Writing for teens..?

There’s a big difference between writing Teen fiction, and writing for teens.

I’m only saying this as a preamble to what comes next, which is not meant to be provocative; simply that in the simple distinction above lies, for me, the absolute crux of good writing and bad writing.

Yes, I write teen fiction. But I do not write for teens. I write books that get published and are marketed at teens, but I do not write the books for them, or aimed at them, or with them in mind.

In every ‘dinner party’ situation I find myself in, when people find out what I do and want to know a bit more, I’m asked questions that go something like this; “But how do you get into the head of a modern teenager?” or “Who are your books aimed at?” And these are fair questions, but having been asked them enough times, and stumbling out some answers I didn’t really believe myself, I came to the realisation that I do not attempt to get inside the head of a modern teenager, nor do I aim my books at anyone. Anyone at all.

What I’m going to say next might sound arrogant, but I promise it isn’t: I don’t write for anyone else, I write for me. Why isn’t that arrogant? Because I believe that precisely the reverse is true – the arrogant thing would be for me, a 44 year old to assume that I know what a modern British 14 year old boy wants to read, or how an Australian 12 year girl thinks, or a German teen or a Brazilian or… You get the point. How could I possibly know those things? And this is really part of a much broader point – whenever anyone writes anything at all, teen, adult, horror, romance, sci-fi, they should be writing it for themselves, because to assume that any of us know what is desired in another’s head is an act of extreme arrogance.

So I write for me, and if there’s something youthful about my writing, it’s because, I believe, that those of use who write for children or teens are still deeply in touch with that part of their lives, in some part of their brain at least, and are seeking to understand it. At the most, then, I concede I might be writing for a part of me, one that is still thinking as I thought aged 16 or so.

Now, as it happens, it seems that my books work well for teens, or so I’ve been told, and I’m also often told that I don’t seem to patronise, or talk down to teens, and if that’s true, then you can guess why I believe that is – because to try and guess the mind of anyone else, adult or teen, is to patronise them.

That being said, I am realistic enough to know that what I’ve put in a first draft might need to be edited a bit, adjusted, changed – but I promise you that in all the edits I’ve ever made to a book, none of them, not one, was because I was thinking of my readers as young people, not adults – every change I’ve ever made in a redraft is towards one goal only – to make it a better book, no matter who reads it.

You should write the book you want to write, and do it as well as you can, with as much truth and passion and energy as you can. And when you’ve done that, you can then hope that something in it will be something that someone else might want to read, but at least you’ve been true to one person – yourself. And with that start, you might just have something.

Closed graves...

Sorry not to have tweeted much (i.e. at all) on the second day of Open Graves, Open Minds, the Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium held at Keat's House - it was a busy day, which kicked off with a tour of the house and then moved on to the sessions proper, starting with a double act from your humble blogger and my friend Kevin Jackson.

I did a 45 minute slot on the folklore of the vampire, and how it differs from the vampire we have come to know from fiction and films. In this I was aided by my friend Thomas over at That Elusive Line, who drew me the handsome vampire you see here.

Then Kevin spoke about various vampirical things, and showed his 10 minute vampire film, Pavane for a Vampire Queen. Take a look if you haven't seen it - it's beautiful :-) And for the eagle-eyed features a cameo by, well, me.

The whole day was a great success, I thought, but the highlight for me was the closing talk, by Sir Christopher Frayling, a man whose books and TV programmes I have admired since I was young. He spoke about pictorial representations of the Gothic in art and film, and it was flawless and fascinating. It was based in part on material first considered in his show Gothic Nightmares from 2006 at Tate Britain, still available in the show catalogue. It was a total fan-boy moment for me, as we traded folkloric aspects of the undead.

Then came vampire themed canapés; black pudding on coffin shaped blinis, stakes through steak etc, and we all went home very happy, and much more enlightened about vampires in general. I'd like to thank Dr Sam George of the University of Hertfordshire for inviting me, and for organising the weekend.

My first published writing...

Here for your delectation I am going to put up a small piece of writing - the first thing I ever had published, as a teenager, which I recently re-discovered when at my mother's house.

Back in the late Dark Ages (1985, I think) I entered a 500 word maximum horror story competition run by the fanzine of my favourite band at the time; Siouxsie and the Banshees. I will embarrass myself by telling you that I won, however, having just re-read the second place entry, I suspect these may have been the only submissions...

Nevertheless, I guess at the back of my mind, it may have planted the seed that it was actually possible to get your writing published, though at the time I was more pleased with winning a tour jacket.

The one thing is does show however, is that I've always been a gruesome little oik, and I present it here just as I wrote it, with a few spelling mistakes corrected, because it's never too late to get your homework right.

The other thing it shows is that I was always destined to be spare with my writing - the limit was 500 words and I coasted in at 325. Such parsimony!

It's called Just a Joke, and it goes like this:


JUST A JOKE

The coffin of nurse Amy West had been exhumed, and now the crude box lay before me. As head surgeon of the city morgue it was my duty to perform an autopsy; demanded by the Police; only now after her burial. She had apparently died of fright. I opened it; my assistant choked as he gazed in; ‘oh Lord.’ My eyes fell to the lid’s interior. The cheap wood was scratched as if by wild animal’s claws, and was stained dull red in places. Then my view sank to the girl, to her fingers; a bloody mess, to her ripped nails, to the huge splinters piercing the once sensitive flesh, exposing bone, to her bloodied dress, and finally to her dry eyes, staring from a face frozen in fear… ‘She wasn’t dead.’

So what had happened..?

As a student nurse she had initially been squeamish, like all the other students, except one girl who never spoke to the other nurses, except to make cynical remarks about their lack of guts. Naturally the other girls hated her, but when they observed an amputation for the first time, they saw her smiling, and they decided to get even for her callousness. Amy was supposed to take the amputated arm to be incinerated, but this is not what she did. That night the nurse took the arm, daubed it with green fluorescent paint and hung it in the strange girl’s room, so that it reached towards the door. They waited next door in Amy’s room for their victim to come off nightshift. Eventually footsteps stopped at her door and went in, then, nothing… Two minutes of silence, then Amy nervously went next door. Seconds later a chilling shriek caused the others to scramble out after Amy, just in time to catch her she turned from the open door and fell, her face writing with confusion; and why…? Behind her, on the bed, the girl crouched, eating the arm…

Open Graves...

Well, next Friday and Saturday I'll be attending and speaking at OPEN GRAVES, OPEN MINDS; the Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium being held at Keat's House, London. I'm delighted to be going along and honoured to be speaking in the company of some wonderful academics and other writers including Sir Christopher Frayling and my good friend Dr Kevin Jackson.

The conference literature says "Delegates will investigate the most famous vampire narrative of all, Dracula, on the centenary of Bram Stoker's death and interrogate its relationship to new developments in interdisciplinary research, drawing on nineteenth-century vampire archetypes. Dracula, of course, is the seminal vampire novel (though it has its antecedents); a gripping narrative that dramatises anxieties over sexuality, new technologies, foreignness, and modernity. Invited speakers will debate the evolution of Dracula from novel to theatre, film to comic book."

At the time of his death, Stoker was better known as a minor personality in Victorian London, as the theatre manager of Sir Henry Irving, who'd been Britain's greatest actor. His obituary did mention that he'd written a certain book called Dracula, but actually his death was overshadowed by the fact that that large boat had sunk in the Atlantic five days before, and the papers were full of Titanic news.

So at the conference we'll be paying due deference to his Stokerness, leaving no (grave) stone unturned, or indeed pun to rest in peace, as we investigate various aspects of the great man.

My talk is going to focus on how the folkloric vampire differs so markedly from the one we've come to know, largely though not exclusively as a result of Stoker's book, and is entitled The Elusive Vampire. It's derived from a chapter I've written for the forthcoming book; Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, edited by Dr Sam George.

All in all it should be good fun, and I'll be tweeting from the event next weekend.

Some early writing...

Herewith the first piece of writing of mine that I still have. Unearthed at Easter. And in case you're wondering, I was five :-)

"Guy Fawkes was a man and he wanted to blow up the houses of parliament and one of Guy Fawkes’ friends had a brother. And he was going be in a meet and the King sent out guards and the guards caught Guy Fawkes. And they got his powder."

No wonder my books are on the brief side...

Short stories

Oops! It's the middle of March and it's my first blog of the year. I have to say that I have some sympathy with the views of my good friend Mr Taylor  over at THAT ELUSIVE LINE on the subject of blogging. Everything I want to write does indeed seem either to be bragging or boring. So the end result is that I don't, and yet as Thomas rightly points out, we are supposed to be doing this digital thing. 

In the end, I think it's best to write only when you want to (that goes for all types of writing), and I wanted to say a few things about short stories, so, ahem....

I've recently written a short story for a project in association with The Guardian and Sony called futurescapes: (Life in 2025 if you want to read it) and as a result of that was asked to be a judge for a short story competition. There were some great entries, but it made me think about the art of short fiction.

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to edit an anthology of short stories for Walker Books. I approached all sorts of friends and acquaintances in the writing world, and was surprised to discover that at least half of the authors I spoke to don't like short stories, or at least don't like writing them. I won't name names of course, but a few people told me they just hated them, didn't understand them, or didn't know how to write them, which was refreshingly honest. I've always liked short stories, because it's a chance to let your hair down a bit, do something different from what you usually do, experiment, take risks, but without the investment required to write a whole book. And some ideas just lend themselves better to short fiction.

I suppose the truth of the matter is that writing, of whatever sort, has to have a point. I don't mean a message per se, but there has to be a reason to do it; because it's beautiful, conveys emotion, makes you think etc etc etc. And the challenge in short fiction is how to do that in say, 4,000 words. It's a tricky art form therefore, and I see why some writers don't like it. But that's also why they can be so satisfying, to do something that 'has a point' in so few words is a great feeling. When you get it right...

The Dead Days

Many years ago (as a nice story should start), I wrote a book called The Book of Dead Days. I wrote it from a feeling, a feeling that I'd had since I was a child, about why it feels so weird between Christmas and New Year.

When you're a kid, there's all that time over the Christmas holidays, and after the excitement of the big day, there's that strange time until New Year's Eve, when not much goes on. When I grew up, and worked in publishing (and therefore had even more time off ;-) ) that feeling just got stronger.

It always felt to me like a time outside of time, and I started to think how it might be a book. The Book of Dead Days, a couple and a half hundred pages of running around in snow-covered graveyards, is the result, my take on the Faust legend.

In writing it, and researching ideas around it, I was pleased when to discover that I wasn't the first person to think these days were different from the others, at least in principle. The Aztecs and the Egyptians both used calendars of 12 months of 30 days, and then added in 5 inter-calendrical days to make up the rest of the year. While these days don't of course relate to the notion of Christmas itself, they did feel that these days were something out of time, in fact, days of ill omen. And that is a notion found in the Christian canon, since the 28th is Childermass, known as the unluckiest day of the year. Something to do with the slaughter of the innocents...

I still love the days between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, and with that time approaching again, it's time to find something good to read, something warming to drink and to be with the people you love.

Yuletide Greetings to one and all. I have to say that as the heathen in me likes to remember that midwinter festivals go way, way back.