Happy Whatever

So during the Sydney hostage crisis, we had the agency TV set to Sky. As I took two minutes to catch up, a Muslim colleague came to stand beside me. “It’s Muslims like that who give Muslims a bad name,” he said, shaking his head. But it wasn’t really a Muslim who took the hostages. It was by all accounts a crazy person. I’d guess that 99.9% of Muslims aren’t crazy. Therefore, not all crazy people are Muslim.

                  By the time I got back to my desk, #Illridewithyou was trending. I don’t get teary much, but this outpouring of support for those regular people who happened to be Muslims really touched me. Jeez, we should have gone to live in Oz ten years ago, I thought. As a friend of mine commented on Facebook, the Australians might be completely delusional about rugby and cricket, but this was something truly special. Apparently it’s called “mateship”, my Brisbanite editor Lynda tells me.

                  And then, the next day, all this good stuff was undermined by a bunch of total arseholes snapping selfies of themselves on Martin Place. Grinning as if they had just burned through the corporate lunch account, or were on their way to the circus. Sometimes the human race really sucks.

                  It might sound a little glib, but the ideal workplace should be a microcosm of society. In my real job at our ad agency, we have Muslims and Christians and Jews and Hindus and atheists and probably one or two Pastafarian members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster all spending their daylight hours there. Respecting each other and working together and getting things done as professionally as possible, and then laughing and hugging each other at beer o’clock on Fridays and at our various agency get-togethers. Those 10 or so working hours a day, those celebratory occasions, are when religion is forgotten, or at least when belief systems and their entrenched animosities are set aside.

                  The oldest extant version of the Christian Bible resides in the British Museum. It’s dated at approximately 500 years AD. It’s in Greek. It was written by a phalanx of authors, mostly unknown, and most of whom never spoke or wrote Greek. If you work in the ad industry, you will know, by hard experience, that the difference between the one-page client brief and what is relayed to the creative team a day later can be two completely different things. So, how much can be changed within a thousand or so pages, over 500 years? How much has actually been expunged, added, or altered over that time? From the exclusions of the many parts of the Apocrypha, to the mistranslations, to the ecclesiastical editing brought about to bolster the agenda of whomever was boss of the Church at the time?

                  Has religion brought about more wars than anything else? Probably not, if you did the numbers. But it has caused so much hurt, so much pain. Two dead in Sydney. The next day, over a hundred Pakistani pupils slaughtered by the Taliban. And God – ha! – only knows what Boko Haram has been up to in the last twenty-four hours.

                  For what? The roots of all modern religions (Pastafarians aside) lie in Bronze Age superstitions that have barely evolved over 5,000 years, and are today neatly packaged in explosive little parcels for different tastes. And all of that in the face of simple logic, basic empiricism, rudimentary science, and the proven laws of nature.

                  We were in Mauritius a few years ago, and on an outing from our wonderfully fake resort, we passed a Catholic church. Outside, twice life-sized, a sculpture showed Christ on the cross, hang-headed with bright crimson blood running from his hands, feet and chest. My youngest, who is Jewish as my wife is, was horrified. I dug into my Catholic past and tried to explain. The more I tried to clarify the mythology, the less sense it made to her.

We were on our way to a Hindu temple, which was populated by blue elephants and beings with banana-bunches of extraneous arms. My daughter was no less puzzled about the crucifixion sculpture than she was about the Hindu gods. Such is the innocence, and the impartiality, we've all lost.

                  If only we were more concerned with our fellow beings, on a practical, tangible, day-to-day basis, than we are with trying furiously to bat for the particular fairy-tale that makes us each feel warmest and fuzziest, we’d be on to a damned fine thing. As they say, having a religion is like having a penis. It’s okay to have one, but don’t whip it out in public, don't thrust it on anyone, least of all small children or your dinner guests. Don't think with it. Don’t compare sizes. And don’t ever try to write laws with it.

                  Merry Whatever, everyone.

                 

Almost lost for words (but not quite)

I can’t do religious rants – I’m not religious. So this isn’t one, even though I’m a recovering Catholic, my wife is Jewish, and yes, some of my friends and colleagues are Hindu and Muslim.

Consider this a rant against those intellectual amputees who have plumbed the depths of hypocrisy by clutching their Woolworths shares in one hand and a placard demanding that I boycott the company in the other.

Excuse me?

That’s like expecting me to flagellate myself with a bicycle chain because my neighbour’s dog keeps you up all night.

My issue isn’t particularly about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Or that I hear no outrage at the chopping off of heads and the kidnapping of young woman that’s going on in some quarters of our wonderful world.

It’s just that you don’t make any sense. 

Not the slightest, tiniest bit.

God, how stupid do you have to be to try to destroy your own investment? Perhaps the answer to an otherwise rhetorical question lies in the fact that the pig’s head which appeared Woolies’ Sea Point branch was actually placed in the Halaal section of the store. There is no kosher section.

(Much to the surprise of many a Sea Point kugel: “Oy, so since when is Woolies selling kosher food?”)

Here’s what I suggest you do. It may help lend a little logic to your otherwise fraught campaign.

If you don't like the way Woolies conducts is business, sell your shares and shop somewhere else. It's a free world (for the time being).

Find a retailer that has no connections with Israel and buy your food and clothing there. 

But be careful. 

Your favourite new store had better not use Microsoft Windows on their computers. Much of it was developed in Israel. 

Check out their hardware. Chances are that their PCs and other devices contain a Sandybridge, 8088 or Centrino chip, developed and manufactured for Intel in Israel. Or that their CCTV system in fact originated there.

Before you enter, throw away your cell phone. Without Israeli engineering, it must be the size of a small shoebox, which will surely get in the way while you’re stocking up on Iraqi or Chinese or Russian produce.

On your way home, please hand the following to the first beggar who comes to your window: your iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and any Samsung products that use Anobit flash technology. Its Israeli origins surely mean you can’t keep any of them. 

Once you’re home, fling your Kindle out of the window – the Java system that drives it was definitely not developed by COSAS. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to learn that it was developed in Israel.

Take that little flash drive off your key ring and smite it with a rock. Sift through your medicine cabinet and toss half of the medicines in it down the loo. Stop eating the Zionist poison of cherry tomatoes at once.

Then, on a clay tablet, begin a petition demanding that AngloGold Ashanti close its Western Deep mines as punishment for being so naughty as to use Israeli-made cooling systems.

There.

Feeling better now?

Perhaps you should do what I did and spend fifteen minutes on Google to find out exactly where, when and how you (and I, and much of the world's populace that has learnt to balance on its hind legs) benefit from Israeli inventions and products before going off on a hysterical and misguided zombie attack of a single random retailer.

And for fuck’s sake, grow up and stop trying to make up my mind for me.

The only reason that I’d consider boycotting Woolworths is that I don’t really like frogs, least of all in my salad. 

But I’d bet my MacBook that the ratio of frog-infested salad to frog-free salad in Woolies is pretty much on a par with the ratio of Israeli to non-Israeli products on their shelves. 

Durban Decay

A few weeks ago I went to Durban for a shoot. We were looking for Kinshasa without having to go there, and I think we found it. Have a look at more pics here.

Video feed. Food. Fodder.

I follow a few interesting content and design websites that serve information that’s generally a little left of centre, and for the most part they’re surprisingly elucidating and stimulating.

In return for my loyalty, they throw up tantalising pics and copy onto my Facebook page, and sometimes I even click on the links to see what’s on offer.

Which is usually a video. And which is the moment I usually close the page.

Yes, I’m old (school), but for the love of simple sanity, please give me a text article that I can scan in a minute, decide what’s important for myself, and go back and focus on certain bits if I feel like it. Instead, I’m faced with endless video nasties where the point of the thing is made at eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Don’t get me wrong. I love sites like upworthy.com.  “A Kid Got Revenge On His Bully And Immediately Regretted It” (sic) sounds amazing. But I really don’t want to watch a 13-minute video about said bullying and said revenge. I want to read (because I can), and filter out the proverbial bullshit from the cherry pie for myself. Instead, I’ve now missed out on  a story about bullies being re-bullied, and perhaps even bullying back. All I’ve concluded is that in the interchange, everyone lost. Which maybe they didn’t. Perhaps everyone won. I’ll never know. What I do know is that nobody bothered to write anything down at the time.

The little I remember of my journalism studies (other than how to touch-type – thank you, four-year Journ degree) is how to structure a news story. Think inverted triangle – the fat bit at the top is all the important stuff, and as it tails off the copy and the content gets thinner and less significant. It meant that the sub-editor could trim articles from the bottom up to suit the layout, and to the reader it meant that he or she needn’t read the whole thing to get the gist of the story. Of course it's different now – now you need to tease people into clicking through to your content. Hence lines on your newsfeed like, "She swallowed 50 kilograms of earthworms and you won't believe what happened next," or, "He took on a grizzly bear with a spatula and a pair of socks - who came out tops?"

Back in the day, the bullying story might have opened with the following: “A bully found the tables turned when his victim impaled him on a wooden spike” (I don’t know if that’s what happened because I didn’t watch the video, but you understand my point). You get it in fifteen words, and then it’s up to you whether or not to read the rest.

These days, it seems we’re caught between semi-literacy and common-or-garden imbecility. We’re training ourselves to think, and talk, in bites – bytes? – of information. We’re Whatsapping and BBMing and twittering and squittering with no bigger-picture thought of what we’re putting out there. Little bits of schmick-schmack that demonstrate nothing more than the proliferation of pointless information, while emphasising the screaming dearth of wisdom. Dickens, the man who wrote books the size of tombstones with nothing more than a quill pen and some spit, would wet himself.

Of course language morphs and develops. If it didn’t, we’d all be speaking like Chaucer, or discussing Beowulf over the braai, sounding like we were choking on chop bones. But really, people – it’s speech that made us human in the first place, and writing that made us even more so. So when a baby copywriter stuck her head into my office the other day to argue against a grammatically-correct apostrophe because it looked ugly in print, I didn’t feel bad that she left in tears with her apostrophe screwed firmly to the sticking place.

Apostrophes – every time you use them to make a plural, a puppy dies. Every time you omit them from a possessive, the Pope’s underpants catch fire. Either way, you’re going to hell.

Hasthtag just saying.

Review of "Theory"

Here's a review of Theory I never thought I'd hear, by the rather particular John Maytham of 567 Cape Talk (it's the second review on the Soundcloud clip).

Private Lawns

People. We’re surrounded by them. In the traffic, in the mall, at work.

I stumbled across this link to an amazing project by Adam Magyar, and other than being both eerie and beautiful, what he does made me think about how we all live together. About how we tolerate each other, and about how we make ourselves tolerable to each other.

Oddly, it seems to be of paramount importance that we fend off others, rather than attract them. So we each build our own bubbles to keep others of our species away. Even in a lift going between two floors, there’s a posture and an attitude that screams, “Leave me alone, do not talk to me, don’t even look my way.”

If you were a dog, you would probably be able to smell it.

As someone who has spent his working life in advertising, it makes me smile (on the inside, because you can’t smile in the lift). Here we are as a communications collective with the single goal of making the general populace to buy stuff to make them each more appealing to others. Shampoo to make your hair shinier, deodorant so that you don’t smell. Toothpaste to stop knocking others out with your breath. Gyms to make you slimmer. Shoes to make you taller. Clothes to make you slinkier. Watches, jewellery, spectacles to make you look richer than you are. Cars, whose keys, once slung onto the boardroom table, become more important than the car itself.

Of course, there’s the obverse. Pre-torn jeans rolled up over the ankles, shoes without socks, tatts and body piercings, the rebellion of giant hipster beards. But, sorry for you lot as well, they’ve all been sold to you in some way or another as a way to make a statement, as a way to make yourself more interesting to your own little subset of people.

So why do we all behave the same way when we’re in a confined space? Whether we wear Hublot and Versace, or the slightly soiled articles from antique clothing stores, I’m starting to think that we’re more concerned with repelling others than inviting them closer.

Whether we’re about to travel business class to Paris, or waiting to catch the evening bus to Thornton, we each raise defences of expression and body language to warn others to keep their distance. We reinforce this with accessories that announce that our interior worlds are inassailable – iPods, tablets, laptops, sunglasses, cellphones, newspapers. A strange dichotomy: money and effort spent to make a statement; behaviour crafted carefully to deny any challenges made to it.

We've learnt to carry our picket fences around with us. 

I’d never seen this more apparently than in Adam Magyar’s work. His look at everyday people is so intimate that he may has well have shot them having sex, or on the toilet. You can’t really stare at people in that way on the way to the fourth floor or on on the red-eye to Jo’burg. But his camera does it for us, and the glimpse over the picket fence is more than a little disturbing. 

It's pretty much what writers do, I guess. But we writers are sneaky little squirrels - we stuff those observations into our cheeks to spit out and embellish upon later, in private, and censor or exaggerate what we think we've seen for our own purposes.

Yes, there’s the astonishing technical aspect to what Magyar does. But what got me was the human aspect. The full-frontal look into people doing nothing more special than waiting for a train, and what those carefully-guarded faces begin to reveal once you have the luxury of really looking at them.

I suppose everyone we ever see – or think we see – is fighting a battle the rest of us know nothing about. 

See more of Adam Magyar’s work here.

Tracy is not my wife

I have a habit that began in a geography lesson in Grade 4, or Standard 2 as it was known back then. This involved drawing all over my schoolbooks in order to manage the crashing boredom of the world’s capitals.

These days, it’s what I do to look attentive in meetings I’ve lost interest in. I hold my nice leather-bound agency notebook just so to keep its pages out of sight, and put a thoughtful (I think) look on my face and begin. I hold onto the belief that it makes me appear diligent and absorbed.

In a way it does, as it masks irritating distractions, such as a client on a cell phone or a colleague playing the harp with her hair. It’s not as though drawing makes one deaf, so if I hear anything I feel needs my comment, I can contribute with conviction. And more often than not, my scribblings bear on the meeting I'm party to. Just as they did in Standard 2.

I never know what will appear on the page when I do this. I don’t think the results are Freudian or Jungian or anything particularly meaningful, given that there’s a rather limited repertoire of what I can actually draw (which is sort of what one would expect from a colour-blind copywriter, and as you'd be able to tell from the pic above).

Today, what appeared on the page was an image of a tribal-looking man with his back to me, wielding what turned out to be a long and evil-looking spear with some dingleberries at the blunt end. It ended up looking as if he was stabbing something to his right, and because all that was there was white space, I drew Mickey Mouse taking fright. Wide eyes, tiny terrified pupils, and white-gloved hands flinging into the air (the meeting was drawing to a close and I didn’t have time to do something quite as anatomically incorrect or as scratchy and laboured as the tribal guy).

Unusually, I put my notebook down without closing it, and of course my doodlings were spotted by a colleague. “Fuck me,” she said, eyebrows arched, “why on earth is he stabbing Mickey?”

He wasn’t actually stabbing Mickey. He was simply standing there with his spear raised in both hands and leaning towards the area where Mickey wasn’t until I drew him in the blank space. On second viewing, tribal man may as well have been chewing on the shaft of his spear – perhaps he was; perhaps that was what Mickey had found so surprising. Who knows. You put characters out there and they develop ideas and motivations of their own.

It was too complicated to explain to said colleague. “He’s not stabbing anyone,” I said, and drew a vertical line between the two characters. “See? It’s two different drawings.” She frowned at the images and realised that she couldn’t argue. But she did look at me in a strange way, as if I’d set fire to her cat or eaten a small child for breakfast. And when I saw her later in the day she gave me the same fearful glance.

I’ve had this many times. “Who’s that?” people often ask when I’ve drawn a face. “I don’t know,” I say, and they look at me as if I’m lying. “Who’s dog is that?” “Is she someone you know?” “Why is he standing at the edge of a building looking at his toes?”

It’s not the edge of a building. It’s the edge of a swimming pool. And he’s actually looking at the shark I couldn’t draw because I ran out of notebook. 

It got worse after the publication of An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Absolutely Everything.

People who knew me well would ask why I’d portrayed my wife in such a dreadful light. “Tracy is not my wife,” I’d explain. “Michelle is my wife. She has been for almost twenty years. Michelle is real. She is really married to me. Tracy is fictional. She is fictionally married to the fictional Chris.” And then that look, that disbelieving glaze, ripe with unspoken accusations about how I could have turned my Michelle into a selfish, materialistic bitch.

Acquaintances would remark that they didn’t know I had a son. “I don’t,” I’d say. “I have two daughters. You’re thinking of the fictional Chris’s fictional son Gabriel.” And then the look, as if I might have a secret son locked in the basement, or that I might somehow have transcended the divide between the parallel universes of fact and fiction and fathered a son with the fictional Tracy.

People who didn't know me and found out that I was the author of Theory tended to glance down at my legs. That’s because the fictional Chris Hayes is missing one fictional leg. Once they'd realised that I had both my legs, they'd look at me as if I were a fraud. When they asked me where I studied architecture, I'd point out that Chris was the one with the fictional architectural degree, not me.

My favourite: “But what happened to Chris after the end of the book?”

“I don’t know,” I said. This time the questioner’s vexation was too much to contain. “But but but,” she sputtered and shot off a cloud of italics. “You wrote him. You have to know what happened next. Tell me! I have to know!”

But I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know what happened to Chris, and I’m not obliged to know. Chris Hayes lived a truncated and fictional life over a brief 225 pages, and while he doesn’t actually die in the book, his story ended when the book did. Ceased. Shut down. Just as hairdryers and lawnmowers and toaster do, three days out of warranty.

“Are you at least writing a sequel?” the distraught woman asked. “Nope,” I said, “Chris has no more story to tell.” And then the disbelieving look, amplified, as if I’d also locked Chris in the basement along with his son, until a time where I might no longer be able to help myself and one day let them out into the world again. 

Why is this? What do people not understand about a mediocre ability to draw faces that don’t belong to anyone? What don’t they understand about “fiction”? We all accept that some people can do ballet really well, or play the trombone or juggle chainsaws, so why is it so difficult to accept that others can tell stories that never happened, or create characters who have never existed?

Yet another reader – Jane, let’s call her – whom I’d known long ago and hadn’t seen for the better part of 25 years, contacted me after reading Theory. She wanted to let me know that, for days after finishing the book, she’d found herself wondering whether Chris had been the architect whenever she passed a construction site. And that she'd been disappointed to read in some newspaper that a firm other than Chris’s had won a lucrative tender. Still laughing at herself, she wished me the best with the next one.

Jane had paid me a great compliment. 

While it’s gratifying to have your characters believed for the right reasons, she’d made me realise that it’s equally as gratifying to have them believed for the wrong ones.

So when Wasted is launched in August and people ask me exactly what events in my life led to the story of Nathan Lucius, or who the nymphomaniac widow really is, I think I’ll just serve up a little more fiction.

#I am an addict

A guest piece from friend and colleague, Jason Harrison, MD of M&C Saatchi Abel. Read it and weep.

Hi.
My name is Jason.
I am the Managing Director of a very successful advertising agency.
And I am an addict.

More precisely, I am a phone addict. I know this because:
I feel anxious when it’s upstairs and I’m downstairs.
I cannot for the life of me leave it at home when I leave the house.
I feel worried when I haven’t checked for that little red notification banner every 15 minutes.
I feel incomplete if I haven’t cycled through all seven different ways I use to communicate every hour.

I cannot drive without trying to text or check important e-mails.

I feel depressed when someone hasn’t liked, shared or re-tweeted my musings.

At Alcoholics Anonymous the first thing they try and get you to do is talk about your problems with a safe group of confidantes (part of the healing process). So I thought why not short-circuit this addiction thing completely by sharing this problem with all my “friends” in the most public way possible. Shock the system = quicker result?

So here are some honest and open confessions of an ad man:

On the first Thursday of every month, I get my closest friends around a table at the local pub for a drink. We fit this it in between work and nappies at home. The idea is to re-connect. These are people that I have known for the better part of 25 years. I have had the best times of my life with these guys. I repay that commitment by checking Facebook underneath the table every 15 minutes to see what is going on with my “other mates”.

Regularly, my parents invite the family over for a braai and whilst my mom tries to talk to me because she hadn’t seen me in a few weeks, I check work e-mails. This is a person who has pretty much dedicated 36 years of her life to helping me through every conceivable situation life has thrown my way. I repay that commitment by not even bothering to look up from a 5cm square screen because “replying to all” is far more important.

Most nights, I come home, eat supper and then lie on the couch to start a vicious circle of checking up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, gmail and Whatsapp whilst my wife tries to tell me about the hell day she has had with our 4 month old daughter and 2 ½ year old son. This is a person who has pretty much dedicated her life to me for the last 13 years (our children now most recently) and is someone who physically cannot control her emotions because her thyroid is dead, hasn’t been out of the house alone in 4 months, and still manages a smile when I walk through the door. I repay that commitment by “liking” that highly entertaining youtube clip about LolCats.

Every morning when my son comes to curl up with me at 6am, instead of taking in that very special moment for the next hour, I frantically start replying to e-mails with one hand whilst he renders the other arm useless. This is a person who has pretty much decided that I am THE BEST thing in the whole world and hangs on my every word. I repay that commitment by starting my day angry with what has not been done.

And the absolute low point happened last week. I had my 4 month old daughter on my lap. This is the same daughter who was hospitalised for the better part of 3 weeks and who almost didn't make it. She was smiling for the first time. She smiles right from the eyes. It is the most beautiful thing. This is the little person who knows nothing else than relying on my wife for 100% of her needs, but still managed to gift me that smile when I had done absolutely nothing to deserve it. I repaid that commitment by checking if one of my client’s Twitter feeds had been updated correctly because we were launching a massive national campaign for them.
 
Reading that back, I feel hollow and embarrassingly pathetic.

How has it come to this? Seriously, how on earth has it come to this? 

I am not that guy. Something has to change and it has to change quickly.

That change is called Lent and it’s starting today. If you didn’t know, Lent is when you commit to giving up your luxuries as a form of penitence to mark the 40 days before Easter Sunday.

It’s become tradition that every year I give up all the “fun stuff” – any form of booze, chocolates, chips, fizzy drinks, red meat & sugar.  Yes, it is hard, and truth be told by the time Easter Sunday comes around, the defining event at the very heart of the Christian belief system is fleetingly acknowledged as I look forward to tucking into a deliciously fat & juicy rump seared to perfection and washed down with a well rounded Cab Sav of pre-millennial vintage.

But this year I have decided to give up my phone for the next 40 days and 40 nights. 

In advertising we need a memorable catch phrase to clarify the thinking, so I’ve decided to call it “40 days of appstinance” (see what I did there?).

So this is the deal I have made with myself:

1. I will still use my phone to take calls and check work e-mail between 8am – 6pm but after that it goes off and gets put in the safe (I will give my wife the key as we addicts cannot be trusted).

2. On top of that all social apps are gone. Erased. Goodbye Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Tumblr and all that other meaningless virtual drivel.

I am checking out, unliking, no longer sharing.  

I am leaving the high speed, virtual highway to appreciate the slow and calm wonders that I am so blessed to receive every single day. 

I am completely unplugging my virtual life so I can remember what it is like to live my ‘real’ life.

I realize that announcing my retirement from social media on social media is a little like an alcoholic getting everyone together in the pub for his last drink. But it needs to be witnessed. (And its already killing me that I won't be able to see your responses.)

But here’s to #Cold Turkey. #Anxiety. #Cold sweats. #Temptation

Acceptance… White noise… Bliss.

See you on the flip side.

#Maybe

How to Write a Novel – The Story

Anything over 50,000 words is regarded as a novel. Anything less, a novella. Unless it’s absolutely astonishing, publishers tend to shy away from a first book that's much longer than 75 or 80,000 words. My assumption is that the increased costs of printing makes a first run just too risky. A 50,000 word novel will be roughly 200 pages long, so 100,000 words would pretty much double the printing cost.

If 50,000 words sounds like a marathon, it is.

But imagine setting out on a marathon with no idea of where you’re going, where the finish line is, or how long the route is. What would your chances of enjoying the run be, let alone your chances of actually finishing?

It’s surprising (or not) how many wannabe writers simply sit down at the keyboard and begin bashing away wildly, with only the nub of an idea to work with. There are so many of them that they even have a name – “pantsers” – because they’re flying by the seat of their pants. Most pantsers run out of steam by around 20,000 words. They’re not even halfway through the marathon and they’re exhausted, lost, confused. It’s bound to happen when you don’t have a plan. I know. I’ve been there.

The first step in planning is to figure out your story.

THINGS YOU’LL NEED:

• An idea
• A computer – a laptop is ideal, because it means you can write anywhere
• Microsoft Word

Western story arcs typically have a three-part structure. It’s a good idea to stick with this, because it’s worked for Hollywood and just about every best-selling novelist you've read.

In the first act, main characters and their routines are established. Themes are introduced. And then you need a “turning point”  or “inciting incident” that takes the story into the second act. This is the “hook” that convinces the reader that it’s worth continuing. It’s the reason for the rest of the story.

The second act unpacks what you’ve established. It introduces obstacles to overcome, expands on character, and moves the action forward. It culminates in a second turning point – generally, at this stage it appears that all is lost, and that your hero is about to be overwhelmed by the weight of what’s gone before.

The third act unravels this further. Your hero either gives in to the forces that threaten him or her, or he/she triumphs.

The final part of the third act consists of the denouement, or conclusion, where you show that your hero has morally conquered or succumbed.

Act I is around 20% of the story, Act II 70%, and Act III 10%.

It’s in the second act that things fall apart. It’s the longest, and throughout you have to ensure that it builds unfailingly, taking your reader to the climax that leads to Act III.

Your story comes down to three basic choices:

• Man versus Man: here, the villain is another person – Holmes’s Moriarty, Luke Skywalker's Darth Vader, Marlow’s Mr Kurtz
• Man versus Self: the villain is a collection of internal conflicts, doubts and fears (this was my choice in Theory)
• Man versus Nature: where the villain is a volcano, an asteroid, global warming or the Antarctic.

You need a villain. You need conflict, friction and tenstion – or else you'll end up with a bland porridge of words that will captivate nobody. Imagine Harry Potter without Voldemort - how could it have been anything more than a cutesy tale about some kiddie wizards?

Write out your story as a synopsis in no more than two pages. This is a lot more challenging than it sounds, but keep at it. It’ll force focus, and it will quickly point out weaknesses and illogical bits, and it will spark off other ideas on how to keep the thing moving forward.

Once you have an end-to-end synopsis that works, and which outlines a compelling story, you’re getting to the point where the real planning begins.

And that’s what we’ll look at next time.

How to write a novel - getting started

 Do you really want to write a novel? Because wanting is not enough.

You’re only a writer if you can actually write. In the same way that not everyone can do ballet, not everyone can do writing.

Yes, you need a good grip on grammar. But writing is not just the stringing together of words and punctuation. Its purpose is to reward and enrich, and to give your reader glimpses into characters and the world they populate in ways he or she has never before experienced. Its purpose is emotional – to move, amuse, scare, provoke. As importantly, to move them along from one page to the next. And all you have at your disposal is a collection of black marks on paper to achieve all that.

Ready?
 
THINGS YOU’LL NEED:
• A nice new Moleskine and your favourite pen or pencil.
• An idea.

Your idea needs to be a strong one. An original one. One that can be sustained over 50,000+ words. 


How do you know it’s a good idea? You can write it down in a sentence or two. If you need a page to explain it, it’s not a good idea.

Here’s the idea that led to Theory: A wealthy man’s mid-life crisis manifests as a crisis of identity. But the more he pieces together his past, the more his present unravels. 

Here’s the idea behind Wasted: A socially inept young guy has taught himself to forget certain aspects of past. But his forgetting has been so effective that he now forgets everyday things unintentionally, and this leads him down a path he had no intention of following.

And the idea for the unpublished The Same Deep Water as You: Three strangers, a man who has just murdered his father, a woman whose own father died a thousand kilometres away at exactly the same moment, and a little girl who refuses to speak are thrown together by fate.

You’ll note that these are simply ideas at this stage, not full-blown synopses. That’s because you won’t know what the story is just yet.

EXERCISE 1: Practice identifying the ideas behind your favourite books and movies and write them up like the examples above.

EXERCISE 2: Write your idea on the first page of your Moleskine. If you don’t like it, scratch it out and put down another. Keep going until you have a fantastically brilliant idea.

DON'T understimate the power of a strong, clear idea.

Some hints: Keep your ideas within your own range of experience. Don’t try a medical thriller if you’re not a doctor. Don’t try historical fiction unless you have the time and capacity to do the research. Don’t set your story in New York or Rome, unless you know the locations intimately. Consider if your idea is something that you might want to read yourself.

Next time: turning your idea into a story.

How to write a novel

It took me a long time to write my first novel. I’d guess around thirty years. That’s because, in my teens, I was convinced that I would write one. One day. Too bad it took me three decades and hundreds, if not thousands, of pages to figure out how.

Once I finally wrote it, I got lucky. After eighteen rejections (or thereabouts – I lost count) my manuscript was one of the 2% or so of unsolicited manuscripts received by SA publishers every year actually to get published.

It's pointless to try to describe the feeling when you finally hold the finished thing in your hands, crisp and virginal and un-dogeared and smelling of paper and ink. Who was it who said that writing a book is the closest a man can come to experiencing childbrith?

It gets better when the reviews are flattering, and when O magazine chooses it for its Father's Day picks – and when the sales figures creep beyond the amount of people in your immediate circle of friends and family. But from the day I’d heard of its acceptance by my new publishers, I began to worry that I only had one in me. So I started the second while we were editing the first, and finished the manuscript (“ms” in the jargon) before the first went to print.

It took so long to get an opinion from James, my publisher, on the second one that I started and finished the third. Then I went back and read the second, and realised that, other than the first nine pages and the last eight, it was rather poo. No wonder James, usually so energetic and optimistic, had been dragging his feet. I put the thing down and rolled my eyes and mailed him and asked him to forget about the second and to look at the third instead.

Now my third attempt, Wasted, is being published as my second novel in August this year by a surprisingly excited publisher.

I’m excited too, of course. Especially as James strongly suggested we find an international agent for me asap. But more than anything, I’m relieved. Because I’m no longer a once-off – which, I’m led to believe, is what 90% of first-time authors are. Relieved because the thirty years I spent dicking around weren’t completely wasted.

It's said that everyone has a book in them. I'd guess that most of them have no idea how to get it down on paper.

If you’re one of them, here’s an idea.

Over the next while, I’m going to share my experiences and the lessons I learnt while writing my three manuscripts on this blog. The plan is to structure it pretty much chronologically, moving from the pragmatic to the more abstract as we go. Of course, writers all have their own strategy to slay the dragon, so you're not allowed to sue me if my methods don't work for you.
 
But who knows – they might just end up short-cutting the process by a few decades.