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.
Reading, Writing

That’s Entertainment!?

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Do you have a conscience about what you write? By that, I mean do you ever pause to reflect that your fictional story might have a harmful effect on a reader?

Obviously, we can’t anticipate exactly what will upset someone. A vegetarian might well be horrified at reading about the protagonist of a story butchering a chicken before cooking and eating it.

When writing details of crimes and forensic dissection in my novels, I’ve occasionally wondered why people like reading about such terrible things. I re-wrote a scene where a serial killer recalled strangling a child, simply because I’d put in too much detail of how to kill someone using a garotte. Instead, I made the act horrific by the killer’s quiet contemplation of how he’d proceeded, looking for any mistakes he’d made that might have given him away. Even worse, in a way, was that he derived no pleasure from the girl’s death, for she was simply a pawn in a bizarre roleplay game

British band The Jam released a song called ‘That’s Entertainment’ in 1980, in which lyricist Paul Weller laconically contemplated the sometimes violent distractions that we use to pass time, dismissing them with a chorus of “That’s entertainment, That’s entertainment.” We’re all observers and the observed in these days of CCTV, and as long as whatever nasty thing is happening doesn’t involve personal harm to us, then it’s a form of entertainment.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook is one of the most controversial books published. Dating from 1971, it’s been variously suppressed and freely available, even for sale on Amazon. Because it details how to manufacture explosives and make and distribute drugs, it’s been implicated in criminal acts, which historically has led to simply possessing the book being a prosecutable offence.

I don’t know that anyone would read The Anarchist’s Cookbook as entertainment, but it’s a good example of that old excuse about ‘putting an idea into someone’s head’.

Over the years, many novels have been implicated in real-life crimes. Mark Chapman was obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, quoting from it in his defence for shooting John Lennon. President Reagan survived being shot by John Hinckley Jr. who’d also read Salinger’s book. It’s impossible to guarantee that a fictional work, be it a book or a film, will never pass from entertainment to inspiring a tragedy:

I could be cynical, by saying that such dreadful events must have done wonders for sales of the book which planted a demon seed in a criminal’s mind, but I wouldn’t want anything that I wrote to mislead those open to suggestion. Think how horrifying it would be if a criminal stated they’d been inspired by your writing to devastate a community.

One of the founders of the BBC, Lord Reith, proclaimed that the aim of the new television company was to ‘Inform, educate and entertain’—though he never said in what order those things should happen. These days, the educational content of much broadcasting is minimal, while information is manipulated through spin and false news. The entertainment factor is often mindless, bubble gum for the brain—which is preferable to the disgusting violent images available online that ghouls post for fun.

I’m mindful of Reith’s words when I write my Cornish Detective stories, trying to set a scene by the use of facts, and letting the reader into my characters’ thought processes while indulging in some showmanship through humour and enjoyable word choice to keep them reading. One of the pitfalls of novel writing was identified by Iain M. Banks,

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.”

So, does that mean that if I create a convincing story which sweeps the reader along, then they might be influenced into breaking the law?

Although I love writing crime stories, exploring what makes the good and the bad tick, I still question why I’m tackling such nasty things. When I do slow down, I remember a Roger McGough poem, called Survivor:

Everyday,

I think about dying.

About disease, starvation,

violence, terrorism, war

the end of the world.

It helps

keep my mind off things.

Do any of you worry about how your stories are not so much entertainment as instruction manuals for the gullible?

Have you changed anything you’ve written, as being too explicit or offensive?

Have you ever read anything, that you thought was too shocking to have been printed?

Marketing, Writing

Books As Commercial Products

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I recently read a volume of poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin, called Late In The Day, which included a couple of essays as an afterword. One was on verse form, the other, an extract from the acceptance speech she gave to the National Book Foundation for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The whole speech is here, with a video. She has wise words to say about the current state of publishing; this resonated with me:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship….

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us—the producers who write the books, and make the books—accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.…

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I’ve had my own experience of my self-published books being treated like ‘deodorant’, for I uploaded 44 titles to Amazon three years ago. I priced them attractively, but all the same, after about 18 months Amazon contacted me to suggest that I allow them to bundle various of my short stories and poetry collections with nine other writers’ work—as if my creativity could be shrinkwrapped like a multi-pack of lightbulbs, toothpaste or deodorant.

This would have given me a profit of 10 cents for each sale, instead of the original $1.99 I’d priced a 6,000-word short story at. No skin off Amazon’s nose, as they make their profit whatever happens, and it’s certainly a tempting purchase for a customer, but it put me in the bargain basement, priced at less than what a charity/thrift store asks for a second-hand book.

The commercial imperative tramples a writer’s message underfoot. It even affects the book cover design, for I’ve read several crime thrillers this year where the illustration on the jacket misrepresented what happened in the story. Sure, it looked alluring or sinisterly malevolent, with a rugged hero, but it was plain that the artist hadn’t read the book, or if they had they were instructed by marketing to sex things up! In this way, books are becoming like the packaging on processed microwave meals.

It’s one of the toughest lessons to comprehend as a writer, that essentially we’re creating a product that needs to be sold to the public. The art and craft of what we do becomes irrelevant if our book doesn’t sell.

How much of a head for business do you have? In India, they’re selling books by the pound—don’t think that it can’t happen where you live….

Image result for india market book stall

Writing

Waiting for the book title to appear.

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Book titles are crucial to attract a reader’s attention. More than I’d realised.

I was using the computer in my local library one day, and overhead a chat between the two librarians and two readers who were each borrowing an armful of books. One lady commented that she always chooses books solely by how intriguing their title is—whereupon, her friend and the librarians agreed with her—I almost fell off my chair, shocked at how shallow their selection criterion was. Not to dismiss such an illuminating revelation, I’ve since chosen what I hope are eye-catching, provocative and memorable titles. I don’t think that having an effective title guarantees a book’s success, but having a terrible title will certainly hold it back.

It’s common practice for a novelist to insert their book title somewhere in the story. The same thing happens in other art forms, such as poetry, song lyrics and film scripts.

I did so with my first Cornish Detective novel, Who Kills A Nudist?—which is what my protagonist detective wonders to himself at the end of Chapter 2, after an initial examination of a naked corpse found on a windswept beach in winter.

Book 2 is called The Perfect Murderer, a term that a supposedly respectable retired policeman uses to describe a serial killer who leaves no clues. It’s a deliberate piece of misdirection, for he’s used his status as a detective to conceal a campaign of killing one hardened criminal a year for 40 years. Never suspected of involvement, he’s really the perfect murderer.

The third novel’s title, An Elegant Murder, wasn’t referenced until three chapters from The End when my detective commented that a cunning killer had found an elegant way to transfer the blame for the slaying of an innocent.

Book 4, Sin Killers, features married ex-secret agents, zealots who’ve mounted a campaign of slaughter against sinners who’ve transgressed their pagan religious beliefs. The husband is a Druid bard who performs readings of old texts in which sinners are killed.

The fifth story is called The Dead Need Nobody, a title that appears early on in the story when a forensic pathologist says it as a passing comment after an autopsy of a murder victim. My detective is reminded of her observation when interviewing a suspect, a manipulative art dealer, a needy narcissist who comments that dying is a great career move for a painter.

Do you, as a reader, look out for the title appearing in the text?

Do you, as an author, reference your chosen title somewhere in the story?

 

 

Writing

You in your Book

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Do any of you make an appearance in your own book?

In Hollywood films, the director Alfred Hitchcock famously made cameo appearances, usually glimpsed walking through a street scene. Naturally, these were uncredited, and Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Peter Jackson have continued the practice.

The authors of books adapted into movies have sometimes made cameo appearances on-screen. James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, turns up as a sheriff at the end of the film, who is deeply suspicious of the surviving canoeists’ story. Stephenie Meyer can be glimpsed in Twilight, Steven King pops up in many of his movies, and John Irving (The World According to Garp), William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist) and Peter Benchley (Jaws) all show their faces. Even John le Carré can be spotted as a guest at an MI6 Christmas party in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Image result for James Dickey, sheriff at the end of deliverance

James Dickey and Jon Voight in Deliverance.

Musicians often appear on one another’s records, not always credited. This commonly happened when they were starting out as session musicians and weren’t yet famous names. For example, James Burton, guitarist for Elvis Presley, appeared on dozens of hit records in the 1950s.

In literature, famous authors have appeared in novels. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the WW1 poets star in Regeneration by Pat Barker. The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, tells the story of poet John Clare’s incarceration in a mental asylum. Colm Tóibín covers five years of Henry James’ life in The Master. There are many, many more, but authors rarely write themselves into their stories. Stephen King did so, introducing himself as an author writing about a gunslinger in the Dark Tower series. Bret Easton Ellis wrote Lunar Park as a mock memoir of his own history of drug use. Douglas Coupland makes himself a data thief in JPod.

In preparation for writing the fifth novel in my Cornish Detective series, I’ve been re-reading the first four stories. I hadn’t looked at The Perfect Murderer for 27 months and had forgotten that I’d inserted myself as an anonymous character in a scene. This is set in a pub at Sunday lunchtime, with the landlady, who’s also a detective sergeant, is checking her customers. She’s part of a team hunting a serial killer, who is a master of disguise, using his altered appearance to stalk his victims. He’s the thirty-year-old man wearing tinted spectacles. I’m the elderly bearded gentleman reading a book—something I’ve done many a time in pubs!

Mary skimmed the drinkers for new faces. She liked to play host, and sometimes the foreign visitors were unsure of the protocol for ordering food and didn’t know that the pub offered reasonably priced accommodation. She recognized several Dutch tourists who visited every winter as part of a twinning association with their town. There were a couple of strangers in, who were keeping to themselves—an elderly bearded gentleman who was reading a book, and a thirty-year-old man wearing tinted spectacles hiding behind a newspaper. She’d pay them a visit and say hello. People responded to her better as a landlady than when she was acting as a detective—it almost restored her faith in human nature.

The elderly bearded gentleman may make an expanded appearance in an upcoming story, perhaps as a witness, though quite how much he’ll resemble me I don’t yet know….

Have any of you portrayed yourself as a fictional character?

Will you, now I’ve suggested the idea?

Writing

Writers’ Houses

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While fantasy shopping for property in Cornwall, where I live, I came across this house in Zennor, in the west of the county.

Hmm, thinks I, D.H. Lawrence lived there for a while: sure enough, it turns out to be the same place.

Image result for dh lawrence house zennor

The house name RANANIM comes from the utopian artistic community that he dreamed of establishing in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda lived in Cornwall from 1916-1917, during which time he worked on Women in Love, which may have been influenced by a homosexual affair he was rumoured to have had with a local farmer. The couple were forced to leave the county, after accusations that they were signalling German submarines by semaphore system using their curtains at night.

Perhaps, it isn’t surprising that there was suspicion about them, for, amazingly enough, Frieda was the fifth cousin, once removed, of Baron Manfred Von Richthofen—the Red Baron—who’d already shot down scores of British planes over the trenches.

Helen Dunmore’s first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was about this period.

I’ve only visited one famous author’s home, which is George Bernard Shaw’s house Shaw’s Corner, located in the small village of Ayot Saint Lawrence in the county of Hertfordshire. Shaw was known for his ascetic ways, and his home reflects this, for though the garden is beautiful, the rooms have a strictly functional sparseness. My favourite feature is his revolving work hut at the bottom of the lawn, which he could turn away from the house to face the hedge, blocking the world out.

Have any of you visited houses with a literary connection, or lived somewhere famed for a well-known writer?

Writing

Inspiration from Art

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I change my laptop’s wallpaper daily, taking images from an 8GB memory stick which holds paintings and photographs I’ve saved over the last ten years.

I’ve stored photos of wildlife, famous and obscure artwork, favourite cars, motorcycles and aircraft and portraits of inspirational writers, musicians and actors. What I choose each day is sometimes done randomly, other times more selectively to create a mood. In winter, I don’t often pick photographs of the Arctic—I’m already cold enough! The wallpaper that appears from time to time, as I close documents stirs wonderment in me and the brief pause while I contemplate another world gives my brain a mini-break. 

Occasionally, I realise that one of the reasons I saved a particular image is that it’s connected to issues that I’d like to write about. This morning, I have a painting by David Inshaw on my computer screen. He created neatly composed vignettes of the British countryside, which feature people in sinister, suggestive and symbolic arrangements. Phallic and pubic imagery abounds, and there’s a feeling in many of his paintings, that things are barely restrained and are about to explode! 

As I look at She Did Not Turn, I wonder who the lonely woman in a blue cloak is, and why she’s making for an isolated house or barn—an assignation with a lover—or does she live there? It’s showery weather, from the largely clear sky and rainbow. What’s the strange structure on the hill summit…a haystack or an ancient fortification? My Cornish Detective novels feature acts of violence in beautiful surroundings, and it would be easy to build a plot around this painting.

I’m currently in the early stages of writing a second novella about an American Civil War veteran, a cavalry officer with PTSD, who is making his way from the Appalachian Mountains to his sister’s war-damaged plantation near Atlanta. He’s travelling by horseback and has inherited a mustang, two mules and a mongrel dog. I think of Olaf Wieghorst‘s paintings of lonesome cowboys making their way along precipitous mountain trails.

Do any of you seek inspiration from paintings, photographs or sculptures?

Reading

Books as Friends

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I recently borrowed two library books by favourite authors, which felt like meeting up with old friends. One is by cult author Richard Brautigan, the other by so-called Liverpool poet Brian Patten.

Brautigan wrote surreal bizarre tales of misfits, and his style is unmistakable and inimitable. I’m enjoying revisiting his Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 which I haven’t read for twenty years.

Patten writes exquisite verse, some of the finest love poetry around and really entertaining poems for children. I’m currently recalling love affairs from long ago, helped by his Collected Love Poems.

Other favourite books that I’ve read many times over the years include The Wind In The Willows, An Island To Oneself, Those About To Die and any collection of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories.

They all lift my spirit in different ways.

Which books do you think of as friends?

Writing

Who Stars in the Film of your Novel?

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I’d argue that it’s impossible to write a novel in the 21st-century without thinking in terms of how the action and dialogue would look and sound when adapted into a television series or Hollywood film. Having said that, you might prefer that your sensitive writing be turned into a radio or stage play, or filmed by a European director as they’d show the subtleties of characterisation and not swamp things in computer-generated special effects.

When I’ve written my short stories, novellas and novels, I’ve more often visualised real people I’ve known rather than famous actors. For instance, a recurring character in my Cornish Detective series is a forensic pathologist called CC, and she’s an amalgam of various earthy country doctors and veterinarians I’ve met, along with a female psychologist I once knew, a survivor of Auschwitz, who’d seen the worst of human nature.

Unusually, I’ve imagined my detective protagonist, (who is the son of a sheep farmer), to look like one of the presenters of a long-running British television series called Countryfile. Adam Henson is a farmer, and his laid-back mannerisms appear in my fictional detective Inspector Neil Kettle. My protagonist has a way of lulling whoever he’s questioning into a false sense of security, before jumping in with a killer punch.

Image result for adam henson

I also remembered the appearance and behaviour of a Swedish actor, called Rolf Lassgård, when writing a novella about a man who escorts his wife to the Dignitas clinic for an assisted suicide, and how he rebuilds his life at the age of 60. Lassgård is probably best known for playing Kurt Wallander in one of the television adaptations of Henning Mankell’s detective novels.

Image result for Rolf Lassgård

The casting of movies is critical to their commercial success but doesn’t always follow how the main characters were described in the novel. The worst recent example of this is diminutive Tom Cruise playing man-mountain Jack Reacher in two film versions of Lee Child’s novels.

Some adaptations get the casting just right. The BBC’s second attempt at interpreting Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, first filmed in the 1970s, is a joy to watch as much for the appearance of the actors, as the scenery and the historical accuracy of the action, even if some of the actors’ attempts at a Cornish accent are a bit shit!

Who would you have to play your characters?

Did you envisage a particular actor as you wrote? Was it their physical appearance or their mannerisms that influenced your writing?

Writing

You think writing’s a dream job? It’s more like a horror film.

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This article was in the Guardian. I recognize many of the thoughts of Tim Lott, who wrote it.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/20/tim-lott-life-as-an-author

Tim  Lott

The comments at the bottom of the article are worth reading (expand them), particularly the one about the 60% of people who want to be writers, imagining that it’s all J. K. Rowling easy-peasy wealth and celebrity. It wasn’t for her when she was trying to find a publisher for her first Harry Potter book, though fortunately, that turned into a publishing juggernaut which will keep her for the rest of her days.

The John Dos Passos observation quoted made me snort in recognition at the truth of it: “Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another.”

Writing

Why all writers are vain

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There was an interesting article in The Guardian newspaper by Julian Baggini, about how sensitive writers are to criticism.

jb

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/feb/25/writers-vain-egotism-julian-baggini

( some great stories on writing beneath this article, and do read the comments section )

One of the first pieces of advice that I’d give to anyone considering writing a book, is to develop a hide as thick as a rhinoceros. Everyone thinks that they’ve got a book inside them, but nobody considers what will happen when the book is released into the wild!

Being an author is setting yourself up as a target for criticism and rejection. These brickbats will come from friends, family, readers, publishers, book-sellers and critics. That’s if they say anything at all, for being completely ignored is the usual fate of a freshly published book. This is why writers welcome adverse criticism, for at least it means that someone has noticed you.