A Writer's Life

How y'all been?  Busy, I hope.

What have I been doing?  Well, today I sent my new novel out into the world, to find representation and love.  It's called 'Shadow of the Mountain', and it's a contemporary novel about love and faith, about what leads a young man from a small town in Wales to fighting a war in Afghanistan.  I'm incredibly proud of it.  I spent two years writing it, poured everything I had into it - and then some emotional reserves I didn't know I had besides - and the result is something I hope you, and many other future readers, will want to buy in the not too distant future.

It's hard work, writing a novel.  It's not something you can truly do just on weekends, around your other jobs and hobbies and social life.  I mean, I know many do - many even have success doing it his way - but you do have to make sacrifices.  For two years I've barely been out socialising.  I've spent most of my free time bent crooked over a writing pad, putting this feverish dream of a novel that was in my head down onto paper.  Okay, sometimes you go out, because you need a break away, for an evening or so, but in that time you won't escape that novel burning inside you.  If you're anything like me, you'll spend that outside time cornering some unfortunate friend in the corner of a pub and babbling incessantly about plot twists, character development and the themes of your novel.   But when it's all done - when it's out there, letting others read it, and for the first time in months your free of it... that's a great feeling, that rush of freedom bubbling through your veins.  You might even look at all those pages, the multiple drafts on your hard drive, the scribbled notes left behind, made on beer mats, and waiters dockets and scrap paper, and think: never again.  But you're a writer, this is who you are, and so...

I began writing the next novel yesterday, in the pause between finishing Shadow of the Mountain and sending it out.  It's been at the back of my mind for some time now, an idea growing, shaping itself in the subconscious, and now it is a life, ready to be transcribed onto the page.  Who knows what she'll be like in two years.  I can't wait to find out.  Such is the life of a writer.  Please don't think me as mad as this blog post has undoubtedly made me sound.  If I do happen to meet you out in a pub, I promise not to corner you and burble wildly.  Can't promise you won't start, though, because this writing lark: it's infectious.

Updates and More Updates

I never blog as often as I'd like.  This doesn't mean that my life has become a hollow void, no siree, it actually means I'm very busy.  Somehow we've gotten almost to April and it seems like just yesterday it was 2012.  So the world can know what is new in my world, here is where we're at:

I've a script with a small film production company, currently in the semi-finals of one of their talent searches.  This is good.  Very good indeed.  Even if it goes no further, I had such great fun writing it, and it has me thinking about writing something else in the genre the script is in.

'Adam Strauss and the Three Sisters', my novel, is currently doing the rounds of literary agents and publishers.  One has come back to me so far, with a rejection, but a rejection letter in which they called me, and I quote, "clearly a talented writer" and had this to say of my abilities, "your narrative style is understated, elegant and very compelling."  This is good.  This is very bloody good indeed.  This was no standard rejection form, and they gave a legitimate reason for turning me down - so I see this not as a reason to mourn, but to strive forward, keep fighting for what I think I deserve, and more importantly, what I think the novel deserves.  Which is readers, and lots of them.

I'm almost at the end of the new novel - currently titled 'An Act of Kindness' (and that's an exclusive, as I've not revealed it before, anywhere, to anyone) - which even in first draft form I'm deeply proud of.  It's emotional, dramatic, turbulent, romantic and with a thrilling central drama.  Believe me when I say this novel has practically been writing itself.

Then, once 'An Act of Kindess' is finished (in 1st draft), I'll return to 'Shadow of the Mountain' (currently in 2nd draft) and tidy up its loose ends, and then I'll have a second novel to tour agents with.  'Shadow of the Mountain' is more political than anything I've done before, but grounded in real emotion - the classic subject of forbidden love, of familial duty, and faith.  I'm pleased with what I have in it, and a final draft should maximise its brilliance.  

Finally, I'm still finishing of the rewrite of the PhD, almost done now - I need it done, out of my life, as it's taken up so much of my existence that it's become a chore now, not a love - and I look forward to the day I'm finally awarded the degree.

So, as you see, busy.  Very busy.  So busy I didn't really have time to write this blog post, but it's good to stay connected, to speak to the world.  So hello world, and if you're an agent who has come to this page through whatever means (internet search, emailled link, interdimensional portal) and want to see more of my work for possible representation, please contact me.

Sayonora for now peeps.  Speak with you all soon.

Updates on a Life

I’m clearly not any good at this blogging thing.  I broke my promise, twice now.  So I can’t blog continuously for thirty days.  But I will try and blog frequently(ish) or until I got so lost in something new that I haven’t the focus any more.

So what’s new?  I’m about to embark to London Town for a one day workshop with James Moran (the wonderful writer of Severance, the Pompeii episode of Doctor Who, amongst many other ghoulish outings) and Dan Turner (director of the very scary Stormhouse, written by another ghoulish writer, Jason Arnopp) so that should be fun. Insights into how to get my brand new, sparkling scripts into the hands of people with money (and hopefully the passion to throw lots of it at me to make the thing).   

I’m reworking my script for the BBC Wales Drama Award 2012 – an award open to all new writers of Welsh residency that I just know is going to be swamped with material of such high quality that I’m going to have to bring something higher than my A-Game (but I don’t know what that is – do we have an A*Game?).  I have a script I think very powerful, but it is part of a six part miniseries, and though they say they’re open to anything, I suspect something that comes to a natural ending at the end of episode 1 might prove more winning – you’ve a beginning, middle and end – where all I have is set-up of the central mystery, of the characters’ lives, and of the community, with a dark suggestion of where it is all going end (badly).  The script rolls along and there are some very strong dramatic character moments and oodles of personal tension…. But it’s like the first three chapters of a novel.  And they don’t want novels.  They want scripts (or stage plays).  I think my problem is I trained as a novelist.  I think like a novelist.  And writing a script is so, so different to writing a novel.

Then there are a few other things cooking away on the script front that, right at this moment, I’m not going to mention.

Then there is the novel.  It needs a new middle chapter, a better summing up of everything that has come in the first half and a better segue into the final act.  It’s all nip-and-tuck work, not major surgery.  But once it’s done, I think I’ll have something special.  I am truly proud of this novel.  And I sincerely hope I can sell it before the end of the year.

So I’m off now, to London, on a long train ride south.  I’ll have pen and paper handy, to write down what I can, but not have computer access for three days.  So au revoir cyber-life.  Keep the fires burning.  I will be back.

The Power of Lolita

In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published his most famous work, Lolita.  Lolita was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and was fourth in the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.  Its reputation is vast; its influence is bigger still.  What follows is an extract from my PhD where I discuss this novel and gives great insights into the creation of one of the greatest novels ever written.

Lolita did not come to Nabokov fully formed in the mid-1950s.  In 1939, he wrote a novella that remained unpublished until 1986, following his death in 1977.  That novel, entitled The Enchanter, Nabokov would go onto describe as “the first little throb of Lolita” in an essay that would subsequently be attached to that great novel.   Like Lolita, it is concerned with ephebophilia and the same technique of a predatory older man to gain access to his desire as Humbert Humbert – by marrying the mother.  But the truth is greyer even than Nabokov paints it.  He touched upon the theme earlier, in a short story written in 1926, entitled A Nursery Tale. The theme would appear also in Laughter in the Dark [1932], and again in one chapter of The Gift [1938].  This concept of ephebophilia fascinated Nabokov – and I dare say if Lolita had been his first novel he would have been accused of being an ephebophile himself.  Lolita was a secret heart beating within him, and though it is touched on in other works, he wrote two distinct novels on the subject – The Enchanter and Lolita itself.   

Yet he is still not done with it, or the subject.  A third, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, was published in 2009, after thirty years of family debate about whether they should release it.  Nabokov had requested it be destroyed.  That unfinished novella features Hubert H. Hubert, an older man preying on a pubescent girl, but unlike in Lolita, he is rejected.  What made Nabokov return again and again to Lolita and the men that pursue her?  I’m not sure even Nabokov knew.  In a BBC interview[i] he said,

“Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.”

Was the desire alone to make the distant tangible to him?  Was he simply imposing structure on a section of the world he did not understand?  Whatever his reasoning, it is lost.  But we can look at how one novel evolved into something else.  In 1939 he stood by The Enchanter, but later disowned it.  He wrote it in Russian, and had this to say of it long after Lolita was finished:

“Now that my creative connection with Lolita is broken, I have re-read [The Enchanter] with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita.  It is a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid.”

And it is those things.  The literary world is glad it was not lost.  Not only because is a short masterpiece by Nabokov, haunting and disturbing in a manner similar to his other work, but also because we can compare how a writer matures, and alters his presentation of similar material.  Here is the famous opening of Lolita:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

God those lines sizzle with energy!  We know straight off how proud our narrator is of this woman, whoever she is.  Very quickly we learn not woman, but child.  Then we’re hit with the lines:

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

And we gulp.  We draw breath.  We know this isn’t going to end well.   But what’s more – here is a man, proud of his actions.  He draws pride in his sexual attraction to a child and in the act of murder.  He is a grotesque, and Nabokov shocks us again and again with him.  Through the novel we feel our understanding of him shift, even our position of empathy.  Everything in that novel comes from that first short chapter; the novel is an explaining of how a man can end up there.  How a man can become that.

The Enchanter, on the other hand, sets out its stall very, very differently.

““How can I come to terms with myself?” he thought, when he did anything at all.  “This cannot be lechery.  Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind presupposes eventual satiation.  So what if I did have five or six normal affairs – how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?  What is the answer?”

The narrator is clearly locked into a similar mental turmoil to Humbert Humbert but shares not a shred of his violence.  This man, who remains unnamed throughout, as does the girl, is stalled by fear when his plan seems to work and gains access to the girl.  His fear causes his death.  The Enchanter is a considerate work, the work of a writer finding his way into material that is beyond his own understanding, but in comparison to Lolita it is a weaker work.  Lolita hits you, hard.  No wonder it was so instantly recognised for its brilliance. 

In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson explaining the idea: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea....”[ii]  It took him eight years to finish Lolita.  It had been eight years since The Enchanter.  

Writing a novel of genius takes time, and patience.  Nabokov got there brilliantly, in the end. 

---

[i] Peter Duval-Smith  and  Christopher Burstall interviewed him in July 1962, for the Bookstand TV programme, in Zermatt.  It was broadcast November 4, 1962.  Printed as Vladimir Nabokov on his life and work in The Listener (London), 68 (1756), Nov 22, 1962, pp. 856-858. Reprinted as "What Vladimir Nabokov thinks of his work, his life" in Vogue, New York, March 1, 1963, pp. 152-155.

[ii] Letter dated April 7, 1947; in Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; ISBN 0-520-22080-3), p. 215

People Watching

So I missed a day.  It wasn’t my intention, but again being called in early to work, and then meeting friends for a few drinks after finishing at 10pm meant that I failed in my intention to blog every day for 30 days.  So, because this is my blog, and my project, I will modify my original intent to state that I will blog Monday to Friday and then only if I get the chance on the weekend.  The weekend I work crazy hours.  I can easily do 30 hours in those two days.  

As it’s been a steaming hot weekend, with thousands of tourists pouring into our ordinarily quiet little town (quiet, that is, apart from summer months and holiday times, and then not really all that quiet at all – we are a World Heritage Site, afterall), I have barely stopped this weekend and so, unless I bore you with stories of abusive customers, drunk customers, drugged-up customers, confused tourists, confused locals then I have little of interest to say.  Certainly nothing of a creative nature to share, other than this:

While I’m rushed off my feet, serving this myriad display of human nature, I am observing.  I watch people – writers are good people watchers, generally speaking – and I see those little tics that others might miss.  Watching how a man treats his wife, or a wife her husband, or a father his children, or whatever the combination of people, you gain insight into the human condition that, later, you can use in your writing.

I love going to the pub.  But I don’t love going to the pub to drink (though that is sometimes a major bonus, but only sometimes), but to watch people.  People let their guard down in pubs, they say things that they might not outside.  They're prone to gossip, exaggeration and belittling of others, and that is good fodder for a writer.  I do the same in nightclubs, but in such places you don’t get conversation, you get actions – people act boldly, brightly, they all want to be seen, and such actions, when translated to the page, can make all the difference between your characters being mechanical and actually human.  Knowing to look for that look of pained rejection that they don’t think has been seen, and then interpreting it.  I think such careful observation in a person makes the difference between a good writer and a great writer.  The great writers have all been great and keen watchers.

So next time you’re out there, or rushed off your feet in work, take a moment to watch how people react, and act, and then write it down.  Writing it down, working out how best to show such actions on the page, will transmute your literary creations into something better resembling human flesh.  People watching then, not just a pervy thing to do, but a major process of creative art.

A Writer Walking

A long walk.  There’s nothing like it on a summery day, with the barest of breezes.  Along the beach, and around the breath-taking scenery of the Great Orme, a limestone headland jutting off Llandudno into the Irish Sea.  The gulls riding on thermals.  Strange insects scurrying over stone, sand-spiders hurrying over undulating dunes.  Sitting on grass, looking out over Anglesey and Puffin Island, watching kayakers in the sparkling water below, but otherwise alone.  Bliss.

A walk to a writer is about more than just getting exercise (though that is a key factor, as we do spend too many hours sitting at desks, tapping words into computers or running pens over paper that any excuse to get up and move around is welcome, even if it is just dancing along to a Scissor Sisters song and hoping nobody catches you!).  A walk to a writer is about allowing the creative juices to flow.  There is something strangely conducive and seductive about putting one foot in front of another for miles on end, and the way it seems to unlock inner potential. 

I find, as I knock back the miles, that I begin to craft sentences, and redraft them, find the rhythm in them.  My footfalls become a metronome to which to time the music of my words. I find solutions to problems that have been bugging me, sometimes for weeks.   If I’m struggling how to get Character A to Point B in the best way possible, I go for a walk.  As is often the case, I’m working on multiple projects at once, and getting a little stuck – todays walk was to try and find the solution to one problem – I solved it, but not until mile 14 of a 16 mile stroll… but I solved it, and that’s what mattered.  And that solution made the walk I’d just undertaken all the more sweeter.

Taking such long walks might not be conducive in the same manner for all writers but I know it works for me.  It worked for Charles Dickens too, so at least I’m in august company.  And I’m getting exercise, both mental and physical contemporaneously.  As Dickens once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy, walk and be healthy.  The best way to lengthen our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose.”

So next time you’re stuck in your writing, and it’s a not bad day outside, maybe go walk for a few miles.  You might just find the solution to your problem and length your life in the process.  See you out there.

Rewriting a Novel

I mentioned in Saturday’s post – Origins of a Novel – that there was another completed novel that I wasn’t sure what to do with.  I have actually been rewriting that novel, transforming it from an American-set thriller to a British one.  I’m going slow, finding that things an American setting allowed me work not so well on British soil, and so I’m having to find new ways of expressing them.

Beautiful Vermont vs.

Here’s the thing.  American landscape is epic, vast, and in places untamed.  It is conceivable that in that vast wilderness there might be a secret laboratory unknown to the rest of the world.  Try and put an unknown lab in the British landscape – we’ve pretty much tarmacked over it all, there is nowhere for it to be – so I’ve had to retcon certain aspects of the beginning of the work.  Such work has meant that later material won’t work either, so I’ll have to reconsider that as well.  This means I’ll end up with a novel inspired by another novel, which bears some similarities to its progenitor, but also major differences.

Beautiful Britain

There are plus sides to this.  I was never entirely comfortable writing about American landscapes and social customs, especially amongst a group of teenagers.  Okay, I’ve seen enough American teen movies and TV series to bluff it, and probably bluff it well, but in my head it lacked true authenticity.  By switching my action to a British boarding school, I’m at home.  I know how these kids act.  I know how they speak.  Already the work is 80% better. 

Then there are downsides.  The original form had a trajectory I liked, a lot – an awful lot, actually – but it just won’t work here, in a British setting.  Where I could have my cast of characters walk through twenty miles of untamed wilderness, alone, hungry, and running for their lives in rural Vermont, I can’t have them do it here.  In Britain we’re never more than five miles from the nearest road in the wildest parts of the land.  In a place that would accommodate everything I need it to accommodate, we’re never going to be more than a quarter of a mile from a road.  So where originally two hundred pages were filled with wilderness trek, and knowing I can’t do it in Britain, it begs the question: how do I fill two those hundred pages now? 

Sometimes writing fiction we’re surprised at how an answer we thought eluding us was already in the text.  Subconsciously we’d already planted it.   I don’t know if the answer to my question is already in the text I’ve written, or rather rewritten, or if I’m going to have to do something very different.   Such doubts scare me, having such lack of knowledge of my own material is almost enough to make me shut the project down…. But I love the characters and their interaction, and I love the idea, and quite often before I go to sleep I find myself thinking about it.  So I have to write it, to see what it can be.  It might just be something big.

So I’ll keep writing and see where it goes.