Category Archives: Writing

Unexplained Sources of Income

25/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

It always helps a protagonist in a novel, if they’re comfortably off. Money is a great aphrodisiac, encouraging intimacy in luxurious surroundings, not to say kinkiness that would be rejected if proposed by a road sweeper!

And if things turn brutal, being able to afford weaponry, the latest technology, vehicles and the wages of disposable soldiers will provide more thrills for the reader than some lone tough guy with iron fists and a chip on his shoulder.

It slows things down if your hero has to work a 9-5 job. Much of Fantasy and Science Fiction storytelling sees the protagonist cushioned by the efforts of serfs or technological support teams.

Even ordinary-looking characters are given social cachet by money. I recently enjoyed James Oswald’s first Detective Inspector Tony McLean novel, Natural Causes, one of a series featuring an Edinburgh copper. Fourteen chapters into the story, he learnt that his recently deceased grandmother has left him a fortune of £5,000,000 in shares and property.

My own Cornish Detective, Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle, is a millionaire from the sale of his deceased parents’ farm and a life insurance payout when his wife died in a road traffic accident. He inherited another half-a-million from his father-in-law, (who turned out to be a serial killer), but gave his house away to a charity who operate women’s refuges, using income from the investment portfolio to run the place.

He’s unimpressed by wealth, his own included, as he’s more of a spiritual soul interested in art, music and nature. He’s toyed with the idea of packing in his career to become a painter, something which bothers his boss, the Chief Constable, as he’s a brilliant sleuth. He stays a detective because he relishes the intellectual challenge and resents the loss of order to society that crimes cause.

I’ve written two novellas in a series about an American Civil War veteran, who is trying to rebuild his life in the Era of Reconstruction. He’s a self-sufficient fellow, a trained blacksmith, but he’s helped on his journey by having been left funds and horses by a fellow veteran, he assisted in fighting off the KKK, before the man committed suicide. Giving him financial freedom enabled me to keep my protagonist moving, not having to stay static to work a job for money.

Ray Robinson did the same thing with his protagonist in Jawbone Lake, which I’ve just read, in which a software entrepreneur investigates the mysterious death of his father. His company is up for sale for millions, so he’s able to travel at will and help out witnesses damaged by dad’s criminal activity.

Forbes business magazine used to publish a list of the wealthiest fictional characters, the last list released in 2013…with the richest fictional character not even human!

Reading a story is escapism for many, so why would they want to stay in a world with the same financial constraints as their own?

How do your protagonists earn a crust?

Are they independently wealthy or wage slaves?

Writing

Swearing in Children’s Stories

25/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I recently read Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, the first part of a trilogy called The Book Of Dust.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but was a little shocked at the number of swearwords—not because they didn’t fit the boy speaker’s way of expressing himself—more because of the likely age of most readers of the story.

I’m not so naïve that I think children don’t know how to swear, but there is a danger that normalising bad language in fiction will lead to overuse in day-to-day speech. Swearing isn’t always a bad thing, as this article points out.

I’ve only ever written poetry for young readers, none of which had anything ruder than the word ‘bum’ in it. With my crime novels for adult readers, I’m well aware that there should be a lot more swearing in the dialogue, were I going for verisimilitude, as coppers and criminals aren’t known for being genteel. Instead, I have my characters use swearing in times of stress.

Various famous children’s books have included swearing, such as David Almond’s Skellig, which caused his publishers to have a heated debate over his use of the word “bollocks”—they left them in! It could be argued that the use of swear words is age-sensitive when young readers are leaving childhood to become juveniles.

Censorship of anything is contentious, but should young readers’ books carry warning stickers if they contain swearing? Sometimes swearing is a key element in the story. In 2014, Brian Conaghan published When Mr. Dog Bites, which tells the story of a teenager with Tourette’s Syndrome, a condition the author knows well, as he suffers with it. Every swearword appears in the text, but in a realistic way and not done to be sensational.

If you write for children, how do you deal with swearing?

Do you make up swear words if you write Fantasy or Science Fiction?

Writing

Why Are Writers…?

25/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

While researching a post on writers and mental health issues, I came across this screenshot:

Yup, got me covered!

Writing

Fantasy Writing Mentors

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

After going through a fallow period with reading matter borrowed from my local library, I recently hit pay dirt by finding some of my favourite authors’ books just sitting there on the shelf, waiting for me to come along!

Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage and the latest story in Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series The Overnight Kidnapper are like settling down to catch up with old friends. I was also fortunate to find a novelist new to me, Amanda Coplin, whose debut The Orchardist is superbly written—likely to be one of my favourite reads of 2019.

Thus furnished with good reading, I’m time travelling to an alternative Oxford, 21st-century Sicily and the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th-century. It makes me feel sorry for people who don’t read.

Laying abed last night, I wondered who’d influenced the authors I was reading and if they’d had a writing mentor. Mentorship requires a good match of personalities, some reciprocity where the guidance is given in an appropriate manner. All the same, you might learn some harsh lessons, so it would be wise to pick someone whose wisdom you trust.

For the purposes of this fantasy, I’ve chosen mentors who I esteem, but also who I think I’d get on with; there are some authors I like who I’d probably fall out with if I met them—for all sorts of reasons, including morality, drug use and politics.

Also, I’ve brought some scribes back to life!

Here are my fantasy mentors:

Crime Genre: James Lee Burke or Dennis Lehane

Literature (whatever your definition of this is): Alice Hoffman or Justin Cartwright

Short Stories: Guy de Maupassant or Michèle Roberts

Poetry: Mary Oliver or Pablo Neruda

Song Lyrics: Diane Warren or Mark Lanegan

All of these writers have complete control of their medium and they haven’t forgotten to include enchantment in their words.

Who would you like to lend you a helping hand?

Writing

Stringing a novel together

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I recently re-read John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and apart from being surprised at how short it is (163 Pages), what struck me about it, was the structure. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained short story. Some chapters feature characters who don’t appear anywhere else in the story. There’s some overlap from chapter to chapter, such as towards the end, when the hoboes plan a surprise party for Doc, but wind up destroying his laboratory then find ways to make amends

A novel composed of a series of individual short stories with interconnected characters is properly called a short story cycle.

Cannery Row isn’t really a short story cycle, but the loosely connected vignettes offering an overview of the myriad picaresque characters makes the reader guess how they’ll interact when they meet the next time.

A noted example of the style is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, in which the characters are linked by location but don’t form a cohesive novel. Published 100 years ago, in 1919, it’s oddly prescient in how it describes the continuing problem of individuals trying to overcome loneliness caused by living in a modern town.

Its twenty-two stories are disconcerting to read, as you briefly enter the lives of characters who express thoughts about identity and fitting into society that we all have.

More recently, Quentin Tarantino created a popular short story cycle with the Hollywood film Pulp Fiction, in which several stories intertwine even though they’re out of chronological order.

I read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge last year, in which the title character, a retired school teacher, is the axis around which the residents of a coastal town in Maine revolve. Her presence is always felt, even if she doesn’t feature very much in each chapter which functions as a self-contained story.

Such influences made me consider how I organise my own novels. In the latest, completed last autumn, there are several chapters featuring only one character going about their business, with plenty of internal dialogue: my protagonist detective takes time out from a murder investigation, to decompress by visiting the Tate Saint Ives; an ageing prostitute contemplates her clients, while wondering how to move on a stolen painting for enough money to retire; a cat burglar has similar dreams, as he cases a mansion he intends to rob, while imagining life as a charter fisherman in the Mediterranean.

I wanted to convey how, when lives collide, the characters’ motivations aren’t what they appear to be on the surface. A reader empathising with a character is more engaged than with a cardboard cut-out figure going through the motions in a predictable way.

Multiple points-of-view in a novel usually allows a writer to show different characters’ perspective on a story that unites them, but there’s something about penning a short story cycle which creates a disorienting effect in the reader (and maybe the writer) as the characters can be looking in different directions and are not necessarily there to serve a central theme.

I imagine this vagueness could annoy some readers, who prefer a focused approach to storytelling, but when writing a series of novels featuring the same principal characters, with minor support characters passing through, detailing individual tales could add to the impact.

I might try this approach with my next novel.

What do you think?

Plotter or pantser, how do you string a story together?

Muriel Rukeyser

Writing

Writing for Posterity

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

The longevity of our books is something that few of us think about, in the dispiriting scrabble to get published in the here and now. As William Saroyan observed:

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

Contemplating which successful and influential books published in the last thirty years will become classics, revered through the ages, it’s easy to be swayed by titles that sold in their millions, but surely there should be more to a book’s worth than earning money. J. K. Rowling’s books contain life lessons that will be relevant through time, whereas E. L. James output will swirl down the plughole.

A classic is a book that has never finished what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

A salutary thought is, that many books that are lauded as classics probably wouldn’t get published these days, initially rejected by literary agents, the gatekeepers of publishing, for being too slow to start, too long, too wordy with a confusing plot populated by unbelievable characters.

What made me think of this post, was researching the life of a forgotten mid-20th-century writer called Robin Hyde. I came across one of her poems in a newsletter, which prompted me to order her only book in Cornwall’s library system. It’s a novel called Check To Your King, which was first published in 1936. It hadn’t been borrowed from the reserve stock at library headquarters since 1996. Robin Hyde had a sad life, but was productive as a writer, until she ended things when the struggle became intolerable.

She wasn’t as successful as she should have been for the huge effort she put into her writing, but even wildly popular authors disappear into the mists of time:

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

Carlos Fuentes

With my own writing, any ambition I have is confined to maybe making a few quid, while entertaining crime fiction fans and making them think a bit about the issues I raise about life in the early 21st-century. The idea of writing for posterity, of being mentioned in the same breath as masters of the crime genre, such as Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard, is laughable to me.

How about you?

Will your gravestone become a place of pilgrimage for legions of loyal fans?

How do you feel about having your biography written by some nosy journalist?

Will your family be squabbling over the rights to your work, after you pass?

I like what one of my writing heroes Richard Brautigan said:

Writing

In Dreams

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Inspiration can come to a writer while asleep.

It’s a fascinating topic, as for one thing, while the body rests during sleep, the brain remains active, getting recharged, but monitoring functions such as breathing, cramp and how full your bladder is! It also thinks.

It’s said that sleep has two phases: shallow non-REM and a deeper REM period, when dreams occur. In the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to gain useful meaning from lucid dreaming. I mainly do so in the hour before getting up, when my grey cells are tussling between a desire to stay asleep in dreamland and getting up to do essential writerly tasks.

I haven’t done much creative writing for four months, after deciding to devote my energies to self-promotion, including blogging and querying literary agents. I feel the lack. To me, writing a story is like creating a garden, while editing is more of a weeding chore, but querying is as unrewarding as unloading a lorry full of paving slabs—tiring, repetitive and with no visible improvement—but, which might lead somewhere someday.

Thus frustrated, my noddle has seemingly been rummaging through European encyclopedias, which I didn’t know were shelved somewhere, as I’ve recently woke with some improbable names on my lips. I don’t know quite know who Terenjé Sesterciné will become in a future story, but I’ve added his name to a folder of character names on my desktop. Last week, I got out of bed thinking about Tezzarini’s Scorchers—who could be an elite squadron of space-age attack ships—or maybe, a red-hot chilli pastry devised by a sadistic Italian cook!

Wondering if I’d read these names somewhere online and forgotten them, I ran a search which confirmed it’s my sleeping imagination that invented them. I shouldn’t be surprised, as the brain is an astonishing thinking machine; that it’s not entirely under our control is intimidating.

Some famous stories were inspired by dreams, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stephen King stepped into a nightmare on a flight to London, which became Misery.

Have you had any peculiar dreams, which proved useful for your writing?

Writing

Book Length…long is good?

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

This article in The Economist surprised me a lot, for when they analysed the ratings given to books by readers on Goodreads, there was a bias towards long tomes.

It could be argued, that in a recession people go for items that appear to offer greater value. Perhaps, when the economy is prospering, there’s an upsurge in consumption of highly priced ‘fun-sized’ disposable items, including short books. Remember the Penguin Mini Modern Classics?

A couple of years ago, writing gurus predicted that there’d be an increase in sales of flash fiction, short stories and novellas, as so many readers consumed writing on handheld devices while commuting or on work breaks. In the last few months, publishing industry experts have noted a decline in the sale of novellas. This explains why so many novella-length books are being called novels—hoodwinking readers into thinking they’ve achieved something worthy.

The worst example of this I’ve read is the highly-praised The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, which at 160 widely spaced pages and 48,800 words is hardly long enough to be described as a novel.

Having said that, recently, I’ve been re-reading old favourites not looked at for decades, which have through time been labelled as classics. I borrowed a copy of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row from my local library, surprised that the Penguin paperback edition is only 163 pages long. Looking on the Reading Length website, it’s 46,110 words, which is little more than novella length.

This article on book-length offers some useful advice.

I’ve been targetting my Cornish Detective novels at about 80,000 words, based on widespread advice that this is a sensible compromise between content and length for a debut author. I chafe at the bit a little, for I’d be able to do more characterisation with 100,000 words.

I’m not sure what it means, but in my recent campaign of querying literary agents—88, so far, and counting—three of them stipulated that the finished novel should be at least 60,000 words long. Perhaps they’ve received lots of undersized manuscripts.

When looking at long books for reading matter, I tend to be influenced more by subject matter and whether I’ve read the author before, than by the thought that it might take me several weeks to finish. I’ve read several very long novels in recent years, including Neal Stephenson’s Reamde at 1,056 pages and 322,080 words and at a bit more than half that length, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History which clocks in at 576 pages and 192,705 words.

If readers see long books as better value for money than normal length offerings of 300-350 pages, then they’d be delighted to acquire Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet for 25p, as I just did in my local charity shop. I haven’t read it before, so I’m looking forward to getting lost in another world. At 691 pages long, it will keep me occupied for a while.

How long are the books you write?

What’s the longest book you’ve read?

If you favour audiobooks, do you listen to long books that way?

Self-Promotion, Writing

Using Pinterest as a Writer

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Back in 2015, two years after I returned to creative writing, I instigated several measures aimed at raising my profile as a writer—hopefully, to sell more books.

I created profiles on Twitter, Quora, and Reddit and Pinterest and began a writer’s blog via WordPress and created a Facebook business page.

I had doubts about how successful such social media postings would be, for there are hundreds of thousands of people doing so, including many, many writers. I subscribed to the notifications of about twenty established and newbie authors, to see what they were saying. I swiftly became aware that many were struggling to fill the space, while there was an awful lot of repetition of publishing news. If someone was prepared to express an opinion, taking a stance with a sense of humour, I opened their newsletters with a sense of anticipation.

Pinterest is an entertaining site, with wonderful images pinned on ‘boards’, but I was bemused by how it could be used to help a writer publicise their books. I came across the suggestion of adding one’s blog address to each ‘pin’, as a way of tempting users into checking you out; to make the pins more interesting, I added information about the image.

I put up a dozen boards featuring things that interest me, including art, nature, trees and wise words, including one board of my own ebooks. These pins were intended to drive readers to my blog—which has since mysteriously disappeared!

I backed away from developing these various social media profiles, for various reasons, including reticence about wanting to promote me as a person (why couldn’t my writing do the talking?), ignorance of the process and irritation at the superficial level people communicate these days.

Recently, I’ve decided to return to self-publishing, so need to find ways of publicising my series of Cornish Detective novels. One interesting aspect of uploading ebooks to Smashwords and Amazon, that hooked my attention is the use of what are called ‘keywords’ as a shorthand way of describing the plot.

Thus, my first novel in the series, Who Kills A Nudist?, would have tags of Nudism/ Murder/ Cornwall/ BDSM/ Supercars/ Smuggling/ Human Trafficking/ Firearms/ Organised Crime/ Surfing

Such tags could also be used as the titles for boards on Pinterest, as discussed by Teagan Berry in these two articles here and here.

It makes sense to take advantage of people’s interests via the boards, for if someone is interested in surfing in Cornwall, and is not averse to reading about kinky sex and murder, then they might seek out my ebook.

Do any of you have a presence on Pinterest?

Have you used your boards to promote your books?

What do you think of it as an idea?

Of all the photographs I pinned on my Pinterest boards, this one has been the most repinned—which says something about people’s need for optimistic images:

Writing

Pay Me The Money!

23/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

In my latest campaign of querying, I’ve selected 88 agents and publishers who I think would be amenable to my Cornish Detective series and who I think I could work with.

I made a submission to Boldwood Books who opened for business on February 1st. I saw news of their inception in the publishing industry newsletters.

The company was started by an experienced publisher, Amanda Ridout, and staffed by executives who know their stuff.

As they’re a startup, with no writer clients, as yet, their website is rather bare. Unusually, they requested the whole manuscript—rather than the first three chapters or 5,000 words—a practice I’ve noticed digital publishers favour more than print publishers.

They’re also relaxed about query letter and synopsis length, so I included spiel about the commercial reasoning behind my series and its Cornish location.

Approaching a publisher directly has advantages, but carries risks too, as most writers are clueless about contracts—which is what a literary agent is good at hammering out.

Boldwood is vague about contracts, which is kind of understandable as they’re new and funded by six private investors, but also slightly worrying. Statements on the site say:

“Your contract will be based on partnership principle and the proceeds of success shared equally.”

“Together we will build you into a global bestselling brand through energetic social media activity; dynamic pricing; collaborative retailer relationships and arresting digital advertising campaigns.”

Apparently, they intend to publish in all formats, with the first books released in autumn this year. Amanda Ridout is quoted as saying:

“We will start off small, but it’s all very scaleable, very quickly.”

Ridout added that the publisher would not be paying advances at launch—no surprises there, as the huge advances newspapers love to report are rare.

The press will look to acquire World English rights as standard, publishing initially in ebook, audio and print-on-demand, and other physical editions when required. Ebooks are cheap to release, but POD can carry fees and audiobooks cost a fortune to record if the narrator is famous.

I wonder how much of that expense will come from the author’s earnings…

As I emailed my submission, I found myself thinking of biker Jesse James, who builds choppers. To encourage customers to pay him, he has a tattoo inked on his right palm, which says Pay Up-$ Sucker.

Not quite the approach to take in the genteel world of publishing, but in trying to turn my books into commercial products that generate income, it’s always in the back of my mind (a cobwebbed place!).

I know that I can write decent stories, but I’m also sure that it feels like entering a pool of sharks when it comes to contracts. As billionaire financier observed

I’m not for one moment suggesting that Boldwood Books are doing anything shady, but setting sail on a newly constructed ship carries risks…think Titanic!

What do you make of Boldwood Books‘ vague assertions?

Paul Pens

Category Archives: Writing

Unexplained Sources of Income

Swearing in Children’s Stories

Why Are Writers…?

Fantasy Writing Mentors

Stringing a novel together

Writing for Posterity

In Dreams

Book Length…long is good?

Pay Me The Money!

Real Write, Real Edit, Real Publish