The First Number Not Nameable in Under Ten Words

Steve Croft is a former nurse, former police officer, current grandparent, keeper of dog, cats, chickens and bees. We also collaborate musically.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way our lives brush up against each other from time to time. I wonder how these interactions ripple out beyond the moment, so I was fascinated to read Tony’s thoughts in his blog ‘Reaching for the Same Packet’. 

As a Police Officer the number of occasions such meetings happen was almost limitless. Doing the job I realised that a living presence has energy beyond the biochemical limitations of our bodies. Searching for a suspect in a house you can sometimes sense a presence before you actually find the person you are seeking. There’s a sort of fizz that dissipates as they realise they won’t get beaten, you realise they won’t fight you and you both become just people whose lives have collided.

Seeing someone emerge from the window of a factory office after responding to an alarm call is different again. Nobody ever shouts ‘stop police!’ because nobody ever does, but invariably the chase is on as they instinctively realise you are there. We run a short distance but I am fitter and faster so we quickly arrive at the moment when neither knows what will happen next.

‘Oh, it’s you Jason’ I say as I recognise him. He slumps, exhausted and becomes just the likeable, addicted, desperate young man I was accustomed to coming across. I reflect on our pasts remembering my own youth, hanging out smoking a sneaky joint on a deserted railway platform. But for a different decision, accepting a new tablet rather than declining, having a go at this drug or that for a dare, maybe I would be where Jason was now.

Responding to a call from someone worried about their friend you can already get a sense that life has left a house recently. There’s a sort of heavy sadness, almost a reluctance of energy to leave. You have time at an incident like this, time to consider what preceded the act that resulted in death and time to take stock of their lives from the evidence around you. Browsing the bookshelves you find yourself thinking ‘we could have been friends’. 

I saw this statue of Justice on a recent holiday. She was standing outside the Palácio da Justiça in Porto. 

The guide on our walking tour explained that the statue was unusual in that she wasn’t blindfolded. This was because the Palace of Justice was designed for the Estado Novo, described by Wikipedia as “one of the longest-surviving authoritarian regimes in Europe in the 20th century”. The statue was a warning to the people, we were told. Justice was watching the people: she knew where they lived.

I was rather impressed by this story, until I did some searching on the internet and realised the statue of Justice on the Old Bailey isn’t blindfolded either. Apparently the idea of a blindfolded Justice was originally a joke, a suggestion that she was blind to society’s injustice. It was only later the blindfold came to represent impartiality.

Another source suggested that the sculptor of the Porto statue wanted the statue to represent the state looking to the future and not being bound by the past.

Thinking about it, I tend to believe this second story. People usually think they’re good guys, even dictators. Those in charge like to think that the people deserve their fate: because they’re lazy or stupid or they simply don’t understand. They don’t like to think it’s their policies and actions that turn people into criminals.

Or perhaps that’s just another story I’ve told myself. 

I’m not sure why the Porto Justice has folded up her scales, though. Perhaps you can think of your own story for that…

I was travelling on a tram through Manchester during the recent heatwave. Two young women of about the same age were standing by the doors. I was struck by the contrast in their appearance, one wearing shorts and a crop top with long loose shirt over both, the other wearing a hijab and a loose abaya. They were both looking at their phones as they travelled through the city.

Now this is not one of those stories where someone on the tram shouted at one of the women and then someone else defended their right to dress as they pleased to general applause. If anything, the scene seemed so unremarkable that no one but me appeared to have noticed the juxtaposition: it was a great example of the unassuming diversity of modern Manchester.

No, the scene reminded me that we have a tendency to write stories as we want them to be, not as they are. 

When I start a story I default to thinking of what I want it to be, not what it is. I have characters in mind, I have places I want them to be and confrontations pencilled in for them somewhere down the line.  

The more that I write, the more I’m convinced that this is the wrong way to go about things.  I’ve written many times about the importance of following your characters. Put them in a situation and then see how they react to it. When my stories aren’t working its usually because I’ve forgotten my own advice.

The same is true in real life, of course. How often do we listen to what people are really saying and how often do we just impose our own ideas upon them?

(This article was first posted in 2011 – I’ve reposted it following something I heard this week on the radio…)

Over the summer I visited the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, a small town by Lake Constance in Southern Germany.  The museum was small but well laid out.  I’m not going to discuss here what I saw in there as I use that sort of thing in stories, but it was all interesting stuff. All in all a fascinating visit, marred only at the end by something that is all too common now when visiting technical museums.  Something that annoys me more and more, something that reduces me to standing in the middle of some room loudly asking:

Why is there an art exhibition?

Why, every time I visit the a museum showing steam engines, industry, aeroplanes, cars, anything vaguely scientific, do I have to have an art exhibition thrust upon me?  Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I don’t enjoy art galleries, I have even written about them here on occasion.  No, what irritates me is the patronising assumption that whilst I’m looking at a history of how things were made, I also need to be culturally educated in some way by second rate artists who couldn’t get their work displayed anywhere else.

Worse, there will be a sign up explaining to me that there is a link between science and art, and this is going to be demonstrated by some painter’s abstract representation of machinery they probably don’t even understand.  This annoys me for two reasons.  Firstly, you don’t need an artist to show you the link:  the form of just about every machine transcends its function – there is a beauty in the shape of those Zeppelins that is owed to more than just aeronautical design. Why not point that out, rather than forcing me to walk through a selection of badly executed paintings before I rejoin the exhibition I came to see? Secondly, if the link between science and art must be expressed, why, on leaving an exhibition of sculpture or ceramic design, do I never see a small display explaining how the internal combustion engine works?  Don’t supposedly arty types need educating too?

I am not arguing for a moment there is no link between science and art.  Of course there is, although every so often I hear a report on the TV or radio discussing a new artist who is producing revolutionary work combining the two.  Is this supposed to be news?  I know lots of people who have been doing just that for years.

Haven’t the BBC heard of Science Fiction?

As it says on Wikipedia: Eddie Stobart: Trucks & Trailers is a documentary television programme series exploring the world of the Eddie Stobart haulage company.

My father in law used to watch this program, and I would occasionally watch an episode with him. 

If you want to know about story telling, watch this program. The writers were experts at making a drama out of very little. When you’re writing SF it’s easy to create conflict. Destroy a spaceship, a city, an entire planet and let the other side retaliate.

This programme didn’t have the luxury of such exotic material, and yet it somehow contrived to keep viewers on the edge of the seat as we watched a driver attempting to move a load from Leicester to Milton Keynes! A distance of 55 miles! In under 2 hours!

The commentators breathless delivery was such that  you could easily forget that 55 miles in 2 hours is an average speed of just under 30 miles an hour.  Not that it mattered when a red traffic light could take on the aspect of a major catastrophe.

When storytelling is this effective you might ask yourself Who needs robots?  And there is a certain truth that some SF stories get so caught up in the sound and fury they end up signifying nothing. But it’s equally true that I was never moved by an episode of Trucks and Trailers in the same way I was moved by say Slaughterhouse 5...

There’s a post that occasionally does the rounds on the internet challenging beginner writers to describe a woman in a picture. The woman in question would generally perceived to be attractive, the assumption behind the task is that some writers will concentrate on her physical appearance. The challenge is seen by some as a test or a trap.

The post is a good test for beginner writers, though not for the reason some think it is. The reason is that no writer worth their salt would describe a character solely as a list of physical characteristics. No fiction writer, I should say. Fiction writing is about communicating emotion, not recounting facts.

You might be surprised how little physical description is included on books.

Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, one of the most eligible men in fiction is famously described as tall and dark. That’s it. It’s his character, his actions, that make him attractive.

When asked to describe someone in their story, a writer would think about the character first. Are they clever, shy, mean, manipulative, generous?  Does anything about their appearance suggest this?

Beauty is subjective, how are you going to make your character attractive to the reader?