Adrian Fayter, MA – worth it?

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Welcome to the MA retrospective diary…  Having completed my final module, it’s time to consider some of the costs and benefits of the experience.  Was it worth it?  For me, definitely yes.  To start, here’s a list of three key benefits which in turn connect to questions to ask university staff if you are thinking of signing up for a Creative Writing course :

Feedback from other students on my work – this was particularly useful due to the wide range of ages, nationalities and backgrounds of fellow students, and the small size of groups.  Ask about:  Usual size of teaching groups.

The chance to edit and proof read the whole of my novel with my personal tutor.  Ask about:  How much individual tutorial time you would get.

Doing research on sales and marketing for the genre I am working in. Ask about:  What contact there would be with professionals from the publishing industry.

Further reflections in future posts…

Are you naughty… Or nice?

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Or are you NASTY?

Books are like most products in the marketplace – they fall into categories, and the categories fall in and out of fashion.  Bookshops now have whole shelves labelled Cosy Crime, to distinguish the gentility of Agatha Christie with the more graphic images of, for example, Kathy Reichs.  Nice as opposed to…  Well, you get the idea…

So as a writer, you have to consider your market.  Who are your readers?  What else are they reading?  What category do you fit into?  But that’s not to say you should copy others, or run after the latest fashion; if you’re currently working on a TV script set in Denmark, personally I’d forget it (unless you’re reading this on your laptop in Copenhagen, of course, then in may still be worth it).  You are allowed to try to be original, find your own voice, and even subvert a genre or two.  If you can be a bit naughty and play around with the reader’s expectations, that’s likely to be a good thing…  Just be aware that publishers and agents may not be as creative or imaginative as you are.  They may very well just seem obsessed about which shelf your work should sit on.  Make sure you have an answer for them.

Confess… and Reoffend

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Let’s face it, you’re not going to get your detective to give the answers in front of a bunch of toffs and servants in the drawing room, are you?  Unless you’re writing some sort of parody of golden age detective fiction, that is.  But you could just as well fall into other, equally unrealistic traps.  How many times have you watched, or read the words of a villain explaining exactly how he did it while he taunts the hero at gunpoint?  Come on!  In real life, he’d just shoot and run, and hope the ballistic experts were going to have an off-day…

Endings will always be tricky in the crime genre, because there will be lots of knots to unravel, lots of facts to confirm or deductions to explain.  You probably know the old writing advice ‘show not tell.’  But inevitably your ending will involve a lot of telling the reader how it all happened.

Here are some points to bear in mind:

Practice makes…  well, you know.  Making dialogue sound natural is one of the skills you have to develop, and especially when characters may be explaining or summing up to one another.  Best never to start these bits with the phrase, ‘What I don’t understand is this…’

Your readers need the whole answer, but your characters may not.  You may be able to spread out your explanations, spread them around, so to speak. Don’t make the Inspector stand and spell out everything in one go to the sergeant.  Answers can come to the reader from a variety of mouths.

Don’t ignore other aspects of ending a book.  Novels are based around character, so we expect character development as the story progresses.  How did the crime and investigation affect your characters?  What have they learnt or what has changed them?  It’s not all about the puzzle solving element, after all.

*

One day, in the possibly distant future, you’ll have completed a book, and you’ll have edited and re-edited, and generally got sick of the whole damn thing.  You’ll be wishing you’d taken up painting instead…

That will be the time to start again on the next one.  If you seriously want to be a professional crime writer, then you’re likely to need to create a whole series.  Check out your local bookshop or library if you’re lucky enough to have one.  Some authors have a whole shelf or more just to themselves.

Despite the best efforts of all law abiding citizens and law enforcement agencies, crime never sleeps.  Nor does the crime writer…

Know whom to trust

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We writers are solitary types, aren’t we?  The genius in his garret, inspiration flowing, creating the masterpiece that will overwhelm its readers; and if it doesn’t overwhelm them, then, well, presumably that’s their problem:  they just aren’t sensitive enough to get it…

Yeah, yeah, nice idea, Mr S Taylor Coleridge.  Way to make a writer feel special!  Maybe we can forgive the implied elitism from someone writing in the days of mass illiteracy and a rigid class system, but it won’t wash nowadays, will it?  If you want people to pay for your book, you’ve got to write one that meets their expectations. How many Romantic Poets have you seen on a bestseller list recently?

Which means that getting advice and feedback is going to be a necessary part of trying to make it as a writer.  Your innate genius is not enough.  Sorry.

But whose advice can you trust?  After all, what appeals to readers varies so much from individual to individual.  Now, a qualified English teacher is a great bet if you are unsure about punctuation, and she’ll have a mass of reading experience to draw on when giving all sorts of literary advice, but that won’t guarantee she is always right.  You need more than one person to help you.

My advice?

  1. Don’t start showing work too soon; give yourself enough time to work, rework, improve, learn and work out where you are going.  Don’t confuse yourself by asking for advice when you’ve barely started.
  2. Take feedback from different sources, but make sure it is from people who are willing to be honest.  You don’t need a sample of hundreds, but you do need more than four or five.
  3. Get people to write their notes on a printout of your work.  It forces them to reflect more carefully and to be more specific with their comments.
  4. Consider feedback as a way for you to look at your own work through fresh      eyes.  You may find you have to be brutal with cuts and changes. But have faith in your own judgement, too.  Sometimes the best person to trust is yourself.  Don’t make changes you really feel you don’t agree with.  You may not be a poetic genius.  But it’s your book.

Action Point Three:  Pick a fiction book that you haven’t read and of a type you wouldn’t normally choose.  One of your spouse’s or partner’s books could be ideal.  Read the first chapter and write down your comments, just as if the author had asked you for feedback.  Be as specific as you can.  You are not allowed to say things like, ‘I didn’t like it because war books bore me.’  Keep your notes so you can use them in future to show the sort of feedback you are seeking on your work.

Hurt the one you love…

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How do you grip your readers?  Some writers say that a story can be broken down into stages and that the stages should get more and more exciting until just before the end.  It goes like this:

Situation – Complication – Crisis – Climax – Resolution

Or like this:

Meet the characters – Bad things – Very bad things – Last chance for rescue –

So that’s how they escaped!

Now sometimes these stages get mixed up, so in a crime book we often find a corpse or see someone in danger right from the start:  bad things can be part of the situation, or you can jump in with a crisis before returning to the situation in your next chapter, telling it as a sort of flashback.  You can see that approach in some of the sample chapters on this site.

And of course you can even break down different episodes in the same way, so that every climax is a cliffhanger:  someone’s in jeopardy and the reader’s wondering how he’ll get out of it…

Which means that if you (and the reader) care about your characters, you have to hurt the ones you love.  Or at the very least, put them in danger of being hurt…

*

And then again, there’s your favourite chapters, there’s the bits you wrote that you are most proud of, there’s those strokes of poetic genius that you stare at admiringly on your laptop screen, wondering how such wonderful phrases could ever have popped into your brain…

You know, you might just have to be prepared to edit them out.  You might find, great as they are, they don’t quite fit your narrative, they’re out of character, they belong in a totally different book, or that nobody else thinks they’re as good as you do.

As Sir Arthur Quiller Couch told his students, nearly one hundred years ago,

‘Murder your darlings.’

Hurt the ones you love…

Action point four:  If you are writing a novel, take each chapter you have written and ask yourself in which of the five stages shown above it fits. If you are writing short stories, use the same approach and break a story or two down into its stages.  Do you have enough crises or cliffhangers to keep the reader gripped?

Disguise the evidence…

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You, the Writer, are a twisted mastermind who puts criminals on the streets, plots their crimes and callously dispenses with their victims.  You toy with the detective, drip-feeding clues and laying false trails, frustrating his enquiries, yet causing cliff-hanging danger so he can’t give in and stop.

The detective, of course, is the reader.

But how do you build up the clues so that the reader doesn’t ‘get it’ too early?  Because the ideal is that the reader gets the answer pretty much simultaneously with your detective character; it doesn’t really work if your fictional sleuth is still blundering around for fifty pages when the reader’s worked it all out…  (‘It’ usually – though not always – being the identity of the criminal:  they don’t call them whodunits for nothing).

So naturally you have to disguise your evidence, especially nearer the start of a story, when the puzzle is at its most obscure.  You have to find ways of giving partial clues.  And then control the pace by which more information gets to the reader so he can reassess what came earlier. Some very simple ideas are below:

Information                            Disguise                                Reassessment after

Voicemail message             Caller drunk                           Found and sobered

Needle is the weapon         Found on drug user                Further clues implicate him

Written evidence                 In a foreign language             Finding translator

 

Action Point Two:  Continue the above list until you have at least 25 ideas.  Try to link as many of them together as possible in order to generate plot ideas, or if you already have a plot in mind, try to fit as many into your own plot as you can.  To help you feel closer to being a criminal mastermind, practise an evil laugh or two.

 

Kill for it…

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Do you want to be a writer?  Is it your ambition, desire, or – sorry, but there’s no other word for it – your dream?  Are you hungry for it?  Would you – almost – kill for it?

Can this blog make you into a writer?  Well, yes, actually, it can.*  It’s not just the knowledge, experience or qualifications, or the fact that I’m doing it, and reflecting on it every day…  No, you could get that almost anywhere.

It’s this:  if you answered ‘yes’ to the questions above, then I know how you feel.

And what’s the most important thing that you need?  Imagination?  Creativity?  A big dictionary?  The best laptop you can afford?  No, the most important thing to have is time.

Despite all the demands of real life – work, wife (or partner), washing up, washing the car, washing your hair – you will have to find time, plenty of it, and at regular intervals, too.  You have to make writing a part of real life, not something that gets pushed out by it.

Action Point One:  Open your diary and make some appointments for yourself to write.  Personalise the appointments, eg ‘11.00 am to 12 noon, Mr Novel / Ms Screenplay / Mrs Ambition / Miss Destiny.’  Treat these appointments with the same importance as appointments with your boss, or your dentist.  Keep the appointments.

*Disclaimer:  this blog cannot guarantee to make you a published or even a good writer, but it can help.  It can certainly make you a writer…

Start Reading ‘Live-in Killer’ By Adrian Fayter

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PROLOGUE

You know you’re in trouble when you see them stoning the fire engines.

You know it’s worse when the firemen get shot.

It had been a mistake to try to cut across Peaseholme, but the ring road resurfacing had been causing huge tailbacks all week, and the radio traffic news reporter was hyping the problem in her usual pant-wettingly over-excitable way.  Stupidly, I got fooled into making a last minute turnoff three roundabouts too early, with a view to cutting over the far corner of what is one of the direst housing estates in the country…  Which felt a little disconcerting, maybe, at this time of night, but ten to twelve minutes would see me back on the right side of the tracks.  Or so I thought…

And why the fuck Radio Hampton wasn’t reporting the real story of the evening I’ll never know…

It was unusually quiet around the Triple Towers, and further on the bouncers outside the Lord Nelson were looking bored and perplexed.  The answer came just beyond Junkie Park:  I crossed the mini roundabout and all of a sudden I was stuck behind a Greatways lorry trying a desperate U turn, while up ahead the firefighters tried to save the community centre under a hail of lager cans, hubcaps and stones.  A white van pulled up hard behind me.  Then my mobile rang.

‘Hello?’  I lifted it to my ear while still staring at the fire ahead.

‘It’s Mum.  I’m just checking that you got home OK.’

‘Ah.  Well…  Look, I’ll call you back…’

The flames had a good hold and there was little to be done, especially as the firefighters had retired, at least two visors shattered by air rifle pellets.  A paramedic, we learned later, was treated by his colleagues for concussion, alongside six elderly ladies from the Old Time Dancing Society who had suffered smoke inhalation.  The right wing, ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ editorials were going to have a field day.  And just for once we would all agree with them.

When the van behind had managed to reverse, I had the space to get out.  The Citroen was at full lock and I’d just bumped over the kerb when a half brick hit my roof and I panicked.  Twisting my neck I could see them, a crowd of silhouettes advancing with the flames behind.  Small silhouettes:  the tallest was maybe five foot seven, they were young teenagers, kids.   But when they turned their heads, even if just for an instant, you could see the rage and excitement flickering in their distorted faces.  They had found the ultimate bully boy thrill.  I hit the accelerator.

I hit a lamp post.

I didn’t let it stop me.

And, amazingly, within minutes I was driving down perfectly normal streets, dodging perfectly normal cyclists, moped-riders and pedestrians who had no idea what was happening only a mile or two away.  With dents in my roof, my left wing, and my confidence.

And so the one successful attempt to foster a community in Peaseholme fizzled out beneath the firefighters’ foam.  The papers were enraged for a day, then lost interest.  Councillors wrung their hands for twenty seconds on TV. An old age pensioner remained in hospital for a week, then died.

On the day of her death my work sent me back onto the estate.