I was about two days into my prison sentence for common assault at Armley Prison in Leeds when I knew that I was going to have to exercise my mind in a way that I’d never done before in order to survive. The relentless coercion and gratuitous violence from other inmates had taken me to a place I never thought I’d be. After a suicide attempt that was rather too close for comfort, I knew that the only way to get through my time was to take control of the psychological pain that had gripped me so hard. My dream career in the police service was over and my nightmare of being a prisoner had begun.

I had never been a big reader, but the one and only book I was allowed in prison, Tony Adams’ autobiography, became my best friend (my only friend, in fact) and I treasured every word on each page. It was my only escape from the abuse, the threats and the violence I endured for much of my sentence.

A chance meeting with the Prison Chaplain resulted in me receiving Daily Strength, a collection of Bible excerpts in a handy pocket-sized booklet that would follow me everywhere I went for the rest of my sentence. It was the influence of the words in Daily Strength combined with the desperation caused by my incarceration that resulted in the first words of my book being written on old envelopes and toilet paper in my cell. I had always maintained my innocence and for the first time in a two-year judicial process, I was able to say things that I wanted to without a barrister or investigating officer trying to make something out of my words. The freedom I got from this was infectious and I would find myself looking forward to every session of writing I’d get in my cell. It would temporarily erase the pain caused by my conviction, something that I, and many others, saw as a miscarriage of justice of gargantuan proportion.

Writing had become my second friend. The discovery of the power that putting pen to paper gave me at the age of 26 in such frightful and unforeseen circumstances meant that my first attempt at suicide was to be my last. My early relationship with writing, far from being an arduous and thankless task reported by lots of unpublished writers, was a harmonious therapy that contributed to my rescue from the demons that had taken hold of my mind in the early part of my sentence.

People often ask me whether I found God in prison. The meeting with the chaplain and the perpetual reading of Daily Strength means the answer to this question is probably yes. However, I also found the power of the written word which led to the publication of A Fair Cop. This has undoubtedly taken me far away from the desperation I once felt to places that without discovering the pleasures of writing, I could only ever have dreamt of finding.

Michael Bunting — 14th June 2009

Author of A Fair Cop.

I blame Walt Disney

The creative writing course I attended years ago taught me about a formula for creating a perfectly structured novel. It was said that endings should focus on ‘The Road Back’ and on ‘Return with the Elixir’. That’s all very fabulous, but what if that road back involves popping a few tablets and killing off the main character? 

If we’re all told to write by the same method and then some start breaking rules and expectations, not every reader is going to be happy. I mean, I understand, for many life’s a bit rubbish at the minute and reading about real life concerns isn’t exactly uplifting. And, I also understand why some readers have ripped up my books, thrown them in the bin, emailed complaints and posted comments online. But, I really couldn’t end my stories any other way. If I want to write realistic characters and throw them into challenging and often dark situations, then I’ve got to have real consequences too.

Of course, I’ve tried to be upfront about it all. The blurb for Black Boxes tells the reader that Ana Lewis has taken a cocktail of tablets and will die by the end of the book. It was hoped that the reader would focus on finding out why Ana had been driven to such an extreme reaction. Yet still some readers have expected a prince on a horse with a whopping big sword to come along and rescue the darkly distressed girl.

And I blame Walt Disney.

Once upon a time, fairytales were soaked in hidden meaning, the teller would adapt the story to offer their own warning or message to their audience. It’s what once made those spoken tales unique and significant. Look at Cinderella, look at Snow White and then look at the way Walt Disney made the endings of their stories perfectly happily ever after, or rather different from their original telling. Disney has happy endings down to a fine art.

The difference, of course, is that real life often (usually) doesn’t have the happy ending of a fairytale. And, of course, I’d love to live in a castle and make friends with the woodland creatures but fact is I don’t and can’t and the important thing about writing (for me anyway) is to write from the heart and to draw on experience. And while my life hasn’t left me in bed with a mixture of pills and a bottle for company, it doesn’t take many steps from disappointments or experiences to imagine myself in my main characters’ shoes. I tend to write about real life and about a society that needs to feel authentic. I want my readers to empathise with my characters and, most importantly, to believe in them.

I know that I pulled on fairytales for inspiration for both Black Boxes and In Search of Adam and I’ll happily argue that Jude in In Search of Adam is a modern day Cinderella and that in Black Boxes, Ana’s children are Hansel and Gretel. So Disney may be the king of happy endings, but I’m trying to offer a truly moral and social message, just like the early tellers of those original fairytales. My stories are trying to recapture those layers in meaning that were so significant in the traditional art.

Problem is, you might not like the endings.

www.carolinesmailes.co.uk

The book was an expose of what it was really like working as an A&E doctor. It looked at the problems in the NHS; the wasted resources, why patients often get sub-optimal treatment and how the Anglo-Saxon culture of binge drinking, getting into fights and abusing NHS staff can really take its toll on the sanity of doctors and nurses. It was sarcastic and also not very PC.

Being known as a potential trouble maker and the author of the book, wouldn’t have helped my career, and so I chose to remain anonymous. The other aspect of why I chose to not reveal who I was, was that I didn’t want patients or colleagues to be thinking that I might be getting inspiration for a next book from our interactions.

But the main point of the book was political — about the fears that the NHS was becoming a political football and was undergoing a slow piecemeal backdoor privatisation. When the book was first publicised and I was invited to talk on newsnight, radio 4 and panorama amongst others, I had the chance to create a stir (and sell lots more books). But I became a wimp and chose to hide under my pseudo name. My publishers and publicist were always telling me it was no problem but I am sure the truth was they were totally fed up by me.

So was it the right thing to? From a sales point of view probably not — it sold a decent number and has paid for a couple of nice holidays but it doesn’t sell enough to subsidise my wife’s shopping addiction. From an impact point of view it was also definitely the wrong thing to do – I have had to turn down a lot of PR and journalist interest following on from the book.

But the worst part of not ‘coming out’ was not being able to take the ‘plaudits’. Lots of doctors and nurses I have worked with have read the book and it was generally well received. Once one of the stories was read out during a coffee break and in response to someone saying to me that the story sounded similar to one I had retold, I just responded that ‘I had read the book and the author sounded as if he was a jumped up arrogant twit.’

As time has gone on and there have been no ill effects from the book, I have started to feel more relaxed telling friends. Other people have started to guess — helped by my pub topics of conversation/rants being identical to the stories in the book. However, my name has never come out and for that I am grateful as I would never want a patient to think of me as an author when they were telling me their problems. But at least now I can enjoy the telling bit about my book now.

My plan for the future will be to come to a half way house. Write future books under my nom de plum but be happy for people to know it is really me. Then I will be able to get more publicity for the books but to patients still be first a doctor and a long way second an author.

As to advice for others writing work based blooks ( books from blogs), just one piece. Whatever you write, write as if you are going to get found out and that you can justify to yourself everything you write.

For any other info please email drnickedwards@gmail.com

If you liked this piece, check out other blogs written by authors from The Friday Project.

I am about to admit a shameful secret. I have only confessed this once before, to a publisher who was so appalled that I feared she might slap me rudely across the face. When I pick out an interesting looking book in a bookshop I check how many pages it has. If it is four or five hundred, I usually put it back. I have ploughed through so many overly-padded books in the past that I became wary of a hefty page count. This has reached the point where, judging a book to be guilty until proven innocent, I now avoid long books.

It’s a question of time, rather than of attention span. The amount of books available online or in the big chains has grown exponentially, and I am surely not the only one who also has a further pile of unread books at home. Nothing would please me more than being able to fully explore this book mountain, but realistically I can only scrape away at the edges. Two or three good shorter books, in this context, satisfies my curiosity more than one long one.

Then there are the other things which compete for my attention. DVD box sets, video games, podcasts and 3D IMAX have all emerged in the last decade or two – to say nothing of the never-ending Internet, where all recorded music is only a click away and everyone that I have ever met is eager to keep me up to date with their adventures. When you add in work, family, physical activities and the incessant noise of 21st Century life, I fear that it is only my complete lack of interest in sport that allows me to read at all.

In the modern world, a lengthy book has to be able to justify itself. Many can, of course, but it is more common for a book to be long because it is expected to be long, rather than because it needs to be. There is the assumption that length equates to intellectual merit and a weighty title is deeper and more profound than a lightweight book. This is nonsense, and it is easy to produce a list of shorter books to make this point — The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, Candide and the Tao Te Ching are the first that spring to mind. It is not the amount of words that is important, but what the author has done with them. Academic and reference titles aside, an author who takes more than 100,000 words to say what it is that they have to say is just plain rude.

Of course, there are reasons why books are the lengths that they are. Marketing departments study the public’s expectations of how books in various genres should appear. Complicated costing processes can lead to publishers stipulating the length of still-unwritten books in the authors’ contract. But if the shift to ebooks proves to be as significant as many predict, then this reasoning will be eroded. A tight, well-written 50,000 word ebook will be no less commercial than an overly-padded 200,000 word blether.

In music, the length of an album has always been dictated by current technology, be that vinyl, compact disc or single MP3s. I suspect that a typical book length will also change, now that more of us are using eReaders. If this is the case, then authors will no longer feel obliged to reach for word counts beyond what their subject requires. A normal book length will be however few words it takes to satisfy the urge to write the book in the first place.

And if an editor then trims a further 20%, just to be on the safe side, then that will be even better.

Gaijin Blues, the first piece in The Friday Project blog series, comes from Ben Stevens. Fascinated with Far Eastern culture all his life, Ben is the author of the martial arts guidebook, ‘From Lee to Li,’ and the just-published ‘A Gaijin’s Guide to Japan’. Ben splits his year between homes in Japan and London. 

Ah, gaikokujin — the ‘outside-country-person’, if we are to interpret the endearing Japanese word literally. Commonly shortened to gaijin, any ‘outside-country-person’ living in Japan — be they black, white, Indian or whatever — is gonna hear this one a lot. Once, when I was walking through a fairly rural part of Japan, a young boy went and hid behind his father upon seeing me.

‘Otosan, otosan, gaijin, gaijin!’ (‘Father, father, a foreigner, a foreigner!’) yelped the endearing little imp, as the slightly menacing father gazed upon me with ill-disguised suspicion. I’m not sure what he thought I might do; given that he and his son were working in an allotment, perhaps they thought I had my beady gaijin eyes on their radishes?

Gaijin carries an edge. To the initiated it conjures up images of meaty Japanese bouncers barring their arms against a gaggle of foreign teachers/off-duty soldiers/contract workers trying to gain admission to some seedy back-street club. Most television networks use gaikokujin instead, deeming it to be less offensive. Add the honorific san at the end, and they’re really on safe ground.

But, in my presence, I’ve been referred to (though only in the third person) as gaijin by a close friend, my late judo teacher, and the owner of a bar I frequent — all Japanese people with whom I have (or had) an excellent relationship. This, however, serves only as proof that I’ve been ‘accepted’; that they don’t have to worry (or at least not with me) about using a word which, noted Will Ferguson in his excellent Hokkaido Highway Blues, is basically similar to gringo.

Hey, a gaijin will never be fully accepted in Japan. Get as fluent as you like in the old Nihon-go; dress up every day in a kimono and take shamisen lessons until you’re a better player than the Yoshida Brothers — won’t make a solitary yen’s worth of difference. Even getting Japanese citizenship won’t work. I’m just content to be the ‘outside-country-person’ who doesn’t get his knickers in a twist each time he’s called a gaijin. (I remained surprised by just how indignant some long-term gaijin can still get.) I think that’s respected, and thus about as good as you can get.