Louise Dean's Blog, page 20

How Do I Know If My Fiction Writing is Good?

How do you tell if your writing is sweet, or whether it sucks?

 

We get word-blind. Over the course of a couple of drafts, the word blindness can get worse. You're clinging to your darlings, but the story's changed, and they're possibly no longer on point. (Our enforced reading break in between drafts, and the astringent Editing course are the citrus you need in your writing diet, but even so, it takes a lot of bad parenting to know how to treat your beloved manuscript roughly for its own good.)

WhenI read a writer's work, I evaluate it very simply. Here's how:

 1. There is nothing wrong with it. It looks clean and good. There are no typos, and the grammar is right. (Don't ever hit send to anyone before using Grammarly.) It's not backstory-heavy. It's not blighted with how he or she 'feels'. ( Ideally none of these 'she-feels a trembling-anticipation-in-the-pit-of-her-stomach wretched things are in it at all. But if you must, because you're not good with words, then no more than three times max please in the first chapter.) Each paragraph leads to the next and inevitably so.

 2. It feels real. The characters are reasonably credible, feel true to life, and are not complete arseholes from the get-go. The setting feels real too. But there are things out of place - wrong if you like - and that's how you make the rest feel even more real. Those objects - or visuals - are your way of making the reader pay attention. If you're one of my writers, you'll know the value of 'dissonant' or impertinent detail. It doesn't have to be clever, it has to stand out. I often cite the yellow washing up gloves in the opening of Normal People by Sally Rooney as a good example of this. Using this technique assists the enfolding and immersive quality of the prose. Readers are inside it! They're living it!

 3. There is a sense of urgency. There is an enticing, alluring sense of foreboding, that something is wrong or going wrong, that something is about to change. In other words, the reader is needed here. The reader must attend and play their part!

Quite simply, that's pretty much it. Those three things. Tick, tick, tick-tock. 

Don't let your long words get in the way of the story - the urgency. Swap long for short (Anglo-Saxon) and keep it active not passive. Remember my reader mathematics rule from previous blogs? You give the 1 + 1 but let the reader do the addition. Leave space for the reader to enter in and perform the calculation which confirms to the reader that he or she is very smart, and clearly needed here or who knows what's going to happen.

It's a surprise to me how few writers understand the value of punctuation. It's not about being 'old school' it's about using all the tools we have to communicate. I lean on my punctuation marks for effect. They're there for where words fail. 

A great tool is the space-return key. When you want to signal to your reader - go figure, you do the maths, or think about that, pal, you hit the space return to give them the nod to do so. 

Always end a sentence with your strongest suit. If you are listing a few items to make your point, make the last one sly and heavy like a rum punch.

Then having given them space to think about how sly and heavy that was, you continue.

No need for everyone to complete their spoken sentences.

"I want to tell you," she began.

Move on. (Now you've got a cliffhanger.)

Here's the writer's antidote to backstory:

Ok, so you just have to slide some in. Yes, you can get away with it - if you don't complete it. Leave the reader hanging. "Then, after all of that and  another three fabulous years in Southampton to boot, something trivial happened which changed her whole attitude to gherkins."  NOW STEP AWAY FROM THAT BACKSTORY. Leave it; just leave it. Tell us later. If you don't conclude your piece backstory, you're still writing actively and leaving breadcrumbs of story for the reader. (What changed her attitude to gherkins?) Weave backstory through your tale.

These are commercial tools, and if you're writing literary fiction, you need them more than most. Give us punctuation, and please God I beg you, give us space.

Here endeth the lemon.

I'm keeping it short and yellow and sour, so you focus and apply the three points above as you scrutinise that first chapter and score yourself out of ten on each before you share it with anyone ever again. My A* grade writers who've taken our course and are getting ready to be pitched to our literary agents, will score no less than a ten from me on each one.

Finally, here's what I do. I make the font size nice and big to fit ten words per line like in the real books. Then I scroll through my manuscript with a really good book in my left hand, and I look from one to the other and I say - is it anywhere close? If it's not, why not? I want it to be better. (That's why when it comes to novels, I've got a lot of preserved lemons in my pantry. They disappoint me, but I'll pickle them one of these days.)

For now, let's focus on you and making some sparkling lemonade. At The Novelry we mean business, and my aim is to get you published and make you famous. The step-change - the leap - between drafts of my writers' books makes my heart race.

 

Write a book that sells in 2020 and join us for our Book in a Year package.

Happy writing.

Louise

 

 

Is My Writing Good?

How do you tell if your writing is sweet, or whether it sucks?

We get word-blind. Over the course of a couple of drafts, the word blindness can get worse. You're clinging to your darlings, but the story's changed, and they're possibly no longer on point. (Our enforced reading break in between drafts, and the astringent Editing course are the citrus you need in your writing diet, but even so, it takes a lot of bad parenting to know how to treat your beloved manuscript roughly for its own good.)

WhenI read a writer's work, I evaluate it very simply. Here's how:

 1. There is nothing wrong with it. It looks clean and good. There are no typos, and the grammar is right. (Don't ever hit send to anyone before using Grammarly.) It's not backstory-heavy. It's not blighted with how he or she 'feels'. ( Ideally none of these 'she-feels a trembling-anticipation-in-the-pit-of-her-stomach wretched things are in it at all. But if you must, because you're not good with words, then no more than three times max please in the first chapter.) Each paragraph leads to the next and inevitably so.

 2. It feels real. The characters are reasonably credible, feel true to life, and are not complete arseholes from the get-go. The setting feels real too. But there are things out of place - wrong if you like - and that's how you make the rest feel even more real. Those objects - or visuals - are your way of making the reader pay attention. If you're one of my writers, you'll know the value of 'dissonant' or impertinent detail. It doesn't have to be clever, it has to stand out. I often cite the yellow washing up gloves in the opening of Normal People by Sally Rooney as a good example of this. Using this technique assists the enfolding and immersive quality of the prose. Readers are inside it! They're living it!

 3. There is a sense of urgency. There is an enticing, alluring sense of foreboding, that something is wrong or going wrong, that something is about to change. In other words, the reader is needed here. The reader must attend and play their part!

Quite simply, that's pretty much it. Those three things. Tick, tick, tick-tock. 

Don't let your long words get in the way of the story - the urgency. Swap long for short (Anglo-Saxon) and keep it active not passive. Remember my reader mathematics rule from previous blogs? You give the 1 + 1 but let the reader do the addition. Leave space for the reader to enter in and perform the calculation which confirms to the reader that he or she is very smart, and clearly needed here or who knows what's going to happen.

It's a surprise to me how few writers understand the value of punctuation. It's not about being 'old school' it's about using all the tools we have to communicate. I lean on my punctuation marks for effect. They're there for where words fail. 

A great tool is the space-return. When you want to signal to your reader - go figure, you do the maths, or think about that, pal, you hit the space return to give them the nod to do so. 

Always end a sentence with your strongest suit. If you are listing a few items to make your point, make the last one sly and heavy like a rum punch.

Then having given them space to think about how sly and heavy that was, you continue.

No need for everyone to complete their spoken sentences.

"I want to tell you," she began.

Move on. (Now you've got a cliffhanger.)

Here's the writer's antidote to backstory:

Ok, so you just have to slide some in. Yes, you can get away with it - if you don't complete it. Leave the reader hanging. "Then, after all of that and  another three fabulous years in Southampton to boot, something trivial happened which changed her whole attitude to gerkhins."  NOW STEP AWAY FROM THAT BACKSTORY. Leave it; just leave it. Tell us later. If you don't conclude your piece backstory, you're still writing actively and leaving breadcrumbs of story for the reader. (What changed her attitude to gherkins?) Weave backstory through your tale.

These are commercial tools, and if you're writing literary fiction, you need them more than most. Give us punctuation, and please God I beg you, give us space.

Here endeth the lemon.

I'm keeping it short and yellow and sour, so you focus and apply the three points above as you scrutinise that first chapter and score yourself out of ten on each before you share it with anyone ever again. My A* grade writers who've taken our course and are getting ready to be pitched to our literary agents, will score no less than a ten from me on each one.

Finally, here's what I do. I make the font size nice and big to fit ten words per line like in the real books. Then I scroll through my manuscript with a really good book in my left hand, and I look from one to the other and I say - is it anywhere close? If it's not, why not? I want it to be better. (That's why when it comes to novels, I've got a lot of preserved lemons in my pantry. They disappoint me, but I'll pickle them one of these days.)

For now, let's focus on you and making some sparkling lemonade. At The Novelry we mean business, and my aim is to get you published and make you famous. The step-change - the leap - between drafts of my writers' books makes my heart race.

In the next blog, I'm going to share with you how Orwell raised his game to create prose 'like a window pane'. It took him a while.

But then again, it takes quite a few years to learn how to write like a child. We're all getting there. The only ones who won't make it are the grown-ups who like their work an awful lot.

Happy writing.

 

Reminder: 

 

Finding a Literary Agent. A Writer's Journey.

A Member's Story.
From the desk of Cate Guthleben.
The Bio.
 
I was born in Broken Hill - a mining town in outback New South Wales now most famous for being where Guy Pearce gets beaten up in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I went to primary school in Canberra and Perth before my family settled in Adelaide when I was 10. I got a typewriter for my 10th birthday because I wanted to be a writer, and I have been trying to write ever since. 
 
I studied Law and English Literature at Adelaide University. On graduating I was a Tutor in Constitutional Law for 2 years then practiced as a Commercial Litigation lawyer. I met my husband at Uni and his law career took us to Sydney, where I lectured at UTS Law School and our daughter was born. Then we moved to Hong Kong where I taught Plain English to Chinese executives and our son was born. After five years in HK, we moved to London where we still live. By now completely sick of reinventing myself I abandoned my “career” and worked as a volunteer for the Victorian Society for a couple of years before doing an MA in Creative Writing at Kingston Uni. In 2017 I joined The Novelry and finally learned the secret of writing every day.
 
The Story So Far.

When thinking back over my experiences of two years with The Novelry, I have Cheryl Cole’s voice in my head saying – It’s a journey, pet. 

I have been writing and trying to write for years. I did an MA in Creative Writing in 2009 thinking it would help, and it did. A bit. I learned how to write an opening chapter, and a few to follow it. But I didn’t learn how to write a novel. I didn’t learn how to plot. It took me a year to finish the book I started on that course. I sent it to a few publishers and got positive feedback. I could write, apparently, but there wasn’t enough of a story.

I started two more novels. I could write the first three chapters of anything, but the fourth? I became stuck every time. I spent every day thinking about writing but not writing. I let it go for a while and embraced the 'Not Writing', but I couldn’t give it up. Then I saw a tiny mention in Mslexia of a new novel writing course with Louise Dean. Write a novel in ninety days. I signed up on the spot.

A new idea came to me and I embraced it. I had read an article in the newspaper about a woman with an anonymous stalker – he knew all about her, but she had no idea who he was. I remember having one brief conversation with Louise about it and she was encouraging. She even fixed my title – The Admirer. But I didn’t call her again, like a nervous squirrel, I hoarded away my free calls for when I might really need them. I was a fool.

The first three chapters oozed out like honey from a full jar. Then I hit a snag –  just as with my main character, I  didn’t know who the stalker was. Not at all. I wrote several chapters that skirted the edge of this problem and sent my protagonist spinning round in circles. I knew how it ended – why couldn’t I get there? Then I had the marvellous idea of just leaping over this enormous plot hole, and coming back later to fix it. It worked. I galloped on to the end, with a few days of my ninety days to spare. I wrote a book, and I knew I could do it again.

I feel bad that no one will ever read a word of The Admirer beyond the first two chapters I posted at our workshop at The Novelry. It begins well. The second half is, I think, more than alright. But it has a hole in its middle. It is flawed, like all its older siblings.

I put it aside for the recommended time before embarking on the second draft. In the meantime, Louise (aka 'Miss') had created the Classic Course. Everyone on it was evangelising about how life-changing it was. I wanted some of that. (Note to Miss – FOMO and The Palps - two of our catchphrases at The Novelry - seem to be keen driving forces behind the creative urge. ) I signed up to take the Classic course all at once, rather than in the daily doses. The plan was to use it to edit The Admirer. When I was about three lessons in a new idea came to me. It was shiny and seductive, like all new ideas. But it was also good. I wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

The lesson was about place as a character, about writing about somewhere unique and transporting your reader there. I’ve got one of those, I thought. A place like no other. I was born there and spent the first thirty-four years of my life there and I love it in a deep and visceral and irrational way. Finally, after a distance of over twenty years, I was ready to write about it.

The Classic course gave me the stages of my journey – a cosy start, the idea of the portal, the garden, the battle and the return. It freed me to think on a grander scale – about heroes and villains, and archetypes. I cast my characters: a child, a man of religion, a man of science, and two old women – one wise, one cruel. There would be magic and humanity and 'Big Themes'. I would write the Great Australian Novel.

And this time it would have a plot. Upfront, before I began one of our close-knit community of writers (Alex) very generously and patiently talked me through my plot.

It took me about six months to write the first draft.

I’m doing the laundry as I’m writing this and a tissue has gone through the wash (the black load, of course). It is a timely reminder that you can’t plot life in advance. Some pretty awful things happened while I was writing, but the writing was always there to for refuge and to help me make sense of it all. I wasn’t alone, either. My weekly calls with Louise got me over the hump of the middle and gave me faith in what I was trying to do. (I also have a brilliant buddy at The Novelry and a couple of 'sixth formers'  who I meet secretly behind the bike sheds for excellent critique and support.)

I finished it in January – just in time for the Full English Retreat. Romla, who hosts the retreats, is my buddy and I sat at her kitchen table making notes while she chopped and stirred and threw wacky ideas at me about what I should do in second draft. Then came third draft and another all-day session with Romla. I think it really helps that our books are completely different. We have three things in common – they are historical, told in the present tense with a close third POV. But that’s it. Hers is hilarious. Mine is not.

Louise submitted the fourth draft on my behalf in May to a handful of The Novelry’s select agents, and I accepted United Agents’ Millie Hoskins offer of representation in June.

Guess what she wanted? More plot. I went away and thought about how to do that, and spent the summer adding threat and peril and 35,000 words to my manuscript. I have never worked for so long or so hard on anything. I sent it back to Millie this week. She won’t read it until after Frankfurt so I’m on tenterhooks to see what she thinks.

I am distracting myself presently by exploring an idea that came to me in June. I didn’t have time to think about it then, but it raised its head again very insistently on the morning after I sent off Mother Country. It needs a lot of research and will take a while to write. I’m feeling my way quite slowly. I’ve bought a new The Novelry Moleskine in anticipation, but I haven’t written in it yet.

It's about Australia again. Historical – but from an earlier period. I am mining the same seam, but deeper this time. It fascinates me, and that's all I can ask for. It still won’t be the Great Australian Novel, but it will be better than Mother Country.

It’s a journey, pet.

I guess that is what keeps me going back to the blank notebook. To the empty chair in the dark room before the rest of the world is awake. The urge to explore and uncover. To drag something to the surface and say – look what I found.

The Forebears:

The photo shows Cate Guthleben's ancestors ( great-grandfather and great-grandmother).

He is Andre Guthleben, born in  1858 in Metzeral, Alsace, France. She is Agnes Inglis, born in 1860 in Nairne, South Australia. Andre travelled to Australia in 1884 - partly to escape Prussian rule in Alsace, and partly because of a broken heart. He and Agnes were married in 1895 in Pine Forest, South Australia.

A Writer's Journey.

A Member's Story.
From the desk of Cate Guthleben.
The Bio.
 
I was born in Broken Hill - a mining town in outback New South Wales now most famous for being where Guy Pearce gets beaten up in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I went to primary school in Canberra and Perth before my family settled in Adelaide when I was 10. I got a typewriter for my 10th birthday because I wanted to be a writer, and I have been trying to write ever since. 
 
I studied Law and English Literature at Adelaide University. On graduating I was a Tutor in Constitutional Law for 2 years then practiced as a Commercial Litigation lawyer. I met my husband at Uni and his law career took us to Sydney, where I lectured at UTS Law School and our daughter was born. Then we moved to Hong Kong where I taught Plain English to Chinese executives and our son was born. After five years in HK, we moved to London where we still live. By now completely sick of reinventing myself I abandoned my “career” and worked as a volunteer for the Victorian Society for a couple of years before doing an MA in Creative Writing at Kingston Uni. In 2017 I joined The Novelry and finally learned the secret of writing every day.
 
The Story So Far.

When thinking back over my experiences of two years with The Novelry, I have Cheryl Cole’s voice in my head saying – It’s a journey, pet. 

I have been writing and trying to write for years. I did an MA in Creative Writing in 2009 thinking it would help, and it did. A bit. I learned how to write an opening chapter, and a few to follow it. But I didn’t learn how to write a novel. I didn’t learn how to plot. It took me a year to finish the book I started on that course. I sent it to a few publishers and got positive feedback. I could write, apparently, but there wasn’t enough of a story.

I started two more novels. I could write the first three chapters of anything, but the fourth? I became stuck every time. I spent every day thinking about writing but not writing. I let it go for a while and embraced the 'Not Writing', but I couldn’t give it up. Then I saw a tiny mention in Mslexia of a new novel writing course with Louise Dean. Write a novel in ninety days. I signed up on the spot.

A new idea came to me and I embraced it. I had read an article in the newspaper about a woman with an anonymous stalker – he knew all about her, but she had no idea who he was. I remember having one brief conversation with Louise about it and she was encouraging. She even fixed my title – The Admirer. But I didn’t call her again, like a nervous squirrel, I hoarded away my free calls for when I might really need them. I was a fool.

The first three chapters oozed out like honey from a full jar. Then I hit a snag –  just as with my main character, I  didn’t know who the stalker was. Not at all. I wrote several chapters that skirted the edge of this problem and sent my protagonist spinning round in circles. I knew how it ended – why couldn’t I get there? Then I had the marvellous idea of just leaping over this enormous plot hole, and coming back later to fix it. It worked. I galloped on to the end, with a few days of my ninety days to spare. I wrote a book, and I knew I could do it again.

I feel bad that no one will ever read a word of The Admirer beyond the first two chapters I posted at our workshop at The Novelry. It begins well. The second half is, I think, more than alright. But it has a hole in its middle. It is flawed, like all its older siblings.

I put it aside for the recommended time before embarking on the second draft. In the meantime, Louise (aka 'Miss') had created the Classic Course. Everyone on it was evangelising about how life-changing it was. I wanted some of that. (Note to Miss – FOMO and The Palps - two of our catchphrases at The Novelry - seem to be keen driving forces behind the creative urge. ) I signed up to take the Classic course all at once, rather than in the daily doses. The plan was to use it to edit The Admirer. When I was about three lessons in a new idea came to me. It was shiny and seductive, like all new ideas. But it was also good. I wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

The lesson was about place as a character, about writing about somewhere unique and transporting your reader there. I’ve got one of those, I thought. A place like no other. I was born there and spent the first thirty-four years of my life there and I love it in a deep and visceral and irrational way. Finally, after a distance of over twenty years, I was ready to write about it.

The Classic course gave me the stages of my journey – a cosy start, the idea of the portal, the garden, the battle and the return. It freed me to think on a grander scale – about heroes and villains, and archetypes. I cast my characters: a child, a man of religion, a man of science, and two old women – one wise, one cruel. There would be magic and humanity and 'Big Themes'. I would write the Great Australian Novel.

And this time it would have a plot. Upfront, before I began one of our close-knit community of writers (Alex) very generously and patiently talked me through my plot.

It took me about six months to write the first draft.

I’m doing the laundry as I’m writing this and a tissue has gone through the wash (the black load, of course). It is a timely reminder that you can’t plot life in advance. Some pretty awful things happened while I was writing, but the writing was always there to for refuge and to help me make sense of it all. I wasn’t alone, either. My weekly calls with Louise got me over the hump of the middle and gave me faith in what I was trying to do. (I also have a brilliant buddy at The Novelry and a couple of 'sixth formers'  who I meet secretly behind the bike sheds for excellent critique and support.)

I finished it in January – just in time for the Full English Retreat. Romla, who hosts the retreats, is my buddy and I sat at her kitchen table making notes while she chopped and stirred and threw wacky ideas at me about what I should do in second draft. Then came third draft and another all-day session with Romla. I think it really helps that our books are completely different. We have three things in common – they are historical, told in the present tense with a close third POV. But that’s it. Hers is hilarious. Mine is not.

Louise submitted the fourth draft on my behalf in May to a handful of The Novelry’s select agents, and I accepted United Agents’ Millie Hoskins offer of representation in June.

Guess what she wanted? More plot. I went away and thought about how to do that, and spent the summer adding threat and peril and 35,000 words to my manuscript. I have never worked for so long or so hard on anything. I sent it back to Millie this week. She won’t read it until after Frankfurt so I’m on tenterhooks to see what she thinks.

I am distracting myself presently by exploring an idea that came to me in June. I didn’t have time to think about it then, but it raised its head again very insistently on the morning after I sent off Mother Country. It needs a lot of research and will take a while to write. I’m feeling my way quite slowly. I’ve bought a new The Novelry Moleskine in anticipation, but I haven’t written in it yet.

It's about Australia again. Historical – but from an earlier period. I am mining the same seam, but deeper this time. It fascinates me, and that's all I can ask for. It still won’t be the Great Australian Novel, but it will be better than Mother Country.

It’s a journey, pet.

I guess that is what keeps me going back to the blank notebook. To the empty chair in the dark room before the rest of the world is awake. The urge to explore and uncover. To drag something to the surface and say – look what I found.

The Forebears:

The photo shows Cate Guthleben's ancestors ( great-grandfather and great-grandmother).

He is Andre Guthleben, born in  1858 in Metzeral, Alsace, France. She is Agnes Inglis, born in 1860 in Nairne, South Australia. Andre travelled to Australia in 1884 - partly to escape Prussian rule in Alsace, and partly because of a broken heart. He and Agnes were married in 1895 in Pine Forest, South Australia.

How To Start A Novel - The First Line.

How to Start Your Novel?

Some Ideas for Writing the First Line.

If the agent of change in the novel is a person and you’re telling the story as an outside observer.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald.

“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis.

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” On The Road, Jack Kerouac.

If the agent of change is the narrator.

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” Mark Twain.

“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, JD Salinger.

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Herzog, Saul Bellow.

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

“The first thing I remember is being under something.” Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski.

“I suppose that’s exactly the problem - I wasn’t raised to know any better.” The Sell-Out, Paul Beatty.

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.” Notes From Underground, Dostoyevsky.

“Of course I have not always been a drunkard.” The Drinker, Hans Fallada.

“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.” The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham.

“First the colours. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.” The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.

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

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

“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, Sylvia Plath.

And, above all else, a line that can never be repeated sadly, because he owns it; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier...

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”

If we have a 'situation' and a cast set-piece.

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

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.

If it’s a big picture, allegorical, historical situation -  then pique curiosity in res media.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” City of Glass, Paul Auster.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.” Underworld, Don DeLillo.

“It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.” A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.

“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.” The Tin Drum, Günter Grass.

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

For big thematic, allegorical works in res media works beautifully, i.e drop-in to the action. The understatement cuts like a knife.

“The amber light came on.” Blindness, Jose Saramago.

A warning note as to what’s to come is a treat:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.

For world-building speculative, fantasy, sci-fi - go oddball.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984, George Orwell.

If in doubt, relax for now.

You’ll only crack it for sure and make a decision on it at the end of the novel writing process.

“Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people.” Elmore Leonard.

Try a short opening sentence for plaudits.

Call me Ishmael.
The old man was dreaming about the lions.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
All this happened, more or less.
I am an invisible man.
A screaming comes across the sky.
It was a pleasure to burn.

The reader enters the world you’ve created without delay. They’re in it - fast. Boom.

Gabriel García Márquez said that he used to spend months trying to get the first sentence right, but when he did, the rest of the book fell into place.

You won’t know how to start it just right until you’ve worked through the hook (your one-line premise for your story) and your synopsis a few times and eyeballed your theme - all of this may well happen in second draft or beyond. I didn't crack mine for my first novel until the end of the second draft. It conformed to this model, I suppose, in retrospect.

A situation of moral emergency in which the dilemma is exposed.

The first sentence establishes the principal dilemma. If you’re being cute, you will cut to the heart of the matter and also infer - this is going to change. (We know this as smart readers, since it’s the first line!)

“For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” Disgrace, JM Coetzee.

My first novel’s opening sentence? (From Becoming Strangers.)

“Before he had cancer he’d been bored with life.” 

The review of my first novel's first sentence in The Guardian was:

The opening lines of Louise Dean's quite exceptional first novel may not be much of a laugh, but they stopped this reader in her tracks. It rarely takes me more than a page or two to sense whether a novel's going to take me somewhere worth going. In Dean's case, those first 17 words were enough. My heart raced and I sat up. I knew.

It's not just the bald, frank darkness of those two opening statements, nor the ache of truth they contain. And it's not just about the rise-and-fall rhythm of the words either, the pleasing arc that the collision of the two sentences somehow creates. No, most of all, I think, it's what the writer makes you feel - instantly - about this mystery "he": a wave of naked curiosity. Who on earth is this man, whose life has been so vivified by death?

 
 

The First Line

How to Start Your Novel?

Some Ideas for Writing the First Line.

If the agent of change in the novel is a person and you’re telling the story as an outside observer.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald.

“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis.

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” On The Road, Jack Kerouac.

If the agent of change is the narrator.

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” Mark Twain.

“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, JD Salinger.

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Herzog, Saul Bellow.

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

“The first thing I remember is being under something.” Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski.

“I suppose that’s exactly the problem - I wasn’t raised to know any better.” The Sell-Out, Paul Beatty.

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.” Notes From Underground, Dostoyevsky.

“Of course I have not always been a drunkard.” The Drinker, Hans Fallada.

“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.” The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham.

“First the colours. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.” The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.

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

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

“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, Sylvia Plath.

And, above all else, a line that can never be repeated sadly, because he owns it; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier...

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”

If we have a 'situation' and a cast set-piece.

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

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.

If it’s a big picture, allegorical, historical situation -  then pique curiosity in res media.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” City of Glass, Paul Auster.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.” Underworld, Don DeLillo.

“It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.” A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan.

“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.” The Tin Drum, Günter Grass.

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

For big thematic, allegorical works in res media works beautifully, i.e drop-in to the action. The understatement cuts like a knife.

“The amber light came on.” Blindness, Jose Saramago.

A warning note as to what’s to come is a treat:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.

For world-building speculative, fantasy, sci-fi - go oddball.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984, George Orwell.

If in doubt, relax for now.

You’ll only crack it for sure and make a decision on it at the end of the novel writing process.

“Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people.” Elmore Leonard.

Try a short opening sentence for plaudits.

Call me Ishmael.
The old man was dreaming about the lions.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
All this happened, more or less.
I am an invisible man.
A screaming comes across the sky.
It was a pleasure to burn.

The reader enters the world you’ve created without delay. They’re in it - fast. Boom.

Gabriel García Márquez said that he used to spend months trying to get the first sentence right, but when he did, the rest of the book fell into place.

You won’t know how to start it just right until you’ve worked through the hook (your one-line premise for your story) and your synopsis a few times and eyeballed your theme - all of this may well happen in second draft or beyond. I didn't crack mine for my first novel until the end of the second draft. It conformed to this model, I suppose, in retrospect.

A situation of moral emergency in which the dilemma is exposed.

The first sentence establishes the principal dilemma. If you’re being cute, you will cut to the heart of the matter and also infer - this is going to change. (We know this as smart readers, since it’s the first line!)

“For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.” Disgrace, JM Coetzee.

My first novel’s opening sentence? (From Becoming Strangers.)

“Before he had cancer he’d been bored with life.” 

The review of my first novel's first sentence in The Guardian was:

The opening lines of Louise Dean's quite exceptional first novel may not be much of a laugh, but they stopped this reader in her tracks. It rarely takes me more than a page or two to sense whether a novel's going to take me somewhere worth going. In Dean's case, those first 17 words were enough. My heart raced and I sat up. I knew.

It's not just the bald, frank darkness of those two opening statements, nor the ache of truth they contain. And it's not just about the rise-and-fall rhythm of the words either, the pleasing arc that the collision of the two sentences somehow creates. No, most of all, I think, it's what the writer makes you feel - instantly - about this mystery "he": a wave of naked curiosity. Who on earth is this man, whose life has been so vivified by death?

 
 

How To Write a Fantasy Novel - The Battle Scene.

To the Battle!

The battle in the classics of Tolkien and others is often a bit of a let down.

There’s a long walk, a lot of fine talk, plenty of awe then either the human hero finds an exit and postpones the battle or there’s a divine intervention which crushes evil a tad unfairly I think.

So, we have a complete rout, or evil sneaks off. There’s not much in the way or real prolonged suffering, no lingering in the mud of the trenches here. But hey ho. We’ve all been surprised by our first punch and children milk-fed on reading books are no doubt the most sucker-punched of all. But we all know there’s no alternative without completely compromising the experience of wonderment.

Tolkien approaches the battle in short sentences. You will know one’s coming because his word count between full stops drops dramatically. This seems to me to prove that discretion really is the better part of valour.

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped. 

No great leap for a man, but a leap in the dark. Straight over Gollum’s head he jumped, seven feet forward and three in the air; indeed, had he known it, he only just missed cracking his skull on the low arch of the passage.

Gollum threw himself backwards, and grabbed as the hobbit flew over him, but too late: his hands snapped on thin air, and Bilbo, falling fair on his sturdy feet, sped off down the new tunnel. He did not turn to see what Gollum was doing. There was a hissing and cursing almost at his heels at first, then it stopped. All at once there came a blood-curdling shriek, filled with hatred and despair. Gollum was defeated.

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

Wow. 261 words. Done and dusted. The average word count per sentence in The Hobbit is 16.3. In this piece, it’s 10.9. This is closer to a book like Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, closer to modern ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and to the dystopia. It’s an effective way to build tension. There are many writers who would benefit from a little more 'tension'. (Even when it comes to writing their emails.)

So that, my bullies, is a battle. A touch of breathy rhetoric. A quick despatch. Some chicanery, a soupçon of mockery and animal sounds from the defeated.

Other battles are similarly disappointing so don’t imagine you need to brush up your military history for this genre.

There was a howl of anger and surprise from the goblins. Loud cried the Lord of the Eagles, to whom Gandalf had now spoken. Back swept the great birds that were with him, and down they came like huge black shadows. The wolves yammered and gnashed their teeth; the goblins yelled and stamped with rage, and flung their heavy spears in the air in vain. Over them swooped the eagles; the dark rush of their beating wings smote them to the floor or drove them far away; their talons tore at goblin faces. Other birds flew to the tree-tops and seized the dwarves, who were scrambling up now as far as they ever dared to go.

Poor little Bilbo was very nearly left behind again! He just managed to catch hold of Dori’s legs, as Dori was borne off last of all; and up they went together above the tumult and the burning, Bilbo swinging in the air with his arms nearly breaking.

Now far below the goblins and the wolves were scattering far and wide in the woods. A few eagles were still circling and sweeping above the battleground. The flames about the trees sprang suddenly up above the highest branches. They went up in crackling fire. There was a sudden flurry of sparks and smoke. Bilbo had escaped only just in time!

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

The exclamation mark can sometimes feel as if it’s the wrong way up with Tolkien. And The Lord of the Rings series is billed as

“Tolkien’s epic story of the battle for Middle-earth .... The three-volume tour de force follows Frodo the hobbit and his loyal protectors as they journey to Mount Doom to destroy a dangerous and powerful ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron to rule all of Middle-earth.”

You just don’t need a lot of battle in your battle, it seems.

Yet, Tolkien was no stranger to the reality of war. He served on the front line as a battalion signals officer for the 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers from June to October in 1916. While there, he fought in the Battle of the Somme which lasted from July 1 to November 13, costing more than one million lives.

Perhaps it was because of this, he defined in his work the ‘battle’ versus ‘war’.

In the books he meant to do as Milton had done in Paradise Lost and:

‘assert eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to men.’

He lost two of his three closest friends on the Somme, a loss he talks about in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings. The books then dignify their deaths, rather than documenting the manner of their dying.

So, he keeps it tidy, and allows for an almost divine interference:

Then the battle began. Some of the dwarves had knives, and some had sticks, and all of them could get at stones; and Bilbo had his elvish dagger. Again and again the spiders were beaten off, and many of them were killed. But it could not go on for long. Bilbo was nearly tired out; only four of the dwarves were able to stand firmly, and soon they would all be overpowered like weary flies. Already the spiders were beginning to weave their webs all round them again from tree to tree.

In the end Bilbo could think of no plan except to let the dwarves into the secret of his ring. He was rather sorry about it, but it could not be helped.

'I am going to disappear,’ he said. ‘I shall draw the spiders off, if I can; and you must keep together and make in the opposite direction. To the left there, that is more or less the way towards the place where we last saw the elf-fires.’

It was difficult to get them to understand, what with their dizzy heads, and the shouts, and the whacking of sticks and the throwing of stones; but at last Bilbo felt he could delay no longer - the spiders were drawing their circle ever closer. He suddenly slipped on his ring, and to the great astonishment of the dwarves he vanished.

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

In the video clip from the Peter Jackson movie we see a clean rout, a few seconds of the long build-up to action, which isn’t bad as an interpretation of what Tolkien intended.

The Battle of the Five Armies involved some 6,000 or so players in the book, whereas the movie depicts an estimated 100,000 CGI-generated goblins, orcs, dwarves, men, elves, eagles, hell bats and other random monsters. Moreover, that relatively small skirmish spans just five pages in the book, but in the movie, it clocks in at over an hour.

Really, you just need an exemplary wizard and a sword to make sense of the mosh pit.

The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it. The sparks were burning holes in the goblins, and the smoke that now fell from the roof made the air too thick for even their eyes to see through. Soon they were falling over one another and rolling in heaps on the floor, biting and kicking and fighting as if they had all gone mad.

Suddenly a sword flashed in its own light. Bilbo saw it go right through the Great Goblin as he stood dumbfounded in the middle of his rage. He fell dead, and the goblin soldiers fled before the sword shrieking into the darkness.

“The more quickly this horror is disposed of the better.” Peter Pan and Wendy, JM Barrie.

A chivalrous bout with a villain is a far cry from a battle with evil, and farther still from war. Think of it more as The Lobster Quadrille in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Think of any crisis, where conflict becomes FURY in your work, as a dance.

Choreograph your conflict.

 

From JM Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy:

'Down, boys, and at them!’ Peter’s voice rang out; and in another moment the clash of arms was resounding through the ship. Had the pirates kept together it is certain that they would have won; but the onset came when they were still unstrung, and they ran hither and thither, striking wildly, each thinking himself the last survivor of the crew. Man to man they were the stronger; but they fought on the defensive only, which enabled the boys to hunt in pairs and choose their quarry. Some of the miscreants leapt into the sea; others hid in dark recesses, where they were found by Slightly, who did not fight, but ran about with a lantern which he flashed in their faces, so that they were half blinded and fell as an easy prey to the reeking swords of the other boys. There was little sound to be heard but the clang of weapons, an occasional screech or splash, and Slightly monotonously counting—five—six—seven eight—nine—ten—eleven.

I think all were gone when a group of savage boys surrounded Hook, who seemed to have a charmed life, as he kept them at bay in that circle of fire. They had done for his dogs, but this man alone seemed to be a match for them all. Again and again they closed upon him, and again and again he hewed a clear space. He had lifted up one boy with his hook, and was using him as a buckler, when another, who had just passed his sword through Mullins, sprang into the fray.

'Put up your swords, boys,’ cried the newcomer, ‘this man is mine.’

Thus suddenly Hook found himself face to face with Peter. The others drew back and formed a ring around them.

For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face.

'So, Pan,’ said Hook at last, ‘this is all your doing.’

'Ay, James Hook,’ came the stern answer, ‘it is all my doing.’

'Proud and insolent youth,’ said Hook, ‘prepare to meet thy doom.’

'Dark and sinister man,’ Peter answered, ‘have at thee.’

Without more words they fell to, and for a space there was no advantage to either blade. Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe’s defence, but his shorter reach stood him in ill stead, and he could not drive the steel home. Hook, scarcely his inferior in brilliancy, but not quite so nimble in wrist play, forced him back by the weight of his onset, hoping suddenly to end all with a favourite thrust, taught him long ago by Barbecue at Rio; but to his astonishment he found this thrust turned aside again and again. Then he sought to close and give the quietus with his iron hook, which all this time had been pawing the air; but Peter doubled under it and, lunging fiercely, pierced him in the ribs. At the sight of his own blood, whose peculiar colour, you remember, was offensive to him, the sword fell from Hook’s hand, and he was at Peter’s mercy.

'Now!’ cried all the boys, but with a magnificent gesture Peter invited his opponent to pick up his sword. Hook did so instantly, but with a tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form.

Hitherto he had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.

'Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.

'I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’

This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.

'To’t again,’ he cried despairingly.

He fought now like a human flail, and every sweep of that terrible sword would have severed in twain any man or boy who obstructed it; but Peter fluttered round him as if the very wind it made blew him out of the danger zone. And again and again he darted in and pricked.

Hook was fighting now without hope. That passionate breast no longer asked for life; but for one boon it craved: to see Peter show bad form before it was cold forever.

Abandoning the fight he rushed into the powder magazine and fired it.

'In two minutes,’ he cried, ‘the ship will be blown to pieces.’

Now, now, he thought, true form will show.

But Peter issued from the powder magazine with the shell in his hands, and calmly flung it overboard.

What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he was, we may be glad, without sympathising with him, that in the end he was true to the traditions of his race. The other boys were flying around him now, flouting, scornful; and he staggered about the deck striking up at them impotently, his mind was no longer with them; it was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up [to the headmaster] for good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right.

James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell.

For we have come to his last moment.

Seeing Peter slowly advancing upon him through the air with dagger poised, he sprang upon the bulwarks to cast himself into the sea. He did not know that the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little mark of respect from us at the end.

He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter kick instead of stab.

At last Hook had got the boon for which he craved.

‘Bad form,’ he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.

Thus perished James Hook.

The Battle Continues!

To the Battle!

(The story continues from last week's blog post.)

I’ll be honest, the battle in the classics is often a bit of a let down.

There’s a long walk, a lot of fine talk, plenty of awe then either the human hero finds an exit and postpones the battle or there’s a divine intervention which crushes evil a tad unfairly I think.

So, we have a complete rout, or evil sneaks off. There’s not much in the way or real prolonged suffering, no lingering in the mud of the trenches here. But hey ho. We’ve all been surprised by our first punch and children milk-fed on reading books are no doubt the most sucker-punched of all. But we all know there’s no alternative without completely compromising the experience of wonderment.

Tolkien approaches the battle in short sentences. You will know one’s coming because his word count between full stops drops dramatically. This seems to me to prove that discretion really is the better part of valour.

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped. 

No great leap for a man, but a leap in the dark. Straight over Gollum’s head he jumped, seven feet forward and three in the air; indeed, had he known it, he only just missed cracking his skull on the low arch of the passage.

Gollum threw himself backwards, and grabbed as the hobbit flew over him, but too late: his hands snapped on thin air, and Bilbo, falling fair on his sturdy feet, sped off down the new tunnel. He did not turn to see what Gollum was doing. There was a hissing and cursing almost at his heels at first, then it stopped. All at once there came a blood-curdling shriek, filled with hatred and despair. Gollum was defeated.

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

Wow. 261 words. Done and dusted. The average word count per sentence in The Hobbit is 16.3. In this piece, it’s 10.9. This is closer to a book like Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, closer to modern ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and to the dystopia. It’s an effective way to build tension. There are many writers who would benefit from a little more 'tension'. (Even when it comes to writing their emails.)

So that, my bullies, is a battle. A touch of breathy rhetoric. A quick despatch. Some chicanery, a soupçon of mockery and animal sounds from the defeated.

Other battles are similarly disappointing so don’t imagine you need to brush up your military history for this genre.

There was a howl of anger and surprise from the goblins. Loud cried the Lord of the Eagles, to whom Gandalf had now spoken. Back swept the great birds that were with him, and down they came like huge black shadows. The wolves yammered and gnashed their teeth; the goblins yelled and stamped with rage, and flung their heavy spears in the air in vain. Over them swooped the eagles; the dark rush of their beating wings smote them to the floor or drove them far away; their talons tore at goblin faces. Other birds flew to the tree-tops and seized the dwarves, who were scrambling up now as far as they ever dared to go.

Poor little Bilbo was very nearly left behind again! He just managed to catch hold of Dori’s legs, as Dori was borne off last of all; and up they went together above the tumult and the burning, Bilbo swinging in the air with his arms nearly breaking.

Now far below the goblins and the wolves were scattering far and wide in the woods. A few eagles were still circling and sweeping above the battleground. The flames about the trees sprang suddenly up above the highest branches. They went up in crackling fire. There was a sudden flurry of sparks and smoke. Bilbo had escaped only just in time!

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

The exclamation mark can sometimes feel as if it’s the wrong way up with Tolkien. And The Lord of the Rings series is billed as

“Tolkien’s epic story of the battle for Middle-earth .... The three-volume tour de force follows Frodo the hobbit and his loyal protectors as they journey to Mount Doom to destroy a dangerous and powerful ring, forged by the Dark Lord Sauron to rule all of Middle-earth.”

You just don’t need a lot of battle in your battle, it seems.

Yet, Tolkien was no stranger to the reality of war. He served on the front line as a battalion signals officer for the 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers from June to October in 1916. While there, he fought in the Battle of the Somme which lasted from July 1 to November 13, costing more than one million lives.

Perhaps it was because of this, he defined in his work the ‘battle’ versus ‘war’.

In the books he meant to do as Milton had done in Paradise Lost and:

‘assert eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to men.’

He lost two of his three closest friends on the Somme, a loss he talks about in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings. The books then dignify their deaths, rather than documenting the manner of their dying.

So, he keeps it tidy, and allows for an almost divine interference:

Then the battle began. Some of the dwarves had knives, and some had sticks, and all of them could get at stones; and Bilbo had his elvish dagger. Again and again the spiders were beaten off, and many of them were killed. But it could not go on for long. Bilbo was nearly tired out; only four of the dwarves were able to stand firmly, and soon they would all be overpowered like weary flies. Already the spiders were beginning to weave their webs all round them again from tree to tree.

In the end Bilbo could think of no plan except to let the dwarves into the secret of his ring. He was rather sorry about it, but it could not be helped.

'I am going to disappear,’ he said. ‘I shall draw the spiders off, if I can; and you must keep together and make in the opposite direction. To the left there, that is more or less the way towards the place where we last saw the elf-fires.’

It was difficult to get them to understand, what with their dizzy heads, and the shouts, and the whacking of sticks and the throwing of stones; but at last Bilbo felt he could delay no longer - the spiders were drawing their circle ever closer. He suddenly slipped on his ring, and to the great astonishment of the dwarves he vanished.

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien.

In the video clip from the Peter Jackson movie we see a clean rout, a few seconds of the long build-up to action, which isn’t bad as an interpretation of what Tolkien intended.

The Battle of the Five Armies involved some 6,000 or so players in the book, whereas the movie depicts an estimated 100,000 CGI-generated goblins, orcs, dwarves, men, elves, eagles, hell bats and other random monsters. Moreover, that relatively small skirmish spans just five pages in the book, but in the movie, it clocks in at over an hour.

Really, you just need an exemplary wizard and a sword to make sense of the mosh pit.

The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it. The sparks were burning holes in the goblins, and the smoke that now fell from the roof made the air too thick for even their eyes to see through. Soon they were falling over one another and rolling in heaps on the floor, biting and kicking and fighting as if they had all gone mad.

Suddenly a sword flashed in its own light. Bilbo saw it go right through the Great Goblin as he stood dumbfounded in the middle of his rage. He fell dead, and the goblin soldiers fled before the sword shrieking into the darkness.

“The more quickly this horror is disposed of the better.” Peter Pan and Wendy, JM Barrie.

A chivalrous bout with a villain is a far cry from a battle with evil, and farther still from war. Think of it more as The Lobster Quadrille in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Think of any crisis, where conflict becomes FURY in your work, as a dance.

Choreograph your conflict.

 

From JM Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy:

'Down, boys, and at them!’ Peter’s voice rang out; and in another moment the clash of arms was resounding through the ship. Had the pirates kept together it is certain that they would have won; but the onset came when they were still unstrung, and they ran hither and thither, striking wildly, each thinking himself the last survivor of the crew. Man to man they were the stronger; but they fought on the defensive only, which enabled the boys to hunt in pairs and choose their quarry. Some of the miscreants leapt into the sea; others hid in dark recesses, where they were found by Slightly, who did not fight, but ran about with a lantern which he flashed in their faces, so that they were half blinded and fell as an easy prey to the reeking swords of the other boys. There was little sound to be heard but the clang of weapons, an occasional screech or splash, and Slightly monotonously counting—five—six—seven eight—nine—ten—eleven.

I think all were gone when a group of savage boys surrounded Hook, who seemed to have a charmed life, as he kept them at bay in that circle of fire. They had done for his dogs, but this man alone seemed to be a match for them all. Again and again they closed upon him, and again and again he hewed a clear space. He had lifted up one boy with his hook, and was using him as a buckler, when another, who had just passed his sword through Mullins, sprang into the fray.

'Put up your swords, boys,’ cried the newcomer, ‘this man is mine.’

Thus suddenly Hook found himself face to face with Peter. The others drew back and formed a ring around them.

For long the two enemies looked at one another, Hook shuddering slightly, and Peter with the strange smile upon his face.

'So, Pan,’ said Hook at last, ‘this is all your doing.’

'Ay, James Hook,’ came the stern answer, ‘it is all my doing.’

'Proud and insolent youth,’ said Hook, ‘prepare to meet thy doom.’

'Dark and sinister man,’ Peter answered, ‘have at thee.’

Without more words they fell to, and for a space there was no advantage to either blade. Peter was a superb swordsman, and parried with dazzling rapidity; ever and anon he followed up a feint with a lunge that got past his foe’s defence, but his shorter reach stood him in ill stead, and he could not drive the steel home. Hook, scarcely his inferior in brilliancy, but not quite so nimble in wrist play, forced him back by the weight of his onset, hoping suddenly to end all with a favourite thrust, taught him long ago by Barbecue at Rio; but to his astonishment he found this thrust turned aside again and again. Then he sought to close and give the quietus with his iron hook, which all this time had been pawing the air; but Peter doubled under it and, lunging fiercely, pierced him in the ribs. At the sight of his own blood, whose peculiar colour, you remember, was offensive to him, the sword fell from Hook’s hand, and he was at Peter’s mercy.

'Now!’ cried all the boys, but with a magnificent gesture Peter invited his opponent to pick up his sword. Hook did so instantly, but with a tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form.

Hitherto he had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.

'Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.

'I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’

This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.

'To’t again,’ he cried despairingly.

He fought now like a human flail, and every sweep of that terrible sword would have severed in twain any man or boy who obstructed it; but Peter fluttered round him as if the very wind it made blew him out of the danger zone. And again and again he darted in and pricked.

Hook was fighting now without hope. That passionate breast no longer asked for life; but for one boon it craved: to see Peter show bad form before it was cold forever.

Abandoning the fight he rushed into the powder magazine and fired it.

'In two minutes,’ he cried, ‘the ship will be blown to pieces.’

Now, now, he thought, true form will show.

But Peter issued from the powder magazine with the shell in his hands, and calmly flung it overboard.

What sort of form was Hook himself showing? Misguided man though he was, we may be glad, without sympathising with him, that in the end he was true to the traditions of his race. The other boys were flying around him now, flouting, scornful; and he staggered about the deck striking up at them impotently, his mind was no longer with them; it was slouching in the playing fields of long ago, or being sent up [to the headmaster] for good, or watching the wall-game from a famous wall. And his shoes were right, and his waistcoat was right, and his tie was right, and his socks were right.

James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell.

For we have come to his last moment.

Seeing Peter slowly advancing upon him through the air with dagger poised, he sprang upon the bulwarks to cast himself into the sea. He did not know that the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little mark of respect from us at the end.

He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter kick instead of stab.

At last Hook had got the boon for which he craved.

‘Bad form,’ he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.

Thus perished James Hook.

Conflict

This week's blog post is the first of two giving you a free sample of some of the action-packed adventure offered by our big story course - The Classic course.

It's crucial to invest in the groundwork of story before going on to potter in prose if you mean business (i.e, to sell books.) Our 'big story' course is a good egg for all writers but absolutely essential for those who are world-building - which is to say writing Fantasy, Historical, Young Adult and Children's. Pack it in your writer's kit bag, toss it behind you back and whistle all the way to the literary agency (nail that theme tune en route).

I'll be referring to the 'classics' in this blog but don't worry, I'm not being lofty and referring to works of Ancient Greece etc, I'm being low-brow. Populist! (Hoorah!) I'm referring to the golden classics of fiction, the bestsellers enjoyed by adults and kids. The genre-busting crossovers!

The course delves into the cunning plots of seven of the ten bestselling books of the last hundred years. (With apologies for the omission of E.L James Fifty Shades of Grey.) 

Conflict between good and evil is at the heart of any classic (big) story.

In his work 'Mysterium Coniunctionis', CG Jung explained the paradox that is the alchemy of creation, the conflict between two forces.

“The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.”

In adult novels, we see the war within and also without, and the novel is driven by the main character’s ability to incorporate the ‘other’ or that which seems at the outset of the story to be in opposition to himself or herself.

Two Wolves - a Cherokee Indian legend.

One day a grandfather was talking to his grandson. He said, ‘There are two wolves fighting inside all of us – the wolf of fear and hate, and the wolf of love and peace.’ The grandson listened, then looked up at his grandfather and asked, ‘Which one will win?’

The grandfather replied;

‘The one we feed.’

In the classic, the threat of evil threat is located outside the self, yet within the safe sealed environment bound by front and back cover. (Ah, how the spine of the book tingles with the conflict!)

'Evil' isn't commonly granted the same credibility as an independent ‘ineffable’ force like 'Good'. We tend to see evil in terms of 'agents' and 'events'. In reality most of what we experience as 'evil' lurks in agency or non-events (the ‘banality’ of evil (Arendt), when good men do nothing (Burke.) Evil, it is commonly accepted, is an absence. (All the things we didn't do?)

Not so fast! In the classic, evil is given a physical form, brimful of intent to destroy all that is ‘decent’. It’s the opposite of Peter Pan's 'youth' and 'joy’, the ‘little bird’.

It’s a miserable old bird.

Hmm.

Yes, well, let’s take the general point even if we’re a tad sick of chummy old male wizards and foul-breathed hairy malevolent crones.

Evil should be introduced with the fanfare of awe and dread - some natural phenomena misfiring to create a super-natural sensation -  to strike up the big band of feeling.

Accessories to the onset of evil are those human feelings which encompass fear of exposure (to the elements and ridicule), leading to loneliness, ostracism, abandonment and of course as a social creature this compromises our survival entirely.

Only a hero has the stomach for going it alone in the face of evil with all these feelings working against her or him. The rest of us are shit scared.

Before evil strikes in Peter Pan, the youngest child (always the most sensitive - think of your youngest character as the barometer in the story) senses it, and feels ‘lonely’.

It was the stillest silence they had ever known, broken once by a distant lapping, which Peter explained was the wild beasts drinking at the ford, and again by a rasping sound that might have been the branches of trees rubbing together, but he said it was the redskins sharpening their knives.

Even these noises ceased. To Michael the loneliness was dreadful. ‘If only something would make a sound!’ he cried.

As if in answer to his request, the air was rent by the most tremendous crash he had ever heard. The pirates had fired Long Tom at them.

JM Barrie: Peter Pan and Wendy.

CS Lewis philosophised on evil in The Problem of Pain, deeming it with a brisk wave of the hand as an unwholesome by-product of God-given ‘free will’ - it’s there so that we can choose to do good. It’s all about ‘agency’. The root meaning of the word ‘evil’ is akin to modern German ‘Übel’ which incorporates ‘transgressing’ and ‘suffering’. In Judaism, evil is not real, it is per se not part of God’s creation, but comes into existence through man’s bad actions.

No matter which way you turn it seems that when thinking about evil happening to you, you come back to you. Your own ability to make choices and choose actions.

That's a bummer. When it comes to bad things, I'd prefer to blame a lisping bald knee-high creature than myself. It would be an unholy relief to have a poltergeist about the place, a constant unseen enemy. It would stop us falling out in this household, holding grudges over towels left on the floor etc. That bloody Gollum again...

To Jung it seemed that people tend to believe evil is something external to them and project their shadow onto others. 

“The acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself—to know what he is. This is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions.” Carl Jung.

 Use your shadow side!

Teaching adult fiction story-creation in The Niney Day Novel course, I make sure my writers have set up their main players before writing and in our first call we talk about them, particularly the main character. Their moral blind spot is the driving force of the narrative plot in a novel. You almost don't need anything else to start writing. They are blind, and then they see. Even if briefly, they see at the end of the book. Pop that on a post-it on your wall and write.

When creating the big players, it's like this. You use your own flaws and failings and grant them to the 'bad guy' or antagonist. They come alive, you get a little light relief. (Laughing at yourself is highly recommended and the only therapy that ever did me any good. It should be more widely prescribed.)

If it's a classic you're after, you gotta have a bad guy. It's such a joy to write. Writing my novels, what has brought me back to the white page more faithfully than anything else is the promise of a next scene in which the 'bad guy' behaves even worse than the last. Cathartic entertainment, yes please.

Evil is a big story opportunity - in fiction.

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. A seven-headed dragon is, perhaps, a very terrifying monster. But a child who has never heard about him is a much more terrifying monster than he is. The maddest griffin and chimera is not so wild a supposition as a school without fairy tales….Fairy tales are the oldest and gravest and most universal kind of human literature. (...) Exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear...fairy tales restored my mental health.”

GK Chesterton.

The reader is presented with evil in a charismatic format, which embodies temptation and ill-discipline and it’s the tussle on the front line of discipline which prepares the reader to deal with the enemy inside.

TRIUMPH FULL STEAM AHEAD!

Post-script: The good news is that evil doesn’t exist, when you and I cease to exist. It’s a figment, similar to Hook in his pirate boat. It doesn’t exist in the universe or unconscious or the great beyond. It’s the product of human agency. 

“The centre of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

Twelve Types 1903, GK Chesterton.

What you dream is more likely to be reality, than reality which is just a passing bad dream.

But is boring and tiring dealing with the war inside. We are temporary, our dreams once fictionalised last forever. I am bad, therefore I write.

Thank God for fiction, as CS Lewis might have said.

Let’s deal with the villain with a sword, my bullies!

Have at you, loathsome varmint!

(To be continued, next week.)

 

Ambition

 
“ I'm afraid, I just didn't warm to Cheryl.”

I get to see a lot of novels-in-waiting as you might imagine. Sometimes my writers will share with me the editorial reports or feedback they have had from other writing courses and agents and ask me to interpret them. I don't read them before I make my own diagnosis. But after I have read the work and made some recommendations, I do take a look.

"The action feels generic and doesn’t feel specific enough for the predicament to be entirely engaging in my opinion." Er, ok.

But sometimes, and especially when you get feedback from agents who want a product that's more or less finished on their desk, you'll get something like the remark above - that they just don't like the main character. Of course, at the end of the day, the problem is in the writing not Cheryl!

Remember, you are not defective as a writer, this is not about you. A novel can be fixed.

Yes, we can and we will fix it. That's what we do at The Novelry. 

Some writers tell me their agent wants less detail, but another editorial report they commissioned praised the detail. What to do? What to do?

If you've been too long in the dark, come into the light. And when you get here, as my writers know, our first session together is all about you, you, you. 

What's your ambition as a writer? What's the ambition for the novel? Ambition is a fine and filthy thing. When you come clean about it, you’re halfway to achieving it. You've got to own up, now's the time and here's the place. Honour your intentions first and foremost. The problem is usually over time the author develops so many, they conflict and cause confusion on the page.

So when I start work with my writers, I ask them about their intentions, both as an author and personally. What are your authorial intentions for the book? What do you want to show or prove here?  How about you? What do you want from the writing? 

I reassure them they can confide their unholy aspirations in me. We make a pact to do our damnedest. You're the author, you get to play God in this one part of your life butI'll always have your best interests at heart. Your ambition.

These good days, my ambition amounts to getting a little time off the grid now and again and at its grandest I envision it as the photograph with this blog, being in a remote place, to potter in my head and look fondly at the world from a distance. I guess you couldn't call it ambition in the worldly sense.

Ambition is a bit like libido. When it ebbs it's a relief to see clearly again. I used to be very ambitious, I suppose that sweet deluded state was helpful to me once.

Here's me on record, interviewed by Time Out in 2006. 

On the one hand I have an unholy ambition to be the finest living writer. On the other I wouldn’t mind simply being left alone. In either case, I know I feel grateful that I have something of my own that I love to do, and that it helps make sense of what seems to have no sense at all.

 

Even in that statement, there's an obvious split between the mania of ego-driven ambition and the desire for space. I have always clung to Philip Larkin's poem 'Wants' - 'beyond all this the wish to be alone.'

The Wall Street Journal gave me the dubious honour in 2010 of being one of the world's five most underrated authors. And just then, I fell down.

Fortunately, as it turns out, life gave me a kicking and it took me some time to recover. My ambition for fiction was pretty much destroyed by the events of real life.

"One fails in all sorts of ways in life, doesn't one, which are much more important than writing books. In human relations and that sort of thing." Graham Greene.

Those necessary but unforeseen losses accumulated, one loss brought another, and they gave me the space to be alone that was my root desire. But I wasn't writing right. 

My friend, author Tim Lott, and I had a grin last year when he quizzed me about the lost years. “I just always thought I'd write the great English novel,“ I said, by way of excuse for the books unfinished. “How's that working out for you?“ he replied. We sniggered darkly about it. Just write what you write, he counselled me. 

You know there's a place reserved for all of us in the 'good' camp, don't you? As Steinbeck said - "and now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good". In fact, there's lots of space there. 

My losses created space and nature hates a vacuum they say. The space was filled by new ideas, new desires, and those desires and ideas don't all belong to me. My ambition is now co-occupied by tenants who are wonderful to have around, milling about being brilliant in their spare time, keeping lives together, seeing through to the other side of other lives while they do it.

With the launch of Pomeranian Books, I've been thinking about the books I want to co-parent.

Lately, I've been reading Don DeLillo White Noise, Shena Mackay The Orchard on Fire, Katherine Heiny Standard Deviation, Mario Puzo The Godfather and Lucy Ellman Ducks, Newburyport.

Don DeLillo's White Noise is a breathtaking work. It's peppered with brilliant insights of such standing that I've been doffing my writer's cap page by page. Remember Hemingway said he could kick Turgenev's ass but wouldn't even get in the ring with Tolstoy? Graham Greene described himself as a 'mouse' next to Henry James' 'mountain'. This is how I feel about DeLillo's prose. Sample some of these:

He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

...

Alfonse Stompanato looked hard at Lasher. “Where were you when James Dean died?” he said in a threatening voice.

...

The boy walked next to his mother, holding her hand, still crying, and they seemed a picture of such amateurish sadness and calamity that I nearly started laughing—laughing not at the sadness but at the picture they made of it, at the disparity between their grief and its appearances.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise.

Were it me, I'd end the chapter when I hit one of these high notes, but DeLillo doesn't need to, he's got more.

Have I finished reading the book? No.

True, I'm reading promiscuously right now, but there's something else. He doesn't need me. There's not necessarily any space for me to figure anything out, he's telling me everything. What's more, I think that there has to be an emergency - literally in commercial fiction - or a moral emergency perhaps in literary fiction.

Shena Mackay's book The Orchard On Fire is beautifully written and so admirable, and has space for the reader. Heiny's Standard Deviation is accomplished and comfortable, and as for Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport? It's a work of genius.

Ducks, Newburyport is wholly original and authentic. We are living in someone else's head and the accumulation of colour, sight, sound, ideas is extraordinary. After a few pages, your head will ache.

Ellman uses the device 'the fact that' over 18,000 times in the book. Galley Beggar Press, who have published this book beautifully, send a bookmark with the book (which weighs in very heavy on arrival - it's over 1000 pages) and the bookmark bears the slogan THE FACT THAT. The Guardian couldn't resist spoofing the device in their review, using 'the fact that' on every line of it.

"I liked the plaintive repetition of “the fact that,” so I built the book around that." Lucy Ellman. "We all have thoughts, memories, worries, associations, dreams. I was interested in burrowing deep into a consciousness. Don’t we all long to know what other people are really thinking? You never even know what you yourself are thinking, or not without years of therapy anyway. But we know a lot about how Emma Woodhouse thinks. It’s what novels are for."

It's a little wearing. 

After a while, you may find you've muted it. That's when the novel really grabs you.

 

Ducks, Newburyport is important because it reveals all the things we hide as women. This is the first time anyone has come clean about how we keep things clean, and how we manage the hiding process. How our given purpose as a woman and mother is to hide things, how our lives are contrived to work at keeping things hidden, day in, day out. Here may be the root of the horrible acceptance of crimes against us; domestic violence and the #metoo movement. So this book is very important indeed. 

In our fiction as woman, hitherto, we mostly have concealed what we conceal. We have been ashamed of showing women doing women’s work. We'd rather show 'go-getting womenfolk' office sorts, professionals, doctors and assassins and so on, doing men’s work the way men tell us to do it. (For less money, shortchanging most of all our kids.)  A double sucker punch self-administered.

Read this way, the recurrent full stop of 'the fact that' falls away like a damaged toenail and you get drawn into the fleshiness of a fully realised existence. By God, it's good. Ellman breaks the artifice of past and present in fiction (how we toil over should I used present or past tense in this novel is swept away by her method) weaving her pressing immediate concerns using the threads of all time and experience. She writes the way life is lived in our consciousness.

the fact that it really doesn’t take all that long to do a few dishes, ten minutes tops, big deal, so why all the resistance, the fact that every day I have to force myself, like ten times a day, the fact that I don’t exult in housework somehow, but dirty dishes are depressing, Anat always said, and I don’t want the kids to be depressed by them, or Leo either, or me, the fact that Leo really has no idea what goes on here all day, the fact that he’d probably flip out if he ever found out what’s really involved in feeding, clothing, housing and shepherding four whole kids, kidherding , the fact that my entire life is now spent catering to their needs and demands, cleaning toilets, filling lunchboxes, labeling all their personal property, shampooing and brushing hair, discussing everything, searching for lost stuff...

the fact that then there’s all the dusting, sweeping, ironing, making beds, washing sheets, towels and clothes, itch, sore eye, ironing pile, tending the chickens, feeding the goldfish, washing the windows, valeting the car, and myself, hunting down dust bunnies

the fact that there’s also the vacuuming, and holding the fort, and fielding the phone calls, planning the meals, settling the disputes, trying to keep track of everybody’s cell instead of my own, Rebel Without a Cause , mending, sewing, making handmade pencil cases for everybody, just because I made one for Stacy years ago, and then of course, in my spare time, baking a million pies, the fact that, seriously, my life’s all shopping, chopping, slicing, splicing, spilling, frilling, fooling, cooling, heating, boiling, broiling, frying, and macrophages, Tuesday, dentist, trash, mush, the fact that if I’d known what I was in for, like all the work involved, the endless chaos, before I had them, well...

Lucy Ellmann. Ducks, Newburyport.

But then, like a tic or tinnitis, you become aware of 'the fact that' again and long for the home comforts of Shena Mackay. 'The fact that' is repeated every couple of sentences in the book. You'll soon pick that it's a device which is used to replace the full stop or period. A device is also a gimmick. I don't like gimmicks. Raymond Carver's advice to writers was - no tricks. 

What Ellman's doing in this book is really important. Too important for 'tricks'. 

The Stop Sign. 

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” Isaac Babel.

It creates the necessary space for the reader to enter in. I have admitted to being a philistine, so let's look at the first passage again without the device, but with the humble and gorgeous poignant full stop:

It really doesn’t take all that long to do a few dishes, ten minutes tops, big deal, so why all the resistance. Every day I have to force myself, like ten times a day. I don’t exult in housework somehow, but dirty dishes are depressing, Anat always said, and I don’t want the kids to be depressed by them, or Leo either, or me. Leo really has no idea what goes on here all day. He’d probably flip out if he ever found out what’s really involved in feeding, clothing, housing and shepherding four whole kids, kidherding. My entire life is now spent catering to their needs and demands, 

Full Stop. Period. Pause. Wait here. 

The 'period in the right place' grants the reader time and space to think and be present in the text, knowing this place has been set aside for them like a bench with a view. It's an editor's number one tool in the toolbox.

Carver's editor Gordon Lish forced Carver to be more Carver-esque than he wanted to be. Many stories were cut by 50% to 70%. 

"More generally, Lish's edits become slices that depend on silence and suggestion, on the reverberations of the barely glimpsed. Carver's original characters did a lot more talking – they told drunken anecdotes, they wept, they felt, they contemplated, confronted, confessed. These differences are not stylistic – unless you consider earnestness and emotion to be a matter of style rather than heart or disposition. In the most changed of these stories, the edited characters simply would not behave the way Carver's original characters do; if they could, if they had the words or the taste to, there would, in a sense, be no story, since so much of Carver as we have known him until now is about what's unspoken. The edited characters well up; the original characters spill over." The Observer, Gaby Wood.

At times, Carver felt Lish went too far. It's got to be a collaboration and a conversation in which the author gets final say as to what he or she will provide, and the editor has final say as to what he or she will publish. But it's a conversation that must be had. An argument if needs be.

Ellman's longtime publisher, Bloomsbury, refused to publish this novel. They should have had a god-almighty row about it with the author.

I used to go to bed grumpy after my editor's observations (Ben Ball now publishing director of Simon and Schuster Australia) on my novel This Human Season, set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, but I'd wake knowing he was right, and grateful to him for wanting to publish it at its best.

Ellman's book is a work of genius. But is it good? 

I can read a couple of pages at a go, then 'the fact that' takes over and I am hearing nothing but that phrase. This makes me sad. Because the book should be better than a work of 'genius' and should be read more widely than by the few who will claim they have read it.

Now that my literary libido is waning, I wonder if I don't like 'good' a lot,

Mario Puzo's The Godfather is on my night table right now.  As a young man, Mario Puzo had serious literary ambitions. Working as a civil servant in New York, he began to place stories in magazines in the early 1950s and had his first novel, Dark Arena, published by Random House in 1955. The book was extremely well received - critics likened Puzo to Malamud, Bellow, even Hemingway - but sold very poorly. Married and with five children to feed, Puzo soldiered on as a civil servant but continued to write. His second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, 1965, is a semi-autobiographical account of immigrant Italian-Americans in the New York of the 1920s and 1930s. But it didn't sell to well either.

"I was 45 years old, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and loan sharks. It was really time to grow up and sell out."

He decided quite consciously to write a more commercial story. He submitted an outline for a novel about a Mafia family first to his previous publisher, Atheneum, who were sniffy, then to Putnam, who were not. Out of this 10-page outline came the 450 pages of The Godfather, published in 1969.

When the paperback rights to the book were suddenly sold for $410,000, he telephoned his mother. She misunderstood and thought he said $40,000. Three times he told her the real figure, and then she said, ''Don't tell nobody.'' Earlier his mother had been sceptical about his work. After ''The Godfather,'' she called him ''a poet.''

It became a No 1 in the United States bestseller lists and staying on them for well over a year. Translated throughout Europe and in Asia, the book sold over eight million copies in paperback even before the film of the book was released in 1972. It's now sold more than 21 million copies worldwide. Puzo described himself once as ''a Romantic writer'' with ''a sympathy for evil.''

He gives us light and shade, and it's the distance between the two which create the glamour and charisma of the bigger stories.

''I wished like hell I'd written it better,'' Puzo said. ''I wrote below my gifts in that book.'' 

Really? So why was it such a success?

For me, as a reader, it's because of the spaces within the prose and between scenes, not to mention the combination of physical and moral emergencies, and the central dilemma of the character of Michael Corleone “Tell my father I wish to be his son.”

Perhaps I'm getting old, but I want to write good books.

But so long as you honour your intentions and know the price of them, the risks and rewards, you can and should write what you like. Every device, ruse, sleight of hand, joke a little edgy, plot twist a little twisted has a price. When you know your ambition, have named it and owned up to it, you'll know what you're doing, and you can assess whether it's a price you wish to pay.