Saturday, March 31, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 5
In general when learning your craft, it is better to simplify your expression. Long sentences exacerbate difficulties in a reader's cognition (particularly the young, brought up in byte-sized management of information). Paring down your words to the minimum a la Samuel Beckett, removing adjectives and erasing all repetitions of nouns, will inform you as to whether you have conveyed the maximum information in the minimum number of words. Then, as you redraft, you can add what is needed to round out characters or give telling substance to the environment which sustains them.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 4
So, you have written a gripping first sentence or two for the browsing buyer in the bookshop but books get published by publishers and that means sending the first three chapters and a synopsis of the plot of the book to an agent. Hardly any publishers are interested in looking at new work, even from established writers and prefer the agent to do the wheat from chaff processing. It feels wrong, I know, to have to desecrate your work by amputating it in this way.
For what it’s worth, agents are not necessarily that bright. They have fixed ideas of what sells, they want to do as little work as possible for maximum financial returns and that means often making crass decisions that nearly precluded Lord of the Flies, Harry Potter or Watership Down ever being published. So we can all curse and spit on their graves – but take heart, I suspect the democratising effects of the internet e-readers will level the playing filed eventually.
Having said all that, the first three chapters need consideration. Given that your opening sentence gambit presents a definite come on, then what follows must help to accentuate the reader’s curiosity. My advice is to get into plot as fast as you can and keep your long descriptions of people and places until later. I know that if you are a clay writer this can be difficult since you feel you are channelling your creativity from your unconscious realms but there it is. The fishing analogy is that many fish don’t bite on the hook straight away but need ‘playing’. Of course if you are the son or daughter of Dickens then your long descriptive opening is a lure all on its own. But its best we don’t have such high personal opinions!
Being brief at the beginning also serves two other purposes; the first being that the reader can exercise more imagination the less you attempt to nail everything and the second is that the discipline of saying as much as possible in as few words, carries you through the book. It becomes part of your style.
Labels: Writing. First three chapters
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Act of Writing No. 3
How do you start a novel? You know yourself that when you go into a bookshop you will pick up books, maybe look at the dust covers and, more likely than not, read the first paragraph of the first chapter. Then you will dump it – unless…something arrests you, something which is like the shard of a hologram in that it encapsulates the possibilities and potential of the whole story to follow. It can be cryptic:
Call me Ishmael. (Moby Dick)
It can be fulsome:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (A Tale of Two Cities)
But, however you start it must not fail the test of the first few seconds’ glance in the bookshop. For those of you who are clay writers, the first line may have come to you before the novel really began to register in its full glory. For those of you who are lego writers, you may have written the entire book and then gone back to the beginning and thought to yourself, “what’s a good way to start all this…”
Here is how I started Azimuth. What do you think? (It came to me after I began the first chapter. I realised I wanted to take the reader immediately into the head of the historian who recounts the Tales of the Magus).
If a man could be said to be constructed from the tools of his work, then Kamil was just such a man. He laboured with pen and paper and from them he built history. His flesh was as dry and pale as bleached parchment, his blood so dark it could have been extracted from crushed beetles and yet his intelligence was as sharp as the knife he used to give edge to his quills. If in total he could be thought of as a book, it would be a thick, learned, heavily annotated leather-bound tome, with a simple modest title and his name in small letters beneath. And it would gather dust, rarely read except by other scholars, in the Great Library.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0934311.html
Labels: Writing novels. First sentences.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 2
Novelists of the clay kind may begin with a great first sentence, a single idea, something overheard, a personal itch or trauma - whatever - and it becomes like grit in the oyster forcing the imagination to create a pearl. Novelists of the lego kind like to gather a mass of data in which to immerse themselves; historical events, genre expectations, real life scenarios, technical detail etc and cut and paste them into a narrative. Whereas the clay type grows the novel, through accretion, allowing characters to form and plot lines to develop as they will, lego types sculpt from the mass that they have collected, obeying self-imposed rules to maintain consistency and characters to further the plot. William Golding tended to read one book on factual information so that he could get jargon, terminology right for verisimilitude in his sea trilogy whereas Luther Blisset in Q had a mountain of data relating to the reformation. In some senses the clay type is homeopathic in approach while the lego type if allopathic. While, as has been noted in the first blog, the one bleeds into the other, pick up any piece of fiction and you can show quickly whether the author is clay or lego oriented.
I am a clay writer: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Novelists of the clay kind may begin with a great first sentence, a single idea, something overheard, a personal itch or trauma - whatever - and it becomes like grit in the oyster forcing the imagination to create a pearl. Novelists of the lego kind like to gather a mass of data in which to immerse themselves; historical events, genre expectations, real life scenarios, technical detail etc and cut and paste them into a narrative. Whereas the clay type grows the novel, through accretion, allowing characters to form and plot lines to develop as they will, lego types sculpt from the mass that they have collected, obeying self-imposed rules to maintain consistency and characters to further the plot. William Golding tended to read one book on factual information so that he could get jargon, terminology right for verisimilitude in his sea trilogy whereas Luther Blisset in Q had a mountain of data relating to the reformation. In some senses the clay type is homeopathic in approach while the lego type if allopathic. While, as has been noted in the first blog, the one bleeds into the other, pick up any piece of fiction and you can show quickly whether the author is clay or lego oriented.
I am a clay writer: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Act of Writing No. 1
I thought I’d write a series of blogs about writing. Having just published a three volume historical fiction called Azimuth that has taken ten years and 920 pages, maybe I have something to pass on to those who wish to follow literary careers. (For the validity of my thoughts you can see for yourself at www.azimuthtrilogy.com)
Where does a writer start? Basically there is a dichotomy between clay and lego. If you are clay then your work is organic and you write to see what happens, everything unfolds and you have the feeling that the work is channeled through you. The end can be as much a surprise to you as to the reader. If you are lego then you adopt certain formulae. You immerse yourself in the expectations of a genre, you plan the plot line, you assemble the characters and you plug all the pieces together in a satisfactory whole.
If you are clay then the danger is in becoming rambling, unfocused and with no tension to your narrative. If you are lego then the danger is that your work is creaky and mechanical. You can see from this that to be successful and take the reader on a ride that keeps the pages turning avidly, clay needs to borrow a little from lego and lego needs to borrow a little from clay. A novel must please. In The Act of Creation, Koestler talks about the punch line in a joke. If it's good we laugh out loud, pleased to have been brought to this happy conclusion. Books are more long winded than jokes, of course, but the same emotive element should endure through their pages. We must feel that reading has been worthwhile, we have experienced the unexpected and we have learned a little by proxy.
What kind of writer am I? www.azimuthtrilogy.com
What kind of writer am I? www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Labels: Better writing, lessons. style