Category Archives: Writing

The Elephant of Surprise

30/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

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.’

Quentin Crewe wrote a book about his expedition, In Search Of The Sahara.

Ever since then, I’ve been watchful for missing the chance of adding surprise to my life, and that includes in my writing.

Have you ever almost missed out—in life, or in your writing?

Writing

Perseverance

30/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

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:

Caroline Leavitt: Portrait of a modern novelist – The Writer

Writing

Whoops! Missed a bit….

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’m notorious for missing the obvious. I’ll spot subtleties that most people miss, gleaning meaning from what’s not said, but if something is staring me in the face I’ll not take it in.

This peculiar trait has passed over to my writing. I was halfway through writing my recently completed fifth novel when I suddenly noticed a glaring omission. Not so much a plot hole, more something that I should have mentioned, as readers would wonder about it.

Briefly, I’ve written a series of stories about a Cornish detective. In the first novel, my protagonist has been widowed for a year after losing his wife in a freak road accident. In book two, he’s spiralling into depression and suffering from panic attacks; he clings to his work as a way of getting through. Book three sees him recovered, following counselling, and he’s in an online relationship with an attractive witness from the first story. She has returned to her native Wyoming, but by the fourth book their Skype conversations are getting more frisky. My detective’s hormones have reawakened.

In Book 5, she unexpectedly turns up at his house, having decided to move back to Cornwall to escape Trump’s America. Things soon turn sexual between them.

I’d written all of this, showing how my protagonist was coping with inner turmoil while hunting serial killers, smugglers and human traffickers when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t mentioned whether he was still wearing his wedding ring. It was only writing a scene where he had to wash his hands clean of a noxious substance, that I remembered the ring.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t worn a wedding ring for 17 years that I forgot it! I went back through my novels and slipped it onto his finger.

Have you ever forgotten to mention an obvious detail?

Writing

Childhood Memory & Writing

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Inspiration can come from anywhere, and we writers must often have the feeling that ‘I’ll use that in a story one day’ when we see or overhear something interesting.

I sometimes find myself foraging for goodies in my memory banks going back 50 years to my childhood. It’s interesting how we come to an understanding of the way that the world works through dramatic and confusing incidents, that are only half-explained to us by our parents.

I wrote a short story called In The Graveyard At Dawn, based on my experiences of walking my dog through the grounds of the local church. This included encountering a widower driven mad with grief, who used to lay on his wife’s grave. When I first saw him at 6:00 am, as an impressionable 13-year-old, I thought it was a corpse not yet buried and I looked around for the gravedigger. He became aware of my presence and sat up hinging at the waist like Nosferatu rising from his coffin. The hair on my dog’s spine and on the back of my neck rose in hackles before we ran from the scene!

I’ve been entering writing competitions recently, and have been casting around for ideas for new short stories to write, as most contests only accept previously unpublished material. I remembered seeing a mysterious and extraordinary woman when I was a youngster, who used to walk past my house. I grew up on what was once known as the Great North Road, a Roman road that’s arrow straight in many places. Playing with my toy cars beside the footpath, I could see this lady coming from half-a-mile away.

What made her stand out, was that she was short, about 4′ 10″ tall, and she walked between two huge dogs, an Irish Wolfhound and a Great Dane, her forearms resting on their backs as they kept pace with her. Her hairdo was unusual for the early 1960s, closely cropped to her head. She had an upright posture, one eye on the horizon as she had a black patch over the other one. At 8-years-old, the only people I knew who wore eye-patches were pirates, and as she lived in the posh houses of millionaire’s row, presumably she was a retired pirate captain!

I never did find out who she was, or how she’d been injured, but she’ll soon appear in one of my stories. You’re probably already making up theories about her—it’s impossible not to when you’re a writer—it’s what we automatically do.

Have you used any childhood memories in your stories?

Writing

Contraction Pains

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I’ve been pondering the use of contractions in how I write a conversation. I recently spent five weeks editing my five completed novels, adding quite a few contractions to make how my characters talk sound more natural.

We all run words together in conversation—you’ve, she’s, hadn’t, I’ve—and not doing so, by pronouncing each word separately can make what’s said sound formal and the speaker stiff and pedantic. In formal business writing, scientific papers and for legal matters, contractions are not used.

In reading, some contractions are easily processed by the brain, but writing them down can look clumsy. People commonly say there’re, but to my eyes, in print, it looks a bit odd and pronouncing it (even mentally in my reading voice) sounds like a small dog growling!

Contractions have altered through the centuries, and I commonly use an archaic example—’tis—which is it and is combined, as Cornish people regularly say it. When I lived in Atlanta, most people said y’all instead of you all.

Expressing colloquialisms too closely can look clumsy, words such as she’d’ve, shouldn’t’ve and mightn’t’ve. Such contractions might ease the flow of conversation, but in writing they become obstructive.

How do you handle contractions? I wonder how tightly edited they are, by editors at a literary agency or publisher—being added or taken away….

Writing

The Joys of being Unpublished

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Although I’ve self-published 45 titles online, I’ve yet to be offered a traditional publishing contract. I’m still chasing literary agents and publishers who open a submissions window, but this is starting to feel like buying a lottery ticket…it’s always some other lucky blighter who wins!

I’m not downhearted, being stubborn/tenacious/determined/downright stupid, and it recently occurred to me that there is much to be thankful about in not having to kowtow to the demands of an agent, editor and publisher. At the moment, I can do what I like with the novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and song lyrics I’ve written, including those uploaded to Smashwords and Amazon, which are readily editable.

The five crime novels I’ve written are so highly polished that they’re visible from outer space, but all the same, there’s still room for improvement. My brain works in weird ways (God was drunk when he made me), coughing out ideas even when I’m asleep. My grey cells recently offered a suggestion of how to improve a sentence that I’ve reworked several times since it was written three years ago. This wouldn’t be possible had the book been gathering dust on some shelf.

Several famous authors have confessed that they never re-read their earlier work, embarrassed by the mistakes they made. Not being in the public eye, and held to account, has its charms.

‘There’s a marvellous peace in not publishing… When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.’

—J D Salinger

Do any of you feel similarly blessed?

Douglas Adams

Writing

Things I wish I’d known before starting to write.

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I returned to creative writing in 2013. The last few years have been joyful, as a direct result of producing short stories, novellas, novels, poetry and song lyrics.

All the same, there are a few things that I wish I’d known before I put fingers to keyboard.

1) No one wants to read my writing. Steven Pressfield crudely summed this up as No one wants to read your shit!

http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-the-most-important-writing-lession-i-ever-learned/

I smile wryly when I think back to my naive optimism in uploading a dozen short stories and novellas to Smashwords, hoping to make a little money in time for Christmas, 2013.

Whatever the worth of my stories, it wasn’t financial, and they disappeared like snowflakes in a blizzard of other writers doing the same thing.

I quickly learned, that half of the battle to get anywhere as a writer was gaining attention through self-promotion. Nobody knows who I am, so why should they want to read my work? Writers are part of a branding process these days. Reclusive authors are virtually extinct. It sometimes feels to me, that reading novels is a form of nosiness for some people. They want to find out more about the author through their work.

In this way, the book world has become more like the music industry and Hollywood.

2) Writing a book is actually the easiest part of the whole process. I love the planning, background research, specific fact checking and seeing a new story take shape.

For me, editing is quite the most tedious task I’ve ever done, confirming what Garcia Gabriel Marquez observed:

I had no idea how time-consuming and soul-destroying it would be.

Querying is like crawling on broken glass to the tradesman’s entrance of a fortified castle full of carousing gatekeepers, the literary agents who know what’s what…and they sure as hell don’t want to know me!

That leaves selling the book, the self-promotion, the flogging of my precious story as a commercial product—see point 1).

Learning that publishing, more than anything, is a BUSINESS was tough. It’s not an arena for gently showing off how clever I am as an author, it’s more becoming the manufacturer of a commercial product. My book may as well be a new flavour of baked beans.

3) What sells best isn’t necessarily the finest writing by the most talented authors. We’re advised by writing gurus to labour carefully to produce a brilliant manuscript, an intriguing story that’s correctly punctuated and free of flab. I take a lot of care in creating my novels, devoting thousands of hours to each title.

It’s galling to realise that someone who’s already got a public persona (and piles of cash) can throw a story together and instantly get a publishing contract. Invisible ghostwriters will knock things straight. Had some nitwit celebrity submitted my novel it would have been published to acclaim.

Readers buy books by people they already know. They also buy stories that are so basically worded, that the language wouldn’t trouble a 10-year-old child. Bestsellers are often not highfalutin literature. Instead, simple yarns sell in their millions.

It makes me question why I’m trying to produce high-quality crime novels, when, if I want to make money, I should simply scribble off a piece of crudity that appeals to mouth-breathing, knuckle-draggers who move their lips while reading to themselves.

Dumbing down has won. That’s something that I didn’t fully comprehend before entering a new era as a writer.

4) Competition writing is an art. Another thing that I wish I’d known, in my early stages of creative writing, is a greater awareness of the rules of writing competitions.

In a burst of enthusiasm and naïvety, I uploaded 44 titles to Smashwords and Amazon in a short period of time. This was the best of my work, including short stories and poetry. Self-publishing in this way, making an ebook available for sale, means that it disqualifies the work from eligibility for most writing competitions.

A few competitions allow entry by stories that have previously appeared online, but not many.

In retrospect, I wish that I’d held onto them, and tried my luck by submitting to competitions. Even if I hadn’t won, being short or long-listed is a better way of raising a writer’s profile, not just to readers but literary agents who keep an eye open for potential talent.

Wise words from the first writer to become a billionaire from her work:

JK Rowling reveals what she wishes she’d been told when she was writing Harry Potter

What do you wish you’d known before starting out?

Writing

The naming of characters

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Character names often outshine the titles of novels, lodging in readers’ minds and entering popular culture as nouns, a shorthand way of describing an acquaintance, such as Tarzan, Sherlock, Gandalf, Hermione or The Wicked Witch.

I’m currently reading James Lee Burke’s novel The Jealous Kind, whose protagonist is distinctly named Aaron Holland Broussard. He’s the grandson of Hackberry Holland who featured in four of Burke’s thirty-six novels.

I try to make my fictional character’s names memorable and am blessed that Cornwall, where my detective stories are set, has a rich array of unusual family names from its Celtic roots.

Thus, I called the owner of a chain of massage parlours Caradoc Honeycombe, which suited his gelatinous nature. Gordon Honeycombe was a popular British newsreader in the 1970s and 1980s, who organised a get-together of 160 members of the Honeycombe clan in 1984. There are 350 Honeycombes worldwide, all descended from one man called Matthew Honeycombe, who lived in the Cornish moorland village of Saint Cleer 350 years ago. Caradoc was a Knight of the Round Table during Uther Pendragon’s time.

Other of my character names include:

*Cleaver— for a heavily-scarred bodyguard who favours blades.

*Noah and Nina Shrike—ex-secret agents, who turn out to be cannibals. A shrike is also known as a butcher bird, as it stores dead prey on spiked vegetation.

*Luna Moth—a massage therapist from Vietnam, who has a large tattoo of this green-winged insect on her back.

*The Watcher—the title given to a sniper by his comrades in the Croatian War of Independence. He was turned into a killing machine by his traumatic experiences as a boy soldier, sating his bloodlust in peacetime by playing a real-life murderous role-play game. I didn’t mention his original family name; he’d dissociated from his origins.

*Esau Tregenza—a reclusive farmer whose mummified body is found in the kitchen of his remote farm, where it has been sitting for five years. A staunch Methodist, all of his ancestors were named after characters from the Bible.

*Tabitha Anstock-Struthers—Devon & Cornwall Police Authority’s press officer. More of a spin doctor, she has the soul of a cyborg.

Some of the names I use hint at the personalities of my heroes and villains, and there’s research evidence that how we’re named affects out entire lives:

The Name Game: how names spell success in life and love

Have you invented any memorable fictional character names?

Writing

Clichés!

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

In 2017, Ben Blatt published Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve.

It uses statistical data to analyse such things as how often an author mentions the weather, what is their favourite colour and how often they use exclamation points. Elmore Leonard hated them but ignored his own advice about how often to use them.

I’ve been mindful of his dislike, ever since reading his 10 rules of writing. I don’t often resort to exclamation points, but in closing my last novel I used them twice in consecutive sentences. I tried removing one, but it insisted on being there! (see…!)

Blatt’s book looks more accessible and relevant than the pure data fest of Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers’ The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of a Blockbuster Novel.

Even this Publishers Weekly article about the book contains some fascinating data:

Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers

Writing

Using Posh Words

29/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

One of the joys for me, as a young reader, was learning new words. I loved looking up meanings in dictionaries, gradually learning how modern English words came from ancient languages.

As an author, I try to make my use of words appropriate for the character who’s speaking. For instance, a regular presence in my series of Cornish detective novels is a 65-year-old forensic pathologist. She was raised as an army brat, in India during the closing days of the British Empire, and has a formal way of speaking that’s quaintly Victorian and militaristic.

As the omnipotent narrator of my stories, I’ll use long and unusual words if they suit the description. Thus, a specialist auditor would scrutinise a dodgy businessman’s account books. I’m not showing off by doing this, more honouring my readers’ intelligence.

I have a large vocabulary, but even so, I was challenged by a novel that I read recently. My eye was caught by Kim Zupan’s debut novel The Ploughmen, as it was the last book in the fiction section of my local library. It’s a brilliant crime thriller, with a highly unusual plot. Zupan looks to be in his sixties, (which gives me hope!) and is an admirable stylist in his descriptions of landscape, wildlife and weather.

He used at least twenty words that were new to me, including albedo, canzonet, arcature and bindlestiff. I guessed the meaning of the last one from the context, and it may be familiar to American readers of this post.

Zupan’s use of such words demonstrated his love of language, and it made me think about whether I was providing enough linguistic gems for my readers.

Do you use posh words?

Have you come across any good ones?

Paul Pens

Category Archives: Writing

The Elephant of Surprise

Perseverance

Whoops! Missed a bit….

Childhood Memory & Writing

Contraction Pains

The Joys of being Unpublished

Things I wish I’d known before starting to write.

The naming of characters

Clichés!

Using Posh Words

Real Write, Real Edit, Real Publish