The House of Writers (5 page)

Morning meetings are followed by an afternoon of writing. At 4.30 everyone “takes a chill and chews a pastry” in the kitchen or reading room—a whitewashed nook where panpipe sounds help mellow the mind, and a tropical tank resides where coloured flatfish duck and dive around lifeless, whiskered catfish, tempting the reader’s eye away from his text. There you can browse the department’s bestsellers, such as
Lighter Than Luck,
with its tagline “You only get one chance to change your world”;
Stranger Than Loving,
with its tagline “A heart closed to hope is a heart closed to happiness”; and
Tomorrow’s Child,
with its tagline: “Hold the meaning of life in the palm of your hand.” Here’s a helpful beginning/end snippet from that book for those thinking about middlebrow fic structures:

He hated kids.

He hated their biting, squirting, nipping, groping, wailing, screaming, dribbling and drooling.

One morning, his wife told him she was pregnant.

“Abort it,” he said.

“We should think about it first.”

“I have. Kill the cells. Flush it out.”

“Don’t be so callous.”

“I am not having a kid. End of.”

Jane burst into tears and he stormed out the room. He really bloody hated kids.

*

Tim held the baby in his arms. The peaceful creature slept, a soft smile on its lips. Tim felt a warm shudder in his bones.

“My son,” he said.

“Your son,” Jane said.

He rocked his baby in his arms. He couldn’t quite believe he had made this thing, that it belonged to him, that he was responsible for the living breathing being in his arms.

“My son,” he said again. Jane stared at him tenderly. This was the beginning.

“Your son,” she said, and cried.

What about the meals? No blocky Madeira or sickly sherry here. I entered the dining area on my first evening to find a long-table of nutritional splendour—organic potatoes arranged in steaming pyramids, seasoned with marjoram and mint; bowls plump with chia seeds, goji berries, and cacao nibs; meek plates of hummus and tahini dip; densely packed troughs of whole grain spelt egg pasta, seasoned with chervil and coriander—among others. I met the readers: Mandy, Rhianna and Georgie, three elderly retired ladies, or as Joe introduced them, “ladies of leisure who fund our fictions from their charitably prosperous banks of inspirationally bottomless money!” At the end of the table, I was surprised to see three small black children sitting patiently awaiting orders. “Cal,” Joe said, “you might have noticed our little brown surprises at the edge. This is Angela, Arran, and Arnold from Somalia. We adopted them to help us with our stories. They are abused children from the village of Mowhaar. We offer them a refuge here in exchange for stories about their sufferings.” Joe placed a potato into the narrow chute that ran along the table, and when Angela told in her thick Somalian accent about the father who beat her and put scorpions in her bed, Joe raised the pulley so the potato rolled towards Angela’s plate. Arran told about his abusive mother who starved him for two days and force-fed him lettuce on the third, and Arnold about having to till an entire field before dawn before he was allowed a cup of water. The ladies cooed and applauded, flinging tofu strips or seitan slices into the chute as extra rewards for their bravery. “The way we see it,” Mandy said, “the more articulate they become, the clearer they can describe all the horrors they suffered. And the books will be so much more
authentic.”

“Tell us about your hardships, Cal,” Rhianna said to me, “and we’ll give you a potato!” I told them about how my sister was pretty horrible to me growing up. “Tsk, you won’t even get a sprig of celery at this rate,” Doreen said. I went on to explain how she used to urinate in my bed. “My goodness! He deserves at least a Scotch egg for that!” Georgie said. And how she used to put ants in my coffee. “A coif of noodles!” Rick said. And dead bees in my hair. “A punnet of couscous!” Doreen said. And a clothes peg on my scrotum. “A muglet of minestrone!” Mandy said. And how she smeared Marmite on my chin as I slept. “A slice of Madeira!” Joe said. I declined. “Oh, have some Madeira, my dear,” Mandy said. The room exploded into laughter.

Socialising on the second floor takes place on the “chillaxminster” carpet, where Joe plays peacenik songs on a ukulele, including “When the Sun Goes Down in Your Heart” and “Sunset Over Lake Positive,” while Julia and Doreen sew daisies into legwarmers and Rick improvises free-verse poems to warm ooooohs (no matter how terrible!). The children play with dolls and dump trucks in a sand-pit, or attend English lessons given by the ladies (who sometimes stay over). I ended up crocheting “lucky” duck feathers into tights or playing the bongos, munching from a bowl of stone-ground sea-salted corn chips and sucking back pints of sparkling Highland water. At my book launch, a vegan buffet had been prepared and a small stage erected for the performance of two colourful tableaux. The Somalian kids were inserted into papier-mâché costumes—a sunflower, petal, and daisy—and moved around the stage like uncoordinated waltzers to trippy lullaby music played on a xylophone, flatly singing non sequiturs like “love of hope in land of freedom” and “we are hope and loving love” in a way that was more disturbing than cute. Doreen and Julia formed a human light show by manipulating the fairy lights wrapped around their long silvery dresses, beginning with a secret strip tangled in Julia’s high-quiffed hair: blue winks below the dirty blonde, moving down her shoulders in yellow-green flickers until a psychedelic disco blinked along the two women’s bodies, bunched tightly together as though caught in a flamboyant Venus flytrap. Joe explained how the sunflower revolving around the pansy symbolised the four cycles of growth as outlined in the Arnold Vernon
Hope Through Ecology
manual. The daisy is at the centre of the sphere on the index of the sun. Sometimes when the weather permits it the petunia is in the ascendance. I understood very little, but it was tremendous fun. The evening concluded with a reading from my novel. Here’s a sneaky peak:

The sun set on the final sheddings of his mis-said heart. Walking into the waning moon as it waxed on the dying embers of the city, he entered a new beginning away from the shattered emblems of his old heart. He was putting his old life behind him, like a used-up bacon slicer being taken back to the repair shop a day ahead of the warranty expiring. He gazed into the middle distance, his eyes magnetised to the hopeful sunset, and with a generous lashing of hope in his hope-filled heart, he went forth into the new world, his heart aquiver with expectation, poised and ready to lead a meaningful, socially conscious, revitalising life, and not the one of degradation and sin he refused to abandon earlier.

—Cal McIntyre,
Hope Hurts at First
(p.459)

A Word from the Team

J
OE:
Hey dudes and pomegranates! Take a load off and let me slip you the info. We four fab ficcers write what “they” like to call Middlebrow Literary Fiction, what we prefer to call Morally Replenishing Moral Fiction: this leans less on the negative. We bite into difficult cookies here, like third-world poverty, homelessness, life in slums, childhood trauma, and substance abuse, always with a hopeful, redeeming outlook. It’s easy to fall into despair when thinking about these doozy downers, so we give our readers a positive message and a way to chew on these issues that will make them strong and feel hopeful. Hope is the most commonly said word round here. Have you hope? So, my groovy team, what advice have you got for anyone looking to hang with us moral ficcers?

D
OREEN:
Be up, don’t beat up.

J
ULIA:
Ooh, that’s nice.

R
ICK:
Get ready to bite into some difficult crackers.

J
ULIA:
Or a cranberry bagel with tropical sheaves and parsley prawns.

D
OREEN:
Yum, how voogey!

J
OE:
Never let the sun set in sorrow.

D
OREEN:
Voogeylicious!

R
ICK:
Miss friends, don’t ’dis friends.

J
ULIA:
Bite into hope, not the Pope.

R
ICK:
Board the bus to the terminal of possibility.

J
OE:
Hug the love, love the hugs!

D
OREEN:
Voogeywoogie!

J
ULIA:
Put wishes into the cannon of disappointment.

R
ICK:
Praise be to he, she, they and everyone!

J
OE:
Love is the best, why settle for less?

D
OREEN:
Voogeywoowoo!

J
ULIA:
Be prepared to be kind.

R
ICK:
Let the stars light the night on your way to what’s right.

J
OE:
Sail the seven seas for one big smile.

J
ULIA:
If I grant you a wish, will you tell me a secret?

R
ICK:
Close your eyes, dream big, and never give up.

D
OREEN:
Voogeyseeyou!

T
HE
adorable ink-cheeked creation of C.J. Watson was inserting his fingers into a pipe that in nineteen days’ time would flood the entire seventh floor and drown a hectare of single-sided laser-printed manuscripts, two hundred Macintoshes containing over two billion words of unprinted work near completion, and three people. He unzipped his flies to make a urological investigation between two corporeal and industrial waste outlets (to see if his winkie might fit into the pipe), only to have his research interrupted by a roar of “What ARE you doing! Get AWAY from there!” He responded to the chide by running up and down the office, figure-of-eighting the writer-locked desks while recreating the exact sonic pitch of an Allied bomber as it unloaded on a village of civilians, collapsing on the cream carpet in a harrowing mass of screams and howls as he scooped his insides up and cried “WHY!?”

The writers turned their murderous eyes on C.J. Watson who was too preoccupied with p.108 of the fourth book in her
Firewood
series to notice her son’s powerful screams that arrested one’s senses and, like all successful war recreations, bludgeoned the viewer into contemplating the horror of mass sacrifice for the propagation of ideological evil. Upon the cease of his howlings, the child (whose adorable name was Puff) leapt up and took on the part of a grieving widow wailing over her husband’s corpse, letting rip a long tirade against the sickness of the world and the beastliness of man until F.V. Young lost his cool and hurled his mousepad towards the adorable ink-fingered Puff and chased him around the office with his stapler, shouting his regular threat to “seal that little blighter’s lips shut.” At which point C.J. rounded off her final clause and took F.V. by the collar, warning him: “If you ever threaten my son with a stapler ever again, I will have you scrubbing the stairs in solders.” She used that threat each time as she loved the triple-S alliteration. F.V. didn’t.

Claire J. Watson had plotted her nine-book-and-increasing
Firewood
series (ex-Firepile, Fireworld, Fireplace, Firehole, and Fire-ice) during her stint as a phone operative for ScotCall. She spent her free time adding complexities to her fantastical world in order to prevent having to start the writing. When more characters, incidents, metaphors, universes, enchanted lands, and themes had been planned than she could conceivably insert into one book she would expand the scope and dream up another handful of plotlines and opportunities for long indulgent description. To distract herself from the looming prospect of writing she signed up to ScotCall dating and fell in pretend love with an operative whose interests included nailing 5K targets, dodgeball, the music of Santana, and sitting on beaches basking in the wonderful sun of the wonderful world created for wonderful us. Being in a relationship with a target-hitting worker meant she had too much free time to sit and compose her novel, so she allowed her pretend love to impregnate her, hoping this responsibility might provide ample distraction from the business of having to write; only her man doted on her so much she had less preparation to do, so she decided to sever ties with the man and raise the child alone. The arguments ate up a certain amount of time. Once the child was born she realised she didn’t love it (him) and so came to her senses and signed up to The House to realise her dreams and knuckle down to complete the nine-books-and-increasing before she went mad.

T
HE
House of Writers
is the first “proper” novel I have attempted since moving to The House. In my twenties, my writing method involved a form of permanent self-distraction using the internet (a portal to view cats). I would write a sentence (or half a sentence) and click back onto the three or four regular windows I had open and stare at the same content I had seen that morning observing minute variations as the feeds expanded. I became so habituated to writing one sentence (or half a sentence) and clicking onto the web pages I had seen before, looking for distraction opportunities, that writing became an incremental and unabsorbing process and the only solution I had was to develop a form of composition that allowed for aimless digression. I also had to account for the general sloth and sleepiness that overcame me when faced with the prospect of starting anew, worrying that the present day’s writing would pale in comparison to yesterday’s (with yesterday’s paling in comparison to the previous day’s, etc.) I had to permit myself to churn out semi-conscious sentences and hope later I might have the concentration to whip them into line as passable constructions.