Category Archives: Novel writing

The writing process blog tour

I’ve been nominated by fellow ALLi author, EJ Lamprey, for the Writing Process Blog Tour.

Elizabeth Lamprey is working on her fifth whodunit after releasing Seven Eight Play It Straight in April – all the whodunits are set in Scotland, near Edinburgh, and are light-hearted fiendishly-plotted challenges to armchair detectives everywhere. She has a secret passion for SF and one day will invent a charismatic mystery-solving alien. One day.
Here is her post about her writing process.
As for my answers to the questions about what, why and how I write, here they are…

1. What am I working on now?
I’m working on my third novel, WorldCult, and a collection of poems. I’m also following a genre fiction course run by PWA, which I’m using to hone my awareness of genre. It’s all very exciting, but terrifying at the same time.

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?

It differs a lot because it is all cross-genre!

Each of the books in the Borderliners Trilogy has a speculative undercurrent, but they are slightly different from one another in genre.

Book 1, Borderliners, is part occult, psychological thriller and part ghost story, whereas Split Symmetry (book 2, out July 2014) is an international adventure thriller as well as a metaphysical love story which some might categorise as ‘romance suspense’.

WorldCult (book 3, out December 2014) is more of a big-concept international conspiracy thriller.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I write in order to explore some of the questions I have in life. For example, what is reality? What about free will and personal responsibility, or the existence of moral systems? Why do powerful people sometimes decide this for others, often with disastrous consequences? What is love, and why does it bind us? This post by io9 pretty much sums up the main questions I’m interested in.

I like to explore these questions within my books. I also see the writing-reading relationship as a form of 3D communication. As Milan Kundera said in ‘The Art of the Novel’, the writer begins the vision but the reader completes it in their own way. Readers often see entirely unexpected elements in my work, and I welcome this.

4. How does my writing process work?
snowflakeI have two modes of operation, a writing mode and an editing one. When I’m working on a new project, I write every day. I do this, no matter how the prose comes out, in order to get into character and setting, getting down around 1,500 words a day. It’s a little bit like method acting. I also write poetry around central events in the book, or concepts, to get me in the mood and to shoot right through to the heart of the matter. Poetry helps. A lot.

The other thing I just have to do, is get the scaffolding up quickly. Without the bare bones of the entire story mapped out, I lose track of where I’m going. So I must admit, I’m a fan of the snowflake method.

It works like this: first, I put a basic story together, then I work on the detail of the characterisation and character arc of my protagonist and other main characters, then I work in the thematic undertones and lastly I polish!

Here’s where I first discovered the snowflake method. 

Finally, I operate Stephen King’s shut door idea (from ‘On Writing’). Figuratively speaking, you keep the door to your work in progress shut until you reach the end of the first draft, then you open it, release the novel to beta readers, collate comments and rewrite. This works very well for me.

The editing-redrafting-editing-redrafting cycle then usually takes at least the same time again, usually double the time. So, if it takes six months to write a first draft, it will take twelve to edit it to the point where I’m happy with the manuscript.

I am tagging two fellow Faber Academy alumni and talented writers:
AK Boheim
DM Sharp author of the Olivia Carter series

My books

Borderliners
Split Symmetry

Currently reading ‘1222’ by Anne Holt.

 

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Philosophical questions with no answers

I love this, eight great philosophical questions we’ll never solve.

Although I like to think we will solve them…one day.

In my books I explore some of these. Look out for #2 and #3 in my upcoming book, Split Symmetry, and number #5 and #7 in Borderliners. #7 also features in my third book, WorldCult.

Reblogged from iO9.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we’re cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all this stuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, “Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously.” And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably tautological ring to it.

2. Is our universe real?

This the classic Cartesian question. It essentially asks, how do we know that what we see around us is the real deal, and not some grand illusion perpetuated by an unseen force (who René Descartes referred to as the hypothesized ‘evil demon’)? More recently, the question has been reframed as the “brain in a vat” problem, or the Simulation Argument. And it could very well be that we’re the products of an elaborate simulation. A deeper question to ask, therefore, is whether the civilization running the simulation is also in a simulation — a kind of supercomputer regression (or simulationception). Moreover, we may not be who we think we are. Assuming that the people running the simulation are also taking part in it, our true identities may be temporarily suppressed, to heighten the realness of the experience. This philosophical conundrum also forces us to re-evaluate what we mean by “real.” Modal realists argue that if the universe around us seems rational (as opposed to it being dreamy, incoherent, or lawless), then we have no choice but to declare it as being real and genuine. Or maybe, as Cipher said after eating a piece of “simulated” steak in The Matrix, “Ignorance is bliss.”

3. Do we have free will?

Also called the dilemma of determinism, we do not know if our actions are controlled by a causal chain of preceding events (or by some other external influence), or if we’re truly free agents making decisions of our own volition. Philosophers (and now some scientists) have been debating this for millennia, and with no apparent end in sight. If our decision making is influenced by an endless chain of causality, then determinism is true and we don’t have free will. But if the opposite is true, what’s called indeterminism, then our actions must be random — what some argue is still not free will. Conversely, libertarians (no, not political libertarians, those are other people), make the case for compatibilism — the idea that free will is logically compatible with deterministic views of the universe. Compounding the problem are advances in neuroscience showing that our brains make decisions before we’re even conscious of them. But if we don’t have free will, then why did we evolve consciousness instead of zombie-minds? Quantum mechanics makes this problem even more complicated by suggesting that we live in a universe of probability, and that determinism of any sort is impossible. And as Linas Vepstas has said, “Consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the perception of the passage of time, and indeed, the idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable. This fits well, because if the future were predetermined, then there’d be no free will, and no point in the participation of the passage of time.”

4. Does God exist?

Simply put, we cannot know if God exists or not. Both the atheists and believers are wrong in their proclamations, and the agnostics are right. True agnostics are simply being Cartesian about it, recognizing the epistemological issues involved and the limitations of human inquiry. We do not know enough about the inner workings of the universe to make any sort of grand claim about the nature of reality and whether or not a Prime Mover exists somewhere in the background. Many people defer to naturalism — the suggestion that the universe runs according to autonomous processes — but that doesn’t preclude the existence of a grand designer who set the whole thing in motion (what’s called deism). And as mentioned earlier, we may live in a simulation where the hacker gods control all the variables. Or perhaps the gnostics are right and powerful beings exist in some deeper reality that we’re unaware of. These aren’t necessarily the omniscient, omnipotent gods of the Abrahamic traditions — but they’re (hypothetically) powerful beings nonetheless. Again, these aren’t scientific questions per se — they’re more Platonic thought experiments that force us to confront the limits of human experience and inquiry.

5. Is there life after death?

Before everyone gets excited, this is not a suggestion that we’ll all end up strumming harps on some fluffy white cloud, or find ourselves shoveling coal in the depths of Hell for eternity. Because we cannot ask the dead if there’s anything on the other side, we’re left guessing as to what happens next. Materialists assume that there’s no life after death, but it’s just that — an assumption that cannot necessarily be proven. Looking closer at the machinations of the universe (or multiverse), whether it be through a classical Newtonian/Einsteinian lens, or through the spooky filter of quantum mechanics, there’s no reason to believe that we only have one shot at this thing called life. It’s a question of metaphysics and the possibility that the cosmos (what Carl Sagan described as “all that is or ever was or ever will be”) cycles and percolates in such a way that lives are infinitely recycled. Hans Moravec put it best when, speaking in relation to the quantum Many Worlds Interpretation, said that non-observance of the universe is impossible; we must always find ourselves alive and observing the universe in some form or another. This is highly speculative stuff, but like the God problem, is one that science cannot yet tackle, leaving it to the philosophers.

6. Can you really experience anything objectively?

There’s a difference between understanding the world objectively (or at least trying to, anyway) and experiencing it through an exclusively objective framework. This is essentially the problem of qualia — the notion that our surroundings can only be observed through the filter of our senses and the cogitations of our minds. Everything you know, everything you’ve touched, seen, and smelled, has been filtered through any number of physiological and cognitive processes. Subsequently, your subjective experience of the world is unique. In the classic example, the subjective appreciation of the color red may vary from person to person. The only way you could possibly know is if you were to somehow observe the universe from the “conscious lens” of another person in a sort of Being John Malkovich kind of way — not anything we’re likely going to be able to accomplish at any stage of our scientific or technological development. Another way of saying all this is that the universe can only be observed through a brain (or potentially a machine mind), and by virtue of that, can only be interpreted subjectively. But given that the universe appears to be coherent and (somewhat) knowable, should we continue to assume that its true objective quality can never be observed or known? It’s worth noting that much of Buddhist philosophy is predicated on this fundamental limitation (what they call emptiness), and a complete antithesis to Plato’s idealism.

7. What is the best moral system?

Essentially, we’ll never truly be able to distinguish between “right” and “wrong” actions. At any given time in history, however, philosophers, theologians, and politicians will claim to have discovered the best way to evaluate human actions and establish the most righteous code of conduct. But it’s never that easy. Life is far too messy and complicated for there to be anything like a universal morality or an absolutist ethics. The Golden Rule is great (the idea that you should treat others as you would like them to treat you), but it disregards moral autonomy and leaves no room for the imposition of justice (such as jailing criminals), and can even be used to justify oppression (Immanuel Kant was among its most staunchest critics). Moreover, it’s a highly simplified rule of thumb that doesn’t provision for more complex scenarios. For example, should the few be spared to save the many? Who has more moral worth: a human baby or a full-grown great ape? And as neuroscientists have shown, morality is not only a culturally-ingrained thing, it’s also a part of our psychologies (the Trolly Problem is the best demonstration of this). At best, we can only say that morality is normative, while acknowledging that our sense of right and wrong will change over time.

8. What are numbers?

We use numbers every day, but taking a step back, what are they, really — and why do they do such a damn good job of helping us explain the universe (such as Newtonian laws)? Mathematical structures can consist of numbers, sets, groups, and points — but are they real objects, or do they simply describe relationships that necessarily exist in all structures? Plato argued that numbers were real (it doesn’t matter that you can’t “see” them), but formalists insisted that they were merely formal systems (well-defined constructions of abstract thought based on math). This is essentially an ontological problem, where we’re left baffled about the true nature of the universe and which aspects of it are human constructs and which are truly tangible.

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Genre marketing

I recently enrolled on a writing course, Exploring Genre’, run by prolific writer, editor and teacher, Tom Bromley, at PWA. Why?

As readers of this blog may have noticed, genre is something which has been taxing my mind for some time. Genre, for me, is a doubled-edged sword. I’m a marketing professional by trade and the logic behind any good marketing campaign is the same, and always has been.

Why genre fiction equates to smart marketing

Marketers talk a lot about market segments and quantifying them. You know, roughly, who your audience is, but in order to engage successfully with them, you need to narrow it down. Normally competitive analysis and positioning helps to sort out which market is not only the best fit for you product but also the one likely to be easier to compete within. So then (as any good marketer knows) you test the theory to end up with a proof of concept. And what any marketing person worth their salt will ascertain from looking at the publishing business is that awareness of genre equates to smart marketing in the world of book sales. Ask any best-selling indie author, and they will tell you that. This blog ‘Write to Done’ hammers this point home very well.

My test-run novel, Borderliners

BorderlinersTake my novel, Borderliners, as a case study. Borderliners was released in February. About a troubled psychotherapist who must uncover what is behind a string of deaths in her village, Borderliners was a story I thought would classify as a thriller – but it isn’t really. The process of self-publishing and getting right up close to my audience showed me that hard-core thriller audiences got fed up with the more reflective elements of the book, whereas readers of YA – surprisingly – quite liked it. Since its publication, I’ve played around with the book a lot, placing it in several categories within Amazon. It got lost very quickly in ‘thriller’ but rose in ‘occult’. I tested it in ‘fiction’ (as in general, not literary), but it got lost there too, so currently it’s in ‘juvenile fiction’.

Borderliners was supposed to be my proof of concept, but I don’t think it is fit for that purpose. I made it as good as I could at the time, but in terms of writing for a specific audience, it hasn’t ticked the boxes. That’s OK though, as the marketer in me finds the Borderliners test a fascinating one. It will soon be followed by my second novel, Split Symmetry, which, as a  mixture of adventure thriller and metaphysical love story, is similarly cross-genre. Effectively, Split Symmetry is also a proof of concept experiment.

Genre as classification

pride-and-prejudiceIn some ways, it’s true that all fiction is, to an extent, cross-genre. As the writer of this Guardian article about genre fiction and classification says, Jane Austen didn’t consider herself to be writing literary fiction. I did snigger a bit at the writer’s re-classification of literary fiction in today’s terms as ‘LitSnob’ – ain’t that the truth. There’s some fantastic story telling and writing within so-called genre fiction, and yet some people feel they are letting the side down if they aren’t constantly reading prose-poetry, not realising that literary fiction is just another marketers’ classification of general fiction.

For me, the answer lies somewhere in between. I’m a big fan of CJ Lyons’ smart approach. She writes thrillers which would be considered cross-genre as they contain romantic elements. So rather than just allow her books to sink and dwindle in the nether regions of Amazon and the like, she used crossroads positioning to find her niche – ‘Thrillers with heart’.

Now, that’s what I call smart marketing. But in order to execute this kind of positioning in your chosen market, you must first know what your market reads, and why. You must know what else your market reads and find your competitive space, and you must be sure your competitive space is wide enough for you to enter – and not too crowded! Early competitive advantage is key.

So that’s me back to the drawing board. Back to school, as it were, to study genres and their audiences and hopefully afterwards, back into the field armed with knowledge which will help me execute my own killer positioning.

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Cults, religion and mystery

prophecy by J F PennI’ve always been interested in what I felt were underground themes around religions and cults. So  I had something of an epiphany moment today when I logged onto Twitter and read through my usual feeds, one of which is made up of writers and publishing professionals. One of the most useful Twitter profiles I follow is @thecreativepenn aka Joanna Penn, a successful self-published author who has now become very much the authority on all things self-publishing.

At the same time, I’ve been agonising lots about my first novel, Borderliners, and the novels which will follow it.

In Borderliners I explore themes around religious beliefs and how people in religious organisations sometimes abuse power. I also look at mental ill health, the fine line between reality and illusion and how our perception may be the only constant. Where is the truth? Who are we, really? What if time isn’t linear? I feel there’s an overlap between what we believe to be ‘supernatural’ and the more acceptable notion of ‘metaphysical’, and this is something I like to mine. It’s very difficult to pull off, and I live in a constant state of anxiety that I may offend my readers’ beliefs (something I don’t want to do), or anger them. I’m also surprised how some readers get to the heart of what I’m exploring and others just don’t get it at all. I notice polarized reactions to my work, not just the novel which is published, but my following novel which is doing its third and final round of beta-readings. Probably, the same thing will happen with my third novel.

It came as a fantastic surprise to me, then, when I realised the person I had been following for self-publishing advice, is also author of novels with (on the face of it) some similar themes to mine. This probably should have been evident, but I was so busy lapping up all the publishing posts that I didn’t notice the actual content of her novels! Doh! Soon to be rectified, I downloaded two of them straight away. In the meantime, I looked back through her interview with Jen Blood (@JenBlood),author of the Erin Solomon mysteries, another series which examines themes of cults, religions and supernatural. I also then downloaded a couple of Jen’s novels too.

Here’s an excerpt, where Joanna and Jen talk about the tricky balance an author of such books must strike between respecting beliefs and exploring the themes which surround them:

So, how do your personal beliefs weave into your books, and how do you walk the line between respect of other people’s faiths and writing?

Jen: I think that for me, it really is, I have a fairly good idea of what I believe at this point, and it’s certainly not a traditional Christian model by any means. So, for me, it really has been something where my characters, I try to think of my characters as organically as possible, so just as I’m a person who’s shaped by my experiences, they’re people – even if they’re fictional people- who are shaped by their experiences. So, for example, Diggs is a hardcore atheist, he’s just that. And Erin is an agnostic, and she’s trying to figure out exactly how her early experiences gel with where she is now.

So, I kind of feel like at this point, it really is separate. Because I do believe that religion is such a personal thing for people: I feel very strongly that people need to sort out their own spirituality, and figure out where they come from and how that informs their life, basically. So I want readers to be able to do the same thing, where they don’t feel like my beliefs are being forced on them, and Erin and Diggs at the same time have their beliefs, and there’s no judgment or forcing of their views on other people. If that makes sense!

Joanna: It is a difficult line to walk, and I struggle all the time with it, and also wanting to respect everyone’s beliefs. But of course, it’s very difficult, because everyone has different things. But you have it doubly worse, I think, because you’re in America, and my one-star reviews are generally from religious Americans! Do you get any kind of nasty emails or reviews? How does that work?

Jen: You know, I’ve been really surprised, and I think that, I have actually consistently been surprised, because I consider myself a fairly liberal kind of person: I’m liberal, I’m definitely very liberal. So I’m often surprised that people who have – not a ton, but I definitely have conservative Christians who really enjoy the books, and I’m very grateful, and I love that they find something in there, and I’m really very pleased that I’ve been able to do this to the point where my views, apparently, haven’t colored things to the point where they’re like, “Well, I’m not reading that!” But, yes, I do occasionally get feedback from people, and it’s usually language.

Joanna: It’s amazing, I think I ritually slaughtered a child and then had a sex scene in a tomb surrounded by dead bodies, and then I get an email that says, “She said the f-word”!

Jen: I know: I’m always amazed by that, and we live in a different world, apparently, because I’m always stunned that people even notice that that’s used, and from the time that I wrote the first book, I’ve really kind of, that’s one of the final things that I do when I’m editing, is I go through and I search for the number of times that I’ve used the f-word, and I limit myself to like four!

Joanna: I limit myself to one!

Jen: Oh, OK! Well, I feel like Diggs would not be happy with just one, he wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Joanna: I even found myself censoring “Damn” – damn really isn’t a swearword, but I get comments about Damn. There’s an interesting thing there: self-censorship. My last book, Desecration, was very dark, and I wrote a lot of really kind of dark things, from my dark self. I did have to come up against: Should I really write this?

The full interview can be found on Joanna Penn’s website.

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Dreams and reality

‘You ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?’

Still one of my favourite quotes from a film in recent years, and now quite iconic, this quote from The Matrix is central to what inspires me in literature.

The fictive dream

On a creative writing course I completed last year with Faber Academy, the term ‘fictive dream’ was discussed. I loved this because this is what writing is to me: dreaming. It’s also many other things, including communicating with readers in a three dimensional way, and finding solutions to questions which preoccupy me life.

Why do I say writing is communicating in 3D? Well, in the words of Milan Kundera, ‘the reader’s imagination completes the writer’s vision.’ And not in an obvious way. I love that readers take their own impressions of the content I’m writing about, their own interpretations and observations, that they see new things I’d never even imagined in what I write, but which are every bit as relevant to the text as what I’d intended. In fact, more so, as stories are meant for others to interpret in a way which is meaningful to them.

As for finding solutions, again I don’t want to be didactic. I am only interested in working through my own thoughts. Often writing a new story throws up answers to old questions. Characters I’ve created supply the answers at unexpected junctures and it amazes me that these answers are somehow coming from my own mind. Sometimes answers only come out after others have read what I’ve written and seen something I hadn’t.

The question

So what are the questions? Another of my favourite quotes from The Matrix goes like this: ‘It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did. Neo.’ This is true of novel writing, for me.

The questions which drive me are varied. The blurred line between illusion and reality is one. A big one. It comes up in Borderliners, beginning with Elena’s vision dreams, which seem to point to future events in the real world and ending with another conundrum which looks at the nature of time itself and the difference between our perception of when events happen and other possibilities therein.

The same idea follows through into my second novel (out later this year), Split Symmetry, which asks: if the possibility of alternate universes posed by quantum mechanics were true, which would be our true reality, and if everything which could happen, does happen somewhere out there, which path is the right one?

Readers, maybe you can help me complete the vision on this one?

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