Hi everyone, I think my blog break is coming to an end soon.

I’ve booked my plane ticket - I fly to the US on the 5th of August. I’m going to be living in the town of Collingswood, as my future flatmates couldn’t find something good in a good area of Philadelphia. Living in Collingswood means cheap rent, pretty parks and a ten minute train ride into campus, so I’m very happy.

I’ve been living in the city of Southampton this last month, reading a lot on Shakespeare. More news soon.

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Best wishes to you all

Daniel

I’ve posted two short pieces on good places to eat in London, and good walking routes around Hampstead.

Daniel

Hi guys, I’m having a really lovely time here in England. I’m reading Keats on Hampstead Heath, listening to lectures by Anthony de Mello, eating a vast amount of meat at Rodizio Rico and disturbing my brain with all kinds of thoughts about writing and poetry. Again and again, I find myself feeling incredibly grateful to my parents - it’s been really nice to live with them again.

HOWEVER, as you’ve probably already noticed, my blogging urge is weak. Not sure why that is, but I’m going to take a break. Lets say for two to three weeks, shall we? It’s not fun pushing out blog posts when the urge is not there. Send me an email if you like, in the mean time:
daniel wal lace @g mail .com (take out all the spaces)

Best wishes to you all, and thanks for staying in touch all this time.

Daniel

I’ve just renewed my flickr pro account, and so all my old photographs are once again available. It’s cool - there are dozens from China, India and Taiwan.

Lovely students from Sichuan:

Lightning strikes Hong Kong:

Acting on Chinese TV:

Purim party:

And breakfast:

I’m staying in Nice, the south of France, with my parents. It’s a really tough time.

My problems include:

Breakfast of croissants filled with nutella
Afternoon espresso in open air cafes
A sea breeze
Shapely French women heading this way and that
Savoury snacks in shop windows
Little bottles of beer in the fridge
Reading Tolstoy on the balcony, his hands around my neck
Making notes in a moleskine, a present from my friend Kay

I’m here until Sunday.

I bought a few how-to-write guides, as part of the process of planning my book’s second draft. Doing this made me half-embarrassed, as usual. Firstly, it’s like breaking cover, allowing the person behind the counter to see my unguarded aspirations / pretensions. Secondly, the genre is set up on the understanding that you have a problem, and the authors of the guides have the answers. Even Dorethea Brande’s “Becoming A Writer”, which promises to focus not on technique but on freeing up the would-be writer’s genius, becomes before long a list of imperatives. “Put down this book, go to the window, and count the birds outside…”

It’s a little frustrating if one is already lounging comfortably on the sofa.

The best I’ve read so far is John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” (one of the old classics of the genre). Gardner clearly knows his writing and his teaching, and he gives an accurate picture (from my experience) of what it’s like to write fiction. There’s a nice balance of severity and encouragement, and he describes how the writer creates, “a vivid and continuous dream” (principally through the sustained use of sensory details). As I suggested above, Dorethea Brande’s book (also one of the classics) has been a disappointment, as was Sol Stein’s book on novels.

My advice to other writers is that literary critics often write far better summaries than the how-to-write writers. My lovely friend Fiona sent me James Wood’s “How Fiction Works” for my birthday, and this gives an excellent account of modern narrative techniques, as invented by Flaubert. Wood’s breadth of knowledge is remarkable, and because he doesn’t need to water literature down, because he is not explaining “how to get your novel published in 30 days”, his account of what Tolstoy and friends do is complex, convincing and morally robust.

Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism” helped destroy some of my semi-conscious limits on what my writing should be. Perhaps such limits seem ridiculous, however, once one begins struggling to “write well”, the effort involves so much will power and skull-bending thought that it’s hard not to create limits, to calcify the mind into a set of rights and wrongs. “Writing well” is undefinable, and so, once inside the furnace of actually trying to do it, there’s a tendency to choose some definable forms of “good”. Then, once these conceptions of “good writing” are chosen, it’s easy to start defending them (or use them to criticise one’s self) like a cheap politician. In his opus, Frye attempted to classify every form of literature, judging none of them - setting every book written on a vast wheel of inter-relation, hinting that literature is larger than its books, that it represents something beyond the page. Harold Bloom’s books are also very good for inspiration and invigoration, if you can handle the occasional shot of pure terror (Bloom makes every classic writer sound like a demi-god beyond normal human understanding).

Reductionism has its dangers. When a how-to-write guide says that Kafka used “conflict” to organise “The Metamorphosis”, or that Flaubert used the premise “adultery always leads to suicide”, I don’t feel that these statements are untrue, just very limited, and very limiting. What is however scandalous is how rarely a “how to write” guide backs up its advice with reference to a great writer’s work habits. For example, in David Braine’s generally excellent book on novels, he comments that novelists should not indulge in any other form of writing - they should store it all up. Reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, one discovers that she did close to the opposite of this.

And do we know of any great writer that trained him or herself to write via the kind of short exercises writing courses now specialise in?

Actually, thinking about it now, that was probably what I was doing back in China, in 2005 - writing little pieces every day, trying out different styles. Hmm. It’s probably for the best that those posts are offline now.

PS The only odd thing about James Wood is that he likes to indulge in a bit prose-making himself: in “How Fiction Works” and in other essays of his that I’ve read, he invents example sentences of his own, offers fresh lines for Macbeth, and gives parodies of Graham Greene and Zadie Smith. Unfortunately, his inventions aren’t that good (James, if you’re reading this, sorry - I think you’re a fantastic critic). It’s like watching a boxing reporter climb over the ropes to show the fighters a good right hook. In comparison, Gardner also provides his own example sentences in “The Art Of Fiction”, and with Gardner, you quickly see that he’s been boxing all his life. His sentence construction is staggering, and his seemingly casually thrown-in story ideas beg to be stolen.

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Daniel

I finished the first draft of my novel today. It arrived ahead of schedule: for the last few days, as the final page has been getting closer, something in me as been demanding more words. I’ve felt a bit battered, actually. Morning sessions have often been followed by an unexpected afternoon session. I finished today at three forty five, and the word count is about 79,000 words.

I think: some parts of the book are already very good. I think after a re-write, it will be readable. I’m going to take a rest, read a series of “how to write” advice books, scour a few more novels, and get planning for draft two.

Very happy; a little weary.

Daniel

Promised, and delivered after long delay: the story of the mouse and the toaster.

Well, we had a mouse in the house. I blame the arrival of a cat next door, perhaps a good example of a negative externality: the road’s mice migrating as each house gained a cat. Our mouse was a tricky, wry fellow, waiting until dusk to wander around the ground floor, popping his head round corners, getting a little annoyed if I was sitting at the computer late, waiting a minute, looking round again, “Oh, you’re still here, aren’t you getting sleepy, human?”

Attempts to murder him failed; cheese-filled traps were left untouched. Then, very late one night, I was downstairs, hungry, jet-lagged from America, in search of toast. I slung two slices in the toaster and turned it on. I sat down at the kitchen table, and realised that the toaster was rustling, shaking. It’s quite a large, silvery toaster, with four slots.

I assumed some of the bread’s plastic bag had got caught in the toaster’s grids, and was melting. I peered into the toaster, and something was moving inside it, running back and forth. It was of course, the mouse.

At first, I thought - die, rodent, die! Then I thought - torturing a mouse to death by fire is surely cruel and abhorrent. So I unplugged the toaster.

The mouse was silent. I figured I would carry the toaster out of the house, and leave it outside, so the mouse would be ejected and forced to move to a different address, but then I had a vision of the mouse running out of the toaster and up my arms. Although I’ve travelled through fairly dangerous parts of the world, I’m still an enormous physical coward.

So I took a kitchen knife in one hand, and a wooden spoon in the other, and started rattling on the toaster, ready to get the mouse when it emerged. But there was silence, and I guessed that the mouse had long sinced escaped.

Obviously, in the morning, my mother was not happy with the story, nor was she happy that I’d had a chance to kill the mouse and had let it live (mercy being a virtue confined to the male half of the human species). We put the toaster away, unsure how we could clean it.

About a week passed. My dad gave the toaster a scrub, and we put it back into active service. I made myself a waffle early one morning, smelt a wave of an odd odour, and guessed it was mouse piss somewhere in the kitchen. I ate my waffle.

Later I came downstairs again and discovered that my brother had discovered the truth. The toaster was crawling with maggots. Little white bobbing things - they were spilling out of the toaster’s crumb-catching tray and on to the kitchen surface.

The toaster was cleaned, the maggots killed, and the toaster was put on the desk with the house computer, awaiting its return to John Lewis. Then, later, as I was writing an email, I looked down at the desk, and saw another maggot making its way out of the toaster, bobbing across the wood of the desk. I picked it up and swallowed it down - sorry, just joking - I scooped it up with a tissue and threw it in the bin. When I sat down again, another maggot was on the move.

My dad, my brother and I took the toaster out to the back patio, and he unscrewed it from the bottom. Lodged in one of the side sections, next to a mass of wiring, was the mouse. It had clearly tried to escape the killing heat that night, only to be electrocuted. My dad, not a physical coward like me, extracted the mouse with metal prongs, and its corpse had a big hole in its side, where the maggots continued to crawl out from. Lovely.

Strangely, no one gave me sufficient praise for killing the mouse in the first place.

NB I should point out that my mother keeps the family’s house very clean and tidy, as well as running two or three businesses of her own, and this story reflects nothing bad on her (she sometimes reads this blog). Love you mum.

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Daniel

This is a post for my friend Ken, who bought me the software program “Bento” for my birthday. It’s a simple organiser/database, which, being for the Mac, is always good-looking. I’ve set up a few simple diaries / databases on it, and it’s working well.

This is where I track my writing and reading day by day:

This is my reading list:

And this is the only complex thing I use it for:

It’s cool, though. While I’m reading a book, I can pull up my reading list, and enter the books that the current book mentions, add them to the reading list, and then they’ll be entered for real in the other file list. Groovy, huh?

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Daniel

I’ve been able to spend time with my father, this time here in England. He works shifts, in television, and so, on the days he’s off, we’ve gone to lunch together in nearby pubs and, one evening, watched Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2″ in Camden’s Roundhouse Theatre.

My dad was hard to appreciate when I was young. He was always working, not very good at talking, at sharing what he thought. He seemed jovial as soon as he finished work, in ways that upset my mother, who had spent all day looking after my brother and me. Now, however, I rather admire him. He certainly loves to work, and, while I once saw that as something unhealthy, now it seems more akin to the view of life that I’ve discovered (of constant reading and writing). Why not be a little obsessed, if you enjoy it? And he has a huge range of interests - playing golf, learning about Islam, going to the theatre, gardening, reading whatever book I pass him…

I came back home this time round, and looked at his book collection, sitting dusty on shelves in the spare room. I was amazed - he had the classics, the George Eliots, the lesser knowns, like Ford Maddox Ford, and even the books that no one reads anymore, like Carlyle’s Sator Resartus. “I brought them with me when I drove down from Scotland”, he said. I wondered then if this was an emblem of middle class, or upper-middle class living - to realise that your parents have done some (much) of the work for you. That something was being prepared for you before you were born. Well, I don’t know - I hope everyone is able to feel that way about their parents.

He and I, however, don’t see eye to eye on newspapers, which is a big issue in our house, as over the weekend, a mountain of Sunday supplements arrives at the front door. I dislike much of what I read in the opinion and literature sections - he, a life long journalist, defends his trade.

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Daniel