I’ve read about 30 writing handbooks in the last few years. One of the best is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s not a writing guide as such, more a motivational boot camp nag into how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.
He really knows what he’s talking about, from long and bruising experience:
Pressfield is closely allied with Shawn Coyne, who is his agent and quite a writing guru himself. His Story Grid method of writing a book is worth a look—it’s cheaper as an ebook.
Together they started a publishing company called Black Irish and published a sequel toThe War of Art. It’s called Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t and is available as a free audio download if you sign up to Audible.
I took a three-year break from reading novels after I returned to creative writing. Instead, I read poetry, self-help books (I need it!), writing handbooks and authors’ memoirs. I avoided fiction, partly because of wariness about my own writing style being affected, but also because I read a novel a day for four years while keeping company with the black dog of depression—I was suffering novel overload.
The novel that regained my attention was recommended in a Guardian article about top 10 chases in literature. William Gay was a writer new to me and Twilightwas the only title on the list which I hadn’t read. I like picaresque Southern Gothic thrillers, by such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah and Flannery O’Connor, so bought a copy ofTwilighton eBay for £2.
It’s everything I hoped it would be, and I was 20 pages into it before I realised that there were no quotation marks to delineate speech. It read OK without them, though I’ve seen the advice from writing gurus that readers like seeing quotation marks on the page ahead of them, as conversation is easier to digest than blocks of text. Cormac McCarthy despises most punctuation, especially quotation marks, so perhaps William Gay was influenced by him.
Here’s an extract from Twilight,to show you what I mean:
Coming into Ackerman’s Field the wagon and its curious freight accrued to itself a motley of children and barking dogs and a few dusty turtlebacked automobiles and such early risers as were stirring and possessed of enough curiosity to join the macabre parade to its ultimate end on the courthouse lawn. Before he even stepped down from the wagon the man said, Get Sherriff Bellwether out here. A fat man in overalls had approached the wagon. Bellwether’s done been sent for, he said. Who all is it Sandy? The man pulled back the quilt covering with the faintest flourish, not unlike a nightmare magician offering up for consideration some sleightof-hand. Goddamn it, Sandy, that girl’s half naked. Did you not have enough respect to cover her up? The man they’d called Sandy spat. I ain’t Fenton Breece, Hooper. All I undertook to do was bring em in. That’s all the undertakin I aim to do. You want to handle them then you cover em up.
I quickly adapted to his style of not using quotation/speech marks, and though I paused and went back a few times to clarify the meaning of what he was saying, I’m not sure it was any more than I’d normally do if an author followed conventional practice.
One thing I’m sure of—if I tried querying a literary agent with a writing sample devoid of punctuation to show when someone was talking, it would be immediately rejected!
I’m not planning on eradicating quotation marks from my writing, but do any of you get by without them?
I returned to creative writing in 2013, initially with short stories, novellas, poetry and song lyrics. I wrote my first novel in 2014, a crime novel and tried querying almost 200 agents and publishers with it before realising it was double the length it should be for a debut novel by an unknown author. D’oh!
Undeterred, (I’m stubborn!), I wrote a prequel of the correct length, followed by three more stories, running into tricky problems in maintaining continuity through a series.
I came across a dilemma of saying the same thing again, which reminded me of a technique that one of my favourite crime writers Ed McBain used.
He’s credited as a pioneer of police procedural novels, and his 87th Precinct stories use exactly the same descriptions of his cast of detectives. Protagonist Steve Carella is always introduced as: ‘He was a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave the impression of great power, but the power was not a meaty one. It was, instead, a fine-honed muscular power.’ These brief hints at the looks and nature of his cast of characters are carried across from one book to another. They become a welcome way of refamiliarising oneself with who’s who, the thumbnail sketch a mantra.
In my series, the Cornish landscape is as much a character as my heroes and villains, and rightly so as it’s a mystical and dangerous place, with plenty of legends and natural hazards. Scores of holidaymakers are injured or killed here every year. Faced with a way of saying this again, I decided to repeat myself:
‘Cornwall could be a dangerous place, and it was usually visitors to the county who were caught out by being too relaxed in its deadly beauty. Holidaymakers tumbled off cliffs and into old mine workings or drowned in rivers and at sea.’ I also repeated myself in introducing one of the characters, a forensic pathologist called CC:
‘She was unmarried but enjoyed plenty of suitors over the years. With no children to distract her she was melded with her career—though an aged Grey Parrot kept her on the straight and narrow. The bird’s language was as colourful as CC’s own, and the pathologist’s screech of laughter reminded him of her avian companion.’
I don’t see this as laziness, and I see no point in rewriting a description just for the sake of being unique. As I found, when reading Ed McBain as a teenager, readers may well like the sense of familiarity the repetition creates.
Not only are we sexy, but we’re also smart. In this article on Intelligence.com, Science Explains Why People Who Love Writing Are Smarterthere’s plenty of evidence to show why we writers are in touch with our emotions, better at learning and also following an activity that’s great therapy.
I know that none of you will disagree with it, though I’ve got to say that after recently finishing two months of querying 88 literary agents I feel about as sexy as a floor mop!
I have a feeling that this post will be about a quandary that doesn’t really have an answer.
I have a tendency to grasp tricky concepts, notice fine details and see things laterally—while missing the blooming obvious! The thought came to me last night while re-reading my last novel, that there werequitea lot of chapters—50—which made me wonder if it was too many.
A typical word count for my chapters is 1,600-2,250. I write crime novels, though I haven’t tailored the word count as being ideal for readers of this genre. Rather, it’s come about naturally, fitting the requirements of the mini-story that each chapter essentially is, imparting a discrete part of the whole. I’m conforming to the expected length of 80,000 words for a debut novel by an unknown author.
Chapters can be of any length, of course, and in my reading, I’ve seen one-word chapters and even blank pages used to convey emotion, while some authors don’t bother with chapters at all. With my longer chapters, I’ve used two or three section breaks, when the scenes described are potentially connected—through being a story about a criminal investigation, but I leave it up to the reader to decide the significance. They like to work things out before the detective protagonist.
I like a bit of variety in chapter length, for several reasons. One is that if a reader sees the next chapter is short, they may keep on reading—and if you prime that chapter with something intriguing, they may go onto the next!
Is chapter length something that you consider when writing erotica, romance, fantasy or science-fiction?
I’ve jokingly referred to writing novels as playing with my imaginary friends in various posts. Many children have imaginary friends, and I was no exception.
I had good cause to create an ally, for when I was three years old my privileged world was invaded by twin sisters. I loved them, but the attention definitely shifted from toddler me to entrancing babies. My role altered too, for suddenly I was a helper and protector.
To cope, I invented Peter—an invisible brother, who did all of the naughty things that I would never do. He stuck around for a couple of years until I went to infant school, where I suddenly had battles to fight alone.
Peter returned to me last night, as I waded through another round of editing my WIP. He came into my mind as an idea for a short story about a writer being haunted by a ghost that looks like himself.
It made me wonder if writers are prone to having kept company with imaginary friends when youngsters—an early manifestation of their creative powers, perhaps….
I’ve met my doppelgänger too, and it gave me great pause for thought. I lived in Southsea as a student in the mid-80s, which has a village feel to it and is the part of Portsmouth next to the sea. Occasionally, a passing car would beep me, and I’d think “I don’t know anyone with a white VW—who was that?”. Once someone hailed me from the other side of the road and even started to cross over before changing their mind.
I didn’t think too much of it until I went out to my neighbourhood store for some Saturday night snacks. Standing patiently in a long queue, I suddenly felt a hand creep between my legs and give my undercarriage a friendly tweak! I turned around to see a complete stranger, a woman some years younger than me who blushed furiously saying “I’m sorry, I thought you were Robert. You look just like him from behind.”
“Well, do I feel like him from behind?” I asked. It turned out she’d been picked up by this man in a club, spent the night with him, and he hadn’t contacted her since. She told me that he worked in a local wine bar, so I went along to have a look at him one lunchtime. He did indeed look like a version of me—though not as tall, handsome or sexy (tee-hee), and could have passed for my little brother.
When I told Robert about the incident in the store where I got goosed and described the girl, he replied gracelessly “Oh her, she’s a bloody nightmare.”
After meeting him, all of the cases of mistaken identity fell into place. Then I had the dreadful thought of what would happen if he robbed a bank—eyewitnesses would finger me as the culprit!
Remembering this incident, I wrote a novella called ‘A Man Out Walking His Dog’, about a man doing just that who discovers a murder victim floating in a river. The story was prompted by my experience of mistaken identity, and hearing that phrase so often on the news—dog walkers are often the first people to find a corpse—something they don’t tell you in the pet shop when you buy a puppy.
A pushy detective tries to frame him for the crime, as he resembles the real killer who’s seen by unreliable witnesses in the area at the same time. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fickle and, all too often, shockingly inaccurate—a situation made worse if coerced by a biased policeman. My accused man escapes by the skin of his teeth, thanks to a video of the killer that his victim made on her iPhone.
We all like to think we’re unique, but we have replicants walking around somewhere—doing good and bad things without our permission!
Did any of you have friends that nobody else could see?
Research suggests that 80% of readers hear a ‘voice’ when reading a story, with only 11% denying that they heard an inner voice at all.
This made me wonder about how much to tailor the conversations in my novels, giving them a sprinkling of dialect, while avoiding spelling words phonetically. My crime novels are set in Cornwall, which has its own language, rich Celtic culture and a distinctive accent. Here’s a good example of it:
As mentioned in the video, there are emmetsa-plenty in Cornwall. These are incomers from out of county, mainly holidaymakers who swarm around like ants, giving the locals much of their income from tourism. Many stay and settle. Some of my fictional characters are Cornish born and bred, while others have moved here. This has caused me a certain amount of head-scratching in how to differentiate their accents and attitudes.
Over the years, there’s been some fuss made about how the Cornish accent is spoken in television dramas. An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Innwas panned because the cast mumbled their words making them hard to understand. The hugely successful new adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark stories has gone the other way, with most of the actors avoiding anything that sounds like a West Country burr. Only the farm labourers, the ignorant unwashed oiks attempt an ‘ooh arr, yes sur‘ country bumpkin way of speaking.
