The Craft of Writing

Recently I’ve been paying more attention to some of the finer details in books that I’ve been reading. I remember at school an English teacher asking the class why an author had written that the curtains were blue. Was it because the character was emotionally cold? Was it because the character was afraid? All I could think was that maybe the author had written about green curtains in a previous book and simply wanted to use a different colour, and that there wasn’t any other deeper meaning.

Narrative

Most books are written in the third person. The reader will often know far more than the main protagonists. Characters can easily be killed off. George R R Martin, the Game of Thrones author, has a different character’s point of view for each chapter. There isn’t too much to add to this, except that Lee Child writes almost all of his Jack Reacher books in the third person, with a couple written from Reacher’s point of view. Most authors will generally keep the same the narrative style throughout a series.

In a first-person point of view, the reader won’t know what other characters are thinking, unless of course the first person can read minds, see Carrots by Colleen Helme. Some people like to read first person books because it means that the main character can’t be killed off. I have a surprise for you, this isn’t always the case. Spoiler alert, The Collector by John Fowles, first published in 1963 is all about a man who wins the pools (the equivalent of the lottery), kidnaps a woman hoping that she will fall in love with him. She doesn’t and he dies at the end, good.

A book I read many years ago was written entirely in the first person, except that the first half was one character, and the second half began with a different character killing off the first character. It wasn’t a very good book. Will Carver, a very dark writer, has one book with three main characters. Two of them are written in the third person and the other in the first person. However, one of the characters kills the first-person character, although the actual death is not written from their point of view. Very unexpected.

Some first-person books are written in the form of a diary, for example The Island by Richard Laymon. Other first-person books like to “speak” to the reader, breaking the fourth wall. One very good example of this is Mister B Gone by Clive Barker, which is all about a demon that has been trapped inside the pages of a book, the book that you are reading, with paragraphs along the lines of “I can see you, about to finish page 31”, which is a little scary. Of course, that wouldn’t work within the confines of an e-book, although that might be a good idea for a short story. Your Kindle has been possessed by a demon and starts off small by downloading 50 Shades of Grey or anything by Dan Brown, and then slowly becomes more and more evil.

Resources

An author who has the resources to devote writing as a full-time occupation has obvious time-based advantages. However, very few authors start out that way. Short stories often allow an author to develop, hone their craft, build confidence and earn a little money before spreading their wings full time.

John Dies at the End by James Wong was written while the author had a full-time job. It is a crazy book with too much going on and at times can be very difficult to follow, almost as if the author snatched a few moments whenever he could to write and then sometimes struggled with the flow. The books flips and changes, and the style is very different towards the end from how it was at the start.

Terry Pratchett, one of the greatest fantasy writers of the last forty years, started out writing part-time. He was a prolific writer who was scorned by critics at the start of his career and then praised by those very same critics many years later. However, the first two books in the Discworld series are in a very different style to those that follow. I would go even further and argue that the first truly perfect Discworld book would be the eighth book, Guards! Guards! where the characters Vimes and Carrot are introduced.

Similarly, Jack Reacher is almost a superhero in the first two books. After that, Lee Child starts to introduce flaws into his creation. Reacher isn’t a very good driver. He lacks the ability to hand out bad news in an empathic manner, and then he starts to make mistakes.

Stephen King often finishes a chapter with the phrase ‘and that was the last time he/she was seen alive’. The film Stranger than Fiction, Emma Thompson plays an author who uses the phrase ‘little did she know’ in every book.

Every writer develops their own style.

My Book

I’m definitely struggling with finding the time to sit down and write. I also don’t think that I’m good enough. Creating a flowing storyline with interesting characters might be beyond my capabilities. I also worry that I would fall into the splatterpunk genre trap of trying too hard to make the violence and horror as grotesque and shocking as possible, rather than working on the plot. Another possibility is that I don’t find the outline of the book in my head very exciting, and because of that I’m not inclined to spend time writing.

Sometimes I think that I would make a good editor. Not proof reading as there is always one more typo out there to be missed as all of my university coursework can attest. As an editor I could point out continuity errors. If a book begins with a cliff hanger, describing something that will occur later in the book, there can’t be anything written about events beyond that passage before that passage has been read. I’m not explaining that very well. If the first chapter describes a near death or possible death and it occurs in chapter 30 on day 100 in the timeline, nothing in the book before chapter 30 should describe events that occur after day 100.

I could imagine giving helpful hints and insights to authors when they’ve finished the first draft of a book. However, would anyone take advice from someone who hasn’t written a book and only their writing experience is a blog that averages 10 views a day. Both Stephen King and Paul Wilson have written books about the craft of writing. Between them they have published well over 100 novels going back over 40 years. I would take advice from them.

Should I take an online writing course? Should I find the time and simply sit at my computer until I have written 1,000 words? Terry Pratchett aimed to write 3,000 words every day. I would prefer to write 500 quality words rather than 5,000 average or completely forgettable words. Terry’s 3,000 words included co-writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman, one of the funniest books ever written.

Should I stick with blogging and triathlons? That does have a certain appeal. My lovely wife started an online writing course a couple of years ago and the short pieces that she wrote were better than anything I have ever managed. Saying that, are the Jack Reacher books really that good, or do they have an interesting main character, a whole load of implausible events and very good marketing.

I think I will continue to think about writing a book.