Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Eight years ago today was the first time I’ve ever literally fallen to my knees. In this case, it was in front of a television showing two planes smashing into a tower, mere months after we were repeatedly told it was a threat and the men and women in charge ignored it, and mere months after I’d spent a fortnight in Washington DC, visiting the White House and Pentagon City. Countless dead, wounded, and worst of all, the millions of people now alone because of the lives lost. To some, it was a harrowing initiation into the true nature of humanity when push comes to shove. To others, it was simply another wave of deaths in an endless list of pointless wars and conflicts.

The odd thing about 9/11, and for that matter, the bombings in London on the seventh of July a few years back, is that everyone was outraged that these people had attacked us in such a brutal fashion. The vast majority didn’t understand what could have provoked these men and women into committing acts of terrorism, even though on a daily basis the news sources were inundated with footage of the USA and the UK stomping Iraqi men, women and children flat under the boot of the “superpowers” that jump in at the first possible opportunity.

I hold no strong political views, simply because I’ve accepted long ago that the only person who’ll hold identical views to myself is, well, myself. I can rant and protest all I like, but unless I’m willing to be Emperor of Earth, there’s not a lot I can do to change things, especially with the government being such a characteristically stubborn and clunky machine in the hallowed United Kingdom. Irony in the name itself is evident enough, because I’ve never seen a collection of constituencies so divided as North Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. The Scottish National Party should be indication enough of the continuing fracture in the societies we live in.

We consider culture important because it allows people to celebrate the customs and traditions of their people, and to embrace other cultures by showing them how the country in question would, for example, cook a meal, or go dancing. The problem with culture is that it’s become the most subtle source of the collapse of international relations that we could feasibly name. I recently saw Bruno, apprehensive as Sascha Baron Cohen sat down with representatives of Palestine and Israel to try to come to some sort of agreement.  ”So what are you fighting over,” he said, feigning complete ignorance. “Hamas,” they chorused. “Humous?” he responded, and I laughed, wondering what they’d do next. They corrected him, and agreed it was something they both ate in their respective cultures.

“See? You both like humous. That’s one thing, let’s go from there.” The Bruno persona was gone, and in its place, albeit only for a fraction of a second, Cohen sat there honestly wanting them to see the logic in his argument. In thirty seconds, he had achieved more than the UN had in years, connecting these people on a base, fundamental level. Have you ever met someone at a party, and connected over the smallest bit of trivia, be it a song, a meal or a train station you get off at to go to work? Everyone has at some point, and it’s these things we need to rely on if anything is ever going to get better.

The problem I find with the USA is they have an amazing sense of patriotism. So amazing, in fact, that it’s become quite xenophobic. This is a familiar feeling if you’re anywhere in Europe, or anywhere else, for that matter. However, when you’re a xenophobic superpower, the problems start to arise when you take offense at various things you don’t really have the right to be involved in. There are several countries I could name, shamefully the one I live in at the moment also, that are very gung-ho when it comes to bombing countries that are barely developed. Bill Hicks once rightly stated “I’m sorry, it’s not a war. It’s only a war when two armies are fighting.”

So what can we do, and where do we go from here? The USA and UK have militarised so much of Iraq that to pull out immediately would write the death sentences for many civilians, the Taliban rising up to reclaim their territory and punishing the Iraqi citizens who submitted to Western rule. It’s patently fucking ridiculous, because had we not gone there in the first place we wouldn’t be in this situation. “It was for the oil,” some say. “No, it was for the damn terrorists,” say the others. It doesn’t matter what it was for. People have died. Thousands of people. And for what? Nothing. We found no weapons, there was no-one there causing any more trouble than normal. In fact, the arrival of marines probably doubled the amount of teenagers being given guns and told to die for their God.

Sinan, co-host of Big Red Potion, was recording with myself and his other co-host Joe DeLia, revealed that he was of Iraqi descent whilst we were discussing the cancellation of the game Six Days in Fallujah, a shooter set in a hyper-realistic contemporary Iraq, a far cry from the melodramatic bullshit of Call of Duty 4. I felt so sorry for him and his family, watching endless news bulletins about one marine dying every few weeks, when thousands of friends and relatives on the other side, who’d never so much as wished a bad thought towards the USA or Europe, were being shot dead in raids and blown to pieces by carelessly planned bombing runs. Remember Clinton’s raid on the “explosives factory”? The one that turned out to be a factory making asprin? Thousands dead, and for what? A few thirty-second CNN bulletins, but never an apology.

As you look around at all the memorials, I’ll be thinking about my visit to Ground Zero four years ago. I cried, simply because building a tower wasn’t the answer to remembering these people, and neither was a plaque citing the deaths of those involved. However, a plaque covering the entire foundations reading “people died here because peaceful resolution is not something that humanity has mastered, these people died because our government drove a small country to desperation and brutality” might be more appropriate. Ghandi was once asked in an interview what he thought of Western civilisation.

His response? “I think it would be a very good idea.”

Recently I’ve been plowing into the first draft of a new novel, and I’m thousands of words in at this point. Characters are set up and introduced, the plot has been hinted at ever-so-vaguely, and I’m easing everyone into their designed roles within the narrative. But sometimes, it’s frustrating not knowing quite where I want to go next. It’s a bit of a catch 22, really – I can’t write the entire narrative plan up in detail, because I might as well write the damn book instead. And yet, at the same time, I feel like the characters are sometimes lost as to what to do.

I enjoy letting them take over, and find things for themselves. I let my fingers type and basically just watch as things take place in front of me, often writing entire chapters without so much as thinking about planning any minor conversations or events in advance. The narrative I’m working on now is a reworking of a short story I published on a writer’s community a while back that good very good reviews, and I wanted to take it that bit further.

Personally, the thing I’m enjoying most is not naming the city yet, or really giving too many details at present. I have the option of simply doing an MS Word “find and replace” if I feel like it, but I’m sick of writing stories where the environment runs all character events. Cities are amazing characters, capable of creating fear, tension and wonder in the same descriptive opening sentence of a book, but I find when that idea runs away with you, you tend to end up with lumbering dunderheads stumbling blindly around an amazing city not doing very much at all.

Still waiting for my new Amazon books to arrive, and while I do I have time to read other material, to experiment with what I might like reading. The Time Traveller’s Wife was a book my girlfriend and myself got very into before we really knew anything about the film (a fantastic adaptation that, somehow, actually improved the work itself. I say somehow, I mean simply by removing all the ridiculous amounts of none-too-subtle erotic bullshit), and it changed my perception of what could be done with pen and paper.

I say this, because in all honesty when it comes to what I like to read and what I don’t, I’m an arrogant, narrow-minded bastard at the best of times. I love science fiction, hard crime thrillers, John “Oh, s***” Grisham and obviously the Black Library range of books. Yet, my girlfriend has the widest taste in literature I’ve ever seen in my life, and I love her for that because she’s opened my eyes. This summer I sat down and read Catcher in the Rye, a book I’d always been curious about but had assumed was classic literature and therefore about as exciting as a cigarette stub on the pavement. I flicked open the front cover in Borders one day, and the word “crap” caught my eye.

I’m by no means saying I was sold on the book because it had the word “crap” in it – I am one of a legion of Kevin Smith devotees, but this by no means indicates that obscenity dictates quality. It’s Lex’s favourite book, ever, and for a (ridiculously talented) student of literature, at one of the top one percent of literature universities in the world, that’s saying a hell of a lot. The book blew my mind, because it opened my eyes to a simple fact I’d been overlooking due to my attraction to largely fantastical settings, characters and plot events; the mundane can sometimes be extraordinarily interesting.

I suppose it’s obvious enough, really. 70% of us watch reality TV on a regular basis, it would seem, and it’s difficult to come up with an argument for why, exactly, that we’re so obsessed. John Grisham is a master of this approach to fiction – take The Painted House for example: slowest buildup to anything happening, in the region of two hundred pages or more of literally painting houses and being a child. But it sucks you in, doesn’t it? Kevin Smith was once asked what he actually did all day, so he decided to diary it. The answer? He doesn’t actually do that many out-of-the-ordinary things on a day-to-day basis, and this is after following his daily diaries for three years. It’s interesting, but it removes the God-veneer from his image somewhat, making him more endearing and, well, real.

So how does all this tie into creative writing, exactly? Well, it just means that in order to establish what someone is like, you can’t simply just put them under pressure and hope an amazing person comes out the other side, and hopefully, during, as well. People crack under pressure, they change, and what you’re showing the reader is a distorted, panicky-as-all-hell version of the character you’ve spent hours creating only to destroy any chance the reader has of connecting with them by putting them in a personality-warping situation.

With my work I’m attempting to put them in situations where they’re simply doing their everyday job. How often have you ever seen a cop write up a crime report, instead of simply jumping in his car and speeding towards the next slow motion bullet-fest? But realistically, what better opportunity for that cop character to reflect on recent events than writing about it himself, inside the pages of a book? Just because the reader and the author know what’s just happened, seeing it from the third-person “omnipresent” standpoint. The character is a real person, ultimately, and they do tend to react to things, no matter how steely or battle-hardened they are. When you stop allowing your characters to be real people, ultimately you’re not writing about human beings anymore. I’m British, and I moan about everything you can think of, constantly. To me, it seems unnatural that someone would be disenfranchised with some of the curve-balls you throw at them on a daily basis as an author.

Regardless, it’s time to continue work and send someone off to do something reckless, whilst two other people do mundane stuff that turns a little dark and twisted. The one thing I learnt from hardcore-Gothic literature studying at university is that people are scared by monsters, aliens and serial killers, but nowhere near as much by things that are slightly wrong. Look at Stephen King’s work, and tell me what scares you more; his odd demonic other-worldly stuff, or the moments where someone notices a door is slightly wonky. He’s ruined hotels for me.