Tag: CM Taylor

Author Interview: CM Taylor on writing within theme, Brexit and his new novel Staying On

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It’s great to have CM Taylor back on the blog on publication day for his new novel, Staying On. I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of this and I stayed up half the night to find out what would happen. It’s a funny and very moving (I cried!) story of a family that needs to face up to its past – a situation that’s brought to a head when Brexit comes along and their life in Spain no longer seems quite so sunny.

Craig, in the teaching you do, theme is a crucial element in guiding the story and the theme for me that came through strongly in Staying On is guilt and culpability. How it manifests, the twisted nature of it that makes people believe different things about the same situation. What made you want to explore this theme in this novel?

Shouldn’t a book in the final instance be about something – have a take on the world, an angle, something to say about how people are, how the world is? That’s what strong theme gives you.

One of the things I write and teach about is the idea that narrative art maps human change, and that characters in stories move from the denial and repression of certain feelings, into the awareness and exploration of those feelings, and then on to acting on them – either positively or negatively.

When you say there’s a strong element of guilt and culpability in the book, it’s true, and that to me is part of character development and theme, of how character carries theme across story, beginning with denial, (“It wasn’t me.” “That’s not how it was.” “It didn’t happen.” “I haven’t got a problem.” “There’s nothing to see here.”), moving into flashes of light, (“Maybe there is a problem.” “Maybe I did do something wrong.” “Maybe there is something I need to look at.”), then into acceptance or conscious surfacing, (“God, I do have an issue here.” “There is something I need to look.” “Maybe I did do something wrong.”), and on into being galvanised, (“I really do need to apologise.” “I really do need to make that clear.” “I do really need to tell the truth.”).

People use denial as self-protection. People lie to themselves about the things which are hardest to entertain. But denial has consequences. If you lie to yourself about one thing it seeps over into other things and leads to moral corruption. As Saul Bellow wrote: “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” Denial surfaces elsewhere in many negative ways, it squirts out hot and sideways into anger, addiction, failed intimacy, extreme competitiveness, self-harm.

I don’t think that this gap between how different characters see things, or the gap between how a character sees things and how it really was, is necessarily just a theme of this novel, I think it’s a part of every character for me, because it’s part of this journey from denial and repression to acceptance and action. Human change has a pattern and self-deceit is part of that pattern. Guilt is an aspect of repression, and accepting your culpability is a stage on the road to accepting the world as it is.

One of your main characters, Tony, is adept at not saying the things that really matter and putting a brave face on things. Never letting people know what’s really going on behind that bright surface. Did you know when you set out how things would turn out for Tony or did he take you places you hadn’t planned?

As above, Tony – as with us all – is on a journey from repression and denial to (ideally) expression and health. Crucial with Tony on his particular journey is his generation, which is that post-war generation, brought up in a world where emotional connection was scarce and rationed. Imagine being a kid where most adults around you had PTSD and didn’t even know it. Jesus. Decode that. And many of that generation, those post-war babies, tend towards the stoic and repressed. They’re very non-presumptive. Or they can be.

So Tony’s particular brand of suppression is influenced by that generation. That’s in the mix, but then it’s also just him. I know lots of older people, volubly acting out their fear and confusion at the world through anger and nostalgia, but then I also know a lot of older people, like Tony, who radically suppress their own needs – sublimating their impulses and being less clamorous, living for other people. I find it beautiful and generous. That said – and this is the rub of Tony’s dilemma – there come points in life where you need to say, “No. I need something here. I need sustenance and nourishment. I can’t suppress my own needs all the time.”

And that’s Tony’s dilemma, a modest, sweet guy who’d always put himself second, who urgently must realise that if he puts himself second again, then there’s going to be none of him left. That’s hard. Especially when you have no skills, no practice in putting yourself first, and all the social and emotional grooves in your life run against it, run for decades against what you now must do.

All that is in the mix with Tony. I knew he was repressing, and I knew what he was repressing, and I knew that it would have to blossom for him to have his emotional denouement, but I didn’t necessarily know how that was going to happen. I knew the suppression but not the expression. He had that wriggle room.

Tony’s story of dealing with a failing business alongside family dramas is told with humour and at the same time is also very moving, it is sad and hopeful and funny and melancholy, and really very true about what it is to be human today. As writers, this is something we all aspire to achieve in the novels we write so what advice can you give to the readers of the blog on how they can create such compelling narratives within what appears to be, on the surface, just an everyday story of a family.

Stay right behind the eyes of your characters and process what events mean for them. There are high stakes in everyone’s life. Success, failure, love, rejection, hope, desire. Are people going to get what they want? Are they going be rejected and not get what they want? Are they going to learn or keep making the same mistakes?

The trick to making an ostensibly everyday story compelling is to dwell on the internal, on the emotional stakes at play. The word, “No,” might be a single word of dialogue externally, but internally it might mean, “Everyone always says no to me.” Or it might mean, “I am never going to get what I want.” Or it might mean, “Right, I had enough of people saying no and now I’m on the march.”

The key to rendering everyday situations into dramatic material is to dwell behind the eyes of the protagonist of the scene, to show the emotional stakes, and to show at what point this person is in the development from repression and denial to expression – to show how does the moment charge that journey. Does it crush them into further repression? Push them over into expression and self-activation?

What is at stake? How does it move the journey? Find that and you have found drama.

With Brexit coming very soon this is a very timely story but the politics of the situation are largely irrelevant in this family’s life as they face up to the past in order to discover if they can have a happier future. Do you think despite the large role politics plays in the collective psyche, mainly due to the way it’s presented in the media, that this is true for us all. That it’s the human stories that go on irrelevant of what the politicians are doing, that really matter to people? 

Well Brexit gets things going, because the book is about a British expat couple in Spain who wonder if they might get kicked out. One of them, Laney, wants to stay in Spain, and one of them, Tony, wants to go home to England. And Brexit puts pressure on that, because Tony is emboldened from his meekness by the situation with Brexit, whereas with Laney her reasons for wanting to stay now appear more flimsy and unlikely. So, the larger political situation acts as a trigger for the internal repressions of the main characters, plus it brings to the surface the subterranean conflicts locked into their marriage. It brings things to the boil.

As to whether it is more human stories that really matter to people, well the book-reading public is a broad church, and political non-fiction is selling well, while political fiction – which is hard to do without coming across as hectoring or didactic – can sometimes do well. So, I think some people want work which is in-tune to the internal verities of love and relationships and self-development, whereas others seek more politically-attuned work. Personally, I want both.

But a strong aspect of the art of the novel is its ability to offer a sense of human closeness, and I strongly wanted to tell a personal story about Brexit, away from the headlines and the slogans and the politicians, to show how normal folk trapped in a normal situation were being affected by a broader political situation, and how crucially it mapped onto issues with their own pasts, and their own relationships. So, yes, I focused on the personal, the internal, because I believe that is the strongest suit of the art of the novel. Though as I say above, seminal political fiction has been written – it is just most obtrusively political fiction is sophomore and partisan and dull.

Now that Tony and Laney’s story has gone out in the world, what are you writing next?

Oh God, this question. It may make me cry.

Well, in no particular order, I’ve just finished the final draft of a TV pilot based on one of my novels. And I’ve been commissioned to co-write a movie which I can’t really say too much about, so I’m tucking into the first draft of that. And I’ve had interest in republishing a couple of my early novels, so I just spent a few days giving them a haircut, purging them of juvenilia, before sending them out. Then, because I’ve got a book coming out, I’m writing blog posts and articles.

And yes, by now you can see that I’m avoiding the real intent of the question. I’m repressing the truth through guilt! And there’s a reason for that. I’m developing two novels simultaneously, and I haven’t worked out which one I want to lead with. One is a character-led thriller series, quite socially realistic, and the other is a stand-alone tech thriller, more heightened, but again character-led. I’m flip-flopping between these two and am not sure which one of these two works of fiction will emerge as my next book, to be quite honest.

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Thanks for giving us this insight into your new novel and your writing tips, Craig.

Keep up to date with Craig’s many writing project on his website. Get your copy of Staying On on Amazon or Waterstones.

 

 

 

 

Author interview: CM Taylor on the transformational arc

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I saw CM Taylor (aka Craig) deliver a workshop on Character is Destiny at the York Festival of Writing and was hooked on the ideas he introduced in it. So much so that I invited him to come and teach an expanded version at a retreat. The Character is Destiny Retreat took place in March 2017 and there were two 3-hour workshops expanding on the ideas that intrigued me at York.

Delighted to have Craig here on the blog today talking about character development and the transformational arc.

Craig, you co-wrote a horror film that’s coming out soon about writers retreating to a remote island and terrifying things happening (I’m sure our retreat won’t be like that!) – can you tell us how writing characters for the screen and novels differs and also how and where it crosses over?
Yeah, that’s correct. The thing which makes a writers’ retreat an apt subject for a horror film is the same thing which makes it appropriate for advancing yourself creatively. You take yourself out of a normal environment, and put yourself in a situation where you can go into yourself, and, with the help of others, engage with your emotions and creative truths.

But about characters, and how writing characters for screen and prose differs, well, one of the main differences I would say is that in screenwriting you need to leave room for the actor and the director. In prose, you are the writer, the actor, and the director, and how you portray the character is the totality of that character’s portrayal. Whereas with screen, you are merely providing the ingredients which the director and the actor will cook up between them. You need to leave room for actors to act.

Plus in screenwriting you work a lot with sub-text. For example, the character can say the opposite of what they really feel and the actor’s face will convey this duplicity and conflict. Like in a film someone can say, “Yes, my Lord”, but their face and tone and body-language can mean, “I will kill you tomorrow.” So in screenwriting you don’t write the, “I will kill you tomorrow” bit, but in prose you kind of have to, because you do not have a twenty-foot high actor’s face to show the concealed meaning. So prose is more of a spoon-feeding kind of medium in a way, the sub-textual elements are fewer.

Now, there is all this stuff in creative writing teaching about showing not telling, and prose writers can learn a lot from screenwriters about that skill, but fundamentally, prose is obliged to be a slightly telling sort of medium. The kind of radical, bone dry showing-only that screenwriters trade in will just not work in prose. The reader does need to be told a little bit.

The unique strength of the novel as an art form is that it can slide behind the eyes of a character in the way that other mediums can’t. We can fall into the mulch of consciousness in the novel. It it is the closest thing to mind-reading humans have invented. Yet. So it’s concerned with interiority and the depiction of moment-by-moment consciousness in a way which the screen is just not. We can say almost exactly what is happening in the mind of a person in prose. But in screenwriting we have to convey what is happening in the mind of the person only through those things which can be seen. Actions, speech. Music can hint at unseen feelings too. And there are the techniques of voice-over, or a character writing a diary, say, or something of this nature. But in terms of the narrative arts, the totality of the un-mediated interior life is available most directly in prose.

The similarities between the two forms of narrative art is that their subjects are themselves subject to the same forces. In the novel and on screen, character is subject to the forces of personal history, subject to the forces of relationships (love, family, tribe, work), subject to the forces of the wider world, (what we might call history or society or war or the environment), and, (although many stories leave this aspect out), they are also subject to cosmic and religious impulses. Those are the four nooses which story tightens around a protagonist. So in both screen-writing and prose writing these same existential human pressures come to bear. And the goal of the writing is the same, to show a person in the grip of events and time, and to show how they change or do not change with regard to their experiences.

That really is narrative art. The depiction of the effects of time upon life.

The focus for this workshop is all about creating an emotional transformational arc for your characters alongside the main narrative arc and plot – can you tell us why you think this is so important to master for novel writing?
Well, psychologically, I think that there is a profound, subconscious, didactic element to stories, and the reason why we consume them with such unrelenting gusto is because they teach us how to live. We see a character in a transitional moment in their life, we see a character forced by life to make a tough choice, and we are desperate to see what they will do, so that we can judge if we would have done the same, so we can judge how different they are to us, or how not different at all.

We gulp down story so that we can see how characters negotiate the changes and horrors of life which await ourselves. On a subconscious level, characters are our avatars whom we scrutinise for advice about negotiating painful change. Stories are wiser than their tellers. They are our elders.

But as to why transformational screenwriting models of how best to depict moral and emotional change – be that heroic or tragic change – in narrative art are particularly pertinent to prose writers, well, a lot of writers of prose are perhaps overly attached to individual words and sentences, and paragraphs, at the expense of scenes and sequences and plot outcomes.

Screenwriters think more structurally on the whole. Prose writers tend to be hacking through the story jungle with a machete, while screenwriters are above the jungle in a chopper, burning that mother down. And I think if you were to honestly recall a favourite novel, years after you have finished reading, what you would probably remember is the fate of the character, or an amazing scene. In short, what happened to them. How they struggled under which forces.

The beauty or not of individual lines, or words, or purple passages, while perhaps paramount to the writer when they are writing, is not that which most readers take away. Narrative is concerned with fates, with what happens to a person when they are put under certain pressures. The pattern of choices a character makes which taken together results in a fate. So it is very important for writers of prose to deal with structure, to understand the underlying shapes of structure. And that’s where I go to screen-writing to steal that structural knowledge. There is without question an underlying structure to narrative art, in particular in the instance we are talking about here, with regard to how characters can be shown to change or not change under external and internal duress over the course of a story. There are real, teachable working models for this.

Which novels do you think have nailed this and why?
Well first of all, different types of novels, different genres of novels, deal with this in different ways. A geopolitical thriller will not trade in heavy emotional transformation, but if it wants to hook more readers in, readers who are interested in human meaning and not just the mechanics of plot, if it wants to add feeling to action, then it can in some unobtrusive simple, structural way deal with emotional transformation. Similarly, a literary novel may be almost exclusively concerned with the emotional development or transformation of the hero or heroine. There’s a whole genre of this – the bildungsroman, the novel of spiritual progress. So any genre can trade in the transformational arc.

A couple of novels I love that work well on the scale of human transformation and in very different ways are Staying On by Paul Scott, and The Van by Roddy Doyle.

Now The Van is a work of humorous social realism, set on a working class estate in Dublin and it concerns male friendship. Two unemployed guys, listless, low in self esteem, decide to set up a fast food van to sell to people coming out of the pubs after World Cup games. Brilliantly simple. Now because it is working on the level of social realism, the transformation here is going to be similarly realistic and small. We are not talking Macbeth here. So, through running a chipper with his mate, the main character gets the respect of his wife back because he’s been active not passive, and he loses his friendship with his partner who becomes bullying and domineering, and he gets his own self-respect back because he’s done something.

So it’s a very small plot. But it takes our hero from a passive moment in his life, through to a wiser sadder place where he holds knowledge of his friend’s character, but where he has a better marriage and more self-confidence. An irreversible change has been made in his character. It’s brilliantly done.

Now in terms of emotional change, Paul Scott’s Staying On concerns a timid wife, obliged to stay on in colonial India by her stubborn and uncommunicative husband. Now in the story he ultimately dies – in fact it is stated on the first page that he does – leaving her stranded. But he is ill first, and during the course of the illness she establishes a timid – to some extent imaginary – relationship with a friend from England, allowing her to confess her difficulties with her husband, and she works up the nerve to force her introverted husband to finally state their financial realities.

So that is again played out on a very micro level. Yes, the illness and then death of the husband is the huge external thing, the change, but the real meat, the emotional transformation, is internal, and comes from her pursuing a friendship in which she is able to gain support for her neglected emotions, and being able to ask her husband for some financial accountability which she never has felt entitled to do before. So she is bereaved and stuck but emboldened at the end. It’s a beautiful book.

What can the writers who take this workshop with you expect to learn?
Well I aim for very practical outcomes. There is a method that I use which fosters a writer’s theme, what they care about most, integrates that theme with character transformation, and then integrates character transformation with plot development. So the three main aspects of narrative art – theme, character and plot are all treated as part of the same moving concern and the same evolving structure. And it’s done in a way which privileges theme, and in such a way that character change is the glue which holds theme to plot, and we treat character change as a process which can be learned and mapped and replicated.

Many models of story are top-down, plot first, and they have their place, but the one I teach here is particularly interesting for prose writers because it privileges the writer’s emotions and themes and seamlessly integrates those with the structural aspects of writing. So what I expect everyone in the class to be able to do at the end of this retreat is have a replicable system of linking theme to character to plot. Now intuition can be great, but it can also be awful. Sometimes if you rely on intuition and inspiration you will be right and sometimes you will be wrong. So what I hope to do is offer a simple, repeatable method whereby you can test the usefulness of your inspiration against a system for unifying the three main aspects of writing.

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