Round Robin: L C Tyler

We now seem to be on the home run for the round robin, having had some great discussions about our own writing and writing generally. Anyway thanks again, Brian, for my questions, which I have answered or evaded as follows:

Q: I think that all our characters are parts or versions of ourselves in some way (in the same way everyone in your dreams is a version of you). Which of your two protagonists is most like you and which of the two voices do you most enjoy writing in? I agree with your general premise. I’ve said before somewhere that I think all of my characters carry at least a small part of my DNA. Martin Edwards has recently explored the same theme on his excellent blog Do You Write Under your Own Name – see: http://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2010/12/autobiographical-crime-fiction.html

Of course, the characteristics you give to your characters are not necessarily the ones you want to own up to. I’ve made Ethelred morose, self-pitying and (at the same time) a hopeless optimist. Elsie is small and stroppy and never misses the chance of a sarcastic remark. Not surprisingly, I’ve probably enjoyed writing Elsie more, and she quickly became an equal partner in the narration rather than just being a foil for Ethelred. It’s fun writing Ethelred too though. I think he is basically a lost character from A Dance to the Music of Time – certainly early on, when I was trying to work out what Ethelred sounded like, I re-read Anthony Powell to get the rhythm of his speech. My family would probably tell you which one I really resemble. As for me, I’m pleading the fifth ….

Q: Secondly, you’re working on an historical novel at the moment, is that right? Care to share some details about it? Yes, that’s right. Its provisional title is “1658” – or possibly “1658!” Anyway, it’s set in the dying days of the Commonwealth, just before the restoration of Charles II and, well, somebody gets murdered. I assume that tells you as much as you’d like to know? That’s all I’m saying anyway. Like most writers I find it difficult to talk in any detail about what I’m working on, because a) it may never happen and b) if it does, it may look very different from what it does now – it could even end up being called “1659”. This might look like a new departure for me, but my earliest published work of fiction was a short story set in the twelfth century. It won a well-endowed short story prize and hence, I think, it’s possibly earned me more per word than anything else I’ve ever written.

Q: Finally, comic crime is notoriously difficult to write well whilst maintaining the right balance between darkness and light – yet you manage it perfectly. What was the appeal of it? Would you ever write only the darker side, or do you find yourself naturally looking at events from a more humorous or satirical angle? Thank you. I think comic crime is difficult both from the point of view that people can rarely agree on what is funny and there is a danger of seeming to laugh at something (crime) which isn’t a joking matter. The answer to the second point is that I am making jokes about detection, not about crime. Sadly there is no real answer when somebody says that you just don’t make them laugh.

Strangely I hadn’t read a great deal of comic crime before I started to write my own, so (unlike a lot of authors) I can’t claim that I had always wanted to write exactly like X or Y. The Herring Seller’s Apprentice was something of a journey into the unknown – at the end of which I discovered I’d written a comic crime novel. I’ve often wondered whether I could write like Val McDermid (say) or RJ Ellory. I’m certainly keen to try lots of different things, so I wouldn’t rule out going over to the Dark Side – but I’d probably want to do it under a different name.

And now questions for Suroopa: You write not only fiction for adults, but also non-fiction and books for children. Your most recent work (I think) is a book describing the experiences of the survivors of the terrible tragedy at Bhopal. Which type of writing do you get most satisfaction from? Do you feel that your non-fiction work impacts on how you write fiction – and indeed vice versa? One further point that intrigues me is this: how does it feel to be writing in English in India today? Does English-language writing in India feel well-connected to the rest of the English-speaking world – and what is its place within contemporary Indian literature? And finally (of course) what are you working on at the moment and when can we buy it?

Round Robin: Brian McGilloway

Thanks to Frances for my questions. Hope the answers make sense.

How do you manage to fit a steady output of novels with a day job and young family?

The short answer to this is ‘with increasing difficulty.’ I found with the earlier books that I was completing them about 18 months before publication so I always felt I had breathing space. Now, though, I tend to be writing closer to deadline and am keen to be doing other writing work as well, so it is getting harder. I suppose the one good thing is that I am quite a fast writer once I get started – I tend to write for about an hour and a half at a time and I manage around 1000 – 1500 words in that time, sometimes more. If I can maintain that pace every day, then in three or four months I have a complete first draft. I also redraft as I write, stopping at natural pauses and going back through what I’ve done which possibly helps speed the process too. I work best with some form of deadline – if I had all the time in the world I’d check e-mails and play Angry Birds rather than writing. If I know I only have an hour, then I’ll write solid for that hour. It can be frustrating, though, to have to stop when your inclination is to keep going…

Of course it also helps a lot that I love writing and would feel compelled to do it regardless – as we all did before we were published anyway. That sense of compulsion – the need to write – drives the books forwards. I also think that working a day job that requires you to talk to other people a lot (as teaching does), there is something wonderful (and anti-social) about then being able to disappear into a story for an hour a day in complete isolation. I listen to music when I write, so it’s a chance to really get my own space in a day.

Secondly, do you plan? ie do you know exactly what's going to happen in a novel before you start writing it (I have always imagined that this is essential in crime writing, although I now there are crime writers who still don't know "who dunnit" until halfway through)?

I do plan a bit – normally about eight chapters ahead. I know the first chunk of the book before I start, but don’t always know how it will end. The planning develops then as the book progresses. I find it’s useful for me in helping keep to the process I mention above – to write significant sections in each sitting, it’s good to sit down with a fair idea about what you’re going to write. That said, the best plans have to be flexible. In next year’s book, Little Girl Lost, the first draft was split into two concatenating narratives which ran alongside each other – one following the detective and the other a child for whom she was searching. One informed the second and offered alternate angles on the patterns of the first. I worked really hard on the child’s narrative, developing patterns and working on the tone of the child appropriate to her age. In the end, after two months on it, I had to accept it wasn’t working right and cut the entire thing – around 30,000 words. I believe the finished book is the better for the cut having been made. Still, I think I needed to write it, even if I didn’t use it, to help propel the other main narrative along and to give me a sense of what was happening off page, so to speak.

And no, I don’t always know who dunnit at the start, though I normally have an idea of what form justice will take at the end, even if not who will be on the receiving end of it.

And lastly, was it always going to be crime for you, or have you considered writing in any other genre?

The first thing I ever wrote (beyond Protestant /Catholic love affairs stuff that is a prerequisite of growing up in Northern Ireland) was a book called One So High about two physiatrists, one of whom is interviewing the other to establish whether he is really mad or just pretending to be to avoid prison over a crime he committed. (I’d been studying Hamlet at the time, if that helps explain it) Even in that, crime played a fairly big role, and that was before I really started reading crime. I love crime novels and the way in which a detective is able to access all levels of society in a single day and often as part of the same case. In a way, it allows me as a writer to look at how things connect and how the actions of those at the top generally create victims at the bottom. Of course The Moonstone, the first English crime novel did just that – it was ground breaking in that the criminals (both accidental and deliberate) are upper class and the victims of the book poor. That’s not to say I would rule out trying to write other types of novel at some stage, but at the moment all the ideas I have and the themes I want to explore are probably best served through a crime narrative.

Thanks for the questions, Frances. I enjoyed answering them. Now Len, for yours – I think that all our characters are parts or versions of ourselves in some way (in the same way everyone in your dreams is a version of you). Which of your two protagonists is most like you and which of the two voices do you most enjoy writing in? Secondly, you’re working on an historical novel at the moment, is that right? Care to share some details about it? Finally, comic crime is notoriously difficult to write well whilst maintaining the right balance between darkness and light – yet you manage it perfectly. What was the appeal of it? Would you ever write only the darker side, or do you find yourself naturally looking at events from a more humorous or satirical angle?

Finally, a very Merry Christmas and best wishes to you all for 2011.

Round Robin: Frances Garrood

Frances, your books have been praised (by Andrew Davies, no less) for their beautifully drawn and endearing characters. How do you go about creating your fictional people? And when you start a new book are the people the first thing to fill your imagination; or does the theme of the novel come first?

Thank you, Eliza. Difficult questions, but I'll try to anwer them as briefly as I can.

First question. I don't think I conciously set about "creating" characters; they just seem to arrive. Some of them are bits of people I've known; others come from my own imagination. If I think about my characters, I can see that there are recurring themes (mad old women, for one. I've known a lot of mad old women), but on the whole it's an unconscious process. I am incapable of creating someone who is wholly bad. I think my work as a nurse and a counsellor has made me very conscious of the fact that there really is good in everyone (how trite that sounds!), and even my worst character, who I suppose is the eponymous Ernest of my first novel, has reasons for his appalling behaviour, and there are glimpses of good among the bad (thoughI have to admit, not many). However I do it, it's a gradual processs. The characters arrive unformed, and they develop with the novels. Some of them just appear uninvited; others are half-expected. But because I don't usually know what's going to happen next, I often don't know who's going to happen next, either.

Second question. I think I probably start with a very vague idea rather than a particular theme, but once the characters arrive, they make the idea into a story, like characters acting out a play. Dead Ernest began with an idea - widowhood - because it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I suppose I almost needed to write about it. Initially, there were three widows, one of them being the youngish one that was once me, but the mad old widow (inevitably) took over, and she was actually rather pleased that Ernest had died, so the original idea went out of the window and it became her story. I like being surprised by what happens; I love the way characters take over. I suspect that only a fellow writer understands the great joy when a character comes alive and does its own thing, almost without any help from the writer. My latest novel does have a structure, which is a first for me, and a theme, but it was still initially very vague, and the characters continued to surprise me right up until the end.

And now I'd just like to say to all MNWers that I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and a really successful 2011. This year has had its triumphs; Ryan's award (a first for MNW), the Kindling of Aliya, Tim, David and others, American rights for Faye, a deal with Macmillan for Dee, and Brian, Eliza and Len continuing to turn out successful novels at an amazing rate (I know that's not all, but it's pretty impressive!). May next year (our fifth birthday) be even better!

And now for Brian McGilloway's questions. Brian, you have been one of Macmillan New Writing's big success stories. Firstly, how do you manage to fit a steady output of novels with a day job and young family? Secondly, do you plan? ie do you know exactly what's going to happen in a novel before you start writing it (I have always imagined that this is essential in crime writing, although I now there are crime writers who still don't know "who dunnit" until halfway through)? And lastly, was it always going to be crime for you, or have you considered writing in any other genre?

Still to Come

Another quick reminder of the Round Robin order. So far we've had:

Dee Swift
MFW Curran
Tim Stretton
Faye L Booth
Alis Hawkins
Ciara Hegarty
Doug Worgul
David Isaak
Ryan David Jahn
Eliza Graham

Still to come:

Frances Garrood
Brian McGilloway
LC Tyler
Suroopa Mukherjee
Aliya Whiteley

Round Robin: Eliza Graham

Thanks for the questions, Ryan. (And congratulations, by the way, on your wonderful success. It's good to 'meet' you on the blog.)

1. Each of your novels, unless I’m mistaken, is written from a first-person point of view, or else a combination of first and third -- what is it about first-person narration that appeals to you as a writer?

Generally, as you say, it happens to be first. In Restitution, however, a large part of the book was written in third. And I use third as well as first in all my novels.

I love the immersion in the fictional world first person provides. I remember sitting in a classroom when I was about fourteen with an English teacher reading us Jane Eyre. The 'I' of Jane was so gripping. I remember the thirty chatty, fidgety, girls sitting back in their seats and listening to every word. Each of us was Jane. Later on, when I read Great Expectations, I loved Pip's take on life.

But first person limits you to what that protagonist perceives or discovers. Sometimes I need to step round an object and see it from another person's perspective. So I switch to third. Restitution, as I said earlier, had one first person and two, possibly three, third-person points of view as it wasn't possible for the main protagonist, a girl of seventeen, to experience everything I needed her to. Technically it was a very hard novel to write, especially as there were jumps in time and location that had to work as well. When I'd finished writing it I reread Bleak House, which uses a first person narrative (Esther's) with multiple (numerous, in fact,) inter-woven third-person narratives. I can't imagine how anyone apart from Dickens could pull such a complex novel together.

I've recently read all Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels and was intrigued to see that Child writes some of the novels in first person (Jack) and others in third person, because there are things essential to the plot of a particular book that Jack wouldn't or shouldn't know.

The other three novels (I'm just finishing the fourth, The History Room) are simpler. Generally there are just two points of view: one first and one third. The third usually provides the historical context for the novel. The principal first person narrator hits upon a mystery and the third person narrator provides the clues. Hey, I've just worked out how my novels operate.

Which is all a very round-about way of saying that I use whichever POV seems appropriate for the book.

2. You’ve now written a couple books while under contract with Macmillan. Do you think that’s affected how you approach the writing process in any way? Or what stories you choose to tell?

Having a time frame to deliver certainly affects the writing process. On the whole I find it helpful to know when something is due. It seems to put me back into undergraduate mode and I switch on the kettle, brew up the tea, buy lots of chocolate and generally revert to being nineteen again, with an eye on the deadline date. On the other hand, writing a novel like Restitution that required years of research and drafting would be very, very hard on a fourteen-month deadline. The two books I've written under contract (Jubilee and The History Room) have been set locally, which saves a lot of time. Again, this has probably been positive as my surroundings are beautiful and historically rich, so it would be a shame to have overlooked them in favour of more distant locations.

I enjoyed answering these questions. I hope I can provide something for the next MNW author and near(ish) neighbour, Frances Garrood, to get her writer's teeth into.

Frances, your books have been praised (by Andrew Davies, no less) for their beautifully drawn and endearing characters. How do you go about creating your fictional people? And when you start a new book are the people the first thing to fill your imagination; or does the theme of the novel come first?

Round robin: crime fiction and screenwriting.

First, thanks to David for asking questions I had answers to -- or at least questions I could make up answers to. Now, on with it.

David I: Acts of Violence is certainly as noir as the books by your Californian predecessors (Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald, et al), but it employs a very different literary toolkit (and isn't a detective novel anyway). Did you always want to write crime novels, or were you drawn to other genres as well? Have you written or started novels in other genres? How do you think writers in other genres, or literary fiction, have influenced your approach?

RDJ: I think if I’d discovered crime fiction sooner as a reader, I’d have knowingly written in the genre sooner. As it was, I stumbled upon it. The first novel I wrote, back in '94 or '95, I think, was called The Dreaming, and was a horror-crime novel about a sixteen-year-old kid stuck in prison for killing his abusive father. The kid dreams of vengeance and his dreams come true, one by one people who wronged him die, and police detectives are trying to uncover the nature of his crimes ... and then must stop him before his dreams catch up with them, as one of them testified against him in trial, which is how he ended up in prison to begin with. (I wouldn’t write that story now, but when I was a teenager writing it I thought it was genius.)

Aside from the one supernatural element, it’s clearly a crime story. But when I wrote it, I’d yet to read even Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, forget David Goodis or Dorothy B. Hughes.

I loved science, was heavily into Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction. I was reading Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg and mostly trying to write that kind of fiction. Until I discovered Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo … and started trying to write pretentious literary science fiction, employing as many large words as I could manage. (Not the fault Pynchon or DeLillo, both of whom I still enjoy.)

But as I continued to write, it became clear that, while I could occasionally come up with a decent horror-type premise, I was no science fiction writer. My mind just didn’t work that way. And more, the genre wasn’t really ideal for exploring my obsessions, which were already emerging, despite my best efforts to write other things.

I continued reading literary fiction, as well as capital-L literature (Faulkner, Hemingway, lots of Dostoevsky), which meant, of course, that I started trying to write capital-L literature. Books for the ages! But what I ended up with, once more, was crime fiction. I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t yet discovered crime fiction. But guns appeared, bodies ended up in trunks, revenge was had.

Finally I stumbled upon crime novels as a reader -- Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake at first, and then I moved out from there in ever widening circles -- and knew I’d found something. Here was a genre which made a habit of exploring exactly the things I was interested in.

But in truth, I don’t care all that much about genre trappings. I’m happy to be called a crime writer. I enjoy reading crime fiction, and think that’s what my stuff is. But it’s an after-the-fact labeling of what I’d be doing anyway, as I think my description of The Dreaming makes clear. It’s simply where my mind goes. But I’m happy to borrow techniques and tricks from anywhere, so long as they’ll improve the story, or reveal character, which, to me, is the same thing.

David I: [W]hy do people read and write crime fiction in the first place?

RDJ: I have next to no idea. I can’t even tell you why I read and write crime fiction, much less other people. Proper mysteries -- which I don’t write -- offer puzzles that a reader can try to figure out, but I think that’s only a small part of the appeal of crime fiction for most people. There’s also inherent melodrama -- in the best sense of the word -- a chance to see human behavior at its most extreme. As well as many ethical shades of gray. We live in a world where there isn’t always a white hat, and a lot of recent crime fiction reflects that. Then there’s the social aspect. Crime novels are good ways to explore society from many angles, and look at everything from blue collar life and the death of unions to white collar crime and government corruption. But really there are probably as many reasons as there are readers and writers.

David I: [Y]ou’re a screenwriter as well as a novelist, which shows in your attention to economy. But Acts of Violence is very internal, with character thoughts spilling directly onto the page and adding a third (and very literary rather than cinematic) dimension to the narrative. What would you care to share about the differences between the two forms—and, in particular, which feels more rewarding and natural to you?

RDJ: The biggest difference, for me, is also the most obvious: length. As short as Acts of Violence is (59,000 words -- short for a novel), it’s about three times the length of a feature-film screenplay. After writing scripts for seven years, working on a novel was very liberating. All that elbow room. All that space to explore characters’ thoughts and feelings and relationships. In a script you have to reveal character through action and dialogue alone, and while that’s a good skill to have, it means ignoring what’s going on inside, which, to me, is the most interesting stuff. It’s a little like the difference between walking through a city verses merely looking at a picture. With the former you get the sounds and scents, the feel of the air on your skin and its taste. With the latter, you might be able to guess at some of those things, but a guess isn’t experience.

Added to all that is the fact that when an editor gives you notes, they’re doing it in order to make your book a better version of what it already is, while, when you get script notes, they often have nothing to do with improving the script, making it a better version of itself. Maybe they want the changes to attract a specific actor, or a director who’s said in interview that he’s always wanted to do a scene with a giant mechanical spider -- or whatever.

And added to that is how few scripts actually become movies. I know a writer who's sold, or worked on, well over a dozen feature-length scripts over a period of a decade who has never had a film made. He lives well, has a house, leases a new car every two years -- but for ten years he’s tried to write movies and hasn’t written one yet. Instead, he’s stuck writing scripts that sit on shelves in producers’ offices. I heard somewhere that maybe one in ten scripts bought in Hollywood actually gets produced. That’s one out of ten that have been paid for. Forget all those thousands of scripts floating around that will never get more than a passing glance.

Well, what’s the point of telling stories if no one is listening? If money is the only thing you’re getting for your storytelling work, you’re not getting enough. The best thing about money is that it buys you time to tell more stories -- stories that people will hear.

Also, it buys food. Eating, last I heard, is necessary.

#

Now, my questions for Eliza. Feel free to answer one or the other or both. I just want to give you a choice.

1. Each of your novels, unless I’m mistaken, is written from a first-person point of view, or else a combination of first and third -- what is it about first-person narration that appeals to you as a writer?

2. You’ve now written a couple books while under contract with Macmillan. Do you think that’s affected how you approach the writing process in any way? Or what stories you choose to tell?

A Brief Pause for Sex

Might I take moment to point everyone in the direction of Faye's blog for a fine discussion of sex in the modern novel?

Plus, it has videos. (No, not that sort. It's people like you that make this sort of discussion difficult.)

Internet and authors--next phase?

For a while now I've been standing back a bit from Google alerts, Amazon, Goodreads, etc. I keep half an eye out on Novelrank, just to see if my books are selling on Amazon, but I don't read all the reviews any more. (I used to read every word.)

My sense that this was a sensible thing to do was underlined this weekend when I read an article by a fellow Brit in which she freely admitted to writing Amazon reviews for her own book. In Britain we've had several instances of authors changing their names and slamming rivals' books on Amazon.

Is the system now so damaged that it's worthless? What's the point of spending a year or more on a book to have someone with a grudge come back again and again and deal out one-star reviews? Or having a rash of family and relatives boost your book to five-star status, even though their 'review' consists only of a brief summary of the plot and then a line saying it would make a good present?

When Playing with the Moon was nominated for a national prize a few years ago the voting system was based on people registering on a site and nominating books. The more people you were able to persuade to do this, the better you did. 'So there's nothing stopping us giving our nephews at university some money and getting them to buy beer for everyone who signs up and votes for you?' my husband said. 'That sounds an interesting way of running things.'

We didn't do this. But supposing we had? Would I have been able to win by simply lining up undergraduates in three or four universities?

I should say at this stage that there are some Amazon, Goodreads and blog reviewers who are fantastic. We may not always agree with what they say about our books but we can't fault them on integrity or their passion for the novel. I'd like to say a big thank-you to them all. You're doing valuable work.

Reviewing aside, there's the whole issue of the illegal free downloading of our work on the internet.

What's the next phase? How can we make the internet fairer to both readers and authors?