When winter begins to descend on wild and woolly Cornwall, I start to dread the cold days ahead. My flat in uninsulated, so while I enjoy 90-100 degrees in the summer becoming the nude novelist, I’m swathed in twenty garments to get through the months from December until April; it’s dropped to 39 degrees overnight.
It’s just as well that I’m hardy, but I stumbled across the answer to my frozen nether regions. It’s called a Kotatsu and is a Japanese device that combines bedding material with a table that has a heater beneath. If I can buy one in the U.K., I might just hibernate for five months!
By coincidence, I came across this article, which offers some useful advice (albeit slightly tongue in cheek) about the silly mistakes that writers make with their early stories:
I say by coincidence, as the article’s author Bill Ferris mentions using all of the senses. I was faced with writing a scene in my new novel that night, which is set at a garage fire where the owner has apparently died through carelessly smoking around a leaking welding gas cylinder. This incident is actually a crime committed by the psychopath retired detective who appears in the next novel in the series.
Describing the scene of the burned down car workshop, I knew that it needed some extra punch apart from saying how the dead owner’s legs looked like large sticks of charcoal. I recalled an incident from my days as a housing officer when I was a callow twenty-something. I thought that I knew it all, but I plainly didn’t. I accompanied a senior housing inspector to check a flat where there’d been a fire, which killed the elderly tenant. He had to authorise the repair work needed, and as we looked around I was puzzled by the strange black strips hanging from the ceiling beneath the seat of the fire, as well as the acrid smell. I was informed that both were what was left of the tenant, with remnants of flesh flying upwards, adhering to wherever they touched and providing a background smell of burnt barbecue!
I managed not to throw up, but this experience at least came in useful forty years later to describe something that most people don’t think about. Our sense of smell is one of the most evocative for making a memory, and my fictional scene of death was enhanced by adding a few details about the scent in the air, as well as the repellent taste in the back of the mouth of the detectives.
These days, I always go back through my work in progress, to see if descriptions can be improved by adding to how the protagonists sense things.
FOOTNOTE: That burnt-out flat took a couple of months to renovate, needing a complete replastering, not just to repair the damage, but to remove the smell of burning. It took even longer to rent out again, as no local people on the housing waiting list wanted to live in a place where an old lady had burned to death. It was eventually rented to a couple who moved to the area from hundreds of miles away.
This article in Literary Hub (well worth subscribing to their free newsletter) made me smile, as I recognised many of the feelings that the author Sloane Crosley experienced about the size of her novel.
(I love the illustration for the article—lost in a book—now there’s a bookmark)
My first novel The Perfect Murderer, written in 2014, was imperfect largely because it was double the length of what a debut work by an unknown author should be, at some 179,000 words. I did some heavy editing and removed 40,000 words. I still have faith in it and know that attempting to cut it down to 100,000 words would be as successful as cutting the neck off a giraffe to make an antelope.
Instead, I viewed it as a learning experience, and it now takes a place as the second novel in my Cornish Detective series. I wrote a prequel to The Perfect Murderer, called Who Kills A Nudist? I kept a close eye on the word count, bringing it in at an acceptable 80,000 words.
I had another feeling of recognition for the plight of author Joshua Ferris, who is interviewed by his editor in the linked article from Sloane Crosley’s.
He had similar problems with the size of his book, having to lose a vast chunk of it. Reagan Arthur, his editor, also called him to task about using the word ‘Jew’ to describe a character in one of his novels. I had similar problems writing my new first novel, as it features nudists, the gay community and BDSM, all of which have politically correct connotations that are formally given respect in the media, even if they’re poked fun at colloquially.
It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, without appearing that I’m being judgmental in any way. My characters might say things that I would never even think. It might help if I were a member of any of these groups, but I’m not (honest!). Just doing the research for these aspects of the story made my eyes water…
Some subjects are hot potatoes, which makes them hard to handle, but potentially satisfying for a hungry reader in search of something a bit spicy.
After Stephen King’s article about whether a novelist can be too prolific, which I posted in the threadof that title, someone has gone and stuck the boot into him.
Writing in the Huffington Post, Michael Conniff has concerns about the quality of Stephen King’s writing – while still liking much about him. My initial reaction is that popular writing is rarely of high literary quality. This makes it easy for elitists to look down their nose at the commercial success of an author who sells books by the million.
Campfire tales, tall stories and yarns are no less worthy than a weighty tome that has been agonised over for style, language and philosophical message. It’s like comparing a hamburger with a haute cuisine dish of beef bourguignon – each has its time, place and purpose. I might read (or eat) something on the move when I’ve got a few minutes to spare that is very different from what I’d consume at my leisure at home.
What do you think? Is Stephen King a nobody novelist who just got lucky? It’s worth remembering that ‘Carrie’, his first novel to be a success, was actually the fourth novel that he wrote. He almost ditched ‘Carrie’, only finishing it at the insistence of his wife who fished the pages out of the garbage. Had she not done so, he could still be languishing on the slush pile.
Bookbaby, a website that offers print on demand, self-publishing and editing services, has a dozen free guides for authors. These cover a variety of things, such as epublishing, using Twitter, blogging and promoting your book, and are available as PDF downloads here :
It certainly made me think about the relationship between quality and productivity. I created a lot of writing when I jump-started my creativity in June 2013. It was impossible for me not to write, and nine novellas, four short stories and thirty volumes of poetry and song lyrics poured out of me – a literary Mount Saint Helens. 2014 was devoted to writing my first novel, with a few poems thrown in for sanity’s sake.
2015 was spent chasing literary agents, and all I did creatively was write four poems. From 2016-2018, I wrote another four Cornish Detective novels, hoping that a series would be easier to query with than a stand-alone.
All of this activity has given me an appreciation of the fits and starts of some authors’ careers, as well as the production line output of others. It’s always puzzled me how some writers take so long to produce a new novel, while others appear to be one-hit-wonders. Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things, which deservedly won the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction. Although she announced that she was working on a second novel in 2007, it didn’t appear until ten years later, called The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.That’s not to say that she wasn’t busy, as she wrote many essays and become an advocate and activist for social causes.
At the other extreme is British romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. She wrote more than 700 books, leaving behind 160 unpublished manuscripts on her death at the age of 98. Her worldwide sales are estimated to be anything from 750 million to more than 2 billion copies. You might think that she would have worn her fingers away with this output, but her usual writing method was to lay on a sofa and tell the story to her secretary, who later typed it up. In this way, she created a novel in two weeks.
I’m guessing that most authors are somewhere in between Arundhati Roy and Barbara Cartland in their productivity.
What do you think about the conundrum posed that being prolific means a drop in quality, while taking time produces fine literature?
Some famous writers were rather eccentric in their choices of where to write, with a few needing the reassurance of strange rituals and fetishes to feel comfortable.
I’ve heard of authors writing while standing up, which could avoid some of the health risks of spending ages sitting down, but would surely be tiring. There are lots of retailers selling stand-up desks these days, though I’ve yet to see a bed or bath aimed at horizontal writing.
Haruki Murakami has shared some images of his writing desk and accoutrements. I see that he’s another writer who works with music playing. I rather covet his reading lamps and am currently watching several flexible neck and Anglepoise lamps on eBay. I’m relying on a bedside table light, atop a suitcase next to my writing table for illumination at the moment.
I don’t have any lucky talismans around my computer, just a mobile phone, memory sticks and a wristwatch, along with a long-bladed Kitchen Devil knife with a serrated edge that I use as a back-scratcher! I think that this makes me pragmatic, rather than stylish!
Some more writers have shared images of their writing desks on the Guardian’s book page:
I think that I’d find sitting by a window with an attractive view too distracting, especially if I had birds to watch. The nearest window to me is ten feet away, looking out on a car park for the petrol station where I live, so not that attractive an alternative to my laptop screen.
The writers’ desks with views of the natural world made me think of Richard Le Gallienne‘s poem:
‘I Meant To Do My Work Today’
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?
She’s offering a good cash reward for the return of her work, so let’s hope that she sees it again.
I back-up my work in half-a-dozen places, including Google Drive– a free cloud storage service. Many writers have lost their manuscripts – which qualifies as the ultimate rewrite, I guess.
A female writer Catherine Nichols experimented with sending her query letter out as a man. She was shocked at the response she received and had the wisdom to extract helpful hints from the comments that got in the critiques.
I Googled her, and found that there’s already a well-known authorwith the same name, so she might be well advised to find another pen name apart from George Leyer!
