Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 5

Pantser vs Plotter

Writers groups tend to split authors into two types – the pantser and the plotter. A pantser has a general idea of what they want to write and just start off, inventing details and plot as they go along. The plotter has a detailed plan of what will happen when for the whole of the story.

There is some debate about which is best but in my view those who say a particular approach is superior are just saying ‘this works for me so I prefer it’. I believe the approach is down to individual preference and temperament and after the all important first edit you should not be able to tell which approach has been used.

Personally, I’m a pantser by temperament. I do initial work on biographies of the main characters, research on the setting and any real people or incidents that will appear and have a general idea of what will happen and often a few key scenes. Then I just write, and have faith that inspiration will see me through. There will often be things I change my mind about but that’s what the first edit is for (although I will go back and make some alterations or add placeholder notes if something major changes). I think of it like the difference between creating a painting and doing a jigsaw. In one case you have a general picture in your head, in the other you have the picture on a box. I prefer the first because it means I can surprise myself.

What I recognise is that this approach doesn’t work for everybody. Some people will want to know exactly where the story is going and write towards it. Plus ca change, or vive la difference.

Some of my favourite writers are pantsers, including Raymond Chandler who famously said if he didn’t know what happened next in a story he had a man walk through the door with a gun. This approach did lead to the question of who killed the chauffeur, which was never resolved in The Big Sleep, but it still created some great stuff. I can only hope it does the same for me.

There’s No Police Like Holmes

The joke is not original, I’m afraid. It was first coined by the Raffles author E. W Hornung, who was also Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother in law. It’s a shame they never decided to collaborate, although other authors have since had Holmes encounter Raffles.

The shadow of Holmes hangs over every author who writes detective stories. Although Poe’s Dupin is arguably the blueprint for Holmes and many other detctives, the success of Conan Doyle’s creation meant the canon is the yardstick against which other detectives are measured. The key ingredients – an amateur who is smarter than the police, the less bright sidekick who is continually amazed at their friends deducations, and a series of seemingly impossible crimes – are repeated over and over. The formula has a great appeal for readers who start off as the sidekick, always hoping to beat the great detective to the solution.

Holmes maxim was when you have eliminated all which is impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, and writers have competed to find solutions that are ever more implausible. There is the sub genre of Occult Detectives, who find solutions that would be impossible for Holmes and his resolutely rational world view, but even they pften work within a set of rules which explains the supernatural deeds.

I’ve done a number of Holmes pastiches for the MX Anthology of New Sherlock Holmes Stories series and it is a challenge to find new implausible crimes. Even Conan Doyle wrote many stories which lack that element and whose solutions could quite easily have been solved by the police if they did their job properly. If they had believed Holmes about Moriarty they would surely be able to find a weak link in his army of criminals to interrogate and turn Queen’s evidence.

I have other detectives I write about including Alfred Jarry as an occult detective finding pataphyscal solutions to cases. His motto would be when you have eliminated all which is mundane then whatever remains must be the truth – and the more impossible the better. By contrast, Beryl Crystal believes her crime solving abilities come from her gifts as a psychic, but as she is excellent at cold reading body language and pattern recognition, there are non supernatural explanations for her skill as a detective. Both are good at unravelling puzzles, from very different directions.

The challenge in all detective fiction is to place clues along the way so that the reader has the opportunity to arrive at the solution themselves, without making that too obvious. The reader should be challenged just as much as the detective.

The End is Nigh On Impossible

It’s always great when you work out who the culprit is in a mystery novel – especially when you are writing it.

My current work in progress is a homage to the Queens of 30s detective novels, set in a present day television show where ten celebrities are marooned in a haunted mansion on a remote Scottish Island while being filmed for a reality television show. The title – Ten Ghost Bottles – is an obvious reference to Christie’s classic which is now called And The There Were None. I’m not the first to steal the idea, and won’t be the last, but hopefully I’ve put my own spin on it.

I normally have a good idea where I am going when I write but as the characters were ones that were familiar to me I thought I would start this one with just them and the concept.

The lead character is a psychic Beryl Crystal who my wife Jules and I invented when we were looking to develop something she could appear in as an actor. It started off as a 50 minute screenplay which we were going to produce ourselves as a pilot, but scheduling issues with the local amateur actors we were going to work with meant we never managed it. However I did a lot of work for a potential pitch and outlines four ten episode series with a range of character sketches for them and a bible about the show. Some of those I have written since as short stories and a stage play (which we will also get round to putting on one day).

The concept for this novel was originally thought of for a different set of characters but I thought it would be better for Beryl. She sincerely believes in her psychic powers, but others are sceptical and she does use some of the stage medium tricks in her act to ‘kick start’ her real powers. In the pilot she is asked to find a missing husband by his family and gets caught up in a police investigation.

The joy of having written the scenarios for 40 episodes is that I have a lot of background on Beryl, her research assistant Charles, the police sergeant who slowly becomes her love interest, and lots of other people in her world. I therefore only had to invent half a dozen new characters from scratch for the novel.

As I said, I had no idea whodunnit when I started but just kept throwing in more and more reasons why it could be any of the people on the island. As there are lots of production tricks installed in the house, it means some of the deaths could be done remotely so there is another set of suspects on dry land. While doing the shopping yesterday, I worked out who the culprit was and how everything and everyone linked together. I’m not telling you, of course, as you will have to read it.

Just a second 35,000 words to go to finish the first draft.

A Better World in Birth

I’m a member of a local writers’ group which alternates between critique of each other’s work and exercises. Last Night’s was on ‘world building’.

As someone who writes science fiction and fantasy (among other genres) I do quite a bit of work on building the world in which my stories are set (although I do cheat by having multiple stories in the same world to save time – and also look at the world that has been created from different perspectives).

I’ve never been part of the slide rule school of SF where the setting is the reason for the story rather than the story being the reason for the setting. When done badly that can be unreadable although there are authors who manage to combine accurate science with good characters. Last night’s session encouraged us to think of the characters first and then see what journey they would go on being part of the world we had imagined.

There’s always a bit of a chicken and egg issue when conceiving a story – does it start with a character, a setting or a plot? The truth is probably all three – I will start with an idea and that quickly suggests the elements. Sometimes a story starts with a title (generally a pun) or an opening sentence that pops into my head.

Matthew Pugh (https://www.facebook.com/pughmds) provided us with a template and notes for our exercise which I found very useful in thinking more deeply about a character I already had in mind for a story set in a complex universe I had created for another tale I will probably start with. In particular I wanted a character who would stand in for the reader in exploring the universe from incorrect assumptions that could the be challenged. I especially wanted to use them as an exploration of prejudice against the alien as a metaphor for the ‘little England’ mindset. Fleshing them out helped considerably as it provides an opportunity to enrich the universe so that challenge and transformation can be more acute.

I wanted to write a comedy of manners, using interstellar diplomacy as a way of looking at the way spoken language is a very small window into the soul of the other – especially if e are trying to understand based on our own cultural template. Now I suppose I’ll have to write it.

Encyclopedia Knowledge

I love an encyclopedia or a dictionary. For me, they are not just something to refer to but something to read.

Before the days of Google and Wikipedia we had to look things up in books. My cousin and I got the two volume Children’s Encyclopedia as children – kept at her house but devoured by me when I was round there. We ended up with one volume each so we could only check facts in one half of the alphabet.

Then my mum subscribed to a part work called The World of Knowledge and each week I would memorise the pages before putting them in their binder. We bought the updated version for my son when he was growing up.

My shelves are full of reference books – most of which I have read from cover to cover. It took me a month each for the massive Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Other books cover words and slang; atlases of imaginary places; myths, mysteries and legends; the occult and conspiracies; and various genres of fiction.

I was reminded about my love of reference books because I’m reading Jess Nevins Dictionary of Snow Hill. Nevins is an expert on pulp literature who created the first two volumes of Crossovers (detailing literary characters meeting each other in books, TV and other media) and the massive Fantastic Victoriana. The Snow Hill book is not really a dictionary. It’s a novel posing as a reference book which is both pastiche and homage to the pulps of the 30s with lots of characters appearing under aliases, plus references to many other fictional people, in an imaginary city where heroes, villains and monsters battle it out during the depression.  There is an overarching plot which is revealed bit by bit in each entry (if you know it, keep it to yourself because I haven’t finished the book) and the introduction hints the denouement will be pretty spectacular and end the city’s golden age.

There have been other books with unusual structures – Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars and Perec’s Life springing to mind – with arguably more literary qualities – but as someone who loves pulps and reference books, I’m really enjoying it.

Give Them Enough Tropes

After reading M John Harrison’s anti biography Wish I Was Here I have been thinking about the use of tropes in fiction – the standard structural elements in genre and fiction in general.

There are some which work against enjoying a book or film – every Christmas Jules and I will watch lots of seasonal films and part of our pleasure is working out exactly what’s going to happen 10 minutes in and playing a kind of bingo. There’s the cute kid/dog, there’s the best friend who is the only representation of LGBTQ+ or an ethnic minority in an otherwise all white cast. There’s the business failing that needs a miracle and the Scrooge character who will find the true meaning of Christmas, and there’s the true love who the lead will fall out with because of a misunderstanding just as they discover their true feelings.

In other cases tropes can be a comfort blanket that settles us enough to enjoy the story without worrying a mad serial killer is about to appear in a romcom (of course you are always expecting a serial killer in lots of detective stories and would be equally disappointed if the opening credits death turns out to be an accident).

Part of the reason they are used so widely is marketing decisions by executives. If a formula is successful it is easier to clone it than find a new one. It also provides a sense in the audience that they know where things are going. More people like country music than jazz.

The other reason is the hard wiring in our brains for meaning and pattern. We like entertainment to be contained and to have everything wrapped up nicely by the end. If Midsommer Murders ended if with DI Barnaby admitting he didn’t have a clue who dunnit, we would feel cheated. Life is chaotic and open ended and something that isn’t gives hope and a sense things can work out all right.

I like reading things that do not go in expected ways or challenge tropes (I like Jazz) but I also like fiction that fits established patterns, and write both. I still like to create tales that have some identifiable structure – just not always the one you may be expecting. However the reason Harrison’s aim is so challenging is that even revolutionary fiction can quickly become a new trope. Writers see something new and think ‘I wonder if I can do that’ and artistic movements will feed off each other creatively. This is a good thing – think about how the creative rivalry between Lennon and McCartney spurred both of them to get better and better and more inventive.

There is a reason there is a genre of mystery novel called ‘cosy’. In fact most genres could be called that because cosy is exactly what we feel when we have our need for tropes satisfied, even slasher movies or experimental fiction. And my conclusion?

Publish and be Blessed

There is a good article in the Guardian online about the rise of independent publishers who are capturing more and more of the top literary prizes (and thank you Tosh Berman for drawing my attention to it).

Tosh, of course, has been responsible for publishing a number of books on my shelf – a series of translations of Boris Vian – so he speaks with some authority on the subject.

When I first started broadening out my reading in my teens there were few or no independent publishers as the technology wasn’t there to do it easily. There were some smaller houses that tackled non mainstream books – John Calder and New Directions spring to mind. As typesetting got easier with computer technology small houses started to grow but still faced a challenge getting their books out to bookshops. Most of my favourites – including titles like Atlas Press were found in independent bookshops or university ones which didn’t rely on large volumes of sales. This was also before the start of social media (and before Amazon) so the means of getting your output in front of people was also limited.

The Guardian article correctly spots two trends – there are fewer large publishers and they have become more risk averse. Part of this reluctance to take risks may be because their model relies on getting their titles in every store available so print runs have to be big. Niche market books are therefore shunned. Unfortunately this also means concentration on celebrity books and clones of whatever breakthrough success has just happened.

Many of the books I love are never going to have mass market appeal. They are obscure, experimental, and challenging. You are not going to see them round the pool in Benidorm. This means they are never going to sell in large numbers, but the people who want to read them really want to read them, so will work harder to find them and are willing to pay a bit more.

Amazon has helped (despite its sometimes questionable business practices and impact on independent bookshops) because if there are only 1000 people who want to read a book, they can find it online.

This is not (just) me being a literary snob – I read a lot of mass market books as well. It is me celebrating the publishers who have a particular love and are willing to invest in it.

The Remainders of the Day

When I was a teenager, the most exciting thing about Woolworths wasn’t the Pick and Mix or the fact they sold the latest records, it was the remaindered books.

I would visit Woolies at least once a week to see what had come in to the bin in the basement full of US paperbacks – especially Ace Books.  It was where I first found books by R A Lafferty, Avram Davidson, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny and many more authors I grew to love. Quite a few had never been published in the UK and they were here for a fraction of the cost of books in bookshops.

The rumour was that they came across to the UK as ship’s ballast. I have no idea if that was true – a more likely explanation was that they came over with other stock from the Woolworths headquarters in the US. I didn’t care. As I travelled round the North East on my bike I would go into any branch I could find in the hope of getting something I didn’t already have.

They were not the only place to find remainders. Department stores also often had a basket of them and some newsagents had a rack they had bought cheaply from a wholesaler.

They disappeared long before Woolworths did. Some bookshops still had UK remainders which now tended to be hardback rather than mass market paperbacks, or would put their excess stock on sale. I picked up copies of Slawromir Mrozek’s The Ugupu Bird and Harvey Jacobs’ The Egg of Glack that way. And there were now more second hand bookshops around so I found David Lindsay’s The Violet Apple and Harry Mathews Sinking of Odradeck Stadium, but there was not quite the same thrill of finding something in the remainder basket.

There are still shops where you can buy remainders – The Works being the obvious example – but they tend to be fairly recent UK paperbacks (although I did find some of the Gollancz original yellow jacketed hardback classic fantasy series and the Black Box mystery collections in a shop in Norwich – including Philip Pullman’s Galatea). There used to be a great shop in Cambridge with several stories of remainders – now sadly gone – and lots of places to buy them in Hay on Wye.

I still miss the remainder basket, though.

You’re Having a Laugh

I have some pieces in the Black Scat Concise Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality which is published later this month. In fact if you look very carefully at the image above, you will see one of them on Cartoonophilia (you will have to buy the book to read it).

As you would expect from this marvellous publisher, the book is very funny. and hopefully my entries will be at least amusing.

It prompted me to wonder whether laughter is a right or left brain activity. I write in various genres and depending on which I am tackling, the right brain (which is more artistic and creative) or the left brain (based on language and logic) are engaged more. Both are needed for writing, of course, especially as most stories are based on pattern, which is perceived in the right brain. Even the act of choosing words uses both sides as as well as meaning, you choose based on ‘tone’.

People think of Science Fiction as predominately left brain as it is about science, and fantasy as more right brain. Certainly ‘hard’ SF may be more analytical – especially all of those scientists and spacemen who may as well be robots for all of the emotions they show. However the best writers in both fields engage both, and as the fields have matured the characters have become more human and the magic has become more scientific.

While some crime fiction is based on clues and logic, following the example of Sherlock Holmes, it has also become more and more about the feelings and motivations of the characters rather than seeing them as simply a set of suspects.

The same could be said of Oulipo style writing which has its base in mathematics and textual restrictions is at its best when it also engages with the characters at a human level.

So where does humour sit? The answer is that it engages the whole brain, according to the latest neuroscience. The left brain analyses the language and structure, it then goes to the frontal lobe to engage the emotions, then the right brain to carry out the intellectual analysis, then the occipital lobe to process the sensory input, then the motor part of the brain to laugh or smile. I suspect all (good) fiction travels a similar route if it engages you.  

Here be Monsters

I’m reading a book at the moment called Hitler’s Monsters about the links between the rise of the Nazi Party and the broader spiritual malaise of Weimar Germany which expressed itself in interest in the occult, fringe science, and race theories.

It prompted me to think about a couple of things. One is what constitutes a monster and the second is why we are attracted to pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and mysticism when times are tough.

Neuroscience would tell us the explanation for the second question lies in the activation of the fear response when we perceive a threat. When there is an immediate danger, this can be tackled by adrenalin fuelled fight or flight which will at least deal with the time based threat, hopefully allowing us to move past it (although we also know about PTSD). However when the threat is more existential, there is not a simple way to move past it.

Covid is a good example. There was not only the danger itself – constantly reinforced in our minds by news media and politicians – but the isolation caused by lockdown which meant we could not have the social interaction which can disperse the fear through activating other systems in our brain/body. The same problem is being felt now by everyone worried about the cost of living crisis or the general marginalisation of large parts of society. As in Germany between the wars the idea that the fear we feel is the fault of some ‘other’ is a natural reaction when we are oppressed by something outside our control. Politicians, the mainstream media and others on social media are all too happy to suggest who that ‘other’ may be. Which one you choose is based on your own pre-existing views.

What made Hitler successful was a combination of blaming the Jews and other minority groups for the problem, and offering the utopian vision of an ideal Germany which would happen if people backed him. He was sold as the messiah or King Under the Hill who embodied people’s desires for peace and prosperity, identified with deep seated figures in German mythology.  I will leave it to you to decide how many contemporary politicians use the same play book.

What makes a monster is the flip side of this. The Jews in Germany were identified by the Nazi’s and their predecessors and fellow travellers with monsters of folk lore – vampires and other dark figures. Anyone who didn’t get with the programme was branded as evil enemies of progress towards utopia.

The idea of monsters comes from the primeval part of the brain that is still hiding from predators in caves or dying from snake or spider bites, or attacks by ‘other’ tribes. The concept is then attached to contemporary concepts like AI, social media trolls, immigrants, serial killers, corrupt Police, toxic masculinity, or big business, and amplified by attributing other things to them to make them an even bigger and more deliberately malign threat. Short emotive phrases condemning them are then repeated over and over again to burn it into our brains.

Monsters in fiction are made monstrous by the opposite process. Take a group or concept people are scared of and embody it in a tentacled alien, ghost or zombie, or our own body betraying us, and it becomes scary.

Sometimes we have to take a long calm look under the bed.