Writer-insighter – Page 50 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

The longest day

It’s today. The twenty first, Midsummer’s Eve, half-way through. Tomorrow we can all start saying “Aye, the nights are fair drawing in” and the long slow quiet walk towards the dark.

I know. It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going. I don’t know what phase the moon is in right now but it’s doing something odd. It makes me walk, sometimes. When I was 18 or so I’d have a passion to drive on full moon with the lanes and fields bathed in silver and silence. There’s a view I remember, coming over the top of s little hill and the road stretching out towards Bratton and the White Horse in the moonlight that will be with me until I die.

It’s wet this morning on this longest day and a kestrel perched on the phone line outside my window. In Sweden they’ll be having parties tonight. In lots of places they’ll mark the mid-point of the year. For me it’s a quiet, quite a sad day, the day the year starts to die, the day after which it all literally goes downhill. I took a walk along the river yesterday afternoon, about four miles there and back, out along where the tied had ebbed away and the swallows landed on the mud, something you don’t often see them do anywhere at all.

It’ll be hotter in July and August than it is now. There might even be a bright and sunny start to October, the way I remember starting university when I bought a pair of red Kicker boots and a new alpaca sweater and wore them both, together, without blushing. But the year’s getting older now, past its midpoint. So let’s make the most of what we have now. We won’t be here again.

WTF

I was hunting the job ads, like you do, when I saw this:

Paid Role For Creative Writer

Seeking up and coming creative writer to become a part of the film project.

We have a very exciting script and are in current talks with a Funding Firm in London with keen interest.

The creative writer should be able to come on board and help furnish the script to the macro excellence we are looking for. The ideal candidate should be expected to write in the cutting edgy genre.

The Treatment and character development have already been completed, so what we require is
someone to help flesh the script out. The project is still in the planning stage.

What are you waiting for? Send your CV and a sample script (no more than 5 pages) to the email below.

The Creative Writer will be working alongside the original creative writer and director of the film.

THIS IS A PAID ROLE

Where to start?

Up and coming? Well, I can give it a go, but let’s look at the property first. You haven’t got a screenplay, you’ve got a synopsis and the characters. In other words, all you’ve got is some ideas for people you saw in the street and what you think they might do if they were trapped in a New York lift with a chemical weapon and a string vest. Nobody’s bought an option on the film or you’d have funding. So far, so what? That’s why you want a writer. Then you might have a screenplay.

Macro excellence

What worries me is what language it’s supposed to be written in. I don’t know if I can write macro excellence. Because I don’t know what it means. Nobody walks down the street saying things like that because even the bloke selling the Big Issue would laugh at them. “Come back to my place, baby. I think I can promise you some….( drop voice an octave and do not rush this bit) ....macro excellence.” Can you see it? You’d be the only person that could that night.

Cutting edgy genre

You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat's ugly. — You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat’s ugly.

But it’s the next bit that really worries me. Can I write in the cutting edgy genre? Cutting edge used to mean really like now. And really like now then is like Filofaxes, ties that look like a piano keyboard and Su Pollard; you can sort of get it and its harmless enough but you wouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe cutting edgy is different though, like an arch Noel Coward looking for another dime bag, Sherlock Holmes when the Duke of Dumfries says no way dude, you still owe me for all the Charlie for Vicky’s Jubilee bash.

Come on. All they want is someone to ‘flesh the script out,’ or change it from an overall plot with some characters to an actual story where you know who says what and how they get to the place where they say it. That’s not hard, is it? So what’s the problem? Well, there’s a few of them. It’s in West London for a start, 150 miles from me which is a long commute especially when you have a tendency to forget your packed lunch. It means working with the original creative, who obviously isn’t that creative or he’d have written the thing already instead of just extended notes. And there’s no money, so it’s being run on someone’s trust fund.

The shrill repetition of ‘this is a paid-for job’ bothers me too. Instead of what, an unpaid job? That’s not a job. It’s either voluntary work, like helping out at the Red Cross jumble sale, or it’s internship, the kind of socially acceptable totally illegal because it breaches minimum-wage legislation slavery for people with rich mummies and daddies that you can eat between deals. That’s what this is. Keep the poor poor. They’ve got the creative writer who isn’t creative and the film director without a film but Pops will fix it. It’s Tim and Jonty’s Gep Yah, isn’t it?

So like WTF, I don’t think I do these kinds of abbreviations. Maybe I’m just too cutting edgy.

Checking out the movies

If you’ve ever read this before you’ll know I’ve been trying to write a screenplay. Accepting I can do it has been one of the major hurdles, like probably anything in life. And as often in mine, I’ve been ignoring the evidence that I can.

Back in March the BBC Writers Room had a competition for screenplays. I’d never written one. I spent four weeks hacking the text of Not Your Heart Away into some sort of shape and utterly amazingly, I was one of the winners. We got to pitch to Cascade, the statutory nobody-gets-more-than-10-minutes on your feet chance to not stick a cigar in your mouth and say ‘See, it’s like Four Weddings meets The Others, I can smell the popcorn!’

The language of the dead

The first draft was ludicrous. 320 pages when it should have been 150. I didn’t have enough time to do much about it but I thought if it got through someone else would edit it down anyway, so I just concentrated on getting the book into a screenplay format. It wasn’t a format I was familiar with in terms of layout and the look of the pages aside, I just didn’t know how to transition from one scene to another and put far too much in.

Cascade didn’t bite. I know. How rubbish is that? My very first pitch of my very first screenplay and they didn’t go for it, even after they asked for a copy of the book I signed for them.

They asked for more scripts, which I’ll do but first I have to get this right. I found the wonderful Celtx software that magically not just provides a template for formatting but converts one format to another in about thirty seconds, instead of having to type the whole darned thing out again, and I watched and read No Country For Old Men over and over again. And no, I don’t see any irony there at all but thank-you for asking.

A friend of a friend in the business has really amazingly kindly offered to lend a hand with this so I sent her the heavily redacted version. I’d hacked it down so much that it didn’t work, coming in at 137 pages instead of the target 150 ish, leaving out four key scenes I don’t think it can do without.

But more than that, it left out the story. Yesterday it came to me how to make the story whole. The film is a little different to the book. First reader’s comment was encouraging.

“This is good. It would have been better if you’d written it ten years ago. You might have missed the time for this.’

That can be fixed. NYHA is set in 1980, but it could be any time once the music and the cars are changed. It could even be a horse and cart. The story in the book is much the same, but how it is told, by whom and when is slightly different. It’s still Ben and Claire’s story. But now it leaves you asking if they can only tell each other in the language of the dead.

Reviews

After the free weekend promotion for Not Your Heart Away one or two people actually downloaded the book. To sound like a school assembly for a moment, the kind Ben and Liz, Claire and Poppy and Peter would all have been bored by and utterly familiar, you know who you are. It is those people I want to talk to now. The rest of you are here because of those people and I want you all to think about that.

When you read it, whatever you think about it, please, just please review it. All that means is write down what you think about it. It’s made some people wistfully happy. It’s made other people cry. When I read it I feel restless, as if I want to go to the places in the book. I went to all of them once.

Location

Every location I wrote about is a real place. But you can’t go there. No-one can. The pub isn’t a pub any more. Claire’s house is a spa for Olympic athletes (no, it really is. I never, ever appreciated quite how big it was until I found that out). At Ben’s house the garden was split into two and sold off and the house went for pennies in 2012. Everything changes. Even love. Maybe especially love.

So rather than maundering off down that track, write down what you think about it. Then post it up to Amazon or Goodreads or wherever else you can think of, please. Even if you don’t like it. Just say why.

See? I could have been a teacher. Gissajob. I could have been a teacher. I’ve got a tweed coat and cord trousers. I can say no running in the corridors, how many times have I told you, I am not in the habit of handing out detentions but you need some time to think about what you’ve done. I don’t want to see you again.

I’ve got empathy, too. I know what it’s like to be on the end of those words. After all, plenty of people have said that last bit to me.

Delicious spicy buns

Matron! Well if that doesn’t improve the SEO ratings I don’t know what will.

I haven’t eaten manufactured foods for a long time. I don’t buy ready-made pizza, pies, humous or pretty much anything already made. As a friend’s father used to say about shop-bought cake, it’s second-hand.

When you make things yourself you know what’s in it. You know what short-cuts you took, the flour you ran out of half-way through, the water you put in instead of milk, all those kind of everyday things that aren’t exactly cheating but mostly aren’t because you know about it. And I don’t want someone else’s compromises.

A lot of people are going to read this and say ‘that’s alright for you, but I haven’t got time.’ They were a bit short of time a hundred years ago too, with a child every other year and no electricity most places. I don’t have a television. That saves me a huge amount of time. I get my once a week fix of The Sweeney on my laptop.

No More Vodafone Day

But yesterday I had something to celebrate, getting out of a mobile phone contract with Vodafone, who decided that although they’re investing £2.5 million per day in a 4G network that will stream even more useless X-Factor celebrity-based crap directly into people’s heads they can’t find the pennies to give me a phone that works if I don’t hold it out of my bedroom window, which is picturesque but arguably inconvenient. Stupidly, I celebrated by buying some Jamaican spicy buns. It made me realise why I don’t buy this stuff. It’s never what it says.

When I think of ‘spicy’ I think of cinnamon, anise, nutmeg, musk, a very non-Ipswich world of exotic tastes and mystery. I did warn you it wasn’t a very Ipswich imagining. And oddly, these spicy buns, with their statutory four bits of ‘mixed fruit’ per bun just weren’t like that at all. The herring in mustard sauce wasn’t much better either. It wasn’t the worst breakfast I ever had. That was hotly contested between a $4.95 All-You-Can-Eat somewhere in Illinois and the La Plaza hotel in Brussels, which probably just sneaked the coveted award for feels-like-hangover-stomach-although-you-weren’t-drinking-last-night. I think it was the boiled mini-sausages that did it, back when I still ate stuff like that.

I looked-up the La Plaza on Trip Advisor to see what it’s like now. It was nearly ten years ago I was there, in a huge, wood-panelled room that seemed like a set from a 1940s noir movie. I wrote about a fictional house that might have been haunted in Not Your Heart Away, where Claire was convinced that she was being watched long after Tex Beneke sang: “I know there’s something following me that I can’t see” in A Little Man Who Wasn’t There. That hotel was the only place I’ve chosen as an adult to sleep with the light on, in case the jackboots and the grey uniforms walked again.

Get Not Your Heart Away free

I know how much those words stir the soul of every netizen.

It’s true. For two days only, Not Your Heart Away is free to download on Kindle.

Just go to the Amazon website here.

If you don’t have a Kindle you can still get it. Go to the Kindle website and you can download the reader software, again totally free. It’ll work on PCs, Macs and anything else you’ve got.

Why Am I Doing This?

Because I care. Ha ha! Fooled you!

Because I want as many people as possible to read this book, to talk about it, to review it, to say to their friends “there’s this really good book.”

So that’s what I’m giving. Now your turn. If you download it would you please just do this tiny thing for me? Review it. Say what you think about Not Your Heart Away on Amazon, on Goodreads, anywhere else you can think of. If you like it, say why. If you don’t, I’d still like you to say why.

So far there’s only been one intellectual “sounds like s**t” from someone who hadn’t read it and then went on to demonstrate his intellectual dexterity by asking if the title was written by Yoda (laugh? I broke ribs laughing…) and then bravely changed his status on Facebook to avoid any discussion of his proclamation.

If you can do a review in a little more detail I’d love to hear it. Meanwhile Bernard Levin, that restraining order still stands.

AE Housman and the SEO tags

AE Housman. Bath. Dorset. Love. Not Your Heart Away. Spam.

These are the key words flagged up in bold in the search engine tags, presumably bold and bigger because I’ve used them more than other words, like MBA or Midnight At the Oasis. I don’t know much about Search Engine Optimisation, just bits and pieces. Use tags. Put links in to other websites, preferably ones who are going to do the same to yours. Include random

Headings

in the text. No, I don’t know why either. It just does.

Does it make a difference? Well yes. Type in Not Your Heart Away in Google and me and AE Housman are top of the bill. In a manly way, obviously. Nothing (embarrassed cough), “unhealthy.” Read in the abstract though, that tag list sounds like the kind of thing people wearing pyjamas shout at passing cars on city streets. It all made sense at the time.

So far so fiction

Just for my own vanity and to convince myself there’s actually something getting done (and of course to give myself an excuse for not writing today, because I was doing this instead) I thought I’d make a list of the things I’ve written.It’s not a hugely long list, nothing that should worry Will Self or Julie Burchill.

In the beginning, there is, was and will be A Day For Pyjamas, to lift shamelessly from The Once & Future King. That’s something I haven’t read for years, not since I stayed up half the night reading it one May morning long ago in Veryan, down on the Roseland Peninsula, gone there for the usual reasons. ADFPs was written when I was 18, in a flurry of activity immediately after my A Levels that might possibly have been better expended before them. It was short at just under 50,000 words although for years I was convinced it was 82,000; there were no word-processing programmes back then. It was staccato and brittle and when I read it now I think that it could have been developed into something more. I had no clue about how to go about getting it published and I’ve told that story elsewhere here, how I sent it to Pan thinking if they published Sven Hassel they’d probably want a crack at this too. They didn’t. After some shambling around with and by Bath Arts Workshop, so much a part of the right-on revolution that they managed to burn their own building down experimenting with a cooking fire on a 200 year-old wood floor, it went in a drawer to be taken out periodically to impress the more impressionable girls I wanted to convince I was artistic and that they really ought to.

Unfinished

Over twenty years later in 1999 I wrote Unfinished, a radio play based on a true story. All my writing is based on true stories; I don’t have much imagination, but I like tales and talking. Even listening, sometimes. When I was about 10 years old there was a plan to build a big new road through marshland near Nailsea in Somerset, where my mother’s family lived for hundreds of years. In those days it was a big village outside Bristol rather than the sprawling commuter suburb it’s become and being close to Bristol it had its share of bombing in World War Two. Before that, around about 1920 my grandfather became the first man in the village to fly; two airmen put down on the Moor and held a raffle for fuel. My grandfather, born in 1901 won the raffle and saw the world he never left circumscribed by his ten or so minutes in the air. Several of the older people in the village knew there were un-recovered and certainly unexploded bombs on the Moor. They were all over the village. My grandmother had a German incendiary bomb on her windowsill all through my childhood; all of her friends did, until the day when predictably, someone discovered that one of them quietly sitting there for the past thirty years wasn’t the emptied-out metal casing everyone had happily assumed it was. That was the story really, the war lingering on in this quiet, sunny rural place where my grandfather ran the pub and the Air Raid Patrol, just before the village was swept away under a tide of breeze blocks and hire-purchase.

Suffolk Blue was a short story about a man who finds some valuable stamps and wonders how to sell them without the owner noticing, whoever the owner might be. I had a story about the fall of the Twin Towers in my head, about a man who simply walked away using the cover of the disaster to re-start his life. Selling some maybe stolen stamps was part of the imagining of that bigger story I still haven’t done anything with.

Golden Cap was a bit of flash fiction I liked a lot, apart from the fact it’s too short. That’s not meant to be funny. I don’t really see the point of flash fiction if you’re going to take the time to sit down and read something anyway. It was about Dorset, theft and the sudden realisation your life is going to change that day, in this case that of a wealthy female City worker who finds herself unceremoniously out of a job.

School Lane or more properly The Universal Boy was entered for the Bridport Prize last year and didn’t get anywhere; when I saw the school-run sagas that did I wasn’t that surprised. That was another true story I heard at first hand from a man in a pub around about 1998. A thin, white haired man in his 70s was arguing with a thickset shaven headed drinker in his 20s. The old man was furious at being called a Nazi just because he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He told how his village had been visited one day in April 1945 by a car load of SS men who collected all the boys together, marched them up to a bunker, gave them machine guns and grenades and told them to stop the Americans who would be there in about half an hour. Job done, the SS men bravely drove off towards Switzerland. The village schoolmaster paraded all the boys in the village square then beat them senseless before he made them throw all of their new weapons in the ditch and saved all of their lives. I keep meaning to do more with that; it needs quite a lot of work finding out about German villages first and there are other things to do.

There was Recover written for Ip-Art, which was a runner-up last year, a daft bit of nothing about an imaginary new drug used to alleviate the symptoms of old age, essentially by putting patients into a coma. That was quite fun to write and fun to be at the festival, in the Spiegeltent.

I Was An Accidental Sex Tourist is repeatedly failing to get published in any of the self-proclaimedly edgy and street magazines. It’s a mystery to me, really. I think it’s quite a good story, putting me in mind of a day I went to Tijuana. No, I don’t know why either. It wasn’t for the donkey-show.

The very most recent thing I’ve written is No Batteries Required, which might well be coming to you on a local radio station very soon, if you live in Suffolk. It’s about a bankrupt chicken farmer who blames an Eton-educated celebrity chef for the EU ban on battery hens and decides to kidnap him to make him recant, live on TV. It’s not the farmer’s fault that the Prime Minister wants to make the chef Minister of Food and drives down to his farm the very same day.

Not Your Heart Away, well, you can read the story of that all over this blog. Is a book, might get an agent, might be a film. I’ve done one proper pitch for it and someone’s really kindly helping me get it into shape for another, much more grown-up and prepared pitch soon. Which reminds me I’d better finish tidying it up.

Emails and paper

A few weeks ago someone gave me the name of a literary agency that she’d dealt with before, who she thought might be in the market for Not Your Heart Away . So I had a look at their website.

I’d heard every agency around is swamped with manuscripts, good bad and ugly these days and if most of them are anything like the stuff I find in most ‘writer’s forums’ it’s a job I don’t envy.

There was a huge section of the website about submissions and how to send them, along with the now-almost-statutory:

‘Lurk, we’re rarely busy yah? Say you won’t hair from us for three months and nay, dain’t keep calling to see how it’s gaying, rarely, because it just gets rarely say irritating and if you piss us orf we’ll just put it in the bin, yah?’

Maybe they don’t still speak like that, but I like to imagine they do. The Sophies and Tansys and Carolines that used to knock about Palings wine bar in Hanover Square after a heavy shift at Conde Nast did anyway, even if it was a while ago I went there.

Sophie’s Choice

After that there was an almost equally as big bit on the website about how not to send email submissions, meaning just don’t. Paper only, please. If you can’t be bothered to do that then just don’t bother at all, which I think is fair enough, if a tad anachronistic. I think it’s specifically done because it’s so easy to fire off an email with an attachment – as an agent you’d have to read the whole lot that came in. Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory came in unsolicited, after all.

So I did. Printed it all out, about 270 pages of line-and-a-half spaced A4. It wasn’t totally unsolicited, a friend-of-a-friend had dealt with the agency for years and thought NYHA might be their sort of thing so give it a go, no guarantees. That was a month ago. Last week I got email from them. Can you send it as an email attachment? Got the paper version, lovely, immaculately presented but look, frankly a bit much to pack around town so be a pal and just send it in Word so I don’t break my shoulder, taking it home to read?

Well, since you ask and as you said you liked the the way I’d done it the first time, ok. Just this once, mind. I just hope it’s the same version, that’s all.

Lies, damn lies and Facebook

I was thinking of advertising somewhere. Sorry, I meant leveraging my cross-platform modalities. And where better than Facebook. Well as it turns out, practically anywhere. I think my ad would have done better in the newsagent’s window in Aldeburgh, frankly. It would certainly have been more cost-effective.

I had an ad there for a month. On Facebook, obviously. The results were memorable. Two click-throughs. Two. In a month. I certainly remember that. Then Facebook phoned: “Would I like to buy an ad?”

Well no, Facebook, I bought one and nothing happened so I won’t be buying another. “We’ll look into it,” said Facebook. And by an AMAZING coincidence there were 50 click-throughs in the next 24 hours. I must be born lucky that way.

Over the next week my little old Facebook ad, the one that garnered no clicks at all for a month, managed 150 click-throughs to the Amazon page I’d specified. The results, or ‘insights’ as Facebook’s newspeak has it, were impressive, or they would be if my stats-inclusive BSc put most of its emphasis on BS.

Facebook Insights

In the new amazing world of business school MBA Advanced Know Nothingness, ‘insights’ just means ‘some numbers.’ You can tell the quality of them by the way they record website hits (a search engine crawled across it) instead of visits (someone actually went to the site). This is the upside down-world of insights, Search Engine Optimisation and ‘creative’ content. In the modern Alice Through the LCD the medium isn’t just the message, it’s actually more important.

So here are some insights anyone on The Apprentice would be proud to trot out.

150 clicks. £60. 9 new Facebook likes. Net sales – er one.

The ad was straightforward. Buy Not Your Heart Away, now, in paperback and Kindle. Click here.

That was it. There could only be one reason to click on it, to go straight to the Amazon page. It’s not exactly ambiguous. I never saw the ad. No-one I know has ever seen the ad, but then, considering a friend’s house-to-rent is on there most days and she’s never even considered using Facebook let alone paid for it maybe that’s not too surprising.

That house is advertised on another website, one that’s nothing to do with Facebook. Nice-looking house.

Nice of someone to run an ad for it without the owner knowing.

There’s one difference between those two ads, of course. Mine was paid for, my friend’s wasn’t. But they both have at least one thing in common. They don’t produce any results.

Whatever you do, don’t buy a Facebook ad. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s the transparency of the con-trick that’s the most insulting part of all.