Falldog

On the recommendation of a friend, I’ve started ‘The Anubis Gates’ by Tim Powers. Lovely stuff so far, with one gorgeous conceit about why magic is so prevalent in myths of the ancient world and yet so rare (and dangerous, if you accept belief in it) in the modern world. Plus, time travel. What’s not to like?

To those of you who stop by and have an interest in writing, I’d like to make two book recommendations on the subject.

First of all, thanks to a mention on Al Robertson’s blog (Al was on the recent Arvon course with me; he’s a man of staggering intellect, noteworthy talent and great height), I’ve picked up Alan Wall’s ‘Writing Fiction’. A tough book, which approaches its subject matter with a serious seriousness and a fierce reverence. There’s lots in it to think about, and a great deal of it I thoroughly disagree with, but the mere act of doing so is quite valuable. Like the aforementioned Arvon course, it’s educational to be confronted with ways of viewing your craft that don’t chime with your own convictions: on the one hand, it forces you to look at things from another angle, and on the other, it validates and strengthens your way of thinking and doing – and writing.

Wall’s book feels, sometimes, like it’s bullying you with its high-minded approach; it’s a form of tough love, but its inclusive, though simultaneously faintly condescending, view of genre fiction is irksome. It’s damning with faint praise, it’s certainly begrudging, and you can’t help but think he misses the point of the few ‘SF’ classics he discusses. (At one point, he says that science is a sadly unexplored theme in mainstream fiction, before admitting that science fiction is all about science… the underlying assumption being, “But you don’t want to go off and read any of that rubbish – read (and write) a proper book instead!”) But, for all that, I’ve certainly found the book useful as a tool for interrogating my approach to my work.

Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘Steering the Craft’, on the other hand, is a joy. It’s three main pluses, in my view, are these: it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by genre fiction (surprise, surprise – it’s by Le Guin, after all), it’s in love with the freedom and power offered by the novel (it has a refreshing approach to the subject of plot: she misses it out, intimating that it’s your novel, you know its shape – and it will find its own shape through the writing anyway), and it’s in love with the freedom and power of the English language. This last point makes up almost the whole of the book, as it looks at ways to use language to build a fiction from the ground up.

It tries to suggest (and I’m putting words in the author’s mouth) that a novel can be as beautiful – in sound, and form, and rhythm – as a poem. Those three things, she suggests, can be found in everything from the shortest sentence to the whole span of the novel viewed ‘from above’. This is absolutely how I am approaching my novel, with a mind to its beauty – not to sound pretentious, of course, I’m no James Joyce, after all. But beauty in writing comes from many sources, from the well-honed phrase to the perfectly proportioned plot. These things have a rhythm, and a pace, and a shape and sound – which is why I hate ‘prosaic’ being used as a dirty word. What’s so ordinary about prose? This is precisely what Le Guin wants you to think about and, more importantly, get over.

If you’ve an interest in getting better as a writer, start here and here.

Ah, the joys of storylining.

Actual work on writing the novel hasn’t been going so well the last couple of weeks: holiday, house-movey business and a feature for DWM have rather taken away the chance to sit down and have a good old bash at it. But the last couple of days, I have been trying to finalise the actual storyline, feeding it all through the lovely Scrivener and enjoying it taking shape. If there’s any part of writing that really can be considered “making it up as you go along”, this is it.

I don’t mean that I don’t know what my story is; I do. I know what the beginning is, I know what happens in the middle, and I know how it ends. (Perhaps it’s better to say at this stage I know why it ends; the how will follow as I complete the storyline. And then it will probably change again as I actually get to the writing of it.) What I have been doing, though, is taking the chance to break it down into beats, figuring out what should happen where and when, trimming out the flabby bits, and – and here’s where the “as you go along” bit comes in – throwing in the little twists and turns of incident that actually make the story flow and move forward.

Case in point: I have two characters undertaking a perilous journey across a deadly mountain range. (The reasons for its deadliness are specific to the world of the story. It’s not monsters or anything like that. It’s what the mountains are made of.) This journey takes up the middle third of the novel, and is important for one of the characters, as she learns both important plot points and one or two things about herself as she goes. As I was typing away, putting the journey down, I thought, “Yawn. This is all very well, but… It’s not that gripping.

So, I sent in the bad guys, who ambush them and take them prisoner. Now, I have the two characters stuck in the bad guys’ prison camp, desperately trying to find a way out, while also learning (with better cause than just stumbling across it) some of that information I mentioned before.

That’s what’s so much bloody fun about storylining. In many ways, here is where you have to make the big mistakes with something as large as a novel – here, where it only takes a few moments to retype a paragraph or reorder a sequence of index cards, you can just play God and decide to make things tougher for your characters. You can throw anything at them, and see if they can get out of it. It’s brilliant.

As I type, of course, I’m not certain how they are going to get out of it. One of the characters is ill, close to death – but the bad guys aren’t the kind of… creatures who would give two hoots about that, so the traditional “My friend is sick! Please, Mr Prison Guard, come inside and look at him (so I can knock you out and escape)” isn’t going to work. But, brilliantly, inside that prison cell, my main character is going to learn some truly devastating stuff – not the least of which is the fact that her new friend is dying – so it will make her desperation to escape all the more meaningful. I hope, anyway.

Earlier in the storylining process, too, I added a new character, and a whole new plot strand for the main antagonist. Creepy stuff, I hope, and a bigger sense of mystery, which I had thought was lacking. Playing around with scenes and movements gives you a chance to see if stuff like this is lacking – or extraneous. I don’t wholly enjoy sticking to a rigid storyline, nor will I make myself if something better comes along during the actual writing, but in its opportunity to crystallise all the floaty plot ideas you’ve got, it’s invaluable.

It’s also useful as a way to get me excited about what I’m working on. When I come up with a little twist like “they get captured”, I can instantly feel how thrilling that bit will be, considering the build-up I’ve given the bad guys and their awful plan by this point. It makes me want to get straight to that chunk and get writing it, see it through the characters’ eyes, root for them as I hope any potential readers will do.

Now all I need is the house-move to be sorted, so I can have a bit of stability and a bit of physical space in which to get on with things! (I shall have a special writing hutch at the foot of the garden. So very Dahl.)

OK, so it’s like this…

If you go back to the very first entry in this blog, you’ll see me talk about a book called Darkland by Liz Williams. You’ll see how reading that book inspired me in a rather-blithe-at-the-time manner to give up full-time work and try to write a novel myself, in the spirit of ‘I can do that’. That’s the seed.

The sapling came later. I stumbled across a writing course, organised by the excellent Arvon Foundation, run by Liz and another author who writes quite lovely books, Graham Joyce. So (as a very kind birthday present from the Mrs), I booked on the course and, a couple of weeks ago, travelled up to Yorkshire – shortly before the heavens opened – to the wonderfully picturesque and remote Lumb Bank, there to learn what I could learn.

What I learnt was this: Liz loves my idea, loves my writing, and really thinks I have a shot at publication. She was so enthusiastic about where I was going with the novel, and so flattering, that I was quite staggered.

So, with the exception of a few already booked freelance gigs (I’m not so stupid as to cancel any – and, sod’s law, the offers have come flooding in since I got back from the course), I’ve cleared the decks to concentrate on the writing between now and the middle of October. I’m very lucky in that my partner is unbelievably supportive about the whole thing, and that my main freelance employers completely understand why I’m saying no to offers of work. This last thing is crucial, as I don’t want them to forget about me, and I will need to come to them for more work in future.

Now, I’m at the start of a reasonably long stretch of time (though, of course, it’s already feeling like it’s too little time, but these are just self-defeating Jedi mind tricks) in which to actually write a draft of the novel that, preferably, I’m happy to hand to Liz and see if she can still stay true to the claim that she’d be pleased to pass it on to her agent.

Hugely exciting, and hugely horrifying in equal measure. I’d say “Wish me luck”, but actually all I want is you all to stand over me with big sticks and make sure I do it.

It seems nothing will shake this headache. I’ve been feeling a bit ropey all day, to be honest. (I got travel sick on a 10-minute bus ride to Lewisham this morning. Really. To the almost-puking stage. I sweated through the last two stops, desperately praying that I could keep it together. How mortifying would it have been, if I’d been sick?)

I’ve had a good day and a half rattling words out for the novel, and it’s been beyond fun. I always kind of cringe when writers say, “The characters really surprised me when they suddenly…” Well, it’s been a little like that, and a little more far-reaching than that. The two main characters (Lily and Bernadotte, since you ask) have sprung to life, one in particular seeming wonderfully mentally unbalanced. The story has changed immensely, and both expanded and contracted (Big Human Ideas in/naff aliens out… mostly), and it’s currently sitting there, staring at me, beguiling me with its possibilities. I’m so pleased to say that I’m finally excited about it, and finally feel like I’m on some sort of track with it – which, combined, is a feeling I’ve not had about this project before now. There will be more word-rattling next week, when I have a full five days (ish… the Mrs and I are off for a weekend away on Friday afternoon) to play.

But, for today, this headache/ill-feeling has made me shudder to a halt, and now I find myself thinking dark thoughts about Linux. I’m a terrible one for wanting to know what all the fuss is about; I hate to feel I might be missing out on something. I can almost hear my poor little Macbook whimpering at the thought of what I might do to it.

Play.com still doesn’t work when I try to place orders on it, nor have I had a reply to my week-old email asking about the problem. (Any other Mac users had this? When you click on checkout, it just takes you to a list of your current outstanding orders.)

Oh, and my internet bank is throwing up unrecognised security certificates. I phoned them and they said they knew about the problem, and I should just go ahead and use the service. Which was fine – until the site threw up even more unrecognised certificates. Hmm. I’m just going to leave it alone for the moment.

Also, the spam continues to clog up the pipes behind this site. I’ve a few ideas to cut it down, while also making commenting easier, and I should implement them soon.

Meanwhile, an uberconstructive week reaches its end, with me about 10,000 words richer than when it started. Today, therefore, I’m leaving the computer alone (after this, anyway) and going shopping… If only I knew how much spending money I had in my account…

Writing should be a pleasure, not a chore.

People who say that are delusional lunatics who have no hope of ever getting published. This is what I have decided. This from Liz Williams’ LiveJournal, talking about the progress of her current novel:

I’m aiming at 2K minimum over the next week or so, which should see this book done by mid-Feb. I have short fiction stacking up, and proposals to write, so this needs to be fitted in. But it’s getting done. I’m not hammering it now, as we have a lot of work-related and social stuff coming up and you know, having a life is pleasant.

“Needs to be fitted in.” “It’s getting done.” “Having a life is pleasant.” Not the comments of someone for whom the act of writing is a blinding orgasm of rhapsodic creation. I often suspect some people think that’s precisely what writing is: the tippy-tip-tap of the keyboard, a shining golden light, a gasp, a cry, and then a perfect little creation is left behind, the writer glowing and breathless in the aftermath. Pah.

It’s true, when I’m in the zone, writing does take me somewhere where the work seems to do itself. On those occasions where it’s really transported me, there has been a definite “coming down” period, a need to earth myself before I’m properly myself again. But that isn’t pleasurable – I’m not at the keyboard, smugly smirking at how much joy the act is giving me.

Perhaps, I sometimes think, people think the pleasure in writing comes from tinkering with words, playing with different choices, different orders, different shapes. If that’s what you dream of, do a bloody crossword. ‘Playing with words’ is irksome and sometimes frustrating: while it may be immensely joyful to just trip out that perfect turn of phrase, more often that not you’re stumbling around the cobwebbed corners of your vocabulary, searching for that perfect word which is just out of reach, somewhere in the dark.

As I remembered (I would say ‘realised’, but I knew it all along, I was just willfully ignoring the fact) yesterday, throw some hard work at writing and the results start to show. I had lunch with a friend, who was being very kind about my writing, while I was being very down on myself, criticising myself for being bad at coming up with ideas… Then, I verbally slapped myself about the face: I’m not bad at ideas, I’m bad at turning ideas into stories, and that’s because I’m lazy and quite often won’t work at doing so. Instead, I’ll hang around in hope that a story will just creep into my head without me noticing – but my brain is too sluggish nowadays to do that on its own, but its not so incapable that it can’t do it with a bit of effort.

So, that’s precisely what I did. The night before, I’d found a scribbled note of a short story idea that had slipped my mind, and which I quite liked. So, I got back from lunch, sat down at my computer, took that idea and (with the help of the increasingly invaluable Scrivener – nothing I write at the moment is happening without it, even blog posts*) worked it into a story.

And it was work. And it wasn’t pleasurable. But it was, at the end, when it had form and shape and new ideas and aspects I’d never imagined, immensely satisfying. It was the satisfaction of a job well done, of a difficult thing wrestled into submission.

That, I think, is where the idea of ‘writing as joy’ was born. The pleasure comes from the satisfaction of the finished result – and there is little more satisfying in a writer’s life than nailing (with vicious hammer blow after hammer blow) a story into the shape you hoped and, if you’re lucky, more than you hoped. But even that is only half the story: then, a writer has to take that framework and plaster it with words, finding exactly the right language to bring the bare bones to life.

I’ll let you know how that half goes.

* This may explain why we’ve had one or two longs posts recently…

I worry about what Doctor Who has done to me. More precisely, I worry for what it’s done to my tastes. And by that I don’t mean that it has given me a tolerance for shoddy TV science fiction (cf Blake’s 7, most obviously, and any number of other bits of rubbish).

This week saw the release on DVD of a story that occupies a rather monolithic position in my childhood memory (and probably that of every fan of a certain age). It was in this story, ‘Logopolis’, that the nine-year-old me saw Doctor Who change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison. “Hang on! I was just getting to like the goggle-eyed shouty man and now this!” But I was young, I rolled with the punches; and, in fact, it’s not the regeneration that makes this story cast such a long shadow in my memory, it’s the story’s eponymous setting.

The planet Logopolis is a world populated by whispering mathematicians, whose murmured calculations hold the universe together. The Logopolitans take numbers, speak the calculations, and make things flesh. “They use word of mouth… [they] mutter, intone.”

When the Doctor finally gets there (about halfway through the story, most of the time prior to this being taken up with the changing of a tyre), we first see it from above: a grey-pink jumbled maze of buildings, the twisting corridors between them making the curved vista look like a brain – the mind of the universe, in fact. And there, crowning the scene, an unlikely seeming radio telescope: hard, jarring Earth technology jutting from this mystical landscape.

At the time, the series’ script editor was a man who had an obsession with the scientific, and who was very keen to get as much ‘hard science’ into Doctor Who as possible. ‘Logopolis’ is one of the finest examples of this, jam-packed as it is with half-realistic technobabble which feels like it’s cribbed from the index of a particularly esoteric physics textbook. All of which makes it all the more surprising that so much of the story is predicated on the idea of pure will made manifest through the power of incantation – a more magical idea you’d be very hard pressed to find.

But it’s this juxtaposition that makes me so fond of Logopolis, I think, and what has made its imagery endure so thoroughly in my memory. That first, overhead shot of Logopolis is burnt into my mind’s eye as strongly as any other childhood memory; its strangeness, the discomfort of its science/magic clash, immediately captivating the young me – and captivating me still.

And it’s this clash of the magical and the scientific that has gone on to colour my tastes in fiction. It’s not simply a question of ‘liking science fiction’ or ‘liking fantasy’. While I’m partial to fiction of that type, I’m still remarkably fussy about it. For a piece of fiction to really tickle my fancy, there has to be some sort of clash: the magic realism of the novels of Paul Magrs (who later turned out to be a Doctor Who fan, and turned his considerable talents to writing for the range of novels based on the series – and later still, I snared him for a Doctor Who short story collection I edited, which is still one of the highlights of my career) is just one manifestation of the conjunction of real and unreal that I like so much.

It’s there in all my Officially Favourite Things: Buffy, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, even the jolt of the Cylons’ mysticism in Battlestar Galactica, along with the many other odds and sods I hold dear to my heart, including, of course, Doctor Who.

It’s precisely the clash of mystical and science-fictional that turned me on to Liz William’s ‘Darkland’ – which, you may remember back on day one of this blog, was the book that set me on the path I’m on now. Today, I picked up another of her books, about a police detective who solves problems to do with demons and ghosts and… er… I realise this sounds familiar, given recent reading matter, but it has a different spin – and even so, it’s another prime example of the real-meets-unreal bait that gets my mental carp a-bitin’. Er.

So, I suppose this entry is a sort of marker. Stuck here with this last big freelance stint in this office, the dream of spending all my time writing and creating – playing in my own created worlds, just like those made by others which I enjoy so much – seems further away than I would like. But I know I’ll be there soon, and with each passing day, I get more excited about the prospect.

For you, I hope this post was at the very least worth your time. For me, it’s a little heads-up to say, “You know, it’s OK. You’re still on the right path. Stick with it.”

Use a Mac with OS X? (You most assuredly should, but let’s not get into this now.)

You really, really have to use a program called Scrivener.

And that’s all the posting you’re going to get for this week. Because I am, for a change, actually busy getting on with stuff, thanks to the above. See you on Monday, and have lovely weekends!

I have a secret shame. It’s to do with things like this news report, and more specifically its first sentence:

Rescue attempts are set to resume to try to save about six dolphins stranded in a shallow cove off New York’s Long Island coast.

… the implication of that being that the rescuers are thinking, “Yeah, well, about six. If we only save four or five, that’s OK. I mean, fuck the rest, right? They’re only dolphins.”

Why not “a number of dolphins”? The story goes on to make it clear that the rescuers do not know for certain how many dolphins need rescuing, and discusses the approximations of numbers of those originally stranded, those already rescued and those remaining.

Also: “attempts are set to… try”. Well, of course they are, they are attempts. That’s what attempts do.

Also: “Rescue attempts are set to… try to save” the dolphins. Well, good. I can’t count the number of “rescue attempts” that have actually set out to maim or kill their targets.

And my secret shame? I keep emailing the BBC News website to point out their silly, silly mistakes. Well, it pisses me off that I spend so much of my career putting crap like this right – and then some of the money I earn from all that goes into paying the BBC to put shite like that online.

Am becoming one of “those people”.

EDIT: Victory for the picky man! They’ve rewritten the first sentence! Mind you, it still says “about six”.

Just been rattling ideas around for a stab at a novel. I appear to have plotted The Da Vinci Code in Space! Back to the drawing board…