Short stories

I have taken a few days off from the novel in order to dust up some stories which I wrote a while ago and now want to send out. I have never written many short stories because I'm not very interested in them. I hardly ever read short stories. For me they are simply too short. I love novels - the longer the better - precisely because they create complete and continuous fictional worlds. I want to lose myself in those worlds and stay in them forever. With a short story you're just beginning to understand the world of the story when it all evaporates. I've noticed that people don't like me expressing my dissatisfaction with the short story form. But that's just the way that it is. It's also nearly impossible, it seems, to get a short story published. I have several short stories which have been short listed for prizes but can I get them published? No, certainly not. But having said that, I've enjoyed working on one of my stories today. It is now much better than it was. It certainly should be. It's a story which has been re-drafted about fifty times over the last six years. But it's only now that I really feel that I'm beginning to understand what it's about. Isn't it dreadful, really, to have put so many hours work into something which will never be read? Or perhaps it's wonderful really? To work and work and work at something just for the sake of doing it. Yes, I think that I better decide that it's wonderful otherwise I'll be too depressed to carry on.

Baggy monsters

The book is a huge and baggy monster. It is 110,000 words. That isn't really much too long. The usually length for a novel is 80,00 - 100,000 words. So length isn't really the problem. It's lack of shape and structure which is worrying. I write very tightly crafted and careful books. My last novel was re-written fourteen times. This one will probably be the same. But maybe my idea of what a novel should be is changing. When I wrote my first novel it was described by the publishers Little Brown as being 'quietly intelligent.' I was just thrilled by that desciption of it (not that they published it, mind you). I wanted my books to be quietly intelligent. But now I'm beginning to wonder. I find myself a little bored of all these tight lipped and sparse English novels that I read. What's wrong with being garrulous and extravagant? At the moment I'm in love with the language of Dylan Thomas - extreme, gushing, lyrical, passionate, only half intelligible, not at all English. Why not write like that? Perhaps I will do. But I suspect that the awful truth is that even those big, rangy, extreme, wind-bag type novels are actually very carefully put together. They look like baggy monsters but underneath that baggy exterior there's a frame-work which has been tightly bolted and braced into place. But still I'm glad to have admitted to being bored with being understated. Bring on the ranting, the anger, the overly insistent voice, the wasteful use of words.

The Essence

For me, writing ressembles making a sauce - a tomato sauce. You begin by putting in all the ingredients but then, when you taste the sauce, it's bland and watery. So you have to boil off a lot of the liquid. That's what you have to do with the writing as well. You have to boil it down again and again. What you're trying to do is to get down to the essence of the thing. You want to finish up with something viscous and full of flavour. You want to lose everything that isn't absolutely necessary to the taste of the sauce. It can take a long time to make this kind of sauce.

Doughnuts

Today I finished the third draft of my new book. That might sound like good news but, since it tends to take me about fourteen drafts to write a book, I've still got a long way to go. I'm about to sit down and read through the book to see what's working and what isn't. I already know what the main problem is. I've done what I always fail to do - and what I regularly see my student failing to do. I've neglected to actually tell the main story. I've told everything else. The book has endless sub plots and back story. Pages of accurate description. But the main story is shadowy and imprecise. I call this the doughnut effect. The book with a gaping hole in the middle of it. There are even some published novels, and memoirs, out there which are doughnut books. Either they lack a central story or a central character. But why does this happen? Why do we all write everything else except the real story?
I think the answer is that we're frightened of the real story - and with good reason. We chose a particular story because it has some resonance for us. We may feel sure at the beginning that it doesn't have that personal resonance but actually it does. But then, as we write, we don't push too far into that story because in order to write it properly it will take us to places where we don't want to go. And so we prevaricate and evade and bluster and write anything else except the real story. Some of us even lay down our pens and give up.
But the book will not work until we have the courage to tell that story. The book is offering us the chance to understand something new about ourselves and we have to find the courage to take that chance. We have to peel back layer after layer of ourselves until we can see what it is that we didn't want to see.
Maybe this sounds like therapy. It isn't. I don't write for reasons of therapy. I write because I like to tell a story. But what I do know is that as I write a book I'm always completely and absolutely sure that the book has nothing to do with me. Then three months after the book has gone off to the publishers I suddenly open my eyes and see how the book relates to me.
It's a mysterious process. Don't be frightened of the doughnuts. You've got to write the outside before you fill the middle in. But push yourself inwards. You won't understand it all until long after you've finished the book.