Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 6

small they may be.
WRITERS have always come into their own when striking out against
the narrow boundaries of their society. In so doing, they expand our
dreams and create them afresh. Consequently they need to be bold.
They cannot be timid, for they are expressing the shared experiences
and fantasies of the human race, nibbling away at the constraints placed
upon our perceptions and viewpoints, exploring what it means to be
alive on this planet.
To do anything less not only short-changes the reader it withers the
writer. Unless a writer pushes at the bounds, writing cannot develop. If
genres were never mixed and merged, if new techniques were never
tried, then creative writing would die. As human experience grows and
develops, these must be reflected in the novels and short stories that
somehow capture the spirit of each age and reach beyond to those that
follow.
NONE of this need be a call for literature in its biggest form - whatever
that really is. There is no need for a crusade to sell high brow works.
More often this is just another genre, one for a cultural elite to
masturbate with relish over their "superior" reading tastes, while
showering the hoi polloi in the discharge of their contempt.
Beyond that, it is just another marketing ploy, a way for the markets to
neatly package and categorise a form of human expression it is
incapable of understanding.

To hear the muse and be transported into the human dreamscape, the
writer must throw salt over their shoulders and into the eyes of the
whispering Commissars. They must be honest in their writing, possess
enthusiasm and a joy for what they do. Above all, they should have
something to say and a burning need to express it - even if that is only a
damn good story.
Liberating the muse from market forces is an attitude, not a technique.
It stems from a love of words and an enthusiasm for human expression.
Unless a writer takes pleasure in their work, how can they
communicate this to others? How can they inspire a mind to dance
through the dreamscape, even if only for a little while?
The market is the last totalitarian system on Earth2. It is also the most
highly developed, the most subtle and consequently the most powerful.
More than most, writers have an opportunity to give totalitarianism the
two-fingered salute of contempt. And they have the luxury to do so,
without risking the sinister knock in the early hours of the morning,
followed by a terrifying journey so some distant gulag.3
Capitalism, after all, is a strange form of totalitarianism. It is a system
that is quite happy to profit from the seeds of its own destruction. And
that is why a call to reject market principles in writing need not mean
the production of "unpublishable" works. Remember that much
literature held in high regard was initially rejected as "commercially
unviable" by the Commissars of Capitalism.
Writers should challenge the restraints of capitalism. Never should the
totalitarian principles of market forces be unquestionably accepted.
Perhaps writers are so bound, but it should be an unwilling slavery and
good writing will always - at least - rattle the chains.
September 1998

It Just Got Harder!
THEY say that writing a novel is one of the hardest things you can do.

It's not like writing a poem or a short story or an article, though each of
those has its separate challenges and headaches for the poor scribe.
But a novel - that's something else.
For one thing it's a long haul. Obviously. Day in day out, the writer is
struggling to piece each word and each sentence together. They have to
sustain the characters, the plot, the dialogue and the narrative over
several hundred pages and many thousands of words.
Beyond that, the satisfying point of completion - of gaining a sense of
achievement - can be months or years away. Seldom are there any
mid-point grains of satisfaction to cheer the author on. But still, if they
are going to be a novelist, they must persevere.
Take it from me, it's hard, often soul-destroying work. One of the
hardest things ever. And it gets harder, because after that final word is
added to the manuscript, the novelist must start again. Savagely. No
novel is written. It is re-written, hacked, edited and revised until both
editor and manuscript look - or more like feel - like a bit-part victim in
a cheap slasher movie.
Butcher your baby, dear novelist if you ever want to make the grade.
But don't expect to retain thy sanity.
Okay, so don't just take it from me.
Try Tom Clancy, and he must know, because he writes some mammoth
tomes: "Writing that book must become the