The First Number Not Nameable in Under Ten Words

Something like don’t forget the pasta, and I found myself just looking at the words.

I was thinking about all these things that we write, all these words that we scribble with a pen or tap out on a keyboard or thumb onto a phone and then think nothing else of them. And yet those words were important enough to write at the time, and the fact of writing them lends them a certain permanence.

I type up so many words – emails confirming my attendance at a meeting or messages thanking a friend – and those words are backed up and the backups backed up to three generations and then those words reside on servers probably never to be seen again. All those words that were important enough to put down at the time and are then forgotten.

Words like this blog post. I like to think it’s interesting enough to read now, I’m under no illusions that people will be looking at in 100 years time.

I’ve been looking at ChatGPT – the AI writer. It’s very impressive, but there’s no intent behind the words, no history or provenance or web of interactions that led to its words being written in the first place.

For that reason alone what ChatGPT writes will always be less interesting than something written by a human.

My advice to would be writers: start blogging.

Why? Because blogging once a week helps instill the discipline necessary to becoming a writer. It forces you to actually publish your work rather endlessly revising it. If you’re lucky somebody might even read what you’ve written: treat that as a bonus.

I’ve given this advice many times: it’s rarely acted upon.

Even by myself.

My writing juddered to a halt around 2018. Family circumstances slowed me down, then Covid finished me off. Spending up to fourteen hours a day at a computer in my day job as teacher meant I had no wish to sit down afterwards and write. The ideas kept coming thick and fast, I’d just lost the urge to knit them together.

And then last year I finally followed my own advice. The discipline of posting here once a week has been enough for me to start writing properly again. I’m now 60K into a novel (that’s probably about a third of the way, see here for why) and I’m working on short stories again.

Thank you to all those who’ve given feedback here. Your encouragement has kept me blogging which has got me writing again.

I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s biography. (sponsored link). There’s a passage in there on the effect that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had on him. It was a passage I recognised. I first encountered Hitchhikers in the 1981 BBC TV version ^[1] [2] and I thought it the cleverest and funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

Like all wannabe writers I wanted to do the fantasy version, but I could never get the ideas to fly. When I picked up the first Discworld book I realised that this was it, the book we had all been trying to write. Terry, of course, did it far better than I could. 

My children never appreciated Hitchhikers anywhere near as much as the Discworld, but that’s probably to be expected.

As Douglas Adam’s himself said about inventions…

1 . Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I’m sure something similar applies to books and music. 

Footnotes

1. When I was at university we all claimed to have heard the original series broadcast on Radio 4 in 1978. I suspect it wasn’t just me lying when we made this claim. I’d have been 11 or 12 when the program was first broadcast and probably too young to understand the humour. And of course I didn’t listen to Radio 4 in those days. 
2. As this post is about Terry Pratchett it seemed appropriate to include footnotes.

I took a parcel to be returned to Amazon to the shop around the corner and I realised I’d predicted this in Recursion. It might not seem that big a deal, but when I wrote my first novel a communication shop seemed a pretty good extrapolation of the world at the time. Back then if you wanted to return a parcel you had to go to the post office.

Better than that, though, is when I thought people lying in bed sending text messages in the middle of the night. This is was in my story Restoring the Balance, Too, first published in Interzone. Texting was a new thing, and it occurred to me that people feeling lonely in the night might speak to their friends in this manner.

Lots of other people had the same idea, of course, but it was original to me at the time and I got really quite excited by the possibilities.

All of this sounds pretty mundane, I’m sure.

And all of this is pretty irrelevant. SF isn’t there to predict the future, but to extrapolate the present, and getting it right doesn’t make a good story. Still, there’s a quiet sense of satisfaction on getting it right slightly ahead of every one else.

The third time I predicted the future was when I wrote about the robots on Penrose, but you’ll have to wait a couple of hundred years to see that one come true.

I  remember being pushed aside by one of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s goons as I walked through Harrods in the 1990s. They were clearing a path for their boss; I was heading to meet my wife who worked there at the time. She told me stories of Al-Fayed’s behaviour that I won’t repeat here.

I see a lot of people are saying that the Crown isn’t an accurate portrayal of events. I never thought it was. Nor do I care, the Royal Family have the money and power to get their point of view across. 

Accurate or not, the Crown S5 E3 has some of the best writing I’ve seen on TV in a long time. 

This episode showed a racist, social climbing bully and an entitled princess find something in common. I don’t know if the story is true. I don’t care, to be honest. As far as this post goes I’m only concerned with the fact that two very different people were shown by the end of the episode to form a connection, to like each other.  

I started my writing career with romantic short stories. It’s there that I learned it’s not enough to say two people love each other, you have to show it. This episode showed humanity in unlikeable character, (the Crown has done this before: it’s the only show that ever made me feel sorry for Thatcher), it laid down enough emotional connectors for the final scene between Al-Fayed and Princess Diana to be completely believable. 

Don’t be distracted by the veracity, the costumes, even by the superb acting: this was a masterclass in writing. 

Richard Feynman coined the term Cargo Cult Science: something that copies the form of science whilst ignoring the underlying rigour. 

Watching some old episodes recently I realised that Alan Partridge is a Cargo Cult TV presenter.

He understands the chat show form perfectly. He knows that, to be a presenter, you need to dress in a certain way, you need to ask questions and to listen, to tell jokes and to be serious. 

He embodies the form, so much so that he repeatedly manages to get himself onto TV.

But he doesn’t understand the underlying mechanism. His jokes come at the wrong time or are inappropriate, he’s full of bathos. All of this is what makes him such a great comic character.

Rings of Power is a Cargo Cult television show. It has the form of a fantasy, the elves and dwarves and orcs, it has battles and  rivalries and fellowships and the best scenery of any TV show I’ve seen. It has everything that Middle Earth should have.

Apart from any sense of connection. People fall out because the plot arc demands it. Dwarves and Elves distrust each other because that’s what dwarves and elves do. People ride to battle and then ride back home again. Nobody likes the orcs. 

Tolkien built distrust out of little things. A steward who would be king. A father who favoured one son over the other.

These things take up as much space on the page as the battles do, they’re what make you believe in one side over the other. A list of kings isn’t enough to give a story a sense of history. An epic battle needs to have people at the heart of it, and they need to have real emotions, not just a cut and paste back story.

I really wanted to like Rings of Power. Sadly, this is what happens when you throw too much money at something.

It’s not the big things that make something an epic, it’s the little things.