The Author's Musings On... CHAPTER ONE

Will Dalrymple casts his mind back to the writing of CHAPTER ONE.

Here we are at the beginning. Welcome all! 'Man to Man' started as a means by which to avoid working on my third year dissertation. I expressed to my friend a desire to write something. Her suggestion was, and I quote, to 'Write something gay'. 

Whether or not she expected Man to Man to materialise as a result is unclear. I took 'something gay' to mean 'something wholeheartedly gay' and thought very briefly on how people tended to write about gay men. Because I had given a couple of pieces of gay fiction a cursory thumbing (lol) through, in my arrogance I considered myself an expert in the field, and my expert opinion was that the field was crap. So I thought it a reasonable course of action to try and top my contemporaries in this regard: go gayer and go crapper.

For this reason, the first chapter is a hammy coming out to preposterously, cartoonishly (although: alas, such people exist) homophobic parents with preposterously clichéd motivations for their prejudices. (NB: Donald's father's boarding school backstory is, like much of the texturing detail in the first installment, forgotten in subsequent volumes in favour of more stupid things. 'Man to Manta Claus' does, albeit in a moronic way, attempt to explain his parents dogged homophobia).

As the series goes on Donald gets less articulate as a narrator, the prose gets more torturous and the characters more absurd. This is both a reflection of my pushing for absurdity as ideas run out and also of the fact that when I started Chapter One I had no real idea of what I was planning to do. The prose in the first volume, I will admit, borrows quite heavily from Rob and Neil Gibbons' Alan Partridge books (unnecessary parentheses, excessive yet rather charming qualifications, a buffoonish quality to the narration), but enjoy this while it lasts. In the coming chapters Donald gets weirder, stupider and more tedious as a character and storyteller - at the beginning he and the prose are buoyant and inclusive, maybe there's a tedious parallel to be drawn there between the writing and the writing process of Man to Man, but I cannot bring myself to draw it: I'm not an aritst!!!lol!!!

xx 

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