Hard Truths

 My wife wanted to go and see Hard Truths at the movies yesterday. We'd seen the trailer, and it looked interesting, and it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste who was the wonderfully serious daughter in Secrets and Lies way back in 1996. Both of us had enjoyed that film all those years ago and it had remained in our minds partly because of Brenda Blethyn’s constant, ‘Sweet-art’ (with a great slide down on the ‘art’ syllable, and because it was an enjoyable movie.

Hard Truths – another Mike Leigh film – is anything but enjoyable. Initially the endless anger that Jean-Baptiste’s character, Pansy, directs at everyone, familiar or stranger, is somewhat amusing and all seems to be leading up to some catharsis. But no, the movie drags on through scene after scene of the miserably-depressed Pansy undermining everything good and finally taking it out completely on her long-suffering husband, who’s long since given up trying to argue with anything Pansy says, as has his 22-year-old son, who retreats from her as soon as he can when he’s at home. The last scene is of Pansy finding out from her husband’s workmate that he’s sitting downstairs barely able to move because he’s put his back out at work. Pansy gets up, but then just sits there, incapable of dredging up even an ounce of sympathy, it appears, for the man. He sits in the kitchen, a tear running down his cheek, knowing that even this crisis won’t change her heart.

You realise about halfway through that Pansy isn’t going to change easily – it’s going take an earthquake to shift her. The earthquake never comes. Three-quarters of the way through she finally consents to go and visit her mother’s grave with her sister, a hairdresser who has her own business, an outlook on life that aims for the positive, and who is successful at what she does. Plus she has two lovely daughters in their early twenties bouncing with life and energy. 

At the graveside, it’s revealed that Pansy had to look after her sister when their mother was forced to go out to work, because her husband had left her. This has somehow contributed to destroying Pansy’s life, and underneath she still hates her mother. In fact she hates all humanity, pretty-much. Her sister, Chantelle, manages finally to get her to come home with her for a dinner with her daughters and Pansy’s husband and son. The son, supposedly never capable of doing anything for himself, has left flowers at home for his mother because it’s Mother’s Day. The dinner party turns to mush because Pansy won’t give an inch. (Did I mention she’s also afraid of insects, the outside world, dirt, other people’s ‘DNA’ on a sofa and so on.) And when she and her family are home again she accuses her husband of not saying anything about his awful mother (which is all we hear about the mother) and then proceeding to throw all his clothes out of their bedroom – surprisingly, they still sleep in the same bed up to that point.

The film has garnered awards from every side. Jean-Baptiste is brilliantly awful – in fact you wonder what it cost her personally to be so awful day after day working on the movie, and, during all the time when the characters were being built up bit by bit in the usual Mike Leigh way. 

And that Mike Leigh way, is I think the problem with this film. It has no real structure. Yes, there are some sequences, as opposed to scenes, but a lot of it consists of Pansy berating someone or other just for being there, basically. The fact that she does could have been told in a few short episodes; instead too many of these scenes just go on and on. They lead us to think that something worthwhile will come out of all this bile, that someone will finally speak the hard truths of the title. But they don’t. In real life that’s probably not unusual. People suffer from someone like this for years because there doesn’t seem any way to convey the truth that they’re unwell mentally and that their sheer aggressiveness to all and sundry is ultimately harming themselves even more than others. 

But this is a film, a story. It isn’t real life and there needs to be some breakthrough, even if, at worst, everybody decides to abandon her to herself.

My wife got completely fed up with it in the end; partly because the last section drags even more than other earlier scenes, partly because there just isn’t any outcome. I’d mostly enjoyed it, though I found the character very frustrating after a while, but even I was gobsmacked when it just ended. As a work of art it was unfinished. In fact it was also unfinished in the sense that it made the audience sit through scene after scene that should have been edited down to the essentials. It’s indulgent on Leigh’s part; he seems to think his audience will just tolerate long scenes of unpleasantness without anyone stepping in and dealing with it – including the main character. You don’t expect a sudden complete turnaround, but a hint of the possibility would have made the rest of the long trip worthwhile.

 

Explaining my process

Work in progress on the New Sheffield Markets, 2012
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 So what have I been doing over the last week or so in regards to the WIP. (I only discovered today that companies use this same acronym for their Work in Progress meetings. Fair enough. I’m sure we writers are generous enough to allow them to pinch our writerly acronym.)

Let me say first that there isn’t a lot of forward progress, in the sense that no new chapters have been written, and chapter 8 remains at about 600 words, which is where it’s been for a week or two.

Is this a problem? No, because I’ve been consolidating, for want of a better word. By which I mean that chapters 1 to 7 have all been revised, and in at least three cases, substantially rewritten.

But wait, you say, Aren’t you some kind of a pantser when it comes to writing?

Yes, I am – but as I pointed out in this post, my approach to writing has been refined over four previous books, and seems to be getting refined still further with this one.

At this point I’m satisfied enough that the first seven chapters I’ve written are keepers. That still may not be the case ultimately. However they’ve got enough structure and detail in them to give me a good starting point. I’m not just writing an initial draft and moving forward until the last page, as a pantser might, but I’m going back over these chapters to make sure they hold together as well as I can currently make them.

As I say, they may not even turn up in the final book. It’s happened in the past. But what they’ve done is give me new characters whom I hadn’t even known existed until I started writing, characters who are taking shape and giving me surprises. And on top of that, they keep saying things that give me clues as to where the book might ultimately go, clues to the underlying plot, for instance. Already some of these ‘clues’ have been ditched – at least for the time being - because I don’t see them as being important enough, or having enough of a seed to take me forward.

Other clues, however, have opened up possibilities and surprises for me – and hopefully one day for the reader. I make notes about these in the comments column in my Word document (yup, Word is good enough for me) and also discuss them in a separate file which becomes increasingly chaotic as further ideas turn up and other things are rejected.

Is it a problem to have a chaotic file like this? I used to think it was, and would worry about not being able to find things in it. Occasionally I’d read a section through and discover something I’d forgotten I’d made a note about was now being used in the story. As though it was a new idea. Or I’d laugh at some of the thoughts I’d had as to where the story was going, and wonder why I’d given them house-room.

With my last book I began to use this file increasingly for structuring what was coming in further chapters because things - as they should - got increasingly complicated in the story.

It was also a good place to pour out my woes when I’d pushed one of my characters into a corner and didn’t know how to get them out again. If I went back to these notes now, I’d find that various solutions would have been tried and found wanting, and then out of the blue the ‘right’ solution had turned up.

It’s still a kind of scrapbook, notebook, or junk box even, where anything and everything finds a home.

I know many authors use writing programs like Scrivener and Atticus that have all sorts of places to fit things so that you don’t lose track of them. I’ve tried some of these, and found them more work than I want to do. By the time I’ve set everything up and followed the manual in detail I could have written a few chapters, plus added to my structuring/note-taking file.

I’m sure many writers find them useful, but they’re not for me.

So what’s to come? In the next few days I’ll take another look at chapter 8 in the light of changes made in the previous chapters, and see where my characters will take me from here.

More benefits of writing slowly

 Originally written back in 2017 for a site that no longer exists, which promoted authors and their works.

In 2014, I published three e-books. That sounds impressive until you realise that the first of those books, Grimhilda!, had started out life as a musical produced in the theatre, back in 2012. In spite of having a script to work from, it took another two years for the book version to get off the ground. Procrastination took its toll, along with many rewrites. Turning a playscript into a novel wasn’t as straightforward as I’d anticipated. 

I finally published it in January 2014, by which time I was viewing it as the first of a series of children’s fantasies. 

However, the second book, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, was non-fiction. I’d had this book in mind for some time, planning to use a set of blog posts from 2009 as its basis. It wasn’t just a matter of publishing the posts: they had to be edited, an introduction had to be written, and more material added from other sources to complement and give additional breadth to my own experiences. 

Nevertheless, all that was done in a short time, and that book was finished and published in April 2014. 

The draft of the third book, The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, took a little longer, but was still written at a fair pace. It became the second in the fantasy series under the collective title of Grimhilderness. The Blood Secret still had to go through a rigorous process with my editor-cum-beta reader, a person who’s like a dog with a bone; she won’t let anything go that she’s not satisfied with, or that reeks of inconsistency. 

Still, that book was produced far more speedily than Grimhilda! – it was published in early November, 2014. I was beginning to think I was a bit of a whiz at producing books. 

The third in the Grimhilderness series, The Disenchanted Wizard, turned my idea of being able to churn out books at a rate of knots on its head. I started it in late 2014, as soon as The Blood Secret was finished, writing the first (very disorganised) draft as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had a good idea in mind, some thoughts about how it would end, and some well-defined characters. 

Yet another two and a quarter years passed before it was ready for publication. Did I do something wrong?

 Not really. Though procrastination and music work got in the way (I play the piano, mostly accompanying singers), the book’s original plan was sidetracked again and again. My co-author/editor/plot-consistency-overseer/script consultant and I discussed the intricacies of the plot endlessly, and again and again discovered loopholes that readers would see right through, or brick walls in the story that were apparently unassailable. Sometimes we’d sit in my house staring into space, wondering if all the effort was worth it, or if we’d ever find a way out of the maze. 

The first half of the book took long enough to get worked out, but once the writing process was begun in earnest the structure didn’t really change. The second half was a nightmare: much of it was rewritten several times over after going off in wrong directions. Whole scenes were abandoned, characters annihilated. I even wrote a piece of flash fiction at one point in which the lost characters railed against their fate. 

The grand climax I’d envisaged got chucked, leaving a great gap, and then later was brought back in. It too was rewritten over and over as various improbable things were removed. The biggest difficulty was that the main character, a girl with no defensive magical powers of her own, had to confront the villain – a wizard – and somehow lay him low. She’d already failed to do this earlier in the book, so it was a challenge to figure out she could deal with him in the climax.

Sometimes solutions turn out to be so simple that you think they’ll be seen as too easy by the readers. In fact, readers accept them. We spent ages figuring out how the girl’s father would be found after he’d been whisked away by the villain. I’ll let you read the book and see for yourself whether you think the solution worked. 

There were things I wanted to keep in, and fought tooth and nail over. In the end I had to let them go because they complicated the plot unnecessarily. Being willing to give up seemingly great ideas for the betterment of the whole book isn’t easy. It was another reason things took longer than anticipated. 

So, two and a quarter years of slog. Were there downsides to this slow process? Yes, of course. The frustration of feeling that it would never get finished, for one. The sense that I wasn’t really a very good writer because I couldn’t produce another book at speed. 

But the upsides were that the book was immensely better for its long gestation. Weak and unnecessary characters were left by the wayside, as were weak scenes. Scenes that did survive were continually strengthened, and, because I had time to think about details, the book was improved in a myriad of small ways. 

A number of authors promote the idea that writing at speed and producing two or three or more books a year is the ideal. Yes, there are authors who can work at this kind of pace and produce quality. I think they’re few and far between. I’ve read books by some of these prolific authors, and I wish they’d given more time to their work instead of to trying to add more titles to their bibliography. 

I’ve mentioned the word procrastination a few times here. There are an endless number of authors online who want to advise you on how to deal with procrastination. I’ve read endless advice on the subject. In spite of that, I’m currently procrastinating on a fourth children’s fantasy. Some of my reasons are valid, and more important than the completion of a book. Some of the reasons are pathetic and need to be dealt with severely. Either way, real life does get in the way of writing, and often takes priority, as a local author, a Mum with two children, has frequently noted on Twitter. 

But if we want to write, we need to try and find a balance between procrastination for good reasons and procrastination for bad reasons. Take every day as it comes. Take time to write (rather than make time to write), even if the creative brain feels at its lowest ebb. A piece of draft writing may seem like rubbish, but I find that it usually gets creativity moving again. That’s always a plus, and it moves us one more step on the road to publication day.

Writing at your own particular pace

At the moment my 'work in progress' opens with the collapse of a house, something that came to me while I was out walking the dog one day. The house, which hasn't collapsed, by the way, is a specific house in a specific street in my hometown. Why the house in my story collapsed remains to be discovered. I certainly don’t know at this point. 

I think it takes time for any writer to find their own approach to putting a story on paper. That doesn’t mean they don’t get books written, but gradually they discover that other people’s methods may not suit their personality. 

I remember reading years ago that the Irish writer, Joyce Cary, (a man in spite of his feminine-sounding name) would write scenes as they occurred to him. Not necessarily in any coherent order; that came later. From memory, Anne Lamott used a similar approach with her novels. 

Other writers, often known as ‘pantsers’ because they write ‘by the seat of their pants,’ just sit down and write from the beginning to the end without having any idea where the story will go. In the book, Reacher Said Nothing, Lee Child claims that’s the way his books get written. 

Young writers are often told that the way to write something as large as a novel is to structure it all out before you start, to make lots of notes about your characters so that you know all sorts of details about them – how they dress, the colour of their eyes, what they keep in their pockets and much more.   

This is rather how the film director Alfred Hitchcock worked: he wasn’t ready to film until every scene, even every shot, was set down in its place. It’s not surprising then that he sometimes said that the process of making the film itself bored him.

I can’t structure anything until I have some idea where I’m going. I understand - now - that this is my way of working, and I’m happy with it, even if it’s slow. It’s an enjoyable process of discovery. However, I don’t write the whole book before thinking about what’s already happened in the early chapters, or who the people are and how it will all end. So my first draft is already littered with comments, and there's another file altogether in which I discuss with myself what's happening. 

I can’t write about characters until I see them in action, even if the scenes that get written eventually vanish from the book. Check out these two chapters from The Disenchanted Wizard, which were deleted very early on. But they were written as though they could be used if necessary. 

I can’t imagine a whole plot in advance and then write the words that fit it. I prefer to discover things that turn up while I’m writing and then work out how everything clicks together. This is a slow process, for me, because when it comes to plotting, I’m a bear of very little brain. Nevertheless I enjoy putting my characters in difficult, even impossible, spots, and figuring out a way to get them out again. 

So, with my current work-in-progress, I’ve now written six or seven chapters. I know something about who the characters are. I know something about the places they go to, and what happens in those places. So far. I have all sorts of unexpected possible plot points turning up, unbidden, and I have the ongoing ‘fun’ of figuring out what they mean and how they’ll fit to other events. 

Hopefully it won't take another five years...

The Juggling Bookie: Eidam on Bach

Earlier this year I came across Klaus Eidam’s biography, The True Life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Eidam uses the word ‘true’ to show he’s dispelling the myths that other, older biographers have cluttered up the facts with.

Why read about Bach? Well, in recent years I find I’m playing his music more and more – and enjoying it. I was introduced to him some forty-five years ago by a teacher wise enough to believe that students should get to know great music even if it didn’t necessarily enthral them. The teacher recommended laying out good money on the two volumes of the 48 Preludes and Fugues, and I did. I learned a few scattered pieces, sight-read those I could get away with (without the teacher knowing) and ignored the rest. But it was like puddling in Bach’s paddling pool, rather than swimming with him in the ocean.

The two volumes travelled with me to England and back, lost their covers, and occasionally got a dusting off - mostly to see if I could still get my fingers round their intricacies.

But now, in my grandfather years, I’ve begun some dedicated work on these astonishing compositions, and the effort’s been rewarded so mightily all I can do is enthuse about their creator.

There are passages in Bach when you feel as though you’re doing a kind of knitting – except Bach never bothers with plain and purl.There are places where you think the piece should finish, but the grand old genius frolics on for another dozen delectable bars. Sometimes he stops right in the middle of something and hives off in another direction, at a different tempo, and with different material. How unbaroque! 

There are bars when the clashing chords are so twentieth-century you ask: did he know he was preempting Stravinsky or Messiaen? Sometimes he’s so intent of keeping the various ‘voices’ running that he’ll swap them back and forth between the hands until the brain goes into meltdown. (Eidam says Bach could effortlessly hold half a dozen different ‘voices’ in his head, being thoroughly aware of them at all times.)

Or he writes passages of astonishing mathematical structure, taking a subject and playing itself against itself, upside-down, back to front, slower, faster – and not just one voice against another, but several together. (He often improvised in such a way without blinking an eye.)

And then there are the sublime moments. In the middle of something that’s already taken wings he opens a window to heaven – just for a couple of bars. You wonder if God hadn’t elbowed him aside - ‘Excuse me, Jo!’ - and written those bars himself.

I recall one particular Bach orchestral concert in London. There was a moment in the evening when the musicians, the audience and the angels took off, skimming along Bach’s great river of joy in such a way that forty years later I still get emotional at the thought of it.

What a man!

This piece first appeared in The Juggling Bookie column in the New Zealand Anglican magazine,Taonga. It was written in 2005 

 

 

Fighting off the internal critic

When stuck on a book, Anne Lamott writes about letting your characters speak, giving them the opportunity to work their way forward, and even showing you what the climax should be. 

For myself, stuck in the middle of a book that refuses to move forward, I have occasionally in the past used a kind of monologue from various characters to give me some better understanding of their 'thoughts' and 'aspirations.' So it's worth considering what Lamott has to say, since my book has been stuck for some months.

But...

Immediately I sit down to let my characters speak, the You Can’t Do This voice arrives.  I ask, Who are you, and what position do you hold in my writing world that allows you to put your oar in the moment I try to write something on this book?

Okay, well firstly, I’m not one of your characters, so you can’t treat me as though I can be bullied into a plot at your whim. 

The truth is you are one of my characters because you don’t exist outside my head. So sod off before I put you in the reject file.

I’m not one of the characters in your piffling book, the one no one will want to read. Wait, are you saving any of this? I don’t want what I say to be lost.

Good grief. Saved.

Right. Now. Every time you sit down to write, I believe you must go back and re-read the entire draft, you must check your synopsis, and your structure, because if you don’t have a structure there’s no way this book is ever – and I mean ever – going to work, and only then think about moving forward and doing some supposedly productive writing. Just because Anne Lamott mentions authors who start to write from the middle of nowhere and think they can get a book up and running doesn’t mean you can. I’m mean, are you seriously published? Do you think a few sales here and there identify you as a writer? You’re pathetic. I hope you just heard the word I used: pathetic. P...A...T...H...E...

Are you going to rattle on all day like this? I'd like to give my real characters some room to speak.

They’re not going to talk to you. They’re sick to death of being stuck in a so-far-undescribed room, or virtually forgotten since chapter seven, while you say, 

nah I won’t finish this,

yes I will finish this, 

nah I don’t know what to do, 

yes I have an idea, 

nah that doesn’t work. 

Make up your frigging mind! The characters have had it up to here. They're contracting themselves to other authors because they need a job. They've given up on the so-called author who can’t get his act together.

You’re talking piffle. No one else would have them because they belong in THIS story.

Don’t you believe it. They can go where they like, even if they have to change their looks a little or bend the arc of their character. They’ll get jobs, don’t you worry.

So you’re saying they're good characters?

Good? Nah, they’ve got the ability to do a bit part in someone else’s novel, maybe, but they’re not going to get anything big in a real book that needs characters crammed with personality. They're cardboard copies of whatever first came to your unimaginative mind. You probably think you’ll get away with calling the load of bollocks you’ve got there a ‘shitty first draft’ a la your mate, Anne Lamott, but that’s not cutting any mustard with them. They want something polished and finished, and you’re never, never going to get around to doing anything like that. You wouldn’t even know where the bottle of polish was. Throw your stuff down the toilet and go and do something worth doing. Don’t ask me what because I haven’t a clue, but no doubt there’s some menial task you can do with a piece of paper and a pen…the easy crossword in the morning newspaper, maybe.

Hmm. I still have a couple of heavies sitting around…they've tried out for a role in the second half of the book…

Rubbish! Now you really are making things up. 

That's my job. They’re going to grab you by the elbows, lift you two feet in the ear...air…

See, you couldn’t even remember how to spell air.

And march you off to the dustbin where you belong. I would get them to flush you down the toilet, but I don’t want it blocking up.

You don’t scare me. I'm the only real voice you've got here!

You’re just a voice without a body, without any physical presence  whatsoever, and what's more I don't trust you. So quit your insistence on standing in the way of my getting on with the book. I’ve already wasted ten minutes writing time listening to your rants. And that's only today. 

[Author whistles up the two heavies, who are glad to get something to do earlier in the piece than they'd expected. They oblige the author and remove the anonymous voice which seems to think it rules the writing-landscape. With a couple of cheerful 'Watch 'er, mate' mutters out of the sides of their mouths, they lift the voice off its feet, as recommended, and carry him/her/it babbling to the dustbin.

'Babbling to the dustbin.' The author immediately jots this down in case he wants to use it at a later point, and feels as though the day may not be a total disaster after all.]

The writer's brain is a con-artist

Because my wife is working this week as well as through the Christmas period, I have some time to try to get moving again on The Counterfeit Queen, which has had a long time sitting on the back burner due to all sorts of family issues going on. 

Yesterday I went through and summarised each chapter that had been written in first draft* – fourteen chapters in all. The fourteenth ended in a kind of unsatisfactory waffle after having a nice twist in the middle of it. The fifteenth chapter had stopped after a few paragraphs, because I really had no idea what I was doing anymore. 

The previous chapters had begun to diverge from the (hard-won) synopsis to a great degree, and if I’d followed the plan as laid out I’ve have been going round in a large circle with more secret tunnels and more imprisonments. Even now it’s hard to get away from the latter – and secret tunnels want to creep in, in droves in this book. 

Courtesy Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

So this morning I began what I’d already planned to do over the weekend: rewrite the synopsis so that it was more in line with what had now changed in the draft. And then things started to go off on other tangents. Immediately my brain said, I’m too tired for this. Let’s go back to bed.'  I pointed out that it's only eleven in the morning. 

The brain talking like that is a sure sign that I need to push forward, but sometimes pushing forward requires the opposite:a step back. This morning I tried this approach: pushing myself to put words down, and then leaving them for a bit, coming back, finding my brain has been working away in the meantime (in spite of claiming to be too tired). Already this has given me a better way forward. 

I’ve also realised that because the section starting with the end of chapter fourteen is the climax of the second act, essentially, it can’t be just more 'stuff.' It has to be that turning point when things either go all well for the heroine or they fall apart completely. Falling apart completely is the more interesting way; it will give the third act more action, action that brings everything to a resolution as well as tidying up all the loose ends. 'Sounds like a lot of work,' says my brain. I don't disagree. 

Anyway, I’ve written down several things that at this point in the story are hanging or could be disasters if not handled properly (by the characters rather than me). I need to make sure I structure this sequence/scene rightly, otherwise it won’t have full impact. The brain is saying…’I’m tired, can we go back to bed?’ and giving me the lame excuse that I was awake at five this morning and surely that’s a long enough day already.

But the brain is a con artist. It claims to be tired when what it actually needs is the stimulation of a challenge. Throw something its way, and it will chew on it while you're not looking and come up with an innovation or solution that you hadn't expected, in fact, would never have thought of. (If that makes any sense.) 

I've lost count of the times I've given into the brain's so-called tiredness, gone for a snooze, tossed around for a while trying to get comfortable, and then found that the brain has solved the problem and wants to get up and going again. 

*When I say 'first draft' I actually the first draft of this current incarnation of the book. There have already been at least two unfinished drafts. But at least each new draft makes more progress than the previous one!

Story structure is hard work

The last couple of months...

I've been spending what writing time I have on my fourth children's fantasy, so blogging has gone a bit on the back-burner.

The biggest difficulty with this latest book is not only that I'm doing it on my own without the help of my usual co-writer, but that for ages there was a big hole (and I'm talking ginormous) where there should have been the bulk of the story.

The First Act, as you might call it, was mostly fine. In fact it was fine through versions 1, 2 and 3 each of which took a different tack, with a different main character as the focus.

But the Second Act? So so. And the Third? Practically non-existent, except that I had a minuscule idea about how it would finish. Probably.

Because structure is always a bugbear for me, I have to work really hard at it, and I have a brain that says, Nah, let's just give up on that for today, when I've only just sat down to write.

So what made the difference? 


I enlisted some help. First I went back to a book written by Libbie Hawker - Take Off Your Pants! - which I'd read before and hadn't felt was quite as helpful as I'd hoped. However, I persisted with it this time, since it's primarily about structuring, and made some real progress.

Hawker doesn't work to a three act structure particularly; it took me a while to realise that she's focusing on character arc as her main structural approach. Nevertheless it proved useful, because it made me focus on where my main character was going to go as she journeyed through the book.

Then I turned to an old favourite: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, with its fifteen 'beats' that point out the way in which many movies (and a number of novels) are structured to give the viewer/reader the greatest satisfaction.

Snyder is more of a three act structure man, which is fine. I needed that in conjunction with Hawker's character arc approach.

Now the thing is...

Both these books helped enormously this time round - aided by the fact that I was determined I wasn't going to be beat.

But I need to say that neither of them quite mention the fact that you really have to know quite a lot about your story before you try to work out things like character arcs and fifteen beats.

In spite of the way it reads in the books, you can't actually start out by sitting down and just doing a synopsis. At least I can't. I have to have piles of stuff written in order to know who the characters are, and in order to figure out at least something of what the story is actually about.

Consequently I now have a large bunch of separate files: various incomplete drafts, piles and piles of notes (to the point that no matter how hard I try I can't quite get them in any sort of order) and all sorts of notes on top of notes. What this process does is give me ideas enough to move forward on a synopsis. It stops me from believing that what I've written first time round is going to be enough, and that I need to keep digging deeper and deeper and asking Why until I'm blue in the face.

One result has been that the two main male characters in version one became one main male character in version two who eventually became the sidekick to the female main character - in the current version. Other characters came and went; whole scenes ended up in the bottom of the pile; fantastic plot moments were abandoned.

And then came Janice Hardy...

I pulled together the Hawker and Snyder synopses (such as they were, still incomplete). And then discovered a third book which I hadn't read before: Janice Hardy's Plotting Your Novel [also published as Planning Your Novel].

Hardy provides us with a series of workshops, taking you right back to the beginning, the place where I'd been months before when I was writing drafts and notes galore. You can skip some of the workshops, or you can - as I did - force yourself to answer the questions she provides, and see if there are other things that you should consider. (If it sounds like hard work, it is, but it was also satisfying because of the sense of progress.)

So now I had three 'assistants' on the case, and in spite of my brain threatening overload, I also had an increased sense of where the story was going. And wonder of wonders, as I pulled the various synopses together, I began to see that big hole that had been such a bugbear filling up at last with real content.

The job isn't finished yet. But I now have a real sense that completing a decent synopsis is possible. And once that's on the page, the real - and enjoyable - part of the writing can begin.

To be continued...

After All

Back in the days when I wrote a weekly column, I produced this one, called 'After All'. It came out in 1993, so the references are to a former Government. However, the issues it discusses (with tongue mostly in cheek) have barely changed a jot.

After All 
7.7.93

Mr Bolger’s condescending response to the report on child poverty should have been expected.

His dulcet tones in the subsequent radio interviews were intended to melt the heart of the hardest cynic. His assurances that he knew what the poor were suffering should have convinced us all of our ignorance on the subject.

Jim Bolger

Mr Bolger is Prime Minister, after all. If the Prime Minister doesn’t know what’s going on, who does? The ministresses of social welfare, or of finance?

After all, if the Government is going to pay attention to what people say, especially church people (who are really pretty much on the periphery of society, aren’t they?), then what sort of wimpy Government would they be?

The purpose of a Government is to Govern, after all, to lead, to pass more laws than the Pharisees, to make enormous changes and expect everybody to follow, to fill the newspapers and television with ads that nobody understands let alone cares about, to spend millions of dollars on changing vast structure so that businessmen can run the country like one big business.

Of course, when the Opposition finally gains power – as it probably will because we’re all so sick of this lot – it will change it all back again.

After all, an Opposition’s purpose is to Oppose. In Opposition they really don’t have anything to do all day except come up with mischievous schemes to upset the Government, such as telling us that most of the National Members are millionaires.

Well, they are, after all, aren’t they? I mean if you add the figures up the right way, you can make anybody look like a millionaire; you can even make the poor look well off.

Isn’t that what the Government is attempting to do, by reminding us over and over of the wonderful recovery we’re all part of? How can we refuse to believe the evidence?

Not that it matters what you believe, anyway. What’s a Government for, after all? It’s not there to be nice to us, it’s not there to pay attention to petitions, submissions or reports. It’s not there to listen to the ‘groundswell of current opinion’ (it considers the swell as swill and treats it accordingly). It’s not there to talk Truth but Governspeak. It’s not there to find ways to balance the books that will please everybody – in fact the fewer people this Government pleases the better a Government it believes itself to be.

It is there, however, to say that it’s ‘responsible in seeking to target very large sums of money to those New Zealanders most in need’: $2 a week extra family support, for example, according to the Guinness Book of Records New Zealand All-time Boring Budget.

And even more, the Government hates to think that someone might be getting more than their share, especially if they have the nerve to be on a benefit. That’s why they’ve given themselves the right to investigate our bank accounts, and take money directly out of them if need be.

It isn’t our money, after all, or the bank’s (who now charge us not only for taking our money out, but also when we don’t put enough in); it’s the Government’s money. They gave it out in the first place, and they printed it.

After all, if they give money to us when we aren’t working, we’ll only go and spend it on irrelevant things like rent, and possibly, if there’s anything left over, on frivolities like food and (good grief!) clothing.

We’re only scum after all – the Government knows that if six o’clock closing was reintroduced we’d be back in there like pigs at a trough. We’ve never learnt anything.

Worst of all, we’ve never learnt that if we give our prime public servants plenty of power, law by law they’ll gradually turn the lot of us into slaves.

Laziness

Stuck with a big hole in my plot/structure/whatever. I have a vague idea what should happen, but how everybody gets to that point is another issue.

So what happens when I strike this kind of a point? I read books on writing. Does that help? Oh, yes, it helps the writer who wrote the book on writing by providing him with a royalty, and it helps me to procrastinate, and it helps me to think about how other books are structured and why their plots work so wonderfully...

What it doesn't do is help me write my book. And the actual reason for that is laziness. I'm not under pressure to get the book done, and I've got three books under my belt already in the same genre. Why do I need to write a fourth?

Well, I don't. The world won't miss it. But having done a draft that covered possibly two-thirds of the book, and having done another shorter draft before that, and now having done another chunk of draft that takes the book from a different point of view - that's another approach to avoiding getting on with what is the problem in the book - it's time to get on and do some actual work.

Sitting down and working out the problems is too hard. Thankfully I have plenty of mentors in this, some of them very famous. I'm not going to mention names because it would only embarrass them...even the ones that are dead. But there have been any number of writers who know that they should get on and do the work and don't, or didn't...

Anyway, I've got other things on my plate at the moment and they're bound to be more important, and...

That last sentence reminds me of a tweet I've kept in my files: One of my New Year resolutions is to always finish what I

Save the Fantastic Cat

I've been re-reading Blake Snyder's excellent, Save the Cat, as well as reading for the first time his third book, Save the Cat! Strikes Back. They're extremely encouraging for writers, whether screenwriters or novelists, or storytellers of any kind. They give a means to work out structure far more satisfactorily than any other 'system' I've come across, and they offer ways to go back over your work and find flaws, and work out how to fix them.

My mode of operation, however, tends to be that I have to initially write something of the story before I can figure out who the characters are and what they're up to. I can't just take an idea and fill up Blake's 15 beats without that.

In fact, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I've been writing a fourth book in the Grimhilderness series, and it's been going very sluggishly. Procrastination is part of the problem; life getting in the way is another problem; and lack of where to go after a certain point is another. But I do have a bunch of characters who are alive in my head, and I have a number of situations, and a general sense of what the overall story is.

This is more than enough to get started on the 15 beats.

Except that I immediately began to discover that things just weren't going to work, once I started setting my story as it stood alongside Blake's beats. Not because I couldn't match certain things up, but because the hero turned out to be passive, and there was no great reason for him to go on any journey anyway. In fact, if  he had any sense he'd go into hiding. Hardly the work of a hero. So back to the drawing board.

I re-watched J K Rowling's film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Rowling's world is so full of stuff by now that she can reference all sorts of things and fans will pick up on them. (I'm not quite so good at keeping such detail in my head as those sorts of fans.) I thought about her story in terms of Save the Cat.

It's interesting to ask: who is the hero? Whose journey are we going on?

Because plainly we have a quartet of lead characters, and the most important of them, Newt Scamander, doesn't go on any great journey at all: he is what he is, unlike Harry Potter, who goes on an immense journey over seven books. Is there a catalyst moment for Newt? I suppose you could find one, and you could find some of the other things that heroes are supposed to have in stories. But Newt is already fully-formed at the beginning of the movie; he doesn't need to change in any great way. Nothing much troubles him - except when there's a threat to his beasts. Otherwise he has a resource for almost every situation and doesn't really need others to help him much.

Which means that the hero who changes is someone else. Snyder mentions this in Strikes Back: the character who isn't quite the main character but who goes through the process of being stuck to having something unstick him to being thrown into a different world to being changed and finally coming back to what he loves but with a different viewpoint.

This is plainly Jacob Kowalski. He starts off on the back foot with no hopes (turned down by the most wonderfully po-faced Bank Manager you've ever seen), with the only life he can envisage being stuck in a canning factory - even though he's served his country in WWI. He is affected by a catalyst - the meeting with Newt and the accidental swapping of their bags. And even though he's the American equivalent of a Muggle, he's thrust in the magical world, and sees all kinds of things he never knew existed. He faces fearsome creatures and learns to love them, and even copes with the horrific rhinoceros-like creature that nearly stomps him to death. And in the end, even though he loses his ability to see magic at work, he gets his much-desired bakery shop and it's a roaring success. And at the very end, Queenie turns up there, and it looks as though his life may change even further.

But besides Jacob, another one of the quartet goes through a considerable journey too, and that's Tina, the kind of magical detective. She's down on her luck as well, having made some mistake in her job, and is reduced to investigating without the proper authority, being put down by her bosses (again) and generally not being able to understand Newt's nonchalant approach to life.

But the things that change Jacob's life change hers too, and she's forced to accept Newt and work with him, stepping into a different kind of world as well, where she has to see that Newt is far ahead of her in the play, and even, in the end, will rescue her from her past when she's threatened with death.

I don't know whether Rowling wrote the script as we see it portrayed in the movie, or whether she wrote the outline and dialogue. However it was done, it's a considerable feat, juggling all the elements that are in it. And if you can keep up with it all, it's likely you'll find Snyder's 15 beats being worked through in their proper order and giving the film a solid underpinning.

Typos and editorial errors

I've come to accept that books published in the last decade or two, both in print format and as ebooks, will have typos in them. It's not entirely surprising with ebooks, since the transition from print to digital seems fraught with typo-traps, and there doesn't appear to be the same amount of time given to the publishing of ebooks that's usually given to print versions. You expect more of print titles, I think, but even these nowadays seem to have more typos in them that I've seen in books published in earlier decades. Even books published in the distant past, such as the 19th century, rarely have typos.

I've just finished reading Elly Griffiths' second Ruth Galloway murder mystery, The Janus Stone, on Kindle. It's a good read, the characters are well-drawn, and the mystery has enough red-herrings in it to keep from guessing what's up until well near the end. However, there were a number of typos in it - mostly words missing from sentences - as well as formatting issues, where there were paragraphs that proved to be unnecessary to the material in hand.

Many years ago I read a fascinating book on the man who edited most of F Scott Fitzgerald's books. This was Maxwell Perkins, a man also credited with getting Hemingway published as well as bringing Thomas Wolfe's books into a readable form. The book about him was, I think, Max Perkins: editor of genius by A Scott Berg.

Perkins didn't just take the manuscript and publish it, he assisted the authors to clarify details, tighten structure, make good decisions about changing things for the betterment of the book, and much more. He was more like a patron than an editor.

I mention Perkins because he's always seemed to me to be the epitome of a good editor: a man who could see faults in the overall book that eluded the writer himself, but also a man who would nit-pick and refuse to let anything faulty go by. He and Fitzgerald had some serious arguments about the latter's work.

By contrast, the editor of The Janus Stone - Jane Wood - should have picked up one major error, which I presume is also in the print form.

One of the characters, a Catholic priest called Hennessey, says, "What about the Holy Ghost? The most important one of the trilogy as far as I'm concerned." This statement is repeated a second time later in the book, when Ruth Galloway remembers him saying it.

I thought at first it was a clue that Hennessey wasn't who he said he was. No Catholic priest - indeed no minister of any Christian denomination - would ever call the Trinity the 'trilogy.' Quite apart from the fact that a trilogy relates to a series of three things, usually of books, but occasionally of other art forms.

Hennessey,however, is definitely a priest, and therefore is hardly likely to use the wrong word in this instance.

I know from my own experience of publishing ebooks just how hard it is to pick up every error - missing words are far more common than misspellings. But errors relating to well-known information should be picked up long before the book goes out into the world.

Galloway, as a character, is very prone to dismissing anything to do with religion. But surely Griffiths, although she has some wry things to say about Christianity in the course of this book, isn't so opposed to religion that she would put something so completely wrong in the mouth of one of her Christian characters.

Bring back Max Perkins and his ilk, I say!

The flexibility of music notation

I've been reading and playing music since I was seven or eight, and over the years it's struck me more than a few times just how flexible a system music notation is. Here are a couple of examples:

Pitch

Firstly, there's more than one way to write the pitch of a note: it depends on what key you're in, whether it's a sharp or flat key. You can even change how you write a note within a piece, regardless of the key (this is called using the enharmonic equivalent). Modern music increasingly does this because of the complications of having many flats and sharps in a piece that doesn't have an official key signature.

I've been working on the vocal score of War Hero, a new opera by John Drummond, over the last couple of months (I'm a slower learner now, in my early seventies, than I used to be when I was in my twenties - unfortunately!) John sometimes uses key signatures, and sometimes doesn't, and in some bars there's a real mix of sharps and flats. Occasionally they've taken a bit of unravelling.

This isn't a new approach. On Sunday I played the accompaniment to a trumpet piece (Legend) by Georges Enescu, which was written at the beginning of the twentieth century. Enescu does the same thing. Even though his piece is mostly in a key with three flats, the score is littered with 'accidentals' - the name for those sharps and flats that don't officially belong in the key you start out in.

Of course there's nothing in the least 'accidental' about the additional sharps and flats in either John's music, or Enescu's. The word 'accidental' is a bit of a misnomer, in fact. In John's opera, he uses a particular chordal structure as the basis of most of the music, a structure that requires accidentals in order to make sense. Once you get used to this 'harmonic world' as you might call it, the accidentals form a kind of 'key signature' of their own.

I don't know if I'm explaining this very well! If you have any questions, ask me in the comments.

Expanding and contracting notes

A second thing that's struck me about the flexibility of music notation is the fact that time is very loose and fluid, by which I mean that a stretch of notes in one piece that might be marked Adagio, for instance (that means the notes are to be played slowly) can be played quickly in another piece that's marked Allegro, even though, on the page, the notes look exactly the same.

And even within a piece, a crochet, which is the basic unit of much music - the note from which we gauge the speed of all the other notes around it; a crochet, as I say, can be shorter or longer, depending on the context. If the composer asks us to play fast for a stretch and then pull back, as though we were reining in a horse we were riding, the crochet will obligingly stay the same on the page, but can be stretched out to accommodate the fact that everything has slowed down.

Musicians understand this, because after a certain amount of training it becomes intuitive. To someone to whom much of this language is already obscure, the idea is much harder to express. I remember it being like a leap into the unknown for one of my piano pupils, a few years back. Not quite as difficult as dealing with quantum theory, perhaps, but, in its own way, still a curious phenomenon in the way music works.

There isn't just one system of music notation

Having been trained in the old school of classical music, like millions of other musicians, I read a lot

of stuff on a page that makes no sense not just to non-musicians, but even to some other musicians. See the t-shirt to the side, which gives you an idea how complex some music can be.

I used play at church a lot. When we were at a Pentecostal Church I played from a single line that gave the tune, and added in the chords as I went along from the minimal symbols given above some of the notes. Some people find this very easy; I had to work fairly hard to make it come together, but in due course found it very freeing, and was able to improvise to a great degree.

Then we shifted churches, and they were using regular music with all the notes. This was fine too, because it meant that chords could be written out in full, and I found myself playing harmonies that I hadn't used in the previous church.

In due course they stopped using 'proper' music and gradually shifted to the extremely simple approach of just the lyrics on the page with a few chord symbols for the musicians. For some musicians this was enough and they could produce interesting music. For me, it was limiting: without a sense of what the composer intended (there was no vocal line with this format) you had to rely greatly on your ear and on what the other musicians - who knew the tune - claimed the piece should sound like. Tricky.

Jazz musicians use a similar approach, and often their music consists of nothing but chord charts. This is like having a skeleton in your living room, and having to explain to guests what it really looks like once it's got flesh on it. Effectively the musicians make up the music as they go along using the chart as a basis for sticking together. It takes practice to learn how to do this, but it provides something different every time the music is played.

I'd never heard of the Nashville Number System until today, but it's another form of music notation, perhaps even more skeletal than what jazz musos work with.

And in the past, keyboard players often used 'figured bass', which was no more than the bass line of the piece with symbols above it that gave an indication of what chord should be played. Good keyboard players could improvise on this skeleton and produce remarkable music. Unfortunately, most of it was lost, because there was no way to record it. Unlike jazz music of today.

The more you explore the subject of music notation, the more intriguing it is to discover how earlier musicians coped with remembering and recording their music, before the extraordinary system we have available today came into being. Something to discuss in another post, perhaps.

Collaborative writing

While reading The Making of Some Like it Hot, by Tony Curtis, (with Mark A Vieira) a couple of days ago, the following piece on co-writing struck me as interesting in terms of the different ways collaborators work together. 

'Billy' is Billy Wilder, the writer and director, and 'Izzy' is I.A.L. Diamond, his second major co-writer. (Wilder had previously worked on several films with Charles Brackett.)

The work wasn’t glamorous. Billy compared himself and Izzy to bank tellers, coming in at nine and plugging away at the thing all day. But writing is mysterious. How do you do it, especially with another guy? First of all, they divided the labour, in part because they were different. Billy was kinetic. He liked to move around. He didn’t like sitting. He was always pacing back and forth, throwing ideas around the room, some of which Izzy would catch, some of which floated into the ether. Izzy was content to sit at the typewriter, like he was driving a car. He’d take everything down, all the crazy thoughts. He liked typing. Billy didn’t. He didn’t like being stuck behind the typewriter. It made him uncomfortable, and it was boring.

They would work on the overall structure first, then make sure all the funny ideas fit. That’s probably how they knew that the musicians needed only one disguise. That was funny enough. But who knows what they really thought, what ideas were flying around that office? I heard that they acted out scenes to make sure they played. Billy would play one character, Izzy would play the other. They would decide every element there, rather than having Izzy go off and dream something up and come back to show it to Billy. No. They agreed where the thing was going, get it down, and then Izzy would go home and type up the draft. The next day Billy would look at it. “Mm hm,’ he would say. ‘Okay. Now...let’s see what we can do to make it better.’ There’d be a lot of smoking, maybe a cocktail at lunch, but mostly batting ideas back and forth. Once in a while they’d hit a dry patch, and there would be silence for hours. But not often. Once they’d gotten rolling, they had momentum.

One thing I found interesting: they would start a picture with an incomplete script. As they were making the picture, they saw it go in directions they hadn’t expected, and they wanted to be able to follow that lead.

Famously, the last line in the film - 'Nobody's perfect' -  wasn’t decided on until a few days before it was shot. It had originally been in a completely different part of the script and was cut. 

The two writers didn’t allow the actors to change anything. One day during the shoot was horrendous in this regard because Marilyn Monroe couldn’t say the line, ‘Where’s that Bourbon?’ without altering something in it, and Wilder wasn't willing to have any of the three words altered. Eighty-one takes later she got it right. (Pages 165-7) Nevertheless, Wilder and Diamond would change lines overnight when they saw the actors giving new life to the original script.