Toby Litt

Practise of Writing - Toby Litt 27/04/2007

Toby Litt has been blogging his way around writing classes at UK universities. Having read his blog at myspace.con/tobylitt, I expected to be patronised. However that didn’t happen. This may have been due to his nervous response to Samantha who came in late and occupied the chair next to Toby Litt, which Carlo Gebler had just vacated in order to fetch coffee for the visitor.

“Don’t let anybody sit there,” he said to Toby Litt as he departed and stayed away for ten minues or so.

It was a good beginning. I don’t know how or why Samantha came late. We entered the building together. Did she lie low somewhere in order to enter seconds after Carlo’s vacating of the chair? Was it oneupwomanship? Or had she just loitered in the rest room? Whatever the reason, she intimidated the famous man.

Litt, whom I had heard reading from Hospital and enjoyed, the previous night in a modestly filled lecture theatre in the Lanyon building, is young, prematurely bald with beard neatly trimmed. Positively groomed, one might say.

He decrees that there is a model of good dialogue which consists of 4 techniques. These are:
1 Ignoring. People don’t necessarily listen to or hear what is said to them. A conversation may consist of two unconnected strands as the participants each pursue their own agenda without listening to the other. I remember that this technique used to have a name, parallel dialogue, useful in script writing and doubtless in other dialogue also. It is good to remember. I used to know lots about writing but forgot it during my nardil phase. Remembering something I used to know is cheering.

2 Powerplay. When two men meet in the street and say hello, one of them loses. Who said that? Nobody remembers. I’m not the only one who forgets. Carlo confesses to senior moments and I don’t suppose he can invoke nardil as an excuse. Does he ever forget the name of the fellow who wrote the play about the Scottish king? That’s not senior, just nardil.

To the matter in hand: dialogue is about power. One participant dominates. The power may shift in the course of the conversation.

3 Concealment. Hiding, Toby Litt calls it. A character’s fear of exposure produces dialogue which studiously says nothing, focuses on the banal. Context, however, can make the banal interesting.

4. Whatever became of technique number four? We have moved on, to exercises in dialogue which Toby Litt analyses fulsomely. We glow in his approbation and note his advice to experiment. His own experimentation, a set of novels written in alphabetal order, is, he says, related to a autistic obsession with alphabets.

Writing courses make good writers, not great writers. What would William Blake have got out of a creative writing course?

It’s a good question. I write it large on the wall five feet above my computer so that I can see it as I crane my aching neck at the end of 500 words of Practice of Writing assignment. What indeed would William Blake have got out of a creative writing course?