A Terrible Writer

Oh dear.  I am a really terrible writer, it turns out.  (Don’t all rush to agree, by the by.)  I mean, sure, I love writing.  And I can churn out words at a reasonable rate, and hopefully they’re reasonable words, but ask me to talk about writing?  And it all falls to pieces.

Hitting the very, very basic stuff, I still struggle with nouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on.  I’ve heard of conjunctions and can just about work them out based on a not-very-high deductive process.  I’ve vaguely got adverbs but still get them mixed up sometimes, and when people talk about suiting the word to the action, the action to the word I really do just go to pieces like a Danish prince faced with a chilly funeral feast.  Studying Mandarin (which I have been doing for six years, on and off, from a book, with minimal success) only deepens the realisation that I don’t know crap about language.  The explanatory sections discussing sentence structures are impenetrable to me, even in English, and I couldn’t get past chapter eleven (‘Grammar Review’) without sitting down with an old school friend who teaches English as a foreign language, and getting her to explain what it all meant.

Copy editorials – something I’ve done now for thirteen novels – only go to further expose how flagrantly I abuse language.  It’s not simply that I’ve had to turn off Microsoft Word’s infuriating spellcheck/grammar function (‘FRAGMENT!’), but innocent editors are inflicted with an approach towards paragraphing, capitalisation and colloquial language which is so gung-ho as to be practically gunk.  The Tribe talk entirely in txt tlk, a process which was as painful for me to write as I’m sure it was for my editor to read.  Many characters  strut onto the page with a merry cry of ‘oi, so like, yeah, it’s so like, totally thingy to be here!’ and their language deteriorates from there; even the most restrained characters, the ones who have years of experience in framing their sentences nicely, will quite often receive enough abuse that their language breaks down into basic bits, as their grasp on reality deteriorates.  Matthew Swift, one of my principal narrators, switches between ‘I’ and ‘we’ so often it’s a wonder he doesn’t just give up and spend the entire book talking about ‘they’ in the hope that, if nothing else, it’ll give a certain consistency to his life.

And even though, arguably, it all works, and it makes sense for the Tribe 2 tlk lik dis and for Swift’s narrative voice to divide and coalesce like fireflies in a hurricane, if I am asked to explain why and how, I am left only with this one, appalling answer: because it is right.  Because it is how it should be, how it must be, what makes sense.  How do I know when Swift is an ‘I’ and when he is a ‘we’?  Answer: I have no idea.  I just know.  It’s what would happen.  It’s an appalling answer, about as literary as bannister, but it’s also true.  And the unfortunate director I work with sometimes on playwriting, must have nightmares about dealing with me, as he does understand language and how you’re meant to talk about it, and we end up having terribly cross-purpose conversations.  It feels like he’s speaking English… it feels like I’m speaking English… and yet the manner in which we express the same ideas about language are so entirely remote as to be almost impenetrable.  He talks of plot, narrative, structure, conflict, expression and arc.  I speak of colour, texture, sound, rhythm and push.  We are basically saying the same things, he and I, and tend to agree; it’s just that we don’t know it yet.

And yet, I know I can change my ways, if I want to.  Back in school, when my teachers decided to inflict the horror that was English Literature A-Level on me, I struggled hugely for the first few months.  ‘Why does Jeremy cross the road, and what does this say about streets in 1850s novellas?’ the exam question would ask and, as a writer, I’d sit there screaming, ‘because he does cross the road!  Because that’s what he has to do!  Because he needs to get to the other side!!’ and, rather predictably, I’d get a C.  My consistently low grades led me to realise that the last thing the A-Level exam board wanted, was for a writer to write about writing, and so instead, I invented the personality of a critic to write my essays for me.  Her name was Petunia, she lived in Hampstead, drove a Volvo, had two very large, very soppy dogs, and was unmarried.  I knew every detail about the life and character of Petunia, and by adopting her voice whenever I wrote an English Literature question, I managed to push my marks straight back up into A grades.  ‘Why did Jeremy cross the road?’ the question would ask, and in would step Petunia to reply, ‘because the road is symbolic of the gulf between what is expressed, and what is felt, in Jeremy’s subconscious mind.  The road is metaphor.’  Indeed, it seemed that the more I pushed the voice of Petunia into parody, the better the grade I received.  ‘The road is not only metaphor,’ Petunia would explain, ‘but it is symbolic of the perpetual gulf between man and woman, embodied as they are in the ice cream cart parked on the other side of the street.’

So it turns out, I can write about writing, if I absolutely have to.  The problem is, I simply can’t do it as me…