Don’t panic! It’s only watercress

Delicious, but not until 1808

 

 Thank you to svacher on Flickr for the picture of watercress

 

It’s just over six months until Kill-Grief is published, and lots of small, unconnected things are making me very nervous:

• A review of a novel about smuggling called the theme unoriginal (yes, there’s a bit of smuggling in the backstory of KG).
• Threads on writing forums ask whether flashbacks are annoying (yes, I have used several flashbacks) or point out that unpleasant characters can end up nothing more than pantomime villains (yes, there are some baddies). In fact, pretty much every discussion makes me feel I’ve done everything wrong.
• A cover design might be turning up in the next week or so – what if I hate it? What if it’s pink?
• Kill-Grief was mentioned in the August issue of Historical Novels Review – what if people noticed it and thought ‘well, that sounds crap’? What if people didn’t notice it?
• There is a possibility of me doing a talk next autumn about – well, I’m not sure, but something about combining science and the humanities by writing historical fiction about medicine. Yikes!
• An agent is currently reading KG to see if she wants to take me on for my next book. What if she hates it?
  

  On the mend

• My horse has injured his leg and, as well as that being bad enough in itself, all the wound care is making me think of more gruesome details I could have included in the book. (Even though it’s not about horses.)

The main thing that’s making me nervous, however, is that I have got to the stage with book two where I need to do some more in-depth research, and I’ve realised just how much easier it is now, compared with the late 1990s when there was sod all on that newfangled interweb thingy.

With facilities like Google Book Search and PubMed Central I can either view information immediately or at least find out exactly what books I need and where in the world they are located. Trouble is, the reader of the end product will be able to do that too. If someone thinks I’ve Got Something Wrong, it will take them two seconds to check a fact that, ten years ago, probably took me weeks and lots of travel to track down. It has taken me so long to write KG that I have forgotten how I know things, and that’s making me doubt whether I really know them at all.

I have probably Got Things Wrong that, these days, are incredibly easy to find out. This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I discovered by accident that watercress was not grown in England until 1808. Argggh! I had mentioned it in a book set in 1756! It was only a background detail of a market scene and easily deleted – it’s not as if the heroine has a torrid affair with a watercress farmer – but now I feel like researching the whole book all over again on the web.

Maybe it would be more productive to stop worrying, and write something set in 1809 in the seedy, cut-throat underworld of watercress farming – perhaps I will keep that idea in the queue for book 5.

Picnics, graveyards and the incentive to write

First of all, a plug – Picnic Publishing wants to hear about your favourite picnic spots, picnic memories and recipes for a new website that will be a handy source of information about al fresco eating (if it ever stops raining).

They are looking for info on good places to picnic – not just in the UK but anywhere in the world – so go along to: www.picnicbooks.com and submit your favourite locations and anecdotes, or leave comments about the places already listed.

One ‘picnic’ place that I possibly won’t be sending in is the very chilly location where I scribbled some of the earliest draft of Kill-Grief. I was working for the NHS patient services (i.e. complaints) department in High Wycombe, and spending my lunch hours shivering on the bench in the nearby cemetery was far preferable to staying anywhere near the phone. (I still have a mortal dread of the sound of a phone ringing.)

It was on a hill on the outskirts of High Wycombe (“High” Wycombe itself is actually in a valley, although that’s not an ideal way of describing it as it makes it sound nice) and the icy wind whipping across the crappy, soulless town would make my fingers turn white on my pen and the pages of my notebook flutter out of my hand. I used to sit opposite the same gravestone every day, so I am grateful to that person for keeping me company and not complaining while I ate my egg butty and churned out the hasty, adverb-laden pages that gave respite from the attacks of the general public.

At the end of the hour I would trudge back to my desk, vowing that whatever it took, I would become good at writing, otherwise I could look forward to another 40+ years of hating to get up in the morning.

Perhaps it would be more highbrow and interesting if I said that I felt a constant compulsion to write – that it’s something I just have to do and that the words will bleed onto the page no matter how much I try to concentrate on other things. But no – the reality is more mundane. I write because I’d really, really hate to have a proper job.

Where did all the big, nasty old ladies go?

A few days ago, the British press went loopy over a debut author. Her name is Lorna Page, but that’s not what the papers were calling her. No – her proper media name is “93-year-old Lorna Page.”

So she was born 93 years ago and happens not to have died in the meantime. To the press, however, this means that she is a sweet little old lady (where did all the big, nasty old ladies go?) who has been ever so clever and amazingly compos mentis enough to write a whole novel all by her little old self.

Like many writers, I was very suspicious when I read this story. The name of the publisher – AuthorHouse – leapt out as a subsidy press who would not by any stretch of the imagination fork out an advance, let alone one ‘significant’ enough to enable the recipient to afford a bigger house and give a home to a number of lonely elderly friends. The warning flags hinted at a cynical marketing ploy, either by the writer or by AuthorHouse. It was the perfect crime – Mrs Page’s age and generosity exempted her from criticism and the reported quotation “Every book that sells will help towards making a home for someone” pretty much skewered on Satan’s pitchfork anyone who thought £16.10 was a bit steep for a paperback.

Mrs Page herself, however, never said anything about an advance. In interviews on Radio 4 and BBC Spotlight, all she implied was that she hoped the book’s proceeds would enable her to help her friends. All the stuff about her ‘hitting the jackpot’ was invented by the media – either to enhance the story or because they lazily misinterpreted the facts.

Radio 4 has now gone to the trouble of speaking to Mrs Page’s daughter-in-law to set the record straight.

“Seems to me they ought to stick to the facts,” says Cate Allen, “but then I’m not a reporter. There was no advance, don’t know who cooked that up.”

There is plenty on other blogs and forums about the subsidy-publishing aspect of the story, so I’ll focus on a different angle – the response to the author’s age. The newspapers’ emphasis on the fact that she is 93 seems to me uncomfortably patronising. The calls to ‘celebrate’ her wonderful achievement imply that elderly people are usually dur-brained dribblers who could hardly pick up a book, let alone write one.

Writing a novel is hard work. Well done to anyone of any age who manages it. Lorna Page is an intelligent person who has written a book – what does being 93 have to do with the price of fish?

I appreciate the fact that the real story “Person self-publishes novel,” is not going to shift thousands of newspapers, but there is something distasteful in the implication that this author is an old dear who deserves a pat on the head for doing something more interesting than sitting around watching Corrie and complaining things weren’t like this in her day. I rather hoped she would turn out to be a criminal mastermind who was conning the gullible papers into publicising her book so she could run off to the Costa del Sol on the proceeds.

The spin on Mrs Page’s age and genuine motives shows the reality of what the press gets up to in the ‘silly season’, but thankfully a lot of good appears to have come out of it. A Dangerous Weakness shot into Amazon’s top 500 and still remains in the top 2000. It would be nice to think people are buying the book because it looks good (which it does) rather than to assuage their guilt at the thought of the thousands of elderly people stuck in care homes, but in any case, let’s hope Mrs Page and her friends have the last laugh.

 

Present Tensions, part 2

Any discussion about the rules of writing can be cleared up by the catch-all solution: You can get away with anything, as long as you do it well. The use of the present tense is the perfect example.

In spite of all the reasons why present tense makes me wary, it is, after all, a natural way of telling stories. To take my favourite piece of overheard dialogue, which I remember from several years ago in a Chinese restaurant:

“The bloke who does my tattoos, right? He actually breeds scorpions, yeah? So anyway he gets this scorpion – it’s like the size of a baby rabbit  – and says he’ll give the kid a tenner if he picks it up by the tail…”

In real-life dialogue like this, the tense isn’t even noticeable – I just wanted to know what happened to the kid – and I think that’s the very difficult key to making it work on the page too. As if by magic, a great example appeared in the comments last time – Anne Brooke’s Maloney’s Law. Anne gave a fascinating insight into how her character’s voice simply would not be bullied into the past tense, so I went to look at the excerpt and was utterly gripped – I can’t wait to read the rest. Blimey, Anne, it’s brilliant.

The thing about this extract was that, if I hadn’t been reading with tense in mind, I couldn’t have told you afterwards that it was written in the present. The atmosphere, action and above all the wonderfully real, captivating, screwed-up main character are what leap out, and the assured writing is there to serve the story, not to clamour for attention. Amazon UK doesn’t seem to have it in stock at the moment, but you can get it from The Book Depository with free postage.

Sometimes it’s the character who demands the present tense; sometimes it’s the story. I can’t for example, grasp how The Time Traveler’s Wife could have worked in the past tense. From what point in the future would the narrators have been looking back? Past, present and future are so intricately shuffled that there is no room for reminiscence – the immediacy of the narration is necessary to the whole concept.

Although I’ve mentioned two contemporary novels here, I also think the present tense can work perfectly in historical fiction. One of the ‘against’ arguments I listed last time was that it’s impossible to believe that the author doesn’t know the end of the story. In theory, this problem is even more obvious in historical fiction. Not only has the writer already completed the book, but the actual events are supposed to have taken place in the past and it seems logical to narrate them in the past tense.

If that were the case, however, books set in the future should look like this:

On Monday, January 7, 2047, Darrell Beaderday will wake up nervous about his first day as foreman at the asibot factory. He will go to the window and will look down at the electric cars that will be queueing to be charged. Thousands of miles away, third-world children will be running on giant hamster-wheels to generate the power…

There are only so many times the reader can put up with the word ‘will’, so it’s perfectly sensible to write futuristic fiction in the past tense. Similarly, I don’t see any problem with using the present tense for historical fiction.

Perhaps time is not really linear. Perhaps all of history is happening at once; maybe our ‘now’ is also the now of a Viking silversmith and a destitute 16th-century crone, a Victorian actress and a 60s Beatles fan,  a 21st-century author, and the last two people finding something to fight about as the world ends. In all these layers of history, it is impossible to be sure exactly when ‘the present’ is. On Picnic Publishing’s blog today, author Kim Fleet uses the phrase ‘time as a palimpsest’ – an elegant image that reflects this idea of layers of time co-existing rather than following one another.

With this in mind, and with that cop-out proviso that it must be done well, I find that the present tense can add a moving realism to the voice of historical characters who experience their sorrows, frustrations, elations and fears independent of some inflexible linear timeline.

 

Present Tensions, part 1

It is a dark and stormy night

The first time I read a novel written in the present tense, I felt annoyed and cheated. I was about 12 and it was a wonderful author whose other books I loved, so I excitedly turned to the first page… only to find it written in what seemed like a really weird way. My response was -  well, I can’t remember exactly, but it must have been the mid-eighties 12-year-old square’s equivalent of “WTF??”

 

I also can’t remember a single thing about the characters or plot, just the incessant drip-drip-drip of what I saw as pretentious “look at me, I’m so different and clever” prose.

By contrast, the last time I read a present-tense narrative I was so emotionally overwhelmed by the story that I consider it the best historical novel I’ve ever read – Sarah Bower’s beautiful, heart-breaking The Needle in the Blood.

These extremes of reaction are evident on a wider scale than just my own inconsequential likes and dislikes. The merits (or otherwise) of present tense tend to divide both readers and writers and make for some interesting discussions/arguments. No one ever says “Oh, God, I hate third-person past tense” and yet present tense comes in for quite a bit of stick.

I don’t hate present tense. I love writing it, and there’s a bit of it in Kill-Grief. These days I like reading it, too – but before I can really get into a present-tense book, it has to overcome my mistrust. I’ve been trying to work out why this is, and these are the main reasons:

•       Present tense can be a warning flag for what Susan Hill calls a ‘me book’, where the main character is a conduit for the author’s ‘ishoos’: ‘I roll over and reach out for the alarm clock, knocking the packet of fags onto the ash-trodden carpet. As I grope for them, my head pounds with the cold, black residue of twenty-five  double vodkas. My hands tremble as I flick the reluctant lighter again and again…” Cue 400 pages of self-absorbed angst that the rest of us are too self-absorbed to give a stuff about.
•      The in-built immediacy suggests a cheap trick to hoodwink the reader into thinking there’s something exciting going on when, frankly, there isn’t.
•       It sounds faux-literary – a form of virtuosity that tries to distract the reader from the book’s deficiencies.
•       Present tense implies that the story is happening in real time – but that’s impossible, because the author has finished it and set it down on the page. It’s difficult for the reader to make believe that the author doesn’t know what happens in the end.
•       The story might have worked better in past tense, but the writer thought present tense was trendier.
•      The present tense is so, well – present, reminding the reader that he or she is just looking at words on a page. It’s like those old submarine movies where the plink, plink, plink of the sonar is supposed to be authentic but just keeps reminding you that it’s a studio with some sound guy tapping away on a xylophone.
•       Present tense might be a growing trend, but trends can just as easily die, dating the work to the era in which it was written, like a mullet in an eighties TV version of Robin Hood.  Maybe present tense will be the mullet of the ‘noughties.’

Hmm, this is looking pretty bad. Surely the present tense must have some redeeming features.

Well, yes, actually – I think it has. If I talk about them now, however, this is going to be a mammoth post, so I’ll leave that for next time.

 

 

Procrastination can be pretty

Kill-Grief, Chapter 1 (Click for close-up)

Yesterday I discovered Wordle. This brilliant site lets you paste in a block of text and create a cloud that gives prominence to the most frequently used words. The genius of this as a form of procrastination is that it’s possible to convince yourself that you are actually doing something writing-related. The pics show the first chapters of Kill-Grief, (above) and Freaks (below) though I took out some character names to balance them a bit.

When editing my first book, I was aware that I kept repeating words, so I made a list of those I suspected cropped up too often. I went through the whole manuscript ticking off every occurrence, then did an on-screen find-and-destroy mission for the worst offenders. I seem to remember ‘against’ being the winner – characters were forever leaning against walls, furniture, doorframes, each other, or anything else that would save them the effort of having to stand up properly.  They were pretty lazy – I don’t know where they got that from.

Listing, however, is quite a long-winded way of finding overused words and the disadvantage is that you have to be alert to those words in the first place. It’s too easy for something benign like ‘against’ to fall below the editing radar, and who knows what more important over-usages I might have missed?

The great thing about Wordle is that it’s not like your brain so it can’t lie to you. Next time I’m in the final stages of editing a novel – which at this rate will be a couple of years from now – I’ll use it to help root out those comfortable words that I keep going back to. There are limitations – some things stick out too much to be used more than once per book, such as – I dunno – ‘susurration’. Wordle wouldn’t draw attention to anything like that, but it looks extremely useful for catching the subtler repetitions, and the images are free to use in any way. It would be cool to wallpaper a room with the Wordle-ised text of a whole novel.

For the Love of Freaks, Chapter 1 (Click for close-up)