by admin | Jun 24, 2015 | Authenticity, crime fiction, genre, readers, research, structure, word count
I’ve just finished the third draft of my new book ‘Cruel Tide’, and the last thing I needed to do before I sent it off to the Editor for the first stage of its journey to publication was to count the final word total. It’s a bit of a chore and half way through I wondered, why am I doing this?
There are probably several reasons for counting words, both as you go along and as a total. I’ve always believed, for example, that a full-length novel had to have a minimum number of words so that the reader doesn’t feel cheated. Below 80,000 or so wouldn’t be enough. Where that number came from I’m not sure: I must have heard it on one of the writing courses I’ve been on and it stuck. Many of the novels you see on the shelves are much longer than that, and are usually commented upon for their length. I recall ‘A Suitable Boy’ when it first came out bring described admiringly in terms of its staggering length, and more recently ‘The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I read all of Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, and loved it even though I skipped through some of the political background pretty fast, but didn’t get past the first few pages of ‘The Goldfinch’ before I ran out of sympathy for the main characters and gave up. At present I’m reading the first volume of a two-part biography of Charles Darwin, but at 540 pages it’s so big and heavy that it’s very difficult to read in bed, and the weight when travelling is enough to drive you back to Kindle.
When I wrote my first novel I was obsessed with making sure it had enough words. As a consequence I rambled on far too much and in the final painful edit, having been advised to cut, cut, and cut again, I excised nearly 40,000 words, including entire characters, sub-plots and yards of riveting description, and the book was better for it, although still not as tight as it needed to be, looking back. The second and third books of the trilogy all worked out about the same, around 90,000, and that seemed to me to be about right. Each chapter was between three and five thousand, and that felt about right too, to keep the story chugging along. Every chapter had to have a point and a contribution to make, and should leave the reader wanting to read on.
The fourth one, just completed, is a bit different as I’ve switched genre from ‘local family saga’ to ‘crime fiction’, and have tried to adopt the three-act structure that I learned from Matthew Hall and Bill Ryan at their splendid workshop a year or so ago. Hall started as a screen writer I think, and he was particularly clear about the necessity of the three acts, each with its own purpose and dynamic, and the parallel internal and external dramas. Maybe that’s why this one has turned out to be somewhat longer than the previous ones. The word count just completed came to nearly 114,000, which was a surprise. This time I’ve been editing quite severely as I went along, to avoid the intimidating sprawl that requires a post-facto hatchet and all the perils of continuity that may ensue.
This longer length is curiously satisfying. It makes me feel like a real grown-up writer, which is rather sad for a woman in her sixties who’s been writing in one form or another all her life. As I have read the ms closely over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reasonably happy about the development of the characters, they way they look and especially the way they speak, and the whorls and twists of the plot. It tells a readable tale without the pace slowing down too much in some places. And I have tried to avoid the research information that so irritates me in some of the books I read, where the writer seems bent on squeezing in far more detail than is necessary, however authentic it might be.
What really matters, of course, is not the number of words but the choice of them – their meaning and imagery and stimulus and sound and balance and poetry. I wish I were more of a poet.
by admin | Jun 15, 2015 | competitions, promotion, self-publishing, selling
For the third time this spring I sent off four copies of my latest book to enter a local literary competition. The first time, three years ago, I was quite sure that the quality of the work, its local roots, deathless prose and professional publication values would shine forth and guarantee at least a place on the shortlist. When it wasn’t on the shortlist, I actually wept. The following year, with another book out, I tried again, but by now I was a little more realistic about how things work and my expectations were lower. Just as well, as there was no mention on the shortlist. This year, my hopes were higher again, as the subject of the book happened to be of interest to one of the judges and I thought this might make a difference. Wrong again. When the shortlist was emailed to me last week, I scoured it again, and again in vain. Disappointment, yes, I admit it, but not as acute as before, and quickly overcome as I settled to polishing the new book. Will I enter this book for the same competition next year? Probably not. Patience is not my strong suit and after a string of rejections I tend to think, ‘Sod it,’ and move on. It was the same when I was looking for an agent, some years ago. Initial high hopes, born of ignorance about how things actually work, were quickly dashed, and after a dozen or so rejection letters I decided to go it alone. I’ve enjoyed doing so, and sales have been remarkably good in both paperback and electronic formats, but I would still have relished the buzz of feeling that someone out there in the book business thought highly enough of my work to offer to represent it and me.
On a day to day basis as I tour the readers’ groups and WIs of West Cumbria I get wonderfully positive feedback from people who read the books and love them, and I know I should be content with that. But, but, I would still love someone who knows about books to tell me that mine are worthwhile, and why they think so. ‘Get over it, Ruth’ I say to myself. Get on with what matters and stop fretting about being ignored. I do, and I have. The second draft of the new book is coming on splendidly, sharper, clearer than before as any second draft should be, and the feedback from my Editor was more positive than any of the others, and she knows about books. But she’s also a friend, so does that count?
Even four years into the self-publishing business, I’m still irritated by the assumption that anything self-published is of poor quality. I joined the Society of Authors partly because they take account of an author’s sales, to distinguish serious self-publishers from others, and membership of the SoA, alongside writers like Philip Pullman whom I revere, means a great deal to me. But I’m still looking, unsuccessfully so far, for someone to review my books and provide one of those pithy quotes you find on book covers, the ones that make you feel it must be worth reading.
I accept that the need for recognition is linked to ego, and to a competitive urge to prove something to oneself and to others. I still think it’s OK to blow your own trumpet a little if there’s a reason to do so, but I can’t stomach some of the excessive self-promotion that others seem to pursue. And it’s obviously not enough for me to get great feedback from my friends, or my readers. I don’t want a Booker prize, but it would be so comforting to have someone whose work I respect tell me that they’ve read my trilogy and value it, for whatever reasons. While I wait for that I shall ‘bash on rewardless’ and put the pursuit of recognition back in its box, out of sight, and not let it distract me.
by admin | Jun 1, 2015 | genre, readers
I was half listening to Radio 4 the other morning and caught the end of a discussion with some literary worthies, about whether the prejudice (their word) against ‘genre fiction’ is relevant any longer, or has it become as superficial and snobbish as ‘designer labels’ in fashion? All agreed that ‘genre’ was a form of labelling for marketing purposes, and that some ‘genre fiction’ was actually pretty good even by (undefined) ‘literary’ standards, although yet again the example they cited was Patrick O’Brian with his wonderful naval saga set during the Napoleonic era. O’Brian tells great stories in an engaging style, and those characteristics seem to be define ‘genre fiction’. If that’s so, I wonder what are the defining characteristics of ‘literary fiction’? How different can they be?
Readers of this blog, a small but discerning group, have heard me bang on about this before, and other much more successful writers than me do the same. Why do I and other ‘story tellers’ feel that the ‘literary’ world seems bent on patronising and belittling us? What’s wrong with a classically good story, well told, which readers find accessible and compulsive reading? The analogy with the fashion industry is an obvious one. The high street stores sell some very good clothes, pitched at the average purse and taste. These clothes may not be unique to this season, or easily dated, or made with exclusive materials, but they’re affordable, wearable, and occasionally really interesting and appealing too. Some high street clothes even appear on models in glossy magazines, alongside their more expensive and extraordinary counterparts from the big name designers.
There’s no profit for producers in fashion that doesn’t date. The fashion industry relies for its survival on the view that last season’s version of clothing and accessories must be replaced, as a form of conspicuous consumption. Perhaps the book industry has the same aspiration. Publishers used to be content with ‘high class’ books that sold to only the most discerning buyers, but it couldn’t charge excessive prices – such as some would pay for a handbag – and when the profit margins shrank under competition from you know who and ebooks they found themselves in a pickle. They wanted to publish ‘quality’ but needed to make larger profits to survive, so they ended up publishing books by known names that would sell not because of their intrinsic quality but because of the name on the cover and sycophantic reviews commissioned from other big name authors from the same ‘stable’. Incidentally, the urge to ‘ghost write’ must be really strong: is it true that Jeffrey Archer’s best-sellers are actually written by other people? And the pressure on successful authors to publish more must also be acute: could their quality suffer as a result?
Obviously, one victim of this ambivalence within the book business is the novice author, apart from the infinitesimally small number in any year who fit the criteria to be hyped into success by massive marketing investment. The message from publisher to agent, and thence from agent to writer seems to be ‘Unless we can guarantee to sell millions of your book, thanks but no thanks.’ And what really are the criteria for this lottery-like selection? ‘I need to fall in love with your book,’ say the agents. And what exactly does that mean? Is it really as arbitrary as it sounds? We’re also told that agents and publishers are looking for ‘trends’ and would-be authors need to spot the rising wave and attach themselves to it. That’s not a very satisfying explanation either, and who determines which waves will burst into flood while others web quietly away?
So here we are again. It is slowly occurring to me that the best way to avoid the frenetic pressure of literary fashion, or the pursuit of quantity over quality, is to avoid traditional routes to publication and do your own thing. The only exception would be the handful of published writers whose talent is so extraordinary that they can make their own rules and stick to them. There may be other extraordinary writers out there, but unless the quirky and unspecified needs of the agent and publisher can be fathomed out, these writers will remain beyond the ‘literary Pale’. There may come a time when this ‘Pale’, ie. a constructed boundary, will cease to be important to the majority of us who remain outside it and become a self-regarding cage for those within. Maybe that’s why the literati I heard the other morning on the radio were admitting that the concept of ‘genre’ is increasingly outdated and needs to be ‘refreshed’. I agree. Let’s do it.
by admin | May 25, 2015 | Authenticity, fact-based fiction, readers, trilogy, West Cumbria
Living as I do in Herdwick sheep country, the idea of sheep being ‘hefted’ is something you take for granted. It means that the sheep are ‘hard-wired’ to remain within a certain terrain and not to roam beyond it, even though they are often on common land on the fells (hills) and unhindered by walls or fences. Lambs born into the flock will learn the details of that landscape and become experienced leaders of the flock later. As well as being useful for farmers, being hefted is a life-saver, when sheep need to find shelter and know which wall would offer the best protection from the wind and snow.
Since I started writing fiction set within this landscape, I’ve realised that people can be hefted too, born and raised in a place that becomes imprinted on the mind, and grows over time. My neighbours can tell me what flowers used to grow in the disused quarry across the road sixty years ago, or when a certain house was extended, or where the old road ran before it was straightened and ‘improved’. I remember my first harvest supper in the village hall, when the after supper entertainment was a quiz: in family teams we were shown slides of the minutiae of the village, a gatepost, a chimney stack, a wood pile, a fence, and asked to say exactly where it was. Some of the teams got all thirty of them correct while recent ‘off comers’ like me struggled to identify half a dozen. That was ten years ago, and I’d be more successful now.
But being intimately familiar with a local environment doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ‘hefted’. The additional criterion, as I understand it, is that you are unwilling to leave and always try to return. I wonder if I pass that test? I love to travel, and do so regularly, but increasingly once I’m off the plane I long to be back in my little patch of heaven in West Cumbria. The final stage of the journey west leads over Corney Fell on a winding single track road, at the summit of which you get the first view of the coast, from Black Combe to the south up to St Bees Head further north, with the Isle of Man on the horizon and the coast of Scotland from the far side of the Solway west towards Kintyre. The view is of course dependent on cloud cover and visibility, but even if I can’t see it, I know it’s there and my heart lifts.
The place where I live is imprinted on my mind in ever-increasing detail, and now attached to it are the fictional characters that I have scattered around the area. I could show you where my heroine Jessie Whelan lived at almost every stage of her life, where her son John and his wife Maggie first met, walked, and fell in love. There’s the street in Kells where the McSherry family lived, and the route the two women took to work at the Haig Pit. In the current book, ‘Cruel Tide’, I know the wood where a body was found, and I’ve found the house high on the Furness fells where the final scene takes place. The problem of writing in this way is that the locations are so clear in my own mind that I can forget to describe them fully enough for my readers.
One of the reasons the books sell so well locally is that readers love to see their familiar territory described and peopled with stories that are authentic and plausible, in terms of their own lives and experience. The joy of shared recognition of a building, or a view gives the reading experience a special dimension that appeals to the ‘heftedness’ of local readers. The challenge is to provide that same emotional response for others too.
Of course I’d really get a kick out of putting on a ‘Jessie Whelan’ tour for the trilogy, all around its setting ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. For the new book (out in November) and the series that will hopefully follow, the tour would start with the extraordinary landscape of Morecambe Bay. Maybe it’s time to buy a bus.
by admin | May 16, 2015 | Cumbria, Lake District, readers, self-publishing, selling, trilogy
A group asked me to talk about publishing my own books, and I heard myself saying to them ‘Publishing is the easy part, selling is much harder’. For me, that’s true, because getting my work into the hands of readers is part of what motivates me to write in the first place. I’ve been struck recently by the number of people who claim to be writing just for the amusement of family and friends, and don’t appear to be interested in reaching readers beyond that group. That’s not enough for me. Maybe because I’m older, I want something to leave behind me, in the memories and on the bookshelves of as many people as possible.
So how do you sell, and how many is enough? As I write this, James Rebanks ‘The Shepherd’s life’ has been in the best seller charts for weeks and must have sold many thousands. It’s a great book, and I’m not begrudging him that success, but he seems to have had some things going for him that the rest of us might not have. Even before the book was published, for example, he had 40,000 Twitter followers, which has since risen to 60,000. If only 10% of those followers bought a book, that’s still a lot of sales! And either through Twitter or his publishers or agent he’s had massive media coverage, which must have helped too.
So how do we lesser mortals sell our books? One way that works for me is to sell directly, usually after doing a presentation or visiting a book club group. People like to buy from the author they’ve just heard from. Fortunately, I really enjoy that side of the business. As a professional presenter in education for decades, I’ve had plenty of practice in marshalling ideas and facts quite fluently without notes and love the stimulus of responding to whatever questions people may have. I can also offer ‘deals’ as I think fit, which makes buying the full trilogy an attractive prospect. I love selling the full set, as it means they may read all three books in the right order and get the reading experience as it was designed to be.
Another route to market for me has been through a local wholesale distributor, Hills of Workington. They take a 50% discount, but they service almost every book retailer and tourist outlet in Cumbria, apart from the south-east corner, and selling to them by the carton is more efficient than trying to reach each outlet myself. The first orders were on sale or return, but that’s not really necessary any more as the three books in my trilogy, all set in Cumbria, sell steadily, and do well in the tourist season. The beauty of historical fiction is that it has an almost infinite shelf-life. The books will have the same appeal to visitors in ten years time as they have now.
Listing the books in both paperback and ebook formats on Amazon and Kindle brings in a steady trickle of orders, and the big national and international distributors Bertrams and Neilsen contact me for books too, but it’s a cumbersome business. I’ve done the workshops about how to increase your ebook sales with promotions, manipulating the ‘best seller’ lists and reducing the price to less than a cup of coffee, but I’m not thrilled about that. If writers like me produce something of worth, it demeans the process if we sell our work for peanuts. And I can’t be bothered obsessing about selling as much as possible if it takes too much of the time I want to spend writing. Some of my time obviously must be devoted to marketing and promotion, but not too much.
So I totter along, wishing I could sell more, longing for the feedback from readers that so rarely comes, thinking about how, where and when to organise my own promotions. Most of the time I enjoy it. I dream of being ‘discovered’ and selling the TV and film rights, not to make a fortune but just to see my stuff reach more people. That would be fun. I need to invest in new ways of doing things, using video on my website for example, or making this blog more entertaining, but that would use creative energy that seems to be constantly diverted into the next book. What I really need is a savvy publicist who’s prepared to work for nothing. Dream on.
How many sales is enough? If I cover the costs of self-publishing to my own high standard, involving proper professional help, that’s enough. My accountant reckoned I should aim to make as much profit over five years as I would done if the money had stayed in my current account, and with interest rates at rock bottom that’s not much. ‘Back yourself’, he said, and I liked the sound of that, so I did.
by admin | May 10, 2015 | character, crime fiction, Explicit details, formula, historical fiction, old posts, plotting, readers, sex scene, structure
As you may remember from previous posts, dear reader, I’ve always struggled with the notion of ‘genre’. I’m not keen on stereotypes generally, and genre has often seemed a rather lazy and delimiting way of categorising a book, to make it easier for booksellers to know which shelf to put it on. As a writer of regional/local women’s commercial historical fiction, my irritation may be understandable. ‘Fiction’ is OK, but the rest of the labels are perjorative, and it’s particularly galling when the ‘local’ label condemns my books to the bottom shelf or the back room alongside books about copper mining in Victorian Cumberland.
After a trilogy in the ‘regional/local women’s commercial historical fiction’ category, I decided to try crime fiction, which I read much of myself and have always enjoyed. As usual, I began by trying to learn about this mode of writing, and enjoyed a day at Crimefest in Bristol last summer, to immerse myself briefly and see what I could pick up. Part of it reminded me of a weekend spent at the Gilbert and Sullivan festival in Buxton the previous year. At both events everyone seemed to know everyone else, except me of course, and there was an air of shared language and complacent jollity, with much kissing and expressions of joy. Even the names at Crimefest had a certain pattern: I was struck by the number of Camilla’s and Jocelyn’s, for example, of whom we see very few in West Cumbria. That must be a cultural habit emanating from London.
The workshop with Matthew Hall and Bill Ryan was really good, as I’ve mentioned before, and focussed mainly on the 3 act structure, that was new to me and quite challenging, which I liked. There was also the interesting idea of a parallel between the external crises in the plot and internal personal crises for the protagonist. I could see how the best of what I’ve read reflected this dual thread. I could also see how the main characters required some personal demons that made them more interesting and vulnerable, and also generated mistakes, false assumptions and some of the blind alleys and red herrings of good crime stories.
The crime fiction shelves,and especially the Nordic noir variety, are full of depressed, lonely, single men with fraught personal relationships and alcohol problems. When does a recurring idea become a cliche? You can change gender, as MR Hall has bravely done, but still end up with the same formula: Hall’s female coroner is depressed, lonely, single etc etc. Or you can give your hero a very particular setting, as with Bill Ryan’s Korolev in Stalinist Russia, and make him a more sympathetic character, but surround his intrinsic goodness with potentially overwhelming conspiracy and evil doings.
There is a general absence of joy among current crime fiction ‘heroes’, which inevitably affects one of the genre cliches, the requirement to include at least one sexual encounter. We are led to believe that sex in fiction increases sales. And sex does appear to be de rigeur these days in crime fiction, which is quite a challenge when many of the current protagonists, however physically attractive they may be, are deeply depressed. They are drawn to the most unlikely and unsuitable people, sometimes against all their better instincts, although the apparently inevitable sexual encounter is often described in unspecific euphemisms. We should be grateful for that at least : anything more graphic might be too grotesque. Incidentally, this feature of the genre was never mentioned in Hall and Ryan’s admirable workshop, but there it is in their books.
So here’s my dilemma as a novice crime writer. Do I absorb the lessons from my more experienced and successful peers and include the obligatory sex scene, even inferentially, or do I eschew it in the interests of the reader’s digestion and stick to the crime stuff – the ‘meat and potatoes’ without the gravy? Much will depend on how I choose to draw my main characters, and I’ve already decided on a rather wild and perverse young woman who finds herself collaborating with a more conventional young man with a less intuitive and more procedural approach. One woman, one man, both relatively young and unattached. The reader’s expectation of sex might be high, but does it have to happen? If a sexual encounter is part of the genre cliche, it would have to be simultaneously provoked by too much alcohol in her case and uncharacteristic lust from him. I could engineer that I suppose by some tricksy plotting, but do I really want to? Is it not possible that two people of different genders can work together without sex? I remember my mother telling me gravely that such a thing was not possible. ‘They’re all the same, dear,’ she said (meaning all men). ‘They only want thing. It’s in their nature.’ I have no clear opinion on this issue.
In each book of my earlier trilogy there was some sex, but I maintain that it was a product of, and necessary to, the development of a character-driven plot. In the current foray into crime fiction, the same must apply. If neither plot nor character would generate a sexual episode naturally, by its own volition, then it won’t happen. Part of me is quite relieved. Trying to write with commitment about something implausible is too difficult. I’m grateful too that as a self-published author I’m under no external pressure to increase sales by giving way to this particular genre cliche. No editorial or marketing voice is whispering in my ear to include something I don’t feel the need for.
This is not to say that in future books, even those with the same characters, sex might not arise plausibly and find a place in the story. But genre cliche alone will not be enough. If we rightly criticise cliche in other aspects of writing, we shouldn’t let the obsession with genre lead to formulaic structures and plots. If that makes them less likely to be best-sellers, so be it. Most of us will never make a full living from writing anyway, so we might as well hang on to our self-respect and avoid cliche in all its forms.
by admin | Apr 30, 2015 | Authenticity, crime fiction, Explicit details, historical fiction, plotting, research
For the first time in a long time I settled in front of the TV last night with a pen and notebook in hand, using the programme for learning not just entertainment. It was the first of the new Inspector George Gently series, set in 1969, and it was the date and the northern police setting that were important for me. My first crime novel is currently in progress, set in the Furness district of Lancashire in 1969, and the hardest thing about it so far – apart from the plotting, the 3 act structure, characterisation and dialogue! – has been to find those authentic touches that are so critical to the proper depiction of setting and time.
I’ve already sought out and corresponded with people who experienced the relevant settings first hand, which I didn’t personally although I was a young adult at the time. That was really helpful. I made copious notes and as I’m writing some of those details are bubbling up, still leaving 90% of the research behind. I recall talking to a community policeman from that era who told me he was offered a panda car but refused it as it would mean changing his beloved helmet for a cap. Priceless, and it’s in. And I have an ex-copper writer friend who has generously offered to check my draft when it’s complete looking for things that just don’t sound right.
As I watched George Gently last night two things struck me very strongly about life in 1969. One was the huge impact on our lives at that time of smoking. Most of the characters smoked unceasingly. Every desk and table had an ashtray, usually overflowing, every room was blue with smoke. What you can’t get from the TV is the smell, but it came back to me. The smell of the ashtray, of smoke on your clothes after a night out, of a newly opened packet of cigarettes. And the other non-visual sensation, for me at least, was the stinging of my eyes after even a few minutes exposure to a smoky room, which kept me out of pubs for years until the smoking ban was introduced, even though for much of my early adulthood I was a smoker myself.
At the start of the programme, there was a warning – or was it just an observation – that the attitudes in the story were a reflection of their time. The underlying theme of the story was the treatment of women in general, and the investigation of allegations of rape in particular. I knew, but I’d forgotten. Somebody had done their homework. Out of 120 allegations of rape over a 5 year period in this one small force, the majority were withdrawn by the victims before any charges were laid and only 6 resulted in custodial sentences. Interview rooms were crowded with men asking the complainants personal questions and laughing at their responses, or shouting that they were lying, or had been ‘asking for it.’ I’m prepared to believe that things have changed, but it was a shock to see and hear just how bad it was not very long ago. For all the scoffing and resentment at ‘PC’ attitudes, many many women’s lives have been changed for the better by more recent condemnation of this kind of behaviour.
My own story picks up some of this, but I’ll go back through again and pick up words, smells, attitudes, and expressions reminiscent of the times, to sprinkle the dust of authenticity lightly across the page. But it has to be done lightly. Some fiction lays the researched authentic detail on with a trowel, clogging up sentences and slowing down the action. You can be impressed once or twice by the quality and depth of the research, but only once or twice before it gets tedious. It doesn’t take much to achieve the effect you want: use of a word that was of its time and has since faded, a smell, an item of clothing, something being eaten. Much of the 60s detail is now regarded as retro and back in fashion, but fondue sets and lava lamps and beehive hairstyles, and the ever-present cigarettes, are still for me evocative of a very particular period.
What I won’t be doing is adding the style and model number of the electric iron that the heroine uses on her full skirt, or the packaging of the Vesta chinese curry she assembles for her supper. Do you remember dehydrated mashed potato? What were we thinking! ‘For mash get smash’. Happy days.
by admin | Apr 24, 2015 | pace, plotting, structure, writing
A few days after getting back from our long trip, my sense of urgency about the first draft of book 4 was overwhelming. I had an outline, or thought I did, which had taken weeks to develop and looked as if it would carry me through the first draft. So I began at the beginning, avoiding the trap I’d fallen into earlier of starting with scenes I was most excited about, regardless of chronology, and hoping I would piece it all together later. That way madness lies, for me at least. So Chapter 1 it was, and then on to chapter two, then three. So far, so good. But by now the inadequacies in the outline were beginning to show. Threads had been left hanging, by default not be design, some actions seemed implausible, minor characters said unexpected things and threw the storyline around.
I stalled, went back, fixed some of the difficulties, re-wrote the outline for the next few chapters and continued. By now all sorts of unexpected things were happening, and the urge to go back and tweak previous chapters to fit in with the current direction was slowing me down. Of course there would be some inconsistencies and things to be fixed, but remembering them was the first challenge and finding them in the text was even harder. Why did someone decide they had to Gateshead? Where did Gateshead come from? In desperation I tried ‘Find; Gateshead’ but that didn’t work. I’d have to go back and re-read all the previous chapters to track it down.
After a number of such frustrations I decided that tweaking things as I went along would ruin the sense of forward momentum that had been turning up such unexpectedly good scenes. This was a first draft, that would be read with care by my trusty editor and annotated in detail to guide the essential re-write that would have to happen anyway, however much fiddling around I’d already done. I’m finally doing what my editor advised me to do in the first place: just crash on through the first draft, amending the outline as necessary as I go, keeping track of plot and all the other threads as well as I can and put it right, all at once, in the second draft rather than ‘toing and froing’ and driving myself nuts.
With that in mind, at least the chapters are rolling along nicely and the fleshing out of the story keeps turning up things I’m happy with and had not anticipated. Which is good, isn’t it? I just wish is wasn’t keeping me awake at night.
by admin | Apr 19, 2015 | A Good Liar, cover, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, Lake District, promotion, readers, self-publishing, selling, title
The publication of my second novel ‘Forgiven’ in 2013 felt very stressful, or at least that’s how I remember it. I felt it was better than the first one ‘A Good Liar’ and had certainly been easier to write, taking a year rather than the previous tortuous four year process. But I underestimated how long it would take to get the final stages of the publication business sorted out, and wanted to get it out into the shops as early as possible in the Lake District visitor season, when probably I should have taken decisions more carefully. Patience was never my strong suit.
The main frustration was about the cover. The cover of ‘A Good Liar’ had taken quite a while to put together and consisted of three parts: a old photo of schoolchildren to place the story in its time; an atmospheric picture of Wastwater to reflect the setting; and a profile of a woman to indicate that the protagonist was female. As one of the booksellers told me, ‘It’s a good cover because it tells the reader about what’s inside.’ When it came to part 2 of the trilogy ‘Forgiven’ I struggled first with the title, which doesn’t give much away, but did pick up one of the themes of the book, and I quite like one word titles. The setting was mainly west Cumbria and the town of Whitehaven in the immediate post-war years, with a family of coal miners at the centre of the action. The cover we ended up with was a gorgeous photo of the local landscape in spring, from a photo taken at about this time of year, when the valley floors were bright green with new grass and there was still snow on the fell tops. A lovely image, but it told the reader very little about the book itself.
From the outset, this book has sold less well than ‘A Good Liar’ and when the third in the trilogy was published the following year, that one sold better too. I began to wonder whether one reason for this might be the enigmatic title or cover of ‘Forgiven’. If the author’s name is well-known then I’m not sure that title and cover matter very much. But I’m expecting visitors to Cumbria to pick this book off a shelf and be interested enough in it to buy it, and why would they, really? They don’t know me from a hole in the ground. They need more at first glance than ‘Forgiven’ could offer them. For ebooks the cover matters less, but for a book on a shelf, competing with others in the reader’s view, the cover matters more.
If I’m right about this, I’m asking myself whether I should approach the reprint of ‘Forgiven’ as an opportunity to ‘re-brand’ it with a new cover. The title is fixed and unchangeable, but changing the cover would be easy and there are many precedents for doing so in the traditional publishing world. As a self-publisher I have absolute discretion about how my work should look, and this could be the time to exercise it.
So, I’m back to the age-old question, what makes a good book cover? The bookseller I referred to earlier takes the functional approach: the cover should indicate what’s between the covers. In that case I might need some reference to winter, hard times and to the pits, and perhaps some images of people of the period. In other words, I could use the same formula as we used for the first cover. Or I could use a more striking image, such as the one I chose for book 3 of the trilogy ‘Fallout’, and enjoy the mixed views that followed. The cover of ‘Fallout’ was designed to surprise, if not shock, the reader and succeeded in that intent, for good or ill.
I’ll have a few months to think about it as there are still enough from the first print run of ‘Forgiven’ to see us through this summer’s busy season. Is a picture of an old coal mine a turn-off for the largely female readership my books attract? Should I hold out for an image of the screen lasses, the remarkable women who worked on the surface sorting and grading the coal, despite the copyright issues that we ran into last time? It’ll be interesting to start again and take longer over the design than I did last time, and even more interesting to see whether a different cover affects sales.
The beauty of writing historical fiction is that it doesn’t have a limited shelf-life: it can be as relevant in ten years’ time as it is now. But the down-side of that agelessness is that it can’t burst upon a waiting world as something completely of its time, new fresh, contemporary. Within the historical fiction genre I’ve tried to avoid the Catherine Cookson cliches, and romanticising a past era that was challenging, complicated and fraught with ambivalence. The cover could reflect some of that at least, rather the rather bland if beautiful image it has at present.
Writing this post has made up my mind. I’ll start thinking about the cover of ‘Forgiven’ now and give myself, and the cover designer I work with, more time to make the best choice. And my new crime fiction book which is due out in November will need a brilliant cover too, which should be ticking over in the back of my mind from now on, while I’m still writing the first draft. Not for the first time, I realise that turning thoughts into words – written or spoken – helps me to pin down what I’m thinking about. I’ll be another year older this week, and beyond the age when my mother’s Alzheimers started. I keep looking for signs that my brain is seizing up, but for the time being, thank heaven, ‘cogito ergo sum’.
by admin | Apr 15, 2015 | Uncategorized
I was speaking at a local Women’s Institute last night, and chose to focus on the challenge of writing fiction set in my local area within living memory. It’s a tricky issue, and it’s rarely raised as a question when I talk about my books, so I wanted to air it myself.
Here in West Cumbria, and in many other settled rural locations I’m sure, people are sensitive about where they live, their neighbours, their histories and their reputations. Details of the landscape are very well known to those who’ve lived in the same village for generations, and memories are long and intense. I realised very soon after I came to live here ten years ago that ‘offcomers’ like me are a subject of curiosity and possible suspicion. Would I ‘fit in’ I wondered? It’s easy to upset local sensitivities, although forgiveness is quick if your motives are deemed to be positive, which is just as well or you could be so afraid of upsetting someone that you compromise yourself too much.
The up side of local fiction is that people love to read about where they live, to see familiar names and places on the page. But you have to get them right! I know of one place in ‘A Good Liar’ where I’ve given the wrong name to one of the passes that run between the valleys, spokes of a wheel on the west side of the Lake District with the Scafells at the hub. Was it Black Sail pass that should have been Scarth Gap or the other way round? It’ll be corrected before the next reprint.
In developing characters to populate this landscape I have carefully avoided any similarity in name, appearance or disposition to anyone I know to be living or have lived here. It’s a fiction, I tell my local readers repeatedly: you may recognise some of the places but the people are made up. Some still nod sagely and tap the side of the nose to indicate that they know I have to say that, but we both know that one of the characters is really so-and-so, isn’t it, eh? There is one exception to this rule, the vicar Lionel Leadbetter in ‘A Good Liar’, who was based on the real vicar of Waberthwaite and Corney in the early years of the last century. Stories about Rev. Pottinger abound and he was clearly an important and recogniseable local figure who made his mark on this community in a positive way, despite of or more likely because of his energy and forceful personality.
In the second book of the trilogy ‘Forgiven’ I wanted one of my characters to be part of the main background event, the explosion in the William Pit in August 1947 that killed 104 men and boys. Each of the 104 was memorialised in a poignant book called ‘104 Men’, published a few years ago. Was it ethically appropriate for me to add another fictional person to that list, the 105th man, just to beef up my story? I decided not, not because I was afraid of any local reaction but because it wouldn’t be right. Another opportunity to blend fact with fiction was available, however, and I took it. Three men walked out of that pit alive, 20 hours after the explosion took place. Their experiences were told, first hand, to the enquiry held by the national Coal Board into the disaster, and I had one of my characters become part of that small group, to live and tell the story of courage and experience and resourcefulness that saved their lives.
The third book ‘Fallout’ presented a further, and the most tricky, demand to a writer looking to blend fact and fiction in an era where the facts are still within living memory. In October 1957 the nuclear reactor at Windscale, just up the coast from here, heated up uncontrollably and then caught fire. It was a tiny reactor by modern standards but if the fire had caused the reactor building to collapse, which was possible, the uncontrolled release of radio-active material into the atmosphere would have been disastrous. In my book ‘Fallout’ this event forms the backdrop to the final part of the family drama that began twenty years before with the start of my trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. Some of the details about what happened at Windscale (now re-named Sellafield) are well-known to many local people, although much of the story – and in particular the underlying causes of the accident – was protected by the Officlal Secrets Act until the papers were released in 2007. In writing the first fictional acciount of what happened during that historic week, I had to make two choices. First, I decided to place a fictional character right at the heart of the action, in the form of a nuclear expert called Lawrence Finer who had been seconded to Windscale to help with problems in the reactor. Secondly, I chose to include some of the key people at the plant as minor backdrop characters, observed by Lawrence Finer as they played their roles during the crisis. I was worried about legal as well as ethical considerations and took advice from a lawyer who specialises in publishing matters. I was told that my treatment should address three issues; one, were the facts about the people and their tasks accurate? two, were the ‘real’ people well in the background, not the foreground of the story? third was anything going to be recorded in my work that could be deemed damaging to the reputations of these people?
I was lucky. The facts had been meticulously gathered and recorded in a book written by the official Atomic Energy Authority historian, Lorna Arnold in ‘Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident’. I had already given the key role to a fictional character who was plausible but had no actual equivalent in the plant at that time, leaving the ‘real’ characters in the background. And, thanks to the actual exemplary expertise and courage of the men I chose to mention, their reputations – which had been unfairly damaged at the time by the Government enquiry into the incident – could be enhanced rather than damaged by the facts of the case. On that basis I decided to go ahead, but when the book was published in June 2014 I had some concerns about a possible local reaction. To this date, there has been none, apart from the repeated feedback from people who worked at the plant that they didn’t previously know what had really happened there in October 1957. Incidentally, some of the irradiated mess left behind after the reactor fire was extinguished is still being dismantled today, 60 years later. In this part of the world, the fact that nothing has been said to my face to indicate unhappiness about my treatment of the story doesn’t mean that nothing is out there. The only roundabout feedback has been that a relative of one of them men involved bought several copies of the book to send to family members in Australia. I interpret this – if true – an an indication of acceptance, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Recent Comments