In the interest of reassuring blog readers who fear they’re losing their marbles when they become forgetful, I thought that I’d post a link to a report on the effect of moving from room to room.
Any person of a certain age starts to fret that they’re succumbing to early-onset Alzheimer’s, when they can’t recall someone’s name or why they came into a room. I’ve wondered if absent-mindedness was more commonly found among writers. After all, we sit staring at our computer screens for ages, lost in the lives of our created characters, then we’re expected to magically return to reality as if we can instantly recall what it was we’re supposed to be doing.
This happened to me a few months ago, when I found myself standing in the bathroom without an inkling of why I’d gone in there. It wasn’t for my normal business, for I was running on empty, so I returned to my laptop to continue submitting to literary agents. After several minutes of typing, I cottoned-on to why I’d stood looking at my bathroom cabinet, for I had a painful hangnail that was catching on the keys as I typed.
D’oh! I went back through to get the nail-clippers to ease my discomfort. This jaunt takes me through two doorways, which is more than enough to disrupt my memory banks, at least according to this report :
Treating myself like an idiot, and heading the problem off at the pass, I now keep a spare nail-clipper hooked over the edge of my pen jar next to the computer.
This test was mentioned in several British newspapers recentlyand is worth doing. Follow the instructionsand give yourself 15 minutes of free time to do it. Don’t panic if you don’t complete a page of the test, as they really are designed to change before you’ve finished – as a rough guide, I got about halfway through before it changed.
I’m surprisingly normal (for a weirdo!), but seemingly need to eat more vitamin B and do more exercise – just as well I’ve bought a bicycle. I did a 40-mile round trip recently in pouring rain and 60 m.p.h. wind, to attend the funeral of a friend, surprised to make it there and back…though I think I need to buy a gel saddle, as I couldn’t walk in a straight line for a week!
This blog has a dozen posts about physical and mental health, but I thought that I’d contribute something about raising one’s morale. Just as it’s easy to become a myopic, spine-bent, jelly-bellied lard arse by being a writer, so it’s easy to turn into feeling like you’re your own worst enemy spiritually—a self-critical slave to drudgery.
I’ve been collecting quotes, sayings, poems and aphorisms for forty years, and sometimes haul out my ring-binder files to boost my spirit with the thoughts of others wiser than me. There are thousands of things been written about the process of writing, but my four quotes here come from some very different men and can be applied to tackling life overall as well as how to approach one’s creativity.
Everyone knows Steve McQueen the film actor, a man renowned for his toughness, derring-do with cars and motorcycles, as well as his womanising. Few are aware of the tough start in life that he had, with a father who deserted the family, a promiscuous drunken mother, a physically abusive stepfather and trouble with the law. He was behaving in a very self-destructive way, but turned his life around with the discipline of being in the Marines, followed by learning the craft of acting.
He later observed that : ‘The world is as good as you are. You have to learn to like yourself first.’
Henry Ford transformed the automobile industry through the use of the assembly line. He may have done wonders for popularising the use of the car, but he was a vile man in lots of ways. Although he claimed to be a pacifist, he was also an anti-Semitic fascist who supported Hitler.
All the same, he was a go-getter and came up with some great advice about attitude:
Doctor Robert Schuller was Ford’s diametrical opposite, a Christian minister and motivational speaker. He authored over thirty books on the power of positive thinking. He was famed for his pithy sayings, but one of my favourites tackles the way that we tend to stop ourselves from doing things – often through self-doubt, laziness or fear :
The last quote comes from a hard-nosed union leader, whose father did a disappearing act. To be more accurate Jimmy Hoffa was probably ‘disappeared’ by organised crime thugs, with whom he’d had dealings. His son James P. Hoffa took over the reins of the Teamsters some twenty-five years after his father vanished. This must have required some moxie, and I like the double-edged thought he had, (which could be applied to borrowing ideas if you’re of a literary bent), as well as being firm encouragement to stiffen your resolve :
I’ve read conflicting advice about how a narrative arc should flow in a novel. I was delighted when I found a graph that showed how a story should have highs and lows, as well as longueurs when nothing much seems to be happening, and that the psychological thriller novel that I wrote in 2014 ‘The Perfect Murderer’ conformed to it. This was quite by chance, or maybe having read thousands of novels rubbed off on me.
This approved pattern starts slowly, as my first chapter does, before climbing steeply to an early dramatic peak – which happens in my second chapter when the corpse of an American tourist is found. My third chapter pulls the key police personnel together in a meeting to discuss the case, which shows something of their individual characteristics.
The problem is that if one is submitting just the first three chapters to an agent or publisher, then it’s not going to grab them by the lapels and say “look at this !” Some experts advise that the opening paragraph should be shocking and that the story should hit the ground running with the first chapter charging into the second. One way around this is to have two versions of your opening chapters – a sensational, make-an-impression sizzler for submissions and the real more sedate bookish form. Daft isn’t it?
I’ve not done this (yet!), but have used a tip to use a hook/elevator pitch in the first paragraph of my covering letter by describing my novel as The Silence of The Lambs meets World of Warcraft. This is meant to indicate the contrast in how an undetected murderer, a psychopath and The Watcher, a game-playing fantasist approach killing their victims.
In the submissions that I’ve made to literary agents, and those publishers with an open submission window, I’ve placed the elevator pitch in the introduction of my query letter. Many agencies ask for a synopsis in a small number of words. One requested just 250 words, which had me frothing at the mouth for a moment until I realised that it forced me to use my elevator pitch.
There’s a bewildering variety of formats requested by agents for submissions, and certainly no such thing as an industry standard form. Some ask for the first three chapters, others the first 5,000 or 10,000 words and one asked for the first twenty-five chapters. The most sensible, to my mind, requested three consecutive chapters from anywhere in the novel which I thought best represented my style and the action in the story.
I’ve read on various forums and blogs that there is a trend towards shorter story formats, owing to readers using iPhones and tablets on the move, where content is taken in bite-sized chunks. Increasingly limited attention spans and the need for instant gratification is also affecting how patient people are when beginning a book – hence the advice that a story should go BOOM right from the start.
I understand the need for a compelling hook or a unique selling point to attract readers but am really confused about the contradiction between allowing a story to develop with peaks,plateaus and even the odd trough and attempting to provide one cheap thrill after another. No one can stay permanently high, forever aroused and unfailingly interested.
I subscribed to crime novelist James Oswald’s newsletter two months ago. His career as an author is inspirational, going from rejections to self-publishing success to signing with Penguin.
Anyway, in this month’s newsletter he mentions a relatively new website called Author Interviews.
Only seven authors have been interviewed so far, including James Oswald, but you can sign up for an alert to tell you when fresh interviews are posted.
I’ve just started reading The Horseman, by Tim Pears, which is the first part of a trilogy of stories set in the world of working horses on farms in the West Country in the early 20th-century. I have a wide vocabulary, but in the first ten pages, I encountered a dozen words new to me, mainly to do with saddlery and blacksmithing. The pacing of the action is slow, contemplative and absorbing, so much so, that it’s impossible to gallop through the page. Pears arranges words poetically. This Guardian review comments on the dense texture of the language used by the author.
Personally, I don’t mind slow reads that entice me into thinking about what’s going on. It’s not necessarily a formula aimed at making huge sales—as I’ve previously commented, many bestsellers are written at a level a 10-year-old could understand—but such rich writing is definitely in the running for literary prizes. Tim Pears‘ eleven novels have won at least six awards.
I read another award-winning novel recently, The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin, which happily took me six weeks to get through, slowed not by unusual language, more savouring the depth and breadth with which the author explored the internal dialogue of her characters, as they contemplated their relationships with loved ones, wondering what to do to make things right. I’ll remember them for a long time.
I may have developed a liking and a tolerance for rich writing, by tackling the intimidating Thomas Wolfe as a teenager.
Wolfe was wildly prolific, given to dashing off vast novels on whatever came to hand…receipts, menus, tissue, proper paper—only loosely organised into chapters, leaving the hard work for his publisher to do. He only published four novels in his lifetime but is the only author to have left two completed novels with his publisher before dying, one of which was one million words long. Reading Look Homeward Angelat the age of 17, I was struck by how voluminous his descriptions were of places, a real cosh to the senses, as sights, sounds and odours crowd around the reader. Truman Capote dismissed Wolfe’s writing as, “all that purple upchuck”, but William Faulkner described him as the greatest writer of their generation.
Try this description of food, which makes me feel like going on a diet!
“In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits– cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.”
This style of writing has fallen out of favour in the 21st-century, where there’s pressure to move the action forward, especially in much of genre writing, though Fantasy and Science Fiction allows an author to linger as they build worlds. I’m currently enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea: The First Four Books,which has thrown me into an alternative realm of islands set in an uncharted ocean.
Robin Hobb’s Farsee Trilogy also immersed me in a world that was both familiar and unfamiliar.
We’re advised to ‘kill your darlings‘…which means one sometimes has to eliminate flowery sections where you were showing off, but what if that perfect little bouquet of a phrase adds to the atmosphere of a paragraph? You might be striking out something that readers would have loved, that became quotable.
In my crime writing, I emulate authors such as James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane, who include plenty of their protagonist’s internal dialogue and observations on people and places they interact with, where the landscape and weather become characters, making the reader feel that they’re there with the detective—not simply following the actions of a cartoon character.
As Barbara Kingsolver observed:
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
If I edited my manuscript with word count as a priority, I’d remove some of the flavoursome ingredients in favour of a fat-free, low calorie, ready meal of a story consumable by the masses and with no nutritive content.
No one wants to make their story difficult to digest, and it’s not necessary to use complicated words that add density to a text, but surely we can write in a way that makes our readers think about something differently and which leads to them learning something new? As a child, I learnt much of what I know from reading books and looking up word meanings in dictionaries—I continue to do so.
If all someone reads isbland pap, what are they going to learn? Concentrating and persevering with a challenging read rich with ideas will create a sense of achievement—even if you disagree with what’s written!
How do you deal with what to leave in and what to take out?
Have you ever written anything that was too stodgy? I did, with my first Cornish Detective novel, which had too many information dumps, as I tried to explain the thinking of a traumatised war veteran turned serial killer. Trimming 40,000 words helped it flow rather than stagnate.
Are there any authors whose work you love for its concision, devoid of tasty morsels? I love Elmore Leonard’s crime stories, but he really makes the reader do the work of imagining what’s happening, following his own cryptic advice:
‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’
Which book overwhelmed you, by being too richly written?
In 2018, Pew Research Center found that 24% of Americans said they hadn’t read a book in any format—print, electronic or audio—in the previous year. There are some surprising statistics in their report, including that:Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 28% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 20% of adults under 50.
Another survey, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, revealed that Americans spend 16.8 minutes a day reading and 166.2 minutes watching television.
Searching around, I couldn’t find any statistics about how many words a day people read. I speculate that anyone connected to the internet might well read more words, even if they’re not in book form than someone did from the pre-computer age.
Book readers consume books in different ways these days, with audiobooks increasingly popular. Apparently, there was a 12% rise in audiobook downloads in 2017, according to this article.
It’s good that people are still consuming books, albeit through earbuds, but once again, it’s indicative of lost skills—the concentration, devotion of time and imagination it takes to read a book for yourself—so many things are done for people by devices in the name of convenience.
How long will it be, before books come in syringes that you can inject into your brain?
For my own part, I get through about 300 novels and 75 non-fiction books a year, mainly on art, philosophy, psychology and local history—partly as research for my crime novels set in Cornwall. I read for two hours on most days. I’ve always bucked trends!
How about you?
Do your friends, acquaintances, work colleagues and family members read regularly?
This article reports on ebook distributor Overdrive’s plans to add gaming features to their books.
They admit that they’re using the addictive nature of computer games to further education, though I’m somewhat doubtful about how much information will stick in a student’s mind. Several surveys have shown that people remember more of a printed paper book than they do an ebook.
Having children chase video game-inspired achievements and badges might sound like an effective carrot, but there’s a danger that players (for that’s what they’ll be) will become good at gaming tactics while learning nothing. Also, there might be elitism…some pupils might dislike gamified books, preferring to study the traditional way.
In being writers, we’ve chosen a form of loneliness that’s exquisite, self-torturing and sometimes boring. Few activities are so likely to cause as many insecurities as writing a story, which you have no idea if anyone will like…what presumption!
It’s as well to learn to like your own company, for you’ll be sharing space with yourself for a long time. As Bruce Springsteen sang in his song Better Days: It’s a sad man my friend who’s living in his own skin and can’t stand the company.
I’m normally wary of pop psychology tests, but I came across one in the Curiosity Daily newsletter that’s disarmingly simple and which has been validated by checks on data from seven United Nations generation and gender surveys. The De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale tackles social and emotional loneliness.
In answering the questions, I laughed at number 3 which asks one’s response to the statement ‘I often feel rejected‘You bet I do…I’m querying literary agents!
Although I’ve been blessed with several long-term relationships, I am by nature a loner. Aware of this, I deliberately moved areas ten years ago, losing contact with a few friends and scores of acquaintances (from managing a community centre), with the intention of devoting myself to writing. I’ve been weirdly focused, for me, avoiding socialising. My three best friends are email correspondents—the longest of 16 years standing—longer than I’ve known anyone.
Instead of howling at the moon, I’ve used my solitude to write. I have no family or regular employment, so don’t have those distractions. Of course, I have the frustrations and doubt that afflict any creative soul, but for the most part, I’m content with my lot.
I scored a lowly 2 in the test, meaning I don’t feel lonely.
