OR: PROLOGUE TO CHAPTER ONE OF ‘HOW TO WRITE FANTASY’ IN THE ‘YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP’ SERIES, THE FIRST IN A TRILOGY OF A WRITING ADVICE SERIES ENTITLED ‘LYING, IN STORY FORM’, WHICH IS THE PREQUEL TO THE SERIES ON WRITERS’ FINANCES CALLED ‘STORY-TELLING TO THE TAX MAN’ WHICH IS THE SISTER PRODUCTION OF A SERIES CALLED ‘HOW TO COPE WITH WRITING ADVICE SERIES FATIGUE SYNDROME’ (SEE ALSO EPISODE ON NEVER BEING KNOWINGLY UNDERTITLED)

There aren’t a lot of laughs in fantasy fiction. There’s quite a bit of description of characters we are told are funny, often large men with large beards who smite their fellows on the back and liken their visages to those of a horse with a hangover, or drink much ale from pewter tankards, light up long pipes and recite merry verses that have the clients of the Saucy Sailor in fits of laughter but leave the reader wondering if he’s accidentally wandered into a Christian summer camp where all the jokes are meaningful and curse-free.

The author may or may not consciously realise his fantasy comedy characters are about as effective as alcohol-free beer but the effect is often the same: he overcompensates by bulking up other aspects of them to intimate humour. Stupid is quite common. Hence, Hagrid is shown to be a bit on the thick side but underneath all that beard-interwoven-with-shirt beats a profoundly loyal heart. He also knows stuff which is of course handy for the author’s required plot shifts. So, all in all, while Hagrid never actually makes the reader laugh, he is the epitome of fantasy character inadequacy overcompensation syndrome, being large, bearded and oddly gentle, which means the reader will give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him to be a really funny character. Anyone wandering into the Harry Potter world for the first time may, however, need to be tipped-off on the joke, or non-joke, or joke about a joke, or the suspension of jokefulness necessary to join the gang.

Fantasy perhaps more than any other genre suffers from CIOS. This is because the author is responsible for making up the entire world of his story, including all the countries and towns, the folklore, the peoples, religions, types of beer – sorry, ale – even the animals (although horses for some reason seem to be ubiquitous in fantasy literature, possibly because without them novels would be even longer since all the questors would have to move around on foot or on the back of something similar to a horse – a forse, perhaps – but that would just confuse and irritate the reader (yeah, like that will), so you might as well just stick with horses; actually, you might just as well stick with medieval Europe but that’s another story, literally). Hence, while fantasy readers are keen to enter strange new worlds, the reach of those worlds is always restricted by the author’s character blank spots.

All in all, unless you the writer are Tolkien and have years of sponsored study into European folklore and history behind you, writing a fantasy novel for you is a bit like walking into the bar on the first night at your new college. It’s a world you don’t understand but very much want to join. Now, the right way to do that would be get around the room and adopt whatever role is required for each situation you find yourself in until you’re able to build your own character within it. But that’s the hard way. Much easier to invent a generic get-by character – maybe a ‘humorous’ one who slaps people on the back, metaphorically only these days of course – and hope that it will compensate for your general lack of insight into the new world you’ve entered. Or created, if you’re the author.

The end result of all this overcompensation is that very often all the characters in a fantasy novel are actually the same. They just wear things that separate them from the rest, like red pantaloons, or have a stu–stu–stu–TER! that appears throughout all their dialogue to hugely irritate the reader but at least make the book longer. In short, the author has to use every compensatory trick in the book (trilogy, never-ending series) – class, race, age, gender – to intimate character where little actually exists.

So, how does the author avoid CIOS? Perhaps he needs to challenge his world more. Of course, he may have invented his world in the first place in order to avoid the challenges of the real world. Like the guy who builds a model railway in his attic, complete with houses and grass and trees and people he’s made himself, with him in control. Having said that, anyone who is invited to view his railway world would, just like a reader, no doubt enjoy it more if a meteorite fell though the roof and smashed Littletown Halt to powdered fibreglass. But that’s not the kind of challenge we’re talking about, I don’t think.

In the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson, Covenant literally challenges the fantasy world he finds himself in – challenges its very existence. But this kind of challenge is probably a bit too crude for our purposes, even if it can be effective.

Maybe we’re talking creative challenge. For example, the obvious way to challenge the creation of, say, a stereotypical medieval Europe-ish submissive, child-bearing, stew-cooking, beard de-lousing woman is to turn her into a bloke with boobs instead. One who can beat up men and therefore out-man them. A better challenge is to go sideways and produce a female character who is neither of these extremes. The trouble with that direction is that it’s leading out of fantasy into creative reality.

Hmmm . . . this problem is beginning to look similar to the view expressed by fantasy editors to aspiring writers: that they should make their books different but the same.

And with that closing of the syndrome circle, I’m signing off episode one in order to go run around the woods a bit more, trying to distract anyone reading this from the absence of any plot movement behind this series.

There’s an understanding I’ve been trying to get to for some years now. I seem to talk around it a lot when teaching and I think a lot of my writing is in pursuit of it. Yet I’ve never quite pinned down what it is. Maybe it’s a little like the Questing Beast that you build your life around finding but never do, yet it’s the journey that’s important and all that, blah blah. No, not that. Questing after something you’re never going to find is just escapism.

On the other hand, it’s quite possible its exact nature is not ever meant to be pinned down. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that it’s actually more real than stuff that you can.

Let’s start with a dichotomy that turns up in various forms but might as well be called clever and stupid. There are stupid books, it’s said, like conveyor belt romance, fantasy, crime and the such. Then there are clever books, like the ones which win the Booker prize or were produced by writers officially designated clever by university professors, literary critics and so on.

The problem is that stupid books are often written and read by clever people. And clever books aren’t always quite as clever as they seem. If you removed the warring tribes that tend to congregate around extremes of opinion, the differences between clever and stupid aren’t so clear cut. You look at a stupid book and find that it has odd moments of beauty and wisdom; while clever books can contain incredibly dumb passages.

Ah but! say the tribes. That may be true but a stupid book has many more stupid passages than a clever book and vice versa.

Maybe. But while the war’s raging, I think a much more interesting, if not elusive, question is being avoided.

The problem with genre, including literary, and the commercial/fan pressure to make a book mostly stupid or mostly clever, and the over-powering myriad reasons for producing more of the same, is that it all pulls you away from – well, that elusive something.

It has elements of the transcendent, I know that, not in a religious sense necessarily, more in terms of intelligent insight, and revealing awareness, and being able to intimate in the spaces between plot points, and characters’ movements, and dialogue, and sentences, truths that can stun the mind and heart even if the brain can’t quite work out why.

If as a writer you want to capture this kind of transcendence you face two major obstacles. First, you have to live and breathe the quest in your own life. And, oddly, that’s a quest that can take you away from writing. Because writing is always going to be secondary to experience, even if its brilliant execution can recapture the experience for other people.

If you have an insight into say the collective mind of a row of trees, hinted at in the rustle of leaves in a light wind, and the eyeless and steady stare of their enduring purpose to join the sky and the earth, then the last thing you want to do is try to write about it.

But if you do, then you are starting at a great disadvantage to the writer who simply wants to create a stupid or a clever book. For he only needs to mine what already exists in the field and shake it about a bit until it looks different enough to attract an editor then a bunch of readers.

For the writer who wants to capture an indefinable truth or first hand connection, however, where the hell does he start? He has to tell a story but he’s not particularly interested in going from beginning to end with try/fail dramas for his main character along the way.
He just wants to capture that moment. He can almost see and smell it, and he knows where it’s going to take place. It’ll say appear in the morning-after-the-party conversation, about half-way through the story, between his heroine and her flat mate. Both are hung-over; the heroine is actually an ancient spirit which used to embody a dragon that has been stolen by the security forces and will probably destroy the world if she can’t stop it. Her flat mate is an ordinary girl who knows nothing of the her friend’s true destiny. But ordinary people possess a deep-rooted if not conscious sense of the miraculous. And so it is that although the two are talking about boys and booze and the next party, the universe is dancing gently on their words.

The rest of the story has to be constructed around this moment. Yet he knows that will inevitably produce weaknesses – not important to anyone else who is also seeking those transcendent moments. But his experience is that even editors often approach a story mechanically, looking for proper structure and steady characters, kidding themselves that a derivative one-liner by the main character also lends the story originality. And because his writer’s heart is inevitably spending time with the magic moment to come, his writer’s brain is not always quite as attentive to the accepted basics as it probably should be.

So, eventually, he concedes that he has to try to do both. To write a solid story which will please the majority of editors and readers, that contains the required ‘conflict’, and the just-enough-but-not-too-much difference to the norm, and characters that may appear to be wiser than the reader (e.g. wizards) but who should never actually make anyone think too much, and absolutely no philosophising – although it’s allowable to write spiritual redundancy as interesting vagueness if it’s literary fiction.

Good luck with that, he says to himself.

I was once having a conversation with a top-selling commercial author. At that time, he had five novels coming out in as many months. He was very critical of literary authors who don’t actually write very much. He, on the other hand, sat down and wrote for eight hours a day, every day. For some reason, I mentioned William Kotzwinkle who for me in his heyday was one of those writers who just went for the magic. He was brilliant enough, and perhaps lucky also to have started out in writing when publishing wasn’t quite so mechanised, to get away with quite a few wonderful but totally varied novels slipping into the mainstream. Passages of his writing are transcendent – they induce emotions in the reader by a kind of conspiracy of shared feeling, rather than by him having to tell you what to feel.

The writer I was talking to blinked at the mention of Kotzwinkle then went on to tell me a story about his last holiday, and how he’d just written all the time during it.

“Couple of friends of mine,” says Nige, “are suffering from middle class community syndrome.”

We’re in his garden, sat in plastic chairs on his decking, surrounded by early summer greens. The sun is low behind his house and the top of the trees are aflare with it. We’re drinking bottled craft beers. I reflect that beer, like everything these days, is another middle class choice syndrome. It’s delicious but for the price of a bottle, you could get a pallet of industrial lager in Tesco.

“Whether or not to be part of theirs?” I say.

“No, which bleedin’ one to choose.”

“Ah. They’re moving out of London.”

“Not quite. They’re buying a second home outside London.”

“So they’re looking for the perfect balance,” I say.

“Yup. They want a nice, supportive village community but not too churchy since they don’t want to feel pressured to make their kids believe in anything. They also want to live close enough to the centre so they get the benefit of cat and kid minders but not so close that everyone knows all their business.”

“Thriving pub but not too loud and blokey?”

He nods. “Close to bleedin’ nature but no local fox hunt or peasant shoot or battery chicken farm.”

“Characters who’ve lived there all their lives but not anyone who votes UKIP.”

“You got it. So they’re scouring the regions for the right mix but of course missing the point entirely.”

“That you can’t pick a community; it picks you?”

“Very pat, Tel. But not untrue. They’ve got money and time and transport links so they can go almost anywhere they want. The problem is working out what they want.”

“Tripadvisor should get into selling property.”

“Well, yeah, then no one would ever move.”

“Then he hits me with the question I knew was coming.

“So,” he says, “would you choose this street now?”

I think about stories again, and the characters we choose to fill them. Do writers go through the same process as Nige’s friends? Do they try too hard to make them fit the story community? Would stories work better if the writer picked a character at random then simply dropped him or her into the first fictional street he sees?

“I know that look,” says Nige.

“I know you know,” I say. “I probably wouldn’t, if I’m honest. I saw one of those get out into the wilds property programmes on TV the other day. This couple had spent months trawling through the British countryside via online property sites but they hadn’t actually visited a single property.”

“Did the programme find them one?”

“No, because they’d got into the habit of rejecting places for being less than perfect. So that’s all they see now, and the imperfections are even more abundant in the flesh.”

“You didn’t choose this part of the country when you moved here though, did you?” he says.

“No. I’d never even heard of it. My girlfriend at the time had a friend who was moving out of a flat near here and we needed somewhere quick.”

What’s really strange, I think, is that while I like living in this street yet didn’t choose it, I know that when I move I’ll be more like Nige’s couple or the couple on TV, and try to find the perfect place.

“Maybe as you get older,” I say, “you believe you have the right to pick and choose your community. You just don’t have the energy to go through all that fitting in and contributing.”

He sighs, which is a rare thing for Nige who, on the whole, doesn’t do ennui. “Every bleedin’ thing’s a decision now, ain’t it? A couple of generations back, you didn’t get any choice at all. You went to the nearest school, whatever it was. Your parents lived in the same place their parents did and where you were going to live, too. You married the nearest girl whose folks were just like yours. You had kids young; the husband worked in the local factory with all the other blokes and the wife kept the home. Must have been kind of comforting.”

“Really? This from the man who married a Serbian goth, who hasn’t got any kids, who works as a builder/decorator in sheer defiance of his excellent but secret educational qualifications, who has the world’s most extensive library of Kennedy conspiracy theory videos, who’s drawing from a huge range of craft beers as we speak.”

There’s a point in here somewhere, to do with writing better. It’s eluding me, like a dream that’s slipping agonisingly into obscurity as you try to keep hold of the ragged edges of meaning that you know it possesses. Perhaps it’s to do with the fact I find so little fiction worth reading these days. Somehow, for me modern authors are like Nige’s friends, restlessly roaming the world of stories but never really taking one on. Instead, they approximate – take a story that’s close to what they want or, more like, what they think their readers want. When maybe what they should be doing is simply taking the first story they come across then making it their own.

“One time,” says Nige, “I was on a job, decorating this woman’s house in Beckenham. She’d been separated for a couple of years, bringing up her daughter on her own, not going out much. She looked kind of mumsy to me at first. Anyway, we used to talk while I was having a tea break or whatever. And I don’t know why, maybe it’s just because I liked her, but this kind of held-back beauty started showing itself or maybe I noticed it because she was such good company. Thing is, Tel, we’d found each other, by chance really. We didn’t want anything other than the company. So, I got to really looking forward to our talks, to enjoying her smile and the way she was with her kid.”

He opens another bottle, fills his glass. I do the same.

“You know what,” he says. “Just about the time I realised I loved her – her, not what she could do for me – and was all ready to ask her out properly on a date, I went round there one morning, pencil stuck raffishly behind me ear, and this bloke opened the door.”

“The husband came back?” I say.

He nods. “Choices, Tel. The kid needs her father; the mortgage needs paying; against that is a stroppy builder from Lewisham who might or might not be the one she hoped she’d find when she was an idealistic teen. The weird thing was, when I looked at her, tried to hold her eyes, the beauty had gone, retreated again.”

“I’ve worked out why people like stories,” says Nige. We’re in the Tavern and as is often the case his face is streaked with paint, rather like a Red Indian – Native American – in a cowboy story. I used to think he just didn’t get time to have a shower after painting someone’s house but now I reckon it’s more a badge of honour, or at least a sign to any single woman that he’s got a job.

“Because they have proper endings, unlike in real life?” I say. I’m dressed in a plain blue shirt with grey trousers, rather like an extra in the background of a movie. We’re both leaning against the counter. It’s Monday night and the place smells a little vacant, stories hiding in the shadowed corners as if waiting for the weekend before showing themselves.

“No,” he says, “because the characters can’t escape.”

For some reason I think about Old Harry then, who used to sit permanently at the end of this counter, large buttocks sculpted around the stool seat as if they’d never been separated. Although he didn’t say much, the bar wasn’t the same after he died. After he escaped.

“Like Julie?” I say.

“Well, yeah, but in her case I organised the escape committee and helped her dig the bleedin’ tunnel.”

Nige’s smile is a little taught when he says this but I let it pass.

“Bit part characters can escape,” he says, “but not the leading people.”

“I seem to recall once reading about some pigmies who were shown a load of western movies,” I say. “If the main character went into a shop, bought something and left, they wanted to know what happened to the shop keeper.”

“That’s because in their world, everyone counts; everyone is part of the story. In our culture, hardly anyone counts, just the main man which is yourself, mainly. If you’re a pigmy you can’t escape the world. But if you’re a westerner, that’s all you ever bleedin’ do. So we like stories, novels, movies because they perpetuate the myth that we’re actually in a world we can’t escape from.”

I think about the stories I’ve written. Never once has a character been able to simply leave the story. Unless they’re just the shop keeper who sold the hero something he needed at that particular moment.

“Are you saying we like to read about people who can’t escape their lives because that’s what we do all the time?”

He pauses in the usual way, by lifting his pint glass and swallowing half the contents.

“As usual, Tel,” he says, “you’re complicating things. What I’m saying is that people are reassured by stories because they’re the only place where their heroes, or the objects of their affection, or just their bleedin’ internet service provider, have to stay put until the end. They can’t just start something and leave it unfinished.”

“Unless they have a better-paid job to get to.” I raise my eyebrow in what I hope is an ironic gesture, modifying the dig, which is about the time Nige was supposed to decorate our place while we were on holiday. We came back to find an unpainted house, a step-ladder with cobwebs on the hinges bearing a note that said he was very sorry but Nige had to attend his grandmother’s funeral. The only problem being that he’d told me about this trick long before we’d employed him and I was able to point out later that this was in fact his third dead grandmother.

He blushes slightly, accentuating the white war paint. “Jobs is different,” he says, not entirely convincingly. “Because you do have to finish them.”

“Eventually,” I say, getting the eyebrow into the act again.

“The point is,” he says, “that while we’re obliged to complete stuff what we get paid for, we rarely ever complete the important stories in our lives – you know, romance, friendships. I mean, how many old school mates have you lost touch with, everyone of ’em a loose end what ain’t been tied up? How many girl friends did you break up with and you still don’t really know why?”

He’s got a point, of course. Most of my old girl friends don’t even seem to be in the internet. Although, I’m not sure Facebook is really a story you can’t escape from anyway.

“There are a few story magazines,” I say, “that don’t want you to send them anything with neat, moral endings. Instead they want characters who act ambiguously and don’t always get what’s coming to them.”

He nods. “Yeah, yeah, but they still can’t escape the story, can they?”

I look around the room, at the clumps of locals, and the odd visitor; at the miniature kayak that’s been hanging on the wall for as long as I can remember, it’s oars going rusty; at Eric behind the counter, not cleaning glasses with a white tea towel, because no barmen ever do that any more, gazing intently at his smart phone. It all looks like a place you can’t escape.

“I could stop coming here tomorrow,” I say. “I could escape and no one would even notice.”

Nige puts a hand on my shoulder. “Of course we’d notice, Tel,” he says. “We just wouldn’t bother to go looking for you.”

“I’m feeling conflicted, Tel,” says Nige. I already suspected this on account of we are actually sitting at a table, rather than leaning against the bar. The last time he wanted to sit was when West Ham got relegated to the second division in 2011.

“That’s not quite true,” he continues. “I used to be conflicted about this country – loved it as much as I hated it; but now I hate it more.”

“Is this because the Inland Revenue have caught up with you at last?” I say.

It’s Tuesday night and the pub is sparsely populated. Nige has an empty glass but he’s not going to the bar for a refill, mainly because there’s no one behind it. Sue, the barmaid, is on one of her fag breaks out the back. Before that, we had quite a long wait to get served because she was on the phone, chatting to her kids with her customer radar switched off. She’s a pleasant enough woman but like most bar staff she’s paid peanuts and therefore we’re not always her first priority.

“No – why, do you know something?” I shake my head and he relaxes. “It’s because of all this attention on the Establishment. Like the Sun setting up a whistle-blower phone line, where us scallies can anonymously tip them off about Establishment types doing wrong.”

I’ve been thinking about this too. How, with all the current difficulties in setting up the long-overdue enquiry into historical child abuse by powerful people, there seems to be a lot of open criticism about the Establishment. And, while it may be over-optimistic to believe, there is perhaps a growing feeling in the country that at last, there just might be some serious examination of the crimes of the rich and powerful, and their ancient knack of protecting their own from ever facing justice.

“But you hate the Establishment,” I say, “aren’t you pleased there are signs they might be losing.”

He doesn’t reply immediately. Instead, he goes to the bar and buys another two pints, having spotted that Sue’s back. He shares a joke with her and for a moment I think he’s forgotten the subject. But when he sits again, his expression reverts to serious with a shot of melancholy.

“They ain’t losing, Tel. The signs are they’re winning.”

“How do you figure that?”

“The very fact they’re being talked about means they aren’t working very hard to suppress interest, which they’ve always done in the past. And they’d only stop doing that if they’re confident it’s in the bag.”

I think about this while he’s taking a long swallow of lager.

“Because they figure people will grow tired of the subject?” I say. “That all these delays will result in a deflation of public outrage?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” he says. “They’ve knocked the spiritual stuffing out of the people. Basically, they broke the country financially but now the rich are actually twice as well off as they were before while everyone else has taken a hit in trying to undo their mess. People are exhausted and subconsciously broken by the fact the bastards always win. Now, they’re so cocky about what they’ve pulled off that they’re waving their sex crimes in our faces knowing we ain’t got the energy to do much about it.”

He really does sound tired. The streaks of paint in his hair from his decorating job make him seem conquered.

“And so,” he says, “I now hate this country more than I love it and because of that I can’t be bothered to work up a rage about putting things right. God save the bleedin’ Queen and all that.”

I begin to think of arguments to rally him round but in fact I think I know what he means.

“Go on, Tel,” he says, “time for your writing analogy.”

“Since you ask . . . the publishing world is obsessed with profits these days,” I say. “But there’s one thing they can’t control.”

“The public’s sporadic and totally unexplainable hunger for stories about elves and fairies and dwarves and spotty kids with wands who never have to work to be a hero, they just are because the author says so?”

“Well, yes, but the only thing they can’t suppress or manage into mediocrity is a writer’s desire to uncover the truth of the deepest, darkest corner of his soul and turn it into a story that resonates with meaning – even if no one else ever buys it.”

“I get that,” he says. “But I’m just a builder/decorator; which means my soul only has itself to look to and these days it can’t get out from under all the bleedin’ equality and unfairness and raping of the people dumped on us from our betters.”

I have no answer to that. He’s right. It does seem as if the country’s spirit has been broken in recent years. There’s a general election coming up but no one is fooled that any candidates are really saying anything they truly believe in.

“Are you thinking of getting out?” I say.

“As a matter of fact, I am. Got a cousin in San Diego who reckons he can get me some work out there.”

“The USA? But you hate all that capitalist cheerleading world-domination crap – to quote.”

“Yeah, but at least they believe it, Tel.”

For some reason, I think about Starbucks and McDonalds and Burger King. Perhaps he’s right: Americans believe in them. Here, we only have them because the Establishment put up everything in the country for sale, to anyone with the cash to buy. Never mind that most of the people didn’t ask for them in the first place.

I feel a story coming on, about how in the future, our genes will be branded, women’s wombs sponsored; babies born with slogans written by nanotechnology across their foreheads. But I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to write it.

We’ve just been on holiday. A high risk adventure holiday. My knuckles are only just getting blood back in them; my timbers are still shivering; my octane is still so high it’s being monitored by Heathrow air traffic control.

We thought about kayaking around the Orkneys, or sky-diving with only a large pair of Y-fronts to break one’s fall, or wrestling bulls blindfolded. But in the end, we opted for the scariest, most unpredictable kind of holiday you can possibly choose in the modern world. We decided to tour Scotland without checking Tripadvisor first.

So it was that we would turn up late to a hotel having to rely on just our five basic senses and instincts dulled by years of checking online first. We had no scores to refer to, no travellers’ tips, no hotel ranking for the area concerned. We didn’t even know if the management responded to complaints with a standard ‘we’re sorry’ comment or unwise but entertaining sarcasm.

One place we found was off the road, over-looking the sea and emanated good vibes. But of course, vibes are rarely discussed on Tripadvisor. More important to know if the breakfast bacon is crispy or not. Worse still, the place was full with a wedding party. Surely, there would be no rooms at the inn? Might as well clear off and find a quiet spot to hook up the tablet.

But, no, this was a high-risk outing and so we marched right into that wedding. Which was a strange experience since it involved unexpectedly bumping into large, beery Scotsmen who’d previously been invisible due to their kilts matching the tartan carpets and drapes. Finally, at Reception we discovered that the wedding was mostly taking place in the afternoon and in fact there was a room free tonight. What’s more it was the best one, cancelled a few hours ago, and we could have it at a £30 discount.

Resisting the urge to check out the room via ‘travellers’ photos’ we went up the stairs, stepping on only two unseen Scotsmen, and looked it over with unbriefed eyeballs. It was lovely. Should we make sure by seeing how many others thought so too? No! Let’s just get unpacked, go for a walk around the hills then . . .

At the back of the hotel was a bar with a roaring log fire, packed with a mixture of people, mostly locals. We ordered food and sat by the flames. Opposite, a white-bearded chap who turned out to be called Bob said, “You two must be married; you look alike.” No one has ever said this before, which meant either he was mad or in the past few minutes we’d succumbed to the horribly inevitable result of couples who largely agree with each other all the time, i.e. that our faces and bodies agree with each other too.

Then I noticed that Bob also had a very red face, as did the woman next to him and the woman next to her. Which tipped me off that both our faces were probably red too, on account of how incredibly hot the log fire was. Whatever, it started off a conversation that went on all night, involving most of the people present. Topics included the essential need to get rid of the royal family as soon as possible; the reason Scottish folk music is better to dance to than Irish; why a young Spanish man present was here for four years to learn Gaelic (music again: he suspected Spanish folk and Gaelic music have quite a bit in common); and of course the curse of Tripadvisor. We were bought a lot of drinks, and bought a lot too. That night, we put our clock back instead of forward and missed the breakfast cut-off time but the hotel still fed us anyway.

When I later read the reviews of the hotel on Tripadvisor, there was a lot of detailed analysis of the food (why it was good; why it wasn’t, etc); complaints about noise in the dining room, and about the hotel’s no-TV policy; with little mention of the bar other than that the prices were a bit expensive. No one seemed to know about the local music scene or why so many artists have moved to the area or how Bob when living in London caught a man rummaging in his van for stuff to nick but instead of taking him to the police, had a chat with him and shared a fag. Later the man invited him back to his family home, his family turning out to be the notorious Richardsons. Bob never had any trouble from criminals again while living in London; but of course he would probably have had quite a bit of it if he’d copped the man he found in his van.

What’s the lesson here for a writer? Well, I guess the obvious one is that if you go away having first made sure every bit of your destination is checked-out for maximum value beforehand, you may well have a nice, comfy stay. But you might not get as many stories to tell.

I picked up a how-to business book the other day and read the first life/business lesson in it. Which is that the author, as a kid, learned from a rich man that while most people work for money, the rich make money work for them. Apparently, this book has sold millions of copies. Which means millions of its readers must now be rich, making money work for them and not the other way around. Or not.

I guess the question is, assuming the author actually embodies his belief about making money work – and millions of book sales suggest he does – can his book actually change the attitude of someone who has always believed you work for money? Well, probably not, but then it isn’t really designed to do that anyway. The author didn’t need the book, after all. He already had the attitude required. How-to books rarely actually talk about the thing they’re supposed to be revealing the secrets of. I suspect they’re designed more for people who enjoy myths and sermons and dreams about how a subject is popularly conceived to be, with just enough truth to sound authentic.

How-to books are for people who don’t really want to know how-to, but feel better if they can believe they know how-to, and they might just put it into practice one day, you never know, once the kids have gone to college and they’ve finished watching the box set of Game of Thrones for the seventh time. Because, well, you aren’t going to learn how to write like G R R Martin if you don’t study what he produced, are you? Even if he didn’t.

People who really want to how-to, are already how-toing, of course. They won’t need to read books written by how-toers for those who don’t really want to how-to in the first place. They might hear the author talk about the book on the radio for five minutes and that will be enough – both to steal the stuff they haven’t heard before but sense will work and to reject all the fake how-to bullshit he’s throwing in just so that he can sell the book.

I think how-toers receive how-to information in one of two ways:

They recognise the dull drone of someone who hasn’t actually how-toed themselves or has but is now making money from selling the ‘secrets’ to others, then wait a few moments to see if there still might be some accidental wisdom present that can be stolen; then switch off/move on as soon as they sense there isn’t.

Or they feel the sharp slap of reality around the chops, waking them up to something they hadn’t thought of before but, with a sting of excitement in the pit of their gut, know will work. It’s revolutionary, dangerous even; it will change them forever; it will make them uncomfortable; but it will work.

The real how-to book isn’t a book. For a book is structured logically, with chapters that lead on from one another, towards cementing the premise set out in the prologue and the blurb. The rich make money work for them . . . The maybe-one-day-how-toer settles in happily to have this edict proven to them logically over the next 300 or so pages. The real how-toer has already tasted this saying for authenticity and, after deciding that it only works in one dimension, spat it out and moved on to the next smash-and-grab.

The real how-to book is a non-stop series of events that manifest in both the mundane and the sought-after, which the genuine how-toer manipulates in order that they will change him towards being more connected to the things he needs to be connected to.

Or, to put it another way, if you aren’t a committed here and now how-toer (which doesn’t include anyone who truly believes they will be one day), you won’t actually hear/see/smell/touch/taste/sense any real how-to advice whether it arrives in a book, a film, an app, a church sermon, a YouTube video, a school lesson, a Lady Gaga song, or David Beckham’s various dolphin squeaks and bat radar soundings.

So, my how-to advice, which I intend one day to make into a series of books titled, “How to Really Want to How-to and Not Just Know How Real How-toers How-to”, is that before doing anything else you need to work out what it is you want to know how-to and how much you want to how-to.

But there’s a complication here when it comes to writing. Business how-toing is relatively straightforward in that most of the how-to is about making money. And if you want to make lots of money at writing, you’d probably be better off reading business how-to books than how-to write ones. One of the boringly predictable aspects of business gurus, after all, is that their advice, just like their suits, never really changes. The same could be said of certain blockbuster authors’ works.

Therefore, I think the question to ask is, would I rather:

a) Write just one short story that stays in the mind of anyone who reads it because of its emotional truth married with great writing style, anchored in a truly memorable main character? or

b) Sell hundreds of short stories which are adequate, maybe even win some awards, which cumulatively get my name known – but not one of which does what a) does?

The total how-tos of these are two quite different, even though they will share some technical how-tos. For one, it probably is possible to learn how-to do b) through books, workshops, imitation and so on. But b) requires a different kind of desire. One that isn’t easy to bookify. It’s about adventure and passion and the joy of bringing out the best of oneself; putting it into a form that entertains through shared emotion, not via sales tricks.

Last week, I taught the first-ever SF & Fantasy writing course at Denman College. It was great fun. The students were really keen and hard-working, determined to make the best of the time they had. The full days at Denman are fairly long – from 9.30 in the morning till 9.15 at night. So, you have to try to get the balance right, between pushing on for a result and taking the time to sit back and reflect, share some laughs and, of course, do some writing.

For me, the secret of teaching as such, is that I must be as keen as the students. Yes, I need to have plenty of stuff prepared but the vital ingredient is that I have to enjoy myself, too. I don’t believe creative teaching works if the teacher has the attitude that they are imparting wisdom, essentially, to the students who just absorb it.

Recently, there was an article in a widely read journal by an author who teaches creative writing. She talked about making sure you don’t run out of material; listed some tricks for overcoming nerves. But what she didn’t talk about was enjoying herself. She made it sound like a necessary chore that a writer has to take on at some stage in their career, and how to get through it relatively unscathed. I’ve met others like her.

Part of the problem, I think, is that writers sometimes get hired to teach on the basis that they’ve had books published, not because they want to teach. They worry about how they will get on, so they concentrate on putting together careful but somewhat rigid sets of exercises and mini-lectures. And yes, new writers need to know about structure and plot and point of view and show not tell. But more than that, they need to see that the teacher is still being creative himself.

And this is the bit that’s hard to talk about but which is essential above how much knowledge of the craft you possess or even how many books you’ve sold. It’s about giving yourself over honestly to the process that you’re sharing with the students. Not sharing in the same way that they’re involved – after all, you are responsible for the course – but certainly the same in terms of putting in your heart and soul and the very best of your attention.

If you can do this, then the students will sense the best kind of encouragement to succeed. You can’t make them be better writers, but you can show by example that improving at anything is always a matter of first setting up a safe, creative environment, then second, jumping in to it without reservation.

This doesn’t mean that every moment of your course will be bursting with creative energy – that’s impossible – but it does ensure that whenever a student has a breakthrough moment of understanding or insight, what they will meet is genuine and fully-felt encouragement, rather than a kind of muted and possibly not fully cognitive acknowledgement.

At one point on our course, I was trying to explain about how magic, in terms of creating moments, characters, scenes that are more than the sum of their parts, that truly excite the reader, is a bit like palm-reading. I confessed that I used to be a professional palm-reader but that I didn’t tell fortunes; I concentrated on reading character. The first ingredient of that is plain curiosity, to always be fascinated by what makes people tick. Then you need lots of practice at reading palms – not necessarily after studying books written by palm-readers (in fact, I’d advise against this, unless you want your creative curiosity to get side-tracked by spurious future-prediction or even cold reading); you could do it like I did, by setting yourself up as a palm-reader in a public place then just jumping in.

When you’ve read hundreds of palms a strange thing happens: your instinct begins to take over, so that it kind of soars above all that practice and connects to revealing aspects of, in this case, other people that you couldn’t really work out logically. At one point, I told them, I stopped looking at people’s palms – but that had unsettled my clients, so I’d gone back to using the hand as a prop.

Writing, I said – and I admit the analogy was a little rough, but at least I was working it out live, so to speak – is similar. You need to be constantly writing but also curious about what you write, what your writing reveals about the truth of yourself and others. And all the time, you’re training your instinct so that eventually, a time will come when it’s able to make an informed leap across the mundane/magic divide and return with a phrase or a piece of dialogue or a twist in the plot that is truly, unpredictably, creative.

I think I said it looks a bit like this:

CURIOSITY – PRACTICE – INSTINCT – MAGIC/CREATIVITY

This, I believe, is how you don’t cheat your students; you don’t usher them through a course that you are just trying to survive. Instead, you’re sharing in the creative process.

And at the end of our Denman course I think we all felt the same kind of creative pleasure at having got somewhere different to where we started from. Okay, I was lucky that the people who came were so open to the process – it isn’t always like that – but the point is that if you’re teaching, you need to make sure you are playing your part right from the start, in working hard to be open and ready. In some ways, there’s no worse sin for a teacher than that they aren’t able to help when a student is making a creative breakthrough or that they don’t even notice it.

Apparently, most of us suffer from superiority complex. We think we know more than we do. We think we’re cleverer than we are. We think we think better than we do. Really clever people don’t actually think like this. They know they don’t know everything, and don’t think they’re particularly clever.

Which is odd. It means that in most conversations, business meetings and interviews, the people doing the most talking – the most emphatic talking anyway- are those who aren’t actually that bright. Who’d have thought?

Does this mean that writers who do the most writing aren’t the brightest writers? Does it mean that the characters doing the most talking in your stories aren’t the most interesting?

Can you write if you don’t have a superiority complex?

Do writers write because they’re tired of spending hours listening to other people going on about a great Two-for-One they got in Tesco the other day, wondering why they aren’t doing any of the talking despite having much better stories to tell?

One time, researching an article I was talking to a guy who gives guidance to people who’ve been in religious cults. We had a conversation in which he talked quite a lot about how he and his wife had joined a cult but when he’d left, she’d stayed and they’d broken up. Hmmm, I thought, resisting the urge to offer him a bit of therapy. He also spoke with that all-knowing superiority complex kind of voice and did most of the talking but I wasn’t getting much stuff for the article and politely said goodbye. About two weeks later, he phoned me because, he said, he had an interesting story for me. It wasn’t of course and I started to think about other stuff while he rambled on.

At one point, he said, “I’ve been reading a really fascinating book lately,” and I said, “‘The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck’.” He said, “That’s right,” and carried on with his story.

Now, we had at no time previously discussed books or the kind of literature he might like. So I was interested in how I could possibly know what he was reading right then. I thought about intuition, or cognitive synchronicity, or plain old extrapolation, but nothing quite fit. While I was thinking all this, he carried on apparently oblivious to what I’d done, as if it was just the kind of thing that passed as normal outside of religious cults.

So, locked up tight inside his superiority complex he’d missed a bit of, well, if not magic exactly, at least something that actually might have been worth talking about.

Here’s the thing: critics tend to also adopt the superiority complex when discussing books they admire. Does this mean they tend to miss the magic moments in those books? (Assuming, of course, they contain any?) Or is it more the case that because they aren’t capable of seeing the magic, they automatically opt for books that don’t contain any?

This would explain, to me at least, the utter predictability of many so-called classics of literature. Virginia Woolf, for example, was the market leader in writing from a superiority complex, producing prose utterly devoid of magic but perhaps appealing to those with the same kind of complex.

This is the danger of paying too much attention to what your teachers tell you in school, especially so-called good schools. Writer, teacher, pupil, critic, the approved system of what constitutes art – it’s all a club that the intelligent but gullible are encouraged to join. Inside, they’ll feel the reassurance of others of kind, all knowing exactly why what is considered good literature is the best. But in order to join, you have to put on the club costume which is a kind of tastefully grey superhero costume, obscured by a tweed jacket, with ‘SC’ in gold across the heart.

I think this is saying that if you want to be a really good writer, one who produces the odd bit of magic in amongst memorable, as opposed to well constructed, characters and stories that live-along instead of follow-along, then you have to lead with your not-knowing anything about anything and keep your knowing a lot firmly in the back seat, offering its views only when asked.

In other words, make your superiority complex your slave not your project manager. Superiority is a cult: it offers surety and the agreement of others but it completely excludes, destroys if possible, any hint of non-cult behaviour that you might actually need if your stories are going to court magic.

I suspect my ex-cult guy joined it in the first place because he was looking for magic. But the odds were against him, given the hierarchical nature of most cults and their obsessive need for members to feel superior to non-members. He left but his wife didn’t. It seems as if he then constructed a new cult for himself: being a cult therapist, which I guess is another kind of superiority affair.

In summary, then, I think I’m saying it’s wise to try not to develop a superiority complex, as a writer, that can make you miss the magic. Some commercial writers, for example, can get caught in the superiority complex of relentlessly pursuing their 5000 words per day targets, then bragging about it or, worse, encouraging new writers to join their club. Literary writers can develop a superiority complex that’s based on almost the opposite approach: writing next to nothing but re-writing it endlessly anyway, under the belief that quality lies in less.

I think there are essentially two elements to writing: telling a story and telling the truth. Ideally, your work has both. But how do you know what’s the truth and how much of it do you need to tell?

Let’s take an issue that’s in the news at the moment, alleged child abuse by members of the establishment: MPs, rich businessmen and royals. So far, the story has mostly comprised accusations followed by strident denials. A fairly typical denial made by the establishment is in effect that a lord or a prince or a noble lord could not commit such a crime because, well, they’re a lord or a prince or a noble lord.

The police, the investigatory commission, and the press will seek the truth and perhaps eventually claim it has been found. What they mean is that it will be determined that X establishment person committed Y crime against Z vulnerable person. But there are perhaps other truths to uncover here, ones that may be of more interest to a writer.

One is tied up in the question: is a prince, a noble lord etc actually a better person than the guy who empties their dustbins? Now, you could take an answer to this direct from the characters concerned, and it would probably be ‘No’. Or you could look at the same characters’ behaviour and their setting and the way their society reacts to them, when the answer would have to be ‘Yes’. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that if members of the establishment did not deep down believe this, then there would be little point in accepting the knighthood, the royal birthright, the place in the House of Lords to begin with; or indeed to bother aiming for those things.

If a writer intends to tell stories that are founded in truth, he has to make his mind up about this kind of question. If he doesn’t, he can still write a story about say establishment types but it will lack moral foundation. Which doesn’t matter at all if the person reading it also lacks moral foundation, or wants to put it aside for the duration. There are enough readers after all to ensure that a writer with talent and no moral foundation can make a living.

Maybe the complication here is that we tend to think we are one belief, or thought, or view, and that such singularity lies somewhere inside us, in our soul say. When we need to decide about an issue – or write a character for a story – we simply open the well-oiled lid of our singular views and draw out the tools needed.

But I suspect that in actuality our beliefs/views/thoughts are only very partially inside us, and not as singular as we think. Much of what we call ‘me’ is a constantly shifting matrix that makes links to views that live outside of oneself, in a social, tribal, national ether that is actually more ancient and stronger than any individual within it. For many people, these links are not very robust, which is convenient because it means we can shift emphasis to whichever of them suits our current needs.

So it is that a politician is offered a bribe by a local businessman who wants to disguise his criminal activities. Instead of pulling on his link to what is wrong with crime, the politician instead thickens up his link to the perception that the crooked businessman’s products are actually useful for people. Or, if that isn’t possible, he’ll switch to his link to the wisdom that ‘everyone would do the same; and in my case I’m helping to protect local jobs’.

There is something of a mystery about how writers who produce great, memorable characters, do it. Or why many other writers can’t: somehow their characters are never more than story puppets.

I believe great character writers instinctively know they have to let their characters explore this ever-shifting (morally, emotionally and mentally) matrix. This risks contradictions in behaviour – something a lesser writer is terrified of, for he knows it will undermine the logic of his story. Of course it’s those very contradictions that a reader loves. But only if they make character sense; that make you think: “What did he just say? – Oh, yeah, okay, yes: he would say that.”

To be able to write this way, I believe a writer has to develop the right kind of self-honesty. Not self-effacement, for that is often too passive. He needs to feel joy at his own ignorance and capriciousness.

This is the opening to my story, ‘Big Dave’s In Love’:

I skip down the street like I got sherbet up me backside. I sweep me arms wide and sing to the pigeons and the cats and the bespectacled mice what study form under the bookie’s shop floor.

“What’s up, Jack?” says one of the cats.

I should hold back the news, at least until I make it to the public bar of The Airpod and Nanomule. Then again, everyone in Gaffville deserves to hear the glad tidings.

“Big Dave’s in love!” I shout, so loud I even gain the attention of the rebellious rooks on the multi-coloured cogni-nylon thatched roofs. Other less cynical birds whoop and coo and shake their feathers in sheer joy. And I do a leap to click my boot heels together because this is what we’ve all needed to save us, ain’t it the truth.

Gaffville’s pavements change colour from doomy brown to cheerful gold as I pass, sensing my mood of altruistic delight. In the transpods, high above the roof-tops, formerly morose citizens wave splendidly down at Jack who is no doubt grinning like a dog with jam-covered balls.

For I am Big Dave’s batman, and if I’m hopping down the street wearing a grin as wide as the boss’s waistline, then perhaps they won’t be doomed to melt away, into the general bio-electro-mechanical sludge that washes across all but a few patches of life on this poor, tired planet of ours.

You can read about the story and find a link to all of it here:

http://arcfinity.tumblr.com/post/23734841554/arc-and-the-tomorrow-project-competition-results

The success of this opening – for me – is what I had to do to write it. Which was to occupy the character of Jack then let his links, connections, thoughts, inclinations and above all his need actually produce the words. I should probably point out that this does not of course lead to big sales. It did win an award, though, and I was really pleased that the editor got it.

I wrote the opening passage then took a long time to finish the story. I’d written the first part by throwing myself inside the main character, taking my morality links with me. This meant I stood a chance of making some new and interesting images and language, and I had to trust that if my moral spine was strong enough it would automatically steer Jack so I and he could be free to let him go with the flow.

After a fairly spontaneous opening it can be difficult to continue. I think this is because morality and fun only get you so far. After that you have to build a story structure. And the problem with that is that any good story structure is rooted in morality. If it isn’t, all you’ve got is a house with no hearth. But it’s your own moral hearth that should be powering the main character. If you switch it to the plot, he’ll lose it and become a character without a hearth.

This, I believe, is the core of the struggle a writer can have to turn a great opening into a gripping story that not only doesn’t lose the excitement but builds on it. And just maybe the secret to doing this is to let your own moral core be split evenly between your main character and the plot, so that they drive each other.