#MyWritingProcess

Never having been accused of punctuality, I gain a certain satisfaction from approaching this latest task two days late. I learned that I'd been nominated by Misha Herwin and Jan Edwards, two conspicuously talented authors, to take part in the #MyWritingProcess international blog tour. After reassurance that this was not one of those nominations that requires me to neck a pint of Brobat with a (temporarily) live echidna in it I put the task into my to-do pile.

Where it stayed.

I could justify this failure by... no I couldn't. The fact is that no one should ever throw me a ball in the unjustifiable hope that I'll catch it. So with the hope that my characteristic tardiness hasn't derailed the whole process, here's my take on this solitary and seldom rewarding process of writing...

1) What am I working on?

After completing The Larks (click here for amazon.co.uk or here for amazon.com), I felt I understood the demands of creating a full-length novel. It's an exhausting process and I didn't feel adequate to the task of starting the next. Not just yet anyway. So the project now is to write a collection of WW1 short stories. While researching The Larks I constantly found snippets of unrelated events and recollections, many of which tried to find their way into the main story. Trouble was, most of them just wouldn't fit.

But they were just too great to waste. Sometimes it would be a single sentence, often a personal recollection that would fire off a thought process that had me asking "I wonder, what's the story behind that?"

The collection doesn't yet have a name; that will come by itself, but the process of creating it has been a genuine joy. The Larks is predominantly an aviation novel, but with these new stories I've found myself in the warm, airless fug of a French dugout, driving an ambulance for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or - go with me on this - watching a ballet dancer from the freezing squalor of a winter trench. Everywhere I've wandered on these battlefields I've found an irrepressible humanity that shines like a beacon across this short century that separates us.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Does it differ? I don't know. This question worries me a little as it's asked so frequently by publishers and agents. Why should being different be an indicator of worth? And if it is, why do the aforesaid publishers and agents exhibit such reluctance to commission anything that actually is different?

I can think of no other branch of the arts where being different is regarded as a virtue in itself. How does Boticelli differ fundamentally from Raphael? De Niro from Di Caprio? Dylan from Cohen? That they all do differ is undeniable, but the difference is in the complex interpretation of their art, not in an advertising-style one-word USP.

But enough of answering one question with a string of others. If my work does differ then I hope it's in the depth and reality of the characters. Our world is shaped and structured by people, and nowhere is this more sharply demonstrated than in war. When I write I find that my cast of characters take control, so in the case of The Larks, the Great War is a backdrop, not the principal subject. Anyone who buys a war novel is hoping to find graphically described action, and I've worked hard not to disappoint on that score. But even in the most frenzied battle, I'm always asking myself, "How does this person feel at this point?" It's my hope that this makes the experience more real and accessible to the reader.

I've also striven for accuracy, not just in making sure that the aircraft are correctly described and their flying characteristics realistic, but also in the minutiae that populate my worlds. Brand names of the period, as much a part of conversation then as i-Pad is today, crop up, usually without explanation (Would you know what to do with a tin of Zam-Buk?), allowing the reader to gain the meaning from context, and become more immersed in the period.

My aim has never been to be different. In fact the opposite; I wanted The Larks to read like the intense personal accounts of the Great War. That this comparison has been made by several reviewers I take as a great compliment. The WW1 collection should evoke the personal memories recorded in superb works like the magnificent Forgotten Voices series of books. If it does, I'll count the exercise a success, and to hell with being different.

3)Why Do I Write What I Write?

The question should possibly be "Why do I write at all?" It's something I've enjoyed ever since Mrs Coulton showed me this magical code of letters in a small Sutton Coldfield primary school. Numbers, their Teutonic scientific brethren, held no magic; they were simply machinery. But words... these incredible tools were gigantic brushes that could paint the dazzling colours that swirled in my childish brain. But even then it was machines of the air that captured my imagination. Spaceships, moon rockets and aeroplanes zoomed, swooped and rat-at-atted through story after story. By the time Mrs Barnett inherited responsibility for my random and uncontrolled creativity I was ready to lock horns on the correct spelling of "Messerschmitt". When I protested her correction to "Messerschmidt" and was later proved right, the future of my principal writing genre was set in stone. The unfortunate effects of the event on my ego were a by-product that has proved less positive.

But I don't just write about flying. I don't so much choose a subject for a story as discover it. I'll read a passage in a book or newspaper, overhear a conversation on a train or possibly pick up an isolated snippet from a guide in a stately home. Then - very often in the car - a story will arrive, almost fully formed. Once that's happened I have little choice but to write it down.

4) How does my writing process work?

Erratically. It happens when it happens, not when I sit down to do it. I have the greatest admiration for those who can attack NanoWriMo with any prospect of success. Writing 1600 or so words every day is a stark impossibility to me. I understand the principle that it's about getting the words down and going back later to turn it into good writing. But I just can't do it. I'll sit for two hours and write half a sentence. Then delete it. Then spend a further two hours researching where the apostrophe - if any - would have appeared on a bottle of Daddies Sauce in 1916 (Before the "S" by the way).

Part of the problem is that I'm not a structured writer. I can't write by building the scaffolding first and filling in the gaps. When I develop a plot it's a very vague sketch because I find that often my characters won't cooperate in taking me where I intended to go. That probably sounds hideously pretentious - in fact it is hideously pretentious, but it's true nevertheless. They become as real to me as members of my family, and they operate according to their own personalities. If I try to force them down prefabricated corridors they lose definition (I'm talking about my characters here, you understand, not my family). To me a novel is a fragile reality that bursts apart as soon as someone acts outside their character. I know things about my people that never appear in the story, but that govern their every reaction. It's the water they were boiled in, and it makes them unpredictable, even to me who created them.

So the plot doesn't always go where I intended. Some years ago I began a screenplay based on life in an advertising agency. It was intended as a sit-com, based on my personal experiences in such an environment. It ended up as a drama series about the rise and fall of an amateur band, because these buggers I'd invented insisted on strutting and fretting their own hours. Before you ask, it disappeared into the commissioning maw of Channel 4 and never emerged from the other end, but you get the general concept. 

I start out with only the roughest idea where we're going, and let my actors lead the way. Like one of Douglas Adams' characters who follows people who look as if they know where they're going, we rarely end up at the intended destination. But we often arrive somewhere far more interesting.

*

So there you go. Job done and baton retrieved from under the sideboard. I'd now like to pass it on to a writer I've admired for some time, and with whom I hope to cooperate on a forthcoming short story collection, the splendid Malcolm Havard. Give him a few days - he's a busy chap, but I can promise that what he'll contribute to this tour will be worth reading.

Carry on the Potters (Part Two)

Never let it be said I don't respond to criticism! I am well rebuked, and here's part two...

Jump to Part One

Well, the balloon had to go up, and it did. First of July we went over and I never saw the like. Explosions going off everywhere, so you were ducking rocks and stones as much as bullets and bombs. I heard as how one of our mines went off with such a bang that the rocks landed in our lines and one poor lad lost a leg. Three days of that and we were mixed up so much we didn’t know which way we were facing.

I got a piece of shrapnel or rock or something – don’t know what – just under the rim of my tin hat. Everything went black and white and I wandered around a bit, bumping into people. Then I opened my eyes and it was dark. First off I thought I was blind, but then a flare went up and I knew I could see. My head was banging like the Shelton Bar, but I raised it and looked around. I was on my own, and I could see I was a good hundred yards from the nearest trenches. Trouble is, I didn’t know if they were ours or theirs. So I tossed a coin in my head and made for the one that was the shortest walk.

I say walk, but I went most of the way on hands and knees. Both sides kept sending up flares, and you showed up like a shilling on a sweep’s bum every time. 

Well, I’d gone a little way when I heard a voice say, “That you, Bob?”

I looked round and there was George, lying in a shell hole. “Hello mate,” says I, “What you doing here?”

“Oh, just taking the air, watching the moon, nothing much.” says George, which was swank because now I could see he was hurt bad.

“Let’s have a look at you,” says I.

Well, I could see straight away he’d copped more than just a Blighty one. The front of his battle dress was all bloody, but when I opened it he just sort of came to bits. He was looking at me the whole time and said, sort of hopeful, “Is it bad?”

“Not too bad,” I said and buttoned him up again. “Wait here and I’ll get a stretcher.”

I started for the trenches again, still not knowing if I was heading for home or Hell. That was when I saw something white waving about fifty yards ahead. Some silly beggar of a stretcher bearer was standing up, in full view, waving a piece of cloth on a stick. Well of course, I should have known it would be Jimmy. When I got there he was standing on the edge of a crater you could lose a bus in. All round the rim there were men lying, fanned out like the petals of a daisy.

“Glad to see you, Bob,” says Jimmy, pointing around, “There’s work for us here.”

I pointed back at No Man’s Land, “George is out there. Help me get him.”

Jimmy shook his head, “Jerry’s letting us off while we’re close to our own side. He won’t be so kind if he thinks we’re advancing.”

“But he’s hurt bad!” I said.

“So are these, and there’s a lot more of them.” He pulled my arm. “Come on, pal, these lads are potters too.”

He told me after that he’d been called to the crater by Major Wedgwood, who’d been cut to pieces by shrapnel. The last words he’d said to Jimmy were “Carry on, the Potters.” Well, we carried a few that night, back and forth from the crater to the trenches, and Jerry never fired a shot.

We never did find George. I saw his name in, let’s see, 1984 I think, when I visited the military cemetery at Bapaume. I’d found the Major’s grave soon enough, then saw a name as I turned away. There was George, further from Shelton than it’s possible for us to be.

And now we’ve got a new millennium coming and Jimmy’s gone the same way as George and the Major. It’s nearly time for me to go too, where my friends went, where Wedgwood went, where our pride went, and where I hope it can still be found.

Carry on the Potters.

Carry On the Potters (Part One)

This was a piece written for a Gladstone Pottery event. Please read in a Six Towns accent...

Major Wedgwood were a tall chap, fair haired, with a moustache you could hang clothes on.  “The Viking”, they called him, and I could see why, that day in factory when I first saw him.  He’d got us lined up in front of the new kiln and he gave us the big speech about being the finest company in the world, in the finest city in the world, because it had finest people in the world.  Pretty poor stuff you’d think, but we drank it up like it was Nestle’s Milk.  This was 1916 and I was only 14, but I was a big lad for my age and they’d set me on to shift barrows at Etruria.

The Major had come back from the War for a board meeting or some such, and then he’d asked to speak to the able-bodied men in the factory about joining his regiment.  They were the North Staffordshires, but he said we’d be joining a pals battalion, where we’d be with our best mates.  The Potters, they called themselves.  Jimmy Leather, an older lad who lived by us in Chatham Street,  said we should enlist because it was our duty and anyway it paid a sight more than wheeling clay.

Well, you can imaging the kerfuffle when I got home and said that me and Jimmy Leather were joining up.  Mom was having none of it, and said she’d write to Mr Wedgwood and tell him I was under-age, so I let on to give up on the idea.  After a bit of argument, you understand, or she’d have copped on I was up to something.

Well, me and Jimmy had a word with the charge-hand next morning and he said we could go down to the recruiting room as had been set up in the offices.  I’d never been in there before and it was a bit frightening, all polish-smelling and clattery, what with typewriters and comptometer machines rattling and people walking about with bits of paper.  We’s shown into a room with a dozen or so other blokes stood around, and when it’s my turn I find myself talking to this sergeant who gives me a look and asks me how old I am.

“Seventeen,” I says.

He gives me another look, up and down, sort of slow, and he sees I’m probably taller than him – he were only a little chap – and he nods and asks me to sign a paper.  He claps his hands once and rubs them together and says, “Alright, duck, you belong to the Prince of Wales now.  Go through that door and they’ll have a good look at you.”  That were it.  I was a soldier.

Course, it didn’t turn out quite how we’d expected.  There were a fair few Etruria lads, but I got to know a chap called George who worked with his dad in a factory making tiles for the London Tube.  We all got on and were good pals through training.  Jimmy and me were set up as stretcher bearers, but we still saw a bit of old George, who was going to be a rifleman.

So that was how we found ourselves in France, near a place called La Boiselle, not that I could ever say it proper.  It wasn’t as bad as you might think; it was warm anyway –bloody hot some days, and that’s swearing.  But you’d go to the rear every few days, away from the whizz-bangs, and you could have some decent scoff and a shower and they’d take your battle dress away and get rid of most of your visitors.

And laugh?  Seemed like we never stopped.  Jimmy was a dab hand with the trumpet – in fact he was one of our bandsmen – and he’d play anything you wanted, and if we were having a bit of a sing he’d be there with the harmony, dead on.  Then George would make some crack about us being too close to Ivor Novello for his comfort and we’d all break up laughing again.  Four weeks and I never so much as saw a German, though we could hear them sometimes in their trenches, calling out, singing and laughing as well.  Made me feel funny that did, to hear them carrying on like they was the same as us.

To be continued...

Time Flies

Very little time available these days for keeping this blog up to date. I am blogging with reasonable regularity though on the Classic Air Force website. They've also let me loose as editor of Meteor Magazine, so at least I get to write about - and occasionally mess with - with old aeroplanes! 

I've written a few short stories recently though, so maybe it's time to post one or two of those up here...

Growing Economies Look Like This

Oh that was another thing I should have mentioned...

I spent a week in India courtesy of my great client, Mana Energy.  They'd asked me to put together and present the case for saving costs and the environment by reducing the fuel consumption of large diesels.  And if that sounds rather dreary and worthy, think again.  My host for the week was Uday Bawa, Mana Energy's CEO, and you couldn't wish for better, more entertaining company.

We spent most of the time in Srinagar, where I was to address the Indian Minister of Transport and the heads of the State Transport Companies.  Rather than put up in an aseptic, air-conditioned hotel we took exclusive ownership of a 100-foot houseboat and commuted to and from work each day on board a beautifully painted shikara.  You could very easily get used to this.

I'd been repeatedly warned about Delhi Belhi and Indian driving so was prepared for the worst.  A week later, uninjured and still able to fart without peril I revised my views.  This place is bloody superb.  It's possibly the best place in the world for a vegetarian, so every mealtime was a short trip to paradise.  Even the dinner served on the brand new Air India Dreamliner that took me there was outstanding.

But let's deal with the driving.  OK, so a two-lane road will have at least five lanes of cars on it, every motorcycle will have at least three people on it, and every lorry (which move in hordes at night) will have at least no lights on it whatsoever.  But strangely enough, it all works like a Swiss watch.  Nobody collides, nobody even brakes sharply, and nobody gets upset or aggressive.  Ever.  Drive around Paris and you never see a car with a straight panel.  Drive around Delhi or Srinagar and you never see a dent.  Work it out.

But what was most humbling was the respect and deference I encountered from business people who, demonstrably, leave us for dead when it comes to knowing how to run an economy.  Faced with so much warmth and humility it would have been easy for me to underestimate them.  That would have been an unforgiveable mistake.

There's a genuine national fondness for Britain here.  It's vital that we continue to work to deserve it.

No Substitute for Paper

Just back from a highly therapeutic trip to Scotland I realise I've left the blog alone again.  Dammit!

So what's been happening?  Well I guess one significant milestone was The Larks going on sale as a physical book.  It's there now on Amazon and shortly - I hope - in more adventurous book stores.

There's something very special about clutching your very own collation of macerated trees.  You can buy your very own piece of printed forest on http://tinyurl.com/thelarks.  I'm assured it's all sustainable, honest!

Babbling on Paul Oldfield's Nite Klub

I'll be rabbiting on on a radio interview with Paul Oldfield between 8 and 10 tonight on 87.7FM or online at http://cre8radio.com/listen/.  I'll get to work on the speech impediment - BASTARD! - when I've fixed my Tourettes.  ARSE!