I came across a quote from one of my favourite painters, which set me thinking about how I write. In particular, how to tackle a couple of thorny scenes in my WIP which will see my detective protagonist do just that—decide something with his head or his heart.
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
I believe that readers remember incidents in a book that move their hearts, more than those that make them think. However clever your plotting, including red herrings, which makes a reader concentrate to work out what’s happening, it’s still possible to trip them up with a well-placed emotional scene. As William Faulkner said: “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
Ultimately, Sean Connery may have got things right:
Making the physical side of stories realistic is essential. If you’ve had experience of what you’re describing, it will show in your writing. The opposite is true, as I’ve read too many crime stories where it was obvious the author had never fired a gun or been in a fistfight or been stabbed. I know these things first-hand, not that I thought, at the time, this will help me write a story one day!
Writing dialogue is helped if you’ve got someone to bounce ideas off. If you’re alone, talking to yourself is the only option. It’s fiendishly difficult to describe conversation, as a lot of things happen apart from the words that are spoken.
Hearing voices in your head helps…it doesn’t mean you’re schizophrenic!
I act out physical confrontations, deciding on things like how many paces my detective protagonist takes, how much room is there to use his extendable baton or throw a punch and what furniture is obstructing the arrest.
At the end of the last book, my Cornish Detective was stabbed from behind with a sword. He beat his assailant to death. Lucky to survive massive blood loss, he’s recuperating, but has post-traumatic stress disorder, making him distant, argumentative and aggressive. In the new story, he’ll confront a Russian female mercenary who’s been killing for twenty years and has recently been murdering big game hunters for money. She’s armed with a two-foot-long machete. How will my protagonist react to the sight of a naked blade?
I acted it out in the kitchen, which led to me punching and kicking cabinet doors and hurling a kettle (empty) onto the sofa in the living room. I’m drawing on having once witnessed a fight between two bikers, in which the little guy threw a metal vice at his taller and heavier opponent, breaking one of his legs.
Having broken my toe acting out a scene in my dreams, I hope I’ll get the violence out of my system while awake!
Do any of you rehearse what you’re going to write.
Let’s imagine that a new environmentally aware superhero appeared, maybe with companions. Their only agenda would be to save the planet. Attacking loggers deforesting the Amazon, beheading whalers, scaring the bejesus out of polluters they’d be deaf to bribes from the 1% who are only interested in making money.
They could be angelic, even a bit demonic, but being good-looking would help the marketing! The realm of imagination is a safe place, but in reality, what would happen is that some numbskull trophy hunter would take aim at our winged saviours, so they can mount their heads and wings on the wall of their den. That’s if they’ve beaten the government to the punch, for they’d capture the superheroes to weaponise them to serve their evil purposes.
Think of the food and drink companies trying to sign them up for advertising campaigns!
If you write Fantasy or Science Fiction who are your heroes?
Which fictional hero can save us in the 21st-century?
Can a superhero be homicidal, while remaining politically correct and Green?
I’ve previously mentioned which stories I like, which tend to be ‘small stories’.
As for overrated stories and authors, I’ve never been able to take to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. At a time when we’re more aware of how we’ve endangered the planet, I’m amazed that a story about whale hunting is still revered. I don’t have the life left to waste on reading Finnegan’s Wakeby James Joyce which is an experiment in search of a plot. I’m not that keen on stream of consciousness novels, the technique that Virginia Woolf used for To The Lighthouse, which I re-read as part of my preparation for writing my fifth Cornish Detective novel, which features two corpses found near Godrevy Lighthouse. Woolf described her book as a “psychological poem”. Reading about banal characters in tedious situations who never get anything done certainly did my head in—is that psychological?
Years ago, I read many of James Patterson’s Alex Cross series and some of his many, many other series and stand-alones. It soon felt like opening one can of beans after another. It isn’t writing, it’s manufacturing! Using hired gun writers to do the hard work as collaborations doesn’t shift the blame for childish prose.
I don’t read many Romances, but I tried to complete Me Before You by Jojo Moyes attempting to understand why it was so successful as book and as a Hollywood film. Its premise, of a quadriplegic seeking suicide as the ideal solution to his predicament, is repugnant. It says much about the author’s laziness and lack of empathy, that she never even met a quadriplegic before writing her tear-jerking trash. I see that the author is currently accused of plagiarism…I’m not surprised.
You know that feeling you have about a book where you think, “I don’t think I’d like this,” but then you try it and find out you were right, mentally kicking yourself for weakening? Maybe I’ve had that experience too many times. Occasionally, I read a book that provides a pleasant surprise, as with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman which was a breakout debut in 2017. I wish it happened more often.
Which books do you think are overrated and underrated?
I clenched my teeth typing that title, as ‘awesome’ is the most overused adjective in the 21st-century. Describing a pizza as awesome is ridiculous, but it’s appropriate if looking at Niagara Falls.
Awe as a word originally meant terror (think ‘awful’) but came to mean something that creates a sense of wonder. Nowadays, it’s applied willy-nilly to anything that’s good.
If we use awesome to describe wondrous or even intimidating books, I find that I’m impressed by the works of those who write simply to convey meaning and by those who create worlds with many characters. For me, the first category means poetry and what might be called ‘outsider fiction’, writers such as Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski.
Here’s an awesome poem describing the human condition in twelve lines:
The Ideal
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.
Complex books written by C.J. Sansom and Robin Hobb which are part of a series blow me away. I’m currently reading Tombland, the seventh story in Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series. It’s 854 pages long, including a 50-page historical essay on the rebellion described. I hazard a guess, that there must be at least 125 characters in the story. It’s hard to keep track of who’s who, so I’d have appreciated a cast of characters at the beginning of the book to refer to. There is a map of Norwich and Mousehold Heath in 1549, which is interesting, but not essential.
I’m staggered by how these authors organise their plotting. The first Cornish Detective story I wrote had forty characters, which made me worry the reader would be confused.
He wrote for music magazines and published seven biographies. His acerbic wit could be cutting and to the point:
I’m inclined to agree with that statement. One of the toughest things for a naïve writer to realise is that they’ve entered a cutthroat business where the marketability of your story, and you as an author, are more important than the quality of your prose. Consider the success of books ‘written’ by celebrities…do you feel sick yet?
Book award season is on us again, in which the usual suspects will dominate: those with an existing high profile who are great for marketing. It doesn’t hurt if they’re photogenic and being young is a bonus too.
I previously criticised predictable awards. They’re more a racket, a deceitful way of making money than they are a deserving reward for a well-written book.
American novelist Alexander Theroux reckoned: “Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.”
There’s no bigger racket than politics!
What do you think of the business side of writing?
Anyone who’s tried self-publishing knows that artifice is necessary to promote oneself and one’s books, so much so that you start to doubt your sincerity, as you play the game of sounding as tempting as possible. You’re part of the racket.
I came across an observation in an article on writing technique which stuck in my mind. I hadn’t heard it before and it made me think about favourite stories and my own writing:
“The best stories have simple plots with complex characters.”
I’ve been kicking around this concept, trying to decide if it’s true. We discussed keeping to a simple theme in an old thread:
But, how does a writer decide to balance detailed characterisation with intricate plotting? At the moment, I’m reading two novels that are are complex stories with complex characters—Mick Herron’s tale of spies Slow Horses and C.J. Sansom’s seventh story about Tudor lawyer Matthew Shardlake Tombland. A lot of concentration is needed to work out what’s going on. Fans of these two authors are hooked by their love of the main players and also by the intrigue of the plots.
It made me wonder what the opposite would be, with a simple plot featuring simple characters. That could be a description of a fairy tale, fable or legend, but stories which have lasted hundreds of years hold universal truths about humanity, so their simplicity is a virtue.
It could also describe bad writing, where the plotting is bare and the characters two-dimensional!
About half of the fiction I read is in my writing genre of Crime. I can think of some stories I enjoyed because of the primitive nature of the plot which drove the action, but which had poor characterisation…these might be better described as Thrillers.
Sometimes, the opposite happens, even with skilled best-selling authors I love, such as James Lee Burke and John Connolly. Their success means they’re permitted to turn in manuscripts that are 720 pages long. A typical crime novel would have 340 pages. The extra bulk doesn’t come from complex plotting, it’s more from in-depth characterisation.
With my Cornish Detective series, I’ve aimed for a blend of simple plotting and describing my characters’ personalities, thoughts and reactions in enough detail to encourage readers to bond with them. My stories are more ‘howcatchem’ than ‘whodunnit’, which helps to simplify the plotting.
Do you agree with the writing advice: “The best stories have simple plots with complex characters.”?
Several authors I know have commented that being a writer spoils the pleasure of being a reader. We’re constantly examining the author’s technique, finding ideas to steal to adapt to our work and, maybe, feeling intimidated and inadequate.
It’s impossible when reading, to not wonder how much the author’s opinions are revealed by their characters. There are various terms used for this, such as mouthpiece, surrogate and stand-in. More writerly is a chorus character which dates back to Ancient Greek plays in which one of the functions of the chorus was to comment on the action.
Ayn Rand uses the character of John Galt to speak rambling monologues to expound her theories on Objectivism in Atlas Shrugged. J.K. Rowling has said that Hermione Granger was based on herself as a girl, and various other characters in the Harry Potter series had their origins in people she knew.
Such self-insertion can lead to the author appearing in idealised form. Stan Lee turned up in cameos in the Marvel comics. Philip K. Dick named a major character after himself in Radio Free Albemuth. W. Somerset Maugham writes The Razor’s Edge as a minor character drifting in and out of the story making comments about the actions of the key players.
We previously discussed You In Your Book, but, how much do you express your own attitudes towards things by what your protagonist says and does?
My crime series is set in Cornwall. The main character is the son of a farmer, who sold the family farm to become a copper. Plots often include rural crime. The new story features, as a sub-plot, an arsonist torching barns in the night. It’s impossible not to mention Brexit: my detective’s attitudes reflect my own.
I’ve reflected who I am by my characters commenting on loyalty, assisted suicide, violence, sexuality, illegal immigration, slavery, human trafficking and drug laws.
How much do you let readers in to who you are through your stories?
I came across a quote from Ed Emberley, an American artist, author and illustrator of children’s books:
“I am determined to have fun doing my work… if I’m enjoying myself then that feeling is passed on to the reader.”
It chimed in with my latest writing project, the sixth story in The Cornish Detective series, which I’m having fun with, as I’m creating it in disconnected chunks. Keeping a series fresh is a challenge, so this unconventional way of forming a plot is preventing me from falling into old routines.
Perhaps fun is transitory, happiness short-lived while contentment is the ideal state. It’s no bad thing to amuse yourself. I favour situational humour. I wrote a chapter last week, in which my protagonist gets swept out to sea while attempting to improve his stamina after being injured. At the same time, two of his detectives are discussing their exercise regimes, praising their boss for being proactive with his wild swimming and looking fitter for it. It’s not a laugh-out-loud comedy, but as it made me smile, it may entertain the reader.
I came across an answer to a question in my Quora feed, which set me thinking. The supposition is that women find writers attractive, and, presumably vice-versa:
I don’t write to be fanciable, more because the stories are in me and insist on coming out. But, thinking of qualities shown by a potential mate, her being a writer would be desirable to me. At least I’d know something of why she was behaving in that strange way from my own experience!
Reading through Derreck Frost’s list, I realised that I’ve done several things that he claims make a writer attractive. I’ve dedicated books to female friends, based two recurring characters on close friends (with their permission) and talked about my writing in emails. This has resulted in useful feedback, so I knew I wasn’t waffling and boring them.
Margaret Atwood was dismissive of readers seeking out writers:
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
Nevertheless, publishers choose the best-looking photograph of their author clients to adorn the book jacket…sometimes, these shots are twenty-years-old. Attractive people sell commercial products better than uglies.
We decided Writers Are Sexy! in an old thread, but are we more attractive than ‘normal’ people?
, more because the stories are in me and insist on coming out. But, thinking of qualities shown by a potential mate, her being a writer would be desirable to me. At least I’d know something of why she was behaving in that strange way from my own experience!