I don’t just write – I write myself at the same time as the stories. Or at least, I explore myself in the act of writing, and discover things I didn’t know.

There are now enough novels under my belt (five) to constitute an oevre (yay). As an avid analyser, I can now explore what this tells me.

1. Each novel is a in a different genre. The first is an amalgam of detective, sci-fi, and psychological thriller. The second, is literary travel– a journey of the mind coupled with a journey to an exotic location. The third, historical fantasy. The fourth, an amalgam of historical and detective. The fifth is again literary, and a romantic political thriller. So, if I don’t follow a genre (almost certainly a marketing mistake) what do my books have in common that marks them as mine?
2. The main male character is almost always flawed and, at least in part, hard to like. They are often unreliable narrators. The only exception to this is the historical fantasy novel.

3. The stories are almost always told in close third or first person by a single narrator. Again, the historical fantasy novel is the exception. In this one I experimented with multiple point-of-view characters.
4. The stories are multi-threaded. There is usually a surface narrative which conforms roughly to a genre format, and then there are other threads. The fifth book, The Tears of Boabdil, does this is spades. There is a fairly simple story of an undercover policeman attempting to penetrate what he believe is a terrorist cell, and falling for the sister of the cell’s leader. Yet there is little of the tension you would expect from a thriller because the narrator gives away in the first chapter most of what subsequently happens. This follows the advice of Boris Fishman

If your story has a secret reveal it from the top.

The drama of the story is in how the protagonist deals with his secret.  But there are also magic realist elements of a parallel story of a wandering minstrel in Moorish Spain. What connects both of these strands, which begin to interweave, is a commentary on truth in which identity becomes the story we tell ourselves and other people.

5. There is a common human preoccupation behind all of these stories. The main character is usually confused or conflicted about what is really important to him. Though there are antagonists in all but the literary travel story, the real barrier to be overcome is internal. Many of the lead characters are of dubious sanity. There is often a helper character who is female and who is usually strong and whole. In some of the stories, the confusion gets the better of the protagonist. In others, he overcomes his barrier.
6. There is a political (with a small “p”) preoccupation behind many of these stories. Part of what the protagonist confronts is social injustice, and the way in which different cultures or sub-cultures get labelled as “other”. The politics is most explicit in the historical fantasy novel, which tracks the attempt of two very different Kings to maintain the integrity of their realms and the allegiance of their peoples.

Now that is all pretty interesting to me (though whether it is to you, only you can say). I hadn’t set out with the intention of writing flawed protagonists. Noble heroes are much easier to like (though arguably much less interesting). Readers identify with heroes, but their sympathy is engaged by flaws. So I guess, a first principle of my writing is

Your protagonist doesn’t have to be likeable, but s/he does have to be interesting

Am I using my characters’ flaws to explore something in myself? Possibly, but if so, I don’t know what it might be. The characters all have different flaws. I don’t think they’re me, though each of them has some aspect of me. I didn’t consciously decide to write conflicted protagonists. It just happened. So, I reassure myself that I just enjoy the depth that a flawed character allows.

The preoccupation with what things mean is definitely me, and the idea that we are all stories is certainly a recurring theme. The first book is even called Identity.

Facts are everything that exists. Stories are the connections between them. Stories tell us what goes with what, what is important and what is unimportant, who to praise and who to blame.

The multi-threading is also a signature. I like stories with layers, especially where the layers “rhyme”.  Just as a piece of music is dull if it only has a simple beat and melody, so with a story.

Complexity rewards the reader’s attention when s/he recognises recurring motifs. Complexity also adds ambiguity, blurring certainty. It makes the reader part of the story’s construction, because there is no single reading, there are as many stories as there are readers. A story only belongs to the author up to the moment of publication. From then on, it belongs to the readers.

Images and metaphors from myth and religion recur frequently in my work, even more so in the short stories. Which is odd really, since I’m not religious. Or maybe I am, and I just don’t know it. I wrote a story, Cara’s Saga, which is a deliberate bricolage (a delicious French world, meaning a construction from a variety of a diverse range of things). And that, of course, is the attraction of bricolage. The story invents a world which is part Inca, part Australian aboriginal, part Canadian northwest seaboard, wrapped up in a homage to Norse sagas. I loved writing it. The Sumerian goddess Ishtar is a character in The Tears of Boabdil.

And there’s a clue there to the pre-occupation underlying it. I’ve been planning to write for most of my working life, but decided not to (at least not write fiction) until I could write whatever I damned well pleased without having to worry about whether it was commercial. I always imagined I’d write science fiction. And yet, I’ve written very little of that genre. I like to explore different worlds, both for the curiosities I encounter there and for the underlying music of the universal human spirit at work. It turns out that the most interesting worlds to me are not those with elves and dragons (I actively dislike elves and dragons), or empires in other galaxies. The most interesting worlds are those inside people’s heads. I’m interested in the ways that people understand things, and how that makes them act.

Stories should take us to places we’ve never been before, and introduce us to characters we’ve never met before. The writer constructs a new world for us. But you don’t have to cross galaxies to do this. Inside every head there is a world which, to the rest of us, is unimaginably different and strange. Since we can never enter these worlds in reality, it’s the job of fiction to take us there and show us our friends, our partners, and our children as they really are.

If we were all aliens beneath the skin, that would be as scary as the pod people in the classic (McCarthy era and anti-communist) sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the work of fiction is not to render people as “other” but as (at least in part) delightfully like us. We have to be able to understand and empathise with the alien universes inside their heads.

I think getting a handle on how those mystifying creatures around me think and feel and construct meaning is my main motivation for writing.

And that’s probably why I’m so drawn to religion and myth. I wasn’t even really aware of this until I was doing a reading at a “Lit Live” event in Frensham and the poet, Jo Young asked me why I used so much religious reference. The impulse is literary, not a religious. These are simply great stories, the best our species has created. And why are they so great? Because they have been the glue which binds communities and peoples together. They express universal longings and fears, and explain, in their distinct and unique ways, cultures to themselves.

Religion and myth are a wonderful toolkit of story pieces.

Like an electronic hobbyist, the writer can take characters and themes and events from them, and plug these into the circuit board of a story. And when narrative current is passed through them, they resonate with deep energy that draws in the freight of hundreds or thousands of years of storytelling.

Personally I don’t make resolutions, but that may not be true of you. It may be important to resolve, for example, to make time to write every day, or to complete what you’ve started, or to edit more, or any number of things.

I do plan, though, what I can realistically achieve this year as a writer. Luckily, most of those decisions are already taken for me in 2018.

January 1	Make plans I have a first draft of a novel, The Tears of Boabdil, that I’m really excited about AND that I believe has commercial possibilities. The year is book-ended by the opening and closing of a 12-month long mentorship I’ve been awarded by Cinnamon Press. In that time, I plan to get my novel into a publishable state.
January	Enter short story competitions I’m more likely to win For several years, I’ve been unsuccessfully entering some of the biggest competitions the literary world has to offer – the Bridport, the Sunday Times EFG, the Costa, for example. I will probably enter them again this year. But with the chances of placing ranging from just over 1% to less than a quarter of a per cent, the odds are not in my favour. So this year I am also entering competitions with more favourable odds. I have sent stories to competitions where the odds of placing are around 4% to 5%: ·         Exeter, which closes on 28 February ·         Bath, which closes on 23 April ·         Yeovil, which closes on 31 May I have entered all of these, as well as the BBC National Short Story Competition, which closes on 12 March and the Winchester Writers Festival short story competition, which closes on 11 April.
February – December	Rework the novel Comments from my mentor should be back by the end of February. If I enter the Bridport Novel Competition, I may want to concentrate in the first half of the year on the initial 15,000 words.
April – May	Bridport Competition This closes 31 May. I ‘m thinking of entering the novel competition rather than the short story.
June – August	Sunday Times EFG Competition Details not yet announced. But will probably open in June and close in September. Winchester Writers’ Festival 15-17 June. Costa Short Story Award Details not yet announced. But will probably open in July and close in August.
September – November	Farnham Short Story Competition Not one to enter, but to run. Writers’ Retreat Ty’n y Coed, November, run by Cinnamon Press

George Monbiot’s book, Out of the Wreckage, is the second this year to explore the idea that what the planet needs is a new story. Like Alex Evans in The Myth Gap, Monbiot suggests that people are mobilised to action by stories, not by facts and evidence.

This is clearly an idea whose time has come, and one which resonates with a “post-truth” world. I won’t rehearse again my concerns with the anti-rationality of the idea, which I covered in a review of Evans’ book.  And, in fairness, Monbiot advocates a new story based on science. I do agree with both authors that we need new stories to confront the challenges of our times.

Stories, as I said in my review of The Myth Gap “are among the oldest human devices for encoding and sharing knowledge. They have the huge advantage over collections of facts that they tell us what goes with what, what is important and what is unimportant, who to praise and who to blame.”

Monbiot goes further than Evans in suggesting the structure of this new story.

“Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. The hero – who might be one person or a group of people – revolts against this disorder, fights the nefarious forces, overcomes them despite great odds and restores order.”

He calls this the Restoration Story and says “stories that follow this pattern can be so powerful that they sweep all before them, even our fundamental values.”  He suggests that this is an archetype, which is common to both social democratic and neoliberal narratives, and he may indeed be right in saying this.

However, the interesting thing about the idea is how timid it is, with its narrative of “restoring order”. And it isn’t the only archetypal story we tell about the future. I know this because I did some research a few years ago, analysing 64 futures scenarios (“Futures and Culture”, Futures 44 (2012) 277–291). All these stories fitted into four broad classes – Progress, Catastrophe, Reversion and Transformation.

• Progress is, as the name suggests, one where existing trends lead towards the expected goals. This story was dominant during the brash optimism of the nineteenth century.
• Catastrophe is also simple – the outcomes prevent us realising our expected goals. In the darker years of the twentieth century, dystopian visions became more common.
• Reversion, which is essentially Monbiot’s Restoration, is a little more complicated, and involves a return to previous conditions in order to maintain viability. These stories often have a sentimental view of a simpler earlier time.
• Finally, the Transformation story involves, as the name suggests, a fundamental change in the “rules of the game“, leading to a new and unexpected end-state.

I would suggest that to get out of the wreckage we need Transformation stories not Reversion stories. Monbiot would probably agree, but perhaps he might want to rethink his narrative archetypes.

It only recently occurred to me that the concept of point of view in literature is a metaphor, borrowed from painting.  I am still struggling to see if anything profound flows from this realisation.  Bear with me, please.

When we write from the point of view of a particular character, we see events from a particular place in the story world. Point of view in fiction is like perspective in painting. Perspective creates the illusion of an image as seen by the eye if viewed from one particular spot.

Perspective is intended to create an illusion of realism. We are so used to seeing it in painting that we don’t notice it as a technique and see it as representational. But of course there were and are other conventions in the history of art. In the Persian tradition of miniature illustration, recession into the distance is indicated not by size but by being placed higher up the picture, horses are generally depicted from the side and the scene is often viewed from above. Viewing from above is akin to the world as seen by God.

Can there be fiction without perspective?

If there can painting without perspective can there also be a fiction without perspective, without point of view? It’s a seductive but impossible idea. All fiction has an inescapable point of view. A story has to be told by someone. But stories can be told in different ways and this has echoes of different conventions of representation in painting.

The world as seen and the world as it is

These days, a first-person or close-third-person narration is common. It makes our experience of the narrator more intimate, but it also adds perspective to the telling. There are objects that are hidden from the view of the narrator, and the constant possibility of distortion – the narrator misunderstanding the meaning of events.

By contrast, a century and half ago, the omniscient narrator was common. Like the period before perspective in art, the narrator could dip in and out of the heads of different characters, revealing their thoughts and their intentions. Important events could be foregrounded. This was like the technique of drawing a scene not as viewed by the painter but the real scene as viewed by God.

The dimension of time

I sense there may be something more interesting in comparing perspective and point of view, but I can’t discover what it is. It may have to do with the way in which painting and writing are different. While a painting is fixed, a story always has some sort of motion in time. Unlike artists, writers have enormous freedom to explore and play with time. Few stories are told linearly from beginning to end. Rather there are flashbacks, fore-shadowing, cliff-hangers, misdirection, and ellipses. There may be stories within stories. And, in the technique of metalepsis, logical boundaries between story levels can be transgressed, as when the narrator intrudes into a world being narrated. The timeline can become extensively fractured in some tales. This too is like the fracturing of perspective in modern art.

Help

Can you do anything to take these insights further?

 

Does a writer have to eschew ideology in favour of empathy?

This topic was heavily explored in an online writing course on Identity and Social Issues that I have just finished with the University of Iowa. Ruel Johnstone, for example, argued that a writer, even a political writer, must take off ideological lenses. You have to look at people, he says, much more closely than in ideology. Jane Bledsoe argued that explicitly trying to push a political agenda or a social justice agenda usually fails. Kia Corthron, Inara Verzemnieks, Tim Bascom, Janine di Giovanni, and Vladimir Poleganov all argued similar points.

When so many people agree, they must either be expressing an obvious truth, or they must be speaking from a similar point of view. It is, of course, a defining characteristic of a dominant ideology that its adherents believe they have no ideology. George Orwell wrote that “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’” How might we tell the difference between these two alternatives?

There does seem to be a self-evident truth to the Iowa argument. As readers, we identify with characters, and so a writer must approach political or social issues through their impact on the character. But, then again, who anyone is and what they want depends on where they sit in society.

And several of the presenters in the course acknowledged they were still expressing an ideological position, and that the reader would probably figure this out. Some offered advice about how to slip information in, so the reader wasn’t aware of it. So the neutral empathetic stance of the writer is not all it seems to be at first sight. Sneaky people those writers!

The dominant view in Western cultures is some form of liberal tolerance. But that’s not necessarily how things really work. Equality of opportunity, for example, is meaningless without the opportunity of equality first. It seems to me that it’s a writer’s responsibility to explore and expose how things really work, to show the clockwork beneath the mask.

Ideology is part of character

I think we need to approach the question by thinking carefully about what ideology is. Ideology is not false consciousness. On the contrary, it only works because it makes sense of a person’s lived reality and experience.  For the investor, it is his (or her) money that creates wealth. For the worker, it is her or his labour. For the person who loses their job to a foreigner, immigration will seem a problem. Ideology isn’t false consciousness, any more than being kind or religious or miserly is false consciousness. It’s simply reality as viewed through the personality and experience of an individual.

In other words, ideology is a part of character. When we render the mental and spiritual world of a character, we are, among other things, rendering that character’s ideology – that character’s understanding of why the world is as it is. If we don’t understand our characters’ ideology well, we will render it as a stereotype. And that will lead to stereotyped characters because it’s poor writing, not because it’s ideological.

If, for example, we want to explore why ordinary decent people in the right circumstances can be persuaded to engage in genocide, it just won’t do to label them as monsters and say “never again”. Because it does keep happening again, and again. We need to get inside their heads and explore their ideology, and the very human hopes and fears that drive it. They’re people pretty much like us.

We never just let the reader come to their own conclusions

I think it’s a fantasy that we allow the reader to come to their own conclusion. How could they? We select the events, we craft the order in which they’re told, we polish and shape in order to create the effect we desire. Creative writing describes events in the light of the ends we ordain for them. The open-endedness is an illusion. Of course, no two readers ever render exactly the same story in their minds, I accept that. They may even disagree with our conclusions, depending on their own concerns and life experiences. Even so the writer is not only witness, but also advocate, judge and jury.

An alternative approach

If we want to authentically render the way the social realm shapes character, we have to build character on more than just individual psychology. In the Iowa course, Karim Alrawi advocated starting from relationships, rather than just the individual. He described his own practice as in his novel Book of Sands set in the Arab Spring, of seeking out and dramatizing the underlying metaphors, not people or events.  And Jennifer Cognard noted that identity is never singular, it’s always plural.

 

I have a new goal as an author – writing gracefully. This goal arrived by accident. I came across the magazine Metaphorosis (“intelligent, beautifully written stories for adults”), whose editor has posted a helpful description on their website of what they’re looking for. He writes of quality prose “it’s not a question of adornment, but of grace”, and cautions against going overboard with images and metaphors. I wonder if I might be in danger of writing without grace.

My journey as a writer

First successes as a writer came in 2015. My initial publication was a short sci-fi story about time travel and the grandfather paradox. Two other stories were accepted that year.

In the years before my breakthrough, I had submitted eight stories. But, though I didn’t know it at the time, the magazines I contacted accept on average only 0.82% of what they received. Well beyond my ability level

The big change from previous years was (a) my writing was improving, and (b) I was more targeted about where I sent my stories.  .

In 2015, I was much more realistic, submitting 23 stories to journals which had an average acceptance rate of 16.99%. The publication I was most proud of was a slipstream story, Zhuang Zhu’s Dream, published in Gold Dust, which then accepted 6.67% of the material sent to it. Last year, my greatest achievement was the story Interstices, published in Structo, which then accepted 3.85% of submissions. You can read both stories by clicking on the links on the sidebar. Two other pieces were also accepted in 2016.

This year, I’ve been more adventurous. So far, I’ve submitted 14 stories to magazines which have an average acceptance rate of 3.15%. I’ve had one story accepted since January. And yet I wondered if my writing had really improved enough to merit targeting more difficult publications.

 

Starting simple

When I look back at what I was writing before I got published, I can certainly see a change. As a teenager I wrote stories. One was even submitted to a magazine and rejected. I wish I still had that rejection slip – it would have been revealing. Hazily I remember it as saying something like “nice idea but needs more work”.

In 2011, I joined a local writers’ group, a diverse bunch of novelists, poets, and authors of short-stories. Later I also linked up with an online writing community.  My apprenticeship to fiction began. Both groups were really helpful in critiquing and improving my work. I learned and practised many of the basic craft skills of structure, character, point of view, and, of course, grammar. I discovered that I already had a natural facility with wordcraft, perhaps based on an adolescent foundation of intense poetry scribbling.

The stories I was writing then are much simpler than my current stuff. They are generally built around a single idea, written with beginning, middle and end. The end is often a twist. Here’s one from that period:

For the first time ever, the August temperature hit 42 degrees. John Campell leaned his head against the aircon-cooled window of the Maglev shuttle as it ran parallel with the freeway and looked at the empty cracking asphalt. It was cars he missed most.  At 21, so many years ago, that metallic blue Tigra had been his power and his freedom. His grandchildren didn’t miss cars at all. As the elevated track crossed the causeway over tidally sodden land he looked down at the empty places where he used to walk, go to school, and play. And soon the city came into view, its silver SmartPaint dazzling in the 42-degree late afternoon sun.

How he wished it hadn’t been him; that he hadn’t been born, when he was, in 1990. Born to pass through what the media now dubbed “the bottleneck”, when everything changed. How he wished it wasn’t his generation that was paying the price for mending the planet. After the It had taken a tough alliance between the Moralez administration in the US and the Fanoniste governments abroad to create a blueprint a frightened and reluctant world would follow.

Still there was money to be made out of saving the planet. And GaeiaTek was making its share. He transferred from the shuttle to a company bike and made his way to the conference room. As he pedalled, he rehearsed his presentation on algal seeding for carbon sequestration off the Ecuador coast

.Was this simplicity the essence of grace?

 

Experimentation and growth

Around 2014 I began to experiment. In one story, for example, I tried to describe the same event from the point of view of two different protagonists. I also explored more complex, and not necessarily likeable, characters, and to read more adventurously. My first whimsical experiments with what you might call fabulism and slipstream originate from this period.

Slipstream is a kind of non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction.

Fabulism is the intrusion of fantastical and mythological elements into a realistic setting.

The slipstream probably originates from a childhood fed by science fiction. The fabulism derives from my lifelong fascination with myth. There’s a particular sensation I have when I write this kind of story – I can feel the air blowing free and wild, and writing it is a guilty pleasure. It always feels like something I’m doing just for fun. And I never think they’re really “serious” until I’ve put them away in my bottom drawer and let them germinate. The tale I published in this genre, Interstices, was first drafted in 2014. Oddly, my science fiction and fabulist stories have been the most successful. Four of my seven publications are in those categories. Yet it’s my socially-grounded writing that I consider more important, though only one of them has so far been published.

The next big change, in 2015, the year I got published, was triggered by joining the University of Iowa Writers Programme MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). I’ve already blogged about what I learned from this so I won’t cover it again.  I was resistant to this change at first because it was a turn to more complex literary writing. Literary fiction had always seemed rarefied and elitist. And yet I’m drawn to complexity, to layers in stories, and to motifs that repeat. The earlier work travelled in too much of a straight line from start to end.  This made the tales “flat”.

I discovered the writer can forge a sense of deeper meaning and immersion through the artifice of repetition and by having different characters, situations and timelines echo and resonate with each other. Chains of words can create the illusion of causal connection or bridges between elements that are, in the prosaic world, distinct and incommensurable.

A tutor in the University of Iowa MOOC told me “If we are just worried about the pieces to make the events line up for some big climactic moment, then we might not be paying attention to building a world that is primed for resonances, for moments that, when plucked, make other moments spring back to life, thereby creating vibrations across the entire narrative world.”

To illustrate what I mean about layers of complexity, this is a diagram I drew to help plan the plot threads for a story, Short Circuit, I’m currently working on:

The setting is the Abbey of Lindisfarne at the time of the Viking raid in the year 793. The green line traces the life of the protagonist, a monk called Billfrith, who is illuminating a manuscript for the King of Northumbria. Woven through this life are abrupt changes, short-circuits, which have to do with a tension between construction and destruction. Billfrith associates the destruction with iron and his old life as a blacksmith’s apprentice; and the construction with the knowledge his current contemplative life in the Abbey allows him to develop. There is another text which captures his attention, describing alchemical experiments. He experiences a revelation just before the attack forces him to confront his past and drives him to desperation. Motifs of iron and fire are woven throughout the story.

So my writing has definitely changed. But is it better?

 

The challenge of grace – back to simplicity?

The post on the Metaphorosis website offers very useful detail about what an editor is looking for: a strong opening, quality prose, and a satisfying and appropriate ending. Quality prose, the editor says, often works on two levels at once.  So I’m on the right lines there. Other major reasons for rejection are:

• Awkward backstory, info-dump
• Grammar
• Character not credible or distant
• No story/resolution. “A surprising number of stories don’t have enough story to them. That is, they’re slice-of-life pieces, or vignettes, or for some other reason add up to ‘So what?’”

I’m pretty confident I’ve learned how to do all of those things. But the editor’s stricture that quality prose is “not a question of adornment, but of grace” rang a warning bell.  Was this me? An overly-literary fascination with complexity? Certainly, some of my readers have warned me against big words and subtle turns.

Yeats once expressed his aim as being to “think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.” I applaud that aim.  I was reminded of the subtle power of simplicity recently reading the gorgeous Palm of the Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabate. In his 1968 Nobel Prize lecture Kawabata said, referring to Japanese art, “The heart of the ink painting is in space, abbreviation, what is left undrawn.”  His writing is as spare as a Zen drawing. For example, this description from his story Thunder in Autumn: “It was early autumn, when the young girls returned from the sea and went walking about the town like fine chestnut horses”.

One of the forms I enjoy writing is very short 100-word flash fiction. This enforces that Zen discipline of using what’s left unsaid. I wonder if maybe I should apply the same discipline to my longer works. Deciding that the only way to test whether I write with grace was to submit something to Metaphorosis, which has a 2.4% acceptance rate, I was rejected.

Please let me know what you think.

Please let me know what you think.