The story so far: I'm a writer based in Canterbury, UK. My first novel, a technothriller called Déjà Vu, was published to critical acclaim in 2005. This blog shoots the writerly breeze on upcoming projects, marketing, and anything else writing-related that springs to mind.
[Photo copyright (c) Mimika Cooney 2004.] I'm a British writer who recently published his first book to critical acclaim. As well as being a writer, I'm an Associate Lecturer in psychological research methods at the Open University, an Associate Tutor at Canterbury Christ Church University and Psychology Section Editor for Intute, a UK higher education information and research service. Say howdy via ian_hocking (at) uk2.net.
Season's greetings, one and all. I hope you're enjoying a well-earned lazy day in front of the telly... Not everyone celebrates Christmas, of course, so Happy Perfectly Ordinary Day to those who don't. One such is my mate Nagarajan, in whose company I served as sous chef on Christmas Eve as he cooked the best curry in the world. Cheers!
Over on Scott Pack's blog, Scott makes a confession or two about aspects of our glorious culture of which he is gloriously ignorant. He invites other bloggers to do the same, so here goes.
Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Kingsley Amis, Valdimir Nabokov, Luis le Borges, Katsuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey, David Eggers, Zadie Smith and Leo Tolstoy.
OK, so this one has nothing to do with literature, but my knowledge of bird species - and Eureopean flora and fauna in general - is equal to my knowledge quark hopping in the subatomic realm. When I see a bird, I typically classify it as a bird, to the amusement of my girlfriend.
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If I could go back in time to 1999 and meet myself on the day I started writing Déjà Vu, I'd say, "Ha! You fool." Then I would yip off about England winning the ashes and tell my former self to get gambling.
Then I would say: "But enough about financial reward. See that book you're writing? Yes, the one that's currently ten words plus three hundred pages of white space. Before it's published, you'll end up rewriting it about ten times. Seriously. Think about it. Ten. Times. That's over half a million words. Still feel all artistic and creative? Sap!"
My younger self would reply, "But I'm writing it really carefully! This'll be just like English lessons in school - straight As, easy peasy. I'll probably have a literary agent before the Millennium Bug hits."
I will then slap my younger self upside the head. "Belt up and get ready for a high-speed reality impact. Oh, and get a haircut."
Ever read that poem, When I was one and twenty? Here I am, in the year 2006 (almost 2007), repointing the brickwork on the latest towering work of genius begat from Hocking's brain. It was 120,000 words when I finished the first draft.
"Excellent," I said in the mirror as the draft was printing. "Thank goodness I'm so much more mature as a writer; lucky me that my prose now borders on poetry and my characters are as memorable as Dickens's. I'll hardly have to rewrite it all! I'd better practice my rejection speech for the agents when they start to call."
Buckle up, Hocking.
This morning, three quarters of the way through the draft, I read the following sentence:
Like a fever, her indecision broke.
Like a fever? Like a fever? In which respect? Did it involve dribbling? Hot milk and honey? A day spent listening to Radio Four?
Never mind the clichés and the claptrap that tells the reader exactly what he or she should be thinking. Let me find an example...oh dear, this one appeared within two clicks:
Kirby switched his reins left and right of the horse's nape, Western style. Horse sweat foamed at his knees.
Horse sweat foamed at his knees? That's up there with Hemingway. It's sharp-as-a-tack important to make that clear, in case the reader thinks that it's camel sweat and gets all confused.
Of course, there are some bits that are less shit than others. Here's one that's perhaps only one step or two from its final shape:
Hrafn held the torchlight on Shaw. He could have both men arrested and let others unpick the threads of their involvement. But the seven letters had not faded from his concern. S, T, E, N, D, E, C. The CVR bus: sabotaged. The landing gear: undeployed. He let his mind walk the curves of a 737-800, feel the rivets, the fluid forces of wind, the cracks of overspeed, and the insistence of a question for its answer.
Well, to be serious for a moment, I'm not overly concerned for the manuscript. As I maraud its pages, my scorched earth policy on crappy sentences should do the trick, eventually. But it's enlightening to note how happy I was with the manuscript after that first draft. Certain that I had learned so much from writing Déjà Vu (and another novel in between, which is currently being read by friends). I have learned a great deal...but you don't get to write a good book in one sitting.
Writing is rewriting. And so to work!
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Over the past weeks, I've been wallowing in a trough of poor fiction. You know how it goes. You get stuck reading a book (or five) that you feel you must finish, but - past the point of no return, which is about half way through for me - the book becomes more effort than entertainment. I get terribly worried during such periods. I find myself listening to podcasts over breakfast instead of reading, and then I wonder if I'll ever find a captivating book again. Well, I've kept myself going through this latest pall by the thought that, on the table next to my bed, is a copy of No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Having trudged through a couple of so-so books, I've now devoured my reward.
In case you haven't heard of him, McCarthy is a 'recluse'. (This is a word used by the media to describe a person who won't come out to play when they ring the doorbell.) He's a southern American writer in his early seventies, and if I had to name the ten best writers I've read, McCarthy would be included. His style is bizarrely similar to Hemingway and Faulkner (I say 'bizarrely' because Faulkner and Hemingway are almost polar opposites in their styles; as they used to tell each other, rather bitchily).
Anyway, I didn't write this post to sing McCarthy's praises, because there are enough people doing that. I wanted to share with you that feeling of 'pseudo-plagiarism'. If plagiarism is the appropriation of another's work without permission or derivation, pseudo-plagiarism is when one of your own ideas (that you've come up with independently) appears, by coincidence, in another's work. It's a bit like the eye, which has evolved not just once but several times, in a number of unrelated species. (As an aside, I always snigger a little when I read that believers in Intelligent Design cite the eye as an example of a mechanism so perfect that it could not have evolved; in fact, the eye has a number of features that suggests its designer screwed up, one of which being the placement of blood vessels between light and light receptors on the retina.)
...Anyway, the villain in McCarthy's novel is a psychopath. In my novel, Flashback, the killer is a psychopath. So far so ordinary. But McCarthy's villain is given to spouting monologues on the nature of chance before he kills his victims. Er, so does mine. McCarthy's villain offers freedom to a victim if the victim can correctly judge the outcome of a coin toss. Check, mine too. McCarthy's villain is constantly referred to as a ghost. My villain's codename is Ghost. Both villains are southern American. OK, so the overlap isn't total, but it was shock to read the coin-tossing scene after I'd noted the earlier similarities.
Could this mean that my book will be as good as No Country for Old Men? I doubt it. NCFOM is a work of genius. McCarthy has clearly been hanging around a crossroads at midnght, waiting for the Devil.
Hell, I might do the same.
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Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway, Faulkner, No Country for Old Men, Flashback
In an exciting twist, my previous post has generated controversy. Yes, I do indeed stand up at the computer. Here's another pic to prove this craziness. In case you didn't know already, you are looking at a Jerker.
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Debra Hamel recently published a picture of her Subterranean Lair(TM), and invited other bloggers to post images of theirs. I don't know about you, but I'm always mildly curious about the way people set up their offices/cubby holes. So here's my effort. I spend my working week staring at this (don't be shocked, but I do stand as I work):
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