Tag: novels

Worth a read!

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When I am writing a book, or trying to, the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down and reading someone else’s book. My eyes just can’t take any more print. In the evenings I tend to disappear into the TV and a series which captures my imagination and is filmed and directed in the style I like. So if a book makes me want to pick it up and read, despite the fact I have spent much of the day writing and staring at words on screen, it must be good. And, boy, this one is. The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod. As the author’s name suggests, she is French and this is the first of her books which has been translated into English, in 2020. It is about Eleanor of Aquitaine. A biography imagined to have been written by one of her sons, Richard. Known to the English as Richard The Lionheart.

The sentences tend to be short, giving the book great pace, and with the strong emotion of Richard for his mother, it really pulls you in and you could easily devour the book in one sitting (188 pages in this edition). It is one of those books you cannot wait to go back to and yet you do not want to finish it! Most of the tale is told then by Richard, although toward the end a few of the other characters get a chance to add their views briefly.

Eleanor was a tour de force. Married to the King of France, one day she saw Henry Plantagenet who was to become King Henry II of England and decided there and then he was the man for her. Almost unknown at that time she instigated the annulment of her marriage to Louis and within two years was married to Henry. Unfortunately she misjudged Henry’s intent and found he had no plan to allow her to continue as the ruler of Aquitaine. Most of the book is taken up with her struggle to turn her sons against Henry and to eventually defeat him. There is no real happy ending however.

If you have any vague interest in History, try the book. The flyleaf states that Clara has been haunted by Eleanor’s story for many years. Let us hope she now feels more content after writing this excellent book about her.

Whoa, characters!

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I can remember quite clearly ploughing through pouring rain and a strong coastal wind one early morning to reach my favourite coffee house. Did I have an important meeting to make? Was I rendezvousing with a mistress? Was I stormed out of the house after a marital spit? No. I wanted to find out what my story character was going to do next. I had no ideas in my head, no plan. I had to sit down and wait for them to tell me what happened next.

Crazy. At least I thought so until I mentioned it to the guy who had run a Writing Group I went to a few years ago. He immediately said he was the same, he had no idea what was going to happen next in the story, had no plan laid out, and certainly not one of these chapter by chapter schemes that some writers swear by, even to the extent of knowing how many words they are going to end up writing.

It’s like that Alan Bennett quote – “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.” (from The Uncommon Reader) only substitute ‘character’ for ‘books’. You sit in front of your computer and wait for them to speak to you. ‘Okay, writer, you’ve left me facing the big, bad guy, I’m unarmed, a History teacher by occupation; how the hell do I get out of this one?’ And he/she does. Somehow. And why does he do this, that, the other, end up with the blond when you intended him to marry the brunette? Because he is he. Or she is she. They make their own decisions. (I should add here that if you are not a writer and reading this, you have probably left the room by now, or should. Characters are real. Forget the fiction crap, bookshops knop nothing.

And when you finish a book? And decide not to use the same characters again? What then? Are they left in literary limbo? Or do they go on, living out their lives? Has my New York PI solved countless cases I will never know about? Or was he gunned down in the very next episode?

And even famous writers get tired of their characters. Author Conan Doyle, creator of one of the world’s most famous detectives, eventually came to view his popular literary creation as a burden. In 1891, just five years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first novel to feature Holmes and his sidekick Watson, Doyle wrote to his mother: “I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”  

Despite James Bond’s success, Ian Fleming was ambivalent about his famous character. He called Bond a “cardboard booby” and a “blunt instrument;” once, he said, “I can’t say I much like the chap.”

Tolstoy grew ashamed of having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This resulted from the “spiritual breakthrough,” when Tolstoy disowned all his earlier works for the sake of his new religious convictions.

So it seems our characters can become larger than life, or take on a life of their own. Or maybe we just bring to light a character who has always been there, just waiting to be written into a story and into our world.

It makes you wonder who is out there now, waiting to step onto the stage…? Oh, is that the time? I mkust hurry to the coffee house, someone is calling out to me…

You Festering Knave!

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For my sins (and I have many to confess to) I am continuing on with a story set in Elizabethan England, somewhere around 1570. As I write my first drafts sat in a coffee shop unconnected to the public WiFi I can only add small details of historical detail remembered from my school and university days (my age prohibits me using that awful ‘uni’ so prevalent these days; I blame Neighbours). The odd groat here, a jerkin there. At home I have started to research the basics – food, occupations, simple everyday language, social rules, etc. And I very soon had to confront the language issue. Do I try and write something completely in the style we believe from our limited resources? ‘Thys’ and ‘thees’ and convoluted sentence structures? Or do I let the characters sound like they just strolled off-set from Peaky Blinders? I decided to consult the oracle that is Hilary Mantel (she was the only historical writer I could think off in the moment). Much to my relief, I found she kept things simple: longer sentences, less abbreviations, less contractions, avoid the obvious modern words and phrases. That is good enough for me.

In my brief reading online about the period I was surprised to learn of laws passed around the 1570s to limit the clothing that each social class could wear. Imagine that today? Although, of course, today, money does set us apart in the quality of the clothes we wear, another form of ‘limitation’.

And even the wealthiest Elizabethans were only allowed to spend £100 per year on their outfits. Apparently it was discovered that many were splashing out ridiculous amounts to keep up with the fashion trends and in particular those started by Queen Elizabeth and it was threatening their families’ financial stability. When men start to wear corsets to give themselves a tiny waist and stuff their doublets to make themselves look ‘shapely’, I guess something needed to be done!

If I should finish the story, the book, should I list an impressive range of academic books and pamphlets, or be honest in this modern age and list instead an impressive range of Googled pages and Wikipedia articles? I do doubt that many writers actually read all the books they put in their back pages. Perhaps they have taken one sentence or learned one fact from the book and added it to pad out the list (creating the same falseness as the stuffed ‘peascod belly’).

And the Blackadder image? It’s hard these days to think of the Elizabethan times and not immediately conjure up Atkinson and co. Maybe it’s because of the ethos of the times, people looking forward to new horizons, quite literally in the sense of spreading England’s influence beyond the island, the ideas coming to light through playwrights and budding thinkers and ‘scientists’, at the same time held back by the limited resources and technology of the 16th century. Blackadder somehow always strikes me as a frustrated fellow who can’t wait for the mobile phone and internet to be created.

Plagiarise, You Fool!

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Damn, that’s a difficult word to spell – plagiarise – I must have stared at it several minutes before I reckoned it was correct!

In an earlier post I described how I had been reading If We Were Villains by ML Rio, a book first published several years ago and enjoying a reissue, I guess, because there is talk of it possibly becoming a TV series or the like. Anyway, it was a great read, and has partly encouraged me to try and write a story set in Elizabethan times (read the other post to see why this might be). Having finished the book, I read through a few reviews on Waterstones’ website to see if other people enjoyed it as much as I had. Yes, they had, but one reviewer stated how the story bore many similarities to a book written by Donna Tartt – The Secret History – in the 1990s. I knew the author’s name but had never read any of her tales. Sought out, bought, I have now started it. And it is very good, very smoothly written, and maybe a little more ‘direct’ than Rio’s. The characters, for example, are described as seen by the narrator before you get to hear them talk or act. Rio’s seemed to slowly develop over the pages. Anyway, so far, the obvious similarity is the group of odd students studying a very niche subject (in Tartt’s case, Ancient Greek). If the plot follows similar lines to Rio’s I will be suspicious of the latter. But then, so many books have been written there has to ‘spillage’ doesn’t there? Overlaps, plain coincidences, repetitions of characters (how many different ones can there be?), etc.

And thirty years on, a chance for a whole new generation to be amazed by a well-written story and maybe encouraged to seek a ‘similar’ tale written years before. Is that so wrong? It does, of course, open up a very large can of worms. Think of all the books an unpublished writer can lift from? Endless. As long as it’s a good story, preferably a very good story, and the new writer can actually write semi-decent sentences.

Looking through the well known cases of plagiarism, I liked the one of Helene Hegemann, German, and only 17 when her novel took the German literary world by storm. Up for awards, on chat shows, critics bowed to her, what could go wrong? A blogger pointed out similarities with another book, then others picked up on examples from other writers, some claimed Helene’s father had written the whole thing. Helene didn’t deny it, she defended herself by saying  “There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity.” Her claim supported by the fact incidentally that one disputed passage came from an author who stole it from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch who admitted taking it from Jean-Luc Goddard! Helene’s publishers claimed it was not ‘plagiarism’ but ‘intertextuality’. But we all knew that, didn’t we?

In recent years in the UK many young women writers have appeared with stories that mix a historical setting (usually two-to-three hundred years ago) with an element of magic. More a case of ‘theme plagiarism’, maybe? Like all these new tales of characters from Ancient Greece and Rome which have suddenly populated our bookshelves.

I suspect you could all put forward your own suspicions and knowledge of famous cases.

But, hell, as the years slip away, it’s becoming a mighty big temptation. Now, I’ve got this idea about a guy in ancient times who survives a war but takes an absolute age to get home because someone or something keeps messing with his navigation. He needs an odd name… yeah, Odd…something…for sure…Oddy…

Love! Love! Love!

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So, the next book is finished, at least in its draft manuscript written in the coffee shop. Now I am editing it at home, with smooth jazz playing in the background. How I’ve come to love the voice of Stacey Kent since discovering this genre of music shortly after I started writing this story.

The working title is ‘You Just Weren’t Looking ‘. Anyone who knows the movie 500 Days of Summer might recognise it as a key phrase from that excellent story of love featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoey Deschanel. The book is my first attempt at a love story, with no hint of crime in it. Does it work? I don’t know. It’s nothing new, nothing special, apart from the fact it came out of my head from nothing. It’s gentle, the twists probably obvious to readers of romantic novels, and I struggled to get to my usual 90,000 words. It comes in at the moment at around 83,000 and it’s just too much hard work to get it up to the ninety. It is what it is.

And what now? I have to write something in the coffee shop each day. Well, right now, it’s looking like a tale set in Elizabethan England. I can’t waste my History A level and honours degree for ever! The research will have to wait until I’ve completed the edit of the other book and will have to be done at home, I don’t trust WiFi from the streets. It’ll no doubt turn out ‘History-lite’. And the main character has my name – James – and it doesn’t feel odd at all, quite strange really. It may be because I came across a real Elizabethan actor, boy actor, named James Sands who was left a small gift in a will by a more prominent actor. That James is the ‘skeleton’ for my main character.

So, what do you do when you complete one book? Straight on to the next? Take a five year break? Divorce the wife/husband?

Oh, and Stacey Kent, listen to her version of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’ – it’s divine.

Onward! Onward!

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I guess there must be two types of writers, when they finish the first draft of their novel. Those who edit, edit, edit until it is as perfect as it’s going to get, and only then start to think about the next book. And the others, who edit the draft but move on the very day to the next ‘big thing’.

I’m the latter; largely because I’ve got into this habit of writing the first draft in coffee houses. There’s no way I can stay away from the places until I’ve finished editing the latest book and no way I can actually edit in the noisy surroundings of the coffee houses. So I have to start the next story, sat in the coffee house the next day. the editing carried out at home.

Crazy, I know. And it can blow your mind, get you seriously confused, especially if the two stories are set in totally different places or times. At nine in the morning I’m writing about a boy actor in Shakespearian England, by two in the afternoon I’m editing a love story in New York in 2022. The accidental crossovers are beyond comprehension!

And so I charge on, into the enemy’s guns, my words no doubt shot to smithereens by poor editing and lazy repetition. A young boy, a boy-actor with a Shakespearian theatre group sometime in the 16th century, stumbled upon another child scrounging for food scraps around the theatre building. A girl, whose voice and poise suggest she’s not from a poor family, who accepts the offer of food only to lead our main character on a merry dance. And I’m sitting in the coffee shop trying to think back to ‘O’ level and ‘A’ level History which included studies of the Tudors as well as, I believe, the odd unit at university, but that’s faded with the lager drunk in copious amounts at the time, and dragging up references to jerkins and groats. Obviously if I continue the story set in that time I will have to research, at Wikipedia level, the theatres, food, clothing, basic language expressions, etc. Fun, but time consuming. My inspiration for the Tudor setting came from the reading of the book I discussed in my last post – If We Were Villains by ML Rio – which although set in the present has so many references to Shakespeare’s plays and use of his words that it kindled some kind of storyline set actually back in that period. I fear readers of any finished book will enjoy themselves immensely spotting all the anachronisms!

So what is the recommended delay between finishing one book and starting the next? There isn’t, is there? It’s all down to the individual. I guess if I didn’t go down to the coffee shop nearly every day I would continue to edit the one book through to the end product. But editing is not writing, is it? It’s not creating something out of nothing, it’s not creating new characters, breathing life into someone who minutes earlier never lived. Which leads on to another thought – what happens to our characters when we stop writing about them? Are they left in an eternal vacuum – Is there another case for them to solve? Do they marry that sidekick? Does the bad guy return for revenge? Does the marriage go on forever? Did they make the right choice in love after all? Are they sitting around waiting for us to pick up the pen or open up the laptop? A subject for another post. Right now, there’s a Tudor boy stuck with a young girl who might be about to cause him considerable grief…

More! More!

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Well, I wish it was my army of fans demanding another novel from me but he seems to have gone to sleep for most of 2022 and, anyway, I don’t like to embarrass JK Rowling, that guy Osman, and the rest.

No, it’s me reaching the natural end of my recent writing, achieving 77,000 words and feeling I need more. Another ten, fifteen thousand? I usually make it to 90,000 so this seems a little light. and so starts the debate – do you fill out a story to reach this imaginary finishing line or do you stop when you come to the natural end point? Fluff out that tight dialogue with repetition? Use that wonderful synonym option to say the same thing twice, with different words here and there? Add paragraphs loosely linked to the storyline, a little background on a character, a parallel discussion on the theme of the book?

Well, I did add one section with the main character discussing love in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and with the story being about love and one guy and two women, I can defend the addition. Whether it works in the bigger picture, I’m not convinced yet.

And mentioning Rowling, whenever I read a review of her latest Strike volume there’s always the comment that her stories are getting longer and longer and not always better. One critic’s opinion, of course, and the people seem to buy the books in large numbers, so maybe length is important, if it’s quality as well.

Flashbacks

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Do you use flashbacks to inform your readers of important or relevant information about your characters or the plot?

I have recently finished watching Better Call Saul on Netflix. What an amazing story and piece of television! It would be so easy to spend all this post, and every other post, extolling the virtues of the acting, writing and directing of this six-season epic. But, to stick to the point of this post, in the TV episodes they start each with a short scene which might or might not be relevant to the main episode about to play out. Sometimes these little scenes are flashbacks or flashforwards which explain why or how a character arrived at the present point in their development or at a certain point in the storyline, or how things may work out in the future. The one that springs to mind is where we go back and see Saul with his brother Charles at their mother’s deathbed. Saul goes out to get coffee and while away his mother regains consciousness and calls out for Jimmy (Saul…long story). She dies before Saul/Jimmy gets back and when he asks Charles if she said anything before passing away, his brother says she didn’t. It reveals a great deal about the brothers’ relationship which is one of the main cruxes of the whole story.

So, the reason I write this post is to think about whether I, you, we, as writers can use the same device to fill in detail about our characters. Other ways would be to tell the entire story in chronological order, or have a character describe what happened in the past. Both seem potentially long-winded and not very exciting. I guess the key is to not have too many flashbacks otherwise the reader may get lost with or not remember all the new information being given to them.

And, of course, what works successfully on TV might not flow so well on paper.

And how do you format the flashback? In italics? In separate mini chapters? With a big FLASHBACK heading?

Anyway, I am trying the idea with my current piece of writing and will probably only see their worth once I finish enough to see their effect when read together with the main story.

Any thoughts?