With the individual as centre of his own story, this vital link between character and community is degraded.
Of course, there are exceptions – in both art and literature – but as a general trend, I think this holds true. And I just don’t think the experiences of an individual alone will be enough to hold people’s attention down the centuries.
Or am I wrong?
SHAKESPEARE'S SECRET
Okay, I’ve conned you. If you’ve come to learn some amazing secret about Shakespeare’s enigmatic life, then you’re not. Rather, I wanted to grab your attention, and in doing so I used a classic storytelling device.
No, the secret I want to impart is why Shakespeare remains the most popular and well known classic writer of all time. One answer people don’t realize is ‘availability’. The plays were quickly collected into a single folio, so he is easily accessible, even if his actual writing isn’t.
Shakespeare is a psychologist’s dream. This in itself is an important point. His characters can be mad, often ridiculously in love, or hungry for power. They don’t begin with this, so the writer explores the points of transition from sanity to madness. We are fascinated by the reasons for this.
Similarly, his characters are ‘archetypes’. By this, I mean they fit a standard type of character. He writes about classic heroes and heroines, villains and buffoons. A glimpse of each exists in our own minds. Hence, they filter straight through the words and bury themselves deep in our psyche.
His plays revolve around situations. This may seem an obvious point. Most stories do. But Shakespeare tells them in the raw, unaffected by incidences of place. His love affairs, schemes and conspiracies – his murders and supernatural events – are timeless and fit any place at any time.
Shakespeare is therefore universal. He delves deep into human situations, the reasons, the impulses. And in doing so he speaks directly to the person. And through this, his plays apply directly to you, be you sat in an Elizabethan audience, a modern theatre, or the medium being used in a thousand years hence.
More than any other writer in history, Shakespeare understood the eternal now.
A NOVEL CHARACTER
A good male character in a novel is not as novel as you think. Indeed, he seems to follow a simple path through the chapters. And rule number one has got to be, don’t make him nice.
Nice is yuck! Boring. Think of Pip in Great Expectations, and how boring a novel it would have been if Dickens hadn’t filled it with marvellous, eccentric, and deeply flawed personages.
The best characters are on the borderline between moral and not. Infact, much of the good novel is about how he copes with this contradiction, trying to do right, but so often failing.
And the crux of the novel is invariably about change. This is why the character must be how he is. If he had a simple, straight-forward mentality, then there would be no doubts as to his actions. It is the doubt that makes the novel great.
If I had to pick a favourite character from a novel, it would have to be Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights – very bad, but very intriguing. But also set close to the place of my birth. Which makes him so – how can I put it – fictitious.
This most passionate of romantic heroes actually exists in one of the most down-to-earth, unromantic places and communities you could find.
HOW TO WRITE TWISTY TALES
No form of writing appeals to me more than short tales with a twist. I love to read them, and I love to write them. Poe was perhaps the first to define them in themselves, and writers such as Roald Dahl raised them to an art form.
Essential to such tales is the importance of a sense of humour. Indeed, I don’t think you can work out the important slants on life that make the twist without one. If, after you’ve written one, you don’t go ‘he he’ to yourself, then it maybe fails.
Which brings me to the second point. That laugh will be pure sadism. And I suspect there must be a touch of this in the mind-set of the twisty tale writer.
Another essential ingredient of the twisty tale is that you must give hints of the twist somewhere in the storyline. Hence, when re-read, it becomes obvious. This is not always achievable, but the best tales have this ingredient.
This makes you, of course, a conman - which is what the twisty tale is all about – fooling the person into a wrong assumption, and then hitting them with the one you want. And to be successful in this is to give a buzz as good as any conman in other fields.
And this is best achieved by placing, in the story, a kind of ‘comfort zone’. Make the reader think they know what’s going on, and also make them comfortable within the narrative. Achieve this, and the twist at the end becomes a twist indeed.
HOW TO CREATE A CHARACTER
Stories need characters, but if you simply match the character to the story, then it will fail. To create a successful character you need to be much more subtle, and take advantage of a rich storytelling culture that has been around for millennia.
We are told that stereotypical characters are cliché, and this is quite true. But an advance on the stereotype can provide a character that can literally get under the skin of the reader, and if successful you’re a winner straight away.
It is all to do with the archetype. The psychologist Carl Jung realized that archetypal characters exist in dream and myth. Principal archetypes are the sage, the mother, the hero, the child, the seductress and the trickster.
You will find them throughout myth. The sage ranges from Jupiter to our image of God. Now guess who he is in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Why are those characters so good? Because they take their form from myth.
Throughout life we constantly soak up images of these mythological archetypes, and we do so because, in reality, they are expressions of stages of our lives. The mythological character is our psyche writ large.
The writer who can successfully transfer this image to a story is helped by a lifetime’s enculturation. Consider the hero of myth, the loner, coming from nowhere, vanquishing the monster and transforming people’s lives. Hercules? Or James Bond.
ORIGINALITY BE DAMNED
It disgusts me to have to say this, but if you want to write original material, you’re wasting good stamps sending it to a major publisher. Apart from the fact that it’s impossible to get your manuscript through the machine, originality is out of style.
Once upon a time publishers were at the cutting edge of innovation and originality, always on the look out for something new. A rich culture was the result, running parallel with a healthy publishing industry based on ideas.
Most of those publishers have now been swallowed up by the big money men, and a once proud industry has been reduced to accountancy. New ideas may be failures and that is bad for the bank balance.
Gone are the days when a publisher would nurture a writer through two, maybe three, market failures, safe in the knowledge that, if the third or fourth was a success, the others would follow through. Now, formula novels are the only likely way of getting into print.
This situation will change eventually. One day, small presses will break through their anonymity and hit the reading public with a new style of publishing and writing. But until then, the second oldest profession is the only way to the top.
AN EMOTIVE WRITER
Every writer worries about being liked. And as a writer I confess to this psychological problem. Nobody wants to be hated, do they? But perhaps they should. Perhaps writers should forget about sentiment and aim for an audience that would hate them.
This seems a ridiculous proposition, but think about it a moment. The job of a writer is to entertain and inform. But it is also to create controversy. After all, if you’re not noticed no one will read you and you can neither entertain nor inform.
There is a mantra that all publicity is good publicity, and this is very true. There is nothing worse than no publicity at all, for you have not reached an audience, and this is usually because you have not aroused emotion.
This is the key
to good writing. There is nothing worse than not causing emotion. Indifference, you see, is death. And there is one way you know you’ve made it – when people declare they hate you. Because for everyone who hates your work, there is another who loves it.
POETIC INTERLUDE 2
GOD SCRIBE
What insanity, this writing thing,
Creating people, plots that zing,
After a time you become inured,
Thinking it real with every word
It’s so true, I give my word,
Reality created from man to bird,
Dripping life, no need to rehearse,
It comes natural in every verse
Ending with your own uni-verse,
You’ve started life but it’s often a curse,
Plots so real, your life you crop,
Only ending with a full stop
It’s unlikely you’ll ever stop,
A magician, you will never drop,
Your ability to make those characters grovel,
With twists and turns in every novel
And once you’re a writer life is novel,
Even if poor, living in a hovel,
Scribbling away from brunch to tea,
You’ve created your own personal entity
MY LIFE’S GOAL
For thirty years I’ve written each day,
Hoping for success without delay,
Honing my craft, getting it right,
Then realising its errors the following night;
My goal is two-fold in all I do,
Perfecting my craft and communicating to you,
A message, a philosophy, a reason to be,
My muses like invading entities;
I was once on the verge of making it big,
Two books sold, published, but life’s a pig,
Publishers changed, wanting celebrity alone,
I festered a while – they didn’t atone;
My pile of rejections became quite high,
But I kept sending manuscripts on the sly,
‘Cos to feel success slip through fingers so,
Gives you a thirst to bath in that glow;
Each year I began with this thirst intact,
A yearning, a need, to interact,
But now it’s declining, this goal of mine,
I’m a blogger! I’m read! And I feel fine
DIARY
We write it down, what we have done,
Today immortalised, the trials and fun,
At work, at rest, and even at play,
A whole life, in words on display,
A remembrance of how we lived our life,
With a touch of wit – sharp as a knife,
The weather, other people, all is there,
Our secrets, hopes, dreams and despair;
Year after year we write it down,
What made us laugh, and what caused a frown,
But reading back to the past just to see,
We think: Oh my word, was that really me?
TACTILE WORDS
Touch!
Words in all their majesty,
Communicating thoughts from you to me,
Touching our minds, making us whole,
Abstract thought their ultimate goal;
Touch!
Modelling our world through concept true,
Written words pass from me to you,
Ethereal in their conceptual van,
But leaving a world that we can …
Touch!
CONFESSION
Confess!! Did you do that?
All was life, and then splat!
Confess!! All was going well,
But then you had to tell;
Confess!! You’re so sly,
Was it you? But why?
Confess!!
‘Twas me
But what is that you call?
Bang your head upon the wall?
‘Twas only a story, after all
NEVER ENDING
It cannot end – goes on and on
Forever with its poetic song,
Stunning with its majesty,
Recited, always, after tea,
Inspiring others to follow its way,
Writing feverishly without delay,
Placing thoughts within the mind,
Sparking intuition, you’ll find;
The poet’s words are magnificent,
Sometimes almost heaven sent,
How can it end, it’s so sublime,
Packed with metre, rhythm, rhyme,
Often with its unique blend,
Oh, the word,
It cannot end ….
AN INVITATION
Come and join me in my home,
Beware, it’s such a scary zone,
Lots to give you a terrific fright,
Especially when it turns to night;
Come and join me, meet my friend,
His teeth are sharp, I won’t pretend;
He’ll bite your neck, as he should,
And I’m afraid you’ll be quite lacking in blood;
Come and join me, meet my pet,
I’m afraid he devoured his last vet,
He’s all hairy and howls at full moon;
If he takes a leg, try not to swoon;
Now you’ve joined me and can’t get out,
At dead of night there’ll be no doubt,
As ghosts and ghouls you’re bound to find,
By morning you’ll have lost your mind!
So thanks for coming – did you enjoy yourself,
Taking tales from my shelf?
There’s nothing to fear, not even the birds,
I’m just a writer – they’re only words
A LITERARY MIND
I sit here, thinking – in my usual space,
My mind’s eye takes me to another place,
Where the books about me speak out loud,
Of writers, ancient, so very proud,
Of characters, creations, denouements great,
Of moral dilemmas to relate;
Poe and Hardy and Dickens, too,
Shakespeare, Lawrence, take me through,
Stories that come from mighty minds,
As brilliant plots begin to unwind,
Genres proliferate as they write,
Space trips, detectives, no respite,
As genius is portrayed in glorious prose,
Love stories, tragedies, heroes repose,
Within the pages until read,
Coming alive as your mind is fed;
Inspiration, one and all,
Constantly they do enthral,
The wannabe writer such as me,
Surrounded by literary divinity
MEMOIRS
Life – Pt. 1
(1) A Life of Change (2) Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - The Beginning (3) Finding a Place (4) Me and the Cold War (5) The Invincible Land Rover (6) Get In Line (7) Working My Ticket? (8) Hills of Fire
A LIFE OF CHANGE
Our life changes as it goes along. Yet change in life is more than biological. It is social, cultural, professional, psychological. As a kid I was a very different person to what I am now. Yet maybe that kid is still with me, inside, rising up in my mad moments.
I do hope so. We should take that child with us into adulthood.
As childhood gave way to teenage years, I changed a great deal. Girlfriends helped, but the main change was becoming lead guitarist in a local rock band. Things certainly changed – and I can even remember some of it.
But teenage hormones don’t last forever. Hence, the band went and I changed into the young man, entering my father’s business. But this was most likely a period of transit, because I was never happy in this life I’d changed into.
The transition ended when I changed and went off to London.
The big city was a change indeed, especially as I’d lived in the countryside. The next couple of years I spent drifting from one change to another, until finally my life s
eemed mapped out.
This change led me into the Royal Air Force, and I was no longer the drifter, but doing a useful job. But I guess I’d just got used to changing, and eventually I changed when I came down with chronic fatigue syndrome.
That was one very big change. I turned from action man to barely being able to do anything. It was a change that was hard to cope with until I changed – realized this was the new me so get on with it.
That was in 1982, and cfs is still with me. And I suppose one of the most fundamental changes that came along with it was a thirst for knowledge and writing.
It was then I realized I’d had the perfect life to become a writer. All those changes, you see, led to experience – the stuff of the writer itself. And maybe a certain wisdom. After all, is a life truly lived if it doesn’t change?
CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME – THE BEGINNING
I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I’m often asked questions about it, but apart from the occasional mention, I haven’t really written about it. Why that is, I’m not quite sure. Maybe it is too close to the real me. But I’ve decided to take the plunge.
People often ask what causes it. Many ideas have been put forward. These include stress, a viral infection, exposure to chemicals such as organo-phosphates, and even radiation exposure.
Can any of these factors be found in my contracting the condition? Well, in the two years prior to it I was in a very stressful job. During that time I had viral infection after infection. And it doesn’t stop there.
I was in the Royal Air Force at the time. And for those two years I was on emergency overseas reinforcement. Hence, I’d been inoculated against every disease known to man – apart from CFS, apparently – and I worked on a site with acute radiation hazards.
So take your pick. But life finally came to a head following a 3 day military exercise in which I’d had practically no sleep. I’d also cracked two ribs a couple of weeks before. Finishing at 8am on the morning, I jumped in the car to drive 200 miles for a period of leave. After 20 minutes I passed out at the wheel. To this day I don’t know how I stopped that car. But I’ve never felt ‘well’ since.