Writing as Jazz

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My Grandfather was 99 last month. He is a lovely man, sharp and spritely enough to be interested in my fledgling writing career and communicates regularly with me by email. His social life is better than mine and he has a bevy of ladies who take him to lunch groups and church services.

He retired as a manager in a factory and was delighted to escape from the tribulations of seventies industrial relations. He has had a full retirement that has lasted nearly forty years and with his youth his well past there is a twinkle in his eye that tells of a life well lived. In his youth he was a saxophonist in a local Jazz band and there is a vinyl record of his playing. He still listens and has passed on his love of Jazz to his two sons my father and my Uncle Brian.

Uncle Brian lives in Canada now but was over for the birthday meal and was complimenting me on my book “Splinter”. He had enjoyed the story although he did have a bit of a reservation that the boss of my gangster family was also called Brian.

I was telling Uncle Brian that if I was serious about being a novelist then I should probably invest my time in a Creative Writing course, which I keep considering and putting to one side as the muse takes me. I told him that life gets in the way and besides by the time I do the degree I could have written and self published three or four novels. Brian, who is a Doctor and eminent specialist in his field, compared the idea of being taught creative writing to being the same as his disappointment at some of the new generation of musicians who are coming out of Universities with a degree in Jazz music he sees in Toronto. His point was that technically they were very good but they lacked the spontaneity needed to make them excel.  

You can’t teach Jazz improvisation it has to come from the heart in the same way you can teach grammar and form but you can’t teach how to put heart into your story telling. Following my put down from the poisoned pen of the Creative Writing graduate lady this struck a chord.

Technically my writing needs extra precision but putting the words on the page and developing the story my brain comes alive. I employ an editor to help me with the finished story but the story and characters are mine alone and they definitely come from my heart.    

 

As a writer I imagine my pre-war granddad played in smoke filled drinking dens surrounded by be-suited gangsters and their molls, a la Bugsy Malone. Probably not, but he has a recording of his music and I have written a book so it is grounding to know that my creative urge is inherited from somewhere close to home.

 

Grandad is going to Toronto again this Summer and Toronto is a great place for Jazz. Last time I was there Brian took me to a buzzing basement Jazz club. I enjoyed the atmosphere and setting if not fully appreciating the Modern Jazz. It was all a bit "plinky plink, clash, plink" for me, but then I was kicked out of the trials for the cadet band for having no sense of rhythm.  I remember watching the audience and making up stories it was a great place for inspiration.

As a Jazz musician plinky plinks around with the rhythm and makes up the tune as he goes along, so a writer develops a story. The difference is that a live performance is over in minutes the music haunts the memory and taps the toe, a novel takes months to write and further months to fine tune and hone to a publishable standard. The words in the story are there to be critiqued, shot-at and derided, the notes of the Jazz musician are created free form and released into the world as soon as they are played for the audience to remember and relish.

A Jazz musician closes his eyes lost in the flow of his music. Can that be taught? They say you should write for your own enjoyment and the readers will pick up on the positive vibes. Can that be taught?

There is much animated debate on how to write, how to market and the dreary argument of whether you are a proper writer if you do not have the “gatekeeper validation” of an agent or publisher or creative writing lecturer. Who cares?

In the same way a Jazz musician blows their trumpet is it not better to just sit down, write and enjoy the creative process.  

Looking at the long life of my granddad who lived through two world wars and seen so much and he still enjoys his Jazz. I hope I am still enjoying life at 99 and when I look back I don’t think I will regret not doing a Creative Writing course. Do you?

Oxbow Lakes, a publishing analogy

Oxbow lakes – A publishing analogy.

Last week on holiday in Scotland I watched salmon jumping up rapids on the beautiful and fast flowing river Dee. My wife and I had rented a cottage and visited the area to see old friends. The friend standing next to me on the riverside is a Doctor of Geology and works in the oil industry and I am vicariously proud of his achievements. I listened in admiration as he pointed out the different rock types to his young sons.  While my friend went on to great academic heights, for reasons of teenage rebellion and inattention as much as inability I failed my Geography exams.

The experience of standing by the river and walking the wild country glens rekindled my dormant memories of school geography lessons. We were close to the River Esk and I recalled the term “Eskers” with affection. As we walked along glaciated landscapes scoured into U's by the ice we stepped across a “Moraine” on the map and I recognised “Truncated Spurs” and “Hanging Valleys”.

It is funny what comes back to you from school. As we walked on another forgotten lesson came into my mind about “Oxbow Lakes”. Later recovering from our exertions in an old Aberdeen pub over a ‘round the regions’ whisky tasting platter I developed my concept about meandering rivers and their relevance to the modern age of publishing. 

In a definition pulled from the recesses of my memory, Oxbow lakes are formed over time when a river meanders around its valley and forms a loop. The slow flowing river deposits silt and debris and faster flowing winter flood water erodes away at banks making the meandering loop more pronounced. Eventually the entrance to the loop becomes tighter and as the silt and debris builds up the river becomes backed up and forces through a new channel. This leaves the former meander cut off from the main river current and forms a lake looking like the loop of a ribbon bow or an ox’s hoof. The straighter river then rushes past at a faster pace on its way to the sea. The Oxbow lake forms its own ecosystem separate to the river. It either finds a new water source or it dries up and disappears.

As we savoured the whisky fumes I hypothesised about the state of the popular publishing industry.

The source in the mountains was the ancient history of Caxton’s printing press and the novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders became a babbling brook. Heading down as the water of the upper stages of the river were the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and down to the broader waters of Agatha Christie and John Buchan. As we reach the mature river further downstream the flow becomes ponderous with slow loops making navigation difficult.

Then the internet comes along and with each modern book published traditionally or by independents the raindrops build up at the head of the river and insist on finding their way down to the sea of readers at the rivers estuary. The skies darken and the weight of new content makes its way down to the meandering loops.    

As in nature, pressure builds up behind a constriction or blockage in the flow and the waters/words find their way down to the sea by the easiest route.  It pushes through the neck of the loop on its way to the readers. The loop becomes an oxbow lake of silted up ideas, viewpoints and traditions.

Riverside dwellers are now faced with stagnant water and insist that their waterfront views should stay the same. They stamp their feet in anger at the clever engineers who insist that they can not re-route the flow as the river of words has moved on. The canny ones have planned for this. They are prepared when they need to move and are ready to take advantage of their new location on the revitalised publishing landscape.

My Geologist friend took another sip of his whisky and concurred that is indeed how oxbow lakes are formed although he was not sure about the world of publishing and we laughed about our Geography teachers. After the hangover cleared I carried on with my writing hoping to add another raindrop of content to the flow of published work.

As the content flows by there will be oxbow lakes created from entrenched positions on all sides of the future of publishing debate but the content of words being added to the flow will not cease to find their way to the readers. The distribution channels might change but books are here to stay. Slainte!

www.jrsheridan.com

The Psychology of the "Put Down"

Freshers week is upon us at my local town’s University. Tonight as a Door Supervisor (the new term for bouncer) I start a week long stretch of late nights on the Door at the local nightclub I work in. Lots of young new students away from their parents will be making lifelong friendships and probably drinking too much.

Freshers Week

By the end of tonight my colleagues and I will be moaning that we are babysitting these kids barely out of nappies. They will be throwing up their pre-loaded cider and we will watch as they go off to make their first sexual mistakes as students. What they will not realise is that we will also be keeping them safe in our venue.There will be predators who look at these wide eyed and naïve young adults as fair game or fresh meat. Outside the club we watch them losing their new found sophistication and pairing up. As a father I hope against experience that they will be safe, although it is heartening that many do look after each other as they weave their way home. 

Sadly around the town some locals look at students as a menace to their self esteem and react accordingly. There will be threats of violence and intimidation will occur. The psychology of a certain type of local youth is that the students are parasites on their town and so they will be abusive and nasty. The university is a big employer in the area and generates thousands of jobs that spread to all areas of the local infrastructure but the locals will not see it like that.

Last year a talented male music student was attacked on the high street. His hand was badly damaged and his promising career threatened. Despite CCTV the attacker was not found. The student was not a threat but for his own reasons the local yob wanted to put that student down so that the student would be made to feel inferior to the yob. Note that the attack took place away from the police and bouncers like myself and that the attacker did not try to threaten me but the student. For months afterwards the student was scared to come out and we made a special effort to look after him and invite him into our club.    

Not every put down leads to violence so I wanted to look at the psychology behind the personality of the put down.  I'm a big guy and in a previous sales job the only people who have ever commented that I had put on weight were competitors that I had recently taken sales contracts from and I knew they were trying to put me down for their own self esteem. I smiled sweetly. 

On the door I receive a lot of threats when I, for whatever reason, won't let somebody into the nightclub. No matter what they say they still can't come in. I take the grief, don't bite back and smile sweetly. The outcome is that the night is calmer inside the venue and I've done a good job.

As a new writer I am enjoying the journey of writing and converting my thoughts into a readable story. After publishing my first novel “Splinter” 7 weeks ago I am waiting for my follow-up novella “Dragon” to go through the editing process.

I am hoping that the editor will not be too harsh with me but I know that whatever he comes back with will be constructive and worthwhile. It should be constructive because I am paying for his professional opinion. Whatever he says I will mull over and have a big warm glow at the compliments and a little sulk at his criticism. I found my editor when he was interviewed about editing on a podcast and I liked the cut of his jib. He was the first professional literary person that I had ever spoken to and he had the same accent as me so I thought he would understand my writing voice better than somebody from the Home Counties. 

When I summoned up the courage to contact the editor then all my years as a successful businessman were forgotten. I was just a very nervous new author who knew nothing about writing apart from I had written a story and I wanted others to read it. After several discussions I entrusted my manuscript to his electronic red pen and had no choice but to sit back and wait. I wasn’t sure if the promised timescale for completion would include weekends or just weekdays. I couldn’t ask because this person held my future in his hands and I wanted him to like my work and not rush through, angrily crossing out as he went.

   

In the end the manuscript came back, I took a deep breath, digested the criticism I had paid for, tucked away the compliments and started working towards publication. I submitted 95 thousand words for editing and the final book that I published is 75 thousand words, (which is 400 pages long but with a biggish font and easy to read layout).  That loss of 20,000 words is not the whole story because there was reworking, rewriting and pruning of tangents. I learnt a huge amount and the finished book is better for his input, as will be my future work, because of the lessons I learnt.

I respected that input because I was paying for it and he wasn't try to put me down for his own ulterior motive.

Feedback has been good and I have worried about all aspects of the book but have been pleased with the good reviews and the constructive comments. It is not a “perfect novel” but in the debate to say there is a perfect novel we start to see battle lines drawn and the debate becomes subjective and bloody as each side tries to put the other down.   

This week somebody has tried to put me down. Not about the content of my book, or the story, or my characterisation. They tried to put me down because I didn’t wait to find an agent or publisher. They say that my book should not have been published. I find this view protectionist and at least 5 years out of date. Having recently spoken to a traditionally published author who has hit the best selling lists and then found he has been shafted by his publisher then I am glad I have taken control to publish myself. 

After posting the bones of the story in a friendly author’s group I have since heard of similar comebacks from the world of academia. It seems many creative writing tutors for whatever their own reasons do not like self published books and give grief accordingly. I started a creative writing course 12 years ago and gave up halfway through. This was not because the tutor was rubbish but more that I felt that I would be better to spend the time sitting talking about writing actually sitting down to write.

In my mind writing is like rugby or soccer, I was taught the basics at school and the only way I will learn is while playing the game. I need boots and a ball in the same way a writer needs a pencil and a blank piece of paper to be filled. I no longer need to be told by a teacher what I can or can’t write about or to be put down for handing my homework in late. Some literary professionals seem to disagree and there is an emerging law of "inverse snobbery" that the more commercially successful an independent author is then the higher the level of animosity and the level of trying to put the other side down.

As far as I know there are no keys to the secret treasure of literary success and in this digital age then the Agents and Publishers are no longer the gatekeepers to the promised land. So what is the motivation behind the protectionism?  What is the psychology behind the put downs?  An image comes into my mind of the Wizard of Oz hiding behind his booming voice and the green curtain.

Behind the Wizard's green curtain 

These are exciting times for all authors and by the time the blood has dried on the bar room floor we will look back with derision at the protectionists who sneered at the lesser mortals who tried to write and self publish their book. Good writers will find readers, bad writers will not. 

If a reader doesn't like your creative work then that is one thing. But if somebody puts you down its always worth taking a bit of time to look at the psychology of why. As a fellow writer nicely suggested to me perhaps the creative writing "guru", who blogged against me self publishing was jealous that I held a physical book in my hand. I did joke that I had bought fish and chips for my wife with my first payment from Amazon and was therefore a paid author. Perhaps I should have been more sensitive to their feelings.  

For the next week on the nightclub door I will have people who I won’t let into the club and they will try to put me down. Locals and students together. Locals will threaten me violence and Students will tell me their father is a lawyer. If they offer me physical violence and if necessary I will (literally) put them down to the floor to protect myself, my colleagues and my customers. If they try to put me down verbally because I am old, bald, fat or all three then I will smile sweetly, which will annoy them even more. For their own reasons they are trying to steal my energy and I don’t care.

If a reader doesn’t like my book and gives me a bad review based on their thoughts then I will be sad. But if somebody who has not even read my book tries to put me down because I have self published then I will smile sweetly and carry on writing Book 2 and Book 3. 

James Sheridan

www.jrsheridan.com

Route into writing

I came up with the character of Dan Richards more than 20 years ago when I first had the idea about wanting to write when I was a 19 year old bouncer in Hong Kong. After coming back to the UK and my home town of Liverpool I became involved in delivery sales for a small company. The inevitable barriers of building a  business and family imperatives stood in the way and whenever I was frustrated at work my thoughts turned to writing about Dan.

Then as the business grew and became more successful I forgot about him. When after 15 years in the rough and tough world of sales and marketing I decided to have a lifestyle change and move to beautiful North Wales in 2007 instead of trying to be a writer I bought a hotel, pub and restaurant business instead and with high hopes dragged my wife to a rural coastal North Wales village. I had worked as a glass collector as a kid and then a bouncer and I had stayed in hundred of hotels. Plus I was a great businessman and I wanted to be my own boss so what could go wrong? It turned out that plenty could go wrong. Despite building the turnover and improving the reputation after a couple of years it became a hard slog. Realising that our lifestyle choice adventure was turning into an unprofitable and unrewarding venture and after yet another wet and disappointing Summer I managed to escape with my sanity barely intact in Autumn 2010. 

After being told by a business headhunter I was “unemployable” as having too much experience to be hired by a new company and too little money to buy or start another business I was pretty downhearted. I had all this business experience of success and failure and I wanted to pass on my hard won knowledge. So I started to write about my experiences in the hotel. At first it was called “The Lifestyle Choice – Don’t Do it” and then as I quantified how much money I had poured down the drain in the experience it became “Ten Thousand Bottles”. It was a cathartic exercise and I looked at the hotel as much more of a journey although it was a business failure I did leant a lot about running a business, dealing with people and about Life in general. The book was a sprawling mess and if I had let it would have run to 150K words. So I pared it down to 120K words and tried to sell it to Literary Agents who not surprisingly were not in the least interested.

In the meantime I wanted to stay in North Wales and my wife was just happy to be out of the hotel and concentrate on her own separate career. I also didn’t want to return to Sales again and the traffic jams on the M6, speed cameras and customer’s problems. So at 40 I turned back to my old stop gap profession of becoming a Bouncer. I had dealt with trouble at the pub and I still played rugby and so I asked around, took my Door Supervisors course, sent off for an SIA License and have now done the job for two years. Its been great, I have worked in pubs, football grounds, rock gigs, concerts, hotels, nightclubs and even a big fat gypsy wedding and a sheep shearing contest. I have even taken an SIA Close Protection course and am qualified to be a bodyguard and have been asked to look after minor celebrities. I have made some good friends, met a lot of decent people and plenty of idiots and I have had a lot of fun.

I don’t know as much of the lovely lyrical Welsh language as I should do but I do know when I am being sworn at. If a customer is rude or aggressive then I throw them out. I don’t even have to smile. I am experienced enough  that I have nothing to prove and am too old to be a threat to the young lads’ egos but can make my presence felt when it is neccessary. I do the job, get paid and go home again. The only downside is that the late hours in the nightclub mean I am grumpy the next day. The pay is not fantastic and we have battened down the hatches in the way we live, but is better than bar work or labouring and for the moment I enjoy it.

In the Autumn of 2012 as I came to the end the umpteenth rewrite of “Ten Thousand bottles” and was struggling to keep up the enthusiasm Dan Richards came back into my head. At first it was a faint knock saying “remember me” then the banging became more insistent and in October I put my non-fiction (pass on my hard won experiences) work to one side and started to write Dan’s story. I was 5 years older than when I had changed my career from Sales Director to hotelier, restaurateur and publican. I had been through the mill and I had learnt a lot about the hard facts of life.

Dan’s story rapidly progressed and the writing flowed. I started the book in Hong Kong, where I had first thought about becoming a writer. The smells, sounds, bustle and general excitement of living there came back to me although I have only revisited the former colony once since leaving after my prolonged two year stint in 1991. Then I developed Dan’s story twenty years on. I know a number of current and ex-service men and women some of who have been traumatised and others who have not been affected as badly through their experiences.

Working on the doors of a nightclub you see the worst of humanity after drink and drugs lay the personality bare. I have thrown ex-servicemen out of licensed premises and listened to their accusations that they have fought for their country and what have I ever done. I have also had great conversations with men and women who have seen terrible things in combat and who have a quiet reticence, dignity and calm about them. My development of Dan’s character comes from dealing with people who have seen so much and who with fortitude and bravery have survived.

I finished the first draft of my book in February 2012 and realised that I wanted to develop Dan’s journey into a series of books. The first chapter about Hong Kong was surplus and so I have decided to publish it as a separate stand alone ebook called Dragon. Some of the characters he meets are too good not to meet again so will come back in a later period of his life. Dan was my hero so why shouldn’t he have some good sex, mixed in with his hard times. That led me to thinking that perhaps some readers wouldn’t want to see quite so much of Dan so I edited the book and published it as two editions Splinter and Splinter (18). Splinter (18) is the author’s cut but I hope that the story of Dan’s redemption is a good one and I didn’t want to cause offence.

Dan was in the Royal Marine’s because at one stage I wanted to join up myself. Then I went travelling, ended up in Hong Kong and two years later thought myself too independent to join the services. My best friend did join the Royal Navy and as an officer went on the “All Arms” course with the Marines. He was so proud when he achieved his green beret after the thirty mile route march on Dartmoor and rightly so.

Dan is the hero of my story so he can be fit and strong, handsome and an all round capable good guy. I have many ideas for Dan to have more adventures and I hope you will follow him on his journey.  

As a footnote about a week after I had finished my first draft about Dan’s story I was working in a nightclub. It was late on a Thursday night and I went in to stop a fight on the dance floor. As I split the fight up, I was punched twice in the face by a blonde lad of about 20 with wild black eyes who had turned his aggression on me. I was still standing and was just about to throw him out when his father who was with him at the club started shouting in my face. He said the lad was “just two days back from Afghan.” The father tried to say that his son had been provoked but I had been waiting for trouble from the lad all night. He had been looking to fight the world and perhaps should have gone out of the club earlier. His regiment had marched with flags flying behind a military band through the streets of the town just the day before. The lad left but he walked rather than being carried forcibly down the stairs. His father apologised and begged us not to have him arrested. Having just written a book about the difficulty of a soldier coming back to civilian life then I could hardly have him arrested for assaulting me and we let him go with his father’s thanks. Young men going to war and coming back with feelings of hostility towards the civilians who do not appreciate the dangers they face has been going on as long as there have been soldiers and civilians, so since time immemorial. With modern technology and modern understanding of post traumatic stress we must be aware of the issues these combat veterans face. I hope my book will help if only in a very small way.       

So you want to be a writer

The song from the Bugsy Malone musical comes into my head. “So you want to be a boxer, in the golden ring. So you want to be a boxer better do your thing. You better quit if you haven’t got it." That’s not bad from memory and I haven’t dared to look it up as it has been many years since I last saw the film. The song ends with Bugsy’s friend the down on his luck, never fought in a ring before, big guy knock out the champion. The song ends with “yep he’s got it! The song stuck in my head and has been playing because I want to be a writer and not a boxer. I have always had plenty of creative ideas but apart from business reports and presentations that I have written then nobody important has seen or appreciated my literary efforts.

Theme tune - So you want to be a boxer

That’s not quite true, my wife and daughter who had first read and “critiqued” my work were the most important people in my life, but you know what I mean. In my O’levels I was given 2 A grades for English but I failed my English A Level because I discovered the joys of adulthood and did not spend enough of my time  reviewing the works of Keats and reading Wuthering Heights for enjoyment, which makes me a terrible candidate to be a writer. Ten yeas after my A Level failures I attended a night school class in Creative Writing but halfway through the course decided I would be better spending my time actually writing rather than listenting to somebody else spouting on about it. There is a University close to me that teaches a well respected masters degree in Creative Writing but now I have actually written and published one book of fiction I want to write another one.