My post about the best Stephen King movies is now up at Insatiable Booksluts - bloody good fun to write, that. :) I am well chuffed to be appearing on a site with possibly the best name ever.
There are a whole bunch of excellent posts over there at the moment in celebration of Sai King's birthday; I highly recommend a browse, O constant reader.
Last week I had a mini-holiday with my lovely bloke. We saw friends, drank too much, ate some ice-cream, watched some jousting, and even spent a couple of days in Brighton, one of my favourite places. It does me good to be near the sea I think; the sound of waves crashing on a shingle beach is one of those odd memory triggers, and instantly I am nine years old again, badgering my nan for another quid to go and play in the slots (we also spent a good couple of hours rediscovering the joy of tuppeny pushdowns and earned a whole five pieces of useless tat for our efforts!).
So I managed to relax for a bit. I’m not very good at being relaxed… now, I can hear some of you snortling from here, and yes, it is true I can give off an aura of being so laid back I’m horizontal (hush, you) but I’m normally thinking about stuff. I’m normally being worrisome. I do find it very hard to just, you know, turn my brain off and shut up for five minutes. But for a little while, sitting on Brighton Pier contemplating a polystyrene cup of mussels and watching the blinding sunshine on the water, I managed it.
Of course, then I got home and immediately started making to-do lists and generally panicking about all the things I needed to finish, but then, you can’t have everything.
One of the things I needed to finish was a guest post over at Insatiable Booksluts, who are having a Stephen King week at the moment. Pop over there and have a look! My post is going up tomorrow I believe (very 19) so I’ll flag it up on here as soon as it appears.
Since I’ve been editing and reading more than writing at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes me stick with a book. More than that, actually, what makes me love a book. There are lots of things, of course, but I think part of it is writing that really makes you see.
When I was a kid I wasn’t tremendously fussy about what I read. In fact, I would read anything left in front of me for too long, including my grandad’s newspaper, my nan’s historical novels, cereal packets, instruction manuals… These days I’m a lot pickier, and I will dismiss a lot of books out of hand because they don’t grab me in the first few pages, or give me a clear idea of what my mind should be looking at. Does this make sense yet?
In Stephen King’s book On Writing (which is a great read even if you’re not interested in the writing process) he talks about how writing is the truest form of telepathy, and I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. Through words on a page the writer attempts to convey to you what is in his or her mind; when the writing is really good, you see it vividly, almost as if you were really there.
Not all fiction works this well. Sometimes you plod through a book and although you enjoy the story and like the characters well enough, you never really feel like you’ve been transported. You never experience that delightful sense of dislocation that comes when you’ve been so immersed in a story that coming back to reality is a serious jolt to your sense of self. I love that. I search for that when I’m looking for a book to read.
Terry Pratchett is a good example for me; the Discworld has always felt like home, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are practically family. I can see the Chalk and I know the streets of Ankh-Morpork. When I was reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House I felt disorientated right along with the characters, and in an even creepier example, the section where the House tricks them all into being relaxed and happy, I felt relaxed and happy. That is a strange and wondrous piece of magic right there.
Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (one of my all time favourites) was almost like a fever dream, full of vivid weirdness – I could see Merricat clearly in my mind’s eye, and will see her forever, I suspect. You know when the writing really sings – the world around you drops away and you’re with Merlin in the crystal cave, or trawling through the haunted halls of Faerie in search of the man with the thistledown hair…
George R.R Martin said that we write fantasy to see the colours again, to speak in the language of dreams, and I think that’s what I’m looking for when I’m reading (and when I’m writing too, of course). Writing is magic, like friendship and My Little Ponies.
So the second draft of Ink for Thieves is finally finished. I’ll probably need to give it one more read through before I pass it on to my brave and wily beta reading team, but for now the big chunk of work is done. At least, on that book it is. The next couple of months will see more pulling out of hair and knuckle chewing as I read my way through the rough draft of Dead Zoo Shuffle and realise exactly how much delicate surgery that book needs before it’s readable- along with plenty of merry hacking, amputating and other bloody works.
Last night I remembered something Stephen King mentions in his book, On Writing. He said, (I may be paraphrasing slightly here) that you “shouldn’t come lightly to the page”. The first time I read that I don’t think I really understood what he was talking about. I thought perhaps he was suggesting that writing, real writing, was always hard work and could never be fun, which clearly wasn’t true at all. Now, having slogged my way through my first novel-length edit and emerged with what is, hopefully, a much shinier and sexier book, I think I’m starting to understand.
I think he’s talking about an acceptance of the sheer work involved. Yes, it’s fun and there are moments when the story suddenly comes together and the characters wander off to do what they want, and then the writing is exhilarating, but what you are doing is serious business. It is art. And you may well have to write this damn book over and over again until it is any good, and that thought is daunting, but no one ever said this was going to be a walk in the park, where gnomes massage your toesies and butterflies waft their secret songs into your ear holes. Much of the time in fact it’s rather more like heaving a giant dung ball on your back (that may or may not have a diamond secreted in it somewhere) and hauling it to the top of an impossibly tall mountain while goats with sarcastic eyebrows frown at you in a judgemental manner. But that’s alright because this is hardcore, this is SRS BSNS.
At least, I think that’s what he was talking about.
