I Shall Eviscerate You In Fiction - Part 1

Here is an unpalatable truth about writers - we're not good with criticism. Or to clarify:- criticism of a writer's work drives them to an immediate and almost uncontrollable rage. Any criticism, about any aspect by anybody = psychopathic episode. Any writer who tells you differently is either lying, in denial or being ghosted by somebody else entirely.

I realise that many people are unaware of this from the blithe way that readers, critics and, occasionally, people who sit next to you on the bus flirt with death. I suppose it could be a novel form of extreme sport or TV reality programme(1). In an effort to reduce the number preventable deaths I offer the following safety advice.

If you must criticise an author to his face then be sure to do it at the end of the conversation. The killing rage begins with the first unfavourable comment, beyond that point the writer has ceased to listen to a word you're saying and is instead imagining how good it would feel to rip your arm off and beat you to death with the wet end.

When dealing with an enraged author never, ever, state that you have no intention of buying their next book. The only thing keeping you alive is the squeaky little voice in the author's head that reminds him/her that dead people don't buy books... It's a very tiny little voice at the best of times.

Before making a criticism ensure that you are not alone, standing by a ship's railing, pool of lava or acid bath or conveniently far from any CCTV coverage. Writer's are very weakly socialised and it's only fear of arrest and prison that is holding them back.

Next week - advice for writers on how to vent in safety.

(1) 'When Authors Attack' presumably.

Midnight Riot Cover (US)

This is the US cover for Midnight Riot (which is what River's of London is called in the states). See him, I wouldn't mess with Constable Peter Grant if I was you!

Moon Over Soho (UK) Cover

This is the almost finalised cover for Moon Over Soho I like the blue colour and the way it thematically matches the Rivers of London cover.

Moon Over Soho will be the second book in the continuing adventures of Peter Grant, Detective Constable and Apprentice Wizard.

Turbulence by Samit Basu

I was first sent this novel as a very large word file and was asked to read it as a favour to my agent. I procrastinated, as I always do in these circumstances, but finally when at eleven o'clock in the evening there was nothing left to watch on telly I opened the file.

I'll just give it a quick scan, I thought to myself.

Three o'clock the next morning I finished reading with that rare sense of loss you get when you finish a book you never really wanted to end.

I'm terrible at summaries and reviews so I'll just say that it involves superpowers, politics, the limits of human responsibility and is fast paced, deep, crisply written, full of vim, vigour, wit, wisdom and zest.

Plus it's really, really funny. As the man with the long name at the bottom of the cover says...

"You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll gasp and YOU WILL demand a sequel!"

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

I don't write reviews partly because I'm lazy and partly because I don't feel I can do justice to someone's work without doing way more writing than I'm willing to do without a contract. I do like to recommend books that I enjoyed and then loot them for any useful craft wisdom the author might have left lying around their text.

Zoo City by South African author Lauren Beukes is a wonderful fantasy noir thriller and then some and you should read it for that reason alone.

However if you are a writer you should also read it because it is a masterclass of how to weave exposition into your book and when and where to spring those little details that bring a setting vividly to life.

So that's my recommendation and my looting - enjoy.

Moon Over Soho Cover

This is the American cover of my second book which will be published in February/March. Just to clarify; the first book will be titled Rivers of London in the UK and Midnight Riot in the US.

Del Rey have informed me that this isn't the finished cover so I'm taking it down until the official cover is released.

Rivers of London Cover

This is the UK cover for my upcoming novel 'Rivers of London' which will be available from all book stores, good, bad and indifferent, from January 20th 2011.

Sometimes more really is more....

I've always felt that a great many modern films could be improved by the judicious snipping of about twenty minutes of material from the final print. If you see a film with a running time of over 2 hours its often a safe bet that the surplus is superfluous - I'm looking at you Cameron.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an exception, there are obvious gaps where chunks of character development have been pruned out and the movie suffers as a result. In this case I would welcome a bloated self indulgent Director's cut.

Not that the film is perfect it has a pointless and grating prologue which adds no information that is not given later and does nothing except drain tension from the narrative. That has the strong stink of the gibbon about it.

Less easy to blame on the hooting of the studio primates is the lacklustre and oddly static climax but in this the Sorcerer's Apprentice is hardly alone; many recent action films including the A-Team and the last two Bonds have ended with action sequences that were less exciting than those that preceded them.

Pushy Minor Characters

What is it with these pushy minor characters? You're tooling along nicely from plot point A to plot point B you need someone to lay some pipe or ease you through a transition and the next thing you know the fuckers are measuring curtains. You've moved on to the next scene and they're still prancing around going "Look at me I'm so three dimensional; use me, use me!" It's like Bottom in a Midsummer's Night's Dream any little part and they're telling you how good they'd be doing. "Oh I can deliver that exposition,' they say. "Just give a chance, I don't mind doing nude scenes or dying, let me die. I can always come back as a zombie or my own twin brother, please, please, please."

I've got one character in the first book who's sole original function was to open the fricking door and now she's a fricking regular - a regular - my publishers are asking when she's coming back. Except my sodding viewpoint character is going "How come she gets all the best lines, if you love her so much why don't you get her to do the first person narrative." It's these pushy minor characters that put the 'extruded' into extruded fantasy series and the 'bloat' into bloated sequel.

Well it's not happening to me you hear? I'll put every one of you against the wall and have you shot - you see if I don't. No minor character is safe in one of my books and nobody's coming back as their own twin sister - evil or otherwise.

Blake's 7 on BBC 7 in June

Yes folks there will be 4 B7 Audio Episodes on BBC 7 this June, two of them written by me and two by inestimable Simon Guerrier. You can listen to them live or 'catch up', as those funky teenagers say, on iPlayer or direct from the BBC7 website.

I will, of course, be reminding you closer to broadcast time so there is no excuse. The transmission dates are as follows....

Blood and Earth by Meeeeeee! Tuesday 1st of June at 18:30
The Dust Run by Simon. Wednesday 2nd of June at 18:30
The Trial by Simon again. Thursday 3rd of June at 18:30
When Vila Met Gan by Meeeee...again! Friday 4th June 18:30

You owe it to your children's children to listen to these shows.

In Praise Of: The Charles Paris Mysteries

Bill Nigh is note perfect as the ageing actor, occasional lothlorio and reluctant amateur detective Charles Paris. Beautifully adapted from the Simon Brett novels by Jeremy Front the mysteries are compact little masterpieces that have never failed to delight.

You can read what Front says about the adaptations here and at least one of the mysteries is available as a CD from all good stockists.

My Macaroni Ostrogoth

Just a quick note to say that my three book deal with Gollancz is now official. I'd post more but for some quaint reason Del Rey and Gollancz labour under this strange notion that just because they've paid for something it ought to be delivered on time.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I’ve just finished N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ and a damn fine book it is too. In turns intriguing, terrifying and exciting it follows the story Yeine Darr a formerly outcast scion of the family that rules the world (the eponymous Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) who is summoned unexpectedly to Sky, the centre of all power, as part of a Machiavellian succession plot. Now I like castlepunk but this takes palace intrigue throws in half the spice cupboard and a shelf full of metaphysics and turns the heat up to eleven. I had really good time reading it and that’s what counts for me.

From a craft perspective I was particularly struck by how cleverly Jemisin starts the book. Yeine Darr, the narrator, keeps restarting her story as she remembers things that she needs to tell you before she can continue. Done skilfully, as it is here, this allows Jemisin to lay down some serious pipe without holding up the story or breaking reader immersion and give us an insight into Yeine’s own mental state. I’m looking forward to the next book.

Writing the Other 2: It Depends on Who the Camera is

First some caveats: I have no academic training whatsoever and the following blog has been written because I’ve decided to articulate some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for ages now(1). I make no claims to academic rigour or any other perspective than the tools I have devised to successfully write things down and then sell them. I hope some of it will be useful but I offer no guarantees. Anyone stealing this material to form the basis of an essay or, god help you, a thesis or something had better be prepared a) for abject failure or b), in the unlikely event of procuring a passing grade, to provide monetary compensation(2). Anyway moving on…

Since I write Science Fiction and Fantasy my definition of the other is quite wide and some issues that apply to some others don’t apply to other others(4). This blog will strive to differentiate and classify the various others into groups and then look at the relative levels of knowledge required to write with confidence(5).

Others, for the purpose of writing fiction, have two principle characteristics: one) what I think of their basic type, contemporary, historical and the fantastic, and two) their prominence in the fiction; point of view, foreground and background. We will deal with prominence first since this is the easiest.

A background character is precisely that; a character that exists only because you don’t want to have your principles act(6) against a void. In this case you can get away with a few telling details, often just a name, mode of dress or verbal tic providing, and this is important, you don’t step on a cliché bomb(7). Heinlein does a lot of this in Starship Troopers to show that his Terran Federation is an equal opportunities fascist state and my favourite example is a line from Robert Holmes’ classic ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’(9) “I was with the Filipino Army during their final advance on Reykjavik” which conjures up a far future in which the balance of power has radically shifted away from where it rests now.

Never get background characters confused with background; if your main characters are operating in another culture, say Feudal Japan, then you’re going to need something more than a verbal tic to get you through the chapter.

A foreground character, or culture come to think of it, is one who interacts enough with your point of view characters for the reader/viewer to get a real sense of their personality. If their role is tightly circumscribed within the work, they’re the pathologist in a crime story, for example, and we only meet them in the lab during autopsies – then as with a background character you can get away with a few telling details. If you’re planning to portray a truly multicultural society then you may have no choice but to treat some of your characters this way – just think about what you’re doing and have some respect for your own ignorance(10). Americans face a particular pitfall when writing about Europe, particularly Ireland and the UK, in thinking that a shared history, literature and pop culture(11) equates to a real familiarity with a particular culture(12). To write a foreground character with confidence you need, what I’ve decided to call on this instance, a working knowledge of their culture.

Point of view: writing point of view, which includes close 3rd person, of a character requires more than a working knowledge of their culture - you must be able to think yourself into their heads and that requires you to embrace the other to the point where it ceases to be the other and that, my friends, is a whole different ballgame(13)…

Next time on Writing the Other ‘Oi! Who are you calling the other?’

(1) Along with the Glee cover version of Amy Whitehouse’s ‘Rehab’.
(2) I’ve had some hard times(3) and this has eroded my sense of humour about copyright infringement.
(3) I wanted to put ‘Will write for food’ on my card but my agent said no.
(4) Or indeed to other’s other others.
(5) They tried to make me go to rehab but I said no, no, no…
(6) I’m using ‘act’ in the broad sense of the word here.

(7) Cliché bombs and how to avoid them will be covered in a later blog but for now the rule of thumb is to avoid getting your telling detail from: i) film or TV, ii) background characters in other authors works, iii) some vague recollection about something that guy you knew did years ago…(8)

(8) If only you could remember his name.
(9) Both of these works have their own problems however.
(10) Surgeon’s Law applies to your casual knowledge of other cultures; 90% of everything you think you know is bollocks.
(11) And language of course.

(12) A good example of this is Lt. Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5 whose characterisation, while strong, is the product of the Russian Jewish immigrant culture of America with a few cold war cliché’s thrown in – rather than any imagined St Petersburg of the 23rd Century.

(13) Possibly one day cricket(14).
(14) I’d rather be home with Ray I ain’t got seventy days…

Mokit on a Tricycle

Spring is in the air, daffodils are thrusting their way through the dog poo, spontaneous singing can be heard from the high rise blocks and film crews are out gambolling on Primrose Hill. This is a favoured location for film crews, not only does it have good sightlines, a spectacular view over London but being Primrose Hill the producers can pop back to their nearby £1,000,000+ Regency Townhouse for a quick spot of lunch and sex with the nanny.

This particular crew were filming a young kid cycling down the steep slope of the hill and, because dead children can cause productions to over run, they had child, tricycle and camera mounted on a motorised flatbed. There was, what back in the 1980s we used to call an AFM (assistant floor manager), standing at the bottom of the hill with a walkie talkie trying to keep unsuitable people out of shot.

We exchanged cheerful nods and I opined that I'd never seen a mokit on a tricycle before, he gave me the glassy eyed grin of someone being forced to talk to weirdos all day, and I walked on whistling cheerfully in the knowledge that my fat backside was waddling away in at least one of the takes.