May, 2010

“You can type this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”
– Harrison Ford to George Lucas, during the filming of Star Wars

A writer’s voice is the product of many years’ learning by doing. Then — just when you start to get good at it — they’ll tell you you’ve got ‘a good ear for dialogue’.

It’s meant to be a compliment, I think; they’re calling you a natural. But it’s a fallacy, just a cliché passed from generation to generation of critics the way kids transmit nursery rhymes in the playground. It seeks to confirm the lie that writers are recording angels, huddled on buses,  in pubs and coffee shops with notebooks in furtive hand, jotting down other peoples’ bon mots.

Truth is, there isn’t much point in listening to what people say, because what people say isn’t usually all that interesting. It’s critically important, however, for any writer to spend as much time as possible listening to how people speak.

Which is a very different thing. It’s a distinction you have to appreciate if you want to spend your professional life putting words into the mouths of imaginary people

Anyone can write a bunch of talking, but talking isn’t dialogue. Like every other word in your novel, dialogue is there to do a job — a number of jobs, in fact. It needs to move the story forward, to give information, to intensify characterisation. Ideally, it should do all three at once.

This is an extract (chosen almost at random) from Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, the story of working-class Irish kids forming a soul band in the Dublin of the 1980s:

— What’s wrong with our ordin’y names? Dean wanted to know.

— Nothin’, Dean, said Jimmy. — Nothin’ at all.

— Well, then?

— Look, said Jimmy. Take Joey. He’s Joey Fagan, righ’?

— Plain ordin’ry Joey Fagan. An ordin’ry little bollix.

— That’s me, Brother, said Joey the Lips. — I’m the Jesus of Ordinary.

— But when he goes on stage, he’s Joey the Lips Fagan.

— So?

— So, he’s not ordin’y up there. He’s special. He needs a new name.

— Soul is dignity, Joey the Lips reminded them.

— What’s dignified abou’ a stupid name like the fuckin’ Lips?

This satisfies all three criteria: the story is moved forward, information is given, and as for intensifying character – well, don’t you know these people, even from this tiny extract? Can’t you see them and hear them?

Would-be novelists worried about their comparative lack of dexterity often decide their dialogue is insufficiently ‘realistic’. Attempting to compensate, they can tend to the sin of the ‘said bookism’ – using an artificial verb to replace the simple word ‘said’ — ‘He asked’, ‘she explained’, ‘she shuddered’, ‘he shouted’: these are said bookisms that wrench you directly from the story, remind you that you’re reading, stop you believing.

Elmore Leonard put it best, as he often does: ‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.’

Said bookisms are to be shunned. This is one of the very few cardinal rules that should never, ever be broken, not even if you’re a genius … unless you’re a genius trying to write like an amateur.

In fact Roddy Doyle’s dialogue, for all its vivacity, isn’t realistic at all. It removes the ers, the ums, the pauses, the failed interjections. It comes in late, it does what it needs to do, it gets out early. It improves on reality. All good dialogue is the consequence of such meticulous artifice. Lord knows, David Mamet probably never heard anyone having a conversation anything like this:

No. What do you mean? Have I talked to him about this?

Yes. I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just …

No, we’re just …

We’re just ‘talking’ about it.

We’re just speaking about it … as an idea.

As an idea.

Yes.

We’re not actually talking about it.

No.

Yet it sounds completely true. (It’s from Glengarry, Glen Ross.)

This sounds true, too – but in a different way:

The girl came out in her robe and put her arms round the boy.

Hey, the boy said.

I’m sorry, the girl said.

It’s all right, the boy said.

I didn’t mean to snap like that.

It was my fault, he said.

You sit down, the girl said. How does a waffle sound with bacon?

That’s from a story called ‘Everything Stuck to Him’ by Raymond Carver. It’s commonplace; nobody seems to be saying much of anything – not with much ingenuity, anyway. But it says everything about these characters; their lives, their history, their age, their relationship, even their future

You’ll note that in each of these examples of impeccable craftsmanship, none of the characters are really talking about what they appear to be talking about. There’s an undercurrent, a deeper meaning. There’s something bigger they want to say. The dialogue shows more than it tells. It has dramatic purpose. Which is about as far from everyday conversation as it’s possible to be.

So if you think you’ve got a tin ear for dialogue, you’re probably wrong. Chances are, you’re simply trying to make dialogue do the wrong job; you’re trying to make it sound like people talking.

To write good dialogue you don’t need to carry a notepad and pencil, and you don’t need a ‘good ear’ for what people say. You need to hear what people mean, which often means you need to hear what they’re not saying. Then you have to work out how to make your readers hear it, too.

If there’s a secret ingredient, that’s it.

(A version of this article appears in Booknotes magazine, Autumn 2010)

May, 2010

You may’ve noticed this occasional blog has been a bit more occasional over the last few weeks.  I’m still writing at the same rate, but the “spare” time I used to maintain Wordcount and do other things (like step away from the laptop) has been used up by the impending launch of my new TV crime drama Luther (BBC One, May 4th, 9 p.m.)  Not least of this, I’ve had to do about a dozen written interviews … which if nothing else has been an interesting exercise in answering similar questions  in different ways.  I’m hoping  Wordcount will return to some kind of regularity next week, but right this moment I’m finding it hard to see past the first episode of  Luther actually being broadcast … after all that work, I’m strangely reluctant to see it loosed into the world. Even after the incredible press we’ve had, this is probably the most nervous I’ve been since the day I got married.

(On the plus side, it’s given me an idea for a post about what it’s like to see your book in the shops for the first time … and how what you feel may not be what you always expected)

Meantime, here’s my latest blog entry, written not for Wordcount but for the BBC. It’s edited somewhat, to conform to their house style:

The character that became Detective Chief Inspector John Luther was pinging round my head long before he had a name – or I had any idea how to use him.

He started as means to connect two ideas from different genres within the broad church of crime fiction. Luther has some of the Sherlock Holmes about him – some of that disinterested analytical genius.

Read the rest on the BBC’s website.

April, 2010

In an early post on this not-quite-blog, I wrote

…one night I woke at 2 a.m. and had the idea. It popped into my head like the answer to a random question on a quiz show. I dashed out of bed and wrote a very rough outline in about half an hour.

There followed a number of emails saying – an outline in half an hour? Seriously?

As much as I’d love simply to grunt my self-satisfied assent, the true answer is -

Well, there are outline and outlines.

Five minutes ago I Googled “novel + outline”, only to find myself bedazzled and aghast at the bountiful harvest of advice that came avalanching towards me. The first link recommended the “Snowflake method” which I found too terrifying to gaze upon, lest it blind me. More generally, there seems to be lot of talk about “obstacles” and “primary goals”, all that stuff.

But here’s my problem with outlines as they’re commonly conceived — it seems to me they’re essentially paradoxical; an abstract of a story that doesn’t exist yet. How can you be expected to know this stuff if you haven’t written the story yet?

Instead of putting myself through that grotesque, illogical torment, I jot down a list of very simple questions. As I work through the list, answering them….a story emerges.

This is easier to show than describe. So below, copied verbatim from a longhand scrawl in an elderly notebook, is my “outline” for the novel that became Burial.

Two men guilty of unsolved murder of teenager – forge normal lives – killing comes back to haunt them

Viewed from a certain angle, this rough idea is also a complete three-act structure — the beginning, middle and end of a story. In order to flesh it out, certain elementary questions clearly need to be asked, specifically: what men? What unsolved murder?

I think of each such question as a way-station, or resting-place. The trick is to navigate from each way-station to the next, without ever getting too far ahead of yourself. So I began writing Burial like this -

• okay, so who are these two men?
• How do they know each other?
  
• Do they know each other?

The answers became the first few chapters, by which time I’d arrived at the second significant way-station:

• guilty of unsolved murder of teenager

Which I addressed by asking yet more basic questions:

• How?
• Where?
• Was it deliberate?
• If so, why?
• Was it an accident?
• If so, how?
• Who is the teenager?
• Someone they know?
• (Then how come they don’t get caught?)
• Someone they don’t know?
• (Then how do they meet?)
• At a party!?
• Whose party?

So Burial got written as it got solved: one question at a time. From such simplicity, complexity emerges.

This may look like a chaotic and muddled way of working, but a clear advantage is that the unwritten novel is no longer a single, unscalable peak which rears like a vengeful god above your head. Instead, it becomes a long, rugged staircase cut into the side of the mountain. Each step is a question, and the answer to each question takes you another step closer to your goal.

Which isn’t to say it’s easy going. Sometimes you’re marching along, sometimes you’re staggering wretched and unshod,
but you only have to make it as far as the next step. There, you can sit and catch your breath, review where you’ve come from, how you got there – and how far there is to go, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

So my claim to have dashed off an “outline” in half an hour may look a bit disingenuous, but it was true – except the “outline” was just a rough three-act structure in three blunt sentences — followed by eight or nine questions of the who, what, why and how? variety.

I’m about half way through answering those questions, which involved answering hundreds of much smaller questions – where do they live? What are their jobs? How long have they been married? Has he been faithful? Has she? If not, then with whom was she unfaithful? And why? And where? When? Recently? A long time ago? Does he know? Did she tell him?

Currently I’m about halfway up the mountain. If I crane my neck to look up, I get vertigo. If I look down, I feel quietly satisfied with the progress made.

But mostly I don’t look up or down. I just look at the next step, which is -

Duncan goes to Balthazar with this — but what does she do with it?

I don’t know the answer. But tomorrow I will.

March, 2010

I recently stumbled across this — crime novelist Vanda Simon talking about the experience of writing of her first novel -

CS: When you were writing OVERKILL, you were a mother with two very young kids, living in Hawke’s Bay, trying to also write– what was your schedule like?

Symon:[...]When I first started out I was really anal about it, you know ‘I want to have quiet, have space, have a desk’. I gave that up real fast, you know you’re sitting at the dining room table, wiping, feeding a child here, wandering over and playing LEGO, all while writing a novel at the same time, having a discussion with your mother-in-law, making cups of tea for anyone who comes and visits, writing a novel at the same time. So, yeah…

This is the only most recent example of something I’ve read time and time again. Only a tiny proportion of published novelists are lucky enough to write full-time. And, assuredly, most as-yet-unpublished novelists must adjust their writing life to the necessities of the everyday.

There’s a pretty good chance the last book you enjoyed was put together by a working parent who got up an hour earlier than they’d have liked, in order to craft five hundred words before the kids woke up.

The last time I was in that situation, I was writing my third novel, Holloway Falls…except I wasn’t really in that situation, because I didn’t have what it took.

I was thirty years old and for the first time I had a decent, interesting day job that was beginning to pay pretty well. Plus, I was in head-over-heels in love and about to get married. Plus, my second novel, Christendom, had been a terrible failure. Plus…

But no excuses; I just didn’t have what it took. Truth is, for two or three years I pretty much gave up writing altogether. If you’d’ve asked me, I’d’ve said I “didn’t have time.” And I’d’ve been lying – to you, and to myself. What I didn’t have was the necessary courage and drive. I became one of those people who spend much more time talking about writing than actually writing.

It was unsustainable. One of them had to go — either the day job or my claim to be a writer.

In the end, it was the day job….but only because my wife, Nadya, had the kind of grit I didn’t. She insisted that becoming a full-time writer was the right thing, indeed the only thing, for me to do.

We lived in North London; we had a ridiculous mortgage, ridiculous debts, a new baby. But I left the day job anyway, full of anxiety and a kind of terrible freedom, and I didn’t earn a single penny for rather more than a year.

Nadya supported us — she paid the mortgage, the groceries, the bills, the daycare. She didn’t complain. She never questioned what, even in retrospect, looks like a terrifyingly reckless decision. Without her absolute lack of fear, I’d’ve have given up long before Holloway Falls got written.

Of course, I wouldn’t have given up for ever, because ultimately the urge to write is a compulsion. My elder son will be ten this year. By now, if I’d stayed in that day-job, I’d certainly be writing again…at the kitchen table, in front of the TV, maybe on a quiet Sunday morning like this one. But any dream of a “writing career” would have perished a decade ago. I’m sure I’d be happy enough, but when I think of the degree to which I’d be haunted by regret, I get the stone-cold chills.

I never take this for granted; indeed as the years pass and I gain perspective on how hazardous and insecure those early years really were, I grow more awed by my wife’s tenacity.

It could have gone so hideously wrong. Even after Holloway Falls was written and under contract, the debts continued to pile up…month on month and year on year.

(In a Pavlovian reaction to those times, I still can’t bring myself to open a letter from the bank. Even the sight of a sealed white envelope in the post-box is enough to induce in me something close to a panic attack. The moment I step into my local branch, I start to tremble and sweat.)

The thing is, though – we don’t change. Not really.

This blog is devoted to the composition of a novel, but some of you may know that I write for the screen too.

I used to think of that as an enjoyable sideline but over the last two or three years it’s consumed a bigger and bigger part of my working life. I’m not complaining — I’m very lucky, and I’m very busy, and I love every minute of it.

I do find it hard work, but ordinarily I don’t find it a struggle — especially if I’m revising one project while writing another. But for the last few weeks, I’ve found doing the two jobs at once unusually exhausting.

I’ve been doing the work, and to an extent I’ve been enjoying it —  which is a coded way of saying, I think I’ve been writing pretty well. But the rest of my life has suffered; the time I spend with my kids, with my wife, with my friends; even things like reading for pleasure and finding a spare hour to write this blog.

Once again, Nadya hasn’t challenged any of it; not my constant distractedness, or my tiredness, not the hours and hours I spend on the phone to producers and agents, not the working until one in the morning…not the fact that my conversation for the last month has been almost entirely about myself and my work.

Yesterday, she came downstairs having watched the last two episodes of my new TV show, Luther.  She had a smile on her face, a very particular smile. On it was written, yet again, her absolute faith in me.

Writers (including, demonstrably, myself) bang on and on and on about discipline, about dragging yourself to your desk, about writing a certain amount every day, about being able to write anywhere. Blah, blah, whatever. At heart, it’s just self-promotion…because it’s about ourselves, always about ourselves.

What we rarely talk about, except elliptically and often self-servingly, in the acknowledgment pages, are the people around us whose tolerance and fortitude make this kind of life possible.

For me, it’s Nadya. Whoever it is for you — if you’re lucky enough to have someone like that in your life; spouse, friend,  parent, teacher — then give them a kiss. Let them know you know. Thank them.

March, 2010

I’ve always been drawn to those magazine articles that show writers’ dens; it’s appealing to see the sanctum sanctorum. But it’s a kind of cheap thrill too, like rifling someone’s underwear drawer or medicine cabinet.

The printed text is the public persona, all primped and contrived — but this  messy desk, that ancient laptop with dirty keys, those curling Post-its on the wall; those are the private person, unguarded, which is what the voyeur in us wants to see.

Of course, this is just a fantasy — when a journalist comes to photograph your private space, you ensure it looks the way you want it to. (Before anyone photographs or films my office, I always tidy — not because I’m a well-groomed minimalist but because personal clutter is like an  open diary. )

I like my little office. I feel at home there, I spend hours there every day. I prefer to work there if I possibly can. But my little office is also just a room in whatever house I happen to be living in…and I move round a lot.

I’ve been in this particular house for five years, which is two years longer than I’ve lived any place since I was five years old. My wife and I are tired of moving. We like that we’ve begun to put down roots. But we get itchy feet, too. We like change. So we’ve just had the house ripped to pieces. What used to be my little office doesn’t exist any more.

Right now, I’m typing in the corner of my bedroom. There’s rough particle board floor beneath feet, unpleasantly gritty with plaster dust. For privacy, I’ve pinned blue plastic tarpualins to the window frames; outside, six house painters listen to classic rock on a local radio station and my dogs howl and yap at every car that goes by.

I can write pretty much anywhere — in any room in any country. This isn’t my natural inclination, but a skill I was obliged by circumstances to learn. I was obliged to learn it because I wanted to write a book. Books get written on kitchen tables, in offices during lunch breaks,  on trains, in hotel rooms, in public libraries, in pubs.

(I exclude from this list coffee shops. I’m perfectly willing to accept this as an irrational prejudice; that would make it one of many. Perhaps you are a genuinely good, ambitous and hardworking writer and a coffee shop simply happens to be the best place available for you to write. If so, I apologise in advance. But in my defence, I haven’t met you yet. All I’ve seen is the posuers, perched there in dangerously tempting proximity to very hot liquids in easy throwing distance.)

But I digress. As some of you know, although I’m English and my professional life is focussed in Britain, I make my home in New Zealand (one of the best parts about being a writer is, you can live anywhere — and I can’t think of anywhere better than here).

Last Monday, to help promote the New Zealand International Arts Festival, specifically Writers and Readers Week, I somewhat reluctantly agreed to take part in a competion called ONCE UPON A DEADLINE:

Watch out for writing where you least expect it. On Monday 8 March, look out for six playwrights and one scriptwriter racing around Wellington in search of a story. They could be sitting at a bus stop, riding an elevator, or watching animals at the zoo. Each will be armed with a laptop, wireless internet, and a minder to make sure they stick to the rules and keep to the clock. At the start of the day, each writer is given a route to follow and will spend one hour at each location, including a turn in the writer’s cage.

The locations were kept from us until the morning of the event. So I found myself blinking and tired, writing a short story in — a coffee roastery;  a cage at Wellington Airport; the middle of a class full of sixteen year old boys (who dwarfed me); at the cheese counter in a city-centre supermarket; in a local radio station; at a Pompeii exhibition in the national museum, Te Papa.

After that we spent an hour with an editor, then gathered at the Town Hall for a “read-off” — reading the thing out to an audience. Three judges decided the overall winner, and there was a “peoples’ choice” award, too.

(The winner, deservedly, was playwright Dianna Fuemana. The People’s Choice award went to David Geary. All the stories can be found here)

It was, as you’ll have gathered, a strange day — all the more so since I tend to be a solitary creature. I’m reasonably accommodated to appearing on stage and on camera: although I find it stressful, it’s part of the job. But I’ve never written a story in public, and I’ve never read a story aloud to an audience.

The story I wrote is just okay — I like how it telescopes time-scales and in 1,300 words, how it keeps shifting from solemn to comical, from the domestic to the apocalyptic. But I’m no short story writer, so I’m not judging myself too brutally. I’m happy with just okay.

What made the day entirely worthwhile was sitting in that cage, then in the thick of those shifty adolescent boys — my first visit to a classroom for twenty-five years. At each venue, I experienced a few minutes’ acute discomfort and self-consciousness. After that, I was just writing. My body was at a cheese counter, but my mind was in the writing place.

It came to me late in the day: that’s essentially the story of my life. If you really want to be a writer, it doesn’t matter where you are or who’s around you.

Sometimes it’s embarrassing — often, you’re an object of derision, certainly mistrust and scepticism. Plus, you look pretty stupid, all hunched up and gurning, typing away while people go about their lives — wheeling luggage to check-in, buying cheese, wandering the halls of a museum. What a way to spend your time. You’re a freak.

You do it anyway.