Ah, yeah, g’day, now.

In the following little bagatelle, I’d like to have a few words with you about becoming a novelist, and I address m’self to this subject in response to the many zillions of letters I’ve received over the years from persons claiming to be latent or potential novelists.

Here’s an example, just to give you an idea of the type of thing we’re knee-deep in down at the Bureau. ‘Dear Fred, I think I have a novel in me, I think, perhaps, we all do, signed Budding Novelist.’ Here’s another one – ‘I’ve always wanted to write a really good novel. At the moment everything I do’s just a little bit boring. I hope this comes right with time. (I’m writing this for a friend) signed P. White.’

Thanks very much Perc., good to have you along.

Of course there are thousands of others along similar lines, so clearly there are many novelists out there fermenting, and just waiting for the muse to spirit them into print, and I think that this is obviously a suitable moment to just whistle through some of the more fundamental do’s and don’ts of the novel-writing caper in general. Now the first thing to do of course is to decide what sort of a novelist you’d like to be: a tall novelist, a short novelist, or a novelist of medium stature, a modern novelist, a neo-classicist or a pastoral-stream-of-consciousness-gothic-feminist. Once you’ve made this decision, you’re halfway there really.

Next you must sit down and pound out your actual novel, beginning each new sentence with a capital and remembering to number the pages very carefully. There’s nothing more frustrating to the reader than getting right through a novel and then discovering that it was read in completely the wrong order.

You will need a main character, or a protagonist’ll probably do if you don’t mind cutting a few corners, and you’ll need a plot of some sort. This is really just a device to give you something to write about while your main character’s in the toilet or changing hats or something.

Once you’ve got your plot worked out, you’ll have to develop some manner of style and when it comes to style in the English novel, you’re in a the-sky’s-the­limit situation. Now when it comes to style in the novel, which it does of course from time to time I think you’ll find, it’s instructive to browse through history and see what’s available.

First of all there’s the first person which is ‘I’, or in this case ‘you’, which is the second person, and ‘he she or it’ which is the third person, except ‘it’, of course, which isn’t a person at all and whatever you’re having yourself.

Now the novel was begun in a hotel called The Mists which is just outside Antiquity and it was begun by several people and Richardson was one of them. Samuel Richardson his name was, he’s probably dead now, he was a very old man when I knew him. And he wrote a thing called Pamela which established two great strains that run through all subsequent history of the novel; the use of the narrator and boredom. The story was fairly simple. It concerned promiscuity, attempted rape and submission and other burning issues of the day. It was basically a diary and the style is a very good example of what scholars refer to as ‘awful’.

You could do worse than emulate the style of Dickens who wrote mainly for periodicals of course, and as a result has most of his characters down a snake pit on a rope that was being burnt by fire by a man-eating tiger at the end of each week’s little capsule. This gives his novels more climaxes per chapter than most novelists could muster and embodies Dickens’ claim to be nineteenth century English literature’s equivalent to The Restless Years.

Then you’ve got your Tolstoy of course who came from a small village in England, called Russia. He experimented with the novel to see how thick it could get, and he discovered that with proper attention it could get very thick indeed. And he sold the film rights and ultimately died in his own personal railway station.

D.H. Lawrence, of course, should not be emulated without medical supervision, as he was captain of the Nottingham Raincoat Brigade and in later life had a brush with an outfit called the Bloomsbury Set, who make Bernard King look like a football team. James Joyce is really the prince of style and if you’re looking for a style for yourself, or perhaps a nice little style for a friend of the family, I recommend you look very closely at James Joyce and Walt Disney.

Well, by now your novel should be coming along very nicely indeed and in the interests of artistic integrity, which is basically a marketing concept, it’s probably time we addressed ourselves to the difficult task of injecting local flavour into it. Because of course the greatest possible achievement for the scrivener is to come up with the great Australian Novel. And in this pursuit, there are several cardinal rules.

Firstly, if you’ve got any interesting characters in mind – drop ’em immediately or you’ll ruin everything. If there’s one thing the great Australian Novel should not have under any circumstances whatsoever it’s an interesting character. By all means have a main character, but ideally, he should be a character of unexampled tedium, and in fact he should never actually do anything; things can happen to him by all means but he’s a victim at all times, never an initiator of an action. And the things that happen to him should, so far as is possible, be boring.

Now if you find that for some reason or other you’ve got an interesting character, have him shot about halfway down page one by a boring character and make it fairly obvious that the boring character didn’t actually decide to shoot the interesting character, he was forced to do it by the crushing heartlessness of the post-war fusion of urban and rural society, in which process the doctrine of free will is emasculated by the power of capitalism and the stark hostility of the land itself. I’m sorry, the stark hostility of the very land itself.

And of course, the main character should be a testament to the alienation of mankind from the pantheistic subtleties inherent in his world and he should also demonstrate with frightening clarity the tragedy of self-deception and man’s inhumanity to woman.

Have your novel published by the University of Dubbo in a run of a couple of dozen and if nobody reads it you’ll be up there with the cream of the crop.

You give it a lash.

I’ll get of your way now. I’ll see you later.

Transcribed with permission from ‘Novelist’ The Fred Dagg Tapes by John Clarke (Fred Dagg Ltd) Festival Records. C3 7 I 48

Other scripts by Fred Dagg have been published by Nelson in The Fred Dagg Scripts, with cartoons by Patrick Cook ($7.95 pb., 0 17 006072 1). This will be reviewed next month in ABR