The book I wish I could have written - by Sue Purkiss

Last Christmas, I was lucky enough to be given a very generous book token, and I've had a very jolly time choosing books that have caught my eye from my local Waterstones, in Wells. One of the first was a book by Marcus Sedgwick, called The Ghosts of Heaven. He's an author I admire, and I think this book was shortlisted for the Carnegie, so it was an easy choice.

However, when it came to the top of the pile and I opened it, ready to plunge into a good story, I found that it was written in verse. To my shame, I decided that this made it 'difficult', and I wanted something at that time that didn't require a lot of effort. So it went back on the pile, and I only picked it up again a few weeks ago.

And it was the strangest experience. Because as soon as I opened it, I saw a drawing - a line which traced a spiral. Why was that strange? Because ever since I can remember, when I've doodled, in lessons or lectures or boring meetings, the spiral is one of my go-to doodles. If you look in any of my notebooks or old exercise books, you'll see it (along with swans, trees, faces, and abstract, cross-hatched scribbles). You have to concentrate hard to do a perfect spiral; it very easily goes astray, because it's difficult to keep the distance between the lines even. So it focuses the mind - though possibly not on what it's supposed to be focused on.

There is a mathematical way to create a spiral, and the spirals which illustrate The Ghosts of Heaven probably used it. You have to use the Fibonacci sequence. This is a mathematical concept - I am terrible at maths, and so I'm not going to try to explain this here; just google it, and you'll get a much better explanation than I can give you. But it's all tied up with proportions and patterns that appear in nature: you see it in a snail shell, an ammonite, the curled up frond of an emerging fern. And it's central to this book.

So that was the first thing. The second thing was that as I read, I realised that the first section of the book is set thousands of years back in pre-history, in the time when our ancestors made beautiful paintings in caves. Now - three years ago, I was in France. About half an hour from Cahors, there is a cave called Pech Merle. It's one of the very few painted caves which the public are still allowed to visit. I was fascinated, of course, by the engravings and paintings of bison, deer, horses, aurochs and so on, with their extraordinary economy of line and clever use of the natural form of the rock face.

But I was truly moved by the hand prints, like this one. They looked so fresh; they could have been made yesterday. It was so easy to imagine someone - probably a woman or a child, because the prints were quite small - placing their hand on the rock, blowing the ochre from a thin pipe to make a negative imprint - then standing back to see this mark that they had made, smiling with pride, telling the others to come and see. They created a vital connection which threw a bridge across 24,000 years.

I kept thinking about those hand prints. I tried to write a story which would incorporate them, but it didn't work, so I abandoned it. Then, recently, I thought of another, very different way I might be able to use them. I'm working on that now, and I'm a little bit hopeful.

But Marcus Sedgewick has done what I tried to do in that first version - and done it triumphantly. He has incorporated spirals, and cave painting, and hand prints: and he's solved a lot of the problems I came across - and solved them so cleverly, so elegantly. Problems such as what kind of language you use to express the thoughts of these early people; what the purpose of the paintings may have been. He's done what I couldn't do. (So it's a good job I'm trying to do something quite different now.)

This isn't a review - there would be a lot more to be said about Marcus's book if it was. But it's about that feeling - when the knowledge uncurls, like the line of a spiral, that someone has already written the book that you really wish you could have written. I've never felt that before. It's the oddest sensation, it really is. Like meeting a doppelganger, a person who, impossibly, looks exactly like yourself. It's unnerving, and just a tiny bit sinister.

What makes an interesting character in fiction? - by Pauline Francis

A thousand thanks to Pauline Francis who has heroically stepped in at very short notice, after unavoidable circumstances created a sudden gap in the schedule.

There’s so much easily accessible material written about this subject - but I’m letting you have a peep at my efforts to create interesting characters.

I think that it’s easier with the first novel to get the character right. Most of us have a character – or know the sort of character – we’d like to write about. In my case it was Lady Jane Grey (the nine day queen).  I knew that she was badly used by the powerful men around her and this somehow chimed with my experience of an overbearing father in my teens... but I didn’t want to write about a real person. I wanted to create my own character. Isn’t that what writers do?

But I couldn’t give up the idea. Jane had all the attributes of an interesting character: a strong woman up against powerful men, having to fight for what she wanted, cruelly treated and with plenty of enemies. I still stood on the brink. Would a real character be a constraint? History tends to set its characters in stone. We only have the bare bones (or the real bones!). How could I create a character that was as fully rounded as one created from scratch?

Then it struck me.

Jane may have lived in the sixteenth century, but could she really be any different from a teenager today, except in speech and dress? How would I feel if somebody looked back at me in a few hundred years’ time and said I couldn’t be interesting because I’d lived so long ago? Once I’d got rid of that stumbling block, it was easy. I forgot that Jane was real. She was a young girl with hope, dreams and fears. I like to think that Jane is the best of my real characters. If I’m honest, I just wish I’d given her a memorable or funny habit, perhaps one that she only revealed to somebody close to her. I did invent another narrator for this novel (Raven Queen) – Ned –and I had huge fun with his creation. I was going to follow the rules here. He was going to be Jane’s opposite -  extrovert and witty. He is, in fact, gentle and conscientious. Yet all readers love him. So perhaps it’s good to go with the creative flow rather than the rules.

One last word about historical characters. Why not turn a situation on its head?

We all know from history that Kings had mistresses, who bore sons who sometimes claimed the throne. But what was it like to be a pretender? Don’t we automatically assume that he’s part of a diabolical plot to win power? I decided to make the fictional Francis (in Traitor’s Kiss) a good person. He doesn’t actually stake his claim as Henry the V111’s son – but he could have. So he’s still a threat – and clever Princess Elizabeth knows this. Francis becomes one of her victims – she leaves him in a madhouse called Bedlam, just in case he decides to make trouble for her – and this strengthens the harsh side of her character.

I’m going to be honest here. In my second novel, A World Away, I created my central character, Nadie, a Native American girl captured by English colonists. She doesn’t really know her path in life (except to find the English boy she loves) and I think this weakens her voice. I’d love to go back and change her because it’s an interesting novel in all other ways. The other central character, Tom, is well-liked by readers, especially because he has to fight against his stammer as well as his enemies.

How can you bring out greater strength in already good characters?

Condense time: In Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick, the story of murder and revenge is made gripping because the action takes place in a small log cabin over a few days. Or use another character as the ‘elephant in the room’ as Marcus does – in this case, the body of the narrator’s father on the kitchen table. It is that dead father who sends a chill down our spine. He is the interesting character. If the story had been narrated by his son in the future, away from that log cabin, it would have lessened the tension. 

Or use a slight twist that nobody expects: one of my characters goes to France during the revolution wanting to be an anatomist – perfect for a time rich in beheadings. Create a strong side-kick: watch a box-set of the BBC series Merlin if you want a master class in how to do this (Merlin is the servant side-kick to Prince Arthur, using modern vocabulary... wonderful!),

This is an endless subject and I know I’ve only touched on one or two areas and that there are hundreds of you out there who have created wonderful characters - too many to mention...

www.paulinefrancis.co.uk

What's in a blurb? – Dianne Hofmeyr

So you've come up with a blurb… what’s the recipe? Take an air of mystery, a sense of character, add a pinch of place and a little pace and mix all together so whoever picks up the book, senses the heady whiff and tastes adventure before he or she even takes a bite… (and thinks ‘I must have this book in my life. Off to the till I go!’)

If only! In a very short space with the average person’s very short attention span, we have to capture the buyer. And different writers will produce widely different blurbs but all blurbs have the same function – to convince a bookshop customer to buy the book they have in their hands.

So what are the basic concepts of a blurb?
– they are short

– they tend to have attention-grabbing words

– they use active rather than passive voice

– they tend to pose questions

– they might end with an ellipsis (…) so the reader has to imagine an outcome.

Other factors to consider:

– Who is the book being marketed to? The blurb must speak directly. A blurb for a teenage reader will be very different to one on a picture book bought by an adult to read to a child.

– What is the most interesting aspect of your book? Is it the character, the setting, the moral conflict? As we emerge from the fog of having written the book, we often can’t find an aspect to focus on. Get a friend to give you another crisp slant on the story with a few phrases and words.

– Make a list of words that give insight into the story. Find exciting synonyms that evoke atmosphere – replace ‘scared’ with ‘terrified’, ‘lonely’ with ‘desolate’, ‘hiding’ with ‘lurking’, ‘very’ cold with ‘murderously’ cold (see below). Okay this is ABC stuff for a writer

– Never summarize the story. You want to keep the reader guessing.

– Perhaps find a particular phrase or piece of dialogue in the story to use as a tagline.

– Don’t introduce too many characters. Don't confuse.

Marcus Sedgewick’s blurb for his book, Revolver, ticks all the boxes.

‘It’s 1910. In a cabin north of the Artic Circle, in a place murderously cold and desolate, Sig Andersson is alone.­ 

Except for the corpse of his father, frozen to death that morning when he fell through the ice on the lake.

The cabin is silent, so silent and then there’s a knock at the door

It’s a stranger, and as his extraordinary story of dust and gold lust unwinds, Sig’s thoughts run more and more to his father’s prized possession, a Colt revolver, hidden in the storeroom.
A revolver just waiting to be used …’

Why am I so blurb obsessed? Because I’ve just written one for my latest book, Oliver Strange and the Ghosts of Madagascar and have fallen into and have tried to drag myself out of all the pitfalls – which included making reference to the ‘place du diable’, the place of the devil, which works in the context of the entire book but not in a blurb where someone might think the book is about devil worship!

Here’s the final result (cropped to make it legible) for a mid-range book… easy language, questions, quite different to a teenage novel, but should I have started with the tagline: ‘A modern day pirate story…’ ? I’m not sure.

If you have any blurbs to share – your own, or a brilliant one you’ve come across, please put them up or share any other recipe tips for a ‘tasty’ blurb.

www.diannehofmeyr.com