Maybe it’s just me, but the werewolves in New Moon really don’t look as if they’re intended to appeal to teenage girls at all.
So, National Novel Writing Month ended at midnight last night, and if you’ve been taking part, I hope you made it to 50,000 words without going completely bonkers.
On the other hand, if you’re trying to write a novel to a deadline but have two months in which to complete it, there’s a very interesting post which I’d point you towards. It’s called How to write a novel in two months, and is by a chap called Jeff Vandermeer (who, I see, has written Booklife, which I’ve seen positively reviewed elsewhere).
I think it’s a solid article, with some good advice, and the one thing which I thought was particularly of note was point (7), wherein he says:
“Don’t animate what doesn’t need to be animated. This might just apply to any novel, but it’s especially true when you’re under the gun deadline-wise. There’s a lodge in my novel and separate rooms for all of the guests, along with one common room. There’re maybe two scenes in the separate rooms and lots in the common room. So I spent my time detailing the common room and really didn’t describe the other parts of the lodge at all. There was really no point.”
I think this is very astute – I’ve certainly known novels I’ve been generally enjoying but have struggled to complete because every time a character walks into a room we get a half-page description of the furniture or whatever; in fact, now I think about it, I gave up on a thriller I was reading some years ago because a row of cars parked outside a building was described in terms of the makes – three Renaults, a Ford, etc – and it not only slowed things down but, as I’m a non-petrolhead, it didn’t give me enough information to be able to populate the scene in my mind, and in fact there was probably no need to do so in that level of detail.
What I like about Jeff V’s use of the word ‘animate’, though, is that it suggests a writer can choose just to leave some things as background, like the flats in a stage play, whilst others should be active in some way. In the book I’m currently working on, I have a military base, and there are certain places within it which are plot-related – the medical rooms, the sleeping quarters, and the like – but others are only really relevant insofar as they’re potential places for the killer to hide, but they’re not of great interest (and thus probably not worthy of going into detail about) in their own right. So I’ll try to avoid ‘animating’ these locations more than is at all necessary.
Anyway, that’s what I took away from reading the article – hope you find something similarly useful in it.
When the Thomas Harris book Hannibal came out in 1999, I was very keen to read it.
I’d enjoyed Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs – even if they were essentially the same story twice (representative of the FBI reluctantly goes to imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter for insight into a current case), they were solid crime thrillers with a good sense of being a race against time, to stop a killer.
In Hannibal, on the other hand, Lecter has escaped, which removes the ticking clock element, and instead of the reality-based investigation, the tone of the book is more one of gothic melodrama, with an ending that left me speechless in the worst possible way (working from memory: Lecter digs up Clarice Starling’s dead dad, drugs her and confronts her with the corpse, and after a bit of her boss’s brains being eaten, she and Lecter become lovers). It was like I’d recorded LA Confidential and found that someone had taped Friday the 13th over the last third of it. Very disappointing. But I guess these things happen.
More strangely, though, there seemed to be a lot of very positive reviews of the book when it come out (as evinced here), often using words such as grand guignol, but hardly ever referring to the ending and making me suspect that they hadn’t actually read it all the way through before getting their reviews in. Anyway, it certainly made me less trustful of reviews, and blurbs and publicity material (I know, it’s appalling that I was 28 before that truth hit home; I like to think of it as a charming kind of naivete, but history will be the judge).
A very similar thing happened to me yesterday in relation to the new John Grisham paperback, The Associate; I used to like Grisham’s stuff a lot, though the further I went through the world of legal academia the less I enjoyed them, until I just stopped reading them.
But The Associate sounded more like The Firm, with its storyline about a newly-qualified lawyer in trouble, and I wondered if this might be a fun read. The print reviews certainly seem to suggest so – look at this gallery of praise taken from the Amazon page for the book:
It’s a damned good read. This is Grisham returning to what he knows best.
Scotland on SundayGrisham paints a fascinating picture. Vintage Grisham, with a really believable ending
The GuardianTense and exciting
Evening Standard
The suspense is there in what is easily his most recognisably ‘back to form’ novel since The Firm. Grisham has returned with a vengeance to his trademark territory: the grim world of corporate law and the sinister machinations of the men on its fringes.
The Times
In typical Grisham fashion it does hurtle along at a decent clip
London LiteDon’t wait for the film read the book first this time. The maestro of the legal thriller’s new one centres on a brilliant student with an unfortunate secret.
Daily Sport
A classic Grisham plot, similar to his first major success, The Firm, and told with the same elegance and elan.
The Daily MailGrisham never disappoints and this is another fantastic read
The Sun
In The Associate, John Grisham returns to the legal milieu he explored so vividly in The Firm. Grisham is such a storyteller that you want to turn the page
The Guardian
Grisham’s new book harks back to the one that made him famous, and effectively defined the legal thriller genre: The Firm. Grisham does a fine job of evoking the insanely competitive culture of a major New York law firm.
The Mail on Sunday
… so, lots of praise there, and many of them referring to the book of his which I’d enjoyed so much, which made me feel it could be one for me… until I went onto the Amazon page and saw that the vast majority of the reviews were negative, and repeatedly spoke about one particular failing: the story just ends without resolving anything.
Seriously, check out the customer reviews; over and over again, people say how much they were enjoying the book, wondering where the story was going and how he was going to tie up the loose ends, and over and over they say that he doesn’t, that the book just ends.
And so I don’t think this is a book I’ll be buying (probably for the best, I have a sizey book-queue already), but I find myself remembering the Hannibal experience and starting to wonder how it is that professional reviewers can overlook something so fundamental as a letdown, or an absent, ending.
I’m very keen on stories that reward you for time expended on reading them by showing that, yes, we were going somewhere all along (and even better if the seeds of the end were planted near the start – as in The Shining), and whilst that’d kind of a personal preference, the concept that ‘stories should have a beginning, middle and end’ is a fairly well-known one, and you’d expect that most reviews would refer to a weak or rubbish ending (as Marie did in this review on Wednesday).
Deadline problems aside, is there a good reason why this sort of thing happens? Is it seem as in some way gauche to address such fundamental elements of a novel?
And of course, the alleged absence of a climax certainly makes the Guardian quote (second in the list above) look pretty strange – unless they’re making the point that sometimes life just carries on without tricky situations being resolved, but that seems an odd thing to do in a thriller.
So, following a bit of um-ing and er-ing about it, yesterday I bought myself one of those electronic reader devices – specifically, the Sony PRS600 Touch which you can see in the picture.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve probably railed against electronic readers before on the blog, which is just typical of my hypocrisy and inability to maintain an opinion – well, either that, or maybe I’m the apotheosis of my suspicion that time, experience and emotion conspire to make fools and liars of us all.
That aside, the rather mundane truth is that I’ve recently been given some very lengthy PDFs which I need to read and review, and given my tendency to migraine headaches, I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a screen than I absolutely have to, and the non-backlit nature of the reader, plus its portability, seems a pretty good solution.
So far, I’m find it’s very much fit for purpose. I’m not looking to buy loads of eBooks (if any – I already have enough actual paper books waiting to be read), but I’ve loaded the PDfs successfully and they seem to work fine. Oh, and Sony give me 100 classic (yes, that does mean out-of-copyright) books with it, so it’s fairly well stocked pretty much from the start.
The main reason for my posting, though, is to share something I thought was quite amusing, though perhaps only if you have a bit of familiarity with the book in question; there are various sample chapters on the Reader when you buy it (in a variety of languages: Le Rouge Et Le Noir and Les Trois Mousquetaires, to name but deux), and one of those is the opening couple of chapters of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I think Douglas Adams would be amused by this.
But no, the Reader doesn’t have the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover. Although a customisation plan does spring to mind…
And before you ask why I didn’t just get the Stanza app for the iPhone, my simple answer would be ‘because I don’t have an iPhone’.
Like many people who’d like to earn their living from writing, I read a lot of books about the business of writing – whether it be for the page or screen or stage or whatever.
Here’s a picture of my current reading on this theme:
(I couldn’t find a decent-sized picture online, so I took the picture myself – see the trouble I go to for this nonsense?)
The book itself is pretty solid so far, but what I wanted to mention more than anything content-related was the cover; more specifically, the state-of-the-art word processing device pictured at the heart of the cover. Let’s zoom in on it, shall we?
That, my loves, is a Smith Corona PWP 7000 word processor, and its inclusion on the cover of the book suggests that at the time of the book’s publication, this was something pretty standard (or perhaps slightly aspirational) for writers to have and use.
However, just to see if you’re as weirded out by the pace of change as I was when I looked at the copyright details of the book, let me ask you this: what year do you think this book was published? Any ideas?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The book was published in 1994. Fifteen years ago. And that realisation made me feel very old indeed.
Anyway, I’d better get off the internet now, and clamber back into my bath chair. Nursey gets very angry if I stop the other residents using the home computer.
Anyone else think this cover makes it look like Alex Cross is having trouble lighting a fag?
As part of their promotional push for the new Stephen King novel Under The Dome, Hodder and Stoughton are holding a writing competition.
The idea is that you ‘take your inspiration from the new novel’ (in whatever way you interpret that), and send your creative writing in, and if you win Stephen King will read your writing and you get a signed copy of the book. Not a bad prize, all things considered, and you have until 15 December to send in your piece of 2,000 words or less (they’re also running some non-writing competitions, but they close tomorrow).
Details of all the competitions are here, but the writing one in particular can be found by clickety-clicking here.
I have a vague notion of an idea for it, and it’s not an onerous wordcount to do in a month or so, so I might have a go… if you enter, let me know how you get on.
Well, kind of.
In the light of the current post service strikes, publishing industry magazine The Bookseller has decided to go all high-tech to get round the non-delivery problem, and so has made the latest issue (cover-dated today) available online.
You can read it on your screen, or download it as a PDF, by clicking here.
So, don’t go sayin I never gives you nuffink never not ever, awright?
I do apologise, I think living in London’s East End is starting to get to me.
I’m assuming they don’t make it available this way every week, mind. And as we all know, when I make an assumption, I make an ass of you and umption… hmm, that’s not right, is it?
So, Amazon have announced that their Kindle device will be available in an international form from 19 October. Which intrigues me.
I’m currently looking into the possibility of an e-reader for some hefty reference items I have in PDF, and the Kindle seems quite appealing, as it takes PDFs and allows you to annotate items (including, unless you can inform me otherwise PDFs), so that sounds about right. And the price is lower than the Sony ones I’d been mulling over and the like.
However, whilst carrying round something small and light is obviously more appealing than lugging round a big printed document, or reading a PDF off a screen (I often feel as if I spend about 90% of my waking hours in front of a screen of some sort or other), I’m slightly wary of getting dead-ended into a bit of tech that doesn’t last for a good number of years; I still think MiniDiscs are a terrific format, and they were super-useful when I was producing a hospital radio show every week, but now I can only use the MiniDisc recorder for a handful of purposes, and so it languishes in a drawer next to my AAC-format Sony music player.
So I’m not keen to go spending a three-digit sum on something which may prove to be something of a technological dead-end, and I have other reservations – there’s a whole DRM hoo-hah about books which you can buy for it, and Amazon recently had to undergo the irony of removing copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from users’ Kindles. Then again, given the name of the device, it’s probably fortunate that it wasn’t Fahrenheit 451.
I guess I’ll wait until the devices actually start arriving in the UK before I throw my hat (a hat full of money) into the ring, and see if there are positive reviews; I like the idea of wirelessly buying books and magazines, sure, but I don’t want to end up with a bit of kit that’s duff sooner rather than later.
And besides, to answer my own question, no, it’s not available in black. Tch.
If any of you good folks have strong opinions about this subject (and to short-cut the usual comment, no I see it as supplementary to my bookshelf, not replacing it), or experience of using a reading doohickey of this type, please share in the Comments, eh? As is so often the case, I’m just learning my way around the topic, and informed input is always welcome.
Just wrapping up in sunny South London is the 24 Hour Book Challenge.
It started yesterday, and a group of writers have been working on a book based around a group of city centre allotments – having started the writing at 10am yesterday and finished it at 10am this morning, a group of volunteers is currently knocking it into printworthy shape and it’ll be on sale as of tomorrow. Follow the above link for more details of what sounds to me like a rather interesting challenge.
On the subject of novels written in a brief time – and unlike the above, you can get involved – it’s just under a month until the start of 2009’s National Novel Writing Month. I don’t think I’m eligible to take part as I’ve already started my book, but are any of you good people intending to have a go?
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