Ok, well since you asked….

Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club,Survivor,Invisble Monsters, Choke, Lullaby,Diary and Stranger Than Fiction, has a theory, one which he borrowed from Bret Easton Ellis, that any writer worth reading doesn’t publish his first, or his second, or even his third novel : Bret Easton Ellis reckons that before any writer shows anyone his cretaive works he must write at least 250,000 words – and keep them firmly locked in a box labelled “My Dark Secrets”*

(* at least half of that sentence was a complete lie, by the way, guess which part).

Which is why I am particularly critical of J K Rowling. It seems as if she just sat at her computer and wrote a very long short story (with the same level of skimping-on-detail that any short story would have). Now, I know that these are children’s books, but that doesn’t mean you need to write at a particularly low level : a good children’s book (for the Potter target age range 9-14) could, in the hands of a good writer, translate to the world of adults without an adult reader feeling in any way above or beyond the words used, or, for that matter, feeling “I could do better”.

When I read vast portions of the early Harry Potter books, I knew I had done – and junked – better work. Admittedly, I was aiming for a slightly more mature, or, I prefer, more capable audience, but that isn’t really the point. A good writer would ensure that a children’s book would work for ages 9-14, or children of all ages 9-90. If you want an example of how a writer can communicate with all ages, look at Animal Farm.

When I was at University, I did a course on George Orwell. He was a contemporary writer – or as contemporrary as any on the course – and I didn’t like the idea of studying Dworkin’s punctuationally challenged, morally-skewed work. (Even consensual sex is rape according to her bile-tract called “Mercy”, which exhibits none on the reader).

Nonetheless, Orwell as a writer is excellent. Not easy, but always easily understood : unfortunately it made the particular course I was on absolute hell. There was little subtext to be gleaned from his work, he always made everything absolutely clear as day. I couldn’t do my usual thing of extrapolating ideas and imagery and turning it into 2:2 grade-winning waffle. Working on Orwell was like pulling teeth.

Anyway, after finishing University, with a head full of ideas, a pitiful dolecheque, and no Internet, therefore endless days of tedium, I locked myself in my teenage bedroom with a Amstrad 256 (in those days, Windows was in it’s infancy, it was, Just Another Operating System, one with a slight advantage over the rest, but still Nothing Fancy), and I wrote. About 160 pages later, I emerged in the blinking sunlight, wit my first novel.

It isn’t very good. So Not Very Good, I decided to print off a few copies, and then never really read it. I can’t even remember what it’s called. Oh yes, “Nowhere Else To Go”. How juvenile is that? Well, very. Though it manages to reasonably imitate/emulate the pre-millenial sense of confusion that we all lived through at that particular time, where we felt that life was changing and so on and so forth. I couldn’t really reproduce it, short of retyping every page, as the Amstrad OS is long dead, and only Dead Tree Editions exist. If I retyped it, like my other work, I would end up massively rewriting it so it would be almost good. Almost.

Incidentally, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Invisible Monsters” is actually his first ‘proper’ novel, but rewritten and massively reworked, so when it actually did get published, as his third novel, it was a noticeable step down in competency, though it did buy Chuck enough time to craft the wonderful “Choke” and yet still get away with a novel a year. A workrate that I would not envy. If I were a full time writer, I would probably publish a novel every 18-24 months, alongside frequent contributions to magazines to keep the coffers flowing.

So… back to “Nowhere Else To Go”. In effect it’s a plotless ramble of a twenty something who works in a comic shop, has a bit of meaningless sex, and one day decides to disappear… albeit, the disappearance only goes as far as him not going to work for the day, at which point I couldn’t think of an ending and left it at a cliffhanger. (Or a ledge hanger, being that there is no drama worthy of being defined a ‘cliff’ within it). I tend to think of it as being realistic, in so much as some portions of it are generally unexciting and lacking a definable plot. (In the same way that “Less Than Zero”, and the entire ouevre of Coupland, until “Miss Wyoming” is largely a plotless wonder).

“Nowhere Else To Go” was amongst my first 250,000 words. So was it’s followup, “Better Than Nothing”. At least this one had a plot, albeit a primitive one. I decided to really branch out with this one : during the day I was working as Officially “The Lowest Paid Journalist In England” – though I only discovered I actually held this lowly title this year when, on a business trip and reading a boredom-breaking copy of some entlemans magazine, a poll of the worst jobs in Britain revealed a person presumably working in the same place on the same wages. Anyway, “Better Than Nothing” was a multinarrative twenty something drama of three friends, all narrated without any precursor (so you never knew, one page to the next, who was writing), who lived in some nameless city, about their interactions, and their actions. There were a couple of other narrators, one being a depressed housewife who was verging on psychosis who had developed an unhealthy obsession with one of the male leads, and lived a fantasy life. If you must know, this was inspired by people who think they are married to popstars. Another narrator was a incompetent serial killer who occasionally abducted and murdered people : in this case a female friend of the main trio who had gone missing.

Anyway, there’s the usual tyrsts of love, lovelessness, twenty something should-mean-something-but-means-nothing sex, the type of sex that happens when you believe in the Big Big Love, but only find suburban disappointment. The sixth narrator is a dying woman, the mother of one of the characters, fading in and out of consciousness.

The day job was exhausting : I averaged 4,000 words a day of advertorial bullshit, internal politics by a series of incompetent idiots who believed that since they were the Husband-Wife Team that ran the office we were their slaves (as were paid an equally insulting amount), and often worked 60 hour weeks. Unable to quit, and with them renging on their promises to pay me an amount which I felt hesitant to take in the first place, I found myself another job as soon as I could, because the Dole doesn’t pay for six weeks if you leave willingly, irrespective of the circumstances. In effect I was being paid 67% of an amount I was hesitant to accept.

So, Steve and Lorraine Anstey, you are cretinuous cunts. No wonder an ex-employee poured concrete through your letterbox. I can’t say I was surprised.

After this, I worked at night, came home, stuck on a bad record – usually “The Second Coming”, which I loved dearly – it being the spring-summer of 1995, and typed my life away. Any fool can think of words that rhyme. I abandoned it at about the 70 per cent mark in mid 1995, thoroughly haunted by the plot of the Dying Mother.

My Mum was a two and a half heart attacks, and week to week, she looked frailer and weaker. It was too much to come home to see her dying by default over the course of years, and to travail upstairs and type it out as a fictional output.

In the summer of 97, I finished it at long last. It seemed pointless to come so far, and jump at the last hurdle. How good it was I’m still not convinced, but a quantam leap beyond the first work. There I could crawl. Now I could walk. I’d even introduced a plot. Stunning stuff, but it made for a satisfactory conclusion and an overall worthwhile work that was, frankly, not suitable for public consumption.

Finally, unpublished novel number three. It’s called “Secret World” and posits a sci-fi level plot. This one is all concept. God has retired to a village outside Coventry as a twenty-something, immortal, largely immoral playboy. There he lives a life of hedonism and disdain for the world, in a similar vein to say, a brainwashed character in The Matrix. I forget his name, but he’s played by the same guy whose in the under/over-rated Memento.

Finally he’s spurred into action by ecological disaster : mankind is due to wipe itself out by destroying a species that contains the cure for a mass plague. Mankind, having grown fat, and our enzymes lazy and unable to fight disease due to a reliance on prescription chemicals, is wiped out by a plague. The cure is on an island, and the place where the cure resides, in the genes of a small insect, is due to be demolished for holiday homes. This was largely inspired by a holiday with my parents I failed to enjoy, enforced twenty-something holidays with your parents, they book places with nightclubs, not realising that for me, a holiday involves late lie-ins, an absence of sublight when asleep, and being nowhere near nightclubs that were open til 4am. As a result I often came back off holiday more tired than when I departed.

I couldn’t work out an ending, so this one stalled at about 50 pages, when they flew off to the nameless foreign resort. It worked well as a short story, but nothing more.

Oh, and then novel Three-And-A-Half. It’s on my website. I’ll post a link.

And finally, my fourth novel. “Wake Up Dead Man”. I’m all written out for now, so maybe I’ll post about that later.






- posted by Mark @ 1:12 pm