A Question of Perspective

Readers may by now be weary of further analysis of the composition process of The Last Free City. Hint to these readers: you're probably visiting the wrong blog. Yesterday I had an experience so unexpected, and so instructive, that it might be of interest to other writers.

The story so far: The Last Free City was designed as the story of Todarko, a selfish youth, set against a background of political intrigue in a proud but corrupt city. Sixty thousand words in, I came to the conclusion that the protagonist's story wasn't strong enough to carry a whole novel, and I cast about for more narrative strands to support it.

Two possibilities presented themselves to me: a story set twenty years before, showing the formative years of Dravadan, the antagonist in Todarko's story; and a narrative from the viewpoint of Oricien, a survivor from The Dog of the North. For a number of reasons, Oricien's story seemed the more promising and I set to work on it. Some 5,000 words later I put aside both optimism and the narrative: Oricien's story did not work. Instead I moved on to telling Dravadan's story--which has now reached about 30,000 words. It is not brillliant, but it is probably salvageable.

Last night I was pruning some back-ups from a little-used computer, and I came across the three episodes which made up the Oricien part of the story. Idly I re-read them. To my astonishment, they were the start of the greatest prose narrative ever written in English! Such euphoria rapidly abated, but even a sober second reading supported the conclusion that it was much better than I remembered: two nicely delineated characters, crisp conflict, some touches of humour. All in all, it's much better than most of the material which has survived.

What are the lessons of this homily? First, don't throw anything away; second, and more important--it's very hard to evaluate work while you're in the middle of writing. Put it away for a couple of months, come back to it, and it may have hidden virtues.

I will be picking up this third strand again once I have finished Dravadan's story...

Exclusive! From The Last Free City

Writers as a breed have a superstitious aversion to showing their work in progress to the wider world. I share this disquiet only to a certain extent. Our readers are interested in what we are up to, and from time to time there is little harm in gratifying their curiosity. With that in mind, today I am posting a short excerpt from The Last Free City. It is suitable for such violence in several respects: it is from a high authorial point of view; it gives away nothing of plot; it introduces no significant characters; it is largely standalone; and there is a high probability that it will not survive into the final draft. It is as it is, and comes with no warranty from the author...

The wealth of Taratanallos—and hence the basis for the lives of measured protocol and carefully graduated luxury of the Specchio—was born out of trade. The twenty-four houses jealously guarded monopolies of tariffed goods among themselves, enriching themselves from customs duties as well as forays into entrepreneurship.

The city’s status as the trading centre of the world might be thought to lend the city cosmopolitan air, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Those residents of the city who were not Tarat citizens—traders from other cities; diplomats; artists, actors and other disreputables—lived in a demarcated area of the city known as ‘the Wrill’. While not barred from the Argentium or the Prieko, their presence was not encouraged, and residents of the Wrill took no part in the cultural life of the city.

Outsiders sometimes took this as proof of the intolerable pride of the Specchio, that they should refuse to mingle with those who contributed so much to their coffers. Such a view, playing as it did on the popular perception of the Specchio as effete lordlings, concerned only with their fetes, their duels and their striving for notional advantage over their rivals, naturally gained a widespread currency.

Nonetheless this view was wholly false. While the Specchio occupied themselves in their introspective pastimes, there was a grimly practical reason for the existence of the Wrill: plague. More than any city in Mondia, Taratanallos was a nexus, a meeting point for traders from every city and culture. A disease brought in on a ship from Paladria, say, could run through the population in a month, and once established amongst those with no acquired immunity, would prove almost impossible to eradicate. The Wrill, therefore, served at once as a sink-hole and a quarantine, albeit a liberal one. On those occasions when plague broke loose—fortunately rare—the Consiglio enforced harsh movement restrictions, and those living in the Wrill perforce must wait out the contagion, or leave the city on ships provided for the purpose.

The arrangements were some way short of foolproof. Outbreaks of disease were years, sometimes decades, apart, and the smooth commercial functioning of the city would be impaired if those living within the Wrill were unable to travel. Hence the so-called “soft quarantine” which discouraged foreigners from mingling with the city folk, but did not forbid it.

That winter, at a time when plague had not been seen in the city for half a generation, an outbreak of disease took hold in the Wrill, and through deficient vigilance on the part of the Consiglio, made an incursion not only into the Prieko but also the Argentium. The countermeasures of quarantine were all the more rigorous for having been neglected in the first place, but by the time the Masavory were able to ring the great bell marking the all-clear, twenty-seven members of the Specchio were dead, including Thrinko, head of House Zamilio and father of Sanoutë, and Lustenaijo, who had once been President of the Masavory.

Those who remained were prompted, according to their temperaments, to reflect on the fleeting precariousness of mortality, or to throw themselves into their revels with redoubled seriousness. There is no disaster so severe that it has no beneficiaries, however. The fourteen year-old Lupus, the son of Thrinko, could now style himself ‘the Dignified Lupus’ and sit on the Masavory as the head of his house; and while his elevation was presumably purchased with some grief, the Viators—who saw attendances rise with a consequent increase in alms—enjoyed the chink of silver while incurring no compensating disadvantages.

On Reading and Re-Reading

One of themes of this blog is that one of the most important things a writer can do is read. It's an activity which is valuable in so many different ways: exposure to different styles, attitudes, approaches; a break from the grind of composition; and sheer enjoyment. The Why Should I Read...? links on the left set out some of my favourites.

There is a balance between seeking out new material and re-reading. The writer who only reads their books once never sucks all the marrow from the bone; while the writer who only reads tried and trusted favourites does not expand their range. So most of us, I suspect, mingle new material with the occasional return to certain titles. My most common re-reads are Jack Vance, of course, but also Austen and, strangely, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro.

What is it that makes a book re-readable. Humans are creatures of story: what will happen next? Will Odysseus make it home? We've known the answer to that for over two thousand years, but still we read Homer. Will Miss Bennet marry Mr Darcy? We can probably guess the answer before the end of the first reading--but Pride and Prejudice remains perhaps the most-loved novel in English. The books we want to re-read take the writer's greatest advantage--that they can keep us guessing--and cast it away. We've read the book once: we've learned that Anna Karenina puts her head on the railway track, but still we come back. And it's for something other than plot.

A re-readable book must keep back something on the first reading. It must yield a fresh delight once we are unyoked from needing to know what happens next. For some books, like The Quincunx, multiple readings are necessary simply to understand the plot (still not sure I do after three goes...); sometimes a second reading illustrates the neatness with which the plot is contrived (why else would you re-read Agatha Christie?); sometimes the beauty of the prose, like a flower, never cloys. Other writers can unite character with elegance of expression in a way which satisfies whichever mood you are in.

David Isaak quoted in his blog a while ago Raymond Obstfeld's dictum that the writer should aim to put a gem on every page. It's the best one-line writing mantra I've heard. Are the books we re-read the ones which pull it off?

Dragonchaser: now to become a collector's edition!

Regular readers will know that I have been working on The Last Free City since April, and progress, although jerky, is definite.

In the interim I had submitted Dragonchaser to Macmillan as a potential follow-up to The Dog of the North. Yesterday I learned from my editor Will that Macmillan have decided not to publish it. Will had many good things to say about the book (all of which I agreed with) but his bottom line was that it is not as good as The Dog of the North (which I also agree with). My hopes for Macmillan now rest on the reception to The Last Free City, a novel much closer in tone and sensibility to The Dog of the North than Dragonchaser. So no need to give up hope just yet...

Writers almost by definition must possess a thick skin. While I am disappointed that Dragonchaser won't benefit from linking up with Macmillan, I'm not devastated. The book was written too long ago for the blow to feel too personal, and my emotional energies are now invested in The Last Free City.

Dragonchaser is neither a better nor a worse book for having been rejected by Macmillan: it is what it is. It's still a book I believe in, and one I think had some commercial potential. Luckily--for those of you who like to check things out for yourself--it's still available as a self-published title with Lulu.com. Check it out here, where you can also buy it in an omnibus edition with my first novel The Zael Inheritance.

It's almost a cliche that the best remedy for a writer who has received a rejection is immediately to plunge into more writing. And since I have a betrothal feast nagging to be written up (hint: it's not going to be all love and kisses...) that is exactly what I shall do!

Also Writes Novels...



Visitors to ::Acquired Taste could be forgiven for thinking that very little fiction writing ever takes place here. With The Dog of the North now making its own way in the world, I should be a hive of industry ("hive" in the busy bee sense, rather than the skin complaint, we hope) on its successor.



That successor, The Last Free City has had rather a chequered history, never evolving with fluency of its predecessors. The main story, that of Todarko, poet, womaniser and dilettante, is peopled with strong characters and a dramatic situation, albeit one that's not protracted enough to make an entire novel. His incomplete story stands at around 65,000 words, after taking out an abortive plot loop (some of which may be recyclable). I had also experimented with a viewpoint story from one of the survivors of The Dog of the North. This trial was not successful, and remains in abeyance. I may yet resurrect it, depending on how my third viewpoint unfolds. This ithird strand s the tale of the early years of Dravadan, the villain of Todarko's story.



We all enjoy explorations of villainy, more particularly in fiction than through personal experience. Recounting the formative years of a dark character is potentially an engaging device, although it runs the risk of producing a Rubber Ducky (thanks to David Isaak for introducing me to this term): that explaining too much about the villain's childhood oversimplifies the character and drains the situation of all interest. Hannibal Lecter is the obvious example, but Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars series is perhaps the apotheosis: three films (and not very good ones) to explain why Darth Vader can't breathe without sounding like he's in an advert for Snorex.



There is another, more serious problem with Anakin Skywalker: not only is he given a pretty crude Rubber Ducky, he's also A Good Guy Really. This is the worst character arc of the lot: Angelic Kid suffers a Moment of Trauma after which he becomes The Embodiment of Evil before turning things around with a Redemptive Death. Does this sound remotely plausible to you? Me neither. (Readers of The Dog of the North may think that I skirt dangerously close to this with Beauceron's character. My defence would involve spoilers, so I must be acquitted on a technicality).



To write a convincing "villain's childhood", it seems to me essential that the seeds of the warped adult are already there: they should not be implanted by an external event--although such an event may trigger the manifestation of this aspect of their character. In that sense the writer should not explain the character, merely document it.



In writing Dravadan, therefore, a character the reader can only view with disgust and--I hope--fear in Todarko's story, I have been careful to avoid either explaining his pathology, or to give him generous motivations perverted by the cruelty of the world. Instead, he's a sod from the outset. This approach, too, has its risks: principally, the difficulty of engaging the reader's sympathy. I have to hope that creating a dynamic character who displays ambition and initiative will retain the reader's interest even when his actions are reprehensible. In a technical sense there are strong similarities with Beauceron, although with Dravadan I have not smoothed off the rough edges. I calculate, as well, that I can get away with one unsympathetic viewpoint when there is at least one other viewpoint in the book. The only judge, of course, will be the reader.



Dravadan's narrative now stands at 15,000 words. There are still several major episodes of his early life to detail, so while his story will not exceed Todarko's (and nor should it), there will be enough to allow the character some depth. For now, we have forward motion, so I will allow Dravadan his head a while longer.



* * *

My re-reading of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy continues, and I am now on the final volume, Madouc. Regular visitors will surely allow me the indulgence of another quotation, so beautifully does it encapsulate one aspect of Vance's art. Madouc, the princess who is really a fairy changeling, is taunted by her companions for her lack of pedigree:

Madouc had no sure understanding as to what might be a ‘pedigree’. She had heard the word used once or twice before, but its exact significance had never been made clear. A few days past she had gone to the stables to groom her pony Tyfer; nearby a pair of gentleman were discussing a horse and its ‘fine pedigree’. The horse, a black stallion, had been notably well-hung; but this would not seem to be the determining factor, and certainly not so far as Madouc was concerned. Devonet and the other maidens could not reasonably expect her to flaunt an article of this sort.

Re-reading old favourites



My holiday in Turkey was enjoyable in almost every way. One small flaw, however, was that none of the books I took with me as holiday reading fully satisfied. When I came back, then, I was desperate to read a book I knew I was going to love, and this took me to the realm of re-reading. Even this approach isn't foolproof. My latest reading of The Lord of the Rings may very well be the last, so much has the book changed. But of the course, the book is the same as ever, so what's changed is me.



Nonetheless I felt I was on a pretty safe bet when I picked up Jack Vance's Suldrun's Garden, the first in his Lyonesse fantasy trilogy. This is a book I have read and loved for over twenty years, and from the first paragraph the rhythm of Vance's prose sucked me in again.

On a dreary winter’s day, with rain sweeping across Lyonesse Town, Queen Sollace went into labor. She was taken to the lying-in room and attended by two midwives, four maids, Balhamel the physician and the crone named Dyldra, who was profound in the lore of herbs, and by some considered a witch. Dyldra was present by the wish of Queen Sollace, who found more comfort in faith than logic.

King Casmir made an appearance. Sollace’s whimpers became moans and she clawed at her thick blonde hair with clenched fingers. Casmir watched from across the room. He wore a simple scarlet robe with a purple sash; a gold coronet confined his ruddy blond hair. He spoke to Balhamel. “What are the signs?”

“Sire, there are none as yet.”

“There is no way to divine the sex?”

“To my knowledge, none.”

Standing in the doorway, legs somewhat apart, hands behind his back, Casmir seemed the very embodiment of stern and kingly majesty, and indeed, this was an attitude which accompanied him everywhere, so that kitchen-maids, tittering and giggling, often wondered if Casmir wore his crown to the nuptial bed. He inspected Sollace from under frowning eyebrows. “It would seem that she feels pain.”

If I had to pick a single favourite book, this would be it: a compelling multi-layered narrative which comprehends both mediaeval-style realpolitik and whimsical fairy-tale, all retailed behind the straightest of faces. He even manages to slip in a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. The emotional range Vance displays in this series makes the work all but inexhaustible. Every time I read the book I discover fresh delights. This exchange between Aillas, the nominal protagonist, and Persilian, the magic mirror who must answer three questions, and fourth earn his freedom, is a tiny slice of perfection:

On the way back to the village Glymwode he turned aside and approached a half-decayed stump. From the wrapping he took Persilian and propped it upright on the stump. For an instant he saw himself in the glass, comely despite the harsh structure of jaw, chin and cheekbone, with eyes bright as blue lights. Then Persilian, from perversity, altered the image, and Aillas found himself looking into the face of a hedgehog.

Aillas spoke: “Persilian, I need your help.”

“Do you wish to put a question?”

“Yes.”

“It will be your third.”

“I know. Therefore, I want to describe the sense of my question, so that you will not return a glib evasion. I am seeking my son Dhrun, who was taken by the fairies of Thripsey Shee. I will ask you: ‘How may I bring my son alive and well into my own custody?’ I want to know exactly how to locate my son, release him from Thripsey Shee in possession of his health, youth and mental faculties, without incurring penalty. I want to locate and free my son now and not in a program involving weeks, months or years, nor do I want to be fooled or frustrated in some way I haven’t considered. Therefore, Persilian—”

“Has it occurred to you,” asked Persilian, “that your manner is most arrogant? That you demand my help as if it were a duty I owed you, and you, like all the others, jealously refuse to free me by asking a fourth question? Do you wonder that I regard your problems with detachment? Have you reflected an instant upon my yearnings? No, you exploit me and my power as you might use a horse to draw a load; you chide and domineer as if by some heroic deed you had earned the right to command me, when in fact, you stole me in the most furtive manner from King Casmir; do you still choose to hector me?”

After a confused moment Aillas spoke in a subdued voice: “Your complaints for the most part are fair. Still, at this moment, I am driven to find my son to the exclusion of all else.

“Therefore, Persilian, I must repeat my charge: give me in full detail a response to this question: ‘How may I bring my son into my care and custody?’”

Persilian spoke in a heavy voice: “Ask Murgen.”

Aillas jumped back from the stump in a fury. With great effort he kept his voice even: “That is not a proper response.”

“It is good enough,” said Persilian airily. “Our urgencies drive us in different directions. Should you choose to ask another question, by all means, do so.”

Whenever I need cheering up--or, more exactly, when I need mental refreshment of a particular kind--I reach Suldrun's Garden down from the shelf. Does anyone else have a "tonic book" like this?

:: 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...

Prologues and Openings

The life of the writer is not just champagne, launch parties and celebrity appearances. (My score in these three areas to date is zero, zero and one). It also involves peripheral activities like, er, writing...

For reasons which I hope are understandable, The Last Free City has taken a back seat in recent weeks. The Dog of the North has been a jealous master and, given how long it has spent in obscurity, who would deny it some time off the leash?

The break has, in any event, allowed me a useful opportunity to take stock of TLFC. I have recounted at length in previous posts the halting progress of the plot, and while these questions are not all resolved, enough of them are to make the story seem workable. A new introductory scene has been percolating for a couple of weeks, and soon I will have to mar its inchoate perfection by writing it down.

First scenes carry a particular weight. They require the balancing of more elements than any other (even including the ending, I think). The introductory scene needs not only to grab the attention, but also to introduce one or more characters and the milieu we will be inhabiting. There's a temptation to try to make opening scenes do too much. If you think your first scene can be at once page-rippingly dramatic, paint a detailed picture of your imaginary world and introduce a cast of thousands, you're probably trying to do too much. You're probably better off emphasising one aspect and hinting at others. In particular, I'd advise against trying to cram in too many key characters. If your antagonist is compelling enough, he can wait a while before we see him--indeed, the suspense of waiting for him may do part of your job for you.

Perversely, it's difficult to write the first scene first, because you're unlikely to know the characters well enough at that stage. This is the fourth novel I've embarked on, and the third to need a new opening scene (The Dog of the North is the exception--perhaps because the viewpoint character was not central to the story, it did not require reinterpretation).

Another thing about first scenes--they don't always come at the beginning. (Give 'em a paradox--it keeps 'em reading...). It's possible to write a prologue which is not in any meaningful sense an opening scene: it may very well be set in a different place, at a different time, focusing on minor characters or even ones who never reappear. A prologue is a commentary on the action to follow, not a part of it. TLFC will probably have one of these too, a scene which provides a link to The Dog of the North and a frame of reference for the story to follow. If you provide such a prologue, the scene which follows it--the first of "the real story"--is the opening scene, the one in which you have to hook the reader with what's going to happen next.

Opening scenes can be challenging: but get yours right and it's the reader's passport to the rest of the book.

Publication Day - Part II

Having now skipped out to Waterstones I can report on a hugely impressive display including a picture of the author which will be familiar to readers of this blog. Photographic evidence will follow in due course.

In another noteworthy event, the July edition of DeathRay magazine includes a short article by yours truly on subject always close to my heart, the enduring excellence of Jack Vance.

The recent death of Arthur C. Clarke leaves Jack Vance as one of the last survivors of the Golden Age of science fiction. Active since the late 1940s, Vance has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (including a Grand Master Award in 1996) as well as the World Fantasy Award.

But a list of awards understates Vance's influence: cited by writers as diverse as Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons and George R.R. Martin as an inspiration, Vance has also attracted a hard-core of devoted fans across the years. In 1999, a group of those devotees set out on an extraordinary voyage: the Vance Integral Edition (VIE). As a writer who had been captivated by Vance’s work for over twenty years, I was delighted to be part of the project—even if I didn’t realise then that we wouldn’t finish until 2006!

I'm afraid you'll have to buy the magazine to read the rest...

Publication Day!

Well, the Big Day is here. I Am Writer.

I shall be popping into Waterstones after work to see the copies, and I may take a couple of snaps for the blog.

The literary life began last night, though, when I took up the kind invitation of Pallant House Art Book Club to appear as a visiting author. Thanks to everyone there for making me feel welcome. The featured book was Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions, a story about 1960s and 70s urban revolutionaries--a trip down memory lane to the bombing of the Post Office Tower and similar events. The group, on the whole, didn't much like the book, finding the protagonist too unsympathetic and the narrative structure confusing. I was worried what might happen when such a challenging body was let loose on me, but they were kindness itself, with all kinds of interesting questions. The group was not composed of natural fantasy readers, and their palpable relief when hearing there were no orcs or elves might even translate into some sales!

Despite now being A Writer, and thereby expected to have some facility with words, the feeling of waking up this morning as a published author defies ready description. Many of you have been here already, and know what I mean.

The next event is the formal book launch at Waterstones on the 15th, where I will have to sing rather longer for my supper. After being interviewed for 40 minutes, I will give a couple of readings and then, of course, sign books through the night until the teeming multitudes are satisfied. My last job interview didn't run for 40 minutes! Now I need to decide which passages I'm going to read--a tricky one, this: obviously I don't want to give too much away, but I also want to grab the attention. I'm really pleased with the ending, but it's perhaps not a good choice for an introductory reading... At the moment I'm thinking of a humorous episode from one of the plot strands (although this requires me to read out the words "pah!" and "uuurgh!" which may require more sangfroid than I possess) and a nice little self-contained duel from the other. I may need to have a practice read at the weekend...

But for now, in between the need to attend to the seminar on "Debt Recovery for Residential Care" I am co-presenting today, I am going to bask in the fulfilment of the ambition I've held for thirty years...