PART ONE:

THE COMFORT ZONE

(and how to leave it)

When Stars Collide…

I am not fatalistic. I’m quite laissez-faire, lazy even. I have no sense of preordainment or destiny.

I am however unsure about serendipity, the idea that events come together and cause a greater event which, without the existence of one of the other factors, would not have happened. Serendipity is also a good thing, unlike coincidence, which can fall into either camp. You will never hear anyone say, ‘that was an unlucky bit of serendipity’, but the term ‘unfortunate coincidence’ runs rampant across the airwaves.

Incidentally, the word ‘serendipity’ didn’t exist before 1754, when Horace Walpole released it into the wild, where it bred successfully and became a part of our colourful verbal countryside.

I always find it odd that words and phrases once never existed – all those things that we say now without even thinking about it, that have become as much a part of us as our ears or our fingers. What did we say before we said ‘Brave New World’, as Shakespeare did in The Tempest? Where would Aldous Huxley have been without it? What would he have called his book? A quick look in the thesaurus suggests, ‘Courageous Updated Society’. I’m not sure that works, although I am willing to bet that, given half a chance, the phrase would trend on Twitter like billy-o (or billio), as these things seem to nowadays.

I digress. This is a bad habit in a writer. Don’t do it.

In 1988, I was beginning my training to be a nurse at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. I was living in a small room in the nurses’ quarters at King Edward VII Hospital in Windsor. It was basic – it had a sink, a bed, a chest of drawers and a window. I would still be there now if

a) they hadn’t pulled the place down a few years ago and

b) serendipity hadn’t walked in.

Prior to that, I had been a porter at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot. My mother had thrown me out in a fit of pique one day and that was how I ended up living in the nurses’ home in Windsor.

I stayed there for the first year of my training. It was convenient. The two hospitals were conjoined, along with Wexham Park in Slough, to create a sort of NHS Cerberus, the growling bouncer that guarded a special kind of hell. In those days it wasn’t like these hideous trusts that we have today, it was just about which health authority you came under and they were all run like potty farms, with the loons in charge.

I had been given a typewriter that the hospital (in Ascot - keep up!) was going to throw away. A friend of mine called Steve, also a porter, had found it on a pile of scrap, stuffed it under his ample jacket and smuggled it to me at the nurses’ home.

It was built like the scaffolding that you see on the sides of ancient monuments. To depress a single key required the same pounds per square inch that it takes to jackhammer concrete. It weighed about the same as a very fat three year old and the noise it made actually registered on a sound level meter. We were directly on the flight path to Heathrow; the planes came over so low that you could hear the passengers buckling up. That was nothing in comparison to my Olympia. It was the equivalent of an ungainly tap dancer on a tin tray. It must have annoyed the entire home.

This, however, was where it all began.

I started with poetry, a few songs, lyrics for a concept album and all the time I had this nugget of an idea sitting in my brain just waiting to be mined, but I couldn’t quite dig my way down to it.

Then I met a girl.

For someone who wants to write, this can be good or bad. In my case, it was quite…serendipitous. You see where I’m going with this?

This girl, Sally, who later became my wife, was my drinking companion (along with a chap called Robert) for the next couple of years. Like most students, we drank a lot. I can’t remember much of that time. I drank because I was depressed. They drank because they were good at it. My wife is from Barnsley, so it was second nature to her. Being a soft southerner, tea was enough to get me giddy, so when alcohol appeared I was lurching towards and befriending almost all the porcelain I could find.

That is a touch hyperbolic. I just wanted to emphasise how I had been misled by a woman. Writing is like the blues; if you can find a howling dog, a woman and the bottom of a bottle, you’re there.

One night, we were drinking again and making generally good banter when my wife laughed. Only, she didn’t, she snorted. Like a pig. She was mortified but, never being ones to let the opportunity slip, between us we came up with the name of the main character for my first book - Snort Laughter. Upon this precarious rock, Earthbound was born.

I haven’t stopped writing since.

Serendipity.

So what are the aims of this book?

To make you aware of the different types of writing – you are not confined.
To reinforce those skills you already have. Yes, you do already have some skills.
To build upon the skills you gain. It’s all about practice. There is a thing called muscle memory. If you repeat a movement often enough, your body will remember the action. The brain is the same. It’s like weight lifting for those little grey cells. You can become very good at something through repetition. Practice makes perfect.
To be confident to carry on writing once you put this book down.
To help others to create. This might seem a bit namby pamby, but it isn’t. I work with students (although summer’s here and I don’t know if the budget will stretch to next year). I am constantly rewarded by helping them, especially in English, because I am trying to get them to see the relevance and the beauty of language and trying to show them that, through words, they have a voice. That applies to every one of us.

At times, you might think this a little basic. I shall look at some rudimentary writing techniques that I have used with students. It’s a starting point. You have to finish it.

I’m not an English teacher; there are far better people out there to do that. Neither is this book about English. This is about writing and whatever happens to be relevant to it.

In the words of Dirty Harry: ‘A man’s gotta know his limitations.’

Something Worth Writing

‘Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.’

Benjamin Franklin

Mr Franklin was a clever guy. He was a great scientist. He invented terms such as battery, positive, negative and condenser, all in an electrical sense, and wrote essays about flatulence (avoidance rather than instigation). He was a masterful politician who, in one of his quieter moments, came up with the idea of the flexible urinary catheter and the Franklin Stove. He was relentless in his pursuit of discovery and self-improvement. He also had an enormous sexual appetite. I mention him because, whatever his motives for such endeavours, he had a need, a drive, to make his mark in the world, to find his place. I don’t think he did too badly.[1]

It is the same for artists of all types, whether it be painting, writing, dance or any other art. There is in the artist an innate need to express and when for some reason they are unable to do this, they turn inwardly and start to decompose.

So the first thing I say is: Just Write. Anything. Anywhere.

À la Pink Floyd, I have a little black book in which I make my scribblings. It cost £1.40 from The Range. Bargain. It has such ramblings in there that I don’t even know what most of it means, but there are also substantial amounts of ‘book’ in there, pages that have been drafted and redrafted until I feel able to put them down in a more formal fashion. I also, I might add, use a pencil. One of those mechanical ones. For some reason I cannot scribble in pen. Maybe it’s because I have the freedom to erase with a pencil. The notebook also contains the foetal wrigglings of poems and concepts and alternative ways to express the same idea. It has been invaluable. I have also used scrap paper, tissue, the back of my hand, the backs of other books. I even once burst into my daughter’s bedroom in just a towel, dripping head to toe in bathwater, to demand a pen and a piece of scrap paper. The only good thing in that story is that she didn’t have a friend round at the time.

Needs must as the devil drives.

By the way, there is no obligation to use one of those mechanical pencils. I just happen to like them.

Once this is done though, where do you go? I would not recommend a sixty-year-old Olympia typewriter. My index fingers are bent. I’m sure that it was the Olympia that did that to them.

I wouldn’t recommend longhand either, but that is a personal preference. In this era of word processors, I’m not sure that longhand is necessarily a viable option any more. For someone as lazy as me, it’s too much like bloody hard work.

If you have invested in a laptop or a PC, I would thoroughly recommend a word processor. They are convenient, flexible, user friendly, save the trouble of transferring from longhand to type and can be linked into so many other programs that it’s a wonder our brains work at all.

Here are some suggestions for word processor programs:

OpenOffice Writer
LibreOffice Writer
Wordpad
Microsoft Word
AbiWord
Google Docs

They are all fabulous. I have a friend with whom I wrote the Praxis series of books who used Wordpad and it presented no problems. The only discrepancy I came across were certain layout issues, which conflicted with Word, but which were easily resolved.

Let’s look at a couple of them.

LibreOffice is a free office suite in the vein of Microsoft Office. This is a review of the software from PC Magazine in August 2015:

Pros

Open source. Available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Fast. Powerful. Opens virtually all legacy documents. Improved import and export features.

Cons

Clunky interface. Confusing menu options. No cloud-based or tablet-based versions.

Bottom Line

LibreOffice 5.0 provides much of the power of Microsoft Office, but in an outdated and inconsistent interface. Still, it's free and open source, and those who can't or won't use proprietary software won't find anything better.

If you look at the control panel at the top, the toolbar and menu bar, you will see that it has so much in common with Microsoft Word, the standard setter in this field, as to make it difficult to tell them apart.

If you compare this to Microsoft Word,

you’ll see how much they have in common.

You can also see, from the varying layouts, bullet points, different indents to paragraphs, fonts, images, that you have an almost inexhaustible number of ways to express yourself.

Both MS Word and LibreOffice come as part of an office suite that offers a degree of compatibility with all the other programs in the suite and therefore ease of access and use. What it really boils down to is whether you want to pay for MS Office (although there are some great student deals out there and Office 365, which even comes with certain brands of mobile phone) or whether you want to go with the open source equivalent.

The thing about Microsoft, whether you like it or not, is that the world deals in everything MS. Not using MS can give some compatibility issues when dealing with others, such as publishers and agents, who often require submissions to be offered up for slaughter in MS Word. Don’t blame me; it’s the way the world turns.

However, to have such great alternatives as all the others listed here really means that there’s no excuse not to have the software, so long as you have the hardware.

If you don’t have the hardware, there are pens and paper at The Range[2].

I do have a caveat about word processors though.

They lie. Frequently. They are borderline sociopathic in the tales they tell. They will flip from language to language for no apparent reason. I have written a book in Australian. Really. No matter how often I changed it, it slipped back into the antipodean tongue. I have written other pieces in American.

Now you might think, quite reasonably, that this doesn’t matter, English is English. There are eighteen choices of English on my version of Word. Each of them in their own way will throw up variables in the same way that a cat throws up hairballs. It is so annoying.

As well as being just annoying though, it matters, because you should be able to trust the software that you are using. Don’t. The other more serious problem is that, if you intend to submit your work, there must be a consistency and a correctness to the grammar and spelling. A publisher will reject your work within thirty seconds if you present what is, to them, badly spelled or grammatically poor work. You are responsible for your word processor’s action.

Another problem I have noticed frequently is that Word is wrong. It’s that simple. It misinterprets sentence structures, it changes spelling when you want the original spelling that you used and it will put in its own grammar or tell you insistently that you are wrong.

But, it is not a human being. It will not be offended if you correct it and it cannot interpret things that you write – it tries to, bless it – but it can only do what it’s programmed to do. So when it throws red across your page in a murderous correctional rampage, don’t take its word for it. Double-check it and double-check yourself.

You can add words to its dictionary and you can make it more aware of your foibles, but it is not able to read your mind. Don’t be bullied by it. It does not know more than you, it is simply a tool designed to help you achieve.

You have to treat a word processor in much the same way as you do a Tom-Tom[3]. Always read the road signs.

Another very important thing to consider is the environment in which you work.

JK Rowling, a woman whom I greatly admire, is famously known for writing the first Harry Potter book in the Elephant House coffee shop in Edinburgh.

That would drive me absolutely round the bend. I have all the concentration of a kitten. If I went into a coffee shop to write, the only thing I would leave with is a large bill. The traffic outside would distract me, the people inside would distract me, the scraping of chairs and the constant chest clearing of the espresso machines, the jolly chatter of the baristas, that underlying mumble of muttering from the customers who constantly come and go and the smells would all conspire to steal my thoughts.

My ideal environment is silence, a comfortable chair and my computer with all those little accoutrements such as a thesaurus to hand. I cannot work with people around and that includes family.

I have learned my limits. I can concentrate for perhaps an hour and a half at a time and then I need to stop for a while and clear my mind. My back can stand only a certain amount of time in the same position before I end up like Quasimodo. My eyes can only put up with a certain amount of computer screen before they begin to feel tired, which in turn affects my concentration.

You will learn these with time and practice, but they are all important factors to take into account if you wish to put your best into your work.

As a bit of an NB here: let’s not forget paper. I have a thesaurus, a dictionary, medical reference books and a wonderful book by Benjamin Zephaniah that contains every rhyming word in the entire universe. Lifesavers, the lot of them.

[1] Thanks to Bill Bryson and Made in America for this info. Great book. Great writer.

[2] And other good stationery stores. NB the future is here. Buy a bloody laptop.

[3] Yes, I know. There are other machines available to help you become stuck under a low bridge or guide you into a river.

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