I have completed a first draft of Bar Code. An extract can be downloaded now, here:

Bar Code extract

I am now seeking to take feedback to cohere a final first draft.

At which point you will probably realise, if you haven't already, why the site is called 'Tantrum'.

I have also outlined, in the last paragraph below, where ideas for a second novel will go.

The Experience of writing Bar Code

First thoughts

A little premature as I am only just editing for a final draft and not had this examined and read by colleagues as yet but an interesting couple of notes occurred on what it was like to try and write a first properly structured novel.

It started way back with me trying to write the most honest piece of creative writing in an autobiography class or simply give up trying.

What I came up with was a similarly dark voice of city anomie born out of my own experience of growing up and looking back.

I got stuck for months afterwards because:

a) I thought that was the catalyst - the start of a long piece of writing at last

b) that I had a natural affinity with autiobiography

What actually happened was:

The story was not the start but the end - similar in conclusion and voice to the ending of Bar Code - and a whole weight of information sat not in front of that 1500 words of autobiography but behind it.

I also discovered that deliberate attempts to write directly about my own life produced the worst, most glaringly naïve and technically weak prose I'd ever come up with - so I chose a dystopian future or near sci-fi genre specifically because of its characteristic of extrapolation - this allowed me to consider exploration of my own past from a remote distance which was more creative for the reader.

As for the development of characters well here's a secret:

I was in the bath about ten years ago and I tipped over some edge of reason - some crescent line across to the dark side of the moon - and I saw in a nutshell that characters are merely versions of the self - split across different lines for examination - they may be embellished with illustrations from other people I meet everyday but essentially that's how it works - and I remember thinking: 'I it seems to make characters in writing more profound if that understanding is met - but having seen the scene in Being John Malkovich whereby he enters his own mind and nearly goes insane...' I thought I should then leave the balance as it stood: not examining too closely the process of my own evolution but keeping the note in mind. 

So I switched off the mirror just in time (or so it felt) but came away with the knowledge that I will never run out of characters to write as long as I am breathing and thinking.

What I saw was a trio - a woman (anima) a male (animus) and one other which hung around as some sort of mediator between the two.

So when it came to kicking myself up the arse three years after a creative writing degree having only achieved scraps and scribbles, I looked amongst all those paragraphs for the most sincere sounding voices which might endure for the length of a novel if they held a common theme.

What I isolated apart from the themes of a dehumanised pattern of consumption and media, were three voices:

One woman (the Olga character) one man (the TK Max character) and one other which had the intelligence to mediate between the two (the Xerox character).

Always look for your unholy trinity but don't sit there for too long and let the bath go too cold.

It may be that the way themes and subjects emerge is also more deeply rooted in psychology than we think. I'm in favour of looking for this and fuelling a sudden, visionary moment, as opposed to all those writing class ideas of 'how to generate a story' - 'get your work space sorted out' 'write down city sounds' etc. and all that crap.

What works for me, as I live in a top floor flat, is clouds. I look at them long enough and the idea will come. Bricks and mortar won't do it for me. Pleasant rivers are too relaxing and make me too calm. Today I was wondering what I was going to do about proving I had an idea for a second novel if I tried to sell a first. And what came to me from a cloudy sky was a line from Lorca when he moved from rural Spain to New York city and saw a 'child's face as blank as an egg'. (Paraphrase).

I see these faces (and in adults) on a daily basis - the lack of interest in other people - and they seem to increase the more we hand out information and politics because the inaccuracy, bias and manipulation of information seems to occur in direct proportion to an increase in the technical means to disseminate it. We become devoid of real feeling and feed ourselves on lies on an increasing scale to suit our own current opinions. Our hard drives become full but our faces become empty.

This suggests that the fault is not the technology but the humans who sit in the centre of it and seek no facts beyond their own sense of antipathy to an idea. People are forgetting this because original sources of hatred or racism are cleverly buried in a media and digital technology trail.

So these sorts of themes: the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of our own humanity, will frame another world for another story, soon. In Bar Code it is marketing that takes advantage of this error. Next time the arena will shift somewhere else. Perhaps history itself will be manipulated. My initial ideas are for another dystopian society which can no longer source any true historical fact and therefore lives in a hodge podge of confused, false customs from past royal courts in London and a highly technological present which needs to define itself anew. 

Language itself may be challenged - in the sense that every word can be attacked by arguments of relevance to other cultures and political systems and words are therefore increasingly mistrusted in comparison to more visceral and often violent modes of expression. This raises another curious paradox - the people who are most media and tech-savvie are more likely to form groups which behave more like neanderthal cultures despite their facility with technology.

Riots, golden jubilees, royal births and deaths, uprisings, cultural springs, factions upon factions and misleading prophecies. Ring any bells....?