Getting asked for advice
Hey all,
Three things this week:
Husbands cards for the US/Canada
ADVICE
Things I’ve enjoyed recently
HUSBANDS CARDS: US/CANADA
A week or two back I offered to send out a tiny tiny create-a-husband card game to local-ish people who were planning to give someone a copy of The Husbands over the holidays. I’ve just posted these out so if this was YOU it should be with you soon.
In the end a fair few people in the US/Canada said they’d like some cards too, and a friend offered to help me post those out - so if you’re in the US or Canada and you’d like some Husbands cards, and you’re gonna get someone a copy of the book over the holidays, please fill in the form here by Wednesday 27 November! (If you’ve done it already no need to do it again.) The cards look like this, and you get six of them:
If you’re in the UK/Ireland and missed this the first time round that’s fine too, just fill out the form now! I’ll send out another batch with the overseas cards at the end of next week.
ADVICE
Here’s a question I’ve been asked at a few events lately: do I have any writing advice for aspiring novelists.
To which my instinctive answer is: haha no obviously not! What do I know! I’ve written one book! I can give advice on baking, game design or elaborate to-do list systems that are ultimately more trouble than they’re worth, if that’s any use to anyone?
But that’s a bit of a rude weird answer. So I had a think and ended up with three pieces of writing advice that I believe to be true, or at least true-ish, and that I can haul out depending on the circumstances:
If you struggle with getting back into things when you return to a piece of writing, try to stop for the day in the middle of a sentence, so that when you get back to it next time you already know what you’re doing. (I can’t remember where I heard this, except that it was many years ago, but it does genuinely help me.)
Learn to pay attention to that horrible little squiggle of a feeling that goes “that’s good enough, right? Yeah, that’ll do,” because if you have that feeling, whatever you’re having it about isn’t in fact good enough. (This isn’t writing-specific, really, this is every single creative pursuit where you care about outcome more than process, and I hate knowing it because I just love to ignore the gross little squiggle.)
In the first draft of a novel, you may write two or three different versions of a sentence or a feeling or a whole scene without even noticing that you’re doing it. Which makes sense! You’re trying to figure out what you’re saying and how to say it, who your characters are, how it all fits together! So a lot of redrafting is just looking back and trying to see what every scene or sentence is doing, and then figuring out if some of them are doing the same thing over and over. Then: ditch the ones that do it worse. (This is cheating, really, because it’s not something I noticed myself, it’s advice I got from Naomi Alderman while I was working on edits for The Husbands, but as soon as she said it I was SHOCKED at how true it was.)
So those three pieces of advice have served me well when questioned. More recently, though, I got sent a more specific question, which was: what advice would I give to young people about writing? Worse still - the person asking me was a high school student who had already collected advice from a bunch of different writers and collated it on a website. Which - great project, obviously, but it meant the low-hanging fruit was already taken (“write a lot!” “read a lot!” “let people read your stuff and try not to get too pissed off when they say they don’t like something!”). It felt quite difficult to come up with something that was general enough that it might be useful, but that hadn’t already been… you know. Advised.
But then I remembered one thing I did as a teenager that I really do think was useful for my writing, and that I don’t see mentioned in advice often, which is: I memorised a bunch of poems.
I think what the process of memorising a lot of poems does is: it really forces you to pay attention to the exact details of a sentence, every tiny decision.
(And I do think it has to be poems, not songs. With songs you have music to help you remember; it’s not quite the same thing. With poetry - or prose, but that’s so much harder! - it’s just the words, alongside whatever rhyme or rhythm or other weird word patterns the poet has chosen to include.)
So if I set out to memorise something like Louis MacNeice’s “Snow”, the first stanza is reasonably straightforward (for me, I mean; everyone’s brains work differently, and if you try to memorise a poem that runs contrary to how your own brain works it’s much much harder - I never could get more than a few lines of Keats to really stick). “Snow” opens like this:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it,
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
…the thing that I find hardest there is that “collateral” and “incompatible” are kinda weird words in that context. They don’t slot into place naturally. So to remember the poem I have to think about them, why are they there, what exactly are they meant to evoke; and then I notice little things like the collATeral / comPATible not-exactly-rhyme, which helps it to stick in my head; and the repetition of suddenly/suddener, which has to be on purpose, but why?
The next stanza isn’t too difficult to remember either, there’s a good rhythm to it and there’s not many obvious places to go wrong. And getting something wrong is the real pitfall - of course it’s always possible to just fail to remember a line or two, but at least if you do that you definitely notice. This is the second stanza:
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
There’s little details that I can feel helping it to stick in my head, the appropriate explosiveness of spit the pips for example.
Then again, there’s some moments that throw me off a little. For example, most of the poem, at least as I read it, doesn’t have a strict repeating metre but it does feel like it’s built from lines with four stressed syllables each, and a very variable number of unstressed syllables between them. And the four stresses sort-of spread out across each line - SPAWNing SNOW and pink ROses aGAINST it; inCORRigibly PLUral. I PEEL and PORtion.
But towards the end of this stanza we run into the tangerine line, which however I read it always feels like five stresses instead, and then in the last line it all tumbles towards THINGS BEing VARious, this big cluster of stressed syllables banging in at the end of its line. It’s different! I have to kind-of flag that up in my memory, reminding myself to take extra care: you’re halfway through stanza 2, watch out.
And then the last stanza is no fun at all:
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Ugh, thanks Louis. There’s a BUNCH of things here that I find hard. First: “the fire flames”. My instinct is to remember this as “the fire burns”, a much more normal phrase. So maybe I try getting it to stick by thinking: well there’s the alliteration of “fire flames”, MacNeice really loves his alliteration. Or I try what is “flames” as a verb doing there, specifically? Is it for a sense of suddenness, a moment rather than the ongoing state that you get from “burns”? But actually that’s almost worse because now I’ve just tricked myself into remembering it as fire flares instead.
Another problem: huge roses, where my instinct is to remember it as “pink roses” from the first stanza.
And then there’s the line that was the absolute hardest for me to get straight: on the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands. I always struggle with memorising lists! Especially lists like these where the words are the same length - “tongue”, “eyes” and “ears” here could appear in any order without messing up the line’s rhythm, right? So how do I know what order they come in? (Not to mention that remembering whether it’s “on the” or “in the” for each of them is its own little problem.)
But I did finally notice something to hook onto: the length of the vowels. “Tongue” is so short! Such a little “uh”! “Eyes” is a bit longer, and “ears” - to me - is longer still. As an Australian who doesn’t pronounce the “r” in “ears”, that word is almost two vowel sounds together, stretching out. So the words in the list are getting longer as the line goes on, before tumbling into the whole longer-still phrase of in the palms of one’s hands. Great, I can remember that. (This is not to say that I think this is necessarily how MacNeice chose the order of the words, consciously or not - I don’t know what his accent was like, I don’t know if it would even be true for him. But it’s true for me, so I can use it to remember.)
And anyway, now I can mostly remember Louis MacNeice’s poem Snow, which is a poem I love, and it’s nice to have it hanging around in my head available to just think through whenever I feel like: if, for example, it unexpectedly snows a little, as it did earlier in the week.
When I was a teenager I memorised maybe a couple hundred poems; it was slow going at first, but it got faster as I got used to it and figured out more tricks.
And I reckon: if you furnish your brain with a bunch of sentences that you’ve chosen because you like them, their presence must have some sort of impact on your own sentences. Plus the process of thinking through a poem as you try to memorise it - noticing words, repeating them, looking away, running through a line in your head, seeing how far you can get and where you tend to go wrong - that process is an accidental and weirdly intense study of the tiny details of sentence composition, of exactly what makes the sentences that you love land so well.
ANYWAY, THINGS I’VE LIKED RECENTLY
The last few weeks I’ve particularly enjoyed:
Fred Deakin’s show “Club Life”, a tour through his personal history of running weird club nights in the 80s and 90s, a monologue broken up by miniature ten-minute versions of each night. A really lovely time, SO thoughtfully put together. Taking part in the dancing is optional but I would say you’ll have a better time if you’re theoretically up for a bit of dancing or if you’re there with other people. The show’s running at the Omnibus in Clapham for another few nights, and from the sounds of it will be in other venues next year.
The card game “No Thanks!” which combines many of the things I most enjoy about card games. First: the rules are very easy to learn. Second: the decisions are interesting but not super complicated. Third, and most importantly: you have to say the name of the game while you’re playing. (Like how you have to say “Uno” when you’re down to one card in Uno.) With this one, if you don’t want to pick up a particular card, you say “no thanks!”, and it’s just very satisfying when four or five people all reject a card in a row. No thanks! No thanks! NO THANKS.
I’ve also been enjoying thinking about the different things that you can fry and sprinkle on soup. Pancetta, nuts, little cubes of halloumi, slices of chilli, pumpkin seeds. This is still purely theoretical for now, I’m not quite ready to settle into accepting winter and eating soup yet, but I can feel the day approaching.
Autumn sunlight, and Gelato in it:
What a cat
That’s all for now!
Speak soon,
Holly