Category Archives: Reading

Romantically inclined

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My first one and a half novels were love stories. The plots were rather convoluted, and they strayed from the acceptable norm of romantic novels in lots of ways, but basically, they followed the traditional rules of romantic fiction. Even though the storylines featured fraud, death and dishonesty the stories were, at their hearts, romances.

The new novel, however, features much unpleasantness and a lot of humour, but I’m struggling to identify the romantic thread. With this in mind, I revisited the accumulated advice on writing romantic fiction to decide, once and for all, if what I was writing could be considered a romance.

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Books… and what to do with them

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Today I had intended to write a very erudite (!) piece about homage to literary classics in films. I’ve just watched ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ for the first time. I’m so glad I did….

It’s such a truly terrible piece of cinematic nonsense (just my opinion, you understand) that I needed something else to occupy me while it wound its way to the inexorable conclusion. In between bouts of Sudoku I realised the film was a reworking of the Lost World literary genre.

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Beginner’s luck pt 2

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Now that we’ve sorted out the peripherals, we can get down the process itself and examine some of the rules of writing from a beginner’s perspective. A lot of what is written about the art of writing applies to those who’ve been writing a while. It’s easy to get bogged down in does and don’ts even before you pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard.

But before I begin, I must add a note about a point I made a few posts ago. Regulars to this blog might remember I was having a go at Stieg Larsson for leaving a plot point hanging – see the ‘Chekhov’s Rifle’ post. Well, I have some humble pie to eat. I complained that one of the main characters in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ had a perfect opportunity to use a weapon she had previously dropped into her pocket, but she didn’t. I wondered at the time whether Larsson had just forgotten about it.

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Beginner’s luck pt 1

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In which we examine some of the influences that shape our writing lives. In part one I thought I would look more closely at the peripherals – those external aspects of writing, mostly outside our control, that nevertheless directly affect how we write and what we write about.  In part two, we’ll scrutinize the writing process itself.

In my experience, writing isn’t a life choice, like exercise, or dieting. We don’t decide to become writers any more than we decide to become a man or a woman (well, most of us, anyway); by the time we’re ready to make such a conscious decision; writing has already made the choice for us. It’s a compulsion: innate, and as inevitable as death and taxes.

So let’s start with some advice:

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Create some tension

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Are you sure you’re starting your story at the right point? Are you approaching it from the best angle?

There’s an old joke about a driver who stops an elderly man and asks directions. The old man considers this for a while before replying, ‘Well, to begin with, I wouldn’t start from here….’

Sometimes, if you follow the strictly chronological sequence of events, you risk revealing too much to your readers and depriving them of the satisfaction of working things out for themselves. This is equally true of chapters, scenes and even whole novels. Should you describe a scene in detail, as it happens, or would it be better to come in later, after the event and leave the reader to fill in the gaps and draw their own conclusions?

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Chekhov’s rifle

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‘One mustn’t put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’

What Chekhov meant by this excellent piece of advice was that nothing – objects, characters, situations, moods – should be random in our writing. Everything must have a purpose.

So why are you thinking of setting your novel in the recent past?

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Sleepless vigilance

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I had a bit of a mental meltdown this week, and I couldn’t think of anything to blog about until I found myself talking with some like-minded people about the lamentable and ongoing corruption of the English language. That got me thinking. I mentioned a well-known apocryphal tale from the First World War as a humorous illustration. You know the one – the message, “send reinforcements, were going to advance“, is sent from the battlefield back up the chain of command. When it arrives at its destination, the message is received as “send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance“.  It’s an extreme example but it demonstrates how easily our language can be altered and distorted when we rely on the spoken word.

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New beginnings

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After casting around in the wilderness for a while, tinkering away at the second novel – the one I began during last year’s NaNoWriMo – I have belatedly realised that I don’t want to continue with it. Not at the moment, anyway.

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Starting Out

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When I first started to write a novel, I thought I knew what I was doing. After all, I figured, I’d read lots of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Just in case there was something I might have missed, I enrolled on a 5-day residential novel-writing course. I won’t mention the name of the organisation. Suffice it to say it is very highly regarded in the field of literary endeavours. Maybe I just hit a bad week, but it was a pretty expensive waste of time and I won’t dwell on it, except to say that I’ve since heard an interview with one of the tutors where she actually admitted how bad she’d been that week. (I think she only did it once; she wasn’t temperamentally suited to the concept of coaching at all.)

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Out of time

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This really annoys me – when you’re reading an otherwise gripping novel or watching an absorbing film, and you’re suddenly yanked out of the moment by a glaring anachronism.

Maybe it’s just me, and I’m overburdened with information. I don’t mean to be glib but sometimes I wonder if too much knowledge is indeed the marvellous thing it’s purported to be. Would it be better not to know? Is ignorance really bliss?

Let me explain. Last night I was watching ‘Atonement’, the film of the book by Ian McEwan. I’ve read the book and seen the film before, and although I thoroughly enjoyed both, there’s always been a little itch, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, that prevented me from enjoying them as much as I should. Last night it finally clicked. My problem hinges on the use of one little word.

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