Subjectivity in reviews, obesity as satire and a pantomime witch

I wrote a short story recently and, as all writers should (and as I suspect that only some actually do), I sent the draft out to people for review and comment.

There was one sentence that I put in that I was unsure about. It felt a bit forced, a bit writery, but I quite liked it so I left it in, knowing that it didn't matter because I'd come back to it later during editing and I could always refine or remove it at that stage. Out of interest (mine, not yours), it was something about a pantomime witch.

So I sent it out for review, and one reader came back and said "yeah, about that line, it doesn't really work. It comes across as a bit clunky, a bit as though you're trying too hard". And I had to agree. Confirmation that I was trying too hard.

Then another reader came back, and he highlighted the exact same line (literally - he inserted a comment directly into the text in Word because we are living in the future) and inserted the comment "Brilliant! Love it!".

So where does that leave me?

In the end I decided to change the line, because I felt that a reader confirming my own nagging doubts about it trumped another reader liking it, but it disguises a deeper issue: where fiction is concerned, the reader is never wrong.

By this I mean that the reader is never wrong in the sense that a piece of fiction is designed to prompt a personal emotional reaction, and that all personal emotional reactions are completely subjective to each individual. So if a reader likes a line that I've written then he's right to like it, but if another reader dislikes it then he's equally right to dislike it. Fiction is like food in that it can be neither "right" nor "wrong", and in that although the ingredients, portion size and nutritional content may vary, if a consumer likes it then that's all that matters.

That said, considering the worrying levels of obesity in the US/UK perhaps consumers should lay off the cheap processed junk and concentrate more on stuff that's altogether better for you. [is this just a bald statement about diet or is it in fact a cunning satire on the state of publishing? YOU DECIDE]

Just look at Amazon. For any book that has more than around a dozen reviews, even accounting for stooges and enemies of the author there will be at least one five-star review and at least one one-star review. Think about that: two people read exactly the same thing, and one thinks it is absolutely fantastic whilst the other thinks it is utter rubbish. Personal opinion is so subjective that it almost makes me wonder whether reviews have any value whatsoever.

Hmm.

Of course, I don't think that reviews have no value. They do. I just think that all reviews are limited by the reviewer, and that no one review or reviewer can be considered to be an absolute guide to quality. At best all you can say is that if a particular reviewer's tastes seem to be sufficiently similar to your own then you are probably going to like what they like and dislike what they like...but even then there is no guarantee that your tastes will coincide on everything. We are each a unique amalgamation of genetics and experiences, meaning that no two people are identical...and meaning that no two personal tastes are identical. Some people will like something about a pantomime witch, for example. Others will not.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. If your tastes are fairly similar to mine then you'll probably agree with them, and if they aren't then you probably won't.

All that really matters, though, is what you think.

Making an 85-year-old professor of ethics kick a disabled child in the face

After writing about narrative in video games recently I've decided that I want to come back to the genre and look at character. I think it's still on my mind partly because I reached saturation point over Christmas from the deluge of television and internet advertising for big-budget blockbuster games like Super Pope Fighter II and War War Kill War 3 and Vernon Kay's Rwandan Genocide Simulator. Sigh...part of me misses the more innocent days of Everyone's A Wally and Auf Wiedersehen Monty.

Anyway. As far as I can tell there are three types of character in video games - the "realised protagonist", the "blank protagonist" and the non-player character (or NPC).

To deal with the first two, there are only two conventions that govern the protagonist in a video game: either he (and let's face it, it's usually a he) is a fully rounded character with a history and a personality - a realised protagonist - or he is an everyman-style tabula rasa: a blank protagonist. Realised protagonists include Tommy Vercetti from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and John Marston from Red Dead Redemption; blank protagonists include the majority of early game characters, as well as the nameless protagonist from the still-brilliant Limbo, Master Chief from Halo, and arguably also Gordon Freeman from Half Life (he has a name but that's about it).

Of course, by having control over the protagonist the player projects at least some of his or her personality onto him, which means that even the fully realised characters are, to an extent, avatars of the player; game developers could design a game with an 85-year-old professor of ethics and part-time volunteer aid worker as the protagonist, but if the player directs him to kick a disabled child in the face then that's what he'll do.

For the most part game characters add a veneer of personality to an otherwise impersonal experience. After all, as I mentioned before, the primary purpose of playing a game is the gameplay - not the story, or the characters. There are a few notable exceptions, however.

Role-playing games (RPGs), for example, place a heavy emphasis on character, although this mostly manifests itself in terms of gameplay - tweaking appearance, skills, etc - rather than as something that drives narrative. One exception to this rule is the excellent Planescape: Torment, in which the player controls the Nameless One, a being who is reincarnated whenever he dies but cannot remember his own past; the game represents a slow, progressive discovery of his memories, personality and former lives, with each new revelation of the past serving as a narrative hook for the player. For me it is expertly done, and one of the only games that I have played primarily with the desire to find out what happens (or rather, happened) next.

Modern games often allow choices of gameplay (Fallout 3, for example, has a very clear moral code, and players that act morally will experience a slightly different game than those who act immorally...although I must say that I quickly discovered that the "good karma" effects accrued during formal missions massively outweigh the "bad karma" effects accrued by minor infractions during sandbox gameplay and as such although my character was considered by the game to be more moral than Jesus himself he spent the entire game stealing anything that wasn't nailed down), and this enables players to exercise a degree of freedom over the character of the protagonist, though only within the parameters of the game's system of choice.

Even without these kinds of formalised choices, however, players have a degree of freedom in how they play most games, and this can be used to lend a sense of character to an otherwise blank protagonist: run in with guns blazing, or hang back and approach with caution? Head-on assault, or stealth?

Characterisation is key to a work of fiction. We, the readers, warm to characters with whom we can identify, whether those characters are heroes or anti-heroes. A character who exists only to progress a plot - and there are plenty out there - is bland and uninteresting. A fictional character who is not fully realised is of limited interest. In video games, however, this is generally not the case. The core of the experience is gameplay, and in controlling the protagonist the player projects himself onto that character, so any shortcomings in the realisation of the character are overcome simply by dint of the player's participation in the game; the player is the character. Or rather, the player fills in the gaps in the character.

As such, video games can get away with investing far less time and effort into creating fully-rounded, sympathetic protagonists, and I think they often do...which is something of a shame. If I'm going to put several hours into completing a game then I'd much rather do so as a character that seems human (Red Dead Redemption's John Marston, Uncharted's Nathan Drake) than as just another anonymous gun-toting marine.

Games don't perform the same function as novels, it's true, but I think that there's an awful lot that games can learn from them about immersion and empathy.

Flash Fiction: "Before"

Before

“I thought I’d see if you needed anything,” she says.

“I should be OK.” He is bent forward, lifting a cardboard box of tinned food out from the boot of his car.

“Can I give you a hand?”

“I’ve got it.”

He carries the box into the house. She waits outside for a moment, then picks up a bag of groceries from the car and follows him through to the kitchen.

The house is dark, but she knows it well enough to navigate without light: the narrow-framed black-and-white photographs, the thinning carpet in the hall, the cupboard with plates arranged but never used. Gold edging. Kept for best.

In the kitchen every surface is deep with tins and packets of food.

“Looks like you’re well prepared,” she says, and laughs. She sounds nervous.

“You can put that on there,” he says, and he nods towards the kitchen table.

As she lowers the bag down she notices the windows. Wooden planks have been nailed crudely across them.

“What on earth have you been doing in here?” she asks.

“Just a bit of DIY,” he says.

“Is this why the house is so dark?”

“Took me longer than it should have,” he says, “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

He glances down at his hand, and she notices the bandage.

“You’ve hurt yourself,” she says.

“It’s nothing. Don’t make a fuss.”

She can’t tell whether he is annoyed at her or at himself.

“Listen, it’s not too late,” she says. “You can come back with me. There’s room. You can stay as long as you like. Until you get somewhere new. Or...you know, longer. If you want.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“John...”

“Forty years. Forty years. I’ll be damned if they’re just going to kick me out and knock it down.”

“Please. You could get hurt.”

He doesn’t answer, instead opens a cupboard and pulls out a bottle and two glasses.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks. He clamps the bottle under his arm and unscrews the cap with his good hand. 

“Do you know what time they’re coming?” she asks.

Whisky tumbles into the glass, joyful and careless.

“Sure you don’t want one?”

She shakes her head. “What time, John?”

“The letter said the diggers’d get here at nine o’clock,” he says, “Police’ll be here not long after, I shouldn’t wonder.”

She swallows hard and looks him in the eye. He seems smaller than she remembers him. As though he were slowly drying out.

 “I think I need some air,” she says.

She opens the back door and goes out into the garden, and he follows. There is no wind. The sky is like a sheet of polished copper.

“It’s a nice afternoon,” she says eventually. The dying afternoon sun erases wrinkles, rubs years from their skin.

“Nice enough,” he says.

“They said it’d storm tonight,” she says, looking up at the sky, “You wouldn’t think it, would you?”

“This is the calm,” he says, and drains his glass.

Book Brouhaha review of The Restoration Man

Alain Gomez at Book Brouhaha has written a very thoughtful and considered review of my short story The Restoration Man, giving it four out of five stars.

Read it here: http://bookbrouhaha.blogspot.com/2011/12/review-of-restoration-man-by-simon-john.html

Ghost Football, With Steven Gerrard

A ghost footballer

Imagine the unlikely situation in which I have been signed by a Premiership football team. Let's call that team Livtottenchestersea Citynited. Imagine now that instead of actually playing for the oily badgers (which is of course the nickname given to Livtottenchestersea Citynited, who of course play in wet-look black and white stripes), I give a fee to tiny-foreheaded wayward-pass-machine Steven Gerrard, who turns up wearing a mask of my face and a shirt with my name on it, puts in 110% in the way that only a footballer can and plays far, far better than I ever could. Then imagine finally that I pick up my exorbitant wages and go home without even having kicked a ball.

It's too far-fetched to be believable, isn't it? If it actually happened then you'd say that it was stranger than fiction. If you were a vacuous reactionary right-wing tabloid columnist then you'd claim that you couldn't make it up. Even though - crucially - it is fiction and I have just made it up.

And yet, the situation that I've described above is essentially what happens in the world of ghostwriting.

Why? Why is it accepted that celebrities (and it is usually celebrities) can claim to have authored a book that in many cases I doubt they've even read? Why is it OK for someone to take credit for the creative efforts of someone else? How many industries would tolerate someone simply stamping their name on something and claiming it as their own work? 

OK, I suppose I can think of a few - I doubt Britney Spears really puts time and effort into creating her new perfume, or that Jamie Oliver really sits down with pencil and paper and draws up designs for his new saucepan - but they're more about endorsing a product than claiming to have created it. You know, approving of it. That's not really the case with a ghostwritten book; it seems peculiar to the publishing industry.

It seems strange, doesn't it? The more you think about it, the more weird it seems (like the word "weapon"...read it and say it in your mind over and over again, you'll soon begin to question the warped logic that decided that such a collection of letters should result in such a combination of sounds).

Now, I'm not talking about this situation as though it's a problem - people are free to buy whatever they like, and free to believe the fiction that Katie Price really is the Saul Bellow of page three; I'm not a vacuous reactionary right-wing tabloid columnist, after all - and I don't want you to think that I am bitter about it (I am, but that's only because I'm bitter about pretty much everything) or that I think that it shouldn't be allowed. I'm just talking about it because, when you think about it, it's a funny situation, and I don't understand how we've reached the stage where the fact that it happens is both well known and tolerated.

It's weird, and that's all I'm saying.

Merry Christmas.

NB I didn't write this blog post. Steven Gerrard did.

Flash Fiction: "By Default"

Not like this.

Not at quarter past three, with a full crowd and your lads out there like animals, vicious and spitting and ready to run through  walls for you. Not on the last day. Not when you’re top of the bloody league and one point ahead of United.

The chairman still can’t believe it, even though he was the one that took Taylor’s call. Nor can you. Now he is hugging, jumping, shouting in your ear: “You’ve won us the league, you’ve won us the league!”

Not you.

City.

Bloody Taylor’s fucking nothing City have won you the league.

Somehow, god only knows how, today, in this day and age, fucking Taylor has managed to fuck it up and City have had to forfeit the game. You don’t know why yet. No-one does. No-one cares. Except you.

“Two points is two points,” they say. The fans chant your name. You wave. You smile.

Forty three games. Forty three fields of mud, blood and sweat. A few tears. You’ve put up with the early starts, the late finishes, the journeys up, the journeys down. Sunderland, Luton, Norwich, Bristol, north, south, east, west. Everything. You’ve given everything. But no-one will remember the other forty three games; they’ll only remember this one. This will be your legacy.

Twenty nine thousand in there, all loving it. All except you.

Hugging, jumping, shouting in your ear.

TV camera, microphone: “What do you think? How do you feel?”

What do you think? How do you feel?

“I’m delighted for the players,” you say, “They’ve worked hard all season.”

There is champagne in your hand, in the air, on your suit. The fans are ecstatic. The fans don’t care. Nor do the players. Nor do the board.

But you care, because this is your legacy and this is no way to win. This is no way to be remembered.

The fans chant your name. You wave. You smile.

Not like this. 

This piece of flash fiction was first published in Stub Magazine.

Salt adds the flavour of salt, of course

I saw an advert for some kind of stock cube yesterday, and part of the messaging for it was the idea that it "really brings out the flavour of beef", which reminded me of the way people talk about salt.

"Ooh," they say, "I always add salt," they say, "It really brings out the flavour [of my cornflakes]," they say.

No it doesn't, it adds the flavour of salt. If anything, adding the taste of salt to something slightly masks the flavour of whatever you're adding it to. On account of the addition of salt taste, see.

Assuming that "brings out the flavour of X" means "makes the flavour of X more prominent" (which we are, because it does), how can adding something that doesn't taste of beef to beef make the beef taste more of beef?

"Brings out the flavour," honestly. It's linguistic culinary madness.