:: Acquired Taste returns

After a pleasant and relaxing holiday, normal service is resumed. Topics to be covered over the coming weeks include:

• on receiving bad reviews (sadly based on experience)
• progress on The Last Free City
• my favourite book (just don't expect any surprises...)

Summer hols...

Readers of ::Acquired Taste will readily come to the conclusion that the writer's life comprises periods of indolent dilettantism interspersed with holidays. The news that tomorrow I am off to Turkey for a fortnight, having achieved nothing meaningful on The Last Free City since May, is unlikely to overset that opinion.

Holidays are in fact an important time for writers, particularly when they aren't sightseeing-type ones. It's rare to get a couple of weeks when neither work nor the everyday business of running a home intrude--much very important thinking on The Dog of the North was done lying by a Spanish poolside three years ago. So it's not a holiday, it's work by another name. (Do you believe that? Didn't think so...)

For those of you maladjusted enough to find a fortnight without my observations disturbing, this month's Sci-Fi Now magazine has a short interview with me in which I outline some thoughts on The Dog of the North and the writing process.

::Acquired Taste will return in early September.

If in doubt...make a list
I have various strategies for kick-starting a story when my imagination is flagging. Putting in a swordfight is one of my favourites, and almost a cliche, but having done this once in The Last Free City I'm reluctant to do so again. The swordfight in question is, for now at least, my opening scene and gets what was already quite a dark book off to a bloody start. There needs to be another one at the end, and my secondary plot has quite a martial theme, so for now we have enough swordplay.

In a previous post I mentioned the role of photos and maps as stimulation too. I have another kick-start strategy which I probably use more frequently than either maps or swordfights, and that's lists. These lists will usually only ever be background to the story, but they provide a framework on which to build the softer art of characterisation.

On Tuesday, then, I spent some time writing lists. Normally 70,000-odd words into a draft is a bit late to do that, but now that I am working on a second narrative strand, I need to deepen and enrich some of the background. In my conception of Taratanallos, the city is ruled by an oligarchy drawn from a group of noble families, and I had already created the ones I was intending to focus on, without detailing all the others; but now I am telling a second story from 25 years earlier, I need to make that structure more robust. So I made a list of all the twenty-four 'Houses of the Specchio', and made sure I wrote down which characters were in which house before I forgot.

What is the point of doing all this? Nowhere in the novel will I list out all of the Houses and, unlike some fantasy writers, I see little point in documenting everything meticulously for its own sake. I've got two real reasons. The first is entirely logistical. Having two time-separated narratives, with some characters appearing in both, makes the sheer management of the information more complicated. (How old is Dravadan in the first section? Which House was Sulinka in before she married Jarodin?). In my original story, where all the action takes place over a few weeks, this kind of "longitudinal dimension" is far less important: Dravadan is the same age all the way through, and Sulinka's past is a thing of hints and allusions. Once a story takes on temporal drift, the management of information becomes much more significant.

While this is true enough, it's essentially book-keeping. It's necessary, fairly enjoyable, but mechanical. The second reason for generating lists is that they create possibilities. Words have a shape, a sound, a texture. When they are proper nouns that you have just minted, those possibilities are fresh and unique. How can a House called Tantestro be anything other than haughty, proud of its lineage, evoking the jealousy of a score of rivals? House Zano, on the other hand, will wear its distinction with restraint, but react furiously if crossed. The point here is not that these words should evoke the same responses in you, but that they take on specificity for me. Once a person or an institution has a name, that name starts to create resonances in my mind, and then I can write about it. House Zano may barely feature in the novel, but I have sense of what it means, and hence how the characters in the novel will react to it. I know how the heiress of that House will carry herself, and why the dreamy young man from tatty old House Carmaggio is deluding himself if he believes he has the faintest chance of marrying her.

And that is why I write lists. Every item on the list is a tiny piece of grit; some will remain dirt forever, but others will slowly accrete imaginative deposits until one day, if I am lucky, they become pearls.

Whose Story Are You Telling?

It's no secret that progress on The Last Free City has been fitful in recent weeks. After the intricate narrative structure of The Dog of the North, the simple story of the callow and selfish Todarko has seemed progressively more unsatisfying the further it has progressed. It's been hard to put my finger on what's not working: the hero is a mixture of flaws and considerable virtues, even if the latter are heavily occluded; the milieu in which he exists also seems full and absorbing.

I came to the conclusion a few weeks ago that a second viewpoint character was what was needed, and set about writing some scenes from the new character's perspective. These scenes were not in themselves unsuccessful, but at the weekend I realised that rather than reinforcing the main narrative, they were diluting it. The plot was already shaped around Todarko's story, and the new viewpoint scenes I was writing were either redundant or irrelevant. So, on Saturday, out they went; only 8,000 words lost, a small price to pay for realising early on that this approach wasn't going to work.

Instead I set myself to polishing the original Todarko narrative. This included fleshing out his relationship with his fencing-master Rodizel (David, don't tell me you'd write fencingmaster...). I always knew that Rodizel had a potentially interesting backstory which also illuminated the motivations of the story's villain, Dravadan. I wrote the start of a scene in which Rodizel's reminiscences to Todarko turn into a full-blown flashback scene (something I normally avoid). The flashback seemed to me so interesting that I am now considering having an entire narrative strand set in this earlier period (an aspect of The Dog of the North I enjoyed writing was the twin timeline). A narrative strand which shows how the villain became a villain in the first place has to be worth exploring.

The book is now at the stage where I have a good sense of all the main characters. Seeing how the older ones were different--but with the potential to develop--a quarter of a century earlier should allow the two narratives to reinforce each other.

I'll spend some time over the next few weeks thinking this strand through. If it works, I can start writing it up when I come back from holiday at the beginning of September; if it doesn't, I've at least deepened my understanding of several of the major characters.

The point of this blog is only partly to whinge about how difficult the writer's life is (you can take this as read). There's also an unwritten contract that I'll share such insights as I can uncover:

• writing novels is hard (OK, you noticed I slipped that one in...)
• first drafts are the time to experiment
• you need to know whose story you're telling...
• ...which need not be the same person as the main viewpoint character
• ...if indeed you have a single main viewpoint character
  
• if what you're trying doesn't work, try something else: there's no 'right' way to do it
• writing novels is hard (indulge me here...)

A Little Visual Stimulation

There is no writing tool more valuable than imagination. The facility for crafting prose is a poor second, because if there is nothing in front of the inner eye, there is nothing for the prose to express.

I am sure all writers have different methods for strengthening and stimulating their imagination. I do not naturally think in visual terms, and in recent years I've found the internet very useful not only for training my visual faculty, but also for providing 'models' around which I can write. Both Dragonchaser and The Dog of the North drew both inspiration and topographical information from the wonderful antique maps of Braun and Hogenberg. The one shown below, of Loreto, has never featured in one of my stories, but I do own a 16th century original of this map.


For The Last Free City I have used maps of another mediaeval city. Because that city is relatively unchanged today, I've also harvested a collection of photographs from the web which I've put into a phyisical file. I can use this for inspiration and also for "blocking out" scenes. Here are a couple of my favourite images:

The Last Free City

This is my image of Taratanallos, the 'last free city'

The Road to Grandille

This image of the bridge leaving the city nicely captures both climate and arcitechture.

The Prieko

It's easy to imagine all kinds of dark deeds in these steep narrow treacherous streets...

Naturally these pictures are all of a 'real' place: my customary non-existent prize for anyone who can tell me where this is.

How do you go about visualising your locations?

The Perils of Genrification

I am unashamedly a genre writer. The kind of book I write will always be sold and marketed as fantasy; as long as it is marketed, I've no reason to complain. My fantasy is all swords and very little sorcery, but I'm clearly part of a tradition that includes, for instance, Jack Vance's Lyonesse and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

This preamble is brought on by a post over at Joe Abercrombie's blog which taps into a wider internet discussion about the extent to which fantasy writers should also be fantasy readers. There is a view, by no means universal, that those writers who don't read the stuff: 1. can't write decent fantasy; 2. disrespect readers by riding in and thinking they can do it better than 'fanboys'.

Neither point strikes me as particularly convincing: Abercrombie is one of many who disprove the first; and disrespect only occurs when the writer dismisses the entire field as crap without having read much of it.

As a writer I would not describe myself as steeped in fantasy. In fact, I'm more likely to dislike a fantasy novel than almost any other genre (in the past couple of weeks I've put down a couple which have done nothing for me). There are of course many fantasy writers I love: the ubiquitous Vance, Abercrombie, George RR Martin, Iain M. Banks (even if Inversions isn't technically fantasy), Le Guin, Tolkien (even if only for past associations).

The point that the debate largely misses is that it's fighting the wrong battle. To write good fantasy it probably isn't essential to read good fantasy: what is essential is that they read good writers, regardless of genre. Fantasy writers whose models are solely from within the genre are unlikely to write the kind of book which will make general readers overcome their prejudice against fantastic fiction. And while there may be those in the fantasy community who revel in their literary pariah status, I'm not one of them... one thing that fantasy readers and writers should agree on is that good fantasy writing is good writing, period.

As the "Why Should I Read...?" list on the left shows, as writers we are all the sum of our reading experiences. If that's the case, don't we have the responsibility to give ourselves the kind of literary diet which won't bring on scurvy?

Pictures from the Book Launch




Images courtesy of Alex Sharkey

News from the Book Launch

Last night was the long-awaited event at Waterstones Chichester which finally unleashed The Dog of the North onto an unsuspecting public. The evening was a great success in commercial terms--over 30 attendees and a similar number of books sold. It was also great fun: Greg Mosse interviewed me for 45 minutes or so and we covered a lot of ground. We went from the first book I could remember reading (Five Little Kittens*) through the writer who in real life invented the process by which sugar sticks to doughnuts**, to Jack Vance, Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian.

I rounded off by reading a couple of my favourite passages from the book before signing a gratifying number of copies. All in all, a wonderful evening which everyone seemed to come away from having enjoyed themselves. With any luck pictures will be along in a day or two.

On Friday it's off to Cambridge to sign stock at Heffers Bookshop.

~ ~ ~

At the weekend I also spent some time on The Last Free City, which now has a new and punchy opening scene. I said last night, only partly in jest, "when in doubt, throw in a swordfight", and that's what I did here. This is a bloody scene which gets a dangerous antagonist on the page from the start, and with any luck generates a narrative momentum to carry the reader into the rest of the story.

*Mrs Tibbetts, going shopping

Wasn't pleased enough to purr
"Kitties, please!" she said quite crossly,
"How can Mummy brush her fur?"

**A prize will be awarded to the reader who can identify this seminal figure in the history of both science-fiction and the obesity epidemic

Experiment is the Mother of Invention

in·vent verb (used with object)

1. to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance: to invent the telegraph.
2. to produce or create with the imagination: to invent a story.
3. to make up or fabricate (something fictitious or false): to invent excuses.
4. Archaic. to come upon; find.

dis·cov·er verb (used with object)

1. to see, get knowledge of, learn of, find, or find out; gain sight or knowledge of (something previously unseen or unknown): to discover America; to discover electricity.
2. to notice or realize: I discovered I didn't have my credit card with me when I went to pay my bill.
3. Archaic. to make known; reveal; disclose.

My last post drew some consistent responses from Alis Hawkins, David Isaak and Akasha Savage on how writers get characters down on the page. None of us, it seems, are into drawing up "character sketches" in advance of writing, although some us would work that way if we could.

What we all talk about instead, and we are hardly alone in this, is "discovering" characters. It's almost a shorthand for the way writers work. There's an unspoken that discovering characters is authentically artistic, a communion with the muse, whereas inventing them is chilly, academic and formulaic. In fact, one rarely comes across a writer who admits to inventing characters at all (they might, however, concede that they invent something vulgar, like a plot; the deity that is character is exempt from such sordid machination).

Let's look at the definitions at the head of the blog, though. I can discover America, or electricity (although as it happens others got there first in both cases); I can even discover Elizabeth Bennet. Jane Austen, on the other hand, did not discover Elizabeth Bennet--she invented her.

It's clear that when writers talk about discovering character, the discovery in question is metaphorical. We are inventing ("2. to produce or create with the imagination") our characters in the same way that we invent every other aspect of our fictional work.

So why is the metaphor so pervasive? Are writers slaves to cliche, too lazy to think of fresh modes of expression? (NB: rhetorical question, particularly if you think the answer is "yes"). "Discovery" in this sense emphasises the gradual and iterative nature of character creation. Those of us who recoil from the index-card approach (Linnalitha: 5' 6", blue eyes, red hair; mercurial, flirtatious, reflective. Likes nuts but not fish.) would argue that you can't design a credible fictional character in isolation, however comprehensive your thesaurus. What we do as writers is not so much discover as experiment: what happens if we write a scene with this character interacting with that one? The writer will have a subjective sense of whether it "works" or not; this will make their impression of the character that much more concrete, and so the next experiment can take place on a firmer footing. The whole of the first draft can be seen as a progressive series of experiments, with feedback between each phase; each character a hypothesis to be tested, either to destruction or refinement. Second and subsequent drafts then use the data gathered from the full series of experiments to return to the beginning and re-run the initial experiments.

In this metaphor, the entire novel is a hypothesis, not just the characters. The writer sets out with a supposition that a given idea, a given set of characters and milieu, forms a viable prose fiction--and then goes about proving that hypothesis true (in contrast with the true scientific method which sets out to prove a hypothesis false).

So next time a writer talks to you about the process of discovery, ask yourself if instead they aren't really talking about "experiment":

ex·per·i·ment noun

1. a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.: a chemical experiment; a teaching experiment; an experiment in living.

How to Write a Novel in 12 Simple Steps

Writing a novel is a mechanical process that anyone can do. There are books--hundreds and hundreds of books--out there which tell you how to do it. Some of them even tell you how to write a best-selling novel in a month. What could be simpler? Er, what's that? They all say different things? But one of them must have the dope, right? If only we could identify which one, we'd be made...

Regular visitors to ::Acquired Taste will be well aware that, sadly, there is no One Best Way to write a novel. We all work in different ways: some of us are fast, some are slow; some redraft extensively, some (not many...) get it right first time; some of us plan in meticulous detail before starting, some fly--or crash--by the seat of their pants. Anybody who has given the methods of successful writers even the most cursory examination will have realised that everyone has to find their own method.

David Isaak and Alis Hawkins both have interesting posts on their blogs today touching on "writers' rules". David emphatically is not a rules man (although he gives a grudging acquiesence to "never start a sentence with a comma"). He convincingly rubbishes the rule of forcing "tension" on every page (although the dictum he quotes from Raymond Obstfeld of having "a gem on every page" makes sense if you can do it...). Alis talks about the received wisdom of writing the first draft in one go, and then fixing problems in rewrite. That approach, which I've also been adopting for The Last Free City, isn't working for her, and in truth it's not really working for me either. Alis' point is that if you're ploughing on with a character who doesn't "work", you're not telling a story with flaws that can be fixed later; rather, with every passing word you're moving further from the story you want to tell. That has some resonance for me (and my solution is to go back to the beginning and retrofit what's gone before in the light of how my thinking's developed since).

So what? I've tried a method which isn't working, so it's time to try something else. But there's another insight I can draw from this. As David, Alis, and all rational people have long realised, there's no One Best Way, no 28-day programme to write a bestseller. But could there perhaps be One Best Way for each author, a method that works unfailingly for David Isaak or Alis Hawkins? It's a belief I'd had without ever seriously challenging it. Some stories come more easily than others, but surely I apply a consistent approach to each? Well, it seems I don't. Some techniques work for me better than others (I'll never be a story-boarder), but I've come to realise that I reinvent my method each time I sit down to write a story. The techniques which carried me relatively easily through The Dog of the North are not working anything like as effectively this time. The Last Free City needs to be expanded and partly rewritten from the start before I go any further with the rest of the story. That's not because I've forgotten how to write fiction: it's the demands of the particular story I'm writing, at the particular time I'm writing it.

The only surprise to me is that this discovery is a surprise. My first self-published novel, The Zael Inheritance, was a very different writing experience to its successor Dragonchaser. But when you've got to the end of the process, and have a novel that you regard as finished (whatever finished means), what you notice is the similarity, not the difference: I wrote a first draft, I polished it, I polished it some more. The mind airbrushes out the fact that in one first draft the protagonist lacked credible motivation, in another the plot did not hold together.

The moral of all this? Well, don't expect a novelist to tell you in unambiguous language what something means--that's why we write novels. But if I can draw any articulatable conclusion, it's this: a novel is a complex, multi-faceted undertaking that works in ways that cannot all be held in the conscious mind simultaneously. No two novels are alike: to write more than one successfully requires a flexibility of approach--so don't resist the flexibility, embrace it.

, Oh yeah--and never start a sentence with a comma...