Harking back to a post called Are You A Psycho? it turns out we all are!
According to a study published in Science Direct, creative artists share traits with psychopaths:
Great News: Artists Might Share Common Traits With Psychopaths
I’m going back to my padded cell now….
I have a feeling that this post will be about a quandary that doesn’t really have an answer.
I have a tendency to grasp tricky concepts, notice fine details and see things laterally—while missing the blooming obvious! The thought came to me last night while re-reading my last novel, that there were quite a lot of chapters—50—which made me wonder if it was too many.
A typical word count for my chapters is 1,600-2,250. I write crime novels, though I haven’t tailored the word count as being ideal for readers of this genre. Rather, it’s come about naturally, fitting the requirements of the mini-story that each chapter essentially is, imparting a discrete part of the whole. I’m conforming to the expected length of 80,000 words for a debut novel by an unknown author.
Chapters can be of any length, of course, and in my reading, I’ve seen one-word chapters and even blank pages used to convey emotion, while some authors don’t bother with chapters at all. With my longer chapters, I’ve used two or three section breaks, when the scenes described are potentially connected—through being a story about a criminal investigation, but I leave it up to the reader to decide the significance. They like to work things out before the detective protagonist.
I like a bit of variety in chapter length, for several reasons. One is that if a reader sees the next chapter is short, they may keep on reading—and if you prime that chapter with something intriguing, they may go onto the next!
Is chapter length something that you consider when writing erotica, romance, fantasy or science-fiction?
I’ve jokingly referred to writing novels as playing with my imaginary friends in various posts. Many children have imaginary friends, and I was no exception.
I had good cause to create an ally, for when I was three years old my privileged world was invaded by twin sisters. I loved them, but the attention definitely shifted from toddler me to entrancing babies. My role altered too, for suddenly I was a helper and protector.
To cope, I invented Peter—an invisible brother, who did all of the naughty things that I would never do. He stuck around for a couple of years until I went to infant school, where I suddenly had battles to fight alone.
Peter returned to me last night, as I waded through another round of editing my WIP. He came into my mind as an idea for a short story about a writer being haunted by a ghost that looks like himself.
It made me wonder if writers are prone to having kept company with imaginary friends when youngsters—an early manifestation of their creative powers, perhaps….
I’ve met my doppelgänger too, and it gave me great pause for thought. I lived in Southsea as a student in the mid-80s, which has a village feel to it and is the part of Portsmouth next to the sea. Occasionally, a passing car would beep me, and I’d think “I don’t know anyone with a white VW—who was that?”. Once someone hailed me from the other side of the road and even started to cross over before changing their mind.
I didn’t think too much of it until I went out to my neighbourhood store for some Saturday night snacks. Standing patiently in a long queue, I suddenly felt a hand creep between my legs and give my undercarriage a friendly tweak! I turned around to see a complete stranger, a woman some years younger than me who blushed furiously saying “I’m sorry, I thought you were Robert. You look just like him from behind.”
“Well, do I feel like him from behind?” I asked. It turned out she’d been picked up by this man in a club, spent the night with him, and he hadn’t contacted her since. She told me that he worked in a local wine bar, so I went along to have a look at him one lunchtime. He did indeed look like a version of me—though not as tall, handsome or sexy (tee-hee), and could have passed for my little brother.
When I told Robert about the incident in the store where I got goosed and described the girl, he replied gracelessly “Oh her, she’s a bloody nightmare.”
After meeting him, all of the cases of mistaken identity fell into place. Then I had the dreadful thought of what would happen if he robbed a bank—eyewitnesses would finger me as the culprit!
Remembering this incident, I wrote a novella called ‘A Man Out Walking His Dog’, about a man doing just that who discovers a murder victim floating in a river. The story was prompted by my experience of mistaken identity, and hearing that phrase so often on the news—dog walkers are often the first people to find a corpse—something they don’t tell you in the pet shop when you buy a puppy.
A pushy detective tries to frame him for the crime, as he resembles the real killer who’s seen by unreliable witnesses in the area at the same time. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate—a situation made worse if coerced by a biased policeman. My accused man escapes by the skin of his teeth, thanks to a video of the killer that his victim made on her iPhone.
We all like to think we’re unique, but we have replicants walking around somewhere—doing good and bad things without our permission!
Did any of you have friends that nobody else could see?
Are they still around?
This provocative article in the Guardian thrashes out the reasons not to self-publish while admitting that making a living as a traditionally published author is all but impossible.
For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way
Ros Barber makes some valid points, especially when she highlights how much time a writer needs to devote to marketing if they self-publish. It’s what put me off uploading ebooks, when I realised that I’d need to spend more time on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and writing entries for my blog than I did in creating my new novel. Hence, I tried querying literary agents in the hope that if I got a publishing deal the book company would promote me.
It’s worth clicking on the link to Ros Barber’s blog, where she lays out how much she’s earned from her novels.
Authors and the Truth About Money – Ros Barber
As William Saroyan observed:
Writing is the hardest way of making a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.
A good friend posted an amusing and truthful observation from Robert De Niro, on my Facebook timeline today.
I’m sure you’ll recognise yourself in what he says….
Some wise words from Linda Epstein, a literary agent at the Jennifer de Chiara agency:
Literary Agents: 10 important things to know
Her Blabbermouth blog is informative, and she welcomes questions…..
Here’s an interview with her:
Literary Agent Interview: Linda Epstein of Jennifer DeChiara Literary
This article in the Independent newspaper struck home with me:
Do you hear a voice when you read this? That might be more normal than you think
Research suggests that 80% of readers hear a ‘voice’ when reading a story, with only 11% denying that they heard an inner voice at all.
This made me wonder about how much to tailor the conversations in my novels, giving them a sprinkling of dialect, while avoiding spelling words phonetically. My crime novels are set in Cornwall, which has its own language, rich Celtic culture and a distinctive accent. Here’s a good example of it:
As mentioned in the video, there are emmets a-plenty in Cornwall. These are incomers from out of county, mainly holidaymakers who swarm around like ants, giving the locals much of their income from tourism. Many stay and settle. Some of my fictional characters are Cornish born and bred, while others have moved here. This has caused me a certain amount of head-scratching in how to differentiate their accents and attitudes.
Over the years, there’s been some fuss made about how the Cornish accent is spoken in television dramas. An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn was panned because the cast mumbled their words making them hard to understand. The hugely successful new adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark stories has gone the other way, with most of the actors avoiding anything that sounds like a West Country burr. Only the farm labourers, the ignorant unwashed oiks attempt an ‘ooh arr, yes sur‘ country bumpkin way of speaking.
Poldark stars decide to ditch Cornish accents
Do any of you hear voices when reading a book or while writing characters?
An article in the Guardian had me pondering the place of sexual activity in my novels.
I haven’t written many sex scenes in my short stories, novellas and novels, though to my amusement a volume of erotic verse that I compiled from saucy verses I’d written was downloaded 4,000 times as a free ebook at Smashwords—four times more than the next most popular title.
I’ve no prudery writing about sex, but with psychological thrillers, unless the plot is driven by sex crimes, it’s reckoned to be an unnecessary distraction to allude to the love and sex lives of the detectives and villains.
I included one bizarre sexual interlude in my first novel, using a paraphilia that most people wouldn’t know existed. This was done partly for humour, though, while I was writing it, I thought that the reader might wonder if this was my kink!
It isn’t, and nor am I interested in the gay BDSM sex that propels some of the action in my second novel, a prequel to the first. In this, the main baddy is a gay, manipulative narcissist who sexually dominates his underlings while running a legitimate luxury car business and illegal drug and weapon smuggling and human trafficking operations. I wrote a sex scene in his dungeon, that felt about as erotic as hitting my thumb with a hammer to me, but which some readers might be turned on by. I did it to show the dynamic of his gang, how they relate to one another under his dominion.
I run the risk of alienating some readers by making my baddy gay and a thoroughly nasty dominant master, as well as having folk think I’m like this!
Does writing about sex cause you any problems?
This article in the Guardian, about a report published by the literacy charity Quick Reads, set me to thinking about my own reading and writing.
Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mocking Bird is certainly an inspirational character, though his popularity is undoubtedly aided through being played by stalwart Gregory Peck in the film adaptation. It makes the publication of Go Set A Watchman even more questionable, revealing as it does his racist attitudes.
The survey by Quick Reads had two different categories, of those characters that readers found inspiring and which ones they most identified with. It tells us something useful as writers creating our own characters, that people like protagonists with flaws:
The survey found that readers prefer to read about a character who makes mistakes (23%) and is funny (20%), than one who is brave (19%), loyal (17%) or kind (11%).
“It is clear that readers are not looking for flawless characters, but instead they are looking for real characters that show us that it is OK to make mistakes. Bridget Jones tops the list as the character that most women identify with, but interestingly she is also in the top five of most inspiring characters, too,” the researchers write.
“The realisation that others share similar feelings of imperfection or inadequacy creates a shift from being ‘alone’ to being ‘one of many,’ enabling readers to challenge previous ideas of being different or non-normal, and become more accepting of their true selves.”
I find it hard to split the difference between the characters who’ve motivated me and those who I feel akin to, but in no particular order:
1) Mole, Ratty and Toad from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows —for their loyalty to friends, love of home and Nature, daft obsessions and opposition to tyranny.
2) Private Investigator Matt Scudder from Lawrence Block’s long-running New York-set crime novels. His unlicensed private detective is down on his luck and battling alcoholism after a tragic shooting when he was a cop. He’s resourceful, determined and flawed. I was doing cold turkey quitting drinking after 27 years of alcoholism when I first read the stories, and they really helped me. 23 years dry and clean this August, I don’t miss it a bit—life is a damned sight weirder sober!
3) Dave Robicheaux, from James Lee Burke’s Louisiana set crime novels. Burke is a supreme prose stylist, one who Stephen King adores. His ex-cop, ex-infantryman hero is also an ex-alcoholic who endures and survives hardship and tragedy full of doubt and depression but still doing the right thing. He faces down some of the scariest villains in fiction.
Who are you inspired by—and who do you like?
Sometimes, it’s fun to squirt a little venom around. My ire is prompted by an article from one of the newsletters I received, which chooses five of the most poorly written top-selling books from history:
http://bestsellers.about.com/od/fictionreviews/tp/The-Worst-Bestselling-Novels-of-All-Time.htm?
I agree with two of their choices, the Robert Patterson collaboration and The Celestine Prophecies, both of which were so bad that I wanted to throw them across the room. I could only do this with the Patterson, as I was given the Redfield pile of tosh to read on a transatlantic flight by a friend whose opinion I admired. Like a fool, it was the only reading matter I took and rather than be arrested by an air marshal for clocking a fellow passenger around the head with it, I thrust it into my carry on bag, later donating it to an Atlanta thrift store—where it joined about 20 others on the shelf!
I’ve never understood the devotion that Ayn Rand’s terrible writing inspires, but criticising Jonathan Livingstone Seagull is a bit like knocking a lava lamp as being kitsch—they’re both symbolic of a period and mindset.
Patterson’s collaborations with guns-for-hire authors mystify and infuriate me, as they read like a poorly worded outline for a novel, being sketchy and with no flesh on the bones. His Alex Cross novels are well written in comparison, so this co-authorship feels like cynical manipulation of a non-judgemental fan base. At least he’s been giving millions away to needy literary causes, so perhaps he has a guilty conscience.
Mind you, it was anger at his poor quality writing, along with one other appalling novel I read at about the same time, which prompted me to write my own, so reading rubbish does have some hidden benefits!
The other book that pissed me off was well-reviewed, but I detested it, as it’s ghastly, mawkish and with no trace of empathy or sympathy for the characters. I’ve seen it described as a black comedy, but it’s not that, as it completely lacks any wit or irony.
Michelle Lovric writes as if she hates every one of her characters and her readers too:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7199784-the-book-of-human-skin
I literally hurled this book at the bedroom wall, causing a dent that I’m rather proud of….
I should add anything written by Jeffrey Archer, who is a failed politician and best-selling author, as well as a rogue of the lowest order. Apart from the scandals littering his career, he writes with the skill of an illiterate ten-year-old and has a long history of plagiarism.
He even copied a little-known Ernest Hemingway short story, almost word for word, getting paid thousands of pounds for it by the Daily Mail as an exclusive. When his perfidy was exposed, he claimed to have merely been inspired by the story—and refused to return his fee.
I read one of his novels once, and it was so terrible that I sampled another, wondering ‘who reads this shit to make it a bestseller?!’ It’s said that his manuscripts require teams of editors to knock into readable shape.
We’re all told as writers seeking publication, to produce the best work that we can and that a fine quality story will eventually gain readership. This isn’t necessary if you’re already famous, spinning notoriety into career-enhancing public recognition, and have lots of servile contacts in the publishing world ready to cash-in on your celebrity.
What best-selling books do you loathe and detest?
