Kit Whitfield's Blog

Hear the conversation...

2009-07-03T10:58:00.004Z

Been a bit of radio silence this week, for various reasons; however, following the panel last week, if you click here, you'll hear a recording of said discussion! (You may also hear brass instruments playing in the background from time to time; this is because there were other meetings in the building, including a concert.) If you want to identify me, I'm the voice that begins by talking about the 'Nine Parts of Speech' poem. It's very peculiar hearing my own voice recorded; I don't sound like that in my own head.

It was very pleasant meeting my fellow panelists, all of whom were nice people. While there, I also met a delightful woman who told me about her work at the following charity: Reprieve, a truly admirable organisation that campaigns for the rights of prisoners, including those at Guantanamo. I strongly advise everyone to check them out - and, if you can spare it, consider making a donation.

Several questions came up. Does Britishness affect one's writing? How so? Do you think of yourself as a science fiction writer? (Guess what I said about that.)

Anyway, have a listen if you're interested, have a look at Reprieve, have a good weekend.

On a panel

2009-06-20T09:15:00.002Z

I've been invited to speak on a panel at the British Science Fiction Association's upcoming AGM. If anyone feels like hearing me speak, do pop along.

Here are the details: The panel will be at 10 am on Saturday June 27 at Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London. The other panelists, I believe, will be Nick Harkaway, Juliet McKenna, Paul Kincaid and Paul McAuley.

So, anyone who's free next Saturday morning and wants to say hello, that's where I'll be...

It's my birthday...

2009-06-18T09:40:00.002Z

... and today I'm thirty-two years old. So, as is my wont on birthdays, I shall be posting some of what passes for wisdom in the confines of my own mind. This year, a saying I invented as an undergraduate; I'd forgotten I used to say it until a friend recently reminded me:

Blessed are the easily pleased, for they shall be often happy.

And a picture of my wedding bouquet, which my wonderful godmother made for me herself - only one of her many generosities. And of the cake, made my some very clever people who were fascinating to talk to as only profound experts on a subject you didn't previously know existed can be - did you know there's a sugarcrafter's guild?

Why do I write made-up beasties and that?

2009-06-15T09:37:00.003Z

It's a question my husband put to me over the weekend: why, given that I read a lot of realistic fiction, do I write the kind of stuff I do?

A very interesting question, in short. I never particularly set out to write fantastical stuff; my writing just tends to come out that way. What's the reason?

I think the reason is twofold. Part of it has to do with reality, and part of it has to do with authority.

Authority is the simpler answer. I don't like to base my characters on real people; I feel uncomfortable setting my stories in real places. Real people and places are fascinating things, but if I try to depict them, it's like a drag on my tail. I slow down. I labour. I grind. The stuff I produce comes out slow, laboured and grinding.

This, I think, is a question of conscience. I often quote Ruskin's 'You will never love art well, until you love what she mirrors better,', and I love reality. The world is a wonderful place. Depicting it badly throws me back on all my self-doubts, my uncertainties about my own perceptions, the horrible sense that if I fail to depict things properly, I will be betraying my beloved world.

This, of course, is block demon talk. But writing imaginative fiction dodges neatly round it. I may make mistakes depicting the life of a London cabbie, but if I say that the life of a lycanthropic activity police officer is thus-and-so, I'm betraying no one. I'm making it that way by fiat. I cannot misrepresent what is imaginary. This takes off the brakes: I can run wild into saying whatever I please. Imaginative fiction frees me up to be a bad girl. Or even a bad person. Writing doesn't have to be virtuous; in fact, if you block off the dark places of your mind, you're blocking your source. Conscious comparisons between your writing and reality lift you up out of the subconscious, and from there there's nowhere vivid to go. Other writers probably don't have this problem, but for me, obligations to beautiful reality can weigh me down.

Which takes me into the second reason why I write imaginative fiction: beautiful reality.

The world is utterly extraordinary. Most of the time we're used to it, but this is one amazing place we live in. When I was a child I read an autobiography in which the writer described regaining her sight after years of blindness and being continually astonished by the vivid loveliness of everything she can see, and that made an impression. I like to stop and stare as if I'd never seen the world before.

Writing, at its finest, can depict that. But this is a trick I use in my own: one way to convey the feeling of never having seen the world before is to create a world nobody has seen before, because it's imaginary. Invented situations are entirely new to both the writer and the reader, and into that you can pour all that first-sight passion of observation that makes the real world so numinous.

I try to write my imaginary situations as if they were real. Because, in a way, they are: they're a caricature of reality, a slight exaggeration of how startling and curious the world really is.

A concept in search of a word

2009-06-08T11:24:00.002Z

Here's a linguistic challenge. You know that not-really-an-apology people sometimes give? It's usually rendered as, 'Well, I apologise, but I only said that because you provoked me,' or 'Sorry, but I only did it because...' The device is basically to embed the word 'sorry' or 'apologise' deep in a renewed self-justification or recrimination. The word's there, but it serves a purely decorative function.

It's a rather tricky argumentative strategy, because there's a social taboo against refusing to accept an apology. But if someone does refuse to be mollified by this, they're not really being unreasonable: the apology didn't express genuine contrition or desire to make amends, but instead was just a word, used as perfunctorily as possible in order to get the 'making amends' bit over with as quickly as possible before returning to the fray. It wasn't really an apology, any more than saying, 'Yes, but you're still wrong' is an agreement. But if one rejects it, then one can be accused of being ungracious, attributing bad faith, and generally giving your opponent a weapon to use against you.

We need a word for this. Things that happen a lot need words. If we can say, 'That isn't a reason, it's an excuse,' we ought to be able to say, 'That isn't an apology, it's a ... something.'

Let's have some suggestions. The best I can come up with is 'apolofication', a portmanteau or 'apology' and 'justification', but if anyone has a better one, let's get it in circulation.

American proofs are here!

2009-06-03T10:17:00.003Z

This morning a package arrived, containing the author galleys for the American edition of In Great Waters. The US release looms closer...

Reading proofs requires discipline. There's always the urge to fiddle, and in this case it's an urge I have to resist as far as possible: the UK edition is already out, and I need to keep the two as consistent as possible. This makes it rather nerve-wracking: if I spot something I regret, I may just have to leave it.

I've decided to treat it rather like a workout. There are about 400 pages; these I'm breaking into chunks, aiming to get through a certain amount per day. But I've already noticed a tendency to glance at the page I'm on much like I glance at the timer when I'm working out. 'Three minutes gone - okay, I only need to do that nine more times and I'm done...' or 'Four pages gone - okay, I only need to do that ninety-nine more times...' This is a long haul, and I'm in for the duration, and it'll probably do me good.

Having said that, the print is really rather nice: legible and attractive, well laid out and generally pleasant on the eye. I'm looking forward to the finished product.

Which nobody will get if I don't proof the darn thing, so I should stop blogging and get back to work, really. While I'm doing that, how about declaring this an open thread? Anyone who has something they want to promote, be it their own work, a recommendation, a blog or anything else: this is your moment.

I'm back!

2009-05-28T07:01:00.000Z

And the wedding went beautifully. We had a wonderful time in idyllic surroundings in the company of lovely people we are privileged to know. Everything went smoothly: the sun shone, the registrars were great (and actually removed the 'marriage is between one man and one woman' bit of the ceremony on request, to my delight, so we managed to get married without demeaning our gay guests and, thus, ourselves), the party was fun, the food was delicious, the band rocked, the children behaved angelically, and it was all terrific. There was a real sense of community; it was just a happy, loving environment, and while I spent a lot of time running around saying hello to everyone, I had a fanatastic time. I'll put some pictures up once I work out how to get them off my camera.

Here are the readings we had. The first is from 'Songs of Travel' by Robert Louis Stevenson:

I know not how it is with you -
I love the first and last,
The whole field of the present view,
The whole flow of the past.

One tittle of the things that are,
Nor you should change nor I -
One pebble in our path - one star
In all our heaven of sky.

Our lives, and every day and hour,
One symphony appear:
One road, one garden - every flower
And every bramble dear.

The second is a 'late fragment' by Raymond Carver:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Oh boy

2009-05-20T13:12:00.002Z

Preparing for a wedding takes a LOT OF WORK.

However, tomorrow I will be packing up Mika to take to the cat hotel and setting off. Mika is not going to like me for this, I fear, but it's a nice place, run by the same vets who rescued her when she was a little kitty, and they're kind people. I figure since she came out of their care sweet-natured the first time, it's a fair bet they treated her well, and will do so again. I shall be explaining all this to her tomorrow, but I haven't told her anything yet, so shhh, not a word.

And then I shall be gone till late next week on a mini-honeymoon; we'll be taking a longer one later, but in the meantime we're going to Bath for a few days. Next time you hear from me I shall no longer be Ms Kit Whitfield, but ... well, actually I'll still be Ms Kit Whitfield because I'm not changing my name, but I shall be married. (It's going to be interesting correcting the people who can't get their heads around 'Ms' - you know the ones? It's usually on the telephone; if they call you 'Mrs' and you say 'Actually it's Ms' they move straight to 'Miss', and vice versa. 'Miss Whitfield' is at least accurate, but once I'm married it won't be, will it? But 'Mrs Whitfield' won't be accurate, because that's my mother. But I'm not calling myself 'Mrs Thomas' either. I think I'll have to resign myself to answering to more or less anything.)

So, here's a talking point. I'll put up the poems we're having read at the wedding after it's over, but in the meantime: what poems did/would you have at your wedding?

And finally, I'd like to take the opportunity to point out that this marriage I'm about to enter into is a right not available to all my fellow citizens. If I wanted to marry a woman, I'd have to settle for a 'civil union', a separate-but-equal piece of unfairness that does my country no credit at all. Marriages are supposed to be about love, and they're also supposed to be about community. Making marriage only available to some people fills a ceremony of love and community with discrimination and division, and that's bad for all of us. I'm delighted to be marrying my beloved, but I'm also angry that the same laws that benefit me hurt my friends and my fellow citizens. So, if anyone is feeling in the mood for a charitable donation, may I recommend Stonewall, a highly successful lobbying group for gay rights. Stonewall has participated in a lot of legal changes for the better - including civil partnerships, which while unfair are better than nothing - which you can read an overview of here.

The LOLcat version of In Great Waters

2009-05-15T14:14:00.003Z

(A LOLcat, for those of you unfamiliar with the word, is a picture of a cat with a funny caption.)

In any event, my editor sent me this link. If you're read In Great Waters, you may see why this is funny.

And if you haven't, well, you'll just have to buy a copy to get the joke, won't you?

Irrational things I believe

2009-05-12T07:46:00.001Z

When you come right down to it, a lot of people have some strange beliefs. I don't mean that they're members of particular sects; I'm referring to beliefs peculiar to themselves, little quirks of conviction that they themselves can't really justify with logic. Here are some of mine:

Washing in dew on May Day makes your skin beautiful

I read this in a magazine when I was a little girl. At the time, I had serious eczema on my hands, and in an attempt to fix it, I tried the dew method. The eczema went away and my hands became smooth.

Rationally, I suppose it just healed up because things generally do. But I still scooped some dew onto my face this May Day.

Wishing evil on someone will rebound on you

I can make a rational argument for this one. Express a wish that something bad will happen to someone in the presence of other people, and it'll affect their opinion of you. Act hatefully, and you're putting the impression of a hateful person out there: people generally don't like hateful people. I know I tend to go off people who wish too much misfortune on others, and many people are the same. So wishing evil on someone probably will rebound on you, in that it'll have negative consequences on how people treat you.

It's possible that my subconscious knows this and comes up with instincts to enforce it. If so, it clearly feels the need to make heavier threats, though, because that's not how this belief works in my mind. There's no logical reason to assume that if I say, 'I hope so-and-so dies in a fire,' I'll die in a fire. There's no logical reason to assume that if I say, 'I hope he drowns,' I'll drown - but that's how my mind seems to interpret it. Even if I don't quite believe what I believe, wishing evil on people just feels unlucky.

If someone says 'Damn you' to me, even as a joke, I'll go to hell

I think I picked that odd piece of theology up from reading at an impressionable age, and somehow it stuck. I'm not sure if I even believe in hell, and it seems to me that a universe run on such principles would be far less reasonable and beautiful than the universe we actually inhabit, so it makes absolutely no sense. But still, if someone jokingly says 'Damn you' to me, I jump up saying 'Take it back! Take it back!' (Anyone who does this is the comments, please don't; it genuinely makes me nervous, and it wouldn't be that clever or funny to begin with.)

Curiously, this belief does not extent to 'damn your eyes.' If someone damns my eyes, I mind a lot less. (Though I'd still invite commenters to not do that.)

I mention these beliefs for two reasons. The first is simply that it's interesting how many people have odd little beliefs tucked away in their corners, and I'd be interested to see what other people's are. But the second is to point out that rationality is a variable thing.

It's been my amateur observation that the people who make the biggest production of how 'rational' they are are not usually the most logical or reasonable people. Generally they're very emotional people, and their emotions are what's driving them; a lot of their self-declared rationality is actually rationalisation of beliefs that are, for whatever reason, emotionally important to them. If you watch an informal debate, the odds are pretty good that the person insisting loudly that everything should be rational is the one who's going to kick off.

Now, this is not to say that anyone who believes in being rational or admires the scientific method is actually a superstitious hysteric; dealing with things logically is an admirable quality, and many people who admire logic and science are clear-headed, rational thinkers. But the people who use logic best are generally the ones who accept that they're beings of feeling as well as thought, and know how to distinguish the two. If you're hung up on being an entirely rational creature, it doesn't stop you from being emotional; it just gives you cognitive dissonance about it, and the easiest thing to do is to pretend that your feelings are actually logical conclusions and any passion you feel is merely the conviction of absolute reason. You have to accept that you have feelings and irrational beliefs before you can can start to exclude them from your logic.

And on that score, there's nothing wrong with emotion. Emotion motivates us to act, to make our minds up, to put our logic to good use. Emotion can get there ahead of us: very often the first sign that an argument is faulty or a situation is dangerous is that it feels wrong, and while we can reason that out with a little thought, it's emotion that's given us the heads-up. Excluding emotion from a discussion isn't just dishonest, it's ill-advised, because emotions may not be logical, but neither are they stupid.

We're all driven by emotion, and we're all liable to pick up some illogical beliefs along way. So, in the interests of fun and truthfulness, I think it's good to acknowledge sometimes just how odd some of our convictions are.

What odd beliefs or opinions do you have?

A Mikalogue we hear every weekend morning

2009-05-06T09:44:00.004Z

Mika:
Morning has broken,
Like the first morning...

Kit: Oh, man...

Mika:
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird,

Gareth: Wsf? Is she at it again?

Kit: Yeahhh...

Mika:
Mika must kill it,
Open the catflap,
Also want kibble...

Gareth: What time is it?

Kit: About ten past seven...

Mika:
Time to get up.

Out in the garden
Ought to be peeing,
Marking of homeland,
Let Mika out...

Kit: Is there any way we can explain the concept of weekends to her?

Mika:
Mika the brilliant
Adding percussion
Helps to remind you
Where duty lies.

Kit: Man, now she's clawing the carpet again.

Gareth: Do you think if we pinned it down, it would bang against the floor less loudly?

Kit: She knows exactly what she's doing.

Mika:
Litter tray worthless,
Mika rejects it.
Open the door, or
Pees on your plants.
Daddy should get up,
Does every morning,
Both you stop lazing,
Mika wants food.

Kit: I'd feed her, but I don't want to positive-reinforce this behaviour.

Gareth: Bzznf.

Kit: How can you sleep through this?

Gareth: Hm?

Mika: Must rest a minute to polish vocal pipes and see if they get point.

Kit: Ah, quiet. Okay, maybe it's a fair time to feed her.

Mika: Aha! There you are. Demand service immediately!

Kit: Are you going to do this tomorrow morning as well?

Mika: Course. Here by popular request.

Kit: Bleh. Baby, the popular request in our bed is that you let us sleep on weekend mornings.

Mika: Mika has many blog fans, and votes their proxy. Morning has broken...

Kit: Curse you all.

There's been a radio silence this week...

2009-05-01T09:29:00.005Z

...largely because my hen weekend starts tomorrow, and my wedding is on the 23rd, which means I'm spending a lot of time running around. So, who here has a wedding/hen/stag weekend story they'd like to share?

And come to that, how come it's stags and hens? I can see the problem with cocks and hens, but why not stags and does? Any thoughts?

And a final question. We're going to be painting plates and cups as our hen activity. If you were doing that, what would you paint?

Cinema and its dicontents, part 5

2009-04-25T06:56:00.000Z

Today, we conclude a week of cinema grumbles...

Cinemas nowadays seem to be looking for an experience people couldn't reproduce at home, such as 3D, in the hopes that audiences will reject the DVD alternative. The thing is, though, people don't go to most films because they have major technological advantages. They go to films because they want an evening out, or because they want to see the film now rather than wait for the DVD release. Both of those are things the cinemas are perfectly capable of offering. What they can't do, though, do not outweigh the alternatives of going down the pub instead and renting the DVD later if the cinema is offering an unattractive environment. A pub with sticky floors puts off punters however shiny their pint glasses; most people would stay away from a restaurant where somebody kept coming between them and their food. If the place is nasty and you can't concentrate on what it's offering, there's no reason to go.

To be sure, a cinema does offer a big-screen experience that's somewhat different from a television, but even assuming someone has a small TV, that's not as big an advantage as it might be. The human brain is a concentrating organ - which means it's excellent at ignoring certain things. Things that stay still and don't make any noise. That rules out obstreperous punters, but it doesn't rule out your living room. As long as you've been reading this post, have you really been that aware of the area around the screen? I certainly haven't; there's a picture of a bird on the wall above me, a printer to my right, and a certain amount of jumble, but all my eyes have really registered is a page of text, with the occasional interruption from my cat Mika, who's sitting on the window outside making silent mews in the hopes that I'll decide it's teatime soon (reasoning, I think, that as lunch appeared when she was out in the garden, maybe tea will as well) - which is to say, the only thing that broke my focus was an object that a) I'm very fond of, and b) was in motion. Watching a movie on DVD is similar: if it's good enough to hold your attention, then your brain cancels out your surroundings, providing a fairly close equivalent to the big-screen experience.

So the upshot is that going to the cinema feels more and more like going to the theatre: an experience somewhat different from the one you have at home, but not something you run to on a regular basis. And that's the nice cinemas; with the affordable ones, it's more like going to an underground theatre only without the sense of sticking it to the Man. On the whole, cinemas feel more like the Man is sticking it to you - and if he's going to do that, he can do it on his own dime.

Cinema and its discontents, part 4

2009-04-24T11:08:00.000Z

So, cinemas are overpriced ... but some of them do try to keep things affordable. I'll take my local cinema as an example.

It never charges above £6.50 (though that's still steep compared with a decade ago). To keep these prices manageable, it has to cut expenses where it can, and some of its methods are rather crafty. For instance, they try to increase impulse snacking and cut back on staffing at the same time by making customers buy tickets and food from the same counter. If you want a ticket, you can't just swing past the concession stand: you have to queue in front of it until, theoretically, your resistance to food has been worn away by having to stare at it for the last five minutes. It doesn't work on me, and I'm not mad about the queues, but I admire the ingenuity.

But because they've cut back in other areas too, the price still feels more than it's worth. Ushers, of course, are a thing of the past, but our local has cut back on cleaning expenses as well, and for £6.50 I'd like to walk on a floor that doesn't squish.

This is something of a vicious circle: by keeping itself cheap and cheerful, the cinema attracts a heavily teenage audience, and teenagers tend to be the biggest messers. Adults are more likely to stay away, so they need to keep going for teenagers, and the place just gets grottier and grottier; again, for comfort as well as price reasons, I have to really want to see a film before I feel like going in there ... and if I really want to see it, the prospect of hearing it compete with a lot of chatty kids doesn't much appeal. I'm glad they've all got friends and are having fun together, but again, if I could hear their conversations for one pound on the top deck of a bus, I'd rather not pay £6.50 to hear them in a cinema.

The cinema's options are limited. Either it could spiff itself up and charge more, or it could do what it does, which is stay grubby and lower the lights - which probably saves it still more money on electricity bills. I admire the spirit ... but I don't feel like it's a fun treat to stay there.

In result, it's not much of an occasion going there. I end up going to that cinema only for films that I sort of want to see, on days when there isn't much else do do, a perfect storm of mild willingness and disinterest that's very difficult for a marketing department to whip up. Whatever a director had in mind when he or she first decided to helm their project, I'm sure that's not it.

Write to Obama

2009-04-23T13:50:00.003Z

I've been running a series of posts on cinema and its discontents this week, and I'll be continuing it shortly. But I've also been following the news, and you know what makes me really discontented? Torture.

President Obama has been shifting position somewhat over the last few days, but his general trend seems to be against prosecuting those who decided that international law and common humanity could go screw itself, they wanted torture to be legal. How much it's his call versus how much unofficial influence he can have is a debatable question, but any influence against prosecution is too much.

This is a terrible idea. The torture legislation has permanently damaged the good name of America and its allies, and the good name of democracy itself; until those responsible are brought to justice, we can have no moral standing in the world. There can be no reconciliation without justice; Obama talks of 'moving on', but it's not his place to say that. He's not the one who got tortured. If someone's predecessor gets you tortured, they've got no right to demand you move on until they've made reparation. No one will be ready to move on until justice is done. Add to that the fact that if the wrongdoers aren't punished, it sends a message to future wrongdoers that you can break any law you like as long as you're powerful enough, and we've got a serious problem on our hands.

Don't get me wrong; I like Obama. Considering the mess we're in, I'd rather have him than anyone else. But if he opposes prosecuting the torture legislators, he's seriously in the wrong.

As it's being thrashed out at the moment, this is the time when politicians are going to be subject to the pressure of public opinion. So please, take a few minutes out of your day and write to Obama, urging him to support any and all measures to bring those who created a policy of torture to justice. If you're in a hurry or can't think what to say, feel free to cut and past anything you like from this post or to write something very brief, but please, write to him and express your opinion, whether as a citizen of America or a member of the international community.

It's being decided as we speak. The more people speak out for justice against the torturers, the more likely justice is to be done. Let's all put our names down while there's still time.

Cinema and its discontents, part 3

2009-04-22T09:53:00.001Z

Here's another financial problem for cinemas that rebounds on audiences: the intersection between concession stands and film length. It's generally remarked that cinemas depend on concession stands now to keep their profits healthy; even the great old Cambridge Arts Cinema, to my sorrow, closed down its original premises several years ago (which is now part of an enormous Borders), and moved down the street. The new place is fine, but it's notable that it has a cafe attached. A nice cafe, selling gastropub-style sandwiches and nibbles and alcoholic drinks, a pleasant place to eat before the film - but still, financially, more or less an upmarket concession stand. If customers aren't coming in big droves, you need them to spend as much as possible while they're actually there, and charging a high mark-up on inexpensive food is one way of doing it.

Now, this would be fair enough, if a bit gouging, if that was all there was to it. But there's a problem with that: films are getting longer - and unlike older long films, have done away with the intermission. Alfred Hitchcock famously remarked that 'The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder,' and mundane though it sounds, it's an excellent point. However good the film, it's very hard to concentrate if you're in pain. 'How long can I go without wetting my pants?' might not be the deepest question in the world, but when it applies to you personally, it will probably seem more compelling that whatever artistic or philosophical dilemma the characters are wrestling with up on the screen.

In Boogie Nights, porn auteur Jack dreams of making a skin flick so exciting that it'll keep customers in their seats post-orgasm: '...When they spurt out that joy juice, they just got to sit in it until they find out how it ends.' If that sounds ambitious, try stacking up the 5-odd millitres of an ejaculation against the 400-600 ml capacity of a human bladder: now there's a problem that can't be addressed with a discreet tissue and some baby wipes.

Worse than that, by straining the audience's loyalties between the story and their comfort, you actually create a needless acid test: I can think of at least one film where the best way to express my distate for it was to remark that I hadn't minded taking a bathroom break in the middle. An audience member debating whether or not to nip to the loos and miss some of the story, in fact, is asking themselves at what point they're prepared to say, 'Oh, stuff this film,' - and that's not a question you should encourage audiences to consider any more than you absolutely have to.

Which is where the concession stand will take a hit. If the film lasts an hour and twenty minutes, a drink might seem like a pleasant accompaniment; if it lasts three hours and ten minutes, do you really want a pint of liquid running through your kidneys? Pretty much every time I go into a cinema, I go through the same thought process: It might be nice to take in some popcorn, but if I do that I'll get thirsty, and then I'll want a drink ... nah, I'd rather be able to concentrate on the ending, thanks.

Teenage boys are the main target of blockbuster movies for a lot of reasons, but I can't help wondering if one of them is simply that they're equipped with a functioning prostate and no uterus to, as it were, press for their attention a couple of hours into the film. And if that's the case, given the limited number of major features for anybody other than teenage boys, I intend to nail 95 theses to the bathroom door.

Cinema and its disconents, part 2

2009-04-21T09:46:00.000Z

So, what are the effects of cinemas trying to cope with falling audiences by saving money?

Here's a big one: to save on wages, cinemas no longer employ ushers. This is what my dad refers to as a 'false economy', or 'spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar.'

If you're going to pay the high ticket prices, it's probably for a film that you really want to see. And that means you want to hear it too - but without ushers around to shine the Torch of Civil Discipline, odds very much favour there being some jackass yapping away throughout the experience. As an audience member there's little you can do about this except start a fight (and it's hard to weigh up your opponent in semi-darkness, but the one thing you do know is that they've got friends with them to back them up), or go complain, which means you have to miss at least five minutes in the middle of the movie while you do so. You miss less if you just try to tune the jackass out. But when a bit of patience and half the price will rent you the DVD, which you can watch in privacy and peace, why would you bother? I'm sure I'm not the only one to have movies in my past where I remember the noisemakers more vividly than I remember the film itself, and noisemakers you can get for free.

By losing the ushers, cinemas make it a lottery whether you'll actually get to enjoy the film or not, and with the ante so high, many people don't feel like gambling.

Some cinemas seem to have gone with the solution of playing the films louder, but that has disadvantages of its own. For one thing, I'd personally like to keep my hearing into old age, but for another, it doesn't necessarily drown out the chatterboxes. In some cases, it simply provides enough cover that they feel comfortable talking in their regular voices - which, in fact, they have to use if they're going to hear each other. A cinematic experience moves ever closer to a clubbing one; I can't but suspect that one reason why Mamma Mia was such a hit was that it actually suited usherless conditions unusually well. Given that cinemas are turning into nightclubs anyway, you might as well get up and dance.

I say this partly as a joke, but not entirely: Mamma Mia tapped into the vast female audience that studios often don't bother to seek out, but it's no Mildred Pierce: watching it is oddly like watching the background for a party you're expected to create yourself, and it wouldn't have felt that inappropriate if we'd all got a free wig and boa with our tickets. Many movies release soundtracks, but Mamma Mia basically is a soundtrack, with a bit of dialogue and some pictures thrown in by way of accompaniment. In itself, it's a perfectly agreeable little thing, but a film that's all accompaniment and relies on its plot and dialogue being ignorable says something about the state of cinemas.

Another method is to try and direct the noisemaking, but that only works with certain kinds of movies and certain audiences. On holiday in San Francisco, fiance and I went to the movies to see a big blockbuster film - I think it was X-Men 2 - and found something interesting: if that audience was a representative sample, American audiences love to make noise. Boy, did they like to make noise. Big laughs, cheers, responding to the movie as if it were a sports event, were all a big part of their fun. But not all audiences do that; English audiences very seldom do unless the movie's a big cultural event and everybody there is part of the same subculture, and even then they tend to be quieter. We save our yelling for footie. Pass a pub with satellite TV on an FA Cup Final night and you'll hear it; some spectacles encourage a kind of spectator response that's almost a game in its own right - let's call it 'synchronised shouting' - but the cinema isn't the place, or at least not here.

The really interesting thing, and the thing that made me suspect this audience was representative, was that the director had clearly factored the noise in. After the moments that raised a cheer - a wisecrack, a stunt, a heroic-looking shot - there was a pause; characters just stood and glared at each other, the camera swooped while they stayed still, and a few plotless seconds went by while the noise played itself out. It worked well enough, and in fact broke the action up quite nicely, but having seen the audience respond so loudly, I started seeing it in other US blockbusters: for an American audience, the director must tap into his vaudevillian subconscious and remember to pause for the laughs.

If you can get that working, it's actually a decent way of dealing with the noisemakers: most people are making a noise that works in harmony with the movie, and the chatterboxes are probably going to be drowned out. But for that to work, you need a big, loud film with lots of action; dramatic silences and fraught pauses are out. X-Men 2, fine; Sense and Sensibility, not so much. It's got its uses, but they're limited, and personally I like films that don't suit the noisemaking vibe.

Apart from the 'direct the noisemaking' film's style limitations, it also seems rather to be going the long way round. A director can't possibly anticipate who will come into every cinema, and managing the amount of noise they make is asking a lot. Most auditoriums are reasonably soundproof - the Arts Cinema of nostalgic memory, I must confess, being a bit of an exception; I have rather vivid memories of all the anguished silences of Bent being punctuated by a busker in the street outside, armed only with a penny whistle and about half the melody of 'Greensleeves'. He was a regular beggar-busker and normally somebody I felt sorry for, but my inclination to give him my change was at a bit of a low ebb that day. But this, at least, was somebody outside the cinema, and a member of staff eventually went out and asked him to move up the street; if he'd been a customer, it's hard to know what they would have done.

Ushers require wages, but if their absence is keeping away customers, their absence costs more money than it saves. That's one problem with modern cinemas right there. Tune in for more curmudgeoning tomorrow...

Cinema and its discontents, part 1

2009-04-20T11:57:00.002Z

Last month, I declared that what with wedding planning, various home improvement projects and writing as well, I'd had it absolutely up to here with making decisions, and I wanted to have a day of fun that was planned for me. Rising to the occasion, my fiance planned not one but two surprise-fun days, after which I felt considerably better. Reflecting on them, one in particular stands out. We had a vaguely India-themed day, meaning we went to a highly-rated Indian fusion restaurant in the centre of town (Moti Mahal, if anyone's interested), and then we went to see Slumdog Millionaire.

That's right: on a planned day-of-fun, we went to the movies. As a special treat.

Ten years ago, I would have considered this a bit of a low-key way to spend a special day. Last month, though, it was a big thing, and not just because Slumdog Millionaire was charming. It was a treat because the cinema has become something of a rare excursion for us - and I don't think we're alone.

On the face of it, this is odd. There's a cinema within walking distance of our house. We both love movies. When we were undergraduates - at the same university, though we didn't meet until after graduation - we both went to the cinema a lot. I dropped by the Cambridge Arts Cinema board every week to see what was new, and quite often I'd buy a ticket: the place was amiably small and a little scruffy, the tickets were cheap, and I could pretty much be sure that whatever they were showing would be at least an interesting experience. Both of us dropped by the local multiplex regularly as well: the tickets were cheap, especially for students, it was within walking distance, and it showed whatever was on. He'd go regularly with groups of friends; my friends and I tended to do other things when hanging out but I went regularly on my own, often as a rest from revising - it would be a total distraction that lasted a limited amount of time, the perfect study break. Sometimes I just walked there and bought a ticket for whatever was showing next, with predictably mixed results, but that was fine; Patch Adams might not have been the most sophisticated film in the world, but it was a pleasant, manageable break from routine, and I was hardly the poorer for the experience.

You'll notice a phrase recurring in our reasons for picking the various cinemas: 'tickets were cheap.' This is a big part of what's changed. There are a few issues that have changed cinema-going over the past few years, and this week, I'll be posting about them.

At the risk of sounding like some old bat lamenting that ice cream used to cost a penny, money is the first one. Ticket prices have risen far out of proportion to income. This is not good for cinemas: it drives away custom. If it costs three pounds to see a movie, you may well drop in just on the off-chance you like it; if it costs three or four times that - and in the central London cinemas it does - then you'd better be sure that you'll really, really like it. Otherwise you might as well do something else with your money. Cinema tickets are getting as expensive as the more moderately-priced theatre tickets, and people don't often go to the theatre. Well, I used to, again as an undergraduate ... but you know why? It was student productions, and tickets were cheap.

So going to the cinema has become a big deal now. It seems to me that cinemas are trying various ways to keep afloat, and have been for some time, but most of their methods aren't very effective. To stay in profit with falling custom, there are two tactics - you either cut costs or increase prices. Cinemas seem to be doing both ... and it's not good for customers. Tune in next time for the first example...

Marketing matters

2009-04-16T14:45:00.009Z

To my delight, I've just recently managed to get my mittens on a DVD of Celia, an Australian film that I first saw when I was a child. The contrast between how I first watched it and how it was sold is an interesting little demonstration in the importance of marketing well.

Celia, first released in 1988, is the story of a nine-year-old girl living in 1950s Australia. Her two great desires are to own a pet rabbit and to play with the lively Tanner children next door, with whom she has sworn loyalty in vows of blood. Unfortunately, the plague of wild rabbits means that even pet rabbits are under attack from government policy, and meanwhile the Red Scare leads her father - himself the child of a Communist mother - to ban her from playing with the Tanners, whose parents are fringe Communist party members. Under pressure from the adult world to relinquish all that matters to her, largely because the government and surrounding culture are overreacting to perceived dangers, Celia's grasp on reality becomes shakier and shakier; already an imaginative child haunted by frightening fairy tales, she is also fierce, and increasingly aggressive. The film captures beautifully the passionate hatreds and loves of childhood, the strangeness of the adult world and the interplay between the two; it's a subtle, intelligent and extraordinarily memorable film.

I say 'memorable' advisedly, because I first saw it shortly after its release, when I was eleven or twelve myself. That was twenty years ago, and I remembered it so vividly that I leaped in excitement when I saw it had been re-released.

Yet if I'd been thirty-one in 1988 and seen the marketing for it, I might very well have given it a miss.

Here's why I watched it. Barry Norman, may his tribe increase, was still doing his film review show on terrestrial TV, and while watching it one night they showed a few clips from the film. Shortly afterwards, my parents signed me up for a good local-ish video library; not the one round the corner, which was dark and grotty and had what I now realise was a collection of porn in the basement (I remember being young enough not to be quite sure whether the illustrated cover of Bad Girls' Dormitory, with the blonde's head thrown back and the brunette licking her neck with predatory glee, was supposed to be sexy or a horror film). No, this new library, near the Pizza Express we sometimes visited as a treat, was located in upscale Notting Hill, with a wide selection and plenty of art-house stuff. Celia was not the only film it provided in my early adolescence - I remember going through Zhang Yimou's early work as well having seen Raise the Red Lantern as well - but its cover leaped out at me from the wall.

Its slogan was 'A tale of innocence corrupted.' Now, in an interview the writer-director Ann Turner remarks that she does see Celia as being 'corrupted into adulthood' by having her world so overset by adult concerns, but the somewhat salacious strapline doesn't quite capture that. Never mind; I was twelve at the oldest, a bit to young to find fault with the slogan, but the image was captivating - mostly a photograph of the star's expressive face. I'd seen some arresting clips of it, and more importantly, it was an adult film in which the central character was a child, and a little girl at that; when you're a little girl yourself, you don't get many of those. So I scooped it up, took it to the counter, watched it twice and have been wondering if I'd get to see it again ever since.

Celia is violent and sometimes shocking - though, as with Susan Hill's I'm The King of the Castle, the relentless enmity and vengefulness of the child characters looked altogether less extreme and closer to reality from a child's perspective that it would to a nostalgic adult - but as a film, it's definitely not a 'shocker'. But have a look at the posters. The American studios released it as Celia: Child of Terror, as if it were a splashy horror movie. Look, a child holding a rifle! One of the quotes refers to 'shades-of-Carrie horror', but stylistically and thematically, Ann Turner is a long way from Stephen King. Someone looking for a King-like experience would have felt let down by all the politics and understatement; someone looking for a film like Celia would not pick up a King adaptation.

The result of all this was that, according to my liner notes, the film 'didn't achieve the popular or even cult success that it clearly deserved,' despite overwhelmingly positive reviews and winning prizes, and has only just now achieved a DVD release by Second Run DVD. It was pitched in a way that put off its natural audience. I don't think I'd have watched it based on those posters; I only got to see it because I'd missed much of the marketing.

Being a genre-juggler myself, and knowing that genre-mixing artworks are most vulnerable to bad marketing decisions, this is the kind of issue I take seriously. But it's a shame for Celia as well; good films don't deserve to fall into obscurity. If you look on Amazon, you can see a few clips from it; in any case, I'd highly recommend it.

Easter Mikalogue

2009-04-12T08:25:00.000Z

Kit: Happy Easter, sweetheart.

Mika: Is there food in it?

Kit: Possibly a fish treat.

Mika: Aha! Is worthwhile holiday.

Kit: Glad you think so, secular puss. Though it's a bit of a shame we can't have an Easter egg hunt this year.

Mika: Mika the mighty hunts! Clearly you know place. Cannot compete.

Kit: Well, that's true. I was more thinking that we've just turfed the garden so we can't walk on it or we'll mess it up.

Mika: Ah, yes. Has complaint on that score.

Kit: Is it about covering up all that earth you liked to dig in? All those piles you were heaping up that we had to spend ages levelling out?

Mika: Had just sculpted that. You is jealous. Wants to be only artist in house. Sabotages Mika.

Kit: That's not fair, sweetie.

Mika: Then why destroy Mika's mounds?

Kit: Well, honey, we thought you might like some nice grass to walk on. Softer on your paws. Less dirt to lick out.

Mika: Suspects this not your only rationale.

Kit: Well, we were tired of the garden being a big pile of dirt as well.

Mika: But was fine how it was! You has selfish green.

Kit: That's 'selfish gene', honey. Have you been into Daddy's bookshelves again?

Mika: True too, you garden in selfish jeans. Is selfish from pants to pelt.

Kit: So you don't want the fish treat?

Mika: ...Okay, happy Easter.

Reading my reviews

2009-04-08T09:37:00.003Z

Amaryllis asks whether I read my reviews. Short answer: this time round, as little as I can.

When Bareback first came out, I waited for my reviews like exam results; I particularly recall an awful night where I couldn't sleep because I knew a review was coming out in the next day's paper, and wound up sitting in front of the paper's website at four in the morning obsessively refreshing until the review was finally posted. (It wasn't even one of the better reviews, as it turned out.) It was such a wretched night that I've never been able to look at that desktop picture again without feeling the horrible, drowsy-eyed tension again.

Mug's game. So this time, I'm going a different way. If my publicist sends a review my way I can't stop myself from reading it, but I'm keeping myself as much out of the way of reviews as possible.

Like a lot of writers, I'm subject to what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy calls 'disqualifying the positive': I can read a glowing review and come away totally depressed because there's one negative comment in it. (And, in fact, I actually did just that recently with a review my publicist sent me: the review said some extremely nice things with a few quibbles, and I spend a couple of days feeling so discouraged that I found myself wondering if there was any point in writing books if this was what happened to them.) This is entirely my own irrational thinking, but I've got more writing to do, and it's bad for it: it's very hard to solve writing problems if your main attitude is despair, because you're liable to reject every solution you can think of.

In saying this, I anticipate a certain argument: I've read a lot of readers talking about how writers should listen to their reviews because they need to hear feedback. Now, feedback is important, but the thing is, reviews are not the only source of it. And in fact, there's a technical reason why looking too heavily to reviews for feedback can be problematic. This is to say nothing against reviewing: it's a fine profession, and its members are smart people who work hard and often have intelligent things to say. The drawback, though, is this: they work under difficult conditions. They have to read several books a week. This means they have to read all of them fast. I've seen reviews of earlier work where the reviewer made some very basic factual mistakes about the book - not mistakes as in 'they didn't appreciate it enough', but as in 'they got things wrong about the plot'; I think one even got the protagonist's name wrong. I don't blame them for that; I assume they were working to a tight deadline, had to review the book from memory and didn't have time to fact-check. (Well, it wouldn't have taken more than a glance at the jacket blurb to check the protagonist's name, so that was a bit sloppy, but the other stuff is understandable.) But it does mean that if you want serious feedback on your stuff, you need to ask people who can take the time to read it slowly and think about it in detail, such as agents, editors and friends. A reviewer can convey an overall impression, but the really constructive feedback is detailed, and it's asking a reviewer to go above and beyond their job description to give you that.

Even more than this, though, it's not a reviewer's job to give feedback. It's to tell potential readers whether they think the book is enjoyable. Which is to say, the reviewer isn't actually talking to me. They're talking about me. In a sense, reading my own reviews is eavesdropping. What they say is assessing rather than constructive: a reviewer is totally free to say 'This sucks' and leave it at that, but what a writer learns most from hearing is 'Your pacing would suck less if you speeded up events in the middle section, and while you're at it there's something sucky about the antagonist's motivations you might want to look at.' That's not a reviewer's job. Their job is to recommend or to dismiss. They're not talking to me.

A review almost always means more to you than the person reviewing your work. They write hundreds of reviews to your one novel. As a result, a writer can get terribly hung up on an off-hand remark, or inflate one person's opinion to the voice of society. And that can be bad for your writing. The heroine of Bareback was written to be a flawed person, and I find that flawed characters tend to draw my best writing out of me, but something that interfered with the first draft of the book I'm currently trying to rewrite - and damaged its quality - is that I worried about whether people would dislike the heroine. The main reason was that a couple of reviewers had said their difficulty liking Lola had interfered with their enjoyment of Bareback. Now, rationally this wasn't the voice of the majority: the majority of reviews were positive, and many people found Lola's prickly personality enhanced the book rather than spoiling it. But those one or two reviews were echoing in my head, and those echoes were bad for the writing, because I was doing what I've often counselled against: thinking about the audience rather than the work.

So this time, I'm staying away as much as possible. I don't lack for people who'll give me feedback in my life; I have a terrific agent and good friends, and I'm usually able to admit to myself when I'm not satisfied with my own work. Reviews haven't been my best source of advice, but they have been a source of avoidable angst, and as it's hard to write when you're stressed, it makes better sense to stay away from stressful sources of feedback when less stressful ones are available.

Having said that, the few reviews I haven't managed to dodge have been very positive. This review was one I felt I had to see: it was the Times, among other things, and my publicist had told me it was coming. So here's what the splendid Lisa Tuttle says about my second novel:

...rich, strange, utterly absorbing and weirdly convincing.

Not bad, eh? SFX also gave me a five-star review, though I can't seem to find it online to link, and a brief search gave me the horrors as I realised I might stumble upon other reviews and thus get sucked into the vortex. I felt like a dieter being invited to a cake-tasting party, an alcoholic passing a bar; like anyone who's tried to swear off something bad for them who finds themselves at risk of being unable to stay away. Those are the reviews I've had shown to me, but I don't think I want to see any others. I don't handle reviews very well, so I'm laying off them.

LATER: the lovely SFX reviewer turned up in the comments section and very kindly pointed me towards the review, now posted here on her blog, for which many thanks. I'd recommend you to check out the blog anyway, as it's interesting.

Oh, those sweet rewrite blues

2009-04-05T11:06:00.000Z

If I'm seeming quiet lately, there's a reason: I'm settling down to a major rewrite.

It's very hard to judge how a book's worked out when you've just finished a first draft, but my agency has confirmed what I suspected: my third novel needs a lot of rewriting. It's been an interesting experience, because you make different mistakes with each book. My first two books, I set myself challenges I sometimes felt were impossible to meet, and as a result would sometimes jam up for weeks at a time. My third book, I'd gotten a bit more confidence in my ability to plough through, but a certain proportion of the time was spent ploughing in the wrong direction.

So I'm going at it with an axe. Certain characters are going to die. So are certain plot strands. Some characters are going to change sex. Others are going to be created. It will be a eugenic bloodbath, and a massive headache as well, because I'm restructuring as well as rewriting. But I wasn't happy with the first draft, and this is the kind of thing you have to do if you want to be professional about it.

There's an old saying that if you can be discouraged from writing, you should be. Being dissatisfied with your own first draft is discouraging, and rewrites are scary; in truth, I find myself fantasising about a nice straightforward job in admin some of the time. But it's not going to put me off; all I can do is try again and hope for the best. This book may or may not see the light of day, but I can promise that I won't try to palm off work that I know I can do better.

I may be a bit quiet for a while; if so, that's the reason. Any subject requests, while I'm at it?

Doing it for the ship

2009-03-23T02:54:00.001Z

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day, herself an aspiring writer, about whether or not a work needs to be read before it was complete. We found ourselves on opposite sides of the debate.

Her view was this: a work of art exists to create an impression in the minds of an audience. Therefore, a work of art that isn't read is like a firework that hasn't been detonated; it hasn't completed its life cycle.

My view was this: a work of art is complete when you write the last word or paint the last stroke. Whether or not it's read has nothing to do with that; it's still a complete work of art even if no one ever sees it.

She made a lot of arguments, but none of them convince me. I've been wondering why I have this opinion.

Part of it seems a question of mathematics: how much audience equals completion? Assuming you sell your work - and that's a big assumption - you have little say over whether anybody buys it. Maybe nobody will. Maybe only a few people will. Maybe lots of people will. Now how many people have to read it? One? Two? A thousand? A million? Is there a point beyond which completeness is reached, or is it a sliding scale - in which case, is a fairly crude bestseller more complete than a subtle and profound succes d'estime that sells far fewer copies? When you get down to specifics, the idea seems unworkable. Even the most obscure work of art is going to be read by one person: the author is always the first reader. It's impossible to write a work of art that no one sees. But to consider a work finished only if it's read by more people, you have to decide on a number, and any number seems arbitrary.

More than that, it's a question of outcome. Put simply, a book isn't a controlled explosion. The author can't influence how the reader reacts to the book. Maybe it'll detonate like a firework in their mind, but maybe they'll cut the firework open, mix the gunpowder into a cake for their least favourite auntie and use the cardboard to prop up an old chair leg - which is to say, the reader's response to the book is something the author can't do anything about. You can write the book as effectively as you're able, but once it's published people will always have their own opinions. Some of them will like it, some will hate it, some will fail to understand what you're on about, and some may completely misinterpret it and decide that you're arguing for a race war or the deification of gerbils. A pyrotechnician can control how a firework will explode, assuming people set light to it correctly: once the taper is lit, the explosion is pre-programmed into the chemistry within the rocket. But reading a book is a far more complex action than lighting a taper, and there's no way of knowing how it will turn out. Was Paul McCartney's work complete when the Manson Family stabbed Sharon Tate?

Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases you'll probably never find out how people reacted. I can tell you the reactions of maybe fifty to a hundred people to my first book, but that's a very tiny fraction of the number of people who've read it. For the others, I just don't know. I probably never will. Which means that there's no point worrying about it. If the readership of those people completes my book, I'll be completely in the dark about whether my book is complete or not; for all I know, thousands of people bought it and never read it. Looking to a book to be completed by its readership is ceding validation to people who care nothing about you, and that's a dangerous business.

I think, from the author's point of view, validation may be what it comes down to. Of course, there's an element of validation for the reader too; being told that you complete a work is very flattering. But 'completing a work' can come uncomfortably close to 'validating a work', and if you depend on other people to validate your work you're in trouble for two reasons: one, you're giving other people too much power over your emotions, and two, you're not actually concentrating on the work - you're not looking for it to validate itself. The first is an issue of self-preservation, but the second is an issue of art. If you consider that a reader validates the work, there's always the chance that you could consider a work complete when it gets a good response, even if you know that you're capable of writing better and some further drafting could have made it more 'complete' artistically. If it's dependent on the reader, why not put in as little effort as you can get away with? I've mentioned before that readers have a tendency to Do The Author's Homework (especially when they're heavily invested in the project because they've spent a lot of emotional energy anticipating it, because all their friends like it, because it presents a view of people that's flattering to them or other reasons that have nothing to do with quality), and an author who believes that readers complete their work can rely on that, the the detriment of their output.

Writing is a self-centred activity. By this I don't mean its selfish, but that it is literally centred on the self. You do it alone; no one can help you in the process unless you have a co-writer, in which case you're centring on two selves. There's always a relationship going on, even in solo writing: the relationship between the artist and the work. Writing advisers often urge you to consider the audience, and they're right insofar as you shouldn't be boring, have the whodunnit revelation depend on clues you haven't bothered to write about or ramble on about stuff that has nothing to do with the plot. But that's just a way of saying 'Make sure your work is interesting.'

I like my audience; the ones who have contacted me about my work have all been very nice people, many of them with lots of interesting things to say. But I don't write for them. I hope they enjoy what I've written, but that's a by-product; that's what happens to the work after it's finished. And I don't consider I'm doing them a disservice by taking this attitude; on the contrary, I think the best I can do for them is to produce the best work I can, and I'm mostly likely to do that when I'm not writing for them.

On the other hand, I don't think I'm exactly writing for myself either. If I want to do something for myself, I take some exercise or have a hot bath or cook something with fresh vegetables. All these things are straightforward to accomplish and produce predictable rewards. Writing is far more complicated.

What comes to my mind is a group of engineers Susan Faludi interviewed in a shipyard that was being shut down despite its good quality of work for her book Stiffed. Despite knowing their jobs were on the way out no matter how well they worked, the men nonetheless finished up with all the patient care and skill they had always shown, benefitting the people who were firing them. When she asked them why, since they might have got some payback by slacking off, she got this reply: 'No, no. Because we don't see it that way ... We were helping the ship.' They loved their work, they took pride in their identity as skilled workers; they didn't work to please their bosses, they worked to created a fine finished ship. That's the artist's attitude. You don't write for the audience, you don't even write for yourself: you write for the book.

To take another line, I'd consider myself an agnostic but the best way I can express the thought is religious: whether or not the book is finished is between you and God. Any audience is always going to be mostly invisible. But the absence of an audience doesn't make the work any the less: Emily Dickinson was still a great poet in her lifetime, even though the vast majority of her poems were locked in a box, and when she sent her friends poems along with bunches of flowers she'd cultivated, 'they valued the posy more than the poetry.' Her works were always beautiful; they just weren't widely called so.

From a writer's point of view, I believe considering your work incomplete until it's read is unwise. It requires wanting something of your audience of strangers that they may never be inclined to give; it also takes your focus off the process and puts it on the effect, something that's always beyond you anyway. Build it well and it'll hold water, but you should never do it for someone else, or even, in the end, for yourself. You do it for the ship.

Behold, a new-look blog!

2009-03-12T14:25:00.002Z

A lovely fellow at Random House has brought it up to date.

Archaic language

2009-03-11T09:16:00.002Z

So here's the thing: I wrote a book set in the early Rennaissance. This presented me with a number of issues - how people would think, what they'd wear, how they got from place to place - all of which had their own set of demands. But none was more important than how they spoke.

Dialogue is crucial to establishing character; what people say tells us how they think. If you're writing a book set in your own era, you're writing at a great advantage: your ear is already tuned to all the subtleties of local speech. But wander even a little away from your home turf, and infelicities start popping up like weeds. Even if someone's writing contemporary style, a slight change can affect it. I can think of many American writers who've used idioms slightly wrong for their English characters: phrases that were grammatically correct but very subtly off. (Americans in transatlantic Internet threads who've picked up the word 'wanker' from their British cyber-friends, for instance, often use it in a way that feels not quite right.) Similarly, I'm sure English writers do the same thing to Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders if they're not careful. Often you can hear the echo of quotation marks clicking down onto the word; either it's used in slightly the wrong context, or with slightly the wrong connotations. Word usage isn't just about the basics of grammar; there's also the issue of common usage, the the conventions there are manifold and delicate.

There's a certain latitude in alternate histories because the real people of that time and place aren't around to correct you. But at the same time, it's important to use language that doesn't throw the reader out of context. In the context of science fiction and fantasy, the famous essay on the subject is Ursula LeGuin's From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, which states the following: 'the point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie. It's different.' - and that if you're setting something in Elfland (by which she means the numinous world of the imagination), your speakers need 'the genuine Elfland accent'; they need to speak in a way that couldn't possibly be mistaken for the modern world.

I hadn't read the essay when I started In Great Waters, but I instinctively agreed with its principles - or at least, with the principle that language needed to suit setting. Bareback, after all, is set in an imaginary world and the characters' speech is entirely modern, but that was a deliberately chosen effect: the whole idea of the book was to throw the idea of 'normal' into question, and having characters speak like normal contemporary people about abnormal events helped create some tension about the idea.

But then, the world in which the live is very similar to ours except for one crucial difference. Other eras have other priorities which affect how people think; they have different etiquettes; the pace of life is not the same. If your characters talk exactly like you do, it feels pointless; you might as well have set it in the modern world. It simply makes the author look as if they haven't immersed themselves in the world they've created, and if they haven't done that it's unreasonable to expect the reader to. Why jump into a pool the architect won't swim in?

At the same time, there are great effects to be had from contrasting dialogue with description. A shining examplar of this is Toni Morrison. Her narrative prose is vivid, extraordinary; dense with metaphor and vibrant with eloquence, challenging and elegant as poetry. Her characters speak vividly too, but their speech is to the point and colloquial. The narrative accent is entirely new; as it twists and tends language into new forms, it takes on an air of timelessness: we've never heard anybody speak like this. The characters' accents, on the other hand, are concrete and real: they're of particular times and places, the accent of a specific people. Between the two styles exists a lively harmony that makes the books infinitely richer, and conveys an important truth: the language of thought and experience is not the same as the language we use in conversation.

So dialogue was important. But there was a balance to be struck. To have completely period language presented two major drawbacks. First, I'm simply not a linguistic historian, and anyone other than an expert is liable to take a nasty purler trying to recreate a whole idiom. Second, even if I did manage it, it's close to a foreign tongue: readers would have to work so hard to understand what the characters were saying that most of the emotional impact would be lost. Perhaps if it had been written to be performed rather than read it might have been different - Shakespeare and his contemporaries are far easier to follow on stage than on the page - but this was a novel, and overly period speech would simply slow the reader down.

On the other hand, modern speech was totally inappropriate. These were not people in a modern situation. Our contemporary speech is casual, informal; we mostly speak it to our friends. We live in a world that idealises democracy even if it doesn't always live up to it, and that considers formality to be stiff and uncool rather than elegant or gracious; our idiom reflects that. The characters I created live in formal surroundings, in situations where careless talk can literally mean the difference between life and death, where rank is essential and language itself is an issue: one of the protagonists doesn't speak English at the beginning of the story and dislikes having to learn it, so using it at all is a political act of sorts. Very few of the characters are relaxed; sharing their thoughts at all is a difficult proposition, fraught with issues of trust and caution.

So how to manage it? In the end, the only thing to do was strike a balance. What I put together was a form of speech that was simple-sounding but governed by slightly antiquated grammar. I stuck to a few simple rules, bending them only when it was impossible to convey things otherwise. Some of it I wrote by ear, but here are a few concrete rules:

- Contractions were to be avoided; 'he is' rather than 'he's' became the order of the day. Very possibly Renaissance people did contract words - and sometimes different words; Shakespeare used 'a' as a contraction for 'he' on occasion, for instance - but on the page, 'he's' looks casual, and hence overly modern.

- Some archaic words were favoured; 'You say it very ill' rather than 'You say it very badly', for instance. Others, equally appropriate, were ruled out. 'Mayhap', for instance, would have been correct contextually, but I wasn't prepared to use it; it's a word I personally associate with high-fantasy novels of the kind that seem to have flushing toilets and machine-washable clothes in the background - ie rather sentimental. (It also has a slightly countrified air to my ears, I'm not sure why. Possibly it's because of the archaic rural use of 'happen', as in 'Happen I'll come by on Tuesday', but I'm really not sure.) Archaic words that sounded too much like they should be spoken at a costume party were out, but archaic words that were plain and clear remained.

- Most importantly - though I don't know if this would leap out at a reader - the present continuous tense was used with care. The present continous is the tense I'm using as I'm typing this sentence you're reading - words that end in 'ing', basically. The present continuous has been on the rise for centuries, and it's still increasing in usage; people nowadays sometimes say 'How are you spelling that?', for instance, which would have been grammatically incorrect just a few decades ago. Language changes all the time. But a few centuries ago, it just wasn't used as much. There are only a few examples in Shakespeare, and they're quite specific. For instance, in The Two Gentleman of Verona:

DUKE: Sir Valentine, whither away so fast?

VALENTINE: Please it your grace, there is a messenger
That stays to bear my letters to my friends,
And I am going to deliver them.

Or I am dying, Egypt, dying, in Antony and Cleopatra. Or Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe, in Othello. What you'll notice about these is that the present continuous is used to indicate that something is in progress at the time of speaking. If you say 'I am going', it isn't a prediction of the future, it's a description of what you're doing right this second. So that was the way I used it in In Great Waters; 'He will be king' rather than 'He's going to be king', for instance. The present continuous was reserved for simultaneous expression, such as 'He is hurting your wife' when her screams can actually be heard in the background. It's interesting how much it changes language when you simply drop a commonly-used tense.

All these things became an interesting issue to debate with myself as well. I can't even tell you how long I hesitated over various choices - whether to keep 'What have you been doing', for example, which used the continuous form of the verb (I kept it in the end, because 'What have you done' would have conveyed a different meaning). There was one character I kind of wanted to use contractions, but I eventually decided against it in the name of consistency.

I live in continual fear that stuff has slipped through the net, but on the whole, my use of language in dialogue was impressionistic rather than historically accurate. What I was aiming for was a reasonably timeless form of speech, antique-sounding enough to give an archaic feel but modern enough to be clearly comprehensible.

Another element is that it's contrasted with another language: the language of the deepsmen. I had no intention of trying to reproduce such language on the page: the deepsmen are a different species with entirely different vocal apparatus, and the English alphabet was simply not designed with their phonemes in mind. As a result, it's presented entirely in italicised translation (I have no time for Tourette's Foreignitis) - but as it's translated for the benefit of the reader, it's translated into a somewhat more modern style. As languages go it's unusually direct, and hence needed to be rendered directly to the reader in a style familiar to them. Similarly, thoughts are often presented in a slightly less archaic form, because the language of thoughts is universal and not precisely verbal. There are several languages in play, in fact, all of them rendered in English and all of them to some extent a translation.

Any rendering of speech is partly artificial. In The Journalist and The Murderer, Janet Malcolm remarks:

One of the striking instances of the necessity for this mediation - showing how the literally true may actually be a kind of falsification of reality - is offered by a transcript of tape-recorded speech. When we talk with somebody, we are not aware of the strangeness of the language we are speaking. Our ear takes it in as English, and only if we see it transcribed verbatim do we realise that it is a kind of foreign tongue. What the tape recorder has revealed about human speech - that Moliere's M. Jourdain was mistaken: we do not, after all, speak in prose - is something like what the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies revealed about animal locomotion ... As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean - thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence.

Any novelist writing dialogue has to decide on a balance between realism and naturalism - which are not the same things. Any rendering of speech is an approximation. The thing to do, ultimately, is to consider how convincing the reader will find it and what use of language best conveys atmosphere and emotion. Idiom is a fascinating mass of subtleties that you play with at your own risk.