All posts by Paul

I am a self-employed writer, which means I’m working for an idiot who doesn’t pay me enough – but the holidays are great. I’m ex many occupations, from the respectable ‘career-ladder’ to disreputable “somebody’s- got-to-do-it”. All a good way of seeing someone else’s point-of-view. Best job, apart from writing, was dispatch-riding on a motorcycle in the 70s, though I’ve also enjoyed teaching, librarianship, counselling and helping to run a community-centre. Sometimes I’ve looked respectable in a suit, other times a bit more wild and woolly (though still stylish) as a biker. It’s strange how differently people treat you, depending on what you’re wearing. A suit means I’m sometimes addressed as ‘sir’, but in motorcycle leathers I’m always referred to as ‘mate.’ The worst job that I’ve done ? You really don’t want to know, but it was in a processed food manufacturer’s factory – put me off bacon, sausages and quiches for a long time, and made me look at pet food in a new way. I’m very glad that I don’t have any pictures. I’ve been writing since I was eight, when I penned a story about a desert island and attempted to compile a dictionary – as Clarissa does in my short story ‘The Moon Is Out Tonight’. I’ve written for magazines under a variety of pen-names, ghost-written a couple of biographies and had a column in a local newspaper. I used to concentrate on non-fiction of an informative, how-to instructional nature, as I’m a firm believer in the dissemination of knowledge to enable people to do things for themselves. Knowledge is power, and in these troubled times of economic downturn and increased intrusion into our lives by government agencies, its vital to know how to get through. My fictional stories also show people coping and finding ways to survive. I’m based in a Celtic nation, the county of Cornwall or Kernow. I’ve been here for twenty years, and have lived all over the country, as well as abroad in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the U.S.A.
Writing

You and Your Manuscript

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After writing my first novel The Perfect Murderer, I took a month to weed out filler words from the manuscript. My search was prompted by 43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately. When I started this exercise, I thought it would take a couple of days, but after noticing about 25 other words and phrases to remove I continued to plug away. Two months later, my manuscript was 9,000 words shorter.

I moved on to hunt for hyphens—words that need them, and those that don’t. This was time-consuming to do, and very boring too with none of the joy of creative writing. It set me to thinking about how differently I feel about a novel at different stages of writing it, then doing multiple edits, while trying to interest literary agents and publishers in it.

I’m a pantser as a writer, plotting loosely while still having a firm idea of what the overall themes will be. In making outline notes for a novel, I do more sketching of the natures of my characters than making a detailed plot. My protagonists direct the story as much as me. This planning stage feels a bit like drawing a rough diagram of a building on a scrap of paper, something that I will inhabit with fictional people who’ll construct the walls for me.

Actually writing a novel, I feel both involved and removed from the process. My characters sometimes do things that I haven’t anticipated, but which are true to their natures. Writing a crime novel means strewing red herrings all over the place, as detectives try to work out what’s going on, so I don’t worry too much about mazes and dead-end corridors that appear. All the same, it can feel a bit like directing the building of my house/novel from a distance. Reading through the latest chapters at the end of the day, to see if it makes sense, is like trying to learn the layout of a new building.

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Once finished, upon typing The End the editing begins. I become a building inspector, correcting features of my story-house—moving an illuminating window from one chapter to another, to reveal details that made my murderer act the way that he did. Overall, it looks like my story works, but as with any newly-built house, I know there’ll be plenty of bedding-in to come, with further adjustments needed.

Trying to flog the novel to literary agents, through queries and submissions of a writing sample from my story, requires so much polishing and hard work for so little response, that I feel like the world’s worst double-glazing salesman. While trying to ingratiate myself with these gatekeepers, my story house sits neglected and empty with no visitors. I don’t read it anymore, and though I’m proud of my creation, it’s also a museum of old thoughts. I want to make something new.

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Tired of scrutinising my manuscript, which feels more like a forensic examination of each and every brick for integrity, I yearn for fresh writing challenges. I’ve become numb to whether the story works as a story, after picking sentences and individual words apart with tweezers and scalpel.

So, my novel has gone from a rough sketch to a building project followed by a second-fixing, correction, mopping-up exercise, onto being a product that I hawked from door to door, before I turned neurotic, micro-managing the elements that I used to construct my monster like Doctor Frankenstein.

Have any of you gone through similar shifts of attitude to their work?

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Health, Humour, Writing

The Perfect Writing Aid

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When winter begins to descend on wild and woolly Cornwall, I start to dread the cold days ahead. My flat in uninsulated, so while I enjoy 90-100 degrees in the summer becoming the nude novelist, I’m swathed in twenty garments to get through the months from December until April; it’s dropped to 39 degrees overnight.

It’s just as well that I’m hardy, but I stumbled across the answer to my frozen nether regions. It’s called a Kotatsu and is a Japanese device that combines bedding material with a table that has a heater beneath. If I can buy one in the U.K., I might just hibernate for five months! 

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/kotatsu-japanese-heating

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Writing

Using all of the senses in your writing

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By coincidence, I came across this article, which offers some useful advice (albeit slightly tongue in cheek) about the silly mistakes that writers make with their early stories:

http://writerunboxed.com/2015/10/17/the-dumbest-mistakes-new-authors-make/

I say by coincidence, as the article’s author Bill Ferris mentions using all of the senses. I was faced with writing a scene in my new novel that night, which is set at a garage fire where the owner has apparently died through carelessly smoking around a leaking welding gas cylinder. This incident is actually a crime committed by the psychopath retired detective who appears in the next novel in the series.

Describing the scene of the burned down car workshop, I knew that it needed some extra punch apart from saying how the dead owner’s legs looked like large sticks of charcoal. I recalled an incident from my days as a housing officer when I was a callow twenty-something. I thought that I knew it all, but I plainly didn’t. I accompanied a senior housing inspector to check a flat where there’d been a fire, which killed the elderly tenant. He had to authorise the repair work needed, and as we looked around I was puzzled by the strange black strips hanging from the ceiling beneath the seat of the fire, as well as the acrid smell. I was informed that both were what was left of the tenant, with remnants of flesh flying upwards, adhering to wherever they touched and providing a background smell of burnt barbecue!

I managed not to throw up, but this experience at least came in useful forty years later to describe something that most people don’t think about. Our sense of smell is one of the most evocative for making a memory, and my fictional scene of death was enhanced by adding a few details about the scent in the air, as well as the repellent taste in the back of the mouth of the detectives.

These days, I always go back through my work in progress, to see if descriptions can be improved by adding to how the protagonists sense things.

FOOTNOTE: That burnt-out flat took a couple of months to renovate, needing a complete replastering, not just to repair the damage, but to remove the smell of burning. It took even longer to rent out again, as no local people on the housing waiting list wanted to live in a place where an old lady had burned to death. It was eventually rented to a couple who moved to the area from hundreds of miles away.

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Poetry

The Worst Day Ever?

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Some of you may be familiar with this poem already, as it’s gone viral since being tacked to a bar wall in London, where it was photographed and posted to Twitter. The poem has a gloomy message read in the conventional way, but if you read it bottom to top then things improve; it’s all a question of attitude.

I hadn’t seen it before, but it appeared in my Quora feed one morning, and I thought that its message was applicable to the loneliness of the long-distance writer:

The Worst Day Ever?
by Chanie Gorkin

Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don’t try to convince me that
There’s something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don’t last.
And it’s not true that
It’s all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be attained
Only if one’s surroundings are good
It’s not true that good exists
I’m sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It’s all beyond my control
And you’ll never in a million years hear me say
Today was a very good day

[Now read it from bottom to top]

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Writing

Novel Dysmorphia

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This article in Literary Hub (well worth subscribing to their free newsletter) made me smile, as I recognised many of the feelings that the author Sloane Crosley experienced about the size of her novel.

http://lithub.com/sloane-crosley-on-self-diagnosing-novel-dysmorphia/

(I love the illustration for the article—lost in a book—now there’s a bookmark)

My first novel The Perfect Murderer, written in 2014, was imperfect largely because it was double the length of what a debut work by an unknown author should be, at some 179,000 words. I did some heavy editing and removed 40,000 words. I still have faith in it and know that attempting to cut it down to 100,000 words would be as successful as cutting the neck off a giraffe to make an antelope.

Instead, I viewed it as a learning experience, and it now takes a place as the second novel in my Cornish Detective series. I wrote a prequel to The Perfect Murderer, called Who Kills A Nudist? I kept a close eye on the word count, bringing it in at an acceptable 80,000 words.

I had another feeling of recognition for the plight of author Joshua Ferris, who is interviewed by his editor in the linked article from Sloane Crosley’s.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/05/author_joshua_ferris_and_his_book_editor_reagan_arthur_of_little_brown.html

He had similar problems with the size of his book, having to lose a vast chunk of it. Reagan Arthur, his editor, also called him to task about using the word ‘Jew’ to describe a character in one of his novels. I had similar problems writing my new first novel, as it features nudists, the gay community and BDSM, all of which have politically correct connotations that are formally given respect in the media, even if they’re poked fun at colloquially.

It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, without appearing that I’m being judgmental in any way. My characters might say things that I would never even think. It might help if I were a member of any of these groups, but I’m not (honest!). Just doing the research for these aspects of the story made my eyes water…

Some subjects are hot potatoes, which makes them hard to handle, but potentially satisfying for a hungry reader in search of something a bit spicy.

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Reading

How long to read that book?

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A new online database is offering a service that estimates how long it will take a reader to complete a book. They have twelve million titles in their vaults, so you should find the book that interests you. It’s possible to tailor the reading speed per minute rate, should yours be different from their average of 300 words.

http://www.howlongtoreadthis.com/index.php

I find this intriguing and a bit worrying. Given that there’s been a reported trend towards people reading bite-size chunks of stories on their smartphones, and that short stories and novellas are proving more popular, where does that leave novels? Will readers look at how long a book will take to consume, discounting it should the estimate be too long?

Too long; didn’t read is increasingly seen as an abbreviation TL;DR

I anticipate that it will come about that publishers start to print the probable reading time on the cover, in the same way, that CDs and DVDs have a running time. I’m being whimsical here, but perhaps the information could morph into nutritional content as well:

‘A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens contains valuable lessons about charity, sharing, benevolence and conquering regret; parental warning: contains ghosts, so may be unsuitable for young children.’

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Reading

Bookmarks—what do you use?

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This article in the Guardian shows some unusual objects used as bookmarks:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/24/bookmarks-versus-dog-ears-how-you-keep-track-of-your-reading-in-pictures

I abhor the practice of turning over the corners of pages to mark where someone left off reading. I also get annoyed when previous readers have left written comments on the page, as I was brought up to value and look after books. I can just about see the point of making useful notes in a textbook, and it’s something that I’ve done with Haynes workshop manuals for cars and motorcycles when I’ve found a better way of doing a repair.

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Although I’m able to remember the number of a page, where I left off reading, for, after all, it’s only one number, I tend to use postcards as markers these days—such as when I have four books on the go at the same time. These cards include a greetings card with a charming message from a friend, as well as some American rustic postcards from Wyoming that a photographer sent me. I’ve been known to use squares of tissue paper, though it’s been a while since I had a proper leather bookmark with tassels.

Librarians are always finding bookmarks, and usually, keep a box of them under the counter— just in case a reader asks for their return. When I worked as a librarian, I sometimes found things that we most definitely did not keep. You may find it hard to believe, but these included slices of bacon (cooked and uncooked), condoms (used and unused), combs, straws, razor blades, cocktail sticks, matches and paper-clips. Weirdest of all was a squashed army of woodlice, which I think are known as pillbugs in America. Their flattened corpses marked the reader’s progress through the book. This slaughter had been deliberately done, as the reader left a message declaring her hatred for woodlice beside her last victim!

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Writing

Con Games: Why Stephen King Can’t Write

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After Stephen King’s article about whether a novelist can be too prolific, which I posted in the thread of that title, someone has gone and stuck the boot into him.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-conniff/con-games-why-stephen-kin_b_5601945.html

Writing in the Huffington Post, Michael Conniff has concerns about the quality of Stephen King’s writing – while still liking much about him. My initial reaction is that popular writing is rarely of high literary quality. This makes it easy for elitists to look down their nose at the commercial success of an author who sells books by the million.

Campfire tales, tall stories and yarns are no less worthy than a weighty tome that has been agonised over for style, language and philosophical message. It’s like comparing a hamburger with a haute cuisine dish of beef bourguignon – each has its time, place and purpose. I might read (or eat) something on the move when I’ve got a few minutes to spare that is very different from what I’d consume at my leisure at home.

What do you think? Is Stephen King a nobody novelist who just got lucky? It’s worth remembering that ‘Carrie’, his first novel to be a success, was actually the fourth novel that he wrote. He almost ditched ‘Carrie’, only finishing it at the insistence of his wife who fished the pages out of the garbage. Had she not done so, he could still be languishing on the slush pile.

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