April 17 2020, 10:34
My favourite five books of 2019
In 2019, on Goodreads, I set myself the challenge of reading 52 books. I succeeded — I wanted to read more, and the challenge did the trick. There were periods where I hardly read at all, and to stay on track I found myself choosing shorter books. I read ten books in November and December, so while I had fallen a little behind, I was pretty consistent all year.
My favourite five books of 2019:
- The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan (1981)
- You Were Never Really Here, Jonathan Ames (2013)
- In the Cut, Susanna Moore (1995)
- The Sea Inside Me, Sarah Dobbs (2019)
- My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout (2016)
I’m reading less in 2020, and even my more relaxed target of 35 books is feeling a little too much. I didn’t help myself by picking The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales, by HP Lovecraft, and then getting stuck in his prose stodge.
Alice’s Masque, by Lindsay Clarke, is the book I’m reading right now. I picked it up from a secondhand book shop years ago and never got around to it. It’s good. I’m a third of the way in. I don’t know where he’s taking me, but he’s earned my trust. I’m hopeful it’ll be on my 2020 list. Time will tell.
April 12 2020, 15:55
A walk around my writer’s block
It took me thirty years to get from wanting to write a novel to finishing one. I walked away from writing several times, but I always came back, because deep down I knew it was a vital part of who I imagined myself to be.
My debut novel, The Complex, came out in August 2019, and while I feel lucky and tremendously grateful it got out into the world, it already feels like it is being washed away by the endless river of words that is literary culture. I keep playing the publishing timeline game — a year to write a draft (The Complex took three), six months to edit (ha, in my dreams), another six months to get it picked up by a publisher (I wish), who will probably want changes (the bastards), and six more months to go through the publishing pipeline (it never happens this fast). That’s two-and-a-half years, with excellent weather, a reliable map, and no mishaps. Let’s say three (lol).
But there is something about writer’s block I need to explore first. I’ve spent most of my writing life feeling blocked in one way or another and I want to know more, perhaps so that I can avoid them when writing my next novel.
Let’s take a stroll around my psychic neighbourhood.
Teenage dirtbag
When I was sixteen, I had three dreams of what I wanted to do with my life: professional tennis player, astronaut and writer.
Nobody had told me these things were impossible, or even particularly unlikely, although I was beginning to suspect that I wasn’t going to win Wimbledon. This was 1989, in Port Talbot, South Wales, and I had to choose my A-level subjects. The college couldn’t handle students doing Physics and English simultaneously, so I had to choose: astronaut or writer?
I had a handful of astronomy books, with illustrations of planets, stars and black holes, and I often looked at them before I went to sleep. Space was a safe place for me, far away from family arguments and the daily shames of teenage life. I didn’t write, but I liked Dungeons and Dragons, and I spent hours drawing intricate worlds on graph paper.
I also loved to read. My father was an electrician in the steelworks. His shifts were long and varied — he could be on mornings, days, nights or doing overtime — and when he was home he would lose himself completely in books. You could call his name from six feet away, and he wouldn’t hear you. Once a month he would get the latest bestseller delivered through his book club, and I would beg him to hurry up reading them, so I could go next — Stephen King, James Herbert, Stephen Donaldson, Dean Koontz, all the big eighties’ horror, fantasy and thriller writers. My mother liked crime novels, but I wanted gore, scares and other worlds.
My stutter started when I was ten years old. It was like words were stuck in my chest, breathing became harder, and it made me feel panicky — like I was drowning in the words I couldn’t say. Seeing people’s faces as I stuttered made it worse, because they couldn’t help, and then I was drowning both of us, so I avoided eye contact. When every interaction is like that, the rational thing to do is to avoid interactions as much as possible. It was so severe when I was sixteen that I could hardly speak to anyone outside my closest circle of family and friends. Answering the telephone was terrifying. Asking for something in a shop was a torment. Talking to women I found even slightly attractive was completely impossible.
Faced with an A-level choice between cool, rational science (with boys), or warm, emotional literature (with girls), and knowing in English I would have to read aloud in class, it wasn’t a choice at all. I took Physics, Maths and Chemistry. Two years later, in 1991, I became the first person in my family to go to university, and to everyone’s surprise except me, I went as far away from home as I could, to the University of Kent, Canterbury, to study Physics with Astrophysics.
My world opened up. Lift off.
Science and literature
I was an average student, and while I loved the astrophysics part, my maths wasn’t strong. In the second year I had an emotionally catastrophic relationship, and I fell a long way behind. After that, I didn’t know how to ask for help, so I stumbled from term to term, enjoying myself socially, but struggling academically.
I left it too late to recover. That’s how I found myself in the university library, a few weeks before my finals, staring at my sparse study notes, realising that there was a chance I might not just do badly, but fail my entire degree. It hit me hard, just like that, in a moment. Stunned, I remember walking blindly around campus, before returning to the library, where through some unconscious longing I ended up in American Literature. I spotted Catcher in the Rye and pulled it out. My comprehensive school English teacher had once given it to me to read. Nearby was For Whom the Bell Tolls. Apt. I’d read that too, and I remembered the romance of it, as well as the clarity of the language. Being amongst those books calmed me. So, I took them out.
My friends thought I’d lost the plot when they saw me reading Ernest Hemingway weeks before final exams. They didn’t understand that it was part of me letting go of my dream. I had twigged that I wasn’t going to be an astronaut, or an astronomer, or even get on the MSc in Medical Physics I’d looked at. I kept studying, but I knew I was just trying to get through it. Somehow I scraped a third. I moved back to my parents’ house. All my friends were talking about graduate jobs, but I couldn’t get one. I applied for, and was rejected from, over fifty jobs that summer. That’s how I fell into administrative work.
Last dream standing
Becoming a writer was the only dream I had left, but I also needed money, so I mashed them together and decided to become a journalist. I did some voluntary work on a local paper, then borrowed four grand to do the formal training, and landed a job on the Salford Advertiser, Manchester. I lasted six weeks. The salary was tiny, Manchester was expensive, my job required a car that I couldn’t afford, I didn’t know anybody, I was in debt, and I hadn’t clocked just how combative the job of a reporter in a city could be. After a couple of weeks, my stutter started to come back, and by the end I was hiding in the toilets for half an hour at a time, afraid to go back to my desk. I was done.
It took months to recover. That summer, in 1996, I found a new administrative job, this time in Mumbles, Swansea, and I began to slowly pay back my debt. My mother gave me an old typewriter, so I could try writing short stories. There were no local writing groups, or evening classes, or support networks. I had no readers and no feedback. It was a lonely business. I kept going for two years, but writing wasn’t a pleasure; it was a war of attrition between my ambition and a harsh social, economic and cultural reality.
I’ve always thought of this period as my first experience of writer’s block. I was desperate to somehow make writing work, but I was completely disconnected from the writing and publishing world. Looking back, I don’t think it was writer’s block. I was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, without any access to learning resources.
Exhausted, I stopped writing, and in 1998, just as I finished paying off my journalism loan, I quit my admin job and took out a new loan, this time to study computing. I began a one-year MSc Computer Science conversion course at University of Wales, Swansea, and started my life as a software developer.
Duty, love and staying sane
In the following years I had several coding jobs, got married, had a baby and bought a house.
In 2004, seemingly from nowhere, I blasted out the first draft of a novel. I was dissatisfied with my job, having a two-year-old was hard, and I needed to feel creative — I remember it as a thrilling three-month frenzy, followed by another six months of soul-shredding frustration. I couldn’t make the ending work. Eventually, I had to stop. By the end of 2004, I was at a really low ebb, and I was lucky I had the money and will to be able to find a good psychotherapist. I questioned everything. It seemed like all of my childhood dreams were dead, and it hit me that I was into my thirties, and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.
I’d written the first draft of a novel — success! — but I knew it wasn’t good, and I didn’t know why. This block was a lack of skill, not a psychological block. With the help of a mental health professional, I managed to tack from quite dangerous waters into one of the most creatively interesting periods of my life.
I began to look for alternatives to writing. I did three counselling certificates, one after another. I took singing lessons. I bought a guitar. I tried to learn the piano. I volunteered with the Samaritans. My son was getting older, my job was stable, and life became easier. In 2007, I allowed myself to think about writing again. I found an online creative writing module with the Open University and, over the next three years, I learned how to write short stories, poems, plays and essays, and I left with a Certificate in Creative Writing.
In 2009 we had another baby and moved house. I had a new job with a much longer commute. Without the structure and deadlines of a course, I stopped writing new material. I still wrote in my notebooks, but I wrote about process, the nature of creativity, psychology and psychotherapy, and why I wasn’t writing. I wrote about my health. I wrote about my health a lot.
I returned to psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the end of 2010. It felt like I had unfinished business. I was desperately trying to write a novel, but life was busy, and psychotherapy was a big creative undertaking in itself. Psychotherapy was fruitful, but often excruciating, and I stopped writing fiction completely, concentrating instead on my dreams, memories, and patterns of thought and feeling.
I felt blocked, but again, in retrospect, it wasn’t writer’s block. I had chosen therapy over writing, but I fought against that choice all the way. However, psychotherapy taught me how to use my intuition and how to listen to messages coming from my unconscious mind. These are priceless weapons in a writer’s armoury.
A breakthrough in my writing efforts came when I discovered Twitter. Once I got to grips with the mixture of anonymity and instant feedback, I started to really play with improvised writing. It was a potent tool alongside psychotherapy. I already knew how I tended to censor my thoughts and feelings, and Twitter gave me a way to write in public without inhibition.
The downside to Twitter was the ease with which I projected aspects of myself onto strangers, so it became perilously emotionally involving, and the many tweets I put into the world gave me nothing tangible in return. Likes and retweets didn’t get me closer to my dream. I needed to change tack if I wanted to write a novel.
The intuitive craft
I decided to stop psychotherapy and in 2014 I applied to study an online MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The application required a recent 2000-word story. By this point I had written thousands of tweets, but hadn’t written a short story in over five years.
I took my time. For the first couple of weeks I just wrote in my notebook about what I was trying to do, how I felt and how I might go about it. I was getting my unconscious engaged with the problem. I started having vivid dreams, and I wrote them down, just as I had learned to do in psychotherapy. I read my old textbooks and notebooks. I researched the MA reading lists. I deactivated my Twitter account. It was intense, sometimes unpleasantly so, and tiring.
Around the third week, a line of dialogue popped into my head, followed by a reply. I wrote them down. Then came a few lines of description. A name. A memory. I wrote 300 words. The next day I wrote another 300 words with the same character. It felt good. I took four weeks, but I finished the story, and a month after that MMU accepted my application.
Why didn’t I experience the writer’s block I seemed to have? I think it was because I had a deadline, a word count, and crucially, both skills and a very strong reason. THe story was going to be read and something would happen as a result — it wasn’t going to sit on a slush pile for months, or be lost in thousands of competition entries. I was writing a story to show I was good enough for a course that I hoped would change my life.
It did change my life. It would be three years before I finished my first attempt at The Complex, and another year until it was good enough to be published by Salt. My tutor, Nicholas Royle, was endlessly encouraging and enthusiastic about my work, and his belief in me helped me believe in myself.
A life’s work
Words have always been a struggle for me. I can see more clearly now what was blocking me from writing at different points in my life. Writer’s block is a specific thing — you can’t have writer’s block if you don’t already have writing craft. My story is one of a man hitting a series of obstacles that he had to surmount.
I am not at all a perfectionist in most things, but in writing I am. I’ve worked my whole life to be able to express myself clearly, in speech and the written word. I’ve always known when the words weren’t right. That can be debilitating, especially if you are solving a complex writing problem for the first time, and a literary novel is a seriously complex writing problem, because for almost the entire process, the words are not right.
I find writing painful. No wonder it’s hard to start writing something new. But I have learnt some things that help.
The first thing is, I’m better at recognising when I’m procrastinating because I’m afraid. I can listen to that fear, and we can reach an agreement. I’ve also learned to trust my writing process, although I still have to remind myself what that is, because it’s slightly different every time. I do know that once I start, I’ll be okay. That makes it easier to start.
Secondly, my confidence in my ability to write something good is much higher now, which helps me get going. This has come from the support of wonderful teachers, like Nicky Harlow at the Open University, and Nicholas Royle at MMU. There is nothing like the enthusiasm and belief of people you trust and respect. That’s what I was missing in my twenties. Teachers.
And finally, I believe in myself as a writer now, but I know self-belief is intangible. Our demons are personal. For me, writer’s block is an emotional block, like my stutter was. It’s a kind of overwhelm, where my mental circuits get fried because they are overloaded. The answer is almost always to slow everything right down and to pay quiet attention to what’s going on under the surface of my mind, to stop caring so much that I rush. I try to let things take their own sweet time.
Onwards
That feels like the end of our stroll together. I hope there was something useful in here for you. I’m currently meandering in the foothills of my next novel. It has a title. It has locations. It has some characters, albeit fuzzy ones. There are no words written yet. I just need a line of dialogue. Perhaps it’s time to start.
July 12 2019, 17:12
On writing ‘The Complex’
The first shoots of the ideas that would combine to become The Complex appeared way back in November 2012, when I was fascinated by Lars von Trier’s film, Antichrist. I hadn’t watched it, I was too scared of it, but I was reading interviews with Charlotte Gainsbourg about what it was like to work on the film, and I became fascinated with the idea of going into the woods, with actors, as a director, and getting them to do whatever I wanted. I was suffering with writer’s block at the time. To be able to write freely, without censure, in a cabin in the woods on my own internal film set, was an exciting idea. I was crushing the life out of myself with old feelings of shame and inadequacy. Gainsbourg in the interviews made film-making with extreme material feel playful. I wanted some of that.
I didn’t write the first words of the first draft of The Complex for another three years. By this point, in December 2015, I was in the middle of the second year of an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I had been flailing around creatively, with two aborted attempts at a novel on my desktop, but now things were getting serious. For the first time, I had workshops in which I had to present work from my final dissertation, a novel, to a group of my peers and my tutor. I remember reading back through years of notebooks, pulling together strands of thoughts and little sketches, about a cabin in the woods. I also found notes I had made about the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, taken after my mother died in 2014. In working through my grief, I had written about his concept of a complex, in which a person is taken over by patterns of thoughts and feelings so that they act irrationally, with great energy.
I had even written in my notebook that The Complex was a perfect title for a novel. I had forgotten all this, even when starting to write two other novels, but now, when I needed it, the title reappeared. I think I fell into a complex to write the first half of the first draft of the book — after years of not being able to write a longer story, under the pressure of a workshop, with a tutor who I wanted to impress, the words started to come. Three voices — Stefan, Gabrielle and Leo.
It became clear that I needed to find a narrative mechanism that would let me write more fantastical, dream-like sequences, but staying grounded in the emerging location of the story. They appeared organically, as I wrote the draft. Stefan has the Virtual Reality headset. Gabrielle has Art’s drugs. And Leo has whatever is in the place itself.
And I wanted to explore relationships. These characters were parts of myself, and I could bounce them off each other, let them rip. A lot of the fun of writing The Complex came from imagining the scenes as if I were shooting a film. My father introduced me to genre stories very young. He loved mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, science-fiction and horror, in books, television and films. Growing up, our house was totally liberal in what I could read, mostly liberal in what I could watch on TV, but totalitarian in terms of having and expressing feelings. No wonder I had writer’s block. But that’s an entirely different blog post.
When the writing was going well, it felt like I was making a film for myself, perhaps for my father too. Dreams, fantasies and the imagination are all real in their affects. Through Gabrielle I could write about my grief at my mother dying, Stefan about optimism and hope, and Leo about desperation, longing and despair. It felt like important work to be doing — even if it might never be published.
Because the book took almost four years to write, by the end of it I was a different person, and I could look more clearly at the themes. There was grief, yes, but also the problems of intimacy, technology, sanity and reality, family, falling in love, betrayal, addiction, competitiveness, manipulative relationships, affairs, and memory. I’d covered a lot of ground, but organically, without a conscious agenda. The story is driven by the characters. In writing, the themes seemed to follow the characters interests, but if I am the characters, and they are aspects of myself, then I guess these were all my concerns and obsessions.
Anyway, my tutor on the MA was Nicholas Royle, who was also a commissioning editor at Salt. I feel lucky and grateful that it will be published and read. Now I have to write some new characters, in new locations, and find out how my obsessions have changed. It’s like writing myself into existence.
Since I’ve put it like that, I’d better crack on.
February 03 2019, 18:12
Anomalisa (2015)
Everyone looks the same to Michael Stone. He is in Cincinnati to give a talk at a conference and is staying at the Hotel Fregoli. After failing to make a connection with an ex-lover, he becomes fascinated by an antique Japanese sex toy. He seems unable to make a connection with anyone.
Then he hears a voice through his hotel door. Anonymous Lisa. Anomaly Lisa. Lisa’s voice and face are different, so Michael becomes enraptured by her. His interactions with Lisa in his hotel room are sweet, if a little manipulative. He is desperate for something real in his life, an authentic person who is not like everyone else, something that he hasn’t fucked up. The scene where they make love is beautiful. Animated intimacy surprised me, perhaps because it was more intimate and real than most sex scenes I’ve seen with real actors.
The nightmare he has that night reveals the horror of his situation. In the basement he meets the hotel manager who says he is in love with Michael, and that he can fuck anyone at the hotel but Lisa. Michael is falling in love with her and his unconscious is telling him he has to protect her, because he is going to ruin it, ruin her. He has brought her out of herself and her vulnerability terrifies him. The next morning her voice begins to change and she starts to become like all the others.
Michael has a breakdown on stage as he gives his talk — he is trapped in his own self-absorption, or perhaps a medical condition, we can’t know. He returns home and is faced with the same face wherever he goes. His family is no comfort. He doesn’t know how to connect with his wife or son. But Lisa is transformed by the experience and heads off into her life renewed. It’s a smart reversal in a film full of doubles. Multiples, in fact.
The hotel is a metaphor for Michael’s psyche, twisted and pulsing with his emotional experience. The story is told in three thirty-minute acts: arriving at the hotel, his night with Lisa, and the consequences. The dialogue is awkward and authentic, and it took me a while to realise all the faces and voices of periphery characters were the same. That was unnerving. It made me wonder if I had the same problem as Michael Stone. And the lines on the characters faces were freaky too. I didn’t know they were puppets, so it added to Michael’s paranoid, nightmarish view of the world. You only realise how ill he is at the very end.
It’s a terribly sad story for him, but an uplifting one for Anomalisa. Brilliant.
August 20 2018, 11:15
Point Break
It’s tricky to find films that my fifteen-year-old son will want to watch with his forty-something parents, but this seemed to sit in the sweet spot — surfing, armed robbers, a cocky young hero, skydiving, a love interest and lots of banter. I wanted to see how the film stood up twenty-five years after the only time I saw it, on it’s release. I remembered Patrick Swayze’s charisma and the adrenaline rush of the action sequences, but beyond that it was pretty vague. Intriguingly, it also had the highest rating on iTunes I had ever seen, 4.9/5 with 74 reviews. That impressed me.
Johnny Utah wants to make his mark at the FBI and take down a crew of surfer armed robbers. He is attracted to the crew's leader, Bhodi, who lets him in to his surfer gang and shows him the spiritual side of being a surfer. But Bhodi’s greed and Utah’s ambition put everyone in danger.
Utah becomes Bhodi, absorbing him, integrating his own shadow, in Jungian terms. We project what we unconsciously desire or fear and, if we do the work, we can claim those things in ourselves consciously, and take back our projections from the other person.
The film is fast-paced, the dialogue cheesily involving, and the main characters substantial enough. Bigelow's camera loves the ocean, making the surf and surfers seem as mystical as the characters believe they are. It’s all very light. My son was impressed. Now I have to convince him to watch Robocop.
August 19 2018, 09:15
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Siblings Sally and Franklin come to a remote part of Texas to make sure their relatives remains haven’t been dug up from a local cemetery in a bizarre, gruesome local crime. But Franklin’s curiosity takes them to the slaughterhouse their grandfather used to own. They are warned not to go there, but in time-honoured tradition, they go anyway. That transgression sets the film in motion.
This is a film about meat. The young people are slaughtered like cattle in a world where meat is life and livelihood. Bones are plentiful in the rural setting, made into art works, mashed together into new creatures. There is beauty and horror in the lives of these people, who are like bacteria, or maggots, stripping life to the bone because it’s all they have. It’s a type of hell.
The film makes meat-eating seem like a transgression, a breaking of natural laws, with the characters hung on hooks, frozen, and butchered like animals. The film seems to say that it is none of our business what people do in their own homes, and if we are too nosy, it’s at our own risk. And all sentient life should be treated with respect. It's a pro-vegetarianism film.
So many horror tropes seem to constellate here. Young people are picked off one by one. A killer has a phallic, mechanical weapon. Rural communities are dangerous to outsiders who don't respect the old ways. There is a final girl.
But the thing that struck me most was the beautiful, dread-filled cinematography, the art design, and the overarching intelligence of the script and direction. Almost forty-five years after its release, when of course it was vilified and banned, it’s now clear it’s a masterpiece.
August 15 2018, 19:35
Exhibition (2013)
This one lingers in my mind. The married couple, D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) have created their own emotional ecosystem, balancing intimacy and distance, in a big modernist house somewhere in Central London. She is an artist, and he is an architect — both work at home, but in their own offices on different floors, talking to each other sporadically through an internal phone system. It’s an unusual setup that has worked for them for years, but comes under strain when they decide to move home.
Neither actor has acted before, which is remarkable to me, and makes sense given the naturalistic rendering of their relationship. They are completely believable as an averagely neurotic middle-aged couple. The house itself is the third character, representing the life they have created together. There are lots of beautifully framed shots of interiors and exteriors, the cinematographer making the most of the glass, concrete and minimalist shapes.
D hates going out and is afraid H will be hurt every time he steps outside. At the same time she lives a separate life in her office studio, performing for herself, using her reflection in the big glass windows, aware that she can also be partially seen through the carefully arranged blinds — if anyone was looking.
March 03 2018, 21:09
High Rise
I read several Ballard books in the late nineties — my mid-twenties — starting with short stories, before being entranced by the shiny silver paperback cover of Super-Cannes. I thought I’d read High Rise, but I quickly realised on starting it that I hadn’t. There was the usual Ballardian sense of society being on the edge of primal chaos, but I’d read so many blurbs on the backs of his books they were blurring together.
Robert Laing is a newly divorced medical academic moving in to high-rise block in London. He’s hoping for a life of comfortable anonymity. We also meet Richard Wilder, a television documentary-maker on the second floor, and Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, in the penthouse. The high-rise is portrayed as a mixture of designed technology and living organism—a social experiment designed by Royal and embraced by the residents.
Laing is a social chameleon who wants to make a safe place for himself in the building, whereas Wilder wants to conquer it and confront its maker. Each man tries to make the building serve them in their own ways, but it’s the women who ultimately make the place their own.
If the high-rise is a living thing, Ballard is its ultimate creator, and I like the idea of Laing, Wilder and Royal being different aspects of Ballard’s creative personality. The prose mixes an omniscient point-of-view with that of each character as Ballard moves between them. The omniscience could also be that of the building itself. It’s a little irritating how characters reveal chunks of backstory in their thoughts, but the descriptions are brilliant and unnerving, and Ballard finds endless ways to show the collapse and degradation of the initially modern and comfortable environment.
I was nervous about watching the film—I didn’t want to subject myself to two hours of disgust and misery. The film is quite different though. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley and adapted by his long-term screenwriting and editing partner Amy Jump who makes the main protagonist Laing. Wilder and Royal are still important, Laing is given far more agency. The film honours the book in how it portrays the dying building, but differnt chaacters come to the fore. It’s an impressive feat.
December 08 2017, 21:14
It Follows (2014)
I avoided watching It Follows because the idea was unsettling. It’s a genius concept embedded in a homage to John Carpenter and Halloween. The characters are all on the cusp of adulthood with their parents barely around. Jay has sex with her new boyfriend and finds out he has passed on to her a curse that she can only get rid of by having sex with someone else. The cursed person is chased by slow shape-shifting dead people, visible only to them, moving methodically at walking pace. They are all ages, shapes and sizes, but always dead and gross.
The cinematography is wonderful—slow tracking shots, wide-angle views of suburban Detroit, open spaces drawing the eye of the viewer to look for the next zombie. Even the soundtrack is touched by John Carpenter, with the synth score serving the mood perfectly.
Who knew a single slow zombie could be so scary?
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