The shortcomings of Flashback are two-fold right now. First, my prose style in the first couple of chapters—where I’m obviously trying very hard—has become so hardboiled that, unless the reader is working out the implications of every scrap of dialogue, they can’t know what’s going on and feel stupid. I put this down to ‘high standards’ (the quote marks are to signal to the irony, since the product doesn’t seem to achieve this) and reading Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Harris. After The Road, I don’t think I’ll be able to write the same way again. But poetic prose doesn’t have to be obscure; you don’t need to write cryptically to write well. After all, McCarthy has been writing for years. I need to weed out the self-conscious metaphors, and put in about forty years more writing practice. One of my reviewers wrote, ‘If you publish this, you’ll be the first person since Virgil to write a thriller in poetic verse!’ I thought that was wonderful.
The second shortcoming follows closely on the heels of the first: obscurity. Because I’m a fan of McCarthy and Raymond Chandler and others for whom the style is equal to, and occasionally outguns, the plot, I’m quite used to narratives where the reader is not party to the motivations or specific driving factors of the character until later in the story. Now, this is obviously a dangerous game to play, and you’ve got to get the balance right. Readers won’t follow characters they don’t identify with in some sense. So… the lack of information has got to be an interesting lack. When you read about a mystery like the loss of the Star Dust, the absence of an accepted explanation isn’t actually irritating; it’s a positive force that makes you want to know more, and makes you interested in the story itself. You feel like you are about to discover something. This kind of anticipation can make twists (i.e. re-configurations of a story’s identity) quite powerful, and I used it a great deal in Déjà Vu. It’s something I need to get right in Flashback, and the solution will be to go slightly easier on the reader. I want to avoid the fatal pitfall of, with apologies to his fans, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.
So these are just some random thoughts about the editing process. Back to work.
Snakes and Ladders
An excerpt from my blog, 26th January, 2006. Read the original.
Well, I must confess to a couple of shitty days, work-wise.
First up, I noticed that some joker—no, I won’t provide the effing link—has placed Déjà Vu in his top five worst books of 2005. At that point, I wasn’t having a bad day. It was just middlin’. Next, I get one of those standard ‘Sorry, try again,’ emails from MacMillan New Writing; I’d sent them my comedy novel ‘Proper Job’, which an agent recently wrote was ‘fresh, lean, original and inventive’ (though, to be fair, that same agent did go on to say that humour is virtually impossible to sell, and I should give up immediately). By then, I would describe my mood as ‘mildly piqued’. Gumblings: Hah! What do they know? I’ll show ’em. Etc.
Then, to round off the day, I get a call from the agent who is currently considering Déjà Vu. You might remember from a previous post that Scott Pack, chief buyer for Waterstone’s, saw this blog and asked for a copy of my book. He read it and enjoyed it. Amongst other things, he said, ‘the thriller element would hold its own with most of the books we sell in quantity…the characterisation was very strong…the ending left me impressed as I put the book down’. Scott then contacted some literary agents, one of whom contacted me. We chatted on the phone and I sent him a copy of Déjà Vu.
So away. The agent called me back yesterday with the ‘thanks but no thanks’ speech. Very polite, and refreshingly honest. He got half way through the book and decided that he would not be able to champion it at meetings.
Arf. Mood meter drops somewhat.
I’m appropriately jaundiced about this industry. I mean, it’s getting on for eleven years since I sold my first short story as a teenager, and in that time I’ve written four-and-a-half novels. I’ve read a number of good books and a number of crap ones. I’m aware that publishing is a lottery, and I’m aware that a writer is, essentially, a foolish person who works—often for years—in the face of long odds. The writer doesn’t expect the reward of fame, or fortune. Like a carpenter or any other manual worker, he only wants people to buy his stuff so he can afford food while he’s making the next thing.
Me: ‘Can I interest you in this lovely mahogany number? I made it myself. Took me five years, and the sideboard-critics love it.’
Customer: ‘No, thanks. We just bought a sideboard from Ikea.’
Me: ‘Why? They’re flat-packed. They’re mass-produced and lack heart. Look, I’ve carved little mice into the legs. They’re practically scampering. Here, micey -’
Customer: ‘But our sideboard has a vaguely sexual Swedish name. It’s called Smegsmog. And everyone’s talking about it. The Stockwells at number five just bought one, for Christ’s sake.’
Me: ‘But what about the sideboards of tomorrow? What if they only came from Ikea?’
Customer: ‘Good-bye. You might shift more units if you served meatballs.’
Anyway, reasons to be cheerfuclass="underline" (1) If Déjà Vu attracted one agent, it might attract another; (2) Wonderful girlfriend, who seems to believe in me despite these constant messages replies of ‘not good enough’ from publishers and agents; (3) Good health; (4) Blog on which I can moan.
Arf.
Long Distance Running
An excerpt from my blog, 25th February, 2006. Read the original.
Well, as promised, the Saturday post will be less of a navel-gazing enterprise than usual. Below I include the usual word gauge for progress on current novel Flashback, and it appears that I’ve only written four thousand words in the past week. This is a poor show quantity wise (fortunately, I don’t have a deadline). I can trace the problem to a complete lack of research.
OK; not a complete lack. I spent most of last summer reading about aviation, and now my knowledge of aircraft safety and the principles of lift are second to none (I’m using ‘none’ in the special sense that means ‘Practically everybody’). Regrettably, not much of a novel comprises technical asides on power-to-mass ratios. Everything is seen through the lens of character. This means lengthy diversions into, for example, the size of an Avro Lancastrian cockpit; how much a passenger might see and hear if he stood at the rear of the flight deck. Halfway through a sentence I realize I’m talking bollocks and, grabbing my surfboard, run into the cool water of the Information Superhighway and come across a site like this—solid gold! This guy will certainly get a big thank-you in the acknowledgments when Flashback sees the light of day. It inhibits the word count somewhat but results in some excellent material that will place the reader precisely inside my imagination.
Flashback Completed
An excerpt from my blog, 25th February, 2006. Read the original.
Well, today I wrote the final words of my current book, a technothriller called Flashback. (The final words? ‘Like a ghost.’) The first draft comes in at 125,410 words, which is shade over the word count I aimed for when I started the manuscript in November. It’s only the first draft, but there’s not just the satisfaction of having written the book—there is also the knowledge that the story works. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the story worked as well as it could; for that, it will take some months of editing. But the story did grip me as I wrote it (there were no moments of writer’s block, whatever that is) and if it doesn’t work on the page in its present form, that probably means some superficial rearrangement is necessary. I say ‘superficial’ rather lightly, of course. Superficial changes like ‘make this scene less intense’, ‘improve this character’s motivation’ and so on will seem progressively unsuperficial as the editing process bites.