Remember Gandalf? He’s baaack….

Stars of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit have re-convened here in Wellington NZ for final pick-up shooting.

I took this just before the premier of the Hobbit movie in 2012.

I’m undecided whether I’ll see the rest of the trilogy. I saw the first – and wasn’t impressed.

My gripes? The cast couldn’t be faulted. Wonderful, wonderful performers. But The Hobbit (novel) was a tightly constructed hero journey. Jackson’s first-part movie wasn’t. It rambled. It brought sub-plots and details that Tolkien never wrote.

It seemed to veer between epic serious – on a scale well above the novel – and Jackson-style visual slapstick, which didn’t bear much resemblance to Tolkien’s quietly intellectual jokes.

I am a huge Tolkien fan. And a huge Jackson fan. Movies don’t have to follow books – but they do have to work as a movie.

This time? Meh.

Have you seen The Hobbit – what are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

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.

Sixty second writing tips: how J K Rowling twisted the tropes

One of the secrets to successful writing is offering something readers can identify with, but that has enough originality to be new. The same…but different.

Modern meets fantasy in another way – a pic I took a few years back of Kastel de Haar, near Utrecht, Netherlands.

J. K. Rowling’s shown us how it’s done. Back in the 1990s, Brit boarding school stories were dead, dead, dead. The world of ripping wheezes at the expense of The Beak, followed by clandestine visits to the tuck shop  with Bunter Major, was soooo 1930s.

Trad magic stories were pretty much dead too – I mean, spells, wizards and potions were so cliched. Put together, they should have worked even less well.

What Rowling did was genius – mashing up two cliches and giving them a twist. That came partly from the way she reinterpreted the spell-and wand trope, partly from the seven-story plot cycle, and partly from her style – easy, unadorned and well pitched for the readership. And now writing has its first billionaire author.

Time for the rest of us to follow suit. But not with school magic mashups. They’ve been done…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Writing is quality-to-time, not word-count

I am often bemused at the way we measure writing, these days, on word count.

Software rates us on it. Contests pivot on it. You can get widgets that graph word-count on a progress bar. It has become a goal of itself.

All of which, to me, stands against what writing is all about.

When I see someone announce – let’s say on Twitter – that they’ve just written 2000 words, I often say to myself ‘great, but were they the right words?’

And how much more time will be needed to get the finished words?

Let me explain.

To me, the goal of writing is to evoke emotion in a reader. That happens not through word count, but through content. The actual number of words is almost irrelevant in this sense – what we have to look for, instead, is the right words. Do they convey the message? Do they do so with proper structure.

So where does word count come in? It has two places. Structurally, word count is important, because the word count tells you the scale of the work – and from that, you can work out the scale of the relevant components. But it is not a goal. Writing isn’t about words; they are simply the vehicle for ideas, concepts and thoughts.

At professional level it is also a standard measure on which everything from books to  features can be commissioned and paid for. It means publishers can budget production to known scales, and it means authors can budget time, based on how long it will take to complete a piece with x-number of words.

That’s the other issue. Completing a piece to length is a very different matter from writing that number of words.

If I draft a book of 70,000 words, that’s great – but I know there’s a lot of work yet, even on those 70,000 words, before I can submit the MS to my publishers. Even when a complete manuscript goes to a publisher, there may yet be 100 hours spent going through it on my part, checking editorial changes and publisher proofs, or answering queries. All of which is essential to completing the book – and none of which adds word count.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing tips, ‘write it now’, geekery and more.

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.

Sixty second writing tips: getting entitled

One of the biggest challenges an author faces these days is the title. Those words are often the first thing a buyer knows about the book.

That’s why publishing contracts give the right to select title to the publisher – and their marketing departments. They’re up with the play on what’s selling, and usually way more experienced than the author at picking the words.

But self-publishers face the same issue. It’s an art as much as technique.

These days the wording is more crucial than ever. The title has to be snappy, up to the minute and filled with verve. It has to be informative – to sum up the book in one or two punchy words. My tips:

1. Be brief. One to three words are best.

2. But phrases can work, if they’re cool, obvious and grabby. A book I’m reading now – ‘How to think like a Neanderthal’ – is sheer genius.

3. Avoid transient fashion words. Nothing dates faster than today’s slang.

4. Get other opinions.

How do you develop titles for your books? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Jack Kerouac, cafe racers, writing and style

Another WordPress blogger suggested a while back that Jack Kerouac was the ‘café racer’ of writers. She was right, of course.

Ducati ‘Paul Smart’ 1000LE, one of only a handful imprted into New Zealand. In some senses it’s more stripped sports bike than classic cafe racer. I took this photo for a book I was writing on bikes in 2008.

That got me thinking – as good blog posts should. Cafe racers were simple, honest motorcycles, quintessential cool. They captured the freedom of lifestyle; road legal bikes you could race on the track. For me you can’t go past the Vincent Black Shadow. The first superbike and, for me, quintessential café racer. Those beasts could drag-race jet fighters – and win, at least until the jet took off. They appeared in 1948 and weren’t beaten for speed until Kawasaki turned up with the 750 Triple in 1973.

The message I got from the post was that Kerouac’s style – his approach, his authenticity, the feel – relates to writing in the same way that café racers relate to motorcycles.

Those three words again  – cool. Fast. Authentic. Kerouac was all these things. There was no doubt about cool.  The beat crowd defined it.

Speed? Kerouac blew On The Road through his typewriter in three weeks. And his stories were fast, too; On The Road, again, pushed at breakneck speed. Authentic? Kerouac went steps further than Hemingway when it came to authenticity. Sometimes what he wrote was literally real.

His was a quest for self in a youth generation who had spun out of the Great Depression and sought all the joy they could find in life.

He wrote real. Authenticity to himself; authenticity to reality as he saw it. Just like a café racer and the riding experience.

Can we learn from this? Absolutely. If we can find something that symbolises our style, like the café racer symbolises Kerouac, what can we then learn about ourselves?

Extending the point (as I always do), I wonder about other writers. J. K. Rowling, for instance, who I’d classify as the ‘family car’ of writers – a bit cliched in terms of ideas, but absolutely solid, reliable and competent (I can hear the scream from the Harry Potter fans…but I mean, magic wands and school stories? Reinvented cliche…but still cliche.)

Or Robert A. Heinlein, who was always looked on as an SF writer but really was an American writer, generally – tackling all the issues that needed tackling. Another realist. Solid. Conservative, yet with a twist that got you thinking. Full sports bike, maybe – Ducati? As opposed to someone like Michael Moorcock, whose writing I’d envisage more like a trail-bike – scorching off on his own very interesting direction with eager joy.

Who’s your favourite author…and what mode of transport – with lifestyle – do they remind you of?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 14: what a Dickens about novels

As we saw last time, the modern novel had its genesis in the late eighteenth century as a literary form designed to carry the reader on an emotional journey.

During the nineteenth century writers refined that and took it in new directions. But perhaps the biggest change came with the way writers published.

Charles Dickens, 1858. Public domain, from Wikimedia commons.

It was the culmination of a 200-year evolution. For a long time, publishing was ‘self-publishing’, and those who wrote needed to be independently wealthy. That changed during the seventeenth century, when it became possible for writers to earn a living by being paid to write. At first this was frowned upon; paid authors – mostly, it seems, working for newspapers in London’s Grub Street – were known as ‘Hackney’ or ‘Hack’ writers, a term that remains today as a derogatory moniker for a bad journalist, or a writer who appears to write for the money, not the dream. Pretty much the meaning it started with.

Those with a yen to write books still had to self-publish. Publishing houses would take money in return for producing the title. Or they might accept a title and buy it from the author, who earned nothing more. That changed with the emerging rights of authors under copyright law, but it was a slow process. The road effectively began in Britain in 1714 with the Statute of Anne. Other developments followed in Germany.

Authors did not begin to assert real rights over their work until the nineteenth century, though copyright was still far from ‘modern’ form. But from this emerged the royalty system. By this the author licensed somebody to use (publish) their intellectual property. In return they received a fee – a ’royalty’, which was a percentage of the returns on the sales. The publisher took on producing and marketing the work.

This was entrenched by the late nineteenth century and remains a keystone of mainstream writing today.  (I’ll post on the transactability of these rights and ‘moral right’ soon).

The popularity of reading -  hence opportunities for writers – grew as society changed. The rising middle classes of the nineteenth century Britain, in particular, had the leisure time to read. Many of them were also educated enough to be able to read - also new. Into this burgeoning market exploded something else – the steam driven press. Suddenly readers could get newspapers and books relatively cheaply and in bulk.

Writers had a good deal to say by this time; the nineteenth century was an age of ideological ferment as the world shook down from the trauma of the industrial revolution. Some of the world’s greatest literature emerged from the mix, and the doyen of them all was Charles Dickens, whose novels were serialised and who became the hero writer of his day. The public couldn’t get enough of his stories, at once serious, funny, sad, happy and always imbued with a razor sharp social commentary.

But behind people such as Dickens – or for that matter, Jules Verne, Charles Dodgson and Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) were a host of lesser novelists, authors of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ – stories that appeared, serialised, in news-stands. Stories to be read once and disposed of.

And then something else emerged; genre. Stories of a particular type written to meet a specific market – something possible only as the audience for books exploded into life

Next time.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: writing in the style of…

One of the hardest things writers face – even if everything else is on par – is that last detail of the art; the style. The actual choice of words.

These are what clothe the skeleton of structure, of content; they give a particular feel to the writing. It is the style –the choice and pattern of words – that makes a particular passage an author’s own.

Mastering style – having control of the words – is as important as any other aspect of writing. It’s also remarkably difficult to master.

So try this. One of the ways music composition is taught is to write something ‘in the style of…’ – forcing the  student to figure out just what composers such as Rachmaninov, Debussy, Bach and so forth actually did in order to get their characteristic sounds. (Last year, I watched 70s prog-rock icon and all round British comedian and musician Rick Wakeman play, live, a string of nursery rhymes “in the style of” these composers. Cool.)

It works for writing, too. Try it.  Pick your favourite author. Look at the way they’ve assembled the words – at the pacing, the vocabulary, the organisation of the sentences, the tone. Make notes. Then try it yourself. It’ll be slow at first, lots of trial and error – but after a while you’ll be able to write ‘in the style of…’

I’m not suggesting such pastiches should become your real style. You have to find your own voice. But working out how other people have done it takes you a long way towards doing that – and towards discovering a good deal more, often by surprise, about how others have done it.

Do you ever try writing ‘in the style of…’?

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.