RESEARCHING TIME, PLACE AND INCIDENT
Every story takes place somewhere and wherever that is you must make sure you know the location, historical period and culture accurately. Don’t guess. While you may create an incident or a story that never happened, where and how and the reactions of the people at the time to the incident or story must be believable. The social and political environment, tools used, common beliefs, education, dress, food, customs, in particular language construction, common slang and argot, social differences and dialogue must be accurate. You owe it to your reader or fourth protagonist to take her into a world that truly existed. Make one major mistake and your reader will being to doubt the veracity of some of the other facts in your writing. Tiny things count – for instance, don’t have a character changing blades in a razor before the safety razor was invented. In my first novel, The Power of One, I had a major character use his beloved Hasselblad camera shortly before it was invented. I received over a thousand letters worldwide correcting me, including one from the Swedish manufacturer begging me to nevertheless retain it in the novel.
Stick to the verifiable facts unless, of course, you are writing fantasy, but it’s as well to be careful with this genre also and remain consistent in all of the usual societal concerns, even if your ‘take place’ is in an imagined world.
THE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
There is a phenomenon that takes place with the fourth protagonist or reader when she enters your book in that she temporarily suspends her critical analysis and takes you at your word. She accepts your larger-than-life characters and inwardly agrees it’s your story and she goes along with it and even becomes a part of it. But if you state something she knows to be inaccurate or impossible at the time in which you are writing then the invisible band that connects her to your narrative snaps. This suspension of disbelief is critical to maintain if you are to enjoy a relationship with your reader, so be careful with your facts – if they can be checked then you must do your homework.
MAINTAINING NARRATIVE TENSION AND CREATING ‘RELEVANT SURPRISE’
Tension – keeping your prose tight and your action moving forward – is essential in writing for a popular audience. We talked earlier about the dreaded marshlands and the story-boat but this is even further caution. You are writing popular fiction and you will only endure if it remains that way. Few things are less popular than a book that is self-indulgent and meanders ever onwards.
To my mind every chapter, short or long, should contain sufficient of your story to be a story in its own right – almost a complete passage with a beginning, middle and end. But it has to be more than this. Each chapter must build excitement and tension or ‘want to know’ by the reader so that she feels compelled to continue.
Here is a mnemonic I have evolved to illustrate the manner and flow or momentum of a popular novel: the saw on its back, teeth facing upwards, with each cutting edge a chapter and consecutively rising a fraction higher – in other words, bringing more tension to bear until the last big cut when the story ends.
I have termed this tension that resolves at the very top of the saw-tooth – or end of the chapter – as ‘relevant surprise’. It’s where the reader learns something about the character or story she didn’t anticipate and could never have guessed would occur – something that drives the story onwards in an unexpected though relevant way. ‘Wow! I’d never have guessed that was going to happen’ is what you hope the reader will be saying inwardly as she reaches the end of each chapter.
Usually, but not always, this relevant surprise factor will be where you begin the next chapter. Yes, it’s hard to do, but it’s also excellent to dare your genius to walk the wildest unknown way. Unpredictability is often one of the more important reasons why we read books. Witness the huge popularity of crime novels that almost exclusively deal in a storyline intended to keep the reader guessing the outcome. Also, by the way, many crime writers persist in using a larger-than-life major character previously known to the reader in every book they write. It’s been going sufficiently long now for it not to be a fluke – a character the reader knows and loves and who will keep her guessing until the very end. Witness Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple and a host of others who have lasted more than a century.
So, don’t make the mistake of thinking that relevant surprise doesn’t belong to the genre in which you are writing. In fact it could be said, along with ‘character is plot’ to be the very essence of storytelling and your work of fiction is unlikely to be an exception.
Keep the tension going and work out the twists and turns every good character undergoes and also the quirks of personality that cause them to do or undertake relevant but surprising-to-the-reader events.
As a possible tip that may be helpful to you, before I start writing, in evolving my relevant surprise factor, I often take the chapter I’m writing to my daily twenty- minute thinking session. You may wish to try this method, sit quietly somewhere, though not necessarily at your desk, and think exclusively about your storyline and chapter conclusion. Isolating a writing problem from the thought clutter of everyday life can have surprising results.
BUM GLUE
Writing is about practice, and practice takes time. I call this ‘bum glue’ – that is, time spent writing. Life is a busy process and sometimes we ‘back boiler’ the things that, to complete the metaphor, should be allowed to go ‘full steam ahead’. If you are going to be a successful writer you have to allocate time to your manuscript. Practice and more practice is a process that never stops, but thankfully it is always rewarding in the end. This is because writing requires thinking at a deeper level than most things, and most writers find that they grow intellectually in the process of writing.
As humans we were given the gift of speech and with it came the gift of imagination. We are able to imagine new horizons, new developments and then attempt to visit them or bring them about. Without imagination we’d still be grunting at each other clothed in animal skins and living in a cave.
As a writer the gift of imagination and the insights that come with it are especially important. If you dedicate time to your writing you will become a deeper thinker – the how, why, when and where of the process we refer to as being completely alive becomes more easily understood. You are now a storyteller. It is your job to explain to the rest of us who we are, where we came from and where we might be going. Dare I say it, but writing, hard as it is, has its own reward.
Allocate the time to practise your writing. In so far as it is possible, be consistent with this time frame and don’t let anything or anyone take priority. Give your writing as much time as you can possibly scrape together in a busy life. Not a few moments here and there but a considered time you allocate each week when you apply bum glue and get down to writing.
I must warn you, although I’m sure your own experience has taught you, that writing is among the most difficult things you will ever undertake. Difficult tasks require time and thought and the more of both you give them the easier they become.
However, writing is a task that is never really easy. This is because there is no limit to where it can take you and unlike a mountain, you will never reach the top. On every occasion after placing the last period onto the final page of a novel I say to myself, ‘This time they are going to find out I’m no good.’ We write because we have to or love to or, more than anything else, want to – and thank God we do. Without artists, writers, singers, dancers, actors the world would be a sorry place. But remember, the first words in the Big Book, ‘In the beginning was the word.’
‘I AM A WRITER’
Repeat this as a mantra last thing before you fall asleep and the moment you wake up in the morning. We all know the human brain responds to repetition and if you’re prepared to put in the work you will surely get the desired result. But no disclaimers or prefacing. ‘I am a writer’ – nothing less. When you sit down to glue your bum to your writing chair this must be your mindset.
Good luck and ne
ver give up.
THE THING THAT MAKES ME HAPPIEST in life is growing something. I still marvel at the fact I can bury a bulb in soil and it will transform into something so beautiful. If you look in my greenhouse right now you’ll see all the summer vegetables we’re going to eat. I’ve sowed the seedlings, they’re up, they’re in there, and in about three or four weeks time I will transplant them to my garden and watch them grow. Soon, they will feed us.
I’ve made the soil from mulch. Everything we eat in this house goes into a bin and gets turned into soil. Every leaf that falls off the trees in the garden has been collected and gets turned into soil so that I’m in this process of turning everything over – the soil of my garden has been made by the food that we’ve eaten, and by the skins of oranges and by the leaves that fell off the trees in autumn. And then to watch something grow, this miracle of growth! Right now if you look into the garden you can see the daffodils, but I can remember selecting the bulbs and spending hours sowing them. And if you look in about three weeks time, the tulips will start coming out, and then the pansies for spring. For me that is just a miracle – the growth, the business of starting.
And children are the same. Children are miracles to me. See a small child growing, he has a point of view, and this small boy is gonna be, one day, something special – who knows. Growth. The business of growing up, and growing up properly, fascinates me. So plants for me are everything.
EXCERPT FROM PENGUIN TV INTERVIEW
WITH BRYCE COURTENAY, 2012
ON MY SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY, all my mates had coffee together and I said, ‘Fellas, I’ve got a present for you, I’ve got a present for you. I’m going to stop, this is my seventieth birthday, I’m going to stop bullshitting!’
And they all went, ‘No, no! Don’t do that! That would destroy everything, that would mess up everything! No, no, no, NO!’
Now I don’t know where you take it from there.
I’ve been called a liar, I’ve been called a bullshit artist, I’ve been called all of those things. I am a storyteller and I’m not sure that some of it isn’t fair comment in the sense that it is very difficult for me to look a fact in the eye and see it, like a small naked actual fact. I like to put a sort of top hat on a fact and dress him in a silk shirt and a pair of striped pants and a couple of tap shoes and then let him do a bit of a tap dance. I am liable to take facts and dress them up and make them work for me.
And perhaps, you know, if you’re being kind you’d call it storytelling and if you want to be crude, if you want to be rude and if you want to be nasty you’d call it bullshitting – and it may in fact be an amalgam of both. But the point is it is very hard for me to look a naked fact in the eye and not want to do something with it – with that fact.
Because nothing I was taught – I mean nothing! – nothing I was taught at school has proved to be true. The atom was supposed to be the smallest thing that ever existed. We know the quark is smaller. Every single scientific fact, every thing that people said ‘This is the definite truth’ about has been proved to be bullshit and it has proved to be different.
And two people watching the same car accident have a totally different recall of what happened, so if storytellers didn’t make facts tap dance then where would we be? I mean we’d all be looking at each other trying to think of some sort of undressed, tiny, small quivering truth and yes, there are truths you have to tell, but I think I can say in my defence, I have never told a story – or, to put it crudely, bullshitted – to hurt anybody or to gain anything from it, or to get richer, or to impress anybody. I’ve done it for the sake of the story. For me the story is everything, and sometimes one translation of the story isn’t another person’s translation. And sometimes I hear my mates say, ‘Oh, shit – here we go, kid’ as I extrapolate on something. But I know they love it – they love it, because it makes the fact dance, and dancing facts are what it’s all about. If we lived life factually, as exactly as it’s supposed to be – as the Roman Catholic priest, or the Anglican minister or the Buddhist tells you it has to be – God, wouldn’t it be miserable?!
All I know is, I don’t know any other way.
EXCERPT FROM PENGUIN TV INTERVIEW
WITH BRYCE COURTENAY, 2012
AS I HAVE NO FAMILY BACKGROUND concerning music, it has largely been a voyage of self-discovery. I have a fairly eclectic taste and nothing you could call highbrow. But what little I know has given me a great deal of pleasure and I write with classical music playing on the radio all day.
I first discovered Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner when I was working in high explosives underground in the Rhone Antelope Copper Mines in what is now known as Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia. The detritus of the world washed up there, ex-Nazi SS troops and officers, the scum of the earth. It was a dangerous job, but I needed the money for university in England. And it gave me an enormous lust for life; every night I faced the prospect of not coming out alive, but it paid handsomely. What you could earn in three or four years somewhere else, I could earn in a year.
I was staying in the singles quarters, which was unofficially run by a bunch of former Nazi SS who had escaped from Germany after the war and, like so many other ingrates and misfits, had come to Central Africa where questions as to your background remained unasked. They were a bunch of thugs, but one or two of them loved Beethoven and Wagner and I’d hear this music coming from their quarters. I liked what I heard and so started searching for more, eventually discovering Brahms, Bruch, Bach and many, many others. Classical music has since become a lifetime passion. Along the way I also discovered and grew to love jazz. And then of course the Beatles and Bob Dylan – and I’ll even admit to loving some of the earlier country and western.
Throughout Jack of Diamonds I’ve weaved some of my favourite pieces of music and for a little bit of fun, even had Jack meet up with some of my favourite performers! Hope you enjoy discovering these musical references and that you also find beauty and inspiration, peace and solace in music – which has the capacity to enrich our very existence.
EXCERPT FROM PENGUIN TV INTERVIEW
WITH BRYCE COURTENAY, 2012
I FIND MYSELF IN THE UNFORTUNATE PROCESS of slowly dying. I don’t mean the way we all are, each day twenty-four hours nearer to the ultimate demise, but slowly, because I have a fairly accurate use-by date – in fact, a matter of months to live.
A sudden death at old age, for instance a heart attack, has the disadvantage of not being able to say farewell to those you love. On the other hand, given always that you’ve reached a ripe old age, it means those who were obliged to care for you can get over the grieving process and get on with their lives while keeping, one hopes, the sweet thoughts about time spent together and happily discarding the negative ones.
In my case I have a wife who can look forward to another quarter of a century of good life and I simply hate the idea of her having to use some of that precious time processing my dying. Of course, my greatest desire would be to remain intellectually viable and physically capable until the very last moment when I finally shut my eyes, my last thought being that I have enjoyed a vastly fortunate life, and die in the presence of a woman I love with all my heart.
While I don’t wish to dwell on the circumstances of my birth, a quick reprise. I was born illegitimately and to a single mother and placed in an orphanage at three months – at the time a quite common circumstance for unmarried women without ongoing and committed male partners. I was born in 1933 almost plumb in the centre of the Great Depression, when the financial world was in freefall and no government could even contemplate social or financial help for a woman finding herself single and with a child – in fact, in my mother’s case two children. The orphanages in South Africa were crowded with such children.
I was then taken out and returned on several occasions to various institutions as my mother attempted and failed to make a home for my sister Rosemary and myself. Quite how many times we shuffled from one institution to another I can’t say, as I wa
s too young to recall most of them. Finally at around seven I was removed from the Boys Hostel in a small town aptly named Duiwelskloof (Devil’s Canyon) in rural Northern Transvaal. From here I returned to my mother’s childhood home where my mother took care of my grandfather in a small town in the Eastern Transvaal named Barberton.
My mother was a dressmaker – not a good vocation when nobody could afford to purchase clothes. I guess we were poor, although the term ‘socially deprived’ had probably not yet been coined and anyway, it didn’t seem of importance as society had only just survived the bumpy ride of the Great Depression and World War II had commenced.
At the age of seven or eight and back with my mother and grandfather I can’t recall ever feeling deprived. In a small town kids are all equal and the boys all went around barefooted wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a shirt (no underpants), even for school and, more importantly, even to meet God at Sunday school. You could always tell the poorer girls as they seldom wore a ribbon in their hair (only to Sunday school) and their plaits were tied with two small pieces of twine, rubber bands being unavailable due to the war effort.
It used to be thought that what happens in the first seven years of a child’s life will vastly influence its remainder. I only make these early years known to point out that the presumption that difficult circumstances in early life, rather than leading to an unfortunate outcome, have in my case led to a most fortunate one. There’s nothing quite like starting on the bottom rung of the social ladder and then learning to recognise each rung as you attempt to step ever upwards. I have always thought that kids raised with parents placed somewhere on the middle or upper range of the social ladder must find it difficult to know in what direction their lives are headed.
The Silver Moon Page 5