As she walked down the train carriage, Annie composed an imaginary autobiography, selecting and categorising what she considered to be key facts about herself for an imagined posterity. When she was eight, she had eaten an ice-cream sandwich so cold it had given her a migraine. In her first year of university, she had lost a pair of socks when they had fallen out of her fifth-floor window. She only ate blackcurrant yoghurts when she felt she had earned them. Her bellybutton was slightly deeper than she would ideally like, plunging from the gentle curve of her stomach down into a tiny pit of wrinkled skin and fluff. It had been knotted by the midwife, whose name she did not know, in such a way as to leave a miniature knuckle of umbilical cord down at the base of the pit, like a grey-pink boulder plugging the hole. The colour of the fluff that formed in it seemed to be completely independent of the colour of the clothes she wore, emerging as small bundles of mysterious greyish lint. Sometimes, while she sat on her bed gazing at it, she imagined her navel was a separate creature in its own right, quietly observing the world from belly-height – the thought both thrilled and disgusted her.
LITERARY FICTION WEEK #3: Ask the difficult questions
She looked sidelong at Graeme. How well did she really know him, she wondered. How well did he know her? Most pressingly of all, how well did she know herself? How well did they know themselves as a couple? What did they think being a “couple” meant? Was that definition the same for each of them, or did one of them – her, she supposed – expect more than the other of this shifting, amorphous relationship? Where were they? What was happening? Would she know even if she knew? Was it, in fact, possible to know? What did she mean by “possible”? Was language ultimately subjective and, if so, did this rob it of its essential value as a conduit for shared meaning? What did she mean by “meaning,” she wondered. Why was she following this line of questioning? What was it that caused her to compulsively interrogate herself like this? Did she need the toilet? Was the journey from a state of unknowing to a state of knowing merely an illusion? Did knowledge have any intrinsic value? Seriously, did she need the toilet? How could one measure value in this context? What was it that ultimately conferred value? Another subjective judgement, perhaps? Another unknowable...
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ she said, getting up.
LITERARY FICTION WEEK #2: Invest conversations with layers of meaning
She turned to her companion and smiled.
‘Nearly there,’ she said. He nodded solemnly. They were nearly there – only two stops away now – but that wasn’t what she had meant.
‘Yes,’ he said. It was an affirmation, she felt, not only of her assertion but of the strange, unknowable bond between them. “Yes” – the undiluted positive, a simple, breathy syllable of agreement. Deceptively simple? Perhaps.
‘Have you got my ticket?’ she asked, already knowing the answer. How much of life was about asking questions you already knew the answers to, she mused. Yet the ritual had to continue. The world spun on its axis.
‘Yes,’ he said again. It sounded the same as before, this sibilant word that fell from his mouth, but it meant something subtly different, she couldn’t help but feel. What? She couldn’t say.
LITERARY FICTION WEEK #1: Open with a detailed description of something irrelevant
Low and flat – as was the rock, she supposed, that the first fish to venture gasping landward, all those millions of years ago, had struggled onto – the briefcase lay across the stranger’s knees in the thin, fluorescent light of the train carriage. It was not quite square with the man’s lap, resting a good ten degrees – roughly 0.17 radians, she quickly calculated – askew. The misalignment, seen both directly and reflected in the dark window of the train, transposed over hurtling fields and telegraph poles, bothered her a little. As for the briefcase itself, it was notable only for its consummate unremarkability; a brown gloss finish with a handle, she surmised – a briefcase so similar to the hundreds of others on that very train as to be rendered figuratively invisible. Literal invisibility, of course, remained beyond the capabilities of science and engineering. For now.
The man got off at the next stop, taking his briefcase with him.
Increase the body count
The policeman says “so where is your papers then?” And I say “hang on officer. I will get them”. But I don’t get them, instead I get a knife from the kitchen and I come back to the front door and I kill him, then I think maybe I will be in trouble, so I go to my friend Ian’s house and I say “hey Ian can you help me escape from the police because I killed a policeman”. . .
Ian looks at me and says “I don’t know man that sounds pretty bad, let me think” but I do not let him think because I kill him. Then when his wife comes home and screams and is not cool with all of it I also kill her. Anyway the police send more policemen and they have stun guns and stuff but its ok because I kill them too, I get arrested and go to court so I kill the judge and then what I do, is I drive off in a stretch Hummer, with a rocket launcher on the roof and I’m all like “Yeeeeaaaahhh!” and when ever people mess with me and stuff I kill them with the rocket launcher especially Mr Cheebing who is my teacher for double science and I’m like “no way!” and he is dead by a rocket.
Make your influences clear
‘Please, you’ve got to listen to me,’ I shouted, hammering on the door. ‘Doctor Browning! Open the door!’ It opened a crack – just enough for an eye and a shock of white hair to appear.
‘You’re crazy,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘There’s no such thing as time travel.’
‘You’ve got to believe me, Doctor,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m from the future. My name is Martin McFoo. You sent me here and now I’m stuck. You built a time machine out of a Lamborghini using uranium to generate six point one terrawatts of energy.’
‘Six point one terrawatts?’ yelled the Doctor. ‘That’s impossible!’
‘You did it, Doctor. You sent me in the car at ninety-nine miles per hour and I came back in time and now I’m probably going to sleep with my own mother. It’s kind of disturbing if you think about it.’
‘Great Skeet!’ exclaimed the Doctor.
‘Listen, please,’ I said. ‘I need to go back. You’ve got to send me back. I have to... RETURN TO THE PRESENT!’
Emphasise your villain’s bad qualities
Doctor Slithingly watched the readout on the computer screen and rubbed his hands together.
‘Excellent,’ he muttered, his voice a thin, rasping hiss. ‘Excellent!’ He laughed to himself in a chilling falsetto. ‘Soon my plan will come to fruition. Soon I will destroy them all!’ The room resounded with the sound of his insane giggling.
This was the culmination of years of research – years of testing tissue samples and creating unnatural biological hybrids – but now it was over. Now, finally, he would destroy them all – every single type and variation of leukaemia. In doing so, he would render useless the work of thousands of charitable organisations as well as denying medical professionals the world over a source of income. He would prevent the publication of hundreds of inspiring stories of survival and sacrifice which might otherwise have sold millions of copies worldwide.
‘Bwahaha!’ he laughed. ‘So long, you meddling haematological neoplasm, you!’
Emphasise your hero’s good qualities
Once upon a time, there was a king who was just and wise and strong and handsome and clever and all the people in the kingdom loved him. However, he had never found a wife. All the women in the kingdom loved him, of course, but he was so devoted to ruling his kingdom well and enjoying all the wonderful food and wine his subjects produced – particularly the wine – that he had never found the time for marriage.
In order to make his kingdom the best it could be, he took a lot of money off his subjects in taxes, so it was important that he spent lots of money on wine so they would get some of those taxes back. He was a very thoughtful king. And in order to keep his kingdom safe, he executed a criminal every day and hung the body on the gate of his palace. Some days, the king’s guards had to work very hard to find someone who looked like a criminal!
One day, he was walking in the grounds of his palace when he saw a beautiful servant girl carrying two pails of milk to the kitchen. The king, being a romantic at heart, noticed that with her hands full, there was no way the servant girl could stop him touching her...
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