Diary of a Shopkeeper, 11th September

Folk sometimes ask where I get my ideas for this column. I find it hard to answer them. I don’t really have ideas, I say. If ideas end up in the columns, that’s an effect of the column being written. The ideas don’t precede the column, or bring it into existence. The words come first, and ideas come later, if at all: sometimes there are only words, and that’s fine.

I was reminded of this while reading the new novel by James Kelman, God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena. It’s narrated by Jack Proctor, a 66-year-old writer from Glasgow, who has been sporadically successful in a conventional sense – he won the Banker Prize, for instance – but who is thoroughly opposed to the commodification of writing by arts bodies and academia. For Proctor, writing is a philosophical and political assertion of the individual’s right to exist, and for the community they come from to exist. It’s about voices being heard, and stories being told.

If this makes it sound like a dry, theoretical screed, I’m doing it an injustice. God’s Teeth is the funniest of Kelman’s ten novels to date. I laughed out loud many times, and when I wasn’t laughing, I was somewhere between grinning and gasping in recognition. Make it interesting! Proctor repeatedly urges his writing students, and Kelman does.

The story follows Proctor through several weeks of a writing residency organised by the House of Arts and Aesthetics, whatever that is – Proctor never finds out. What he does find out is that it’s almost impossible to write while on a writing residency. Instead, he is expected to give talks, do readings, teach classes, and above all perform the role of The-Banker-Prize-Winning-Author.

Proctor can’t perform anyone else’s role. What he wants to do – what he must do – is write. The comedy of the book, and its political punch, comes from Proctor’s continual battles with teachers, students, and arts officers, who may be well-meaning, but who continually frustrate his attempts to write, not to mention failing to grasp the value of his writing advice. And it really is good advice. Anyone setting out to tell stories, whether short or novel-length, could learn an enormous amount from Proctor’s guidance:

Some of you think you have ideas inside your head and that your task as a writer is to transcribe or translate, to somehow pin these ideas down onto the page. It is nonsense. What we do is invent stuff on the page, whether it’s a paper page or an electronic page is irrelevant. We assemble stuff; we break ideas up, break them down; we cut, copy and paste separate bits together.

Whether this is advice the actual living Kelman would give, I don’t know. But I am happy to take it from the fictional Proctor.

The same folk who ask me about ideas in this column also ask me about characters. Who is Mrs Stentorian, in real life? they say. Is Willie Pickle based on me? The answer is nobody, and no. Those characters are not based on anyone. They emerge from the words on the page. They don’t exist till the words are written down, and till you read the words. When you read them– alakazam! – they live.

Proctor tells a group of students:

Let all of us go now and if we haven’t already done so we should begin writing at once, and those of you who find it impossible to write a single word must find a pencil and write down on an A4 piece of paper the following words: it is impossible to write a single word

and follow that with the word: Why?

and following on from that just hold yer breath and dive in

No better advice for any writer. Splash!

God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena is published by PM Press, and is available from Stromness Books & Prints (01856 850565) for £12.99. You can read more about PM Press’s Kelman books, and find some interesting links to interviews etc, here.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 14th September 2022. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.