I’m sure that we all have favourite silly words. Diphthongsounds a lot ruder than it is, while dongleis always good for a smirk – such as when innocently saying things such as “I recharged my dongle” or “I dropped my dongle down the back of the sofa.”
Scrumping is something that I did a lot of as a child, as there was an abandoned orchard nearby, and the word is pleasingly silly and naughty, inviting emphasis when said—and I wouldn’t feel a wazzock for doing so.
I like the word copacetic, which I came across in James Lee Burke’s novels, before living in Atlanta, Georgia for three years. I was delighted to hear people using it there. It’s definitely an Americanism, and I like throwing it into conversations as most Brits wonder what the hell I’m saying!
I’ve heard all sorts of sad stories about writers paying publicity agents, or taking out boxed advertisements themselves, in an attempt to catch the attention of fickle readers.
The worst tale of woe was a writer who’d gone down the vanity publishing rabbit hole, then laid out an additional $9,000 for banner ads, paid reviews and even a couple of billboards! This resulted in additional sales of 50 books, so I dread to think what her overall loss was.
It seems to me that the biggest hurdle to overcome is simply that of finding a way to get your name into readers’ heads, along with the type of story you write. This was partly why I chose the eccentric pen name of Augustus Devilheart when I started self-publishing six years ago. I reverted to my own name, for various reasons including honesty.
Lesia Daria chose to pay a marketing service for her first novel, and her experience is told in this article:
Going it alone is not without its drawbacks, however. I’ve compared self-publishing to emptying a bucket of water into an ocean—who’s going to notice it? To stand any chance of success as a debut writer self-publishing, readers have to know about you via social media…which is what I’m gearing up to do in 2019.
Well-established authors do well with epublishing, as they already have a name to trade on. Many aged writers are digging out the old novels and short stories that weren’t considered fit enough to be printed thirty years ago and sticking them on their own web sites for sale.
Lawrence Block, who is one of my favourite crime writers, does this. He, and several other well-known authors such as Donald Westlake, earned a living back in the ’50s and ’60s by writing soft-core porn and pulp fiction. They used pseudonyms back then, for discretion, but are now proudly churning out their backstock in these less judgmental times.
One of the trickiest problems when editing a manuscript is deciding which words need hyphens.
Editing my third novel in 2016, I realised that I’d committed a lazy (but common) typing error, as when I wanted to type an em dash to mark a break in a sentence or an en dash for dates I’d used the hyphen key. The conventional QWERTY keyboard is inadequate in many ways, when it comes to punctuation, requiring one to use the numeric keyboard for foreign accent marks and the en and em dash.
Having corrected that error, I moved onto tackling numbers. I was taught as a youngster, to write out all numbers up to one hundred, except for dates, but from 100 on it was OK to use the numerical form. Looking online, modern style guides offer conflicting advice. Some say to write numbers up to ten, but thereafter the numerical form is acceptable. This looks odd to me, as well as lazy, though I appreciate that it may make the reading process swifter.
Using a sentence from my first novel, the way that it now reads is:
There’d only been five constables who’d died in the county in the whole of the twentieth century, and now a Detective Inspector lay murdered fourteen years into the twenty-first.
But, if I followed the modern style guides it would be:
There’d only been five constables who’d died in the county in the whole of the 20th century, and now a Detective Inspector lay murdered 14 years into the 21st. The corrected version looks more like outline notes to me, rather than a sentence fit for printing.
I found this interesting article in the Daily Telegraph today. Matt Johnson is an ex-policeman, who suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and turned to writing violent crime thrillers as therapy to aid his recovery.
I’ve met several ex-soldiers with PTSD over the years, including a couple of Vietnam veterans who were still trying to cope with trauma forty years later. Knowing them, prompted me to write of a serial killer with PTSD in my first novel The Perfect Murderer.
Writing is undeniably therapeutic, and organisations such as Lapidus, the Writing for Wellbeing organisation do great work.
My fictional serial killer has PTSD, and knows that he does, using it as an edge to stay on the fringe of society. I link his shadowy world to the online homicidal activities of players of violent video games, young men who are often alienated from society. There have been several real-life examples of mass murderers using video games as training for their intended attack, including Anders Breivik in Norway.
I’m not suggesting for one moment that all PTSD sufferers are potential homicidal maniacs. Nonetheless, there’s always a huge increase in violent crime when conflicts end, as there’s inadequate therapy for traumatised veterans. It’s a sad fact that more Vietnam veterans died from violent acts after the war than were killed during the conflict—including by suicide.
Boy soldiers are commonly used in revolutionary warfare. The atrocities in Africa, the Middle East and Slovenia featured children as warriors—often kidnapped and brainwashed youngsters; it’s still going on. I once worked with a man who’d been snatched from his classroom by the army of the Ayatollah in Iran. He was 14 years old, and with minimum weapons training, he found himself in a firefight using a machine gun forty-eight hours later. He killed people and became the victim of chemical warfare. Twenty-five years later he was struggling to cope with the guilt of what he did. He tried to make amends by working with refugees in London.
He was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. He had the wisdom to seek counselling, but hearing of his experiences made me wonder what would happen to a disaffected and traumatised warrior with no family or friends, someone who’d been turned into a killing machine—hence my novel, with a serial killer who’s been fighting since childhood.
One of the things that I’m most grateful of, is that I never had to fight in a war, and now I’m too old! It troubles me greatly that not enough is done to deprogramme veterans from violent ways, and to help those who are tormented by trauma. Any outreach project offering support is welcome.
After writing my first novel The Perfect Murderer, I took a month to weed out filler words from the manuscript. My search was prompted by 43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately.When I started this exercise, I thought it would take a couple of days, but after noticing about 25 other words and phrases to remove I continued to plug away. Two months later, my manuscript was 9,000 words shorter.
I moved on to hunt for hyphens—words that need them, and those that don’t. This was time-consuming to do, and very boring too with none of the joy of creative writing. It set me to thinking about how differently I feel about a novel at different stages of writing it, then doing multiple edits, while trying to interest literary agents and publishers in it.
I’m apantser as a writer, plotting loosely while still having a firm idea of what the overall themes will be. In making outline notes for a novel, I do more sketching of the natures of my characters than making a detailed plot. My protagonists direct the story as much as me. This planning stage feels a bit like drawing a rough diagram of a building on a scrap of paper, something that I will inhabit with fictional people who’ll construct the walls for me.
Actually writing a novel, I feel both involved and removed from the process. My characters sometimes do things that I haven’t anticipated, but which are true to their natures. Writing a crime novel means strewing red herrings all over the place, as detectives try to work out what’s going on, so I don’t worry too much about mazes and dead-end corridors that appear. All the same, it can feel a bit like directing the building of my house/novel from a distance. Reading through the latest chapters at the end of the day, to see if it makes sense, is like trying to learn the layout of a new building.
Once finished, upon typing The End the editing begins. I become a building inspector, correcting features of my story-house—moving an illuminating window from one chapter to another, to reveal details that made my murderer act the way that he did. Overall, it looks like my story works, but as with any newly-built house, I know there’ll be plenty of bedding-in to come, with further adjustments needed.
Trying to flog the novel to literary agents, through queries and submissions of a writing sample from my story, requires so much polishing and hard work for so little response, that I feel like the world’s worst double-glazing salesman. While trying to ingratiate myself with these gatekeepers, my story house sits neglected and empty with no visitors. I don’t read it anymore, and though I’m proud of my creation, it’s also a museum of old thoughts. I want to make something new.
Tired of scrutinising my manuscript, which feels more like a forensic examination of each and every brick for integrity, I yearn for fresh writing challenges. I’ve become numb to whether the story works as a story, after picking sentences and individual words apart with tweezers and scalpel.
So, my novel has gone from a rough sketch to a building project followed by a second-fixing, correction, mopping-up exercise, onto being a product that I hawked from door to door, before I turned neurotic, micro-managing the elements that I used to construct my monster like Doctor Frankenstein.
Have any of you gone through similar shifts of attitude to their work?
When winter begins to descend on wild and woolly Cornwall, I start to dread the cold days ahead. My flat in uninsulated, so while I enjoy 90-100 degrees in the summer becoming the nude novelist, I’m swathed in twenty garments to get through the months from December until April; it’s dropped to 39 degrees overnight.
It’s just as well that I’m hardy, but I stumbled across the answer to my frozen nether regions. It’s called a Kotatsu and is a Japanese device that combines bedding material with a table that has a heater beneath. If I can buy one in the U.K., I might just hibernate for five months!
By coincidence, I came across this article, which offers some useful advice (albeit slightly tongue in cheek) about the silly mistakes that writers make with their early stories:
I say by coincidence, as the article’s author Bill Ferris mentions using all of the senses. I was faced with writing a scene in my new novel that night, which is set at a garage fire where the owner has apparently died through carelessly smoking around a leaking welding gas cylinder. This incident is actually a crime committed by the psychopath retired detective who appears in the next novel in the series.
Describing the scene of the burned down car workshop, I knew that it needed some extra punch apart from saying how the dead owner’s legs looked like large sticks of charcoal. I recalled an incident from my days as a housing officer when I was a callow twenty-something. I thought that I knew it all, but I plainly didn’t. I accompanied a senior housing inspector to check a flat where there’d been a fire, which killed the elderly tenant. He had to authorise the repair work needed, and as we looked around I was puzzled by the strange black strips hanging from the ceiling beneath the seat of the fire, as well as the acrid smell. I was informed that both were what was left of the tenant, with remnants of flesh flying upwards, adhering to wherever they touched and providing a background smell of burnt barbecue!
I managed not to throw up, but this experience at least came in useful forty years later to describe something that most people don’t think about. Our sense of smell is one of the most evocative for making a memory, and my fictional scene of death was enhanced by adding a few details about the scent in the air, as well as the repellent taste in the back of the mouth of the detectives.
These days, I always go back through my work in progress, to see if descriptions can be improved by adding to how the protagonists sense things.
FOOTNOTE: That burnt-out flat took a couple of months to renovate, needing a complete replastering, not just to repair the damage, but to remove the smell of burning. It took even longer to rent out again, as no local people on the housing waiting list wanted to live in a place where an old lady had burned to death. It was eventually rented to a couple who moved to the area from hundreds of miles away.
Some of you may be familiar with this poem already, as it’s gone viral since being tacked to a bar wall in London, where it was photographed and posted to Twitter. The poem has a gloomy message read in the conventional way, but if you read it bottom to top then things improve; it’s all a question of attitude.
I hadn’t seen it before, but it appeared in my Quora feed one morning, and I thought that its message was applicable to the loneliness of the long-distance writer:
Today was the absolute worst day ever And don’t try to convince me that There’s something good in every day Because, when you take a closer look, This world is a pretty evil place. Even if Some goodness does shine through once in a while Satisfaction and happiness don’t last. And it’s not true that It’s all in the mind and heart Because True happiness can be attained Only if one’s surroundings are good It’s not true that good exists I’m sure you can agree that The reality Creates My attitude It’s all beyond my control And you’ll never in a million years hear me say Today was a very good day
This article in Literary Hub (well worth subscribing to their free newsletter) made me smile, as I recognised many of the feelings that the author Sloane Crosley experienced about the size of her novel.
(I love the illustration for the article—lost in a book—now there’s a bookmark)
My first novel The Perfect Murderer, written in 2014, was imperfect largely because it was double the length of what a debut work by an unknown author should be, at some 179,000 words. I did some heavy editing and removed 40,000 words. I still have faith in it and know that attempting to cut it down to 100,000 words would be as successful as cutting the neck off a giraffe to make an antelope.
Instead, I viewed it as a learning experience, and it now takes a place as the second novel in my Cornish Detective series. I wrote a prequel to The Perfect Murderer, called Who Kills A Nudist? I kept a close eye on the word count, bringing it in at an acceptable 80,000 words.
I had another feeling of recognition for the plight of author Joshua Ferris, who is interviewed by his editor in the linked article from Sloane Crosley’s.
He had similar problems with the size of his book, having to lose a vast chunk of it. Reagan Arthur, his editor, also called him to task about using the word ‘Jew’ to describe a character in one of his novels. I had similar problems writing my new first novel, as it features nudists, the gay community and BDSM, all of which have politically correct connotations that are formally given respect in the media, even if they’re poked fun at colloquially.
It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, without appearing that I’m being judgmental in any way. My characters might say things that I would never even think. It might help if I were a member of any of these groups, but I’m not (honest!). Just doing the research for these aspects of the story made my eyes water…
Some subjects are hot potatoes, which makes them hard to handle, but potentially satisfying for a hungry reader in search of something a bit spicy.
