by admin | May 18, 2014 | character, crime fiction, genre, plotting, self-publishing, structure, writing
‘Once a teacher, always a teacher’: I think that’s true, and being a teacher – however long ago – makes you permanently and irredeemably critical of how information and ideas are presented. Although I’ve not taught school students for many years, I make part of my living still through ‘teaching’ adults, and after twenty years of doing so I have an idea of what works.
So a visit to Crimefest in Bristol last week was a chance to learn about writing crime fiction from a brace of presenters I’d never seen in action before – Matthew Hall (the MR Hall of ‘Coroner’ fame), and William Ryan. It was an afternoon workshop, and something about the blurb made me think it might be useful. From Cumbria to Bristol is a long way, but it turned about to be worth every mile and every pound it cost me. What did they do that I found so helpful?
For a start, they told us right at the start that some aspects – but not all – of successful fiction writing can be taught, not just ‘caught’ or developed through some mystical intuitive process. They were well-organised and positive. The room was small, a screen had to be invented using a tablecloth as nothing else was available, a laptop failed to function and had to be replaced. Clearly they had worked together before and in supporting each other they reassured us that they would do whatever it took to give us a positive professional experience. They had two clear foci – character and plot – and some slides to support what they told us and asked us to do. All the materials had been circulated well in advance by email. Obviously they had presented this workshop before, but had customised to fit the timings and the size of the group.
I’ve seen this before as an educator, but it was fascinating to see how the passivity of our group during the previous session – about which more later – transformed into engagement given the opportunity to do so. Each one of us was involved in specific tasks that were clearly relevant to the issues of the three act structure, character development and dynamics, and the protocols of crime fiction as a genre. The time was tight, the pace fast, and intense short group activities were interspersed with more anecdotal and expository slices that had me scribbling furiously, not what was being said but insights and ideas that began to tumble around my mind about my own next writing project. I was clearly learning not just listening and it was exhilarating.
Several months ago I had a similar experience at the Winnipeg central library in a workshop presented by Andrew Pyper. He’s a Toronto journalist turned very successful novelist (latest book, ‘The Demonologist’) and used a similar structure and presentation style that engaged and excited his audience. On that occasion too, in just a few hours, I learned so much which has proved very useful since.
Andrew Pyper was a journalist; Matthew and William Ryan had both been barristers in a former life and are now highly successful authors: all three have a passion for words and stories, both spoken and written. The previous session at the Crimefest day in Bristol provided an alternative – much less satisfactory – experience: the contrast sharpened my understanding of what for me is helpful and what is not.
We were faced with a panel of two professional editors and two agents, who were asked quite good questions about their roles and function first by a moderator, and then by us. If I hear another agent tell me that the criterion for choosing a submission is that ‘they fall in love with it’, I think I’m going to scream. They talked about ‘dating’ to describe the relationship between author and agent, and told us that the process of taking the book from manuscript to publication was like ‘giving birth’. I regard myself as an old-fashioned feminist but this excessive ‘feminisation’ was actually deeply unhelpful. What are we as writers to do with such advice? I was also struck by how all four of the panellists cheerfully informed us that they were too busy ‘going to meetings’ during the working day to read the submissions or manuscripts they were supposed to be working on. All the reading was done in the evenings or at the weekends. Not sure how my fellow participants felt about that, but I found it depressing. How could that make any writer feel confident about the professional attention their efforts would receive?
Even more depressing, but perhaps revealing too, was that none of the four had ever actually written anything, or felt they were capable of doing so. These were not writers, or even speakers of words, these four people spent their time responding to other people’s words but not themselves engaged in creating them. Advice to self: if you want help with being a writer, learn from people who write. Further message to self: whatever the current role of the agent is, I think some of them have lost the plot, literally.
by admin | May 10, 2014 | A Good Liar, character, ethical questions, fact-based fiction, Fallout, point of view, research, Windscale fire
It was one of those spooky evenings when you get the impression that the people you’re talking to know more about what you’re talking about than you do. The Millom Ladies Guild were listening politely to my stories about the real vicar who inspired the one I depicted in ‘A Good Liar’ when one of them said, ‘Oh, yes I remember him. I was there when the new school was being built.’ (If you know the story of A Good Liar, you’ll understand all this: if you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time!) Thank heaven she didn’t disagree with either my details or the description of the vicar. A little later I was talking about the fire in the nuclear reactor at Windscale in October 1957 and the people there who played a crucial role, and one of my audience was a cousin of a man I had referred to.
This is why the writing of Part 3 of my trilogy, ‘Fallout’ set in the community around Windscale at the time of the fire caused me some anxiety. I wanted to tell the inside story of the fire, the details of which were revealed only recently, fifty years after the event. This meant naming names, or giving fictional names to men who would be instantly recogniseable to many of the local people who will read the book. If I name them, I wondered, can I also give them words to say, words that they might have said but there is no actual record that they did so?
I decided to include half a dozen real people, under their own names, as minor characters in the background of the action. The main Point of View inside the plant is carried by an entirely fictional character, a visiting physicist from the Harwell nuclear research labs. The ‘real’ characters were named, given things to do and words to speak, during an event within the living memory of both myself and probably the majority of the potential readers. My editor wasn’t sure how to deal with it, so we called in a lawyer who deals mainly in copyright issues, for an opinion about the ‘ethics’ and legality of doing what I’d done. His view was that it was OK, for three reasons: a) the named people were playing a background not a foreground role; b) what they did in my story was supported by the evidence in the official history of the incident and was therefore a matter of public record; c) nothing that I had them doing or saying could be seen in any way as negative or blameworthy, in keeping again with the conclusions in the factual historical record in Lorna Arnold’s ‘Windscale 1957: Anatomy of Nuclear Accident’. On top of all that reassurance, the lawyer also said how much he enjoyed the relevant sections and wanted to read the rest.
One of the ladies in Millom asked, ‘Do you have to get permission to include real people?’. A good question, and I sincerely hope that the advice I sought was correct and that the answer in this case is ‘No’.
by admin | Apr 10, 2014 | character, dialogue, Explicit details, fact-based fiction, memory, plotting, speech
In the past few days I’ve met many new people, re-connected with friends I’ve not seen for years and heard so many stories, told in many different voices. Half my mind has been on the content of our conversations, but I’ve also been noticing habits of speech, how people walk, all sorts of things about them that I’m storing away to use in future. People won’t reappear in my fiction as complete replicas of those I’m seeing around me. I’ll take a turn of phrase here, a posture there, an over-heard snippet of conversation and many other apparently trivial observations, stir them up and leave them for a while. Then I’ll discover which details bob to the surface when next I’m creating a fictional persona. My memory may need a jog, so I’ll make a few notes: just a hint – a smell, a hand, a scar, a voice – an impression to spark a later response.
It’s clear to me that these observations have always been part of my fascination with people, but I’m now more specific and intentional in my ‘noticing’. And I’m more curious too, about the backstory and how and why someone’s idiosyncratic characteristics have developed. Give your imagination space to play and you can capture so much interesting stuff. Even if I’m not sure yet about the plot and shape of Book 4, I’m beginning to find some of the characters, and consider how they may react and behave in challenging circumstances.
I think I already have the central character. She is someone I already ‘know’, with a rich backstory already in place. Now I have to find the people around her, or against her, and provide the circumstances in which all them can reveal who they really are. Once the final painstaking stages of publishing Book 3 are behind me, then I can let the fun part of Book 4 really start. It won’t be long.
by admin | Mar 28, 2014 | Authenticity, character, dialogue, Fallout, research, Sellafield, speech, Windscale fire, writing
Writing dialogue is really difficult. I realised this on the very first ‘writing’ course I went on. One of our tutors was Louise Doughty, a skilled teacher as well as a great writer. She gave us the transcript of an actual overheard conversation to look at, and made her point quite easily that the authentic spoken word is often unintelligible in the written form. The transcript was littered with repetitions, unfinished phrases, interruptions, and other distractions that made it almost impossible to read or make sense of. It illustrated the jerky, random thought process which underpinned the articulation we were reading on the page, which was authentic but unhelpful to the reader. Our task was to take this original transcript and edit it so that the meaning was sustained but the speech was still digestible: it was a difficult but very useful lesson to learn, and if I were teaching anyone to write dialogue I would do the same.
In my own writing I use speech and dialogue extensively and for a variety of purposes; to drive the narrative, to illustrate relationship, and to add to our understanding of a character and their state of mind. That’s a big ask. The structure of a person’s speech can illuminate what we know about them: think of Jane Austen’s characters and how much we learn about them by the way they speak and the words and phrases they use. In fact, almost all we know about Austen’s people we gather through speech rather than description. I try to see and hear my characters speaking and build what I see and hear into the words on the page. Some of the nuances of what is meant as well as what is said are hard to capture without use of adverbs or more explicit ‘speech verbs’ such as ‘murmured’ or ‘explained’ that sound clunky and used sparingly.
When it comes to the second draft, I have to speak the text out loud, and frequently change the dialogue at that stage, to make it sound more more like the spoken rather than the written word. The two are quite different, and I notice in my reading that some authors don’t seem to recognise this. Their characters speak with too much complexity, in sentences that are too finely crafted to sound authentic. Of course it’s a struggle. Sometime you sacrifice narrative clarity to authenticity and hope that the reader will not notice, or forgive you.
In the third part of my trilogy, ‘Fallout’, some of the action takes place inside the nuclear plant at Windscale (as Sellafield was known then) during the reactor fire of October 1957. All the characters we see and hear in those scenes are male, with a science or engineering background and intensely focussed on the task at hand. Their patterns of speech must be – and are – completely different than conversations taking place in the home or the shop or at the Friday night dance at the club. You should be able to hear in their voices the tension they are feeling and their intense concentration on the crisis they face. What they don’t say is as important as what they do. I enjoyed writing those chapters after weeks of detailed research and thought about what it would have been like in that place at that time. I rolled it past someone with a similar background and experience to see if he felt it sounded authentic, and took his advice. I think it’s not bad: you’ll have to judge for yourself when the book appears in June. In the meantime I’ll keep working on dialogue, hoping to improve with practice and experience.
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