‘Writing is very lonely but it’s not nearly as painful as dance’

Carlos Acosta: ‘Writing is very lonely but it’s not nearly as painful as dance’

Carlos Acosta is one of the best and most famous dancers in the world. So why did he write his first novel?

Carlos Acosta photographed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Photo: Ken Rake/Camera Press

By Jane Shilling

7:00AM BST 26 Oct 2013

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‘My baby!” cries Carlos Acosta, swooping down on my copy of his first novel, Pig’s Foot, and giving it – mwah! – a smacking kiss. He is glowing with pride, as well he might be. He’s just read a rave review that compares the book with Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.

“Did you like it?” he asks. Yes, I did. “What did you like about it?” You might suspect another writer of fishing for compliments, but not Acosta. He has spent three of his four decades in rehearsal rooms, analysing every step. The habit of taking something apart – a gesture, a novel – so as to put it together again, refined and improved, comes as naturally to him as breathing.

One thing I like about his novel, I say, is that it has a distinctive voice: pungent, original and funny. His narrator, Oscar Kortico, is the sole survivor of four generations of a Cuban family, originally – like Acosta’s father’s family – of slave origin. The novel opens in midstream of consciousness, with Oscar recalling “the day I came home from primary school dragging a dead cat by the scruff of the neck”, and continues in similar trenchant vein. “I’m the narrator and anyone who doesn’t like it can f--- off.”

Episodes of savage violence and almost equally savage sex are punctuated with tender depictions of family life. Acosta is the father of an 18-month-old daughter, Aila, and the novel’s sweetly comic mixture of scatology and transcendent love perfectly captures new fatherhood.

Offstage, Acosta has the potent charisma of someone who doesn’t know what it is like not to be superlative at what he does, an oddly egoless quality of absolute confidence. He is slighter than he seems on stage, and he speaks with the incantatory phrasing and repetitions of a born storyteller.

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We already knew he could write. His 2007 autobiography, No Way Home, was praised for its lyrical descriptions of his difficult childhood, growing up in a family of 11 children in a poor suburb of Havana. The book took Acosta 10 years to complete.

“In my house we were not cultured people,” he tells me. “There were no books, and I was a very bad student as well. I never read anything. The whole process of writing, I didn’t know how to do it. But when I was in Cuba, there were often power cuts when we were in school, and there were not many distractions. So we used to gather around and tell stories and jokes, and I was very good at that. Unconsciously, I always liked storytelling, without knowing that I could write anything.

“When I arrived here in Britain, I met somebody who introduced me to all these books and I began reading: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Notes from Underground, which I really liked. I would analyse with a critical eye, until I got a sense of what makes a book a classic.

“I want more to life than just dancing, I want to experience more, live more. I try to evolve and discover and stretch myself. So when my autobiography was quite well received, that gave me the confidence to say, well, I can write a little bit, and I like telling a story. As the next challenge, what if I came up with a world of my own?”

He cites as his fictional influences a formidable list: Camus; Márquez; the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, author of the Dirty Havana trilogy; the Mexican Juan Rulfo; Roberto Bolaño; and Haruki Murakami. Not that he sees himself in their league. “I understand my limits. What I want to do is just old-fashioned storytelling, to produce some hours or weeks of escapism from this world. With that I would be very satisfied.”

The idea for his novel began with its title: “I wanted to write a book named Pata de Puerco – Pig’s Foot. I don’t know why, it just came into my head, and I began saying, what if it is a very little hamlet in a very isolated place?” The writing, he says, “was very lonely and everything, but not nearly as painful as dance”. It took him three years, between rehearsals and performing.

“When I have an hour or so I go down to my dressing-room, open the computer and escape into my own world. I wanted to produce two realities – I’ve always liked the two sides of the coin. So there is an argument between the two generations of Cubans – the older generation, who lived through the Battista era and thought that revolution was the best thing that happened to Cuba, and the younger generation, craving freedom and not to live by any ideology.”

A darker duality underpins the book, which is dedicated both to Acosta’s wife, Charlotte, and his daughter, and to his elder sister Berta and aunt Lucia, both victims of schizophrenia. “It is in my family genes,” Acosta says sombrely. He remembers Lucia being taken away to hospital when he was seven. “She was shouting at the window, and the whole neighbourhood was gathered downstairs. It was terrifying.” She killed herself in hospital and Berta also developed suicidal schizophrenia, and died two years ago. “So I try with this book to pay homage to these two people who were so wonderful.”

Costa’s grip on sanity has never faltered – “not that I know of” – but as a young dancer he struggled with being far from home. “I became a foreigner and I hated that.” Does he have sympathy with his troubled former Royal Ballet colleague, Sergei Polunin, who left the company abruptly last year, and abandoned a production of Midnight Express this spring, days before the opening?

“I think probably this kind of reaction is reaching out for a helping hand,” says Acosta. “But it is very hard, because many people tried to help him, but he is a guy who is in no way approachable. If you don’t really have the sense of humility to let yourself be helped, you sink even more. You become lonelier and lonelier and lonelier, and I think that is what happened with him. Which is a big shame.”

Besides madness, there is a great deal of sex in Acosta’s novel, some tender, some peremptory, some blackly comic. “I think sex is a very, very important fact of life in all relationships,” he says. “And I think if you really want to be honest about it, there is nothing wrong with talking about something that is part of our daily life. I like sex, you know.” Yes indeed. His autobiography made that clear. Was there any trouble with disgruntled girlfriends? Not girlfriends, he says. “But my wife found it difficult. She tried to skip through some of the graphic descriptions. Nobody wants to read about what went on before.”

^{The dancer turned novelist: Carlos Acosta in Agon (Alastair Muir)}

Acosta is exploring life beyond classical ballet. Besides his novel, he has a leading role in Days of the Flowers, a film by John Roberts about two Scottish girls who take their father’s ashes to Cuba. It’s a featherlight confection with an honest performance by Acosta, at his best in a scene where he dances with his wallflower girlfriend.

He has said that he wouldn’t dance beyond 40, that he wouldn’t dance Romeo again, that he doesn’t see himself as a choreographer. Yet he turned 40 this summer, his production of Don Quixote for the Royal Ballet drew praise for its choreography, and he is about to dance Romeo in two productions.

Next month he partners the 27-year-old Bolshoi star, Natalia Osipova, in her debut as a principal for the Royal Ballet in Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet, and early next year he will reprise his partnership with Tamara Rojo in Derek Deane’s version for English National Ballet. What does he bring to the role at 40?

“It’s a role I know very well,” he says. “I decided that if I’m going to keep dancing, I don’t want to step back. If I want to stick around for a while, I want to do it all, close to the level that I used to do when I was 25. The challenge is to be able to deliver the essence of Romeo with dignity, and with the experience that is hard to achieve when you are 20.”

Yet he feels the urge to step back. “I want to be able to spend more time with Aila if I can,” he says. He wants to give her a sense of his Cuban roots. “Charlotte speaks to her in English and I speak in Spanish, and the best I could give her is to be able to know that side of her roots, because Cuba is just so wonderful. There is still that sense of community and I would really like her to have that.”

He intends to spend more time in his homeland: “What I am planning is maybe to have a company in Cuba, maybe a small theatre to run, and at the same time to dance things that are suited for my age and more contemporary, which is easier for the body. I would like to do choreography also.”

And perhaps another novel. “I’d like to write about somebody coming from Cuba, who goes to London. These two worlds, so different, and the search for the soul along the way. This is all very vague – I am still thinking about it. But I like the idea of somebody on a quest: starting there, and coming here, with a conclusion that I still don’t know. Does he go back, or not? I don’t know. We’ll see.”

7 important grammar rules

Semicolons should be used rarely, if at all. And beware dangling modifiers!

By Ben Yagoda | March 14, 2013

 

These rules were not meant to be broken.

ThinkStock/iStockphoto

I

recently wrote an article for TheWeek.com about bogus grammar "rules" that aren't worth your time. However, there are still plenty of legitimate rules that you should be aware of. Not following them doesn't make you a bad person or even (necessarily) a bad writer. I'm sure that all of them were broken at one point or another by Henry James, Henry Adams, or some other major author named Henry. Moreover, grammar is one of the least pressing problems when it comes to the poor state of writing today. In my new book, How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them, things like wordiness, poor word choice, awkwardness, and bad spelling — which have nothing to do with grammar — take up the bulk of my attention.

Nevertheless, anyone who wants to write in a public setting has to be aware of grammar. (And I'm concerned with writing here; talking is a whole different ballgame.) If you make these errors, you're likely to be judged harshly by an editor you want to publish your work; an executive who, you hope, will be impressed enough by your cover letter to hire you; or a reader you want to be persuaded by your argument. In each case, there's a pretty easy workaround, so better safe than sorry. 

1. The subjunctive
This one is pretty simple. When you're writing about a non-true situation — usually following the word if or the verb wish — the verb to be is rendered as were.

So:

* If I was were a rich man.

* I wish I was were an Oscar Mayer wiener.

* If Hillary Clinton was were president, things would be a whole lot different.

If you are using if for other purposes (hypothetical situations, questions), you don't use the subjunctive.

* The reporter asked him if he were was happy.

* If an intruder were was here last night, he would have left footprints, so let's look at the ground outside.

2. Bad parallelism 
This issue comes up most often in lists, for example: My friend made salsa, guacamole, and brought chips. If you start out by having made cover the first two items, it has to cover subsequent ones as well. To fix, you usually have to do just a little rewriting. Thus, My friend made salsa and guacamole and brought chips to go with them.

3. Verb problems
There are a few persistent troublemakers you should be aware of. 

* I'm tired, so I need to go lay lie down.

* The fish laid lay on the counter, fileted and ready to broil.

* Honey, I shrunk shrank the kids.

* In a fit of pique, he sunk sank the toy boat.

* He seen saw it coming.

(The last three are examples of verbs where people sometimes switch the past and participle forms. Thus, it would be correct to write: I have shrunk the kids; He had sunk the boat; and He had seen it coming.)

4. Pronoun problemsLet's take a look at three little words. Not "I love you," but me, myself and I. Grammatically, they can be called object, reflexive, and subject. As long as they're by themselves, object and subject don't give anyone problems. That is, no one who's an adult native English speaker would say Me walked to the bus stop or He gave the book to I. For some reason, though, things can get tricky when a pronoun is paired with a noun. We all know people who say things like Me and Fred had lunch together yesterday, instead of Fred and I... Heck, most of us have said it ourselves; for some reason, it comes trippingly off the tongue. We also (most of us) know not to use it in a piece of writing meant to be published. Word to the wise: Don't use it in a job interview, either.

There's a similar attraction to using the subject instead of object. Even Bill Clinton did this back in 1992 when he asked voters to give Al Gore and I [instead of me] a chance to bring America back. Or you might say, Thanks for inviting my wife and I, or between you and I… Some linguists and grammarians have mounted vigorous and interesting defenses of this usage. However, it's still generally considered wrong and should be avoided. 

A word that's recently become quite popular is myself — maybe because it seems like a compromise between I and me. But sentences like Myself and my friends went to the mall or They gave special awards to Bill and myself don't wash. Change the first to My friends and I… and the second to Bill and me.

5. The 'dangling' conversation
In a class, I once assigned students to "review" a consumer product. One student chose a bra sold by Victoria's Secret. She wrote:

Sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performed well…. Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you. 

The two sentences are both guilty of dangling modifiers because (excuse me if I'm stating the obvious), the bra did not sit in a class or dance at the bar, and "your breasts" are not slightly pricey.

Danglers are inexplicably attractive, and even good writers commit this error a lot... in their first drafts. Here's a strategy for smoking these bad boys out in revision. First, recognize sentences that have this structure: MODIFIER-COMMA-SUBJECT-VERB. Then change the order to: SUBJECT-COMMA-MODIFIER-COMMA-VERB. If the result makes sense, you're good to go. If not, you have a dangler. So in the first sentence above, the rejiggered sentence would be:

The bra, sitting in a class or dancing at a bar, performed well.

Nuh-uh. The solution here, as it often is, is just to add a couple of words: Whether you're sitting in a class or dancing at the bar, the bra performs well.

6. The semicolon
I sometimes say that when you feel like using a semicolon, lay lie down till the urge goes away. But if you just can't resist, remember that there are really only two proper uses for this piece of punctuation. One is to separate two complete clauses (a construction with a subject and verb that could stand on its own as a sentence). I knocked on the door; no one answered. The second is to separate list items that themselves contain punctuation. Thus, The band played Boise, Idaho; Schenectady, New York; and Columbus, Ohio.

Do not use a semicolon in place of a colon, for example, There is only one piece of punctuation that gives Yagoda nightmares; the semicolon.

7. WordsAs I noted in my previous article, the meaning of words inevitably and perennially change. And you can get in trouble when you use a meaning that has not yet been widely accepted. Sometimes it's fairly easy to figure out where a word stands in this process. It's become more common to use nonplussed to mean not bothered, or unfazed, but that is more or less the opposite of the traditional meaning, and it's still too early to use it that way when you're writing for publication. (As is spelling unfazed as unphased.) On the other hand, no one thinks anymore that astonish means "turn to stone," and it would be ridiculous to object to anyone who does so. But there are a lot of words and expressions in the middle. Here's one man's list of a few meanings that aren't quite ready for prime time:

* Don't use begs the question. Instead use raises the question.

* Don't use phenomena or criteria as singular. Instead use phenomenon or criterion.

* Don't use cliché as an adjective. Instead use clichéd.

* Don't use comprised of. Instead use composed of/made up of.

* Don't use less for count nouns such people or miles. Instead use fewer.

* Don't use penultimate (unless you mean second to last). Instead use ultimate.

* Don't use lead as past tense of to lead. Instead use led.

I hesitate to state what should be obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be stated. So here goes: Do not use it's, you're or who's when you mean its, your or whose. Or vice versa!

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 19th, 2013 Leave a Comment

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction.  He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.

1: To get started, write one true sentence.

Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.

Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:

When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.

T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

6: Use a pencil.

Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

7: Be Brief.

Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

To grasp the genius of PG Wodehouse, read him

The great writer’s gifts do not translate to the screen, so 'Blandings’ was bound to fail

Auberon Waugh called PG Wodehouse, pictured, 'the most influential novelist of our age' and a master of 'the Great English Joke' Photo: ALAMY

By Harry Mount

8:19PM GMT 14 Jan 2013

Blandings, the BBC’s new PG Wodehouse adaptation, will not win many converts to one of the great comic writers of the 20th century. It makes for perfectly harmless family viewing, and Wodehouse enthusiasts will back it out of loyalty. But Wodehouse’s sublime story of Lord Emsworth, and his devotion to his prize pig, was reduced to a banal, knockabout tale of toffs acting stupidly, decorated with a series of jaunty Twenties props.

All the posh Jazz Age signifiers were there – the plinkety-plonk Charleston banging away in the background, the thin-fat font on the opening credits. Timothy Spall, a gifted comedian, played Lord Emsworth straight out of the Central Casting school of Silly Earls. He never stood a chance. TV and film versions of Wodehouse are always bound to fail: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, both extremely witty Wodehouse fans, also reduced Jeeves and Wooster to dull, mirthless caricature.

Wodehouse’s exceptional talent was as a supreme prose writer – his work must be read, not performed. He may have written successful musicals; his dialogue may be perfectly timed, his plot lines beautifully crafted, as a glance at his densely worked manuscripts shows. But his real comic power depends on him being read – for the variety of literary references; for the bathetic pay-off at the end of a high-flown piece of writing; for the originality of his similes. These things don’t work when they’re put in the mouth of an actor – they sound too elaborate and forced.

Take this line in The Inimitable Jeeves: “When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.” It incorporates several Wodehouse devices: the contrary thought of elderly aunts being the most terrifying of creatures; the Boris Johnson-esque tendency to drop in obscure Latinate words; the metaphor that becomes a simile.

All this takes skill, knowledge and wit which combine in the mind to produce the comic effect; on film, that line would fall flat. Without the brilliant prose, the BBC’s Blandings became just bland; a silly story about posh twits making a pig fat.

  It’s perverse that the bad telly adaptations go on being made, while the books aren’t read much nowadays. In the month before Christmas, the top five Wodehouse titles sold fewer than 100 copies. None of the Blandings books sold more than 30 copies. Other 20th-century British comic writers are doing much better. Over the past 14 years, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh – a devoted Wodehousian – has sold 142,000 copies; Leave it to Jeeves has sold 32,000 copies over the same period. Why has Wodehouse’s readership fallen off a cliff?

It’s not as if people aren’t interested in the subject matter – just look at Downton Abbey. Funny, posh people are in vogue, too: witness Miranda Hart, riding high in the Christmas TV viewing figures and the non-fiction bestseller charts.

Part of the reason is Wodehouse’s references. However lightly delivered, they depend on at least a passing understanding of classics, English literature and the Bible; Wodehouse won a senior classical scholarship to Dulwich College in 1897. He never shows off how clever he is, but he does assume a certain level of knowledge in order for the reader to laugh at, say, Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves: “I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.”

In order to get that, you don’t have to know who the Nervii were; but you do have to know who Caesar was. There has also been a coarsening shift in English humour over the last generation that has left Wodehouse marooned on an island with his ageing band of fans.

In the 1973 anthology, Homage to PG Wodehouse, Auberon Waugh called him “the most influential novelist of our age” and a master of “the Great English Joke”. By that, Waugh meant the teasing of all people who take themselves too seriously – whether it’s the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury or your self-important next-door neighbour.

That teasing still goes on, of course. But modern comedy is either a race to the bottom – be as rude as you can be about the Queen – or it’s ultra-gentle, observational Michael McIntyre stuff.

The BBC has wrongly placed Wodehouse in the ultra-gentle category – thus the Sunday teatime slot. He doesn’t belong there. Wodehouse is caught between the two poles of the modern age – mischievous but not vulgar, inoffensive but not anodyne. His gifts cannot be captured by the screen, the ultimate medium of the modern age, either. That’s not to say he’s outdated. His genius has been obscured, not promoted, by television exposure. Read him; don’t watch him. He is still timelessly funny.

Sex tips for writers

 

Even the best authors can end up sounding like porn soundtracks when they turn to sex writing. Here's what to avoid 

• Edmund White
• The Guardian, Thursday 6 December 2012 19.46 GMT

‘Bad sex' writing is funny because the anatomical vocabulary of conventional sex writing is hackneyed, impossible to visualise, stale, and given to bragging.

 

I started ruminating about sex writing while thinking about the annual Bad Sex awards – won this year by the novelist Nancy Huston for Infrared. Most sex writing is either soft-focus romance, (like those fuzzy movies you can rent in hotel rooms), utterly elided ("they read no more that night ... ") or hardcore one-handed reading, designed more as a substitute for sex than a realistic description of sex, which is usually comic, following Henri Bergson's definition of comedy as something that occurs when the body fails the spirit. Of course "bad sex" writing is funny because the anatomical vocabulary of conventional sex writing is hackneyed, impossible to visualise because full of ludicrously mixed metaphors, stale, and given to bragging.

Years ago Renaud Camus wrote a book called Tricks, which astonished everyone because he was determined to record his fiascos as often as his triumphs. (Today some people don't even know what the word "tricks" means).

Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels ... tacky. Even careful writers begin to sound like porn soundtracks when they turn to sex writing.

As Susan Sontag once observed, pornography is practical. It was designed as a marital aid, and its vocabulary should follow natural biological rhythms and stick with hot-button words in order to produce a predictable climax. It is not about sex but is sex. Whereas the great sex writers (Harold Brodkey, DH Lawrence, Robert Gluck, David Plante, the Australian Frank Moorhouse) have a quirky, phenomenological, realistic approach to sex. They are doing what the Russian formalists said was the secret of all good fiction – making the familiar strange, writing from the Martian's point of view.

I've written some of the strangest pages anyone's typed out about sex. In my first novel, Forgetting Elena, an amnesiac man is drawn into sex by the Elena of the title. Only he doesn't remember of course what sex is, and he veers from thinking it's a coded form of communication to imagining it's a way of inflicting pain mixed with pleasure on oneself and on one's partner. I suppose I was basing it on my own first experiences of sex as a sub-teen. In another obscure novel, Caracole, I have lots of heterosexual sex, which is written from the point of view of a virginal teenage boy.

To be sure, most of my sex writing has involved two teen males or two (or more) adult men. I always bear in mind Harold Brodkey's remark to me that if you write "she went down on him", it is a "lie", because no one can summarise an intense, prolonged and inevitably unrepeatable and original sex act with a snappy five-word formula like that. He felt that every sex act had to be entirely rethought and reimagined from the beginning to the end. Which of course made his sex writing very, very long.

I've always thought that the main problem with gay erotica is what I call "the cock-and-balls" problem. It seems to me that gay sex writing is a major test for the typical reader, who is a middle-aged woman. Isn't it terribly alienating to have to read about those rigid shafts and hairy bums?
I guess straight men would hate such lurid passages just as much if they read fiction. But older women, at least, often like sex to be linked to sentiment and never to be purely anatomical. I imagine that's why so few gay novels have "broken through" to the general public; all their sexual hydraulics must seem either bleak or seedy. Or "boring", as middle-class people say when they're shocked.

Top tips for writing a strong female hero

Moira Young

The Costa award-winning author of Blood Red Road shares her top tips for creating fictional female heroes that live, breathe and fight on the page

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012 11.15 BST

'Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes': Moira Young, winner of the Costa children's book prize for Blood Red Road

The first female hero I ever met was six inches tall, lived inside our tiny black and white TV, and danced and sang her way along the yellow brick road with her friends. It was, of course, Dorothy in the movie of The Wizard of Oz. I was four years old. There it was, the hero's journey with its archetypal elements – the call to adventure, the road of trials with its allies and enemies, the ordeal, seizing the sword (in Dorothy's case, the broomstick of the Wicked Witch) and the hero's return – all to a catchy musical score. Little wonder that female heroes and the hero's journey sank deep into my psyche and that my first books star a strong teenage girl hero.

1. Rebel Heart (Dustlands)
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Those are my credentials. So here it is, my Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide to Knitting Your Own Female Hero.

1. Make the stakes high

Give your hero a pressing dilemma, an important problem to solve, an urgent need that must be met. This will kick off the action and drive her through the story. It's her quest. We need to identify with her and root for her, page after page, so it should be a universal concern: success, love, death, survival, freedom, revenge, justice. At the same time, we need the quest to be deeply personal to the hero. We won't give a toss if she risks all to save the kidnapped uncle of her next-door neighbour's best friend. We might if it's her twin brother.

Not all heroes accept the high-stakes challenge willingly. A reluctant hero is fine, but if the story is to engage, they have to commit to the adventure sooner rather than later. Dorothy is a reluctant hero. She backs off from adventure, but it grabs her anyway and flings her into Oz. She's just a farm girl from Kansas, ordinary like most of us. But her desire to get back home is so great that, with the help of her friends, she overcomes her fears, conquers every obstacle in her path, kills the witch and is hailed a hero.

Oh, and if you want to make the stakes for your hero even higher, ratchet up the tension by setting the clock ticking. Trigger the timer on the bomb, either literally or metaphorically.

2. Keep her at the centre of the action

Remember, her need to succeed in her quest is what's powering the story. She makes the decisions, for good or ill, that move the story on. I write in scenes. For each scene, I ask myself the same series of questions, including: Is the main character at the centre of the action? Is it from her point of view? If the answer is no, I rewrite it. If there's some reason she can't be at the centre and there's a danger of her being sidelined, I ensure that I don't lose her for more than five or six lines. If it isn't appropriate for her to speak or act, I give her an inner reaction or thought.

3. Put your hero in extremis

Have your plot choices push her to the edge and beyond. She needs to be tested and challenged, psychologically, emotionally and physically, over and over again as her story progresses. Her true heroic character – determined, resourceful, courageous and self-sacrificing – will be revealed by the choices she makes under pressure. Sacrifice is the hallmark of the best heroes. They're willing to give up something of value for the greater good, up to and including their own life.

4. Make her multi-layered

You want your readers to sympathise and identify with your hero. So, like a real person, she should be a complex personality. She needs to be an entire symphony, not just one note. Give her some interesting flaws: fears, weaknesses, internal contradictions and quirks. Set up conflicts in her character that will be impediments to her achieving her goal.

5. Look for real female heroes, past and present

A hero is someone we admire for their courage or outstanding achievements. They don't have to be warriors like Ripley, battling aliens in outer space, or my own character, Saba, fighting to save her brother in the future world of Blood Red Road. They're in your own family and community. Browse the biographies, autobiographies, newspapers and magazines at the library. Listen to the radio, watch the news. We live in a world where women and girls are heroes every day, in big ways and small ways. Write their stories down. You'll be inspired.

Moira Young is the author of the Dust Land trilogy, a dystopian series set in a post-apocalyptic world. The first in the trilogy, Blood Red Road, won the Costa children's book award. The second, Rebel Heart, picks up exactly where the Blood Red Road ended, with the colourful and opinionated main character, Saba, crossing a barren land, keeping her family safe from the Tonton and hoping to be reunited with Jack. The film rights for the series have been optioned by Ridley Scott's production company.

Why you should begin well

Vikram Kapur in The Hindu

In life as in literature, there is nothing like making a great first impression.It is hard to overstress the importance of beginnings. I once heard the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri
say that if the first sentence of a book does not grab him, he is liable to close the book then and there. A bit extreme, perhaps, but it does illustrate how crucial beginnings are.


There are all kinds of first sentences — atmospheric, interrogative, informational, reflective, action-packed… One thing, however, all of them have in common is that they set the tone for the book that follows. This month let us look at some first sentences to see how they help forge an effective beginning.


Haruki Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweetheart begins: “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” Over the course of this short sentence, Murakami introduces us to his main character and tells us that she is a young woman of 22. He also lets us know that this is going to be a novel about first love. While most of the sentence is literal, the use of the word “spring” lends it a deeper meaning. Instead of “spring”, Murakami could have said “April” which would have been a more accurate reflection of exactly when Sumire fell in love for the first time. However, he chose to use the more metaphoric “spring”. The season of spring, in many cultures, symbolizes passion. The use of the word here sets the tone for the extreme passion that Sumire goes on to feel for the object of her affection.


Beginning in the middle

On the other hand, instead of beginning with a statement, you can begin right in the midst of action. Take a look at this first sentence from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity: “The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.” A sentence like that instantly summons images of darkness, frenetic action, and the trawler being tossed about haplessly in the midst of it all. It isn’t surprising that Ludlum wrote thrillers. You would hardly expect a story of first love to ensue after reading such a beginning. 


Then there is this first sentence from the iconic Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The most interesting thing here is how Garcia Marquez instantly places the reader in two time frames. He is going to tell us about what happened on that afternoon. At the same time, however, he is inserting the burning question — how did Aureliano Buendia come to face a firing squad? — in the reader’s mind. Furthermore, Aureliano Buendia is being taken to “discover” ice. By using the word “discover”, Garcia Marquez captures the sense of wonder someone feels at seeing ice for the first time. Since the discovery was made many years ago when Aureliano Buendia was a boy, the whole effect of it on him would be magical.


From a completely different sensibility comes this first sentence from the prolific British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.” Unlike Garcia Marquez’s two time frames, Kureishi is firmly entrenched in one time frame — the night before the parting. The despondent tone of the sentence instantly communicates the mental state of the narrator. He is suffused with regret and guilt, and is clearly talking about leaving loved ones. The tone suggests a failed marriage, and reading on, one is not surprised to learn that the narrator has decided to leave his wife and children the next morning for a younger woman.


Finally, here is the first sentence of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time.” The sentence is, at once, a play on words, cleverly inverting the old way of beginning a story: “Once upon a time…” It also places the novel in Bombay and, consequently, in India. Finally, it tells us that the novel is going to take the form of a fictional autobiography. Only in this case it is an autobiography that tells us about the life of a person, as well as a country.


These are just five examples of beginnings. There are several more, and it would be worth your while to study them. Think of the beginning of a novel like a serve in tennis. It is, perhaps, the only time where you have the reader’s undivided attention. Hence, everything is in your hands. You can hit an ace, which will allow you to win over the reader. Or you can lose it all by hitting a fault.


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In the last week of February, I was writer-in-residence at Pondicherry Central University. There, during one of the lectures, a student asked: How should a writer live? Should a writer be a hermit? Or live out in the world?

As far as I am concerned, a writer must live out in the world. It is only when you engage in the world that you gather its sights, sounds and smells; that you get to experience its various paradoxes. Experience, as the great Latin American writer Roberto Bolano reminds us, is the seed from which great writing sprouts. A hermit can only write from memory, or what he or she can glean from books. The only current experience that he or she has to share is that of being a hermit, which most of the world does not care about. True, you have to retreat into your cave from time to time to be able to write. But a cave is not the place to live.

Riveting conversation

After coming home from Puducherry, I attended a discussion between the novelist and short story writer Bulbul Sharma and V.K. Karthika, Editor-in-chief of HarperCollins India, at the Alliance Francaise in New Delhi. It was a telling reminder of how enjoyable a literary conversation can be when the moderator and writer are in concert. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the two often seemed to be on different planes. More often than not, that occurred because the moderator had not bothered to acquaint himself with the writer's body of work, and was clearly winging it. Thankfully, there was no chance of that happening here. Karthika is Bulbul Sharma's editor, and, therefore, knows her fiction intimately.

Bulbul's fiction illustrates the value of writing what you know. Bulbul, who is currently 60, got married at 19. In her stories, she deals chiefly with women in families. These are ordinary women, drawn mostly from her generation, who live caged lives within the confines of a traditional Indian family. Many of them only get to see the outside world after they are widowed. One of the stories from her collection My Sainted Aunts is about a character going abroad for the first time at the age of 70.

Listening to Bulbul read from her work, I was reminded of how compelling simplicity can be in fiction. Bubul's characters are ordinary people. Her prose is pared back rather than purple. Her stories deal with the small defeats and victories of people living a run-of-the-mill existence. They instantly evoke the iconic Hindi writer Premchand, who Bulbul mentioned as an influence. To me they are also reminiscent of Jane Austen in the way they hone in on women in family situations. They exemplify how resonant simplicity can be even in an age where writers are known more for their bag of tricks than what they write.

Two weeks after Bulbul's event, I wandered into the amphitheatre of the India Habitat Centre where Penguin India was holding its Spring Fever festival. That night Rahul Bhattacharya, who won The Hindu Literary Prize last year, and acclaimed fiction writer Anjum Hasan were in conversation with the critic Sunil Sethi. Regrettably, I could not stay for the entire discussion. But I did hear Rahul Bhattacharya read from his first book Pundits From Pakistan which has been re-issued by Penguin.

Characters come alive

Pundits From Pakistan is a cricket book dealing with the Indian team's historic tour of Pakistan in 2004. The passage the author read from dealt with an instance in the first Test match where Rahul Dravid, filling in for an injured Saurav Ganguly as captain, declared with Sachin Tendulkar close to a double hundred. While describing the reaction to that momentous declaration, the author effectively mimicked the voices of Tendulkar, V.V.S. Laxman, Imran Khan, Ian Chappell, and other well-known cricket personalities. He was using ventriloquism in a bid to enhance the audience's enjoyment of his performance. In the same way, a writer can employ his or her ability as a ventriloquist to bring various characters to life in a book. Many of the great writers are superb ventriloquists. Salman Rushdie gets into the skin of his characters in that manner. So does J.D. Salinger. The best ventriloquists in literature, though, are the playwrights for whom writing dialogue is their chief stock-in-trade. Most prose writers use dialogue in its most basic form, which is to move the story forward. They lack the ear to do anything more with it. Playwrights, on the other hand, utilise it as a key ingredient for building character, as well as negotiating between status shifts. As one of my old professors told me: If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, then read a good playwright.