An Invitation to the Party on Mount Olympus

Writing, they say, is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.

Anyone who has tried to write will recognise the feeling. I must have spent the better part of a decade marooned at the keyboard with my spoon; possessed of an urgent need to write, but not quite sure how to proceed.

I knew I had some talent, and I definitely had the guts: I would have sat there until the heat death of the universe if that was what it took. But there was something else I needed and I didn’t know what it was. And no one seemed able to tell me.

All the while, from up above me, came the sound of the party on Mount Olympus.

I wish that all first novels could be written with such cadence, such panache and such abundant comic talent—Daily Telegraph

About the Dean

Like most writers I decided I wanted to write at a fairly early age: somewhere between the second and third weeks after conception. Happily adrift in the amniotic fluid I decided, initially, I would become a hippo but was told the job was over-subscribed; instead I was offered the lowly position as a writer called Malcolm Pryce. I took it.

Following a long journey down a dark, mucus-lined tunnel I was ejected into the hands of a nurse - to loud cheers - in a pale, green-tiled room in Shrewsbury, September 1960.

I spent my childhood in Aberystwyth and later read German at the Universities of Warwick and Freiburg. After university I became, for a while, the world's worst aluminium salesman, raising the art of not selling aluminium to levels which have never been seen before or since. Subsequent to that, I found work in London as an advertising copywriter. I then travelled the world for a while before fetching up in Singapore and working once again in advertising. In 1998 I quit and took a year off to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour, the first draft of which was finished on board a cargo ship off the coast of Guyana. The novel was published in 2001 and was well received. I decided to write more in the series, and rented an apartment in Bangkok for three months. Here I wrestled with the problem of how to continue a series about a town I had carelessly wiped off the face of the earth at the end of Book I. Somehow that three months turned into seven years. I now live in Oxford. For a more in-depth glimpse into the chamber of horrors known as my soul, take a look at malcolmpryce.com

The End

For a moment it was as if we were travelling across the middle of a page, with whiteness and black markings all

around us, and geese lifting off the snow like letters coming unstuck― The Snow Geese, William Fiennes

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music,

we must forget them—Nadia Boulanger.

headmaster@qwertyuiop.org.uk

Contact: headmaster@qwertyuiop.org.uk

Copyright © Malcolm Pryce 2009

Since then I have published five best-selling novels and discovered in the process much that would have made my journey a lot easier if I’d known it at the time. Qwertyuiop College is my attempt to make this experience available to others.

As, you’ll note from the Homunculus mowing the lawn, Qwertyuiop College is not like other creative writing schools. It is, in fact, a metaphorical college, which means none of the evils that bedevil more traditional establishments. No lumpy custard, for example; and no tyrannical bell pealing throughout the day reminding us that break is over and soon we shall die. Instead there is me, Malcolm Pryce, author of a series of critically-acclaimed private eye novels set in Aberystwyth, and would-be midwife to the first-time novelist.

I teach a workshop once a week in my flat in north Oxford. The course covers all aspects of fiction writing—from coming up with ideas right through to revision and polishing—but just as important is the philosophy that underpins it.

To give you an idea of what I mean, take a look at the whistle-stop tour of the course below; if you like the sound of it, get in touch. (All correspondents will receive free of charge The Great, Jealously Guarded Secret of Writing which I stole at great personal risk from Mount Olympus.)

The School Homunculus

The first step on the road is to understand the rôle played in your writing by the Homunculus. This is the swarthy, webby-winged cousin of Gollum who sits on your shoulder while you write and tells you to give up.

If you find yourself getting stuck, or stumped, or suspect what you have written is rubbish, the Homunculus will cite this as evidence that you were never cut out to be a writer, even though these things are, in fact, routine aspects of a writer’s day.

Defeating the Homunculus is essential, but not particularly difficult. (We are lucky enough to have a reformed Homunculus on the staff here at Qwertyuiop College.) We do it by dispelling a few misconceptions about the craft of writing, principally the erroneous belief that the published works of the writers we admire reflect precisely what the writer had in mind when he first sat down to write. (Take a look, for example, at the opening of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four above.)

In truth, plenty of writers have very little idea of where they are going when they set out. And even those who do know can completely change the plan en route. Writing is a voyage into the unknown and many of its best bits are the result of serendipitous discovery along the way. I generally have very little idea where I am going when I start writing. But I spend a lot of time afterwards making it look like I did.

Wernicke's Land

Having vanquished the Homunculus we begin with a field trip inside our own heads. (Hammer and chisels are provided.) The destination is a gloopy landscape of neuronal porridge known as Wernicke’s Land, adjacent to the Superior Temporal Gyrus. This is the location, so the boffins tell us, of that weird alchemy in which the straw of text is converted into the gold of meaning. This is where a guided dream unfolds in the reader’s mind. Some people call it the fictive dream and generating this dream is the chief aim of the fiction writer.

Few people ever spare a thought for this miracle but an understanding of it can be very helpful. The aim is to make the reader a witness to, and participant in, the story rather than someone who receives it second hand. We create the emotional experience of participation rather than impart information.

The notion of the fictive dream lies behind the oft-quoted injunction to writers to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, and this is achieved in the mental theatre by constructing the tale out of scenes. Reflection, philosophising, flashback, analysis…these are not scenes. But a man walking into the room holding a gun is a scene.

From this it follows that the author needs to make each scene as vivid and realistic as possible. The tools we use, of course, are words; both considered in isolation and when strung together. We are generally a godless lot at Qwertyuiop College but we do make an illuminating excursion into the pages of the greatest work of prose in the English language, the King James Bible. It teaches us the importance of avoiding the abstract and using words that describe things we can touch and feel and see. We consider, too, metaphor and simile and a process that goes by the technical name of defamiliarisation which describes the attempt to remove the bandages of gauze through which we normally see (or ignore) the world. Perhaps the fundamental contributor to the reality of the fictive dream is the use of particularising detail with which we rescue objects from the fate of being anonymous and generic.

Of Unicorns and Sausages

There is one question which, judging from my experience at book-readings and festivals, fascinates the lay public more than any other. Namely, where do authors get their ideas from? The assumption seems to be that ideas are rare beasts like unicorns which you need a special permit to catch. In truth, they are more like home-made sausages. The trick is to force the issue, be proactive. You can’t sit in the kitchen and wait for the Muse to ask you for a dance. You have to steal a kiss.

It helps to give up the search for the Chimera of totally original ideas, and accept instead that new ideas are really recombinations of old ones. The raw material of life goes in through your eyes, your ears, your heart; it arrives at the sausage machine hidden in the basement of your soul where a team of elves turn the big handle and out comes new stuff. At Qwertyuiop College we call it Gist. Life-lived is the raw material, and the great thing is, everybody’s got it, unless you are in a coma. Collecting the raw material is relatively easy. More difficult is to get the handle of the sausage machine turning. Creativity is hard work and the unconscious mind seems to spend most of its time inventing excuses not to engage in it. The brain needs to be cajoled. To show you how it works we at Qwertyuiop College have developed a unique, patent-pending, re-combination machine, called the Gistivator®. It consists of three parts: the box, the gist and a wooden spoon. Instruction will be provided.

The King Died and then the Queen Went to the Pub

Now comes the hard bit.

We have to write a plot. Ah yes, you knew there was a catch coming, didn’t you?

Plotting is hard. It’s like lifting weights by telekinesis. But there’s no avoiding it.

Essentially a plot is a blueprint that describes what material we use and what order to put it in. It’s a map of our route across the landscape. An itinerary.

One way to get your head round it is to reflect upon the difference between life and art.

Some people claim with respect to art that the only rule is there are no rules. But it’s not true. It is not art that is wild, chaotic, unbridled and anarchic. It is life, which, we know, doesn’t have to make sense. Life never has to defend itself against the charge of improbability. Art on the other hand is the imposition of form and structure upon the raw material of life to draw out meaning. In literature the relationship between events contains a meaning that is absent from the events of life.

Central to plot is the notion of causality. Life, as Elbert Hubbard famously said, is just one damned thing after another. Whereas plot is one damned thing because of another. In life, events are subject to pure contingency, which means there is no reason for them, they just happen. Story is a chronicle of events. As E. M. Forster said in Aspects of the Novel, The king died and then the queen died is a story. Whereas the king died and then the queen died of grief is plot, or the rudiments of one. Story answers the basic question, what happened next? Plot hints at an answer to the question Why? In a satisfying plot the events must feel logically entailed by what went before, like a series of dominoes collapsing; this is why coincidence and chance feel unacceptable, at least late on in a story. If this feeling of causality is missing, events will seem random, gratuitous, unsatisfying, puzzling.

One of the most inventively comic crime novels of recent years—Sunday Times

I Was So Enthralled I Forgot To Chop Off Her Head.

Make ‘em laugh; make ‘em cry; make ‘em wait—Wilkie Collins

Perhaps the most urgent problem the writer needs to address is what E. M. Forster identified as the Scheherazade problem. You know how it goes. The Sultan adopts the strange new policy of sleeping only with virgins then beheading them in the morning. Before the year is out the town is struck by a severe shortage of virgins. Scheherazade volunteers to entertain the Sultan and spins a tale each night of such fascination, always breaking off at the good bits, that she manages to forestall her doom for 1,001 Nights. How did she do it?

Through curiosity.

A great first line almost invariably poses a half-formed question in the mind; a sense of intrigue. It doesn’t have to be in your face, it can be subtle, but it makes you wonder.

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen—Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father—Berg, Ann Quin

No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember—Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Javier Marias

This is the saddest story I have ever heard—The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford.

This is the threshold, other questions quickly follow. Whodunnit? Why? How? Will Romeo and Juliet get together? Will Ahab find the whale? Does Red Riding Hood really not know what the Wolf is up to? Or is she just a shameless, cautionary parable about the dawning of sexual awareness?

Now, having raised the questions, the one thing you must on no account do is answer them.

The essence of fiction is delayed gratification. You promise something good and don’t deliver it, or at least not for a while.

That’s why we keep turning pages : to find out what happens next.

The psychological manipulation at work here is the same as the advice given to young ladies in our grandmother’s day on the art of courting. Play hard to get, but, of course, not too hard.

This, too, is the reason why criminal masterminds go to such elaborate and unnecessary lengths to kill the hero. Throughout my childhood Batman and Robin ended up each week in a room with spiked walls that closed in on them. The following week they always escaped. Spikey rooms are great for suspense, but hopeless murder weapons.

In this way, we traverse the marvel-filled world of the Superior Temporal Gyrus and learn along the way lessons about character, plotting, setting, point of view, dialogue, endings, revision and much else besides. We also learn some other deeper truths about the writing process: that it is slow and methodical, like farming; and that most of it consists of manual labour, standing in the stream panning for words. Many of our words will get thrown back in the river, and only over the course of a season can we hope to gather together a small pile of shiny ones. But during that time, once we unlearn the urge to rush, and acquire the patience, we learn that as with all the great undertakings in life the best experiences are often ones you have along the way.

Igor, Hand Me That Tray of Noses.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me— Sigmund Freud

We all know where writers get their characters from, don’t we? They base them on people they know, especially ones who were horrible to them in the past. Writing, as Dorothy Parker once said, is the best revenge. There is some truth in this charge. Many of my friends claim to have discovered more than a passing resemblance between my villain Herod Jenkins and my old school games teacher. Although my lawyers reject this claim. In short, you can invent, or steal from life or do a bit of both. Or, as we say at Qwertyuiop College, ‘You can think them up, dig them up, or chop them up.’

More interesting is the question ‘What makes them tick?’

Questions about human motivation have preoccupied poets, thinkers and philosophers since the dawn of time. At Qwertyuiop College we like to point out that one of the most profound comments on the human condition came not from the ancients but from Dutch footballing ace, Johann Cruyff, who said in a TV interview: ‘When you are on the substitutes’ bench you want your team to lose.’

So sad, but so true. Everybody wants to be a somebody.

Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way—E. L. Doctorow

About the College

I run this learned institution from my flat in Summertown, north Oxford; or relocate to the pub if word should arrive that the Muse has been spotted there. (Such are the joys of a metaphorical college.) The atmosphere is friendly, relaxed and frequently perfumed with the incense of coffee and ginger biscuits. I teach a small workshop of four to six people, cost £25 per person, per session. Private tuition/mentoring is also a possiblity, write to me to discuss.