Stephen Cox's Blog, page 6

Should genres police who can write them?

This post contains modest spoilers for Klara and the Sun, and The Fear Index.

Some people in the literary world are massive snobs.  They assume that romance, or crime, which sell vastly more than other genres, must be bad.

It is interesting that Austen, Eliot and Dickens were not considered ‘great literary writing’ by the literary greats of their day.

Science fiction and fantasy are considered weird books for unwashed boys despite having enthusiastic readers. The genre feeds a great many successful TV series and movies, and the electronic games industry. And as a lifelong reader, it interesting to see journalists wrestling with issues of ethics and technology which I first met in ‘books with rockets on the cover’. John Brunner for example wrote books which kind of got how fast, disjointed, and alienated modern life might become. Where wars are fought online.

People who write in genre can be quite prickly about it. A big chunk of the literary world puts it down. It can lead to them getting protective when people breeze in and talk rubbish about it.

For example, a literary author – let us call him Ian – who has stopped having much interesting to say decades ago – decides to write a book about a robot who develops feelings.  To do this he has to explain that he is writing literary fiction and therefore addressing things much better than (sniff) science fiction. In further defensive interviews it appears he has not read any SF published in the last twenty-five years or any by a woman.

The science fiction world is scathing. Including me.

The moral question of what we owe a being we created is the theme of Frankenstein and its myriad successors.  The issue of what happens when an artificial person develops feelings and seeks independence drives the plot of Rossum’s Universal Robots, the 1920s Czech play which gave us the word Robot. And myriad successors.

This and similar debacles fuels the idea that, say, science fiction is a body of knowledge only the adept should tackle.  Enthusiasts say no one should write it unless they read it widely and know its canon and its roots.  Perhaps we should go so far as to say you should read terrible writers because they were once ‘important’. We are a guild, with sacred mysteries, and people should stay in their own lane.

I think this is a mistake.  It conflates three issues.

Should writers tackle themes they think are of interest? Yes. The creative imagination shouldn’t be full of demarcation disputes. It is good if people see the role of artificial intelligence and want to write about its possibilities for good and ill.

Should writers be informed about the existing works on that issue -, whatever that is? Obviously, that’s helpful.  Is it essential? No. There are so many books on some themes I couldn’t hope to read more than 5% of them.

Should writers puff themselves about their originality with no knowledge of the genre?  Well, that’s a belly flop into the cold custard.  

A better author, the late, great Iain Banks, wrote in both literary and science fiction worlds, and he said that anyone can write a detective story. To have the butler do it as a brilliant twist, they must expect and deserve mockery. (1)

It’s a good sign of someone not having read widely if they claim originality for ideas which turn up constantly. (“Magic and science in the same book” and “orcs are good really” being two of them.)

I have just read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, whose narrator is an Artificial Friend, brought into the home of a teenage girl.  It is science fiction because it asks – what are the consequences of scientific advances?

In this book Klara is a wonderfully off-centre narrator, and clearly sentient. The introduction of AI has led to widespread economic disruption.  It is also revealed that society allows some children to be mentally ‘lifted’ – a process which is clearly imperfect – and which creates a divided society between those families which can afford the process and the rest. (Just because we could, should we?)

Many writers would have written big symbolic clashes about these issues. What we have is a story of how it affects a couple of families, seen through a sympathetic but otherly observer, and where we readers have to fill in the gaps. It’s science fiction in a literary mode. And like Frankenstein it asks what we owe the people we create?

Another example I quote is Richard Harris’ the Fear Index, a thriller about an AI which trades on the stock market which develops sentience. It is a wonderful monster, because it figures out a better way to do what it needs to than its creators. (Just as computers which play Go develop werid moves no human ever thought of, driving the human players to re-engineer their own game as they play.)

So science fiction is good and matters. I don’t think as a writer I should tell people what they can write.  I reserve the right to mock them if they claim originality for well-trodden ideas. After all, science fiction writers often revisit well-trodden ideas themselves.

My own books sought to reach a wider audience than convinced science fiction readers. I don’t think I have ever been guilty of running the genre down. It’s a big galaxy with room for a great many approaches.

(1) It is interesting that the first comment that the butler being the murderer is a terrible cliché appears to predate any real work in which this was the plot.

Photo of robot bewildered by literary snobs by Alex Knight Pexels

Why I write

George Orwell famously wrote, “Why I write” – a defence of truth against propaganda, and a call to arms against the ills he saw in the world. In a time when he saw lies winning, he kept going. He saw clear writing as a defence against the bullshit of his day and much of what he says is valid now.

I don’t pretend this is that essay.  We need many Orwells today, and those who write from wider perspective than he did.  But also, his fiction outlived his journalism and political essays, at least in terms of sales.

I’ve done some minor Orwelling in my time and I should be doing more. I do believe that my fiction talks about how the world is and how it could be.

I have always written. My grammar school did everything possible to stop people writing creatively or applying the truths in literature to modern life.  That urge to write still fought through, and it has seen me try poetry for a few years, run a postal roleplaying game, and run various newsletters, promoting and commentating.  My thirty years in communications were in some sense about spreading truth.

I have gone through spates of writing short stories. A writing bout in the early nineties brought me to some crucial personal revelations – all those characters tortured by private secrets who’d be happier if they were honest. What could that have been about?

Then on holiday in 2012 I fired up a new laptop and started a novel. That’s over ten years ago, and I have two traditionally published novels out and another with my agent. And perhaps a hundred short stories, from the brilliant to the disastrous, largely unpublished.

So why do I write?

I write because it is an urge, because I like the results of my writing (sometimes), because I want to do it better, and because other people I trust, like and enjoy my stuff. I want to share my stuff and hear back from people about it. It is partly an oblique way to ‘tell my truth’.

There are not vast numbers of people who write like me – I know few people who write in my space, and a couple of those who do are very successful, which suggests there should be wider interest.

So, I will probably carry on writing fiction. But in what frame of mind?

Last night, someone at my writer’s group expressed her desire to stick to the day job and ‘write as a hobby’. Right now, what she wants is to get confident enough to share her work and improve.  That’s a wonderful and healthy ambition, because with determination, it’s achievable!  My parents took up music in their late forties, and that hobby gave them enormous fun, a good social life, and a retirement purpose.

They were financially secure.

For many years I loved what I did for work, and it paid the bills. The work I used to do is now beyond me. Now I want to write, it feels like my purpose, but the bills bit is rather urgent.  

Read my blog on author incomes.

So there is.

1 – Writing what I want

2 – Writing stuff to support my writing career

3 -Other stuff

which needs to add up to some sort of plan for the next ten years or so.

2023 will be interesting.

(Photo Amador Loureiro Unsplash)

“Shocking but not surprising” – author incomes in the UK 2022

To Parliament for the launch of an ALCS report on writer incomes.  And I used to nip in for work reasons and it is worth remembering what a strange building Parliament is.  Kind of Hogwarts. 

TLDR It is very tough living on writer incomes and much worse than even ten years ago.

ALCS is a body which collects secondary use income for authors, and they also commission the Uni of Glasgow to run an independent study of author incomes. 

The headlines are that the typical (median) author who works on it more than half their working hours has seen their income drop 60% in real terms since 2009.  That author currently gets £7000 a year from writing, which was said to be ‘shocking but not surprising’. Writing is paid a lot less than the minimum wage (and the amount of time required unpaid to promote the book is extraordinary.)

The number of writers for whom it is their full-time job has dropped from 40% in 2009 to 19% this year.

The creative industries are around £100bn.  Less and less of that is going to the author, under increasingly tough contract terms and a worrying tendency to offer contracts which have no upside if the work does very well.

MP Giles Watling spoke passionately about the importance of the creative arts. An actor and producer in a former life, he said that young actors are notoriously poor, but their careers tend to build.  He said that what the report showed him was that authors can’t assume the same will happen for them.

Amy Thomas who led on the research said that reward was very unequally distributed, with one percent of authors getting a quarter of total earnings, and the top 10 percent getting just under half the total earnings. Women, the very young and very old, and ethnic minorities were significantly less well paid.  She said this was ‘a profession approaching a tipping point’.

A freelance journalist and author listed all the different things she did to make a living. Freelance rates have barely increased in ten years and she can’t tell young writers to ‘demand what they are worth’ because they won’t get the job.

During lockdown, we read, we watched, we listened. Were the writers seeing the benefits of this? Does it matter that authors are largely juggling the writing around other jobs or caring responsibilities – that the system favours those with private incomes and /or partners in secure middle class jobs? It is not a system set up to reward working class voices, for example.

I don’t write just for the money.  I write because I enjoy the creation. It feels like my purpose in life. I enjoy people reading my work. But to be really good, and to stand any chance of having time to do it, I have to work hard and work within this difficult market.

The industry in the broadest sense relies on people of passion and creativity who do it because they love it, and who are over-optimistic about the returns (or cushioned against them).

There’s no obvious policy fix. Researchers investigate the world, other people must find solutions, or just shrug.

A Universal Basic Income would be great, exploitation would continue but we could still live.  Ireland gives writers a significant tax break.  France prevents book discounting in theory protecting small bookshops and authors incomes, although the impact of that might be less positive than you think.  A campaign of public shaming around some of the worst practices might work – it has begun to stop literary festivals expecting authors to appear for free.

Making payment at the time the writers’ job is done would also be a start. After all, when you get a dress or jacket drycleaned, you don’t ask the drycleaner to wait for payment until a month after you wore it.

Five Act Plot Structure – Out of the Brambles

So been reworking through John Yorke’s Into the Woods, a book on story structure I read on retreat. This is a topic I have a lot of difficulty with but I’m at the stage that I want to understand story mechanics more formally. I’ve got rather stuck with another project and I have been hoping this helps.

Woods argues that some of what makes stories work is instinctive and a writer can often get it fairly right without following a formal structure (and it turns up anyway.) He also says that all the competing structure theories largely map onto each other. His ‘Five Act Structure’ is quite openly a development of the three act structure first described by Aristole. Finally, he says people who work within the structure sometimes play with it – so Shakespeare occasionally skips an Act and Raiders of the Lost Ark can be seen as having seven Acts.

So colour me surprised when I studied Draft Two of my Work in Progress which turns out to follow… the five act structure.

It fits best if I discard my rough idea of what the great turning point in the book is – the midpoint – to something a little later which happens to better unite the different strands of plot. The story kind of works as written and the shift in conceptualising it works.

My existing method leans rather a lot, after the first sloppy draft, on not boring the reader and keeping the story going. So I look at how far into the book must A, B, and C, happen. This has a similar effect to formal planning.

Fun fact about stroy structure – if you post on it, people immediately recommend two other books about it….

Positive Criticism Only?

I went to a lovely writers’ group at the weekend, which offered writers the chance to get ‘positive feedback only.’ You were given the choice to have unfiltered feedback as well.

Photo Tatiana Syrikova Pexels .com

I understand that many writers offer stuff for comment with their first need and hope being validation.  A writer will often float in a place between ‘this thing I wrote has potential’ and ‘this is nowhere like as good as the last book I enjoyed so I am terrible and should give up’. I see the case to be encouraging, always, and particularly for new or nervous writers.

Some people and groups enjoy being destructive. Or they seize on a single point that isn’t perfect and deluge the author with suggestions without giving a balanced view of the whole piece. It has taken me years to explain to my partner that when I ask for feedback, don’t start with the typos. This is unhelpful.

I once had a criticism so obviously and objectively wrong it blocked me for months. And some people may have been unsupported and over-criticised a great deal up until that point. Be gentle it is my first time is ABSOLUTELY fine.

But how kind is it in the long run to give only positive criticism?

Writers’ groups support us through the solitary weirdness of writing, but a primary purpose for most writers showing their work is to help us improve.  To do that we need to develop our own dispassionate inner critic.  Outside opinions positive and negative help us do that, by us working through how they are right, or not. Someone may struggle on their own for ten years honing their masterpiece in solitary isolation, without getting much better. No feedback – improve – more feedback loop. 

Once you do start sending stuff out to be published, you certainly will get critical feedback, sometimes from people with no skin in being friendly about it.

Opinions can be framed positively. Positives can be stated first. A writer’s group should encourage you to keep writing.

But if say the stakes aren’t obvious to you, or if no woman on earth would talk like that, you need to tell the writer that. For their sake.

Feedback should be offered from an empathetic place and a real spirit of seeking to help.  It may still sting.

I remember the first criticism I got from my current group. I was cross. I went home, slept on it, reread the offending paragraph, and the feedback I had received was right. So right it was almost unarguable.

Reading other people’s stuff helps.  Critiquing other people’s stuff helps. And a first time reading can be really scary, although at the All Good Bookshop Group, we bend over backwards to be un-scary.

So I told this other group, ‘Bring it on’. Because what ever people say, the decision what to do is mine, only mine.

I give positive constructive feedback! Why not check out my services for writers?

Testimonial: Manuscript Assessment

Zoltan Tasi /Unsplash

S, a Young Adult/Historical Fantasy (Sept ’22)

The feedback you gave was well thought out, perceptive and very useful. It was also at an appropriate level for a draft 2 as it focussed on whether the story and characters were working rather than primarily on the prose level. The pointers you did give on the latter were both enough and useful. 

It reassured me that the setting, characters, and structure of the plot largely worked although you did make some important suggestions to strengthen and make more credible the key developments of the last third of the book.

(Approx 3000 words of feedback including a synopsis as I saw it, the themes, positives and negatives in a report, and copious notes in the margins.)

Why not check out my services for writers!?

When the music changed the story

In previous writing, I used music sometimes to set mood, or to give my writing energy, or to daydream. With Our Child of the Stars, the music marched in, expecting a bigger role. Here’s how the music changed the book.

It came to me… A scene was small town America, the end of the Sixties, and fall sunlight lit up her patchwork quilt of bright leaves. Molly was sewing her son Cory’s Halloween costume against the clock, and she’d had to lock him out of the room to get it done. How Molly and Gene loved him, and how they feared for his safety. Only a handful of people knew that Cory existed.

Music was playing on a record player… Molly’s favourite singer, a specific image of a folk singer with long dark hair. It took me weeks to figure out it was Joan Baez singing Farewell Angelina – an elusive song of love and loss.

“… the LP worn from years of enjoyment. Joan Baez filled the house with music, that extraordinary voice making mournful love to the air so the whole house became sad and beautiful.”

Molly’s favourite singer – that had to mean something. I knew far more of Baez’s CV than her work. I soaked myself in her music and many others known and new to me. Baez was and is a musician who uses her talent to fight injustice with beauty… a focused anger and compassion from that era of bright promise, and endless war.

Music became more important as I wrote the book. Gene always had a guitar I think but the music grew and he became more of a musician. Molly remembers their marriage day.

“Gene stood grinning in his best suit, with the flower in his lapel crooked. He was the one for her. The people they loved had come to support them and neither of them tripped over the words. Then off to dance, to his choices and hers: ‘Stop! in the Name of Love’, the Temptations and the Supremes. Peter, Paul and Mary, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Stones.”

The one song cited is ironic, foreshadowing. The beautiful marriage enters stormy waters – tragedy, depression, alcoholism. Gene strays but how far? I played those songs and others about broken hearts, as I decided, how far could he go and the marriage still be healable.  Again, the choice of song was unconscious but sharp in its meaning. Gene Stops! He changes his mind at the motel door…

In American Pie McLean shows as so many did the growing disenchantment at the end of the Sixties, entering the Seventies. You cannot understand the time without seeing how many people did not have flowers in their hair. The majority of young people voted for Nixon in 1972. Unpicking this, and hearing other voices from that era, helped me understand. It flowed naturally to me that Molly and Gene had friends they disagreed with – they would find decency in unexpected places.

The Meteor brought fire and destruction, and a wounded boy – the only survivor of a tragedy in space – a boy they call Cory. He learns English and Earth music with enormous enthusiasm. Cory fizzes – he is childhood turned up to 11 – eager to learn, make friends, and explore – he brings delight back into Gene and Molly’s life. Yet he finds Earth’s cruelties are challenging – his world has no war, no starvation.

It was important to me that he did not look human and that we should overcome our prejudices. He is traumatised by the loss of his mother and his friends. In the early weeks, he adopts Where Have All The Flowers Gone as a ritual song of letting go his dead mother and the many others of his kind who died. For him it becomes a night-time song to remember and heal.

We shall overcome keeps turning up– a song of many roots – fashioned by a Black preacher, then a song of the labour movement, then civil rights and the opposition to war… Gene plays it to Cory when they first meet because it’s a party piece and Gene has run through the obvious children’s songs. It’s a song Baez also sings for a very serious purpose at a crucial point in the book. I found writing about the Sixties was also writing about the challenges of our time.

Gene and Molly wrangle about Gene’s passion for science fiction and support for space travel – Molly thinks caring for people on earth should take priority. Of course, the irony is, Gene’s ‘stupid space stories’ turn out to have a purpose.  I loved the humour and anger in Gill Scott-Heron’s performance piece, Whitey’s On the Moon – it didn’t end up in the final edit but there’s a taste of in Molly’s argument under a full moon.

Many of the songs across the two books are ones I invented, as artists respond to the events that do not happen in our version of history.  In Our Child of Two Worlds, the family face bigger dangers, and everything they take for granted is under threat. For if Cory’s people come and take him away, they will break Molly’s heart.

The world is both beautiful and sometimes unforgiving – humanity rises to love and loyalty and courage and compassion, yet we add to the inevitable darkness too.  Yet we have hope and humour and music. Our Child of the Stars (and Our Child of Two Worlds) make a single story about family, friendship and what we owe each other – how love grabs us and makes us vulnerable – about how love in all its forms has a price. This ordinary and extraordinary family make a song of hope about how things could be.

Joan Baez – “Farewell Angelina”

Joan Baez “We Shall Overcome” (at the March on Washington with MLK)

The Supremes “Stop in the Name of Love” –

Gill Scott-Heron – “Whitey’s On The Moon”

Don McLean – “American Pie”

Pete Seeger “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”

Paperback Launch Update

Palmers Green Author Stephen Cox has his second book out in paperback on 13 October. It’s also the tenth anniversary of committing to being a writer.

Our Child of the Stars and now Our Child of Two Worlds combine family drama in 1960s USA with new takes on a few classic SF ideas.  A childless couple adopt an orphaned alien and try to keep him safe – against peril on Earth and in space.

LAUNCH

Saturday 15 October, 7pm All Good Bookshop.  35 Turnpike Lane, Wood Green, London, N8 0EP. There’s some wine and snacks but do BYOB.  Stephen will reading, doing Q+A and talking on Tigger or Eeyore? – ten years getting publishing. RSVP appreciated.  BTW you can order from the bookshop and Stephen will sign and dedicate where asked

ONLINE LAUNCH

There is an online launch Monday 17th Oct at 7pm on Zoom – similar to above. All welcome but email stephen.cox.pr@gmail.com for Zoom link. Stephen does talks to groups.

ENFIELD TOWN SIGNING

If you just want to grab Stephen to sign a copy, Enfield Waterstones Church Street are planning a just-turn-up signing 12-2pm Sat 15th. 

Our Child of the Stars was praised by the Guardian, Grazia, FT, the Mail and LA Times. (“…a wonderfully emotional, heart-warming journey of what it really means to be a parent” – LA Times).  

The sequel, Our Child of Two Worlds has won similar praise. “Riveting, compelling, and emotionally charged: a page turner I loved” “watch and be dazzled”

More on https://www.stephencox.co.uk

The Case of the Corrected Carol

“Mystery/detective/police or legal procedurals are antithetical to horror/fantasy; if you like one, you will not usually like the other. because traditional mysteries MUST be realistic, otherwise detection makes no sense.”

Joyce Carol Oates”

This is objectively wrong. 

Firstly, because many people read widely in genre. I read thrillers, contemporary fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and some YA (and YA can be any of those genres as well – it is more a mode than a genre).  To give a specific example, I have read traditional murder mysteries set in ALL these genres – traditional in the sense of solved by logic, insight into character, lab work, etc.

I have written ‘traditional’ mysteries which are also science fiction or fantasy.  What are the actual issues?

Does the logical process of unpicking a ‘traditional mystery’ require absolute realism? Clearly, if you have read good SFF, you know it doesn’t.

Oates assumes that once you leave the shores of absolute realism, anything can happen. Therefore a mystery cannot be constructed because things happen without a reason. This is a rookie error, each story in science fiction and fantasy follows their own logic, which is sufficiently revealed to the reader that the story makes some sense.

Mysteries fall into two types – fair, where the reader can puzzle out what is going on from what is in the text – and unfair – where the ‘investigator’ has information the reader does not, or they can make the uniquely correct deduction from the facts whereas a normal person couldn’t find the signal in the noise, or there are multiple solutions. (Famously Arthur Conan Doyle accepted some of his Holmes stories had other solutions.)

A great many mysteries are written to be ‘unfair’ and are perfectly enjoyable. You are along for the ride. The SFF mysteries I have written are fair – the detective knows nothing relevant to the case which has not been shared with the reader. Try “Murder in the hospital” in my Free Fiction pages

It is rare to set out to write a mystery which is immediately solved – although it would be a splendid story if the solution could be known immediately but be exceptionally difficult to prove.

Those solving the crime can share what they learn with the reader. ‘Using this spell, I can say who has been in this room since the last full moon.’ This is then no different from any other source of information for the detective. Spells or hitech are just lab work.

Or whatever is special in the world may mislead the detective or be inconclusive.  We used to think DNA was infallible. Then we discovered human error creeps in.

If your story rests on orcs having night-vision but being colour-blind, a fair author will slip that fact in, directly or otherwise. It’s no different from writing a deeply conventional murder.

Mysteries are usually out to entertain with a thrilling or intriguing plot, to shed some light on character and the human condition, and in the classic murder mystery, to assert moral order over immoral chaos.  The murderer is caught or otherwise punished.

SFF stories can be heist movies, buddy cop stories, classic noir thrillers, creepy psychological chillers, or political dramas. They can be set in any era and any genre. Ultimately they are more often about people than ideas.

But Joyce Carol Oates does us one favour – it reminds us to read in a genre before pontificating about it.

Picture thanks to cottonbro pexels.com

Detection can take place in many worlds

The Power of Shorts

Les Murray wrote a great poem about shorts, as in trousers, but I am talking about short stories.

Short stories provide a superb form for fiction, and I’ve written a good many.  An intriguing story can be done in a few words – flash fiction is often more like poetry – or they can sprawl to 10000.

I believe an idea, or a set-up, has a natural best length. Your story seed might grow to be a rabbit hutch, a shed, a house, or a cathedral.

 It is one reason why all the speculative genres are keen on the short form. You might feel 2-5000 words is enough to float the imaginative challenge.

One of my stories (Winged) postulated a society where a small number of people – apparently at random – grow wings in adolescence. The winged can fly, are stronger in various physical ways, and much more charismatic. This fast-tracks them into the elite of politics, the civil service, and media. The story combined the prompt ‘what if coming out immediately moved you into the elite’ with the human idea of ‘what happens to a school friendship when one friend receives a massive leg-up in life through chance’. 

Some great ideas don’t need much development. Winged will never be a novel. I am perfectly capable of developing a credible working society around this, and of writing a novel about male friendship. I just didn’t feel I had to do this particular work, this particular way.

Conversely, when I wrote the short story that launched Cory into the world, it was obvious I was tilling fertile ground. Family. An outside eye on humanity. Loving difference. A kid in terrible danger.   The issue was not – can this grow into a novel? It was, is it two novels or three?

With short stories you can try out ideas, and forms, and settings – try them as a writer and try them as a reader. You can finish the piece with the end of the world, the transcendence of humanity, or the Second Coming. You get in when you need to and leave before you outstay your welcome.

Short stories allow you to taste someone’s work.  I’m unlikely to finish a novel with a truly terrible chapter but if a short story doesn’t work for you, you haven’t wasted a day.

I am intrigued by novellas. 20-40k allows substantial room for character, world, and plot development. 

Anyway, a plug.

I have free fiction on my website. Newsletter subscribers get exclusive content every so often. 

Coming soon a new story in the Coryverse (the world of Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds) and in due course a new taster story to the world of my Work in Progress.

I may share with you the real solution to the Princes in the Tower; a charming enigmatic elegy; a sweet superhero love story; a provocative post-apocalyptic tale; and the only story I have ever written inspired by a scientific research paper.