A Little Book About Trees, by Tim Burr

Tim felt at once they were not a receptive audience. There were few truly earnest faces among them, while others pretended, thinking perhaps he had more authority than he did, when in fact he had none. Worse, he felt empty of a sudden. It had seemed such a little thing at the time, just to come along and talk. But an audience’s attention isn’t guaranteed, especially not a captive one like this. He’d have to work at it. Then having won it, he’d have to come up with something worth saying, and fast. What he’d planned to say, aided by these stilted notes he clutched in increasingly his sweaty palm, just wasn’t going to do the job.

It had started as a joke. He’d written a little book about trees called, well, “A Little Book About Trees.” It had taken him all of an evening, and he’d posted it online, like he did with his other stuff. And like all his other stuff, some of it going back twenty years, he’d not given publishing a second thought. Maybe someone would appreciate the joke and leave a wry comment. There were some real wags out there in cyberspace. But then the impossible happened, and a publisher emailed him. This really doesn’t happen, ever, he’d thought, and especially not for a title like: “A Little Book About Trees” by Tim Burr. I mean, the publisher knew it was a joke, right?

The publisher wasn’t one of the big six, of course, but a small, local press, who handled history and nature. The book would be a good fit, he said, after cautioning Tim there’d be hardly any money in it, but he’d like to print the book anyway, if Tim had no objection. Well, Tim had no objection. It would even be funny, he thought, seeing it on the shelves. Trees weren’t exactly his forte. He’d simply blagged the information from a dozen places around the web and put it into his own words. Then he’d illustrated it with his own photographs. Literature it was not. Poetry it was not. And of all the things he’d ever written, this, he felt, was the least worthy of anyone’s attention.

What he had that he felt was of infinitely more value was a dozen epic novels of a romantic and metaphysical nature. With all his heart, he still believed in them, but they sat up on his web-site with the rest of his stuff, and hardly anyone read them. Still, he wondered if one thing might lead to another, and then, well,…

With publishing, there also comes marketing, so Tim found himself on a bit of a promotional book tour. Or rather, he had a ten-minute phone-in slot on the BBC local radio station. Then there was a morning in a bookshop with a pile of his books for signing. He dressed up in tweed for that, but no one got the joke, just like they didn’t get the Tim Burr bit, and no one was buying the books either. Tim didn’t mind that so much, and even understood it, having by now seen the cover-art foisted upon him by the publisher’s graphic designer. It looked like it had been dashed off in half an hour, which was fair enough, this also being about how long it had taken Tim to write the book.

That said, the book did go on to sell a thousand copies, which just about broke even. You’ll still see the occasional one in publishers clearance, but it’s fair to say Tim’s brief moment in the spotlight faded back into obscurity. So it goes, thought Tim. It never did lead to anything else, and nobody got the joke.

But then there was this teacher who taught English to adolescent students. She was the sister of a friend of a friend of Tim’s, and she’d arranged a speaker to come into school for the annual Book Week, but they’d cancelled at the last minute. This was an esteemed professor, author and arts critic, who sounded to Tim like the real thing, except he was too busy, and also rather rude having cancelled at so short a notice. So, there was a desperate trawl for anyone who might know someone who knew someone half resembling a writer. And that, to cut a long story short, is the only reason Tim was standing there now.

“Just talk a bit about writing,” the teacher had said.

Simple enough, thought Tim. Except, right now he couldn’t think of a thing to say. And he wondered if part of the reason was he knew nothing about writing after all, or if he did, he’d forgotten it, and his dozen novels of a romantic and metaphysical nature meant nothing in the scheme of things. So there was no point trying to enthuse such a reluctant, and by now fidgety crowd of youngsters over the wonder and the mystery of the literary creative arts, when Tim was losing the plot of it anyway, and when the surest route to the high-street bookshelves turned out to be a spoof title called “A Little Book About Trees”, and a subject he knew nothing about.

The teacher, a trim, middle-aged lady with a permanently harassed expression, and greying hair, was starting to look less harassed, and more worried. Was Tim all right? I mean, he was a writer, wasn’t he? And there was nothing writers liked more than boring the pants off others about their writing. So go on, Tim, just say something. Anything.

There came a titter from the back of the class. In Tim’s day there would have been spitballs to follow, but they did not seem an overly violent bunch, and he took comfort from that.

“So,…” he said, a little too loud, and while it got their attention, it didn’t stop the kids from looking at their watches. It was a half hour slot, but there was a risk this was going to be the longest half hour of his, and their lives.

“So,” he said again, softly this time. “How many writers have we got in the room? Put your hands up.”

Tim put his hand up. No one else did.

“All right, he said. “Let’s call it something else. Who keeps a diary?”

He put his hand up. Glances were exchanged. A dozen hands went up, shy at first, but helped by the hand of the teacher.

“So, you were having me on,” he said. “I’m not on my own after all. There are lots of writers.” Titters again, but this time he felt they were with him, and he relaxed. “Can you tell me this, though,” he said: “Would you ever show your diary to someone else?”

There were no takers for that. “Why write it then?” he asked. The atmosphere had changed. Already they were five minutes in, and he’d barely scratched the surface. “That’s a mystery, isn’t it? Let’s think about that.”

Then he remembered why he was a writer, and realised he’d just woken a dozen kids up to the fact they were writers too. And those who weren’t? Well, by the time he was done, he’d have shown them they could be writers as well if they wanted. He was doing none of them any favours, of course, because it was an odd thing, to be a writer. But the blood-writers among them would know that.

And they’d do it anyway.

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Visual Verse – a monthly creative challenge.

To be a genius poet. To be considered profound. To be considered in touch with the very pulse of life, the universe, and everything. To be like John Clare, or Wilfred Owen, or William Wordsworth. How? Well, get your poem published, of course. Enter it into competitions and win! Who knows? And good luck to you.

Poetry is one of the most sacred of the creative arts and, judging by the amount of poetry on here, it is practised by many, myself included. But, along with the rest of the publishing world, the route to print is a bit of a dimly lit labyrinth, and not something I’ve the stomach for groping about in any more. You might spend years getting your piece into an obscure journal, much to your delight, but you’ll be paid in washers, if at all, and unless you’re attractive in some way, unless you are a story in yourself, unless your persona either chimes with or indeed seriously offends the mores of the day, you’ll find yourself an also-ran, and an awfully long way from the front page.

So, why bother with Visual Verse? What’s different about it? Well, Visual Verse is a sort of online poetry magazine. At the beginning of each month it puts out an image and invites a response – prose or poetry, it’s your choice. They want between 50 and 500 words. Also, to enter into the spirit of things, you’re supposed to spend no more than an hour on your creation. I’ve had a few goes at it, because I like to see what the image triggers, and I’ve had some responses accepted. They take about a hundred pieces a month, which is around half of the submissions they receive on average. So, whilst they won’t publish absolutely anything, they’re not as choosy as a paid literary journal. In short, Visual Verse won’t make you a famous poet. Oh, and of course, they don’t pay. But apart from that, what’s not to like?

Not all the images work for me. Indeed, many leave me stumped, and I certainly don’t respond every month because, well, there’s only so much altitude to be gained, and I’ve other stuff on the go that’s more important. But if you’re a poet, as I know many of you who follow me are, and you’ve not come across Visual Verse yet, why not give it a go? If nothing else, it’s a good way to trigger the creative juices.

You have until the fifteenth of the month to submit.

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How do we know what’s true?

When you’re not writing for publication there’s a lot you don’t have to worry about, like mainly the expectations and the tastes of others, and the need to always be better than your last novel. Because you’re just bound to fail eventually, aren’t you? Plus, since it’s as likely my work will be forgotten a hundred years from now as that of any other non-A list author, it’s really not worth putting yourself through it, is it?

WordPress will have been bought out by then, transformed and subsumed into whatever passes for the Internet in 2120, and the self-conscious writings of millions of bloggers will have rotted into the sedimentary layers of obsolescence. Ditto Smashwords and that veritable sea of self-published novels that were all going to make their authors a mint, but never did.

By then historians will be researching the great pandemic of 2020 using as source material the archives of a fawning press, and the evasive, rose-tinted, self-aggrandising memoirs of politicians. Meanwhile, the truth is buried here, at least as people genuinely saw it, along with – and indistinguishable of course – from all the lies, and the spin and the barking madness.

So how do we know what’s true?

When you write as I do, you’re writing primarily for yourself. It is both a cathartic experience, and an exploration of how and why we think the way we do. Our opus is then a map of personal development, charting our footsteps through a world of ideas, in search of originality. It’s about reaching that stage when we can write something genuine from our experience of life, and believe in it. That doesn’t make it important of course, or even universally true. It is only the truth, as we see it, but “as we see it”, is the best any of us have to go on.

I hit my messianic years early, woke up from childhood as an angry young man to a world that seemed bent out of shape. I wanted to straighten it more into an image of my own liking. I think we all go through this phase. The rest of life is about coming to terms with the fact it doesn’t matter how much we shake our fist at it, the world is what it is. And what it is is a mish-mash of events that seem out of control. More than that, the world makes demands upon us that are inconvenient to say the least. We’d much sooner avoid all of that and just do whatever the hell we want.

Thereafter, sanity rests in attaining the mid-point between one’s sense of self-importance and all the inconvenient evidence to contrary. It’s about having the courage to take on the world as we find it, and find a place in it that’s the least uncomfortable for ourselves. There, in the gaps between sleeping and doing stuff we don’t want to do, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find sufficient serenity to know it doesn’t matter much either way. That is, except to say, every moment of adversity is a test of emotional resilience, that progress in life, and truth, is measured by how far you’ve left that angry young man behind.

There’s a lot we could be angry about right now. Indeed, that young man in me is in danger of getting lost in the red-mist again, so we have to maintain some perspective, scan the paragraphs for ire, and root them out, because the truth is never angry.

So we come to my work in progress, “Winter on the hill”, and the lesson that it’s dangerous to write in turbulent times, and with the expectation current affairs can be used as a passive backdrop against which our characters act out their dramas. Because these days current affairs can turn our lives on their heads. Thus, my characters suddenly find themselves scattered and social-distancing, their lives on hold and reduced to emailed dialogue, and no action. It’s inconvenient, but I have to work with it.

It’s odd how the story began with themes of fundamental freedoms, the right to roam, the rout of Leftist politics, being spied on by drones, and the dangers of authoritarianism by stealth. Then, suddenly here we are, confined to our homes, spied on by drones, policemen enquiring into our shopping habits and the necessity of our journeys. There’s also no exit strategy and the population is so terrified of dying from this bug, they don’t care. Subcutaneous RFID tagging from birth? Sure, bring it on, so long as it keeps us safe. You see the problem here? And maybe that’s where my story’s going, but I’m not sure I want to follow it because that’s a dark place. That’s a place so far from the truth it’s almost a figment of the imagination.

In the mean-time I tickle back and forth through the narrative to date, checking the characters are saying what they mean and what that means about the journey of my life. Am I looking like I’m on course for something? Am I still in the flow, or am I straining too hard in a direction that’s going to fetch me up on the rocks.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if I write or not, if I finish or not, if it means anything or not. The only one who needs to find out if there’s anything worth a damn in any of this, is me. In uncertain times, turbulent times, it highlights the fact you’ve really only yourself as a reliable reference point. So be true to yourself, and protect those around you as best you can. But watch out too for that angry young man and don’t let him catch up with you, because he’s a real trouble-maker and for all of his reforming zeal, he wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.

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A month of storms

Yarrow Reservoir overflow – Anglezarke, West Pennine Noors

“Februaries of late years are a month of storms. We get as many as two or three in succession, battering in off the Atlantic now, bringing gales and rain, the likes of which seem every season to break new records.”

So muses Rick Jeager in the latest chapter of my work-in-progress ‘Winter on the Hill’. An ageing socialist firebrand, Rick has gone to ground in an old house perched on the edge of the Western Pennines. He’s thinking back on the Left’s crushing election defeat last year, accepting that perhaps the struggle is now lost on all fronts, and imagining the course of the next few decades as the climate becomes ever more dominant in human affairs. And while he ponders, he passively watches the rain as it pours down off the moors, swelling the rivers and lifting the grids on the plain, drowning meadows and homes, on its way to the sea.

In many ways, being senior in years, the climate breakdown doesn’t matter to Rick as he won’t be around to see the worst of it, though it strikes him as curious, as his own life enters its winter months, the planet itself seems also to be set on its own end-game.

I’m a bit disappointed in Rick thus far, actually, and I’m hoping he’ll get his act together, that through his bunch of newly acquired eccentric friends in the Autumn Tints walking group, he’ll somehow rediscover his mojo – perhaps where he left it on a mountain cairn in his youth – and maybe he’ll enjoy a little late-flowering love along the way.

For myself I’m looking forward to the coming spring. I know we’ve a way to go yet but as the last Friday of February approaches and the daffodils and the crocuses make their appearance, I cannot help but feel more positive. Hopefully my own rallying mood will rub off on poor old Rick.

So,… it was a busy day yesterday, repairing fences left gap-toothed by a week of gales, repairing a nasty crack in a UPVC door that was let fly in the wind, replacing a window handle that had come off in my hand. Added to that, the boiler is on the blink again and the roof is leaking around the chimney, but only when the wind blows from a certain direction. The boiler man should sort the former out on Monday, but not I imagine without his usual sucking of teeth over various reg changes that provide him with a million reasons for walking away and leaving us without hot water, in spite of our premium-gold-peace-of-mind-or-whatever contract. As for the chimney, it’s leaked off and on for the twenty years I’ve lived here – and probably long before that – in spite of the attentions of a long line of  roofing men who have tried various fixes in exchange for my funding their holidays, and all to no avail. I shall keep the buckets in place and trust the wind changes direction.

Come on Rick, buck up, man! We need you to sort this mess out.

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How to write fiction

Well, that’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it? There’s a lot of fiction out there, good stuff too, by writers with big names, genius writers who’ve lived big lives and have something to say – had their work published by Penguin for heaven’s sake! So what advice do I think I can offer, me a denizen of this poor-man’s parallel medium, without embarrassing myself? Well, since it was a little voice inside me asking, I see no harm in having a go, and I suppose we start with the uniqueness of one’s own life and experience, one’s own nature, and one’s own view of the world as we encounter it. That’s got to be worth something right?

Sure, that’s worth the telling, because no matter who you meet along the way, and what you do or see, everyone and everything, every situation has something to teach you, if you’re prepared to listen, to observe. And I suppose that’s what writers do. They take the lived experience, and they distil it into its essence, something potent, something that says, yes, this means that and, though we aim at attaining sufficient impact to pull a reader up and make them think about their own lives, their own experience, the important thing for the writer is the “Aha” moment – that’s the landslide in the brain when, after hours pecking at the keyboard, the way opens and all becomes clear. Everything else – publishers, editors, readers – it’s all of piddling insignificance compared with that. And what that is is the development of writer’s own self.

Still sounds a bit arrogant? I suppose so, except arrogance is for youth, while old age has the excuse of its own experience.

The other important thing about writing fiction is the audience you’re aiming at. Here’s where I part company with those who want to know how to get published quick, how to get editors to like their stuff, because it beats me. You can spend a lifetime studying the market, reading every book ever written and trying to write just like that, and still not crack it – success, I mean. But though it can indeed be a long journey, the secret of your own success is when you finally tell yourself you don’t care. And you mean it.

I’ve written a lot of novels now and, except for a couple of the early ones I’ve not written them with an editor, a market, or indeed any kind of audience in mind. That said, they are written to an exacting standard, one essentially aimed only at pleasing my self, and by that I do literally mean my “self” in the Jungian sense of the word, and I’ve discovered he’s a pernickety old curmudgeon who won’t be sated by bluff and bluster. He wants to see the real deal, or as near as I can manage it, the unexpurgated vibe of life. It’s not that he doesn’t know what that is of course. What he wants is for me to recognize it, to reflect it back at me and so, through writing, I pick up a piece of myself from the mud of life’s lived disarray, shine it up a little and pop it back into place on the puzzle-board of my allotted time on earth.

No matter what your background – privileged or humble – life is big, complex, filled with paradox, love, hate, triumph and tragedy and then there’s the question: does it mean anything or not? And however you choose to answer, that question leads on to other questions, equally profound, paradoxical though I suppose, ultimately unknowable. Yet life, in all its wonder and absurdity, and possibly even its pointlessness, raises a tingle in the bones, and for a certain type of personality, it’s important to give creative expression to that tingle in some form, be it visual or written.

In writing fiction we get to be someone else, born into someone else’s shoes, and we get to ask: if this happened, then what would I do? In this situation, in this company of people, if so-and-so said this, what would I say? What would be the right thing? The wrong thing. What would be merely expedient, and what would that say about me, about life?

This kind of writing, internal, self-referential, is a high wire act, maintaining a balance between self-indulgence and a more sincere existential exploration. If we get the balance right, we achieve a mythic resonance in our work, and others are drawn by it, sufficient to follow us at least some distance. Get it wrong and, well,… we just make a fool of ourselves. But even there all art has to be allowed its freedom to fail. No sense staring at the blank page afraid to make a mark lest we do not achieve a masterpiece at the first go and everyone laughs at us. Indeed, I suppose that’s the most valuable of all the lessons about how to write fiction, or anything else for that matter,…

And I mean, to hell with it:

Just do it.

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And so the story goes

A quick look at Smashwords’ “trending” titles has me wondering about the company I’m keeping these days. Many book covers on there feature a “ripped” male torso, often tattooed and with titles that imply the illustrated man is a real bad-un who treats his wife/girlfriend/lover appallingly. The implication is that muscles and maltreatment are attractive to females, that Alpha male culture is alive and well, that if a man wants a svelte, blonde haired, blue eyed mate with a peachy bottom, he’d be better leaving off his cerebral development to spend more time at the gym, pumping iron or whatever else it is black hearted cads are supposed do.

I’m sorry girls, if I was never that way for you, that I was sensitive and somewhat flimsy, to say nothing of concave in the pectoral region, though, thinking back, it might explain a lot, and worse that I have been badly letting down the present Mrs Graeme by my lack of aspiration to the more simian levels of impolite society. She says not, but I fear she’s just being polite.

So it hardly seems worthwhile my putting pen to paper on yet one more story featuring an ordinary, if somwhat eccentric, oppressed guy, and a girl who rewards his kindness, to say nothing of his angsty, halting advances with her love. It hardly seems worthwhile putting out a title as vague and sexless as say: “Winter on the Hill” when there’s a chance it’ll appear on the same shelves as: “Bad boy punishes his b*&ch” and “Bullied by her Man”. It seems I’m niche, and my niche is getting narrower.

I know we’re talking about light entertainment here, fluff for kiddies maybe, people with the majority of their lives ahead of them, but still it’s worrying the type of stories they’re being told, to say nothing of the stories they’re telling others. And it’s no use me saying it’s not really like that, that I don’t actually know any cruel men, because for sure they do exist. It’s just that I instinctively distance myself from them and thereby defeat them by not entering into combat in the first place. I also stand so far ahead in time, at least from the perspective of life remaining to me, I’m as good as dead to the young for all the relevance I have, and maybe that’s the way it’s always been. My niche then, is people of a similar age and outlook to myself, which is what? Late middle age, middle income, and a Cappuccino socialist to boot? Yes, indeed, a narrowing niche.

My stories are about a man’s puzzlement at life, about looking at the crazy flow of events and trying to make sense of one’s self and others, and how in the end the events of life themselves are irrelevant, that it’s only in relation to others we truly discover our selves.

Sartre is a difficult philosopher for me, but it was he who said: “Hell is other people”, and I know exactly what he means – this line coming from his play “In Camera”. Three strangers, lately dead, find themselves in Hell. But Hell is a small, locked room and only themselves for company. Initially they await in dread the torture and the fire and brimstone of biblical telling, each eventually realising that while without the others their continued existence has no substance, it is equally the case there is no torture Hell can devise that is worse than “other people”. It’s a conclusion I’ve perhaps been fumbling towards myself, but the other way around, that if other people can be Hell – and they certainly can, especially to an introverted type like me – we can also find heaven in them. I don’t mean everybody of course, though we always do well to understand where others are coming from, their back-stories, their trials, their tribulations.

But is is worth spending the whole of 2020 on another novel, rambling towards that same conclusion?

Oh, well, go on then,…as if I could stop myself.

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On my bookshelf – Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan 2012

By a process that is both conscious and subliminal we form a picture and an opinion of the world from the images presented to us, and from the stories we are told. We pick them up from culture, both popular and highbrow, from the print media, and from the movies we see. Whilst inevitable and obvious, it also renders us vulnerable to manipulation, because what if the world isn’t really like that? And how do we form a truly independent opinion of reality anyway? Is it even possible?

We accept that oppressive regimes will censor the media in order to control a population and to manage its image abroad, but what if we in the west are also subject to a subversive manipulation of the media so that everything we see, read and hear possesses a slant that tips our thoughts in a particular direction? What if, say, even certain authors of high-brow fiction gain prominence and publication for having political views considered favourable, while others are forced to languish in obscurity? What if the very bedrock of intellectual thought itself is tilted by design to enourage a certain line of thinking?

This is the plot of McEwans “Sweet Tooth”, so named after the security operation to recruit unwitting authors into a propaganda machine, to fund them through an apparently bona-fide arts foundation so they might quit their day-jobs and focus on their writing, unaware they are in fact serving other interests.

Our writer Tom Haley, struggling literary author and lecturer at the University of Sussex, is duped by low-level secret service minion Serena Frome into signing up, and the pair become lovers. Set in the early 1970’s McEwan plunges us into a world of power cuts, fuel shortages, the three day week, striking miners and hunger-striking IRA prisoners, all of which serves to remind us that while we think we live in politically perilous times, they are as nothing to what has gone before. But that’s just something else I took from the book, probably because I’m a little late coming to the postmodern party and realising that, as a cultural movement, it’s not completely bonkers – that it’s never wise to accept uncritically the prevailing Zeitgeist as being the only truth there is.

Serena is herself subject to scrutiny by the “service”, result of a past affair with a disgraced officer, and this lends further intrigue, as does the tension caused when operation “Sweet Tooth” begins to fall apart. Worse, Serena is no cold-hearted career-spy; her love for Haley is genuine, but this can only mean two things: the future of their relationship is doomed when she’s finally exposed, as are her prospects for advancement within the service due to her percieved incompetence by her mysoginistic male colleagues. But then all is not quite as it seems,…

Written in the first person, from Serena’s viewpoint, McEwan is convincing as a woman, but is this story really McEwan writing as Serena Frome? Or is he writing as someone else, writing as Serena, and if so, how did this “someone else” come by all the material of Serena’s life including her recruitment to the secret service?

Although ostensibly a spy story, the spy stuff and the political shenanigans of the times, provide only the background music to Serena’s otherwise unglamorous and poorly paid life as a low-ranking officer in what could have been any other drably routine Civil Service department. Instead McEwan steers us into a different territory and tells us something interesting about the times, about the nature and the power of fictional narratives, and the world of the literary intelligentsia. On top of that, he weaves us a cunning love-story while the spies themselves, as drab as they are sinister, display the same petty jealousies and banal office-intrigues as the rest of us.

To finish, he pulls off a satisfyingly crafty twist when we finally get to know just whose story this really is.

 

 

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Selling online? Set yourself free.

Amazon and Smashwords allow the independent author to easily self-publish online for money. You upload your file, your cover artwork, set a price and that’s it. I’ve self-published on Smashwords for years but have kept my books free. Downloads are in the region of 1000 per year, initially, tailing off gradually to a few hundred, all of which I’m more than happy with. As for Amazon though I refuse to deal with them as they regularly feature pirated copies of my books and have made the process for getting them taken down so opaque I no longer bother. It’s just easier to tell everyone I don’t publish on Amazon, that any book appearing on there under my name is in breach of copyright. If you’re a pirate on the other hand I highly recommend the platform as it’s more than likely you’ll get away with it. But that’s another story.

The lesson thus far then, in so far as my own experience goes, is that if you want to self-publish, and you’re happy to make your book free, you are guaranteed to find readers, and plenty of them, and that’s a truly liberating experience, both for you and for your story. However, the same is not true if you set a price.

According to Smashwords’ own analysis, some authors do sell very well indeed, while others don’t sell at all. What they don’t say however, is what proportion of writers don’t sell, but I suspect it’s most of them. By far the most popular price point is free but some books, especially those priced modestly at $0.99 or $2.99 do sell, sometimes, but that doesn’t automatically mean yours will. As with conventional publishing the reasons why one book sells and another doesn’t aren’t clear. Good marketing helps of course, but there’s only so much an independent author can do to get their name and “brand” out there without breaking the bank, and my philosophy has always been that since it’s unlikely you’re going to make much money anyway, you’re better giving your books away and going for a readership. Better for a writer to be read and make nothing at it, than to aim for gold and not be read at all.

I’ve got eleven novels on Smashwords now, coming up on twelve, all free. But what would happen if I set a price for them – say $2.99? Surely I’d sell at least a few copies? Well, as an experiment, I tried it with “Between the Tides” and it killed my readership entirely. Not a single download. So I lowered the price to $0.99. Same thing. Not a single sale.

The lesson then does indeed seem to be “keep it free”, but in the end it’s up to you and there’s no harm in trying. Someone always wins the lottery. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that, so go for it and see what happens.

Which brings me to the shameless self-publicity bit about my latest novel which, as of this evening, is now complete. As is my habit I’ve been serialising it for free on Wattpad first, even though Wattpad is a simply dreadful platform for downloads, but I still find it useful as part of the drafting process, even if that only means getting the chapter numbers right. But how’s this: once it’s done, I’m going to pull it from Wattpad, then publish the final draft exclusively on Smashwords for $0.99. I’ve even filled in a US tax form and everything in anticipation of making a killing. After all, this book’s been a year in the writing and I’ve burned some serious midnight oil on it. Why should I give it away?

Well, for one thing, I’ve already had my money’s worth from it. It may be fresh to the reader but I’ve lived and breathed it for a long time and, even though no one else may be able to decipher what it is I’m trying to say in it, I do, and I’ve already moved on, psychologically, to thinking about the next project.

Still,… it’s tempting. So perhaps you should catch up with it on Wattpad, just in case I change my mind. Go on, I’ll give you until midnight December 31’st. Then, come January 2020, I’m turning over a new leaf, becoming a paid author no one will ever read again. And then like all New Year resolutions, once I’ve sobered up, normal service will probably be resumed, and the Inn at the Edge of Light will finally,… be set free.

Possibly.

Or not.

As the case may be.

 

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The writing life – growing some soul?

The online world remains the easiest outlet for creative expression, at least one that comes with an audience. I’d say it was my “preferred” option but that would be to suggest I have any other choice which, in common with many of my kind – at least those of us who have wised up – I don’t. However, I do actually “prefer” it because there’s a world of difference between writing and publishing and while writing online grants us the freedom to explore stories in a direction of our own choosing, publishing does not. Publishing just wants more of the same. Publishing wants what sells.

This is not to say I don’t still toy now and then with at least the idea of flirting with the printed press again, but the essentials there haven’t changed in forty years which means if long-form fiction’s your thing, you need an insider’s contacts to avoid the slush pile and to deliver your musings with an auspicious whack, directly to a commissioning editor’s desk. Without that advantage, you’re going nowhere my friend.

There’s self-publishing online for money of course, but for all its blather, writers should be wary of its over-hyped promise because this won’t make you rich and famous either. Kurt Vonnegut nailed it when he said the arts were no way to make a living, only to grow some soul. What does that mean? It means we have to buckle down and a get ourselves a proper job first. Anything will do, so long as it leaves us time and energy at the end of the day to write. The trouble is, being an amateur hack, we’re likely to be as unknown in our sixties as we were in our twenties. Is that a failure of ourselves as writers? Well, it depends how much you grow your soul in the mean time, and none of us are best placed to be the judge of that anyway.

I suspect it’s a journey we must all make as individuals, so nothing I say here is going to make sense to anyone just starting out, and they’ll still likely believe against the odds they can change the world with their story, if only the world would wise up and recognise their genius. But trust me, it wont.

It’s a funny old business, growing soul. I mean, if writing or any other form of art were truly integral to that process, one might think thrashing out the most perfect story or poem, then unceremoniously deleting it wouldn’t matter, that if anyone read it or not would be irrelevant, that growing one’s soul is a purely private matter, no audience required. Except to me it does seem important, this exchange from one mind to another, writer to reader, that unless we writers complete that particular end of the bargain, the muse or the genii or the daemons who gave us this stuff in the first place won’t be happy until they’ve goaded us into finding an audience for it. Or this may just be a sign of residual vanity in me, that forty years of writing has left my soul the same button-mushroom size it was when I was ten.

In the bad old days this primeval urge to find an audience would deliver us into the hands of the vanity press. You could tell them apart by the fact they accepted your manuscript in glowing terms, while the other lot simply returned it unread. Yes, the vanity press would butter you up no end, appeal to your – well – vanity, then print your novel and deliver you a crate of the things, leaving the rest to you, which is to say high and dry and probably skint. Beware, vanity is a terrible thing and can lead you into all kinds of trouble.

They’re still around, those shysters, moved mostly online now, offering also their worthless authoring services like reading and editing, all of which still leave the writer out of pocket and no nearer publication than when they started. So don’t be tempted, or at least if you are don’t be surprised when you get shafted.

I look to the online world then as a means of pacifying that particular whim of the muse who seems curiously untroubled by giving the work away. And it has to be said there’s something quietly subversive about it that I enjoy. Yes, you can charge for it on Amazon and Smashwords, but then the downloads shrivel to nothing, because everyone online is after free-stuff and the value of a work is, after all, in its scarcity, and regardless of the fact you spent a year writing it, your novel can be copied and pirated in a nanosecond, rendering it essentially worthless – at least in money terms – anyway.

The downside is that while the Internet has the advantage of a potentially global reach, for readers actually hitting upon one’s work it’s a bit like sitting on a needle in a haystack – an entirely chance and unlikely event. So, building even a humble readership can be rather a slow business. Why bother then?

Well, perhaps the truth is if we were wealthy enough we might spin our musings from the psychiatrist’s couch, whittle down to the nub of things that way, but instead we write for the mysterious “other”. The “other” understands us perfectly; they just never write back to say so, and that’s fine because if they did, we’d know it wasn’t them anyway.

Is that growing some soul? I don’t know, but I’m still writing, always looking for the next story, the next tumble down the wormholes of my dizzy head.

And that has to count for something.

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So you want to be a poet?

Well, if you’ve made it this far you probably already are a poet, though you may not know it. But wait, let’s check! Do you know what iambic pentameter is? How about an Italian quatrain? A Shakespearean sonnet? Yes, okay, they’re definitions of poetic structures; beats per line, order of rhyme, number of lines, that sort of thing. How about a foot? That’s the basic unit of measurement of accentual syllabic meter. Of course it is! There are different types of feet too: iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic, all to do with the stress on the syllables.

Still want to be a poet? A poet would be well up on all that stuff wouldn’t they? Except, I write poetry, which makes me a sort-of poet, but to be honest I had to look all that terminology up on Wikipedia. If I’d been a Lit student having to field questions on it, I’d surely have failed. Well, I did fail actually – not that I was ever asked those questions, specifically. Log tables made more sense to me, but I still liked writing poetry. Log tables are obsolete now, while poetry remains pretty much a constant throughout time. And do you really need to know about all that structural theory stuff anyway? Well, the poet Robert Frost thought so. He said: there can be no fair tennis without a net, that without proper structure, poetry seldom yields works of beauty.

And he may have a point:

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Reopened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey;

That’s W H Auden writing in 1940. Plenty structure and rhyme there, and a silken beauty in the flow of it.

But then how about:

A shattered army, Thames’ filthy tonnage, tumbrils of carrion,
Not a beautiful spectacle
For the drinkers of history, or for me
Or my friends, this island’s parallel issues.

That’s Ted Hughes, writing in 1963. No structure, no rhyme, like being hit in the face with a plank of wood, leaving you with multiple splinters to pick at, which I presume is what he intended. So, maybe Frost was just an old fuddy duddy traditionalist and you can play tennis without a net after all, that indeed certain poetic themes demand a freer form if they’re to achieve their desired impact.

I used to strive for structure in my own poetry, but sometimes the struggle took over from what I was trying to say. Rhyme and structure are satisfying to achieve, like completing a literary puzzle, but they can also cheapen a poem, so why push for rhyme if you don’t have to?

How about this:

I remember sitting together in parks
leaning over bridges
counting trout and swans
holding hands under arches
kissing away suns
and moons into darkness.

I remember platform good-byes
last-minute trains
slamming us apart
and my non-self walking back alone.
I remember smaller things:
a pebble in my shoe
and you throwing a match-box on the Serpentine

That’s Phoebe Hesketh. No structure, no rhyme except for that last poignant hook between “shoe” and “you”. A friend of Herbert Edward Palmer, an English poet and critic, his advice to her was never to let the conscious mind force a poem into shape. That’s important, I think. It can be pleasurable exploring traditional patterns in poetry, and good practice trying them out, and if a poem falls into such a pattern, then let it be, but if doesn’t want to, don’t make it.

According to certain psychological theories, we exist upon a seething mass of unconscious energies that seek to become conscious through us. They are our life’s work, whether we know it or not. And poetry, indeed any form of creative expression, is a good way of achieving that, and it’s not like we have any choice in the matter. For a creative person to ignore the pressure from within is a very bad thing, and will backfire with more neuroses than we know how to handle. But to sit a while with pencil and paper, jotting the lines that are offered up, seemingly from nowhere, is worth years of therapy, whether you know an iamb from a trochee or not.

Poetry has always been an important aspect of any civilised culture, and not just for the professional – if indeed there’s such a thing as a professional poet any more. But can anyone really write poetry? Well, okay, not everyone wants to, not everyone gets it, but I suspect if you’ve a hankering for it, you can write it well enough. As a way of expressing the seasons of your life, there’s no finer way of honouring your self. How to start? Start with your life. Imagine you are a bit of the universe seeking to discover the meaning of itself through your eyes. So you capture a moment in time as if to bookmark it, and you say to the universe, okay mate, this bit’s important. Let’s remember this. Then you look back over the stuff you wrote twenty, thirty years ago, and you can see the change in yourself, the smoothing out, the growing up.

However we should beware the trap of thinking poetry is a road to fame and fortune because of course it’s not. Even the Poet Laureate only makes £6000 a year, which doesn’t get you much of a mortgage, does it? Fame and fortune are their own path, with their own rules, and only about one in ten who seek it, by whatever means, succeed at it. But in the business of writing poetry what we’re really looking for are glimpses of meaning, which boil down to those occasional and all too often elusive personal gifts of insight from the unconscious. Sometimes those insights are beautiful, sometimes they’re ugly, and mostly they’re of no interest to anyone else. But as always, in the writing of anything, the person most served by the effort is you, the writer. Poetry, however you define it, helps us grow a little. It’s just occasionally we’ll hit upon something that’s of a more universal appeal, so it’s not always true we should give up on the idea of publishing altogether. But as ever my advice these days is just to blog your stuff, thus calling it “sort of published”, and be done with it. Poetry can heal all wounds, but pursuing, through poetry, the eternally precious bane of fame and fortune is pretty futile, and worse, it will tear your heart wide open again.

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