Out of office reply...

I'm not around right now.  Like a bird, I'm flying south for winter (well, a week anyway).

Unlike a bird I won't shit on you as I pass overhead.

There may or may not be wifi, my laptop may or not survive a strip-search, so I may or may not post / comment. I planned to schedule a post or two to amuse and entertain in the meantime, but time is running out... so I'll leave you with a little competition:

I'd like you to write me the worst opening sentence of a novel you can come up with.  There'll be a 'super' prize* for the winner. You may want to read my previous post for inspiration - you may even want to start your sentence: 'It a was a dark and stormy night' but I won't hold you to that.

Post your answer as a comment.  Tell your friends too - get me up to the 100 follower mark while I'm away so I miss it and feel terrible, why don't you?

* Well, a prize anyway - and you'll really get it too. I remember how skeptical Dave was about ever getting that camel prize until it turned up on his doorstep (sans three wise men).  P.S. But it won't be a camel this time... I promise!

It was a dark and stormy night

I used to love reading 'Peanuts' by Charles M Schulz in the Daily Mail (I was just a kid, OK? It was my parents... I didn't know what I was doing.)

My favourite character was Snoopy, the wannabe novelist dog who, like me at the time, never got much past the first sentence of any great work of fiction he was writing.

Did you know his standard opening: 'It was a dark and stormy night' was written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton at the beginning of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford?  I thought the name sounded familiar, and it is because of he annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for examples of really bad fiction.  Last year's winner is a fine example:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil. 
--Molly Ringle, Seattle, Washington

This passage must have been perilously close to being nominated for another much-loved literary award - the Bad Sex Award, the winning passages of which I found strangely erotic:
"like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her"
and
"He unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night"

  *blushes fetchingly and goes back to the cartoons...*  

To be brief

Shall I tell you what's interesting about writing a novel?

Yes.  I shall.

As regular readers know, I've mainly written poems and short stories. I've also worked on a local newspaper, and as freelance newsletter editor and press and PR officer.  It's all writing, but it's all writing of a certain kind... succinct!

Learning to edit comes in really useful for poems and stories... where the reader is expected to do a good deal of the imagining.  It's good for any writing which, due to the limitations of space or the pursuit of brevity, applauds the cutting down of what you want to say to the minimum possible number of words.

This can be tricky in a novel.  It dawned on me some way into it that readers may struggle with this kind of succinctness and could need some breathing space between events, some scene-setting - the sort of stuff I cut out of stories, poems, articles ... and blogs!

When I read, I'm too impatient for pages and pages of irrelevant 'purple' prose - but I'm not sure I want to romp through a story at breakneck speed either. So I'm now anti-editing - adding rather than taking away. What's she thinking?  What's the background to this?  What's the weather like? - not for padding (it's already 77k words with a few scenes to add), but to make it a more satisfying read.

I'm interested what you think - do you like the 'two veg' of scene-setting or do you skip to the 'meat' of the next exciting thing?  Do you want to know a character's whole back story or is a well-chosen pen sketch enough?  And when YOU write do you find yourself writing too much or, like me, do you compulsively edit what you've written until you are gnawing on the bare bones?  Short - or lengthy - replies welcome!

A novel request

Help! I'm in need of some assistance and advice again! The novel's up to 76k words and I'm hoping to have a full draft ready within the week (eek!). So now I'm looking for anyone willing to:

(a) read first 3 chapters quite quickly - which will be sent to the first of a long list of agents imminently

(b) read a first draft of the whole thing, offer general constructive comments and answer some questions afterwards about specific aspects

(c) join in a less time-consuming way by offering suggestions for the following:

• Examples of low-level bullying by girls ... nothing too nasty, preferably something quirky/ embarrassing circa 1980 (I was lucky enough to not have been subjected to or witnessed any bullying at school)
• Examples of saints with silly names
• Examples of bureaucratic jargon or local authority political correctness 

If you'd like to do the actual reading (a) and (b), please send me your email address to clare at clarekirwan dot co dot uk. It's expensive and laborious to send hard copies out, so please only say yes if you're happy to just get a Word file to read on screen.

Think you're funny?

Laugh? I nearly died.
There are no clowns in my book, but plenty of coffins

This is a serious post about being funny... but there are some jokes at the end.

I was thinking about being funny when I posted about doing stand-up the other day. Like I said, they weren't exactly rolling in the aisles - wrong material / wrong audience maybe?

People tell me I'm funny. It's one of the things I aspire to be (being funny and being liked: my two aims in life - how needy is that?) But if the occasional quip falls on stony faces I begin to doubt my powers to amuse.

I've been working a lot on my novel-in-progress lately - a lighthearted romp involving a little trouble with Big Society, planning department shenanigans and the undead. And last weekend I finally allowed a good - but critical, discerning and ruthless - friend to read the first half. How many times have you seen a book described as 'laugh out loud funny' but it barely raises a titter? Imagine my delight to hear my friend laughing out loud at my book, my baby. Don't worry - it is supposed to be funny! But it's easy to lose faith when you are the only one to have read something, and humour is subjective.

Meanwhile on Twitter there was a meme where people shared their favourite short joke. Here are some of the ones I liked the best, which gives you a clue as to the sort of humour to expect :

1. My wife bet me I couldn't build a car from spaghetti. Imagine her face when I drove pasta...
2. I bought ten tonnes of Tippex the other day... big mistake!
3. I just spilled glue all over my autobiography - that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
4. Two goldfish in a tank, one says to the other... "How do you drive this thing?"
5. What do you call a donkey with 3 legs? Wonkey
6. "Doctor, doctor, I think I'm a moth." "Sorry, mate, this is a solicitor's, not a doctor's surgery." "I know, but your light was on."
7. How do you titillate an ocelot?  Oscillate its tits a lot
8. What's gray, wrinkly and hangs out your granddads pajamas? Your grandma.
9. Why did the baker have brown hands? Cos he kneaded a poo.
10. (gotta have a library joke) Man walks into library: Can I have fish & chips please? Librarian: This is a library. Man whispers: Can I have fish &..