Archive for the 'Writing' Category

Things you think about on the jacks when you should be working

Published
by
Colm
on 26 June, 2012
in Misc. and Writing
. 2 Comments

There’s a category of idea you can’t really express without over-expressing. Without sounding like you’re completely overthinking it. There’ll be a core of truth and true feeling but the idea will be so abstract, and expressing it will require a tone of such extreme seriousness, that the idea becomes, for most people, irresistibly easy to poke fun at and dismiss. One unhappy result is that the people who want to express such ideas very often do it in this kind of bowing, apologetic way that robs it of even the small impact it might have had. So that’s no good.

But if you express the ideas in or as comedy, you can keep the idea and the feeling and the serious tone intact, and just blithely sail by the apologies and the apron-wringing. The sense that you don’t take yourself entirely seriously can take people off their guard, can undercut the abstraction just enough that the core of the idea gets through without everyone feeling like they have to dismiss you for being a ponce who sits around thinking about things.

It’s sometimes much easier to take an idea seriously when you can laugh at it.

Morning

Published
by
Colm
on 18 June, 2012
in Writing
. 6 Comments

It’s 6am and I’m sitting at a black oak desk and I’m working, because 6am is what one does when one has decided to take oneself seriously. It’s not actually oak, it’s whatever compound constitutes IKEA’s two-rungs-from-the-bottom standard. It’s as sturdy as it needs to be. It is black though, that much is true.

I met Kevin Barry on Saturday, at a signing. The net result is that I can never hang out with him ever again. I talked over him while he was asking my name, and then he was like “Hmm?” and I was like “Oh! Colm!” and before I could recover from that some photographer swooped in and made us stand there like goms for ages, him pretending to sign the book over and over till your man could get the shot and me with this thousand-watt gormless stare and no idea where to point it, and now everything’s just awkward forever and I’m going to live in Sweden, in a hut, in the dark. Never meet your heroes, or people who might one day become your heroes, or just basically anyone.

___ days since last incident

Published
by
Colm
on 30 May, 2012
in Writing
. 17 Comments

Sometimes you’re standing in your garden savagely beating weeds with a stick that used to be the handle of a rubber broom until you broke it last year using it to savagely beat some weeds and you suddenly realise, although you’ve known it for a while and just pretty successfully avoided thinking about it, that it’s been something like a year since you last posted anything on your website that you set up oh God how long ago right after walking out of your MA graduation ceremony, your website that was supposed to be some kind of diary or proving ground or practice arena or silent, expensive rebuke to your tendency to pretend it was fine and good to take the most elliptical possible path towards what you still for some reason don’t quite like to admit is your dream, something like a year or like 14 months and five days or whatever, it’s not like you keep count, and you think to yourself what, really, have you been doing with the time? Well, you’ve been savagely beating weeds, isn’t it. Which is no excuse. So let’s go.

A call for submissions

Published
by
Colm
on 25 March, 2011
in Fiction and Writing
. 5 Comments

Writers, painters, sculptors, bakers, dancers, prancers, flautists, chancers: I want you to help me effect the gruesome death of an innocent man.

Specifically, old chum of mine David Maybury. You may or may not know him. You may wish him no ill. But that’s all right, because it’s all just (victim-endorsed) fiction. It’s not really happening! If it was, I probably wouldn’t be blogging about it. I would still tweet it though, because #lolmurder, and because I have to break that stubborn three-retweet barrier some day.

Details, then: I’m collecting stories in which Dave dies in some campy, outrageous fashion, to be published here. There’s no restriction on length or format (short is fine, illustrations are more than fine). There’s a rudimentary back-story on the site, but don’t worry about that – for the time being at least, it’s just a gag setup to justify a bunch of standalone stories.

Do head over and have a look, and if you’re at all interested in creating fiction of whatever stripe, I’d love to hear from you.

On imagination and, you know, whatever

Published
by
Colm
on 13 April, 2010
in Books (and the like), Films & TV and Writing
. 16 Comments

David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, 1993:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

JD Salinger is dead

Published
by
Colm
on 29 January, 2010
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 7 Comments

I speculate that the coverage for this is going to boil down to I Liked Catcher In The Rye/I Did Not Like Catcher In The Rye. So a few thoughts here on why a) you’re wrong not to like it and b) JD Salinger was way more important than one book.

The standard view on Catcher is that it’s some mopey teen wandering around being angsty. This polarises people: his worldview resonates with an awful lot of readers, particularly adolescents, but everyone else just wishes he’d cowboy up. The debate never seems to go deeper than that, which is a crying shame, because there’s way more going on in the novel.

Firstly, Holden’s mopiness isn’t just Gawd-no-one-understands-me angst. There’s a line near the start where he says1 “Sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen”. Holden was thirteen when his brother Allie died; his brother, whom he adored, placed at the absolute centre of his universe. Allie’s death destroys Holden and, though he never confronts it head on, the entire novel details his attempts to come to terms with it.

Secondly, despite what many people seem to think, we’re not supposed to see Holden as a role model. Arrested development is not something to aspire to. All-encompassing cynicism is not something to aspire to. If there’s a how-are-we-to-live message in Salinger’s writing, it’s that no matter how hard it might be, the best thing we can do is find a way to get outside ourselves, stop acting like everything is about us, and keep moving forward. There’s an excellent distillation of this in the second part of Franny & Zooey. Or, more conveniently, you could read this speech by David Foster Wallace, who was heavily inspired by Salinger.

At the risk of turning into a wild-eyed evangelist, I think it’s a tragedy that Holden Caulfield is the only one of Salinger’s narrative voices that most people are familiar with. He’s dour and self-absorbed and I can see why you might not like him, whereas Salinger’s writing as a whole is characterised by a genuine warmth and humour that most writers couldn’t even approach. His short stories are phenomenal (see for instance the title story in For Esme, With Love & Squalor). He can do this thing where, in about four or five words, he describes a gesture or facial expression so perfectly that a character’s entire history, state of mind and motivations are dumped directly into your brain.

Ok, wild-eyed evangelist. Breathe.

Right now I’m going to read over these two letters a few times (the latter being some of the best writing advice ever dispensed). Then I’m going to go home and read the books again. Then I’m going to wait for all the manuscripts he’s finished since he retired from publishing to surface. And then… I don’t know what I’ll do.

  1. I’ve no copy to hand, so I’m quoting from memory. [↩]

The secret of klassic komedy

Published
by
Colm
on 9 April, 2009
in Writing
. 14 Comments

This secret: I have discovered it. It’s all about third seasons. Black Books especially, but especially Arrested Development – the only way you could beat the jokes-per-second density of AD3 is by watching Airplane! on fast forward.

Which is not to say that writers should completely skip the first two seasons of a new show. Temporal logistics aside1, that would be depriving us of some fine material. No. But on the other hand, why waste your A-game? And why keep us waiting?

Clearly the only solution is to hire a technically competent team of writers who nevertheless lack that certain spark, and task them with writing the first two seasons. The original creators and true creative minds can write the third season concurrently2, with the lesser seasons being held back for release as a DVD extra.

I literally cannot conceive of any problems with this plan. Someone start writing cheques for me now, because I am on fire.

  1. Physics: ever the enemy of comedy. Well, except slapstick. [↩]
  2. Or maybe they’d have to wait a while, have a staggered start to the writing of each season… I don’t know, the bean counters can work it out. [↩]

A free thing for you

Published
by
Colm
on 3 April, 2009
in Fun with words and Writing
. 13 Comments

Spectacularly poor timing – I meant to post this much earlier – but I find myself in possession of a whole heap of blank postcards (for mysterious reasons!) and I’m looking for something to do with them. I’ve always felt bad when other people do mix CDs and whatnot because there’s very little I can give them in return. So here we are: send an email to post at emesq dot com with your postal address and maybe a word or a sentence on what you’re into and I’ll write a short story for you.1

I’m hoping this is a thing that will be fun for all concerned. If it goes well enough we may even be able to throw some capital letters on there and make it a full-blown honest to god Thing. I would like that. And so would she.

  1. Very short, mind, we’re talking about a postcard here. I’ll make up for it by throwing on a wee doodle as well. Maybe even in colour! [↩]

coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee

Published
by
Colm
on 2 April, 2009
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 7 Comments

I would post but my good LORD how is it so hot in here. Faces are not supposed to sweat. That is something I firmly believe. Surely this whole scenario should make sweet delicious cups of cheap nonsense coffee less attractive but no, I want them. I want them very badly. I haven’t slept in days. I have discovered that being on edge is a prerequisite of good writing. I have been doing some very, very good writing. Everyone should read some Roberto Bolaño. Where was I? Oh, right.

I need your advice

Published
by
Colm
on 26 March, 2009
in Writing
. 22 Comments

Right. How do you write a poem? I mean, without feeling all self-conscious about it and worrying about what poems are supposed to sound like and getting your head stuck in some other century and ending up with at best a bad parody and at worst a limp imitation1. Come on come on come on, deadlines to meet, I haven’t got all day.

  1. I originally wrote “limp invitation”. Feel free to psychoanalyse that once you’ve addressed the main body of the post (I’d like to address HER main body, wha). [↩]
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