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Not too challenging, Kaz, if you do what I did and go to abebooks.com. When I looked there were quite a few copies available from various sources.
As for fantasy speaking to human reality, a lot of the tide of stuff that’s come pouring out since LOTR opened the flood-gates simply doesn’t. As a matter of interest here is Le Guin herself’s rather bad-tempered verdict on such writing.
‘Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude… The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, moulded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.’
A rather arrogant and intolerant attitude, you might say, but for the fact that Le Guin’s own writing does speak to human reality, very much so, and rather beautifully with it.
I’m another one whose eyes glaze over at charts, grids, questionnaires and all the rest of it, and find the idea of forcing a story into a set framework very inhibiting. I’d come to suspect that lack of a coherent framework in my writing was one reason I’ve never got on the road to publication, but when I applied the 7 Cs to my last effort it turned out to conform quite closely. Didn’t help it to get published though…
Good point, Squidge. It can also help if your think about how you perceive things in real life. When someone becomes angry, for instance, no one tells you ‘this person is angry.’ It’s shown to you as you see their brows come down, as you hear their voice rise.
And for all ‘novices’ reading this, another plug for Emma Darwin’s blog, the finest resource for writers on the web. Clear, in-depth, intelligent advice. Often quite funny, too.
Oh, and Andrew (and anyone else who’s in a similar position), do keep the ‘stupid questions’ coming. Many of the regulars here are quite some way along the writing journey, and we haven’t had a lot of this kind of intersting discussion. It’s livening the place up no end.
I once tried out a character questionnaire from Emma Darwin’s blog on a principal character of mine, and my answer to seven out of twenty-one questions was ‘Dunno’ and/or ‘Does it really matter?’ Some of the other answers were pretty vague. But while writing the story I never had any difficulty in imagining what she’d say or do.
Everybody has their own way of working; mine is very like Tony’s above. The important thing, I believe, is to find out which way suits you best, and not put yourself in a creative strait-jacket by blindly following some ‘rule.’ What works for some people may not work for you.
For example, we keep hearing ‘cut, cut, cut’ when it comes to editing, but I always end up with a skinny first draft and add to it. I don’t seem to be able to help it: it’s just the way I work.
And the character questionnaire that some will tell you is so essential for getting to know your characters: I find that rather like painting by numbers, stifling imagination rather than aiding it.
But yes, perfectionism may be your enemy when you’re drafting, but it’s absolutely essential when you’re editing.
Not entirely incidentally, there’s a certain resonance for me in all this. Caerleon was where my mother lived for nearly four decades, and so I have a passing, though not intimate, familiarity with the area Arthur Machen loved so much – though I have no doubt that he would be appalled if he could see it today, with the M4 passing within a couple of miles of his ‘noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk.’ One of his stories even mentions in passing a place called Croesyceiliog (Croyce-uh-KAY-liog), where my aunt and uncle lived for many years. It was probably a little village then; now it’s part of Cwmbran, the new town that sprang up in the nineteen-sixties, and there is no trace of the old village left.
The house where Machen was born is still standing, and has a blue plaque.
Well done, Libby – so full of intrigue and resonance – and thinks to Raine for setting such a thought-provoking theme that I was actually inspired to write something. Oh, and yes, that bread-knife is still in daily use.
‘Shall we pull down the blinds?’
One of the things I took away from my mother’s house when she had to go into a care home, not long after our move to Wales in 2011, was a bread-knife. They don’t make ’em like this any more: it has a bone handle, smoothed from decades of use, and a finely serrated blade (in contrast to the great hacking teeth of the bread-knife we’d been using up to then), scratched but still glitteringly bright. On that blade is engraved what looks like a maker’s logo until you look closely. Then you see that it says CIS Newcastle Conference 1936.
I have no idea what the connection was between the Newcastle conference of the Co-operative Insurance Society and a bread-knife, or how that knife came into my mother’s possession, but I do know that 1936 was the year my mother left school and began working for the CIS. Her father was a life-long socialist and a strong supporter of the Co-operative movement (which meant more then than it does now, when the Co-op is little more than another supermarket chain), and that may have had something to do with it.
By her early twenties, at the height of World War II, she was working in their office in Gloucester, taking the train from Bristol, where she was born and raised. Also commuting from Bristol to Gloucester was a man seven years older, my father.
Neither was very comfortable around the opposite sex. My mother had had to wear glasses from childhood, and was shy and inclined to over-weight. My father had once, in his youth, asked a girl out only for her to stand him up. Unswervingly honest and conscientious himself, he also had a mind that, once made up, set like concrete. He decided that girls weren’t to be trusted, and devoted his leisure time to sports and guzzling beer with his mates. ‘I suppose I probably missed out there,’ he once said to me in a rare unguarded moment, not long before he died.
But something about this quiet, bespectacled young woman appealed to him. He didn’t rush into it: he’d ridden in the same carriage several times before he spoke to her. It was getting dark and time to hide the train’s lights from German bombers. ‘Shall we pull down the blinds?’ he said.
That was the beginning of how I got to be here.
399 words (phew!)
God, the nostalgia. It’s all coming back to me…
A couple of little snippets from that Croydon club:
I was still at school and couldn’t afford to go there every week, so on weeks when lesser-known bands were billed I didn’t bother. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. One night the promoter got up on his hind legs at the beginning of the evening and said, ‘You lot stayed away last week, didn’t you? Well, you missed something. The band was really good. There was this funny bloke with a flute…’
I wasn’t at all surprised when I heard that Christine Perfect of Chicken Shack had become Christine McVie. Not after I’d arrived at the pub for a Chicken Shack gig to see her sitting chatting quietly with John McVie (and no, Fleetwood Mac were not playing that night) at a table in a corner of the bar.
Oh yes, and the previous year, before I’d started going there, Jimi Hendrix, no less, had played in that back room.
Complacency and casual disregard for human life ain’t the half of it, sometimes.
I mentioned above that the Railways Inspectorate had a battle in the nineteenth century to get fail-safe brakes adopted. They were up against not only reluctance to spend money – the so-called automatic vacuum brake was more complicated (and therefore more expensive) than the simple vacuum brake – but also, in some quarters, downright obstreperousness, an attitude of ‘no interfering government official is going to tell us how to run our railway.’ The chairman of the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, Sir Edward Watkin, was about the stroppiest of the lot.
In July 1884, near Penistone, South Yorkshire, an MS&L locomotive suffered a broken driving axle and the resulting jerk broke the coupling between the engine and the train. The engine was otherwise undamaged and stayed on the rails, and if the train had been fitted with the automatic vacuum brake that would have been the end of it, for the rush of air into the braking system would have put the brakes hard on. But the MS&L used the simple vacuum brake, in which air had to be sucked out of the braking system to put the brakes on. So while the engine stopped, the rest of the train didn’t, the carriages falling down an embankment with the loss of 24 lives.
Not unnaturally the reporting officer had strong words to say about the MS&L’s policy on brakes. Sir Edward Watkin’s reaction was that ‘he would prefer an occasional Penistone to being compelled by Government to put on something which he did not want.’ What the relatives of the victims made of that has not been recorded.
As a PS to the original blog, sometimes my researches for these pieces lead me to on-line forums frequented by railwaymen, retired or otherwise, and I glean fascinating snippets of info and opinion, not always suitable for inclusion in the actual blogs. Here are a couple I found while researching this one.
One man who’d worked at Crewe North depot, where Driver Jones and Fireman Turnock were based, said that for years after the accident fixed opinion in the mess-room there – despite all the evidence and the unequivocal verdict of the report – was that it was all the signalman’s fault. Oh no, couldn’t be one of ours.
As for the signalman himself, another man said he had worked some years afterwards at a station where Armitage was the stationmaster. He described him as ‘a bag of nerves.’ The dead and the physically injured aren’t the only victims of incidents like this.
I think Lieutenant Abbie Sweetwine must have been quite some woman. It must surely have been most unusual in those days for any black person, let alone a black woman, to achieve officer rank in the US armed forces. And she shrugged off the fuss made about her, saying that she’d only been doing her job.
One thing I’m taking away from all this is that it’s never safe to assume you’ve made it until you’re actually holding the book in your hands.
I used to be contemptuous of writers who go off on hostile rants about the arrogance of agents, assuming they were being paranoid, were unable to face up to not being good enough to be published, and were blaming others for their own inadequacies. Now I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve heard too many stories like the ones in this thread.
Or maybe I’ve become one of those people…
Ath, my daughter got married in Scotland on my birthday, the one you’re coasting up to. Being Scotland, there was a piper, and my daughter got him to play That Song.
Ah, but all those people you mention, they’ve already made it.
In the news this morning: several actresses walked out of the César awards (the French Oscars) after convicted rapist Roman Polanski won Best Director for his film ‘J’Accuse’ (‘An Officer and a Spy’). Obviously the French film academy considers that a work should be judged on its own merits rather on the morals of who’s responsible for it. Equally obviously, many disagree. I gather there was severe controversy over the film being nominated at all.
This puts me in the quandary that started this thread. I’m interested in the subject – the Dreyfus affair – and enjoyed Robert Harris’ novel, so in normal circumstances I’d like to see the film. But…
Hilary, my reactions to this are twofold. First, intense sympathy for you. What an awful let-down! Even if she did make clear what the actual purpose of the meeting was, it shows a certain sense of entitlement (as Ath said) to expect you to come running to London at the crook of a finger just for a chat about revisions. And if it never occurred to her how high her invitation would push your hopes and expectations, then that shows a regrettable lack of empathy too.
Second, in a strange way it’s made me feel a little better. Last year, after submitting two novels over the last few years and getting absolutely zero interest for either, I decided that the drain on my emotional and mental resources (the time-and-emotion suck, as Emma Darwin once put it) of jumping through the hoops of the submission process simply wasn’t worth it, and gave up. I’ve been feeling like there’s a big hole in my life ever since, but now I’m sure I made the right decision, because God knows how I would have coped with being messed around like this. I reckon I’m better off out of it. Do I want to invest my hopes in people who’d treat me like this? i think not.
And the age thing. I don’t know how old you are, but you’re certainly quite a bit younger than I am, so where would that leave me? Yes, you see a lot of people telling aspirants that age doesn’t matter, but I’m convinced it does.
Once again, commiserations. And congratulation: you’re showing more resilience than i have.
I have to agree with Ath, Daeds: you are not a bad human being.
Since antisemitism has been mentioned, I’d like to highlight another problem of distinction (or lack of it). I’ve long suspected that the apparently endless fuss about antisemitism in the Labour party is due (apart, of course, from people finding any excuse they can to vilify Labour) to confusion between hostility to the state of Israel and hostility to all Jews. Like the idiot I saw a picture of during the election campaign carrying a placard saying, ‘If you’re anti-Zionist, you’re antisemitic.’ This is, of course, complete bollocks.
I would be a terminally conflicted person if I were antisemitic, seeing that I married a half-Jewish girl, but I am very distinctly underwhelmed by the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs by the Israelis. And I see that (since he’s also been mentioned) Michael Rosen is of the same mind. Does this make him a Jewish antisemite?
It wasn’t just white supremacy with H P Lovecraft. It was worse than that. About the only people he didn’t despise were those of what he defined as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ descent – whatever that means. He was a raging snob as well, both intellectual and social. His disgust at the ‘degenerate’ hillbillies in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ comes steaming off the page. It isn’t even as if (let’s face it) he was a very good writer.
But yes, it’s an inescapable fact of life that those who produce great and/or well-loved art are often not actually very nice people. I can think of several examples from music. Ike Turner is notorious for the appalling way he treated his wife, but very few people know that seventy years or so ago he was a primary architect of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was a less than charming person in several ways.
I still like Chuck Berry’s classic songs, but there is one example of my being put right off a musician by his views. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s passionate anti-war protest ‘The Universal Soldier’ is known over here from Donovan’s version, but in the USA it was a hit for Glen Campbell. When asked if he agreed with the song’s sentiments he replied, ‘Certainly not. If you won’t go and fight for your country you’re not a man.’ Yet he had no objection to making money out of the song. My disgust at his hypocrisy has tainted everything I’ve heard by him ever since.
Oh yeah, oh Lord, I got them ol’ Brexit blues…
My writing has been dead in the water for a while now, and while the main cause of that is the totally negative results of my last submissions Brexit hasn’t helped. Like Alan, I’ve found the whole business, from first to last, intensely dispiriting, for more reasons than I can, or would even want to, list here. And it’s led me into following politics and current affairs more than is my wont, which has made me feel even worse. Pretty silly of me, really, when one of the reasons I chose to live in a fairly remote village was to get away from all the shit.
I may be starting to recover. With its whopping majority the current government can do what it likes, so the battle’s lost, or won, depending on your point of view. Already I feel my morbid interest waning and myself slipping back into hermit mode. Which is a relief.
But yes, the deep divisions Brexit has driven between us are very sad indeed. All you can do is avoid discussing politics with anybody you don’t know well. And probably not even then.
Oh, and yes, there is a comp / challenge (set by Athelstone again), but I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat. There’s still a regular monthly comp running though.
Yes indeed. Don’t anybody take this amiss, as those who do post are lovely people and I value you all, but the Den has remained a rather small place, things do get a bit quiet and dull sometimes, and I still miss the liveliness of the Cloud. So yes, it’s great to see you back, Skylark.
I have a friend (though I don’t see much of him now), of a much more practical bent than me, who for nearly twenty years kept the first new car he’d bought back in the seventies (a Vauxhall Viva – remember them?) doing all his own maintenance and servicing. He doesn’t do that anymore. You can’t service a modern car without a garage’s specialist computer systems.
I wonder what that old geezer in that garage in the Auvergne would have said about waiting for Ken? ‘Merde,’ probably.
There was, of course, no such thing as corporate manslaughter back then. But I did hear that after one Victorian accident (not this one) where the driver was charged with manslaughter, Punch published a cartoon showing a policeman collaring the driver and a director walking away, with the caption ‘Yes, you’ve got one. But you ought to have got both!’
As for ‘more than cream’ floating to the top, yes, I can think of two very conspicuous examples right now…
Thanks for this. I remember your ‘The Truth About…’ blogs on the Cloud, and used to enjoy them immensely: perceptive (Isn’t hindsight wonderful?), moving, and uncompromisingly honest. This one is no exception.
And yes, there has been a sad dearth of blogs lately. Maybe it’s time for another tale of the rails…
It’s never even occurred to me to reply to form rejections. What’s the point? Who’d bother to read it? I can’t speak for any other circumstances, because I’ve never been there (sob).
Great idea for the competition – specially as I had an entry all ready to go and didn’t need to do any actual work…
Congrats, Sandra. I’m only glad I didn’t have to do the judging.
I believe I once read that Henry VIII, in his youth, could reputedly vault into the saddle over the horse’s hindquarters while wearing full armour…
Yes. In one of mine I rewrote two chapters from a different POV – for consistency: they were the only chapters from that character’s POV and it upset the balance. Then I discovered that those chapters really, really did work better with the original POV. So now I’m going to have to not only restore the original chapters but change others to be from that POV too. Or shelve the whole project…
Ah, Jonathan, you and I (and Harry) are thinking along the same lines. And yes, there is more. The full blog is here:
https://jerichowriters.com/find-voice-writer/
When I was (a lot) younger I used to snort in contempt when I read in an author’s bio on a book cover, usually American in those days, that they had a degree in creative writing. Hah! I thought, either you got it or you ain’t. You can’t teach it like you can physics or history. It’s not hard and fast stuff like that.
Much later, after discovering the Word Cloud and participating in various on-line and real life writing activities, I thought: how arrogant was that? Certainly I considered myself to be a better writer after the S E course.
Now I believe there’s a grain of truth in both points of view. Peer-to-peer critique, workshops, courses etc can teach you stuff. Certainly they can help you progress from the mistakes beginners often make – and I’m not talking about breaking rules, just about what works for a reader and what doesn’t. But over-reliance on such things will inevitably stultify your style, so Harry does have a point. And it’s still true that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
What it really comes down to is voice, which is what Harry’s blog is about. And voice really can’t be taught. It was the one thing that gave me the most trouble on the S E course, until I realised that. Ask anyone to define it, and they can’t. They can only quote you a piece of writing and tell you that there’s a really strong voice in it, and when you read it you’ll see what they mean. But I still defy you to define it.
I think (hope) I found my voice in my second novel. And I did it by doing what Harry says further on in that blog, something I quoted in an earlier post. I took the brakes off. I let myself go. There have been times in the past when I’ve struggled to express something vividly and exactly in polished, correct English. This time I thought, stuff that, and wrote it just the way I wanted to. And it was so liberating. I struggled with the plotting of that book, but the actual banging of words down was great fun.
