All the Blogs below originally appeared on AN AWFULLY BIG BLOG ADVENTURE, the Scattered Authors' Society's blog...
FEASTING THE WOLF...
I'm away with the Vikings again...
My recent book, FEASTING THE WOLF, was set against the background of the Great Danish Army invading England in the 9th Century. I'd hardly finished it before a publisher who shall be nameless asked if I would write for them 'a book for boys, set in the Dark Ages, with lots of adventure and violence.'
I need the money, so I at once set about constructing a story. Colleagues have been blogging about the joy of beginning a new book. Well, this, by way of contrast, is about the graft of starting a commissioned book...
'The Dark Ages' could mean anything from the 6th Century and King Arthur, to the 8th, and Vikings, but it was always going to be Vikings, because I already know a lot about them and they were certainly real, whereas King Arthur is a bit iffy. 'Adventure' to me suggests more than a nod to history.
I needed an idea, so I dredged up a book I'd written years ago, and which had never been published. And I decided to use my partner as a sounding board, because he once was a boy and so might have a better idea than me about what boys might enjoy. How about, I suggested, a Viking trying to win enough gold to persuade the father of his sweetheart to consider him as a suitor?
Yuck! Anything remotely to do with weddings or kissing or girls was not on.
Well okay, how about, our hero sees a really beautiful sword for sale, but the swordsmith won't sell it, so our hero steals it and -
“That makes him a thief!” said my partner, really shocked.
Yes, and? Vikings were known, occasionally, to take without permission.
But no, no, no, I didn't understand. Heroes of boys' adventures cannot be thieves. They must be honourable and clean-living and right-thinking. This hero sounded less like a Viking every second. I didn't feel I was getting anywhere.
In the end it was my brother (also once a boy) who said, during one of our pub conversations, “Base it around the Battle of Stamford Bridge.”
Well, that Battle was right at the end of the Viking Age – literally, as the Viking Age can be defined as 'from the early eighth century to 1066'. Also, I generally try to avoid pinning any of my stories to a definite historical date since arguing with historians can be so tiresome, I find. And Stamford Bridge, like the Battle of Hastings, has 'the one memorable date in English history'.
Still, I thought it was worth looking into, and started researching the Battle. Before long, I was fascinated, and committed. Stamford Bridge it was going to be.
It was the Battle fought in Yorkshire about twenty days before the Battle of Hastings, and for a story-teller, it has lots to offer. An invading Viking army numbering thousands. Impossible, heroic forced marches. Five thousand Vikings fighting to the death under the hot Yorkshire sun (really) without armour. Hardship, courage, heartbreak. Thank you, bro.
I invented and named my heroes (I searched for names on the Viking Recreation sites on the web). One of the characters, obviously, had to be the giant Norseman who held the bridge against the Saxons. How could he be left out? I sketched out the story and e-mailed it to my agent, to see if she could flog it.
Instead, she flung it back. Too much history, she said, and not enough story. And expunge all mention of the Saxon boy wanting to be a monk! Christianity was the biggest turn-off. And there was I, thinking I was merely reflecting the mood of the time, when Christianity was still fresh and vital, and the young warrior, Christ, ascended the Tree, to do battle with the Devil...
But the main thing, with this book, is to sell it – so back to the laptop. History and Christianity out, story in. And my agent was, as usual, right. The story is coming to life as I get closer to the characters and ruthlessly cut out the history. Can't wait to get to those five thousand hot, sweaty, doomed Vikings...
(FEASTING THE WOLF is published by Usborne). And an extract from it can be read on this website.
REWRITING.
When I was a child, our house was littered with drawings, on used, opened-out envelope, or
old wallpaper, and even drawing-pads. My brother drew dinosaurs or battles, my sister drew swimming seals or people, and my father's drawings were usually of aeroplanes or birds.
They all had one thing in common: there would be repeated attempts at the drawing. My Dad, for instance, would do a sketch of the whole plane, and then, underneath, another drawing of its undercarriage, and another of its wings. He hadn't been happy with the first drawing, so he practiced the bits he felt needed improving. Turn the paper over, and there would be another, larger, better drawing of the whole plane.
These sketches taught me something without my ever realising I'd learned anything at all - You won't get things right the first time, so repeat them until you do.
My own drawings were usually of people. I'd draw someone leaning against a wall, and then do a skeleton sketch to try and perfect their position; followed by a drawing of the head and shoulders, trying to get the slant of the shoulders and tilt of the head right. Then I'd draw the whole figure again, trying to improve on the first version.
As a child, I drew far more than I wrote; in my early teens, I drew and wrote about equally. After my first book was accepted, when I was sixteen, writing took over from drawing (and I haven't seriously drawn anything for about thirty years now). But the lesson that I never knew I'd learned moved with me from drawing to writing. If I wasn't happy with something I'd written, I rewrote it – and if I still wasn't happy, I rewrote it again, and again, if need be, until I thought I couldn't improve it any more.
I didn't think I was doing anything. Rewriting was part and parcel of writing. It was just what you did; as much a part of writing as using a pen.
Years passed, and, in the way of impoverished writers, I started teaching Creative Writing. But between you and me, gentle reader, I was puzzled as to what 'Creative Writing' was exactly. And even more puzzled as to what I could teach my students. If I had ever stopped to think about what I did when I wrote a book, I couldn't remember doing it.
I consulted a few 'How to Write' books, to find out what those authors told their students, and it was enlightening. “Oh, I do that! Who'd have thought it?” I resolved only to steal those 'creative writing' tips that I could honestly say I used myself. (So you'll hear only a perfunctory mention in my classes about keeping notebooks, or meditating, or doing ten minutes of 'automatic writing' every morning. These things are very useful to those who find them useful, but they make me feel like Laurence Olivier confronted with 'The Method'. Why don't you just try writing, dear ones? It's less like hard work.) My classes were about setting scenes, writing dialogue, building plots. It never occurred to me to tell anyone to rewrite, because rewriting to me was writing. I didn't think anyone would need to be told that.
Slowly, slowly, over the weeks, it became apparent to me that the idea of rewriting had never, ever occurred to many – not just a few, but many – of my students. A lot of them seemed to think that it was cheating. A real writer, they seemed to think – Thomas Hardy, let's say – just sat down and wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles straight off, from beginning to end, never blotting a word; and then he packed it off to his publishers who printed it without asking for any changes. That's the kind of genius he was. That's the way a real writer works.
If my students wrote a story, and found themselves dissatisfied with it, they concluded that it was another failure, put it away, and tried to forget about it. The next thing they wrote, that might be perfect.
“Couldn't you,” I suggested nervously, not at all sure I was on firm ground here, “couldn't you rewrite it?”
They were astonished. But they'd finished it! And it wasn't any good. What was the point of wasting more time on it?
“But nothing I've ever written,” I said, “was much good in its first draft. But if I like the idea – if there are bits that are good – I rewrite it, and improve it. I've rewritten some things dozens of times over. I rewrote the whole of GHOST DRUM six or seven times, and I rewrote the ending many more times than that.”
Some of the class were quite excited by this revolutionary idea. Others were as plainly horrified, reminding me of a little girl in Year 4 of a school I once visited. Her story was so good, I told her, that she should rewrite it. The look she gave me would have reduced a lesser writer to a pair of smouldering boots.
But having belatedly realised that rewriting was actually a tool of the writer's trade that I'd never before suspected I was using, I became evangelistic about it. “Rewrite!” I cried to each new intake of students. “You must rewrite!”
And then one of my students stopped me in my tracks by asking, “But how do I know what parts I have to rewrite? How do I know which words I should change?”
Well – er – quite. Obviously, these are the technical complexities Jordan was referring to when she spoke of her ghost writer 'putting it into book words'. When a writer, like wot I am, takes the raw first draft and puts it into book words, what exactly is it I are doing?
I hadn't a clue. Look, I only write the stuff – I don't waste my time thinking about it, any more than a ditch-digger thinks much about ditch-digging. She just heaves another shovel-ful of mud.
But there were my students, waiting for an answer. So I gave thinking about it a try. And boy, did my brain hurt...
REWRITING, PART II
So, as promised, I have cudgelled the brains over my student's question: How do you know what parts to rewrite? How do you know what words to change?
There are, I've concluded, two levels to rewriting: the big and the small.
The big takes in the whole of the book or story – never mind this or that word, does the whole thing work?
The small concentrates on words, sentences, paragraphs at most.
So, to begin small...
One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever came across was: Read your work aloud. It's a good idea to train yourself to hear a voice speaking the words in your head, even if you're reading or writing silently. This helps you to 'hear' the rhythms and stresses even as you invent the words - but it doesn't replace reading aloud.
Feeling your lips, tongue and throat shaping the words you've written, and hearing them, forces you to concentrate on every syllable, on rhythms, and on the sense. Reading by eye alone, you can skim through sentences, and even whole paragraphs if you're a very fluent reader (as writers tend to be). You can miss the small details of sound.
But words are, ultimately, meant to be spoken, not read. Poetry, as a poet once told me, is rhythm, not rhyme – and rhythm is sound.
But am I listening for? How do I know which words to change?
Well, I consider if my words are easy to say, and pleasing to hear. The twelfth Leith policeman dismisseth us. Beware of such jaw-breakers. What the eye reads easily may be a clog to the tongue – and I want that talking-book deal. So if I catch myself writing a tongue-twister, I rewrite it.
I'm on the listen-out for repeated sounds that jar. 'My keel coursed cruel care-halls - ' The Anglo-Saxons were keen on alliteration, and if consciously done for effect, it can be wonderful. But if I've repeated sounds through carelessness, and it's spoiling the rhythmn or sound, I change the wording
Are the words I've chosen the best ones for the job I wanted them to do? English is crammed with words that are close in meaning, but have their own nuances, weights, textures and colours. 'Amble' has a clumsier and more endearing sound than 'stroll'. 'Lope' is quite different from either. 'Smirk' has very different connotations from 'smile' or 'giggle'. Is there another word that's a closer fit for my meaning? That means the same, but has a better sound or stress for that sentence? Or has a sound that better fits the sense?
Do the sentences have a good natural rhythm? Reading them aloud makes this obvious. Am I running out of breath before reaching the end of the sentence, or the next natural pause? Does the sentence have the natural swing of speech's rise and fall? When I read it aloud, does the stress fall on the most important words – the words I really want people to hear? If the answers are 'no', then shorten the sentence, or divide it into two; change the word order, or find other words.
But having said all this about making a sentence easy to read, sometimes I want to make a sentence clumsy or difficult. If I'm describing drudgery, then I want the words I use to be slow, awkward, clumsy, tired. I might want the sound and rhythmn of my words to reflect the sleek quickness, the harshness or the cold of their sense. If what I've written doesn't do that, I try to find words that do.
A frequent consideration is whether the phrase I've used is a cliché – a phrase too over-used and stale to make the reader stop and think about the sense. It isn't easy to avoid cliches, and I am certainly guilty of using them often. For one thing, they're often true – as white as snow, as cold as ice. But I am honour bound to try. So I give the brains another pummel, and see if I can come up with something fresher.
Finally, I check if I mean what I've said. Words can get away from you. A friend of mine, a teacher, once read in a pupil's exercise book: 'I was lying on the settee watching the telly eating peanuts.' She wrote in the margin: 'My telly prefers chocolate.' But it's all too easy, in a moment of carelessness, to mangle your grammar, and say something you never meant to say. So I watch out for this kind of slip and – rewrite it.
Enough for one posting. I don't imagine for a moment that I've said all there is to say on this subject, but something like this goes through my head when I'm rewriting.
But I hope I've gone some way towards answering my student's question: 'When you rewrite, how do you know what words to change?'
THE PLEASURE OF LIBRARY-VISITING...
...Is one pleasure I'd almost forgotten, so I've something to thank the credit crunch for.
I'd grown used to buying books, mostly on-line, but now that I really have to find ways of saving money – apologies to fellow authors, but I really do – I'm back to the library again. At least I'm adding to your PLR (Public Lending Rights).
I first joined the library when I was fourteen. Dudley Library, in the West Midlands. A stately Victorian Goddess sat above the door, reading a book. Come to think of it, she's still there, still reading, and good for Her.
It was a different sort of library then. There was a lot of emphasis on silence. And it was no use looking for anything except books, newspapers, and the occasional magazine. I wasn't complaining. I was a book-lover, and I'd never seen so many books in my life. Adult and children's fiction downstairs – and cooking and gardening. Oh, and biography and history, national, international and local.
Upstairs – well. The heavy stuff. Psychology, criminology, sociology. Literary criticism. The reference library. The archives. Ecology. Mathematics. Science. And I had an adult ticket. I could take any book from any of those shelves. It was dizzying.
But hard to make a choice, when I could only take five books. I spent hours in there. In the first years I would walk through the door and look round for the red and yellow books. Because they were science-fiction, weren't they? And I was into sci-fi at the time. Except they weren't science-fiction. They were Victor Gollancz – a firm that happened to publish a lot of science-fiction. I remember being very puzzled the first time I grabbed a red and yellow book that wasn't sci-fi.
What a forcing house for a writer, though. I read every kind of fiction – crime, romance, thriller, kitchen-sink, historical, humourous, shed-loads of fantasy, ghost and sci-fi. Curiosity led me to read a lot of classics: Jacobean tragedies, most of Shakespeare, and, in translation, Classical Greek plays, Tolstoy, Balzac, Sagas, Moliere, Medieval Romances, Beowulf... All for the price of a bus-ride. If I'd had to buy the books, I could never have afforded it.
I read widely in psychology, because I wanted to know how – or why – people tick. Forty-odd years later, I'm none the wiser, but, with the help of these books, I have given it a lot of thought. For the same reason, I read criminology and sociology – with much the same result.
I read books on popular science, and there's nothing like astronomy and quantum physics for making you feel that you must urgently hold your skull together with both hands. You want poetry? A kind of fierce poetry? Read books on Quantum Physics.
And if any mention of anything caught my interest – well, the library was sure to have books on it.
It was in Dudley library, I well remember, where the man Pratchett first came into my life. I was looking at the shelf of 'recently returned books', as I always did, and there was this book called MORT by someone I'd never heard of. I didn't like the picture on the cover, but read the blurb, then almost put it back because I am naturally suspicious of 'humorous fantasy'. Then I leaned on the shelf and read a few pages – hardly got as far as page 96 – and decided to borrow it.
Well, since then I think I've read everything the man's written, including such titles as STRATA and DARK SIDE OF THE SUN. Something else to thank both Dudley Library and Pratchett for, is that I passed MORT on to my Dad, and he loved it too. For years I bought him the latest Pratchett for Christmas, reading it myself before wrapping it (buying books as presents and then reading them yourself before wrapping them is a strong Christmas tradition in my family). For years me and my Dad discussed the Disk-world, made jokes about it, reminded each other of 'best bits', tried to pinpoint our favourite characters. (Death was always a strong contender, and I hope He came to collect my Dad. They would have got on: they both loved cats).
The library I go to now is very different. It's a small branch library, but it still has ranks of computers; and it loans dvds and computer games as well as books – and sells greetings cards. But there are still, thank whatever gods there be, shelves and shelves and shelves of books, which is really all I'm interested in. (I can get all the internet's sex and violence at home).
I'd forgotten the thrill of scuttling back into my house with a stack of thick, heavy library books, but I'm realising anew how much I love the feeling. It's a bit like having a big box of chocolates to open – all those wonderful flavours and textures, and which one to go for first? The fluffy, light-hearted confection of romance or fantasy? The hard-centred, gritty realism of Rankin's wonderful Rebus, or something by Minette Walters? That rather cloying self-help book with its interesting 'case histories'? The serious book on Iron Age brochs, which fascinate me strangely? Or the one on bog-bodies, some of which are real nightmares. (I don't recommend anyone to look at photos of Grauballe man). I can spend a day or more dipping into the different books, and looking at their illustrations (if any), before deciding which one to start reading.
And when I finish them, there's still a library-full waiting for me!
In fact, I feel a bit of a fool for ever giving up the library. What a truly wonderful, altruistic institution. And what a lot I owe it.
SHORT STORIES
I was on the cross-trainer at the gym, listening to music on my little zen-stone, when a song prompted a short story to drop into my head.
I find it's like that with short stories. Putting a novel together takes an age. You have to research the background, come up with characters, name them (always difficult), invent histories for them, thrash out a plot, change the plot, change the characters, start again... A novel, for me anyway, is constructed over months, even years – bashed together from odd bits and pieces. I always think of a full length book as being 'under construction' or 'up on the stocks'.
A short story tends to arrive almost complete. I suppose that's because it's short. Often there's no need even to name the characters. I may not know the exact words I'm going to frame it in, but I have the whole span of the story, its mood, its imagery, sometimes even the way it's going to be told – in the first person, say, or in a series of short, disconnected scenes.
I'm usually aware of a novel putting itself together. I remember the initial idea, I know when I decided to include this character, and that incident. I remember deciding to drop that whole section, and the reasons why. But a short story often seems to have come from nowhere. One moment I'm sweating on the cross-trainer, thinking of nothing in particular – the next second, there's a story. And it does seem as if some inner light-bulb has illuminated the inside of my head.
When I sit down to write the story, there's a lot of hard concentration and revision – this isn't automatic writing I'm talking about – but the work focusses on the arrangement of words in a sentence, or to what degree I can pare the narrative down before it becomes incomprehensible. With a novel the work covers a far wider range – research, say, or the sheer logistics of getting character B to a particular place, at a particular time, so s/he can encounter character D.
I suppose I'm saying that, for me, a novel is about plotting and a short story is about language. (I keep saying 'for me' because I'm very aware that it might be different for another writer).
I can clearly remember the arrival of some stories. I was watching the film 'Silent Tongue', in which a simpleton boy, played by River Phoenix, is mourning his dead wife, an Indian squaw. Her body, wrapped in a blanket, has been lodged in a tree, for the birds to pick clean. The boy, unable to understand that she is dead, sits under the tree, on guard, driving the birds away with shots from his rifle. The woman's ghost appears to him, haranguing him for keeping her tied to her body – she can't travel on to the other world until her body has disappeared.
My head is so stuffed with old stories and songs that they leak out of my ears. As I watched this part of the film, the words of the old ballad leaped into my head: 'Who lies weeping on my grave and will not let me sleep?' I was seized with the idea of writing my own version of this old song. I pared it down to almost nothing but dialogue, and then realised that I could make the title work as well. I called it 'Overheard In A Graveyard', and so was able to cut all description or even mention of the setting. The finished story is told entirely in dialogue. The two voices aren't even given genders – they could be male and female, or both male, or both female. You decide.
OVERHEARD IN A GRAVEYARD
'What is Longing made of, that it never wears out?
Bone breaks. Rock wears away to sand. In this dark rain, hard iron falls to rust.
Razors blunt. But Longing's edge still cuts deep... '
Published by Hodder in my book, 'NightComers'
The whole story can be read here, on my website.
I used a similar title for 'Overheard In A Museum', (unpublished as yet) which came when I fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, and stood beside the Gokstad ship. The museum is within sight and sound of the Oslo Fjord, where the ship must once have sailed:
'When the doors of the hall open, I smell the sea. I hear it. The pulse of the long-felled oak runs through me, and I feel the sea rush past and under me, and I surge forward to climb the wave. But I never move. I shall never more move...
The most surprising arrival of a story was during the Scattered Authors' Society (SAS) conference last year. My colleague Katherine Roberts (author of I AM THE GREAT HORSE), headed a collage workshop. Under Katherine's instruction, we first had to fix in our minds the kind of story we wanted to write, or the writing problem we wanted to solve. Then we whiffled quickly, at random, through a pile of magazines and, without thinking, ripped out any image or words that caught our attention. After a few minutes of this, we had to look through our bits of paper, and arrange them on a larger sheet to form a collage.
There were about ten professional writers in that room, with glue and paper, and tongues sticking out between teeth. It was, for an SAS conference, a rare few minutes of intense, absorbed silence.
Collages finished, we each had to speak about our own for a few minutes. I had known from the outset that I wanted to write a ghost story. I had chosen a large photograph of a wild moorland area. Over it I had glued a headline that had grabbed my eye: 'Buried in an Unmarked Grave'. There was a photo of a street of old terraced houses, and a dark, dirty flight of steps. But when I had to talk about the collage, I couldn't say much. I said I felt that the flight of steps led down into the underworld, and that someone was buried 'in an unmarked grave' on the moorland, and 'nane shall ken whaur they have gane'. Another colleague, Celia Rees (author of SOVAY), said that it reminded her of the Moors murders.
And then we went for lunch. My room was near where we'd been working, and I tossed the collage on my bed, and sped off to the refectory, for an hour or so of the usual lively SAS chat. I forgot all about the collage, but when I came back to my room at the end of the afternoon, there it was on the bed. The instant I looked at it, Celia's comment and my own thoughts came together and the story 'Carla' was in my head – the characters, the incidents, the mood, the way I would tell it.
I wrote the story about four months ago, and am still tinkering with it, but on the whole, it pleases me well enough. It's unpublished, but I've added it to a collection of new stories that I'm slowly building up, and which may be published one day.
I'll add this latest story to it, when I've written it, if it's any good at all. The song I was listening to on the cross-trainer? 'Cruel Mother' by June Tabor -
She leaned her back against a thorn
All alone and so lonely
And there she has her babies borne
All in the green woods of ivy
She took a knife both long and sharp
All alone and so lonely
And pierced it through each tender heart...
All in the green woods of ivy...
WRITING WITH A CAT
My cat does an excellent impression of a car alarm, usually when I have to remove him from his favourite sleeping place, my computer chair. He then strides up and down the landing outside my work-room, going, 'Waaaa! Waaaa! Waaaa!' in a shrill, rasping, repeated wail which bores through my concentration in seconds. Throwing things at him distracts him only for a moment. Closing the room's door means louder wails and a scratched door. Shutting him in the yard means that he batters the patio doors with both paws, rattling it in its frame, and still wailing, until you'd swear looters were breaking in. He's a large and determined cat.
The only thing that shuts him up is allowing him to jump onto my lap. (Sometimes he's too idle to jump, and waves his front paws at me, demanding to be picked up). Once on my lap, he settles comfortably, front paws folded under, assumes a smug expression and vibrates gently with contentment. He watches the screen as I work, his ears pricking with interest as it shifts and flickers. Happily, he's never shown any interest in getting closer to it, though once, when I printed off a book proposal, which showered from the printer onto the floor, he sprang from my lap and killed all the pages. (Critics! They're everywhere).
Working with a cat on my lap means having to type around a pair of hot, silky little ears, and occasionally having a thick, furry tail wafted across my face – or coiled round my neck like a boa. It means having to pause when the cat stands up and turns himself round two or three times, before draping himself across my legs like a heavy, furry scarf. But he's quiet – apart from an occasional snore – for hours, so it's worth it.
The next time I'm asked one of those questions - 'Do you find it best to write by hand, or by word-processor?' - 'Do you use blue or black ink? Pen or pencil?' - I'm going to say, 'I always write with a cat.'
COMICS...
“Well done! You've saved the day! Let me reward you with these tickets to the circus and a slap-up feed at the Hotel De Posh!”
The Hotel De Posh's signature dish: a mountain of mashed potato with sausages sticking out horizontally all round it, and a bottle of fizzy lemonade (or, more likely, Irn Brue). Desperate Dan's favourite, his Aunt Aggie's speciality, is far too famous for it to be worth my mentioning it here.
Lord Snooty and his pals. Roger the Dodger, Minnie The Minx, Dennis the Menace. Little Plum and the Three Bears. And Pansy Potter, who let slip her Dundee origins because her title didn't rhyme unless pronounced with a Scots accent. She was the Strong Man's Dotter.
A subtle Scottish cadence ran through all the speech bubbles. People were asked to fetch messages, for instance, while we ran errands in the Black Country. And all those Dads in the last frame, with their slippers! They're all tall, lanky, square-headed Scots.
When I was a child, our house had lots of books – shelved floor to ceiling in most rooms, piled on the stairs and window-sills – but we were never bought comics. (In theory, we had weekly pocket money to buy our own, but in fact this pocket money arrived in our pockets only once or twice a year). My parents had nothing against comics, they just didn't think them worth spending their scarce income on, when they could buy us a second-hand book from Dudley market for very little more.
Next door lived a brother and sister who were obviously filthy rich, because they had several comics each week. On Friday evenings it was my regular chore to carry next door a bloody joint of meat wrapped in newspapers (the Sunday joint, delivered by a mobile butcher, and taken in by my mother for her neighbour). Every month or so my reward was to have my arms piled with a great stack of comics and magazines, and I'd hardly be able to say, 'thank you,' for grinning. Home I'd scuttle, clutching the pile, bursting in through the back door with a cry of, “Comics!”
“Bags me the Beano,” my Dad would say.
The Bunty, The Judy, June, Jackie and, later, The Romeo and The Valentine. Even, occasionally, The Red Letter, which my mother remembered from her own young days. Looking at the cover she said, with satisfaction, “They've still got the nasty neighbour peering round the curtains – she was always there, every week.”
But the girls' comics were quickly skimmed through and thrown aside, with their tales of butch (female) car mechanics made-over to win beauty contests, and champion hockey teams kidnapped and forced to play for aliens. They were appetisers, something to read while other people had the comics you really wanted.
Those were the boy's comics: The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper. The Valiant, the Buster, The Hotspur, The Victor. After we'd finished with them, my Dad took them to work, and his workmates read them during their tea break, their feet up on the stove, laughing at The Bash Street Kids. It takes a real man, I think, to admit that he finds the Beano a good read.
My Dad (born in 1928) often told us that he'd bought the very first copy of The Beano, complete with its give-away 'flash-bang'. He wished he'd had the sense to put it away carefully and keep it mint. Instead, it was probably used to light a fire. (And research suggests it was actually The Dandy he bought. Wishful thinking: The Beano was always our favourite, The Dandy a poor second).
My Dad, my brothers, my sister and I, all drew. The house was littered with opened out envelopes and other scrap paper covered with drawings, and we pored over the comics' illustrations as well as the stories. (We could never understand why friends never seemed to notice, or care, when a favourite strip was drawn by a different artist). The comic art was often of a high order. The drawings of 'The Steel Claw' (in The Valiant) were favourites: a sort of comic-strip 'film-noir'. But the Bash Street Kids, careering along in a massed group, all feet off the ground at once, were a joy, full of liveliness and movement.
The artist who drew the thick, woodcut-like drawings for 'Faceache' and 'Jonah' was a master. His strips were not only grotesquely beautiful, but laugh-out-loud funny. I remember one in particular, where Faceache had resolved 'to be good'. This turning over of a new leaf was often how a story of Minnie the Minx, or Dennis the Menace, or Roger the Dodger began.
Anyway, Faceache swore, that for that day at least, he wouldn't twist his face into terrifying gurns, causing unrest and panic among the populace. Instead, he was going to help the baker. Queue a series of wonderfully managed panels where Faceache burning his hand coincides with an innocent delivery man looking through the window just as pain convulses Faceache's already unlovely features into a particuarly inventive and novel shape. Panic and unrest ensues. It was almost filmic. I remember my Dad took that particular strip to read in the bathroom. He said it nearly gave him a rupture.
My brother, sister and I used to discuss the comics like a sort of junior book-club. We laughed at Captain Hurricane, his 'raging furies' and exclamations of 'Suffering Sausage Munchers' and 'Cowardly Cabbage Crunchers!' My mother told us that, as a child during the Second World War, she'd seriously believed that Germans only ever said, 'Achtung, Pig-Dog!' Well, apart from 'Heil Hitler!' obviously.
We discussed whether it was sensible of Fish Boy (who had been abandoned in the wild and raised by fishes), to take an injured fish from the water and lay it on a rock to 'bathe its wounds'. And which was better – Galaxo, the giant robot ape, or the boy who controlled an army of little robot men by means of an armband (the name of this strip escapes me). We were cutting our critical teeth.
At the same time I was reading the Norse Myths, Hans Anderson, Kipling – but that was 'literature'. I could enjoy it, but hands off.
Comics were on our level. Often well-drawn, often funny, often inventive, but emphatically not literature. We could kick them around, say and think what we liked about them, have our own opinion. We learned discernment, by and for ourselves. Once learned – and not least of the lessons was that it was enjoyable – we could carry it with us into other fields.
I once read an article in which a critic declared that it was impossible to appreciate Tolstoy and Mickey Mouse equally. In order to be refined enough to appreciate Tolstoy, I gather, you had to leave Mickey far behind.
Rubbish. You can enjoy and appreciate Mickey – and Dennis, and The Bash Street Kids – and Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck - for what they are, and for the skill, verve and wit that they have. And then you can shift gears and appreciate Tolstoy, on his level, as someone who had entirely different aims. The ability to move from one to the other demonstrates a flexible mind – which is probably necessary for creativity.
George Orwell got a lot out of smutty postcards.
It takes a real critic to appreciate both Mickey and Natasha.
BOOKS TO KEEP
I took a load of books to a charity shop recently, and that started me thinking about the books I'd never, ever part with.
Rudyard Kipling's First and Second Jungle Books, and The Just-So Stories. My father read these when he was a boy, and loved them, so he bought them for my seventh Christmas. I loved them too; and came to know them almost by heart. Kipling taught me such new words as 'insatiable' and 'replied' – and his love of chanting, rhythmic language appeared later in my own books, such as The Ghost Drum.
Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. 'Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest of cornflowers, and as clear as the clearest glass; but it is very deep, deeper than any anchor chain can reach...' (M. R James' translation). I was about nine when I found this on our bookshelves, and was hooked straight away. The Dauntless Tin Soldier, The Tinder Box, The Nightingale – I loved them all. Later, as a teenager, I realised that many of Anderson's tales were his re-tellings of traditional tales – The Seven Swans, for instance. The book took on a new interest for me.
Scandinavian Mythology, by H. R. Ellis- Davidson. My mother promised to buy me, for my fifteenth birthday, whatever I chose, and I chose this – though I didn't realise at the time that Davidson was an acknowledged expert in her subject. Mum had the vapours when she saw the price: one pound, fifteen shillings (£1-75p). And this for a large-format, hard-backed book with many colour-photographs.
But she kept her word, as she always did, and I still use this book for reference. It outraged my aunt with its photo of 'Windeby Girl' – a naked, partially preserved bog-body. How could my parents allow me to look at such things? The Windeby 'Girl' has since been discovered to be a boy. Had she known, my aunt would have had conniptions.
It was a story in this book, 'King Olaf's Warning', which became the germ of my first collection of re-tellings, The Carpenter and Other Stories.
K. M. Briggs' Dictionary of British Folk-Tales. I found these in a Birmingham bookshop, priced at £30 each. I couldn't really afford them, but asked myself, Was I ever likely to come across them again? I rushed to the payment desk, where the assistant exclaimed, “Oh, thank goodness – we ordered those by mistake and thought we'd never get rid of them!”
Those books have more than paid me back, not only in material, but in entertainment. I've lost track of the number of stories I've found in them to retell, and the number of ideas they've given me. They were worth every penny – as books generally are!
FROM TYPEWRITER TO LAPTOP...
I started my writing career on an old, second-hand typewriter, bought for me as a Christmas present by my parents, when I was twelve. A good present – I was still using it seven years later.
It was big, made of cast-iron, and I could hardly lift it. Just bashing the keys down took effort.
Bashing a key levered up a long metal stem, on the end of which was a metal stamp forged with the image of a letter. This letter slammed an inked ribbon against the sheet of paper you'd rolled into the machine, stamping an image of the letter to the paper. There was a whole nest of these metal stems and when you typed fast they frequently got wedged together, and you had to stop and dislodge them.
If you wanted a copy of your work, you had to put a sheet of carbon paper behind your first page, and then a sheet of 'copy-paper'. If you wanted two copies, then another sheet of carbon paper behind that, and another sheet of copy-paper. You then had to align these sheets of flimsy, floppy paper, and somehow persuade them to be rolled into the typewriter without becoming creased or misaligned. This seldom happened.
But what I really dreaded about the typewriter was changing the ribbon. The inky ribbon wound backwards and forwards between two reels on top of the machine. At the middle, it passed through a clip, which held it in place for the keys to strike. It was a simple, relatively uncomplicated system, and worked very well, but eventually the ink on the ribbon would wear out. So much did I hate changing the ribbon that I would keep using the old one until my typing was barely visible.
Removing the old ribbon was easy and clean – there was no ink left on it. You took out the spools, unclipped the ribbon, and threw it away.
It was putting on the new ribbon that was the pain. As soon as you opened its plastic wrapper, you were covered in ink. But you then had to unwind it, and thread it through the little clamp – a fiddly business during which you became further daubed in ink. Next, you had to clip the free end to the opposite spool and wind it on. By this time you needed a bath and a change of clothes.
I'll draw a veil over the rug-biting rage that ensued when I discovered I'd put the new ribbon in upsidedown, and so everything I typed was in red... But I may return to this subject.
AMSTRAD AND BEYOND....
At nineteen, using some of the vast profits from my second book, 'Twopence A Tub', I replaced my old cast-iron typewriter with a new, small, light, plastic one. It was baby blue, I remember, and I could carry it in one hand. It was a toy actually, meant for children, and I used to be asked how I could work on such a tiny thing, but I never had any difficulty with it (apart from the enraging task of changing ribbons, but that went with the territory in those days). I didn't care if it was a toy – it was such a relief not to have to practice weight-lifting every time I needed to put it away.
I used this baby-blue typewriter for babies for several years, but then decided to splash out on something for grown-ups. I bought a big, electric brute, but we never got on. It was fine while I was actually writing – light to use and fast. But whenever I paused to think, it buzzed at me impatiently. It buzzed all the time, being electric, but I only noticed it when I paused. I resented the buzzing. It distracted me.
It was about this time that a friend said to me, “Come upstairs and see my Amstrad...”
The Amstrad was an unlovely thing, but I was smitten as soon as I saw how fast it printed off a page. At that time I wrote my books by hand, or pounded them out on the typewriter. The result was a heap of loose pages, full of mistakes, crossings out, rewritings. There would be mysterious signs, to remind me to find out the bit , or even two bits – written on other pieces of paper – that I wanted to include at that point. Before I could submit anything, I had to type out a good copy. It used to take me months.
I repeat, months. Every day, the first page produced was so full of mistakes, that it had to be re-done. Or, I'd laboriously type a chapter, and then find that I'd forgotten to include the planned changes that would have improved it. Sometimes it remained unimproved because I couldn't face typing it out again.
I would muddle the sequence of page numbers and have to re-do them; and I hated having to estimate the word-number almost as much as I hated changing ribbons.
When I saw how you could skip about on the Amstrad's screen, changing words, shifting paragraphs, altering names, until you had it all exactly as you wanted it... Well! Find and replace! Spell-check! Word-count! No ribbon to replace! I was ecstatic. And when I saw how it could print out a lengthy typescript in a morning – Well, it was lust, I tell you, lust. I had to have one.
Of course, disillusionment always sets in. The first Amstrads never reminded you to save. Many a time I spent all day working on something, then switched off the machine and lost it all. I soon learned to save compulsively, every few words.
The Amstrad printer could also be a trial. If you forgot to put the bale bar down (the bar that held the paper close to the cylinder), the printer would refuse to work. It was easy to miss this small detail. Unlike modern computers, the Amstrad didn't tell you what was wrong, it didn't make any suggestions, it simply refused to respond to any of my efforts to persuade it to print. This several times induced in me the kind of rage the early Plantagenet kings were famous for, when they rolled on the floor, foaming at the mouth and biting the rushes. If I'd had any rushes, I would have gnashed them.
The whole point of the printer was that you could go away and leave it to print, but in actuality, you dared not leave it for a moment, because it used tractor-feed paper which always, always jammed – unless you were there to prevent it. Even if you were watching it, it frequently got out of sync and printed over the page perforations.,
Despite all that, I never, ever longed to return to typewriter, or pen and ink. In fact, when I read writers raphsodising about how they can't create without the movement of hand and pen over paper, it makes me want to slap them. Nor do I think that computers encourage sloppy writing. I think they encourage revising and improving, because they make it so easy.
The solution to the Amstrad's drawbacks was to get a better computer, which I did, as soon as I could afford it. I'm on my third or fourth computer now (I've lost count), and I'm writing this post on a laptop, much to my cat's indignation. He's sitting by me, glaring at the laptop which is in his place. He considers himself the original and still the best laptop.
This little laptop will count the words in a piece of writing, check spelling, offer me a choice of words from a thesaurus, point out grammatical mistakes (not that I ever take any notice), print in italic, in different fonts, and different point sizes.
It's smaller and lighter than my first typewriter, and connects to the internet, so if I need a Viking name for a character, or to understand the route by which the Vikings marched from Riccal to York, I just jump to the internet and Bing! I have the answer. I can connect to a printer which not only prints faster than ever the Amstrad did, and never jams, but also photocopies, scans and faxes. But I don't need to print off very often, as I can submit my work by e-mail.
I can play music from my computer's memory, and load up my zen-stone for the gym. I can feed in photos from my digital camera, and moments later, edit them on screen. I can update my TomTom, which guides me to school visits and back.
Sometimes I feel like NASA. And I shall never again have to change a typewriter ribbon.
I remember my old cast-iron typewriter with affection, but go back to it? Not a chance .
FEASTING THE WOLF...
I'm away with the Vikings again...
My recent book, FEASTING THE WOLF, was set against the background of the Great Danish Army invading England in the 9th Century. I'd hardly finished it before a publisher who shall be nameless asked if I would write for them 'a book for boys, set in the Dark Ages, with lots of adventure and violence.'
I need the money, so I at once set about constructing a story. Colleagues have been blogging about the joy of beginning a new book. Well, this, by way of contrast, is about the graft of starting a commissioned book...
'The Dark Ages' could mean anything from the 6th Century and King Arthur, to the 8th, and Vikings, but it was always going to be Vikings, because I already know a lot about them and they were certainly real, whereas King Arthur is a bit iffy. 'Adventure' to me suggests more than a nod to history.
I needed an idea, so I dredged up a book I'd written years ago, and which had never been published. And I decided to use my partner as a sounding board, because he once was a boy and so might have a better idea than me about what boys might enjoy. How about, I suggested, a Viking trying to win enough gold to persuade the father of his sweetheart to consider him as a suitor?
Yuck! Anything remotely to do with weddings or kissing or girls was not on.
Well okay, how about, our hero sees a really beautiful sword for sale, but the swordsmith won't sell it, so our hero steals it and -
“That makes him a thief!” said my partner, really shocked.
Yes, and? Vikings were known, occasionally, to take without permission.
But no, no, no, I didn't understand. Heroes of boys' adventures cannot be thieves. They must be honourable and clean-living and right-thinking. This hero sounded less like a Viking every second. I didn't feel I was getting anywhere.
In the end it was my brother (also once a boy) who said, during one of our pub conversations, “Base it around the Battle of Stamford Bridge.”
Well, that Battle was right at the end of the Viking Age – literally, as the Viking Age can be defined as 'from the early eighth century to 1066'. Also, I generally try to avoid pinning any of my stories to a definite historical date since arguing with historians can be so tiresome, I find. And Stamford Bridge, like the Battle of Hastings, has 'the one memorable date in English history'.
Still, I thought it was worth looking into, and started researching the Battle. Before long, I was fascinated, and committed. Stamford Bridge it was going to be.
It was the Battle fought in Yorkshire about twenty days before the Battle of Hastings, and for a story-teller, it has lots to offer. An invading Viking army numbering thousands. Impossible, heroic forced marches. Five thousand Vikings fighting to the death under the hot Yorkshire sun (really) without armour. Hardship, courage, heartbreak. Thank you, bro.
I invented and named my heroes (I searched for names on the Viking Recreation sites on the web). One of the characters, obviously, had to be the giant Norseman who held the bridge against the Saxons. How could he be left out? I sketched out the story and e-mailed it to my agent, to see if she could flog it.
Instead, she flung it back. Too much history, she said, and not enough story. And expunge all mention of the Saxon boy wanting to be a monk! Christianity was the biggest turn-off. And there was I, thinking I was merely reflecting the mood of the time, when Christianity was still fresh and vital, and the young warrior, Christ, ascended the Tree, to do battle with the Devil...
But the main thing, with this book, is to sell it – so back to the laptop. History and Christianity out, story in. And my agent was, as usual, right. The story is coming to life as I get closer to the characters and ruthlessly cut out the history. Can't wait to get to those five thousand hot, sweaty, doomed Vikings...
(FEASTING THE WOLF is published by Usborne). And an extract from it can be read on this website.
REWRITING.
When I was a child, our house was littered with drawings, on used, opened-out envelope, or
old wallpaper, and even drawing-pads. My brother drew dinosaurs or battles, my sister drew swimming seals or people, and my father's drawings were usually of aeroplanes or birds.
They all had one thing in common: there would be repeated attempts at the drawing. My Dad, for instance, would do a sketch of the whole plane, and then, underneath, another drawing of its undercarriage, and another of its wings. He hadn't been happy with the first drawing, so he practiced the bits he felt needed improving. Turn the paper over, and there would be another, larger, better drawing of the whole plane.
These sketches taught me something without my ever realising I'd learned anything at all - You won't get things right the first time, so repeat them until you do.
My own drawings were usually of people. I'd draw someone leaning against a wall, and then do a skeleton sketch to try and perfect their position; followed by a drawing of the head and shoulders, trying to get the slant of the shoulders and tilt of the head right. Then I'd draw the whole figure again, trying to improve on the first version.
As a child, I drew far more than I wrote; in my early teens, I drew and wrote about equally. After my first book was accepted, when I was sixteen, writing took over from drawing (and I haven't seriously drawn anything for about thirty years now). But the lesson that I never knew I'd learned moved with me from drawing to writing. If I wasn't happy with something I'd written, I rewrote it – and if I still wasn't happy, I rewrote it again, and again, if need be, until I thought I couldn't improve it any more.
I didn't think I was doing anything. Rewriting was part and parcel of writing. It was just what you did; as much a part of writing as using a pen.
Years passed, and, in the way of impoverished writers, I started teaching Creative Writing. But between you and me, gentle reader, I was puzzled as to what 'Creative Writing' was exactly. And even more puzzled as to what I could teach my students. If I had ever stopped to think about what I did when I wrote a book, I couldn't remember doing it.
I consulted a few 'How to Write' books, to find out what those authors told their students, and it was enlightening. “Oh, I do that! Who'd have thought it?” I resolved only to steal those 'creative writing' tips that I could honestly say I used myself. (So you'll hear only a perfunctory mention in my classes about keeping notebooks, or meditating, or doing ten minutes of 'automatic writing' every morning. These things are very useful to those who find them useful, but they make me feel like Laurence Olivier confronted with 'The Method'. Why don't you just try writing, dear ones? It's less like hard work.) My classes were about setting scenes, writing dialogue, building plots. It never occurred to me to tell anyone to rewrite, because rewriting to me was writing. I didn't think anyone would need to be told that.
Slowly, slowly, over the weeks, it became apparent to me that the idea of rewriting had never, ever occurred to many – not just a few, but many – of my students. A lot of them seemed to think that it was cheating. A real writer, they seemed to think – Thomas Hardy, let's say – just sat down and wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles straight off, from beginning to end, never blotting a word; and then he packed it off to his publishers who printed it without asking for any changes. That's the kind of genius he was. That's the way a real writer works.
If my students wrote a story, and found themselves dissatisfied with it, they concluded that it was another failure, put it away, and tried to forget about it. The next thing they wrote, that might be perfect.
“Couldn't you,” I suggested nervously, not at all sure I was on firm ground here, “couldn't you rewrite it?”
They were astonished. But they'd finished it! And it wasn't any good. What was the point of wasting more time on it?
“But nothing I've ever written,” I said, “was much good in its first draft. But if I like the idea – if there are bits that are good – I rewrite it, and improve it. I've rewritten some things dozens of times over. I rewrote the whole of GHOST DRUM six or seven times, and I rewrote the ending many more times than that.”
Some of the class were quite excited by this revolutionary idea. Others were as plainly horrified, reminding me of a little girl in Year 4 of a school I once visited. Her story was so good, I told her, that she should rewrite it. The look she gave me would have reduced a lesser writer to a pair of smouldering boots.
But having belatedly realised that rewriting was actually a tool of the writer's trade that I'd never before suspected I was using, I became evangelistic about it. “Rewrite!” I cried to each new intake of students. “You must rewrite!”
And then one of my students stopped me in my tracks by asking, “But how do I know what parts I have to rewrite? How do I know which words I should change?”
Well – er – quite. Obviously, these are the technical complexities Jordan was referring to when she spoke of her ghost writer 'putting it into book words'. When a writer, like wot I am, takes the raw first draft and puts it into book words, what exactly is it I are doing?
I hadn't a clue. Look, I only write the stuff – I don't waste my time thinking about it, any more than a ditch-digger thinks much about ditch-digging. She just heaves another shovel-ful of mud.
But there were my students, waiting for an answer. So I gave thinking about it a try. And boy, did my brain hurt...
REWRITING, PART II
So, as promised, I have cudgelled the brains over my student's question: How do you know what parts to rewrite? How do you know what words to change?
There are, I've concluded, two levels to rewriting: the big and the small.
The big takes in the whole of the book or story – never mind this or that word, does the whole thing work?
The small concentrates on words, sentences, paragraphs at most.
So, to begin small...
One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever came across was: Read your work aloud. It's a good idea to train yourself to hear a voice speaking the words in your head, even if you're reading or writing silently. This helps you to 'hear' the rhythms and stresses even as you invent the words - but it doesn't replace reading aloud.
Feeling your lips, tongue and throat shaping the words you've written, and hearing them, forces you to concentrate on every syllable, on rhythms, and on the sense. Reading by eye alone, you can skim through sentences, and even whole paragraphs if you're a very fluent reader (as writers tend to be). You can miss the small details of sound.
But words are, ultimately, meant to be spoken, not read. Poetry, as a poet once told me, is rhythm, not rhyme – and rhythm is sound.
But am I listening for? How do I know which words to change?
Well, I consider if my words are easy to say, and pleasing to hear. The twelfth Leith policeman dismisseth us. Beware of such jaw-breakers. What the eye reads easily may be a clog to the tongue – and I want that talking-book deal. So if I catch myself writing a tongue-twister, I rewrite it.
I'm on the listen-out for repeated sounds that jar. 'My keel coursed cruel care-halls - ' The Anglo-Saxons were keen on alliteration, and if consciously done for effect, it can be wonderful. But if I've repeated sounds through carelessness, and it's spoiling the rhythmn or sound, I change the wording
Are the words I've chosen the best ones for the job I wanted them to do? English is crammed with words that are close in meaning, but have their own nuances, weights, textures and colours. 'Amble' has a clumsier and more endearing sound than 'stroll'. 'Lope' is quite different from either. 'Smirk' has very different connotations from 'smile' or 'giggle'. Is there another word that's a closer fit for my meaning? That means the same, but has a better sound or stress for that sentence? Or has a sound that better fits the sense?
Do the sentences have a good natural rhythm? Reading them aloud makes this obvious. Am I running out of breath before reaching the end of the sentence, or the next natural pause? Does the sentence have the natural swing of speech's rise and fall? When I read it aloud, does the stress fall on the most important words – the words I really want people to hear? If the answers are 'no', then shorten the sentence, or divide it into two; change the word order, or find other words.
But having said all this about making a sentence easy to read, sometimes I want to make a sentence clumsy or difficult. If I'm describing drudgery, then I want the words I use to be slow, awkward, clumsy, tired. I might want the sound and rhythmn of my words to reflect the sleek quickness, the harshness or the cold of their sense. If what I've written doesn't do that, I try to find words that do.
A frequent consideration is whether the phrase I've used is a cliché – a phrase too over-used and stale to make the reader stop and think about the sense. It isn't easy to avoid cliches, and I am certainly guilty of using them often. For one thing, they're often true – as white as snow, as cold as ice. But I am honour bound to try. So I give the brains another pummel, and see if I can come up with something fresher.
Finally, I check if I mean what I've said. Words can get away from you. A friend of mine, a teacher, once read in a pupil's exercise book: 'I was lying on the settee watching the telly eating peanuts.' She wrote in the margin: 'My telly prefers chocolate.' But it's all too easy, in a moment of carelessness, to mangle your grammar, and say something you never meant to say. So I watch out for this kind of slip and – rewrite it.
Enough for one posting. I don't imagine for a moment that I've said all there is to say on this subject, but something like this goes through my head when I'm rewriting.
But I hope I've gone some way towards answering my student's question: 'When you rewrite, how do you know what words to change?'
THE PLEASURE OF LIBRARY-VISITING...
...Is one pleasure I'd almost forgotten, so I've something to thank the credit crunch for.
I'd grown used to buying books, mostly on-line, but now that I really have to find ways of saving money – apologies to fellow authors, but I really do – I'm back to the library again. At least I'm adding to your PLR (Public Lending Rights).
I first joined the library when I was fourteen. Dudley Library, in the West Midlands. A stately Victorian Goddess sat above the door, reading a book. Come to think of it, she's still there, still reading, and good for Her.
It was a different sort of library then. There was a lot of emphasis on silence. And it was no use looking for anything except books, newspapers, and the occasional magazine. I wasn't complaining. I was a book-lover, and I'd never seen so many books in my life. Adult and children's fiction downstairs – and cooking and gardening. Oh, and biography and history, national, international and local.
Upstairs – well. The heavy stuff. Psychology, criminology, sociology. Literary criticism. The reference library. The archives. Ecology. Mathematics. Science. And I had an adult ticket. I could take any book from any of those shelves. It was dizzying.
But hard to make a choice, when I could only take five books. I spent hours in there. In the first years I would walk through the door and look round for the red and yellow books. Because they were science-fiction, weren't they? And I was into sci-fi at the time. Except they weren't science-fiction. They were Victor Gollancz – a firm that happened to publish a lot of science-fiction. I remember being very puzzled the first time I grabbed a red and yellow book that wasn't sci-fi.
What a forcing house for a writer, though. I read every kind of fiction – crime, romance, thriller, kitchen-sink, historical, humourous, shed-loads of fantasy, ghost and sci-fi. Curiosity led me to read a lot of classics: Jacobean tragedies, most of Shakespeare, and, in translation, Classical Greek plays, Tolstoy, Balzac, Sagas, Moliere, Medieval Romances, Beowulf... All for the price of a bus-ride. If I'd had to buy the books, I could never have afforded it.
I read widely in psychology, because I wanted to know how – or why – people tick. Forty-odd years later, I'm none the wiser, but, with the help of these books, I have given it a lot of thought. For the same reason, I read criminology and sociology – with much the same result.
I read books on popular science, and there's nothing like astronomy and quantum physics for making you feel that you must urgently hold your skull together with both hands. You want poetry? A kind of fierce poetry? Read books on Quantum Physics.
And if any mention of anything caught my interest – well, the library was sure to have books on it.
It was in Dudley library, I well remember, where the man Pratchett first came into my life. I was looking at the shelf of 'recently returned books', as I always did, and there was this book called MORT by someone I'd never heard of. I didn't like the picture on the cover, but read the blurb, then almost put it back because I am naturally suspicious of 'humorous fantasy'. Then I leaned on the shelf and read a few pages – hardly got as far as page 96 – and decided to borrow it.
Well, since then I think I've read everything the man's written, including such titles as STRATA and DARK SIDE OF THE SUN. Something else to thank both Dudley Library and Pratchett for, is that I passed MORT on to my Dad, and he loved it too. For years I bought him the latest Pratchett for Christmas, reading it myself before wrapping it (buying books as presents and then reading them yourself before wrapping them is a strong Christmas tradition in my family). For years me and my Dad discussed the Disk-world, made jokes about it, reminded each other of 'best bits', tried to pinpoint our favourite characters. (Death was always a strong contender, and I hope He came to collect my Dad. They would have got on: they both loved cats).
The library I go to now is very different. It's a small branch library, but it still has ranks of computers; and it loans dvds and computer games as well as books – and sells greetings cards. But there are still, thank whatever gods there be, shelves and shelves and shelves of books, which is really all I'm interested in. (I can get all the internet's sex and violence at home).
I'd forgotten the thrill of scuttling back into my house with a stack of thick, heavy library books, but I'm realising anew how much I love the feeling. It's a bit like having a big box of chocolates to open – all those wonderful flavours and textures, and which one to go for first? The fluffy, light-hearted confection of romance or fantasy? The hard-centred, gritty realism of Rankin's wonderful Rebus, or something by Minette Walters? That rather cloying self-help book with its interesting 'case histories'? The serious book on Iron Age brochs, which fascinate me strangely? Or the one on bog-bodies, some of which are real nightmares. (I don't recommend anyone to look at photos of Grauballe man). I can spend a day or more dipping into the different books, and looking at their illustrations (if any), before deciding which one to start reading.
And when I finish them, there's still a library-full waiting for me!
In fact, I feel a bit of a fool for ever giving up the library. What a truly wonderful, altruistic institution. And what a lot I owe it.
SHORT STORIES
I was on the cross-trainer at the gym, listening to music on my little zen-stone, when a song prompted a short story to drop into my head.
I find it's like that with short stories. Putting a novel together takes an age. You have to research the background, come up with characters, name them (always difficult), invent histories for them, thrash out a plot, change the plot, change the characters, start again... A novel, for me anyway, is constructed over months, even years – bashed together from odd bits and pieces. I always think of a full length book as being 'under construction' or 'up on the stocks'.
A short story tends to arrive almost complete. I suppose that's because it's short. Often there's no need even to name the characters. I may not know the exact words I'm going to frame it in, but I have the whole span of the story, its mood, its imagery, sometimes even the way it's going to be told – in the first person, say, or in a series of short, disconnected scenes.
I'm usually aware of a novel putting itself together. I remember the initial idea, I know when I decided to include this character, and that incident. I remember deciding to drop that whole section, and the reasons why. But a short story often seems to have come from nowhere. One moment I'm sweating on the cross-trainer, thinking of nothing in particular – the next second, there's a story. And it does seem as if some inner light-bulb has illuminated the inside of my head.
When I sit down to write the story, there's a lot of hard concentration and revision – this isn't automatic writing I'm talking about – but the work focusses on the arrangement of words in a sentence, or to what degree I can pare the narrative down before it becomes incomprehensible. With a novel the work covers a far wider range – research, say, or the sheer logistics of getting character B to a particular place, at a particular time, so s/he can encounter character D.
I suppose I'm saying that, for me, a novel is about plotting and a short story is about language. (I keep saying 'for me' because I'm very aware that it might be different for another writer).
I can clearly remember the arrival of some stories. I was watching the film 'Silent Tongue', in which a simpleton boy, played by River Phoenix, is mourning his dead wife, an Indian squaw. Her body, wrapped in a blanket, has been lodged in a tree, for the birds to pick clean. The boy, unable to understand that she is dead, sits under the tree, on guard, driving the birds away with shots from his rifle. The woman's ghost appears to him, haranguing him for keeping her tied to her body – she can't travel on to the other world until her body has disappeared.
My head is so stuffed with old stories and songs that they leak out of my ears. As I watched this part of the film, the words of the old ballad leaped into my head: 'Who lies weeping on my grave and will not let me sleep?' I was seized with the idea of writing my own version of this old song. I pared it down to almost nothing but dialogue, and then realised that I could make the title work as well. I called it 'Overheard In A Graveyard', and so was able to cut all description or even mention of the setting. The finished story is told entirely in dialogue. The two voices aren't even given genders – they could be male and female, or both male, or both female. You decide.
OVERHEARD IN A GRAVEYARD
'What is Longing made of, that it never wears out?
Bone breaks. Rock wears away to sand. In this dark rain, hard iron falls to rust.
Razors blunt. But Longing's edge still cuts deep... '
Published by Hodder in my book, 'NightComers'
The whole story can be read here, on my website.
I used a similar title for 'Overheard In A Museum', (unpublished as yet) which came when I fulfilled a childhood ambition to visit the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, and stood beside the Gokstad ship. The museum is within sight and sound of the Oslo Fjord, where the ship must once have sailed:
'When the doors of the hall open, I smell the sea. I hear it. The pulse of the long-felled oak runs through me, and I feel the sea rush past and under me, and I surge forward to climb the wave. But I never move. I shall never more move...
The most surprising arrival of a story was during the Scattered Authors' Society (SAS) conference last year. My colleague Katherine Roberts (author of I AM THE GREAT HORSE), headed a collage workshop. Under Katherine's instruction, we first had to fix in our minds the kind of story we wanted to write, or the writing problem we wanted to solve. Then we whiffled quickly, at random, through a pile of magazines and, without thinking, ripped out any image or words that caught our attention. After a few minutes of this, we had to look through our bits of paper, and arrange them on a larger sheet to form a collage.
There were about ten professional writers in that room, with glue and paper, and tongues sticking out between teeth. It was, for an SAS conference, a rare few minutes of intense, absorbed silence.
Collages finished, we each had to speak about our own for a few minutes. I had known from the outset that I wanted to write a ghost story. I had chosen a large photograph of a wild moorland area. Over it I had glued a headline that had grabbed my eye: 'Buried in an Unmarked Grave'. There was a photo of a street of old terraced houses, and a dark, dirty flight of steps. But when I had to talk about the collage, I couldn't say much. I said I felt that the flight of steps led down into the underworld, and that someone was buried 'in an unmarked grave' on the moorland, and 'nane shall ken whaur they have gane'. Another colleague, Celia Rees (author of SOVAY), said that it reminded her of the Moors murders.
And then we went for lunch. My room was near where we'd been working, and I tossed the collage on my bed, and sped off to the refectory, for an hour or so of the usual lively SAS chat. I forgot all about the collage, but when I came back to my room at the end of the afternoon, there it was on the bed. The instant I looked at it, Celia's comment and my own thoughts came together and the story 'Carla' was in my head – the characters, the incidents, the mood, the way I would tell it.
I wrote the story about four months ago, and am still tinkering with it, but on the whole, it pleases me well enough. It's unpublished, but I've added it to a collection of new stories that I'm slowly building up, and which may be published one day.
I'll add this latest story to it, when I've written it, if it's any good at all. The song I was listening to on the cross-trainer? 'Cruel Mother' by June Tabor -
She leaned her back against a thorn
All alone and so lonely
And there she has her babies borne
All in the green woods of ivy
She took a knife both long and sharp
All alone and so lonely
And pierced it through each tender heart...
All in the green woods of ivy...
WRITING WITH A CAT
My cat does an excellent impression of a car alarm, usually when I have to remove him from his favourite sleeping place, my computer chair. He then strides up and down the landing outside my work-room, going, 'Waaaa! Waaaa! Waaaa!' in a shrill, rasping, repeated wail which bores through my concentration in seconds. Throwing things at him distracts him only for a moment. Closing the room's door means louder wails and a scratched door. Shutting him in the yard means that he batters the patio doors with both paws, rattling it in its frame, and still wailing, until you'd swear looters were breaking in. He's a large and determined cat.
The only thing that shuts him up is allowing him to jump onto my lap. (Sometimes he's too idle to jump, and waves his front paws at me, demanding to be picked up). Once on my lap, he settles comfortably, front paws folded under, assumes a smug expression and vibrates gently with contentment. He watches the screen as I work, his ears pricking with interest as it shifts and flickers. Happily, he's never shown any interest in getting closer to it, though once, when I printed off a book proposal, which showered from the printer onto the floor, he sprang from my lap and killed all the pages. (Critics! They're everywhere).
Working with a cat on my lap means having to type around a pair of hot, silky little ears, and occasionally having a thick, furry tail wafted across my face – or coiled round my neck like a boa. It means having to pause when the cat stands up and turns himself round two or three times, before draping himself across my legs like a heavy, furry scarf. But he's quiet – apart from an occasional snore – for hours, so it's worth it.
The next time I'm asked one of those questions - 'Do you find it best to write by hand, or by word-processor?' - 'Do you use blue or black ink? Pen or pencil?' - I'm going to say, 'I always write with a cat.'
COMICS...
“Well done! You've saved the day! Let me reward you with these tickets to the circus and a slap-up feed at the Hotel De Posh!”
The Hotel De Posh's signature dish: a mountain of mashed potato with sausages sticking out horizontally all round it, and a bottle of fizzy lemonade (or, more likely, Irn Brue). Desperate Dan's favourite, his Aunt Aggie's speciality, is far too famous for it to be worth my mentioning it here.
Lord Snooty and his pals. Roger the Dodger, Minnie The Minx, Dennis the Menace. Little Plum and the Three Bears. And Pansy Potter, who let slip her Dundee origins because her title didn't rhyme unless pronounced with a Scots accent. She was the Strong Man's Dotter.
A subtle Scottish cadence ran through all the speech bubbles. People were asked to fetch messages, for instance, while we ran errands in the Black Country. And all those Dads in the last frame, with their slippers! They're all tall, lanky, square-headed Scots.
When I was a child, our house had lots of books – shelved floor to ceiling in most rooms, piled on the stairs and window-sills – but we were never bought comics. (In theory, we had weekly pocket money to buy our own, but in fact this pocket money arrived in our pockets only once or twice a year). My parents had nothing against comics, they just didn't think them worth spending their scarce income on, when they could buy us a second-hand book from Dudley market for very little more.
Next door lived a brother and sister who were obviously filthy rich, because they had several comics each week. On Friday evenings it was my regular chore to carry next door a bloody joint of meat wrapped in newspapers (the Sunday joint, delivered by a mobile butcher, and taken in by my mother for her neighbour). Every month or so my reward was to have my arms piled with a great stack of comics and magazines, and I'd hardly be able to say, 'thank you,' for grinning. Home I'd scuttle, clutching the pile, bursting in through the back door with a cry of, “Comics!”
“Bags me the Beano,” my Dad would say.
The Bunty, The Judy, June, Jackie and, later, The Romeo and The Valentine. Even, occasionally, The Red Letter, which my mother remembered from her own young days. Looking at the cover she said, with satisfaction, “They've still got the nasty neighbour peering round the curtains – she was always there, every week.”
But the girls' comics were quickly skimmed through and thrown aside, with their tales of butch (female) car mechanics made-over to win beauty contests, and champion hockey teams kidnapped and forced to play for aliens. They were appetisers, something to read while other people had the comics you really wanted.
Those were the boy's comics: The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper. The Valiant, the Buster, The Hotspur, The Victor. After we'd finished with them, my Dad took them to work, and his workmates read them during their tea break, their feet up on the stove, laughing at The Bash Street Kids. It takes a real man, I think, to admit that he finds the Beano a good read.
My Dad (born in 1928) often told us that he'd bought the very first copy of The Beano, complete with its give-away 'flash-bang'. He wished he'd had the sense to put it away carefully and keep it mint. Instead, it was probably used to light a fire. (And research suggests it was actually The Dandy he bought. Wishful thinking: The Beano was always our favourite, The Dandy a poor second).
My Dad, my brothers, my sister and I, all drew. The house was littered with opened out envelopes and other scrap paper covered with drawings, and we pored over the comics' illustrations as well as the stories. (We could never understand why friends never seemed to notice, or care, when a favourite strip was drawn by a different artist). The comic art was often of a high order. The drawings of 'The Steel Claw' (in The Valiant) were favourites: a sort of comic-strip 'film-noir'. But the Bash Street Kids, careering along in a massed group, all feet off the ground at once, were a joy, full of liveliness and movement.
The artist who drew the thick, woodcut-like drawings for 'Faceache' and 'Jonah' was a master. His strips were not only grotesquely beautiful, but laugh-out-loud funny. I remember one in particular, where Faceache had resolved 'to be good'. This turning over of a new leaf was often how a story of Minnie the Minx, or Dennis the Menace, or Roger the Dodger began.
Anyway, Faceache swore, that for that day at least, he wouldn't twist his face into terrifying gurns, causing unrest and panic among the populace. Instead, he was going to help the baker. Queue a series of wonderfully managed panels where Faceache burning his hand coincides with an innocent delivery man looking through the window just as pain convulses Faceache's already unlovely features into a particuarly inventive and novel shape. Panic and unrest ensues. It was almost filmic. I remember my Dad took that particular strip to read in the bathroom. He said it nearly gave him a rupture.
My brother, sister and I used to discuss the comics like a sort of junior book-club. We laughed at Captain Hurricane, his 'raging furies' and exclamations of 'Suffering Sausage Munchers' and 'Cowardly Cabbage Crunchers!' My mother told us that, as a child during the Second World War, she'd seriously believed that Germans only ever said, 'Achtung, Pig-Dog!' Well, apart from 'Heil Hitler!' obviously.
We discussed whether it was sensible of Fish Boy (who had been abandoned in the wild and raised by fishes), to take an injured fish from the water and lay it on a rock to 'bathe its wounds'. And which was better – Galaxo, the giant robot ape, or the boy who controlled an army of little robot men by means of an armband (the name of this strip escapes me). We were cutting our critical teeth.
At the same time I was reading the Norse Myths, Hans Anderson, Kipling – but that was 'literature'. I could enjoy it, but hands off.
Comics were on our level. Often well-drawn, often funny, often inventive, but emphatically not literature. We could kick them around, say and think what we liked about them, have our own opinion. We learned discernment, by and for ourselves. Once learned – and not least of the lessons was that it was enjoyable – we could carry it with us into other fields.
I once read an article in which a critic declared that it was impossible to appreciate Tolstoy and Mickey Mouse equally. In order to be refined enough to appreciate Tolstoy, I gather, you had to leave Mickey far behind.
Rubbish. You can enjoy and appreciate Mickey – and Dennis, and The Bash Street Kids – and Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck - for what they are, and for the skill, verve and wit that they have. And then you can shift gears and appreciate Tolstoy, on his level, as someone who had entirely different aims. The ability to move from one to the other demonstrates a flexible mind – which is probably necessary for creativity.
George Orwell got a lot out of smutty postcards.
It takes a real critic to appreciate both Mickey and Natasha.
BOOKS TO KEEP
I took a load of books to a charity shop recently, and that started me thinking about the books I'd never, ever part with.
Rudyard Kipling's First and Second Jungle Books, and The Just-So Stories. My father read these when he was a boy, and loved them, so he bought them for my seventh Christmas. I loved them too; and came to know them almost by heart. Kipling taught me such new words as 'insatiable' and 'replied' – and his love of chanting, rhythmic language appeared later in my own books, such as The Ghost Drum.
Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. 'Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest of cornflowers, and as clear as the clearest glass; but it is very deep, deeper than any anchor chain can reach...' (M. R James' translation). I was about nine when I found this on our bookshelves, and was hooked straight away. The Dauntless Tin Soldier, The Tinder Box, The Nightingale – I loved them all. Later, as a teenager, I realised that many of Anderson's tales were his re-tellings of traditional tales – The Seven Swans, for instance. The book took on a new interest for me.
Scandinavian Mythology, by H. R. Ellis- Davidson. My mother promised to buy me, for my fifteenth birthday, whatever I chose, and I chose this – though I didn't realise at the time that Davidson was an acknowledged expert in her subject. Mum had the vapours when she saw the price: one pound, fifteen shillings (£1-75p). And this for a large-format, hard-backed book with many colour-photographs.
But she kept her word, as she always did, and I still use this book for reference. It outraged my aunt with its photo of 'Windeby Girl' – a naked, partially preserved bog-body. How could my parents allow me to look at such things? The Windeby 'Girl' has since been discovered to be a boy. Had she known, my aunt would have had conniptions.
It was a story in this book, 'King Olaf's Warning', which became the germ of my first collection of re-tellings, The Carpenter and Other Stories.
K. M. Briggs' Dictionary of British Folk-Tales. I found these in a Birmingham bookshop, priced at £30 each. I couldn't really afford them, but asked myself, Was I ever likely to come across them again? I rushed to the payment desk, where the assistant exclaimed, “Oh, thank goodness – we ordered those by mistake and thought we'd never get rid of them!”
Those books have more than paid me back, not only in material, but in entertainment. I've lost track of the number of stories I've found in them to retell, and the number of ideas they've given me. They were worth every penny – as books generally are!
FROM TYPEWRITER TO LAPTOP...
I started my writing career on an old, second-hand typewriter, bought for me as a Christmas present by my parents, when I was twelve. A good present – I was still using it seven years later.
It was big, made of cast-iron, and I could hardly lift it. Just bashing the keys down took effort.
Bashing a key levered up a long metal stem, on the end of which was a metal stamp forged with the image of a letter. This letter slammed an inked ribbon against the sheet of paper you'd rolled into the machine, stamping an image of the letter to the paper. There was a whole nest of these metal stems and when you typed fast they frequently got wedged together, and you had to stop and dislodge them.
If you wanted a copy of your work, you had to put a sheet of carbon paper behind your first page, and then a sheet of 'copy-paper'. If you wanted two copies, then another sheet of carbon paper behind that, and another sheet of copy-paper. You then had to align these sheets of flimsy, floppy paper, and somehow persuade them to be rolled into the typewriter without becoming creased or misaligned. This seldom happened.
But what I really dreaded about the typewriter was changing the ribbon. The inky ribbon wound backwards and forwards between two reels on top of the machine. At the middle, it passed through a clip, which held it in place for the keys to strike. It was a simple, relatively uncomplicated system, and worked very well, but eventually the ink on the ribbon would wear out. So much did I hate changing the ribbon that I would keep using the old one until my typing was barely visible.
Removing the old ribbon was easy and clean – there was no ink left on it. You took out the spools, unclipped the ribbon, and threw it away.
It was putting on the new ribbon that was the pain. As soon as you opened its plastic wrapper, you were covered in ink. But you then had to unwind it, and thread it through the little clamp – a fiddly business during which you became further daubed in ink. Next, you had to clip the free end to the opposite spool and wind it on. By this time you needed a bath and a change of clothes.
I'll draw a veil over the rug-biting rage that ensued when I discovered I'd put the new ribbon in upsidedown, and so everything I typed was in red... But I may return to this subject.
AMSTRAD AND BEYOND....
At nineteen, using some of the vast profits from my second book, 'Twopence A Tub', I replaced my old cast-iron typewriter with a new, small, light, plastic one. It was baby blue, I remember, and I could carry it in one hand. It was a toy actually, meant for children, and I used to be asked how I could work on such a tiny thing, but I never had any difficulty with it (apart from the enraging task of changing ribbons, but that went with the territory in those days). I didn't care if it was a toy – it was such a relief not to have to practice weight-lifting every time I needed to put it away.
I used this baby-blue typewriter for babies for several years, but then decided to splash out on something for grown-ups. I bought a big, electric brute, but we never got on. It was fine while I was actually writing – light to use and fast. But whenever I paused to think, it buzzed at me impatiently. It buzzed all the time, being electric, but I only noticed it when I paused. I resented the buzzing. It distracted me.
It was about this time that a friend said to me, “Come upstairs and see my Amstrad...”
The Amstrad was an unlovely thing, but I was smitten as soon as I saw how fast it printed off a page. At that time I wrote my books by hand, or pounded them out on the typewriter. The result was a heap of loose pages, full of mistakes, crossings out, rewritings. There would be mysterious signs, to remind me to find out the bit , or even two bits – written on other pieces of paper – that I wanted to include at that point. Before I could submit anything, I had to type out a good copy. It used to take me months.
I repeat, months. Every day, the first page produced was so full of mistakes, that it had to be re-done. Or, I'd laboriously type a chapter, and then find that I'd forgotten to include the planned changes that would have improved it. Sometimes it remained unimproved because I couldn't face typing it out again.
I would muddle the sequence of page numbers and have to re-do them; and I hated having to estimate the word-number almost as much as I hated changing ribbons.
When I saw how you could skip about on the Amstrad's screen, changing words, shifting paragraphs, altering names, until you had it all exactly as you wanted it... Well! Find and replace! Spell-check! Word-count! No ribbon to replace! I was ecstatic. And when I saw how it could print out a lengthy typescript in a morning – Well, it was lust, I tell you, lust. I had to have one.
Of course, disillusionment always sets in. The first Amstrads never reminded you to save. Many a time I spent all day working on something, then switched off the machine and lost it all. I soon learned to save compulsively, every few words.
The Amstrad printer could also be a trial. If you forgot to put the bale bar down (the bar that held the paper close to the cylinder), the printer would refuse to work. It was easy to miss this small detail. Unlike modern computers, the Amstrad didn't tell you what was wrong, it didn't make any suggestions, it simply refused to respond to any of my efforts to persuade it to print. This several times induced in me the kind of rage the early Plantagenet kings were famous for, when they rolled on the floor, foaming at the mouth and biting the rushes. If I'd had any rushes, I would have gnashed them.
The whole point of the printer was that you could go away and leave it to print, but in actuality, you dared not leave it for a moment, because it used tractor-feed paper which always, always jammed – unless you were there to prevent it. Even if you were watching it, it frequently got out of sync and printed over the page perforations.,
Despite all that, I never, ever longed to return to typewriter, or pen and ink. In fact, when I read writers raphsodising about how they can't create without the movement of hand and pen over paper, it makes me want to slap them. Nor do I think that computers encourage sloppy writing. I think they encourage revising and improving, because they make it so easy.
The solution to the Amstrad's drawbacks was to get a better computer, which I did, as soon as I could afford it. I'm on my third or fourth computer now (I've lost count), and I'm writing this post on a laptop, much to my cat's indignation. He's sitting by me, glaring at the laptop which is in his place. He considers himself the original and still the best laptop.
This little laptop will count the words in a piece of writing, check spelling, offer me a choice of words from a thesaurus, point out grammatical mistakes (not that I ever take any notice), print in italic, in different fonts, and different point sizes.
It's smaller and lighter than my first typewriter, and connects to the internet, so if I need a Viking name for a character, or to understand the route by which the Vikings marched from Riccal to York, I just jump to the internet and Bing! I have the answer. I can connect to a printer which not only prints faster than ever the Amstrad did, and never jams, but also photocopies, scans and faxes. But I don't need to print off very often, as I can submit my work by e-mail.
I can play music from my computer's memory, and load up my zen-stone for the gym. I can feed in photos from my digital camera, and moments later, edit them on screen. I can update my TomTom, which guides me to school visits and back.
Sometimes I feel like NASA. And I shall never again have to change a typewriter ribbon.
I remember my old cast-iron typewriter with affection, but go back to it? Not a chance .
Last modified: Wednesday, 14 April 2010, 03:36 PM