Blog Archive for Creative Writing

I’ve already written about this in the post about Richard Charkin’s talk (’The Future of Publishing in the Digital Age’), but I wanted to write a bit more about it. If you’ll indulge me.

There’s an article in last week’s Economist (I’m not the fastest of readers) about new technologies in publishing (’Unbound‘, Economist 7th June) which covers devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, already mentioned before.

Now, the Kindle is clearly not an object of desire. It’s not an iPhone, and it’s not the sort of thing that will MAKE people rush out to get one and switch medium from paper to electronic. It won’t be the sort of thing that you whip out proudly in public - if anything, firing up one of these will only make fellow readers harrumph and flick through their paperback noisily in defiance. It reminds you of the sort of early-80s Alan Sugar AMSTRAD computer brick which somehow managed to excite people sufficiently to help make Sugar the millionaire he now is.

But that doesn’t mean that the Kindle isn’t another early step in an interesting direction.

As a traditionalist in the audience countered in Richard Charkin’s talk, and as the standard argument goes, “yes, but you’ll never be able to beat holding a good old-fashioned paper book in your hand, whether you’re reading it on the train or in the bath”. Wrong. Not YET. But they will. The Kindle may not yet be that beautiful, but just think about what WILL become possible. Using only today’s imagination, future e-books will be far less cumbersome than what we have now, and will be able to use smart-links in the book’s text to either look up definitions online or in built-in dictionaries. Or make recommendations of other books in the margins. Maybe we won’t have the satisfaction of pulling out the bookmark from a page near the end of the book, showing everyone you’re almost finished (admit it - often, one of the nice things about the book is finishing it, whether it was a great book or not; it’s an accomplishment). But perhaps instead the e-book will have an hourglass; or a Google Map showing the progress the professor’s made in his chase around Europe to find the code; which cycle of hell Dante has reached (oh no - he’s surrounded by celebrities braying their life stories!); or an emoticon showing how close our heroine has come to achieving full atonement for her childhood crimes.

Maybe the e-book will have a soundtrack playing in the background, either the official film soundtrack, or preferably one of your choice. E-books will be able to pick up wi-fi updates (already entire books can be downloaded wirelessly via Amazon) so you could even pick up local histories or commentaries as you pass by. Suddenly you’ll be able to get a whole lot more out of the myriad ‘Untitled’ paintings in galleries if you can actually look up relevant articles by critics friendly or hostile.

And that’s just using today’s imagination. Who’d have thought only ten years ago that we’d be surfing the internet at high speed on our own mobile phones (”Internet? Mobile phone? Can’t imagine what for!”) In ten years’ time, it’s already hard to predict what consumer technology will be available - but take a look at this Youtube clip from Nokia from earlier this year. It’s basically some high-tech back-of-the-envelope sketches of future mobile possibilities. Which, for me, makes the prospect of the potential of e-books very exciting indeed.

Am I willing the end of the paper book? No, of course not. I have nothing against it, it’s great for what it does, which is to get across the text of a book in a very simple way without any distractions. So why replace it? Well, why not? One very good reason would be the environment. Why should some retired bank manager in Dorset think that several hundred trees should suffer so the world can hear about his thrilling rise from middle-class to slightly-upper-middle class, via that car crash and the death of his mother and dog? Why should we rub out forests the size of Wales (or is it Luxembourg, I can never remember) just to recycle the same thriller plot from that flabby right-wing American author? If the book was purely in download format, then you’d buy the e-book once (or perhaps every year, with a contract, from the Blooms-Blackberry Corporation) then simply pay for downloads.

If the e-book weren’t a ‘walled garden’ product (eg AOL, which keeps the user corralled in an internet zone whose borders are decided by the ISP) you could also access the works of lesser writers, the ones who you won’t find in the front porch of Waterstones, the ones who don’t even have a book deal. OK, so many writers without a deal simply don’t have a good enough product, but equally, publishing budgets are limited and many great works never see the light of day because our current system only publicises a few hundred books a year. As with popular websites and viral campaigns, if the product is good, it will be seen, whether thanks to corporate marketing budgets, or more likely via wildfire email forwarding. Suddenly that retired bank manager, or that tragic guy born without a sense of perspective, can have their life story in download format available to all.

OK, so perhaps it’s not such a great idea after all…

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on June 19, 2008

I’ve already mentioned the plenary speech by Richard Charkin, in Thursday’s blog. This packed afternoon also saw readings from some of the students on the National Academy of Writing course, the BCU-based course for aspiring writers. Some of these readings, which also involved collaborations with other creative areas such as Tina Freeth’s work with illustrators (also listed below) and can be found in the NAW’s first publication, the anthology ‘Finding a Voice‘, available on pre-order on Amazon. We also heard a talk by student Richard Howse about Litopia, the online writing community where aspiring writers can offer their work for dissection and have access to a huge array of writing resources, articles and podcasts.

The show was kicked off with a reading by our NAW fellow, Nicola Monaghan, from her new novel Starfishing (a passage which we had the opportunity of workshopping with her last year); included a reading from another tutor Jackie Gay; and finished with a fascinating talk from the novelist, scriptwriter and professor of English literature David Lodge.

In his talk, he spoke of the art of writing, as he’s studied it and as he himself has employed, comparing the styles and techniques of different writers. For example, he spoke of John Irving’s method as starting with the book’s final sentence and working back from there, never touching that final line until reviewing the whole book at the end. He approaches his writing as he did his wrestling in his previous, more physical calling - that is, grappling with every line until it yields its intended meaning. David himself writes, as he regards it, fairly conventionally - that is, proceeding linearly a chapter at a time, reviewing and pruning all the way along.

What with his other, academic career, he deals often with campus life and the art of teaching writing in his books, and particularly the contentious issue of whether the art of writing can, indeed, be taught. While David doesn’t believe that great writers can be born in such classes, there is certainly plenty of opportunity for average talents to be tuned and improved.

In his 1990 play ‘The Writing Game’, he deals with just this. A student on a creative writing course asks the teacher, Leo, how she can improve her work. He respond, rather glibly, that good writing boils down to ‘repetition’ and ‘difference’. Knowing which, and when, however, is the difficult art.

David Lodge’s talk offered a fascinating insight into the world of writing, and a great literary counterpoint to the industry view offered by the flamboyant Richard Charkin.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing on June 15, 2008

This was the title of yesterday’s keynote talk given by Bloomsbury’s Richard Charkin at the National Academy of Writing’s end of year show. He cheekily began by pointing us towards some easy-to-find online articles about publishing’s future which would better cover the topic of his talk, and then went on to speak at greater length about its past developments, including early attempts at computerisation and spell-checking before moving onto leaps online by the likes of Amazon under Jeff Bezos.

As this was an audience predominantly made up of writers and wannabe authors, it was refreshing to hear the word from the business end. And I find that a lot of writers forget that this is a business, selling products to a complicated market. It’s not, unfortunately, about the love of art - perhaps in earlier eras, publishers and patrons would take punts on long shots just for the love of it. But, as Richard Charkin was saying, publishers rarely make big money on general fiction (except, in the case of Bloomsbury, for one particular series of novels…) but rather in more specific markets such as medicine, scientific and financial publications. Considering publishing companies’ often large profile, it’s still no surprise that Bloomsbury’s the only one listed on the London Stock Exchange.

When he (eventually) came onto the subject of the future of the book, he doubted the potential of e-books devices such as Amazon’s Kindle - many people buy books as furniture, or gifts, so where do e-books fit in with that model? “Happy Birthday Mum - I emailed you a link to download the latest McEwan.” Though he doesn’t think the argument ‘you can’t read an e-book in the bath’ works very well - you can’t really, after all, read a normal book in the bath… He also rues the gradual drop in quality of book production in general, as publishing companies struggle to keep costs down.

There was also a nice anecdote about an earlier time in his career when he licensed the digital rights of the Oxford Uni dictionary to a spell-checking company for the sizeable price of $600k. On testing the spell-checker, and checking naturally for expletives (this was the expurgated US version), he was asked if he wanted to add the previously non-existent ‘f***ing’ to his personal dictionary, to which he agree. On then looking it up to ensure it was there, he found it between the words ‘frustration’ and ‘fulfilment’.

True story.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on June 12, 2008

Must be patient, imaginative and good with their hands.
GSOH and non-smoker essential.

“As in marriage, the rules of collaboration are communication and surrender. Afterall, it’s all a learning experience.”

Syd Field - Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

Tina Freeth is a student on the National Academy of Writing, the first intake, of January 2007. As part of the NAW Graduate Diploma in Writing, students are asked to become involved in collaborations, with other students or writers, or just people in desperate need of some good creative writing.

Here’s an outline of Tina’s projects, and some links to how they’re going so far…

Collaboration One: Constructing Tina Freeth

“I managed to make contact with a Birmingham City University lecturer and artist Chiu Kwong Man in the hope that I might be able to meet some of his illustration students to work on a collaboration. He put me in touch with his third year student Elaine Brambil, whose illustrations weren’t what I imagined illustrations to be… that is drawings. Elaine’s work is subtle collage and nostalgically layered images, stuck, cut and pasted together to create a visual narrative.

Elaine wanted to collaborate with a writer to experiment with a narrative that was already in place. Her previous work assembled from bits of discarded pieces (postcards, old tickets, old photographs) and trinkets sold cheaply in the Rag Market or passed down to her from her parents or grandparents. I have to admit this kind of collaboration was not what I had expected to do, but the more I thought about it the more I came around to the idea.

Elaine discussed her initial ideas about a fictional person dying and leaving behind objects which form the basis for a narrative. On hearing her ideas I began to formulate my own in alignment with hers. My mother had died a few years back and I inherited the family photographs and old documents. I offered these up to Elaine for her use and agreed that I could write some pieces of fragmented memoir. Unbeknownst to Elaine I had started my memoir last year, but had reached a blockage when I had to begin writing about my distant past and the 70s. I knew this project would get me thinking about memories. Elaine was very much interested in secrets and the emotional and quirky parts of families we rarely see beyond the smiling family portraits, so I wrote fragmented accounts of my family and of my childhood growing up in a council house in Birmingham.

The result of our collaboration is a dummy book made by Elaine featuring my words and her illustrations.

This is the prologue:I used to have recurring dreams of Mom dying. Some nights I’d wake up sobbing with snot and sorrow drenching my pyjamas. The terror of not having her in my life was larger than my phobia of snakes and my fear of the dark. She was just like the light on the stairwell - always switched on helping me to navigate the ups and downs of life. I was twenty-six when my light went out. Mom died on the 6^th August 2003 whilst I held her hand. As a child I used to sneak into her bedroom asking for pain relief from cramped calf muscles. ‘Put your foot on a cold floor,’ she would whisper, as she rubbed my hardened leg with her warm hands easing my pain away. It always worked, like some kind of instant magic. The one person who used to take my pain away, was gone. The woman whose apron strings I was tied to, had left me as others had left me before. She was the person I loved most in the world and suddenly I felt very much alone.

Collaborating with Elaine has been great for me as it enabled me to look at my past creatively, we went through my old photos together and she picked out the ones she felt were visually interesting, and if I had trouble knowing if they would go with the illustrations I would edit as appropriate. If I was stuck with knowing what I should edit and cut I would look at her illustrations and she looked to my writing for inspiration on visual content and composition.

Collaboration Two: The Lonely Lemon

After working with Elaine for a few weeks, Chiu then asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him, a kind of see-saw experiment where we both draw and write. I have to say that I was unconfident about my drawing abilities and also Chiu’s style is rather dark compared to my own happy-go-lucky conversational writing style. We began with a sentence:

There was a lemon boy, how he came to be nobody nose (yes, a homonym!).

This collaboration began quite rocky with my social realism drawings not working alongside the art I know Chiu produces. I didn’t see how it would work. After a few attempts to create a working path that we would both be happy with, we decided on sticking to what we did best, him drawing and me writing. Chiu produced eight illustrations featuring a lemon boy and a host of other strange characters and left me to get on with writing a first draft response to the creatures that had broken free from his imagination.

I wanted the story to mean something and so it is about the human condition, I also wanted to get as many lemon references in there and play with language and the meaning of various words. The whole first draft can be read on Chiu’s website www.myeyeisonfire.net (The Lonely Lemon) and I’m currently in the process of rewriting it as a children’s story inspired by his family’s collaborative follow-up to my initial draft.

From collaborating with other people and visual artists in particular I’ve realised how creative we can encourage each other to be. Collaboration, like Syd Field said is like a marriage, a relationship where both parties should get what they desire but with the overall outcome foremost in your mind. From these two projects I’ve decided to write some short stories using my friend’s photographs of Hong Kong as starting points and visual stimuli for creating a narrative. I’ve also recently been to Paris and bought some postcards written during the early 1900s. Anything can be a made into a story – all you need is that creative spark ignited, whether by another person or an object or memorabilia.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on June 6, 2008

This week, apart from the official start of the NGA festival which kicks off tomorrow, has already seen the start of the Online Narrative. In ten locations dotted around the city (not just the centre, which is nice) observant passers-by will find billboard prompts to take part in a two-week narrative by texting or emailing in story snippets.

National Academy of Writing fellow and award-winning novelist Nicola Monaghan and NAW student Gabrielle Bulmer will compile and steer these ideas together to make a series of stories relating to the comments.

The ongoing narratives can be viewed here. If readers don’t like the direction the story’s taking, they can change it!

So this June, you can either use your texts to contribute to an exciting interactive and participatory medium where for two weeks, the people and visitors to Birmingham can build their own storyline; or you can spend your texts on Channel 4 to help put the next porn-faced show-oaf on the cover of Heat Magazine…

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on June 4, 2008

This month finally saw the acquisition by HarperCollins of the Friday Project - the publisher of online writing and blogs, unfortunately not the similarly named atrocious Channel 4 programme for those with alcoholically lowered standards. Over the past four years, the company had nurtured and sought out new writing online, material which otherwise may have remained in electronic format only but which often deserved a wider audience, but many now see their purchase as the end of the line.

The team had started a few years before, a bunch of writers and bloggers, writing weekly email newsletters such as London by London, the Flirting Thing and the Friday Thing, the linking theme being a focus on quality, sharp humour and an intolerance for the banal - genuinely excellent writing.

The last of these was a newsletter I’d been receiving since its creation in 2001 (an entire age ago, in internet terms - there are still fossil remnants to be found with Google) until its sad end last year. This was a weekly email written by a small team of freelance journalists attacking political hubris and hypocrisy, the gutter press and generally feted fools - all with a usually perfect balance of anger and wit. It was the only email you would genuinely read every time it arrived in the inbox, occasionally delayed by what had clearly been a late night in an East End pub.

There’s too much to quote as an example of what was crisply offensive writing - and not just news round-ups but also a deeply brilliant music column. Instead of what seems to be a consensus of opinions in at least the newspapers’ music columns (why risk being branded as uncool and out of touch when you can simply recycle what’s already been written?) their writer actually dissected good and bad music in a genuine attempt to divine what made it work.

What’s more, it was a great example of how good writing - with no budget and no real marketing - can still reach a large audience through its quality and word of mouth, the ingredients that made so many great internet ideas into success stories. If it had been average writing, or the rehashing of others’ works, it wouldn’t have been passed from friend to friend, and the Friday Project publishing company would have found it far harder to find support from the publishing industries. OK, so the project in its original guises is no more, but they’ll reappear somewhere else in the near future.

The archive of these emails can be found at http://www.thefridaything.co.uk and the books published by the Project can be seen on http://www.thefridayproject.co.uk - have a search through the archives for several years of brilliant writing and journalism.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing on May 19, 2008

It has emerged that one of NGA 2008’s guest speakers, Bloomsbury Publishing’s Richard Charkin, stole a laptop belonging to the online behemoth Google at last year’s Book Expo. (Click here for full shocking story).

OK, it’s not EXACTLY theft, but his act articulates the growing fears in the publishing world about the effects of publishing large, if not complete, tracts online by the likes of Google, Amazon and others. Does this benefit the literary world in general by exposing countless works to a larger potential audience, or is it purely to bring more visitors (and ultimately revenue) to Google’s own pages? A similar argument is raging in the world of music downloads - is it a shot in the arm for an ageing, static industry, or genuinely damaging for future writers and musicians?

Richard Charkin will be one of this June’s guest speakers, representing the Creative Writing line-up, and giving a talk on the future of publishing in the Digital Age on June 11th. Thanks to Richard Charkin’s blog from his time at Macmillan for this link - see http://charkinblog.macmillan.com. Also see his article for Prospect Magazine on the conflict of free information versus freedom of information.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on April 28, 2008

OK, so the article is almost 2 years old (sorry…!), but here’s Melvyn Bragg’s full July 2006 article in the Guardian which first alerted aspiring writers to the new National Academy of Writing, and the reasons for its siting in Birmingham:
http://books.guardian.co.uk…

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing, General Festival News on April 10, 2008

You’re reading the first post of the NGA Creative Writing Blog, which I hope will become a repository of comments, opinions, and occasionally outrageous statements over the coming weeks in the build-up to the June Arts Festival.

Anyone can post anything relevant to creative writing in general - whether you’re student, professor, amateur or professional writer or poet. Or indeed none of the above. I’m Mike Morrison, your moderator/blogmeister for this section, and am happy to receive all comments, including vulgarities though only if used with style. Any sentence with the phrase “at the end of the day” will, however, be instantly pruned.

Posted by Mike in Creative Writing on March 12, 2008