bollocks

Lies, damned lies and percentages

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I’m not saying that people make up percentages, I’m saying if that they were telling the truth they’d give us the figures. I’m going to make up some examples here in part because my point is about the lying rather than these specific lies but also because it seems appropriate. For I’m seeing this particular lying technique used a lot at the moment over whether Britain should stay in Europe or not and if you’ve seen an actual fact for either side, well done.

I’m seeing it most of all in discussions about immigration which is apparently a dreadful problem. Oh, is it bollocks a problem. BBC Breakfast interviewed a woman this week who said, like so many others, that immigration is a very bad thing and it must to be stopped. Only, she’s an ex-pat British woman living in Spain. She’s an immigrant. You can’t buy stupidity like that but you can pander to it.

Consequently you’ve seen people banging their fists on tables about how immigration has – I don’t know, let’s make up some high figures here – doubled. Maybe more. Maybe there are 60% more immigrants.

Since when? Usually people say “since when” in the same tone and with the same meaning as something like “you and whose army?” but I mean it literally. Immigration has doubled since when? Wednesday? The 17th Century?

The 60% or whatever other percentage in whatever argument you like is not a figure, it is a red-alert klaxon saying the speaker wants you to believe something you wouldn’t if you knew the truth. Say it is 60%, say immigration is up 60% and let’s even throw in that it’s up that much since this time last year. We’re throwing in an actual baseline comparison, we’re throwing in a genuine since-when.

Only, say 10 immigrants came to the UK last year and a whole 16 came this time. That’s a 60% increase right there. Gasp. Doubtlessly or at least presumably the actual figure is more than 16 people but I don’t know what it is and people telling you percentages don’t want you to know.

It offends me that politicians think immigration is a vote-winning issue and it offends me even more that they’re right. For god’s sake, though, my family is from Ireland: I’m only first-generation British born. I shouldn’t be allowed.

Shut up and do it

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I was doing a thing in a television studio this week and – no, wait, actually, quick aside? I was the talent. I’m not used to this. Wasn’t producing anything, wasn’t writing a word, not interviewing anyone, my job was to turn up and be interviewed on a show. I was the talent. So strange.

I mean, I’ve done a lot of radio on both sides of the mic but precious little TV. It turned out that some of the other guests I was chatting with in the green room had never done any television before so I was the great wise expert, having done it once. I tried not to dispense too much wisdom. They have to learn for themselves, they have to make their own mistakes.

That way you’re looking at me now, that’s how a runner at the studio should’ve been looking at me. I was chatting with a couple of runners and got into the subject of a film one of them had made last year. She told me about how hard it had been to get the rest of her group to actually do anything and I was nodding wisely, ready to say that she’s back at university for the next year and she’s making more films, I bet those others aren’t.

“But you’re back at university for the next year and you’re making more films, I bet those others aren’t,” said Rob McLaughlin, one of the other guests. I’m not sure how I taught him so well but clearly I did. Clearly.

We talked on about how production is collaboration and part of the job is getting the right group around you. And this runner – wait, I’m not telling you her name because she’s 17 plus she’s already made more films than I have – this runner mentioned how none of her friends are into filmmaking. Some of them sounded actively against it, they had been doing that thing of saying you’re wasting your time on that, you’ll never make it, that’s rubbish.

I was really ready now to point out that no matter what you do or want to do, there are people around you who say no. Ultimately the thing I’ve learned as I near 50 is that you have to say bollocks to them and do it. They come around after you’ve done it and in fact they tend to come around whether or not you did something successfully. If you want to do something, that’s always better than not wanting to do anything and you should just do it without them.

“But I suppose if you want to do something, that’s always better than not wanting to do anything and you should just do it without them, shouldn’t you?” she said.

I’ve got one word for you

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Bollocks.

That’s the word. It’s not personal. But before I ask you to come along for a reasonably strident ramble about something, I want to examine that word.

Bollocks. You read that and you know I’m not an academic, I’m not writing a paper, I’m just talking to you. You don’t need to know me well to recognise that I say it quite a bit too, it’s part of my ideolect. (Countries have languages, towns have dialects, people have ideolects.) I think you read the word ‘bollocks’ and you have an idea of my age as well. Maybe you can’t pin it down to the month and day but you don’t think I’m 15 and you don’t think I’m 70. It’s a broad range, I agree, but it’s there.

You might get that I’m a man. It’s hard to judge this from in here where I said the word, but it feels more like a man saying it than a woman. It feels more British than it does, I don’t know, Indonesian.

There’s a tone in the word, too. It’s not exactly serious but it isn’t playing about either. Bollocks is a firm word, said with intent, it’s not a filler word like ‘well’. Nor is it strong like ‘fuck’. You can argue with a man who says bollocks, there’s often no talking to someone who’s saying fuck.

I did have a worry that you could think I was saying bollocks to you, somehow about you, but that came more from the headline up there where I said “I’ve got one word for you”. It’s possible to interpret that as meaning I have one word to describe you. On its own, though, if you’d just come in on that word bollocks then I believe that you would unthinkingly, unconsciously but immediately have thought this is a non-academic, firm but not overly serious, debatable point being made by a British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner.

I believe that but I know this: you would not have got any of that if what I’d actually written was “Insert Word Later”.

I have regular arguments about dialogue, especially dialogue in drama, and the short summary is that I’m right about it being vital and anyone who thinks it isn’t, is wrong. Told you I was strident. I’m struggling to think of anything else that I am so irrevocably black and white certain sure about. Tea and dark chocolate come close, but this is more important to me.

What previously I’ve said to you before and what I have argued in countless pubs is that if I don’t believe the dialogue you give a character, I don’t believe the character. It’s common for dialogue-haters to be plot-fans but what they miss is that if I don’t care about the characters, if I’m not interested in them, the plot is just the thing I have to get through before I can go home. Characters facing grave peril, I’m in. Characters whom I don’t believe in facing the same peril, well, let them die. What do I care?

The reason this is all on my mind now, though, is partly because it is always on my mind. I am a dialogue man and it’s one of only two things I will accept I’m good at. (The other is typing. Can’t touch me for typing.) I am immeasurably pleased and relieved to say this to you because my dialogue writing is responsible both for everything I get to write and for how successful any of it has been.

Dialogue is obvious in scripts but I’m really writing dialogue to you right now. Didn’t I just say bollocks? That’s dialogue.

Emails I write are really dialogue and so are articles. I can’t do it when the house style of a magazine is more formal but the rest of the time I can because I’m always doing the same thing. I’m trying to convey something to you. Talking.

That’s what dialogue is in scripts: I’ve heard arguments that say dialogue is pretty speeches when actually no, it’s people talking.

The other reason this is all on my mind now is that I recently went to a couple of sessions of the PowWow Writers’ Group in Birmingham. I don’t think the word dialogue came up once. We certainly didn’t have this bugbear argument, I could write you an advert for how interested the group is and what they’re doing. Yet there was something.

I think it was in the way that one thing which did come up was the idea that when you’re writing, you should just get the stuff written. Get it down, then you can work on it. All true. Writing is rewriting, editing is critical.

Hours later, I joined a dot. The people I’ve most argued with about dialogue, the ones who are plot fans and believe dialogue is pretty speeches, also reckon you can do it tomorrow. Get down the story and the plot, then just before you’re finished, you can go back to do a dialogue pass. You can make the speeches prettier later, it’s a tasty extra that you can worry about just before you print the thing out and look for some pink ribbon.

Can you bollocks.

Everything you’ve just read sprang from the word bollocks at the top. I could’ve begun with Insert Word Later and then gone on to all this but it wouldn’t be the same. The bounce, the rhythm, what I wanted to say to you and when would all be different. I’ll bet money it wouldn’t have been so strident, for one thing.

So let’s say you’re writing a character who is strident. A character who is also a non-academic, firm British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner. At one extreme, you end up writing dialogue like “Hello, William, my old British friend who I think should have gone into academia but I’ve been saying that to you since you were a teenager back in 1989”. At another extreme, you end up writing a narrator. Shudder. Or the single worst descriptive prose novels have ever known.

Or you could just say bollocks.

Praise on toast

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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.