Better Careers Advice (From Anne Fine)

Following on from the last post I would like to tell you about the best careers advice I ever received. This was also at school. I don't think it is surprising that it was from a writer.

Chilren's author Anne Fine (pictured above, doesn't she look like a lovely lady?) came to my school once to talk at our annual prize-giving. We normally had really boring people who were generally terribly sucessful in industry to come and talk to us about success, working hard and all those other quite dull things, but this year (god knows how) the school had managed to persuade someone famous and interesting to come and speak.

I remember Anne Fine's speech being witty and interesting, and I remember her talking about education and success not always being best measured by exam results but in terms of personal achievement and the satisfaction a person gains from a task. As I was sitting on the prize-winners' bench I remember not being that impressed by those sentiments; I wanted maximum fame and glory, thank you very much, but I appreciate what she was saying now that I am very much older and my life isn't measured in percentages and grades any more.

The one thing that really stuck out for me was her advice on what one should do with one's future.

"Find something you enjoy doing and do that."

Simple.
At the time I wondered what on earth that would be; I was maybe thirteen or fourteen and enjoyed giggling my way around record shops, reading Point Horror, making mix tapes and going to friends' houses to chat. Not much you could build a career on.

But the fact that her advice stayed with me showed that it must have struck a chord somewhere: I think the idea of a job as something to be enjoyed was entirely new to me, but her sunny personality and obvious love of life gave her words weight. She had followed her own advice and it had worked well for her.

Careers Advice

When I was five I went through my 'Watership Down' phase and wanted to be a rabbit when I grew up. Specifically, Hazel. Hazel was my hero: courageous, resourceful (maybe I had a tiny crush on him, I don't know). To her credit, my mother did nothing to disourage me, despite the difference in gender.

When I was sixteen I wanted to be a writer. I was good at English and liked writing poetry (some of it not so awful, even reading it back at this cringingly long distance.) I was going to do A-Level English and then go on to read English at university. This seemed to me the obvious route to being a writer: study lots of books and then write your own. Simples.


I was fuzzily aware in the back of my mind that there wasn't one of those nice management-training-course set-ups for wanting to be a writer; no-one took you on after university to write a book for them. So how did people become writers? There were journalists, screen writers, novel writers, magazine editors... There were a lot of words floating around but I wasn't sure how to get at them. I worked on the school magazine but I did the creative writing side and wasn't sure about factual writing. I was a bit scared of it.
So I made the terrible mistake of going to see the school careers advisor.

Oops.

I think the clue was in the title. 'Careers'.
I spent some time in the tiny careers library looking at glossy leaflet options.
1) Let the army sponsor you through university? Great! Money to study... and then three years of killing people dead at 5am. I hate early mornings.
2) Management consultancy. Lots of money! Training following a 2:1 in any degree! Don't even understand what it is! (Although now I have lots of friends who work in management consultancy even they don't know what it is, so that needn't have put me off)
3) Accountancy! Training following a 2:1 in any degree, even English! Numbers! Lots and lots and lots of numbers! And being organised! And tidy!

It didn't occur to me that these glossy brouchures were created by companies who could afford to produce such things. Not one of those leaflets was 'how to be Roald Dahl', '10 steps to becoming Stephen Fry' or 'Margaret Atwood 1,2,3'.

So the meeting with the careers advisor began. I have to mention (you might have guessed from the fact we even had such a thing as a careers library) that my school was a bit academic and was very good at getting clever girls into Oxbridge. All well and good.

"So, what is it that you're interested in?"
"Well, I'm good at English and I'm planning on studying it at university."
"And how can I help you?"
"Well, I'm wondering about, well, jobs after it [I didn't have a word for the thing that writers did. 'Job' didn't really seem right]."
"Of course, a degree in any subject [even English, it was implied] can lead on to all sorts of things. Had you got anything in mind?"
"I like writing."
His shiny little cherry-blossom face lit up.
"Ahh! Wait one moment."
He rustled around on the shelves and came back with an assortment of glossy brochures.
"Have you considered a career in advertising?"

Now, I know some perfectly nice people who work in advertising. It is a very good career and pays well. But advertising is the devil and accounts for about 90% of misery in the western world by promoting lifestyles and aspirations that people can't afford and don't need.

After discussing the routes into advertising and the possibility of one day, if I worked hard, maybe even writing snappy captions for shampoos, I went away clutching a pile of glossy brochures with such titles as 'Marketing for Graduates' and 'Advertising 1,2,3'.
I felt oddly let down, although I couldn't say why.

I just felt further than ever from Stephen Fry.

Pygmy Giant

Happy Easter!

My topical story from the last post is up on the Pygmy Giant, a site for British flash fiction, today.

Click on the title at the top to take a peek.

A topical story

Almost shaking with frustration, Jack slammed the drawer shut. His family knew to keep back at times like these and they watched his tight-faced rage as he tore through the living room, hurling cushions off chairs and knocking Lilian’s neat pile of coffee-table books to the floor, where the colourful, glossy paper crumpled under their weight. Lilian had trained herself to put the blame for Jack’s thoughtless destruction on herself. Obviously the wrong place to keep my best books, she thought, ignoring the damage.
Jack turned to look at his family, lined up out of the way against the wall.
“Where?” he screamed.
His anger was met with practiced quietness and shaking heads. They knew that violence was imminent but still they held strong against his rage. It would all be over soon.
“Where?”
Blank looks.
Forgetting them, Jack turned his attention to the pile of video cassettes that were stacked up on the floor, his actions more focussed on the outpouring of his annoyance now rather than to the object of his search, which he had almost forgotten in his temper. The front stack toppled under the storm of irritation.
A wink of metallic colour made him freeze, one hand ready to topple another tower of cassettes. Hardly breathing, he moved the remaining plastic boxes out of the way, slowly, as if wishing too hard would made the brightness fade. Carefully, carefully, Jack cleared a space around the thing that he had found and his family watched his movements with relief, catching each other’s eyes and smiling.
Jack turned to face his family, the treasure clutched tightly in his hot hands, his four-year-old face beaming with utter joy. His first Easter Egg.

Molehills out of Mountains

Not quite Everest, is it? No, Glastonbury Tor is here as a visual metaphor that our deeds very rarely meet up to the challenges we set ourselves. BUT that doesn't demean what we achieve in any way. Glastonbury Tor is still quite magnificent in its own right, and this picture even has a cow on it. Bet Everest doesn't have any cows.

So, how are the challenges going?
Number one: The Wordcount per Week Challenge. I haven't written a single word of my novel since last week.
Number two: The Exercise Every Day Challenge. Well, between last weekend's Hen Party and, um, baking more carrot cakes than you can count to for last weekend's Hen Party the exercise thing hasn't really happened.
Number three: The Keep On Top of the Washing Up Challenge. Tick! The dishwasher can take all the credit for this one.
Number four: The Blog More Often Challenge. Not bad. Signs of Strangeness has acquired some more posts, thanks to LL's contributions.
Number five: The Write Something Different Challenge. This is what I mean when I said we shouldn't take away from our achievements; my computer currently has four Word documents open, each one with a different piece of writing in progress: a short story destined for a competition, an almost-finished slice of autobiography for Mslexia and another two pieces of flash fiction.
I submitted my Flash Fiction, entitled 'Sculpture' (see previous post) to WriteWords and had some positive feedback. I submitted a poem to a collection with the theme 'Age' I had read about on the same website.

So a big

for me this week.

Sculpture

"For Chrissakes, Janine, turn the volume down. I'm having to shout!"
Eddi needed jazz to work and today she had Duke Ellington careering from the CD player, his exuberance focussing her mind on the flowing form in front of her. Janine always put the volume up too high; she had steady hands and the kind of quick responses that were vital in aiding Eddi's creation of her art but, by f***ery, the girl could be a cretin sometimes.
"Now, concentrate everyone! I’m starting the contouring.”
They leaned in, waiting on Eddi’s commands, engrossed in her effortless skill. When this latest model was unveiled to the public Eddi would be swamped with work and her team would have a job keeping up with the clients.
“Gregory… ready… okay… NOW!”
Gregory slickly passed the precious, fluid globes, faintly luminous under the stark lights, to Eddi and watched as they were incorporated seamlessly into the structure. The woman was a genius.
“And… we’re done. Closing up. Johan… suturing.”
Gregory marvelled at the dexterity and speed with which Eddi and Johan sutured up the patient along the black marker lines that traversed the iodine-tinged skin.
Beautiful.

New Challenges

It's always good to set yourself new challenges.
Generally, I get thoroughly enthused and start a good five or so at a time. This week, it's my new Word Count Per Week challenge, my Exercise Everyday challenge (does walking to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet count?), my Keep on Top of the Washing Up challenge (cheating by buying a dishwasher ha ha), my Blog More Often challenge (working well, thank you) and my Write Something Different challenge.

I have found that blogging has stretched me in a slightly different direction; it is snappy and cheerful and thoroughly unlike my novel writing and poetry. I find this trains my brain in the same way that swimming and resistance work helps with running. Even if I am just writing short snippets, in the words of the Great Vileness Tesco, Every Little Helps.

So my Write Something Different challenge is all about... writing something different. I started writing poetry as a moody teenager but, surprisingly, I was quite good at it. Until a few years ago I couldn't imaging writing imaginative prose. I had written articles for school, university and work publications but one day I sat myself down and wrote a thousand words of a novel. They weren't very good and 900 were swiftly axed, but at least the process had begun.

I have joined a forum on WriteWords (mentioned in my last post) that to me seems like a boot camp for short stories.

Short stories terrify me. I don't know how to write them. This forum kindly nudges you for weekly attempts around a theme of less than, say, 600 words. 600 words! That's nothing! I write paragraphs of fewer words than that.

Which is why I joined. 600 words or fewer on the theme 'the artist' by Sunday.
Left, Riiiight! Left, Riiiight! Go! Go! Go!



Thanks to Let'sGoDigital for the photo of Mount Everest.

Procrastination

I have to write a synopsis. Actually, I have to write two. There is the chapter breakdown and then there is the shorter summary synopsis.
The reason for this is that a kind friend in America said he might wave them in the way of a literary agent or two over there and see if they bite.

Obviously, American literary agents are better-looking than this nice fishy and they probably eat more salad.

I started it yesterday and went through each chapter and tried to write down the salient points. It sounded flat and lukewarm.

Now, I should have started several weeks ago when he first made the offer but my first attempt was ripped apart so badly (by somebody else) I can't say I prioritised it. Which is stupid. What a wuss.
So I had it hanging over me and thought I should get started. By Chapter Four of insipid prose I was checking ICanHasCheezeburger every five minutes. Ooh! A new kitteh!
Then I checked the weather, the latest news (Gail Trimble's team were disqualified? No!) and the various brands of white tea sold at Sainsburys.
All very interesting stuff.

It is far harder to write a good synopsis than a novel. This is your opportunity to really 'sell' your book and without it your shining novel will never reach anyone. But I can't sell!

(By the way, this is a photograph of a closed-down shop)

And then there is the fear that this is an opportunity I could completely stuff up!
American literary agents want things presented a little diferently than British aagents, who mostly want a one-page synopsis described as a 'book jacket blurb with an ending'. In face, quite a few of these do actually end up as the book jacket.
But Americans want a full chapter breakdown as well as the snappier bit, which apparently can't sound anything like a book jacket blurb with an ending. It has to fully describe the book and the action. I suppose one reason for the difference is that British agents (all sounds a bit 007) also ask for the first three chapters usually whereas the Americans don't let you get that far unless they've been hooked by the synopsis.

And my half-finished synopsis currently isn't good enough to use as toilet paper.

Then this morning I remembered the online writers' community I joined a few months ago, WriteWords. You do have to pay to join but at least there are some friendly souls there who will quite happily give you feedback. It's a good place to start. If they rip my synopsis to shreds then I can have a second chance, something that certainly won't happen if a literary agent uses it to line the kitty litter box.
So maybe I should stop chatting and get on with the f@+$ing thing?

Vietnamese flower

I took this photograph in Vietnam last year.
It is here to celebrate getting to 40,000 words. Good work, team!

Michelangelo

The picture above is from Michelangelo's unfinished 'Captives' series. These are my favourite of all his works; in them you can see the mind of the sculptor operating and follow the process of the form emerging from the marble. Even at this stage the tension, emotion and sheer beauty are already visible.
Michelangelo is reported to have said that the shape of the sculpture was already there within the rock and the skill of the sculptor was in finding the form and coaxing it out.

I personally think he was selling himself a little short by this. However, I do think there are parallels to the process of writing a novel. According to Margaret Atwood's wonderful 'Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing', I am not the first novelist to liken the sculpting of a novel to that of a stone statue; you begin with your ideas and slowly begin to rough out the beginnings of a form. As you dig into the mass the ideas crystallise and you begin to feel the shape of the story within. There is a definate sense that there is something already there and you are merely smoothing away the layers to find it.


That is very different to the analogy of building, that you start with the raw materials and add block by block, creating the details last.
Sculpture is the process of removal. The story is already there and must be released through determination, hard work and care.

Maybe what is more fascinating, then, is the question: if the writer or sculptor merely reveals the shapes, where do they originate?