Tag Archives: writing

Candlemaker Row by cyocum, under Creative Commons license

Umbrellas of Edinburgh

Edinburgh, Reading, Writing, , ,

Umbrellas of Edinburgh (Freight Books) is a new anthology of poems and stories about Edinburgh, including my short fiction ‘Candlemaker Row’. Here’s the story behind the story…

The city of Edinburgh has been thoroughly explored in literature, and to write about it is to enter unavoidably into a dialogue with a lineage of authors from James Hogg, Robert Fergusson, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, through Muriel Spark and Norman McCaig, all the way up to the present day and Ian Rankin, Candia McWilliam, Irvine Welsh and Alexander McCall Smith. The city is a literary palimpsest, the opposite of Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow:

‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living here,’ said Thaw […] ‘Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets.’

– Alasdair Gray, Lanark, A Life in Four Books (1981, London: Picador)

 

By contrast the ideas and images of Edinburgh as a split city – its towering heights and its great depths; its clean, wealthy elegance and its dark, seedy poverty; its convenient embodiment of Calvinist notions of good and evil, and the dualism that’s strongly associated with Scottish fiction – have become so familiar as to verge on cliche.

And yet … they’re strongly present in my direct, lived experience of the city; they are woven through my perceptions, shaping my imaginative response. When I tried to write about the place I’ve lived for twenty years, the ghosts of so many literary Edinburghs created a very specific anxiety of influence: it seemed there was no part of Edinburgh that hadn’t been imaginatively claimed; literally, no space for a fresh response. I realised I would need to find a way to create this space, if I was to write a story that offered anything unexpected, any kind of new perspective.

To achieve this, I employed two strategies. The first was destructive: razing the city in an unspecified disaster, I thought, would clear the ground and allow me to imaginatively reconstruct the city afresh. The second was more subtle: privileging smell as a sensory response to place, rather than the more usually dominant sight and sound, held the possibility of creating a different map of the city. The story that emerged was of a specialist in the technology of virtual smells, working on a project to recreate the lost city as a virtual reality – an idea inspired in part by Kate McLean’s ‘smellmap’ of Edinburgh.

In the early stages of writing this story I knew I was exploring the idea of home, but other, interconnected ideas quickly emerged – of what we mean when we talk about the ‘real Edinburgh’; of one small part of a city so much reproduced that it comes to stand for the whole; of the validity and veracity of the imaginative reconstruction of a city based on second-hand source material – a copy based on copies; of ownership of place. All of these layers of story can be read as illustrative of my initial difficulties in writing about Edinburgh. In another way, too, this is a story about the process of writing creatively, since in writing the city I was engaged in the same kind of imaginative recreation as my narrator: both of us rendering a physical place in code (binary or linguistic) and employing sensory detail to create a convincing setting for a future participant (virtual reality user or story reader).

Perhaps any story about Edinburgh must be built on unsettled foundations, since it could be argued that the city itself is uncanny: the Old Town embodying the city’s dark, haunted past, surmounted by the order and rationality of New Town but refusing to remain hidden, persisting instead as central to representations of Edinburgh. ‘Candlemaker Row’ turned out to be a double ghost story: haunted (perhaps) by the narrator’s lost lover, a literal ghost in the machine of the virtual Edinburgh; and by a disembodied city that’s ‘built from code and light’, an Edinburgh raised from the dead.

Umbrellas of Edinburgh is available now from Freight Books.

 

After the party

Edinburgh, For authors, Listening, Writing, ,

It’s the first day of September, and Edinburgh breathes again.

For locals, whether we love or loathe the culture, chaos and crowds of the Festivals, their departure can feel like a special moment. The circus is packed away, and the city begins to settle back into itself. The sudden peace is often accompanied by the first hint of a change in the weather, a suggestion that autumn won’t be long.

This year I’ve spent a lot of time at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh Book Fringe. As well as readings, discussions and literary cabaret there have been book launches and parties and a steady and very welcome stream of guests – plenty of opportunities to meet up with old writing friends, and to make new ones. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s also been distracting; I’ve written very little in the past couple of weeks, and lack of time isn’t the only reason. Just as important is the lack of mental space. Of silence.

I recently came across an article that describes how mice exposed to silence (rather than white noise, music or baby mouse calls) developed new, functioning neurons in the areas of the brain associated with memory and the senses. The study hasn’t been replicated in humans, but the idea of silence as actively beneficial resonates with my own experience of quiet as something restorative. In common with many writers I’m more introvert than extrovert: though I don’t think I could go as far as Sara Maitland, embracing silence as a way of life, frequent spells of quiet time and time spent alone are essential to me. It’s why I work in a studio space with no internet, away from the noiseless noise of email and social media – and why I’m hopeful about what will happen to my work rate when I take up a Hawthornden Fellowship this winter and experience a whole month of silence.

Yesterday, walking through the quiet city streets, I found myself talking out loud. Voice, for a writer, is a kind of metaphor encompassing what is said and how it’s expressed as well as technical issues like characterisation and point of view. As I heard myself narrating my thoughts, it struck me that what I was doing was literally tuning back in to my own voice, now it was audible again in this emptier, quieter space. Preparing to get back to writing, now the party’s over.

writing still lifeThis quiet moment reminds me that a writer’s job is to make the work, and to make it as well as she can. The rest of it – the events, the reviews, the interviews, all the stuff that Helen Dunmore calls litbiz – is just glitter and confetti; as shallow as those artfully arranged instagram pics of colourful notebooks or shiny MacBooks accessorised with coffee and croissants, filtered and hashtagged: #amwriting #writerslife.

The truth of it is, no matter how perfect your notebook-and-coffee still-life seems in the sun streaming through the cafe window, you still have to take yourself off on your own to a silent place – actual or metaphorical – and focus on what matters. #shutupandwrite.  #writerslife. #nofilter.

Image illustrating ideas

How to have ideas

For authors, Ideas, Inspiration, Writing, ,

Over the years a number of people have told me how they’d love to write a book – only, they don’t have an idea to write about. I used to be fairly dismissive of this. My view was that if someone doesn’t know what to write about, they don’t want to write but rather (lord knows why) to ‘be a writer’.

The longer I teach creative writing, though, the more sympathetic I’ve become to this attitude.

We are born creative creatures – as children we know how to play, how to make-believe. If you’re lucky, you’ll have encouraging parents and a good teacher or two; if you’re lucky, your creative instincts will survive and even thrive into adulthood. But for many of us, creativity is something that is not nurtured, is not developed. Pressures on schools to deliver academic results above all mean creative subjects are often sidelined (and sometimes, as by UK Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan, actively discouraged). For many, by the time they leave secondary education, those creative instincts that were once so strong have been all but forgotten.

So when someone says they want to write but they don’t have anything to write about, they’re voicing a genuine need – an urge toward self expression which, carefully supported and nurtured, might well develop into an ability to write for a wider readership.

When I run creative writing sessions, my work often centres around helping participants to rediscover their creative skills – and when it comes to generating ideas, there are plenty of techniques that can help. Some of the activities I use involve striking two dissimilar things together (a snippet of overheard conversion, for instance, with a childhood memory of a place you once visited) to make new sparks; freewriting, using the prompt ‘I don’t want to write about…’ (this comes from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones); asking ‘what if?’ questions (What if London was flooded? What if a computer virus became conscious? What if sugar was banned?).

Even reading widely and noting what catches your eye can be a useful approach. In a recent series of workshops on creative writing about science and technology, we used copies of the New Scientist as source material. We selected interesting stories and news items, and made notes about possible themes that might emerge from this material (for instance, a theme of watching and being watched emerging from a news item about surveillance technology) along with any personal experiences that connected with our chosen material. By the end of the session the room was buzzing with scores of promising ideas.

Of course, some people have the opposite problem: they want to write, but they have too many ideas and can’t decide which to pursue. What then?

One option is to combine them all in a single project (probably a novel, since that form is stretchy enough to contain all kinds of disparate ideas). In her guide to novel writing Monkeys With Typewriters, Scarlett Thomas describes how she uses matrixes to harness all the ideas that are currently interesting her.

Or there’s another option, one I prefer: with each idea you have, pay close attention to your own reactions. I find this helps me distinguish between a promising idea that might be perfect for another writer but is just not for me, and one that feels like mine. If I can practically feel my pupils dilating, my mind’s eye focusing, I know I’ve got something worth exploring. In Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, Adam Marek describes how he experiences this particular sensation: ‘It’s a feeling a bit like delight, a bit like surprise, a bit like weightlessness.’

Once you’re attuned to this sensation, it becomes far easier to recognise an idea that really resonates with you, and to become generous with all those ideas it feels like anyone might write. You can become profligate: spread them around, give them away … and what you give you shall receive, tenfold.

Virginia Woolf, edited page

Surviving the rewrite

For authors, Writing,

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been absorbed in rewrites of my next novel. It’s not the first set of revisions, and perhaps my writing process is unusually inefficient: it’s not until the second draft that I’ll share the work-in-progress with a couple of trusted writer-readers, then the third draft goes off to my agent, and comes back for more (thankfully, relatively minor) amendments.

Writing is hard: all writers say it (sheepishly, because it’s not like we’re working down a coal mine). And some days, rewriting is the hardest thing of all. Every word, every sentence, has to be hauled up from the deep, to lie motionless on the page – if not dead, then at least in a critical condition. I worry that if I’m boring myself I’ll certainly bore the reader; I know every word will have to be rewritten yet again. But as I tell my students, you can’t rewrite a blank page – so there’s no choice but to carry on.

When it’s a slog like this, when everything I write seems flat and awful, that’s when I find myself wondering if it’s too late to retrain as a gardener or a dog-walker. Something useful and energetic, with plenty of fresh air.

But then … then I reach a part of the book where it’s like I’ve remembered all over again how to write. And the difference is in the unexpected. It’s about whether or not I’m surprising myself – with the turn a conversation takes, or a connection I hadn’t known was there, or just a sentence that has energy and voice, that seems to write itself rather than lurking around half-formed until I clumsily patch it together.

This is why some writers prefer not to plan their novels at all: knowing where they’re meant to be going takes away the sense of adventure and the joy of discovery. If you know what you’re going to write, what’s the point in writing it? And even though I’m a planner, I still need that sense of unexpectedness. Making minor changes to a scene may seem more efficient than rewriting that scene from scratch, but I’ve realised it’s actually harder and more time-consuming – because if you’re tinkering round the edges of something that already exists, there’s less room for surprise, less pleasure in making something fresh and new and alive.

And as with most things I learn about writing, I’ll forget this – and have to discover it all over again when it’s time to rewrite the novel after this one.

Jane Alexander 26 sestude

26 Children’s Winters

Edinburgh, Inspiration, Reading, Writing, ,

What is it that prompts you to really pay attention to an object in a museum, rather than letting your gaze skim across the surface? It could be a well-written label – or perhaps it could be a story, an anecdote or a poem…

26 is a not-for-profit organisation made up of writers, editors, publishers and others who work with words. It pursues its aim of ‘inspiring a greater love of words, in business and in life’ through all kinds of activities, the most visible of which is a series of exhibitions and books that ask writers to respond to objects, places, artworks, stories and more.

26 Children’s Winters is the latest 26 exhibition, currently on show at the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood; I was one of 26 writers invited to respond to a specially chosen object from the museum’s collection. Each of us was asked to create a ‘sestude’: the signature literary form of 26, this can be a poem or a piece of prose, but must consist of exactly 62 words. It’s quite a challenge – especially when your allocated object initially fails to inspire! I’ve written here about the process of creating my sestude.

The end result took an unusual form that made things tricky for the exhibition designers – but as you can see they did a great job of accommodating my awkward piece:

Jane Alexander 26 sestude

And here’s one of my favourite sestudes, by writer Lucy Harland:

Jigsaw Piece sestude by Lucy Harland
Jigsaw Piece by Lucy Harland

The project will raise money for It’s Good 2 Give, a small Scottish charity supporting children and young people with cancer.  The sestudes are a really engaging way of encouraging people to look closely at each object, and prompting memories and personal associations – and you can see them on show until 31 March 2016.

Music to write books by #2 – Now Wakes The Sea

Inspiration, ,

Holy Songs was a Christmas present, and it’s made its way straight onto the Music to write by playlist. You can probably imagine roughly how it sounds from the ‘things we like’ section on the NWTS website – a list that includes spring reverb, dub, John Betjeman, tape loops, Kurt Schwitters, Musik aus der DDR and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Obviously, it’s going to be brilliant. It’s the sort of music you hear when you lean your  head against the window of a moving car or train, all drone and loose, circular melodies. There are vocals buried in there somewhere, but the words are so indistinct they’re no distraction. It’s perfect writing music. The only problem is it’s not on Spotify – instead I’ve added the only NWTS track I could find – but you can stream or buy it from Bandcamp.


Also worth checking out, if you can find it: Addressing the Haggis, an excellent lo-fi collection of Burns songs from 2013, featuring my favourite ever version of ‘Charlie Is My Darling’. Music to drink whisky by!

Writer’s block? Why an art class might help…

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Writing is necessarily solitary, and though I get to meet all kinds of interesting people through teaching creative writing, opportunities to share experiences with, and learn from, other writer-teachers can be hard to come by. So it was exciting to attend my first National Association of Writers in Education conference a couple of weeks back, and to find myself surrounded by hundreds of other professional ‘writers in education’. Over three days of seminars, workshops and presentations we covered subjects ranging from flash fiction for beginner writers, with the hugely enthusiastic Carrie Etter, to storytelling with military veterans.

One of the most surprising sessions for me focused on the benefits of integrating drawing with your writing practice. Though there are plenty of accomplished writer-artists (strangely, the examples that spring to mind are all Scottish: John Byrne, Alasdair Gray, Ian Hamilton Findlay…) I’ve tended to think of drawing and writing as mutually exclusive activities. Drawing is about looking – looking hard – and if I’m working on a piece of writing I’m usually oblivious to the detail of the world around me, because I’m so thoroughly absorbed in the world I’m imagining.

So what was surprising about the activities our experts (Patricia Ann McNair and Philip Hartigan from Columbia College Chicago) asked us to try? After some scribbly warm-ups, we made ‘blind mono’ drawings of something or someone in the room – line drawings made without looking at the subject and without lifting pen from paper. And while we drew, we were supposed to think about a piece of writing we were working on. Holding those two activities in my head at the same time was a challenge, and I didn’t feel I managed it very well. But then we turned over our paper and began a ‘blind writing’, working fast and covering up each line of text as soon as we’d written it – and I was amazed at how fluently ideas arrived for a a story that had been stuck for a while at the ‘vague inspiration’ stage.

Drawing with writing on reverse
My ‘blind mono’ drawing

Philip and Patricia suggested this effect may be to do with a physical openness, a loosening up that transfers itself from the physical process of drawing to the more static, hunched-over business of writing. Perhaps it’s as simple as using movement to shake the ideas loose, in the same way that going for a walk can unstick you creatively. And I’m not sure how it would work with writers who haven’t drawn since school, who might well have negative preconceptions about their ability to draw ‘well’. But – even though I’m quite pleased with my blind mono – this isn’t about drawing well: what I learned was that you have to let go of the idea of making a good picture, to make good writing.

Music to write books by

Uncategorized, ,

Apparently mild ambient noise can encourage creativity. This rings true for me: swapping my study or the quiet floor of the library for a  coffee-shop often lifts me into a writing zone. I’ve always thought it’s something to do with forgetting your self; sometimes silence is too self-conscious.

Rainy Day Cafe is a great alternative to spending a fortune on Americanos, and less likely to result in caffeine jitters. And music can work too – but it has to be the right music, which for me means no words, or words that are deeply buried in the music, or words in a foreign language. I’ve started a playlist of my favourite music to write by, and the idea is to add to it till I have a whole day of inspiration. So to start off,  Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (any of their soundtrack compositions work for me, but White Lunar brings together some of their best stuff, and is a great place to start listening); then, developing the Warren Ellis theme, a Dirty Three track from Whatever You Love, You Are.

Five reasons to be a writer-teacher

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At a workshop last week I asked some of my creative writing students what they hoped to gain from their studies. You might think the answer would be obvious: I’d like to be a professional, published author. But interestingly, only one of a dozen students told me this was her goal, and the range of other reasons was much more wider than you might expect. They were learning variously for pleasure; to be able to use the skills of creative writing to enliven their academic or educational writing; to write a family history; to record their own lives for future generations; to try something new.

This diversity of ambition tends not to be considered in the conversation about whether or not creative writing can be taught. (As an ex-art student, I find it genuinely baffling that this is even a question when no-one seriously suggests that drawing, painting etc. might be unteachable; my favourite contribution to the debate comes from author Tim Clare: Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Not If Your Teacher’s A Prick.)

Anyway, this made me consider the question from my own perspective: what do I hope to gain from teaching creative writing? The obvious answer is an income, and that’s certainly a factor. But in five years of teaching all different kinds of learners, at all levels, I’ve found there are other benefits, too.

1) It makes you a more thoughtful writer. When I began teaching creative writing, I had to become much more consciously aware of the techniques and strategies I was using in my own work so I could explain and illustrate them to others. This increased self-awareness is like switching on the light so you can see what’s in your tool-kit. There are still times when I find myself fumbling around in the dark – and a bit of fumbling has its place – but once you’ve got electricity, it’s hard to imagine how you ever built a whole house by candlelight.

2) It unsticks you. Just occasionally during a conversation with a student, a lightbulb appears above my head as I realise the solution I’m suggesting to them is the very thing I need to apply to my own work-in-progress. One story had been perplexing me  for years; then I had the lightbulb moment – to do with organising time – and it was finished that afternoon. And that solution worked for the student, too.

3) It makes you raise your game. When you realise how very many people there are out there who are talented writers bursting with inventive ideas, that’s a great incentive to work harder at developing your own skills – as well as a reminder that talent and inventiveness often need a third, less glamorous friend: persistence.

4) It gets you out of the house. Most of my days are spent reading, writing, thinking, procrastinating, going for walks and making tea – alone. I like alone, but I also like to be reminded from time to time that other people exist; that I exist. Teaching, especially with really varied groups, allows me to meet new people – to connect with the world outside my head.

5) It pays. Because unless you’re happy living in that garret, you’re going to need a day-job.