Experimenting

Last week’s ‘flat-pack’ email was, on the face of it, a right old mess.

Most of my emails (including this one) take the form of short articles, the kind you might read in a newspaper. They start with a thought, develop it, and end up with some kind of conclusion. Nearly always, I try to make sure that the emails are going to be useful.

And last week? Well, the whole thing was a jumble.

There was no visible sequence. Yes, there was some actual advice in there (Roughly: “50,000 words doesn’t make a novel” and “think of Nanowrimo as a way to establish strong writing habits.”) But there was also a lot of apparent nonsense – an anecdote about a friend tempted to give her publisher the 100,000 words they’d requested, but ‘haven’t had time to get them in the right order.’ A couple of bits of housekeeping. Some misdirection nonsense about flat-pack parts missing the right sort of bolt. And so on.

Now the crisp logic of Normal Life says that such an email ought to be a failure. Why would people want to pick through a mess when they could have a nice straightforward A to Z type read like everything else in the world?

On the other hand: we’re creatives, right? If we adhered closely to the crisp logic of Normal Life, we wouldn’t be writing books or reading these emails in the first place. There’s something about the subversive which appeals to us. Last week’s email generated more than one reply suggesting that I write a whole novel in a kind of flat-pack form. (My reply? Yep, honestly, I’d love to.)

But flat-pack novels? There aren’t so many of those, are there? I think I’ve read only two genuinely flat-pack novels – The Unfortunates by BS Johnson, and Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. The first of those is literally a book in a box. There are 27 chapters in total, each one separately bound. One of the chapters is marked as being the first, another one is marked as the last. Apart from those two, you can read the chapters in any order you fancy. The thing is a meditation on friendship, loss, football and (I guess) the randomly associative nature of the human brain.

The second book is presented dictionary-style with three mini-encyclopaedias (one Jewish, one Christian, one Islamic) presenting information on a people called the Khazars over various different time periods.

Neither book has a plot. I personally didn’t finish either book, nor was I especially engaged by either.

I don’t think the BS Johnson book ever sold much. The Khazars book was certainly fashionable but I seriously doubt that most people actually read it.

Oh yes: and if your covering letter to a literary agent tells them that your work is experimental, it has already moved 85% of the way to the dustbin. First bit of actionable advice for this email: please don’t tell an agent that your novel is experimental, even if it is.

Maybe experiments are only for emails to creatives. Maybe for everything else we just need to stick to existing templates.

And look – second piece of actionable advice – mostly the answer to that is just a YES. Stick to the formula. The formula for writing a good book already offers tons of flexibility. It’s not like writing a good book is easy. The recipe is not exactly easy to follow.

Especially if you’re not yet published, I’d urge you to get a regular novel right and published, before you start to mess around with the template.

But …

If you do want to rough fiction up, then please do. Examples:

• Twilight. Teen girl meets handsome boy? Yawn. Teen girl meets handsome vampire? An utterly different proposition. A tedious me-too book has just become something you want to read. (Or did, before vampires were everywhere.)
• Fingersmith. The genteel world of Victorian-era historical fiction is ripped apart by this brilliant book with its central lesbian love story and its mad, convoluted crime plot. Utterly modern in some ways, the book also seemed more true to Victorian England than most actually Victorian books.
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. An Agatha Christie country-house style murder? Boring. Or rather: if you wanted that, why wouldn’t you read Agatha Christie and her contemporaries? But if you take the exact same concept and have one person trotting through seven different incarnations on the exact same day, you have a real beauty of a crime puzzle: like a Sudoku puzzle played in three dimensions
• Maynard and Jennica. A brilliant novel – a debut and also (it looks like) Delson’s last novel. The book tells a boy-meets-girl story (yawn) but does so via dozens and dozens of different voices. Friends and relations and casual acquaintances of the pair offer their insights on different bits of the narrative as it progresses. It’s a technically virtuoso performance; I’ve still never read anything quite like it

These books didn’t play by the rules. Whatever people thought Victorian historical fiction was all about, Fingersmith did something different. As a matter of fact, the natural market for Fingersmith was quite likely not with people who mostly liked historical fiction. If you generally like corsets and “Good heavens, Mrs Fortescue” type fiction, then Sarah Waters’ take on all that was likely to make you drop your teaspoon in horror.

But – here’s the kicker – all these books totally, 100%, completely play by the rules that matter.

You read them from beginning to end. Although authors may mess around with timelines, the reading experience is one of continuous, structured narrative. There are Big Story Questions that get asked and answered. The outcome of the whole story remains in flux at all points.

In short: the only experiments you can get away with are experiments that nevertheless pay close and careful homage to the basic template of successful story. If you live within that template, then experimentation is nothing but a joy and a delight.

And last week’s email?

Well, honestly, it looked like a random assembly, but it was more thoughtfully designed than that. Yes, it had a playfully digressive quality – with you, the reader, very much in on the game – but it was also carefully structured. Very roughly that email ran like this:

• Nanowrimo is all about writing a 50,000 word novel
• But novels aren’t 50,000 words long and writing that much text at speed is only going to produce rubbish
• Then again, a thuggish “just do it” approach is not a bad way to smash bad writing habits and reinforce good ones
• So maybe Nanowrimo has a point, so long as you understand what it can and can’t achieve.

If the email had genuinely just been a random spillage of facts and thoughts, I think you’d have rejected it. It’s the sense of purpose threaded through the random spillage that kept you (I hope) thinking that you’d get something by reading on. And it was the random spillage that (I hope) kept you entertained en route.

So experiment, yes please.

But stick to the template.