Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?

Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.

Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts.  I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics.  My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie.  While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window.  Both of which are available on Amazon.

My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.

Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for.  In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off.  I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.

"Fab," she says to me.  "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs.  I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."

And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much.  Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space.  That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat.  It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.

"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter!  Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry.  And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."

I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters.  It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more?  It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee.  The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about.  A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them.  Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.

I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it.  We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever.  This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge.  That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation.  I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.

Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!

Oh, I can't be bothered changing the channel...

“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”

It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.

Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.

We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.

(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)

We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.

Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.

I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.

Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.

The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.

And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.

Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.

It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.

Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.

Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.

Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.

And now ‘My Family’.

Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.

A nice dream.

And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!


Will

The Penny Dreadful

My story 'Cloak Man' is in the first issue of The Penny Dreadful, it's looks very nice and you should have a look if you haven't read the story before. Hell, take a look even if you have.


Will