The Divine Accident Theory of DANNY

Just dropping by quickly to share this find with you before I go to Editing Hell. I discovered this old, unpublished article in my blog archive while rummaging around trying to find 'Emily Bronte was a Shameless, Self-promoting, Cocksucking Whore'.

I had completely forgotten about this piece. It was written during the height of the DANNY backlash, during which time there was not just a vein of thought but a whole fucking ideology which I christened The Divine Accident Theory of DANNY.

The Divine Accident Theory was my umbrella name for the general consensus among DANNY's detractors that anything that was good in DANNY (and there wasn't much) was an accident, and that I was some kind of bumbling amateur who broke every rule because I was too stupid to know otherwise.

This school of thought finally got so outrageous that it became impossible to answer their criticisms of the book and one day I just gave up and wrote this piece, ostensibly agreeing with them, tongue so firmly in cheek it's a miracle I ever got it out again.

It wasn't published because it was decided it was too subtle (they never were good with sarcasm) and they would probably just adopt it wholesale and repeat it as gospel proof that Stone did, in fact, realise she had written DANNY entirely by accident while channelling through the Virgin Mary, or at least Annie Proulx (sorry, Annie, I promise that is the very last time I will take your name in vain.)

Anyway, now I'm passing it on.

Enjoy!

P.S. Just for the record, all the criticisms that feature in this piece were levelled at DANNY, often many times, in many different guises. Ah, the good old days, indeed.

I am talentless, no good. The only good things in my book are there by accident, in spite of me. It is primitive, untutored, outsider art. No work, no effort, no skill. I had nothing to do with it. It was written with a kind of animal stupidity. Any bits that are good are simply because my English teacher drummed them into me parrot-fashion.

Any bits that are bad, and there are far more of those, are because I have never learned what I'm doing.

I don't know any grammar. Despite all the education I've had, the books I've read, the study I made, I took none of it in.

I understand nothing, not even basic human nature. I am so bad at this, in fact, that all my characters are interchangeable. John could be Danny, could be Ian, could be Stephen, could be Rab, could be... It's difficult to tell who's talking because they have no genuine character and no motivations. I don't understand these things, or I forgot them when I was writing.

My heroes are not clear-cut or likeable because my own personality is so ugly that it couldn't help sneaking out into everyone I wrote. I am so talentless that I never spotted discrepancies in motivation, conflicting behaviours, contradictions. I left them in when they happened because I didn't know better.

It is entirely unrealistic for people to live like they do in my book. No-one lives like that. It's only my warped view of life. My idea of reality is completely bent out of shape because my own reality is.

I didn't know when to stop. I was enjoying it so much I just kept on and on and on and on. Although I didn't realise it at the time, because I enjoyed certain television programmes as a child, twenty years later I just rewrote them, unwittingly writing fan fiction, despite not having had a TV for thirty years. The only rightful claim I have is to being the first TV-less fan fiction writer.

I am arrogant because I will not listen to any help people offer me. I discard suggestions that are only meant kindly, to help me. I act as if I have a right to my own vision and discount others, making me a monstrous egotist. In fact I avoided going to anyone who might help me because I didn't want them to interfere with what I might say. I just didn't want to hear it.

I am full of self-importance and have delusions of grandeur. I have no right to compare my book to anyone else's work - no matter who they are. It doesn't matter if this is solely for marketing purposes, to help people identify what kind of story DANNY offers. It smacks of ego and offends people who read   Real Writers' works.

I have never learnt humility. If I had listened to what everyone told me, no matter who they were or how well qualified they were, I would be a much better writer. No matter what people miss when they read my work it is my fault. If they rush through it and don't concentrate it's my fault for moving the narrative too fast, or making it too subtle.

It was an act of appalling conceit to write a book 990 pages long and shows a total disregard for the lives people lead. They have to go to work, go on holiday, read in the bath or bed. If I had been even remotely considerate, or thought for one single, solitary instant about what I was doing I would never have written it.

It was stupid and egotistical and arrogant to even attempt to write in a different style, to think I could create real time in a book, to have the characters tell the story instead of the author.

I knew people might find it strange or disorientating, having no author to guide them in what to think, how to perceive events, determine motivations, but I mistakenly thought they'd enjoy the challenge. No-one asked me to give them a challenge, make it more complex, do something so unusual, but I was so determined, so stubborn, about doing something different I went ahead and did it anyway. When people missed the point I didn't just shut up and put up, I asked for more attention. I expected it, like the monstrous little egotist I am.

I thought people ought to be grateful. I had brought them this masterpiece of originality, this creation without compare, and all along it was on every fan message board on the planet. There was a million of my book, just with different character names, all doing the exact same thing, word for word. There was nothing original in my book at all. Not only was I cheeky and conceited and arrogant, I was unoriginal too.

And when people pointed out to me what I'd done, when they, as tactfully as possible, said, 'You've just written a cheap wank story copied from a million other wank stories written by closeted women all over the planet', I started howling with rage and pain. I tried to explain to them , who knew far, far better how to write this kind of fiction. People who've been doing it for years, who've been having their work critiqued by friends and colleagues, who understand the genre, who know real grammar and who know how and when to break the rules. People who have knowledge, and respect for other people, people who only wanted to point me in the right direction, kind people who offered me words of encouragement and I cast them back at them, still asserting arrogantly that my book was an original, that it was good .

But I had made the decision that it was good - based on what? Years of reading and writing in a vacuum, so focussed on producing my own voice, my own thoughts, my own images, saying what I couldn't find anywhere else, that I didn't care if it broke the rules.

Although I searched and searched and only found tiny bits here and there, scraps of plot, teasing bits of dialogue, ideas and images, all along Danny was sitting there, waiting to be found, on a million fan sites, slash sites, amongst the lowest of dabblers and amateurs. All that work was for nothing, but I was too arrogant to see, too conceited, too selfish.

What I have to do now is face myself. How can I publish future volumes of something that I now know to be so bad, derivative?

What I thought I was I am not. What I thought I had created I only cloned. What I thought I felt was false. What I had to say was not acceptable, could not be heard, because in my stupidity I told it in a way that could only be deciphered by people who also disregarded rules, 'the proper way', what had gone before. What I thought I had made clear I had encoded. There were rules, are rules, to fiction and I broke them all.

I made my sex erotic, pornographic, insanely detailed. I drove a plot with that sex - and no plot can be driven by sex. I was even told this by a senior editor in a big, important, global publishing house - someone who wanted to publish me, but not DANNY - "Sex is not sufficient motivation for a story" and I went right on and did it anyway.

I made gratuitous sex and violence non-gratuitous by making it carry its own weight, have its own dynamics and reasons, but then I made it complex by not always showing exactly what those reasons were.

I made my characters do contradictory things so that people would be thrown off-kilter, be unable to make trite, glib decisions, determine where the story was going and feel oh-so-safe because they knew it all. But all they got was lost and frustrated, and angry .

I gave them incomplete pictures, encouraged them to fill them in themselves, then pulled the rug out from under them. I set out to make people uncomfortable, to disorientate them, to use things they'd never seen used before, like scenes that were set in as real time as I dared.

I did all that, thinking, They will love this. This is the book I've searched for all my life. I've put in everything that is missing from other people's work; the truths, the uncertainties, the realities, the ambiguities, the ugliness, the beauty, the pain. But all people want is a decent plot, language they understand, the kind no-one talks except in books. I discarded all that and made my own language like I was someone, like I had something to say when no-one, no-one had asked me to say anything.

I broke the rules. I did it deliberately. I caused a lot of unnecessary pain. I bucked the system out of arrogance, conceit and disrespect.

Good people have suffered.

I am so very sorry.

Not .