Six of One
I am in it, talking about favourite books, books I don’t get and books that have changed my life.
Previous contributors include Robert McCrum, Nikesh Shukla and Diana Athill. All worth a read.
Archive for March, 2011
Ben Johncock’s Bookish Half Dozen
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011Guest Tips #5 Trilby Kent
Thursday, March 17th, 2011
“Art is knowing what to leave out.” -Frank Wedekind
Lately, I’ve found myself gravitating towards classic short novels and novellas – works such as Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows – in which, to paraphrase Chekhov, nothing and everything happens. In several important respects, they are different from short stories: broader in scope and emotional range and often encompassing a wider array of characters. Technically, I think they must be every bit as sophisticated, and of course they also have the advantage of being readable in a single sitting.
As a writer, what strikes me most about these books is the fact that there’s nowhere for their authors to hide: no meandering digressions, no indulgent scene-setting, no distracting parallel narratives, no philosophical posturing – and above all, no attempts to explain. The story (or should that be the plot?) is usually quite basic, but at the same time entirely complete in itself. There is something organic about these works that makes them highly enjoyable to read, rewarding to study and, no doubt, far from easy to write.
The novel that I’m working on at the moment will be shorter than my first: 80,000 words is the target dictated by the powers who will consider it as part of my submission towards a PhD in Creative Writing – although at the moment I’m wishing that I had even a fraction of the necessary skill to say what I mean to say in half of that. It is, in part, a gothic tale, and one of the things I’ve noticed trawling through modern works in this genre is the value placed on brevity.
Guy Burt’s After The Hole, Julia Leigh’s Disquiet, Frank Wedekind’s Mine-Haha, Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte all succeed at least in part because of the suspense built steadily and steeply, but always with a certain reserve, toward an often shocking climax. I’m certain that these novels wouldn’t work nearly as well if their authors had tried to spin out the tension over 300 pages or more.
Of course, writing spooky is more about page count: as I’ve begun to learn, it’s also about knowing what to leave out in a given paragraph, or even within a single sentence. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it is to transform a scene from suspenseful to downright creepy by cutting anything that attempts to shed light on actions or things described (dialogue, usually; though also sometimes direct narration). A twist of hair found shoved to the back of a drawer, or a little girl poking at something in the river with a long, bent stick; whatever the image, its power will only be diminished by attempts at explanation.
It’s an obvious rule, perhaps, but one that’s easy to forget amid the flurry of first-draft wordification. It is the silence at the end of Kressmann Taylor’s epistolary story Address Unknown that packs such terrifying effect into a mere 60 pages. I’d love to know if Taylor was ever tempted to spin this into a longer work (did anyone ever approach her to buy the film rights?) – if so, I’m extremely glad that she didn’t.
In journalism, we’re often reminded of the importance of white space on the page – similar, I suppose, to what musicians mean when they talk about learning to listen to the notes that aren’t played – and more and more I’m coming to realise that the same holds true for fiction. The humble ‘delete’ key has never looked more appealing…
Trilby Kent’s novel, Smoke Portrait, will be published in the U.K. in March.
This post is part of the Guest Tips Series, a collection of pieces of advice and personal experiences from writers who are not me. Bits of advice or ranting from writers who are me can be found here, in the Tips for Writers bit of the blog. If you fancy writing for me, you can find out a bit more about the hows and whys and wherefores here.
Station Stories 2
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Here I blogged about my difficulty in finding a story for the Station Stories project – the performance date fast approaching. Your own Station Stories choo-chooed in and, eventually, mine arrived too. It was midnight the night before I needed to report back to the group I am collaborating and performing with – but just in time is better than late or not at all.Thanks for the inspiration. You were all Top Bananas.
Here’s a little bit more about how we’re going to perform the stories written for the project – from the Manchester Literature Festival website:
Audiences are linked to the writers’ microphones by headsets using wireless technology, making the event unobtrusive and ensuring the audience hear every single word, whilst still experiencing the live ambience of the location. A musician accompanies the writers and improvises music using sampled live sounds from the station, manipulating these sounds and playing them into the audience’s headsets between and underneath the text. The writers interact with passing members of the public who may be unaware that a performance is taking place.
Station stories will explore the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy. It will express the peculiar, unique qualities of this marginal, in-between world, where anything can happen and often does.
We’ve all chosen the part of the station where our stories are set. We’ve met the sound technician, Rory and the musician, Dave, that will be working with us. We’ve discussed space, movement, sound and themes. We’ve wandered around the station (and I deserve a special medal for my wandering, as I did it while carrying McTiny and sporting a fat lip from where he slapped me in the face with a heavy duty rattle…)
My story is going to contain photographs, shoes and a mad dash to platform ten (I think). I’m not going to say any more, but if you want to see me and the others then book your tickets soon – we’re doing three performances per day between the 19th and the 21st of May.
Choo Choo!
Fright + Heads + PSA
Sunday, March 13th, 2011
I’ve blogged before, with varying quantities of tantrum and self pity, about the aspects of the writing life that I feel less comfy with, less equipped to handle, less likely to pull off with success. Somehow in that post I got onto talking about gin and Worzel Gummidge. Getting pissed. Putting a pretend head on. Coping strategies.
This past couple of weeks have been tough ones for doing things that I don’t particularly like doing. It seems relevant here to mention that one of several recurring dreams I have (the ones that are not about seagulls or monkey puzzle trees or balls of unravelling yellow wool) involves my mind replaying the most terrifying parts of The Return To Oz over and over again. All night. Heads. Shouting heads. I have been having dreams like this, this month. A ton of them.
Mr. is brilliant, largely ignoring me, or muttering with unconcealed scorn: ‘You were like this the last time you had a book out, you know,’ as if writing a book were no more important than any of the other hundreds of tasks we do every day. Which is isn’t. It does make it easier. As does the fact that this urge to get drunk and decapitate myself might be a pattern, even if it is one I am not yet aware of.
I like to think some of you find this blog useful – writers and writers in the making. So it is almost a public service announcement for me to say yes, I am lucky and this is a good life. We are together and healthy and I get to do the job I always wanted to do. 
But. But. It is also contains bits of work that aren’t exactly my cup of tea. That leave me frazzled and anxious and teary. And I don’t yet have any advice for myself or for other people on how to deal with that.
Which is lucky, because I am friends with lots of writers and when I don’t have Tips, they often do. If you are, like me an incurable attention seeker who is horrified at the thought of being Looked At, see Emma Darwin’s blog for lists and suggestions on coping with the horror of publicity.
Guest Tips #4 R. N. Morris (Part 2)
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
photo by Simon Nicholls
Generating Mystery and Suspense
Part Two (you can read Part One here)
When I’m thinking about suspense, I picture a tightrope walker. The tightrope walker keeps walking forwards, doesn’t look down, and doesn’t look back. Imagine, however, that you’re a tightrope walker crossing a high wire suspended between two walls. You can’t see what’s behind the wall ahead of you (or the one behind you for that matter). You’ve got to keep moving and you’re in trouble if you fall off. But you have no idea what it is you’re moving towards.
The tightrope walker is the reader, of course, not the writer. The writer constructed the walls, and knows very well what’s behind them.
One of the simplest and most effective ways of creating narrative tension is to obey the often cited directive “Show don’t tell”. What I mean is if you write what is happening but you don’t explain why it’s happening, you immediately create tension and suspense in your writing that will keep the reader reading.
The very nature of linear narrative storytelling works in your favour. Think about the way you construct a sentence. The meaning of that sentence isn’t fully grasped until the reader gets to the end. And a skilful writer will arrange the words so that the punch is delivered towards the end. Writing is by its nature a series of revelations, a gradual unfolding. You can’t blurt it out all at one. You have to weave a thread.
It’s up to you as a writer to decide how much you tell the reader, and when. Of course, readers don’t like it if they feel that they have been cheated, that something crucial was withheld from them that could and should have been shared. But there’s no reason at all to do that. I’ve just finished Lee Child’s 2010 novel, Worth Dying For, in which a mysterious consignment is being smuggled across the Canadian-American border. We’re not told what’s in the container, only that it is something very valuable to certain criminals. We can guess, in fact that’s what we’re invited to do, and there are certainly plenty of quite legitimate clues dropped. It would be cheating if Child misled us, or if he hadn’t mentioned the consignment at all and it turned out to be crucial.
The way to do it is through point of view. There are characters who don’t know, fully, what’s going on. If the reader is linked to them through viewpoint, they don’t feel cheated, because they are as much in the dark as the protagonist, and may even get there first. When you are writing scenes in which characters who do know the secret are involved, either stay away from their viewpoint, or restrict their focus, so they are thinking about something else at that moment more urgent, such as staying alive! Showing and not telling comes to your rescue again.
Suspense is also created out of a sense of inevitability – the best plots combine inevitability and surprise. The reader knows that something bad is going to happen, but is not precisely sure what form it will take. As a writer, you can play with this, setting up expectations, and subverting them to create surprise.
In my first novel, Taking Comfort, the central character Rob is drawn into collecting mementoes from scenes of tragedy and disaster. I aimed to create a sense of inevitability in the downward spiral of his obsessive behaviour, the progression from accidentally finding things, to seeking disasters out, to – possibly – initiating them. But I also hoped that how this spiral played out would be totally unpredictable.
Of course, when you surprise yourself, you know that you’ve really succeeded. To do that, you have to dig deep into whatever part of your subconscious it is that contains the story waiting to be told.
R.N. Morris is the author of four historical mysteries published by Faber and Faber: A Gentle Axe, A Vengeful Longing, A Razor Wrapped in Silk and the forthcoming The Cleansing Flames (due out May 2011). A Vengeful Longing was shortlisted in 2008 for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger for best crime novel, and runner up in New York Magazine’s Culture Awards for best thriller. He has twice been highly commended in the CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime. His first novel, written as Roger Morris, was the contemporary thriller Taking Comfort, published in 2006 by Macmillan New Writing. He has run workshops on mystery and suspense for City University MA in Creative Writing. He has also written the libretto to an opera.
This post is part of the Guest Tips Series, a collection of pieces of advice and personal experiences from writers who are not me. Bits of advice or ranting from writers who are me can be found here, in the Tips for Writers bit of the blog. If you fancy writing for me, you can find out a bit more about the hows and whys and wherefores here.
Unaverage week
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
Most of the time being a writer involves hunching over a rickety desk, sending the odd invoice, worrying about receipts and lots of reading. Then there’s the teaching, which involves all that, and then some marking and some talking and lots of replying to emails. None of this is very exciting to anyone other than me, I am sure.
This week has been different, obviously. There was the telly thing, which I still haven’t seen yet, but which evidently one or two of you liked. And the telly thing temporarily put A Kind of Intimacy into the Amazon Bestseller Charts, which was unexpected and very nice. And on top of that I have heard that French rights to A Kind of Intimacy have just been sold. Which is also very nice.
Other new things about this week include some changes round here. First – a new page about Cold Light on this website. I get asked a fair bit about my writing process, how I do drafts, whether I type or handwrite and so on. I thought a sneak into my dark box of drafts might be interesting to some of you. The front page has had a bit of a spit and polish too, but isn’t quite finished yet.
I’ve been overwhelmed by all the messages you have been sending me and all the new visitors to my blog. Hello and thank you. I’ve been a bit crap about doing phone and emails but will be catching up soon. Promise.
P.S The picture is the actual cheese and pickled hedgehog that the kind people at the Culture Show made and brought in a cool box to UCLAN all the way from London. I was allowed to take it home and I kept it on my desk until it went all manky.
Guest Tips #4: R. N. Morris (Part 1)
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Generating mystery and suspense
Part One
The Roman God Janus was depicted with two heads, one looking forwards and the other looking back. It’s a useful image for thinking about the differences between mystery and suspense, and how they work in narrative.
Mystery essentially looks backwards towards some buried event in the story’s past. It’s the desire to discover the truth about this event that keeps the reader reading.
Suspense is the dynamic force that pulls the reader forwards. It operates in the story’s present.
A narrative moves away from its starting point towards its outcome. If both the starting point and outcome are withheld from the reader, you have generated mystery and suspense.
But – I hear you ask – surely it’s impossible to withhold the starting point of a story? The story begins with the first word of the story.
Well, no, not really.
Russian formalist critics distinguished between two different versions of any story. The first they called the fabula, which is the ‘real’ timeline of the story – everything that happens in the story laid out in chronological order. The second version of the story they called the siuzhet, which is what you get once those events have been subjected to the artistic manipulation of the author. This is the story that the reader experiences.
I always construct two timelines when I am planning my novels. One timeline begins with the event that precipitates the events of the story. It’s the beginning of the fabula. But it is, generally, the last thing that is revealed in my second timeline, the timeline of the events as they unfold for the reader, my siuzhet timeline. The beginning of one version of the story provides the ending for the other.
When I’m thinking about mystery, I’m imagining a shadow play. The hidden events of the past cast a shadow on the present. The reader sees the shadows, but doesn’t understand what’s creating them.
The first shadow may be the presence of a dead body. In A Gentle Axe, the first of my St Petersburg mysteries, there were actually two dead bodies, found together. A dwarf inside a suitcase with his head smashed in. And a burly peasant hanging by the neck from a tree with a bloody axe in his belt. It immediately set up a series of mysteries, the most interesting of all, I think, was: Who are these men and what exactly is the relationship between them?
As the writer you have to know what is casting those shadows. You have to have a very clear understanding of events that may never directly feature in your narrative, but which give it its shape. It’s all very well to confuse and mystify the reader, but you can’t afford to be confused or mystified yourself.
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb, the narrator Dr Watson compares a newspaper account of a case to his own version: “… like all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth.”
A mystery story is a succession of revelations, but to sustain itself over a novel, I think each revelation has to give rise to, or be replaced by, a new question, or mystery. One of the things I do when I have a reasonably evolved storyline, broken up into notional chapters, is to look at each chapter, or sequence, as a series of questions. For example, my question sheet for the third of my St Petersburg Mysteries, A Razor Wrapped in Silk, reads as follows:
- (a) Who is in the carriage? (b) What happens to Mitka?
- (a) Why have so many children disappeared without trace? What is the significance of the foreign factories?
- (a) Who has killed Yelena? (b) Why was she killed? (c) How is this connected to the disappearing children? Etc..
To be clear, these questions are not answered in the chapter, but they are the questions that I think the reader will be asking themselves at that stage in the story.
Of course, the most important question of all is, What happens next? If you’re doing your job in terms of creating suspense, that’s a question the reader will be asking all the time.
(part two of this guest post will run next week)
R.N. Morris is the author of four historical mysteries published by Faber and Faber: A Gentle Axe, A Vengeful Longing, A Razor Wrapped in Silk and the forthcoming The Cleansing Flames (due out May 2011). A Vengeful Longing was shortlisted in 2008 for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger for best crime novel, and runner up in New York Magazine’s Culture Awards for best thriller. He has twice been highly commended in the CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime. His first novel, written as Roger Morris, was the contemporary thriller Taking Comfort, published in 2006 by Macmillan New Writing. He has run workshops on mystery and suspense for City University MA in Creative Writing. He has also written the libretto to an opera.
This post is part of the Guest Tips Series, a collection of pieces of advice and personal experiences from writers who are not me. Bits of advice or ranting from writers who are me can be found here, in the Tips for Writers bit of the blog. If you fancy writing for me, you can find out a bit more about the hows and whys and wherefores here.
Telly
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
Sadly for you I am appearing on the telly this Saturday night – thus ruining yet another weekend for you all with my relentless attention-seeking.
John Mullan along with a panel of judges read 57 novels published in the last two years, and between them they chose what they thought were the twelve most interesting. A Kind of Intimacy was one of the twelve.
You’ll disagree and come up with your own best and worst lists, of course – and I think that’s a good thing. I’m interested in what conclusions the panel of judges drew about where contemporary British literature is headed. Down the pan, according to some, I am sure.
Just in case you can bring yourself, the Guardian ran a piece about the Culture Show Special here. The show itself will be running on BBC 2 at 9pm this Saturday night.
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