Back On The Menu

Just a note to say that Terra Incognita or Bernice Summerfield; Terra Incognita Bernice Summerfield as, no doubt, Amazon will list it - is back on the menu. I'm hoping to have the book finished by the end of October 2009 or April 2011 at the very latest. I know that the six people that read Genius Loci are waiting with bated breath and I hope that the book doesn't dissapoint.

Writing Bits: Just Say No

Today's blog has been brought to you by the TV series Castle and the letter N.

There is always a temptation to allow the logic of a story push you into an unnecessary scene. A good example of how this can be averted is demonstrated in Andrew W. Marlowe's script for the pilot episode of Castle.

The series premise, that playboy author Richard Castle will team up with no-nonsense NYPD detective Kate Beckett and solve crimes, is obvious to the audience from before the end of the teaser, thus the only question is how smoothly Marlowe can acomplish the pairing without straining the audiance's willing suspension of disbelief.

Thirteen minutes in (1st turning point for you structure fans) Castle uses his friendship with the Mayor to wheedle his way into the investigation. Now at this point logic dictates that Detective Beckett will object and that, because she is part of a disciplined service, she will take that complaint to her superior - Roy Montgomery. The audience expects it, I was expecting it and indeed Beckett even says the exact line that everyone was expecting...

BECKETT: Sir, can I talk to you for a minute - in private?

Logic dictates that Beckett should then talk to her boss and lay out the reasons why her working with Castle is a bad idea only to be over ruled and sent off with a flea in her ear. The trouble is that the resulting scene wouldn't have any real plot or character function - the series focus is squarely on Castle and Beckett the friction should be between them not frittered away on supporting characters. Any such scene will be at least half a page long, probably a whole page and that's out of a 42 minute show.

Several solutions come to mind:-

a) you could write the scene so brilliantly that nobody cares that it's slowing down the plot.
b) have the scene happen off screen and reference it in a couple of lines of dialogue.
c) have it happen on the other side of a glass door so that we can play off Castle's reaction.
Or d) which is Marlowe's solution...

BECKETT: Sir, can I talk to you for a minute - in private?

MONTGOMERY: (Closing door) No.

There you go, no scene, no loss of momentum, Montgomery is shown to be in charge and have a sense of humour and the whole audience is on Kate's side because who hasn't been put in a bad situation by their boss(1).

Now stop procrastinating and get back to work!

(1) I do not want to hear your boss stories, your boss stories will be moderated.

Cat Number Two

It's much harder to sell a script than a novel because compared to publishing there are many fewer people who can make a go decision by an order of magnitude. There are precisely 4 people in the UK who can, on their own authority, order a TV drama script made. Everybody else you talk to, everybody else you have meetings with, everybody except for those 4 (don't ask who they are) is merely a stepping stone to a final decision by the the people that can. All of these people have opinions, some of them can read a script and some cannot but that is irrelevent - good or bad your script is entirely dependent on their good will to advance. The fact is you could write a fabulous script that was loved by all who read it, championed by a giant in the industry and it could still not be made because one of those 4 didn't like cop shows/SF/men with beards/historical dramas or whatever or may merely have spent their drama budget that year.

If, despite knowing this, you still felt a need to repeatedly bang your head against a brick wall than the book to buy is 'Save the Cat' by Blake Snyder. This is the best common sense book on script writing I have ever read and if you study it closely and understand it properly then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your rejected script was at least a good one. Then having got this strange urge to hurt yourself badly out of the way you can go do something useful with your life - like accountancy. As I said to the Evil Monster Boy everybody loves an accountant, especially in March.

Throw Mummy On The Train

There is an apocryphal story, attributed to Mark Twain, that in the 19th Century Egyptian steam trains were run by burning mummies rather than coal or wood. It’s an attractive story and so plausible what with the mummies baked dry by centuries of Egyptian heat making them so combustible, the relaxed 19th Century attitude to a nation’s heritage and conspicuous shortage of coal and wood in the Nile valley region. Sadly, as far as I can tell, it’s not true.

Still it does make a wonderful metaphor for the process of writing a novel. When one is in the pit and getting the job done, my max sustained writing speed appears to be 250 centigreenes(1), one is taking concentrated chunks of research and imagination, some of which have been marinating in your brain for decades, and burning them in the engine just to gain that extra 200 words (50 cg).

Now it’s true that many authors, particularly former journalists, can run their engines on pure bovine excrement but even the most seasoned hack must throw in the occasional mummy if they want to avoid leaving the tracks altogether.

It’s when a writer starts to run out of mummies that his or her work becomes moribound, sometimes bloated, occasionally recursive but nearly always unreadable. Many writers complain of what we used to call writer’s block but now goes under the more modern name of Acute Story Deficiency Syndrome or (ASDS).

During the sixties there were brave experiments into drug therapy by such luminaries as Michael Moorcock and Phillip K. Dick and although carefully calibrated doses of amphetamines, alcohol and coffee were deemed to be promising the side-effects were terrifying and are now considered unethical.

The only solution to ASDS is to go tomb raiding and dig up more mummies but that’s a subject for a future blog.

(1) The centigreene (cg) is the SI unit of measurement for writing novels and is approximately 5 words per day. It’s named after Graham Greene who consistently wrote 500 words a day all through his career. Thus a 100 centigreene is a greene and a 1,000 centigreene is a hectogreene, 5,000 words or roughly equivalent to the old imperial measure of one and one third Agathas. It’s important to note that the centigreene is a linear measurement denoting a rate of writing towards finishing your novel. Any other words written - blogs, emails, twitters and faux research are considered a separate vector and don’t count.

Cat Number One

Many people have approached me over the years and nearly all of them want to know the answer to one question - are you ever going to lose weight? Those that don't ask this question or fail to be discouraged by my surly disposition invariably go on to ask a second, much harder, question to whit - 'How can I became an almost successful author just like you?'

My first impulse is to grab the questioner by the neck and scream 'What makes you think I want you to become an almost successful author? What makes you think I want the competition? Why don't you just hand me a razor and have me cut my throat now....' And so on. Fortunately nine times out of ten I curb this impulse and avoid having to explain myself to local law enforcement. I then give them the advice that I am about to give now...

Go out and buy 'How Not To Write A Novel' by by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. The best book about writing prose since 'The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and how to avoid them)' by Jack M. Bickham (can we see a pattern here, I think so). The premise is very simple, ask any six successful authors on the best way to write a novel and not only will you receive at least seven contradictory answers but also at least one that involves peanut butter and nudity. However, ask those six authors how not to do it and you will get something close to a consensus.

Once you've bought the book read it twice and then sit down and write your novel carefully following all the advice contained inside. If you do that and send the manuscript out to enough publishers and literary agents, at least 25, and you still aren't published then you're just going to have to live with the fact that you can't write.

Some of you are even now reaching for your keyboard to ask me the best way to submit to agents and publishers - stop right there. Have you bought the book, have you read the book and have you written an entire novel following its advice? I didn't think so. No more questions, less talk more writing - get on with it.

Castle over Red Riding

People have no idea what is difficult and what is easy in script writing. 'Red Riding', Channel Four's sumptuous serving of deproporn, must have been a relatively easy adaptation. It was sold as 'difficult' and so the audience was primed to expect plots that barely hung together, lots of landscape acting and angst, oh yes, lots of angst. 'Castle', a lovely bit of fluff starring Nathan Fillion, has been constructed with a great deal more care and attention to detail. Ironically because expectations are so low the writing has to be of much higher quality. Anyway I'm really enjoying it and for me that's the most important thing.

The eBook Issue

I can't figure out how to embed this so here's the link...Pay the Writer

Just a quick note

Just a quick update in case the three of you wondered where I'd gone. I've been hard at work on a novel, which I'm not going to talk about in case I jinx it, a new Blake's 7 prequel and on script editing things that I'm not allowed to talk about. Since that accounts for the bulk of my waking hours, the rest being taken up with the Evil Monster Boy, working at Waterstones and eating. None of the latter topics make for exciting reading except maybe the Evil Monster Boy who is getting bigger and eviler with every passing day. He's doing quite well at school at the moment but is ignoring my subtle hints as to suitable future careers. I want him to be an acountant he wants to be a movie star. I suggested he become an accountant and a movie star that way he'd never be ripped off by his manager but he's not convinced. Anyway I believe I've written enough so that the paragraph reaches all the way down the length of the illustration so now I'll stop.

Law and Order: UK

I went to see a screening of Law and Order: UK at the NFT last night. The episode was followed by a really interesting Q&A panel with Dick Wolf and Chris Chibnall. It was so wonderful to watch the L&O formula applied to a British crime procedural. No killer cam, no landscape acting, no pissed off Mrs and a blistering pace that wasn't going to slow down for anything so mundane as a back story. ITV is going to be really glad it commissioned this.

And now......

The new Blake's 7 website is up and can be found at www.blakes7.com. Since I will be contributing a blog to that site as well it means I have a brand new excuse for not posting here. I know the three of you will be thrilled.

Signing on the 29th

I can't think of anything witty to say so we'll just stick to the facts. On the 29th of December I will be signing Battlefield DVDs and Eye of the Machine CDs at The Who Shop in East Ham London.

In an ideal world my presence alone should be enough to send you careering down to East London with a bag full cash and a pocket full of sharpies but, alas, the world is far from ideal. So to sweeten the pot I'm throwing in, strictly in a supporting capacity , Nicholas Courtney, famed thespian, Swahilli speaker and military officer impersonator.

If that doesn't get you to part with your hard earned cash (and by extension save the world from global recession) then nothing will.

Battlefield

As of the 29th December 2008 my Doctor Who adventure will be available on DVD. It's crammed with extras including interviews with yours truly and a commentary track where I can be heard desperately trying not to moan out loud at the awful bits. I am deeply ambivalent about this project but I have to say it wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered it being.

As a writer there's a special embarrassment that goes with a script that goes horribly wrong. Like a sexual encounter that ended badly you don't want to think about it and you resent having people bring it up in public. Still sexual failure doesn't (in my case) generate residuals so I'm not going to complain too loud.

Here's a good review and here's a bad review and here's the relevant page at Amazon.co.uk. Why not buy it and make up your own mind - at the very least you can revel in the near future zeerust and Jean Marsh's frocks.

Altogether now - 'It's the eye of the....'

It is a day of joy because finally 'Blake's 7: The Early Years; Eye of the Machine/Point of No Return' is out. The CD is almost as long as its title and packed with Blake's 7 goodness. In addition to Eye of the Machine you also get, purely as a bonus, James Swallow's Point of No Return which deals with a critical point in Travis' career. I'm very pleased with the way both of them turned out.

So buy Eye of the Machine/Point of No Return (or Point of No Return/Eye of the Machine as James insists on calling it) it's got drama, excitement and some quite reasonable writing.

It's available from Amazon, play.com and the Blake's 7 Website

The Painted Man

I was given a proof copy of this book at work, I am the resident geek after all, and because free stuff is free stuff I started to read. I had very low expectations, apart from the Blade Itself (reviewed below) I've become increasingly discontent with fantasy novels. I expected this either to be the kind of generic fantasy in which the author ticks off a list of cliches - obscure hero, wise mentor, vestigial empire - or one of the new breed of 'oh look how cynical I am' anti-Tolkeins where the same cliches are ticked off only this time upside down.

Instead the world building was startlingly fresh and original and the characterisations had that quality that all good writing aspires to - they felt 'true'. Not realistic you understand since human beings are almost never realistic in real life but true.

I'm going to pay the author the greatest compliment I know - I'm going to buy the second volume with my own money.

Play More Dungeons and Dragons

Once your youth has passed you by there is a tendency to look back at the things you did with a mixture of awe and incredulity. One thing that has struck me recently is how much time I spent bored out of my skull doing stuff I didn't really enjoy in the vain hope that someone would get off with me. So if you're aged 17-21 and slightly geeky listen carefully...

Play more Dungeons and Dragons, or go fishing, or get involved in cosplay or join a Carnival Krewe or something that you want to do. Don't spend your time in nightclubs listening to music you don't like very much, damaging your hearing and utterly failing to get off with someone nice. It doesn't matter how many hours of nightclubbing you do, if they don't fancy you, they don't fancy you.

It's good to socialise but utter boredom is nature's way of telling you that you're not having a good time.