Tuesday 30 November 2010

The Law of Unintended Consequences

In a recent post, Warp and Weft, I was flirting with the idea of adding tension and depth to your narrative by contrasting the style of your writing with the subject matter, suggesting for example that you might try dealing with dark material in a light-hearted manner. With a kind of weird synchronicity, I have just finished reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, which was first published in 1947 and offers a gripping account of German resistance to the Nazis in Berlin during the Second World War.

Fallada explores what it is like for a country to be occupied by its own bureaucrats and politicians, but he describes the brutalising effect of the Third Reich in an almost picaresque fashion: the boot boys of the Gestapo come across as rogues, an assortment of low lifes on the make, and many of them are fallible, even comic figures.

I found this having a strange effect on me as I was reading: the characters were believable, but the light, almost jaunty way in which Fallada portrayed them became it increasingly alienating.  Their offhand violence and treachery somehow failed to register on an emotional level and I found myself thinking that certainly the first half of the book was almost Brechtian in the style -- I half expected Mother Courage to bob in and burst into song.

When the hero Otto Quangel is arrested, the narrative becomes altogether darker and his tribulations are described with such grimness that it was impossible not to be drawn into his plight.  He himself regrets the repressed way in which he has lived his life, and just as he failed to reach out to the people he cared about most, many of Fallada's characters failed to reach out to me.

Which makes me think that if you are experimenting with your writing, using different stylistic techniques, it is important to keep interrogating what you were doing.  Write with your heart, but make sure that your editorial brain stays alert, so that you don't achieve a dazzling effect in one part of your story, only to pay a high price for it somewhere else.

Monday 29 November 2010

Revealing My Sources....

If you want to keep up-to-date with industry news from within the world of publishing, including snippets of information about which authors and genres are selling well, which editors are on the move and where they are going, or how independent bookshops are faring, then The Bookseller's comprehensive web site provides an excellent one-stop shop.  To make life even easier for you, they send out a free daily news e-mail - click here if you are interested in subscribing to it.

For example, you may be interested to know that The Fiction Desk, a well-established site for all things literary, is venturing into publishing with the launch of a new imprint featuring quarterly anthologies of short fiction, with the first edition, called Various Authors, scheduled for April 2011.  Editor Rob Redman is accepting submissions from unpublished as well as published authors via the web site. Worth a punt?

Sunday 28 November 2010

Relationships (thank you Adam Phillips...)

If you've got a situation in your head, a plot that is growing satisfactorily out of it and one or two strong characters who are gradually taking shape, but you are still in the process of teasing out the central relationships, you could do much worse than get hold of a copy of Monogamy by the psychotherapist Adam Phillips. This is a fascinating, elliptical exploration of why relationships go wrong and why monogamy has infidelity built into it (and many other fascinating themes and ideas).

I devoured it soon after it was published (roundabout 1995, I think, and it is still available on Amazon) and scribbled down hundreds of notes and quotations which I still consult when I'm feeling stumped or looking for inspiration.

You might like to try this one for size: "The things about people that we fall in love with are often the things that end up driving us mad." There's a whole short story just in this single sentence, right there for the taking...

Saturday 27 November 2010

Getting Started

In a recent post I was chuntering on about how to build the back story of one of your characters -- what has happened to them prior to your narrative beginning - and using that as a means to help kickstart your novel or short story.  Brian Keenan (if you haven't yet read An Evil Cradling, his extraordinary account of being a hostage in Beirut, drop everything and start it now) once came up with an interesting suggestion.  He said that a good beginning for a narrative is a room containing some orange peel and a pair of unlaced shoes.

I've tried this with various creative writing classes and been astonished by  the range of fascinating situations and plots that it has given rise to.  Why not try it yourself, and if the orange peel etc doesn't get your juices flowing, come up with your own random ingredients and see what you can cook up with them...

SMALL PRESS

Alun Books

Alun Books is a small press, founded in 1977 in order to publish books about Wales and/or by Welsh authors, mainly in the English language. The Barn Owl Press imprint was added in 1982, for a series of award-winning children's books, and in 1991 Alun Books merged with Goldleaf Publishing, adopting Goldleaf as the imprint for its local history publications.

Friday 26 November 2010

Warp and Weft

Among the many things which come together to create a good piece of writing (confidence, originality, authenticity, grammar) is something which is often neglected, and that is texture.  It's one of the additional extras which mark out flair from mere competence and there are a number of ways of achieving it.

Think in terms of weaving: you have the warp going in one direction and the weft going at ninety degrees to it and the interlocking of the two is what creates the material you are making.  It's the same with writing -- if everything is flowing in the same direction, you end up with not much texture to your work and consequently very little structural tension (which is a little bit different from the tension arising from plot - what happens next?)

It's easier to achieve than you may think and can be quite fun to do. Try  contrasting the style of your writing with the subject you are describing.  For example, if you are working on a dark piece about suspicion or mistrust, experiment with writing about it in a light-hearted, comic style.  That way the threads of your narrative are working against each other, creating tension.  If you want an idea of what I mean, read WH Auden's poem about Miss Gee. it's a heartbreaking ballad about a lonely and sick woman, but it is written in a bright and brittle tone with bouncy rhymes and rhythms, so that the form of the writing counterpoints and enhances the sadness of what Auden is writing about.

SMALL PRESS ALERT
Aloes Books

Aloes Books have been publishing since 1970 and accumulating second-hand books of quality and taste since before then and claimed to be an efficient book-find place, literary note-book, bibliophile watering hole and a print and publishing advice service

Thursday 25 November 2010

Where do I begin?

By the time you are picking up your pen, or opening a new word document, presumably you have some idea of the story you are hoping to tell, (or at least an interesting a situation for your imagination to work upon) and there in front of you is the blank page or the empty screen and at that point you start to panic and go running for the trees, because when it comes down to it, you don't know where to begin.

I'm not going to talk about plot or structure at this point, I'm going to talk about character, because generally speaking the character is author of the plot and should come first in your thinking and planning.

To quell the panic, it might be a good idea to write down twenty things that you know about your main character, focusing on significant things which have happened to him or her.  Carry the list around in your head for a little while, as it is usually extremely productive to allow things to mulch, and then whittle it down to the five most salient points.  Sequence them into some kind of order -- it doesn't have to be chronological, it can be thematic - and then start writing a paragraph or two and hey presto, before you know it, the page isn't blank anymore and on the screen the beginning of a story is emerging...


Today's featured small press...

Allardyce Barnett Publishers

Unsubsidised, small print runs of books about poetry, art and music.

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Authenticity - the Charles Dickens way

In a preface to one of his books -- I can't, at this moment, put my finger on which one -- the great Charles Dickens once said, "I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages as though I have certainly done and suffered it myself."

Recently, I have been wrestling with some particularly demanding emotional scenes in the novel that I am writing at the moment.  My first solution (see my post Missing) was not to write the scenes at all, but that won't do.  Having got a grip on myself (or lost my grip altogether) I am immersed in the raw feelings of my characters as they make difficult journeys towards some kind of resolution and I find myself humbly in step with Mr Dickens.  If you are going to write plausibly then it you need to suffer as your characters suffer, or to be more exact, you need to have suffered.  The most basic advice dished out to authors is to write about what you know.  This doesn't necessarily mean write about psychedelia in San Francisco during the 1960s, or Welsh folklore, or Roman London.  It means draw on your emotional experience, even if that means touching raised, red scar tissue, because that will enable you to write authentically, and if you're writing isn't authentic,  if it tries to express a universal truth without going into the particular -- the painful and personal -- then nobody will bother to read it.

SMALL PRESSES

As promised, here are a few more small presses you might like to consider when it comes to submitting your work...

Acumen Magazine

Long established poetry magazine with an online presence, sponsored by Arts Council England and responsible for organising the Torbay Literary Festival.

Agenda Editions

Agenda has put many now famous poets on the map, and regularly publishes new work by the likes of Seamus Heaney and Brendan Kennelly,  consistently discovering fresh, talented voices from every English-speaking continent.

Aireings Press

Formerly a twice-yearly  print magazine which now operates online only.