Nige and I are in the Tavern for the first time since it’s been renovated. We’re sitting at a corner table, Nige for once foregoing the action at the bar, because he wants to take in the overall effects of the changes.

“It used to be a real pub,” he says, “now it’s trying too hard to pretend it’s one.”

He’s got a point. Whereas before the furniture didn’t match and the lighting was uneven, the place at least possessed non-corporate charm. Now, the eating area to our right looks like an American diner, and the furniture throughout can’t hide the fact it was bought as job lots. The bar staff also wear matching white shirts. Oh, and the prices have gone up.

Although I agree with him, I decide to use the situation to wind him up a bit.

“Come on,” I say, “at least now it’s providing for a wider demographic, not just embittered builder/decorators who still bring their own spit and sawdust in with them.”

He’s half way through a long swallow of beer and I take advantage to move the conversation on before he can launch into a long rant about how the present economy is very good at producing wealth for the wealthy while at the same time trying to kid the general population that it’s actually getting what it wants.

“I take it the date didn’t go very well last night,” I say.

He puts down his glass, frowning.

“She was a very nice woman,” he says. “Really intelligent; runs her own IT company. Took a genuine interest in me. Beautiful, too.”

He reaches for his glass again, still frowning.

“And?” I say.

He withdraws his hand, says, “And nothing, really. I mean, there was nothing wrong with the date, or her. Everything was nice and normal.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I thought it was. But I guess for it to be special, there had to be something different there. It don’t have to be perfection; in fact, that’s a killer when you think about it. And it don’t have to be laugh a minute, although that can help. It could be you have one hell of an argument but it’s a row with backbone, if that makes sense. Where you’re really sussing each other out at a deeper level. But when everything’s just okay and pleasant, well, you ain’t going to remember that for very long, are you?”

This time he picks up the glass, and I take a moment to think about what he’s said.

“Oh no,” he says, “you’ve got that look again.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one what says you’re going to use Nige’s love life as an analogy for your bleedin’ blog about writing.”

“Yes, but this is a good one. I’ve been talking about short stories, and so far only about what has to go on before you even start writing.”

He laughs. “I get it: there has to be something.”

“Yes, exactly. I read a lot of short stories that are perfectly okay but they don’t have anything different about them. They don’t give the reader something to remember, even if it’s an argument.”

“Just like one of Steve’s stories?”

We both look round quickly to make sure Steve isn’t in tonight. Steve likes to corner anyone he can and tell them stories about things that have happened to him. This might be the time he travelled first class on a train accidentally because he thought he was in second class and the ticket clerk didn’t even notice, or how he took over this slot machine in a pub, just as the bloke who’d been playing it all night went for a pee, put in a quid and won the jackpot then nipped out before said bloke came back from the loo, and so on.

“You wait for the punch line,” Nige says, “but it never comes.”

“And,” I say, “he tells the story the exact same way to whoever he’s telling it to.”

“So, in your damn analogy, Steve is someone who shouldn’t be writing because he ain’t got that anything worth saying.”

“Yes, he’s like a lot of writers: they want to be story-tellers more than they have a story to tell. Steve isn’t interested in the content, just that you listen.”

“So, the lesson is?”

It’s my turn to swallow some thinking-time beer.

“That if you want to be Steve the Story-teller,” I say, “pouring out mundane ‘stories’ to anyone who’ll listen and, who knows, one or two might actually get excited by mundanities, then you don’t need to do anything other than write about any old crap that comes to hand. You can just reach into your memory bag of other people’s stories, take out a few, swap around the details a bit, change the names and places, then call it your own.”

“Or?” He’s grinning because he senses nails and colours and masts appearing on my internal horizon.

“Or,” I say, “you respect the reader by taking the trouble to make sure that there’s something in your story that’s not ordinary. It can be a character you wished you knew in real life; or a plot that twists brilliantly in a way you didn’t expect but which holds up when you go back and read the story again; or it actually makes you laugh; or cry; or has a transcendent element that pings the feeling in all of us that we can be better somehow than we are.”

“Hey, now I’m feeling guilty,” says Nige.

“How come? You’re not a writer.”

 “Yeah, but I expected that woman last night to bring something to the date. Not sure that I did, though.”

I suppress the urge to tell him it’s not like that; that he’s an interesting bloke just the way he is. But I don’t, because he’s right. So often, we go on dates or attend business meetings, or just meet a mate in the pub, leaving the something to others to bring.

I think a lot of writers do the same. They want to be The Writer but they expect the reader somehow to bring the something different, extra, unusual to the relationship, or not. And maybe many readers do, or like the writer just don’t bother. For whatever reason, they’re happy to be The Reader, listening to Story-teller Steve. Or rather, not really listening, more endorsing the two easy, convenient roles.

“So, what are you going to do on the next date?” I say.

He finishes his beer and stands, ready to get two more. “Man up,” he says. “Stop farting about expecting women to be glamorous and dangerous and fascinating. Make sure I’m those things first.”

“Glamorous?” I say.

He pulls his long hair behind his ears. “Well, the manly equivalent: wash hair, shave nose hairs, put on clean underpants.”

He points to my glass. “Same again, Tel?”

“No, get me something different this time.”

He grins. “Anything?”

“Well, anything without an umbrella in it, obviously.”

I’d like to explore a bit further the background processes that govern what we write.

First, I was thinking about how the selection of a particular genre to express a story through might at least in some cases be a substitution exercise. I believe that for a story to carry real power, the author has to make a connection to truth of one kind or another. Which, unless he spends all his time trying to figure out the truth behind people and things, is not easy to do to order. But he knows he has to have something powering the story; so he reaches for a truth substitution that’s already in place and guaranteed to produce at least the simulation of power, magic, connection.

So, for example, he selects the literary genre where he can find ready-made power-simulations, like gloomy allusions to the meaningless of life expressed through the minutiae of dreary characters’ every day lives.

Second, somebody sent me a link to series of paintings by George Bush. Most of them were, not surprisingly, of world leaders he knows. To me, they lacked any kind of truth, emotion, power or connection, and showed an amateur level of skill at best.

So, I thought perhaps it goes something like this, where creative arts are concerned:

1.    NO SKILL – TALENT MAYBE, MAYBE NOT

2.    AMATEUR, then either progresses to

2a.  AMATEUR WITH A LITTLE SKILL, WILL PROGRESS NO FURTHER or

3.    PROFESSIONAL, then either progresses to

3a.  PROFESSIONAL WITH TALENT AND COMPETENCY TO MAKE MONEY/FANS/FAME, and/or

4.    TRUE CREATIVE CONNECTION, EMPLOYING GREAT SKILL, EMOTIONAL CONTENT, TRANSCENDENT QUALITIES (very rare, needless to say, and may or may not make money, etc)

The very nature of the life Bush has led would preclude him from 3 to 4, and to get to 3 he’d have to re-learn to paint properly, start again, etc, and it’s not likely he’d do that or could even if he wanted to.

Getting to 4 may be about total immersion. Like Sibelius was reported to have said: when he went walking in the mountains and forests he heard the music of the mountains and forests. Bush spent decades immersed in his need to survive politically, win ground for the US, decide whether or not to go to war, etc. Which means he can’t turn on creative/connected immersion at his age.

Truth substitutions and simulations expressed through genres or styles can of course make a lot of money, far more than a real truth connection. Jeffrey Archer is a good example, producing work that isn’t ever intended to do more than badger a genre into producing a derivative framework on which he can hang stock plots and coat-hanger characters.

Perhaps the problem with aiming for 4 is a) it’s hard to get to so you may waste years of earning time trying and even if you get there, b) you may find that hardly anybody wants it anyway.

The other problem with 4 is that it doesn’t inhabit a community. It’s an individual response, and requires leadership not collaboration to bring it home in a story or poem or piece of music. Yet today everybody is socially networked; there is no division between writers and fans; everyone owns all parts of the creative process.

There isn’t an answer here, obviously. But I believe it’s important to consider why we write in the first place, even if the result may not always hit the target.

Writers like to brag about being solitary creatures, unless that is they’re humble-bragging about attending conventions and sitting on panels being apparently over-awed but also somehow sneakily wise. They also join more societies, groups, workshops and drinking circles than they like to admit. For one thing, these are excellent displacement activities, especially because they’re filled with other writers doing exactly the same thing. But they also provide what most writers secretly need, which is company they can share their frustrations with. Not getting published; not getting any money; not getting recognition; not getting any writing done—whoops; scratch that last one, it’s just the beer talking.

The problem with all this covert socialising is it makes the writer what he would most deny being: a herd member. Bit by bit and without him noticing, he accepts the warmth and security of numbers, of automatic support. He enjoys knowing that they know that he knows that what they all know is not what the non-herd knows (even though actually they do). He starts to notice herd names mentioned in awards; he hopes his will soon follow. He listens to the talk about what editor X likes and doesn’t like. He finds it harder to write as fluently as he once did; but that’s okay: he has friends he can talk to about it, who will understand.

Traditionally, however, story-tellers told stories to the herd. They were the one facing the herd, studying it, working it, entertaining it. But they were never part of it. Because the modern story-teller can’t know who his audience is, he has to launch his story at another target. Roughly speaking, there are three to choose from:

1.         Creative transition/the unknown

2.         Imaginary readers

3.         Something else

Let’s deal with 2 and 3 first. 2 is problematic. The traditional story-teller adjusted his story according to the reactions he saw in his audience; probably included some of them as characters in it. But if the modern writer tries to do the same with his imaginary readers, he’ll just be talking to himself. Apart from the obvious symptom this reflects, the problem is he can’t then surprise himself; therefore, his story is going to be predictable and derivative. It’s like trying to work out beforehand what your girlfriend is going to say about the fact you’ve just lost a grand betting on the gee-gees. When you meet her, you start answering the questions you thought she was going to ask but of course she interrupts you to ask some that you just didn’t see coming.

As for 3, ‘something else’ can be that award you really would rather like to win; or that editor you just know loves stories about gay robots. The problem with this is it means you’ve lain down railway tracks that your story is now destined to run along. And chances are, they’re not perfectly aimed, because you’re not being totally honest with yourself about your true intentions, and so you’ll miss your destination anyway.

Okay, for 1, let’s go back to that probably mostly mythical time when bards roamed the land. They were the story-tellers of their day but while they had consummate social skills (their lives could depend on them when singing to a megalomaniac king, for example), they weren’t part of the community they entertained. They didn’t want to be, because they needed to be telling stories full of the strange and exotic and new. And the community wanted them to remain distant, to spend most of their time travelling in foreign places, collecting more fantastic stories.

Fast forward to today and a group of people are out for the evening in a wine bar. They’re having a conversation but all of them are also on their mobile phones. The conversations taking place on Facebook and Twitter feed into and out of the conversations they’re having ‘live’ with each other. This doesn’t really matter because there probably isn’t much difference in content between the two social realms. Leaving aside the question of whether or not they should give priority to the friends who’ve actually bothered to turn up, the question here for the writer is: is he doing the same with his stories?

Groucho Marx once said, “Here are my principles and if you don’t like them—I’ve got some more.” Today, it’s very easy for a writer to say, “Here are my stories and if you don’t like them—I’ll write you some you will like.”

Social media is comforting. Everyone shares with people who think like they do. What they share makes them think even more like their Facebook friends. After a time, if you’re not careful, it isn’t really thinking at all; it’s herd behaviour. Then it’s harder to think differently because if you do, you might alienate your friends.

So, the writer has a choice to make. Does he aim his stories at the reader herd or does he step away from his writers’ herd and concentrate on 3: head-off into the creative unknown where he will need to make some sort of transition in himself, rather like a bard’s training, in order to first hear the music of the universe and second to translate it into stories which don’t do what’s expected of them, that surprise and illuminate and transform?

There is no doubt at all that there are millions of readers out there who want something different to herd fodder. But most of them are probably social media users too. Because of this they may not initially be as open to something different as their reader ancestors were, but that doesn’t matter: they will be once the writer does his thing.

Nowhere is this dichotomy of story origin more apparent than in Science Fiction. SF movies make huge amounts of cash and appeal to a massive herd. SF literature, on the other hand, is a tiny genre where writers are lucky to make enough money to pay for their ticket to Worldcon, even when it’s in their own country.

It’s difficult to see movie writers aiming their stories at 1. There’s too much at risk in doing so. But it’s also risky for the solo fiction writer. For quite some time now, traditional publishing has aimed mostly at the largest herds it can identify, and producing downwards pressure on writers to satisfy them. Self-publishing offers writers more interested in 1 the chance to at least make their work available, but it’s a longer haul. When you put a story up for sale on Kindle, you have to ‘tag’ it, and there is no tag named ‘Not What I Expected But Really Good and Made Me Think Too’.

So, all this needs to go on in the writer’s mind before he actually starts writing or even thinking about what he’s going to write. If he doesn’t consider these issues, then he’ll automatically default to a herd approach, either of the writers in his gang or of the commercial herds targeted by the fiction business; or both.

When deciding what to write a story about, I suggest staying away from the inner ideas committee. Resist brainstorming, blue sky thinking, flip chart listing and above all setting out one’s objectives.

Committees appear to put together most BBC sitcoms, for example. Which is why they’re usually based around a family. This is good committee thinking: let’s appeal to the widest demographic. Everyone has a family. It’s universal.

It’s also a default universal. When student son has run out of socks and pants he takes a bag of laundry home to his mother. When teenage daughter brings her first boyfriend home, Dad is jealous and disapproving. When it’s Christmas everyone eats turkey and argues a lot. And because your characters are all acting by default, the writing is in danger of doing the same.

A non-blood family can be better to write about because then they need a reason to stay together; they won’t inevitably be drawn back into each other’s magnetic fields. The characters in ‘Red Dwarf’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’ are non-blood families; therefore tensions that exist can actually be game-changing – someone might just walk out or join a new family. But won’t of course, because there’s another series on the way.

Default universals are everywhere: the office, the pub, funerals, weddings . . . none of which are bad ideas in themselves, just as long as they’re not made the reason for the story.

The point is, life itself is a series of default universals. We think we’re in control of where and how we spend our time and spirit but not really. Not unless we make special efforts to be, and are prepared to pay the price. Don’t want to do Christmas any more? Fine, stop sending cards, eating turkey, attending the office drinks party . . . But let’s just say that in one form or another, you’ll be explaining/defending your decision for the rest of your life. Much easier to just go with the default flow.

And you can do the same with your writing. A lot of fiction stays close to default universals, and it’s often popular. Presumably this is because it doesn’t poke at one’s spirit conscience. If you can read about the same default universals that govern your own life, and it’s officially endorsed by a publisher or TV company, then you can feel okay about sticking with it.

But good writing deals with true universals. What are they? Well, I don’t have a pat answer to this question. I’m writing this blog after reading a lot of short fiction and finding myself frequently mystified as to what the stories were actually about. Oh, they featured characters who did stuff and who suffered or rejoiced accordingly. But mostly they just travelled from A to Z in doing so. I couldn’t see why they’d bothered, in other words, other than to provide a set of actions for the reader to follow.

And I guess the obvious suspects as true universals are the things we all can not avoid: death, love, thirst, hunger, pain . . . instinctively, however, I think there needs to be more than those bare bones, at least for a good story to emerge.

So, perhaps one true universal is the death of oneself: the facing or avoiding thereof. Oneself being that comfortable collection of default universals we think is us but which is really just what everybody else tells us is us. Then, if you write a story about, say, a kidnapping, the surface point of it may be whether or not the victim escapes but the true point of it would be about how she reacts when the process of being taken shows her that her existing life is not nearly as solid as she thought it was.

Similarly, a good love story will never be just about whether or not the boy and the girl get together at the end. ‘Groundhog Day’ is such a good film because while on the surface it’s a will-they won’t-they love story, the true universal underpinning everything is the question of whether or not he’s prepared to change his existing self to be worthy of her love, and whether he has the means to do it.

True universals have to be disguised, I suspect, by default ones. This is because you can’t force people to face the truth. You have to let them choose to, when they’re ready, and they may never be ready. ‘Groundhog Day’s truth is disguised with a lot of humour and charm and novelty. The Bill Murray character is not a nice man at the start, so you can decide the film is really about how a nasty chap becomes a good egg; not that it’s about asking yourself how you might change to be worthy of the good people in your life.

I’m still thinking about this. But I suspect the difference between a great, memorable story and one that is just okay lies in the writer facing true universals in his own life then translating the process into a well-structured story full of resonance, even if the reader isn’t sure why exactly.

I’ve just returned from a short story workshop in Oregon. I had to read around 240 stories by different authors before attending. Although I work with new authors and have been a member of various critique groups, this was the largest volume of stories I’ve read in a short period. If nothing else, it would certainly make me think twice about editing a magazine. 

However, you do learn a lot from such a process. I’ve been writing short fiction for several years now, and sold around 40 stories. But the experience of reading so many from a wide range of professional authors has got me thinking about the fundamentals of short fiction writing, away, perhaps, from the more prescriptive ‘do this, don’t do that’ guide books on the subject. 

Short stories are, after all, the closest equivalent we have to story-telling around the community fire. It may now be more a case of the individual in front of the screen but the principles probably haven’t changed so much. The question is, what exactly are the principles of good story-telling? 

At this point, I can feel the teachy tug towards talking about the 7-point plot structure, Show Not Tell, POV, etc. But I’m going to resist it, mainly because I think one of the reasons there is a high degree of predictability about a lot of short fiction today is that the craft lessons begin too far forward. 

So, in the beginning . . . 

A very long time ago, before there were galaxies far, far away, the universe was awash with energy that only wanted to expand and be free and playful and spiritual. But every time it tried to express itself nothing appeared, just some inarticulate pulses that rapidly faded away. 

And so energy had to slow down somewhat, take a bit of time to build a platform or two on which to perform. Planets were formed, full of theatrical possibilities: mountains and seas and animals and weather and pain and pleasure. Now there’d be some shows! Energy passed into all the different bits of matter, and lives were played out in births and deaths and the journeys in-between. 

And yet . . . it all became rather predictable after a time. Something was missing. The cycles of the planets and the lives upon them were always the same. Perhaps it was because the universe was in effect telling its own story. An independent story-teller therefore might change things. 

And so the writer was created. 

Always torn between paying the bills and letting rip with his imagination. Or his imagination and the desire to win prizes. Or to be loved. Or to be respected by his peers. Or whether to go with a PC or a Mac. His head is part god and part boulder. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he decided before writing anything what balance to aim for between the two. But instead, he gets an idea, or steals one from someone else, putting it down to simply borrowing from the collective writers’ pot, then gets half way through the story before realising he doesn’t know why he’s writing it. Not wanting to waste all those words, however, he carries on anyway and finishes it. Sends it out. Is rejected. Is bought. 

Before he knows it, his writing is running along a well-worn channel, the only problem being that he doesn’t really know where the channel starts or finishes. And the problem with any well-worn channel is that it tends to be predictable and therefore joyless, lacking in surprise, delight and excitement. 

Just to complicate things, a writer has two beginnings. His first is when, without a care in the world, he writes stories with both eyes on the stars. Words flow and creativity fires his blood. The trouble is, no one can get the energy from his pages; it’s got no matter to perform through. So, he has to learn the matter stuff: to put together the prose platforms on which his story can be enacted. 

Every kind of writer then starts from the same place. At least they do in terms of technique. But all that learning has dulled their beginning place. They know how to write, so they write, and straight away they’re zooming along that well-worn channel. They may even make a lot of money in the process. But they may also never recover the thrill of the first beginner writer they used to be with eyes fixed on the stars. 

So, I think a true writer has to find the true beginning of every story. It won’t be in the selection of a stock character to fit a stock setting to solve a stock problem. The end of its tail will be flying about in a blood-fizzing ocean storm of joy, whether dark or funny or charming or painful. He’ll resist the channel and spend some time trying to grab hold of that tail, knowing that when he catches it, the ride will be a joint one: its energy, the matters that he’s learned, and most important of all, his desire to produce something unique from all three. 

Next: finding the true universals . . .

It’s been a while since my last blog post. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, more that I haven’t had time to reflect enough on what to say before, well, saying it. In the past month or so I’ve had to write six short stories, do quite a lot of editing work and take a creative writing course at Denman College at the last minute after the tutor became ill. The course was a lot of fun, partly because it had to be pretty spontaneous. Also, when I thought about it on the way there, I reckoned I’ve had a tremendously varied experience with taking and giving different kinds of courses, in different parts of the world, in different genres and different formats. Which should be good for the students. I don’t adhere to any particular way of teaching, just try to find methods and practices that will help each student become the kind of writer they want to be. If they know what that is, of course.

For the blog, I could have bashed out some more Tales from the Street but they wouldn’t have been given any reflection. By which I don’t mean doing a lot of re-writing or polishing. It’s more to do with having the time to push an idea beyond the first, immediate level of cognisance.

For example, ‘brainstorming’ is an exercise beloved of trainers. You fill flip-charts and cover the walls with Post-it notes of the first things that pop into people’s minds. At the end, you stand back and admire all the sheer stuff everyone’s produced. Someone writes it up but when/if anyone looks at it later all they see is the bleeding obvious. I believe this is because, while it may be true to assume everyone has gold inside them, it’s definitely true that to get to it, you have to bypass all the rubble and rock in the way. And that takes both courage and time. So, it might be better instead to choose the three best thinkers in the group and give them a few days to come up with ideas that are new and challenging. But of course that’s not a very democratic approach.

You see a similar effect with critics, especially these days when everyone wants to read a review immediately, even during if possible, the release of a new film/book/TV programme. So, critics brainstorm with themselves. They watch, say, the latest BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ and brainstorm their review with the easy to grab hold of rubble and rock lying around in their front brains: Cumberbatch, bromance, Gatiss/Moffat-is-God, in-jokes, etc, and come up with exactly what’s in everyone else’s front brain. Which these days passes as a good review. Later, a strange thing happens. Critics, often the same ones, make more reflective comments which are oddly contradictory to what they said earlier. Now they talk about how the latest ‘Sherlock’ was something of a disappointment; that the plots just didn’t add up; that there were too many nods to the fan-boys; that the whole ‘Are they gay?’ thing with Holmes and Watson was over-done, and so on.

Now, I’m going to move this into writing. I’ve just reviewed ‘Dust’ by Hugh Howey for Arc (New Scientist’s online magazine for Science Fiction, reviews, etc). It’s the final book in his series set in a dystopian future USA where people live in giant silos surrounded by poisonous air. I thought it was the best of the bunch and I really like Howey’s integrity and obvious passion for what he writes. However, while the lead character, Juliette, is just what you need in such a story – gutsy but with faults, heart mostly in the right place, determined and brave – most of the rest of the characters don’t come across as much more than sign-posts for plot developments. Which on the surface is strange, since Howey spends quite a bit of time telling us what characters are thinking, including a lot of their history and their hopes and fears. Whole pages are taken up describing someone’s every thought as they walk between rooms. But somehow all that information doesn’t really tell us what they’re like.

If you’re with a friend in the pub, and they’re telling you about this interesting new person who started work at their office today, all you really want to know is what they’re like. So, if your friend goes, “Jack wore a plain blue suit today the same one, he told me, he always wore when starting a new job. At 10 am he made a coffee for himself, using a one-cup cafetiere that he said he took everywhere with him. I joined him and he told me that his mother is in hospital for routine surgery, he supports Spurs and his cat is called–“

“Yes, but what’s he like?” you scream.

Now we need to take a detour and look briefly at Show Not Tell (SNT), which is of course one of the important lessons a writer has to learn. In essence, it’s about causing a reaction in the reader so that they discover for themselves the nature of a character or a scene, rather than you just telling them what it is. A classic example is to portray a character doing and saying things that make the reader laugh, so he says to himself, “Hey, this character is really funny!” rather than you telling the reader that the character is really funny – oh, how everyone laughed at the hilarious things he said, and so on – which of course is likely to cause pretty much the opposite in the reader who just wants to laugh.

However, like most principles, SNT only goes so far. It can get your readers laughing, say, at your funny character, but it’s perhaps not so good at conveying what they’re really like. Yes, better writers will avoid the trap of just piling in lots of information and action and hope that it will somehow Show you the character. They’ll provide plenty of touches of actual emotion; plenty of Show. But I’ve been thinking lately that something else is needed; perhaps a higher level of Telling.

Back to your friend in the pub. If he says something like, “There’s this guy at work called Alex who just loves an audience. He even walks into the open plan area wearing a show biz smile, arms held up, nodding warmly at his people . . . ” you get a pretty good idea of Alex, even though your friend isn’t really showing you Alex, he’s telling you about him.

But this kind of Telling requires reflection. It stems from a mind which is always curious about other people; always trying to work out what they’re really saying and what they’re really thinking. It requires a sort of confidence, tinged with arrogance: that you know you’re right about this character; you don’t have to hide it behind a lot of Showing.

Anyway, with these ideas sort of in the background, I’m going to resume the blog proper next week, possibly with a short series on writing short fiction but with the intention of Telling about it perhaps, more than Showing; the challenge being to make it this second tier of Telling that I’ve been struggling to understand recently.

“You’ve got paint all over your face,” I say to Nige as he joins me at the bar. I don’t expect a reply immediately, knowing he’ll need to acclimatise his innards with a half pint of lager first.

As he drinks, his eyes are smiling over the rim of the glass. The paint is yellow and white, and suspiciously neatly streaked across his cheeks. There are a few blobs in his long brown hair, too, but I get the feeling those are the bits he’s unaware of.

He puts down the glass and says, “I know. It’s a ploy, Tel. It occurred to me that most of the women around here now are middle-class and therefore have a suppressed but manifold desire for working class totty, like me. So, I thought I’d wear proudly the marks of the working man as a focal point for their libidinous interest.”

“Those marks look more like you did them with your fingers, not your brush. Anyway, there’s a fundamental problem with your plan.”

“What’s that?”

“Look around: there aren’t any women here.”

It’s true. Over there is Old Harry, who’s been old for at least twenty years now, reading a newspaper as always, maybe his eyes moving nearer to the print as time rolls on. At the other end of the bar is Loud Derek, fairly quiet now since there is nobody nearby to shout his opinions too. No one’s sure what he does or did for a living but the rumour is it’s something to do with MI5, but then it was probably him who started the rumour. Other than that, there’s just a table with three male musicians sat around it, their instrument boxes close by. Their bow ties and white shirts look a little incongruous; then again, as Nige has said, the area has become more middle-class in recent years so we’re used to seeing classical musicians rubbing figurative shoulders with painter/decorators wearing war paint.

“Damn. Okay, so what do you want to talk about?”

“I’ve been thinking about endings.”

“Happy endings?” He waggles his eyebrows but I ignore the inference.

“Any ending, actually. I’ve had to read a lot of short stories recently, for a workshop I’m giving soon, and what they all lack is a convincing ending. Some just stop; some leave it to you to work it out for yourself; others cheat with an ending that’s dramatic but illogical to the story. So many times, I’ll turn over the page, expecting ten or more pages to come, only to find the story stops right there. I’d say this is mostly with new writers, by the way. Any ideas why?”

He doesn’t reply immediately; instead finishes his pint and orders two more.

Then he’s clearly thinking about the question and I have to suppress a laugh, since his concentrating forehead is turning the yellow lines there into thoughtful wave formations.

“First thing I’d blame,” he says, “is serialitis.”

“Come again.”

“You look at films, TV, even bleedin’ books – nothing ever finishes these days. Everyone’s looking for a potential cash cow so the last thing you want to do is finish a story, or kill off a character. So that sort of mind set must affect all writers, to a degree. They sit down to tell a story with their mind already fixed in the idea that they shouldn’t ever end it.”

“Well, you could be right but – “

“Serialitis is the other end of remakeitis. Nobody’s killing off the Amazing Bloody Spider-Man at one end and they keep remaking his story at the other. So it never finishes and it never finishes starting either.”

He reaches for his glass and I have the chance to add my theory.

“Another reason might be,” I say, “the general lack of commitment today. If you think about it, everyone used to get married and that was very definitely an ending; an ending to ever being single again. And having kids was an ending to ever living without kids.”

“You may be on to something there. Me and my ex lived together for five years before we got married; then we did and were divorced within six months. Now, I’m not a huge fan of hers, but she said something at the time what made sense. She said that while we weren’t married, somewhere in the back of our minds was the notion that we could always be single again if we wanted to be. So, the act of getting married had our subconsciouses suddenly pooping their pants because that retention of the possibility of freedom was suddenly gone. And since, as you allude, we’re part of the general non-committed these days, we then wanted out of the arrangement.”

“But we still have the folk memory that endings are a mark of maturity and therefore that makes it hard for say you and your ex to have got together on the basis that there was no commitment; that you’d just carry on carrying on until you didn’t want to do it any more.”

“Yes, even though that’s kind of what we did anyway. And it ain’t just couples; it’s banks, too, and insurance companies. You got a bank account and that was it for life; now, it’s more likely to be a one night stand, except you’re the one getting screwed, of course.”

“Death, too.”

“I’m with you, I think,” he says. “Infant mortality ain’t what it used to be; people live longer; we never see any dead bodies these days. So, no endings again; we just expect life to go on and on.”

“The more you think about it, endings have become taboo.”

“So, what’s your solution, mate? Are you saying that if anyone wants to be a good writer, they have to get married young and stay married; join up with Barclays for life; visit the morgue every week to remind themselves of death; and kill off every character they write about in their first story?”

“Well, when you put it like that, no. But on the other hand, maybe that kind of life, one full of commitment and endings, needed more escaping in one’s imagination. Maybe writers in the past used to not so much avoid endings but look for more fitting ones to put in their stories: the kinds of endings they wanted in their own lives. Now, there aren’t any endings, either in real life or the imagination.”

“Well, this pint’s come to an end. And the one thing you can say about beer and sex is that more of the same is always a good thing.”

“As long as it’s a happy ending?”

“Tou-bleedin’-che. Oh, and I’ll tell you something else that never ends: social media.”

I actually feel a shiver down my spine at this. “You’re right: all those words appearing all the time, telling stories but without any endings. Because you can’t end anything on social media; the idea is you have to stay endlessly connected.”

“God help us,” says Nige, “we’ve become addicted to never-endings. No wonder they’re making another three bleedin’ Star Wars movies.”

“Sturgeon was right,” says Ben.

I don’t have to respond since I know what he’s referring to. It was once put to Theodore Sturgeon, the Science Fiction writer, that 90 per cent of SF was crap. Sturgeon’s Law, as it’s become known, derives from his reply: “Yes, but then 90 per cent of everything’s crap.”

“But,” says Ben, “he was being generous. I reckon in reality we’re talking 99.99999.”

I stand, point to his beer glass. “You want me to ask the barmaid to just pour in the 0.00001 per cent good bit of a beer?”

“Tell her to smile at the hidden camera. The brewery are always watching.”

I go to the counter for two more pints. I’m concerned about him. Okay, we couldn’t meet tonight in the Mr Morris wine bar on account of it being taken over by a private party, and Ben doesn’t like pubs because they remind him of book shop chains; and book shop chains, with their unfair publishers’ discounts, are close to putting his small, independent book shop out of business. But, still, his mood seems darker than normal.

“Do you really believe that?” I say, returning to our table.

“Actually, yes. And not just because the book world has bent over and offered its arse to the corporate todger. I mean, I reckon we stock more than a fair share of good books at our place but when I say ‘good’ I just don’t know what that entails any more.”

“Let’s keep it simple,” I say. “Surely Shakespeare is good.”

He takes a long swallow of beer, grimacing as if expecting something less homogenous to have hit his throat.

“I don’t know. When did you last read a Shakespeare play?”

“Read one? Probably not since college, over thirty years ago. But — “

“Okay; so when did you last see a Shakespeare play in the theatre?”

“Well . . . ” Shit. I recall seeing Ian McKellen do Macbeth, or was it Hamlet, when I was a teenager. He was great. He must have been great. He is great. And I think I saw ‘A Merchant of Venice’ with an actress I was in love with at the time and wanted to impress by going to see Shakespeare as keenly as I’d trot along to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea.

“I see,” he says, in the tone a doctor might use when he’s just diagnosed your liver is full of alcohol memories. “So, when did you last see a Shakespeare film?”

I’m about to mention Joss Whedon’s adaptation of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ then remember I’ve had the DVD for several months but haven’t removed it from its cellophane wrapping yet.

“I really enjoyed ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’,” I say, “which was based on ‘Taming of the Shrew’, wasn’t it?”

He sighs, drinks more beer. “You’re proving my point,” he says. “Shakespeare’s great but he’s also boring. Which is another kind of crap.”

“But in that case, what isn’t crap?”

“Honestly? Not much. Everything’s over-hyped, either by condescending media whore critics talking about popular culture that they hate but feel they should praise because that’s what ordinary people like, or anally-retentive supporters of the classics who don’t actually enjoy them, just think studying high art makes them better people.”

“So everyone’s full of shit?”

He laughs. “Yes. You, me; the barmaid over there, even if she does look like Audrey Hepburn. We’re all full of shit, but we never admit it because if we did, we might as well just hand in the keys and let McGonads turn the world into one giant turdburger.”

“If everything’s crap,” I say, “what gets you up in the morning?”

“People are full of crap but lots of them do great things, every day. Writers on the other hand — I just don’t think they try hard enough.”

“To be better writers?”

He holds up his hands. “Okay, let me come at this another way . . . I’m not really saying there aren’t any good writers or any good books. But there aren’t enough of them. There are too many writers producing crap because it sells but not admitting to it, and too many readers buying crap because it’s easier to digest or because someone else told them it’s not crap, and the end result is that we give prizes, money and fame to half-wits producing stuff that really should make them ashamed.”

“Are you including all genres in this?”

He nods. “No exceptions, although some are more full of crap than others. But definitely no pass for literary fiction — that’s full of the worst crap of all: written by insecure tossers who think they’re actually pretty damn clever. They’re not. They’re transparent, boring and predictable. If you don’t believe me, try reading anything by Virginia Woolf.”

I shudder, remembering having to study ‘To the Lighthouse’ at school, thinking I must be missing something but suspecting that in fact the book was just good at looking clever without possessing much actual substance.

“See?” he says, noting my Bloomsburyian frown.

“Okay, but if you’re right, what’s the answer?”

He shrugs. “Call a moratorium on reviews, prizes, blurbs, etc — anything that suggests a novel is good. Instead, we issue everything in plain brown covers with the word ‘CRAP’ across the top of it. Then, we might just be pleasantly surprised. Or not.”

We sip our drinks in silence for a while, then I say, “When I’m writing, it’s like there’s this bank of sensory material right in front of me, within easy reach. It’s full of character tics, and word runs, and story twists. I want to get the story finished, so the easiest thing to do is reach for what’s to hand. But most of it isn’t really mine, is it? It’s all the digestible crap that the world puts in front of us, to make sure that what we produce won’t actually make anyone else think or pause or reflect.”

“Same as when you want to tell a girl you love her.”

“I think it takes courage to push beyond that immediate bank of help, to reach into the unknown — of oneself, really. Because, once you do that you stop being a follower-writer and become a leader-writer.”

“And there’s no guarantee anyone will go with you.”

“You might not sell any books.”

“Or your shop might have to shut down.”

The barmaid is leaning on the bar, staring at her phone.

“I remember reading somewhere,” I say, “that Audrey Hepburn moved away from making films and spent the last part of her life working for UNICEF in some of the most disadvantaged places in the world.”

Flickering blue light makes the barmaid’s eyes seem on fire.

“Yes,” says Ben, “but people only remember her films.”

Nige and I are sitting in the possibly unwisely named The Optimist, a little back-street pub, all wooden furniture and floors, shiny pumps, no TV, friendly if not particularly well-trained bar staff.

Perhaps because he’s in a chair for once, having sat on a nail earlier today, Nige grimaces and says, “I hate all this, you know.”

We don’t often come to The Optimist, it being a ten minute walk from our street, but this statement surprises me. “I thought you liked quiet pubs with bar staff who don’t wish you a nice day?”

“I don’t mean the pub per se,” he says. “I mean the phoney evil system that controls it.”

“But the beer’s real, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but every pint the landlord pulls here is instantly recorded at the brewery. Which is bad enough but he also has to buy all his booze from them at inflated prices. And he just gets a wage; no incentive to make the place pay its way.”

“But surely the brewery wants it to pay for itself; otherwise, what’s the point in owning it in the first place?”

He takes a long swallow of his beer, frowning. “Sometimes, Tel, I wonder what you did with your college education. Look, the way it works with pubs now – and just about every other bleedin’ once great British institution – is that the government’s encouraged market forces to rule. And what that means is a place like this gets sucked dry of any profit by the brewery, with the staff treated like shit and the locals just an inconvenience; then, when it stops being profitable, they just sell it off for a big fat fee and it’s turned into more housing.”

I think about arguing with him but actually I know what he means. “I was reading SFX the other day,” I say, “and the section on what’s coming was very depressing. Spider-Man 3 or should that be 6; Wolverine 29; Terminator 5; re-boot this and re-launch that . . . all costing millions and, I guess, making millions, too. Nothing new; no one taking any chances.”

“Market forces again,” says Nige. “Which is fine for delivering you the cheapest toothpaste, but when it comes to art, I don’t want Tesco telling me what I like.”

“But people do like all those super-hero movies and never-ending fantasy novels.”

“They think they do,” he says, “because the corporate world tells them they do. Oh, what am I saying – yeah, I suppose people really do like Harry-bleedin’-Potter. And it wouldn’t matter that they do so much if those books weren’t shoving all the interesting stuff into oblivion.

“It’s the crap perpetuation syndrome. And by crap I mean stuff that it doesn’t take any brain power to access.”

“Have you actually read any Harry Potter?”

“Have I?” He shakes his head sadly. “My ex-wife was a fan. Made me read the first one, which I handed back with an expressive grunt or two, and later gave me the fourth because she reckoned it was more adult. Give me strength . . . I told her to read the first page of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ since that contains more character depth and good writing than what you’d get if you put the whole of the Harry Potter series through a style mangle.”

I finish my beer and stand. Nige nods, hands me his empty glass. While I’m getting two more at the bar, I think about what he’s said. I know what the counter-arguments would be: that popular series like Harry Potter help to get kids reading, then they’ll move on to more challenging stuff. But I’ve always been sceptical about that line of reasoning. Surely, if a kid wants more challenging stuff, he’ll just go directly to it? Why would he need to be led there in various stages of easy-reading?

When I return I say, “A friend of mine makes TV programmes for the BBC. He said he’s always meeting people there with degrees who tell him they make programmes for stupid people.”

Nige snorts. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t surprise me. The BBC disappeared up its government remit decades ago. It chases ratings like Benny Hill used to chase fanny. But it ain’t supposed to need ratings because we pay it to produce programmes anyway. How nuts is that?”

“So, what exactly is the problem with all this?” I say.

He swallows about a half of his pint, then leans back. “Just that using market forces where art’s concerned means that crap rules; worse still, it’s exponential crap: the more crap you feed people and the cheaper you sell it, while at the same time making sure the good stuff doesn’t stand a chance, the more they get used to crap with everything; therefore, they convince themselves it’s not actually crap and buy even more of it; meanwhile, the perpetrators of said crap also convince themselves that they’re producing what the people want; which they are, the problem being the people have been brain-washed into wanting crap.”

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

He laughs. “I’m not the bleedin’ writer, Tel. You are. What are you going to do about it?”

I think about the many writers who, subconsciously or otherwise, find it hard not to chase readers one way or another; or who study what works in the market, compress it down into snappy guidance points which they then follow religiously. And I think about the few who go their own way but who often seem to avoid putting anything out there at all. Is the answer somewhere between the two? No, probably not; because that’s just another kind of compromise.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just going to carry on writing what I want to write; the kind of stuff I like to read. Anything else feels dishonest.”

He finishes his pint in one more swallow; stands, ready to buy two more. “Same again?” he says.

I smile. “What do you think?”

Last weekend, I attended World Fantasy Con 2013 in Brighton. This is quite a literary-based event, e.g. the organisers banned costumes (except for Halloween night), which didn’t go down too well with a lot of writers. I mean, I was disappointed because I’d been hoping to wear my costume of the writer in the corner who doesn’t want to be noticed but does really.

I went to quite a few panels, most very interesting, some not so, which is fairly typical of Cons. The first time I actually sat on a panel, as moderator, was at a British Fantasy Con, with Neil Gaiman on the panel. Having done quite a bit of training and coaching, I assumed the rest of the panel would appreciate my having prepared plenty of discussion material. I don’t think they did. At least, if the shocked looks on their faces as I ‘prepped’ them before the start were anything to go by.

No, on the whole Con panels rely on members to talk amusingly and knowledgeably off the tops of their heads. Which most can do, of course. For instance, at World Con I went to a very entertaining panel discussing ‘Writing for series TV’, including Brian Clemens, Richard Christian Matheson, David Pirie, Stephen Gallagher and Rob Shearman.

I was rather star-struck, especially by Brian Clemens who was responsible, amongst other great series, for The Avengers. He said at one point that the best advice on writing he ever got (from the Danziger Brothers) was: “There’s no mystique to writing. It’s arse to chair and pen to paper.”

I also went to a panel discussing how to sell scripts to movies and TV. Richard Christian Matheson said at one point:

“You have to have a really high threshold for rejection. In this business, golden opportunities turn black. You have to keep writing. There are an extraordinary number of set-backs to face. Take an inventory of your nature: where is your threshold? It’s not about the one moment; it’s about momentum. You have to be relentless – in a way that you’re not about anything else in your life. And you do that by loving to write – so all the rejection doesn’t punch a hole in you; it just makes you keep on going.”

The panel had me fired up about thinking bigger; at producing a few stunning spec scripts and taking on TV; no, make that Hollywood. But then, the last panel I went to discussed the question, “Is it possible to make a living from writing short fiction?” The panel said they’d been joking beforehand about how this would be the shortest-ever discussion; probably just the one word, and not with more letters than two in it.

Then Rob Shearman spoke about how he’d been writing short fiction for a few years now and loved it. He talked about how in many ways it’s the purest fiction form. It’s where, as a writer, you can really take control and be free from outside interference. He also loved the completeness of a short story: that you encapsulate an idea or theme, and a character or two, in the appropriate writing style, then move on to another one.

This chimed with me. I used to write children’s books but became disillusioned with the publishing industry. The interference isn’t as bad as with movies, but there are still various committees your book has to pass through and their criteria aren’t really that different to Tesco’s when it comes down to it. I’d started at a time when a writer could write what the hell he liked and his editor could just go ahead and publish it. I tried premier-pharmacy.com writing stuff that conformed with ‘market needs’ (whatever those are) but didn’t have the heart for it. So I decided to switch to my first reading love: Science Fiction (and Fantasy), partly because I’d learned there are a lot of very good short story markets for the genre.

The first time I sat down to write an SF short story it was for my entry application to the Odyssey Writing Workshop. I was actually thrilled again at being faced with a blank page. I had an idea and a feeling for the shape of the main characters, and whereas with a novel, I could be looking at weeks or months before hitting the ‘point’ of the story, now I could get to it in a day or so.

Every short story I’ve written since has been for its own reasons; and they’ve all been different. Apart from the creative pleasure this kind of freedom brings, it’s also made me a better writer. I’ve used just about every form, tense and structure, and tried dozens of different points of view for the main characters.

Also, while competition for places in the top magazines is incredibly strong, it’s for the most part open. You write a story because you want to; an editor reads it and buys it if he/she likes it. Done. Okay, there are going to be some market considerations for magazines too, and the need to get ‘names’ on board, but there is still plenty of space for stories that are excellent just by being themselves. And if you produce enough quality stories, you’ll sooner or later sell one, which is a great confidence boost. Selling novels, of course, is incredibly difficult and usually you’ve only got one or two to hawk around.

I often advise the writers I work with to try short fiction, but few rarely do. They start with novels and stick with them. Which is frustrating because I can see how much their writing would improve if they wrote shorts too. But I think sometimes they’re frightened to. Perhaps it’s because in some ways you put yourself more on the line with a short story. There aren’t enough words to hide behind. Here’s the main character; here’s the problem he’s got; here’s how he solves it (or doesn’t); and here’s how I’ve taken you through his well-structured journey with exactly the right kind of prose, tone and voice. More than anything, here’s how I’ve produced something magical and memorable, and now I have to do it all over again, already.

Perhaps it’s also fear of change. While you stick with that novel, spending years re-writing it and sending it out, you don’t have to change or develop as a writer. You tell yourself it’s just a case of the right agent or publisher discovering you. But if you write a short, then another, then another, and you send them all out, and they’re all different, then in a way you’re putting yourself out there as a writer, not just as one book. And if you get rejected as a writer, well, that would be the end, wouldn’t it?

I believe there’s a limit to the amount of creative, interesting and magical stories a writer can produce before they become predictable and repetitive. However, those who only write novels face the danger of staying below their creative limits. I believe you can access the bottom quarter of your creativity by sticking to one or two projects (novels in this case) but you only access the top three-quarters by producing more, trying more, and reaching for more. Which writing short fiction demands.