What They Don't Tell You About Writing A Novel

"I do what I love, and I love what I do

but if you think this is easy, you must be new."

 M.C. Abdominal

1) There isn't a point at which you're "in". When you start, it's easy to think of writing as a club that has either accepted you or hasn't: it's not really true. Also, be ready not to to be satisfied. You might think you've set out what you intended to do, and now it's time to stop - or your first novel might encourage you to write another one. And another.


2) "Write what you know" isn't really correct. It's a decent rule of thumb, but really, it should be something like "Only include what you can depict convincingly". That's not as catchy, but it's more accurate. After all, nobody knows what it's like to ride a dragon. And as for "Show don't tell", there are times when a quick tell defeats a slow show. Not many, but some.


3) You can't write a good book through reading alone. That sounds weird, but a lot of advice boils down to "keep writing and reading". Yes, these are both vital, but getting feedback from others and learning the skills of how to write are also very important.

There wasn't a picture for "Toby Writes A Book"

4) Keep old ideas, and be ready to cross them with one another to get new concepts. I suspect that good new ideas don't just appear - they develop from something else. Often putting some unexpected element into an otherwise familiar story can yield very different results. It may be that an idea is perfectly good, but you're just not ready to write it yet.


5) Be wary of writing advice that says "You must do this". There's been a bit of a meme of "10 rules of writing" this week, basically as a response to Jonathan Franzen's rather odd observations here:  https://lithub.com/jonathan-franzens-10-rules-for-novelists/. However, some of the replacement lists are no better. Beware of anyone who says "You must do it like this". A lot of this business is figuring out what works for you.


6) Contrary to the impression I always get, you don't have to own a cat. Or even like them.

Gilbert & Sullivan's Blade Runner

Blade Runner: or, The Replicant's Revenge 

by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Deep breath...

Are you the latest model of a modern android replicant?

For in the nightmare future robot servants represent
A cheap source of labour
But if we dislike their behaviour
We don’t execute them: we mark them for retirement.

Now you may want to tell yourself “I’m no menace to society!
“I don’t remember fleeing from an offworld colony!”
You may recall when you were born
Or a prancing unicorn
But trust me any memory could be planted artificially.

You might like eating sushi, neon signs and cars that fly
And permanent advertisements for Coca-Cola in the sky
But you’ll find it’s all in vain
For memories like tears in rain
Get forgotten in just four years, and then you'll find it’s time to die.

So… Don’t come back to planet Earth or Rick Deckard or another
Blade Runner will hunt you down and shoot your robot lover
A blaster shot will hurtle
Through you if you flip the turtle
So tell me only the good things you recall about your mother.

Can you tell if you are human, as the androids all yearn to be?
Or if Deckard is a replicant with any sort of certainty?
Will Rick and Rachel stay alive?
Was it four bots or really five?
Just be warned the sequel goes on for all eternity!

Talking About Talking

I'd quite like a hat like this.

I've been watching Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House, which is very loosely inspired by Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel of the same name. Both the TV show and the book are highly acclaimed, and both, I think, have serious problems. In both of them, the dialogue feels wrong.

In the TV show, characters seem to communicate important information in monologues. That is to say, they basically go off on one for several minutes, usually with shouting and/or crying involved, and nobody really responds or tries to interrupt. It's really weird.

"Do I want a cup of tea? Yes, please. My father gave me a cup of tea once, the night that we first saw the statues move. I remember it well: a the storm raged outside and at 8.30pm, I..."

It's not quite that bad, but not far off at times. People just don't talk like that. They might do in stage plays, where internal thoughts have to be explained to the viewer, but I don't think it's really needed in TV drama ( the question "Is this a dagger I see before me?" would probably be answered with a special effect these days).

The novel has its own problems with dialogue. Everyone is very flippant and delivers their lines as witty repartee, no matter what horrific things they've just experienced. It's like one of those black and white films where bitchy starlets crack wise at parties. And if you've just met the living dead, it doesn't sound convincing*.

"... which was jolly."

Which gets me (neatly) to the importance of dialogue. Anyone who's not writing in the modern era - or about people in unusual circumstances, such as a haunted house - has to make a decision as to how the dialogue is going to work. Too "normal" and it will jar with the setting. Too strange and it will be hard to follow.

Someone once said to me "You can tell when the Space Marines are talking, because they say 'do not' instead of 'don't'." Personally, I'm not a great fan of "heroic" speech, as it loses a lot of nuance (except when Suruk the Slayer is using it. He's naturally epic).

"Let none dispute my epicness."

When I wrote Up To The Throne - and other fantasy -  I tried to use normal conversational English, taking out obvious Americanisms and Britishisms. It was surprisingly hard writing a novel about the criminal underworld without using "yeah"! I also took out all words with a real-world significance: the days of the week have different names, although there is still a sabbath, and there are no Christophers - and no sods.

Writing Space Captain Smith, in which a lot of the jokes are in the dialogue, makes me realise how important it is to get the speech just right. As to whether I've got the new book right, well, we shall see...


*On the off-chance it's of interest, I reviewed the novel HERE

Five Things About Fear (and other quality alliteration)

So, it's Halloween. All the pumpkins and green food dye don't do much for me, to be honest, but I am interested in what makes a book or film frightening. I think there are five main aspects:

1) Suspense versus action
Skilled writers and directors know that whatever they put on the screen can't be as nasty as what the reader or viewer can think up. That's why the exploring of the haunted house takes up much more screen time than the ghosts. The demons in Hellraiser, for instance, get less than 5 minutes of screen time. It's important to know the distinction between what's frightening and what's exhilarating. Frightening is when we are hiding - exhilarating is when we are fighting back.

"For ever... and ever...."

2) Power
Adversaries need to be dangerous, or to seem it. The skeletal robots of the Terminator films are relentless. The zombies in Night of the Living Dead may be slow, but they've got numbers, and they keep coming. Even in an action film like Where Eagles Dare, where the good guys are deadly commandos, they are going up against a much larger force. One robot or zombie or Nazi might not be much of a problem, but a whole load of them...

And then you have creatures like the cenobites of Hellraiser, or the ghosts in The Shining, which seem almost omnipotent in comparison to the people they hunt. The haunted house is much bigger than the people who enter it, and it holds all the cards. Of course, this can get ridiculous, like those slasher films where being insane seems to make you immune to gunfire, but a real expert knows how to balance this.


3) WTF?
Some of the strongest horror comes from a sense of not knowing quite what you're looking at. Until the very end of the film, the creature in Alien is never seen in full. The surreal beheading of Science Office Ash is only explained after he's stopped flailing around and squirting white slime. Until that point, it's like watching a nightmare.

There's an old BBC adaptation of M.R. James' ghost story "Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad". In it, a professor dreams that he is being chased along a beach by... something. We know what we're literally looking at: it's clearly a sheet in a breeze. But the weird groaning sound it makes, coupled with the heartbeat on the soundtrack, makes us think "What the hell is that thing? Let's not find out!"

Whatever this is, it's not good. And it's getting closer.

4) Sympathetic characters
It's impossible to care about characters that you don't like. That means that they need to have sympathetic motivations, to act sensibly and to be convincingly portrayed. The Cabin in the Woods is a good parody of bad horror films: the characters are forced to act out the ritual roles of idiotic teenage victims in a slasher movie. It's when they get away from the conditioning that they become more likable.

However, "sympathetic" sometimes means "entertaining" or "realistic" rather than "charming". A character can win a lot of respect from readers by being sensible and active. Macready from The Thing starts off gruff and rather miserable: Alien's Ellen Ripley seems prissy and uptight when we first meet her. But the acting is good and, once trouble starts, they're sensible, active and behave like decent (if frightened) people.


5) Taste
Surprising one, this. But I think great directors know when to pull away. Often, all that's needed is the hint of what's going on to bring the horror home. This often involves overstepping the bounds - but knowing when to stop. You never see the knife in the victim in Psycho. The worst deaths in Alien are never seen. After all, whatever you see, you can probably imagine something worse.

And with those pleasant mental images, I'll see you next time.

The Appeal of Noir

Patrick Stewart and Alec Guiness in Smiley's People

When I first encountered Lidda the Rogue in the 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons manual, I didn't run into a lot of fantasy that really suited me. That was probably my fault as much as the genre's, but there was a level of complexity and intrigue that I didn't see back then. I should probably have been looking harder.

I encountered the feeling I wanted to create more often outside fantasy than in it. I found it in noir: in the books of James M. Cain and early James Ellroy and above all, in the novels of Raymond Chandler, who I think is one of the best writers of the 20^th century. I also found it in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, which defined the subgenre of cyberpunk in science fiction, and the murky, downbeat spy novels of John le Carre. All of these books contain violence, corruption and subterfuge, but there’s more to them than just chaos and death. All of them involve flawed characters trying to make the best of their position: whether by solving a mystery, hacking a company computer system, or unmasking a spy, using whatever cunning and improvised gear they can find.

Cover art by Josan Gonsalez. Note the obligatory cigarette!

And they all involve a sense of morality. Richard Morgan (of Altered Carbon fame) recently observed that all good noir involves not just noticing that the status quo is bad, but fighting against it. Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe struggles to find justice in the corruption of 1940s Los Angeles. George Smiley might fight dirty, but he’s most certainly on the right side of the Cold War. Even in the weird dystopia of Gibson’s world, there are real monsters to be defeated. That sense of justice seems to be to be one of the most basic human emotions. As Chandler himself put it in "The Simple Art of Murder": "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean".

Bit of a fantasy title, come to think of it

I think without this sense of morality - even a skewed morality that is as much about revenge as  justice - it's easy to produce a kind of war-porn, where the story exists for little more than shock value. Or, just as bad, you end up telling stories whose morals are too simple: yes, war is hell, but that's nothing new. As another author - in fact, one who'd written several Warhammer 40,000 novels - once told me, darkness works best when there's light for it to contrast with, and vice versa.

Up To The Throne isn’t a comedy, and contains no jokes. It’s also played entirely straight: there’s nothing ironic or post-modern in there, and it isn’t a parody or commentary on something else. Giuilia’s primary motivation is outrage, and, after that, the obligation to settle debts, both to her friends and enemies. But I think it’s easy to sympathise with someone like that. The sense of seeing corrupt and often downright evil people getting away with it is unpleasantly familiar.

As such, I think it is in the tradition of noir, as I understand it. A single determined person  looks for revenge in a corrupt city and, in doing so, uncovers a conspiracy. And that search takes them to some very dangerous places.

Woman With A Lockpick

Many, many years ago, I used to travel up to Cardiff every few months to visit my friends Owen and Alex. I’d stay in their house and generally make a nuisance of myself for a couple of days. Because I worked on Fridays, I’d get a late train and arrive at all sorts of weird and unhelpful times.

Once, I showed up while they had friends around, I think to play a game. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I started reading a Dungeons & Dragons manual that happened to be around (the Third Edition Players’ Handbook, to be precise). Flicking through, I stumbled upon the picture below.

It’s one of a set of pictures of example characters, who are depicted with various upgrades and specifications to demonstrate what can be done with the rules. This particular person is Lidda the Halfling Rogue, but I didn’t know that at the time.

It's interesting what prompts you (ie me) to write. Whatever subconscious reason there might have been, I looked at this picture and thought “This is the kind of person that I want to write about”.

What strikes me about this picture is its practicality. I don’t only mean the lack of exposed flesh, but the sense that this is a real person, with real problems. She’s peering at a lockpick (at least I think she is), and the end of her nose has gone pink, as if she’s got a cold. Things like that didn’t happen to fantasy characters when I was young, outside comedy.

And of course, the outfit. Actually, it’s not all that practical, and it seems to be largely made out of random off-cuts strapped together, but it looks warm and it’s got pads. After all, if you’re going to be picking locks and squeezing through windows, having reinforced gear is a pretty sensible idea. There’s also the interesting fact that her hair is rather elaborately braided, which hints at something other than practicality - vanity, or religious observance perhaps. If there are cyberpunks in fantasy, this is what they would look like.

 *

The heroine – or maybe protagonist is a more accurate word – of Up To The Throne doesn’t look much like Lidda, to be honest. Giulia is human, for starters, and rather more “normal” looking in terms of outfit. There are half a dozen other ways she differs, but I still look at this picture from time to time, to remind me of what this thing is all about. It’s about that sense of improvisation and pragmatism, of credible people behaving logically within a weird, impossible setting. 

I don't know who drew this. I've looked but, as with a lot of rulebook art, unless it's by one of the three or four people whose work I recognise, it's very hard to track down. So, if you do know who drew Lidda the Halfling Rogue Looking At A Lockpick, let me know. In the meantime, thanks, mystery artist.

Next time, some thoughts on noir. And maybe I'll tell my Games Workshop anecdote.

A Supercharged Renaissance

So, why set a fantasy novel in the Renaissance?

Well, first up, it's important to say that it isn't our Renaissance. It's the equivalent of our Renaissance in a fantasy world, where magical events happen and are expected to happen. It's what's known as a "low magic setting", in that impossible things don't occur all that often - which is lucky if you happen to live there, as a lot of the impossible things are really dangerous.

Such as this.

So, alongside the developments that humanity is making - in engineering, painting, literature and learning about the world - you have a small number of monsters, wizards, fey folk, revenants and other (frequently lethal) beings. Also, while there aren't many people with the magical skill to shoot lightning or turn people into frogs, there are some with the ability to strengthen mechanisms, summon weather, enchant objects and basically supercharge things that would otherwise hardly function into effective machinery. So, with the right enchantments, that clockwork cart that only rolls downhill and is so heavy that it sinks into the ground can potentially become a very useful and stylish set of wheels.

This could really happen!

But still, why the Renaissance?

For one thing, it's hard to pin down one period in one place as "the Renaissance". England barely had one, at least not in the same way as Italy. But we all know what the concept is, and it encompasses some really interesting things. Developments in thought, in scholarship, in art and in understanding man's position in the world really accelerated between 1400 and 1600 (in Europe, at any rate). It was also a time of some truly foul, vicious and crazy behaviour. Of course, I'm talking about something of a caricature, but that's how historical periods tend to be remembered. 

Giulia's world is a condensed and accelerated version of that (it's the magic, you see), in the same way that a lot of epic fantasy uses a condensed and exaggerated version of the Middle Ages (another long and varied time period). That enables a character to have lots of interesting adventures: in Giulia's world (if you had the cash), you could chat to a philosopher, buy a potion from an alchemist to change your appearance, steal a painting from a genius artist and go for a ride in a flying machine - or on a wyvern - on the same day. And then get murdered by a pack of revenants. It's not all perfect.

"I'll distract him with this hourglass while you loot the barrels."

There are other aspects, too: gunpowder was becoming more prevalent (very useful against those undead hordes) and Christianity (or its fantasy equivalent) was in serious turmoil. Both of those enter Giulia's world, in strange and distorted forms.


So you set Up To The Throne in the Renaissance because...

At some level, the answer to a question like this is always "because I think it's cool", and I'm not sure that's much of an answer at all. That aside, I think it comes down to possibilities. The Renaissance itself was a time of possibilities, when mankind's potential for greatness (and badness) was coming into its own in Europe. And Pagalia, where Up To The Throne is set, is a microcosm of that: a city where geniuses cross paths with assassins, and magical creatures clash with the fanatics who would wipe them out. Something really good could come of it - and something truly awful. Aptly, it's a powder-keg. All it needs is a spark...