The Art of Writing No. 46

I’d like to continue the refrain of Jack Sanger good, Jack Sanger not bad which I began in the last blog. It was in answer to the question I posed myself after my illustrious writer friend opined that I maybe should not deign to build a central character who is a successful writer. My first answer involved the notion of ‘critical introspection’ from my academic days.

Admittedly I am not (yet) a household name in the world of fiction but who knows, I have ambition! Let me think a little more about my weaknesses as a writer, some of which will have leaked on to the screen of previous blogs, more as incidental  remarks than focused literary self-criticism. So, let’s go. These are areas I have recognized I should watch carefully in order not to pollute my prose with infelicity.

I appear to have a problem with prepositions. I make more adjustments to prepositions than any other part of my syntax. Why? Maybe it goes back to childhood at school, maybe the cadences of my inner dialogue betray me with alliteration and other sound resonances which then produce the wrong word. Maybe it's because I hate repetition in a paragraph and stick in an inappropriate preposition in an attempt at variety and then revert or change again, sometimes having to alter the whole sentence to avoid repeats. Occasionally I can’t think which preposition is the right one and stare blankly at my notebook or screen.

Another failing I have is over-extending metaphors. I begin well enough but find myself moving from fluidity into a stick morass as I chase the meaning into cul de sacs of ornate meaninglessness. Why is Kamil in Azimuth a fearful detective? Well, he is not used to it being a man of the library rather than of action. But, having spent a sentence or two delivering this picture I go on and on, reveling in his fears and historical anti-heroes.  The answer to this is worth a note. What can be said in an effusive paragraph can be spread more thinly through the whole book so that the picture of Kamil is in the form of a drip-feed and we have, from the novelist’s point of view, a kind of character striptease. Since, like most writers other than the most obsessively pedantic, I hate rewriting or erasing my ‘flow’, this was a hard lesson for me.

There are times when I am too pleased with the sound of my own voice. That is, I find my own views coming from the mouths of characters rather than theirs. It is obtrusive and crass and has to be scratched regardless of the sheer beauty of the text (!).

I can write pages of dialogue without the scaffolding of description or helpful positioning pointers, assuming the reader can follow who is speaking. This, of course becomes increasingly cryptic if there is more than one person involved in dialogue.

I rely too much on my own definitions of words and later I have to check in a dictionary what they actually mean. Occasionally it is the opposite of my assumption, a sort of malapropism. I used the word ‘enervate’ entirely wrongly at first. our This can then throw my careful building of  poetic expression.

Weaknesses become apparent over the years and we attend to them laboriously and somewhat truculently. That’s the way of it. We play to our strengths and excommunicate our evils. Now should I have used that word there?

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

The Art of Writing No. 45

Taking up the theme from blog 44, I’d like to enlarge upon this notion of the ego of the writer – or my own ego in particular! Having been a professor in my last but one incarnation (teacher, social worker, PhD student, researcher, chair in management research and management consultant) I probably have a different take on the process of exploring the mechanics and conceptual subtleties of writing novels than most. I was reasonably successful in those roles even if none of them gave me the ultimate sense of ego-value I probably desired. I always wanted to be a writer. Indeed this ambition saw me as a bit of a marginal academic in that I never really played the academic game; building networks, kowtowing to the bureaucrats and chasing the journals. I did publish a great deal but was more concerned with readability than aridity. What I am sure I was good at was generating research reports that had impact and supervising students to complete better than average PhDs. The quality of my writing was not the real issue here, it was a capacity and motivation to understand the processes that underpin social behaviour, whatever that might be, such as children’s experience with computer games, information handling in classrooms or the effects of appraisal of doctors on their medical practice. I had developed a style of critical discourse involving all those with whom I worked which meant that openness, frankness and fairness dictated how we approached everything we did. There was no room here for lily-livered sensitivities about personal expression. Everything could be contested for how else could anything be improved?

So when it came to writing up PhDs and research reports and the occasional book there was much dissection and self-analysis.

Now, at an age when it is unusual to think in terms of beginning a new career (fiction) I am honour bound to continue in the critical vein that I had established long before. I have written what I consider to be a significant contribution to literature (Azimuth) and also some titles which are less profound, more ephemeral but with elements that make them worthy of a reader’s attention. All of them can be found at the website listed at the end of this piece.

So these blogs are part of an introspective discourse on the processes of writing. I write therefore I am and because I am who I am I want to understand  what is making me! What is this mysterious process, this alchemy which has me pouring myself on to the page. There is a very nice Buddhist story, probably in Zen Flesh Zen Bones by Paul Reps, concerning a caterpillar or millipede being asked by a passing insect how it managed all its legs so wonderfully well. The multi-legged wonder considered this question for a moment and immediately toppled over. Many people believe that by being self-analytical we destroy the subtle processes which make our work what it is. I supervised a sculptor who felt this way. He made great steel installations for public spaces. He also wanted to do an MPhil so he could teach in an art school. By using stop frame photography and writing about what each frame represented in the process of his creation he changed his fundamental relationship with his work. What had been an opaque and magical process was now articulated in his mind. It lifted his work to a new level. The intellectual and the creative could walk hand in hand.

So, back to ego. I am not on a trajectory to prove what a great writer I may be but to be as honest as possible about what for me writing fiction involves.

www.chronometerpublications.me

The Art of Writing No. 44

I spent the weekend with a writer, internationally well known and a long time close friend. We discussed my novella Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story, at some length. He had read it twice and made notes on it. It was the kind of experience most writers crave, if they are not too thin skinned, where virtually every sentence is turned over for sense and value. At the basic level he found ambiguities where I had not meant them, despite my attempts to produce sharp, clean prose. Yet it was in a subtler area of debate that I really benefited.

One of the pervasive threads of the novella involves the central character being a writer. It is he who undergoes ‘gothic’ experiences. My friend (who eschews publicity at all costs, unlike me!) felt that to have a writer as the main protagonist made me vulnerable to a particular kind of hazard. Since the hero of Through a Mirror Clear is very successful in his authorship, this possible pitfall is cranked up (or dug deeper). Not only is he internationally famous within the horror genre but his reading matter appears to be  from the top, classical drawer. What my friend argued was that by casting him in my tale thus, and by invoking his highbrow literary interests, I was by implication placing myself shoulder to shoulder with the greats and promulgating the merits of my own prose. How could I presume to invent such an individual and his world without antagonising the reader or at least inciting him/her to be far more critical of my work than would normally be the case?

So, does it take a great writer to create the life-world of another writer and provide the reader with a profile of the inside of such a person’s mind? I never thought so before. On this basis a novel which includes God as a character would be a step too far, even for Tolstoy.

To be even implicitly self-aggrandising was not my intent. I wanted to develop a drama in which the writer’s success in his genre might provide ironies and resonances when he became faced with strange and unsettling challenges to his reason, as horrifying as any in his own work.  What I would say is that it tests nerve and skill to include quotes from your author-character’s published text. I had to do some of this in Azimuth and found myself later scratching a lot of it out.

But, as I have stated many times elsewhere in these blogs, what the writer thinks s/he gives and what the reader receives can be two very different things. I suppose we hope that if most of the people most of the time are mostly unperturbed then we have done ok.

So there’s a thing to prick the conscience of any king of words. In the manner of Russian dolls, here am I in a blog on writing, discussing a fellow writer’s thoughts about the art of writing, particularly the problem of being a novelist writing about a novelist’s relationship with his writing. And finding it extremely problematical and labyrinthine!

All my own writing, including Azimuth and Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story

www.chronometerpublications.me

The Art of Writing No 43

I have just finished reading a couple of Joseph Conrad novellas; Heart of Darkness and Youth. What strikes me as instructive for the aspiring writer in both of them is how Conrad’s knowledge of the sea and the technology of ships, albeit in the early days of metal hulls and mechanical navigation, becomes a kind of mystical manual for the reader who has not and will never spend such time on dangerous water. I suppose Victorian and Edwardian times, the era of empire building, gave writers licence to provide an early superhero identification and escapism for the reader. But I’m no literary critic!

What makes me turn over the experience in my mind is how expert knowledge can be presented in such a way that we are drawn into it as if being initiated into the mysterious rites of some exotic fellowship. The naming of parts, the special lingo, the daily round and the required practices of seafaring men all have a seductive appeal. Much of writing stems from such ingrained knowledge and it seems to me to be superior to that ‘researched’ backcloth to much of literature today. Why? Well, I would imagine that the telling of tales has greater power if expertise is implicit rather than explicit because it imbues every word we read and does not appear forced.

I remember Jorge Luis Borges’ satirical response to any crude writing which flaunts a writer’s expertise in a subject, in this case the taxonomical knowledge of the animal kingdom:

What I take from this is that a novelist has an infinite set of possibilities at his/her disposal. Being keen to flaunt expert knowledge may restrict the flight of creativity. As Borges shows, we authors can be experts in fabulous taxonomies of the imagination.

www.chronometerpublications.me

The Art of Writing No. 42

I mentioned plagiarism.

There is a form of it which divides writers down the middle. It can be subtle, invasive and even contaminating. It revolves around the issue of whether a novelist should read other writers’ fiction during the process of making a novel.  There are many writing manuals which focus on a writer’s need to read quality fiction in order to develop good habits rather like student artists being made to copy famous paintings in order to understand the strategies that great artists employ. I saw a documentary on Jack Cardiff, the finest cinematographer ever, who studied paintings in order to understand how light works to dramatic advantage on celluloid. The better the fiction, the more it instructs, though I feel that the process is one of immersive osmosis rather than direct imitation. What I mean is that the brain is so complex that it will mix your range of reading in a melange and bring out your improved literary expression. Read Timothy Galway’s The Inner Game of Tennis  to understand this. He argues that by merely watching another player, the brain assimilates so much information it reproduces good strokes in a way that pedantic, step by step teaching cannot achieve.

For myself, reading other authors while I am writing fiction is a no-no. Inevitably (because I am competitive!) I am constantly comparing my work with theirs and it slows me down. I also find myself with the wrong ‘voice’ in my head, that of a character in another author’s work. I use expressions which I know are borrowed.

Establishing your own literary identity is a hard won battle with every book you have ever read. My advice is to leave a gap between the last fiction you have read before starting writing, read non-fiction or listen to music or do a Cardiff and view art, anything to dislodge the last exciting chapters from your mind! It is only through time that your unique qualities will show and no-one will be able to point to unconscious plagiarism.

I wrote Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story (as Eric le Sange rather than Jack Sanger) because I was irritated by a Julian Barnes novella winning the Booker Prize for literature. I felt it was mechanical and artificial. There was little in it which was organic and truly of the heart. Not that I want you to compare the books, just to underline the effect that reading others’ work can have. We are private individuals are we not? We live in our fantasy universe and have to deal with whatever comes our way. I make sure now that these incursions are not from the prose of another artist!

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic love Story by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon

Azimuth by Jack Sanger in paperback at azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth by Jack Sanger in three separate books on Kindle Amazon

The Art of Writing No. 41

In a long series of blogs about one subject, writing, there is bound to be crossover, overlapping and repetition, just the very things the blog warns you against! But, unless it becomes a blog novel, I don’t have to spend time doing excisions and elisions to give it a flow. This, of course, intimates that I have written about today’s subject before though this blog is tangential to the last offering on the subject

If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I am on a crushingly tough course to bring original thought to issues that perplex us. Every day I write a couple of zen-like mind benders. The art of reducing a complex concept to a few characters is time consuming even when you have developed the mental muscle to fashion such aphorisms. There are two purposes in doing it. The first is to continue to refine my mind-tool and practise control over language. The second is to persuade readers that my voice is intriguing, occasionally illuminating and a good test as to whether my novels are worth obtaining. Among my tweets are little adverts for my books. I hope they are sufficiently redolent of my other cryptic tweeting in their power to persuade.

My first tweet of today says: Stereotyping is how society tailors you a straitjacket

Stereotyping is a massive element in our lives far beyond race, gender and religion. We are conditioned to present ourselves from nursery school to the grave with  growing certainty, calling it maturity, as though we have discovered who we are and those around us can feel secure in our predictable identity. We learn to behave according to this template and find it extraordinarily difficult to do anything which contradicts it. Each time we try our society in the shape of friends, work colleagues and family try to push us back inside the casing we have developed. A great deal of literature concerns those individuals who break the mould, or have it broken by events and then try to come to terms with the changes forced upon them. The changes in a character give the reader the opportunity to identify with, and to play vicariously with, projected changes in his or her own life. There must be a novel which focuses on completely uninteresting people doing uninteresting things but, unless it is a post-modern (and unintentionally funny) antithesis of  the drama in normal literature, who among us will read it?

Most of the characters in Azimuth undergo change, even the minor ones and some undergo enormous geological disturbance. A minor character who brings an unearthly, sorcerous and mystifying colouring to the plot is my version of the old Lilith myth. If you don’t know her it is worth discovering how she refused to lie down under Adam and was booted out of Eden as a consequence. Since then she has been blamed for much of the wanton mayhem that erupts in civilized life. I won’t tell you who she is because the fact is disguised for much of the second Book. I advertised her presence like this among my regular tweets today:

In Hebrew texts Lilith was Adam's first woman bringing blood, chaos and upheaval to humanity; she lives on in Azimuth: http://www.Azimuthtrilogy.com

The Art of Writing No. 40

I had the problem that most writers have when they go back to draft novels they have written some time before, intending to refurbish them and flog them as ebooks. This is not to suggest that they are not good enough for publication on paper but, like hundreds of good to great pieces of fiction (!), they were declined owing to the subjectivity of the publishers’ new police, the agents. At least the internet provides a platform and if you can catch the zeitgeist of current literary preoccupations, your readers can do for you what that anonymous person in an office with rejection templates in front of her/him could not do. Or, better than that, you can break the mould and create new kinds of fiction.

Anyway, such was my problem with The Strange Attractor. I had worked like a slave on it but got many rejection slips, a few of which suggested that someone had read the first twenty five or so pages I had sent on their demand. I had a version of it on an old computer and so the raw material was there for a re-write. What did I discover about my former self, the individual who wrote it? What needed changing in the prose, characters and plot? As far as the ‘I’ that wrote it was concerned, the ten years had not made too much difference. I think I was less relaxed, possibly because writing was my night job. This evidenced itself in the sometimes cryptic nature of the prose. Given I could not give it the time I would have liked, somehow the prose reflected this. The dialogue was pared down too much. The descriptions were too skeletal. I think I was also being a bit too fancy dannish in my cleverness in an attempt to woo the agents. Perhaps there was an element of fantasy projection going on, too. Maybe I was looking for a new, exciting partner and created versions of her in my pages!

As far as the novel is concerned the most obvious issue that leapt from the page to smack me between the eyes, was how quickly it had become dated. Not in a good way. My re-writing involved being more tolerant of the need to explain, the desire to support the reader securely, to be less ambiguous, to ensure that the key turning points of the plot were well advertised (even in their veiled nature) and to revise street argot because it had already passed into retro-nerdism. The technology in the book (a key constituent) was what was prevalent before the miniaturisation revolution and even the attitudes between males and females did not sit well with the post feminist changes in society, so these, too, needed updating.

The re-write was slow and pernickety because it was  more a matter of changing the odd word or sentence on each page and making sure that everything in the book, spoke of a particular time in social history, particularly the way the ‘hero’ uses chaos theory to solve crime. (Strange Attractor is a key term in chaos theory but has undoubted strength in its metaphoric ambiguity, as a title). What I learned from the reupholstering of the book’s innards was to think more carefully about slang, the material things that date quickly and the social changes which make characters seem oddly behaved and out of place in the present day. Either I could have edited it as a period piece or brought it up to date. Doing the former would have meant a lot more research to couch my phraseology in those times (which is not my greatest skill) or refreshing as I went. That is what I did.

The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange aka Jack Sanger, Kindle, Amazon

The Art of Writing No. 39

Here is the beginning of the novella, Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story, I have just published on Kindle, Amazon. I wrote about its genesis two blogs ago. I thought I’d try to explain how I set about trapping the reader (hopefully!) at its onset.

It had happened with increasing regularity if you looked upon it from the vantage point of today. He was sure it had not occurred in the first thirty years. There must have been

isolated outposts of it over the next decade which he had put down to daydreams and

nothing more. But hardly any time seemed to go past now without some singular event.

They were both disturbing and exciting, a sinister mystery and a delight.

What was the most teasing aspect was that if he tried to capture them, using his mind

like a high speed camera to create a still, the images with which he should be left were

blank leaving him swimming in a void. On the contrary, if he did nothing but continue

with the unfettered run of his thoughts, they remained as a blurry background, something parallel and almost incorporeal. Almost.

The latest visitations were the most definitive yet in that in them he had a strong sense

of a female presence, if not of a reality around it.

While the story as a whole seems to engage very well I was unsure for a long time about what to do at the kick off. I wanted to put the reader immediately into a puzzle, whet his or her appetite and, as the story progresses, get him or her guessing increasingly about what is going on. On the latter score I am sure it seduces as a whodunwhat.

Given that it is a long short story, I decided that all the ingredients of the puzzle should be in the reader’s mind within the first couple of minutes of starting the story. Hence the reference to strange visitations, the high speed camera line and the enigmatic female presence. Being a horror story about taboo, with technology as part of its setting, it seemed essential to create an air of mystery and immediately precipitate the guessing game. Also, I wanted to provoke reader identification with the condition the main protagonist suffers. Most of us have experienced daydreams, dreams, nightmares and peculiarly bizarre thoughts beyond our immediate control. We tend to ignore them even while a part of us wonders at their import. This human condition of being vaguely aware that there is something beyond immediate reality was what I was trying to capture in the novella.

There were, when I last read the literature, two kinds of human learning; serial and parallel. If you are a serialist you like information in building blocks, logically connected until you have constructed the whole. If you are a parallelist then you start from the whole and gradual break it down to the component parts. Parallelists like all the information at the start. This is a novella for parallelists. Within a couple of chapters they have all the information they need. After that all is embroidery. Only the last line confirms or disconfirms their hypotheses regarding the plot.

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Jack Sanger Kindle, Amazon

The Art of Writing No. 38

Repetition is the bane of the author. There is a high incidence of the repetition of a word or phrase within a single paragraph, never mind chapter!

Consequently there are many writers who sit with a thesaurus by their computer or notebook. Not many of us have a labyrinthine vocabulary and having at hand a resource which provides synonyms can help us produce a much more involving and entertaining text. (There are free ones on the internet).The issue for the writer is that the more intensely you operate in the ‘zone’, with words spewing from your tommy-gun-like-brain on to the paper - for there seems to be nothing inside your head to impede their progress - the more clichéd your writing becomes. Arrestingly innovative sentences help make a book. Using alternative words and phrases gee us up because they create hooks for our imaginations, momentarily, by stimulating our pleasure in the new and fresh. You have to be a very great writer indeed to write in a fever of concentration and still maintain originality and freshness in your choice of words. I remember reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and twice, maybe three times he talked of the hero ‘gunning’ his car away from some scene or the other. I felt short-changed. His writing is never more than adequate. The better the writer, the more he or she tries to avoid repetition of a word, be it noun, verb or adjective. I remember seeing a rather fine film set in my home city of Newcastle, called Get Carter. An excellent phrase was used by either a gangster or Caine, I can’t remember which, but whoever it was described the eyes in someone’s face as piss holes in the snow.  Then I happened to see a B movie some couple of years later and there was another gangster using the same phrase, attesting to its B movie status.  The same happens with novels. It is careless and lazy to plagiarise from other sources, as well as being an act of thievery against a fellow professional. It is also careless and lazy to plagiarise from your own novel, either a previous work or the one you are currently writing! Remember, plagiarism can be unconscious – the mere duplicating of words and phrases you have used already.

Essentially, most repetition within your work breeds banality and a lifeless prose. Avoid it.

Having said all that, when my editor read the first draft of Azimuth Book 1, she said she could not remember who some of the characters were because I did not repeat the ‘handles’ which enable the reader to follow characters through the plot.  Instead, I had resorted to a variety of synonyms when describing them. I learned that repetition might actually be necessary. The cast of characters in Azimuth runs into the hundreds and since for most of the inner narrative there are no names to distinguish individuals, I had focused on making my prose rich and diverse, offering different adjectives to describe a character every time he or she turned up, thereby confusing the reader. Using the same noun and adjective to re-introduce a character helped. The ‘fat boy’ is always reintroduced at his next entrance as the ‘fat boy’, not the plump boy, the rotund boy, the obese boy…. It is the same when introducing characters’ appearances. Try to give a unique visual profile to every one of them so that there can be no confusion. This extends to names. Don’t even include names beginning with the same first letter. Books are made from words, not visual images. Generally we can differentiate people easily in films and on TV by their features alone but in books we have to be sure we are including enough detail to make a character unique.

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange on Kindle Amazon

Azimuth by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle Amazon

Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF) www.azmuthtrilogy.com

The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon

The Art of Writing No.37

Today, I have released a novella called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. I thought it might be worth a little detail on how it came about.

I had made all the agreements with printers, typesetters and illustrator to ensure that Azimuth the paperback would come out on time and in reasonable nick, in fact a paperback with beauty and weight. Whilst I was waiting for Azimuth to be produced physically and before I began the long, hard road of marketing it, I decided to write a novella. I wanted to try something different, testing myself with a plot, characters and writing style far removed from the historical imagination of Azimuth.

The idea came to me when I was being introspective about my brain and my mind. Why was it that I experienced visions of people, events and environments that I had never encountered before, in daydreams? Where did they come from? Was my brain driving my mind to experience these events for some undisclosed purpose? This was heightened when an unknown beautiful woman reappeared a handful of times in my thoughts, I had the germ of a plot. The Cheshire Cat-like woman took me back to a poem I liked when young, Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot. In it there is a mysterious, almost ghost-like woman who has probably inhabited my unconscious ever since first encountering her.

I had no idea about plot line other than finding a literary way of explaining her visitations. I invented a character – or at least one leapt to the screen – whom I named, as soon as the story permitted,  William Jethro Blake. Blake, as you may know, saw visions much as he saw other forms of reality. The Jethro element referred to Jethro Tull, the gardener.

My first ten or so chapters came off my keys in a strange, dislocated, haphazard fashion, rather as the visions did, themselves. In fact, iteratively, I had William (or he had me) musing on exactly this lack of cohesivness to the narrative:

The consequence was that he found himself interrogating his notebook’s words and phrases for a pattern of meaning but they would not cohere and make sentences and paragraphs. They remained obstinately asynchronous, discrete, islands unto themselves. The experience defied that essential human capacity to make sense out of partial information. He had run writing classes and given people exactly the kind of hotchpotch he was now staring at and they would come up with a wonderful variety of story threads, combining them all as if the words were polarized magnets and could twist and turn to clump together. No, here they were repelling each other and refusing any attempt at union.

I moved on to the second half of the novella, intent on drawing all this disparate information into one flow of sense, giving the story a punch-line such as I described in the last blog. It came to me. The ending and the reason why the first ten chapters were written the way they were. Alchemy took place in my unconscious and I opened a portal and let it out. Have trust in the imagination. Ah the brain and the mind, they are our tools but may become our straitjackets, if we treat them as servants.

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange on Kindle Amazon

Azimuth by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle Amazon

Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF) www.azmuthtrilogy.com

The Art of Writing No. 36

When Little Nell died she caused a national outpouring of grief in Victorian industrial Britain. Readers of the chapter by chapter novel The Old Curiosity Shop implored Dickens to find a way out, a resurrection of the character. In its time it was the epitome of fine writing about a deeply difficult subject. But, not so long after, in the literary scheme of things, Oscar Wilde said,

“One must have a heart f stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Writing about death, to be effective and keep the reader’s attention and empathy, is a matter of hermeneutics. Everything about it must ring true to both the context of the story and the time when a person reads it. Of course we can read about the demise of Nell today, and enjoy it even while we regard it as mawkish and sentimental. We make allowances for the period and transport ourselves back to what it must have been like to have a Victorian sensibility. Most of us will write about death or the dead at some point. In The Strange Attractor I described an illicit visit to the morgue to watch a post mortem. That was easy in the sense that the bodies were dead and the act of dying lay outside the narrative. Also the attitude of the observer, Edward Silver, a private detective, was cool and detached. But in Azimuth, a major character is killed. I tried to write about grief and death within the context of the book, sentimentality not being a dominant trait among my characters.

They seated her body, her head bowed, on her roan, holding her there from either side and walked slowly to the nearest high ground, a small, exposed cliff of brittle red stone. They laid her along its base and the Warrior took powders from saddle bags and mixed them before working them into a crack in the vertical face just above her prone form.

  Whatever she had been before her death was no longer evident no matter how much he reached his mind out to her, -May your spirit go where you have always wished it, he said in a soft, caressing tone, -And may further life spring from your decay.

  -Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his daughter in a breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so that her tears fell upon the lined face. She and her father looked down upon what seemed too tiny a form for so powerful a woman, dressed as always in a warrior’s garb, knife in her belt and sword in her hand.

Looking at it now I remember going over and over the lines which included:

  -Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his daughter in a breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so that her tears fell upon the lined face.

Was I being mawkish? I think I certainly was in my initial descriptions of the burial. I said far too much about the granddaughter’s emotions. In the end I opted for these short lines of a sorrow that breaks through her disciplined and wise nature. You must decide.

When writing something like Azimuth (perhaps within the canon of moral sagas like Lord of the Rings, Beowulf or His Dark Materials) I was always aware that I had to integrate a modern day audience’s rejection of cloying emotion with the harsher times of my characters. It is part of the macro business of persuading readers that this vast, cyclical drama, though it is ostensibly about the changes in a man who begins as a warrior and ends as a sage, is relevant to people’s lives today and the period is immaterial when it comes to being human.

Books by Jack Sanger (aka Eric le Sange)

Azimuth by Jack Sanger paperback and PDF www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth, the ebook, by Jack Sanger in separate volumes Amazon Kindle

The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Amazon Kindle

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le Sange , Amazon Kindle

The Art of Writing No. 35

Jacques Derrida and others of the postmodern literary circus, formulated a theory that it was impossible to produce unequivocal, unambiguous prose. Whatever you do as a writer, no matter how much of a Hemingway or Beckett you might want to be in the Spartan simplicity of your text, it will be read equivocally and ambiguously. Other meaning, said Derrida, leaks out. Reception Theory suggests that every reader reads with a unique interpretation. Fifty readers, fifty different books. Now I have said earlier that one of the ways we might attribute value to writing is to ask if a book lends itself to multiple interpretations. While acknowledging that even simple prose can produce wildly differing understanding (think about instructions to build a wardrobe), more complex expression extends it to infinity.

But the point to be made is this, the ambiguities of great literature are rich and lead to a far greater depth of discourse because the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, the words. The very use of language, its poetry, its apparent verisimilitude, its authentic dialogue, its factual accuracy, its labyrinthine plots, its realistic and complex characters, all and much more, conspire to beguile the reader.  And the closer you are to achieving such quality, the more you must be diligent over key turning points in your narrative. For example, if you are writing a crime novel, you will lay down, you hope unobtrusively, clues that will later prove to be threads in the rope of the plot. For this to work, each character must be in the proper place at the proper time, every motive and relationship must be credible. Look through your narrative and decide where the key junctures are – and then go over what you have written at these points and make sure you have refined them as much as humanly possible. There is nothing worse than finding yourself (as I have mentioned before) in the position of  Raymond Chandler, caught out by film makers who discovered his plot did not stack up. As I have suggested, people will still interpret and believe they have read something that was not there, as a consequence, but on revisiting the vital section, they will grudgingly concede that you couldn’t have done more to inform them. Indeed, good writing leads the reader to acknowledge your arts in deceiving him or her, long enough to get a good tale told.

When I was writing Azimuth I became very befuddled because I was dealing with an extraordinary long time line and children were being born and growing up, events were happening that changed the course of later history, people said and did things which bent the fate lines. I had to create a flow chart at the end and check whether my time line actually worked over generations. I made alterations. I located passages that seemed to me to be main springs to the health of the book and worked on them again.

It is very difficult to get everything in a 300 page novel absolutely perfect but manage the key scenes for the plot to work and you will evade much criticism. Reading for most people, most of the time, involves unconscious editing as they go. They miss bits out of your writing without knowing it. They are not doing a Masters course in literary criticism so it does not matter to them.  Key scenes are their stepping stones across the river of the life of the novel. Don’t let your readership get swept away because you have not made the footholds solid and supportive.

Azimuth trilogy paperback by Jack Sanger available at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth by Jack Sanger in 3 separate ebooks at Kindle (Amazon)

The Art of Writing No. 34

Once you are writing every day and your imagination begins to bulk up on its muscle, ideas come to you many times every day regarding plot lines. I said in an earlier blog how some writers carry an ideas book in their pocket and note down the significant in what they are experiencing whether it be the looks of a person, a few lines of dialogue, a landscape, or a telling aberration in their physical or mental worlds. Some writers have files of recorded data which see them through the lean times when, otherwise, a portcullis of a writer's block might fall across productivity. The notion of having such a resource is more appealing as a concept than a reality for many writers. You only have to look at the planet to realize that humans find it difficult to plan and conserve, against the future. We exploit instead.

Anyway, as I said, ideas come to you (like dreams) the more you make ready for them and reward them with records of their appearance!

Here is a typical example. I watched a documentary last night on science and the light it casts on the nature of life. Like many such programmes it did not quench my thirst. I’d love to know what is the factor that stokes up the extraordinary mechanism that we call DNA. At one point in the programme it was stated that scientists over the next decade or two will create the first unicellular life form. Immediately I thought of a neat Sci Fi short story. At the moment these cells are made and escape from the laboratory, a cataclysm wipes out humanity. Over millions of years they develop into the varieties of complex life we see today; until scientists reach the point where they can create their first unicellular life form… The twist in the tale involves the realization that we are in a never ending loop of creation and destruction. Very Hindu. It would have to be written so that this is disclosed at the very end of the tale.

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler suggests that creativity, in the main, comes from taking two disparate pieces of knowledge and bringing them together to create a third, already known but not, until then, with any connection to the first two. This happens in music, maths and comedy. In music, the final movement may resolve the countervailing nature of what has gone before. In maths, the QED in an equation (forgive my O Level knowledge) produces a pleasing line of proof from separate and hitherto unconnected pieces of mathematical information. In comedy we have the punch line.  I even use the latter to set the scene in the website for Azimuth:

On a grand scale, a novel does the same. The ending should be an intellectually and pleasing denouement which brings together what seems contradictory or paradoxical and shows that a logic pertains to all the books events.

Azimuth by Jack Sanger (paperback and PDF at www.azimuthtrilogy.com)

Azimuth (separate volumes of the trilogy) as ebooks also on Amazon Kindle

The Art of Writing No. 33

I was reading blogs yesterday about the art of writing for ebooks. There were many interesting asides in them, comparing ebooks to traditional paper based literature.

The first one was the splendid (for the author) notion that a book is never out of print once it has been fired into the stratosphere.  It hovers forever to be discovered by generation after generation whereas books go out of print and an author is very lucky indeed for resurrection to occur once the publisher has disposed of the last copy. It also means that as fads and fashions come and go, a novel can come into its own at a time the zeitgeist chooses. Since one of the lines of argument in these blogs is that we authors are satisfying a desire for some kind of legacy through our writing, ebooks may be our eternal children, or our virtual tombstones with extraordinarily long epitaphs written upon them!

The second is the malleability of an ebook when compared with the traditional form. I spent so many months with illustrators and printers producing Azimuth to get the quality of cover image, paper and a layout that does justice to the complex multi-leaved essence of the story, but with an ebook this final form is never reached. I know that subsequent editions of a successful paper based book usually bring with them changes in art and format, yet the process is still static once these decisions have been made. With an ebook that does not sell, you can change its appeal. You can write a new, more dynamic synopsis, add a new front cover and even change the label (this being the way the book is pigeon holed; crime, romance, SF, fantasy…). It makes one think of Paul Valery, the French poet, who said “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned”. Thus it is with enovels. Indeed, should your reviewers all point to a passage in your book that that they feel undermines the book’s general quality, you can re-write it and insert the change.

Third, it is liberating to feel that your novel is not a hostage to fortune in the shape of the preconceptions and subjective judgments of agents and publishers, nor, if it leaps those hurdles, the reviewers in the press. It all comes down to your work and the reactions of your readers. Will they enjoy it? Will they text their friends and tell them how good it is? Will the book snowball on the back of a gathering storm of readership? However, your book is not in a bookshop. It is not a physical entity. And this classical way of selling stories is the one where currently the big money is made. Not for much longer, though. To counteract traditional selling techniques, you have to shepherd your audience to your ebook by equally effective, but innovative forms of marketing.

I write this blog and hope it directs readers to Azimuth. If they like what I say and how I say it, it can help persuade them I am genuine and the book should be a great read. I tweet aphorisms every day to a similar end: @profjacksanger. Today’s first one is:

Religions are insurance companies offering a single policy, life after death, asking you to take it on trust that there will be a payout

Then there’s Facebook and Linkedin. But marketing is hard work. Are you prepared for the daily grind and will your imagination’s well never run dry?

Azimuth (the paperback trilogy) by Jack Sanger at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth by Jack Sanger in ebook in 3 separate volumes Amazon Kindle

Jack Sanger also writes under the nom de plume Eric le Sange and his work appears on Amazon Kindle

The Art of Writing No. 32

The advantage of writing a blog is that you are not restricted by the logics of publication. Your various outpourings may overlap and reiterate what has gone before. Like much of writing it has a special capacity for helping you articulate what is an evanescence until it is put into words and becomes moored in your thought. When I was an academic we used the phrase, writing yourself into knowledge.  The act of writing can be, therefore, a primary act of formulation.

One of the absolute pleasures of writing is finding that you have conversed with your unconscious and drawn into view a flame which had, until then, remained a trickling line of smoke indicating there was a fire somewhere. This fishing into the depth of self becomes easier over time as you learn to trust it. Like a sportsman or woman, at the height of his or her powers, who plays intuitively, beyond the intercession of thought, you are hardly aware of the substance in what you have written until you examine it later, as its first reader. It is then that you have to decide how authentic it is, how much is plagiarised or pure! The pinnacle of such experience is in writing poetry which, like music, tells its truths as a potent alchemy that is more than the mere words on the page. Meanings echo and ricochet away from it, ad infinitum. The more you work with your imagination, the more it comes up trumps. The result can be an insight akin to that delivered by ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream of consciousness’, a kind of authorial therapy, but it can also be the route that takes you into exciting realms beyond the conformity of your previous work.

This process evidences itself most in the way you manage the themes that underlie your work. I have already discussed their place in your narratives. Finding a fresh way to express the complexity of these themes can result directly from the unusual metaphors and insights that erupt from your unconscious, unfettered by the shackles of logic. And this is also true of descriptions of places, people and events. Having no fixed sense of any of these and allowing the creative juices to bring them to the fore can produce the strikingly real and unusual. The plasticity of your brain can either be increased by the appeal to the imagination or decreased by a rigid approach to expressing exactly what you have pre-ordained.

I watched a programme last night about human survival in the icy wastes of the far north. An igloo was built. It was almost exactly how I described an igloo being built in Azimuth. Now, many of you would have googled the strategies for building these ice houses before writing. Fine. But then you have the problem of making what you have researched seem natural and part of the flow of the narrative. When I wrote it, I WAS there with my characters solving the problem of how to survive a terrible night and so it came out in the very portrayal of traits, place and dialogue. I hope I am not sounding too vain here, it is as dispassionate as I can make it and, as I have said before, you can check my introspective analysis by reading the relevant section in the third Book, The Final Journey.

Azimuth by Jack Sanger, the paperback trilogy from www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth as separate E-Books, The First Journey, The Second Journey, The Final Journey) from Kindle Amazon or as PDFs at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

The Art of Writing No 31

I have written about how the first paragraph of you novel can seduce the reader in the bookshop or on a website. The opening paragraph of a novel should really be returned to, time and again. It is probably the most refined piece of writing in the whole book. Almost equal to it is the final paragraph. Why it comes second is that usually it is not a factor in someone actually buying the book though I do know people who read the end first to see whether they are going to like it!

The worst that can happen in writing is finding too late that your novel is a cul de sac, that the end just will not come or cannot be satisfactorily resolved. The second worst problem is finding a perfectly adequate ending that leaves the reader feeling underwhelmed. The third worst finale is disbelief and anger at being led up the garden path to no purpose. The fourth is an artificial tying up of all the loose ends – even though people love closure and have done so since the time of Dickens. Modern audiences, however, want resolution tinged with a little uncertainty. Realism should prevail and life is never that tidy.

Best endings tend to be the reverse. As I was outlining above about opening paragraphs, repeated returns to the end game help you, consciously or unconsciously, to find a path to the conclusion which sits naturally in your narrative.

Since I write organically and have no idea of the ending, I use my growing reminder sheet at the bottom of my draft to suggest possible endings. Over time, these get scrubbed out, leaving the one that will go live and even that will be modified at the very end. In Azimuth there are two stories, like entwined DNA, both being long and complex and each ending falls, only two or three pages from the other, at the very culmination of the book. You can read the reviews of Azimuth on the Kindle site or on my Azimuth site (see below) to check out the effect the endings have on readers.

In Misery by Stephen King, the story hinges on a female fan of a novelist who kidnaps him to try to stop him killing off the main character in a series of successful books. An ending she could not condone after all the endings she has read in the series. It is the perfect illustration that endings must satisfy. We understand her fiendish fanaticism and identify with it. Thus, King provides us with a great ending about the nature of endings!

After reading Azimuth, a friend said she felt bereft. “But what is happening to those wonderful part-humans, now? she asked, “I miss them and worry about them.”

Azimuth by Jack Sanger in paperback and PDF at www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Azimuth  by Jack Sanger in separate volumes on Kindle Amazon

The Art of Writing No. 30

Returning to the subject of ‘themes’ in novel writing: a couple of blogs ago I outlined the thesis that you can elevate the quality of your work by having your characters wrestle with issues that are current, perennial, local or universal. In Azimuth one of my central protagonists spends his life searching for enlightenment but, in the mean time, being deflected from his course by adventures. A bit like Odysseus, unable to get home as the gods seek to thwart his plans. So, at the heart of the 66 Tales within the three volumes, this man returns again and again to this theme, exploring it through the eyes of the people he meets and via introspection on what befalls him. I hope there is no heavy sermonizing at any time. I am an agnostic but wanted to write in an open way so that the reader could follow his or her paths to personal understanding. The reviews suggest that many people were buoyed up and stimulated by this theme. Others just loved the mystery and unpredictability of the adventures themselves, as well as those of the historian who tells the tales.

All good novels smuggle in far more than their genre might require. A novel is a Trojan horse which you take inside the walls of your mind, willingly, and once there begins to stir up your thinking. If, as an author, you want to proselytize because you are, say, a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim – whatever – the effect could be somewhat censorious. The only people who will enjoy your work are those committed to your belief. Your books become self-fulfilling prophecies. But if you write in such a way that the ambiguities of belief, the case for and against, is represented naturally through the thoughts and actions of your characters, then you will draw in many more readers. You do not wish to convert them but merely get them thinking. Your dialogue becomes Socratic.  Representing good vanquishing all evil in a cut and dried narrative leaves critical readers thinking ‘but that is not like life’ and doubting the integrity of your tale. For me, raising critical consciousness is central to fictional writing. A critically aware population is far less likely to accept any form of totalitarianism.

You may think this is a bit high falutin’ when all you want to do is write something which is a good read. So be it. I believe that fiction has more purchase over the way people develop a skeptical approach to what is presented to them by all media than any number of sermonizing tracts.. Novelists have responsibilities, whether they are writing to a formula or are attempting something grander in scope.  The classic ingredients in storytelling; good vs evil, the so-called battle of the sexes, the moral dilemma of killing, utopian ideals vs messy human reality, innocence and experience and many more, if ignored in your work, may make it appear superficial. Touching on themes such as these, allowing some characters to play out their dramas around them, can lift your work on to a different level.

Azimuth by Jack Sanger www.azimuthtrilogy.com

The three Azimuth books also in Kindle Amazon