Titles

Titles to novels are almost harder to write than the novel itself. This isn’t apparent from the point of view of the reader. On my desk, I can see Terry Southern’s ‘Candy’, Philip Roth’s ‘Zuckerman Unbound’, and Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’. Each title exists, in my mind at least, as though they are integral to the novels they represent. When I think of the book. I think of the title.

As a reader, you know the title before you know the book. As a writer, you often come to know the book long before you know its title. I have spent days thinking up a title for a story I’m in the middle of completing. Nothing seems right but then, the book is still a series of problems I have yet to overcome. Finding the title transforms the story (or a series of written pages) into something more imposing. It gives the manuscript an identity. It’s like putting the roof on a house. Until that point, it wasn’t a house but a series of walls, abutments, and foundations. I want to give these pages an identity as a book but perhaps it’s too early. I’m still standing in the foundations wondering if this thing will ever get built.

Bones

Sometimes I fear that I write for words and not for meaning. A novel is more than a sequence of chapters and writing any kind of narrative from the inside requires a knowledge of their anatomy. Much of it is empty space. The places where the blood flows, where the simplest prose can suffice and mere detail exist. But to create these spaces requires knowledge of where cartilage must be strung, where the supports of the narrative’s bones must rest. Too often I find myself filling space before I have the skeleton in place. At other times I worry too much about bones. Somewhere between the two, lies a novel.

The Writers

From my room, I hear the hammer of weights from the gym. In the summer, they work out with the doors open. The sound echoes across all the gardens and the waste ground separating me from them. The routines are always the same. They have the same regularity as my fingers find on this keyboard. They exercise as I exercise. Big fingers hitting iron keys. These guys are as local as me but they grunt when I sniff. They swear when I try my hardest to find just the right word. More often than not, the words they find are much better than mine. In their way, they are also writers. I can tell because they also growl when they exercise.

Two Lines: The Mirror of the Sea

"Landfall and Departure mark the rhythmical swing of a seaman’s life and of a ship’s career. From land to land is the most concise definition of a ship’s earthly fate."
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

Absolute stunning perfection.

So much could be said about two lines that hang together like the balanced sails on some turn of the century clipper. The lines have a ‘rhythmical swing’ and a caesura sits about the middle of the first line (after ‘swing’) which leads the ear to find an equal length until we reach the full stop. It’s only natural for us to then read the second line with a slightly forced pause after ‘concise’, which the pushes us on to stress ‘definition’. The technique is poetic. The effect sublime.

Cultural Hyperventilation

The media is in a febrile state. The internet has made it so. Where once we had a relatively few collections of individuals, to whom we even ascribed friendly names like the BBC, NBC, HBO, Macillan, Random House, Hodder & Stoughton, all producing TV shows, films, books, newspapers, or journals, we now have millions of individuals breaking all the rules and teaching us how to be creative. Low cost HD cameras and a general will to anarchy has made it possible for consumers to become producers and for the mainstream to embrace everyday culture in a new and, apparently, invigorating way.

Increasingly the web is the place where the media source material for broadcast. We are encouraged to send our videos and photographs into news channels for which they pay us nothing but the honour of having our names read out on air. YouTube has become the free repository of gaffs, gags, and the grisly, and it is these momentary oddities of life that are delivered into our living rooms on a daily basis. They may be cheap filler but they are increasingly defining our culture, and who and what we are.

Against these new standards, older forms of expression seem precisely that: old, outdated, lapsing into insignificance for all but a few who wish to cherish their archaic mannerisms. Structure went out of the window with the talent. This is a world made by and for William S. Burroughs where everything it cut up and rearranged. The most damning criticism of any form of culture these days is to describe it as ‘safe’. Although new media isn’t really new media at all (though the medium has certainly changed), it is a new way of ascribing value to the brash, the bold, the ballsy. MTV can lay claim to have been in the vanguard of this new aesthetic of grotesque banality. ‘Jackass’ (and it’s UK derivative ‘Dirty Sanchez’) represented the most extreme examples of the low-brow writ large. When a man is willing to put a staple through his own foreskin in order to get on TV, there’s very little chance that the slow burn privations of long term artistic integrity stand any chance of succeeding. What chance the young but talented landscape painter against Damien Hurst’s diamond-encrusted skulls or the media-savvy doodling of ‘Banksy’?

As rank amateurism flourishes, professional amateurism gains ground. It is now an established practice that all those tangential to fame also find fame. The world is filled with hundreds like Karl Pilkington (mate to Ricky Gervais) or Jimmy Doherty (he of ‘Jimmy’s Farm’ and childhood friend of Jamie Oliver). Give the audience more of what they think they want. Why be satisfied with Ozzie when there’s also Sharon, Kelly, and Jack? We want more, more, more, more of the same...

The ironies are as apparent as they are vulgar. Democratising the means of production has led us to the point where the daughters of rock stars can present the news, footballers wives produce newspaper columns, porn stars write books for children. The product may be inferior to that of the professionals whose jobs they have taken but only by reducing our standards have we allowed ourselves to become in thrall to those standards and to these people. Our banality breeds their banality and it can only get worse.

As the visual has risen, it is customary to say that the written has lessened in significance. Yet the written word still has a role to play: it’s that of the placeholder or the tag. It isn’t so important that words are put together with any artistry. They must simply exist in the right form to help people find the visuals to satisfy their hunger for quick Big Mac entertainment. It isn’t hard to envisage a time when good tagging is cherished over good writing. In fact, it might already be here. Welcome to the world of the blogosphere.

Is it possible that too much creative oxygen makes us hyperventilate? Do we breathe hard and fast because there’s simply too much culture to enjoy? Or is it that we’ve not enough quality carbon dioxide in the blood, too few producers of merit and note? And how do creators keep pace in a world where the average consumer with a video recorder stands more chance of success than an artist in a studio? Is it culture? Is it art? Is it even good for us?

The most popular websites in the UK are generally those like the BBC that already have a large readership because of their (old-media) mainstream activities, or those that embrace the counter-side of culture. Yet to describe it as counterculture is trite when it is really in the ascension. To be counter in our culture is to still believe in the role of the library or the museum, it is to read books other than those plugged 24/7 via Amazon’s newsletters. To be different is to refuse to embrace this cult of difference. A few people still succeed by working the old way. From the creative individual’s point of view, it has more guarantee of success. However, when the creative pool is measured in the many millions, the media can carry on plucking out the lucky strikes. From their point of view, there is always another funny clip of a dog wearing glasses, a guy trying to mix cola and mints, another monkey who has struck a few keys together and accidentally written a masterpiece. No wonder so many of us are confused and gasping for breath.

First Voice

I suppose I begin with the thing that started my thinking about voice and it’s that quote by Philip Roth I’ve put to the right of the page. When I first read this line I questioned if ‘voice’ is really as uncategorisable as this quote would suggest. Might we not equally equate it to ‘genius’ and from there leave it alone as an irreducible truth? The assumption is that ‘voice’ is out there, to be picked up from ether if the writer has the talent. It’s a fairly common assumption. It’s the hackneyed line: ‘You either have it or you don’t, kid... And you sure as hell don’t’.

My instincts – my faith, I suppose – encourage me to believe that it’s more practical than that. Voice is a deliberate construction which at the most basic level comes down to lexical choices, runs through syntax and grammar, and expands to include something as nebulous as ‘world view’ or ideology. Might we not say that Orwell’s voice is still apparent in many an iconic dystopia?

At the level of words, though, I think we can be more precise. Roth himself writes the words of Nathan Zuckerman who is himself repeating the words of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. And he makes an subtle choice in the quote that really began my thinking about voice. ‘Voice’, says Lonoff, ‘begins at around the back of the knees’. I think the ‘at’ is superfluous unless it does something we don’t initially notice. Voice ‘begins around’ would make for an easier read. Only, voice is not about what’s easy. It’s about what is characteristic. The ‘at’ gives us a broken rhythm of speech, or, at the least, it locates us in the idiom of the Jewish writer living much of his life out in the countryside. Lonoff, Zuckerman, or Roth: the line passes us by unpolished. And to my untrained ear (or eye) is critical to understand voice because voice is as much about the unpolished nature of prose than it is about presenting clean marble. Voice is alive when prose appears to be hewn from a natural rock face.

To jump metaphors: it is the background radiation – a ‘white noise’ – that lies beneath whatever we’re hearing.

Take another example, and speaking of 'White Noise', it is from the first page of Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’.

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

Where is the voice here? I would say it’s the prolonged detail lapsing into repetition (the running and repeated images of people covering their faces). I also think it’s most apparent in the disjointed fourth sentence, beginning ‘They had shoes...’. The narrator breaks off, ‘a woman with a shoe in each hand’, as if the woman has literally run through his sentence. The voice here is harried. It makes, of course, for a great opening. There is momentum generated by fleeting glimpses of a scene, rather than a prolonged exposure to detail.