Andrew Fish's Blog, page 2

Dialogue Coach

Ey up, just want t'say few words about dialect in t'writing. No, that's not some monster outta Doctor Who. That there's Dalek. Dialect is speaking, like, only like normal folk do it, like.

There's no doubt that dialogue is one of the key elements to master as a writer. It can be one of the most difficult; it's frequently one of the most overlooked, but it can also be one of the most enjoyable. When characters speak they don't just share information with the reader, they provide a degree of understanding of themselves as characters. Get their voice wrong and you break the illusion. Get it right and you add to the pleasure of getting to know them for the reader as well as yourself. As a comedy writer, of course, it's easy to consider such characterisation as important, but for the serious writer too there are things to consider.

Firstly, it's about what your characters say. I recently read a book in which a key character was continually described as being enigmatic. The word appeared almost every time he did, like a lingering bad smell. The overuse of the word bugged me a bit (these things do when you're a writer), but not quite so much as the fact that the character spent most of his dialogue expositing. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but a defining feature of enigmatic people is that they tend not to tell you much. An enigmatic character would be a character of few words - secretive, shady.

But you can see how the mistake was made: the central character of the book was, as is so often the case, a newcomer to the world. The world itself had complex elements that needed to be understood, as well as a back-story to be revealed, and the enigma was the only character on the inside in which the author had a great deal invested. The job, therefore, fell to him. The author could have created another character to serve as a guide, or even allowed the central character to find things out for himself, but they should have used the enigma only occasionally and, rather than referring to him as enigmatic, made his words (or lack of them) speak for themselves. Being fond of one of your creations is fine, but there are inherent dangers in overusing characters who are defined by a limited range of characteristics. Ford Prefect's malformed public duty gland would be hard to sustain if you made him the central character in a Hitch-hiker's book. Jeeves would be a lot less the deus ex machina if he were more the focus than Wooster.

Expositing is one of the more common problems which authors face in dialogue. There's always a certain amount of information to get across to the reader. If the central character is an insider you can do a certain amount of this in their internal narrative, but when the character is an outsider, or when there are people in the world who have key parts of information which need to be discovered rather than known by the central character, dialogue is often the easiest way to get them out there. The trouble is it can feel a bit clunky when one of your characters effectively makes a speech to tell the reader what they need to know. Most of the time it's not how people speak.

'That's Perkins,' said the barrister. 'He's been up in front of the judge fifteen times over the last ten years, every time for a minor offence. Four shoplifting cases, five petty thefts, three assaults, an aggravated burglary and now murder. He had a troubled childhood - father died when he was three - and he lived with a dominating mother and three sisters. All the standard ingredients for a case like this.'

'And do you know his inside leg measurement?'

Jeffrey Archer does this all the time.

Probably the worst genre for expositing is science-fiction. A book set in our world can assume the reader understands a certain amount of what's going on - you don't need to explain the concept of the staircase, for example - but in science-fiction, the ascendotron might not be so obvious. Unfortunately, if the characters are all of the world in question, this presents a problem: in the same way you wouldn't expect characters in a regular book to discuss the nature of the chair or the water cooler, it cannot be right for sci-fi characters to discuss the furniture of their world as if it were a novelty - unless it's important to the plot that it is a novelty, of course. Having an outsider or having inventions as new or unusual would get you out of some fixes, but you can't do that every time. This is particularly true in a series: Perkins the off-worlder can be expected to not understand a few of the novelties of the big planet on his first visit, but three years in when he asks for an explanation of the pschyo-phone it won't just be the other characters who think he's stupid.

You could make your life easier by limiting the differences between your world and ours, but sci-fi wouldn't be sci-fi if it was just a room with a view of a quantum phasomatic. You want your world to feel different and that means gadgets, slang, entire ways of life will be different. Some of this will need to be explained to the reader. If you're writing for radio that either means a narrator or dialogue where characters are introduced to the niceties of life (unless they're obvious in context), but for a novel you can reserve the explanations for narrative passages. That's not to say nothing should appear in dialogue, but if Perkins should already know about it, don't tell him.

Once you've established what your characters should say, you need to consider how they should say it. It's no good describing your character as a rough diamond if he talks like a newsreader. Similarly, a character who is set up to be hesitant or nervous is hardly going to speak in long, coherent sentences. If Perkins is a serial criminal you have to ask yourself if he is a Moriaty or a thug. A Moriaty would speak in faux-intellectual over-dramatic stylised tones (aha, Mr Barnes, but how do you know my cane is not actually tipped with a rare snake venom?) where the thug would be blunt and to the point (you try it with me, Barnes and I'll stick ya). Both, however, would disregard the strict rules of English the writer strives to apply to narrative (albeit with varying regularity). Even posh people don't always talk proper.

So far, of course, all of this has applied to how the individual character speaks. The art of conversation, in art as much as life, also depends on knowing when not to speak. Whilst having Perkins explain his scheme for world domination in a single uninterrupted soliloquy might be very efficient use of time, in practice his henchmen are bound to need explanations, clarifications - or simply to ask to be excused to go to the toilet. His henchmen don't, after all, have his intelligence. Although they may have his bladder control. Real conversation has a bit of back and forth, and whilst there are occasions when a character should be seen to lecture, most of the time it just comes across as amateur.

Continuous monologue also robs a writer of a key tool in establishing a character - their physicality. How a character moves, their facial ticks and involuntary physical reactions can open a window on the soul in a way which they would never deliberately reveal in words. If Perkins steeples his hands in anticipation of something particularly devilish, raises an eyebrow when being sly or bangs the table when feeling aggrieved these are all things which add to his characterisation. Someone who simply talks uninterrupted might as well be a ventriloquist's dummy for all the personality they exhibit (and gat's gen I conquer the girld).

Finally, we return to where we came in - dialect. As a writer I pay a great deal of attention to the way people around me speak. Whether it's the slang and the malaprops which an individual consciously adopts to mark themselves out, or the subtle linguistic traces which come from a regional or non-English upbringing, it's all grist to my mill and ink to my pen. For a comedy writer, there's a certain joy in exaggerating these nuances, but even for the serious writer there can be a great deal to gain by giving thought to the subtle tics of a character's speech. Sometimes it helps to enrich the role of a minor character, sometimes it allows you to dispense with dialogue tags or background information, but mostly it helps to reinforce the breadth of your world. Would Die Hard have been a better movie if Gruber was played as an Englishman rather than simply by an Englishman? Of course not. Could Scott have written Rob Roy with a cast seemingly from the Home Counties? Hardly. And likewise if Perkins had the slightly staccato delivery of a white South African or the awkward conjugations of an English-speaking Russian it might add a layer to his performance that implied a background the writer needn't then fill in.

Sometimes I cut an odd figure when I'm writing. I'll type for a bit, then I'll sit back from the keyboard, gesturing and reciting, getting under the skin of a character in a manner reminiscent of a character actor. Because that's what writing is - a performance: a poor script might be improved by the introduction of suitable actors to bring their talents to the roles, but a poor novel has only the reader to interpret it. It therefore falls to the writer to elevate the performance of their characters, to bring life to creatures who exist only in ink and paper and imagination. Dialogue is a key part of this performance and one an author overlooks at his peril.

To Whom It May Concern

One of the common themes of literary debate is the question of whether a writer should write purely for the love of their art or for commercial reasons. "Do you write for yourself or your readers?" one forum thread asks. "Should I self-publish or hold out for acceptance?" asks another. There seems to be almost a feeling of guilt at the idea that an author could - shock, horror - be interested in earning money for what you might imagine is the baring of their soul.

In my own little corner, I have drawn a distinction between what I call literarists and monetarists - people who love to write and people who love the idea of being a bestseller. Add to this a new definition - the purist. The purist is the writer who recoils from the very idea of making money. These can be people who write for the love of "their art" - which generally means to be able to show off to their friends, or simply those who are afraid of being regarded as monetarists. The debates will mostly be framed by the latter - people who harbour urges to be literary successes but who aren't sure whether this is somehow unclean.

For my own part, I am not a purist. I take the view that there's nothing wrong with an author wanting to make money by doing something they enjoy. After all, if they can do well enough to become a full-time writer it will liberate them from wage-slavery and give them time to write even more. That's when you can write those books you know you'd never dream of releasing: sequels to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Shakespearean tragedies about the decline of Tony Blair - you know the kind of thing. This is wildly different from a monetarist, someone whose only interest in writing is as a path to fame and fortune. As with all things it's not a black and white issue: there is a whole spectrum of literary mindset from those who write for cathartic reasons with no interest in publication right through to those who pay someone else to ghost-write so that nobody will think they are illiterate (a hopeless ploy that depends on people being stupid enough to believe they wrote their own work). I believe that the motivation is all important: things written to strut as art will lack soul as much as things written purely for monetary gain.

So where is the line drawn? How do you write a book that preserves your integrity and passion, but which won't be rejected as self-indulgent?

First off, of course is "the idea". Non-writers often view this as the only difficult thing, which is why some authors will talk of people offering them a great idea in return for half the proceeds of the resultant bestseller. The truth, of course, is that ideas are easy: we all have mad little thoughts (or at least I hope we do), but anyone who has been writing a while will have tuned their brains to recognise them when they have book potential. Sometimes you will even read someone else's book and see a different and interesting angle in something they say. The key is that a monetarist will see a successful book as a template or an indication of a market: Harry Potter was a success, ergo books about wizards are a way to make money; children's books are nice and short, so that's an easy way to retire quickly. The literarist, by contrast, may - for example - see a character, say Harry's werewolf godfather, and think "what's it like to be an outcast like that? That would be an interesting story." A purist, of course, will eschew anything that smacks of something that has gone before, which means they will deliberately seek out ideas which nobody wants to pursue: what if instead of a werewolf it was a child troubled by a fear of cucumbers in a world whose whole zeitgeist was based on phallic salad vegetables?

Once you have the idea comes the question with which I started - do you write for yourself or your readers? A monetarist will think of this in terms of ticking boxes: the audience for this book are into angst-ridden teenage vampires, so we'll make sure there's a few of those. Mentioning celebrities will get tick another box - particularly if they write something sensational enough to get newspaper coverage. The purist takes the apposite approach - deliberately trying to ignore any concern for who might read the book, maybe even trying to "defy convention", considering a limited audience as evidence of artistic merit.

Our pragmatic literarist, meanwhile, can't afford to think like either. You have to have some idea of who might read your books, because you can't start by writing a book to appeal to fans of Enid Blyton and then include a sex scene or writing a book which would appeal to housewives and then having a pastiche of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the third chapter. But equally, simply ticking boxes means you end up writing things in which you have no emotional involvement. Knowing who your audience are allows you to filter your content, both in terms of defining boundaries of taste and in terms of pitching metaphors, cultural references and language. Your passions should define what you write, your audience should define what you don't.

Another element of writing in which having a conceptual audience matters is the sequel. I've already written about whether series are in themselves good or bad, but one thing is certain - if you wrote the first book for a particular audience, the second needs to be written for the same people. There is a form of angst amongst writers who fear being hemmed into a corner with their writing (another reason some write purely for pleasure). It is easy to feel that if you have a successful book, you are now bound to write all future works for the same audience. This is not necessarily true: whilst there will be a demand to write more for a receptive audience it doesn't follow that books outside that series (or oeuvre if the relationship is looser) have to be for the same people. As long as the "brands" are clearly distinguished, whether by different cover art styles, labelling or even a different author name, there's no reason an author shouldn't write different books for different people. Publishers may buck, but there's always another publisher if one isn't interested.

And that brings us to the last part of the debate about writing for cash - getting the book out there. Some authors see the sometimes soul-destroying process of trying to secure agents and publishers as a bridge too far. This, they say, is the point at which art dies. The compromises required to get a book past the gatekeepers of industry are the final act of an author selling out.
But it doesn't need to be like that: agents and publishers are human and can allow personal tastes to cloud their judgement, but they also have valuable experience you'd be a fool not to take into consideration. The important thing is to be able to tell the two apart: so, if they suggest your bisexual lisping vampire shouldn't be bisexual to avoid alienating readers, that might be something on which you stand your ground. If they say the lisping makes the dialogue hard to read, however, that's something that might be worth thinking about. And if they say his continual references to his Armani sealskin coat is likely to lead to a lawsuit, that's something you should just accept. You use your own judgement in filtering theirs - you needn't accept everything that is said. Where it is difficult is when rejection is without reason - or at least without a given reason: the dreaded rejection slip has driven many to despair. Here the author has literally no clue as to why they have been turned down, and it is this that leads many to consider alternatives.

There is self-publishing, of course, and the advent of eBooks has led to a shift in attitudes toward going it alone. Many authors who would have eschewed vanity publishing in the age of print see its digital equivalent as a liberation - an escape from big business, rather than an admission of defeat. In the past it was only the purists who thought self-publishing was noble in itself - a way to put their books in the hands of their circle without exposing it to the wider world - but these days it's sometimes a fall-back for an author who is tired of rejection, sometimes a first choice for an author who fears rejection or simply wants to play the game their own way.

However, it could be argued that, far from avoiding monetarism, self-publishing is embracing it. To be determined to put a book out there, convinced of its ability to find an audience and become a bestseller, certain that the industry doesn't know a good thing when it sees it, that is the attitude of someone who is determined to seek literary success without necessarily having literary talent. How often, as a writer, do you find people who assume what you do is easy? Who say they'll probably put a book out themselves when they get round to it? Most of them will never even write a book, but those who do are frequently those who end up self-publishing out of sheer determination to make money. The literarist is frequently far less bullish, far more likely to give up with the book that has been rejected and turn to the next one, hoping this will be the one which will break through. Publishers can be wrong, but that doesn't mean authors are always right. If you're a purist, of course, you don't care; if you're a monetarist you should listen very carefully. And it shouldn't be forgotten that if you do see the option to go it alone as an easy way to avoid rejection you're fooling nobody but yourself. Because going it alone means doing all the marketing work, all the distribution and all the publicity yourself. You can just pop the book on Amazon and do no promotion at all, but don't be surprised if the sales figures reflect the lack of effort. Books rarely find their audience without help.

Our outlook as writers is always going to shape the way we write, publish and promote our books. What's important is that we are honest about our intentions - not to other people, but to ourselves. A writer who pretends to noble aspirations because they don't like the idea they're writing for money will make decisions that make it less likely they'll ever earn any. If, like most authors, you see writing as a dream job, you need to keep an audience in mind - they are the people who will be paying your salary. If you're not interested in writing, but want the money... well, there's little advice to be offered. You might be lucky and write a book that captures a mood, or one so bad people buy it out of curiosity, but it's more likely you'll write something mediocre that people ignore in droves. Taking a job for the wrong reasons is rarely the path to happiness any more than writing to prove how clever you are is a path to goodhood.

The Love of Text

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in search of a literary career must be a lover of language.

Alright, maybe not universally acknowledged - there are many out there whose priorities are fame, fortune, or simply not having to work for someone else - but for those of us who only see bestsellerdom as providing the security for us to write without let or hindrance, the love of language is a defining part of our make-up.

I recently read a wonderful book called The Etymologicon - an exploration of the interrelations between various English words. It's the kind of book which can sometimes be surprisingly successful, but which more often than not leaves non-writers cold. The volume of the derivations of English placenames sitting on my bookshelf at home was far less popular. I suspect also that another recent acquisition - The Story of English in 100 Words - will have a smaller audience.

Why should this be so? Well it's actually largely because of the way The Etymologicon is executed. The book doesn't simply explain etymology, it plays with it, finding humorous little links and amusing asides as it goes through the language. It's like the difference between reading Ayckbourn's The Craft Art of Playwriting (another one on my shelf) and going to see a production of Improbable Fiction. It's a celebration as much as an explanation of language, a literarist speaking to fellow literarists but in language which engages the lay-reader.

Literarists, I should explain, are those who enjoy the craft of language. They are writers like myself who take pleasure in accumulating little fragments of knowledge, turns of phrase, snippets of poetry and playing with them. They may use them in their books, paraphrasing and twisting them to deliver a witty epithet or a resonant description, they may use them in everyday conversation. They may never use them at all - they take enough joy in the discovery to make the effort worth its while. To an outsider this may seem odd, but this is much as with other crafts: we may not understand why a chef obsesses about Madagascan vanilla, but we enjoy the pannacotta in which it sees use.

And it is this consumptive appreciation - the fact the lay-consumer can appreciate the effort that goes into our literary pannacotta without caring a great deal for the detail - which makes writing the basis for a career. If everyone was a literarist, we'd all keep ourselves amused, possibly even swap literary doodles, but none of us would think to sell our work, much less buy that of others. It is the uneven distribution of the literarist gene which makes writing lucrative - at least in potentia. And that is why it attracts the monetarists.

Monetarists, in this context, are not people who believe in a creed of economics revolving around money supply. They are, rather, people who see the gold in tham thar hills and want to go fetch them a shovel. They don't care about being literary - they may not be too worried about being literate - but they are convinced that writing must be easy and that if they can produce one, huge-selling book, be it the next "Fifty Shades of Gray" or "The Da Vinci Code" - the actual book doesn't matter to them or us - they will then be able to retire on the proceeds. They need never look at another ghastly word again (apart from such phrases as "I promise to pay the bearer on demand", of course).

Unfortunately, sometimes they succeed. The number of people I've heard saying they bought some book or other just to see if it was as terrible as they'd heard is frightening. It's almost tempting to write a deliberately bad book just to become successful enough to have the time to write the good ones. Almost. Because a literarist can't do that: we are the people who fret about whether it is better to have loved and lost than to have been first besotted and then bereft; whether tis nobler in the mind's eye to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or better to face the armoured might of mishap. In short, we care about what we produce. We wouldn't be who we were if we didn't.

And this is why literature will endure. There's a lot of fear out there at the moment: fear that the opening up of the market represented by electronic books will spell the end for literary fiction. But there was the same fear when paperbacks were introduced, when pulp fiction was born and when first cinema and then television produced easy entertainment for mass consumption. The mistake is to assume that literary necessarily means highbrow or niche or that the great unwashed, faced with the choice, will always opt for the Muller-Light over the pannacotta.

It isn't true.

Most readers can tell the difference between a well-produced labour of love and a cheap cash-cow (if not a cheap cash-horse). People who love to write for its own sake aren't going to stop just because more people can get their unfiltered rubbish to an audience. Even if the monetarists were to decide there was more mileage in appearing to be literary, they would still lack the years of assimilation on which literarists draw. Only by dense research (which they would decry in the name of a fast buck) or by stealing from the opposition (which would appear pastiche) could they approach the mark.

Let's make it clear, when I talk about literarists I'm not talking about literary snobs. People who want to subtly mirror Dante's circles of Hell in order to show their pretentious friends how clever they are have never been mass-market successes and never will be. Electronic books make little or no difference when your audience is largely comprised of people who buy your books to be seen to own them. These are not people who love language for its own sake - they are people who love language for what it says about them.

No, the people I'm talking about are the modern successors to Waugh, Wodehouse and Dickens. These are people who love language, but who don't see writing for the people as beneath them. These people will always have a market. They might not outsell a Da Vinci Code (marketing still makes the world go round), but that's not what it's all about. Because whilst a literarist doesn't shun earthly wealth they do want to make a living. Making a living from writing is about freedom: the freedom to divide time between consuming and producing literature, between writing for public and personal consumption. And, for the literarist, it's that freedom which really matters.

You Scratch My Book

Recently, a furore has broken out in the press: a secret fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting public, undiscovered by the masses for years, possibly even decades, has finally been exposed and attracted universal condemnation. No, I'm not talking about the equine offal discovered in a seemingly never-ending amount of supermarket produce (personally I'm waiting for the horse-hair toothbrush story to come out), but the amount of bovine waste product in an unspecified number of book reviews. Sock-puppeting, as the phenomenon is curiously known, is apparently rife: authors pretend to be other people in order to review their own books; they put their friends up to posting positive reviews; sometimes they are even encouraged by publishers or agents to post positive reviews of others with the same imprint or representation. It's getting to the point you can't trust anything on Amazon beyond the title and ISBN.

All of this is enough to give any conscientious author something of a moral hernia. Because, if you're an unknown writer struggling to make your book visible to the wider populace, wouldn't asking friends and colleagues to review your book be the most natural thing in the world? After all, whilst people often claim not to be swayed by reviews, a book which nobody appears to have anything to say about tends to attract purchasers in much the same way as a Findus lasagne attracts horse lovers with a desire for genuine Italian food - that is, not at all.

To be fair, it's not unreasonable to believe that readers can tell the difference between the genuine and the fake. This isn't about differentiating between one brown chewy fatty disc and another, after all. It would take a tremendous amount of effort for an author to generate vast numbers of positive reviews without falling into the trap of repeating structure and phrasing, or looking like someone with a copy of Roget's Thesaurus they're desperate to make use of. Not that some people wouldn't make the effort, but if they're not a good enough writer to produce a book that stands on its own merits, they're hardly likely to be masters of language enough to produce a wide variety of well-crafted reviews. They could ask their friends, which would be harder to spot, but unless the author had persuaded them to read the book first, these would also likely be littered with seeded phrases or just vague to the point they could be about almost anything.

Not that this is much reassurance to the honest author. The honest author can be a paranoid character, constantly looking for any reason why they should fail. For these authors, the concern is not so much the moral hazard of whether their actions constitute sock-puppeting as whether their reviews appear to be provided by said puppets to the lay reader. Once the idea is out there that people fake reviews, why should not the reader assume their reviews are so faked? And this leads to some odd thoughts, such as that a negative review is not something to be feared but proof positive that at least some of the reviews are genuine. But how many? Why should a reader assume that because one negative review is genuine - if, indeed, it is (sock puppeting also involving negative reviews of rivals) - the positive ones aren't still fake? If it was that simple, the cunning fraudster need only ensure a few negative reviews to get away scot-free.

The truth is that there's not much you can do to prevent cynics believing you're up to something - that's what cynics are like. In the same way that nobody with a fixed view of Tesco is going to believe they either didn't know or weren't in some way responsible for their dodgy beef burgers (and that Ocado or Waitrose would never do such a thing - even if they stock the self-same brand) some people will always assume that authors, particularly independent or small-press authors, are corrupt. There's nothing you can do to persuade them otherwise. That's not to say you should just decide to be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb and do as the cynics expect. What you should do is try to behave in a morally defensible manner and hope that most people believe you to be honest. Does that mean you don't ask friends for reviews? Not at all. If your friends have genuinely read and enjoyed your book, why shouldn't they be allowed to express an opinion? You can ask them to read the book, you can even ask them to review it. As long as you don't tell them what to say, or give them the impression you want them to be anything less than honest there's nothing wrong with having someone you know contribute a few words about your opus.

And the same approach holds true for reciprocal reviews. If you're asked to provide a review for someone in exchange for them doing the same for your book, it's not wrong to agree. What would be wrong would be to write a dishonest positive review in the hope of getting one back. If you liked the book it's all well and good, but if you didn't, by all means defend the friendship by not providing a review, but don't write what you don't believe. In fact, if you feel that although you didn't like the book your issues could be a matter of personal taste, write a constructive criticism: most people don't assume everyone shares their taste and look beyond the star rating when considering a purchase. If what you don't like about a book endears it to another reader you might even be doing the author a favour.

In the end, the people most likely to scream foul if they think an author isn't playing fair are other authors. Readers might be annoyed if the reviews of a book don't reflect their own views, but they have to feel particularly cheated to stick their heads above the parapet and shout about it. As with the burgers and lasagnes, most people will simply avoid the tainted brand. And because, in contrast with the average food product, most authors do go on to produce new and improved work; because few authors can retire after one book (and real authors don't want to anyway) it's important that readers aren't left with a suspicious taste in the mouth. A reader who comes away with a feeling that a book was OK, but not fantastic, may give the author a second chance if they hear good things about a later work. A reader who feels cheated will likely not. An author who wants to succeed would therefore be better employed working on their craft than trying to perfect the art of the fake review.

Serial Offender

It's an open secret that Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is the first in a series following the titular time-traveller, but was it ever thus and should authors be aiming to canonize their work in this fashion? Are series any more than a succession of reheated souffles?

When you look back across the literary landscape of the last hundred years it is clear that series dominate. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings to The Hitch-hiker's Guide, the characters which define eras have all been those who have taken multiple outings. If you go back further, even Shakespeare wrote a series: Henry IV part 1 was followed by Henry IV part 2 and then Falstaff was given his own spin-off adventure in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The attractions of a series to an author are obvious. Quite apart from the ease of picking up readily created characters, the brand recognition which goes with a successful world or character is frequently far more potent than the brand recognition which goes with the author. It's why Arthur Conan Doyle got so frustrated that he attempted to condemn Sherlock Holmes to death, and why fan pressure ensured the sentence was commuted. Some authors also see a guarantee of future sales in using plot-hooks - cliff-hangers and subtexts which make readers interested in continuing their adventures. Whilst it's easy to see that Harry Potter would have done well on the basis of self-contained stories, it was the overarching plot about the battle with Voldermort that ensured readers bought the whole series instead of just those with the more interesting plots.

That's not to say the benefits are all one-way: readers invest in the characters in a good novel too. Not as much as the writers, but the emotional attachments a reader forms are psychologically very similar to friendships. And much as you wouldn't ditch a friend and find another as soon as they'd run out of anecdotes about their lives, you feel an impulse to spend more time with characters you've grown to love. Sometimes that familiarity can have rewards, when an author uses a character trait or even a character sparingly, the occasional nods give the reader the feeling they are part of an in-group to which casual readers cannot belong.

For detractors, however, a series is seen as a way for an author to avoid work. By repeating the structure of plots and using the same characters, producing a novel becomes an exercise in simply joining the dots. And the second outing is never as surprising or original as the first, which is why some writers also avoid writing series - to mark themselves out from the lazy authors and declare their professionalism. This could be said to be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, of course, but there are always those in any creative profession who think it's better to be right and unsuccessful than compromise and make money.

There are certain types of book where a serial is almost mandated. No author would write detective stories with a different detective in every book - what would be the point? Since the majority of the rest of the cast of a murder-mystery change every novel (if only to prevent their complete attrition over the course of a series) there is always much that is new. And whilst in murder as in romance there is a risk of telling the same story with a different cast, readers will quickly lose interest if that is indeed the case. Unless we are to suggest it is lazy for an author to write multiple books in the same genre, series would seem sometimes to be not just justified but necessary.

Personally, I'm a pragmatist. Whilst I can see the artistic reasons why an author shouldn't spend all their time with one set of characters, I see no reason why they should have a cast-iron rule to dispense with them entirely after each novel (except for their murder victims, of course). The ideas I generate for novels are hugely varied, rarely fitting in the same idiom, let alone with the same set of characters, so I've never sat down with a view to create the first volume in a series. Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow started life as Robin Who? a one-off novel about a time-travelling schoolteacher. It was only whilst writing that ideas for further Erasmus novels came to mind. But whilst it would have been easy to simply pick a list of interesting historical periods for a long-running series, I decided to work a different way: in order to avoid too much repetition, each book had to start with the plot structure, which I would then attempt to find an appropriate historical home. That way I wouldn't simply repeat the same story: elements would recur, naturally, but they would be modulated, like movements in a classical symphony, fitted to the different underlying themes and developing in complexity as the work progressed.

Meanwhile, I have written other, distinct books. Some of these have also developed lives beyond the first volume, meaning that should I get the opportunity to become a full-time writer I will be able to interleave several unrelated canons, keeping the work fresh and interesting for me, but providing the continuity that many readers crave.

Finally, note should be made of the author who has found the best of all possible worlds - by creating his own world. Terry Pratchett's Discworld is often mistaken by outsiders for a single series - a cohesive mediaeval fantasy world with wizards and dragons, imps and elves. Fans know, however, that it is many series - from the novels surrounding the witches to those following the city watch. Sometimes they cross over, bringing characters together as if in a fantasy equivalent to The Avengers Assemble. This approach has given Pratchett all the brand recognition of a series, whilst giving him the freedom to develop different ideas and different characters within it. The series has even evolved, the world technologically advancing to become almost a Victorian parody in its later installments.

Would I do the same thing? I don't think so: if you read three of my books from any three canons you'd find that not only the characters and settings differ but the rules of the comedy itself. A novel where gods walk the Earth and superheroes ply their trade would not sit easily with the more rooted, realistic comedy of Erasmus; a universe in which robots and humans come together to create music would seem somewhat out of place alongside the tales of a group of Elizabethan pirates with a psychotic foul-mouthed parrot and none of them would sit in the same universe as one where God went in for therapy, depressed at being continually mistaken for Father Christmas.

In the end, a series can be comfortable or constraining. There will be times when any author wants to go to their comfort zone - there are other times when they should quite rightly mix it up and do something different.

Sources of the Legend

I live in Robin Hood's village. Edwinstowe Church is, according to local legend, where Robin and Marion tied the knot. Given that my novel, Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow, revolves around Robin Hood, it's easy to assume the two are in some way connected and that the book was triggered by the location. It's not a bad theory, but it suffers from one minor flaw: namely that I wasn't living in Edwinstowe when I wrote it.

How much our environment influences our writing is, of course, something that varies from writer to writer. Tolkien had never been to Mordor and Adams hadn't taken lunch in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but there probably were real-world experiences which gave them some of their resonance. I've long been familiar with Sherwood, but a version of Robin Hood where his pursuits were inhibited by little wooden fences or where the Sheriff needed only to follow the signposts to get to the Major Oak would have been a different type of humour, more Python than mine. I therefore drew from a more idealised forest, stripping away the thinly wooded birchlands of the present for the denser, oakier woods that stood before. Likewise, with the current Nottingham Castle a manor house built on the site of the original mediaeval fortress, I used my experience of other, better preserved castles to inform the picture. It's rather like creating film or television - you use the best approximations you can from what's available and make the rest up on the computer.

But there were elements of the Nottinghamshire environment which informed my tale. Nottingham Castle may be history, but the rock on which it stood remains. The tanning pit, used quite graphically in one scene, is part of a tourist route through Nottingham's ancient caves.

Elsewhere I reference the Major Oak, which like Edwinstowe Church has tenuous links to the Robin Hood legend. Nobody is sure exactly how old this venerable tree is, but since the best estimates put it at between eight hundred and a thousand years old it wouldn't have been particularly impressive in the early thirteenth century - if it was there at all. I play on this in the book. I also play on the broader geography of the area. Because, for all the scorn that is heaped on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for its shaky grasp of England, there isn't a single version of Robin Hood where he doesn't escape from Nottingham Castle and pop up in the heart of Sherwood Forest a few minutes later. Given that the distance from Nottingham to the heart of Sherwood is over twenty miles, this suggests either a serious turn of speed or a slight lassitude with regard to the facts. In fact it was niggles such as these which made me think about having a time-traveller go back and find the truth in the first place. From there it was only a short leap to the idea that the truth would be - for reasons I won't reveal here - considerably different to what the legend suggests.

From such small triggers do inspirations come. We all have those moments of insight, but an author's mind is trained to recognise them and pounce on them as the seed of a book - just like a comedian's mind is trained to recognise similar ideas and use them as the basis of a joke. The real craft, of course, comes in taking that small seed - or acorn, if you will - and nurturing it to become a novel. To soak up the environment is then to clad the sapling with the autumn leaves that lend the colour and character. Sherwood may not have inspired the book, but it made it whole.

And what of Edwinstowe? Does Robin Hood's village take kindly to my treatment of their most famous visitor? There's an amusing little story I was told by a woman who once ran a local free newspaper which sums up the attitude of Robin Hood's village to Robin Hood. The story goes that it was decided to create a tapestry for the village church. Various locals suggested things they associated with the village, from Thoresby Mine to the Major Oak. It was only when the tapestry was complete they realised that nobody had suggested Robin Hood. They hastily stitched an image into a corner to finish it off. Such apathy speaks volumes - but not necessarily volumes I'd be inclined to write.

Sir Humphrey Appleby's Last Stand

In honour of the return of Yes, Prime Minister to UK screens next week, I thought I'd dust off a blog I wrote back in 2004, at a time when civil service jobs were facing the axe and student fees had just been introduced.

‘Face it Humphrey, there’s no way you can spin yourself out of this one.’

‘With respect, minister, you can’t actually spin yourself out of something at all.’

Jim Hacker eyed Bernard, his private secretary, quizzically. Life was full of mysteries – how the Department of Administrative Affairs had managed to survive successive governments without him losing his post being one of them. Somehow the whole department had become so lost in the Whitehall bureaucracy that the Prime Minister had either forgotten that it existed or had deliberately ignored its presence. Jim had a brief memory of having become Prime Minister himself, but Sir Humphrey had insisted that this was nothing more than a bad dream, although he failed to specify for whom the dream had been bad – he could scarcely have done a worse job than the current incumbent. Of all life’s mysteries, however, the most immediately pressing was how Bernard always managed to find something to pick out from even the most innocuous remarks – or was it inconspicuous? – never mind, he just wouldn’t use the word in conversation.

He allowed his eyebrow to raise a quarter inch, an action that, in their long association, Bernard had learned to take as a signal that he should make a more complete explanation.

‘It’s just that if you spin you just go round and round,’ Bernard went on, making circular motions with his right hand. ‘You’d need to spiral to actually move to somewhere else.’

Jim’s eyebrows assumed the disappointed pose, a signal which Bernard seemed not to have learnt.

‘The fact remains,’ he continued, ‘that this time Sir Humphrey has lost.’

‘Lost, minister?’ Sir Humphrey stood in front of Jim’s desk, a folio of papers held tightly to his immaculately tailored, pin-striped suit.

‘Yes, there are going to be significant lay-offs throughout the Civil Service.’

‘I hardly think that is likely, minister.’

‘It’s been announced, Humphrey. The Chancellor made a public statement yesterday.’

‘Announcements aren’t statements of fact, minister, they are simply an indication of a minister’s desires. You’ll recall that our Prime Minister promised not to introduce top up fees for university students.’

‘Education, education, education,’ said Jim.

‘A most sophisticated slogan, minister,’ said Humphrey, with barely concealed sarcasm.

‘It wasn’t mine,’ Jim defended himself. ‘I wouldn’t come up with something like that.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Humphrey, ‘and yet, here we are a mere seven years later, putting through the paperwork that will bring in the very student fees we were told would not be imposed.’

‘Times change,’ said Jim. ‘University degrees don’t grow on trees, you know.’

‘Actually the certificates are made of paper,’ Bernard interrupted.

Jim ignored him. ‘Laying off civil servants is an entirely different matter,’ he continued. ‘It’s something that will be seen through and the public will appreciate that the saving will help to improve their public services.’

‘Without the Civil Service there will be no public services,’ said Humphrey.

‘That’s not how the public will see it.’

‘But that’s because the public don’t know what we do.’

Jim smiled. ‘You know something, Humphrey,’ he said, ‘in the twenty-odd years I’ve been here, I don’t think I’ve ever worked out what you do either.’

Humphrey looked offended. ‘We facilitate and administrate, minister,’ he said coldly.

‘Yes, but what do you actually do?’

‘Facilitate and administrate,’ repeated Humphrey.

‘It’s no good repeating your mantra at me,’ said Jim. ‘I know what you say you do, but I mean, what would happen if you didn’t do what you do? Would the country stop working? Would the hospitals stop healing or the schools stop teaching?’

‘Not immediately, minister, no,’ Humphrey conceded, ‘but they would suffer impediments due to the lack of administration and facilitation. Administration and facilitation are vitally important.’

His voice seemed to have a strained quality and Jim turned his head and eyed the man cynically. ‘What’s the matter, Humphrey?’ he asked. ‘Why does it worry you so much about these lay-offs? Is your name on the list?’

‘No, minister.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘It’s not just the redundancies, minister, there are also talks of relocations.’

‘You mean moving departments out of London?’

‘Yes, minister.’

‘Well, I can’t see a problem with that,’ said Jim. ‘Spreads the public sector jobs around a bit, helps relieve the commuter congestion.’

‘This department is one of those being relocated,’ said Humphrey.

Jim shrugged. ‘What of it?’ he asked.

‘We won’t be near to government. How can we be expected to work efficiently when our lines of communication are cut off?’

‘Our lines of communication won’t be cut off,’ Jim corrected him. ‘This is the twenty-first century, we have email…’

‘We also have spam, hackers and viruses.’

‘We’ve got telephones.’

‘Operated by privatised corporations.’

‘We’ve got the postal service.’

‘Yes.’ Sir Humphrey’s tone conveyed the kind of tired admission that is usually associated with admitting ownership of a particularly unruly child.

Jim picked up the tone and made no attempt to defend the point. ‘Carrier pigeons?’ he suggested with a crooked smile.

Humphrey raised an eyebrow.

Jim leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s not as if we’ll be at the end of the Earth,’ he said.

‘The Earth hasn’t got…’

‘Bernard!’

‘Sorry, minister.’

‘I mean, we’ll still be in England, won’t we? It’s not as if they’re moving the department out to India, is it?’

Humphrey said nothing. Jim gave him a worried look. ‘Is it?’ he asked.

‘No, minister.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘They’re sending us to Leeds, minister.’

‘To Leeds?’

‘Yes, minister.’

Jim leapt up from his seat, banging his left knee in the process. ‘Why didn’t you say?’ he demanded, hobbling around the room. ‘We can’t afford to be moved to Leeds – we’d be out of touch, away from the heart of government.’

‘Yes, minister,’ agreed Humphrey.

‘The Chancellor’s moves have to be stopped.’

‘Yes, minister.’

Jim paused in his limping. ‘I suppose he might not be planning to actually do anything,’ he said. ‘This could be just another one of those statements of policy, couldn’t it?’

‘They’ve already passed the necessary paperwork to us, minister,’ said Humphrey.

‘You mean we’re having to administrate our own relocation?’

‘We are here to administrate and facilitate, minister. Who else is there?’

‘Quite.’ Jim sat back down, a look of intense concentration on his face. ‘I suppose this paperwork will take quite a while to process, won’t it?’

‘There is rather a lot of it, minister.’

‘And there’s always the danger that, in a large bureaucracy, some of it will go missing.’

‘Indubitably, minister.’

‘So, if a relocation order were, say, to be lost, it wouldn’t be economical to spend time and resources looking for it, would it?’

‘No, minister.’

Jim nodded. ‘I think we’re both on the same page, Humphrey,’ he said. ‘I trust that I can leave things up to you.’

Humphrey smiled warmly. ‘Yes, minister,’ he said.

Mythmaking

A few nights ago we were watching one of those shows where a celebrity goes round the country and pretends not to have visited places before. You know the kind of thing – the kind that makes you pull a website and check hotel prices. Anyway, this particular show was in our patch – much to the relief of our bank manager. The credulous celebrity took the viewers across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, including a visit to Chesterfield where they looked at the crooked spire of St Mary’s and All Saints church. The sight might not have made us want to go on holiday, but allegedly it drew in Edwardian tourists by the bucket-load, which is why it was included in a commercially available photo album of the day. So far, so straightforward. But the programme went further and started looking at the mystery of why the church spire became crooked. There were no definite theories – unseasoned wood was about the best they could manage – but one thing they completely debunked was what my wife, who was educated in Derbyshire, was taught at school. Back then they were told that the spire had been partially melted by an incendiary bomb during the Second World War. A perfectly reasonable theory – but not if it was already drawing tourists before a single shot was fired. Clearly, my wife had been sold a pup.

Now I’m not a local myself, but this prompted me to scurry onto the Internet to look for corroboration. Not because my wife is one of those the moon landing was faked types, but simply because it intrigued me that a myth could get started a mere few decades after the events it claimed to represent and then have such a great deal of traction. But the Internet, despite its reputation for disseminating and prolonging myths, drew a blank. Had the Internet been extant when my wife was at school, I suspect it would have been a different story – or at least a more widely disseminated version of the same story.

Now you may be asking yourself at this point whether I’m going anywhere with this. The answer is yes, because of course Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is a story about myths. In particular it is a story about the myth of Robin Hood and one man’s quest to establish the truth of it. Because the myth of Robin Hood is fascinating, not because of the stories themselves but because – unlike the other great British myth, King Arthur – it is a thoroughly anti-establishment myth. And in an age where writing was largely the province of the nobility and the clergy, it tells a story which aims squarely at both.



Of course we know how this happened: whether or not there is a kernel of truth within the myth, the stories themselves were first delivered as ballads – songs or rhymes performed to the people on festive occasions. Some therefore see Robin as an embodiment of The Green Man and Marian as The Queen of May because these characters were very much part of those festival traditions. Whether real or fabricated, the stories would have been adapted to their audiences as they were performed. People would have heard the tales set, not in Sherwood Forest – of which they may not have heard – but somewhere closer to home. This is why there is a conflicting tradition which places Robin Hood in Yorkshire and why there are Robin Hood related landmarks across the country. When the printing press was invented, however, writers began to gather the folk tales together, and perhaps because the major seats of learning – Oxford and Cambridge – were closest to the East Midlands the Sherwood version of the legend came to dominate, with the Sheriff of Nottingham and King John cast as the villains of the piece. There have been more recent attempts to set the legend elsewhere and elsewhen – including a fairly credible attempt to set it in the time after the Norman Conquest, when we know Hereward the Wake served a very similar role – but apart from a few superficial elements such as the Robin Hood look established by Hollywood and the connection to the Crusades established by more recent film versions, the story has proved remarkably resistant to change. Yorkshire, whatever the history, has lost the mythology.



And this means that there is hope for that myth about St Mary’s Chesterfield. Because the truth is little more than theory and considerably less interesting than the myth and because, in years to come, the documentary evidence may yet be buried under the digital mass of half-truths that is the Internet; because most people outside the East Midlands have barely heard of Chesterfield, let alone the crooked spire; because of all these things, it is entirely possible for some spinner of tales to come forward and propagate the myth in a best-selling novel and make it simply more attractive than the truth. It could happen. And maybe then people really will go to Chesterfield to look at that spire, because that’s another myth: most people who pass through Chesterfield aren’t looking for twisted architecture – they’re heading for the Peak District.

What's in a Name?

First off, Happy New Year everybody. Now is the time for men to make their resolutions (women don’t need to, of course) and promptly to break them. I don’t do any of that stuff, of course, but I thought I’d try – if not resolve – to find some time for a little bit of thoughtful blogging this year. I can’t guarantee to deliver an article every week, but we’ll see how we get on. In a crunch, the books will always take priority.

So let’s start by looking at the origins of Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow. Authors are always asked where they get their ideas from. Most of the time this results in a vague, even flippant answer, largely because authors don’t really know themselves. Some may even be afraid that to speak of their fonts of inspiration would be to lay them open to any passing misfit with dreams of literary stardom. I have no such fears, because I know the source of my ideas is the rather odd way my brain works, the way it absorbs a great deal of unrelated information and latches it together in unexpected fashions. Nobody is going to be able to use that to usurp my literary camp chair (I don’t merit a throne at this point) without an MRI scanner and a research grant larger than the likely proceeds of any ensuing book.

That’s the general source of ideas: asked about specific books, most authors are more lucid. Ask for the origins of character x or plot y and the author will happily wheel out the time-honoured anecdote or the dusty old book which served as the inspiration (probably an algebra textbook). For my book, probably the most interesting question is where the central character, Erasmus Hobart, comes from. Even with the raw work done at the font (or secular equivalent) by the average middle-class family these days, it has to rate as an unusual name for a character.

As, of course, it is. There haven’t been a great many Erasmuses (Erasmusii?) in history. The most famous is probably the mediaeval philosopher, after whom the character is not named. Less well-known, but more interesting is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. I first came across him on a visit to Lichfield. It’s a beautiful place and well worth a visit. Tucked away on one of its quieter streets stands an elegant Georgian town house and it is here, in his former residence, that a museum dedicated to this unsung scientific hero is to be found.

Because Erasmus Darwin is a hero. Founder member of the Lunar Society – an eighteenth century group of thinkers, poets and other (pardon the pun) luminaries – inventor of such things as differential steering, poet, scientist and – perhaps most surprisingly – one of the first people to formulate a theory of evolution. That’s right – we all think of Charles Darwin as the man who dreamt up evolution, but his grandfather was there first and he wrote his in rhyme, a lengthy piece called The Origin of Society. The reason most of us don’t know this is not due to poetry critics, but poor timing. Erasmus Darwin’s views on evolution came at a pivotal moment in history – just before the French Revolution.

Now you may ask why a group of French proletarians with a penchant for lopping off the heads of their aristocrats would be interested in evolution. The truth is they weren’t – they didn’t know anything about Erasmus’ seminal work. But the climate of political tension created by the Reign of Terror made any idea which threatened the status quo in England dangerous. A generation of rising stars hid their light under bushels rather than be viewed as traitors to king and country. By the time the dust settled, Erasmus Darwin had died and his poem, published posthumously, was largely passed over by the masses. Had Charles Darwin not been forced to publish by news of a fellow researcher reaching the same conclusion, it is possible that The Origin of Society would have been rediscovered by the scientific establishment and that Erasmus, not his grandson, would have become the hero of biology. Perhaps the vogue for scientific poetry might have continued, making A Brief History of Time even harder to follow.

Discovering Erasmus Darwin for myself made a profound impression. How could such a man be so unknown? What could I do to redress the balance? I wasn’t going to write a history, of course, that would require far too much research, but I would honour his name by using it as the basis for the name of another thinker and inventor, the time-traveller Erasmus Hobart. Why Hobart? Well, Darwin (Charles, that is) was honoured by having a town in Australia named for him. Looking for another name on the same continent, I lighted on the capital of Tasmania. Although it also takes its name from a person, since it was only a colonial secretary, nobody remembers him. It’s also an obscure enough place name that it doesn’t sound daft (imagine calling him Erasmus Melbourne or Erasmus Adelaide by contrast). I don’t imagine it will, in itself, bring glory to Erasmus Darwin, but if asking the question leads more people to look him up it can be no bad thing.