Writing And Songwriting

So today I rejigged and recorded three old songs of mine. And... I love them. It's as simple as that. It's not completely normal for me to love the songs I write, but it's not hugely surprising -- I rarely write a song I don't like, these days.

I wish writing (of the non-song variety) was like that. I'm rarely happy with fiction I write, and even when I am, I'm not.

Part of the reason for that difference is inherently in the medium. Songs are small. They're less than five minutes long, when most novels take at least five hours of solid concentration. Songs are 300 words or so, novels are at least 200 times that long. Okay, songs have music, but if your songs are as simplistic as mine, and you've spent your teenage years mucking around with one instrument or another, that's not a massive ask. Songs are easy because they're small.

A more specific reason for my song-easy-book-hard outlook is motivation. I write books because I want to do that for my career; so I don't judge what I write by whether it meets the minimum requirements needed to please me, but by it's ability to wow thousands of neutral or potentially strangers.

Songs are easy because I never intend or expect anyone else to be that into them. I like these, and that's all I'm really bothered by. If I ever get to that stage with a manuscript, I know it's time to have a good long hard long good long look at why I'm writing it in the first place.

February Album Writing Month

 Here's a warning; this blog may stray slightly off topic over the next four weeks. Here's the deal/low down/goose/explanation/goose/truth/goose again:

The last two years, I've taken part in FAWM (February Album Writing Month). The idea is to write 14 songs in 28 days, because of one simple principle: writing a lot of songs in a hurry does more for your songwriting than labouring (or procrastinating) over a single pop masterpiece.

That principle is ridiculously true, for me at least. Before I FAWMed, I had never finished a single song, for a given value of finished. When I FAWM, I always get at least 14 new songs, and at least two of them are far better than I could have come up with without the time pressure of 14 in 28.

This year, I'm not doing it. I'm not writing 14 new songs, anyway. But I'm going to take advantage of the excellent community, feedback and project-mentality motivation to go through older songs, rewrite them and record them. As a new WORLD RECORD amount of my friends (three) are trying it this year too, I might get involved in a couple of original collaborations, if nothing else.

So that's what I'm going to be thinking about/doing/obsessing over this month. The focus on the blog is still going to be books, but some songs might get the odd look in as well. You have been warned.

(And if you think it sounds like the most fun ever, it is. There's still time to sign up here, and add me here.)

Books as Insulation

I collect the books I like. Not in a serious way, not in a series way, but I still collect them. All well and good, you say, but I'm starting to ask why? What for? I have some 400 books in my room, all read, alphabetical by author, chronological within author. Fiction Non-Fiction Biography Entertainment. Yeah. Why?

Well... I like doing it. Maybe that's it. I like collecting things. I especially like putting things into alphabetical order by author, and chronological within author. But if it's as unpragmatic as that, it's a very expensive past time.

Maybe it's because I love to lend books. At least, I've always assumed I do, but it's never really come up. In recent months, I have been asked for a good book to read, and have leant out half a dozen excellent novels. What really struck me about that process, pleasant though it was, was how bloody difficult it can be. Reading -- even to a book-blogger -- is a very private thing. How do I know what this guy will like? Or how this girl will react to that author?

Maybe a better tactic is to lend them to myself. Keeping the books I love, clearly, offers the possibility of re-reads. I now have a personal library selected by the only person who's taste I really trust; it sounds great, but in reality I never do it. I've re-read Watership Down about 5 times; all of Pratchett at least twice; and Harry Potter. All of which re-reading took place years ago.

I have favourite books -- The Great Gatsby, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Bluebeard -- that I've only read once. It's a travesty.

I think -- I have to think -- the point of my shelves and shelves of books is to be re-read, by me, someday. Lending is good, collecting is fun, and they probably do keep my room fairly warm; but they exist for my own future, repeated pleasure.

The problem with that is, where do you find the time? There's also thousands of unread books out there, vying for my reading hours. It's a delicate equation that I have yet to balance. Do you re-read? How often? Or do you give your books away once you get to The End?

A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood

I talked about great books becoming great films, last month. I thought I'd push the theory, or at least push my luck, by reading a book and watching the film in the same day. Brilliant idea. Stupid idea.

The problem with the film is that the book is brilliant. The other problem with the film is that the book involves mostly normal events going on in the background of the inside of George's head.

The Book is subtle and assured, effortlessly funny and almost heroically intelligent; and human. It works astoundingly well as a book of people, but it's also a 'book of ideas', which is usually enough to put me off. I've read too many recycled philosophical arguments in the mouths of dull caricatures to warm to the term.Book if ideas, indeed. Pshaw.

Geo and Charlotte do openly discuss the novel's themes of holding on to the past, mortality and loneliness... but it's okay. Not only is Isherwood too good at his craft to trip up here, the whole thing is fitted to the dynamic between the characters; the topics come up because of Charlotte's designs on the future, and Geo's resistance to those designs.So even when it's a book of ideas, it's really a book of people.

The Film includes the same characters (or at least the same names) and many of the same details of scene and dialogue; but it changes the entire plot into which these details fall. I saw adverts for it when it was released, and was pretty sure I would have loved it. In fact, watching it two days ago, I was convinced it was -- most probably -- a very good film. But it wasn't A Single Man.

Did I ruin the film for myself by reading the book first? I could just as easily have watched the film beforehand... is it possible to ruin a good book by watching the film first, though? Do films have that power?

And can any Isherwood fans tell me what to read of his next? Because the book really was excellent.

Corpsing

Toby Litt

I have one basic response Litt novels, most of the time. I want to love them, but I never quite do. There are occcasional exceptions (Hospital, Journey Into Space) -- but exceptions is, I'm learning, the right word.

The existence of such exceptional exceptions keeps me hopeful; and I was a fair distance in to Corpsing before I realised it wasn't going to join them.

It's clever and hip and most probably post-something. The prose is frequently hilarious, smart like new shoes on the surface, and the premise is pretty intriguing.

It lacks a little heart, but heart isn't what this noirish revenge novel needs. In fact, for a novel that starts with a shooting in a restaurant and ends with an attempt to re-enact the same shooting, it lacks focus.

Without giving away the 'twist', the book ends with something of a pull-out and reveal. The issues the reader takes seriously in the novel turn out to be wide of the mark, and not what was really going on. Too wide to count as a near miss, but not nearly wide enough to count as astonishing.

Suddenly we should have been caring about the frustration of police inaction, and intrigued by what the officers were really up to. But for the 300 pages up until that reveal, we and the narrator haven't really bothered about that too much. It was a small problem, and now it's pretending to be the whole plot. And the whole plot has now become an aside.

This has happened to me a lot recently. Authors can't end their books properly. It's not that they go completely for option A when I would prefer B: it's that they go for both, or neither, or forget to put an ending in at all.

What should an ending have? What should an ending be? Is it just me that's struggling to find good ones at the moment?