Creative Digest #9: Keeping perspective; in defence of the adverb; licking, brushing and pinching
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at how to keep a level head as a published writer, relearning a 'taste' for adverbs, and lessons from a C16th essayist
Welcome to the ninth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
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Keeping perspective in the publishing industry
By Joe Thomas
Over the last week or so I have had what you might feasibly call a barrage of news from agent, editor, publicist, foreign rights agent, publisher, an American publisher, various prize committees, and HMRC. Taking stock, I would say the good news/bad news ratio is approximately 50/50 (the HMRC news was good news, surprisingly) and, I think, overall, I’d take that, and always will. If offered a 50/50, good news/bad news hand for the rest of my writing life, I’m all in.
Does that sound a negative approach? I don’t think so. During Term 2 of the MA/MFA, I lead the Working as a Writer module in which I try and show a little of the practicalities and vicissitudes of being published and a part, therefore, of the publishing industry – or working as a writer. A significant element of this module involves industry guests – writers, agents, editors etc – coming in to help to demystify the parts of the publishing industry in which they work. Sometimes, their realism can creep into negativity, expressing a certain dissatisfaction with certain elements of the wider industry. (I’d challenge anyone in any industry to talk for an hour about their work and not find reservations or aspects that aren’t wholly edifying.)
On the other hand, the incredible enthusiasm they always show for books, writers, and writing, is both infectious and exciting; I think about this a lot: there’s nothing quite like holding your book in your hand for the first time, knowing what it took to get there, and they communicate this feeling. A message that I deliver, and that the industry guests deliver too, is to acknowledge that there will be good news and bad news, that, even, good news can lead directly to bad news (I’m longlisted for a prize! I’m not shortlisted for the same prize!), and the best thing a writer can do is prepare for that. The novelist Keiran Goddard talked to us about how important it is to retain your sense of worth and dignity in the face of both good and bad news, and I liked that idea, that this is something you can aspire to and actually achieve.
When I was struggling – really struggling – writing Red Menace, my agent gave me some helpful advice. He said: ‘there’s only one thing a writer, at any stage in their career, can do that will guarantee to improve the prospects of their book, and that’s to work on it, to write and have faith; everything else is outside the writer’s control.’
I think this, combined with Keiran’s idea, is a good pair of principles for anyone working as a writer.
As for the last week, the really important news was which school my son would be starting at in September. He got our first choice.
In defence of – dare I say it? – the adverb
By Deepa Anappara
It’s possible to argue that there’s no such thing as reading too many books, but at one point in my life, I read so many creative writing guides that their cumulative effect seemed to be the equivalent of consuming ten desserts in one sitting. Writing a story that followed the rules laid out in these texts – a narrative structure beginning with an inciting incident, the swift introduction of antagonists and helpers, scenes indicating rising, then falling, action – felt so formulaic to me, it stopped me from writing altogether; I realised that these constraints, while helpful for many, weren’t for me.
I have since noticed that when offering feedback in a workshop setting, rules from bestselling writing guides can sometimes replace discerning comments arising from a deep engagement with the text and an understanding of authorial intentions. Rules act as shorthand; almost everyone knows them, after all. You can annotate an expository scene with the words, show, don’t tell, and your work is done.
The distaste for adverbs is similarly popular, perhaps because of Stephen King’s On Writing. ‘The adverb is not your friend,’ he writes in the book. And he’s right, of course. But I baulk at the notion of going through a page with a red pen, crossing out every adverb in its path.
In his piece, ‘The Audacity of Prose,’ the writer Chigozie Obioma says that ‘… the work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration.’ Language, he writes, can act as the equivalent of special effects in film; it can’t be achieved with sparse prose that ‘mimics silence’. Here, I think Obioma is speaking, amongst other things, against blanket statements about language or writing, including—I would add—a ban on adverbs.
One of my favourite writers is Michael Ondaatje, a novelist and poet whose works defy neat genre classifications, and I still remember the thrill I felt on reading the first paragraph of his novel Divisadero (2007). Describing the grandfather of one of the novel’s protagonists, Ondaatje writes, ‘He married lackadaisically when he was forty, had one son, and left him this farm along the Petaluma road.’ (Emphasis mine.)
King’s argument in On Writing is that with adverbs, the writer is telling us that they are not getting the point across, but I would argue that ‘lackadaisically’ has the opposite effect. The word characterises the grandfather with such precision that as the reader, I can imagine a man who is ambitious yet moves at his own pace and perhaps doesn’t care much—in his youth at least—for the trappings of family. Without ‘lackadaisically’ the sentence lacks the ‘special effect’ that Obioma writes about; the word embodies the character, and the multiple syllables make the reader slow down as if mirroring the character’s action.
It reminds me of Ondaatje’s The English Patient, in which the eponymous character tells the nurse Hannah to read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim slowly. ‘He [Kipling] is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. … Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.’
I am not making a blanket statement about the efficacy of the adverb with my example here, but it is one that has stayed with me for years, reminding me of what a well-placed adverb can achieve.
Licking, brushing and pinching – some lessons from Montaigne
By Jonathan Gibbs
I’m just coming to the end of a term’s sabbatical, in which I’ve been working on a book about the writing the literary (i.e. non-academic) essay. It’s impossible to do this without spending time with Michel de Montaigne, the C16th French nobleman who more or less invented the form as we understand it today, or at least gave it its name. (His word essai means test or trial, from the verb essayer, to try.)
I wouldn’t necessarily point students to Montaigne’s 100+ essays as models to copy for their structure – or, sometimes, for their conclusions! – but there is plenty to learn from them in terms of what we would today call Montaigne’s methodology: the thinking behind the activity. A good example is his short piece ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’. This is ostensibly about these two Ancient Greek philosophers and their views of human folly, but Montaigne begins by setting out his general approach to writing essays. It contains a lot of useful guidance, and is itself delightfully written. Here it is in Donald M. Frame’s translation, which retains some of the formality of Montaigne’s C16th prose, but do give yourself time to let it work on you!
“Judgement is a tool to use on all subjects and comes in everywhere. Therefore in the tests [essais] that I make of it here, I use every sort of occasion. If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank. And this acknowledgment that I cannot cross over is a token of its [i.e. his judgement’s] action, indeed one of those it is most proud of. Sometimes in a vain and nonexistent subject I try to see if it will find the wherewithal to give it body, prop it up, and support it. Sometimes I lead it to a noble and well-worn subject in which it has nothing original to discover, the road being so beaten that it can walk only in others’ footsteps. There it plays its part by choosing the way that seems best to it, and of a thousand paths it says that this one or that was the most wisely chosen.
“I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well. Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance.”
There is a lot on offer in these lines:
· that you should be ready to tackle topics you don’t understand;
· that you won’t know if you can understand them until you try thinking (i.e. writing) about them;
· some topics are a bit flimsy and need ‘propping up’;
· even a well-worn topic is worth writing about, if only to work out which of the many other takes on it you think is the right one;
· any topic is as good as any other to start an essay on;
· don’t think you can exhaust a topic in your essay;
· be playful with your topic, approach it from different angles and try out your thoughts on it (in his charming phrases: lick it, brush it delicately, pinch it to the bone; in his less charming phrase: stab it as deeply as you know how) and do this especially from an unusual angle.
Buried in there too is a phrase that could be a mantra for all creative writers: when you write, do so without a plan and without a promise. It’s only through the free play of your imagination, with no pressure on yourself to produce a masterpiece, or even just a thousand words a day, that you will come up with anything worth reading.
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels.
Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour. Her next novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, and is currently writing a book on the non-academic or ‘literary’ essay.
Department news:
Rebecca Tamás was recently a guest on the poetry podcast 'The Poetry Bath'. You can listen to her interview in two parts here (part 1) and here (part 2). Her second poetry collection will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Jessica Andrews’ stage adaptation of Saint Maud will run at Live Theatre in Newcastle from 10 Oct-2 November 2024. Details here.
Deepa Anappara is co-organising a conference on decolonisation in Creative Writing teaching and publishing with Farhana Shaikh, an editor and lecturer in Publishing at De Montfort University. Please see here for a call for abstracts.
Current MFA Creative Writing student Aderonke Adeola recently took part in the Writers on the Rise mentoring programme organised by the Black British Book Festival in collaboration with Pan MacMillan. Aderonke also appears on the City podcast Word on the Square talking about her experience at the university. Listen to it here.