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.
Many writers use Grammarly to catch mistakes in their manuscripts.
This morning, I found another free online tool that hunts out dubious grammar and spelling. Proofread.botworks well and catches glitches that Grammarly misses, offering more of an explanation as to why there’s an error.
Other tools can be found in the articleHow To Easily Proofread and Edit Your Own eBook, from the Digital Reader website, whose free newsletter is worth subscribing to:
I’ve previously mentioned how plots, characters and whole stories get stolen. There are unimaginative dolts, plagiarists and organised fraudsters out there, happy to rip you off.
Even if you’re an honest writer, it’s still possible, indeed likely, that what you’ve created has been done before.
As it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9—
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. Where we get our ideas from is a mixture of memory, observation, imagination and sometimes appropriation. Even famous writershave filched storylines.
I’ve just read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist, which I recommend, as it’s full of common-sense wisdom and has lots of thought-provoking quotes, such as this one from film director Francis Ford Coppola:
“We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.”
I haven’t deliberately stolen plots for my five novels, but who knows where I got my ideas from? After all, I’ve read thousands of books in my 65 years, so I’m sure there’ll be similarities between my work and previous authors.
Subconscious plagiarism happens, even to a member of The Beatles:
I’ve been writing crime novels for the last three years, set in dozy 21st-century Cornwall, but where modern technology constantly intrudes. Mobile phones, computers, CCTV surveillance cameras can certainly be used as key elements of the plot, but they also slow the action down, for I feel that I have to mention them, (or I’ll sound like I don’t know my subject), but I’d prefer to move things along with face-to-face questioning of suspects.
The same applies to forensic pathology and psychiatry, with offender profiling, all of which are crucial, but which involve masses of research for the writer. Thanks to series like CSI, everyone thinks they’re an expert.
I well understand why many crime writers choose to base their stories in olden times before everyone was connected. My second novel, The Perfect Murderer, was so stuffed with technology, that I set the third, An Elegant Murder, on untamed moorland, with no security cameras and where mobile phone reception is patchy. This returned my story to basic policing skills for my protagonist detective and was more enjoyable to write.
I’ve been reading local crime writers’ novels, to see how they tackle the county and plot layout. Thankfully, for my future prospects, most of the best-known are long gone. It was reading one of the most popular,W. J. Burley,that emphasised how much things have changed in the last forty years. Burley wrote a series of stories featuring Inspector Wycliffe, which were turned into popular television crime dramas that are still shown on British television.
The novel I read, ‘Wycliffe and The Pea-Green Boat’was set in 1975, and the detectives did their work without computers, mobile phones or security cameras. Most documentary evidence came through the post, or by police courier, if it was really urgent. In one hilarious scene, Wycliffe had to wait for twenty minutes outside the only phone box in the village, while a young man flirted with his girlfriend!
These were simpler times, and, it seems to me that it’s easier to tell a human story without gadgets constantly interfering. For one thing, explaining evidence gained from phone, computer and CCTV records means a lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’—something we’re discouraged from doing in writing.
Do any of you resent the interference of technology? Did you move your story to a bygone era to get away from it?
Imagine Pride and Prejudice set in modern times, with texting, Skype and social media!
I always send a message to my subconscious before going to sleep, asking my grey cells about what to write next, or how to tackle a plot problem. Sometimes, my brain makes useful suggestions to me in the night, as I turn over in bed. Other times, I attempt to access nocturnal ideas in the transition state between sleep and full wakefulness.
This morning, my mischievous noddle spat out one word—Thyssingness.
Puzzled as to what the hell this archaic-sounding word could possibly mean, I roused myself and went online to check. You won’t be surprised to learn that it doesn’t exist, though there’s a Thyssing Industrial Supplies in Victoria, Australia.
I think that my brain’s thesaurus got scrambled, but there have been plenty of authors who invented words that have since entered the English language. Charles Dickens coineddozens of words, such as the creeps, devil-may-care and flummox.
William Shakespeare: supposedly invented 1,700 words, includingadvertising, torture and summit.
Children’s authors have free rein to play with language. Lewis Carroll and Doctor Seuss invented plenty of nonsense words, as well as others that are commonly used. Dr Seuss is credited with inventing the word nerd, while Caroll thought of chortlefor quietly laughing.
Science-Fiction and Fantasy authors often create whole languages for their worlds.
My Cornish Detective novels contain local expressions and words delivered in the local patois, which many readers won’t be familiar with, but they’re real words. For instance, holidaymakers who invade the county in summer, swarming around, are referred to as Emmets, which is Cornish for ants.
There are several well-known songs written about writers and writing, including The Beatle’s Paperback Writerand Elvis Costello’sEveryday I Write the Book.
Songwriters like to include literary references in their lyrics. Jefferson Airplane sang about Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit,Iron Maiden bellowed of Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World, Led Zeppelin injected Tolkien imagery into their songs, and Kate Bush gave an eerie interpretation of Wuthering Heights.
The Doorstook their namefrom Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which was written about his experiences on mescaline. Lead singer Jim Morrison was a voracious reader and wrote poetic lyrics referencing psychological issues. Several volumes of his poetry have been published.
Nick Cave wrote an angry song called We Call Upon The Author, in which he took swipes at various creative types including writers, politicians who’ve engineered social chaos and even God himself:
Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain
Down in my bolthole, I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“The waves, the waves were soldiers moving”. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
When people ask me what I do for a job, and I reply”I’m an author” the next question is usually “What do you write?”The glib answer is simply to say “Words”, but I like to go mystical on them by quoting Neil Young’s song title replying that I write‘Words (Between the Lines of Age)’which appeared on his albumHarvest.
It’s not that I’m going for immortality, more that what I write appears to immediately vanish into the ether of Time!
Do you have any favourite songs or lyrics about being a writer?
With some writers, I experience not envy, more a feeling of admiration for the strength of their writing. Authors such as James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane and Barbara Kingsolver compose sentences and paragraphs that have me immediately re-reading them.
If any envy does creep in, it’s for the fact that they’re not constrained in the way that I feel limited by the hoops I have to jump through as an unknown author—irksome things, such as the 80,000 word limit for crime novels, and starting my story with a sensationalistic event that grabs the attention of some dozy editorial assistant trawling through the slush pile.
I tend to suffer more from bewilderment than envy, mystified at how a weak and flawed novel got published. I recently finished a highly-praised crime novel, which came with fifteen endorsements on its cover and opening pages, from other authors and critics. They said things like‘I had to sleep with the lights on after reading it’, ‘truly terrifying’ and ‘an eerie, spine-tingling read’. Maybe I’m desensitized by writing my own crime stories, but I felt mildly scared just four times in reading it.
To add to my confusion, the novel had several editing mistakes, including ‘baited breath’when they meant‘bated breath’. Considering the amount of time that I spend repeatedly going over my manuscript, weeding out punctuation and spelling errors, I’m amazed that so-called professionals let such things slip.
Who would want to be as successful as J. K Rowling? The first author to become a billionaire from her work, she’s given away so much money that her wealth dropped to half-a-billion—but gosh darn it, has recently risen to roughly one billion!
All well and good, you might think, but she has to employ bodyguards to prevent kidnapping and terrorist attacks. Imagine what an attractive target she is for a demented ISIS suicide bomber, as an author who writes about witchcraft.
There’s such a thing as being too successful!
Do any of you suffer from writer envy, or are you like me, merely baffled at how some books get published, when you can’t get any attention for your brilliant manuscript?
I like to surprise myself occasionally, and that includes what I write about. Real life and fiction can both be well-ordered, which is fine as a framework to rely upon, but ultimately unsatisfying.
In writing, there’s Raymond Chandler’s advice about having a man with a gun enter a scene to liven things up. Surprises needn’t be that dramatic to be influential. While we’re creatively writing away, it can be easy to miss the wood for the trees, and it pays to step away from the text to see it as a reader might.
In nearing the end of my fourth novel, Sin Killers, I realised that I’d missed something out. My detective protagonist is planning to arrest a deadly married couple, who he suspects of running a campaign of intimidation, blackmail, kidnapping and murder.
As my story stood, he’d only met them once, quite by chance and for just a minute. There needed to be some form of confrontation, before he swooped in to arrest them. It was what a reader would expect to happen—a rounding out of the villains’ characters—via verbal sparring with their hunter.
I duly wrote a chapter that I hadn’t planned, where he watches them perform at a folk evening. The music they play, and the ghost story and poetry they orate reveals their attitudes towards retribution. Talking to them afterwards, my detective confirms that he’s chasing the right suspects.
I sometimes remind myself of the advice that explorer and writer Quentin Crewe gave about surprises:
Surprise yourself occasionally, even give yourself a shock. It might be just what people were expecting you to do.
This is bittersweet wisdom for me, as I once met Quentin Crewe. It was in 1981, and he was about to leave on a trans-Saharan expedition. He and his team came into the pub where I worked as a barman, leaving their mighty desert vehicles parked outside right where I could see them.
They were looking for a fit young man, able to join them at short notice, as one of their crew had broken his leg that morning. His sponsorship was in place, to fund the stand-in so I wouldn’t have to pay a thing…could I go?
At the time, I was doing bar work to save for going away to teacher training college in a couple of months. I had no family or girlfriend who needed me, and I could have postponed my plans to become a teacher for a year. Instead of choosing excitement and unpredictability, I went to college in some spurious attempt at being respectable. As the old saying goes, ‘We regret the things that we didn’t do, rather than the things that we did.’
As I’ve commented in other posts, there is a fine line between being determined and being stubborn when it comes to carrying on with writing.
Generally, people describe you as determined if you’re doing something they approve of, and stubborn if you’re persisting with a task they consider foolish. And, what of being tenacious?
One thing that’s sure with the business side of traditional publishing, starting with getting an agent, is that no one else is going to do it for you. Even more self-reliance is needed should an author go the self-publishing route to getting their book into readers’ hands.
When my spirits start to flag, I remind myself of William Saroyan‘s observation:
‘Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.’
It’s tempting to think that published authors have it easy, so it was revealing to read of the struggles that Caroline Leavitt went through. Her attitude to being rejected, and the importance of having a supportive community, are inspirational:
I’m currently reading Pride of Baghdad, written by Brian K Vaughan and with artwork by Niko Henrichon. It’s a thought-provoking story about freedom and oppression, using the device of having a pride of lions escape from Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid. Inspired by a true story, it’s received lavish praise which it thoroughly deserves.
Initially, I discounted graphic novels as being glorified comics. Then, I noticed that the film The Road to Perdition, starring Tom Hanks, was based on a graphic novel. I enjoyed reading it and saw how the moody, gloomy artwork inspired the noir look of the movie. This made sense, as film-makers have long used storyboards to lay out the plot in a visual form.
I’ve gone on to read many more graphic novels. I tend to avoid superheroes in lurex bodysuits, though the Brian K Vaughan’s anarchic Runawaysgang are fun—imagine having supervillains for parents, who neglected you and whose evil plans you tried to thwart.
Instead, I look for graphic novels telling tales of real life. Will Eisner, Harvey Pekar, Alison Bechdel, Robert Crumb, his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Daniel Clowes all have something to say about the human condition.
Harvey Pekar
In the fantasy genre, I lovedKrampus: The Yule Lord, by Brom, which admittedly is more prose than pictures, but the artwork is astonishing and who could resist a story where Father Christmas is the villain?
I’ve just requested The Arab of the Futureby Riad Satouff from my local library, which might help explain the political turmoil of the Arab world to me better than any news report. Graphic novels can be effective in tackling politics, as the stunning Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, showed about Iran during the Islamic revolution.
Literary classics have been turned into graphic novels too: I recently read Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usherand I liked the graphic novel version of Jane Eyre.
