I haven’t written many sex scenes in my short stories, novellas and novels, though to my amusement a volume of erotic verse that I compiled from saucy verses I’d written was downloaded 4,000 times as a free ebook at Smashwords—four times more than the next most popular title.
I’ve no prudery writing about sex, but with psychological thrillers, unless the plot is driven by sex crimes, it’s reckoned to be an unnecessary distraction to allude to the love and sex lives of the detectives and villains.
I included one bizarre sexual interlude in my first novel, using a paraphiliathat most people wouldn’t know existed. This was done partly for humour, though, while I was writing it, I thought that the reader might wonder if this was my kink!
It isn’t, and nor am I interested in the gay BDSM sex that propels some of the action in my second novel, a prequel to the first. In this, the main baddy is a gay, manipulative narcissist who sexually dominates his underlings while running a legitimate luxury car business and illegal drug and weapon smuggling and human trafficking operations. I wrote a sex scene in his dungeon, that felt about as erotic as hitting my thumb with a hammer to me, but which some readers might be turned on by. I did it to show the dynamic of his gang, how they relate to one another under his dominion.
I run the risk of alienating some readers by making my baddy gay and a thoroughly nasty dominant master, as well as having folk think I’m like this!
I had a bit of a mental tussle with the place of swear words in my second novel. It’s a crime novel featuring a gruesome death, drug smuggling, illegal importation of weapons and human trafficking—all typical of Cornwall!
Given that I was writing about hardened detectives and violent villains, they shouldn’t have been talking like genteel vicars at a garden tea-party, but despite this, I didn’t include that much swearing. It wasn’t out of prudery, for I can out-swear anybody, and have, once causing a foul-mouthed Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer to complain about me.
My reluctance to use oaths in my Cornish Detective series is more that I fear it will distract from the flow of the story. Swearing is a useful tool to emphasise the tension a character is feeling when talking, but starts to look like the writer is going for a shock effect if peppered through the text. Anyone who has read Irvine Welsh (best known for ‘Trainspotting’) will know what I mean.
In real life, people often use expletives in a calm way when talking to one another, showing mild irritation at best. Funnily enough, I wouldn’t be having this problem if I was writing an erotic novel as I could use profanity willy-nilly!
Interestingly enough, recent research shows that having a large arsenal of swear words is proof of a healthy verbal ability and not poverty of vocabulary.
It’s always puzzled me how most swearing references sexual activity or private body parts, with blasphemy bringing in religion in a sacrilegious way.
You might think that rather than using things that we’re fond of, swearing would choose people, physical activities and jobs that make us disgusted. In my opinion politician should be a swear word! The only profession that is used as an insult uses Cockney rhyming slang, with ‘merchant banker’ being a euphemism for wanker.
How do you deal with four-letter words in your writing?
Does it bother you if a story is full of swearing?
There’s been a kerfuffle recently over writers not getting paid for attending literary festivals. It caused Philip Pullman to resign as a patron of the Oxford Literary Festival.
Do click on the link to the video of Harlan Ellison’s foul-mouthed rant about being expected to work for free by a major film studio—he tells it like it is, and he made me smile.
I’ve wondered about this too, as today people expect authors to give their services away for free by attending festivals to read from their work and answer questions. It’s almost as if they think we’re all monied dilettantes who dabble in creating stories for our own amusement.
As we all know, not everyone makes millions from their writing, even though we all work hard at it. I estimated recently that since the summer of 2013, when I returned to creative writing, I’ve devoted 10,000 hours to researching, writing and editing my stories. In that time, I’ve earned about £40 from my efforts. I’m not going to attempt to work out what that makes my hourly rate of pay!
Storytelling has been around for as long as humans could talk to one another. In the Middle Ages, troubadours or minstrels told stories to the public for payment, reciting traditional tales as well as those of their own making. Booksellers once took their wares on the road, flogging them from carts and panniers on pack animals. It’s as if modern day authors are expected to continue an age-old tradition, by being peddlers of their own literature, scraping a living from pennies.
There’s an old bit of advice given to writers of crime stories on how to move the action forward. It was given by Raymond Chandler in an essay called The Simple Art of Murderin a magazine called the Saturday Review of Literature, published in April 1950.
In the essay, he laments that while his stories may lack realism due to the compressed way that they show events, with only a limited group of characters, that:
This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
As I look back on my own stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published.
I remembered this advice, as I contemplated how to proceed with my second novelWho Kills A Nudist?I was at the midway point, with the murder at the core of my story and various subplots involving drug smuggling, illegal weapons importation and people trafficking adding murkiness to the villainy. My detectives are surveilling the suspect’s mansion from a boat on the river running beside his estate—their position means they can see things well, but not easily intercede.
Their suspicions about the main baddy being involved with bringing in guns from Europe are proved when his henchman starts playing with an automatic pistol while drunk. He’s apparently suicidal, placing the muzzle in his mouth, but they are reduced to being spectators owing to their precarious location. This scene provided my tale with tension, as well as unexpected comedy, and helped me decide the direction of the next few chapters.
The ‘gun in his hand’ needn’t be taken literally, for any unexpected event can move a story on. Often, we write such perfect worlds, with characters who don’t stumble over their words imparting just what needs to be said, and the action unfolding seamlessly. But accidents do happen, and people lose their tempers unpredictably.
Why not throw a spanner in the works and see what happens?
I took a break from creative writing over the festivities of 2018-2019, mulling over the progress of my Cornish Detective series, after completing the fifth story. Recharging my batteries seemed to help my enthusiasm, so I returned to querying in February, sending off 88 submissions. It’s as well to remember that what we do in creating stories isn’t a sprint, but more of a marathon with obstacle courses thrown in!
While reading about writing, I found this lovely lecture by Zadie Smithcalled That Crafty Feeling. It was originally given to the students of Columbia University’s writing programme in New York on Monday 24th March 2008. The brief: “to speak about some aspect of your craft.”
There’s an excerpt of her reading from her lecture here:
It’s worth a few minutes of your time to read. I recognised much of what she says about the relationship a writer has with their book. She uses the terms ‘Micro Planners’ and ‘Macro Planners’ to differentiate between the two main types of writers, more commonly known as ‘Pantsers’ and ‘Planners’. I’m definitely a Micro Planner or Pantser, though I do make vague plans on scraps of paper to guide my plotting.
I am at her ‘step away from the vehicle’ stage with my five novels, written over the last four years. It’s been a valuable period of reconsideration, and I’m glad that I didn’t rush to self-publish them.
The novelist’s subject matter is certainly controversial, and it set me thinking about some of the problems I faced in 2015, when writing my second novel, Who Kills A Nudist?
Briefly, the plot includes a murder victim found at the location of a nudist colony on a Cornish beach, used by mainly gay men. The likely suspect is also involved in drug smuggling and people trafficking. I have my own opinions on these subjects, but none of them are bigoted. My fictional characters, however, display hostility towards gays and illegal immigrants. People who are ill-educated or politically biased aren’t likely to use politically correct language.
I wrote a short sentence in the way that my right wing, hardline retired detective talks, having him say something about the gay nudists in a dismissive and inflammatory way, describing then as ‘deviants and shirt-lifters’. It’s certainly how he would speak, but it’s not how I think. It rings true, but has the potential to taint me—not that I’m that bothered, as after making 650 queries, I’m bulletproof!
All the same, it raises some interesting problems. We can’t make all of our characters politically correct, otherwise the narrative will be bland, safe and boring. An out-and-out baddy can go berserk, saying and doing what he likes, but what about more ordinary people who casually express opinions that might stray from what is acceptable?
Have any of you faced similar problems writing your stories?
I’ve heard all sorts of sad stories about writers paying publicity agents, or taking out boxed advertisements themselves, in an attempt to catch the attention of fickle readers.
The worst tale of woe was a writer who’d gone down the vanity publishing rabbit hole, then laid out an additional $9,000 for banner ads, paid reviews and even a couple of billboards! This resulted in additional sales of 50 books, so I dread to think what her overall loss was.
It seems to me that the biggest hurdle to overcome is simply that of finding a way to get your name into readers’ heads, along with the type of story you write. This was partly why I chose the eccentric pen name of Augustus Devilheart when I started self-publishing six years ago. I reverted to my own name, for various reasons including honesty.
Lesia Daria chose to pay a marketing service for her first novel, and her experience is told in this article:
Going it alone is not without its drawbacks, however. I’ve compared self-publishing to emptying a bucket of water into an ocean—who’s going to notice it? To stand any chance of success as a debut writer self-publishing, readers have to know about you via social media…which is what I’m gearing up to do in 2019.
Well-established authors do well with epublishing, as they already have a name to trade on. Many aged writers are digging out the old novels and short stories that weren’t considered fit enough to be printed thirty years ago and sticking them on their own web sites for sale.
Lawrence Block, who is one of my favourite crime writers, does this. He, and several other well-known authors such as Donald Westlake, earned a living back in the ’50s and ’60s by writing soft-core porn and pulp fiction. They used pseudonyms back then, for discretion, but are now proudly churning out their backstock in these less judgmental times.
One of the trickiest problems when editing a manuscript is deciding which words need hyphens.
Editing my third novel in 2016, I realised that I’d committed a lazy (but common) typing error, as when I wanted to type an em dash to mark a break in a sentence or an en dash for dates I’d used the hyphen key. The conventional QWERTY keyboard is inadequate in many ways, when it comes to punctuation, requiring one to use the numeric keyboard for foreign accent marks and the en and em dash.
Having corrected that error, I moved onto tackling numbers. I was taught as a youngster, to write out all numbers up to one hundred, except for dates, but from 100 on it was OK to use the numerical form. Looking online, modern style guides offer conflicting advice. Some say to write numbers up to ten, but thereafter the numerical form is acceptable. This looks odd to me, as well as lazy, though I appreciate that it may make the reading process swifter.
Using a sentence from my first novel, the way that it now reads is:
There’d only been five constables who’d died in the county in the whole of the twentieth century, and now a Detective Inspector lay murdered fourteen years into the twenty-first.
But, if I followed the modern style guides it would be:
There’d only been five constables who’d died in the county in the whole of the 20th century, and now a Detective Inspector lay murdered 14 years into the 21st. The corrected version looks more like outline notes to me, rather than a sentence fit for printing.
After writing my first novel The Perfect Murderer, I took a month to weed out filler words from the manuscript. My search was prompted by 43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately.When I started this exercise, I thought it would take a couple of days, but after noticing about 25 other words and phrases to remove I continued to plug away. Two months later, my manuscript was 9,000 words shorter.
I moved on to hunt for hyphens—words that need them, and those that don’t. This was time-consuming to do, and very boring too with none of the joy of creative writing. It set me to thinking about how differently I feel about a novel at different stages of writing it, then doing multiple edits, while trying to interest literary agents and publishers in it.
I’m apantser as a writer, plotting loosely while still having a firm idea of what the overall themes will be. In making outline notes for a novel, I do more sketching of the natures of my characters than making a detailed plot. My protagonists direct the story as much as me. This planning stage feels a bit like drawing a rough diagram of a building on a scrap of paper, something that I will inhabit with fictional people who’ll construct the walls for me.
Actually writing a novel, I feel both involved and removed from the process. My characters sometimes do things that I haven’t anticipated, but which are true to their natures. Writing a crime novel means strewing red herrings all over the place, as detectives try to work out what’s going on, so I don’t worry too much about mazes and dead-end corridors that appear. All the same, it can feel a bit like directing the building of my house/novel from a distance. Reading through the latest chapters at the end of the day, to see if it makes sense, is like trying to learn the layout of a new building.
Once finished, upon typing The End the editing begins. I become a building inspector, correcting features of my story-house—moving an illuminating window from one chapter to another, to reveal details that made my murderer act the way that he did. Overall, it looks like my story works, but as with any newly-built house, I know there’ll be plenty of bedding-in to come, with further adjustments needed.
Trying to flog the novel to literary agents, through queries and submissions of a writing sample from my story, requires so much polishing and hard work for so little response, that I feel like the world’s worst double-glazing salesman. While trying to ingratiate myself with these gatekeepers, my story house sits neglected and empty with no visitors. I don’t read it anymore, and though I’m proud of my creation, it’s also a museum of old thoughts. I want to make something new.
Tired of scrutinising my manuscript, which feels more like a forensic examination of each and every brick for integrity, I yearn for fresh writing challenges. I’ve become numb to whether the story works as a story, after picking sentences and individual words apart with tweezers and scalpel.
So, my novel has gone from a rough sketch to a building project followed by a second-fixing, correction, mopping-up exercise, onto being a product that I hawked from door to door, before I turned neurotic, micro-managing the elements that I used to construct my monster like Doctor Frankenstein.
Have any of you gone through similar shifts of attitude to their work?
