D i a r y A r c h i v e : J a n / F e b 0 6
'LEOPARD' - Wednesday 22nd February 2006
But maybe it should. Or maybe I ought to remember that the reason why all the books I studied at school have stayed with me for years is that they ignored the racial make-up of their characters and explored truths which were truly universal. Or maybe I'm right about the blind spot.
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'NOISE' - Wednesday 8th February 2006 Lots and lots of thoughts floating around. There always are, of course, but these current ones are particularly depressing. I suppose I've just been wondering - and at this point cynics may choose to roll their eyes - if it is actually possible for human beings, as a whole, to get on with each other. It seems to me that as long the limits of our tolerance aren't being pushed, we're quite happy to smile at and be friendly with one another, but all that warmth evaporates precisely when it's put to the test. And I never cease to be amazed by the depth and ferocity of the hatred that is left in its place. It's a scary, in-bred hatred. The sort that makes you consider if we wouldn't be better off degenerating into single-celled organisms and starting all over again. What's worse is when fairly intelligent people - people who really should know better - try to legitimise and rationalise their many hatreds by using terms like 'freedom of speech', 'religious beliefs' and 'cultural differences'. They tend to be people who know how to shout very loudly and are adept at using words to fulfil their own hypocritical, self-serving agendae. Unfortunately, the words they use are also our labels for all sorts of values which we quite rightly hold dear. And when the words are abused, then surely we are all insulted and we are all lessened. I prefer not to shout. I suspect that's actually true of most people. But I also suspect that shouting's very much 'in' at the moment. It's brash, it's thoughtless, it's usually emotive yet lacking in substance, it's unsophisticated and it's curiously childish. So I guess that puts it in the same broad category as current cultural treasures like reality TV, manufactured pop music and computer-game-style news bulletins. I just hope that when the shouting dies down (and surely, one day, it'll have to... won't it??!?) there'll still be enough of us non-shouters left. And that we'll still be doing our best to say what we have to say responsibly and with an awareness of our own shortcomings.
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'FEEDBACK' - Thursday 2nd February 2006 I got a letter from the BBC's writersroom the other day. It was basically a rejection of my State Of Emergency script, but it also contained buckets of encouragement. Here are some of the good bits: "a professionally written, compelling story which chillingly and atmospherically depicts future life" "There are some interesting and wacky concepts here" "Asha and Raya are intriguing characters" "a well-written piece from an author with a good grasp of narrative showing potential for radio and TV as well as film" Of course, there were bad bits too - they were the reasons why the script was rejected - but the final paragraph said that they're interested in "keeping abreast" of my writing career and that they'd like me to send them some more stuff... which is the best writing-related news I've had in a long time, so I allowed myself the faintest of smiles when I read the letter. Soon wiped it off, though. In other 'news', both courses are going well and are generating a few interesting ideas for films and novels. If I'm being honest, though, I'm currently less intrigued with the ideas themselves than I am with trying to work out where they come from. But I think my magnum opus about a struggling author who wants to unravel the workings of his mind can wait a while... certainly until March, anyway...
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'TALLY' continued - Saturday 21st January 2006 Guess what: the total number of Pumpkin Seed rejections has gone up to 6! And that's not counting the letter which said that my submission had to be returned because the agent to whom I'd sent it is dead. So that makes 7 down, 20 to go.
In slightly more encouraging news, I've enrolled on another course, although this one won't involve a mad rush from the south coast to the City. In fact, it won't involve any travelling at all, because it'll be conducted online, which should prove interesting. First lesson: 11 am tomorrow.
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'TALLY' - Thursday 19th January 2006 Here we go again... On Tuesday, I sent copies of my children's book - The Pumpkin Seed - to 27 literary agents... and today I received my first rejection. "Having considered" my work (does that mean they read it?) they decided they wouldn't be able to find a publisher for it. I wonder what tomorrow's post will bring...
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'CRUMBLES' - Saturday 14th January 2006 I'm putting all my faith in fortune cookies this year. On the 1st of January, the Divine L and I decided to start the new year as lazily as possible by having a Chinese takeaway. Naturally, we picked up a couple of cookies too. Lo and behold, mine contained the following message:
And the Divine L - who is my champion and chief source of motivation as far as creativity goes - found this:
So there we are: the Gods will be on my side in 2006! The Sunday Times recently ran a depressing article about the current state of the publishing industry. I won't link to it here, because they don't allow much of their online content to be accessed by non-paying visitors, but the basic premise was this: They took the first three chapters of two Booker-winning 70s novels (one of them by V S Naipaul, who is a Nobel winner), changed the names of the characters and submitted them to 20 agents and publishers, after having made up fake names for the authors, of course. You can guess what happened, can't you? For a start, not a single person recognised the works. And, more importantly, no-one considered them to be of any quality. All 20 agents/publishers responded with a rejection letter, most of which said that the writing contained some good ideas but was simply not worthy of publication.
Monday should be exciting, because it'll see me dashing off to London after work to attend the first session of a 10 week course entitled Novel And Longer Fiction Writing. Feels strange being a student again, albeit a part-time, mature one. Oh, and I'd better extend official, cyber-thanks to my muse, whose generosity has not dwindled over the last fortnight: just a few days ago, I completed the first draft of a 30-minute TV script called The Unchangeable Features Of Troy. So, yes, things have been busy lately.
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On the radio this morning, an English actress of Indian descent was interviewed about her adolescence, which was spent in the UK. She said the time was marked by struggles to find out who she "really" was, to work out a way of expressing her ethnicity, to cope with the intolerance of the many "narrow-minded" people she encountered... All the familiar ethnic-minority-angst... not that its familiarity makes it any less real or important, of course. Her words made me ask myself - not for the first time - why I have so little interest in exploring such issues in my own writing. I often wonder if I shouldn't take this as an indication that a massive blind spot exists on my psyche. You would've thought that my multi-ethnic background would have compelled me to write pages and pages of racially themed fiction, but that certainly isn't the case. I also wonder if I shouldn't feel angered by the fact that my literary education was firmly fixed on the writing of white people living in western Europe. At school, I didn't study a single novel, play or poem written by a representative of an ethnic minority (I'm sure I hadn't even heard the term at school!) but that didn't bother me then... and it doesn't really bother me now.
