Sixty second writing tips: rule-breaking gives your writing style – but avoid swill

Good writing pivots on good grammar. And, sometimes, creative use of grammatical rule-breaking. Like starting a sentence with a conjunction.

The purpose of breaking grammar rules is to lend an edge to your personal style, to set your work apart from others. But not to lose the meaning. The trick is knowing which ones to break. Break the wrong ones, and you’ll simply be treated as inept.

Rules not to break are the ones that create clarity – that are there for purpose.  The ones that can be broken are those that don’t change meaning. For example, it’s OK to begin sentences with conjunctions, as I did earlier and which is a pretty common advertising technique.

Other favourites of mine include one-word sentences (which I have a LOT of trouble getting past publishers’ editorial ‘fixes’) and occasional long list-style sentences. Tolkien was good at these, too, when he described his Middle Earth settings. Used sparingly, they can be effective. And that, I guess, is the other point about style from rule breaking – it has to be sparing. Otherwise the effect’s lost.

Do you have a favourite grammar rule to break?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

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 15: the rise and rise of the genre monster

One of the big literary inventions of the nineteenth century was one that transformed the novel-writing scene. Genre.

When novels first emerged in the early part of the century they were, as often as not, social commentaries. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was typical. So were Charles Dickens’ various stories. They were joined by others that we might , indeed, call ‘genre’ – notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But for a long while these things were few and far between.

Jules Verne, public domain from Wikimedia.

That changed with the commercialisation of novel writing – with the advent of the steam driven printing press, with the advent of mechanisms for mass-producing and mass-selling novels to the rising urban middle classes of the developing world who had the leisure time – and the spare cash – to buy books and then read them.

One of the earliest genres was science fiction, a device for social commentary. Jules Verne introduced the world to it, using his ‘science fiction’ stories –really, travel romances – to lampoon national cliches; German stern-ness and order (Professor Lidenbrock/Journey To The Centre of The Earth), American go-getting (From the Earth to the Moon) and British reserve (Phileas Fogg/Around The World In Eighty Days) among them.

H. G. Wells used science fiction for social commentary towards the end of the century. When five British Maxim gun crews slaughtered 1500 spear-wielding Matabele at the Battle of the Shangani river in October 1893 – and another 2500 a week or so later at Bembese - the world was horrified.  ‘Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun/and they have not,’ Hilaire Belloc intoned in The Modern Traveller, a little later. From that also emerged Wells’s The War Of The Worlds, a remarkably slim book pivoting on one question; how would the British feel if a superior technology descended upon London?

Detective stories flourished. Conan Doyle effectively popularised and defined the ‘short story’ format for them at the end of the nineteenth century – giving the world one of its most iconic and enduring literary characters in the process.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans thrilled to their own genre – westernsl, celebrating the myths of frontier. A form epitomised by Zane Grey, who spent periods big-game fishing in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.

The point was that popular genres changed as society changed. Cowboy stories went in and out, detective stories rose and fell. Science fiction, which began life for social satire and comment, retained that function into the twentieth century – but became a way of popularising tech-wonders.

If anything, genre change is moving at hyper-speed on the back of the web revolution.  We have to keep up with – and ahead of – the trend if we’re to succeed.

Urban fantasy, anyone?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: writing by layers

One of the techniques I use to get structured written content assembled quickly is to write it in layers.

If you’re daunted by the complexity of what you have to write – be it non-fiction or the complexities of a novel with of its character arcs, plot, dialogue, need for pacing and so forth, try this.

I’ll often start with the skeleton of a chapter or sequence – the main thrust of what I want to say.

Then I’ll go back and add a layer – add nuances to the argument, build points or add detail. It might be a particular type of detail, for instance.

Then I’ll go back again – and add another layer, like ‘colour’.

About this time I’ll often re-style it around the more complex nature of the content.

I guess the analogy is similar to sculpture or painting – you start with the broadest strokes covering the whole canvas, then go back and detail it in sequence.

It’s the inverse of the method by which you totally finish one part before moving on to the other. The advantage is that it gives you that structural overview from the outset.

Does this work for you? Have you ever tried this approach before?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A visit to Tyne Cot cemetery and the solemnity of remembrance

It is nine years since I stood under the Menin Gate on ANZAC day, with other New Zealanders, marking our day of national memorial for the wars of the twentieth century.

My photo of soldiers’ graves at Tyne Cot, 2004.

The gate spans the Menin Road that leads out of Ypres, a town in Flanders; and during the First World War, soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and other places walked down that road, usually to their deaths. Part of that road, not far from the town, was under German artillery fire from 1915 until 1918; Hellfire Corner, it was called, and hessian screens were raised – not to stop the shells, but to prevent anyone sniping the troops. The gate, a huge arch, is lined with the names of soldiers who disappeared, their bodies never found, in the churned muck of the trenches.

Later, my wife and I walked the quiet lawns of Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the area and a silent reminder of the lethality of the Western Front. A rotunda carried names – including those of New Zealanders – who had fallen during the Western Front campaign, and were never found.

For me that campaign defined the futility of the human condition – the way we intellectualise ourselves into corners. Militarily it was a cleft stick; the triumph of defence over offence. Industrial technology could bring men to a battlefield in unprecedented numbers. It expanded the battlefield to colossal scales. However, it could not move men on it, nor could infantry overcome the barriers posed by machine gun and wire. Once that had developed it was difficult to find a military way out, without new technologies – which were developed. But that took time, and meanwhile men died, and political solutions were never explored.

At the time, of course, it seemed rational and logical. But that is true, I think, of every war humanity has fought through its long history.

We keep falling into wars, just as we keep insisting that we must never fight them again. It is a relentless cycle which, I fear, is a part of the human condition.

As I walked those silent gravestones in 2004 – and as I sit here now remembering the solemnnity of that day, and thinking about the intellectualised rationality, the stubbornness and the horrors of the war that led to these deaths - it gives pause for thought.

What do you figure on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

ANZAC Day 2013: remembering why we fought

It’s ANZAC Day this week in New Zealand – 25 April,  our equivalent of Memorial Day in the US or Armistice Day in Britain.

It’s iconoclastic. Most nations remember their military dead on days when a war ended – typically, for Commonwealth countries, 11 November, when the guns fell silent over the Western Front in 1918.

But not New Zealand and Australia. Here we remember our war dead on the day we began our first big overseas military campaign, the ground assault on Gallipoli that began on 25 April 1915.

The day is tied into our national identity. That wasn’t always the case. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) embarked on that campaign it was to do duty for Empire – for Britain, a country we called ‘home’ even though most of our young men had never been there.

I used to write histories of our twentieth century wars. In my final foray into that field, Shattered Glory (Penguin 2010), I explored the virtually spontaneous celebrations on 25 April 1916, the anniversary of the landings – at which time the Gallipoli campaign was turned, by sleight of hand, from an ignominious defeat (which it was) into a triumph of New Zealand’s contribution to Empire.

It became nationalist towards the end of the war, a spontaneous focus for grief flowing from the terrible death toll of the Western Front, New Zealand’s most lethal campaign of all time and the definition of what the First World War meant, socially and historically.

Of late, 25 April has become New Zealand’s de-facto national day – a moment to remember those who gave their lives – the young men who were never wearied by age.

To me it is also a day to ask a simple question. Why? Why did they go to war?

It is easy to suppose that young men were fooled by Boys’ Own images of war as glorious, a superior sports event that showered honour on soldiers, family and especially school.

I have found letters and diaries suggesting that this may have been true for the Boer War of 1899-1902, our first military campaign. But not the First World War. Not really. Most of the young Kiwis who went to fight even in 1914 knew what war entailed, even if they had yet to learn the true lethality of industrial age fire-power. That lesson had been driven home by 1916; and certainly most of their sons were cynical enough in 1939, when Europe again plunged into war and New Zealand’s young men flocked to sign up.

They did not go because it was glorious. They went because it was necessary.

We forget how close the world was, then, to a new dark age. In the 1930s democracy was but one of three competing systems, and it was on the back foot. In New Zealand of the day, the government of Michael Joseph Savage opposed fascism wherever it stood, even at risk of annoying a British government that felt appeasement was a cheaper option. But Savage was right. So was Winston Churchill, a politician, writer and historian who knew very well what both Nazi and Communist flavours of totalitarianism stood for. But such voices of warning were not heard until almost too late. And for a while in 1940-41, as Britain and her Comonwealth stood alone as the last main bastions of civilised western democracy outside the United States, things stood on a knife edge.

New Zealand’s part in that war took our fighting division from Greece to Crete to Egypt to the Western Desert to Syria, to Libya, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and finally Italy and – in the last hectic days of the struggle – Trieste. They did so under a remarkable commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (3 bars), etc. (It is nearly a decade since Penguin published my biography of this incredible man; I still think it is one of my best books).

Other Kiwis fought with our navy, with the Royal Navy and with the Merchant Marine. Still others fought in the skies, with the RNZAF and RAF among other services. And we had a presence in the Pacific, where a New Zealander, Major-General Sir Harold Barrowclough, led forces that included a US contingent under Richard M. Nixon. Yes, that Richard M. Nixon.

All this was done not for glory, or rewards of heroism, but because it had to be done. Whatever it took. The alternatives – a world dominated by Nazi evil, fuelled by what Churchill called the ‘dark lights of perverted science’, were too horrible to contemplate. And we knew it.

Today we must remember those who died to make the world a better place, safe for democracy - who helped make the modern world what it is. Both here in New Zealand – and around the world.

Please join me in remembering them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Introducing the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process

Welcome to the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process, designed to create the maximum possible editorial confusion while keeping the content as far from completion as possible. As used by civil servants.

1. Insert the word ‘final’ into the filename as early as possible.

2. When it’s edited (again), create a relative qualifier. ‘New final’, as opposed to ‘old final’.

3. Move on to the ‘final FINAL’.

4. Then the ‘new final FINAL’.

5. Then the ‘updated new final FINAL.’

6. Decide the ‘old updated new final FINAL’ is better after all.

7. Ignore the ‘last modified’ date and send one of them randomly to the publisher.

8. Discover they typeset the wrong version, decide to edit one into the other.

9. Make changes. Tell the publisher that’s it.

10. Make more changes. Tell the publisher it’s just two or three little fixes.

11. Look at dozens of random pages, finding something to change every time, each of which is the ‘very last’. Send them, individually, to the publisher at erratic intervals.

12. On receiving the printed copy, open the document. Spot something. Time for a second edition. Go back to (1).

Now, I made this up for laughs…but I have a horrible feeling that it happens, in Dilbertian offices. I hope I’m wrong about that.

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