Having Fun!

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I can particularly relate to the email which Harry Bingham sent out on Friday.

It starts out with a quote about having fun: “Benjamin Jowett was a Victorian professor of Greek, a theologian and a college reformer. Photos of him have a somewhat stern and whiskery air, but he is responsible for one of my favourite quotes ever:

We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps have found it. But have we had any fun?

I love that. As writers, we’re not all that interested in truth, so perhaps we can rephrase: We have sought a decent story, and sometimes perhaps have told one. But have we had any fun?

That quote is in my head because it occurred to me this week that perhaps my best books are also the ones I most enjoyed writing. It’s certainly true that the ones I most laboured over ended up proficient enough, but less joyous in the reading.”

He goes on to mention several books that he has written that he enjoyed writing and people have enjoyed reading. He says, “Overall, I think it is true that a joyous writing experience leads to a better reading experience. That’s nice to know in one way. Most writers could make more money in other jobs – or indeed, use those other jobs to fund their writing time – so it definitely matters that writing is fun.

But life ain’t always easy and writing isn’t always pleasurable. What happens if you are finding the writing a slog? The joyous writing = good writing rule is a comfort if you’re having fun. But doesn’t that also mean that painful writing = bad writing? In which case, the rule seems to double your troubles.

I think maybe it does.

I do strongly believe that you should write mostly for the fun of it. If you’re not actually under contract to a publisher, then why write if you hate it? Of course, in any book, there’ll be tough patches that you just have to push through, but that’s the same as any challenging hobby. Overcoming those challenges is part of the joy.

But some books have the joy/challenge balance wrong. The joy’s never quite enough, the challenges rather too constant.

So what to do? As usual, I don’t really know the answer, but my personal cocktail of solutions includes the following:

  • KBO. This was a core part of Winston Churchill’s philosophy on life. If women were around, he expressed it as “KBO”. If they weren’t, he said it plainly: Keep Bu**ering On. In the end, an ability just to push through the tough patches is the single most important quality of any writer.
  • If possible, take a break. And the breakier the break, the better. A sharp change of routine – a holiday, a love affair – is going to work better than “everything the same, but no writing”.
  • Figure out if there’s a technical flaw somewhere. A big one this, especially for less experienced writers. So often enough, you start a project with enthusiasm. At about the 30,000 word mark, that enthusiasm starts to dissipate. Then you write more text, but it just seems pointless. You don’t like what you’ve written. You give up. And often, often, often it’s because of an identifiable and fixable technical fault. So it could be something you’re doing wrong in terms of points of view. Or your sense of place. Or your plotting. Or almost anything. Those things will make your writing seem bad (because in this one specific way, it is bad). Then, since you don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it, you just give up. That’s where a professional can help.
  • Cut. Oh my goodness, this is so simple and so powerful. If you are telling a good story in 120,000 words that you could express equally well in 90,000 words – and it’s very, very common to see such things – then you have attached a huge drag anchor to your narrative. It can never leap free because you are burdening the reader with 30,000 purposeless words. Cut, my friend. Cut more than you think you can cut. Take joy in cutting. You will feel your manuscript lift and surge forward in the water. It’ll love you for the surgery. Be ambitious.
  • The dagger in the table. And sometimes, simply enough, a narrative starts to drag because it’s a bit draggy. The set-up is great. The ending you have in mind is fantastic. But the bit in-between? It’s all a bit ho-hum. So kill someone. Or have a bank robbery. Or have someone get abducted or buried underground. Offer a mid-story incident that shatters the shape of the story that the reader was expecting. Write a novel with two climaxes. Plunge the dagger into the table and watch it quiver.
  • Ask yourself: have a nailed the basic concept for this novel? If you don’t have a stellar concept, your novel will never be stellar. If your concept – your elevator pitch – just isn’t all that strong, the novel will essentially be unsaleable no matter how many nice little plot turns you have in chapter 22, and no matter how quirky you make Aunt Maisie. And if you have embarked on a novel with too little zizz, then add it. You don’t have to scrap what you’ve written and start again. You just have to find the ingredient – a ghost, a murder, a secret letter, a splash of magic, a something – that gives life to all the rest.”

I think Harry is right: that fun can make big difference in writing. I’m working on a collection of short stories, and I’m having a lot of fun writing them. But I’ve decided to stick to some rules. First of all, my idea for a new story has to be thoroughly tested in my mind for at least a week until I’m sure that readers would enjoy the story. My second rule is if the text starts to lose momentum I stop and fix it, taking whatever time it takes. So far, I’ve had only one story that I just didn’t like after three pages. And my third rule is to look at my completed work through the eyes of a sceptical reader. I keep finding little flaws that are fixable.

J K Rowling Explains

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There is an article by Anita Singh in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph which gives some insight into why Ms Rowling took on the Scottish National Party and Nicola Sturgeon in the Big Trans Row.

J K Rowling

“J K Rowling has defended her stance on women-only spaces by stating the ’98-99 percent of sexual offences are caused by those born with penises.’ The Harry Potter author said she felt a ‘moral obligation’ to take on trans activists who had adopted ‘the attitude of the fundamentalist’. Those close to Rowling had implored her not to enter the debate. ‘There were people close to me who were begging me not to do it,’ she said in the latest episode of The Witch Trials of J K Rowling podcast. But Rowling said she had no choice but to stand up against ‘a movement that I see as authoritarian, illiberal. I think I have a very realistic view, not a scaremongering view, on what may happen when you loosen boundaries around single sex spaces for women and girls,’ she said. ‘I can already hear the screams of outrage: ‘You are saying that trans people are all predators.’ Of course I am not, any more than I’m saying all men are predators. I have good men in my life who are among my favourite people. But I am also aware the 98-99 percent of sexual offences are caused by those born with penises. The problem is male violence.’

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, between 2017 and 2020, the 98 percent of victims who had experienced rape or assault by penetration since they were 16 years old reported that the perpetrator was male. Data also show that in the year ending in June, of the 6,403 people convicted of serious sexual offences, 6,223 were male – or 97.2 percent.

On why she felt moved to act, Rowling said: ‘I had been becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which women were being shut down. I was starting to see activists behaving in a very aggressive way outside feminist meetings. I’m looking at an assault now on freedom of speech, freedom of thought, even freedom of association.'”

It seems to me that some trans activists have lost the distinction between Respect and Rights in a democracy. Like any other person, a trans individual is entitled to our Respect. But Rights and Freedoms in a democracy are not unlimited. Rights and Freedoms can be trumped by individual Safety, Privacy and Fairness, as is the case with women-only spaces and most women’s sporting competitions.

Putting Emotion on the Page

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Jane Freidman’s blog has a useful post about writing believable emotion. The post was written by Susan DeFreitas, who is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursala K Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.

Susan DeFreitas

 “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

It’s a saying that applies well to fiction: people often don’t remember the plots of the novels they love, but they absolutely do remember how those books made them feel.

I think this is such a huge part of what makes us readers—and writers—to begin with: as James Michener put it, “the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

Okay, but…how do you do that, exactly? Meaning, how do you actually generate strong emotions in the reader—and how do you get the reader to feel what your character is feeling in the moment?

There are some very specific points where you’re actually writing the character experiencing emotion in the moment.

And this is something that many otherwise excellent writers get wrong, I find, by slipping into a distanced point of views, an issue that can occur whether you’re writing in first person or third.

Here’s an example of an emotion written in a distanced way from the third person:

She felt angry. “Stop that!” she shouted.

And here it is from the first person:

I was stunned. “I’m leaving,” I announced.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with either of these little snippets—but the fact is, neither is likely to generate any real emotion in the reader, even if the author has set up those other key elements of the story in such a way as to predispose that reader to care.

So what will?

Let’s address why overt statements of emotion don’t work.

Think back to a time when you really were angry, or really were sad.

Did you realize, in the moment, that you were feeling angry?

Did you realize, in the moment, that you were sad?

Chances are, you didn’t. Not right away, at least. Because those words—angry, sad—are the sort of labels we apply to our feelings after we’ve had a chance to process them. The feelings themselves are much more immediate and visceral.

To speak in the terms of brain science: Emotional labels like anger and sadness are generated by the frontal lobe, that advanced part of the human brain that can think about what it is thinking, and think about what it is feeling as well.

To truly put your reader in the emotional position of your POV character, you have to dig deeper, to the more primary thing, the feeling itself, which doesn’t occur in the frontal lobe at all, but rather in the older, more primal parts of the brain associated with our physical and social survival.

And that is best accomplished by body language and internal narration.

Tactic #1: Body language

Body language is generally the easier tactic for most of us to get a hold of, because we’re all quite familiar with the physical manifestations of emotion.

For anger, for instance, that might mean:

  • your hands balling up into fists
  • pursing your lips
  • clenching your napkin
  • feeling your jaw tighten
  • shoving something out of the way

Those are all physical manifestations of an emotion that tells us we may need to fight, to defend ourselves or others.

For feeling sad, that might mean:

  • feeling tears well up in your eyes
  • feeling heavy
  • needing to sit down
  • closing your eyes
  • taking a deep breath

Those are all physical manifestations of an emotion that tells us we may need to reveal our vulnerability to others, so we can get help—or that we may need to go to ground, conserve energy, and nurse our wounds.

Fiction is full of the physical manifestations of emotions, and writers can often go too far with it, having their characters leapfrog right from bad news to outright sobbing, with no pitstops in between for glassy eyes, a tear escaping down a cheek, and so forth.

But even so, this sort of “body language” is indispensable when it comes to really translating the emotion of the character to the reader. Because it’s this sort of language that the reader maps onto her own body, when she reads it.

This sort of thing actually helps your reader feel the emotion of the character, physically.

Tactic #2: Internal narrative

But to my mind, the more important tactic, when it comes to the generating emotion in the reader, are the thoughts that actually carry that emotion.

Feeling teary-eyed and heavy, feeling your jaw clench—that sort of body language carries emotion in a general sense. The thoughts associated with the specific emotions of a specific circumstance actually put us there, in this specific moment of the story.

For instance, here are some thoughts that might carry the emotion of anger in a specific circumstance:

Julie couldn’t believe it—her best friend had betrayed her, and hadn’t even had the decency to try to hide it. How had Julie so disastrously misjudged her? And here Julie had thought they’d still be friends when their kids were grown, when they were two old biddies getting up early to hit the estate sales…

And here are some thoughts that might carry the emotion of sadness in a specific circumstance:

Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t. In fact, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was even wrong until the moment she said it. And now everything I’d worked so hard to build was crumbling down around me…

These sorts of thoughts are part our internal narration—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about what’s going on in our life. These sorts of thoughts help us formulate and preserve our identity, and to negotiate our social environment.

Internal narration  does a lot to show the reader the meaning the character takes from the event being related, which helps to keep us clearly in that person’s point of view—and helps us to feel exactly what they’re feeling.

Combining tactics

Now here’s the body language and the thoughts conveying anger combined:

Julie could feel her hands balling up into fists as she clenched the napkin in her lap. Her best friend had betrayed her, and hadn’t even had the decency to try to hide it. How had Julie so disastrously misjudged her? And here Julie had thought they’d still be friends when their kids were grown, when they were two old biddies getting up early to hit the estate sales…

Here’s the combined body language and thoughts conveying sadness:

I could feel tears prickling in my eyes, so I squeezed them shut. Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t. In fact, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that anything was even wrong until the moment she said it. And now everything I’d worked so hard to build was crumbling down around me…”

This is a good little tutorial.

Review: The Beginning of Spring

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I bought this book because it was listed by the Guardian as one of the best one hundred novels written in English, and I had never heard of it.

The author, Penelope Fitzgerald was born in London in 1915, and was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. For a time in the 1960s she co-edited a literary magazine with her husband, an alcoholic, who was barred as a lawyer. This led to a decade of poverty during which the Fitzgeralds lived in subsidized housing. Mrs Fitzgerald taught theatre and at school until she was 70. Her writing career began at 58. She wrote nine novels, three of which, including this novel, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1979 she won the Booker Prize for a fourth novel, Offshore. She died in April 2000.

Penelope Fitzgerald

The Beginning of Spring is set largely in Moscow in 1913. The principal character is Frank Reid, an Englishman who was born in Moscow and has a printing business there. Without any notice, his wife Nellie leaves to go back to England with the three children, but while they are still in Russia, the children are sent back to their father. Frank contacts his wife’s brother, Charlie, but he does not know where she is.

Frank seeks a nanny to take care of the children. He rejects an older, professional nanny, who for reasons unknown has been dismissed from her position, and he hires a beautiful, young salesgirl, Lisa, from adepartment store. Lisa is quiet and serene; the children admire her. Frank falls in love with her, he makes advances and she reciprocates. A student who breaks into Frank’s printing business is apparently Lisa’s ex-lover. Selwyn Crane, Frank’s chief accountant confesses that he had planned to run away with Nellie, but he decided against it. Nellie went to live in a Tolstoyan community in England, but she decided she does not like the communal life, and suddenly returns to Moscow. Meanwhile, Lisa leaves Russia illegally.

This is a gentle, almost passive novel, which nonetheless holds one’s attention through the uncertainties of the intentions of the characters. Moreover, the descriptions of the settings, the characters and the events are of sufficient clarity that one feels comfortable with them, but one cannot predict the direction of travel. In fact, the novel ends without answering some of the lingering questions. Ms Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the culture, the people and the settings of Moscow a century ago, are startling in their unique accuracy. She studied Russian in he 1960’s and visited Moscow in 1975.

What makes this novel unique is its Moscow setting and its simultaneous clarity and uncertainty. The story is also quite captivating.

Censoring Roald Dahl

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Today’ Telegraph devotes two entire pages (and there is even more on its subscribers only internet site as well as three paragraphs of editorial) to a detailed description of the changes made to Roald Dahl’s books by sensitivity editors under the supervision of Puffin, a Penguin Random House imprint. Ultimate control resides in Netflix which bought the books in 2021 for $686 million. Puffin is the largest publisher of childrens’ books globally. The article is written by Ed Cumming, Genevieve Holl-Allan and Benedict Smith.

““Words matter,” begins the discreet notice, which sits at the bottom of the copyright page of Puffin’s latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books. “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

“Put simply: these may not be the words Dahl wrote. The publishers have given themselves licence to edit the writer as they see fit, chopping, altering and adding where necessary to bring his books in line with contemporary sensibilities. By comparing the latest editions with earlier versions of the texts, The Telegraph has found hundreds of changes to Dahl’s stories. Language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race has been cut and rewritten. Hundreds of changes to some of the best-loved children’s books ever written. Even Quentin Blake’s illustrations do not make it through the sensitivity reading unscathed. Earlier editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory include three sketches of Mike Teavee with 18 toy pistols “hanging from belts around his body”, but the guns have been scrubbed out by 2022, as well as a related sentence.

“Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the latest changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”. Organisations such as Inclusive Minds have sprung up to help publishers navigate these newly choppy waters. Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, says they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”. To do this, they call on a team of “Inclusion Ambassadors” with a variety of “lived experience”. She says they mostly work with authors writing now, but are sometimes asked to work on older texts.

“When it came to children’s books, Matthew Dennison (a biographer of Dahl) says Dahl didn’t care what adults thought as long as his target readers were happy. “‘I don’t give a b—-r what grown-ups think,’ was a characteristic statement,” Dennison says. “And I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children, and this always inspired derision, if not contempt, in Dahl. He never, for example, had any truck with librarians who criticised his books as too frightening, lacking moral role models, negative in their portrayal of women, etc,” he continues. “Dahl wrote stories intended to kindle in children a lifelong love of reading and to remind them of the childhood wonderlands of magic and enchantment, aims in which he succeeded triumphantly. Adult anxieties about political niceties didn’t register in this outlook. This said, although Dahl could be unabashed in offending adults, he took pains never to alienate or make unhappy his child readers.””

My view is that Puffin and Inclusive Minds have got it largely wrong. I grew up reading classic stories that were absolutely enchanting and also included violence and bits of racism and misogyny. I could have done without the latter two items, but in retrospect, I didn’t pay much attention to them, nor was I brainwashed by them. Children like stories with strange elements, and for this reason, I think that focusing on appearance, colour, weight, health, gender, and violence (up to a point) is actually counter productive. The story becomes too bland. I have a suspicion that most of the ‘Ambassadors’ of Inclusive Minds, while they may have some ‘lived experience’, none of their lived experience includes reading to six to thirteen year old children.

Ulysses Deemed Offensive

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According to an article in the Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2023, by Craig Simpson, Ulysses is being banned again.

“Academics say the Dublin-born author’s early novel contains ‘explicit references’ to ‘sexual matters’ that some may find ‘difficult’

Outraged censors banned Ulysses in 1922, and a century later academics fear the novel may be too shocking for modern students, as James Joyce’s work has been issued with a trigger warning for being potentially “offensive”.

James Joyce

The 800-page story of an ordinary man’s day in Dublin is taught on a dedicated module at the University of Glasgow, where staff now alert students to possibly upsetting “language and attitudes” in the writer’s work

Joyce’s writing contains “explicit” references “to sexual matters”, according to a trigger warning seen by the Telegraph states, highlighting the same issue which led Britain to ban his work 100 years ago.

Modern students are also warned they may be offended by references to “race, gender and national identity” in the work of the Irish author, who famously lampooned the nationalism of his homeland.

The blanket warning for the dedicated James Joyce English literature module at Glasgow states: “As part of this course we will examine texts that include explicit or graphic references to sexual matters.sec

“We recognise that some students may find this difficult and may find some of the language and attitudes towards race, gender and national identity that we discuss in relation to Joyce’s work offensive.”

The warning adds that a safe space will be provided to discuss Joyce’s literary output, stating staff will “endeavour to make seminars a space where everyone can discuss these ideas and engage with this content sensitively, empathetically and respectfully”.

The Dublin-born author, who died in 1941 at the age of 58, is regarded as among the greatest modern writers, particularly for his masterpiece Ulysses, which was initially banned in the UK and the US for the “obscenity” of passages describing sex and masturbation. The British ban was eventually lifted in 1936.

Censors principally objected to a passage from the point of view of Joyce’s heroine Molly Bloom. The main discussion of race in the work centres on the Jewish identity of the book’s hero, Leopold Bloom.

This identity clashes with the Irish nationalist sentiment of other characters in the book, which Joyce lampoons in Ulysses and his other writings, including A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, which contains complaints that Ireland is an “old sow” with “too much god”.

This early novel is taught along with his final work Finnegan’s Wake on the Glasgow module, which has been given the trigger warning, a move which has been criticised.

Prof Frank Furedi, an education expert at the University of Kent, said: “The trigger warning brigade demonstrates that the impulse to censor is alive and well. The spirit of the old-school censors who banned Ulysses in 1922 lives on.

“It was only a matter of time before the grievance archeologists dug up something to feel traumatised about in Joyce’s great work.

“The trigger hunters could not possibly give the author of Ulysses a free pass. For the record, if you find Joyce triggering you better confine your reading to the London phone directory.”

A spokesman for the University of Glasgow said: “We give warnings to students who may find some contexts disturbing or for whom a particular class session may cause upset. 

“We are, however, keen for everyone to engage, and endeavour to make seminars and lectures a space where everyone can discuss these ideas and engage with this content sensitively, empathetically and respectfully.””

I find this controversy somewhat amusing. Does it not occur to these nervous academics that the internet is awash with pornography, and that only an extreme ‘snowflake’ could be upset by it. One is tempted to advise these snowflakes, ‘Grow up, or don’t study literature.’

Page One

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Last Friday’s email from Harry of Jericho Writers was about writing that first page of a book.

“The start of your book is a delicate, beautiful thing.

It has a joyous quality for sure. Something like cracking open an egg, the peep of new sun, climbing on board a train, feeling the flap of a sail, a rope straining at its mooring. You only get that feeling once per book, and it’s worth relishing.

You can go big, if you want to. You can start in the middle of a bar-room brawl, with bottles flying and chairs thwacking. Or you can start with something apparently small, except that the wriggle of a little story-worm catches the reader’s attention and, dammit, they find they’re hooked.

But, of course, there’s another issue with beginnings, a bothersome one. Because agents, blast them, start books from the beginning too and they are very unusual readers indeed. Partly, yes, they’re unusual in that they’re professionals looking for work they can sell. But also, they start reading literally thousands of novels a year. How many first pages does an average agent read? Maybe two thousand. How many actual books does an average agent read? Well, probably roughly as many as you do – or a few more, because they’re pros.

Because agents read so many opening pages, they are deeply – horribly – familiar with the clichés of the genre. That means, they are exquisitely sensitive to badness in openings.

What’s worse is this: the opening of your novel may well be the first thing you’ve ever written. It’s where you’re at your least experienced, not your most. That’s true in general, but it’s also true of this particular story. Midway through your book, you’ll know your characters better, your story better, your themes better, your voice better – everything better.

Which means that when an agent picks up your book it’s effectively an encounter between a Story Opening Super-Analyser and a scarily undercooked Story Writer. Not fair, right?

And look: nothing I go on to say in this email is absolute. You could pick some horrible cliché to open your novel with but, if you deliver that opening in a confident and well-written way, then any sane agent will read on, with interest. For everything I say below, you should bear in mind that there’s almost certainly a classic of world literature that takes the cliché and rebuilds it into something wonderful.

At the same time, clichés feel wrong for a reason. If you can avoid them, you probably should. And with that said …

Dreams

There’s something horribly schoolchildish about any story that starts with a dream, before, two or three paragraphs later, admitting, “Then I woke up.” It feels cool, but cool in much the same way that my kids think that making pots of green goo out of ordinary kitchen ingredients is cool. Once your age hits double-digits, it’s time to move on a bit.

I think there are also two more specific reasons for concern. One is that dreams are totally unboundaried. Not rule-governed. And that doesn’t just break the laws of life, but of stories too. Even kids’ fantasy fiction has rules that govern its fictional world. Opening without rules feels disappointing – the difference between a park kickabout and a World Cup tie.

The other is that, once you get two or three paragraphs in, you play that limp trick on the reader: ha, ha, fooled you, it was only a dream. That yields a feeling akin to disappointment. “You made me read this, on the premise that it mattered, but it didn’t matter. Oh.” I’d gently suggest that this is not a feeling you want anyone – still less an agent – to encounter on the first page of your novel.

Beds

More generally, one agent once told me that a stunning proportion of all manuscripts she read – she reckoned well over ten per cent – opened with a character in bed. She reckoned she’d almost never, perhaps literally never, offered representation for such a book.

There’s nothing obviously wrong with that. You could imagine some Beckettian novel that opens with a character in bed and keeps that character in pyjamas for most of the story. But … again, I think there are two specific issues here.

One is that you don’t want to bracket yourself with the ten per cent of novels that an agent is most inclined to reject. The other is this: why is it that so many authors start with a character in bed and (usually) waking up?

I think it’s that the writer themselves are warming up. They are aware of embarking on something new. Of introducing a new character to the world. So they start at the beginning: the opening of the day. As they move their character through toilet / shower / coffee / conflakes, they limber up, like your pre-gym warm-up.

And: don’t warm up. Or, if you do, don’t do it on page. Don’t do it anywhere that the reader is going to see it.

Poetry & prologues

The fantasy manuscripts we see start with a snatch of poetry by way of prologue. Or if not poetry, then myth, or incantation, or something similar.

And again, you’re going to tell me that Tolkein did this all the time, and maybe he did. But poetry (and myth and the rest of it) is, almost by definition, harder to penetrate than prose. An opening needs to gently lift the reader into your story vehicle and get them drifting away from the bank, the train gliding away from the platform.

Forcing the reader to wade through a couple of pages of (often quite dodgy) poetry is the opposite of that gently lifting model. It’s like you’ve built a low wall in between the reader and the railway carriage you want them to get into.

Too much, too soon

My least-favoured story opener is with highly extreme emotion of any sort. Often some horrible situation (a prisoner under torture), but really any sort of extreme emotion, conveyed with a plethora of emotional superlatives.

The reason why this doesn’t work is that stories have the quality of new social situations. You’re meeting characters for the first time. If your best friend had a terrible heartbreak sob story, you’d be prepared to listen to the whole thing, dishing out biscuits and tissues as needed. But if you had just for the very first time met a new parent at the school gate and you got the same excessively tearful download, you’d just want to pull away.

A reader doesn’t care about an emotional drama for its own sake. They care because they care about a character. And that means learning them, building them, creating the knowledge that will generate sympathy.

That’s the ‘too much’ error, and it’s a particular bogeyman of mine. But there’s a ‘too soon’ error as well.

That error is giving away your punchline much too early. You have a world where gravity can be rubbed away via a smartphone app? Or memory works only for twenty-four hours? Or your character, a woman, is working, disguised as a man, on board an old three-master?

Then great! I love it! What great ideas!

But don’t tell me about them. Not on the first page, nor even the third, nor anywhere in the first chapter. Yes, of course, you scatter tantalising clues. A coffee machine that has to be pulled down from the ceiling. Reminder post-its on the mirror. Some odd piece of behaviour by a ‘seaman’ apparently remembering a husband.

The clues are what tantalise. They’re what drag a reader through the story. Once you deliver your punchline (“An anti-gravity app! 24 hour memory!”), that particular sequence of clues carries no more force. For sure, other things will come along – you’ll start introducing the full Technicolor complexity of your story – but we’re talking about openings. If you want to get the reader into your story-vessel and pulling happily away from shore, then those tantalising clues are a brilliant way to maintain engagement. In time, as the reader bonds with your character, you won’t need the clues any more. But during this first chapter, don’t give the game away too early. Use the clues, delay the punchline.”

For me, on the first page – in fact in the first paragraph – I try to stick to these rules:

  • A character is introduced
  • An important theme of the book is revealed (what the book is about), and
  • An uncertain, but important issue or event is presented

Here, for example, is the opening of Seeking Father Khaliq:

“May I ask you, honoured Professor al-Busiri, if you will go to meet Princess Basheera?” 

I looked up reluctantly from the student essay I was reading, and considered the bearing of the woman who had entered my office unannounced.  She was tall and slender, graceful; she was motionless, but there was a suggestion of incipient mobility.  She was dressed in a black naqib and a jilbab so that I could see only her dark eyes.  Her voice, however, had an optimistic lilt to it.  She must be about thirty, I thought.

Deliberately, I pushed the essay to one side.  “Who, may I ask, is Princess Basheera?”

“She is my employer, sir.”

“And what does this Princess Basheera want with me?”

“She has an assignment that only you can fulfil, Professor.”

Books on Credit

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The January 26th issue of the Daily Telegraph has an article by Chris Price which says much about the times the world is in.

“Egyptians have resorted to taking out loans to buy books as inflation surges in the country. Book prices have more than doubled as the value of the Egyptian pound plummeted by about 43% against sterling over the last year.

Authors have even reportedly begun cutting out characters and descriptions as the cost of paper and ink soars, with inflation hitting a five-year high of 21.3% in December, according to statistics agency Capmas.

Mohammed el-Baaly, of Sefsafa Publishing House, told the BBC: “A book has become a luxury item here in Egypt. It’s not a basic commodity like food and people are saving on luxuries.”

Keen readers now reportedly can spread the cost of a book over nine month at 1.5% interest, according to the Egyptian Publishers Association.

Teen fiction author Dina Afifi told the BBC she hoped the scheme would bolster sales. She said, ‘My book’s been downsized, slimmed down to just 60 pages from around 100, because of the rising printing costs.’

Mr Baaly added: ‘The cost of paper and ink has gone up tremendously. The cost of a ton of paper is nearly four times higher than the start of last year.'”

The interest rate of 1.5% quoted in the article must be a monthly rate which would be equivalent to about 20% per year.

The Guardian, in an article dated last October said; “The price of books is likely to go up, say publishers – which are acting to avoid steep rises for readers.

Some presses are exploring printing on cheaper and thinner paper, postponing reprints for older books and publishing fewer titles to reduce costs and avoid increasing recommended retail prices.

But the hike in costs of paper and energy and the effects of Brexit mean price rises are likely in the long term if not in the short and medium term, “if the current high production and distribution costs stabilise at the current levels”, said Juliet Mabey, co-founder of the independent publishing house Oneworld

Valerie Brandes, founder and publisher of Jacaranda Books Arts Music, said it was highly likely that book prices for consumers would have to increase “across all formats” by 10 to 20%.”

So, we’re fortunate not to be buying our books in Egypt!

The Importance of Sound

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There is an article by Susan Griffin dated January 20, 2023, on the Lit Hub website which is worth some extra thought and perhaps attention. Ms Griffin makes the point that the sounds of the words we write can make a difference to the readers understanding and appreciation.

Susan Griffin has written over 22 books, including nonfiction, poetry, and plays. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Notable book. Woman and Nature, considered a classic of environmental writing, is credited for inspiring the ecofeminist movement. She and her work have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement & Service, among other honors. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Susan Griffin

Ms Griffin says: “Soon after my failed attempt at a war novel, I began to read passages out loud from books I liked. I had listened many times to my older sister, who was studying drama in high school, as she read passages from plays or poems out loud. So, as with practically everything she did, I followed her example. I read stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s stirring poem, “Renascence,” dialogues from Alice in Wonderland, and, though I never could finish the book, I loved to perform the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities.

Perhaps because of its notable symmetrical rhythm, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or the dramatic list of contrasting circumstances, “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,” I loved this paragraph and would read it over and over, even when I was alone in the back bedroom, staring out a window that looked over other houses, streets, a few palm trees, and a giant neon sign depicting red paint as it poured over a round earth, imagining as I read that I was creating a larger perspective on the urban scene below.

I did not know yet that with this practice I was training my ear to take in the music of language and, in the process, beginning to notice the music of the various phrases and sentences passing through my mind, bits and pieces, which even without any clear logic seemed to carry meaning. Over time I began to recognize these fragments as the seeds of something I might one day write.

When asked in an interview “how do stories begin for you?” one of the great storytellers of our time, Grace Paley, answered, “A lot of them begin with a sentence — they all begin with language.”

We think of language as conveying meaning. But here, I believe, Paley is talking about sound as well as sense. “Very often,” she goes on to say, “one sentence is absolutely resonant.”

In this way, literature is not, as many often suppose, abstract. Its medium is the human voice, a phenomenon every bit as concrete and sensual as oil paint or marble from Carrara. And though modern attitudes do not recognize the meaning inherent in the concrete world, the medium is never passive. As Michelangelo told us, the material from which he sculpted his masterpieces guided him. “I saw the angel in the marble,” he said, “and I carved until I set him free.”

Sound can dive beneath presupposition and assumptions, the world of clichés that has already bored you, to unlock the vital yet undiscovered and unspoken worlds that lie just beneath the surface of what has become habitual.

For this reason, it is important that you listen to the words you have written. If the sound of your words is true (in the sense of a true note or hitting the mark), your reader will be riveted if not enchanted. And, more crucial to this process of writing, which you have already begun by this time, you will be exhausted; put in a kind of trance, the way religious ceremonies from diverse cultures have done for centuries. Thus, even you, as you write, will be led by the sound of the words you have written toward a wisdom you did not know you had within you.”

This advice may seem rather obscure and opaque. But I do find myself listening silently to a phase or a particular word I am proposing to use before, or even after I’ve typed it. Something about it doesn’t feel right. An alternative will spring to mind or I will consult the thesaurus. The alternative is much better. Perhaps the meaning is closer to what I’m trying to convey, but perhaps, also, the alternative has a sound that is more in tune with the feeling I want to transmit. I don’t think this is a scientific process; for me it is intuitive.

Lost Novel Is A Best Seller 83 Years Later

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An article dated 17 May 2021, on the BBC News website caught my eye. It had a picture of the author, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, who died in 1942 at the age of 27. He had written the novel 4 years earlier.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

“Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger is about a Jewish man who – like the author – attempts to escape the rise of the Nazi regime.

It was rediscovered in 2018 after the author’s niece told an editor about it.

The book has had stellar reviews and has now entered The Sunday Times list of top 10 hardback fiction bestsellers.

The UK edition sold almost 1,800 copies last week to put it at number 10 on the list.

It was written in the weeks after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, also known as the November Pogrom), the outbreak of mass violence against Jews in Germany and Austria in November 1938.

It tells the story of a Jewish businessman called Otto van Silbermann, who hears a knock at his door from Nazi Storm Troopers and quickly realises he must flee.

He and his wife stuff all their money into a suitcase and end up boarding train after train across Germany as they try to make their escape.

Boschwitz himself had left Germany three years earlier after anti-Semitic laws were enacted.

His book was published in the US and UK in 1939 and 40 respectively, but made little impact and soon went out of print. The author died in 1942 at the age of 27 when a boat he was travelling on was torpedoed by the Germans.

Boschwitz’s niece contacted German editor Peter Graf after reading an interview with him about another novel he had rediscovered.

She told him about her uncle and the book, the original typescript of which was in the archive of the National Library in Frankfurt.

Graf went there and told the BBC that as soon as he read it, he ‘knew that this was an important novel’.

He decided to edit and revise the book and it was published in Germany. It has now been released in 20 other languages so far this year.

He believes the novel, written more than 80 years ago, has a powerful message for modern society.

Graf added that the novel was essentially about ‘the disenfranchisement of a hitherto respected and well-off citizen’. He added: ‘Anyone who reads the fate of Otto Silbermann will understand a lot about human values and how terrorism and the lack of courage of the masses make terror against individual groups possible.'”

The article says this about the author: “Boschwitz was a young business apprentice who left Germany in 1935 and emigrated to Norway with his mother. Later he lived in France and stayed in Belgium and Luxembourg. Both came to England shortly before the outbreak of World War Two in 1939.

They were arrested as enemy aliens and Boschwitz was sent to Australia, where he spent two years in an internment camp.

In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to leave the camp, but the ship taking him back to England was torpedoed by German U-boats.”

I have been watching the BBC4 documentary The US and the Holocaust, which makes the point that in the late 1930’s the US and much of Europe had very little sympathy for the plight of German Jews. In the US, this was attributable, in part, to the terrible state of the economy and the opposition to immigration as it was feared jobs would be lost to immigrants. There was also a view that confronting Germany about its treatment of Jews would stir up trouble. More recently, with a clearer understanding of the Holocaust, and the publication of books like The Diary of Anne Frank, sentiments have shifted dramatically.

In the Sunday Times, David Mills wrote: “There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Française and Alone in Berlin. I’m not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them.”