Sacrificing Children On The Altar Of Literature

The two questions any author gets asked the most, are ‘where do your ideas come from?’ and ‘do you use real life people for your characters?’. If the answer to the latter is yes, the follow up question, is ‘do they know?’

The child psychologist Jean Piaget drew up his theories partly through observation of his own children. Sigmund Freud psychoanalysed his daughter Anna and though anonymised, she was the case study for “A Child Is Being Beaten” published in 1919. Neither author was challenged at the time over any questionable ethics, though some of Freud’s modern critics have since rounded on him, not just for the ultimate in Oedipal/Electra Complexes concerning his own daughter, but accusations of virtual incest through opening up her deepest intimacies on the analysand’s couch. 

Both authors would have likely offered up scientific method in any putative defence. However, fiction authors have no such recourse when frequently asked whether we base our characters on real life people. And while our attempts at anonymising (through fictionalising), may just about get us through condemnation for identity theft and lack of consent, when children are used for material that is feasibly an invasion of privacy too far.

I knew I wanted to become a parent, through observing my own childhood as a singleton with a certain dissatisfaction and some resolutions on how I might do it differently.  I was an observer by nature and writing seemed well suited to such a temperament. I started writing stage plays, but when my twin boys arrived. I switched to late night novel-writing since I could no longer devote the time hanging out at theatre bars networking. My early novels barely mentioned children, but now that my sons have attained the age of majority and fledged from home by attending university, I've turned my literary observations to writing about parenting and children. In doing so, have I betrayed their privacy?

The comedian Stewart Lee had a routine about now that he was a parent, his entire life was in service to his children, driving them around to play dates or watching kids’ movies with them, so that he had no real life material to draw on to create a new comedy routine (which of course he adroitly subverts by offering up plenty of comic evidence, eliding Scooby Doo with the political woes of our nation). When you become a parent, one of the things it does is prompt memories of your own childhood in offering perhaps a ready reference to apply to that of rearing your own children. But I had already covered this happenstance through my own reflections that had fed into my desire to become a father in the first place. I may not have always prefigured my parenting actions correctly, but I wasn’t taken by surprise. So the first childhood experiences I offered up to the altar of literature were actually my own. Not quite the scientific method of Piaget and Freud, but I do probably hold the intellectual and emotional rights over my own experiences.

But such content was not enlisted in isolation. There was an echo with the more recent layerings provided by having my own children. But a good deal of what I put into the novel were certain universals about children and in particular child development, rather than details that would identify and out my children as the raw material of the book. Piaget outlined developmental stages which all children go through as their brains mature and although his timeline for such phases has been challenged, the principle remains generally accepted. The same in my book, that language really only enters the picture once the child is able to take on solids through the resultant change in the anatomy of the throat. How we then gain words through imitation long before we know how they are spelled, before we acquire knowledge of the alphabet and the school-borne struggles of mastering the stroke of our pencil to write our letters. From these universals I could proceed to consider how we all acquire our personal forms of self-expression, how much it stems from our parents and how much it deviates as we are able to individuate ourselves. I don’t credit I am betraying any confidences in sharing some observations on these developments. Indeed, one of the arts of novel writing is to make its themes universal enough to speak to a wide diversity of readers. A novel that remains subjective to the experiences of the author is far more likely to fail to communicate. 

In real life I have twin boys. In my novel the protagonist mother has two girls. So my experiences standing on the touchline managing my twin’s Under-9s football team to an FA Fair Play Award couldn’t feed into the novel. However, the overweening ambition of some of the other parents stood there on the touchline screaming at their scions, did inform the novel’s contemplation of the hazy line between a child’s individuation and the parent’s overlaying of it with their own projections for the child, rooted in the parent’s own neediness or unfulfilled dreams.

I also have scenes set in the nursery school playground, but again the mother of girls demands a different depiction than my actual experiences of a father waiting to collect his boys at going home time. Though the playground politics of who talks to who and who shuns who, is likely a universal scenario, standing as a man huddling close to the smattering of other fathers among the preponderant women does ineffably change the dynamics. So while the portrayal of the fictional mother’s isolation reflected my own, I’m happy to report that the by extension isolation of her child, did not reflect the true status of my own twins who were perfectly blended into the social scene of the kids at their school. My fictional mother doesn’t even have the consolation I managed to utilise, of quietly imagining that I would assuredly be in possession of the best record collection of any parent stood in the playground, seeing as I worked in an independent record shop at the time. See, one doesn’t require the direct experiences of one’s own children to get into an infantile mind, one just probe’s one’s own stock of such behaviours.

Further novelistic reflections of pester power in the supermarket, or of the end of service for a teaching toy as all its peripherals are finally and unutterably lost, each represent my reflections looking back on similar incidents; they happened while bringing up my twins, but again there are dual refracting lenses, me as a father casting back to when I was a child so that the outcomes written about is a new synthesis, neither truly representing my childhood nor that of my twins. The choking on a raisin never to the best of my knowledge afflicted either of my boys, while the panic over the body dysmorphia engendered by dolls, was never any direct translation over from “Action Man”^TM, seeing as I wouldn’t provide my boys with anything military in the toy department. So a good deal of the work just comes from the imagination, rather than transliteration of actual events, that in another register might appear in a memoir or biography. 

And this is the rub and which returns us to the questions readers ask of authors. Novels do many things, but one of the most significant is that the author takes you inside the mind of his characters, someone likely to have different experiences and thoughts to that of the reader. But where do these characters come from? They come from the mind of the author of course, but ultimately authors are writing about themselves. They may pick characters seemingly diametrically opposed to themselves, but in doing so they are likely tapping into lesser seen parts of their own personality, exploring or imagining themselves in these guises. For a writer cannot write wholly outside of their own experience. Even if a writer employs an anecdote someone else told them, or something they read in a newspaper or saw in a film, it becomes part of them if it enters their stock of memory enough to be recalled when the writer decides to use it in a book. Second hand experience rather than first for sure, but still from within them. So I don’t believe I have pillaged the lives of my children for my novel, only myself. If I'm wrong in believing this, then I guess they will call me out on it. I'll let you know if that's the case.

Published by Dead Ink Books 

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Comma As Muck - Editorial Battle Royals over the Comma

Before the social media age, I didn't know what an "Oxford Comma" was. But thanks to the wonder of people with too much time on their hands on Twitter, I know realise I have not only always rejected the O.C., but I will fight anyone who says I have to use a comma before the word 'and' in any circumstance, as part of a list or not. I vaguely remember being told at school that you don't put commas before 'and', which is odd, because I was probably that first generation of pupils who were given no grammar training at all as it had been dispensed with as we were to learn our mother tongue more organically. What grammar I picked up was through having to learn French and Latin in secondary school.

As a writer, I've never really thought much about grammar. I used to write stage plays and there you have to think very hard about commas, colons and ellipses for the actors who have to speak your dialogue. Since moving to prose, I've mainly written flash fiction, where with just 1000 words to play with in a story, grammar doesn't weigh too heavily on the whole.

But (another vague rule was never start a sentence with 'but') as I received my novel's proof copy edit back from my publisher last week, all of a sudden I've had to think very, very hard about grammar and in particular the humble comma. In the edit, there were no more than ten words changed, deleted or added throughout the whole book. there were maybe about another 5 tense change edits. Some style guide edits around brackets and whether the full stop went inside or outside and also if you ended a bracket with a question mark, do you still need a full stop outside the bracket? And the rest of the edits - commas deleted and commas inserted. I was asked for my comments on the proposed edits...

Dave Eggers has written a novel entirely in dialogue, but he doesn't employ speech marks. Instead each new speaker starts with a dash.

Will Self has written a book without paragraphs (and even changes narrator mid sentence and without warning).

Mathias Enard has written a book without a single full stop, that's right, the whole 500+ pages is one sentence...

These are not random acts or examples of sloppy grammar. They have made these decisions consciously for stylistic reasons. And in reviewing my proof, I realised that though probably born from an organic sense, the vast majority of my use of commas was its own stylistic decision.

The novel is quite conversational in style. Three different narrative voices to be precise. Each differentiated from the other. So a uniform style guide across the board is not going to work. They use pauses for dramatic effect, for emphasis. A comma is always going to work better for this than a semi-colon or colon, even if they're rattling off a list. (To my mind, a semi-colon is always suggestive of a magician about to reveal some great trick, which may not always be appropriate in a sentence, maybe it's less of an outstanding revelation and more a natural corollary). A comma can indicate where the emphasis of a sentence should fall, important if a sentence is building up to some climactic reveal or suggestion such as at the end of an argument, or outrageous statement. A comma can also lend temporality to certain verbs and actions, such as "re-emergence", "festering", or here in the case of "trailing", conveying the sense of a repeated happening, which over time has yielded a certain effect or understanding.

Been trailing here long enough now to put the names to the faces, the faces to the aspects of the mothers 

Which brings me to a reason to delete commas. Phrases like "of course", "you see", "only", "since", "well" and the like, usually sustain a comma. But when the speaker (in the cases of my three narrative voices, an internal voice) is in full-flow, is being declamatory, commas in these cases only slow the flow. When one of the voices uses the phrase "of course", she may not be supposing and weighing up the alternatives, she is using it for emphasis as if there are no other possibilities. Confident, assertive, a comma absolutely works against this. One of the characters has written her words in a diary, so she has already largely processed them between the event she is reporting and coming to set them down on paper. She is not ruminating, she is leaving herself a fully-realised story, with morals and cautions to avoid mistakes in the future. Another voice exists only online, where grammar is rarely strictly formal. The third voice, (non-human), is putting forth an argument in rhetorical fashion, as if we the human race were slow kids at school who just have to listen and take our medicine as she delivers it. Pace and tone fundamentally determine the need for pauses or run-on sentences. Sometimes the speaker offers a seeming space for the listener to consider what has just been said; other times no such opportunity is permitted, because to the speaker's mind it is self-evident. The tension for the reader is whether these narrators are trustworthy and their words reliable; that for all their assertive flow, are there perceptible cracks in their confidence which might undermine the veracity of what they say? Commas can't do all the work behind such tension, but they are indispensable to it. A comma can hint at insincerity as much as bluster.

Although we read silently, we still do hear it at some level inside our heads. I always have a draft explicitly where I read aloud to try and see how reading it might be for the reader. Sometimes you have to help the reader, to give them pauses to catch their breath, or cogitate on something you suspect is going to reverberate in their mind. Here the humble comma is most helpful in breaking up the run of a sentence and providing the reader a chance to get to the end of it. Such commas must be careful not to work against the logic used in the previous paragraphs, but they are still important for helping the reader along. I use the phrase "the everyday arpeggio of parenting", which because of its plosive sounds can leave the reader a little breathless, so I use a comma to let the reader catch their breath before completing the sentence "inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve ends".

So there you have it. No more than 15 notes on words, but page after page about commas needing to be instated or inserted ones needing to be removed. I really came to see my own novel in a whole new light, that of the microcosmic at the level of the sentence. No doubt in future I shall still write with an innate and organic sense of grammar, but in the revisions and edits, I shall have to think about every comma in this way once again.

A Bucket List - Flash Fiction

The milkmaid entered the barn carrying a three-legged wooden stool in one hand, a metal pail in the other. She set down the stool, sat down and decorously arranged the hem of her bodice and smoothed the apron of her dirndl. He wasn’t sure why she was clad in a bonnet, surely it wasn’t as protection from squirted milk? Perhaps it was a covering against straw from the thatch above. Whatever its purpose, it conjured up in him images of hair nets worn in bakeries, that trepanned the wearer and in doing so changed the proportions of the face in unwholesome manner. Always enough to put you off your bread. Now it further induced in him the image of bank robbers who pull stockings over their faces to distort their features. No, enough of this bane, hair is meant to be witnessed! The milkmaid untied the straps of her bonnet under her chin, threw the linen away carelessly and shook out her liberated tresses with such flourish that necessitated a reprise of her raiment redress.

She brought her hands to the cow’s teats. She started plucking and drawing then back and forth like organ stops. The sound emitted was the metallic syncopation of the milk striking the metal sides of the bucket. I shuddered at the thought of her hands working me with such vigour, although the cow was seemingly unmoved by any discomfort in the contact. You were briefly stirred by the tribadic association of two females, however the alien nature of the udder, looking like some sort of deep marine creature shattered any imagining of the human mammary. In addition the stream of jism whizzing evoked by the unending jet of milk was further off-putting and confused any desired picture with him at the centre of it. And finally the soundtrack. That strange stretto effect as if the liquid percussion bifurcated into two notes on impact. To your ear it elicited somewhat the same as that of the men’s urinals with all that entailed. So while the milkmaid’s dress may be playing host to milky white drops resiling from the pail’s steel sides, no happy correspondence can be drawn because of the many occasions of urinary splash-back I had encountered. 

CRITIQUE:

1. First, second (too passive?) or third (voyeur) person perspective? 
2. Sounds other than human?
3. No animals
4. Keep in mind the visual qualities of fluids (colour)
5. Consider precise motion and vigour of hands at work in symbolic activity
6. The images (both experienced and imagined) held before any scenario even starts can knock it off kilter through less palatable associations

Confessional - How Can Artists Confront Death in their Work?

I have two great passions in my life; being a parent and writing fiction. And I will have both snatched away from me at some point in the future (or sooner if Alzheimer's strikes at the core of me). So my passions, my loves, as with anybody's, has death and cessation at the other end of its lens.

We all die, hardly a blinding insight Marc. While that is of course true, I have been stricken with that awareness for virtually all of my life. Most people function fully because they never think of death in their daily lives, until maybe they start approaching it in their old age. Me, I think of it almost every day.

We are all exposed to death, introduced in childhood through the death of pets and grandparents. Me, I had a cat who lived until he was 23 and the first of my grandparents didn't pass until I was 18. So I wasn't prematurely exposed through the customary course of events. 

Young children with plastic imaginations are very suggestible to terrors and assaults on their body's integrity, even if they don't fully understand the ramifications. My own young son given a lesson at school on food health, including dangerous levels of salt intake, consequently went on to develop an eating disorder since he shunned food on the basis of its salt content or sell-by date under his own investigations, as his fearful imagination ran wild. I had a similar experience that instilled in me the awareness of my death and cessation at the age of 6. 

My bedroom abutted my parents' and my Dad always liked to listen to BBC Radio 4 at such a volume I could hear the BBC enunciation clearly through the bedroom walls. At about 10pm the programme he was listening too announced that some people would not be waking up from their night's sleep next morning and - here it gets a bit hazy, I think somehow the actual words got conflated with my own childish imagination - this was because they would have turned into dragons. Terrified of the possibility of never waking up again, I kept myself awake through the rest of the night. Thereby not only catalysing a preternatural awareness of death, but also laying the seeds for a lifetime of insomnia. After all, if you're terrified of surrendering to the great unconsciousness that is death, that also may make it a might trickier to surrender to it even on a temporary basis in the form of the unconsciousness of sleep. 

So I was, and have always been terrified of death. Just to be clear, not the act of passing itself which to me is a minor detail no matter how agonising or supported by loved ones gathered around. (Both of which were the case with the death of my beloved grandmother, as the congestion in her lungs led her to two hours of agitated motion around her hospital bed trying to free up her breathing, wrenching her hands from ours in her distress). No, I'm talking about the eternal cessation, unconsciousness and dreamless sleep that is death's annihilation of the self. *

So how does this black hole awaiting me and all of us actually manifest itself in my daily life? Well it's not every minute of every day as that would clearly reduce me to a gibbering wreck. But I would say the awareness strikes me at least once a day, sometimes more. It can be simply looking at my son and feeling crushed that we will be parted permanently, or something on TV, or even no particularly conscious prompt at all, it just comes upon me. And such an awareness drags you out of your immediate state of consciousness and into another, overwhelming one that blots out all other thought and offers only a single emotion - terror. 

The only way to combat it for me, is to counter blot it out. Not by thinking nice things like flowers or gambolling lambs since they too will inevitably succumb to death, but by sort of overloading my brain with an internally generated white noise. I say white noise because it is not constructed of any rational thoughts, but literally a buzzing interference (are these brainwaves I have no idea?). There is no telling how long these are required to go on for in order to tamp back down the mortal thoughts, but somehow the terror subsides. Using one void to efface another. In such a state, I am fit for nothing else. 

So much for the distinct incidences of mortal awareness. It also pervades so much (if not everything) about my life as a whole. On a mundane level, I don't fly, am not particularly drawn to speed or other activities where your feet leave the ground. Yes I know you can get hit by a car when crossing the road, but then my optician died in a skiing accident... Though I have always written about death a lot in my work, yet as I wax on into my 50's I have found this year to be dominated by writing stories about ageing, infirmity and death. If Picasso had blue and red periods, I seem to be in a literary equivalent, my death period. (It is only interrupted by a body of stories about the wider politics of the world, which the way things are heading represents a global scale of extinction, so form a parallel version in many ways). 

So far so depressing right? I may even be a depressive (there is a family history of quite a spectrum of mental illness and mental conditions). We'll get to the contrary in a moment and even throw in a bit of fun. But if I am a depressive, I must be a reasonably high functioning one, almost never missing a day's work through sickness and having turned out 10 books and been the main child rearer to my twins, including coaching their youth football team for 3 years. Suicide is not an option for me, because I am so terrified of death I could never hasten my appointment with it. I don't mean this flippantly, I cleaned my father's blood off the kitchen floor after his serious suicide attempt that left him hospitalised and strapped to his bed to prevent him repeating the act... 

How do I cope with my own internal terror? Largely through comedy and a sense of the absurd. When the terror of death is your ultimate emotional scalar, most other anxieties abounding in life seem insignificant and indeed I remain imperturbable in the face of most of life's foibles & travails. I can go a stage further, I can derive the absurd about them. I am not ashamed to say that most things we human beings get aerated about I find amusing, including those of my own doing. I can defang most things in life and derive a measure of mental calm accordingly. It is the counterbalance to the deep core of terror that lies just beneath.

However there is also a serious side to absurdity. As stated above, the human condition is absurd: whatever relationships you form and whatever you build or achieve materially, will be sundered from you. Maybe that's more tragic than absurd, but Samuel Beckett seemed to find it the latter. (Indeed tragedy derives from hubris, that is human beings daring to get above themselves and approach the semi-divine, destined to failure because humans can never aspire to the immortal). 

I also find it absurd that more people are not as terrified of death on a daily basis as I am. It should pervade each of us as per our human condition. Now I understand fully why this isn't the case, because it would utterly impair daily functioning. Not to do so is actually a pretty good coping mechanism. But the downside of this is that we are largely left both unprepared and unreconciled (except for the fortunate few of deep faith or those blessed by a 'happy death') for our own demise (or the death of a close loved one). And also we don't necessarily work back from the end point to consider what the purpose/meaning (if any) of life is. Death really ought to preface and put all the rest of life into context. 

So I in addition to the outburst of white noise moments, I have also erected a system of mirrors that keep conceptualisation of death reasonably remote; I write about it and I derive humour around the margins of what it leaves us in life. And contrary to the idea of possibly being depressive, I actually enjoy life and am amused by it. But as I grow old, I seem to have reached a stage where these refractions are unravelling. As you notice slight changes in the body's elasticity, it's harder to keep awareness of sometime impending death at bay. Will my sense of humour continue to immure me against a slowly failing body? I doubt it. You realise it is just a form of misdirection, of your own conscious thought.

I am proud of everything I've written, but literature while it can move us, always retains an intellectual element; that of the material having to be ordered into a narrative, word choice, the rules of grammar, editing etc. And such an intellectual element necessarily introduces a distance no matter how slight. I've written about death a lot so far, but I can't help feeling that the intellectual part of the approach leaves me falling short of really getting to grips with Death. All art metaphoricalises its material, and metaphor is just another refracting mirror so that you're not directly confronting Death, just as we cannot stare directly at the sun. 

And yet to go deeper invites the phenomenon that requires my white noise response to be ongoing throughout the duration of any such writing project. That way lies only madness. Probably. Do I undertake such an endeavour, with the potential risks to mental health attached? I don't feel I have any choice, not that I have a project currently in mind to broach this with. I don't have a choice because the physical process is clearly in motion anyway (I say this as someone who in my 54 years to date has had the incredible fortune/ genes to have never had to spend a single night in a hospital. But the markers of decline, however slow, are evident to me. 

Watch this space...

* Does perhaps technology offer us modes of cheating death? It's a possibility, but uploading one's entire stock of memories to some sort of smart interface does not preserve life. It would solely be an existence as newsreel, that is unreflexive and static; the essential 'you' would have no real relationship to the memories, unable to add to them. I imagine it would be like a form of Alzheimer's, where the active relationship to your memories is split asunder, so that you are cast adrift from them; the memories are preserved, they still exist, but they no longer are 'your' memories, because that 'you' has ceased to exist in any meaningful way.

Meditation Ex-Cathedra : Flash Fiction

When the levee of my mother’s natal waters broke; when the champagne bottle was dashed against her cervix and started my baby hull moving down the rollers of the birth canal; when HMS neonate me was launched into the world, it had no concept of its future obsolescence and scrappage. Of its down the line replacement by another in the lineage fleet, bearing the same name but managing only to serve in effacing the uniqueness of its memory.

It spent its early days all at sea trying to cohere the view through the telescope provided by the visual cortex and processing chip of a brain. These cozening forces of ordinate and abscissa, plotting the flat earth co-ordinates of reality as fixed and immutable. Freud of course would have it that one is also unwittingly consumed by the perspective rendered extant by the sextant; your personal parental poles of latitude and longingtude. From the antipodes of father and mother, when there is a whole host of the rest of the world to explore and chart. Further palimpsested by majusculed school and prescriptive religion. Establishing a moral foundation erected like a hollow Gaudi edifice, with the dislocating wind blowing up a maelstrom through the upright interstices. 

Of the heritable venerable three questions for man, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What have I done?’, most who bother to interrogate themselves only get as far as grappling with the first one. The last is a matter for consideration solely on death beds and the second is forsaken because they fail to supply the context of their inevitable death through which all explorations would necessarily be refracted. They remain steadfastly progressively forward looking, rather than applying the singular teleological certitude to their thought processes. So inevitably they come to focus on their identities. The person they are during their brief sojourn on earth. Yet what is the point fixating on something that is ultimately perishable? They also reify love’s existence in order that they will not spend their sojourn alone, but again why would I devote contemplation on something equally fugacious? 

Author I took the antipodal approach. Placed myself in the full-length mirror. Over time studied the maculations of the skin, burst blood vessels, the ossific curvature, the protuberances and the loss of sinewy definition. No looking glass could reflect the loss of suppleness, the fitful sleep, the arthritic joints. The physicians had diagnosed my corporeal failings, I was now trying to diagnose myself for my readers. To offer them a speculum into their own being. But stood there in the mirror, pressing and pinching the flesh to see if the nevus had regular contours or not, scrotal bobbins cupped in my hand feeling the spindle for noduled swelling, I have no idea of whether I am of any assistance to my readers. As my words are released, I scrutinise them for their effect, but the letters are reversed in the mirror and illegible to me. The audience remains invisible, occluded by my eidolon therein the glass. The author dies twice over; once at the end of his life, the other every day in isolation. 

Advice For Reading Live

For me the best thing about being an author is reading to a live audience. But I know a lot of authors are nervous about reading publicly so I thought I'd offer my advice to nail a live reading.

There are two main aspects to consider, the first is what you read and the second is how best to prepare.

Dealing with the latter first, the simple advice is rehearse. If I'm doing a piece I've performed before, I'll practice it twice every day for the week ahead of the reading. If it's a new piece, then I will do that for at least a fortnight ahead. The length of the reading slot can also effect these timings.

Why rehearse? Well there are three advantages I can think of:

1) Familiarising yourself so that when you come to read live there are no surprises in your own text that catch you out. This may sound a bit odd, after all it's your own text. But you'd be surprised, you may have written it quite a while ago because the publishing process can take a long time. Or just as significantly, when you were writing it, you weren't likely to be writing it with reading it out aloud and there are things that translate differently from page to voice. For example, I wrote a pun on 'greased lightning', with 'greased' written as the country Greece'd. Rehearsing I realised there was no possible way that this would come over to the audience and had to factor that in. Rehearsing and you may come across tongue twisters, difficult words to pronounce or alliteration that ties you up in knots, so practice and you can conquer them.

2) Which brings us to timing. Apart from a rehearsal allowing you to time the length of your reading if you have been given a time limit (which you always will in any open mic, but even often when you are on the bill as a named performer), rehearsing is vital to help you pace yourself. With the adrenaline running once you get up on stage to stand by the mic, it's the most natural thing to speed up and belt through your reading. Rehearsing maximises your chances for keeping the reading speed under control. The more measured the pace, the more chance the audience have of taking in your words. The more comfortable you feel up there, the more rehearsed, the less the tendency to tear through your piece.

3) Bringing the work alive. There is nothing worse than a reading which takes the audience back to listening to a dreary schoolteacher just reading to them from a textbook and making no eye contact. While you probably won't be making eye contact with individuals in the audience if the lights are low, it's still advisable to look up from the text and look out at the audience. It helps establish a genuine two way relationship and a rapport. I wrote the opening to a short story that went

"What is the ideal length for a suicide note? Asking for a friend".

When I read this story, I always look up from the text when I deliver the line 'asking for a friend'. It not only establishes a connection, it actually puts me and the audience together in a complicity - they realise that the character is not really asking on behalf of someone else, but trying to disguise the fact he's talking about himself. So the simple action of looking up actually helps establish the parameters of this story within its opening two lines. Again, I had no idea of any of that when I was writing the story, but through rehearsal its importance emerged.

It's not just about looking and connecting with the audience by sight. If you're feeling confident, you can enhance the story with gesture or an expression thrown out to them. You  are to some extent acting out the story, albeit with one hand since the other is occupied holding the book. Rehearsal does not mean you have to learnt the text by heart to free both hands -  poets can learn their poems because they have compression & specialist rhythm to help them master their work. It's not the same for prose writing, even though rhythm is important for us as well, it's not necessarily designed for projecting through voice, more structuring the reader's journey through the sentences. If you don't feel confident enough to do gestures and expression when you're starting out that's fine, but in time you're very likely to reach such a level.

Finally rehearsal allows you to accent certain words or phrases that again may enhance the meaning of the piece. I don't have much variety in my voice and can't do other accents, but you might have this ability which may contribute to your work aloud. It's because I don't have a terribly interesting voice that I adopt a lot of gesture and performance in my readings to compensate.


How to choose what to read. This is a harder one to be definitive about. First it depends what options you have. In all likelihood you are talking about your debut book, so you're restricted to that. Especially if the reading is mainly aimed at promoting that book. I'm going to assume it's a novel, since short stories and flash fiction are much easier to do live in that unlike an extract from a novel, with these the audience are getting the whole piece and therefore require less contextualising. For the past 4 years I have mainly been reading my flash fiction, but with a new novel coming out this summer, I'm going to be switching back to reading extracts and so what follows applies to me as I make my selections in the next few months.

Firstly what type of book have you written? Action thriller, literary fiction, romance, horror? This will inform your thinking as behind what you choose to read. What are you hoping to convey with what you read? Are you after conveying the style of the book? Or give a taste of the main characters and their relationship? Do you want to convey the atmosphere of the book (such as in Horror or Supernatural)? Do you want to read something that ramps up the tension in the room, then leave the audience on a cliffhanger? Maybe you want to make the audience laugh, or perhaps present yourself as a storyteller par excellence. All of these are valid but always derive from the book you have written. If you have a long reading slot of course you might be able to present a couple of different ones of these impressions. So these are the thoughts you ought to consider when choosing your piece. A descriptive piece may convey the atmosphere and the style of writing, but the downside is it may be hard for the audience to picture in their minds coming to it cold. Dialogue heavy extract may best convey the relationships and characters, but can you carry off the different voices to make them distinctive enough to the ear no matter how distinctive they are on the page.

If you can read the opening of your novel it is always useful as it is doing the job of providing context, rather than if your first extract is somewhere further inside the novel when you will almost certainly have to offer a preamble of how the plot got to that point. A general rule is less explanatory preamble and more reading of the actual text if you can possibly manage it. The preamble, or bits in between the extracts are your chance to talk about the book as a whole and do a selling job on it, sort of pitching it subtly and the extracts will hopefully show that off to the best manner. In the bits between the extracts you can talk about all manner of things associated with the novel, such as where you got the idea from, or which writers inspired you, these are nearly always more engaging for an audience than them trying to grasp your novel summed up in a few sentences. When I come to selecting my pieces (and I won't be selecting the opening of the novel), I may stick with my flash fiction approach and give minimal 1-line preamble and trust to the extract itself doing all the work and conveying to the audience what it's supposed to convey. The novel's structure has the advantage that it is episodic and those episodes occur out of sequence within the book itself, so they are fairly self-contained chapters. Having said that, one of the three main voices I can't read aloud at all, since there are visual cues and ideograms in the book that I just couldn't reproduce in a reading.

So there you have it. I wish you all luck with your live readings and please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments and I'll answer them.

Dear Teen Me

A few years ago I was invited by the fabulous "Dear Teen Me" website to pen a letter from my contemporary self, addressing the teenage me. Sadly the website no longer functions, but I'm reproducing that letter I Wrote for the site.

Dear Marc from author Marc Nash

Seeing as like the primitive tribesman you have a dislike of having your soul captured by a camera, tracking this shot down from your Gap year back in 1982 was something of a coup. Fortunately even though you have no pictures of your youth, your mother clung on to the few photographic morsels you granted her. This is you sat at the top of a cathedral either in Paris or Italy in the days you used to travel. And yes you are wearing a music T-Shirt, that of Joy Division a band who were to play a very important part in your life, not least because one of your first plays was about them and the fact that their lead singer committed suicide. But here at age eighteen, the sun is shining, you’re underneath the sky on top of the world where anything is possible ... and you’re wearing summery black!

*

1977 aged thirteen and the year of family parties sitting in marquees in back gardens talking about punk rock. Well Marc, you never did master the paltry four strings of a bass guitar and fulfill your dream of being in a band, but you did make it into the arts. You didn’t write any lyrics, but you did still compose words in the form of stage plays and novels. Even though you have still never read a classic novel other than the handful you studied at school. At the age of fourteen, it was a recommendation from one of your cool older cousins to listen to The Cure’s song “Killing An Arab” and then read Albert Camus’ novel “The Outsider” that kindled your love of modern novels, while still burning the fires for music from which you have never looked back.

Teenage years were when you finally turned your head away from the childish world centred around the home and started to think about the wider world. You discovered politics through a concern with the nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction. That fusion of the political and the fear of death has never left you and permeates all your writing as you now approach the age of 50. Cleaning the blood up off the floor of a parent after a serious suicide attempt in your last year of teenagehood probably saw to that. Though a terrifying and brutal initiation into other people’s misery, it has set you up for not shying away from tackling dark subjects in your writing and probing the extremes of human behaviour. When you wrote about suicide bombers in “Not In My Name”, you could balance the ‘bomber’ aspect with the ‘suicide’ part like few others possibly could.

There were wars a plenty around the world while you were a teenager. On your doorstep there were the charmingly euphemistically named “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East which was of grave concern to your family, but which you couldn’t engage with as you held an opposite point of view from them. In your Gap year Britain sailed an army halfway around the world to bafflingly fight over some barely inhabited islands against the Argentinians. That was when you realised you had a love-hate relationship with your own country, another theme you would go on to write about extensively, particularly in your debut novel “A,B&E”. Interestingly you chose to write that from the point of view of exile from Britain, even though after extensive Gap year travel as a teenager, you resolutely decided to stay in London and set your face against further travel. These days you don’t have holidays, you only write in your time off. You travel extensively in your imagination.

Yet it was a another conflict about which little was reported because journalists couldn’t gain access to the closed country, which really caught your attention, perhaps because you could not confront these other wars which were supposed to prompt your allegiances more directly. And that was the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the subsequent horrors of the Killing Fields and the disastrous famine. That warzone resonated more than any other with you, but you could never find the words to express such a scale of depravity and horror. It would take you 30 years until you were finally able to write a story about it. Before then you had written on Northern Ireland and the Middle East, intricate, complex works making no judgements of the various parties involved. But your story on Cambodia pulled no punches in delivering its searing condemnation of the cult of death.

And where did this passion for writing and particular the novel develop from? Well you got into Britain’s supposed best university to further you hunger for knowledge, But your were appalled by the closed and prejudiced minds of many of your fellow students. You were also disillusioned with your History course as you felt the teachers were not really interested in teaching, only in pursuing their own research. You were on the point of walking out, when a new student theatre stage space was opened and you decided to try your hand at writing stage plays. Even then with no experience, instinctively and temperamentally you opted for some radical staging and the whole play was performed behind a wire mesh fence separating the cast from the audience. And because you had difficulty casting it, you decided to back up your words by stepping in and performing yourself. You even learned to smoke for the part and scaled the fence to confront the audience at the play’s ending. From that short 20 minute piece, you then went up to the Edinburgh fringe Festival with two new plays, which in retrospect was complete madness, but you had no fear. You were hooked by creative writing back and you also completed your degree, as playwriting kept you in college.

You knew an office job wasn’t for you, so playwriting seemed like a good way to avoid that, which of course it wasn’t as there was no money to be made. After four years you secured a job in an independent record store to pay the bills, but the number work there left the word side of your brain free to continue writing in the evenings. You kept pushing the boundaries in what you did, moving away from dialogue and more towards movement and dance. The dancers looked at you like you were mad, what need did they have of the written and spoken word? It was only cut short when your beloved twin boys arrived and you became the main carer for them. No more hanging out networking in theatre bars for you, with bottle feeds and dirty diapers to see to at the double.

So you turned to writing novels through the night, interrupted only by feeds and changes. The books you liked to read weren’t really out there in the market, so you set out to write them. Stories that pushed the narrative form into new places, books of ideas and a rigorous pursuit and examination of language. And once self-published, you started giving live readings, the closest to the dream of performing live in a band. And you put on a show live. You inhabited the characters, you dialogued with the audience through the way you staged your readings. 

So it wasn’t quite how you imagined it might turn out, but looking back a lot of the seeds were in place in the teen you. Here’s to our salute of the old age us, pen in arthritic hand still writing and challenging the status quo.

Love and respect

marc x

Guest Post - Author Jim Webster

I've "met" jim Webster through the Goodreads site and he is that rare virtual beast who is both erudite and chockfull of common sense, so when he puts across a point of view it is measured and demands serious consideration, as against all the other shouty voices you encounter. Jim's blog is always a good read and like me Jim has published books in double figures spanning science fiction and fantasy adventure. He has his latest book just out now-

Available from Amazon for just 98p


I asked Jim to blog about whatever he fancied and this is the question he wanted to explore:


How many voices at one time?


It's a question I have wondered about and occasionally discussed with others. When you're absorbed in writing one particular book, you tend to take on the 'voice' of the characters in that book. (Well at least I do.)

This, at least in my case, can spill out of the book a little. When I was in the middle of writing a number of stories for Tallis Steelyard (a poet who dwells secure within a fantasy world of my creation) a young lady asked me directions. She wasn't entirely sure where she was going and on gentle questioning it appeared that her boyfriend had asked her to meet him at work.

This had involved her in a long train journey followed by a bicycle ride out into the middle of nowhere looking for a particular site. I felt this showed both dedication on her part, and an element of taking her for granted on his.

Thus I directed her to where she wanted to go, and as she thanked me, I, or perhaps Tallis Steelyard, gravely informed her that had she been my girlfriend I would have arranged for her to be collected.

Now we had talked for ten minutes, and it was obvious she had a good sense of humour, so she merely smiled and equally gravely replied that she would keep this information in mind for future reference.

But you see the problem. When you write there is an element of getting into the mind of the characters you're writing about and the blighters have a habit of returning the favour.

Unfortunately this has let me down. You see, I wrote six novellas about a character of mine, one Benor. He's a cartographer, dwelling in a fantasy world with no elves, dwarves, dragons or hobbits, and indeed very little magic. The stories are detective stories, and the cunning plan is that like the Sherlock Holmes stories, you can read them in any order. It's a collection rather than a series.

I wrote them, edited them and got everything set up so they're published at four month intervals. The next one is called 'Woman in Love'

The problem is, I'm 75,000 words into a SF novel, and I didn't want to break off. But the realisation that books don't sell themselves has forced me to. So with a mental crashing of gears I've got to leave one set of characters, and re-enter the minds of another set.

The story? To quote the blurb

"Asked to look for a missing husband, Benor finds that the female of the species is indeed more deadly than the male."

Cheers Jim and best of luck with both the new book and the science fiction work in progress.

Dead Line - Flash Fiction

The hands were the last outpost of activity. Or rather the fingers gripping his pen. The rest of the musculature had withered through disuse. The mouth, that other outlet for words, had seized up through a wholesale aridity, dry river beds of sputum, meaning his desiccated lips were unable to form even the simplest phoneme. His legs stilled through stagnation in the chair, had now become paralysed with a deep vascular thrombosis. He could no longer feel his feet, uncertain and uncaring that he was receiving no proof of the floor pushing back at his undersoles for being in contact with one another. His abdomen, having initially echoed the current concavity of his sallow cheeks, had now blazoned its tocsin through distension, an ill-windsock of fetid air. A second, unadvised gastrulation returning him to a state of the scaffolded truss of the womb. His serpentine labyrinth of bowels having fruitlessly demanded their regular oblation, therefore began to devour him from within. While the sphincter had drawn down its shutter and closed for the business end, but only after its liquidation sale had left him marinading in his own soil in the writer’s chair. There was a deadline to be met after all. 

I have commissioned the above image as a T-Shirt design from the wonderful Little Appleseed.

It's a bastardisation of one of the tenets of Sergey Nechayev's "Revolutionary Catechism" which I use as the epigraph in my book "Not In My Name" in its original, unadulterated form for a book about terrorism. 

What do you think? 

Possible coda for the above story:

His literary agent prised the pen from the author's cold, dead hand and set it on the writing desk. He shuffled the sheaf of papers straight and slipped them into a manilla envelope. He smiled at the thought that the publishers had little chance of getting their advance back as it would go into the marais that was probate. How were they to know what he held in his hand was the final work? he could claim it was an old manuscript found beneath dust on the author's shelf. He would pocket all the proceeds, save for an honorarium to pay for the author's pauper's grave. A writer's final resting place marked without any words at all. 

Squid Ink - Flash Fiction

The sea was a perpetual whirring roil of motion. Shoals and schools of corybantic choreography. Treasure hunts for shiny stones on the seabed, or the come hither siren tease of pearly mothers. Spawns and other pregnable culch-ures. Procreation and the anti-creation of predation, rapturous raptors going about their annihilating antics. Squid-I took my place in this tumultuous orchestration. Staking my mood from the ambiance of my surroundings. Cooling my blood to blend in with the sandy bottom, or raising my temperature to bouquet the riot of colour of the underwater flora. Else I fire my ink-jet heels to make good my escape, nebulising the senses of my would-be consumers. But then my nervous system was struck by a notion, what is it about this world that constantly makes me need to escape? Why cannot I just reside contentedly within it? Why do I have to cast small simulacra of myself to stymie my foes, when each exudation only weakens me, dilutes my being? They munch me in effigy anyway.  A sudden impulse made me fire my ink when no pelagic guzzler needed blotting. I watched the chromatic mucus shape and form my feelings, but not just through the usual matching pigmentation, rather they agglomerated into words. Until they diluted and dissipated on the gentle sway of the underwater swell. I fired them again. Different words coagulated before again dispersing on the undertow. I watched the iotas of my verbiage diffuse further afield and I saw it brought discomfort and unease to the marine life who encountered it. Mildly toxic it seemed to perfectly encapsulate my temper. I used some of my appendages and appurtenances to inscribe into the sand and grit of the seabed, before inking in my words there and passing rocks over to hold the type in place beneath. No fish prey or predator dared disturb my reverie of penmanship. Amid all the pother and bustle, I had discovered the peace that lies at the heart of the ocean.  The ink concentrated, the thoughts magnified, my blessings countable against each one of my tentacles, finally I had come into my own against the backdrop of the eternally teeming crowd.  

Guest Post - Author Virginia Moffatt

I've asked one of my favourite writers Virginia back for a guest post (her post on my blog for her debut flash collection can be found here) as she has an exciting new project to talk about. I say new, but I know she's been working on this novel for a while as I was lucky enough to read an early part-draft of the book "Echo Hall". It's a book I really hope gets published and here's Virginia to tell you a bit more about the process and the book itself.

After ten years of writing  my novel, ‘Echo Hall’ and two years of submitting to agents and independent presses, I’ve finally been signed by the publisher Unbound.  I couldn’t be happier, and  I’m very grateful to Marc for inviting me here to tell you about it.

Unbound is a relatively new and unusual publisher. Formed in 2011 by three writers - Dan Kieran, Justin Pollard and John Mitchinson – it produces books by crowdfunding, inviting readers to get involved. The company is both a funding platform and a publisher, offering authors 50:50 royalties once the book achieves its target.

I first heard about Unbound in 2013, through Shaun Usher’s ‘Letters of Note’ twitterfeed.  I loved reading the letters on twitter so I was really pleased to hear they were going to be published.  ‘Letters of Note’ went on my Christmas list and I thought no more about the company until after my copy had arrived a few months later.

I was visiting my friends Hugh and Zoe one day, when Hugh rushed in hugely excited to have his hands on the copy of their friend’s Unbound book. That friend was Paul Kingsnorth, and the book, ‘The Wake’ has done extremely well. (Deservedly so, it’s a remarkable novel). At that point, I sat up and paid attention. Two great books in a few months suggested Unbound was on to something

After that I followed Unbound with interest, and though my first pitch to them was unsuccessful, I was delighted when my second was accepted by Scott Pack earlier this year. Although, the idea of raising the funds is daunting, I am also excited about the possibility of working with readers before the book is even produced. And, I love being part of this young, vibrant company, whose enthusiastic staff are all book fans and produce beautiful hardback and paperbacks.

I’m also delighted to have been signed by  Unbound, because I love the idea of working with readers to make the book happen. I’ve kept going with ‘Echo Hall’ for all these years because I really believe in my novel and am excited about finally getting it out into the world.

Set against the backdrop of three wars – the 1991 Gulf War, World War 2 and World War 1 – the novel follows the fortunes of three women who become involved with the Flint family, the owners of Echo Hall.

The book concerns the impact of unresolved conflict within families and nations, which asks does history always have to repeat itself, or can we find another way?  I have peopled it with characters who go to war, characters who don’t and I hope, as well as being a gripping yarn it will make readers think about the questions I’m raising. Although this is a book set in the past, it is very much a book of the present as the  origin of today’s wars in the Middle East can be traced right back to World War 1.

If you are interested in backing this book, it is easy. All you have to do is sign up to Unbound and pledge here https://unbound.co.uk/books/echo-hall.  (But be warned there are some great titles on there, pledging can be a bit addictive!)

If you are interested in pitching to Unbound, that too is easy. Just send your details via this link https://unbound.co.uk/authors/work-with-us.  Alternatively, it is worth following Associate Editor, Scott Pack (@meandmybigmouth) on twitter. Before Christmas he invited people to pitch to him directly and has promised to do it again. Really worth doing, it worked for me! 

Dr Who Plotholes

I love Dr Who, although since the man who revived it Russell T Davies left the job of producer, I've been less enamoured of it, mainly because the writing has been patchy. The show uses so any different writers , parcelling out episodes to different people, this is perhaps inevitable. And sure it's light-hearted family entertainment with legions of devotees who will gladly receive everything with critical faculties suspended, that perhaps the show shouldn't be put through any analytical wringer. But I'm a writer and I just can't help it. Equally the show currently has such an outstanding central cast I can't bear to see their talents wasted on leaden scripts. The current series has had a couple of excellent episodes, a couple of meh ones and some really terrible ones. But the penultimate and first in a two-part season conclusion was pretty good. The addition of Michelle Goes to an already stellar cast made this pure joy for e to watch. Well almost pure...




Since it was full of plotholes, or at least seemed to be, seeing as some of these might be resolved with the second and final instalment. Now normally I am not in the least bit bothered by plotholes, since plot itself is the least interesting thing to me as a writer. So for me to be aggravated by deficiencies in the logic of events, they must have been pretty glaring (and blaring). See if you agree with me.


1) Danny Pink - Dead!?
He's been killed in a road traffic accident. (Nice touch that it was Clara dropping the 'ILY' bombshell that inadvertently killed him). Okay, the premise was there's a waiting station in Limbo called the Nethersphere, because the dead can still communicate and hold conversations if you care to visit them. So Danny is dead, but still negotiating the terms of his post-life existence (with a wonderfully oily Chris Addison as his sales rep). All this is fine because it's really a front for harvesting bodies to turn into Cybermen.


So:
1a) Do Cybermen require still living bodies to convert, or can they process corpses? The delete option Danny was fretting over seemed to suggest the former, since 'delete' is as we know the first step in the cybernetic process, to remove human emotion. In which case how is Danny alive? If he was put into a coma by the car impact, why isn't he hooked up to tubes and drips in a hospital?


1b) The hoax front is to maintain the fiction that the dead don't die, and if telepathy is used to achieve the impression that they're still sentient in some way, who is the telepathy being transmitted to in convincing us that the dead Danny Pink is still hanging on in there at some level? Because we are inevitably going to get a happy ending, Danny Pink isn't likely to be dead, so that takes up back to the car crash. Did Missy somehow stage it, convince all and sundry DP was deceased, just to capture hi so as to lure in Clara & The Doctor to her lair?


2) The scale of death:
Missy makes the wonderful observation that the shortcoming of the human race is that the dead outnumber the living. Lots of corpses to turn into Cybermen for her fiendish plan then (suggesting that the answer to plothole 1 is that they are in fact dead and only trick projections suggest they are still alive). All well and good, but how do all the dead fit into the crypts of St Paul's Cathedral and how do they get there? We only see about eight Cybermen come down the steps, hardly the whole host of humans past now is it? How extensive were the dark water tanks and again I ask, where and how did they all fit into the architecture of St Paul's? Maybe St Paul's is Missy's Tardis, bigger on the inside etc... When Danny P & his salesman/minder/psychopomp Addison pop out on the balcony for a breather to get DP's head straight, the Nethersphere scape is suggested to be never-ending (as initially established by the view through a porthole). Now London, the city that houses St Paul's is big, but that weren't no London vista through the window. Presumably the Nethersphere too is just a projection.


3) Kids, always a tear-jerker plot device:
Danny Pink is reacquainted with the kid - aka unarmed non-hostile - he shot in Afghanistan. Nice bit of conflict and personal redemption issues there served up in a trice. But why is the kid there at all? He's too short for being converted into anything but a mini-me Cyberman. Why has he been kept alive all this time that has seen DP establish himself in a second career as a schoolteacher? So this swings the pendulum back into it being a telepathic projection into Danny's noggin, that he isn't dead at all, but just having his melon messed with. Chris Addison informs us it's very unusual for such a confrontation in the Nethersphere, while Doctor Chang tells Clara it's equally rare to receive a call on the inside when Danny P is calling her. I hear a plot clunking with the sound of a bolted on solution.


So I'm none the wiser as to how the episode holds together logically. Maybe it will be resolved next week. Sorry but a nerd orgasm induced by the echo of a 1960's Cybermen iconic image on the steps of St Paul's couldn't induce e to overlook all the bits that don't hang together for me.


I stand back and await y lapidation...

Penmanship - Flash Fiction

The man was lying asleep on his side, his hand tucked under his face for a pillow, when he was shaken awake. His whole bed was aquiver and he suffered that shooting vertigo as the block mattress was shot up vertically. The tethers bound him in place. He knew what was to follow.

 

The metal probe projected horizontally towards him. Its point was dulled so that there was no spangle reflection to blind his eyes. To help veil him from its unerring assignment. The stylus started cutting into his skin. His wounded flesh responded by filling in the cavities with blood, but the duct mounted beneath the stylus squirted some sort of anti-coagulant to sluice the blood away as soon as it tried to dock with the skin.

 

He shut his eyes and gave into to the lapping swish of the chemical reagent jets. He had endured the sensation so many times, his nerves had ceased to fire at the trespass of the spike. It was gouging out characters on his skin, some of which he could flick his eyes to read, others which remained beyond his purview. Because of the irregular contours of his body, the words spelt thereon were not arranged in sentences. He was not a flat plane like the leaves of a book. And that seemed to be the very object.

 

When the stylus had finished its calligraphic furrows, there was the customary pop as the liquid stream was shut off and replaced by a more viscous fluid. Here it comes, as a black ink was sprayed into the scores in his skin, until the trenches were full to the top. The probe performed its shuffling retreat as it was winched back. He leaned his head back against the metal block and turned to one side. He saw the arrayed ranks of others trussed and coloured exactly the same as him, though he could not make out the inscriptions on their flesh. A printing block army. A typeset textual host. And then it began.

 

In rapid fire, the typebars were launched forward headlong, pressing the composed human monotypes against a giant white canvas of indeterminate fabrication. The letters were intaglioed, incised against the blockish lumps of uninscribed flesh to create the impression of three-dimensional lettering. Not unlike that of graffiti taggers, though this was intended as far more of a formal imprint. For this was the justice system’s record-keeping of its proceedings, or at least the footnote annotations thereof. For this race it was important to have the sentences produced with differing depths and alignments and not just necessarily legible in a linear fashion. Their justice resonated with greater and more intricate profundity in that way.

 

The impact at rapid velocity against the canvas always knocked the human print stamps immediately spark out. They came to when a sprinkle of water washed over their face. An alert that the cleansing and maintenance procedures were upon them. Now their blocks were positioned to the horizontal and they passed through a vertical plane of some muslin like material ingrained with an astringent that served to flush out any vestiges of ink squatting in skin recesses. A blast of heat was quickly applied to evaporate any surface liquid and scour the flesh prior to silky spurts of an aqueous polymer coated the degraded flesh and quickly flowed to seal it smooth. The fusible skin would harden and set within an hour and the human composite stick would be good to go once again the following day to record the judgements handed down.  

Story versus Narrative

The story goes that Ernest Hemingway was challenged to tell a story in just six words and he came up with the following:

"For sale, baby's shoes, never worn".

But is it actually a story? For the reasons below I would say not. It is definitely a narrative, because it has a movement forward; From the neutral commercial opening "For sale", it has moved on by the end to deliver a powerful emotional punch, as the implication is that the shoes were never worn because the baby has died. But the devil is in the detail and 6 words just cannot provide any such detail. There are too many unanswered questions for the reader to decide that this is anything more than a taste of a story rather than a complete one.

1) Baby's shoes: newborns don't really wear shoes. They are in babygrows with pouches for their feet. So it's unclear whether the baby died during childbirth or in the home. Since babies don't walk, while in the home they are unlikely to wear shoes, though they may have them for when being taken out in a pushchair or sling, where the shoes are purely decorative adornment. The shoes don't have to provide any support for the foot, since again the baby is not putting any downward pressure on the foot against the ground. Therefore such shoes are flimsy, unless the parent has indulged in a designer brand trainer/sneaker (though presumably Hemingway was writing before the ubiquity of the branded sneaker took hold). They are 'booties' rather than shoes perhaps. So the question has to be asked, why bother putting them up for sale? They are low-cost items, except perhaps if a brand trainer/sneaker is the item in question. What resale value could such short-lived accessories have?

2) Why is a grieving parent putting baby shoes up for sale anyway? If it is to banish a painful reminder from sight, just throw or give them away or burn them? The emotional impact of the tragedy in this tale is a tad compromised, if a parent has the wherewithal to put up an advert to sell such a low-cost item. One would certainly like greater insights into the parent's motivation behind such an action. This part of the story is too incomplete.

3) Time is always an important quality in fiction. There is no way of knowing how long after the baby's death the advert was put up. Is it at the end of a grieving process of some length, therefore possibly representing closure? Or is it as above still in the rawness of the immediate aftermath? The narrative moves, but we are uncertain along what timescale, the opposite ends of the possible spectrum again inflecting the emotional state of the character very differently. Never worn suggests that it is either in childbirth or so soon after as the baby never taking an outing in an upright pushchair or a sling so as to require decorative footwear. But it is not conclusive.

It may seem churlish to spend so many words to critique a 6 word piece, but I wanted to use it to illustrate some of the differences between narrative and story.