by admin | Mar 14, 2014 | A Good Liar, cover, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, Lake District, self-publishing, title, Windscale fire
You may have gathered that since the ms. of my third novel in the trilogy went to the editor last month I’ve been thinking about the details of publication. This past week, driving around the flat wintry landscape Manitoba, Canada, I’ve been watching the colours of sky and snow and thinking about the cover image that will make my new book jump off the shelf or the page saying ‘Read me’ and, better still, ‘Buy me’. This is the image that will appear on my Amazon page and Twitter and everywhere else, and it has to be both telling and compelling.
One of the great things about self-publishing is that you get to make these decisions for yourself. Writing a book is such a personal endeavour: it’s always bothered me that someone else – or worse still a ‘committee’ – should decide what the finished book actually looks like. I don’t want to use images of people: the reader should be able to imagine what characters look like from the text, or from inside their own head. The cover of this new book set in such a wonderful location should reflect that place, and say something too about the events between the covers. In the case of ‘Fallout’ – yes, I finally decided to keep that title – the image could represent two central themes, the importance of the beach and its ever-changing light and tides, and the fire deep in the nuclear reactor burning red, orange and blue. Sunset over the beach could fulfill both of these hopes in one image, if we could find the right one and not have to pay too much for the copyright. If that sounds mercenary, it is. Self-publishing a real book, as well as an electronic one, is an expensive business, but it’s what I’ve chosen to do. I love books, the look and feel of them as well as their contents. Creating a book continues to be a real pleasure, and one that has to be paid for.
When ‘A Good Liar’ was published, the cover captured the key elements of what lay inside. There was a stunning image of Wastwater under a stormy sky, contrasting with a faded grey picture of rural schoolchildren, taken in the very year of the book’s setting. The cover of ‘Forgiven’ was a gorgeous photograph of a lush green Lakeland valley and a granite wall, taken by my book designer John Aldridge, combined with a bright sky from a different location. This third cover, on the last book of a trilogy entitled ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’, will focus on the Irish Sea of the West Cumbrian coast. Somehow I hope we’ll find the image that delights me and anyone who chooses to read the words inside. Let’s hope the bookshops will find the space to display the cover rather than the spine. I can’t wait to see it.
by admin | Mar 9, 2014 | Uncategorized
The question of whether the location of a story should be real or fictional has bothered me ever since the first idea for my first novel ‘A Good Liar’ several years ago. I wanted to write about where I live, but I also knew my neighbours – many of whom had lived there for generations – were cagey about having their place and inferentially themselves, publicised in this way. So I fudged it. I created a fictional village called Newton at the heart of the story, but all the rest of the locations were real. Many local people who’ve read both ‘A Good Liar’ and ‘Forgiven’, the second of the trilogy, have asked about this decision. Some have asked for a map, which I resisted because of the fudge between fact and fiction.
On balance, I’m glad I didn’t name my village in the books and at least tried to protect its privacy. I’m also glad I checked beforehand with the current owners of a house where some of the action in ‘A Good Liar’ takes place – the Mill Cottage in Boot, Eskdale – to ensure that they were OK with seeing their home both in print and in illustration. They were, as the Mill attached to the cottage is now run as a tourist attraction and publicity is good for business. In the second book, ‘Forgiven’, I wrote about another very precise location, West Row in Kells, Whitehaven. You can check it on Google Maps and see as I did the wonderful view from the houses on that street, looking out over the Solway Firth to Scotland. If – or when? – the story is ever filmed, how would the current residents feel about the tour buses bumping down their cobbled street? I don’t seriously expect that to happen, but it’s an interesting speculation.
So when you’re writing fiction set in a particular area, as I do, deciding about real or fictional place names and details is an issue. In Part 3 of my trilogy set in West Cumberland in the last century I faced this question again, with the choice of Seascale as the main location, and the Windscale nuclear plant (as it was called then) close by. I didn’t ask the residents of Seascale if that was alright with them. Neither the place nor its people were presented in a negative way, and I don’t expect complaints when the book comes out later this year. The question of its title, by the way, remains unsettled, and you can see why if you read my previous blog post, ‘What’s in a Name?’.
With the as yet untitled Book 3 going into production I’m turning my mind to Book 4, and the possibility of switching genre from historical fiction to crime fiction, using as my protagonist one of the characters from the trilogy. If you’re read ‘Forgiven’ – and if not, why not? – you might want to speculate about who the lead character might be. The decision I’m facing now is where to set this new book. I want to stay in Cumbria with its rich history and glorious landscape, but should it be a fictional location or a real one? If it’s crime fiction, the dark side of the place will necessarily be revealed, with bad people doing bad things. If that’s in a recogniseable setting, and only a few decades ago, could that put me at odds with the community I have chosen to live in? If it does, should I care about that?
Fiction writers have always plundered their own lives for people and places and doings and sayings: some of them – D.H. Lawrence for example – knew they would cause upset and didn’t appear to care. But I do care. Does that make a wimp rather than a real writer?
by admin | Mar 4, 2014 | A Good Liar, Fallout, Forgiven, readers, self-publishing, title, trilogy, Windscale fire
Here’s the thing…..for several months I’ve been referring to my new novel by a title. It wasn’t a brilliant title – intriguing, clever, achingly memorable – but it was pertinent, had a useful double meaning and I was getting used to it. The novel is about a continuing family saga, and part of the action takes place in a nuclear plant where there’s a fire and radioactive contamination of the area. All the detail about the nuclear reactor fire is real by the way, and makes a very suspenseful story. My chosen title is – or was – ‘Fallout’. Get it?
So far so good. The manuscript is with the editor; the book designer and I have been discussing the new cover, which has not been started yet. BUT today I hear via Twitter that another novel with exactly the same title is due out on May 1st, and is already visible on Google. No nuclear connection in this one, but it’s a resonant name for a dysfunctional group or relationship, and I’m sure it fits this other novel perfectly well.
Now what do I do? There’s no copyright on titles, so I don’t have to change mine, but do I want my novel to come out with the same title in the same month? The title of my first novel ‘A Good Liar’ was only a prefix away from other book titles, but they had been published years before. This feels different.
I’ve been jotting down alternative titles all afternoon, realising as I do so ‘what’s in a name’. Now the editor and the book designer and I – and you too if you wish to join in – are playing around with the possibilities, with a fairly imminent deadline. If we have to change, I hope it doesn’t cause confusion among my potential readership, and we can come up with something so magical that more readers are inspired to pick it up, and then also read the two previous books in the trilogy (‘A Good Liar’ and ‘Forgiven’) just to get the full flavour of my heroine Jessie Whelan’s courage, flaws and fierce protection of her independence. By the way, if you’re thinking of suggesting a title, Jessie does find love, even if she’s not sure what to do with it. When a decision is finally made, you’ll be the first to know.
by admin | Feb 27, 2014 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, trilogy
Not very long ago I first became aware of the complexities of ‘genre’. I understood this to mean that books had to fit into a category with a label recogniseable to others in the book business. My prior knowledge was rudimentary: I knew about fiction and non-fiction, and that some fiction is about the present day and therefore ‘contemporary’, or set in the past and ‘historical’, but as a wide-ranging reader I had never given the issue much thought. When I started to write myself the original motivation was an interest in my own community, in the first half of the last century before mains electricity, mechanised farming and antibiotics. Within that community I created a woman with a respectable position and a dark secret, and so it began.
In the opening chapter of the first book ‘A Good Liar’ a young woman’s body is discovered and the reader might ask, ‘Who pushed Alice in the river?’ Very soon, however, the demise of poor Alice fades in importance as characters rather than events begin to drive the story. Thus far I had not asked myself about ‘genre’. It was only when I started to learn about finding an agent that problems of definition appeared. ‘You have to be very clear about your genre’, I was told. Why, I wondered: what matters is the writing, surely, not the ‘format’. But I was the novice so I complied, concluding that my genre was ‘local historical fiction’: you could almost hear the groan from any prospective agent, all of whom were in London, as far as possible away from West Cumbria where I live and my stories are set. ‘But is it literary fiction of commercial fiction?’ was the next question, and is it ‘women’s fiction’, whatever that is?
I ended up by defining my first book, the product of four years of struggle, learning, frustration, effort, determination and optimism, as ‘local historical women’s commercial fiction’, which I suspect is the kiss of death in publishing terms. Needless to say I have found this process of genre definition unsatisfactory, and am still unsure of its purpose. Searching for an agent with this definition hanging round my like an albatross seemed like such a fruitless task that I decided instead to self-publish, and did so, with that book and the two more that followed. I believe that the three books in my trilogy – ‘A Good Liar’ (2012), ‘Forgiven’ (2013) and ‘Fallout’ (forthcoming, May 2014) – have a life and a quality beyond this clumsy pejorative label.
How do I define my own books? They tell of women’s struggles against limitations placed upon them by the circumstances of their lives in the middle years of the 20th century, set in the richly varied and interesting landscape of Cumbria’s west coast. They are both universal and particular. The strictures of ‘genre’ are more of a hindrance than a help.
by admin | Feb 19, 2014 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, readers, Rohinton Mistry, selling, structure, trilogy, writing
Of all Rohinton Mistry’s poignant and ‘pain-full’ stories the ones I love most are in his ‘Tales from the Firozsha Baag’, about an apartment building in Bombay (as was), told through the eyes of a boy who lives there and knows all the quirky tenants and the connections between them. The eleven stories are linked by the boy and a place, and we follow the complex trail of friendships, quarrels and animosities which leads from one episode to the next.
A trilogy, three stories in a sequence, can have similar delights, and present similar challenges. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write a trilogy until I found my main character Jessie Whelan, months after starting to write ‘A Good Liar’, and quickly discovered that she was too complicated and interesting – to me at least – to be lost after just one book. So I left the ending of ‘A Good Liar’ ambivalent and unresolved, to encourage the reader to want more, jumped ahead ten years, and carried on.
It was only when planning the next part ‘Forgiven’ that I realised that for some readers this would be the first book, not the second. I needed to build on the prior knowledge of some readers without repeating too much and boring them, while at the same time enabling new readers to have sufficient backstory to develop the internal tension I was striving for.
Flashbacks weren’t going to work: there was too much detail that could seriously interrupt the forward movement of the plot. So I had to reveal necessary backstories through reminiscent conversation, or questions from ‘new’ characters requesting and receiving information that new readers might also find useful. All that couldn’t be within the first few pages, but if the new reader was kept waiting too long they might give up. Not all that the new reader might find interesting is needed at one time: little morsels can be dropped in from time to time, just to add flavour to what’s currently happening.
It all needs to be planned of course, and I’m getting better at that from a very cold start. My early assumption that I could start to write and all the necessary plot details would fall neatly into place was the main reason why my first effort ‘A Good Liar’ took four years to complete, compared with a tight year or less for each of the following books.
Once the first draft is readable, it then needs to be looked at both by ‘experienced’ readers, who’ve read the previous parts of the trilogy and ‘newbies’ who have not. Their needs are different and both have to be reasonably happy with what’s presented to them. In commercial terms, it’s helpful if, wherever the reader starts, she is keen to read either the previous parts of the trilogy or the following ones, or both.
Selling more books was not a major consideration when I decided to write a trilogy, but it’s been noticeable that when the second part appeared it boosted sales of the first one. I’m hoping of course that the publication of Part 3 of the trilogy ‘Fallout’ will similarly bootstrap the sales of the previous two. For a self-published author of fiction, finding a readership will always be a challenge. A single book might have novelty value but then sink without trace when the first flurry of attention – if you’re lucky – is past. Producing three books in a series in successive years is a writing challenge, but should help sales, if the books are worth reading. If the first one is a reeker, then it could work the other way. Until the author’s name on the cover is so well-known that anything you write will sell, you’re only as good as your last book.
Despite the complications, I’m glad I decided to write three linked books, each set in the same area with overlapping characters and ten years on from the previous one. The story encompasses the first half of the twentieth century in West Cumberland, and I enjoyed the long view as well as the microcosmic details of each episode. It’s a West Cumbrian saga as well as a family saga, and I’m happy about that.
Now that the third part is virtually complete, I’m casting about for the theme, place and time of the next book. I may even try a different genre, crime fiction this time, but set in the past like ‘Life on Mars’. I won’t be making a definite decision about that until ‘Fallout’ is ready for the printers in about three months’ time.
by admin | Feb 15, 2014 | Fallout, memory, Uncategorized, writing
Sometimes my working life seems to be in two distinct parts – the education work and the fiction writing – that have no connection with each other and are mutually exclusive. These days the balance of time has tipped towards the writing, but while working in a school yesterday I had the curious sensation of the two worlds colliding, not in terms of the content, but in terms of the skills and the way I’m using my brain.
The content of my education work is so embedded after thirty years of experience that It seems to occupy the same space as the imagination I use when I’m writing. This cognitive content may have been learned sequentially but now its different subsets merge and flow into each other, making connections without any effort on my part. I think of something, an idea or a fact, and it immediately connects with something else.
When I’m working, presenting to a large audience as I did yesterday at Rosebrook Primary School in Stockton, I have to find the words to describe and explain the connections that have jumped into my mind. Those words have to be spoken, and immediate. The fast processing and reaction is – for me – the intellectual equivalent of an extreme sport. I guess it gives me the same rush, although the only danger is that the words will dry up, or tumble out randomly, or offend someone. I’m pretty sure I have offended people in the past by saying exactly what I was thinking without employing the filters that kick in when you slow down. Very occasionally, when I’m tired or unwell, I can’t find the words I need, but that’s rare. Over time I’ve learned to just let my mind relax and focus, not distracted by anything except the focus or the question I’m responding to. I try not to listen to myself, although occasionally I’m aware that what I’m saying is just right. The downside is that the words are ephemeral and what my listeners actually hear, through the filter of their own experience and values, may be different than what was said.
My experience of writing is much shorter than my experience of speaking. If I write as fast as I talk, the words usually flow, but they sound like spoken words not written ones. To shift from the spoken to the written form requires different structures, tighter, more concise, more measured, more thoughtful – more ‘poetic’. That’s where the re-drafting and editing start, for which I need to slow down. Speaking the written words out loud helps, and I’m now half way through doing that for the penultimate version of ‘Fallout’, before it goes to Charlotte, my editor. This will be her first sight of most of the ms. and I value her judgement so much that waiting for her reaction has made me nervous. I know I will need to take more time, adding and deleting before any final polish, but that goes against the grain of my habitual impatience. ‘Life is short’ has been my motto for decades, probably since my father’s sudden death when I was nine: I’m learning slowly to control the urge to rush.
Spoken or written, fast or slower, words are a constant joy. I hope something else carries me off before I lose them.
by admin | Feb 7, 2014 | Explicit details, Fallout, readers, self-publishing, trilogy, writing
Writing a trilogy is trickier than I thought: I’ve written the three novels in ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’ as three ‘episodes’ set ten years apart, but readers may not tackle them in chronological order. No matter how much you want her to start at the beginning, every reader may start wherever she wants. As a consequence, I can make no assumptions about what the reader already knows about previous events or understands about the characters.
Other series I’ve read with pleasure, notably the Patrick O’Brian ‘Aubrey and Maturin’ stories, make very few concessions to the reader: if you’re lost, that’s your problem. But I have tried to be a little more accommodating, and there’s the rub. For the ‘experienced’ reader I can afford to be implicit, letting them fill in the gaps from what they already know. For the ‘novice’ reader however, implicit is harder: it may drive them back into the previous episodes for greater understanding, or it might drive them away altogether. More details and back stories sometimes need to be provided, which could threaten the flow of the plot and risk annoying those for whom the repetition is unnecessary.
On the whole I think explicitness has won out, but while writing recently the final stages of Part 3 ‘Fallout’ I’ve tipped towards ‘less is more’. The main thread of the story is the one that really matters, to me at least, and is reasonably well tied together at the end. I had planned to have a big ‘set piece’ as a penultimate chapter, to update the wider cast of characters and make their futures more explicit, but when I got to that stage the big scene lost its appeal. I knew I was done when I started to cry, and didn’t want to dilute the final impact by writing more.
So the ms of ‘Fallout feels almost complete. It will have to be read out loud and crafted more thoughtfully, sentence by sentence, but the main work is done, a couple of weeks before my self-imposed deadline. Is that a good sign I wonder? After the protracted agonies of the first novel this has felt alarmingly straight-forward. If there’s something seriously awry I’m counting on my wonderful editor Charlotte to find it. Mick, my partner, has been reading as the draft has unfolded and his feedback has been invaluable, but he may be too close to see the faults clearly, as I am myself.
I recall this feeling of anti-climax: restlessness, uncertainty, desperate for feedback. The urge is to start on the next stage in self-publishing, the nightmare of promotion and ‘marketing, but I’m trying to be patient – not my strong suit. By next week I may know more and feel differently. Watch this space.
by admin | Jan 31, 2014 | Authenticity, ethical questions, fact-based fiction, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, point of view, research, Sellafield, Windscale fire
I’m writing historical fiction set in the region where I live, in the mid-twentieth century and therefore within living memory. I have also chosen to incorporate real events as the backdrop for my characters’ lives. I don’t regret this choice: it has added authenticity and genuine excitement to the story, but it has generated ethical as well as technical questions.
Here’s the first example. In August 1947 104 men and boys were killed in an underground explosion at the William pit in Whitehaven. This event was part of the ‘backdrop’ of my second novel ‘Forgiven’ in which a mining family, the McSherrys from Kells, played a leading part. Violet McSherry and her daughter Maggie Lowery were both screen lasses at the Haig pit, and Frank McSherry was confined to a wheelchair by a previous mining accident. Violet’s brother Tom worked at the William Pit, on the shift that was below ground when the explosion occurred. I wanted one of my characters to be involved, but could Tom be one of the men who was killed? No, I decided, he could not. The families of those killed still live in the area. A book called ‘104 men’ chronicled the lives of each of the victims. I could not ‘borrow’ the identity of any of these people, or add Tom to the list as the 105th victim, without risking offence. Instead, I added Tom to the small group who managed to escape the explosion and walked out of the pit unharmed 20 hours later. This device gave me the opportunity to tell the story from the POV of a survivor, and the story of the men’s survival was fascinating in itself. This story has been widely read and enjoyed locally, and to date no one has questioned my decision to blend fact and fiction in this way.
In Part 3 of the trilogy ‘Fallout’, a similar issue has arisen, and I am still pondering the best course of action before the book is complete and published. This time the setting is the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria where the world’s first nuclear fire occurred in October 1957. The events have been exhaustively documented in recent years, although many of the details were not published at the time for political reasons. One of the principal characters is a fictional physicist Lawrence Finer, seconded to Windscale from Harwell, the nuclear research establishment near Oxford. Finer is present as the fire in the reactor starts, threatens to destroy the reactor and is finally extinguished. He is spoken to by men who were ‘really’ there, including Tom Tuohy the Deputy Works manager at the time who was instrumental in ‘saving the day’. I have put words into his mouth, and into the mouths of three other ‘real’ people, based on my detailed research into exactly what was said and done at the time. It makes for an exciting blend of fact and fiction, but is it acceptable?
My editor Charlotte Rolfe is on the case, and has already consulted a publishing lawyer, who has read the relevant chapters and believes that they are OK: the ‘real’ characters are in the background, not the foreground; nothing that they say or do is detrimental to their reputations – in fact quite the opposite; what they say is consistent with the known and documented facts. He also, by the way, said that the chapter describing the fire was ‘rivetting’ which I was chuffed about.
I wonder if other historical novelists struggle with these questions? I wonder if I should give first sight of the ms before publication to the relatives of the four men named in my story, out of respect and politeness, even though technically and legally the ms is not a problem. I want to do the right thing, and I also believe that a fictional account of what happened at that momentous time is worth telling.
Ironically, on this very day, Sellafield nuclear plant is partly closed due to an apparent radiation leak, and the issue of nuclear safety is on our minds yet again.
by admin | Jan 24, 2014 | A Good Liar, Fallout, readers, sex scene, Uncategorized, writing
After nearly three books with my main character Jessie Whelan, I know that sex has always been important to her. Her first affair resulted in a baby she was forced to give away; the second reckless fling with a much younger man ended with a drunken sexual assault that left her bruised and humiliated. When the love of her life finally arrives, how will the sex be, if at all? And – the big question for me – how will I represent this on the page without being too graphic or too coy, and in a way that honestly illuminates their relationship, as the best sex should?
Writing about Jessie’s violent encounter with the young man in ‘A Good Liar’ (Book 1 of the trilogy) was very difficult: even thinking about it in retrospect makes me feel uncomforatble. The first draft of the sex scene in Book 3 ‘Fallout’ was easier to write, but that may be because both parties are clearer about what they mean to each other. It also helps that their friendship is based on mutual intellectual respect and a similarly rational, even ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to sex as a natural extension of their close relationship. Now I’m on the second draft, and the issue is on my mind again. My guess is that some of my readers will prefer implicit allusions with more left to their imagination, while others would prefer more explicitness. Anyone who thinks that sex is irrelevant doesn’t understand Jessie Whelan.
So far in writing this scene I’ve been explicit about a few ‘stages’ in the first sexual encounter, but left gaps, to avoid the tedium of a ‘blow by blow’ (sorry!) account. It is their first time and both partners are relatively inexperienced, so extended feats of sexual athletics are therefore unlikely. I anticipate that their enjoyment of each other will grow with trust and practice, and this might be hinted at later. Despite all the passion, we can still laugh about sex too, and they do. My mother would have been appalled, no doubt, but my heroine doesn’t aspire to be ‘lady-like’.
I’ll have another go at it and then check with one or two people for their reactions. My best hope is to steer a readable middle ground between too much information and too little, and to avoid the ghastly Lawrentian euphemisms that ruined a good story in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. If you want to see how it turns out in the end, Fallout should be out in June 2014. The difficult sex scene in ‘A Good Liar’ can be found in the book, which you can get through my website or through Amazon. The Kindle version is available as well.
by admin | Jan 8, 2014 | historical fiction, point of view, Uncategorized
When you’re a fiction-writing novice like me, it’s hard to know what you don’t know. Not only had I never written fiction before I started on my first novel in 2008 aged sixty, I’d never learned anything about writing, no courses, no books, not even in a book club, although I read widely and daily. In those circumstances I embarked on the novel with confidence born of ignorance. I thought I could put words together quite effectively, but I hadn’t thought about structure or any other key questions. First person or third? Past tense or present? Plot-driven or character-driven?
In Part One of what was to become a trilogy I started with two questions for the reader: who pushed Alice in the river, and would the abandoned child ultimately find his mother? It was only after a year or two of hopeless meandering and some very critical professional feedback that I realised that neither of these questions really mattered. The most interesting questions were: why does cautious Jessie take a lover, and then another, and what happens when the abandoned child turns up twenty years later.
The key point raised by my ‘reviewer’ (Sarah Bower for The Literary Consultancy) was that I didn’t seem to understand ‘point of view’. Whose eyes are you looking through, Sarah asked; whose ears hear what’s being said? In the draft that I submitted for critique the point of view sometimes varied randomly from one sentence to the next, as if the narrator of the action was formless, slipping at will into the shoes of whoever might be around in the scene. I wasn’t bothered whether the eyes and ears were those of a major character or a minor one. I called it kaleidoscopic, she called it a mess.
My reactions to the critique were classic: for a number of weeks I put both it and the manuscript aside and refused to think about them. Then I decided that ‘point of view’ was a pretty silly concept and therefore it couldn’t matter much. In the end I bowed to the unavoidable conclusion that my reviewer knew much more about writing fiction than I do, and that I should think more about what she had suggested. Choose two or three characters to carry the ‘point of view’ she had said, no more. Make it clear to the reader whose point of view is paramount, chapter by chapter. If you want to change it within a single chapter do so carefully and purposefully.
It was soon very clear why I was tempted to either ignore the critique and abandon the whole project or carry on regardless. Limiting the points of view in this way changed everything. Almost every chapter would have to be re-written. And then another realisation hit me: if I wanted to tell a complicated story with very limited points of view, some of the details would have to be conveyed indirectly as none of my key protagonists could realistically be involved in witnessing the action directly. Sounds complicated, and it was. The first draft of the first novel took two years, and the radical redraft a further two before I had anything that was worth polishing. The effort involved, sustained by only a faint glimmer of confidence in the potential outcome, nearly finished me off. It was only stubborn determination not to waste the effort completely that finally pushed me to finish ‘A Good Liar’, cope with the repeated generic brush-offs from agents and decide in the end to publish the book myself.
The second and third parts of my trilogy have continued the decisions about third person, past tense and two or three points of view adopted for part 1. But now I’m thinking about what to write once the trilogy is complete, which should be summer 2014. Knowing what I know now, what different choices could I make about the next novel I hope to write?
My own reading has become more analytical, more aware of tenses, voice, dialogue and structure. Maybe reading fiction is like watching cricket: you never really understand what’s going on unless you’ve played it yourself. And I’m still thinking about ‘point of view’. If you choose the singular point of view, as in Jane Austen, all the action and details necessary for the reader have to be conveyed through the eyes and ears of one person. That person has to be in every scene, witnessing the action directly or hearing about it from someone else. Unless this key protagonist is merely the constant recipient of other people’s news, he or she has to drive the action forward by their own actions, or inactions.
I recall reading Robert Goddard and wondering why his protagonists seem so prone to getting drunk, or over-sleeping, or other mistakes that lead in turn to twists and crises in the plot. With only one point of view there’s no other way to drive the plot forward. Those same necessary personal frailties apply in spades to various contemporary fictional detectives – Morse and Wallender to name but two – who are irredeemably prone to aberrant behaviours, depression and dysfunctional personal relationships. How else can drama be created?
As writers we are faced with a choice of singular, limited or multiple points of view. What are the implications for both writers and readers? Do different genres necessarily deal with this issue in different ways?
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