It’s not the sort of thing I’d have done when I was younger. I rather looked down on such things then. It was all about the work, the talent, the integrity. Etcetera.

Well it is about those things of course, but the sad, or at any rate realistic, fact is that you’ll never get anything published unless you get out there in some way or other.

It might be a Masters programme that attracts the notice of agents, it might be a writers’ group that runs its own events and brings out its own anthology, it might a charismatic leader who sacrifices his own interests for the good of his followers (a rare breed indeed), but something has to make the introverted writer turn to the outside world and try to make contact with it.

I don’t quite know why novelists are like this, but they’re notorious for it. It’s not true of playwrights or screenwriters, in fact it’s untrue of everyone else who works in any of the creative industries, where everything operates in teams. If people in these lines aren’t prepared to work with others, they don’t work at all.

I’ve been networking  ever since I was published, and looking back I can see that I was slowly working towards it, getting a bit better at it all the time, a bit less inward, a bit less intense and a bit more aware of people other than myself for a long time before it.

It started with running an event called the Tchai Ovna teahouse readings, where, for a long time, I didn’t read my own stuff despite having the perfect opportunity to do so. Refusing to sell out, you know. Above it all. Hanging onto integrity like grim death.

Now I network deliberately at meetings, conferences, societies and groups, and I’ve seen for myself the successful results of it. It really is, fairly or not, about who you know.

Years ago on my Creative Writing masters I met Carol McKay, an excellent writer of short stories. Some years later through a networking event called Weegie Wednesday I met her husband Keith. Not being a writer himself but always one of the crowd at all the writing events he was beginning to hatch an idea. The digital revolution was happening and everyone was wondering if, how and when they should jump into it.

About six months ago Keith launched Pothole Press, a new e-publishing company. First out was Carol’s book Ordinary Domestic, a collection of stories she’d written down the years that had won prizes and been published in various anthologies. It’s a startlingly original first book by a really gifted writer.

At around the same time I realised I had a problem. I’d written one novel that had made a bit of a splash but I had nothing to follow it up with. I needed to buy time to write the next one.

What to do? What to do?

Carol McKay

The answer was to gather three stories I’d published before and give them over to Pothole to publish in a new volume. The result was a publication I’m really proud of, Best Man. It came out just before Christmas and did very well. It’s still doing so.

What was fascinating was seeing that the act of putting them together didn’t just give them new life. It made them into something new, something bigger and deeper because of their juxtaposition with each other. Something that made me understand the common themes between them more clearly than I had before. It made them from three separate short pieces into one longer work.

And about this book, some good news the other day. Two glowing reviews appeared suddenly that keep me feeling I’m getting the books out there, keeping the energy and the drive going while I get on with the second novel. If you click the links, you can see them.

http://www.northwordsnow.co.uk/issues/2013/NNow23ForWebv2.pdf

http://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wie-editions/editions/nawe-conference-2012.html

Pothole are a new kind of publisher because they can do this. Using all the advantages of digital publication, working across Kindle, iApple, Kobo and Nook and willing to extend after that towards print-on-demand, they give writers like me the chance to use the full range of publishing forms to best effect.

They open the door for a new writer to develop current and existing work in ways that allow him always to move forward.

Carol has gone on to publish more of her work, including a groundbreaking work on Addison’s Disease and a creative writing textbook.

And another excellent new writer (well, she’s now on her third novel so I’m not sure if she still counts as new, to be honest), Leela Soma, has brought out an anthology of her own, Boxed In, also on Pothole. Which adds up (all modesty aside) to a portfolio of some of the best new writing there is around at the moment.

So best wishes to Keith, Carol, Leela and all at Pothole. Lang may their lums reek, as we say in Scotland. (It means, long may they keep warm and healthy, sort of.) I know in my bones that Pothole Press is going to be around for a long time to come, and as proof of it there will a special Pothole Press reading at the Tchai Ovna teahouse in September, and lots of other Pothole author events.

Leela Soma

You might not be able to make it, but anyone who reads this is very welcome.

I’m pleased. Disproportionately and deliberately so. It’s been a while since I’ve made time to focus on the writing career and this story, dashed off in an angry spurt last autumn, means more than one small piece of success. It’s also the first new one I’ve written in a long time. As such it’s a reminder of and a pointer towards the route I must follow.

It’s brought back to me how much I love short stories. They were the first thing I tried to write, thinking that once I’d mastered them I’d move on to novels. Thirty five years have passed and I’m still learning, and now I know I’ll never know everything about them. And I’m glad of it.

They have a beauty all their own. They don’t pretend to be more than they are. They keep their feet on the ground. There’s no space for pretension, wool-gathering, build-ups towards reveals or climaxes.

Their very shortness lets them do things novels can’t. They take the more direct route. They punch through things novels have to go round.

At the same time they’re subtle, suggestive. They flicker. They’re alive.

And they’re fast, or they can be. You can throw one off. The energy of the writing can be the narrative drive. They can be hard, accurate, sharp.

I guess all writers have to decide what their relationship to their work is, and know that that relationship changes. For me at the moment when the novels don’t flow or need time and attention I don’t have, the short stories surge out. They’re bursts of feeling or memory or both, like the unresolved ends of a confused and confusing friendship or, in the case of Union Rules, anger.

It takes me back to my early days as a hopeful writer, hopes which were shelved for many years while other things happened, and which have come back recently with such force. There were short story writers I read, then and in the intervening years, who stood out, who I wanted to be like, and whose trace is there inside my mind every time I try to write one of these short forms.

One was Frank Moorhouse, the Australian. His The Americans, Baby hit me dead centre when I came across them in my teenage years. I’d never read anything like them. They were smart, cynical and obsessively sexy, but innocent too, young people in search of something and not always finding it, or finding something they didn’t like.

(This the cover of the edition you can buy now. I don’t much like it. The original, which showed a blond-haired young woman on a city street staring up at an invisible opponent, was much better.)

It’s only now, looking back, that I can see that those young people’s quests for individual, cultural and national identity and the troubled compromises between them were very much like my own. There was a feeling of tremulous hope about them, and also the possibility of disaster.

Years later I came across another of Moorhouse’s collection, Forty Seventeen, about the relationship between a man who’s forty and a girl who’s…well, seventeen. Say no more. But it’s a fantastic collection about the fear of getting old, of losing past lovers and friends, but worst of all about losing the possibility of being young and cool.

Another writer who made a mark was Isaac Bashevis Singer. He’s heard of much less these days but in my mid-twenties, when I was travelling all over America, he’d just won the Nobel Prize and he was everywhere, a tiny, wizened, ironic New Yorker who’d lost all his family in the camps, wrote only in Yiddish and had maybe twenty collections of short stories to his name.

He had a huge store of Polish/Jewish folklore, myth and memory to draw on, overlaid by his experiences in the West after fleeing his home country just before the war. Anything can happen in his stories, including the appearance of dybbuks, golems and ghosts, in which – like any sane person – he absolutely believed.

I came across another influence at the same time when still touring the States, in The Twin Cities or Minneapolis-St Paul. The band I was roadieing for turned up at a theatre with a thousand people in it and radio stations everywhere. Walking stiffly up and down backstage like a robot and looking not unlike Frankenstein was someone I took to be a very well-dressed janitor, he looked so different from everyone else and yet so at home.

But when the show started he walked out in front of all those people and told, as opposed to read or recited, a story, a tale about an old Norwegian farmer who wore a blue woollen suit and lived by the Great Lakes in a place called Woebegone. He was Garrison Keillor and the show was Prairie Home Companion, which hadn’t been heard of at home back then, and while he spoke that audience was in the palm of his hand.

Some years later, back home, it was suddenly no longer necessary to read work from other parts of the world to find great short stories. They were right on my doorstep, and one of the best writers of them was a young guy whom I read with at an event he organised at the South Queensferry clocktower, where he worked as the warden.

His collection, Bucket of Tongues, came out a couple of years later. They owed something to Kelman, whose short stories I like too, but they had an energy, humour and a poetic sensibility all their own. They were about young guys who lived in pubs, hung around on corners, worked as butchers’ assistants. Duncan McLean was someone I added to my internal collection of favourites.

Success didn’t continue for him though. Once Irvine Welsh’s mentor, his work was swept away by the phenomenon that was that particular piece of marketing, and he gave it all up to run a delicatessen on Orkney, where he lives still. A pity, if you ask me, because as a writer of short stories he had much more depth and a much lighter touch than his apprentice.

So – all male writers, I notice. I know, I know, but at least it’s honest. And I’d never claim it as the best, just as I’d never claim anything about any story of mine.

The point is it’s my own personal collection, not like anyone else’s, and a particular set of influences – a special list of loves if you like – that have something to do with letting me write what I want the way I want, a way that’s different from everyone else.

So who reads old short stories in battered collections that no-one remembers? Well, me. Or at any rate, I remember them. For all their obscurity, or maybe because of it, I think what they say is important.

Big things in small parcels finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Little situations that raise big questions.

They keep bringing life: the lives of short stories keeping mine alive, letting me learn, keeping me going.

Long may they continue.

Not only does it take everything out of you and utterly confuse you as to what to write next, it also seems to nail you to the same thing over and over again, forever.

This isn’t necessarily A Bad Thing. But it does take a bit of getting used to. There you were, the newly-published writer, covered in blue paint and screaming ‘Freedom!’ at the top of your lungs.

There you were imagining the world was your lobster and that you’d be able to write all those different ideas, all those multicoloured dreams you’d had for years, down on paper at last. There you were imagining everyone would love you. That your life would be different.

Oyster

Instead, after a brief flurry of mind-twisting excitement, it’s back to the drawing-board. Back to the beginning and start all over again. If you don’t you’re sunk.

But when you do, how come your mind’s suddenly gone blank? How come the empty screen is now so terrifying? How come everything you thought you’d gained has suddenly gone?

I’m as interested in the developments writers go through as I am in what they write, and I think that when we reach this stage – which is just another, one of many we’ve already been through and of many that are yet to come – it’s worthwhile thinking back to where the first novel began.

It’s true that things can never be quite the same. When you were writing that first fateful book you’d nothing to live up to, nothing to lose and everything to gain. But you’ll never repeat that freedom, enjoy that first breakthrough. You will never, ever be a debut author again.

But equally, you made certain decisions as you wrote that first book, things that might be hard to remember now it’s finished but which were the foundations it was built on. And they’re probably still the foundations of whatever you go on to write next, or they’ll at least have something to do it.

So I think it’s worthwhile turning to these and looking at them again when trying to decide how to move on.

I didn’t actually know my book was crime fiction until I saw the cover. Then and only then did I realise what it was. And I also realised that it was a specific type: neither police procedural nor a plot-driven tale of derring-do, but something else entirely. Turning to crime hadn’t been, for me, a decision to emulate hard-boiled wisecracking detectives or a lightbulb moment where I was inspired write in a genre that makes money (though I still live in hope).

It was much more a realisation of limitations and being realistic about what I could do, which I was determined to turn into good work. It was as much intention as talent, inspiration or luck. This time I was going to write a book and nothing was going to stop me.

One important decision was to work in a form – a specific structure or ‘genre’ as it’s often called. This was a crucial turning-point – one which, in a way, a writer can never return from. But it’s also very complex, with no simple answers and no rights and wrongs.

Another was that it had to have resonance, something deeper to say than a worked-out plot. Another was that the characters had to be at the forefront, the driving force. And so on.

Point by point, element by element, I built my story from my idea, not necessarily consciously, just letting the ideas come – but always checking back against the list of things that I wanted.

And I discovered that the vehicle of genre, so often despised by people who talk about creative work rather than practice it, is a marvellous way of carrying huge amounts of material with implications far beyond plot, and also one that people will actually read.

Imagine that, a readable book with thoughtful content! If only the big mainstream publishers could come up with a such a groundbreaking concept.

Looking back at these first principles has made me realise something. And that is that the only person who really taught me anything, for all the qualifications, training and advice I took or didn’t take along the way, was me. There was no other person who decided what I’d write, there was no other model I followed. There can’t be for any writer.

I think all (good) creative writing teachers understand this. They give their students permission to write, which is important, and lots of inspiration, but then the student must do it him or herself. There simply is no other way.

So I looked up the word ‘autodidact’ in the dictionary, and found that it doesn’t just mean, as I’d always thought, a self-educated learner. What it also means is someone who seeks to join up different things, who attempts to change his or her life by turning what is already known and owned into knowledge and ownership of something else.

It’s not about someone who reads a lot of books in his spare time, it’s about transformation, and an understanding that all of us, every one, has the potential to achieve it. It may require arrogance, anger, selfishness, sacrifice or whatever it takes, but it’s there for us to do if we choose it.

The mechanic who becomes a world-leading authority on botany, the aeronautical engineer who turns himself into a best-selling writer of thrillers, the disabled man in a wheelchair who shows us the meaning of time – these are the autodidacts.

I think all writers are this. The more I meet, the more I talk to and read, the more I find the only similarity between them is this need to connect, to live and think and work outside themselves towards something else, often unknown. Their mercurial and unique talent is not to be what they are at the moment but to seek to join up with something new. To bring the possible and the impossible together, to make the ordinary of cosmic importance, to literally collide worlds.

Exceptions? Sure, they exist, and we’ve met them. The elitist who holds all work in contempt but his own. The academic so institutionalised that his fiction is unreadable. The novelist keen to knife his rivals in a dispute over a literary prize.

But these people are dead. Imaginatively, creatively and in every other sense. They may walk and talk and give every appearance of life, but they no longer reach out, they no longer try to connect. They think they don’t have to.

Of all writers, surely the crime novelist is the archetypal autodidact. The good, contemporary writer of crime fiction is not a cozy comforter, not a fluffy cardigan but a perpetrator of murder, mayhem and mischief. She sneaks up on people, deceiving them into a false sense of security, and then rocks their little world. She holds up a mirror for us to see ourselves as we are and not as we like to pretend.

For me, an autodidact, an outsider, picking my way through my second novel, getting back to first principles is helping me remember my anger, my feeling of exclusion and the reason why I write in the first place.

It all seemed very complicated and difficult for a while there, but really it’s quite simple. I’m still what I always was, padding though the night alone in my quest, and the fine houses of the established and the welcomed are still there too, all lit up on the hill, waiting to be burgled.

I’m going to pick the locks of their mansions. In dead of night I’m going to wander through their homes, rifling through their possessions. I’m going to fill my pockets with what I want: only the smaller, more valuable items, the ones I can easily use. I’m going to try on their clothes, smash their plates, drink their whisky and soil their linen.

And then I’m going to steal their hearts away.

It goes like this. You can’t teach creative writing.

Yes you can. No you can’t. Yes you can. No you can’t.

That’s as much intellectual content as you get.

Famous detractors of teaching creative writing in, say, universities, schools or the community, or anywhere really, include Stephen King, who really ought know better, especially considering he wrote one of the more helpful books on creative writing himself, On Writing.

But fame’s never stopped anyone from being silly I imagine, and in fact I think it probably encourages it.

In the centre of this non-battle, despised on the one hand and bought in large numbers on the other, is the creative writing textbook.

I’m a bit of a teach-yourself-creative-writing-book junkie. I started buying them years ago, thinking that I’d better find a way to learn this thing I wanted to do after I found, to my vast surprise, that it didn’t come naturally.

So I bought them but didn’t necessarily read them, which was another mistake. Later, when I joined a well-known Masters course at Glasgow University and I took some of my collection along to a workshop, I well remember the quietly shared chuckle and meaningful silence that passed among the company as I opened my plastic bag to take them out and pass them round.

At Glasgow, you see, and most ancient universities, one doesn’t learn. One just knows.

The shared sense of belonging to an elect group vanished the moment the other students got their hands on the books and actually looked at them. Then they asked if they could borrow them. (I never did get some of them back.)

The point is, some of these books are very, very good. They demystify something around which there can be far too much misty romanticising. They do – or they should do – exactly what they say on the tin. No more, no less.

I like that plainness, that functionalism. They remind me of my dad and older men of his class and generation, engineers, plumbers, draughtsmen. Class has everything to do with it of course, as it always does in Britain. Which is the real reason books of this sort are so looked down on by many in the literary world.

They’re practical, you see. They do stuff. A bit like a battered old toolbox. And we don’t open toolboxes ourselves, do we? We have a man who comes in to do that for us.

Well, not all of us actually, writers have delineations of class too. But more of that another time.

There’s also a huge variety of these how-to textbooks. If you want something a little bit more decorative, or argumentative, or impassioned, or businesslike or esoteric or sensitive, you can certainly find it. There is now a creative writing textbook for almost anything, from romantic to children’s writing to non-fiction to erotica. There is everything from the thoughtful and questionable to the downright bad (I’m still trying to forget How to Write Fast, a thumping tome whose sole point was that quantity was everything).

And there are groups and conferences. The NAWE conference in York last year was a great experience for me because there were so many like-minded people at it. And because (unlike my day-to-day working life) everyone agrees on at least one thing.

I hope to get to the Great Writing conference in London this year – yes, a Scot can survive in England – and there are others I’d like to see at least once before I die, the Association of Writers in America, for instance, who hold a monstrous get-together every year.

My point is that Creative Writing education is now an industry, and a very rich one. In these days of expensive course fees, people are likely to pay for something they feel they’ll get a return from. They won’t necessarily feel the same way about Englit or Art History.

Creative Writing as a subject in fact, or maybe more accurately as a discipline, has run fluidly between and through all the others.

Its astonishing and unique ability to change its shape, nature and direction no matter what subject it deals with, its ability to become that subject, or to be one in itself, was made clear to me in York, where talks and workshops dealt with projects in Heritage, Business, Education, History, Art, Film, Journalism, Science and Maths, to name only some.

Its diversity, adaptability and versatility make it the ideal training ground for graduates who go on to work in the creative industries. At York David Morley, professor at Warwick University, announced that the Creative Writing department was splitting away from English, literally moving house to the Science Park. The discipline now has as many links with that field as it has with Literature.

And getting back to the main point, which was the belief often trumpeted by those who should have been a bit more thoughtful before they voiced an opinion that the ability and the wish to write can’t be learned, but is an innate, essentialist talent held by a few and not by the many, well, we hear rather less from them these days, perhaps because digital publishing has swept away many other cherished assumptions they had about the game they thought they owned.

Changed days, and still changing…

I’m reading at the moment – and greatly enjoying – A Kettle of Fish by author Ali Bacon. It’s the sort of book I’d never’ve come across if I didn’t have a kindle and didn’t communicate with other authors via Twitter, Facebook at al.

I’ve never met Ali and probably never will, but somehow we found each other through the tweeting process and after some talking she gave my new ebook Best Man a nice review, which you can view here if you want:

We’ve little in common apart from the fact that at almost the same time we were both at St Andrews university. And yet reading Kettle of Fish I feel somehow as if there’s much in it that I recognise, and somehow know.

St Andrews rooftops

It’s about the east coast, which I knew well at one time, and about being young, making mistakes and wondering what the future holds. And it’s about the past too.

It reminds me of those university days and also of when I was a lad, no more than twelve, when I spent hours in Bearsden and Maryhill libraries. I didn’t have any idea then that books belonged to different categories, and that some were meant to be better than others. All that came later, when it arrived in full armour inside the ramparts of a literature degree, which I thought gave me insight into books.

Ah, mm, metaphors…

The elderly professor who led the course had written only one book: Ships and Shakespeare. He’d been a Lieutenant Commander during the war (which means, I think, that he’d captained a ship), and so naturally after the conflict was over turned his attention to the possibly justly neglected theme of Shakespeare and the sea.

I never read it so can hardly condemn it, but what, to be honest, can you say? Some stuff on galleys in Antony and Cleopatra? I can’t think of anything else. (But if anyone out there knows I’m doing his work an injustice maybe you could let me know. Maybe Shakespeare is much fishier than I ever knew!)

Anyway, back to the topic. Ali’s book is precisely the sort I’d never have read in a million years unless I’d come across it as an e-book. I’d never have gone to that part of the bookshop, never have opened it up from reading the blurb, seen an advert or come across a review. And yet it’s really enjoyable, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time: funny, spirited, mysterious and more than a bit edgy, with the main character seemingly escaping one kettle of fish only to end up in another time and again.

I’ll never turn away from traditional books completely (like everyone else) but this e-book buying and reading, and writing and publishing, is clearly doing for me what it does for everyone else: it brings back what’s fresh and new about reading, why it’s so invigorating and why we can’t afford to lock it away inside genres, or allow people to control it for us, any more.

A Kettle of Fish is undoubtedly what they call ‘cross-genre’ – neither fully ‘young adult’, nor ‘romance’, nor ‘mystery’, but a bit of all three and probably more. That’s why it works so well, I think, and it’s what contemporary writing has been achingly missing for so long. We’re no longer reading what we’re supposed to, we’re reading what we please, like children discovering the world through a library.

I haven’t finished Ali’s book yet, but I’d thoroughly recommend it on the strength of what I’ve read so far. When I finish it, I’ll post a review on Amazon.

I hope it leads other readers to her book too.

Well, the process of writing this one was a bit different, or unique anyway. But it always is. I find that something will happen and then, often years later, my memory of it and other things that have happened since, including my own thinking about the original experience, will come together and make something else, which is the starting point of a new story.

This way

It’s strange the way this comes into your head. It arrives whole, without any calculation or plan, and though you might change or restructure some of it later, it’s best to go with this original idea, which can be as much a tone as anything else, no matter how weird it seems. If you change it too much, it doesn’t work. Or it turns into something different.

I knew what this one was based on from the start. In one of my many moves between colleges, I met, in the unlikely atmosphere of a technical crafts college – places usually filled with engineers, hairdressers and welders – an outrageously camp gay man. He was as out of place as a daffodil on a tank, but I thought he was battling bravely on.

There was one strange thing, though. He pretended not to be gay. I never once heard him say he was in the first year or so that I knew him, and even when I got to know him better he seemed to believe he could be gay or not gay at will. He’d trained as an actor and I think he genuinely believed he could deceive people as and when he wished. He even had a girlfriend whom he brought out whenever danger threatened.

It was a difficult friendship because he had no idea of what friendship was. What he thought about, his whole motivation, was sex, and a particular kind of sex at that, one that was to do with power.

This is saying more than he ever told me. What he did let slip were hints and clues to a sex life that was completely casual, utterly promiscuous and totally devoid of feeling. Indeed, feeling – meaning things like sympathy, kindness, empathy, and so on – was a thing he rather despised. Thrilling encounters at dawn on Hampstead Heath, midnight games in Kelvingrove Park – those were the only kind of feelings he had.

Cottage

He could be cruel, callous, even vicious, but there was nothing about him that compromised. He pushed things always to the edge, as far as they could go and often further. He prided himself on his openness, an odd claim for someone who tried to disguise who he really was. A colleague of ours, a woman with an unerring ability to sniff out everyone’s deepest, darkest secret and then to tell the whole world  about it, said of him that he’d never come to terms with the fact that he was gay. I usually mistrusted her and her snap judgments, but on that one I think she was right.

Straight?

But what’s gay and what’s straight anyway? In this story – which is about a friendship – a gay man and a straight one try to get to know each other, and fail. Some would say there’s nothing that divides them. Other would say they’re as different as it’s possible to be. But  think opposites are closer than those who are merely different, and maybe the fact that this section of the novella is called ‘The Other’ says as much as I can about what the distance between them is meant to be.

Gay?

There’s a freedom about the gay man, a lack of sentiment and a determination to do what he wants that the narrator of the story rather envies. And there’s a recklessness about the same adventurer, a self-destructive streak and a fate that the straight man can never share. And the friendship doesn’t last, no matter what is right or wrong of it.

It’s a story, at the end of the day, about a kind of relationship.

I hope you enjoy it.

I consider myself a flaneur.

It’s there proudly at the top of this blog, a simple, bold and challenging statement. The more I use the term the more I like it.

It’s a quality that I think has quite a bit to do with the stories I write, some of which are in my new novella. 

And it’s a self-imposed title that’s got quite a bit of attention, with colleagues and other bloggers getting in touch to ask what it is.

So … what is it?

(I’m indebted for this information to my fellow academic Louise Barrett, who went to the trouble of finding an article about it. Thanks, Louise!)

Well, the flaneur is a walker. He strolls through the city, never hurrying, his pace slow, his manner and demeanour never constant. He’s outside the crowd, an onlooker, but also part of the crowd, caught up in it, invisible in it. He hardly ever stops, except when his attention is caught by something, which he studies with great intensity, taking in every aspect of what he’s seeing, letting it fill his sensibilities until it becomes an almost otherworldly experience – and then he moves on.

The practice of the flaneur is known as flanerie, his female equivalent the flaneuse, and it was once such a fashionable pursuit in Paris, where – as you might expect – it originated, that the flaneurs took to walking with turtles in the arcades, with the turtles, of course,  setting the pace.

I love flanerie, and was unconsciously practising it for years before I knew it, dawdling here and there, never hurrying, sauntering about the city just for the pleasure of it, and getting on with my stories and novels at a turtle-like rate.

So it’s not surprising that there’s much flaneurhood in my stories, tales of relationships over long periods of time set in or around the city, with its hard pavements, fast food restaurants, alleyways, passing crowds and lit-up shops.

Too much flanerie?

This is especially true of the opening section of my book, the one that gives the whole thing its title, Best Man. (It’s also got something to do with the third section, The Other – but more of that later.)

The two young guys in it are flaneurs par excellence, intent on nothing more than eating and drinking as much as they can while hanging around the city in a state of perpetual aimlessness. It’s a lack of purpose and ambition they enjoy and have no intention of ever giving up, though it doesn’t always bring out the best in them.

I got the idea from a friend a mine who was a truly dedicated consumer. For example, he smoked Capstan Full Strength, cigars and a pipe (though not all at once). And when it came to drinking he was truly daring, always ahead of me no matter how hard I tried. He discovered Aquavit, Campari and Soda, Vodka Blue and lots of other things before I’d even heard to them. Not that I’ve ever drunk Campari, you understand.

Never touch the stuff

It was a strange and wild friendship linked only by bouts of excess and bound to be destroyed by real life, which I’m afraid in the end it was. But the flanerie was real, dedicated and the one and only point to the whole thing. It had no motive other than pleasure.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” is something I’m often asked. Well, it’s simple, and you can do it too. Just try hanging about long enough.

There’s far too much positivity and enthusiasm in the world. Come over to the dark side and try a spot of loafing. It’s great to see how it makes everything look different!

The recent publication of my three part novella Best Man has reminded me of how mysterious and strange the research for creative writing can be.

The middle section of the work, called Inkerman, is about a real place, a long-vanished village in Renfrewshire near the west coast of Scotland.

Inkerman

It was built, run and rented by factory-owners, first of mines and then of brickworks. They owned not just the houses but also the only shop, and made sure their tenants could only buy their essential goods (candles, boots and tools) from that one place by paying them in vouchers that were valueless anywhere else.

When the factories finally fell into disuse, the place was demolished.

Miners Row, Inkerman

What grabbed me about this story was the way the people were seen as nothing more than fodder for the work, which was harsh, dirty and crippling. And the astonishing thing was the way they managed to survive. And not just that, but in the face of brutalising treatment they seemed, despite everything, to hold on to their human qualities of love, caring for families and children, and their sense of community.

I know this – or should I say, feel it so strongly that I believe it to be true – because my own family and my partner’s are the direct descendants of these heroes and heroines, and despite waves of exploitation, recession, change and political manipulation they continue to defy the odds and not merely endure, but sometimes live healthily and well.

At the shared public water-pump in Inkerman

They may have been worked little better than slaves and pushed from their homes when their usefulness was over, but they didn’t go away. They stayed where they were and made the best of what they had, which was more than their employers ever did.

They still do the same thing today, in the grip of one of the worst recessions anyone has seen.

I wrote this section, which deals with two different waves of change in the same place, from this feeling, from my knowledge of the town of Paisley and the surrounding area, and from studying photographs of old Scottish towns and visiting local museums.

What’s left today

It was localised digging but none the worse for that. And it had, for me, emotional truth. When it was finally published I felt that it gave other people that feeling too.

And then I came across a book full of photographs of the real place, the vanished village of Inkerman, called, as in all mighty empires, after a battle. There are many Inkermans and Balaclavas and Redans and Kops and Mafekings across the UK, villages or streets or football stands named after some conflict in a far-flung part of the world, usually disastrous.

dulce et decorum est

It was amazing to open the book and see the place exactly as I’d imagined it. It was as if I’d seen the photographs before, they were so exactly like the place that had made itself up in my head as I wrote.

But maybe it’s not so strange. Maybe all imaginative writing is an attempt to recover things we’ve forgotten or things that run so deep we can’t reach them any other way.

Or maybe it was like my ex-supervisor Margaret Elphinstone said when she spoke at the Scottish Writers’ Centre, describing how she came across a settlement exactly where she’d imagined it when she was on an archeological dig, looking exactly as she’d described it in her book, although the book had been written years before she visited the place.

There’s a lot of debate in academic circles about the value of research for creative writing and other forms of creativity, but to me the answer is simple.

Factual research is digging then speculating, or reaching inspired conclusions. Imaginative research is speculating and then finding. They’re the same thing, two halves of a circle that can’t be broken, no matter what professors and research boards say.

It’s not magic, it’s not a mystery. But it’s wonderful all the same.

One of the supposed results of digital reading is the rebirth of the short story. It’s meant to be the new thing you can read easily on the train, or in the airport, or on the bus while you travel to and from work with your Kindle, Kobo, iPad or whatever.

I’m a bit dubious about some of these claims. I really don’t see why you can’t read a novel just as easily in these situations, or anything else you fancy.

But judging from what I see on the Net and from what I’ve recently bought myself, I think there might be something in this assertion. Recently I’ve bought Daphne Du Maurier’s first short story collection The Doll (dangerously sexy for its day, I believe), and Fancies and Goodnights, a collection by a long-forgotten but once leading short story writer John Collier. The fact that they’re there and that I can buy them cheaply and easily is all I really needed to know.

I love short stories, but somehow I gave up reading them a long time ago. Now that my interest has been renewed through reading them on my Kindle, I’ve found myself wondering what’s so different about the e-publishing of this kind of story as opposed to longer works.

I wonder if the answer lies not with the form itself but with the way it was traditionally presented before the e-reader came along.

Pushed decades ago out of its traditional markets as popular magazines foundered and became more ‘niche’, as they say, I first came across the short story as something you found in collections of works by one author or in anthologies by many different ones.

It’s the kind of thing that’s for reading quickly, for dipping in and out of, and it feels better to mix them up. The single-author collection can feel a bit too much of the same thing, while the small arts magazine, well-meaning and important though it is, can make its contents feel compressed, and sometimes not varied enough.

But with a Kindle, you can download a single short story, or a collection of three, or any combination you like, by anyone, provided it’s published in that shape. And indeed one thing I’ve really enjoyed is the way forgotten forms such as the short story or the novella, long frowned on by an industry which said they didn’t sell enough, have come back with a bang.

And very importantly for authors, they allow stories previously published stories a new life, a readership beyond the magazine or book they were once published in.

So I decided to experiment with the form myself, and the result is my latest book, Best Man, which is a collection of three short stories or a novella, depending on how you look at it.

Here’s the link, if you want to know more:

It’s selling well and has just reached the top 10,000 on the Kindle list, which is pretty good, they tell me. And sales are rising, which is always nice to see.

Here’s hoping it’s another success after the novel. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been tagged in The Next Big Thing by fellow writer Carol McKay (Website: www.carolmckay.co.uk Blog:http://carolmckay.blogspot.com). Carol’s short story ‘Flags’ won the inaugural Booktown Writers’ Short Story Competition, and she has published several e-books in 2012 through The PotHole Press.

I’m instructed by Carol to tell you all about my next (or current) book by answering these questions and then I tag five other authors about their Next Big Thing. So here I go!

What is the working title of your next book?

‘Best Man’

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It’s three short stories I wrote a while ago pulled together into one novella. The idea’s been in my mind for some time.

What genre does your book fall under?

Good question! Comical, reflective, mysterious, literary, disturbing.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The title story would have to have really good Scottish character actors. Robbie Coltrane would be typecast so how about Peter Mullen and Davie McKay, maybe?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Three stories about relationships, loyalty and change.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Independently published as a Kindle/Kobo publication.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote these stories in different years – I suppose together they took about six weeks to write.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I think if there’s any one writer’s work I can say they’re similar to, it’s the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Okay that’s a big claim, but he’s undoubtedly one of the major influences.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

People I’ve known, responses I’ve had to places, friendships I’ve had, histories I’ve come across. Slightly eerie and off-kilter ideas that I’ve thought through.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

They’re different – unlike anything written by anyone else. They’re short but sharp I hope, and they run deep.

Here are some fine authors I’ve tagged to tell you about their Next Big Thing! ….. (I haven’t done this bit, but I’ll work on it)

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My thanks to Carol McKay for tagging me.