That branding exercise was a good exercise to do, I think, even if nothing comes of it on the ‘finding your readers’ front. It certainly helped with the ancient Greek principle of “know thyself.”
One thing I did notice was that several people said my fictional worlds felt grounded and real in a way that brought the past (or the fantasy setting) to life. So I thought I would share the advice that I followed in order to achieve that. This is probably the only writing advice about style that I’ve ever made a consistent effort to follow, because the prevalent advice at the moment – to make your language as invisible as you can, so that people only notice the plot – has always struck me as a sad, barren, grey timidity in a language that can provide fireworks if you let it.
Two of my three favourite authors of all time are Tolkien and Ursula LeGuin. (Patrick O’Brian is the third, and although he doesn’t talk about this stuff, his books are hard to jam closed for the exuberance of their language and settings. He practices what the other two preach.) What I like about them all is not just because they have great plots and good characters – it’s because their worlds are lush and sensual and full of juice. You fall into them and you’re there, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching something that never existed at all, and being overwhelmed by it.
I wanted to be able to do that! So naturally when I found out that they had published writing advice, I went and got hold of it. If you’re at all interested in doing the same thing, it’s worth getting hold of it yourself, but in the meantime I’ll pass along a few quotes.
Here’s what Ursula LeGuin has to say in the opening of Steering the Craft
Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this childish love for the sounds of language… Others “outgrow” their oral/aural sense of language as they learn to read in silence. That’s a loss.
Skipping over most of the book, here’s another paragraph that resonates with me:
Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets to “load every rift with ore.” It’s what we mean when we exhort ourselves to avoid flabby language and cliches, never to use ten vague words where two will do, always to seek the vivid phrase, the exact word. By crowding I also mean keeping the story full, always full of what’s happening in it; keeping it moving, not slacking and wandering into irrelevancies; keeping it interconnected with itself, rich with echoes forward and backward. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich: these adjectives describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings and implications.
If I join up those two things, I get the advice to enjoy language, play with it, using all of its poetic qualities and techniques wherever you think they’ll enhance the read. But at the same time, keep it concrete, specific and as singular as you can.
Tolkien says something very similar in his essay “On Fairy Stories” (among many other thought provoking things):
The “fantastic” elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or
occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or
about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a
good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood
which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by
the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and
stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.
And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or
fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more
luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature
can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the
words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.
Which I take to mean “remember that even the simplest things in your fictional world – the sea, the rain, the tea-cup in your character’s hand, reflect things in our own world which are real, and remarkable. There is a kind of miracle in the existence of anything at all, and in the same way everything that you put into a book is something created out of nothing.” The details of your fictional world are little marvels of creation and ought to be treated as (as LeGuin says) “Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich.” In your subcreated world, all the things are real things, which you summoned out of non-existence with your mere words. It’s well worth treating them with the kind of care you would give to anything magical, potent and strange.
A writer can draw your attention to grass in their imaginary world in such a way that when you come back, you see grass in your own land as the remarkable and peculiar thing that it is. The pundits may tell you that everyone knows what grass looks like, so just drop the word and move on. But it’s not so – few people have the time to really notice grass. If you do it for them, you can give them back some of their childish wonder at how amazing everything is. So don’t just drop the word ‘grass’ and move on. Take the time to notice whether it’s close cropped, hair fine grass, striped in two greens, or long, coarse grass with moss and dandelions, just turning blond in the summer heat. Your worlds will be better for it and you may end up working enchantment.
That’s the theory, anyway. I don’t think I match up to it yet, but I try.
Just a quick note to say I’m blogging over at Samhain’s blog today, where I’m being all “bah, humbug!” about Christmas elves.
http://www.samhainpublishing.com/2011/12/a-brief-history-of-elves/
If you know of a good reason why I should learn to love these little fakers, do please come over and tell me 😉
A bit of a round-up post today, mainly consisting of things which I think of as good news. First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my branding questionnaire post. I’ve thought about it over the week and decided that I can’t really handle historical and fantasy under completely different pen names, because there will be many situations in which I’ll be doing something that’s historical fantasy or fantasy historical. So all three things bunch together.
I have, however, come up with a new tag-line to describe the sort of historical and/or fantasy writer I am, and re-vamped the header on my website to match. I like it more the more I see it. At least it’s not as grim as the old ones. What do you think?
The new historical, fantasy and historical fantasy header revealed 🙂
Other nice stuff for me – I’ve just sent in the final line edit of Under the Moon: Dogfighters. So now I can wrap and send presents with some hope of them arriving on time. Even better, Samhain tell me they will get Dogfighters available for pre-order just as soon as the cover art is OKed.
Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon is already available to pre-order, which I think is astonishing and very cool, as it’s not out until April. It has a new blurb, rather better than the one it’s been using in the past –
The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army.
Under the Hill, Part 1
When Ben Chaudhry is attacked in his own home by elves, they disappear as quickly as they came. He reaches for the phone book, but what kind of exterminator gets rid of the Fae? Maybe the Paranormal Defense Agency will ride to his rescue.
Sadly, they turn out to be another rare breed: a bunch of UFO hunters led by Chris Gatrell, who—while distractingly hot—was forcibly retired from the RAF on grounds of insanity.
Shot down in WWII—and shot forward seventy years in time, stranded far from his wartime sweetheart—Chris has been a victim of the elves himself. He fears they could destroy Ben’s life as thoroughly as they destroyed his. Chris is more than willing to protect Ben with his body. He never bargained for his heart getting involved.
Just when they think there’s a chance to build a life together, a ghostly voice from Chris’s past warns that the danger is greater than they can imagine. And it may take more than a team of rank amateurs to keep Ben—and the world—out of the elf queen’s snatching hands…
Warning: Brace yourself for mystery, suspense, sexual tension, elves in space and a nail-biting cliffhanger ending.
~
On the free story front, thanks to Gaye who gave me the heads up that the link to Insubordination (the Captain’s Surrender tie-in) was not working on my website. I’ve fixed that, and – in the process – I’ve made the story into a .pdf with a nice new cover. It’s now back up and available for anyone to download to their e-reader or computer.
I’ve also fixed the link to Communion (the Wages of Sin tie-in) which is also available in pdf form suitable for your e-reader.
I’ll work through and give the other freebies their own cover art in due course. And possibly also put up Wildfire for anyone who wants it. Now I really need to get wrapping!
So, it’s worth thinking about light, if you’re writing a historical novel, particularly if you live and/or were brought up in a city. We moderns are as unaware of light as a fish is of water. We switch it on where we need it, and the night goes away in an even wash of colourless white illumination. Even when we switch it off, outside the windows the lamps keep shining and all our streets are yellow and the shadows are madder-brown.
Photographers and painters spend their lives acutely aware of the light – it’s angle, its intensity and its colour, and the fall of the places where it is absent. But writers have a tendency to ignore it, because we are less visual beings and we’re too busy worrying about plot and characterisation, and wondering if we’ve got too much description rather than too little.
I think that’s a shame, because if you’ve ever sat in a room illumined only by candlelight, you’ll know that it’s an entirely different experience from sitting in the same room under electric light. There’s a sense of human impermanence and fragility from the fact that the light is so vulnerable – too sharp a draught and those little flames that flicker so brightly on the end of their wicks could snuff out. The darkness is behind them all, waiting for its chance, and it can be felt, like a prowling presence just outside the protective circle.
Candlelight is also far more beautiful than electric. The colour of candlelight is the colour of the light before a storm – thick, golden and sweet. Garments look richer in it, faces look smoother, soft-focus, dusted with gilding. It’s a warm light that encourages quiet voices and secrets, intimacy and intrigue. And it casts more shadows.
Out there, beyond the charmed circle, outside the light, who knows what lurks? Even the rooms of your house fill up with hidden things, whether that be murder clues or secret trysts or supernatural terrors.
If you’ve ever walked outside, in the countryside, where there is no light pollution, on an overcast night, on your own, you’ll know you can feel buried alive even in the open air. And if you’ve done the same under a full moon, when the sky is indigo and green as a bad bruise, and all the world is tricksy silver-blue, you’ll appreciate how hard it was for our ancestors not to believe in elves and wights and headless horsemen. Under that lunatic light, you can practically see them wherever you look.
Yet again I’m thinking about branding. Initially I was very resistant to the idea that an author should have a brand. “What if I want to do something different?” I thought. “If I brand myself as a historical author, what will become of me if I want to write fantasy, or mystery, or Gothic historical mystery fantasy with a touch of action/adventure? Because I know I’m likely to want to do all of that stuff.”
But at the same time, I felt continually compelled to protest against the fact that publishers have this tendency to put my books in the ‘erotic’ or ‘sizzling’ or ‘sensual’ category. What gets my goat there is that I feel it’s false advertising. People are buying the books hoping for delicious sexiness, and they’re getting battles at sea and the occasional stolen kiss. If that happened to me, I’d feel cheated, and I don’t want my readers to feel cheated.
So, what happened recently is that my resistance to false advertising met up with my understanding of branding, folded it up a bit and shook it out into an entirely different shape. I suddenly understood that branding is not a way of limiting what you do at all. It’s a way of discovering what you do and describing it accurately, so that the people who are interested in that kind of thing can find it, and the people who are not interested in it can avoid it and thereby save themselves money and disappointment.
Apologies to everyone if you all knew that already, and I’m the only one for whom it had ever been a mystery.
As a result of this, I’m now trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes me unique as an author. I can’t brand myself as a ‘historical’ author, because I also do fantasy, and I can’t brand myself as a ‘fantasy’ author because I also do historical. But there must be something about the way I do both of those genres which unites them both – something which is my way of dealing with them, my way of seeing. And that is my brand – the limitation that is placed upon me entirely by virtue of me being myself. If I could just put my finger on it.
Which is where we come to the questionnaire part. I can’t help feeling that this is a terrible imposition on anyone who reads this blog, but on the other hand I would really love to know the answer to some of these things. So I’ll compromise by putting it out here for anyone to answer any part of if they want to – and obviously not to bother if they don’t.
Questionaire
How would you describe my genre of work?
With each of my books, what do you expect from the story?
How do you usually feel after reading one of my books?
If you were describing my books to a friend, how would you describe them?
Ultimately, why do you keep reading my books?
If you had to compare my books to another author’s, who would you say I’m
similar to and why?
Are there any elements, themes or genres you are hoping to see from me soon?
This weekend saw me in two layers of thermals and a big black coat playing as one of Coton Morris Men’s musicians, and can I just say that (a) the inventor of handwarmers is hereby promoted by me to the status of a minor god, and (b) nobody told me that whistle players need to carry a windsock to make sure they stand with the wind behind them. Otherwise, while you’re trying to blow a note, the breeze blows back and all you get is silence and red in the face.
I have decided to drop all that Irish- tin- penny- nonsense at the front. The instrument doesn’t originate in Ireland, isn’t always made of tin, and even the cheapest ones cost about a fiver.
Here, for example, is an article about the oldest musical instrument in the world which is still playable, a bone flute from Jiahu in Henan province in China and here is a vulture bone one from Germany 35,000 years ago. Both of them are end-blown, from what I can see, so ‘flute’ is a bit misleading.
In deference to the fact that the whistle is one of the most ancient instruments on the planet, I’m adopting the plain Anglo-Saxon word for the instrument (hwistle) and just sprucing up the spelling a bit.
Speaking of Anglo-Saxon whistles, have a lovely video of someone who is either admirably non-gender-biased about their name, or not really Kate Corwen at all, playing one.
Read the rest of this entry »
of an angered morris musician at Mill Road Winter Fair. With one blast from the melodion, Jane of Coton Morris Men knocks down two of the dancers who’d had the audacity to complain about her festive scarf.
And my characters stare back.
Sometimes when I’m starting a project with all new characters and setting, and I don’t know much about either, I will sit down and ask my heroes to talk to me. Usually they say something along the lines of “Sod off! Don’t be nosy.” And they look at me as any sane person would look at a stranger who was waving a microphone under their nose and encouraging them to reveal the secrets of their psyche.
Sometimes, however, they are unselfconscious enough to give me an answer. In Leofgar’s case I believe it’s because he’s a trained bard and he’s used to giving a performance at the drop of a coin hat. But I could feel the resentment coming off him, nevertheless.
Having got it, it turns out that he does love a bit of alliteration. And he’s remarkably good at telling me loads of stuff without giving me anything useful to work with. Par for the course, really, for one of my characters.
~*~*~*~
“Tell me about yourself, Leofgar,” I say.
He bows his head and the barley coloured curls fall over his forehead. There is an angelic look to the spareness of his face, and in certain lights it would be sweet enough for a woman’s, but for the angles. He is the only one who thinks he resembles a drawn sword.
“What is there to tell? I am, as you see, a wanderer. Blown by fate’s breezes, trimming my sails to the tempest in order to survive it. Yet if you insist on learning of things now forgotten, and uncovering words left unspoken in ages past, I will recall them. I am the son of a farmer. From the fertile fields of Kent, I come. Always, as a boy, would I walk out alone to the boundaries of our land and further, tag along with the tinkers, demand tales of far lands and long forgotten wonders from anyone who would tell them. These I remembered, teaching myself to roll the words over in my mind and search where they might be fitted together to build new cities of thought, wondrous in their conception.
My father was a kind man, but fancied himself cursed with me. When he could catch me, he would beat me. My brother too – older than I. On him fell all the labour and my father’s hope and he bore these burdens like an overloaded ass, kicking and complaining all the while. A sister I had too, she was wed young and had no time for me, but there were small places behind the barrels of her brewing house where I might go and hide from herdcraft, mumbling my mindhoard over to myself.
My mother was well enough. Kind when she remembered me, too busy with garden and grounds, cheese and children, dairy and drudgery to set me to work. So when Anna came the first year and I could not be prised from his presence, I think she knew how my wyrd had been woven.
Anna, in those old days, – I am wordless when I think on him, all my subtlety reduced to a smile. When he came, I found at last a fellow, one at whose shoulder I could stand, knowing his mind. I found a well full of the water of which I had been parched, I gulped down his stories greedily and dogged his steps. When he left I begged him to let me go with him, but he would not. "Next year," he said, "If you are of the same mind." But he made me a flute from a cow’s leg-bone, and left me to learn to play. By the next year I could play it and make my own. I had remembered all his tales and told them back to him, and I had learned to make little doggerel rhymes of my own in praise of my family and friends. This did not earn me any break in work or beatings, but I was proud.
That year he stayed at our steading for two weeks, beginning to teach me the great tales. But he would not take me with him. By the third year I had grown tall enough, and strong, that he could not carry me back. That year I went with him. I have been a wanderer ever since.”
starts up today! Every day until Christmas, at about 2pm, there will be a new post about something festive, and an opportunity to win either a free book or something else just as exciting.
My post isn’t up until the 23rd, but I’m going to be clicking on it every day because there’s something interesting every day for a month, and you can’t always say that about the internet 😉
Check it out over here: Speak Its Name Advent Calendar
As November draws to a close, and all over the internet come the cries of NaNoWriMo participants reaching their 50K goal for the month, I have achieved my In2.5NoEdMo.
My individual month of editing two and a half books – if a novella counts as a half book – turned out to be almost as strenuous as the writing challenge. But I finished it on Friday, had a weekend, and started work on my WIP again today with a grand total of 1051 words. The plan had been to finish this WIP during NaNo, but you know what they say about the plans of mice and men.
Most of my work time today was spent reading what I had already written, so that I could pick up the tone and characters from where I put them down, and I’m pleased to say that I definitely enjoyed what I have so far – this gives me hope for the rest of it.
I doubt it will be finished this year, now. December is not a great month for buckling down to anything other than Christmas. But we’ll have to see. I might be able to get the rough draft done by the end of January, God willing, if I work hard and nobody else gets ill.
Oh, oh, and I have seen the mockup of the cover art for UtH: Dogfighters and it’s even better than the cover art for UtH: Bomber’s Moon. Probably my favourite cover ever, in fact. I can’t wait to show everyone 🙂
