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 | 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?
by admin | Dec 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
I thought I’d set up these posts to link automatically to FB, but I needed to do some more ‘settings’, so let’s see if this works. All the blogs posted since last weekend are on ruthwords.wordpress.com, including all the fumbling first attempts at posting pictures etc which I will delete shortly. Still getting the hang of all this new stuff – new to me at least!
by admin | Nov 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
I’ve struggled with this question right from the start, although I think I’m closer now to finding the right balance between necessary authenticity and unnecessary tedium that slows down the action and gets in the readers’ way. I’m trying in this trilogy – based where I live, within living memory – to inject fictional characters into real places and events. It’s not easy, especially when the places and events are as technically complicated as a fire in a nuclear reactor. I need to know how the core was constructed, where the weak spots were and why it went wrong, but all the reader is really interested in will be is what happened to the people they (hopefully) care about before, during and after the fire, rather than the fire itself. I suspect that there may be some that want more technical detail, but more who would be bored or irritated by it. Not for the first time, I’ve thought of writing a companion volume with the background detail, but quite separate from the novel itself.
For the time being, I struggle on. When the crisis happens, we have to know enough about both the characters and the circumstances to appreciate the tension, understand some at least of the dlilemmas and share the worries about how things might develop. It would make a great movie, but I may be getting ahead of myself. One step at a time.
by admin | Nov 26, 2013 | Uncategorized
I knew that dividing my time this week between writing and blogging would be an issue. On top of which I’m still unsure about getting into my blog, using a terribly complicated password that I’ll never remember. Even now I can feel my adrenalin level higher than it should be at this time of night! But I’m in and I can say a few inconsequential things, just for the practice.
I have been thinking a lot about how to use my new blog, and how to use the old website, which I set up more as a shop than as a blog space. I really want to keep this blog ‘pure’ which I may change my mind about, but that’s what I want to do right now. No shop. I thought about Amazon links for my books and others, but in doing that am I endorsing Amazon at the expense of the bookshops where I make the majority of my sales? It’s hard to decide what’s the right thing to do, and lots of conflicting advice out there to make matters worse.
If I keep the focus on the writing for the moment, maybe my mind will clear about the commercial issues. Can’t sell what I haven’t written, and when this book is done I’ll have the full trilogy. There seem to be quite a few people waiting to read Part 3, and I just hope I don’t disappoint them. Be warned, I don’t like happy endings.
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