The Truth About Lies

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When is a poem like a dog?
2007-10-07 14:21:00
In 2005, Stephen Fry, the author/actor/acceptable-gay-face- of-middle-England published a book, The Ode Less Travelled, where he, as one reviewer put it, “turned his considerable firepower on contemporary poetry” and he did not miss his mark. He focuses on three areas he maintains are sadly neglected by today’s poets: meter, rhyme and form. A poem, as far as Fry is concerned, should conform to certain rules and contain specific things.I haven’t read the book but having heard him wax loquacious on the subject and after reading reviews in The Observer and The New York Times, I’m pretty sure I know where he’s coming from. And he has a point – but only up to a point.Let’s just consider form today. It all boils down to definitions. What exactly is a poem? Spike Milligan’s ‘Oojah-ka-Piv’ is a poem, as is E E Cummings’s, ‘l(a’ as is Philip Larkin’s ‘Poetry of Departures’ – check out the rhymes and half-rhymes.It’s a fair question. My daughter writes ...
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The untimely death of the short story
2007-10-03 13:23:00
There are certain questions that refuse to go away, questions like: But why do you love me? Do aliens really exist? Did you just fart? and Is the short story dead?There does seem to be a growing attitude that the short story is something an author moves through – a step up from the angst-ridden poems of their plooky youth – on their way to churning out the next great British/American/(enter your own country here) novel.I wrote two-and-a-bit novels before I started on short stories – they’re hard. I’m reminded of the time I first started programming. I had a ZX Spectrum and, even with the expansion pack, you only had 48K to work with but it’s amazing what you can do when you have to. Nowadays we have memory up the kazoo: get it done and out into the marketplace. One wonders if J K Rowling’s massive tomes are a kind of literary bloatwear, not that I have anything against my fellow Scot even if she is an ‘Edinbugger’. (Cultural note: there is no love lost between ‘W...
More About: Story , Death , Short , Short Story

English in its underwear
2007-09-30 22:12:00
Scots is English in its underwear. It's difficult to be pretentious in a language like that.I’m sorry to say that the above quote is not one of mine. I’m far from sorry to say that I knew the man who said it. William McIlvanney is a much-respected Scottish writer who wrote vernacular fiction years before Irvine Welsh and who can not only be credited with creating Tartan Noir crime fiction (Ian Rankin dedicated his second ‘Rebus’ novel to him) but also with making it literary. He has just published his latest novel after a ten-year gap.CBC Radio One has recently broadcast an interview with the author and this is, I'm not ashamed to say, nothing less than a shameless plug, not that I imagine he needs it.Anyone who has read even a couple of my blogs will realise that language fascinates me and I owe a lot to this guy. He has pointed out more than once that the lower down the social ladder you get, the more metaphorical (and this encompasses similes, metonymies and synecdoches...
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A case of ‘the readers’
2007-09-27 12:10:00
I have readers. Yay me! Hello readers and by that I mean the readers out there who’ve generously decided to subscribe to my blog. At least the two of you I know about. I appreciate the commitment. The problem is – yes, I know I always have to look on the dark side – commitment smacks of relationship and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I know, I’m the one who led you on, hanging my blog out there for all and sundry to have a gander at but suddenly I’ve gone all shy. Sorry about that. You see, in my life I’ve proven quite good at the art of attainment – if I wanted something then I usually managed to get it or get as close to it as I could till I got bored being around it – but I’ve not been so hot at maintain-ment. (Okay, not a real word but bear with me). Now all of a sudden I have readers with opinions and thoughts and expectations and I have no idea what they expect. Oh my, they might even have standards. What happens if I let them down? I have written a lot...
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Why is a writer like a cup of coffee?
2007-09-24 19:15:00
I’ve just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead. It started life as a set of lectures she was asked to give at Cambridge University in 2000 and I can’t say I’m displeased she decided to work these up into book form. The book deals with some pretty fundamental questions: What is ‘a writer’? Who do we write for? Is writing for money a bad thing? and so on.The thing I found interesting from a personal point of view is how many of the questions I really didn’t have a definitive answer to. My question is: Do I need the answers?I used to do this thing – you couldn’t really call it a game more a way of annoying someone – where I’d ask why they did something e.g. cross the road and whatever their answer was I’d ask why again. Let me illustrate:   Q: Why did you cross the road?   A: To get to the other side.   Q: Why do you want to get to the other side?   A: So I can go home. &nbs...
More About: Coffee , Writer , Cup of coffee

A question of identity
2007-09-21 14:42:00
Identity is a big thing. I’m not sure if it’s more of an issue for a writer than an actor for example but then I’ve no idea what an actor feels. I do get the desire to want to be someone else because I’ve never been especially happy with the person I am. From my early teens though I identified with being a writer but that was always an idealised self, my alter ego, my version of the superhero. I was always acutely aware however that there was a “real me” on the inside and it was important that he not get allowed to take control of the writing process.A not unreasonable assumption many make is that writing, by its very nature, has to be autobiographical. Not so. Not in my case anyway. Only now I’m working on my fifth novel have I come close to anything like that and what I’m finding is that it’s much harder than I would have ever imagined. It’s uncomfortable to write and the only way I can seem to cope is to fictionalise it, to push it further and further away fro...
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BlogRush
2007-09-17 16:52:00
I’ve just signed up to BlogRush and I’m not sure. I think I’ve done it right; the widget (if that’s the right term for the wee interface) is squatting unobtrusively at the bottom of my side panel and seems to be working okay. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait.Understandably I’m nervous. This is the first of my websites to get pushed out into the world – the rest are still under construction – but I suppose this is the most important one. The thing is, the reason this site exists is to direct/attract people to my writing when I finally get my main website out there and there’s this horrible issue that I find myself continually struggling with: how much does/should the reader really need to know about me before deciding to take a chance on whether I can string a story together or not?Personally I’d rather back right out of the picture. My books/stories/poems are far better than any blog entry I’ll ever make and yet that’s what most people will judge me on...

Two minutes and twelve seconds
2007-09-14 19:39:00
Word count: 442 wordsThis will take you 2 minutes and 12 seconds to read. Approximately.I had to go to the doctor’s yesterday. I was there a week ago and he gave me some medication which, to say the very least, did not agree with me. To say a little more, it was like being dragged, kicking and screaming back to one of those weeks when you were a kid and sick and just starting to realise how much the human body can hurt itself if you disrespect it too much. It had been a long time since I had felt so miserable and what hurt – though way down the bottom of the list of the things that really really hurt – was that the root cause was taking something to make me feel better.Anyway, that sets the scene. I went armed with a history of my miscellaneous aches and ailments hoping, once looked at together, an underlying cause might manifest itself. Of course, when the list came out of my bag the doctor’s hands went up – physically I think though it might just have been metaphorically...
More About: Minutes , Twelve , Utes , Seconds

Twenty-seven dictionaries
2007-09-08 22:42:00
I’ve always known that I owned a lot of dictionaries but until today I’ve never actually sat down and counted them. In total I have 27 including the 2 thesauri and my wife has another dozen of her own. That’s a lot of dictionaries.Neither my father nor my mother to the best of my knowledge ever owned or even read a novel. My mother in the years leading up to her death would pick up the odd woman’s magazine from a second-hand shop but even those she only skimmed. My father bought books by mail order, self-help books mainly but we also ended up with four sets of encyclopaedias, The New Universal Dictionary and Hartrampf’s Vocabulary Builder and I owe a great deal to both of these two excellent books which I sat and read like novels. It puzzles me that it took so many years for it to dawn on me that I was a writer; words always fascinated me. I remember seeing a copy of the complete Oxford English Dictionary at school (all twenty volumes of it) once locked away where no one w...
More About: Twenty , Dictionaries , Went

French computer sex
2007-09-04 00:36:00
I have a question to which I am confident there is an answer but one for which I don’t want to know the answer: In French who decides what gender something is? Before the 1940s the expression ‘computer’ existed but it referred to someone who performed calculations, not to a machine, so, when the term ‘computer’ was finally assimilated into our daily lives who in France decided if its computers were male or female? The French for ‘the computer’ is l’ordinateur which, because the French drop off the vowel in le and la when it precedes a noun beginning with a vowel, doesn’t help; is it le ordinateur (male) or la ordinateur (female)?I could look it up but I like the mystery. I like the idea of some Département de l'attribution du genre aux objets neuters (Department of the Assignation of Gender to Neutral Objects), in a little dusty office off the Rue de le something-or-other inhabited by a secret society of ancient Gauls sitting around trying to determine whether a ...
More About: Computer

The miracle of language
2007-08-31 00:44:00
I don’t get language. I know a lot of words though I’m always a little wary of dropping most of the big ones into conversation not out of any lack of confidence but because they don’t belong in conversational English. Take a word like borborygmia for example (the sound of wind moving through your digestive tract), it’s a lovely word but what’s the point in using it if you have to explain it?I was having a quiet spot at work today and, as I do, I was pondering why we use the term ‘paragraph’ to describe a distinct division of text. The ‘graph’ bit I got – from graphein “to write” – but what did the prefix ‘para’ mean? I thought about parachute, paramount, paraplegic, Paraguay – okay maybe not Paraguay – but I couldn’t figure it out and I didn’t have a computer to hand.Now I see it comes from the Greek paragraphos, "short stroke in the margin marking a break in sense," and that makes sense, some sense. Maybe one day I’ll look up the history of t...
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Why we read
2007-08-23 21:46:00
I picked up a book today for the first time since God alone knows when, a fiction book that is. All I seem to have been reading of late have been textbooks – how to write HTML, how to blog, the ins and outs of web marketing – it can wear you down.The book, not that it matters too much, is On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. I’ve not read anything by him since The Cement Garden despite the fact we have practically all of his books in the house. The attraction was its size. Best to break oneself in gently.I have mixed feelings about reading which I could put down to my age but it’s not the case because I’ve always had them. Do I like reading is perhaps the first question that deserves an answer and the answer is, no.Let me clarify. I don’t particularly enjoy the physical act of reading – I can never get comfortable, my eyes start to itch, I get sleepy – unless (and it is a BIG unless) the author manages to captivate me, entrance me – call it what you will. We use the term...
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Good reads
2007-08-20 12:28:00
I’ve joined a new site by the name of Good reads whose purpose is to provide a home for a pile of book reviewers to store and share information. (Note to self: there must be a better collective noun for book reviewers. Maybe ‘column’? A column of book reviewers).The chore, which is where I am at the moment is entering all the books, or at least a good whack of the books, you’ve read. (Hm is ‘a good whack of’ a proper collective noun?) As a writer you might imagine I’ve read a ton of books (and would that be Avoirdupois or Troy) but I don’t own many of them. (Actually, if I’ve read a ton of books I probably own about 7 or 8 hundredweight of what I’ve read – I still have quite a lot of books).The thing I’m finding is that there are books on my shelves that I know I’ve read and yet I can’t remember a damn thing about them. I even remember enjoying them at the time. Now, the question is, does this reflect badly on me or the author? I suppose a bit of both. The...

Thirteen
2007-08-17 02:56:00
I was playing around with keyword checking websites yesterday, trying to get a feel for them. Meta tags were so much easier. I started with the kinds of keywords I thought might work for my site but didn’t come away much the wiser. So, I thought, let’s have a go with some words where I know what to expect so I tried “transformers” and lo and behold hardly anyone was searching for that word until a couple of months ago, now 100,000 people a day are investigating them. Cool.Okay I said, let’s try something that women will search for. Assuming men were more interested in the contents than the containers I typed in “bra” but I was so wrong: only 60% of all searches were by males. I told my wife and she said to look up “breasts” which I obediently did and the results were also a bit of a surprise: a mere 67% of males. To be honest I expected more but I was forgetting about breast cancer and implants.Then I took a closer look at what breasts were being looked at. Jessica...
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Jeanette and Richard
2007-08-14 14:22:00
I love Jeanette Winterson in much the same way I love Richard Brautigan. I think she’s beautiful and it delights me no end when I rediscover – because I never remember – that we’re the same age; he’s handsome in a way that only my wife will ever see me and it pleases me, again for no logical reason, that we both had daughters even if he did give his an odd name (Ianthe). But that’s not why I love them.My wife owns every book Jeanette has ever written. She even has a DVD of her screenplay. I have virtually everything Richard ever wrote though I doubt I’ll ever have the money to afford some of the early poetry books. I’ve not read all of Jeanette’s books nor am I in a rush to buy the last couple of Richard’s novels that I’ve not got to (The Hawkline Monster and Dreaming of Babylon). The reason is the same: I’ve read everything Samuel Beckett ever wrote.I own a copy of every piece of fiction that Beckett ever wrote. I have DVDs of all his stage plays, CDs of all...
More About: Char

Imaginary buddies
2007-08-11 02:37:00
I just read an article called The Buddy List: The Fifteen Most Dynamic Duos in Pop Culture History.I have to admit to being pleased to see Vladimir and Estragon there (albeit at #6). There were some glaring omissions, Batman and Robin was the first that jumped to my mind but, on checking the criteria the compilers imposed upon themselves, I could see why they weren't there. I was less convinced that Mulder and Scully should be excluded because they wound up as a couple but what the heck.I was also sorry to see George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men were not on the list. You couldn't call Lenny a sidekick but they’re definitely not on an equal footing. Of course I became aware of the notion of George and Lenny long before I read the book. The pairing of the big dumb bloke with the little street-wise guy was a regular feature in the American cartoons I watched as a child and perhaps it is there that the origins of my own literary creations dates back.What puzzles me more is that ba...

The guy in the corner
2007-08-08 20:52:00
I’ve been looking through some social networking sites for writers, Storylink, Readerville and Writing.Com. I’m trying to get a feel for them, to understand where they fit into the mix these days but I’m not quite there yet. I used to be involved with Zoetrope a few years back but it consumed so much of my time I quit and wrote a couple of novels instead.Things have changed. The lingo for one. And the mentality. Now don’t get me wrong, I spend hours online as does my wife. I still own all my reference books – I have a shelf full of dictionaries – but I rarely need to get off my backside to check one. And that’s a good thing. I believe that’s a good thing. Between us we own five computers and have totally embraced this new technology but only up to a point. And that point for me was about ten years ago. I haven’t moved on not because my experience with Zoetrope was bad because it was anything but.Now I’m told I need an author website, a blog, a MySpace page and so...
More About: Corner , The G , The Corner