Old Fashioned or Badly-Written?

Often, when I’m struggling to motivate myself to write, I take the obvious step. I read.

This week it was PD James and Death Comes to Pemberley. As it’s a long time since I read any PD James and even longer since I read Pride and Prejudice, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

I should say at the outset that this isn’t a book review, but a rambling reflection on writing. PD James is a terrific crime writer but it did seem to me, as I read on, that she seemed to be breaking every rule in the book.

Never use passive voice. Unless you’re PD James, it appears, in which case Darcy and Elizabeth can settle down once logs have been thrown on the fire. Those who know better than I do repeat the mantra (I do it myself) of show not tell - but DCTP is full of telling not showing. And reported speech instead of direct speech… the book is awash with that.

Actually, I’m not sure that it’s any poorer for any one of those things, once in a while.  I’m not hung up on the rules that people constantly turn out for writers, because not only can you always find places where authors break the rules and it works (or adhere to them so painfully that it quite clearly doesn’t) but because the rules change.

Take adverbs, for example. These days the adverb is a sinner, the devil we should excise from the detail of our work. But I like adverbs, in moderation. Of course they can be unnecessary (she whispered quietly) and of course sometimes we use them because we’re too lazy to think of an alternative. But occasionally it occurs to me that it’s more elegant to use a single word to express oneself. ‘Angrily’, I would argue, is probably at least as good as ‘in an angry voice’ and so on.

Back to PD James and the writer’s rules. Death Comes to Pemberley struck me as an old book, rather dated, perhaps lacking a little in drama with all that reported speech. And of course there’s a problem in writing a sequel to a classic like Pride and Prejudice because the reader will expect the same characters even though (like Charlotte Lucas) they are irrelevant to the story. Nevertheless the author has to include them, and their background, and so they become part of a back story that can’t be left unsaid, even though the book might be improved if it were.

It did strike me that the way we write changes rapidly, almost too rapidly. Readers expect things and we have to deliver. I enjoyed Death Comes to Pemberley, for all its old-fashioned feel (in its style, not in its substance); but I can’t help wondering whether, had it been written by an unknown, it would have found a publisher.  Though I have to say, I’m glad it did.

Cinderella, You Shall Go to the Ball!

This is not a question I ask very often…but what am I going to wear?

It’s less than two weeks until the Romantic Novelists’ Association summer party and Cinderella is going to the ball. Yes, I have my ticket booked down to London and I’m off to meet up with a few old friends, several virtual friends and (I hope) make a whole host of new ones.

Sometimes being a writer is a lonely business. I’m lucky. I have plenty of boots on the ground, so to speak. There’s always someone in an online group who will offer me advice or sympathise with a rejection, and when I’m in that land of the lost dark Alone where only writers go I can always find someone to meet me for a coffee and keep me company in the wilderness.

So far, however, I haven’t been a great networker. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer and so the trip to RNA or other events in London, or even in Penrith, are just too much of an indulgence in terms of time and money. Of course I wanted to, and of course I looked at the calendar and thought ‘maybe I’ll go to that…next year’. And, of course, I never did.

This year is different. Coming through the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme means that Thank You For The Music is eligible for the annual Joan Hessayon Award. And so I get a ticket to the summer party in London. I get to rub shoulders with some terrific romantic novelists. I get to meet all this lovely people. I get to have my photograph taken with the other lovely contenders. And that means I get to panic about what to wear.

My purple sparkly dress. I love that. But is it too purple? Is it too sparkly? Is it a little too Christmassy? And the blue check one -  I like that too but maybe it’s a little bit frumpy? That lovely fuchsia one I had for Rebecca’s wedding doesn’t fit any more and actually I don’t wear dresses very often so if there’s anything suitable in the back of the wardrobe the moths will have got it.

So that means a shopping trip. Shame, eh? A dirty job but it has to be done.

I’ll let you know what happens…

Too Much Information - More Thoughts on Historical Research

I said I’d come back to the subject of historical research and here I am.

At the moment I’m reading Catherine Bailey’s The Secret Rooms, about the mystery of Belvoir Castle. I’m about a hundred pages in and to be honest most of those first hundred pages seems to have been about her research process rather than what she found. I confess: I’ve starting skipping bits so that we get to the mystery more quickly. (Do we really need to know what the weather was on that day she first skimmed her card through the automatic door into the National Archives at Kew? Or where she met the Duchess for an interview?)

Research is a funny thing. If you’ve done it properly your reader shouldn’t notice. If you’ve done it badly, we certainly will. Ms Bailey is writing non-fiction, of course; but she made me realise that in both fact and fiction you shouldn’t allow yourself to intrude. I want to know about the people involved in this great mystery and we’re slow getting to the point.

Up to a point I sympathise. After all those hours of research it must be tempting to use as many fascinating snippets of information as possible, even if either they aren’t directly relevant to the project in hand, or you have five quotes which will illustrate your point (especially if you only need one).

Back to Ullapool Museum and Mrs Fraser’s records of the men of Lochbroom who went off to the Great War. She included, as far as she was able, every single one of them. We know their war records, their families, their education. For some of them we know very much more.

The Fowlers of Inverbroom Estate lost two sons. Because they were the gentry their deaths were more extensively reported than those of the estate workers (unfair, I know, but this is a piece about historic research not social justice). Captain Alan Fowler’s life and his return in death are outlined in a long and detailed piece in the local paper. The grieving widow, the assembled dignitaries, the elderly gardener who served three generation of the family at Inverbroom House - they’re all there in Ullapool Museum.

On the way back south we passed Inverbroom Lodge. You can just about see it through the trees. And if you have the imagination you can see the community assembled for the funeral, the perfect set

ting for a story, perhaps, about those of whom we know little.

I’m still not sure that I have the staying power for that kind of research, but I may yet give historical fiction a go. Fact or fiction, however, I’ll try not to let the many things I discover over-ride the story. Catherine Bailey - please take note.

Just Too Lazy To Write Historicals...

I don’t write historical fiction, or not at great length; and I have nothing but admiration for those who do. It isn’t that I don’t find inspiration in historic places, or characters, or time because the opposite is true.

I’ve had a couple of short stories published with historic settings and over the years I’ve invented plots and crafted characters in Jacobite Scotland and in post-World War I England, alongside a rather nifty (if I say it myself) time-slip. But even as I amused myself on car journeys by indulging in quite complex characterisation for these ideas, I knew that I would never even attempt to write any of them.

It’s because I’m too lazy. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this elsewhere. I regularly read books set in the past and I pick out the anachronisms, some of them horrendous. Sometimes I even go and look up the date that the first snowdrop was imported into the British Isles (it’s the early sixteenth century by the way, so your Celtic hero couldn’t have handed a bunch to his love).

These mistakes irritate me and I don’t to be someone who makes them, even though I’ve never been one to let a minor detail get in the way of my plot and I regularly shift geography round to suit my purposes. But I can’t bear the idea of galloping through a full-length novel without knowing what kind of saddle belonged in what place at what time, or how long it would take to travel from Paris to London in 1820; and the effort involved in following these up is just too great.

I won’t say all this changed on a recent visit to Ullapool Museum, way up in the north of Scotland, but I did stop and think. With time to kill I sat down on an old church pew and began to leaf through some of the documents available there. It’s an amazing resource. Photocopies of old parish records, school rolls, newspapers, bills, fishery accounts, old maps and so on, all valuable to the public for reference.

I’ll write at a later date about the detail of what I found in those fifteen minutes or so, but  was very struck by its richness. Here’s just one example: in 1921 a Mrs Fraser collated information on every local soldier lost in the Great War - their photos, their war records, names of other members of their families who served, comments for their friends and excerpts from the letters sent by their commanding officers (many of whom will have met the same fate in their turn).

Both moving and richly rewarding, it’s the kind of thing that made me think that historical research is not so dull and dry after all.

A Novel in a Nutshell - the Curse of the Synopsis

Trying ot get your novel in a nutshell? Good luck!
Photo by potkettle, Wikimedia Commons

Oh, how I hate synopses!

You have, say, 90,000 words in your novel and the synopsis is to be no more than a page (two, if you’re lucky). Say that’s a 500-word synopsis. You have to lose 89,500 of your total, precious words that you’ve spent the last several months crafting into something worthy of the name ‘novel’. Ditching the words for numbers for once, that means you have to cut your novel to less than 0.6% of its original length. Ouch.

Let’s just think about your story. How many characters do you have? Maybe twenty? And okay, only two of those are the hero and heroine but then you have the villain and the hero’s vengeful ex-girlfriend and the heroine’s ailing mother, not to mention her needy best friend and the false romantic lead. So that’s seven, the absolute minimum you have to get in those 500 words, all of whom have to be introduced.

Oh, and you can’t tackle the key plot twist without introducing that other character (perhaps the hero’s twin brother who’s in the army and is unexpectedly home on leave) who isn’t in himself significant but who has to be in there because without him and his background that clever twist you introduced to the plot will just sound plain implausible.

Even allowing for this it might not be quite so daunting if it was a straightforward telling of the story but it isn’t. You have to make sure that you get the character’s motivations in, otherwise the stupid and misguided things they do will just appear… well, stupid and misguided. (because obviously he only did whatever it was because his childhood experience of poverty leads him to place a false value on money which our heroine has to understand before she can help to overcome him.)

My particular bugbear is that I have to give away the clever twists in my plot. Whether I’m approaching a publisher or submitting to a competition - how can anyone recognise my talent with the twist in the tale or appreciate my cliffhanging situations when they know what’s going to happen in the end? I only pray they read the synopsis last.

So how do you tackle this monstrous task? There are those who say that you should do it first so that you can get to the crux of your story. Then there are those who say you should do it last because your story is bound to change out of all recognition and you’ll just have to do it again. I’ve tried both ways; I’ve even tried writing it in the middle. Trust me; no way is any easier than any other.

It’s a necessary evil, of course, but word for word it takes more effort and energy than that full-length novel. A whole novel, in less than the length of a blog post? Of all the parts of my writing it’s the one I hate most.

Five Star Reviews...by Me!

I write, I read. I review. The first is easy, the second less so. The third is the most difficult of the lot.

It ought to the the easiest, because someone else has done the hard work and turning out a review (Amazon likes them short but I don’t think this does a book justice, alas) takes very little time. Yet somehow, it’s something I don’t seem able to get my head round.

In real life, of course, I review all the time. “You must read this book,” I tell my friends; or, if they ask me what they should take on holiday I might think about what I’ve just finished and shake my head: “I don’t think I’d bother with that.” Or (because reviews like this are very personal: “I loved it but I don’t think it’s your type of book.”

I was brought up with the mantra that if you can’t say anything nice you shouldn’t say anything at all. So, if I can’t in all conscience give a book five stars I won’t review it. This brings problems of its own because I don’t really have time time to review all the books I’ve read so there are plenty of five-star books out there that I haven’t got round to reviewing - and not a few friends will now be chewing their fingernails thinking I didn’t like their book when actually something else came between me and the Amazon page just at the wrong moment.

At this point I’m in a trap of my own making. If I only give books five stars, and I only review books by my friends, then then it looks as if I’m giving the book five stars because they’re by my friends. But because I choose books I think I’ll like, most of the books I read would get a review of at least four stars anyway. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother.

The first book I reviewed was Anne Stenhouse’s Bella’s Betrothal. I didn’t intend to read it because I’m not really into Regency but I bought it because Anne’s a friend and when I read it it surprised me and made me laugh. Five stars. Then it was Jenny Harper’s Face the Wind and Fly. I’ve watched this book creep through different edits and different tiles, battle with self-publishing and emerge the other side. And it’s a good book. Truly it is. Five stars again.

Two more five stars are coming up, for Myra Duffy’s Endgame at Port Bannatyne and John Erwin’s The Last Will and Testimony of Jedediah P Carpenter. And maybe I’ll try and extend my reviewing, and try and be a bit more brutal as I do so, or even review books by complete strangers. Watch this space…

Who Do You Think You Are?

No cats were harmed in the process of writing.

Sometimes you have to laugh.

A friend bought my book and sat down to read it. Her boyfriend was sitting next to her. The conversation, as I understand it, went something like this:
He: “What are you reading?”
She: “Jennifer’s book.”
He (looking at the cover): “But…I thought you said she went to church.”

They do say that you should write about what you know and the corollary of this is the old question: is it about you? Now, to be clear. My book is not a dirty book; it’s not even a naughty book. In technical terms it falls somewhere between 'sweet' and 'sensuous'. And what you see on my lovely cover (I can say that because I didn’t design it) is actually pretty harmless. A couple, he with his arm around her. Okay, she’s wearing a skimpy top but then again it’s Majorca in the summer so anything more would be odd. And what you see on the cover is pretty much what you get in the book.

The question of whether a book is autobiographical is a fascinating one. In my case the answer, which is obvious to anyone who knows me, is a clear no. Abby’s story is not mine.

But the thing which intrigued me about the conversation above is not the autobiographical-or-other debate (though I suspect I’ll return to that regularly in the future because there’s much to be said about it). It’s the implication that you can’t write about certain things if you’re a certain (other) type of person.

Well, I’ve written about murders and I’m not a murderer. I’ve written about suicides and I’m still here. Essentially what a writer does is take human nature and explore it; and human nature is on a sliding scale. For example, most of the time I internalise my frustrations and though sometimes I take them out on my nearest and dearest, I’ve never yet kicked the cat. But I can extrapolate those feelings to kicking the kitty and worse if my plot requires it.

I would say that you don’t have to experience something in all its horrors to be able to write about it - though I’m sure some people would disagree. But it may be true that you write about it better if you have.

If you read my book you might think you recognise me in Abby but you won’t. Actually I am in there, but I don’t think you’ll spot me. And maybe there are people out there who recognise themselves in my writing but aren’t there either. But, reader, that’s for another post…