A Penchant For Esoteric Cursive

This is a photograph of myself and my two very dear friends, Rob Gordon and Paddy Johnston. I am smiling because the numerous straighteners, chemical effervescence enhancers and industrial soap flakes that comprise a high percentage of modern commercial lager production are eating their way into my lower duodendum and I am tearily thinking of the Battle of Britain, and the translucent pilots, gone now, with their beautiful, straight lips. They are smiling, I imagine, because I am pinching their arses very hard. The nodding sensei in the background is Jonny Rose, though if you click on his name you will only recieve what I wished him to be; he is in fact a very friendly and enthusiastic social media caliph, part of Social Purley.

At the time of taking we are about to graduate from our Creative Writing Masters degree. It was a great year for all of us, and I believe I speak without exception; we tailored our craft, played gigs and generally extended the Long Night of university, Schezerade-style.

And now we have emerged, clutching our little scrolls (which were in fact frameable, unyielding card - there was no soft vellum, no errant strands of fur. I wanted a VIKING degree) and, predictably, we are finding it rather difficult, much like everyone else. Paddy is working in an engineering firm, being exceptionally talented at bringing people cups of tea and telling them how to sell dust (at least, that is what I believe HR and Marketing consists of) and Rob is working for Virgin, greasing Richard “Call Me Sanchez” Branson’s stripper coil and pumping out excellent social media and travel content like blasts from the shotgun of the apocaplyptic survivalist that he has always dreamed he would be.

I am having less success, but bear with me. All in good time.

In fact, it seems that all I am qualified to do is teach Creative Writing. So, permit me. Below are some things I learnt about writing. They are not necessarily what was intended. If you are currently on a writing course, or indeed practice any of these rituals to enhance your work, stop now. They are bad for you. 

1) Write In Pairs To Bring Out The Best Of Both Of Your Work

I will not be as foolish as to say that this never works. Many excellent partnerships have produced excellent works, not least in the realms of fiction; Good Omens really injected strains of both Prachett’s irreverent genius-nonsense and Gaiman’s careful, wry dessication into nothing other than itself. It was an accomplished piece. These pieces do exist. But forcing writers to work together is futile. We are like pandas. All the bamboo and surreptitiously snaffled prying fingers will not make us fuck. Leave us alone on a mountain, and we’ll hash it out together.

Several times I was forced to write with people who were nothing like me. They do not see the world as I do. Not for one minute am I suggesting that my world view is superior, but taking a common plot and trying to bring five distinct plans into one does not work. And, more often than not, I was not the only one who did not wish to work together. Paddy and I are, if not chalk and cheese, at least like two chemically repellant alloys that want so badly to bond, but alas cannot with the three dimensions assigned to us. We read each other’s work, appreciate it, critique it, but would never dream of actually writing in that way.

Editing the work of others is a fantastic way to approach your own work differently. Creating a politically-correct, homogenised “story”, designed to bottle a small part of everyone’s “genius”, is a route to misunderstanding one’s strengths. Let me work with who I like. Let me be my own panda. 

2) Never, EVER Use “Nice”

This? This is a… biggie. You use “nice” in a piece of writing and your tutor will skew sideways as if strafed by a mounted gun emplacement and fix you with a leaky, betrayed gurn, as if to say: “Why, Django, why? I was only three days from retirement, my daughter is graduating college, I’m going to be a father, a grandfather, and a grandmother. Your… timing… has… been… better…” Nice, apparently, means nothing. It is a bloated, hideous mess of a word, a grey sweetmeat that nobody wants, the pluck of a person’s vocabulary, and something that bad writers use.

Fuck off. Fuck off with the ironclads of authorship. No word is bad. No word is useless. There are only useless writers, and even they are rarer than useless rules. Think of “nice”! Think of its possibilities! 

Rarely is a writer afforded a word that is so short, so subtle, and yet can contain so much power. Used in speech, it is like uranium-tipped irony, a faucet through which an entire plot pours, unseen. Within a text, it completely spread-eagles the author and his method, and (I extend my metaphor into etymology here), like Prometheus, he is fuel for the hungry buzzards above, the readers.

Of course, it must be used delicately, or perhaps never used at all; but to ban its use is to deprive each and every writer that listens of that one time when they may use it, whether in one novel or one lifetime, and to use all their skill and all their restraint to render it the most powerful word in the text. “Nice” has brothers, also, words that have so much power and influence that their continued use is seen as lack of invention.

Use them wisely, but, for the love of pity, use them.

3) You Will Never Be As Good As The Very Best

This final point is not an overt rule, in that it is rarely given voice in situ; however, the pervading pressure of a Creative Writing class is one of abject future portent.

I understand that this attitude has a purpose - to breed humility and understatement in a generation of writers who could, with the right cocktail of entitlement and coddling, be pretty fucking insufferable. But writers must believe in their own ability, even if it is misplaced. If even one writer in every five thousand has the actual ability to match their ambition, the world is a better place for it. This self-confidence and self-assuredness will also help those who will, inevitably, fail; victims of the law of averages. But, hopefully, they won’t stop. They will keep going until they are dead. And they will not be unhappy.

Standing at the foot of the colossi of literature makes me, as a writer, unhappy. I am not sure that I do owe anything to these men and women; I may enjoy them, I may love them, I may reference them in my work, in my ludicrously ring-roadish blog posts, but they are men, and women, and that is enough. I am at that oracled age now of 22, a sort of inverted Hendrix, the typical age that most writers find their feet. I could name twenty writers that have done so, and these men and women were, at the heart of it and in their time, no different from me. They just happened to be wonderful, wonderful writers. They are not gods. They were tradesmen with Aspergers; blacksmiths that slipped and hit the anvil.

Treating these great writers as gods will not breed humility or good writing. It will breed fetishism, an altaresque where we continually bow down to those who went before us, a modesty that stifles the desire to rise, and a post-modern, post-ironic world-weariness, an imminent awareness of the past, a tool that will smash any and all homages, original thought, devotions or passion for any subject, ever.

You notice that I do not rule out homages, or reference, or acknowledgement of achievement; these people happened (and this is the right word) and we should celebrate this fact. But never give them more power than they are due; we will make slaves of ourselves. We have already begun, and I myself am not immune.