The Tongues of Men

Apart from the shocking news that the refitted Co-op round the corner started stocking cinnamon whirls again before withdrawing them a second time (the heartbreak!), I thought I’d start my first writing week of the year with a roundup of news to get the fingers working for another week of editing.

Remember Anjali Joseph and Christie Watson? Anjali’s Saraswati Park won the Desmond Elliot Prize, awarded to best first novel published in Britain. And Christie, not to be outdone, bagged the Costa First Novel Award for Tiny Sunbirds Far Away and is in the running for the overall Costa prize this month.

Not bad. I like that Christie is not giving up nursing. It’s difficult to run two jobs but there are rewards too. Both ways. And the combination means she can write intelligent things about nursing like this in the Guardian: NHS reforms must give nurses time to care.

Suffice to say you should read both those novels. And congratulations to another friend, Jon Cullen, on the publication of Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open. I have said it elsewhere, as well as down the pub (the Old Spring, astoundingly the most middle class pub I have ever set foot in), but here’s another shout for some great ideas and all that hard work. The New Scientist seemed to like it.

What else? Still no one knows the future of publishing but I found these predictions interesting. They imply that publishing is affected considerably by technological development, down to specific devices. They also paint a more cheerful picture for authors, suggesting that ebook royalties and copyright terms will improve this year, and that self-publishing is going to work for more and more writers.

I’m trying something new by going to a writers' group. I met a playwright at the boys’ football who told me about it. (I love Cambridge. The week before I was chatting to one of the other dads about combi boilers). They meet to talk through two or three people’s writing each week. Sadly it’s during the day, but on my writing weeks I can give it a shot. It will make a nice change to sitting in a room on my own all week not knowing if what I’m writing is bollocks or not.

Finally, you should apply for World Book Night to give away 24 copies of one of these marvellous books. Now for some editing. Laters.

Ah, remember the giddy days of early summer, when a Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were crowned anew, cherished Fitzbillies Chelsea buns were rescued from oblivion and I finished the first draft of my novel? Well, sort of.

By first draft some people mean an initial version that they would be happy to show to agents and publishers. What I mean is that I filled out the plan I had for the book.

Early on I plotted the story out in detail, both the current action of the book and the backstory. So when I wrote all of those chapters, I felt rather elated. In software parlance, the novel is feature complete. I sketched a skeleton for the book and now it has flesh on all of its bones. I projected a book of about 100,000 words and the draft comes in at over 105,000 (about 300 pages if you think in those terms).

It was a huge relief to get that done. It is by far the longest thing I have ever written. By over ten times. I jubilated just to achieve a novel-length word count. First big question (can I actually compose a cohesive single work of such length?) answered.

However, after the feature-complete stage comes the testing and bug fixing and user interface design and spit and polish. Or, to use the skeleton and flesh analogy, I've stitched together a Frankenstein's monster but parts of it are ugly as hell and the heart is not beating just yet. My creation needs LIFE!

So with a surgeon's knife, a brewing electrical storm, a bug-eyed hunchback and a limitless pile of cinnamon buns, I am tackling the following:

Continuity
Who knows what when? Does anyone notice that it's Christmas in the middle of the book? Is everyone the right age to be doing the things they're doing? Legally? What happened to Jonathan's coat? Had the Internet been invented when I need it to be? Does it sound like the same book all the way through?

Authenticity
Some scenes in the book are placeholders, glossed over just to get to the end without losing momentum. Now I'm going back over them to make them appear real. Last week I was researching how to put on tarty makeup and treatments for breast cancer. I made some assumptions that just don't hold up, and changing them has a knock on effect for other characters and other scenes.

Drama
Is the level of dramatic tension right throughout the book, building steadily to a climax? Not just overall, but in all of the narrative threads – will readers care? Is the pace right? Is it clear enough what all of the characters want and why they want it? The secondary narrative thread in particular needs augmenting to give it a slower burn.

Style
This is the wood and the trees. It's the voice. The character's voices. The texture of the language; the extent of the similes. It's not repeating the word 'tent' too many times. It's the shape of the sentences and paragraphs and chapters. These are not things that can be inserted mechanically but they can all be improved, by standing right back and by zooming in forensic detail.

Each change has implications for the whole book. Each time a scene becomes more authentic the list of things to check in continuity grows a little longer. I tell people that I'm editing but it is more like rewriting. I'm deleting scenes. I'm writing new chapters. I'm restructuring, I hope without damaging the foundations.

And overall I'm trying to keep a view of the whole thing. Is it any good? Why should anyone care? Is my monster alive and terrorising orphans and blind people at will?

I've been writing The Tongues of Men for over three years now, which seems like a lot (unless you're Jonathan Franzen), except that I only take nine writing weeks a year. 30 weeks is not long to write a novel with literary pretensions, especially when you have to continually dip in and out of it. I'd love to be nearer to finished by now yet I'm happy with where I'm up to and that the book is still moving forward, even when it feels like going backwards to get there.

Tonight was fairly typical.

In from work and straight to the table to wolf something down before taking the boys out to swimming. Most nights we do eat together, the clamour of which has to be suffered first-hand to be believed. Last night I said, "the baby's quiet" at teatime. Mary pointed out that he'd been yelling for the last half hour, only I hadn't heard him beneath the shouting of the other three.

But Monday the kids eat early. And only the toddler greets me as I come through the door – the others are grouped around a computer game. So no stories about Club Penguin or school – just an 18-month-old desperate to play football with the yellow ball that the neighbours have thrown back over the fence. We exchange a couple of passes in the kitchen, then he follows me to the table where he copies my every move. He sits in the chair next to mine, frequently almost falling off, eats my pizza crusts, sips my drink.

We've only got 15 minutes so I shout to the boys to get ready. The four year old is barred from accompanying us since he made so much fuss by the pool last time. We can get from our house fully clothed into the pool with trunks in 10 minutes. I'm grateful we haven't got girls.

Girls. The boys change slowly afterwards in the hope that they'll bump into two of their favourite female friends who come for the later lessons. They try to impress them by doing head-over-heels down a grassy slope. It seems to work.

By the time we get home it's almost bedtime. We squeeze a bit of dinosaur origami in and then I promise to read to the oldest three if they get ready on time. It is impossible for them to stand around the sink and not wind each other up. Tonight it's all about accidentally drooling toothpaste on your brother's hands.

We start a new book by torchlight: The BFG. We have to read a good few chapters to discover that the giant is in fact friendly, so that the four-year-old won't be afraid of Bonecrunchers all night. By the time we've sorted out bedding and drinks and prayed and hugged and answered the sincere questions that they always ask at this point to prolong my presence in the bedroom – I shut the door and trudge down the stairs.

I'm thinking of all the things I'd like to blog about, all the ideas I've jotted down, and the embarrassing yawn of time since I last posted that makes it harder to just publish any old post. There’s also SmyWord that desperately needs updating, as well as Verbatim. But Mary wants to talk, about arrangements for later in the week, for the weekend, Christmas presents, which is fair enough as we've not had a chance to catch up yet.

I finally sit at the computer, but then a child starts yelling, so loud it might wake the toddler. I race upstairs to prevent that happening, knowing it will only be a case of my tummy hurts or he's copying me, which it is. Only with an added bout of singing. There is nothing I can say to prevent this occurring each night. It happens again, and this time I play the "next time someone gets moved to our bedroom" card, which seems to stick.

Back to the computer, but typing is difficult. The space bar is jamming. The beautiful Apple keyboard has long lost its virginal whiteness to scrawls of biro and the imprints of filthy fingers, but it's the fruit toast that is more annoying because it gets under the keys and stops them working. I discover just how hard it is to clip a space bar back on again.

So, the space bar is back and bouncy, and the C, V, B, N, M, <, >, and both command keys are back in place too. I decide to write about why I haven't been blogging so much, about how I'm still working on the novel and it's going well, but how most evenings by the time the kids are settled and everything else that needs doing has been done and those other things talked about I am so tired that I'll sink into the sofa while Mary plays yet another episode of some formulaic show like Escape to the Country or Masterchef because there isn't enough time to watch a whole film. Although I draw the line at The Apprentice.

And this is the blog post. I managed to spew it forth without any further interruptions. Masterchef is chugging through its banal liturgy in the other room, but I wanted to share my excuse for not writing so much of late. It's a flimsy one, I'll grant you, and I'd be the first to remind myself that JG Ballard wrote prodigious amounts while bringing up his three children single-handed. Although I'll bet he had a nanny. And there was no Club Penguin in those days.

So there we go: a little taste of evening leisure chez nous. I want to pick up the blogging here again. Next week I have a writing week so I'll let you know how the novel is progressing. I know some of you actually read this so thanks. Time for bed.

I met a guy at the Content Strategy Forum 2011 who is a content strategist like me. He works for a website agency in London, and has young children. And like me, he also writes his own material outside of work: screenplays and stories.

There was, however, one key difference between us. Unlike me, this guy has already had his work published, or rather, his story has been made into an animated film.

By a little company called Disney.

After his idea was picked up by an agent who turned out to be rather good and his story became an international kids' film, he had a run of eight years of being a screenwriter. Eight years of doing what he had only dreamt of – what lots of other aspiring writers would kill to be able to do.

And there we were, talking at a conference.

He was happy with his job, happy having kids even though it wears you out and you fall asleep in the evenings instead of accomplishing all the great things you imagine you will do with the time when they're finally in bed. His attitude towards writing was tempered by the realism of having been there already, but he still wanted to create more filmable stories in the future.

We only talked a little over lunch but I realised there was so much to learn from someone like him. And although I should probably have asked more questions about how he got to work with Disney in the first place (luck and a good agent played significant parts it seems), I admit I was more intrigued by the other end of his brief career.

Why did it fizzle out?

He told me, in a roundabout way. I was talking about when new ideas compete with existing work. The closer I get to finishing my first novel, the more ideas I have for the next one. And the one after that. And the kids' book I've already started writing with my boys. I've got a rough structure mapped out for novel number two, with character sketches and a couple of experimental chapters written to see how it feels. I've got a solid conceit for a third novel, and the other day between Cambridge and Kings Cross I wrote a synopsis for a fourth, out of the blue, inspired by a throwaway remark in a book, about a man who doesn't realise that he is in…

This is the problem. I'm not going to tell you what it's about. Because the more life I give to these ideas the harder it becomes to finish the lumbering old first book. The one that's not sexy any more. The one that needs redrafting and editing. 95,000 words that need squaring up to one by one.

I have come close to jacking it in and starting the next book. I know it would be stupid but there is so much promise in the new idea. In the blank page. What if this first one is just a limbering up exercise, and the next idea is the one that will actually have the legs to succeed?

The screenwriter nodded his head. He knew exactly what I was talking about. 'If I could sum up the reason that my writing career ended when it did,' he said, 'it was because I gave too much attention to the new ideas instead of focusing on the job in hand.'

Sobering.

So I'll be looking for a good agent in a while. And buying enough tickets at the tombola to give luck a fair chance of coming my way. But in the meantime, the only thing to do is to stop thinking about the new ideas and crack on with shipping the first. Focus!

After New Year the Christmas decorations were still up on the ward: a small tree in reception and a cladding of greetings cards on the notice board. Davina arrived this time to find the woman asleep so she picked up the magazines from the floor and placed them back on the table. She filled the glass of water from the cooler in the hallway. She tried to look at the edition on top of the pile but kept reading words and scanning pictures without processing them, returning to the top to start again, expecting something to stick, burr-like, then giving up. She looked at the parrot picture above the bed for interest but met the same glossy indifference. She had glanced in that frame a hundred times before and still did not care what was in it. She walked the few steps to the window and surveyed the view.
Half of the prospect was taken by a facing hospital building, the other half by a sight across the city, both of which were made dark, almost silhouetted, by the white sky. A few windows in the building opposite were lit up, uncurtained little rectangles, a handful with people inside. In one ground floor window a cleaner or doctor, someone wearing a green scrub suit, sat at a desk and wrote. In a window higher up, nearer to her eye level, Davina saw a woman’s back, white, with only a thick, black band of bra strap to break the naked aspect. The woman reached back and unhooked it. The girl looked away. When she returned her gaze somebody else was drawing the bed curtain across. She noticed the strip light behind her reflected in the window.
Davina stepped back towards the bed and drank a little of the water. She drank half, then all, of the glass. She went into the hallway to refill it from the cooler. The male nurse was there, speaking quietly to a colleague. She walked past him, up to the desk, out of earshot.
‘Is it possible to choose which nurses look after someone?’ she asked the ward manager behind the counter, who was checking back between some notes and a monitor screen, only answering after several seconds.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If there was someone who a patient would rather not have change them and stuff – can a patient choose?’
‘No,’ said the manager, giving up on the screen and facing Davina squarely. ‘Unless the patient would like to do it herself. Have you any idea how busy we are? Never mind with Christmas leave and winter flu.’
‘What if I make a complaint?’
‘Do you wish to make a complaint?’
‘Well, that depends what happens if I make one.’
‘What happens,’ said the ward manager, ‘is my staff who should be caring for people like your friend end up doing more paperwork, being asked stupid questions in stupid meetings, and being taken away from the ward where I need them most. Usually, for absolutely nothing at all.’
The male nurse walked into the reception area and behind the counter to a box of files. She asked again, ‘Do you wish to make a complaint?’
‘Forget it,’ said Davina.
As she walked away the manager called after her:
‘You people come in with your baggage but we’re just trying to do our job.’
In the room the woman was moaning, her eyes flickering. Davina placed her hand on her bony shoulder and she woke up.
‘Oh God,’ she said.
‘It’s okay,’ said Davina.

From the first draft.

Yesterday The Guardian website featured some found poems from Sarah Palin's emails. They weren't particularly good. Marika challenged me to do better.

So here are a few. None of them is good enough for Verbatim Poetry, except the first, perhaps, for the dinky rhymes. Turns out that Marika was right – Sarah Palin does lack poetry.


THE TANNING BED

And the old, used
tanning bed that my
girls have used a handful of times
in Juneau? Yes, we paid
for it ourselves. I, too,
will continue to be dismayed
at the media and am thankful you
and Sharon are not part of the strange
going's-on in the media world of today.



NEITHER COLD NOR DELICIOUS

And no, we didn't
participate in eating
the moose meat.



CAN SOMEONE FLAG

Can someone flag
the lie in the blog
sexy highway talk among governors
that claims Trig
was in the fender
bender
with me
and he
wasn't in a car seat
on my commute.
Sheeeesh.



HI MOM

I'm smiling at u
in the camera.



ACCESS

I am a hunter.
I grew up hunting –
some of my best memories
growing up are of hunting with my dad
to help feel our freezer.

I want Alaskans to have access to wildlife.



METAPHORICALLY ECLECTIC

I hear from the worker bees in the field
that Industry is on a roll against us
on a rampage because they had no idea
they wouldn't get their way on all issues.
We don't win ball games merely playing defense.



I'M FREE

I'm free – noon
on – to do
ktuu



ALCOHOL FREE

With so many kids and teens
coming and going in that house
especially during this season of celebrations
for young people, proms, graduations,
I want to send the message that we can be –
and the People's House needs to be –
alcohol free.



SUPPORT

If the new cheese manufacturer
wants us to do anything with them
to help kick off their venture
(if you think it's a good idea)
please let Kyle know
we can come cut a ribbon or something.