Start writing fiction

End of an era. Of sorts. Eight years ago, in April 2004, I was taken on by The Open University to teach their innovative new module A174 'Start Writing Fiction'. It was innovative in that it was delivered completely online and because it was the OU's first foray into teaching creative writing at undergraduate level.

The module attracted interest across the UK and beyond. Hundreds signed up for each presentation and it ran three times per year. I've taught on it, three times a year, since then. Now, in May 2012, I've just finished marking my very last students' assignments on its very last presentation. With twenty-five students per group, I  reckon I've worked with six hundred students on this one module alone.

I still hear people say, 'Can creative writing be taught?' It's such a stupid question I won't dignify it with an answer. Sufficient to say that 600 people in my groups alone have learned the nuts and bolts of how to create believable characters and satisfying story arcs and they've also been given the tools to explore their memory and imagination. Equipped for life with a satisfying creative outlet.

As for me, I'm still going to be teaching on the OU's second level creative writing module, A215. A longer module, it covers developing your own creativity, writing fiction, poetry, life writing and also preparing for publication. You can read more about it here http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/a215.htm  But I'm also hoping to start writing some more fiction of my own.

Further to my last post, I've been doing some further reading and deeper thinking about the e-book revolution. I'm so pleased that my partner, Keith, has set up The PotHole Press and has published my short story collection and I was saying that writers need publishers like him - with his attention to detail and his determination to produce the best possible end product. I hold this opinion because I've downloaded several e-books and bought some printed books published by small organisations who offer a print-on-demand service only to discover their products are badly presented, badly edited and don't replicate the quality achieved by the major publishing houses.

These are people - be they independent writers or small publishers - who invest their time and energy and also, often, money, because they have an ambition to see writing they believe in made available for the public to read.  Who am I, then, to deny them the right or to castigate them for doing it?

It's clear the larger publishing houses seek big sellers. They want a guaranteed return on their investment. After all, they've staff and offices to pay for, over and above the actual printing and distribution costs. Mass media, social media and online retailing means there's a big spike in interest for a very few books. If I can make an analogy with the 100 metres - there are eight people in the race, all pretty much achieving phenomenal speeds but it's the winner's name that everyone remembers. And that 'everyone' is, thanks to mass media, now a global audience rather than just a small village, small town or small country.

Who could blame a large publishing house from wanting to publish only the biography (or novel) written by the winner? That would be a guaranteed earner. Why would they want something written by the people who come six or seventh, or only made it to the heats? But this doesn't mean those runners are no good at what they do.

In a global market place, there are very few winners. This applies to the book world, too. Guaranteed success is there only for the dead certs. So, someone who has made a name in one field (e.g. running, music, TV soaps) will have his novel snapped up by a publisher without any qualms about literary quality. That can be bought in in the form of copy editors and ghost writers and because of the fame of the name, the work will be a major success.

So where does this leave those who aren't the front runners? Well, I've been reading some blog posts recently and will share the links to them. First, here's David Manderson on his experience at a debut novelist training event where 'wisdom' was handed down from on high by those supposedly in the know about what publishers want. http://davidtmanderson.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/debut-authors-the-bitter-truth/    David's book 'Lost Bodies' is one I recommend totally.  It was published by a relatively small publisher (Kennedy & Boyd) but their production standards are excellent - a fitting match for David's literary talent.

I've also been very interested in following up Catherine Czerkawska's blog posts about indie publishing. Catherine has achieved a wide ranging and well-respected publishing history over the years but as a 'midlist' literary author (i.e. not a front runner bringing in huge sales and not a new young discovery who just might have promise), she's decided to take control of her own publishing and promotion - with drive and success. http://wordarts.blogspot.co.uk/  Her blog makes fascinating reading.

Finally, for a look at the economic reality for the best-intentioned small publishers, here's a link to Two Ravens' Press recent blog   http://www.tworavenspress.com/TRP%20Publishing,%20four%20and%20a%20half%20years%20on.html

My views are still the same in some respects. Quality is everything. If you go down the indie route and self-publish, you need to set high production standards. If your book is accepted by a small publisher for e-book publication or print-on-demand, you need to insist on high spec publication. None of this uploading of pdf files which result in random line breaks and a messy reading experience. Punctuation and proof reading have to be the best you can get. This is where I'm indebted to The PotHole Press, because I know that Keith will treat my writing as seriously as I do myself and will ensure the highest production standards.

Maybe the most important thing about having a publisher, rather than doing it all yourself, is advocacy. Someone else there working with you and for you, helping you take your writing into the world.

I'm pleased to say that Ordinary Domestic: Collected Short Stories is now available as an e-book for Kindle.  Published by PotHole Press, this collection brings together the stories I've had published in various magazines over the years and makes them available again, and all together. There's 'Unrestricted', which was a finalist in the big Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition, and there's 'Marion', which was my very first publication - in Cencrastus, a Scottish literary magazine - way back in 1999. 'Frozen Waste', which was the opening story in the first edition of prestigious magazine Gutter, is there, too.  Some of my favourite unpublished stories are also in the collection. Which one's your favourite?

PotHole Press is a new venture, set up and run by Keith McKay, my partner. He's looking for submissions of literary fiction primarily and has expressed a particular interest for collections of literary short stories. My views on this? Well, I'm delighted he's published my short stories and I really appreciate the skill and talent he's lavished on it. He believes that standards in e-book publishing should be every bit as high as those we expect from print publishing - and by that he means the reputable, big publishers. It's disappointing if an author has spent years polishing their work only to have it mangled by self-publishing it as a pdf on an e-book reader. Keith's standards are high and that's in the author's favour.

As for the whole e-publishing phenomenon, I'm all for it. The publishing industry is in a period of upheaval. E-publishers and Print-On-Demand publishers are the SMEs of the publishing world and like any other small to medium enterprise they bring a new zest and vitality to the industry. They're prepared to put in the hours and take risks - to find, prepare and market good writing. But what about quality when everyone who's ever written is able to publish their own manuscript via POD or e-book? This is where the difference will lie. And this is where we still need publishers like The PotHole Press, whose tag-line is 'We take pride in our e-books'. 

Ordinary Domestic: Collected Short Stories 

is available from Amazon by clicking the link in the box on the right.

 

Three good publishing related news items this week.

First, my review of Morag Joss's Across the Bridge appeared in Northwords Now. A favourable review :) because I enjoyed it and what the author was trying to do. Northwords Now launch this issue with an event at the Scottish Writers' Centre on Thursday 8 December from 7pm.

Second, a surprise through the post! A copy of Le soir, quand je me couche: the French translation of As I Lay Me Down To Sleep. Really weird, seeing what you've written expressed in a different language through the filter of a translator whom you've never met. Thank you, Alexander Fox! I'm very pleased the book is out in France. And in one of the bigger sized paperbacks, too!


Third, an email telling me that Spilling Ink Review have accepted my short story 'Safety Glass' for issue seven of their influential e-zine. 'Safety Glass' is a difficult story in that it demands full attention from the reader as it's a bit of a puzzle. What happens when your protagonist's thinking is fuzzy? The story started out life when I imagined what it would be like to be a woman trapped between the two layers of a double glazed window (reading this as all kinds of metaphor) but it moved on to be about a woman trapped in a very different kind of glass. I'm glad Spilling Ink Review have run with the idea. It's a story I wrote at the same time as 'Grit', which was published in From Glasgow To Saturn e-zine.

What I did on my holidays

Did we have a summer this year? Possibly not. Though my garden did produce a knee-high volume of grass, docks and buttercups so I guess we must have.

Craggy landscape, Northern Ireland, 2011

Now the new term is starting, I'm thinking back over what I did during the two months off. The good things included a trip to Ireland, which is where my dad's two grannies came from, and also where Keith's dad's family were from. We spent three days in Sligo and three based in Ballymena, so this was an all-Ireland trip and a very educational one for me, too, given it was my first visit to the island.

The biggest shock for me was seeing so many Union flags and NI flags with their 'red hand of Ulster', hanging from every lamppost in the main street as we drove off the ferry at Larne. There's clearly a strong desire to proclaim a nationality, there, and a separate one at that from the rest of the island. I think of the design for a new sculpture which is planned for the main road north from England to Scotland, with its shooting, revolving stars, and I guess the difference is that Scotland, now, doesn't feel under quite so much pressure of being overwhelmed and assimilated by its bigger neighbour.  Though I see that Belfast has its own significant piece of architectural and stellar sculpture planned, too, as this link shows. No one turned up for a public meeting about that so I guess the flags might be statement enough for many. Enough on that from me.

Carol looking awkward at Bellanurly, Co. Sligo

In Bellanurly, just outside Sligo, we tracked down the field where my grandmother was born in 1888. I hope there was a house there at the time! Sligo town and the area around it were beautiful. So, too, were the north and north east coast of Northern Ireland. We had a very blustery day at the Giant's Causeway, which was atmospheric, and then blissfully clear and calm weather for our trip south towards Glenarm, the village Keith's father's family were from. Sadly, I managed to delete half of my photos while they were still in my camera (don't ask) but Keith took some. Here are a few:

Turbulent Garavogue River, Sligo, Aug 2011

   
                                             

Yeats' Building, Sligo, August 2011

The river that flows through Sligo is very lively. Perhaps it's tidal?  There were plenty of swans on it, despite the currents.

The Glasshouse Hotel, Sligo, 2011

We also passed what might be Coole Park, setting for one of my favourite W. B. Yeats' poems, The Wild Swans at Coole. The building in the picture was donated by one of the banks to create a museum in recognition of the poet, who spent a lot of his childhood in Sligo.

Carol, near the Giant's Causeway, Aug 2011

Keith on a blustery day at Giant's Causeway, Aug 2011

One very good thing about my holiday was that I was able to take lots of notes and I've since written a 3000 word story set there. Lots of it is direct fact in that it uses real landscapes, weather and incidents, but it's fiction in that the characters are imagined and the central storyline is untrue.

Causeway flags

I really like the neatness of these 'flagstones'. 

I've called the story 'Flags' and have sent it off to a magazine already. Normally, I'd leave it a while and then read it over and over again during editing. Fallow time helps defamiliarise it so the writer can discover it as if for the first time, coming close to what the prospective reader will experience. However, I've sent it off already. If it comes back with a thanks but no thanks, fair enough: I'll work on it again.

Also during the summer, I took the decision to step down from the steering group of the Scottish Writers' Centre. I was involved there for about eighteen months and found it to be hugely fulfilling. I've really enjoyed my time working with the others on the committee but I needed a break. Being a volunteer can be so demanding! Full praise for those who devote so much time and effort to help realise the vision they have.

The Scottish Writers' Centre has a full programme for the months ahead and I recommend a visit to their website - and to their events, which are mostly held in the CCA at 350 Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. I certainly plan on going along to most of them.

So that was my summer 2011. As for the poor weather - better to have downpours and few sunny days than no rain at all.

The background to this summer is that famine has returned to East Africa. I've long been a supporter of the great work done by Oxfam, and urge everyone to consider making a regular donation to them, if at all possible. Many a mickle maks a muckle - lots of us giving a small amount adds up to a great deal.

Yet, surely, in these days, we should be able to do much more than emergency responses? Surely 'capital' should be able to see and seize financial opportunities to provide solar-powered desalination plants and pipelines and to provide valuable infrastructure in Somalia and Kenya? Labour there must be cheap just as Irish navvy labour was cheap one or two hundred years ago when Britain's canals and railways were built.

East Africa could be developed just as Ireland itself was and just as 'the wild west' of the USA was, with private capital funding massive construction projects like railways, roads, electricity, plumbing. It was do-able then. A few people got rich on it and millions benefitted in the process. Why is it not do-able in East Africa now?  

Enjoying the luxury of a lush garden, summer 2011.

If I Should Die Before I Wake

In 2007, I worked with Eileen Munro, a former student on my Open University creative writing course, after she approached me for help in writing her autobiography.  The year or more we spent on it had deep lows as she relived the upsets of her childhood (and as we read her Social Work and medical case notes together) yet it had much in the way of emotional highs and gusty laughter, too. In working together, we tried to create something that adhered as closely as possible to the truth, while crafting a story which would provide an engaging, honest and thought-provoking read. 

After it was published in 2008, I told Eileen I wouldn’t be able to spend the same amount of time co-writing her second volume, given that I had projects of my own which I wanted to explore (and, as I subsequently found out, because my health was in freefall). I was pleased when I heard she was immersed in writing the follow-up. Now it’s available, here’s my review of it.

Eileen Munro’s If I Should Die Before I Wake was published in July 2011 by Mainstream Publishing, three years after her first book, As I Lay Me Down To Sleep. The second volume of memoir follows Eileen from the birth of her first child in difficult circumstances, through a continued exploration of the search for family life and a yearned after sense of belonging.

                Eileen’s life story is a painful one because she was one of the generation of babies given up for adoption in the early 1960s when illegitimacy was universally stigmatised. In those days before abortion was legalised, young mothers-to-be were secreted away in institutions or with family members in distant parts of the country, to complete their pregnancies and dispose of their ‘mistakes’ through adoption before returning home to resume a ‘normal’ life. The theory was that the children born to these single mothers would enjoy a better life because they were adopted by a married couple who would be able to provide love and security.

                As I Lay Me Down To Sleep told the story of the very different consequences for one such child. Adopted just after birth, Eileen might indeed have enjoyed a sweet life except that her adoptive parents became alcoholics who left her vulnerable to abuse. Her father was violent and her mother died in a drunken stupor when Eileen was twelve, after which Eileen and her sister were taken into care. A troubled teenager, Eileen herself became a single mother at the age of sixteen but passionately vowed she would keep her child and cherish him so he wouldn’t suffer physically and emotionally as she had.

This is the point at which If I Should Die before I Wake opens. We meet Eileen, still vulnerable, innocent of the adult world as any sixteen year old is, but steely with bravado. Unlike most sixteen year olds, Eileen had no home or family support. No mother to turn to for help in raising her baby and no one to help her keep tabs on rent and electricity bills. No one other than a social worker on the end of the phone, or the manager of whatever hostel she happened to find herself in.

This should evoke a feeling of empathy in the reader or perhaps a sense of outrage at her circumstances. That doesn’t quite happen in this book and I think it’s because Eileen does herself no favours by presenting every authority figure as loathsome. Universally wicked and evil, associated in her descriptions with stern morality and girdles, the women running the homes she lived in are cardboard cut-outs and this is one thing in this otherwise moving account of her life which irritated me as a reader.

                Take Mrs Woods of Hove House, a woman whose very clothes were imbued with powers to humiliate and repress the young Eileen. ‘Staunch and heavily-girdled in Marks & Spencer’s good churchgoing clothing’, her ‘brown-patent square-toed and -heeled shoes remained unmoved, demanding my answer’. Mrs Linn, the health worker, is also presented as one-sided, biased against Eileen (‘seemed to take my fears as a personal attack on her authority, and she was determined that I would not undermine her’). Even Mac-Mac, a worker shown with a rare soft side, turns deceitful.

                Eileen proclaims herself the injured party throughout, innocent even though she admits assuming the lead in breaking into another occupant’s room. And when she recounts the gruesome brutality she suffered from a partner who arrived in the middle of the night to find her with another man, the reader’s fellow-feeling shrinks a little in disbelief at her unconvincing explanation of why that man was there. There’s sparse evidence of the mature Eileen weighing this up in the memoir: not much in the way of taking stock of how her actions could have been misinterpreted. 

            Memory is, of course, subjective: two people witnessing the same event will write about it from different perspectives and with different attitudes and agendas. Who is to say which is the real truth? Eileen is entitled to write her truth as she sees it and to sculpt a narrative out of it. 

It is the total intimacy with the memoir writer which readers enjoy: a sometimes prurient interest in sharing a wounded person’s hurts then, with the wounded person, learning to rise above them. There is a hunger for this kind of confessional memoir and writers, and commercial publishers, have a right to feed it. Perhaps as readers we're too worldly wise to hope for a 'happy ever after' but at least this chapter of Eileen's story ends, satisfactorily, on a note of lightness and optimism.  

Busy events schedule

Busy few weeks at the Scottish Writers' Centre.

Last week, David Manderson led the discussion on creative writing (higher) education. Very interesting. He gave a useful overview on the growth of CW courses in UK universities over the last 15 years. Some audience members asked what the value was, e.g. what good does it do a student to finish their studies with a pile of short stories when there's no market for them. Reasonable point in many ways but then, we could ask the same question about English Literature essays. There's a value in study; learning techniques of creative writing has the general educational value of developing a student's critical analysis. At a vocational level, it helps the student put craft ideas into practice. As an analogy, I think of driving. You can study theory and pass your driving theory test but that doesn't make you a good driver. Dave's novel's due out soon.

This coming Thursday, 14 April 2011, the fabulous Tom Leonard will be reading from his work. Definitely one to look out for. 7pm in the CCA Clubroom in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Admission free! The SWC appreciates the support of the Scottish Book Trust in staging this event.

On Thursday 21 April at 7pm, David Kinloch launches his new poetry collection, published by Carcanet. It has the intriguing title of Finger of a Frenchman. That's one not to miss!

And on Thursday 28 April at 7pm, we've a special session on Iraqi Fiction, in cooperation with the Goethe Institut, Glasgow, and featuring Abbas Khider, Kusay Hussain and Sue Reid Sexton. As with other events, admission to this is free (though donations to help with the organisation of future events are always welcome).

The Scottish Writers' Centre operates out of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD.

Having mentioned Sue Reid Sexton, I'll also mention that Keith and I attended a launch of her novel Mavis's Shoe, which was published by Waverley Books in March to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz. I'm really looking forward to reading it. It's about a young girl who loses her sister on the first night of the blitz, when Clydebank, a shipbuilding town on the banks of the Clyde, just next to Glasgow, was devastated by enemy bombs. I used to spend my Saturday afternoons in Clydebank when I was just a little bit older than Mavis.  Sue's reading was superb - completely evocative, thrilling and poignant. She had the great idea of using sound system to replicate the bomber alert and all clear sirens, which really made the blood in my veins curdle. She also partly dramatised sections of the novel, with three students from STAG theatre group reading the parts.

I've read the first chapter and am now eagerly trying to finish the Emile Zola book I'm reading (slightly struggling with) so I can get on to reading Mavis's Shoe! But I can't skip it because the Zola book is set in the flat plains of Beauce in France, close to where I spent last summer on the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and this is the area my main character in Spell in the South comes from, so it's useful secondary research :)