I just posted on the Odyssey Workshop forum, to see who was coming from the USA to World Fantasy Con in Brighton, UK, later this month. In case some of them are visiting the UK for the first time, I thought I’d give them a bit of guidance to help them fit in:

There are two ways to pronounce ‘Brighton’. The toff method is to go, ‘Bright-un’ – you pull back your mouth from your teeth and articulate ‘Bright’ crisply, ending with a sharp ‘t’; then ‘un’ like a soft but well-enunciated ‘en’. If you want to say it more like the traditional tourist (i.e. from South East London) and therefore not sound out of place, you go: ‘BrEYE-n.’ Keep your lips fairly close together but not actually touching (except on the ‘B’ at the start), emphasise the ‘eye’, then a slight gap finishing with a mumbled, ‘nnnn’.

Actually, there are three ways to pronounce ‘Brighton’ since the modern indigenous local is now gay, Brighton being the gay capital of the UK. But I’m not going to give you advice on how to pronounce gayly – it’s more about performance, anyway.

Tipping: unlike in the USA, you won’t be chased out of a bar by a barman with a hatchet if you tip less than 20%. Tipping in UK bars is not, in fact, required at all; if you do tip, you will be easily identified as an American and therefore probably find yourself paying twice as much for the next round. When you (finally) receive your drinks from the bar person, all that’s required is a brisk ‘Cheers, mate,’ accompanied by a brief nod of the head – this nod is an ancient traditional vestige of a time when all British peoples (outside of the toffs) felt an affinity with each other. Your little nod says you recognise that while he/she is serving you, you are no better than he/she. The fact that he/she is almost certainly Polish these days has not yet altered this much-loved social requirement.

10% tipping in restaurants is fine, up to maximum 15% if the waiter didn’t make you feel like you should really be troughing in McDonald’s. Remember that in the UK as a general rule, waiters and bar staff aren’t trained; they’re paid peanuts and no one expects them to do much more than stay awake while they pretend to take your order. Brighton is better in this respect than most places in the UK, mainly because many of the B&Bs and restaurants are run by gay couples and therefore are top-notch establishments.

On no account do a ‘Hendrickson’. This is to find yourself talking to a Scottish/Welsh/Irish barman and in an attempt to show you understand the local sporting culture, observe that since Scotland/Wales/Ireland (North and South) did not succeed in reaching the World Cup finals next year, you expect he’ll be cheering on England. Let’s just say it won’t be safe to drink whatever he serves you following this, even if it stays in the glass.

If you do want to talk about the World Cup, please remember that what the entire world apart from the USA plays is ‘football’, not ‘soccer’. American football is a game played mostly with the hands; the rest of the world plays football that’s, um, played mainly with the feet.

It’s probably best to not mention the Royal Family. This is because the British tend to be sharply divided in their views on this subject (pretty evenly, too, despite the pro-Royals impression the media tends to give). On the one hand, the Royals exemplify all that’s best about Britain: ceaselessly and tirelessly working for the good of all; sacrificing their lives for the nation; smiling and waving cheerfully through all adversities, etc, etc. On the other hand, they’re the Nazi-loving descendents of the robber barons who stole the nation’s wealth and have perfected the Mafia-like trick of getting the people to pay to keep them in luxury (although unlike the Mafia, the people actually feel grateful for doing so) while holding on to said wealth, and of exemplifying the nonsense notion that breeding equals privilege, etc, etc.

Ditto ‘Downton Abbey’.

Finally, the British attitude to SF/Fantasy. Like everything else, it’s complicated. When I was young, admitting you liked SF/Fantasy was another kind of coming out – not of the sexual closet but out of the same rickety old foundations-less shack as comics, musical theatre and the ‘Carry On’ films. Back then, even Patrick Moore scoffed at the notion that there might be life on other planets. And while he changed that view in time, and even wrote an astronomy book with the lead guitarist of a popular music combo whose name wouldn’t sound out of place in Buckingham Palace, it doesn’t mean the British as a whole has embraced SF fully.

Dr Who now exemplifies this British contradiction. When it first appeared (and I remember hiding behind the sofa during the first-ever episode) it was difficult to hear the dialogue on account of the constant parental barrage of, “What you watching this rubbish for?” and “Why can’t you watch something educational instead?” Dr Who now, of course, is a national institution on a par with the Royals – and it’s just as risky to criticise it. But that doesn’t mean we British are at peace with SF. Check out ‘As Others See Us’ in Dave Langford’s wonderful ‘Ansible’: http://news.ansible.co.uk/a315.html (lots of other useful UK SF/Fantasy stuff there too).

I watched a film the other day which led to me thinking about enthusiasm envy. It was one of those sombre affairs that critics and intellectuals like, heavy on intimation of meaning (rather than actual) and somewhat light on fun. To like such stuff, you have to buy into the notion, probably first encountered at school, that worthy art is the kind you have to suffer.

It’s difficult to resist this brainwashing in our educational journey. Older, clever, teachers keep telling us which books, plays, films are the ones we should bend our minds to understanding. Our parents either echo this or at least agree the teachers must be right. So, if they find us reading genre fiction or, even worse, comics, we’re punished or censured or scorned. A dichotomy builds in our lives, between ‘approved’ and ‘worthless’ art – well, not actually called worthless so much these days, but rather things like ‘commercial’, ‘genre’, ‘light’.

Okay, so far so obvious. We all know about the war between Literary and Genre. But I want to talk about an aspect of it that might not be so apparent, to do with enthusiasm.

Take SF/Fantasy, for example. People who like speculative fiction not only have thousands of books and films to choose from, there are all sorts of online communities to join and conventions to attend. At these conventions, they tend to drink, talk and dress up a lot and, apart from the odd writer who feels he ought to perhaps be a little more ideologically restrained, they really, really enjoy themselves. Oh, and they’re incredibly, unashamedly, enthusiastic about their genre.

I don’t really often see the same enthusiasm in the worthy corner. At least not of the same open-ended nature. I’m not sure there are even any Literary conventions as such. I’ve heard of book events held in towns full of afternoon tea shops, where readers sit and humbly listen to authors talk about their books. I’ve listened to The Book Club on Radio 4 with its carefully articulated questions from the audience to The Author. And a while ago, I swapped favourite books with a colleague at work, someone who loved pubs and jokes and silliness of various kinds. But the book he gave me, as his favourite, was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. (I gave him The Once and Future King by T. H. White.) When I returned it, I said, “I’m sorry, Steve; I managed about 80 pages but it’s very heavy going.” He said, “Yes, it is heavy going, I agree.”

Now, I may be wrong but I doubt very much that if you asked anyone at a speculative fiction convention to tell you about their favourite book, they’d qualify their comments by admitting that in effect it’s pretty boring. Why would anyone want to read a boring book? Well . . . see above, perhaps.

My own moment of liberation was on a train between Swansea and Cardiff in the 1970s, struggling with The Magus by John Fowles. It suddenly occurred to me that I really didn’t have to read this book, or even like it, no matter how worthy it was. So I threw it out the train window and ever since have only read books I actually like.

I’m a member of various writers’ forums and groups and have noted that at times the Literary people can be rather disparaging about genre writers. Oh, they disguise it more these days, perhaps because some genre writers make a lot of money and even, whisper it, write very well at times. However, the old prejudice slips out from time to time. For example, recently I bumped into this, from the writers’ guidelines of the literary journal The Gettysburg Review:

“We do not publish genre fiction—mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and the like—but are certainly not opposed to considering work that self-consciously employs the tropes of formulaic writing for more sophisticated literary ends.”

You can certainly have fun with that, assuming that is you understand what they’re going on about.

Anyway, the barely suppressed hostility that is sometimes shown by Literary fiction people towards genre folk is often rooted, I believe, in envy. Genre lovers don’t wade through difficult wordage because they feel they ought to. They just plainly like their stuff and aren’t shy in expressing the fact. They don’t like books just because they’re told to (although many do suffer from Robert Jordan syndrome – which is the chronic inability to stop buying books in a series that died long ago, because they can’t shake their initial loyalty to something they loved).

Does prejudice run the other way? Of course, and I’m no doubt expressing a fair bit of it in this post. However, I don’t think genre lovers actually envy ‘worthy’ lovers. They may feel inferior at times, since Literary still claims it owns the most ostentatious awards. It also tends to bag the teaching positions, at least in this country. If you haven’t had much published, or anything at all, it needn’t matter. As long as you have a creative writing degree and like the right books, then you can always tutor what you in turn were tutored.

I guess this post is a plea for enthusiasm from all writers. I’m tired, for example, of hearing writers go on about how difficult writing is. About the dozens of drafts they turn out before getting it right. About the ‘shitty first draft’. If it’s that kind of difficult, don’t do it. Look for enthusiastic difficult instead, which is taking leaps across the creativity void, for example, trusting there’s something inspiring and new on the other side. But you have to leave the tired, old but comfortable behind you. Or taking yourself and all your writerly struggles out of the way, to stand aside and just let your characters speak, your plot breathe and your prose tear down mountains, magical or otherwise.

Two situations:

Elmore Leonard on BBC’s “Desert Island Discs”, explaining that he has no computer, mobile phone or TV. Kirsty Young says, “So, what do you do?” Leonard says, “I lie in the dark and think.”

A couple at the table next to us in a local restaurant. Her phone is never switched off. She spends the entire meal looking at it, apart from a brief period when she needs both hands to eat but even then it’s still glowing on the table next to her plate. Her partner looks well phubbed (phone + snub, apparently) and eventually switches on his phone, too, unable for whatever reason to tell her to turn hers off. I thought it might have been more effective if he’d taken out a book and read that instead – ‘bubbed’ her, maybe.

There are the obvious problems with phubbing, for example making your partner feel as if the fact he’s taken the trouble to spend time with you physically is worth less to you than checking out what your Facebook and Twitter pals had for their lunch today. Even if all you ever talk about with your partner is what you had for lunch today anyway and showing him photographs of that nice cheese sandwich you got in M&S, you’re still telling him that he’s second best in getting your attention. For what that’s worth – which brings me to my point, where writing’s concerned.

Writing is all about getting other people’s attention; but the question is, how do you produce something that’s worth their attention? Okay, there are plenty of books around today with about as much original thought as a cheese sandwich, and they appear to find plenty of readers. But I doubt they’re produced by much lying and thinking in the dark. They’re just chasing the tail of the low-consciousness end of the market. Fifty shades of cheddar and all that.

I’m talking about real writing; stories that do more than just reflect surface life. And for that purpose I’m going to choose to interpret Leonard’s words somewhat non-literally. I’m pretty sure he meant actual lying and actual dark, and can see the benefits of both. But there are easy diversions one can take while supine and light-free; kipping for example. No, real writers need to be lying in the dark all the time.

Let’s go back to Facebook/Twitter for a moment. The surface appearance, phubbing aside, is that millions of people are in constant communication. But that depends on what you call communication. Passing on others’ thoughts about others’ thoughts about others’ actual thinking (or not), isn’t communicating. It’s shovelling e-shit from one side of the e-world to the other. It provides the illusion of participation and of course the delusion of exaggerated self-importance.

Real writers don’t shovel shit. They get below the surface and interpret what’s really going on – below their own and others’ surfaces – then turn it into stories with unforgettable characters, plots and emotions. To do that, they have to lie in the dark in plain sight. They have to watch others’ behaviour without them being aware, and interpret that behaviour; and do this all the time. So they live a double life. On the surface, it’s all, “How are you today?” “I’m fine, thanks”, “Had a great cheese sandwich for lunch”, “Really? What kind of cheese?”

But under the surface . . . all apps are turned off; the smart phone is unplugged; the internet is a glossy chimera below the consciousness horizon. Here, motives are uncovered; emotions behind the etiquette feelings are read; the cry for help within the LOLs and the smiley face icons is heard.

Or not. Because I think the real writer goes deeper than this. Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is, that while most peoples’ surface thoughts are predictable and common, so too are the feelings that lie behind them. We all like to think our inner lives are special, which is why we protect them so strongly. But in reality, they’re probably just as ordinary as anyone else’s lunch menu.

So, do real writers plunge into the even deeper world of archetypes, say, or genetic imperatives? Actually, I think it’s at the interface between this level and the behind-the-surface emotions and thoughts that the writer needs to strike out in his own direction. Going too deep will just mire him in inevitable human drive terminal points – something that quite a bit of literary fiction does too much of in my view. Yes, yes, it’s all existentially pointless at the end of the day; yes, yes, people are driven by ancient unstoppable needs – I get it. Now, why don’t you do something interesting?

To summarise, then. Writers can’t afford to become diverted by the constant superficiality of social media. They could, I suppose, use Twitter/Facebook to interpret what anyone is really saying but that path leads only to death by a thousand trolls. Better to lie in the social media dark, watch and interpret; bub the phubber with a good book or a pad and pen; lift one’s eyes from the mini silver screen and face the world first hand, ready to storify it.

Sometimes it seems that the writing blogosphere is in danger of sinking in a slurry pit of humblebragging, big tarting, whingeing and all-round delusional blathering. Forums are swamped with writers essentially either bigging themselves up under guise of questions they don’t want answered or moaning about their sorry lot under guise of making ‘objective’ observations about how the industry works.

One of the best/worst humblebrags I saw recently was from a writer claiming she had a dilemma and would appreciate our views. She apparently couldn’t decide whether or not to attend a prize-giving event where her book was a candidate. Her reasons for going or not going made no sense but then they weren’t really the point. What she was actually saying was: HEY, HEY! I’M UP FOR A PRIZE! ISN’T THAT GREAT! HEY, HEY! EVERYONE CONGRATULATE ME!

One of the negative effects of the internet is that such irritating behaviour receives instant support from others who also practice it. In the old days, you only had the pub to humblebrag in and let’s face it, if the person above had had to put such a pointless question face-to-face, others would have been splitting their sides. When you can’t see someone, they can get away with the implication that they’re poker-faced in making big tart claims. But when they’re directly in front of you, the faux frowns and conflicted waving of the hands looks exactly like what it is: pantomime protest designed to encourage compliments.

Under the surface of all this fake modesty, humility and bashful acknowledgement of the support of like-minded fellows, I suspect something like this mind-set is constantly plotting one’s self-aggrandisement:

• My life is defined by being a writer. It’s what I tell others I am and what I want to be respected for.
• To do writing well requires a long period of training, constant practice and on top of that the courage and talent to keep pushing the boundaries of my creative limits.
• But I prefer to talk a lot about writing; to produce a blog full of advice to other writers; to post a couple of thousand words a day on writers’ forums. I am convinced that all this activity is the same as creative writing.
• If I make the maximum out of the small amount of creative work I actually produce, this will somehow bring about my ‘breakthrough’.
• When I get my breakthrough, everything will change. Publishers will chase me with contracts; my agent will handle all the financial arrangements; I will be free to write what I really want to write.
• I can’t write what I really want to write now in case I miss my breakthrough moment.
• My advice to others (on how to do what I haven’t done myself) is based on my minimal actual experience but I just know it’s wisely universal.
• I ignore all inconvenient advice from commercially successful writers (usually involving hard work, persistence and humility) and justify it with the view that they just churn out product and don’t understand art.
• I must at all times support the humblebragging and self-delusion of the other writers on my forums. This is crucial in order to maintain my self-respect.
• I am defined by being a writer. Nothing must ever question this. If I’m not a writer, I’m just an ordinary person who watches television and avoids the truth.
• If I’m going to achieve my aim to be a recognised writer, I need to make more effort, basically. But if I make more effort, I will break the edifice of ‘writer’ I have spent years building.
• Edifice is everything and must be protected at all costs.
• I will support all advice that encourages delaying tactics rather actual results, e.g. that writing is re-writing; that great work only comes from endless revisions and multiple drafts.
• Being a WRITER is much more important than being a writer.
• I must always protect the circle of self-delusion, e.g. I must regularly link my numerous forum posts to similar numerous posts on my blog; never let outside advice threaten the edifice.
• I had a couple of books published many years ago but I must never admit this was in effect the end of my career; that I now need to try and try again in different ways. Instead, I’ll mention my ‘work in progress’ frequently, and my agent, and encourage everyone to believe my career is still alive.
• I’ll take up teaching. Many creative writing establishments are only too happy to give teaching jobs to real writers, not those commercial imposters.
• I will make sure my students learn about real writing from me. I will give them the indisputable truths of writing, e.g. that re-writing is writing.

Or:

• Write because you want to. When you want to, you’re more likely to love to.
• If you don’t want to, don’t.
• If you don’t write, do something else. You can always come back to it when the something else has given you real stuff to write about.
• Find out what needs doing from those who know, not those who say they know.
• Do what needs doing; struggle with the constant contradiction between creative impulse and fiscal need.
• Always be honest about what you’re actually writing and why.
• Brag, don’t humblebrag.
• Don’t support the group mind, especially when it’s buttressing each others’ edifices.
• As a general rule reverse the advice given by writers who don’t actually write very much.
• Don’t let yourself forget that writing is an improving game, not a consolidation exercise.
• Write because you want to.

I’ve been thinking about organisations and their systems quite a lot lately. It’s easy to see the negative effects these can have when you look at say local government. In order to function, or so it believes, local government needs to be properly organised then exert control over what happens within it via systems. Once established, the organisation and its systems becomes more important, at least to itself, than the work it’s supposed to be doing. Hence, local governments often seem to work in the opposite direction to what local people actually want but because the system is working so smoothly it doesn’t matter. What people want is irrelevant. Or, rather, what people want must be what the system produces because the system works, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, I don’t see it’s very different in publishing. Publishers are organisations and they produce books via various operational systems, one of which is genre. Putting a book into a genre saves time and money in that its audience can be easily identified, informed and sold to. The problem is, once the operating system becomes effective, at least in its own terms, it begins to exert control over the creative element. Then, genre becomes more important than quality of writing. Right at the source, the author is shaping his output to fit some genre or other, rather than pushing his creative boundaries.

Pitching has moved back down to the author, too. Pitching used to exist mostly at the reader end, with the blurb on the back of the book. And with some publishers, they didn’t even have blurbs: readers took their books on reputation of quality, or read some first in the book store or library. Then pitching moved to the sales teams pushing books to book stores and distributors. Then it moved to editors pitching to the sales team. Then to editors pitching to their editorial team. Now, authors need to pitch to their editors. And you don’t pitch on quality; you pitch on usefulness to the genre, to the system.

Do publishers’ systems work? Well, again, they must do else they wouldn’t exist. Perhaps a better question is: what’s the price of the publishing systems that work? I’d hazard a guess that quality is the price. Not that editors don’t like quality writing; of course they do. But it’s become increasingly irrelevant except perhaps to a minority of quality-seeking readers.

Which gives the quality-seeking author something of a dilemma, i.e. is it worth it?

Another problem with systems is that the end users have become conditioned to them too. When you go shopping in a supermarket, it’s much easier to go for the well-known brands, even if they might not be as good as the lesser-known ones. You know what you’re going to get. You don’t have to spend time researching the ingredients. Lots of other people agree the big brands are worth buying, so you have company. Better still, the big brands tend to be cheaper.

One argument against dropping the Net Book Agreement was that quality would suffer. Publishers would concentrate resources on their big brand name authors and, crucially, cut the cover price of those authors’ books. Which means the ‘mid-list’ authors, who perhaps tended to pursue quality more than genre-fit, would become an endangered species. Hmmmm . . .  

Has self-publishing broken this brand-price-quality conundrum? It may be too early to tell. However, so far, a lot of successful self-published books do seem to imitate traditional publishing’s brands, genres, styles, etc. Which makes sense: many readers of self-published books have been programmed by traditional publishers, and will probably still search for genre rather than quality, at least as a first thing. And, of course, a lot of self-publishing authors want to make sales now.

I believe there are a whole lot of readers out there who look for quality first. However, it will take them time to find it in the vast ocean of self-published work available. And how does the quality-producing author help them to find his work? After all, he needs to describe it in some way, and many self-publishing outlets insist he ‘tag’ it with recognisable genre labels. All of which means, quality authors finding quality-loving readers will take a lot longer than with genre-to-genre relationships.

Maybe a new genre is needed. Something like the IT’S NOT WHAT I EXPECTED, BUT IT’S REALLY GOOD genre. Which by its title alone would challenge authors to do something different with the genre they may feel trapped by. It might even in time attract readers who are fed up with the DON’T EXPECT MUCH OTHER THAN COPY-CAT IDEAS, PREDICTABLE PLOTS AND STEREOTYPICAL CHARACTERS BUT, HEY, WHAT THE HELL, AT LEAST IT FITS THE GENRE genre.

I’ve had a break from this blog while thinking about the direction it should take next. I’ve enjoyed telling stories from the street. Indeed, members of the street were out last night in it, literally. Sitting around on a gaggle of different kinds of chairs, sipping wine, blinking into the evening sun and talking about, well, the street. I was just back from taking a creative writing course and therefore rather tempted to tell them about it and look for some blog-worthy reactions.

But I think it may be best for a while for me to try flying or at least blogging solo, streetless and keeping things firmly under one mental roof. If I get lonely, I can always nip down the Tavern to share a few pints with Nige. As you may have noticed, Nige is essentially suspicious of writers. He believes that while a builder/decorator’s work is always clearly and honestly on display, and the creator therefore openly judgeable, writers tend to hide behind their writing like meerkats wearing sunglasses. The fact that Nige’s work is not always what it seems to be either – at least where numbers of coats are concerned, not to mention the odd hole made in the wall mended with packed newspaper and Polyfilla – is perhaps besides his point.

The creative writing course I took was at Denman College, which is set in beautiful grounds in Oxfordshire. It’s the Women’s Institute’s centre for a wide range of courses, open not just to members but also to outsiders, including men. While my course was taking place, the rest of the college and grounds were occupied by flower-arranging events. All around the lawns were constructs of that looked like a mixture of Miro-esque art with native American feather arrangements and even a few flowers for good measure. Lovely little bursts of inventiveness, good for kick-starting one’s creative processes.

My course was on how to deal with writer’s block, even though it doesn’t really exist. The problem is usually everything else except writing. Or that writing doesn’t carry sufficient helium in a person’s life to lift it above the demands of family, job and television. We don’t suffer walker’s block, or boozer’s block, or talker’s block, mainly because we do these things regularly and as part of our lives. But, often, writing is not a regular part of a writer’s life. Therefore, it becomes first a yearned-for moment, then, when that doesn’t arrive as soon as is hoped, turns into a thing to be feared or even hated. Not writing as such, but the process of sitting down in a chair to write.

I didn’t talk about writer’s block directly until near the end of the course. By then, the students had performed some writing exercises and had each produced a complete piece of flash fiction. Despite, apparently, suffering writer’s block. Then, I suggested that one of the possible models for explaining an aspect of writer’s block might be SIMPLICITY – COMPLEXITY – SIMPLICITY. This looks at how we’re attracted to an activity we like and develop some ability without really thinking about it, and can even become pretty good at it. Then we decide we want to do it professionally and one way or another come crashing against the fact we’re just not good enough. And we won’t become good enough by continuing with the way we currently, in this case, write. We have to re-learn; start again; break down what we’ve been doing and find its weaknesses; re-construct our approach along professional, technical lines. If we work hard enough, eventually this complexity changes into a new simplicity, only this time it’s informed and has deep foundations.

But it takes courage to give up what we know works. I once wrote a story called ‘System, Magic, Spirit’, set in a world where two very different systems of magic exist. The fact they’re different doesn’t perhaps matter so much as that they’re both systems. And systems tend to govern our actions. Somewhat like the civil service, they start out as aids to the greater life but end up cutting us off from it more often than not.

In my story, the main character breaks out of the grip of systems by re-discovering the real magic in his own life which, for him, is having the chance to help someone with promise to fulfil it. I think writing is similar, and one way to navigate the COMPLEXITY stage is to find ways to hold on to the magic. The trick, I think, is to learn to love the complexity, even while you’re struggling with it. And I think the trick to that is to love what the complexity will eventually allow you to create. Which is where SPIRIT comes in. If there’s such a thing as a soul, I think we’re given one at birth. But spirit, I suspect, is more like a conscious soul, and has to be built on the foundations of technique, understanding and invisible craft.

I realise I’m mixing systems and models here, but I think the process is consistent. When we want to step up to professional level in something we love to do, we have to find ways to preserve that love. Writer’s block, I suspect, is really just a kind of guilt induced by spending less time than we know is needed with the thing we love. And the simple way to break that vicious circle is to write more. It doesn’t have to be the greatest short story ever. It can be a journal, or a blog, or a diary, or an email. Rather than keeping back your best writing from what you see as mundane outlets for it, then freezing when you find a rare moment to produce it, put your best writing into everything you write.

             We’ve got new neighbours and are at their place with a bottle of wine to say hello. They’re a couple in their thirties with a two-year old child. It’s a very warm summer’s evening. The gardens are full of white and pink roses, amongst a thousand shapes of green; birds skitter in the bushes.

            At one point, James and I are in the garden on our own and there is that slight nervousness between two people who know nothing about each other but live closer than most of their family.

            He’s just told me that he works for an online marketing company, where he’s responsible for a large team of people. I tell him I’m a Science Fiction and Fantasy writer, then something clicks.

            “I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi,” he says. “And I still like the ancient classics like Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury.”

            I laugh. “I grew up reading those guys as they were actually producing their stuff.”

            “But,” he says, “I find these days there’s more happening in comics than books.”

            “I used to read comics avidly,” I say, “then stopped in the early 80s for some reason. I think because they were getting rather predictable.”

            He nods. “They probably were back then. But now, if you know where to look, there’s a lot of innovation going on in comics.”

            “I read this review of the Avengers movie the other day. The critic is one of those rather artsy-fartsy middle-class types who is usually appalled by super hero movies. But he liked the Avengers because he thought Joss Whedon had put the fun back into super-heroes; that he knows how to nod and wink to the audience that it’s okay to like this film – don’t worry: it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

            He shakes his head. “He’s got that totally wrong. Joss Whedon doesn’t do what that critic means by ‘fun’.”

            “I agree. He does characters who are funny. But that requires the skill to produce convincing characters in the first place, then give them dialogue that’s actually funny.”

            “Absolutely! The super hero stories that work best are the ones that take the subject seriously. Not as in po-faced but as in, well, tone.”

            “Which is why the Batman TV series totally sucked – because it wasn’t for comics fans; it was for people who couldn’t enjoy super heroes unless they were sending up the genre.”

            “I would say Joss Whedon’s a brave man – a great writer working in genres that won’t ever be taken seriously by the art establishment – except I think he’s doing exactly what he loves to do.”

            And suddenly, it’s turned out to be a great day. I’ve met someone who really gets what I get. Who understands that great writing is just that; it’s not dependent on whether or not its form is an acceptable one.

            “It’s all about honesty to your art,” I say. “And there’s nothing worse than someone who plays at their art; who wants the benefits of the form but also wants his audience to know he’s not really serious, that if it turns out winning the literary prizes means you have to say you were just being ironic . . . “

            “But that way leads to compromise and crap writing. You can’t have your cape and eat it.”

            We both laugh at that. Later, in my study, with the window wide open and the cool night breeze tickling my bare feet, I wonder what the point is of my conversation with James. The point that I could tell my writing group about.

            For decades, super heroes have fought the bad guys. What do the bad guys want? Well, the world, in one form or another. They want to rule.

            Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that literary fiction critics want to rule the writing world? And if they do, does that make them the bad guys?

            I have an insight then, perhaps. Super heroes spend a lot of time fighting bad guys. But they’re not defined by them. What they really care about, or should do, is fairness, honesty, truth. If those things could exist in the world without the need to be defended, they’d hang up their capes in a second.

            So, it’s no good a comics or genre writer existing just to battle the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, stuffed-up, over-artsised, prejudices of the literary establishment. He has to write because he loves what he writes about. The best literary writers do the same.

            And with that thought, I wrap myself up in my metaphysical Bat cape and go to sleep.

             I’m with Ben and Trevor in the Mr Morris wine bar. It’s a sunny June evening and the deep brown table we’re sitting at shines with stripes of yellowish light from the venetian blinded windows. Trevor is a banker, a little old school in the sense that if you look at him too closely he seems to almost disappear. Yet there’s a twinkle to his eye as he says, “Did I ever tell you about this bloke where I work, we call the Bollacle?”

            Ben and I shake our heads.

            “He talks all day about any old crap that happens to enter his head, or whatever’s on his computer screen. He speaks in this deep, resonant voice, like an oracle but what he actually says is bollocks.”

            I sip my wine, slightly uncomfortable at the knowledge that if I was in the Tavern with Nige, I’d be gulping at a pint of beer.

            “The Bollacle drives me nuts,” says Trevor. “He’s not unintelligent but he’s at a much lower grade than he should be.”

            “Banks enjoy grading people,” says Ben. “Like toilet paper: the higher the grade, the less shit you get on your fingers.”

            Ben sees bankers on a par with big publishers: petty tyrants who exist only to screw money off him when all he’s doing is trying to sell great books to nice people.

            “Anyway,” says Trevor, “I think the Bollacle’s problem is that he’s become too dependent on the bank looking after him. He’s intelligent enough to do his job without much stress, and it leaves him plenty of time for talking himself up.”

            Ben stands, waves his hand vaguely at the table. “Same again?” he says.

            Trevor and I say yes please, and Ben goes to the bar.

            “It’s okay,” says Trevor, noting my frown. “I know he hates bankers. Doesn’t mind me most of the time but not when I’m talking about work.”

            “So, what’s your theory about the Bollacle?”

            “Well, you need to know that his line manager works at home.”

            “Isn’t that fairly normal these days?”

            “Increasingly so, but this guy only comes in the office once every few weeks.”

            “Isn’t that good for the Bollacle – no one keeping an eye on him?”

            “Yes, at one level. But deep down, he feels bereft. I reckon a line manager is like a father figure, at some level. I think the Bollacle wants to be guided, to be given a paternal direction in his job. In the absence of that, he’s putting on a brave face, pretending that he knows everything and can do it all alone.”

            It’s an interesting theory. And it might explain a curiously persistent attitude held by an awful lot of writers, possibly as a result of them not having a line manager – the publisher of their dreams – present to guide them. Either that or they have an agent they mistakingly believe is their line manager.

            Writers want to be looked after. They want to be free to just write – or at least pretend to – and have someone else take care of all the messy, official, business stuff. Someone like a publisher or, better still, an agent. A father/mother figure who will tell them they write real good and they don’t have to worry because Daddy/Mummy will go sell their books for them, arrange all the promotion, deal with all the contracts, sweet-talk the publisher’s editor to not interfere with the all-important creative process . . .

            It’s not totally a fantasy. Perhaps many writers actually used to enjoy that kind of life, even if they were probably getting a less than best deal for their work. And the media still likes to plays up the (increasingly rare) event of an author getting a huge publishing deal for writing something that no one saw coming, commercially at least.

            But I think the problem is they allow this need to be looked after to leak into their creative lives, too.

            Ben returns, and I say, “I think a lot of writers fall into the Bollacle Syndrome.”

            “Sounds like a good title for the new Bond film,” says Ben, sitting.

            “They’re too comfortable in their limitations,” I say. “So, instead of trying new things, they talk up those limitations, even write about them indirectly, then bitch about not getting published.”

            “There’s a saying attributed to Paul Getty,” says Trevor, “although it’s probably an urban myth that sounds plausible. Anyway, when he started out he used to carry around a piece of paper in his jacket pocket. Wherever he was – coffee bar with friends, family event, whatever – he’d take out the piece of paper and read it; then invariably he’d leave immediately. It read: ‘Is what you’re doing at the moment helping you to become a millionaire?'”

            I laugh. “But most writers don’t leave where they are under any circumstances.”

            “That’s the point,” says Trevor. “They think staying put and just sounding like you know what you’re talking – writing about – about is enough.”

            “You lot even have a saying for it, don’t you?” says Ben. “‘Write what you know’?”

            “Yes, but – “

            I’m once again not sure if the analogy to hand is the right one. Getty wanted to make a pile of money; okay. But is that the same as wanting to write a pile of words? Money is money. But words can be profound or banal, silly, funny, deep, shallow.

            “But,” I continue, “how does a writer know whether what he’s writing is something that isn’t helping him to become what he wants to be or that it is? I reckon there’s two things a writer has to try to get right: knowing when to go and when to stay. Sometimes, the answer is in his head. Other times, it’s in a spontaneous bike ride along the Thames, or going to see a French art house movie when he hates them. What I can’t get my writers to do is struggle to get that balance. They just want to stay at home in their heads and wait for someone else to tell them.”

            “So,” says Ben, “are you saying that before a writer can write what he knows, he has to know what it is in what he knows that’s worth knowing and what is just him avoiding going out to find out what he doesn’t know that once he knows can be the key to what he wants, even if he won’t know for sure either what he’s going to know or what about what he then knows is worth knowing?”

            “Exactly,” I say.

            “‘Exactly’?” says Trevor. “Even the Bollacle would have trouble making that lot sound convincing.”

            And the conversation moves on. But I think I do know what Ben meant.

            If a writer is going to produce work that does the unexpected and the great, he has to develop the desire to take leaps into the unknown – both of himself and the world around him. He has to Getty himself out of the predictable, take a chance that if his desire is propelling him, then the new strange worlds he arrives in will be just what he needs, even if he couldn’t possibly have known that to begin with.

“Where you been for the past couple of weeks, Tel?” says Nige. He’s come straight from working late, for a few last minute beers in the Tavern. His hair is lightly powdered with white plaster and his hands are spattered with paint that’s probably called ‘aubergine’ if he’s been working in Blackheath or ‘purple’ if it’s Catford. He looks a bit like an untidy dandy.

“We decided to go on an adventure,” I say, “without a safety net; do something highly risky and unpredictable; recapture the pioneering spirit of great British explorers like Scott of the Antarctic.”

“You went to the South Pole?”

“No, to Austria. But without a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide and with no access to Tripadvisor.”

“You don’t mean – ?”

“Yup. We’d drive into a town and actually go into a hotel and book it without first finding out what several dozen other previous travellers thought of the place. Scary.”

He takes a half-pint swallow of lager, puts down the glass, nods appreciatively. “I suppose Scott probably wouldn’t have bothered dragging his arse across miles of frozen waste if he’d checked Tripadvisor first and found out about the cramped conditions in that hut.”

“What’s weird,” I say, “is that we found some great hotels but since coming back home we’ve had to resist the urge to still check them out on Tripadvisor, to confirm that they really are any good.”

“That’s because,” he says, “we live in an age of over-expectation and sense of entitlement. You watch young people come in this place for the first time, for instance: they expect everything to fit exactly with every need they have. But I remember a time when you’d walk into a pub and have to fit your expectations exactly around the manager’s or you were out on your ear. I once saw a couple of middle-class tossers thrown out of this place, before it was gentrified, just for asking if it did food. Quite right, too. Pubs are for boozing, not fine bleedin’ dining.”

“Exactly . . . you can probably sense a writerly analogy on the way here, can’t you?”

He snorts. “Let me see if I can do it for you. Your group has problems coming up with stories that bite you in the bum because they’re Tripadvising their plots to death beforehand.”

“Yes, it’s another kind of displacement activity, which writers are experts at; but this one not only prevents you writing at all, it stops you getting into the unsafe places where the real stories lie.”

Nige stares at some past and distant place, just over my left shoulder. “Do you know,” he says, “for me summer holidays, I used to just pack a bag and go hitch-hike at the start of the M1 or the M4 – and go wherever the lifts took me.”

“You think my writers should hitch-hike to a story?”

He frowns, reluctantly re-focusing on the here and now, and on me. “Why not? All this Tripadvisor/Lonely Planet crap has got them believing the story’s already there, kind of fully-formed and ready to grab. Which it is, I suppose, but it’s also tame and predictable.”

We’re silent for a couple of minutes. Nige finishes his beer and orders two more, even though my glass is still two-thirds full.

I think about expectation. The problem with Tripadvisor is you can only ever be either just about satisfied or disappointed. Without Tripadvisor, you can’t be disappointed – because you aren’t expecting anything – and you might be brilliantly surprised. But for that, you have to take a chance.

“When I was a kid,” I say, “there weren’t any reviews of books, at least not where I’d find them. So I used to go in the local library and just take out a book at random. Give it a go. Sometimes I’d hate the story but occasionally I’d be amazed and delighted – more so, because it was my discovery, not just someone else’s tip.”

“And if the writer can’t amaze himself when he’s writing a story, what chance has the punter?”

“I honestly think the book and movie industry doesn’t want readers to be surprised any more. It wants to tell them what to expect and then deliver it. That’s where the economics lie: in producing a predictable product that never surprises but always delivers.”

“What: mediocrity?”

A group of young people enter the Tavern. They look healthy, well-fed; they’re dressed in clothes that . . . well, that accentuate their image. Everything about them looks comfortable. They go to the bar with the confidence of knowing they will be served what they ask for. Nothing jars between them or their surroundings.

“Writers should always jar,” I say, “and not fit in. Their stories should lie about their destination: pick up the reader on the pretence of giving him a lift to Disneyland then take him to Dungeness instead.”

“Seaside pebbled wasteland, nuclear power station, oddly appropriate narrow gauge railway train, black ex-fishermen’s huts full of wacko artists and the occasional BNP loner? They wouldn’t like it, Tel.”

I sigh. “They would if they hadn’t been expecting giant foam Donald Ducks, Coke on tap and sexless family entertainment instead.”

It’s usually best to resist arguments based on polarisations: cycle helmets will save your life vs. they don’t make any difference. Kirk vs. Picard. Literary vs. Genre. And where the latter’s concerned, I believe the perceived differences actually revolve around a common factor, which for now I’ll call the Third Element.

The first two elements are the Writer and the Story. But for any kind of story to really work, there has to be an extra element of wonder. Of course, in traditional story-telling, fantasy often provided this Third Element – ghosts, witches, fairies – all serving to amplify the moral dilemmas life puts in our way.

But, as there was a move away from folklore and fantasy with the industrial revolution, perhaps there was also a similar movement towards ‘realism’ in written fiction. The growing polarisation of Religion vs. Science no doubt added to this split in story-telling approaches.

So, it could be said that literary fiction on the one hand was liberated from the old superstitions and beliefs but on the other perhaps threw out the fairy with the maistir (stale urine). What’s perhaps ironic is that the antipathy felt by some literary writers to genre seems to focus especially on science fiction, as if the term is really an oxymoron of betrayal. But does this anger amount to a kind of subconscious totem envy?

The more polarised literary fiction author, then, perhaps has to first rediscover the need for magic – of a ‘something else’ – in his story, other than just reflecting the day-to-day – and then work hard to produce it out of the mundane. As for the genre writer, his Third Element is already made for him, of course. But he has to resist just throwing a few words at it and letting the totem of say space opera or steampunk or the magical quest do all the work, instead to use the Third Element lightly – either by sliding his focus closer to the literary form or by blowing full-scale with it, yet anchoring it firmly in believable and sympathetic characters.     

And here’s the thing: I suspect if you look closely enough at the best literary fiction, you’ll conclude that the writer has quietly slid up that totem at least far enough to touch the need for wonder and myth and connection that all but the most intellectual reader longs for. In which case it’s a shame when some such literary writers are prone to protest that they don’t write science fiction: their stories just happen to be set in the future. As if they’re heading in a completely different direction to the genre writer.

In fact, I think all good writers stand close to the line between literary and genre, left foot one side, right foot the other, or vice versa. In short, any writer in love with a story starts out with excitement in his heart because he’s on the trail of something special, even though he may not know what it is. Unfortunately, very soon, all sorts of genre- or anti-genre-based voices will try to stop him reaching the full expression of it.

As said, I think one of the keys to not getting genre-bound is to avoid polarisations: modern society makes us stupid vs. modern society makes us smart; we’re affected by a collective consciousness of folk culture vs. we’re not, and so on.

In other words, I think that truly creative people, working in any genre, are participators in a Third Element which makes use of the dual ‘options’ of real vs. the fantastical but is not determined by them. We’re different but the same.