold. There’s another thing about it: I can remember a phone call from the girl who was involved with publicity when it was first published. ‘I fell in love with Luis,’ she confided. ‘I mean really fell in love with Luis. I’ve never ever felt like that about a fictional hero before.’ Clearly I’d got something right then.

So what am I doing now?

Apart from listening to/watching this, on a loop (yes, Roz, it's definitely part of my Undercover Soundtrack) I’m wrestling with point of view, and making it work, making it better.
I'm writing a lot more dialogue.
I’m working on the sexy bits, making them better. (This is fun, have to admit.)

Above all, I’m turning the basic story into three new and different novels, which involves a lot of extra writing, as well as drastic changes: The Golden Apple, (which was my old title because the one thing I really like about it is the title), Orange Blossom Love and a third novel called Hera’s Orchard. I’m planning to publish the first one in June, the second in the autumn some time and the third at Christmas, if I apply myself.

I’m also falling in love with my hero all over again. It’s a strange thing this writing love stories. You have to be a little bit in love with your characters, warts and all, to be able write about them. It doesn’t just apply to love stories either. When I was writing The Physic Garden, I had to crawl inside William Lang’s head and stay there for a very long time. I was passionate about William, emotional about him, even though The Physic Garden is a story about friendship and betrayal and by no means a romance. I felt for him in my heart as well as my head. But Luis was a dimly remembered affair and I had to rediscover him, find out what it was I liked about him all those years ago, find out what it was about him that made that young publicist fall in love with him so comprehensively.

It has been a surprisingly slow process. There's a part of me still hankering after Joe and Helen from Ice Dancing, to the extent that I know there’s a sequel to that novel kicking around somewhere in my imagination. And some part of my head is still back there with William Lang in 1800s Glasgow, in the physic garden of the old college of Glasgow University.

But I’m getting there. Luis is undeniably attractive. That's why Margaret falls for him against all her cautious instincts. He plays the guitar and sings. He’s impulsive, sensuous, fiercely proud and when all’s said and done, a wee bit too tempestuous for poor Margaret’s comfort. You know what? When I went back to this story, I felt the same way. Like when you meet an old boyfriend and wonder what you ever saw in him.

Sitting on board in the sun, writing. 

When I first drafted the story – like Kathleen Turner in The Jewel of the Nile - I was sitting on board a boat in the sun, writing, and I was madly in love with the Canary Isles myself. It’s a story full of life and sunshine and music and that’s kind of what I need right now. I always liked Margaret, quiet, sweet, sensible, put upon Margaret, with her hidden depths. Now I’m getting to know Luis all over again. Falling a little bit in love again. I think. I hope. Or as one of the traditional Canary Island poems which run through the novel would have it: 
‘I love you because I love you.
Nobody tells me what to do with my love.
I love you because I feel it
deep in my heart.'

When a promising setting doesn’t provide inspiration – Elizabeth Kay

The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions blank spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace. The Romans and mediaeval cartographers used to write Hic sunt leones (here be lions), for unknown territories. There’s one instance of Hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) on The Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from about 1510. So what was that about – Komodo dragons, or fossilised dinosaur bones?

Hunted by Elizabeth Kay

I was into dinosaurs long before they became popular – in fact, I don’t think my mother even knew what they were. Someone had given me a book called Animal Life of the World, a 1930s compilation full of wonderful chapter headings such as Death Dealers of the Deep, Queer Servants of Man and Hunters of the Air. And there, amongst them, Big Game of Other Days. Clay models, photographed in black and white and resembling over-endowed rhinoceroses, placed in realistic dioramas. I thought they really existed, probably somewhere in Africa.

            Once I learned about evolution I realised the error of my ways, but brontosaurs and allosaurs had already found a place in my heart and Conan Doyle’s book was the adventure story of my dreams. I did think the premise a bit unlikely – a sheer-sided plateau, isolated, unexplored, full of extraordinary creatures? Where could that possibly be, in this overly accessible world of the recent past?

And then I went to Venezuela.

These table-topped mountains really do exist, and they’re called tepuis. They were the ones that inspired Conan Doyle, and there are still some that haven’t been climbed.  You can see why. The Angel Falls tumble from one of them, and we climbed to the foot to swim in the pool at the bottom. It was a treacherous journey, over tangled tree-roots and ankle-turning stones, and that was the easy bit. The sheer face would have been another matter altogether. Landing someone on the top would have been very risky, due to the dense vegetation. You wouldn’t even be able to lower someone from a helicopter, as they’d probably fetch up in the canopy with no way down. But what a gift for a writer. The sort of place where anything might exist, and anything could happen. And despite the gung-ho imperialist anthropocentric storyline, I don’t think anyone’s exploited that environment any better than Conan Doyle.

            I’ve frequently used a setting I’ve experienced in my travels as a starting point for a story, as you remember all the smells and the tastes as well as what you see and hear and touch. So when I went to Galapagos I was armed with a camera and notebooks, fully expecting to come back with a story I couldn’t wait to write. And what happened? Nothing. I still haven’t written anything about Galapagos, even though I went there almost three years ago. I incorporated my Costa Rican impressions into the beginning of The Divide, and amalgamated all my African experiences into Hunted. But the place I thought would be the most magical of all has resulted in zilch.

            I’ve wondered a lot about this, and these are my conclusions.

            Galapagos is now a huge tourist destination. It’s strictly controlled, and with good reason; the flora and fauna are unique, and invasions from other places could be devastating. Sniffer dogs patrol the arrival area at the little airport, searching for seeds of alien species. Even boat trips between the different islands involve rigorous checks. You are limited as to where you can go, and wherever you do go there are going to be other people. Although the scenery is remarkable – particularly on South Plaza Island – you couldn’t get lost on it. And on the bigger islands, such as Isabela or Santa Cruz, you’d never meet an animal that hasn’t been photographed a thousand times. Even underwater the sea lions that buzz you, the turtles that swim lazily alongside you, the iguanas that feed on the sea bed – they’ve all starred in numerous documentaries, and you might well believe they had really good agents.

       

I can’t help thinking that the creature bursting forth from John Hurt’s body in Alien was inspired by something gruesome like the ichneumon fly. Nature had all the best horror ideas first.
          In other words it’s all beautiful, exotic, and different – but the unexpected is in short supply, and it’s the unexpected that is meat and drink to a storyline. Your back garden and a stereoscope are more likely to reveal something that hasn’t been seen before, as long as you don’t have an aversion to invertebrates.

            Technology has a lot to answer for, I reckon. It may have given us excellent tools like the stereoscope, but no sooner has someone arrived in some obscure part of the world than they’re posting their photos on Facebook, and uploading their videos onto YouTube. Television has turned the depths of the ocean and the tops of mountains into familiar territory. The private lives of dangerous beasts are common knowledge. No longer can you lose your hero unless you have an elephant trample his mobile phone, or a serial killer trash her SatNav. And if you want something new in the world of natural history, you need to look small. Insects maybe, or diatoms and protozoans.Or spiders.We live on an overpopulated planet, and things can only get worse. As we eat up all our resources, our imaginations become victims too.

Perhaps this is why so many writers opt for fantasy, science fiction or historical scenarios. Even the fifties is a better place to be than the 21^st century.

            I’m going to have to find somewhere less publicised than the Galapagos, I think. It’s no accident that Mongolia provided the best material, as it’s not a holiday destination that occurs to many people. Any suggestions? Apart from North Korea, that is.

NOTHING TO SAY by Dan Holloway

One of the things I've heard said most often is that modern literature has nothing to say. I guess that's the thing every generation hears most. And if you were to take a look at so-called cultural indicators like the Granta 20 under 40 list, you would be excused for concurring (no, I won't link to it because my use of the conditional "if you were" is not intended as an exhortation). When I asked Rebecca Wait, author of the really very good The View on the Way Down, just out from Picador, what she thought was the greatest 21st century novel not yet written, she gave the excellent answer "I think sometimes the greatest novels are the ones that seem incredibly weird and surprising when they’re first published." Obviously, having just written a novel comprising wholly of numbers

(click that pic there to download it for FREE) I was mightily encouraged to hear that.

But,to be honest, I think she has explained in a nutshell why every generation has critics telling them they are ideologically bankfrupt. And she has also explained in a nutshell why it is imperative for people to keep publishing the "incredibly weird and surprising". I think as self-publishers we so often forget that applies not just to a mainstream we so often dismiss for not doing it but also, in our endless quest for 5 star reviews and qualification for websites that allegedly sort out the best of self-published books by using star ratings as a mark of quality (if I can guarantee you one thing it is that in 40 years' time, when the game-changingly great self-published books of the early 21st century are discussed in cultural history classes, it is that not one of the books on those lists will be able to be found on websites that do readers' the favour [I can almost hear a Dickensian "doff me cap, thank 'e kindly sir, I'm only a humble reader" when I say that] of seeking out the best for them).

Anyway, that brings me to the pluggy bit (don't worry, I hope the controversy levels stay resaonably high but I am so excited about the next bit - and my own book - download it. It's FREE. It's WHOLLY WRITTEN IN NUMBERS - that I shall save my swingeing assault on self-publishing gatekeeper sites for next month). What I love even more than writingis the chance to show the world the amazing talents that *are* currently bubbling away under the literary surface, and one of the ways I like to do this best is by publishing and holding installations and events.

And I am delighted to say my new project, NOTHING TO SAY, is now being launched. My intention is to create a literary equivalentof the legendary Freeze exhibition, a snapshot of a literary moment in time, a moment that captures a wave that is about to crest as it prepares to rear up on the shore of our collective consciousness. There will be a series of very exciting events culminating in a week-long exhibition in the basement of The Albion Beatnik (now officially the internet's favourite bookshop - see this!!). Do check out the project's website for full details.

But what I really want to talk about are the books. I am publishing 6 startlingly fabulous limited edition collections and they are available for pre-order now. There are just 25 copies of each collection in the limited edition print run. Make sure you don't miss out on yours. To pre-order your copy of any (or indeed all) of these titles, simply Paypal £6 per title to songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com and add £1 each title for UK postage or £3 for postage anywhere in the world outside the UK, and stating which collection(s) you would like and your address by 17 May. At today's exchange rate that's US$13.82 incluiding postage and shipping to the US, CA$14.02 to Canada, AU$13.86 to Australia and 10.66 Euros to Europe.

These books are proof that something marvellous  is happening in contemporary literature. They are as distinct as could be imagined - the fractured artwork of Andy Harrod, the filthy surrealism of Jared Joseph, the unsettlingly classic Kiran Millwood Hargrave - and yet all of them have a common sensibility. A disquiet with the status quo. A need to say more, to utter a sentiment not yet spoken, and a burning ambition to place themselves at the centre of a conversation that is about to happen. These are 6 of the most remarkable voices you will hear. As a generation we may have NOTHING TO SAY,  but I would urge you to listen hard, because like the universe-void in the moment before the Big Bang it is about to explode into something marvellous. Oh, and anyone looking for a cover - the image I have used is by the extraordinary Eleanor Leone Bennett. She has just been named Young Environmental Photographer of the Year, to add to an absurdly long roll-call of credits for someone not yet approaching the end of their teens. She has also done a lot of work for the superb Nine Arches Press, and many other cutting edge literary publications. I would urge anyone to speak to her.

 

Paul Askew's Animal Magnetism is a beautifully surreal journey through love and loneliness in the company of Wthnailesque narrators and a delicious assortment of poetic animals. His work has the fragility and lightness of a paper lantern but it also has a glorious sense of the absurd, and comes in equal parts T S Eliot, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and internet poetry.  

Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue
I ordered a date
and was given the future.

I don’t know why, but I’m imagining you
listening to Charles Mingus and smoking a Gauloises.
Everything changes with the dusk;
your dress, your hair, your lipstick, the way you move.
In deeper light, you become the evening,
just as you had been the day.

The song’s still playing as you undress,
turning into night. You click your fingers
and I come.
And now it’s November.
We’re huddled in coats, drinking whisky;

the fireworks are done. We have a clear sky
and a fire that neither of us will let die.

wide-shining is a collection of retellings of classical myths constructed with filigree precision. Like a Dali painting, each poem is a thing of beauty and yet each leaves you with the disconcerting sense that something you can't quite pinpoint is ever so slightly wrong. What makes these poems so startlingly fresh is the precision of that ever so slight imbalance that lifts these poems from the classical to the absolutely contemporary. 

Persephone

Most mornings I can barely stand to look at this
something-like-happiness misting our periphery,
an epiphany spat out like pips from our tongues,
all our half-sung songs stringing along behind us,
and you, dark god, perfect weight above me, telling me
you love me and me drop dropping droplets through your hand,
my stolid body turning liquid as sand and running our fierce current
fast as silver-quick fish, my flick-flecking lips biting like teeth
as I shoal beneath you, held so tight I can barely breathe.

The shift of the seasons sinks us,
and at my brink I tip through
summer autumn winter spring
– all the fast-spin of cold and heat –
fells me as I fall back replete,
my heart beating pomegranate red,
jawing my mouthful of seeds.

  

Dirty White Everything is what happens when the poetic blank generation gets dressed up for a goth night out. The ultra-modern post-consumerist sweats of Brett Easton Ellis are delicately fused with the lace and velvet of fin de siecle Montmartre to deliver an unforgettable journey into a dark night of emptiness and exquisite pain. 

Catching Flies

Train drags itself back to Swindon,
back legs a burden, wounded animal.
Sitting backwards, wrenched
all fingernails and heels and
Fay Wray King Kong scream,
spitting lipstick saliva at authority.
I am dragged home back to
awkward adolescence,
the floor is sticky
with discarded lollipop stick.
Dragged towards
Job Centre Tuesdays,
orphaned shopping trolleys,
trees blooming Tesco plastic,
garish carpet and
knick-knacks that only ever remind you
of buying them.
I look out the window
see a dead seagull on the tracks,
look back and notice
a spelling mistake
on the safety card.
The man sat beside me
looks like my dad
sleeping with his mouth open.

  

Andy Harrod fuses media more perfectly than any other writer in the UK today. Blending art, photography, conceptual typography, poetry and prose with a musical sensibility that earworms its way inside you as you read, spending time with this collection is like watching in horror and amazement a skilled surgeon take the top off your head and lay every part of your mind out in front of you. It is impossible to read this book without coming away with a profoundly changed sense of yourself

.

 

mammal is unlike anything else. Structurally it is, well, a mammal, a living creature constructed from limbs and a head and a torso of poems that are not quite separate but not quite parts of the same whole, bleeding into one another but separated by silk-thin membranes. Its content is surreal, transgressive, humorous, disturbing, rhythmic, complex, like watching the slow dissection of a living creature unfold before your eyes. 

Now i am a jaybird.

i live among the copies
behind my life is violets
the violets copy in the brushgrass behind
the violents copulate & scrub behind the brush
we fuck & fall away like brushstroke
Cheryl & i

brushgrass like an oil painting
brushfire we fly away the waitress
the waitress with child
the waitress scatters us away with glasses
vermouth glasses & ghosts.
pink lady stains from a pure clear mouth
a strain mouth pretty pure
Our beaks are black.
dark our beaks at our backs
are our black tails hedged & angled
we wrestle with the angles
math across the door & lambsblood
we spill the oil & the bread
we get us wet
we fill us with what
with what

fill us with what we want.
lord give us strength to copy
fill us with what we want
we want
to copulate in love
to violate to blank
to violet.
to violet
to copy in loveto xerox the deity
xerox the deity
Where’s Cheryl.
she blisses at the slightest provocation
she’s blissing on the ground with others like us
like us, i am on the bough with others
others like me
brothers mothers
nothing the others
as we utter with pleasure & ruse
repetitive herds of blackbirds rue
as we utter with dainty want
it’s us we want
we want us.
we want our daily want
us we utter with deity want
give us our daily bread
give us our olive oil
pus the violets
boil the violets

 

 Imagine an earthquake destroyed Manchester and buried everyone and everything in it. And imagine in 700 years' time an archaeologist uncovers a box and in it are unanswered love letters from someone no one knows to someone no one knows. That's the closest I can get to describing the sense of voyeuristic heartbreak experienced as you read this beautifully, painfully intimate and needle-sharp collection. 

Designs Charged Wearable

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll seem very important to you.
One day I will mean nothing to you at all.

When you forget about me, your mind will
Congeal in cool, wax clumps
Like a switched-off lava lamp

You don’t know it yet but one day I will seem very familiar to you.
One day you won’t recognise me at all.

You’ll be like a man-trap in the un-walked woods
I’ll be the leaves that disguise your entrance
Nobody will ever fall in
And together we’ll be the world’s worst kept secret

One day I’ll make a lot more sense to you.
One day you’ll wonder how you ever understood me, but
You don’t know that yet.

If I ever get scared of the dark again
I’ll ask you to walk me upstairs
Shadow puppet plays at midnight
Might make me feel better.
I’d make a great stay-at-home-widow.
“The dark is so dumb” you will tell me
“And the dead are so ignorant”

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll be your phone wallpaper background
One day you’ll delete my phone number.

You may one day find yourself taking my
Poetry books to the cancer shop
Along with two of my dresses
After tiring of explaining the logistics of
Any given Pixar film to me

One day I’ll get around to subscribing to your feel.
Would it be wrong or would it be hilarious
To make a snow-cock today?
I tried to work an allusion to GK Chesterton into this poem

But I soon lost interest,
But
You don’t know that yet.

Home Thoughts from Abroad by Jan Needle

Thoughts from a visit north of the border. The house party consisted of Cally Phillips, George, Hector, Dude, Jan and Viv. Call it an authorial thinktank, or brainstormer. There were three guitars and a tin whistle in the croft (!), and we didn’t play a note.

One of the subjects me and Cally talked about a lot was the continuing problem of self-division. So keen was I to meet and pick the brains of a genuinely computer literate writer that I paid half a million quid for a single rail fair from Manchester to somewhere north of Aberdeen. I won’t tell you where exactly, because Hector and Dude would die of excitement if they had any more visitors to run around and slobber over, and I won’t mention that the cost was well offset (as my kids might say) by the gift of a magnificent Subaru to drive back to civilization in.

Cally and George, near the Spotty Bag shop.  Cold

Two points before I continue. One, I’ve never agreed with the bizarre rule that you must never use a preposition to end a sentence with, and Two, I’m lying about the price of the rail fare. Booked in advance, it was twenty five pounds. And the Subaru, much to my astonishment, did about thirty to the gallon. The whole thing would have been ridiculously cheap and successful if I hadn’t then tried to insure the vehicle for a year when I got home. Confused.com (the lady with the funny hair and a cornucopia under her skirt) wanted just under two grand! I’ve since been told by my daughter and other young things that Confused.com is far and away the dearest on the market, but I still haven’t dared ask any other company. Bloody television advertising.

And so to self-division. Ms Phillips, as regular readers of AE well know, is a powerhouse of energy and commitment. Her emails to me are often timed long before sparrowfart (that’s not rude; it’s Australian for unpleasantly early in the morning) and emails constitute about minus nought per cent of her daily literary output. Her house is scattered with the corpses of worn out computers, and George has to sustain himself with a large and wondrous collection of single malts. But the first thing we agreed is that the era of new media authorship is the era of fragmentation. Which boils down to this:

Jan: Cally, tell me how one writes books, and gets the fact of their existence known to more than seven people.

CALLY: How many hours are there in your working day? Do you get up before or after dawn? Do you go to bed before or after the bats have hung up their batboots for the night?

Jan: Cally, I grow old. I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I must stop work after the Archers, obviously. The emotional strain of trying not to strangle Pip (at least metaphorically) becomes too great.

Ms Phillips laughs. A merry laugh, but tinged with sadness. Or even existential despair.

CALLY: You men are so self-indulgent. You have to school yourself. Do you have two madly energetic dogs? Do you do all the cooking, housework, snow clearing, cat sitting for the neighbours? You must divide your time up. First the important things, then the less, then the least. Pull yourself together, Needle.

Jan: But writing takes it out of me! By the time I’ve done a thousand words I want me mum! Sorry, I mean me bed. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sometimes I just can’t go on…

So Cally showed me how to set up new blogs, and talked through how to get people to read them, and explained this, and explained that, and cooked the tea, and for all I know knocked off a thousand words as well. Oh, and took us up to Banff, and introduced us to the Spotty Bag shop (the best shop in the world), and walked us through the woods. She even set up the new blog for me, and we made a list of things I’d do on it as soon as I got back to England and had a sleep. And I was inspired.

But we did agree the whole thing was bordering on the ridiculous. When I had young children, and overworked myself as a writer and had a proper (!) job as well,  my kids started calling me Uncle Daddy. And in those days my publishers did (or said they did) all the promotion and stuff like that. And now it’s down to me.

Cheshire. On the canal boat five days later. Warm

And our biggest area of agreement is that one can do too much of the self-promotion thing. And one needs a way of assessing whether it is worth it. I honestly spend far more time trying to be noticed than I do writing books. Sometimes I spend more than an hour a day on Facebook. More than an hour, for God’s sake!

What for? Who am I kidding? How many ebooks does it sell me?

The upshot of that delightful two days in Scotland, with those delightful people and their deliciously bonkers dogs, was this – we need to write more books. Not blogs, but books. If you write more books, more people might read them. If you write about the books you’ve already written, if you write about them till you’re blue in the face – the people who like them will say ‘Come on, then? Where’s the next one? We haven’t got all day, you know.’

So here I am now, three weeks after Scotland, sitting at my table – a better person. Since I got back I have processed half a new book to go electronic, although I’ve not had time to start an original yet. And I’ve failed to polish up the details of the proposed new blog like I promised Cally that I would.

She’ll understand. Because she knows I think it is a good idea. But we’re also both sure of this (pretty sure): Don’t tear yourself to pieces getting noticed. Get the real work done.

It was good to meet you, Cally Phillips. And your gang. It was an inspiration. 

Lancashire. Bloody freezing...

BIG PS. It turns out that another bigger brain than mine, Sue Price, is even now working on the publicity problem, and has also got some egregiously good ideas. We'll all be rich, I tells ya! Where would I be without generous women?

PPS I'm part of a small bookfest at  the Albert Club in Manchester  on Sunday June 2. It's a great place - tennis, bowls, snooker, culture. And me! Everybody welcome. http://www.thealbertclub.co.uk/

Following his track - Dennis Hamley

          In my last blog, I suggested that it was time I stopped faffing around and got on with some proper writing.  So I’ve done just that and have now passed (I hope) the point of no return with The Second Man From Porlock,  my latest attempt  to  get the  old, failed novel about Samuel Taylor Coleridge right at last and out of my system.  

STC.  The man himself

          Trying to write novels centred round real people presents many difficulties.  They aren’t biographies: conversely, they can’t be pure fiction.  It takes a braver writer than I am to dare even to think of writing a book like Milton in America, Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful ‘What if?’ novel, which turns what might well have been Milton’s fate into something which actually happens.   This makes for a stunning piece of literary and historical understanding, not to mention  empathy with the poet himself. 
          It takes craft of a high order to write Stevenson Under The Palm Trees, Alberto Manguele’s fascinating novella about RLS’s last days, psychologically intriguing, with the Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon manifesting itself in RLS himself and involving a seemingly actual event which I can’t find recorded anywhere but which is crucial to the story.   Ackroyd’s Chatterton and The Lambs of London  dramatise and interpret mainly known fact.  So did my earlier STC effort, though with one mighty elephant in the drawing room which was, though not pure fantasy, a very unlikely supposition which I might have got away with if there hadn’t been so much intervening (and unnecessary) faction.  Instead, I made a seven-legged monster out of it and rightly paid the penalty.

          Well, I’ve thought a lot about it since. The problem is: how to meld the stuff of fiction into a huge structure of known fact in such a way as to make a convincing novel where we can legitimately ask ‘What happens next?’ without upsetting either the undeniable progress of STC’s life or the probabilities of his reasonably well-understood psychology.  Or, to put it simply, I don't want anyone telling me it's rubbish.

          There’s a central image in my mind - and real life - from which everything springs.  Coleridge is in Sicily, walking up the green lane lined with poplar trees which leads to the opera house in Siracusa, his heart pounding and his mind aflame with emotion composed of anticipation, lust, fear and guilt in equal parts. And this could, as TS Eliot said,  ‘lead us to an overwhelming question.’  

          To get to grips with the past you have to follow it round a bit.  Kathleen Jones knows this better than anyone in Authors Electric.  To follow STC’s track, you have to move from Ottery St Mary to London and the old Christ's Hospital, to Cambridge, then Bristol, Nether Stowey and the Quantocks, Germany, the Lake District, Sicily, Highgate and plenty of places in between.  Well, I know Cambridge well enough and have followed him round Bristol as well as I can.  Sadly, where Coleridge went in Germany is a region which I don't know, but it doesn't matter too much for this story because its only significance is that he should have come home a lot sooner. I’ve been to Nether Stowey but not enough yet and I need to get to Culbone Combe:

… that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er under a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

• 

Looking down Culbone Combe over the Bristol Channel.

          But I have stayed in Greta Hall, his house in Keswick, in the Coleridge wing itself.  It's now a guest house run by Jeronime Palmer and her partner.  It's brilliant.  They have a real feel for the Lake poets, their families and their history, even going so far as to hunt down and eventually find in Kent a magnificent fireplace which Robert Southey installed but which had long been removed.  It was wonderful to stand in STC's study, see through his windows 'a whole camp of giant's tents' and agree with him that there could not be a room in England 'which commands a view of Mountains and lakes and Woods superior to that', across which 'mists & Clouds, & Sunshine make endless combinations, as if heaven and Earth were talking to each other.'
          But Greta Hall was not good to STC.  It's often very hard to sympathise with him because he brought most of his troubles on himself through invincible self-centredness, quite a lot of which he showed while he was in Keswick. Here he became estranged from Sara, his wife, and embarked on his platonic passion for another Sara, Hutchinson, sister of Wordsworth's wife-to-be.  Here his health worsened, even though he still ran up and down mountains. The opium took hold even more than before and, to try to break his habit, worried friends rallied round to send him to Malta and better weather than the English Lakes provided. He reached Malta and, after some unexpected hard work, he took a holiday in Sicily.  And here he had a big adventure.

Greta Hall.  STC's wing is on the other side.  Robert Southey commandeered, cuckoo-like, the main house for his own family. 

          He came home in a worse state than he went.  Years later, he arrived in Highgate for the last chapter of his life.  He found lodgings with the pioneering Dr Gilman and thus became the first drug addict to enter rehab.   
          In April we set off for Pond Square and The Grove, overlooking Hampstead Heath and close to Highgate cemetery.  This was wonderful.  Although the pond in Pond Square has disappeared long ago, the atmosphere is still redolent of STC, Keats just over the Heath and their long, talkative walks together, and the scores of literary friends who visited the great man. The Jaguars, Range Rovers and Mercs parked outside the houses hardly matter and 'The Flask' is still a lovely pub which serves great beer. STC was living before my eyes.

Moreton House in Highgate, STC's first lodging in Highgate.

Dr Gilman had to move to a bigger house down the road because STC had so many people coming to see him.

          Then, a week later came our long-awaited trip to Sicily. This was unforgettable.  Agrigento and the Valley of Temples, Palermo. Monreale (and a lovely long lunch with my one Italian fan, his girlfriend and brother), Taormino, a little adventure on Etna and, for me the centrepiece, Siracusa, the heart of my novel.  The image of the green lane and the resinous poplars on blue, limpid evenings has stayed with me powerfully for so many years.  But this green lane only seems to exist in books about STC. I've often tried to place it on maps.  There's an opera house in Ortygia, the old town crowded higgledy-piggledy on its tiny island, but there's definitely never been space for a green lane there.  Nor is there a trace of an opera house on plans of the new town and I've found absolutely no reference to it in anything I've read about Siracusa. So when we entered Siracusa I half-feared that the green lane was about as real as 'Kubla Khan': the opium must have got the better of him again. Which would not have been surprising - the fields round Siracusa were covered in poppies. Sicily then was smothered in narcotics for the English trade, so it was hardly Coleridge's ideal destination.
          But Siracusa is a wonderful city - the Archaeological Park, with its Greek theatre, Roman amphitheatre and the Ear of Dionysius, is unique and Ortygia is superb.  We went by boat all round the island, taking in the Arethusa Font and the Castello Maniace and then started the tour of Ortygia.
          We had a wonderful guide, Renato, a professor of literature with, I found later, a love for and huge knowledge of the English Romantics.  He was knowledgeable, eloquent and dramatic, as every guide should be.  And when I asked him afterwards where the Siracusa Opera House with the green lane was, his unexpected answer was, 'Not in Siracusa.'
          He told me it was demolished in the nineteenth century.  But yes, it was indeed approached by a green lane with all the space it needed because it was in the Archaelogical Park close to the Greek theatre - which figures because STC was staying at the Villa Timoleon, just next to the park, the home of Leckie, the British Resident in Siracusa.  So he wouldn't have far to walk and wouldn't have to force his way through the chaotic little streets of the Old Town.  He could savour his emotions without distraction.
          It's incredible just how much that little piece of information has altered my whole conception of STC's visit, the atmosphere and the image.  It means that I've got such a better feel for the event.  I know now how this beguiling city could have affected him and how many possibilities spring out of it. I can write the whole episode with confidence, without feeling my tongue bursting through my cheek. The novel's heart has changed.
          So I'd better get on with it.  

Renato tells me the opera house was somewhere near here, in the Archaeological Park.  I wish it still was.

          I'm going to end with a draft of chapter 1.  It introduces a completely fictitious character who will have a decisive role to play without interrupting STC's known chronology.  The defacement of 'Kubla Khan' which he finds is real enough.  I've seen it for myself.  I first knew of it through a passing mention  in Freddy Brittain's book It's a Don's Life, published in 1972 by Heinemann.  'Written in a contemporary hand,' says Freddy.  Freddy, a classics Fellow, was a man for whom the adjective 'donnish' could have been invented and knew everything knowable about Jesus College.   I followed up the defacement from there and the more I think of it, the more I'm sure it's more than the gripe of a dissatisfied reader.  So for me it's become a central image as important as the green lane in Siracusa.  But which STC contemporary wrote it, eh?
          I hope you enjoy the little taster which follows.

From:   
                   The Second Man from Porlock

1

The Discovery

In an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters and happy grove of quiet, ever-honoured Jesus College Cambridge.

From Biographia Literaria

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge is a place of secrets.   To enter it is to walk straight into the distant past.  Handsome bookstacks are connected to the roofbeams by wooden balusters.   The stacks are arranged in bays, each illuminated by a stained glass window.  Each window bears a scroll proclaiming in Latin the subject of the books housed in each bay – Physic, Canon Law, Civil Law, Theology.  The earliest cataloguing system.

       As now, so then, when this was the only library in the college.   On a dark, cold  evening in February 1822, shortly before Evensong in the chapel and dinner in Hall, shivering readers huddled over the tables in flickering candlelight.   A library clerk, Scrivener by name, was browsing the shelves.  He had come up to Jesus College from the grammar school in Hertford and was forced to work to eke out the meagre money which kept him at Cambridge.   Curiously, he took out a thin, green volume, a recent addition to the stock, and opened it carefully.  The pages had been recently cut, the paper was crisp and white and the book had the exciting smell of newness which he had come to love. The book contained three poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Scrivener knew about Coleridge.  He had been an undergraduate at the college thirty years before.  His career there courted notoriety rather than glory, but as a poor scholar he too had worked as a library clerk.

Scrivener skimmed through the poems, vowing to read them more attentively later.   “Christabel”,  “The Pains of Sleep”, “Kubla Khan.”  Of course, he knew the poems Mr Coleridge had published with Mr Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads: who did not?   But these were new to him.   “Christabel” – a wild, romantic story and, he noticed, unfinished.   “The Pains of Sleep” – he shivered as he read, for it spoke of agonies and horrors in the loneliest hours of the night, surely the work of a tortured soul.  And “Kubla Khan” - a fragment, a dream, hypnotic: he almost swayed to its subtle rhythms.

      Then he stopped short.   His eyes widened, first in surprise, then horror, then surpassing interest.   Underneath “Kubla Khan” was a comment  pencilled in an angular hand.   

The writer of the above had much better keep his sleeping thoughts to himself, for they are, if anything, worse than his waking ones.

         His first thought was that of the conscientious library clerk.  This is a disgrace.   The second was of the embryo critic.  What an elegant sentence, expressing a trenchant thought memorably. The third was that of the earnest scholar.  What does it mean?  The fourth was the obvious one.  Who wrote it?

        The college librarian was at his desk reading a much older, bulkier book.  Scrivener scurried up the library holding the poetry collection open at the page.   “Dr Vavasour, sir,” he whispered urgently.   “See here.”

          Dr Vavasour took the book and looked at the pencilled scrawl.    His mouth pursed with anger.   “This is a new book, hardly on the shelves six months.  Who has dared to deface it?”

         Scrivener felt the guilt of the insecure person who fears he will be unjustly blamed.    But Dr Vavasour knew his library clerk better than that.  

“Surely no undergraduate would write such words,” he said, with unaccustomed forcefulness.  Scrivener wondered if his anger was altogether in proportion to the crime.  “Mr Coleridge is too much admired by the young.  He is one of the moderns.”  Modernity was obviously anathema to him.

         “Though I admire Mr Coleridge, I prefer Lord Byron and Mr Shelley,” said Scrivener.

        Dr Vavasour looked at him over his spectacles.  “As for poetry, Mr Scrivener, you would do well to confine yourself to Ovid and Virgil.”

         “But sir, who would cast such a slur on one whose works are so fine?” 

        Dr Vavasour peered at the handwriting.   If not an undergraduate, then who?   The College Fellows were fond of writing tetchy memoranda to each other: he knew their hands well.  This belonged to none of them. Yet some still remembered Mr Coleridge and the disgraceful scene he made in the Senate House during the trial for sedition of William Frend, sometime Fellow of the college.  And how he fled from Cambridge and his debts and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoon Guards under an assumed name, only released because the army thought he was insane and his brother paid them a great deal of money.  And how drink and opium, together with a talent for laziness approaching genius, ruined a promising mind and sent him down without a degree.

        Yes, several colleagues were well capable of writing such a comment.

        But the handwriting was stiff, angular, almost unnatural.  Suddenly Dr Vavasour had an inspiration .  Disguised.  Who by? Why?

“Leave it with me, Mr Scrivener,” he said.  “I will not stand for spoliation of my books, even if I agree with the sentiment expressed.  I shall get to the bottom of this." 

But though his enquiries were exhaustive, he never did.

*       *       *       *

Scrivener’s rooms were on First Court, opposite the  gatehouse and the library.  He did not then know that they were directly above where Coleridge had lived. After dinner in Hall he returned to them, lit candles, stoked up the fire and then sat at his small desk to think.            
    He knew he was no genius.  Back in Hertford he was regarded as a brilliant young fellow.  But Cambridge was an extraordinary place where he had found out what real brilliance was.   He had also found extremes of stupidity, drunkenness and sheer bloody-mindedness which he had never dreamed of. Sometimes, he was puzzled to note, all four co-existed seamlessly within the same person.

     Could Mr Coleridge have been like that?  Surely not.  Everyone knew that his friend Mr Wordsworth, at Cambridge some years before Mr Coleridge, certainly wasn’t. People at St John’s College regarded Mr Wordsworth as one of their brightest stars.   Most at Jesus seemed to have nothing good to say about Mr Coleridge.   Except, grudgingly, that he was a fine poet.  Even then, some dismissed him as a plunderer of other people's best thoughts: a mere copy-cat.

      Still, Mr Coleridge did have debts at Cambridge, he did drink too much, took opium and, it was whispered, sometimes went with whores.  Scrivener shuddered to think what they would say back in Hertford if he were guilty of such practices. 
     He knew that Mr Coleridge had written poetry at Cambridge and won the prize for Greek verse.  He felt a twinge of shame at the ineptitude of his own recent efforts to win the same prize.  Yet he wanted so much to be a poet.  He had been working on a poem only that morning.  Perhaps he should carry on with it.   He found the sheet of scrawled-on and liberally crossed-out paper and reread what he had written.

Lines Written  on Jesus Green
As in the dusky silence of the groves,

Through tiny valleys and past green retreats,          

With easeful ripple flows the shining stream
Along its hidden course,         

So flows my life, unnoticed in the throng
Of chattering seekers-out of worldly fame.
Always the observer, never the observed,
And thus...

      And thus - what?   The question made him want to throw the paper on the desk and cover it with books so nobody should see it.   The encounter in the library had unsettled him.   He looked at his unfinished poem.  Always the observer, never the observed.  Yes, that was his trouble.  He must not let this place overwhelm him.  He must be positive in all he did.   For a start, he must burn this lame verse and never write such self-pitying rubbish again.  And then he would …

Yes, what would he do?   His mind was a foggy blank.  The pencilled comments on “Kubla Khan” seemed somehow to have possessed it completely.  

The writer of the above had much better keep his sleeping thoughts to himself, for they are, if anything, worse than his waking ones.

He carefully wrote down the intrusive sentence underneath his failed verse.   How terse.  How economical.  How precise.  How silly it made his poem look.  With a sudden shock, he realized that he could be the first person to read the sentence since it was written.  Was that important?

Yes, it was.   Was he meant to see it?   Did it concern him in some way?  But how?  Sleeping thoughts?  Waking thoughts?    Was “Kubla Khan” a sleeping thought?

Scrivener had read Mr de Quincey’s book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which had been published just three years before.  It was all the rage, in Cambridge as everywhere else.   It said that opium caused dreams more vivid, real and wonderful than anything in ordinary life.  This thrilled others: it frightened him.
      Was that what the mysterious defacer meant, that  “Kubla Khan” was an opium dream?  The words had danced compellingly through Scrivener’s brain, the visions of the Abyssinian maid with her dulcimer and the poet with flashing eyes and floating hair (“Beware, beware:” the words  were sonorous bells in his mind) feeding on honey-dew and drinking the milk of Paradise were so vivid, real, wonderful – and, yes, frightening.
    He was about to scrumple up the paper and throw it in the waste basket. But a strange thought stopped him.  If he was meant to see it, the sentence might contain a message on which he must act.

      What could it be?  He peered at the words through narrowed eyes.  He said them aloud several times.  Once, in case there might be some hidden code, he said them backwards.   But they remained enigmatic.

      It was time for sleep.   He undressed, put on his nightshirt, climbed into his bed and blew the candle out.

        Yet his mind wouldn’t stop working.  When he finally slept at three in the morning, he saw the strange, angular handwriting crawling across the page and mocking him in his dreams.  When he woke, his head ached and the puzzling words were still there.

*      *      *      *

Jesus College Cambridge in the days of STC and Mr Scrivener.