Sunday Whoever

This week’s Whoever has been with us since May 2021 when he had the beautiful All My Darlings Waiting published. Now it’s time to find out more about this writer of poignant, lyrical work. We sent Antony a list of questions and his responses are as thoughtful as his fiction writing. If you haven’t read any of Antony Osgood’s work you really are missing a treat.

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What topic(s) would you not take on?

I have long since put aside the advice to write what only I know. It’s what I don’t know that bugs the hell out of me. That’s the stuff I want to explore. I try to write away from myself. That’s where writing becomes exciting. Even if I set a story in a familiar situation, within everyday scenes weirdness and profundity and wonder hide. That’s how you engage people. I’ve written, in the first person, several dozens of characters who are of a different gender, orientation, age, culture, or perspective than mine. (A Japanese girl, the ghost of a Blitz victim, a woman who happens to be ‘disabled,’ an arsehole misogynist editor, a kleptomaniac Polish postman, to name a few.) It’s liberating and terrifying as a writer to take on topics you might hesitate at first to write. That hesitation increases your anxiety which can help ensure you do the legwork of getting it more right than wrong. You have to let the character and situation speak. Don’t show your bias or voice. It’s their show. Your job as the writer is to clear a path for them and get out of the way.

The best sensitivity reader has to be yourself – but that ability takes a long-while to learn. In the meantime, share widely with trusted people who can come back to you with ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ questions. So I suspect there’s no topic I wouldn’t take on, and given most fiction deals with topics through character, no character should be out of bounds either. When you write a story, you build a narrative, create a relationship between an event and a character, and that’s quite a universally human experience: you need no particular identity or background to treat characters in a balanced way.

When I wrote my first sex scene, I was acutely aware of the Bad Sex Awards, and the burden of the biases of being a bloke of a certain age. (The number of male writers who describe a woman physically, and their male characters psychologically, beggars belief.) Hence the need to write away from myself.

What, in your opinion is the best line you’ve written?

Without wishing to sound like a dick, it helps me to imagine that the best line I’ve written will be the next. I suspect that if I spend too much time looking at what I’ve produced over the years, only the flaws and near-misses will stand out. My palms would begin to itch, and my lips become sore from nervous nibbling. Being bothered ‘beyond words’ by such short-comings, I’d whittle away my hours tinkering with what has been done and abandoned, rather than focussing on the next thing. If every story published is a work in progress, and unfinished, but good enough to let go, then a writer is pretty much the same. Who we were when we wrote a thing isn’t who we are now, nor who we’ll be tomorrow, thank goodness. This position isn’t drawn from the fear of hubris making itself felt, but rather the worry of the risks from spending too much time treading water staring back at shore, when really, there’s a need to keep striking further out, swim forward, because I’ve only so much time remaining. Every old line I get wrong takes me closer to a better line tomorrow. I shit you not.

Would you write what you would consider shite for money?

It’s not something I would choose to do. I’m fortunate given I’ve retired and make a little money from two non-fiction books about disability, autism and behaviour. (Though there’s always the inclination to write another, and another, given readers have enjoyed this part of my work.) That cushions me a little, and helps avoid any temptation to sell-out or exchange my motivation to write in a way that challenges conventional forms and voices, for a commercial win.

I’ve a friend who is a writer and is good mates with another writer who for decades has written commercial fantasy fiction on demand, under contract; mind-boggling money, mind-numbing work, lauded but miserable. We all have to put bread on the table (unless you’re gluten intolerant), but I’d rather work nights someplace than write shite of no merit or meaning beyond the cash it fetches. My friend wouldn’t mind a little of the kudos and cash of his mate, but me, not so much. Most people spend their lives working to enrich others; why do the same with your writing? Many of the world’s best selling books are written badly. Yeah, yeah, they’re crying their way to the bank, but there’s some good science to show if you monetise what you at first find intrinsically motivating, pretty soon your lose your mojo. Writing is between you and the blank page. Put a bank manager in the middle and you’re fucked.

Will you ever go Woke with your writing and use pronoun / non-descript characters and explore sensitive issues in an understanding and sensitive way?

Long question, short answer: you mean I don’t?

Do you see something different in a mirror that others don’t when they look at you?

George Clooney is hiding beneath my beard. When I shave (twice a decade, whether I need to or not), he’s always just left the bathroom, leaving behind a gerbil-faced bloke I do not recognise. Years ago, when I was teaching, I did an exercise about perception, asking people to say two truths and one untruth about themselves, and let others decide which was the lie. My three were: he was once a musician, once a trainee monk (both true), and the lie was he belongs to the British National Party. Never ask others what they see in case they tell you, is my advice, and never look in a mirror.

The future – Bleak or hopeful?

For the planet, it’s looking rosy. For humanity? Meh. On a smaller scale: we live, we die. (And on that comma is the space where we must live.) Lorca wrote ‘the whole of life is dependent on four letters’ which passes as profound where I live. Why not opt for hopeful? We can’t do much about life beyond find a meaning that works for us, and choose how to respond to events over which we have little control.

What would you like to like as you hate that you hate it?

Carbohydrates.

Records? Tapes? Or CDs?And…

My wife, who is the brains of this outfit we call a family, once noted that many of my longer stories feature a cross-dressing male character. I continued to cook her dinner but remained profoundly silent. So the CD thing is always quite appealing.

Has anything you have written told you something about yourself you did not know (good or bad)?

Every. Fucking. Thing.

So I’ve this friend – the guy who knows that moneyed but miserable fantasy writer? – and they both plan and plot. They’re really good at it. I’m in awe of their ability to plot and to engage the reader with their narrative flow. I imagine if they’re on a date night – not together, but with their respective other halves – they’d plan their moves as carefully as the wine and meal and lighting. I don’t – I can’t – do that. Knowing what’s coming spoils the surprise. I like to improvise, to write a thing and discover where it leads and what it is. It’s like starting to chisel away at a block of granite, and letting the stone dictate the cut.

I might start with a character or situation or title or a sentence, I might begin with an ending – a sense of emotion or thought – then just write. To plot too early is like voluntarily wearing a straightjacket. Avoid self-restraints. I’m always pleasantly surprised to discover that what I thought something meant at draft three has changed by draft ten. Often, I think I know the motivation of a character only to discover later a little aside scribbled down in draft one turns out by draft ten to be a motif of symbolic importance. It’s usually about draft six that I begin to plot, because only then do I have an inkling what the hell is going on and what the characters are on about. So my method is somewhat Organic, whose maiden name was actually Chaos. I’ve learned to trust my unconscious to know what its doing, despite the best efforts of my conscious mind to force it into shape.

Let me give an example. I’ve just finished the seventh draft of a short seven-thousand word story called Goes Without Saying (anything less than two-hundred thousand words is a novella, right? Literally Stories submissions count as flash). I happened to be sitting in my favourite cafe-bakery in Margate (a Greek place near the clock tower) wondering how I’d a) justify to my wife why I hadn’t done the washing on such a sunny day, and b) respond to a prompt given me by my friend the plotting writer, about an atheist waking up dead. So to get started, I wrote about the cafe-bakery, given, you know, I was there. It’s so full of fabulous customers and characters and diverse languages why wouldn’t you exploit the natural resources it has to offer? Two flat-whites and two hours later and the place had become heaven’s waiting room and the atheist was busy beginning to suspect his day had not turned out quite as he planned. He’d only had a cough and a little fever and somehow, there he found himself in a jolly welcoming cafe-bakery that he couldn’t quite understand or remember walking to. By draft three he did not remember dying. Death got dumped. By draft five he had a family, had changed his sexuality and ethnicity. By draft seven the atheist had been waiting around timeless and edgeless for so long that bits of his identity were crumbling as easily as the laminated buttery delights he consumed, as he explored his memories of time in the army, and later his divorce, and keeping his son safe, who he’d been obliged to raise alone. By draft eight his son had nursed him when he was sick, though of course, the man felt better now, though he was a little confused. His son was a Liverpool fan, I wrote, in passing, in draft four, improvising, then by draft eight, the ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ lyric hit home and my synapses gave a jolt because I had a refrain to fold in throughout, and an end point, too: his son, as an old man, and dead himself, finally turns up in the cafe-bakery to rescue his father from eternal waiting. Then I had a reason for all the earlier mentions of Greek icons, and the names of the staff.

What the character and this situation tell me is that despite my comfortable persona as a miserable old woke fart, decrying the social conventions that cause us misery, I’m hopeful, in that Ted Lasso Roy Kent way, and that relationships are what make us human, because that’s what I often come back to in my stories. Time and again. I didn’t realise just how much I write about belonging and loneliness until Goes Without Saying came along. But this is particularly true of the novels I’ve written. Each rewrite uncovers surprising things.

I’ve learned then, when replying to people in response to them asking me what I’m doing sitting drinking too many flat whites in a cafe-bakery whilst ostentatiously writing like a dozen other (and younger) poseurs, that I have absolutely no bloody idea, but that given enough time, given enough rewrites, given space to let the characters and situations speak for themselves, I shall.

What percentage of their time do Dogs spend thinking about world peace?

Roger Waters says not enough. The Buddhist in me (careful, Dalai Lama) says cut Dogs a break, they’ll achieve wisdom in the end after half-a-dozen more lives, but in the meantime, surround yourself with Cats, who know what’s really going on.

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Antony Osgood

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay – Question mark inside a light bulb on a black background.