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Word Count 82: Galley Beggar short story prize, how to answer the ‘Why now?’ question

by Suw on August 27, 2024

Plus working class writers, and the cats of Porto.

The Duoro River flowing through Porto with the historic port cellars on the left, the Ribeira on the right, and the marine layer coming in from the Atlantic over the Ponte da Arrábida.

Hi there,

After a marvellous week off in Porto and a bank holiday yesterday, I’m now back at my desk looking at the apple tree from my office window and thinking about ideas.

Whilst on holiday, I woke up one morning with a fully formed idea for a TV drama, complete with setting, protagonists and some sense of the character arcs. It had sprung from the fragment of a now-forgotten dream, but I wrote it all down and reading it back now, a week later and in the cold light of day, it’s still solid. But, well, will I ever do anything with it?

Ideas are like blossoms on an apple tree: It’s easy for a concept, character or a ‘what if?’ to flower, but only some of them will develop into fruit, and more will fall off the tree before they’re ripe than will end up in your fruit bowl. And that’s OK.

I used to feel a bit bad about all the ideas for books and TV shows that I had, but never properly worked on. Now I just see it as a suite of ideas I can pull from when I next get a gap in my creative schedule. It’s impossible to execute every idea, even every good idea, especially when you’re working a full-time job or running your own business. We’d all be a lot more creative if we had universal basic income, but that’s not currently the world we live in, so all we can do is write as much as we can, when we can.

Pick the apples when they’re ripe and don’t mourn the ones you miss. They all become good compost for next year’s crop.

Opportunity: Galley Beggar’s short story prize

This year’s short story competition from Galley Beggar is now open. With a grand prize of £2,500 and shortlisted entries getting £200, it’s well worth the £11 entry fee. The deadline is midnight, 13 October 2024 (UK time), and they are looking for stories below 6,000 words. The prize is open to published and unpublished writers based anywhere in the world who have a previously unpublished story to enter. (See FAQ for more details.)

Read this: Why now?

Scriptwriter Jack Bernhardt has tackled the question that I suspect all writers dread hearing from a commissioner: Why now?

I’ve always thought it was a stupid question. Why have I written this thing right now, and not, say, last year or next year? Well, largely it’s because it’s the thing that’s in my head right now. The one time I wrote something because I thought it’d be a high-concept, commercial novel, rather than because the story was burning a hole in my brain trying to get out, I ended up writing 110k words about a pandemic just before one actually hit and my MS instantly became unsellable.

But Bernhardt digs into the question from a different and more thoughtful point of view, exploring the interplay between a particular show and the time from which it sprang:

I have to confess, I don’t mind “why now” as a question as much as other writers. There’s something romantic about it, the way it implies that all ideas have their time, that if we could see the expanse of all history every idea could find a year, a month, a day that they could claim as their own.

He goes on to talk about how “why now?” has become degraded as an exploratory question:

The problem with “why now” is that it seems to have morphed into something rigid — it’s no longer a question of how the current era informs one’s idea, but of how one’s idea can encompass everything about the current era. Does this story deal with the key theme of our times (whatever that is)?

Furthermore, culture now changes faster than TV shows can be produced, causing issues for satirical shows and pushing writers to set their shows in the past where they can anchor themselves more solidly to an era.

If you’re wondering “why now”, then now is definitely the time to read this piece!

Read this, two: Working class writers

There was a great conversation yesterday on Bluesky prompted by a post from Ray Newman about his discomfort with calling himself a ‘working class writer’, despite that being what he is.

What I came to realise is that you don’t ever really shed working classness. It’s baked in. It shapes your attitudes to life and your perspective on the world. In the negative sense, the scars are permanent.

[…]

If I experience the slightest financial shock – an unexpected bill, for example – I completely flip out, and revert to being an anxious child. Even if, once I’ve taken a breath and counted to ten, I can easily afford to deal with it.

And there was a second conversation that sprang from a reshare by Ian Martin in which Joel Morris said:

A mate and I came up with the phrase “the chink of departing coin”. You either hear it constantly or you don’t. Telly especially these days is full of characters not driven by it, written by people who’ve never been aware of the chink, which is why they are in a position to write and be on telly.

I watch stuff now and ask “why aren’t these people worried about money?” as almost the first question. Because the audience will be. And they’ll want that reflected on screen. All the best popular stories manage to include it. That noise. Chink chink chink. The meter running down.

Class is a complex thing these days. How you grow up is not always how you live your life, but what you learn as a child can certainly stay with you for life — I’m still picking apart the bad lessons about money that I learnt from my parents.

But, as Joel points out, having money or not is foundational to all of our experiences, and if we’re writing anything based in the real world we really do need to think about how our characters earn a living, and whether they hear the chink of departing coin as loudly as most people do.

Obligatory cat picture

Last week’s trip to Porto was a delight, and I was particularly happy to see two cats just chilling and doing their thing.

I would absolutely recommend a trip to Porto – it’s a fabulous city, full of character, amazing port wine and muscatel, fabulous food and some glorious old buildings many of which are decorated in exquisite tiles both inside and out. But if you do plan to go, get a few weeks of hill repeats in before you fly. Those steep hills brutalised my calves and they still haven’t fully recovered!

Finally, for those of you following Grabbity’s health issues, she’s now largely rejected the second brand of renal kibble, though will eat it under pressure. Copurrnicus, on the other hand, loves it, so I’m constantly trying to feed her on her own, which is easier said than done. So I’m off to the vet’s at lunchtime to see what renal soft food they’ve got.

Overall, she’s a much happier cat now her problem teeth have gone. And once we’ve got her diet settled, we’ll move on to sorting out her arthritis.

Cheers for now!

Suw

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Word Count 81: New Julian Simpson audio drama, new comedy course from Joel Morris

by Suw on August 13, 2024

Plus, what Labour can learn from South Korea, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde on the Edinburgh Fringe, and an update on Grabbity’s health.

Hi there,

We’re having another one of those melty days as I write this, so I’ve moved down to the lounge where it is cooler and am now surrounded by cats who think that they ought to be snuggling me. Much as I would love to have a cuddle, it’s 27c down here (I hate to think how hot it is up in my office), I have a wet tea towel cooling my feet, and the the last thing I need are two purring hot water bottles on my lap.

I’m heading into Ada Lovelace Day season and things are getting busy, so I’m going to either shorten the newsletters if I can (this one was supposed to be short, but it’s still clocked in a thousand words or so!), or possibly take some time off, or I’ll perhaps just make the schedule a bit more ad hoc. We’ll see how it goes!

Stop, look, listen: Temporal

Julian Simpson’s latest audio drama, Temporal, has just been release and is available now on Audible.

In the not-too-distant future, a 21-member crew launches from Earth. Their mission: to establish a temporary colony on Mars. Little do they know that colony will become permanent–and the last stand of the human race. Because, without warning, every single person left on Earth simply…vanishes.

Now, a thousand years later, the resources needed to sustain life are running out, and the very existence of the Mars colony is threatened. Humankind has only one option–to return to its home planet.

But is Earth safe? Could the Vanishing happen again?

You might remember, back in Issue 61, that I waxed lyrical about Julian’s Lovecraft Investigations, an HP Lovecraft-inspired audio drama done in the style of a true crime podcast. It’s genuinely one of the best written, acted and produced audio dramas I’ve ever listened to. I am sure that Temporal will be just as good, not least because Julian has once again worked with sound designer David Thomas, and I can’t wait to listen.

And, as a bonus, if you want a peek behind the scenes, Julian has written about the background to the project and how it call came together.

Opportunity: Joel Morris launches comedy course

Comedy writer and dissector of the comedy frog, Joel Morris, is launching a new online course for writers, The Writer’s Room. Joel, who wrote the fantastic Be Funny Or Die and has such a storied career in comedy writing that I can’t even sum it up.

Starting in September and running over 5 weeks every Sunday via Zoom, the course will feature a 45 minute talk from Joel followed by a discussion. You can find more info on his website, where you can also sign up to get the dates and times when those are finalised. The cost will be £350 + VAT.

If you want to be a comedy writer, this really is a must-do course.

Read this: Dave Cohen on the BBC and South Korea

The BBC has been underfunded for years, and as I’ve said before, comedy has been one of the key victims with fewer and fewer comedies being commissioned.

So it’s great to hear that comedy writer Dave Cohen met with policy wonks just after Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of the opposition to discuss how Labour could “work constructively with the BBC”. Dave has now taken a quick look at what the Labour manifesto has to say about the BBC, and how they could take a leaf out of South Korea’s book to improve both the economy and the arts in the UK:

The reason I’ve become obsessed with South Korea is because a few years ago their government worked out what we Brits had known and successfully followed for decades: a small amount of government funding for the arts brings a massively disproportionate success to the country.

It would be great to see Labour understand that investment in the arts isn’t a ‘nice to have’, it’s essential to their project of national renewal.

Stop, look, listen: The Rest Is Entertainment — Robert Downey Jr & the Death of TV Comedy

About halfway through this episode, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde discuss how the Edinburgh Fringe has lost its role as the best place for comedians to get themselves discovered. Not only putting on a show at the Fringe a horrendously expensive endeavour these days, the loss of TV comedy shows means that there’s no one really looking for new talent.

So what are comedians doing instead? Listen to find out!

Obligatory cat picture

They couldn’t find a vein in one of her legs, so she has shaved patches on both.

You might remember that last time I emailed, Grabbity was due for an X-ray to see what was going on with her teeth. Well, she ended up having two of her lower incisors out — those are the tiny little teeth at the front, in between the fangs.

Unfortunately, the pre-anaesthetic blood tests showed that she has early stage kidney disease, so the poor girl had to stay at the vets overnight whilst they gave her additional fluids. Then she had to have more anaesthetic than usual, so was quite drunk when we got her home. And it was a very, very hot day, so she was panting and generally very put out.

We’re moving her on to a renal diet at the moment, which she is very unhappy about. I have two types of renal kibble, and will be buying a tester pack of renal soft food as well, to see if we can find one she’ll voluntarily eat. Meanwhile, I have a kilo of food she’s rejected.

Dental work isn’t covered by pet insurance, so it’s been an expensive couple of weeks. But it’s worth it for the fact that it uncovered the kidney disease at an early stage when it’s still manageable, and also highlighted that she has arthritis. We can now look after her much more effectively and make sure that she has the treatments she needs to live happily and comfortably.

Right, that’s it for this time round!

All the best,

Suw

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Do you ever get ‘the typies’?

by Suw on August 7, 2024

Charlie Riedel’s amazing photograph of Simone Biles at the Paris Olympics

Gymnasts get the twisties. Golfers get the yips. Can writers get the typies?

In 2021, gymnast Simone Biles pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics saying that she was “having a little bit of the twisties”. Last week, she was back at the Olympics in Paris, once again performing incredible feats of gymnastics and demonstrating the grace and strength that has made her famous.

But what are the twisties, and what do they have to do with golf and writer’s block?

Success in gymnastics, like all sports, requires amazing mental acuity — you need to be able to know, at all times, where your body is in space and how to control its movement so that you land safely. We all have the ability, called proprioception or kinaesthesia, to know where our body is in relation to the world around us. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to walk or type or knit or, in fact, do anything.

But some gymnasts suddenly and unexpectedly lose this sense midair, making it a challenge to land safely. In 2021, when Biles was struck by the twisties, she had to cut a 2.5 rotation down to a 1.5 rotation because she wasn’t sure if she could “make it all the way around”. She described the feeling as being “lost in the air”.

Biles did, ultimately, avoid injury, but other gymnasts have not been so lucky. When former gymnast Christina Myers tried to push through the twisties, she wound up with a spinal stress fracture.

“Imagine skydiving and your parachute won’t open,” she said. “Your body starts adding extra twists and flips to the skill you’re supposed to be doing, and it can affect even the skills that feel as routine as walking to an elite gymnast…

“Your brain wants nothing more than to perform the intended skill correctly, but your body feels like it suddenly has a mind of its own.”

Similar to the twisties, the yips are found in sports like golf, cricket, tennis, and baseball, where the golfer or other sportsperson finds themselves unable to carry out actions that they used to be able to perform without problem. The yips cause a loss of fine motor skills and muscle memory, and affects athletes’ decision-making. Whilst some people do recover after a period of yips, it can also be career-ending.

Tommy Armour, a Scottish golfer who coined the term ‘the yips’, described it as “a brain spasm that impairs the short game.” Johnny Miller had the yips so bad that he couldn’t even look at the ball or the end of his golf club whilst putting, so “placed a dab of red fingernail polish on the grip, below the position of his right thumb, and looked at that instead”, or even putted with his eyes shut.

In June, I wrote about how writer’s block is not a myth, and how researchers have identified four categories of cause:

Physiological causes: Stress, anxiety, extreme emotional states such as grief, mental or physical health issues, and exhaustion.
Motivational causes: Fear of criticism, performance anxiety, and lack of enjoyment.
Cognitive causes: Perfectionism, problems associated with over-planning or under-planning, and rigid thinking, such as forcing a story to move in a certain direction.
Behavioural causes: Procrastination, interruptions to writing, and being too busy to write.

But there is, in my experience, a form of writer’s block that is a lot more like the yips or the twisties, which isn’t connected to motivational, cognitive or behavioural causes and doesn’t seem to have a clear physiological cause.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason at all, I do get writer’s yips or twisties — what we could potentially call the typies — wherein I just stop being able to write. Despite knowing that I know how. Despite having ideas. Despite having time. Despite having faced my fears and set them aside. Despite even having a clear plan for what to do next.

Somehow, there’s a mental disconnect that gets in my way. I feel like I just don’t know how to write. It’s not that I literally forget how to type – I can do all sorts of other bits of writing, but I just can’t progress whatever my current big project is.

Although some have speculated that the yips are a form of performance anxiety, the fact that they affect some specific actions and not others indicates a more complex cause. The yips can cause involuntary muscle spasms, which seem to have a neurological aspect. In these cases, the golfers have developed what’s called ‘focal dystonia’:

Dystonia is a movement disorder that causes the muscles to contract. This can cause twisting motions or other movements that happen repeatedly and that aren’t under the person’s control.

Mogigraphia, or writer’s cramp, is possibly the first focal dystonia to have been identified and described, notably by English physician William Gowers in the late 19th century. Gowers also linked it to similar problems suffered by “telegraph operators, seamstresses, knitters, masons, sailors, painters, enamellers, cigarette makers, and musicians”.

Although the typies isn’t writer’s cramp, just as the twisties probably isn’t a form of dystonia (as far as I can tell), it is perhaps from the yips that we can draw inspiration for how to deal with the typies. The New Yorker talks about golf coach Hank Haney, who controlled his yips in a similar way to Miller, by looking at the audience instead of the ball.

[Haney] had noticed that, on the few occasions when he couldn’t avoid demonstrating a shot with his driver, he was able to do so successfully if he looked at his audience, not the ball, while he swung—a feat that impressed his students but for him was an act of desperation. “That was something I discovered by trial and error,” he told me. “Focussing my eyes and my attention on something different—anything to not anticipate the hit, anything to not anticipate the moment of contact with the ball.” In his new swing, he glanced at the ball only briefly, at the very beginning of his routine; during the actual swing, he kept his eyes on the brim of his cap.

When I’ve had* the typies, I’ve generally just waited for it to go away, which can take weeks if not months. It would undoubtedly be better for me to be able to recognise when it’s happening and learn to deal with it by focusing on something different. Instead of looking out for what’s wrong in my writing, I should do a read through and only highlight what’s right. Instead of trying to work out why something isn’t working, look at what is. Instead of waiting, wrap myself in reminders that I am actually a capable writer.

Thankfully, unlike the twisties, the typies is unlikely to result in physical injury. But it is frustrating to lose so much time to this unsatisfyingly vague and difficult to pin down form of writer’s block. At least now I feel like I have tactics to try when it happens again.

*I say “had”, but I’m coming out of a six-week bout of the typies right now, and it has not been much fun.

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Word Count 80: Arthur C Clarke winner is…, fixing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in post, Marianne Dreams on Backlisted

by Suw on July 30, 2024

Plus genre hopping, top UK streamers, the ‘nivali’ mystery, and a fresh-faced Grabbity.

Hi there,

When I was a kid, my Dad defined summer as “Three sunny days and a thunderstorm”, and this week appears to be cleaving to that prognostication. And just as summer seems to be coming in random chunks this year, so is Covid, because I’m currently enduring my second bout in five weeks. It’s much milder this time round, which is something to be grateful for, I suppose. But I’m still hacked off that I missed out on seeing Deadpool & Wolverine on Sunday night. Bah.

Martin MacInnes wins Arthur C Clarke award

In Ascension, by Scottish author Martin MacInnes, was awarded the Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction book of the year last Wednesday at an event in London.

Dr Andrew Butler, chair of the judging panel, said that the book was “an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.” Another judge described it as showing us “vistas between the cellular and the cosmic”.

The Guardian said:

The novel follows marine biologist Leigh as she joins a team exploring a trench discovered in the Atlantic Ocean. “The whole novel is beautifully written,” wrote Adam Roberts in a Guardian review.

“Richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail, never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vast mysteries, but also capturing a numinous, vatic strangeness that hints at genuine profundities about life,” he added. “Nobody else writes like MacInnes, and this magnificent book is his best yet.”

The other books on the shortlist were:

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner.

What I’m watching: When the editor has to fix it in post

I loved this 10 minute video on the editing of iconic 80s movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and how much had to change in order for the story to work. Writer/director John Hughes had slapped together a screenplay in less than a week and went on to shoot that first draft. But the initial cut came in at 2:45 and didn’t test well, so the story was reworked and shortened in the cutting room.

“Having the story episodic and taking place in one day…meant the characters were wearing the same clothes. I suspect that Hughes writes his scripts with few, if any costume changes just so he can have that kind of freedom in the editing,” said the film’s editor, Paul Hirsch.

It’s an amazing story, but it’s also a lesson: Do not shoot your first draft. It’s much quicker and cheaper to rearrange a story on the page than it is to fix it in post!

Stop, look, listen: Backlisted – Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

Marianne Dreams was one of the most influential books of my childhood. I don’t remember how old I was when I read it, but it left such a huge imprint on my imagination that my first ‘proper’ story was a Marianne Dreams pastiche. My teacher even spiral bound my little book for me, complete with laminated cover. I think that was the first moment I realised I wanted to write. ( I should have listened more closely to that little voice.)

This episode of Backlisted, featuring children’s writer Rachael King and novelist Richard Blandford, along with hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, provides a fascinating look at this children’s classic. They describe Marianne Dreams as “the eerie, disturbing tale of two sick children who meet in a realm of nightmares”, which is pretty much how I remember it too.

Why Aren’t I Writing?: Genre hopping is good for you

Over on my other newsletter, I wrote about how successful authors often write in a wide variety of genres and formats, and why you should consider sampling different types of writing.

Read this: iPlayer top streamer in the UK

Haunted scrotum Rupert Murdoch is launching a new ad-supported TV streaming service in the UK called Tubi, but what I found interesting about The Guardian’s write up is not the commentary on whether it’s likely to succeed, but the streaming service stats. The percentage of people watching the top ten streamers is:

iPlayer: 52.7
Netflix: 51
iTVX: 38.6
Channel4: 34.6
Amazon Prime Video: 30.7
Disney+: 27.7
WBD (inc d+ BT/TNT EuroSport): 17.7
Paramount+: 10.6
Freevee: 8.7
Apple TV+: 7.9

The new Labour government has committed to preserving the BBC, and this stat is just one example of why the political objections to the BBC are ill-founded. If you destroy the Beeb because you don’t like its news output (and there are some legit questions about their news operation), you lose everything else that the BBC produces. Which is a lot.

Tweet of the week: The ‘nivali’ mystery

This tweet is actually a BlueSky post (I’m there as @suw, btw) from Bill Ryan:

I’m reading this book [Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater], and on page 75 I came across this phrase: “I woke up with her words in my head, I showered with them in my head, I niveli off…” I like to think I’m up on British slang, but I had no clue what this could mean 1/3

So I looked it up, and found this on Goodreads (2/3):

The error seems to have been introduced during the conversion from UK English to US English, as all of the words affected are ones that have different spellings in the US:

towelled
sombre
organize
frappes
citrussy
sequinned
levelled
chiselled

But it’s not a straight find-and-replace error, because there isn’t a single common text string. Ray Newman considered “‘sniveling’ (US) versus ‘snivelling’ (UK) as a possible root cause somewhere along the line.”

Book blogger Gav suggested that it might be some “fancy macro” that got corrupted, which seems like the most sensible solution. And I did seem something elsewhere about an Excel spreadsheet getting corrupted by some weird AI-drive autofill.

We may never know exactly how this happened, but as Marie Phillips said, authors, your “new anxiety dream just dropped”.

You’re welcome.

Obligatory cat picture

Poor Grabbity is not having a great time of it this year, as she’s now dealing with toothache and possibly arthritis as well. She’s lost two teeth and may have to have a third removed because of resorption, where for reasons unknown the body decides to reabsorb the hard tooth enamel.

She’s been refusing to eat kibble for a couple of months, eating only expensive pâté, which is a classic symptom of tooth resorption. She’s now on some hardcore painkillers, which really have breathed new life into her, and we’re due to take her for an X-ray soon to see what’s going on and what we need to do for her.

Just look at that fluffy face, though. You’d honestly never know there was anything wrong.

That’s it for this week!

Ta ra for now,

Suw

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Why we should stop fretting about the new Labour government

by Suw on July 7, 2024

It’s just utterly boggling my mind, all the weird concern trolling and catastrophising that people are doing about the new Labour gov’t. Not just from Tories either – most of what I’m seeing is from people I know to be left-leaning. Concerns no one had about the last Tory landslide are suddenly common currency.

Firstly, when did was start expecting a gov’t to ‘win hearts and minds’ as well as a majority? Did the Tories win hearts and minds in 2019? 2017? 2015? 2010? Did Blair in 2005 or 2001? People were excited in 1997… but hearts and minds? Really?

We elect a political party into government. We aren’t selecting a life partner, we’re getting on a political bus that’s going in roughly the right direction. Some of us hope that perhaps we can help steer it a little by being politically engaged; most just sit at the back and get on with their lives.

No one has ever expected a government to win hearts and minds before, and no one should. That’s populist bullshit that belongs in the bin. We have voted, Labour have won, now we judge them on their actions, not whether we’re in love with them or not. They don’t have to be perfect and, indeed, how can they be perfect? Everyone’s idea of a perfect government is different, so expecting perfection or purity is unrealistic and perpetuates negative thinking. I want competent, and so far that’s what Labour has been.

Next. When did vote share suddenly become important? Because again, no one cared about vote share in any of the last 7 elections that I remember. And guess what? Vote share doesn’t matter, especially not in this election.

People vote according not just to their preferences, but the system they know they are in, and their feelings about the way things are swinging. The narrative in the final weeks of this very overtly FPTP election was that Labour were on their way to a ’supermajority’, known the UK as just a majority because the word ‘supermajority’ is meaningless propaganda.

But the propaganda worked – people felt empowered to protest vote not just against the Tories but also against Labour, having fallen for the story that both parties are the same. (That particular piece of propaganda comes largely from the far left, from what I’ve seen, but I dare you to look at Starmer’s Cabinet and his first actions in office and tell me that Labour are the same as the Tories. They are palpably not.)

In FPTP, people can protest vote knowing that it probably won’t make a difference. In fact, this knowledge is so baked in to our national voting psyche that a lot of people protest voted against Cameron in the Brexit referendum, thinking their vote didn’t matter. (Except it really did, that one bloody time.)

When people are angry, they protest vote. People are, currently, very rightly very angry. They have protest voted. Would they have voted the same way had the race been tight? Maybe not, though we’ll never know.

Furthermore: tactical voting. Because there were Tory seats where the Lib Dems had perhaps a slightly higher chance of winning than Labour, people were encouraged to vote tactically. The Lib Dems ended up gaining an additional 64 seats and now total 72, the best result for them in 100 years so it would seem that the tactical voting worked.

And we do need to talk about turn out. At 60% it was the lowest since 2001. Again, how much of that was Labour voters not bothering because they were (correctly, as it turns out) sure that a Labour win was inevitable? I certainly heard from people on the ground that Labour turnout was low, but would like to see actual evidence about that.

All of this — protest voting, tactical voting and a potentially low Labour turnout — means we can’t read anything significant into the vote share. It absolutely cannot be taken to mean that Labour doesn’t have a true mandate, or that their win is somehow fragile. They’ve got a majority of 172, and they got a majority in every nation, which is about a solid of a mandate as it gets.

This all brings me on to proportional representation. Is it a fairer system? Yes. Does this election’s vote share tell us anything about how many seats parties would have won under some form of PR? No. No, it absolutely doesn’t, because people vote understanding the system they are voting in, and they may well have voted differently under a PR system.

The fact that Reform got 4m votes says nothing about how many votes they’d get under PR, as people who voted Reform to kick the Tories in the teeth on Thursday might not take the risk if they knew their vote mattered in a PR system.

We don’t have an alternative world in which we can re-run Thursday’s election under PR in order to see what would have happened. Personally, I would like PR, but I don’t think it’s an important priority when there are so many more serious things to fix first.

I am confused, though, as to why so many people are now concerned about FPTP vs PR, when no one gave a shite after Johnson’s 80 seat majority. Why is a Labour majority so threatening, even to left-leaning people, that PR has now floated to the top of people’s minds? Genuine question, I really don’t know the answer.

Finally, for this thread at least, why are so many on the left wallowing in foreboding joy? Brené Brown defines ‘foreboding joy’ as that feeling of needing to plan for disaster when we start to feel joy. You could also call it castastrophising or imagining the worst, though some of it is certainly anti-Starmer concern trolling.

But just look at who Starmer’s appointed to his Cabinet and advisory roles. Not only is it incredibly diverse, there’s not a single Eton grad: Louise Haigh (Sheffield High School) and Anneliese Dodds (Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen) went to non-elite private schools that fall more in the ‘aspirational middle class’ schools bracket.

Hilary Benn is possibly the most privileged appointment, having gone to two prep schools, but then a comp and the Uni of Sussex. He has been MP for Leeds, so knows the urban North.

Angela Rayner grew up on a council estate, left school pregnant and trained in social care. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, worked as an economist. David Lammy’s mother raised him alone and he was the first black Briton to study a master’s in law at Harvard.

Starmer is also leaning heavily on expertise: Sir Patrick Vallance, an actual scientist, is science minister. James Timpson, whose Timpson’s key cutting and cobbling business employs ex-offenders and care leavers, is prisons minister. Human rights lawyer Richard Hermer KC is attorney general.

Then let’s look at Labour’s first actions in government: They’ve scrapped the horrendous Rwanda scheme and Streeting has already arranged to go into pay talks with the junior doctors to try to avert a strike. And they haven’t even had a full working day in office yet.

Starmer’s first press conference as PM yesterday was also a breath of fresh air. Calm, self-assured, friendly and polite, Starmer spoke in clear and complete sentences, with no waffle or bluster. The media’s going to have a hard time adjusting to that, I suspect.

So maybe it’s time to set aside all that catastrophism and foreboding joy. Maybe we should give Labour a chance to get their feet under the table, after all, parliament doesn’t even return until 17 July. Let’s stop expecting either perfection or disaster and reacquaint ourselves with both compromise and participative democracy.

I think we’ve all disengaged from our politics over the last 14 years, so perhaps now would be a good time to remind ourselves how to contact our local MPs and what political engagement looks like. Perhaps we can start with a clearer understanding of Labour’s manifesto https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cml2en8xlxko and remind ourselves that https://www.writetothem.com/ exists.

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Writer’s block is not a myth

by Suw on June 12, 2024

It might be a messy, complicated thing with a variety of causes and potential solutions, but it absolutely does exist.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last newsletter. I finished the first draft of Fieldwork, my half-hour sitcom pilot script, and wrote about how much prep went into it, compared to the 8 hours and 41 minutes it took to write. And there’s been a lot going on with the day job, which is all to say that when I came to write this week’s newsletter, I really wasn’t sure what to write it about.

I eventually found myself searching for “myths about writer’s block”, as I thought that might be a good topic. Imagine my surprise when Google served up several pieces asserting that writer’s block simply doesn’t exist. Some of the people making these assertions are professors. Others are writers. All of them should know better.

Some reject the whole premise outright and say that it’s just an excuse to not write. Others reject the term but recognise the concept and prefer different words to describe the same thing. Some reject the term, reject the concept, then go on to talk about something that looks suspiciously like… writer’s block. One particularly harsh take was that anyone who has writer’s block isn’t even a writer.

Yet all these “writer’s block is a myth” posts still managed to make suggestions for how people should tackle writer’s block, usually by suggesting that the afflicted should just put their heads down and write anyway. Which, to my mind, somewhat misunderstands the whole problem. (Forcing yourself to write can be a solution, but there are many others activities that can also help.)

So I’m here to say that writer’s block, as in “the inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of basic skill or commitment”, as writing expert Mike Rose put it, exists.

I say that it exists partly because I’ve experienced it, partly because I know lots of other people have experienced it, but mostly because academics have studied it, and it’s notoriously difficult to study something that doesn’t exist. And there’s even a test for “writer’s apprehension”, which is a slightly different way to think of and describe writer’s block.

(Before you rush off and take it, though, it’s aimed at students and not at professional writers so fairly useless outside of the academic experience. Apparently my score shows a “troublesome […] lack of apprehension” and whilst I “do not fear writing or evaluation of writing”, I “may not be adequately motivated to work on [my] writing”. Hilarious.)

Reading these posts, which I’m not going to link to because I don’t want to give them oxygen, has made me rather cross. They display not just a lack of empathy for others but also the arrogance to think that their experience is the only valid experience. Yay, well done that you don’t experience writer’s block, but many people do, whether briefly or over the long term, and it’s a really frustrating and miserable experience.

What is true is that writer’s block is an umbrella term for a number of different issues which all result in someone not writing when they really want to or have to. These various causes, as I wrote last month, fall into four categories:

Physiological causes: Stress, anxiety, extreme emotional states such as grief, mental or physical health issues, and exhaustion.
Motivational causes: Fear of criticism, performance anxiety, and lack of enjoyment.
Cognitive causes: Perfectionism, problems associated with over-planning or under-planning, and rigid thinking, such as forcing a story to move in a certain direction.
Behavioural causes: Procrastination, interruptions to writing, and being too busy to write.

And because human beings are messy, some people may find that they experience a combination of problems that fall into more than one category. And because of this, solutions may not be as simple as just pushing through and forcing oneself to write (although that can work in some cases). Some people might need to peel back the onion layers of their block’s causes and work through multiple solutions over a period of time before they reach a place of comfort and confidence in their writing abilities.

Writer’s block is a symptom with multiple physiological, motivational, cognitive or behavioural causes, not a cause itself. If I am stressed, then that causes writer’s block. It’s not that I’ve got writer’s block therefore I can’t write.

That would be like saying runny noses cause colds. There are over 200 different viruses that can cause a cold. Those viruses inflame the mucous membranes in the nose and throat, at which point our nose turns into Niagara Falls. But if we don’t have the virus, we don’t have a cold.

The direction of causality here is important. If you think some sort of nebulous undefined ‘block’ thingie is the cause of an inability to write, then of course you’re going to look at the whole idea suspiciously, because you’re not understanding causality properly. If you don’t understand lift, flight look like magic.

No one, however, is served by these high-handed dismissals of what is actually a fairly widespread and well-studied experience. Indeed, if you come across anyone who rejects the idea of writer’s block, send them my way. I have some choice words for them.

Meanwhile, what is your experience of writer’s block? Are you suffering from it now? Have you had one or more bouts of short-term block that lasted a few weeks or days? Or have you experienced a longer term block that lasted months or years? Let me know in the poll on Substack.

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Word Count 76: Short story comp, explaining general meetings, Fieldwork update

by Suw on June 4, 2024

Plus some more publishing industry angst and a detailed rebuttal.

Hi there,

At the end of the last newsletter, I promised to share my excess links on Substack Notes or Bluesky. Well, that was two weeks ago, and I’m afraid I got a bit busy. That’s probably a good thing, because I was so busy that I’ve not been doing my usual reading and listening and am a bit short of stories this week. This newsletter might be a bit lighter on links than usual, but as I was the right kind of busy, I hope you won’t mind.

Suw’s News: Writing has begun on Fieldwork

One of the core things I’ve learnt over my 26 years as a self-employed person is that if I don’t track my hours, I either don’t work enough or work too much. So it’s with some significant confidence that I can tell you I have spent at least 332 hours on Fieldwork before getting to the point of actually starting to write the thing.

But writing has now begun! I’m a third of the way through the first draft and I’ve two days to finish the rest of it before I send it off to Dave Cohen for feedback. Next week will be spent redrafting it for a final round of feedback before it’s technically “done”, in so far as this course with Dave is concerned. It will, obviously, not be done done.

In the following weeks, I have to rework it into a 10 minute short, which was the original plan, and a 30 minute podcast script, which is the current plan. The podcast version is going to be interesting, because I don’t think in audio, I think in pictures, so I have lots to learn about writing for radio.

Opportunity: Short story competition for USians

Four Walls whiskey is offering a total prize pool of $44,444.44 for “the best bar stories”. Five writers will win $4,000 each, with another 40 finalists getting over $600 each (by my calculations, it’ll be $611.11). The competition is only open to people over 21 who are living in the USA and the deadline is 23:59 on 14 June.

Four Walls is a new whiskey brand created by writer, actor and businessman Rob McElhenney, along with Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day, co-creators of their long-running bar-based sitcom, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. McElhenney also owns a bar in Philly, Mac’s Tavern, and Four Walls sponsors another of McElhenney’s businesses, Wrexham AFC.

There’s a whole thing here about portfolio careers that’s tickling in the back of my head, but I’ll have to write about that another day.

Tip-top tip: How to take general meetings

If you’re a screenwriter, you might get lucky enough to be invited to a general meeting to discuss… things… with a producer. But what is a general meeting, and what kinds of things get discussed?

Script consultant Philip Shelley has published a very useful guide to general meetings by producer Jamie Hewitt, with some great tips for how to prepare and what to expect.

Read these: Debuts fail to launch… or do they?

Kate Dwyer, writing for Esquire, argues that debut novels are largely failing to launch, creating a crisis for publishers. She says:

For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book.

Dwyer puts this largely down to the collapse in promotional opportunities for book publicists, and the need for authors to develop parasocial relationships with their readers — their readers need to feel that they know you as a person, not just as an author. But it’s become harder to do that:

the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically, more so than first-time nonfiction writers.

Solutions appear to be hobnobbing at industry events, having the money to hire your own publicist, get lots of already or soon-to-be influential friends, and build your own community. Easy!

Industry insider Kathleen Schmidt has published a fairly detailed take-down of the Esquire piece, saying:

If this were true, hardly any debuts would be published. First, it is not a given that your book will sell like crazy if it is chosen for a major book club. The sales figures for Reese’s Book Club, Oprah’s Book Club, Reading with Jenna, and GMA’s Book Club wildly fluctuate.

She also refutes a lot more Dwyer’s points, but I particularly liked this line as a positive thing to take away from this latest paroxysm of publishing angst:

Book publishing is a long game.

Indeed it is. As with many things, overnight success often takes years.

It’s well worth reading Schmidt’s piece, even if you don’t read the Esquire one first, because in amongst the rebuttals there’s some useful advice as well.

For me, Dwyer’s piece, and all the pieces that have run along the same lines recently, are a sign of a widespread anxiety about the state of our cultural industries, in America especially.

Truth is, authors are finding it harder to make a living writing, and both success and wealth are concentrated in an ever decreasing number of hands. We’re seeing a decrease in the diversity of voices able to crack a cultural career — you need to have access to money to be able to spend the time developing your craft to a point where you’re even able to try to develop a creative career.

And in America, book bans are becoming more common in schools and libraries along with aggressive illiberal campaigns against books, schools and librarians, creating an atmosphere of fear amongst professionals, parents and children. All this against the backdrop of an election that could have a catastrophic outcome for not just the country, but the world.

We have to be incredibly careful when reading these pieces here in the UK that we don’t assume our industry and situation is exactly the same as in the US. Sure, authors are still struggling to make financial ends meet, and it’s still hard to break out, but I don’t think things are as bad as Dwyer makes out.

Read these two, too: Does the maths math? Does it matter?

We already know that the maths of being a writer is pretty dire. So many surveys, analyses and think pieces tell us that it’s nigh-on impossible to earn a comfortable living as an author.

Erik Hoel does some napkin maths and figures out that what he calls ‘cultural billionaires’, ie people who earn a comfortable living as a writer, are as about as common as actual billionaires.

Monica Byrne asks whether an author can live from their royalties, and comes to the obvious conclusion that no, it’s not.

Which isn’t to try to dissuade anyone from being a writer. Indeed, quite the opposite. I internalised the lesson that I’d never earn money from writing a long time ago, so I didn’t write, and it made me incredibly miserable. If you want to write, you should absolutely write.

This is more to say that you must, absolutely must, diversify your income stream. Writing makes me happy, but it won’t make me much money, so the next few years of my life continue to be focused on searching for a way to facilitate my writing without tanking my income.

Which I guess is a great moment to suggest that you can, if you like, upgrade to a paid membership and help me along!

Obligatory cat picture

It’s too bright. It’s just far, far too bright. Copurrnicus buries his face as he takes a well-earned nap.

That’s it for this time! By my next newsletter, the Fieldwork pilot script should be complete, which is an exciting thought!!

All the best,

Suw

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Reincorporation: The art of looking back when you can’t move forward

by Suw on May 29, 2024

How Shaun of the Dead, Ted Lasso and Cabin Pressure use callbacks and repetition to create gags, move the plot forward and develop characters.

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve written about the insights I’ve gleaned from Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, so this week I’m taking on his rather rambling chapter on Narrative Structure which, ironically, shows very little actual narrative structure. Despite its messiness, Johnstone makes a couple of useful points, the first of which is about the importance of structure.

Johnstone suggests that one should ignore content, ie the minutiae of plot, and focus on structure instead. Story is not, he says, just a series of events, but events that are connected in a meaningful and satisfying way — in order for there to be a story, there has to be “some sort of pattern [that] has been completed”.

That leads us on to his second useful point, which is that in order to progress forwards we sometimes have to look backwards.

The improvisor has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. […] They admire the improviser’s grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten.

In comedy, you have the callback, a joke that refers back to one told earlier in the show or series. In drama, you have foreshadowing and Chekhov’s Gun, where later events refer back to earlier set-ups.

If a plot is a series of connected events that mean something, then that meaning is created, at least in part, by referring back to earlier events, dialogue or environmental cues, such as props seen in the background. Improv, in particular, sings when the improvisor calls back to an earlier line or set-up, whether their own or someone else’s. Those moments, as Johnstone identified, often get the biggest laughs because they reveal a deeper structure to the scene, one that the improvisor has created on the fly by remembering and reincorporating something said or done earlier.

Johnstone suggests that an improvisor should (his emphasis) “look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you’ve shelved, and then reinclude them.”

The same is true for writers.

I think this reincorporation can be most clearly seen in TV. A few examples I’ve been looking at recently are Shaun of the Dead, Ted Lasso and Cabin Pressure.

Shaun of the Dead

The reincorporation of Shaun’s walk to the corner shop isn’t just funny, it adds character, context and drives the plot forwards.

Shaun of the Dead is extremely well known for its use of repetition and callbacks to create not just comedy but also pathos. Whether it’s “You’ve got red on you”, “Leave him alone”, or the visual callbacks such as Shaun’s walk to the shop before/after the zombie apocalypse (above), Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright use repetition to first set up a gag, then develop character and empathy, and finally pay off with humour and/or pathos.

One of the most effective running jokes is “He’s not my dad”. Shaun first says this on page 18 to Noel, his cocky young colleague who’s asking why Shaun’s allowed to take personal calls and he isn’t. It’s a throwaway line that would go completely unnoticed if it weren’t repeated later.

On page 60, when Shaun says it childishly to his mum, Barbara, as he and Ed try to persuade them to flee to safety despite Philip, his stepdad, having been bitten, it’s a simple repetition gag.

By page 72, when Shaun reflexively says it to Ed in the car as they escape, it says something about Shaun’s character. He’s so invested in Philip not being his father that he can’t understand either who Philip is as a person or the true nature of their relationship.

But on its final outing, on page 76, after Philip has fully transformed into a zombie, it’s full of emotion and pathos. It’s only now, having lost him, that Shaun realises that Philip has done his best to be a good father.

It’s also still really funny, not just because of the repetition but because this time it has a double meaning:

ED nods to the slavering PHILIP. BARBARA looks on in shock.

BARBARA
Shaun, we can’t just leave your Dad.

SHAUN
He’s not my Dad!

BARBARA
Oh Shaun-

SHAUN grabs a shaken BARBARA by the shoulders. BEHIND we see ZOMBIE PHILIP lunging forward into the front seat.

SHAUN
He’s not Mum. He was but he’s not anymore-

BARBARA
I’m sure if we just-

SHAUN
That’s not even your husband. I know it looks like him but believe me, there is nothing of the man you loved in that car now. Nothing.

BEHIND we see ZOMBIE PHILIP reach forward and SWITCH THE HARD HOUSE OFF. He sits back and looks almost peaceful.

This video from Daniel Pressey summarises a lot of these examples:

Ted Lasso

The Ted Lasso pilot, with only 31 minutes to play with, has to fire off its jokes way faster and so has less room for long-period callbacks, but writers Jason Sudeikis and Bill Lawrence still manage to get one big callback in.

The set-up is on page 9 of the script:

FLIGHT ATTENDANT (O.S.)
We’ll now be dimming the cabin…

As she continues on, Beard grabs his blanket.

COACH BEARD
Better get some sleep. The jet-lag will kill us.

TED LASSO
Yeah, yeh, yeh.

Then, shortly afterwards, we get what appears to be the pay-off, a false pay-off if you like, but it’s deliberately obscured by another joke:

INT. AIRPORT – EXIT AREA – THE NEXT DAY
Ted and Beard walk with their luggage toward a bunch of drivers holding signs. Ted looks a little worse for wear.

COACH BEARD
You didn’t sleep at all?

TED LASSO
Not a wink. No, my brain just kept cookin’. First I was thinkin’ about not sleepin’, then I was thinkin’ about thinkin’ about not sleepin’. Next thing I know they’re handin’ out warm chocolate chip cookies and the plane’s landing.

COACH BEARD
I didn’t get a chocolate chip cookie. You eat mine?

TED LASSO
That’s not part of the story.

But in the very final scene of the episode, we get the callback and the true payoff.

INT. TED’S APARTMENT – BEDROOM – MOMENTS LATER
Ted, finally in bed, pulls up the covers and turns off a bedside lamp. It’s COMPLETELY BLACK.

TED LASSO
Shoot. Now I can’t sleep.

It doesn’t seem like much of a joke written down like this, but it really is a lovely piece of writing. After all Ted’s been through in the episode he really should be knackered, and we get this line not just as a gag, but as a way to encourage us to empathise. We all know what it’s like to be tired but unable to switch off, so in this joke, we get a laugh, some character work, and a bit of empathy. It’s masterful.

Cabin Pressure

The pilot of John Finnemore’s seminal radio comedy Cabin Pressure, similarly short, manages to give us not just a great callback joke, it makes the reinclusion core to the episode’s plot and gives us some great insights into character at the same time.

Martin, the plane’s captain, is overbearing, under-qualified and clings to his own self-importance as a way to try to make up for his acute awareness of his own considerable failings. Douglas, his second in command, is better qualified to be captain but his self-serving laissez-faire attitude to almost everything makes him unsuitable for the position. We see all of this in the short argument about whether to divert the aircraft to Bristol:

DOUGLAS
Of course, Martin, if you say we divert, then divert we shall.

MARTIN
Thank you.

DOUGLAS
Unless of course we were to smell smoke in the flight deck.

MARTIN
What?

DOUGLAS
I’m just saying, if by any remote chance, we smelt smoke in the flight deck, we would of course be duty-bound to land at the nearest available airfield with immediate priority. In this case, by a happy coincidence, Fitton.

MARTIN
Yes, maybe. But I don’t smell smoke in the flight deck.

Sound effect: Lighting a match.

DOUGLAS
How about now?

MARTIN
What are you suggesting, Douglas?

DOUGLAS
We tell the Tower we smell smoke which we do. We get to land straight away. They check the aircraft. Don’t find anything. One of the life’s little mysteries, but jolly good boys for taking no chances. Everybody is happy, and there’s jam for tea.

ARTHUR
Right. That’s, you know, that’s really clever.

MARTIN
No! I’m sorry, but absolutely not.

But in very final scene (again), after we’ve learnt that there’s a cat in the unheated hold that may very well die from exposure if something isn’t done, the callback no only serves a comic purpose, it’s (again), a key plot point. Furthermore, it recapitulates Martin and Douglas’s character types and relationship whilst giving us the chance to look at them from a totally different angle — Douglas’s willingness to bend the rules turns out to be what saves Martin’s arse.

MARTIN
All right, fine. Fine! All right. It’s only a job. There’ll be other jobs.
(flips on the intercom)
France control, this is Golf-Tango-India. Request immediate diversion to nearest airfield.

FRANCE CONTROL
Roger, Golf-Tango-India. Do you have an emergency?

MARTIN
Well, uh.
(sighs)
We’ve got…

DOUGLAS
One moment, please, Tower.

MARTIN
What is it, Douglas?

DOUGLAS
Captain…
(lights a match)
I do believe I can smell smoke in the flight deck. Can you smell smoke in the flight deck, Captain?

MARTIN
Yes… Yes, I can, Douglas. Could you request an immediate diversion, please?

DOUGLAS
Certainly, Sir.

In all three cases, though more frequently in Shaun of the Dead, core parts of the narrative are created by looking back to past events, dialogue and plot points and then reincorporating them. They aren’t just a way to set up a great gag, they also provide us with a deeper insight into the characters (especially Shaun and Ted) and can form the very core of the main plot (Cabin Pressure).

So the next time you’re feeling stuck about where to take your story, look backwards. Look at the set-ups that you’ve already created and ask yourself what you can call back to. What characters have you introduced and then forgotten which you can now reactivate? How can you take a concept from the beginning and reintroduce it later on? Is there dialogue or action you can repeat in a way that’s funny or creates pathos?

Getting stuck may not mean that you need a new idea. Perhaps, instead, you need to recycle an old one; you need to find the pattern and complete it.

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Word Count 75: Clarke Award shortlist, Neil Gaiman interview, Canongate goes B Corp, The Fall Guy

by Suw on May 21, 2024

Plus audiobook news, Colleen Hoover’s writer’s block, SFF book length advice, and the state of British TV.

Hi there,

I’ve got a veritable smorgasbord of links for you today, so I’m breaking away from my usual newsletter format and where I’ve got a lot of related links I’m grouping them by theme, otherwise this would be a very, very long newsletter!

Also, happy Three-Quarters-Of-A-Century Newsletter to me! Yes, this is my 75th Word Count newsletter, which also coincides with the arrival of my 300th subscriber! Thank you to all of you for being a part of my newsletter journey, and even bigger thanks to those of you who are supporting my writing with a paid subscription. I am incredibly grateful!

Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 38th Arthur C Clarke Award, which celebrates the best of science fiction, was announced last week. The short list is:

Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Ten Percent Thief, by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
The Mountain In The Sea, by Ray Nayler
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, by Isabel Waidner

Lots of good reading there!

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman was interviewed by the Royal Literary Fund. Interviews with Neil are always good value, but I particularly liked this bit:

What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

The proudest moment of my writing career would be my first Hugo Award. I got it for American Gods. I was one hundred per cent certain that I wouldn’t get it -there were lots of amazing books on that shortlist. So I’m sitting there happily in the audience, not having written a speech, not even a list of thank yous, because I knew I wasn’t going to win. And then they called my name. I went up on the stage and I remember standing in front of an audience and saying, “F*** I’ve got a Hugo!”

Canongate first UK publisher to become a B Corp

B Corp certification is awarded to “companies able to demonstrate that they have a positive social and environmental impact on the world”, and British publisher Canongate has now won its B Corp status, the first UK publisher to do so. Caroline Gorham, production and systems director, said:

“Becoming a B Corp feels like a public commitment: we want to ensure our impact on our colleagues, authors, suppliers, booksellers, readers and the world at large is a positive one.”

I’d love to think that this could be the beginning of a trend, but I find myself doubtful given the poverty wages/advances most major publishers pay.

What I’m watching: The Fall Guy

If you haven’t yet gotten to the cinema to see The Fall Guy or, as we say in the UK, The Autumn Guy, hie thee to a picture house right now. I don’t often feel moved to review TV or movies, but The Fall Guy is fabulous. It’s that perfect blend of action and romcom that reminds me of Romancing The Stone. It never takes itself too seriously, yet someone somewhere (literally everyone involved) took the making of it very seriously indeed.

I love a film that takes us behind the scenes, and The Fall Guy does just that, showing us how stunts are done by a dedicated and large crew of experts who makes sure that the stunt men and women don’t hurt themselves too much. Though, as Ryan Gosling’s Colt Seavers says, it all hurts. But Gosling and Emily Blunt’s comic timing is perfect, their chemistry sizzles, and the whole thing is just perfection. You don’t need to have ever seen, or even heard of, the original TV series to enjoy this, so go see it on the big screen if you can.

And yes, I’m going to keep making that ‘autumn guy’ joke until someone laughs.

Audiobooks: The good, the bad, and the bad is also the ugly

The Guardian reports that in the UK, audiobooks are are booming, with downloads up 17 per cent since last year and revenue up 24 per cent to £206 million over the same period. Audiobook revenue has also doubled over the last five years, which is fabulous for authors and publishers.

But despite increases in the value of several publishing market segments, and overall growth for the industry, “major publishers have said that they are struggling with rising costs” and that there will be cuts, so the good news is tempered a little.

The Guardian also takes a look at “dramatised audiobooks” which feature dozens of, even over 150, different actors and narrators. I can’t see this become a major trend, simply because of cost. Only the most popular titles are ever going to get this treatment, so I don’t think that it asks quite the “existential question” that The Guardian claims in its headline.

Variety report that Spotify are being sued in the US over the bundling of audiobooks into its Premium Individual, Duo and Family subscription streaming plans, which will results “result in an underpayment of royalties”. Spotify recently increased its subscription prices, but Billboard calculated that because of bundling:

songwriters and publishers will earn an estimated $150 million less in U.S. mechanical royalties from premium, duo and family plans for the first 12 months that this is in effect, compared to what they would have earned if these three subscriptions were never bundled.

Ugly, indeed.

Colleen Hoover struck by writer’s block

Smash hit author Colleen Hoover hasn’t written anything for 18 months, and doesn’t know if she’ll write again. In this interview, she says that she has become a lot more famous than she ever wanted to be, and that has attracted a lot of cruelty from her detractors. That, and the pressure of needing to live up to now high expectations, seems to have damaged her confidence and she finds herself unable to develop anything beyond the idea stage.

Last week I took a look at the four types of writer’s block and a dozen potential solutions. To me, it seems like the cause of Hoover’s writer’s block is motivational: She’s suffering from a very understandable fear of criticism, performance anxiety, and lack of enjoyment. I hope she can find her way out of what sounds like a rather unpleasant place to be.

How long should an SFF book be?

This set of posts from editor Jonathan Oliver on Bluesky (sadly, not formatted as a thread) explores not just how long a science fiction or fantasy novel should be, but also the pressures within the industry that are cutting page lengths.

Honestly, shorter often is better, because it forces you to make the hard choices and only keep the stuff that really, really works.

So, I have seen various comments on what length a work of SFF ‘should’ be, and as a professional editor I wanted to add my 10p’s worth. Firstly, I very rarely see novels over 150K that don’t need trimming down a touch. That’s not to say there aren’t great epic works out there…1/

Secondly, the current economy of print, paper costs, and shipping means that physical novels published in the mainstream are trending shorter. Couple that with that the fact that the latest trending genre (romantasy) tends to go for shorter novels (70-90K). 2/

Of course, with self-publishing, you can publish at whatever length you like. But, if you’re intending to produce physical copies via POD you still have to consider the longer the work, the more it’s going to cost to print, especially at that scale. 3/

On an artistic basis, a novel should be whatever length it should be. But, the longer epic works I see generally need squeezing to refine the narrative, and SFF audiences (especially with the rise of self-pub) tend to go for shorter works in series, rather than huge fat pbks by newer authors. 4/?

I love an epic when it’s done well, but they’re really really hard to do well. I’ve had one client over the past three years who has managed to nail it. But he’s struggling to get his book out into the mainstream because publishers are less likely to take a risk on a big work by an unknown 5/

So, in conclusion – stories should be whatever shape they need to be. But, in the reality of SFF publishing (taking into account boring real world economic factors and international situations’ effect on shipping) bigger books are on the wane, and slimmer, punchier titles or on the rise. 6ish?/

The rot at the centre of British TV runs deep

There’s no good news coming out of the TV industry at the moment, which is a bit miserable for anyone hoping to break into it. Channel 4 reveals that less than 10 per cent of “film and TV workers are from working class backgrounds, the lowest in a decade. And most of them are based in London.”

The Guardian talks about the misogyny that women in TV and film face. There’s way too much from this article that’s quotable, but I’ll stick to just this one:

The number of women in senior roles fell 5% between 2019 and 2022. One in three directors are women, yet they get only a quarter of director credits. Contributions from female writers fell from 43% to 32% between 2016 and 2022. Behind these figures, women are less likely to be employed on peak-time shows, which are generally more prestigious and have larger audiences, than men.

Oh, and this one:

“There’s tremendous cultural impetus,” Aust adds, “to get women to behave like men and not present any kind of disruption – don’t have a baby, don’t have IVF, don’t go through menopause, don’t have periods.” Reynolds knows an experienced documentary-maker who hides the existence of her son for fearing of losing work. Eikhof interviewed one woman who, when suffering from morning sickness on set, hid airline sick bags in her handbag so she could vomit discreetly.

Philip Ralph spoke to the Royal Television Society about how difficult it is for early career writers to get their foot in the industry’s door.

“What’s happening now is an existential-level crisis for the industry. Like what happened to the miners in the 1980s.” This is writer Phil Ralph (Doctors, Einstein and the Bomb), following the decision to axe BBC One’s daytime mainstay Doctors. […]

With its mix of long-running storylines and stories-of-the-day, Doctors was developed to train early-career writers. They would then move on to bigger series, some eventually creating their own shows.

I’ve deliberately put this section at the end, because dear lord it’s depressing reading. This thread by Kelly, a director on Twitter, pretty much sums up how hard it is for people who aren’t in London and aren’t connected to the right people to make any headway at all.

I do worry that we are gutting the future of the creative industries, which together contributed “£126bn in gross value added to the economy and employed 2.4 million people in 2022”, because industry leaders and politicians are all so bloody short-sighted. Yes, of course it’s cheaper to axe long-running training ground TV shows and replace them with ineffective and selective competitions, but in 10 years time, who’s going to be writing your hits?

We have already reached the point at which only people who don’t need the money can really afford to work in the creative industries, and it’s only going to get worse from here on in and idiots and AI decimate the jobs market.

Obligatory cat picture

To cheer you up after all that, here is Sir Izacat Mewton and Professor Grabbity Tinycat helping me to iron way back in 2013.

That’s it for this week… or is it? I actually have a bunch more links that I didn’t include because frankly this newsletter’s long enough as it is. If you’re on Substack Notes or if you follow me on Bluesky, I’ll be sharing them there.

All the best,

Suw

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The four causes of writer’s block and what to do about them

by Suw on May 15, 2024

What does science have to tell us about writer’s block?

A couple of years ago, Sarah J Ahmed and C Dominik Güss from the University of North Florida published a paper, An Analysis of Writer’s Block: Causes and Solutions, in the Creativity Research Journal (£/academic access required). It’s a fascinating read that has quite a lot to teach us about writer’s block and its potential solutions.

Ahmed and Güss recruited both fiction and non-fiction writers via various writing organisations, such as Horror Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, Technical Writers Association and Travel Writers of America, and surveyed them about their experiences of writer’s block and the things that they did to tackle it.

They wanted to find out:

The most common causes of writers block.
How long the blocks lasted.
Which stages of writing the blocks occurred in.
Whether there was a relationship between the cause of the block and the stage of writing it occurred in.
What common solutions writers used to break the block.
How the responses of the professional writers compared to the semiprofessional writers.

The paper’s long, so I’m just going to look at the causes and solutions section, though I might address the others in my next newsletter.

I think it’s worth noting that these results are for professional writers such as journalists or marketers, full-time published authors, or university level writing teachers; and semiprofessional writers who have published their works, had ten years or more of “serious writing experience”, or write full-time during retirement. There were too few aspiring writers to draw meaningful conclusions, and no students or other classes of beginners.

This means that these people have had time to understand their own blocks and the solutions that work for them. I suspect the results would be different for less experienced writers, but there’s much to be learnt from the pros and semipros.

What causes writer’s block?

Ahmed and Güss define writer’s block as “a period during which a competent writer cannot produce new material” and describe some writers’ experiences, demonstrating the varied nature writer’s block:

some writers have described struggling with developing new ideas despite retaining their ability to construct a paragraph fluidly, others have reported the opposite problem. Authors with writer’s block can experience diverse struggles with the same aspect of the writing process and combined sub-tasks necessary to create the final product differently.

They describe the four main types of causes of writer’s block:

Physiological causes: Stress, anxiety, extreme emotional states such as grief, mental or physical health issues, and exhaustion.
Motivational causes: Fear of criticism, performance anxiety, and lack of enjoyment.
Cognitive causes: Perfectionism, problems associated with over-planning or under-planning, and rigid thinking, such as forcing a story to move in a certain direction.
Behavioural causes: Procrastination, interruptions to writing, and being too busy to write.

The most common causes of writer’s block “reported by approximately 42% of writers were physiological, such as life stress, general anxiety, depression, and burnout”.

The full results were:

Physiological

Frequency: 42 per cent.
Defined as: Stress, anxiety, intense emotions.
Examples: “Depression,” “I have a harder time writing when mental or physical illness there is high stress in my life,” “I have health issues,” “A stressful life event leads to physical and emotional exhaustion”.

Motivational

Frequency: 29 per cent.
Defined as: Fear of criticism or rejection.
Examples: “Pressure to perform well,” “Receiving critical performance anxiety, or loss of feedback,” “Stifled by an unnerving experience enjoyment with a writing group”.

Cognitive

Frequency: 13 per cent.
Defined as: Perfectionism, problems due to errors in planning (not planning sufficiently or too fixated on an outcome), rigid thinking.
Examples: “Perfectionism,” “Not having planned well enough in advance,” “The block is related to the work itself rather than outside influences”.

Behavioural

Frequency: 11 per cent
Defined as: Procrastination, being too busy to write
Examples: “Busy promoting books #1 and #2, no time to write #3, demanding professional work schedule diverting attention from creative work, change in writing routine,” “Stressful life event – just being busy and having lots of other obligations build-up”.

Some people, 5 per cent, reported that more than one factor was at play.

I think this is really interesting, not least because we often think of writer’s block as intimately linked to procrastination and perfectionism, but for this sample, that wasn’t so much the case.

Rather, the most common cause was a heightening of emotional and/or physical states in a way that impaired the ability to think and write, but which wasn’t context-specific. We need some level of stimulation in order to perform well on cognitive tasks, but if we have too much then “memory, information processing, and executive functioning” are impaired. Too little, and we become bored and disengaged.

Stress, high emotions, ill-health or exhaustion all push us out of that Goldilocks zone and into a state where it’s harder for us to write. So it makes a lot of sense that physiological causes are the most common — we’re all subject to these things, one way or another, and because they aren’t context-specific, they are hard to completely avoid.

I’m also not surprised that motivational causes — context-specific “fear of evaluation, writing anxiety, and decreased intrinsic motivation” — came in at second place.

Ahmed and Güss say:

Evaluation anxiety exhibits a negative relationship pattern with creativity and routine problem-solving tasks. Generalized stress or anxiety, such as life-event or time pressure stress, affects people in generally the same way regardless of perceived self-efficacy [confidence in your ability to perform a task]. However, evaluative stress is most detrimental to writing when a writer has low levels of writing efficacy and enhances writing when a writer has high levels of writing efficacy, likely because someone with high levels of writing efficacy, or competence, would have higher levels of writing confidence and therefore would interpret the challenge as less threatening.

So, the less you believe in your ability to write, the harder writing gets.

This is what I experienced last year with Tag: After a particularly difficult round of feedback, I lost faith in myself. I felt completely stuck and really didn’t want to go back to work on it because I couldn’t see how to fix it.

Now, looking back over my writing life, I can safely say that I’ve definitely suffered all four types of writer’s block. Cognitive and behavioural blocks earlier in my career, when I had fewer tools to tackle my planning problems and was generally too busy to write because running my own business took up every waking second. Then physiological and motivational writer’s block in more recent years when I had those other blocks under more control both because my domestic situation was much better (I got married!) and I’d learnt how to deal with them.

So what about solutions?

Ahmed and Güss asked their participants to share and rate the things that they had done to try to shift their block, and then analysed only the most effective suggestions. That resulted in a list of twelve possible options:

Take a break from writing: “Stop writing, decide tomorrow is another day, and walk away from the computer until the next day.” (26%)
Work on a different writing project: “Jump from the work on which I’m currently engaged to another.” (13%)
Keep writing: “Force myself to write to a certain page number” (12%)
Revise or reread current work or skip ahead to work on a later section: “Reread notes or drafts” (10%)
Read a book or watch a movie: “I read the work of authors I admire to become inspired.” (10%)
Take a walk: “I go for a walk” (6%)
Discuss ideas with others: “Ask for advice. See what other people think. While you usually won’t use what they suggest their ideas can kickstart you brain.” (8%)
Change writing location or writing method: “Switch up locations or methods of writing – write using a pen, a typewriter, etc.” (6%)
Exercise: “Exercise/movement” (3%)
Research: “Researching relevant or related topics” (3%)
Eat or drink something: “Drinking coffee or snacking” (2%)
Meditate/do yoga: “Meditate for five minutes” (1%)

Personally, I’ve done 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 at different times, and generally find all of them have worked, though sometimes I need to chain them together. So if keeping writing doesn’t work, then I’ll take a break and go for a walk.

What do you think of these solutions? Have you tried any of them?

The next time you get blocked

The next time you find yourself at an impasse, you can sit down with a cuppa and think about which type of block you’re dealing with. What factors are affecting your ability to write? Are you dealing with a physiological, motivational, cognitive or behavioural problem?

Once you’ve worked that out, you can more easily select a potential solution from the list to try out. Perhaps if the cause is physiological, say you’re too tired or too stressed, then taking a break is the most sensible course of action. Motivational issues might be best addressed by talking to others or revising. If the problem is cognitive, maybe pushing through or doing more planning would help. And if it’s behavioural, perhaps again pushing through or doing research might help.

Ultimately, information is empowering. Understanding the nature of your block gives you a clearer idea of what might unblock you.

And, finally, remember to believe!

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Word Count 74: Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, reader surveys, do people buy books?

May 7, 2024

Plus Fieldwork progress, character creation, and a sleepy Copurrnicus. Hi there, It was a long weekend here in the UK, which was much needed. It’s been really drab and rainy for a long time, and so dismal I’ve even had my SAD lamp on to lift the mood a bit. In May. I’m hoping that […]

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Resisting the lure of research

May 1, 2024

And learning how to transition from research to pre-writing to writing. Yesterday, I published an update on my new sitcom, Fieldwork, where I compared the writing process for my unnamed and now trunked pandemic disaster novel (which I’ll just call Pandemic for now) and the process I’m going through with Fieldwork. Both stories are based […]

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Fieldwork: Building a script one week at a time

April 30, 2024

Plus Joel Morris’s new book about comedy, Be Funny Or Die. Dave Cohen’s Build a Sitcom correspondence course started a couple of weeks ago and I am so glad that I signed up for it. One of the problems with writing anything based on real life is managing the transitions from research to pre-writing to […]

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Word Count 73: Write Start competition, an ecofont saves trees, the Origin Story of zombies

April 23, 2024

Plus inside the Met’s book conservation lab, lots of AI news, and another rejection is balanced out by starting my Script in Eight Weeks course. Hi there, Suw’s News: Another rejection and a course started The rejection emails from Discoveries 2024 arrived in inboxes, including mine, late last week. Whilst rejection is never a surprise, […]

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What to do when your mind is blank

April 17, 2024

This week’s newsletter brought to you by the letter S, for stubbornness. Sometimes, I find that my head is just… empty. I need to write something, but there’s not a single idea to be had. Not a light on in the house. I could skip a week, I suppose. People do. But if I skip […]

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← Previous Entries

bubbling enthusiasm for $arbitrary_topic

Opportunity: Galley Beggar’s short story prize

Read this: Why now?

Read this, two: Working class writers

Obligatory cat picture

Stop, look, listen: Temporal

Opportunity: Joel Morris launches comedy course

Read this: Dave Cohen on the BBC and South Korea

Stop, look, listen: The Rest Is Entertainment — Robert Downey Jr & the Death of TV Comedy

Obligatory cat picture

Martin MacInnes wins Arthur C Clarke award

What I’m watching: When the editor has to fix it in post

Stop, look, listen: Backlisted – Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

Why Aren’t I Writing?: Genre hopping is good for you

Read this: iPlayer top streamer in the UK

Tweet of the week: The ‘nivali’ mystery

Obligatory cat picture

Suw’s News: Writing has begun on Fieldwork

Opportunity: Short story competition for USians

Tip-top tip: How to take general meetings

Read these: Debuts fail to launch… or do they?

Read these two, too: Does the maths math? Does it matter?

Obligatory cat picture

Shaun of the Dead

Ted Lasso

Cabin Pressure

Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Canongate first UK publisher to become a B Corp

What I’m watching: The Fall Guy

Audiobooks: The good, the bad, and the bad is also the ugly

Colleen Hoover struck by writer’s block

How long should an SFF book be?

The rot at the centre of British TV runs deep

Obligatory cat picture

What causes writer’s block?

Physiological

Motivational

Cognitive

Behavioural

So what about solutions?

The next time you get blocked

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