The Word Cloud

Angry at the similarities between Cartland's Knave of Hearts... and her own These Old Shades, Georgette Heyer told her agent "I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate. I think ill enough of the Shades, but, good God! That 19-year-old work has more style, more of what it takes, than this offal which she has written at the age of 46!"

Wielding language like a rapier, in the manner of the best of her heroines, Heyer says that Cartland "displays an abysmal ignorance of her period. Cheek by jowl with some piece of what I should call special knowledge (all of which I can point out in my books), one finds an anachronism so blatant as to show clearly that Miss Cartland knows rather less about the period than the average schoolgirl," adding that she would "rather by far that a common thief broke in and stole all the silver".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/aug/02/georgette-hayer-decries-plagiarism

Which I suppose is a plug, as I'm one of The History Girls. There are a months-worth of us, though, from Caroline Lawrence to Adele Geras, plus guests, and there's a new post every day, so it's worth dipping into.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

And, admittedly, the post that's up today is mine...

Emma

The HWA, the Historical Writers Association, is a new society aimed at all genres of HF and is hoping to do for HF what the CWA did for crime fiction. Anyone is welcome to participate and what may interest Worders is that not only can you directly communicate with authors and pick our fraying, wine-addled brains but the HWA lists a large proportion of agents, editors and publishers willing to answer questions and offer advice where pertinent.

At the moment it's a bit Roman heavy and would like more genres represented. Don't think that it's all Tudor and togas; anything up to and including 20^th century fiction counts as long as it is in an historical context and as I said writers and readers are invited to participate, although there is a criteria for authors wishing to join, anyone can post and be active in discussions. So come along and have a look!

http://www.thehwa.co.uk/ 

Mark Keating. Author of the Pirate Devlin and Hunt for White Gold. 

I've just sent off my third book to my agent to send on to my publisher. It's bought and paid for, as is the fourth which is still only just starting to creep forward from the back of my brain.

The thing is, and what I wanted to share with those of you biting your nails waiting for the phone to ring or for the enquiry letter to come back, is that it doesn't get any easier.

When you send out a manuscript you are always putting yourself up for minute scrutiny at best, judgement worse.

You spent months writing it, played with it, printed and read it dozens of times and it will never be perfect but you hope that those who know will see it for what it's worth past the adverbs and repetition that you only ever spot afterwards.

I know I've got months of copyediting to come, swathes of red pen and questionmarks but I just want that one word of approval to begin with and then I'll calm down.

Hopefully most of us write because we need to and not because we've got our eyes on a helicopter we want to buy (those days are gone) and you may think that published authors are contented souls who have done the hard part and are just writing by numbers now. Don't.

If anything your first book is the one to treasure. The world has no expectation of you. People are not going to ask for their money back or realise that you just don't have it in you after all and if they reject you it's for a hundred reasons that you may never be privileged to know If they reject you after you're published then you're really doing something wrong.

My point is that a writer who will stay the course should always be nervous. Judge your own work ruthlessly and you can only ever be pleasantly surprised. If you find yourself adamant that you have written a bestseller or a literary masterpiece that will one day be acquired reading for university chances are you may not be the writer that you want to be.

And remember what I said: It ain't gonna get any easier. Just better. Hopefully.

markkeatingsbooks.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

There was discussion last week at our writing group about historical novels playing around with history to the point of being unreliable as a reference. Someone was unhappy about Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, who apparently was not such a fine character in real life. Others didn’t care because Wolfe Hall was a marvellous novel and Cromwell a wonderfully drawn character; if it’s fiction, it’s OK. Clearly, some veracity has to obtain otherwise why write about the subject in the first place? But how much? 

 

Anyway, lighter discussion ensued about titles of novels/films that might offer a very different view of history. How about: Ivan, The Really Rather Nice? Do Clouders have any more suggestions?

Was going through a scene in my head, as I walked/rode on the bus to work today!  Good grief.  Anyway, it was a jolly little scene with someone expiring from the plague.  Well, people did a lot of that in the 5th-6th century! Erm ... Must think of happier scenes.  But it was from the current WIP, so that's good.  One day, I must sit down and write any actual outline of this book  ... erm (again)

A few months ago, in the piece I did for the Independent's My Book of a Lifetime slot, I found myself saying, "Both my first novel, The Mathematics of Love, and now A Secret Alchemy, are about love, war, and the life of the spirit. At the most fundamental level, I sometimes think, what else is there to write about?" The rhetorical question was designed to get readers disagreeing, and of course it's only partly true of my own work, let alone anyone else's. There are a million other things to write about, from being conceived, to hunting a great white whale, to chasing a nose which grows legs and joins the Russian civil service.

But both the WIP, working title Kindred and Affinity, and the little squeaks of a new story, maybe novel-sized, which I can hear in the gaps, are probably also encompassed in that definition (prescription?) of 'love, war and the life of the spirit'. This evening - maybe it's the Autumn blues - I'm wondering if it's a bad thing to stick with these same basic preoccupations; or is it simply a bad thing that I've become aware that I do? After all, a novel by definition is novel: something new. And I'm also aware that the first two preoccupations, at least, are in some ways the easy option, the safe bet for writers who can't be bothered or aren't able to try harder and write fresher, and whose fiction is therefore dull, formulaic or actively meretricious: cheap in the aesthetic rather than the financial or literary sense. Am I doing the same? Goodness knows I don't sit and think 'war sells' or 'love makes readers cry', any more than I sat down and decided that The Mathematics of Love was going to be a cross between Possession and Birdsong (not least because I hadn't read either). But here are my characters - people, times and places - and the more specific themes I want to explore - say voyeurism, surrogate fathers, enclosed societies. I start to think about how and where to build those lives so as to give the themes a chance to grow and set shoots, to dramatise them in different shapes and times. And the answer to how and where so often seems to be love and war, under the eye of a God or some transcendant and immanent force which my characters - some of them, sometimes - seem to believe in.

And yet when I look at the work of any writer I admire, I see that they, too, return time and time again to the same fundamental meditations, even if each time what the novel dramatises is individual lives: contingent, particular and, yes, new. Granted, as a human being you can't entirely escape your particular preoccupations and tastes, but to turn the question on its head why, if you're driven to examine fundamental things, keep dressing them in new clothes?

I think the newness of a novel is not accidental, nor is it superficial, but equally the oldness is neither laziness nor tedium. Perhaps it's because only it's only new things which we look at properly, being lured by their novelty into examining each bugle-beaded bonnet or pagan tattoo hard enough to see the shapes beneath: the old, fundamental things which underlie them. In other words, perhaps the oldness only works if the newness does too. A small child asks for the same story over and over again not because they've forgotten what happens - heaven help you if you change a word - but because they want to re-live the fear of the wild things, and then the comfort of getting home: it's the new (re-)speaking of the words which conjures up the oldest feelings in the world.

For my own work, I don't know. Because what I most notice in excellent writing is the things I couldn't do myself, and someone else's ideas which I must work to apprehend, I associate excellent writing with ideas and things I don't do. In which case my writing - which by definition is ideas and things which I do do - is not excellent. But maybe I'm just having a wobble about how crude the basics - for which read oldnesses - of one's writing can look, because any broad generalisation, whether it's a blurb or an elevator pitch or a snide, dismissive review, can seem a reductio ad absurdum of the complex of ideas and feelings which is a novel. The whole novel, on the other hand, not reduced thus, gives those ideas and feelings human form, so that they can dwell among us humans, and we in them.