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.
This article in Vox.com reveals some startling examples of product placement by authors and screenwriters:
When a writer signs a contract agreeing to mention a company or product a certain number of times in their story, then the book is really an extended commercial…more so, if the company’s name is part of the title, as in Fay Weldon’sThe Bulgari Connection.
Although a fashion blogger turned novelist, called Riley Costello, is attempting to patent the term ‘shopfiction’, it seems that the notion of promoting product names in books has declined in use, largely because books are seen to be less influential these days.
Setting a story in the world of fashion or music, come to that, it would be impossible not to name names, as both activities are driven by competition between labels and brands for clothing, perfume and instruments. That’s not necessarily product placement.
Some commercial names become common expressions, such as to hoover, google it, jacuzzi, q-tips and tupperware.
Product placement is not usually an issue with Crime writing, but it’s something I’ve taken into account in penning my Cornish Detective novels. Without meaning to infer that what vehicles my characters drive are in any way desirable, I mention their cars, bicycles and motorcycles more as a way of showing their natures. I’ve read some crime novels that didn’t describe the make of car at all, which seemed daft, for the author happily named the detective’s gun and even which ammunition it was loaded with.
I’m happily working my way through James Oswald’s Inspector McLean series. I’d hazard a guess, that Oswald admires and maybe owns an Alfa Romeo, for his protagonist drives a classic Alfa, wildly unsuitable for his job, and a more modern Alfa only lasted one book before it was destroyed when a building exploded.
I tend not to have my detective protagonist say “google it” when his officers are searching for information while staking out a suspect’s house, instead he asks someone to look on their smartphone. One of my beta readers called me on what she thought might be product placement, as I’d had my main character order a collectable Victorian book on orchards from AbeBooks, which seemed to be the most likely place that he would have found it, and that sounded less clumsy than saying “an online book retailer.” Admittedly, when I wrote it, I thought some readers might benefit from knowing about AbeBooks, but I don’t see any money coming my way! Nor will I get anything for mentioning Taser, the electroshock weapon, which has been used a couple of times in my stories.
How do you handle the issue of mentioning product or company names?
Crime writers, in particular, will be interested in a startling discovery about DNA, which has been shown to be highly mobile, migrating between objects in previously unimagined ways. Instead of DNA being undeniable evidence that a suspect committed a crime, it could just be that skin cells and bodily fluids were transferred by touching a door handle that hundreds of others later touch.
This could potentially affect us all. Say, for example, that you sneeze while walking along a street. You can’t see it, but some of your sputum attaches itself to a lamppost, which a passerby brushes against, picking up your DNA on her dress. She is murdered that night—your DNA is on her dress. So what, you say, “I’m not a criminal, no one has my DNA on file from a previous conviction.” But unbeknownst to you, your cousin submitted a sample of their DNA to an ancestry tracing service which shares their data with law authorities, and there are enough similarities for you to be arrested! Have you got a provable alibi?
It’s not as if the police are operating with a clean slate. A British forensic researcher found DNA on three-quarters of crime scene tools he tested, including cameras, measuring tapes and gloves, making evidence discovered at a crime scene highly unreliable.
I predict that there will be hundreds of appeals against convictions based on DNA evidence, as a result of this revelation.
My jaundiced view of literary prizes is that most of them are marketing exercises to increase the sales of an already successful novel. I understand why this happens, for it’s getting the snowball rolling that’s the hardest part of attracting attention to one’s book, so if it’s already gathered momentum why not add a few more layers with prizes?
It’s worth remembering, that not all prize-winning books have huge sales. Bestselling novels are usually genre writing. There are prizes within genres, of course, but the high profile awards are somehow seen as conferring quality on the winning book which is literary in style. It’s rare for a crime, western, romance, fantasy or sci-fi novel to win a major award.
I’ve read a few of the main contenders for this year’s round of back-slapping by the publishing industry, enjoying them, but it becomes rather tedious when the same titles win lots of prizes. Colson Whitehead‘sThe Underground Railwayhas won the Arthur C Clarke prize for science-fiction, a Pulitzer, a National Book Award and he’s been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Sebastian Barry’sDays Without Endwon the 2016 Costa Book Award and the 2017 Walter Scott Prize.
Francis Spufford won the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize for his Golden Hill
I’m not jealous of these authors (not much), for their entry into literary prize awards happens at the behest of those with vested commercial reasons, so it’s hard to take them seriously.
There aren’t many book awards decided by readers’ votes. One such is the Books Are My Bag Readers Awardwhich is curated through bookshops. Reader Viewsruns an annual competition aimed at the independent writer who self-publishes.
The Goodreads Choice Awardis supposedly chosen by readers, though users of the site have no say in which books are nominated which has led to allegations of bias.
I’ve spent most of this year entering writing competitions, which has meant writing fresh material, as I naively self-published my entire catalogue of short stories and poetry online—effectively disqualifying it from 99% of contests. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of interpreting what the competition organisers are after, and have even felt a slight frisson of anticipation when I see the longlists announced for such awards as the Bridport Prize and the Bath Short Story Award.
It’s easy, as an unknown author lurking in the shadows, to look at the fuss surrounding national and international book prizes and think “This is nothing to do with me.”
It’s all as meaningless as music and acting awards—a bunch of insincere arse kissing run by the merchants selling their wares.
It’s easy to become paranoid as a writer. After all, we work alone, hidden away from the world creating stories that we hope will be loved by the very people we’re shunning. But to do this, we need to make entreaties to mysterious wraiths—literary agents—whose websites appear to show them as civilised arbiters of taste, yet they’re also strangely silent when approached.
Querying takes on the feeling of throwing a message in a bottle into a tempestuous ocean: has anyone even read your submission, and if they have done did they immediately dismiss it or laugh their heads off at your ineptitude?
The old saying ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean to say they aren’t out to get to you’takes on a frustrating twist for writers: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean to say they even know you exist.’
This state of disconnectedness and paranoia are well summed up in a poem by Phillip Lopate, called We Who Are Your Closest Friends. An excerpt appears in Anne Lamott’s Bird By Birdwhich is one of the best books about writing I’ve read.
We Who Are Your Closest Friends
we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift
your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us
in announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves but since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality
Do any of you feel like you don’t exist, that what you’re doing is just a figment of your own imagination? How is it that mediocre authors get published when your immaculate manuscript can’t get a look in? Do you ever feel like there are more people who hate you and your writing than love it?
Should your paranoia follow you to bed and cuddle up with regret, then remember Fleur Adcock‘s poem Things:
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
It’s an evolutionary quirk of the human mind, that we remember and focus on negative memories better than we do the pleasant events that happened to us. Partly, this is a hard-wired defence mechanism to keep us safe, but it can make your brain feel like it’s conspiring against you.
While exploring the Galley Beggar Press website, I came across this wise advice from one of Galley Beggar’s founders Sam Jordison:
“I also want to give a few words of encouragement. Submitting a book takes guts. I know it can feel like cutting your own heart out and serving it up so other people can poke around in the red, bleeding, somehow-still-beating flesh. I’m acutely aware of how dispiriting it can be when this act of emotional exposure is met with either a negative answer or silence. So I want to be clear on a few things. We admire anyone who has finished a novel, let alone been brave enough to send it to us. Just because we might say ‘no’ (or nothing) this time, it doesn’t mean we won’t say ‘yes’ another time. Just because we might feel your book doesn’t fit on our list, it doesn’t mean it might not fit somewhere else. Just because we’ve said ‘no’—it also doesn’t mean we might not have regrets later. (In the past we’ve missed some damn good books. It happens. You can’t always understand what you’ve got in front of you when a manuscript comes in.)
All of which is a convoluted way of saying that you’ve really got nothing to lose by sending in your work, if you think it fits with what we do. And potentially, lots to gain. Even if it’s quite a long shot…
It’s also a way of saying: don’t give up.”
There are some decent and polite agents around, but on the whole, I’ve found literary agents to be just about the most uncommunicative profession I’ve ever had dealings with—silence being their default setting unless they’ve been programmed to spit out form letters of rejection!
All the same, It’s vital to keep on keeping on with the querying, while investigating other ways of getting your name and stories known to the general public, such as entering competitions.
I read of one Science Fiction writer (whose name escapes me), who spent several years querying literary agents, getting nowhere. He knew that one particular agency was an ideal match for his debut novel, and even though he’d written several more in the intervening period, he continued to submit this book. On the twelfth submission, he was signed to them. When he sat down opposite his new agent, she claimed to have never heard of him before!
I’m not sure what this proves…other than, that if you don’t persevere no one is going to come out searching for you and your novel.
Of all sad words of mouth or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.
Quite by chance, I came across a quote from super-agent Carmen Balcells, said not long before she died:
‘To be a literary agent: it’s a modest job. But it’s a job that’s important for the writer. It’s a position that you take the right decision for your clients. And the problem is that the ego [of the agents] can get in the way. It’s very important that the agency is a person, one person. It’s not about money.’
I’ve just read a volume of poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin, calledLate In The Day, which included a couple of essays as an afterward. 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 ishere, 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 short stories and poetry collections with nine other writers’ work—as if my creativity could be shrinkwrapped like a multipack 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. 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 would ask for my secondhand 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 processed microwave meals.
First of all, forget becoming a bestseller: who cares about your sales and vast wealth? Your novel was turned into an inferior film by Hollywood, and more people watched it than have ever read your books. The publicity surrounding the movie caused a brief blip in your sales figures, as a few discerning readers sought out your back catalogue, but it didn’t last.
You’re not a household name and those that are often write inferior fiction that briefly satisfies some squalid urge. How many authors could the average dunce-in-the-street name anyway? And, most of those would be dead—classical authors they were made to read at school—putting them off reading for life.
No, what you need to happen to be really famous is to have journalists write about your sex lifelove life...they’ll gussy it up by pretending it’s about how your romances affected your writing, but what they really want to do is puncture your reputation as an intellectual to show you up as a lascivious beast or a repressed misanthrope or even kinky beyond imagination!
Most of these saucy tales won’t come out until you’ve been dead for a while—after all, there are libel laws—and some editors might have enough conscience left to avoid destroying a marriage or literary reputation.
Still, years later (or even as soon as you’re dead), your horizontal jogging exploits will be revealed. Books such asThe Intimate Sex Lives of Famous Peoplewill include a few writers’ sexual shenanigans.
Readers will be amazed to learn that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a fetish for feet and that he agonised about the size of his penis, once whipping it out in a restroom to ask Ernest Hemingway what he thought. H.G. Wells was a satyr, rarely without a woman and many were young enough to be his daughter; he was shagging into his last year, dying at 80. James Boswell, famed as the chronicler of Dr Johnson, was always at it, often with prostitutes where he probably caught the gonorrhoea which killed him at 54. Before losing his virginity he used trees as sexual partners!
If thinking about this future exposure bothers you, remain chaste and preferably lead a reclusive lifestyle. That way, you could end up as a symbol for your country when they use your image on banknotes. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare have all adorned British banknotes. Robert Louis Stevenson appeared on a Scottish £1 note, while James Joyce was on an Irish tenner. Denmark chose Hans Christian Anderson for its 10 Kroner note.
I wonder how long it will be before J.K. Rowling appears on a British banknote…perhaps in the next century. As for her sex life, for the moment, we can only ponder who slytherined into her gryffindor and expelliarmussed!
I’ve just finished reading Don Winslow’s The Force. It’s a brilliant portrayal of a corrupt detective’s fall from grace. The book cover has heavyweight endorsements from Stephen King, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, the Sunday Times, New York Times and Mail on Sunday.
Michael Connelly says: “There is no higher mark for a storyteller than to both educate and entertain. With Winslow these aspects are entwined like strands of DNA. He’s a master.”
I can only agree, for Winslow knows his stuff, being a former investigator, anti-terrorist trainer and trial consultant. His previous seventeen novels are all well-researched, gripping and totally believable. Two have been filmed—The Cartel, and Savages—whileThe Forcehas had its film rights bought by Ridley Scott.
It would be impossible for Winslow to write his true-life crime novels without mentioning the facts—reminding the reader of news stories, while they identify with the fictional characters the author has inserted into history. The atmosphere of fear and tension he creates is all the more credible for it.
In my own writing, I do loads of research to get facts correct—a lot of crime fans think they’re experts through watching such television series as the CSI franchise, which is wildly inaccurate a lot of the time. I love passing on knowledge, especially if it’s relevant to the story I’m creating, but there always comes a moment when I pause to think is this too much information? I’m writing a fictional story, not delivering a lecture.
I’ve certainly learned lots from fiction, including, as a boy, how to go poaching for wildlife. I’m a Nature lover, but all the same, was fascinated by how the labouring class defied their lords and masters to take gamekeeper-protected game birds and salmon. I wondered if such stories as ‘tickling fish’ were true. This is where the poacher lays on the bank dangling his hands in the water, waiting for a fish to rest above his palms, gently stroking its belly before scooping it up and out of the river. Years later, as a young man, I worked with a poacher, who took me poaching with him and I found that the tales were true.
‘Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guess work. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up.’
Do facts ever cause you to dither as they become obstacles to your narrative?
Have you ever learned anything useful from a novel?
How the writer dresses can all be a part of their brand, which is tackled in the book. I dread to think how I’d present myself, though I guess I could ape how my protagonist detective dresses, which is practically for the sometimes rough landscape where he investigates crimes—hence, he favours supportive walking boots, wax proof coats and leather jackets.
The British actress Beryl Reidsaid that she found how to play a role through choosing the shoes that the character wore.
This approach makes sense, and it’s an oft-given piece of advice on how to judge personality.
Have you ever used clothing to indicate characteristics in your fiction? Do you dress distinctly, hoping to establish an image?
Tom Wolfe (keeping his local dry cleaning shop in business!)
Based on a real-life murder, that happened while I lived in Atlanta, it was one of several pointless slayings that haunted me. A middle-aged family man, a hard worker without a criminal record and with no known enemies, was found sitting dead at the steering wheel of his pickup truck at a set of traffic lights on a remote industrial estate at 3:00 am. He’d finished work an hour before, and someone had drawn alongside and fired a bullet through his window and into his head. The engine was still running, the radio playing.
Responding to an anonymous phone call, a police patrol car discovered him. No attempt had been made to rob the victim, and with no witnesses, his murderer was never caught. Police theorised that he’d simply been killed because he was vulnerable. Perhaps a gang member was testing out his new gun for the first time. The slaying may have been incited by the 9/11 terrorist atrocities, which happened the year before, as there’d been many racially motivated attacks against innocent Muslims nationwide. But, the dead man was a light-skinned Mexican—simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.
I wrote the story as a three-hander, from the point of view of the victim, the police patrol officers and the gang member who pulls the trigger. As I made notes for the story, sketching out a plot, I had the unsettling thought that this gloomy tale was just that—a depressing narrative with no redemption and no moral message.
Then, I recalled a short story by my favourite writer of this form. Guy de Maupassant worked at the end of the 19th-century, and his stories are brilliant vignettes of avarice, cruelty, envy, suspicion and lust among the peasants and the gentry, Two Friendsis set at the time of the war between France and Prussia, and is without mercy, simply describing what would likely have happened at the time. It’s worth a read:
Inspired by de Maupassant, I went for a similar atmosphere with my short story. A matter of fact fait accompli recitation of a tragic event, without making a moral message.
My dilemma over what to do with Bullet At The Lights made me reflect on how I’d handled the tone of previous short stories and novels. It’s easier to take liberties in the short form, as novels are more hidebound by convention, especially when writing about crime. Sometimes, I’ve made oblique moralistic comments via my characters, but I haven’t been heavy-handed and preachy. Then again, the goodies, my police detectives, usually triumph over the baddies, though one committed suicide and another, a serial killer, may have escaped as his body was never found.
Amazingly enough, there was once a time with the BBC, back in the 1960s and early ’70s, when it was a stipulated regulation that in any crime drama the policealwayshad to win—the villains had to be caught, punished and regretful. This led to some unsatisfactory tacked-on endings to scripts that had been believably well-rounded up until the point where the coppers made some miraculous breakthrough.
Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood film producer, once said that “If you’ve got a message send a telegram.”
How do you handle the morality of your stories? Do sinners have to be punished, or do they get away with it? Writing bad guys is always more fun than portraying fine upstanding heroes—which is why so many have character flaws to make them feel more human.
Do you censor yourself, for fear of leading your readers into misfortune? I’ve done so a couple of times, with my crime novels, when I decided that I’d given too explicit instructions on how to throttle someone with a garotte, and how to make an improvised explosive device,
Artists of all types, but especially film directors, refuse to accept responsibility for what they’ve shown, taking the stance that it’s up to individuals to behave in a humane and legal manner. Have you ever worried that you were leading your readers astray?
I’ve just finished reading Helen Cadbury’s first crime novel, To Catch A Rabbit,which was enjoyable. I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up, Bones In The Nest.
She’s been through a rollercoaster journey in recent years, with two books published and optioned for television series, but brought down by a fight with cancer:
There’s an endorsement quote byLesley Glaisteron the cover. She’s a highly experienced novelist, and knows her stuff:
“A rare find—a literary crime novel that you can’t put down.”
This made me wonder what makes a novel ‘literary’. There’s snobbishness about what one reads, with various interpretations made about the difference between genre writing and literature:
I write crime novels and enjoy reading within the crime genre. Some of the more literary authors I favour include Dennis Lehane, John Connolly, Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke. They’re literary because of their use of stylish language and willingness to unravel the emotions of their characters. To my mind, genre writing is more simplistic, with the action taking precedence over character development.
Helen Cadbury’s writing is literary because she tackles the thought processes of her protagonist, but it’s not that challenging to read.
Does that mean that literature has to be difficult to get through, but it has a density of meaning that genre writing lacks?
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