Category Archives: writing

Writing ‘Red Star Falling’: Part Three

the writing process, writing

I heard back from my editor yes­ter­day. He’ll be tak­ing a look at my final­ised manu­script on the bank hol­i­day week­end (next week). Ahead of those edits, won­der­ing what they might be, I thought it would be use­ful to post another instal­ment of my writ­ing journal.

In the last excerpt, I had fin­ished the first draft of the story, which came in at 15,000 words. I next turned to the prob­lem of deal­ing with an editor.

Thursday, 4th April

For my next trick, I’ve been in con­tact with an editor. A few things are rolling around my head on this sub­ject. First of all, the cost. It’s expensive.

As I’m going to pub­lish this short story (call­ing it a novella, now!) to the Amazon Kindle—i.e., in elec­tronic format—it needs to be in good shape. That means edit­ing. What does an editor do? Well, there are dif­fer­ent types of edit­ing. There’s noth­ing about these types that a writer can’t do alone (indeed, many writers edit the work of oth­ers, too), but they usu­ally find it dif­fi­cult because they lack per­spect­ive. The editor gives a kind of ‘san­ity check’. They work as a pro­fes­sional, exper­i­enced sound­ing board. I liken them to record pro­du­cers. They don’t fun­da­ment­ally change the text itself, but they lend it a cer­tain per­spect­ive that can be help­ful. They sug­gest dele­tions, addi­tions, and so on.

Is it worth it? Undoubtedly. As a writer, I feel it’s my duty to get my work into the best shape pos­sible. If my story were a boxer, this would be about hir­ing the best trainer.

Friday, 5th April

It’s a struggle to make the story as alive as it can be; what is the best way of present­ing it?

I’ll need to increase the ten­sion in cer­tain parts. I’ll prob­ably do this by set­ting the char­ac­ters against one another rather more. The final scene, in par­tic­u­lar, is a bit too friendly.

I go on to write:

There’s a char­ac­ter I’ll prob­ably delete, and another I need to be very care­ful about. His iden­tity is

(Redacted.)

For that [redac­ted] to work, his motiv­a­tions need to seem con­sist­ent dur­ing the ini­tial read (when the reader thinks [redac­ted]) and also when the reader goes back over their memory of his actions and thinks, ‘Aha!’ My model for this ‘Aha!’ moment is the reveal at the end of The Usual Suspects. That is to say that I aspire to cre­ate the same effect.

Good luck with that.

During this stage, the story tends to dog my thoughts and give rise to that faraway look that friends often com­ment on. The story is a multi-piece jig­saw puzzle where I’m allowed to change the size of the pieces as well as their arrange­ments. There’s no way this can hap­pen con­sciously. You have to let your uncon­scious percolate.

One more thing is hap­pen­ing. As I become more famil­iar with the story—dream about it, pon­der about it dur­ing idle moments—I think of cer­tain meta­phor­ical con­nec­tions that could be made. For instance, I’ve decided that Saskia should be ‘awoken’ at the begin­ning of the story by a vase of flowers fall­ing over. Not entirely sure, at this stage, whether the flowers should be red or white. Anyway, it com­ple­ments the end­ing of the story, where [redacted].

Sunday, 28th April

I often recall some­thing that Steve Jobs said about design­ing a product. Good design, he claimed, is about leav­ing things out. By elim­in­at­ing what is not great, you leave the great bits. I’m often reminded of this when I read stu­dent work, like an essay. I’ll look at a para­graph and think, ‘You should have left that out,’ because the other para­graphs were writ­ten at the top of your game; they work well. Only leave in the stuff that works well. If some­thing doesn’t work—a char­ac­ter, scene, metaphor—then you can try to fix it, but must always remem­ber that dele­tion is also a fix.

Structurally, I’ve decided not to include some flash­backs (of the future, where the main char­ac­ter comes from). This should give the story a tighter, more focused feel. You can’t have too much focus.

I’m aim­ing for this story to work in the same way that a third act works.

The final draft was 20,000 words. That’s the ver­sion I sent to the editor.

The Next Big Thing

writing

I’ve been meme-slapped by m’colleague Roger Morris, writer of the Porfiry Petrovich mys­ter­ies and other enter­tain­ments, includ­ing one of my favour­ite books of a few years back, Taking Comfort. I have to answer ten ques­tions in ten minutes about my cur­rent book. It’s very cur­rent indeed, as I’m plan­ning to release it on the 21st December.

1) What is the work­ing title of your next book?

The Amber Rooms. I went through a few dif­fer­ent titles before I arrived at that one. My favour­ite was the St Petersburg Paradox (which is a conun­drum drawn from prob­ab­il­ity theory).

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I hon­estly don’t remem­ber. I’ve always wanted to write a novel about Russia, and there are ele­ments of Russia scattered here and there through­out both Déjà Vu and Flashback. I have a feel­ing that Russia will fea­ture again in future nov­els, if they’re written.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

It’s sci­ence fic­tion, prob­ably steam punk. Historical sci­ence fic­tion might be a bet­ter term. If I actu­ally had time to read any­thing these days, I’d have a sharper idea of the genre.

4) What act­ors would you choose to play the part of your char­ac­ters in a movie rendition?

Saskia Brandt could be played by Franka Potente, Alexandra Maria Lara, or Olivia Wilde. Kamo: Gael García Bernal. Stalin: Jake Gyllenhaal. Ego: Robert De Niro.

5) What is the one sen­tence syn­op­sis of your book?

Time trav­el­ler Saskia Brandt is trapped in Russia in 1908, try­ing to get home, but she’s stolen a great deal of money that belongs to the Bolshevik Party. They want it back.

6) Will your book be self-published or rep­res­en­ted by an agency?

It’s self-published.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About nine months, but that the was second or third attempt. I got about 10% into two sim­ilar nov­els before I real­ised they weren’t working.

8) What other books would you com­pare this story to within your genre?

I can only think of The Man in the High Castle.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The main char­ac­ter, Saskia.

10) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

During the story, Saskia stays in a house that is mod­elled on the St Petersburg home of Prince Felix Yusupov, who con­spired to murder Rasputin.

I have to nom­in­ate three more people, so how’s about comedy-crime-scifi-horror-nonfic writer Aliya Whiteley, scifi nov­el­ist Stephen Sweeney, and tech­no­thriller (and now Kindle best-seller) Michael Stephen Fuchs. (Blast, it looks as though Aliya’s already been in the meme-wash. Check out her Next Big Thing here.)

Where Am I? Readers, Progress, and Free Books

writing,

The Amber Rooms

This morn­ing, I received an email beginning:

Well, it’s 2.00 in the morn­ing and I’ve just fin­ished your book.

The email made me laugh out loud, and I reflec­ted that it’s con­sid­er­ably easier to write these days in the know­ledge that people might want to read the final product.

This cor­res­pond­ent raised an issue. Am I still retired from writ­ing? I thought I’d update this blog with the answer. As usual, I’ll try to avoid obfuscation.

I worked with my agent on an updated ver­sion of Déjà Vu over the sum­mer. (With her per­mis­sion, I used this text to revise to the ebook, so it’s effect­ively a new edi­tion.) She then sent the book to vari­ous pub­lish­ers. As is now becom­ing typ­ical, I had pos­it­ive com­ments from all of them, but no bites. There’s a small chance that one might come back to us at this point, but I’m not hold­ing my breath.

Tracking my sales is becom­ing dif­fi­cult because some income is through Amazon’s lend­ing pro­gramme (US-only). As a rough guide, I’ve sold about 16,000 books through the Kindle, and about the same num­ber again (I think) has gone in free promotions.

I’m still writ­ing. My goal is to fin­ish a final draft of The Amber Rooms but the end of October and pass this to my agent. She’s prom­ised to edit it through­out November (though I’ve just real­ised that I haven’t men­tioned the length of the length, which is about double Déjà Vu), and I’d like to release it for Xmas. The pic­ture at the head of this post is the latest ver­sion. What do you think?

I heard a stat­istic a couple of years back that aca­dem­ics top the UK chart for unpaid over­time. Whether or not that’s still true, my writ­ing is very squeezed at the moment. It’s get­ting harder to sit down at a com­puter after a day’s work. I’m pretty con­fid­ent I can fin­ish off The Amber Rooms by then, but there’s a chance it might fin­ish me first.

Under the aus­pice of Thirst eDi­tions, a writerly con­glom­er­a­tion and child of Matt F Curran’s brain, I’ve just pub­lished a short book that exam­ines some of the philo­soph­ical issues that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence research­ers need to address. It’s writ­ten for under­gradu­ate psy­cho­lo­gists but the lay reader should enjoy it. If you’re intrigued about the extent to which Saskia Brandt is human, knock your­self out with Down to the Wire: A Short Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, I’ve made Déjà Vu, Flashback, and Proper Job free for the next five days. There’s no scheme behind this decision other than the nat­ural cycle of the Kindle pro­mo­tions mech­an­ism for self-published authors; essen­tially, you have five days of free offer for every ninety, and I’m still in the busi­ness of get­ting my books read. I’m plan­ning to make them free again at Christmas, partly to coin­cide with the launch of the Amber Rooms, and partly because it’s Christmas and I want to bring down everyone’s mood with tales of my heroine trapped in time.

My Desktop

prouctivity, writing

[See the lar­ger pic­ture]

I’m fas­cin­ated by the series My Desktop, which is a Guardian column by my friend and writer-abite-tine Ben Johncock. The series fea­tures a snap­shot of a writer’s com­puter screen, which allows the word-botherer in ques­tion to riff on their work­flow and habit; some­thing all writers itch to know about, I would suggest.

Here’s mine. You’ll notice that I use a Mac. This is OS X Lion run­ning on my dad’s old Mac Mini. My writ­ing is done within a sep­ar­ate user account. (I have an exact duplic­ate of this account on my MacBook Air.) This means that (i) I can set it up in a way par­tic­u­lar to my wordly habits (it does not, for instance, have a con­figured email cli­ent) and (ii) it provides an uncluttered envir­on­ment that I can rely upon, no mat­ter how untidy my main user account gets. The back­ground was a mono­chrome grey until last year, when I changed it to a more friendly, phys­ical grey. The text ‘Be ori­ginal’ is a reminder that I would like to write books that stand apart from oth­ers. The image itself comes from InterfaceLift.

At the bot­tom of the screen, in the OS X dock, there are no ‘pinned’ applic­a­tions. Minimally does it. The blue com­pass is the Mac browser, Safari. I keep this run­ning for quick checks of Google maps, Wikipedia, and vari­ous pages rel­ev­ant to the cur­rent work. I try to observe Stephen King’s excel­lent rule that you write with the door closed and edit with the door open, so Safari gets an out­ing only when I’m edit­ing, as I am now. Otherwise, I enter [’TC’] in the text if I feel that I need to insert some­thing that I can’t at that moment. ‘TC’ means ‘to come’. For instance, I can never remem­ber the full name of one of my char­ac­ters, so I often write ‘[TC Pasha’s name’], which I’ll replace with Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov later.

The pen-and-ink icon is Pages, where I keep the text of the work. I’ve tried writ­ing in applic­a­tions like Byword (where I’m writ­ing this post) but I prefer the feel of Pages. To the right of this is a strange, double-paned icon: OmniFocus.

OmniFocus is a task-manager applic­a­tion that I find use­ful for main­tain­ing lists of edits. Although I haven’t opened it for a few weeks, it was great for work­ing through the edits sug­ges­ted by my agent. I cat­egor­ised them as major or minor and kept a record of what I’d done.

On the left of the desktop, in the win­dow called ‘Amber Rooms 101′, you’ll see three files. One of these is my cur­rent draft. Another is the pre­vi­ous draft, which I’m ran­sack­ing. The third is a text file con­tain­ing notes about what I want to do with the cur­rent draft. This folder is actu­ally a search. It’s look­ing for ‘AR101’ in the title of the file. When I move onto another draft, I’ll cre­ate new files with ‘AR102’.

In the Finder bar at the top, you’ll see a small blue box icon. This is DropBox. I use it to syn­chron­ise files between my machines. I have a Writing folder access­ible to this user account, but my other DropBox files are hidden.

Music? Never listen to it dur­ing writ­ing or edit­ing. The only other things on my phys­ical desk, at which I stand rather than sit, are late-nineteenth-century maps of St Petersburg.

The Cabinet of Curiosities

writing

Some cen­tur­ies ago, it was com­mon for wealthy indi­vidu­als to indulge their appet­ite for the strange using so-called cab­in­ets of curi­os­it­ies. These were not cab­in­ets in the mod­ern sense. They were rooms arranged with arte­facts for which cat­egor­ies had yet to be inven­ted. Narwhal horns. Fossils.

There is a sense in which my cur­rent novel, The Amber Rooms (Saskia Brandt 3), is a cab­inet of curi­os­it­ies. Even now, I can­not be sure how the ele­ments will cohere. They simply interest me. There is the Amber room itself. There are ele­ments of Soviet pro­pa­ganda, such as songs ded­ic­ated to Josef Stalin. To this list I could add another six or seven ele­ments; how­ever, to do so here would spoil the book.

From Wikipedia:

The jux­ta­pos­i­tion of such dis­par­ate objects, accord­ing to Horst Bredekamp’s ana­lysis (Bredekamp 1995) encour­aged com­par­is­ons, find­ing ana­lo­gies and par­al­lels and favoured the cul­tural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of end­lessly trans­form­ing nat­ural his­tory and a his­tor­ical per­spect­ive that led in the sev­en­teenth cen­tury to the germs of a sci­entific view of reality.

I am cur­rently two thirds of the way through the final draft. In six weeks or so, it will be com­plete. The meta­phors at the sen­tence level, scene level, and the level of the story itself will have come together. Their jux­ta­pos­i­tions will be set. It might sur­prise you that I do not know for sure when this will hap­pen, or even if. What is the book about? How does this qual­ity of ‘about­ness’ inform the plot? Which impres­sions will be left in the mind of the reader six months after the book is closed?

The curi­os­it­ies for my novel Déjà Vu made little sense to me at the close of the first draft. It was only later, months later, that I changed the research pro­ject of Jennifer Proctor from some­thing inter­est­ing but them­at­ic­ally irrel­ev­ant to time travel. That was the eureka moment for Déjà Vu. Curiosities, which I had been col­lect­ing for years, came together.

For Flashback, the eureka moment arrived early. I was read­ing a fairytale in which a char­ac­ter cut her fin­ger and fell into a bewitched sleep. Then I under­stood how the recon­struc­tion of memory uni­fied stor­ies of Saskia, Cory, and Jem.

Right now, whenever I open the file con­tain­ing the latest draft of the Amber Rooms, I feel like an 18th-century man of inde­pend­ent means brows­ing his cab­inet of curi­os­it­ies. Why are these things inter­est­ing? How should a vis­itor be intro­duced to them? What are they doing in this room any­way? Back to the basic ques­tion: why are these things interesting?

★ The Amber Rooms: Thoughts on the First Draft

story structure, style, writing,

Yesterday even­ing, I expor­ted the first draft of The Amber Rooms — Saskia Brandt novel three — to my Kindle with a plan to read it quickly and estab­lish how much work it needs prior to pub­lic­a­tion. I have, delib­er­ately, com­mit­ted myself to a 2012 pub­lic­a­tion date for the book. This gives me space to re-draft three (maybe four) times, on the assump­tion that a single draft­ing takes three or four months. (I’ll have the energy to work about half an hour, per­haps an hour, when I come home from the day job.)

What is a first draft? Hell, what’s a draft? Back in the day, when writers pro­duced long-hand manu­scripts and had them typed up peri­od­ic­ally, it made sense to think of each draft as a com­plete revi­sion of the last. Some writers — Ken Follett, I know, did this — would not even look at the pre­vi­ous draft when writ­ing the new.

We’re more advanced these days, of course. Our type­writers have Apple logos.

The Amber Rooms. Hmm.

I note that I aban­doned the novel, with a heavy heart at the indif­fer­ence of pub­lish­ers’ reac­tions to books one and two, in September 2008. Even then I had the idea that I was going to retire from writing.

The draft I’m read­ing is quite tightly writ­ten. The first half, I remem­ber, was revised when I came up with a cooler idea for a begin­ning about two thirds of the way through. I could prob­ably release it for the Kindle tomor­row and it would be work­able as a story. However, it has the poten­tial to be a much bet­ter novel than either Déjà Vu or Flashback.

So what’s good about it?

First, the lan­guage passes muster. There are no clichés and each sen­tence deserves to be there. I’m get­ting on for hav­ing writ­ten a mil­lion or so words of pub­lish­able fic­tion. By this point, Hemingway, Chandler et al. are now con­struct­ive rather than crit­ical ghosts. I find it easier to cre­ate and manip­u­late tone. I know when a slow­ing down of the nar­rat­ive works as a rest for the reader without sac­ri­fi­cing over­all pace — or, at least, I think I do.

Second, the story is reas­on­ably com­pel­ling. There are nuts and bolts to be tightened here and there, but each scene is a scene — that is, it advances the story — and the research (which is some­what more osten­ta­tious in this novel, as it is set in Russia, 1908) con­trib­utes to the milieu without dis­tract­ing from it.

So what’s bad?

Right now, the book is some­what ema­ci­ated. I’ve pared it down to essen­tial con­nect­ive tis­sue. While this gives it pace for the most part, there are one or two points — in par­tic­u­lar, an escape scene at the begin­ning of the novel — that are far too brief. It works too much like a mont­age, or notes for a novel.

Talking of mont­ages, I’m head­but­ting the ceil­ing of my tal­ent again: I find it dif­fi­cult to con­ceive of story bey­ond the con­fines of the medium that I’m most com­fort­able with. That medium is, para­dox­ic­ally, cinema, not lit­er­at­ure. Too often, I’m present­ing the story as shots and describ­ing beats with the eye of a cine­ma­to­grapher. I have to get away from this. It does make the story very read­able but I need to remem­ber the par­tic­u­lar advant­ages of the novel as a form. (I will be doing this later in the draft, as I settle down.)

One example is where our heroine, Saskia Brandt, arrives in St Petersburg pur­sued by three ‘watch­ers’ from the Tsarist secret police. She travels quickly from horse bus to trol­ley rather too much like Jason Bourne. And when I describe the moment she loses the last of her three watch­ers, whom she leaves hand­cuffed to a rail on the trol­ley, the fram­ing reads like a story­board. It’s effect­ive, prob­ably, but there is too much sleight of hand about the whole thing. Hemingway could do this without being super­fi­cial; I should be able to do it too, given time and thought.

Let’s get geeky: metaphor.

The meta­phor­ical lan­guage of the novel is often wonky in a first draft. When the book is fin­ished, and I have an idea of its iden­tity, I know which meta­phors are cor­rect and which are not. For instance, there is a meta­phor early on in the novel in which Saskia thinks of time passing through her hands like a rope, too fast to grip. I don’t know why this is a good meta­phor for this point; but it is. Other meta­phors are com­pletely wrong. An inab­il­ity to choose the cor­rect meta­phor is the hall­mark of a bad writer (or at least a writer who has sub­mit­ted a draft too early). One of the dif­fi­culties with select­ing the right meta­phor is that it can­not be done con­sciously (for me, any­way). It must be done ran­domly, a bit like Arthur Dent pulling out let­ters from the neo­lithic Scrabble bag in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They’ll get stead­ily more appropriate.

Looking back, the meta­phor­ical lan­guage of Déjà Vu and Flashback seems to revolve around mir­rors, blood, old wounds reopen­ing, iden­tity, and the con­nec­tion between help­ing someone and the phys­ical cost of that help (ampu­ta­tion; “Take my hand,” and so on).

As you can tell, I’m prob­ably more inter­ested in this stuff than the mech­an­ics of hav­ing the story work as a thriller. However, it must work as a thriller first or the meta­phor­ical brick­work will fall. That’s the job of the second draft — to get the plot work­ing. Third draft — plot plus meta­phor equals story. Four draft — finesse.

Maybe.

And, always there is the chance that the book doesn’t work at all; that it will die on stage. In a way, that makes it more excit­ing. Everything, abso­lutely everything, is on the line.

So I signed up to a Russian evening class, Comrade

writing, ,

Like you do.

Or rather, like I did. I’ve stopped going now because I was excep­tion­ally poor at form­ing even the simplest sentences.

Aliya Whiteley is — apart from being a great comedo-tagico-Ilfracombo nov­elista — study­ing for an MSc in Library and Information Management. As part of this, she inter­viewed me about the resources I used to help me research the third Saskia Brandt novel. (For those who aren’t keep­ing up, which often includes me, that’s the third one; Flashback is the second; Déjà Vu is the first.)

Can I ask — in the case of your last novel, where did you look to find the inform­a­tion you needed? So where did you go to learn a bit of Russian, read oral his­tor­ies, etc? How did you decide that was what you’d need to know?

For the Russian, I signed up for a local even­ing class. I stud­ied Russian for two years. I didn’t expect to learn it very well, but I felt ridicu­lous writ­ing a novel set in Russia without know­ing any­thing about the lan­guage. The oral his­tor­ies showed up on Amazon. The book was out of print — ‘Women Against the Tsar’, I believe it’s called — and described the lives of sev­eral women anarcho-bolsheviks in the lat­ter part of the nine­teenth cen­tury. Another source of inform­a­tion was the writer Roger Morris, who was in the pro­cess of writ­ing nov­els set in the same period of his­tory (though a little earlier). I spoke to him about oral his­tor­ies and sent him links to some websites…which reminds me, the web was a very use­ful sources of inform­a­tion. I popped into one or two for­ums related to Tsarist Russian mil­it­ary uni­forms to ask the experts ques­tions about mater­i­als, col­ours, etc. I also looked on mem­or­ab­ilia sites for clothes that had been owned by people in the time period of interest — these were very good qual­ity pic­tures with lav­ish descrip­tions includ­ing the cor­rect ter­min­o­logy (some­times in Russian as well as English), which is quite import­ant when writ­ing prose.

Is it ridicu­lous writ­ing about Russia without speak­ing the lan­guage? Try writ­ing about Russia without hav­ing set foot on Russian soil.

Feel free to check out the full inter­view. This is part one.

★ The End of the Beginning

psychology, publishing, writing

My, hasn’t time flown? I sat down to update my blog this after­noon cer­tain in the know­ledge that my last entry was about a month ago. It turns out I pub­lished my retire­ment speech in mid August.

I thought it would be worth­while provid­ing an update on my books. Several people have been kind enough to ask after them. As you know, I’m intend­ing to release them as free ebooks, but one or two prob­lems have cropped up in the course of mak­ing this hap­pen. The main issue is that releas­ing Deja Vu (orFlashback, or The Amber Rooms) for the Kindle — my pre­ferred ebook reader — seems to require a US bank account. That is, it requires a US bank account if I want the book to be the ebook store, which I do. Stephen J Sweeney has poin­ted me in the dir­ec­tion of a pos­sible ser­vice that might let me do this and keep the books free; I’ll get round to look­ing at that in the New Year.

One option is to leave the ebook files as naked links, here on my webpage, but I doubt most people would find their way here and have the tech­nical know-how to trans­fer the con­tent to their device. The store is still the best way to go.

Meanwhile, there are some­what irrit­at­ing defi­cien­cies in the file formats used by ebook read­ers and the vari­ous tools that a user can use to cre­ate them. To take one example, I used Apple Pages to cre­ate an ebook of Deja Vu and it rendered fine on the iBook applic­a­tion for the Apple iPad. Then Apple released an update to the applic­a­tion and sud­denly the ebook has extra line spaces. Go figure.

Am I writ­ing fic­tion? That would be telling. I cer­tainly have more time for blues gui­tar, learn­ing a bit of pro­gram­ming, and con­cen­trat­ing on my aca­demic career. Happy New Year to one — and, indeed, all.

★ And In The End

publishing, writing

What fol­lows is a very per­sonal post, for which I do not apo­lo­gise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though per­haps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sen­ti­mental. That said, it will be hon­est. I will write about some­thing that has been very import­ant to me since I was a wee scamp.

A long time ago — when I was an under­gradu­ate, fif­teen years back — I read an inter­view with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was liv­ing in a trailer and had so little money that the tele­phone was dis­con­nec­ted. The ori­ginal news about the pub­lic­a­tion of Carrie came via tele­gram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he ima­gine she wanted: a hair dryer.

Fifteen years ago, read­ing the inter­view with King, I already had two nov­els under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve writ­ten four more. These last — Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms — are quite good. Déjà Vu has been pub­lished and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

Someone wrote — King again, I think — that a writer is a per­son who will write no mat­ter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pen­cil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We — they — would want to play foot­ball if they were foot­ballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a work­shop, tools, and cus­tom­ers if they made fur­niture for a liv­ing; writers want to be read.

Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

For my part, I can­not write fic­tion these days. There are too many words unpub­lished behind me. To write a novel is to com­mit years of your life. Nobody wants to com­mit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the begin­ning, with a cer­tain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be pub­lished. Right now I do believe the books I’ve writ­ten are good. I believe that sec­tions, ele­ments, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excel­lent one and he would not be wast­ing his time with me oth­er­wise. The real­ity is that the pub­lish­ing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of sci­ence fic­tion thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people open­ing them next time.

What is to be gained by retire­ment? Why not take a break? These are ques­tions that my agent — who has been very sup­port­ive of my decision — has asked.

Since writ­ing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deep­en­ing dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the craft of writ­ing. This dis­il­lu­sion­ment is almost cer­tainly super­fi­cial. Much as I hate to write this, the feel­ing is prob­ably based on some­thing akin to jeal­ousy. It is not jeal­ousy per se. Rather, it is the feel­ing expressed by the sen­tence ‘I could do bet­ter than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or gen­er­ally below par pub­lished writ­ing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for some­thing (that is: read­ers) dimin­ishes to the point where I am barely pick­ing up a book. The pro­cess has become pain­ful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world trav­el­ling rolled into one. My writ­ing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of pois­on­ing the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two — lit­er­at­ure and the stuff on my hard drive — I choose literature.

My fifteen-year crack at a writ­ing career has had other con­sequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a super­mar­ket by a sulky teen­ager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she *does*. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sac­ri­fices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the bene­fit of see­ing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

This post is not meant to be a dol­lop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the cen­tury. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cash­ier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announ­cing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empir­ical evid­ence sug­gests that very few people who write fic­tion ser­i­ously ever ‘make it’ in the accep­ted sense. We only hear the stor­ies of the suc­cesses. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the pro­cess is more public.

A col­league said some­thing to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psy­cho­logy at the same uni­ver­sity, though his was the year below mine. This col­league is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a suc­cess of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, “Well, I’m sur­prised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.”

That startled me. Then I recalled sit­ting in Dave Earle’s advanced stat­ist­ics class and skim­ming over page after page of equa­tions, barely tak­ing them in, because I didn’t really *do* psy­cho­logy. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sit­ting pretty with a full-time com­pet­it­ive schol­ar­ship keep­ing me in pen and ink, not to men­tion another schol­ar­ship lined up to carry me through my PhD — and as the Chi-square con­trasts flowed before my eyes, I was more con­cerned with the open­ing para­graph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

Several years later, how­ever, it’s time to *do* psychology.

So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll con­tinue to tinker with my extant manu­scripts (not least to incor­por­ate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are com­plete, I’ll make them avail­able as print-on-demand books, prob­ably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writ­ing books for liv­ing became what I *did* for the next fif­teen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as an adult, I would, instead of shrug­ging in a mor­ose teen­agery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encour­age this ambi­tion in a young man, par­tic­u­larly when good English is such a trans­fer­rable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thou­sand words a day, rain or shine, and pro­duced vivid, good qual­ity, character-driven stor­ies that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his loc­a­tion (usu­ally Maine, USA), and dates between which he had writ­ten the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I rel­ished the pro­spect of those years.

In 2005, I read a short, hand­some review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown har­bour slapped me on the back. The theme of the even­ing was that this review marked a mile­stone on the way to some great, lit­er­ary city. Outwardly, I whole­heartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was hold­ing the high-water mark of what would serve as a my lit­er­ary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tire­less and fault­less in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to for­get my part­ner, Britta: she put up with all man­ner of con­sequences while I spent time cre­at­ing altern­at­ive real­it­ies. I never did get her that hair dryer.

Ian Hocking
This Writing Life
Canterbury, UK
2003–2010

Thoughts on the Dramatic Structure of Doctor Who

writing,

A few minutes ago, I fin­ished watch­ing the final epis­ode in this season’s Doctor Who, star­ring Matt Smith. A sat­is­fy­ing and clever end to a great story.

The show is an inter­est­ing one from a dra­matic stand­point: good fic­tion will usu­ally chart the jour­ney of a char­ac­ter along a line describ­ing his devel­op­ment. There should be a fun­da­mental, irre­vers­ible change between the char­ac­ter at the begin­ning of the story and the char­ac­ter at the end. This does not work for the Doctor. How do writers get around this? They sub­ject his com­pan­ions to peril; and they have his com­pan­ions undergo ‘growth’ on his behalf.

Not only this, but the stor­ies often struggle with the prob­lem of the ‘deus ex mach­ina’ — solu­tions to story prob­lems that arrive seem­ingly from out­side the story itself. In today’s epis­ode, it turns out that a prison box happened to have the abil­ity to recre­ate the entire uni­verse. As did the brain of the Doctor’s assist­ant, Amy Pond. This hap­pens rather too much, but, inter­est­ingly, does not appear to wound the story fatally. Indeed, these inter­ven­tions have almost become a trade­mark of the show.

It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare my own guesses about the dir­ec­tion of the show, pre-broadcast, to how the show turned out. This is fairly straight­for­ward because I wrote a spec­u­lat­ive script in January. Overall: pretty much on the money with regards Amy’s impend­ing mar­riage and the romantic rela­tion­ship between her and the Doctor; and wide of the mark in terms of her pro­fes­sion, which turned out to be a kisso­gram rather than a police officer (got that from a leaked set photo). Writing the script was an enjoy­able exer­cise, but some­thing I prob­ably won’t come back to, given that the plot of my story was very sim­ilar to The Beast Below.

[scrip­pet]
DOCTOR WHO AND THE DIAMONDS OF BLOOD

1 EXT. SPACE

FX: THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Bang! The sun is a bril­liant, white orb. We drift back and the sun dims. The EARTH swooshes past. The sun: dim­mer and dim­mer. We pass JUPITER, SATURN, URANUS until we slow down on the loom­ing, majestic, black disc of PLUTO. It is no brighter than a tomb­stone on a moon­lit night.

A series of SHOTS, over which we hear the NARRATOR; an old man, tired.

FX: SHOT ONE (PLUTONIAN MOUNTAINS)

…DISSOLVING TO:

FX: SHOT TWO (PLUTONIAN PLAINS)

…DISSOLVING TO:

FX: SHOT THREE (PLUTONIAN PLAINS 2)

NARRATOR
I am one of the ancients, born in the fires that marked Creation, to die alone in the ice cold dark­ness at the end of all things. I wander from galaxy to galaxy, from star to star. I am the last of my kind.

CUT TO:

2 EXT. ICY PLAIN ON PLUTO

NB All scenes on PLUTO take place at NIGHT.

FX: A BLACK PLAIN, WITH HINTS OF ROCK LIT BY MOONLIGHT. WE CAN’T SEE ANY STARS.

IN LONG SHOT ON THIS PLAIN: THE TARDIS MATERIALISES.

The WHITE LIGHT atop THE TARDIS throws a pale, stead­ily illu­min­a­tion for a few metres around it. We can­not, how­ever, see behind the TARDIS yet.

HOLD on THE TARDIS for a BEAT.

THE TARDIS opens. Softly.

THE DOCTOR steps out. He looks mis­chiev­ous, as though on the verge of a prank.

He walks onto the sur­face of PLUTO. His steps are comic tip-toes.

We see AMY stand­ing at the door to THE TARDIS, smiling.

THE DOCTOR turns to her. He puts a fin­ger to his LIPS.

THE DOCTOR removes A PIN from his pocket.

He holds it up to the light. Lets it scintillate.

He drops the PIN.

(DING!)

AMY
We’ve got the whole planet to ourselves?

AMY leaves THE TARDIS.

THE DOCTOR
It’s not actu­ally a planet. More of a plan­et­oid. Or a big, inhospitable -

AMY
Wait — we’re not going to suf­foc­ate, are we?

THE DOCTOR
The TARDIS is pro­ject­ing an envel­ope of oxy­gen, nitro­gen, and so on; the usual sus­pects. Fresh as an alpine meadow. Minus the cow pats, of course. That would be tak­ing verisimil­it­ude too far.

AMY
What should I be wearing?

THE DOCTOR has his back to AMY. She can’t see as he pro­duces NOT JUST ANY POCKET WATCH with a GLOWING DIAL.

THE DOCTOR
(looks at the watch)
AD 13 times 10 to the 4th?

AMY
What’s that?

THE DOCTOR
It’s a date.

AMY
What? This? Now?

THE DOCTOR
Of course. It wouldn’t be a date otherwise.

AMY
Well, I had no idea. You should have said earlier, in the TARDIS.

THE DOCTOR
Why would I? It wasn’t AD 13 times 10 to the 4th then.

AMY
You are so alien.

AMY walks across the sur­face of PLUTO away, cast­ing her eyes about.

AMY
So we’ve got a whole planet to ourselves?

THE DOCTOR
It’s not a -

AMY
Whatever it is, it’s dark.

THE DOCTOR
Not much sun­shine this far out. Plenty of peace and quiet, though. Over-rated, I feel. Give me a ker­fuffle any day of the week. Even malar­key. At shenanigins, I draw the line, obvi­ously, like any sens­ible person.

THE DOCTOR crouches to pick up the PIN. Something cap­tures his atten­tion on the ground.
AMY, absorbed by her own thoughts, looks up at the black sky.

AMY
Doctor?

THE DOCTOR’S POV: Lying on the sur­face are sev­eral DIAMONDS. He puts one in his mouth and bites.

THE DOCTOR
(con­tin­ues)
Diamonds? Well, that’s not right, is it?

AMY
Doctor, where are the stars?

THE DOCTOR
Hmm? Directly above your head, I shouldn’t won­der. No light pol­lu­tion on Pluto. Prepare your­self for the most beautiful -

THE DOCTOR looks up.

There’s noth­ing there. Just BLACKNESS.

AMY
Doctor, I think we’re being watched.

THE DOCTOR
Amy, I can assure you that there is noth­ing on this — well, to use the ori­ginal Greek for the wrong term — this ‘wan­derer’, apart from ourselves, the TARDIS -

In an INSTANT, the entire PLAIN is illu­min­ated in a hellish red light.

FX: We look up to see the under­side of a HUGE, SPHERICAL SPACESHIP. It’s con­vex base is about the size of the Millennium Dome. Unlike the Dome, it has a CIRCULAR HOLE in the middle. This is where the light comes from. The SPACESHIP has massive legs like a NASA lunar lander.

THE DOCTOR
(con­tinu­ing)
– and a very large, flash­ing, not to say wink­ing and blink­ing, spaceship.

THE DOCTOR — still crouch­ing — looks at AMY.

HIS POV: THE TARDIS is, we now see, perched on the EDGE of a MASSIVE SHAFT that has been sunk into the PLAIN. The OPENING is identical in size and shape to the HOLE in the base of the SPACESHIP.

THE DOCTOR
Of course, a space­ship on Pluto — that’s not unusual. Improbable, but not unusual. The real ques­tion is this.

He holds up a DIAMOND.

AMY
Blimey, you’re a fast mover for a nine-hundred-year-old.

THE DOCTOR looks at AMY, looks at the DIAMOND, looks DOWN — and real­ises that this might be cre­at­ing the wrong impression.

AMY looks at him. Is he serious?

THE DOCTOR
Ah, no. Listen. Me? No, no. Now look -

As the dialgoue con­tin­ues, their voices are drowned out by a RUMBLE that trans­forms into a DEAFENING ROAR, which builds as they talk:

AMY
– this is very nice and everything, and you’re prob­ably a great catch for a spe­cial lady who is, well, alien and…and likes to travel! Or even settle down and have…something with tentacles -

THE DOCTOR
– I didn’t mean that, I just meant there shouldn’t be any of these dia­monds on Pluto, that’s all, for the love of Omega. I’m tech­nic­ally mar­ried to a sac­red hand pup­pet on Ragaloos Six, any­way -
Suddenly, the GROUND begins to SHAKE.

PRAC: DUST ROLLS.

THE DOCTOR and AMY fall prop­erly to the ground and reach for each other.

PRAC: PIECES OF THE SPHERICAL SHIP — WIRING, A METAL PANEL — CLANG TO THE GROUND AROUND THEM.

THE DOCTOR
(roar­ing)
Back! To! The TARDIS!

AMY, hold­ing her ears, nods.

THEIR POV: The TARDIS.

They crawl along the ground.

REVERSE: Closer, closer to the TARDIS.

THEIR POV: THE TARDIS teeters on the edge of the ABYSS, then tips in!

THE DOCTOR and AMY look on in horror.

AMY
The TARDIS is indes­truct­ible, cor­rect? You’re always say­ing that.

THE DOCTOR
Yes, I am, aren’t I?

The PLUTOQUAKE stops.

THE DOCTOR stands up, pulling AMY upright too.

THE DOCTOR
(con­tinu­ing)
Let’s go.

He turns on his heel and walks away from the HOLE.

AMY
What about the TARDIS?

THE DOCTOR
What about her?

AMY
Can’t you just fish it out with it your sonic screw­driver or something?

THE DOCTOR stops.

THE DOCTOR
Fish her out with my sonic screwdriver?

AMY
It, her. I’m just…throwing out some ideas.

THE DOCTOR
Fish her out?

AMY
You’re the one who brought me here to what should have been the most serene, far-away, quiet place in the uni­verse but turns out, by the way, to be the loudest, scar­i­est, red­dest, bizarre alien court­ship ritual -

THE DOCTOR
(angrily)
You see that big hole in the spaceship?

AMY
I only said ‘fish it out’.

THE DOCTOR
(with airquotes)
It’s a ‘laser’. It hasn’t star­ted yet. This -
(points upwards without look­ing)
– is the pre-laser scan­ner that looks for weak­nesses in the rock before blast­ing it to pieces and since I’m sorry to say that my Nivea Factor Sixty is in the TARDIS, which is at the bot­tom of that shaft, I would very much like to watch the show from over that rise where view­ing will not be inter­rup­ted by such trivial incon­veni­ences as the both of us explod­ing into puffs of mostly carbon.

AMY allows her­self, frost­ily, to be tugged along.

THE DOCTOR
(to him­self)
’Fish it out.’

AMY looks wounded. Then -

PRAC: AMY’S FEET RISE FROM THE GROUND, PEDALING.

PRAC: AMY REACHING DOWN FOR THE DOCTOR.

PRAC: HE CLASPS HER HAND; FLOATS UP ALONGSIDE HER.

AMY
What’s happening?

THE DOCTOR
You’re the expert.

AMY
You mean we’re being fished-?

THE DOCTOR
Very very prob­ably. Hold on.

THE DOCTOR and AMY cling to each other as they waltz up into the belly of the SPACESHIP.

CUT TO TITLES

[/scrippet]