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.