THOU SHALT NOT

Editors and agents - like everyone else - have their likes and dislikes, their enthusiasms and their prejudices. Some of these are longstanding, whilst some are fads. MiseryLit, for example. Or in the chicklit genre, any recent novel with the word ‘Wedding’ or ‘Shop’ in the title.

Apparently editors Don’t Like Books About The Media right now. Which is a bit of a bummer, since that’s my background and the background against which my novel is set. I’d read that so-called ‘glamorous’ settings appealed to readers. Only, it seems, if you’re writing about those who appear in front of the camera rather than working behind it. Same with the music business. Which is another bummer, as two of my characters are a musician and his manager. Oh, and writing. Yes - you guessed it: I have two writers in my book!

So, dear readers, I have compiled a list of ten Forbidden Subjects which I’ve heard, from various sources, it’s best to Avoid Writing About if you want to get an agent/be published. Please add a pinch - or a cellarful - of salt as required.

Thou Shalt Not:-

Write exclusively about older women
About 70% of the bookbuying public are middle aged women. Yet Transita – a publishing house set up to cater specifically for this age-group – aren’t accepting submissions any more, which doesn’t bode well. The received wisdom is that if you are going to have a middle-aged or older woman in your book, make sure there are a range of other-aged women in it as well.

Write about people who moan or are depressed
Characters must be interesting, feisty, spirited. Or, if they must moan, they should be funny about it. Think Bridget Jones. Readers don’t want to hear about people like themselves.

Write about what you know
This is a tricky one. Apparently if you write about what you know, it’s all too easy to be
self-indulgent and give the reader info-overload.

Write about what you don’t know
Also tricky. If you write about what you don’t know, you may risk doing too much research and, er, give the reader info-overload.

Write about disability
Interesting one. A participant on an MA course was recently told that people didn’t want to read about disability (he was blind).

Include a lot of internal processing or reflection
Thinking is OK in literary fiction, but not in commercial fiction.

Include Prologues
Or, if you do, best not to actually call it a Prologue.

Write accents
Tiring for the reader to try to decode – best to just hint at an accent in the rhythm of the speech.

Include song lyrics
Song lyrics cost money to clear – if they can be cleared at all – hence it’s better not to use them.

Write in present tense
There’s a divergence of opinion on this one – some editors apparently hate it. So is it worth risking their ire and rejection over a simple matter of tense?

I’ve done every single one of the above in my last novel. My characters are in their fifties, and one is mildly depressed. I’ve written about what I know (television and therapy) and about what I don’t (plastic surgery). One of my characters is blind. My characters tend to reflect on their lives. I have a prologue, a Scottish character, song lyrics (though I wrote them myself) and the novel is written in the present tense.

Hmm.

On the upside, it’s strangely liberating to have unknowingly committed so many crimes against fiction. On the downside, I wonder whether the themes of my new one – painting, magic and rebirth – will, by the time I complete it, be on that list of Things To Be Avoided…

Anyone want to add to the list?

In memoriam Ruth Vincent 1931-2009

At first I thought to skip my turn this month and ask one of the others on the Strictly Writing team to fill in for me. The energy needed to post something here was going to elude me, and more importantly it might not be appropriate or respectful this week.

My mother breathed her last breath on Wednesday 20 May and I spent the week before sitting at her bed, watching every single breath. So what could I possibly say for Strictly Writing? The only thing that mattered had gone with that breath.

Then I thought again. This would not be the only inappropriate act on my part. My mother would not have wished for me to get drunk ten nights in a row – she hardly touched a drop. And let's not even think about the (temporary, I hope) resumption of smoking. Worse than that, I confess, even until the day she died I was taking notes. Unable to read, I must have attempted the same page of the Patrick Gale novel a hundred times and anything beneath the headlines on the newspapers quickly blurred - who cared about MPs' expenses? All I could do was watch her breathe and wait for anything she might say, or talk to my brothers and my father about whether we should call for another injection of Oxycodone.

Was it shameful that I was able to jot down notes? I wanted to capture some of her last utterances, it’s true, and that seemed a plausible excuse. It wasn’t just that, I must admit to hoarding details too – the name of the disinfectant in the plastic spray bottle at the end of the bed, a description of the pink sponge swabs we used to roll moisture along her lips, the hospital visitor with dementia who repeatedly lost his wife’s bed and had to be guided back – each morning they break the news to him anew. I can’t pretend I was storing all those for emotional reasons alone. You know my guilt: I’m a writer.

Then I thought a third time. After all, Mum was the one who taught us to love books. She read several thousand herself, scouring the shelves of the Upton public library and, years earlier, plundering the box of newly published Pans and Picadors that arrived each month because my father was a director at Macmillan.

Her vocabulary was immense. Whenever I craved the precise word for a story and the dictionary failed me I would dial her number. Even in her last days, profoundly sick and disorientated by high calcium levels and the elaborate cocktail of analgesics, when she had to force out every phrase, her precision in diction was commented on by many. Two days before she died one of my brothers came in and said, in that voice of forced hope we all used, ‘You're looking really well today, Mum.’ She replied, ‘There’s no need to talk to me as though I were an inebriate.’ My family all worked hard to suppress the laughter we often tried to mute so as not to disturb the other three patients in the ward. When I thanked her for acting as my telephone thesaurus, my ever self-deprecating mother said, ‘I was wrong to glorify myself in that way.’

And she wrote. Her letters were each a work of art, both the distinct writing voice and the crisp neat strokes of nib against paper. She accumulated thousands upon thousands of words in journals with grey cardboard covers. These she kept safe for decades, never showing them to a soul until, a few months ago, when she knew she was dying she passed them to my youngest brother to burn. She was confident he could be relied upon to do so without reading them, a temptation that might have been too much for me. Adam stood in his garden in the cold rain and tossed notebook after notebook onto a bonfire. How unpublished is that?

So, maybe my mother wouldn’t mind me posting this memento. It’s no more inappropriate than the notes I took in the hospice. It’s no more inappropriate than the Bank Holiday sun that should not be shining today.

One day, if I have the will to make use of those notes in some fictional account of death, they might help pin down more clarity and detail than writing from memory alone. The books my mother loved were real, stories that boomed with emotion not by shouting about it, but by accurately depicting the circumstances that generate it: T S Eliot’s objective correlative. If I can manage even a little of that, my mother will forgive me.

For now, and for a long time there is no possibility for me to write well about these matters. All I can do is shout . . . Oh, my mother I miss you so much. I miss your example of how a human being should be. I type through tears, trying to stop them falling onto the laptop.





Picture: Mum with me and Matthew (before Daniel and Adam were born).

Ten Tips to Trounce Writer's Block

There's a school of thought that says there's no such thing as writer's block. It's an excuse put about by lazy wasters who spend more time dreaming of glitzy literary parties than doing any actual work. But whether or not you subscribe to this view, there's no denying the fact that writing has its bad patches. Sometimes it's extremely difficult indeed. Sometimes it's hard to write anything at all; sometimes it's impossible to believe that what you've written is any good.

Today I'm listing my favourite strategies for getting going again when the going has got tough. You probably have lots more ideas I haven't thought of - if so, please add them in the comments and let's build up a resource that has something for everyone.

1. Fool your brain
I read somewhere [citation needed] that smiling releases endorphins, so by making yourself smile, you trick your brain into feeling happier. Similarly, you can convince said brain that you're writing. I do this by copying out something I have already written. The act of scribbling makes it easier to carry on beyond the end of the scene, and before I know it, I'm writing something new.

2. Do the fun bit
Skip ahead to an easy scene, or one that's been occupying your mind so much that you can't get on with anything else until you've written it.

3. Tell the dog
Explain verbally what you're trying to achieve. Tell a pet, a tree, a cuddly toy, a tape recorder, or if you're very brave, a writer friend. Articulating the idea brings it into focus, and even if the dog just snuggles deeper into his basket in the hope you'll go away, you have made a statement of intent – once you've said it, you have to get on with it.

4. A change of scene
Try writing somewhere different – in the garden, on a park bench, in a café or library. Or try longhand when you normally use a computer, or vice versa. Break the habit of sitting in the same place staring at the same blank page.

5. Get off your backside
The word “exercise” strikes fear into the heart of those of us who remember shivering on a sleet-swept hockey pitch while a “teacher” with the world view of a Tyrannosaurus Rex (but a smaller brain) screamed “MOOOOOVE!” But it doesn't have to be like that. Exercise includes nice stuff like walking and gardening. Ignore the fact that lots of hugely talented famous writers were drunken slobs – exercise really does renew your mental and physical energy. Honest.
I am trying to convince myself of this more than I'm trying to convince you.

6. Shoot the crap-censor
Writer's block isn't just the blank-page phenomenon – sometimes it means looking back over every sentence with a despairingly critical eye. It all seems so, so dire that you never make any progress. Don't worry, just lower your standards. In fact, don't have any standards at all. Hell, you can even use adverbs if you like. Just bung any old crap on the page. [Caroline makes a superhuman effort to resist the temptation to add “It works for Dan Brown.”]

7. Don't be yourself
If you are not motivated and inspired, act the part of someone who is. Pretend to be a focused, well-organised, supremely talented writer, and get her/him to do the work.

8. Clock on
In a normal job, you must show up and get on with it whether you like it or not. Treat writing the same way for a while - turn up, slog through it, then go home. Others might view your writing as a self-indulgent arty-farty little hobby, and it's difficult not to internalise this attitude and feel that, because you're not guaranteed to make money, it isn't real work. Tell your inner guilt to take a hike, because it is important and it does deserve the time.

9. Tiny goals
Set a minuscule target – to write 100 words, or to edit one page. Every step is an achievement and is far better than neglecting your writing on the basis that you haven't really got time to get into it - with the result that the small amount of time you do have is aimlessly spent watching YouTube vids of funny cats.

10. Wait it out
Tides ebb and flow; so does the writing life. Motivation and inspiration need a rest sometimes – let them rest, and do something else while they take their time to regenerate. Treat 'em mean and keep 'em keen – if you don't agonise over them or lament their absence, chances are they'll come crawling back when you least expect them.





http://www.carolinerance.co.uk/





Photograph by Warley Rossi.

Guest Blog by Roger Morris - The Surrealism of Detective Fiction

I'm reading, on and off, an anthology of American Detective Stories. It has some authors I've heard of, including Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton and William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner!) and many I hadn't. Clinton H. Stagg is of the latter group. His story, The Keyboard of Silence (1923), features - wait for it - a blind detective.

Reading the story has convinced me of a long-standing thesis of mine: detective fiction is actually a branch of surrealism.

To quote one joyously surreal passage: ‘“One often wonders,” continued Colton [the blind detective] ... “why a stout woman, like that one two tables to our left, for instance, will suffer the tortures of her hereafter for the sake of drinking high balls in a tight, purple gown.”’
His assistant is understandably amazed. But as the blind detective explains, ‘”All stout women who breathe asthmatically wear purple. It is the only unfailing rule of femininity. And to one who has practised the art of locating sounds that come to doubly sharp ears the breathing part was easy.”’ And so on.

Stagg (who sadly died at the age of 26) was parodied by no less than Agatha Christie for his lack of realism. But I can’t help feeling Agatha is missing the point. The point is not that it’s unrealistic. The point is it’s fun.

Another surrealist masquerading as a detective writer is G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown stories I am also dipping in and out of at the moment. Chesterton was a master of the ‘impossible crime’, and an unashamed exponent of the puzzle story. In fact, back then, in the Golden Age of detective fiction, there was no shame in writing stories that were primarily literary puzzles.
Much of the surrealism of the Chesterton stories is tied up in the solution of the crime, which often pushes plausibility to the limit. Well, beyond it, if we’re honest. I can’t give you any specifics, because I would be giving away the endings, but it’s hard to beat ‘The Secret Garden’ for the sheer audacity and outrageousness of its denouement.

The surrealists themselves were fans of pulp crime fiction, most notably the Fantômas series of novels by Souvestre and Allain. The fascination shows in Magritte’s 1926 painting The Menaced Assassin. A woman lies naked on a chaise longue, blood streaming from her mouth. A man, presumably her murderer, listens to a gramophone. His overcoat and hat are on a chair, with a suitcase on the floor. Two men in lie in wait for him on either side of the doorway, one holding a net, the other a club. At the window behind him, three heads are shown peering into the room. It was that painting, and the desire to write the story it suggests, that inspired me to take up crime writing in the first place.

How will Fantômas escape? Answers on a postcard – or in a blog comment.

Detective stories link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Book-American-Detective-Stories/dp/0195117921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239207912&sr=1-1
Father Brown link: http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140097665,00.html
Reference for Magritte painting: http://robertarood.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/the_menaced_assassin.jpg

Roger Morris lives in North London and is the author of a series of historical crime novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment. In fact today sees the publication of the US Penguin paperback of the second book in this series, A Vengeful Longing. To find out more about his successful writing career visit his website or blog.

The winner is...

Congratulations to...

JULIE

who has won a signed copy of Earth Inc by Mike Bollen. Well done Julie - the book will be on its way to you shortly.




For more info about Earth Inc, check out Picnic Publishing's website, where you can read excerpts from the book and Mike's guest posts for Picnic's blog. You can also listen to audio extracts on the Earth Inc MySpace page. Or, of course, you can just go and buy it.

Have a great Bank Holiday Monday everyone! Some of us Strictly Writers are taking up CarolineG's challenge of National No-Mail Day - wish us luck, as we'll certainly need it! We'll be back on Tuesday with a guest post from crime writer R. N. Morris.

You've Got Mail

My name is Caroline and I am an email addict.
In the time it took me to write that, about five million emails went whizzing around the world. It’s reckoned that about 210 billion are sent every single day. And even though many of them are offers for penile extension and requests from made-up banks, a very large number are genuine.
Rather too many of them are probably mine.
It’s hard to remember what life was like before email. I work from home and on the rare days when my program is ‘down’, I’m like one of those lions pacing around its cage at the zoo. I live on a quiet road and the ping of my inbox helps me feel in touch with the world outside. [My email doesn’t literally go ‘ping’. It doesn’t make any sound at all, but you get my drift]. Almost all my journalism commissions arrive via email and it’s the medium I use most to contact people in my job. I often set up interviews by email and sometimes even get to DO the interview by email, thereby by-passing the phone entirely. That means no transcribing of the conversation and a clear record of what was said for all concerned. Result!
I also love email as a means of keeping in touch with friends, from the ones that live just down the road, to the one who live thousands of miles away in different time zones. The great thing about this medium is that you can reply at your leisure, unlike phone calls that happen when your child is decorating the bathroom with their bottle of Matey bubblebath, or when you’re late for an appointment, or just can’t be fagged to speak right now. Sure, an answering machine serves that purpose too, but ‘screening’ calls always feels just a little bit furtive.
And yet…I’m wondering whether this need for control when it comes to communication is necessarily a good thing. I’ve become uncomfortably aware lately that I would almost always rather send an email than pick up a phone. I’ve always found it much easier to write about my feelings than say them out loud, and my email addiction feeds into this. Where will it end? I have visions of myself as a wizened old lady, tap-tapping away on my keyboard with my gnarled fingers while tumbleweed blows through my house and feral cats scavenge for scraps under my desk.
Then there’s the whole ‘watched pot’ problem. I have a handful of submissions to agents out there right now, all of whom are overwhelmingly likely to get back to me my email. Let’s just say I’m visiting my inbox at a rate that went beyond healthy quite some time ago.
So something must be done. I’m thinking of having a day soon where I switch off my modem from dawn to dusk. I’ll probably crack within the first 20 minutes but I’d like to know whether I’m made of strong enough stuff.
I’m going to call it National No-mail Day.
Anyone else out there care to join me and reduce that 210 billion?

What's hot this year...

While newspaper columnists are busy trying to predict when the recession will end, and others pondering when Starbursts will turn back into Opal Fruits, I thought I would delve into the world of literature and make a few suggestions of my own for 2009.

I'm no Mystic Meg, so rather than make predictions, I've thrown up a few ideas as to what titles I feel will make waves this year. Of course, I could be totally wrong in my assumptions put forth, but here goes....I must also add that the following books are not necessarily ones I've read, but they are novels which I feel will have an impact upon the reading public.

My first choice is The Vagrants by Yiyun Li.
I first heard this author being interviewed on a New York Times book podcast. She picked up the Guardian First Book award with her exquisitely crafted short story collection, set in and around China, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. This debut novel from Fourth Estate, is based on an incident in 1979, and looks at the ripple effect on individual lives in a provincial village when a young woman is sentenced to death for speaking out against the cultural revolution. The author grew up in Beijing and now lives in Oakland, California.

The second book I'm flagging up is Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín which follows the life of Eilis Lacey, an Irish woman who cannot find work at home. When a job comes up in America, she leaves her family and her home, and sets out for a new life in Brooklyn. With a strong female character, this is one which is being promoted heavily in bookshops, and one which I feel will continue to dominate the book charts this year.

My third choice is The Prayer Room by Shanthi Sekaran. Again, I was introduced to this book and the author via a literature podcast. The story begins in 1974, when young Englishman George Armitage goes to Madras, but instead of starting his Ph.D dissertation, he returns home with a bride named Viji. In her new American world, Viji seeks consolation in her prayer room at their new home in Sacramento. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of this book.

My fourth is Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury), a book which features central character Hiroko who is due to marry a man by the name of Konrad Weiss. As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono, her world suddenly changes as a bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. The blast sears the birds from Hiroko’s kimono onto her back, a fusion of 'charred silk, seared flesh'. The story moves forward and two years after the bombing, Hiroko travels to Delhi where her life will becomes intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf.

All these books are strong contenders, I feel, for prizes. If you want to have a flutter on who you think will win the Man Booker International Prize 2009, visit the fun prediction website www.hubdub.com where you can stake virtual dollars on who you think will take the trophy. There are many other predictions which would be fun to make - perhaps Dan Brown will churn out another book in his series, or a Conservative MP will make it onto the X-Factor judging panel? And now the lottery numbers...well, we've run out of time, so I'll keep those to myself.