Writing and Reading

Because a good writer is a good reader. And a good reader is a good thing.

[thethomasblack]

Reading: Michel Bussi

I’ve written in previous blogs about my liking for the French crime writer Pierre Lemaitre. The first of his books translated in English – ‘Alex’ – is superb and the subsequent releases, Irene and Camille, while not quite as strong are still extremely successful pieces of crime fiction.

Now comes another French writer – Michel Bussi, with his thriller ‘After The Crash’. Like Lemaitre, Bussi isn’t a new writer – ‘After The Crash’ is his sixth novel and its translation into English comes three years after it was originally published to huge success in France.

For all the praise and awards that the book has got, it’s disappointing that Bussi’s English publisher has rifled through all the coverage and found the one with the words ‘Stieg’ and ‘Larsson’ on the cover. Because, obviously, every European crime writer is pretty much the same, aren’t they? In fact, Bussi like Lemaitre comes to an English language audience as a fully-fledged novelist, rather than a debut writer finding their feet.

Unlike Larsson, Bussi doesn’t have the Scandi-noir interest in politics or a social element to his writing; there isn’t that Scandinavian interest in the environment and the role of nature in the storytelling. Instead, like Lemaitre, there is more interest in the way a story twists. Here there is the mystery of the identity of a baby who survives an air crash at the book’s heart; and a piece of evidence that means nothing at the time, but holds the answer to the riddle eighteen years later.

I haven’t read anything like enough French crime fiction to know if this is part of a wider trend, but certainly just as the TV show Engrenages (Spiral) stands comparison to The Killing, The Bridge, etc, and in a crime tradition of its own, so Bussi and Lemaitre do likewise against Stieg Larsson, et al.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

Girls, Strangers & Trains

A good writer is a good reader. That means keeping both an eye on the latest publishing trends and also widening your knowledge of your genre’s greats. For any aspiring crime writer, two books worth exploring are a pair of debut novels published sixty five years apart: Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ (1950) and Paula Hawkins’ ‘The Girl on The Train’ (2015).

There are plenty of parallels between the two books, and not just from the their titles. ‘The Girl on the Train’, this season’s hot new bestselling crime novel, has got some fantastic quotes – Terry Hayes, for example, has described it as ‘Alfred Hitchcock for a new generation’ and the rights have been snapped up by Dreamworks. Sixty-five years ago, the original Alfred Hitchcock was purchasing the film rights to ‘Strangers on a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith.  

Both novels, too, have a clarity to their pitch that is immediately compelling: in Highsmith’s story, two strangers meet on a train, agree to kill for each other, hence making the crimes untraceable. In Hawkins’ tale, the train also defines the structure, with each chapter set up with a ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ section to mirror the daily commute. Like another Hitchcock film, ‘Rear Window’, it is what the protagonist observes that sets the story in motion.

Yet in two striking ways, the books could be more different.  Highsmith’s book was something genuinely new and different, whereas Hawkins’ book is one steeped in modern publishing. The patronising ‘girl’ in the title feels a clear nod towards the mega-success of Gillian Flynn’s novel (she’s not alone – other recent crime ‘girls’ can be found ‘in a red coat’, ‘with a clock for a heart’ or ‘a dragon tattoo’). The protagonist, meanwhile, follows the current vogue for unreliable narrators –SJ Watson did it expertly with it memory loss in ‘Before I Go To Sleep’, Hawkins uses a mixture of alcoholism and black outs here. And as with ‘Gone Girl’ and Lucie Whitehouse’s ‘Before We Met’, Hawkins also throws in the ‘You thought you knew someone’ plot card as well.

That’s a good hand of cards to play and Hawkins plays them well. Highsmith’s story, by contrast, contains no such chicanery or sleights of hand to steer the reader off course. She knows that she has enough in both her premise and her characters for the story to play out straight, yet remain every bit as compelling.

That’s the second difference between the two books: the complexity of the characters. In both cases, the authors have come up with a cast list of unlikeable individuals. That’s always a challenge for a writer to pull off: if the reader doesn’t care about the characters, then however strong the plot is, they might not read on. Care, which new writers sometimes fail to appreciate, is different to like: a protagonist can be as unpleasant as anything as long as they intrigue the reader and compel them to continue.

For me, the most interesting element of Highsmith’s book, ultimately is not the novel’s original narrative premise, arresting that it is. Instead, it is more that once the murderous deeds have been done, the focus shifts to the effect this has on the characters. That psychological element of the guilt gnawing away is what makes the second half of the book. TS Eliot famously praised the playwright Webster for seeing ‘the skull beneath the skin’. Highsmith goes one further, and unlocks the psyche within the skull.

By contrast, Paula Hawkins’ book, along with the Gillian Flynn novel that it echoes, remains very much skin deep. And because of that, the characters don’t engage in the same way. By the end of both books, for all their various plotting strengths, I didn’t care what happened to the characters and could have put either of them down (in ‘Gone Girl’, if you know how that finishes, I wish I had!).

It doesn’t have to be this way, but that seems to be the trend for many of the books in this latest crime sub-genre – the stories and concepts are sharp (and the plotting of ‘Gone Girl’ with its interweaving double strand narrative is structurally superb), but the unpleasant and unreliable lead characters don’t grip and grab as they could.

Patricia Highsmith might not have pulled off the plot tricks and reveals of her present day successors. Equally, she might not be piled high on the front table of the bookshops these days (last month I bought three of her novels, recently republished as Virago Modern Classics, for five pounds in a bargain bookshop).  But she had an understanding of malevolence that any writer wanting to be the next Paula Hawkins would do well to explore.

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: The Darth Vader School of Editing

Spare a thought this morning for editors and agents everywhere. The first working day of December means only one thing: inboxes full of the first fruits of NaNoWriMo manuscripts. 

This isn't to knock anyone who has spent November writing away to get that manuscript down. Getting that first draft finished is all important. Until you've got that, you can't move on to the next stage -- the process of redrafting and rewriting that any good story is ultimately crafted from. And that's all important too -- November manuscripts already being emailed are a bit like Luke Skywalker flying off to fight Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back: far from the finished article, and not yet ready for battle.

Darth Vader's editing job on the young Jedi might have been a little offhand, but the basic principle was right -- rare is the first draft that doesn't benefit from a little pruning. Certainly, the 'second draft' of Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi was much more successful. Different writers return to their stories in different ways -- Martin Amis, for example, claims he writes 15-16 drafts of each novel. I've never gone that far myself, but mine usually go through 6 or 7 versions before I think they're ready.

A good example of how rigorous you should edit your text is the case of short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver's most famous collection is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, with its iconic, pared down writing style. The first draft of the stories, however, was quite different. A few years ago, the original manuscript was published as Beginners, allowing readers to see what the stories were like before Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, got to work on them. The New Yorker published a fascinating article showing how many changes Lish made and I think it's hugely instructive. If you want a sense of the degree you should be editing your script, this is a good example.

So my advice to NaNoWriMo writers everywhere is to take December off. Put the script in the drawer until after Christmas to give yourself some distance, and then get stuck into the editing. Either that, or prepare yourself for the Darth Vaders of the literary world to cut you down to size...

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: Fifty Eyebrows of Grey

I read 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. I know. I kind of felt I should, to try and make sense of why it was so successful. There's a whole load of non-writing reasons in there, of course, such as the fact that the advent of ebooks means people can buy and read books without the embarrassment of the bookseller or fellow commuter raising their eyebrows at their choice of literature.

Ah, the eyebrows. For all the people who made snide comments about the quality of the writing, I personally thought that EL James could write ok for the sort of book it was, but what she was in need of was a bloody good edit. Because the novels had started out on the web and then were picked up and slapped out by a publisher, at no point had the script gone through a rigorous edit. So what people were flagging up as bad writing were in fact things that a decent editor would have spotted and taken out.

When you're writing anything of length, one of the things to watch for is that you don't repeat yourself or use the same phrases again and again -- the sort that are fine in isolation but cumulatively become a bit obvious. So it is with EL James and various body actions: there's a lot of lip biting for example. And there are a lot of raised eyebrows. They're raised in surprise. In mock horror. In a what-do-you-think-stupid look. They arch. They shoot up. They even quirk (Isn't that the Miley Cyrus dance?). They do all this suggestively. Censoriously. Questioningly. And quite, quite, quite repetitively.

The only eyebrows that should be being repeatedly raised here are those of the reader at the book's saucy shenanigans. Instead, it is the characters who are giving their eyebrows something of a workout: fifty-odd times, ironically enough, by my reckoning. My advice would be that if you don't want your protagonists coming across all Roger Moore, stick to this simple formula: you've only got one pair of eyebrows, so you can raise them twice in a book and no more.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: Value Added Dialogue

Years ago, I went on a course at work about negotiation skills. Can't say I learnt much about negotiating (that's why I'm a writer rather than an agent) but I did pick up something very useful for my fiction. What the instructor showed us was some fascinating research about how we communicate. When we talk to someone, the words we say only ever forms a part of that communication -- I can't remember the precise numbers but it was tiny, 10% or something: far more important were the way the words were spoken (30%) and the body language that goes with it (60%). 

Whatever the exact figures, the point is a good one to remember when it comes to writing dialogue. Quite often authors give it the script-like treatment of just sticking to the words. But you're writing a book, not a film and by adding in the body language to a conversation, you're opening the exchange up on a whole new level. The body language that accompanies can suggest all kinds of things: it can serve to emphasise what is being said, or it do precisely the opposite, exposing what the person speaking is really thinking. 

So sure, get that skeleton of the conversation down in the first instance, but when you go back to rewrite, add in this extra layer of detail to really bring your dialogue to life.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

READING: Keigo Higashino

I can't pretend to have too much knowledge of Japanese crime writing, but I came across 'The Devotion of Suspect X' in a bookshop by chance, and it was something of an unexpected delight. Unexpected because both the book jacket and quote were completely misleading -- the publisher lazily pitching him as 'The Japanese Stieg Larsson' when the author is a completely different sort of crime writer, and the designer choosing a picture of an intriguing looking woman when the main character is much older. And male. 

This book is what you'd call a howdunnit rather a whodunnit. The murder takes place in the opening chapter and so we immediately know the who and the why -- a confrontation between a violent ex-husband and a mother and daughter leaves the former dead. Enter the next door neighbour, Ishigami, who offers to deal with the situation and create a cast iron alibi for the women.

Ishigami is smart, super smart. What follows is a battle of wits between him and the detective, Kusanagi. Kusanagi's instinct of what happened is correct, but the alibi Ishigami has created for the women is seemingly watertight, unless the detective can find a way to unravel it. The result is a philosophical rather than a psychological thriller, a crossword puzzle of a plot and a quietly compelling read. 

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: Three Thoughts On Chapters

If you're writing anything longer than a short story, one of the questions you have to ask yourself after a while is how you are going to divide the material down into chapters. How long should they be? There's no steadfast rule, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking hogwash: the length should be what feels right for the story that you are trying to tell. But to help you decide where those lines should go, here are three pointers:

1. Think about plot: in terms of what a chapter 'is', a good rule of thumb is that it is a chunk of text that moves the story on. If that sense of going forwards isn't there, then you probably haven't got a chapter. Always remember that the chapter breaks should about story rather than scenes or chronology: there is nothing less exciting for a than a character going to sleep at the end of one chapter and waking up at the start of the next.

2. Always remember your reader: chapters are there to help signpost to them how the story is shaped: it's a way to help them navigate their way through the story. Be nice and help make their reading experience as user friendly as possible. 

3. Maintain your rhythm: how long your chapters are will create a particular feel. As a rule, the shorter they are, the more pace it will give the telling (though don't overdo: those super-short chapter books can be breathlessly banal). Whatever length you decide for your chapters, try to stick roughly to it -- it helps creates a rhythm to the narrative and when chapter lengths are all over the place, it can read in a very disjointed way.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

READING: Harriet Lane

Alys, Always, Harriet Lane's debut novel isn't actually a crime novel. From a legal point of view there is no crime involved at all. And yet, and yet ...

Frances Thorpe, the book's protagonist, is an overlooked sub editor at a literary magazine. One night, returning to London, she comes across a terrible car accident and a dying woman, Alys Kite. Alys Kite is the wife of a Booker Prize winning novelist, and Frances is invited into the family home to share Alys' final moments.

What Frances does, however, is to use this opening as an opportunity to further her own career. Slowly, stealthily, she manipulates her own position and the hand she has been dealt. There is nothing criminal about what she does, and yet there is no doubt she is behaving in a bad way. She is careful, calculating and patient -- waiting for the right moment and taking advantage when it comes along.

The result is a wonderfully unsettling read. This is a beautifully written psychological thriller that leaves a shiver behind, whatever the temperature outside. 

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: A Shark's Guide To Writing

There's that great line from the film 'Annie Hall' where Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, describes a relationship as being a bit like a shark: 'it either moves forwards or it dies. And what we have on our hands here is a dead shark.'

As with life, as with writing: it is always important to keep going and to keep going forwards. It is very easy (and tempting) to try and make that opening section perfect and end up in a spiral of writing and rewriting and rewriting the same section. Once you start down this route, you’re making it that much harder to finish your novel (what you have on your hands, etc.)

It also means that you can lose your narrative momentum and voice – once things become too stop-start, it can be really difficult to pick this up again. So while rewriting is obviously a crucial part of the writing process, don’t let it overwhelm proceedings at the expense of the next chapter. There'll be plenty of time for all that later on. So get that draft down and keep swimming!

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

READING: Pierre Lemaitre

For all the Scandinavian crime dramas I have enjoyed on TV in recent years, I've always had a sneaking suspicion that French police show Spiral is a nudge above. Similarly, among the many wonderful Scandinavian crime novels I've read this year, the book for me that stands just above them all is similarly from France. 

Alex is not Pierre Lemaitre's first novel, but it is his first translated into English. In fact, he's written several, and just as there were suspicions that a debut novelist couldn't have written The Cuckoo's Calling, so this immediately bears the hallmarks of both an experienced and talented crime writer. 

The pitch of Alex is effortlessly simple: the character of the title is kidnapped and the police are on a race against time to find her: that golden rule of policing being that if you don't find the person within 48 hours, the trail goes cold. So far, so familiar. But what Lemaitre brings to the table, tense and taut writing aside, is a Gallic dash of structural ingenuity. The story is told in alternating viewpoints, from that of Alex and that of the lead police detective (if you don't like rats, I should say, this isn't the book for you). 

That technique might sound a little familiar too, and you'd be right. The ubiquitous Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn does a similar dual narrative thing as well. Structurally, the two books are similar in another way too -- they both play on having some sort of switchback twist to pull the rug out from under the reader. But while Gone Girl's twists are first predictable and then preposterous, the narrative of Alex turns not once, but twice in ways that are both genuinely shocking and thrilling. I won't say what they are in case you're thinking of reading, but put it like this: despite sometimes feeling I've seen everything a crime book can do, it was a nice surprise to discover I could still be surprised.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: Warming Up

The more I write, the more I notice similarities with taking exercise. Just like when you're training for a run, so when you're writing a novel, it's all about regularly getting the 'miles' in -- the more you write, the 'fitter' you become, and the further you can write each day.

An important part of exercise is warming up and I think that's true, too, of writing. You need to stretch and shake your mind out of its sleepyness, its stress from work or whatever. Some people I know like to 'free write' to get themselves into the mood -- a literal splurge to get them into the zone.

My own preference is to write a haiku. A haiku, for those who don't know is a short Japanese poem of three lines -- the first of five syllables, the second of seven and the third of five. If you're being picky, it should have some nod towards nature in there (though I don't always follow that). What I like about it as a warm up exercise is that it is self-contained -- it's just long enough to get the brain whirring and short enough to allow you the satisfaction of completing it. So here, for what it's worth, is what I wrote when I sat down at my desk today:

Beautiful morning

Blue sky, sunshine, cup of tea

Blank page and a pen.

And with that, I'm ready to write.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

READING: Johan Theorin

One of the features of many a Scandinavian Crime novel, as I said in a previous post, is the political slant that can be traced back to Sjowall and Wahloo. Another key element, is often the use of nature and landscape -- far more so, perhaps, than the more urban Anglophile tradition.

Swedish writer Johan Theorin is not known internationally in the way of a Larsson or a Nesbo, but his books have every bit as much quality to them. I can't say I know much Swedish but even from the original titles - Skumtimmen, Nattfak, Blodlage, Sankta Psyko - there is something that make you want to plunge in. Thankfully, his translator has done a fantastic job of capturing what makes the books special.

What that is for me is the way Theorin's stories are driven by an amazing sense of place -- in his case, the Swedish island of Oland. His debut book, retitled in English as Echoes From The Dead, begins with a mesmirising scene in the island fog -- do the sample chapter download thing on Amazon to see what I mean. When setting works well, it not only brings atmosphere to a story, it is almost as though you are adding another character into the narrative. That's certainly true with what Theorin does with Oland. Very much worth checking out.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

WRITING: Using the Senses

One of the simplest yet most powerful things you can do when writing description is to make use of all the senses. When describing a scene, the initial instinct is to follow the 'Say what you see' slogan of TV quiz show Catchphrase. Yet more often than not, it's the sounds or the smells that can create real associations and help the text to 'pop out'. And where appropriate the textures, feel and tastes too (where appropriate: don't have your characters licking the scenery just for the sake of it).

If you had to read just one book to show you what you could do with the senses, I'd recommend 'Perfume' by Patrick Suskind. A murder story set in 18th century France, it centres round a character with the most incredible sense of smell, and ends up using this gift for somewhat nefarious purposes. It's a great read anyway, but what really leaps off the page are the smells: to capture those and bring them to life is an incredible achievement. For a writer, it shows just what is possible when you put your mind -- and nose -- to it.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

Reading: Sjowall and Wahloo

Once in a while you come across anothe writer or reader who loves the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and it’s always a nice moment to find you’re not alone.

Sjowall and Wahloo (apols for the lack of of umlauts, btw, thanks tumblr) wrote a series of crime books in the 1960s starring detective Martin Beck. Beck as a character was one of the first ordinary police heroes. Not for him the uber intelligence of a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercules Poirot, but instead the sheer slog of investigative police work. Which may make the books sound a little dull but they are anything but: tight, sparse, beautifully structured and rich with reality.

As well as writing one of the first police proecdural series, Sjowall and Wahloo were also instrumental in adding a political layer to crime writing — staunchly left wing, part of the aim of the books was to capture Swedish society as they saw it. This political slant has long been a feature of many a Scandinavian crime writer since, everyone from Henning Mankell to Stieg Larsson.

And of course, Sjowall and Wahloo famous wrote the books together: a husband and wife team who got the typewriters out once the children had gone to bed. Innovate writers, then, many times over.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

Writing: Beginnings

Some writers say that end of a story is the most difficult part to get right. I disagree. I think the beginning is the most difficult part — a fact compounded, of course, because it’s the part that people read first.

The key to writing a good start is to remember that there is always more than one way into a story. There are different angles you can approach the narrative from and given the importance of wowing the reader from the get-go, it’s worth spending the time experimenting with the possibilities and getting it right.

The start of a story is something you should return to, rather than rewriting and rewriting until it’s perfect. Once you’ve written the rest of your story, it’s easier to see what the ‘real’ start to your story should be. So while it might sound counter-intuitive, the best beginnings are often those that are written last.

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

Reading: Strangers on a Train

It always amazes me how few people have read Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Sure, everyone knows the story or have seen the film but somehow most people seem to think that’s enough. If you’re one of those, you’ve missed an absolute treat. It’s one of my favourite crime books and a great, great read.

It always staggers me that this was Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel. It’s so precise in its plotting and in its writing that it feels far too polished and accomplished for a first time writer. Its premise is pitch perfect: two strangers meet on a train and hatch a plan to murder for each other. With nothing to link the two, they’ll never get caught. Except, of course, that things don’t quite work out like that. This is a book about psychology as well as plot: Highsmith is as interested in the after-effects of the murders as the murders themselves; Bruno, who suggests the plan, is a dark, amoral character, but his partner in crime, Guy, is increasingly wracked with guilt.

It’s a book that instantly feels filmic, so much so that Alfred Hitchcock brought the rights within days of publication and gave it to Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay. He struggled with it and was eventually dropped from the project. The final script had one very significant change from the book, namely that in the film, Guy doesn’t keep his end of the bargain and murder Bruno’s father. What the film misses, and what is one of the book’s strengths, is how Guy deals with the aftermath of his murder: he’s got away with it, but he can’t get away from what he’s done. His psychological unravelling is the core of the second half the book.

Bruno, by contrast, is somewhat more unfazed by his actions. Highsmith quickly fell in love with writing such a dark protagonist, and would repeat the trick many times over her writing career, most notably with Tom Ripley. Having an amoral character at the heart of the story and the psychological insights into Guy’s demise leave the book feeling very modern and ahead of its time. It’s amazing how fresh it is to read, over sixty years on.  

(Footnote: while most authors enjoy that moment of receiving copies of their debut novel, Highsmith’s response of seeing Strangers on a Train in print was somewhat more reserved: ‘I remember opening the carton of books on the floor in my apartment in New York and my first thought was, ‘These are taking up a lot of space in the world’’).

@thethomasblack

[thethomasblack]

Writing and Reading: An Explanation

Yeah, yeah, I know. Like the world needs another blog. So I'll keep this brief. The idea behind writing this is that I like writing and I like reading too, and I thought I'd write about both. So the posts will alternate between between thoughts about writing and suggestions about reading. It'll mainly be about crime books, because that's what I like. I hope you'll like it too.