Jen Black's Blog, page 8

Never use a verb

 

“Never use a verb other than "said" tocarry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is thewriter sticking his nose in.”

I saw Elmore Leonard’s piece about creative writingand liked the sentence so much I read the rest. (I have read it before andagree with most of it.) Other authors say similar things, and sometimes theyway they say it is entertaining.

It took me a while to know when I needed to use theverb “said” at all. So many times, particularly if only two characters are inthe scene, the tag is not needed. I think I’ve got it now.

Sometimes I long to go back and re-edit all myearlier titles, but will have to stay as a record of my learning process. Tentimes 70k words is 7ook and to read through that lot with a correcting penwould take maybe longer than I still have on earth!

Time to take note

 Do workshops help writers write?

The one given by Mari Hannah helped me.

She writes Police procedurals/crime fiction, and since that is the genre I have recently decided to attempt, I just had to attend. It would have been criminal not to! There was much good information and I saved her talk, and think this is worth taking about: she mentioned four things that she advises everyone to do: 

Keep a timeline. It is so easy to lose track of things and exactly when they happened. I came home and starting reading my own work from the start. Glad I did, for I found several instances where I'd got things a) repeated or b) out of sequence.  So now I follow Mari's advice and keep a timeline on a separate document.

I n my read through I also looked for what she calls "a raised action." Evidently police keep a log of every order/question and someone is in charge of that sheet.  When I went through my story - you can guess I found orders I had directed someone to do and then forgotten about them.

A Setup/Payoff sheet. This sits next to the Raised Action sheet, possible on the same document. in my pc. Things discovered in the investigation go in here so they are not forgotten or worse - ignored!

The fourth list she recommended I already do, and I suppose most writers have a character list. How detailed you wish to make it is up to you. I like to note hair and eye-colour so I don't have to sit and try to remember what I said about the character the first time I mentioned them.

So thank you to Mari for an excellent talk. Much appreciated.

A deadly place

 

Odd to read that someone who vanished thirty-seven years ago has been discovered on a thawing glacier near the Matterhorn. He failed to return from a hike in September 1986. In June this year climbers crossing the Theodul Glacier “discovered human remains along with several pieces of equipment.”

Even odder to think that it is an area where we’ve skied many times over the last thirty years, though I don’t think we were in any danger of skiing exactly where he died. I hope not, though we must have been pretty close. It seems the melting ice is bringing lots of bodies to the surface. Otzi the iceman was just the first!

We were in Zermatt in January this year and we walked a lot around the village but we did not venture up into the high mountains. Our days of tearing down mountainsides at high speed are well and truly over but I have to say there is nothing quite like it - and the memories of a beautiful and possibly deadly place remain so very clear.

It can be easy or it can be hell

 

My characters aretalking to each other. They are a team, so they have to.

Dialogue can beeasy or it can be hell.

And how to makethem all sound different – more like themselves and not like the other guy. Itain’t easy. The ideal is that you should be able to tell who said what withoutthe dreaded he saids and she saids. Nice work if you can manage it, as someoneonce said.

I usually get thewords down and then add necessary tags so that we don’t get totally lost aboutwho said what to whom. Then I look to make it more interesting and that meansadding some action. What are they doing while they have this dialogue? How arethey feeling? Is that coming across in what they say, or have I got to resortto telling readers how my characters feel? Maybe I can get away with saying sheis angry if I say “her anger rose until it boiled over in a splurge ofboiling hot words.” (A bit wordy but you get the idea.)

I like to addnorthern dialect to some of my characters, but its easy to go overboard with it.I know what they’re saying, and I hear it around me most days but dialect maynot carry to the far corners of the world. Sometimes I toss in a glossary atthe end and leave it at that.

It’s a balancingact I find entertaining.  Once I’ve donemy best shot, I leave it and go back a day or two later when I do a readthrough. I have to do this. This time I’m glad I did because I’ve foundcharacters talking about something that hasn’t happened in their world. I knowit’s going to, but they shouldn’t know about it yet. So easy to get confusedwith time lines. They almost deserve a post to themselves.

A new Rebus?

 I caught a snippet this morning  because my dog woke me at 3.30AM! (Chewing her feet in that noisy way she has developed during this grass pollen season). Had she not, I might have missed the news that Viaplay, a Scandinavian streaming giant, is filming Rebus.

Ian Rankin dropped this snippet, so I assume it is true. Richard Rank of Outlander fame is to play a re-imagined, 30-year-old, recently de-moted Sergeant Rebus in modern Edinburgh with modern day stories.

I adored Ken Stott's portrayal and frankly I can't see it being bettered. I'll be keen to watch it when the new version is released in the UK in 2024.

Stott's voice was so distinctive it was recognisable anywhere.

Hexham as a crime scene

 

Is atmosphere ofplace important in crime writing?

I’ve justfinished the latest Rebus and I wonder if I’m the only one who checks thelocations on my ipad as I read? I used to know Edinburgh fairly well. As ayoung person I linked the city to Mary Queen of Scots and thought it terriblyromantic. A cousin of mine, only a few years older, remarked dourly that it wasa grim, dirty city. A friend who trained as a town planner did his workexperience in Edinburgh and took me to see some of the desperate councilestates that tourist rarely see.

If you read IanRankin’s books, and I own most of them, then Edinburgh is revealed in splendidmisery. The town itself seems to breed the crimes that go on inside itsbuildings and has done for centuries. The history reeks of witchcraft, murder,grave robbers, back stabbers and their stories seem to rise out of the sootystones of the city.

So yes, I thinkplace is important and I’m wondering if Hexham is appropriate as a setting formurder. Has there ever been a murder in Hexham? It seems there has. Records ofmurder in the twelfth century, and more through the ages right up until HollyNewton died in January this year. I doubt there’s anything I can do will to makethe pretty little market town of Hexham seem as grim as Edinburgh. There are ancient buildings, such as the Old Gaol, built in 1333 from stones taken from the Roman site at Corbridge. Surely those stones have memories? Maybe they can be made to give them up...

Throwing in the towel

 Indie writers have so many things to do.

Write. Edit, edit again, get a cover, publish.

Promote, endlessly promote.

So I'm wondering if blogging is really worth the time it takes.

I've suspected for some time that Blogger Stats are off the wall. When between one day and the next they shot into the thousands of users per day, I seriously thought of throwing in the towel.

But then, there are so many memories, personal memories, that I've recorded and so many photographs I may not have anywhere else that I hesitate to delete it. 

So maybe I'll keep it going a little longer....

All those boring things

 Back in England after three weeks in France.

Those three weeks were hot weeks, usually 28-32 degrees around midday. At that point we retreat into the shade of the bolly, or lounge on the balcony on the other side of the house where there is some shade to be had. By evening, the sun is fully round and the balcony becomes the place to enjoy a drink after dinner.

Right now I'm in the throes of catching up on laundry, re-stocking the fridge and all those perfectly boring but necessary household things.

My crime shows

 This is where I confess which crime shows I watch.

This won't be in any particular order. In other words, its random, but I suppose how quickly the particular show comes to mind indicates something about its effect on me. So, here goes:

Wire in the Blood,  fictional Bradfield near Manchester

Blue Lights, set in Northern Ireland

Happy Valley, set in  Halifax area

Line of Duty, presumably London, but I never really knew

Unforgotten, in London

The Bridge, Copenhagen - Stockholm

The Fall, Northern Ireland. No fan of GA, but Jamie Dornan scared me silly.

Broadchurch, Kent

Shetland 

Geri/Hadji  a Japanese detective. Not sure where it was.

Then of course there are the old favourites always worth a re-watch - Morse, Lewis, Endeavour.

I watched Silent Witness when Amanda Burton was the lead player but not much recently.

I'll watch Vera if there's nothing, absolutely nothing else on, but I'm not keen. The settings are local, which makes me curious. I often watch just to say - OH, look there's....

No element of Slasher movies in my list, but some of them were horrific in the sense that things happen to people that should never happen. The young policewoman in Happy Valley, for instance. But it was hardly gore.

More gore

 "Contains violent scenes which some viewers might find distressing," the continuity announcer warns almost every night now on British tv.

Why do people watch such gross stuff?

Further to my post on 1st June, some say it appeals mostly to the adolescent male especially if viewed as a group where it becomes a communal activity. Jeffrey Goldstein of Utrecht University says if an adolescent watches alone, he will certainly talk about it to his friends and claims it is a peer-bonding activity and a rite of passage or a chance for young men to test their metal and flirt with taboos.

This not to say that women don't watch it; they do.

Alternatively there is something called sensation seeking in a safe society. One might argue there is little risk in the western world today and when we watch the gory tv shows we always have the remote to fall back on. We can simply switch it off.

The worry is that we will need ever increasing violence and gore to entertain us.