Grey, Grey, Grey (repeat 47 times)

They say that everyone has a book in them.

My standard reply to this has always been a flippant, ‘Yes, but most people’s books would be unreadable’. You only have to look at some fan fiction on the web to see that. Pick any film or TV show (or even Radio 4’s ‘The Archers’) that has a substantial following and likely as not there’ll be some budding author online extending the official story in prose form – and usually with some pornographic content thrown in for good measure (though thankfully not in the case of ‘The Archers). It’s a nice idea – if you can ignore the copyright infringement – that anyone can have a go at taking his or her favourite characters into situations that the ‘official’ cannon won’t.

When ‘Snowqueens Icedragon’ posted ‘Master of the Universe’, her erotic fan fiction based on characters from the ‘Twilight’ vampire saga, she was basically just transcribing her own filthy daydreams. ‘This is my midlife crisis, writ large’, she says. ‘All my fantasies in there, and that's it’. Could she have imagined in her wildest (and cleanest) dreams the success it would have when she removed the copyrighted details, changed her pseudonym to E. L. James and rebadged her work as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’? It’s now become the UK’s fastest selling paperback. Good luck to her and her many readers.

But the problem with most online fiction (and many self-published ones) is the total lack of editorial control. Much of it is simply dreadful. Happily though some of it’s good and some of it – like ‘Master of the Universe’ – finds a niche market.

I’ve recently re-examined my views on this article’s initial statement and I’m no longer sure that my default response to it is correct. I don’t think I still believe that everyone has the ability to write a book, whether a good or bad one. I’m not sure that everyone has the dedication. Sure, everyone could have the idea for a book, a one-off spark of inspiration – ‘ooh, that would make a great plot for a novel’ – but to carry it through to completion? No, I don’t think so.

One thing that E. L. James did that they (and I) have yet to do? She finished what she started. She has three completed novels out there in the market. I have none. I do though have half a dozen novels lying around in various states of progress. My hard drive is currently a graveyard of dead and dying novels. Some I still like, some I despise for having wasted so much of my keyboard time. I’ve learned something from starting all of them, but sadly none of them have taught me how place 100,000 words in a precise order that other people could take an interest in and even recommend to their friends. Yet.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for this week. I must dash – I’ve promised to complete my next self-published book by the end of the month.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

On Your Bike

I note that it’s Tour de France time again. Some will be getting excited at the possibility of a British victory. Some will see it as a chance to lust after fit young men in skin-tight Lycra. And others will already be typing their articles about ‘drug cheats’, just itching to insert the latest star name into their writing.

Because sure as boxers will go through their ridiculous macho pre-fight weigh-in posturing pantomime, sure as weak-ankled Premiership footballers will roll around in agony as if taken out by a sniper in row J at the merest nudge from an opponent, sure as Pakistani cricketers will overstep the mark every time that they overstep the mark, then cyclists will feel that they have to test the substance testers’ testing abilities. I don’t know what it is about this particular sport but it seems that, more than any other event, the winner of a cycling tour isn’t finalised until all the urine’s been analysed and the court rulings have been overturned several times.

(All of the above is ‘allegedly’ of course.)

It’s terrible the stuff that people put into their bodies to give them an extra competitive edge, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I’m not so sure. Let’s take the hypothetical case of two athletes – pick any sport you want. Athlete A sticks to a healthy diet of grilled chicken and fish with plenty of fruit and vegetables, protein shakes and isotonic drinks to aid recovery. Athlete B regularly eats pizza and chips and washes them down with eight pints of beer.  Now if all other things are equal then you’d expect Athlete A to come out on top in their chosen event, but isn’t that just because they both partook of substances that they knew would alter their performance – one for better, one for worse? Could it not be argued that eating a protein-packed tuna steak is no different to taking some other substance that will increase muscle strength? The Olympic motto is made up of three Latin words: ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’, which translates as ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. Surely steroids, stimulants and all the other drugs on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned substance list are designed to make the human body do just that: run faster, jump higher, be stronger. Isn’t one of the aims of the Olympic movement to test the limits of human ability? How fast can we go, how high can we jump, how strong can we be without the aid of physical attachments?

Which brings us to Oscar Pistorius, the incredible South African ‘Blade Runner’. Sprinting on his carbon fibre prosthetics he is, quite literally, in a class of his own. But that’s the problem. Oscar wants to be able to run against all the other kids in the other classes too. He’s not content with demonstrations and private challenges. Having rightly become a Paralympic legend, Oscar feels that he should be able to take on the best able-bodied athletes in the world in regular competitions like the upcoming London Olympics and has taken his case to court several times. Now I think that what he’s done with his life is magnificent and his drive and determination put most other people’s to shame, but if we allow Pistorius to compete against able-bodied athletes, where do we draw the line? Could we eventually see an old bloke who works at B&Q winning the weight lifting with the aid of his fork lift truck? Should shot putters be allowed to take a howitzer into the circle with them as part of their legal equipment?  While he is undoubtedly a supreme physical specimen, at least some of Oscar’s successes must go down to the technology which aids his phenomenal natural ability, and this must prevent him from competing against those whose abilities aren’t also mechanically enhanced.

There are some mighty big questions there and they’ll be discussed long after this summer of sport is over. One thing’s for sure though. I won’t win any medals. I’ll be too busy watching it all from the safety of my sofa with beer and snacks within arm’s reach.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Self Censored

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Then the boy – and isn’t it always the boy? – does something stupid to ruin the situation. Just when things are at their worst something miraculous happens and they get back together. The end.

How many short stories have followed that basic formula? Thousands? Millions? And many of them have been written by much better authors than me. There’s no way that I could write a top quality short story along those lines, but it hasn’t stopped me trying, many times.

No, if I’m to be successful in the short story field (however you might define ‘success’ – there’s a whole ‘nother blog in that) then I have to try something different. I have to make my stories stand out from the crowd in some way.

Fortunately I’m not afraid to take the road less travelled, to write about subjects that others might shy away from, so maybe this is the way that my writing should veer: towards the dark side. Don’t get me wring, I couldn’t and wouldn’t fill my tales with ‘gorenography’, sexual deviance or distasteful political and personal viewpoints just for the point of titillate the reader, but I wouldn’t automatically reject them as subjects if they were part of a good plot. For instance, I once wrote a short story about internet grooming. It conjured up unpleasant thought in me and hopefully in the reader too but it was integral to the storyline and, believe it or not, the final twist gave it a ‘feel-good’ ending. Sort of.

I’m currently working a tale about assisted suicide. That one doesn’t have any twist but hopefully gets the reader to ask a few questions about themselves and the society in which they live. The same applies to another about domestic abuse. These aren’t taboo thrills shoehorned into my prose for shock value. They’re jumping-on points, integral themes without which the story wouldn’t even exist.

So my question to you today is this: Am I wrong to tackle these subjects? And if not these, are there some topics that are just too raw to write about, just too objectionable to put into a piece of fiction the point of which is, let’s face it, simply to entertain?


© Shaun Finnie 2012

Going For Promotion

It’s easy to see where some old phrases come from.  ‘Make hay while the sun shines’, ‘Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched’, to ‘throw a spanner in the works’: these are all pretty straightforward in meaning and it’s not difficult to see how they originated.

But what about ‘blow your own trumpet’? Where did that one start? It does sound a little dodgy, especially in the American version, ‘blow your own horn’….

Well I did a little research and found that it comes from Ye Olde Days of Yore, or maybe a few months beforehand. When a knight rode into town he was supposed to have a herald or two to sound a fanfare announcing his arrival, but if he was too poor or lowly to have a herald – or even if he just thought that he could do a better job of self-promotion –  he would dispense with the need for a herald and literally blow his own trumpet.

It’s a fascinating concept – a guy who feels the need to announce his greatness to the world and if, through circumstances or choice, there’s nobody else to do it then by God and King Harry, he’ll just have to do it himself.

I can’t imagine doing that. I’m English. Maybe in the days when dragons needed slaying we did that kind of thing but not now. If God had an off-day and it was left to me to save the Queen I’d probably be more likely to say ‘It was nothing, don’t make a fuss’ than to book a slot on TV selling my story to Pierce Morgan.

But maybe I should. Maybe, in my professional life at least, I should shout my triumphs however small.

So here goes…

‘My name is Shaun Finnie and I’m a writer. I have several books available at the moment and they’re all fantastic. Go and buy them now, your life will be better for it.

‘Look at me everyone, I’m fantastic!’

No, it’s just not me. My horn should remain untainted by my own lips.

Perhaps I should try a wig and a pseudonym. Or hire a herald to write fake reviews on Amazon?

© Shaun Finnie 2012

'Group' Therapy

In the Year of Her Lord 1486, a book was published in St Albans. It was called, with incredible simplicity, ‘The Book of St Albans’ and was credited to Dame Juliana Berners. It was aimed squarely at the huntin’ an’ shootin’ and fishin’ types, probably because the Sun readers of the day hadn’t learned that they couldn’t read yet.

‘The Book of St Albans’ is memorable today for one reason; within its pages Dame Juliana more or less invented the concept of collective nouns – words for a group of things. As nobody had brought these words together before the good Dame she was free to do as she liked. And, apparently, she liked very much, which is why we now have a bellowing of Bullfinches, a plump of Moorhens and a murder of Crows.

But these were laid down over six centuries ago. Dame Juliana tried her best to move with the times, I’m sure, but there’s a limit to how far you can predict the future. Most things that we take for granted today would baffle her. Most of them baffle me to be honest.

With that in mind, let’s have a go at updating the list. Let’s create some new collective nouns, starting with a couple for my golfing buddies:

·         A Jed of Woods;

·         A ningboard of Irons;

·         An i-Sore of Gadgets;

·         A midden of D*n Br*wn Books;

·         An assimilation of Post Offices;

·         A deluge of British Summers;

·         A catatonia of TOWIE and Big Brother ‘stars’;

·         A serpent of Politicians;

·         A slumber  of Lords;

·         A redundancy of Big-Budget Movie Remakes;

·         A meringue of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings;

·         An irrelevance of Tweets;

·         A Cousteau of Chelsea forwards;

·         A remainder of Books by Shaun Finnie.

So that’s my claim for Damehood. Now it’s over to you…

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Revulsion Compulsion

All good writing (and most bad) is at least partially autobiographical in nature. Our own life experiences form the basis of our thoughts, dreams and imaginations. My fiction is no different. I plunder my history as much as any author does, giving characters parts of my own lifestyle and memories, giving them my own prejudices and desires, experiencing my own life wish-list through their actions. They say ‘Write what you know’. That’s what I do. That’s what all writers do if they want their work to appear believable.

But of course ‘Write what you know’ doesn’t mean that if I don’t know something right now, I can’t learn about it and then write knowledgeably. That’s the point of research. Read up on a subject; then I’ll know about it and will indeed be able to write what I know.

But research can only take a writer so far. For instance, I’ve written from a female point of view despite (last time I checked) being very male. After I’ve rewritten (and rewritten, and rewritten) and made that kind of story as good as I can, I then send it to several women friends to see if my female character sounds and acts in an authentic manner. I guess they’d have a better insight into her then I do. Similarly I recently wrote a story from the point of view of a young American boy growing up in the 1950s. That’s not something I personally experienced so I got an American friend to check it out. His cultural suggestions made a huge difference to the believability of that character.

Sometimes though I just have to rely on my imagination. I don’t personally know any really repugnant people. Even my ex-boss who I always claimed that I wouldn’t spit on if he were on fire had some good points. Like getting made redundant before I did; lots of people found that very entertaining.

I don’t know any mass murderers. I don’t know any far-right neo-nazis, or any far-left revolutionaries for that matter, although I do know several people who are ‘far out’ in many other ways (‘man’). I don’t know any mad scientists who spend as much time refining their plans for world domination as they do practicing their trademark evil cackle. ‘Mwah-ha-haaaaa’.

I’ve never really come into contact with anyone who I’ve found irredeemably loathsome so how can I write from the perspective of a completely despicable character? And I do want to. Actors say that the villains are the best part to play, that they relish the challenge of trying to convince an audience that they’ve become a character as far removed as possible from their own. What are writers if not just actors who use the written word instead of the spoken one?

Yet if I manage to create a believable character who disgusts the reader in some way, does it mean that part of me is morally repugnant too? Is it harmful to go digging, to bring these socially unacceptable sections of my psyche to the fore?

I guess there’s a bit of (insert your favourite villain here) in all of us.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Imminent Linguicide

Alot is not a real word. It’s two words, as in ‘I rant at my screen a lot’. That’s not hard to learn, surely?

Apparently so, because I see it all the time throughout the internet.

There’s no such word as ‘forums’ either. It’s fora. It’s a simple enough lesson, but if you look at most online message boards you’d think that learning a new word was as impossible as implementing a decent European fiscal policy or teaching D*n Br*wn how and when to use exposition.

I’m utterly dismayed when I read things like the following, which is a large forum creator’s explanation that he knows that ‘fora’ is the correct plural, however…

‘…whilst we are against most forms of language dumbing-down, we are also against unnecessary complication. Everyone knows and understands the word forums. Most people don't know what fora means. There is almost no chance of changing that situation significantly, no matter how hard the purists might want to. Like the failed Esperanto language, we believe reality wins over idealism. It's sad but inescapably true. We don't believe it makes sense to promote fora as the "correct" pluralisation because it creates confusion, offers no real benefit, and can't work anyway so it's pointless trying.’

That’s that then; it’s pointless trying. I know that you can’t see me, but I’m shaking my head in disbelief and exasperation. He may as well have said, ‘I’m going to die so it’s pointless living’.

We have the language of Keats, of Milton, of Shakespeare and it’s pointless trying to retain its magnificent complexity. We may as well reduce it to ‘Shl I kmpr u2a smrs day’.

It’s as ridiculous as saying (as I heard this week) that a new blockbuster movie is ‘awesome’. If the great Cthulu and all his fictional deity mates ripped the sky apart and came screaming through the lacerations in the fabric of the of the space-time continuum along with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and if they were all lead by the late, great, Charlton Heston in full Moses regalia…  now THAT would be awesome indeed. But a movie? No. That’s not awesome, it’s merely entertaining.

Do these things matter? Well yes, I think that they do, in the same way that correct apostrophe use is important – just how did a film called ‘Two Weeks Notice’ ever get released? On grammatical AND artistic grounds? Was nobody at all in the Warner Brothers organisation taught about apostrophe usage with possession and omission? Or maybe they know but decided against the apostrophe on artistic grounds?

These are rules, and if we play fast and loose with these, then what other rules can we decide to ignore? Tax evasion? Speeding? Murder? Where do you draw the line?

I think that you can tell by the tone of this piece that I’m feeling particularly old this week. I’ve noticed that there are more grey hairs on my chest than black ones and that when I stand up my knees crack like a shot from Chuck Connors’ rifle; you might need to look that one up if you’re not old yourself.

If I’m honest I know that change is good. Change is healthy. The world is made for the young. Otherwise we’d still be living in Elizabethan squalor, doffing our caps to the local Squire and eating frumenty.

There is no point whatsoever in ranting against linguistic changes, trying to turn a tide whose advance is – as the owner of that forum said – inevitable. It only leads to frustration, stomach ulcers and a reputation for being the local nutter.

Language evolves, innit? But there’s still no such word as ‘alot’.

© Shaun Finnie 2012