Words maketh the monster.

Couples. John Updike

“…his toenails were hideous: ingrown, gangrenous, twisted toward each other.”

Clearly, the reader is not supposed to like this character. This is just one sentence from John Updike’s, Couples, where the character of Freddy Thorne is described. The story follows the affairs, rivalries and domestic rituals among ten couples living in the fictional New England town of Tarbox. In the story, Freddy is the anti-hero to the main protagonist, Piet Hanema, who, despite being the most active participant in the adulterous games being played out, is the character to whom the reader’s sympathy and interest is aligned.

Here is a small selection of the less than favourable words used deliberately by Updike to describe Freddy in disparaging terms.

In an early scene, Freddy speaks in close proximity to a female character, and his breath is described as “meaty.”

In another scene, he uses his “crooked forefingers” to make “quick horns at his scalp”. Presumably, we are meant to see him as some kind of devil.

“Freddy looked up. His eyes were monstrously enlarged by the magnifying glasses that supplemented his ordinary glasses.”

While, later in the story: “Freddy’s hairless face became very ugly, the underside of some soft eyeless sea creature whose mouth doubles as an anus.”

Quite an accumulation and a none too subtle set of indicators from the author to inform our disposition toward Freddy Thorne.

Couples is a pacey and entertaining read, set in 1963, in a society managing post-pill promiscuity against the waning influence of religion. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise” is one of the more famous lines from the book. It’s a farcical, at times comedic, romp. John Updike, author of some twenty-one novels, is renowned for his Rabbit Angstrom quartet of novels, 1960-1990, he also wrote The Witches of Eastwick, 1984, but it was Couples that put him on the cover of Time magazine.

Couples.

John Updike. 1968, Penguin.

The Write Stuff

Randy Newman. Singer, songwriter, composer, pianist.

So you want to write?

Here’s a simple truth I’ve garnered from reading about how writers work:

You’re going to have to commit time to put fingers to the keyboard. Or, in the case of Stephen King and James Patterson, put pen or pencil to paper.

You can’t wait for the muse to arrive – your muse may not turn up. He or she may be indisposed.

You can’t rely on technique or experience – previous endeavour is no guarantee of future success.

You can’t hold back writing because the thought isn’t yet perfectly formed – you can always come back to craft and finesse a rough draft, the caveat is you need to commit to rattling off the raw version.

You can’t necessarily know where the time will take you, but you have to have faith that if you are strict about putting the time in, the ideas will follow.

I was reading an interview with Randy Newman, American singer /songwriter / composer / pianist. Over a prolific fifty-year career, he’s brought us ‘Short People’, ‘You’ve got a friend in me’, and has composed the soundtracks for Toy Story 1, 2, 3 as well as the upcoming Toy Story 4. Randy talked about the importance of a strict work schedule – just putting in the hours. He works from eight till five if he’s working on a movie or from eight till noon if he’s writing songs. Here’s how he expressed his faith in the process:

“I’m just sitting at the piano, trying to find something I can get a ride on.”

Randy Newman, January, 2018.

Here’s a link to the full interview the Guardian conducted with Randy Newman:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jan/21/randy-newman-trump-ivanka-song-toy-story-smiths

Lives In Writing

Couples. John Updike

This fascinating book by David Lodge, writer and critic, is a collection of essays which study the interface between real lives and how they are written about. The sections exploring the working methods of writers I found particularly revealing.

There’s a chapter that discusses the challenge facing the biographer of Muriel Spark, the Scottish writer who is variously described as ‘eccentric and unpredictable’, while ‘some thought she was a little mad’, and further ‘some acquaintances regarded her as a kind of white witch.’ Spark didn’t start writing novels until she was thirty-nine, and she then went on to produce twenty-two novels at the rate of one per year, most well known amongst them being The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Times named Muriel Spark as No 8 in its list of “the 50 Greatest British writers since 1945.”

Kingsley Amis, meanwhile, turned out novels every two years or so, adhering as he did to a “lifelong discipline of writing every morning between breakfast and the first drink at noon.” Later in life, with his health and morale in decline, it took him four years per novel.

Graham Green had a routine that ensured he could write his target of 500 words per day, which later contracted to 300. It seems to be a recurring theme among the writers that they adhere to a strict ritual, even if, as in Greene’s case it was “agonisingly difficult.”

I did some further exploring, on the subject of daily wordcount.

Hemingway once said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Having achieved that, he went on to be a 500 words a day man.

Ian McEwan: “I aim for about six hundred words a day and hope for at least a thousand when I’m on a roll.”

The prolific Stephen King sets a daily goal of 2000 words.

J.G.Ballard, who brought us Empire of the Sun, and its sequel which I very much enjoyed, The Kindness of Women, said, “All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re professional. There’s no other way.”

They all have their own way. Mine is getting up pre-dawn every day. At 4:15am, I prepare a pot of tea and off I go. I manage about 300 words, before beginning my elsewhere working day. On weekends, I push for 500 per day, 600, if, as McEwan said, I’m on a roll.

Lives in Writing. David Lodge. Vintage Books. 2014.