Michelle's Blog

I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso (Rivera)
Giving up the day job (8): Robin Yassin-Kassab

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Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, the story of Sami Traifi, a second-generation Londoner, and his wife Muntafa, who decides to take up the hijab, when Sami discovers a nasty family secret. He is also a prolific blogger on his blog Qunfuz (Arabic for hedgehog!) and is co-editor and regular contributor to Pulse political blog.

MT: Welcome, Robin. Can you tell us about the day jobs you have done in the past?

RY-K: Most of the time I was an English teacher to adults or universiy students, in various countries. In Pakistan I was a journalist for a Pakistani paper called The News. In Paris I also worked in market research. In London I was a controller for a cab company, a hospital porter, a packer in the sub basement of John Lewis, etc.

MT: Was there anything in those day jobs that inspired your writing?

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Among aspiring writers, one of the hardy perennial arguments (or rows, or flame wars, depending on the forum) is about when and how much the members should be critical and challenging... or is that vicious? And when and how much they should be supportive and empathic... or that sycophantic? Which is more likely to improve your writing, and which is more likely to be enjoyable? And no, the answer to that last question isn't necessarily what you might think. It's genuinely a complicated question, I think, and yet a very important one, if you're going to find the right places for your writerly self to hang out, meet other writers in the same boat, and learn to be a better writer.

Leaving aside the forums where there's active bullying going on, let's assume that we're in a forum where everyone is basically well-intentioned, and wanting to help. And let's also leave aside the question of being supportive about external things - rejections, disappointments, blocks and panics and deep gloom. It's perfectly possible to be honest about how sorry you feel for a rejected writer, while knowing that the work was quite possible nowhere near good enough. The two things are, if you like, separate value systems, and both have their place in a forum: unconditional support is enormously important for those bad times, just as critical scrutiny is at others. But for now, let's stick to the question of feedback on writing-related stuff.

Firstly, some people are more thick-skinned than others: with some writers, it takes four-letter words to convey the fact that something they've written really won't do, while with other writers saying 'I wasn't altogether convinced that..." is more than enough to get them revising furiously.

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Writers are like plants. Some are hothouse flowers, delicate and sensitive: put them in a greenhouse and they’ll flourish: but place an orchid in a draught, and it soon topples over. Others are hardy perennials: providing they’re planted as per the instructions on the packet, they’ll keep growing back year after year, even after the toughest of winters. And then there are those tenacious miracle-plants – you know, the ones that can root themselves in the tiniest fissures of rocks, or anywhere where they can extract the smallest particle of nourishment from the air or the sun or the ground. Wherever there’s the whisper of potential, they’ll cling on for dear life.

There’s a discussion on WriteWords at the moment about how ‘cosy’ an atmosphere needs to be to support writing. Can an environment be too understanding and accepting? Do we need the harshness of rejection to grow, in the what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – sense?

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The deadline for Short FICTION's New Writer competition has been extended until April 30th so I thought I'd invite Tom Vowler to come and chat a little about it here and let you know why you should submit. I'd like to say that Short FICTION is an excellent literary magazine, I am always incredibly impressed by the quality and the range of what it publishes. OK, take it away Tom!


1. Who are you and what's all this New Writer comp stuff got to do with you? (sounds a little rude,eh?!)

Tom Vowler: I'm the Assistant Editor of Short FICTION, an annual literary journal now in its fourth year, published in south-west England. Each issue we run a competition for writers who have not had a book of fiction published. Why?

..........

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Warning: if you find offensive language offensive, please don’t read this post. Not even the title.

Hey, guys, I think I’ve found an aspect of writing that we haven’t already fished to extinction on Strictly Writing. That’s fucking difficult these days; we’ve trawled the whole of it, from dreaming up ideas to polishing your commas. In case it isn’t fucking obvious enough, I’m talking about swearing. Do you mouth it off in your fiction? Only in dialogue or in the narrative too?


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Sorry for the unauthorised absence, I’ll do my best not to let it happen again…

I’ve been thinking today about how we compartmentalise our lives so much, giving x number of hours in the day for work, so many for looking after the children, and x amount for writing (or whatever it is that feeds us). It feels like we are trying to squeeze key elements in our lives into neat ‘compartments’, which works, gives us control, but perhaps it’s too regimented and institutionalised, and

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Hell oh. I'm Gillian and bye now ewe will no me as won of the Strictly crew. Eye like to think eye am a good speller. Of coarse, we knead to bee good spellers, ewe sea. As authors wee set an eggs ample to others. Perhaps there are sum people who want to bee authors but our not that good at spelling. That's were the pea sea comes in handy.

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Thank you to everyone who sent kind wishes and congratulations on the Sense Award, including Pat Jourdan, an Irish writer whose stories I love and reviewed here. Even Pat's emails are wonderfully written: 'Dear Sarah - hooray! This is how life ought to be, writing doing something for other people AND the writer being celebrated. Congratulations. And Miriam Margolyes has such a gritty-with-honey voice too. These bright milestones (well, they do certainly gleam in the sunlight) make up for all the other times when we think we are mad to be going on writing.'

Kristie Lagone, editor of Literary Fever, Brian Lister at Biscuit Publishing, Ra Page at Comma Press and Roland Goity at LITnIMAGE all sent warm words, too. Not to mention friends and family. (My mother's so proud and I'm not too old to appreciate the pleasure of having made her feel that way.)


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Writer Olivia Ryan has been asking which her blog readers started writing first, short stories or novels, and the answers are interesting. I'm probably in what I'd guess is a largish minority, in that I started with novels, and until the second year of my Masters, ten years later, when I'd basically finished the novel that wasn't yet The Mathematics of Love, I didn't think of writing a story. But there was a workshop full of terrific writer-readers, and it was joy to discover that there was something I could write which took maybe a week or two, which I could spread out on the floor and contemplate whole, which friends would read and talk about, which magazines might publish, which someone might like enough to call Highly Commended, or even give a prize. Why not do that? For someone like me, who is not good at delayed gratification and who'd normally spend two years writing a novel which will only be read or real if a commercial enterprise thinks that it'll make money, it was a revelation. I had some success, too, chiefly at Bridport.

And yet, and yet... to this day, if a story of mine isn't working, it's usually because there's a novel inside it struggling to get out. And even now, too, if I'm suffering from a bout of feeling that it's all been done before, as I was talking about in Making the Skeleton Dance, I'm more likely to do that over a short-story plot, because it seems there's so little space in which to clothe the skeleton in more than a bikini, and get it to dance without dislocating its elbows. This is, of course, my deficiency, not the deficiency of the form: although sometimes an idea (for example the central idea of Maura's Arm) just is clearly a single-sitting story, fundamentally my story-telling mind works at novel-scale, and I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about it.

So I suppose it's hardly surprising that I do tend to jump into any talk which assumes that you can't write a novel until you've learnt to write short fiction, and if I hear of a card-carrying writing teacher saying that you mustn't try to write a novel till you have (and believe me, I have heard of such) then I begin to boil.

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