As writers and readers, we should always be open to experience. The "Why Should I Read...?" list is not a fixed canon, although it contains many books I have loved for twenty years or more. But there are always new books to read, and some of those strike such an immediate chord. I came across one last week (with apologies to David Isaak, whose original post on the subject set me scurrying to find it).

"Why Should I Read...?"

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop
Stephen Koch, 2002

"How to write" books are ten a penny. Most contain some germ of useful knowledge (although some are wholly meretricious), and many of them I've read and profited from. Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy is one of the best. But nothing prepared me for Koch's double-distilled vintage.

Koch taught for many years on a prestigious American university creative writing programme, and his book is, above all else, practical. His prose is cool and lucid, and on first reading his insights, and the observations from other writers he sparkles throughout the text, seem unremarkable. That's because he's stripped away the semi-mystical trappings of many guides, to concentrate on what you need to do to set about creating prose fiction. (His approach has many similarities to the classes run by Greg Mosse, about which I've blogged elsewhere).

All of Koch's book is recommended. In particular, I've never seen better on point-of-view and redrafting. On point of view, he trenchantly argues that in getting hung up on having a unified point of view, you're sacrificing the great advantage the novel has over other forms of narrative--the ability to switch distance and viewpoint in the interests of the whole. For redrafting, he suggests a slow second draft to counteract a rapid first one, and vice versa; and he argues that the focus of the second draft should be primarily for structure. And don't worry if it comes out longer, because it will be cut away in third draft. (He cites he 10% rule: the final draft should be 10% shorter than the first, whatever length you're working at).

Koch is not, though, a doctrinaire teacher: if what I'm saying doesn't work for you, he says, ignore it: for his only real rule is that you should just get on and do it. Especially, don't put off starting because you haven't worked out the story yet: Koch argues that you can't establish the story until you work it out be writing it. This seems perverse, undisciplined--but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Every story I've ever written, I know the end, and sometimes not much more. Doing more work in advance, as I'm doing with the follow-up to The Dog of the North, doesn't make things any easier (in some ways, it makes it more difficult). Koch's views help me understand why this is the case.

This is a book for writers. If you haven't written, or attempted to write, a sustained piece of fiction, the insights are no more than academic. But for the practising writer, this is gold-dust.

How has it influenced me?
Hey, I only finished it yesterday. Give me a chance! Already I can see some specifics which will help kick off my next piece of work, and the idea of that you can only understand your story by writing it is what management consultants call a 'paradigm shift'--a moment which at once alters and clarifies the way I think about the question.

This is a book which will be on my bookshelf for some time to come--so that lurid green cover is no bad thing after all...

Lessons for the aspiring writer
(too many to summarise, but:)

• you don't need to know everything about your story to start writing it
  
• indeed, the story only comes into existence as it is written
  
• point of view is a liberation, not a constraint
• "the cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story; the cat sat on the dog's mat is" (quoted from John le Carre)
  

Havant Literary Festival

I've been asked to appear on a panel at the 2008 Havant Literary Festival. To put that another way: people are going to be asked to pay money to hear what I have to say. This is, to put it mildly, a strange feeling.

Here's the official blurb:

Sat 27 Sep 1.00-3.00pm

'How I Got Published'

Local authors Tim Stretton (The Dog of the North, Dragonchaser), Tim Bouquet (Cold Steel) and Tom Cain (The Accident Man, The Survivor) describe their individual journeys on the road to getting published. They will share the benefits of their collective experience and take questions from the audience. Chaired by local maritime crime author, Pauline Rowson. Numbers strictly limited - book early!

Tim Bouquet and Tom Cain were on panels at the Chichester Literary Festival last year. Both spoke engagingly about their books, and no doubt will do so again. There will clearly be an expectation that I do the same...

In a masochistic kind of way I'm looking forward to this. There's a mental adjustment I need to make, that to most people in the audience my experience is something they aspire to achieve. I don't know if it's revealing a trade secret to say that I don't feel any different to the ranks of unpublished writers--the job is still the same: trying to write the best fiction I can. Matt Curran has frequently drawn the distinction between wanting to write and wanting to be published. They aren't quite the same thing. For me, writing has always been about the stories, and not what happens to them afterwards. So if I have any free advice ahead of the Havant Literary Festival, it's this: throw away all your "How To Write the Perfect Query Letter" books. Writing--and even getting published--isn't about the confections you use to decorate your work. It's about getting that work right - whatever "right" means for you. And if that doesn't attract a professional publisher, that doesn't make it a bad book; and The Perfect Query Letter is unlikely to have helped you much.

Looking forward to seeing some of you at Havant in September.

Case Study - First Person Narratives

I don't normally write about books I'm in the middle of reading, although in some ways this is the truest response of all. Once I've finished a book, I reinterpret the experience in the light of my assessment of the whole. Very often this means I undervalue a book which has kept me enthralled for 400 pages but then lost me with a weak ending. The emotional experience of 'reading', rather than the analytical one of 'having read', is found only when we are in the process of reading the book.

That prologue aside: I'm about halfway through Philippa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance, the sequel to The Other Boleyn Girl, about which I wrote last week. Gregory has adopted a different narrative strategy for the later book: rather than a single first-person narrative, there are three intertwined first-person stories. First-person is usually discouraged by creative writing gurus (and certainly it imposes considerable technical challenges and limitations), but handled well, it's an immediate and intimate viewpoint.

The Other Boleyn Girl was relatively straightforward in its narrative stance. Virtually the entire book is from the viewpoint of Mary Boleyn: the reader identifies with her, and Gregory doesn't play unreliable narrator games with us. The approach reinforces the claustrophobia which is the dominant atmosphere of the novel.

The Boleyn Inheritance takes more risks in giving us three narrators: Gregory has to ensure that the voices are kept distinct, and there is a danger that in giving us three viewpoints the reader identifies with none. So far, at least, the risks are paying off. All three characters are clearly defined: Anne of Cleves, cool and dignified, intelligent and reflective; Katherine Howard, a brilliant rendering of a giddy flirtatious girl given added poignancy because the reader knows her fate; and Jane Boleyn, a calculating, ambitious character resurrected from The Other Boleyn Girl.

Anne is perhaps the easiest to identify with. She is a stranger to Henry's court, a victim of her brother's intrigues (and repressed incestuous desires), and the reader learns about the environment through her. Her stoical intelligence as she tries to avoid being Henry's second murdered wife engages our sympathy. I found the repeated references to Anne intending to live her own independent life without men overdone, and anachronistically 'feminist', but it's a small objection.

Katherine is the most clearly rendered voice. Those of us who have daughters will recognise the tone. Without being a modern 'teenager', she is idenitifiably adolescent. The reader can only look on in horror as her vanity and boy-mania lead her down to a destruction she cannot see coming. She is not exactly a sympathetic character, but the reader hopes against hope that she will see sense.

Jane is the most interesting of the viewpoints. In The Other Boleyn Girl she is presented through the eyes of Mary, who strongly dislikes her; and even when we see her through her own reflections, she is not an attractive character: manipulative and ambitious. But she has self-awareness, and a conscience of sorts. This conscience is a flexible friend: she genuinely likes and admires Anne, but is willing to give false testimony against her on trumped up witchcraft charges. Jane's character development is the best thing in the novel, and while I know what happens to her at the end, I can't see how she's going to get there--which keeps me turning the pages.

The initial chapters are relatively lengthy: Gregory wants to give us a foundation for all the characters before moving on. Once she's established character, the chapters become much shorter, sometimes only a page. This risks fragmenting the narrative, but is probably unavoidable with all three characters often commenting on the same event (such as the chilling scene where Anne is set upon by a drunken lout, spitting out his foul kiss--only to find it's King Henry in disguise). This triple-retailing approach would be unworkable if we had to wait twenty pages to switch viewpoint characters.

The two major decisions a novelist has to take is: "who are the viewpoint character(s)?", and "first or third person?". Gregory's work shows that, while first person is often discouraged, it has more flexibility than is often acknowledged. By giving us three viewpoints, she avoids the limitations imposed by a single character's perceptions, but she doesn't sacrifice the intimate, confessional tone. The Boleyn novels can be read as a terrifying study in tyranny, but we never see inside the tyrant's head at all. What we're shown is the effect his actions have on his powerless court. It's technically highly accomplished, and should make any writer think twice before rejecting the first person narrative.

From Page to Screen

The Other Boleyn Girl (2001)
Philippa Gregory

In previous blogs I've looked at the relationship between novels and their film adaptations (a strange preoccupation, you might think, given the vanishingly small chance of ever seeing The Dog of the North on the screen). Films are often criticised for "not being the book"; a curious objection, since it's clearly implied in the word "film". I've tended to be more forgiving of film-makers, who don't have the scope to explore interior states which novelists have.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a generally favourable review of Justin Chadwick's film, The Other Boleyn Girl, not having read the book. This defect I have now remedied, and readers of the blog might be interested in how they differ.

Chadwick's film, of necessity, considerably simplifies the plot. Mary Boleyn has only one bastard by the Henry VIII in the film, but two (including a son) in the book. The existence of the son has a major effect on the dynamics within the Boleyn family, but also adds complications which a 90-minute film could not have accommodated. The film also attenuates (almost to invisibility) Henry's struggles with the Pope to grant his divorce from Katharine of Aragon.

The film also all but removes Mary Boleyn's romance with her eventual second husband, William Stafford (but then confusingly drops it back in at the end, in a way which makes very little sense unless you've read the book). This, for me at least, was a good decision: the courtship phase of the relationship was a bit Harlequin Romance for my taste, and jarred with the assured realpolitik of the rest of the novel.

The point of view is also dramatically shifted. Gregory's novel is first-person, something film always struggles to replicate. Without the insight into Mary's thoughts--and particularly growing disillusionment with the "family business"--the film struggles to present the "good" sister as anything other than insipid. Anne, on the other hand, is more sympathetically treated in the film; but the film is less successful at displaying Mary's highly ambivalent feelings towards Anne--one of the finest elements of the novel.

Despite having a smaller canvas to work with, Chadwick does interject some new material not found in the novel. A final scene in which Mary pleads to Henry for Anne's life is introduced (in the novel, more plausubly, Mary is keeping her head down in case she shares her sister's fate). Indeed, the whole business of Anne's trial and execution is given much greater attention in the film: the novel dismisses it in a curiously perfunctory fashion. A scene early in the film in which Anne and Henry hunt together is also introduced (Anne botches her chance and the torch passes to Mary: it's there to show the Boleyns utter opportunism which the book can do more indirectly).

The character of Mary and Anne's mother, Lady Boleyn, is also entirely different in the film. Played by Kristen Scott Thomas, she is an appalled and powerless victim as her family's ambition prostitutes her daughters. The performance is one of the best in the film, but it's there because Chadwick has no other way of reflecting a sensibility which Gregory can reveal through Mary's first-person narrative. Gregory's Lady Boleyn is a chilly "Howard girl" with no maternal feelings at all.

The major difference, and the one which lifts the book far above the film, is in atmosphere. Gregory's portrayal of the Tudor court is frighteningly claustrophobic: Mary soon realises she wants no part of it, but she cannot escape. Even Anne, who stokes the claustrophobia in keeping Mary by her side, falls victim to it. As her own downfall becomes inevitable, she realises she is trapped. Henry's descent from selfish playboy to tyrant contributes to and explains the context (this psychotic king is much better realised by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors than Eric Bana in The Other Boleyn Girl).

Readers and viewers who enjoy the Tudor period will no doubt be entertained by both incarnations of The Other Boleyn Girl. But those who prefer their historical drama to have emotional depth as well as opulent costumes are steered towards the book first.

Macmillan New Writing Focus

Three Things About Me (2006)
Aliya Whiteley

I'm not an expert on the anatomy of the brain. I assume there's some kind of mechanical apparatus contained within, flanges, wheels, cogs and the like. When the brain is not fuctioning within the usual parameters it's invariably described as 'having a screw loose', which is valuable empirical insight into the construction principles under the bonnet of the cranium.

It's almost a cliche to say that writers must of necessity have a screw loose: brains that work with smooth efficiency don't go to the kind of places that generate fiction. Readers who ask 'where do you get your ideas?' have all the screws fully tightened, or they wouldn't conceive, let alone ask, the question.

If writers do have a screw loose, then writers of comedy must have two; and those who write black comedy can only do so with a minimum of three screws at below optimum tension. Which brings us to Aliya Whitelely...

I missed my opportunity to meet Aliya at the launch of her latest book, Light Reading, so I didn't get to listen for the telltale clatter of screws loose in the brainpan. But Three Things About Me rattles quite loudly enough...

In very brief summary, Three Things About Me is the story of six customer service trainees and their corporate trainer. This is too close to the kind of environment I occupy in real life for it to exert much fictional appeal, but I gladly make the journey in this case. The novel is, among other things, a lacerating destruction of the kind of management gobbledegook which infects the modern workplace, as well as a cruel lampoon of people we all know. At once bleak, embarrassingly acute and curiously redemptive, it's also a considerable technical achievement.

Three Things About Me is only 300 pages or so long, but Whiteley crams in seven different points of view without losing clarity or control of tone. All the characters are grotesques in some way (even those who end up engaging the reader's sympathy, like washed-up actress Alma or retired superhero--you really have to read the book--Sam) and the different viewpoints are pin-sharp in their definition. Rose, the frankly terrifying uber-chav, is a magnificently realised monster, and the not-quite-romance between the acerbic Hilary and rocker-manque Gary is at once embarrassing and poignant. The trainer Rob and star trainee Charlotte communicate in management-speak (Charlotte even thinks in numbered lists), but Charlotte's professional veneer conceals...well, you really will just have to read the book).

Three Things About Me has been compared to The Office, which considerably understates its ambition. Whiteley can go beyond the everyday into a rip-roaring world of surrealism (when we find out why Sam's superhero identity is 'the Death-Defying Sputum', it's worth the wait). She's able to meld the horror of everyday banality with an ability to make curious linkages: Three Things About Me starts where The Office stops.

Aliya Whiteley is a writer with unusual talent: her flair for penetrating everyday observation is matched with a free-wheeling imagination which goes one step further than it should. The result is fiction which teeters on the edge of lunacy. Let's hope those last screws hold...

The Strangeness of Blogger

Today's post, with its upload of a Dog of the North proof page, has appeared with last Sunday's date (because that's when I started it). OK, it shouldn't have taken a week to write 70 words, but even so, that's a software glitch by any standards...

To find the original post, just scroll down the page, or click here

On the Big Screen

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
Dir: Justin Chadwick

Regular readers of ::Acquired Taste will know that, while I write fantasy, I also have a partiality for historical fiction. Before Christmas we looked at the BBC series The Tudors, a piece of highly entertaining froth looking at Henry VIII's struggle to divorce Katharine of Aragon and marry Anne Bolyen.

The Other Boleyn Girl, adapted from Philippa Gregory's novel, covers broadly the same period but from a rather different perspective. Where The Tudors was primarily an ensemble piece (if it had a lead character, it was King Henry), TOBG is a more tightly focused domestic drama, with the Boleyn family at its centre. This makes at times for a curiously unbalanced narrative--Henry's break with Rome is casually squeezed into five minutes of a badly flagging fourth act--but the film is not attempting to provide a nuanced portrait of the high Tudor period.

Instead, the film's focus on a single, crassly ambitious family considers the human cost of political intrigue. It's taken for granted by the Duke of Norfolk (a smoothly repellent David Morrissey) that his brother-in-law will not object to the Duke prostituting either or both of his daughters in the cause of family advancement. In the film's political dynamic, women exist to be manipulated, trophies and tokens to be enjoyed and cast aside. Anne (Natalie Portman) believes that she has learned to pull the strings at the French court: events prove her sadly optimistic.

Where the film stands or falls--and by large it stands--is in the relationship between the two Boleyn sisters, Anne and Mary (Scarlett Johansson). Johansson, despite a huge amount of screen time, is given very little to do except look demure and victimised (which she manages very well). Portman has by far the stronger role as an ambitious schemer who will betray anyone--including her sister--to get what she wants. Events unravel, of course, and Anne is dragged down to eventual show trial (where her uncle Norfolk is among those who condemns her) and execution. Portman manages to wring a degree of sympathy for her fate in a nicely-rounded portrayal.

The film is interesting in that it concentrates on the viewpoints of the two essentially powerless sisters. The decision to steer away from the court power politics (Wolsey and Cromwell hardly feature, Sir Thomas More not at all) allows the marginalised characters to take centre stage. In this it may be dismissed by some as a "woman's film" (the male characters are generally either weak, callous or both), but in taking a different perspective on a well-known period, it's to be commended. It's not without its flaws, but for those interested in writing fiction about court intrigues in pre-industrial societies, it's required viewing.

And here it is...

The first page of the Macmillan edition of The Dog of the North sees the light of day!

I've now sent my proofing changes back to Will (about 60 in total, most of them italics which disappeared between software versions).

The book runs to 470 pages, which looks much better value for £14.99.

It's quite a feeling to see the whole book set in the MNW format: it's now one step closer to 'reality'.

* * *
Yesterday's Guardian had an interesting piece by John Patterson on how the trend for turning novels into films has a pernicious effect on writers (because it makes them think in 'screenplay' terms rather than exploring things books can do which films can't). It's deliberately provocative, and perhaps goes further than I would - but it's still well worth a read.

Proofs

I had an email from Will last night to say that the proofs of The Dog of the North are ready, and they "look great". I may be biased, but I'm sure he's right. I can't wait to see them; although the book had a brief self-publication run, seeing someone else's typesetting will be a thrill.

It's also the final chance for me to give the book a last once-over, before I let it make its own way in the world. I've read the book so often (apparently I even wrote it, although that's now so long ago I have to take it on trust) that it's unlikely I'll see anything new, but if I pick up even one correction it's worth it.

If I can work out how to use the scanner/printer/fax machine/photocopier/combine harvester combo under the desk I'll post a picture of the proofs when they arrive.

"Why Should I Read...?"

The Book of Dreams
Jack Vance, 1980

For the first time, "Why Should I Read...?" revisits an author, the peerless Jack Vance. I make no apology for this; Vance could easily support forty entries. In our first visit, we looked at his masterpiece of high fantasy, Lyonesse: The Book of Dreams, another work of Vance's rich later period, is an example of his sf. I don't propose today to revisit my earlier analysis of Vance's excellences--instead, I'll let the work speak for itself.

The Book of Dreams is the final work of Vance's "Demon Princes" series, in which the hero Kirth Gersen tracks down and kills the five galactic crime-lords who killed his parents. It sounds pretty grim stuff, an Elizabethan revenger's tragedy set in the far future; but that reckons without Vance's characteristic humour, and his interest in the societies in which his protagonist finds himself. Most Vance novels have an interaction between the protagonist and a local functionary: in this case, Gersen is staying at the prestigious Penwipers Hotel as he tracks down the elusive 'Howard Alan Treesong':

The porters moved swiftly around the room, adjusting the placement of furniture, wiping surfaces with their scented cloths, then departed, swiftly and quietly, as if they had merged into the shadows. The chief porter said: “Sir, the valet will attend you at once to assist with your wardrobe. The water is already drawn for your bath.” He bowed and prepared to leave.
“One moment,” said Gersen. “Is there a key to the door?”
The chief porter smiled benignly. “Sir, you need not fear intrusion at Penwipers.”
“Possibly not. But, for instance, suppose I were a jewel merchant carrying a parcel of gems, and a thief wished to rob me. He need merely saunter to my room, open the door and divest me of my wealth.”
The chief porter, still smiling, shook his head. “Sir, such a terrible thing could never happen here. It would simply not be tolerated. Your valuables are quite safe.”
“I don’t carry any valuables,” said Gersen. “I merely suggested a possibility.”
“The inconceivable, sir, is rarely possible.”
“I am totally reassured,” said Gersen.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He drew back as Gersen extended his hand. “The staff is adequately paid, sir. We prefer to accept no gratuities.” He inclined his head crisply and departed.

—The Book of Dreams, Chapter 3

I'm not even going to explain why this is wonderful. If you don't see it, I don't think I can tell you. Our brains are just differently wired up. The only clue I can give is that it's not just the quality of the writing; it's also the context. Can you think of another science-fiction writer who would try to deploy something of this sort in an adventure story? It's the kind of passage which helps us to understand why one of the 20th century's greatest science fiction writers cites his own favourite author as P.G. Wodehouse.

How has it influenced me?
This one's simple. One day I'd like to write a passage this good--and be able to repeat the trick, as Vance does in every novel after about 1960.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• read the passage a couple more times; you'll find the lessons
  
• look particularly at the dialogue tags and adverbs
  

Breaking the Rules

Jim Crace's The Pesthouse rejects all the advice given to aspiring writers--but does he make the risk work?

In our last blog entry, I set out my current reading list before plunging in to what fellow writers seemed to agree was the most promising choice, Jim Crace's The Pesthouse. It's not a long book, and already I've had the chance to read and digest.

The Pesthouse is part of the long tradition of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction, the brand of speculative fiction most likely to find a mainstream audience (think, for instance, of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale). Technology, and even the memory of technology, are long gone from America as the unlikely couple of Franklin and Margaret pick their way to the east coast through famine, pestilence and marauding robber bands. The Pesthouse is a self-consciously mythical journey, the journey east deliberately reversing the western spread of the original European settlers.

Many of readers of ::Acquired Taste are themselves writers. You will all have heard the 'rules' (and almost certainly questioned their validity). Show don't tell. Reveal character through dialogue. Tell us what characters do, not what they're like. Crace knows these rules better than the rest of us: The Pesthouse is his ninth novel. So, in choosing to ignore 'the rules of fiction', he's making a deliberate artistic choice.

The most obvious of these choices, and the biggest risk, is to all but dispense with dialogue. In a novel of over 300 pages, there are perhaps five pages of it, half of that in a conversation between one of the protagonists and a minor character. Crace has foregone the most common, and most useful, way of conveying information, and to replace it, he simply tells us what the main characters are thinking, and why they act the way they do. It's an extraordinary decision, and not one I would dare take in my own (unusually dialogue-intensive) fiction.

So how does Crace get away with it? His main weapon is the sheer beauty of his prose. If you can write with the muscular lyricism Crace commands you can probably make your shopping list into compelling reading. And the lack of dialogue is curiously appropriate to the story: it's a quiet book about a quiet place. America is huge, and empty. The survivors are concentrating on staying alive, and mistrustful of their neighbours. When people do get together, there's a wary truce as they tell their life stories over a shared meal. The Pesthouse can be seen as an extended version of one of the stories, a story told and not shown.

Crace also has a facility for the creation of place. The decayed, toxic America with its ruined highways and towns beyond the inhabitants' memory or understanding is realised with stark clarity. Occasionally we'll see a bizarre institution from the new America. The Finger Baptists, a luddite sect whose arms have atrophied because they believe using their hands is the devil's work, would not be out of place in Jack Vance. The ships on the east coast, taking a select few to Europe, are sail-powered, and the careful reader can infer that it's not just America which has sunk into a dark age.

But Crace's choices are not without cost. Because most of the action takes place inside characters' heads, or through a distant third-person narration, the story can be uninvolving at times. Franklin and Margaret sometimes feel more like archetypes than individuals. That's entirely appropriate for mythic tale that Crace is telling, but it takes a risk in terms of reader involvement. What we lose is perhaps best illustrated by thinking about The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is also a stylist of unusual talent, but she puts us in the action, rather than above it. Tastes will vary, but for me at least, The Pesthouse is an ambitious work which falls just short of the first rank of dystopian fiction.

What Shall I Read?

I have a problem which I share with many writers: too much on the 'to read' pile. Indeed, I doubt that anyone who doesn't have that problem is really a writer at all. Reading is part of the nutrition which we all need to create the kind of links and cross-fertilisations that lead to satisfying fiction.

That said, my reading pile is worse than usual at the moment, something I blame in large measure on my fellow MNWer David Isaak, whose blog spews an endless stream of things which simply demand to be read. His current series on books about writing promises to continue the trend: Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit was full of good sound practical advice, retailed in the style I call 'American Smartmouth'. A treat from start to finish.

So what's on my reading pile at the moment? I confine myself to books I have in the house, ready to pick up, and which I haven't yet read (re-reading is important too, but would make my current decision far too difficult. How could I justify not picking up Pride and Prejudice or Emphyrio once more?).

1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow
Alex Zamoyski
The title says it all. For anyone with even a glancing interest in 19th century history, this can only be a fascinating topic. Sometimes history books are let down by the prose, but Zamoyski's work has drawn many plaudits. Surely this will be good!

The Gentle Axe
R.N. Morris
Maintaining the 19th century Russian theme, MNW stalwart Roger Morris takes Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Crime and Punishment, and gives him a new case to solve. I've not yet read any of Morris' work, but I'm looking forward to trying this one.

A Quiet Belief in Angels
R.J. Ellory
A 'Richard and Judy' choice, I picked it up on a 'buy one, get one free' offer with Regeneration (see below). It's set squarely in the 'literary thriller' genre which is very popular at the moment--and doesn't always work for me. Probably one for my summer holidays.

Regeneration
Pat Barker
I've been meaning to read this World War One story for years. Now I can. Penguin have had the excellent idea of returning to their classic cover design for certain of their books--and when the classic design is this good, why not?

The only problem is, the cover doesn't look right on a new book. Orange Penguins should be smashed to buggery, like my copy of My Cousin Rachel.

How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction
ed. J. Williamson
As recommended by MNW's other fantasist, Matt Curran. No more need be said, and my fingers twitch every time I see the volume. This one won't be on the pile for long.

Pesthouse
Jim Crace
This dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic America was not just recommended but given to me by Will, my editor. Because Crace has a sigificant reputation as a mainstream writer, he can get away with writing fantasy and seeing it published by prestige imprint like Picador. I've not read Crace before and I'm looking forward to this one.

Lord of Light/The Amber Chronicles
Roger Zelazny
As recommended by David Isaak, these stories come from one of the premier stylists of SF's Golden Age. Somehow I've got to 40 without reading any of his longer fiction. This needs to change!

Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football
Phil Ball
Over the past fifteen years, football has finally acquired a literature to rival cricket's. David Winner's offbeat but revealing Brilliant Orange, a history of Dutch football, keeps company with David Foot's more straightforward but equally intelligent Italian chronicle Calcio. The best football books are about much more than football: the world's most popular sport is a revealing prism through which to write social history. In Spain, with the eternal rivalry between Real Madrid (once Franco's house team) and Barcelona, the focal point for Catalan nationalism, one can argue that football is the county's social history. Among the fiction I'd like to write one day--for now, at the bottom of the list--is a history of a fictional European country told through its football. If nothing else, the idea is original...

* * *

So, which of these should I read next? To deflate any possible narrative tension, I should say that I've already decided--but what would you read?

Macmillan New Writing focus

Testament
Alis Hawkins

I'm in danger of becoming the kind of reviewer I despise, singing the praises of my own coterie of Macmillan New Writers to the point where the reader despairs of any kind of objectivity. The risk of attracting adverse comment, however, is entirely worthwhile in if it allows me to draw your attention to Testament, the January MNW offering.

Yesterday I quoted with approval David Isaak's assessment of MNW novels as 'the teensiest bit outside the standard categories'. Testament is an interesting illustration of the view, all the more so because on the surface it doesn't seem to be true. The timeslip novel--two narratives, one historical and one contemporary--is very popular at the moment. Kate Mosse's two recent novels, Labyrinth and Sepulchre, are recent bestsellers in the genre.

No doubt MNW's marketers were delighted to have a novel to promote which occupies the territory as solidly as Testament. One narrative is set in the 14th century, the other the 21st, and the unifying feature is Kineton and Dacre College, under construction in the first strand, and under threat in the second. So far, this seems a genre staple. What makes the book unusual is the stories Hawkins chooses to tell in each strand. The plot of the historical section is centred around a master mason's struggle to build an architecturally-revolutionary new college; the contemporary narrative centres on that college's efforts to resist takeover by a brash younger rival. We are not in 'arcane secrets passed down the centuries' here, which is a refreshing change.

Given the rather unusual nature of the plot, I won't give too much away. Birth and rebirth are major themes of the novel; both for the college itself, and for the main female characters in each narrative. Hawkins is as comfortable with the political machinations--medieval and current--as she is with the emotional dramas of the characters' lives. And her portrait of Toby, the disabled child so disgusting to the 14th century world, is a melancholy and moving one which stays in the mind after the covers are closed.

The danger all writers of timeslips face is the risk that the reader will find one narrative strand more interesting than the other, fatally unbalancing their reading experience. Testament is the most successful timeslip novel I've read in terms of keeping the present-day narrative as fresh and absorbing as the historical one. It's a difficult technical act to pull off, and almost invisible when it succeeds--so it's worth drawing attention to here. Hawkins is hugely gifted in the creation of character, and her lead females in both stories are so powerfully rendered that the reader is fully anchored in their world, not left waiting for the next change of scene.

Testament will, I suspect, be marketed as a "woman's book". Pigeonholing books by gender is never very helpful (after all, I want women to read The Dog of the North, even though fantasy is a traditionally masculine genre). "Women's fiction", in particular, has pejorative undertones, suggesting either frothy vapidity or issue-driven sentimentality; and in any event, the book really does have much broader appeal. Yes, the the central characters are female, and both stories turn on women's yearning for children and the unexpected consequences of those yearnings; but Hawkins is a profoundly humane writer. Her eloquent message of tolerance, and the importance of liberal values, is articulated in prose of crisp purity and emotional power: all readers of discrimination--even men--will enjoy it.

"Introducing an outstanding new voice in fantasy fiction"

Many visitors to ::Acquired Taste will be seasoned readers of fantasy, and thus keen to read "an outstanding new voice". Even more so, perhaps, when they learn that the book in question is "an exquisitely written tale of loyalty and treachery, heroism and cowardice, homeland and exile, set in a brilliantly imagined and utterly spellbinding world". Hey, who wouldn't to read that?

Well, hang on a sec... there's a catch. For the "new voice" in question is none other than...Tim Stretton, author of The Dog of the North. And you all had that on your must-buy list anyway--didn't you? Even worse, the literary judgement quoted is hardly objective; it comes from the Macmillan New Writing site and is lifted from the blurb. It hardly qualifies as objective opinion.

And yet... there is an art to writing blurb (beyond getting people to buy the book, which is a given, and which the MNW piece does very well). Good blurb stops short of hyperbole, although a little exaggeration can be winked at. It takes elements which are present in the text, polishes them, and shoots them in a flattering light. The elements the publisher chooses to display in the blurb are significant. And in the case of The Dog of the North, Macmillan have chosen to emphasise my authorial voice--ironically, the very thing which has proved the biggest obstacle for other publishers. But Macmillan are right: the single most distinctive feature of my writing is the authorial voice, and if the book is any sort of success the voice will probably be the main factor.

Lest I be accused of over-promoting my own work (surely a permissible peccancy on my own blog, in any event), I should also note that if you dislike The Dog of the North, it will also, I suspect, be for reasons of voice. The more distinctive a feature in a work of fiction, the harder it is to overlook it if it isn't to your taste.

David Isaak has mentioned elsewhere that the sole unifying feature of the MNW range is "most of them are a little bent, just the teensiest bit outside the standard categories". I think that's right, and what's 'bent' in my work is the coolness and narrative distance I use to tell the story. I'm pleased with the plotting in The Dog of the North, but it's not what makes it an MNW novel.

From July 4th, you will be able to form your own judgement. In the meantime, I can give thanks for having a publicity department which appears to understand the book.

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Bonus marketing quiz - kudos to the reader who can tell me which author has written, according to their publisher, a sexy and irresistible novel to launch a major new fiction brand

Additional credit will be awarded to anyone who can explain what a "fiction brand" is, and how it differs from a "writer".

How To Write... Mystery

A brief look at why all stories are, on some level, mystery stories

Once again, "How To Write..." is about something other than its ostensible title. I've never written a pukka mystery (although I've come close), so my advice is--not for the first time--of dubious value.

On Wednesday, my editor Will gave me the copyeditor's comments on The Dog of the North--another milestone out of the way. The copyeditor had told Will how much enjoyed the book (not always a given) and, even better, said it reminded him of Jack Vance. (Note to flatterers everywhere: this is the biggest compliment you can pay me. It's best when accompanied with familiarity with Vance's work, although even this is not essential...)

The copyeditor's detailed comments were generally straightforward. If the house-style is to write "marketplace" and not "market-place" I'm not going to hang myself over it. But there was one specific comment which was fascinating, even where I didn't agree with it. The Dog of the North is structured around two separate but interlinked narratives which do not converge until the end of the novel. The copyeditor noted that the relationship between the two narratives--particularly the temporal relationship--is not immediately clear, although certain aspects of it can be inferred. I could, he suggested, have made things clearer by a couple of sentences at an early point in the story. And so I could: it would be a very easy change to make.

The copyeditor outlined how the narratives had unfolded in his head, and at which point he had reached the key realisations. And it was exactly the way I had intended it. The novel has a number of key mysteries: one hidden (i.e. I'm doing something in the background I'm not telling you about) and one superficial. The superficial mystery is in making the reader ask: "why are you telling me two stories? how are they related?". And the alert reader, by picking up on the clues, can establish the answer before I tell them. By giving them a little puzzle to solve, I pique their interest and, with any luck, hold their attention.

The Dog of the North is not, in any conventional sense, a mystery novel. It does not stand or fall on how the puzzles in the text are resolved. But it's a mystery in the sense that all novels are mysteries. In all but the most experimental works, "what happens next?" is what keeps us reading. That can be as obvious as "will Poirot catch the murderer?", through "will Hamlet kill Claudius?" right the way through to "will Elizabeth marry Mr Darcy?" If you don't want to know what happens next, the writer hasn't written a story. Note, however, that that question doesn't have to be resolved in the expected way (most murder mysteries work by delivering the expectedly unexpected) or even at all (the ending of Great Expectations is crafted to allow two mutually exclusive readings, and the ending of The Italian Job works only because it doesn't resolve anything). And some endings resolve the central mystery, only to open another (Jack Vance frequently does this, and more recently L.C. Tyler's The Herring Seller's Apprentice closes off one mystery only to open up another).

So I've got two flippant pieces of advice for anyone who wants to know how to write a mystery. The first: write any story. Job done--you've written a mystery. Secondly, if you want to write a 'mystery' in the narrower genre sense: read The Herring Seller's Apprentice. It uses, and subverts, just about every trick in the book. If you can't see how it's done after that, you're beyond help.

"Why Should I Read...?"

Full Time
Tony Cascarino/Paul Kimmage, 2001

For the first time, "Why Should I Read..." looks at biography--or is it autobiography? The question "whose book is this?" is central in this case. Full Time tells the story of Tony Cascarino, a professional footballer of star (but not superstar) status. Cascarino has since moved into a second incarnation as journalist and pundit. In neither of these latter careers does he appear a reflective or articulate man; yet Full Time is one of the most introspective and precise insights into the life of a professional sportsman. A paradox? No, because at this point enter Kimmage, Cascarino's ghost writer.

Paul Kimmage was also a professional sportsman--a journeyman cyclist good enough to finish the Tour de France--who became notorious for his first book A Rough Ride, a bleak account of his journey into disillusionment with the sport he loved. Kimmage clearly is both reflective and articulate, and his skill as a ghostwriter is not just to capture Cascarino's thoughts, but to prompt the kind of introspection necessary to make a wonderful book about an ordinary career.

Cascarino does not emerge as a particularly likeable character: his serial infidelities, gambling and occasional loutishness are not an appealing combination. Here again, Kimmage is to be commended, firstly for avoiding becoming too close to his subject, and secondly for extracting such honesty. If, in the end, the reader ends up with a grudging admiration for Cascarino, it's because of this honesty: he does not try to avoid responsibility for his misbehaviour, and he admits with almost masochistic relish his failings as a human being. It's hard to avoid the feeling that there's something expiatory in his frankness.

This makes the book sound like therapy, which it isn't. For anyone interested in football--or indeed 'elite' performers in any field--there are fascinating insights. One of the most absorbing facets is the self-doubt which dogged Cascarino throughout his career. Those of us who are writers will know all about the nagging critical voices which can so undermine confidence. For a footballer, particularly a forward, where instant and accurate responses are essential, these negative thoughts can be career-destroying. At least writers have these crises in private, and can solve them at their own pace.

Full Time is a magnificent achievement, a sporting biography which casts aside the usual platitudes and vacuousness to explore the psychology of the professional footballer. More of the credit is due to Kimmage than Cascarino, I suspect; it's an unusually concrete expression of 'what a writer does'. Cascarino provided the raw material, the conversation which formed the basis of the text: but it was Kimmage who organised the material, arranged the revelations for maximum effect, drew out insights and linkages, and imposed the pattern and order to make 'art' out of what otherwise would have been saloon-bar reminiscences.

Even if you don't like football--that's 'soccer', American readers!--Full Time is a perceptive character study, a powerful exercise in viewpoint, and an illustration of how the writer can interpret and enhance experience.

How has it influenced me?
It's unlikely I will ever write a sports biography (although I am open to offers). Full Time, situated at the confluence between biography, autobiography, reportage and fiction, represents for me the touchstone for how they should be written. If we see Cascarino as Kimmage's fictional construct, a flawed hero, then he inhabits the same kind of anti-hero space as Beauceron, the protagonist of The Dog of the North (although I like to imagine Beauceron has a bit more composure in front of goal).

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• ghost-writing can be an honourable occupation
• an unlikeable person can still be a sympathetic protagonist
• the writer can be found in his interpretation of the events on the page, not the events themselves
  

How To Write... Sex Scenes

The first in an occasional series considering various technical aspects of our literary craft

My headline for today has, I suspect, lured you here under false pretences. I've only ever written one sex scene, and that of a very indirect sort. It's not a branch of literature, in general, that I admire. This arises not from prudishness but from a perception that such scenes very rarely add anything--beyond risibility--to the reader's immersion in the fictional world.

The first question the writer needs to ask is "do I really need a sex scene at all?" The writer is creating a construct, an imaginary world, by choosing which details to set in front of the reader, and which to omit, or imply. Introducing a sex scene is therefore a conscious choice by the writer. There are many ways of conveying to the reader that characters are in a sexual relationship; there's no need to depict the act unless it adds something to the reader's experience.

A sex scene can be justified, it seems to me, for one or all of the following reasons:

• the relationship depicted is the central point of the novel
• the scene is revelatory of one or both (or more--orgies are within the scope of the discussion) of the participants' characters
• it provides an emotional counterpoint to events immediately before or after the scene
• it provides comic relief

Let's assume that you've decided that your story does need a sex scene. Your next choice is the kind of language you are going to use. Do you prefer euphemisms and oblique metaphors? Does the sea pound against the shore? Is your heroine carried along on a surging tide? (This approach frequently deploys nautical imagery). This method will at least avoid offending your grandmother, but if you want sidle up to your sex scene in such a peripheral manner, why have it at all?

At the other end of the scale, do you prefer anatomical precision? There is a comparatively limited gamut of what can be put where, and in what sequence, but at least this tactic avoids coyness.

Analysts of the sex scene will be interested in how the author chooses to refer to what Jack Vance called "the frontal member". From this one choice, the tone of the rest of the scene will follow. The choices are (with variants, of course):

He, Him
As in "she felt him inside her, a pulsing warmth etc etc etc". Under this approach man and member are one, indistinguishable and indivisible. The point of the scene may be to demonstrate precisely that fact about the protagonist's character, but more usually it's a default setting for the writer who's keen to display sex on the page without the indelicacy of listing the anatomy involved.

Penis
Medical terminology is occasionally used to avoid the oblique obscurity above. Unless the writer is trying to convey a clinical and emotionless coupling this is unlikely to be successful.

Cock
Slang terms--there are of course others--are often used to convey an earthy immediacy, and can deliver anatomical precision with emotional intensity. The main danger here is that the language is so alien to the voice of the rest of the story as to jar.

There is an annual 'Bad Sex Award' "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it". In this latter aim it appears not to have succeeded--indeed there is a perverse kudos to winning it--but it does illustrate that a bad sex scene stands out with priapic prominence from its surroundings in the way that, say, a bad fight scene would not. Your sex scene may be fully justified in its context, but if you can't write a good one, you are still setting yourself up for an embarrassing failure.

In creating the illusion of a fully realised fictional world in the reader's mind, the writer is making a series of choices about the scenes to present. Your reader will fill in any gaps you choose to leave. When considering a sex scene, more than anywhere else, you should ask yourself whether you can do a better job than your reader's imagination before reaching for the literary Viagra.

"Why Should I Read...?"

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling, 2007

I had long resisted reading Harry Potter. That wasn't because they were children's books, but because they were so hyped. I am naturally resistant to reading anything which is forced down my throat, and often disappointed by books which are touted as spectaculars. Harry Potter was therefore an acquaintance I was not keen to make. Set against this, though, was the fact that the books were fantasies which had picked up a mainstream audience, and so of professional interest to me.

In the end, I'm glad I held off reading them as long as I did, because in the end I was able to read them one after another, without having to wait a year between each book. Reading them in this way reinforced the consistency of Rowling's vision, and for a month I lived in her world. I've chosen the last book in the series as "Why Should I Read...?" not because it's the best of them (although it's close), but because to get that far, you'd have to have read the other six - so it's seven for the price of one.

The criticisms of the books are well-known, and in most cases misconceived. The later books are supposedly "too long". While Rowling tends to the verbose at times--and the proliferation of adverbs can irritate--they are tightly plotted, both within and between individual novels. The writer she most reminds me of is Dickens: in her ability to create comic grotesques, in the fierce morality of her voice and her mastery of the long, complex plot, the comparison is not inapposite. Modern readers, queuing for days outside the bookshops in the way nineteenth century readers thronged the dockside for the latest Dickens instalment, clearly agree.

Unlike George R.R. Martin, Rowling can keep control of her material over the long haul, but like Martin she has a propensity for killing off sympathetic characters. It's this steeliness of vision--her recognition that characters are subordinate to the overarching structure--which pushes her work into the enduring category. When you read the later books, in particular, you have a real sense of peril which most thriller writers can't match. Characters you care about can and will die. And these are children's books! Here again, Rowling is to be commended: she doesn't sanitise her message for a juvenile audience, and a series which starts off with the cosiness of Enid Blyton ends with bloodshed on an epic scale. The way in which the books treat death, not as a plot feature, but as the thematic core of the series, is more mature than most books written for an adult readership. And those readers, sadly most in the US, who denounce the books as apologetics for paganism and witchcraft have missed the point by the largest margin possible. The Harry Potter series is profoundly moral, and in a mainstream Christian way--and, incidentally, retailed with much more humour than those more overt Christian propagandists CS Lewis and Tolkien.

Rowling's series is destined to be regarded as one of the greats of fantasy literature: at once profoundly serious and richly comic, propelled by a spectacular imaginative fertility, these are books which will be read, re-read and loved for generations to come.

How has it influenced me?

I first picked up Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone less than two months ago: it hasn't yet had a chance to influence my writing. But if you see me kill off your favourite character in a future book, you know where I got the idea...

Lessons for the aspiring writer?

• Write what you want to write--if it's good enough, the market will come to you
• The reader will forgive you killing off favourite characters if there's a good reason for it
• Humour and tragedy can, handled skilfully, enhance rather than contradict each other
• You probably don't need that adverb...
  

On the Big Screen

The Kite Runner, 2007

dir: Marc Forster

Last month we looked at the latest film adaptation of I Am Legend, and judged it a qualified success given the long shadow of the book. Yesterday I went to see The Kite Runner, Marc Forster’s treatment of Khalid Hosseini’s bestselling novel. Unlike I Am Legend, I had not read The Kite Runner, and was able to watch it with a mind uncontaminated by the source text.

The film has garnered mixed reviews, but the bad ones can only be from critics who are difficult to please: for me, it was the best film of the year. A haunting coming of age tale, a story of long-delayed redemption, a respectful picture of a middle-eastern culture, The Kite Runner is at once timeless and yet evocative of a particular time and place. A major Hollywood film with more than half the dialogue subtitled would deserve points for bravery even if it had nothing else to commend it, but The Kite Runner has many more points of excellence.

The plot is simple, which need not be a bad thing: two boys from different social backgrounds, Amir and Hassan, grow up as friends in pre-Soviet invasion Kabul; Amir’s cowardice leads to disaster for Hassan, and they grow apart; their lives take different paths and it is only a quarter of a century later that a reconciliation, albeit of an indirect sort, occurs. The relationship between the two boys is captured with marvellous subtlety: their estrangement occurs not because of Hassan’s resentment, for he feels none, but from Amir’s guilt at his behaviour: guilt which leads him to frame Hassan for the theft of a watch. Hassan admits to the crime he has not committed out of loyalty to his friend. It’s a heartbreaking scene.

The performances are uniformly excellent, particularly the two boys and Homayoun Ershadi, who gives a compelling, nuanced portrayal of Amir’s prickly, proud and ultimately noble father. The ending, which I won’t give away, brought sniffles to my cinema companion (who is normally quite hardboiled about these things), as the soaring kites underscore Amir’s redemption.

There are some obvious parallels with Atonement, another recent film of an acclaimed novel: both concern the effect of childhood actions on adult life, and both dramatise the redemptive power of story-telling. Atonement has garnered the critical plaudits, but for me The Kite Runner is a much more satisfying film. Where Atonement is, for this viewer at least, static and emotionally uninvolving (with the plot hinging on a flashy and obvious piece of misdirection), The Kite Runner trusts the characters and plot to generate its emotional power.

* * *

Matt Curran wrote a typically interesting piece over on the MNW blog about the pros and cons of film adaptations from the writer’s perspective. One of the big plusses he mentioned was that, if the film is halfway decent, it will bring more readers to the book. The Kite Runner is a case in point: probably a book I would not have got round to reading, it’s now in the post on its way from play.com. And if I like it, he has another book out too. Now as for Atonement…

I can never sit and watch trailers in the cinema these days without imagining how my stories would translate to the big screen. There’s a hell of fantasy epic to be pulled out of The Dog of the North (nudge to Macmillan’s rights department) even if it has a piece of plot misdirection of the sort I derided in Atonement.

In any event, I think my self-published novel Dragonchaser has the most cinematic potential. It has a relatively simple plot, a small number of main characters, and most of all it has galley races—and how marvellously they could be rendered on screen! A thought for another day…

"Why Should I Read...?"

"Learning to Be Me"
Greg Egan, 1990

The Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan has been a prolific contributor to the scene since the late 1980s at both short story and novel length. His great gifts as a writer--brilliant conceits, concision, scientific depth and philosophical complexity--are better suited to the shorter form, and while his novels are good, I've always found them slightly unengaging. But as a short-story writer, he has few equals in the sf genre.

"Learning to Be Me" is just about the best of his short stories, a corrosively powerful examination of the nature of identity and consciousness with bears comparison with Kafka, and an opening line of Austenesque brilliance:

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to me be.

The 'jewel' in question is a kind of miniature hard-drive onto which every thought, sensation and emotion of the host is engraved. This can then be implanted into a new body, providing a quasi-immortality to the host. Once the technology has become established, it becomes the fashion for people in their twenties voluntarily to 'die' and move their jewel to a new host body to avoid the dangers of accident. "Learning to Be Me" is the story of a man who tries to identify his sense of self with the jewel and not his body to overcome his fear of physical death. The story's resolution, which I won't give away, is chilling, and not one to make us desire this kind of immortality.

Egan's story is an effective fictional exploration of the idea of self, told as so often in his fiction, through a dysfunctional relationship. Few writers pack so much into so short a space, and in his best work he combines speculative originality with emotional power.

How has it influenced me?

Egan is about as far from me in the speculative fiction universe as it's possible to be. He excels in short, pithy work at the hard-science end of the spectrum. While I've long been an admirer of his writing, it's something I could never do, and have never tried to. But he serves as enduring reminder of just how good science fiction can be--and why most of those who sneer at it are arguing from a position of ignorance.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Short stories are not cut-down novels; they are a wholly different forms with different requirements and effects

The short story can be a powerful means of exploring philosophical questions (and by extension, novels are not)

In the short form of fiction, uniquely, strong characterisation is not essential

Getting on with it...

I have not yet got back into blogging in 2008. Partly this is the natural indolence which always afflicts the New Year, but--on a more positive slant--it also reflects the time I'm putting in to my new writing project. I've been working on plot, on character sketches and the location of my new story. And I woke up this morning with a great idea for a twist which overturns part of the standard "boy meets girl" plot element. I don't know whether it works yet, but potentially it gives me a narrative reversal of the sort which underpins much good fiction (and much bad fiction too..).

There's an interesting post over at the MNW Group Blog this morning in which David Isaak talks about selecting a title. I find it hard to work on a story without a title, or shortlist of titles, but David's one of those who can work in the void of a project called "Untitled". My new story doesn't have a firm title yet, but there are several in my mind. Getting the right title is important: it's the first part of creating an expectation in the reader's mind about the kind of story I am going to tell.

The title at the top of my list at the moment is A Prize So Dear. It works on nearly every level -- "dear" has more than one meaning, each appropriate to the story I am telling; there is more than one "prize" the title could refer to; and as well as being lifted from a Shakespeare sonnet, it's also relevant to a poem in the story. So far, the perfect title for this story. The only downside: it sounds more like a trashy romance than a fantasy. Is it creating the right kind of expectation in the reader's mind? While there is a romantic strand which is central to the plot, the book will be in no sense a romance.

So what are the other title possibilities? In second place is The Last Free City. This one has the merit of being easy to remember, and of capturing exactly what the story is about. On the downside, it's not very interesting. The language is too simple, the impression too static.

My third and final option is one I greatly like: The Dimonetto Road. In its own way, it's perfect. Readers of The Dog of the North will know what a dimonetto is, although not how it relates to roads--a combination of familiarity and mystery which is ideal. It sits trippingly on the tongue too. So what's wrong with it? The problem is that its connection to the story is too tenuous. There is a "Dimonetto Road", but it exists almost outside of the story, and its impact, although profound, is indirect. If the story develops as I've outlined it (by no means a certainty) then the Dimonetto Road is becalmed in the margins.

No doubt the problem will resolve itself, and will certainly become more clear once I start writing. For now, I simply offer it as an illustration of the kind of artistic choices a writer has to face.

And while ::Acquired Taste is not in any way a democracy, if you love or loathe any of the titles, why not let me know? If you were browsing the bookshop for a fantasy novel, which of those titles on the spine would you take down from the shelf?

"Why Should I Read...?"

A Game of Thrones
George R. R . Martin, 1996

A Game of Thrones is the first novel in a sequence which is perhaps the most ambitious ever attempted in fantasy. When complete, A Song of Ice and Fire will run to seven immense novels, a feat of sustained story-telling which makes The Lord of the Rings look like a preliminary sketch. The first novel in the series introduces Westeros, a continent riven by civil war and broadly equivalent to medieval Europe. This is not surprising: Martin is a student of medieval history and has cited the Wars of the Roses as an inspiration. The plot arc is one of competing houses vying for the throne of Westeros, with a huge cast of characters buffeted by events outside of their control.

Other than the immense scale on which Martin's imagination operates, two other features are worthy of note. The first is the extremely risky multiple-point of view narrative strategy he adopts. Each novel has between eight and a dozen third-person narrators. Each chapter within the novel uses a single one of these viewpoint characters and the effect can be dizzying. Martin risks reducing identification with the characters--and hence immersion in his fictional world--by chopping and changing so frequently; but the approach does allow him to keep several major plot arcs going simultaneously. By the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, Martin seems in danger of losing control of the material: some storylines have been abandoned altogether (to be picked up again in the yet to be published A Dance with Dragons). It's just about impossible to keep so many balls in the air at once, and Martin has decided to set some down in a dignified way rather than have the whole lot collapse around him. It's a sensible and pragmatic decision.

The other main characteristic of Martin's narrative is his willingness to kill off sympathetic characters. With so many viewpoint characters on stage, he can destroy some major ones without losing momentum or narrative coherence. The result is electrifying, and the reader really does get a sense of the brutality and arbitrariness of life in a war-torn pre-industrial world. It's a technique that's almost impossible to use in a more conventionally structured work: if you have a single protagonist, you might kill him off at the end, but you can't do it halfway through. The result is that Martin can not only imperil his characters, he can follow through on the threat. It's another high-risk approach and it's magnificently successful.

How has it influenced me?

A Song of Ice and Fire has been a huge influence on The Dog of the North, in more ways than I realised at the time. The Macmillan cover of my book, with a flaming city at the top and a sheet of ice at the bottom, draws out one very obvious (but unintentional) parallel. And Martin's interest in medieval warfare and political intrigue is also at the centre of my own fiction. Martin's world is bigger, rougher and more brutal than mine (although he greatly admires Jack Vance, not a lot of that admiration seeps through into his writing), but we both draw on some similar motifs and inspirations.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Your story is as long as it needs to be

Effective fantasy works not because of the 'fantastic' trappings, but through the richness and depth of the characters

History provides a marvellous touchstone and sourcebook for the fantasy writer - it's what you do with historical material once you've got it that makes it fantasy

When writing a long story, there is a delicate balance between sustaining interest by using more viewpoint characters, and losing focus by having too many of them