Posts Tagged ‘book’

21
Feb
2010
Categories
Writing

Aperture and the book

So Apple squeezed out a new edition of Aperture (and it’s actually rather good). It’s just unfortunate that it’s come now as I’m contracted to write a new edition of this book

The deadline is mid-April.

Fortunately that’s eminently do-able. It just means that the novel is going to have to take a bit of a back seat for a little while.

Is that a good thing? Yes, and no, I think.

No, because I’m really enjoying it. I never resent opening the same old file yet again, as I have done almost every day for most of the last year, meeting the same characters, working out whether they’re saying what they should the way they ought.

Yes, because it might do me good to have a break.

I read that Stephen King recommends putting your work aside for six weeks between writing and starting on the edit. I didn’t do this, so maybe I didn’t have a chance to step away from the words and view them a few weeks later with a fresh, unsympathetic eye.

Enforced exile could do me good. And it could do the book good, too.

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07
Feb
2010
Categories
Books

The Railway Detective by Edward Marston

It all looked so promising. A Victorian-era murder mystery set in the 1800s. Except the dialogue felt to this reader more like a script from the 1980s.

The Railway DetectiveThe Railway Detective is the first book in a series of novels about Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck. The Great Exhibition is fast approaching when a daring raid is launched on the mail train. Death, theft and blackmail follow as our dashing hero tries his hardest to solve the case.

There are a lot of points on which Marston has hit the bullseye. The plotting is spot on, his unravelling of the story can’t be faulted, the logic behind the investigation is strong and believable. But the main character isn’t particularly likeable, the villain’s motivation isn’t (I don’t believe) entirely plausible, and the words spoken by the characters feel strangely detached from the era in which they were spoken.

That’s where my important lesson lay.

My book is set in the years spanning 1856 and 1871 – almost the same era as this one – and like this is a detective story. The other thing it had in common, in the first draft, was fairly modern dialogue. I had wondered about that and whether it mattered, and having read this book I now see that it really does.

You can paint a scene, describing the look of the characters, the clothes they wear and the utensils they use, but unless the reader believes that they live and act within that scene in a logical and fitting manner, they feel detached and less believable. That, I think, is why I didn’t feel empathy towards the characters in this book – I didn’t believe them, so I invested very little time in hoping for a good outcome for each one.

Needless to say I’m spending a lot of time revising my own dialogue in the hope of convincing more readers that the words spoken – although spoken by fictional entities – really could have been said when I say they were.

And, of course, making sure my (hopefully) published sentences aren’t as tortuous and twisted as that one.

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30
Dec
2009
Categories
Books

Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries by Kate Westbrook

It helps to have a couple of weeks off work, but I raced through this book in about a fortnight. What a contrast to the last book I read, which took far, far, far longer than it should.

2009-secret-servant.jpgSecret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries is the second in Westbrook’s Moneypenny trilogy dealing with M’s right-hand woman and James Bond’s sometime muse. Not a great premise, you might think. Apart from a trip to the races in A View to a Kill we never see her away from her desk in the films, even if she is occasionally transported to a snazzy office inside an Egyptian ruin for The Spy Who Loved Me, or a submarine in You Only Live Twice. Oh, and Bond’s apartment, briefly, at the start of Live and Let Die.

So it’s a bit of a relief to find that these books aren’t about ordering paperclips and maintaining the stationery cupboard. In the first, Guardian Angel, Moneypenny played a key role in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. This second volume, Secret Servant picks up the story a few months later, just as Kim Philby has defected to the Soviet Union, after years of spying on British Intelligence from the inside.

Moneypenny befriends his wife and is sent behind the Iron Curtain to bring them back.

The language very clearly evokes the feel and spirit of the sixties, when a fancy dress was a frock, flirting was discrete and the hotbed of office gossip was the powder room.

It’s as gripping as the original, fast paced and well written, with a real sense of menace running through the Soviet chapters, but in the last quarter relies a little too much on telling the reader what has happened than on letting us experience it alongside our hero. It drops a star for that, unfortunately, but Westbrook (a pseudonym) has nonetheless written a cracking tale that keeps you guessing what will happen to the very end. Indeed, at times the only reason you know Moneypenny survives is that she wouldn’t have been able to retrospectively write her diary had she not.

It’s a worthy addition to the Bond cannon, and a great lead-in to the final volume in the series, Final Fling. That’s on my shelf waiting to be read; it can’t be long before I’m reaching to take it down.

4 out of 5
Price£7.99 (£4.98 from Amazon)
Author Kate Westbrook
ISBN 0719567696

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08
Dec
2009
Categories
Books

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

This is a lengthy book. 1006 pages in all, although that’s not the metric I’d use when declaring it lengthy. The Pillars of the Earth is longer, but it isn’t lengthy. That’s because it’s the right length for the story it tells. It was well paced, fast moving, inspiring, engrossing and engaging enough to carry me through its 1100 pages without ever wondering when it would come to an end.

Jonathan Strange and Mr NorrellJonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, though, often had me measuring the bulk of unread pages between forefinger and thumb, asking myself how long it would take me to get to the end. It is, then, both a long book and anlengthy book. Or at least, it was for me.

It’s an impressive undertaking – I certainly won’t deny that. Anyone who can keep track of a story so long and not lose their distinctive voice here and there along the way (Clarke never does) is a truly skilled writer, and on that score this book is a triumph, but clipping away half of the story and removing some of the various diversions would have made it move at greater pace and focussed the reader’s mind on the pertinent thread running through.

So would axing the footnotes, which present in abundance. One – an unusually lengthy one, it must be said – spreads over five pages, and I would argue that if it were really that important, and needed to be outlined in such great detail, it should probably have been weaved into the fabric of the story itself.

But, but, but, I think I may be in the minority here. It’s garnered impressive ratings on Amazon, with a four-out-of-five rating from 290 customer reviews. Professional reviewers, too, have heaped praise on the book, and their quotes are much in evidence on the covers.

So, your mileage may (and probably will) vary.

If that’s the case, Amazon is selling it at a discount right now, so bag yourself a copy and it’ll see you well into New Year.

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01
Dec
2009
Categories
Books, Journal, Writing
Tags
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Editing the book

It’s a while since I’ve written about the book, mainly because I’ve been so busy editing the thing.

It’s a big job. Some days I can work my way through three or four pages of the stuff I’ve already written. On others, three paragraphs would be something of an achievement. Am I taking too long over it? I don’t think so. There’s no point racing through and ending up with something you’re not happy with and clearly won’t sell.

I also know that this edit, making a second draft, won’t be the only one. I can see how it has improved so far, but I also know where it could yet be better. Even looking at the first couple of chapters, which I was quite happy with following the first thorough edit, I can see where a few little tweaks here and there could make things better still.

Fortunately I have two very helpful readers who have been running through it with pen in hand to pick out the bits that don’t quite work. It’s been very instructional and incredibly helpful, in large part because their points of concern have pretty much mirrored my own, which would suggest my self-criticism is valid. I’m also relieved that as we tend to agree on the points of issue I’m not kidding myself that it’s all great. That would be awful.

So the book is coming along and I’m now at the end of the second draft of the first five chapters. But that’s not the last chapter, and it’s far from the last edit, too.

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28
Nov
2009
Categories
Books

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett: review

2009-the-pillars-of-the-earth.jpgI put off reading this one for ages because, let’s face it, it’s long. Very long, if we’re being honest, and the thought of hauling around a 1100-page book for as long as it would take me to read on a daily commute didn’t appeal.

What a mistake. I’ve never read so many pages so quickly.

The Pillars of the Earth is a saga in the truest sense of the word – a sweeping story of the middle ages and the building of the fictional cathedral of Kingsbridge. Hugely frustrating when the villains get their way, genuinely edge-of-seat when the heroes get close to their goal, racy when required – slow when you need it, it’s a masterpiece that had me hooked from about 20 pages in.

Now admittedly with such a long and sweeping story some elements have to be glossed over, and there is a fairly key event close to the start that isn’t entirely believable on account of the fact that our main character doesn’t get enough time to mourn one particular event, but once beyond that it’s a non-stop rollercoaster to the very end.

And there’s real peril, too. This isn’t one of those books where everyone you like makes it through to the end, which is a refreshing, and at times shocking change to the norm.

The story is 20 years old this year and to celebrate, Ken Follett had written a new intro that you really, really, should skip – I can’t stress this enough – as it gives away the end of the book, which is just plain stupid. Nonetheless it remains his best-selling book to date, and I can quite see why.

So much so, that I’ve bought the sequel – World Without End.

Very excited to see that they’re making it into a TV mini-series.

Rating:
Title: The Pillars of the Earth
Author: Ken Follett
Price : £5.25 from Amazon
ISBN: 978-0330450133

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07
Oct
2009
Categories
Writing
Tags
,

A lengthy edit

Editing the book is going to take a long time, I think. I’m about half way through chapter one at the moment – on only the first edit – and already been at it two weeks. There are 33 chapters in all, so you can work out for yourself how long it would take to complete at that rate.

And then, of course, you’d start on the second edit.

I looked at the stats for chapter one and it’s taken 943 minutes so far. That’s editing and writing. Or, in other words, 15 hours 43 minutes. It sounds like a lot until you realise that it’s actually less than two working days. The trouble is, when your working days are taken up actually working, you don’t have that much time for writing and editing.

Chapter statistics in Word

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30
Sep
2009
Categories
Writing

Bringing your characters to life

The Writers and Artists Yearbook blog has some excellent advice for giving your novel life. Particularly at the editing stage, where I find myself now:

…ask yourself in each scene what is at stake for the various characters involved. If there is no great danger: either of someone’s long buried secret being revealed, or fortune, life, or honour being lost, then there is little motivation for the reader to keep on.

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23
Sep
2009
Categories
Books, Journal, Writing
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Finishing up, ready to edit

I’ve finished my book… and I’m one paragraph short.

I swear, finding the right words on which to tie it all up is more difficult than the whole of the rest of it combined. There won’t be a sequel, so I don’t need to find something commercial and open-ended that will bring the characters back. That, at least, is something, but how do you tie up the final loose end when all of the others have been brought to a logical and satisfying conclusion?

Anyhow, 83,464 words done, and in fairly short order. I started the week after Easter, when I’d outlined the premise at dinner in Darlington and thought that if it was ever going to be more than a brief synopsis I ought to put in some work.

Now I need to go back through for the first edit and rewrite and, you know what, I’m really quite looking forward to it. I loved writing it, and actually looked forward to sitting down and getting my fingers on the keyboard, and now that I feel like I know the characters so much better I can direct them more effectively and make their dialogue better fit their personalities.

There will be some cringe-worthy bits, of course, but that’s what rewrites are for: ironing out, rounding off, and excising the worst of your literary excesses before they escape.

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12
Jun
2009
Categories
Books
Tags

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief is the perfect demonstration of why publishers are so keen to get their authors on those big tables you see in bookshops, or at least it was in my case. If it hadn’t been set out by the door in the shop near work I’d probably never have found that. That would have been a shame.

The Book ThiefSo, the premise. It is 1939, 1940, and the years around then, and Germany is at war. Liesel Meminger is abandoned by her mother, not entirely voluntarily, in the town of Molching, near Munich (don’t bother checking – it’s fictional). There, she is handed over to a loving foster father and a fierce foster mother, who ladels every sentence with a generous serving of German expletives. Had her younger brother not died on the train there, she’d have had company, and might not have had such a hard start in her new home, but he did, so she did.

Over the 550 pages that follow, Germany fights what eventually becomes a war of attrition and the book’s narrator finds his workload only ever gets heavier. That’s because the narrator is Death and there are an awful lot of bodies to pick up.

Who would ever have guessed that Death could be such a quirky, approachable character; likeable, even. Who could ever have known he had such a way with words, for if there is only one reason to read this book it’s surely the style of language.

Zusak is something of a linguistic genius, and if you don’t envy his skill at constructing sentences you’ll certainly never have read before, then you really ought to be writing yourself. Never expect the expected, as he pulls out perfect adjectives, powerful similes and metaphors that make me very jealous indeed.

But perhaps the trouble is that that is the only reason to read this book, and that’s a shame. I didn’t identify with any of the characters, I didn’t feel sympathy or empathy, and even towards the end I didn’t really care whether they survived the Allied bombing or became a fraction in the statistics of war.

Yet, still I don’t feel that the hours I spent in Molching, watching Liesel grow and mature was time wasted, and Kathryn thought it was great, which perhaps explains how it won itself a place on that table.

Overall, then, three out of five. Brilliantly written, not so brilliantly plotted.

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