The Chess Piece

[This piece was written for a friend, about a friend, and was intended as a gonzo-style venue review. I hope you like it.]

Richard rolls up the marble steps of the State Library, chessward and chilled. As if the fritzing, fizzing fluros of The Chess Room (official title) don't matter, as if the heavy-levying of the SL goons who line the very walls ain't happening, pardner.

Pardner? Pah! Player. Pussycat. Pawn.

Richard is here to crush me like the slightly-more-mediocre chess chump that I am.

Up the stairs, up again, and left into the bowels, what passes—ahem—as the very large intestine of "recreation" in this hell-hole of hallowed highbrowety:

The Chess Room

These chess pieces,

I tell him, having lurched into a wonky wheelie-chair near a perilously high dropoff into the AV "space",

are blunt.

Blunt? 

He cocks a crazy eyebrow.

L-l-look at them! 

I stammer, waving a rook frantically before his eyes. It's big and plastic and white and an insult to the sensibilities not just of these esteemed halls of uni-student z's, but also to the coiled-spring temperaments of the players who surround us.

(There's a couple of rows of shelves behind us, housing what I glance out of the sweaty corner of one eye to be books on chess. Just to, you know, keep with the theme of the place and all, like we could ever forget where we are. As I await his reply, a couple of kids clearly wagging some tedious lecture on post-modern-modernism or, I hope, something even more brutal, gaze longingly into each other's eyes over their unplayed pieces. I stifle a gag…)

Blunt!

I scream, the room spinning, the scent of the plastic sheeting they use to wrap the countless mountains of tomes in that place finally making me crack.

Hey, 

Says a low, meancing voice.

What's going on here?

A shadow deep as time casts our board into a totalitarian gloom: Security Guard.

I reel back in my seat, bugeyed and green.

We're playing chess, 

says Richard, all nice-as-pie, all sweet-as-you-please, and I know, I just know his next move will start the sweeping, brakeless carve-up that will clear the board of half the pieces in the next three minutes. I wanna buy time.

Yeah, 

I squeak, trying to control myself.

Ahem, yeah. We're just playing, boss.

Glowers from on high. This guy's frown is neanderthal in both stature and sensitivity. Oaf! I scream silently;

Boss.

I say again, aloud.

Well, keep it down, or you'll have to leave. This is a quiet area.

Richard's gaze crackles with electricity; the lights dim again (or am I losing consciousness?) and the henchman skulks off elsewhere. Before I know it, the kid has castled and the queen is dead.

Checkmate.

Better luck next time? There is no next time. My glorious, gorgeous, gobsmacker of a plan is to confuse him.

Rico, 

I tell him.

The Library's out, pal.

His face registers nothing but ethereal calm. Gaze? Unreadable. Shoulders? Set. Breathing? Level.

Match Bar!

I scream. He follows.

It's similar—steps, seating, a view of the curious circus on the State Library lawn—but different from The Chess Room.

For one thing, the rum is better. Hell, the rum is present. So is anything else you care to drink, along with imported Japanese ice-chillers in which, presumably, Rich will collect the corpses of my soon-to-be-slayed regiments.

My secret weapon? The tiniest travel-chess set in existence. A hand-me-down heirloom from the dimmest reaches of my flayed family tree, it boasts a magnetic board (I suspect ol' Rich has been knocking the board while I'm otherwise, shall we say, engaged—in talk, you understand. This will put us on an even, ahem, playing field…).

He orders the city's thinnest French fries as a distraction and has, it seems, had them import Britain's most charming barmen, who, along with the black-and-white bastion of the board, now vie for my bleary-eyed attentions.

Damn him!

We have an entire lounge to ourselves, acres of it, and the waitresses keep bringing drinks to the low table on which blood is spilled from the first.

Another ploy, fair boy?

I curl my lips into a maniac grin and strike!

Take that! 

I cry, slamming a tiny black pawn down between the board and my Mojito.

One of his knights is damaged, yet he steers this headless horse around the board as an apocalyptic oracle, threatening pieces left and right until I manage to get him into a corner and hang him, greasy-fingered, from the disco ball that Match Bar, on non-Mondays, presumably sets to a slowly rotating shimmer.

Stalemate, sucker!

Rue Bebelons

This time, this time, I'm determined.

To the home turf, homey! 

I yelp, dragging him westward, pulling him wayward, into the bloody red Rue Bebelons we both know and love.

No chips, but dips; no matt-sheen cocktail list, but decent house red and that cosy-as-an-old-pair-of-jeans feel that soothes the beleaguered chess player all the way back from the brink.

There's a half-booth in the corner and we take it. Rico chooses black. The bar tender changes the record, vinyl being, of course, the stock-standard at Bebelons.

Here, then, is a bar where you can wear a beret or a bassoon, play chess or play the field, and no one raises an eyebrow. It's a bar for anyone with a brain who's over eighteen, a bar where hipsters need not apply. Why it doesn't support more obvious alcoholics is beyond me, but kids, I'm not paying attention to my chic cohabitants right now.

What matters here are Richard's nimble fingers, and how he shuffles those pieces among the squares.

I eye his moves, a singular, spasming portion of my brain toying crazily with the idea of tearing down the string of dried red roses from above the bar and throwing the dusty blooms at my opponent. Or bribing the bar tender to play something a little less relaxing, a little more threatening. Anything to beat Richard. Anything.

Then, it happens: Reggae. Bob Marley. My formidable opponent is for the moment distracted; I am too. Delirious and seeing only the chalky red of the Beblons walls, I counter his move, whatever that was, slamming a sequestered piece onto the checked red tablecloth.

His eyes swing back to the board.

Checkmate! 

he cries. Only this time, it's mine.

The little things

Writing for money is sometimes less about the writing.

People who want to write for money get caught up on the idea of writing. But in some ways, the writing—cultivating a flexible style, getting the tone and voice right, putting coherent sentences together—is the least of your worries.

Frequently, much more pertinent are the other things. The little things.

Taking a brief, for instance.

This isn't about filling in a neat proforma. It's not about stroking your client's ego. It's about amassing the information you need to write something that not only pleases the client sufficiently for them to use it, but, most importantly, will succeed with the audience to achieve the client's goals.

What about researching?

Wait, what? Yes, research. Research that goes beyond Jimmy Wales's Wikipedia is a bit of a conundrum for many would-be writers. Whether it's your own personal experimentation, or research you do through interviews, reading, and observing the subject of your writing, research is essential.

Without research, what will you have to say?

Then there's writing to deadlines.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, try writing to deadlines for a week, or a month, or a decade, and let me know how you go.

Actually, if you get to a decade, you'll be peachy: over time, writing to a deadline becomes a doddle. Why? Because at some point, the writing—the putting of words on a page—becomes a natural and necessary precipitate of all the other things in this list.

Once you can write to deadlines, step up to the next challenge: writing to budgets. It's one thing to get paid to write. It's another to make writing pay.

Understanding that writing is communication? Also a big deal.

In these days of blogs and content marketing and banner ads and print mags in their bajillions, it's easy to see writing as creation—work whose point is the production of sentences: something to publish, something to sell.

That might be "writing" but it won't make you worth paying.

What will make you worth paying is the results your writing produces. And to produce results, your work has to communicate with actual human beings. To do that, you have to:

1. have something to say
2. know who you need to say it to
3. know why it matters to them
4. have the sense and sensibility to formulate that message in a way that speaks to those people.

Providing a rationale: critical.

Being able to explain why you've done something the way you've done it is essential. Only then will you be able to give the client factual reasons as to why you don't believe a particular change should be made—and give them in a way that makes sense to the client and has more than a shadow of a chance of convincing them.

This point could probably also cover weird grammatical and cultural hangups your client wants to apply to the copy.

Oh, and taking and making amendments. That's a thing too.

There are worthy amendments, and there are poor ones. How will you tell them apart? By intuitively using your "art"? See the point above. Once you've mastered rationale, how will you make sure that the amendments you do make protect and enhance what you believe to be the integrity of the client brand's communication with its audience?

These aren't lofty pro writing goals; they're the little things. They're what make a writer worth paying. Anyone can put a sentence on a page. The question is: why that sentence? Your facility with most of the items on this list will enable you to answer that question with competence and certainty.

Something to think about

If you could judge a book by its cover, you'd never read Language and Human Behavior by Derek Bickerton.

But you can't, and you should.

Among the many, many thrilling ideas in this book is the suggestion that we all think largely in words. That we need words to think. That these concepts are linked, and that language produces thought.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a thrilling idea. I naturally want to conclude that by extending our language, we extend our ability to think. I've found this to be true myself, as, I expect, have you.

But there are languages that encompass different concepts from our own—concepts that are inexpressible in English. What are we missing by not having words for those ideas? How much are we limited by this? And to that point, how much are we limited by the vocabularies we do have, which certainly represent only small portions of the total the language has to offer?

If you're going to concern yourself passionately with some issue that's completely beyond your control, and reasonably ethereal to boot, Derek Bickerton will give you something to think about.

Paradiso

Remember this? It's been a while, but since then I've read the Inferno and Purgatorio. Now I'm in Paradiso, and brother, is it sweet.

To be honest with you, I began reading the Inferno when things were indeed hellish. Not as hellish as they'd ever been, and not as hellish as they got, but on the whole, they were hard.

You know what I'm talking about.

It's not inconceivable that I dreamed, on some level, that things would change as I read through the cantos, threaded my way through the seven circles of hell and up the spiralling mount to Paradise. Because sometimes books do mirror life. Coincidentally, sure. But it happens.

As in this case.

Paradise doesn't look like I thought it would. This isn't what I fought for. Now I know how Dante felt when he found himself unexpectedly in Eden. How did everything get so pretty so suddenly? When did the sky lift, and what's that light up ahead?

So my trick seems to have worked. Here we are in a glorious place where all faces show love, and a calm beauty prevails. Let it last, Alighieri.

Such pretty words

In The Grass Harp, Truman Capote conjures a little girl who calls herself Texaco Gasoline, "because they were such pretty words."

Sometimes, words are pretty. They feel good in the mind, in our ears, on our tongues.

For me, one of those words—on a par, I think, with Texaco Gasoline for mundanity—is telephone.

To think of the thing in my pocket taking the same name as an object that sat in small squadrons on office desks the size of tennis courts, with rotary dials, multi-coloured so you knew which one was for what, is crazy. To call the thing in my pocket by the same word as something with two horns attached to walls in English manor houses, which would connect you to an operator, is equally crazy.

The word telephone is so much more indulgent than the clipped, expedient, modern "phone". Telephone is luxuriant. Telephone takes time to say and to listen to. Three glorious syllables, which I like to draw out, instead of one.

Grown adults snigger when I call my phone a telephone. Friends chuckle. It's just a phone! Right?

Well, shorter isn't always better. And telephone is such a pretty word.

Unintelligible

Today's incredulousness is brought to you by a major web brand:

What's the problem? The dulled out scribble beside the Live Chat alert, friend. Can you read it? I couldn't, and it doesn't get any bigger when you enlarge the text.

Beige on beige tinytext. I'll keep that little gem in mind for the next time I don't want to communicate something.

Resolution

My professional New Year's resolution is pretty simple:

Don't write anything you don't want to read.

This could be rewritten as "Don't write anything you don't want to", but I think the extra word will add validity in the face of crushing, soul-destroying client requests which, though they're few and far between these days, do still come in occasionally.

The precipitate of those final weeks prior to Christmas, this resolution feels useful. While I'm hardly a literary snob, there's a fair bit I don't want to read. Fortunately, most of it is actually dross.