Oh, the humanity!

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

How do you show the humanity of your characters?

There’s certainly a place for two-dimensional characters in a narrative if they’re only passing through. And, there’s much to be said for an uncommunicative monster relentlessly pursuing the innocent: no one much cares about the feelings of a shark, dinosaur or orc in Jaws, Jurassic Park and The Lord Of The Rings. But, if your characters are hanging around for a while, then they need some backstory or a current predicament that explains their behaviour.

I write in the Crime genre, which provides quandaries about getting the correct balance between internal thoughts & external action. It could be argued that one of the differences between literature and ordinary fiction, (including genre writing), is that literature portrays characters, but ordinary fiction is more plot driven.

I’ve read some crime novels where the protagonist and antagonist showed no doubt or emotion about a fatal conflict they were involved in. Such unrealistic writing doesn’t even qualify as hardboiled, which might be tough and unsentimental, but usually features a complex lead character who’s endured some tragedy that affects his actions; just think of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca.

Leo Tolstoy observed that “The best stories don’t come from good vs. bad but good vs. good.” If your antagonist, the baddy, has elements of decency, then they’re a lot more interesting than being evil through and through. The same applies to any protagonist who struggles with character flaws. Jo Nesbø’s detective Harry Hole is a weak-willed recovering alcoholic, not averse to drugs, who’s wildly disorganised with a chaotic love life that leads him into risky sexual encounters. His determination and desire to see justice done sees him through. For all of his weaknesses, it’s his love of his fellow man that endures.

The title of this post comes from radio journalist Herbert Morrison‘s coverage of the Hindenburg disaster, the conflagration that destroyed a zeppelin of that name in 1937, which killed 36 people as it tried to land in New Jersey. Surely, one of the most emotional commentaries recorded, with Morrison’s own humanity shining through:

Having your faith in humanity restored by reading a story is one of the abiding strengths of fiction. Remember the struggles of the characters in To Kill A Mocking Bird, The Lord Of The Rings, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games and the Harry Potter saga? The protagonists and antagonists were all confronted with challenges that damaged their bodies and exposed their souls. A lesson taught by all of these stories is that one’s destiny isn’t set in stone and that we shape our moral characters by clinging on to humanitarian beliefs.

I jerked around my Cornish Detective’s belief system in the last novel, for he was almost stabbed to death in the penultimate chapter and still in a coma at The End. This experience will make him mistrustful and more aggressive. His basic decency survives, as he’s a generous man with his time and money, and does what he can to protect the wilderness, but he’ll have an unpredictable edge in the future.

Do you have any favourite characters in your own writing and famous books, who show their humanity in inspiring ways?

William Zinser

Writing

What Scars Does Your Character Have?

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

We all have scars—external and visible on the skin—and internal damage that we keep hidden, but which actually has more of a profound effect on our characters.

Scars on the skin can become conversation pieces, especially between new lovers. An intimidating facial scar on a rough face warns adversaries away, with an unspoken message of surviving suffering.

The world’s first billionaire author created a protagonist with a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead.

To be a writer, Stephen King said, “The only requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” Tapping into your own scars is a useful technique for unlocking the scars in your characters.

Scarring can be done deliberately…for ornamentation and as a badge of honour. These days, tattooing is common, and those with body scars sometimes opt for concealing the damage with ink. I knew a woman who had no interest in tattoos until she had a double mastectomy. Reconstructive surgery gave her breasts again, but an elaborate floral design helped her move forward with her new shape.

In some ways, we’re becoming more tribal in our attitude to symbols, with extreme body modifications that tap into primitive roots. Raised scarring of the skin in which the bulbous cicatrices and gouged depressions form a pattern are not for everyone, but many folk pierce their ears for earrings and some have their lobes tunnelled to contain a large plug.

Going back to the 19th-century, duelling scars were viewed as proof of manhood, with some wanabees faking their sword fighting experience by slashing their cheeks with cutthroat razors.

There’s a poem about scars, which looks at them in an unusual way. Written by Jane Hirshfield. For What Binds Us contemplates healed wounds as being a stronger union than a ‘simple, untested surface.’

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest-

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Jane Hirshfield

The protagonist in my Cornish Detective series is about to turn 50. In the last book, he’s fallen in love, but is then brought crashing to earth by being stabbed through his side with a sword stick blade. Obviously, this will leave pronounced scarring, and he’ll have damage to his hand—from gripping the blade to prevent it being withdrawn and used again as he flounders on the floor trying to take out his extendable baton to strike back.

The attack will also alter his nature, making him less trusting and more aggressive. His character was shaped by losing his parents as a teenager, emotional scarring that gave him resilience. In this way, I used a common trope in fiction…just think of the number of main characters who are orphans in literature and film; they’re vulnerable with a great capacity for growth. (Harry Potter shows his scarred face again.)

Another emotional scar came from losing his beloved wife in a traffic accident, two years before Book 1, which sent him into a couple of years of depression. Living with the black dog and counselling gave my protagonist more self-knowledge than many fictional detectives. Previous physical injury from falling off a motorcycle as a teenager, then being kicked by a suspect during an arrest, left him with a weak back—an internal scar, which he treats with Shiatsu massage sessions.

In my fourth Cornish Detective novel, Sin Killers, I used a heavily scarred character, who I based on a career criminal that I only saw a couple of times when I was a youthful dispatch rider in London. A veteran of Kray twins gang wars in the 1960s, he had a malign presence. A handsome man, if you only saw one side of his face, the other side was a gridwork of scarring…including a divot through his eyebrow and onto the cheek from a hatchet blow, which had darkened his iris to near black. My fictional henchman has a heavily scarred face, and he’s still a violent man, but he’s aware of increasing fragility from ageing and wants to retire to live aboard a boat on the river surrounded by nature. Outside he looks like death, inside he’s a naturalist who prefers wildlife to people.

Any scar is a memento of where we’ve been, but it needn’t affect where we’re going.

How do your characters handle their scars—internal and external?

Do your characters wear tattoos?

Humour

Do you have a Writer’s Fork on your Hand?

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Your destiny may be written in the stars, but perhaps you can get a clue of where you’re bound from the lines on the palm of your hands.

Palmistry or Cheirology proponents claim that if the Head Line on your palm ends in a tassel-like fork on the Mound of Luna, then you possess a creative ability with words.

The deeper that the fork extends into the Mound of Luna, the more a person retreats into imaginary worlds, with a natural talent for using words. The wider the fork, the more adaptable and resourceful you are.

Apparently, the dominant hand shows the person’s actual development, while the non-dominant hand shows latent talents and potential.

Gawping at my own wrinkled mitts, I find proof of my schizoid personality, for my right dominant hand shows a Writer’s Fork that’s entirely disconnected from the Head Line. It’s as if it was dashed onto my palm, breaking the fork off, so that it’s laying beneath the Head Line and moreover facing my wrist rather than the side of my hand. D’oh!

On the other hand, literally, my left Writer’s Fork looks like it was branded into my skin, being red, deep and clear.

I’m not sure what to make of this, though I am a Thursday’s child—who ‘has far to go’ according to the old nursery rhyme, so perhaps I should start writing stories in longhand using my potent left hand!

How are your Writer’s Forks?

Morale, Querying, Writing

Resilience & the Writer

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

As I neared the end of writing my fifth Cornish Detective novel last year, I had a rather sardonic thought—that I’m about where I thought I’d be five years after returning to creative writing in 2013. What prompted this bit of reflection was literally a reflection, for the screen of my laptop monetarily darkened, turning it into a mirror, so I had one of those ‘Aargh’ moments when you catch sight of your ageing self going about your business! Here was I, researching a fact about forensic medicine, for a crime novel that had taken me nine months to gestate—that may never be read by any fan of the genre.

It made me wonder how determined or maybe delusional an unknown author, in particular, has to be to keep their nose to the grindstone. Doing writing because you love it is great motivation: anyone who chooses becoming an author as the road to riches, in a J. K. Rowling way, is going to find it’s a rocky track with deep ditches either side.

All of this musing reminded me of something that noted writing guru Noah Lukeman has said several times in his books—that realistically, a new author should plan on it taking several years to get anywhere with their stories—to adopt a mindset that it’s going to be long haul. In answer to a question from a newbie author on how to query a literary agent when you have no proof of your writing ability, Lukeman advises:

You can attain major credentials on your own, but first you must prepare for a sustained effort. Instead of a three or six month plan to attain all the credentials you need, why not give yourself a three or six year plan? With that kind of time, you can attend writing programs, workshops, conferences, colonies; spend extensive time networking and build an endorsement list; get stories published in magazines and online; begin to build a platform; and most importantly, hone your craft extensively. This doesn’t mean you need to refrain from approaching agents before you accomplish all of this; on the contrary, as I said, there is nothing wrong with approaching agents with no credentials whatsoever, and you can work to achieve all of this concurrently with your approaching the industry. But you should always be working to this end, regardless. There are many specific, concrete steps you can take to help get you there (which I explain at length in my book How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent), but perhaps the most important step of all is your willingness to devote a sustained, multi-year effort to building your bio on your own.

(From Ask A Literary Agent (Year One)…a free pdf download.)

Despite this salutary advice, I still harboured the hope that I could earn a few quid from self-publishing my early writing as e-books on Smashwords and Amazon. I was right—I made a small amount—about $40!

After foolishly querying about 350 agents with my first Cornish Detective novel, that was an unfeasibly long 179,000 words, I edited it down by 40,000 words. I also wrote a new opening story at the acceptable length of 80,000 words. I queried another 100 literary agents and publishers with open submission windows, getting more favourable responses and learning how to target specific agents, stalking them on social media to find their likes and dislikes. One large agency, that handles writers, musicians, television programme-makers and actors, asked me if my first novel was part of a series—as it would be easier to pitch to a publisher or television production company.

That had always been my intention anyway, to write a series of crime novels, with a view to them being adapted into a television drama, along the lines of Inspector Wycliffe—which is also set in Cornwall, though it pre-dates the computer age, making it rather creaky.

This sounds ambitious of me, but why not aim for the stars? As Michelangelo said:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

Accordingly, I’ve now built a solid body of work, but in all honesty, how can I know whether it will appeal to anyone? Writing is full of uncertainty: no one knows what will work until it does!

William Goldman

Pride is an emotion I don’t exactly trust, as I’m more stoical in my approach to life, but I am proud of my Cornish Detective stories—and also of my bloody-minded determination to get them written—sacrificing most of what normal people consider essential, such as a social life and a love life. It’s helpful that I’m a reclusive old geezer!

The writing has been joyful to me, but what I’m not looking forward to is returning to the self-promotion trail. Navigating the world of publishing is like stumbling through thick fog with only a candle for illumination, banging the instruments of my one-man-band hoping to attract attention. That’s the feeling I get whether I’m chasing a traditional publishing contract or if I go back to self-publishing. No one else much cares what I’ve created—a hard fact of life every author should quickly realise—so it’s up to me to big myself up.

I’ve sometimes thought, that the best preparation for becoming a writer is to get everyone that you know to say “No” to you, when you ask them something, as it’s a word you’ll be hearing a lot when it comes to trying to sell your book. At least 500 times would be good preparation for growing a hide as thick as a rhinoceros!

How long have you been writing?

How thick is your hide?

Does being an oft-refused author help you cope with rejection is other parts of your life?

Do friends and family admire your determination—or think you’re just a bit mad?!

Writing

Endangered Diacritical Marks

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Perhaps I should start the PPPP—Pedantic Paul’s Punctuation Patrol, after previously posting about disappearing dots and praiseworthy semicolons, but I’ve noticed another trend affecting the squiggles that we use to show the nature of a word.

Diacritical marks or glyphs indicate how a word is meant to be pronounced, changing the sound of the letter which has the accent mark. In an increasingly bland world, where dumbing-down has triumphed, it’s refreshing to see something that offers both accuracy and a stylistic flourish.

Thus the double dot of the diaeresis over the letter in naïve indicates that it should be said as if it were a double e (ny-EEV). Most books print the word as naive—which could be pronounced as nave—it’s strange how removing these foreign punctuation marks requires extra knowledge from the reader…it’s complicated the reading process, rather than simplified it.

Other common examples are cliché which is often written as cliche, and café usually becomes cafe.

I read a fair few foreign novels in translation, and I’ve noticed that in these diacritical marks tend to be retained, whereas books published in English-speaking countries omit them—even if the plot takes place abroad where they’re used.

Scandinavian novels are replete with diacritical marks, though this doesn’t stop British and American publishers from altering even an author’s name…presumably to make them look less foreign (and intimidating). A good example of this is hugely successful crime writer Jo Nesbø from Norway, whose surname is usually printed without the slashed o. His name should be pronounced as nez-bOO…rather than nez-bOW.

Other author names that cause confusion are Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (CULL-um Toe-BEAN)

and fantasy author China Miéville (mee-AY-vill) and French erotic writer Anaïs Nin (Ahn-EYE-ees).

I‘m fond of diacritical marks, using them when writing, even though it means pausing for a moment to insert them via the Special Character function in my LibreOffice Writer software.

It’s probable that book publishers have their own policy in handling such glyphs, but for the moment, I’ll continue to use them. Of course, in the language of their origin, diacritical marks appear on the keyboard…and in the written alphabet, they’re usually treated as separate letters and listed after Z.

One that I’m particularly fond of, which has largely disappeared in written English, is a glyph created by merging two letters into what’s known as a ligature. This makes Æ or æ a dipthong—an amusing word for a gliding vowel—a combination of two vowel sounds in one syllable. I first encountered it, when studying Latin as a teenager (it was that sort of school), and it’s still commonly used in modern Scandinavian languages. These days, æ usually gets typed as two separate letters, though pleasingly it does remain in Encyclopædia Britannica.

The French, who actively do everything that they can to preserve their nation’s identity, have been anxious about relaxed rules about spelling, that sees the disappearance of the circumflex as being acceptable; for example Août meaning August.

Do you use glyphs or diacritical marks in writing your stories?

Have you invented your own…for fantasy or science fiction?

Do you like seeing such marks printed in a book you’re reading, or do they irritate you?

Writing

Visualising your Book

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’d argue that anyone raised in the 20th-century is so immersed in moving images, that it’s impossible for them to read or write a book without picturing the action as a film. In a way, we’re all cameras, recording what we see every day in our memories, but the proliferation of smartphones means that snaps and videos have become an interface—one that doesn’t necessarily aid an understanding of events—it captures a moment but obscures context.

I first became aware of the power of graphic novels when I read The Road to Perdition, written by Max Alan Collins, after noticing that the 2002 Hollywood movie adaptation had been based upon it.

In the last few years, I’ve borrowed about 100 graphic novels from my local library. I’m fairly averse to superheroes in Lycra bodysuits, constantly fretting about practicalities…like how do they go to the loo. One unexpected boon of graphic novels is as a reminder of, or an introduction to, classic novels.

Another graphic representation of a story is through storyboarding a film project, a technique that’s been around since the 1930s, with key scenes drawn resembling the illustrations of a comic. Seeing illustrations of action yet to be filmed helps set designers, cameramen, sound and lighting technicians and the director to plan what’s needed.

When writing stories, I sometimes visualise how a scene would be filmed, or at least drawn for a storyboard or graphic novel. I’ve deliberately written my Cornish Detective novels in such a way as they’d transpose to a television adaptation. Maybe it’s a consequence of growing up in a household dominated by photographic images, for my father was a noted industrial photographer (for British Aerospace—many publicity shots of Concorde were taken by him) and I quickly came to memorise events in a visual way, sometimes altering camera angles and lighting levels, while another part of my brain churned out words for the script.

As an example of how visual artists adapted the written word, look at Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, where the protagonist Pip first meets Magwitch, an escaped convict, when visiting the graves of his parents and brothers; later, unknown to Pip, Magwitch becomes his benefactor. In the novel, their meeting is described in this way:

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”

The graphic novel version adapted by Jen Green, published by Classical Comics and illustrated by John Stokes, pictures their first encounter this way:

Film director David Lean’s 1946 adaptation of the novel is highly atmospheric, with great use of sound, including bird calls and moving vegetation.

In my last Cornish Detective novel, I wrote a comical car chase scene, which takes place through Cornish lanes that are only 10′ wide, too narrow to allow two cars to pass side by side, so every few hundred yards there are passing places carved into the banks. The coppers in their patrol car are pursuing thieves driving a Ford Transit van. Lanes around here are not only narrow, with grass growing down the middle of the tarmac (untouched by tyres), but also winding with many blind bends, so the chase never exceeds 30 m.p.h. Every so often, the baddies slam on the brakes and reverse towards the police car, forcing them to accelerate backwards to avoid a collision. I started to visualise the pursuit as an excerpt from The Simpsons or Wacky Races! Cartoon violence concluded the chapter when the criminals put up futile resistance more for the sake of form than any hope of getting away.

Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, gave some great advice about how to describe a scene through visualising it, putting in what you want a reader to experience.

How do you ‘see’ your book, as you write it?

If you’re using a multiple viewpoint, do you pan around the scene?

If writing an epic fantasy or historical tale do you imagine scenes as large oil paintings?

Do cartoonish images add to the humour of what you’re writing?

Writing

Doubt & The Writer

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

All of writing is full of doubt. We journey along a lonely trail, beaten by phantom pillows that come out of nowhere, making us agonise over such trivial things as which font to use, should there be a comma there and is that word one word or is it hyphenated or even two separate words?

When it comes to larger issues, such as deciding on the theme of your story, pondering whether that would appeal to readers, then you’re entering fortune telling territory. Apart from the blows that sap your ego, it’s easy to stray into booby trap territory. Giving yourself leeway over plots is a wise attitude to have from the outset, for, after all, there are only so many stories that can be told, but what about details you think are original? In a fit of apprehension, I checked that my protagonist detective Neil Kettle’s name hadn’t been previously used in a crime series I’d never heard of, pleased to find it was mine alone.

Mind you, with the lack of perception that sometimes envelops me, in my last novel I only noticed that I’d called one character Mungo and another Bengo 70,000 words into writing the story. Typical Cornish young men, one was a surfer, the other a scuba diver. I felt like an idiot for not noticing the similarity of their names, realising that that itself was the solution—I made them cousins—doubt evaporated!

As for finding anything certain to believe in, when it comes to the totally imponderable side of publishing that actually decides the fate of my book, it feels to me like forcing myself into a warehouse stuffed from floor to rafters, with the very pillows of doubt that have been biffing me about as I wrote the manuscript. I can’t see which way to go, and all I can do is tackle what is in front of me at the moment, eviscerating various pillows to find a load of largely irrelevant stuffing about blogging, tweeting and the best way to crawl to query a literary agent. Should I return to self-publishing, (which I first did in 2014), even though it feels like emptying a bucket of water into an ocean of other ebooks?

The weird thing is, that even successfully published authors who’ve made a decent living from their work are still stricken with doubt. As dogmatic as ever, Ernest Hemingway said a couple of things that acknowledge his own and all of our uncertainties:

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

Humourist Robert Benchley was just as honest:

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

Sylvia Plath rationalised:

“And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Brian Patten wrote an enchanting love poem called ‘Doubt Shall Not Make An End Of You’ whose opening lines I sometimes recall when faced with doubt about the progress of my WIP and what will happen to my Cornish Detective series:

Doubt shall not make an end of you
nor closing eyes lose your shape
when the retina’s light fades;
what dawns inside me will light you.

I console myself by remembering that I’ve got this far in my writing by determination and whatever glimmer of a talent I have; I can go further, even though I’m unsure of which direction to take. It’s up to me to illuminate my stories by using my imagination, dragging them out into the light for others to see.

Essentially, doubt is a cloud on the horizon. Sure, it may rain on you a bit, but what if it blows away to reveal the sun?

Blimey, I’ve just this moment realised that I’m channelling the spirit of 1969 era Joni Mitchell!

How do you handle doubt?

(It’s a writer’s companion, not their enemy)

Writing

Writing for 21st-Century Readers

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Much has been said about the limited attention spans of modern day audiences for every form of show business, be it music, television shows or Hollywood films. It takes an inexperienced author a while to realise that they too are entering the cutthroat world of show business, and that their act—which is their book—needs to perform in a way that grabs and keeps the attention of a fickle mob of readers, who appear to have the attention span of a goldfish with attention deficit disorder!

I recently read Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zamarodi which argues the case for being bored as a way of increasing creativity and productivity; this means controlling excessive use of social media.

In one chapter, Zamarodi examines what she terms Reading Incomprehension, whereby dozens of readers contacted her to say that they were unable to get through all of a novel or even a magazine article. Even professional journalists admitted problems to her, with their eyes skipping around the page—as if scrolling on Facebook or Twitter—finding it hard to focus on the meaning of the text and looking for a quick payoff. With a book, this can be a long time in coming.

Before the Web, reading was primarily a linear activity. The Internet has hyperlinks, scrolling screens, photographs and sometimes an immense amount of information, that’s impossible to take in, which encourages nonlinear reading. Our brains haven’t adapted to this new way of reading, even if it’s supplanted the traditional method, meaning that our comprehension has declined, as has our patience—we move on too quickly. Various scientific studies have been done, that prove readers’ recall of a story that they read in printed form is better than those who read it on a Kindle.

This is partly due to the depth at which people read. With a book in your hand, you can pause to think, re-reading a sentence to savour its meaning; it may be a slower process than scanning a page on an electric screen, but it ultimately brings more enjoyment and satisfaction.

All the same, being faced with huge paragraphs can be intimidating. In the last year, I’ve read a few novels that were originally published in the 1950s and 1960s, where paragraphs were more than one page long; they looked like mountains to climb.

It appears there’s a trend towards making the pages of a printed book imitate the appearance of a smartphone or Kindle. Journalist Constance Grady, who writes for the Vox website, recently came across a novel that was structured like a season of a television series, with each chapter being one episode. This is a deliberate marketing ploy by an outfit called Serial Box.

By coincidence, I read a highly-praised crime novel by a debut author, which has a modern way of laying out the pages, to include pages of social postings gossiping about the investigation into a missing child.

Close to Home, by Cara Hunter, has police interviews of suspects and witnesses printed in italics, the questions and answers widely spaced, as are newspaper reports on the case, which appear in a separate box. There are very few long paragraphs, with most averaging 4-5 lines. Each page has a lot of white space…making it look easy to tackle—as well as resembling the screen of an electronic reader. The format means that the paperback version has a few more pages than is usual for a debut crime novel, at 361 pages, and I’m surprised that it still comes in at a typical-for-the-genre 85,219-word count.

It certainly has a modern look in how the printed page is arranged, which presumably came from the publisher’s marketing and design departments putting their heads together.

All of these studies and developments in publishing have made me reconsider how I’ve been arranging my Cornish Detective novels. Although I’m a veteran reader, I’ve noticed, over the last few years, that I feel a bit weary when I turn a page to see that there are very long paragraphs facing me, so do I really want to inflict such obstacles on my readers? When being taught how to write, as a youngster, the advice was to discuss one topic in a paragraph and to begin a new paragraph when the topic changed. The same thing applies to when a new speaker starts saying something.

I largely stay true to these rules, but sometimes when my detectives are chewing the fat over, say, on a complicated subject, such as money laundering, the paragraphs expand to look enormous. I’ve sometimes introduced another speaker, just to chop them up!

What do you think of these new ways of laying out the pages of a novel?

Have you noticed any trends that look like they’re aimed at readers with limited attention spans?

Is your own writing affected by worrying that you’ll bore your readers with overlong paragraphs, or even lengthy sentences?

Writing

Repetition—Good & Bad

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Repetition, when it’s done unintentionally, is one of those bugbears of writing that only comes to light when editing your precious manuscript. It’s part of the sneaky family of ‘Why-didn’t-I notice-that?’ errors that creep in, which includes missing words, spelling mistakes, punctuation gaffs and wordiness.

Annoying as it is, to discover repetition, I’m sanguine about it, as I’ve always thought that it was more important to get the story down, with effective characterisation, believable dialogue and an engrossing plot. My story is a garment I’m sewing from a pattern in my head: I’ll iron it later!

Sometimes, I’ve used repetition deliberately using the same descriptive phrases in different books in my Cornish Detective series, hoping to encourage familiarity in my readers, and maybe loyalty as they enter a world populated by characters they already know. One passage that I’ve used in each of the five stories indicates the personality of my protagonist:

‘This was why Neil loved his job. Always motivated by setting wrongs right in catching villains to see them punished, he couldn’t deny the thrill of the chase, of defeating a warped mind.‘

In writing dialogue, a writer can have fun with ignoring the rules of orderly writing, if it’s their characters who are using incorrect grammar, repetition, split infinitives, double negatives—which can be attributed to their poor education—not yours!

Having said that, repetition can certainly sneak in without me noticing, while lost in the throes of creating more chapters. The other night, I typed ‘hammering’ into the Search function of my LibreOffice software, as I knew I’d used that noun to describe a sculptor working on a block of granite…and I needed to find out what I’d said her age was. To my alarm, from highlighted examples, I saw that I’d used ‘hammering’ eight other times in the manuscript, which I was completely unaware of; I changed some for other doing words!

One thing that happens in real life, but which is tricky to convey in fiction, is known as ‘Mirroring’ In this behaviour, people copy the behaviour of who they’re talking to, with similar non-verbal gestures. But, they also use the same words when participating in a conversation, to build a rapport. If an author does that in their prose, there’s a risk it will look like they’ve lost their powers of imagination.

A useful tool to root out unwanted repetitions is Wordle, which is described by its designers as “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”

I write crime novels, and there’s only a certain number of ways of describing the illegal death of a victim, so it’s inevitable that murder and manslaughter appear a lot. I haven’t often used word repetition as a stylistic flourish, other than when a stressed-out suspect was being arrested, and he launched an angry tirade of abuse, using variations of the word ‘fuck’ a lot.

Some writers are famed for their use of repetition, in particular, playwright and screenplay writer David Mamet. Here’s an example from his 2008 martial arts film Redbelt:

“You know the escape,” he purrs, as Joe yields to hypoxia. “You know the escape. Breathe. There’s always an escape.” And again: “There’s always an escape.”

The use of repetition in poetry can be powerful, as in one of my favourite poems ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop.

One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

It’s all a question of balance, for repetition can emphasize setting, reinforce a character trait and lead the reader towards noticing what, at first sight, appears to be an irrelevant detail. On the other hand, saying the same thing over and over again can drive readers mad! Your aim should be to lead them on, further into your story, not throw obstacles carelessly in their way. Certainly, repetition can be used to create the sense of monotony your character is experiencing, but multiple use of the same word over a few pages only shows how bored you were while writing!

I wrote a gory fight scene at the end of my fifth crime novel, in which my hero copper gets stabbed several times, before overpowering his assailant and repeatedly beating him with his extendable baton. He wants to put him out of action, as there’s a hostage’s life at stake, but he slips into oblivion from blood loss. He faints as he’s beating, beating, beating away.

How do you use repetition in your writing?

Do you have any favourite examples from literature?

Reading, Writing

Does being a Writer spoil your Enjoyment of Reading?

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’ve learned a lot about the techniques of writing, since returning to creating stories six years ago. I’ve admired many authors, from boyhood, savouring how they transported my imagination. I like how they did it, as much as the story they told.

As I aged, I decided that life was too short to waste it reading badly written books. Persevering with novels that annoyed me, seeing them through to the end, made me disappointed in myself and contemptuous of the author. I tend to avoid writers who don’t engage me in some way. That’s not to say that they’re second-rate, for there have been bestsellers and literary prize winners that simply leave me cold.

I’m suspicious of the hoopla that surrounds authors who are household names, and of challenging novels of literature that takes a committee of eminent writers to decide which is best. I’m glad that books are getting recognition, but not so gullible as to believe that reading these much-lauded authors will be a pleasant or character-improving experience.

It’s possible to admire a work of art, but not like it very much. I admire the movie Citizen Kane, but don’t enjoy watching it. I admire the technique of Paul Auster, but don’t get any pleasure from his novels.

I recently started reading a highly-praised crime novel You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott, an author new to me. The opening chapter was bewildering, a confused hotchpotch of one sentenced conversation between partygoers, as witnessed by a drunk mother. I didn’t know who any of these characters were and had to read paragraphs a couple of times to get an idea of what was going on.

I immediately recognised what Megan Abbott was trying to do, by introducing an unreliable narrator, but it came across as a poor copying of Paula Hawkins’ Girl On A Train and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. I scanned pages further into the story and was similarly confused and unimpressed. Considering how much we’re advised by writing gurus to grab the reader’s attention with our opening five chapters, this was a dismal failure.

I gave up on it, turning to one of my favourite authors Dennis Lehane. Reading his World Gone By was like entering a beloved restaurant where I knew I was going to enjoy the meal. Then, I noticed signs of a run-on sentence, which Lehane had rewritten, to make three shorter sentences. It still read clumsily, but…hang on, I’ve forgotten the storyline…what was it he said? So I reread the paragraph, annoyed with myself for dissecting writing technicalities rather than enjoying the whole.

So, does being a writer spoil your enjoyment of reading?

Paul Pens

Monthly Archives: April 2019

Oh, the humanity!

What Scars Does Your Character Have?

For What Binds Us

Jane Hirshfield

Do you have a Writer’s Fork on your Hand?

Resilience & the Writer

Endangered Diacritical Marks

Visualising your Book

Doubt & The Writer

“And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Repetition—Good & Bad

Does being a Writer spoil your Enjoyment of Reading?

Real Write, Real Edit, Real Publish