On the Big Screen

The Town

dir. Ben Affleck (2010)

Yesterday I caught the latest Affleck vehicle (he stars as well as directing and co-writing, so if you don't like the film you know who to write to).  In many ways it's wholly formulaic - a heist movie in which Affleck is a bank robber trying to go straight after one last job, which he takes on against his better judgement.  He falls in love with the manager of one the banks he's robbed (played with luminous appeal by Rebecca Hall) and of course this proves to be redemptive*.  The robbery does not, of course, go according to plan, and Affleck is forced to scramble for his life.  The ending, if not exactly happy, is appropriate and gives overtones of a brighter future.

You've seen this a hundred times before and yet--somehow--The Town is a scorching film.  Affleck manages at once to be level-headed, capable and yet vulnerable.  The blue collar Boston environment is vivid and believable.  This being Affleck's film, the audience's sympathy is with him, but unusually for the "villain as hero" genre, the police chasing him are not portrayed as bungling or corrupt: they're professionals with a job to do, and Jon Hamm as the FBI man always has our respect even as we want him to fail.  The action sequences are directed with brio, and the central relationship between Affleck and Hall, while not exactly convincing, is always compelling.

"Formulaic" is often thrown up as a criticism of films--and indeed books.  But what some see as a formula might more accurately be described as blending together elements which have been proven to work in the past.  What matters is the skill and vigour with which the ingredients are combined.  The Town might be formulaic--but so is Pride and Prejudice, so is The Big Sleep, so are Patrick O'Brian and Richard Stark.  If you don't like your dinner, blame the chef, not the ingredients.

I expected popcorn entertainment from The Town.  I found something rather better.  Highly recommended!

* I am no relationship expert, but this is not a dating strategy I would recommend

Why Should I Read...?


Bomber
Len Deighton, 1970

In my teens I read a lot about the Second World War, a phase I'm sure most bookish boys go through.  Until re-reading it this week, I haven't read Bomber for at least 25 years, but it always remained in my mind as a remarkable book, even once I had long forgotten the details. Reading it again now I can see why I remembered, and why judges as good as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess rated it among the great novels of the 2oth century.

Bomber  is set in one single day ("31 June" 1943) and tells the story, in clinical "docudrama" style, of a bombing raid against a German industrial city.  The novel uses multiple viewpoints and perspectives, both from the British and German sides.  The raid is a disaster on every level: the light Mosquito bomber, in a precisely choreographed scene, drops its marker bombs by accident on a sleepy market town, with the result that the 700 heavy bombers following carpet-bomb the town instead of the target.  Most of the inhabitants we see are killed, as are many of the German fighter pilots and the British bomber crews.  Deighton doesn't take sides; instead, with chilling detachment he chronicles the varying fates of the characters, who die heroically, farcically, gruesomely (one plane is downed by a bird strike, another from friendly fire).  Of those who survive, one German pilot is arrested on landing and subsequently executed for protesting against concentration camps; the star British pilot is taken off flying duties for refusing to play in a regimental cricket match.  For all the crisp precision of the prose, this is an angry book, showing up the horror of mechanised warfare.

Technically the book is also a tremendous achievement.  Deighton makes us care about the characters despite the pared-back prose (and also allows us to differentiate a large cast in our mind), and to admire the bravery of both the bombed and the bombers.  I suspect that 40 years ago the book was even more revolutionary, both stylistically and in the way in which all the characters are portrayed as victims.  (I suspect that Alastair McLean's action stories like The Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare are more typical of the period).

Bomber is not an easy read, but it is a bleak masterpiece.   

How has it influenced me?

Bomber was probably one of the first novels I read that dispensed with any pretence of happy endings.  The novel is a gruelling read but the reader recognises the rightness of the downbeat conclusions.  If the bomber crews had all come back safe, if the German pilots had all survived to collect their Knight's Cross, we might have been pleased for men we had come to care about, but it would have been the wrong ending for the novel.  It also shows that the writer can create sympathy for the characters without purple prose.  Deighton's ability to create memorable characters in a couple of paragraphs--one or two telling details can do it--is also something we can all learn from.

On World-building - Less is More

Tim Stretton may be one of the best fantasy world builders ever.  It's all done through the story, not lengthy explication.

So says fellow writer CN Nevets.  Is he right?  Probably not, in truth, although I appreciate the sentiment, and it does give me the chance to outline my theories on the business of world-building, probably at tedious length.

What do we mean by world-building?  According to Wikipedia, 

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. The result may sometimes be called a constructed world, conworld or sub-creation. The term world-building was popularized at science fiction writer's workshops during the 1970s. It describes a key role in the task of a fantasy writer: that of developing an imaginary setting that is coherent and possesses a history, geography, ecology, and so forth. The process usually involves the creation of maps, listing the back-story of the world and the people of the world, amongst other features.

Swallow that undigested and you've already fallen into a hole so deep you can't climb back out.  You may, as a writer, want to flesh out your world to give it a "history, geography, ecology, and so forth" (the "so forth" gives me the shivers); you can't, though, expect your readers to have the same level of interest.  The more of this kind of work you do, the harder it is to resist bringing it into the story--almost always to the detriment of the text.  Few readers will be engaged by a travelogue--reader engagement is created by character and plot.

Many readers have praised the world-building of the Mondia series (no, really, they have), but if I reference back to the Wikipedia definition, I could tell you nothing about its ecology; less about its history than the reader might imagine; and the geography arises entirely from the maps I created before I started.  I need to know more than the reader in all of these areas, but to be convincing and engaging I need to emphasise elements other than world-building.

It's important to realise why we are world-building.  If you are writing a novel, the setting is not an end in itself; it's one component of a multi-faceted work of art.  Here, as in so much else, Tolkien clones often miss the point: The Lord of the Rings does not succeed because of the author's obsessive documenting of Middle Earth, but because of the epic scope of the narrative.

However much world-building you do as preparatory work, you only need to show the reader enough to give the story texture and credibility.

Glount had been the seat of the Dukes of Lynnoc for a thousand years.  One of the oldest cities of Mondia, squeezed between the Penitent Hills and the sea, it had long been a centre of commerce.  If Croad was a poor cousin to Emmen, Glount was an older uncle, steeped in every vice and abomination concealed under a veneer of urbanity.  The Dukes of Lynnoc embodied the essence of their city, and could trace their lineage back to its foundation with only a minimum of creative genealogy.  A powerful independent city for six centuries until its fall to the first King Jehan, it had taken its absorption into the Emmenrule with scarcely a blink.  Things went on as they had always done, and while the King away in Emmen might wield a nominal authority, to the folk and rulers of Glount, matters went on as they had always done.

--The Dog of the North

In the passage above, I am trying as economically as possible to give the reader a flavour of one of the story's minor locations.  I resist the temptation, therefore, to list the lineage of the Dukes of Lynnoc for the thousand years in question (and indeed, never felt the need to compile one in my preparations).  In mentioning "the first King Jehan", my aim is to create a texture of history (there must be at least two Jehans) without overcooking it.

The paragraph above is simple exposition, and this is important too.  It's all too easy to convey information to readers solely through dialogue, which is frequently takes place for no identifiable dramatic reason.  If you want the reader to know something, the best way is often just to tell them in simple declarative prose.

I also try to make my exposition short.  "Little and often" is the best policy here.  In The Dog of the North, the idea of separate Winter and Summer Kings is critical to one of the plot strands, but the reader would be poorly served if I set out all the details up front.  Piece by piece, the reader learns (much of it alongside Lady Isola and Lady Cosetta, who as outsiders are well-placed to be fed the information I need the reader to have).

Lady Cosetta let out a gasp.  “I had heard Mettingloom was remarkable,” she said.  “But I never imagined this.”

“‘The City in the Sea’,” said Beauceron.  Allow me to point out the main features.  You see the little cluster of islets ahead, through the neck of the bay?  That is where the customs men, or Pellagiers, conduct themselves.  Then, rising from the sea itself, you see the ‘Metropoli’:  a cluster of closely-packed islets.  They are linked by bridges, and instead of roads, there are waterways – the famous ‘aquavias’. That is where we find the King’s palace, the Occonero.  Over to the left you see Hiverno, the Winter King’s residence.  The Summer King’s retreat Printempi is behind the Occonero and not visible.”

That is the first we hear of the Winter and Summer Kings.  For now, it's enough: it's time to get on with the story again.  The reader will not understand everything at once.  That's not a bad thing, because it helps foster the curiosity which will draw them into the story.  A few pages on, I'll feed them a bit more.

Those are my general principles for world-building.  I can summarise them in two precepts.  First, respect your reader, who has come to you for a compelling story, not a display of your cleverness; and trust your reader, who doesn't need to be told everything on page one to remain interested in your story.

I'm interested in other writers' views too.  How do you go about it? (And, since all writer must establish their credible fictional worlds, I'm addressing a wider audience than the fantasy community here).

Back on the scene

I've been away in Turkey for a late summer holiday--hot and sunny, since you ask--but sadly that's all now in the past.  Summer holidays are great reading opportunities for me, and the best book I read was RJ Ellory's A Quiet Vendetta.  Ellory has become a crime writer of the finest class: challenging plots, beautiful prose and a superb control of voice.  Highly commended too was Sharon Penman's Here Be Dragons, which after a slow start grew into a powerful and moving political and personal drama.  I'll be reading the others in the series.  On a less exalted level, Robert Harris's Lustrum marked a welcome return to form.  The late Roman republic is well-tilled soil, but Harris finds something new in giving us Cicero's unmasking of the Catiline conspiracy.

I had hoped too to think through some questions on The Fall of the Fireduke, and although I made some progress here it was less than I had hoped.  Instead, my mind found itself perversely exploring a different novel idea entirely, the result being that I now have an almost complete novel outline in my head.  If the idea's good enough, it will keep, so this one's filed away for future use.

I probably won't get much writing done for the next couple of weeks: it's the Chichester Writing Festival this weekend, and I am presenting training courses at work--something I enjoy, but which leaves me too enervated to write.

At the weekend I will also be taking delivery of the long-awaited Kindle.  Next year's summer holiday, I hope, will not be accompanied by a bag filled entirely with books...

Work in Progress

I have made the occasional tantalising (perhaps...) remark about The Fall of the Fireduke, my current work in progress.  This is not the book that a writer concerned with career advancement would write; it's set in Mondia, which has so far proved commercially unfortunate.  It takes place at a different time, using different characters, to the previous Mondia novels, so it could be seen as a standalone.  However we view it, it's the novel I need to write at the moment, before perhaps trying something different.

I'm now about 20,000 words in: generally about the point I start to think this is not going according to plan (even where I don't have a plan).  I'm writing this one to a slightly different method.  I envisage at least two, perhaps three, narrative strands, but I'm writing one from start to finish, rather than interweaving as I go.

In some ways this approach is easier because I'm not confused by switches in voice and point of view.  On the other hand, it leaves the story feeling very unbalanced.  This main story is about Floreyn, a young man who falls into the clutches of his family's enemy Duke Varrel.  Floreyn finds his captivity less irksome than he had imagined, largely through the charms of Varrel's neice Tanneke (OK, I know you've heard this one before).  There is a clear narrative structure here, but in writing up, there are an awful lot of Floreyn-and-Tanneke scenes in close proximity.  If this was the whole story, I think the reader would be bored.

I know as I write, though, that if I have two Floreyn-and-Tanneke scenes together, I can break that up with one of the other POV's.  Elsewhere, Tanneke's sister Adelisa is trying to ensure that her drunken husband Sir Eglamour does not endanger their son with his inept scheming; and Duke Varrel's household has been infiltrated by a would-be assassin.  There's enough there for variety, and no need for like scenes to sit too close together.

I've never written a novel this way before.  The two narratives in The Dog of the North  were written together for most of the novel before I cracked on and finished off Beauceron's about three-quarters of the way through.  In The Last Free City, I wrote Todarko and Oricien's narratives together throughout, before interleaving Malvazan's last.  But for The Fall of the Fireduke, I have to take a leap of faith that two narratives I've only sketchily conceived will complement and strengthen the one in progress.  And if they don't the novel fails.  That's scary.

At this stage, I am not sure if the third narrative strand, Varrel's assassin, has enough legs to work.  Gaspar, our would-be assassin, is fun to write and has the most fully-realised voice in the book.  On the other hand, unless I want to write fantasy's The Day of the Jackal*, there is limited fictional mileage in having Gaspar follow Varrel all over the place, trying and narrowly failing to kill him at every turn.

Nonetheless, The Fall of the Fireduke is moving forward.  Stretton's Law--you see it formulated here first--is that all first drafts are crap at 20,000 words.  I'm intrigued enough to write on, the only way to answer the questions:

~ will Floreyn overcome familial rivalry to get the girl?

~ will Gaspar manage to kill the Fireduke?

~ and will he find out who is paying him to do so?

~ will Varrel succeed in his treasonous scheme to usurp the crown ?

~ will Adelisa rise above her unhappy marriage to secure her son's inheritance?

Actually I know the answers but I think it's going to be fun getting there... (feel free to guess the answers - there are no "maybes", they are all Yes/No.  A prize to the first person to get all five right!).

* now there's an idea...

At the cinema

When I wasn't writing or cooking over the past few weeks, I took a couple of trips to the cinema.  Over the latest Twilight film we will draw a veil of discretion, pausing only to observe that it almost certainly delivered what its target audience wanted; Inception, however, was rather more interesting.

Christopher Nolan has the happy knack of being able to make intelligent pictures which unite critical and commercial success.  His two Batman films are both superior examples of their type, and The Prestige is an undervalued gem.  The first two hours of Inception, meanwhile, are so compelling that they mitigate the flabbiness of the final half-hour.  Nolan also gives us a nicely ambiguous final scene; in a film about the interface between dreams and reality, anything else would have been crass.

The plot is not meant to be summarised in a sentence.  Leonardo di Caprio leads an assorted team who can enter their target's mind to extract information--or, in the case of the "one last job" of the film--implant an idea.  Most of the film, therefore, takes place with the cast running around inside another character's head.  If, like my film companion, you can't buy that idea, you won't like the film, but if you go with the flow, it'll carry you along.  And for all its intellectual trickery, Inception  is at heart a very old-fashioned kind of film--a heist movie: the ill-assorted comrades, the meticulous planning, the botched execution.  The heist struture is what orders the narrative and makes the film, for all its hi-tech gizmo chic, surprisingly easy to follow.  (The deft skill of Nolan's infodumps also has plenty to do with it).

Once we see Inception as a heist movie rather than a Borgesian deconstruction of reality, it all makes rather more sense.  Its closest cousins are not The Matrix or Avatar, but Reservoir Dogs, The Italian Job and The Sting.  As with The Dark Knight, Nolan has made a first-rate genre picture, and none the worse for that.  See it if you get the chance.

'Serendip' is coming!

Publication of Editions Andreas Irle's Serendip, the German edition of Dragonchaser is nearly upon us.  The proprietor of Editions Andreas Irle--Andreas Irle, as coincidence would have it--has created a page on the EAI website, showcasing some excerpts and a downloadable first chapter.  Those of you of the German persuasion should proceed there immediately, without pausing to mention the World Cup.  The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.de.

Serendip is the first book of mine to be translated, and it's a strange experience to have book with my name on it, which I can't read.  How do I know the quality of the translation if I don't speak German?  There is no cast-iron assurance: it may be my story, but they're no longer my words.  In this case, I can be confident.  Andreas is a friend of many years's standing from the Vance Integral Edition, but more importantly, he is a well-respected translator of many of Vance's works.  Since I acknowledge my debt to Vance on my own work, it's reassuring to know that my translator has a similar understanding and enthusiasm.

Even if the worst has happened, and Andreas has chosen for his own purposes to interpolate observations along the lines of "Die einzige Sache, die schlechteres als Tim Stretton' stinkt; s-Arbeit ist der Autor selbst"*, at least I won't understand it.  And such a maverick edition would rapidly become an internet phenomenon, and swell both of our bank balances.  Andreas, you didn't...did you?

*"The only thing that stinks worse than Tim Stretton's work is the author himself"

Chichester Book Club

I'm delighted to be part of a new be part of a new site, the Chichester Book Club, which showcases the work of published writers working in my local area.  I know some of these writers already, but seeing everyone's work together shows what a diverse writing community Chichester has.  The site is the brainchild of Isabel Ashdown, whose debut novel Glasshopper  is garnering rave reviews.

Whatever your reading tastes, there's likely to be something for you (disclaimer: if you like fantasy, you're pretty well stuck with me), so why not pop over for a browse?

What I've been up to

Things have been a bit quiet over here for the last two weeks (although followers of @timstretton on Twitter will have been vexed by periodic tweets).  I have not been wholly idle, and over the next couple of weeks I'll be blogging about:

~ my current work in progress, The Fall of the Fireduke

~ the imminent German publication of Serendip (Editions Andreas Irle's translation of Dragonhaser)

~ summer reading - the latest by LC Tyler and KJ Parker's fantasy Colours in the Steel 

~ Inception    

I have also spent a lot of the summer cooking, so if you want my observations on chicken cacciatore or greek salad omelette, I'm your man.

On My Travels: Budapest

I'm just back from five days in the Hungarian capital.  I can rarely visit a new city without wanting to reinterpret it in some fictional context, and Budapest was no exception.  It's a fascinating place, and what excited me most about was the sense of historical layering.  In the past couple of years I've visited New York, which seems to exist entirely in the present, and Bruges, which deliberately sets out to reflect nothing but its past.  Budapest, by contrast, seems at once to embody the countless waves of invaders and occupiers who have laid down the strata which make up the city.

I didn't expect the Turkish influence to be as strong as it was, but from the Cafe Kara near our hotel to the thermal baths dotted all over the city, the sense of the old Ottoman Empire was pervasive.  At the same time, though, a traditional European sensibility was in evidence:

Buda, overlooking the Hungarian Parliament

Budapest embraces and reinterprets its own history.  The impressive Vajdahunyad Castle, although looking antique, dates from the end of thre 19th century and incorporates Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture.  It's a deliberate contribution to Hungary's millennium celebrations in 1896:

Vajdahunyad Castle

If in Bruges it's easy to imagine you are walking through streets in the 15th century, in Budapest one gets a feeling of the early 20th century, as the tram and buildings in this street illustrate:

A journey from the past

We stayed in Andrassy Avenue, a long wide boulevard reminiscent of Hausmann's 19th century Paris boulevards.  Wikipedia has a picture of the street in 1896, and it's scarcely different today:

Andrassy Street - 1896 or 2010?

But while the look of the street may hardly have changed (even today there is still a second inner road where horse and carriage once trotted), since 1896 Hungary has experienced Fascist and Communist regimes (both grimly comemorated at the Museum of Terror on Andrassy Avenue itself).   Andrassy Avenue itself was renamed Stalin Avenue in the early 1950s and then, on Stalin's death, Avenue of the People's Republic.  Only on the fall of Communism was Andrassy restored to his inheritance.

The layering of history in every aspect of the city makes a visit seem like a live archaeological dig, with elements of the past six hundred years present simultaneously.  It's the kind of feeling we might get when immersed in Jack Vance's Dying Earth: Therlatch perhaps, Old Romarth, or Ampridatvir:

I have known the Ampridatvir of old; I have seen the towers glowing with marvellous light, thrusting beams through the night to challenge the sun itself. Then Ampridatvir was beautiful—ah! My heart pains when I think of the olden city. Semir vines cascaded from a thousand hanging gardens, water ran blue as vaul-stone in the three canals. Metal cars rolled the streets, metal hulls swarmed the air as thick as bees around a hive—for marvel of marvels, we had devised wefts of spitting fire to spurn the weighty power of Earth... But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.

For a writer of fantasy, Budapest gives almost too much to work with, and shows us that fantasy can draw inspiration from periods other than the Middle Ages.  And for the tourist--well, you just have to visit the thermal baths.