The Last Thing the Author Said: Writing by Nick Sweeney
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Pavlov's Dogs - who owns a story?

5/11/2018

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The first page of the first draft of Pavlov's Dogs
Pavlov's Dogs is based on two stories told to me by two different people, so my telling you that will beg the immediate question: what makes it a story by Nick Sweeney? The simple answer is that I was the one who wrote it. Stories never come out of nothing, and rarely come out of imagination alone.

The main part of the tale was told to me by a friend who had set off on a trip through North Africa somewhere - maybe Morocco, but I can't now remember. It might even have been Spain, but it doesn't matter - somewhere hot and dusty, where more adventurous, or just curious, tourists go off the beaten track and where there are conscript soldiers having to cross the country to get to and from their barracks. I was familiar with them myself from a long trip through Morrocco in 1989, and from trips in Turkey in 1988 and throughout the early nineties, when I lived there. Mostly the soldiers were rather forlorn but very friendly, and, in general, not well educated enough to know English that well. We usually communicated via universals like the sharing of food and cigarettes. I was often advised not to either pick up hitchers nor hitch, in both Morocco and Turkey, but my only concession to this was never to do it at night - all kinds of dangers were promised if I ignored this advice - though I did, sometimes, if I misjudged times or distances. Apart from some angry words with a hitcher, once, and a driver once, which I felt could have developed into a full-blown row if it had gone any further, my experiences were always unremarkable, and I'm just mentioning them here to show that the story my friend told me had a background with which I was familiar. But anyway, as I said, I wrote it, so could have just made it all up anyway!

The two main elements of my friend's story featured the soldiers robbing her and her pals, and the man out on the beach arranging stones to some scheme of his own. There was a whole minibus full of people on the trip, but as it's a short story I decided I had to keep the number of characters down, so I made it two couples in a jeep. My friend's story very much hinged on the dynamics of leadership in a group of people who were on the face of it egalitarian, idealistic about promising to share the work and responsibilities of a trip like this, but never actually fulfilling their share. I left out some incidents (which now makes me think it was indeed Morocco) when my friend repeatedly warned the others not to buy dope from just anybody; she was shouted down repeatedly, and they were ripped off repeatedly, even arrested once in a police scam worked out with the local dealers – the dealers get the money for the dope, the police get a ‘fine’, and the dope is handed back to the dealers, so it can all start again with the next gullible crowd of tourists. They still managed to blame her, despite her warnings. In fact, as the trip went on, she saw that they desperately wanted a leader or mother figure, but only to moan about, talk back at, and by which to feel hard done by, so that they could all feel like ‘proper’ rebels; by the end of it she felt like the spoilsport auntie of rebellious and sulky teens.

The characters remind me of those in TC Boyle's wonderful novel Drop City, the plot of which focuses on hippies in the sixties who take their 'back to the land' movement quite literally, and go to a remote part of Alaska to live off their wits and the land; not being particularly well-equipped with wits, the land proves formidably resistant to being lived-off. The comparison I make here is that many of the people in Drop City had a kind of self-assuredness that was untested against any actual test; it's the same with my characters, apart from Carrie, who are basically out of their depth, but still don't appreciate being rescued by her. Carrie is out of her depth too, to a certain extent, or is close to it; it's only the fact that she has the character to face the challenge which gets her through it.

The other story was told to me by a vegetarian friend who went to a restaurant abroad somewhere - again, I can't now remember where. The incident is more or less how I've written it: a child waiter with gloves too big, a piece of raw meat under an omelette. My friend thought it was sort of funny, though one of his friends was put off their own dinner because of it. The only difference I've made is that, when my friend complained, the manager paced grimly all over the restaurant yelling in turn at each and every member of staff who could possibly have handled the dish, and made the chef come out and say sorry, like that Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers. Even so, my friend thought this was an act, a way of entertaining the manager, the staff and the other people in the restaurant - sort of, it's a slow night, so let's wind up the veggies. Now I’m thinking that it might have been funnier to depict this, but the story was getting a bit long, and I wanted this interlude to be sinister, rather than comic. I don't know now: reading this story again after so long, I feel that it lacks humour, and perhaps could do with some comedy, so I may rewrite and add that part one day, and see how it turns out.

Lots of very short paragraphs, I notice, which I don't usually like in other people's writing. I guess they work here, which at least should make me more tolerant of them when I see them in other stories.

I also sketched out a big scene in which Carrie confronted her friends, and had her telling them what she thought of their cowardice, their lack of togetherness, their willingness to blame her for everything that went wrong, but I guess this should have been implicit in the story anyway.

I wrote it very quickly, possibly all in one go, I see from the original draft of it in a notebook, on 30th July 2000. I don't think I did much work on it for a while, wasn't convinced of its worth. I certainly showed an early typescripted draft to fellow writers at Out of Reality, the writers' group I used to go to from 1999-2001, and remember some of them liking it, and getting some good advice about it.

I worked on it further and had it in shape by the time I did my MA at Goldsmiths in 2001-2002, and submitted it as one of my pieces of assessed work. Some of the tutors said, among other things: 'effective characterisation through reaction to situations, the tone is cool and suspenseful, strong plot which impacts upon the structure (Eh? Don't understand that even now), a strong narrative, should open with the second sentence (I can't remember if I took that advice or not), but it is unclear how the different elements connect with the body of the narrative.' All these helped it towards the final version. It first came out in Ambit magazine, in 2002, and is now out again in Literally Stories, and you can read it here.
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How I Got to the Place of the Dead - Morocco 1989, and how a trip lends itself to a story

11/11/2014

2 Comments

 
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My story The Place of the Dead d was published in May 2014 in the collection  Exiles, An Outsider Anthology. Edited by Paul D Brazill, it's published by Blackwitch Press. It features a host of talent, among which I'm very happy to be numbered. Please buy a copy: all profits go to the Marfan Foundation, which funds research and channels aid to sufferers from Marfan Syndrome. Paul asked all contributors to say a little about our stories, and the following first appeared on his home page. 

The Djma el Fnaa is Marakech’s central square. By a linguistic quirk, its name can be translated as either ‘the Mosque of Nowhere / Nothing’ or ‘the Place / Assembly of the Dead’. It was too good a title not to use for a story, and several people have indeed beaten me to it in the 25 years since I thought of it, and done that. It’s a market place by day, but at night turns into a circus of a place, full of performers, storytellers, hustlers, vendors, snake bullies – they don’t charm them at all – musicians, dancers, pickpockets, some plying their trade only because of the tourists, and some just because they always have. As noted in my story, our guide book described it as ‘the most exciting place in all of Africa’, a ridiculous claim that I make a character address briefly, and somewhat flippantly.

My first wife and I spent five weeks in Morocco in July and August 1989. I’d been there about two weeks before I got to Marakech. I was used to the hustlers by then, which didn’t make them any less wearying. They didn’t want all your cash, just some. They weren’t bad people, just hungry, jobless – just bored, maybe. They weren’t begging; you couldn’t cut to the chase by paying them to go away. None of this stopped it being tedious, though, especially when you knew that you would extricate yourself from it only for it to start up again a few minutes later, a different bloke, same spiel.

A friend of mine had travelled in Morocco the previous year. He’d lost his rag with a hustler in some small town, told him to fuck off. After that, the man and his pals followed him around for the rest of his stay, saying, “You don’t say ‘fuck off’ in this town,” and making slit-your-throat gestures at him. They camped in his hotel lobby, occupied tables in every restaurant he went to. They said, “See you later, alligator,” each time he managed to get away, or when they had to go home for their tea. They were probably just having a laugh, labouring a point, or really had nothing else to do. When my friend gave up on that town, this entourage escorted him to the bus station. It was their last chance to slit his throat. Though he’d got used to it as a charade of sorts by then, a performance, he was glad to get on the bus. An old man boarded, shuffled and wheezed up the aisle and sat down, turned to my friend and grinned and said, “See you later, alligator,” not knowing it was  a goodbye and not a greeting; it was just some stray English, offered in friendship. It only freaked my friend out a little, I think.

So I knew not to tell the hustlers to fuck off, even though I wanted to sometimes. I said I was not interested in making a financial contribution to their ventures, at that moment – maybe I’d bore them into going away. But Moroccans are polite and patient, mostly. (One man was the exception, aggressively accused my wife of acting like ‘a Jew’. “There’s a very good reason for that,” she informed him, somewhat dangerously, but her actual Jewishness was beside the point he was trying to make. He was a carpet seller, though, a breed apart.)

It sounds like I had a bad time in Morocco, but in fact I enjoyed most of my time there – you can’t spend five weeks anywhere and have every single moment be a joy. I’m reminded of a scene in Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Timing: a couple in a fractious relationship are in the Djma el Fnaa, and the woman chides the man for his petty obsession over some aspect of their life together. “Look at where we are,” she reminds him. I’ll probably never go back to Morocco, so I’m glad I didn’t let anybody, even an anti-Jewish carpet seller, spoil it for me. Why am I talking about all this, then?

The answer is that a story isn’t made up of the nice things in life. I’m also not a travel writer, and any guide book can describe the brilliance of Morocco better than I can – just as a postcard seller can supply a better photo of its monuments than I’ll ever take. I’ve tried to reflect Marakech’s atmosphere in The Place of the Dead, but it’s not a story about Moroccans. Think of the crowded streets I show in my tale; most of the people in them were unaware of us, and if they were aware, they were leaving us alone. As per the brief of this anthology, the story is about foreigners, outsiders, and how they might behave out of their comfort zones.

The couple in my story is not based on me and my first wife, nor on any of the many people we met. A few of the incidents described happened, such as the frustrating, lengthy journey at the opening of the story, the conversations with hustlers, the sunglasses that attracted a pint-sized opportunist, the constant assumption that we’d want an English newspaper, and watching that exciting ending to the 1989 Tour de France, a race that is often done and dusted in its last few days, and like watching paint dry. They are all only background, though. None of them make a story. The heart of the story is the people in it, and how they conduct themselves when faced with certain choices, and how their lives will be affected by those choices, and by their actions and reactions.

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    LAST THING

    Nick Sweeney

    Kent-based musician with Clash covers band Clashback, among others. Writer of novels, short stories and pastiche Balkan tunes. Laikonik Express is out with Unthank Books; my stories are all over the place... in a good way!

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    The Emigre Engineer, my novelette of transition from the Russian Revolution to the America of Prohibition. Out with Ploughshares, October 2021

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