Is this the end: Probably not.

As planned Book 9 (Now titled ‘The Exercise’ is completed and up for sale on Amazon.

I am happy with the way it turned out. It was envisaged as a different kind of fiction (in keeping with my original intention of writing some very varied books) and I may have invented a new genre of Bureaucratic Fiction (ie fiction that is itself bureaucratic in nature). It won’t appeal to everyone but it is already of interest to people who have had experience of writing/reading official reports; who deal with issues of what counts as reliable evidence; who think about what can be assumed to be trustworthy – and so on.

Amongst the many things hidden inside the text, there is the transcript of a lecture I would love to have delivered (even though it is far from my areas of expertise) – it has some parts that made me laugh as I wrote it, and many points that keep coming back to me and stimulating further thinking.

So, in the early part of 2025, I have nine books published in both paperback and ebook formats, and two older ones that exist only as ebooks – so 9 or 11 depending on how I count them This gets me comfortably to my 2025 intention of having ten very different books written and published.

I probably, for now at least, don’t have another book in me. I could revamp the two older ebooks. I could pull some articles from the website where I lodge various bits of thinking and do a book of essays/thinkpieces. I could pull together some more recent poems and edit then into a book. Or I could just leave it there for now and focus on promoting and advertising those nine varied books.

In any case. I can’t see a time when I will not be writing something for some reason or other.

And so on to book 9

 It doesn’t have a working title yet. I simply think of it as ‘that air crash book’.

Much of the early work has been done:

Getting the original idea. I asked family for suggestions for further writing. A few suggestions came back. One stood out, and immediately resonated with me. The challenge was to write a compelling tale based on a wartime airplane crash on the moors near to where I was born. I shifted the writing away from that real crash to a similar, but fictitious, one. That was the jumping off point for my thinking, as I sat on buses and trains, leading to disconnected sets of possibilities.

Sketching a beginning. I wrote out a set of potential opening sentences: There was the screech of metal as the plane failed, in thick fog, to clear the rocky outcrop on the top of the moor. Wreckage was spread across the bracken. It was told from the first-person point of view (to give it an immediacy), by a young woman who had been in the body of the plane and thrown out as the doorway twisted open.  ‘I went to check the pilot. He was clearly dead’. And then the introduction of a mystery. ‘I can’t be found here. That’s simply not possible. There’s nothing I can do for the pilot. My leg is broken. I crawl as best I can deep into a thicket of bracken and wait to die ….’

Was that it? If so, it was going to be a very short book. I sketched out what was likely to happen next: A local farmer had seen the plane come down and goes to check on the crash; the police are sent for; things get set in motion to investigate, as with any air crash; there will be a coroner’s report on the dead pilot, and some attempt made to contact any next-of-kin relatives. It still felt like a cul-de-sac – not really going anywhere.

At the time of starting the book it was an unusually dry summer, leading to large moorland fires having to be dealt with. This triggered an idea that the body of the young woman, long dead, could be uncovered by firefighters dealing with these major fires 80 years after the plane crash.

Settling on the approach and the narrator.  It was initially going to be a linear tale told by a young woman who is somehow, mysteriously, involved in the plane crash, As things reshaped themselves in my mind, it turned into an account of a group of people applying to be staff at a new centre for information analysts, told by one of the participants.

The story next pivoted to be centred on a two-day group training exercise for people being recruited as information analysts. As such, it is set out in the form of a Training Pack: Welcome; Day 1 exercises; Summary of ideas from Day 1; Introduction to Day 2; Day 2 Exercises; Summary of outcomes from the two days. The subject material for participants to work on could be in the form of separate documents that related to a World War 2 US Air Force plane crash in fog over moors in the North of England. A mystery emerges as the evidence gets progressively revealed during the training exercise. Day 2 information comes in the form of reports relating to the body of a young woman being discovered close to the crash site, but more than 80 years later, by fire service people dealing with a moorland brush fire. She seems to be both somehow connected with the crash yet can’t be. She appears to have no relatives, and no recorded connection with any part of the Air Force.

The documents could simply be presented as a collection of reports with no additional commentary ie there being no narrator. Ideally the text material would be a box of loose-leaf separate documents that can be spread out, shuffled around etc – but will, in practice, have the sheets gathered in order as the book.

The reader is put in the position of being a participant in the same sensemaking process. It is anticipated that the book will be informed by a number of themes: What counts as evidence? What sense can be made of things when you only have part of the information? What connections can be made? What is reliable? Another thread is around ideas about how events across time are connected through people’s lives.

Doing some initial research. None of this was familiar, in the sense of the advice often given to writers to write about what you know. Some research was necessary. I looked up details of World War 2 military air crashes. I looked up maps of US Air Force bases in 1944. I read articles on the nature of time and got lost in various theories of what constitutes Time. I diverged into wormholes, introductory quantum physics, time travel, history of the US 8^th Airforce. There were readings on what constituted evidence, or reality, or sensemaking. I dwelt briefly on New York hotels; the mechanisms of hotel key cards; the recruitment of teams to work on decoding at Bletchley Park, and other interesting side wanders. Some of this informed my ideas. Much was simply discarded.

Next steps:

The above was a process of looking outwards within a very loose framework – a process of scooping, gathering, sifting. The task now is to work the resulting melange up into a credible narrative – a process more like weaving, or painting, or doing a jigsaw. The whole thing has to hang together satisfactorily. The balancing act is to have sufficient detail to make it feel realistic and credible, but not so much detail as to become boring. Certainly, there have to be no cases where an expert (or pedant) can discount the whole with ‘But that’s not how things were in reality!’

This may take me a few months of writing, with blocks of text being shuffled around to get the best sequence. If the documents on which the book rests are evidence of something, then there will need to be decisions about what, and how much, to reveal to the reader, in what sequence, as things move along.

I am quite looking forward to doing the mechanics, the jigglings and jugglings – as much as the writing itself, getting some sort of flow going; finding words that do work beyond their allotted task; to do the editing, spellchecking, grammar revisions, realigning non-sequiteurs, the final polishing, the tightening up of loose and baggy bits, and the fleshing out of any sections that feel too sparse.

The aim is still to keep the whole less of a linear storyline, and more of a collection of discrete pieces of information/evidence to be played with, thought about, and linked together into possible chains of understandings …. with a structure that allows for a degree of flexibility but also provides a gradual structured revelation of clues and possibilities – asking the reader ‘So what do you make of it all so far?’

I don’t want it to be a straight mystery, nor a war story, nor an eventual romance – maybe more of an open puzzle. It may still end up as a very short book. An option would be to have a longer book with several parts: The story as above; then a section that is based on the people in the group – their actions, thoughts, relationships etc; and maybe a final section is philosophical/theoretical on the nature of understanding. None of this is determined at this stage.

There is no deadline, but I do set myself some outline intentions: Do the next couple of bits before Easter; aim to have a good enough draft of the whole by the Autumn; get final text up ready for publishing before the end of 2024 …. Leaving 2025 for Book 10.

Revisiting old stuff

In a society where one is urged to reuse, recycle, repurpose etc, at what stage is it useful to go back and amend stuff already written?

With most forms of publication there is the possibility of changing the existing text of a book. Writers can get an Author Copy of their book and sometimes, no matter how much editing time has been spent getting it right, there can sometimes be one or two errors. Usually nothing significant, but enough to get in the way of the reader’s flow across the page. This is a real irritant when a few hundred copies of an initial print run have been sent out into the world. You have to wait until a second print run to put things right. Mind you, there have been examples of famous books where the short-run first edition becomes suddenly more valuable because it has a couple of interesting errors. Of course, errorless proofreading before doing even a single copy is the ideal, but usually I upload the book text and cover, then run off a single Author Copy of the book to quickly read through. This gives me the chance to see any errors in a fresh light and allows me to see how the words sit on the actual printed page (the equivalent of getting the Printer’s Proof before running the public production). With print-on-demand there is no need to wait for a second print run, leaving a number of faulty copies already out in the world. I can nip in to the original text file, on the publishing server, as soon as I notice anything to change, make the amendment, and the very next copy printed off after that is error-free.

Beyond that, I have never gone back and changed things substantially. For me, once a book is felt to be finished that is it – best left well alone. If I did ever feel otherwise, then there might be some fun in producing different versions, over time, with different endings.

I have a different view of the articles on my web page (www.thewordsthething.org.uk). These articles were written at specific times, written in the moment, open to further development. I have administrator control over the website and its contents. I can easily go back into any article and immediately update parts, amend parts, or delete parts – either because the context has moved on or because my own thinking has moved on. I don’t do this very often because it feels more authentic to simply say that that was what I was thinking at the date of the article and I might do it differently if I were writing it now.

In a very different way, there have been some interesting repurposings of whole books. I have ended up with author copies printed off to spot the errant mistake or two and, having served that purpose, they are no longer of real use. These redundant copies have been repurposed via the art activities that sit alongside my writing activities. Sometimes the text has been cut out and strung along wires, festooned. Sometimes the whole book has been bound in red tape, or suspended from wires, or bored through with padlocks. Pages have been pulped and use as papier-mache, suspended on a wire to make a model yellow wrecking ball (the secret being that inside the ball is a screwed up sheet with handwritten secrets from 70 years of my life). In such ways part of the outcomes from my writing is finding new life as artworks.

Being Ernesto

And here it is.

One of my shorter books, but one that I enjoyed writing most.

Final version available via Amazon.

Cover from an artwork done by me.

I am quite pleased with it really

Book 8

My previous books are:

It’s Murder on the Eleven

Another Glorious Day

Five Men

Everything There Is

Metropolis: Art, Words and Cities

Fragments:Lives

Sides and Edges

So I am in the middle of writing book eight in the planned set of ten. These ten are designed to be quite different from each other. The remaining unwritten two exist in half-written form as several files on the computer and some hand-written outlines, plus a couple of potential timelines and diagrammatic outlines of how the book might be structured.

Like each of my previous books, this one is already throwing up a set of puzzles that need thinking through or practically working through. I don’t mind this at all. Part of writing, for me, is getting ideas turned into words; part is solving puzzles that come out of getting those words down on the page; and part is getting it all to flow structurally, in the best way I can, so that the reader has an easier time enjoying the story as it goes along.

This book had its origins in a previous one, ‘Fragments:Lives’. That book was about someone living temporarily in Vancouver in 2017. The backdrop to the main action was the various real events happening in Vancouver at that time. It was written in Vancouver as these day-by-day events unfolded around me. The main strands of the story are about what happens when an old female artist dies – What was her life like? Who deals with her legacy? Who has any right to make decisions about things? That book’s narrator is involved in this action, as the city gets on with its everyday activities, and he gathers it as material that might form the content of some potential novel – which he starts to write on the plane as he leaves Vancouver.

The last few thousand words of ‘Fragments:Lives’ thus become, after slight editing, the opening of this eighth book, which then goes on to have a life of its own.

So, I already had a main character, Lizzie, that the fictitious potential novelist had invented. I had a good idea of her character. I also had two or three minor characters already in place. The starter text ended with a good springboard (‘… and that is when my life changed.’) to move on from.

I soon got to around 10,000 words of this new story. I was enjoying writing it, even if it was beginning to present me with some puzzles that needed thinking about, and resolving, before the book went much further. Although these are listed separately below, they didn’t come at me in such an itemised linear way. I had to keep going back over them, separately and collectively, until I was happy that things were lining up well and I could see the next steps more clearly. Sometimes it was a matter of coming to a certain decision about a person. Sometimes it was about which order things happened in, and who knew what when. Sometimes it was about changing a line of development, then maybe changing it again.

Once I got past 15,000 words, there was a danger that a good idea I had got written in only to find, on reading through, that it had already been included. To keep track of what was in there, in what order etc, I did an A4 page of bullet points. Each bullet equalled one key bit in the story, in order that they appeared in the text. This gave me a way of keeping a summary overview to check on from time to time.

Title

The ending of ‘Fragments:Lives’ was copied into a new file and simply titled ‘First 4000 Words’. That stayed as the working title of the file for some time. Soon the story had become centred around a casket – so the working title became ‘Casket of …..’. I tried out various endings to that phrase: Casket of Fear; Casket of Hopes; Casket of Dreams – none worked brilliantly enough to stick, so it was left open-ended for a while longer. Towards the final part of the writing a new character had emerged. The text had a line about ‘….becoming Ernesto’ and, for now, that has stuck as a good potential title for the book as a whole. It might change again, who knows.

Tenses

The adopted-in starter text was descriptive of things that had already taken place (a choice already made for me by that fictitious potential author from Fragments:Lives). I carried on writing in the past tense but really wanted to move, as quickly as the story would let me, into the present tense. This would allow me to talk about things immediately happening to the character – giving the story a much more active momentum. The more the character described things as ‘This is happening now ….’ then later ‘This is happening now ….’ the more it became difficult to sort out the passage of time. I kept launching into present tense only to redraft it into past tense and move on.

Who is telling the story? Who is it being told to?

 Obviously, I (the writer) am the one telling the story -writing the text of the book – to anyone who wants to later read it. Within the book itself, there is the main character who narrates things as they happen. So, she gets to be the one telling the story. It is her tale to tell, from her perspective, in her voice.  Midway through, this other character (Ernesto) takes on some substance. How was he going to get a voice? (Particularly as he was dead). If his view was going to be left to Lizzie to narrate for us, how would she know what he was wanting to say? (Particularly as he was dead). Some device would be needed to make that possible.

Who is helping; who is hindering?

Besides Ernesto, Lizzie has a number of other characters to interact with: her mother, a police friend, a psychologist, a librarian, an archivist. Some of these were there from the beginning. Some emerged, out of a need, as the story unfolded. At each stage, the characters can help Lizzie in some way and thus move the plot along. There is also, always, the opening to bring in some deceit, some unintentional confusion, some distracting, some double-dealing etc. I have a tendency to make my characters nice enough people, people one can side with – but maybe that weakens things. Maybe there are times for some out-and-out baddie to appear on the scene. I don’t think that is going to happen, but there’s still time.

From the start I didn’t want it to be some simple Good vs Evil plot. I saw it in terms of people coming together (in some way; for some reason/s) and struggling to make sense of things. So the protagonists were Sensemakers and the ‘enemy’ was things not making sense, things not stacking up etc. Maybe that would bring in things like the nature of evidence; what can be believed and on what basis; what is real, if anything?

Tight writing and padding; and notes to myself

For the story to move along nicely, the writing needs to be kept tight – nothing in there that doesn’t contribute in some way to keeping the flow going. At the same time there were gaps emerging that needed to be somehow filled. If one situation jumped too suddenly to some different situation that would move things along, but might leave the reader behind wondering how all that suddenly came about. Anything put in to ease the change had to be more than simple padding – itself it had to contribute to the whole.

There were parts in the writing where I left a gap with a note to myself (in red font) saying More to go in Here. Sometimes the potential filler text was written quite quickly and loosely. This was done in a different colour (blue or green) to signal that I had to come back to it later. When I had time, I returned with a clear head and revised the text – which was then changed to black font (to show that it was a final version – for now).

Early constraints

The text imported from the end of Fragments:Lives gave me some things that had to be worked with: a map, a land document, a Will, a passing mention of Bolivia, and the specific name Ernesto Gottlieb. These had to be ditched or worked up in the a new storyline for which they were not initially intended. Each needed fleshing out. Each needed a backstory. This required some bits of research.

The initial character of Lizzie was a given at the start. One ongoing consideration was how to maintain her basic characteristics, whilst letting her grow as time passed.

Which brought another device. The story moves across a number of years. I didn’t want it to be Lizzie’s diary. Some of my other books had verged on being Journal in format. How does the story jump across any time gaps. Lizzie is the narrator, it is up to her to signal any such jumps eg ‘That was ten years ago, now.’

Historical and geographical crosschecking

The story was set in New York (and Bolivia), with specific locations mentioned to give things some reality. There were also some dates: A document dated 1834, a Will dated 1884 etc. Characters travelled around during the story – within New York; within Bolivia; From Bolivia to New York and vice versa.

This gave me various things to think about.

I needed to draft out a timeline for Ernesto and another for Lizzie: When were they born; when did key events happen to them; what about family history? This helped with fleshing out the character but also stopped me tripping myself up by having things happen before they could according to the sequence of dates used as a skeleton timeline.

There were bits of geography to get right: What place was located where in relation to other places – so that it became feasible for the characters to move in the right directions, taking an appropriate amount of time for the journey.

It was important to match the historical period together with the moving around of characters. A couple of times I had Ernesto getting on a bus – way before buses were a realistic form of travel. A simple change of ‘bus’ to ‘cart’ did the trick. If he sailed anywhere, would that be a sailing ship or a steam ship, and how long would that journey take etc.?

Some outline research was done on the history of Bolivia; the main events in late 19th Century New York; the structure of US census data etc. Not much of this made it into the final story. The research was still necessary though. It helped with getting the continuity and feasibility right; it helped with a few background details; and occasionally it sparked off some new line of thinking.

Underwriting and overwriting

Near the end of writing, with most sections in place, most things edited and fact-checked, there is still another task. This is about balance. Reading the whole text through, some bits may appear to go on just a bit too long – are overwritten – and need pruning down. This is different from the advice, in many How To writing books, which recommend cutting out all adjectives, adverbs, unnecessary words, to get to the bare-bones action. This is about fitting the overall volume of words to what went before and what comes after. The aim is to avoid a situation where the story is moving along nicely but then comes a chunk of text, and the reader eventually thinks ‘Oh, get on with it!’ It is an exercise in enabling the reader’s flow, letting it move along without getting bogged down.

The other thing to look for is the opposite – any parts that are underwritten. For example, a character is introduced and things happen. Suddenly, that character no longer plays any part – here one minute, gone the next. The action shifts to something else. This interrupts the attention of the reader, who feels puzzled that something has unexpectedly gone off a cliff. In this case, things can need a more gentle ramp from one topic to the next. This has to be done carefully, avoiding any sense of some padding simply having been stuffed in to fill things out. Whatever gets written in still has to add something to the story.

Finally there is the checking for any dangling ideas. Not everything has to be rounded off – some things can be intriguingly left open – but that is different from the writer having forgotten to bring some thread to a satisfactory conclusion, where it is needed to bring a sense of satisfaction that everything has been put in its place.

The book still has a way to go. There are sections to fill in. There are facts to check and research details to confirm. There are blue-font sections to edit and turn to black-font. There are transitions to read through to make sure they are as good as they can be for the reader. There are continuities to assure – Could that person actually know that at that time? There are decisions to be made about how it comes to its conclusion. And that just finishes off the writing. There is then editing of the almost-final draft text: Are paragraphs in the best sequence? Has it all been spell-checked? Are the names spelt the same consistently? Are there stray bits that are left dangling for no good reason, or that have mysteriously popped up from nowhere? Is the layout consistent? Finally, there is a cover design to find. Most of the books use my own artworks as a basis for the cover – Do I have something that will fit with the overall storyline?

Getting to ten: without repetition, boredom or deviation

The original aim was to write ten books: each different from the others; all within a framework of ideas that I work with on other things; each written for enjoyment, without too much focus on commercial aspects. The process would not be write/ publish/promote each separate book but write and publish to get a collection of books and then promote the package as a whole. I would try to avoid getting caught up in repeating something I had just written, and which I had enjoyed writing, so that I turned out sequels or series. Whilst being within the same mesh of interests each book would be as different as possible from the others – recognising that my own ways of writing would probably show through.

I am now at book #7. Already published (on Amazon site as paperback and as ebook) are:

It’s Murder on the Eleven: A light murder mystery, based on Birmingham’s famous number 11 bus route.

Five Men: Set in the decades leading up to the 1950s; based in a Manchester hospital ward as a device to throw a small number of male characters involuntarily together and see how they get on.

Another Glorious Day: A strange tale of a man unintentionally locked alone with his thoughts and memories.

Everything There Is: The 2097 diary of a teenage girl. This had to work as a young adult story, but also I wanted to explore what life might realistically be like in 80 years time (based on developments actually underway at the moment).

Fragments:Lives: Written in real time in Vancouver 2017, featuring the day-to-day events of that city but also follows a set of characters working out issues connected with legacies, art, decision-making, city life etc.

Metropolis: Art, words and the city: A set of fictions written in response to a Birmingham 2013 contemporary art exhibition that was focused on cities (real and imagined); plus some non-fiction exploration of the nature of cities.

Book #7 is part-finished. It tries to use current concerns about reuse/recycling/repurposing to take bits of previous texts I have written and rework these into something new – using fictional written portraits of people as the subjects of some imagined anthropological study, and interweaving this with notes about research in general (with some real references). It is in a final draft stage, ready for editing, and should get published fairly soon (I hope). It may (or may not) get titled Sides and Edges.

So I am doing OK on numbers (10 books on my list by 2025/6 doesn’t look impossible, but will still be a real challenge).

I am certainly doing OK on keeping each bit of writing an enjoyable thing rather than a drudge. I similarly enjoy all the challenges of the editing process, seeing it as sets of interlocking puzzles to solve in order to get the many parts adding up to something I am happy with.

In the books so far there is a variety of settings, contents, characters, plot lines etc. Four of the books did settle into a daily format, even if not a formal diary/journal layout. This is something I will need to keep an eye on in the future, or I might fall down on the ‘repetition’ criteria. Although there is this variety, there are recurring themes and ideas. These are all part of the wider framework of interests that I do all my work within (whether it be writing, or research, or tentative attempts at making art). These themes include:

falsehoods and truths

who has the authority to determine things

concerns of individuals, and societal expectations

identities – fixed and shifting over time

the influence of place

networks and interconnectedness of people

acting in the present without being able to know the future

legacies: what one leaves as a trace

social and political issues of cities

art and creativities

moral duties

what counts as evidence

layers and facades

fragments and wholes

So, still keeping thing enjoyable, still within the overall framework, are there three more books that might get written in the next five or so years? There is a list of possibilities (and if I don’t get there, I’m not going to beat myself up about it).

#8: A book I have started working on but which at the moment is lacking any driving power. It is envisaged as a set of documents that the reader can move backwards and forwards between, piecing bits of understanding together; starting with the crash of a World War 2 aeroplane on some isolated moorland, and moving across time periods.

#9: Another book that is underway – but really only just a few thousand words of text at the moment – picks up a thread from the final pages of Fragments:Lives without being a sequel to that book. It has very different characters, setting, storylines. The main narrator is someone with high sensitivities that respond to the layerings and histories of a city, and sets that person working on a puzzle from a casket of evidence. (You see how the themes recur, and how it can all slip into repetitiveness).

#10: A book that brings together a range of poems, many of which have already been written for a variety of purposes. A lot of the text exists but it all needs bring together, needs substantial reworking (I suspect), and will need a focus on editing to get things in an order that flows and makes some sense rather than ending up as a disjointed ragbag of stuff.

Alongside this is the need to seriously think through my approach to promotion and marketing so that, as the collection gets to 8 or 9 or 10 books, there is a credible – and interesting- plan in place from 2022/23 onwards.

Fragments:Lives From idea to product; a journey in small steps

Fragments:Lives is my sixth novel. It has just been published, both as a paperback and as an ebook. The tale has had a life of its own: Taking its time on a journey, with just a few ups and downs but mostly with sufficient momentum to always maintain my hope that it might come to some satisfactory outcome.
I enjoyed writing this one (I always enjoy writing my books) and have set out some of the thinking steps on that journey.
The stimulus; the origins
Vancouver is a city that I have visited several times. My next visit (in April-May 2018) will give me a total of around 100 days spent there since 2001.
The city, its people and its happenings got into my brain. When I was thinking about my next book, Vancouver kept persuading me to use what I knew and felt by being there.
The setting
Walking around the city’s West End gave me elements of the setting: low apartment blocks; distant glimpses of the water and the mountains; older traditional heritage houses carefully constructed from wood; bits of history leaking through here and there; easy transit routes …
Characters
The people in the book are nowhere near being based on actual people I met there. I already had a cast – in rough outlines: A small group of four or five people; an older man and an unrelated older woman; a younger man and an unrelated younger woman – with the two women being connected/related; plus a very small number of background characters to be sketched in very briefly where that helps carry the main story forward. This would give some interactions across age; across gender; across generations.
It occurred to me, early on in the writing, that I tend to locate my novels within very small worlds. No extensive list of characters; no armies of supporting actors. Usually no more than 6-12 people in total throughout the whole of any one book.
One book is based on a woman on a bus calling on assistance from a handful of her regular contacts. Another is structured around five men and their wives plus a couple of hospital staff. Yet another has a girl, her immediate family, and a handful of friends. At the extreme is the story of one man alone in a container, with just his thoughts and imaginings.
Plot? No idea of this at the outset
I picked up on issues in Vancouver. These were reflections of contemporary issues in modern, Western cities – one of my overarching interests. This included housing and homelessness; loneliness and contact; histories, legacies and city planning; decision-making, at the city and personal level; public art and art in general; change and redevelopment; a sense of loss and a sense of anticipation for the future. These were not to be stuck in the book as chunks of exposition, lecturing the reader, or to show how much research had been done – they were somehow to be contexts for the main story, or levers that helped moved that story along. The thing had to be, first and foremost, readable and interesting.
A balance had to be found between rehearsing the issues in all their interesting detail and letting the four characters get on with things. The majority of what was originally sketched in from the background research had been deleted or amended by the end of the journey.
Timescale
My books tend to take a couple of years to go from idea to published product. This was true in this case. The first year was a matter of getting ideas together, then letting them stew for a while; trying out various possible structures; deciding on whose story it was going to be, and who would be telling it. Then a serious attempt at getting the words down, editing generally as I went along; collecting new ideas and seeing where they might fit (or discounting them) – taking me into the second year. This was rounded off with several months of rearranging, editing, checking, deleting and infilling. Then a month of final polishing and sorting out a piece of my artwork that matched the themes of the book, and which might thus make a good cover picture.
Decisions made
Of the four main characters this was, initially, going to be the old woman’s story – her take on things as reflected through her everyday experiencing of life in Vancouver: her comings and goings; her interactions with the others.
It was going to be told in the First Person to give a sense of action rather than passivity (I had already decided that she was far from being a passive old woman). The danger was that it this might then be a rather endless autobiography – this happened, then this, then this, … It also prevented me from getting directly inside the heads of the other characters. I would only see them as she saw them.
I needed an external observer, watching these four characters interacting. It would still be the old woman’s story (ie a story focused on her character, her thoughts, her experiences) but somehow told through the eyes of a newcomer to Vancouver. This would give me a number of threads:
Who was the old woman, really? What was she like and how could we know that?
What might be deduced about a person from their belongings, their tone of voice, their mannerisms?
How do people relate to each other? Mother-daughter; two older friends; young incomer settling into an existing network of relationships?
The marvelling of a newcomer to the ways of any city.
These were initial threads – but still far from being enough to hang a developing story on. It was, at that stage, a non-story; writing in which nothing happened.
I needed a way in to some potential for change, some unfolding of events.
After a while I came to the conclusion that I needed to kill off the old woman. So, overnight, she went from being centre-stage narrator to a person no longer there, but somehow still having an effect.
It did, immediately, give me a more active start to the story: ‘Elizabeth died yesterday’. (A start that I didn’t end up using in the final version).
There was then a bit of mentally jiggling things around:
• An early introduction of the narrator (who, where, why….) through his actions and thoughts, not through any straight description of him.
• A way of giving the reader a feeling for the location (again without straight description).
• With three other people brought into the first several paragraphs (who they were; how related/connected; hints of their personalities…) – all via actions around the old woman’s funeral.
• Old woman’s life being revealed, uncovered, prised apart in retrospect – becomes an intrigue: ‘Who were you Elizabeth? Who were you, really?’
• Unfolds via going through her belongings, disposing of her assets and ‘little treasures’ – What a life’s-worth of accumulated stuff can tell us.
• What happens to her memory, her belongings, her home – and who decides?
There still wasn’t much there, but enough to give things a kick-start.
One year on, with a credible number of thousands of words in place, there were still reshapings. The young incomer was now a potential writer… so collecting fragments, images, snippets…
The final version of my tale could be the one he wrote whilst in Vancouver, based on his observations there; or at least contain large sections of his practice writings.
This still didn’t have the right alignment between the story he was writing and the observations that may be the basis of some writing. It all felt too jumpy, too disconnected, too fragmented.
I settled, finally, on a format that was the observer’s notebook that he kept for:
o jottings, observations, thoughts
o his explorations into the life of Elizabeth, the old woman
o daily events involving the other people around him
o small snippets of trial writings
leading up to the possibility of starting to produce some ‘proper’ writing.
That seemed to work.
I tried it out on a couple of trusted readers. They liked it.
Then it was a final polish, sort out a cover, and get it published.
The final product is selling – not like hot cakes, more at a level of warm biscuits, but it has only just gone on sale.

Why (at the moment) I’ll never write a series

Not because I don’t read series-books. Not because I don’t admire the writers of series: I do (mostly).
It’s because I like the variety of writing in a range of styles, for a range of purposes, making the writing available in a range of ways.
What do I mean by a series?
I suppose I mean a set of books in which the same characters develop across several books, rather than within one book.
I have in mind the last series I have just finished reading. I was looking round in an airport for an interesting paperback to fill the time over the next few days of travelling. I came across one by a writer I was not familiar with. It was her latest book and was excellent. On the way home, I came across another of hers featuring the same, very likeable, detective. I started reading that one: same characters, same setting, but a few books earlier in the series.
This raises the first issue with series books. The author produces them in order but a reader may pick up any one book, almost at random, then another – not necessarily reading the books in sequence.
So, whichever book I pick up – with an established set of characters, each with their own set of happenings and attitudes (developed in earlier books in the series) – has to do two things:
• Help a newcomer like me (dropping in maybe in the middle of the sequence of books) to immediately get into the characters and their background, giving me all the details necessary to let me do that.
• Put an old-hand reader, already familiar with all that has gone before, straight in the middle of the new action – rather than repeat the details of the characters in such a way that established readers get tired of being told the same stuff over and over in each book they read in sequence
The second issue, as I see it, is that of the stories developing within a closed world.
Once having the detective based in Oxford, or in a rural area that encompasses a set of Middle England villages, or in an out-of-the-way village near to Montreal – it becomes hard to transfer his /her duties to other police departments, in other locations.
Each book brings out the shape of the person’s individuality – their gender, marital status and sexuality; their cases and career to date; their scars, phobias and quirks of character.
The detective accumulates a set of sidekicks, forensic supports, management officers, relatives, friends and enemies. Promotion (or death) comes infrequently, so they stay in that milieu. This brings familiarity and reassurance, but also tends to fix things: That track will always lead to the forest; the old forge is always next to the village inn; that old burnt tree will always have its unique history; that factory is where colleagues got killed.
Each new book has to stay largely true to these scaffolds.
With each book, the setting and the main people gets described in finer and finer detail. As the series evolves it becomes harder and harder to change things.
There are devices. The detective may take a trip on the Orient Express or on a cruise liner. Even detectives go on holiday or decide to visit distant relatives. After a long run of stories based in their English setting, the detective may suddenly find the need to be in some foreign place for a brief spell – and gets drawn into some crime-solving whilst there.
Mostly, though, the crime takes place in the location where the detective’s job is located. If this is a large city, then crimes may be understandable – but when the writer’s selected closed world is an out-of-the-way set of villages then the reader has to suspend belief on starting each new book; has to unbelieve that this tiny place (with sometimes several murders to each story) has had more murders there than inner-city New York at its worst.
Book series for quite young children are sometimes simpler. No-one dies; no-one is born; no-one has affairs or mental breakdowns; people are rarely changing relationships with each other; world events rarely intrude to upset things. The setting can feel a bit like a set of cardboard cut-out buildings with characters placed there for a one-off set of events. Things are always reassuringly the same.
PC Plodalong, Mrs Bun in the bakery, Captain Sparks in the fire-station: all exactly as they were last time we met them. The scene remains as familiar as it always has for the next detached set of happenings: Sammy Has A Surprise; Sammy Makes a Friend; Sammy to the Rescue; Sammy Gets Wet …. and so on.
In the kind of series I am talking about, though, there is change and development and histories and complexities.
How does a writer keep track of it all? Over three or four books it may be possible to rely on the sense of the character and a good memory for facts, but once we get into a long series (Think of the Discworld stories of Terry Pratchett) then there may be all sorts of histories and subtleties to remember, probably requiring some detailed, colour-coded archive system.
So, I think I’ll stick to each book standing on its own.
There has been the story of a bus passenger in Birmingham; the story of a special forces soldier in Afghanistan; the story of four men in hospital in Manchester in 1956; the story of the thoughts and feelings of a teenage girl in 2097; the story of a young writer on an extended stay in Vancouver in 2017, the book based on a collection of impressions of more than sixty people with quirky characteristics. In only one case was reference made in one book to a character from another book – and that was purely for fun on my part, and probably went unnoticed by readers.
I have no idea what my next book will be, but it is unlikely to be an extension of any of the above existing ones.
Although, you never know.

Writing the website

After some persistence, I am now able to think of myself as ‘an independent writer and researcher’ or as an ‘independent thinker-writer’.

By this I mean that I work for myself – not in the simple sense of being self-employed, but of being self-occupied and self-directed ie the things that I write are things that I have chosen to write rather than being commissioned or contracted, or determined by any influencing organisation. I also mean that more than 50% of my self-occupying development activity is connected with writing, researching, thinking and publishing.

This is structured around four main pillars of activity:

• Ebooks in a variety of genres and styles. These are published via the Amazon Kindle site and are accessible via kindle readers, ipads, mobile phones, personal computers, laptops etc.
• Poems of varying quality, written for a variety of purposes. These have been much improved by participation in poetry events and courses.
• Blogs via WordPress. Two are relatively active and one is waiting to be kickstarted back into use. Of the two active ones, there is this one setting out my approaches to writing, and another which sets out the background thinking to my overall development activity R:2025.
• Website Articles on the www.thewordsthething.org.uk site. It is this fourth pillar of my writing activity that I want to explore further, below.

Writers are encouraged to have a website but usually this is for publicity and promotion of their ‘main’ writing output. In my case the website is seen as a main form of writing in its own right.

The site has been deliberately constructed in a way that:

• Sets a tone of being ‘exploratory’, ‘thinking tentatively about’, ‘as an informed amateur’. It does not set itself out as being expert or definitive.
• Has the feel of being something of a compendium or bazaar ie encourages people to wander, to ramble around a bit, to stumble upon things rather than there being a clearly-directed layout to take the reader to a product by the most direct route. It is intended to be broad-based rather than narrowly-targeted.
• Has a gallery of photographs, selected for passing interest, but mostly is unashamedly somewhat ‘wordy’ as opposed to the current trend for things to be snappy, bite-sized or highly-visual. The aim is for longhand rather than soundbite.
• Is structured around overarching themes that reflect my framework of interests: Language and Writing; Art and Creativity; Place and Locality; People and Society; Policy and Research; Learning and Work; with a catch-all Odds and Ends section.

To date, the site has more than thirty substantial articles on topics as diverse as:

trends in politics; puzzles re autism; identity; planning; bureaucracy; poverty and inequality; forms of writing; employability, work and core skills; researcher roles; ideas of contemporary, progress, flourishing and change; learning in a non-traditional way; issues in cities today; and local history.

There is still more to be done on other lines of interest, including:

• Local jobs, living wages, reasonable expenditures that work for society in general
• Learning and development that will enable more people to move on
• Concerns re wellbeings and sustainabilities (personal and public)
• Approaches to notions of social value and social impact
• Nature of evidence, research, explorations and understandings
• Support for, and usefulness of, art and creativity
• Aspects of how people operate in contexts of uncertainty and contingency
• Policies and their implementations (or failure to implement)
• Considerations of public/private
• Incompatibilities of various ideas and beliefs

…. all of which will keep me occupied thinking, researching and writing for some time yet…..

Some ongoing reflections prompted by a Poetry School course

The Poetry School, based in London UK, runs a range of courses. I signed up to one of these: an online course spread over ten weeks. There were five packages of tutor input and five related assignments.

 

What made this course so enjoyable and useful?

It was something to do with the level of challenge.

There is a development theory around proximal zone of development (Vygotsky) – identifying the next steps and setting opportunities in place to allow person to ‘spread forward’ into that next zone of skills and understanding. This course moved me across a boundary into a new area that I was just ready to move into and explore/hopefully grow within.

It was also to do with having the right balance of input and production, at the right pitch. The tutor was key to that: knowledgeable, willing to share insights, excellent at constructive support – with links that could be followed or not. The amount of background material gave me a real sense of having gained theoretically and practically – and, on my terms, that gave the course high value.

The fortnightly timespan was manageable in terms of reading and absorbing the background material, getting assignment poems put online within a week, then having another week to mull things over or try out other poems etc.

 

It was about new forms and new ideas – the changing nature of poetry – but was still about poetry

The course focused on contemporary poetry and some of its recent roots. A key idea was the changing nature of poetry – responding to (and contributing to?) wider changes in society. From a challenge to the calming, soul-saving view of poetry, it went back into some of the strands from the past 40-50 years (specifically the work of the New York poets, the work of poets influenced by postmodernism, and some very recent poetry influenced eg by the internet).

The implication, for me, was that we can expect poetry to continue to develop: to change shape, find new forms, explore new topics, draw on new sources, and be put to new purposes.

Although we were urged to leave behind any over-focusing on older ideas, one of the key things I had to keep reminding myself was that, even though we were challenging the form of poems, each bit of what we produced still had to work as poetry. Every word, every line had to hold its own – to justify its inclusion in that way, at that point of the text, in that particular wording/lineage. This pushed me, over and over, to think ‘What is a poem? How is this thing I am writing attempting to be a poem? How would I know if it is being successful in that?’

In a couple of the assignment poems I wrote there were phrases that I couldn’t let go of quickly enough. They insinuated themselves into the poem then kept quiet so that they would be more easily overlooked – but were clearly (going back after a week or so) misplaced additions that jarred. Similarly with the odd bits of overblown imagery; the clinging clichés etc.

 

How many edits does it take to change a poem?

In my case, very many. It had been relatively straightforward to get to a poem that I thought might be 80% ‘there’. Moving that poem on the last 20% was much more protracted and fiddly – I fact I don’t think I ever got much further than the 80-85% mark and could have continued fiddling and faffing for much longer on a number of the assignments. One assignment poem went through about 7-8 iterations before ending up in its submitted form – even so, immediately it had been put online, a re-reading threw up a few words that I should still have changed. I sensed that I could tinker and tinker forever but there had to be a point at which there was a feeling that the poem worked as well as possible without further change. Having the deadline certainly helped to say ‘that’s it: like it or not’.

 

Did I come to any conclusions about Bad Poetry?

Yes, but not in any moral sense or because I found some poems hard to relate to– just in the sense that some poems seemed not to work. If I were to write out a checklist of Things To Guard Against it might be something like:

• Sloppily written; not tight enough
• Extraneous words, lines, sections
• Sounds scrappy and disjointed for no real purpose
• Unclear, imprecise (ideas and language) whilst pretending to have clarity
• Lacks any structure in terms of words/sounds
• Rehashes old, tired, overused ideas
• Too ephemeral – no sense of Presence. There being no motivation to reread it
• Dull, no movement in it (compared to being intentionally ‘flat’ for effect)
• Not been worked on sufficiently, not even at the 80% mark
• Hammers points home; overly didactic
• Shifting/uncertain narrator, to no effect
• Feels more of a chore than a puzzle
• Too closed-down: no space for the reader to think for themselves around what has been written
• Overloaded with cliché, adjectives etc
• High on the abstract, no detail at all

 

Poetry styles that appealed to me

I loved the input on the ideas around the New York Poets for a number of reasons. Partly because I do Urban not Rural; I go for the fragmentary, tentative, conditional nature of things. I go for snapshots not extended scenes; things glimpsed through bus windows on the way into the city centre etc. Partly because my own writing style has always drifted to cut-off sentences; ideas bumped up against each other; notes as much as essays etc. Partly because I enjoyed the juxtaposing of poem formation with ideas from Abstract Expressionist painting – with words being splashed/thrown/dribbled onto the page – and the effect coming from textures/patterns/disorder.

A newspaper article that I read at the same time, was about Frederick Seidel – a poet writing about inequalities and politics of race – but who, in the interview, was strong on his poems being poems: They come to him as poems and are still poems as he lets them go – rather than being statements of belief. The poems are works – things being worked on – and that work is concerned with language, sound, look (line breaks etc). There is belief and political/social feeling inside the working but that isn’t what he sees as happening within the finished work. For him it is poetry that has to work as poetry.

I also loved the input on postmodernism and poetry. I had come across postmodernism from other angles but never had to apply that thinking to poetry. I found it fascinating: Found poems, incorporating other styles of texts, being playfully serious/seriously playful; caring without showing it too much. My submitted poem for this section was a found poem based on the texts associated with a photographic exhibition I visited; footnotes; ambiguities; disturbing the readers sensibilities re nostalgia, etc.

 

What did I think of my own poems?

There were poems that I enjoyed writing (whatever the quality of the outcome) and ones that I thought were OK as poems. The assignment on postmodern poetry and the final assignment were the ones I enjoyed most and which (in my opinion) produced my most interesting poems. The one I struggled to find much enjoyment in writing (ie was a task to be got through by the deadline) was also the one that worked least well.

The final assignment – about a man with a boat who used to fish but now gets a living transporting people across from Iraq to Europe gave me a lot of intellectual pleasure. Thinking about this poem put all sorts of ideas in my head around whether people smugglers are evil traders or simple boat-owners put out of the fishing business by war and global forces; there being varieties of people in the smuggling trade (as in any business) including young entrepreneurs with MBA business models willing to see people as units of trade; possible links back to the slave traders and so on. The poem didn’t flow out of me but came in chunks. Arranging such fragments on the page was part of the challenge. In the end the whole thing, set out on the page, unintentionally had something of the outline shape of a boat about it (or my imagination was straining itself by that stage). By the time for submission I couldn’t really judge its quality. It may or may not have worked – I had got too close to it to be able to tell. My feeling that it was interested and good was justified by the tutor’s comments that he was blown away by it, and that I had invented a new poetry form ….

 

What have I learnt about my own writing?

Certainly that my prose style (to the extent I have one) gets too easily carried over into poems – a cavalier use of colons, dashes, ellipses, lists, lack of any punctuation, etc etc. There is a syntactic laziness there that I need to think more closely about. Certainly there can be a sparseness about the language I use. My background lies in a science training not in any literary training, and in forty years of writing reports that some would consider bureaucratic (in a nice way). Both of these have given me a tendency to be crisp, terse etc. (hence the desire to do more on any poetic instincts lurking inside me).

 

Does edgy poetry have to be downbeat?

In one poem I tried for humour but it still had an underlying sadness. The street-scene poem captured the buzz of contemporary life but in ways that intentionally hinted at the anxieties and confusions of existence in urban busy contexts. Another poem started off with admiration but ended up saying ‘I might have hated you except you even died before I could get that far’. The nostalgia-undone found poem was sad throughout on a number of levels as was the Boat poem. Either there is an inbuilt tendency for me to generate sad-sounding work or the topics of interest deal with the downsides of modern life or I just haven’t tried hard enough to get into the edginess of humour (or the humour of edginess).

 

Some thinking points emerged that will buzz around in my mind for some time yet:

• Does it matter if the narrative is clear: if it can be read differently by different people? If the intention of the author no longer determines things? The street scene poem was going to be titled “High Street 3.27pm” and the date – pinning it down as a one-minute observation/snapshot at a unique time (implying that the next minute might well produce a quite different set of impressions, a quite different poem). This afternoon timing would have pinned down the ‘They’ as schoolkids (entangled in their huge schoolbags; entangled in their feelings for each other; entangled in jostlings, appearing to be more legs than arms). Without so specific a title, a different reading might have them as late evening, citycentre youths. Does it matter? Does it change anything? If the poem still has to ‘work’ then does it have to work for all the possibilities that different readers build into their separate readings of it? (And can a poem bear that responsibility??).
• To what extent can a poem do work in the wider world (rather than in the heads of individuals)? Can a poem do anything eg countering fundamentalist thinking because poetry can be subtle, contesting, opening of possible imaginings; or putting some processes in place that work against politically-motivated austerity etc?

 

I am pleased that I signed up for this course. It did all I hoped in bringing together my interest in ‘contemporary’ with my desire to remotivate some poetry writing. I gained so much from it that I have already signed up for an equivalent course in the autumn (bringing together poetry with another of my key areas of interest ie cities and contemporary urban life).