Michael Collins

Archive for the ‘About writing’ Category

Walking out of the local supermarket and into the main mall area three months ago, I saw a toddler, aged around three, standing near a toy car—you know the ones, you put your child behind the steering wheel, feed the slot a dollar, and the thing lights up, growling and shaking, to the utter delight of the young.

She was blonde, barefooted, and dressed a little raggedy, but she had an inner beauty, an exuberance, and a sense of wonder that, despite the weight of my bags and the prospect of a plod to my car in scorching thirty six degree sunshine, made me chuckle.

As I drew level, she stood on the car’s pedestal and called to someone behind me. ‘Daddy, daddy, look!’

She climbed into the driver's seat

Hearing a rough, throaty male voice echo through the mall, several people including myself stopped to look around. ‘‘Get off that fucking thing!’

The little girl, appearing not to hear, began to climb into the car’s driving seat. Her fascination with the machine was intense—as if she’d never set eyes on anything like it before. Perhaps from the country, I thought.

In the next moment, a thin, shaven-haired, thuggish-looking guy around thirty rushed to the girl, gripped her by one arm, and hauled her from the machine. His pale, hawkish face was twisted with ferocious anger—almost feral.

As he viciously bent the girl’s arm and her leg slammed against the toy car, she screamed in pain.

It was over in seconds, with half a dozen of us spectators left gawping in horror and shock as the man disappeared around a corner in the direction of the mall’s exit. Gradually, muttering in disapproval, we began to disperse and move in our intended directions.

Feeling nauseated, and trying to come to terms with a sense of guilt, I walked towards the car park wondering what I could or should have done. It had happened too quickly, I rationalised. The guy was probably on drugs—he looked like a junky, all emaciated and mean-looking—so any interference may have had terrible consequences for the girl and for me for that matter. He may have been carrying a weapon—he looked the type. Anyway, my involvement would have enmeshed me in witness statements, possible court appearances, maybe even some retribution from the guy himself. And for what? It’s possible the girl was an impossibly naughty creature and the incident was the culmination of a day of enormous parental frustration.

Beginning to walk across the deserted car park, I heard a terrible wailing. It was the girl, perhaps a hundred metres away, held against a battered old truck and being beaten with a length of plastic piping.

I was paralysed. I didn’t know what to do. My hands were full of shopping bags, it was unbearably hot, and there was nobody else around to help. The guy was also probably half my age and, built like a whip, would make mincemeat out of me.  As the girl’s cries became shriller, battering my ears, and the heat seared mercilessly up from the concrete, I felt like throwing up. Was this like being in hell?

Is this what hell is about?

Luckily that entire incident never happened. I made it up. The questions are: what emotions did it evoke? How did you feel about the girl, the father, and me? Did my inertia and pathetic rationalising make you angry? Were you imagining yourself in the same circumstances, and wondering what you would have done?

Sometimes we have to cause readers some discomfort. It’s not all about feeling good. If we can bring their emotions to the surface, make them angry, distressed, or even confused about how they feel, we’re doing our work.

What was the last piece of fiction you read that upset you?

You have 10 minutes

Here’s a fun exercise to help you get started on your book. Exercise? Fun? I’m kidding right? No, I’m not—not in this blog anyway. Next time I definitely will be, so watch out. For now, let’s have a look at a way of getting those creative juices flowing. Remember, we’ve all got to start somewhere.

You have only ten minutes. This makes sure that the exercise is enjoyable, so don’t go hard on yourself. Ready?

On a sheet of paper, or on your keyboard, make a list of possible chapter titles—anything that springs to mind. It doesn’t matter how many you come up with—just go for it. The titles don’t have to make sense, they may not even seem relevant. The idea is to simply make a list right off the top of your head. And, the more you think about it, the less useful it will be. Go on, have some fun and see what happens!

Allow your mind to do the work!

Done it?

How did you go?

You’ve allowed your unconscious and pre-conscious minds to do a whole lot of work. Now you can examine your list and flesh out the titles with a couple of sentences, then one or two paragraphs, and then maybe a page or two. And there you go, your first draft flowing into being.

Without fear

Yes, it’s that time of the year when we might make some resolutions: this year I will write without fear—fear of rejection, fear of going public, fear that my innermost thoughts and dark psyche are being exposed. I shall write bravely, setting aside time to write—for myself—come what may.

Brave words, but what the hell has a specific time of the year got to do with what we should be doing right now anyway? A few wise words from Karen Nixon’s new blog got me thinking. She talked about our propensity for wanting to leave the old year’s pain and difficulties behind and make a fresh start in the new, and she made the valuable point not to wipe the slate clean, but to take all we’ve learnt, moving forward with the benefit of hindsight.

Take the New Year by storm!

Well, here’s some hindsight. A writer doesn’t look forward to a point in time when the stars and moons are in perfect alignment to do his or her thing. A writer does it now. Now, I say. And, yes, as you take the New Year by storm, may the mistakes you have made in the blundering universe of writing be your reckless, charging stead.

To the breach!

(500) Days of Summer

Looking through an array of Christmas cards yesterday, I was struck by the complete lack of imagination of the wording inside them. Has it always been like this, I wondered. For the last few decades I’ve gone for blank cards because the generic wording never seemed to fit—for me anyway. And now the words all seem very much the same.

In the 2009 movie, (500) Days of Summer, a romantic comedy about a woman, Summer, who doesn’t believe in true love, and the young man, Tom, who falls for her, Tom is employed by a greetings card company to write the sentiments inside the products. I was fascinated. Do jobs like this still exist? I also really felt for him when his depression resulted in a departmental transfer—from greetings to condolences. But, more importantly, where are his cards?

How often have you received a card from someone you haven’t seen or heard from since last year, and seen something like, ‘lots of love from Aunty Flo and Uncle Bill’? And that’s it. No news. Not a scrap. Flo’s husband, Uncle Bill, may be recovering from a triple bypass following a massive heart attack, and Flo herself celebrating the year she climbed Kilimanjaro (aged 89, and probably precipitating Bill’s condition), but all you get is ‘lots of love’. Oh, and, ‘wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’, because that was already printed there.

Let’s make our words really matter.

Just to continue the light-hearted theme of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, and grinding to its climactic conclusion (see, it’s contagious), the winner of this year’s award goes to David Guterson, best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars.

His novel, Ed King, brings the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex (note the pun) from the distant past into late 20th century Seattle.

In one scene the main character “massaged, kneaded, stretched, rubbed, pinched, flicked, feathered, licked, kissed, and gently bit her shoulders”, but the clincher for the gong was “Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap.” And I love the end of that scene: “Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.” Well, after all that you’d need to, wouldn’t you?

Read me

What is it about reading a sign? You’ve seen it plenty of times—someone drops litter beside a fully signed-up trash can, dogs and their human slaves roam unfettered on a dogs-on-leashes only beach, we skip across the road when the sign says, DON’T, and junk mail appears in the letterbox, despite the sign that asks otherwise.

Do we not see signs, or are we ignoring them? Why isn’t the message getting through?

Maybe our message just isn’t strong enough, poorly worded, or too obscure. Perhaps what we want to say is drowned by the clutter of our lives, or perhaps we aren’t reading words any more and just want to look at the pictures.

How has reading changed for you?

The winner of this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction is about to be announced.

Last year, for passages in his book, For the Shape of Her, Rowan Somerville won the 18th Bad Sex in Fiction award. When he courageously attended the awards dinner in St James Square in November, he said, “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the nation, I thank you.”

Two questions immediately spring to my mind (I know, I know, you want to read the pieces of bad sex writing that clinched the award for Somerville—just hang on!): one, did he sit down with the express purpose of writing the most unsettling descriptions of sex that he could? And two, what did it do for his book sales? Read on and then tell me what you think.

His description of sex: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”

And his take on a woman’s pubic hair: “Desert vegetation following an underground stream.”

While his protagonist: “Unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night. He took it between his lips and sucked the salt from her.”

Outstanding!

You can’t be much of a writer if you’re not a reader. And you should have read sufficient of your genre if you intend to become good at it. It’s a bit pointless writing historical romances when you only read sci-fi, don’t you think?

You want me to read what?

But what else should you be reading? I’d go nuts if I had to stick to one particular genre. My tastes range from literary fiction to chick lit, and all points in between, although I draw a line at speculative fiction—I just can’t see it.

There have been numerous theories flung around about what writers should read. For example, one insisted that reading a trashy novel would be seriously detrimental to a literary fiction writer’s work. We now know that to be nonsense. Literary fiction writers read the news just like the rest of us.

So, what do you read? Is it connected in any way to what you write?

Critics

Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs. ~ John Osborne

Things are about to warm up around here. Shorter, sharper blogs, delivered with far more frequency. Not that we’ll lose all the thinky posts—they’ll still be there, and we’ll have a few more from time to time.

For starters, I’d like to mention Lionel Shriver’s gut-pulling novel, So Much For That. If you’ve felt reluctant about putting your weight behind your words when you write—pulling your punches—take new heart and dive into this superb example of how people really are and what makes them that way. Shriver writes with furious energy about people, as sad, disillusioned and utterly unlovable, and yet …

Get into it!