Most Pretentious Communication Of 2009

I received this email yesterday. The punctuation and capitalization is all theirs.

Radical thoughts for publishers and authors

Dear sir/madam,

radical thoughts provides a unique service aimed at publishing agents and authors in refining contemporary, fictional and non fictional literary scripts and/or books currently defined as works-in-progress.

radical thoughts represents a group of academic achievers with interests in all soft and hard sciences including classical English and historical literature, theological interpretation, paranormal investigation, artistic resolution and media marketing with a cumulative knowledge spanning thirty years of academic research

our business concept is to offer high end product and services to discerning customers who seek to attain a higher level of audience satisfaction through the application of simple and specific rules in problem solving and dynamic research enveloped within a literary framework governed by syntax, word clarity and formal/informal written structure

let our team of professionals focus on your work-in-progress projects with the aim of improving both visual and auditory perceptions of your intended audience

for additional information please reply to this email

My favourite part is the third paragraph, the one about word clarity.

The Writing Process

I don't think anyone has described it better than this.

TO PAINT THE PORTRAIT OF A BIRD
First paint a cage
with an open door
then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird
then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest
hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving...
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he can just as well spend long years
before deciding
Don't get discouraged
wait
wait years if necessary
the swiftness or slowness of the coming
of the bird having no rapport
with the success of the picture
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
wait till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush
then
paint out all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the feathers of the bird
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of its branches
for the bird
paint also the green foliage and the wind's freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of insects in the summer heat
and then wait for the bird to decide to sing
If the bird doesn't sing
it's a bad sign
a sign that the painting is bad
but if he sings it's a good sign
a sign that you can sign
so then so gently you pull out
one of the feathers of the bird
and you write yours name in a corner of the picture

- Jacques Prevert
(translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

Where Nothing Is Forgotten

I am off to the West of Ireland on Thursday, to what used to be my parents’ house. It’s a thinly poulated area, very green and very beautiful. The land is no good for farming. Too much bog and heath, too many rocks, lying everywhere like the toy bricks of giant children. But that’s all right because I’m no farmer. I can spend hours just gazing at the view. And on a clear night the sky is pierced with a million stars.

There’s nothing glamorous about this part of Ireland, no jaunting cars for the tourists. But there’s a music festival once a year. People cram into tiny bars to hear local people play fiddles and bodhrans. Children get up on hastily erected wooden stages in the village street to show off their skills at Irish dancing. Old men with broken teeth sing rebel songs and are cheered on by their friends,

It’s a landscape that still carries the scars of famine and poverty despite the brand new Japanese cars that occasionally zip up the winding road from the village, heading towards the nearest town where commercial properties thrown up in the days of the Celtic Tiger now stand empty, waiting for the next boom.

And everyone is related to everyone else. The local cemetery is full of Keaneys going back centuries. Once a year, for the blessing of the graves, that cemetery is full. People stand beside their family plots and recite the rosary. Nine times out of ten, the rain slants down on them mercilessly, coming from the mountains, and the prayers have to be rushed through before everyone is soaked to their skins.

It’s a place where nothing is forgotten, a place that is so steeped in memory, you expect the stones to talk. It’s where I go to remember who I am and why I became a writer.

Skeletons In The Attic

Recently I’ve been reading on the web that a new publishing paradigm is emerging which will dispense with gatekeepers such as editors and agents. Instead, people will publish their own work and through recommendation on social networking sites readers will be able to find what they want to read.

I don’t believe a word of it. As someone who gets sent a lot of manuscripts by aspiring authors I have to tell you that the truth is an awful lot of them are very bad indeed. Of course, there are some genuinely talented people with compelling stories to tell but there are also scores who haven’t got an original idea in their heads yet are convinced the world should recognize their brilliance. If I had a pound for every manuscript I’ve seen about a boy wizard who goes off to a school to learn magic, I’d be a rich man.

But it’s not just lack of originality. I get sent manuscripts by people who can’t spell, can’t write in sentences, get words mixed up, don’t know how to punctuate, don’t use paragraphs and don’t number the pages. Others forget the names of their own characters or have dozens and dozens who are all simply names with not one word of description. I've been sent manuscripts for children which are full of very nasty sex scenes; stories in which animals get torn apart or slaughtered; stories that are blatantly racist or just insidiously so; books that are outright misogynist or merely very, very sexist.

It’s always these authors who get utterly infuriated when I point out where they might be going wrong (even though they’ve sent their manuscripts to me for my opinion in the first place). And whenever I am tempted to reply that I’m only pointing out those factors that are likely to limit their chances of landing a publishing contract, they invariably reply, ‘Well I’ll publish it myself then.’

When I was at university I firmly (and wrongly) believed that I could play the guitar. This was in the days of punk rock when there was a belief around that you could bypass the tired old hacks in the music business, set up your own record label and put out your own records. So I did just that. And when I’d paid the bill to the pressing plant I was left with hundreds of singles that I didn’t know what to do with.

Of course there were people who successfully set up their own labels but they were the minority of talented individuals and most of them soon graduated to larger labels as soon as they got the chance because they quickly found out that producing a record, like publishing a book, is only half the battle. Then you have to find ways to promote, sell and distribute it. If you’re successful, you soon discover how much time and effort that takes. If you’re not, you’re left with an awful lot of unsold stock.

I know an author who set up her own publishing company a few years ago. Her shoestring enterprise has carried on precariously ever since. One thing I can’t help noticing though is that she hasn’t written anything herself for years. Why? Because she’s turned into a publisher, of course. And, much as we authors like to moan about them, publishers do a great deal of work on their authors’ behalf.

So when people say to me, as they often do, ‘Why don’t you cut out the middleman and publish yourself?’ I simply tell them, ‘It’s because I don’t want to be a publisher; I want to be a writer.’

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering what happened to all those records I made, I left them in the attic when I moved house.

The Tuscany Syndrome

The Haunting Of Nathaniel Wolfe has now been shortlisted for two awards, the Calderdale Children’s Book of the Year and the Hounslow Junior Book Award. That’s very gratifying but it also feels slightly weird and distanced, if I’m honest, because the follow up, Nathaniel Wolfe and the Bodysnatchers, has already been published.

What’s more I’ve finished a new book in a different series which is due for publication next year; I’m currently working on the second book in that new series; and I already have a very strong idea for another book when I’ve finished this one. So that makes me almost four books away from the one that is currently attracting attention.

That’s what publishing is like, of course. There’s always an enormous delay between finishing your manuscript and seeing it published. As a result, by the time readers are asking you about a book, you’re struggling to remember the plot. Even the names of the characters escape you. At a meeting with my editor recently I couldn’t even remember the title of one of my books

The fact is that once a book is finished you’ve moved on emotionally. You’ve been carrying all this stuff around in your head for months and you simply had to get it down on paper. Otherwise it was threatening to consume you. Once that’s done, you heave a great big sigh of relief and forget all about it. At least that’s what it’s like for me.

After the completion of a novel there’s usually a period of tranquil satisfaction – what I call the Tuscany Syndrome. You feel like you’re on holiday in Italy sitting beside a shimmering pool with a glass of red wine next to your deck chair. In a little while you might go for a walk to the little church down the road that is absolutely full of Renaissance masterpieces. But maybe you’ll just have another swim first. Or even a little snooze.

Exactly how long that feeling lasts depends on the kind of person you are. For some it might be six months; for me it’s about a week. Then I wake up one morning feeling as if I’ve forgotten to do something incredibly important like pay the mortgage or send off my accounts to the Inland Revenue, and I realise it’s started all over again: I’m beginning to worry about what I will write next.

The anxiety phase usually lasts about a fortnight before it turns to outright panic. Although I’m a reasonably prolific author I have an absolute terror of discovering that there’s nothing left in the attic of my imagination: I’ve written all the books I’m ever going to write and I’m nothing but a dried up husk. I’ve had this fear for the last twenty five years but each time it descends I am completely convinced that finally it’s for real. Then all of a sudden I get a new idea and I’m back on the merry go round once more.

I have an friend who produces a book about every six years. Slow down Brian, she keeps telling me. Spend more time in Tuscany! But just when I’m starting to believe she might be right, an ominous shadow spreads over the swimming pool. I look up to see an airplane blocking out the sun. Even from down here I can make out the livery of a low-cost airline. It’s an omen. Reluctantly, I get to my feet, pick up my towel and head back to my villa to start packing. The holiday is over. There’s work to be done.

The Private Life Of Mr X

You can’t always wait for stories to come to you. Sometimes you have to coax them along. There are a number of different ways of doing this, some very deliberate and methodical requiring patience and attention to detail, others quite spontaneous involving surrender to processes one does not completely understand.

One of my favourite techniques is what I call narrative collision - allowing two completely separate stories, or fragments of stories, to come together in my head. I think of it, rather grandiosely, as being like when sub-atomic particles in a Hadron collider smash into one another and produce new particles that behave in totally unexpected ways.

It makes you shake the kaleidoscope and look at everything with fresh eyes. Suddenly you realise that Mr X from the first narrative has been Mr Y from the second all along and that explains why he has been behaving so mysteriously.

Of course it has to be tempered with the mundane process of asking yourself straightforward questions about the story such as, ‘In that case why on earth didn’t he just got to the police/call an ambulance/use his mobile phone etc.?’ You mustn’t get so carried away with the excitement of discovering Mr X’s alter ego that you start bending the plot into ridiculous shapes.

No, what you have to do is keep very quiet and observe. But make the characters think you’re not watching. After a while they’ll forget all about you. They won’t even notice when you follow them off stage, watch them take off their costumes and leave the theatre. That’s when you find out what they’re really up to. That’s when the story really begins.

More Than Just A Maniacal Laugh

I get asked to read a lot of fantasy manuscripts by aspiring authors. That’s not surprising. It’s the genre most readily associated with children’s fiction. Unfortunately, it’s also the genre that produces the worst results when done badly. So I wanted to highlight one area where a lot of bad fantasy falls down, in the hope that it might be of use to someone.

It seems to me that every fantasy needs a meta-narrative, by which I mean an over-arching account of the world within which the smaller narrative takes place. Take Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, for example. Frodo has inherited a magic ring, which has the power to make him invisible. More importantly however, that ring is the one ring of power made by the Dark Lord to subjugate all the other rings of power and bind their wearers to him. It is the missing part in a historic struggle between good and evil that began before Frodo was born and will come to involve nations and peoples that he has only heard of in legends. So Frodo’s story is really part of a much larger story, the meta narrative.

In order for a fantasy to work properly the meta narrative needs to be fully integrated into the story. This means that the motivating forces within it need to be explicable i.e. the reader needs to be able to understand just what the hell this story is about and what circumstances produced the events that are being described. This sounds obvious but a lot of people who write fantasy get carried along by their own imagery and their sense of poetic narrative so that the reader has no clear idea what sort of world the story is taking place in or why the characters are acting as they are.

The motivating forces that govern the meta narrative need to be personified. In particular, there needs to be a clear source of evil in the book. This should not just be a cartoon villain who loves evil for its own sake. There should be a history to the development of that evil and a degree of human complicity so that we understand that the evil described has the power to take root in all of us. To put it bluntly: there needs to be more than just a maniacal laugh; there should also be a powerful sense of sin.

It goes without saying that the relationship between the smaller story and the meta-narrative needs to be watertight. That means no holes in the backstory, no random and unexplained happenings, no characters or incidents that are invented simply to get the author out of his or her difficulties with the story.

Finally the power of the meta-narrative needs to grow as the story unfolds, like a shadow looming larger and larger over the protagonist until he (or she) comes to realise that he is really part of a much larger drama than he could possibly have imagined when the story began.

Does that sound like a tall order? I don't think so. All I'm really saying is that fantasy, just like naturalism, needs to be properly thought out.