by admin | Aug 10, 2014 | character, Explicit details, historical fiction, readers, research
Right back to my student days, ensconced in the circular reading room at Manchester Central Library for days at a time, I’ve loved research, digging around, following footnote leads, piecing a picture together and seeing it emerge in all its satisfying complexity. I still love it. The decision to write historical fiction, forty years on from my student days, was partly motivated by the research opportunities. Now the object of my investigation would be the community where I live, a multi-layered fascinating area with a deep dark past in the far north-west of England, too far from the M6 motorway to catch many Lake District tourists. Off I went to the local history libraries and my note books filled up with details of events and people and the way lives were led.
As it turned out, by the time came to write the first novel, I was floundering in the details, which stuck limpet-like and refused to be dislodged, weighing down the action and irritating potential readers. Much of it had to go. ‘Murder your darlings’ I was told on a writing course at the Faber Academy that was too good to ignore. And I did: whole chapters, sub-plots, and characters. Thousands of words fell to the sword.
I read something by Ian Rankin, explaining he does the outline first and then decides what research he needs to do. It made sense, but I think there’s more to the research business than this, at least for me. The first stage is to think, about the characters if they already exist, or the times, or the place, and any potential dilemmas or crises that these might generate. Then for me the first stage of research starts, not looking for details but the the feel of a period or a place. The reading may be wide-ranging, with few notes, just to stimulate and titillate to the imagination. Then an outline begins to emerge: don’t ask me how this works. Ideas just bubble up from somewhere, but there are definitely more of these bubbles if I’ve been reading around, slowly sipping information and letting it ferment.
Then comes the first draft of the outline, usually ‘good in parts’ like the curate’s egg (where did that expression come from?). At this point, as the second outline grows from the first, I begin to realise what I need to find out about. There are specific detailed questions to be answered: how long does it take for a body drowned at that point to wash up somewhere else? Where did ladies go shopping for clothes in Whitehaven in 1937? When did formal adoptions start? and so on. Much of the information is findable on the internet while more arcane details mean another trip to the local history library. Even when the research is limited by this ‘need to know’ process, much of what I find out will never make it into the final text. Too much, too specific, unnecessary, intrusive, cut it out. Out of pages of notes you might be left with a glimpse, a smell, an aside, but it will carry all the authenticity you need and the rest is superfluous.
Is research necessary? Absolutely. One bad mistake and the reader’s trust can be damaged beyond repair. But the most common problem is too much rather than too little. Up to a point, authentic detail is admirable and necessary; beyond that point it’s just irritating. It’s a fine line. Whoever edits your books needs to be alert to the possibility of research overload and use their metaphorical red pencil when the line is crossed. As the author you might be disappointed by this apparent disrespect, but you’ll be grateful later. Beware of any novel where the blurb refers to ‘meticulous research’, which must be euphemism for ‘tedious name-dropping’. I could provide examples, but instead I’ll respect the commitment of the author to historical veracity and then read something else.
by admin | Jul 13, 2014 | A Good Liar, Authenticity, character, crime fiction, Cumbria, ethical questions, Explicit details, fact-based fiction, Fallout, research, Windscale fire
After finishing the trilogy based on the life of feisty but difficult Jessie Whelan, ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’, I’ve been thinking about the next book, or possibly the next series, having realised the commercial advantages of a series when each book encourages sales of the others. I’d like to set the series in a location dear to my heart, the west coast of Cumbria, and move towards crime fiction. It’s a well-worn genre, and difficult to do anything entirely new, but that doesn’t bother me: the range is so diverse, and the variables so many that my goal of something suspenseful and fresh will be achievable if I try really hard and use what I’ve learned so far.
Part of the freshness I want would be in the location, a neglected part of the country which has wonderful potential – beautiful, complex, layered, with the inwardness that stems from geographical isolation. It’s also where I live, and that could be the source of dilemmas to come. There can’t be a crime story without bad things happening, caused by people behaving badly. They may not be evil people, but they do evil things, for whatever reasons. I will be setting these evil matters within a community that I’m part of and that I’m very fond of. Do I have the ‘detachment’ that may be necessary, and will I care if what I write upsets those who would rather not have the region’s dirty linen, even the fictional dirty linen, exposed in public?
Hasn’t this been a problem all along? In the three stories so far, bad things have happened, and so far my neighbours are still speaking to me. But the bad things so far have all been external, an explosion in a pit, a fire in a nuclear reactor, neither of them caused by the wanton action of bad people. Blame, if we wish to allocate it, could be placed at the door of a process of cutting corners, or even human error, or the impact of political haste or a flu epidemic, not stemming from from deliberate acts by malevolent individuals.
If it’s crime fiction there will have to be a crime, and probably a series of crimes, and the criminals will probably be local. Not every baddie could be an ‘offcomer’ newly arrived from the distant iniquitous dens of London or even Leeds. Of course some of the evil-doers will be local: even a cursory scan of the local papers reveals plenty of evidence of local wrong-doing, and occasional acts of startling ferocity such as the recent multiple killings by a deranged taxi driver, Cumbria born and bred, who shot his victims both deliberately and then randomly before turning the gun on himself.
What I will need to do is use all the geographical details of my chosen setting but find the crime details elsewhere, to avoid crossing the line between crime fiction and ‘true crime’. As with most local fiction, authenticity will derive from the details of place and time, not from the characters, who remain fictional. The exception to this rule I made myself in ‘Fallout’ – part 3 of the trilogy – in placing known people from the Windscale nuclear plant in 1957 into the story as part of the backdrop. I took legal advice about doing so and was assured that it was acceptable, so long as nothing any of these people were given to do or say was at odds with the known facts, or in any way detrimental to their characters or reputation. It would be a different matter if any of these ‘known’ characters had been given criminal things to do.
In the first part of the trilogy I grappled with these choices, and decided to anonymise the village where most of the action takes place, which was loosely based on the village where I live. I changed its name and tweaked the neighbouring locations too, although more distant locations were left alone, visible on the map and in life. All the characters were fictional, although one – the vicar at the time – did possess some of the characteristics of the actual vicar at the time when the story was set. Even so, some of my neighbours were convinced that some of the characters in the story were real people. ‘You got so-and-so off to a tee,’ someone said to me, although ‘so-and-so’ was entirely a product of my imagination and – as far as I knew – bore no resemblance to any real person, living or dead. When I protested, my neighbour smiled, putting a finger to the side of the nose in the time-honoured gesture of ‘You can’t fool me’.
So, known setting and unknown characters and events will be required to make this work without doing insult or injury to my home turf. That decision helps. For a start I won’t have to spend many hours combing through back numbers of the North-West Evening Mail or the Westmorland Gazette and can let my dark imagination roam a little more freely. Now I have to get on with it.
by admin | Jun 30, 2014 | character, Cumbria, fact-based fiction, Fallout, Forgiven, historical fiction, Lake District, research, trilogy, writing
Tomorrow evening I’ll be talking to the ‘Friends of Whitehaven Museum’ about the Jessie Whelan trilogy, which has the overall title ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’. It could be quite a large group, some of whom may have read all three books and others may not even know of their existence. My appearance is part of their regular programme of speakers, and I guess I’ve been invited not as a writer but as someone who has researched and recorded slices of local history in fictional form.
So, I’m thinking: what should I talk to them about? The one thing we all have in common is the setting, and the meeting will take place just across the harbour from the site of the major backdrop event in Book 2, ‘Forgiven’, the explosion in the William Pit in August 1947 that claimed the lives of 104 local men and boys. Think of the impact of that on the local community: all those funerals, day after day, and the thousands of people whose lives were affected, children left without fathers, wives without husbands. I’ll tell them how I tracked down the transcript of the NCB report on the accident, including the accounts from the three men who survived, and how I researched another facet of ‘Forgiven’, the lives of the Displaced Persons in their camps in Cumberland in the years after World War Two. Book 3, ‘Fallout’ was set at the time of the nuclear reactor fire at Windscale, just south of Whitehaven, in 1957, and in doing the research for this book I accumulated far more detail than I could possibly have used in the story, much of which was not clear at the time, even to those who were working at the plant. That too will probably be part of what I share with the group. People are usually interested in the past history of where they live, especially when that history is as rich as ours.
As a writer I should be discussing the triumvirate of character, plot and setting, but talking about setting alone would take us far longer than the limited time I’ll have, and I must find time to say something about the process of turning local history into fiction, which presents another set of challenges worthy of conversation. I’ll try to explain how the characters were born and developed as I wrote about their lives, and how I have tried to have both setting and character drive the plot. Looking back, the process of writing looks far more rational and ordered than it felt for me at the time. I’m now learning more about how to structure and plan a work of fiction, but – in the words of the metaphor – the stable door is banging in the wind and the horse has long gone. Maybe it’ll make for a better effort for the next book. In the meantime I’ll reflect on what I thought and did at the time and not pretend that I consciously followed rules that I was mostly unaware of. Considering that admission. the books turned out better than they might have been.
I’m doing many talks to various groups around Cumbria over the summer, and each one will be different, which sounds inefficient but it’s the only way to keep things fresh. If the people I’m with seem willing to talk I’ll ask them right at the start to help me frame our discussion through their questions and interests. Managing those unanticipated expectations, adding important bits of my own and doing it all within a short time frame is enjoyably risky. It’s like really good teaching and I love it.
by admin | Jun 15, 2014 | character, crime fiction, genre, villain
All the characters I’ve developed so far in my writing have been flawed in one way or another – Jessie is impulsive, John so unassertive, Maggie ambitious, Violet blinkered by her religion – but all of them are essentially good people. If, as I’m considering, I turn to crime fiction for Book 4 I need at least one character who is truly malevolent, and now I’m struggling. The big piece of paper where I’m sketching out the interrelationships in the new book is looking interesting but too benign. It lacks an attractive ‘baddie’, like Milton’s Satan, just charismatic enough to reel us in and make the inevitable betrayal all the more shocking.
Current events lead me to consider a possible backdrop of paedophilia, or people smuggling, or abuse of immigrant workers as the dark side of the plot. It may be squeamish on my part, but I want to avoid explicit violence against women, although setting the action in the 1970s would provide plenty of scope for misogyny and casual gender discrimination. My own working life began early in the 1970s, and I clearly recall how as a young married woman at my first job interview being asked what my contraceptive arrangements were. I said I would share mine if the Deputy Headteacher interviewing me would explain his. He didn’t pursue the matter. Women in general, and young women in particular, were routinely insulted and undermined, and it would be so easy to turn the story into a feminist rant, but that’s not what I want to write. I’m looking for a villain, a rounded, credible, intelligent, articulate character uninhibited by compassion or conscience whose behaviour wreaks havoc and threatens the people we love. Rather than trawl unsuccessfully through my acquaintance looking for such a person, I may look for inspiration among fictional villains, past and present. Scarpia? Iago? Shakespeare’s caricature of Richard III?
Or should I aim for an ill-intentioned collective, the paedophile ring, the terrorist group, the cabal of bent coppers on the take? Looking across the current literature, it feels like every conceivable angle of conspiracy has been done to death, literally and figuratively. The heroic isolated protagonist against the odds, again? Maybe the nature of successful crime fiction is that it repeats the well-worn genre protocols with just enough of a twist to pique the aficianado’s interest. Is that what I want to do? For the time being it’s back to the drawing board, and the large piece of paper.
by admin | May 29, 2014 | character, Cumbria, historical fiction, promotion, readers, self-publishing, selling, trilogy
I searched on the bookshop shelf in a nearby market town but my books were not there. I asked at the counter. ‘Oh, they’re in the ‘local’ section,’ I was told, ‘in the back room’. What could I say? True, my books are set in a recogniseable area, and local people who read them are pleased to find places that they know. But all the fictional characters are exactly that, fictional, and these characters and their stories are actually more important that the ‘localness’. So why are the books ‘condemned’ to the ‘local’ shelves, alongside histories of hematite and Herdwicks?
This could be another example of the tyranny of genre. We are obliged to allocate a genre, that is a label, to our books so that the booksellers know where to put them on the shelf. And as a consequence of being labelled as ‘local’ – by others, not by me – I find myself explaining to someone in Ambleside that the books may be set on the west coast of Cumbria, about an hour away from Ambleside by road, but they can be – and are- read with pleasure by people on the other side of the Atlantic, not the other side of the county. One of the beauties of historical fiction is that – compared with contemporary fiction – it doesn’t date. There may not be a sell-by date, but there appears to be a ‘sell-within’ limitation, and I’m wondering how to get around it. I would so love to see my novels on a bookshop shelf in Leeds, or Newcastle, or even London, but the chances of that appear to be slim to none.
If I were a commercial publisher, I would find editors of the national media book sections who would commission a review, but as a self-published author the review route seems to be blocked. Do nationally recognised reviewers ever get to see, never mind read, self-published fiction, or do they, like the publishers, restrict themselves to reading that which has been already ‘filtered’ by other colleagues in the book trade? Is it worth sending off expensive parcels of books in the hope of a response? There may be a ‘slush pile’ for reviewers as well as for publishers, and I have no particular desire to end up on it. Is there anyone out there, I wonder, who would be willing to take a chance on reading a trilogy by a self-published author with pretty good sales, about an independent woman struggling to survive and maintain her integrity and independence against serious challenges in the early twentieth century?
Let’s say the trilogy is set in ‘The North’, that foreign land known only to pioneers who venture as far as the M6 and keep going past Birmingham or even Manchester. Is there such a genre as ‘northern fiction’? I’d be OK with that: there is something about this half of the country that feels and looks different than the more manicured south. But when ‘local fiction’ comes to mean ‘readable only by those within a thirty mile radius of where I live’ I get a bit fed up.
That’s the end of today’s moan. I resolve to be more positive in future.
by admin | May 20, 2014 | character, crime fiction, critique, dialogue, pace, plotting, point of view, readers, speech, structure
There was such a huge response to my post on the question ‘Can you teach writing?’ that I decided to add some more, so here it is. I didn’t make this stuff up: I learned it from my own painful experience, and from great guides like Andrew Pyper, Matthew Hall and William Ryan, whose ideas I have shamelessly plundered. Here goes….
There are a number of aspects of teaching how to write fiction. Let’s divide the process up and pay attention to at least some of them…
- Translating thoughts into words and sentences. This is about vocabulary and rhythm, the sound, imagery and flow of the language. If you need to pay attention to grammatical accuracy, this is where the conventions need to explained and practiced. Some of the rules of these conventions – the use of the apostrophe, for example – might need to be ‘taught’, but the best learning is from reading and speaking words aloud, analysing the ‘poetry’ of others’ language and how the full meaning is conveyed, and then bringing those insights into your own work. Working with others encourages you to hear your language, get feedback on it, and refine it constantly to achieve the effect you are striving for.
- Finding and developing ‘characters’. People are the essence of fiction, who they are, how they react to the world and others to them, how they speak, walk, dress. There is no easy way to develop the characters who will inhabit and drive your story, and every writer will have their own way to find and flesh out the people they need. You can start with an image, from life, from a picture, or in your head. Then you think and ask questions of this image until it develops dimensions and warmth. What motivates the person, how do they look and sound, what are they afraid of, what and who do they love, – the questions are the ones you use to check out anyone who does or will mean a great deal to you. All and any questions are relevant here, some of them very personal. Even if you never use the answers to all the questions in your story, it helps to deepen each character in this way. Once you have the details, add things like birthdays, favourite colours, hair style, etc and make a separate file, or file card, for each character to help continuity and consistency. It’ll save so much time later. This process can be both taught and practised to great effect, before you embark on a first draft of anything.
- Plot, and the ‘Three act structure’. You can research the theories of plot and structure online to great effect, and as much as you want. The three act structure is most commonly used in films, or in crime fiction, but you’ll find it in all forms of fiction, back to Dickens, Jane Austen and other classics that were around long before such a structure was given a name. Most fiction starts with a question – ‘What if…?’ – or a crisis, to kick start the action and grab the reader’s attention. Much of the plot will then evolve from the interaction between the characters and the events, to drive the story forward. Action is generated by both external events and internal processes, such as the emotional reactions of the characters, and their development and changes over time. We want our characters to have an impact on the external events and also be affected by them, creating tension on a number of levels to keep the reader engaged. The relationship between character and plot, between internal and external can be as complicated as you can handle, and as the reader you have in mind will be happy with. My advice would be to keep things relatively simple while you’re learning the craft.
- Point of view: whose shoulder are you sitting on, seeing and hearing what they see and hear in each scene? Do you write in the first person, or the third person? In the present tense, or the past. The ‘costs and benefits’ of all those approaches can also be ‘taught’ and rehearsed, leaving you the writer ultimately to make the best choices for the effect they wish to generate.
- The idea of a ‘theme’ that runs throughout your work. I’m not certain about this for a beginning writer. It could lead to some pretty pretentious and self-conscious stuff, and needs to be handled lightly, but this too – like keeping notes on the details of your characters – can help the continuity of longer works of fiction and add to the shape and structure of what you write. You should be able to answer the question ‘What’s your story about?’ without just recounting what happens. Incidentally, the answer to the question will also help in ‘pitching’ your story to an agent or anyone else in the book and film business. In the scale of what can be ‘taught’, the issue of ‘theme’ might not be the first thing I would ask the apprentice writer to tackle, but it would be something to work on before you start to write in earnest.
- Planning and thinking before you start to write: learning patience, when all you want to do is get writing. I paid a heavy price for my impatience in writing my first novel, embarking on the first draft way too soon and getting into all sorts of trouble that took years – yes, years – to untangle. What I’ve learned to do – having been well taught in various workshops – is to start with an idea or a question, and gradually expand to a page of the overall shape of the plot, then expand again, and again, and again, into ‘Acts’ or stages, then into sections, then chapters. I call this working from the inside, out.
- Displaying your plan. By this time you’ll have an outline for most of your sections or chapters. Now pin them up somewhere, on a wall, or lay them on a cleared floor, and look at them. Take in the big picture and start moving things around, adding bits, changing bits. You can’t do this by reading sequentially on a screen: you have to get a ‘simultaneous visual impression’ of the shape of the whole work, before you start to write. This is your map of the territory. You may change your mind about the route once you embark on the trip, and you may even change your destination, but the map is always there to ground you and to keep you going if you start to feel lost or stuck.
I’ve written this pretty fast – it’s a blog post of a thousand words or so after all, not an essay. There’s loads more you could add, and heaps of great books and advice available. But this might do for a start. I wish I’d thought about these few things before I started. I haven’t even mentioned dialogue, which is definitely something you can be taught, but if you get the characters rights, and the setting, and speak out loud whatever you have characters say, you can improve the quality of dialogue immeasurably. And then there’s the challenge of the opening paragraph. Bets way to learn that is to look at opening paragraphs, consider what makes them work, and then write your own. See what I mean? So much to be learned, and all of it can be taught, if you have the right teacher.
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