This Writing Life

It’s over at BigAl’s Books and Pals.

Déjà Vu is a science fiction novel set in the fairly near future, and it introduces technology that I can already see myself using and keeping in my pocket. I found the mechanical wonders a lot of fun, and I think the characters are well-drawn, as one might expect from a psychologist who writes novels. There were twists and turns, surprises and character shifts. On the whole, I found this a well-crafted, interesting tale of technology and hot pursuit.

Last Wednesday found your digital correspondent in Exeter, sitting in the garden of a German friend. He complimented me on the prose style of my second novel, Flashback – lovely – before dropping this bombshell: “Of course, there are…well, a few typos in the German phrases.”

“Oh? Man with one ‘n’, that kind of thing?”

My friend made a wounded, apologetic sound.

I gagged on my Campari.

It turns out that the German phrases in Flashback are not the nuanced, native- checked wonders that I had remembered putting the book. They are, in fact, monstrosities spawned of the half-remembered, vestigial foreign-language centres of Hocking’s brain. During drafting, stage one was the “shoot German from the hip” method. This produced sentences like the following (spoken by a man after a life-or-death struggle):

“Ist er Todt?”

Stage two – which would have involved checking this with a native German speaker, such as the one I regularly have breakfast with – never happened. I must have been re-routed before I got to that bit of the flowchart. Stage two would have corrected the above to:

“Ist er tot?”

In other words, the character would have gasped “Is he dead?” instead of “Is he called Todt?”

I will not deny that the original, incorrect version seriously weakened the dramatic tone of that scene for readers who understand German.

Possibly apropos of this, sales for Flashback in the German Kindle store have been disappointingly flat.

Now, reader, there was a time when I could speak foreign tolerably – the twenty minutes or so of my GCSE French aural exam. Immediately afterwards, this information was jettisoned with a little ‘pfft’ sound similar to that accompanying the release of waste matter from a spaceship. In my defence, I have picked up some German over a series of somewhat cryptic Christmases in Bavaria; however, the greater part of my conversations involved me repeating Monty Python jokes or lines from Dinner For One.

I do like foreign words; and I just came across this Guardian article, Say ‘non’ to phrasebook foreign language in fiction, by Daniel Kalder. Here’s a quote:

On the whole though the practice of leaving foreign words untranslated in a text is symptomatic of poor writing- shoddy; lazy; it’s a cheap bus ticket to bogus exoticism. It signals to the reader that the author does not know the culture he is describing very well, or otherwise completely ordinary words would not rattle around in his consciousness demanding to be inscribed in italics so they really stand out. “Look, look at me! Look at me now! I know the German word for attention is achtung! See how profound my grip of German culture is?”

Putting my academic hat on for a moment (it’s suede with leather patches), the distinction between English and foreign words is a difficult and perhaps pointless one to make. The English language is rather like a portly child released in the direction of a buffet following a period of food deprivation and exposure to Saturday morning TV adverts for sugary snacks. The portly child tastes everything; and the things he hasn’t tasted will be fingered to such an extent that other, svelter languages will smile politely and say they’ve already eaten.

Shoddy, Mr Kalder? Lazy? Dogmatic bollocks, sir. Hemingway dropped foreign speak into his prose a great deal. So does Cormac McCarthy. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for moi.

Brace yourself for an illustrative quote from Flashback (note that the original italics aren’t rendered here):

As the bus came parallel to the Lancastrian, Cory saw sunlight flicker down each of her twenty-five silver yards. Her engines were loud and blaring. Just fore of the cockpit were the words ‘Star Dust’. Her raised nose was open. A ramp led to the gap, through which ground staff passed sacks of mail. There was a crewman visible inside the cockpit. He waved to the man in charge of the chock cable. The man waved back, then indicated the approaching bus with a tick of the head. Cory watched this exchange and envied its camaraderie. Never more intense was the feeling of being shanghaied. He was isolated from the good people at Project Deja Vu, among whom he had been a favoured son.

Miss Evans parked upwind of the idling engines. She slipped from the vehicle to station herself by the wing. The passenger door was a rounded rectangle in the fuselage covered by the G of the aircraft’s huge registration code, G-AGWH. The door opened and a uniformed officer emerged.

‘Please approach First Officer Cook directly, ladies and gentlemen,’ called Miss Evans.

‘Zu viele Koche,’ muttered Harald Pagh, elbowing Cory. ‘Sie verderben die Suppe. Mr Atalah, don’t you agree that too many Cooks spoil the broth? You have a similar idiom in Arabic, of course.’

‘I am Chilean, Mr Pagh,’ said Atalah. His coat whipped in the propeller draught and he fussed with the hem. ‘We do have a proverb about cooking, however. Nunca defeque mas de lo que come.’

Pagh looked at Cory. ‘What did he say?’

”Never shit more than you eat’.’

Pagh gasped, then erupted in laughter that rivalled the Lancastrian’s engines for volume. ‘Is that so, Mr Atalah?’

‘You had that coming,’ said Jack Gooderham.

‘A pen, Jack! It might prove profitable.’

I’d argue for legitimate use in this excerpt. I’m not showing off (any more than writing is already a showing off) but using foreign malarkey to create tone, communicate something to the reader, and ultimately engage them.

Arguing against ‘a bit of the foreign’ reminds me of those readers who suffer brain infarctions when they see a verb other than ‘said’ use to indicate that someone has spoken. ‘Replied’, ‘responded’, ‘scoffed’ et al. are verboten.

M’comrade Ben Johncock – author of, among other things, The Importance of Being Benjamin – asked me a Bookish Half Dozen questions a little while ago, and he’s now published the result.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t like Life of Pi.

Another interesting piece in The Guardian about self publishing (this is the term they’re applying to independent ebook publication) by Alison Flood.

This caught my eye:

“Publishing has always been a quasi-monopoly built on the lock publishers had on paper distribution. Digital distribution has broken that lock, but legacy publishers are still behaving as though they have monopoly power,” believes Eisler. “They’re running their business with two general imperatives in mind: (i) maintain the primacy of paper (in significant part, by delaying the release of digital books and pricing them too high); and (ii) offer punitive financial, creative, and other terms to authors. Or, to put it another way, publishers are currently running their business in a way that punishes both their end-user customers (readers) and their providers (authors). This was sustainable when publishers faced no meaningful competition. They do now, and will have to adapt or die, because yes, more and more authors are eschewing the legacy model in favour of self-publishing and in favour of the emerging Amazon hybrid model.”

I, and many others, have commented on the article. Brace yourself for the somewhat arrogant mode, but I’m responding to some counter-independent comments. It runs:

Interesting article. I like the data (indeed, I’ve blogged on Scott Pack’s blog ‘Me and My Big Mouth’ a couple of times about my own ebook publishing experiences, where I’ve tried to be transparent about my sales).

Whether ebooks will be good for the publishing industry is a moot point. It is certainly good for me. In my case, my first book was published by a small press and went nowhere because, back then (in 2005!), you had to get your book into a highstreet bookseller or otherwise die on your arse. Over the years since then, I’ve had countless agents and publishers rave about my work and then mutter something about marketing/categorisation/effort and not publish it. Clearly they thought it was not the bother. I disagree, and I’ve now sold more than three thousand copies since March.

Again, it’s a moot point whether this is good for publishing. I will be forever indebted to Amazon, who manufactured and pushed the Kindle when everyone (including me, at first) was pouring scorn on it. They’ve given me the chance to have people read my work. That was never going to happen with UK publishers.

Are my self published books crap? Quite possibly, but I don’t think so. Both were professionally edited and both have good covers (the first my own, the second produced by a professional). Both books have mean ratings greater than 4 on Amazon. But, more than this, dozens of people a day are downloading my books; a large percentage of them will be reading them.

That’s the revolution: being able, as an artist, to reach the end point of the creative process.

Up the workers.

Worth a complete read, I think. But this paragraph struck me as interesting:

Ask yourself this. If someone offered you a half-million dollars today as a one-time payment, or $50,000 a year for the rest of your life, which would you take? Assuming you weren’t in the middle of a financial emergency and expected to live longer than a decade, you’d be better off with the annuity. And that’s the difference between legacy publishing and indie.

Here’s the article.

You’ve probably noticed that J K Rowling has announced a new website called Pottermore. As far as I can make out from the video embedded on that site, it’s somewhat in the Star Wars: Galaxies mould. I got a whiff of Willy Wonka from the video, but that might be my office needing a clean.

Rather more interesting for me, with my ‘independent writer’ hat on, are the comments generated by an article in the Bookseller, J K Rowling to take Potter digital.

What is clear…is that the digital content will be published under the imprint Pottermore Publishing, rather than by her print publisher Bloomsbury, which does not own the digital rights.

Actually, I’m not sure this is clear. As comment Peter Cox points out:

JK Rowling has confirmed that she will release paid-for e-book versions of her incredibly successful Harry Potter books from her new website Pottermore “in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide”.

Whether the ebooks will, or will not, involve her physical-book publishers, my eye is drawn to those commenters who believe that when digital rights revert to the author (or stay with them because they are unsold), the publisher should retain a percentage of the sales because the publisher helped to edit the book.

Both viewpoints are justifiable: The author can reasonably claim that if the publisher wants the digital rights, they can pay for them. The publisher, by contrast, might argue that the text of the finished product is a composite of the author’s work and the editors who helped her render it.

Morally, should Bloomsbury be rewarded to helping to edit the book?

Commenter Peter Cox writes:

Without [Bloomsbury’s] clever marketing there would be no Pottermore launch today; it stands on their shoulders.

That’s a strong claim. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Bloomsbury significantly contributed beyond the usual ‘background noise’ publicity that minor, new books get.

I do wonder how much one would credit an editor in a work of prose. I certainly include the names of my two editors – Aliya Whiteley and Clare Christian – prominently in my books. The idea that they are co-writing the book is a tricky one. Let’s say I suggest to a painter that a particular viewpoint might make a nice sketch. Did I produce the sketch? Hardly.

This does make me wonder, however. I think you’d see some commonalities between books that have been edited by a particular individual, much as you’d see commonalities between music albums and their producers. But producers aren’t in the band. Only the band are in the band.

Jesus, I hate Dobby.

Just sayin’.

A couple of months back I tried to publish Déjà Vu for iBooks via Lulu. It didn’t work so I gave up in disgust. Then I tried to publish it with Smashwords. It didn’t work there, either, so I gave up in disgust.

All the more perplexing for me, then, that there are now two editions of Déjà Vu available for iBooks. One published by Lulu, of course, and one published by Smashwords – bien sur.

It’s twice the fun! And both are 45p rather than the Kindle price of 70p.

If you’re going to buy a copy, please get the Lulu one. I was able to manually control its formatting, so it looks as I intended it to look. The Smashwords one is the product of an automated formatter, and looks rubbish.

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.

What’s it like developing a cover for a book? Well, there’s the cheap option – Déjà Vu – and then there’s the expensive one – Flashback.

I talk about both over at Me and My Big Mouth, the blog of Scott Pack.

Now, do you need to spend this kind money to publish your book? Difficult to say. One might argue that £1000-plus is taking the enterprise into what used to be known as ‘vanity publishing’ territory – i.e. a con targeting the vulnerable.

Part two of my interview Aliya Whiteley is now up on her website. More mots bon from me.

A: When do you feel satisfied that you’ve done enough research?

I: I don’t think I’ve ever felt satisfied with research. There’s always something that you’ve handled wrong. With specific regard to a novel, where you’re dealing with the representation of lived experience, there’s no way everything is going to ring true. A phrase might be wrong; or a train line that you thought was there in 1904 wasn’t built until 1910, or some such. I’d go as far as to say that if I ever had that feeling of satisfaction, I’d be losing my grip on reality.