You need to watch out for clichés. Most people wouldn’t know a cliché if it bit them on the ass! And don’t use adverbs either, because some bad writers have used them, so that’s that for adverbs. I remember reading a bad book and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t good. I didn’t like it. As my Uncle Billy Bob used to say, “are you writing a book or taking a shit?” That’s right. I said “taking a shit”, and not “secreting a brown article”. I’m not trying to offend anyone. I’m just being true to my poor middle class roots. I’m just a normal guy, like you, who thinks that normal guys like to read books about normal guys that are written by normal guys. And if those hoity-toity critics don’t like it, they can bite my ass!

Sometimes I look at people like Joyce and Kafka and I think, “why didn’t you write more books guys?” What were they doing? Taking a shit? Yeah, that’s right, I said “taking a shit”, and not “imagining cloud biscuits out of my flesh ravine”. I’m not trying to offend anyone. It’s just that to a poor middle class guy like me, I can’t see what they were doing all that time. I edit my work twice and then I’m done. I’m a normal guy writing normal books for normal guys. And I bet you are too. I think we’re gonna be pals, you and me. I think we’re gonna be pals.

INTERVIEWER

It seems Allen Ginsberg is the diametrical opposite of you.

DICKEY

I certainly hope so. I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that. They damn themselves to a life of inconsequentiality when they could have been doing something more useful. They could have been garbage collectors, or grocery-store managers. Poetry is, as Yeats has said, “a high and lonely profession.” It is very easy, too easy, to pick up on the latest thing in the newspapers and write a poem. That’s all Ginsberg does. He just doesn’t have any talent. I’ll do a Ginsbergian poem or a Robert Bly poem for you right now.

I don’t agree with Dickey, entirely, but I do think he makes a valid point. Reaction is not writing and, by and large opinion and literature do not mix well. And while poetry can be the most obvious sinner, fiction does it to. A call-to-arms poem is embarrassing, but a preach novel is unbearable. Think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, undoubtedly one of the most politically important novels ever written, but also unquestionably awful as an actual book.

As for Ginsberg… well, I do like some of his stuff, but I’d rather read Stevie Smith. Wouldn’t you?

And his influence…

Changing the subject slightly, what do you think about that quote? Is Dickey wrong or right? Should poets learn different forms? Should prose writers practice different styles? Or can we do whatever we like now? Is form dead?

Oh let’s have a discussion about literature. Let us do.

While not as elusive as things so-good-they-are-bad (Finnegan’s Wake, Mrs Dalloway, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River) the genuine so-bad-it-is-good film/book/album etc is still a rare beast. The first twenty-or-so minutes of Francis Ford Copolla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula are so wonderfully appalling that you watch them with a feeling approaching nirvana, but pretty soon the film just becomes boring and overlong. All those mega-super-shark vs Octo-lion films are trying to be so-bad-they-are-good, and so they end up being just plain bad. The reverse is true too. For example, R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet is not so-bad-it-is-good, it is good. It is messed up, and head-scratchingly bizarre, yes, but intentionally so. I Believe I Can Fly is possibly so bad it is good, but Trapped in the Closet is just good.

Usually, as in the case of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the so-bad-it’s-good work is created by someone who is capable of greatness. It is no fun just to watch somebody fail. Anybody can fail. Ideally you will be almost continually thinking “oh wow! Did they mean that?” as you watch/read/listen. When a genuinely talented person pushes themselves the results can often be catastrophic, but rarely boring. (Though sometimes they are – The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus springs immediately to mind.)

I have started Thackara’s The Book of Kings, a very serious novel about the second-world war. There are no jokes. I have laughed out loud four times. The sentences are magnificently bad. So much so that you start to wonder whether it is not Thackara, but the concept of the sentence itself which is in the wrong. Surely if the concept of the sentence was acceptable, then Thackara could, by the law of averages, produce one that didn’t scratch your eyes on its journey to your mind.

The first line of the novel is:

“On a clear June morning late in the 1960′s, a convertible blue two-seater started quickly southeast from Calais down files of poplars, long rising and falling over the great gray-green and yellow squared carpets of farmland.”

The third line of the novel is:

“The thin-legged American at the wheel, who was called Jim, raised his voice.”

Or how about this:

“”Hitler’s war was the big one.” Jim murmured the name that had killed his father.”

Or this:

“”Yes” Albert laughed bitterly.”

Thackara is either a genius or a madman, or both, or neither. I’ll keep reading and find out.

No. Not like that. Jeeezus! What is it with you people?

I like ducks. They are a bit bobby-on-the-water and that. And geese too. Bit bigger but still quite bobby. Not so much swans. They are alright, but not very colourful, and they bob less, being considerably bigger. Waders. Waders are pretty cool. They do that dippy thing with their heads. Gulls-

Anyway… You get the point… Birds…

I’m not really a bird watcher. I don’t really go looking for birds that often. I’m certainly not a ‘birder’; partly because I have no interest in seeing rare birds, but mostly because THE WORD BIRD IS A NOUN AND NOT A VERB. I am just a guy, a guy who likes birds, and likes to have a basic knowledge of what the different ones are called.

The world is a zoo, full of infinite variety. Whether you believe that the staggering number of animal species on earth arrived here via evolution or by God’s hand, you cannot escape the fact that whichever process it was, it worked. Imagine if people spent less time arguing about the how, and more time just watching all the different sorts of ducks.

No. More. War.

There. I said it. No more war. You cannot watch ducks and go to war. They are far too calming. What with them being dead bobby-on-the-water and that.

What have I learned from the MA so far? A lot about structure. A lot about narrative technique. A lot about my own writing.

Oh, and I have a first chapter of a novel. Done. And the second chapter is going to have a cat in it.

First, 3hundredand65. 365 storytellers take on 366 days in 2012. Each morning a different writer adds one tweets worth of prose, then during the day, Dave Kirkwood adds the illustration to accompany the text. This is already looking incredible. The drawings are not only really good in their own right, but also provide a fascinating experiment in collaboration. I love a good collaboration me. The drawings will become the cement between the texty bricks, keeping order and determining the shape of the story. (does cement determine shape or am I mixing metaphors? and it’s mortar isn’t it, not cement? no wonder my homemade swimming pool fell over)

Go and check it out (3hundredand65, not my homemade swiming pool). Sign up to add a days worth of writing. And keep an eye on those drawings because they are being auctioned for the Teenage Cancer Trust. All the details are on the site.

Second, is Top Ten, a brand new website where you can share you own personal top tens. This is the brain child of Dan Carpenter, a man who already has a large family of healthy, brilliant brain children. Write him a Top Ten, or go and read my Top Ten Animals that have caused me to Experience Fear, Shame and/or Discomfort, or both. Yeah. Do both. Great stuff. Ta.

I love 2012.

Now, nothing gets my word juices flowing more than the meetings of literature and genre. I am excited, and you should be too.

Right, details…

Cutaway magazine submissions page

Cutaway on twitter is @cutawaymagazine

Cutaway on Facebook is this

Follow, like, tweet, ask, write, create, go, go, go!

But, that wasn’t enough for me. Oh no! The excitement does not stop there. I have also added a new thing on the side of the blog on which I will count the books I have read this year.

One of my half-resolutions this year is to finish every book if I start reading. This means I will, hopefully, become a more discerning and careful reader, and a more patient and respectful human being. It will also means I will think really, really hard before starting any books by Roberto Bolaño in the next twelve months.

I have a big year of reading planned. At the top of my ‘to read’ pile are books by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Evie Wyld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paul Metcalf, Peter Wild, and Socrates Adams. (the latter being on my virtual ‘to read’ list as it is still the responsibility of Amazon at the moment. I have already read the sublime Slouching towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (now that, ladies and gentlemen, is prose). I’m determined to work my way through A Dance to the Music of Time. I’m going to get round to finishing Infinite Jest. I’m going to read lots of more popular stuff for school, which means I’ll finally force myself through Cloud Atlas and get to re-read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (which I last read in a rather unglamorous hotel room in Vienna. Twin beds do not a romantic getaway make.)

My reading tip for 2012 though is not a book but a website. Or at least part of a website. The Paris Review have made all their interviews with writers available to read online, for like free and that. If you are a reader they are interesting, but they are essential if you are a writer, or if you are becoming a writer. (That sounds so much nicer than ‘trying to be a writer’ doesn’t it? I might use that again.) They are essential because they are not only about what but also how writers write. They are worth a thousand how-to-write guides. There are over three hundred interviews, and they are with the big hitters of literature.

Anyway this is the link. Enjoy.