We stood at Pendennis Point on the jagged rocks, the rain like sea-spray, watching the water swell and roll, debating whether or not to go in. I think our minds were made up as soon as we saw the sea, but we played with the possibility for five minutes or so – not because of any dare-devilish tendencies or macho pride, but merely out of disappointment.
Instead of throwing ourselves into the waves, we went to the old keep and talked about fatherhood.
⁂
Tuesday
Went to the Meat Counter and had the best burger I’ve ever eaten. Wolfed it and washed it down with a pint of Harbour pilsner. Resolved myself to eat one a week when I’m working and can afford it.
I hardly ever eat meat; I’m allowed one weekly treat.
⁂
Wednesday
I switch on the CD player. Jamiroquai comes on, and for a moment I’m confused, and then I feel a little pang as I realise it must’ve been Laurence, yesterday, as we drove him to the station.
Our goodbye was rushed, the train due to leave any minute. He leant through the front passenger side and we hugged, and then he ran off up the platform as I pulled away.
⁂
Thursday
I turn left onto Western Promenade Road, drive past the Jubilee Pool, and there, as I round the bend, I see St. Michael’s Mount.
‘Have you been to Penzance, yet?’ My nan would always ask. ‘Have you seen St. Michael’s Mount?’
My answer was always the same.
And now, finally, here I am, looking out over the sparkling sea at St. Michael’s Mount, cut off by high tide, the chapel cresting the peak.
I feel my throat close and my vision goes soft-focus, like a lens misted with sea-spray.
I blink and focus on the road ahead.
⁂
Friday
I drove back from Hayle with a difficult decision to make, but a weekend to mull it over.
Paddy and I stand at Pendennis Point, on the jagged rocks, the sun a burning orange globe sinking in the distance.
The sea is movement and colour. Deep steel-blue purple pink orange flashing white. The lapping waves with their sharp peaks look like an impossible mountain range, falling and reforming over aeons. I feel that familiar sense of insignificance that I often have when faced with the sea. I consider having a cigarette. I change my mind. I remain smoke-free.
⁂
Saturday
Reclined on the sofa with Audrey asleep in my arms, trying to dislodge raspberry seeds from between my teeth (roughing up the tip of my tongue) and reading Any Human Heart by William Boyd. This book belonged to my nan.
It is the epistolary form of the novel that has moved me to write this post (as always, reading inspires writing).
I have been neglecting my blog. I have forgotten what it is for – but this week has reminded me.
⁂
Sunday
Today.
I have made my decision. In fact, I made it on Friday evening, but these two nights have allowed time for it to sink and settle in as a certainty, rather than it just floating around with the other options.
At my desk, I finish writing this post. Beside me the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám lies open – my nan’s copy from 1945; Has anyone even read this? – our yearbook anthology; a pocked lump of temerite serpentine from Kynance Cove, black and white and red; beer mats, books, other artefacts.
My partner comes in and rests her head on my shoulder. It’s time to leave this world of words, I have things to do.
The Old High Street is aptly named. It’s one of the oldest streets in Falmouth, branched with alleys and courtyards; an arch spans the street at the top of the hill, crested by a clock-tower. Here, away from the big businesses of Market Street, you can find independent cafés, boutiques and antique shops. And Greenbank Books.
Illustration by Mervyn Peake from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Displayed in the window is a varied selection of publications: Peter Ackroyd’s London; The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Mervyn Peake; specialist books on subjects such as maritime, motoring, military and art; and countless titles on Cornish history. Inside, the light is warm and books line all three walls; two tables occupy the carpeted floor space, one spines-up for browsing and one covers-up for display. A lifetime’s worth of reading.
Today there’s jazz playing: Charlie Parker. The other times I’ve come here it’s been classical music. Either way it’s always instrumental: there’s no room for lyrics, this small shop is already full of words.
Julius Hyde greets me, shakes my hand, pulls up two chairs on the shop floor. He comes across as a gentle man, unassuming and knowledgeable. He wears spectacles and a knitted cardigan and his hair and beard are grey.
I came here with a long list of books early in the summer and he knew the titles he had in stock and exactly where each one was, even if it was buried under a pile of books in the back.
He’s been running the shop for almost two years now, tending customers of all sorts, from young to very old. Many of them are looking for specialist books, of which the shop has an excellent stock, whereas some just come in to browse the paperbacks. Before becoming a bookseller he was a collector.
‘I’d been collecting books for thirty years,’ he tells me. He speaks slowly, deliberately – not hesitant, just unhurried. ‘I could put the first stock of books in the shop from my own collection of stuff.’
He admits that parting with his collection was difficult, but as a bookseller he has so many texts coming through that there’s no space for him to miss anything.
‘Do you ever find anything interesting in your books, such as inscriptions, photographs or notes?’
‘Not as many as I’d like.’ He smiles. He says he’s found some interesting items such as photographs, postcards and pressed flowers. ‘Never any money,’ he laughs. ‘And I’ve never found any photographs that shouldn’t be in there either.’
Once he sold a travel book and a train ticket to Pitlochry fell out from between the pages as the customer opened the book. She asked to keep the ticket: she said the man she was buying it for would love that the ticket was in there. It gives the book a history, a story of its own, set in the wild beauty of the Scottish Highlands, the protagonist an unknowable traveller reading this very book.
Inscriptions, though, from a bookseller’s perspective, aren’t so romantic.
‘Generally, inscriptions are a bit of a nuisance. The fact that people write, in biro, very banal things, or they think it’s fine to write all over the book, is a bit of a mystery to me. It’s almost a kind of defacing.’
I agree with him, I tell him I can’t bring myself to annotate, at least not in pen. It’s as if the book doesn’t belong to me, it doesn’t belong to anyone, and that to add my own words would be a futile attempt to possess something that isn’t mine. It’s the books that possess us, if only momentarily. That said, for me a banal inscription wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, and an interesting inscription might just be a deal-clincher.
I look down at the notebook in my lap, to the questions scribbled there. I’m getting caught up in the conversation. ‘So let’s talk about literature,’ I say, looking up. ‘What’s the first book that you remember, not necessarily reading, but loving, really affecting you?’
Edward Ardizzone, Stig of the Dump
‘Probably Stig of the Dump,’ he answers. ‘And interestingly, the cover art from that is by Edward Ardizzone who’s now – forty, fifty years later – one of my favourite illustrators.’ (Later I look up some illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. They are simple and scratchy: crosshatchings and lines built up to form a full image. Visually they remind me of the lines of type on a page, or the metal etchings that sometimes accompany old books.) ‘Well after that I should think probably the Narnia stories, The Silver Chair was one I really liked as a kid.’
‘I think when I was a kid my favourites were Diana Wynne Jones,’ I say, trying to remember the names of the books but I can only recall the colourful cover art, parallel worlds and the enchanters that had nine lives (“The reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen) ‘and then the His Dark Materials trilogy – I loved that when I was a kid.[i] And at the moment,’ I ask, ‘your favourite book, or writer?’
‘Probably Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, which is again sort of fantasy. And other than that I suppose Zola. It’s quite a contrast.’
I make a mental note of Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan – add it to the to read list I carry around in my head.
‘So why do you think books are important, if they are important?’
I’ve noticed that Julius watches me as I ask the questions and looks away across the shop to answer. He looks away now, scratching his beard, his eyes flickering beneath his specs as he rummages around in his brain.
He starts slowly, searchingly: ‘I think they’re more important now because they’re one of the few pleasures you’ve got in the modern world where you’re actually creating. A book gives you the narrative and the rest of it you create yourself in your mind.
‘And in a world that’s increasingly bombarding everyone with images, to focus down on just the words and create your own images from that is… is a real kind of release.’
This calls to mind something Margaret Atwood wrote, comparing the printed text of the book to a musical score, ‘which is not music itself, but becomes music when played by musicians’.[ii]
‘That’s right,’ says Julius. ‘And I think, in a way, that’s becoming a rarer thing. Everybody’s just being bombarded with so much information and the idea that it’s got to hit you immediately’ – he claps his hands together – ‘and a book is the opposite of that. And I think we need that, too, I think people actually need that sort of difference.’
This is the difference between visiting a bookshop and buying a book online. It’s a slow experience as opposed to the immediacy of the internet, and it’s an activity that you participate in, running your fingers over the spines, searching, surrounded by stories. They may not have what you were looking for, but there are so many possibilities. You may stumble across your new favourite book.
‘Some say that people tend to read less these days and that written fiction is going to vanish, do you think that’s going to happen?’
‘No. No, I don’t. People use lots of different media but that’s always been the case. I think there’s always going to be innovation but I don’t think that’s going to kill it.
‘I hope there’ll be more of an appreciation of the book as a beautiful object. Maybe people will become more and more interested in specialist bindings and illustrations and that kind of thing.’
When I run out of questions and thank Julius for the interview, he hesitates, stays seated.
‘I just thought of another book that I really enjoyed, called Carter Beats the Devil…’ He gives me a brief synopsis and I add it to the list in my head.
‘Right, OK, I’ll show you some books,’ Julius says, rising from his chair. He walks over to the display table that dominates the the middle of the small shop. ‘Although having said about special bindings, there is something to be said for just ordinary…’ he hauls a polystyrene box of books out from under the table, ‘just an ordinary, modern binding.’
The first one he shows me is The Sweet Shop Owner by Graham Swift. On the cover, a boy looks through a sweet shop window at the jars of brightly coloured confectionary. It reminds me of Bill’s Candy Shop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, decades before Candy Crush Saga could even be conceived. The second is Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, an old photograph of the Süleymaniye Mosque in a sepia heat-haze.
Julius puts these ones away and has a rummage around in the back room for some older publications. He hands me Lays of Ancient Rome with its burnt-orange cloth cover and ridged spine decorated with gold tooling; it’s hefty for its size. Next is The Old Sailor’s Jolly Boat, published in 1844, and then a copy ofRobinson Crusoe that looks equally ancient to my young eyes; inside are intricate etchings of scenes in the story. The first two of these have marbled endpapers: pretty funky for the nineteenth century.
After he finishes showing me these beautiful old books, we shake hands and I thank him for his time. What I intended to be a fifteen-minute interview turned into an enthusiastic, forty-minute conversation between a literature student and a bookseller. In fact, we continue chatting for another half an hour. That’s one thing the internet lacks – human interaction – and, as is often the case with second-hand shops, I came away with something that I didn’t expect to find.
[i] George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons, (New York: Bantam Books, 2012) p. 495
[ii] Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. 44.
The city sprawls along and out from the coast, up and over hills, swallowing the surrounding villages: Ovingdean, Hove, Portslade and Patcham, all absorbed. Soon Shoreham, Worthing, Newhaven, Lewes and Mid Sussex will become part of ‘Greater Brighton’. One day most of the world will be cityscape, like William Gibson’s Sprawl, or Margaret Atwood’s pleeblands.
***
Down on the beach, the pebbles, greasy and flecked with powdery salt, shift beneath one’s feet and sound like rain as they’re dragged into the sea by the waves. From the Palace Pier come carousel songs and fairground sounds and the rich, sweet smell of freshly fried doughnuts – but below the Pier, beneath the tourist attractions and flashing lights, the stench of piss is so strong it stings the eyes and burns the nose.
***
In the dark, crisp, clear early-evening, the air fresh after rainfall, the lights reflecting blurred and bright on the slick brick street; empty but for us and a lone busker (a strange time to busk, he must’ve done it for the joy) singing in spanish and smiling and strumming his guitar under an awning, Kensington Gardens felt like a film set. Unlike in the day when it’s too thick full of people with stuttering gaits whom I have to stop and swerve to avoid, walking in the wake of cigarette smoke.
***
I remember walking past the Scientific Support Branch van parked outside a house on Elm Grove, around the corner from my parents’ house, seeing police officers in white boiler suits and knowing something serious had happened. A man had been stabbed to death.
On the bus going up St. James’s Street, past Rock Place and a police blockade. An armed robber shot dead by police.
***
The anti-fascists are ferocious in the defence of our city. When the March for England used to come to Brighton, they were outnumbered, out-shouted and outmanoeuvred. A small group of the MfE bunch managed to break away from the main body and slip behind the police line. They poured round the corner, eager for a fight, and found one. Surrounded by anti-fascists, they were peppered with projectiles (one taking a beer can to his bald dome), until saved by the police they had evaded. This was in 2013. Their last march here was 2014, and they haven’t come back since.
***
When I come home now I barely recognise the city, until muscle memory carries me down the same old streets and I forget I ever left. But the new builds and changes jar all the more for it. It’s uncanny. Navigating the city consciously and unconsciously both at once. Like driving a new car – just as I forget about the process and let my body do the driving, I reach for the gearstick and it’s an inch out of place.
***
It’s late and I’m tired and my daughter’s sleeping so I should be too. I’m cutting this post short, and will add more episodes tomorrow.
Apologies for any spelling/grammatical mistakes – I’m not proof-reading this now no way José.
I sat there, searching my mind for something to say, stroking, against the grain, the stubble above my upper lip. Weighing words against one another, touching them to determine their texture, turning them over, examining them, poring over their subtitles and suggestions, I began to lose track of the sentence, the bigger picture, so to speak.
I tried to pull the focus, step back and see it all, only to find I’d lost sight of it all together. The clock was literally ticking, each swipe of the second hand like a little windscreen wiper, sweeping my thoughts to the side as they tried to trickle down into view, leaving my mind blank. I had to get up, take the wooden clock from the wall and put it in the kitchen. Still, the incessant tick tick tick, as though it wasn’t coming from the clock at all but from somewhere inside my own head.
***
Earlier this academic year, I told my lecturer for the module ‘Writing a Novel’ that I was struggling with an idea. She, perspicacious as ever, gave an instant and accurate diagnosis: ‘Sometimes we get so caught up in here,’ she said, tapping her temple with a finger, ‘that we forget to look out there. If you just look out the window, there’s six million things you could write a novel about.’
It was true: I’d been mind-mining myself, digging deeper and deeper as the tunnels grew darker and darker, until I could no longer see to find my way out of that empty, cavernous place. Of course, reflection is important, but reflection requires something to reflect upon.
Ultimately, we are all reflectors. And what’s the use of a mirror in a dark, empty room?
***
I haven’t gotten up to much recently. Well, except handing in my dissertation and preparing for baby Birnie. But other than that, not much.
The internal is dependent on the external, and sometimes when I sit to write, or close my eyes to daydream, or rummage around in my head (or old computer folders) for ideas for pieces, everything seems to have dried up. I see something, I reach out for it, it crumbles to dust. It’s like trying to write with a pen that’s run out of ink, hopelessly scratching at the paper.
My partner and I went for a walk today, following the stream up through Glasney Valley and under the viaduct. We moved here in October so I’ve never seen it so verdant. Robins flittered across the path and the delicate, leafy, tangy scent of wild garlic mingled with the smell of rain and the heady fragrance of flowers. I saw a few good saplings that I might try to make into bows, and decided on tomorrow’s lunch: wild garlic pesto and pasta. And I got excited about taking my family along the same walk, to show them the burbling brook and the old stone walls, and more excited still to show my baby some of the beauty left in the world.
The sea seems to change colour as it shimmers in the light of the evening – a film of steely blue, shades of pink and purple, green and turquoise.
This is where Isla stood at the edge of her life, the shoreline, contemplating her years, her son’s birth, her husband’s death.
This is where I came swimming in March and came out of the water blue-skinned, wracked with shivers and a coldness deep inside me… [there is a shimmer, a glitter, of pink light on the water. Are they fish? It seems unreal] … A coldness that didn’t leave my body until I woke the next morning.
This is where the serial picnicker took his first-date ‘victims’ who never heard from him again; where he took Alice, his dying wife, and where he wished he was somewhere at sea, someone else.
***
Violet
Photo #1, Berlin War Memorial: The blocks look more like a geometric pattern than a place; a piece of abstract art rather than a photograph. Serene considering what it represents. Powerfully peaceful. No sense of size. These structures could be small, they could be colossal. The blocks are smooth lavender on top, dusky cerise where the sides catch the light and indigo in the shadow, scratchy, dipping down to black in the spaces, the avenues between.
Photo #2, Pigeons in Venice: //////////////////////////////////////≥ («that was my cat) Pigeons with their little pink feet fill the frame. Violet, grey, white, black. Their shadows double their numbers. A cool blue lens flare streaks down from the top of the picture and a faint pattern of tiny pink circles, like pink leopard-print, is layered over the top, most visible over the lilac flagstones.
***
Scarlet
When the turkeys are all killed, it’s time for the geese. Gareth carries one over and puts it upside-down into a conical bucket with a hole in the bottom so that its head and neck stick out. Below the bucket is a drain covered in blood of such a vibrant scarlet it’s almost orange. With the turkeys, Gareth stunned them with electricity before cutting their throats, but now Paul is brandishing a hockey stick, whistling as he swings it round. He takes aim and cracks the goose on the back of the head. It bleeds from its eyes and bill, unconscious if not dead, as Gareth pushes his knife into its neck and wrenches forward to rip its throat open. Its body twitches as the blood drains out and it’s long neck relaxes and contracts, curling like a snake, with its head dangling off at an unusual angle.*
Voice – that elusive element of writing that can make or break a piece. Good voice authenticates the character, gives them a personality, an identity. It makes the text a character in itself. It carries your reader through your writing. If the character voice is clear and well-crafted, your reader will hear it as they read and they will become immersed in the world of the text.
Here are a few tips on how to write clear, consistent and creative voices that I’ve found useful.
1. Go with the flow.
I find most of my character voices come about naturally. As you begin writing, often the characters will form themselves in your mind. You can hear how they speak, their accents and rhythms and tones. Go with it. Listen to how they sound and let their voice flow out through your fingers. I know that’s a very abstract tip, but give it a try. Even if it’s not the voice you originally intended for that character, just let it happen. I find it’s better to let things develop naturally rather than limit yourself to a rigid pre-writing plan. Sometimes with this natural method the voice will magically translate from your mind to the page, other times it will completely miss the mark, but you can iron all this out later (see tip #9).
If you do hear the character’s voice then let it speak through you. But if you can’t, that’s fine, there are a few things you can do to craft it from scratch, which I’ll go over now. These are also general tips that will help even if you do find a natural voice.
2. Language.
People use different words. Their vocabularies depend upon a lot of different things: region, vocation, age, cultural identity, nationality, and the list goes on. It’s unlikely a sixty year old Eton-educated man would say ‘Wicked, bruv,’ except, perhaps, ironically. Think about the kind of vocabulary your character would have. If he’s an intellectual, he might use academic language frequently, or recite quotes; if she works on the docks, she might use vocational language and industrial metaphors. Where the first would say ‘Security, escort this man off the premises immediately,’ the second would say, ‘Haul his arse out of here.’ One example I particularly like is in Margaret Atwood’s novel Maddaddam, third book in the trilogy of the same name. The character Zeb says, ‘Once they got a hammerlock on power, they didn’t have to bother so much.’ ‘Hammerlock’ is kind of armlock, a submission move in wrestling. Zeb is familiar with martial arts, and so that aspect of his character comes through in the language he uses. Not only does Zeb have a clear, distinct voice, but this voice also characterises him. Use words and phrases your character would be familiar with.
3. Research.
So, you decide one of characters is a dockworker, as in the example above. How do dockworkers speak? Do your research. If you live near a dock, go mill about (try not to look suspicious) and listen out for specific words and the general rhythm, tone and cadence of their voices. Obviously, not all dockworkers speak the same, but you’ll pick up on certain ways of speaking that people have in common. If you don’t live near a dock, watch a video or doc(k)umentary and look out for the same things. One of my lecturers said that when she’s writing a character from a specific nation or region she’ll find audio clips of conversations of people from that region and listen to them for a while to get the feel for the voice. Accent, rhythm, tone and slang can then be plucked from the ‘real’ audio clips and planted on the page.
4. Phonetic spelling.
Once you have an accent in mind, you can use phonetic spelling to allow it to speak through your writing. For example, the black Mississippi preacher in Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury announces: ‘I sees de light en I sees de word, po sinner!’ Much of the dialogue in Faulkner’s novel is spelt phonetically drawing attention to cultural and historical ways of speaking. However, though phonetic spelling can be used to illustrate a character’s accent and pronunciation, it can sometimes be difficult for the reader. So I’d advise to use this technique carefully. If it doesn’t feel right, throw it out.
5. Particular phrases.
Some people have certain phrases that they like to repeat, like the crooked Chief of Police, John Noonan, in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest always saying, ‘Well, that certainly is fine.’ The repetition gets the phrase stuck in the reader’s mind and they associate it with that character. It creates consistency and helps the reader to attach a voice in their head to the words on the page. Another example would be Syrio Forel in A Game of Thrones always saying ‘Just so.’ Again, the reader attaches the phrase to the character and they begin to hear a distinct voice when that phrase is repeated. In the latter case, ‘Just so’ is not unique to Syrio Forel, it is a common phrase among the Braavosi – a city with its own culture – so in this example the phrase is not only used to define character voice but also to enrich the world of the text with a region-specific vernacular, which in turn helps to define other characters in relation to one another.
6. Gruff/glib.
I recently revisited a chapter I wrote a while ago and came across a passage in which a character who is usually quiet, reserved and not great with words suddenly pipes up with an eloquent and poetic speech. Though I was happy with the writing, it was completely out of character. To craft a convincing voice, there has to be consistency. If a character is a blabbermouth, keep them blabbering; if they have a kind of brief and brutal poetry to the way they think and speak, maintain it throughout; if they struggle to say what they mean, make sure they don’t slip into a profound clarity of speech. In other words, keep in character. Give your characters different ways of speaking and try not to let all the voices bleed into one. If you find yourself writing something and thinking perhaps it sounds more like another character then either have the other character say it or rewrite it. Part of this will be the language they use, part will be how that character might react to an event or speech act, and part will be in the rhythm. For example, my aforementioned character usually speaks in short, terse bursts. Straight to the point. Simple sentences without undue ornamentation. Brevity, not levity. Whereas another character, say a poet-politician (?), might speak in long, meandering sentences, fluttering, like a butterfly swaying and dipping drunkenly through the air, now here, now there, frivolously floating in over-description and flittering its coloured wings, from clause to clause, keeping the reader guessing as to where they will finally land.
7. Voice not adverbs.
Allow the voice to come through in the speech itself. Adverbs should be avoided wherever possible (though sometimes they are necessary). Over-description can often break the binding spell of reading by clouding the connection between reader and text with too many words (like the poet-politician’s excessive and frankly painful rambling). If a character’s tone can’t be guessed through what they’re actually saying, maybe it needs rewriting.
8. Read aloud.
You should read back all your writing aloud, it helps you to hear the rhythm. You can then tidy up the clunky bits of prose that you will most probably find. Reading aloud is also very important for voice, whether it’s speech or narrative voice. Sometimes, especially when you’ve been writing for a while, it’s hard to get that connection with the words that allows you to see and hear and taste whatever’s happening in the world of the text. You look at the page and you just see words. Reading aloud helps turn those words back into sensations. So go somewhere you feel comfortable where you can read aloud confidently and get into character. I find it helps to approach it as an actor playing a role: get into your character’s head and try to talk in the accent that you imagine them speaking in. You’ll probably find yourself ad-libbing a little, as certain words and phrases may come more naturally to that character. This is good, go with it. Also, writing and speaking are different acts, so sometimes written speech can feel unnatural. By reading it aloud you can hear whether it sounds natural or not, and those ad-libbed bits will come across as more natural speech.
9. Rewrite.
Equally as important as the initial writing, rewriting is where you iron everything out. In terms of voice, after a little break all those inconsistencies will become blaringly obvious and you can begin to pick them out and add bits in and unite your character’s voice. As I wrote in point 1: if you follow the natural voice, sometimes that voice will slip. The rewrite is where you can go back, often with a much stronger sense of character voice as you’re more familiar with your character, and fix it all up to be clear and consistent.
I hope these tips have helped you or that you’ve found this post interesting. I find voice to be a very difficult thing to write right, and these are tips and tricks that I’ve heard or read from tutors, lecturers and fellow writers.
If you’ve got anything to add, any tips or techniques that I’ve missed, I’d love to hear them so please comment below and impart some wisdom on me!
These Buzzfeed-style ’10 things’ lists seem pretty popular, so I thought I’d try one of mine own, sweet reader.
1. Character Creation
One of my favourite parts of gaming is character creation. I’m the kind of guy who spends hours editing the appearance of my in-game avatar, and often days deliberating over their perks and specialisations. I also like to imagine their entire identity: their personality and backstory, and even a character arch. Embarrassingly, with my Khajiit (cat-man) save in Skyrim, I went onto an Elder Scrolls wikia page to look at Khajiit names and their meanings to give my character a moniker that matched the backstory I’d dreamt up for him (Ri Do J’Kaa). Sad, huh?
Well, I haven’t had the time to play any xbox recently, what with university and all, and I doubt I’ll have to time once my baby’s born… but, don’t despair! Isn’t raising a child the ultimate character creation?
2. Meet the Mini-Me
As well as being excited to mould my son or daughter into an intelligent and thoughtful poet, artist, musician, philosopher, chess GM and wizard, I’m also excited to watch it fall short of my unrealistic expectations. I jest. While I’ll try to instil in my child a love of literature, music and thinking by reading to them, playing to them and encouraging their curiosity, I won’t push them around or pressure them. Ultimately, I’m excited to meet my child and watch them develop into a person who exceeds my every expectation – even if they’re an illiterate, tone-deaf fool.
3. See How I Change
But hey, it’s not all about my baby. I’m excited to see how becoming a parent will change me. Will I become more compassionate? Patient? Confident? Dads always seem to know everything (mums, too). When we’re kids, our parents are Gods, with an apparent mastery of the world and all its workings. How will I change to fill that role, or will I just blag it?
4. Non-pregnant Partner
Though the pregnancy has been a great experience, I’m looking forward to having my bumpless partner back. There are a few reasons: I can prank her again – hide and jump out and scare her silly little socks off; we can share a bottle of wine, some soft cheese and pâté, all of which are no-nos for an expectant mum; and play-fighting, I can get my own back – like just a moment ago, she jabbed me in the ribs and pinched my nipple and there was nothing I could do. Once the baby’s out, I’m going to pin her down and tickle her ’til she wees.
5. Rediscover My Inner Child (or, An Excuse to Be Immature)
I’ll now have an excuse to romp around the playground like the big child I am: swings, slides, you name it, I’ll probably have more fun than my kid. Watching cartoons will be justified, as will using my imagination to play make-believe (which is basically what a writer does anyway), and general, wonderful silliness.
6. Purpose/Motivation
Like many middle-class millennials, I’ve kind of drifted through life care-free for the most part. I’ve had a pretty easy ride. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I know how lucky I am, but I’ve never really had that drive to achieve, to strike out into the real world. Living with my parents and then off to university, the real world has always been there but at a safe distance. And now it presses in, and I’m ready to meet it head-on.
7. Children Are Hilarious
They’re even funnier than cats. My eight year old cousin was over from Australia for Xmas and came up with the phrase ‘death-peeing’. When his mum and I asked what it was, he said that it was when someone hasn’t peed in three days because there has been a long queue for the toilet and when they finally pee they’re so relaxed that they die. We were in hysterics, but he told us off for laughing at such a serious issue.
I’m looking forward to hearing the crazy shit my kid comes out with.
8. Family Unit
Family ideology is used to normalise a certain kind of behaviour: couple gets married, man gets job, woman rears the kids, they get a mortgage, pay their taxes, obey the law and toe the line, and eventually raise their children to be similarly productive, obedient members of society. The obvious example is the nuclear family. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of ‘the family’ (especially the old model of productive man + domestic woman) as of course not all people want to get married, not all people want to or can have kids. But the idea of the family as a unit really appeals to me now (it would be worrying if it didn’t). My partner, our child(ren) and I will form our own family unit. A beautifully imperfect, squalling unit with all the friction of a thundercloud.
9. Love
This one is simple and saccharine: I’m excited to experience a love unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.
10. Someone to Avenge Me
And finally, and most importantly, I will have a son or daughter to avenge me; my very own Inigo Montoya.
When I think of the self, the subconscious self that determines the surface self, I see something like a star: a burning ball, an explosion contained by its own gravitational force. Others see a shadow, or a puzzle built piece by piece. I see a star. In the centre is the character’s core, on the periphery the lesser elements. Every single element is subject to constant change. The peripheral elements are often spat out like solar flares, other things take their places, and the star reforms itself.
The core elements are just as unstable, though more deeply rooted. For something to become a core element it must be pushed, or pulled, or drilled into the centre where it holds fast. The girl who grew up reading will have the written word in her core. The boy brought up on a farm, with pets as companions since birth, who befriended the lambs only to see them reared for slaughter, will have an aversion to violence in his core, an animal compassion; no doubt he will become a vegetarian.
In theory, the entire star’s composition can be changed, but in practice this is near impossible. The point is, though the self is unstable, it is these core elements that make up character, these deep, slightly less unstable aspects of the self that give identity its continuity, its semblance of coherence.
These days everything is so temporary, so transient, flitting in and out of our peripheries too fast to be absorbed. News, communication, fashion and fads, governments, opinions, truths. Money is made from constant consumption which both flourishes from and propagates impermanence. Attention spans are, in general, shortening, as people take a fleeting interest in this topic or that. The result is a subconscious self made almost entirely of interchangeable periphery elements – all surface activity and an empty core.
A host of hollow stars.
I originally wrote this as a character’s diary entry in a short story but it didn’t make it into the final cut.
What have I been up to? Late 2015/early 2016 has been the most difficult period I’ve ever faced. During my third and final year at university, and impending parenthood, tragedies have befallen a close friend of mine and two family members.
I won’t go into detail: though these things affect me, I feel it’s not really my business to blog about the lives of my friends and family, but suffice it to say that any one of the three tragedies alone would be devastating.
In a way, my dissertation (due 16th of May) and my baby (due 18th of May) have both demanded so much attention that I have been able to focus on these two things and plough on through. Though I do find myself slipping sometimes: I talk too harshly to my partner as stress and strain manifest themselves as irritability, or I need a moment to sit, head in hands, breathing slowly and clearing my mind until there’s nothing but a dark calm.
And sometimes I get this feeling that I haven’t been there enough for the three people I love who are going through far tougher times than I am. This guilt grows just after I’ve snapped at my spouse, for she, too, is having a tougher time than me as she’s the one growing the human inside her.
Well, all I can do is all I can do. Wallow in self-pity or step up to the plate. I choose the latter.
the ability to make any two people agree with each other.
Language, of course.
I’ve written about the infinite dangers of time travel in a previous Daily Prompt. In fact, I think they recalled all the PastMaster3000s after space-time was smashed to smithereens, slivers and shards of alternate timelines flung across nowhere through nothing. Kind of like a sci-fi version of the Tower of Babel. Now there’s an idea: I could write a sci-fi series based entirely on the bible. The Sci-Fible? Then again, it’s probably been done before.
Speaking of the Tower of Babel, here’s a cheat: one could get the time travel power, go back to the building of Babel when humanity was united and spoke a single language, learn this language and use it to unite the world when one returns to the now. Viola! all the powers, baby. Kinda.
However, je disgresse. Why language? Well, there are las razones obvias (danke Google Translate), such as employment potential or the relative ease with which I could travel or move anywhere in the world. And there are perhaps more profound reasons – language playing a crucial role in the construct (verb) and construct (noun) of culture, in both its being brought about and its being. With the ability to speak and understand all languages (an ability I have dreamt about since I was a child: it was always one of my three wishes from the djinni in the lamp) comes the ability, potentially, to understand all cultures.
But the thing that I find fascinating is all the literature that would unlock itself to me, if only I had the key. Sure, there are translations, but we all know that translation translates to change; translation is mutation, and in mutation some things are lost (and perhaps others are gained). Par example:
Nasiir stood atop the tower. Below him, the Grand Bazaar was a rippling patchwork, a wailing sea of silk awnings, seething with buyers and sellers and beggars and thieves.
Now, filtered through a few translations:
Nasiir standing on top of the tower. He under, Grand Bazaar is screaming silk curtain, is a mosaic waving sea of buyers and sellers and beggars and thieves and a kitchen.
See how it mutates. The tense has changed. Where the hell did the kitchen come from? I like ‘screaming silk curtain’ and ‘a mosaic waving sea’.
Of course in this exercise the translation/mutation has been amplified as I had to give a short, notable example, but the point remains: a translation will change a text. To read a novel in the language in which it was written would, I think, be an entirely different experience to reading the translated copy.
That said, this exercise has yielded some interesting results – the translations/mutations can produce some striking lines as words are grouped together in unusual combinations. And that’s what contemporary writers should be doing, avoiding clichés and producing original, interesting prose. It seems there’s something I could learn from Google Translate.
Samuel Birnie 