Michael Davies's Blog, page 8

Writing a good death: Part 2

“…[T]he stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; – ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; and he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victims, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.”

Ahab, from Moby Dick. What a way to go. Here’s another example of a perfect death. Why is it perfect?

It wraps up the novel.

Ahab died at the end of the novel but in such a way that it��wraps it up nicely. It’s not a death that leaves the reader wishing he was alive. There’s not really any wriggle room here. Perhaps if a more redemptive narrative was weaved between the pages, then��we may have seen this occur��instead. Which leads me to the other reason it works. It doesn’t just wrap up the story.

It wraps up Ahab’s story.

Ahab is a man so totally consumed with the hunt that it destroys him. In the end the author��has done such a great job destroying Ahab’s soul and spirit that it makes sense his body now dies as well, killed in the death throes of the object of his obsession. If you are creating a character that loses himself, and you have no intention of writing a redemptive thread back in to the novel, then a death is a perfectly good place to end. It fits the cold harsh reality of the being you just created.

The principle we can draw from this then is that death works when the character you have developed is worthy of death.

COVER RELEASE: WORLD OF PANGEA: PATH OF THE WARRIOR Out May 15th

WHAT CAN ONE MAN DO AGAINST THE GODS?

���Where the sacred rivers meet,

Beneath the shelter of the Keeper of all things.

There lies the hall of the beginning,

The ruler of the world before the Kings.���

Pangea is shaken. The past has become the present. Ancient myth has awakened, and legends walk amongst the living. Idris has always known the path of the warrior was his to choose. Now, as war strikes at the heart of Pangea, he must wrestle as a mortal thrust into the wars of immortals. It will take more than his training to face the chaos as darkness strikes deep into the life of his people, and Idris���s own inner demons threaten to destroy him before the battle even truly begins.

Set against an extensive mythological backdrop, Path of The Warrior begins��as a coming of age story and��quickly explodes into an epic conflict between light and darkness. This��first novel in the Pangea trilogy promises to take you beyond this earthly realm and into another where mortals and immortals struggle for the fate of their world.

Please contact me if you wish to review Path of the Warrior or interview me as the author.

Don’t kid yourself: Part 1

Are you fed up with writers block? Is this your third story in as many days? The process is more difficult than it seems,

The splurge

Writing a novel is a lot more repetition than we care to admit. Firstly there’s writing it, the splurge. When we romanticize��the novel-writing craft, the splurge is what most of us imagine. It is a story shouting, “write me!”, a dream whispering “live me,”��a new world demanding “create me!”. This is why so many novels go unfinished. We enjoy the splurge but we do not enjoy or respect what comes next. Don’t kid yourself, it’s a long road but one that’s worthwhile.

The Personal Edit

Next is the personal edit. Even if you are terrible at grammar, like myself, you need to do this. Yes, you need to trawl through the splurge you have just written and realize that it is indeed a splurge, and far from finished. You need to spot plot holes, clich��s and bloviating. Then you need to re-write a good chunk of it. I spent far more time re writing than I did splurging.

The feedback

If the personal edit is tedious then this is at first painful, and secondly tedious. You need to show your work to someone else. Have them critique it. Then you need to truthfully judge if what they say has worth. Some of my first feedback was about the perspective. There was a sudden shift and I ended up re writing half the novel. Writing it first time is joyful, re writing it is tedious until the end, which is where an extreme satisfaction kicks in.

These are just the first few steps. There’s a lot more to come! You want to finish that novel don’t you?