Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Paranoia & the Writer

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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 Bird which 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

then for the good of the collective

Phillip Lopate

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.

Image result for paranoid gif

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.

Why People Remember Negative Events More Than Positive Ones

We should all learn to be friends to ourselves.

Writing

Storytelling: Education or Entertainment?

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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.”

Image result for Don Winslow's The Force.

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—while The Force has 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.

Image result for trout tickling

As Margaret Culkin Banning observed

‘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?

Writing

Stories with a Message

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In 2017, I wrote a 6,000-word story to enter in the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Competition. As with several short stories I’ve written, it started out as a poem.

Image result for galley beggar press

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 Friends is 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:

ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/maupassant/guy/two-friends

Image result for guy de maupassant two friends

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 police always had 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?

Writing

What makes a story ‘literary’?

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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:

Cancer, crime and turning 50 – author Helen Cadbury on the year which changed her life forever

Image result for cadbury To Catch A Rabbit

There’s an endorsement quote by Lesley Glaister on 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:

Literary Fiction vs. Genre Fiction | HuffPost

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?

How do you define literary writing?

Posh words?

A preachy delivery by the author?

No great thrills in sight?

Pretentiousness?

Writing

Free Proofreading Tool

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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.bot works 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 article How To Easily Proofread and Edit Your Own eBook, from the Digital Reader website, whose free newsletter is worth subscribing to:

How To Easily Proofread And Edit Your Own eBook | The Digital Reader

Writing

Write it like you stole it!

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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 writers have 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.”

Austin Kleon’s website is worth a look: AUSTIN KLEON is a writer who draws.

Image result for austin kleon

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:

40 Years Ago: George Harrison Found Guilty of ‘My Sweet Lord’ Plagiarism

Image result for stealing ideas cartoon

Writing

When Technology Intrudes

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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.

Image result for bodmin moor

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!

Image result for burley 'The Pea Green Boat' 

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! 

Writing

Theme Songs for Writers

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There are several well-known songs written about writers and writing, including The Beatle’s Paperback Writer and Elvis Costello’s Everyday 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’s Brave New World, Led Zeppelin injected Tolkien imagery into their songs, and Kate Bush gave an eerie interpretation of Wuthering Heights.

The Doors took their name from 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 album Harvest.

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?

Writing

Envy & the Writer

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Booklife.com has an interesting article on how writers become envious of the success of other authors:

What Writers Need to Know About Envy

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?