It's The Way You Tell It

For the last couple of days I’ve been reading an extremely long manuscript by an aspiring author. It’s absolutely full of basic errors in punctuation, syntax and vocabulary. One of the biggest howlers was when the author meant to write etcetera but actually wrote excreta instead.

Reading something like this, I understand why some agents have a reputation for being grumpy and unapproachable. Why would anyone think they could send out a manuscript so full of errors? I suppose there are only two reasons. Either they don’t see the mistakes or they don’t think they matter. Either way I’m reminded of something the best-selling author Ken Follett wrote.

Most writers I know are interested in obscure questions of spelling and grammar. For example, is there a difference in meaning between "each other" and "one another"? Some people say that "each other" should be used where just two people are involved and "one another" for three or more. Copyeditors may correct a writer who fails to follow this rule. But some authorities maintain there is no difference, and certainly ordinary speech does not distinguish between the two.

 Are you thinking this is a perfectly trivial question? If so, you probably aren't going to be a professional writer. Words are our tools, and subtle distinctions are important even if readers are not consciously aware of them. When I first came across this business about "each other" and one another" I was mildly panicked at the thought that I might have been misusing these phrases all my life.

Writers are generally fascinated by puns, word games, variant spellings, regional dialects, forms of pidgin English, new coinages, and everything to do with the language they use. In the same way painters are usually fascinated by the way light falls on surfaces and changes the way things look. You'll never be a writer if you don't love the language you use.

Mr Follett wrote this in the introduction to a book called Writing The Blockbuster Novel. Now I don’t actually aspire to write a blockbuster novel myself but I do agree that if you’re not fascinated by language, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to become a writer. After all, there are plenty of other ways to express yourself.

Writing a novel is not a simple matter. So many people seem to think that it’s all about coming up with a great story. But it isn’t.  Of course you do need a great story but it’s the way you tell it that counts – the language that you use. Get it right and agents will not hesitate to sign you up, editors will gladly wave contracts in front of your nose, foreign publishers will bid for the rights to your book, etcetera. But get it wrong and your manuscript is just a great big pile of excreta.

 

So What's Your Book About, Exactly?

I’ve been in bed all week with a flu like virus. It was a nearly a completely unproductive week until the day before yesterday when I suddenly came up with an idea for a new book. I tried it out on my wife and daughters and they gave it a big thumbs up.

When I say I came up with of an idea for a book, I’m talking about the basic premise. I haven’t got any plot yet, except for the opening scene, and only a limited picture of the main characters. But I’m sure all of that can be summoned up in time. The main thing is that I know what the book is going to be about. The premise is as clear and as bright as a candle flame in a coal mine.

A couple of weeks ago I had to write an evaluation of the Apprenticeships In Fiction scheme which I’ve participated in for the last three years. The scheme is aimed at authors who have completed a full length manuscript and want help bringing it to the point where a publisher might find it attractive. It works like this: candidates submit their manuscripts; a panel selects the most promising; then each successful candidate is mentored by a professional writer for the next twelve months.

One thing that struck me forcibly when looking back over the last three years is how many aspiring authors face a major problem identifying the premise of their novels. You ask them what their novel is about and they start telling you the entire plot, or they tell you about four different competing premises, or they complain that their novel is much too complex to be summed up in a single sentence.

This last attitude strikes me as downright silly. If you want to sell your novel then you have to be able to say what it’s about – simply, clearly and in very few words. If you can’t do that, it suggests that either your novel is confused, or you are confused, or both.

In these difficult financial times, publishers want certainty. They’re moving away from the scatter-gun approach whereby they hope that a percentage of their output will hit the target and accept that some will not. Instead, they just want to back winners. For all authors therefore, and in particular new authors, this means that you need to have a really clear vision of your book, and you need to be able to communicate that vision with conviction.

To put it simply: if you can’t pitch it, ditch it.

The Unexpected Wedding Guest

This blog is supposed to be about writing but you can’t help life sneaking in sometimes. Like now, for example when all real writing has become impossible because I am suffering from what I can only describe as a wedding-related virus.

Just before my elder daughter’s wedding last September I came down with something similar which meant that on the day itself I looked like death warmed up and, after delivering my speech, was unable to speak again in anything above a whisper for days.

Now it’s happened again. I was in bed for most of the last two days while an invisible demon kept driving a nail into my skull just above my right temple, filling my mouth with sand and shoving a rotten tomato up my nose. At the same time one of his associates seemed to have extracted rather a lot of blood from my body so that it has become like a badly inflated air-mattress.

Everybody is sympathetic but I think they also can’t help laughing at me. Just a little. And in the nicest possible way. And who can blame them? It looks like a huge attempt to steal the limelight. However, I am determined to recover and rebound in time for a week next Saturday when I will have two married daughters.

In the meantime I am having regular draughts of Lemsip. If you are reading this in a country where Lemsip is an unknown quantity let me put you in the picture. It is a remedy for colds and influenza that comes in powdered form. You add hot water and get a hideous luminous yellow concoction that tastes and smells like low-level radio-active waste. But it does seem to do the trick better than most.

Recently I’ve learned that among the guest list at the wedding will be at least one unexpected name. Both my daughters seem to have inherited the family tendency to receive messages from beyond the grave in their dreams. Recently Emily announced that she had seen her maternal grandfather (long since dead) in a dream and he told her he was very pleased to have a chance to talk to her, that he was delighted about the wedding and that he would most certainly be there.

I know this steadfast belief in an after-life seems like so much puerile self-delusion to those like Richard Dawkins who zealously insist that there is nothing but what you see in front of you. To them I say, with all the careful consideration that their arguments deserve – ‘Yeah, whatever…’

What's In A Name?

I’ve been asked to change the name of the protagonist of my latest book and also the title of the book itself. I don’t mind, actually. I wasn’t wedded to either of them and the reasons given for the change seem entirely plausible. I have often changed titles and names in the past, generally without a struggle. Sometimes, however, this process can be more difficult.

Imagine an author of children’s fiction who is contracted by his publisher to write a fantasy . Let’s say that the name of the fantasy is The Temptation of Ignatius Hood. Now as far as I know this is not the title of any book in print and certainly not the title of anything I have ever written and I wouldn’t want you to think, even for a moment, that the anecdote I am about to recount is anything other than an entirely hypothetical situation.

So, let us imagine that this purely hypothetical author went to a meeting with his equally hypothetical editor and she said to him, ‘We’re not happy with the title The Temptation Of Ignatius Hood’ and he said, ‘Oh really. Why’s that then?’

To which the editor replied, ‘Because this is a children’s novel and we think that children will have difficulty with the name Ignatius.’

‘But if they have trouble with the name Ignatius, they are going to have trouble reading the rest of the novel,’ the author pointed out.

Thereupon the editor replied with that old publishers’ ace, ‘Well the sales people are saying that they’re not getting a good reception from the book buyers.’

So, of course, the writer caved in immediately saying, ‘Oh God! All right then. What do you want to call it?’

To which the editor replied, ‘We thought you might like to come up with another suggestion.’

Now imagine that innumerable weeks went by during which the writer produced suggestion after suggestion, each of which received the thumbs down from the sales people until a point was reached where the writer was starting to come up with frankly ludicrous titles just to see what the response from sales might be this time.

Picture the bemused and befuddled writer, thinking of lists of titles, printing them out on a sheet of paper, cutting the paper up, throwing the pieces into his waste paper bin, emptying the bin onto the ground and reassembling them at random when suddenly the phone rings. It ought to be a red phone, really, for this is A Very Important Person In Publicity.

‘How are you?’ asks the very important person in publicity.
‘Fine,’ lies the bemused and befuddled author.
‘Good. Well I was wondering if you’d like to come to lunch with me. I’ve had an idea for your fantasy that I’d like to talk to you about.’

‘Certainly,’ says the author, confident that since this is the VIPIP herself, he will enjoy a fairly decent lunch.

And indeed he does. But the VIPIP refuses to discuss the Great Idea until the dessert has been consumed. ‘Let’s just relax and enjoy ourselves,’ she suggests and the relaxed but still bemused and befuddled author is happy to concur.

Finally the coffee arrives and with it has come the time to unveil the Great Idea. ‘We were thinking about calling your book The Temptation of Ignatius Hood,’ suggests the VIPIP tentatively.

‘But that’s what it is called,’ replies the author, now twice as bemused and befuddled.

‘You like the idea then?’ asks the VIPIP.

‘Of course I like the idea,’ protests the author. ‘It’s my idea.’

‘I’m so glad,’ the VIPIP says, leaning back in her chair and basking in the glow of a difficult mission skilfully accomplished. ‘That’s settled then’

Imagine how irritating this would be. If it was what actually happened.

I Can Talk The Talk, But Can I Walk The Walk?

Public speaking is on my mind at the moment. I have been busy learning my speech for my daughter, Kathleen’s wedding in three weeks’ time. It’s the second wedding in eight months so I have a clearer idea what to expect this time. However, this speech is decidedly more difficult than the last one because the first few sentences are in Greek, since the groom’s family are Greek Cypriots and quite a large number of them are coming over from Cyprus especially for the occasion. I don’t actually speak Greek so I am learning this parrot-fashion.

I also heard this week that a school in Essex has won me as a prize, or at least they have won a visit from me as part of a competition organized by a website called Reading Zone.

Some writers are daunted by speaking about their work in public. I’ve got a friend who writes literary fiction for adults. Her novel came out about a month ago and she is utterly terrified every time she is asked to speak about it. I’ve tried telling her that the audiences at book events are generally supportive but she says that I’m missing the point. It’s the whole business of getting up in front of strangers and talking about who you are and what you do that she finds so excruciatingly painful.

I think I had this knocked out of me by being a secondary school teacher in Inner London for ten years. If you’ve stood up in front of thirty stroppy teenagers day after day and tried to control the ravening beast that is their collective psyche, any speech, whether to wedding guests or bibliophiles, holds very few terrors.

I remember one occasion when it had been snowing heavily in London. The roads had been partially cleared but huge mounds of dirty snow and slush were piled up at the kerbs.  In those days I rode a bicycle to and from school. When I set off for home that afternoon, almost the entire class for whom I was responsible was standing at the bus stop. As I drew level with them, the wheels of my cycle began to lose traction, spinning hopelessly on the icy surface. Then, slowly but surely,  I started to fall sideways, landing unceremoniously in one of the enormous drifts of snow.

When I re-emerged, totally soaked and utterly humiliated, it was to a great roar of delight from my students. Shivering, I re-mounted my bike and cycled home in the certain knowledge that in less than twenty four hours I would be facing that same audience, trying to make them concentrate on Shakespeare.  By comparison, delivering a speech in Greek is going to be a piece of cake.

No, public speaking does not worry me. The thing that really terrifies me is public walking. I have this recurrent nightmare that I am proceeding with great dignity up the aisle, my daughter on my arm. A string quartet is playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The groom and the best man are standing ready and waiting. The guests are all looking at Kathleen and smiling benignly. And that’s when I step on the hem of her dress. There is a ripping sound, she stumbles and falls forward. The music stops abruptly. The guests give a collective gasp of dismay. Kathleen looks up from the ground with tears in her eyes. Her ankle is broken, the wedding is ruined and it is all my fault. 

The First Rule Of Achievement

Today is the official publication day of my latest book, Nathaniel Wolfe and the Bodysnatchers. My publisher sent me a bottle of champagne in the post. That’s very nice except that I stopped drinking at the end of 2007. Never mind, I’m sure I’ll find someone to drink it for me. This sort of thing never happened when I was young and utterly impoverished. In those days my wife and I would buy a bottle of extra strong cider on a Friday night and sit in front of an open fire drinking it slowly. I think there must be some sort of cosmic rule which states that you can only have stuff when you no longer really want it. Or maybe it’s the other way round. As soon as you stop wanting stuff, it is automatically yours.

Moving The Radiators

I have just finished the changes to the First Draft of my latest book that were suggested by my editor. I both enjoy and dislike rewrites. I enjoy them because I want to make the book as good as possible. I dislike them because they are always so immensely fiddly.

When an editor says, ‘I really love your book but I just wondered if in the third chapter there could be a little more of this and a little more of that,’ it always sounds so reasonable, so straightforward, so simple to accomplish. But actually it’s a bit like someone coming along after you’ve entirely redecorated your house and saying, ‘I love the new look but I wonder if all the radiators downstairs could be about ten centimetres to the left.’ And when you say, Are you crazy?’, they reply, ‘Oh come on Brian, it’s only ten centimetres.’

What they don’t realise is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s ten centimetres or ten metres, you’re still going to have to lift the carpet, take up the floorboards, drain down the central heating system and re-do the pipework.

So it is with a manuscript. Once it’s finished, even the tiniest changes can threaten to bring the whole thing tumbling down like a house of cards.

At the beginning of my career I use to bitterly resent these editorial suggestions. ‘What do they know about it?’ I would complain to my wife. ‘If they’re so smart, how come they’re not writing books themselves?’ But eventually I realised what a childish attitude this was. Both the author and the editor have the same aim in mind: to produce the best possible book. And each has his or her part to play. It’s a collaborative process.

All the same, I always breathe a huge sigh of relief when I’ve got to the end of the rewrites and emailed the manuscript to the publisher. Now I can forget about it for a while and do some gardening.

Just so long as I don’t suddenly get another new editor who comes along and says, ‘Tell me Brian, have you considered moving the radiators ten centimetres in the other direction?’ That has happened to me before, as a matter of fact. And I think I was very good about it. I didn’t swear, I didn’t even make a fuss. But I didn’t move the radiators, either.