How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

(Jokes will follow.)  I was going to title this post ‘how many writers is too many writers?’  but somehow my brain slipped sideways to a lightbulb joke. Typical.

Seriously though, what I’ve been reflecting on are all the writers I know who don’t write. Contradictory statement? Well no. They have written in the past. They may have studied writing. They go to writing related conventions etc. They identify as ‘writers’. But they don’t write anymore.

Life gets in the way, as I like to say, and writing struggles to be at the centre (or anywhere on the map) of people’s lives.  Obviously for some people it’s a motivation thing. Others just repeatedly get slammed against the wall by fate. Priorities change.

This – going back to my title – is why I think it’s strange when people say that all the writing courses available today (and the famous NaNo) are baaaad. All they do is convince the talentless that they can write, supposedly.

Well maybe they do. I’m not a slush-pile reader who has to wade through the results of the annual November word-fest.  But the proportion of writers I know who don’t write indicates to me that this effect probably doesn’t last.

I’d say the stats are running at about 30% drop-out rate. And the writers in my sample can all write. In fact they’re pretty good writers and many had early encouragement from agents, publishers and/or got shorts published in good markets. Then X happened.

Interesting to me is the rest of the writers I know who do keep at it. Some are published. Some are not. Some will probably drop-out as time passes. But they seem to find a way to put writing on the map of their lives and, well, write.

Now to the jokes…

How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to screw the bulb almost all the way in, and one to add a surprising twist at the end.

How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
Depends on just how married the author is to the old lightbulb.

How many cover blurb writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A VAST AND TEEMING HORDE STRETCHING FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA!

Listening to China Mieville

Somehow I’ve never managed to hear China Mieville talk about his work. So it was with great interest I listened to this interview on the ABC about Railsea.

I think I expected someone more  ‘ornate’ sounding – which is how I find his writing. Instead he was kind of straight-talking, almost understated. Very articulate and smart too of course.

One of the few times I’ve been surprised to hear an author talk when all I know of them is their work.

The person behind the work

I’m a bit of a Shakespeare fan. Not the kind that learns the great speeches line by line etc, but I have read the plays for fun and try to see one on stage each year.

The thing that I’ve been pondering recently is the debate about whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare, or the Earl of Oxford or any of the other thoughts that fly around about it. I’ve met people who believe it was the Earl of Oxford. Others who believe it wasn’t.

I don’t care.

I really don’t think that knowing who wrote these plays matters. They are great works both because many of them are simply excellently written, and because of the place they have come to have in our cannon of English literature. We understand much of the time they were written in. We know a fair bit about source materials and influences.

So why does the man matter?

If it was because the story we’ve been told was in itself inspiring or fascinating, I could understand it. But maybe that’s why people care so much – Shakespeare’s personal story just doesn’t seem romantic enough?

And of course, until time-travel is invented, we can’t know the truth so it obviously gives people a lot to argue about!

To me the concept of ‘Shakespeare’ is that a great writer, wrote plays that still talk to us today.  Whether he was an Earl or an actor doesn’t matter. I’d even go so far as to say shouldn’t matter, but given there’s even a movie about it (Anonymous) it clearly matters to a great number of people.

Why I liked On Writing by Stephen King

There were two things I liked about Stephen King’s book On Writing. He’s genre, and his comments on writing felt very practical.

I found the autobiographical section really interesting, but you could happily skip it if writers lives don’t interest you.  What I like most about having it there, was the evidence of a writer who had ambition. As someone who lacks that particular thing, I’m always impressed by naturally ambitious youngsters.

That Stephen King is a genre writer is one thing. That he’s not ashamed of it, is the great bit.  He’s honest about the fact he writes what he writes. And he’s proud.  I think all genre writers need a dose of that.

I really liked the tone of the book, too. It gave me a sense that you could have a quiet chat with this famous, famous author and be completely at ease.

On Writing is only the second book of his I’ve read, but one of the reasons I thought Mr King was an author who might teach me something, is that not only has he written so many books but that so many were adapted to film.

To me that says a lot about the appeal of both the ideas and the storytelling.

Agatha Christie’s best deduction

One of the unintentional effects of the first week of my ‘break’ was that I went on a book-bender. Prompted by the recent receipt of a shiny new library card, one of my reads was an Agatha Christie in the Poirot series.

Not a bad read, though a very talky book, but the thing I liked best about it was that one of the characters was a crime writer and she kept observing that while her most common murder weapon – undetectable poison – was a bit silly, it was what the readers liked.

I think that sums up the most popular end of popular fiction for me. Whatever your own preference / prejudices are as a writer, there are big audiences out there who’s tastes run to certain types of storytelling.  And, bless ‘em, they are the folk who keep the book trade in business and probably libraries too.

Mind you, you’d have to work pretty hard at a convincingly ‘undetectable’ poison these days!

My other favourite nugget of writerly wisdom from this character was that readers were always writing to her to tell her she’d got little details wrong, but it wasn’t necessary to be an expert in anything as the readers were so helpful with their corrections.

 

Fallen idols

I have two favourite writers,  both responsible for shaping my ideas on what the kind of fiction I love could be. Ray Bradbury, who died this week, is one of them and his Dandelion Wine and his Farenheit 451 are two of my favourite books.

His writing taught me that spec fic doesn’t have to conform to marketing categories or ‘genre rules’ and along with my other favourite writer, Issac Asimov, he showed me that science fiction was where my imagination most firmly wanted to be.

Ray Bradbury’s way of looking at the ordinary world and seeing the extraordinary in it, to this day puts a smile on my face.

It makes me sad that both these authors are gone from the world, but I can’t feel sad for the lives they lived and the words they’ve left behind.

 

Farewell Paul

Paul Haines died this week.

He wrote strong, dark, twisted fiction and was justly respected by many people in the writing community.

Some years ago, as a member of a writing group I’d just joined, he gave me generous encouragement, and took the time to talk to me about what I wanted from my writing. Something I’ll always remember.

After such a long illness, I hope he can now rest peacefully.

Overwrought: the way we like it?

It struck me recently that what I really dislike in current spec fic writing for TV is the melodrama.

Having been watching episodes of Terra Nova, Supernatural, Sanctuary, Being Human and Dr Who it became pretty clear that you can’t have an episode without someone tearing up, being outraged or embracing.

Everyone has to be in love with someone, people must regularly sacrifice themselves for the greater good and, when a character dies, it must be lingered on in a way that invites the viewer to react with sadness to the death rather than having the other characters react naturally.

It’s probably not worth dedicating a post to how much I dislike the 21st C Dr Who, but let’s just say that every time I find I’m getting into it, I end up turning away in disgusted at the overwrought responses, and unsubtle emotion.

It’s as though people doing this writing have decided that nothing on TV sells if it isn’t at least 60% soap-opera.  But then maybe that’s what people want?

The Dickens

Every time I hear a story by Charles Dickens, that has been turned into a radio production, I’m touched with a the same awe.  His writing is so full of distinct voices, and he paints pictures of locations by dipping down into wonderful detail.

I have to admit that, for me, this detail works best on radio. I find it slow going to read, but listening gives you a different relationship to the words.

Satire is of course the other thing Dickens does very well, and this – alongside his characterisation – give actors quite a lot to work with.  Something evident in screen productions too.

I’m often surprised that there isn’t more Dickens made for TV or film.

 

The anxious artist

A playwrite friend of mine showed me a book the other day which I thought was very interesting. I won’t plug the book directly as I haven’t read it yet, so don’t know if it’s worthy of that, but the concept was interesting.

Written by someone with years of experience counselling creative people, it listed and discussed the main types of anxieties that creative people feel about themselves and toward their creative process and work. My friend had just had one of those ‘oh yeah, that’s me!’ experiences reading it and from a quick look it seemed like almost any writer would.

He and I then got into a long discussion about the strangeness of our relationship to being creative, in that we all seem to struggle for external validation of one sort or another, we all doubt the worth of what we create and… well it’s a long list really!

Why is it that being creative is such a fraught thing?

And ironically – at least in my mind – writers also have to have a contrasting touch of arrogance. If we didn’t, surely we’d never think other people would be interested in our scratchings.

As you can tell, I’m still mulling this one over…