PJ Shann's Posts - CrimeSpace2024-03-28T20:26:40ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShannhttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/60998470?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://crimespace.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=1o93rql5zqmz1&xn_auth=noACHIEVING PERFECT PEACEtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-07-08:537324:BlogPost:3935742014-07-08T07:50:27.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>PERFECT PEACE is the second novel of my PERFECT WORLDS series, and it’s also my longest novel to date, logging in at around 156,000 words. Not only that, it’s the single seed that the whole projected series grew from.</p>
<p>It began as a simple idea that kept surfacing in my mind, usually as I was dropping off to sleep at night. I honestly don’t know where it came from – I like to think that it was a message from the ether, from the place where all true and good creative thoughts emerge. …</p>
<p>PERFECT PEACE is the second novel of my PERFECT WORLDS series, and it’s also my longest novel to date, logging in at around 156,000 words. Not only that, it’s the single seed that the whole projected series grew from.</p>
<p>It began as a simple idea that kept surfacing in my mind, usually as I was dropping off to sleep at night. I honestly don’t know where it came from – I like to think that it was a message from the ether, from the place where all true and good creative thoughts emerge. Or maybe it was the result of late-night cheese’n’crackers, or even a piece of undercooked potato. As Dickens has a sceptical Scrooge say of one of his ghostly visitors, “there’s more of <i>gravy</i> than of grave in you...”</p>
<p>But I digress...</p>
<p>In my mind’s eye, I saw a young woman attending a funeral, crying even though she hadn’t known the dead man at all, and in fact hadn’t known that he’d even existed until after he was dead. I was curious about this situation, about what it meant, about who this young woman was, and how she came to be at the funeral of a man she didn’t know, and all the more curious simply because the idea was so persistent, because it wouldn’t leave me alone... it felt like the idea <i>wanted</i> me to follow it, and so eventually, I did.</p>
<p>I took the first conscious, tentative step on what would eventually prove to be a long, fascinating journey of discovery by mentally adding a hymn in the background as the young woman dried her strange, unearned tears, and was instantly rewarded with a find which convinced me I was on to something special, something that was meant to be. In researching hymns that might be sung at a funeral, I unearthed one from the 19<sup>th</sup> Century called <i>Perfect Peace</i>, and right there was the title for my previously unnamed new project – and not only that, the lyrics of the hymn gave me a couple of beautiful epigrams to bookend my story.</p>
<p><i>“Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin”</i>, to start, and <i>“</i><i>It is enough: earth’s struggles soon shall cease, and Jesus call us to heaven’s perfect peace”</i> at the end<i>.</i> For a novel encapsulating the kind of darkness I had in mind, these quotations couldn’t have been more apt if I had written them myself. But there they had been, floating around in the electronic ether, just waiting for the moment when I needed them.</p>
<p>Synchronicity - you’ve got to love it.</p>
<p>As the novel began to develop, I found that the small seed that had once planted itself in my mind was a fast and prodigious grower – a literary Leylandii. So many characters with so many aspects of their lives pertinent to the underlying plot, all of them budding into leaf and flower before my astonished eyes like time-lapse photography in a nature documentary, and all their back-stories like a gigantic root system just as complex as the above-ground growth, but largely hidden until I started to dig, dig, dig. And dig, dig, dig I did. I couldn’t resist. I had to know.</p>
<p><i>Couldn’t resist. Had to know.</i></p>
<p>I seemed to me that this was a winning combination for a work of fiction, and now that it’s completed and out there in the public domain for anyone to buy and read, I still think so. It’s a long story, with a large cast of fully-realised characters, but once you’re fully immersed in the story, it’s difficult to leave. And if it’s a couple of shades darker in a few places than even I imagined at the beginning, I can honestly say that it isn’t my fault.</p>
<p>It’s the ether’s fault. That damned ether...</p>PERFECT DAYtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-07-08:537324:BlogPost:3937702014-07-08T07:49:20.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>As occasional readers of this blog or visitors to my website may know, I am currently involved in the on-going process of writing a series of full-length crime/mystery/suspense novels gathered together under the umbrella title of PERFECT WORLDS. I have two titles already completed and e-published, a third underway, and a fourth still in the planning stage, but today I think I’d like to talk about the first in the series, PERFECT DAY.</p>
<p>The whole PERFECT WORLDS project began when I…</p>
<p>As occasional readers of this blog or visitors to my website may know, I am currently involved in the on-going process of writing a series of full-length crime/mystery/suspense novels gathered together under the umbrella title of PERFECT WORLDS. I have two titles already completed and e-published, a third underway, and a fourth still in the planning stage, but today I think I’d like to talk about the first in the series, PERFECT DAY.</p>
<p>The whole PERFECT WORLDS project began when I started to play around with the notion of a series of crime novels linked by the inclusion of the word ‘PERFECT’ in the title, but not necessarily connected by anything else. This idea – simple though it was – seemed to promise an extra amount of creative freedom and a lack of staleness while still having the attraction of producing a linked body of work. It meant that the stories I wanted to tell didn’t have to share the same characters, the same locations or the same situations like other series (although they could and, as it now seems, some of them eventually will), but they would certainly share all the qualities I hoped to make a major hallmark of the series – which included a convincing atmosphere of dark reality, strong, believable real-world characters interacting in a recognisable universe, and a commitment to consistently good writing.</p>
<p>PERFECT DAY actually began life as a manuscript that was initially called JOYRIDE before it became engulfed by the PERFECT WORLDS idea, but I think it only really fully came to life with the new title and the new thematic direction. I knew from the very start, however, that I wanted to write a story about a woman, Joan Crosby, who thought she had managed to survive the very worst that life could throw at her, only to realise, to her disbelief and horror, that she’d had no idea just how bad things could really get, or the depth of the intrigue with which she had been surrounded for far longer than she could ever have imagined.</p>
<p>I wanted to explore the effect of undue, almost unbearable pressure upon the relationships in Joan’s life - upon her relationship with her husband, with her sister, with her friends, and also upon her relationship with herself, upon her sanity, and upon her perception of the fundamental beliefs of her life. I wanted to explore the nature of love and lust and greed and deceit and betrayal, to examine both the baser and the finer natures of the human condition and the strength of the survival instinct, and I wanted to do it all in the format of genre fiction.</p>
<p>Piece of cake, right?</p>
<p>Well, did I succeed in all of these ridiculously lofty aims? Almost certainly not, but I tried, and even if I did crash and burn a little, I still think aiming high is a good thing, and I still believe I managed to craft an interesting and compelling story out of the colourful wreckage.</p>I MADE A MONSTER!tag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-04-06:537324:BlogPost:3883222014-04-06T07:59:48.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>If you happen to have visited this blog before, you may be aware that I write three kinds of fiction – dark crime (<i>Perfect Day</i> and <i>Perfect Peace</i> and the <i>Crime-Mystery-Suspense Short Story Collection</i>), light crime (<i>The Queen of Hearts</i>), and horror (<i>Comeback</i> and the <i>Horror Short Story Collection</i>). In my writer’s mind all these genres are one and the same. To me it’s all the same world, only slightly different aspects of it and viewed from a slightly…</p>
<p>If you happen to have visited this blog before, you may be aware that I write three kinds of fiction – dark crime (<i>Perfect Day</i> and <i>Perfect Peace</i> and the <i>Crime-Mystery-Suspense Short Story Collection</i>), light crime (<i>The Queen of Hearts</i>), and horror (<i>Comeback</i> and the <i>Horror Short Story Collection</i>). In my writer’s mind all these genres are one and the same. To me it’s all the same world, only slightly different aspects of it and viewed from a slightly different point-of-view.</p>
<p>But recently I have been made aware that readers may not altogether share my opinion on this matter, that from a readers POV it may be better – commercially and in other ways – to be known for one genre only, at least until I become successful enough for it not to matter (which won’t be anytime soon, unfortunately).</p>
<p>Now, although I’m not entirely convinced that readers are so easily confused by such things, I decided that it might be worth trying the experiment. To be honest, it sounded like it might be fun. Now I know better. I meddled in things that man must leave alone, and I got a boot in my arse for my troubles.</p>
<p>After much deliberation, I decided to keep my crime fiction under my real name, and to pass the horror baton into the grubby, slimy hand of a creature entirely of my own creation. I busily cobbled together a new name and character from the materials I had to hand, taking them from my own life and family, I made new covers for the two horror books published so far and I slapped his name on them, and then I set him up with his own blog, his own author’s page on Amazon, and his own email address... Thus I breathed life into the child of my mind, a veritable literary Prometheus.</p>
<p>His name is Jim Mullaney. I ushered him into the world, saw his eyes open for the first time on this brave new world, heard his initial formless cries, guided him with a kind paternal hand to his first stumbling steps... and then guess what?</p>
<p>That’s right, the son of a bitch turned on me.</p>
<p>He used the bio section of his very first blog to have a pop at me – me, who had given him life! Actually tearing me a new one over my decision to keep my own name attached to crime instead of to horror, and accusing me of not wanting to get my hands dirty with the bloody business of the genre. Telling his readers that they could forget about “that other guy”, as if I was nothing at all to him.</p>
<p>I have to admit, I was completely sucker-punched by this attack, and, as the possibility of trapping him in a burning windmill doesn’t seem to be a realistic option, I still haven’t been able to come up with any suitable kind of response. Hence this post. How do I deal with this problem? How do I deal with this ungrateful child, this monster of my own making?</p>
<p>If you’d like to read the creature’s unkind comments on his unfortunate father, visit:</p>
<p><a href="http://jimmullaneyhorror.wordpress.com/">http://jimmullaneyhorror.wordpress.com/</a></p>
<p>I am open to advice on this matter.</p>
<p>Wait.... I have an idea. I think I may begin writing a series of romance stories, and then attribute them to a female pseudonym. Yes, that’s it. I think I’ll give my monster a bride, a little bit of the old trouble and strife, and <i>then</i> we’ll see what the ungrateful bastard is really made of.</p>THE TROUBLE WITH SCRIBBLEStag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-02-23:537324:BlogPost:3872012014-02-23T19:43:07.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some people out there, writers among them, who don’t believe a condition like writer’s block really exists. They think it’s a myth, a grandiose theory perpetuated by the lazy, the liars, and the plain bone-idle, and by those airy-fairy arty-farty types - the dilettante - who like the idea of writing and love the idea of being <i>known</i> as a writer, but in reality just don’t have the stomach for the genuinely hard work of conceiving, writing and…</p>
<p>I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some people out there, writers among them, who don’t believe a condition like writer’s block really exists. They think it’s a myth, a grandiose theory perpetuated by the lazy, the liars, and the plain bone-idle, and by those airy-fairy arty-farty types - the dilettante - who like the idea of writing and love the idea of being <i>known</i> as a writer, but in reality just don’t have the stomach for the genuinely hard work of conceiving, writing and finishing a sustained work of fiction. And sometimes, of course, it actually <i>is</i> that – God knows there are vast legions of wannabe-neverbe writers out there.</p>
<p>But maybe a little like IBS, RSI, SAD, or Clinical Depression, it’s just one of those things that some people will never completely believe in until they have first-hand experience of it.</p>
<p>One thing to remember, though – <i>stuck</i> isn’t <i>blocked</i>. <i>Stuck</i> is not knowing where to go next. <i>Stuck</i> is knowing where to go but not which route to take to get there. <i>Stuck</i> is just <i>stuck</i>, and there are lots of practical ways of getting around any obstacle or out of any kind of irritating rut you may have fallen into. <i>Blocked</i> isn’t being <i>stuck</i>. <i>Blocked</i> is being FUBAR.</p>
<p>Everyone who <i>has</i> suffered an attack by the peculiar and unpleasant beast that is writer’s block knows all too well how real it feels when it has its teeth in you, and how badly it can poison your life. How that terrible feeling of inertia and stagnation and hopelessness chips away at other, perhaps happier aspects of your world, and slowly begins to sour and devalue them. And how all the while you have that awful sense of time and opportunity passing you by, and the added indignity of having your discipline and your hard-earned practise of the craft being steadily eroded and weakened. Your wheels are spinning but you’re going nowhere. You’re trapped and shackled, imprisoned in an airless, lifeless bubble, a deadly grey vacuum, sapping all your creative energy and keeping you from the occupation you love and which you feel defines you as a person.</p>
<p>In all honesty, and from the heart, it really sucks.</p>
<p>Personally speaking, my own great trial with writer’s block lasted eight solid months, during which I was unable to write as much as a worthwhile sentence. In the grand scheme of things, eight months may be no more than the blink of an eye, but I can assure you that at the time those months seemed like <i>years</i>. This dreadful mental impotence initially coincided – not entirely coincidentally, I suppose – with my last (and thankfully successful) attempt to stop smoking cigarettes. It shouldn’t be too surprising that these two factors should be linked. When it comes to writing and writers, absolutely <i>everything</i> is linked.</p>
<p>Of course, there are many, many reasons why a writer may become blocked - lots of them far more serious than mere nicotine withdrawal – and far too many to list in total. The imagination of the human mind, after all, is infinite, and therefore the ways it can become hampered and compromised are also infinite. Nevertheless, some of the more common contributing and underlying factors are a list of what we might call the usual suspects: Lack of time. Lack of success. Lack of appreciation. Lack of encouragement. Lack of confidence. Naturally, all of them are linked one to the other, like lethal daisy-chains.</p>
<p>The standard pragmatic advice dished out to sufferers of writer’s block is generally of the ‘tough love’ school of thought, which is no bad thing - <i>get back on the horse, writers write, just do it</i>, etc., which are all valid comments – if a writer is only stuck. But sometimes, if it’s genuine writer’s block, then that’s like telling someone not to be sad when they’re completely heartbroken, or not to worry when they’re worried out of their mind over something entirely out of their control.</p>
<p>Sometimes <i>time</i> is the only cure.</p>
<p>Like trying to give up smoking, no amount of good intentions or nicotine gums or herbal supplements or pastoral support will get you off and <i>keep</i> you off the little cancer sticks – only the power of your own mind will do that. That little switch someplace deep inside that suddenly clicks and you know, finally, you’re done. Writers have another little switch, and it’s down to the individual to find and maintain it.</p>ONE SIDE OF EVERYTHINGtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-02-15:537324:BlogPost:3869722014-02-15T10:10:15.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>One side of everything is what I like to call first-person singular. So, not ‘Tom, Dick, or Harry did this, that, or the other,’ but ‘<i>I</i> did this, <i>I</i> did that, <i>I</i> did. <i>Me</i>.’ One side of everything is exactly what a writer shows to a reader when they write in the first-person, and while this approach may, at first glance, seem to offer a very narrow and limited range of creative options, in many circumstances what could be viewed as a handicap can actually be an…</p>
<p>One side of everything is what I like to call first-person singular. So, not ‘Tom, Dick, or Harry did this, that, or the other,’ but ‘<i>I</i> did this, <i>I</i> did that, <i>I</i> did. <i>Me</i>.’ One side of everything is exactly what a writer shows to a reader when they write in the first-person, and while this approach may, at first glance, seem to offer a very narrow and limited range of creative options, in many circumstances what could be viewed as a handicap can actually be an enormous advantage.</p>
<p>For a start, telling a story in the first-person gives a writer licence to really go to town on characterisation. It gives a writer the opportunity to <i>be</i> the characters in their own novels and short stories in a very intimate, visceral sense, to get inside their characters’ heads and to wear their skins, and to give vivid expression to their deepest fears and highest pleasures. It allows a writer to <i>reveal</i> all the shades and hues of character by presenting aspects of the world refracted through the prism of their characters’ individual personalities, and not through the hopefully omnipotent pronouncements of a very minor deity - the writer who is forever standing back, well out of the stream of action, watching, not experiencing, not tasting, not feeling, not hurting...not <i>whatever</i>ing.</p>
<p>In my opinion, first-person singular is especially effective in the crime, mystery, suspense, and horror genres, allowing the writer the luxury of telling their story entirely from the POV of their main character, whether they’re a cop, a PI, a vampire or other entity, or an intended victim. This is a great tactic in terms of generating and maintaining the atmosphere of mystery and suspense in a story, because each new twist and turn, each fresh shock and scare, each startling new development and discovery can be fully shared between character and reader, just as it was between character and writer. When this works just right, it’s like there’s a direct connection between writer and reader, even though they’re separated by time and space, all of it channelled through the medium of the character, all three sharing the same identical experience.</p>
<p>And of course, writers don’t have to restrict themselves to only one first-person narrative per story. The more the merrier, if the story demands it, as it might well if multiple viewpoints are necessary to get to the truth. To tell the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story.</p>
<p>For example, imagine relating the account of a famous, elaborate, and dangerous magic trick, with the first-person narratives of the illusionist and the narrative of a member of his audience running in tandem – the narratives will be very different, but they will both be the truth, or aspects of the truth, as the characters see it. One will focus on the glamour, the danger, and the mystery of the illusion, while the other will concentrate on the mundane realities behind the business and showmanship, and the reader gets to experience both and blend them together into a satisfyingly complete whole.</p>
<p>And sometimes one first-person POV simply isn’t enough.</p>
<p>In the story of a broken marriage, there would have to be at least two, wouldn’t there? (And don’t forget the family dog’s first-canine narrative, because he’s the one the estranged couple are <i>really</i> fighting over, not the kids.) Or how about a big time con-trick, or an armed robbery, or a natural disaster, or a court case.... Imagine all those first-person narratives, all those character-shaped individual perceptions of the same basic story, offering writer and reader alike with a complete holographic picture of the full story. The full <i>truth</i>.</p>
<p>Unless one or more of these first-person narrators are pathological liars, that is...</p>
<p>But that’s a different, and possibly more interesting, story.</p>ARE YOU SPEAKING THROUGH ME?tag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-02-06:537324:BlogPost:3866982014-02-06T22:18:11.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>In theory, writing dialogue should be one of the easiest things in the world. It should be like breathing, blinking, and breaking wind – real-world talents that every one of us shares (although some of us are far better at the latter than others). After all, we mostly all talk a great deal, and we mostly all hear others talking (sometimes far more than we might want to), in our day to day lives, at work, and on TV, so we can’t really claim that it’s something of a major challenge to simply…</p>
<p>In theory, writing dialogue should be one of the easiest things in the world. It should be like breathing, blinking, and breaking wind – real-world talents that every one of us shares (although some of us are far better at the latter than others). After all, we mostly all talk a great deal, and we mostly all hear others talking (sometimes far more than we might want to), in our day to day lives, at work, and on TV, so we can’t really claim that it’s something of a major challenge to simply write those words down. Can we?</p>
<p>Well, as it happens, yes we can.</p>
<p>How many times have you read a novel and later said of it something like, ‘What a great story/concept/visualisation/atmosphere/twist-in-the-tail – but the <i>dialogue</i> just stank to high heaven...’? I know I have, although to be honest ‘high heaven’ may not have been the exact expression I used. In fact, there have been occasions when I’ve put a book aside, never to be touched again, simply because the dialogue was so shockingly poor that every turn of phrase was like dragging my nails down a blackboard or having blocks of polystyrene being rubbed together under my nose.</p>
<p>The awful truth is that some writers simply don’t have an ear for dialogue, and their characters all end up ‘sounding’ to a reader’s mental ear like poor actors plodding their way through the lacklustre script for a cheap film. How can you believe in a character, trust him or her, empathise with their pain, share their sense of peril, or joy, or loss, if you wince every time they open their mouth? In this sense, bad dialogue is just like any other anomaly in a work of fiction – it pulls the rug from under your readers’ feet and the wool from over their eyes, and it dumps them out of the story faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And that’s Game Over, Jack.</p>
<p>The generally received wisdom for writing dialogue is that it should be written the way real people speak, but that idea doesn’t really work 100%, otherwise every book would be filled with page after page where small, isolated islands of information and lucidity would be surrounded by a vast ocean of <i>um</i>s and <i>err</i>s, sighs, and <i>hmmm</i>s, wait-a-minutes, throat-clearing grunts and coughs, false starts, backtrackings, and endless habitual repetitions...you know, like, yeah, like, you know? Boring and dull. But at the other end of the scale, sectioning off a few sentences of staid, functional narrative, enclosing it in speech marks and daring to call the result dialogue, is probably a lot worse.</p>
<p>The best course of action, I believe, is to follow one fairly simple rule, and that rule is to <i>know</i> your characters before you start channelling though them.</p>
<p>If you know your characters the way you should, you’ll begin to hear their voices in your head when they have something to say. You’ll know their backgrounds, their upbringing, and their accents, and how those accents affect the rhythm of their speech, and you’ll know their private, professional, and intimate vocabularies, their sense of timing and their life-references, their tastes in emphasis, and the terms in which they are likely to express their humour, anger, or despair – and, sometimes far more importantly, you’ll know all the things they <i>wouldn’t</i> say, either through personal choice or a plain lack of knowledge or experience.</p>
<p>As far as I’m concerned, if a writer sticks to that one rule, they can’t go far wrong with dialogue. They’ll never make a boy sound like a man or a woman sound like a girl, unless that’s the specific intention. They won’t have doctors talking like barflies or manual labourers quoting the philosophers, unless it’s a facet of character that has some special relevance to the story being told. Characters won’t stand around in bunches talking like a convention of pronunciation-impaired SatNavs. Characters won’t say ‘haemoglobin’ when they mean ‘blood’, or say, ‘Sir, I do not believe that you, in fact, understand the subject we are in the middle of discussing in the slightest!’, instead of, say, ‘Clearly, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Jack.’</p>
<p>In conclusion, dialogue <i>should</i> be simple to write. Just cut the crap, keep the meat and the colour, and say what your characters really mean.</p>THE PERFECT SETTING?tag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-30:537324:BlogPost:3863782014-01-30T19:05:16.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>Okay, so the moment has arrived – it’s finally time to begin your incredible new project. The idea for this masterwork, previously a tiny, dry seed sleeping in your mind, has suddenly begun to sprout. Urgent stems have thrust their way into the sunlight and reached for the sky, buds have formed, leaves have unfurled, roots and tendrils have surged in all directions at once, and the whole thing is growing at a geometric rate. New characters are introducing themselves to you on a regular…</p>
<p>Okay, so the moment has arrived – it’s finally time to begin your incredible new project. The idea for this masterwork, previously a tiny, dry seed sleeping in your mind, has suddenly begun to sprout. Urgent stems have thrust their way into the sunlight and reached for the sky, buds have formed, leaves have unfurled, roots and tendrils have surged in all directions at once, and the whole thing is growing at a geometric rate. New characters are introducing themselves to you on a regular basis, intriguing plot twists are occurring to you at odd moments of the day, and you’re murmuring stray lines of dialogue to yourself as you fall asleep at night. Creatively speaking, the green light is definitely on, and all in all, you couldn’t be happier.</p>
<p>But there’s a potential problem on the horizon – where do you set the damn thing?</p>
<p>Unless you exclusively write a series in which a small number of central characters prowl around within the same limited setting, one with which you’re intimately familiar or culturally linked (like Rankin and Edinburgh, for example), or unless the story is uniquely linked with a particular global location – a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, or a plot to destroy Radio City Music Hall – then this is something you may have to consider quite carefully.</p>
<p>Do you set it where you actually live, or in a fictional place that strongly resembles the place where you live? Well, you <i>could</i> - at least then you’d be sure to have a convincing grasp of the geographic and environmental background to the story, and be able to paint a convincing picture of the local landmarks and nail the local accents, et al. On the other hand, if you live in a small village and your story is specifically concerned with the illicit sexual shenanigans or illegal practises behind the bland public face of a small village, I wouldn’t recommend it. People who know you, and know you write, already assume (falsely, of course) that anything you produce is only a thinly disguised version of your own depraved life, or else a jealous attack on theirs, so you don’t need to feed their suspicions and paranoia any more than you already have.</p>
<p>Okay, then how about you set your story in a city far, far away? Good idea. But <i>which</i> city? London, Paris, Rome, New York, Boston, Delhi, Peking, Adelaide?</p>
<p>Do you know any of these places well enough to get under the skin of the characters which inhabit them? Have you lived there, or even visited long enough to understand how the infrastructure of the place works, or how its particular racial dynamic might shape or otherwise affect your story? Or do you take the Rough Guide approach to research and get all your detail and colour from the internet and other writer’s novels - and run the risk of making foolish mistakes, a literary tourist with your camera around your neck and your mouth hanging open? So dangerous, so very easy to make a calamitous error. Think of all those Hollywood movies with sequences filmed in London, where the hero runs out of Regent’s Park and straight into Trafalgar Square.</p>
<p>Or, or, or...</p>
<p>Do you simply take the next step along the fictional trail? Your characters are fictional, your storylines are fictional, so why not your settings too? I dare say there’s not many Sci-Fi writers with timeshares in the Crab Nebula, but plenty will have set up home there over the years. Lots of writers have their own fictional lands, cities, and towns. Tolkien had Middle-Earth. Ruth Rendell has Kingsmarkham. Stephen Kind has Castle Rock (and others), and so many other writers besides. Even I have one.</p>
<p>At first glance this seems like the easiest option, allowing the writer complete creative freedom, and the power of a town planner suddenly gifted God-like abilities. And it’s fun playing with the almost infinite options, like a purely literary Sim City. But there’s a downside to this power, too. A purely <i>fictional</i> downside, true, although one creepy enough to have suggested the idea for this blog.</p>
<p>Actually, I lied earlier - it’s not <i>me</i> who has a fictional town, it’s the writer who’s the main character in my horror novel, COMEBACK. The writer’s city is called Eldritch, a dark, horrific plague-pit of a town, and during the course of the novel, he actually gets to visit it, which is when he is able to see at first hand all the terrible mistakes it’s possible to make when you start playing God. Imagine all those tiny mistakes, omissions, liberties taken under the banner of poetic licence, and the all-too convenient literary shortcuts suddenly made flesh and blood. Without the imagination of the readers to plug the gaps and fabricate the background detail, the only things which exist are those things the writer put into words, and nothing more. Nothing at all. Imagine the consequences and repercussions...</p>
<p>No spoilers to those of you who might want to read the novel at some point, but there is one moment I’d like to share, because it gave me a real chill when I re-read it myself just recently while preparing for publication.</p>
<p>At one point my writer is being driven across his city, and the car passes a junior school he created purely for one paragraph-long scene in one of his novels, where a helicopter passed overhead and all the children in the playground far below waved up at it.</p>
<p>A quick, throwaway detail, right? Just a bit of colour. That’s what my writer thought, too.</p>
<p>But looking out of the car window, the writer realises that the children are <i>still</i> there, years later, imprisoned behind the school fence, locked out from the shelter the school might have offered, because that’s where he left them. He further realises that because he described their faces from the helicopter pilot’s POV as featureless ovals, that’s exactly what his creations have – featureless faces, no eyes, noses, mouths or ears. They’re blind, deaf, mute, trapped forever, but still waving, waving forever more – all because his fictional world was imperfectly realised.</p>
<p><i>Brrrr</i>...</p>
<p>Could you live in one of your own novels? After that, I’m not sure <i>I</i> could.</p>DON’T LOSE THE SUB-PLOTtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-25:537324:BlogPost:3861962014-01-25T08:40:36.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>There are a lot of people who view all sub-plots with the gravest suspicion, regarding them at best as a pointless distraction from the main business at hand, and, at worst, as a dangerously amateurish self-indulgence<i>. Kill your darlings</i>, they screech like dogma-drilled harpies, <i>kill, kill, kill them all!</i> Needless to say, I disagree.</p>
<p>In a general sense, I’m all in favour of sub-plots. In fact, I delight in them. They offer so many exciting possibilities to writers of…</p>
<p>There are a lot of people who view all sub-plots with the gravest suspicion, regarding them at best as a pointless distraction from the main business at hand, and, at worst, as a dangerously amateurish self-indulgence<i>. Kill your darlings</i>, they screech like dogma-drilled harpies, <i>kill, kill, kill them all!</i> Needless to say, I disagree.</p>
<p>In a general sense, I’m all in favour of sub-plots. In fact, I delight in them. They offer so many exciting possibilities to writers of fiction, open up so many interesting roads of expression, and gift us so many new dramatic opportunities - and, as an added bonus, a lot of these opportunities crop up entirely unexpectedly. That’s a big part of their charm.</p>
<p>As your novel progresses and your fictional world grows larger and ever more complex, these highways and byways jump out at you like road-signs on a foggy day. Some days you immediately know that taking a little detour would not only be interesting, but might even be necessary for your story’s health and vitality. Sometimes you want to know where the road goes just for the sake of it, maybe simply because it’s got an interesting name, and that’s a good enough reason to go exploring. If things happen to go wrong, there’s nothing to worry about. You have a full tank of gas. Turn back, try a different route.</p>
<p>Done just right, sub-plots illuminate and beautify your novel’s darker, more desolate regions, rescuing them from the threat of torpor and the dangers of ennui, and bring a whole new range of colour to a fictional landscape that you might have believed you already knew like the back of your hand. Being proved wrong like this can be a real, genuine pleasure. In a way, writing fiction is just like any other craft or skill, or, in fact, like any other aspect of life – the more you learn, the more you understand how much <i>more</i> there is to learn; the more you know, the more you understand how <i>little</i> you really know.</p>
<p>Uncertainty of this kind is <i>good</i>, because it’s the opposite of complacency and blind, inflexible dogma. Confronting the new and the unknown head-on and exploring the possibilities, however diverse or disturbing, is <i>good</i>, because it’s the very opposite of stagnation and denial. That’s why life is an adventure, and not a predictable theme park ride, endlessly circling the rails and eliciting the same old screams in the same old pattern. Life keeps you on your toes, and so should both writing and reading fiction, because the best fiction doesn’t only entertain and distract, it reflects our lives, sometimes from angles we may never have considered before.</p>
<p>The very best sub-plots mostly run more or less parallel to the main plot, and either mirror, contrast, or even subvert your novel’s primary theme, allowing your reader to enjoy the story from a variety of different viewpoints, and inviting them to immerse themselves ever deeper in their willed suspension of disbelief. Once you have them in that almost hypnotic state of suggestion, you can really begin to put them through the wringer. You can make them laugh, you can make them cry; you can make them shudder, cringe, and moan.</p>
<p>Seduced by a story broadened and enriched by subplots, all aping the texture of the real world, they’re putty in your hands. And they love it. You love it, too, because if you’re a writer, you’re also a reader.</p>NOMENCLATURE’S A BITCH AND THEN YOU DIEtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-25:537324:BlogPost:3860192014-01-25T08:39:18.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>One of the many smaller pleasures of writing fiction is the fun to be derived from choosing the names of your characters. There’s a lot of joy in nailing down the perfect name for your maverick cop/cerebral private detective/vampire overlord/super-soldier from Planet Zap, and just as much amusement in bestowing the names of people you dislike upon the seedy/degenerate/evil characters currently paddling around in the shallow end of your WIP’s gene pool. But the truth is that the more you…</p>
<p>One of the many smaller pleasures of writing fiction is the fun to be derived from choosing the names of your characters. There’s a lot of joy in nailing down the perfect name for your maverick cop/cerebral private detective/vampire overlord/super-soldier from Planet Zap, and just as much amusement in bestowing the names of people you dislike upon the seedy/degenerate/evil characters currently paddling around in the shallow end of your WIP’s gene pool. But the truth is that the more you write, the more characters you bring into the world, the more difficult it is to satisfactorily name them.</p>
<p>You could use <i>any</i> name at all, of course, but it’s always better to find the right one, isn’t it? In the first place, a character without an appropriate name is a character without a face, and in the second, it’s difficult to write clearly or well without the handy peg of a name to hang your narrative on − all that ‘he/she/him/her’ business can get confusing for a reader, especially if there’s a few characters involved and a lot of action.</p>
<p>So sometimes, while waiting for inspiration, you just have to plough on through with a handy working alternative in order for the book to move on, and for those moments when the names don’t come easily, I have developed several strategies that have served me well over the years.</p>
<p>I have, for example, written stories where the members of criminal gangs have been named by letters of the alphabet until almost the final draft:</p>
<p>‘A turned the gun on B, and while B was thinking about this alarming development, C came up behind him and kicked his legs away.’</p>
<p>I have assigned characters names according to their function in the story:</p>
<p>‘THUG#1 pushed DOC#2 back against the wall and NURSE#1 started to scream.’</p>
<p>In yet other stories, HARRY, RON, and HERMIONE became involved in a steamy ménage à trios that resulted in an orgy of blood, mayhem, and death, while getaway driver TOM experienced a phenomenally bad trip on experimental drugs as his partners in crime, DICK and HARRY, burgled a rich man’s house. Elsewhere, married suburban couple LAUREL & HARDY decided to wage war upon their hated rival neighbours, ABBOT & COSTELLO, and LARRY, CURLY and MO did something unspeakable with BARBIE, SINDY, and KEN.</p>
<p>I have also been known to turn to outside sources for inspiration – chiefly I’m referring to those august publications, the phone book and the TV guide. Pick up the TV guide, flick through the pages, stop at random, choose a forename at random – then pick up the phone book, and repeat the process for the surname. This approach has a double benefit, in that not only is it quick and easy, it can also throw up some really unexpected combinations, and, occasionally, startling and poetically apt ones, too.</p>
<p>Naturally, it doesn’t always work out <i>quite</i> as well as it might, and then you write stories where the characters have names like BRAD H PREPARATION and ANGELINA WALMART, but one way or another it all works out.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Anyone have other ideas on naming characters?</p>BUILD A CHARACTER OR GROW ONE?tag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-20:537324:BlogPost:3861662014-01-20T22:33:29.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>Apart from ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ (although in some cases, ‘<i>Why</i> do you get these ideas?’ might be the more appropriate inquiry), one of the more frequently questions writers get asked about their work involves the creation of character. Both readers and writers alike are always interested to know which came first, the story or the character. The answer is usually character. Or story. Or both. Or neither...</p>
<p>The truth is there is no stock answer, it’s different…</p>
<p>Apart from ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ (although in some cases, ‘<i>Why</i> do you get these ideas?’ might be the more appropriate inquiry), one of the more frequently questions writers get asked about their work involves the creation of character. Both readers and writers alike are always interested to know which came first, the story or the character. The answer is usually character. Or story. Or both. Or neither...</p>
<p>The truth is there is no stock answer, it’s different almost every time.</p>
<p>Sometimes you deliberately set out to build a character from the ground up to fill the requirements of the story you want to tell, and sometimes a character will grow organically from the story, like a flower growing through a gap between paving slabs. Sometimes it’s a weird combination of the two.</p>
<p>The Build-a-Character method is a basic checklist, usually more associated with formula genre fiction, which supplies this functional blank with all the skills, life-experiences, background, knowledge, beliefs and philosophies it will eventually require to serve the needs of the plot. It’s a good, if somewhat mechanical, method which aids the plotting process itself and often reduces the need for extensive rewriting. Breathing real life into the blank is usually secondary to this pragmatic process, and how well this is done afterward is probably the difference between a merely competent writer and a really good one.</p>
<p>A good example of a character growing organically from the material comes from the second book of my Perfect Worlds series, Perfect Peace.</p>
<p>I had already been writing the novel for a while before deciding to add a prologue where a body was found on a beach. In my notebook, I had found a scribbled line – originally intended to be a minor detail mentioned in passing by another character – about the body being found by an older lady walking her dog, and so I went with that idea.</p>
<p>Just a couple of pages should do it, I told myself. No more.</p>
<p>What I ended up with, however, was a lot more than just a couple of pages. I got a fully-rounded character with her own unique story to tell, and this left me quite puzzled – why had this character grown so much in such a short space of time? Where had she come from, and what bearing did her personal circumstances have on the story I was writing?</p>
<p>At the time I had no answers to any of these questions, but I decided to leave the new prologue as it was until the editing process began, when I assumed much of it would be either cut entirely or condensed to the bare essentials. What happened instead was that as the book’s first draft progressed, this character continued to grow and infiltrate the novel, until her story and the novel’s were so closely entwined that they became exactly the same entity, and in the process succeeded in enriching the novel beyond all measure.</p>
<p>In the final analysis, the character built-to-purpose and the free-range character should both fulfil exactly the same role within the novel, which is making sure that the clockwork mechanism runs smoothly and true. But it’s very difficult to say which is the sweeter, the perfectly calculated creation – the square peg in the square hole – or the character that takes charge of its own destiny, the character that won’t be ignored or denied, and creates its own rightful place in your fictional world.</p>
<p>Which do you prefer?</p>THE FILM OF THE BOOK OR THE BOOK OF THE FILMtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-20:537324:BlogPost:3861642014-01-20T22:32:34.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>Always a tricky one, isn’t it? People who love books frequently love movies, but it doesn’t always work the other way around. Filmmakers and studios know this, which is why movies of books so often disappoint their avid readers. A novel is usually the work of an auteur, a tin-pot god whose every word is law. Even in the hands of a cinematic auteur, film-making is a massively collaborative process, and very rarely is it the chief aim to painstakingly recreate the novel that only a tiny…</p>
<p>Always a tricky one, isn’t it? People who love books frequently love movies, but it doesn’t always work the other way around. Filmmakers and studios know this, which is why movies of books so often disappoint their avid readers. A novel is usually the work of an auteur, a tin-pot god whose every word is law. Even in the hands of a cinematic auteur, film-making is a massively collaborative process, and very rarely is it the chief aim to painstakingly recreate the novel that only a tiny percentage of the producers’ target audience may have read. The film of even the best book should be a completely different entity, if it’s to work in this entirely different medium. Film is the ultimate ‘show, don’t tell’. That’s why entire chapters are cut or compressed, characters are forgotten or amalgamated, and telling details and cherished dialogue either ignored or changed. A film script isn’t a novel.</p>
<p>Now I’m one of the worst for complaining when things don’t go right, but occasionally they get it exactly right.</p>
<p>For example, I love Stephen King. I’ve read just about everything more than once, seen most of the terrible film adaptations, and seen all the goodies, too, of course - Shawshank, Green Mile, Mist (stand up and take a bow, Frank Darabont), Misery, and Stand By Me (Rob Reiner). And then there’s The Shining, which is for me the clearest example of a talented filmmaker knowing how to make his movie better than the author of the source material could.</p>
<p>I’ve read that Mr King disapproved of the choice of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, on the grounds that the audience’s expectation was that Nicholson was crazy anyway, and so couldn’t be surprised or shocked when Torrance high-sided it.</p>
<p>I’d say that was shrewd casting by Kubrick, considering that everyone who went to see the film already knew what it was about, more or less, and therefore that ensuring the audience believed the actor playing the guy who was going to go crazy could actually <i>deliver</i> crazy, probably increased the box-office tremendously.</p>
<p>And then there’s the axe. Jack and his axe, an iconic image that’s probably sold a hell of a lot of paperbacks for Mr King. In the book, Torrance’s weapon of choice is actually a glorified croquet mallet – which I believe was faithfully reproduced in a painful remade-for-TV version some years later. A croquet mallet...</p>
<p>The point is, in a book an author has time to explain the reasoning behind such a choice, and even make it work. But film is shorthand, and a talented filmmaker like Kubrick knew that when a madman starts hacking his way through doors and trying to murder his nearest and dearest, he doesn’t – shouldn’t – reach for a crochet mallet. In those circumstances, a madman reaches for an axe, and that’s all there is to it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Anybody else out there who has any pet theories on book-to-film or film-to-book translations?</p>FICTION IS NON-LINEARtag:crimespace.ning.com,2014-01-20:537324:BlogPost:3858282014-01-20T22:30:06.000ZPJ Shannhttp://crimespace.ning.com/profile/PJShann
<p>Of course, I've always known this. It's a rare day when I write something that works perfectly first time. More often than not, everyday stresses and concerns intrude on my writing time, meaning that my mind is never as focused as I would wish it to be. The end result is that I not only write sentences back to front, I also write paragraphs inside out, and write them in the wrong order, too. It's like my mind has all the information it needs to write the story, but because there's so…</p>
<p>Of course, I've always known this. It's a rare day when I write something that works perfectly first time. More often than not, everyday stresses and concerns intrude on my writing time, meaning that my mind is never as focused as I would wish it to be. The end result is that I not only write sentences back to front, I also write paragraphs inside out, and write them in the wrong order, too. It's like my mind has all the information it needs to write the story, but because there's so much more traffic circulating through the old noggin, it comes out a little jumbled. Those are the days that come back to haunt you during revision.</p>
<p>On a wider scale, I sometimes deliberately write out of order, too. For instance, on my last 157,000 word novel, I had the last couple of chapters written not long after the first few. Then I wrote the middle, and then all the other bits that joined everything up.</p>
<p>Now I've discovered a new non-linear wrinkle in my universe. I have just begun preparations on a new project. I will be publishing one of my older novels at Halloween - a horror novel, of course, to suit the season - and simultaneously a short story collection in the same genre. Re-reading these works with a mind to updating them slightly, I discovered (or re-remembered) something curious. The novel is called COMEBACK, which was inspired by one of the short stories in the upcoming collection, which is called COME BACK. I only realised when I looked at them both again, that although the novel was inspired by the short story, the short story was in fact only written <em>after</em> the novel was finished. The short story existed purely in my head for about a year before I ever wrote any of it down, during which time I'd already banged out the novel.</p>
<p>I wonder what would happen if we could live our lives in a non-linear fashion. Not just in reverse, say, like Benjamin Button, but just all over the place. I think it might be a little like living in a Chris Nolan film.</p>