Being a Tolkien fan is all about the reading experience

It occurred to me the other day that I could probably be classified as a bit of a Tolkien fan. I’ve been soaking up Tolkien’s books ever since I was about 10.

I had to pose in the entrance of the 2012 Hobbit Artisan Market in Wellington …but that’s the limit of geek, for me.

I must have read The Lord Of The Rings a dozen times or more. The Hobbit as often. I have the maps, I saw the movies, and I went to the exhibition of movie props.

But I wouldn’t call myself a total Tolkien fan. I don’t dress up in the costumes – you know, green cloaks that render you invisible against green grass, green rocks, green water, green sky etc.

My copy of The Lord Of The Rings is from three different editions. Nor do I collect memorabilia, or go to Armageddon comic-con gatherings to ogle merchandise and be photographed beside the guy who swept the studio floor on alternate Sundays while they were shooting out-takes for The Return of the King.

It is a limited kind of enthusiasm; and I also view what Tolkien did in a literary sense with a suitably critical eye; he wasn’t perfect, and he wrote a lot of stuff the hard way.

So what is it, for me? Well, it’s the reading experience. Tolkien created a world that became real for the reader. He did it by description – if you open The Lord Of The Rings at virtually any page, you’ll find evocative descriptions of the settings – the sounds, the smells, the feel.

He did it by depth; his world was rich with its own mythology and history, rich with culture, with language, with peoples of all kinds, all of them carefully described.

Not actually Rohan. Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse, in the top of Lindis Pass.

He did it with scope; his themes struck chords with the very heart of western thinking, western mythology, and western culture; epic battles between good and evil, between right and wrong. Clear-cut, scarcely shaded in any greys.

And he did it by giving us heroes we could identify with – not Aragorn, who was the archetypal mythic  hero; but the hobbits, who were ordinary, everyday folk. Effectively, people like us – people who we could identify with and journey with, who became heroic.

A message of hope, swathed in all the things that speak to our sense of culture, right, wrong – and place.

That’s why I like Tolkien. Have you read his books? What draws you to them – for you, is it the reading experience, or something else?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more writing tips, humour geekery and other stuff.

Write it now, part 17: Tolkien’s lessons about writing a best seller

How do novels become not just sellers, but best sellers – and hyper-sellers?

Hobbit Market, November 2012. I had to lie prone to take this picture. ‘Get up,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted. ‘People will think you’re dead.’

Quality’s important, but not always a criteria. Seldom have I read a novel as incompetently researched and clumsily styled as The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said). I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor do I want to, but I’m sure somebody’ll comment about what I am told is, well, derivative dribble.

I posted the other week about how genre becomes popular because it keys into changing social ideals – and last week about how types of genre become specifically popular on the back of particular social trends.

The best-sellers are the ones who float to the top of those heaps. The thing is, they’re usually transient. But every so often a book transcends that – becomes not just a best seller, but a lasting best seller. A classic.

Something everybody has at least heard of – even if they haven’t read it – and which stays in the public mind for years – even decades.

Like The Lord Of The Rings. In just a few heady years during the late 1960s,  J R R Tolkien’s epic effectively mainstreamed fantasy. His mythos was embedded in western popular literature even before Peter Jackson’s movies (filmed in my country and my city, bwahahahaha) catapulted his creation to stratospheric popularity.

Hobbit market, November 2012 – Tolkien, mainstreamed.

An astonishing achievement for a modest and retiring Oxford don who had to be nudged into finishing anything for a publisher.

Tolkien never planned it that way. His publishers didn’t anticipate it either. The book he presented Allen & Unwin with in the early 1950s was barely publishable – they broke it into three parts to spread the risk, and a glance at early print runs reveals it shifted only a few thousand copies.

Then, in the mid-1960s, it took off. Kicked into life by a pirated American edition, followed by Tolkien’s authorised edition. It kept on selling. And on. And on. And on….

What happened?

His themes struck chords with a new generation, particularly the idealised pre-industrial England of the Shire and the hippified, natural Earth-spirit lifestyle of Tom Bombadil. The link between Bombadil and counter-culture values was lampooned with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer in Bored Of The Rings.

Rohan. No – central Otago. No, Rohan…oh, I give up…

This was a generation that read a lot of fantasy, partly because fantasy had become an element of their fabric of escape. Tolkien met their need on both counts. Genre tastes, in short, had caught up, though his own motives were different in many respects (eerily, also similar – every generation found reason to object to industrialisation).

Other authors tried to imitate him. Tolkien, in short, had created a new genre, about a generation ahead of its time.

Hutt River or Anduin. Well, maybe the houses are the give-away.

As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, the book gained an enduring public audience. Part of that was due to the way that 1960s youth ideals were mainstreamed. Part of it was the scope of Tolkien’s vision, engaging symbolisms at a fundamental level. And that wasn’t surprising. He was trying to write Britain’s missing mythology; he wrote to fundamental themes – capturing our cultural framework in soaring battles between total good and utter evil; the symbolisms of mythic heroism.

All was given a dimension that ordinary people could identify with, through the ordinariness of the hobbits – little folk who, inevitably, were more heroic than anybody could imagine.

A stunning achievement. And not something that can be easily repeated – certainly, I suspect, not by design.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next time: getting down to the nuts and bolts of novel writing.  More humour, more writing tips – and, well, more. Watch this space.

Write it now, part 16: hurrah for the sensitive new age vampire

What is it about our obsession with vampires? Vampires, it seems, are where it’s at today. And I don’t mean real vampires – you know, the ones who suck self-esteem. I mean the fantasy types, currently in pop-literature and movies in their sensitive new-age guise.

These days, novels about these reinvented suckers are  a license to print money, if  done right. Actually, it seems to happen even if they’re the literary equivalent of dribble.

I thought I’d finish this brief series of posts on the history of novels with a few thoughts about this rather – uh – pointed genre. I think it tells us quite a bit about our own society. And that’s Step 1 on the way to writing books that sell – which doesn’t mean ‘best sellers’, but does mean books that sell enough to generate a viable living.

That, alone, is a triumph for authors. I am not kidding.

Vampires always were a part of human mythology. Their first boost into western popular psyche came during the nineteenth century – heralded by penny dreadful stories like Varney the Vampire. The whole thing was given a kind of respectability, if you could call it that, by Bram Stoker, whose Dracula of 1897 defined the genre in one best-selling shot.

Superficially it was a horror story. Actually it was about something else – tweaking the sensibilities of Victorian-age, idealism. The salacious subtext – the subversion of morality – wasn’t much hidden, and readers loved it. Vampire stories were a socially acceptable frame around which to wrap what readers really wanted.

Part of the reason why Stoker and his imitators got away with it was because the vampire was also portrayed as evil. That stereotype persisted through the twentieth centry – right up until the 1970s when Fred Saberhagen turned the genre on its head with his hilarious The Dracula Tapes.

This told the story from Dracula’s perspective. Vlad Tepes – Dracula – was a polite nobleman who wanted to set up house in Britain and live quietly and privately in the centre of civilisation for a while. He got shipwrecked at Whitby (I mean, he wouldn’t sabotage his own ship – what sort of idiot did people think he was?), then ended up being harassed by an imbecile self-appointed vampire hunter named van Helsing who couldn’t be reasoned with. Very, very funny inversion of the genre.

About the same time Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire, which presented much the same concept of vampires as dimensional, multi-faceted individuals. That set off the whole new-age vampire schtik – everything since has been, to my mind, a follow up to and in many ways diminuition of her concepts.

As far as I can tell, these days the writing of it has got down to one-dimensional teen angst style romance stories along with fifty shades of – well, salacious Mills and Boon. With blood. Uh…yay…

But that stuff still sells. Why? Just like it did for Stoker, over a century ago, the genre meets an immediate need – keys into something society feels it lacks. Vampires offer the twenty-first century a style of escape that is – well, interesting.

It’s to do with the underlying psychology. It’s about validation through being attracted to power, and the ability to achieve desire (represented by the vampire) – although that attraction carries a cost (blood sucking, a metaphor for power and strength). Interesting, made more so by the fact that the vampire  is supernatural. And that begs questions about why we’ve latched on to this – what is lacking in oursociety that attracts us to validation via supernatural means instead?

What’s your take on this one?

And let’s hear it for SNAVS. They’re what might make writing profitable…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next time: fantasy genres, more geekism, comedy and some other stuff. Watch this space.

Sixty second writing tip: melodrama vs real drama

There is a scene in Dan Brown’s The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said) where the protagonists meet the villain ‘Teabing’ and spend most of a chapter on exposition.

While they’re doing it, a pink-eyed assassin is sneaking up on them. I never liked that scene. It was melodrama. You can imagine it in a British music hall skit:

Audience: He’s behind you!

(intruder ducks, ostenatiously, behind a couch).

Baige Gent: (finally looking) Oh no he isn’t!

Audience: Oh yes he is!
(etc).

I suspect Brown had the asssassin turn up because the scene was otherwise a boring “please explain, Professor” data dump. No tension.

The way to make a scene like that dramatic isn’t to have The Bad Guy sneaking up on The Good Guys while they’re pontificating. It’s to throw tension into the interactions of The Good Guys. This is where tension comes from any scene:

1. The character arc of the main protagonist creates it – the dissonance between what they want, and what they need.

2. It is created by dissonance between the differing goals of the characters (given multiple dimension, and the difference between what them wants, and what they need).

3. Drama also comes from some threat to the intended goals of one or more of the main characters, either from the difference between their goal and that of another character – or an actual threat. Think Hemingway and The Old Man And The Sea. Hugely dramatic, all the way, because of the relentless tension created by the interpolation of the sea.

To make these work, you also have to create a character the reader feels for – that they identify with.

The master of tension-by-dialogue was Isaac Asimov, whose books generally consisted of long discussions. But they carried in them all the drama and character development demanded of any novel.

How did he do it? Those rules above, that’s how.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing lessons – amps to 11 with Pink Floyd!

A few years ago She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were sitting quietly at home watching the 483,986th TV re-run of The Sound of Music. It was a hot evening. The windows were open.

Julie Andrews got up to sing. And suddenly the room filled with sound. The anti-Sound Of Music. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Undistorted. In our lounge.

I thought it was the neighbours. But it wasn’t. It was someone four doors down and over the back fence, who wanted to fill the evening air with Messrs Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright at planet-engulfing volume.

Impressive. We were 75 metres from source. Yet the whole was crystal clear, balanced, without a skerrick of distortion.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable.

Usually, when someone whips amps to 11 all you get is the bass whoomph, which isn’t audible next to the speaker. It’s to do with the way the wave generates.

But not this. I’m talking perfect fidelity. That meant it was a really, really good sound system – set up by someone who knew precisely what they were doing. The secret word might be ‘Perreaux’ (Google it).

And they used this to play Pink Floyd. Sub-zero cool. What made it doubly amazing was the quality. Pink Floyd span the gamut of amplitudes and frequencies. Meaning that not only technically pure sound but also intentional distortion has to be amplified without further distortion, then conveyed over distance. I cannot say how amazing that was, to me at least.  (OK, I’m a geek… hey, it’s the 21st century. Geeks won the war for cool. Get over it.)

Welcome to the machine. We abandoned the Trapp family and went outside. Probably other neighbours hated it. But hey…

All this has a point when it comes to writing. Quality counts. Anybody can whip the amp to 11 – which in the writing sense means splurging out words.

Anybody can write. It’s taught at school, apparently. Can everybody write like Hemingway? Certainly not. And that is the issue. Getting to Hemingway level means evolving skills beyond the point of ‘unconscious incompetence’ into the tortured realms of apprenticeship – of ‘conscious incompetence’, of ‘conscious competence’ – and then ‘unconscious competence’, when writing is second nature.

Possibly all to a soundtrack of Pink Floyd. I like that idea. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 13: novels and novelability

In this series we’ve been exploring writing in all its forms. Today we’re starting a detailed look at one of the most popular forms of writing – fiction.

Jane Austen. Public domain, from http://www.wpclipart.com/famous/writer/writers_A_to_D/ Jane_Austen_coloured_version.jpg.html

Fiction, and particularly novel writing, is the writing that attracts the most interest. It’s where most people start. I was trained in it myself, way back when. Most ‘how to write’ training today is geared towards fiction, and I’ve noticed that a lot of online discussion is predicated on the assumption that any book being written will, by default, be a novel.

Not all books are, of course. But it’s true about a lot of the books that are written these days – and certainly that’s true of the books being self-published on Amazon.

Fiction is also where the money is. The only billionaire author, and most of its millionaires, are novellists.

So where did the ‘novel’ come from? The form we know and love today emerged in the late eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift had something to do with it. So did Jane Austen – she, in fact, is often regarded as the inventor of the novel in its modern form. That’s not quite true. But certainly she helped shape it. Specifically, she found new ways of engaging reader emotion – she created interesting characters and set them to interact on a stage identifiable to the audience.

In her classic Pride and Prejudice (1813) the main emotion was – well, pride. By modern standards Austen’s style was pompous, even clunky. Check this out:

“She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so  great man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still  more strange. She could only imagine however, at last, that she drew his notice  because there was a something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according  to his ideas of right, than in any other person present…” (Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

But that was perfectly acceptable in that age; Austen was a great novelist, a great story teller, and we can but lament at the way her premature death cut short her career.

Nor was Austen alone. In 1816, Mary Shelley took novel writing in different directions with Frankenstein, effectively a foray into science fiction. Novels, it seemed, did not have to be ‘real’ in order to engage their reader – indeed, one of their appeals was that they allowed readers to escape.

By the early nineteenth century, then, the modern novel was fairly on its way. Understanding how the novel journeyed over the next 200-odd years is handy to know if we want to write one – because it allows us to understand how the form has always been shaped in the specific by contemporary need, contemporary ideal – and it is still changing. Next week.

Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on why novels are such a popular first stop for people wanting to write? The creative urge? Expression of a story? All these things? I’d love to hear from you.

And have any of you seen  ’Ink and Incapability’, from Blackadder The Third (BBC 1988).

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: Write it now – the evolution of the novel; also more funnies, more writing tips, and some highly refined geekery.

Sixty second writing tips: a plan a day keeps the panic away

Ever been overwhelmed by the enormity of your writing? By the sheer scale of the task? Its complexity – especially as you start getting out to book length?

It’s something every writer slams into sooner or later. Especially if you’ve got a publishing deadline – one agreed with a publisher, or one you’ve created yourself to release a book.

There’s the writing, the revising, the proof-editing, the line-editing, the typesetting, the production process, the marketing plan the – aaaargh! You get the picture.

To me the answer’s in the planning – in identifying what has to be done, setting out the dependencies, identifying the critical time-constraints, then systematically working through them.

The twist I put on it – which I’m sure I’m not the only one to envisage – is that this works to any scale. Not just the big-ticket project of a book, but even figuring out how a writing session is going to proceed, before plunging into it.

It means I can figure out when and how I’m going to deal with correspondence, social networking, revisions, editing, the writing itself, and so on.

At that level, fifteen minutes sorting out what has to be done that day can save hours of floundering later.

Even ten minutes, actually. Time well spent. I find it’s handy. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 12: disentangling that idea splurge

Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring the way writing is structured, with an ever-closer focus.

My account of the ‘musket wars’, published by Penguin in 2011, was pretty hard to structure – took a lot of re-working via the ‘shuffle the pages’ technique – to get a lot of simultaneous social concepts into a single readable thread.

This last post on structure takes us to the deepest level – the way paragraphs and sentences are arranged.

One of the biggest problems most writers have to face is translating the way we actually think and imagine things – which is usually as a ‘simultaneous picture’ – into writing, which is a single linear thread.

It’s failure to tackle this problem, I think, that produces non-fiction in which half the side-points are relegated to footnotes. And fiction riddled with flash-backs.

The key to the problem is deconstruction – being able to take that ‘simultaneity’ of ideas and fit them together in linear form. What comes first? The approach we looked at last time – ‘organising principle’ – works at this level too.

The best starting point is that old adage of starting big and moving on to detail. Say you’re describing a scene from a character’s viewpoint. Their first impression will always be the big picture, moving on to the details as they notice them. The nature of how they notice those details may be a reflection of their character – remembering that fiction is a way of taking readers on an emotional journey.

It’s often harder in non-fiction, where the organising principle may not be chronology, but a theme or idea. Different components have equal weighting in the big picture – making it difficult to figure out which one might come first. But, again, organising principles help.

The key point to bear in mind for all writing – non-fiction and fiction alike – is that it is taking the reader on an emotional journey. And sometimes, the nature of that journey can itself become a device for ordering the content.

Next –  look at some of the nitty gritty of novel writing, genre content and other stuff.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more sixty second writing tips, inspirations, geekery – and a spot of history.

Sixty second writing tips: being professional

I’ve always said that professionalism counts for writers. Publishing is a business, so is writing, and professionalism gives an edge. To me it is:

1. Competence – understanding the field, what’s needed to write well, and being able to do it (a lot of my recent blog posts are about how to do this part).

2. Reliability and committment – honouring the spirit of agreements.

3. Accepting responsibility. If you’ve made a mistake, admit to it.  Understand how it happened – so you know not to repeat it next time.

4. Abstraction – I’ve said it before, and it deserves repeating. You are not your writing. It does not define your self-worth. If you get criticised or knocked back – don’t take it personally.

5. Modesty. You do what’s needed, get stuff done – and maybe some amazing stuff. But don’t let it give you airs. There is no room for a sense of self-superiority in this field.

Do these work for you? Do you have a definition of professionalism?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: getting fresh editing eyes by random dipping

One of my favourite writing tips is so well known it barely needs repeating. When you’ve written your first draft manuscript, stick it in a (metaphorical) drawer for a month and don’t look at it.

The idea is that you come back with fresh eyes.

“Hmmn…books. New fangled rubbish. They’ll never replace scrolls, you know”.

It sort of works, but like all cliches there are two problems with the idea. One is getting that month, especially if there is a deadline and the work has to be juggled between half a dozen other writing projects, along with all the impecunious demands of everyday life.

The other problem is that it’s too easy to re-awaken the old ideas – to lock back into the old thinking. Sometimes the ‘novelty factor’ lasts about a page and a half. Sometimes those old thoughts can creep up on you without you even really noticing.

But there are ways around it. Try this. Print the manuscript off and look at isolated pages, making sure you don’t start with the first one.

Does it grab you? No. Right - what’s missing from that page? Figure it out. Make notes on the page.

Now go to the next page, not one in order. Repeat.

What this does is highlight – and test – the ‘grabbability’ of your work – the power of your words to hold the reader. It also draws your ideas out in isolation – and that brings them into a stark relief. It’s a very different context from the steady step-wise progression of the writing from the beginning.

After you’ve dealt to the manuscript, it’s time to reorganise; get the pages back in order and start re-reading from the beginning – this time, taking those notes into account.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013