I remember a piece by Harry Harrison – maybe in HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS – where he had to explain to his mother in law that when he was sitting staring at a wall for hours, he was in fact working. I imagine most writers will tell you three things about thinking time – it’s the most valuable work, the most frustrating work, and the least billable. Very few people in this world get paid for the hours spent staring at the wall. And it’s always frustrating, because what you want is for the form of a story to just drop into your head after thirty minutes in the chair, and that very rarely happens. It’s days or weeks of wandering around inside your own head and its stores, which looks to the rest of the world like you’ve become a vegetable creature whose circumnutations do nothing but slowly capture and engulf pieces of chocolate.
Yes, we are all outwardly lazy bastards — and if you are entering the journey of a creator of stories now, then be advised — you’re allowed to stare at the wall for as long as you damn well like and need to. Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”
(That line is from Olga Tokarczuk.)
You have permission to dream other lives and whole new worlds for as long as it takes.
Widows and orphans is actually a term from typography, a system to ensure a paragraph isn’t split across two pages. I borrowed the term to describe for myself what is one of the worst processes in writing for me.
When you’re asked to write a piece at a certain page count – like the one-page pitches I turned in today – you need to hit that count. A page-and-a-bit pitch makes you look like a slob at best, and an idiot at worst. When they ask for one page, you give them one page.
The first draft is almost never one page long. So it’s widows and orphans time.
Those paragraphs that end up with one word on its own on a line? That word’s an orphan. You need to rewrite that paragraph so that there’s not one word on its own taking up a line, because you need to buy back that line’s worth of space. This is usually a technical thing – clean up a few lines and the orphan will be back in the family. If you’re lucky, capturing your orphans will be enough to get you inside the page break and you won’t have to make any widows. But you’re a writer, so you’re never that lucky.
Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.
But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language.
And then sometimes you say fuck it, reduce the type size by one point instead, and go and have a drink.
When I’m building a story idea, I’ll often use placeholders for names of people and places. AAA, BBB, etc. Because choosing the right name for a character or location can take time, and in the first instance I just want to establish the shape of the idea. If I stop to find the right name, I’ll lose the storytelling energy, and I want that energy to carry me to the end of the story idea in one go if at all possible. So now I’m facing my notes on a full outline and it’s full of AAA and GGG and NNN, and this is the bit that can take the time. The wrong name will break a piece. Spider Jerusalem in TRANSMETROPOLITAN wasn’t Spider Jerusalem until after I sold the series – he had the wrong name for some weeks after that, and the piece didn’t lock together until I pulled that name out of a notebook I kept when I was nineteen.
I just realised this is a thing; that’s to say, a part of the process. Or, of my process. There’s a sense of reality in printing (and reading on paper) a finished novel. In theory, you can go through an entire creative effort without ever producing paper on your desktop, but for me there’s a separate space of “tangible book” which has a particular moment and a set of uses. This morning I printed the first two chapters to look at, and aside from the sense of pleasure in seeing a physical manifestation of work done (in this instance a sort of echo, because I held the whole book in A4 recycled a while ago) there’s a difference between words on screen and words on paper.
Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different – different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to – but different again from – reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have.
Fascinating. I never print! Printer ink is too bloody expensive!
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Published September 25, 2023 by Warren Ellis
“I’m looking forward to new ways,” he said. “It’s just, I got as far as this. And that’s what I do. That’s it. And if I could just muster up the energy, God willing, to make a couple more, one more maybe, and that’s it, okay? That’s as far as I got. You keep going until you can’t. But what I mean is that you gotta rip it out of your skull and your guts. To find out what the hell you really…what do you really feel should be said at this point in life by you? You gotta say something with a movie. Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? You’ve got to be saying something.”
As most cave paintings will show you, sequential art narrative is pretty much the oldest artform. Probably the first, certainly not the ninth. Which is funny, because we tend to think of it as a hybrid art, comprised of and periodically recharged by elements brought in from other arts. It takes a particular concentration – which I was reminded of by the story of John Coltrane bringing ideas from other arts and disciplines into his music – to realise that all arts are charged by cross-pollination. Sometimes, just the smallest crumbs of nectar can get you somewhere new.
David Amram, the French-horn player, met him for the first time in early 1956 outside the Café Bohemia on Barrow Street in Manhattan’s West Village. Amram had just finished a set with Charles Mingus’s band, and Coltrane was sitting outside the club, eating a piece of pie. He said, “How are you?” I said, “Everything’s fine.” And then he said to me, “What do you think about Einstein’s theory of relativity?” I don’t think he was so interested in what I knew about it; I think he wanted to share what he knew about it. I drew a blank, and he went into this incredible discourse about the symmetry of the solar system, talking about black holes in space, and constellations, and the whole structure of the solar system, and how Einstein was able to reduce all of that complexity into something very simple. Then he explained to me that he was trying to do something like that in music, something that came from natural sources, the traditions of the blues and jazz. But that there was a whole different way of looking at what was natural in music.“
Here’s a small and stupid example. I’ve been doing this on and off for years, but I was first called out for it by editors when I was doing STORMWATCH at Wildstorm. I wasn’t “buttoning” stories with a grace note or aftermath or other obviously conclusive scene. I was just stopping when I got to the end of the story, with a hard cut.
Which I stole from Spike Milligan. And so did the Monty Python crew.
In the sketch series Q, Milligan just cut each scene when he ran out of jokes. No grace note, no flourish or wrap-up or button. The sketch would just stop dead when there was no more useful material. I love that. Utterly against all narrative conventions, and often peculiarly uncomfortable. This is what the Python writers took from Q. Look at their tv series again and see how so many of their bits just stop with a hard cut.
It gave me more real estate for the story – I was working in done-in-one single issue stories – and the hard cuts made grey-area action stories just that little bit more unsettling, I thought.
Point being – you can find useful ideas for your art anywhere, if you just look around and be open to them coming from the strangest places.
I used to write flash fictions. Miniatures, mostly. I guess I had some kind of mental block about fiction fragments, which I kind of regret now. Probably because I have a folder in my filing system called “Loose Ideas” that is pretty much nothing but fragments and broken notions, that I occasionally dip back into, to see if there’s anything useful in there. For some reason, I have less self-consciousness about non-fiction fragments — but I tend to resist putting an incomplete thought out where other people might see it.
Over twenty years ago, now, I wrote around fifty flash fictions on an early social network. All miniatures with simple closures. There was a scattering of other micro-things in other places. And then I seemed to stop doing them. I’m not sure why.
I’d been thinking over the last couple of years about “short fiction” again, as I like it, but my thinking was limited to the 5000-15000 word region. Which requires from me a chunk of time and planning. I wrote the 10,000 word DEAD PIG COLLECTOR in a week – Molly told me she thought it was the best thing in prose I’d done — but those bolts of lightning don’t happen often.
And then, last night, I read a piece in the Times Literary Supplement about Piece Of Paper Press.
Piece of Paper Press was designed as a lo-tech, sustainable publishing platform used to commission and publish new writings, visual and graphic works by artists and writers. Each book is made from a single A4 sheet that is printed on both sides, and then folded, stapled, and trimmed by hand to create the book. There is no schedule; titles are published when they are ready.
The books are printed on a photocopier or domestic printer, and assembled and trimmed by hand. Titles are never for sale and they have no ISBN numbers. Editions are simply made (and made simply) and then given away. The project would—I thought at the time—never need any funding or financial support in order to continue. Each book is made from a single sheet of A4 paper, which is folded, stapled and trimmed to give a roughly A7 format and sixteen pages including front and back covers. If the project were any more complex in either production or distribution I would probably have given up years ago.
There is no earthly reason why this wonderful little project – which includes Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Elizabeth Magill and Courttia Newland in its number – should make me think about flash fiction again. And, obviously, I’ve never seen any of these little books and never will, except for the occasional photo. But it got me thinking again, there in the dark, about how flash fictions worked for me as, variously, scratching at an itchy idea, planting a seed or, very occasionally, building a stem.
I’d toyed with the idea of starting a paid newsletter for fiction, because I have really been feeling the itch for prose again, but in ways that don’t suit print publication. But, to make (say) five dollars worthwhile for a reader, you really need to provide five dollars’ worth of work a month. NORMAL was 25-30,000 words and cost a fiver on digital, so that’s my yardstick. That’s a hell of a lot to generate every month. And I already have a stack of work on deck.
So what I’m thinking about today is creating a category here for flash fictions. Miniatures and fragments. Before I lose the use of that particular muscle entirely. (I stopped drawing regularly thirty-odd years ago – tried to pick it up again four years ago and found out it was completely gone, the simplest marks are out of my reach and no amount of practice brought them back.) I’m a writer trained to compose at the keyboard – my notebooks just capture shorthand notions that then get expanded and tested at the keyboard – and it may prove a nicer way to meet that wish to sketch again.
