In this section, writers analyse their own work and that of others.
A chance to for authors to learn from each other : An insight into writing not normally available to readers.
Introducing Characters
An author, when introducing a character for the first time, has to achieve certain goals if he is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. Readers like to speculate; and a good writer will prompt that speculation right from the beginning. ‘Is this a good or bad person?’ the reader will ask himself. What kind of personality is this individual going to turn out to have? What may be this person’s role in the story? And, above all, am I interested in her or him? The reader’s first encounter with the character should be peppered with clues, but not answers, to these questions. The resulting need to know will drive the reader on and into the story that follows.
Writers may introduce their characters in various ways, some of which lend themselves more readily than others to stimulating the required curiosity.
A very common method is to provide an abridged biography of the character: a little of the ‘back story’. Another method is to provide a character analysis of the person being introduced. Sometimes a physical description is used. All of these methods allow the author to provide exactly the specific information which the writer desires to convey. But they may be too direct for some readers, who like to be left with a bit of detective work to do by themselves.
So instead the author may present the new character through what he or she says or does. Or, alternatively, the reader may be given an insight into the thoughts and feelings of the character. In both cases, the reader is left with the challenge, and hopefully the enjoyment, of interpreting this information. Less usually, characters can be shown to the reader through the eyes of third parties, leaving the reader to judge them by how others see them.
You can come across all of these in your reading, and, depending on the skill of the writer, any of them can capture your imagination and draw you in.
Here’s a fun activity which might help you go a bit deeper into characters, whether as reader or a writer. Read the excerpts below, and think about the techniques the author uses to present the character, and what you learn about each from the excerpt. And if you want to read the books to find out if you are right, I’ve included book covers with links to buy them.
Excerpts :
An author, when introducing a character for the first time, has to achieve certain goals if he is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. Readers like to speculate; and a good writer will prompt that speculation right from the beginning. ‘Is this a good or bad person?’ the reader will ask himself. What kind of personality is this individual going to turn out to have? What may be this person’s role in the story? And, above all, am I interested in her or him? The reader’s first encounter with the character should be peppered with clues, but not answers, to these questions. The resulting need to know will drive the reader on and into the story that follows.
Writers may introduce their characters in various ways, some of which lend themselves more readily than others to stimulating the required curiosity.
A very common method is to provide an abridged biography of the character: a little of the ‘back story’. Another method is to provide a character analysis of the person being introduced. Sometimes a physical description is used. All of these methods allow the author to provide exactly the specific information which the writer desires to convey. But they may be too direct for some readers, who like to be left with a bit of detective work to do by themselves.
So instead the author may present the new character through what he or she says or does. Or, alternatively, the reader may be given an insight into the thoughts and feelings of the character. In both cases, the reader is left with the challenge, and hopefully the enjoyment, of interpreting this information. Less usually, characters can be shown to the reader through the eyes of third parties, leaving the reader to judge them by how others see them.
You can come across all of these in your reading, and, depending on the skill of the writer, any of them can capture your imagination and draw you in.
Here’s a fun activity which might help you go a bit deeper into characters, whether as reader or a writer. Read the excerpts below, and think about the techniques the author uses to present the character, and what you learn about each from the excerpt. And if you want to read the books to find out if you are right, I’ve included book covers with links to buy them.
Excerpts :
1. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Jane Austen - Emma
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Jane Austen - Emma
2. Anya, glass in hand, looked down the ten floors from the white lights of her office windows. She peered through an abyss of blackness to the orange mist hovering above the street lamps of the lifeless evening streets of the city of Y…. A warm sense of power in her head and the glow of vodka in her stomach cossetted her. She had a goal, she had a plan, and she was about to put it into practice. Her aimless ideas had been swimming around hither and thither, but now they had found an irresistible current that had turned them all in the one direction and was sweeping them irresistibly towards her objective.
She turned from the window to survey the scene inside the office. There was a sense of being in control, of watching everything being played out to her own script. This is so easy, she thought to herself. Too easy! Look at them all, so predictable! She knew she could manipulate their emotions like strings attached to their puppet bodies.
James Gault The Redemption of Anna Petrovna
She turned from the window to survey the scene inside the office. There was a sense of being in control, of watching everything being played out to her own script. This is so easy, she thought to herself. Too easy! Look at them all, so predictable! She knew she could manipulate their emotions like strings attached to their puppet bodies.
James Gault The Redemption of Anna Petrovna
3. Her husband had now been dead for a week. She still felt exhilarated.
Janet retreated deeper into the warmth of her bed and thought about Lady Macbeth. “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe full of direst cruelty!” she exclaimed, rising slightly and thrusting out her arms dramatically.
She was boasting. She had not been cruel to him, not much anyhow, nor had she pushed him to murder, as far as she knew.
“Unsexed,” on the other hand. Well, he had done a pretty good job for her there, she thought.
Timothy Balding – The Impostors
Janet retreated deeper into the warmth of her bed and thought about Lady Macbeth. “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe full of direst cruelty!” she exclaimed, rising slightly and thrusting out her arms dramatically.
She was boasting. She had not been cruel to him, not much anyhow, nor had she pushed him to murder, as far as she knew.
“Unsexed,” on the other hand. Well, he had done a pretty good job for her there, she thought.
Timothy Balding – The Impostors
4. Jerry had worked at the same hospital as me. He was Head of Facilities and Services Development. He claimed he was just an ‘accidental’ Project Manager and had been promoted in a series of errors. I was the Head of Biochemistry in the Pathology lab. That had been my planned career pathway.
Things in the British health service had started to change, as did the rules on pensions. As a result of our interpretation of the writing on the wall, we grabbed are pensions and ran. We ran all the way through France until we arrived in, the Languedoc. Here we had found our dream house on the edge of the village of Les Lilas.
Ted Bun – New House… New Address
Things in the British health service had started to change, as did the rules on pensions. As a result of our interpretation of the writing on the wall, we grabbed are pensions and ran. We ran all the way through France until we arrived in, the Languedoc. Here we had found our dream house on the edge of the village of Les Lilas.
Ted Bun – New House… New Address
5. Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”
“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”
“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol
6. Examining the edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain I could see movements—human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently, then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed the manager. 'I know—I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, as cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's all right. I am glad.'
His aspect reminded me of something I had seen—something funny I had seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get alongside, I was asking myself, 'What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it. He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain. Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
His aspect reminded me of something I had seen—something funny I had seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get alongside, I was asking myself, 'What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it. He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain. Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Credibility – how writers try to ensure their plots are believable
Fiction is exaggerated reality. Were it not exaggerated, it would be boring. But it also has to be credible. And this is the problem for novelists developing their plots: how to achieve that magic balance between what would be unbelievable and what would be intriguing.
There is no easy answer to this. A lot of factors are involved but it seems to me the three main ones that influence just how far an author can go in stretching reality are:
However, there is one general point to make. The starting point from which any story springs has to be something from the real world. I don’t think anything, even the wildest fantasy story, can spring from pure imagination. And even such a thing was possible, could the writer ever put it into words, or could the reader make any sense of it? Surely we can only understand something if we can relate it to our experiences. So the basic building block is reality, which writers enhance with their own imaginations. But how much imagination is permissible?
As I mentioned above, it depends firstly on the genre of the work. For some genres, the base of reality can be stretched so far that even the most outrageous situations will readily be accepted by the reader. Fantasy and supernatural stories are examples of these. In fact, the appeal of these genres is that they are totally unreal. But in other genres, strict adherence to what is factual and possible is a stringent requirement. For example, for the detective story to work, nothing can be so unrealistic that the reader is unable to decipher the clues. Similarly, in most cases, readers of historical fiction expect strict accuracy in the reporting of events, people and the environment prevailing at the time of the story - unless it is a deliberately contra-factual account of a historical event, of course. Other genres fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Political thrillers, for example, can vary between the absurd nonsense of the James Bond adventure to the strictly plausible occurrences in real-world thrillers like Tom Clancy’s ‘The Hunt for Red October’. The question the author always has to ask is: Just how far will readers of this genre follow me in my imagination?
The second factor to take into account when creating an imaginative plot is the style of the writing. If you are writing a comic novel, you can get away with a lot more outrageous situations than you can in a serious work. A good example of this would be the amusing political thriller ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ by G.K. Chesterton.
Another aspect of style that affects credibility is the voice used to tell the tale. In first person narratives, or narratives in the third person where the situations are presented through the thoughts of the characters, the story is depicted from the point of view of those involved in it. It is depicted through the distorted lens of human perception, and therefore the facts can legitimately be embellished with as much imagination as the author feels is appropriate. On the other hand, an omniscient third party narrator is meant to be objective, and the author here strays into fantasy at his peril.
In the end, no matter how much an author carefully considers whether a particular plot twist will be acceptable or not, every reader is different. Each one of them sits somewhere on the scale between totally gullible and intransigently sceptical. Someone, somewhere at some time will be moved to say “you don’t expect me to fall for that?” about every story. All that writers can do is their best.
Contributed by James Gault
Fiction is exaggerated reality. Were it not exaggerated, it would be boring. But it also has to be credible. And this is the problem for novelists developing their plots: how to achieve that magic balance between what would be unbelievable and what would be intriguing.
There is no easy answer to this. A lot of factors are involved but it seems to me the three main ones that influence just how far an author can go in stretching reality are:
- the genre of the work
- the tone or style of writing and
- the attitude and preconceptions of the reader.
However, there is one general point to make. The starting point from which any story springs has to be something from the real world. I don’t think anything, even the wildest fantasy story, can spring from pure imagination. And even such a thing was possible, could the writer ever put it into words, or could the reader make any sense of it? Surely we can only understand something if we can relate it to our experiences. So the basic building block is reality, which writers enhance with their own imaginations. But how much imagination is permissible?
As I mentioned above, it depends firstly on the genre of the work. For some genres, the base of reality can be stretched so far that even the most outrageous situations will readily be accepted by the reader. Fantasy and supernatural stories are examples of these. In fact, the appeal of these genres is that they are totally unreal. But in other genres, strict adherence to what is factual and possible is a stringent requirement. For example, for the detective story to work, nothing can be so unrealistic that the reader is unable to decipher the clues. Similarly, in most cases, readers of historical fiction expect strict accuracy in the reporting of events, people and the environment prevailing at the time of the story - unless it is a deliberately contra-factual account of a historical event, of course. Other genres fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Political thrillers, for example, can vary between the absurd nonsense of the James Bond adventure to the strictly plausible occurrences in real-world thrillers like Tom Clancy’s ‘The Hunt for Red October’. The question the author always has to ask is: Just how far will readers of this genre follow me in my imagination?
The second factor to take into account when creating an imaginative plot is the style of the writing. If you are writing a comic novel, you can get away with a lot more outrageous situations than you can in a serious work. A good example of this would be the amusing political thriller ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ by G.K. Chesterton.
Another aspect of style that affects credibility is the voice used to tell the tale. In first person narratives, or narratives in the third person where the situations are presented through the thoughts of the characters, the story is depicted from the point of view of those involved in it. It is depicted through the distorted lens of human perception, and therefore the facts can legitimately be embellished with as much imagination as the author feels is appropriate. On the other hand, an omniscient third party narrator is meant to be objective, and the author here strays into fantasy at his peril.
In the end, no matter how much an author carefully considers whether a particular plot twist will be acceptable or not, every reader is different. Each one of them sits somewhere on the scale between totally gullible and intransigently sceptical. Someone, somewhere at some time will be moved to say “you don’t expect me to fall for that?” about every story. All that writers can do is their best.
Contributed by James Gault
The Writing Team
The term novelist conjures up a very romantic vision of a creative genius locked up in his garret with its quill pen, typewriter or, nowadays, computer, and with only its magical imagination for company. There it sits in the damp and dark as the characters speak and the plot unfolds in a stream of perfect words that only have to be committed to paper. Or, in modern times, computer screen. Ah, if only it were so!
In fact the work of the writer becomes more and more a collaborative effort the deeper you get involved. Even if you self-publish, and have acquired all the technical skills of formatting manuscripts, creating covers, pricing, manipulating key words and other such esoteric tasks, it is still not really a do-it-yourself activity. Like building an Ikea self-assembly wardrobe, writing a book is not something to be attempted by one person. If you try it, your book, like the furniture, is likely to fall apart.
There are many different roles you may want to have in your team, e.g. publicist, designer, etc. but the most important roles are related to the creation of the written manuscript. We can divide these roles into editing and preview reading.
Many writers think they can edit their own work, but to do this is to do no editing at all. A new pair of eyes is essential to evaluate and correct any work. The author sees what was meant; the editor sees what was written. An editor is the author’s most important collaborator. Even the most basic task, checking for typing, spelling and grammatical errors is too much for the writer, who will inevitably misread what is written and miss a myriad of errors. I know, I have done it so often myself.
But this kind of copy-editing is the absolute minimum, and there is a far greater role for an editor to play. Your editor is the first person to see your work. Not having any idea of who the characters are or where the story is going, an editor reacts to it in a different way from the author. This means editors can pick up flaws and faults the writer can never see. They include these :-
An editor who can help weed out all such flaws from a writer’s work has to be a key team member.
But, like the author, an editor ends up by becoming too close to the book. This is why it is useful to submit your book to readers, (or Beta readers) and pre-publication reviewers. They are going to be coming to the work with fresh minds, will read it only once and feedback their general impressions. The author then has the chance to make minor pre-publication adjustments. The risk of the readers just hating your book is always present, but this can be minimised by making sure that pre-release readers are interested in your genre and sympathetic to your style of writing. Even then, the author needs a thick skin and the confidence to brush aside unjust and unhelpful criticism. You can’t please all the people all of the time.
To sum up, the advice to writers is to avoid going solo at all costs. Build a small and sympathetic but critical team around you. And join the teams of some other writers as well. You can learn from other people’s problems too.
Contributed by James Gault
The term novelist conjures up a very romantic vision of a creative genius locked up in his garret with its quill pen, typewriter or, nowadays, computer, and with only its magical imagination for company. There it sits in the damp and dark as the characters speak and the plot unfolds in a stream of perfect words that only have to be committed to paper. Or, in modern times, computer screen. Ah, if only it were so!
In fact the work of the writer becomes more and more a collaborative effort the deeper you get involved. Even if you self-publish, and have acquired all the technical skills of formatting manuscripts, creating covers, pricing, manipulating key words and other such esoteric tasks, it is still not really a do-it-yourself activity. Like building an Ikea self-assembly wardrobe, writing a book is not something to be attempted by one person. If you try it, your book, like the furniture, is likely to fall apart.
There are many different roles you may want to have in your team, e.g. publicist, designer, etc. but the most important roles are related to the creation of the written manuscript. We can divide these roles into editing and preview reading.
Many writers think they can edit their own work, but to do this is to do no editing at all. A new pair of eyes is essential to evaluate and correct any work. The author sees what was meant; the editor sees what was written. An editor is the author’s most important collaborator. Even the most basic task, checking for typing, spelling and grammatical errors is too much for the writer, who will inevitably misread what is written and miss a myriad of errors. I know, I have done it so often myself.
But this kind of copy-editing is the absolute minimum, and there is a far greater role for an editor to play. Your editor is the first person to see your work. Not having any idea of who the characters are or where the story is going, an editor reacts to it in a different way from the author. This means editors can pick up flaws and faults the writer can never see. They include these :-
- flaws in continuity of the plot - where something happens which is incongruous with what has gone before
- inconsistences in the character development - where in order to progress the plot, a character is made to act in a way which destroys his/her credibility
- lack of detail that confuses the reader – information needed to understand what is going on has remained in the author’s head and has failed to reach the manuscript
- excess of detail that bores the reader – unnecessary over-explanation that detracts from the progress of the story
- unexpected emotional reactions to a character - the author thinks he has created a lovable sympathetic character but the editor finds instead un-endearing qualities
- illogical plot – the story doesn’t quite hang together, perhaps because the author failed to relate some key incident that is essential to the story
- failure to maintain the reader’s interest throughout the book – the editor can point out where the story seems to lose its way and where more incidents or links are needed to keep the reader’s attention
- poor characterisation – an editor can see where the writer has failed to provide an important character with a personality, although presumably the writer had a clear idea of what the character was like.
An editor who can help weed out all such flaws from a writer’s work has to be a key team member.
But, like the author, an editor ends up by becoming too close to the book. This is why it is useful to submit your book to readers, (or Beta readers) and pre-publication reviewers. They are going to be coming to the work with fresh minds, will read it only once and feedback their general impressions. The author then has the chance to make minor pre-publication adjustments. The risk of the readers just hating your book is always present, but this can be minimised by making sure that pre-release readers are interested in your genre and sympathetic to your style of writing. Even then, the author needs a thick skin and the confidence to brush aside unjust and unhelpful criticism. You can’t please all the people all of the time.
To sum up, the advice to writers is to avoid going solo at all costs. Build a small and sympathetic but critical team around you. And join the teams of some other writers as well. You can learn from other people’s problems too.
Contributed by James Gault
Naked storytelling.
Sorry to disappoint, but this is not about stripping off and reading your latest work aloud to an appreciative but amazed audience. Nor is it a survey of the work of naturist story writer and fellow contributor Ted Bun. Instead it is a resume of some of the things that exasperate me when I come across them in novels, and even in very well-known novels by famous and successful authors.
My main message is this: if you’re a writer with a story to tell, please just tell it. Without diverting embellishments. Most authors have an insatiable predilection for wandering off the point. It is too easy to find 100,000 word novels that really should be 80,000. How often do I find myself yawning, screaming ‘I don’t need to know that’ at the pages, skip reading, or in the worst cases, throwing the book away? How do these annoying distractions arise? I’m going to look at four situations in which novelist can get carried away and inadvertently plump up their books with superfluous padding
.
UNNECESARY DIVERSION TYPE 1 - THE CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY
The first of these arises when the author is developing characters. In order to ensure that what they do, say and think is credible, a writer has to invent a whole life story for all but the minor characters. But is it necessary to regurgitate every detail of this fictitious past history into the actual finished work? Does the reader need to know who X’s great-great grandfather was, or that she had chickenpox twice as a toddler? The reader trusts that every piece of information given is relevant. Writers who lack the discipline to restrict themselves to the essential lose the trust and ultimately the patience of the reader.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 2 – THE OVERDONE DESCRIPTION
Another source of literary waffle arises in descriptions of places or people. There are many valid reasons for indulging in detailed descriptions, like for example the creation of atmosphere, to illustrate some aspect of a character’s personality, to provide information which will later have some relevance to the plot. Some authors also believe that they are obliged to provide word pictures, to prompt the reader to picture the setting of a scene or someone’s appearance. But some then go overboard: indulging their love of the landscape, their obsession with clothes or physical features, or even just their love of using words.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 3 – THE POLITICAL ASIDE
Some novelist just cannot pass an opportunity to pass up slipping their political and social viewpoints in to their work. This can often be done both subtly and briefly, and in such a way that it integrates into the story and enhances its significance. But even great novelists - Anthony Trollope is one - are sometimes unable to resist the temptation to interrupt their stories to present vast political manifestos.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 4 - RESEARCH REPORTS
This is a diversion that appears most frequently in historical novels, although authors of other genres have to carry out research and are susceptible to it as well. It is quite understandable that writers who have spent hours and hours researching the background for their stories want to make maximum use of that research. It is a dangerous temptation. Readers don’t like it when they realise they are being subjected to a large tract of information with little relevance to the plot but which the writer has taken herculean efforts to find and, ‘by god, you are going to have to read it’. A modified version of this type of diversion appears in Fantasy novels, where the author feels the need to elaborate in minute detail on the universe they have created, perhaps even with the aid of many diagrams and maps. If you have read some of the great fantasy epics, you may well recognise this one.
ADVICE TO WRITERS
Readers don’t need to be warned of these faults; they react simply by putting the book down and starting another or skipping whole sections. If writers want to avoid this fate for their works, this may be a good maxim: don’t miss out on essentials, but if they don’t need to know, don’t tell them!
Contributed by James Gault
Sorry to disappoint, but this is not about stripping off and reading your latest work aloud to an appreciative but amazed audience. Nor is it a survey of the work of naturist story writer and fellow contributor Ted Bun. Instead it is a resume of some of the things that exasperate me when I come across them in novels, and even in very well-known novels by famous and successful authors.
My main message is this: if you’re a writer with a story to tell, please just tell it. Without diverting embellishments. Most authors have an insatiable predilection for wandering off the point. It is too easy to find 100,000 word novels that really should be 80,000. How often do I find myself yawning, screaming ‘I don’t need to know that’ at the pages, skip reading, or in the worst cases, throwing the book away? How do these annoying distractions arise? I’m going to look at four situations in which novelist can get carried away and inadvertently plump up their books with superfluous padding
.
UNNECESARY DIVERSION TYPE 1 - THE CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY
The first of these arises when the author is developing characters. In order to ensure that what they do, say and think is credible, a writer has to invent a whole life story for all but the minor characters. But is it necessary to regurgitate every detail of this fictitious past history into the actual finished work? Does the reader need to know who X’s great-great grandfather was, or that she had chickenpox twice as a toddler? The reader trusts that every piece of information given is relevant. Writers who lack the discipline to restrict themselves to the essential lose the trust and ultimately the patience of the reader.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 2 – THE OVERDONE DESCRIPTION
Another source of literary waffle arises in descriptions of places or people. There are many valid reasons for indulging in detailed descriptions, like for example the creation of atmosphere, to illustrate some aspect of a character’s personality, to provide information which will later have some relevance to the plot. Some authors also believe that they are obliged to provide word pictures, to prompt the reader to picture the setting of a scene or someone’s appearance. But some then go overboard: indulging their love of the landscape, their obsession with clothes or physical features, or even just their love of using words.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 3 – THE POLITICAL ASIDE
Some novelist just cannot pass an opportunity to pass up slipping their political and social viewpoints in to their work. This can often be done both subtly and briefly, and in such a way that it integrates into the story and enhances its significance. But even great novelists - Anthony Trollope is one - are sometimes unable to resist the temptation to interrupt their stories to present vast political manifestos.
UNNECESSARY DIVERSION TYPE 4 - RESEARCH REPORTS
This is a diversion that appears most frequently in historical novels, although authors of other genres have to carry out research and are susceptible to it as well. It is quite understandable that writers who have spent hours and hours researching the background for their stories want to make maximum use of that research. It is a dangerous temptation. Readers don’t like it when they realise they are being subjected to a large tract of information with little relevance to the plot but which the writer has taken herculean efforts to find and, ‘by god, you are going to have to read it’. A modified version of this type of diversion appears in Fantasy novels, where the author feels the need to elaborate in minute detail on the universe they have created, perhaps even with the aid of many diagrams and maps. If you have read some of the great fantasy epics, you may well recognise this one.
ADVICE TO WRITERS
Readers don’t need to be warned of these faults; they react simply by putting the book down and starting another or skipping whole sections. If writers want to avoid this fate for their works, this may be a good maxim: don’t miss out on essentials, but if they don’t need to know, don’t tell them!
Contributed by James Gault
The sounds and senses of words.
The Excerpts
“Full fathom five thy father lies” The Tempest, William Shakespeare
“Charlie Best stepped down from a Ryanair flight at Carcassonne airport and into the sunny straw colours of his new life.” Best Intelligence, James Gault
“There was a slow, smiling air about her” Lamb to the Slaughter from Tales of the Unexpected, Roald Dahl
“The doorbell chimed its usual hesitant off key jangle, reminding Marianne once more of her inefficiency when it came to household repairs.” Three Girls, Sally Dixon
“He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.” Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
“Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” Do not go gently into that good night, Dylan Thomas
The explanation
Authors are apt to agonise over their choice of words. There are a million ways to say the same thing, but each way is subtly different. Some ways are mundane, some are innovative and interesting, and occasionally a turn of phrase comes to mind that might even suggest a touch of genius. It is this last, all too rare, wonder that the writer’s struggling inspiration strives for.
What do authors look for in a word? There are two aspects to be considered: sound and meaning.
It may seem strange that the sounds of words matter much to writers. Don’t they write to be read rather than to be listened to? Unless, of course, they are poets or songwriters. But most authors know that if their work sounds good when it is spoken aloud, it sounds similarly good when spoken internally. It gives the readers more pleasure and it creates a stronger impression in their minds. To make our prose sound well, we turn to poetry for inspiration. So we borrow techniques like alliteration, assonance and consonance.
The above example from Shakespeare is an example of alliteration, where the first consonant of consecutive, or nearly consecutive words, is repeated - the effect is that the words trip easily off the tongue. We can see it used again in the quote from Roald Dahl. Lesser writers, like myself in the second example, will choose alliterative phrases where we can. It helps our sentences to flow freely, as in my example and into the sunny straw colours of his new life. (The additional ‘s’ at the end of colours is a little bonus that enhances the effect of the alliteration)
Consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds anywhere in a word produces a similar effect. In the Robert Frost extract He gives his harness bells a shake has the repetition at the end of the words.
Alternatively, we can repeat vowel sounds, as in Rage, rage from the Dylan Thomas quote. This is called assonance, and you can imagine a prose writer using it, for example, to embellish a description of a gloomy scene: It was a dark, black, sad afternoon. Here both assonance and consonance are used to give a ‘ring’ to the sentence and add to add to its emotional effect.
This particular off-the-cuff example also borrows the imagery prevalent in poetry to emphasise the gloomy mood, with words like dark and sad which, of course, cannot be applied literally to an afternoon. You can see other examples of the use of imagery in both my choice of the word sunny and in the quote from Sally Dixon (chimed its usual hesitant off key jangle). Sally additionally makes use of the onomatopoeia in the words chimed and jangle to enhance the reader’s sense of being present in the story.
So for a writer there is more to words than their meaning. The sense of a word includes its emotional and judgemental significance and, when combined with another word, it can convey much more than it does on its own.
It is relatively easy for a writer to say what she or he means; it is difficult to say it powerfully and well. Very often, the first word that comes to the writer’s mind will not do. The right word has to be searched for. Sometimes it comes easily to mind; at other times it is a tortuous travel through the tunnels of memory. So ,dear readers, spare a kind thought for the long agonies of labour that went into the birth of what you read.
PS I’ve rather cheekily embedded some of the techniques I talk about in the article itself. If you’ve nothing better to do, why not see if you can find them?
Contributed by James Gault
How to tell the back-stories of your characters
The Extract:
Her name was Le Hoa. ‘Hoa’ means ‘like a flower’, and it had been well chosen: she was as beautiful as a lily or an orchid. But her misfortune was to have burst into bloom much too soon, like the magnolia tree at the bottom of our garden. Every year, it explodes far too early into a pre-seasonal profusion of pink, long before our wild winter winds have given up and left the landscape in peace. The delicate magnolia flowers shine for a few days and then are blown asunder, leaving bare desolate branches in their wake. This was the fate of poor Hoa.
If only she had been blessed with nothing more than beauty. There was a world-wide demand for decorative, subservient wives, especially Asian girls who have been brought up to smile sweetly and kowtow to their menfolk. She might have grown old happily, enjoying art, music and literature, dedicating herself to her husband, supervising the education of any children that might have come along, overseeing the development of the grandchildren in the end she never had.
It wasn’t to be. In addition to her beauty, she had had the misfortune to have been gifted with both intelligence and compassion, and this was to be her downfall.
Her parents blamed the Americans, all of them in general, and one of them in particular, Tim Nguyen. This was unfair; their own genes were completely to blame for her sharp and critical mind, and her concern for others was a product of the upbringing they had bestowed on her. They were the ones who had sent her off unprotected into the world, naive and unprepared. They had had the mistaken belief that sending a Vietnamese girl to an English speaking sixth-form school in far off Singapore would be the key to a bright and better future. But what parents ever blame themselves?
James Gault Jan2019
The Explanation:
Of course novelists want their readers to understand their characters. They will have spent many hours inventing them, exploring them and developing them even before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. And they understand that the full enjoyment of their stories requires an appreciation of and sympathy for the protagonists.
But at the same time, readers have only a certain level of tolerance and patience.They want to get on with the story. They do not want to be diverted by a long and detailed biography of every passer-by or bit-player. They also have limited tolerance for little irrelevant details from the past lives of the hero and the heroine.
So how does an author balance these conflicting needs? There are many solutions, some of which we discussed in two previous writers’ notes articles (Concise Characterisation and An Unusual Way to Build a Character). This extract illustrates some other ways authors can give character information while trying to keep the reader’s interest.
Character should always be linked to plot. The personality and even the physical attributes of a character play a part in determining what happens to them, and of course vice versa. In this extract I introduce the narrative drive of the story: something unpleasant but unspecified happens to the heroine. I create the link between character and plot by suggesting it is caused by her characteristics: her youth, her beauty, her intelligence, her kindness, her isolation from her parents. To add to the interest for the reader, I also take the chance to add the element of mild social criticism of ‘tiger’ parents putting their ambitions for their children ahead of the child’s psychological well-being and happiness.
So by integrating the character descriptions and back-stories with plot development and some sort of comment on the world at large, I hope to avoid boring the readers with a biography and description that has them wondering, ‘Why is he telling me all this?’
Contributed by James Gault
The Extract:
Her name was Le Hoa. ‘Hoa’ means ‘like a flower’, and it had been well chosen: she was as beautiful as a lily or an orchid. But her misfortune was to have burst into bloom much too soon, like the magnolia tree at the bottom of our garden. Every year, it explodes far too early into a pre-seasonal profusion of pink, long before our wild winter winds have given up and left the landscape in peace. The delicate magnolia flowers shine for a few days and then are blown asunder, leaving bare desolate branches in their wake. This was the fate of poor Hoa.
If only she had been blessed with nothing more than beauty. There was a world-wide demand for decorative, subservient wives, especially Asian girls who have been brought up to smile sweetly and kowtow to their menfolk. She might have grown old happily, enjoying art, music and literature, dedicating herself to her husband, supervising the education of any children that might have come along, overseeing the development of the grandchildren in the end she never had.
It wasn’t to be. In addition to her beauty, she had had the misfortune to have been gifted with both intelligence and compassion, and this was to be her downfall.
Her parents blamed the Americans, all of them in general, and one of them in particular, Tim Nguyen. This was unfair; their own genes were completely to blame for her sharp and critical mind, and her concern for others was a product of the upbringing they had bestowed on her. They were the ones who had sent her off unprotected into the world, naive and unprepared. They had had the mistaken belief that sending a Vietnamese girl to an English speaking sixth-form school in far off Singapore would be the key to a bright and better future. But what parents ever blame themselves?
James Gault Jan2019
The Explanation:
Of course novelists want their readers to understand their characters. They will have spent many hours inventing them, exploring them and developing them even before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. And they understand that the full enjoyment of their stories requires an appreciation of and sympathy for the protagonists.
But at the same time, readers have only a certain level of tolerance and patience.They want to get on with the story. They do not want to be diverted by a long and detailed biography of every passer-by or bit-player. They also have limited tolerance for little irrelevant details from the past lives of the hero and the heroine.
So how does an author balance these conflicting needs? There are many solutions, some of which we discussed in two previous writers’ notes articles (Concise Characterisation and An Unusual Way to Build a Character). This extract illustrates some other ways authors can give character information while trying to keep the reader’s interest.
Character should always be linked to plot. The personality and even the physical attributes of a character play a part in determining what happens to them, and of course vice versa. In this extract I introduce the narrative drive of the story: something unpleasant but unspecified happens to the heroine. I create the link between character and plot by suggesting it is caused by her characteristics: her youth, her beauty, her intelligence, her kindness, her isolation from her parents. To add to the interest for the reader, I also take the chance to add the element of mild social criticism of ‘tiger’ parents putting their ambitions for their children ahead of the child’s psychological well-being and happiness.
So by integrating the character descriptions and back-stories with plot development and some sort of comment on the world at large, I hope to avoid boring the readers with a biography and description that has them wondering, ‘Why is he telling me all this?’
Contributed by James Gault
The Eccentric Character
Names of Books: Can you forgive her? (Anthony Trollope) and Ogg (James Gault)
The extracts:
From Can you forgive her? (Anthony Trollope)
It will perhaps be as well to say a few words about Mrs. Greenow before we go with her to Yarmouth. Mrs. Greenow was the only daughter and the youngest child of the old squire at Vavasor Hall. She was just ten years younger than her brother John, and I am inclined to think that she was almost justified in her repeated assertion that the difference was much greater than ten years, by the freshness of her colour, and by the general juvenility of her appearance. She certainly did not look forty, and who can expect a woman to proclaim herself to be older than her looks? In early life she had been taken from her father's house, and had lived with relatives in one of the large towns in the north of England. It is certain she had not been quite successful as a girl. Though she had enjoyed the name of being a beauty, she had not the usual success which comes from such repute. At thirty-four she was still unmarried. She had, moreover, acquired the character of being a flirt; and I fear that the stories which were told of her, though doubtless more than half false, had in them sufficient of truth to justify the character. Now this was very sad, seeing that Arabella Vavasor had no fortune, and that she had offended her father and brothers by declining to comply with their advice at certain periods of her career. There was, indeed, considerable trouble in the minds of the various male Vavasors with reference to Arabella, when tidings suddenly reached the Hall that she was going to be married to an old man.
She was married to the old man; and the marriage fortunately turned out satisfactorily, at any rate for the old man and for her family. The Vavasors were relieved from all further trouble, and were as much surprised as gratified when they heard that she did her duty well in her new position. Arabella had long been a thorn in their side, never having really done anything which they could pronounce to be absolutely wrong, but always giving them cause for fear. Now they feared no longer. Her husband was a retired merchant, very rich, not very strong in health, and devoted to his bride. Rumours soon made their way to Vavasor Hall, and to Queen Anne Street, that Mrs. Greenow was quite a pattern wife, and that Mr. Greenow considered himself to be the happiest old man in Lancashire. And now in her prosperity she quite forgave the former slights which had been put upon her by her relatives. She wrote to her dear niece Alice, and to her dearest niece Kate, and sent little presents to her father. On one occasion she took her husband to Vavasor Hall, and there was a regular renewal of all the old family feelings. Arabella's husband was an old man, and was very old for his age; but the whole thing was quite respectable, and there was, at any rate, no doubt about the money. Then Mr. Greenow died; and the widow, having proved the will, came up to London and claimed the commiseration of her nieces.
Names of Books: Can you forgive her? (Anthony Trollope) and Ogg (James Gault)
The extracts:
From Can you forgive her? (Anthony Trollope)
It will perhaps be as well to say a few words about Mrs. Greenow before we go with her to Yarmouth. Mrs. Greenow was the only daughter and the youngest child of the old squire at Vavasor Hall. She was just ten years younger than her brother John, and I am inclined to think that she was almost justified in her repeated assertion that the difference was much greater than ten years, by the freshness of her colour, and by the general juvenility of her appearance. She certainly did not look forty, and who can expect a woman to proclaim herself to be older than her looks? In early life she had been taken from her father's house, and had lived with relatives in one of the large towns in the north of England. It is certain she had not been quite successful as a girl. Though she had enjoyed the name of being a beauty, she had not the usual success which comes from such repute. At thirty-four she was still unmarried. She had, moreover, acquired the character of being a flirt; and I fear that the stories which were told of her, though doubtless more than half false, had in them sufficient of truth to justify the character. Now this was very sad, seeing that Arabella Vavasor had no fortune, and that she had offended her father and brothers by declining to comply with their advice at certain periods of her career. There was, indeed, considerable trouble in the minds of the various male Vavasors with reference to Arabella, when tidings suddenly reached the Hall that she was going to be married to an old man.
She was married to the old man; and the marriage fortunately turned out satisfactorily, at any rate for the old man and for her family. The Vavasors were relieved from all further trouble, and were as much surprised as gratified when they heard that she did her duty well in her new position. Arabella had long been a thorn in their side, never having really done anything which they could pronounce to be absolutely wrong, but always giving them cause for fear. Now they feared no longer. Her husband was a retired merchant, very rich, not very strong in health, and devoted to his bride. Rumours soon made their way to Vavasor Hall, and to Queen Anne Street, that Mrs. Greenow was quite a pattern wife, and that Mr. Greenow considered himself to be the happiest old man in Lancashire. And now in her prosperity she quite forgave the former slights which had been put upon her by her relatives. She wrote to her dear niece Alice, and to her dearest niece Kate, and sent little presents to her father. On one occasion she took her husband to Vavasor Hall, and there was a regular renewal of all the old family feelings. Arabella's husband was an old man, and was very old for his age; but the whole thing was quite respectable, and there was, at any rate, no doubt about the money. Then Mr. Greenow died; and the widow, having proved the will, came up to London and claimed the commiseration of her nieces.
From OGG by James Gault
But there was one of his friends whose behaviour was so odd and whose appearance was so bizarre that Ogg felt he could always get a good laugh out of a visit to him.
His name was Peregrine Pratt, and this was the least of his troubles. He had a body that could only be described as long and thin. He was so tall that he was constantly afraid of damaging his head on the ceiling, so he adopted a semi-crouching posture. In a standing position he looked exactly like an old knotted wooden walking stick. It was worse when he sat down. In an attempt to avoid damaging contact with furniture, he splayed his spindly arms and legs in preposterous directions, and when seated he looked like he had just been stolen from the Tate Modern. To accompany his long gnarled body he had a long gnarled nose in a long gnarled face. All of this was topped by a sprawling bush of matted greasy black hair. The overall effect was that of a badly damaged old mop abandoned in a corner. Fate, feeling that she had not yet been sufficiently unkind to him, had bedecked his face with prurient acne. And while is was her normal procedure to remove these disfiguring spots around the age of twenty, Peregrine Pratt still had his mottled face, five years beyond the usual term. But even his appearance wasn’t his biggest woe. He had no friends – except Ogg – as any who were either brave enough or short-sighted enough not to be revolted by his virulent ugliness had long since been frightened off by his vicious bad temper.
Most people would totter and collapse under the weight of such a hazardous load of misfortunes, but Peregrine Pratt was basically a happy man.
The explanation :
There is nothing more delightful than a person who is ODD. Not of course threateningly or aggressively odd, but different in a comforting and amusing way. They can light up otherwise grim and tense situations in real life, and they can do the same job equally well in fiction.
Of course, unless it is in an out-and-out comic novel, the eccentric character should never be the hero or heroine. Readers are expected to identify with the main protagonists, but the fun of the eccentric character lies not in our being like them, but in observing them like outsiders.
Trollope’s Mrs Greengow is a treasure. At first sight she is a terrible woman, a hypocritical gold-digger marrying an old man for his fortune. We should despise her, but the lightness of Trollope’s ironic tone wins us round. Her marriage might have been a Herculean task, but she stuck to it with dedication and cheerfulness until the inevitable and lucrative end, and we end up admiring her. The coup de grace of this little excerpt is the attitude of her family, whose change in attitude on realising the inevitability of her upcoming wealth serves to reinforce that the redoubtable Mrs Greengow, unlike her family, is at least is well deserving of the fortune she has earned. For the rest of the novel, we look on her with a favourable eye, rejoicing in her machinations and successes.
In the second extract, Peregrine Pratt is another kind of oddball. The antithesis of the romantic lead, both in his appearance and character, he is a character that readers could easily find repellent. But in attributing his misfortunes to nature, the author portrays him as a victim, and although he is so ridiculous the reader has to laugh at him, it’s a guilty laugh tinged with sympathy. Perhaps, we hope;things will get better for him. Who knows, he may even find his own ‘right one’.
In both these novels, the eccentric characters contributes to the main plot bit drives one of the main sub-plots. They may be a bit of fun, but, like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, they contribute another facet to the more serious themes of the novels.
Contributed by James Gault
CUTAWAYS
No specific example this month, but I want to carry on with the theme of continuity I started last time. And I want borrow a theme from film editing and apply it to the process of writing an action scene in a novel.
Movie editors are encouraged to avoid a problem known as the ‘jump-cut’. This is what can happen when a long sequence of action takes place in the same scene, and there is a need to shorten it by cutting out the less important material. If you just take out these bits, then what you end up with is a jump-cut. For example, in shooting a close up of someone talking, the position of the head or body always moves as the person speaks. If we cut out a part of the speech, at you see a sudden unexplained movement as the image moves instantaneously and unnaturally from one position to the other. This jump is extremely distracting and destroys the continuity of a scene.
A similar thing can happen in a piece of writing. Imagine a scene in one location, showing several events with a time gap between each. If there is nothing written to indicate these gaps, the reader will suppose that there is no gap, it is one continuous piece of action. When it becomes clear from the context that there must have been some elapsed time, the reader is distracted and confused, and any atmosphere and tension the author has been building is dissipated. Exactly like a jump-cut in a movie.
How can such a faux pas be avoided? In film, one way is to introduce a transition, like a short cross-fade or a wipe, between the different sections of the scene. These serve as a clue that some time has lapsed between each section. In writing, the same effect can be achieved by a line of dashes or asterisks across the page. This is often used and it does work, but it is not the best way, because the artificiality of the transition is still distracting.
What filmmakers often do is to use the cut-away. They change the picture to something else for a short time, just a few frames, and then go back to the original scene. The intermediate shot is called a cutaway. The same trick can be used in writing.
Here, written purely as an example, is how it might work. Can you spot the cutaway?
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” she croaked. The very idea of his infidelity seemed to stretch beyond the limits of her credulity. She stormed out of the room.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat there, looking at the floor, lost for any words that could evoke her forgiveness.
Outside, the rain continued to bombard the window as the wind shrieked through the branches of the fruit trees in their garden.
She marched back in, but he still couldn’t look at her.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Any kind of excuse or explanation?”
James Gault
No specific example this month, but I want to carry on with the theme of continuity I started last time. And I want borrow a theme from film editing and apply it to the process of writing an action scene in a novel.
Movie editors are encouraged to avoid a problem known as the ‘jump-cut’. This is what can happen when a long sequence of action takes place in the same scene, and there is a need to shorten it by cutting out the less important material. If you just take out these bits, then what you end up with is a jump-cut. For example, in shooting a close up of someone talking, the position of the head or body always moves as the person speaks. If we cut out a part of the speech, at you see a sudden unexplained movement as the image moves instantaneously and unnaturally from one position to the other. This jump is extremely distracting and destroys the continuity of a scene.
A similar thing can happen in a piece of writing. Imagine a scene in one location, showing several events with a time gap between each. If there is nothing written to indicate these gaps, the reader will suppose that there is no gap, it is one continuous piece of action. When it becomes clear from the context that there must have been some elapsed time, the reader is distracted and confused, and any atmosphere and tension the author has been building is dissipated. Exactly like a jump-cut in a movie.
How can such a faux pas be avoided? In film, one way is to introduce a transition, like a short cross-fade or a wipe, between the different sections of the scene. These serve as a clue that some time has lapsed between each section. In writing, the same effect can be achieved by a line of dashes or asterisks across the page. This is often used and it does work, but it is not the best way, because the artificiality of the transition is still distracting.
What filmmakers often do is to use the cut-away. They change the picture to something else for a short time, just a few frames, and then go back to the original scene. The intermediate shot is called a cutaway. The same trick can be used in writing.
Here, written purely as an example, is how it might work. Can you spot the cutaway?
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” she croaked. The very idea of his infidelity seemed to stretch beyond the limits of her credulity. She stormed out of the room.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat there, looking at the floor, lost for any words that could evoke her forgiveness.
Outside, the rain continued to bombard the window as the wind shrieked through the branches of the fruit trees in their garden.
She marched back in, but he still couldn’t look at her.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Any kind of excuse or explanation?”
James Gault
CONTINUITY
Name of book:
Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
They reached the door of the first choice apartment without seeing anyone. Simon had been right about the fifteen second lock. They were in with less bother than most people would have with a sticky key.
Inside the shutters were down and they paused a moment to let their eyes acclimatise to the darkness.
“The window,” Simon whispered. They crept over to it.
“We’ll lift the shutters just enough so I can get my shot in. The harder we make it for anyone to see inside here, the better.”
Simon found a button and pressed it. The metal roll-top shutters started to unwind with an audible metallic groan. He switched it off when there was about six inches of daylight showing.
What was that? Both men stopped and listened. A sudden grunt had come from the direction of the bedroom. Charlie crept over to the closed door and listened.
Nothing. They both waited. After a couple of minutes, the soft rumble of a snore could just be made out. Charlie’s mouth fell open and he frantically mimed someone sleeping.
Simon signalled to Charlie to go to the front door, and open it again slightly, quietly. Then he pressed the shutter button in reverse, rushed to the door, and they both got out quickly and shut it. Luck was with them. There was no one else in the corridor.
“The other flat,” Simon hissed. They crept down the corridor.
They got into it as easily as the first. But this time they were a lot more careful. Charlie stood ready by the door while Simon silently checked all the rooms. He gave the thumbs up sign. There was nobody else in this flat. Charlie sighed with relief but he was still pretty mad.
“I’ll kill that bloody Alex, that last place was supposed to be empty.”
The explanation:
There are two aspects of continuity: consistency and coherence. Consistency is something that they worry about a lot in films. You’ve probably seen examples of it. During a single scene, in shot one the man is wearing a red tie and in the next it’s a blue one. Or the girl leaves her bag on the restaurant table but is seen carrying out as she steps out the door. The kind of thing that the audience notice and the whole effect and atmosphere is lost .These little slips of inconsistency are expensive to fix in film making, if not caught. The scene has to be set up again, actors recalled, lighting and cameras placed and matched to the original, several takes shot. Although less common in literature, the same kind of mistake can insinuate itself into a novel. It’s not so costly to change a few words in a book, but if you get it wrong the result is just as disastrous.
Coherence is more common in novels than consistency. It occurs when the reader loses the sense of place or time in the story. Action scenes are particularly prone to this, and can even slip though editing and into published books from well-respected authors. Action scenes are hard to do in literature; they work much better on film. Writers have to portray a clear and logical picture of what happens and at the same time imbue the passage with a sense of atmosphere and tension.
The excerpt is from an action scene in which two assassins are setting themselves up to shoot their victim from the window of what should have been an empty apartment. How do I make sure the action flows in a clear and understandable manner? The short answer is I picture myself filming the scene. I have to make sure that each ‘shot’ or incident links to the next. Each move the assassins make is explicitly depicted; nothing is missed out. They go from the door, to the window. They hear a noise, and one of them goes to the bedroom door. Then both of them move to the front door, exit the flat and enter another. At all times we know exactly where they are. If I was filming it, I would know exactly what to shoot and how the shots would link together.
The difficulty as a writer is that you know what happens, but in the desire to imbue the senses of tension, character and atmosphere, you miss out an important step in the action. You may not notice, but the reader will, and the resulting feeling of confusion will undo all your good work.
Contributed by James Gault
Name of book:
Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
They reached the door of the first choice apartment without seeing anyone. Simon had been right about the fifteen second lock. They were in with less bother than most people would have with a sticky key.
Inside the shutters were down and they paused a moment to let their eyes acclimatise to the darkness.
“The window,” Simon whispered. They crept over to it.
“We’ll lift the shutters just enough so I can get my shot in. The harder we make it for anyone to see inside here, the better.”
Simon found a button and pressed it. The metal roll-top shutters started to unwind with an audible metallic groan. He switched it off when there was about six inches of daylight showing.
What was that? Both men stopped and listened. A sudden grunt had come from the direction of the bedroom. Charlie crept over to the closed door and listened.
Nothing. They both waited. After a couple of minutes, the soft rumble of a snore could just be made out. Charlie’s mouth fell open and he frantically mimed someone sleeping.
Simon signalled to Charlie to go to the front door, and open it again slightly, quietly. Then he pressed the shutter button in reverse, rushed to the door, and they both got out quickly and shut it. Luck was with them. There was no one else in the corridor.
“The other flat,” Simon hissed. They crept down the corridor.
They got into it as easily as the first. But this time they were a lot more careful. Charlie stood ready by the door while Simon silently checked all the rooms. He gave the thumbs up sign. There was nobody else in this flat. Charlie sighed with relief but he was still pretty mad.
“I’ll kill that bloody Alex, that last place was supposed to be empty.”
The explanation:
There are two aspects of continuity: consistency and coherence. Consistency is something that they worry about a lot in films. You’ve probably seen examples of it. During a single scene, in shot one the man is wearing a red tie and in the next it’s a blue one. Or the girl leaves her bag on the restaurant table but is seen carrying out as she steps out the door. The kind of thing that the audience notice and the whole effect and atmosphere is lost .These little slips of inconsistency are expensive to fix in film making, if not caught. The scene has to be set up again, actors recalled, lighting and cameras placed and matched to the original, several takes shot. Although less common in literature, the same kind of mistake can insinuate itself into a novel. It’s not so costly to change a few words in a book, but if you get it wrong the result is just as disastrous.
Coherence is more common in novels than consistency. It occurs when the reader loses the sense of place or time in the story. Action scenes are particularly prone to this, and can even slip though editing and into published books from well-respected authors. Action scenes are hard to do in literature; they work much better on film. Writers have to portray a clear and logical picture of what happens and at the same time imbue the passage with a sense of atmosphere and tension.
The excerpt is from an action scene in which two assassins are setting themselves up to shoot their victim from the window of what should have been an empty apartment. How do I make sure the action flows in a clear and understandable manner? The short answer is I picture myself filming the scene. I have to make sure that each ‘shot’ or incident links to the next. Each move the assassins make is explicitly depicted; nothing is missed out. They go from the door, to the window. They hear a noise, and one of them goes to the bedroom door. Then both of them move to the front door, exit the flat and enter another. At all times we know exactly where they are. If I was filming it, I would know exactly what to shoot and how the shots would link together.
The difficulty as a writer is that you know what happens, but in the desire to imbue the senses of tension, character and atmosphere, you miss out an important step in the action. You may not notice, but the reader will, and the resulting feeling of confusion will undo all your good work.
Contributed by James Gault
PLOTS and PLOTTING
What is a plot? Is it just the series of events that occur in a work of fiction, what we might call the story? Or is it perhaps more specific than that? Words can be hijacked to mean whatever the writer wants, and in this case I am shamelessly going to do that and define a plot in a specific sense.
A plot is a story with certain characteristics. For my definition, I am borrowing from a book called The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, in which he analyses and classifies the stories of works of fiction from different eras and from poems, plays, novels and films. You may not agree with all his classifications, but he puts his finger on what is perhaps the essential element of a fictional plot: a character is presented with a problem and has to overcome the challenges of solving that problem.
In a way, all fictional stories (and possibly all interesting real life ones) fit this model. The structure is obvious in certain genres: mysteries, thrillers, romance etc. Other genres do not at first sight appear to conform, and these I would call episodic genres. They include biographical novels, sagas, slice of life stories and so on. In these cases, there is no central problem to be solved, but a series of different problems which arise and are resolved. So they are more a collection of related plots, tied together by a central theme. For me, this kind of book requires much more talent from the writer, who has to find some other narrative drive to pull readers through to the end of the work.
Of course, the path to coming up with the solution to the main plot problem is normally long and tortuous. Other, smaller problems arise along the way, obstacles are put in the path of the protagonist, attempts to move forward are thwarted and misleading information is presented and misinterpreted with disastrous results. Unexpected plot twists make readers stop and re-evaluate their conclusions so far, and set their imaginations off in new directions. There is often a false ending, where everything seems to be resolved and then some forgotten fact or incident raises its head, plunging the reader back into the problem and looking again for a secure and safe answer, but with heightened suspicion now. Without a good helping of all of these ingredients, no narrative can expect to hold a reader’s attention to the end.
I’m going to risk an oversimplification here. There are other elements to novels, like writing style, atmosphere, accurate details, but I would contend that to be effective, the two main essentials are character and plot. So, for a novel (or play, or film, or TV drama, or narrative poem) to engage its audience. there are two essential goals the writers must reach:
- find an interesting and difficult problem for the protagonist to solve
- create main characters with whom readers can identify as they try to solve the problem.
Contributed by James Gault Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
ZOOMING INTO THE NOVEL
Name of book: The Wages or the Gift by Rosalind Morris
The Extract
(Chapter 1)
The noon rush had long since quieted, yet a silent residue of previous tensions lingered. Tensions are curious creatures. No one can see them, but their presence is rarely missed. They have no physical mass, yet they can fill an entire room suffocating those inside. The excited-anxious sort, the fear-based breed, the angry-blaming kind, and many others stay long after the immediate crisis has passed.
The tensions at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital’s maternity ward on one Monday afternoon were no exception. From 12:05 pm to 2:03 pm, they had sixteen women on the brink of motherhood.
The halls cluttered with doctors and nurses hustling to attend to each patient. The maternity waiting room filled with tense, anxious fathers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-to-be. The pacers walked their respective courses across the marble floor. The talkers traded stories, discussing and sometimes debating the pros and cons of various baby names. The watchers, their focus on the door, stayed perched to jump up at its slightest movement, eager to hear sweet declarations such as “It’s a boy!” /“It’s a girl!” /“You’ve got twins!” With each swing of the door, the crowd grew thinner, the room quieter until only two people remained. Not the typical maternity ward waiters, they were two young men, ages eighteen and twenty-six. The elder stood six-foot-one with a medium build, his amber eyes dark with worry because the younger, slightly more chiselled and a half-inch shorter, tottered on the verge of a breakdown.
The Explanation:
This is a classic example of the zooming approach to starting a novel. The extract starts with the overall feel of the space our reader is entering. This place that was recently filled with excitement, anxiety, and the hustle of an overflowing maternity ward. From there, our reader moves further into the scene , past the lingering emotional atmosphere into the recent past that created it. Our reader sees the halls begin to clutter, the maternity ward fill, and then watches the people waiting in their respective roles and feelings. Our reader watches their numbers dwindle, as the story moves back to the present, and their numbers are down to two. Our reader gets a more specific description of these individuals as the story zooms in on them with specific description and insight.
Contributed by Rosalind Morris
Name of book: The Wages or the Gift by Rosalind Morris
The Extract
(Chapter 1)
The noon rush had long since quieted, yet a silent residue of previous tensions lingered. Tensions are curious creatures. No one can see them, but their presence is rarely missed. They have no physical mass, yet they can fill an entire room suffocating those inside. The excited-anxious sort, the fear-based breed, the angry-blaming kind, and many others stay long after the immediate crisis has passed.
The tensions at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital’s maternity ward on one Monday afternoon were no exception. From 12:05 pm to 2:03 pm, they had sixteen women on the brink of motherhood.
The halls cluttered with doctors and nurses hustling to attend to each patient. The maternity waiting room filled with tense, anxious fathers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-to-be. The pacers walked their respective courses across the marble floor. The talkers traded stories, discussing and sometimes debating the pros and cons of various baby names. The watchers, their focus on the door, stayed perched to jump up at its slightest movement, eager to hear sweet declarations such as “It’s a boy!” /“It’s a girl!” /“You’ve got twins!” With each swing of the door, the crowd grew thinner, the room quieter until only two people remained. Not the typical maternity ward waiters, they were two young men, ages eighteen and twenty-six. The elder stood six-foot-one with a medium build, his amber eyes dark with worry because the younger, slightly more chiselled and a half-inch shorter, tottered on the verge of a breakdown.
The Explanation:
This is a classic example of the zooming approach to starting a novel. The extract starts with the overall feel of the space our reader is entering. This place that was recently filled with excitement, anxiety, and the hustle of an overflowing maternity ward. From there, our reader moves further into the scene , past the lingering emotional atmosphere into the recent past that created it. Our reader sees the halls begin to clutter, the maternity ward fill, and then watches the people waiting in their respective roles and feelings. Our reader watches their numbers dwindle, as the story moves back to the present, and their numbers are down to two. Our reader gets a more specific description of these individuals as the story zooms in on them with specific description and insight.
Contributed by Rosalind Morris
AN UNUSUAL WAY TO BUILD A CHARACTER
Name of Book: The Pacifist by Mehreen Ahmed
The extract:
Without a dint, the chauffeur dashed off in the direction of the news agency. The men sat quietly yet again. Being unreasonable became Malcolm no less than mourning became Electra. Lips pouted slightly, he avoided Tommy’s gaze. With bated breath, Tommy continued to look for the chauffeur, certain that he would return any time. When he did, Tommy exuded a palpable sigh of relief. So much that Malcolm could not hide a smile on his lips. He leafed through the newspaper with deft, long fingers of manicured nails, cut squarely. In a moment of impulsive munificence, he glared at Tommy’s awkwardness over the newspaper.
“Relax, what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? Do you not see how late we are?” Spewed Tommy in short sharp breaths. “You are doing this deliberately, aren’t you? To insult Henna and me.” In a sudden fit of temper, Tommy’s patience snapped; words spat out.
Malcolm paid attention. Out of some unspoken reprisal, he then calmly asked the chauffeur to turn the car around, back to his mansion.
The explanation:
Many novelists ‘create’ their characters by giving a description of their personality. Jane Austen, for example, famously does it in Emma. ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’
Nowadays this approach doesn’t seem to work. Maybe this style of writing is out of fashion; maybe modern writers just don’t have Miss Austen’s talent, or maybe it is just that readers of today don’t like being told this kind of information and want to make up their own minds. Contemporary novelists tend to fall back on have three basic tools to communicate the personality of their characters: how the character behaves, what the character says and what the character thinks. Done well, this approach allows the reader to assess the character just as they would someone they met in real life.
But in ‘The Pacifist’, Mehreen Ahmed hits on a less frequently used character development tool, and a particularly effective one at that. She shows us what kind of person Malcolm is through the eyes of others.
Before this extract, Tommy has been trying to get his boss Malcolm to an important event where people are waiting for him, but Malcolm has been dithering and delaying, and Tommy is becoming frustrated, because his relationship with Malcolm doesn’t allow him to say what he feels.
The extract employs the standard methods mentioned above: we are told Malcolm is ‘unreasonable’, we see his supercilious smile, and we hear his remark to Tommy, carefully chosen to annoy him. But the masterstroke is Tommy’s reaction, towards which the author had been building all through the chapter. It lifts Malcolm’s character right off the page and into our emotions: he makes us angry, the arrogant bastard.
The coup de grace of the extract is the last sentence, though. Malcolm reacts to Tommy’s worries by yet another detour and delay, thereby underlining the nastiness in his personality: he’s a real selfish arrogant bastard in fact. It’s a brilliant piece of writing and a lesson for all authors.
The technique is not unique, for example Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby portrays all the characters through the eyes of the narrator Nick Carraway. But this extract from The Pacifist is a fine example from a talented young writer that is well worth bringing to the attention of our readers.
Contributed by James Gault
Name of Book: The Pacifist by Mehreen Ahmed
The extract:
Without a dint, the chauffeur dashed off in the direction of the news agency. The men sat quietly yet again. Being unreasonable became Malcolm no less than mourning became Electra. Lips pouted slightly, he avoided Tommy’s gaze. With bated breath, Tommy continued to look for the chauffeur, certain that he would return any time. When he did, Tommy exuded a palpable sigh of relief. So much that Malcolm could not hide a smile on his lips. He leafed through the newspaper with deft, long fingers of manicured nails, cut squarely. In a moment of impulsive munificence, he glared at Tommy’s awkwardness over the newspaper.
“Relax, what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? Do you not see how late we are?” Spewed Tommy in short sharp breaths. “You are doing this deliberately, aren’t you? To insult Henna and me.” In a sudden fit of temper, Tommy’s patience snapped; words spat out.
Malcolm paid attention. Out of some unspoken reprisal, he then calmly asked the chauffeur to turn the car around, back to his mansion.
The explanation:
Many novelists ‘create’ their characters by giving a description of their personality. Jane Austen, for example, famously does it in Emma. ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.’
Nowadays this approach doesn’t seem to work. Maybe this style of writing is out of fashion; maybe modern writers just don’t have Miss Austen’s talent, or maybe it is just that readers of today don’t like being told this kind of information and want to make up their own minds. Contemporary novelists tend to fall back on have three basic tools to communicate the personality of their characters: how the character behaves, what the character says and what the character thinks. Done well, this approach allows the reader to assess the character just as they would someone they met in real life.
But in ‘The Pacifist’, Mehreen Ahmed hits on a less frequently used character development tool, and a particularly effective one at that. She shows us what kind of person Malcolm is through the eyes of others.
Before this extract, Tommy has been trying to get his boss Malcolm to an important event where people are waiting for him, but Malcolm has been dithering and delaying, and Tommy is becoming frustrated, because his relationship with Malcolm doesn’t allow him to say what he feels.
The extract employs the standard methods mentioned above: we are told Malcolm is ‘unreasonable’, we see his supercilious smile, and we hear his remark to Tommy, carefully chosen to annoy him. But the masterstroke is Tommy’s reaction, towards which the author had been building all through the chapter. It lifts Malcolm’s character right off the page and into our emotions: he makes us angry, the arrogant bastard.
The coup de grace of the extract is the last sentence, though. Malcolm reacts to Tommy’s worries by yet another detour and delay, thereby underlining the nastiness in his personality: he’s a real selfish arrogant bastard in fact. It’s a brilliant piece of writing and a lesson for all authors.
The technique is not unique, for example Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby portrays all the characters through the eyes of the narrator Nick Carraway. But this extract from The Pacifist is a fine example from a talented young writer that is well worth bringing to the attention of our readers.
Contributed by James Gault
Location, location, location!
Name of book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
At two forty-five, Kathy was standing in Glasgow Green looking up at the old carpet factory that had been built as a copy of the Venetian Doge’s Palace by an upwardly-mobile manufacturing mogul. As a young student, in the first throes of a romantic relationship, it had been one of her favourite places. Hers and Ahmed’s both! They had felt it symbolised the Glasgow citizen. Poor, downtrodden, trying to pretend they were something more than they really were. It symbolised them too. Unlikely university students trying to fit in with the sons and daughters of the privileged middle-class! She the daughter of an unemployed shipyard worker, he the son of a struggling Asian corner shop owner! The imitation Doge’s Palace was a place they bonded with, and it seemed natural to Kathy that he had chosen it as a meeting place after so many years.
The explanation:
Every story takes place somewhere, whether in a real place or somewhere drawn from the depths of the author’s imagination. In some stories, the location can be incidental. In others it is an inherent part of the work and the author has to create a real feeling of the place in his readers’ imagination. How?
In this story of drug battles and corruption in Glasgow, the city itself plays a prominent role. It’s a story that could only work in this particular place. In writing the story, throughout the book I had to always have this in the back of my mind. I had to ensure I communicated a view of the city that made the story work.
A city consists of streets and buildings, houses, shops and factories, but above all it consists of people. And in Glasgow, the people are important and in some ways unique. It’s not a capital city, but an old Victorian industrial settlement where hard-working inspired entrepreneurs made their fortunes and promptly escaped to better pastures. Now the industries have mostly gone, it’s a place abandoned by aristocrats and the nouveau riche, inhabited only by the poor, the working classes and a few middle-class professionals. They all bear an inbuilt resentment at being deserted, which they temper with the self-pride that comes from having survived and, to a certain level, flourished. Everyone in Glasgow is an underdog who overcomes their own adversity, sometimes legally, more or less, and sometimes illegally.
In many ways the buildings of Glasgow are typical of the people: proud symbols of being better than they seem on the surface. The old carpet factory in Glasgow Green is just one example of this. I chose to set a meeting there with two of the main characters so I could, in a way, develop the character of Glasgow itself as a compliment to the main protagonists in the novel.
Name of book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
At two forty-five, Kathy was standing in Glasgow Green looking up at the old carpet factory that had been built as a copy of the Venetian Doge’s Palace by an upwardly-mobile manufacturing mogul. As a young student, in the first throes of a romantic relationship, it had been one of her favourite places. Hers and Ahmed’s both! They had felt it symbolised the Glasgow citizen. Poor, downtrodden, trying to pretend they were something more than they really were. It symbolised them too. Unlikely university students trying to fit in with the sons and daughters of the privileged middle-class! She the daughter of an unemployed shipyard worker, he the son of a struggling Asian corner shop owner! The imitation Doge’s Palace was a place they bonded with, and it seemed natural to Kathy that he had chosen it as a meeting place after so many years.
The explanation:
Every story takes place somewhere, whether in a real place or somewhere drawn from the depths of the author’s imagination. In some stories, the location can be incidental. In others it is an inherent part of the work and the author has to create a real feeling of the place in his readers’ imagination. How?
In this story of drug battles and corruption in Glasgow, the city itself plays a prominent role. It’s a story that could only work in this particular place. In writing the story, throughout the book I had to always have this in the back of my mind. I had to ensure I communicated a view of the city that made the story work.
A city consists of streets and buildings, houses, shops and factories, but above all it consists of people. And in Glasgow, the people are important and in some ways unique. It’s not a capital city, but an old Victorian industrial settlement where hard-working inspired entrepreneurs made their fortunes and promptly escaped to better pastures. Now the industries have mostly gone, it’s a place abandoned by aristocrats and the nouveau riche, inhabited only by the poor, the working classes and a few middle-class professionals. They all bear an inbuilt resentment at being deserted, which they temper with the self-pride that comes from having survived and, to a certain level, flourished. Everyone in Glasgow is an underdog who overcomes their own adversity, sometimes legally, more or less, and sometimes illegally.
In many ways the buildings of Glasgow are typical of the people: proud symbols of being better than they seem on the surface. The old carpet factory in Glasgow Green is just one example of this. I chose to set a meeting there with two of the main characters so I could, in a way, develop the character of Glasgow itself as a compliment to the main protagonists in the novel.
THE SAG IN THE MIDDLE
The extract.
We don’t have any extracts to look at this time, because the topic for this issue is related to the structure of the novel, so we are considering novels in their totality.
The explanation.
I listen to a lot of readers talking about different books, or commenting on them in book lovers’ Facebook groups, and one complaint dominates. They moan about the number of novels that become a bit slow and tedious after the first couple of chapters. Sure, these books usually begin well, generating a lot of interest and reader involvement right at the beginning. Then they get boring. But finally, if the readers don’t give up, they begin to discover the pace picking up and the book becomes a rattling good read after all. So what are the causes of this ‘sag in the middle’, and how do authors try to avoid it?
In one sense, all plots are the same: a character has a problem he has to solve. The differences are in the nature of the problems and the method of finding and implementing the solutions. Most novels begin by telling us, in a way that arouses our curiosity, that there is a problem. But if we, the readers, are to really get involved, we need to have the problem explained and the skills and personalities of those involved given to us. It is this ‘exposition’ phase of the novel that gives writers a headache. Most people, unless they are philosophers or scientists, find explanations a bit boring. They are about the past, and the past is over and done with. The future is much more exciting.
This is the dilemma for novelists: the need to tell readers something they really don’t want to spend time getting to know. How do they get round that?
The obvious and easy solution is to keep the exposition as short as possible. If your audience is not going to enjoy reading it why make them suffer? This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment, but a lot of authors do seem to have a sadistic tendency to labour superfluous detail in their expositions.
However, if the writer wants to avoid this defeatist approach, there are other options. Important past events can be presented as intrinsically interesting stories in themselves, rather than as a mere list of facts. Just as they do in the main story, writers have to use all the skills of characterisation and tension building in these back stories. Sub-plots can also be useful here too, if they are related to the story and are used to introduce knowledge that contributes to the main thread.
Writers should always remember that a novelist is obliged to constantly fight to keep the reader’s attention. There must always be a reason for wanting to turn to the next page. If not, dear reader, exercise your right to close the book and start something else. The author doesn’t deserve you.
Contributed by James Gault : Photo by Leonie Fahjen from Pexels
The use of extended metaphor.
Name of Book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
In this extract from a detective thriller, the funeral of the Glasgow gang boss is described.
‘Kathy Thomson’s life was to change completely after the murder of her husband. She had been restricted to the procreative duty of providing a dynasty for Big Tam’s empire and had produced a prince and a princess. But Kathy was an avid reader of medieval historical novels. She knew the early death of a monarch with only child successors was the perfect precondition for regency. And that the regent would often be the grieving widow. She had her reasons for seeking power and this was her big chance.
The funeral of the old ruler was a momentous event in the legends of the West of Scotland underworld. The typical Scottish weather painted a perfect backdrop: low grey cloud, a chilling breeze and interminable drizzle. Striding behind the coffin to the graveyard, Kathy cut a striking figure in black widow’s weeds, a protective arm around each of her two weeping children. Tellingly, Mac the Knife and Billy the Kid strode behind her, menacing and proprietorial. They were wearing their allegiance to the new queen on their sleeves. The other four Glasgow drug barons, further back in the procession and partially screened by the rest of Big Tam’s close family, could see enough to realise that the Thomson reign was not quite yet on the verge of disintegration.’
James Gault 2018
The explanation:
One of the secrets of creating innovative descriptions of a scene is to guide the reader to look at it in a different way. An author can achieve this by superimposing a relevant analogy on the action. When this is done, two scenes are described: the ‘real’ scene and the analogous scene. This double vision is intended to provide a much deeper and imaginative experience for the reader, who is led to envisage both scenes and then, at the same time, compare them against each other. The tools of analogy a writer can use are the simile and the metaphor.
In this extract the author picks up on the idea of a drug ‘baron’ and uses the analogy a medieval succession war alongside the modern day events of a battle for supremacy between rival gangs. The metaphor begins with the use of ‘dynasty’ and is kept up through words like ‘successors’, ‘regency’,’queen’ and so on, right up to the use of ‘reign’ in the last paragraph. The extended metaphor serves to underline the foreshadowing of the gang warfare that is to come.
Contributed by James Gault
Name of Book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
In this extract from a detective thriller, the funeral of the Glasgow gang boss is described.
‘Kathy Thomson’s life was to change completely after the murder of her husband. She had been restricted to the procreative duty of providing a dynasty for Big Tam’s empire and had produced a prince and a princess. But Kathy was an avid reader of medieval historical novels. She knew the early death of a monarch with only child successors was the perfect precondition for regency. And that the regent would often be the grieving widow. She had her reasons for seeking power and this was her big chance.
The funeral of the old ruler was a momentous event in the legends of the West of Scotland underworld. The typical Scottish weather painted a perfect backdrop: low grey cloud, a chilling breeze and interminable drizzle. Striding behind the coffin to the graveyard, Kathy cut a striking figure in black widow’s weeds, a protective arm around each of her two weeping children. Tellingly, Mac the Knife and Billy the Kid strode behind her, menacing and proprietorial. They were wearing their allegiance to the new queen on their sleeves. The other four Glasgow drug barons, further back in the procession and partially screened by the rest of Big Tam’s close family, could see enough to realise that the Thomson reign was not quite yet on the verge of disintegration.’
James Gault 2018
The explanation:
One of the secrets of creating innovative descriptions of a scene is to guide the reader to look at it in a different way. An author can achieve this by superimposing a relevant analogy on the action. When this is done, two scenes are described: the ‘real’ scene and the analogous scene. This double vision is intended to provide a much deeper and imaginative experience for the reader, who is led to envisage both scenes and then, at the same time, compare them against each other. The tools of analogy a writer can use are the simile and the metaphor.
In this extract the author picks up on the idea of a drug ‘baron’ and uses the analogy a medieval succession war alongside the modern day events of a battle for supremacy between rival gangs. The metaphor begins with the use of ‘dynasty’ and is kept up through words like ‘successors’, ‘regency’,’queen’ and so on, right up to the use of ‘reign’ in the last paragraph. The extended metaphor serves to underline the foreshadowing of the gang warfare that is to come.
Contributed by James Gault
Creating atmosphere in a scene
Name of Book: OGG by James Gault
The extract:
In this story of time travel, the Great Being Ogg has taken Antonia back in time to somewhere, and she is trying to work out where and when she is.
This time she knew that she herself was different. For one thing, her clothes weren’t right. She couldn’t see them, but she could sense them clinging unnaturally to her. And her skin! It felt as if it were someone else’s. What had Ogg done to her this trip?
She wished there was more light, so she could give herself a right good inspection. But they were in a dark, funereal, side street. Tall buildings watched over the solemn blackness, sentinels against the invasion of moonlight. Scattered street lamps cast little puddles of light, tiny candles keeping vigil over secret shadows and subterranean tombs. A hundred metres away, the city was alive. Antonia could imagine she heard the living move busily around town in cars, taxis and buses. But the rumble of the city’s heartbeat faded out before it reached her ears. Only an occasional car horn came to her in an eerie scream. A warm pink glow of activity tried to reach from the civilised main street into the silent darkness, without quite making it to where she was standing, shivering in the summer evening heat.
The explanation:
On stage, when the curtain opens and before the actors begin to speak, or often even appear, the director will want to set the atmosphere using the set design and the lighting. Novelists face the same challenge, but they only have written words for tools. How can they create the emotional expectation of the reader with such flimsy and inadequate resources? They can use the description of the setting and the thoughts of the characters. Let’s look at what I try to do in this extract.
I begin by using the character Antonia’s thoughts to create a sense of mystery and of uneasiness. She’s in unfamiliar clothes and even her skin feels like someone else's. Ogg has changed her and it doesn’t feel right. She, and the reader, are already suspecting something not so nice is going to happen.
Next, I try to reinforce the sense of uneasiness in the description of where they are. Like a film director, I make use of light and darkness to create a chiaroscuro effect to suggest menace. I put the characters in shadow and silence, and underline this by having light and noise in the distance. The only noise I permit them to hear is a ghostly and frightening scream. I’m using these contrasts between the main thoroughfare and the side street to emphasise the sense of danger. I also use temperature and colour, talking of the ‘warm pink’ of the main street, while the character shivers in the side street in spite of the heat of the evening.
The reader can expect dark and dangerous occurrences to follow, and in fact they do.
Contributed by James Gault
Making a description stand out.
Name of Book: The Redemption of Anna Petrovna
The extract:
While she waited, she looked around the reception area. It wasn’t anything like the paper factory, where visitors found themselves hanging around a crowded afterthought of a room furnished with the leftovers from the serious business of production. The space she was in now was dedicated to creating an impression of power and permanence. Vast open areas, tiled walls and floors, large leather sofas that looked lost in the emptiness that surrounded them, bronze wall plaques and sculptures of worthy workers and soldiers– everything was large, heavy and immovable. And colourless! A mass of self-important greys! Whatever went on here was important: momentous decisions were being taken whose effects would be felt for decades if not centuries.
The explanation:
If an author only writes what other writers would write, what’s the point? Readers should be shown the world from a perspective different from their own. They should be prompted to think ‘You know, I never thought of it that way’. In a novel, the view presented ought to be unique, whether we are getting the authorial point of view or that of a character. This different point of view can be particularly powerful when describing a setting.
One way of presenting a setting in a unique way is to show it through eyes of a character, whose goals, feelings and personality will all affect what the person notices and how they react to it. This is what I am trying to do in the extract.
Anna has gone to the office of her aunt, a successful businesswoman, whom she hasn’t seen for a long time, long before she became successful. Anna herself has started a small business and she hopes that her aunt can offer her some practical help. She imagines her aunt’s business is similar to her own, except a little larger. What she finds is not what she expects.
The bare bones of the description are that the reception area is a large, colourless space with little furniture and some works of art scattered around – a bit like a half-empty museum. I could have left it at that, but I chose not to. I had other information I wanted to convey. So I have Anna interpreting what she sees, showing how her preconceptions of her aunt are being changed by it, and imbuing her special meaning to every feature. No-one else would see the setting in the same light. Readers may be familiar with such imposing receptions of large businesses, but would they have read all of this into them?
Here I am trying to convey not only a sense of the space, but of the interaction of the character with that space. The extract also hints that the help Anna will receive from her aunt is much more than she was expecting.
Contributed by James Gault
How Important is Grammar?
Name of Book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
Charlie recalled the photo she had shown him. Double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! Two heads of mid-length unwashed hair! Two pairs of metal framed glasses! He could easily have taken them for brothers. Or maybe a pair of gays so much in love with each other they wanted to look identical. The one thing they weren’t was unnoticeable, which is what he most needed them to be. He’d have to keep them hidden in the cellar as much as possible.
They arrived under cover of darkness, which was a bit of a relief for Charlie. Had anyone noticed them turn into his drive, at least their psychedelic van stood out marginally less in greys and blacks than in glorious technicolour. Laura marshalled them quickly into the garage and safe anonymity, and then escorted them through the corridors and into the main house. Charlie noted the route chosen with satisfaction: there was a fair chance he could keep them hidden inside his walls for the duration of their visit.
Introductions were made over the late meal that Laura had prepared. They were a taciturn pair, and their lack of conversation inspired a similar reticence in Charlie. It was left to Laura to keep the party spirit going, and it was a tough task. Did they have a good journey? Nods of the head. Where had they come from? Germany; the information communicated via an almost inaudible grunt. How long did it take them? Three days - in the same low grunt. Et cetera for the rest of the thankfully short supper!
© James Gault 2017
The explanation:
Some readers, and many writers, find books containing grammatical errors a complete turn-off. Readers are entitled to set their own standards for what they choose to read, but in being pedantic about the use of grammar, do they deprive themselves of the chance to experience some exceptional writing? And does fear of making a grammar error inhibit creativity for a writer? Yes to both questions.
What’s the point of grammar? Why can’t we just throw words out in a random order as they come into our head? ‘Me think good idea.’ What’s wrong with that? It’s pretty clear what I meant. If good writing is expressing clearly and concisely what’s in your head, surely this has to be worth a Grade A?
If you look at this month’s extract, I would claim that, even to a grammarian, it’s not too bad. But it’s not grammatically perfect. There are a lot of incomplete sentences. My English teacher would have corrected them. For example, she would have changed Double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! to something like: He remembered the double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! But the words added to make the grammar perfect don’t tell us anything extra. If you add words to complete all the incomplete sentences in the extract, it becomes long-winded and struggles to hold the reader’s attention.
There are other situations where less than perfect grammar is useful. You might want to portray a character or narrator as poorly educated, or from a particular background, and deliberately insert grammatical errors: Hey, I cook real good, me and you back to my place, what you say? sort of thing.
Another thing about good grammar, especially when long and complex sentences are involved, is that it requires a lot of thought to be given to the construction of the sentences. The result is the writing comes across as considered and thoughtful, not a lot of good if the author is trying to achieve spontaneity. If character or narrators have to share their thoughts as they come to them, best to keep the sentences short and let the grammar slips show through.
I am not suggesting writers have carte blanche to produce works full of mistakes. But I am suggesting that writers should not be hemmed in by grammar rules. And readers should perhaps realise that bad grammar may be deliberate, and may itself be telling you more than the bare meaning implied by the words.
Contributed by James Gault
Name of Book: Best Intelligence by James Gault
The extract:
Charlie recalled the photo she had shown him. Double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! Two heads of mid-length unwashed hair! Two pairs of metal framed glasses! He could easily have taken them for brothers. Or maybe a pair of gays so much in love with each other they wanted to look identical. The one thing they weren’t was unnoticeable, which is what he most needed them to be. He’d have to keep them hidden in the cellar as much as possible.
They arrived under cover of darkness, which was a bit of a relief for Charlie. Had anyone noticed them turn into his drive, at least their psychedelic van stood out marginally less in greys and blacks than in glorious technicolour. Laura marshalled them quickly into the garage and safe anonymity, and then escorted them through the corridors and into the main house. Charlie noted the route chosen with satisfaction: there was a fair chance he could keep them hidden inside his walls for the duration of their visit.
Introductions were made over the late meal that Laura had prepared. They were a taciturn pair, and their lack of conversation inspired a similar reticence in Charlie. It was left to Laura to keep the party spirit going, and it was a tough task. Did they have a good journey? Nods of the head. Where had they come from? Germany; the information communicated via an almost inaudible grunt. How long did it take them? Three days - in the same low grunt. Et cetera for the rest of the thankfully short supper!
© James Gault 2017
The explanation:
Some readers, and many writers, find books containing grammatical errors a complete turn-off. Readers are entitled to set their own standards for what they choose to read, but in being pedantic about the use of grammar, do they deprive themselves of the chance to experience some exceptional writing? And does fear of making a grammar error inhibit creativity for a writer? Yes to both questions.
What’s the point of grammar? Why can’t we just throw words out in a random order as they come into our head? ‘Me think good idea.’ What’s wrong with that? It’s pretty clear what I meant. If good writing is expressing clearly and concisely what’s in your head, surely this has to be worth a Grade A?
If you look at this month’s extract, I would claim that, even to a grammarian, it’s not too bad. But it’s not grammatically perfect. There are a lot of incomplete sentences. My English teacher would have corrected them. For example, she would have changed Double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! to something like: He remembered the double helping of shapeless sweaters and dirty narrow jeans! But the words added to make the grammar perfect don’t tell us anything extra. If you add words to complete all the incomplete sentences in the extract, it becomes long-winded and struggles to hold the reader’s attention.
There are other situations where less than perfect grammar is useful. You might want to portray a character or narrator as poorly educated, or from a particular background, and deliberately insert grammatical errors: Hey, I cook real good, me and you back to my place, what you say? sort of thing.
Another thing about good grammar, especially when long and complex sentences are involved, is that it requires a lot of thought to be given to the construction of the sentences. The result is the writing comes across as considered and thoughtful, not a lot of good if the author is trying to achieve spontaneity. If character or narrators have to share their thoughts as they come to them, best to keep the sentences short and let the grammar slips show through.
I am not suggesting writers have carte blanche to produce works full of mistakes. But I am suggesting that writers should not be hemmed in by grammar rules. And readers should perhaps realise that bad grammar may be deliberate, and may itself be telling you more than the bare meaning implied by the words.
Contributed by James Gault
Concise Characterisation
Name of Books :
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens and Ogg by James Gault
The extracts:
The beginning of Dickens’ Hard Times, where we hear Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s speech to the pupils of the school.
‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
from Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Ogg and Antonia have been transported in time and place to a shady night club in fifties USA.
A squat balding fifty year old tuxedo with a cigar stood before them.
“You havin’ a good time? I ain’t seen you ‘round here before.”
“We’re from out of town,” Ogg drawled, and Antonia choked on her sparkling water.
“Well, you sure picked the right place for good entertainment. I’m Harry. Harry Biaggi. This is my joint. D’ya like it?”
“Well, yeah, Harry, I do. It’s a real nice place you got here.”
“We try to be classy. Howd’ya find us.” Harry snapped his fingers as he said this and a bow-tie appeared and slid a seat under him. He sat down.
from Ogg by James Gault
The explanation:
If we read the opening few pages of Jane Austin’s Emma we see a common way for authors to introduce characters. Emma’s family, biography and character are presented to us in intimate detail, and before we start her story we feel we know her like a good friend already, and we can sympathise with her successes and failures and feel the delights and angst which follow. For this particular novel, the detailed early establishment of the character is important because the author needs to arm us with the tools to judge Emma.
This kind of approach to characterisation is out of fashion now: it slows up the action and needs inspired writing to keep the reader’s attention, and is especially distracting for any but the very main characters.
Nowadays, we expect to discover our characters rather than be asked to judge them. We expect to get to know the characters slowly as we read their story. We form first impressions, then we develop these impressions and sometimes we misjudge and need to correct our assessments. The discovery of the characters is as important to us as the development of the plot. The characterisation is drip fed to us, and the personality of each individual has to permeate each part of the story.
For protagonists that first impression is of prime importance, while for minor roles it is the only information we get. So we expect the author to imbue our first meetings with the characters with indications of what kind of people they are: by what they say, by what they do or by both.
The excerpt from Hard Times is only six short sentences of dialogue, but how much does it tell us about the speaker? He is self-opinionated, he at least claims to be rational, he expects to be listened to and obeyed. He speaks in short sharp sentences, in commands and assertions. No debate is permitted. We don’t know what he looks like, we don’t even know his name, but already we don’t expect we’re going to like him very much.
In the second extract, all the elements are employed to create an impression of Mr Biaggi: description, dialogue and actions. All of this is condensed into a short dialogue. Biaggi is presented as middle aged and overweight but well dressed. He has the strong accent of a man from the gutter who has made it to the top – others jump to satisfy his every wish. But he also has an aura of feeling inferior: he is anxious to please and be liked and appreciated. In the novel his is a walk on part, we never meet him again, but he leaves an impression and sets the tone for what follows.
The point of both extracts is to note the denseness of the character information which is presented at the same time as the plot is developed. The reader has to work hard to catch all the points, but the ongoing development of the story never flags. This is what I am calling Concise Characterisation.
Contributed by James Gault
The Use of Foreshadowing
Name of book: The Redemption of Anna Petrovna by James Gault
The context of the extract:
The heroine, Anna Petrovna, has quit her job but she has made a deal with her old boss that allows her to set up a little business she can run from home. She is in her flat, waiting for her fiance to come home from his job so she can tell him what she has arranged.
The extract:
"She heard the door of the flat open and close. She waited, sipping her tea, turning her back a little to the door so she wouldn’t see him come in. It was a little ritual they had. He would come in, she would pretend not to see him, he would creep up behind her and kiss her gently on the back of the neck, she would purr. She loved this ceremony; it was a tribute to her regal power."
The explanation:
In this little paragraph, I'm creating the atmosphere and the power structure of the relationship between the couple. The little ritual has nothing to do with the plot, we won't hear of it again and it has no significance in the story, but it is a vital clue to what is going to happen. Let me explain!
The key phrase here is 'regal power'. Quite clearly the head of this household is the girl. You should also note that the whole thing is staged, a pretence, encouraged by her. The reader is meant to get the idea that this woman is not only bossy but she is insincere in the relationship. I use the words 'ceremony' and 'tribute' to suggest this insincerity. This ritual both enforces her superiority and gives the man the sense that his role is to please her. The word 'purr' with its associated imagery of a pet cat was chosen to reinforce this role. My purpose is to give the reader the idea that what we have here is not entirely a satisfactory and stable relationship. The girl is in it for her own ends, and she doesn't care too much for the man's feelings or wishes.
Why does the reader need to know this? Because, unsurprisingly, this relationship is doomed and they will break up later in the book. And I want to prime the reader for the subsequent problems the couple will have and the eventual collapse of their marriage.
This is what foreshadowing does: it helps make the subsequent plot development more credible because you have signaled the possibility of that development earlier, and it poses intriguing questions to keep the reader interested. You just have to hope that your readers pick up the signals.
Contributed by James Gault November 2017
Name of book: The Redemption of Anna Petrovna by James Gault
The context of the extract:
The heroine, Anna Petrovna, has quit her job but she has made a deal with her old boss that allows her to set up a little business she can run from home. She is in her flat, waiting for her fiance to come home from his job so she can tell him what she has arranged.
The extract:
"She heard the door of the flat open and close. She waited, sipping her tea, turning her back a little to the door so she wouldn’t see him come in. It was a little ritual they had. He would come in, she would pretend not to see him, he would creep up behind her and kiss her gently on the back of the neck, she would purr. She loved this ceremony; it was a tribute to her regal power."
The explanation:
In this little paragraph, I'm creating the atmosphere and the power structure of the relationship between the couple. The little ritual has nothing to do with the plot, we won't hear of it again and it has no significance in the story, but it is a vital clue to what is going to happen. Let me explain!
The key phrase here is 'regal power'. Quite clearly the head of this household is the girl. You should also note that the whole thing is staged, a pretence, encouraged by her. The reader is meant to get the idea that this woman is not only bossy but she is insincere in the relationship. I use the words 'ceremony' and 'tribute' to suggest this insincerity. This ritual both enforces her superiority and gives the man the sense that his role is to please her. The word 'purr' with its associated imagery of a pet cat was chosen to reinforce this role. My purpose is to give the reader the idea that what we have here is not entirely a satisfactory and stable relationship. The girl is in it for her own ends, and she doesn't care too much for the man's feelings or wishes.
Why does the reader need to know this? Because, unsurprisingly, this relationship is doomed and they will break up later in the book. And I want to prime the reader for the subsequent problems the couple will have and the eventual collapse of their marriage.
This is what foreshadowing does: it helps make the subsequent plot development more credible because you have signaled the possibility of that development earlier, and it poses intriguing questions to keep the reader interested. You just have to hope that your readers pick up the signals.
Contributed by James Gault November 2017