Invisibility

A writer should be invisible – even though the way the publishing industry works now is running counter to that. You no longer need an author once you have a copy of the book yourself (audio-books are increasingly being read by their authors, but they often have horrible voices). An author’s persona wouldn’t do half as much for their work, in my eyes, as a musician’s does. Partly because in almost every book there will be several characters an author will need to inhabit but e.g. a concept album can get by on just one.

Some authors do seem to have public personas – at the moment, there’s Neil Gaiman, who as much as it irritates me wears a leather jacket and is summarily called ‘rock star writer’ in America – and there used to be Barbara Cartland on the opposite end of the spectrum, with her continuously pink and fluffy appearance. I think that the only writer who’s carried off their image with success is Oscar Wilde – and I think that shows in what he’s now remembered for (in part also because of the scandal he was involved in, which his style has become forged with). Which would you rather be remembered for – the presentation of your work or it’s content?  

In response to the article Kass posted the link to – I like genre fiction, and I think writers need to stop being embarrassed about the idea of belonging to a genre. It annoys me that the idea of ‘literary’ writing persists when it’s really all about how something is written and not what is being written, (the example in the article being about the narrative structures of Never Let Me Go and Wolf Hall). It’s an entirely different point of judgement, meaning in my opinion literary fiction and genre fiction shouldn’t be compared at least not with the aim of claiming one as better than the other.

What influences and inspires you as a writer?

My main inspiration normally turns up in the form of imagery, and my main influence is often anything with a fairytale element. Ekphrasis has always been really useful for me when it comes to writing poetry, but writing prose tends to come from images that just appear internally. I do write stories from ekphrasis or personal experience, but they tend to be a lot harder to write and work with for some reason.

As for the fairytale element, this tends to be about how the story is written, or how the content or narrative is treated rather than what the content actually is. I’m not really into having dragons or unicorns in my stories unless you’re going to subvert it and set them in the most mundane reality you can think of. 


I’d like to share some examples of fairytale-inspired works that I feel influence me: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (of course), Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts, and Joanne Harris’s Jigs and Reels, all of which are also short story collections – something which will have been an influence on me writing mostly short stories myself.

autobiographical protagonist vs. narrative

A protagonist that embodies the flaws and weaknesses of the writer distracts the reader from the narrative itself.

I partially agree. I think this is a topical question because I think the current trend in critical analysis is to read everything is somewhat biographical. Reading now, the modern reader would probably search out something, a character attribute that they would then apply to the author. There are stories where that viewpoint is completely valid, like the Swimmer being about Cheever’s alcoholism, so I’m not dismissing that school of thought entirely, I just think that it’s one that’s over-prescribed currently.

 However, I would say that a protagonist deliberately intended to embody the author in some way actually helps a reader to examine the narrative – in that, once you understand the protagonist as representing the author to whatever degree, you then want to move on and examine the narrative to see what effect the author-protagonist has had on it: is it a slice of life, clearly something that actually happened to the author, or is it structured so as to enhance something, an idea or information about the author, that they want to put across.

This post will be edited later to add my writing excerpt ~

Uniquely American, uniquely British

Why are Cheever’s short stories are sometimes described as ‘uniquely American’?

Various things stick out for me as particularly American in Cheever’s short stories but the one thing I think I’ll focus on is treatment of class – many, if not all of his stories are set among the middle class, those social climbers who are forever having cocktail parties. I think that in British short stories, if there’s an undercurrent of class issues to be found, both the reader and the story itself will be somewhat aware of it. American short stories, particularly Cheever’s, set it up as a case of whether you do or do not have the money to back it up, it doesn’t really look at the general privileges and attitudes that come with the social class you are born into. E.g. in ‘the Swimmer’ when Ned’s snubbed by the barman. However, in the story this moment is about showing Ned is not as nice as he seems, and also about his real or imagined sense of persecution. It’s not really a comment about how class works in America; it’s very much based on the individual’s response. This is the issue I’ve decided to solely go on about simply because those suburban cocktail parties turn up in nearly every bloody story. I couldn’t help but compare them to the cocktail party in the Great Gatsby – one that does talk about middle class consumption, ideals, gaudiness, and attitudes towards new money.

 What would make a story ‘uniquely British’?

I went on much more than I planned to up there, so keeping this to one thing as well – pathetic fallacy is definitely uniquely British in my view, at least in comparison to the USA’s creative output – I should imagine pathetic fallacy is also important in Europe and elsewhere in the world, because practically everywhere else has the history and resulting sense of place to back their pathetic fallacy up. Perhaps pathetic fallacy about rain and bad weather is uniquely British – see Wuthering Heights for a start.

Would you want to write a narrative that was uniquely identifiable with any culture?

I think it’s impossible to not be informed by the attitude of the culture you grow up in, so I don’t think it’s a case of whether you want to or not.  Our stories will be likely to always have a British sensibility, attitude, flavour, etc.

If people are going to respond to this, maybe you could suggest anyone / any writing that you think is free from their cultural background in their writing? my first thought was Neil Gaiman, but isn’t part of his writing – particularly regarding American Gods – that he’s writes from the outsider’s perspective on the USA, USA famously being the country of people who arrived from elsewhere.

Is there a contrast between the truth of our lives & the story that we tell of our existence?

Yes, I think there is. Yet you can’t provide an unbiased perspective on your own life, and neither can anyone else, so that gap is always there even when not intended to be. I think this gap is widened by people’s choices though – because everyone makes a narrative out of their life. It might just be in turning experiences into anecdotes, but when George Orwell talked about the internal monologue he had in his early twenties, of how he narrated his own life as he lived it, I was surprised to see how he associated this with his interest in writing. I never thought that other people didn’t do it – because I do it. Not all the time, but often.  I thought everyone else did, because I know plenty of people who do, people who don’t consider themselves writers (although I have no way of knowing whether they write in their free time or not). Everyone sees themselves as the primary focus of everything because our own perspective is the only one completely available to us. So I assumed that it was also common for therefore see things as a narrative in which we were the protagonist (not necessarily hero).

If I were going to ask people to respond to this (no point, I doubt this will get comments but even then it would still only be commented on by other writers who’ll be predisposed to this practice) I’d be interested to know whether this is really as uncommon as Orwell made it sound. 

No pristine environment

How is it that I became a writer?

First off, in primary school, there were yearly anthology prizes, and a creative writing club.

In secondary school, there was another creative writing club, but much less successful. There were creative assignments too, but it was a much more academic environment. Creativity was encouraged, but through the school's massive art department. Probably why I started writing only poetry from age 14 on - poems could be kept to myself and didn't seem to require an audience the way a story does.

I have also been to some creative writing courses before uni, at Arvon centres. The first one was at Moniack Mhor, outside Inverness. It was a writing poetry about Nature course, and everything was wonderful and easy and inspirational and I wrote loads, some of which I still like. It was such a great environment, with a supportive group, that I felt like I'd finally got it, and that I could say good-bye to Imposter Syndrome from there. (these hopes sadly never materialised, but it was from this point on that I felt I might consider myself a writer).

'no writer emerges from childhood into a pristine environment, free from other people's biases about writers'.

I haven't had too many problems with this, it's only really shown up in two ways: everyone suggesting I should think about journalism, and and everyone secretly thinking that a creative writing degree, and writing as a profession, is instable, unecessarily mystical, and deeply suspect. As I am also considered these things by enough people the second doesn't bother me.

Part of my interest in Stephen King relates to this, in observing his readership and how he's considered the current 'down-to-earth' writer of the people. Everyone should take a look at his official forums, even though they're not very active, and read some of the comments that get left there.

Is the writer, as an artist special? if so, how?

My automatic reaction is 'no'. There are plenty of writers who I considered special in themselves, but the process itself isn't. The output is like everything else - 90% and 10% good. It's because nearly everyone is literate - and we don't have the filter and rating systems of galleries like the art world does - that everything about writing seems mundane and leads people to be skeptical about what writers do. However, I think that's still more sensible than the right brain's self-mystification.