Letting Go

Madrid.

Just looking at the name on cheap holiday search engines made me tingle with excitement. South European heat, blue skies, sun pouring down onto warm squares. I booked to fly the very next day.

I’d never thought of myself as impulsive: I like to consider things through, work out each possible line of attack before I make a move. It’s part of my training as a novelist: you have to be certain that what you are going to do works before you spend time doing it. Are the through-lines of the plot coherent? Would Character X act in such a downright filthy manner? So to book a flight leaving the very next morning to a city in a country I’d never visited: outrageous! (Okay, it was only Madrid, not Montevideo or Mogadishu, and okay Madrid is probably very safe and familiar to someone familiar with any other European city, but the point still holds, the act was impulsive, somewhat rash and possibly foolhardy.)

Madrid though.

I landed late. The flight out was late, and I didn’t know where I was going. I found my hotel a little after 11pm. I caught the metro into the city and disembarked at a metro station that sounded like it might be central (it wasn’t) and walked the streets for two hours, uncertain of where I was going – no destination, just the thrill of experiencing a new place.

Over the next few days I explored El Prado, El Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Royal Palace, and walked more of Madrid, choosing a street out and just following it. This kind of leisurely, uncoordinated holiday perfectly suited my mood. It was antithetical to my personality. Sometimes we just need to let go, followed the unplanned trail. And that leads me back to writing…

When I logged back online on Monday morning I discovered that the Red Planet Productions Prize had launched again: its doors are now open for new scripts. I’ve been thinking about, and writing potential scripts for this very prize most of the year – moving between them, trying to discover which one is supreme. On Monday morning a new idea hit me – and I think it’s a killer. But I’ve no time to plan it, to mull on it: I’ve just got to write, follow the street out, keep running, until I hit the end and hope it works.

Letting go. Booking a holiday for the very next day. Writing by the seat of your pants. Do you know how thrilling that can be?

A Memory of a Place

An interesting post on Jason Arnopp’s blog today – read it first, then read my response.

I love stories like these. I’ve not been to a Cypriot bar like the one he describes, but I could smell its drink-stained walls, hear the familiar hubbub of patrons, and see my way into his dingy, unsafe but much loved flat. I read a story like that, and I have a whole world bubble up in my mind. I see a short story, a setting, there is so much potential. It makes me think, I would have loved an experience like that – and I think that because it takes distance to realise how much those days truly mean.

Living in rural Wales my whole life, there have always been a few pubs I can go in where everybody knows my name, the drink I have, and what I do. The town where I currently live there are three pubs where this is the case. I can go in them just once a month and they remember. I know all the regulars and can have the same drunken conversations again and again. This is why my story differs to Jason’s: he speaks of Sam’s Taverna with affection because it is a place where he felt safe, where the maddening constraints of the real world could not knock him down (or at least so easily). For me, my equivalent(s) of Sam’s Taverna – though they are good places – are constraining because they are safe. I am unchallenged in them, same as Jason was, but the outside world is unchallenging too. I work part-part time in a supermarket while I write and try and sell my work – a novel, a screenplay – and though the writing is tough, it is fun, the supermarket job is just dull. The familiar routine of that job and these pubs where everybody knows my name and knows what I do, it is cotton-wool, it makes me feel safe, when really, I need to be challenged.

This leads me to suspect that though sometimes we all need that place we feel safe, we’re better off striving out into the unknown, challenging ourselves, trying to become better than we are.

On his blog Jason asks his readers to talk about their Sam’s Taverns: this is mine:

My Sam’s Taverna? The place that comes closest was a pub called the Cwmanne Tavern. Unlike Sam’s, my tavern is still there, in mid-Wales, on a country road between Lampeter and Cwmann. It changed hands three times while I was a student in Lampeter, but with each new landlord it remained my pub. Lampeter, if you’ve never heard of it (and few have) is a town with a population of less than 2,000 people, 20 miles from the next nearest town, a bus service that stopped after 6pm, and when I was there a place where there was no TV signal. You had to make your own fun. It also has one of the smallest universities in Europe (before it merged), with a live-on-campus population of less than 800. Really, you had to make your own fun. It’s no wonder for a town of just 2000 people, it has 9 drinking establishments! It used to have 11…

During the first landlord’s tenure (2000-2003) we were often in there until dawn, singing songs while he played the guitar. We had a pretty strong pub quiz team then – me the only student, the rest the local farmers – and we drank far too much beer. Walking the half mile, bleary eyed through the breaking dawn, empty fields either side of me, and no traffic on the roads: it could almost have been the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, or be the greatest day to come.

The second landlord (2003-2006) changed many things – for the better. He was a Dutch man and he bought in bottled beer from all over Europe with names I could never say. He filled the jukebox with Johnny Cash and Nina Simone and Dire Straits – and he put me in charge of the pub quiz nights. We’d quiz, then play pool until 3am, and every Tuesday night sing along to Nina Simone’s Sinnerman – all 9 minutes of it – and then drink some more. I picked the best quizzers in that pub and we ended up battling the Eggheads on BBC2 one Bank Holiday in 2006 – we lost, but it’s those kind of things that make the memory of a place great.

There were bad days too: I fell out with that second landlord over the pub quiz I hosted. His wife shouted at me when I asked a literary question – “nobody likes literature,” she said, “nobody reads books any more.” This in a student pub. Because they didn’t pay me to host the quiz, and this being not the first argument about having questions about literature in the quiz, I stormed out. I kicked the door on the way out. My bootprint in the shattered wood on the doorframe is still there today. I over-reacted, and was rather drunk, but she was the one out of order. People might not read as widely as they once did, but everybody knows who wrote Frankenstein, right?

I’d written a novel about a girl who was a regular in that pub – and here’s proof you can know a place intimately and yet not know it inhabitants – I saw her there all the time but barely spoke to her. I was desperately in love with her and so could never speak to her. We both circled around in that pub, never really knowing one another. I told her, one drunken night, I had written this novel in which she featured. She demanded to read it, and so I had to let her. She admitted afterward she wanted to read it so she could laugh at me: instead she found herself moved. “It’s not me in these pages,” she said, “But I’m honoured if that’s what you see in me.” The novel was published as a print-on-demand novel a few years later, and though I’m not sure she ever read it, she, that novel, and my memories of my university days are all intangibly embroidered into memories of that pub. It was a great pub.

The final landlord changed very little, and I still loved it, but I had finished my PhD, and it was time to finally leave (2008). I’ve not been back since, but I visit every now and again in memory. I suspect I will write about it one day. I suspect it is still as great as my memory makes it out to be.

W. Somerset Mauham, 'The Summing Up' (1938)

W. Somerset Maugham wrote ‘The Summing Up’ in 1938. He was sixty-four years old, and his greatest literary achievements – ‘Of Human Bondage’, ‘Cakes and Ales’, ‘The Moon and the Sixpence’ amongst others – were all behind him. The world in which he lived was about to enter into a bloody war, and society as he understood it as a younger man had changed irrevocably. At was at this crossroads in his own life and the life of the world that he felt the need to sum up all that he knew.

‘The Summing Up’ is a blend of material: it is autobiography, writer’s guide, and philosophical treatise. Late on in the book he writes, “The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past… is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries.” Somerset Maugham has become one of the great figures of our literary past, but when one reads his books his world retains familiarity, though the days he describes have long passed. I could hear his voice as I read his words. He could almost be a contemporary.

This is not a book for all. As autobiography it is distinctly lacking: one will learn little of the details of the man’s life, though one would gain a slim understanding of his philosophical leanings. As a writer’s guide, it is also distinctly lacking: his advice seems not to extend much beyond read, and read widely. He contends that the majority of people have not the skill, nor the inclination to be great writers, that they fear the graft required of Lady Muse. And as a philosophical treatise, it is distinctly lacking: We are given a whistle-stop tour through Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche and Somerset Maugham’s explores elements of their teaching but provides little else. And yet, the sincerity of his writing provides the work with gravitas. It reveals a man facing up to mortality and to the end of a career. It has that tang of bittersweet fulfilment with life. He admits he will write more, but the house is already built. Life is coming, as it must, to an end.

A Blogging Return (Yes, Another One!)

Okay blog, I admit it, I’m a crap friend. I set you up, fill you with high expectations, only to dash them all. But I’m back. And hopefully for more than just one post!

So what’s new?

I wrote - and failed to sell –a CBBC pilot – something of which I’m still proud. I’m convinced the BBC Writersroom only rejected it because of a two scene similarity with Back To The Future. Their rejection letter singled those two scenes out more than any other – but beyond those scenes they were full of praise – great characters, cinematic presentation, snappy dialogue. They did feel I hadn’t quite got modern 16 year old speak down perfectly at all times, but that was a more minor quibble. Nevertheless, I still think this pilot has great potential. I’m thinking of adapting it to a YA novel.

I wrote – and failed to sell – a CBeebies pilot. I didn’t want to write for CBeebies, but the opportunity was there and so I had to go for it. I think the show I came up with was fun, but a little under thought and somewhat diffuse in presentation. Was it a studio bound thing or an outdoors thing? Was the human in charge or the puppets? It needed more work, and more time, than I could give it. It did allow me to write a musical number though, so that was fun.

I wrote – and have currently placed with the BBC Writersroom – a radio play. Entitled ‘Quake’ it is a love story about beginnings and endings and crosses two continents but is set over just 45 minutes in the life of one family in one café. It is has humour, romance, bitterness, and joy. I’m proud of it. I hope BBC Radio 4 buy it, produce it, and air it. I know you’ll love it too.

I wrote – and am trying to sell very soon – a BBC3 science fiction/fantasy pilot. I’m happy with the work so far. It needs another few drafts before the Writersroom can see it. It has action, drama, evil monsters, and a kick-ass murder in a bathroom. I hope one day you get to see it live.

I wrote – and need to rewrite – a BBC1 serial killer thriller. It’s got good characters, an fascinating central drama, and a killer twist that I just love and is the reason I want it to be made. So viewers up and down the land can have the pleasure of scraping their jaws up off the living room carpet come the end of episode 5.

I wrote – and need to rewrite – a film script. A British film, about a indiscretion by one teenager that rips apart his life, and his family’s life. It asks questions about crime and punishment in the twenty-first century, and has a very tender love story at its heart.

I am still writing the literary novel – and have been for some years now. It’s still without a title. But I know how it ends now. You better have the tissues ready.

I have written a shaky first draft of another novel – a commercial thriller set in the States, which has chases, gunfights, and a diverse cast of characters trekking through wilderness. It gets bloody. People die. When I get around to rewriting it, I hope I can sell it.

So what hasn’t changed?

I’m still single. I’m still living with family. I’m not getting any younger. I’m still going to far too many pub quizzes – I’m even hosting one again now.

What are you promising me?

That I will sell something. I will earn hard-earned cash for my writing. Hopefully the BBC3 pilot and the literary novel and the radio play… I try not to ask for too much, but for these three things I must.

My final promise, dear blog, is to not leave you for so long. Perhaps, who knows, I may even be back tomorrow.

One Day (2009) David Nicholls

One Day (2009)

David Nicholls

David Nicholls first came to my attention through the film adaptation of his first novel, Starter for Ten. I always meant to read that novel, when memories of the film had faded a little. Then I heard, in early 2010, about his new novel, One Day. It seemed everybody was talking about it: book groups, TV shows, bloggers, journalists. I read the blurb. Not for me, I thought: chick-lit, too soapy most likely. I think I was partly envious as well – might I not want to write this sort of thing? I dismissed it as something I would never read.

Skip forward to March 2011 and I was sitting in a writing group, talking with a young woman about books we loved. She declared One Day the “best novel I’ve ever read.” I’d been hearing this praise from women a lot. What was it about this novel that hooked readers so quickly and profoundly? I fired it up on my Kindle and set out to discover its secrets.

One Day tells the story of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, students when we first meet them, on their last night in Edinburgh. They are, we soon learn, perfect for each other – but it will take them fifteen years to finally get there. It charts their relationship over one day each year, the same day, St Swithin’s Day.

The format initially seems distancing: how will we care about a character when we get such short fragmented insights into their lives? Somehow David Nicholls does it, and does it effortlessly. His prose appears basic – no fancy literary flourishes – but the prose hides depths. One Day becomes a wonderful testament to friendship and to love, but it also swims down deeper, and meditates upon loneliness, failure, parenthood. It is a novel that encompasses life, and it is that quality that makes it great. For One Day is a great novel, it is certain to become a contemporary classic, and it would not surprise me to see it on bookshelves a hundred years from now, on another St Swithin’s Day.