Guides to Writing Poetry

A friend of mine was recently doing some research on poetry and I remembered I'd written some guides for the now sadly defunct Wise Badger website. These are here. There are sections on rhythm, ballads, villanelles and cinquains.


1. A Guide To Poetic Rhythm

Poetry has much in common with music. It is soothing to the ear, if that is its intent. It can stir the passions. It can alter your mood instantly. Music is essentially a combination of pitch, rhythm, meaning and the shape of the sound. Poetry has all these elements but pitch.

Because of this, the rhythm and the shape of the sound need to be more interesting for a poem to be successful. The need for meaning depends on the style of the poem. People like Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Wendy Cope did without it on occasion.

I am not going to go into all the details of what differentiates a trochee from an iamb from an anapest. These are just technical terms for the type of rhythm a poem possesses, but anyone interested in a list of the jargon can find it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_%28prosody%29. What I am going to do is give you some ideas how to use them.

The basic unit of measurement in poetry is a 'foot'. The 'metre', the equivalent of the time signature in music, is made up of the type of foot and the number of them per line. The 'iambic pentameter' you might have heard from school just means there are five 'iambs' (an unstressed beat followed by a stressed one) per line.

So what are stressed and unstressed beats? These are the syllables that make up your words. Some are stressed and some aren't. Let's take the start of Shakespeare's most famous sonnet as an example:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

There is a recognisable rhythm to these words. All the way, it is an unstressed beat followed by a stressed one (the 'iamb') and there are five of them per line. If the stressed syllables are emboldened and the unstressed ones are not, we get the following:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Being a musician, I tend to think of this in terms of drum patterns, with a kick drum for the unstressed beats and a snare for the stressed ones. If it helps you to think of it in Morse code, dots can be unstressed syllables and dashes stressed ones. So this rhythm is :

. - . - . - . - . -

As a rule of thumb, the key for rhythm in poetry, as it is in music, is consistency. Once a rhythmic pattern has been established, the poem is often stronger for adhering to it. This is more important when writing lyrics than poems, to be honest. There are times when you would want to change metre for effect. For example, this limerick:

There once was a bard from Japan

Whose limericks never would scan.

When told it was so,

He replied, "Yes, I know,

But I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can.

But the basic rhythm is as follows:

.-. .-. .-

.-. .-. .-

.-. .-

.-. .-

.-. .-. .-

This is the standard limerick metre. It is not enough to get the number of syllables right. They also have to be the right type of syllables.

What I find helpful is to know, when I'm writing a poem, what the underlying rhythm is. Generally, once I've got the the first two lines, it tells me enough about the metre and rhyme scheme to continue.

Let's write a quick couplet as an example:

Feel the rhythm in your feet

This is as follows: -. -. -. -

So we need a similar rhythm for the second line. How about ''the poem's heart is the poem's beat'? This is .-. -.. -. -

There were a couple of extra unstressed beats in that, but that's fine. That often happens when a drummer is playing, and drummers don't know much but they do know rhythm! It's just a couple of extra beats and that makes the poem more interesting. The important thing is that the stressed beats (the snare drum equivalent) are in the right place.

This also works because the additional unstressed beats (the opening 'the' and the 'is the') were short syllables. Some take longer to say than others. 'Heart' for example, is a word to luxuriate over. It's always a good idea to read your poems over a beat – fingers snapping, hands clapping, the slapping of your thigh if you're getting into a country rhythm, etc. This ensures that everything is in the right place. Regional variations of pronunciation should be taken into account. I'm a Londoner, so 'bath' is pronounced 'barf'. Were I from somewhere more Northern, if might be 'baff'. This is the difference between a long syllable and a short one.

There are poems to be recited aloud, and poems to be read on the page. Bear in mind when writing that repetition of rhythm gives the reader more of a chance to understand what's going on. However, like progressive rock music, only complexity can satisfy a more discerning reader. Like so many things, the key is to know your audience.

2. How To Write a Poetic Ballad

There is probably no word that appeals to me as a poet while simultaneously repelling me as a musician as much as 'ballad' does. As a musician, it conjures up images of schmaltzy, sentimental, over-emoted slow tempo songs about love. Perhaps uniquely, putting the word 'power' in front of it doesn't make things better at all. As a poet, however, 'ballad' reminds me of some wonderful poems, a continuous tradition that goes back to the 13^th century and was itself influenced by earlier works such as Beowulf. To most people, a ballad is just a song you can slow dance to. But that definition has only been the musical one, and is only about a hundred years old. So what is a ballad in poetical terms?

As you might expect from something that has been going on for hundreds of years with only poetic fashion to regulate it, there are conventions rather than rules. Most ballads tend to be made of quatrains (four line stanzas), although the likes of Oscar Wilde subverted this with 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', which had six line stanzas. Most ballads in Europe follow a pattern of alternating lines of tetrameter (four beats to the line) and trimeter (three beats) but in places like Spain, the tradition was more for eight beats. The tetrameter / trimeter structure was so that ballads could be sung over any number of folk tunes.

One thing that seems to be consistent with ballads everywhere, though, is that they have a narrative. They tell a story. This story can be whatever you like: comic, tragic, religious, romantic. There aren't really any bounds. The alternating lines tend to rhyme, although even that is not a rule. Spain, breaking with tradition, used consonance (like alliteration, except the repeated consonant is not at the start of the word). Ballads also tend to be long and detailed. Some can have dozens of stanzas. They are more concerned with telling a story than the sort of images that could be savoured in a shorter poem. If, say, a haiku is a watercolour, and a limerick is a seaside postcard, a ballad may well be a movie.

I would love to tell you a story as an example of what I mean. To be honest, it was my wife's birthday last night, I'm still hungover and coming up with a new story is beyond my current powers! But I am someone who likes fairy tales in space, so I'm going to have a go at writing a ballad based on some scenes from the Star Wars movies.

I'm going to follow the more common European traditions and use four line stanzas. I will use the standard 'ballad metre' of iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter ('te TUM te TUM te TUM te TUM' followed by 'te TUM te TUM te TUM').

First we should set the scene:

A long, long time ago,

In a galaxy far away,

A young heroic farmboy prince

Was bored of baling hay.

Welcome, Luke Skywalker! You are now the hero of this ballad. Many ballads tell the tale of a character, often a doomed one. And Luke did have his moments of peril.

His name was Luke, his hair was blond,

Tattooine was his world.

There wasn't much to do at night

With two suns and no girls.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot that I borrowed the last line from Blue Harvest, the Family Guy special on Star Wars. But this is actually in the ballad tradition. There is some heated debate by experts as to whether ballads were even written by one person or came from a whole community, like a football chant. But even those who believe they were written by one person agree that they were written for and often based on the community. Tiny Scottish villages have a whole heritage of traditional ballads just based on their history, which battles they fought, etc.

But back to our ballad. We know a little about Luke now. A typical role playing character, basically, a humble innocent unaware of his destiny but itching for more. What happens next? Well, the thing that really rocked his world was the arrival of the droids, R2D2 and C3PO. They were pivotal characters, the only ones to appear in all six movies, and responsible for much of the humour of the franchise. So how do we get them into the ballad?

The pedal bin and golden man,

As camp as Larry Grayson,

Ended up with Uncle Owen,

Luke's closest relation.

I don't like the last line, to be honest, but like rap, many traditional ballads took some terrible liberties with rhymes and there are many examples of words that are seemingly included just because they fit, so I think I'm consistent with the form.

I have introduced the droids by nicknames because I think they give you an affinity with a character. It makes you feel you know them better, especially if it's the sort of affectionate mocking you get among friends. And R2D2 does look like a pedal bin.

So poor Luke is still stuck, having to wait to go to space academy until after the harvest, not understanding it's probably for his own good and angry with those who protect him. To make this seem more immediate, to try and make the reader empathise more, I'm going to write this in the present tense. Also, 'wanted' would have been too many syllables:

He wants to join the rebels but

He's still stuck on the farm.

Uncle Owen keeps him there

To keep him out of harm.

And then the Merlin of the piece arrives, the almost immortal Obi Wan Kenobi. R2D2 had escaped and went looking for him in the desert. The force is strong with that one:

The pedal bin had slipped a cog

And flew across the sand.

Luke went to investigate

But ran into a band

Of sand people. Thankfully,

Obi Wan attacked.

He drove them off and rescued Luke

And took him to his shack.

This technique of spreading a sentence across stanzas is called 'enjambment' and can be effective in building tension during passages with action in them. It might not be something found in the more traditional ballads, but the ballad form is still evolving, still being used by a new generation of poets. This is my first ballad and I'm having a ball.

But back to Luke. He now discovers his father was a Jedi, gets given a light sabre and instantly believes everything a complete stranger tells him about a religion he's never heard of. But that makes him sound less heroic, so we'll leave it out.

Obi Wan dressed like a monk

And sounded like dementia.

But Luke had heard his destiny

And lusted for adventure.

These are not the sort of rhymes I use in any other poetry I write. But I think they fit with a ballad. There is something declamatory about them. Like the limerick, the ballad has its own rhythm that lends itself to immodest rhyming, at least in this metre and style.

It's probably time to give R2D2 his real name. At this point, he plays the hologram he had refused to show Luke. To continue with our ballad:

R2D2 (pedal bin)

Had played a DVD:

On holographic desert air

Was Princess Leia's plea.

I reversed the usual order of the last two lines to put it into the style of Yoda, another character in the Star Wars universe. The small green syntactically challenged Jedi, he is.

'Help me please, oh Obi Wan,

The hour of need is nigh.

Meet me here in Alderan

Before we all must die'.

'Die' is always a good word to end a line with. Everything about it screams finality.

The impassioned speech of the princess brings a bit of melodrama to the proceedings, which was another staple of the ballad tradition. At a time before radio, TV, videogames, etc, and where there was no facility for playing music without playing the instruments, ballads were the soap opera of their day. This is the reason so many traditional songs are quite grisly in their depiction of murders, executions and the like. One way or another, the dark side has always entertained us.

And so have ballads. And they still do. I've been having a great time writing this. You should try it. Pick a story you like and rewrite it in verse. Find inspiration in the newspapers. Writing just this bit has got me thinking about other poems I want to write. Maybe there is even a place for an epic ballad saga based on the lives of the Skywalkers, their droids and all the space folk they meet on their many adventures through the galaxies.

But it is not here. I realise now that there is no way I would be able to write the whole of Star Wars in ballad form for this article, so I'll stop right now. I don't know why I thought I'd be able to. I blame Old Speckled Hen.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas as to what a ballad is and how to write one. They're fun to do and like any creative act, writing a ballad opens up neural pathways that can keep the brain working, prolonging active life.

But for those of you who have somehow avoided seeing Star Wars and want to know what happens, this is the whole saga in abridged ballad form:

The Jedi only fight for good,

The Empire do not.

Things explode, the tale gets told,

The good guys end on top.

 

3  How To Write a Villanelle

The villanelle is arguably the poetic form that has the most 'rules'. The poem must be exactly 19 lines long, 5 tercets (3 line stanzas) followed by a quatrain (a 4 line stanza). Of these 19 lines, 8 of them are the same 2 lines repeated 4 times each. The first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the second and fourth stanzas, and the third line of the sixth. The third line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the third and fifth stanzas and the fourth line of the sixth. Only 2 rhymes are allowed.

Villanelles tend to be about loss, but there are examples of villanelles on all sorts of subjects. 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' (below) by Dylan Thomas, written to his dying father, is probably the most famous one. But give it time - one day, somebody might be writing an article like this about your poem! You just have to write it...

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What makes the villanelle so tricky to write is the need to have the repeated lines and the fact that only two rhymes are allowed (words that rhyme with 'night' and those that rhyme with 'day'). For this reason, at the planning stage (and you will need one), it is important to come up with lines that you don't mind hearing over and over again, and also to make sure that there are sufficient rhymes for them. Don't be shy about using a rhyming dictionary if necessary – there are lots of them available online. Also, be creative with other writing aids – I used a spreadsheet to write my villanelle. It seemed the best way to insist that rhymes got repeated in the right places. It also meant that changes to the repeated lines were instantly reflected in the rest of the poem. Bear in mind also that, as the first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of two others, it needs to be a line that stands on its own.

When I reread Thomas' poem, I wanted to write a villanelle of my own. I booted up Excel instead of Word and got the repeated lines in the right places. It is very easy to link one cell to another just by entering '=' and the reference for the cell you want to copy. That got the structure in place. I tried several repeated lines before deciding on 'This is it. This is the end' and 'And now I've lost a lover and a friend'. I had already decided I wanted to write about the end of a relationship, these lines would not be overly jarring if repeated frequently, 'end' has lots of rhyming words, and the repeated 'this is' was a deliberate echo of Thomas' repeated 'rage' in his villanelle.

So now I had the structure and the repeated lines in place, I just had to flesh it out. The first stanza was almost finished – as it contained both repeated lines, it was only the middle line that was needed, and at this stage it didn't need to rhyme with anything. I tried a few lines and ended up with 'For many years, I've tried to make you stay'. It fitted nicely between the two lines I already had and like 'end', 'stay' has many rhymes.

And that basically was it! I just tried new lines that fit, one stanza at a time. Because I already had the structure and repetitions formalised in Excel, it was impossible to get it wrong.

I was quite pleased with the final poem. This is as follows:

This is it. This is the end.

For many years, I've tried to make you stay

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

I've made mistakes. I've tried to make amends

And in return, you tried to make me pay.

This is it. This is the end.

I've changed so much and no more can I bend:

I think my whole persona's gone astray

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

My love for you was strong: it did ascend

To heaven, but now it's gone away.

This is it. This is the end.

I do not mean to anger or offend

But you and I are now as night and day

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

For too long we've attempted to pretend

That everything could carry on OK.

This is it. This is the end

And now I've lost a lover and a friend.

The villanelle can be a lot of fun to write, and like anything difficult, you really feel like you've accomplished something when it does all work out. Happy writing!

4 - How To Write a Cinquain

The cinquain is an interesting poetic form. Like the haiku and tanka, on which it is based, it emphasises economy and adherence to syllabic rules. The cinquain was invented by American poet Adelaide Crapsey in a posthumous collection from 1915, It derives its name from the five line structure of the basic form.

There are many types of cinquain to choose from, but they all basically follow the same pattern – one line has (say) two syllables, the next four, the next six, etc, The number of syllables alters from line to line in accordance with the rules of the individual form.

A good example of Mrs Crapsey's cinquains is 'November Night':

Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall

This basic cinquain follows a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern. But we're not going to do a basic one. That would be boring. We're going to push the boat out and write a 'garland cinquain', which seems to be the hardest of all. A man's reach must exceed his grasp, to quote Robert Browning.

The garland cinquain is made up of six separate cinquains, the sixth one derived from the previous five. So the first line of the sixth one comes from the first line of the first, the second line of the sixth from the second line of the second and so forth.

Like the villanelle, a planning process is useful. It is better to write the sixth cinquain first and base the earlier ones around it.

How do we do that then? Well, a good place to start would be to come up with a theme. This is usually the hard part. I find it somewhat daunting to sit down with a blank page and every subject in the world as an option. I work better with parameters. Maybe you do too. So as I'm writing this for Wise Badger, I'm going to make this poem about the wisdom of badgers.

The first line of the last cinquain has to have two syllables. By a fortunate coincidence, 'badgers' has two syllables. So I'm going to make that my first line. We have established a cast of characters. What can we say about the badgers?

Well, we want to emphasise their wisdom, and we have to do it in four syllables. So how about 'wiser than owls'?

The next line needs to be six syllables long. The previous line was unexpected: owls are generally considered rather wise. So we need to justify this statement. What makes badgers wiser than owls? I needed some time with Wikipedia to work this out, but the badger has some advantages over the owl. For one thing, a badger can eat an owl but an owl cannot eat a badger. So I suggest: 'can pluck birds from the trees'.

The following line is eight syllables long. So far, we have: 'badgers / wiser than owls / can pluck birds from the trees'. What can the owl do instead? Not much, really. For such a wise bird, it lives mainly on a diet of vermin. So let's reflect that. 'But owls can only chew on rats' seems to sum this up. We need a two syllable line to finish the sixth cinquain, so let's just add 'and voles'. We now have the following:

Badgers,
Wiser than owls,

Can pluck birds from the trees

But owls can only chew on rats

And voles.

We're on our way. It may not seem like we've done much, but we're actually 33% complete. We have written five lines, all of which will be repeated, making ten in total, and the whole poem will be thirty lines long.

The first line of the first cinquain will be the first line of the sixth one we just wrote. So it starts with 'badgers'. A good place to start, given the subject matter. There are no rules that we need to adhere to for the remaining lines, except for the syllable count. So line two needs to have four syllables.

What else do we know about badgers? They're white, black and grey in colour. By another remarkable coincidence, 'white, black and grey' would fill the four syllables we need quite nicely. So let's add that.

Comparisons often work well in poetry. What else is white, black and grey? An elderly nun springs to mind. Also a well read newspaper. We need a six syllable line, followed by an eight and a two. So I suggest: 'like an elderly nun / or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs / and time'. That seems to work.

Cinquain number one is therefore:

Badgers,

White, black and grey,

Like an elderly nun

Or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs

And time

Cinquain number two needs to have 'wiser than owls' as its second line, but no-one says the punctuation has to stay the same. I'm going to rephrase it as a question and make the first line 'what are', so we have 'what are / wiser than owls?'. As it's a question, we should probably answer it. There are many things wiser than owls. At least some humans, I would imagine. I've never understood why the owl was considered wise when 'bird brained' is an insult. Who are some famously wise humans? I don't want to get into whether Socrates was wiser than Nietzsche, or Keats more wise than Shakespeare so I'll limit myself to job descriptions. The following six and eight syllable lines suggested themselves immediately but seemed to require a more defiant statement. Luckily the two syllable line was available.

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Cinquain two is now complete as follows:

What are

Wiser than owls?

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Getting into my stride now. Only another twelve lines to write and we've finished this. It's already 60% complete.

The previous line seems to require some explanation. We need to come up with a way to justify the grouping together of badgers with the loftiest ideals of the human psyche. Back to Wikipedia. One thing that impressed me about the badger was that, in North America it sometimes eats coyotes, sometimes is eaten by them but has been seen working co-operatively with the wolf-like creatures when they hunt. This intrigued me.

The only other constraint on this cinquain is that the third line must be 'can pluck birds from trees'. Hmmm.

How about 'badgers / can run with wolves / can pluck birds from the trees'. That showcases their occasionally co-operative natures and their tree-climbing skills. The next line, the eight syllable one, will probably need to start with 'and'. So how about 'and work with species not their own / to hunt'.

The third cinquain is now complete:

Badgers

Can run with wolves

Can pluck birds from the trees

And work with species not their own

To hunt

This may not seem like a big deal. Humans hunt with dogs and horses. The badger / coyote relationship seems a lot more democratiic though. Could this be a sign of wisdom?

By this time, I had got the rhythm stuck in my head and words were just coming out that fit without much conscious thought. I was pleased with this:

We hunt

With dog and horse

But we dominate them

The badgers just collaborate

Wisely

Then I remembered that the fourth line had to be 'but owls can only chew on rats'. I thought of the badger's omnivore status and came up with the following:

The gut

Of a badger

Can process many things

But owls can only chew on rats.

Real wise.

Another badger skill, especially if you're a honey badger, is to shrug off the venom from the snakes you eat. They have the resistance to toxins of a beat poet. The honey badger has been described as 'the most fearless animal in the world'. Its willingness to fight, and fight dirty, is a staple of YouTube links around the world.

'Honey / badgers are brave' fits the requirements of the first two lines of the fifth cinquain. They are natives of Africa and have eaten from animals as wild as lions. Their taste for exotic meat could be represented as 'fearless in their hunger / for more exotic fare than mice / and voles'. The 'and voles' was required by the form.

So now we have a finished Garland Cinquain. This is the final piece:

Badgers,

White, black and grey,

Like an elderly nun

Or a newspaper, smeared by thumbs

And time

What are

Wiser than owls?

Philosophers, poets,

And, believe it or not, badgers.

They are.

Badgers

Can run with wolves

Can pluck birds from the trees

And work with species not their own

To hunt

The gut

Of a badger

Can process many things

But owls can only chew on rats.

Real wise.

Honey

Badgers are brave,

Fearless in their hunger

For more exotic fare than mice

And voles.

Badgers,
Wiser than owls,

Can pluck birds from the trees

But owls can only chew on rats

And voles.

There are other types of cinquain than the 2-4-6-8-2 format shown here. A reverse cinquain goes 2-8-6-4-2. A mirror is a normal cinquain followed by a reverse one. A butterfly cinquain goes 2-4-6-8-2-8-6-4-2. And a crown cinquain is five cinquains combined to make a longer poem.

The cinquain is an interesting exercise in writing. If you are writing something in blank verse, where there are a specific number of syllables on each line, writing some cinquains can get you into the flow of counting beats. Like the haiku, it can be considered both an end in itself and a means to other writing.

War, Games and Wargames

First of all, I love videogames. I'm not some old bastard who thinks children should be sent outside on a sunny day with a stick and a hoop because it was enough for me when I was a kid. It wasn't.

I have been addicted to videogames with varying degrees of obsession since I was old enough to see the screen of the machines on the seaside pier. I'm old enough that when I was young, it was the only place to see them. They were far and away my favourite part of the holiday. I was never the sort to get that excited about hunting crabs in rock pools or riding donkeys or seeing Madame Rosa, such a powerful mistress of her own destiny that she's reduced to telling others about theirs, at a fiver a throw, from the wooden stall between the candy floss and the jellied eels.

No, I just liked the fact that this was something I felt part of. No longer was I limited to shouting at the screen when the hero did something stupid, like in all those films I used to like. Now I was the hero. I had some say in the matter. I felt empowered. I hadn't felt lacking power before: this wasn't some deep psychological need to feel in control of some aspect of my life, even if it was just a tiny block of pixels on a tiny screen. This was about the story. I've always loved stories too. For the first time, I was able to write my own story, on-screen. Maybe it was the story of the ham-fisted redhead who got wiped out by the evil Galaxian empire, but so what? It was my 10p and I'll tell whatever damned story I want. I have choice.

Now, though, I'm not sure the same choices apply. Sure, the games are absolutely fantastic. They really are. High gloss, with Hollywood production values and stories, music and voiceovers by Oscar winners... they can spend years on a title. Tens of millions of dollars. This isn't the industry that gave us Manic Miner anymore, where one teenager (a very manic minor) spent six weeks in his bedroom with his Spectrum and came out with the best selling game for years. This is a very different industry indeed.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I'm going to start this with a big 'what if'. What if you were the government of a militaristic country that had loads of ambitious plans for invading lots of smaller countries, countries that may arguably have been equally militaristic but were way too small to be a conceivable threat? What if you had a lot of high tech military hardware that was the result of having your military spending more than the next 23 countries combined? What if a whole generation of young men were addicted to videogames, often involving war and shooting stuff? And what if the people who made these games wanted you to help them make them more realistic?

Now, let's say you wanted to cut down on training costs for your army. Would you not get your new games developer mates to change a little of the game? Perhaps hammer home the fact that North Korea were the bad guy, or Afghanistan, or whatever else? Would you not use Xbox controllers to control the real aerial drones in Afghanistan, because your recruits already know how to use them? Ensure that as much of the Army, Navy or Air Force training required was done as part of the game? Gun and plane recognition, map reading, spatial awareness, jargon, squad tactics, urban guerilla techniques, familiarity with a country, some local words... these could all be learnt on an Xbox, and the recruit pays for it themselves. It's a win-win.

The Scouts were originally conceived as a way of preparing boys for life in the forces. The Empire required a constant source of new soldiers to put down mutinies from those pesky ungrateful colonial types, who inexplicably resented all these strange white faces that were just trying to civilise them with things like smallpox, opium and Christianity. Preparing Englishmen from childhood to wearing uniform, taking orders, learning a few survival skills and pledging loyalty to God and the Queen was a good way of cutting down the training process.

It just strikes me that we are doing a similar thing with videogames. Or at least we have the potential to. Here is something that kids of an impressionable age will be spending hundreds of hours on. God knows I did. I had to retake my Chemistry 'O' level because of Jet Set Willy, which was much more interesting than the periodic table. That was over 25 years ago now, and I can still remember so much about it. About all those games. Had I spent that period of my life playing games that suggested everyone with a turban was a bad guy who should be shot, who knows what my world view would be like now? As it is, I live in perpetual fear of cleaning up after a party, which is what Jet Set Willy was all about.

If kids of an impressionable age are spending vast amounts of time on something, it's going to leave an impression, possibly one more troubling than getting the theme tune stuck in their head. Some fairly important people are worried about this. The president of Venezuela believed Mercenaries 2, which was set in his country, was so designed to get the American public supporting an invasion because they would be used to thinking of the Venezuelans as the enemy. In fairness, the Americans were greedy, stupid and oil-obsessed in the game and there was no real good or bad guy. Such things do not concern mercenaries. But he saw the potential for the influence to be misused and so do I.

Maybe there should be a 'manipulative political content' rating on games as well as the ones for the violence and swearing. It's far more dangerous because you don't even know it's there.

The Write Job Might Not Be Performing

I had to write an essay at music college on the changes to the music industry. At the time, I dealt mainly with the market for recorded music: how record shops were going to the wall because of format changes, how seeing their distribution medium for music change from atoms to bits had enabled piracy on an industrial scale and how the only future for actual records would be for obsessive audiophiles that either thought the warmth of vinyl was better than the convenience of MP3s or for those who wanted music so obscure it had never been digitised. Maybe there's a version of Basin Street Blues by The Blind Presidents where Sweet Huey Desmond does this wild clarinet solo or something, but it was on an independent label in New Orleans and there were only a few copies. There will always be completists. I've met Dylan fans over the years who have literally thousands of his live recordings, because His Bobness has a habit of rewriting his songs while performing them and it's never the same thing twice.

But even since I was at college (and that was only about five years ago), the industry has changed. I saw an interesting graph recently. It showed that in the 70s, the typical working band would make 90% of its income from sales and 10% from touring. The gigs were basically an advert for the album. Now, those figures are reversed. Bands like The Rolling Stones make far more from ticket sales, T-shirts, etc, than they do from selling CDs. If it's sold as bits, if it can be digitised, it will be on Pirate Bay the day it's released. The main function of the recordings is now to encourage people to come to the gigs, and while there, buy some tat. Perhaps a patch of a mouth with a tongue sticking out that can be sewn onto a backpack or something. A baseball cap. A belt buckle, with some bands. I saw a Family Guy recently where Chris said 'belt buckles are a great way to express opinions'. He may be right.

But I don't think it's right that bands can only be successful if they play live. The Beatles gave it up in 1966 and did all their best work afterwards. Many great albums used studio tricks that could not have been replicated live at the time, and that even now, would usually require a very formalised timing that allows little in the way of improvisation or rediscovery. I've seen Floyd live a dozen times but they are always stadium rock gigs with a cast of thousands and everyone is keeping time to a click track. I've always had a great time, but it would have been nice to see them at Middle Earth in the 60s where everything was made up on the spot and they could just work off of each other. I don't want to see them recreating the album when I see them live: I want to see great artists in the act of creating something. I want to see improvised sections, something new, something other than what I could get from the album. I could have stayed at home and got that. I could have avoided the crowds, the larcenous prices, the rail replacement buses and the frantic rush from Wembley to Paddington late at night, wishing they hadn't left Comfortably Numb for the encore because you couldn't possibly leave without hearing that and now you might have to spend the night on the pavement. To be fair, it would have been worth it too. Great song and awesome live. But I digress.

Having a situation where the role of the album is to advertise the tour is bad for music, because it encourages bands to just do live what they did on the album, which means they will only do on the album what they can do live. And there are many musicians (like me) who hate the performing side but love the writing and recording. What are we to do? There are two types of bands: they do covers or they do originals. If they do covers, they are not going to want to do my songs. And if they do originals, it will be because they want to do their own songs, and mine will just be covers they've not heard of.

And if we're in a situation where writers have to be performers before their work can get out there, what of the people that are sensitive enough to be a great writer but too sensitive to be performer of any kind? There have been enough casualties in the past. Don McLean's 'this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you' could have been written about any number of people in music, people like Syd Barrett and Peter Green, people who were artists in an industry that processed artists. It is hard to deal with for some. I worry about some of the clearly unwell people I have seen on Britain's Got Talent and the like. If they did win, it would kill them. Susan Boyle seems to have come close.

I guess my central point is this: writer and performer are different jobs, and it would be surprising if the best performer was necessarily the best writer. It may well be that the best performers can't write for shit and the best writers sit at home telling nobody about it because they're not the going outdoors and talking to people type. The sort of personality that makes someone a good frontman could limit the sort of songs they are capable of writing. If you want a song about feeling ignored and unloved, say, ask the bassist to write it. :)

Like many things, we can get better results if we play to our strengths. If one country grows shit wheat but good cattle, and another nation the opposite, they can both have shit pies or they can share and both have good pies. But for as long as we have good writers who are bad singers (Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, etc) and good singers who are bad writers (way too many to name and I don't listen to the bad writers anyway), music is going to be less than it could be.

I have a theory on songwriting. It's called the Scooby Doo theory. Imagine a line with Daphne at one end and Velma at the other. So it goes from pretty but shallow to plain but interesting, in effect. I think most artists can be plotted along here somewhere. Dylan is all Velma. He's got a voice like sand and glue, as Bowie said, and yet he's an amazing poet and if you've heard decent lyrics since the mid 60s, it was probably because Dylan let people see it was possible. At the other end, say, is Mariah Carey. Lovely clear voice but she is dull as ditchwater and apparently said that when she sees pictures of starving African children she wants to cry, because she could never get that thin.

There are always exceptions of course. John Lennon bends the graph. Paul Simon too, because he can write some amazing lyrics and he has the same sort of choirboy voice as Paul McCartney, although I don't want to hit Paul Simon around the back of the head with a shovel.

Not sure why I'm so pissed off with Paul McCartney at the moment. It's probably just because it's Christmas. That would mean I was simply having a wonderful Christmas time, though. And then maybe I could drown Cliff Richard in an enormous vat of mistletoe and wine. With a couple of dead reindeer floating in it. One has a red nose because I punched it in the face. Noddy Holder would be well advised to steer clear of me too...

And as for Shakin' Bloody Stevens...

(Self) Publish and Be Damned

I got the first paper copy of part of my new novel today. It was very exciting. The novel isn't complete - this was just a tester to make sure there weren't any major problems in the parts I was able to write before Lulu.com's 30% off offer ended and I had to pay more for everything. Incidentally, saying '30% off of everything on the site' is a lie if the postage is at the same larcenous rates it always is, but hey ho. Accept the things you cannot change.

So I've now been re-reading it again, in print this time. I'm not going to lie about it: I'm a very self-indulgent person. I like to luxuriate in whatever I've done because deep down, I probably don't believe I'm capable of it. It comes as a pleasant surprise. Deep down, I might not be Andy the writer. Maybe I'm still Andrew the accountant. But that's a problem for another day.

The problem for today is how long it takes to be self-indulgent as a novelist. You have to read a whole book! It was no problem when I was just doing a poem. Anything longer than three sides of A4 was generally too long to perform: you get timed slots. And songs were generally quite short. My longest was my Christmas song at eleven and a half minutes. You can still get on with stuff if there's a song playing. You just listen out for that bass run or that really cool organ bit that Ray Manzarek wishes he'd thought of. Painters, as they generally do, have it the easiest of all. Just hang it on a wall and glance at it. No-one even knows you're doing it.

As a novelist, though, to get properly self-indulgent, who have to sit down for a good couple of days. You can just zoom in on favourite bits, but then you feel bad that the rest of it isn't your favourite and start asking what's wrong with it. It gets complicated. Doubt sets in.

So now I have about 70% of a book to get self-indulgent about. It has a cool cover though. My friend Helen Cherry took the photo and posted it online. When I saw it, I regretted that I couldn't use it because the book was supposed to be called 'Across the Universe' and be mostly set in space. But when I realised how long it would take to tell the (supposedly preliminary) tale of them battling across a post-nuclear wilderness, she let me use it. She even resized it and made it purple.

And now I've just got to finish the damned thing so I can start being self-indulgent all over again! I know where it's going and it scares me. This will be the longest thing I've written by at least a hundred pages. There are several parallel story threads happening as it builds to the conclusion, several sub-plots. There's lots going on.

Writing is like riding a tiger. The hard part can be knowing how to stop. But I'm having a lovely time, killing people in interesting ways and discovering new and interesting things about America. A couple of weeks back, I had a helicopter following the Colombia River east, towards the Rockies, and when I checked the map, there was a place called The Dalles. I investigated this tiny hamlet and it turned out to have been the site of the first biochemical attack on American soil. And I just checked it out because I liked the name and thought I might be able to get a 'Dallas' pun in there somewhere! Maybe make all the residents be called J.R. or Bobby or Sue Ellen or something. But no, it was the home of a mad cult that gave 700 people salmonella so they could influence a county election and get planning permission to extend their compound. And that was after a prolonged campaign of wiretapping, attempted murder and all sorts.

Funny old world.

Anyway, I'm probably getting self-indulgent about self-indulgence now, so I'm going to go and be self-indulgent about my book instead. I've just got to a good bit :)

Roll Over, Lazarus

Well, I didn't think I'd be blogging again. I set a blog up ages ago when I was doing a creative writing course. We were encouraged to write every day so I was rambling about all sorts of shit. Facebook back then limited posts to 400 characters or something crazy. It was almost as bad as Twitter. I've never seen the appeal of that. Anything that can be said in 140 characters isn't worth saying.

As soon as I could post essay length things on Facebook, I dropped the blog, apart from the occasional writing competition or something. And it would have stayed that way had I not caught up with Helena, an old school friend. She had told me I should write a blog, I told her that I had, she read it and told me I should write more. So here we are. Why not? I'm always up for rambling about stuff.

And what a world full of stuff we live in! All sorts of things. Things we can touch, things we've done, things we never will, and sometimes, things we write stuff on. I may be writing something on not ending sentences with prepositions at some point. If I do, the last sentence was an example, a taste of things to come.

I'm writing this on my piece of shit laptop. It's probably about four years old, the disk is too full to defrag so it runs like a dead dog trying to swim in molasses, several keys don't work properly because there is so much tobacco and smoking paraphenalia under them and it overheats several times a day.

And while I'm writing this on my laptop, I'm also writing it on my laptop. I'm writing about technology. If all goes according to the plan, by the end of the month or so, I will have written five books on this beast. And yet I care nothing for it at all.

Not a jot. If I have the data, I don't care about anything else. The bits are everything. The atoms merely contain them. It's the ones and zeroes that matter.

Had I typed up the manuscripts for three novels and two poetry collections, I'd probably have them in a fireproof safe, even if I had to make it myself out of used asbestos and Quality Street tins buried in the garden. I would have an emotional connection to the pieces of paper. If I ever became the sort of writer that knew how to sell books, future generations might have bid at auction for the original manuscript.

What can I leave to posterity? A laptop I hopefully won't still have in a couple of years time and an OpenOffice ODT file. Literally the first time I print anything is when I see the first bound proof reading copy, and I've usually been so obsessive about proof reading (as has Gen) that there aren't really any major changes. So I have no atoms to leave, only bits.

It's not just authors that are affected, of course, even if they are the sort of authors who might be celebrated enough to have their manuscripts change hands at auction.

Both my mum and my nan had a stack of love letters, tied up in a ribbon, that my dad and granddad had written to them. I still think it's lovely. There was a lot of time taken to write them. They would have been required to buy stamps and envelopes, to leave the house to post them. There was an investment.

I don't think kids today are really going to have this opportunity. From what I've seen (and I've been father or de facto stepfather to a few of them now), they communicate mainly using texts or Facebook. Facebook isn't so bad, although a little sterile, a little lacking in the personal touch. And it takes ages to look at older messages, especially if you have the sort of relationship where you communicate a lot.

As for texts, though... the teenagers I've seen change their boyfriends and their phones on a constant basis. For them to show their kids and grandkids the sort of messages my mum and nan had, they are not going to need a bit of space in a dressing table. They're going to need a landfill. And chances are, they're not the sort of declarations of undying love that posterity will be kind to. Acronyms and punctuation seem to be the main linguistic tools for communicating emotion.

I'm old enough to have written love letters and optimistic enough to have written love poetry. I think it's nice to craft it, put some time in. The convenience of texting is great for things that needed confirmation, but not discussion. Saying 'fancy a pint at the Glue Pot at 8?' works a lot better than 'what do you want to do tonight?' Short questions and short answers suit the medium better. And things like taking time to woo a lady, even thinking of her as a lady, are so far out of the norm that maybe it's inevitable that the technology can't cope.

Shame though.

But I've not lost hope. I think, like this blog, and like Lazarus, romance could be in for a comeback. I've had my faith in love restored, and I'm one of the most calloused, cynical, grumpy bastards I've ever met. And yet on New Year's Day, Gen and I will have been together a year.

I've had two other phones since we met. I still keep the phone with her first texts on it though. Just in case my grandkids are interested.

Cinderella Flash Fiction

Here's my entry for a competition to update a fairy tale in 350 words or less. This is exactly 350 words:

“Well of course you're shallow!” said the Fairy Godmother. “What's with the sense of entitlement? Of course you can't go to the ball. You don't belong. Why would you want to go? Have you got anything to wear? No! You expect me to provide it. Why do you want the prince? You've already got Buttons.”

“I don't want Buttons, I want the prince,” said Cinderella.

“I want, I want... it's all I get from you. Ooh, I have to have the best carriage and the finest horses and a ball gown that makes me look like a meringue so I can pretend to be someone I'm not. Don't you think someone wanted that pumpkin? And what did the mice ever do to you? You're just bloody selfish.”

“But you're my fairy godmother! You're supposed to be helping me!” She stamped her foot.

“I am helping you, you airhead! You'll get nowhere with these ridiculous expectations. Live within your means. Pick a man who loves you, not some tool who thinks you can base love on shoe size. Learn to be happy within your own life. Don't change your life. Change yourself.”

“Don't change my life? I have to work!”

“Everyone has to work, sugar. You think I'm doing this for the good of my health?”

“You don't know what it's like. Did you never watch Slumtown's Next Top Princess and think 'that could be me?'”

A derisive snort. “You need to sort your life out, girl. You're even harder work than Lady Di. And we all know how that ended up...” A shudder. “Look, you need to get this into your head. You're not going to be a princess. Like most people, you've got a hard life that you have to make the best of. Work out what skills you've got and use them to your best advantage.”

So Cinderella got herself pregnant by a married footballer, sold her harrowing story to the tabloids and spent the rest of her life blaming the fairy because she wasn't a princess.