Robert Lautner's Blog, page 3

An Elephant walks into the room.

I never sit down and think about writing a novel, about what to write. I wait for the story to come to me. When I finish a book I’ll hang around and wait for a story to come. After writing eight novels (five already published and the others to follow) I’ve got the method down pat.

I never worry or think about it but know it’ll come when I’m ready. Just relax, deal with the other shit more than I do when I’m writing.

I know how it will come. It will be by accident. I’ll be browsing for something else, watching the news or a film and something will just pop out, maybe not even related, just a phrase, or a footnote in a book, an object in the background and I know it when it comes. If I can spend more than ten minutes thinking on it, getting excited about the possibilities and the journey that might be ahead then I know I’ve got it. If it doesn’t still hold me after that or the morning after or the week after, if I don’t dream about it, then I know that wasn’t it, that maybe it was someone’s else’s story and I just tapped into it along the path to them.

Sometimes I know I can’t write it. I can’t afford to invest in something that might take me five years, or travel too much, study too much. It’s got to be something that I can do in about eight months or I won’t be able to feed my family. There are no rich patrons in my life. I’ve got to consider that sometimes I can’t afford to write and when you think about it maybe no-one ever can. Or can’t afford not to.

So I never really have much to say. Blogging ain’t my thing. But the strangest thing came to me today and I’m going to think about it over the holidays and new year. It wasn’t there yesterday.

I’m not doing this right am I?

I’ve just sent off my eighth manuscript to my agent. I still get nervous about this. Mainly because I never know if what I intended the story to be about will actually come through.

I only use two pieces of writing advice. One is from Virginia Woolf:

“Allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken. Suggested not stated.”

The other is from Nabokov:

“Get the main character up a tree and once they are up there throw rocks at them.”

I think that’s about the only advice I need to know.

The thing is achieving this is subjective. I believe in writing a story, a novel in which something most definitely happens, that will entertain, and this is the backbone. I’m not interested in reading a book which is wonderfully written but if you picked it up and shook it not much story would fall to the floor. I want someone to read a story that compels them to read on, and not in a high-octane thriller way, just the journey of the story. But I also hope that under the story are themes and meanings that readers will discern beyond the story. And that’s where I get nervous. Have I done that? Will anyone get it? What the hell were the sunken themes anyway?

My ambition is that a reader will assume what the book is about and then finish it with a completely different take. The book will have two faces, and hopefully the reader themselves will start the book with one face and finish it with another. That something changed as they read.

If I were to generalise I find that people who read what most of us might consider ‘trashy’ fiction do not like ‘change’ in their real life and they do not like it in their entertainment either. You have met these people. They live in the same town all their lives proudly, travel (if at all) to the same places, work the same job, fear influxes and generations like creeping diseases personally assaulting them. They can be nice or they can be the worst person you ever met. But commonly you’ll find their bookshelves and music/ DVD collections full of good, safe standards. There is nothing wrong with this and maybe I’m the fool for trying to give something else in the experience, foolish because my books do not sell or I should write bestsellers about detectives and maniacs or shout about my books from every platform I can.

The thing is I’m the worst self-promoter. I want to be a writer not a hawker. I do my best but as my nature is resolutely inclined to be selective and quiet, social interaction and media is an anathema to me. The natural state of social media to be upbeat seems often diametric with the writer as a serious entity any more and the PR unable to be anything but exuberant seems more like a child smashing the wrong puzzle piece into place: “Wow! Check out the amazing new thriller by…” And it turns out to be about a serial killer who eats children and wears corpses as hats. I don’t get it.

I’ll get my coat. French exit.

About

About.

Stuff I’m working on.

“By Their Own Motion” is the title of my 2nd novel (although the title may change as publisher’s are wont to do) and is very different from Road to Reckoning. My choice is to write historical fiction but it is not the period that I write in that appeals to me so much as an object or subject that captures my own interest and imagination.

In the case of Road to Reckoning it was the creation of the Colt revolver and its significance, and the romanticism of the wooden model of the gun which the story grew from. Similarly “By Their Own Motion” is set in 1944-45 but it is not the period that drew me. The story is about the company that built the cremation ovens for the SS and specifically the patent for an oven design for Auschwitz which, if constructed, would have enabled the SS to exceed beyond the horrors of what was already unimaginable.

For my current work I needed to return to the 19th century and back to America. After writing a novel set in Germany at the end of WWII I needed something more traditional and comfortable to write so I’m journeying through North West Montana and Canada in the winter of 1865.

I’m hoping to use this blog to update on that book (and one other that I wrote before By The Motion of Them) and I am notoriously poor at doing this sort of thing so bear with me.