Rich Man's Frug

Hello loves!

My partner's been away for a week, and Digby and I have reverted to our natural troll state: lurking in our cosy flat, leaving crumbs everywhere, blasting soundtracks from musicals at top volume, eating small children who stray across our path. Here's some of what's been occupying my trollish mind recently.

1 - Rich Man's Frug

You know when something becomes so iconic that it’s imitated thousands of times, and eventually, people are more familiar with the copies than the original? Like the “epic handshake” meme, which is actually from the 1987 movie Predator, with Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Home alone, I've had one of my favourite versions of this on repeat recently: the "Rich Man's Frug" dance from the 1960s musical Sweet Charity, choreographed by the legendary Bob Fosse (who also directed Cabaret, IMO the greatest musical of all time). It’s one of those things you’ve definitely seen, even if you’ve never even heard of the original. Fosse’s choreography was so revolutionary that it’s been endlessly reinterpreted.

Here's the OG:

The precise gestures! The quirky poses! The neutral facial expressions! The silly chicken-pecking thing! It's so delightful.

Once you learn to recognise it, you'll see the "Frug" everywhere. Beyonce's riffed on it several times, most clearly in Get Me Bodied and Single Ladies. You can see references to it in everything from 1990s Michael Jackson to Bring it On to Jenna Ortega's Wednesday dance that went viral last year.

But, goodness, there's nothing quite as delightful as the original.

2 - The Art of the Lie

Between all the musicals and Trump protest songs, an album I've been loving recently is John Grant's The Art of the Lie, after getting to see him perform at Hackney Church with my buddy Dashe a few weeks ago. John Grant is basically if Chappell Roan was a bear with a vocoder. His trademark is wrapping savage lyrics in the soft padding of a whisky voice (e.g. "You're not honest; you're just a prick").

His older stuff sounded more 90s grunge-folksy, with a melodic-growl that sometimes reminds me of a less-problematic Ryan Adams. His best-known song, "GMF" is a deliciously ironic self-loathing anthem, recorded with Sinead O'Connor. It utterly slaps.

You could probably say I'm difficult
I probably talk too much
I overanalyse and overthink things
Yes, it's a nasty crutch
I'm usually only waiting for you to stop talking so that I can
Concerning two-way streets, I have to say that I am not a fan

His 2024 album, The Art of the Lie, veers into witty electro-funk, with songs like "All That School For Nothing" layering cutting social commentary with disco-pop. He spends a lot of the album messing around with a vocoder (that's the thing that makes Daft Punk sound like alien robots). But the album has remarkable range, swerving between songs that get you grooving and songs that have you sobbing your guts out.

My favourites are "Marbles" (a love song both wry and sweet - "I've got the poise of a newborn giraffe ... my comportment like that of a Komodo dragon ... and you make me lose my marbles"), "Father" ("I feel ashamed because I couldn't be the man you always hoped that I would become") and "It's a Bitch" (a funk banger about being overeducated and unable to pay your rent).

The opening act at the Hackney gig, Birmingham band BIG SPECIAL, were also great - very "cost-of-living-crisis-Britain's pretty shit right now innit" - strong early-Blur vibes. Try cathartic belter SHITHOUSE and moody rapture ballad BLACK DOG/WHITE HORSE.

3 - The art of self-editing

Legend has it that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, pounding it out on a 120-foot scroll so he wouldn’t even have to pause to change typewriter paper. Like so many great stories, this is a lie: Kerouac actually reworked the novel over six or seven drafts. And the truth is, most of writing is rewriting.

The secret shame of most professional writers? Our first drafts are awful - clichés, clunky prose, plot holes that are more accurately plot canyons. Most of us write first drafts that are no better than your high-school English essays, I swear. The skill professional writers learn is rewriting, shaping that gummy blob of a first draft into something readable.

There are some exceptions, of course - the rarefied few whose first drafts are vigorous and sumptuous and animated by unworldly imagination ... arseholes! But writers like that are uncommon. For most of us, writing is a process that looks more like doggedly hacking a sculpture out of raw stone than plucking butterflies from the sky.

It can be annoying, reworking the same description of a tree seven or eight bloody times, but it's also my very favourite part of the process. I'm there now, deep in the last (?) round of structural edits on my perimenopawsal werewolf novel Femme Feral.

It's funny, but for a skill that's so much a part of what professional writers do, revising isn't a skill that's taught very explicitly in most creative writing classes (our Bath Spa MA in Writing for Young People is a happy exception). So, if it's helpful, here's what my own self-editing process looks like.

Step 1: Take a break
After writing a draft, I put it away for at least a month. You can't see a novel properly when you're too close to it.

Step 2: Read it like a reader
When I'm ready to come back to it, I use a service like Printt to print the manuscript as a bound book. It helps me to make it look as much like a book as I can. Then, pen in hand, I read through, marking what’s confusing, boring, or fun, and jotting down ideas for fixes.

Step 3: Make a map
Then I create an outline of the book as it is. I do this in a spreadsheet that has these headings:

1. Chapter number / title (if chapters have titles)
2. Point-of-view character (if it's a multiple PoV book)
3. Word count (helps me to see if chapters are too long)
4. Location (what % of the way through the book is the scene? - I find this helpful to work out if, for instance, I'm taking too long to get to the inciting incident)
5. A summary of key plot points (what happens in the scene)
6. When (the time and date of the scene, to help me keep track of the timeline)
7. Where (what settings - helpful to check if a character is "stuck" somewhere for too long, or if there's an opportunity to revisit somewhere later in the novel)
8. Main character's goal (to make sure there's unity across the scene of what the main character's trying to achieve)
9. Major change (what is the POINT of the scene? What do we learn, or how is the situation changed for the hero?)

I know this seems anal, but this step is essential for me. It helps me to understand the structure of the novel and see where there are issues. Less "plotter"-y novelists than me sometimes do a much lighter version of this just using Post-Its.

Step 4: Plan structural changes
Next, I copy that outline to a new tab and consider adjustments: Do I need to cut scenes? Combine them? Shuffle? Write new sections?

Step 5: Create a checklist
I make a long bullet-point list of everything that needs to change, organised by chapters or sections. Depending on where I am in the process, this might include feedback from editors or readers, or just my own notes from the read-through and plotting exercise.

Step 6: Rewrite, don't edit
Finally, and I know this will sound bananas-cuckoo-batshit-insane to many of you, I open up a brand new document, set it side-by-side with the old draft, and rewrite the novel sentence by sentence, changing things as I go. I try not to use copy-and-paste until we're at line-edit stage. This forces me to slow down and really consider every single word.

This is a trick I learned from Matt Bell's fantastic book Refuse to be Done - the single best book about self-editing I've ever read.

Some other resources I swear by for self-editing:

• Srunk & White's Elements of Style (book)
• Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft (book)
• David Michael Kaplan's Revision (tricky to find book; here's a summary)
• Jerry Jenkin's self-editing checklist (online)
• Steve Himmer's collection of ideas from writers about revision (online)
• Martine Leavitt's essays about writing go into very helpful specifics - I specifically love this one about how to convey emotion without resorting to shrugs and eyerolls (online)
• Chuck Palahniuk's "nuts and bolts" essays in Lit Reactor - particularly this one about "thought" verbs (online)

I also find Grammarly, Pro Writing Aid and Panlexicon can be helpful tools.

Here's my longer directory of all my favourite books, podcasts and guides about the craft of writing: https://www.sambeckbessinger.com/my-favourite-resources-about-the-craft-of-fiction-writing/

Wish me luck with my all spreadsheets!

Love,

Sam and Digby