Eight Days a Week

What does your normal working week consist of? Is it the clichéd Monday to Friday, forty hours or so? Or perhaps it's more flexible that than? Maybe you might even do shift work? Chances are though, whatever your working pattern, your employer gives you two days a week off, probably Saturday and Sunday.

As a self-employed writer I have the freedom to work whatever hours I want. That's fantastic, but it has a downside; the fewer hours that I put in then the lower wordcount I produce. I try to work five days and take two days off but unless I have something special planned those two rest days are unlikely to be at the traditional weekend. I prefer to take my two days free time when most people are at work, meaning that anywhere I go will be quieter and possibly cheaper.

But a full day off? Twenty-four hours without any writing whatsoever? That very rarely happens. I know that many people will see my work as an easy option - sitting around thinking and occasionally tippy-tapping at a keyboard - but the truth is that I'm practically always working. In this line of work there's no time off at all. Even when I'm away from the office my mind's still working out plot points, considering how my characters would react in certain situations, soaking up my surroundings or making notes about people and places I see for further reference.

On a night out with friends or a day shopping with the Beloved I'll always have a notebook and pen with me. I've been known to dictate messages into my phone for later transcription and even sent text messages to myself if a have a sudden thought that just needs a quick note. I have notebooks in just about every room in the house including a waterproof one in the bathroom for if I have a flash of inspiration while soaking my aches and pains away. And naturally there's a pad in my bedside cabinet so that I can document those most unfathomable of thoughts - dreams - before they disappear back into whatever ether they came from.

My point is that, though I may not actually clock as many official working hours as most employees, I can honestly say that I'm always on call, ready for that moment when something triggers a thought that has to be recorded before it evaporates like early morning mist over a summer lake. I'm never unavailable, the muse can strike at any moment and if I miss it then, with the state of my memory, it's gone forever. You could say that I'm at work 24/7, 365 days a year.

It's a tough life, but it's so much more enjoyable than my old job in the steelworks.

© Shaun Finnie 2014

Silence is Golden

It's good to get away from the office and the keyboard sometimes, to sit peacefully with just a notepad and a pen. Somehow in a different environment the ideas flow in a different way. It seems more organic, like I'm creating stories in the same way that people have done for centuries.

I sat in my local library, a lovely new building that laughs in the face of all the local council cuts that have fallen on similar facilities up and down the country recently. It's more of a community centre really but the library section is excellent, well stocked with books and incredibly peaceful. It's almost like a church for those of us who worship the written word. I settled into a comfortable wing-backed armchair, paused a moment to soak in the calming atmosphere and then took up the tools of my trade.

In this perfect workplace I churned out page after page of useful prose and nodes, the ideas flowing directly from brain to arm to pen to page. It was effortless, almost like automatic writing, if you believe in such things. I was, as athletes say, in the zone and all was well in my ultra-productive world.

Remember that I said the library is a kind of community centre? I should have become suspicious when the librarians began to erect a set of brightly coloured barriers around the children's book area, just beside my little oasis of calm. I should have noticed that the little cluster of push chairs and buggies in the doorway had multiplied in the last few moments but I was so engrossed in my work that my peripheral vision had sort of shut down. I was pretty much oblivious to everything except my blurring hand and the scribbled squiggles that it left on the page.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that 'Hell is other people'. If I may, for the purposes of this blog I'll amend that to 'Hell is other people's children.' Now, I'm sire that all the little darlings are perfect angels, at least as far as their parents are concerned, but an entire pack of them did nothing for the library's ambience or my concentration. Fingernails down a blackboard sound like nothing compared to a shrieking two year old. The repeated and unheeded maternal calls for Tilly and Kayden to stop running around weren't really conducive to my channelling of the muse but I grit my teeth and pushed my pen with a renewed purpose. I'm a professional. I could work through this. And I did. I plodded on and tried to block out the sounds of carnage. I have to be a bit smug here and say that it worked. For a bit. Right up until the singing started.

I'm quite willing to believe that, at some point in his fictional furry life, Little Peter Rabbit did indeed have a fly upon his noes but let's be honest: his tale doesn't really make for great song lyrics. He's never going to win an Ivor Novello with lines about his floppy ears and curly whiskers. But the thirty or so members of the mother and toddler group didn't seem to care, with the elder half of their contingent singing along with gusto in four different keys at the same time, while the younger attendees either stared at their parents in bemused incomprehension or completely ignored them and continued slapping their play partners with the hardest hardback they could wield.

I momentarily considered joining with the song but suspected that my vibrant tenor might stand out among so many wobbly altos and sopranos. And anyway, I know a somewhat different set of lyrics to the tune that they were attempting. I'm all for education at an early age but I think that there are some things that these toddlers were a little too young to find out about.

I tried to carry on with my work but the moment had passed. My creative juices had dried up like a week-old Lidl Satsuma. It was no good. I packed up my stuff in my manly man-bag and headed for the coffee shop around the corner. Perhaps a slice of Victoria sponge would clear my ears.

But just before I left the library lady nearby asked if she could have a piece of paper to scribble some notes on and naturally I shared a page from my notebook with her. There was never any question as to whether I would. Share with people, it's just the right thing to do.  Remember: there's no I in Pad.

Read or Dead

I'm not a great fan of literary sequels. But at least they're so much better than the sequel penned by a different writer after the original author's death. That really is a ghastly idea.

Here's a challenge: can you think of any book that's a follow-up to a dead author's work which compares favourably with the original novel. I bet you'll struggle.

There are a whole host of 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'James Bond' books written long after their original author had passed and while many are readable and some highly enjoyable they don't hold a candle to the brilliance of the original creations. The same with the many authors who have tried to follow in H.P. Lovecraft's sick and twisted footsteps.

I might make an exception for Andrew Neiderman writing as "The New Virginia Andrews" but again, nothing that he's produced is of the level of her classic 'Flowers in the Attic'. And Eoin Colfer is an excellent writer. I love his Artemis Fowl series and his later, more adult-oriented works, 'Screwed' and 'Plugged', but can anyone really offer an argument in support of 'And Another Thing', his addition to the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series? If ever there was a redundant addition to a classic series surely this was it?

This blog and it's predecessor from last week can really be summed up as a plea to writers young and old to strive for original ideas, to shy away from the lure of an already-established readership in favour of pushing new boundaries and mining for new storylines and characters.

Of course there are no new ideas in the universe but is it too much for obviously talented writers to hang the old ideas onto new frameworks with new characters and new situations to flesh them out? Are there no new sleuths in the world? Is it really more important to write more 'Sherlock' stories? And P.D. James is supremely talented, so why on Earth did she have to create the Jane Austen pastiche, 'Death Comes to Pemberley'?

I better quit before I descend into Full Rant Mode. So it's time to wrap up, for time is something I have little of at the moment. I have a huge writing project that I'm in the middle of.

It's a sequel to my novel, 'The Happiest Workplace On Earth'. Well I have to pay the bills like everyone else.

© Shaun Finnie 2014

Once More, Without Feeling

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew heartily sick of his Sherlock Holmes novels. He felt that he had written much worthier work (both in the fields of medicine and spirituality) and that his writings on the master detective were pulp trash. Yet his publishers and his public wanted more about Holmes and so he wrote them what they wanted, if only to make sure that he was allowed to write about the things that he loved.

I recently found a novel that I hadn't known existed - 'Son of Rosemary's Baby' by the author of the original 'Rosemary's Baby', Ira Levin. Frankly, it's a pale shadow of the first book, with underdeveloped characters and a truly risible, laugh out loud ending. But Mr Levin is quite honest to say that he'd resisted writing a sequel for decades before an offer came along that he simply couldn't turn down.

I can understand him doing it for the money, certainly. And I can also get the idea that, if people really love a novel then they'll naturally want to find out what happens to its characters after they've turned the final page. And for the author there's a built-in readership in a sequel which equates to much-needed income. That's something that every writer, even Sir Arthur, welcomes.

So the author might (if they're lucky) end up financially happy but will they be artistically satisfied? Surely all of us write because, at some level at least, we have to and would write whether or not anyone eventually read our work? Tell me it's not just me that does this? Tell me that best-selling authors of sequels aren't just literary whores, pandering to their customer's every desire whether or not it's what the writer really wants to do?

I understand that, with a sequel to a well-received novel, everyone goes away happy, at least to some degree, but wouldn't they be even happier with a new novel full of new ideas? Eoin Colfer has sold millions of Artemis Fowl books, but his later, adult novel - 'Plugged' - is so much better (to these adult eyes, at least). It's full of completely fresh ideas, not weighed down with the baggage of previous work. And then he went and spoiled it by writing a terribly inferior sequel, 'Screwed'.

And I've even written sequels to my own short stories, usually when readers have asked me the same question: What happened to the characters next. I've been as interested as they have and I've given it my best shot but it seems to me that it's a bit of a cop out, a waste of talent and imagination. That story's been told, let's all move on to the next one.

So I think I've made my view clear. I'm not a great fan of literary sequels. But at least they're so much better than the sequel penned by a different writer after the original author's death. That really is a ghastly idea.