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Life is a Rollercoaster

Actually I’m not such a fan of Ronan Keating’s song (even though it was co-written by Dido/Belinda Carlisle/Stevie Nicks Svengali Rick Nowels) but I was struck on a visit to Alton Towers on Friday about the parallels between rollercoasters and narrative in fiction.

Theme parks are strange places: they’re physical manifestations of the human desire to be entertained that is normally fulfilled mentally by books, films, TV — even other art forms like painting and music. It’s probably no co-incidence that theme parks tend to re-use the narrative of familiar stories and fairy tales to bridge the gap between engineering and customer experience. The most successful rollercoasters and rides have some sort of story invested in them — whether it’s a general theme, such as riding the Congo River Rapids,  or something more specific, such as the recent rebranding of Alton Towers’ Spinball Whizzer as Sonic (the Hedgehog) Spinball. (This involved the theme park painting the ride blue and putting up a statue of Sonic the Hedgehog outside the ride — and they had the nerve to describe it on their park maps as ‘New’.) There’s a genuinely new ride at Alton Towers, which has a strong narrative theme — they brand it ‘Th13rteen’ and it apparently has some associated story about wraiths. (I don’t know the story to that one as I’ve not been on it).

Disneyland in its various manifestations is an obvious example of the connection between stories and narrative and these kind of rides.

On first thoughts, it seems like it’s an unlikely connection between the engineering of a steel rollercoaster and a narrative story but there are many parallels. Often novels are analysed by sketching a simple line graph that might represent something like intensity of plot events. This often looks like a sine wave on an oscilloscope but also quite like a rollercoaster: a narrative needs some variation in its pace so there are peaks and troughs. The classic Hollywood screenplay is constructed with plot points about 25% and 75% of the way through the script so conforms quite well to the pattern.

A rollercoaster is similar but must also work within the laws of physics, which tends to mean that it starts with a steep climb to charge the cars with potential energy, which is then discharged through drops with gravity bringing the heights of the curves closer to the ground as the ride goes on. However, this is not always the case and several rides will use traction in the middle to supplement the energy — as log flumes tend to do. The best rollercoasters will play tricks with the riders’ expectations — either by some sort of disorientation or sensory deprivation (like being in the dark).

The thrill element of the rollercoaster will exploit the riders’ sense of physcial danger. I’ve not been on Oblivion at Alton Towers but this seems to be a classic example of fear as the car teeters for a second or two sixty feet above a near vertical drop into a tunnel that’s about another 60ft deep underground before plunging  down underground. While the people on these sort of rides are obviously physically involved, they also know that there should be absolutely no danger. I would guess that a lot of a novel’s (or film’s) appeal is the vicarious engagement the reader has with the characters who will usually be in some dangerous predicament (physical or emotional). In the end the reader knows it’s only a story, in the same way that they know a rollercoaster is safe, but the skill of the author/designer is in trying to conceal that artificiality.

There seem to be a lot of parallels between coasters and narratives — they’re a continuous line of events designed to thrill or entertain by managing and subverting expectations that are quite primordial in the human psyche. The riders of a rollercoaster and readers of a novel will willingly surrender themselves to the skill of the designer or writer in the expectation of receiving gratification that derives from being temporarily removed from the ‘real world’ and having their norms and expectations challenged.

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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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Opening the Novel?

Unlike the majority of my fellow students on the City course I’ve not approached the writing of either of my novels-in-progress in any kind of sequence — either chronologically or in anticipation of the eventual order in the book. I’m not too concerned by this as I think my brain works in a non-linear way — my (by now fairly distant) past in computer programming means I’m quite familiar with defining the meaty, functional bits of a concept and then choreographing these together — in the same way as one might write a coherent argument or report. The exercise I did with the post-it-notes (see post below) was quite useful for taking stock of where I planned to get compared with where I am now but it’s evident that I still need an opening for ‘The Angel’ and that, while I’ve written an opening for ‘Burying Bad News’ that’s likely to be superseded by later developments.

Over the weekend I thought I had a plan. I would start off ‘The Angel’ in dramatic fashion with James being unjustly fired from his financial job — being made a scapegoat partly because he’d been slowly drifting away from being ‘one of the lads’ and engaging his interest in arts. I guess this subject could be the most autobiographical of any of my writing as I’ve now twice been on the wrong end of this experience myself — currently going through the consequences of this ‘process’ as HR people like to term it. Perhaps, because I’ve aired quite a few of my own grievances, I’ve managed to do 3,000 words of this opening.

It’s in three sections — starting in media res halfway through the meeting where James is ‘re-organised’ in clinical HR speak; then a scene which is quite useful in a number of ways where he packs up his mementos from his desk (lots of character clues through the artefacts) and befriends the Somali security guard; finally a more dramatic scene in the gents where the real reasons that he’s been fired are revealed — not going to the lap dancing club being one — and he hits his erstwhile boss.

It was a real slog to write all this and took me a whole day to revise it (I think I was still feeling the effects of my cold/flu). However, 3,000 words is quite a lot, especially when this section doesn’t impinge much on the rest of the plot. To break it up a bit and avoid the impression it’s a book wholly about City types, I’m planning to interleave James’ section with Kim’s own crisis which I think  I’ll have happening in parallel.

I have a nice vision of her having an almighty row and bust up with the St. John Rivers-type character I’m yet to define — I see her standing on the top of Village Underground in Shoreditch throwing his stuff down to the street from 40 feet above Great Eastern Street. The trouble is I’m finding it difficult  to think of what she could throw without her getting arrested. I’ve wondered about her pouring paint on him. Maybe she could do it on the other side of Village Underground near the entrance to the warehouse and the spiral staircase which is currently a dead end due to the construction of the new Shoreditch High Street station? I think this would work quite well if it’s quite physical and visual as it would contrast with the corporate stuff. The two would then turn to each other in the aftermath of their stressful mornings and head out on the aforementioned bender.

If I do two scenes with Kim at about 1,500 to 2,000 words and I guess the bender is going to take about 4,000 words (I’d like to write this for my tutorial with Alison on 27th March,  although I need to get it to her earlier than that) then I’m going to have about 9,000 words of an opening to the novel, which I think might be ok if I’m looking at around 80-100,000 words overall. I’ve already written an ending of about 3,000 words which could be expanded (I wrote it bearing in mind the tutorial word limit) and it needs some context preceding it. I’d then probably have my two pivotal plot points at about the 12-15,000  and 70-75,000 word points — where the action leaves London and then returns. Seems far too neat to actually work out properly!

Speaking of Village Underground, I was quite alarmed to hear on the radio this morning about the huge fire in an ‘office and bar complex’ in Shoreditch. Fortunately, for my own selfish purposes, it’s not Village Underground that’s gone up in flames, it’s a place about half a mile away from Shoreditch High Street — but it just shows how real life can intervene in these things.

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Bender

Both Alison and Emily have said they think it’s a great idea for me to start ‘The Angel’ with James and Kim going out on a massive bender together (or at least have the sequence quite near the start). I’m certainly of the belief that there’s no bonding experience like a session getting completely plastered in the company of similarly afflicted others — something to do with the lowering of inhibition and probably why it’s an ingrained part of UK working culture.

In the discussion I had last Wednesday on plot with Guy, Nicole and Sue we discussed, amongst other things, how this might happen and how it might end. I think we all thought it might be good if the two characters ended up in a posh hotel suite but were too tired and emotional to consummate any latent attraction. I’ve thought about this a bit further and have some ideas about how they might wake up the next morning.

I’m now giving some consideration to how the bender might unfold. I’d ideally like this to be the opening chapter that I submit to Alison before Easter. I want to make it fast moving and, towards the end, quite blurry and increasingly surreal (as much as I can get away with within my genre).

I have to admit to recycling this idea from two Open University assignments — one short fiction and the other a longer screenplay —  from 2008-9 where two characters, also called, by chance, James and Kim, went on a bender in similar circumstances. They went from Mayfair to Canary Wharf — where Kim pulled James out of dock.

I’ve settled on having both work around Shoreditch/Bishopsgate so this version will go in the opposite direction. It will be quite picaresque in construction and I want to move up a spectrum of the vast number of options in London and the diversity of drinking/eating places. So I’m minded to start in somewhere really shabby and edgy (in the truest sense) and then move via better pubs up to posy bars and to a top class restaurant and thence to some top hotel — I think something very boutique and designer with massive rooms. I feel a visit to a bookshop and a flick through a Time Out guide to London might be coming up. Actually I’d quite like to base the hotel on the Hotel Rival in Stockholm, which is part owned by Benny Andersson from Abba, and is incredibly Swedish-trendy. I’ve stayed in it twice and drunk in the bar for the beautiful people of Stockholm — with beer at £7 a bottle. The rooms aren’t huge but very stylish and have Playstations and DVD players — with, of course, ABBA CDs to choose from. I’m sure there’s some similar places in London but I may make one up. I may also make up the restaurant as I’m quite keen to reproduce a scene in that from my previous screenplay which was rather satirical about celebrity chefs.

As luck would have it, there was a broken water main on Euston Road last night, causing traffic jams all the way down City Road. I was driving to City so I decided to take an alternative route back to the A40 Westway which is similar to the route that my characters are likely to take. I turned down Goswell Road, then down Clerkenwell High Street and carried on the road (whatever it’s then called) to end up at Holborn. I could have gone round the back roads of Fitzrovia and Marylebone but I stayed on the routes I knew so ended up going down Shaftesbury Avenue, skirting Piccadilly Circus, down through St. James’ and along Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner and then up Park Lane to Edgware Road. I think James and Kim might, for the sake of the readers’ interest in setting, hit the river at some point. I’ll maybe have them go to the Anchor on Bankside and then maybe into the Royal Festival Hall — maybe they could go up the Eye. Now that would afford me a lot of opportunity for the sort of descriptive setting that Emily was recommending to us last night.

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Something Borrowed…Leads to Plugging Some Gaps

The end of my last extract, which unfortunately I didn’t have time to read on Saturday, had a fire scene in The Angel. For some reason I was looking around on the internet for fire and ice imagery and came across some references to a classic novel which has a couple of fires. I decided to ‘borrow’ a bit of the action, although the original language was definitely not in keeping with the tone of what I was writing.

Here’s some selected parts of the source — no need to worry about quotation as it’s very out of copyright:

‘I hurried on my frock and a shawl: I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand…I [was] amazed to see the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, became further aware of a strong smell of burning…in an instant I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. “Wake, wake!” I cried. I shook him but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him…I rushed to his basin and ewer…both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug,  baptized the couch afresh…the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last.’

This gave me the idea to have Kim empty ice on James to try and wake him, although my fire wasn’t dramatic enough to have flames inside the room:

‘ She coughed. The air stank. The smoke detector at the end of the hallway bleeped incessantly. She ran to the top of the stairs. Catching an orange glint in corner of her eye she stopped and looked out of the window. She saw flames through the outside glass door of the function room…”James. James. Wake up. Wake up. There’s a fire.” Kim shook him hard…flames were licking at the thatched roof…Turning the bar sink taps on full, she grabbed two bar towels and plunged them into the water. She picked up a plastic bucket and filled it from the ice machine. Carrying the bucket, she rushed upstairs, pressing a wet towel to her face. In her room she found James had put on his jeans but had then fallen asleep again on the bed. The thatch was now ablaze outside the window…Kim threw the ice in his face. “Get up you stupid man. There’s a fire. I’m not leaving you here.” As he awoke, a finger of black smoke entered the bedroom.’

I guess almost every writer who’s ever read Jane Eyre will probably have consciously or unconsciously borrowed something from the novel but it was quite fun to do. No one noted on any of the scripts that they’d spotted it, although had I got to read it out then perhaps it may have been more obvious.

I think there’s a bit of a Jane Eyre archetype in the plot of the book. While James isn’t really a Mr Rochester, Kim is going to be coming from somewhere different (Germany) to London and then will meet James and fall out and reconnect with him later (perhaps?) but I think her St. John Rivers phase will come before James. Hold on! That’s given me an idea for the sort of character she can hang around with in London — a supporting character and a bit of sub-plot that I noted I was lacking with the post-its.

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Plotting

I adapted Emily’s suggestion about using index cards to plot novels (and do various other things) by using post-it-notes on a conference room wall in our offices. It’s not as permanent a reminder as having index cards arranged on a corkboard at home but it was quite useful for seeing how the plots were working out. I went way over the 12 suggested plot points — with 44 for Burying Bad News and 32 for The Angel.

For both novels I seem to have two main points of view so I used different coloured ink for either: red for Frances/James and blue for Sally/Kim. There were a couple of general plot points in each which I wrote in black.

Here’s how Burying Bad News looked:

Post-It-Note Storyboard -- Burying Bad News
Post-It-Note Storyboard -- Burying Bad News
The picture’s probably too small and reduced in definition to read but it shows a few deficiencies — Sally’s story carries the narrative mostly in the first half, to be replaced by Frances’ towards the end. I think I need more resolution for Sally and more introduction for Frances. Seeing as what’s represented on the board is a little less than double what I’ve already written, which is about 50,000 words, then adding in the extra will probably take me substantially over 100,000 words in total — so making me less than half way through. Mmm.
Here’s the Angel:
Angel Post-It-Note Storyboard
Angel Post-It-Note Storyboard
This has a more symmetrical feel to it and it’s nicely balanced around two plot points about 25% and 75% through the story (like the classic Hollywood screenplays that I was trained to write at UCSB). I feel like I’m still short of sub-plot for this and I’ve only really got three well developed characters who could sustain a love triangle through the first half of the plot but Emma seems to disappear afterwards. More minor characters are required but there’s some good themes coming through with some juxtaposition of art/sex/money/food and drink.
I only had this stuff on the wall for about half an hour so I took photos to preserve the display. I’ll need to come back and do it again but it was a useful exercise in taking stock so far.
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Two Sections of ‘Burying Bad News’ to Read

 Here are the fruits of my labours of approximately the past six weeks — about 12,300 words in two sections. That’s about 12-15% of a whole novel by a rough estimation so I’m reasonably pleased with the amount I’ve done. The longer piece (working title ‘Bird and Baby’) is the more revised and redrafted of the two. It’s taken an awful lot of hours to produce that. The other one could probably benefit from a couple more redrafts.

Taken together, they give a reasonably good overview of the characters in the novel — the five principal characters are all featured between the two pieces. The two are fairly contemporaneous in terms of plot sequence too. I would probably divide the longer piece and use the shorter one to intercut it.  

In both I’ve tried to combine some character exposition with plot development. In ‘Bird and Baby’ I’ve also tried to reveal my character Robert Cross’s political views (I’ve actually made him a secret lefty) so I go into his opinions on things as weighty as the Iraq war. Hopefully the political exposition isn’t too tedious as I’ve brought in other characters and plot elements.

I found that this section expanded enormously as I was writing it — almost in the fabled way that writers talk about when they say characters take over. I threw in a few chance meetings to break up the scene and found that the interaction with the characters created whole new scenes I’d not anticipated. The same happened with a pair of shoes.

There’s a bit of self-reflexiveness in that there’s a fair amount that discusses writing and the English language — and there’s also a bit of a rant about getting published.

A read of the latest synopsis should hopefully give some context to these two sections.  This first (‘Bird and Baby’) comes when Sally has got to know Robert Cross (the minister) reasonably well in her subterfuge as a supposed wine-writer. She’s arranged to meet him in Oxford when he’s doing constituency business so she can hopefully try to press him on his political views. She starts the novel as a committed enemy — the references to the demonstration outside the Oxford Union and the aggressive woman are to Sally as a political agitator — she was the tormentor but is trying to keep that hidden.

Sally is also responsible for having started a rumour that Cross is having a sexual affair with Ana. This has reached the press, via her political contacts. The story is just starting to break in the second section — Wendover Station.

Spot the carefully hidden references to Nancy Sinatra and Little Richard.

Click here to read ‘Bird and Baby’ (9,024 words): Bird and Baby — v44 — featuring Sally, Robert and Ana

Click here to read ‘Wendover Station’ (3,323 words): Wendover Station v12 — featuring Frances and Declan

The letter referred to in ‘Bird and Baby’ really exists and is exactly in the place described. I referred to my own photo when I was writing about it.

Inkling Letter from Eagle and Child
Inkling Letter from Eagle and Child

Should anyone have any comments then it’s possible to add them to the end of this blog post. I can also mail Word files if anyone’s really keen to suggest any changes.

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‘The Angel’ Changes

I reworked the synopsis of ‘The Angel’ based on the feedback I’d received.

Probably the biggest change was that I gave James and Emma a different backstory that changed the start of the novel — I married them — unhappily of course as there wouldn’t be much of a novel otherwise. Actually, in terms of a catalyst for action, he doesn’t actually fully realise that he is unhappy until the relationship develops with Kim. Emma will have some good qualities but I think theirs will be one of those functional sort of relationships that people drift into, ready to be shocked out of them at some point.

Because James will be newly married then his relationship with Kim will need to start more gradually — and this will hopefully give her decision to run the pub with him some more plausibility. She’ll need to be running from something in London, however, as much as being attracted to the countryside. James and Kim can still go on their massive bender round London — that’s a slightly environmentally friendly approach as I’ve already written something very similar for an OU course (albeit as a screenplay). It should be good for location and setting, though.

Most of the middle of the synopsis has stayed the same but Kim’s story follows a simpler narrative arc — she arrives, settles in eventually, deals with some crises which eventually lead her to move away again — and at the end the big question is ‘does she come back again?’ She does undergo some change, however — a development of calm and spirituality.

I’ve cut some of the ending of the previous synopsis — the bit about the abortion and so on. It was a bit too rushed to properly do justice to in the synopsis and I need to think whether it’s appropriate in the light of the other changes. The way the synopsis now reads, she could be motivated to leave by the fire.

One thing that’s not in the synopsis that I’ve been considering is making Kim even more of an outsider by having her as a non-white character. I think it would make a negligible difference to the plot – but it might give the outsider theme some more resonance. It would also be a challenge to write — and a potential minefield.  However, I’ll carry on considering this as it’s not something I’d want to take over the novel.

I kept the locations at the end in (Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge) mainly to give some sort of sense of location.  In practice I may well go for something more original — or perhaps subvert expectations by having them set-up to meet on the Millennium Bridge but things don’t go to plan and they are reconciled somewhere else — the skateboard park under Waterloo Bridge perhaps?

I created a spreadsheet based on Emily’s list of questions/attributes for characters. I still need to properly fill it in but it made me realise another flaw in my synopsis — I don’t seem to have enough characters. I can see this might have been a reason behind some of the feedback. There’s really only two who play a role all the way through — James and Kim. If you don’t like them then you’re not going to like the book. I have Emma and her predatory father as additional characters in the synopsis but I think I need a couple more significant characters.

So I’ve simplified my original ideas but I think I need some new ones for the actual novel. The synopsis itself is much improved, however. Here’s the version I handed into Emily.The Angel Revised Synopsis v4 — Distributed Dec 09

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Plotting Spooks

When it comes to pacy plotting, Spooks on BBC1 is pretty good. It’s also quite a model of editing what are, in essence, pretty bland scenes together. ‘The Grid’ is basically a dark room with a few tables and computers and that’s where at least 30% of the action happens. The exterior action is mainly shots of people walking down streets intercut with other shots of people sitting in cars or also walking down streets. Then there are very ordinary looking safe houses on Peckham council estates and disused warehouses where all the villains threaten to remove bodily parts from the heroes. No wonder they like to stick in a spectacular explosion every so often. When you realise the action is largely banal and repetitive it shows that the dialogue is very clever in transforming the mundane into a cliffhanger — and quite a bit of it can be classed as ‘telling’ — ‘he’s got a dirty bomb in that suitcase that will kill half of London’ suddenly gives a whole new meaning to another shot of a bloke walking along a street with a bag. It’s very clever and makes good use of the characters being hard-bitten secret agents to ensure they never let the dialogue-driven pace flag with sentimental asides.

Another good example of well-structured ‘plots’ are in the more classy reality series like ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘The Restaurant’. These are edited into little dramas with a very clear narrative arc — the obstacle or challenge is defined, the contestants try to overcome the obstacle, they succeed or fail and then have a short review of how they performed with the help of Raymond or Siralan to ensure they take away some self-knowledge. The climax is the firing but there’s a short period of resolution and reflection afterwards. You can almost set your watch by the plot points on ‘The Apprentice’ — about 7 minutes for the task to be set, 12 minutes or so when they’ve decided how they’re going to organise themselves, 20 minutes when they first start blundering into disaster, 30 minutes when the outcome of the task is teetering between success and failure, on about 37 minutes they’ve finished and prepare for the boardroom, at 52 minutes someone’s getting a roasting, 56 minutes when someone gets fired, then there’s the taxi ride.