Category: Structure

Desperately seeking elixir? #amwriting

7/5/2019

I wrote recently how, after a few uninspiring months, I’d been infected with a new novel idea. A few weeks on, I love the characters, the situation and the potential quirkiness of one of the voices, but I’ve tried to rein in my enthusiasm to nail the plot. As one of my writing goals of 2019 is to reflect on where I’m placed in the marketplace and in my writing journey, I’m exploring how to make my fiction more commercial (as well as more literary), which means not embarking on projects that might lack wide appeal.

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Pushing through the publishing bottleneck: is there an ingredient X?

1/9/2018

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Yesterday, on the last day of meteorological summer, I shelved my 100th book for the year. But even a reader as voracious as I am will never find time to read all the books she might enjoy. While the superabundance is great for readers, it’s less so for writers competing for their attention and time. However big and colourful our books, we’ve only one shoal in a pond so extensive we may never see, let alone touch, its banks.

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Should I stretch this short story to a novel?

27/8/2018

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One moonless night, when her daughter was but a few months old, Eve clawed back her silken baby skin and planted a bomb in her chest. It wasn’t as difficult as you’d imagine; a baby’s body is more malleable than an adult’s. Getting under her daughter’s skin was rather like peeling an orange. Or picking at the flap of a sealed envelope to slip an extra something inside.

It was only a small bomb, the size and shape of a button battery, albeit large in relation to her daughter. It was bigger, for example, than her daughter’s dainty fingernails, bigger than the snub of her nose. But, like a school uniform, the child would grow into it, grow until the bomb was eclipsed by the face of her wristwatch or an ornament she might hang from her ear.

I wouldn’t blame you if the opening has put you off my most recently published short story (or the length at over 3000 words) but, if you do choose to read it, you might be able to help me decide where, if anywhere, to take these ideas next.

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A lifetime of lies: Testament & Should You Ask Me

16/7/2018

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Can you rewrite your own history and get away with it? That’s what Joseph Silk and Mary Holmes, lead characters in these two new novels, seem to have done. Both have been motivated to avoid traumatic memories – but there are consequences. In Joseph’s case, it’s been the impact on his family; in Mary’s, it’s a lifetime of guilt. Both novels feature a bond between young and old. Both address aspects of the Second World War: Joseph takes his suffering under Nazi-inspired racism in Hungary to his grave; far away in relatively safe Dorset, the backdrop of war pushes Mary to confess. Read my reviews and see whether you sympathise with the decisions they took.

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Narrative structure, psychoanalytic theory and the grief that never goes

13/7/2018

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I sometimes wonder if there’s a fundamental incompatibility between my ambitions to improve as a writer and attract more readers, and my loyalty to my personal truth. Certainly the recent trend towards up lit seems at odds with my need to embrace both light and dark. And industry advice doesn’t always acknowledge the complexity of being human and that characters can be as motivated by loss and fear as by desire.

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Teenage fugitives: The Shepherd’s Hut & Sal

6/7/2018

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When teenagers flee the family home to fend for themselves, they swap one kind of brutality for another. And while their troubled lives will have forced them to develop survival skills in some areas, they are often more vulnerable than their peers in others, such as emotional literacy. But real-life tragedy can make engrossing fiction as you’ll find if you let the young narrators of these two novels lead you into the wilderness: Jaxie in Western Australia and Sal and her younger sister in Scotland. For real-life youth homelessness, mostly in urban areas, Centrepoint (in the UK) is worth supporting.

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Come into my cave! #amwriting

24/6/2018

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As Britain hurtles towards the cliff edge of Brexit, and the President of the United States pays compliments to a dastardly dictator while referring to migrants as animals, it’s as if we’ve learned nothing from the run up to the Second World War. If politics were fiction – if only! – we’d be approaching the crisis point known as the cave.

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Fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District: Reservoir 13 & Whistle in the Dark

3/5/2018

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Oh dear! As a Ranger in the Peak District, albeit only as a volunteer on alternate Sundays, I carry a sense of responsibility for the safety of visitors to the National Park. So it’s rather disconcerting to read about two teenage girls, on holiday from London, going missing there in a matter of weeks. Fortunately, both were characters in novels, and both providing the foundation for an engrossing story about the repercussions: the first for the residents of a fictional Derbyshire village; the second for the family of the girl who is found after four agonising days.

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Even loving marriages have secrets: How I Lose You & Fire Sermon

11/4/2018

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Two debut novels by women about women reviewing their (successful and stable) marriages in the context of an important relationship for one partner that’s not shared with the other. In the first, the wife’s passion for God and poetry leads her into the mind, arms and eventual bed of a man who isn’t her husband; in the second, the wife, emerging from her grief at her husband’s sudden death, becomes suspicious about the nature of his secret friendship with a woman he’s met on business trips abroad. Both authors employ non-linear structure to good effect.

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Genealogy: The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland & The One Who Wrote Destiny

5/4/2018

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When we find ourselves unmoored, we might be extra motivated to seek to consolidate our roots. That’s the slim connection between these two novels in which a woman confronting terrible loss decides to research her family tree. Both involve a story of migration: Jane Ashland’s ancestors moved from Norway to the USA; Neha’s in The One Who Wrote Destiny came from Kenya (and before that India) to the UK. For another novel about tracing the members of an extended family, see Kintu.

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In a word: Asymmetry & Magnetism

18/3/2018

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I couldn’t resist pairing these recently published, unconventionally structured, debut novels about relationships: their intriguing one-word titles are almost interchangeable, with Alice in Asymmetry magnetically drawn to (and later repulsed by) her much older lover and the mother-daughter relationship explored in Magnetism inherently asymmetrical. My reading experience of both was mixed, strongly engaging with the second halves significantly more than the first. See what you think.

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Two novel encounters with the wild: Under a Pole Star & Green Lion

21/8/2017

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A historical novel about Arctic exploration or a novel set in a near-future South Africa? A romance or an account of a relationship falling apart? A motherless girl or a fatherless boy? Wild animals or ice? Both of these novels explore the conflict and compassion that connects us to the natural world, but it was a bonus for me to read that the protagonist of Green Lion told his friend that his father was killed in a hunting accident in the Arctic, the setting of Under a Pole Star. Read on to see if I was right to pair these reviews.

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Three novels about people whose brains work differently

18/7/2017

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Okay, perhaps not the most elegant title to sum up the common thread between these three debut novels from small and innovative independent publishers. But they’re all, in very different ways, about life with a brain or mind that functions a little differently from average. In the first, we meet an elderly voice hearer on a mission to bring hope to his granddaughter. In the second, a retired teacher with dementia is convinced a former pupil can save him from the persecutory antics of his deceased father. The third takes the reader even further into the realms of fantasy as a teenager with unexplained blackouts is drawn into a world she thought existed only in her dreams.

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Bloody revolutions? The Last Summer & Birdcage Walk

5/3/2017

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In literature, as in life, revolution often entails blood loss and drama. In these reviews we eavesdrop first on an assassination plot at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, while the second features an unexplained domestic death against the backdrop of the French Revolution.

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Family dynamics: Swimming Lessons & Our Magic Hour

26/1/2017

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I decided to pair these novels after reading blurbs suggesting both were about young women adapting to significant losses: the mother’s disappearance in Swimming Lessons and a close friend’s suicide in Our Magic Hour. But, on reading the latter, I felt the main character’s issues predated that particular tragedy, originating with a highly ambivalent mother in a difficult marriage. Unfortunately for the character, but very accommodating for my reading and blogging schedule, the same applies to the first novel. I hope one or both of these will appeal but, if not, you’ll find several other posts and reviews on the theme of family dynamics if you follow the link.

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What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

20/1/2017

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Blinded by the sun as they walked slowly back to the car, they leaned towards each other. They felt wrong together, mismatched, a mistake taken too far. But from a short distance they looked like many couples did to outsiders – exclusive, close. From a greater distance, they looked like a single person.

Jack and Milly’s marriage is like the weather, with sun either too fierce or blocked by clouds. They inhabit a climate with myriad variations of hot and cold, seeming different from the inside than from outside, from morning or evening, when filtered through a prism of the promise of happiness or resignation to “for better or worse”.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

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Two novels about “Everything”

27/11/2016

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Not really, of course! But I thought it would be fun to combine my reviews of two novels with “Everything” in the title, especially when both explore the nature of memory and require the reader to work a little harder to figure out who is speaking sometimes. Oh, and they both have blue covers!

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All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

4/6/2016

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Upstate New York in the early 1970s and George and Catherine Clare move into a farmhouse at the foot of the hill. Previously, the hub of a working dairy farm, the house feels haunted by the woman who held it all together and, unbeknown to Catherine, died along with her husband in the master bedroom. Because of this unhappy legacy, the Clares got it cheap, which causes some resentment in the close-knit community centred on Chosen, the nearby town. Yet George, a professor of art history at the local college, charms them initially, but it’s Catherine, a former artist and now stay-at-home mother of three-year-old Franny, whom they take into their hearts. So everyone is shocked and saddened when George comes home one evening to find her with an axe through her head.

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Life circles: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

23/4/2016

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As a child, Lucy Barton was the strange kid no-one wanted to talk to, who, lacking a television, knew nothing of popular culture and who, according to the other kids, stank. At home, she and her two older siblings were emotionally neglected, often hungry, and periodically on the receiving end of a vicious slap. Lucy hung around at school at the end of the day for the warmth. Too small to have a library, there were nevertheless books in the classrooms and it was in books that Lucy discovered both a solution to her loneliness and her own secret desire to write.

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