It’s easy to worry about someone copying your plotline, or of having inadvertently borrowed key elements from a novel that you read ten years ago and had largely forgotten about. There are only so many stories under the sun, and it’s reckoned that there are only seven (or five) basic plots, so there’s bound to be some coincidences.
It’s quite likely that someone has written a thriller that contains elements of my first Cornish Detective novel, which is about a war-hardened mercenary who’s killing victims as part of some twisted role-play game. After all, there’s been much reporting on how computer games induce violent acts in real life, and more people are aware of the ongoing trauma of PTSD for veteran soldiers. I was more concerned that another author would get their book published before mine, with the same title of The Perfect Murderer.
I like catchy titles, and though there’s nothing crucial about my narrative that would prevent me from changing the title, I’d still be a bit miffed that someone beat me to it. Mind you, I was a bit surprised that a famous crime novelist, H.R.F. Keating had written his first Indian detective story featuring Inspector Ghote with the title The Perfect Murder. I probably read it when I was in my twenties, forgetting the story but storing a form of the title in my memory banks.
Some theft does occur with books. It’s impossible to take legal action against those who’ve stolen your entire story if it’s in the Far East – unless you’re a major corporation, and tough to do so even then. A writer friend who published a series of romance novels as ebooks in the U.K. went to visit friends in India. They’d read her books, and tentatively showed her some pirated versions of them, which had been printed as paperbacks with the Western names changed to Indian, along with other cultural details referring to clothing, food and religion.
There was absolutely nothing that she could do about it, and the supposed author looked to be a made-up identity for an online search found nothing about them. My friend moved on through Asia, as part of her post-retirement backpacking adventure, ending up in China. She wasn’t entirely surprised to find her romances were on sale in street markets, again altered to represent the country.
She hadn’t used Digital Rights Management for her ebooks, not thinking that such foreign piracy would ever occur. DRM is easily removed anyway.
I suppose that this list could be used as a test of how well-read one is…I hadn’t heard of Dream of the Red Chamber before, but I’ve read all of the others, apart from The Koran and The Da Vinci Code. I absolutely refuse to read Dan Brown or watch the movie adaptations of his books. I don’t need to try something to know that it’s rubbish.
Someone once conned me into reading The Celestine Prophecy, and if I hadn’t been on a Jumbo jet crossing the Atlantic at the time, I’d have thrown it at the nearest wall! To make matters worse, it was the only book that I had with me, so I ended up memorising the in-flight magazines.
I read somewhere that placing an item into your shopping basket, then leaving it there, could have benefits with the seller offering the would-be buyer a discount to make the sale. Sure enough, after placing a copy of the publishing guide in my basket for two weeks, I received an email notification that the last copy had been reduced to £2.59 with free postage and packing.
I made it mine, saving about £10.
Incidentally, Harry Bingham is a thriller writer, who after realising that debut authors were having problems securing an agent and publisher for their first book, established an advice site he called Writers’ Workshop which also offered editorial services. It was recently rebranded as Jericho Writers.
I subscribed to crime novelist James Oswald’s newsletter two months ago. His career as an author is inspirational, going from rejections to self-publishing success to signing with Penguin.
Anyway, in this month’s newsletter he mentions a relatively new website called Author Interviews.
Only seven authors have been interviewed so far, including James Oswald, but you can sign up for an alert to tell you when fresh interviews are posted.
I’ve just started reading The Horseman, by Tim Pears, which is the first part of a trilogy of stories set in the world of working horses on farms in the West Country in the early 20th-century. I have a wide vocabulary, but in the first ten pages, I encountered a dozen words new to me, mainly to do with saddlery and blacksmithing. The pacing of the action is slow, contemplative and absorbing, so much so, that it’s impossible to gallop through the page. Pears arranges words poetically. This Guardian review comments on the dense texture of the language used by the author.
Personally, I don’t mind slow reads that entice me into thinking about what’s going on. It’s not necessarily a formula aimed at making huge sales—as I’ve previously commented, many bestsellers are written at a level a 10-year-old could understand—but such rich writing is definitely in the running for literary prizes. Tim Pears‘ eleven novels have won at least six awards.
I read another award-winning novel recently, The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin, which happily took me six weeks to get through, slowed not by unusual language, more savouring the depth and breadth with which the author explored the internal dialogue of her characters, as they contemplated their relationships with loved ones, wondering what to do to make things right. I’ll remember them for a long time.
I may have developed a liking and a tolerance for rich writing, by tackling the intimidating Thomas Wolfe as a teenager.
Wolfe was wildly prolific, given to dashing off vast novels on whatever came to hand…receipts, menus, tissue, proper paper—only loosely organised into chapters, leaving the hard work for his publisher to do. He only published four novels in his lifetime but is the only author to have left two completed novels with his publisher before dying, one of which was one million words long. Reading Look Homeward Angelat the age of 17, I was struck by how voluminous his descriptions were of places, a real cosh to the senses, as sights, sounds and odours crowd around the reader. Truman Capote dismissed Wolfe’s writing as, “all that purple upchuck”, but William Faulkner described him as the greatest writer of their generation.
Try this description of food, which makes me feel like going on a diet!
“In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits– cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.”
This style of writing has fallen out of favour in the 21st-century, where there’s pressure to move the action forward, especially in much of genre writing, though Fantasy and Science Fiction allows an author to linger as they build worlds. I’m currently enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea: The First Four Books,which has thrown me into an alternative realm of islands set in an uncharted ocean.
Robin Hobb’s Farsee Trilogy also immersed me in a world that was both familiar and unfamiliar.
We’re advised to ‘kill your darlings‘…which means one sometimes has to eliminate flowery sections where you were showing off, but what if that perfect little bouquet of a phrase adds to the atmosphere of a paragraph? You might be striking out something that readers would have loved, that became quotable.
In my crime writing, I emulate authors such as James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane, who include plenty of their protagonist’s internal dialogue and observations on people and places they interact with, where the landscape and weather become characters, making the reader feel that they’re there with the detective—not simply following the actions of a cartoon character.
As Barbara Kingsolver observed:
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
If I edited my manuscript with word count as a priority, I’d remove some of the flavoursome ingredients in favour of a fat-free, low calorie, ready meal of a story consumable by the masses and with no nutritive content.
No one wants to make their story difficult to digest, and it’s not necessary to use complicated words that add density to a text, but surely we can write in a way that makes our readers think about something differently and which leads to them learning something new? As a child, I learnt much of what I know from reading books and looking up word meanings in dictionaries—I continue to do so.
If all someone reads isbland pap, what are they going to learn? Concentrating and persevering with a challenging read rich with ideas will create a sense of achievement—even if you disagree with what’s written!
How do you deal with what to leave in and what to take out?
Have you ever written anything that was too stodgy? I did, with my first Cornish Detective novel, which had too many information dumps, as I tried to explain the thinking of a traumatised war veteran turned serial killer. Trimming 40,000 words helped it flow rather than stagnate.
Are there any authors whose work you love for its concision, devoid of tasty morsels? I love Elmore Leonard’s crime stories, but he really makes the reader do the work of imagining what’s happening, following his own cryptic advice:
‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’
Which book overwhelmed you, by being too richly written?
In 2018, Pew Research Center found that 24% of Americans said they hadn’t read a book in any format—print, electronic or audio—in the previous year. There are some surprising statistics in their report, including that:Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 28% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 20% of adults under 50.
Another survey, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, revealed that Americans spend 16.8 minutes a day reading and 166.2 minutes watching television.
Searching around, I couldn’t find any statistics about how many words a day people read. I speculate that anyone connected to the internet might well read more words, even if they’re not in book form than someone did from the pre-computer age.
Book readers consume books in different ways these days, with audiobooks increasingly popular. Apparently, there was a 12% rise in audiobook downloads in 2017, according to this article.
It’s good that people are still consuming books, albeit through earbuds, but once again, it’s indicative of lost skills—the concentration, devotion of time and imagination it takes to read a book for yourself—so many things are done for people by devices in the name of convenience.
How long will it be, before books come in syringes that you can inject into your brain?
For my own part, I get through about 300 novels and 75 non-fiction books a year, mainly on art, philosophy, psychology and local history—partly as research for my crime novels set in Cornwall. I read for two hours on most days. I’ve always bucked trends!
How about you?
Do your friends, acquaintances, work colleagues and family members read regularly?
This article reports on ebook distributor Overdrive’s plans to add gaming features to their books.
They admit that they’re using the addictive nature of computer games to further education, though I’m somewhat doubtful about how much information will stick in a student’s mind. Several surveys have shown that people remember more of a printed paper book than they do an ebook.
Having children chase video game-inspired achievements and badges might sound like an effective carrot, but there’s a danger that players (for that’s what they’ll be) will become good at gaming tactics while learning nothing. Also, there might be elitism…some pupils might dislike gamified books, preferring to study the traditional way.
I’ve read several crime novels recently, which appeared to have been written with the sole intention of testing how strong my stomach is, with detailed descriptions of mutilations, torture and decomposition.
Most of them were marketed in a steampunk/Goth/alt.horror way, trading on the image of the author. Chuck Wendig has a strong reputation, and several members of the Colony have mentioned his cantankerous newsletter sent from him blog Terrible Minds.
HisBlackbirds is scabrous, but relatively mild compared to a couple of other gruesome novels I gave up on. Sacrificing plot and characterisation for explicit descriptions of dismemberment and torture makes me indifferent as to what happens to the protagonist or antagonist. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at this trend, for people are hardened to viewing atrocious acts—try looking at the Daily Mail website, where there are embedded videos of violence and people dying.
I’m not being hypocritical, for though I write crime novels featuring murder, I always emphasise the effect the death has on the victims’ friends, relatives and acquaintances. The killers’ emotions are described too—and they are not always what the reader expects.
As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve just read Natural Causes by James Oswald. It’s the first in a series about an Edinburgh detective, in which he’s investigating a ritual murder of a walled-up corpse from 65 years ago, which he theorises may be linked to a series of recent killings of prominent men, who all have their entrails exposed. It’s gory, but the author doesn’t dwell on it too much. All the same, it came as a surprise to me, for the overall tone of the story is quite genteel with lots of inner dialogue.
On finishing the book, there’s a note from James Oswald about how he moved from writing fantasy stories to the crime genre. He explains that Natural Causes started off as a short story, which he expanded and entered into the Debut Dagger competition of the Crime Writers Association. To grab the judge’s attention, he added shock value, telling the ritual killing from the point of view of the victim:
‘I have always had rather mixed feelings about the scene, though. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly a powerful hook that sets up the background to the story. On the other, it’s a 500-word graphic description of a brutal, ritual gang-rape and murder.’
Readers also had mixed feelings, some being put off reading on, others complaining that it clashed with the rest of the story. The offending chapter is printed after the explanation, and really it belongs more to a horror story. For the paperback edition I read, the original chapter for the short story version is used, which still isn’t for the squeamish, as it describes a corpse sitting in a chair with its innards streaming down onto the floor.
As it turned out, he got short-listed in the Debut Dagger, before going on to sell 350,000 copies of his novels as e-books. The thing is, his gruesome opening may have contributed to him being placed in the competition, so although he had a change of heart about it, the gore was his calling card.
The word ‘gore’ is relevant to me, as I quietly contemplate the plot of my sixth Cornish Detective novel, which will feature a crime scene awash with gallons of blood, but no corpse. The blood, when analysed, turns out to come from several people and a variety of species of animal! I’m looking forward to writing it this summer, but am staying on course with my self-promotion campaign of blogging and social media posting. I don’t think I’ll be able to write a bloodbath that’s not repulsive…then again, some readers like being scared.
There’s a specific fear of blood, called haemophobia
which is described by psychologists as ‘irrational’, though to my mind, seeing what should be in being out is highly rational a fear. Lose 30%-40% (about 3-4 pints) of your blood and you’re headed towards a state where transfusion won’t save you. I’ll inject a personal anecdote here (pun intended) for I bled out at the age of 11, following botched dental surgery, which saw me dead for a few minutes as they attempted to restart my heart. This may explain my weirdness! The dentist who operated on me was drunk, going ahead with the extraction without the required presence of an anaesthetist; he was struck off, forbidden to practice. It’s a wonder that I’m not haemophobic.
It’s worth remembering, that the first books we read as children are often violent fairy tales, and campfire storytelling, from the time of the caveman, was aimed at being scary.
This article on which book format is best for enhancing literacy and language skills and bonding with the parent seems to back up other surveys about ebooks.
Ebook readers certainly have their advantages, mainly being able to carry dozens of titles, but we interact with a screen differently to how we relate to a physical object. A book isn’t just the words on the page, it’s a physical object that we feel with our skin, that we manipulate with our hands and which smells in a way that’s redolent of a pleasurable experience—think of the odour of a new bookshop and of a secondhand books emporium. Hard to get turned on by the smell of a smart device, be it a laptop, phone or Kindle.
Having a glass screen between us and the words is not only a barrier but also carries connotations of being work-related or a way of killing time with meaningless web surfing. Neither attitude is conducive to achieving the type of concentration needed to learn from and enjoy a book.
A 2014 survey showed that recall of events in a mystery story was worse by those who read using a Kindle.
Furthermore, reading from a device that’s basically shining a light into your face, is a poor way of relaxing while you’re in bed, as your body needs to produce melatonin for you to sleep properly.
This article in the Guardian explores some of the problems with ebooks, not the least of which are plagiarism and piracy.
It’s sometimes said that ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ but it doesn’t apply to what is effectively fraud. A writer acquaintance, who’s written a series of modestly successful children’s adventure stories, published as ebooks, was alerted by a friend travelling in Asia that her books were for sale in China as cheap paperbacks. Her friend moved onto India, where she also found them in street markets. She recognised them, as she’d designed the book covers—which had been altered to look like Chinese and Indian children. So far as they could ascertain, the supposed authors’ names were the only thing the plagiarist wrote themselves. The writer could only speculate on how many millions of sales she’d made, without knowing it. There was no way of stopping the trade.
Should this piracy have occurred in the West, legal action could be taken, but even when that happens, book pirates fight back. It beggars belief, but one of the most notorious of them has launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay for his defence against being sued.
Do you ever feel like the world is going increasingly wrong?
I sound like I’m against ebooks, which isn’t the case, what with 45 titles published and five novels to begin releasing this summer. I must admit, I’ve never read a novel in digital format. The most I’ve read is probably a few thousand words of a PDF download writing guide.
I’m online for 12 hours daily, up until midnight, 90 minutes before I fall asleep—time I fill with reading a book in physical form—my brain appreciates the change of pace.
If you have children, how do you read to them?
What format do you read for pleasure…and for work?
I find that, as a reader, I approach books in different ways. Some titles I hope will be edifying, such as philosophy and self-help books. Volumes of poetry and studies of a painter’s work may lift my spirit. Sometimes, I read non-fiction as research for my crime novels, delving into forensic medicine, autopsies and poisons.
I tend to base my library requests on book reviews and works praised in author interviews. There’s always the drawback, when reading in my chosen writing genre of Crime, that I’ll be less likely to enjoy the ride than look for ways that it could be improved.
There aren’t many authors whose work blows me away every time, making me thrilled when I see that they’ve got a new book being published, keeping me alert for its UK publication date, so that I can be first in the queue to request it at the library. When I’ve got my hands on it, I’m voracious!
One such author is James Lee Burke, whose 400-500 page novels I usually read in a few days, but then I’ve been a fan of his 22 Dave Robicheaux detective novels since the first title, The Neon Rain was published in 1987. After so long together, I’ve invested in his protagonist’s story arc, even wondering about how he’s getting on from time to time, which proves how real he is to me.
Reading a new Robicheaux story is like meeting up with an old friend—and it’s not always good news—Burke’s protagonist is a deeply flawed man, which he realises himself, and it makes him all the more compelling. I’m currently 50 pages from finishing the latest story New Iberia Blues, already having mournful feelings that I won’t be able to find anything as good to read next.
In the Crime genre, the only other author I know of who portrays such a conflicted hero is Jo Nesbø whose Harry Hole is self-destructive, determined and excruciating to keep company with—which again makes the books unputdownable. There’s definitely an element of “What’s the idiot going to do next?”, that keeps me reading on.
It’s a key element of story-telling, that we care what happens to the main characters. Their story becomes our story—their truth becomes ours—a merging occurs. From the time of the caveman telling tales around a fire to people reading e-books on smartphones and Kindles, the narrator needs to create that empathy.
In historical fiction, I’m transfixed by the dilemmas that C. J. Samson’s Tudor era lawyer Matthew Shardlake faces.
Shardlake is one of the most likeable fictional characters ever created, and one who lives on his wits and cunning in what were incredibly dangerous times politically—with heads rolling off the Royal chopping block—and, where a man could be stabbed to death by the henchman of a courtier as he walks along a darkened street.
What these three protagonists share is that they walk a fine line between normality and oblivion. They all want to make things right in society, but the evil forces they oppose threaten to corrupt and destroy them. They’re living on the edge. As Friedrich Nietzsche warned:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
As a reader, I stand alongside them, glad that I’m not them, but eager to know how they’ll survive.
