by admin | Sep 23, 2015 | crime fiction, Cruel Tide, promotion, self-publishing
As soon as I get on a plane, this happens. In the days before actually setting off on a trip my head is full of logistical arrangements, blocking out the deeper bigger picture of what I’m doing and planning. As soon as the seat belt snaps on, the noise clears and my mind is free to roam again, with minimal distraction. It’s a form of mental hibernation, necessary to deal with the tedium of the journey itself.
Yesterday, it happened again, and by the time I checked into the hotel in Edmonton where I am now my head was busy with the decisions that I was rehearsing in the last blog post. In the past week or so, some of the picture has cleared a little, and the mental hibernation pushed that thinking along further. Realistically, my chance of finding an agent and surmounting the subsequent hurdle of a publishing deal, remains minimal. Infinitesimal actually, and as such probably doesn’t merit a major investment of my time. The submission to a potentially sympathetic agent has gone in, but my expectations remain very low.
I’ve also been prompted to re-think my use of an editor. My current editor has done a wonderful job for me, but she’s not part of the fiction publishing and bookselling network, and not a specialist in the genre I’m trying my hand at now – crime fiction. She knows a good story, but I suspect there’s more to the nuances of this genre that neither of us still know much about. We need to talk about that, and I might set out to find a specialist editor for feedback if not for further help.
Another chance encounter has also made me think about the stage of the paperback self-publishing process that is the most difficult for me – marketing and distribution. The two hang together of course: you need good promotion and marketing to raise the volume of sales to the point where the national distributors and bookshop chains are interested in putting your book on the shelf or storing them in a warehouse. The distribution deal I currently have covers only Cumbria, and what I need now is coverage elsewhere. More internet searches reveal a raft of ‘service providers’ who claim to be able to do that, but they’re expensive! Do I want to invest that much? Are my books worth it? The trilogy ‘Between the Mountains and the Sea’, set in West Cumbria, benefits from local distribution, but the new title ‘Cruel Tide’ is aimed at a wider market, at crime fiction readers wherever they be, although its links to the north-west of England are strong. Maybe investing in this would be worth it. There’s be less profit per book, but that could be offset by selling more books.
The cost of the ‘service’ is for each book, putting the cost of involving all four books is well beyond my means. But if I employ specialist help for the fourth book, might this bootstrap interest in the previous ones? The main female character of ‘Cruel Tide’ is the grand-daughter of the main female character in the trilogy, and the trilogy provides the extensive backstory of ‘Cruel Tide’ although the new book stands alone, and will probably become the first book of a new series.
As I’ve found so many times before, writing about these choices is clarifying them in my mind. Writing takes the early shape of ideas and sharpens them into the next stage. That’s one reason blogging is helpful: writing for an audience makes you concentrate harder than writing a few rambling notes for yourself. Five more weeks of travel lie ahead. By the time I arrive home I should have it all sorted out. Yeah, right.
by admin | Jul 20, 2015 | crime fiction, Cruel Tide, self-publishing, trilogy
One of the many things that made Margaret Thatcher anathema to me – even now after all these years – was her apparent complete absence of self-doubt. It’s a ‘fundamentalist’ trait, I suppose, which manifests itself in similar ways whatever the beliefs of the believer. I have a reputation – undeserved, surely – for expressing myself quite forcefully at times, about Margaret Thatcher for example, but underneath it all I am frequently assailed by self-doubt and one of those times seems to be upon me now.
The ms of Cruel Tide is with my editor Charlotte and I’ll get it back for approval in a week or so. We’ve corresponded and talked at length about several previous drafts, but even so waiting for her editing suggestions feels like waiting for an exam result. Did I do a good job? Is it really crime fiction or just another character-driven story with ‘events’ like the trilogy that went before it? Was it a good idea to link it to the trilogy, or was that choice driven by commercial considerations? Is Cruel Tide as well-written as it should be? Does the dialogue work? On and on the questions go. I could lay some of them to rest perhaps by re-reading the text yet again, but I daren’t, and anyway it may be too late. Once the production machine begins to hum along there are few opportunities for major changes. Tweaking only from now on, and I do want the book to be ready for the shops well before Christmas. Now I’m thinking like a publisher rather than a writer, but when you self-publish you have to be both.
I was hoping that sales would be quite brisk as the summer moves on and more visitors arrive in the lake District, but things seem to be slow. Ebook sales go up and down without any explanation, and I can’t tell whether any of my promotional activities have any impact on anything except direct sales, which are always good when I’m ‘performing’ somewhere. Fortunately I so enjoy the ‘performing’ element of this work that I will continue to do it regardless of whether it sells books or not. Sometimes I yearn for a larger audience and somewhere other than a village hall or church rooms to do my work, but it’s the same old problem of breaking in to the ‘festivals’ circuit that many self-published authors like me face. What does it take to get enough recognition to be asked to do things that will build a reputation for quality? I know I can engage and entertain larger audiences as I’ve done it for decades in my previous life as an education presenter, but no one in the book business would take any notice of that. On paper I’m another elderly unagented northerner who writes and publishes old-fashioned stories, and I’m popular on the Cumbrian WI circuit. Nothing wrong with that, but it may not get you noticed by people wanting to sell tickets for ‘Words on the Water’ in Keswick or the Hay Festival. I look on Twitter at fellow-writers enjoying their contributions to book festivals and I think ‘I could do that!’
Nothing like a good moan. My partner thinks I should have more faith in myself. ‘Keep going’ he says. ‘The books are good, and eventually someone who matters in the book business will notice them.’ Maybe he’s right, but I’m not certain: the doubt is not enough to stop me thinking about the next book, however, and the current mood will probably pass. In the meantime I wonder if all this introspection is just unnecessary and a waste of energy. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to live the life I have and afford the luxury of high-quality self-publishing. I’ve been writing fiction for less than five years and hopefully getting better with practice. Self-doubt is probably appropriate and realistic and OK. Get over it.
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 | 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 | Jan 12, 2015 | Authenticity, character, crime fiction, genre, readers, villain
The current novel is my first attempt at crime fiction, after reading tons of it over the past decades. Reading other authors’ crime fiction is easy: you can be self-righteously critical of too much information, too little information, too many clues, none at all, plot twists you can see coming a mile off and others so arbitrary you feel cheated. Oh yes, I can take other people’s work to pieces, but writing your own is a different story, literally.
To some extent, crime fiction can feel a bit formulaic. You go on the course and buy the book – the Arvon book on crime writing, for example – and see what protocols characterise the genre. But a perverse refusal to obey rules that I have always struggled with is getting in my way. If someone says, you need a 3 act structure I say ‘Really? Why?’. I’m working hard to overcome this unhelpful trait. So for now, as an novice in the field, I am following the structural conventions, but am still struggling with whether and how to hide clues, and pop in just enough false leads and red herrings (where on earth did that phrase come from?) to keep the reader on her/his toes.
Only got the outline so far, although it’s pretty detailed in parts and up to 18,000 words. The clues etc are in the outline, but because they’re in this truncated form they’re obviously standing out more than they should and hopefully more than they will when the full ms in in place. Those trusted few who are reading and providing feedback on the outline are counselling a lighter touch, and they’re probably right. I’m pleased with one false trail that serves to undermine the protagonist’s self-confidence, which always adds to the tension.
The new book is set in the recent past, and so has necessitated some research about details of the period, but I think I may be learning how to handle it as the obsession for authenticity isn’t looming as large in my mind as it did previously. Some details are essential of course, but I’m also trying to detach the action a little from its setting to avoid local readers feeling that their home turf is being traduced by bad people doing bad things. No-one minds recognising the local setting when the characters and their actions are benign, but I don’t think that will hold true when some of the people are pretty nasty.
The overall problem is how to balance the inferences with the need for twists and a ‘reveal’ towards the end. Classic examples of the genre require the main characters to be summoned finally by the hero detective who then rehearses the clues etc before finally revealing the baddy. I definitely can’t be bothered with that, but some final shocks are necessary. Too many clues may herald and reduce the impact of the shock, but if there are none, is the writer cheating? Maybe I read too fast and without sufficient thought, but sometimes I’m not prepared for the final reveal at all and don’t like that. Thinking about it, what really matters, even in crime fiction, is that we have to care about the characters, even if we don’t like them. What happens to them should matter to us: it’s not just a plot device. And we’re back to character driving the story as much as plot.
What I seem to be doing as the outline expands slowly into a first draft is putting in clues etc and then paring them back to the merest sliver of a passing detail that could be missed or noticed and remembered, so that the assiduous reader feels rewarded later for their concentration. Will it work? Hard to tell. The acid test is giving it to someone to read who’s never read any previous version or had any conversation about the plot. They have to come to it raw, as it were, and then tell me how satisfied or otherwise they feel. It’s going to be a while before I get to that stage.
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