Germain Greer at Malvern Theatre

I have always thought that women should be treated as equal to men, but I became a more serious supporter of the feminist cause when my first daughter was born, so I went to listen to Germaine Greer in Malvern. She is a professor so I expected something a little academic. To my surprise, much of the material that she quoted was about celebrities cavorting about, rather than an emerging evidence base in peer reviewed literature. It seems to me that if you read too much into the slogan on the tee shirt that Annie Lennox happens to be wearing you risk arriving at an unreliable conclusion.

She spent some time talking about the recent slut walk phenomenon, and I think she was right. The whole concept is brilliant, in that it produces a very visible confrontation to a set of deep underlying attitudes. Pulling the whole of an iceberg of prejudice to the surface is often effective because such things frequently look ridiculous in the daylight. To take the iceberg analogy a little further, they melt in the sunshine.

Germaine also quoted from a card she had been sent by an anonymous revenge seeking person, she presumes it was a man. The card blamed Germaine for every woman that ever walked out of a marriage. I can’t quote it exactly because I didn’t think to take notes, mea culpa, I am a professor myself, what was I thinking.

I’m not sure who was getting revenge on whom, the postcard writer for sending it, or Germaine for reading it out. She quoted from it repeatedly and simply refused to take the blame for anything it alleged. I have no problem with that because the accusations were ridiculous, but I think she could have delved for a deeper meaning.

Why do people write such things? Surely if they gave it a moment’s thought they would realise that the receiver of such a message, written in a vengeful and exaggerated style, and I suspect in capital letters, would bin it in a moment. Such a message reveals a complete inability on the part of the sender to see into the mind of the person the complaint is aimed at. From that one might surmise that the writer cannot comprehend why they have been abandoned. Might it not be exactly those attitudes that lead to someone writing such an intemperate letter that are the root cause of the deteriorating relationships that were the trigger for the letter?

I think if I were in Germaine’s shoes I would have asked the audience, who were about 80% female, ‘Would you live with a person who writes postcards like this?’ I wouldn’t be expecting them to say yes.

I am reminded of one of the maxims in Stephen Covey’s book, the seven habits of highly successful people – Understand and be understood. If you want other people to comprehend what you are saying, then the first thing you have to do is get where they are coming from. The writer of that card clearly had no understanding at all of Germaine Greer.

I have to pause here and ask myself if I have either. I was initially shocked at the hostility she appeared to show in the early part of almost all her answers to questions from the audience. For example, one questioner asked, what would her ideal world look like? The answer began along the lines: ‘What sort of fascist question is that?’ She went on to elaborate that the Nazi view of the world was an idealised notion of everyone in their place, all that fresh air and hiking of the Hitler Youth etc. All true, but hardly the answer to the question, though further into the answer she did begin to show some empathy without actually ever answering the question.

Why did she respond like that? I suspect because she has spent about 50 years being asked hostile questions, so the first thing to do is clobber the question into the long grass and then construct an answer that takes you back onto your main material, which is what she did. It is a strong response, but one that may have surprised a few people. Whilst the answer disappointed me, it was good to see a tough and seasoned campaigner at work.

I think my other disappointment was that, although the title was 40 years of feminism and fun, she didn’t talk much about fun. She did criticise the women’s movement for not having enough fun, contrasting the average women’s march with the gay pride events in Sidney and in effect saying that the gays were so over the top and clearly enjoying their own outrageous behaviour, that they were impossible to ignore. You can see why she like the slut walks.

I wanted her to go into more depth in examining the role of women. I was surprised that she made no mention of the value of female literacy and education of women. As Kofi Annan has said:-

“We know from study after study that there is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls and women. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition, promote health -- including the prevention of HIV/AIDS -- and increase the chances of education for the next generation.”

As a professor, with access to that literature that Annan was quoting, I expected some of that in the lecture. What better way to drown the cynics and the vengeful postcard writers than to point out to them that treating women as equals would make the world better for all of us.

More thoughts on chick lit

I bought a Versace jacket. OK so it was second hand, and an absolute steal at the price, but still quite an odd experience.

I tried it on because Lois was busy seeing what she looked like in a new pair of trousers. I glanced at myself in a mirror and was shocked. I looked better than my own self-image. Almost as if I was looking at someone else who happened to have my beard and was wearing my jeans.

Obviously some fashion designers are worth what they earn. I ought not to have been surprised, after all someone like Versace could not stay in business this long if all they sold was image with no substance, but it is still a mystery how this better looking person got into my clothes.

Does it matter? I'm 66, so hardly likely to be making money or influence from how I look. It is a weird thing that external appearance, which, without a mirror can only be seen by other people, should matter to me. It provides an opportunity to explore what vanity is like. Take how I felt looking in the mirror, and amplify it to an almost psychotic level and there is a character with a very different view of the world.

For a writer the challenging thing about fashion is that it's very much a right hemisphere thing. What goes on in the brain is all pictures and emotions; translating that into words presents a number of choices, none of which can be guaranteed to work. You could spend all day talking about the feel of the leather, or the way the light reflected off it, and completely miss the smell or the way it moves or the fit or the cut.

Actually the sleeves are a tiny bit too long and with the zip done up it's tight enough to keep me on a diet, all of which suggests that I may have been reading too much chick lit.

Why I like chick lit part 2

Chick lit is more than just Sophie Kinsella. I can't claim to have a comprehensive knowledge, but I have to discuss 'Rachel's Holiday' by Marian Keyes. Julie Cohen, mentioned this in a seminar and I remember downloading it to the Kindle on my phone during her lecture. I’m glad I did. I’ve since given paper copies to other people too, though not as many as Julie gave away in book week (See www.julie-cohen.com for more detail on her blog)

Rachel’s holiday is a serious book about addiction, except it follows a similar pattern to Sophie Kinsella's books by portraying a character who is too trivial in everything she does to realize the mess she is in. Self centered, constantly partying, this woman takes whatever illegal substances she can lay her hands on every time she can. She justifies her excesses with trivial excuses, as she runs up debts and runs off friends.

Obsessed with celebrity and instant gratification she aspires to have everything as soon as possible while propelling herself down a slippery slope to real addiction and poverty.

The book is a study in character development. Why go on reading about this air-head of a woman, an Irish girl in New York for all the wrong reasons, who is eventually rescued by her family? Somehow, she manages not to think twice about why her parents would go to the trouble of almost abducting her from New York to get her into rehab in Ireland. Wouldn't it cross her mind, you would think, that this is a bit extreme, and might mean that other people who know her are seriously worried about the way her life is going? Wouldn't that bring most people to just consider the possibility that she might be screwing up more than she thinks?

Nothing of the sort. Instead, she fastens onto the notion that this is an up market rehab outfit where celebrities have been admitted in the past. She will use the stay there as a holiday, which obviously she deserves, because she has a stressful life, and she will meet loads of vitally important glossy people who will be buddies or trophies as soon as she is back on the party circuit.

The beauty of Marian Keyes writing is that the reader can see all the flaws way ahead of Rachel herself, a classic use of the unreliable narrator, and somehow we keep reading just to find out when the penny will drop. When will she realize that any celebrity who finds their way to rehab is off the rails and only worth knowing if they manage to get their life back together and stop being the ultimate party animal?

OK, so I'm not giving too much away if I say that she makes it in the end, and learns some lessons and has insights that all of us can value. I think that is the joy of the chick lit genre, at least of the books that I've read so far. They are real literature, often tackling significant social problems and doing it in a way that makes the learning and insight accessible to a far wider audience than serious literature ever expects.

You could say that they are modern fairy tales, battles between good and evil, with glossy make believe characters, structured so that the reader doesn't think that they are being lectured to.

I am reminded of Terry Pratchett complaining that his books were not taken seriously. He said something along the lines of, 'Throw in one lousy dragon and no one takes you seriously.'

Chicklit has a similar problem; great stories, but once they mention shoes the serious reviewers stop reading. Wake up guys, shoes is where it all starts. 

The Spearhead Dinghy

In March I mentioned a boat, a dinghy called Spearhead, that I helped design many years ago. Two of them have been sitting on my back yard for the last decade, sailing very occasionally. 

One has now gone to a new home. After a couple of weeks of refurbishment, we got it sailing. Not as dramatic an event as we might have liked because there was no wind but it did ghost along. We now have the other one on Ebay.

So, as a digression from my normal obsessions, here is a little of the history of the boat and what makes it special.

The project started out when my father was measurer for the 5o5 world championships. (For those of you who don’t know about such things, that is a class of sailing dinghy, five point O five meters long). The measurer has to make sure that all the boats are the same, so inevitably by the end of the week we knew all the ways that people tried to cheat in order to make the boats go a bit faster.

Flatter and longer with a deeper point to the bow seemed to be the main things and make it lighter if you can. In a 5o5 all those things are illegal, but what about making a new class?

Making a boat lighter, calls for some engineering innovation. In a sailing boat, there are forces at work that will break the hull. Start with the mast, it’s not difficult to see that this produces a downward pressure on the bottom of the boat which would make a hole and sink it. Normally the boat has extra thickening to resist this, but that adds weight. When the wind blows on the sail it pushes the mast sideways, so we resist that with side stays, but they pull the sides of the boat inwards. Also, if you do that maths and triangulate the forces, you will see that tightening the side stays also pulls the mast downwards even harder. Actually, it is all in three dimensions, and some of the force goes through the forestay and that too can deform the hull.

The solution to all this came to me lying in bed one night. A triangular aluminium tube frame fitted under the foredeck from which the mast could be suspended. The stays are attached to the frame so that all the rigging forces are contained. The whole thing weights about 10 pounds and because aluminium is light and the arrangement is very efficient, it allowed us to reduce the weight of the hull by about 80 pounds compared to a similar sized racing dinghy.

The rest of the boat was also packed with innovations. The deck was made in one big moulding, using epoxy resin for the fibreglass because that is stronger weight for weight than the more traditional polyester resins that were traditional at the time. We had a theory that by taking a lot of the stress out of the shell and into the frame system the boat would last a lot longer. Thirty odd years later I can say that we were right, not many wood or fibreglass dinghies last as well.

We created the shape by working in a big shed with a trapeze wire hung from the roof. We spend hours sliding in and out, simulating the movements that would be required when sailing. We gradually built up the shape with car body filler, sandpapering and polishing until we had something we could move around with ease. From that plug, we made a mould so that the whole deck of the boat could be cast as a single entity and dropped onto the hull.

The result, as you can see from the pictures, looks more like a modern racing car than a traditional boat. Of course, they make the cars out of carbon fibre, which would have been nice, and even lighter but we weren’t millionaires.

Why did we call it Spearhead?

 Because the shape of the wetted area when it floats looks like a spearhead, well, it would if you were swimming underneath. There are other clever things about the design, on which I could bore for England, but I’ll save those for anyone who asks.

I’m getting too arthritic for cold-water sports, and all the team that built the boats are dead now, apart from me. This is the last one left in the family after free cycle locally found a home for my old boat, so I’m writing this in the hope that we can find a good home for a piece of history that, as the pictures show, is also a load of fun

Why do I like chick lit?

The book group I belong to are reading Sophie Kinsella’s ‘Remember me’ this month. I think I am the only man in the group, so it is slightly weird that I recommended Kinsella to the others. 

‘Remember me’, for those who don’t know, tells a first person story of a woman who wakes up after a road accident having lost the last three years of her memory. The last thing she remembers is falling down some steps coming out of a club somewhat the worse for wear. We get a brief sketch of her underachieving life and tedious job in which she has just failed to get an annual bonus because she has been working a few days less than a year. She has been out drinking with those who did get a bonus and is feeling pissed at her employers who she thinks have been mean, her boy friend, who didn’t turn up, and her dysfunctional family. Did she make it to her estranged father’s funeral? Not a cheerful start to a book but told with enough pace and wry wit to keep the reader turning the pages.

She wakes up in hospital assuming she hit her head falling down the stairs and gradually discovers that she is three years older, rich, with a very good looking and successful husband and appears to be running the department that she used to work in.

Her first reaction is to think ‘Hey great, I have a wonderful life, even though I have no idea where it came from.’

It would be very easy to descend into some heavy serious stuff about amnesia, or if I was writing it, I’m sure I’d have to fight off the temptation to explore some detailed neuroscience. Instead, Kinsella manages to keep moving with the story and uses chance encounters in scenes with other characters to open up just enough of the confusion and anxiety that would be felt by anyone in this predicament. She manages to convey a character who is both too shallow to be seriously bothered by what has happened and yet also driven by abiding curiosity to discover how her life has changed.

We discover that all her old friends hate her because she is now a very demanding boss, nickname cobra. Gradually we begin to get other glimpses of a less than perfect life.

In some respects, it could be argued that there is no plot, not in the active sense anyway; it is more a sort of static mystery to be uncovered, almost like archaeology. What drives the book along is the lead character’s curiosity about the last three years of her life. This is only likely to work as a literary device if the reader has enough sympathy and empathy with the character to care about her life. So where does that empathy come from?

Putting it another way, what is it about this ditsy woman that makes me want to turn the pages? Asking myself the question brings me up against the simple fact that almost every woman I know is more interesting, or at least less shallow than this character appears to be, at least from her own description of herself. I think the crucial issue is the contrast between how she professes to be and what she appears to have achieved, plus perhaps some basic empathy with her predicament.

I think that is what makes me read Kinsella’s other books too. She puts apparently lightweight characters into situations that demand our empathy, and then in rising to the challenge, something emerges in their character that demands our admiration and rewards us for reading to the end.

I’m taking the risk of writing this before I find out what the rest of the reading group think. They may hate it.

Writing groups

Writing plays a large part in my life, so here is another angle. I go to a couple of writing groups, where members write about a topic or a title that has been set beforehand. One group is part of the Pershore U3A and the other is Worcester Writers Circle which is apparently the oldest in the country and 70 this year. The Circle has all the titles for the year on their web site (http://sites.google.com/site/worcesterwriterscircle).

From that you can see that last week's title was 'Catch the little thief'. Is it a good idea to bend my mind to some random title? Wouldn't it be better to get on with whatever book I am writing?

I think a lot of writing groups do this, so it must work for some, and has obviously worked over a period, so not a thing to cast aside lightly. I usually try to think of something on the subject, at least for a day or two, but there is some benefit in trying harder. If I keep writing the current book, there is every chance that it won't be much different from everything I've done before. Really bending my mind to this week's title might just drag me into writing something I've never done before.

So, Catch the little thief it is.

‘What's your name?’

‘Catch.’

‘That's a weird name for a kid.’

‘It’s what they all say when they throw things at me.’

‘What do they throw?’

‘Rocks mostly, crusts or something I can eat, if I'm lucky.’

The kid grinned, ducked his head and squirmed away, but the big man was too quick for him and grabbed his coat, rapidly transferring his grip to a shoulder as the skinny arms wriggled clear of the sleeves.

‘Put your coat back on, we haven't finished.’

Twisting him around the dark brown eyes searched his face.

‘Do you have another name kid?’

‘What you want to call me?’

‘I’m not calling you names I’m asking questions. Are you gonna run some more?’

The kid looked up, his glance darting between the figure holding him and the nearest building. Half a smile cracked the face in front of him; the bastard knows it’s too far to run. The kid shrugged. The hand on his shoulder relaxed a little, but didn't move.

‘This way.’

Three steps took them to the car and the kid climbed in with startling alacrity, creating enough space to spread his small frame and own as much space as he could.

‘Never been in one of these huh?’

‘Cop car init.’

‘Sure is.’

‘Am I going to jail?’

‘Not unless you try to drive this thing.’

‘How thick are you? I'm sitting in the back seat; even a big bugger like you can't reach the pedals from here. Besides, that bloke in the front can drive us’

The kid stopped looking over the driver’s shoulder for a second and risked a glance at the man alongside him, grinning, raising his eyebrow a fraction. Sensing the attention on his face, his right hand sneaked across to the door handle and pressed it. His body tensed to jump and run, he pushed harder, then sank back in the seat defeated.

‘I can't get out can I.’

‘Not unless you can jump over a big bugger like me.’

The smile came back, but the detective still had the initiative.

‘Where do you live Catch?’

‘Like a house, you mean?

With your mum or your dad.’

‘Fifty two Newbold road.’

The big man leaned forward and touched the driver on the shoulder

‘Did you get that?’

The driver half turned,

‘There's only forty houses in Newbold road.’

‘Try another one kid. Lets have name and address properly this time.

‘Catch. Catch is my name. Only name I go by.’

‘OK Catch, have you got a last name.

‘Little thief.’

The detective laughed.

‘That's the other thing they call you huh? How long have you lived on the streets?’

‘I don't live on the street.’

‘Kid either you live in a house or you live on the street.’

‘I live under the street.’

This brought a pause, a deep breath and a rueful smile.

‘Catch, Have you always been this smart?’ Another pause. ‘Nah, don't answer that one, how would you know. Any idea how old you are?

‘I might be twelve, or maybe thirteen.’

‘Did you go to school?’

‘Before my mum died.’

‘When was that?’

The kid shrugged.

‘Well, roughly, like how many winters ago?’

‘I'm not a Red Indian.’

‘I never said you were.’

‘Then don't make with the how many moons stuff. It was the seventh of January 2007, why does it matter.’

‘You've been on your own since then?’

‘Mostly. Sometimes I hang out with people.’

‘Who?’

Catch turned, taking in a change in the figure beside him, shoulders dropping, one more frown line, he’ll be calling a social worker next, he thought.

‘Whoever. I'm a little thief remember. I go with anyone I can get stuff from.’

‘So I should arrest you for stealing?’

‘Not that kind of stuff.’

A resigned sigh. ‘What then?’

‘Learning, brain stuff, finding things out.’

‘Go on.’

‘Reading, computers, money, languages, stuff to know, good stuff.’

He risked another smile, captivating, enticing, and sucking the detective into his world. ‘Can't go to school, can I, they'd have me in an orphanage and I'd never get out or learn anything either.’

‘That's not how it is ki… Catch.’

‘They don't teach cops much do they.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Do you know how many O levels the average kid in care gets? Do you know what percentage of kids in care end up unemployed or in Jail? Put me in there and I'll end up being a top gang leader in ten years time and give you loads of trouble. I'll have to change my name of course.’

‘Because we'll never catch you.’

Catch caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window, hair all over the place a smudge of dirt on his forehead and for a nanosecond a mercurial smile flashed across his face.

‘On the other hand we could say I'm sixteen and small for my age and I could help you. Pretty soon, they'd be calling you Catch. What do you reckon?’

It could be said that I cheated slightly by adding a comma to the title, but I enjoyed trying to create a character with the minimum amount of description. There is of course the usual problem that when something begins to work, I feel like writing a book about the character. Catch is now running around in my head full of mischief, but he wouldn’t be there without the writing group.

Great writing

There is always a choice about what to include and what to leave to the reader. What to write and what to leave between the lines.

Somehow the really great writers put just enough on paper for the reader to leap from one stepping stone to the next, inventing the story in their mind as they go. It may be that every reader invents a slightly different story, but they all invent tales that they live in, love, and remember.

I think that's the real difference between telling and showing.

Tellng is all about downloading the details that are in the author's mind, like writing a technical manual describing the story. Showing, on the other hand is opening the door to imagination so that the story pours into the minds eye of the reader, it becomes their story and they remain grateful to the writer for opening a crack into a different universe.

If I have this right, then that's why it is so difficult to set out a technical description that really defines the difference. There are of course particular sentences, that can be seen as much more likely to fall into one camp than another, but on their own such examples become part of the great lexicon of telling, and only illustrate showing when they are accompanied by the right experience in the reader, and that doesn't happen when the sentence is written, only when it is read.

So some telling turns out to be showing, words, sentences, whole paragraphs that if isolated would seem to be telling, in it's most obvious form, can show a story if the whole thing works.

One example I am reading at the moment is Nicola Morgan's book ‘Wasted’.

I'm taking a huge risk here, she's a better blogger than me and has written a lot of books, gets asked to talk at conferences for writers etc. so it's hardly my place to critique. On the other hand I am a reader, so what the hell.

I find myself asking, as I read the book, 'Why does this work?' The style is very authorial, you'd cut the whole thing if you followed Elmore Leonard's advice and cut out anything that looks like writing. Of course some of that is just fashion, if we all took Elmore's advice no one would have read a word of Arthur Ransome and all his wonderful stories written in an omniscient third person that can even tell you what the dog is thinking.

Nicola's story is in that same point of view, allowing her to tell us, and I do mean tell, what is in the head of each character as she goes along. Not only that, but she frequently uses the authorial privilege of telling us what will be in their head, or what might be. Yet there is something about the story that makes me want to keep turning the pages, which means that something is right.  As Terry Pratchett says, there has to be a hidden message at the bottom of page one that says turn to page two, and a similar one on page two that gets you to three and so on. Those messages are obviously there, else why am I on page, um, well it's an ebook, so page numbers mean nothing, but I am well past half way.

Which in a roundabout way gets me back to where I started, the better writers know, or at least instinctively grasp, what to put on the page and what to put between the lines.

Showing, means enough words to lever open the space between the lines, to drive wedges into reality and open the cracks into the fictional space that lies beyond. Telling fills the page and covers the cracks like Polyfilla; smooth, sometimes even beautiful, but boring.

Suspense is one of those wedges, crucial to inducing the reader to use their imagination to explore what might be hidden deeper or later. Telling has no suspense. I used write papers in the civil service. Suspense is frowned on. You can't write a brief for a minister that says come back next week, or leaves anything to their imagination. Civil Service documents are all Polyfilla.

I think there is an issue too about how big those wedges need to be, and the answer is just big enough. Hammer a huge lever into the crack along with a JCB and an army of construction workers and we are back to a parallel universe that exists in the author's head rather than one that the reader is helped to discover. We are all storytellers but economy and sparsity is the key, just enough telling so that the story and the discovery of it becomes the main experience. Of course literary fiction is important too, it may not always have a narrative, but it does have ideas and images; it does do things to your mind and it still has those page turning messages.

But stick with the story for the moment because the story matters too, which is why the Stig Larson series works. The writing may be littered with Ikea shopping lists and stuff to fill 'what not to do' sessions on creative writing courses, but the story and at least one of the characters are so much bigger than the writing. The lesson from the popularity of Larson and probably Dan Brown and dare I say it the later J K Rowling books, is that if the story is big enough, the writing can break the ‘Rules’.

Rules, like show not tell, are no more than someone's attempt to codify best practice. Whether invented by an individual, or a group, and tested by time, or academic study, they are not tablets of stone and they are often oversimplifications. Who is going to remember a complicated rule?

Show don't tell is good, as rules go, and is probably easier to understand than saying that you should make the content that appears in the mind of the reader bigger, on any metric that you can devise, than the intellectual activity required to read the words. The reader will feel rewarded if they get back more than they put in.

Great writing reveals in the world or evokes in the reader something beyond their normal experience. Whether in fiction or fact, shown or told, the bargain every writer tries to strike is, if you make the effort to read my words, I'll make it worth your while.

PS My thanks to Nicola Morgan for a brief comment on an earlier draft.