The second kind of nonsense I’m interested in is explored in my poems ‘With unction down the purple lane‘ and ‘Down, Down and Down‘.

You might say that these poems make no sense at all, which is why I used to call them “utter nonsense” to distinguish them from the first kind.

But when I look back at those poems, which still satisfy me in a way, I see that they are not “utter nonsense” at all. The semantic meaning may elude us, but there is another kind of sense in the regular rhyme scheme and metre. The form of the poems conveys meaning.

Moreover, the words themselves still mean something, even if they are being put together in unfamiliar combinations. The words “duck”, “spasm”, and even “rug-swept friends”, evoke images and feelings and, in that sense, still tell a kind of story.

Finally, you’ll notice that I struggled to finish these poems off. How can you make the ending seem final, when there is no coherent narrative? In both poems, I artificially created a sense of ending by telling how it “ended”, or talking of the “answer”. This was a way of making those endings seem final.

I wanted to explore other poetic forms, to see if it was still possible to write this so-called “utter nonsense” and still convey a certain kind of sense.

So I wrote a sonnet:

I tried a nugget in the fold today;
It didn’t take the pleasing listless trek.
Believing hurried fortunes on the wreck,
But nothing re-appeared upon my tray.
A hundred pleasures fluttered in the clay,
Galumphing penguins wrestled on the deck;
A hungry dolphin wriggled down my neck,
But all the ladies folded up the hay.
And yet, there is a leigh-way for the ride:
A much-ignited whistle lies around;
The beacon with the thistle steps aside,
And slowly all the angels run aground.
I never give a comprehensive lie,
But all the same, these dentists tell you why.

To give this poem direction, I still relied on those ‘direction’ phrases: “And yet”; “But all the same”. Equally, one might argue that the form of a sonnet is as coherent as that of my earlier two poems - perhaps even more so. The form of a sonnet does tell a story, intrinsically: the rhyme scheme breaks the poem into segments, with the final rhyming couplet signalling an obvious conclusion of some kind.

So there is a certain kind of sense to these poems, too, because even without semantic meaning, the form of our writing conveys meaning, tells us a story.

These are very early experiments in the art of nonsense. I hope I will have a chance to explore it more.

It was ‘The Owl and the Pussycat‘ that made me invent a mismatched duo, gloriously happy to live outside convention.

But it was ‘There was an old man of Whitehaven‘ that made me avoid a happy ending for my odd pair.

When I first discovered Lear’s limericks, I didn’t like the fact that the final rhyming word was just a repetition of the first. The other limericks I knew were pleasing because they went somewhere; Lear’s didn’t. But I soon realised that this was the point. Tragically, the old man of Whitehaven gets nowhere, and ends up “smashed” by the people who decide what is and is not acceptable.

In my poem, it is the weather, not society, that defeats the Shrimp and the Radiator. But it seemed important, when I wrote the poem, that my characters should not succeed in their goal of living freely in whatever clothes they chose.

By its very nature, nonsense writing brings together things that do not, normally, go together. It therefore often seems an appropriate medium in which to explore the outcasts of society - or those who live on the edge of acceptability. I like Lear’s limerick because, for all its silliness, I recognise the truth in it.

This is the first kind of nonsense - the kind that actually does make sense, after all. The kind that, like satire, at first seems absurd, but in fact tells the truth.

His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he still remembers their telephone number, and without thinking he dials it, surprised to be doing it, and by the way it feels and sounds: a sequence of bright tones that resonates inside him like an echo on a canyon wall, as strange and familiar as his own heartbeat. O’Neil intends to listen to the phone ring a couple of times and then hang up, but thern there is a click on the line.

“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean–”

“Honey? What time is it?” He hears the woman turn over, and then the scratch of the alarm clock on her bedsie table as she pulls it toward her. “Is it midnight?” she asks. “Where are you?”

For a moment O’Neil does not answer. The phone is slick in his damp hand. “It’s late,” he says finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

The woman’s breathing in the receiver is deep and even, like sighing, and O’Neil thinks she may have fallen back asleep.

“Mmmm. I was having the strangest dream. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” O’Neil says. He hesitates, then speaks again. “I think everything’s working out just the way I wanted it.”

“That’s nice to hear. It’s nice when everything works out like that.” The receiver rustles against her face as she pulls the covers close. “Honey? You sound … I don’t know. Far away.”

“I’m really okay,” O’Neil says. “A little tired. It’s been quite a day. I have some news too.”

“I know,” the woman says sleepily. “You love me.”

The answer is easy to give. “I do. Of course I do.”

I wish you were here, honey. Let everybody else handle things for a while. Can you? Just come home.”

“I will,” O’Neil says. “As soon as everything’s taken care of here, I’ll come straight home.”

“Come home, my darling. Say it: I’m coming home.”

“I’m coming home.”

“And you miss me.”

O’Neil thinks of his parents, gone so long, taken from him when he was just a boy in college, standing at the door with his key in his hand. “Yes, I miss you. It’s awful, missing you.”

“I miss you too,” the woman says, and then - so gently O’Neil doesn’t realize what has happened - she hangs up the phone.

The scene has a ghostly quality. It takes place in the middle of the night, the phone number is “strange and familiar”, and the woman is outside of time, neither old nor young - or perhaps both. O’Neil sounds far away, and the woman has just awoken from a strange dream.

O’Neil and the woman are not really talking to each other - they each use the other’s words to signify something that matters to them. But it seems important that neither of them denies the identity the other has imposed on them. O’Neil feels that he can say the words the woman presses him to say - it doesn’t matter that he is not the person she thinks he is.

And yet, there is another way of reading this passage - another interpretation, in which the woman is O’Neil’s mother, and both speakers’ words can be taken at face value. The scene gets its ghostly nature, in part, from the fact that this possibility is never entirely overruled.

Perhaps there is also something here about the inevitable distance involved in communication - particularly over the telephone, at midnight, when we are half-asleep. O’Neil never gets to tell his important news, because the woman has something else in mind. Perhaps there is a sense in which we always misinterpret one another’s words - in which there is always a more significant meaning, for the listener, than what was intended.

First at school then at university, my work was only read by a teacher or tutor. During those years, I also wrote countless pieces that were only ever read by myself.

The size of your audience influences the work you produce. When I was writing my academic essays, I would think to myself: “What does the one person who will read this think of my work? What does he normally like to read? What impresses her?”

Years later, I’m still writing, but now I’m increasingly tempted to try and find ways of increasing my audience. In the publishing world, the focus is often (understandably) on the size of your audience. This is mainly because the size of your readership often has a direct relationship with commercial success: the more people buy your work, the more money you make.

When I started blogging in 2006, I took advantage of the many online tools for measuring your readership. Like many bloggers, I became obsessed with my visitor statistics, thinking that to be a successful blogger I needed to get lots of readers. I wanted to use this blog as a way of promoting my storytelling, so I was keen for as many people as possible to download my story, ‘A Cadence‘.

But during this process, something unexpected happened. Four people, all good friends of mine, responded to my work in an extremely creative way by getting together and illustrating my story. Years after I wrote it, I was suddenly very excited by my story again. More than that, the illustrations inspired me to start work again on the other three stories in my collection - and on new projects. When I wrote ‘A Christmas Argument‘, I was thinking more of my illustrator friends than of any potential wider audience. On 1 December 2008, I invited my friends round, Gemma cooked us a delicious lunch, I read out the story and then we illustrated it. I really enjoyed the day, and I think the others did too.

This has given me a new understanding of my audience. One approach to writing is to aim, constantly, for more readers. The goal is for your writing to spread as far as possible, reaching people you’ll most likely never meet or even hear from. The alternative is developing a relationship with your audience, nurturing what you have instead of constantly trying to reach more people. As Seth Godin puts it, “The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.”

So really, the point of this post is to say: thank you for reading. I’m saying this to you, the people who are already here. Thank you taking an interest, and I promise that there’s another story coming very soon. Would you like to help me illustrate it?

Some of them do so implicitly, simply by being sincere and giving us no reason to think that this is fiction.

Some make their claim explicitly:

• Celebrity autobiographies often tell us: what you’ve read in the newspapers is mythology and hearsay. This is the truth.
• Some biographies say: the earlier biographies about this person were wrong. Here is the true story.

But many works of fiction also claim to be true. Yann Martel’s Self is brilliantly confusing because it appears to be an autobiography. When I started reading, I thought it was telling the true story of Martel’s life - until he described an event that I believed to be physically impossible.

Suddenly, I started seeing the work as fiction. My relationship with the text changed.

This story claimed to be true, but I rejected that claim and treated it as fiction instead, because there was something about the text that I was unable to believe.

Perhaps, then, more important than a story being true, or even claiming to be true, is whether or not we believe it is true. And where does that belief come from? Textual details can influence our decision, of course - if the story seems flippant or irrational, we might doubt its claim to factual truth. But ultimately, when assessing a text, we bring to it the history of everything we have ever read, thought and heard. We bring to it our prejudices, our superstitions, our cultural bias, our faith and our passion.

A lot is said about the unreliable narrator, but we need to think also about the unreliable reader - who, in the end, gets to decide what to make of a story.

People have been arguing about the existence of God for hundreds of years. Many different sides of the argument have been put forward using historical facts, logic, rational thinking and common sense - alongside passion, guesswork and storytelling. In the end, what side of the fence we sit on is determined, simply, by what we believe.

Belief cannot be based entirely on what we know to be true - the word itself implies doubt. I do not know, I believe - I think this is true.

Belief plays an equally significant role in how we read truth writing like biographies and autobiographies. If nobody had ever believed A Million Little Pieces, there would have been no uproar when the story turned out to contain fiction.

I’ve always found it difficult to accept the view that life writing is different from fiction simply because it is factually true. Factual truth is something external to the text. What happens if we discover that a biography we’ve always loved is not true? The text itself stays the same, but our relationship with it changes. So, it’s not the text alone that matters here, but the relationship between reader and text. As readers, we bring knowledge and experience to the text, and that influences how we perceive it. But above all, we bring belief (or disbelief). Whether or not we believe a story absolutely changes how that story functions for us.

For some people, the Bible tells a story that can influence how we live.

For others, it contains the absolute truth.

The same words work completely differently depending on what, and how, we believe.

“… it just emerged as I was trying to begin the story. I suddenly realised that Lyra had a dæmon, and it all grew out of that.”
(’The Man Behind the Magic: An Interview with Philip Pullman‘)

I like Pullman’s implication that he isn’t really the author of this story - that the details were something for him to realise rather than invent.

But this is also a story of beginning again. Pullman tried to begin the story without dæmons and it didn’t work, so he began again - this time, with the dæmon present: “Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening Hall.” It’s a compelling opening, and many would argue that dæmons are the most successful element of Pullman’s work. It seems important that dæmons were born when Pullman started again.

I tried a more self-conscious version of beginning again when rewriting ‘A Fantasy’, the followup to ‘A Cadence‘.

The original story started with a knight, Sir Drake, who fell in love with a princess. In my head, the story was all about this knight and whether or not his fantasies came true.

When I’d finished the drafts of all the stories in this collection, I realised that ‘A Fantasy’ was by far the weakest. It needed a lot of work. At first I thought this would be a case of a few tweaks, but after hiding from the story for about a year, I eventually decided that the whole thing needed to be rewritten.

Remembering Pullman’s story of regenesis, I tried to talk myself into a similar mindset. I asked myself what other elements were in the story that I was not seeing. Who else was there? In the end I “realised” that what I’d missed was the emphasis. In the first version of the story, the princess was objectified - she was something for Sir Drake to dream about obtaining. I wondered how the story would change if I made the princess an equal protagonist. What if it wasn’t just about Sir Drake’s fantasies, but about hers as well? What if the rich and healthy princess was just as scared of her very ordinary destiny?

Instantly, the story started to shift, and I can now see how ‘A Fantasy’ fits into the collection. In ‘A Cadence‘, the princes go on adventures while the ordinary people work on the land and think about what’s going on. The rich and famous people are clearly the protagonists, and the ordinary people are mere extras. What ‘A Fantasy’ now enables me to do is begin the transition from stories about extraordinary people (with mermaids and dragons) to tales about very ordinary people.

When we talk about storytelling, we put a lot of emphasis on beginnings. I agree that beginning is a great challenge and a real achievement. But perhaps even harder - and even more important - is the process of beginning again.

She doesn’t like it, because in every episode the monsters nearly kill the humans but they get away in the end.

I like it, because in spite of that it tells me a believable story about a lonely man.

Which of us is right? Perhaps both (they’re just opinions, after all). But reading The Writer’s Tale recently, I was interested to see the show’s current head writer, Russell T Davies, describe precisely this conflict.

He explains how, as a new episode begins to take shape, two stories converge and start to fight for space. One of the stories is about the monsters, while the other is about the people:

“I’m glad to have started, though worried by what’s to come. I had a fair bit of Cybermen-in-Victoriana worked out, but this two Doctors story, the real story, is so strong that it’s sort of knocking out everything else.”

I’ve stuck with the show because, in spite of the hackneyed formula of the key characters nearly dying in every episode, the overarching examination of human nature continues to engage me. Davies’ comment above, about 2008’s Christmas Special, plays out this conflict between formulaic monster plots and emotionally engaging human storylines.

I’m intrigued by his notion that the second storyline, about the relationship between two people, is “the real story” - as though the other story, about the Cybermen (the monsters) is just a means to an end.

When I was putting together the page about my story, ‘A Cadence‘, I toyed with various ways of describing the tale.

One obvious way would be to describe its elements - it’s a story about two princes and a mermaid. This conveys something of what the story contains.

Another way is to outline its themes - in this version, it’s a “not-so-fairy tale about stupidity, beauty, grief and revenge.”

Which is better? Perhaps neither. But I might verbalise this as Davies does his own stories. I might say: “It seems to be about fabulous creatures like mermaids, but really it’s about human qualities like stupidity and vanity.”

But in the end, I realise that the storyteller’s tools are part of the story he’s telling. I can’t deny that Doctor Who is, on some level, about formulaic monster chases. You can’t pluck out the essence of a story without in some way destroying that story. The story is the whole thing - the monsters and the emotions.

She said: “A long time ago we used to be like monkeys, with long thick hair and claws instead of nails. We lived in the trees.”

The first problem was that when she said “we”, meaning the human race, I thought she meant “we” as in her and my dad. So I started to develop a very strange understanding of their early married life.

The second problem was that my only sustained experience of monkeys at that time had been not of the real things, but of Coco the Monkey, the mascot of Coco Pops, my favourite breakfast cereal. I came to the conclusion that my mum used to look like Coco the Monkey.

I had misunderstood the story. I realised that it was a story of origins, but instead of recognising that it was about our collective origin as a species, I’d interpreted it as a story about my parents’ origins as individuals.

I believe that at the heart of storytelling lie two questions: where do we come from, and where are we going?

These stories have been told on the individual level, as various kinds of autobiography, and they’ve also been told on the collective level, as stories about humankind as a whole. The Christian myth, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, evolutionary theory, and lots of other stories, have all influenced the way human beings see themselves by attempting to explain where we come from and where we’re going.

Our concept of time is linear, and so are the stories we tell. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I think we like to perceive our lives like that too. The middle is usually now, where we are at the moment. So the puzzle is working out how this particular story began, and guessing how it will end.

The story we tell about ourselves changes as we get older, but the anxiety does not go away - we realise that we are in the middle of something, but we want to understand the whole narrative.

Today I’m going to list 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I’ve enjoyed reading. In most cases, that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.

Over time I want to address why each of these works helped develop my understanding of the genre. So, if the words are clickable, that means you can read more about what these books did for me.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

Ken Dornstein, The Boy who Fell Out of the Sky

Margaret Forster, Diary of an Ordinary Woman

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil

Susie Gordon, Peckham Blue

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger

Richard Holmes, Footsteps

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Matthew Alan Kreib, Filling a Gap: Authorship and Identity in Collaborative Autobiography

Roman Krznaric, Christopher Whalen and Theodore Zeldin (eds), The Oxford Muse: Guide to an Unknown University

Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild

Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Yann Martel, Self

Marjane Sartrapi, Persepolis

Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red Snow White

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity