Category Archives: Novel writing

November 22, 2013 · 11:14 am

Protagonist as observer

A protagonist must always have special powers, something which makes them stand out from the rest.

In the Millennium trilogy, Lisbeth Salander not only has superhuman hacking capabilities and acute intelligence, she is formidable in hand to hand combat. Gillian Flynn’s Amy, in Gone Girl, is more manipulative than most. She has some kind of personality disorder – an extremely destructive one – and the ability to wield it as a weapon.

The observer

Like the observers of Fringe, my protagonist, Elena, has the ability to see across timelines. She experiences premonitions and she experiences events from the past, both in her dreams and her waking life as she moves through the Borderliners trilogy. Of course, the reader is always free to form their own opinions of her capabilities. Some might see her as psychic. Some might see her as psychotic, someone who sees and hears things which aren’t there. Others, as merely delusional. Others still, may see her as merely human, someone who has the same capabilities as anyone else, if only we decided to pay attention to what was going on around us.

It is up to the reader to decide what is really going on.

In Fringe, the observers are definitely not of this world. They look and behave strangely. They know of their purpose in life and accept it. They are neither good nor evil.

Elena, on the other hand, must decide. As she moves through life and the strangeness of events surrounding her catch up, what will she make of this? Will she move her consciousness up a level? Or will she descend into a pit of delusion?

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November 19, 2013 · 12:08 pm

Quantum tectonic event

Split SymmetryWhat if a quantum tectonic event split our reality?

So that different versions of ourselves appeared from an alternate universe, to show us what our lives could have been had we made different choices, or what we might become, should we change our behaviour right now?

As Werner Heisenberg said,

‘Atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.’

What if our lives were made up of infinite possibilities, all of which were happening simultaneously, until the observer – you – decided to pin one down? One choice, one life.

Look out for Split Symmetry*, which explores all of these questions – and more – against the exciting backdrop of a mysterious Italian mountain range, a group of friends who become embroiled in the worst earthquake the region has known and a quantum event, which changes their lives for ever. The question is, does it only alter the world for them?

*out late next year or in early 2015

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November 4, 2013 · 1:07 pm

Charismatic leaders

One theme which interests me in literature is the power of the charismatic leader. Scratch the surface, and often you find an extremely powerful and dangerous individual who has a potent and toxic influence on those around them. How does a person become so charming within their chosen social circles or community that eventually they become revered, a status which gives them licence to commit all kinds of wrongdoing on the unsuspecting people around them?

Among the ‘villains’ listed in the Telegraph article, the 50 greatest villains in literature, my favourites are:

  • The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis
  • Voldemort from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
  • Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare
  • O’Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
  • Fred from The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

My book, Borderliners, looks at the influence a charismatic leader has on her community, and how she succeeds in hoodwinking large numbers of people – with disastrous consequences.

Psychological traits of cult leaders

In his article about cult leaders, Joe Navarro, a former FBI Counterintelligence Agent, says the following:

They demanded perfect loyalty from followers, they overvalued themselves and devalued those around them, they were intolerant of criticism, and above all they did not like being questioned or challenged. And yet, in spite of these less than charming traits, they had no trouble attracting those who were willing to overlook these features.

Often, those who decide to ‘follow’ such people can suffer a range of psychological ill effects, including mental breakdown, and the idea of a vulnerable person who treads a precarious borderline between reality and illusion, health and mental breakdown is central to my novel.

Charisma

Max Weber, a German sociologist and philosopher best known for best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, defined charismatic authority as:

The external or internal rule over man made possible by the faith of the ruled in this supernatural power of the leader.

Such leaders tend to be:
These characteristics are:
1) Self-confidence and self assurance
2) Need for power and low authoritarianism
3) Expert power
4) Referent power
5) Communications and rhetorical skills
6) Assertive, dynamic, outgoing, and forceful

I’m particularly interested in the article’s statement that they often arise because of ‘cultural unrest’ which leads to a situation in which followers think of the charismatic leaders ‘as “prophets” or “saints”’ who will provide them with a route to salvation.

This would certainly be true of my very own villain, and she is hopefully not somebody I will ever come across in a dark alleyway.

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October 30, 2013 · 4:27 pm

My top five thrillers and spooky novels

Borderliners, the first novel in my trilogy, is a psychological thriller set in the autumn of several different timelines.

As I prepare this novel for publication at the end of 2013, some of the key themes of the story are uppermost in my mind: dreams and reality, the mysterious nature of time, ambiguity of human relationships and the destructive nature of isolation and the vulnerability it brings to its subjects.

Inspiration for some of my themes comes from my love of thrillers and some of my favourites are listed here:

  1. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  2. Dark Places, Gillian Flynn
  3. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  4. Blackwater, Kerstin Eckmann
  5. The Landscape of Love, Sally Beauman

For me, Gillian Flynn is the current queen of the plot-driven suspense thriller, but almost nothing beats the way I felt when I first read Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ over a decade ago. I was a student at the time and spent several days and nights immersed in the story. Kerstin Eckmann’s Blackwater is one of a longer list of nordic thrillers I’m very fond of, but the one which stands the test of time in my memory. The Landscape of Love is a peculiar novel, which I found both disturbing and compulsive at the same time. The use of changing points of view from the reliable to the unreliable narrators was one which I loved and has followed through to my own work. Finally, The Master and Margarita contains a masterpiece of a scene where Margarita, the Master’s mistress, is invited to a ‘Walpurgis Night ball’ , an event associated with the occult and the supernatural.

Happy reading!

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October 22, 2013 · 6:14 pm

Dirty drafting

my writing deskAre you a ‘dirty drafter’ or a detailed planner?

I’ve decided I’m the former even though I would dearly love to be the latter. Given the plot driven nature of my stories, I really should be a planner, but I kind of wing it a bit.

Why? Well, the answer is simple. I love the feeling that the manuscript is becoming something more than you planned. It’s almost like giving birth, albeit a lot less painful (physically, at least). You imagine what you might be making/have made, but it ends up an entity of its own. When characters become that little bit darker than you wanted, or you wake up in the middle of the night and realise they have to do something completely unexpected. That’s the feeling I’m after.

#Nanowrimo

So as the countdown to National Novel Writing Month begins – now T-9 to lift off (or write off) – I’m reminded of why I like to bash down as many words as possible in the first instance. Just as the author of this article about drafting suggests, the more you write, the more you want to find out what happens next.

Compass

Of course, I’ll never go back to the dark days of no planning whatsoever. I’ve learned over the course of the last three years and two manuscripts, that you need a compass. Stephen King calls it his ‘what if?’ question, which is, as I understand it, a kind of ‘mashup’ of two or three ideas or events which make an entirely new entity you can use to kick off your novel concept. Faber Academy and other creative writing courses like to you get an elevator pitch down before you start – theory goes, if you can’t get the basic concept into one of these 25 word pitches, it won’t fly. This is probably true, by the way. But great long reams of planning charts and characterisation cards? No, this is not for me.

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