Many famous authors have used one or more pen names, and there can be all sorts of good reasons for the subterfuge – not the least, evading the taxman!
I used several noms-de-plume when I was writing magazine articles back in the 20th century, and sometimes these were provided by the journal involved, where various writers penned articles as a columnist with an established identity. One of the strangest gigs I had was as an Agony Aunt for a women’s magazine. I got the job through having I’d trained as a marriage guidance counsellor and volunteered as a Samaritan, and from growing up surrounded by women knew more about the medicinal use of yoghurt than most men…
When I started writing fiction again in 2013, I cast around for what to call myself. I have nothing against my own name of Paul Whybrow but wasn’t sure how memorable it is. There are a couple of other Whybrows who are writers, though they’re not related to me – one is Ian, a children’s author, the other Marian and she concentrates on art books.
I chose something that I thought would distinguish me from the norm, and which might stick in people’s minds. I had a couple of eccentric great-uncles when I was a child. One was called Edgar, which I didn’t fancy as a name, the other was Augustus, which I liked partly because of my favourite Roman emperor. I have ancestors who came over in the Norman invasion of 1066. Their family crest featured various elements, including a strange red heart shape with a devil’s forked tail looping upwards from the pointed base.
I’d used this shape as a mascot on crash helmets for years, and for signing artwork, so Augustus Devilheart I became (stop laughing at the back!), which I thought worked OK. After slow sales for my ebooks, several female friends advised me that some readers might be finding my pen name intimidating, thinking that I was a devil worshipper—so why not try my real name? I did, and it helped, though it was a real pain to have to change all the manuscripts, deleting them from the online sales sites and uploading the new version.
In trying to establish Augustus Devilheart as a creative entity, I’d joined various social media sites using that name. Some of these were easier to alter than others, and I found to my consternation that Goodreads would hold onto my nom-de-plume forever. They don’t allow authors to delete books published using a pen name. This made me think of them as more intelligence-hungry than the FBI, KGB, CIA and MI5 combined.
I was assiduous in saying that a book had been previously published using the pen name, by adding a note to the frontispiece and on my blog and social media site profiles. I rather thought that I’d left my former identity behind, until I received a spooky contact update from LinkedIn on my Paul Whybrow Gmail account, asking me if I knew Augustus Devilheart? Well, do I?
Most of us have heard of the phrase the power of positive thinking, which came from Norman Vincent Peale’s bestseller. It can be hard to see the good in situations that have stalled or plainly failed, and making lemonade when life hands you lemons is only temporary refreshment.
I once read a definition of the human body as being essentially a chemical factory, which is controlled through electrical impulses that are fired from the brain. What and how we think affects how we feel about our own selves and the world itself.
Colin Wilson has an anecdote about becoming aware of the power of shifting how he saw things in his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose. Wilson sprung to fame in 1956, with his examination of various outsider artists called The Outsider. He made a lot of money very quickly and was taken seriously as a thinker. His writing never reached such heights again, and though he studied and produced books on a huge variety of subjects, many of which sold well, he was also critically savaged.
He called himself, almost dismissively, a writing machine, and though he brushed aside the criticism he also suffered from panic attacks and bouts of despair. He was trying to fight off a panic attack as he was about to embark on a train journey to visit his publisher but had the insight that he was at his lowest ebb at that point, so was unlikely to be seeing things clearly. What if he flipped things around, and instead of panicking about the upcoming meeting being dreadful, look on it as being a wonderful opportunity for suggesting a new writing project? He immediately felt a surge of relief, which perked up his thoughts and boosted his physical being.
Colin Wilson went on to write about this process, which he saw as mastering his emotions. He was essentially trying to get away from feeling helpless, something which American psychologist Martin Seligman expanded upon. He believes in positive psychology and favours something called Learned Optimism, which is done by consciously challenging any negative self-talk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism
Doubt is something that affects writers a lot, and it’s not helped by the amount of time that we spend alone. I find that it helps to view doubt as simply a shadow, an insubstantial sign that the solid and good story which I created actually exists.
As author George W Pacaud observed :
‘Why inflict pain on oneself, when so many others are ready to save us the trouble?’
Block’s interest in the two types of writers was raised by a colleague at a literary conference, Arno Karlen who writes largely non–fiction. He gave a lecture in which he postulated that there’s often a very thin line between fiction and non–fiction. He cites Hemingway, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer as examples of reporters in the guise of novelists.
This made Block wonder about how he wrote things. How much was he using experiences and people that he’d known as inspiration, and how much came purely from his imagination? He gives several amusing examples of how he found it easier sometimes to write convincingly about people and places that he didn’t know than to create an accurate impression of those that he was acquainted with.
I thought about my writing and decided that I use a mix of autobiographical experiences and made-up stuff. I definitely favour factual details, though this is done more in a write what you know aboutway. For instance, I give several of the characters in my novel physical and mental ailments that I’ve had—gout, Reynaud’s syndrome (cold feet), depression and Aspergillosis—a fungal infection of the lungs.
Gout is one of the few ailments that one gets no sympathy for having—it’s always assumed that it’s your fault, through rich eating or drinking too much port and brandy. In fact, it’s more of an inherited condition (my grandfather had it) and is a form of arthritis. I’ve suffered various pains, including stabbing, being shot, poisoned (Black Widow) and broken bones, but nothing hurt as much as gout. Thankfully, I’ve only been afflicted a few times, and not for twenty years, but at the time it felt like my big toe joint was clamped in a vice that was being hit with a club hammer and heated by a blowtorch.
Ah well, it’s all grist to the mill, and I passed my agony onto the forensic pathologist in my novel, and her condition provided a turning point in the plot.
The Gout by James Gillray, 1799
The pitfall of being a Reporter style of writer is that one could come across as giving a lecture if too much detail is given. Then again, an Imaginer really needs to describe their creation in a feasible and convincing way. What sort of writer are you – a Reporter or Imaginer?
This blog has a dozen posts about physical and mental health, but I thought that I’d contribute something about raising one’s morale. Just as it’s easy to become a myopic, spine-bent, jelly-bellied lard arse by being a writer, so it’s easy to turn into feeling like you’re your own worst enemy spiritually—a self-critical slave to drudgery.
I’ve been collecting quotes, sayings, poems and aphorisms for forty years, and sometimes haul out my ring-binder files to boost my spirit with the thoughts of others wiser than me. There are thousands of things been written about the process of writing, but my four quotes here come from some very different men and can be applied to tackling life overall as well as how to approach one’s creativity.
Everyone knows Steve McQueen the film actor, a man renowned for his toughness, derring-do with cars and motorcycles, as well as his womanising. Few are aware of the tough start in life that he had, with a father who deserted the family, a promiscuous drunken mother, a physically abusive stepfather and trouble with the law. He was behaving in a very self-destructive way, but turned his life around with the discipline of being in the Marines, followed by learning the craft of acting.
He later observed that : ‘The world is as good as you are. You have to learn to like yourself first.’
Henry Ford transformed the automobile industry through the use of the assembly line. He may have done wonders for popularising the use of the car, but he was a vile man in lots of ways. Although he claimed to be a pacifist, he was also an anti-Semitic fascist who supported Hitler.
All the same, he was a go-getter and came up with some great advice about attitude:
Doctor Robert Schuller was Ford’s diametrical opposite, a Christian minister and motivational speaker. He authored over thirty books on the power of positive thinking. He was famed for his pithy sayings, but one of my favourites tackles the way that we tend to stop ourselves from doing things – often through self-doubt, laziness or fear :
The last quote comes from a hard-nosed union leader, whose father did a disappearing act. To be more accurate Jimmy Hoffa was probably ‘disappeared’ by organised crime thugs, with whom he’d had dealings. His son James P. Hoffa took over the reins of the Teamsters some twenty-five years after his father vanished. This must have required some moxie, and I like the double-edged thought he had, (which could be applied to borrowing ideas if you’re of a literary bent), as well as being firm encouragement to stiffen your resolve :
I’ve read conflicting advice about how a narrative arc should flow in a novel. I was delighted when I found a graph that showed how a story should have highs and lows, as well as longueurs when nothing much seems to be happening, and that the psychological thriller novel that I wrote in 2014 ‘The Perfect Murderer’ conformed to it. This was quite by chance, or maybe having read thousands of novels rubbed off on me.
This approved pattern starts slowly, as my first chapter does, before climbing steeply to an early dramatic peak – which happens in my second chapter when the corpse of an American tourist is found. My third chapter pulls the key police personnel together in a meeting to discuss the case, which shows something of their individual characteristics.
The problem is that if one is submitting just the first three chapters to an agent or publisher, then it’s not going to grab them by the lapels and say “look at this !” Some experts advise that the opening paragraph should be shocking and that the story should hit the ground running with the first chapter charging into the second. One way around this is to have two versions of your opening chapters – a sensational, make-an-impression sizzler for submissions and the real more sedate bookish form. Daft isn’t it?
I’ve not done this (yet!), but have used a tip to use a hook/elevator pitch in the first paragraph of my covering letter by describing my novel as The Silence of The Lambs meets World of Warcraft. This is meant to indicate the contrast in how an undetected murderer, a psychopath and The Watcher, a game-playing fantasist approach killing their victims.
In the submissions that I’ve made to literary agents, and those publishers with an open submission window, I’ve placed the elevator pitch in the introduction of my query letter. Many agencies ask for a synopsis in a small number of words. One requested just 250 words, which had me frothing at the mouth for a moment until I realised that it forced me to use my elevator pitch.
There’s a bewildering variety of formats requested by agents for submissions, and certainly no such thing as an industry standard form. Some ask for the first three chapters, others the first 5,000 or 10,000 words and one asked for the first twenty-five chapters. The most sensible, to my mind, requested three consecutive chapters from anywhere in the novel which I thought best represented my style and the action in the story.
I’ve read on various forums and blogs that there is a trend towards shorter story formats, owing to readers using iPhones and tablets on the move, where content is taken in bite-sized chunks. Increasingly limited attention spans and the need for instant gratification is also affecting how patient people are when beginning a book – hence the advice that a story should go BOOM right from the start.
I understand the need for a compelling hook or a unique selling point to attract readers but am really confused about the contradiction between allowing a story to develop with peaks,plateaus and even the odd trough and attempting to provide one cheap thrill after another. No one can stay permanently high, forever aroused and unfailingly interested.
I’ve just started reading The Horseman, by Tim Pears, which is the first part of a trilogy of stories set in the world of working horses on farms in the West Country in the early 20th-century. I have a wide vocabulary, but in the first ten pages, I encountered a dozen words new to me, mainly to do with saddlery and blacksmithing. The pacing of the action is slow, contemplative and absorbing, so much so, that it’s impossible to gallop through the page. Pears arranges words poetically. This Guardian review comments on the dense texture of the language used by the author.
Personally, I don’t mind slow reads that entice me into thinking about what’s going on. It’s not necessarily a formula aimed at making huge sales—as I’ve previously commented, many bestsellers are written at a level a 10-year-old could understand—but such rich writing is definitely in the running for literary prizes. Tim Pears‘ eleven novels have won at least six awards.
I read another award-winning novel recently, The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin, which happily took me six weeks to get through, slowed not by unusual language, more savouring the depth and breadth with which the author explored the internal dialogue of her characters, as they contemplated their relationships with loved ones, wondering what to do to make things right. I’ll remember them for a long time.
I may have developed a liking and a tolerance for rich writing, by tackling the intimidating Thomas Wolfe as a teenager.
Wolfe was wildly prolific, given to dashing off vast novels on whatever came to hand…receipts, menus, tissue, proper paper—only loosely organised into chapters, leaving the hard work for his publisher to do. He only published four novels in his lifetime but is the only author to have left two completed novels with his publisher before dying, one of which was one million words long. Reading Look Homeward Angelat the age of 17, I was struck by how voluminous his descriptions were of places, a real cosh to the senses, as sights, sounds and odours crowd around the reader. Truman Capote dismissed Wolfe’s writing as, “all that purple upchuck”, but William Faulkner described him as the greatest writer of their generation.
Try this description of food, which makes me feel like going on a diet!
“In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits– cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.”
This style of writing has fallen out of favour in the 21st-century, where there’s pressure to move the action forward, especially in much of genre writing, though Fantasy and Science Fiction allows an author to linger as they build worlds. I’m currently enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea: The First Four Books,which has thrown me into an alternative realm of islands set in an uncharted ocean.
Robin Hobb’s Farsee Trilogy also immersed me in a world that was both familiar and unfamiliar.
We’re advised to ‘kill your darlings‘…which means one sometimes has to eliminate flowery sections where you were showing off, but what if that perfect little bouquet of a phrase adds to the atmosphere of a paragraph? You might be striking out something that readers would have loved, that became quotable.
In my crime writing, I emulate authors such as James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane, who include plenty of their protagonist’s internal dialogue and observations on people and places they interact with, where the landscape and weather become characters, making the reader feel that they’re there with the detective—not simply following the actions of a cartoon character.
As Barbara Kingsolver observed:
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
If I edited my manuscript with word count as a priority, I’d remove some of the flavoursome ingredients in favour of a fat-free, low calorie, ready meal of a story consumable by the masses and with no nutritive content.
No one wants to make their story difficult to digest, and it’s not necessary to use complicated words that add density to a text, but surely we can write in a way that makes our readers think about something differently and which leads to them learning something new? As a child, I learnt much of what I know from reading books and looking up word meanings in dictionaries—I continue to do so.
If all someone reads isbland pap, what are they going to learn? Concentrating and persevering with a challenging read rich with ideas will create a sense of achievement—even if you disagree with what’s written!
How do you deal with what to leave in and what to take out?
Have you ever written anything that was too stodgy? I did, with my first Cornish Detective novel, which had too many information dumps, as I tried to explain the thinking of a traumatised war veteran turned serial killer. Trimming 40,000 words helped it flow rather than stagnate.
Are there any authors whose work you love for its concision, devoid of tasty morsels? I love Elmore Leonard’s crime stories, but he really makes the reader do the work of imagining what’s happening, following his own cryptic advice:
‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’
Which book overwhelmed you, by being too richly written?
How do you deal with denoting who is speaking and how their voice sounds?
I’m currently writing a short story, that’s growing into a novella, about a widowed hedge witch meeting a newcomer to her village, a handsome widower, who appears to have arcane knowledge, but is reluctant to engage in conversation about it, when she makes hints. To write their interplay, a lot depends on the tone of their voices—only so much can be conveyed by word choice, for them talking and me as the narrator.
Dialogue is one of the trickiest areas of writing to make realistic. Much of everyday conversation is full of filler words, delaying tactics, pauses and irrelevancy. For example, in writing crime novels, I’m well aware that when my detective interrogates a suspect, he gets results quicker than would happen in real life, where questioning can go on for days.
Mark Twain highlighted this dilemma well:
There’s also the problem of accents, for writing them phonetically looks patronising and can be awkward to read. Many writers, including me, drop the occasional colloquialism into a local person’s speech. In Cornwall, a greeting might be “Awright, me ‘andsome?”—meaning “How are you, my friend?” I’ve met some Cornish men and women, whose accents were thick enough to cut with a bread knife. Transcribing their speech accurately would be tricky to do and to read.
Recently, I came across a television spy drama where the writer, or maybe the director, hadn’t bothered with accents at all. It was an episode from Callan, a series that ran from 1967-1972. Well-written by James Mitchell, with great characterisation and brilliant acting, the episode I saw had David Callan captured by the Russian secret service. None of the KGB agents sounded Russian, rather their British accents made it easy to forget that Callan was imprisoned in Moscow. However, the skill of the actors conveyed with one shift of expression, what would have taken a novelist a dozen words to describe.
Curious about how audiobooks deal with this side of drama, I listened to several extracts from novels set on foreign shores, finding variable results. Should my Cornish Detective series ever reach audiobook format, it would be treading a fine line between authenticity and listenability.
It’s a common bit of advice from writing gurus, to only use‘said‘ to delineate who is speaking, partly because ‘said‘ becomes an invisible stepping stone to the reader. Emotion can be conveyed with judicious use of verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives—The suspect moaned“I didn’t do it”—but, this runs the risk of looking like stage directions in a script if it’s done too often in a novel.
Maybe I have too literal a mind, but I always imagine a character blowing up into fragments when I read he exploded.I have a running joke for my own protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle, who’s alert to finding out if he’s been given a nickname by his team, worried that his habit of whistling with amazement will see him called Neil ‘Whistling’ Kettle. He still whistles, a mannerism that’s hard for him to break, as he grew up whistling commands to sheepdogs on his family farm.
Things could be worse, for words often have more than one meaning, some of which are a bit rude!
After spending the last four years writing a series of detective novels, I decided to devote 2019 to self-publicising. I may well return to self-publishing, but as I throw myself into blogging and social media posting, I queried 88 agents and indie publishers who look like they know what they’re doing.
I’m not sure that I do, but one thing I’ve learnt about the business of writing is that no one knows what works until it does….such as when an unlikely-sounding story becomes a bestseller.
Over the years, I’ve come to a state of mind where I don’t mind being a bit lost, having a look around where I’ve unexpectedly ended up while keeping my eye on my ultimate destination. My attitude to writing and publishing conforms with my career path, which has wandered like an albatross. I’ve always admired people who knew what they wanted to do from a young age and did it, finding their choice to be as happy as they thought it would be. Not many people have this certainty.
I wonder how many writers knew exactly what their first book would be about and how it would be published—surely, only those who intended to vanity publish can be this certain. Like a fledgeling learning to fly most of us have trial runs, before attaining any proficiency.
Ultimately, the important thing is to get something down on the page…you can’t edit and improve what isn’t there. All the same, there’s little point in getting stressed about what you’re doing, agonising that your book will never reach readers. It might have been easy to say, as a legendary and reclusive writer (is such a thing possible in the 21st-century?), but I like J. D. Salinger’s laid back approach:
There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasionof my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. Idon’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself. I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange,aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.
I’ve always been comforted by an old Chinese proverb, which advises:
‘To be uncertain is uncomfortable; to be certain is ridiculous.’
In undertaking projects, I usually do a lot of planning, accruing information and raw material to complete the task and nudging what I’m creating in what I hope is the right direction—sometimes giving it a bloody big shove if it’s defying me!
Mind you, what I’ve accomplished were things that I had control over—rebuilding engines, repairing a roof on a 19th-century cottage, organising a playscheme for deprived inner-city children. The problem with writing is that though I can create decent stories if I want to be published traditionally, I first need to persuade a literary agent that my story is commercially appealing. Even if I self-publish, I have to sell myself and the books to indifferent readers.
During my recent round of querying agents, I found myself disconnecting from writer me to observe salesman Paul, as I analysed my introductory letter, synopsis and three chapter sample—wondering if I knew what I was doing and were the documents enticing? Even if I’ve done a good job with my submissions package, much depends on luck and timing, which are beyond my control.
I’d like my Cornish Detectiveto venture out into the wide world. Why is he still hanging around with me?
All any of us can do is keep on trying.
Do you know where you’re going to?
What do you hope will happen with your writing career?
It sounds like an unlikely source of solace, but I sometimes hear the lyrics of the theme tune of Mahogany, starring Diana Ross, playing in my head:
Some time ago, I posted about authors and their friends appearing in their own books and film adaptations, in a thread called You In Your Book
It’s still going on, for quite by chance, I’ve recently read three novels in a row which feature personal appearances. James Lee Burke’s excellent Dave Robicheaux series has long seen the Louisiana detective raising an adopted daughter called Alafair. In the books she’s an El Salvadorean refugee he rescued from a crashed plane. She grows up to become a lawyer and screenwriter. In reality, his own daughter Alafair is a lawyer and crime novelist. I don’t know how tightly he’s based his book character’s mannerisms on his own daughter, but there was an unsettling moment towards the end of the latest story, New Iberia Blues, in which Alafair is kidnapped and threatened with death by a nutter. It really looked like she was dead at one point, which felt ominous—surely, he’s not going to kill his own daughter, thinks I—but no, she survived. Imagine the atmosphere, if he’d bumped her off.
Sadder, was the way that crime novelist James Oswald handled the real-life death of his parents in a car crash when he was 40, by having his protagonist in his Inspector McLean series lose his parents in a plane crash when he was four. Write what you know, certainly: writing as therapy, maybe.
Touchingly, Amanda Coplin based the titular character of her debut novel The Orchardist on her own grandfather, who tended orchards in Washington state, where the story is set. It’s all the more realistic for being drawn from her own memories. She acknowledges his influence when giving thanks in the end matter.
In my Cornish Detective series, I’ve based two recurring characters on friends, with their permission. One is a retired social worker, the other a photographer and maker. I don’t steal details from their lives, striving more to capture their attitude to the world.
Have any of you used friends, family members, acquaintances or work colleagues as the basis for fictional characters?
This year, I’ve been writing a short story to keep me sane (ish) while I queried agents and indie publishers. One of the protagonists is an incomer to a village in decline, who’s purchased the rectory which was empty for ten years, during which it was vandalised. It needs restoring, so I went to write:
‘He’d be busy renovating his new home—even if he employed tradesmen.’
I paused, fearing the wrath of sensitivity readers—should I say tradespeople?—which looks clumsy to my eyes. Also, it jars with the dynamic of the story, where males are in positions of influence, and smug with it, unaware that the village really runs on the efforts of a coven of modern–day witches.
Etymologically, the use of man as a suffix came from it meaning person in Old English—there wasn’t a gender differentiation. However, political correctness has seen a few expressions of long-standing being replaced with descriptors that are gender neutral.
Actresses have become actors, police officer describes policeman and policewoman, and there are no longer air stewards and air stewardesses, but rather flight attendants. Surgeon has long been used, with no differentiation based on gender. Firefighter was swiftly adopted and rightly so.
Although some jobs might have gender-neutral titles, like mail carrier, people still commonly say mailman and mailwoman or postman and postwoman without it being seen as sexist. And, sporting activities appear to have escaped being lumped together: sportsman and sportswoman are commonly used, rather than sportsperson.
Other artistic activities have long been described inclusively, such as painter, though one still occasionally sees sculptress and, less commonly,poetess and authoress.
It’s a shame, in a way, that political correctness has led to smoothed-over, catch-all terms that are vague and which imply we’re all the same. Can’t we celebrate the differences anymore, by acknowledging that someone is masterful at what they do with a special word, such as a female pilot who is worthy of being called the delightful-sounding aviatrix—rather than the bland aviator?
How do you handle potentially sexist expressions, terms and job descriptions?
