Does Size Matter?

27/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

The length of a manuscript influences whether it will be published traditionally. This is particularly true for new authors. I made a beginner’s mistake by not considering this when I wrote my first novel The Perfect Murderer. If I’d seen any advice about how long genre novels should be, my brain glossed over the figures.

I wasn’t consciously aiming for any particular length, for though I had a rough structure for the storyline I write in an organic way, allowing the action to evolve through what the characters would do in the circumstances. Sometimes they did things that I hadn’t anticipated, but it felt right to stay true to their natures.

I had a brief frisson of achievement when I passed the 100,000-word count, anticipating that I’d be finished at about 130,000 words. I was correct, though after reading through the manuscript several times, then leaving it alone for a week, a nagging feeling arose that it felt distinctly unfinished.

This was mainly because there were so many questions left unanswered, to do with the fates of my two killers and their victims. I’ve read thousands of cop stories, mysteries and thrillers in the last fifty years, and it’s always rather bothered me when I find myself thinking “but what happened to?” at the end of a story. There can be good reasons for leaving things unresolved, of course, such as the planned reappearance of a character in a sequel. Sometimes vagueness is a result of savage editing or even forgetfulness. Raymond Chandler forgot to identify who’d killed a character in The Big Sleep.

The end of my novel felt snapped-off, full of rough edges, so I smoothed things off by writing an afterword, explaining what became of the corpses of my goodies, innocents and baddies. I also set my lead detective up for a sequel, while not ruling out that the serial killer hadn’t perished and could return. This took my manuscript up to 160,000 words.

My beta-reader, who’s just finished reading the novel, loved that I’d written an afterword and that there was a feeling of optimism after what had been a rather harrowing tale. But the length of my novel is a no-no for a first thriller by an unknown author, as the guideline is 80,000 to 100,000, with most published first books being at the lower end of those figures. Other genres vary in what is expected for a word count, with science-fiction and fantasy novels the longest at up to 150,000 words, followed by historical at 100,000+ and bringing up the rear are westerns, which can be as short as 45,000 words.

I expect that we’ve all read novels much longer than this. I forced myself through the 1,267,069 words of Marcel Proust’s A La Rechcherche Du Temps Perdu, as a teenager – I didn’t have a social life! The last 69 words were the best… I’ve since read many other long novels by Thomas Wolfe, Iris Murdoch, John Irving, Victor Hugo and Tolstoy, enjoying them all. Sometimes it takes that long to narrate a story, and also there’s a challenge to the reader to last the course. Hence the phrase “I like a nice long read.”

2015 turned into the year of the long novel. After the success of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch at 784 pages and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries at 864 pages, which became the longest novel to win the Booker Prize, several other novelists have cracked the 1,000 page barrier.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/year-of-the-very-long-novel.html

I decided not to rewrite my novel, as taking an editorial chainsaw to it to halve its length would have been a travesty. I don’t expect a literary agent, or publisher with an open submission policy, to take the risk of publishing something that long by an unknown author, but that’s OK. One needs to be an established and successful writer to have long novels accepted. It’s amazing to me that J.K. Rowling got away with such lengthy books, particularly as they were aimed at young readers who supposedly have limited attention spans. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was 896 pages and 257,045 words! Something tells me that her publisher didn’t want to edit the goose that was laying so many golden eggs…

Instead, I wrote a prequel to The Perfect Murderer, called Who Kills A Nudist? which introduced my detective and forensic pathologist characters. This second first novel was a comparative doddle, by limiting it to 80,000 words, and I’ve got the enthralling sequel all lined up to publish afterwards – hurrah!

How long are your novels?

Have any of you experienced similar problems of conforming to what is expected for word counts? Or have you had the opposite problem of feeling like you’re padding the narrative out to reach a nice size?

I must admit that I’ve had the wicked thought of doing this with a couple of my novellas, which are about 30,000 words long.

Health

Eyes, computer screens and spectacles

27/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

After my previous post on eye dominance, I’m at risk of sounding like I’m obsessed with eyes by talking about them again. I must admit that my greatest fear is losing my eyesight, for, after all, any other part of the anatomy can be replaced with a man-made prosthesis, but not one’s eyes…

Spending a long time staring at a backlit laptop screen is not good for my eyes, I know that, so I take precautions such as adjusting the brightness and contrast of the screen in the settings. It helps to alter my focus from time to time, rather than staring intently at something that’s only two feet away non-stop. Looking around the room and out of the window at sights nearby and on the horizon gives my eyes a workout. This article in WebMD sums up the problem and the solutions very well: http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/computer-vision-syndrome

I came across some empirical proof that Computer Vision Syndrome affects techies, nerds and geeks when I lived in Atlanta. My ex-wife was a network administrator for a multi-national telecommunications company, and her office was located on a site alongside lots of other technological and research firms. When people left for home, the roads became gridlocked – Atlanta is famed for its smog and traffic jams, and drivers become expert at driving very slowly.

All the same, there were hundreds of fender benders, or low speed collisions, in the proximity of the business park. The police and insurance companies issued a statement after examining drivers’ statements about what caused the accidents. They were blamed on drivers not being able to shift their focus from the instruments and dashboard after spending hours staring at their computer monitors. Their spatial awareness was poor too, as their brains had become attuned to tunnel vision. The advice was issued that people recalibrate their eyes by having a good look around them, before stepping into their cars and driving off like a robot.

I’ve been wearing spectacles for about nineteen years. I discovered that I needed them in an unusual way. I used to help to manage a community centre, which rented out rooms for various activities and that had a free-to-use computer suite. So far as I knew, my vision was fine. One Christmas I was asked to stand in for the man who usually played Father Christmas, as he was recovering from knee surgery. Although my beard was turning white, I had no idea that I was sufficiently ancient, portly and trustworthy to play Santa Claus, but was honoured to be asked.

A red and white costume was provided, along with a fake cotton-wool beard, but I decided that I’d look more convincing wearing some grampa/John Lennon style glasses. I acquired a pair at a charity/thrift shop for a mere 50 pence. They didn’t look like they had strong lenses, but I tried them out by looking at a newspaper—thinking that the print would be blurred. Instead, the words jumped into sharp focus! D’oh – I needed to wear glasses after all, as my brain had been working in overdrive to compensate for the deterioration of my cornea.

Any spectacles wearer will know what a pain they are to clean. I don’t like the idea of using contact lenses, and the thought of laser eye surgery makes me queasy, so I’ve stuck with glasses. I clean them each morning and have tried a number of different ways, including commercial glass cleaner sprays, vinegar and lemon juice. I’d try rubbing alcohol, which is freely available in America but hard to source in the U.K. (no idea why) unless bought online.

All of these methods kind-of worked, but the lenses soon became smeared, as if I’d wiped them over with a greasy rag. Looking online, I found that the best way to remove marks is washing-up liquid or dish soap. Rubbing a dab of it between forefinger and thumb on each side of the lens, followed by rinsing off beneath a running tap and polishing with paper towel sees the glass gleaming. It works better than anything else that I’ve tried.

ADDENDUM:

This is encouraging news. I recall an experimental surgical technique from a few years ago, where a lens was inserted into a tooth, which was then located in the eye socket – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197256/Blind-man-sees-wife-time-having-TOOTH-implanted-eye.html

It makes me think of the amusing question, Where would you have a third eye? The end of a finger would be quite useful, provided it came with a reinforced eyelid to protect it from harm. Just think of the things you could see! At the very least, it would make finding things in a pocket easier.

Health

A Question of Balance

27/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Some of you may have seen reports in the press earlier this year, which picked up on a report in the journal Stroke—which reports news on strokes and cardiovascular diseases.

This report highlighted the importance of being able to balance on one leg, and its relevance to the information that’s sent to the brain. Unsteadiness could indicate problems, which might lead to strokes and falls in old age.

I have a particular interest in this area of health, for I had a minor stroke in 1995, at the age of 41. In a way I wasn’t surprised that it happened, for 1995 was an extremely stressful year, what with the end of a long-term relationship, business failure, homelessness and all round nastiness and sadness. Having a stroke almost felt like my brain telling me it had had enough of this rubbish, and to clean up my act!

I was fortunate to get away with only a few after-effects. The main one was a strange and erratic tendency to miss out certain letters when I wrote something. Some days I would omit the letter ‘b’, the next day the letter ‘g’ would be missing from a page of writing. I didn’t notice that I wasn’t penning them while I was writing – it was only when I read things out. This was in pre-computer days, without the intervention of a spell-checker to highlight mistakes, when I wrote everything in longhand.

To retrain my brain, I copied out hundreds of pages from novels and non-fiction books, reaching a point where all of the necessary letters were there.

My balance is OK, which may be partly helped by having ridden hundreds of thousands of miles on motorcycles and bicycles.

Try the tests in this article – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2956179/Can-standing-balance-one-leg-help-young-balance-offers-insight-general-health.html

N.B. CAUTION! Do these balancing tests in a clear area, especially if you’re going to close your eyes. Having a bed or a sofa to fall onto nearby is a good idea – I don’t want you putting an arm through your television or computer screen.

Writing

Writing as the Opposite Sex

27/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

The title of this thread isn’t meant to imply that any readers of this blog have pen names which conceal their true gender. Rather, I’m referring to creating the fictional thoughts of a character in the first person, though a second or third person viewpoint could require adopting a different way of expressing their behaviour if they’re of the opposite gender.

I’ve written twenty short stories and novellas, five novels and about 500 poems and song lyrics. Five of the stories are seen through the eyes of my female protagonist, and there are multiple viewpoints too, including those of women. I try to avoid any of my characters behaving in stereotypical ways that are meant to show their gender – men who can’t cook, women who don’t know how to top-up the oil of their car engine, that sort of thing. I dislike this hackneyed and sexist shorthand, which is lazy, demeaning and doesn’t work anyway.

I think that I’ve done OK in representing my female characters well, and my beta-readers who are all women, have commented that they found them believable. I may have an advantage from my upbringing, which was primarily in female company – sisters, mother, aunts and grandmothers. I’ve also worked in jobs that are dominated by women – teaching, librarianship and counselling. I have eight close friends, and seven of them are women. From all of this, I may have picked up on female attitudes, strengths, worries and, for want of a catch-all term, traits, better than some male writers.

I can’t say that I noticed inhabiting my female character’s persona affected me greatly, though it certainly altered novelist Elizabeth Day’s writing and behaviour when she penned a novel, Paradise City, that has an alpha-male as the protagonist.

I’m not trying to start a war between the sexes with this post. I’m tempted to have one of the characters in my next Cornish Detective novel be transitioning from one sex to the other, which would certainly throw open different points of view.

I avoid writing anything sexist, unless it’s to show some flaw in a character, but there’s a lot of casual reverse sexism in advertising and even in the routines of supposedly politically correct comedians. I saw a book advertised recently, by Bridget Christie, which is called A Book For Her and which has the tag line beneath the title *And for him, if he can read

http://www.bridgetchristie.co.uk/

Imagine the outrage that cover would cause had the book been written by a male comedian, and the disparaging remark was made about women being illiterate….

Writing

The Perils of Pen Names

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Many famous authors have used one or more pen names, and there can be all sorts of good reasons for the subterfuge – not the least, evading the taxman!

I used several noms-de-plume when I was writing magazine articles back in the 20th century, and sometimes these were provided by the journal involved, where various writers penned articles as a columnist with an established identity. One of the strangest gigs I had was as an Agony Aunt for a women’s magazine. I got the job through having I’d trained as a marriage guidance counsellor and volunteered as a Samaritan, and from growing up surrounded by women knew more about the medicinal use of yoghurt than most men…

When I started writing fiction again in 2013, I cast around for what to call myself. I have nothing against my own name of Paul Whybrow but wasn’t sure how memorable it is. There are a couple of other Whybrows who are writers, though they’re not related to me – one is Ian, a children’s author, the other Marian and she concentrates on art books.

I chose something that I thought would distinguish me from the norm, and which might stick in people’s minds. I had a couple of eccentric great-uncles when I was a child. One was called Edgar, which I didn’t fancy as a name, the other was Augustus, which I liked partly because of my favourite Roman emperor. I have ancestors who came over in the Norman invasion of 1066. Their family crest featured various elements, including a strange red heart shape with a devil’s forked tail looping upwards from the pointed base.

I’d used this shape as a mascot on crash helmets for years, and for signing artwork, so Augustus Devilheart I became (stop laughing at the back!), which I thought worked OK. After slow sales for my ebooks, several female friends advised me that some readers might be finding my pen name intimidating, thinking that I was a devil worshipper—so why not try my real name? I did, and it helped, though it was a real pain to have to change all the manuscripts, deleting them from the online sales sites and uploading the new version.

In trying to establish Augustus Devilheart as a creative entity, I’d joined various social media sites using that name. Some of these were easier to alter than others, and I found to my consternation that Goodreads would hold onto my nom-de-plume forever. They don’t allow authors to delete books published using a pen name. This made me think of them as more intelligence-hungry than the FBI, KGB, CIA and MI5 combined.

I was assiduous in saying that a book had been previously published using the pen name, by adding a note to the frontispiece and on my blog and social media site profiles. I rather thought that I’d left my former identity behind, until I received a spooky contact update from LinkedIn on my Paul Whybrow Gmail account, asking me if I knew Augustus Devilheart? Well, do I?

Have any of you had problems with pen names?

Dean Koontz

Writing

Staying Positive

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Most of us have heard of the phrase the power of positive thinking, which came from Norman Vincent Peale’s bestseller. It can be hard to see the good in situations that have stalled or plainly failed, and making lemonade when life hands you lemons is only temporary refreshment.

I once read a definition of the human body as being essentially a chemical factory, which is controlled through electrical impulses that are fired from the brain. What and how we think affects how we feel about our own selves and the world itself.

Colin Wilson has an anecdote about becoming aware of the power of shifting how he saw things in his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose. Wilson sprung to fame in 1956, with his examination of various outsider artists called The Outsider. He made a lot of money very quickly and was taken seriously as a thinker. His writing never reached such heights again, and though he studied and produced books on a huge variety of subjects, many of which sold well, he was also critically savaged.

He called himself, almost dismissively, a writing machine, and though he brushed aside the criticism he also suffered from panic attacks and bouts of despair. He was trying to fight off a panic attack as he was about to embark on a train journey to visit his publisher but had the insight that he was at his lowest ebb at that point, so was unlikely to be seeing things clearly. What if he flipped things around, and instead of panicking about the upcoming meeting being dreadful, look on it as being a wonderful opportunity for suggesting a new writing project? He immediately felt a surge of relief, which perked up his thoughts and boosted his physical being.

Colin Wilson went on to write about this process, which he saw as mastering his emotions. He was essentially trying to get away from feeling helpless, something which American psychologist Martin Seligman expanded upon. He believes in positive psychology and favours something called Learned Optimism, which is done by consciously challenging any negative self-talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism

Doubt is something that affects writers a lot, and it’s not helped by the amount of time that we spend alone. I find that it helps to view doubt as simply a shadow, an insubstantial sign that the solid and good story which I created actually exists.

As author George W Pacaud observed :

‘Why inflict pain on oneself, when so many others are ready to save us the trouble?’

George Eliot

Writing

Are you a Reporter or an Imaginer?

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’m currently reading Lawrence Block’s Spider Spin Me A Web – A Handbook For Fiction Writers. Chapter 20 is called Reporters and Imaginers.

Block’s interest in the two types of writers was raised by a colleague at a literary conference, Arno Karlen who writes largely non–fiction. He gave a lecture in which he postulated that there’s often a very thin line between fiction and non–fiction. He cites Hemingway, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer as examples of reporters in the guise of novelists.

This made Block wonder about how he wrote things. How much was he using experiences and people that he’d known as inspiration, and how much came purely from his imagination? He gives several amusing examples of how he found it easier sometimes to write convincingly about people and places that he didn’t know than to create an accurate impression of those that he was acquainted with.

I thought about my writing and decided that I use a mix of autobiographical experiences and made-up stuff. I definitely favour factual details, though this is done more in a write what you know about way. For instance, I give several of the characters in my novel physical and mental ailments that I’ve had—gout, Reynaud’s syndrome (cold feet), depression and Aspergillosis—a fungal infection of the lungs.

Gout is one of the few ailments that one gets no sympathy for having—it’s always assumed that it’s your fault, through rich eating or drinking too much port and brandy. In fact, it’s more of an inherited condition (my grandfather had it) and is a form of arthritis. I’ve suffered various pains, including stabbing, being shot, poisoned (Black Widow) and broken bones, but nothing hurt as much as gout. Thankfully, I’ve only been afflicted a few times, and not for twenty years, but at the time it felt like my big toe joint was clamped in a vice that was being hit with a club hammer and heated by a blowtorch.

Ah well, it’s all grist to the mill, and I passed my agony onto the forensic pathologist in my novel, and her condition provided a turning point in the plot.

The Gout by James Gillray, 1799

The pitfall of being a Reporter style of writer is that one could come across as giving a lecture if too much detail is given. Then again, an Imaginer really needs to describe their creation in a feasible and convincing way.
What sort of writer are you – a Reporter or Imaginer?

Humour

How to speak Australian

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

My friend in New Zealand wrote to me recently, saying that she was looking forward to doing something in the ‘arvo.’ I had no idea what she meant, briefly wondering if an arvo was a make of car that I hadn’t heard of before.

She’s lived and worked in Australia a lot, so I’ve become used to hearing of ‘barbies’ for barbeques, and arvo turned out to mean afternoon. One of the funniest Australian abbreviations, to my mind anyway, is that their outlaw biker gang members are known as ‘bikies’ – which make them sound like cuddly toys.

I knew an Australian woman who married a Cornishman and settled here. She was wildly amused by the expression ‘have a root around in my drawers’, meaning to search for an item, as to root means something considerably ruder in Oz.

If any of you are thinking of creating an Australian character, you could get some good tips from this video.

Reading

The most popular books of all time

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

At least E.L. James hasn’t made the list!

I suppose that this list could be used as a test of how well-read one is…I hadn’t heard of Dream of the Red Chamber before, but I’ve read all of the others, apart from The Koran and The Da Vinci Code. I absolutely refuse to read Dan Brown or watch the movie adaptations of his books. I don’t need to try something to know that it’s rubbish.

Someone once conned me into reading The Celestine Prophecy, and if I hadn’t been on a Jumbo jet crossing the Atlantic at the time, I’d have thrown it at the nearest wall! To make matters worse, it was the only book that I had with me, so I ended up memorising the in-flight magazines.

http://metro.co.uk/2015/07/15/the-most-popular-book-of-all-time-isnt-harry-potter-5297319/

Reading

eBay buying tip

26/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’ve read many handbooks on writing over the years, acquiring them off Amazon, AbeBooks and eBay—usually for a few pounds.

I’ve had my eye on Harry Bingham’s The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook Guide to Getting Published, for a while, putting a watch on it as all the copies advertised were at least £13.

I read somewhere that placing an item into your shopping basket, then leaving it there, could have benefits with the seller offering the would-be buyer a discount to make the sale. Sure enough, after placing a copy of the publishing guide in my basket for two weeks, I received an email notification that the last copy had been reduced to £2.59 with free postage and packing.

I made it mine, saving about £10.

Incidentally, Harry Bingham is a thriller writer, who after realising that debut authors were having problems securing an agent and publisher for their first book, established an advice site he called Writers’ Workshop which also offered editorial services. It was recently rebranded as Jericho Writers.

He’s made many useful videos, which are on YouTube.

Paul Pens

Monthly Archives: April 2019

Does Size Matter?

Eyes, computer screens and spectacles

A Question of Balance

Writing as the Opposite Sex

The Perils of Pen Names

Staying Positive

Are you a Reporter or an Imaginer?

How to speak Australian

The most popular books of all time

eBay buying tip

Real Write, Real Edit, Real Publish