Sunday, April 29, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 26
Many people reading
this will be from the new medium of e-book writing. Given the extraordinary
sales of e-readers over the last couple of years, it is obvious that this medium
is going to be the main outlet for creative writing in the future. The
previous blogs seem to me to be equally appropriate for physical and virtual books but there
are notable differences that are worth a note or two.
Producing your book
for Kindle, IPad or Sony (apart from a reliance on teckie knowhow, yours or an
agency’s, to translate your book into an acceptable format) gives you a great
deal of power over your finished product. It is you who decides how pages look,
what font, what glyphs (symbols that act as dividers within chapters) and what
cover. In other words you become a designer-writer. Some of you will baulk at
the very notion, preferring to stick to what you think you know best but others
may find this previously barricaded world, worth breaching. I read a friend’s
new book this year and the cover looked as though it had been designed by an
android. It had nothing to recommend it. Remember that a great
percentage of buyers in bookshops buy books after being attracted by their
covers. Now, when you buy e-books, you also have a facsimile cover to help
persuade you.
My three recent books
(five if you split Azimuth into its three volumes) gave me a great deal of
pleasure in the formative stages of designing their covers. In two cases I gave
the book to a designer to read and also outlined a rough brief. She (Hollie
Etheridge www.holsterdesign.com) offered a variety of interpretations for me to look at. I chose what
was nearest to my projected vision and suggested amendments and then, through
this iterative process, all was accomplished, a JPeg was sen to me and I uploaded
it in the relevant area of the site.
The front cover has to
grab. Since Azimuth is a
multi-layered, historical fable, the cover had to represent mystery,
Tale-telling and adventure set in a Persian empire. Hollie produced the
following:
In The Strange Attractor, a crime novel
with echoes of Raymond Chandler, the aim was to have that nourish, amoral feel
to it, harking back to the forties and fifties:
With Through a Mirror
Clear: a Gothic Romance, I worked with my wife who is excellent at PhotoShop.
This probably allowed even more hands-on decision making. The aim was to
represent a novella which tells a tale about rupture in family life and which
explores the capacity of the mind to deceive and inveigle:
So, you see, creating
a book can be extended by new technologies and the author can have an even
greater sense of omnipotence over his or her world!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance
Labels: Writing hints: telling a book by its cover. E-book design.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 25
How deep do you delve into your main
character(s)?
It’s a question that faces all novelists.
Revealing character has a spectrum from the implicit to the direct but usually
it has to be some mixture of the two. By implicit (in the extreme) I mean that character is being explored
through actions and without the author adding his or her pennyworth through
direct descriptions of people’s traits and attitudes. The reader makes up his
or her mind through the accumulation of evidence as the book marches on. At the
other extreme, the entire character is laid on a slab and forensically
dissected in a ‘pre-mortem’, so to speak.
Most readers appear to like some balance
between the two. They like their characters introduced as they enter the fray of
the narrative so that they can ‘see’ them and sense the same kind of
information they would get at a first flesh and blood meeting. Then they would
like them to develop as they navigate the extraordinary circumstances you have
arranged for them. A well described character at the outset, who does not
develop, results in the novel’s hold on the reader being entirely dependent
upon the intricacies of plot, like in an Agatha Christie. Do we learn that much
more about Poirot than we gain in the very first pages he graces? Poirot’s
adventures are more like crossword puzzles than an illuminated manuscript. The
characters are roughly daubed and tend to be stereotypes.
Here is how I introduce the Historian in
Azimuth:
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…”
Kamil is a typical scholar of the period,
fat and preoccupied with library affairs. Over the 920 pages he becomes a
detective, falls in love, faces death and… commits acts of which he is less
than proud. All the while we are privy to his inner thoughts about what he has
to face. At the end I was very tied to him. He was more real to me than many
acquaintances. But I am just one reader of my work. And it is for you to
determine how three dimensional he becomes.
When you are editing your book, it is worth
tracing whether the events you have included in your narrative are leading gradually
to greater understanding of your dramatis personae or leaving abandoning them as two dimensional ciphers.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com (for paperback and PDFs)
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger Books 1, 2, 3 on Kindle Amazon
Labels: Writing. Depth of character.
Friday, April 27, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 24
I thought I’d mumble on a bit about first
person and third person characters in your writing.
In many ways, writing in the first person
is more difficult because it challenges the reader to identify with the ‘I’ in
your story as opposed to ‘he’ or ‘she’.
There is a far greater degree of distancing when your hero or heroine is
depicted in the third person. The
reader has choice as to how much s/he identifies with your central character
when ‘he ‘or ‘she’ does this or that, whereas if it is an “I’ who is doing it,
the reader is faced with the direct question as to whether he or she would ever
do such a thing or feel like that. Given the way that most narratives are, it
is also easier to write in the past tense. The past tense also allows some
distancing and emphasises the storification of people’s lives. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", was the wonderful line by L P Hartley
that emphasises my point. We are used to being entertained in this way, from
early childhood fairy tales.
Writing in the present tense is not
particularly unconventional but it is a strain on the writer. Having written a
novel in the continuous first person present about a Marlowe-like Private Dick,
The Strange Attractor’ I found when I
started editing for the third time, I still had sections that had slipped into
the past tense. You may be better at it than me! The real difficulty is in
conveying dramatic action. “I am punching
him as he grabs my throat. I fall back, half-exhausted” or, “I press my lips against hers and watch as
her eyes half close but a glint…” can be very effective and even seductive but you have to do
it through the whole novel. The third person present tense is a little easier,
maybe. But nowhere near as easy as third person past tense.
In Azimuth,
all but the first Tale is in the past tense but in the first Tale I use the
continuous third person present. I wanted to draw the reader into the birth of
the central character in all the Tales and make it dramatic. It starts the
whole train of events, lasting 3 books and 920 pages! Since it happens while
the mother is being hunted down by assassins it was an effort of concentration
to keep to the format.
Mixing first and third person narratives
can give a multi-dimensional set of perspectives on a Tale as events are seen
through different characters’ eyes. Mixing past tense and continuous present
provides an equally rich range of possibilities as we move from a past period
to the present. If you prefer to map out your work before you start, you can
work out the different media you are going to utilize to make your work truly
gripping. If you are more organic in your approach, you will find yourself
wrestling with the narrative constantly – but, we hope, fruitfully.
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange, Kindle
Amazon
Labels: Writing tips. Getting tense in your writing? First vs third person narratives.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
The
Art of Writing No 23
A game I used to play when waiting for
someone in a bar or sitting waiting to be called to the departure gate for a
plane, in fact whenever I had not had the sense to bring something along to
entertain myself, was ‘scenarios’. Before developing the fluid structure of the
game I had occasionally found myself wondering about one or two people around
me because the way they dressed or talked or acted made them the centre of
attention. Then I began to think of the sin of omission – why was I not as attracted to the rest of my immediate
humanity? I remember teachers in school being faced with describing the
children in their classes. The research showed that there was a hierarchy of
connection (good or bad) with a percentage of pupils but there were also many
who just slipped through classroom life, unnoticed. Once I had started down
this road and tried to observe people equally, life became immeasurably more
interesting. I even wrote an academic book called The Compleat Observer for researchers.
My observation led me to create scenarios
for the people around me; their histories, current circumstances, ambitions,
sexuality, psychologies… It had the effect of broadening the range of
characterization which was later to prove handy when writing fiction. The best
bit about it (since we humans love solving conundrums) was seeing whether
predictions about people turned out to be true. Of course, among strangers this
was rarely possible but during an evening an occasional hit made me grin to
myself. “He is having an affair with a
younger woman and is waiting nervously for her”. “He is going to be stood up.” “
She is sad and waiting for a friend to join her and commiserate.” On the
other hand, the occasions when my predictions proved utterly wide of the mark,
showed how I, like many I know, have inbuilt ways of seeing that belittle the
potential of those around me. They weren’t sad. They were not poor. They could
be massively extrovert.
This all adds up to understanding what
stereotyping really is and how dangerous it is for the writer. It is far more
than crude gender dichotomies, race, religion and so on, it is within us at all
times and is part of the way that we construct the world. A novelist has the
advantage that all the characters in his or her novels are as transparent as
needs be even when they begin as strangers to the author and gradually, as the
plot thickens, take on a flesh and blood reality with any number of subtle
psychologies. We read books where only the main characters have any claim to be
life-like. The rest have walk on parts and may not even be graced with a description
or name. Tom Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead is a lovely poke at how we write off minor characters
by giving them a complex life beyond anything Shakespeare had decided for them.
So, the point of this little essay is to
ask you whether you are caring for the whole of humanity in your fictional
universe. To be fair to your characters (whether good or evil) have you said
enough to make them sufficiently real to please the reader? Have you looked round
the bar of your novel and given time to those you would once have ‘written off’’
without even knowing it?
Labels: Writing tips. Minor characters.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 22
What differentiates a professional writer
from a writer, i.e. any literate individual? In the last blog I showed examples
of how we must interfere with regular brain patterns to produce something worth
reading as a fictional artefact. Just because everyone can run doesn’t mean
that they are athletes worth entering for prizes and being watched by millions.
Obviously, being a professional writer involves discriminating your text from
the humdrum realities of every day communication. Under normal circumstances
your brain is tuned to do the minimum required to accomplish any act. So –
knitting is difficult at first and requires programming the brain to do pearl
and plain and follow graphic patterns but soon you can knit and watch the
television – or, during the French Revolution, watch heads roll under the
guillotine. Knitting is relegated to an autonomous part of the brain.
Establishing a unique style that is
communicative and expressive and draws readers into your world needs an
interference with basic brain patterns, as I have said. Just as with knitting,
editing our writing is extremely onerous and laborious at first. By being
ruthless with our work, appraising every word, finding better similes and
metaphors, cutting out flab and all the tiny acts of improvement in which we
must engage, our writing becomes more honed and effective. And, like knitting,
as we exercise our brain muscle and write in a disciplined way every day, we
find the need for drastic editing actually diminishes. Our brains become
configured to what becomes known as our ‘style’. This does not mean that
editing becomes eliminated. Not at all. But it does mean that editing can
concentrate on felicitous expression rather than the chopping away of crude
surpluses. Raymond Carver, long regarded as the master of the concise short
story, never mastered it. Latterly, it turns out that his unheralded editor did
it. Whether true or not, the essence of the story is that it is in the editing
that style is finally nailed to the page.
It took me three months to edit Azimuth, with professional help and I still find slight wrinkles that irk me.It took my alter ego, Eric le Sange, a month to do the same for The Strange Attractor.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Monday, April 23, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 21
A further note on writing dialogue.
People speak with different sentence
lengths or breaks, they use personal metaphors, their language varies in
richness and substance yet much of what passes for speech in novels is barely
differentiated. The writer often uses his characters to talk the plot along but
not deepen our sense of individuality.
Trying to separate out characters has to be
done via our descriptions of what they look like, what they wear and some
account of how they speak. By doing this the writer builds a mental construct
for each character and should enter that construct every time the character
talks. Reading aloud what has been written helps to pinpoint what is different
about the individual – particularly reading dialogue aloud with or to a friend.
From the reader’s perspective each
character is signposted. A verbose person is easily differentiated from a
brusque one, a child’s metaphor and simplicity of language from an adult’s, an
individual’s acuity from a dunce’s denseness. Gradually, as empathy with each character
becomes more easily experienced and transposed into text, dialogue takes on a robust strength
and the writer finds that he or she does not need to scaffold conversation with
constant descriptions of how the character is speaking or feeling (“he
interjected angrily”, “she said sadly”, “he agreed amusedly” etc). As I pointed
out in an earlier blog, once framed
a conversation can elicit much that you don’t need to put into words.
Much of the time a question mark, a few dots or an exclamation mark delicately
steers the reader through the conversation as though he or she is listening
with a glass at the wall of a private chamber.
In The
Strange Attractor I tried always to maintain the central character’s flip,
Marlowesque speech patterns but diluted by his sense of impotence at events. In
Azimuth I spent much of the time in
female characters. Many of them and all different. It was a test to create
speech patterns that served their profiles.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Twitter @profjacksanger
Sunday, April 22, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 20
There is a very appropriate zen tale of the
centipede who is asked how he manages to coordinate all those legs and promptly
falls into a ditch. Like the centipede we do a hundred things without ever
questioning them.
It is very difficult and takes a great deal
of diligence and practice to refashion your writer’s mind. Recent developments
in cognitive psychology show that the brain is almost infinitely plastic which
means that by adopting new habits and rituals we can reinforce new ways of
seeing and doing. The other day I watched a documentary as a young man, blind from eight years old, had
become a bat. We saw him cycling down a road making a clucking sound and
navigating by the echoes. He had realigned his brain so that he could see with
his ears.
Think of writing first as an every day
activity. We do it. We send emails, letters, fill forms, make lists. We sometimes
edit them afterwards, if we feel they are significant enough and would
represent us badly should we not do so.
In the same way that we might walk down a road and use the experience to
give directions to others, the process tends to be shorthand and reductionist.
We don’t convey the full experience of walking down the road. Writing can be
like that. A sort of minimal communication of a story, bereft of richness and
vibrancy. Are there ways of intervening with what has become a knee jerk
process? I think so. To change the very structures of thinking involves doing
things differently.
I stayed in the countryside one year and
while there I became interested in writing a book of aphorisms for management,
based upon zen conciseness and depth of meaning. The first took me two days.
Days! Ten words. Fifty letters. Pre-Twitter! The second took me a day. The
third took half a day and so on until I could write maybe five in a day. Two
months and I had produced An A to Zen of
Management. The fact was that I began to see words and meaning differently.
My brain became retooled. Here are two examples:
Autonomy:
an illusion, very material to motivation.
Coach:
every king needs his fool.
Since then I started to tweet using the
same newly shaped brain. Today, for instance:
Each
person comprises many selves but rarely develops more than one; the perfect
subsistence culture (@profjacksanger.com)
In Azimuth I adopted a horrendous new
punctuation for speech. My editor threw up her hands in disgust. But by using
it I found myself studying the nature of dialogue completely differently.
Instead of some superfluous conversation,
it attained at times (I hope) a touch of zen.
You can check all I say against the proof
in my books!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange
Kindle Amazon
Saturday, April 21, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 19
There is a much discussed cliché concerning
writing. This relates to the difference between a hard day’s slog and a seemingly
purple day’s outpouring. The received wisdom is that the dufference is too
minimal to make a case for inspiration providing greater quality than
perspiration. A good friend and well known writer once said to me that writing
prose was like pulling teeth. It was painful, hard and sometimes he only wrote
a half page in a day. He won the Whitbread prize for best novel of that year. I tend to agree with the overall drift
of the argument. Purple patches are wonderful for the writer but the reader may
never discern which bits of a novel have been created in this way. When I edit
my work I have no recall over what came like a dream and what was a struggle
though I have had experience of quickly written pieces being more like
colanders than sturdy vessels that hold sense properly. Of course poets like Coleridge
stimulated their imagination with drugs to ensure the purple patch effect!
The upshot of all this is to write write
write. Develop a ritualistic behaviour which ensures a discipline. I tell
myself that if I write three hours or so every day, I can finish a book in six
months to a year. A book a year seems a reasonable return. In the 40s writers
like Edgar Wallace were spent up and drunk every Sunday, wrote a crime novel
between Monday and Friday and started the process of obliteration all over
again at the weekend. But writing so quickly has its drawbacks. Usually these
relate to fissures in the plot.
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep had a major discrepancy in the plot, not discovered
by readers but by film makers when they came to put it on the screen: a
telegram was sent to Raymond Chandler asking him “who killed the chauffeur?” Chandler replied, “Damned if I know.” I suppose a little anxiety I
suffer from concerns such an obvious flaw line in the narrative. While writing The Strange Attractor meant that I could
revisit and cross check easily, it being just over 200 pages, Azimuth is 920 pages with innumerable
characters and full of ‘seeding’ of alternate plot lines, as described in
previous blogs. Hence the author’s alerts list I regard as a necessity.
If every writing day is like the last, your
desk is left exactly how you last used it, you also abandoned your prose for
the day knowing exactly what your next sentence and paragraph is going to be,
then the discipline of writing is being properly supported. Some days will be
much slower than others but when the smell of ink has dried and the reader take
up your book, none of this will be apparent.
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle books, Amazon
www.azimuthtrilogy.com for a complete guide to Azimuth by Jack Sanger
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle books, Amazon
www.azimuthtrilogy.com for a complete guide to Azimuth by Jack Sanger
Friday, April 20, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 18
The convenience of an ‘alerts list’ at the
bottom of your growing draft novel is not to be underestimated. Take this note
I placed there while writing Azimuth. I had just conjured it up in an early part
of the narrative and was so taken with it I copied it for later reference:
“Find the she-worm and feed his
flesh to her as he sleeps the sleep of truth.”
Two things about this. First, when I wrote
it I did not fully understand it. The words came through my brain without touching
the sides but they had a Blakian feel to them and were obviously an answer to an
as yet undisclosed hazard facing Princess Sabiya and Kamil the Historian in the
Second Journey. So I copied them on to my list of reminders of all the seeds I
was sowing for later writing. Every time I continued the narrative involving
these two characters my eye would glance down at this note to myself. I would
reject utilising it many times, patiently waiting for the storyline to reach
the point when the quote could be reinserted to drive the story line through
its deepest waters.
These alerts are like faint pointers to the
direction of travel. They are not strong enough to take hold of the story but
by having them in your mind when you are writing they act like mild currents
under your vessel. It is still for you to steer. So, the second thing to say
about the invocational words I copied is that the imagination will write for
you if you learn to let it. Some of the best and most timelessly magical bits
of Azimuth came to me without knowing and challenged me to incorporate them in
the text.
In case my references to Azimuth seem to
suggest it is a fey genre novel about pixies and elves, it is no such thing.
The reviews at http://www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews
may dissuade you. So might me saying, “It is an adventure story full of danger
to its characters and their search for answers to why they are alive.”
Labels: Writing. The alers list.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 18
A reader has pointed out that my dichotomy
of clay and lego to crudely divide approaches to writing are somewhat
patronizing and imbalanced. That was not the intention. By clay I meant
organically developed narratives where the writer is only one step ahead of the
reader in understanding what is going on, while by lego I meant that much of
literature is plugged together from familiar elements within a genre. Maybe I should have used plasticine and
meccano as metaphors, though those remembering that latter are fewer on the
ground as each decade passes! The reader pointed out that the terms themselves
are from a child’s world, not from an adult’s. I tried to defend myself by
saying (did I wholly believe it?) that authors should have a child-like
playfulness to be properly creative. Engaging with the construction of a novel
is akin to entering a playroom, bursting with potential, eyes wide and trusting.
Actually, the reason we have genres in
writing is because there forms are so appealing. Most successfully rich authors are those who mine a stratum of precious metal efficiently,
satisfying their readers’ desire for certain verities; structural topographies,
a range of characters, degrees of credibility and satisfying narratives. It does not mean that they do not
borrow from plasticine’s organic elements. Better still if their novels belong
to a series where the reader feels s/he knows the chief protagonists and their
relationships, traits and modus operandi. If clay is an art and lego is a
craft, all writers will try to utilize some elements from each.
A reader’s review I had the other day
regarding Azimuth (http://www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews)
said she loved the trilogy but did not know much about the genre. This
nonplussed me. What genre is it? By stipulating a genre it might be easier to
market it to a specific audience but that would obviously be limiting, as well.
Most writers would love a crossover hit of a novel that appeals to everyone at
some level or other. Azimuth contains elements of fantasy, fable, modern
philosophy, labyrinthine plotting and pulsating (!) adventuring. A one name
genre title would surely be too restrictive.
I realize this blog has been less practical
than I might have wished so will tether an useful insight to it.
Because I write organically myself,
wondering where the next paragraph of a meal is coming from and because it is
easy to forget detail as I progress through my novel’s circumlocutions, I
constantly make notes about people, places and events at the bottom of my draft
concerning what has just been written. These are seeds which alert me to what
MUST be dealt with later, what facets of character might affect future
behaviours, what puzzles must then be solved, what an environment looks like,
the colour of hair and eyes, the skills and/or character defects of
individuals. Once I have satisfied the reason for keeping this self-advisory
note in my later writing, I scrub
it. Thus, I try to ensure that there are no loose ends that will trip up the
storyline. It is the novelist’s version of ‘continuity’ in film. This does not
mean being too smartass neat and tidy at the end of a book but rather that the
integrity of character and plot has been maintained throughout , even if there
are still poignant questions hanging in the air at the end.
Labels: Writing. Formula or organic? Keeping a grip on continuity.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 17
What I ended up doing in the last blog, was show how complexity in characters’ profiles provides a springboard for a book to go in many directions. We can demonstrate this by looking within the action of your own tale. You have three characters. If each displays only one characteristic (thus being a cipher) then you have a maximum of three believable outcomes when they interact with each other, since each acts true to this trait. If not the reader dumps the book because the characters’ behaviours aren’t credible. But take the same three characters and build into their profiles ambiguities, paradoxes, dark and light and there can be limitless potential in the products of their interaction.
So much depends upon the setting up and evolution of the characters in your story. The greater the depth, the greater the potential for rich progression as the story moves on. However, we must also realize that authors have their limits of tolerance as far as open-endedness is concerned. For some, too much ambiguity and range can easily lead to writer’s block as they become swamped by infinite possibility. Finding the right balance between character depth and plot imperative is at the heart of a long piece of writing. I suppose we have to establish our ambition. We can earn our way in any of a number of genres by tamping down our characters just enough to augment but not impede the pace of the narrative. We can make them credible with rough brush strokes because readers of genre fiction have in-built tolerances themselves and have a less exacting expectation of character development. But if we take upon ourselves a higher brow ambition, then characters will vie with plot for which has the greater significance. There are many great examples of novels and plays which are practically plotless from the usual physical and geographical action perspectives but whose narratives are entirely concerned with evolving psychosocial relationships between protagonists. Becket, Joyce, Kafka and many more subverted the need for traditional plot lines in favour of exploring in the greatest depth, character. Authors must temper literary ambition with an awareness of personal capability. Books take a long time to write.
The Art of Writing No. 16
Let me pursue this question of character complexity. What I said in the last blog was that those that people our pages, to be life-like, have to have shades of dark and light. There is a unique moral colour chart for everyone and it includes sin and evil. What is revealed it is a consequence of circumstance. So, even if you create a totally virtuous being as a character, he or she will only be believable against a backdrop of the mixed morality of those around him or her and similarly with a character who is wholly evil. Such completely exceptional natures must become a central focus to a novel or not be there at all. You just can’t sell a novel with a cast list where everyone is a monochrome figure. That is usually the stuff of comics, propaganda or puppetry. So think seriously about how you might explore right and wrong through the messy profiles that people actually have in life rather than by a crude simplification of character. To be enriched by the experience of a novel means that the reader leaves it believing they have had an experience which makes life more comprehensible and even a touch more manageable. A book is a vicarious and unique experience for each reader.
In Azimuth, one of my central characters kills frequently at first but over the course of the trilogy the regularity of death decreases as he gains a moral direction. Establishing this as main plot construct makes it attendant upon me to present him at first as a man in whom empathy for others is just a putative trait among many such as courage and honesty but one which grows through experience to dominate his profile. Each time he kills his internal conflict grows over his actions. To make this psychological tension vibrant, every death must be described uniquely, the nature of death itself explored and the impact on this character’s further experiences built in to the succeeding narrative. As readers we must not be able to predict when or, indeed, whether he will transcend his upbringing and gain enlightenment. Azimuth is a saga and has dozens of characters, from walk-on parts to those that affect the direction of the story line significantly. What I tried to do with each was provide enough ambiguity in the profile of each so that the maximum number of possible actions was open to every one of them. If you establish this as your modus operandi as an author, your plot becomes pregnant with continuous possibility. But if your characters are single trait ciphers, unpredictability and tension will not haunt your pages.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
twitter@profjacksanger
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
twitter@profjacksanger
Monday, April 16, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 15
The question of having characters as ciphers or as complex human beings who beguile, infuriate, seduce, anger, irritate and illuminate the reader in turns is crux. In much of fast food literature, written to formula whether bodice rippers, blood rippers, space trippers or crime grippers, women may be depicted in short authorial shrift. They fulfill the roles of victim, sex partner, wife or mother against a generally greyed out background to the fast narrative. Likewise, men have their stereotypical roles in this range of fiction as victims, progenitoirs of evil, husbands, killers and so on. The more formulaic the genre, the less human characters usually are. Descriptions of them are rarely truly interesting because the writer hopes that the imagination of the reader will fill in the flesh where it is missing.
The reason Dexter is such fine TV is that the hero (!) is a serial killer with whom we can identify. The complexity of his character and motivation is so multi-layered that we catch ourselves wanting him to get away with yet another macabre act and, as a consequence, wondering about the dark sides of our own natures. It is viscerally funny and poignant, disgusting and sentimental and utterly riveting. Clearly a writer can write about anything, no matter how taboo but getting away with it is another matter. By that I mean, inveigling the reader into a world he or she never normally occupies, making it familiar and then building identification with the characters’ struggles, therein.
Why characters have to have complexity is because it allows the writer to explore the unexpected. If, in formulaic writing, a character commits an idiosyncratic act that cannot be explained by depth of character, then that act is not credible to the reader. All of us buy books to suspend our disbelief. The writer, like any stage magician, does this through complex layers of human psychology in his or her cast list.
To tie this up to previous blogs, books are mostly about people in extraordinary circumstances in which they have sex, kill, love, hate, are terrorized by reality or otherwise, go to war, abuse their loved ones, engage in magical journeys… The humdrum is not what we are seeking when we pick up a book in a bookshop. That is the place from which we may want to escape! Generally we want to know why these characters have got where they are and how they are going to navigate what is in front of them. The more we feel we know them, the better we believe it.
It is a necessary exercise to look at your book in its first full draft and take each main character through the interweaving plot. Are you creating a wafer thin profile? Are you ensuring there is no ambiguity or paradox in this person? Are you limiting his or her power to surprise us by transcending misfortune in some noble way? Can we understand and find credible the wonderful and terrible things characters do, equally?
Can we identify with them, full stop.
Can we identify with them, full stop.
I was asked at the launch of Azimuth (I did it here in Accra) after I'd done a couple of readings, with whom of my characters did I identify most, as the author. I said every one of them, even the most pathological of the killers and the most pure of those seeking self-knowledge. But, if pushed, I would choose the manipulative and occasionally heartless sixteen year old heir to an empire. That’s writing for you – a male writer, nearly seventy years old, creating a sixteen year old mixed race Persian princess who has become as real to him as any close friend.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Sunday, April 15, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 14
To bridge this blog to the last two, let me state that sex and death are inextricably linked in much writing because they are in life. The French call an orgasm un petit mort, as if to emphasise the point. In the BBC series about the neurotic, fat psychoanalyst who helps police solve cases by profiling killers, Cracker, the overweight fellow often refers to the buzz that killers get from killing which makes them want sex before and after murder. I met a Frenchman once who was elated because he had knocked down and killed someone. Now he had achieved this particular ambition in his life. Yet in much of writing, apart from high literature’s deep psychological studies, killing is almost an afterthought. It is wham bam and on to the next scene. When victims are mere ciphers and killers show little thought to death owing to the writer’s pen, then you begin to wonder. Are you writing a superhero comic, a run of the mill crime novel or something which educates and informs? There will be many future blogs on the issue of complexity, moral or otherwise so that’s enough for the moment except to say that all good writing must rest upon the author’s empathy with his or her characters, good or evil.
Azimuth’s three volumes depict, among other things, the gradually changes in a heroic figure as he comes to terms with killing. In this trilogy he deals with (and deals out) death easily at first but begins to realize the enormity of what he has been doing. Meanwhile the historian, Kamil, who has written the hero’s history, also kills under a strange force that leaves him powerless to do otherwise.
Kamil stared at the dripping blade in his hand and a coldness swept his body followed by a momentary exultation which, later, he could not fathom. Was it the relief at his survival or the fact that he had killed for the first time?
You will have to read the books to follow the way that the characters’ experiences change their inner pathologies but nowhere in the book is death taken lightly. Because I, as a writer, have a repugnance for killing, whether by individuals or states, every act of death is a challenge to me to understand the act and empathise with BOTH killer and killed. I don’t want my idealism to result in proseltysing because the reader would see that as a sermon and not true to the awkward and contradictory nature of human profiles. As I said above, as writers we can attempt to understand complexity or we can play by established formulas and do little to advance the cause of human enlightenment.
Buy Azimuth at:
or download from kindle as an e-book
Labels: Writing. Dying to please.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 13
More nuts and bolts about sex, if that is not being too euphemistic! And euphemisms, metaphors and similes are often at the heart of scenes of physical intimacy.
Having discussed people’s sneering at hyperbole in the last blog, it may help in the writing of sex scenes to consider two steps. First, determine whether such a scene helps the plot along by being so explicitly detailed or should you make only passing reference to it. Does it deepen our understanding of our characters and therefore make plausible the scrapes they get into? The second step is attendant upon the first. Having decided you must explore how this flesh, blood, heart and mind activity affects character and plot development, play with the following (by no means exhaustive) strategies and see which works best for you:
1 Write from the outside as though you are a forensic biologist
2 Write from the outside as though you are a Martian
3 Write from the outside but focus on one element of the act in such a way as to convey the whole
4 Write from inside the heads of one or both of the participants
5 Write from the physical reality of participants
6 Write from the emotional reality of participants
Meanwhile, use a thesaurus and try to provide a rich variety of terms for parts of the body and the convulsive acts, themselves.
As I inferred in the last blog, we are all possible experts in the basics of sex but the way we engage with others is unique. For a sex scene to be successful in your novel it might educate, excite, challenge, amuse, create identification, surprise, induce longing. However, overriding everything, at the conclusion of it we should know more about the psychology of the participants. We shouldn’t feel that the writing was gratuitous or formulaic but that the writer navigated all the pitfalls rather adroitly, unusually and even - poetically.
Friday, April 13, 2012
The Art of Writing No 12
It seems like a lot of you are now following these meandering blogs about writing. I have spent most of my life as a writer, both academic and fictional and there is much to pass on, be it idiosyncratic and personal. However, there must be much that is generalisable, should you take it and extrapolate it into your own context. Being a series of random acts, these insights are just how they arise in my mind. Maybe later I will order and refine them into a manual and put them on kindle for free.
Anyway, sex.
I wrote recently on twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/Profjacksanger) The pen penetrates the blank page in an act of copulation and the cells of the story begin multiplying. In a Freudian sense, sex is in everything we do. If men think of it every ten seconds and women not quite so much, it must infiltrate (or inseminate) our writing. Nevertheless it still has an aura of taboo for the writer. How to describe the physical, emotional and intellectual consequences of such intimacy? Like fingerprints, everyone has sex as part of his or her make-up but, like fingerprints, the experience of it is unique. So we are aware, when we write about the sexual act that if we over-indulge, people will scoff and if we take Wittgenstein’s view (that which cannot be spoken of, should be passed over in silence) the reader knows we are copping out. What kind of writers are we then?
Overwriting is a bit like Hitchcock discovering Freudian imagery in the sixties. Towers rising and falling, trains rushing into tunnels, shoals of little fish thrashing about. Hyperbole and sex don’t seem to go together. Sex-writing, like everything else, should be conditioned by the relationships and the setting in which it takes place. If the couple have an edgy relationship then does sex between them smooth out or intensify the edginess? Sex in a luxurious hotel may be very differently described from sex in a back alley or in the domestic bedroom where it has taken place hundreds of times and can show the break down of a relationship or, indeed, the rejuvenation of one.
So, when it comes to writing about sex, you must spend far more time on getting it right than when describing other human acts or scenery. Here’s something I wrote in The Strange Attractor (Kindle e-books Amazon):
“On the chair,” says your pleading voice between the probing tongue strokes in my ear. It stands waiting, a deus ex machina of odd limbs in the centre of the room. And now I am almost silent in my gorging as you fill all my horizons. You speak and croon to me in barely intelligible growls and moans. You are astride me and your naked thighs are rising upon me. The chair tips precipitously and my limbs strain into delicious pain as I hold you mid air so that you can let reason go and make your animal instincts blot out all logic. Your pincering internal muscles grip me and work on me as I bend to your breasts and lay hand and mouth to your nipples. Finally, we ride together, sound-tracked by your jolting whimpers, into a temporary eyes-shut darkness.
Does it do what I have said? Does it capture some aspect of the womanising male detective’s character? (He is the ‘I’, the first person narrator of the story). Is it sufficiently unique? Does the setting of the chair, an art piece installation, promote enough of an environmental difference? You could of course download the book and enjoy all of Ted Silver’s sexual and other exploits!
The Strange Attractor by Jack Sanger Kindle Amazon
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Art of Writing No 11
What I have found useful in developing plot lines is as follows. Given that in these blogs I crudely dichotomise writers into two camps, lego and clay, let me look at how narratives are developed in each. Plot lines of the clay type writer are a little more mysterious than those of the lego. For the clay writer they are much more organic and evolve from an alchemical mix of characters’ psychology, previous action and the environment. There is a sense of the plot unfolding as the heady mix of interactions go on. To some extent you are at the behest of the characters that you have created, their will being stronger than your (maybe) desire to control them and speak through them! On the other hand, lego writers like to create a predestined pattern or formula for their plots, particularly in, say, crime fiction. What both camps desire is that the ending of a narrative cannot be guessed until it happens, whether this means that the guilty party is revealed or that an illumination of character and circumstance occurs which makes the foregoing plot line suddenly translucent.
The problem we have as writers is that we plagiarise unwittingly (if we are honourable!) and so it is easy for the reader to latch on to what has become a plot cliché. We borrow from films, books, the internet, news stories without realizing it.
So – before you go too far, whether you are clay or lego, ask yourself whether you can remember anything similar to the events you are portraying and, if so, scratch out and start again. Horrible to do. I have said on Twitter that writing is an addiction but editing is cold turkey! (@profjacksanger.com)You may have to take extreme measures to make your plots unique but also believable. Some writers begin with an extraordinary ending and then work towards it, some write bits of plot and character on study cards and then riffle them and try to cohere the new pattern of events. Some set up a group of characters and then introduce an act of god to see how they will behave.
I don’t see myself as a crime writer but have one book of that genre on kindle under the pseudonym Eric le Sange. In it I use a little knowledge of chaos theory and work out how a Private Dick solves crimes utilizing it. By this introduction of a novel detection technique both plot and character become different. Add to that the notion of a womanizing detective who is shamed and blamed by most of the women he meets and a richness evolves. Good luck!
www,azimuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange, kindle e-books, Amazon
Labels: Writing techniques. Plot
Monday, April 09, 2012
The Art of Writing No 10
Having a writer’s block is like having a terrible on-going organic ailment to the writer, particularly to the artist whose self-value is almost totally and inextricably tied up with the need to express himself or herself in words. How we live and how we die is a conundrum we try to solve (or evade) throughout our lives and the writer attempts it by giving birth to poems, novels and short stories which allow the reader glimpses through to vast panoramic insights into his or her existence. It can act as a tombstone (albeit one with rather a long epitaph!).
So not to write for such people is akin to a disease. Let’s call it stultification. Everything from the mind to the pores in the skin and the various other orifices of discharge, appear bunged up. What to do?
Here are one or two solutions for this, in no particular order, for the more major issues in blockedness (I dealt with incipient writer’s block in the last blog):
1 Ignore any thought about the entirety of a piece of work and just write, write write whatever, drivel through to well coined phrases. Every day. Perspiration eventually leads to inspiration. It is astonishing how you can suddenly find yourself in the groove and all you have to do is dump the meandering introductory riffs. It is also astonishing how themes emerge this way and your apparent discrete elements become cohered.
2 If the block is in the middle of your work, write the ending. Or write character descriptions for later. Don’t allow a silence to grow between your tapping keys and the screen, or pencil tip and paper. Stay with it. Trust it and your brain will come up trumps.
3 Organise your desk so there are no distractions. I always do this at the end of one project and the beginning of another. A spring clean, including the desktop on the computer.
4 Attend to outside constraints (relationships, jobs, friends, environment can all lead to lower self-worth and a sense that you have nothing to say. You MUST give yourself the licence to do both write and sort out. Strike a bargain with yourself. Sorting out elements in your life will give you the reward of writing. Sort out writing and the joy of fulfillment spreads into your every day life.)
5 Take a notebook everywhere. Allan Ahlberg, the children’s writer, a life long close friend, makes notes everywhere he goes. Snippets of conversation. Paradoxes in adverts. Phrases used by writers he admires. Malcolm Bradbury, once my writing supervisor, wrote much of The History Man and Eating People is Wrong by ducking into the toilet and scribbling down what academics were saying at parties. Never forget to write down an idea as it happens to you. Afterwards it could turn from diamond to paste in your memory, if not.
6 Think small and allow the big idea to materialize as a book progresses. In Azimuth, I wrote a short story about the birth of an extraordinary child in pre-Buddha days. Then another. Then I began to realize this was a biography of an early thinker…920 pages later, full of strange fables, adventures, illuminations, the book is out on show...
After writing Azimuth a lot of people asked me what I was going to do, knowing that the book had taken ten years to write. What I did was take my own advice. I began writing whatever came into may head. Suddenly I realized why I was writing and what the story actually was. A neat (I hope) novella emerged with a satisfying kick at the end, called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story. The title is a quote from The Lady of Shallot… and will be on Kindle shortly.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
The Art of Writing No 9
How do you leave your writing each day? Have you a tendency to writer’s block? In Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance by Pirsig there is a great vignette in which a student is unable to write, set the task of describing a building. The teacher tells the student to focus on a wall, then a line of bricks, then a single brick. The student begins to write. You may have to develop your own rituals but here is advice I gave to my many PhD students.
Never leave your notebook or computer (whatever medium you use) at the end of a chapter, paragraph or even sentence if you feel that you are completing a train of thought. The full stop that you insert at this point is tantamount to inviting writer’s block if you suffer from it. Instead, leave your writing in the middle of a flow where you can be more or less certain that you can pick it up again and continue with the sentence and paragraph. For example, in the middle of a description of a person, scenery or an event. When you come back you can complete it easily and on you go. Our brains have what is to come all ready and waiting if they are given the right signposts on the route of travel.
Labels: Writing tips. Writer's block.