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Archive for August, 2009

Late summer is a surreal time of year for those of us living in the countryside. Driving to Nottingham on an August morning is like visiting a rural sculpture park; passing field after field with the hay baled and distributed, seemingly randomly, across the landscape, transient totems of a megafaeniliac age.

And as with all such phenomena there is variation between the tribes. Some favour the traditional cubes, sharply regular and striking against the gentle Midland slopes; others go for the more aesthetic cylinders. Both, no doubt, have their benefits, whether they are easier to move or to store.

By why do they stop there? I noticed this morning one of the traditional silly season stories about corn circles. Once, people would travel to marvel at these alleged alien markings. At least, that is, until it was admitted they were part of a practical joke. Now it doesn’t matter how elaborate the patterns become, few people bother to look. Why? The trouble with corn circles is that they aren’t really that visible at ground level. People get their best view in the newspapers. But what if, say, one enterprising farmer were to take his hay cubes and to stack them, not just anyhow, but in an approximation of Stonehenge? It would make the papers, naturally, but it would also attract visitors. Visitors who might be encouraged to visit a local farm shop, say. The success would encourage other farmers to try something similar the following year. And it could go on and on. For a couple of weeks in summer our countryside would be strewed with a myriad temporary sculptures, lightening the mood, encouraging trade and reconnecting us with both our cultural and agricultural origins.

Maybe that’s what the traditional stone circles were all about in the first place. Tradition is, after all, simply a name for something people keep doing because they can’t remember why they started. And our traditions have always been quirky ones. So go on, flatten the hay – and then stack it in interesting formations across our green and pleasant land.

Probably the most difficult aspect of being a writer is knowing where to draw the line in self-criticism. Even amongst those who struggle to get past page one of their magnum opus, it is invariably the feeling that what they are doing is worthless that makes them (metaphorically these days) rip the paper from the typewriter and hurl it into a disgusted ball in the wastepaper basket.
Get to my stage of things – several years passed, a number of books written, still fighting to get them out there – and it’s actually harder. Because, even if you are self-confident enough to hold up your latest effort as a work of genius (a state of mind I’ve never achieved) by the time you’ve written a few more books the chances are you’ll look back on that earlier work as somehow flawed. If it hasn’t been published by then, the temptation is either to rewrite it or ditch it. The former is what I refer to as the Tolkien trap. Tolkien was not a prolific writer, but a prolific rewriter. In his life he wrote and rewrote the same books continuously. After his death, his son has issued a number of these rewrites, most of which are only purchased by true hardcore fans.
Was Tolkien right to behave this way? Would the first version of Lord of the Rings been as successful as the version that eventually emerged? Who can tell, but authors should take heart from the fact that many of the books that are released and are successful would probably be roundly condemned by many authors, not least their own. Some are simply naive scribblings that were nonetheless good enough to get their author accepted and give them chance to grow; others are products of a bad period in an established author’s life. None of them are, for the most part, seen anywhere near as badly by the legions of non-writing readers in the world. These people are forgiving of overused dialogue tags, of semi-colons serving where full-stops would have been better, of hanging clauses used as sentences. For no good reason.
When you develop your writer’s eye you can find faults in books lauded as classics. Walter Scott’s chapters of character set-up grate; early Wodehouse can fail to effervesce in the way of his later works. And that means that, when dusting off an old work and giving it a new edit, when trying to batter a once great scene into a shape where you can still admit you wrote it; in those circumstances you should be a little more forgiving of your own work. Let the reader be your strictest judge. After all, the last thing you want is to die in penury only to have your children prosper by publishing everything in the ensuing years.