William Peace's Blog, page 19

Turning Reality into Fiction

Writer’s Online has a piece on December 10 this year written by Lori Ann Stevens about how to capture a real, frightening event in prose. It’s not easy. It can seem dry, exaggerated, stilted or difficult to believe. But Ms Stevens has some tips on how to make the terrible event real for the reader.

Lori Ann Stevens

Ms Stevens is the author of Blue Running, published by Moonflower Books. She said, “My sister’s boyfriend was fourteen years old when he accidentally shot himself in the stomach while cleaning his hunting rifle. He was alone, and the wound was fatal. His sudden death left everyone shaken and horrified. I hoped that the school counsellors would help my little sister heal from the trauma. I’d recently had a baby, so I acknowledged and then buried the image as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized how profoundly this boy’s death had settled into my consciousness. In Blue Running, my new novel set in Texas, a similar accident occurs. I relived the accident as I typed the scene, watching quite helplessly as this girl – filled with dreams and imagination – bled out on the floor. In spite of her friend’s screams for help, in spite of a desperate race to find a phone, to flag down a car, the girl dies. Her best friend could only witness the horror, hold the girl in her arms, feel every moment. Like me, the writer who was finally reckoning with the memory.

“It was my imagination that had made the real event so long ago unbearable: what had gone through his head as he lost his grip on consciousness? To die violently and alone – I can’t imagine a more terrifying event. It’s this capacity for imagination, and the willingness to step through those doors, that makes us empathetic humans… and makes writers create believable scenes for their readers.

“But it’s not easy, writing out terrifying, real-life events. Robin Hemley in Turning Life into Fiction, puts it this way: “‘But it really happened!’ is such a lame defense for a story you’ve written. If it doesn’t seem believable, forget it.” It doesn’t matter that a scene is based on real events if the narrative choices aren’t authentic. Here are a couple of tips to make these terrifying scenes credible in fiction. Rather than describing the blind flight of adrenaline blurred by mayhem, try to capture the crystal clear moments that imprint on the brain in the midst of the event.

“It probably won’t come as a surprise that slowing the pacing of the story allows the reader to experience the event, moment by moment. On the one hand, it’s counterintuitive, because terrifying events are often experienced as a blur – a rush of adrenaline sending you into survival mode. On the other hand, it’s also the exact inverse: a slowing of time and space. Who’s been in a car wreck and doesn’t have a terrifying, slow-motion memory imprinted on the backs of their eyelids? The car fishtailing on the icy road, the classic music on the radio echoing like a phantom, your tight grip on the steering wheel, the car jumping the curb like a fledgling bird and plummeting down the frost-covered grassy knoll.

“In this ironic slowing of time, my characters notice things we don’t register in our everyday lives. Their frame or focus might be more limited in a frightening situation as they  fixate on one thing and store it in their memory: the buzz of a fly on the windowsill or the odd swish of an overcoat. Sensorial details like the cold tip of your nose, the sand grabbing onto your feet, or the smell of burnt hair. If your character is frightened and alone, forget the heartbeat racing and focus on the sound of his breath whistling, giving his hiding spot away. One benefit of staying in the moment like this instead of rushing the narrative is that your sentences might stretch out, compound the images, keep the readers moving from detail to detail, phrase to phrase. Or use shorter sentences.”

I tend to agree with Ms Stevens that it is most effective to use short, graphic, incoherent details in brief sentences to convey the feelings of a frightening event. Trying to capture the event in all its horror comes across as false. We need a sense of time moving quickly, of snapshots of consciousness. Short sentences and phrases pick up the pace. Onomatopoeia can be useful. For example, if sliding is the issue, using many words with an ‘S’ sound can convey the feeling. Effective horror scenes tend to show, rather than tell. It is often more powerful not to deal directly with the central horror threat. For instance, rather than describing the site of a broken bone, show that the limb seems to be at an odd angle.

Cancel Culture Hits Publishing

There is an article in the Daily Telegraph two days ago written by Ella Whelan titled ‘Twitter is the last place writers should go if they want a debate’. The article centres on Kate Clanchy and her 2019 award-winning book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. The author used the phrases ‘chocolate-coloured skin’, ‘almond-shaped eyes’, a ‘fine Ashkenazi nose’, a ‘narrow skull’ for an Ethiopian boy, and ‘flirty hijabs’ for Muslin girls. Clanchy also described one of her students as “African Jonathon” and another being “so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache”. Two autistic children were described as “unselfconsciously odd” and “jarring company”. 

In a separate article, The Guardian said, “Clanchy has taught in state schools for more than 30 years. In 2018, she published an anthology of pupils’ poetry and was awarded an MBE for services to literature. In 2020, a panel of independent Orwell prize judges described her memoir as “moving, funny and full of life”, offering “sparkling insights into modern British society”, and awarded the book the prize for political writing.

Kate Clanchy

This summer, reviewers on Goodreads pointed out the ‘unsavoury descriptions’ and critics in the world of publishing raised the alarm not only about the book, but what is said about the world of publishing that such passages would go uncut.

Ella Whelan said, “Anyone who knows the industry will tell you that it is elitist and exclusive. A recent survey revealed that 90 percent of the publishing world is white. On top of that, it is also a profit-driven market, in which social media trends are consulted more often that artistic judgements about which stories or writers deserve to enter print.”

Three writers, Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh, Chimene Suleyman, the Society of Authors,, Philip Gwyn Jones (a Picador publisher), Picador, Pan Macmillan (Picador’s owner), and Kate Clanchy went on Twitter to express their various views that:

British publishing must do betterpreventing authors writing about people different to themselves would be a death knell to literaturevigorously condemn online bullyingappalled by the suffering experiencedwelcome the chance to write better, more lovingly

My reaction to this bruhaha is that first of all, British publishing must do better in selecting books and authors more on artistic value and less on what the loudest British culture does or doesn’t want to hear. Given its white elitist nature, British publishing needs to be more sensitive to the feelings of minorities. Fighting culture wars on the Internet with personal condemnations is unethical and counter-productive.

What bothers me more about some of the descriptions in Ms Clanchy’s book is not the alleged racism. (What’s pejorative about the adjectives ‘chocolate-coloured’ or ‘almond-shaped’ or ‘flirty’? In fact, ‘flirty hajib’ is a playful description. Are we not permitted to identify a character as a member of a minority group except by writing ‘black’ and ‘Asian’ and ‘Muslim’?) I am more concerned about Ms Clanchy’s apparent unease as a teacher with the disabilities of her pupils.

The 27 Best Opening Lines

Ellie Harrison has an article on this subject in the 17 October 2019 issue of the Independent. She said,

“The first sentence of any piece of writing is arguably the most important – both in terms of hooking the reader in and of doing justice to the body of work that it is introducing. Our attempt, here, is perhaps a little on-the-nose and definitely overestimates the quality of the copy that follows but, hey, it caught your attention and demonstrated our point.”

Ellie Harrison

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” – The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” – I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” – The Road by Cormac McCarthy

“It was love at first sight.” – Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” – High-Rise by JG Ballard

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

“Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” – The Stranger by Albert Camus

“124 was spiteful.” – Beloved by Toni Morrison

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” – The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

“All this happened, more or less.” – Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

“All children, except one, grow up.” – Peter Pan by JM Barrie

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – The Go-Between by LP Hartley

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” – The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” – Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.” – The Crow Road by Iain Banks

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” – Murphy by Samuel Beckett

While I agree with Ms Harrison that the role of a first line is to capture the reader’s attention and to introduce the story which is to come, I don’t feel that some of these opening lines do the job. Some seem annoying and untruthful, like the exploding grandmother and writing in the sink. But others, like the first line of David Copperfield, are quite catchy.

Well, here’s my latest first line: “I’m not sure I should have accepted this assignment.” Granduncle Bertie will be out early next year.

Review: The Tattooist of Auschwitz

This novel was first published in 2018, but I don’t remember hearing about it at the time. The title caught my attention, particularly when the cover says it is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov.

The author is Heather Morris, a New Zealander now living in Australia. While working in a large hospital in Melbourne, she studied and wrote screenplays. She was introduced to Lale Sokolov in 2003, and she originally wrote Lale’s story as a screenplay before reshaping it into her debut novel.

Heather Morris

Lale was born Ludwig Eisenberg in 1916 in Krompachy, Slovakia. He was Jewish and was transported to Auschwitz in April 1942, where he was tattooed with the number 32407. Lale’s parents were transported to Auschwitz in March 1942, while Lale was still in Prague. They were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz. In early 1945, Lale is herded on a train which takes him to Austria where he is made to work as a pimp in a German officers’ quarters. In April he escapes and boards a train to Bratislava, where, eventually he meets Gita, proposes and they marry. Lale changes his name to Sokolov. In 1949 they move to Australia, where Gita became a dress designer and Lale was in the textile trade. Their son, Gary, was born in 1961. Gita died in 2003 and Lale in 2006.

Most of the novel concerns Lale’s experiences in Auschwitz, where he was selected to be a tattooist, placing the required numbers on the arms of new arrivals. As a tattooist, he had an improved living status, and access to staff working in the office, as well as to the female barracks, where he meets and falls in love with Gita. His female friends provide him with jewellery, which has been confiscated from the arriving Jews, in exchange for additional food, and in Gita’s case live saving medication. Lale is able to exchange the jewels for food and medicine with Polish workmen in Auschwitz. Lale meets the infamous Dr Mengele, and is tortured when his cache of jewellery is discovered.

The novel faces a difficult task balancing the unethical work which Lale performs as a tattooist and a pimp against his good deeds of providing extra food and medicine with the additional weight of necessary survival. While the book is presented as a novel, it is really a biography of Ludwig Eisenberg, and, as such it is a powerful, well-told story. I felt that sometimes there was not sufficient clarity in the contrast between Lale’s dedicated optimism and the grim pessimism which must have prevailed throughout the camp. Sometimes, the dialogue does not ring true, in the sense that it is tasked with carrying the story further rather than expressing the emotions of the characters.

Overall, a very good read.

An Author’s Complaint

In last Friday’s email, Harry Bingham quoted a disappointed author, Natalie Tay, who wrote:

‘As someone who has experienced endless rejection, frequently accompanied by notes assuring me that it was an “incredibly close call”, I simply can’t sit back and agree that a rejection means “you’re not there yet”.

I’ve spent years and months believing that [but] sometimes you get rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your work. I can’t even tell you how many agents I’ve had who have told me that my pitch was intriguing and the quality of my pages was excellent, but this “wasn’t the book for them”. And the thing is, because the world of traditional publishing is so fickle, this happens. Probably all the time.

I’m sure you could argue that my book must have been missing some sort of je ne sais quoi or needed one more draft or who knows what, and with some of my manuscripts I can agree with that assessment. But with others, I can’t. Not to say I’m done learning or above needing help, but at some point when I’ve produced multiple manuscripts that match the quality of existing published novels, I have to believe it’s not me.

So please, for the love of all of the souls who have been crushed one too many times, own up to the fact that luck is involved.’

Natalie Tay

Harry responded:

“And she’s right. Her writing has a crisp professionalism. There’s nothing in the pages I read that gives the book away as unsuitable for Big 5 publication. On the contrary, you could find any number of Big 5 books that are either of the same standard, or a shade less adept. (As a matter of fact, you could probably find some major bestsellers that were less adept. I can think of a few…)

So let me give you a somewhat more detailed view of how Planet Agent makes its decisions. As far as agents are concerned, books fall into roughly the following strata:

Nowhere close to good enough These books have obvious problems on the first page, and probably the query letter too.

Not good enough (manuscript) These books aren’t as bad, but the problems do reveal themselves – and usually on the first page.

Not good enough (synopsis)

A niche category this, and not a much populated one, but you’ll come across some manuscripts where the prose comes across as acceptable, but perhaps not quite compelling. The agent wonders whether to read on and turns to the synopsis. The synopsis, however, fails to deliver a convincing story arc and the agent is left feeling that the book is unsaleable.

Strong

Once you’ve discarded the books that are clearly not strong enough, you’re left with maybe 1-2% of the total slushpile, where the reasons for rejecting just aren’t that clear. The prose? It’s fine. The story? All present and correct.

But the agent is only going to take on perhaps 1 in 1000 manuscripts, so just 0.1% of what comes her way. That means she has to discard 9-19 of the 10-20 strong manuscripts she comes across. Some of the reasons for dropping those submissions would include:

Too similar to an existing client.Submission comes when the agent is busy or stressed.Submission arrives just when the agent is blown away by a genuinely stunning manuscript.Submission fails for reasons of personal taste, rather than objective critical judgement.Submission fails because when the agent is thinking of who to sell the manuscript to, and how she would pitch the sale, she can’t quite see her way to a compelling strategy.

Luck pretty obviously plays a part here – and for that reason it’s vital that you query 10-12 agents, not merely 3-4. That said, the fifth bullet point on this list is not to do with luck and we’ll talk more about that in a moment. Before that, though, there is a fifth category of manuscript to deal with …

The outright stunning

Any sane agent would pick that book up. Any sane editor would, at the least, be seriously tempted. Yes, there will be some luck-based rejections nevertheless (agent too busy, too stressed, no personal click, etc), but the author’s experience is going to be essentially one of doors flying open, rather than doors slamming shut.”

Harry then lays out three possible options:

1. Query a digital-first publisher.

Those guys accept more like 1 in 100 manuscripts than 1 in 1000. They’re hoovering up the almost-but-not-quite manuscripts from elsewhere. That doesn’t mean they’re second-best as publishers, however. There are some absolutely first-class publishers amongst their number … and I know people who have gone from a print-led Big 5 imprint to a digital-first one, and seen their sales go through the roof. They’ve also, nearly always, had a better outcome in terms of author care. In effect, those guys take some of the luck out of the question. They take the top 1% of manuscripts and let readers choose their favourite. It’s a brilliant model.

2. Self-publish.

I’ve made a more regular, dependable income from self-pub than I ever did from trad. I’ve had stronger relations with readers. I’ve had better marketing, better book covers, more flexibility, more control. As it happens, I made my biggest film and TV sale via self-pub not trad. What’s not to like? Self-publishing is an outstanding route to market and no one should feel embarrassed to take it.

3. Nail the elevator pitch.

The trouble with most strong manuscripts – the ones that get rejected – is that they ask, politely, to be admitted to Publishing Towers. The stunning manuscripts don’t ask: they kick the doors down.

Competent writing + a workmanlike premise = a book that might or might not get published

Competent writing + a stunning premise = a book that can’t be ignored.

The elevator pitch essentially does the agent’s work for them. How do I pitch this to publishers? How do I set out the path to sales?

With a book that’s merely strong, those questions have fiddly, failure-prone answers. With a kick-the-doors-down book (Crawdads, Gone Girl, Light We Cannot See), those questions have answers that are blazingly obvious.

That’s where luck stops being a factor, or almost. Yes, you might hit an agent who’s too busy or stressed or drunk to notice the bar of gold that’s just struck their toe. But go to more than a handful of agents, and one of them is bound to pick it up – and be delighted that they have.

I think Harry makes some very good points.

Amazing Story

The BBC ran an amazing story on September 19 about a young English woman who gave up a career in financial law for crime writing; she decided to go down the self-publishing path and has sold seven million copies.

Louise Ross

Duncan Leatherdale of the BBC wrote:

A young woman brutally slaughtered in a ritualistic killing on Holy Island. A skeleton concealed by a murderer in Hadrian’s Wall. A robbery of ancient artefacts from Durham Cathedral.

“Once you get bitten by the writing bug it’s hard to shake it,” Louise says.

“Everywhere we go I find little bits of inspiration from the landscape, although I’m not always looking for places to commit crimes.

“That only really happened once when I was on Hadrian’s Wall and I did think, ‘hmm, you could hide a body here’.”

Since 2015, Louise has written 18 books in the DCI Ryan series, four novels chronicling the exploits of forensic psychologist Dr Alexander Gregory, a short story anthology and the Cornish cove crime thriller.

For the previous 10 years, she had been a financial services lawyer in London which involved tackling white collar criminals and “trying to stop people perpetuating fraud”.

“I found after a few years I was not loving it and I could not say my heart was fully in it.”

Deciding to take a sabbatical, Louise, who by this time was married to a barrister called James, set her sights on studying forensic psychology.

But her work-break soon became a “lovely surprise” maternity leave as she discovered she was pregnant with the couple’s first child.

At around the same time, the couple were on a train bound for Edinburgh when, travelling up the Northumberland coast, she had a flash of an idea that went on to change her life.

“We saw Holy Island,” Louise says.

“It was miserable weather but so atmospheric and I remember looking at the island and thinking it would be a great place to set a story.”

Inspired by her love of the “golden age of crime writing” encapsulated by the likes of Agatha Christie, as well as her childhood passion for the good versus evil narratives of the Christopher Reeve Superman films and Star Wars saga, Louise found herself creating a new detective – Det Ch Insp Maxwell Finlay-Ryan.

His first adventure is on Holy Island, where he has gone to recover from his own recent trauma when he is confronted by the gruesome murder of a young woman whose remains are found in the priory ruins.

Louise spent 18 months writing it around getting to grips with motherhood, before starting the hunt for an agent and publisher.

“With breath-taking naivety I sent it to 12 or 14 agents and publishers thinking that would be enough. I only later learnt JK Rowling sent Harry Potter to hundreds.

“I did have one offer from what I would call a midsize publishing house which was exciting, but when the contract came through and I was supposed to feel elated, I just didn’t.

“I thought, ‘I’m handing over an awful lot here, my intellectual property in perpetuity’.

Holy Island was published by Amazon as an e-book on 1 January 2015 and sold 25 copies, all to family and friends, while Louise also printed a few copies to sell in local bookshops.

But by May it was number one in the Kindle store, knocking Paula Hawkins’ Girl On A Train off top spot, with daily sales of about 4,500 for which Louise credits “word of mouth”.

The majority of her seven million plus sales have been e-books although printed copies produced by Dark Skies Publishing, the firm run by her and her husband, can be found in mainstream and independent bookshops with audio books also available.

Louise acknowledges she is in a fortunate position to be able to have the time and support of her family to write and publish her books, with James effectively operating as the publishing director.

“Independent publishing is not for everyone, it does depend on what your support network is like,” she says.

In November Dark Skies Publishing will publish its first book not written solely by Louise – an anthology from more than 50 authors to raise money for homelessness charity Shelter.

Virginia Woolf’s Thoughts on Characters

The Writers Write website has a post by Freddie Moore has excerpted ten points about writing characters from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. In the essay Virginia Woolf is responding to an article by English writer Arnold Bennett who argued that 20th century authors were failing to write good novels because they did not write good characters. (Freddie Moore is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her full name is Winifred, and her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Huffington Post.)

Virginia Woolf

Ms Woolf’s comments were:

Practice character-reading until you can ‘live a single year of life without disaster’. (Character-reading is Woolf’s term for people-watching for the sake of constructing fictional characters. I think her point was that when you’re a good character-reader you won’t have any disasters.)Observe strangers. Let your own version of their life story shoot through your head — how they got where they are now, where they might be going — and fill in the blanks for yourself. (This is a favourite pastime of mine when I’m in a restaurant, watching other people, particularly those having intense discussions.) Listen to the way people speak, but pay special attention to their silence. (The silences may be more meaningful than the dialogue.)Write characters who are both ‘very small and very tenacious; at once very frail and very heroic’. Let them have contradictions.Write about people who make an overwhelming impression on you. Let yourself be obsessed.A believable character is never just a list of traits or biographical facts. (Because traits and facts don’t define character.)Illustrate your characters outside of the superficial standards of their time. Let them be complex.Any captivating protagonist should be someone you can imagine in “the centre of all sorts of scenes.”Find a common ground between you and your characters — “steep yourself in their atmosphere.” Learn to empathise. (A writer needs to feel what the character is feeling.)Describe your characters ‘beautifully if possible, and truthfully at any rate’.

How to Write a Synopsis

There is an article on the Writer’s Digest website by Courtney Carpenter on synopsis writing that I thought contained some very good advice. I have struggled writing synopses ever since I started writing novels. My instinct was to write a brief summary of the book – much as I did in my high school English class, when I was writing a book report. But invariably, it came out rather bland, instead of catching and exciting the reader’s interest. Even the advice I had from and editor didn’t include a useful template, and focused on cutting out the non-essentials.

My search for a bio of Courtney Carpenter drew a blank. She has written dozens of articles for Writer’s Digest, so she was probably a member of WD’s staff. Her broad knowledge of writing skills led me to search Amazon for the books she may have written. No luck.

In her article on Synopsis writing, she says,” Before sending your book proposal out to potential literary agents, here are some suggested elements you should include while writing a synopsis:

Narrative Arc. A synopsis conveys the narrative arc, an explanation of the problem or plot, the characters, and how the book or novel ends. It ensures character actions and motivations are realistic and make sense. It summarizes what happens and who changes from beginning to end of the story. It gives agents a good and reliable preview of your writing skills.Active Voice. Agents look for good writing skills. Let yours shine in your synopsis by using active voice and third person.Unique Point of View. An agent is usually looking for an idea of fresh or unique elements. Is your plot cliche or predictable? Have elements that set your story apart from other things they have seen.Story Advancement. A synopsis should include the characters’ feelings and emotions. Use these elements to advance your plot and story.Write Clearly. Focus on clarity in your writing and avoid wordiness. Remember, less is more.

“Here are some tips on what to avoid when writing a synopsis:

Mentioning too many characters or events.Including too much detail about plot twists and turns. You don’t want to tell the entire story. What you want to do is write a book summary with enough detail about the plot to intrigue the reader or agent.Unnecessary detail, description, or explanation. Make each word in your synopsis count.Editorializing your novel or book. Don’t use “…in a flashback,” or “…in a poignant scene.” If you have a confusing series of events and character interactions, not only will your reader be confused, but a potential agent will be too.Writing back cover copy instead of a synopsis. Don’t go astray and write a hook to intrigue a reader to buy a book or an agent to request a manuscript. Focus on summarizing your novel or book.

“Jane Friedman gives some of the best tips for formatting a synopsis. She recommends beginning with a strong paragraph identifying your protagonist, problem or conflict, and setting. The next paragraph should convey any major plot turns or conflicts necessary and any characters that should be mentioned in order for your book summary to make sense to whomever is reading it. 

“Lastly, she recommends indicating how major conflicts are resolved in the last paragraph. This ensures a clear presentation of your book or novel and doesn’t leave the reader confused.

For me, Ms Carpenter’s quotation of Jane Friedman makes a lot of sense. It is: 1. What’s this story about? 2. What major events happen? And 3. How are the problems resolved?

Review: A Man Called Ove

This novel was a number one bestseller across Scandinavia before it became a New York Times bestseller. It is the first novel of Fredrik Backman, a Swede, who was born in 1981, and who has since written six number one Swedish bestsellers.

Fredrik Backman

The principal character in this novel is Ove, who is impatient with and critical of everyone but the extremely patient and uncritical wife whom he adores. He grudgingly tolerates some neighbours and a cat which adopts him. His preferred adjective is ‘bloody’. Managers and other decision-makers come in for particular censure, because, for him, they are always serving some remote, uncaring system rather than the beneficiaries and customers of the system. He is extremely knowledgeable about all things mechanical, and his favourite occupation is repairing them, with cars and Saabs, in particular, a top interest. Everything, including people, should be orderly and functioning properly. At first, the reader may take a retaliatory dislike of him, but when we learn of his absolute love for his wife, and his somewhat backhanded favours for undeserving neighbours, we begin to accept him. His wife is badly injured and his unborn child is killed during a holiday trip to Spain. Every day he carries his wife to her much-loved teaching job, but she dies prematurely of cancer. To her grave, he brings fresh flowers and talks to her, getting her advice, which he can accurately foresee. He reasons he has had enough of life with its people troubles; he decides on several methods of killing himself so that he can be buried beside his wife and join her in the hereafter. In each instance, however, he is unwitting interrupted by others. When he goes to the train station to throw himself under a train, his intention is diverted by a man who falls onto the tracks and must be rescued by Ove. He unintentionally establishes a friendship with a thirty-year-old Iranian woman, her incompetent husband and her two young, troublesome daughters. When a manager who disregards local parking rules decides that Ove’s long-time enemy, who was once his close friend, should be taken away to a care home because of his dementia, Ove concocts a plan, on behalf of the patient’s greatly distressed wife to thwart the taking into care. Eventually, Ove dies having left detailed instructions for his Iranian neighbour to find and implement. There are three hundred people at Ove’s funeral, a tribute of which Ove himself would not have approved.

Mr Backman’s light-hearted writing makes it easy to smile at Ove’s obsessive attention to correctness, at the reactions of others to this correctness, and the others’ ability to understand Ove’s good intentions. The novel is a happy study of human nature from an unusual perspective.

Review: Il Pirata

On Tuesday, my wife and I went to see (and hear) Il Pirata (The Pirate) at Teatro Massimo in Palermo. I mention it because reviewing an opera has much in common with a book review. Teatro Massimo is the largest opera house in Italy

and the third largest in Europe, and as one would expect, it is not lacking in grandeur. Above the stalls there are six levels of boxes!

Il Pirata was written by Vincenzo Bellini, who was a Sicilian, but the premiere of the opera was in 1827 in Milan, because Teatro Massimo was built between 1875 and 1897.

The libretto was written in Italian by Felice Romani – with considerable involvement of Bellini – based on a three-act French melodrama, which, in turn was based on a five-act French play. The opera, however, is in two acts.

For those of you opera fans, the cast we heard was:

Gautiero: Giorgio Misseri

Imogene: Marta Torbidoni

Ernesto: Francesco Vultaggio

[image error]Rubini as Gaultiero in 1827

Synopsis: The pirate captain Gaultiero is shipwrecked on the territory of the Duke, Ernesto, having lost a sea battle to his old enemy the duke. Gaultiero, unaware of where he has landed, confesses his love for Imogene, who, ten years earlier, unbeknown to Gaultiero, became the duke’s wife under duress. Imogene comes to offer hospitality to the shipwrecked sailors. Gaultiero recognises her, but she does not recognise him, singing instead of her love for him. That night Gaultiero reveals his identity to Imogene and she explains that she married the duke to save her father from threatened death. Ernesto becomes suspicious of the identity of the pirate leader because of his wife’s apparent interest in him. Gaultiero manages to meet Imogene before he is permitted to depart, but he refuses to leave without Imogene, who urges him to forgive and forget. Ernesto overhears their duet and challenges his rival to a duel Ernesto is killed in the duel and the duke’s knights sentence Gaultiero to death for murder. As Gaultiero is executed Imogene seems to lose her mind.

This opera is packed with intense emotions: love and hate. The music fully supports those emotions, and while in my opinion it does not achieve the standard of Giuseppe Verdi, it is certainly very good. The voices of the three principal characters were first rate. The libretto, which was projected above the stage in both Italian and English, left out – for me – an important consideration: how did Gaultiero become a pirate? And, what’s to love about a pirate?

(As an aside, the Italian of the libretto is hardly recognisable. My wife, who is Italian, said she had to read the English version to understand what was happening. The Italian language has changed greatly in the last two hundred years.)

Fiction writers have been told: “Show, don’t Tell!”. In opera, generally, and in this one in particular there is a lot of showing: in the demonstrative body language used by the characters – the acting was excellent – and in the powerful orchestral music. This showing reinforced the emotive language of the libretto.

Two essentials of fiction were missing from this opera: a setting, and in-depth characterisation. The ‘sets’ were extremely minimal. There were only two scenes; one for each act, instead of the six scenes in the libretto. One didn’t have the feeling if ‘being there’. The costumes were late 20th century street wear, in some cases altered to show the effect of shipwreck and battle. Imogene didn’t resemble a duchess, and Gaultiero didn’t look much like a pirate. I’m sure these omissions represented real savings for the producers, particularly as the opera was staged for only three nights.

Still, it was a very enjoyable evening.