Category Archives: Writing

Getting Gooder at Writing?!

22/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Since returning to creative writing in 2013, I’ve learned a lot of new skills and some of them felt like scaling a frozen waterfall using ice axes and crampons. I mean stuff like formatting a manuscript, which made my brain melt as I attempted to understand the instructions in Smashwords founder Mark Coker’s free Style Guide.

It turned out to be easier to learn by actually doing it, submitting faulty versions of a short story to Smashwords’ Autovetter which told me what I’d done wrong.

Aspects of writing that I thought I’d be capable of doing, turned out to be complicated with subtleties…mainly linked to marketing myself and my books. Learning how to write plot synopses, queries to literary agents and which tags or keywords to choose to attract readers of ebooks all had me feeling like I was a trainee psychiatrist, not an author.

Selling anything requires trickery. I don’t mean dishonesty, just something that lures a customer into taking a bite at your hook. It could be termed Clickbait in that however you describe your book, including the tags, cover blurb and cover design, needs to make a potential reader curious in some way.

In learning how to do this, I’ve become very aware of what attracts me to a product, be it a book, DVD or CD. The title of this thread is provocative, for we all know that ‘gooder’ isn’t a proper word, but using a slang word might create more interest than my being correct with ‘How I’ve Improved My Writing’…which sounds pompous. It’s important to choose a story title that intrigues as well as informs.

When I read through short stories and poetry I wrote five years ago, the main thing that I correct is wordiness. Usually, less is more, as keeping things simple lets the reader use their imagination. I’m currently re-editing the first novel I wrote, having not looked at it for eighteen months. Leaving stuff in the bottom drawer always improves my eyes’ focus.

I recall wanting to write a crime novel that had literary elements. This ambition led me into using posh words and ten words where one word would have been better.. It’s stuff like having written: “The knife had left a scar on the fatty part above his left jaw” —the fatty part above his left jaw, what are you one about, Paul? I rewrote this as “He had a knife scar on his cheek” Simpler and conveying the same message.

Overall, I think that I’ve learned how to make my writing more forceful with fewer words…punchier. One of the masters of laconic yet dynamic writing was Raymond Chandler, who apparently laboured for hours to cut back what he’d written, and who said:

It takes time to distil a story into the written equivalent of whisky. Far easier to dash off what amounts to palatable but weak beer. As Mark Twain is deemed to have said: I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Writing a story shouldn’t force your readers into consulting a dictionary. Using pretentious and unusual words can certainly be used to show the nature of a character, maybe a snob who’s trying to intimidate someone. I did this in my latest Cornish Detective novel, where a murder suspect, a snooty art dealer, talks down to the detectives by referring to painting terms such an en plein air and wet-on-wet.

What I need to get betterer (!) at is how to schmooze. Ingratiating myself with literary agents, publishers and readers doesn’t come naturally to me, but it’s onwards and upwards, as these days there’s no choice but to be your own cheerleader. The biggest fallacy about publishing remains true—that a well-written and well-polished manuscript will automatically rise to the top of the slush pile. Your story may shine, but luminosity alone won’t sell it.

How has your writing improved?

Do you look back at early efforts and groan?

What aspects of writing and publishing intimidate you?

Writing

Still Breaking the Rules

22/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I completed editing my fifth novel as 2019 began, before sending off another barrage of queries to literary agents. I’m currently preparing to return to blogging and social media, with a view to raising my profile for self-publishing my Cornish Detective series. I feel like I’ve just built and furnished an ice station in the Arctic by writing my latest book, which I’m now leaving the comfort of to wander the cold wilderness, ill-equipped and without any sense of direction. Eeek, a polar bear!

In anticipation of receiving a blizzard of rejections from literary agents, I’ve been reinforcing my ego by reading articles about best-selling novels that were turned away multiple times.

There’s so much advice flying around about how to write and the best way to get published, that it’s easy to get buried by it all. One thing that drives me slightly crazy is when I see published novels, some of which have become bestsellers, break the rules that I’m expected to conform to. But now I’ve gone through another bout of making submissions, I again find myself mystified over the gulf between what we’re told to do as unpublished authors, and what really happens.

If I take notice of one frequently given piece of advice about how to begin a story, I’ve shot myself in the foot straight away with the opening chapter of my first Cornish Detective novel. Elmore Leonard states in his Ten Rules of Writing not to begin a story with the weather, though I may get away with it, as he allows it if it shows ‘a character’s reaction to the weather’—which my story does. Also, in my story, the weather becomes a character, interfering with the investigation of the drowning death of an elderly naturist.

Leonard’s advice about weather is regurgitated all over the place about what not to do, yet there are many fine novels that begin this way, including:

*Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit—Thirty Years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

*Charles Dickens’ Bleak House—London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

*Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre—There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

More recently, best-selling crime novel The Dry, by Jane Harper, thrusts the weather to the fore, with a malevolent drought that holds an isolated Outback town in its merciless grip: It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them, there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.

The drought had left the flies spoilt for choice that summer. They sought out unblinking eyes and sticky wounds as the farmers of Kiewarra levelled their rifles at skinny livestock. No rain meant no feed. And no feed made for difficult decisions, as the tiny town shimmered under day after day of burning blue sky.

The opening two paragraphs of my first Cornish Detective novel Who Kills A Nudist? are: The weather wanted her: she couldn’t resist its call. Salt spray coated the windows, a frill of wind-blown sand edging the frame. The photographer gazed out of her cabin at the breakers 50 yards away. A gale was brooding, as the nor’westerly tried a few breathing exercises in rehearsal for a full recital tomorrow night. This would be the third tempest she’d endured in her time on the beach.

Built a century ago, as a coastal watch station at the start of the first world war, the wooden hut endured. It flexed just enough to tease the wind that jostled it without animosity. She pressed her hand to the wall timbers in the darkness, feeling the structure pulse like a pliant lover ignoring the bluster of a clumsy brute. She was learning life lessons from her refuge, but couldn’t stay hidden forever.

The story is set in the wettest winter on record so it would have been foolish to ignore it. The weather is obstructive to the investigation, literally destroying the crime scene when a storm surge removes the top eight feet of the beach!

I’ve considered rewriting the opening (for all of two seconds), but decided against it, partly as the weather is such a dominant feature of Cornwall’s rugged landscape. Even the beautiful Mediterranean-like beaches and ocean turn lethal; my latest novel begins with two murder victims being retrieved from the sea.

Apart from weather advice from writing gurus, other things that irk me include:

* Not overusing adverbs and adjectives. I admit, writing can often be improved by pruning these, as I recently did with the help of the Hemingway Editor app.

When lost in full flow while writing, it’s easy to get over-flowery. One thing that I noticed about my own writing, was that superfluous adverb use was often a form of tautology.

Having seen the value of removing adverbs, the world’s first writing billionaire J. K. Rowling sprinkles them through her prose like confetti. As adverb hater, Stephen King bitchily observed: “Ms Rowling seems to have never met one [adverb] she didn’t like”

* Leave out the bit that readers skip. This will remain one of the mysteries of the writing nebula! If you take this advice to mean, don’t get too wordy with detailed descriptions, then fine, for hinting at things with a sketch is always better than making an accurate engineering drawing.

But, just from feedback from my beta readers, there are some who skip over the violent passages, while others race ahead to get to the dialogue as if the meaning can be entirely understood by what the characters say. I included a lovemaking scene in my latest novel, the first one in the series, which so embarrassed one reader that she said she preferred it when my protagonist got stabbed with a sword!

What writing advice confuses and enrages you?

Which bits do you ignore?

Writing

Strange Ambitions

22/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

So far as a master plan for my series of Cornish Detective novels goes, I remain sardonically inclined to think that anything I plan won’t turn out how I think.

As Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang advised: ‘It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.‘

Publishing is such a crazy business: writing that’s utter drivel becomes best-selling, while well-written stories languish neglected.

Should things go well, it would be gratifying to see my novels sell respectably, before being snapped up by a television company to be adapted into a crime drama series, which will help sales of the books.

That’s what I’ve been working towards over the last five years. Beyond such pie in the sky thinking, I’m aware that there could be fallout consequences, which I’ve tried to embrace the potential of in these four strange ambitions:

1) My Cornish Detective stories spark off a tourist trail, with readers trying to find the locations crimes happened, where my detective lives, which Indian restaurant he uses, where he had a fight to the death with a kinky art dealer.

After all, this sort of thing happens with successful books. Think of the bookish tourists visiting Sherlock Holmes’ 221B Baker Street in London (and in Pennsylvania).

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales have become the basis for various tourist trails in London and Edinburgh.

King’s Cross Station

The locations in New Zealand chosen for the film adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings continue to boost tourism. Living in Cornwall, I’m well aware of the effect successful books have on increasing visitors to places used by Daphne Du Maurier in her ever-popular novels, and, more recently, the television adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark series saw the tills ringing. Fans of the Inspector Morse crime novels and television series flock to Oxford where they were set.

2) Have a Wikipedia page, preferably one with a few fibs!

3) Be known as “the writer of”, as in “Paul Whybrow, the writer of the Cornish Detective series.” Inextricably linked in this way might well become tedious and frustrating, but it’s a rarely acknowledged aspect of fame. Just think of successful artists of all types, who are labelled with their most successful work, as if that’s all they’ve ever done.

4) Also, once I’m dead, some crime writer is hired by my publisher to continue my series. Let’s hope it’s someone good!

What, in your heart of hearts, are your secret ambitions as an author?

To have your book title on a T-shirt?

To be besieged by adoring fans at a book signing?

To overhear two readers talking about your book?

For ‘Author’ to be added beneath your name on your gravestone?

Writing

The Writer & their Story

22/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

For me, one interesting aspect of writing novels is how my relationship with the story alters. From conception to planning, through creation, (including fact-checking), and on to completion—followed by multiple read-throughs as I edit—the manuscript shifts shape. My responses to it alter too, though they are for the most part benign.

It starts with the germ of an idea vaporous suppositions about what would happen if…?

My latest Cornish Detective novel was sparked by contemplating the importance placed on possessions over relationships, how success was judged by what someone owned, rather than what they did for others. Seeing the crazy prices that art fetches at auction made me wonder what an art lover would do to get his hands on a painting, and how far he’d go to protect his collection. Immensely valuable items get stolen, so organised crime gangs enter the picture, with paintings being used as collateral to ensure dodgy deals go through. Cornwall is famed for its art scene, and there have been some dubious sales involving forgery brought to court in recent years, so I had the ideal backdrop for my story.

Creating a story goes through several stages, which feel like this to me:

Stage 1: Beachcombing.

Head down, concentrating on ideas that have washed up, I decide which ones to use.

Stage 2: Jungle Gym

There are many ways I can write my tale, but I need to bear in mind how the route I take will affect my readers. I make them work to understand what’s happening with the investigation, but there are a few whoopee slides to take them by surprise.

Stage 3: Woodworking

Having constructed my story, I need to tidy it by editing, in the same way as a carpenter planes and sandpapers furniture, before applying varnish in a final polish.

Stage 4: Ennui (Happy-Sad)

As tightly edited as I can make my manuscript, I always experience a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction from having completed a project. I’m kind of proud to have written a novel, but go through the literary equivalent of that conundrum “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” which goes “If a book is written but no one has read it, does it really exist?”

Stage 5: Leave home!

Finally, I feel like I’ve created a troupe of five innocent little dancers, in writing five Cornish Detective novels, who’ve yet to show off their moves in the big, bad and critical world of publishing. They dance well together, but will anyone like their act? How do I sell my babies? What will happen to them?

How do you see your book?

What sort of thing is it?

Does it haunt you?

Writing

Bloated Writing

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

As writers, one of the most commonly given pieces of advice is to cut excess detail, pruning the flowery passages that looked so good when we wrote them in a euphoric burst of inspiration, our fingers a blur on the keyboard. Less is More is the mantra.

Elmore Leonard cryptically claimed: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it”

Much as I love his books, his style is as bare and parched as a sun-bleached horse skull. Colette was equally blunt, but offered more of a clue about what’s needed to avoid bloat.

My first Cornish Detective novel, The Perfect Murderer, was written before I learnt about recommended word limits. I may have been swayed by reading two very long novels at the time, Donna Tartt’s Secret History (193,000 words) and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde (322,080 words).

I queried agents with that story, eventually cottoning on to what was the main problem with my manuscript when one commented that although he loved the premise and my writing, it was simply too long. I edited it down by 40,000 words to 139,000. I may return to hack away more, though I can’t see how without a major rewrite, as it’s such a complex plot. Also, my two readers, merciless critics both, not given to pulling punches, didn’t notice the length. This had me thinking that just as a well-proportioned athlete isn’t considered obese, even if they’re heavy, then a well-paced story disguises its length.

J. K. Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike crime novel Lethal White has been criticised for being bloated. She does have form. It’s worth remembering that, while her first Harry Potter novel came in close to the recommended word count of 80,000 for a debut by an unknown author. Her second story was a bit longer, but then she embraced loggorrhoea in a ‘too much ain’t enough’ way!

1) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/ Sorcerer’s Stone: 76,944 words.

2) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: 85,141 words.

3) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: 107,253 words.

4) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 190,637 words.

5) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 257,045 words.

6) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: 168,923 words.

7) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 198,227 words.

The thing is, you don’t criticise the goose that’s laying the golden eggs—do you?

I was living in America when Harry Potter became a publishing phenomenon, and I read the first three novels to my then wife. We got one-third of the way through Goblet of Fire before giving up, as it was flabby and self-indulgent, disappearing up its own backside!

J. K Rowling isn’t the first author to take flak for verbosity. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye was widely panned when published, with critics saying, among other things, that it was “too long“ and “monotonous“. When confronted with the six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Duke of Cumberland remarked to the author: “Another damned, thick square book…always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?”

As Ambrose Bierce observed: “The covers of this book are too far apart.”

Having said that, these days, thanks partly to the success of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice, adapted into the epic Game of Thrones, there’s been a whole slew of mega-novels in the Fantasy genre.

While this might work in Fantasy, as well as Science Fiction and Historical novels, I can’t help thinking that for other genres, it’s got to be a case of diminishing returns for an author to spend years writing extremely long stories.

In the winter of 2018, I completed my fifth Cornish Detective novel, which comes in at 90,000 words—10,000 more than the previous three—but I’m OK with that, as it signifies a sea change in my protagonist’s character. The plot included two new elements with my hero falling in love and lust, only to be in a fight to the death two days later, which sees him and his opponent on life support at the end of the book. I’m hoping that by the time my faithful readers (?) have read the story arc of my detective, that they’ll not mind a slightly longer tale. After all, previously published crime writers, such as Jussi Adler Olsson, James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly write series that are as much portraits of their characters and their family lives, as they are about the investigation they’re running. Readers read on because they’ve bonded with the protagonist, their relatives and their cohorts.

Have you read any stories that you thought needed pruning?

How do you tackle bloat in your own writing?

Writing

Becoming Invisible

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

I came across this quote from Philip Pullman, taken from his book of essays on storytelling Daemon Voices:

We who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that just because the reader is interested in the story, they’re interested in who’s telling it. A storyteller should be invisible as far as I am concerned.

It reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s admission, as found in her book on writing Negotiating With The Dead

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

It’s inevitable that some of our personal views will permeate the text.

Some authors of fiction deliberately take a stance that reflects their attitude, be it political, feminist, about gender fluidity or man’s desecration of the planet. Consider Charles Dickens’ writing, which contained important messages about poverty, inequality and social deprivation, which was based on personal experience.

The problem with remaining invisible is that in these days of self-promotion, selfies and blogging, we’re expected to share our feelings about what we wrote. Even if we’re only in the spotlight for a moment, that interview or videoed appearance remains on the internet forever…we wind up haunting ourselves!

It’s often stressed that we need to develop our ‘voice’—our own distinctive style of writing, but how to do that while remaining invisible feels like a conundrum.

I typed The End of my fifth novel last December, which produced the usual happy-sad reaction, before embarking on a couple of weeks of editing—which wasn’t too arduous a task, as I edited as I went along. However, after reading Philip Pullman’s advice, I’ll be on the lookout for places where I intrude as an author. Certainly, I share some traits and attitudes with my protagonist detective, but I don’t want it to read like I’m being preachy, using him as a mouthpiece.

Writing in the first person inevitably makes your story sound up close and personal, but it’s quite possible to do the same thing in, say, third-person omniscient if you mistakenly have your character reveal information that they couldn’t possibly know.

How do you handle the problem of straying into your own writing?

Writing

Keeping it Fresh

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

Even if an author avoids writer’s block, it’s quite possible to feel jaded by one’s output.

There’s a lot that’s rather mechanical about the writing process, when it comes to multiple read-throughs of the manuscript, editing away, thinking that you’ve finally created a version that’s faultless, at least so far as punctuation, grammar and repetition are concerned—only to discover a glaring error that you somehow missed fifty times!

Some writers love the task of editing, but whatever your attitude, there are various proofreading apps such as Grammarly, Hemingway Editor and Typely to assist you.

When I returned to creative writing in 2013, I did so after four years of depression, which my brain cells plainly got tired of, as suddenly I had a freshwater spring of writing ideas bubbling from me. Titles, sentences and fragments of verse erupted: I had to sit down at the keyboard to turn down the noise in my mind.

Initially, I wrote short stories, poems and song lyrics. Some of these were about aspects of life that were of concern to me, such as bereavement, being a loner, the aftereffects of having fought in a war (PTSD), mistaken identity and the search for love. Several poems became the inspiration for short stories and novellas.

I turned to writing novels in 2014. I completed the fifth story in my Cornish Detective series in 2018. I queried 88 literary agents and indie publishers early this year, which is my third major campaign of making submissions, totalling 650 times I’ve heard ‘No’! It’s hard to keep querying fresh, for there are so many hoops to jump through, to satisfy agents’ different requirements, that it becomes an exercise in concentration and humility.

I’m planning a return to self-publishing. In between novel writing, and even during, I’ve created flash fiction, poetry, short stories and novellas. Some of these were for competition entries, but working in shorter forms is stimulating.

Even if you don’t normally write poems or stories that are 50 words long, there are benefits to trying. For one thing, it forces a writer to consider word choice, refocusing your imagination. With no intention of releasing this work on sensitive readers, you might still get inspiration from it, that will intensify your novel.

Another advantage of compressing or condensing ideas into verse or flash fiction is that when you return to longer forms you’re more aware of the logline and tagline of your story….

Altering perspective in this way helps me to stay fresh. It’s very easy to get obsessed with the characters in your main project. But, changing tack doesn’t always provide clarity.

With the overbearing influence of technology and forensic evidence in 21st-century criminal investigations, I was starting to feel rather constrained in how to simply tell a story, so I took a break and returned to the 19th-century to write the second novella in a series about an American Civil War veteran. Far from being simpler to create, there were so many complicated issues to do with race and politics, that it was even trickier to tell in a cogent way. I began to yearn for the solid certainty of CCTV and autopsy evidence.

How do you keep your creative juices flowing?

Writing

Oh, the humanity!

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

How do you show the humanity of your characters?

There’s certainly a place for two-dimensional characters in a narrative if they’re only passing through. And, there’s much to be said for an uncommunicative monster relentlessly pursuing the innocent: no one much cares about the feelings of a shark, dinosaur or orc in Jaws, Jurassic Park and The Lord Of The Rings. But, if your characters are hanging around for a while, then they need some backstory or a current predicament that explains their behaviour.

I write in the Crime genre, which provides quandaries about getting the correct balance between internal thoughts & external action. It could be argued that one of the differences between literature and ordinary fiction, (including genre writing), is that literature portrays characters, but ordinary fiction is more plot driven.

I’ve read some crime novels where the protagonist and antagonist showed no doubt or emotion about a fatal conflict they were involved in. Such unrealistic writing doesn’t even qualify as hardboiled, which might be tough and unsentimental, but usually features a complex lead character who’s endured some tragedy that affects his actions; just think of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca.

Leo Tolstoy observed that “The best stories don’t come from good vs. bad but good vs. good.” If your antagonist, the baddy, has elements of decency, then they’re a lot more interesting than being evil through and through. The same applies to any protagonist who struggles with character flaws. Jo Nesbø’s detective Harry Hole is a weak-willed recovering alcoholic, not averse to drugs, who’s wildly disorganised with a chaotic love life that leads him into risky sexual encounters. His determination and desire to see justice done sees him through. For all of his weaknesses, it’s his love of his fellow man that endures.

The title of this post comes from radio journalist Herbert Morrison‘s coverage of the Hindenburg disaster, the conflagration that destroyed a zeppelin of that name in 1937, which killed 36 people as it tried to land in New Jersey. Surely, one of the most emotional commentaries recorded, with Morrison’s own humanity shining through:

Having your faith in humanity restored by reading a story is one of the abiding strengths of fiction. Remember the struggles of the characters in To Kill A Mocking Bird, The Lord Of The Rings, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games and the Harry Potter saga? The protagonists and antagonists were all confronted with challenges that damaged their bodies and exposed their souls. A lesson taught by all of these stories is that one’s destiny isn’t set in stone and that we shape our moral characters by clinging on to humanitarian beliefs.

I jerked around my Cornish Detective’s belief system in the last novel, for he was almost stabbed to death in the penultimate chapter and still in a coma at The End. This experience will make him mistrustful and more aggressive. His basic decency survives, as he’s a generous man with his time and money, and does what he can to protect the wilderness, but he’ll have an unpredictable edge in the future.

Do you have any favourite characters in your own writing and famous books, who show their humanity in inspiring ways?

William Zinser

Writing

What Scars Does Your Character Have?

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

We all have scars—external and visible on the skin—and internal damage that we keep hidden, but which actually has more of a profound effect on our characters.

Scars on the skin can become conversation pieces, especially between new lovers. An intimidating facial scar on a rough face warns adversaries away, with an unspoken message of surviving suffering.

The world’s first billionaire author created a protagonist with a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead.

To be a writer, Stephen King said, “The only requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” Tapping into your own scars is a useful technique for unlocking the scars in your characters.

Scarring can be done deliberately…for ornamentation and as a badge of honour. These days, tattooing is common, and those with body scars sometimes opt for concealing the damage with ink. I knew a woman who had no interest in tattoos until she had a double mastectomy. Reconstructive surgery gave her breasts again, but an elaborate floral design helped her move forward with her new shape.

In some ways, we’re becoming more tribal in our attitude to symbols, with extreme body modifications that tap into primitive roots. Raised scarring of the skin in which the bulbous cicatrices and gouged depressions form a pattern are not for everyone, but many folk pierce their ears for earrings and some have their lobes tunnelled to contain a large plug.

Going back to the 19th-century, duelling scars were viewed as proof of manhood, with some wanabees faking their sword fighting experience by slashing their cheeks with cutthroat razors.

There’s a poem about scars, which looks at them in an unusual way. Written by Jane Hirshfield. For What Binds Us contemplates healed wounds as being a stronger union than a ‘simple, untested surface.’

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest-

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Jane Hirshfield

The protagonist in my Cornish Detective series is about to turn 50. In the last book, he’s fallen in love, but is then brought crashing to earth by being stabbed through his side with a sword stick blade. Obviously, this will leave pronounced scarring, and he’ll have damage to his hand—from gripping the blade to prevent it being withdrawn and used again as he flounders on the floor trying to take out his extendable baton to strike back.

The attack will also alter his nature, making him less trusting and more aggressive. His character was shaped by losing his parents as a teenager, emotional scarring that gave him resilience. In this way, I used a common trope in fiction…just think of the number of main characters who are orphans in literature and film; they’re vulnerable with a great capacity for growth. (Harry Potter shows his scarred face again.)

Another emotional scar came from losing his beloved wife in a traffic accident, two years before Book 1, which sent him into a couple of years of depression. Living with the black dog and counselling gave my protagonist more self-knowledge than many fictional detectives. Previous physical injury from falling off a motorcycle as a teenager, then being kicked by a suspect during an arrest, left him with a weak back—an internal scar, which he treats with Shiatsu massage sessions.

In my fourth Cornish Detective novel, Sin Killers, I used a heavily scarred character, who I based on a career criminal that I only saw a couple of times when I was a youthful dispatch rider in London. A veteran of Kray twins gang wars in the 1960s, he had a malign presence. A handsome man, if you only saw one side of his face, the other side was a gridwork of scarring…including a divot through his eyebrow and onto the cheek from a hatchet blow, which had darkened his iris to near black. My fictional henchman has a heavily scarred face, and he’s still a violent man, but he’s aware of increasing fragility from ageing and wants to retire to live aboard a boat on the river surrounded by nature. Outside he looks like death, inside he’s a naturalist who prefers wildlife to people.

Any scar is a memento of where we’ve been, but it needn’t affect where we’re going.

How do your characters handle their scars—internal and external?

Do your characters wear tattoos?

Morale, Querying, Writing

Resilience & the Writer

21/04/2019 Paul Leave a comment

As I neared the end of writing my fifth Cornish Detective novel last year, I had a rather sardonic thought—that I’m about where I thought I’d be five years after returning to creative writing in 2013. What prompted this bit of reflection was literally a reflection, for the screen of my laptop monetarily darkened, turning it into a mirror, so I had one of those ‘Aargh’ moments when you catch sight of your ageing self going about your business! Here was I, researching a fact about forensic medicine, for a crime novel that had taken me nine months to gestate—that may never be read by any fan of the genre.

It made me wonder how determined or maybe delusional an unknown author, in particular, has to be to keep their nose to the grindstone. Doing writing because you love it is great motivation: anyone who chooses becoming an author as the road to riches, in a J. K. Rowling way, is going to find it’s a rocky track with deep ditches either side.

All of this musing reminded me of something that noted writing guru Noah Lukeman has said several times in his books—that realistically, a new author should plan on it taking several years to get anywhere with their stories—to adopt a mindset that it’s going to be long haul. In answer to a question from a newbie author on how to query a literary agent when you have no proof of your writing ability, Lukeman advises:

You can attain major credentials on your own, but first you must prepare for a sustained effort. Instead of a three or six month plan to attain all the credentials you need, why not give yourself a three or six year plan? With that kind of time, you can attend writing programs, workshops, conferences, colonies; spend extensive time networking and build an endorsement list; get stories published in magazines and online; begin to build a platform; and most importantly, hone your craft extensively. This doesn’t mean you need to refrain from approaching agents before you accomplish all of this; on the contrary, as I said, there is nothing wrong with approaching agents with no credentials whatsoever, and you can work to achieve all of this concurrently with your approaching the industry. But you should always be working to this end, regardless. There are many specific, concrete steps you can take to help get you there (which I explain at length in my book How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent), but perhaps the most important step of all is your willingness to devote a sustained, multi-year effort to building your bio on your own.

(From Ask A Literary Agent (Year One)…a free pdf download.)

Despite this salutary advice, I still harboured the hope that I could earn a few quid from self-publishing my early writing as e-books on Smashwords and Amazon. I was right—I made a small amount—about $40!

After foolishly querying about 350 agents with my first Cornish Detective novel, that was an unfeasibly long 179,000 words, I edited it down by 40,000 words. I also wrote a new opening story at the acceptable length of 80,000 words. I queried another 100 literary agents and publishers with open submission windows, getting more favourable responses and learning how to target specific agents, stalking them on social media to find their likes and dislikes. One large agency, that handles writers, musicians, television programme-makers and actors, asked me if my first novel was part of a series—as it would be easier to pitch to a publisher or television production company.

That had always been my intention anyway, to write a series of crime novels, with a view to them being adapted into a television drama, along the lines of Inspector Wycliffe—which is also set in Cornwall, though it pre-dates the computer age, making it rather creaky.

This sounds ambitious of me, but why not aim for the stars? As Michelangelo said:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

Accordingly, I’ve now built a solid body of work, but in all honesty, how can I know whether it will appeal to anyone? Writing is full of uncertainty: no one knows what will work until it does!

William Goldman

Pride is an emotion I don’t exactly trust, as I’m more stoical in my approach to life, but I am proud of my Cornish Detective stories—and also of my bloody-minded determination to get them written—sacrificing most of what normal people consider essential, such as a social life and a love life. It’s helpful that I’m a reclusive old geezer!

The writing has been joyful to me, but what I’m not looking forward to is returning to the self-promotion trail. Navigating the world of publishing is like stumbling through thick fog with only a candle for illumination, banging the instruments of my one-man-band hoping to attract attention. That’s the feeling I get whether I’m chasing a traditional publishing contract or if I go back to self-publishing. No one else much cares what I’ve created—a hard fact of life every author should quickly realise—so it’s up to me to big myself up.

I’ve sometimes thought, that the best preparation for becoming a writer is to get everyone that you know to say “No” to you, when you ask them something, as it’s a word you’ll be hearing a lot when it comes to trying to sell your book. At least 500 times would be good preparation for growing a hide as thick as a rhinoceros!

How long have you been writing?

How thick is your hide?

Does being an oft-refused author help you cope with rejection is other parts of your life?

Do friends and family admire your determination—or think you’re just a bit mad?!

Paul Pens

Category Archives: Writing

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Strange Ambitions

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Becoming Invisible

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

Keeping it Fresh

Oh, the humanity!

What Scars Does Your Character Have?

For What Binds Us

Jane Hirshfield

Resilience & the Writer

Real Write, Real Edit, Real Publish