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How good would Aliens be if it started with the fight between the powerloader and the Alien queen over a kid that you didn't know who she was, being protected by a woman who you didn't know what her relationship with her was, while a half dead man you had no investment in looked on, and then flashed back from there? Maybe with some voice over from Ripley saying something like "As I battled the Alien queen I kept asking myself... how did I get here? How did it come to this?" and then a fade out to the stars.
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I remember listening to some radio programme about "classic pop songs and how they were put together" or something like that. It dealt with True by Spandau Ballet. The song starts with that famous two-note guitar riff, which is essentially the chorus. You're straight in to the "best bit" of the song.
I wasn't convinced by this until they played a master tape of how it was originally going to start until the producer turned it all round, and it was pretty rubbish. A meandering bass line, a synth pad comes in, a bit of hi-hat, and so on, and it totally failed to hold interest even two seconds into the song.
Not sure how relevant that is to the discussion, but there you go. Oh I know, I was referring to Thorn's "make the first bit really really good, and make the rest really really good as well".
So, er, write like you're Spandau Ballet, and edit like you're their record producer, and all will come good.
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Vader: Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father. Luke: He told me enough, he told me you killed him! Vader: No, Luke, I am your father!
How did I find myself, minus a hand, hanging for dear life beneth the gaze of a dark Sith Lord claiming to be my father? Well, a long time ago...
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Dan Brown is the worst prose I have ever read. I'm currently using some time off to write something - so far I have played Football Manager 2007 for a day and a half, watched scrubs episodes I have already seen, and made about five different juices as experiments - all I have to show for my creativity is a swirly stomach, a fairly decent fictional division one team, and tired eyes from staring at the tele too long....
Plus, I've now got some work coming in for the next few days, where I will no doubt stand around thinking about how good it would be to have some time off so that I can get some writing done.
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quote:Originally posted by mart: Is that the mental process? Should it be the mental process? Or is the process the understandable one of, hmm, I've got a bit of a talent at this, I enjoy doing it; I might be able to make some money out of this, and get a bit of public recognition, if I try really hard. But! The market will decide... I'll just write it and see what people think...
When it's been part of your life for a long, long time (at least 20 years), it becomes hard to tease out individual motives from the more general process of self-definition that reaches white heat in the teenage years and early twenties.
One of the recurring characters in A Dance to the Music of Time make the observation that everyone has a kind of personal myth, the preservation of which is critical to their identity - what happens to them isn't half so important as what they think happens and how they can make it mesh up with the existing contours of the myth. I think there's a lot in this - and it's hard, therefore, to give a satisfactory answer to your question.
There's probably a continuum of motivation - ranging from the profound existential need to render the imaginary concrete, to a wish to be thought of as funny and clever by funny, clever people. Depending on mood and audience, you could be anywhere on this scale at a given point in the writing process. Plot this against an attitude towards 'the market', 'publishers' and 'the consumer' that will similarly range all the way from unappeasable contempt to grovelling desire for validation ...and you end up with an at least bipolar (probably quadri-polar) perspective on writing, or creativity generally, as it relates to the world beyond the desk and laptop.
Thorn is right, of course, about knuckling down and keeping at it - and in my heart of hearts I guess I just wanted to hear him say it again, rather than genuinely expecting him to come up with a magic bullet to resolve something that'll always remain a minute-by-minute struggle with a heap of blank pages. Gay as it may sound, I think I may print off that post and pin it to my pc as a goad, which is I imagine exactly how it was intended.
Re. Dang/Kovacs comments on editing/rewrites - don't know if you've been following the row about the Director's Cut of Raymond Carver's stories that's about to be published. It seems the austere tone of the stories that made Carver's name was largely the work of his first editor, Gordon Lish. This article gives an account of the nitty gritty of the controversy and concludes with a 'before and after' example of Lish editing Carver's work (improving it greatly in the process).
Wonderstarr - surely you edit or rewrite large parts of your academic work before publication, of is that a completely different kind of activity?
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Star Wars - opens with the first spaceship flying over the top of the screen, which is pretty thrilling, and is then followed by the impossibly huge second spaceship bearing down on it, which is just gobsmackingly ace.
Again, start really really good, then carry on being really really good.
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quote:Originally posted by Benny the Ball: Dan Brown is the worst prose I have ever read.
What people want isn't brilliant prose though. Whether by accident or not, he clearly did something right. He must have tapped into something universal to have blown up like that. As much as you can blame social hysteria, people did seem to love that book.
[ 30.10.2007, 07:33: Message edited by: Jimmy Big Nuts ]
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quote:Originally posted by ben: Wonderstarr - surely you edit or rewrite large parts of your academic work before publication, of is that a completely different kind of activity?
No, it's the same activity for me, and I do it as little as possible. The Batman PhD was "edited" of course because I had a supervisor, and so I lost a whole 10,000 words or so on Batman and "blackness" (African-Americanness) which is now probably gone forever and probably wasn't really all that appropriate or necessary anyway, but would be of some interest (to me) as a kind of deleted scene.
My other non-fiction books: barely at all. Maybe I just had an easy-going editor. I had to rewrite a chapter recently but ironically that's because the editor was my PhD supervisor again.
But no, I see it as equally hard to cut stuff from non-fiction. It is still part of a flow, and even more so, part of an argument -- and in academic writing, if you cut something you have to check whether it was the first time you referred to someone, and rejuggle the rest of the work accordingly... and so on. And I still can't help thinking there is some value in the bits that were cut.
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quote:Originally posted by Benny the Ball: Dan Brown is the worst prose I have ever read.
What people want isn't brilliant prose though. Whether by accident or not, he clearly did something right. He must have tapped into something universal to have blown up like that. As much as you can blame social hysteria, people did seem to love that book.
Story.
There you go -- it proves the point above. Same with JK Rowling. Prose can be pedestrian if you have a "rollicking" story.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: I think there's a lot in this - and it's hard, therefore, to give a satisfactory answer to your question.
My answer to the question is that I want to publish a novel because I really do think I'm good enough at writing fiction to do it, if I keep working. And it's really tempting to give up, but I think it's one of the few things I have enough talent for, if I combine the talent with work.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: This article gives an account of the nitty gritty of the controversy and concludes with a 'before and after' example of Lish editing Carver's work (improving it greatly in the process).
That article makes Carver look pretty mediocre. The journo could also use a harsher editor:
quote:Lish's audacious slashings liberated Carver's densely expressive artistry from the superfluous connective tissue of his rather mediocre ruminations
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What do people think of this approach to writing a story (going from one sentence that sums up the entire story, to a few paras, to a few pages, until you have an outline of the whole thing, to then writing the first draft, and so on).
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story that taps into somthing though. Rowling and Brown have similar themes. There are shady superstitious uber-organizations and old secrets being unearthed. I suppose that we're finding comfort in the idea that truth comes from the ancient past, that our current situation is in some way connected to history. It's the antidote to where pop culture is going - the destruction and re-imagining of the past and the invisibility of the organizations that persist outside of this process.
I'm sure that success is working out what we need.
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quote:Originally posted by mart: What do people think of this approach to writing a story (going from one sentence that sums up the entire story, to a few paras, to a few pages, until you have an outline of the whole thing, to then writing the first draft, and so on).
Christ that sounds like utter tedium. I think other best-sellers like Robert Harris use this kind of technique... writing a sentence on each of 70 index cards then gradually converting those into turning points of the plot, distributed at a rate of two or three per chapter.
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quote:Originally posted by mart: What do people think of this approach to writing a story (going from one sentence that sums up the entire story, to a few paras, to a few pages, until you have an outline of the whole thing, to then writing the first draft, and so on).
I think that guy has either forgotten what it's like to not be published, or things were genuinely different when he started -- his advice seems cloud-cuckoo.
quote:So although people say, "it's terribly difficult for a first novelist to get published," in fact, if you are good it is not that difficult.
My first novel was not very good but it still got published. It wasn't good enough to be a bestseller, but it had something and a publisher read it and thought, "this guy could be going somewhere". He published it because he thought I might write something better one day.
Your job is to show them what you can do. To start with, you will need an outline because the publisher will want to know what the story is about and how it develops. They will also want to know whether you can write and if you have got the power of words.
For that, you will have to write at least some of it.
Also I don't like any of the extracts from his novels: they sound corny.
With regard to story, I think it's worth considering whether Brown and Rowling are using basic templates that have been used successfully many times before.
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Speaking of writing, I was working on my second book a few weeks ago and did a few thousand words about the main character losing his job, explaining it to his wife feeling great and then falling into a mire of booze and failure. At the time I was writing purely from imagination, and am proud of the fact that my capturing of the emotional landscape of the situation was incredibly astute and accurate. Hooray, etc.
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Whenever I pick up a novel and read the first page, about 95% of the time (mostly when it's not Lee Child rubbish smiley) I don't feel at all inspired to read further. When I looked at the novels my colleague, a successful crime writer, has published, I thought they seemed pretty hokey and clumsily-written.
But this isn't heartening, because those novels have been published. I think I'd feel better if I picked up published novels and was really impressed & hooked by the first paragraphs, so I could think "ah yeah, they're doing something I can't, that's why they deserve to be in print."
Instead of just feeling baffled, as if there's a system of merit I don't understand.
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Yeah, I get that often, although it probably just means I should read better books. But I do find myself frequently shaking my head and thinking "Why is this better? Why is this publishable and not me?" Like those books what were shortlisted in the Daily Mail competition and seemed bewilderingly hackneyed and inept. I'd love to have a publisher talk me through the process and explain why something like... fucking... Cold Caller is publishable, and not a hot stream of faeces being jetted into the eyes and mouth of the reader. Stuff like Julian Clary's book, or Ben Elton or whatever I can understand because it's basically something with a recognisable brand. But The Football Factory? What's up with that?
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I'm usually happy to give a book a couple of chapters to get me drawn in. If nothing's grabbed me by then the book goes back on the shelf, or down the charity shop, and that's that. Probably explains why I haven't read many classics really.
I don't think I'd be too concerned about the first page or two though, but it is nice when a writer does manage to get you speed reading from the start. Can't remember when that last happened though.
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I'm hoping it might be a benefit to my crime fiction that I don't read any crime fiction (except if Lee Child counts) and don't like any of the crime fiction I've looked at in shops.
Like when I'm successful it will be a "USP" in interviews that I never read anything else in the genre
Seriously I think it could be a help, in that you're free of that genre's cliches and conventions -- though also of course it means you don't really know what that genre-readership wants, and some of those conventions might actually be quite useful.
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Isn't that a wee bit patronising? The crime genre runs from David Peace to George Pelecanos to Jim Thompson to Richard Stark - even those four names run a pretty wide range of thematic and stylistic variation and that's just a bunch of white US (except Peace) males. If you're serious about writing crime, surely you should be dipping into the most inventive, ambitious examples of the genre rather than dismissing the mega-market stuff and leaving it at that?
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Yes, that's an angle to take when it comes to making music. If you produce, say, "dance music" without ever really listening to anything in that genre, there's a chance (an outside one, admittedly) that you may produce something outstanding that has never been tried before. If it is good, it will then get copied and quickly become a template of its own.
More often than not, I suspect, you will:
a) end up following established templates, even though you didn't mean to - things work for a reason
b) produce something that just doesn't 'work'
c) produce something that, while 'good', is of no interest to anyone
Bands that start out as teenagers messing around often come up with quirky ways of doing things, simply because they don't know much about the conventions that make up the structure of music. I remember reading somewhere that Joy Division and New Order didn't know anything about different keys (not a majorly important thing, but still a bit mad) until NO's third album, or something daft like that.
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Also it was kovacs who recommended Clockers to me. I'm guessing he read it before he declared it one of his favourite novels. So I'm not sure what "I don't read crime fiction" really means in this context.
quote:Originally posted by ben: Isn't that a wee bit patronising? The crime genre runs from David Peace to George Pelecanos to Jim Thompson to Richard Stark - even those four names run a pretty wide range of thematic and stylistic variation and that's just a bunch of white US (except Peace) males. If you're serious about writing crime, surely you should be dipping into the most inventive, ambitious examples of the genre rather than dismissing the mega-market stuff and leaving it at that?
I don't know. It isn't meant to be patronising, just an accurate representation of my experience to date. I mean, I like Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, but I don't know anything about the guys you listed. I like Richard Price, but I don't even know if that's "crime". My ideas are probably shaped a fair bit by superhero vigilante myths and The Wire, both of which are crime stories in a way.
The truth is, I'm not trying to write within the crime genre. I'm writing something I want to write, and crime seems the best way to pitch it in terms of market.
I'm not sure I agree with your suggestion that a writer has some duty to read up on the best and brightest of what's gone before. If I was being provocative, I could say the time you seem to spend reading other people's books, from some sense of responsibility, is an avoidance strategy to keep you away from the harder business of writing your own stuff. And it's only writing your own stuff that's going to get you published, isn't it. It's easy to think to yourself, oh I better just get through these six more celebrated novels before I tackle my next chapter... I have a duty to literature to carry out this kind of research thoroughly, to know the greats, to suss out the terrain behind me.
quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: Also it was kovacs who recommended Clockers to me. I'm guessing he read it before he declared it one of his favourite novels. So I'm not sure what "I don't read crime fiction" really means in this context.
I touched on this, and I love Richard Price but I don't know if it's what most folk would call crime fiction. It's pretty leisurely and character-driven, unlike plot-driven bestselling thrillers (or such is my impression). But yeah, I expect the idea I gave of "crime fiction" above was too narrow.
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I would definitely class Clockers as crime fiction and I studied crime fiction at a school where kovacs used to be a teacher, so my opinion on this matter can be regarded as unassailable fact.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I would definitely class Clockers as crime fiction and I studied crime fiction at a school where kovacs used to be a teacher, so my opinion on this matter can be regarded as unassailable fact.
lol... pwned.
I've thought of a good thread now.
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My list is going to look incredibly square next to kovacs's, but...
- David Lodge - Michael Chabon - The Dan Ashcroft character from Nathan Barley - Ron Jeremy - John Irving - Fargo
I don't know. It's hard to pin down alot of the time. I'm influcenced as much by things that I hated as anything else. The first one i wrote was defined by the fact that I wanted to write something for/about men that wasn't part of that whole bloke-lit thing in the late nineties; stuff like Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons. Or rather, to take something like that and choke it on Jim Thompson novels. The new one is more a reaction against garbage like Chuck Palahniuk and Douglas Coupland. It's always easier for me to think in terms of what they're not, rather than what they are.
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I don't think that's square. I don't see how it would add up, but then I'm sure that could be said of mine, too. Actually I was thinking of adding Lodge to mine. On the "mailshot" I've been revising this week (ie. cover letter, synopsis, "grabby" stuff for agents) I included some totally arrogant pitch about how the genre of my novel was Jack Reacher busting onto a David Lodge campus, how the style was Martin Amis and Iain Banks before they got old, how the tone was Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons if they grew a pair of balls between them.
I edited it out today, but... I thought it was quite fun, though obviously incredibly full of it.
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rubbish smiley) I don't feel at all inspired to read further. When I looked at the novels my colleague, a successful crime writer, has published, I thought they seemed pretty hokey and clumsily-written.![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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