Writing, the iPoodle bites back, the most NSFW thing I have seen in public, falling over Mr Hot, etc.

Ssomeone asked me last night about structure, and in trying to answer this rather big question in eight seconds before Tim Minchin started his set at the Reprieve comedy bash – which by the way was unbelievably awesome – I realised it was something I should explore a bit. So…

1. Everything I know about structure, I learned from…

Well, several places. Robert McKee’s book, Story, was my bible when I was scriptwriting, although I also used that old George Lucas favourite, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. (I always confuse that title with The Seven Faces of Dr Lao, which I saw when I was about two, and have always loved. And now I come to think about it, there’s something distinctly Master Wu-ish about Dr Lao. Yeah, I know, it’s hardly a model of nuanced portrayals, but it’s, what, a thousand years old now?)

Then there’s detective stories. The detective story form – or I should probably say the crime story – is enduring and popular and has produced some of the most famous and beloved books in the library, and there’s a reason for that. The form is perfectly in tune with a very pure and simple shape. There’s a crime, an investigation, and a solution. You can riff on that in all kinds of ways – I genuinely think of The Gone-Away World as a detective story structure, albeit heavily messed around and disguised – but that spine will always bring you home and allow your reader to keep track of what’s going on. I’ve just done it again with the new book. Although the new new book, which we shall refer to as T-Book, is different.

And then there’s Wodehouse. I’m not going to editorialise about Wodehouse much. I’m just going to observe that this guy was able to plot ridiculously complex bedroom farce comedy, with doors opening and people coming in and out at exactly the right moment, weaving together two or three love plots and a rude mechanical story and a notional central plot and make it funny all the way through and bring it all home without strain in, what, seventy thousand words? Less? And he wrote over one hundred books. Yes, I know, he did some very stupid things in his life. He remains the Yoda. Comedy writing is hard, and he’s probably the best there ever was.

2. No, I do not really plan.

That is to say, I try to, and I know roughly where I’m going when I start, but what happens next can change everything. TGAW stayed broadly on target, but I cut the beginning and the end of the new one and rewrote them entire because that needed to happen, and I may well be about to do so again.

However… at any given time during the writing of a book I will have a rough structure in my mind, and it will be constantly re-written on bits of A4 paper. The whole plot outline will be sketched from start to finish in keywords falling from the top to the bottom, often with gaps and wiggly lines to show I’m missing bits. I will break the thing into three, into five (III Act Structure from the movie, V Act from Shakespeare, because I know no better than to use structural breakdowns from other forms and media, hmm, oh, well) and see where the turning points come and what’s going on.

So actually, I plan all the time. But there is no list of chapters, no perfect march route, which I know some authors manage before ever they begin.

3. Except…

T-Book is a little different. It will be shorter than the first two and a bit more linear, and I’m writing it differently. I’m allowing myself to be a bit freer with what I write when, and in payment I’m sticking to a tighter sense of what goes where and when. It’s trying to break out, but I’m trying to keep it in. I’m reckoning to write it fast and finish it before October… yeah, insane, I know. I’m using Scrivener for the first time and finding it excellent, but the very usefulness of it is changing somewhat the way I write, as is the iPad, which I carry everywhere and on which I’ve already written five or six thousand words of T-Book. I use Pages on the iPad, and export via email, because there’s no Scrivener app and probably won’t be, unless we beg and fund it. Working in little bites – which is what I was doing anyway – means that I’m generating a collection of almost-connected moments, ideal for the story, which I will weave together once I’ve got all the way through the narrative in my head.

Anyway…

Tim Minchin sang this song last night and it brought the house down. NSFW or in the Vatican.

But that is not the most NSFW thing I have seen recently. Or rather, it probably is in reality, but I have to say I think this sculpture in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris is absolutely the rudest object I’ve come across in years:

Speaking of the iPad, which I was earlier and the other day and last night and which a lot of the comics last night took the piss out of and which is the cause of a great deal of marital strife around the world and which… well, clearly, it’s a bit overexposed…

Basically, there’s a new iPhone coming and I don’t care, because the iPad is more interesting to me. I was seriously wondering for a moment whether I should junk the iPhone all together and stick with my trusty Samsung Xtreme, which has a battery life measured in geological time and can sustain being dropped into a martini for an hour. In fact, if you have bluetooth, you can make and receive calls while the phone is in the martini. Seriously. Because once you have an iPad, what is an iPhone for? It becomes… a third device. Weird.

And finally…

I fell over Rafael Nadal’s leg in the train yesterday. He was nice about it. Dude totally needs an iPad, though, he was watching video on some big-ass old notebook. [Bore, drone, witter, SHUT UP, HARKAWAY]…

Oh, and I’m going to be at TOC Frankfurt in October… yay!

So I took the plunge and ordered and iPad and I swore me an oath in the blood of unborn swans that I would not, ever be a pain about it.

Sorry, swans.

Basically, look, here’s the thing: it’s bloody stupendous.For those of you who care, the OS is a slightly tweaked version of the iPhone OS, with an infinitely more fluid feel. The landscape format version of Mail looks like the one on your Mac, the portrait one has a dropdown inbox which is rather stylish. Games are hugely addictive. iBooks is great and Kindle for iPad is nicer than Kindle for Kindle. TV and movies are lovely. I find the keyboard perfectly acceptable; there’s a period of learning as you adjust to the smaller size and a slight oddness in hand position you need to adopt to let the pads of your fingers absorb the hardness of the screen. I’ve already written a thousand words of my next novel on it. Or you can use a remote keyboard if you can be bothered. This is something I can carry instead of a laptop and be okay most of the time.

Yes, there are problems, and no, they don’t really matter very much. What it adds is still vastly more impressive than what it cannot do, and as we know from experience with Apple, they tend to come along later and fix the things we whinge about. In this respect it is identical to my iPhone experience: everything you have heard which is bad is true up to a point, and all those things are simply eclipsed by the other things you have heard about which are better than you’ve been told.

From a writing perspective…

Well, as I say, I’ve already started using it for work. It’s interesting to me to be working on the paired down version of Pages (which works fine, by the way) because I’ve recently been using Scrivener and WriteRoom. The lack of whistles and bells doesn’t bug me – in fact it’s rather welcome. I don’t need software suggesting grammar modifications. I don’t want a multitude of fonts. I want a screen and a keyboard and somewhere they serve tea. The fact that the iPad doesn’t multitask (much) means I don’t either, and that’s all to the good. I actually rather prefer this version of Pages to the main one, which somehow honks me off because it always seems to be telling me I could be doing more with my life.

My evil masterplan: travel with a portable projector and a bluetooth keyboard and project my book twelve by nine onto my hotel room wall. Eat that, Minority Report!

Battery life? So far, so good, although I will confess first that I haven’t been using 3G – I wanted to try living without it, and I found that quite acceptable – and perhaps more relevant: I’m used to nurturing the battery of my iPhone, so I automatically switch the iPad over to Airplane Mode whenever I’m not using it. And why not?

More profoundly, the touchscreen thing is a powerful change to the way we work. It is physical in a way our interactions with data conventionally are not. I do quite want a stylus option, actually, but perhaps that will come. The sense of being able to point at stuff with your actual hand, move your finger and feel that you’re affecting the electronic world directly, is very pleasing and primal. The only frustration is that I want more. I want to be able to reach through the screen. I want to feel the depth, not just the surface. I want, basically, a TARDIS-like fishtank full of warm District 9 goo which will take my instructions. I want to be able to stammer out my story ideas and have them come back nicely typeset… but look, this will do in the mean time.

Verdict: this is a dinosaur killer. It takes a bite out of laptops and netbooks and looms menacingly over the Kindle. It doesn’t even stop to wipe its feet on Sony’s Reader, which is the e-reader device with the greatest market penetration in the UK – or, probably, was until last week. It sets the bar. Yes, there will be later versions. Yes, there will be competitors. Yes, it’s an Apple device, with all the lock-in attendant thereunto. Yes, it is a shiny, stylised bit of techno-nonsense which you do not really need because actually all anyone needs is a strip of green land to farm, a couple of goats and a supply of clean water.

But assuming that we’re not in Subsistenceville: this is a lifestyle device with teeth.