What do Edward Gibbon, tomatoes and peanuts, paedophiles, Ernest Hemingway and bullshit have in common? Nothing. They just all feature in today’s 1,000 words (well, actually 1,499, but let’s not quibble, eh? It’s spring

One thing which puzzles me a little about writing fiction is the widespread use of the ‘first-person narrator’. I say ‘puzzled’, but it really doesn’t puzzle me as such. I see it more as technique many writers resort to (‘to which writers resort’ Ed) because, in a sense, it is ‘easier’. I know that because I have also adopted it in one or two of the comparatively few short stories I’ve written (as, of course, does Hemingway in his first two novels, which is pertinent to this entry).

For those of us with, to put it bluntly, the gift of the gab, that is those of us who can apparently bullshit at the drop of a hat, the ‘first-person narrator’ is a god-send. It becomes almost like day-dreaming, you get those day-dreams down on paper and your laughing. Well, I admit it’s not quite that easy, but if you want to get away from the ‘universal narrator who is all-seeing, all-knowing and a total pain in the butt, ‘first-person narration’ is the obvious way to go. But, as I say, I, at least, regard it as something of a cop-out.

As for ‘getting it all down on paper’, I should write ‘on paper’ as everything is now digitised. And the emergence of word-processing software is, for me at least, another god-send. I re-write a hell of a lot, and the prospect of writing, even a short short story, on a typewriter, then having to re-write it again and again as you revise it for however many times you want to do so to get it as you want is not a happy one.

Yet that’s what writers did until computers came along. In fact, take it back even further, to the late 18th and 19th centuries: writers wrote by hand and each subsequent draft was also handwritten. I suspect, though, that they weren’t too fussed either and all the scribbling must have been a pain (‘Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon’, the Duke of Gloucester, King George III’s brother, is said to have told the historian when he was presented with the latest volume of Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the writer, right).

I also suspect that, just as I believe the ‘writing’ pretty much always first takes place in the mind, those writers who had to write by hand spent a great deal more time actually thinking about what they were going to write. I mean you don’t want to get several thousand words down on paper, only to realise somewhere down the line you had fucked up (or, more politely, taken a wrong turn and written yourself into a corner).

Here might be a good point to mention Anthony Trollope’s novel Lady Anna. I haven’t read an extraordinary amount of Trollope, but I have read some, and it can be pleasant and entertaining reading. But Lady Anna was odd: it didn’t flow as it might (and as the prose I like should) and was oddly disjointed, even occasionally a little dull. A little later I discovered why that might have been: Trollope wrote the novel on board the ship on his long voyage to Australia to visit his son.

He was in the habit of writing, more or less strictly, 1,000 words every day, and once that had been done, he simply knocked off for, I suppose a glass of claret. Furthermore, he didn’t bother re-reading what he had previously read before getting down to that day’s 1,000 words, which might account not just for the oddly disjointed nature, but all manner of, often dull, repetition. Bet you didn’t know that, but to be fair, nor did I until I found out. But where was I? Oh, yes, ‘first-person narration’.

Perhaps I’m being more than a tad purist when I say that as far as I am concerned there should be ‘a reason’ why some bod is tell her or his story, and it would follow that reason would be an intricate part of the story. So, for example, in Lolita, the paedophile Humber Humbert has written a memoir by way of ‘explaining’ and possibly even trying to ‘justify’ what he did, including the usual bull from paedos that he was somehow ‘led on’ by Dolores Haze. After completing the memoir, Humbert dies of a heart attack and the memoir is then given up for publication by a psychologist.

Overall that makes sense. But what about, for example — chosen because I have read them comparatively recently, the ‘first-person narrators’ of Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms? Why exactly did Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry tell their stories? Well, I know why: because Hemingway is almost always writing about himself (he does seem to have been extraordinarily self-centred in the literal meaning of the word, as well as its usual meaning) and those to main characters were more or less proxies for him. I suggest a better writer would have gone the extra mile and given her or his first-person narration context, as Nabokov did in Lolita. It could be anything, bloody anything, but whatever is was would serve as a frame for the narrative voice.

Another point to make is the element of sequence in a first-person narration (which, as I point out) usually hang about in mid-air for not much of a good reason. Say I went to the local Chinese restaurant for a meal and halfway through a cook burst out from the kitchen fleeing another cook with a meat cleaver and trying to chop the first cook in half. I meet you the following day and tell you all about it (and by the way, the murder did not take place as the manager and his son managed to pin down the second cook, who immediately burst into tears. It seems he had just had news from back home in Shanghai that his father had been killed in a car crash and took exception to a dismissive remark the first cook made. Thought I might tell you in case you were getting worried).

‘Jim,’ I say (and you are Jim, obviously, although that most probably is not your name, but it will have to do for you as part of this example), ‘guess what happened last night! We saw a Chinese cook trying to kill his mate with a meat cleaver!’ I might then carry on and give more details, but by bit, filling in the story which you (Jim) has a nosey fucker want to get.

What I would not do is nab you and say: ‘Well, it was towards evening on a dull day when my partner, who is eight months pregnant, got it into her head that she wanted — no, needed! — a plate of sweet and sour pork. Naturally, I agreed that we shouldn’t just get a takeaway Chinese meal, but actually go for a sit-down as we hadn’t done so for a while. Well, as we were looking though the menu and considering whether to have starters . . .’ That is not going to happen. But that is pretty much always what happens in first-person narratives.

Here’s another good example where it works: Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. One point of the novel is that the narrator is ‘unreliable’ — very modern and even more modern as Ford was one of the first to do that kind of thing. And not only does he tell his story, he tells different versions of it and his mendacity is crucial to the novel. Thus the ‘first person narration’ works.

Thought I’d get that off my chest. And as, elsewhere, I have promised my self to write every day (to stay in the swing of it all) I have now done my duty:

To come: why peanuts really jack me off, masquerading as ‘nuts’. And no they are not ‘a legume’ — you read that recently didn’t you. They are, in fact, a fruit! And along those lines, tomatoes are not ‘a fruit’ as you also read in that ‘interesting’ piece in the Daily Mail/Readers Digest/the White Canyon Bugle/New York Times kiddies’s section or wherever else you get your ‘knowledge’: they are — hold on to your hats! — actually ‘a nut’. Bet you didn’t know that, either. And neither did I until I made it up just a few moments ago. Bullshit? You bet and then some!

PS Here’s another interesting ‘fact’: an astonishing 87 per cent of people who could be bothered to fill in the questionnaire, in fact, have a full 33 per cent less knowledge that they assumed. Stick that in your pipe!