Faulks It.

It’s been a quieter week and there’s a temporary lack of drunken misadventures with which to entertain you. So, instead, it’s time for another blog in the irregular series on writerly technique.

Sebastian Faulks – he of Birdsong and more recently the new James Bond book fame – has a proper novel coming out (as opposed to something he bashed out in a fortnight’s holiday to the Bahamas).

Quick confession before I blunder further onwards – I’ve never actually read a Faulks’ novel. I’ve kind of always lumped him into the category of ‘probably not as good as he’s hyped to be.’ Like Ian McEwan or Martin Amis. No, that’s not fair. They’re both in the ‘not as good as they used to be’ category. Someone like Dave Eggers, then. Or DBC Pierre.

Right, now I’ve just slagged off five significantly more successful than I writers, let’s continue.

The hoo-hah around the novel’s release is that it is the first of Faulks’ books to be set in an entirely contemporary environment and that it (may, might, possibly, if you peer through the murk hard enough) contain characters who are not favourable facsimiles of real people. In particular a literary critic, who in the novel only gets joy and satisfaction from writing poisonous reviews and may (at a certain angle, in a particular light) bear more than a passing resemblance to a critic at the Independent.

Oo Sebastian Faulks might, occasionally, borrow from his own life for his novels. What a big surprise? Almost as a big a shock as the notion that authors don’t always agree with the reviews they get.

I think we all poach bits and bobs, friends and enemies. It’s unavoidable. John Berger once said “imagination is not the ability to invent, it is the ability to disclose that which already exists.” To do this, I believe, we must draw on our own understandings of how the world exists.

I’m not suggesting that all fiction is really the author’s life through a cracked mirror - although there’s plenty of that about. See the near-reportage of Graham Greene or the weirdness that is Paul Auster. (Once you’ve spotted the trick, it becomes kind of hard to ignore that every novel essentially starts “Once upon a time there was a novelist, called Paul, who lived in Brooklyn…”)

No I suspect that this is more the writer, as they’re supposed to do, communicating their understanding of human nature to the wider world. That, in order to push boundaries and stretch our writing emotional credentials, there is usually a grounded base that that the author can trust to ring true because, well, because it is.

The shelves of your local bookshop (go and have look, go on, stop using bloody Amazon) are lined with this stuff. Joshua Ferris’ And Then We Came To The End is set at an advertising agency. Ferris used to work at an advertising agency. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is about a Dutchman in New York who lives in the Chelsea Hotel. O’Neill may be Irish (actually, thinking about it he may not be, but never mind) but he does live in New York in the Chelsea Hotel. Irvine Welsh’s better books are those set in his native Edinburgh. John Updike was, apparently, something of a womaniser and it’s curious to see the lead in Run Rabbit debating whether to stay with his mistress or to return to his wife. More than a few of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters struggle with alcohol and the author died from an illness related to his own drink trouble

I could go on and these are all excellent books, but clearly there is at least an element within the writing, a single factual thread, that the writer clings to and around which he weaves the story.

The question should, I think, not be ‘do we do it’ but ‘should we be allowed to do it’?

A friend of mine is nervous that their parents will spot a moment vaguely similar to something that happened during childhood, even though they’ve changed the gender of the character. (Note how I’ve made this paragraph genderless – ah, the power of rewriting.) This is a moment in life that they’ve borrowed, twisted about a bit and exaggerated the emotional impact of, but it would still be very easy for people in the know to draw the wrong conclusions.

I’ve had similar concerns. A short story I wrote dealt with a son’s relationship with his Father. I gave it to my parent’s to read and was worried that they’d think this troubled relationship was how I felt growing up. It wasn’t, but I was pulling at bits of empathy from my understanding of how my relationship with my Dad works.

Unfortunately (and indeed unsurprisingly) not everyone likes appearing in the written form. They can get a bit upset; sometimes they might even feel betrayed. My ex used to be very uncomfortable about her appearances in this blog and she drew comparisons between the characters in my, now abandoned, first attempt at a novel and our relationship. Perhaps, that was a fair criticism. Perhaps it wasn’t. I was using my understanding of our relationship to write about a fictional relationship, but maybe I hadn’t stepped far enough away. I certainly didn’t intend to novelising myself.

To an extent, I’m still doing it. I had the opening of the novel I’m currently writing workshopped recently. It starts at the end of a relationship and I was quite surprised when nobody asked ‘Is this…?’ Because it is and isn’t. It isn’t in that the circumstances, situation, nature, dialogue are a million miles from the end of our relationship and the story then goes somewhere it wouldn’t be possible for me to go. But then it is, in that I am mining the seam, as it were, of the emotional maelstrom I got ripped through last year.

It’s good stuff too, but does that justify borrowing a little line from here, a little look from there? I appreciate I am getting miles ahead of myself given that a) I haven’t even finished a first draft yet and b) have neither agent and publisher, just to remind you how far removed from the authors listed above I am. Okay, so let’s rephrase it. Let’s try: Should I even be writing about doing it in this blog? It is, after all, tantamount to the same thing.

One of my friends who made an appearance in last week’s blog emailed me say that they didn’t recall saying the words that I’d put in their mouth. They weren’t annoyed (I don’t think), but just couldn’t imagine themselves saying the particular phrase. I replied that I was pretty certain they had, but did concede it could have been someone else in the group. They came back saying that they were no longer sure whether it was the real them speaking or an imaginary version.

“Congratulations,” I almost wrote, “you’ve become a character.” And then realised that to characterise someone is such a way would be totally unacceptable.

I like to think I have been given a degree of licence by those friends whom I’ve known a long time (it tends to be those who have been around for more than a decade who get named and given recurrent appearances) to tweak reality slightly for dramatic convenience, but I cannot (must not) completely invent on behalf of real people.

Okay, so davidmarstonwrites is different to a novel – I don’t proclaim this to be fiction - but the problem is that after you’ve done it once, the reader struggles to distinguish between what the factual element is and the where the wholly fictional world begins. They start to see comparisons that aren’t there. In another short story, I wrote of a man who had an affair. Actually, it was more about a man who might have had an affair or he might just have been writing a story about having an affair. It got a bit complicated and didn’t really work – in fact one of my tutors called in “a short story that ate itself.” Anyway, it led to me being accused by a couple of people of it either being about me having or wanting to have an affair with someone in particular. Which it wasn’t. In fact, it probably had the least elements from my life of anything I was writing at that time. Which may have been why I couldn’t get it to work.

So, I changed the girl’s hair colour and moved it to a different bit of London and no-one ever said anything again. Except, that it was still a bit crap.

Perhaps, my point behind all this is that if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to write brilliantly amazing fiction that includes snippets of your reality to prevent the entire fictional mesh floating off into a mental void then you better be talented enough to do it well. Indeed, those defending Faulks were arguing that a novelist of his skill would have disguised his target so successfully, would have thrown forth so many red herrings, that no-one would ever have noticed it. That people were simply looking for something that wasn’t there. Although, of course, if you’re going to be viciously vitriolic about someone it might appear to defeat the point, if no-one notices it - unless you’re also trying to avoid a lawsuit for defamation.

Note to everyone (especially Boris), there’s no point suing me. I haven’t any money or assets.