Behind the Words: A Trolley Full of Marx

This is another story I think of as a window. It has minimal arcs, very little information, just a snapshot moment of two people’s lives together. Fiction works by allowing the reader to climb inside the world and experience events for themselves, what creative writing teachers and editors always reduce to “show, don’t tell.” Readers come to a text with a life of experiences behind them and an understanding of how the world works. As such, there’s no need for a storyteller to explain things like emotion, motivation, reaction. We already know, already understand. For example, the repeated chorus “who has time?” doesn’t need a backstory. We don’t need to know why they are both busy, we all get the feeling of having so many things we would do if only we had the time, and we also know people who use that as an excuse not to do things, not to try things. The reader doesn’t need a paragraph of “She wished she could do X, Y and Z but because of her job, which was A, she didn’t have the time.” That’s all redundant. “Who has the time?” is enough.

The idea behind this story is to reduce the narrative down to almost nothing, to let the dialogue speak for itself without much gloss (even removing all but a few speech tags) and let the reader interpret the scene for themselves. As a young writer I was heavily influenced in this regard by Roddy Doyle, and it’s something I’ve worked on throughout my writing life. Why tell us the colour of the character’s hair if it is irrelevant to the development of the plot? If you don’t tell me, my imagination will fill in the blanks anyway. In fact, even if you do tell me, my imagine will alter it anyway which is why we’re always so pissed off when the actor on screen looks nothing like the character from our favourite novel we’ve been imagining for years. David Mitchell has gone as far as almost completely removing speech tags from his writing (and since so few people notice this about him, it proves the point that they are redundant) using character movement to indicate who is speaking when it isn’t immediately clear.

I’m working on a science fiction novel at the moment that is taking this approach as its guiding principle, which is a fun challenge given the story is set on a system of 37 occupied moons and therefore requires a decent amount of world building. I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, but it’s very much to mine and it’s my story, dammit!

This particular window flashed by me during a workshop I took part in with the Nagoya Writes group. The group is mostly about people reading their work, but for a year or so one member would lead workshops and that’s the part of writing groups I prefer. As I’ve written elsewhere, unthinking, knee-jerk comments about writing can do more harm than good (I’ve been guilty of this myself) and writing groups where people read work that the audience hasn’t encountered before and then expect detailed feedback on can be counterproductive. Listening to someone read and reading the text yourself are two very different experiences, and I like to read something a few times before giving critical feedback on it. So I much prefer writing groups that do workshops and then circulate members’ work for feedback outside the meeting time.

Writing groups are important to me, and have been a key part of my development as a writer. My first was the University of Aberdeen Creative Writing Society, which I joined in first year (1998) and I still hold many of those friendships today. It was the first time I’d literally met other writers, the first time I showed people my work (I’d sent it out to journals and been somewhat successful, but that’s by distance, they don’t reject you to your face, thank gods). Throughout March I’m going to return to some of my work from this time, if I can face the cringe, because these years were when I moved away from juvenile poetry and matured, somewhat, as a writer, and began writing prose seriously for the first time. My first published short story was written while a member of the CWS.

I’ve been a member of various groups over the years, but these days I’m more isolated – as are we all. I have beta readers but at this age (in my 40s) many of my oldest and most favoured beta readers have too many life commitments to devote hours to giving me feedback on a novel. My work as an editor keeps me involved in that side of things, but I do miss the atmosphere of a group of friends seriously discussing something I’ve written and coming away with pages of notes to work on.

The particular workshop that led to this story escapes me. I can’t remember what the prompt was, but as with all writing, it reflects back to me my interests at the time and shows some tics in my writing, the things I will reach for first when trying to get something started.

It opens with a line of dialogue, something I love in writing. I hate a preamble (seriously, all those podcast presenters who spend five minutes at the start telling us what they ensuing conversation is going to be about, stop it. Get out of the way and let us hear the conversation. You don’t have to sell it, I’ve already subscribed) but it’s bad writing to a certain school of journalism (every interview I do for the Japan Times I open with a sentence from the interviewee that perfectly introduces the theme of the interview and every time I’m asked by my editor to write a proper introduction. Which is fine. Papers have their preferred style and my taste isn’t more important). In my short stories, I get to indulge.

The two string guitar comes from a memory of being a student at Glasgow, doing my creative writing masters, and sitting with my classmates in Louise Welsh’s living room, late at night, drunk, and finding exactly such a guitar. I sat fiddling with it for a while, trying to tune the two strings to each other (it was the A and D, if I remember right) before Louise said, somewhat exasperatedly (I’m well aware someone picking up a guitar at a party is a signal for eye rolling and polite toleration) “Play something then” exactly the line in the story. I did, in fact, then play “Teenage Kicks”.

Louise’s flat was much, much cleaner than the flat in the story, however. I won’t name the person in whose flat I used to regularly find things like scrabble tiles while sitting on the floor, but I want to make perfectly clear I am not accusing Louise of keeping an untidy house!

At the time, which would have been 2008 or 2009, I was reading a lot of Marx and a lot about Marx. In the wake of the 2007 economic collapse, a few podcasts I listened to began discussing exactly what was wrong with capitalism from an economic viewpoint, not a political one (if you can separate the two). Mark Thomas’s It’s the Stupid Economy was one, but it kept cropping up in the unlikeliest of places. I’d read the Communist Manifesto, and read a decent amount about left wing revolutionary groups as all liberal teenagers do, but I’d never really engaged with Marxism on an analytical level. What I was coming to understand is that there are two strands to Marx’s writings – his analysis of capitalism (in Capital, for example) and his writing about Communism. In essence, one strand is writing about the present, one about the future. I’d only every really engaged with Marx’s view of the future and never really dug into his analysis of the present. After 2007 when we definitively entered the era of late-stage capitalism, the time seemed apposite. I started with Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right, and a podcast Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, which are a series of lectures he gave at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). This reading, listening and thinking bled into a lot of my writing from the time, as it does here.

Around the same time I went backpacking in China and read Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (also translated as The Possessed or Demons, my translation was The Devils) as I was going. It’s perhaps Dostoyevsky’s most blatantly political novel, dealing as it does with a revolutionary group in Tsarist Russia. I love this book because while it has much of the depth of thought and emotion that Crime and Punishment has, it also has much more humour than Dostoyevsky is usually given credit for (I think it would be hard to write about revolutionary groups without there being at least some humour). I’ve never been politically committed enough to be an active campaigner (speechwriting is my ideal political role, and yes I’ve fantasised about being Toby from the West Wing) but I have enormous respect for those who do (not all, of course, but the ones who do it out of a genuine desire to help and improve). So all of that fed into this short scene of two campaigners hanging out during their down time.

My copy of The Devils was stolen in China, taken by one of my companions in the sleeper car (4 bunks to a room) from Xian to Shanghai. I didn’t notice until I gathered my belongings and by then I was the last one in the car. I didn’t mind. I don’t know if The Devils is banned in China or not, but the idea of someone in an authoritarian regime stealing my copy of that book, reading it and passing it on fills me with pleasure.