VERY SHORT STORIES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Songs, poems, and messages scribbled on birthday cards: these are all very short stories. What stories do we tell that qualify as short? Here’s one I’ve just invented.

 The Betrayal.

 “Hi!”

   “Die!”

   “Urgh!”

I might edit that later. The title risks being longer than the tale itself, and that’s always a warning. Also, I may have used too many exclamations. The first exclamation! Well, that indicates an enthusiastic welcome from the character on meeting a sound ally.
   The second exclamation! This emphasises the sense of betrayal. That third exclamation! I could have left it out. The violence of the betrayal comes in telling the ally to die. We could just tail off into the repercussions, without the exclamation, as the body slumps against a wall, smearing blood down and sideways in a short yet tragic arc.
   And now I’ve committed the crime of spending more time explaining the tale than I did in the writing of it. Should I cut the last line completely? Then the title would match the tale in length. That would be 13% too pretentious.
   Carly Simon encapsulates a whole faux poseur art gallery of rogues in a song about being pretentious. Title: YOU’RE SO VAIN. The body of the text delivers on the title’s promise. You probably think this song is about you.
   Simon takes over four minutes to tell the whole story. It’s done as a real singalong song; the level of repetition is called a chorus, and we find this acceptable in so short a span of time.
   I say short. At four minutes and a little bit over, the story falls within the acceptable time-frame of three to five minutes given to songs playing on the radio. Simon released that one in late 1972.
   The start of 1972 saw Don McLean’s hit American Pie clock in at over eight minutes. If you wanted a big hit, you had to go for a small song: stick to around three minutes – or your five-minute epic would fade out sixty seconds early as the news came on.
   Checking music charts for the period, I see MacLean’s song listed as part one and part two. It was released on Needle-Reader Technology using both sides of the disc. Being a singalong song, the level of repetition is called a chorus and we find this acceptable in so short-ish a span of time.
   My story, The Betrayal, uses exclamation as repetition. And that’s about it. I say it is my story, but the brevity of the so-called plot is severe enough that it comes across as a joke that’s been flitting around the world, bat-like, looking for yet another perch.
   Do bats eat fish?
   Apparently, though I can’t confirm that they eat perch.
   Wordplay. Joking. The joke is a short story. Or it should be, almost all the time. I claim no originality for The Betrayal. Something tells me it’s been done before. The only thing more annoying than having seen it all before is not having seen it all before.
   We’ll chalk that up to Oscar Wilde, on the basis that Dorothy Parker attributed every witty aside to Oscar – whether he uttered witticisms or not. Repetition. Brevity. Wit. The very short story.
   That very short story could be shorter.

 Betrayal.

 “Die!!!”

 I feel there is scope for shrinking the tale a shade more.
   Let us try modest variation on a well-worn theme. A new short tale I’ve named…

 Mystery.

 “?”

 

I’m not sure the story needs quotation marks. Title is a bit lengthy. Hmmm…

 Query.

 

?

 

There you go.

 

Quiz.

 

?

 

Better still…

 

Whu

 

?

 

I suppose, in the end, there is this…

 

?

 

!

 

Kill a minimalist approach by means of flogging a dead horse that’s a dead pony in the rewriting of a tale. Once minimalism is down at the particle level, only angels dancing on the head of an argument about angels dancing on the head of a pin can see what’s left. And that is swiftly disappearing up Stephen Hawking’s arse with a sideways commentary that black holes ain’t so black.
   Instead of reducing the size of the story to theoretical levels, open your short story into strange new avenues. Take a long view of the short story and add highly technical things. Characters. Dialogue. Incidents. Plotting. Anecdotes.
   Poetry is short, and commentary on it often unbearably long. But we return to brevity and Oscar Wilde opining on the business of being a poet…
   A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
   Wilde serves us a short story about poets and poetry and the matter of printing. He hints at criticism and worry over career failure brought about by bad reviews. His sentence breezes through the room, and leaves lingering scents which are our own thoughts on his thoughts.
   A story is a story. It is also our impression of the story. A short tale is written with the framework of the world in mind, but knocks out all the scaffolding. That leaves us to view the slender structure with our own knowledge of the world painting a whole landscape behind the piece at a later date.
   One of the best short stories I’ve read? Akutagawa’s story was published one hundred years ago. Even in translation from Japanese to English, the tale still carries a great deal of power, of storytelling energy, in so confined a space.
   Translation is a tricky thing. His story is called In a Bamboo Grove or simply In a Grove. This grove, in the text, is a grove of bamboo and cedars, so I’m inclined to think of the work as In a Grove. The story runs to almost 3,500 words. On average, that’s about two of my blog posts and a little bit over.
   In a Grove is a murder mystery. I first encountered it in the Kurosawa movie, Rashomon. Characters tell different accounts of a man’s death. As I watched the film, I had the distinct impression that we would hear a statement from the murdered man. I’d seen so many Kurosawa movies by the time I watched Rashomon that I’d grown familiar with the director’s style. His flourishes. Having the dead man turn up seemed normal.
   And so it went. Spoiler for you – spoilers about a movie that’s 70+ and adapted from a story that’s a century old…aren’t really spoilers. When it comes to famous stories featuring dramatic moments, you are going to shit yourselves when you read

 

REDACTED.

 

What of this dead witness? The ghost operates through a medium to tell his version of events. This murder mystery uncovers another crime during the investigation – that of a rape. Different characters have their own versions of what happened and why.
   Ghostly testimony wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, or on a court of tennis for that matter.
   There isn’t much room for the writer to move around when the short story is packed with characters. Akutagawa uses minor details as mighty weapons to get around a few problems. You’ll find witness accounts differ in tiny ways. One witness mentions a point. No one else mentions that point at all.
   Several witnesses mention the same point, but discrepancies arise in the smallest details. Inconsequential? Perhaps. There’s the matter of people who confess to the killing. We’re not talking about suspects denying committing crimes. No. It’s the reverse. Characters queue up to admit what they’ve done.
   Akutagawa plotted discrepancies with incredible skill. As readers, we are even prepared to accept the introduction of a new character – the dead man himself – and play the game of considering how accurate his ghostly evidence is.
   To be precise, we consider how accurate the medium conveying the information is. If we want to. So, technically, that’s the introduction of two characters.
   This story could’ve been murdered in translation.
 

Wait a minute; this guy’s contradicted that guy. Okay, it all goes down in this grove just off the Yamashina stage road. But how many arrows were really there? Violent struggle? Where are the signs? Whoever wrote this didn’t keep a lid on the small details. Here, I’d better fix this, and fast.

 

Fast and loose.
   Luckily the story wasn’t “fixed” in translation. Every witness has something different to say. Four of the witnesses explain events to a High Police Commissioner…
   At this stage, I’m not even convinced they were all talking to the same investigating official. There is some question as to where a character was from, and that could bring in police officials from different jurisdictions…if you want to press the point.
   Can we add a headline to this crime? Samurai from Kyoto…wait. We aren’t even sure of that. Someone is pretty sure he wasn’t from Kyoto.
   Since its publication, In a Grove has generated many stories about the one true version of what went on. As a story, it has been studied to death and studied beyond death in the ghostly section of the tale. A story is short…but don’t write it off as slender or lacking in character.
   Stories are sometimes stories about stories. A movie review is a short story about a longer story, for example. And a movie review about a movie not even seen by the reviewer can, on occasion, be priceless instead of worthless.
   Sir Michael Caine, on his movie JAWS: THE REVENGE.

I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

Caine was paid a lot of money to go on holiday to the Bahamas and out-act a rubber shark. He accomplished this difficult task. Nice work if you can get it. Purely in the interests of research, I watched a mercifully brief video compilation of Sir Michael’s dramatic input.
   He left his mark on the franchise.
   If, in your heads, you are thinking to yourselves that this was a skid-mark, I, for one, would not contradict you.
   Telling short stories is conversational. Except for the typing. I’d use voice software to recognise the words and burble them out for me, but voice and recognition software are terms that don’t go together if you are un-American.
   A cruel rejection of a vital vowel-sound, and I was sent back to the typographical salt-mines.
   How to write a short story? Invent something and babble until you run out of steam. If you accidentally create a novel…oops.
   Invent something. Anything. Invent a television show about a dinosaur brought back to life by mad scientists, only for the dinosaur to crash and almost die while flying an experimental fighter jet. Don’t worry. We have the technology. And the TV budget. We can rebuild him. He is…
   Cyborgosaur.
   Underneath his skin he has a solid Tyrannosaurium™ chassis, as well as extendable metal forearms with opposable thumbs, laser-beam eyes, cyborg legs with Turbo-Boost™ and secrets yet to be revealed. He is Michael Knight Dynne O’Saur, a man reptile barely alive.
   Join him and his merry gang of misfits, operating from their secret desert base in the Canyons of the Doomed. Embark on a shadowy car-trip into the thrilling world of a man reptile who does not exist.
   With Raphael – his open-top bus pursuit vehicle...
   Angel DeVille, the loveable rogue mechanic...
   ...and Control, played by veteran of the London stage Sir Suave Bright-Smoothly.
   Every week our lone hero embarks upon a crusade to champion the downtrodden, cheer the helpless, back up the innocent, and slam dinosaur tail into the butts of those who believe they are above the law.

Episodes, in order of broadcast: Pilot Part One, Pilot Part Two, Rogue Cyborgosaur, Reptile Twin of Evil, Control on Trial, Death of a Buddy from the Old Days, Cyborgosaur: P.I., Goodness Cretaceous Great Balls of Fire, Dinosaur Down, Old Fossils Never Die, You’re a Lizard Harry, and the thrilling finale Extinction Event.
   With Ernest Borgnine as Harry Dean Stanton.

I’d tune in to watch that. Who wouldn’t? Maybe it plays better as a short collection of words. Under 250. If you are struggling to write something, write something short. At least the struggle isn’t as long as the one over writing a novel is.

BLOGGING FROM HALLOWE'EN TO THE 1ST OF NOVEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 In the blink of a wink, I find I’ve been blogging for a decade. Initially, I blogged weekly. Occasionally, I’d blog more than once a week if something came up. Then something else came up, and I switched to blogging monthly.
   Here we are at the start of another month, and I am still blogging. Last night, Hallowe’en, saw light misty rain fall upon the scene. This was not always the case. A decade back, with a self-imposed blogging deadline, I marched through torrential rain to reach the interwebs.
   In those far-off days, I didn’t have much use for the internet. If I really had to use it for something, I would gain access at a friend’s house for the vital whatever-it-was. The internet strangely rose in importance, and more and more services became almost exclusive online.
   My intermediate solution was to travel to a hub of anti-social activity: the library. There I endured the hopped-up persona of a drug-user who had the zero presence of mind required to conduct his business in a way that involved opening his mouth when he didn’t have to.
   I hope he was convicted of cruelty to his dog. He was defending that very case from the public library and proclaiming this to us. We were not fellow-users of the library. No. We were passengers on the same electronic raft, surviving a shipwreck of this buffoon’s making.
   It seemed important to the prick to let us all know he was defending this case. I hadn’t seen any wanted posters up on public buildings. We wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t mentioned it. People who loudly proclaim their presence in libraries had better be dressed to fight fires in libraries.
   Otherwise, shut the fuck up and keep your business to yourselves.
   He disappeared to the toilet and came back far more animated, shall we say. This was the guy who decided he didn’t like the Polish woman, so I was caught in the middle of that unfathomable minor disagreement.
   Flaked-out druggie started swearing at her in Italian. She had the decency to stick to English, though she could have sworn back in Polish. His patience wore thin as the drugs kicked in, and his instinct for survival told this prince that he’d better quit the scene, stage-right. Or stage-right-now.
   Off he went. The Polish woman commiserated with me. Here’s the score so far. Number of Scottish arseholes I’ve met: too vast to list. I have never met a bad Polish person. Record still stands. All the Polish people I’ve met have been absolutely fine. May that state of affairs long-continue.
   I’ve told that story in many different ways. Trying to soften it, I suppose. I wonder if the drugged-out ninja superspy was a dealer who got high on his own supply. All names haven’t been changed to protect the guy. I didn’t care who he was, is, or will be in the future.
   Upshot. I left the library thanks to the charmless encounters I had in there. On the Hallowe’en night in question, a decade ago, things were a lot easier to take. My main obstacle? As ever, when blogging, the barrier was the blogging platform itself. The library’s customers that night were not the worst I’d encounter.
   All changed, now. The interwebs are piped straight through the electrical hose and up the wall to a handy outlet in my office. Of all the office layouts I’ve had, this much-refined latest version is the best. No dog-bashing drug-users here, thank fuck. Just me in an alcove, off to one side. And all is right with the world.
   What changed for the better, over ten years? Internet is harvested and delivered straight to me. The nearest restaurant, my kitchen, isn’t too far away. Sadly, Twitter slowly died a death over the past decade. It’s on life-support now, and has been for too long to pin down to an exact date.
   Twitter became more like Facebook, while Facebook transformed itself into a data mining operation that can only have one possible goal: artificial intelligence. They are almost there now, given that the plastic robot running the operation is, er, a plastic robot.
   Blogger made improvements. I suppose. It is a little bit better and a little bit worse. When I type this entry up, I know I must transfer my text to the platform itself. There, I must adjust every last rat-bastard motherfucker of a paragraph for reasons of…
   Improvement.
   This is a quick fix, but it was something I never had to fix at all in the Golden Age that never was. A decade on, the template is still broadly the same: borrow a radio format from Alistair Cooke, and write at least 1,500 words on a topic.
   Not golf.
   If I want to write more than 1,500 words, I will. And if I have to write less than that, I’ll have my reasons. I’ve since transferred the format over to writing scripts for game-related videos. It works pretty well.
   I just spent a few moments staring at Cooke’s old apartment building on Fifth Avenue, in New York, courtesy Doctor Google. With all the golf Cooke played, how he found the time to pen his near-infinite list of weekly radio scripts is a mystery.
   His Letter from America truly was from there. Not a gimmick. Nearer the end, Cooke didn’t have the option. He was housebound. A brief politically-themed talk framed as a letter about America simply wouldn’t fly as a series being commissioned today. Cooke made his own job, and was captain of that radio ship from the dawn of time until his retirement.
   Retirement was a thing Cooke put off on the basis that…as soon as you retire, you drop dead. Health failing, relying on three pillows in bed, sounding frail but still firing on all cylinders, Cooke covered the politics of the day.
   He could just as easily have covered golf. I endured his golf talks. And I am quite sure many listeners endured his talks on American politics. In the case of his last broadcast, politics of the day meant a day in February, 2004.
   Cooke, being Cooke, ranged across politics from 2004 back to the early 1990s in that final chat, and veered off into talk of Napoleon by way of several American presidents…and Miss Lewinsky. Cooke talked of many things. American cabbages and American kings…
   The telling point in his last broadcast came at the very end and not in the political chatter that made up the bulk of his final weekly broadcast. Except, that, for reasons of the plot, I couldn’t find that point when I went looking for it. His last talk, his farewell letter, is preserved on the BBC archive…
   And yet, it isn’t.
   Cooke’s recorded letter would be made mid-week and sent from America to London. For the Friday night broadcast, he’d record good evening and good night. And for the Sunday morning repeat broadcast, Cooke would record good morning with no farewell at the end.
   News of his retirement was expected. Leaked. Announced. I tuned in for the Friday night farewell. He offered us good morning. Then he talked politics instead of reflecting on his long-running radio show. The archived version, with good morning preceding the letter, was from the Sunday repeat.
   On the initial Friday broadcast, at the end, instead of hearing his saying good night, I may have misremembered the man saying goodbye. It was no surprise that his death came a little over a month later.
   Cooke was a journalist who observed and reported and observed some more and reported again. He was the sort of journalist who knew that the journalist is never the story. When Robert Kennedy was shot dead, Cooke, nearby through an act of coincidence, found himself reporting on the unreportable. As time passed, he would find the unreportable turning to reportable with disquieting rapidity.
   And then, in death, cremated, Cooke had one last story – this time, about himself. His bones were illegally harvested for anti-cancer treatment, despite having died of cancer himself. The scam uncovered, perpetrators were brought to justice.
   Cooke was not always to my taste. And concerning golf, his obsession was insufferable. I suspect this marks me out as a non-golfer. It seems Mark Twain never made the comment about golf being the spoiling of a good walk. I’ll go with Dorothy Parker’s view, and assume that anything witty was coined by Oscar Wilde.
   That itself sounds witty enough not to have been stated by Dorothy Parker, but by Oscar.
   Would you like Alistair Cooke’s writing? I suspect not. You pretty much had to be there, listening to his weekly radio talks, to get what he was about in the moment. He was topical. That now makes him deeply historical.
   From him I learned the arcane wonders of the Electoral College. He dredged that topic up when elections loomed large. Aside from being topical and historical, Cooke was repetitive. The nature of his show made repetition an inevitability. God was a pup and the Devil wore short trousers and neither of those entities had beards at the time of Cooke’s ascension to radio immortality.
   Of course he repeated himself down the decades. Sometimes that’s the point of keeping going. You must make it a matter of deliberate policy to repeat certain and uncertain things. He died in 2004. His coverage of American politics couldn’t quite take in Obama’s run for the Oval Office. Cooke was 95 when he retired. He gets a pass on that score. It’s difficult to take the man to task for not lasting another half-decade so that he could see in Obama.
   Occasionally I think of Cooke when I pen this blog. I reached high in this cubby-hole for a copy of Cooke’s collected radio letters. He wrote in freedom and he found that pleasing. Cooke wrote with the freedom of a man who wasn’t sure what he’d write about for that week’s radio talk.
   When everyone else was being extraordinary topical that week, he’d find a worm wriggling in the patch of mud revealed by an upturned stone and he’d waffle away about that.
   I don’t know what I will write about when I sit to tackle a blog post. As a writer, I feel that level of freedom easy enough to deal with. Some find the level of choice terrifying. But to me the only true horror is to run out of coffee. In a decade of blogging, that has never been an issue. So. It’s a horror I never worry over. I buy in bulk, of course.

ILLNESS FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

No, I am not promoting illness for writers. Here, have a disease. The disease of writing. There is no cure.
   Recently I took on a job and accepted the money for it. Almost instantly, I keeled over ill. What could I do about that? I was ten pages into the work.
   This is what I did.
   I stopped the work, and started getting better. There was no question of doing anything on autopilot. I'd have done a disservice to the client, myself, writing, and the dark side of the moon. Think of the chilblains, damn it.
   What can you do, when you are ill? As a writer, generally, you are self-employed and work from home. So the sick-bed may be in your office.
   Tempted to keep going through the disease? Here's highly technical medical advice, provided by healthcare professionals...
   Fuck that shit.
   You may want to take note of that advice. Put it on a magnet and stick it to your fridge. Get better. Let the work pile up. And get better.

*

There are many examples of authors who lay in sick-beds. If young as a scribbler, the would-be writer traded shares in illness for those in reading.
   Some books were written in sick-beds. Others were penned from what would become death-beds.
   I've often said that writers are always on the job. This is true. Stumbling back from shopping, I struggled to recall the source of a word.
   As Dorothy Parker was fond of reminding us, just say it was all down to Oscar Wilde. In this case, that happened to be true. The weight of the tins in my bag propelled me to this realisation.

*

As with shopping, so too with illness. The writer is always on the job, even if ague precludes the notion of typing. Looking to write a realistic fever-dream? Simply fall ill and call it research.
   I didn't get much done when I was ill. Why the hell not? I am one of those unusual individuals - I rarely fall ill, and seldom recognise doctors if I must trek to the local surgery. That is, assuming the building hasn't relocated since my last visit.
   People who don't often fall ill often fall hard when we do fall ill. We are ill-prepared for illness as we're propelled into a strange world of arcane surgery opening-times, tests, test-results, and that peculiar thing called medicine.
   Not for me that life, this time out.
   I was borderline: sick enough to lose a week to illness, but not sick enough to require expert treatment. Yes, in a very Scottish way that is designed to thin the herd in time of plenty, I struggled on alone.
   You'll want to hear that in my fever-state I carved out vast empires of the mind, storing away each dew-drop of sweat in a box of stories marked WRITE LATER.
   Hah!

*

Well, okay, as I lay there I worked my way through some story difficulties - that's true. After the worst of it, I hauled myself to the keyboard and wrote far more in a night than I felt I had any right to scribble.
   There is an urge to write that cuts across illness. You must determine, studying the barometer, whether to cut across the illness and keep writing...
   Or just get better.
   At the worst of it, I felt as though I'd been hit by a bag of hammers taped to the end of another massive eff-off hammer. Walking from room to room was a fragile experience. I expected floors to splinter under me. Ow.

*

I know. It's excessively Scottish to seek no help for that. But hey, I managed to scrape a blog post out of the experience without getting killed. That's a result.

*

Was this post meant to be about contingencies and alternative plans? Fuck no. Sometimes lying there sweating it out - yep - sometimes that IS the contingency.
   Fight your battles. Choose the battlegrounds, though. I stopped work at the start of the difficulty. There was no other option. At the far end of the difficulty, I didn't return to the work I'd started on. Instead, I took a sideways move into some old material just to see if the cylinders were all firing.
   They were. And in the right order, too.

*

Obviously, I am still blogging around a week or two ahead, so the flow of the blog was never going to face disruption. Ah well, back to it.

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN AND NECROPHILIA.

By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist's work beyond that artist's lifetime.
   Those of you interested in fucking corpses will have to look elsewhere. I have no evidence that George R.R. Martin fucked corpses - though he created plenty in his fiction. So, again, for those of you misconstruing the meaning behind this blog post, seek help in other places.
   I stopped reading A Song of Ice and Fire - Martin's saga inspired by the Wars of the Roses. I'll summarise and say imagine Lancaster versus York, transplanted to a world of Martin's creation. The bloody rose of Lancaster became the golden lion of Lannister. And so on.
   Why stop reading? I'm waiting for one of three things to happen. One. My death. Two. George R.R. Martin's death. Three. The completion of his series during his lifetime.
   I decided to hold fire. Not a hard decision. I'll wait for the whole series to come out before I pick up another of those books. When George isn't off spending time hunting a great white whale, he's planning deep in the labyrinths of his mind - for his brain contains more than one labyrinth.
   Putting the books out there is taking a lot of thinking and doing. Einstein gave us an equation for turning energy into published volumes. The effort is tremendous.
   If Mr Martin dies, whole worlds die with him. And then what? Necrophilia? What are the lures allowing another to finish what the creator started? There are two major lures which spring to mind. The first is monetary.
   Copyright law allows for the financial exploitation of material after a creator's death. At the time of writing, that period is 70 years. Or for as long as the Great Ormond Street Hospital exists, in the case of receiving certain royalties delivered by young Peter Pan.
   Why does the right exist beyond death? If you want to boil the notion to its essence, the literary estate is there to care for the deceased author's destitute spouse and child. That's your story nutshell.
   The other lure is the lure of unfinished business - finishing something for the fans.
   Both lures are of interest. They may be weak or strong. I don't happen to have a term for what happens to an estate that is managed well after death. (Lucky?) When the thing's done badly, why don't we call that necrophilia...
   There are a lot of people out there who foam at the mouth when it comes to George R.R. Martin and the time it takes that man to finish writing a book. Well, a book takes as long as it takes to write. That loose description is multiplied, not added to, when tackling a saga.
   Here's a quote from Mr Martin.
   "It never would have dawned on me to write to Professor Tolkien and say, 'You better hurry up with The Silmarillion before you die, old man.' What kind of cretin does that?"
   When I read that comment, I was reminded of the things that were said of Tolkien. His readers - and those were certainly not the fans he'd pick up later - went around frowning, muttering...
   "But what if he dies before he finishes it?"
   In Professor Tolkien's case, his son Christopher would have stepped, nervously, into that gap. Christopher ended up as a Gandalf-like literary steward for the printed side of the Tolkien estate. He had far less say over movie rights, which his father parcelled off.
   "They gutted the book, making an action film for 15- to 25-year-olds."
   You'll have to read The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, and sit through Peter Jackson's movies, to determine whether those films might stray under my heading of necrophilia. No one is saying you have to. I'm just saying.
   Inside knowledge. Is that a good thing? Christopher Tolkien's taste for scholarship and his insider's view of his father's work helped keep necrophilia at bay as far as the written word was concerned. He has his detractors, of course. Christopher happens to be one of them.
   I've heard wretched things said of Frank Herbert's son. Doesn't mean they are true. Frank Herbert created a story about giant worms in the sand. Or something. I'm not quite sure. Having not read the books, I thought I'd give the movie a go when it popped up on television.
   The movie is a brave effort to tell some kind of story about giant worms in the sand. Or something. The movie has its fans. One of those was Frank Herbert. I didn't take an interest in the books. Except to note that, after his death, the dunes of Dune seemed to stretch endlessly.
   Raiders of Dune. Henry and Dune. The Dune Cookbook. I may have made that last one up. Along with the first two.
   It's a dirty game, shooting at an unread target. I considered reading some Dune books to give this blog entry a veneer of respectability. But having a veneer of respectability would destroy the last shred of respectability I possess.
   When is necrophilia not necrophilia? Franz Kafka didn't want his work to see the light of day. Max Brod was meant to throw the pages on the fire. Was Max thinking of the money? Or of unfinished business?
   Brian Herbert was undoubtedly thinking of his dear old dead dad Frank when he raked around in the garage and uncovered notes for all those things of a sandy nature.
   An author dies and a movie goes into production. Unfinished business with the fans? Or the lure of cash for the destitute spouse and child?
   On a side-note, necrophilia conducted while the subject is alive is...I don't know. Cannibalism? When an author disappears up his or her own fundament.
   Accusations have been aimed at George R.R. Martin. He's lost the plot. It's very easy to say that if you've never had to plot. Martin is taking time to reach the end of his tale.
   We can only hope he reaches the story's end before his own. Then we'll see how much of the plot he lost. Or how much of a corner he managed to paint himself out of. His world is a large place, with a long history...
   I suspect one structural element to his saga bugs readers more than anything else does. Some of his characters die for no reason. Well, you see that in the news on a daily basis.
   People die for no reason. I think Mr Martin is attempting to hold a broad broad tale together without committing the ultimate crime...
   If you tie off every single loose end in a saga, you are doing something wrong.
   Why did I read the first few books? As entertainment. On the authorial side of things, I saw, immediately, that I didn't write that way myself. So it was good to have a bit of variety. Something different. Deep in my archive, I found early notes for Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords.
   And I was shocked to see I'd dated the ancient paperwork. Yes, 1991. So, old George and I set down ideas for a fantasy series in the same year. He spent half a decade getting to publication. A quarter of the time it took me to put my first volume out there.
   Why, Mr Martin. You are starting to seem speedy by comparison.
   I had many detours with which to contend. So how goes my own fantasy saga? I still see the series as ten isolated books, readable in isolation. Missed one? Not to worry. In that vein.
   Other stories claim more of my attention. But I return to Neon Gods from time to time. Book two bleeds into book three, and book three haemorrhages into book four.
   Some people sketch their worlds in coloured chalk. Others go for the bronze statue based on the oil-painting - that approach takes longer. I'm working my way up to coloured chalk, by mining it.
   Advice for writers? Try not to disappear up your own fundament - or someone else's, for they may press charges. What do writers owe readers?
   A sense of professionalism. Speed is another matter entirely. From Missy Biozarre came the worrying comment, "I rather like having credibility as a writer."
   She wasn't hinting that I have none, I hope. My head is in the clouds - and it's difficult to disappear up your own backside when the other end is far below. Yes, yes, in the gutter looking at the stars. As for death, I'm reminded of a recommendation from Kacey Vanderkarr. "Please don't die!"
   I'm not creating a broad tapestry. More a fishing-net. Yes, that was a reference to my own work. Hit that free audio on the blog for more details.
   Technique. I have a few corners I don't want to paint myself into. But looking across at George R.R. Martin, I don't have his trouble. I created a non-saga of a saga with Neon Gods - and that generates other problems on a different approach.
   Necrophilia? Mr Martin doesn't need the cash. If he makes it to his own end before finishing the story, cash will serve as the least of his worries.
   At that point, it's up to his wife - if she's still around - to say what's what. The other lure, of unfinished business, may prove contrary to George's wishes. Max Brod ignored Kafka so that Kafka would not be ignored.
   Was that a fancy way of hoping Mr Martin finishes writing the story so that we needn't worry over the literary legacy, body-snatchery, and necrophilia? Maybe. When the series is finished, I'll pick the books up again. Or more likely, I'll read the books from the start.
   Until then, other tales occupy my mind. Some of those are ones I'll have to start writing. And finish writing. Though clearly a fantasist, I am under no illusions when it comes to the heady notion of legacy...
   I can't shake the sensation that my work has no lasting merit. And I don't write with the intention of creating a legacy. So I should be spared necrophilia. In every fucking sense.

WRITING FICTION. THE CHAPTER TEST.

For chapterless works, take a different approach. (A warier one.)

If you plan to write a work of fiction divided into chapters, or acts, there's an important test to apply. Of the piece under consideration, ask yourself this question...

Does something important happen in the chapter?

   Be brutal. If you manage to answer yes, then that part of your writing passes the chapter test. (That's if you manage to answer yes. Apply honesty.)

   If the answer is no, chances are that you can remove the entire fucking chapter without adversely affecting your book.
   Your fucking so-called fucking precious fucking so-called fucking feelings are fucking unimfuckingportant. Fucking take the fucking so-called fucking pain - so that your readers don't have to.
   Profanity in the preceding paragraph was employed to jar complacent writers reading this - the ones who sat straight-faced and said I'm not that writer. My chapters contain stuff.
   (I concocted this blog post after reading a novel in which the plot was relegated to the last ten pages and negated through plot-reversal in the final five. Just so you know.)
   The definition of something important is left to the honest appraisal of each writer. A few points worth considering...

*

 

There is a view that everything in your story must be relevant to your story. No room for dead wood. Taken to extremes, this affects readers who know that is precisely how you always operate. Readers may be herded into thinking that every single item is of significance, comma by fucking comma.

   Result? Even the seemingly-insignificant points raised in your story are automatically flagged as significant. When there really is no dead wood lying around inside your text, will you still leave scope for surprise? Only you can answer that one.

*

Dramatist Anton Chekhov made a statement many take as a commentary on foreshadowing items in storytelling. He was writing about placing the detail of a gun in a tale.

"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."

   The comment isn't just about foreshadowing. It's about cutting the story until there's no fat left, then writing it down. Or cutting the fat after being written, prior to publication. (Don't go cutting after publication - let the story go. Write a better one next time.)

   No dead wood. Chekhov feels it's vital to place everything just so. Something important happens in each act of the play. More than that, though. Chekhov indicates that nothing unimportant should happen at any point in the story. His statement has also been written as...

"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

*

Do we go along with that? We have choices to make. Another dramatist, J.B. Priestley, wrote a play called Dangerous Corner. This starts in darkness with the sound of a shot. Priestley's story has often been likened to a radio play unleashed on the stage. I heard it performed on radio, and was left to imagine the darkness of the opening seconds.

   Though I haven't seen the movie adaptation or a staged performance, I'm inclined to think radio may just be the best place for Dangerous Corner. With the introduction of the shot, does a gun feature in proceedings? Yes. I'll leave the plot out, for those with the inclination to experience Priestley's material.
   Priestley gave us the indication of a gun, and followed up with a firearm in act three. Was he taking Chekhov literally, with a wink at the audience? Priestley often winked at the crowd while displaying the straightest of faces.
   Google's mapping service has blurred the face of Priestley's statue in Bradford. J.B. Priestley, Grumpy Old Git? I can't help but think, had Priestley lived to comment on the sight, he'd have expressed a preference to see the background architecture blurred instead.
   It's the addition of a pipe to the statue that renders Priestley into a wrinklier version of Harold Wilson, with less hair. Judge for yourselves. There are images of these two pipe-smokers side-by-side on the internet, should you trudge far enough. Squint at photos of the young Priestley, and you can almost imagine that he is Harold Wilson.
   My diversion into talk of pipe-smoking Yorkshiremen serves no plot-based purpose. A chapter without development in plot may indicate plot is coming along shortly, after the instigation of character-based activity. Occasionally, story is about atmosphere.
   If every single item in your tale is vital, does that turn you into a predictable writer? Make a choice. Are you in the mood to write a mystery? Herrings of a scarlet hue may mislead your audience for a time. In the same breath, those things are vital and trivial. Of no consequence, yet of great consequence.
   Should nothing happen in a chapter? If the nothing in question is a way of delaying an important act, then the nothing in question becomes all about something. You can heighten tension by throwing kitchen sink after kitchen sink at your readers, before you heave a truck packed with kitchen sinks at your audience in the NEXT chapter...
   But it's easier to build tension by leaving the introduction of essential plumbing UNTIL the next chapter. No advice here. Just a reminder that it's all down to choice, in the end.
   If a chapter-divided novel is a collection of short stories flying in loose formation, then yes...something important must happen in each chapter. For every chapter in which nothing important appears to happen, you'd best throw in a chapter which explains why. Chekhov has a point about needless clutter - wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.
   Be mindful of the importance of needful clutter. Herrings painted scarlet. And, just as important in writing mysteries, don't overlook gold herrings. Diversions from the plot which concealed the plot all along, upon further examination.
   In Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L. Sayers lays on a boatload of misdirection around the death of a painter, knowing most of her non-painting readers will be fooled long enough to keep reading. Artists may give her plot no more than a scathing glance.
   Something must happen in each chapter. Will that something be important to the readers, and not just of interest to the author? Jay Parini offered his novel up for sacrifice on the altar of Gore Vidal's wit...

PARINI: I’m writing a novel in which two characters talk about Kierkegaard for about twenty pages. Can I get away with this?

VIDAL: You can do that, of course. But only if these characters of yours are sitting in a railway car, and the reader knows there is a bomb under the seat.

   A sly dig from Vidal indicating that, should Parini proceed without the bomb, that novel will only have one reader.

*

Decisions, decisions. What do I give time to, as someone who experiences fiction?

   If I pay to see a movie, you have me until the movie ends. This country hick invested time in reaching the vast glowing screen, after all.
   Though if a movie is showing on TV, I'll find something else to do if you can't hold my attention for twenty minutes. At most, I'll waver as long as the half-hour point.
   I tend to give a new TV series about fifteen minutes to convince me. No, I'm not a fan of the idea that episode two is better. Don't let episode two do episode one's job, TV writers. The Sopranos gained and held my attention. I checked out of Lost before that first precious quarter-hour had elapsed.
   Books? If I start a book, I am almost always bound to finish that book - regardless of quality. Here, it is the writerly eye intruding that makes the drudgery of trudgery bearable. For, as a creator of fiction, I often learn much from reading truly shitty wordsmithery.
   The chapter test is all about having forced myself through books with wall-to-wall nothing chapters. Writers inflicted these flaming coals upon my weary feet. I'm sure they'll continue to write The Great (Insert Nationality Here) Novel, believing that which is of utmost importance to the scribbler is of equal importance to the reader.
   Scribbler, beware.
   So I'll raise caution again, for those who missed it. Does something important happen in the chapter? The definition of something important is left to the honest appraisal of each writer. Chapters are short stories flying in loose formation. The looseness of that formation is as much the reader's affair as it is the writer's. Your audience may forgive.
   To write one stray chapter may be regarded as a misfortune. Writing more than one is definitely a sign of carelessness.

Other entries. See also WRITING FICTION. THE KNIFE TEST and WRITING FICTION. THE WOMAN TEST. For a piece on conduct, rather than typing, there's WRITING FICTION. THE CREEPY SEXIST DICK AUTHOR TEST.