Novel types

Fiction Writing Tips

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Melissa Donovan has 42 Fiction Writing Tips for Novelists on the website “Writing Forward”.  You can view her entire list here: http://www.writingforward.com/writing-tips/42-fiction-writing-tips-for-novelists.

I have picked out my top ten of her tips, and give my reasons for the selections below:

  • Don’t lock yourself into one genre (in reading or writing). Even if you have a favorite genre, step outside of it once in awhile so you don’t get too weighed down by trying to fit your work into a particular category.  (This particular piece of advice appeals to me because I haven’t selected ‘my genre’.  [See the post on Genre.]  I think this advice is especially appropriate for reading.  Reading different genres can definitely open the mind.)
  • Don’t write for the market. Tell the story that’s in your heart.  (This advice is related to the item above.  It seems to me that some writers have a genre which the market – and readers – recognise.  Sticking to that genre and their market can make them financially successful.  Think J K Rowling.  But even she has branched out with an adult story she wanted to tell.)
  • Make your characters real through details. A girl who bites her nails or a guy with a limp will be far more memorable than characters who are presented in lengthy head-to-toe physical descriptions.  (This is a very good point.  I think that what the writer should try to do is to stimulate the reader’s imagination, and a small, but telling detail is probably the best way to do that.)
  • The most realistic and relatable characters are flawed. Find something good about your villain and something dark in your hero’s past.  (In Efraim’s Eye, the villain has a  past which distorts his view of women, and one tends to feel sorry for him.)
  • Avoid telling readers too much about the characters. Instead, show the characters’ personalities through their actions and interactions.  (To this I would add, what the characters say.  The words a character chooses and the way they phrase their opinions can say a lot about their values.)
  • Every great story includes transformation. The characters change, the world changes, and hopefully, the reader will change too.  (I think that we’re all interested in important change – as long as it doesn’t hurt us.  We like to see how and why others change, and the effects on them.  In Efraim’s Eye, Naomi goes through a major change: from being an unfulfilled nomad to setting down nourishing roots.)
  • Aim for a story that is both surprising and satisfying. The only thing worse than reading a novel and feeling like you know exactly what’s going to happen is reading a novel and feeling unfulfilled at the end — like what happened wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Your readers invest themselves in your story. They deserve an emotional and intellectual payoff.  (Very true!)
  • Let the readers use their imaginations. Provide a few choice details and let the readers fill in the rest of the canvas with their own colors.  (I think this advice is particularly appropriate for sex scenes.  I used to think I had to paint a complete picture; now, I believe that a few brush strokes are sufficient to engage the reader’s imagination.)
  • Appeal to readers’ senses. Use descriptive words that engage the readers’ senses of taste, touch, and smell.  (To this I would add the reader’s sense of hearing.  Sometimes it’s appropriate for the reader to hear what’s going on.)
  • Apply poetry techniques to breathe life into your prose. Use alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor, and other literary devices to make your sentences sing and dance.  (This is about engaging the reader’s brain at another level.  Ms. Donovan has another point about ‘crafting compelling language’.  When we surprise the reader, we get him/her thinking.)

There are plenty of other excellent suggestions on the website!

 

Lady Chatterley and Sex in Writing

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The Daily Telegraph carried an article last Tuesday in which the author Julian Barnes suggested that the failure of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity prosecution in 1960 opened a whole new world for writers. Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize in for The Sense of an Ending.  He said that upon hearing the outcome of the prosecution when he was 14, “At last, I remember thinking, British literature would be able to catch up with foreign, especially French, literature, which for a century had been far more truth-telling – and far more titillating than its British equivalent.  But having a new freedom and knowing what to do with it were two quite different things.  Instead of a blanket prohibition, there was almost the reverse: not a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.  And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by new misleading cliches.

“It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previos one because each generation needs to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors were prim and embarrassed, its successors sex-obsessed and pornified.  And so writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

This is an interesting point of view.  Some I agree with; some I don’t.  While the Lady Chatterley prosecution may have been a watershed at the time, in my opinion, it has little effect on literature today, 50+ years later.  What affects literature today is what the public wants to read and what critics think they should read.  Critics don’t speak with one voice on the subject of sex: some criticise authors for attempting to write about it, and others point out the blank space left by its omission.  Some readers today may be ‘prim and embarrassed’, but others, as the success of Fifty Shades of Grey shows, are quite happy to be immersed.

For myself, I don’t feel any ‘commercial pressure’ to include sex in my novels.  I include it because it helps to define the personality and values of the characters involved.  Here, for example, is a passage from Efraim’s Eye:

Paul was suddenly awake.  There was someone in the room.  A slight, pale figure had slipped almost soundlessly past the door.  The figure made no threatening movements.  He tried to see through the gloom.  Like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis, the figure dropped its robe.  It was Naomi.  She lifted the bed covers and climbed in beside him.  She was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Naomi?”

“He tried to attack me.”

“You’ve been dreaming.”
”It was horrible.”

Still trembling, she clung to him.  Gently, he stroked her hair, which cascaded across her face and shoulders.  There was peaceful, utter silence in the room.  She lay on her side, against him, her head on his shoulder.  He kissed her forehead, and stroked her back.  Gradually, he felt the tension seep out of her.  There was the faint scent of her perfume.  He felt one of her breasts against his chest.

“Thank you, Paul.”

Desire swept over him.  “I want you Naomi.”

She said nothing.

She stroked his chest, and her hand strayed down across his belly.  “Oh!”  For some time she continued to hold him.  “Do you have a condom, Paul?”

“No, but I’ve had a vasectomy, and . . . and I have no . . . “

“no STD’s,” she finished the sentence for him.

She continued to caress him.  Then deliberately and languorously, she slid on top of him.  Reaching down for him, she guided him.  She gave a little groan of pleasure and began to move.  He was almost passive, knowing that his time was later.  He caressed her face, her breasts, her back, her arms.  “God, you feel lovely!”

She gave soft mewling sounds as her passion flamed higher, and the pace of her movements increased.

Then, suddenly she convulsed, buried her face at his throat and gave a long sighing groan.  He could hold out no longer, wrapped his arms around her, and succumbed to the surge of ecstasy.

They floated down; lay on their sides, her back against his chest, pressed tight against him, his arms still around her.  She felt blissfully safe.

They fell asleep.

This passage is intended to reinforce several points about the characters.  Naomi can be child-like and she is very frightened by the terrorist; she views Paul almost as a father figure; she did not come to him for sex, but for security.  Paul admires Naomi, and would not normally have tried to seduce her, but her naked presence is too much for him.

I don’t agree with Barnes that the ‘old euphemisms’ and the ‘new cliches’ are necessarily ‘misleading’.  It is not a word I would have chosen.  I think what he probably means is ‘ill-conceived’.  For me, this is the challenge: how does one choose the right words and construction to have the reader feel what the characters are feeling – no more, no less?

I think that Barnes has a point when he says that ‘readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.’  I had a friend who emailed me after reading Efraim’s Eye to the effect that he felt he now knew me better, “including your sexual experiences ha ha!”  My reaction on reading the joking email was to shrug.  He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows.

 

Reading classics

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First of all, let me apologise to my subscribers for being off line for several weeks.  My publisher (Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.) hosts the site, and for some reason, they took the site off line.  After I protested twice (the second time quite vehemently) the site went back on line.  Sorry about that.

There was an article in the Sunday Telegraph about two weeks ago which caught my attention.  The title read: “Fact of fiction: how reading the classics gives the brain a boost”.  The article went on to say:

“Academics at Liverpool University found that reading the works of the Bard and other classical writers had a beneficial effect on the mind, by catching the reader’s attention and triggering moments of self-reflection.

“Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read pieces by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and others.  Scans showed that the more ‘challenging’ prose and poetry set off more electrical activity in the brain than more pedestrian sections.

“Scientists were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word and noticed how it ‘lit up’ as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.

In the first part of the research, the brain activity of 30 volunteers was monitored as they read passages from Shakespeare’s plays . . . and again as they re-read the text re-written in simpler form.  While reading the plain text, normal levels of electrical activity were displayed in their brains.  When they read Shakespeare, however, the levels of activity ‘jumped’ because of the use of unfamiliar words.

“In one example, volunteers read a line form King Lear: ‘A father and gracious aged man: him have you madded’. Shakespeare’s use use of the adjective ‘mad’ as a verb caused a higher level of brain activity than the straighforward prose.

The study went on to test how long the effect lasted.  It found that the ‘peak’ triggered by the unfamiliar word was sustained  into the folowing phrases, suggesting the striking word had hooked the reader, with their mind ‘primed for more attention.’

“Volunteers’ brains were scanned while reading four lines by Wordsworth: ‘She lived unknown and few could know when Lucy ceased to be.  But she is in her grave and oh the difference to me’.  Four translated lines were also provided: ‘She lived a lonely life in the country and nobody seems to know or care, but now she is dead, and I feel her loss.’  The first version caused a greater degree of brain activity, lighting up not only the left part of the brain concerned with language, but also the right hemisphere that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion.”

This makes sense to me, but I think that some comments are in order.  First, poetry is a different medium than prose: it is more condensed and tends to convey more feeling.  That being the case, one would expect the reader to be more engaged with a well constructed poem than with its prose equivalent.

Second, (apart from the use of ‘mad’ as a verb) the English language was different for the classical writers than it is today.  The English language is constantly evolving.  The reader therefore expects differences and their brains will be more alert.

Third, it is desirable but difficult for the writer today to achieve the same ‘brain boosting’ prose.  Desirable, because it captures the readers attention.  And difficult, because if the writer is not careful, s/he can create distrust in the reader.  The reader may begin to believe, ‘s/he is just making this novel difficult not for artistic reasons, but just for the sake of being different in their writing style.’

This is a particular concern of mine which I have touched upon in other posts: how to write in a style that the reader finds interesting for artistic reasons not just to differentiate my writing from that of other writers.

 

Efraim’s Eye

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Efraim's Eye

My third novel, Efraim’s Eye, has now been published and is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Briefly, it is about a lone wolf terrorist who has a fanatical hatred of the British, and who is financed by his half-brother.  Efraim intends to destroy the London Eye and kill the eight hundred passengers.  Standing in the terrorist’s way are a middle-aged British financial consultant and a beautiful Israeli charity worker.

A (nearly) full synopsis is as follows:

Efraim has designed a plan to sever the supporting cables of the London Eye, using shaped charges, causing the Eye to fall over into the River Thames.  All 800 passengers will be killed or drowned in their capsules.

But first, he must call on his half-brother to provide the funds with which he will buy the ingredients for the shaped charges.  Having obtained the money, he travels to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya, where he obtains the RDX high explosive, the polymer binder, and he has the casings manufactured.  He kills two Taliban who try to steal from him, and a Russian agent who tries to entrap him.  He visits prostitutes and agonises over the Qur’an’s proscription of ‘unclean women’.

Efraim’s half-brother, Yusuf, is chief executive of the Moroccan chapter of the British charity, Global Youth Enterprise.  GYE provides loans and mentors to young entrepreneurs who have a business idea, but no funding.  The CEO of the British GYE suspects that all is not well in his Moroccan chapter, and he engages Paul, a senior financial consultant, on a pro-bono basis, to assess the Moroccan chapter.

Paul is a well-to-do, widower in his late fifties.  He has worked in large practices, has joined Charitable Consultants LLP., and now has his own practice in the City.

Paul is joined in Marrakesh by Naomi, the operations director of the parent GYE.  An Israeli by birth, in her mid-thirties, and beautiful, she speaks seven languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and English.  In their week-long assessment of the Moroccan GYE, they find much that is wrong, including lack of financial and operating procedures, lax board governance, and rumours of fraud and embezzlement.  But they can’t find proof of illegality.  Yusuf’s evasiveness and hostility frustrate them at every turn.  Efraim appears threateningly, and his malevolence reminds Naomi of events in her childhood.  She draws close to Paul and they become lovers. 

Reportedly, Efraim is a fiery, fundamentalist imam at a minor mosque, and secretly, Paul and Naomi attend Friday prayers.  Paul records Efraim’s talk and Naomi confirms its venomous intent.

On his return to England, Paul informs Sarah, his divorcee lady friend, of his affair with Naomi, and Sarah leaves him.  On hearing Paul’s report, the Accreditation Board of British GYE decides that the books and bank accounts of Moroccan GYE should be properly audited, and Paul is sent back to Marrakesh to perform the audit.  A careful inspection of the bank statements reveals that fraud has been committed, but they lack the evidence of embezzlement until Naomi finds it.  Paul and Naomi secretly hear Efraim speak again; he gives clues that his target is the Eye. Just before fleeing to England, Naomi is abducted and severely beaten by Efraim.

Paul succeeds in convincing Scotland Yard of the seriousness of the threat, and a thorough plan of prevention is set in motion.  The attack is expected on Sunday.  Paul decides that he and Naomi should visit the Eye on Saturday.  They find Efraim hurriedly laying out the shaped charges. 

(You’ll have to read the book to discover the conclusion.)

Young Adult Books

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 We’re all familiar with children’s books and adult fiction, but ‘young adult’ is a category to which I hadn’t given much thought.  But recently, while on holiday inSicily, I stopped into a book shop in Capo d’Orlando to look for an English novel by a good writer.  There are about four book shops in Capo d’Orlando, but I knew that the shop in the main square carried a few English books (about 25) and some German books, as well (about 10).  If that this represents much less than 1% of their stock surprises you, I have to say that less than 1% of the population of Capo d’Orlando speak any English!

I had a browse through the English language books, and one ‘from the bestselling author’ Carlos Ruiz Zafon caught my eye.  The brief write-up on the author said that “Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the author of six novels, including the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game.  His work is published in more than forty languages and has been honoured with numerous international awards.  He divides his time betweenBarcelona,Spain andLos Angeles,California.”

The novel I bought was The Midnight Palace – originally published in Spain as a young adult novel, “The Midnight Palace is a haunting story of a secret society and a labyrinthine railway station with a dark past.”

“Murders most foul, chilling crimes and dark deeds” says Vogue.

The story begins inCalcutta,Indiain 1916 when twin orphaned babies, a boy and a girl, are carried to safety by a police officer who is then murdered.  The story continues in 1932 when the orphans have turned sixteen and are released from their orphanages.  Their mission, together with five other released orphans (four boys and a girl) is to find out who killed the parents of the twins.  Sound interesting?  I thought so, and as I read through it, I began to discover what seemed to be some of the elements making up best-selling young adult fiction:

  • The setting should be somewhat extraordinary as to place and time:Calcutta, 1932
  • The main characters should be adolescents: in this case 16 years old
  • Places should be intriguing: in this case a huge old railway station destroyed in a fire and an old tumbledown castle.
  • There should be some major wrongs that need to be put right: lots of murders
  • Plenty of mystery is a good addition, particularly if it takes all the deductive skills of the young orphans to solve it, with very little adult help.

Maybe I’ve become to unimaginative, and too literal in my thinking, but I got two thirds of the way through the book and lost interest.  There was too much in the story that defied credibility:

  • A villain who’s motives and plans are extremely complex
  • A villain who shoots fire from his fingers
  • Lots of supernatural powers
  • A burning, runaway train that keeps running away
  • One person taking over the soul of another
  • And an orphan boy who owns a watch inCalcuttain 1932

I guess to really enjoy this novel, one has to suspend disbelief.

The research I have done suggests that the ‘young adult’ category covers age 12 through 18.  It must be quite difficult to cover this age range with any one novel.  I suspect that writers who specialise in young adult fiction cater to a narrower age group.

There is one piece of young adult fiction that I remember well from my high school days, and that is The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger.  It was written in 1951 as an adult novel but has become an adolescent favourite, with 65 million copies sold, in almost all of the major languages.  I read it when I was 16 or 17 when it was required reading in my English class.

The Catcher in the Rye relies on a different set of themes that The Midnight Palace to capture the attention of adolescent readers. 

Briefly, it is a story told in the first person by Holden Caulfield, a 17 year old boy who is attending a military academy inPennsylvania.  He is kicked out of school and spends several days inNew York Cityduring which time he experiments in various ways and tries to understand himself.  Holden Caulfield has become an icon of teenage rebellion.  The novel deals with a number of themes which are important to Holden’s age group: identity, connection, sexuality, alienation and belonging, but I believe that this is a novel that anyone from the age of 15 onwards would find interesting and thought-provoking.

Chapbooks

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I had never heard of ‘chapbooks’ until recently.  They were popular, pocket-sized, paper-bound books which preceded the novel and existed from the late 16th century until the middle of the 19th century when they were unable to compete with newspapers and some churches considered them ‘ungodly’.  The form originated in England and Scotland, but similar books were published in the US, as well.  Chapbooks were an important vehicle for the distribution of popular culture, particularly for people living in rural areas.  They provided entertainment, information and (often fictitious) history.  Now, they are valued as records of popular culture, that has not survived in other forms.  Chapbooks were aimed at people without formal libraries, and, in an era when paper was valuable, the paper of old chapbooks was used for wrapping, and even for toilet paper.

The word chapbook is derived from the old English word ce’ap, meaning an itinerant peddler.  The peddler would buy the books, on credit, from publishers which were originally clustered in the London Bridge area of London.  The peddler would travel about, selling the books at markets, fairs and door-to-door.  In the mid 17th century enough chapbooks were printed in one year to account for one English family in three.  They were usually printed on a single sheet of paper and folded to produce a book of up to 24 pages, often with woodcut illustrations that may not have had any relevance to the text.  Reportedly, in most cases the quality of the paper and the printing were very poor.  However, in some cases, chapbooks were long, well printed and historically accurate.  At a time when an agricultural labourer was making 12 pence per day, chapbooks sold for 2 to 6 pence.

The literacy rate in the mid 17th century for English males was about 30%.  This figure rose to 60% a century later.  It seems likely that chapbooks contributed to this rise in literacy, with many working people readers and a few were even writers.  Before the industrial revolution, workers had periods of time available for reading, and chapbooks were read aloud to families, and probably in pubs, as well.

Between 1661 and 1688, Samuel Pepys collected chapbooks.  His collection is kept at Magdalene College, Oxford.  Mr. Pepys devised the following list of subject categories of items published during that time:

  • Devotion & Morality
  • History – true & fabulous
  • Tragedy: murders, executions, & judgements of God
  • State & Times
  • Love – pleasant
  • Love – unpleasant
  • Marriage, Cuckoldry, etc.
  • Sea – love, gallantry & actions
  • Drinking & good fellowship
  • Humour & frollicks

Stories set in a mythical past were popular, as were stories about heroes (rich or poor) triumphing in difficult circumstances.    Robin Hood is featured in chapbooks before he started giving to the poor what he took from the rich.  Ignorant and greedy clergymen were often figures of fun.  Some trades (cobblers, weavers and tailors) whose members were often literate were sometimes the subject of a story.

Today’s novel, while far more sophisticated (in most cases) than chapbooks, owes some of its attributes to the chapbook.  These include entertaining and informing, while historic novels provide historic settings.  But the modern novel goes further: considerably longer, written (mostly) in better English, with more complex characters, interactions and plots. Many novels today are intellectually more challenging than the chapbooks of two centuries ago.

Genre

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Each writer is supposed to have a genre.  (Genre – adapted from the  French – is “A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.”)  I’m afraid I  don’t have a genre, as yet.  But then, I have to confess, this is typical of me.  For example, at university I had difficulty deciding on a major (principal field of study).  I started out wanting to do  architecture; then, I changed to mathematics, and after taking a course in set theory (which I didn’t understand at all), I ended up as a physics major.  Or, more recently, consider my track record as a management consultant.  I’ve worked in the health, financial services, retail, manufacturing, technology, engineering, and business services sectors.  And in terms of my assignments, they have included business process improvement, cost reduction, strategy, sales and marketing, service improvement, team building, culture change, and coaching/mentoring.  Not much focus there.  “Jack of all trades and master of none,” you might say.

Does it matter?

It didn’t really matter for me as a management consultant, although my colleagues considered me a little bit strange.  I generally took the assignments that clients wanted to give me, and made a decent living.  Besides, I rather enjoyed the changes that lack of specialisation brought with it.

But, for a writer, the situation is somewhat different.  The reputation of a writer is very clearly linked to his or her genre: romance, science fiction, mystery, etc.  People will continue to buy a particular author’s books, because they like them and they know what to expect with the next one.  J K Rowling and the Harry Potter series are good examples.

So, what about my books?  Well, the first one, Fishing in Foreign Seas, is in two genres: romance and business.  The second, Sin & Contrition, is a series of morality tales.  The third, which is about to be published, Efraim’s Eye, is a romantic thriller.  The fourth, which I’ve just finished, is another thriller about the drugs trade in Afghanistan and Iran.  I’m just getting started on a new novel, which is written in the first person, and is an interesting (I hope) philosophical biography, but not an autobiography.  So is there a theme that runs through these five?  Well, yes, there is temptation: not just sexual temptation, but human temptation; there is sex and there is religious/spiritual controversy.  I suspect that those themes would not constitute any recognised genre. 

(Efraim’s Eye was published 24 September 2012.)

(For more information about my novels, see www.williampeace.net.)

I rather enjoyed writing the two thrillers, but the trouble with most thrillers – from my point of view – is that the genre isn’t really suitable for promoting serious thoughts about what it is to be human.  Guns and debates about spirituality, values and morality don’t naturally fit well together.  But, I think most educated readers enjoy both excitement and some intellectual challenge in what they read.

So, I’ve got to keep working on defining my genre!