That the internet offers potentially every individual with a computer the opportunity to self-publish is at once something wonderful and terrible. As a grammar pedant, it pains me to see people develop online authority as writers despite not knowing the difference between “it’s” and “its”. In traditional publishing, points of style, grammar, spelling and the like would fall under the jurisdiction of an editor or proofreader. With online publishing, there is potentially no filter between the author and the ‘submit’ button – with just one click, a piece is live for the world to see, mis-placed apostrophes and all. (And pedantry aside, I would add that it’s not just apostrophes. There really is some dreadful, barely comprehensible writing out there on the blogosphere.) On the other hand, I am also conscious that the Internet is giving me, as a reader, the chance to discover writers I would almost certainly never encounter offline. Blogging, in particular, gives writers a direct link with their readers: no longer is the communication mediated by a third party, who might impose his or her assumptions and prejudices on the transaction. At the same time, social bookmarking services and story submission websites such as Digg and Newsvine enable users to customise the reading process so that stories are generated and prioritised according to their preferences rather than, again, the assumptions of an editor. In a nutshell, then, that’s the beauty and the curse of blogging.
I have never aspired to be a blogger. I grew up surrounded by books, and I have always loved the physicality of them. I can never decide which excites me more – the musty smell of old second-hand books or the pristine smell of new ones. Whereas online writing is permanent – available anywhere, always backed up in case of disaster – books can be lost and therefore can be treasured. Books age, over time acquiring the marks of ownership. I used to hate it when my books got scuffed, but now I like it if a book gets a few blemishes that show it’s been somewhere with me.
And it is books that I aspire to write. I want my work to be available in physical, paper form, so that it can be treasured and lost and discovered and shared in the real, physical world. I rarely read stories on a computer screen – I prefer to take them on the bus with me, or read them in bed, or sit in my papasan chair and dose off with a book in my hands. And, as a writer, I want to contribute to that physical process for other people. The end result, for me, is to get a book in print.
So it occurred to me that I could use this blog, in part, as an opportunity to document my progress. Although print is my goal, one of the virtues of online publishing is the fact that you can update your content on a constant basis – many bloggers post every single day. So, on this site, I can not only show finished products where appropriate, but also convey the process of making those products.
The printed matter I currently aspire to create is a book called Stories. I’ll briefly explain the origins of the project. Over three years ago a friend of mine asked me to write a fable so she could illustrate it. I appreciated the challenge, and started thinking about what a fable actually was. I know this is perhaps stretching the original meaning of the word, but for the purposes of this project I was thinking of a fable as being, simply, a story with a moral. I’d never written such a piece before, and my postmodern training had taught me to be sceptical of interpretations that try to pin a text down by giving it a moral or a meaning. So the story that I eventually came up with, ‘A Cadence’, is actually one that explores the idea of a story with a moral, suggesting interpretations but never fixing on one rigidly in the manner of Aesop. It is also a story about stories. I wanted to use this tale to portray a world in which storytelling is one of the building blocks of humanity (as I believe it is in ours). But the piece is also, I believe, a good story in its own right – I think that it is the kind of story I would like to read, although this is always hard to say as we are too familiar with our own words to be able to judge them.
I really enjoyed writing ‘A Cadence’, and before I had finished it my mind was already creating more stories in a similar style. The first had been about a mermaid. I then imagined a tale about a dragon. Realising that all of these stories were based on very familiar tropes from folk tales, I also began to think of my favourite existing stories, and how I might re-tell them. I gradually built up the idea of a collection of stories, apparently unconnected except for the fact that they all had the same garrulous and fussy narrator. Without meaning to, in ‘A Cadence’ I had created a narrator who would not leave things alone, who worried about how best to describe things and who constantly interfered, unable simply to tell the story. Thinking perhaps a little of Lemony Snicket, and a touch also of Flaubert’s Parrot, I liked the idea that as the stories progressed, we would begin to know a bit more about this narrator, perhaps that the stories would become more about him and less about the other characters. That, very crudely, is the idea behind Stories.
Over the last few years, while doing other things (and not writing much), I have continued to think about these stories. First I worked out what stories I wanted to tell, then I started writing them. As with ‘A Cadence’, I did not start at the beginning, but instead contributed various disconnected paragraphs with the intention of filling in the gaps. Those disconnected paragraphs have sat on my computer for months while I endured a job that stifled and bored me, daydreaming about the stories I was going to write but rarely actually getting anything done.
Then, last month, I went away for a week with Gemma to Northumberland. It was here that I had finished my first draft of ‘A Cadence’, and I had a vague intention of doing some more work on my stories. Gem was revising for an exam, and she suggested that, at the end of each day, to reward her for doing her revision, I could read to her what I had written that day. So, on the first day, I completed the first half of ‘A Fantasy’ and read it out. Like Scheherezade, I was then compelled to finish the tale, and the trend continued. By the end of the week, I had completed a first draft of three out of the four remaining stories: ‘A Fantasy’, ‘A Substitute’ and ‘A Tragedy’. I am extremely lucky to have Gemma as my editor. She is honest and passionate about my writing, just as much when she likes it as when she doesn’t. After hearing her feedback, I came to the conclusion that these first drafts provided the good basis for a collection, but had some serious flaws that needed to be resolved. In particular, the garrulous narrator and postmodern trickery are perhaps too intrusive. For these stories to work, they need to be essentially very well told stories. As Gemma put it, a storyteller should strive to be interesting rather than to be clever.
And that is my progress so far. Back at home, I am working once again predominantly in my head rather than on paper, but I think I know what needs to be done to those three stories to make them work. For the first time, a finished product seems like a plausible idea. I am really excited about finishing the stories, and about finding an audience for them. I will keep you updated on my progress.