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Next Stops on the Monday Blog Hop

As mentioned in my Blog Hop post from last week, the relay has continued this Monday with three writers from my MA Creative Writing course taking up the baton. All are great posts about three fascinating novels.

I’ve seen drafts of Kerry Hadley’s novel The Black Country while workshopping on the Manchester Metropolitan University course. She describes it very well in her post — a story that skilfully reveals a very dark core from an ostensibly everyday suburban situation. And the narrator plays an intriguing role that’s still a mystery to me, having not had the chance to read the complete novel. Kerry’s blog is at: http://kerryhadley.weebly.com/kerrys-blog/another-blog-hop

Anne is working on a new piece of writing, House of Scars, which is in the science fiction and/or fantasy genres, as was her work on the MA course. In her previous work, Anne showed her talent at creating a credible , dystopian world — inhabited by characters the reader can immediately relate to. To do this in an alternative reality seems a lot harder task to me than placing a novel in the contemporary world where the reader can bring their own points of reference to the writing. Anne originally comes from Denmark but the quality of her writing is so fluent you’d never suspect she comes from the trendy land of Scandi-noir and this year’s Eurovision. Anne’s blog is at: http://annekirstinejensen.wordpress.com/

Matt Cresswell, who’s based in Manchester. In addition to his writing he runs Glitterwolf magazine which is described on its website as ‘a UK-based literary and arts magazine that publishes the best poetry, fiction, art and photography by contributors identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.’ Matt is also working on a new project since workshopping with me on the MMU course. From the blog post it sounds like a highly imaginative story —Tintwistle & Co., which is set in ‘a sort of steampunked London’ and featuring ‘a short, sharp, opera-singing detective’. Matt’s blog can be found here: http://mcresswell.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/blog-hop-monday-the-return/

And next week the blog continues (and goes international too) with contributions from:

Kip Jankowski:  http://avadakipdavra.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/there-is-never-enough-time-never/

Eygló Daða Karlsdóttir: http://moonsith.wordpress.com/

Leonie M. Smith: who Anne will be hosting on her site: http://annekirstinejensen.wordpress.com/

Emma Yates-Badley: http://emmawritinganovel.wordpress.com/

I look forward to reading their Blog Hops on 2nd June and thanks very much to Kerry, Anne and Matt for their great contributions.

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A Stop on the Blog Hop (or a Quick Introduction to My Novel)

I’d like to say thank you very much to Lisa Goll for inviting me to take part in this ‘blog hop’. Lisa is organiser of the extremely successful London Writers Café Meetup Group — her entry on this Blog Hop was published last Monday.

I’ll answer the three vital Blog Hop questions below but, as an aside,  I’d recommend anyone in the London area who’s interested in writing to go along to one of the London Writers’ Café events — I’ve been to some great agent and author talks and also to the convivial Christmas party at the BFI on the Southbank.

The answers below are about my ‘just-about-to-be-almost-finished’ novel The Angel but, for a short taster of my writing, I’d invite anyone who’s interested to read the previous post on this blog — that’s directly below this one. It tells how one of my short stories was read at an event last week by the amazing Liars League London. Or just check out the Liars’ League website directly (after reading my answers, of course) where the text of the story can be found, along with a video of a great performance by actor Sarah Feathers. There’s another story of mine in the March section too.

1. When and where is the story set?

My novel is set in the recent past in the aftermath of the credit crunch. In retrospect, I think this will be a fascinating time for people to reflect back on — a time where economic ‘certainties’ evaporated and many people’s lives were thrown into turmoil unimaginable a short time earlier.

Where is it set? In the pub!

The Angel is an idyllic village pub that gives the novel its title. Although plenty of boozy action happens in and around the pub but there’s actually much more to the novel’s setting. There are two principal locations:  the early action mainly happens in Shoreditch and the City of London, then the story moves to the bucolic Chiltern village where The Angel stands next to the green. While it’s less than forty miles from Shoreditch, the many contrasts between the two locations echo the conflict between the main characters which brings me to…

2. What can you say about the main characters?

…James, Kim and Emma.

I could talk all day about my main characters (and the minor ones) — in fact sometimes I feel like I’ve been talking all day to the characters. I’ve become so involved with them while developing the novel that they seem like old friends. I occasionally see people in public and think ‘Yes, the way her hair is cut is just like Kim or she stands exactly like Emma would’.

With an Oxford degree, well-paid City job, beautiful wife and enviable house in the country, James ought to feel like life’s served him up a banquet. But, a fanatical home cook, he nurtures a frustrated ambition to set up his own restaurant and hopes his appearance on a TV cooking show contest will kick-start his gastro-career.

Kim is a German abstract artist with a studio in Shoreditch and an unscrupulous art-dealer boyfriend who’s manipulated her into a few dodgy commissions that she might come to regret. She abuses her body, is steeped in debt but determined to succeed as an artist — publicising her work by climbing East End buildings to painting street art.

Emma, James’s wife, is a senior human resources manager for one of Britain’s biggest supermarkets and is extremely ambitious and aspires to the lifestyle of a director of a FTSE-100 company, with all its luxurious trappings. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly — and this often includes James.

3. What is the main conflict?

At its heart, The Angel is a romance and the principal conflict occurs when James buys one of Kim’s paintings and becomes intrigued by her — she represents everything he feels he’s constrained from becoming himself. And although she’s far from conventionally beautiful — she’s studded with piercings and wears fetish gear — he finds himself unaccountably attracted to her. How prepared is he to risk his marriage to Emma to get close to this quirky artist?

There’s plenty of psychological conflict within each character too — James is struggling to assert his own ambitions against the expectations of others, Kim is fighting to keep faith in her destiny as an artist, despite continual setbacks. Emma is coming to the realisation that her husband may not share her dreams.

The novel also highlights the conflicts between a life in the City, über-hipster, post-industrial Shoreditch and the timeless villages of rural England — between the traditional British identity and the cool perspective of modern Europeans.

So there’s a whistlestop tour of the background to my novel and its main characters. There’s plenty more about The Angel and how it’s evolved if you dip into the blog.

So who’s next on the Blog Hop? The three people who’ve kindly accepted to take the baton from me in this blog tour are all ex-coursemates from my Manchester Metropolitan University MA in Creative Writing — and three marvellous and very different writers and their work kept me gripped throughout the course. They will be publishing their answers to the three big questions on their own blogs on 26th May (see below for details).

Matt Cresswell

Matt Cresswell is a writer and editor from Manchester. His fiction has appeared in Icarus, Southpaw, PIYE, Iris, Hearing Voices and Shenanigans (Obverse). He is the co-creator of End of the Rainbow webcomic, with the omnibus due out from Lethe Press any day now and the editor of Glitterwolf Magazine, a literary and arts magazine showcasing lgbt contributors.

His blog is at www.mattcresswell.com

Kerry Hadley

Kerry Hadley is author of an anthology of short fiction called Fifty-One Ways to Leave your Lover,which available from Amazon. All proceeds from its sale go to the charity Platform 51, which helps girls and women in challenging circumstances. Kerry has an MA in Creative Writing and her novel will, hopefully, be published by spring next year.

Kerry’s blog can be found at: http://kerryhadley.weebly.com/kerrys-blog.html

Anne Jensen

Anne Jensen was born in Denmark – she moved to England in 1995. Having recently completed an MA in Creative Writing, she is now currently working on her second novel, House of Scars. She lives and writes in Salisbury.

Anne’s blog can be found via: http://annekirstinejensen.wordpress.com/

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48 Laws of Power

I caught a glimpse of an old favourite book of mine on my exceptionally cluttered bookshelves and pulled it out to have another look. It’s Robert Greene’s ’48 Laws of Power’, which is, I suppose, a sort of psychology book illustrated with some literary (and other) quotations. I’ve always thought that an awful lot of human motivation is about power and the book likes to allude to military strategies as quoted by Machiavelli or Sun Tzu:  I’ve had a fair amount of what recruitment agents call ‘board level exposure’ and know how much like medieval courts the top tier of management in plcs and AGs are — and the laws can also be applied to business relationships and office politics. Additionally most of the ‘laws’ in the book can be applied to the most intimate or domesticated of human relationships. So in many ways the book could be seen as quite a resource for novelists.

Here is a short selection of my favourite laws — the full list can be found on a website associated with the book (and Wikipedia).

  • Law 1 Never Outshine the Master
  • Law 4 Always Say Less than Necessary
  • Law 12 Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim
  • Law 15 Crush your Enemy Totally
  • Law 16 Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
  • Law 17 Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
  • Law 32 Play to People’s Fantasies
  • Law 33 Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew
  • Law 41 Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes
  • Law 42 Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter
  • Law 46 Never appear Perfect

Probably the most insightful law is the fifteenth. It stems from the famous Machiavelli quotation ‘men must either be crushed or else annihilated; they will avenge themselves for small injuries but cannot do so for great ones’. Law One is also extremely important as it takes into account people’s jealousies. This is why all job advertisements that ask for thrusting, confident, assertive types are fundamentally misconceived — anyone who performs too well in front of their boss and makes him or her look quite ordinary is going to be stitched up sooner or later in a corporate environment. Law 46 is fairly similar — no-one likes anyone who’s perfect but if you’re calculating make sure that your imperfections are carefully selected to be relatively cosmetic.

I wonder if it’s my interest in such theories of scheming and treachery that has led to a lot of feedback on the writing I’ve read so far to emphasise the reader’s dislike of my characters — who it’s been noted are quite often trying to stitch each other up?

Of course the law I ignore most myself is the fourth — ‘always say less than necessary’ as the length of this blog entry and the others confirms.

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Feedback on Synopses

I had my one-to-one tutorial with Emily and she was happy to go through both synopses — although this made it quite frenetic as we only had ten minutes to cover both.

I was most surprised that she liked both synopses equally — both “had legs” she said. This was was interesting as I had thought one was a lot stronger than the other — or at least one was more developed to the extent of a lot of the synopsis actually having been written.

The most vivid synopsis was the one that was the newest, although it had plenty of flaws, such as the lack of development of a potentially interesting character — Emma the status conscious girlfriend who gets the elbow somehow. This was also picked up by my friend Kathy (who’s doing an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University) who also kindly read through the synopsis.

I was a bit worried that the pub setting of what is currently called ‘Pub Story’ would be thought of as humdrum but Emily thought it potentially rich and entertaining.  The newer synopsis also had an immediate ‘inciting incident’ (the point at which the reader is invited into the story) that set the tone for the rest of the novel. The ‘Burying Bad News’ synopsis was much more confused as it was difficult to work out at which point the reader was going to be pulled in. This probably reflects the indecision that comes with having written substantial parts of this novel already — I’m really not sure whether it should open chronologically or in ‘media res’. 

Both synopses failed in some of the most important aspects — they didn’t communicate effectively what I’d planned for the novel. One example was setting. I’d planned to use as settings a combination of London and the area around where I live (literally Midsomer Murder country — it’s filmed all round here and people are surprised it’s not the West Country or Cotswolds but Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in reality).  The setting is obviously pretty vivid to me but I didn’t get this across at all in the synopsis — and clearly the setting is appealing in general or else Midsomer Murders, Morse, Rosemary and Thyme and all the rest of these dramas (loads of them) wouldn’t be filmed round here.

So I think I’ve learned a lot about synopses and hope to work on the two to correct the flaws. I see it needs to do a lot but the most important is to hook the reader with the inciting incident and set the tone. Also, elements such as setting and a vivid sense of character are just as important as plot. I have different jobs to do with either synopsis.

For ‘Pub Story’ I need to think more about the actual plot  and characterisation and I’ve given this a lot of thought and come up with some interesting ideas for Emma and to link her in to some of the other characters. I’ve thought some more about Kim and also about the need for a better title — preferably something that can work as a pub name and a metaphor for the story in general. I’ve decided that ‘The Angel’ might be good — and it’s a nice reference to the tube station just up the road from City University too.

‘Burying Bad News’ is slightly more problematic as I have to rejig what I already have rather than have the freedom to think of new ideas. However, the questions that Emily raised are more problems with the synopsis than the ongoing work itself — I need to make it more obvious that the story is told from the perspective of the two women and that the role of the MP is more of a foil than anything else. I also need to tick a few more boxes as regards the genre — it’s a thriller rather than a detective story (as the detectives are fairly peripheral).

So quite a bit of revision to do to the synopses but I’m fairly encouraged that the ideas themselves are appealing. One point that Emily made was that they both had plenty of character in opposition and potential for conflict — which is the basis of any dramatic action.