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04-May-26 On writing...

I’ve been writing, both as an amateur and as a professional, for most of my life. I write for no other reason than I enjoy writing. I love the act of creation, of producing something out of nothing. The process of dragging situations, plots, narratives and dialogue out of my head and setting them down on paper so that they become somehow real is what keeps me going, gets me fired up. That said, process isn’t quite the right word. There’s never a process, so to speak. There’s never a fixed, pre-determined plan of action. It’s something else entirely! Magic, even?

The whole creative process (that word again!) truly fills me with shock and awe. I might start the day staring at a blank page and, three or four hours later, that same page is covered in words. Sometimes those words make sense. More often than not, I’ll sit in silence at the end of a writing session and wonder how this happened because I genuinely have no real idea where some of these ideas came from. It’s a mystery. It just happens.

What’s this article about?

It’s about what I like to call good writing and the practice of doing good work. It’s also about helping others discover the magic that comes from writing for yourself.

What follows is not so much an essay. It’s really a collection of hints and tips wrapped around an ad hoc assemblage of anecdotes, a loosely collated series of habits I’ve acquired and assimilated over the last fifty-five years, and whilst I would not pretend to be a good writer of the standard of say Dickens or Austen or Vonnegut or Dick, I do think I’m pretty good. A few others do, too.

I hereby present you with a small number of lessons on good writing. But first, before we begin, you really ought to ask if I'm qualified to offer an opinion? Well, yes. I am. Once upon a time, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I contributed regularly to arguably the best music technology magazine in the world and I managed to hang on to that gig for more than five years.

In those days, nineteen eighty-seven to nineteen ninety two, the magazine’s readership was roughly one hundred and fifty thousand per month. That figure was based purely upon the magazine’s publishing run. However, the publishers reckoned their readership was probably double that number because music magazines, and music technology magazines in particular, are passed around more than a dodgy bottle of Peach Schnapps at your average sixth form college or an over-filled Bong at a student party. I might know a thing or two about writing. Then again, I might be nothing more than just a tired old wannabe hack. I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Lesson One : Do it for yourself

First and foremost, as I said above, I write for no reason other than I enjoy writing. In my humble opinion, so should you. If someone wants to give you money for your efforts then let them. It’s their nickel. However, I maintain that the writing in and of itself should be the reward.

That’s Lesson One. Do it for yourself.

Of course, just because you enjoy an activity, be it cooking, curling, basket weaving or collecting Green Shield Stamps (remember those?), then it does not necessarily follow that the end result will be good by anyone’s metric but your own. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue those aspirations. Do it because you enjoy it.

Remember, you could spend your entire life banging away at any number of endeavours and the results will never rise above mediocre at best. Plenty have done so. Plenty still do. Doubtless plenty will continue to do so well into the future. It’s your life. You can do as you please so long as it’s legal in your province and, if it isn’t, consider moving somewhere where it is legal.

I derive an enormous amount of satisfaction when I pick up an article, an edit or an entire manuscript I wrote many, many moons ago and I actually enjoy it, especially so when I don’t have any clear recollection of writing said missive.

As a for instance, I recently found an extract from a novel I’d been working on maybe ten or more years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so that I spent another couple of hours finishing the piece off properly as a short, stand-alone story. It’s in my short story bank, there to be used and abused at some point in the future. Maybe my kids will get a kick out of it.

Anyway, at the risk of repeating myself, write because you enjoy writing. Play your musical instrument or paint your paintings or spend your time fixing up old cars. Do it for yourself. Do it because it’s fun. If it feels selfish then be selfish. Learn to forgive yourself for being selfish.

So, here we go. That’s Lesson One out of the way.

Lesson Two : Know who and what to plagiarise

Find a writer you like, a writer with a rhythm and meter that you feel matches your own, and then get busy with the old quill pen. Figure out what makes their books tick, how they structure a story, how they build characters. This takes time and patience but trying to imitate your heroes is the way to find your own voice.

If you’re not already aware, I stole the title of this missive from Stephen King. I did so in full daylight, right in front of your very eyes, and whilst there were no Police Officers present to arrest me (yet!), there were witnesses. Plenty of witnesses. You, for instance, Dear Reader. You are complicit in this most heinous of crimes.

Do I care? No, I don’t and, hopefully, neither will you by the time you reach the end of this article or, indeed, this paragraph. Why? Because stealing or, as I like to call it, creative borrowing, forms the second lesson in what I call good writing.

My own personal touchstones are, as stated, Stephen King (obviously) and Clive Barker. I love their prose. I love their characters. I love their dialogue. Where we differ is in plotting. Stephen King insists he doesn’t start with a plot. Instead, he’s very fond of taking two disparate and perhaps contradictory ideas, and smashing them together head on, whilst he effectively sits back and watches where the pieces fall. Mr. King lets his characters write the story for him (so he says). His trick is in knowing (or guessing) how certain people will react under difficult circumstances. To do so over the course of a novel is cool. To do so over a career lasting several decades is semi-miraculous. Kudos to the Master.

My favourite Stephen King head-on clashes are Misery - a writer wants to kill off his most popular character so he can work on other projects only to meet his super fan, who really is an obsessive loon and absolutely does not want him to kill his darling - and The Shining, where a hack writer with nothing left to write about takes on a job in a remote hotel over winter in the hope of finding inspiration. He finds something else entirely. Beautiful.

Whilst I don’t steal Mr. King’s plots (No! Really! I don’t!), I do like his writing style and I do borrow certain ideas and phrases. That wasn’t always true. I didn’t like his books at all in my early formative years. I thought his prose was too long and too drawn out and he took too long to set scenes, build plots etc. Later, when I learned to actually read a fucking book, that’s when the art of writing hit me in the face like a custard pie at a Bar Mitzvah.

[There’s an image you won’t get out of your head any time soon!]

My method varies from project to project and the starting point depends entirely on the book or books I’ve just read. If the book was any good then I’ll revisit the text and look for tipping points, where a character went one way instead of another. I explore the other way, test out ideas based on alternatives. Can they be turned into a short story or indeed, a full novel?

Another key difference between myself and Mr. King is that I do keep an Ideas Bank, a small collection of short stories that I visit and revisit every now and again when I need a fresh pearl or a nugget of gold, or if I’m just plain stuck. I suggest you do the same. I feel genuine pain and a deep, deep sense of intense loss (not to mention frustration!) when a good idea slips away and is gone forever simply because I didn’t write it down quickly enough. I keep a notebook by the side of the bed just in case my brain serves up a couple of interesting ideas in the small hours. It does that, a lot actually. I also have a simple Notes app on my phone where I jot down ideas as they arrive. Sometimes, all it takes is one word to start the ball rolling.

Most projects begin by scribbling down a rough outline. I pull in a couple of ideas and influences, maybe a dash of political commentary followed by a few hastily assembled lines of dialogue. After that, I just leave the ideas to fester for a couple of days or weeks or, indeed, months. Later, when the time feels right or when another project comes to a logical conclusion, I then stir the melting pot and catch whatever spills forth.

Lesson Three : Learn to read in earnest before you start writing in earnest.

You can start writing at any time. There’s no rule written in huge gothic script on an aged and weatherworn parchment that says You must have read everything by Dostoyevsky and Dickens before you can begin writing!

However, it does pay to be well read. I went through an extended reading phase around fifteen years ago where I read anything and everything, and I bought more books that I can possibly read in one lifetime. I also inherited a staggering number of books following the death of a close friend, and I’ve not even scratched the surface of that lot, frankly.

There’s a flip side to this. I must also point out that, some years ago, reading became something of an obsession and my real life started to suffer. (So did my eyesight) Learning to walk away is a key survival trait in writers. Maybe Learning to walk away should be lesson number four. It isn’t. Not in this draft anyway. Speaking of first drafts…

Lesson Four : The first draft always sucks

Repeat after me : The first draft ALWAYS SUCKS. Don’t expect anything else.

Feel free to print the above out on a large sheet of A3 paper and hang it over your bed. Laminate if required. Trust me, this simple act will save you a lot of pain and misery down the line.

I learned this simple truth the hard way. Ten years ago, I spent several months working on my first full length novel. Before I fell in love with the book, I fell in love with the process. (Tsk! Tsk! Hughes. It’s not a ‘process’…)

I’d get out of bed every morning at five forty-five, make coffee, sort the dog out and then sit down for two hours of intensive creative writing. Building a routine worked wonders. Setting that time aside so that I could be completely and utterly selfish was central to finishing the project. My family deserve a lot of credit here because they learned not to interrupt me during this time.

The results paid off. Three months later, I found myself in a rather euphoric state of mind, my legs trembling, my fingers shaking, my head buzzing, when I typed the final line in the final paragraph in the final chapter. I’d done it. I’d realised a dream. I’d written a book. A novel. And not just a few thousand words. The final word count ran to more than one hundred and sixty eight thousand words over three hundred and seventy pages.

Then I made a mistake. I was so pleased that I’d crossed the finish line that I let my significant other have a look at the first few pages. I thoroughly deserved everything that followed.

I imply no criticism here other than “You could perhaps have been a bit kinder” but… Yikes… Her comments cut to the bone. They weren’t even what you would call brutal. They were spot on in some cases but the timing couldn’t have been worse. I abandoned the project completely. My new novel and I shifted sideways into different emotional states. Simply put, the magic went away and I haven’t really looked at the finished work in seven or eight years.

Here’s the money shot. This is perhaps the best advice I can give, the voice of experience talking. Please pay attention.

Take your finished novel, your masterwork, whatever you want to call it, and print it out or archive it away on a hard drive. Seal it in an envelope and stick it in a drawer. Then leave it completely alone for at least three to four months. Don’t be tempted to return before you’re absolutely certain you can deal with the fact that your first attempt might be utter garbage.

The first draft is always utter garbage. That’s the rule. It’s always true.

The magic comes in (trumpet fanfare, please, Maestro) the re-write.

Have no fear. At the end of your cooling off period, you’ll return to the project with a fresh set of eyes. Most of the time, you won’t remember a single word. You may even doubt that you wrote it. I know I do.

Which leads us rather neatly into…

Lesson Number Five : Beware of Over-editing

The editing process follows this crude pattern.

The Review – The First Draft sucks. Always. Reading through, you immediately realise that the plot sort of works but there are holes and the ending isn’t nearly as pin sharp as you saw it in your head. In addition, the characters are paper thin ciphers, their motives are sketchy at best and the dialogue is so wooden that the Forestry Commission want to cut you off at the knees and turn you into a lump of flat-pack furniture. Worst of all, the entire manuscript is stuffed full of spelling mistakes and the kind of grammatical errors that would make Messers Strunk and White go weak at the knees and wonder why they bothered in the first instance.

Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t loose faith. Every single writer who ever walked the Earth has come to realise that the First Draft really does suck. It will be awful. That’s just a fact of life. However, this is a temporary set back. It’s genuinely more important to get your story ideas down and to actually finish the initial run through than it is to be overly precise.

This first edit is what I call the spade work. It’s like digging over your Grandmother’s back garden after twenty years of neglect. This bit is hard. It is difficult. Often, you get to work and fix all of the spelling mistakes and the missing words only to find the actual prose itself is truly awful and those grammatical errors render the who assemblage largely unreadable.

So, you locate a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White because you’ve now realised that you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in your High School English classes. Hint - Grammar isn’t all that difficult once you learn the basics.

Next, you really get inside your character’s heads and let them speak for themselves because they’re better at arguing their point of view than you are. From there, you develop their motives so they’re no longer cartoon characters.

Best of all, you fix the ending so that it makes sense.

You made it this far? Excellent. The next stage is easy. Dump your first edit in a drawer and leave it for a couple of weeks. Think about starting a new project. Go work on the garden. Decorate the guest bedroom, if you have one. Let those edits settle.

The Second draft – The Polish. I’m always astonished by the number of spelling mistakes that make it through to the second draft or the polishing stage. Doesn’t matter. You found them. Fix them and they’re done.

Next, have the guts and the determination to delete anything that isn’t absolutely necessary – mindless exposition should always be top of the list. I detest closing monologues, where motives are explained to anyone still awake. Ugh. That’s just a personal thing. Repetitive descriptions are another candidate ripe for summary execution, and doubly so when it comes to sections that discuss clothing. Again, this is personal but I prefer to let the reader decide what someone is wearing.

This is a clip from around twenty years ago. I held on to it as a measure of how much such descriptions suck:

Charlene stepped out of the elevator. Her red stiletto heels were new and pinched in all the wrong places. Her nut brown hair was tied up at the back in a pony tail with a bobble she'd found down the back of the sofa. Her off-white blouse was old and worn at the elbows. Her blue pin-striped business suit looked like something her mother would wear but at least it hugged her ass like an over-stuffed armchair.

Instead, say something like:

Charlene was wearing her one and only business suit, a dark blue affair with a pawn shop stub still clinging stubbornly to the cuff.

That should tell you everything you need to know about Charlene. Let the reader decide the cut of the suit, the style, if it’s fashionable or not. It’s okay to make the reader do some of the spade work. You can’t do everything in this make-believe world. There isn’t time.

Trust me, less really is more.

As a guide, aim to reduce your overall word count by around ten percent. I always aim to reduce my word count but inevitably the word count grows by increments every time I edit. I note that this missive was originally sixteen thousand words long and I had intended to reduce its overall length to no more than fifteen thousand words. At this point in the second draft, we’re at seventeen thousand words and still climbing. This is what happens. You get on a roll and can’t stop. The key here is to just let it all out. Go with the flow. If it needs to be seventeen thousand words or eighteen thousand words or, indeed, twenty thousand words then so be it. If it’s any good then I doubt the reader will complain. Most don’t and the few that do? They have other issues to contend with.

However, and this one is important - do not delete superfluous characters or apparently irrelevant subplots. Instead, give your superfluous characters something meaningful to do and perhaps leave their apparently irrelevant subplots unresolved so that, if you have to write a sequel, you’ve got spare characters to work with. Retroactively changing your history in a sequel is not a good look.

You’re allowed to review the Second Draft section by section a couple of times but no more. Once it’s done, it’s done. End of.

The Third Draft – there is no third draft. If you get to the end of the Second Draft and you’re still not happy with the result or still see room for improvement then either one or all of the following is true:

• You’re a crap writer and have no talent
• You have confidence issues that mean you feel ashamed of your work and probably still wet the bed occasionally
• You’re a perpetual procrastinator

You can fix issue number one by NOT giving up. Just stick at it. Read lots. Write lots. When I say read, I mean REALLY read not just speed read. Find a book you love and examine the way each sentence is structured. Copy those structures. Listen to the dialogue in your head then repeat your own dialogue out loud – just don’t do it in the middle of Lidl. It’s not a good look. Study the rhythm and meter of the Greats. By all means, write more. Write until you drop.

Issue Number Two is also easy to solve. Bothered by critics? Upset by harsh words? Yeah, me too. So... Write under a pseudonym. Write anonymously. Hide in plain sight. Trust me, this works a charm. How? Authors have a habit of taking criticism personally, in my case, very personally. However, if a critic doesn’t know where to aim then they can fire all they like but they’ll rarely hit their mark. This is particularly true of jealous writers, which is a major problem on a number of publshing sites I frequent. They will religiously downvote your work. Some do it out of spite. Others do it because it keeps their work at the top of the heap. They sell more that way. It's a shitty thing to do but, hey, what did you expect. Honourable behaviour?

If your critics hate the piece with a passion and their comments have some merit then you can safely walk away from the project and nobody will be any the wiser. Your reputation will remain unsullied. I’ve done this for nearly twenty years on one particular project and I still enjoy the anonymity.

Issue Number Three is a major problem, perhaps the biggest problem. Procrastination comes in two forms. In the first instance, you finish the first draft and never get around to the second, and the project is effectively abandoned. The second form is characterised by over-editing. Typically, this involves going over the same section of text time and time again to the point that all of the original passion, joy and spontaneity that made it good in the first instance ends up on the cutting room floor.

Confession time. I am a card-carrying, fully-paid-up member of the League of Colossal Procrastinators. I’ve published a fair number of stories under many flags of convenience but, rest assured, I also have a staggering number of half finished stories lurking in various far flung corners of my hard drive. Indeed, I’m more than a little concerned that this particular missive will land in one of those piles and may, in truth, never see the light of day.

Editor Ha! Ha! Ha! It didn't!

Issue Number Three is the dream killer. Issue Number Three will rot your soul. Learn to let go. Push your darlings out into the real world and damn the consequences! Say Hello, Wave goodbye and move on to your next project.

Do NOT over-edit. Fix the problems or start again.

Time for another anecdote.

Twenty years ago, I started a writing project over on the Tumblr platform. I invented a set of rules to make sure I didn’t spend too long on what was ultimately a vanity project. I decided that those articles would be short and snappy, tight and precise, and wouldn’t feature detailed exposition or long, extended exchanges between characters. I wanted to create a body of work that wouldn’t take the reader very long to skim through because I figured that readers didn’t have too much time to get too invested in one piece of arty scribble when there was so much else to consume at the same massive literary buffet. [This was in the day when Tumblr wasn’t full of angst-ridden teens complaining about not being old enough to get a tattoo of Charles Manson on their backside.]

Having written a piece that might consist of just a couple of lines of quick-fire dialogue or a more fully developed outing running to around a thousand words, I would then edit and I would keep editing to the point of over-editing. The resulting mass of words would lack life, colour and drama. All of the rough edges had been chiselled away to nothing and what remained was the literary equivalent of a finely polished marble bust. Nice to look at. Nice to fondle. Maybe nice to put up there on your mantelpiece but otherwise devoid of life and soul and character.

I soon learned that over-editing is a cardinal sin in writers. Writers who over-edit should me made to sit and watch day time soaps every day for a month each and every time the elect to spend another weekend tweaking a few more paragraphs of their master work. If you want a model of terse-to-the-point-of-painful, watch an episode of Eastenders. A scene will sometimes last less than a minute but then pack in every single human emotion you can think of (and then some) because the writers really know how to cut the flab right to the bone.

Procrastination is your worst enemy. Why? We’ll come to that later on *.

Before we skip on, let’s revisit lesson one : “Know who to plagiarise”.

* That was a joke, BTW...

Lesson Six : Learn how to spell plagiarise

Learn to spell without the aid of the Spell Checker or a Dictionary. You’ll thank me for this one. So will your editor.

This lesson is not absolutely essential because you don’t need to be brilliant at spelling to get your ideas out of your head and into your word processor or whatever you use to record your thoughts. You just need to do it.

That said, I regard good spelling as good manners because one day, with a bit of luck, an editor may want to look at your work with a view to actually printing your literary love child. I think it both kind and polite to make the editor’s job as easy as possible because, by God, if you’ve ever tried editing someone else’s work for real then you’ll know that this is not an easy task. You need to be a special kind of person to stomach some of the literary gems that come your way.

As an author, the last thing you want is for an editor to balk immediately at the number of basic spelling mistakes like mixing up their, there and they’re or see, sea, seen and scene, or indeed, write and right (because that’s what I just did. I caught it in the edit!)

Commissioning Editors, Hallowed be Thy Name, are another species entirely. They’re wild and untamed beasts. You should treat them with the utmost respect because they may look at the number of basic spelling mistakes on the first page and reach immediately for their pile of Rejected stickers. A good Commissioning Editor has a pile of Rejected stickers right next to their Shredder. Remember that.

One more point regarding Editors : learn to edit yourself

Editors are expensive. No, that’s not true. Editors are very, very expensive. Finding an editor who will check your one hundred and fifty thousand word behemoth is a tough call any day of the week and those that do respond to an enquiry will usually ask big bucks up front before they’ll even look at your work. Some editors work for free. Some are very good. Some are rubbish. Some edit for free so that they can gain experience as an editor. Tread carefully here.

Here’s a true story. I once gave the first few chapters of a new book to a wanna-be editor so that she could get a leg up in what is a fairly difficult field to break into. This was not a good move. She took it upon herself to re-write all of my dialogue, all of the exchanges and all of the prose as though it was a Radio Four drama, which it most definitely was not. The dialogue, in particular, really suffered. The gags were entirely excised on the basis that humour is subjective and she ‘knew’ my intended audience wouldn’t see the funny side. There’s so much wrong with this whole scenario I’d be here until midnight if I wanted to pull it to pieces but, no. I'll stop there. She knows she did a bad thing. She apologised. She got the wrong end of the stick. But, suffice to say, the trust that has to exist between a writer and their editor was utterly broken and I never sent her another word.

I have recently started to edit my own material. I had to. I was generating so much written content that I simply couldn’t afford to pay someone else. Editing sucks. Like a Hoover. It’s about as much fun as kicking the corner of the bed in the middle of the night. However, I’ve made the process more enjoyable if I do it with the door open and keep a steady supply of chocolatey edibles on hand. And the inevitable coffee. These days, I drink it hot and black and without sweetener.

Next lesson...

Lesson Seven : Dialogue and motivation

Realistic dialogue brings a book to life. Wooden dialogue kills a reader’s interest quicker than you can say “Stone me, Copper! You got me fair banged to rights on this jolly old caper but society is to blame!”

Nobody talks like that. Nobody ever talked like that and yet dialogue exactly like that made it to the Silver Screen time and time again in the late nineteen forties and early fifties. Aks yourself how relevant are those pearls are today?

Learn to write decent dialogue.

Writing is an art. Writing is a learned skill. Telling a story takes time, practice and patience. Didn’t get it right the first time? Try again. Keep trying until you get it right. Take your time. Use words to paint pictures, both on the page and in the reader’s mind.

Writing is learning about people, developing characters that are real and solid and tangible on the page. These characters need to have a life of their own. It’s your job to figure out how they think and what they’ll do next when something happens. Maybe nothing happens. How do they handle a non-event?

Do your characters talk? Do they talk a lot? Or do they keep their thoughts bottled up? Do they have something meaningful to say when they do eventually speak? They don’t need to say anything insightful or meaningful. Lots and lots of people say nothing insightful or meaningful over the course of their entire lives. The point is they don’t have to. There is no rule book that says you have to say or do anything insightful or interesting. Silent characters can still be a powerful device in any narrative. You just have to know what to do with them.

Learning about people and characters means learning to write realistic dialogue and you only learn to write realistic dialogue by learning to listen to other people and their motivations for behaving as they do.

Right now, I’m sitting in a Pub in the Roker area of Sunderland, the New Derby to be specific. This public space is not at all conducive to good writing - it’s loud and there’s a different football match on every TV in the room - but it is a useful training ground for learning dialogue.

We’ve all heard the old saying that you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that ratio. In other words, you should listen more than you talk. A lot of people ignore that rule, in particular the rather inebriated woman sitting behind me as I write this, and that too can be a powerful device. She doesn’t know it yet but this loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed Harridan is now a character in a Detective novel, and she gets horribly murdered with a bag of Beefy Crisps in the first chapter.

Dialogue is about getting inside your character’s mind space. Empathise with that character. Figure out their back story, their history, their motivations. A character without an obvious back story is apt to be more than a little dull, I would wager.

Lesson Eight : Know your Muse

So, you’re reading this. Can I ask a question? Well, I’m going to ask the question anyway so... tough. Can you tell me why you’re reading this? What’s your motivation?

There could be any number of reasons why you’re reading this. Maybe you’re curious. Maybe you’re just nosy. Maybe you’re looking for inspiration because your Muse has done a bunk. Don’t worry. My muse does that, too. They’re fickle. They’re taciturn. They’re bastards. Yeah, my muse is a bastard. A right tricky little bastard.

For instance, my muse can bugger off into town for days in search of a new cardigan or a nice pair of stiff brogues, and she (yes, she’s a she) frequently only reappears when it’s damned inconvenient, typically at dinner time, or when you’re trying to reverse park in Tesco or when you’re trying to have sex. In other words, my muse chooses to reappear at those precise moments when walking away to fetch a pen and paper is considered bad manners, impossible or just plain rude. Take a hint from me. Never, ever reach for a pen and paper when you’re trying to have sex. It never, ever ends well for either party. Trust me on that one.

That’s Lesson Number Eight by the way. Always, always have a pen and paper to hand except when you’re trying to have sex. Then again, your particular fetish might involve a pen and paper and, truth be told, I really quite enjoy the Take a letter, Ms. Jones role playing game but that’s another lesson for another day.

Well, actually, it isn’t a lesson for another day. It’s a lesson for today. Right here and right now for instance.

Lesson Number Nine : Find your Discomfort Zone

Did you feel uncomfortable picturing the above scene? You didn’t? Okay, indulge me. Picture this.

Put yourself in the position of Ms. Jones. You’re at work. It’s late on a Friday afternoon and the whole office has gone for a liquid lunch down The Black Bull. You’re sitting behind your desk wearing your very best blue managerial suit and the phone rings. You’ve just been summoned into your Manager’s office for a chat. What does this chat involve? Is it warm and friendly or is it slightly sinister? Slightly creepy? Are you going to get fired?

The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Why? Your Manager’s hand shake feels like you’re caressing a dead fish. The guy could sweat for England. He has a major problem with body odour. And, to cap it off, you would rather be in the pub with your colleagues, wouldn’t you? Frankly, you would rather be in the Dentist’s chair having root canal work than be right here, right now.

But curiously, a last minute urgent request from upper management has suddenly turned up and you have to stay back. Convenient, eh?

What has your Manager been thinking about? What’s the plan? Is it genuine, altruistic and business-related or is it altogether a little more sordid?

How does that scene make you feel? Uncomfortable? Concerned? Distressed?

If it made you feel uncomfortable then good. It was meant to. You should get used to writing scenes that make you feel uncomfortable. If it feels uncomfortable then you’re doing it right!

Truth be told, there are parts of this world that are tough, brutal and hateful, and there are a lot of truly shitty people walking streets. Good fiction rarely comes from writing about three old ladies sitting around a table sipping tea in a Bristol cake shop. It comes from difficult, uncomfortable situations staffed by difficult, uncomfortable people.

You don’t have to take these people home to meet your mother. They’d probably steal her best silver anyway but I do think that getting to know one or two truly colourful people will give you a whole new spectrum of characters to play with.

As I said up above, my venue of choice for colourful people is The New Derby near Roker Park in Sunderland. It’s not a rough pub. Actually, it’s quite nice but it does bring in a lot of people you wouldn’t meet down your local Masonic Lodge. You’re more likely to see some of these types down at the local Bridewell.

Take, for instance, the gentleman sitting behind me. He’s in a pub crammed to the rafters with Sunderland supporters. Sunderland are not playing and therefore the atmosphere is not particularly charged so it feels safe. Well, safe-ish. However, this gentleman has shouted his support for Millwall Football Club on more than one occasion in a seemingly deliberate attempt to provoke a reaction. And this tactic has worked!. One or two characters at the bar appear to have noticed this fellow’s enthusiasm for a rival team and seem a little interested in teaching him some manners. Home turf and all that.

See what I mean? Characters like this make your stories sing! They really do. Cardboard villains twirling their moustaches are a thing of the past. They’re from a bygone age of tea and crumpets with the Vicar in front of a roaring fire.

That’s Lesson Nine.

Learn to live with discomfort. Explore your discomfort. Figure out why it feels uncomfortable. Dig deeper. This approach pays dividends. It really does.

Lesson Number Ten : Shipyard Language

Lesson Ten appeared just over the horizon a few paragraphs ago, like a mighty sea-going vessel heading for the nearest port. That mighty sea-going vessel is called bad language. Learn to get comfortable with what society terms bad language or what I call shipyard language.

Personally, I don’t think there are any bad words in the English Language except necessary, which I always have to spell out letter-by-letter because I can never type it without whispering I see two esses. It’s the same with yesterday and inconceivable. I have to spell them phonetically otherwise I may as well just go back to bed because the rest of my day has been ruined. Those words shatter my concentration. They take you out of the Zone and break the spell. Every single fucking time. I blame my middle school English teacher, Mrs. Murphy, for that one.

I’m fairly convinced that there is no such thing as bad language. There are words that are perhaps inappropriate in certain contexts but then the context of the scene is of the utmost importance.

Take for instance, this scene. Two old ladies are sitting in a tea room in Auchtermuchty - it’s a gorgeous little town on the east coast of Scotland - when they’re joined by the local Vicar. Agnes turns to the Curate and asks Would you like some tea, Vicar? to which the Cleric replies Fucking love some, Agnes! Fucking love some!

Now, I doubt you’d find the above exchange in an Agatha Christie novel or anything by Jane Austen. You’re more likely to find a scene like this in a comedy penned sometime between 1980 and 1988, before alternative comedy and cancel culture killed real comedy.

Dialogue, good dialogue, is essential. Dialogue needs to be appropriate. Ask yourself this question. Can you hear your Vicar using this kind of language? Can you see the scene in your Mind’s Eye?

Consider another scene where two East End thugs are about to beat the living tar out of an immigrant. Picture the setting. It’s dark. They’re down a scruffy back lane in the Dog End of town and it’s raining. The little guy is about to receive a thumping. It’s going to hurt. He may not survive.

These characters are not going to speak with a so-called BBC RP (Received Pronunciation) voice (unless it’s a comedy).

“Excuse me, my good fellow,” said the First Goon. “But I’m afraid that, in your haste to exit the Public House without paying for your round, you accidentally spilled my friend’s pint.”

“Now there, Nigel,” said the Second Goon. “It was more than just my pint that got spilled. He spilled beer into my Crisps, too, and I was looking forward to those. I haven’t had a solid meal since nineteen thirty seven.”

How your victim responds is an absolute minefield of political correctness and Spike Milligan jokes. Tread carefully, my friend. Tread carefully.

What’s wrong with this. If it’s a serious drama then the context is hopelessly wrong. If it’s a comedy then you’re in a Taliban-sized minefield of your own making.

If you’re going to explore the area of race-relations (and why not) then you need to be prepared for criticism. You need to be prepared for the inevitable Twitter Pile On. The worst kind of criticism. We’re not talking about your Aunty Mary grumbling about the number of times you said Fuck in that last paragraph. We’re talking about death threats.

Think I’m not being serious? I just watched a documentary about the influencer Andrew Tate wherein a BBC Journalist was talking about some of the messages he’d received from Tate Fan Bois in relation to his latest expose. Those comments were not pretty. No, Sir. Not pretty at all.

Just be aware that some people won’t like your writing and some people really won’t like your writing. Some people won’t like your writing so much that they might feel motivated to seek you out and hurt you, or your family. Just be mindful of the kind of people out there.

If you absolutely have to write about a situation that brings about strong emotions and even stronger reactions then use a pseudonym. Plenty do. Yes, you are chickening out a little but chickening out is better than someone leaving a dead badger on your doorstep when you’re heading out to work in the morning.

Anyway, back to the Mill, as the saying goes.

Bad dialogue, inappropriate dialogue or just plain rotten dialogue, is deeply harmful to your narrative because it breaks the spell, the unwritten contract between you, the author, and your reader. They’ve paid their nickel. They want to be entertained. They want to immerse themselves in the world that you’ve created, a world that they may know nothing about. They want to see how your characters develop. They want to discover their motivations and their back stories, and how they relate to their lived experiences. Don’t destroy your scenes with dialogue that sounds out of place. Research here pays dividends. If your characters come from the East End of Sunderland then go visit the East End of Sunderland. (I dare you, I really do). Listen to the people. Participate in their exchanges. Pick up the patterns in their speech. Look at their life choices and their motivations. Study and observe. Take notes. Bring your notes to the next lesson. I look forward to reading your results.

Of course, your characters may all come from Chelsea and spend their entire lives flitting from one Cocktail bar to the next, sipping caviar from a beer glass and downing champagne into the small hours. Hey, some people do live like this. Go join them, if you can. Somebody has to write their stories. Might as well be you. Again, I look forward to reading your results.

Pitching dialogue is hard. Writing good dialogue is a real skill. You need a really, really good ear to do it well because you need to listen very, very carefully. I used to have a Scottish neighbour, Hillary. She was a lovely, lovely warm person but I couldn’t understand a single word she said. She was brought up in the middle of Glasgow and her dialect could only be fully understood by the people she’d grown up with. Her husband, who was from Newcastle, required subtitles just to find out what was for tea.

I genuinely tried to write a page of dialogue featuring Hilary's and I failed. I didn't understand a word of what she said, and I reasoned that neither would my audience. I know you shouldn't ever try to write for audience but this remains a rare exception.

And so we come to the dreaded Lesson Number Eleven:

Lesson Number Eleven : Sex

Unless I’m writing pornography, and I occasionally do (because why not?), I loath writing sex scenes. Why? Because I’ve written sex scenes in the past and they never, ever work. Deep down, I guess I’m just a deeply hypocritical prude with one foot in the liberated nineteen sixties and another in the eighteen sixties. I sometimes I feel that I am the very definition of Victorian Dad.

It gets worse. You write a sex scene. You read it back. It doesn’t quite suck as much as you first thought so you let it pass. Then your editor reads it and... Trust me. Get ready for an unhealthy dose of brain numbing embarrassment. I always develop an overpowering urge to stare at my feet. Every single time.

Long, long ago, I adopted the Barbara Cartland attitude to sex in novels. Party A grabs Party B. Party A makes their intentions clear. Party B thinks this is a good idea. They pull back the bed clothes or move the breakfast cereal off the kitchen table and then switch the lights off. That’s it. They may be having sex. They may not be. They may, in fact, be sitting up in bed doing The Times Crossword Puzzle or playing a round of Gin Rummy instead of playing with each other. Why? Because I find even the best descriptions of the sexual act to be ridiculous or just downright unrealistic. Like I said, I blame my Protestant upbringing.

Years and years ago, I remember sitting in Newcastle upon Tyne’s Central Library and I started reading a sex scene in a novel by (I think) Melvin Bragg. For reasons I do not fully understand, even to this day, I burst out laughing. I really did. A real hearty belly laugh, too. I then went red in the face as tears of laughter started to well up behind my eyes. One of the Librarians shuffled over to my table, looked over my shoulder and smiled. “Oh, you’re on that page,” she whispered. “Yeah, thought so.”

Lesson Number Eleven goes like this. If you think you can write a good sex scene then you can’t. End of. So don’t. Please. Writing bad sex scenes will either make you into the fool you always knew you were or you’ll end up having to explain to your Significant Other where and with whom you dreamed up that particular position. You can only blame Channel Four so many times. If your SO was the inspiration then you’re (probably) on safe ground. If not then you’ll either end up sleeping on the sofa tonight or on a park bench. Or maybe you’ll end up in Court. Your choice.

There are only a few writers who can craft a really good sex scene. Chances are, you’re not one of them but, hey, prove me wrong.

Lesson Twelve : Comedy

Two comedians walk into a bar. It hurts. They’re both bleeding. One of them cracks a joke. The other laughs. The end.

Did you see that scene in your head? Good, because I did too. Was it funny? That’s partly up to you and partly driven by context.

Comedy is highly subjective. Comedy is not universal. What is funny to me may not be funny to you. I like fart jokes. So does my son. His Mum? Not so much.

Many of my characters crack jokes. They have a sense of humour. I’ve only known one person in my entire career who had no sense of humour whatsoever and he was a teacher named Howard. I worked for Howard for eighteen months and I never heard him laugh once, not even when the Sixth Form Physics Club tried to bounce a laser off Spot Lyndsey’s famous spot.

A guy gets hit in the face with a custard pie? That’s always funny. A guy gets hit in the face with a baseball bat? That’s rarely funny unless the bat has With love written down the length of the shaft in Biro, and the guy had it coming anyway. That’s kind of funny. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. That’s not for you to decide. That’s for your characters to figure out. Life works like that. They might find it funny. They might not. If not, that’s another avenue to explore. If they do then remember that Guy Ritchie got there first and he does not take prisoners.

Lesson Thirteen : Tropes, motivations and story arcs

Generally speaking, the use of tropes is frowned upon somewhat these days. What’s a trope? According to Google’s AI bot thingy, a trope is a commonly recurring motif, theme, or figure of speech in literature and storytelling, such as enemies to lovers or the hero's journey. Derived from the Greek for turn", it acts as a convention, device, or symbolic representation, which can become a cliché if overused. Synonyms include figure of speech, motif, metaphor, image, and convention.

The keyword here is cliché.

You want to stand out from the pack? Avoid clichés. Simple. End of.

Use your brain. Come up with something better.

I think it’s fair to say that Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Quest structure has been pretty much beaten to death. And yet it’s still popular and in regular use across most of the fantasy genres I can think of even though most people can see the arc of the story well in advance. It’s kind of tired these days. There are no real surprises left.

My advice is… use a trope like the Hero’s Quest if the device suits your purpose. Use it if the path gives your story structure and defines your character’s motives but, if you must go down this path then please, please, please throw in a couple of twists early on and not just at the end. Have you characters do something radically different, something that goes against the whole ‘Bad guy turns good’ meme.

Tropes, of course, are genuinely good fun to explore especially when you start mixing and merging tropes. Often, when examined from a different perspective, a trope can really deliver the goods. For instance, ‘Stranger Things’ is just a rehash of the well-worn teen-angst horror movies from the nineteen eighties. However, the Duffer Brothers’ respectful approach to the genre coupled with good acting, brilliant special effects and a superb soundtrack lifted this series into a whole new realm. Kudos.

From the other end of the scale, look at the recent additions to the Star Wars saga. Or just don’t. Save yourself some time and effort. Hollow characters, paper-thin plots, everybody comes back from the dead. There’s no end to this series, no conclusion, no resolution. That’s why it’s not longer satisfying for an adult audience. It’s essentially a series for children except that the film makers hadn’t realised or simply ignored the fact that their core audience, the people who grew up with Star Wars, are now pushing sixty or seventy years old. They’re beyond adults. Treat them as such.

What about motivations? In the original films, the motivations were clear. Bored farm boy is bored and seeks adventure. Crazy old guy has sworn an oath to keep bored farm boy safe and hidden from the Bad Guys, especially Bored Farm Boy’s Dad because if Crazy Old Guy fails then the entire Galaxy will descend into a state of CHAOS, a little like Tesco on New Years’ Eve. The Bad Guys want to hold the Empire together. They’re the State. They make sure the buses run on time and the toilets always flush. However, from the whole ‘Child of the Sixties / Flower Power’ ethos, they’re inherently evil because they’re in charge. They’re the Man, Maaan! Let’s all form a commune and be like fab and groovy. Yeah, why not but will the buses still run on time and will the toilets still flush?

The original Star Wars is a sixties hippie tale dressed up in flares and wide lapels, which is okay. It’s a fantasy. The latest additions to the series, with the possible exception of The Mandalorian and Andor, feel wrong, a bit like putting Dipers on Granddad. There’s something missing. Innocence, perhaps.

Here’s the flaw in Star Wars. What does crazy old geezer do to keep bored farm boy safe and away from the evil Bad Guys? He takes bored farm boy on an adventure where he buddies-up with a low-morals, con-man / smuggler and his pet Gorilla and then goes off to flick the Bad Guys in the bollocks with a wet towel.

Now look at the first of the recent trilogy - The Force Awakens. Bored Scrap Collector - who just happens to live on the same planet as Baby Bad Ass and Bored-farm-boy - meets an on-the-run ex-Storm Trooper minority-with-a-conscience and they butt heads with the evil Empire (in all but name). Anakin’s Grandson, Luke’s nephew, turns up and everything goes to crap. Then the same low-morals, con-man / smuggler and his pet Gorilla turn up and… It’s more of the same. The Good Guys head off into the distance with a hair brained plan to flick the Bad Guys in the bollocks with a wet towel and escape intact.

And Emperor Palpatine turns up again. But hang on? Wasn’t Emperor Palpatine killed off at the end of Return of the Jedi? He’s back and apparently none the worse for his little mishap at the end of ‘Return’ even though he’d been fried by Big Bad Ass’s electric finger, tossed down a mile long energy shaft thing, evaporated in a wall of blue electric whatever-that-was and even survived the Death Star II smashing into the forest moon of Endor. Okay, so he’s special. He’s strong with the Dark Side. The Dark Side protects.

Mate, some of us are really strong with the Dark Side but we run home to bed and stay there for a week if we stub our toe on the side of the bed.

All of this is complete and utter bobbins unless you accept that it’s…

(another fanfare please, Maestro)

…a fantasy. It’s a story for kids. It says so on the tin. What were we expecting?

I feel that Star Wars has become a parody of itself. There’s no resolution, no final act. Everybody comes back from the dead.

Handy hint, guys. Nobody comes back from the dead. End of.

Nobody comes back from the dead. Yikes, that rings true. I saw the first Star Wars movie in January 1978. I was fifteen. I just watched it with my kids. They’re seven and four. Think on that.

Lesson Fourteen : Beware of Monetisation

Years and years ago, say nineteen eighty one, I bought a synthesiser, a Moog Prodigy, to be specific. I’d wanted a synthesiser for years because I wanted to learn to play a musical instrument just like my idols, Billy Currie and Gary Numan. I’d tried the guitar (both acoustic and electric) but my fingers are too fat and too stubby to manage the fret board accurately so a keyboard seemed like a good choice. I’d saved a lot of money from a summer job and so, not long before Christmas, I bought a synthesiser from my local music store. I was thrilled even though it was expensive. Anyway, I couldn’t actually play the instrument (and some would argue that I still can’t) but I was willing to stick at it. And I did. That said, I’m deeply embarrassed by the fact that, forty five years on, I still can’t read sheet music with anything approaching a degree of fluency and I can’t really play all that well but these omissions have done little to curtail my enthusiasm.

I think what pissed me off about the whole Prodigy purchase was my Mother’s reaction. She was openly hostile to the idea of indulging a creative urge. She was absolutely certain that I would be far better off dumping that saved cash in a bank account. However, if I was determined to buy the wretched thing then I had to justify the expenditure somehow. Straight away, there was pressure to become a true virtuoso. I had to have an ambition. I would be the new Keith Emerson, the next Vangelis. I would start releasing albums of music and earn mega bucks. And if that didn’t work out then I could always sell the instrument by the reasoning that even used, the Prodigy would have some residual value.

Some people feel that any hobby that requires time and energy should provide some sort of fiscal reward otherwise what’s the point? What about the simple pleasure of doing something for fun? That's the very definiton of a hobby, isn't it? What’s wrong with that?

My mother's attitude hurt frankly, and still needles me to this day. This deperate need to justify time and energy with some kind of monetary reward makes some sense I guess. That angers me. What pisses me off more is the sad fact that I fell for it. For years, I honestly thought that my hobby had to generate cash and, without a cash reward, the effort was utterly pointless.

Any creative activity, be it writing or playing an instrument or collecting stamps, provides you, the would-be artist, with a giant sand pit full of infinite possibilities. Money shouldn’t come into it. Money taints. Everything.

What I’m saying is that, if you're made to feel any pressure or to be successful or make your hobby pay for itself or if someone comments that daft hobby of yours doesn't pay the bills then quietly invite that person to drop their pants and go sit on a pineapple. It’ll do them a lot of good.

By the way, I still have the Prodigy.

Lesson Fifteen : Honesty and Self-Censorship

I’ve saved this lesson to last because it’s the most important of the lot. It really is. It’s a tough one but bear with me.

A lot of writers – even some of the best writers - start off with good intentions but many quickly start writing for someone else. They worry that this mythical someone else won’t like the story or the dialogue or the acts depicted therein. They worry that someone, somewhere will be offended.

I call this phenomena The Aunty Ethel Effect. Let me explain.

It starts innocently enough. You ask a question. It’s nearly always the same question, too.

Who is my target audience?

On the surface, it’s a reasonable question. Is my audience middle class and affluent? Are they educated? Will they understand the complexities of the plot? Will they understand the dialogue? Will they get the jokes? Would they know the difference between quantum mechanics and a hole in the ground? How will they react to shipyard language? And the violence? Should I still include the scene where Charlie gets whacked over the head with a tyre iron? And so on.

Then you start wondering if your audience will actually like the end result. You start looking through the project for all of those troublesome areas that cause so much friction. You actually think a test reading is a good idea. Then you ask a truly hideous question.

Are there elements of this project that I could do without?

Okay, so the language is a bit fresh in Chapter Ten and Chapter Fifteen so I’ll tone that down a little, perhaps make it more palatable, more reader-friendly. There’s quite a bit of sexy talk in Chapter Sixteen and that just feels wrong because, well, it’s wrong, right? Right?

Next, you either skirt around or take out some of the more confrontational issues.

Sex and bad language are always the first to go. Politics, too. That’s a difficult one to fix. Say your ideal reader is a left-leaning liberal with purple hair and a cat named Lenin. Can your antagonist be another left-leaning social justice warrior? No, because that would alienate your left-leaning social justice warrior friends. Okay, so let’s make the antagonist an extreme right winger with a bad haircut and Mommy issues. That’ll get a laugh, right? Because everybody hates extreme right wingers with Mommy issues, which is basically all of them, really, right? Right?

Right?

You might imagine that the next casualty would be the violence but, truth be told, a lot of audiences feel much more comfortable with the idea of someone getting shot in the head and bleeding out onto the newly cleaned carpet than they do if your characters have a sex life. Okay, so you compromise. The violence can stay but the sex act with the Hoover Flex and the Wheelbarrow in Chapter Twenty has to go.

Then again, the section where Norman puts Charlie in a vat of battery acid whilst eating pop corn and watching K-Pop Demon Hunters is guaranteed to alienate the teen audience so that has to go, too. Phew. I nearly ruined a perfectly good book there.

What are you actually left with?

You’re left with a hollowed-out shell of an idea. You’re not writing for a mature, adult audience with a unique set of life experiences. You’re not writing for free thinking, progressive minds. You’re not even writing for yourself.

You’re actually writing for your Aunty Ethel.

But even that’s not true because you’re actually writing for an idealised version of your Aunty Ethel. The Aunty Ethel you’re writing for is a fiction, a chimera built out of childhood memories of sweets and birthday parties and trips to the sea side. It’s a fiction. A lie.

Here’s a thought.

Did you ask your Aunty Ethel if she liked a bit of smut between the pages? Did you find out if she was comfortable with shipyard language? Did you ask her if the line with the Hoover Flex and the Wheelbarrow made her laugh out loud? No, you didn’t.

Once you start down this path of second guessing your audience then I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but, sad to say, you are fucked. You really are. You’re doomed. Utterly. End of.

How Aunty Ethel reacts should not be, should never be your concern. The only instance where this should be a concern is when you’ve been commissioned to write for a specific demographic in exchange for money. You’re contractually obliged to remove the difficult stuff. This has never happened to me but I can well imagine the letter from my would-be Publisher:

“David, you’ll have to take out the scene where Doctor Smith sticks a cactus plant up Mr. Willerby’s bottom because the target demographic for this novel is between the ages of five and ten. They might laugh but their parents won't!”

Still, you should always write according to what characters want to do or will do. If you want to write serious fiction then take the Aunty Ethel filter off and chuck it in the bin. If you’re writing for a specific demographic then your Publisher should tell you in advance. Then you can use a filter but remember that Spot goes to the Abattoir is never going to see a print run.

Can you go too far? Is self-censorship ever acceptable? I think so. Or maybe not.

Some years ago, just when the whole Cancel Culture vibe was starting to bite, I wrote a line, a wise crack, for one of my male protagonists. He turns to another guy and says:

“Dude! I think you forgot to change your Colostomy Bag! You stink!”

I think we would all agree that’s pretty offensive. I did too and I agonised on whether I should include the line for weeks. In fact, I deleted it twice before common sense took over.

It’s not something I would say. It’s probably not something you would say but it is something my character would say. He had no self control. He didn’t care who he offended. Call it a defect in his character, if you will. I decided to stay true and honest to the written word. Get into your character’s head space. Say the truth.

Lesson Sixteen : Sexuality and Gender

I added this section a little late in the day...

A certain class of writers often shy away from writing about sexuality and sexual orientation. They're frightened of the consequences. I think that this is utterly wrong. In my mind, a character's sexuality drives their actions. Their choice of partners is as relevant as what they had for breakfast because their decision-making process is an intrinsic element of their personaility, their life experiences. Just don't write cartoon characters. That's lazy and predictavle, and you're apt to find yourself scrobbling around in a tiresome trope. Just write people as they really are.

Don't know any gay people? Go meet some. Go talk to them. They don't bite (unless you ask them to!) Be nice. Be cool. They're no different to you or I.

What matters is that a character's actions should always drive the narrative. Your character's interactions should always follow a pattern, namely cause then effect. Sexual orientation may influence the story but it doesn't have to. If you go down the route of saying X is gay therefore he's the bad guy or Y is a lesbian so she has go shoplifting on a Saturday then you thoroughly deserve whatever comes flying at you.

Lesson Seventeen : Do Your Research

Good research is the backbone of a good novel. The Devil really is in the detail.

As has been said many times before, you don’t need to be an actual astronaut to imagine what life might be like in space. However, it does pay to know something about science and space physics. Might I kindly suggest you at least look at a Science book before you attempt to pen the sequel to The Hail Mary Project.

Similarly, if you’re writing a modern day Police Procedural then it pays to know something about PACE. Don’t know what PACE is? There’s your problem.

A friend of mine, John Kennedy Melling, used to edit for a well-known author, a lady who passed a decade or more ago. I even bought a couple of her books. Truth be told, they were awful. I doubt she’d ever set foot in a Police Station except perhaps to complain about a bad review in the Crime Writer’s Digest. She just made the whole lot up on the spot. Those novels may have had a ring of truth to them forty years ago but, these days, the interview process has changed beyond recognition. We don’t live in the land of Z-Cars or Dixon of Dock Green anymore.

Two years ago, I featured as an extra in a long running TV Detective series based here in the North East of England. The series was fun and we really enjoyed our regular Sunday night Spot the Location competition. However, their reenactments used to drive my Policemen friends up the wall because they’re nothing like real life. Evidence gathering is everything. Details etc. Want to know what an interview is like in real life? Go watch many of the examples on the BBC and other real life crime shows. They host recordings of the genuine article. Want to know how forensic teams gather evidence? Watch a forensics programme! How does an arrest actually take place? Youtube is your friend here.

I read a piece this morning by a lady who claimed that, for a wager, she’d performed as a Camera Bunny on an adult site. In my humble opinion, she’d plainly invented the whole adventure because, you guessed it, adult sites don’t work like that in the UK. Had she done any research, she’d have known that you need a verified identify, camera equipment beyond the level of a simple laptop camera, good lighting, a second camera, an assistant to juggle everything and another to manager the feed. Do it on the cheap and you certainly won’t get an audience beyond maybe five or six desperate souls. You certainly would not get the several thousand paying idiots that she claimed.

The moral of the tale is this: If you don’t know anything about a specific field that requires specific knowledge to be convincing then please do not bullshit your way around said field. Get caught out and you’re credibility is shot through completely. Do your research.

The best solution to the problem is to cultivate friends in the Police Force or an Adult site or whichever field seems relevant to your plot line. This approach pays dividends. If the need arises, my circle includes several retired Police Officers including a Dog Handler and a specialist in Cold Cases, and they’re happy to provide insights so long as they’re treated respectfully and their contributions anonymised.

Go find some friends.

Lesson Eighteen : Beware of the wrong research

This hint needs to be in letters three feet high and trimmed in neon lights.

Don't be tempted to go digging in places that the Law of the Land finds problematic.

We're adults. You know what I'm talking about.

True Story : I read a post on a flashing web site about a man who liked to hang his penis through the railings of a nearby Primary School. He got off on the activity. He got off on the reactions. He thought is was just harmless fun. He also got beaten to a pulp by angry parents. When the case came to Court, he got off with a suspended sentence because it was his first offence and because he promised he'd never do it again. In addition, he said he was writing a Detective novel and wanted to know how his character would feel and react.

There are some flaws in this logic.

• Flashing is illegal in the UK and has been for many, many years
• Waving your dick at children has consequences for the children
• This wasn't his first offence - it was only the first time he'd been caught
• There was no Detective novel
• He failed to predict the violent outcome - he's an idiot

Claiming that this activity was research was a lie. A bare-faced, bare-arsed lie. And yet somehow he got away with it. The Magistrate believed him. I'm suggesting that the perpetrator was lucky in this regard. Very lucky. I'm telling you now that researching this particular area of human interaction is guaranteed to end badly. Very badly.

Instead, if your character is a pervert, if your character is a sexual deviant then just use your imagination. You don't need to get involved in a Gang-land shoot-out to know that getting shot in the gut hurts. You don't need to go into space to know that getting ripped to shreds by a giant Xenomorph is likely to end better for the Xenomorph than it is for your poor character.

Don't be tempted to indulge your darker fantasies. Leave them in your head, where they belong.

Unless you feel like researching what the inside of a Police cell looks like.

Lesson Nineteen : Avoid Technobabble

“Reverse the polarity of the Neutron flow”

This is my favourite bit of Doctor Who bollocks because it is genuinely utter bollocks. You can’t reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Neutrons have no charge and therefore no polarity. Oh, they do in a Doctor Who universe? Is that your cop out? Horse poop! Utter Horse Poop. Stick with real physics.

“Star Trek? That’s a load of crap,” I hear you say. That’s your opinion but remember this. Even sixty years ago, Gene Roddenberry got a lot right because he consulted the likes of the Rand Corporation and a bunch of top scientists to make his predictions about the technology of the twenty fourth century as real as possible. That said, there was a time when I used to mute Geordie La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation whenever he opened his mouth. I can only take so much utter bollocks.

Find another way.

Does your plot involves mathematics? Remember that only 0.01% of the population will understand anything beyond GCSE maths. Tread careful here.

Does you plot involve a particularly gruesome murder? Get your hands on a couple of genuine autopsy reports and learn the science behind them. They make remarkable reading.

Lesson Twenty : Critics

Everybody seems to have an opinion these days. Everybody. And everybody feels qualified to spread their opinion even if said opinion has the intellectual weight of a badger reading the news.

I no longer say anything negative in public when it comes to the work of other artists, be they musicians or writers or accordion players. I will always try to say something positive. Why? Because I know how hard it is to create. I’ve walked the walk. I know the talk. I know how much hateful comments hurt and why be an asshole when you can say something nice instead.

The worst I’ll ever do if I really don’t like a performance is walk out.

Truth be told, only a minority of critics truly know what they’re actually talking about. Hardly any of the vast army of critics out there, those who profess to know the scene and know what’s good and what’s bad, have read any of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideas on the art of criticism. Remember these facts.

How can a critic know what you were thinking when you created a work? Were they in your head at the time? No, they weren’t so why do they pretend that they know you? All critics go to the bathroom, just like you. They also pick their noses, fart, snore, pick their feet, wank and look at left-handed web pages. Then they pretend they’re better than you. Really? Think on that.

Generally speaking, I will listen to only one or two critics. My other half, Julie, is one of them. I trust her instincts. She’ll listen to a piece of music and tell me (truthfully) if it works or not. She’ll watch me do my astronomy talks and then offer help and guidance. “This bit here is fine but the bit with the stuffed Aardvark didn’t work because it was overlong and featured too many jokes about big noses.”

Critics. Don’t try to sweet talk them into giving you a good review. Don’t pander to their ego in exchange for a few column inches in a paper that will be on the bottom of the cat’s litter tray by the end of the week and absolutely don’t sleep with them in exchange for a good review. Just don’t sleep with them. Period. End of. It’s what they deserve.

And finally...

At the start of this missive, I talked about my motives for writing. I said that I do it purely for pleasure. The joy of creation, of building something from nothing. The creative power of pure thought.

However, in the course of writing this document, I re-discovered another motive.

A couple of days ago, I picked up a book written by the philosopher and one time Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, (161 CBE – 181 BCE) and, all of a sudden, I heard the voice of a man who has been dead for more than two thousand years. He was talking to me, talking about his meditations, his private notes to himself. Okay, so not actually his voice but my brain’s idea of what Marcus Aurelius might sound like if he was speaking modern twenty first century English. That kind of telepathy is rather amazing, isn’t it? Talking to someone across a bridge lasting two millennia.

Marcus Aurelius has achieved a form of immortality. He’s still remembered for his thoughts and actions. His voice still carries weight and I think that’s what drives a lot of authors, a need to be remembered, a need to matter or, equally, a desperate need to get the last word in. Who doesn’t want to be remembered? I certainly do. I want my kids to remember me as more than just the old guy with the big nose, the crap hair cut and the scruffy clothes. I want them to think more of me than the guy who taught them pull that finger, the guy who pulled faces and got Teddy drunk on beer and Lamb Kebabs. (Only my kids will get that last reference...)

So that’s one reason I do it, I guess. The need to leave something of value behind once I’ve shuffled off to the Big Jam Session in the Sky.

Okay, so that’s twenty of the best, all penned with nothing but good intentions. I have more, which implies there may be a part two to this essay. We’ll see. Take whatever you fancy from the above if it suits your purpose. Just leave me a credit. That's only fair.

Part Two More thoughts and ideas

I said there might be a Part Two and here it is:

Where does the story begin?

Every budding writer wants an answer to this question. Do you design a plot? Does your plot follow a design? How do you create characters?

Okay, so quick answers only.

The story begins when you jump on the train.

No, I don’t really plot. Sometimes, there's a vague plan but, generally speaking, I let the characters drive the action. More often than not, changes happen On the fly. An idea will pop into my head and I'll follow that instead of the plan.

Of course, the actual answer is never quite so cut and dried.

Only one story I can think of starts right at the beginning and that, so the Cosmologists tell us, is the story of the Big Bang. The Creationists may disagree but I’m a Physicist and the evidence points conclusively in my favour. So tough.

Every other story follows as a consequence of the Big Bang. You are a consequence of the Big Bang, as am I, and since you can’t begin every story with “Once upon a time, there was a huge explosion!” (unless you’re Michael Bay) then you have to accept that every story has a back story, a time and a place where your current story kicks off.

A lot of writer’s hate back stories. I love them. I’ll often kick start a project by exploring a character’s back story before I start the main journey. Sometimes, I’ll get the ball rolling by writing maybe a dozen chapters just to get my head into the game. When those ideas are in-the-can so to speak, I’ll step backwards in time and write a character’s back story, detailing the events which led to the first sentence of the first paragraph in the first chapter of this new story. Often that back story is more interesting than the current story and digging deeper takes you off in a completely new, previously unseen direction. It’s those ‘someplace else’ moments that make writing so much fun.

Generally said, I don’t plot a story in intricate detail. I prefer the spontaneous approach. I prefer the characters to do the heavy lifting for me.

I use a lot of character dialogue to drive the story forwards. My editor would say I use too much dialogue but I really do enjoy getting into the headspace occupied by my characters. I try to imagine what they’re thinking and what motivates them to think in that particular way, and then I try to figure out where they’ll go next.

That’s where the story begins. With the characters.

Next question: How did you start writing?

That’s an easy one to answer. I was around eleven years old and I’d just watched an episode of A Man from Uncle, a TV spy drama from the nineteen sixties. I don’t remember the plot at all. All I remember was the end credits rolling up the screen amid an aura of disappointment. Nothing about that episode was in the least bit satisfying. The dialogue had all the realism of a pre-school Nativity Play. The development was sloppy. The conclusion made no sense. I had an intense feeling that the cat could have written a better episode and we don’t even have a cat.

With that notion buzzing around in the space between my ears, I wondered if I could write a more satisfying twist that led to a more logical and perhaps more entertaining conclusion.

Then I wondered if I should. I mean, what did I know? I was eleven. I’d never written anything more complicated than a note for the Milkman :

Two pints only, please. Thank you.

I guess this was my first real encounter with the writer’s nemesis, our Cryptonite if you will - The Fear of Failure. I’m convinced this illogical emotion is what holds back the vast majority of would-be writers - the fear that our efforts will be judged poorly by our peers, that we will be lampooned and ridiculed simply for trying. Many writers do suffer this fate. I did too and even now, aged sixty four, I still can’t handle criticism at all well. It’s an echo from my childhood.

Anyway, I wrote my updated and improved version of that strange little episode the very next day as part of an assignment. I handed the poorly scribbled manuscript to my teacher, Ms. Stewart, and promptly forgot all about it. I was ten or eleven. You would too.

What I didn’t know was that I was actually sitting my eleven-plus (or a version of that exam) although how I didn’t know it was the eleven-plus is a mystery. Maybe they forgot to tell me.

Ms. Stewart was impressed but also amused. My spelling was, in her view, baroque but I didn’t know what baroque meant in this context and neither did I really care. I did ask my Mum later and she just laughed. Actually, she laughed a lot.

For those interested, baroque means whimsical. In other words, not very serious. A trifle. Yeah, I get it now.

Ms. Stewart’s favourable impression was the only encouragement I needed. I started writing stories and whilst those early efforts were highly derivative - I simply cloned various episodes of Doctor Who or Star Trek and appended my own ending – they were fun. A lot of fun, in fact.

Sometimes the only change I made was to excise the needless love interest because I was eleven and wasn’t interested in girls at that point in my life.

By the way, I passed the eleven-plus exam on the basis of that story alone and I ended up on the top tier of my new school where I embarked on a very strange and very unusual career path thanks purely to that thoroughly rotten episode of “The Man from Uncle”.

One to ponder in the wee hours, I think.

Working overtime

I continued writing through my teens. My imagination was working over time even though my spelling and grammar were still abysmal.

True story - I came bottom of the class in a spelling test. I knew I’d do badly right from the start so I signed my name as anonymous which was, ironically, the only word I got right. My English teacher, Maxine Hamilton Birkmire, only figured out the identity of the mystery author by a process of elimination because I sure-as-shit wasn’t going to own up to that monstrosity.

This isn’t even the full picture. Let’s put this calamity in its proper context. Consider this. I scored lower in that spelling test than all three of the non-English students in my class, pupils whose mother tongue was Hindi, Urdu and Arabic, and definitely not English. Think on that. As a result, I have never, ever been a fan of the phonetic teaching system. I blame that pile of rancid testicle-scrapings for my inability to spell words like necessary and yesterday without a quick aide memoir.

Yes, that is a one hundred percent true story.

I was roughly thirteen when I got bored with rehashing the various TV sci-fi series of the day and started writing more original stories. I’d read Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and loved it but I wanted more so I scribbled a bunch of ideas down and began working on a possible sequel. Star Trek’s Five Year Mission had come to an end so I began to imagine what might have happened in the aftermath. They were fun if a little clichéd.

I wrote a murder mystery but accidentally murdered the wrong person in the third act. I had to re-write the first two chapters from scratch before the story made any kind of sense to anyone. Truth be told, I loved that story and recycled it many, many years later. One day, I’ll publish it.

I wrote a short story about a football player who was sent off for a professional foul about twenty minutes into the first half of a really, really crucial match. He had to sit on the bench and watch his team get absolutely hammered by their sworn rivals in the full knowledge that his team’s dire fate was his fault entirely. Worse, every single man, woman and child watching from the Stands recognised that our hero is a complete and total knob. I liked that story even if there’s no hope of redemption for the main protagonist. Sometimes, an unhappy ending is more fun than it’s jollier counterpart. How do you come back from that? Can you redeem your character? You can’t. He’s a knob.

Confession is good for the Soul

I also wrote sex stories. These are the reason why I don’t write sex stories any more.

This happened fifty years ago. I was fourteen. My brain was flooded with hormones.

In the main, these stories were fun. They were exciting. They were dangerous. Nearly all came with a happy ending, if you get my meaning. I also discovered said stories had an audience and every author craves an audience.

The process worked as follows. I would wait until I had a slow homework night and then write a story, usually by hand because I didn’t want the noise of the typewriter to attract any unwanted attention. Once complete, I would then take the dog for a walk along the trail that most of us would follow to school the following morning. When I was certain I hadn’t been seen, I’d hide the neatly folded manuscript under a convenient rock and then head home.

The following morning, I’d joyfully discover this mini-missive on the way to school and I’d read out this awful, awful rubbish as though it had been penned by another author entirely, much to the amusement of my friends. Yeah, I learned to disguise my hand-writing too, a trick that would come in very handy later on in life.

The first story I wrote featured three class mates, Colin, Lesley and Julia. Lesley and Julia were stuck on a particular maths problem and they enlisted the help of the class brain, Colin, to solve the problem. Colin delivered the goods and earned his reward, which was a three-in-a-bed romp.

I no longer have the piece of paper but I remember the major details and the problems therein. Ignore the writing and the dialogue. It’s a given that they were dreadful. Ignore the situation, too. That was laughable. Utterly laughable.

The major problem lay with the real-life characters. In reality, Lesley and Julia weren’t interested in Maths and Colin was about as far from being the class brain as you can imagine. Writing involves the suspension of disbelief and the problem was, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t get the real life characters out of my head. That these two girls would shag Colin at all was utterly inconceivable because Colin was a dork. Colin was the dictionary definition of the word dork. If you sawed Colin’s head off, you’d find the word dork running through him like a stick of Blackpool Rock.

The next story was better. I made sure of that. I worked on the structure, the dialogue and the scenario until it was at least halfway realistic. That story faired better amongst the collective Brain’s Trust that was the tiny cadre of suburban resistance along our street. I was on a roll.

The third story was when I struck gold. The main character was a girl at school called Helen and I really liked Helen. I wrote her as a real human being. I mimicked her dialogue, gave her a motivation and a logical path. Her story went places. The ending made sense. The action was impressive. Who knew Helen was so athletic?

I liked the end result. My friends liked the end result. I was happy.

I continued with my efforts for the next three to four months, essentially repeating the same formula. My peers were certain that the mysterious author of such utterly rotten prose was a student - Castle Leazes Halls of Residence was only one hundred or so meters away – so nobody really put much thought into figuring out the identity of this third rate hack.

However, my brother did, probably after the third or fourth story. He realised that there was a pattern in these works, a familiar thread. Boy meets girl. Girl has a friend. Girl and her girl friend get friendly. Boy joins in. You know the rest. Yeah, I know it was hopelessly crap but still better than much of the utter bilge buzzing around YouPorn or PornHub.

The Mucky Manuscript Project lasted right up the the moment that the School Bullies caught wind of the enterprise. I was taken to one side over a dinner hour, pinned against the wall of the Gym and instructed that I should convey all future stories to said Bullies for their immediate perusal. Failure to do so would result in a thumping. I shut up shop immediately. The run of stories ceased almost as suddenly as they had started. The adventure was over.

With hindsight, I’m glad I shut up shop when I did. What if I’d been discovered? What if I’d been unmasked? I remain convinced that I would have been expelled in an instant. Worse, I shudder to think what my Head Mistress, Miss Florence Kirkby, would have thought of my literary ambitions though, truthfully, I think she probably would have been delighted by the frequency and versatility of her appearances.

The Mucky Manuscript Project sounds scary but I learned a couple of valuable lessons. Firstly, like I said above, good writing comes from good spelling and good grammar. Good spelling and good grammar come from reading a lot and writing a lot. In other words, practice. Good stories come from good characters. Write real people. Motives, too, are very, very important. It’s that old familiar story. You need to get your ten thousand hours under your belt before you can even start to think of yourself as competent.

So, get writing. Stop reading this, pick up your word processor and start.

Okay, so where next?

On Giving up...

I pretty much gave up writing stories for a couple of years around nineteen seventy eight or seventy nine. I had other things on my mind, specifically my parent’s impending divorce and a series of very bad life decisions centred around girls. However, there was one episode which sticks in the mind like no other.

I’d written a short story about an up-and-coming musician who is invited to speak to a journalist in a coffee bar in Newcastle City Centre. This guy is on the verge of being discovered. He’s officially bubbling under and so, naturally, the local music journalists want to find him first so they can take the credit for the discovery. That’s the way the scene works.

I wrote the story as a plain he says, she says narrative though, in time, the dialogue became deeper and darker as I explored their back stories. Each character had their own set of motives - both were chasing their big career break, both were relatively naïve, both should have known better, frankly.

The conversation ebbed and flowed, as conversations do, until the journalist’s true motives began to show through the gaps. This is where the musician discovers he’s hopelessly out of his depth and he’s dealing with a real shark. And so on...

I liked the story. I liked the edgy dialogue. I liked the subtle cut and thrust between the adversaries and I really liked the slow, gentle reveal. No spoilers!

My mother found the story sitting next to my typewriter, an Imperial sit up and beg machine that was older than my Grandmother. Mum liked this strange, strange tale and wanted to know more. My brother read it and pointed out a couple of factual errors – the coffee shop in question was always rammed at that time of day and my characters would have had a hard time talking in a whisper. The quick exit I’d planned for one of the protagonists wouldn’t have worked because you’d never get a taxi in Newcastle at that time of day. In addition, fighting your way through rush hour traffic would be a slow affair. You’d be better off walking or, better still, running. Yes, run! Run as fast as you can! Run anywhere you can but Get the Hell out of Dodge!

And so on. Details are important. They help build a solid foundation for your narrative. Check them. Don’t rely on assumptions. Boots on the ground research is incredibly important.

"What happened to put you off writing, David?" I hear you whisper.

Alas, my father, that undiscovered literary genius, overheard our conversations and wanted to know more. How dare someone in his household have the temerity to create without his knowledge or permission? He was the arbiter of all things creative. He decided who did what, where and when. His word was the Law. You forgot that at your peril.

Dad didn’t ask if he could read the manuscript. He snatched the papers out of my hands and dusted off his reading glasses. Thereafter, he pawed at the crumbled pages in much the same way as a house cat scratches at the contents of its Litter Tray.

He managed to read the first page over the next hour or so. He genuinely found this difficult because he had the reading age of a six year old, a particularly dumb six year old I should add. He didn’t bother reading page two. He simply mumbled something indecipherable, ripped the manuscript in two and tossed it in the bin.

"I don’t want you writing this kind of shit any more," he opined. "Nobody reads this crap."

Wowza.

Then the penny dropped. I should have known. I really should. You see, little did we know, but Dad had been moonlighting as a critic for The Times Literary Review for the past decade and he was therefore an authority on the written word.

Tsk! And Damn it! Why didn’t I spot his elevated intellectual status? Not being able to read beyond seventh grade was just a disguise.

My bad! My bad! I should have known. I should have recognised this Literary Titan in our midst years before.

Undeterred, I rescued the pages from the bin, taped them back together as best I could and then hid them away in a filing cabinet until the ink had faded and the paper had fallen apart. They lasted longer that the Old Man, I should point out. He walked out a couple of months later and made a new life for himself in London where he doubtless used his considerable literary influence to land a job at Random House.

I’m joking. He couldn’t spell literary and the only time he read The Times was when it was wrapped around a portion of fish ‘n’ chips.

Don’t worry. Payback came later.

Sad to say, that event pretty much killed any of the joy to be had from writing. I genuinely felt that there was little or no point in toiling away at anything if that was the kind of reception you could expect.

Back to Writing

I went back to writing in nineteen eighty two when my new girlfriend, Julie, had to spend a year in Norway as part of her degree course. Stuck away in a High School near Trondheim, there was nothing much to do except either drink Moonshine, have sex or write.

So we wrote. We wrote a lot. In fact, we wrote at least two, sometimes three, long letters every week. That’s when I re-discovered my love of writing. Those letters (I still have them) were more like a diary than a correspondence. Keeping a journal is a very powerful tool, by the way. Simply recording your day to day adventures is still writing. You might not be working your way to your first best seller but at least you’re writing and, don’t forget, you can add ideas and try out plots and plot twists in your letters if they’re suitably disguised.

Anyway, those journals were a catalyst that paid dividends and I started writing short stories all over again as soon as Julie came back from Norway.

Summer approached and I was out of work, which meant I had to sign on to receive Social Security. There was an added benefit to signing on. This was the time of Margaret Thatcher and The Falklands War and youth unemployment was through the roof. Various organisations wanted to do something to help. One of those organisations was the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle and, for less than a pound, you could watch two features and enjoy an ice cream at half time. Yes, you read that correctly. Less than a pound. You couldn’t even lick the fluff off the cinema’s carpet for less than a pound these days.

Consequently, Julie and I spent many, many nights watching a staggering variety of films. Some were good – Body Heat, Mississippi Rising, The Devils. Some were not. Subway Riders with Christopher Lambert was definitely not. We left the cinema long before the final reel and found the Cinema Manager sitting on the front steps with his head in his hands.

"That rubbish is here until the weekend," he mumbled. "We’ll go bust!"

My point here is that films and books have a lot in common. Lots and lots of books get turned into lots and lots of films, and I started to wonder what it would be like to try writing a book specifically with the aim of turning it into a movie. What would you need to do? How would you write it? How would you structure it?

To make that happen, you really need to learn to write screenplays and that’s a whole new ball game with a whole new sets of rules. I bought a book on writing screenplays – it cost fifty pence – and off I went.

I wrote a short story that I quickly turned into a screenplay about a guy walking home from the Pub one night who finds his ex-girlfriend stuck in a Wheelie Bin. What does he do? Does he help? Does he offer life changing advice? I’m not saying. I’ll post the screenplay someplace, assuming I can still findit.

The dialogue for that project was incredibly sweary and incredibly tight but also incredibly funny. I really enjoyed playing with that idea. There’s the joy. Find the joy.

Skip forward a couple of months. Julie and I were once again, visiting the cinema. We bought our tickets, found our favourite seats and sat back to enjoy the movie. That’s when I discovered that said seat had a very, very sharp something – I never discovered what it was – and this sharp something prodded me hard in the back right between my shoulder blades. Yes, that hurt. It really did. We changed seats and went back to the movie.

However, three days later, an incredibly painful swelling came up on my back. My Mum reckoned it was a Boil and I needed to lance it. So I did, with a sterilised needle and a lot of hot water. Yeah, that was a Boil. And yes, it hurt. A lot.

Then I wondered…

What if it hadn’t been a Boil? What if it had been something else? My imagination went into overdrive. Yours would too if you could see what came out of that b*****d.

Very quickly, I knocked together a few pages of prose that I felt were both funny and exciting. And frightening, too. The ‘thing’ growing on the protagonist's back was a nasty evil duplicate that grew bigger and bigger until it developed a head and a mind of its own. It swore all the time, drank and took a line of coke when it thought nobody was looking. Of course, all this went on whilst it was attached to the host - until the time came when it wasn’t and there was a nasty evil duplicate running around town.

Okay, it’s a fun idea. It has legs, so to speak. You could take it anywhere. Just a shame that a more-or-less identical story appeared a few years later in the form of the film “How to get a head in advertising” staring Richard E. Grant. It’s a bitingly funny film.

I don’t claim that the authors stole my idea. Far from it. What it does prove is that a genuinely good idea can come from anywhere and, quite literally, go anywhere.

1984 and all that Dystopian Guff

By nineteen eighty four, I was reading at least one major novel a week although I spent the entire summer working my way through The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That blew me away. It really did. I also spent a lot of time working on my other hobby, which is music. I built a basic recording studio in my bedroom and started writing tunes. The writing fed the music and the music fed the writing. Win-Win all round, eh?

Around this time, I bought three books for ten pence each at our local second hand bookstore, Robinson’s in the Grainger Market. They were The Master of the Temple, The Soul of the Robot and one other, the name of which escapes me.

The Master of the Temple was Devil-worshiping trash but also good sexy fun. The sex scenes were quite inventive and highly amusing, too. Many of the acts described therein were illegal in several of the southern states of America, and probably still are. The Soul of the Robot was about a robot (no kidding! Wow!) with a soul, perhaps the only robot with a soul. I enjoyed it but, in both instances, I came away with the feeling that I could do better.

So I did.

I started working on a trilogy, three interlinked novels centred around the emergence of an old, old evil. I didn’t finish those stories. Not properly anyway and not for another twenty years. Because something wonderful happened.

Something wonderful happens

I’m a huge believer in Jung’s principle of Synchronicity. You make your own luck. The more you interact with the Universe, the more the Universe interacts with you. More and more happy accidents come your way. This is a subtle way of saying You ain’t ever going to get what you want sitting behind a keyboard night after night talking to people you’ll never meet on a platform that won’t be there in a couple of years.

Get out there and live your life. Explore. See the world.

Now, let’s skip back in time to nineteen eighty two, when I’d just blown all of my spare cash on a new musical instrument, a Moog Prodigy synthesiser. I had an urge to write songs but I didn’t know how. Music theory was never my strong point.

At a friend’s suggestion, I signed up to an evening course on Sound Engineering at Spectro Arts Workshop in Newcastle. It’s not there anymore. The whole site was demolished in the nineties. The course leaders were Peter Burne-Jones, a classically trained musician, and Paul Gilby, a graduate of Newcastle University trying to make his way in the world of music publishing. The course was amazing and I learned a huge amount in a very short space of time.

Skip forward three or four years to nineteen eighty five or thereabouts. I spotted an advert on TV for a new music magazine, Sound on Sound, and it looked interesting. I bought a copy the very next day and, surprise, surprise, discovered that one of the editors was Paul Gilby.

My studio was still a small amateur arrangement but I wrote to Paul and asked if they needed any reviewers. Paul asked me to write a test piece – a review of a software editor for the pretty-much impenetrable Yamaha DX21 synthesiser, which I’d recently acquired. I wrote the review over the next four or five days. It was pretty good. It worked. Julie agreed to proof the article and, once in a suitable form, off it went.

I didn’t have to wait long before I received a phone call from Paul. They liked the review and were going to publish. Better still, I would be paid for every word they used. These are the words every author wants to hear. Wow! I had a paying gig.

You can’t ask for more.

A couple of weeks went by before the new issue of Sound on Sound appeared. I bought a copy from W H. Smith in Newcastle and Julie and I read it together on the way home in the Leazes Park. Words can’t describe the feeling.

More invitations followed. The work flooded in. At the time of my first article in nineteen eighty seven, Sound on Sound had around sixty thousand readers. Four years later, that figure hovered around the one hundred and fifty thousand mark. The audience was huge but then so too was the pressure to deliver the goods. More and more work came in to the point where I considered jacking in my day job to work full time for the magazine. The work was certainly there. In many ways, I wish I had jacked in my day job.

So, you see how a chance meeting in a back lane training workshop can lead to big things? The moral of the tale is this. Get yourself out there. Go meet people. Explore.

Beware of Money-thinking

I feel that this needs pointing out.

Ever since I first sat down to write a short story or bought a synthesiser and played a simple tune, there has always been pressure to turn that activity into a paying gig. You had to justify the expenditure. There had to be something tangible at the end otherwise it was just a self-indulgence, a folly, a waste.

My mother detested the idea that I'd spent so much money on a toy. She reckoned that the synthesiser was a passing fad, that I’d soon work it out of my system, sell it and stick the money in the bank, where it would be safe. Therefater, I could settle for a mediocre but equally safe job working as a insert boring job description here. She maintained I’d be able to sell the synthesiser after a couple of years and whilst the value would have depreciated, at lease I’d have learned a valuable lesson. Don’t waste your money on follies.

Instead, why not waste it on marrying a work-shy illiterate chain-smoking drunk?

That same pressure exists in many of my peer groups. I see it all the time.

"You spent N thousand bucks on a musical instrument and you don’t play it? You’re not working on an album? Why not? Isn’t that a waste?"

I detest this attitude and say so, openly. What happened to doing something purely for the pleasure?

Don’t give in to the pressure. Do it because you love it. It’s a Hobby. Do it because you enjoy it.

To quote from Neil the Hippy, Get lost, Bread-Heads! You're harshing my Buzz, man!"

Let’s finish off this missive.

These days, I write purely for pleasure, which is, I feel, the best possible motivation. I’m sure I could, if I really wanted to, go get myself a publishing deal and I very nearly did five years ago when I found a short story competition running out of The Word in South Shields. I sent in a short piece, just two thousand words, and… bloody hell, it was published.

I haven’t published properly because, you guessed it, I don’t handle criticism at all well and I’m really worried that any work that escapes out into the real world will suffer the same fate as that Musician meets Journalist story from way back in nineteen seventy eight. I know another review like that would stop me in my tracks, maybe knock me back another forty odd years. That said, I have a few literary projects running under a variety of nom-de-plumes and they’re doing rather well, thank you. Maybe I should have just a little more confidence in my own work.

And why not? I hear you ask but no… I’d rather work in quiet anonymity than under the screaming limelight of a wider stage.

Writing is a hobby. I enjoy it. Do I demand any fiscal reward for my efforts? No, I don’t but they might be nice.

The End? Possibly

Anyway, we’re at the end. I initially thought that this essay would run to around five thousand words but that was hopelessly wrong. The word count has gone up steadily for weeks and is now heading towards eighteen thousand words. Too much to read in one sitting. Too much to edit in one sitting and certainly too long to post on Facebook, which is why I’m posting this on my own web server as part of the Cacophony series.

Addenda : Future updates.

Please regard this essay as a work-in-progress document. I’ll be here a while, I’m afraid. I know I’ll end up editing and revisiting the themes contained herein for a couple of months.

Feel free to review this piece if you want. You can praise these words or take a massive dump on them. That’s your prerogative, Dear Reader. That I won’t ever read your comments, scathing for otherwise, is mine.

Corollary. The after-thoughts.

I began writing this missive close to midnight a few days before my sixty forth birthday. Outside, I could hear the Police Helicopter buzzing overhead, doubtless chasing some n’ever-do-well or cutpurse through the town’s back alleys. There’s a story in there. Someone, somewhere, is having an adventure. Maybe it’s the two teenage boys who tried to break into my neighbour’s car earlier on this evening. Maybe it’s the Cops trying to catch yet another dangerous driver. There’s a story to tell. Go find it.

I’m writing this at roughly twenty three hundred hours on a Easter Bank Holiday Monday. Today has not been good by anyone’s metric. Our family pet, Amy, has been ill for sometime and we’ve reached the point where we’re ready to let go. Alas, she has too, we think.

We can’t see into her mind. We can’t know what she’s feeling – anxiety, dread, exhaustion – but we have tried to make her last days as enjoyable as possible. We put her in her buggy, padded her as much as we could and we took her on what we call the ‘Trundle Walk’, which is just a short sojourn around a group of office buildings not far from home. Said buildings border on a nature reserve so the environment is sound, the pavements are even and there’s a lot to see. Amy seemed to enjoy herself. There were treats to eat and sights to see and, of course, the kids loved every minute of the walk. They’ve both grown up with Amy and this is their first experience with death. We’re expecting some tears.

Sad but inevitable. Everyone is condemned to a slow, uncomfortable death. Nobody gets out of this show alive.

It’s with this in mind that I added these last few paragraphs of this rather long piece that began a month ago as just a small list of suggestions but quickly mushroomed into an article that is almost a short novella. Not quite perhaps but getting there. Yes, definitely getting there.

The Bitch is back

I’m writing this because the Muse is here. That taciturn, unpredictable bitch has shown her face and I find that I am compelled to scribble down some thoughts lest she keep me up all bloody night with mindful insights and witty remarks. How do I know the bitch is in town? Because I’ve just added over three hundred words without pausing. Likely this number will exceed five hundred by the time the clock strikes midnight. I have hardly stopped to catch a breath. I also know I’m in the zone because the spelling mistakes are multiplying with every paragraph. Happens. Get used to it.

I should also point out that I am typing this stone-cold sober. I have not had a drink in weeks. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a drink that was stronger than a Diet Coke. Probably months ago. Probably Christmas or not long after. Why is this important?

I am not Hemmingway. You are not Hemmingway. You do not need to be as pissed as a shit-house rat before you’re in the right state of mind to even think about writing. Personally, I find that getting utterly rat-arsed drunk does not improve the quality of the writing. I have done it. I was angry and depressed at the time – finding oneself staring down the barrel of a divorce does tend to make you a tad annoyed and I turned to my poison of choice in those days, which was Tequila. On one occasion, I drank so much over three, maybe four hours, that I lost the use of my legs. I also achieved very little productive writing and, in fact, ended up in an internet Chat Room with a grown man who wanted me to pretend I was an athletics major called Todd, and a woman who was convinced that she was a spider. No, I am not making this up. Not one iota.

You know what I did with those two? I jotted down a couple of pertinent details and promised that, one day, I’d turn them into characters in a book. I did and the story was sent up the line to a well-known publisher but, alas, never saw the light of day, which was a shame, I reckon.

Speaking of Hemmingway, I found a friend a few years ago who acquired a cat called Hemmingway. Hemmingway was a rescue cat and, as cats go, he was pretty likeable. Alas, Hemmingway also had a counterpart and he was just awful. Perhaps you would be too if your named was (wait for it) Butt-crack. Yup, that was the cat’s name. Can you imagine dinner time in that house, standing on the back step and yelling Hemmingway! Butt Crack!”? Can you imagine the response you’d receive. Incidentally, Butt Crack was mercifully renamed shortly after his adoption. Butt Crack became Chester or, occasionally, Chesterfield, which is much more neighbour-friendly.

Anyway, muses.

Suppose you’re not in the mood. Suppose that your Muse has buggered off. How do you kick start the creative flow? Is there a way to jump start the grey cells? Well, yes. I think there is. It’s called a Journal.

I keep a diary and I make sure I add something at least every other day. Writing a diary helps enormously. Do it regularly enough and the activity becomes part of your creative process, your routine and I’ve found that routine is what drives you to the page. Keeping a journal drives the compulsion, the need to write and writing a couple of paragraphs about your day is definitely better than endlessly doom-scrolling through Facebook.

What do I put in my diary? Obviously, I’ve been charting Amy’s progress over the last few months and keeping a record of her notable decline helped us arrive at the rather inevitable conclusion. I also keep a record of progress made on various jobs, my day job, musical activities, reading lists, future ideas, that sort of thing. I keep a detailed record of books I’ve read. I don’t just place a tick box in the margin. I actually record what I felt about the writing, which sections worked, which didn’t.

For instance, I been working my way through an anthology of short stories in the last few days. I also have a piece in said volume and I wanted to see how it stacked up against other writers. Some of the stories worked on every level. Some worked on some levels but were let down by poor dialogue or an unconvincing premise. Some were just bad. Bad with a capital B and I was forced to assume that the Publisher added some of these works either as a favour to the author or because good stories were a bit thin on the ground and, according to the Publisher’s basic axiom that more is better than less, those stories were added to bulk up the publication.

I’m also in the middle of several other books – Lars Iyer’s “Wittgenstein Junior” is one. “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell is another. I have, on standby, “Algorithms to Live By” by Christian and Griffiths and Howard Jacobson’s biography of Elon Musk. That’s an eclectic mix and deliberately so. You should never read just one type of book. Mix it up a bit. “Oh, I don’t read anything except Horror and Sci-Fi!” some of you might say and that’s fine if you’re into writing Horror and/or Sci-Fi but the problem with that approach is that so many other writers of Horror and Sci-Fi do exactly the same. They stay in their rather insular echo chambers. They don’t ever wander off the reservation and it’s important to take the blinkers off every now and again. There’s more out there than slash and stalk movies and sequels to prequels.

Stop talking and go to bed, David!

We’re now up to twelve hundred words and the clock is slowly heading towards my midnight cut off. That’s my deadline. I promised that I wouldn’t pull another all-nighter. I promised I would go to bed.

Pulling an all-nighter might be necessary (that word again!) if you’re on a tight deadline but I’ve rarely found that the quality of the work increases after midnight. The quality does seem to deteriorate when I become tired so maybe this isn’t a healthy practice.

Getting up early does seem to work well. The house is quiet. Everyone else is still in bed. Nobody objects to the smell of hot coffee gently wafting upstairs so it’s a win-win all round.

Once up, I rarely look at e-mails or social media before I start work. I find them too distracting. It’s very easy to get locked into a long and detailed response and, before long, your writing time is up and you’ve got to rejoin the human race. Similarly, social media is purposely designed to keep you distracted, to keep you from working and to make you notice advertising so that’s a huge “NO!” from me first thing.

Here’s a trick to writing that I picked up from the makers of South Park. Most writers move through their stories according to a pre-conceived plan. There are only a small number of permutations available most of the time. Matt Stone and Trey Parker use a different technique called the But then... method.

Something happens and it’s kinda normal and ho-hum and humdrum. But then… this happens. And the characters work through that set of problems. But Then… something else happens, and the characters work through that set of updated conditions.

Used to excess, But Then... writing can result in some violent jump-cuts between themes and behaviour, changes that will break the flow and magic in your work, shatter the spell between you, the writer and your reader. That’s occasionally counterproductive.

Which reminds me… We had a power cut this morning. Just a momentary brown out but it did screw up my alarm clock (a little) and it did reboot my precious iMac. That’s always a worry because my iMac likes to back up stuff in the middle of the night and losing a backup disc is not my idea of fun at all.

The Power cut did serve one purpose though. I ended up with an idea for a new short story. A software engineer wakes up one morning and realises that his development system has been reset overnight and he starts to wonder if he was reset by the same problem. It’s an absurd notion, right? But what if it were true? How would you even know? He asks his favourite AI helper, who makes a whole bunch of crazy and ridiculous recommendations for proving that he’s still the same old happy systems programmer he used to be but then… But then…

But then... This is my story. Go make your own ending up.

That's All Folks!

Right, it’s now close to midnight so I’m signing off now. Seventeen hundred words in ninety minutes. Not bad. I even spelled some of them correctly. Shame about the grammar though. That’ll need an editor.