Gottle of geer

"Find your voice!" the writing handbooks say.  Which is fair enough.  But there's more.

"Find the voice of your characters!"  OK, yes, reading it back they seem to be distinct personalities.  Next.

"Find your narrative voice!"

Ah.

Looking for Buttons was written in the first person, narrated by Kate, the central character.  I like first person narrative, I like its immediacy and intrinsic bias.  It's why I prefer Ice Station Zebra to Where Eagles Dare, although filmwise I'd call it the other way.  (Yes, I do realise that writers of romantic comedy do not as a rule cite Alistair MacLean as their writing inspiration, but I am nothing if not, erm, yes, you could say odd.)  The Difficult Second Novel, which has more in common with MacLean and Adam Hall than with Looking for Buttons, has a first person narrative.  So, first problem - does the narrator of the DSN sound too much like Kate, i.e. do both books in fact just sound like me?

The Difficult Third Novel is shaping up to follow Looking for Buttons into the chick lit genre, but it's written in the third person, with an all-seeing impartial narrator (a bit like David Attenborough, only without the charm and erudition).  Reading it back, it's OK, but it's not quite right.  So, second problem - should I rewrite it from the point of view of the central character and see if that sorts it out?  Which itself brings me to the third problem, which is actually the first problem all over again.

I feel I should draw a flow chart at this point, but that's just the latent scientist in me, and if I sit quietly with my copy of Doctor Faustus for a minute the feeling will pass.

It's not enough just to put words on a page in the right order.  You've got to throw your voice at the same time.  But if you don't get it right it turns into a boomerang and comes back to clout you round the ear.

It's enough to drive you to drink a gottle of geer.

You know how to whistle, don't you?

If you'd asked me about feedback ten years ago, I'd have launched into an explanation of how amplified sound leaving a loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone, causing a cycle of further amplification until you get the whistling screech familiar at rock concerts or near a hearing aid wearer.  Possibly I'd have drawn a diagram.  If you'd asked me on a day when things were going particularly badly, I'd probably have gibbered into my copy of Fundamentals of Acoustics and lapsed into miserable silence while scrolling through the vintage jewellery listings on eBay.

But those days are behind me now and today I'm more concerned with feedback from readers.  Yesterday a friend told me I had my first US review on Amazon.  I was a little nervous.  I don't know anyone in the States so this was my first review by a complete stranger.  Eventually I plucked up the courage to read it and it was far kinder than I'd dared hope.  This was A Relief.

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  It's easy to lose all perspective over whether what you write is any good or not, and it gets worse once you've had a few knockbacks from literary agents (although I still cherish the rejection letter than described Looking for Buttons as "well-written and perceptive").  Until now, only friends had judged the book and, delusional though I am, I could not regard their opinions as totally unbiased.  But now Looking for Buttons is out there, fending for itself, being read and, I hope, enjoyed by people I will never meet.  I hope that some of them will tell me what they think.

Until then, I'll just have to whistle to myself.

At the end of the day, you need clichés

Flick through any guide to writing and the chances are you'll come across advice along the lines of 'Avoid clichés like the plague'.  Good advice, but I think that clichés can be useful shortcuts if you handle them properly.

Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.

Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?"  My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post.  Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope).  The general framework is familiar, I grant you.  That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book.  It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.

When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements.  We're brought up on fairytales.  Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?

Books offer us a happy ever after.  If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?

[PS  This blog has just passed a thousand hits.  Thank you very much for reading it.]

A rather angsty post

I am having a bit of wobble at the moment.  Technically, I should be all smiles.  Looking for Buttons is out in the world, selling fairly steadily.  I am A Published Writer, albeit a DIY one.

But.

But but but but but.

It's said that everyone has a book in them.  What if Looking for Buttons is the only one I have?

I want to write.  It's what I do, spinning yarns when I'm not knitting them.  That's the image I've always had of myself.  But when I sit down at the keyboard I can't string a coherent sentence together.  I've re-read what exists of the Difficult Second and Third Novels.  They seem to have been written by someone else.  It's like watching Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France.  I can ride a bike but no way could I do that.  I get the same feeling as I run my eye along the bookcase.  I've lost my writing nerve and with it part of my identity.

I hope this is just a temporary blip.

Such stuff that dreams are made on

My subconscious is a strange place.  I don't know if everyone does this, or it's just me, but I dream in narrative.  Several times I've woken in the night lunging for a pen before I lose whatever gem of a plot has just spooled before my mind's eye.  Occasionally it still holds up the next morning.  Once I got a half-decent opening scene for a thriller and on another maddening occasion I awoke knowing I'd just imagined an entire episode of Spooks.  It had been rather exciting (which perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that I was dreaming) but I couldn't remember anything else about it.

Now it seems the shadowy (and probably very dusty) recesses of what passes for my mind are dwelling on the world of e-books.  When I woke at half past three this morning I had been dreaming of reading an article on e-books.  There were two points that struck me:

1. Any woman seen with an e-reader in public at the moment will be assumed to be reading porn.
2. What are the long-term implications for charity shops?  Second-hand bookshops, too, although those seem to be like hen's teeth round my way.  If e-books come to dominate the market, donations to charity shops will dwindle.  I still haven't got an e-reader (hypocrite! I hear you cry) but I imagine that once you've read a book you don't want to read again it's just deleted.  If it was a paper book (I was going to write 'proper book', but that's surely opening up a can of worms best left undisturbed by an indie author) it would, I hope, end up being passed on rather than binned.  I don't have any statistics, but I should think books bring in a steady revenue for charities.  Even people who actively avoid manically over-familiar persons in aggressively bright tabards may end up handing over a fair bit of cash to charity in their thirst for reading matter.  What happens when they no longer have a reason to cross the threshold for a browse?

I was so struck by these points that, in my dream, I began to read the article aloud to my mother.  As is the way of dreams, at this point the article became one about market gardening, written phonetically in an obscure Scottish dialect, and as such became irrelevant to this post.

I'm still worried about what reading a Kindle on the train would do for my street cred, though.

Heyer today...

When you find a writing style that works for you, it's very tempting to stick with it.  That's fair enough.  Developing a distinctive voice is part of maturing as a writer.  And perhaps one day your book will be published and you start to think about what comes next.  The question then is whether you've got more than one book in you.  Maybe you have, maybe you haven't.  But what if your readers just want the same book over and over again?

At the moment I am trying to read my way through my bookcase overflow pile, mainly for health and safety reasons as it's taller than I am.  I'm being very strict.  Once I've read a book it goes to charity, unless I have a compelling reason to keep it (i.e. it's written by Adam Hall, my hero - and yes, I'm aware that he might not be the obvious inspiration to a romance writer, but nevertheless, he was the guv'nor).  The last book but three was a Georgette Heyer.  I've read a fair few of her books over the years and time and again the same characters crop up: the sensible heroine, usually grey-eyed and on the verge of being left on the shelf; the semi-rakish hero, rich, titled and needing to be taken down a peg or two; the daffy ingenue; the young rascal; the bitchy socialite; the scheming in-law.  I need to be more scientific and read them in publication order, because I can't yet tell if she was writing to a formula or if she just got trapped by her own popularity.

I'm not necessarily complaining that the books sometimes seem a little formulaic.  The best ones are very good indeed and had me willing the hero and heroine to get together (I loved Sylvester).  They're well-written and entertaining, with an extensive lexicon of Regency slang (ever been "bosky as a wheelbarrow"?), and sometimes it's nice to know what you're getting.  But it's interesting all the same.  A little further down the now-teetering overflow pile is one of Heyer's crime novels.  I'm looking forward to seeing how she tackled that genre.

I have a bet with myself that the heroine will have grey eyes.

Romance: the proof is in the reading

Writing a romance should be easy.  You take a man and a woman, throw in a few complications, shake it about a bit et voila!  Only I don't think it works like that.

I've read books that have made me swoon.  I've read a fair few more that have led me to consider lobbying for book-throwing to be considered an Olympic sport.  In almost every case, the problem was the same.  The protagonists were annoying.  In the far off days when I made a point of finishing every book I started, Wuthering Heights nearly brought on apoplexy.  Now I recognise that it is regarded as a classic, but Cathy and Heathcliffe irritated me beyond endurance (I was nineteen at the time, an age when I would have expected star-crossed lovers to appeal).  On the other hand, I've rooted all the way through an Alistair MacLean thriller for the hero to get the girl and had my heartstrings well and truly yanked when she didn't make it to the final page in one piece.

So is it just a matter of taste in the reader or is there something more to it?  What makes one pairing iconic and another moronic?

Anybody want to share their favourite couples here?

Just something I lashed up

Today I'm going to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.  I haven't read it, but everyone else seems to have an opinion so I'd better jump onto the bandwagon while it's in town.

So here's my take on the female population's sudden desire to read about being tied down while a capable man does all manner of things to them:

For the past however many years, women have been trying to Have It All.  They're knackered.  It's no wonder their ultimate fantasy is to lie down while someone else does all the work.

This is not about me

Looking For Buttons started out as an idea: what happens if your teenage crush goes on to become a worldwide star?  How do you get over them when their face is everywhere?  I started playing around and soon I had a set of people in my head, doing things that I wrote down.  After a while, I found a beginning and got to the middle, which was actually where I started, and eventually I reached the end.  Gosh, I thought, I've written a whole book.  And then I thought about trying to get it published.  The problem with publication, however, is that people might read it.  People I know.

I'm a thirty-something woman writing about a thirty-something woman and it's my first novel, so readers may assume the book is in some way autobiographical.  It's started already.  One of my guinea pigs read an early draft.  She rang me: "Charlie [the Hollywood star] is a mixture of X and Y, isn't he?", X and Y being two gentlemen of our acquaintance at university.  Another claimed delightedly to recognise herself in yummy mummy Poppy on the grounds that she is married to a man in Poppy's husband's profession - which she wasn't when I began writing the book.

The thing is, I didn't set out to write barely disguised portraits of my social circle (actually, these days it's more of a social arc: I don't get out much).  It's fiction.  Poppy is not a sketch of my friend, she's a figment of my imagination.  And Charlie is simply Charlie (though he'd dislike being thought of as simply anything).  But now, as I prepare to send out the manuscript to another agent, I'm starting to worry.

What if people I know read it and think it's about me?  What if my friend who isn't Poppy reads the whole thing and ends up mortally offended?  What if my family read it and think this is the sort of thing I get up to?  And, most alarmingly of all, what if X or Y reads it and thinks the book is about them?

Excuse me, I have some nervous editing to do...

Naming no names

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I have trouble with names.  Not in remembering them, mostly (although I once had a GP I could only ever think of as Dr Hyphen-Thing because I saw him so rarely that the only fact that stuck in my brain was that his surname was double-barrelled).  No, my problem is my own name.  More specifically, my name in relation to book covers.

Having given the matter some thought, what's letting my novel down is not its title.  Looking For Buttons sums up the tale neatly, and I've always been happy with it and its Cinderella connotations.  But my name is not terribly authorly.  It's not snappy or modish.  It's also only a few syllables away from a Famous Author, which could lead to complications.  So I think I need a pseudonym.

But what to choose?  I could Make Something Up.  I could reverse my school nickname, but May Brian is more family saga than romantic comedy.  (Yes, my nickname was Brian May.  It's a hair thing.  Life is too short for straightening irons.)  I could seek inspiration from my ancestors, but one of them was called Euphemia and that's even less apt.

With the WIP (work in progress), the problem is reversed.  I've got a great pseudonym, a no-nonsense thriller writer's name (conveniently, the book is a no-nonsense thriller).  Fab.  Except I can't think of a title for the book.  I'm a third of the way through and I haven't the faintest idea.  Nothing quite fits.

So I sit and I type and the Untitled on the title page sits there and sniggers at me. Heigh ho.

 

Buttons? What buttons?

No, not those sort of buttons.  This has nothing to do with haberdashery or electronics, or even bellies.  But it has everything to do with Cinderella.

Have you ever wondered if Prince Charming is really the man for you after all?  Perhaps you just want someone kind, gentle and caring.  Someone who'll unblock your drain or jumpstart you car in the snow, someone who's seen you with no make-up and a temperature of a hundred and three and still won't run away.  Someone who's not rich, not flashy, not necessarily drop-dead gorgeous, but always one hundred per cent real.

Maybe you should be Looking For Buttons.

Looking For Buttons - a comedy for the romantically hopeless.  A new novel for 2011.