The Book Groups

Posted by William Gallagher

The plural is important. I’ve been waiting to show you The Book Groups for months. It’s a short story that I was commissioned to write – actually my first-ever commissioned short prose – for the West Midlands Readers’ Network. That’s an organisation which does a just unfathomably huge and wide range of work with readers, libraries and anything to do with books. I think this is their best idea: they commission six writers and then pair them up with six reading groups.

I got a group in Combrook, near Stratford on Avon. (Actually, they might disagree with that definition. Sorry. It’s just that the two times I went, I pointed the car at Stratford and it seemed to work out.)

So I got to see the group twice. The first time I went to sit in on one of their meetings and have a natter about what we all particularly like in fiction. It started so sensibly. I took proper notes. Lots of notes. You should see the notes. More ideas than I could capture. Every author in the programme says this is exactly what happened with them and their group: you come away dizzy with information and perplexed about how to fashion a short story that covers all of these points. That addresses all the groups’ preferences.

It’s easy.

You ignore them.

I didn’t mean to.

I really didn’t mean to. I took that first night very seriously – as daft and funny and full of chocolate fingers as it was, I also took it seriously – and so it was with some guilt that I ignored everything.

Everything except one tiny point. I think literally the tiniest point. It turns out that this gorgeous little village actually has two book groups. And I could not get it out of my head. What if the groups were rivals?

I’ve not had this before: driving home, it was as if the story were pounding at the inside my head, wanting to get out. I refused to listen, I concentrated on the drive and I refused to listen and I will not listen, okay? Enough. The next morning, it was as if I were shaking to get this written. I’ve had that plenty of times on deadline but here it was pushing, shaking, pounding its way out. I can clearly remember the moment when I thought – and maybe even said aloud – okay. Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll write this story about rival book groups, are you happy now?

The plan was that I’d write this tale, get it done and out of my head, then I would go to the notes and start doing the job properly. I’m all for doing jobs properly and as I say, I took this seriously. The Combrook group is so nice there was a moment when I could’ve stopped being a city boy and moved there. They deserved a story that fit all we’d said, that covered the characters and the village, that was a proper job.

And instead they get The Book Groups.

Because once it was written, I just liked it too much. I felt I hadn’t touched the research and yet I’d also spent the research. It was all in this story even as none of it was in this story.

So this is about book groups and I want to tell you that nobody from Combrook is in it. Not from either of their groups. That was one thing I stressed when I went back to read them the tale. The other thing I stressed was that I’d like my seat to be nearest the door in case there was trouble.

I think I can tell you that they loved it. They stood up this week at an event and said so. On Wednesday, there was a presentation to all of the groups of the book we made. Six authors, six groups, six stories and about eighty people gathered in the Library of Birmingham. I know five of the tales were superb. I think mine is too. You don’t often hear me say that, do you?

One more thing? My tale is narrated in the first-person by the leader of a book group. So it’s a short story but it sounds like a script to me. Something I’ve not really understood and yet have been rather proud of is that actors have often told me my scripts are easy to learn because the dialogue is good. How could I not be proud of that? I get it now, though. Because I learnt my story and I learnt it very easily. I didn’t read it at the presentation, I performed it.

Or at least, I preformed the start. We could only read a few minutes of the tale at the event, there wasn’t time for all six stories to be read in full and anyway, we wanted you to grab the limited-edition book.

I long to read the whole story to you. To perform it. Combrook called it “Alan Bennett chic lit”, which made me shatter with pride. My sister said it made her picture Hyacinth Bucket. I admitted I sometimes channeled Les Dawson. If I could come around your house and perform this to you, I would. I can’t even get you a copy of the book now – but I can show you the story. In full.

Sorry: I really intended to write you a single paragraph of explanation and then simply reprint the story. I even thought that would make this week’s Self Distract a quick job. But this story, getting to write this story and then this week to get to act it, it’s been a highlight of my year and I had to tell you.

I could’ve told you faster, mind. Your tea’s gone cold. Go get another mug and a biscuit. Because here’s The Book Groups.

William

—

THE BOOK GROUPS

by William Gallagher

Our little Book Group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is. Ask my husband. He’ll tell you it takes quite some running. But it is our group.

And we were first.

Susie Farrow can say all she likes, I started ours six months before hers. And she only did it because she couldn’t get into mine. It’s not my fault I’m popular. And we can only have so many chairs, that must be obvious to the meanest intelligence. I understand she’s disappointed, of course I do, but that’s no excuse for running around claiming it was all her idea. I ask you. She even got that in the newspaper. Back in Plant a Tree year. “Susie Farrow runs the village’s first reading group and plants trees”. The Parish Observer.

Not very observant if you ask me.

I’ve been in the Parish Observer now. I’ve been in all the newspapers. And you don’t see me bragging.

It’s about standards.

We have standards here in my group. I insist on it. But that doesn’t mean we are exclusive. We do welcome new people, of course we do. When there’s room. I mean, we let in Henry, how is that being exclusive? He arrived just after Sally Moon passed away so there was a vacancy, but that’s beside the point. He wanted to join and we let him, no questions asked. We don’t vet people. We don’t check their income and everybody has a secret past in banking, I’m hardly impressed by that.

Some of us have commented, just in passing, that Henry is good-looking but I don’t see it myself. I love my husband. It’s so much easier when you’re married and can get back to books. I don’t envy these young ones chasing men all the time, I really don’t.

No, the problem with Henry is that none of us in the Reading Group are quite sure he can read.

I suspected it first when we discussed Bleak House and he looked quite blank. Fair enough, I thought, it was a challenging read, perhaps it was too soon. So I went the other way for our next one, I chose an easy book for us. The Da Vinci Code. It’s a terrible book. But sometimes those are best because you can have a really good time discussing how terrible the writing is, how schoolboy the descriptions are.

I was right, too. Henry was much more lively in that session, he got quite animated. Waving his arms about. Touching knees. I don’t like that myself. My husband never gets animated. It’s easy to say what you think without touching, that’s what we say. But it takes all sorts. So long as they’ve read the book.

And I was just sure he hadn’t. I went out of the room to replenish the chocolate fingers and did he say thanks when I came back in? Or was he in mid-sentence talking about Tom Hanks? I pretended I thought it was thanks and the group did give a little laugh. I confess I am quite funny, but I don’t like the group to get boisterous. My husband watches the football upstairs while we’re here and it’s just easier if we keep things a little quiet. “You are a reading group after all,” he says.

When they’d gone and he was off to his bedroom, I rented the film version off Netflix to check it out. It’s a terrible film.

We should’ve had a film group.

Some of the things Henry had said were definitely from the film and not in the book. Well, I say definitely. It was very late when I watched it and we had drunk quite a bit of wine – we are always respectable, I will not tolerate drunken behaviour, someone has to stay sober in our house – so I might be wrong. I’d have to watch the film again and I’m not that concerned.

I think Henry has a little thing for me.

I don’t say anything. Let the girls fuss over him. It’s them I’m thinking of, really. I know they’d be disappointed if I asked him to leave the group. So, never let it be said that I turned anyone away.

Not since 1989 anyway when Amy Rogers said that about Pride and Prejudice and, well, I think we all knew I simply had no choice.

She’s with them now. The other group. I’m sure they get our post.

Still, once you get something in your head, it is hard to stop it festering. And at each meeting, Henry would only ever suggest books that have been made into films. Mind you, what book hasn’t now? But a couple of months ago, before all this unpleasantness, I decided we should pick a John Irving novel. Something meaty for the run up to Christmas, you know? I went through Amazon and I looked up every book on IMDb to see what had been filmed and what hadn’t. I love the internet. You can read how to do anything on there.

Anything. I miss it.

Then at the next meeting, I proposed A Prayer for Owen Meany. I expected to see Henry nipping off to the bathroom again to look it up on his phone but no. He agreed right away. Said he’d never heard of it but if I recommended it, we should definitely read it.

I mustn’t encourage him, I won’t.

Everybody was quite frosty to me that evening, it was most unusual. But I’m not there to be liked. I’m there to get us reading good books and then having a good time talking about them. It’s important. It binds us together, there is nothing like reading. And I really do believe that our little group is a key part of what makes our village special. Makes it a community.

I was walking through our village a few days after the meeting, just past where the post office used to be. It was the last shop in the village and it closed down twenty years ago. Either the Post Office closed it down because of fraud or Environmental Health did for something else. If I ever knew, I forget. But it’s on my way to the brook and everybody knows I take a walk to the brook each morning.

You can’t go anywhere here without bumping into two or three people you simply have to talk to. It’s why we like it here. My husband isn’t much of a talker. It’s easier to get conversation out of a stone! But I do like talking with people, I do like knowing what’s going on. I do like eve-rybody mucking in, everybody cheery together. We’re not some anonymous city, I couldn’t bear that.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Henry walking up to his Jaguar. He was pleased to see me. He can be sweet like that. I look at his excited, out of breath face and I haven’t the heart to tease him about his reading.

But it just shows that you never know what people are really like be-cause he said to me, he said: “I’m so glad you picked that book. Great, isn’t it?”

Then he was gone, I didn’t see where he drove.

Primarily because here comes Susie Farrow, overdressed as usual. She’s out of breath too but I don’t think it’s excitement at seeing me. She’s unfit. Unfit to run a book group, I say. That’s my little joke. Still, it comes to something when a girl her age is red and panting. I ignore that, of course, and just give her a short but polite enough nod.

She sees the book in my hand. “Oh, I heard you were reading that. Sad ending, isn’t it?”

That woman has not spoken a word to me since I turned her away from the group and the first thing she says is to spoil a book. It’s meanness, that’s what it is. And it’s to boast. Of course she’s read it. Of course her book group has read it, hasn’t everyone?

Bad enough that I’m going to see her at the village Christmas party. I walk on and put Susie Farrow out of my head.

I wear a little tinsel hat and I give a little speech about how our lovely reading groups are such good friends. I say something like it every year and it always gets a polite little round of applause. One year even my husband joined in. It was easy to get him to come that Christmas, I’d actually organised sponsorship and he came to support me. To this day, people ask how I got a company to sponsor our little do.

I’ll tell you, though, because it’s about quality. It’s because our group is best. I know it and so does everyone else, including the brewery. So it’s no harm being gracious at the party. I am gracious. I’m not “up myself”. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Still, it is about standards and I do think that we should all play our part. Especially in our village. And this year it was so obvious that Susie Farrow thinks she’s superior. She was right there in front of the stage before I was called up to make my speech but then I couldn’t see her when I went to start. I always like to catch her eye during my speech and let her know I know that our group was first. But this time she had walked out. She had actually walked out. Fresh air, said one of the girls. Can’t take the heat, I said. I was pleased with that.

My gaze went to Henry. He’s dependable. Even if he can’t read. I hardly had to look at him before he understood me and was heading out after Susie Farrow. He didn’t get her back in time for the end of my speech but as I say he’s dependable, it doesn’t make him a miracle worker. And they had clearly had words outside. They came back in looking so angry and it was obvious how they avoided each other for the rest of the night.

I’m proud of Henry. Standing up for me like that.

I’m sure he has a little thing for me.

I mustn’t encourage him. I won’t encourage him. But there is something there. I can’t deny it.

My husband came to pick me up. It was easy to get him to do that, it was on his way back from the club. When I came out, Henry was talking to him. He saw me and slapped my husband on the back. “Here she is, you lucky fella.” I’m just saying what he said.

My husband never says anything like that.

Maybe that was why it was so easy.

I was surprised how many people came to his funeral. But then I am a figure here, it’s silly to be modest about it. They all turned out to support me. They’ve not been quite so good since. I really thought Henry would be here every day but I haven’t seen him once. But I expect he’ll make up for it when I’m out.

I tell you, though, it’s really the girls I’m disappointed in. I haven’t seen any of them, either.

I have seen Susie Farrow.

Of course Susie Farrow came to visit me.

She said she was here to build fences, she said she was here because she didn’t know I’d got it in me. She said we could be friends when I get out. Got to stick together. Us girls. “Very well,” I said. “Let’s talk like friends. Who’s given you that ring?”
She wouldn’t tell me.

All front, all talk, that Susie Farrow.

But I’ll give her this, she did bring me a book. She says that she and Henry had a meeting, representing the two book groups, to discuss what to bring me. That will be Henry’s doing, I’m certain. The book is The Wimbledon Poisoner and Susie Farrow says it’s a joke. I’ve never been one for comedy but I thank her for the thought. And I’ll check it out later, I’m sure there’ll be a message in it for me.

Do you know, there are quite few ladies here who I’ve seen reading at recreation. I should start a group. I’m going to start a book group, just for us.

We won’t be the first group, obviously. But you’ll see. We’ll be the best.

Just hang on a sec

Posted by William Gallagher

I want to give you an example of something. On Wednesday, I was nattering with this guy in a pub in London. He mentioned a writing job he used to have that he had particularly enjoyed. The front of my head is fully in the conversation and enjoying the talk when the back of my head starts thinking.

I couldn’t do what he had done – for one thing, it’s his idea and for another it’s quite a while ago, the gig is gone – but there are elements that really particularly appealed to me. Take this element, change that, bring this, try the other, soon the back of my head is joining the front and I’m enthusing at him about what we could do now.

That’s Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, I knew exactly – I mean, exactly – every inch of the new idea and what to do plus who exactly – I mean, exactly – to pitch it to. And had pitched it. I can’t know if it will happen and I imagine it’s a year away if it does, but 25 hours after the idea, I’ve got a meeting.

This is how I like to work. Think of something and do it. I can’t tell you how satisfying I’ve found the last year: I’ve produced five events in 2014 and while that isn’t many, it is 100% more than I have ever produced before. To think of something and get it done, to eventually be sitting in the audience watching people you’ve chosen be everything you wanted them to be, it makes me giddy.

I like being giddy. I like being busy. I like rushing, I hate waiting around. It’s just that I feel I’ve wasted so much time and have done so little, I need to catch up and get on. If I’m not shaking with giddy exhaustion by the end of the day, I start shaking that I’ve burnt those hours away for nothing.

Except.

That does tend to be the only time I think of today. Usually my head is in next week or next year. I’ve had a stone in my stomach for the last month because I couldn’t get a guest speaker for an event I am especially keen to do well. My head’s been in the day of that event and in the days since I got the gig. Worrying about what I’ll do and worrying about what I could’ve done better or sooner or quicker. Not an awful lot of my head in the day today.

I’ve got the speaker now. She’s a mensch for doing it, I’m a bit of a mensch for asking her, but let’s not menschion that. Let’s just leap to how, now that I have got that sorted out, my giddy mind is looking forward to how that event will go. And my relaxed mind is half looking forward, half very nervous about an event next week where I’m performing myself. (I’m reading from my entry in a book of short stories. I love the story, I deeply loved how the book required me to meet various people before writing, I love how those people reacted to the story, I hate how sick with nerves I am before the launch.)

And.

I have this fear that I’ve wasted so much time yet here I am arguably wasting every day. Always working on the next thing.

But.

I went to a poetry event earlier this week, an evening about Next Generation Poets. Originally I was going on my own, just nipping in to see it, and it was a treat to then find that a friend was going and we could meet up beforehand. I don’t want to presume she had as good a time as I did, but I had a great time and was walking in to that show with her feeling very good and relaxed.

And by total chance, found myself seated precisely in the middle of seven friends I like and whose work I rate immensely.

It was terrible.

There they all were, great and talented people, every last bloody one of them better dressed than me.

None of them were performing, none of us were doing anything, we were just this tiny segment of the audience that happened to be sitting together. My body was in my seat and for once my head was in the room, in the time too. At that point I still had the stomach stone but it lightened. I forgot how far behind I had been feeling I was with everything.

I was just acutely, deeply and actually happily aware of the here and the now. Maybe I’m only reaching for the Ferris Bueller line “Life moves pretty fast… if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.

But in the here and the now, the there and then, there was a buzz that wrapped around my shoulders and it came from these talented people.

Maybe even from me.

Come in

Posted by William Gallagher

Here’s a thing. If you show up unexpectedly at my front door, I will be delighted. (Bear with me, this is a theoretical exercise. If you actually show up at my door I will be delighted but I also haven’t tidied up, so it’d be that special kind of delight that borders on panic.)

In principle, anyway, you coming to my door uninvited is in all ways a very good and a very great thing that would make me happy. Really delighted: I’m beaming at the thought. And promising myself I’ll hoover. Since it’s you, I might even dust. Could you pick up the corner of that carpet for me?

If, instead, I show up at your door – well, no, that’s just not going to happen. This isn’t you, this is me. I cannot come to your door unexpectedly or without invitation unless I have a really good reason. “Excuse me, are those flames coming from your roof?” My just turning up as me, not with a message or a parcel or a purpose, I cannot do it. It will never happen. No matter how much I enjoy talking to you, I just can’t do that. I don’t know why.

So when I do go to someone’s home, when they have invited me, I find that very special. It doesn’t matter if I’m there for some practical reason like a meeting or because I’m picking you up to give you a lift somewhere. You don’t let someone you dislike into your home – not if you can help it anyway – so I am alert to the fact that you are welcoming me in. I get the compliment and it’s a big thing to me.

I have had meetings in friends’ houses recently and I’ve felt all of this. There’s a project I’m working on where we tend to have day-long meetings at a particular friend’s house. She actually apologised this week, said she knew it was inconvenient for us to schlep over there and I explained she is insane. It is a treat for me. I think it’s a privilege.

There is just something about how we are all the same and we need the same things, we do the same things, we have the same things – we have kitchens, we have loos, we have books – but everywhere is exactly and precisely as different as everybody. What you choose to have in your home. The spoken and unspoken rules, the way that you choose to cook, the spaces where you work seriously and the spaces where you relax. It fashions a specific environment. It’s an exo-skeleton, a body around your body. It’s the contents of your head and your taste and your past made corporeal and physical and made to be right there within touching distance.

Maybe I’m just groping toward the cliché that a home is someone’s castle but I think your home is you.

Appropriately, my mind has just darted off thinking that I must have a very untidy mind.

But anyway, the other night, Angela and I picked up a friend from her narrowboat on the canal and I felt all this even more acutely. It’s a huge boat and I want it, I want writer Elisabeth Charis‘s home exactly the way she has it, but also it’s closed in enough, it is small enough, that all my feelings about being invited in somewhere were concentrated.

Angela said it best: she said the boat hugs you.

There is a cocoon feel even as the boat rocked a little in the wind. You felt distinctly separated from the rest of the world especially as you could see that rest of the world bobbing outside the window. It helped that you could only make out the rest of the world because there was street lighting near the canal. Otherwise, it was dark out there and it was warmly bright inside.

Equally, from the outside as we walked up to it, I wasn’t sure Elisabeth was even in. The boat looked dark to me. It looked like every other narrowboat I’ve seen on canals and now I wonder if they were all occupied, all the time. They look cold and forgotten. Interesting paintwork, yes, but also somehow alone and closed, bumping next to to the towpath. Yet maybe every one of them was this alive and warm on the inside.

All those boats, all these houses on the street, all these homes in the world. Maybe this is just on my mind because we had a good night. Maybe if Angela, Elisabeth and I hadn’t had a fine natter I wouldn’t be thinking about the bubbles we form around ourselves and about the membrane between outside somewhere and inside it.

I do like houses and homes and I do like property TV shows like Grand Designs. And I think I may be being pretty grand here myself, I may be overblowing things yet I feel it: being invited in to someone’s home is special.

Mind you, maybe I’m only thinking about this because Elisabeth is tidier than I am.

Praise on toast

Posted by William Gallagher

I had a bit of a rant about the idea of the praise sandwich this week on The Blank Screen news site. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then and also I’ve been discussing it quite a bit. Consequently, I want to rant a bit more. Do you mind?

You might know this under a different term so let me explain what I mean by praise sandwich. It’s when you have criticism to give a writer and you think it’s going to be pretty bad so you begin with something nice and you end with something encouraging.

The idea is that the little writer believes the praise and is thereby cushioned enough to accept your true criticism. That the poor little writer will learn from you, that you can give them the benefit of your knowledge and do so in such a way that they don’t realise how harsh you’ve really had to be.

Give me strength.

You’re already detecting a certain antagonism from me about this idea so let me nip in quickly with this: no, it hasn’t just happened to me. It’s certainly happened over the years and I think I’ve even been taught to use it too. But I read a piece recently by someone who was advocating it and perhaps because it was couched in a lot of talk about being professional, it narked me.

Because if you actually are a pro, you can smell the praise sandwich from the first bite.

Don’t waste my time with it, don’t insult me with it. If you think you need to give me a praise sandwich, we shouldn’t be working together. We should not be in the same writing group. Good writing groups are so hard to find that I never have. I’ve long since given up trying, though I did have a go with one a few months ago. It wasn’t the right group for me: there was some professional work going on there but not much and at most the writers fed each other praise on toast.

I did the same: I ended up talking encouragingly to a writer who will never get her book published. I could tell her why, I did tell her why, she just didn’t and never will listen to anyone. Hard to know why she was there, really. But then she’s not a pro. She’s a reader, not a writer. Usually criticism is just one’s opinion but in this case my points about her book were as practical and pragmatic and certain as if she’d told me she was entering a poetry contest and the piece she was submitting was a 170,000-word doctoral thesis about trout.

Tell me what good I did her. Tell me what good the praise sandwich I got back was. This was a group that prided itself on being so tough that it could scald the skin off your arms but to me it was kindergarten. It was nap time at kindergarten.

I got some useful stuff out of them. A couple of things I will change in my work. I remember there was one I actually changed right there and then, I made the fix on the copy on my iPad. But the useful wasn’t all that very useful and I had time to make that change because as good a criticism as it was, I got it instantly, accepted it instantly, agreed instantly and thanked the critic instantly, but still had to listen to another five minutes about it. You take in the first minute, thinking there’s going to be something else. Then around the third minute you tune back in because you think it’s fascinating how someone can find this much to say about a character’s job title.

The thing of it all, of course, is that this particular group does not like my work and I don’t like all of theirs. I don’t actually feel they were doing much work and I did like the material I thought was being done seriously. I was just in the wrong group.

You learn from criticism and being with a new group of people ought to be helpful. Fresh eyes, new ideas, all that. But it so often doesn’t happen. Groups form an ecology and as different as each group of people is, they share the same problems for an outsider. It’s like they’re in a bubble and what you see through the iridescent shifting skin of that bubble is different to what they see inside. Inside, this is a world and it has its rules and especially its hierarchies. Both formed over a long time, both now so ingrained that the members don’t see them as artifice but as reality. Their opinion is not their opinion, it is fact.

Whereas what you see as an outsider is chiefly the clock. Uh-huh. Is that really the time? Already?

I think that inside the bubble you are protected and you have your place. I know very many writers who enjoy their writing groups, I know of many groups that I think are run superbly. I’ve a friend who once stopped enthusing about her writing group mid-sentence because she was embarrassed how much it meant to her. It was clearly an important part of her life and I think she felt awkward about that yet I told her the truth: I envied and I still envy her. The support and the friendship, it’s a precious thing for anyone and maybe especially so for writers since we spend so much time alone.

So don’t think I’m against writing groups and do think that this precious envy is why I tried out this particular one that, frankly, I will never name. You can whistle for it, I ain’t squealing.

I just wondered then and was reminded by the piece I read recently about what it’s like just inside the bubble yet not inside the sanctum. I don’t think it can be a happy place. I picture one trying to get further inside, the way we all do in all social groups somehow, and that means accepting the rules, agreeing with them. I remember getting the sense that this group I tried was interviewing me for a position and not seeing at all that I was interviewing them back for whether I wanted to join. I remember thinking that fitting in with them would not mean improving my writing, it would mean learning to write the way they do.

I’m also not squealing about what piece it was that I read. So this is a one-sided argument but then I’m a man with a mouth and two blogs, I’m always one-sided arguing at you.

I just don’t call it being professional.

That was the narking thing. Calling yourself professional because you use the praise sandwich on someone. That tells me you think you have to use this softly-softly approach because the little writer needs help from you. It tells me that you think you’re right and they’re wrong. That you’re professional so you have to give them the six-inch sub and it’s not your fault if they’re so unprofessional that they can’t take it.

Be supportive, don’t be supportive. Criticise, don’t criticise. Praise, don’t praise. It’s completely up to you but don’t take a moral high ground simply by calling yourself professional. Don’t set yourself up as an excoriating critical group and then waste my time with a finger buffet of praise.

Writers need help and we need influence and we need criticism. I can’t point to any group I’ve ever tried that got me what I need but I can point to countless people who have. Some of them I’d call mentors, all of them I’d call friends now, every one of them I’d call professional. One of them phoned me up laughing down the line about how bad a scene I’d written was. He’s now sick of me using that as an example of a favourite moment in my writing but it is. He didn’t open by saying “Well, I think you typed this marvellously…”, he went straight in to the criticism. And he got me laughing about it too.

This wasn’t because I’m rhino-skinned and it was only partly because I am a professional writer, I am a writer by profession. It was more that I knew he and I would fix that scene, I knew that we both wanted the material to be the best it could be. I loved that he just could just laugh at me because I love that he knew he could. He wasn’t precious, I wasn’t precious, this was art but it was also a job and we got on with it.

So, please, I’m asking you, give me some credit for being a pro and do not use the praise sandwich on me. The praise sandwich is baloney.

UPDATE 12:10:
Writer and group-runner Andy Killeen has commented here yet WordPress is blocking a link he refers to. Here’s where he wanted you to go and now I’m off there myself to see whether he agrees with me or not. It’s going to be an interesting piece whichever way he stands.

Get up

Posted by William Gallagher

The following takes place between smugness and embarrassment. Paragraphs happen in real time.

Listen, I have a thing. I have this accidental new gig talking about productivity – it’s a dull word but getting yourself more time to write or compose, it’s worth the odd dull word – and one crucially important aspect is to do with finding your best times to work. In an ideal world, with no day job or kids, there will be a time of day that just suits you the best. Maybe you’re a late night writer, for instance. You just are or you just aren’t.

My point is to look for that time, experiment around until you know when it is and then always do your best to keep that period clear. It’s simple and obvious enough, you get it.

Only, as an example, I generally tell people that I found my best time for writing is when I get up at 5am. The sole thing I stress and underline more than the fact that this is just an example, I am not recommending you do 5am too, is that I stress and underline and weep about how I loathe it. Getting up to write at 5am is all kinds of stupid and it is a damned curse that it’s when I happen to function the best. I would like put this functioning best capability to functioningly sleeping. And similarly, if you write best at midnight, I envy and applaud you. That’s when this should be done. That’s when real writing happens. Going to bed before midnight should be illegal.

But.

I’ve changed my mind.

Not about how stupid it is to get up at 5am and not one pixel about how stupid I am for doing it.

But it’s no longer just an example.

I’m afraid it’s a recommendation.

I fell off the productivity wagon a little while ago, coming off the back of a big book project. Plus I had a lot of evening speaking engagements and it was both crucial that I didn’t fall asleep in them and also knackering that I was doing them at all. Also, plus, and, lots of excuses. It has always been that the weekday 5am is inviolate except for when travel makes it impossible or other things in my schedule make it unwise.

Whatever the excuses and the number of excuses, the result was that I had a couple of weeks where it wasn’t practical to get up at 5am.

Yet I didn’t feel all that more rested and refreshed.

I felt rather bad, actually, and things were just not working out. A few rejections, a lot of very poor writing from me. I do a weekly email newsletter for my productivity site, The Blank Screen, and in it there is always a brief section that tells you what I’ve been writing lately. It is there to hopefully keep prodding you into doing your own writing, it is there to certainly prod me. And the last few have been feeble. Practically nothing going on. And so the newsletter that used to be a nice prod for me started to become a bit of a cattle prod in my side. Just for that section, I enjoy the newsletter. But lately not that section. (I’d like you to see the newsletter, it’s good. Do sign yourself up here.)

I don’t think I consciously connected the problems to the lack of 5am starts but about a week ago, I felt so overwhelmed with what was going on and what wasn’t being done, that I made myself get up at this stupid o’clock again. Not because it’s my best time but just that I needed the number of hours it gives you when you start that early and you don’t finish until late.

And since then I’ve pitched more successfully than I have in months. My new book is about 10,000 words further on. I thought of a new business, started it, announced it, got my first paying clients. We are now fully in the smugness section and I do apologise but there is embarrassment coming, honest. So yes, I can see I got up early and I can point to specific things that have gone well because of it. But I think the truth is that it’s me who has made them go well, not the clock. But the clock has got me some extra hours in the morning, it’s got them before the phones start ringing, it’s given me a head start every day and by 9am I feel I’ve done loads – because I’ve done loads.

So that’s it. It is 5am, Monday to Friday for me now, forever. Always.

Cue embarrassment.

Except today.

Last night I was at the Royal Television Society’s awards gala dinner in the Midlands and I think I must’ve passive drunk because my head is a jackhammer on a spin cycle. Also, I got to bed around 1am. And it’s going to be a late night with a lot of driving tonight. So yes, the excuses are back and I’m embarrassed. But I’ve got the buzz of the week’s work behind me, I’ve got a buzz from last night, actually, and I know that next week is going to be full of 5am starts so I am hoping that sheer momentum will carry me over today’s jackhammer lie-in.

I’d suggest we chat at 5am some time soon but we should be working, shouldn’t we?

Writers, retreat!

Posted by William Gallagher

I may have got the punctuation and the emphasis wrong there. What’s my job again? I’d like to borrow you for a moment here to talk about two things, the first of which being that clearly writers should never retreat. Clearly. Not without a very good excuse and a chocolate biscuit.

But the second thing is that there is a writers’ retreat this weekend and you can make it. It’s an online retreat called Inkspill – I keep saying this to people, but I love that name – and it’s also free. I’d be mentioning this to you by way of being a service and for once telling you something useful instead of just my usual self-aggrandising ego-laden pondering, except that I’m a contributor to the Inkspill retrate. So this is still an S-AELP. I came so close.

Inkspill is here on A Writers’ Fountain, the blog of poet Nina Lewis. She’s organising the weekend and it’s a series of blogs and videos to do with writing and a bit to do with writers. Chiefly writing. You’ll be writing during this, so you will.

I am one of the writers but you’ve also got Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie, both of whom I’m looking forward to stealing from – I mean, learning about.

My section has an intro video which makes little sense unless you’re on the Inkspill retreat and unless you know what my section of the programme is. Without that knowledge, which I seem to be keeping from you, the intro video just looks strange. I’m okay with looking strange. Do pop off to Inkspill to find out what’s going on and when. But for now, let’s look at me being strange.

I’m overselling the strange. And I am conscious that I sound like one of those people reality TV crews get bouncing up to the camera and saying “you should film me, I’m kraaazy” and they’re not. Don’t expect me to be very strange in this video, it’s not like I wear a hat, but as well as the mystery of what in the hell I am talking about, I do give you a writing exercise. It’s one of my favourites, too.

Writing prompts vs writing promptly

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s probably a vestige of starting in journalism where you knew what you had to write and you knew you had to get on with it. But it has taken me so long to warm to the idea of a writing prompt that actually, I still haven’t. Not quite. I see the appeal a bit more than I did yet the notion someone can say “Write about… happy daisies” still feels a bit wet.

I can’t shake the feeling that a prompt is necessarily random and trivial. That if I were ever to write about happy daisies it should be because something in them makes me shake and I must get it out, not because a stranger glanced at a Van Gogh painting.

What’s slightly embarrassing is that I’ve used prompts, I’ve set them for people.

What’s mortifying is that people have set them for me and I’ve written some of my best material because of them.

Maeve Clarke, an author I worked for and then with at Writing West Midlands’ Young Writers scheme, once set her group of 8 to 12-year-olds this prompt: write a fairytale. I was helping out at that session and I joined in. I wrote a fairy tale. In about a quarter of an hour, having never typed a single word that could ever be construed as fairytale-like, I’d written 900 words of The Prince and the Spinning Wheel’s Angular Momentum. And you see that’s a link? I was so pleased with that wildly out-of-my-wheelhouse story that I posted it here on Self Distract.

The disadvantage of posting it, though, is that I can now see the date: November 2012. It’s two years since I had proof both that a writing prompt could spin me off into new and satisfyingly unsafe areas – and that when prompted, I can’t half write promptly. Nine hundred words in a quarter of an hour. That tale fell out of me, didn’t it?

Maybe I can’t really account for why it’s taken me two years to properly accept that writing prompts can work, but there is a reason I’m telling you all this today. Last night, I invited my family to an event in which I will be reading a story. I’ve been a writer for my entire adult life and I’ve never invited them anywhere before. To be fair, I can’t bring guests to a Doctor Who recording. And even in the past year when I’ve been doing a huge number of talks, every one of them has been either closed or far away. But now my own family is spending money to come see me. I’m not scared.

I am, but I have help. The event is Seven Minute Tales and it features six authors reading extracts from stories we’ve written to order. I’ve seen two of my fellow authors’ tales so I know my family will have a good night. Plus I burn to read mine and the fact that we have to stand there in front of a room of people and read is dwarfed by the fact that we only get to read extracts to them where I burn to read the whole thing. I know, as all of us in the event know, that seven minutes works out to about half the story if we’re lucky.

You’ll get six half-stories, six tales where you will end up wanting more. Fortunately, if you buy a ticket for the event, you also get a copy of the book collecting them all. So I suppose you don’t have to wait long to find out what happens next. But I want to tell you.

I want to read it to you. I am that pleased with my tale and it is something I would never and I think could never have written without one hell of a prompt. And without having to write it quite promptly.

This is what I call a real prompt. I was commissioned by Roz Goddard of the West Midlands Readers’ Network to create a story for a particular group. Six authors were assigned to six reading groups: the groups had to apply to the scheme and the authors were asked to pair up with them. I don’t know yet where everybody went but the authors are Yasmin Ali, Liam Brown, Charlie Hill, Catherine O’Flynn, Kate Long and I. It’s pretty good company to be in.

I got a reading group in the village of Combrook, which to my navigationally-challenged mind is near Stratford. I bet the group would say Stratford’s miles away, what am I talking about, but that’s the rough direction I pointed the car at.

The job was to meet with this reading group and have a natter about fiction. Talk about what they like in reading, talk about them and talk about their village. Then I was supposed to go away and write about 2,200 words of a new short story for them.

I tell you now, you would want to live in Combrook. And you would want to join this book group. And if you did, you would be agog and delighted at the torrent of tales they could give you about the village. There is too much to ever get into a story but then that wasn’t the brief, I wasn’t meant to document the village or recount a real tale, I was really to create fiction that this group would like.

Talking with some of my colleagues, I know we all came away with huge long lists of points and elements and facts and preferences. One author, I think, managed to get the entire list into the tale and that’s rather amazing. Another cherry-picked two or three elements and crafted a story I think is the best of the ones I’ve read.

And then there was me.

I recorded the session plus I made several thousand words of notes and I didn’t use any of them.

All this glorious material, all these delightful people, and I ignored everything.

Because.

During the email exchanges before the meeting, just sorting out when I’d go and how near Stratford they are, the group mentioned the very smallest of facts. This village of Combrook, as small as it is, actually has two reading groups.

I drove away late that night with masses, simply masses of detail and information and history and yet all the way home that one fact of the two groups kept banging at my head. You’re not supposed to actually write about your group. This project has been running for years and every author, every year, has conjured up the most astonishing range of stories and settings and tones. None of them has ever written a syllable about the group they visited.

But bang, bang, shove, the village has two groups.

It go so I decided fine, write this story about two rival reading groups and get it done, get it out of my head, then throw it away and do my job properly. Write it, forget it, and start thinking what my real story should be.

I never did. All those notes, forgotten. That audio recording of the session, never listened to. Because I have never before had a story that was more in charge of me than I was of it. I get really passionate about my Doctor Who scripts and if I can’t do one because my idea is too close to something else, it physically hurts me. (Writers will tell you that nothing is wasted, that you will always find a home for an idea if it’s good enough. But this is Doctor Who. It’s not like you can take a rejected idea and pitch it to Hollyoaks.)

But this was more than that. The banging in my head, I feel ridiculous telling you that so I’m not going to admit that my hands shook at the keyboard. You didn’t hear that, I didn’t say it.

The story came out of me very quickly, though it then took a long time to get right. Fortunately, my sense of time is as bad as my sense of navigation: I misunderstood the deadline and I think part of the shaking was to do with how I thought I had much less time to write than I had. I did have this writing prompt about the two groups and I thought I had to write it promptly.

Whereas right now I know I have to write a disclaimer. This is an easy disclaimer because it’s entirely true but it’s also an important one because I liked the Combrook group a lot. Nothing in my story really happened and, most importantly of all, there is not one single character or even facet of a character that I based on anyone in the group.

But a few days ago, I went back to Combrook and I read them the story: “The Book Groups”.

If it hadn’t gone down so well with them, I might not be telling you this so happily and I definitely wouldn’t have told my family at all. But it did and right now I am very proud of it. I’m a writer, the pride will alternate with doubt, but today I’m seizing the pride and I’m being a bit brave about it.

Because I want to invite you to the event.

You’d have to pay, I’m not that generous, and you’d have to get to Birmingham, I’m not on tour. But if you can get to the Library of Birmingham for 6pm on Wednesday 26 November this year, you will hear six stories read promptly.

Details and online booking here or on 0121-245 4455. Tickets are a fiver and are genuinely selling out fast. I half hoped I could boast to my family about it but it’d be full before they booked. No such luck.

And when it’s done, when the book is out, I’ll post The Book Groups here. That’s not scary either.

Pride cometh before Autumn

Posted by William Gallagher

I have a problem with the word pride. As one of the things you shout when a large number of lions are rushing toward you, fine. It’s also fine when it’s about you.

I completely get the idea of having pride in one’s work and more than getting it, I also get it: I have that pride in what I do. It rarely lasts, I am a writer after all, but at the moment I deliver it to you, I am proud of it – or I wouldn’t deliver it to you. That’s all fine as well. And I would especially hope that you know this kind of pride too.

For that matter, I would hope that you quite often feel proud of yourself. It’s you. Of course you should.

My problem is when I feel it about other people.

It’s not that I think it’s necessarily a bad thing to be proud of someone else, it just feels odd. What right do I have to be proud of someone else?

As I write, this Autumn’s Birmingham Literature Festival is nearing its end and it has been a very good year for it. Last year I actually did an event in the Festival and I still think this year’s is better. I’ve also had an interesting perspective on it because while I have done nothing and have attended lots, I’ve been half- or quarter- or a fifth- involved in bits. The Writers’ Guild has had a couple of events and I’m on the Guild’s committee so I had a fingernail in organising them.

The most I did was get a speaker to the Festival. There isn’t a pixel of the Festival that I could claim pride for myself but going to so much of it and having these tiny peeks behind the curtains, I am proud of the Birmingham Literature Festival. Proud that it happens in my city, proud that it is in the Library of Birmingham.

Thoroughly, delightedly proud of how successful it’s been. After I did my doings with that speaker, I left the green room to go find Angela. The queue for this event was so long and so full of people I’ve come to know in part through simply having gone to the Festival a lot, that it took me twenty minutes to get to her. Walking down that line, I got into four conversations. “Really got to go,” I’d say, then walk down ten paces and “Oh! Hello!”.

That was a Writers’ Guild and Birmingham Literature Festival event: the Guild’s Tim Stimpson interviewed Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Full house. Queue snaking along the length of the Library and having to double back at one end. I did feel proud but the word I said at the time was just “Cor”.

I don’t think you can be in Birmingham and not be proud of this Festival. I’ve worked with many of the people doing it, I’ve had this tiny glimpse backstage, I’m a fan.

But.

There were many, many events where I at least vaguely knew the performers. That’s a funny thing to explain: I don’t know the poet Liz Berry at all but after you’ve seen her perform, you feel like you do. Tremendously, startlingly powerful poetry from someone so personable that if you ran into her with a friend, you’d introduce Berry to your pal like you’ve known her for years.

I want to introduce people to you, I want to list people that I actually do know and who were on full form in this Festival. But there are just so many. I do love that there are so many that I fear forgetting one. I don’t love that I’m going to chicken out. I’m not proud of that.

Only…

There was this one event. The launch of a book called A Midlands Odyssey: it’s a transplantation, a transformation of Homer’s Odyssey into tales of the Midlands. I could’ve just bought the book, and I did, but I wanted to see Elisabeth Charis, who produced it. I wanted to see Jonathan Davidson, one of its editors. Charlie Hill wrote one of the tales, Lindsey Davies whom I’ve met before did another, Elisabeth wrote a tale too. It’s published by Nine Arches Press and I really like the company’s editor, Jane Commane.

But then the first person who got up to read was the author Yasmin Ali.

I knew she was nervous because she’d told me. But in that theatre, under those lights, she strode up to read an extract from her piece and she looked like she did it every day. Read with style, got great laughs, if it had been you reading, you’d have been very proud of yourself.

And I told her afterwards, I told her truthfully: I’m proud of her.

But I don’t understand what right I have to be proud. I had nothing to do with her event or her story or her book or her. I didn’t have a damn thing to do with anything, but what I felt was pride.

Yet nuts to the word and the oddity of feeling it, if you went to the Festival or you are connected to Birmingham, you feel proud too.

If you didn’t go or you’re not connected to the city, then get yourself a sliver of a taste of a pixel of a moment of the whole event on BBC Radio 4. This coming Sunday’s (12 October, 16:30) Poetry Please was recorded there and features four Midlands poets – Liz Berry, Jacqui Rowe, Bohdan Pieseki and Stephen Morrison-Burke. And then in the following week’s edition you can hear me. I get to request a poem that always makes me weep. Please listen and picture poet Jo Bell squeezing my arm as I wept through the reading.

I’m fine with how I’m clearly not a hard, tough man. Possibly even a bit proud of it.

Time Gentlemen Please

Posted by William Gallagher

I was ready to see myself. To turn this corner, wait by this door, to see my younger self come through as I had before. The reality of standing there wasn’t all that much different from the years of imagining it. A simple toilet door.

This side of the door, my side of the door, the gents. Empty then, now empty again but for me.

That side, well. Back then, back when I was first here, when I was that young and it was this same night, I thought it was a glorious time. I’d say that I had been thinking only of rushing back out and being with my new friends. But in truth I hadn’t thought at all. Too excited.

Too full of her.

Now would be different. My younger self will come through that door any moment and I am going to stop me. Just put my hand on his chest and say “Please”. I wondered if my younger self would understand, I wanted to be clever enough to understand, but it doesn’t matter. If I confuse him, if I scare him, it doesn’t matter. Just delay him here for one minute. Stop me going out when he went out before.

Just one minute. A few seconds.

Maybe you can always time travel when you know this, when you know to the minute, to the second when and where it all went wrong. So badly wrong. Outside this room, through that door. The things said and not said. The things I’ve done that I couldn’t ever undo.

Until now.

Now I can undo them, now I can stop me ever doing them. Just a quiet word with myself and if I listen, great. If I don’t, fine. Delay me and everything will be fine.

I was ready to see myself.

The door moved. The outside door was being opened, my younger self was out there opening it and I was in here seeing how the air and the vibration bumped the inner door. I felt a pressure on my chest, nerves and excitement and a little fear pushing in on me.

Right where I planned to place my hand on him.

I looked down.

My hand was on my chest.

Because I was standing next to me.

I looked older. Substantially older. And not very well. But the me staring at me from a cubicle doorway had the same expression I was planning to use. Serious. Calming. Sober. Strong.

He looked at me as the gents door swung open and I came in.

“Please,” said the me in the cubicle.

He moved his hand from my chest to my arm. It was still only a little touch, a little pressure, but it was commanding and I stepped inside with him.

He closed the cubicle door. Raised a finger to his lips.

And we waited for me to leave. Exactly as I had before.

ENDS

Easier said than done

Posted by William Gallagher

This is easier to say than to do so I’m just going to say it. And perhaps you can do it. Let me know how you get on.

It’s just this: writing should hurt.

That’s what I think we get wrong, especially when we’re starting. I mean especially when we’re starting out, but also when we’re starting a new piece.

I was talking with a friend whose draft novel I’ve read and found myself saying this: there was nothing in the book that she had worried about me reading. As fun as it was, as enjoyable as it was, I feel this means she can go further, can go deeper. I don’t know whether she will and in fact I don’t know whether she should since the novel works as it is. Yet I know she can and I think it would be richer if she does. She’s got it in her so her book could have it too.

Tell a lie. She was concerned about one thing. There’s a deeply attractive character in it named Will and she wanted to make sure I knew there wasn’t one single pixel of him that was based on me. Thanks so much. You can over-stress these things, you know.

I wouldn’t have believed he was me, I wouldn’t have thought about it, wouldn’t have occurred to my noggin. Whereas I did notice that there was no pain in there, no exposed nerve endings, not of hers anyway. Her characters, yes.

Writing something should hurt you. When you write, you should be cutting yourself open and at most cauterising the wound. When you send that writing to someone, there should be something in it that you are worried about them seeing. Something new and very personal to you, something you don’t talk about, that you maybe avoid thinking about.

Now, as a reader sometimes I am just not in the mood to be put through a car wash and as a writer there haven’t been many Radio Times articles where I’ve bled over the page. Well, I have literally bled over the keyboard from effort getting something right, sure, but not from revealing something of myself in them. Not intentionally, anyway.

Drama and fiction need more blood. It is a curious thing yet the more personal, the more harshly deep you go, the further into yourself you search, the closer you get to your audience.

So excuse me, I’m off to search. I will spend some time reaching into the most hidden version of me, my very worst self, my very foulest being where I think things that scare and repulse me, where I want to visit now yet I truly do not want to be forever.

And then I’ll fashion all that into a lightweight romantic comedy.