Justin Hill Author

Dave Hughes, In Memoriam

2012-01-08T22:06:00.000-08:00

In Praise of English Teachers

At the end of last year my old English teacher, Dave Hughes, died. I saw him last in the summer, when he came to my book signing in York, and admonished me for repeating words in the opening scenes of Shieldwall.

'It's meant to be poetic repetition,' I told him, but he wasn't convinced, and I think he was still marking me down.

We were supposed to go for a coffee, but he seemed distracted, and hurried off. I only found out later that he was suffering from bowel cancer, and that in five months he would be dead.

I meant to write personally to him, but in the end, his death came quicker than my letter, and all that arrived in time was a Facebook message. Less than I had intended, but then so much in life is so. But fitting perhaps, that it was on Facebook that he chronicled his decline.

His Facebook page is still there. I wonder how long it'll be before Facebook decide his account has been inactive for too long, and they clear away his account.

I was 13, in grade 3 at St Peter's School, York, when Dave became my English teacher, and he remained it, and I kept the same seat in the same class until I left school at 18. We went through 'O' levels and 'A' levels together: namely, the Miller's Tale, Auden's poetry, Macbeth, Hamlet, Douglas Dunn, and Rosencrantz and Guildernstern and Dead.

Dave was the kind of teacher who had something of the Dead Poet's Society about him, before the film or the concept came out. We called him Dave, rather than Sir. He had a curriculum in mini lessons that he gave to you at the beginning of term, and included his and other student's writings. He liked to recite chunks of the Canterbury Tales in middle English, and invited us to write modern versions: the Tax Collector's Tale; the Hairdresser's Tale; the Policeman's Tale. Before we were old enough to pass as 18, he used to invite me and a few friends over to his house on a Saturday night, and we sat in his living room, like juvenile Inklings, with our cans of John Smiths by our feet, and he talked to us as if we had something interesting worth saying.

That first lesson he taught us about speed reading, and let us ask him any questions we liked: and he answered them all. Though letting a class of 13 year old boys come up with questions was always inviting a degree of silliness.

There was a lot of distinctive things about Dave. He handed back your work with a sheet of footnotes on your work. These could run into 30s little numbered stars, with comments on a separate sheet. I remember the day he gave a short story I wrote, 36/40. Anything about 34 was great, 35 fabulous, and that 36 earned me a distinction in English, and a little early confirmation that I might have a gift.

I told him, or perhaps my parents did at parents night, that I both loved Tolkien and wanted to be an author. Both seemed embarrassing details at the time. But Dave was kind and considerate, and I think he shared my love of Northern literature. He was of course, drawn to mountains, and tragically to Norway, where his friend, and my chemistry teacher, died in a climbing accident on the Svartisen Icecap, in Arctic Norway in 1986. And he had poems published in a journal called Giant Steps, alongside names now well known, like Simon Armitage and Helen Dunmore. My first signed book: and knowing an author seemed such an important step towards becoming one myself.

Even though I now have many other signed copies - from more renowned authors - Dave's collection of poems keeps it's prized place.

And this morning as I brought it down, I found tucked inside a bundle of his curriculum, with the distinctive typeface he used.

It was odd reading his Facebook posts. He had a gift for language of course, but the most poignant thing Dave wrote on his Facebook account, was 26th October.

NOT a good week so far... Felt terribly weak - and had to abandon a stay with Mum and Dad when reflections of each other other simply made us aware of what each side was losing. I rode the stair-lift and Dad could only say, this was meant for me, not for you.
But feeling better: if I can have another transfusion, it could make all the difference. Do call soon if you plan to call at all....

And when a friend promised to visit after Christmas, he wrote:

David Hughes: won't be here till then, Sorry

But rather than these as his last words, perhaps better would be his poem Valediction, for his friend Barry Daniels, who died attempting to save a student who had fallen into a crevasse. I think much of this would apply equally well to Dave:

You'd much prefer a place where gods might hike
on sponsored walks that you could organise -
to build a climbing wall, or something like.

Your sort of heaven should have lowering skies
that always look like rain, but never quite
make up their minds - then soak you by surprise

and leave you squelching in your tent all night
with sodden sleeping bag and wrinkled feet,
damp boots, wet breeches, shrinking till they're tight.

When morning hammers in with wind and sleet,
disgusting though it seems, your flapping tent
must feel a bit like heaven: twelve square feet

comparatively dry, where you're content
to fester till they call you. Then in haste
you'll shudder into clothes: it's time you went.

I hope your lunch is always Lion Bar waste
or greenfruit pastilles - nowhere near a stream
to swill away their sickly after-taste

It don't take much of those to make it seem
that reindeer pate, marmalade and bread
are things you've never eaten, just a dream.

But dreams aren't thinks confined to food or bed:
your waking, walking dreams inspired us all
to want to follow paths you chose and led -

and led us safely till your own one fall,
your fatal stumble where our paths all fork.
I mostly hope your heaven holds lands that call

where all their better bits are three months walk
through glaciated valleys, peak on peak,
that shadow, loom, and avalanche; and talk

must always plan in detail, week by week,
the many first ascents that wait for you:
those marvellous, untrod summits you still seek.

NB
After posting this I went in search of some of Dave's poems, but came across this instead, which says a lot about what a distinctive man Dave was.

Sunday Times Picks the Best Historical Novels of 2011

2011-12-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

‘Much the best was Justin Hill’s Shieldwall, which superbly evoked the wordplay of the period’s poetry as it unfolds a compelling story of Earl Godwin’s battles against the Norse.’

Singapore Day 2: Man Asian Shortlist Announced

2011-10-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

What to do at a literary festival?

Well - I always imagine them something like my backpacking trips when I was a younger me: early nights, lots of reading, up early, and hours and hours walking and seeing places.

Then you throw in a bunch of writers, and the balance shifts more to long dinners, late night's drinking and then late mornings, just up in time for breakfast, where we sit and wipe bleary eyes and set out for our days.

I was delighted to be included in the Chinese writer's lunch: and as soon as Paul Tan of the festival told me this, I struggled to bring all my mandarin back to mind. Was with Bi Feiyun and Taiwanese writer, Hao Hsiang-yu.

Then an interesting event on settings, with Meira Chand, Kunal Basu, and Dawn Farnham. A really interesting session, followed by dinner with the Man Asian Prize team who were buzzing from their simultanous launch of the 2011 longlist.

Bi Feiyun spent the night trying to finish off the last of last year's prize money on some fine wines: and I thought that was a good lesson in life, to share the bounty we get with others. A great guy, who's had a great year, also winning the Mao Dun Prize. Well done him!

Great that the prize is attracting big names, and that the prize is so well run: slick, professional, and focussed on the job of promoting Asian writing.

Razia Iqbal below:

Singapore Writers Festival

2011-10-28T02:51:00.000-07:00

There's something special about festivals that call themselves writers festivals, rather than literary festivals, and spotted Bi Feiyun sitting in the lobby as I went for lunch.

Bet he's not written a think since I last saw him at the prize event last year: there's something highly disruptive about winning prizes like the Booker/Man Booker. And then who else should I run into here, than a bunch of Hong Kongers standing in the hotel lobby.

Thanks to Jean who was the best of volunteers, taking me out to find a very delicious beef randang. And then a few hours wandering the streets with a taste of pork knuckle in vinegar; and cracked pepper pig stomach and chicken soup with a spicy sweet soy sauce.

Everyone very friendly. First event tomorrow, after a rather long lunch.

Tonight we're off on a boat trip. Ten writers sent up the river: will we survive? Will I be sea sick..?

Unknown Soldiers of 1066

2011-10-13T00:04:00.000-07:00

History – like memory – tends to fixate on the principal players, victors and casualties, and glosses over circumstantial details and many events of interest to us remain hidden and mysterious.

Arthur’s twelve battles are just names without locations, as is Brunanburg; while even the locations of later battles like Bosworth are often sketchy. But the Battle of Hastings is unique in that we have an astonishing amount of detail of this battle, fought 945 years ago.

We can trace, for example, Harold’s movements from September 8th when his army supplies ran out; almost to the day through to his famous march north to the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25th September; and then south again, ending up at Hastings, on 14th October. Of the important men who died at the battle there is Harold, of course; his two brothers Leofwine and Gyrth and their friends and cousins and retainers, but we also know the spot – the precise spot - where Harold’s banner flew and where he was killed.

We know this because William insisted that the high altar of his abbey mark the exact spot, and when the Norman monks started work on a site they thought much more appropriate, William furiously chastised them and ordered them to do his royal will.

Uniquely we also know some of the common folk who died at Hastings. We know, for example, Abbot Leofric of Peterborough died on campaign but before the battle. (Campaigns in Saxon times were no doubt as unsanitary as they were in Florence Nightingale’s times. ‘Summer sickness’ doubtless thinned both armies).

Another Abbot, Aelfwig of Winchester’s New Minster died in the battle with twelve of his monks: and the lack of information provokes us to wonder who these monks were. Were they the moustached and warlike monks, like Bishop Leofgar of Hereford, Harold Godwinson’s chaplain, who died in battle with the Welsh? Can we picture these Winchester monks in the heriot – here-geat – wargear of mail, helm and spear, wielding beaded axes and chanting their prayers? Or were they performing a more supporting role – tending, ministering, and caught up in the massacre after the battle?

We don’t know. It is as the historian Richard Fletcher wrote, that facts seldom speak for themselves and ‘have to be coaxed and entreated into utterance’. The gaps between these facts are fertile ground for the historical novelist, who brings the facts and characters to speak.

Other names include Godfric, Sheriff of Berkshire, who was no doubt leading the worthies of Berkshire. Imagine those waiting at home, hearing rumours of slaughter. The terrible absence of men who did not return. Their experience must have been like the hometowns of the pals regiments when they began to hear rumours of the Somme. You wonder if any of them really knew what happened to their sons, fathers and husbands.

Most of these names are gleaned from the Domesday Book: men who were still remembered 20 years after the battle, when the book was composed, and English scribes began to count every ox and cow and pig and hide and yard of land. These missing men were the GPs, vicars, local businessmen, and MPs of their time. They were the local lord of the manor; the self-made farmers and freeman; the lynch pin of their communities; the good and the respected and the resented; that familiar face that rode off to answer King Harold’s fourth summons, and did not return.

There was Eadric the Deacon.

Breme, a freemen from Suffolk, who had been one of King Edward’s men. And then there are unnamed men: men from the abbeys of Abingdon, St Benet of Holme, Bury St Edmunds, St Augustine’s, Canterbury were all said to have fought in the battle. Individual men listed in the Domesday Book: one from Cavendish in Suffolk, and two freemen from Tytherley who rode off in September 1066, and did not return: the unknown soldiers of 1066.

Tytherley is now split into two villages, with both with churches dedicated to St Peter. Google the place and you get images of churchyard tombs, bungalows, houses for sale, a black and white picture of a Victorian gentleman fishing in the village pond. It looks much like any other village, really. Green, hedgerows, a church wall war memorial, someone’s photograph of a full English breakfast: rashers, sausages, tomato, both scrambled and one fried egg.

Both East and West Tytherley are listed on Wikipedia, and neither entry remembers the men of 1066. The earliest mention is for 1335, when the manor, no doubt still part of the royal estate inherited by William from Harold, and so to Edward III, who then gave it to his wife, Queen Philippa. The next entry records that William Fothergill Cooke invented the first commercial electric telegraph whilst living there.

It’s a fairly typical village. And so it was in 1066. Then three men held it from King Edward, and then King Harold after him. It had land for 6 ploughs, 2 villans, 22 bordars, 7 ½ acres of meadow, and woodland for fencing. The Domesday Book says ‘two of those who held [in 1066] were killed in the Battle of Hastings’.

Were they brothers? Neighbours? Friends? Begrudging neighbours? We do not know. But there are stories in these scant facts. Ways of coaxing those facts to speak. Their names are like the faces of people standing in the fire lit shadows of a Vermeer painting: just brief and tantalising glimpses of people usually lost to the long dark night of history.

As with so many of our glimpses into Anglo-Saxon England, the detail about these men is brought to us because of a land dispute. The scribe records that ‘The men of the hundred say that they have never seen the king’s seal, nor his officer who had given seisin of this manor to Alwine Ret…and unless the king were to bear testimony, he [Alwine] has nothing there.’

This comment hints at the chaos after Hastings, and no doubt refers to a disputed inheritance; resentment of how the dead men’s families fortunes changed. We are lucky for these flashes of faces from the long dark winter’s night of the past. How the grievances of the men of Tytherley were resolved we cannot tell. Away from the spot lit leads of Harold and William, the light of history only falls so far. But Hastings still stirs up strong feelings, and we the inheritors of these Tytherley men are still arguing over that battle's inheritance.

Look what's just landed in my inbox

2011-09-29T19:03:00.001-07:00

Always great to see the 'face' of a book you've written, and here's Shieldwall, in its mass market form.

The Long Road to Hastings....

2011-09-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

It took Harold Godwinson 17 days from hearing of William's landing to march south and face a battle. Embarrassingly, it's taken me a week or so longer to get a synopsis put together. I blame Real LIfe TM - but finally done and sent off and can't wait to get stuck in. There's some really fabulous material here: great choices for the characters, complex and interesting situations - and unlike Shieldwall - there's a lot of not battle action, which I know will please a lot of people. (Heh - I didn't get to write history...!) And I'm sitting at my desk, and I find myself in early Autumn, which is the best time to start a novel. Can't wait to get stuck in. Am going to spend a couple of days letting a head of steam build, go through index cards and pick out good bits, and then set off with a Harold Godwinson as he sets out in life. He's only a young lad in a cloak and kirtle, sitting whittling a stick and dreaming big dreams: and I bet if you told him he'd end up being Earl of Wessex and King of England, and die in the most famous battle in Christendom, when I bet he'd be pretty happy with that. And if anyone is curious about the appeal of Shieldwall to an Asian audience, then here's Peter Gordon in the Asian Review of Books...

Bringing History to Life: Hong Kong Book Fair

2011-08-14T23:46:00.001-07:00

A great talk, covering Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Perspectives on China, and the differences between Fiction and CNF

Interview: Wall Street Journal

2011-08-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

Justin Hill is something of an anomaly: He’s an English writer, based in Hong Kong, who has garnered international acclaim.

Two of his novels, “The Drink and Dream Teahouse” and “Passing Under Heaven,” were nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and he’s won a Somerset Maugham Award, a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and a Thomas Cook Travel Book Award shortlist placement for his writing.

Before coming to Hong Kong four years ago, Mr. Hill spent nearly 15 years living in and writing about China. The subjects of his works have included his experiences and observations as a young volunteer in the fast-changing Shanxi province, the life of female Chinese poet Yu Xuanji and the small African state of Eritrea.

His latest, “Shieldwall,” released in May, is a historical novel set in 11th-century England, shortly before the Norman Conquest. The book received glowing reviews from critics at publications such as the Sunday Times and Guardian for its historical accuracy and gripping battle scenes.

Read full interview Here

By Patrick Brzeski

Review: The Australian

2011-08-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

Work of English historical fiction re-creates land fit for Saxon heroes George Williams

Shieldwall comes as a pleasant surprise. Hill has written about events usually passed over in favour of more well-known times. Moreover, he has done so with obvious passion and in a manner that is evocative and at times almost poetic in catching the mood of the era.

This book is an undoubted success both as a work of fiction and as a tale of history. It gives a stirring and well-researched insight into the disasters, mishaps and treachery that made life in 11th-century Saxon England such a misery.

The author has not told the whole story of the events leading up to 1066. There is obviously much more to come. Indeed, Shieldwall is planned as the first in a Conquest Trilogy. The next two books will certainly be welcome.

Read Full Article here

Sunday Times Review Shieldwall

2011-07-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Great review for Shieldwall in the Sunday Times this week. Catch the whole review here

If you don't have a Times subscription, then here's a sample:

'Written in supple, intelligent prose, which carries echoes of the wordplay in Anglo-Saxon poetry, Shieldwall is a vivid historical novel. Hill not only succeeds in bringing the distant world of pre-Conquest England to life but, in Godwin, has created a complex character whose struggles to be true to his ideas of faith, duty and friendship are entirely convincing.' Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

Shieldwall #9 Best Seller at Hatchards

2011-06-15T23:56:00.000-07:00

Clearly a shop with a discerning clientele....

Dymocks Dinner: Shieldwall returns to HK

2011-06-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

It's not often you pass your local bookshop and find a large picture of yourself.

The event was at Grappa's Cellar

All that Old English study finally comes of use when needing to quote the Battle of Maldon and Maxims II on stage.

Book Tour Part 7: Shieldwall in Charlbury

2011-06-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

There were hopes that I'd be on Excess Baggage again saturday morning, meanwhile I spent two nights in Charlbury - one of the most charming English market towns you could hope for, nestled in fabulous Oxfordshire countryside.

First stop was a talk to the children of Charlbury Primary School: who were one of the most enthusiastic audiences I had: with ten hands going up each time I asked for a question, and the year 6 boys at the back who asked 'Is it gory?' and when I said there were gory bits gave out a large 'YES!'

Nest morning I took advantage of a quiet morning for an eight mile stroll through ancient woodland. More very tall trees, the delightful little church just outside Charlbury, and lots of deer.

A saxon door still in the stonework:

Vicky and Ed had organised a delightful evening at the Corner House, and Jon at Evenlode Books came along and was the jolly bookseller by a large pile of Shieldwall.

Fine weather, lots of old friends, and new, and a great way to end the tour.

Hay 'paid' it's authors with a case of Cava: and so this was my contribution to the festivities:

Then it was back to London for a quick signing at Goldsboro Books,

An Ethiopian lunch at Menelik's on Caledonian Road: which looked like this and hit all the spots:

Thanks to Soph, Charles and Lara, Tara, Ed and Vics, Buz the Broadsword, Martin and Shirley for coming along, Katie and Damien, William, Isabella, Harper, May, Felix, Bella for your bedroom, Jon, Daniel, Zoe and everyone else who helped me along the way.

Book Tour Part 6: Shieldwall in London

2011-06-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

Back in London had a very busy time coffee/lunching/dinnering with a great selection of friends.

For you, dear reader, one of the highlights was the the inaugral meal of the Historical Writer's Association (HWA) http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif where there was a great collection of the UK's best historical novelists. For a room full of literary types, it was a very jovial, friendly and fun evening. 'So what's your period?' was the general question, and then you found yourself listening to an expert in anything from Romans (Ben Kane, Manda Scott and Tony Riches); medieval (Robyn Young); pirates (Mark Keating); 18th Century (Imogen Robertson) - and that's just a taster of who was there - severely limited by my memory.

There were signings at Hatchard's and a very interesting lunch with John Man, one of the most interesting writers on Mongolian history.

Book Tour Part 5: Shieldwall storms York

2011-06-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

I grew up in York, and know the alleys and snickleways like the back of my hand so it was a joy to be back and avoiding the inevitable crowds.

The beer and black pudding were as good as any I remember, and my hotel had a particularly good full Yorkshire breakfast.

There was a book signing at Waterstones: thanks to everyone who turned up, especially Michelle of Scarborough!

And then a day out and about, at Benningborough Hall, where I had forgotten how tall trees in England are.

And what an oak tree looks like after it's been hit by lightning.

Book Tour Part 4: Nottingham cont

2011-06-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Nottingham Castle was built across the valley from the Saxon town by the Normans, and was a critical part of the royal estate up to Richard III's time. And it was from Nottingham castle that Richard III marched to Bosworth.

It's on a sandstone ridge and the sandstone is full of tunnels. Could recommend this highly enough: and here are a few pics.

Book Tour Part 3: Shieldwall heads North to the Land of Snot

2011-06-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, Snottingeham - The Village of the People of Snot - is the old name of Nottingham, the next stop on my tour. I was the guest of the university there, and was expecting a few night's stay in a 1960s pre-fab, and instead found myself greeted by the porter 'Are you my house guest sir?' and then taken along a tree-lined avenue to a delightful Georgian country house, and into the Newstead Suite, where the chancellor stays when in town.

I had a busy 40th birthday, doing a talk on 'Landscape and Space' with Thomas Legendre and Matthew Welton and then a public lecture in the evening on 'The Writer in China'.
A fine curry afterwards, and then I happened to be near Lenton Road, which to me, and many others, means Games Workshop. Couldn't resist going over and hanging out, and meeting the geeks, and visting the figure museum there, with some of the best of miniature painting and diaoramas.

GW is also the home of one of my favourite pulp publishers: Black Library, and I had a very enjoyable session with Nick Kyme, who has an amazing ability to riff on an idea.

I've a lot of respect for pulp fiction writers because a lot of 'literary' writers could learn a thing or two about story telling from them. So it was a delight to meet up for a curry with Graham McNeill, New York Times Bestselling author, the author of an astounding 22 novels, and winner of the David Gemmel Legend Award. We ended up in a late-night rock bar, and really enjoyed the night, Graham's a great guy!

Lunch that day was in the world's oldest pubs, with a great pint of pale ale, and the next day a fabulous tour through the tunnels under Nottingham Castle.

Book Tour Part 2: Shieldwall at Bosham

2011-06-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

The reason I wanted to go to Bosham is here:

and here -

Yes, the church (well, the arch) featured in the Bayeux Tapestry is still here, and the saxon tower remains, with only one floor of Norman addition. A fine beacon, no doubt, for the sailors who plied the mud flats. The church, and the fact that the manor house here, almost definitely sits on the site of the hall where Godwin and Harold spent a lot of their time.

It was very odd being somewhere, which I had already imagined and written about, and then visited. It was much flatter than I had imagined, and the tide made much more of a difference here: as it sped in over the mud flats, and altered the feel of the place twice a day.

This is also the place where Knut's eight year old daughter is said to be buried, and where he was said to have tried to turn back the tide. But instead of a tale about his arrogance and stupidity, he actually went on to tell his courtiers that this was proof of the power of the Almighty.

It was clear why this would be a favourite haunt for Harold Godwinson, a dedicated falconer, as there was plenty of game birds for hunting.

Book Tour Part 1: Shieldwall and the Hay-on-Wye Festival

2011-06-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

Arrived in London, and drove down to Hay with Charlie Viney, and his son, Tom, and had a great time: seeing England again, and talking all the way from London to the Welsh border.

When we were almost there, we passed through Ewyas Harold, which has one of the few pre-Conquest Motte and Bailie castles in England: built by Ralph the Timid during Edward the Confessor's reign, to protect against the Welsh.

Stayed here: The Swan Inn, and expected it to be full of writers and intellectuals, but was strangely quiet.

Walked along the river, which must have been the border between the Welsh and English, and found a post-Conquest Motte and Baile castle in the field across the road, and after dinner in the long summer twilight, conducted a little tour for the London literary types.

A fine castle:

Talking to a whiskey soaked audience, courtesy of Highland Park.

And then my big talk - going head to head against a double act of The Archbishop of Canterbury and Simon Russel-Beale - and delighted to have a fine turn out. First talk on Shieldwall went very well: and a quick signing, before heading back to London via Hereforth: where the Welsh burnt the cathedral down in 1056, after a vigorous resistance in which 7 canons were killed.

Remembered how Bishops of Hereford seem to have been the military type, with responsibility for leading the local resistance. Like Bishop Leofgar, once chaplain to Harold Godwinson, who died in battle in 1056.

Thoughts on Hay:
I was very impressed with Hay, not having been there before, and hearing that it was more corporate than literary. Peter Florence was delightful, the audience diverse and interested, and what impressed me most of all was the number of school kids. I've never seen so many at a festival, and thought this was an excellent feature.

As an author: the volunteers were excellent and helpful; the carrot cake and coffee generously distributed, and the tech support as smooth as it gets.

Shieldwall Breaks into the Best Seller lists at #2!!!

2011-05-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

the picture says it all, and just time to squeeze in a bottle of the finest bubbly before flying to London for the UK Book Tour!

UK Tour Dates

2011-05-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

I asked my wife, What to take on a book tour? She told me a pen, ink and a spare change of underwear. And books of course! I've got my own list, and will be adding and subtracting from that in the next few hours of scrambled packing, but just time to let you know what's happening in the next few weeks.

If you're around, or it's a rainy day, and you have nothing better to do, then why not come and listen to some old english. Or indeed, the adventures of Godwin Wulfnothson. Or indeed, about that other great conquest of England, in 1016, not 1066!

Friday 27th May
2pm The Moot, Hay-on-Wye: An intimate, whiskey sipping atmosphere, sponsored by Highland Park. Who could miss that?!
4pm Elmley Foundation Theatre, Hay-on-Wye: Gripping fiction that reclaims the Saxon history of Ethelred, Edmund and Harold from the Norman conquerors by a multi-award-winning novelist. (and my last public appearance as a 39 year old, who's been sipping whiskey all afternoon...)

Tuesday 31st May
2pm Landscape and Space: Nottingham University, English Department
6.15pm The Writer in China, Nottingham University Public Lecture.

Friday 3rd June
Accessing the Medieval: Nottingham University

Saturday 4th June
12pm Waterstones Bookshop: Book Signing

Monday 6th June
St Peter's School, York

Thursday 9th June
Charlbury Primary School

Friday 10th June
7pm Corner House, Charlbury

Party Shoes on...and an interesting link

2011-05-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

Zee Stone Gallery, 7pm, 19th May.

Period costume only. Leave battle axes at the door, please

Want to read more: click here Thanks to Dymocks for picking me as their Author of the Month.

Run Dont Walk to your nearest Bookshop!!!!

2011-05-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

Shieldwall is selling out all over Hong Kong, so make sure you grab a copy quick!

SOLD OUT IFC and DB!!

Buy Shieldwall Week Launches in Hong Kong

2011-05-15T05:35:00.000-07:00

Let's get Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother off that number one slot!

Buy Shieldwall this week and lets put literature back into the best seller lists!

Signing in York: 4th June

2011-04-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you're around then come and say hi! Would be great to see you there.

Saturday Waterstones, York 4 June 2011, 12:00PM

Hay On Wye Just Announced

2011-04-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

Catch me here, on my last reading ever, as a thirty something. And that's official!

Papers on the Staffordshire Hoard

2011-03-29T00:49:00.001-07:00

Here are some fabulous papers on the Staffordshire Hoard Synposium, that was held in March 2010.

It's also the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Towton: the bloodiest battle in English history, that ended the War of the Roses. A massive 28,000 men died in the battle, and there's a new mass grave about to be opened.

A previous one furnished the material for Blood Red Roses: which was shocking, surprising and illuminating evidence just how men met their ends in battle, as well as what kind of wounds they suffered in earlier battles, and survived.

Maxims

2011-03-13T23:22:00.001-07:00

There are some thoughts, or lines, or things that people say that distract you. That keep nagging away. Like sand, they get under the waistband, or in the shoe, or appear on the bathroom floor, where the children climb into the bath.

And I'm chaffing. It's a mysterious series of poems in an anglo saxon reader, named Maxims II.

Maxims II.

If there is Maxims II then there must be a Maxims I. And the subtitle didn't do some much as inform as mystify. Maxims II: Gnomic poetry.

Gnomes write poems?!

Sheesh. Except that gnomes were - like dwarves - seen as not just smiths, but also as depositories of arcane knowledge.

The maxims in question are an old english form of poems that state - the sometimes obvious - at other times religious, or the aspirational. The're a little like the Havamal, where gods answer questions and the answers are the stepping stones of wisdom.

But there's poetry in the chinks, and a sense of a world view that is quite intruiging. I'm hooked. And I've got an odd sense that the opening of my books lies somewhere within the opening.

Here's the opening of Maxims I
Frige mec frodum wordum. Ne læt þinne ferð onhælne
degol þæt þu deopost cunne. Nelle ic þe min dyrne gesecgan,
gif þu me þinne hygecræft hylest ond þine heortan geþohtas.
Gleawe men sceolan gieddum wrixlan.

Which Tom Shippey translates as:
Question with wise words. But do not let your opinion remain hidden, or what you know most profoundly stay obselete. I will not tell you my secret knowledge if you hide the strength of your mind from me, and the thoughts of your heart. Men of perception ought to exchange their sayings....

(Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English 1976)

You can hear a recording of these, from a little later along, read by Professor Drout here
So. I'm going to sit down with these, and wait for the muse - in the form of a short and hood-dark and bearded figure, with a jerkin of singed leather, and well-muscled forearms, to come and whisper in my ear.

It's that time of year again....!

2011-03-07T17:38:00.001-08:00

Not reading, but you can catch me talking to some great authors, here.

And generally hanging around in the bar as well.

And I'm on the radio! Catch me Thursday on RTHK with Xu Xi and Sarah Lazarus talking about Serious Men, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Award Shortlist.

Opening lines

2011-03-07T01:07:00.000-08:00

So!

I've done the research, gone through my notebooks, filled out piles of index cards, read the first page of Marquez's General in his Labyrinth, (an odd habit I have of reading the opening page before beginning any book - an authorial version of a lucky rabbit's foot) and today I sat down to start my next novel.

I even opened the word document, and saved it into the file that I had created.

But I didn't have that opening line. Which has got me thinking of where opening lines come from.

The last one, for Shieldwall, which wont be out until May, begins: Christ did not come again that year.

I had that, and the second line fixed in my head long before the beginning.

Christ did not come again that year. The Lord kept to His churches and the pages of his book, and Wulfnoth sat in the half timbered hall as the peat fire smoked and rain dripped from the roof-thatch.

Passing Under Heaven begins,

On the day Minister Li retired from office, he lay on his bed and felt a great sense of release, as if the values and morals that had controlled him through his life were as frail as the morning dew.

And it's hard to say where that came from. It might have, at one time, begun the book, but I know that that particular section was only moved to the beginning of the book a week or so before the deadline.

It was a case of jigsaw pieces finally making a new and more brilliant pattern.

Ciao Asmara, i think was more of a process than a flash of inspiration, and A Bend in the Yellow River began the same was as the one thousand word article I had published in the Guardian Weekly, because I did not want to change something that someone had paid me money for, and because getting published there was a token to myself that perhaps I could be a writer.

The Drink and Dream Teahouse. I sat down with my toshiba satellite, and began to type.

I never changed a word of that opening paragraph, and in a strange way I seemed to predict the themes that would tie up the lives of the characters in the novel.

For two weeks exploding firecrackers shredded the winter gloom at Shaoyang’s Number Two Space Rocket Factory. The fourteenth and last night was the Lantern Festival: hopeful lovers carried their hearts in moth-skin lanterns, bobbing like hooked fish on the ends of long canes. A river of stars flowed through the night, the candles burned steadily down, and after midnight solitary spirits wandered the streets with increasing desperation - searching for their perfect match, who might never come.

So what should a opening line do? Well, after all this, there's something of an over emphasis on opening lines. Not that it shouldn't grab the reader, but that the next line, the first paragraph and so on should grab and surprise the reader as well. Some of the best openings have their knock out line at the end of the first paragraph

Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and the charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

Or this one from Penelope Lively in Perfect Happiness

The fifth Brandenburg. Somewhere, some place, every moment, an orchestra is playing the fifth Brandenburg concerto. Violins are tucked under chins, bows rise and fall; in recording studios and concert rooms, and here in the dining-hall of a Cambridge college where a hundred and fifty people are gathered together for no reason except circumstance which is perhaps the reason for everything. They are together for one hour fifty minutes and for the most part will never see one another again.
Some, of course, will.

Writers are dangerous...

2011-02-21T17:26:00.000-08:00

..but is this sign outside my front door, really necessary?

And another response on the Shieldwall proofs from Manda Scott of Boudica fame, which is very kind.

'With Shieldwall, Justin Hill joins the ranks of thoughtful, intelligent writers who know their period, but know also how to weave strong, striking characters and a driving narrative that sweep the reader through the havoc of battles and personal tragedy to the calmer waters at the end. This is an extraordinary account of an extraordinary time, heart-strong and heart-ful and utterly engaging. Don't miss it!'

How I start my day

2011-02-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

The World Tonight: as they say themselves, in depth reporting and intelligent analysis of the world's news.

Intelligent analysis: isn't it sad that they have to make this clarification about their style of news.

But that's another blog entirely.

The good news is that now it's available as a podcast, meaning I can listen to it as I take the kids to school, and sweat off at the gym, which means I'll be able to concentrate more when I sit down to work.

Which, for you dear reader, means that I'll be able to write the next book even faster...! ;-)

On the publishing industry, which after music and film is the next in line for revolution with the internet, here's some thoughts from the Today programme.

Although, like so many 'news' items they manage to waffle on without saying anything practical or useful.

Proofs out, first responses in

2011-02-06T18:27:00.001-08:00

The proofs have been out for a week or so hot off the press from Little, Brown:

London, one thousand years ago: look out of your window. There are 5,000 Vikings camped in the Tate Modern , and they are not there for the Matisse exhibition. They are grimful (hostile) and geheare (hairy) , and have been stoking their courage in the meadohalle (Mead-Hall i.e. pub) . If you put your head above the wall that surrounds the City from the Tower to Ludgate you are liable to be hit by an arwe (arrow ). You are starving. There is no Pret. You are in a City under siege…

The noble warriors at Andribb, Brúnede have spoken…

‘Shieldwall definitely fits into the better section of Historical fiction (don’t be put off by the Anglo-Saxon terminology for place names – there’s a Glossary in the front in any case) – Justin has crafted a wonderful tale based around an unsettled time on these shores. Great characterisation, detail and historical information takes the reader back to days gone by – move over Bernard Cornwell, there’s a new author hitting the bookshelves. Can’t wait for the next book’

Andrew Edwards

‘I loved this book and couldn’t put it down once I had started it. Can’t wait for the next one’

Carol Donnelly

‘Shieldwall was a great story – I loved the father and son dynamic of Wulfnoth and Godwin and Godwin’s story of survival without his father. Godwin was one of those characters that keeps you reading because you really care about what happens to him.’

Rachel Hum

‘I love this story-telling like The Pillars of the Earth where the adventure is epic and sweeping and like CJ Sansom the historical detail is so alive that you can almost smell the world that you are reading.’

Frances Doyle

‘Shieldwall is a battle epic as vast, bulging, and ferocious as its hero. I would rate it as highly as our Sphere historical adventures, except then I might get in trouble.’

Dan Mallory

Candlemas, one day early

2011-01-31T23:11:00.000-08:00

Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, falls on the 2nd February. It takes its name from a special mass when the candles for the year ahead were blessed, and the day (though not the festival I think) is known in North America as Groundhog Day.

It was also the date of the Candlemas Ball when I was a student in Durham: a rather drunken night in the depths of winter, at St Chad's College on the narrow North Bailey. It is a time when the days are beginning to lengthen, but the weather bites only colder, and we would stand on the cobbles of the North Bailey, and the wind would cut through coat and dinner jacket, straight to the bone.

It's also something of an important event in the life of the characters I've been working with. But you'll have to read the book to find out why.

Book! Did I mention the book?! Well, I had a phone conversation last night where my editor and I zipped through the few points that the proofs had thrown up. Twenty minutes later we were done. Yipee! And my editor was telling me the tale of the man from accounts at Little, Brown, who read the book and said 'I frigging love it.'

Great! We love the man who works in accounts.

In the Hill Household we're waiting for the arrival of the last Hill. As it's not arrived yet, and I had a lovely fat organic chicken in the fridge, I thought we'd celebrate one day early. Hence, the champagne, and the excuse to light the candles and make a filling desert to keep the kids content.

Roast Chicken, with garlic, thyme and lemon butter. A great sage and onion bulgar wheat stuffing, followed up with an oat crumble of caramelised pear. Ah! Now to the next book....

Proofs out...

2011-01-30T21:23:00.000-08:00

So! Had an email on Friday from a lady who'd already read one of the proof copies, and i was a little apprehensive when I clicked on the email: but she was suitably impressed, and very complimentary, which was wonderful, as it's very hard at this stage to judge your own work: it comes in proof stage looking like a real book, and with the added complication of being both intimately familiar and predictable, but also a little foreign.

The book has of course, started it's life beyond you. Like a teenage child that doesn't listen to the parents any more. And being that parent must be a bittersweet moment. What do we give our children but roots and wings, and as my favourite NYC Shrink always says the roots are the easy bit.

The publicity wheel is beginning to turn. Chatted with my publicist on friday, have the author questionaire to fill in: festivals, radio, newspapers, blogs all looking for books to fill thier lists.

I'm planning to be in the UK in June and August, and will be visiting various groups so if you'd like a visit or a reading, then why not get in touch and we'll see what we can work out.

Shieldwall done

2011-01-20T02:08:00.000-08:00

Just finished going through the proofs of Shieldwall, and it's a terrifying experience as the writer to see your novel as a book, which looks so different from the word doc you've been working on, in my case for four years.

It's a hell of a period to try and make sense of, even without the pressure of turning the tale into fiction - but I'm delighted at the end of the book, how well the story keeps going, and how much is brought across of those tumultuous few years: ignored for many reasons, no doubt partly because 1016 must be one of the most astonishing years in English history.

It's also great because the book leads nicely into the reign of Knut, and so now I can start thinking about exactly where to start the next book, and which parts of the story to bring into the narrative. I want to get Macbeth in there, though he might have to wait until the second half of Conquest, but I've had the line 'It was Macbeth's fault of course, so the men of the North remembered long years after' in my mind for at least a year now.

What was Macbeth's fault, you might ask... Harold's defeat at the Battle of Hastings of course!

So, when you might be asking is Shieldwall out? Hold the date: May 26th, 2011.

Janus

2011-01-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

So how do you start a novel, people ask me, and it's hard to know where to start, because I've usually forgotten by the time they ask. As I say, I've only written five books, so - as Madonna used to say - I still feel something of a virgin.

But here I am, with the proofs of Shieldwall on one side of the desk, and the beginning notes for the sequel on the other side. So, as I'm here and the moment is still vivid, I thought I'd pull out a ball of wool.

At the moment I'm reading Antonia Fraser's biography of Charles II. Why might you ask? Well, I'm looking for insights into the character and lifestyle of Edward the Confessor - who is a central figure in the story of 1066.

The Normans portrayed him as Edward the Confessor, a saintly figure, who gave his saintly blessing on the Norman take over of England. This of course strengthened their position. BUt no contemporary source says anything about his religiousity. Yes, he finished Westminster Abbey, but then it was practically compulsory for rich magnates to found or endow religious institutions. In fact, the only comments we have about his character mention his love of hunting (like Charles II) and his fiery temper. And these are more interesting than a saintly man with a long white beard.

He and Charles suffered similar fates. Growing into a time of turmoil. Exile whilst still a child, or at least before adulthood. Coming to adulthood across the channel in France, and returning to England as a unifying king in thier thirties. And both ended up heirless.

So I'm reading this book - a very fine tome from my old publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson - and making notes on the character of Edward the Confessor.

When you know the character of the major characters, then you can see the conflicts between them. And bingo!

New Year, Last Year's Resolutions

2011-01-02T04:24:00.001-08:00

So, sitting on the couch this New's Year's Eve, and waiting for the fireworks over Hong Kong Harbour, it occurred to me that any resolutions for 2011 - and I enjoy resolutions, or fresh starts of any kind - were to be pretty much the same as last year.

Some people might have found this despressing, but for me it was strangely compfrting. LIfe hasn't changed that much since last year, and as any novelist understands, it's rare to finish one of your projects within one year.

What also struck me - and this is perhaps more interesting - all the things that happened or were achieved that I had not planned for or even expected - and these are the more interesting things that happen in life.

2010 was a busy year in the Hill household. So busy that we barely had a moment to stop and think about our year until lunch on New Year's Eve when it struck us what a great year 2010 was. Lots of great things happened that we never expected or anticipated, and at the beginning of 2011 I have my list of resolutions in hand, but am more excited and intruiged about the things we dont expect, that will arrive before our next New Year's Even lunch.

Oh yes, and a very important date for your diary:
26th May, 2011.

Christmas 2010

2011-01-02T04:19:00.000-08:00

For those of you unlucky enough to miss our Christmas Dinner, here it is again....

What's in a name....

2010-12-20T17:54:00.000-08:00

...well! Quite a lot actually. I was struggling to find some names in Old English and decided to turn to the Old English Facebook page, and got a little help with one: Jerusalem.

Rebecca Katya Danicic wrote "hello! I just joined this group, so this comment's probably too late. However, i've just been translating 'The Wanderer' and came across the compound 'eardgeard'. The noun might mean 'city' and literally translates as 'homeland-dwelling', but it is used of Jerusalem in the triad of poems called 'Christ'."

I'm guessing this is a literary word, because Dr Stuart Lee, of Oxford University helped out here and let me know that Jerusalem was Ierusalem. How easy was that!
Normandy was Normandig, which when you know 'g' was pronounced 'y' makes sense.

The others, and a few extras I came across:

Strathclyde comes from the Celtic, Srath Chluaidh. But I found an Anglo Saxon Chronicle ref, involving beating up the men of Cumbra land

Flanders: comes from Dutch, I think,and I couldn't find a better word so I used Bruges, which was Bricge

Norway was Northweg, which means the North Way. I guess there must be a South Way somewhere....

I wanted the book to start in Viking Dublin, for a number of reasons, and finding old english names for Ulster, Connaught and Munster were quite difficult. I found a Norse name for Ulster, Ulfastir. Munster didn't really have an equivalent, but the roughly similar kingdom (which gives its name to the Meath of West Meath etc) was Mide.

Saxony: I thought would be tough, but the Old English had a fond feeling for the Saxons they left behind and (from Bede) is the name Eadlseaxum: the Old Saxons.

I really enjoyed the search, and during it I realised I've at last reached the stage of knowing enough old english to work these out, which also felt great.

All Quiet

2010-11-11T16:26:00.000-08:00

It's very strange around here. For the first time in five years I've no book on the go. It's still with the copy editors, and the longer the process drags on, the more distant the book feels.

It's starting it's own life - out there - meeting the audience.

But I did get the cover through last week. Top blurb is a bit of filler for the moment, but you get the idea.

I love it. Feel like I've finally broken through from having pretty Chinese women on the cover of my books. Not that I have anything against pretty chinese women, and they do honour to my feminine side. But it's good to remember the masculine side as well.

The Eve of Hastings

2010-10-13T07:50:00.001-07:00

Of course you knew, dear reader, that 13th October is the night before Hastings.

Babies Leaving Home

2010-10-07T19:04:00.000-07:00

you know,. it's so long since I last gave a book to publication, (six years!) I feel something of a newb, and keep having to ask my editor: so, what happens next?

Shield Wall went to be copy edited yesterday, and it's scheduled to return n the beginning of November. It's a slightly odd feeling, like fighting a battle, where the enemy come back at you again and again and again, and then suddenly you look up and the enemy have disappeared, and you realise - almost after the event, that you've won.

It's kind of like this. I waited for my editor to come back with comments, and instead he told me the book had gone to the copy editor. It's like a child leaving home. My baby has been sent off, and for the author, this is the moment that your baby leaves home and goes off to have it's own life. And you aer left behind with the memories of the first day your baby opened thier eyes, or walked, or said Dada!

Had another bolly of course, but this is a more bittersweet moment. It's my baby, going out into the world.

But heh, it's a great book! I'm sure it'll have a long and happy life.

Light the candle, infuse the tea, put the bolly on ice

2010-10-06T03:06:00.000-07:00

If you've followed this blog at all, you'll know what a dragged out process finishing a book is. The mss ping pongs back through various stages of editing, which ranges from story, to chapter, to paragraph, to sentence, to word and then grammar. And everything in between.

But I think Shield wall is about at the end of this process. I had a few things my editor wanted me to look at, and then I had things I wanted to look at, and I procrastinated until today, because I wanted to have a day with nothing else to do but lock myself into a room with the world and the characters, and just hang out with them, in a literary kind of way.

It went well. I was spell-checking by 3pm, and had a chance to take a long walk and see if anything else came to me.

There's a niggling reluctance now, to send it in. But it's time really, and so here goes.

Somewhere, almost out of hearing, a long slow drum roll begins.....

Larboard and Curry

2010-10-03T19:58:00.001-07:00

Working through the last notes, I came upon a couple of interesting etymological conundrums.

The first is the word 'curry' which I have used to describe richly spiced stews. I used this word because the earliest English cook book is named 'A Form of Cury' ( written by the cook of Henry II, in AD.1390 and includes hares in talbotes and capons in coney) which delighted me, because it seemed that 'curry' had a history and etymology long before our contact with India and tumeric and vindaloo. It also seemed to reinforce the idea that medieval English cookery was much closer to the spiced food of the middle east, than our more modern cuisine.

But strangely enough, a check with the Anglo-Indian Dictionary named Hobson-Jobson, curry does indeed come from a Tami word,
kari, which meant sauce. And a check with the Oxford English Dictionary, shows that 'Cury', from a 'Forme of Cury', comes from a middle french word, the predecessor of the word cuisine. Ah well!

Another interesting one was the word 'port' for the left side of a boat, which dates from only 1855, when it was officially adopted by the British Navy. The previous word was the middle english, 'larboard' - which was the 'ladde board'. Ie the side where the gangplank went, with ladde related to the verb laden, 'to load'.

The Old English was bæcboard. Though why the backboard, as opposed to 'steorboard/starboard' I'm not sure.

October 4th, 2010

2010-10-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

Our air con packed up half way through the night, and we threw the windows open and found that autumn had come, overnight, to Hong Kong.

There was a cool breeze, an indistinct sunrise, through drifting clouds, and a scent of smoke on the air. And - of course with autumn - a sense of passing.

Obviously, for our family, is the departure of our nanny, Rowena who is returning to the Philippines to start her own family. As we went through our morning routines, breakfast, pack and walk to school, we were aware of Rowena going through a divergent routine: pack, check passport and ticket, recheck, look forward with excitement and expectation for the airport bus.

But it's always harder to be left behind, and the air of loss is in the air, and we're hugging each other a little harder and a little more often than before.

And then, of course, there is the novel: which was batted back to me by my editor with the exhortation for 'one last heave!' but also with the 'Well done – really, really near now. You’ve done brilliant work on Eadric, Edmund , Godwin. I am really impressed.'

It's going to be finished again, today, and can't quite decide whether to go for more champagne. The problem is, really, there are a number of little stages between now and the final manuscript and I could be drunk from now till Christmas if I celebrated each one. There's proof editing, typsesetting, a few last chances for changes. Before the manuscript is printed, and published, and then the book, like rowena - or any of the friends we pick up and then misplace or lose in life - heads off towards a different destination.

Shield Wall goes live!

2010-09-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

Hweat!

With the world being what it is, you can already pre-order Shield Wall from Amazon and The Book Depository - which has the advantage of providing free world wide shipping.

Who could beat that? Go knock yourself out!

What do authors do when they'd not writing?

2010-09-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

My editor's had the book for four days now and not a peep! Shame on him!

Well. I've sorted through the boxes in the spare room, cooking more than the family can eat, and getting some exercise: as well as imbibing a touch of bubbly each night, now that hang-overs no longer mean a missed day of work. Not sure how much longer I can find things to do, but at least we have a holiday booked (first for six years no less) with our favourite Australians, in Bali, at the end of October.

Ah!

By which point I will be tearing my beard out in my frustration to get back to writing. Very much looking forward to getting into the next book, and getting some pay off from all the clever threads I have set up in book one.

- Just checked email, and no he still hasnt't got back to me!

Grrrr!

In the post

2010-09-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

there was a time when finishing a book led to a long hour or two, sitting nervously over a dot matrix printer, refilling it with paper, removing printed sheathes and then putting it all into an envelope, and carrying you love-child to the post office, where it was sent, and mentally tracked from post to sorting office, and eventually to your editor's desk.

Comments came back by post. By hand.

Now, there is a little less ceremony. You finishing the book. Spell check, then pop it into an email and press send.

Shieldwall went off yesterday, at 149,143 words of un-putdownable action emotion and battle!

Usually, at this point (3 years, 11 months) I'm sick of the thing, but I love this book, and want to get straight back to it, just to iron out the last few little details.

And usually, finishing a novel leads to a hole in my life: like losing a lover, but with this book being the first of a series, I'm itching to get back.

The Scene of the crime....socks and all!

And something entirely random for Mid Autumn Festival

tolkien professor

2010-09-05T19:35:00.001-07:00

It's funny where ideas and inspirations come from, and I cam across Corey Olson's podcast, The Tolkien Professor, recently and found it very informative: not least because it allows me to enjoy the works without actually having to read them; nor even that Corey Olsen is a professor with a phd in medieval literature, which gives him fabulous insights into the way Tolkien crafted his stories - but also (and I was talking to one of my postgrad students about this recently) - the way Tolkien framed and structured and thought about his stories was very different to the way we think now in the modern novel.

This is great - as it allows new depth and insight into a story - and offers an alternative to the more generic way of telling stories propogated through creative writing courses and hollywood script writing clinics.

Grump over. If you're at all a fan, go and subscribe, some really interesting material there.

Back on the book front, I managed to finish five chapters last week and send them over to my editor: which means I've polished fourteen overall and with seven to go. Hoping to finish it off by the end of the week, but who knows.

Catching up

2010-09-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed, my life stopped in March. I'm not dead, of course. Still kicking! But it was in March that my in-laws arrived... (Blair and Marie - Only kidding!)

No. In March I started reworking my novel. And it's been a long and challenging and fun process, during which I've blithely missed deadline after deadline, and my poor editor's blood pressure has gone sky high.

Luckily for him, I've almost finished - and I've learnt a lot this year about writing and stories, and feel a little dumb that it's all taken me so long. It'll be four years in November, I think, which isn't bad for 'literary fiction' (hate that term) and appalling for pulp deadlines, which range about 3 months a book.

What's been slightly surreal, is that publishing takes about 9 months to wind into action. And as I've been cutting and resculpting, strange web pages have been appearing all around me, selling a book I haven't finished yet.

Of course, the amazon pages are just gratifying - if not a little odd when you're hot in Japan, because when my mother asks why haven't I finished, yet again, I can just send her to the page and prove that this book does exist.

But much more warming and encouraging are nice comments from readers on the historical fiction forums, where they've noticed my forthcoming series, as well as saying some really nice things about Passing Under Heaven.

It's lovely to read nice things about books you wrote a long time ago from people who aren't related to you. And I feel a little guilty it's all taken so long. But I have been busy, and am delighted to say I'm now full-time at the English Dept of City University Hong Kong.

We're also expecting our fourth child in January, 2011, so 2011 is looking like a really exciting year.

It's way too early for new year resolutions, but is it too late to fulfill ones I made last New Year?! In January I promised myself I would blog once a week, and so, very late on in the year, I'm getting my life back from my novel, and letting it go off into a life of its own.

And in that fabulously rambling way, I'm promising my readers something to perk up thier mondays...

Requiem

2010-03-05T01:23:00.000-08:00

Friday again, huh!

I’m nose deep in editing my latest novel at the moment, which lives under the title Shieldwall, but almost definitely wont be published under that name. It went to market a 200,000 word door-stopper, and like rose bushes and apple trees, needs a little bit of pruning to really bloom.

I’ve been though all kinds of music for this novel. I started off with a mix of medieval songs and Gregorian chants, as well as some Anglo Saxon music that was sung at the Coronation of Edward the Confessor. Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack to INto the Wild, Steeleye Span, of all things, as well as Ganbold.

What's blasting away at the moment is the finest track for editing for action, thrill and momentum: Mozart's Requiem!

Extreme Burns Society of Hong Kong, 2010 Meet

2010-02-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

Nan Shan Peak, Lantau Island.

Can the real Ganbold, please step forward

2010-01-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

I started off this novel, about four years ago with a selection of music that seemed to conjur up the cold and the dark and the brilliant candlelight of Anglo Saxon England. A little historical research threw up songs in Latin from the coronation ceremony of Edward the Confessor. Then there was the wealth of Gregorian Chant and a few songs that Sinead O'Connor recorded with the monks of Glenstall Abbey, which were piercingly beatuiful.

But as i sit down to but this story and these characters into their definitive shape, I'm going back to the strangest music I have, and which I picked up in a hut in Mongolia: Ganbold.

It's what I sat down to write the first pages of The Drink and Dream Teahouse to, and I guess it was part of the alchemy when my writing first began to sing itself.

Press Release, courtesy of The Viney Agency

2010-01-06T04:57:00.000-08:00

Richard Beswick at Little, Brown has bought UK and Commonwealth rights (XC) for two books in the Conquest series by award-winning novelist Justin Hill for a substantial five figure sum.

Little, Brown will publish the first volume in 2011. Beswick said: ‘In his career Justin Hill has won an array of awards and this is his most brilliant book yet. Set against the background of the 11th century Viking and Norman invasions it is a breathtaking evocation of feudal England, as well as being full of visceral excitement’. The deal was concluded by Charlie Viney of The Viney Agency.

Justin Hill’s Passing Under Heaven (Little, Brown, 2005) won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, while his The Drink and Dream Teahouse (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) won both the 2002 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 2002 Betty Trask Award. Ciao Asmara (Abacus, 2002) was shortlisted for the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Hill’s work has been translated into fourteen languages and he was listed among the top twenty young British novelists by the Independent on Sunday.

Henry Treece: Viking' Dawn

2010-01-04T01:06:00.000-08:00

I read Henry Treece when I was a boy, and during the recent BBC Open Book feature on forgotton classics, Henry Treece got a mention, and I thought I have to find those books again, and just see how well they compare to my memory.

I have a think, you see, about reading books that really grabbed you as a child. I set my students to read something they loved a year or so ago, and having spoken passionately about why it was such a good idea, I thought I should take some of my own medicine and have been fairly hooked ever since.

I liked this book probably as much as I did as a child. It's simple, short, and niocely doesn't take any of the obvious story directions you'd expect with Vikings. I was impressed, actually, with how much he manages to fit into a book of just 168 pages.

I've noticed with a lot of older writers, how they flout the current mantra of show not tell, and happily tell, tell, tell, and still their stories zim along. I like these older styles, and curiously, he uses a lot of similar expressions to Tolien, which makes me think they may well have been current lingo at the time. I'm a show and tell kind of writer, I think, and I wonder if growing up with TV has altered the way we write now.

Back to Mr Treece: he was born some nineteen years after JRRT, and died five years earlier in 1966, but I think he was writing the kinds of books that JRRT and CS Lewis approved of. Books in the manner of Haggard not Wolfe. Books that people read because they're great reads rather than featuring on academic syllabuses or adding a whiff of intellecutallity to one's aura.

Ah! I seem to have hit upon a gripe of mine. Better stop there before the rant begins.

The Last Meal, M at the Fringe.

2010-01-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

Well, amidst all the Christmas jolities this year, something rather sad happened.

M at the Fringe, Hong Kong's most loved restaurant closed.

Of course, most of you wont know M at the Fringe, or have any idea why it is such a loss. It was the place you went to sit and talk. It wasn't a place where the food or design or styish facilities were the chief attraction, though they were all unique and admirable.

The food was always fabulous, and varied and inventive. The staff were attentive without being intrusive, swift, efficient and polite. Perhaps the only place in Hong Kong where all these are combined.

It was the host of the famous literary lunches, and in my time I saw Ian McEwan, Andre Aciman, and most recently Colm Toibin. The owner, Michelle Garnaut often passed through, between her other establishments in Shanghai and Beijing, and it was a place - for us - where we went to mark special occasions, and it had become the place Elle and I went for a long lunch on Christmas Eve.

Our last meal?

Half a dozen of those freshly shucked oysters with a few glasses of prosecco; caviar and sour cream on slivers of new potatos.

We went for a New Zealand Pinot Noir, lightly chilled. For the main I had the best Suckling Pig in town, while Elle went for the Gaggle of Goose.

Not really a desert kind of person, and I think a strong cup of coffee saw me in fine singing form for the 5pm Christingle Service at St John's Cathedral.

The good news is that there willbe an M in Waiting opening some time this year, until a suitable new spot can be found, and - as every cloud is lined with suprises - we'll get out and find some other spot.

But cast adrift on a little raft of memory, will be our 2009 Christmas Eve lunche at the Fringe.

So long 2009: we had fun I guess....

2009-12-30T19:19:00.000-08:00

We've been joking for a while about how we'll kick 2009's backside as it exits on Midnight December 31st, but really a lot of great stuff has happened this year.

Our daughter, Isabella Arwen was born. And she had all the toes and fingers that a father could want, as well as a sleep routine and smile that could make any parent could wish for.

I re-wrote my novel. A couple of times i think. We drank a lot of Bollinger to celebrate, and a few rows worth of prosecco all along the way.

My brother was married. We spent maternity leave in Ireland, and London where I went to the 20th anniversary reunion for my school, St Peter's in York.

So long, 2009! Not many people will remember you that fondly, but you and I - we spent a long time together, and life for the most part was good.

Life is, I honestly believe, good.

Christmas Menu

2009-12-28T03:44:00.000-08:00

I sat down to the Christmas meal last year to eat and almost fell asleep on the spot. I had cooked so much, with sauces, chutneys, veg, and a variety of stuffings that I was utterly exhausted by the time it came to eat.

Resolution to self, keep it simple next time round. So this is the keeping it simple: a roast goose with a staightforward selection of delicious foods. Had George and her brother and daughter and parents over, which made 3 kids and six adults - and managed to stretch this out for six hours of feasting.

Merry Christmas, which does of course go on for Twelve Nights!

Christmas reading

2009-12-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

Christmas: fabulous! I'm clearly a great fan of this fesitval of light and food and company, which really Christmas is all about, and like to accompany the season with suitabe reading.

Now when I was young I read Terry Brooks The Sword of Shanara, timing my reading so that I finished it on Christmas Eve - allowing me to stay up late and hopefully catch sight of Santa or my father, which I think I did a couple of times.

As a slight cheat there was a BBC drama I recorded back in the 80s, which was all about the pagan themes of Yuletide - but which went missing a few years before I could convert that cassette to mp3.

Which has left me a little lacking, when wanting some literary Christmas mate4rial.

I tried Dicken's Christmas Stories, which include the Christmas Carol, but others besides. Enjoyable, but sometimes I just can't be bothered to go through Dicken's wordiness. My son loves The Snow Queen, from The Pink Fairy book. I don't bother reading it now, but just snuggle up and retell it, which always seems a more interesting way to experience a stopry.

For the last couple of years Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, has filled my Xmas slot.

It takes part over two subsequent Yuletides, with the feasting and warmth and company, during the fantasitical reign of Arthur. There are some fabulous phrases - the grass being fixed with frost, swine swinging they swagger home!

You might like it

2009-12-02T16:09:00.001-08:00

You know it's been a busy year: I strted work at Hong Kong University, started a pension policy, started jogging again, and I (we?!) had a baby, (Isabella Arwen) who has been delightful and rejuvinating - as well as a large consumer of sleep-time.

It's because of her I'm writing this blog, actually. Isabella has given me the gift of sitting and doing nothing, as she chugs quietly away on a bottle of milk. Part of that time has gone to catching up with sleep, but a large amount of time has gone reading. Yes, reading!

It's a slightly odd admission for a writer to make, but I haven't been reading as much as I ought, and sometime this year I decided to go back and read books I liked as a child. I got Terry Brooks, Sword of Shanara, one of the first Lord of the Ring's look alikes, that Santa kindly brought me back in the early '80s, and which became my Christmas holiday reading for years after. I would aim to finish the book on Christmas Eve, hoping it would keep me up long enough to catch sight of Santa, or perhaps later, my father coming in with a well-stuffed stocking.

I bought Julian May's Pliocene Series. I went back to my old Dan Abnetts. I read The King of Athelney, by Alfred Duggan - which my father gave me years ago, and said something like, 'Try this, you might like it.'

He was right of course, I loved it. It tells the tale of King Alfred, from a boy to an old and victorious man. It has chapter titles like, Battle Winter, which got my teenage and adult imagination masticulating with excitment.

I could go on. Haggard, Tolkien, Robert E. Howard. All fabulous writers and fabulous ways to spend an hour or two with a baby. Between books I realised a couple of things. I wasn't reading any of the worthy 'literary' fiction my books seemed to be lumped as. These books, that teenage boys like to read, were still books that I like to read, and then I realised I was finally writing a book that I could give to my teenage cousin and say 'Try this, you might like it.'

Su Tong Scoops the Prize

2009-11-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

Which might not suprise many: he was the odd one out in the list, being a well-established author in a list of mainly unpublished young voices. In that way, the whole ceremony lacked some of the fairy-tale quality last year, when one of those young-bloods, Miguel Syjuco from the Phillipines, beat off another established Chinese author (Yu Hua).

I haven't read the books this year, but I have no doubt that the judges have picked a worthy winner. He is the one Chinese author I can think of who was writing interesting and provoking material about China way back in the '90s. And he's been doing it ever since, with less attention than many other Chinese authors. Colm Toibin made the most beautiful speak, as chairman of the judges, that I have ever heard - and throughout the room there was a palpable snap - as from a daydream - when he sat down again.

When prizes insist on inviting all the shortlisted authors, staging a sit-down meal, and adding a certain ceremony to the whole occasion it's tough on the four authors who go home disappointed. You're not hungry, you don;t want to talk or make conversation, and you're torn between hoping and smothering those hopes. And then, having been feted, you suddenly find yourself, less the star, than the guest at someone else's party. Which is the wrong way to feel, of course.

To be shortlisted is really the honour, and for the unpublished young authors, who left disappointed that night, they might well find that being shortlisted is more of a prize than winning is for Su Tong.

Hear them here first: Man Asian Literary Prize, 2009

2009-11-15T17:28:00.000-08:00

So. It's November again, and another Man Asian Literary Prize. Well, it's only the third so far, but already becomming a well-established event. To recap: the prize is for a work by an 'Asian' writer (difficult to determine, but roughly a resident or national of an Asian country) with a work not yet published in English.

The idea of the prize is to promote Asian writing around the world, and the short-list this year are a fairly mixed bag in terms of experience and recognition. Su Tong is an already established writer, with an oscar winning film (Raise the Red Lantern) adapted from one of his early novellas. Other literary veterans include US/Philipino author, Eric Gamalinda and Indian publisher and author, Siddharth Chowdhury. The young bloods are Nitasha Kaul, whose phd thesis intruiginly combined economics and philisophy; and Omair Ahmad, a journalist/analyst with an expertise in Kashmir.

Last night, we got to hear them all talking about and reading from their work. The last two prizes it seemed clear after the reading which novel would win, but can't say I can tell this one. They all had strengths, and with a new set of judges (Colm Toibin, Gish Jen, and Pankaj Mishra) who knows which they'll go for.

Other men than me were confident Su Tong is going to win, but who knows.

I had the pleasure and honour of reading Su Tong's piece in English. Back in the 90s, Su Tong was the only Chinese novelist who work varied from the Wild Swan's style misery books and I think he's one of the really interesting voices to come out of China so if you haven't had the chance to read him yet, put him on your list.

Dinner, was at Yung Kee, where it was interesting to see that once you put a couple of glasses of wine into them, the shyest writers on stage became quite eloquent.

Prize announced tonight.

Su Tong, Eric Gamalinda, Siddharth Chowdhury, Nitasha Kaul, last year's winner Miguel Syjuco, Omair Ahmad and myself.
Thanks alot to Martin Merz for sending me this pic.

Lunch with Colm Toibin

2009-11-15T16:11:00.000-08:00

Colm is over as the chair of judges for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. On Saturday we had lunch at M at the Fringe, and I was lucky enough to sit opposite the big man, but barely shared a word as I was also sitting next to the aunt of the restaurant owner, a very entertaining lady, Diana Marsland - who sailed from Australia to London as a younger lady, worked at the Hilton, and travelled back east by land, and had many interesting stories about Afghanistan.

Anyway! Colm was very entertaining after lunch, and one of the writers you listen to and think, i should go and buy one of his books.

Twiddling my thumbs

2009-11-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

So! As the poem began, I finished the book!

Well, I've been saying that for so long I can't remember. Partly because there are so many stages, it seems, to finishing. There's the first draft. The second draft. The draft that went to the agent. The draft that came back from the agent. The draft that incorporated his feedback. The draft I finally finished, and then I sat on the book over the weekend to see if any other points came back to me, and the draft that included those little changes.

Each time something about the book changed. It got longer, usually, smaller characters got bigger parts, and some of the characters began to drift through various drafts in their roles and motivations. As the author it was all fascinating!

And the book's not really finished. Like the fatted cow, it's just finished enough to go to market.

And now I'm twiddling my thumbs, which is a wonderfully odd place for me, as this book has been about 4 years work (I can't get a reliable doc 'created' date as 'm on a different computor, but the earliest file I have is a six page beginning, which is still the beginning, last modified on 27th October 2006 which fits nicely my recollection of a year's research, followed by three years writing.)

Where next? The sequel of course, which is great to look forward to. And the selling of the book, which is part of the general air of disappointment (not necesserily with the money, but the whole slightly grubby but entirely necessary marketisation of my book. But also putting my feet up more, spending more time with the kids (genuinely!) and reading. Four years is a long time to learn things, and I've learnt alot of stuff during (and not necesserily connected to or because of) writing this book. One is the kind of books I like to read. I knew it of course, but I'm clearer now about what kind of books I don't like. I suppose 'genre' is the closest way to describe the kind of books I like. But 'genre' seems to be a term used to describe books (crime, fantasy, science fiction, romance, whatever) where story is important. And I have found that I rather like story. In fact, story is gripping in a way that beautiful language, clever literary references, or any of the other marks of that rather doomed genre 'literary fiction' is not.

And to make some kind of sense of this blog, I think each draft has made this novel more about the story (as well as the historicity and the characters and the beauty of the language of course!) It's a good thing to have learnt. But hell, this is only my fourth novel, so I'm just a beginner really.

What is she called? Well, this novel has gone through a couple of names, and now she's called Shieldwall. Not a very female name to be honest, and as I've compared my other novels to girlfriends, I guess this one is less like a lover than a great friend. Reader, meet Shieldwall, Shieldwall, meet reader! I think you'll get along very just fine!

Past Lives

2009-10-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

I lived another life apparently. In Dark Age England. Or so I was told at a party this weekend when talking about the book I'm just finishing off.

It's a little odd. I've been telling people I'm finishing for about six months. And it's true. I finished the novel to show an agent - now my agent - the very impressive Charlie Viney - and then finished it again with his comments included, and so on, until now - i'm finishing the book so I can sell it, and then they'll be comments from the editor, and I'll finish it all over again.

But apparently, my previous life had to be in that time, because the world is so vivid to me. The world's leading practitioner of second life reinformcement/enhancement - I can't remember exactly - is flying into Hong Kong and I could see her, if I liked. And I was quite tempted, I have to admit.

I've certainly found that this book, this topic and these characters chime closely with me. But they it seems to link into thoughts and ideas I had when I was a child. It runs off the kind of things I read when I was a boy: Njal's Saga, Laxdaella Saga, King Harald's Saga, and of course, The Lord of the Rings.

This edit is particularly exciting, because there is little to change. You are teetering on that sentence or paragraph, whilst you balance the rest of the book on your shoulders. And so you have to keep all that in your head, all the characters, action, story lines, love affairs, whilst thinking about that comma.

It has taken up most of my attention for about two months now, during which my ability to do simple things like answer emails, has ground almost to a halt. But I should finish this week, which prompts me to remember other novels, and how I parted with them. I like this one, and in many ways I don't feel that abrupt break, as this is the first of a trilogy, and the characters will continue into the next book.

Of course I meant to be chronicalling this whole period with this blog, but life somehow got in the way of good intentions, and so this is very late in the whole process. Passing a resolution long before New Year to keep up blogging my way through whatever is left of my time with this novel, which now has a name - or I should say it's now got a name that has stuck.

Dear Reader, meet Shieldwall; Shieldwall, it's an exciting time for me, because you will soon be meeting your dear readers.....

Diamonds

2008-07-21T00:03:00.000-07:00

My wife is in diamonds, and the funny thing about these clumps of carbon, is that uncut, they're fairly uninspiring. There's certainly no sparkle.

I said before how, if I started writing the novel today I would a better and more succinct novel - and I'm not in a position to put aside the previous year and a half of work. So what to do?

I took a week off writing, and made a list of the twenty scenes left in the book. Which brought me, after a couple of days of mulling on the matter, to the core of the story: which is not the core I thought it was.

Illumination! Fantastic. Which brings me to diamonds. NOTE TO SELF: I write best when I write as succinctly and tightly as possible. When the words are as finely chiselled as possible. When the story moves as boldly on from one scene to the next. It's an exciting thing for a reader, to follow a story that leaps from scene to scene like a mountain goat: rather than one that cow-plods from field to field.

It's quite a simple thing really, but very hard to have that level of control/condifence over the story and the characters to write this well. I was listening to Bruce Springsteen at the time, and was fairly inspired by his style of lyric, which is fairly distinctive in that his songs tell a story. Dont believe me? Have a listen Or here

If a song can tell a story, with a voice and characters and conflict, then why can't a novel?

Plotting, Part 2

2008-07-14T18:38:00.001-07:00

Life has given me a handy deadline of six weeks to get to the end of this novel - and it's a target that's just possible to reach.

How to do this best, I wondered to myself this morning an came up with a plan. I will limit myself to 20 scenes to bring all my characters to the end of thier stories. Which means sitting down this morning and looking at the story, and looking at the characters and working out which scenes are the crucial ones.

In fact, this seems like a great way to plan a novel. If I was to start again, I'd spend a few weeks or maybe months writing about the characters: so I could get to know them and how they act in different situations. Then I'd plan out seventy - and no more than seventy scenes for the whole novel. Then I'd sit down and write them. You wouldn't even have to write them in sequence.

It seems so easy, doesn't it?

How to Structure a Novel

2008-07-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

Some people use graphs to show how a novel should build and peak. Some think of concertos. Both these certainly have their uses. Structure is certainly something I struggle with - and hopefully next time I'm struggling I'll stumble upon this post and remind myself of the best way for me to understand how all this stuff fits together: Shakespeare, dear boy. Shakespeare!

By which I mean, Acts and Scenes.

I'm not sure how it works but maybe from my school days, of sitting in English class taking it in turns to read out that month's Shakespeare play, I seem to have absorbed some kind of understanding of what makes a scene. And then what scenes make up am act. And how acts work together - or build upon each other - to make a play. Or story.

And plan it out from the beginning, in acts and scenes.

Something that's true from my first novel is that I seem to work in chunks of about 30,000 words. Not that I get to 30K and stop, just that the seams of the novel start to strain and stretch at this point, and it's at this point that I tend to take those 30K out and look at them and fit them pack them down together with less air between them.

Actually I tried planning this novel out from the beginning. But my plan - like those of generals - did not survive contact with the enemy. But I do wish I knew then what I know now about the whole tale. I would have spent much less time on the beginning, and jumped ahead to the main grit. I've been pencilling in scenes I should have written into the first half of the novel, and just pushing along, assuming they have written.

Of course a lot of this will shake out when the first whole draft is written and then I can look at the whole lot - lay the body out on the slab in front of me - and I can cut away all the flabby and unpleasant flesh.

Lessons for next time? Plan as much as possible, and understand the story and it's affect upon the characters as much as possible before starting.

Learning

2008-06-29T23:25:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's been a long time, hasn't it. I can't believe how long really, but there you go: I've been writing.

I think I had about 95,000 words for the first half of my novel, and I realised that it'd taken me far too many words to get to this point in the story: and so I went through it cutting and cutting and stitching the remains together.

On top of this I knew that I needed a wide spread of characters with which to enter the second half. This meant I added some new bits to the whole: scenes, comments, memories.

And after a month or so's work I had cut 95,000 words back down to about 55,000: and with a much stronger story than before.

When I was sure I had a solid foundation then I started the second half of the novel.

It was clear to me that the writing would have to be very tight to get all the key stories and storylines into the second half, and so I went through the novel, scene by scene, plotting it out onto the wall of my office.

There are many different ways of planning a novel, and I have heard and seen comparisons that range from concertos to graphs, but I find the best way is in terms of Acts and Scenes, much as I learnt at school when reading Shakespeare.

It's not only a good way of plotting the novel, but it also helps to plan the scenes ahead. I'm banging on now, and the writing has been flowing easily, almost too easily at times, and I've found I've had to go back at times to add scenes and flesh out storylines.

But it's all great fun. I've also identified a number of scenes I should have written in the first half, but rather than go back and write them now, Ive put them into my novel planner in different colours and am treating them as scenes that have been written, and pushing on towards the end: which is out there somewhere...

Characters: as a note to myself, I've also rediscovered that characters with pasts are more compelling than characters with futures. Something to remember for the future.

Suzhou: St Patrick's Day

2008-03-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

My last day in China: it's an odd feeling. It rained during the night and the trees are dripping and the car park is wet and glossy, the air damp and chill.

The news this morning was the election of the Chinese premier and vice premiers. The news all week - or rather the non news - has been the riots in Tibet. These started out as a rumour someone said in Beijing. 'Have you heard about the riots in Tibet?'

Nothing more.

In Chengdu the only foreign news service was CNN, and it took me a day to realise that when the signal blanked out it was because it was a report from Tibet.

In Shanghai the censor was much more relaxed. And there was the BBC as well, covering the news in much more detail: namely rumours that a hundred have been killed by Chinese police/army. ('CNN is not covering this for fear of losing the Olympics' someone told me. )

In Suzhou there is no foreign news, just CCTV channel 9, which is the English language channel. They mention the Tibetan news, and the report is full of words like 'insurgance, seperatists, Dalai Lama clique'. 'Tibetan seperatists will be crushed' is a phrase that sticks in my memory as I go out to my talk with Brian Keenan. I'm a little hung over from St Patrick's Day the day before - but it is good to celebrate a good English saint, even though the Irish like to pretend he's there's. A great guy, by the way - Brian Keenan - and despite the fact I promised myself an early night I find myself at the bar chatting till midnight.

I was fourteen when he was kidnapped, and nineteen when he was released. 'Who's Brian Keenan?' my wife asks when I tell her - in fact most of the people can't really place the name. But I knew, and I read his book An Evil Cradling when I was in China: it's a great book, that goes beyond the experiences of a man who was a hostage, and says something profound about the world.

This blog was originally written March 18th, but this blog site is banned in China.

Shanghai

2008-03-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday afternoon on the roof terrace of M on the Bund, having lunch with Madelein Thien and marvelling at the sight across the river, which looks like Hong Kong Island, viewed from Kowloon.

Spent a very pleasant night last night, watching the last day of the six nations rugby, and England beating Ireland at last. And beating them in the line out. At last.

This blog was originally written March 16th, but this blog site is banned in China.

Chengdu

2008-03-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

It struck me on the plane down here that I grew up in a medieval city, and that I find this scale of city comforting: which may be one reason why I so much prefer the hutong to the highway. I like tight and overhanging streets, full of people you can reach out and touch.

Chengdu

Chengdu is the only inland city I'm visiting on this tour, and not surprisingly I've been here more times than the other places put together: and I find these moments and 'me's crowding around me demanding to be heard, and remembered.

The first time was in 1994 when I came on a Shanxi Province Teachers Trip when we went to see some old dams and then took the Three Gorges. I came here in the summer of 1995, on a thousand mile trip from Lhasa to Golmud, to Xining, to Chengdu, to Kunming, where I was meeting my parents. I remember meeting my girlfriend then on a warm steamy night, just off the train. It was the last summer I saw my father. Two months after he left he killed himself in a cottage in the Lake District.

And I came here in the summer of 1998, drifting home from Hunan, with the seed of a novel in my head - the opening scene - where a factory closes, a man dies and it starts raining. And that seed grew like a weed, or a tall straight shaft of bamboo - into The Drink and Dream Teahouse. And I became a novelist. And I wrote a book I was really proud of.

This blog was originally written March 14th, but this blog site is banned in China.

Leaving Beijing

2008-03-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

Thursday 13th March

There are moments when you wonder how you got here, like this. If ask myself this when I attend events and find myself standing talking or sitting on stage with famous writers.

I guess a large section of my personality is the budding writer, still trying to work out how to get published, so when I sat on a panel in Hong Kong with Colin Thubron a few days ago, it made me a little giddy. There have been more of these moments here in Beijing: bumbing into Arundati Roy and Hari Kunzru; being asked to moderate Brian Keenan (Justin - do you mind chatting with Brian on stage in Suzhou?) - Do i mind?! Hell no!

And then I interviewed bestselling Chinese author, Jiang Rong, about his book Wolf Totem. What do I know about China? I feel, but then I talk to other people, or read other books and it's only then that I realise that I know alot about China. And a lot more than other people who claim to know everything. No names mentioned. ;-)

It's also been nice to come back to Beijing and wander around the place with no destination other than lunch or tea. I don't like much of the new Beijing, but I've been taking lots of notes, and I see a lot of stories around me. I have just starting writing short stories, a form which has either alluded me or puzzled me before. I find it hard, I guess to start a story and then close the window on it without exploring the characters at novel length.

But I'm getting the hang of it now, I think: short stories are like little snapshots of a life or a moment, or in the words of Madelien Thien, when I asked her about her short stories, they're 'little universes all of their own'. This of course is the other great thing about lit fests - you get to hang out with other writers, and suddenly - after spending most of your life in an office, alone except for your imagination - you're not isolated. It must be how the puddle duck feels when suddenly the urge to migrate comes upon him and he seeks out all his fellow ducks and they gather in one vast flock to wing south - and I'm winging to Chengdu tomorrow.

This blog was originally written March 13th, but this blog site is banned in China.

Beijing Lit Fest

2008-03-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

It is good to be back in Beijing. I guess I'm odd amongst ex pats who have lived in China, in that I've never lived in Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen - only passed through on the way inland. But of all those big cities, Beijing is the closest to me: it's where I first landed - on a Finn Air jumbo which, when taxiing towards the terminal we stopped abrunptly. It was a little odd, and I peered out of the window to see why, and saw that there was a crossroads at the airport, with traffic lights. Our light has turned red, and as I peered out, the opposing traffic - a lone bicycle - had right of way.

Anyay, that was January 1993, and now the new Beijing airport is open: the largest building in the world, and I doubt there are any bicycles allowed on the airport.

Still - it conveys a sense of how Beijing is changing. I never recognise the place, because most of the buildings - from the ancient hutongs to the dull Communist-era blocks of flats - have been demolished and been replaced with skyscrapers. The only bits I recognise are the streets around Tiananmen, which never really change. The city has undoubtedly deteriorated: it has switched from a city of the pedestrian and bicycle, to a city for cars, where pedestrians are like the little figures at the bottom of vast science fiction canvases, put in at the bottom to give the whole place a sense of scale.

And there's a lot of building going on: and vast holes everywhere. In fact, between my hotel, which was opposite Beijing Hooters, was a vast hole (see the size of the digger to get a sense of the size of the hole), being worked on by short tanned little migrant workers: peasants in effect, in hard hats and luminous jackets and I felt at home around them and their curious and amused looks because they come from places where I have lived, and they looked remarkably like the students I used to teach - who were short and dark little peasants.

But it is great to get off the ten lane highways and find the little streets that still exist behind the modern facades. Each time I go back to Beijing there are less and less of them, and little things or people I used to think would always be there have gone.

One of those is jianbing: a breakfast food that combines egg and crepe and a crispy biscuit thing - all smeared with plum sauce and chilli and coriander and spring onions. It's heaven, and there used to be guys all over the little streets making these: but now they're made - if at all - they are in the supermarkets. Which is not the same.

I knew a guy across Beijing, who I always used to go to and he would always remember me even though it was months between each visit. Sensing that street jianbing sellers are fading from Beijing, I got a taxi the next morning and told my wife that I would video 'our' jianbing man, before he disappeared. But when I went to where he worked he had already disappeared.

I managed to find another, and thanks to YouTube here is a jianbing:

And then I thought I should video what it was like to walk through a hutong, just for me to remember when these hutongs are also gone.

This blog was originally written March 9th, but this blog site is banned in China.

Hong Kong Lit Fest 2008 and a little more Gygax

2008-03-06T00:14:00.000-08:00

I have a personal bond with the Hong Kong Literary Festival: I came here for the first time on my honeymoon in 2002. While most newly weds spend their time in bed, I have to admit that my wife spent a number of mornings alone in our room at the Mandarin Oriental: listening to me on the morning Radio Hong Kong talk show. But our week was spiced up with lunches and meals with literary greats (Hanif Kureshi and Amitav Ghosh amongst others) - and more parties and champagne receptions than is decent in one week.

So it was with a little thrill that I unpacked my author's pack for this year's festival: the two week membership of the Foreign Correspondant's Club, the name tag and info pack of when I should be where.

The festival started with the launch of 50/50 - an anthology of Hong Kong writers, and the next night followed up just as well with an exclusive Asian Literary Review party, while last night I was with the Hong Kong Geographical Society, to listen to the great travel writer, Colin Thubron, talk about his journey along the Silk Route from Xian to the ancient Antioch, on the Mediterranean coast. Unfortunately, great writers often disappoint, but Mr Thubron was an excellent speaker, and spoke without looking at his notes for an hour, plucking facts and history and story in an almost breathless account. The audience questions were a little dull, with the dullest being one lady who was very concerned to know if Mr Thubron could use chopsticks - but overall a great event.

Meanwhile, to get back to the late Gary Gygax, here's a wonderful quote from him in 2005, which backs up my feeling that storytelling and role-playing are closely related.

"The story of the hero being called forth, usually unwillingly, and adventuring and undergoing a change has been with us probably since stories were told round campfires."

I like that.

The Magic of Gygax

2008-03-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

The news is a fairly dreary procession of events and declarations, but once in a while you see or hear something that stops your little world spinning for a moment. In my inbox this morning was an email that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, had died.

I was always quite impressed with the name 'Gary Gygax'. While you wouldn't be frightened of a dragon called 'Gary', 'Gygax' seemed a suitably esoteric and strangely archaic sounding name. Tolkien might have called his Farmer Giles of Ham dragon 'Gygax', rather than 'Crysophylax' - or maybe they were related in some way, hatched in the same dragon brood - because dragons lay eggs don't you know. The name also looked neat, and it alliterated: but most of all - I saw that name on the front of my Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. And - in some kind of Pavlovian response - that name began to symbolise that sense of magic, adventure, the feeling of my little village life in York opening up - and me growing up into something more exciting than a schoolkid with a bicycle.

But oddly, I don't think I've seen that name on the front of any rulebook for twenty years. In fact, I only played Dungeons and Dragons for about four years, but it did lead me onto other roleplaying games, onto roleplaying weekends when we would camp out in the grounds of a friend's house (whose parents just happened to own a country house and a theatre production company and so all the cloaks and shields and plastic stage armour any young lad could wish for) - where we cooked over camp fires and sat up late into the night - and I remember, it was then that I stayed up all night for the first time, and the toe of my wellington boot melted. But Dungeons and Dragons inspired me. It filled my hours in a strangely obsessive way. I wrote stories about my character's adventures. I drew maps of their temples and castles. I wrote letters to my brother's characters, and he wrote them back, and we tip-toed along the corridor that connected our bedrooms, late (as it seemed then) into the night. It was an old farm house and we knew that corridor and it's squeaky floorboards like the backs of our hands.

My parents were a little worried, I remember, and they sat in the same room and discussed me - in the way that parents do - while I sat and drew a new castle for my characters. Was it healthy, they wondered. Could it do any harm? Was it Satanic? (At the time D&D was banned by the monks at Ampleforth school for encouraging devil worship). I also remember hearing there was going to be a radio 4 play on called Dungeons and Dragons - and I sat and listened to it and was a little insulted, as (so it seemed to me then) tried and utterly failed the capture - the magic of being 10 or 11, and carrying a sword instead of a walking stick, or school bag.

Now: I had a lot of issues with D&D, but most of them were because it wasn't realistic enough. How could my 22 hit points fighter still fight with the same degree of strength when he had 1 hit point left? Runequest gave me the answers. And when I had enough little lead figures, Warhammer turned up and so my double life as an army general began.

There is no Rod of Resurrection, but there is magic in the name Gary Gygax, and it still brings that thrill of adventure - and the sense of opening, from this world to another where more is possible. And when I think about the events that led me to write novels, there are two that stand out in my memory: when I was nine or ten, hearing one boy give his book report on The Hobbit, and thinking that I should read that; and the year later when the odd boy in the back of the class was going on about this new game, D&D. I remember I begged my mother to get a copy. My school included Saturday morning, and I remember rushing home that Saturday lunchtime, and running in to see my boxed set - with it's red dragon curling on a bed of treasure -and my mother telling me that the lady at the Precious of Petergate toy shop told her that they had sold out - and I ran to my room sulking fiercely.

But there on my bed, lay a plastic wrapped copy of basic D&D.

'They said it was the last copy, but I asked them to check and the lady found one in the back,' my mother rather smugly told me, when I came back downstairs beaming.

And so it all began.

The news today is all about Ian Paisley resigning; the UK Transport Minister's plans to shelve road charging schemes; and the specultation about whether Obama or Clinton will win in Ohio and Texas. I'm actually supposed to be at work, but wanted to stay at home and try and capture this moment. And in my world - the mailing lists I subscribe to, and the message boards I visit - the death of Gary Gygax is the only real news there is. All the men who were once boys, and who sat in the same rooms as I did, rolling dice and staring at the player's side of the Dungeon Master's Screen - and graduating from hack n slay to a more intelligent way of interacting with worlds and monsters you have never come across before.

Gygax is dead, but there is still magic in that name: just seeing it and thinking about it has brought back all these wonderful moments that shaped my youth. And when the world presses too heavy and close, and I stray upon his name again, I know that I will feel that same sense of opening and possibility, and adventure.

The Aftermath

2008-02-20T04:32:00.000-08:00

Well. Did I did learn a couple of things. One: I'm not like Ian McEwan. Two: I don't want to write like Ian McEwan. Three: I wish I had McEwan's sales figures.

The other thing that struck me was something McEwan said when he talked about his early writing., which was along the lines of during his first four books he was under the misapprehension that you should not show a character's interior thoughts. And that clearly he changed his mind. Martin Amis said something along the same lines last week, talking about theme in his own writing - that when one has written a few books then you can go back and have a look at the preoccupations that unite them all. I find this very reassuring because I still feel I'm learning about writing, and clearly both of them learnt from their early books that then helped them go on and write more.

As far as the rest of the lunch: very pleasant, and McEwan was a good deal more humourous than his work might make you think. I even went so far as to buy his latest book, Chesil Beach, but found it hard to get through the first sentence without being repelled. No other writer has this affect on me - of turning me off immediately - and I tried to work out why and pushed on further into the book, and it's the narratorial voice I dislike, which is irritatingly all-knowing.

Still, Passing Under Heaven and Ciao Asmara both went into their second impression this week, which is great news, and I'm struggling against the deadline for a couple of short stories, which seems a much more difficult style of writing than writing books. Got a very exciting March coming up, with a tour of China's lit fests, from Hong Kong to Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai and Suzhou. Strangely, it's the thought of the various foods I'll be eating along the way that is exciting me most. But food, intelligent conversation, and fine wine are about as good a combination as you can find. Which strangely brings me back to the lunch. More please!

Literary Lunches

2008-02-10T22:30:00.000-08:00

I'm having lunch with Ian McEwan tomorrow. Well, not just me. There's about forty of us who have paid a nice sum for the honour of eating and drinking some fine fare, and then listening to Mr McEwan talk about his work for half an hour.

And all this feels very relevant as next month I will be taking a month off touring the various Chinese literary festivals, and I'm wondering what exactly lit fests and lunches are all about. What do we hope to achieve or learn by listening to an author talking about their work. And - as an author - what do I gain by meeting an audience?

I suppose that the author's motivation is clear. Beyond the pure ego-boost, and the chance to sell books, I'm very clear about the purpose of these events for me. It stems from the fact that writing is a peculiarly divorced art form, with artist and audience seperated by time and place and in case of translation - even language. Readings are the only time an author meets their audience and when I read I get to feel their reaction, in the same way that an actor can feel the audience from the stage.

As a spectator I'ma little more confused by lit fests. And I suppose there's a rainbow of reasons why people attend. I go to learn something from the authors, or to be inspired. But the problem is that authors are so random at delivering a performance anything like thier books. Very entertaining raconteurs I remember seeing include Louis de Bernieres and Simon Winchester, but - my first - AS Byatt was less interesting than a pot of paint.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting from tomorrow's lunch. I'm not a big fan of McEwan's writing, but he has certainly hit a groove in the popular British literary scene - and I am sure I can learn tomorrow - and now all that's left is to hope that McEwan is one of those writers who can hold the attention of an audience in the flesh, as well as on the page.

Phew! That's over then....

2008-02-04T00:35:00.000-08:00

It's February, isn't it? I'm not entirely sure where the last three months went, but they've certainly gone. I blame all this on the fact that Christmastide coincided with an avanlanche of family visits. These started in November and ended mid-January, and all this means that life is only just starting to settle into its equilibrium. And life, of course, means the novel.

I actually got a fair amount of work done when they were here, but only in short bursts, and as soon as they left I got to get straight back to work, working full days and nights, and have been buried under drafts ever since.

People often ask me how to write novels, but I have no idea how to write, although I know alot more than I used to. I can tell you however, how I wrote each of my own novels: and they're all as different as children. Having written two novels I thought I knew something about how this one would go, but it's coming out in quite a different way from all the others - just proving the point that there are a hundred ways to reach the same destination.

But there are a few things that unify my novels:

My first chapters inspire me throughout the rest of the book
I have a strong sense of what I want the book to be: and when I'm far far out to sea, this is the light by which I navigate
Confidence: there is nothing as valuable as having confidence in what you're writing, and it's a hard thing to get when it's not there. This is especially hard when you're writing about a time and place you're not familiar with, which is what I'm doing. But a couple of years into researching and writing this novel, I feel I'm starting to get my confidence about my work and it feels great to come at my draft and decide what stays in and what goes

When I started work again this year I had about 80,000 words, and had only got about 2/3 through the book. This was clearly too long, and I'm currently going through the novel something like a dot the dot exercise, leaping to the critical scenes and cutting out the bits between. This is making a much tighter and more confident reading. So far it looks as though I will cut about 20,000 words from that when I finish the draft.

One of the reasons that this novel is quite different to the others is that I know what the second half of the book will be like, and paused 2/3 of the way through to assess if I had enough characters to get me through this second half. The first time I got there I was well short. About 7 drafts have followed, and as soon as that 2/3s was working as a group and got me to the point I wanted to be at, then I've started cutting it to retain the best writing.

Novels have long planning times, and most of March I am going to be attending lit fests across China, so March will be a bit of a miss. My aim is to get this draft finished and then start drawing up detailed plans for the last part of the book. I'm always impressed with the way Desperate Housewives delivers their stories: they're bold and confident - and I rarely plot my novels much, but this time I'm going to try and plot the last chapter out much more closely. It'll be interesting to see how it works, but I'd like to try and treat each chapter like a poem: so that it's intense and concentrate.

Well, I'll let you know how it goes.

Talking Books: How to achieve 'epic'?

2007-11-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

It's funny how books - like people I suppose - turn up in your life and deliver answers almost before you know what the question was.

I've been working on the novel, and got to the point where I was quite happy with the basics: storyline, character, language etc. But something else seemed missing. It didn't seem to have any gravitas. It was, I suppose, just a story, but not something that said anything profound about the world: and I like to read things that are profound.

I was thinking about this when I started reading John D. Rateliff's excellent The History of the Hobbit, which gives a draft by draft account of The Hobbit: where Thorin was Gandalf; Gandalf was Bladorthin; Smaug was Pryftan; and the Goblin king was called Fingolfin. All a bit obscure unless you're a Tolkien fan - but the important thing for me was a letter CS Lewis (of Narnia fame) wrote about The Hobbit, to Charles Williams 'The Hobbit escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot and excitement by a very curious change of tone....we pass insensibly into the world of epic. It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsokn [hall-burning] and Badger had begun to talk like Njal'

It was the phrase 'escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot' that struck me. My novel felt like it was well-paced and drafted, but failed to reach to the pinnacle of relevance: when it says something profound about the human condition.

I came across a similar concept yesterday while reading VS Naipaul's Reading and Writing. He quotes a letter by Joseph Conrad, who is commenting on a novel by a friend: 'the novel was clearly one of much plot but all the drama all the truth are thrown away by the mechanisms of the story.' And Naipaul writes of Conrad: 'The discovery of every tale was a moral one.'

It's easy to understand what is missing and quite different working out how to fix it. I have my ideas, and will come back when I think I've solved it. There's another relevant quote from Naipaul which gives a very interesting insight: 'A novel was made up; that was almost its definition...at the same time it was expected to be true...so that part of a novel came from rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to a reality. '

Seeing reality through the fiction: this is of course what all good novels - good writing - all good art - does. It adds insight to our lives.

The First Man Asian Literary Prize

2007-11-10T03:52:00.000-08:00

Not all hedge funds are bad: and in a world where literature - from the writers to the organisers of festivals -are usually involved in a loss-making business (writers usually receive something less than the minimum wage for the hours, or years on a novel), it is important that Man Group plc have stepped up to support a Asian Man award, a prize very much along the lines of the Man Booker in the UK.

It seems a little odd to encompass Asia into one literary prize, but actually all the other great landmasses already have their own prizes - a plethora of them in North America and Europe - and apart from the generic 'misery books' that China throws out, along the lines of Wild Swans, Asian voices seem under represented on the shelves of most bookshops.

Having spent the afternoon listening to the finalists of this, the first Man Asian Literary Prize, reading and talking about their work I have been struck at how universal their stories are, and how accessible and important. There is Jose Y. Dalisay's dark comedy about the body of an overseas Philipino who is sent home in a coffin, and gives us the flip side of the impact of US naval bases on a local community; Reeti Gadekar's clever and funny exploration of Western and Indian culture and society; and Xu Xi's novel which - like many of Hong Kong's residents - straddles cities as far apart as New York and Hong Kong.

Unlike most literary prizes, which peg their publicity on the 'big' names who file around the shortlists on 5-yearly intervals (please not McEwan/Rushdie again!) the names of this list, chosen from a staggering 200+ entrants from across Asia, are probably unknown to most people. None of them have been published in the UK or USA, which does not mean they shouldn't be. Jiang Rong's 'Wolf Totem', is a run-away best-seller in his native China, with sales figures in the league of JK Rowling (2 million official sales, and an estimated 4 million pirated copies). Nu Nu Yi, a favourite Burmese writer, has written fifteen novels, and over a hundred short stories, while five of Dalisay's novels have won the Filipino National Book Award. That writers of this calibre have remained undiscovered is surely a crime, and more than this: it is a loss to people who love literature.

Of course - and this is part of the purpose of the prize - this award will help propel some of these writers out of the 'Asian' world into a Western bookshop. Wolf Totem has been picked up by Penguin and will be out in the UK in March 2008, and many of the other writers have publishers who have shown interest.

It begs the question why do we need a prize to encourage readers to try something from a Burmese or Philipino writer? Stories are about people, and having written two novels about Chinese characters - both eminently successful - I heard nothing from the writers this afternoon that would preclude a Western reader from sitting and enjoying their tales. Because good writing is - and there is no doubt that the five writers shortlisted here are good writers - universal. It is about the human experience and that experience does not change radically if you are Thai or French or American or Chinese.

Hopefully this prize will put Asian writing more onto the map: and also give Asian writers more confidence and more encouragement to put their experiences and lives into literature. Certainly the profound changes that are happening here deserve a literary voice.

The Harry Potter of Novel Writing

2007-11-06T03:26:00.000-08:00

I've spent much of the last 6 weeks going back through the novel, teasing out scenes here, rewriting them at times, cutting in others. What has struck me and my readers is that I often build to a climax, and then avoid the climax and move on. Which means, when I go back I need to build all these scenes to their natural conclusion: which is truly exhausting work - and probably the reason I avoided doing it the first time round. I think of this process as a little like casting a spell, which is how Harry Potter comes in: because hitting these scenes is just like spell-casting.

Here's how:

Preparation: think about the scene, work out where you want it to end up, and what the climax should be. Get all the ingredients you need with you (not spider's legs but tea of coffee or cigarettes or whatever you're going to need for this process which might take anything up to a couple of hours.) Sit down. Clear away all the detritus of the day. Focus your mind.

Casting: Focus clearly. Put yourself into the characters - in wizard terms, possess your character's body and feel how they feel and see what they see and write it down as clearly and honestly as you can. There will probably be more than one character that you have to possess: which is an exhausting process as you take on the personality and backstory and experience of each of the characters in turn. Like a spellcaster, you are summoning spirits and illusions and movement to enchant and entrance the reader. Focus: your are summoning a world and a moment into being.

Recovery: If the spell has been cast properly then as all wizards in all tales - you will be exhausted. You're body will feel empty and dislocated from the world around you: because in truth you have passed from our world into the world of your imagination; have possessed the body of imaginary people and moved them like real.

The spell ends.

This analogy becomes much more understandable when you think of the original meaning of the word 'spell', whose spelling (from a different word source) hasn't changed since Old English times, and which comes to us in the word 'gospel' [O.E. 'godspel'].

For the original meaning of 'spell' is story. And what else is story-telling than the working of illusions, the charming and enchanting of an audience: once through sitting in a fire lit hall and telling them a tale, but now more likely through the words we write on a page.

Ted Hughes Letters: Brilliant listening

2007-10-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Radio 4, and there have been a number of inspirational radio plays this year that have been a great aid in my writing.

I've just listened to the latest: Ted Hughes Letters. It's moving, beautiful, shockingly tragic: and exposes you to the private thoughts of a great writer. On a personal note, it reminds me of my Yorkshire childhood, and I'm lucky enough to have stayed at Lumb Bank, which is now one of the host sites of the Arvon Foundation. And not far from there is Sylvia Plath's grave. And his now, I guess, although he was still alive when I was there. [Actually he was cremated and his ashes spread far from Yorkshire and Sylvia, on Dartmoor]

But this is writing at its best: accessible to anyone. You've got a week to catch it - if you're reading this after 5th November 2007, then sorry. For the rest of you, this is a real treat:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml

Revising: the Joys of Rewriting

2007-10-28T22:07:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's not very glamorous, it's not sexy, and it doesn't do much for your home life: but revision is absolutely integral to any book. Some books more than less, but for the beatniks out there, while On the Road was typed on one long sheet of paper, it was heavily revised before publication.
I've not written anything here because I've been rumaging back through my novel, like nosing my way back into a wardrobe stuffed full of old clothes, trying to sort out which bits I want to keep and those I want to throw away.
And it's a process...I've been at work for about three weeks, putting alot of my other life on hold (answering emails, gaming, updating the website etc) - while I try and sort my way into some kind of sense. First of all I wanted to introduce my main character with a chapter of his own. In that chapter I introduced two new characters because I want a nice set of interesting characters well established by the middle of the book. And now I find that I need to write more about these two characters, and In doing so I'm altering where they are from, because I have found that I can use this group of three friends to tell the story I wanted much better than I was trying with the main character alone.
Alot of the work I am doing is because I have a clear idea of where I want the book to be by the middle of the novel - and how far from that I had got. By comparing the two, it allows me to assess how much I have achieved that I wanted to achieve.
I've also learnt something about my writing style, that I tend to plot very closely the movements of the characters through the physical geography of the novel, when I am not clear about where the novel is going. This all struck me when I started reading Far from the Madding Crowd, where each scene is clearly set out, and the consequences feeding into the next, and the unimportant details are then left out.
I'm bearing this in mind as I go back into the wardrobe, but also when I write my next novel, I want to plan out the process a little more clearly: because I think this will save me a few months hard work. I should work out the themes and the ideas I want to get across and then work out how various characters can carry each of these along. I feel I could go back and rewrite huge chunks now, and stick to the main scenes.
This all reminds me of something Mary Renault talked about: using the fast forward button for a story, just cutting unimportant details with the insertion of a sentence or paragraph, and getting back to the main details.
The best way of breaking down a novel, I find, is to take coloured cards - with each character getting a seperate colour - and then write what happens in each chapter on each card. I then pin these on my wall, chapter by chapter, allowing me to visualise the story a little bit better. If there are too many blocks of one colour, then I look where I can insert another story thread into the mix. Then I mark the main story events: and look through my list of events for scenes I can cut, or scenes that achieve the same thing as another, or just slack.

Reviewing the novel so far.....

2007-10-11T01:37:00.000-07:00

So - I've had a few weeks away from the novel and I take this opportunity to sit down and print it out and read it, a little fresher: and I have to say I'm disappointed.

There are a couple of things that are not as good as I had hoped.

the opening chapter is GREAT - but it feels as thought the narration loses some of its authority after that. Not sure why this is: maybe because I was less sure of the direction of the story after the first chapter, and spent a couple of months re-writing this point, and then cut lots of it and made it much more simple and straightforward.
I'm not happy with the main character's character: even though my readers have all said they're happy. I guess this is where being the novelist helps, as I have a certain idea of what I want this narrator to be like, and he's not as rounded as I want. Too much of his personality is shown by action, which is something that comes naturally to me (the infamous show not tell) but I need to find another way of developing and adding to his character. Note to self: This can be a very small touch, and might not necesserily mean more than a paragraph or sentence even. And in doing it, make sure you don't patronise the reader.
There's a point about half way though where the narration feels like it loses momentum, the main character going home in a way that is reminiscent of an earlier chapter. Perfectly fine in real life, but stories are not real life, and they shouldn't be. It would make a much more interesting movement to cut that chapter [point B] and get directly from point A to C. Also in this chapter the problems the character face are cast in too universal a light: so they are problems that seem to affect all of England. I need to find a way of making it personal to him. I keep in mind Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, where he's dealing with a big historical event, but where the French Revolution is made personal to all the characters involved.
Improving the characters: I have to admit I'm lazy in the sense that I don't do things that I've heard other novelists do (like writing letters in each character's voice, writing reams character background and motivations) - I like to sketch characters in bold black and white lines, rather than try and paint them in photographic detail. But there are times I need to update that sketch, especially as the story develops and the role of the characters becomes larger and more central than I had originally envisaged. I've had my wife read out a long list of questions about these characters I'm concerned about. I have her read the list to me (a very dull task) because I like the spontineity of the response that comes out, which I feel gives me more interesting and more truthful answers for these characters. I guess in the same way that we have to act instinctively to sudden changes or surprises, without lots of pre-thought.

It's great to have had this time away from the novel, though I wish I had come away feeling happier about it all, but novel writing is all a process, and if it makes the book better at the end then it's a good thing. But it does remind me how novel writing is a process of continual disappointment - like a child that never quite lives upto the parent's expectations. High expectations are cruel to impose on children, but I think you need to have high expectations of art, because its the only way you produce your best by pushing yourself, forcing yourself to improve and make the writing better.

I'm writing all this, knowing that my writing time is going to be limited in the next few weeks as I have a few things that will keep me occupied. One is a book I need to read and review by Monday. And another is a short story competition I agreed to help judge way back in the spring, and suddenly find I have 30-odd short stories to read and judge. But it's important to go in with the right mind-set, and I like looking at other people's work:they're a nice break from my own writing.

EDIT: I was walking last night and was convinced I had to go back to the end of the first chapter and cut the other 43,000 words and start again: but I think the problem is the way the main character is introduced in the second chapter. He is found in quite a passive way, and him being passive as his first moment in the novel, gives the reader a lingering sense of passivity about him. So I think I'm going to go back and introduce him in a chapter of his own, with all the details about him that give the reader quite a different impression of him from the start. Then, I think, there is not so much I will need to edit, because there is very little internal thought, and much more character shown through action - which will still work, but the reader will interpret him slightly differently.

Ubud Literary Festival

2007-10-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been a little crazy: in preparing to leave for Bali, being at the lit fest, and then coming home again and trying to tackle the snow drift of jobs that have been piling up - which is all a bit irrelevant, except for the fact it means a three week break from my novel.

I'm a little supersticious of taking any break from the writing, especially when the novel is flying along, but sometimes there's no choice. Shit happens. You are sick, your children are sick, the novel is stuck, you're out of enthusiasm for the novel, for writing in general.

So - I try and find ways to make this work for me. One nice aspect of a forced break is that it gives you a chance to put the book away for a while, and then come back to it a little fresher, a little more like a reader will come to the book. And that's a great thing to achieve, because you start to see the saggy bits or the bits that really shine.

Sometimes - and this is the same with many problems, not just writing - taking a break allows your subconcious to bubble away quietly, and then the solution or inspiration will suddenly spring upon you and surprise and delight!

I'm half way through the book. 50K in, and as this is a novel based on real events, the second half is vaguely set out for me. It's up to me to decide how to deal with these recorded events: maybe by following them like a dot to dot drawing, or filling in the gaps between.

I've almost finished digging through the snow-drift, but having waited this long I'm happy to wait a little longer. I hope to start reading next week, and deal with the results, and then pull the story along. Just add a thousand words or so.

Notes to self:
1. Make sure the 50k so far works
2. Make sure the characters are full and rounded and empathetic
3. Make sure I have enough characters to carry the story through the second half of the book. This is the most important one, I think.

This all brings me back to the reason I was away: the Ubud Lit Fest. I'm a fan of lit fests, mostly because I'm a writer who enjoys reading to an audience. Writing is such an isolated art form, my audience is usually a simgle person who picks up a book alone, in a room, maybe years after I have written the book, and opens the book to the first page, and starts to read. No other art form is the artist so divorced from the audience, so readings give me a chance to feel the audience reaction, like an actor or musician.

I used to feel somewhat schitzophrenic at lit fests, as you go from no one to speaker and then back to no one again. But I don't feel that any more: I like lit fests. They give me a chance to meet other writers, and to talk ideas, inspiration, techniques, experiences and problems with agents and publishers. They're the closest thing writers get to conferences, and the conferencing usually goes on with a bottle of wine. Because writers are solitary creatures, by necessity, which is not something that seems to hold true for artists, who seem to mingle much more easily.

Ubud is a beautiful place, and there was a great bunch of writers and artists and literary types around. Its a credit to Janet de Neefe, and all the other people involved, all the more remarkable that this festival is less than 5 years old.

Goodbye to all that

2007-09-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

My first novel has just gone out of print. I didn't know books went out of print any more, what with print on demand publishing, and I it's left me feeling rather stumped.
The Drink and Dream Teahouse, because that is her name, was my first literary love affair: an intense and passionate love affair. I threw everything I had into her. When I was away from the computer, I couldn't stop thinking about the story and the characters, and what they were going to do next. I became tense and cranky. I wanted to get home and touch her again, I recited her opening paragraphs to myself and laughed out loud, and if she could have spoken I would have called her late at night on the phone. When I was writing her she made my life a mix of extremes.
When I had sat and written something that I knew was great, I could run a marathon; drink a case of wine; go find a woman. Sometimes I combined all three. And when she was finished, I plunged into depression and despair, and missed the excitement of creating. When she went out into the world alone, I probably sang 'Wild World' and thought of her and cried.
But now she's out of print. It's a personal thing for me. It makes me feel sad, like autumn, the scent of jasmine and walking along the playing fields I used to play in as a child.
Make no mistake: The Drink and Dream Teahouse was a great novel. The Washington Post picked her as one of the Top Reads of 2001. She won a Betty Trask Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; was translated into 13 languages, and she was so profound that the Mainland Chinese government even banned her! But she was charming too, and was good at attracting attention for me at parties: and it was because of her that I sat and shared a cup of tea with Valerie Eliot, TS Eliot's widow.
But also a lot of things happened which weren't great, like they do to all doomed relationships. My editor and I both left the publishing house before the paperback launched, so I guess she was launched somewhat half-heatedly. In the US she launched a month after September 11th, and disappeared, like so many people, into that great pile of rubble.
When I got the email last night, my first reaction was to go onto Amazon and search for new copies of her I could buy. I need new copies for my children, and their children, if life blesses me with those. But I also felt relief: despite the great memories. I left her behind a long time ago, went onto other novels and other stories, and now I feel that she has finally left me alone. The door is closed. She is that nagging ex-girlfriend who has finally got a life of her own, and has moved away from town.
She lives on of course, on living room bookshelves and in second hand bookshops, and when a reader opens that first page she blooms effortlessly into full flower, without regret or hesitation or remorse. Unlike real girlfriends, who age or sag or loose too much weight or hang around with dorks, or harbour bitter memories, she is still as beautiful as the day she left me. As the day we left each other, I should say.
You know, if I were you I'd go and find yourself a copy. Get a hardback and protect the dust jacket in a slip-case. Get a good bookcase to sit her on, and surround her with great books.
Cherish her - don't leave her there to dust and fade in the sun! Bring her down occasionally, open her wide on your lap, pick a page at random, or a favourite scene, and she will sing arias, as she sang to me that summer I created her.

Tolkien, writing, and raising the stakes

2007-09-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

I had the toughest week getting the chapter I was working on right. Writing is a funny business: you get one chapter spot on, and then you try to do the same again, and suddenly you find yourself overwhelmed with the fear that the novel is becoming too generic: that the plot is repeating itself: in my case, the main character returns home, finds something from his father, someone arrives, and that arrival forces the main character to act.

I remember reading somewhere that the stakes should keep increasing for the main character, till the crescendo of the story is reached. If you think of Lord of the Rings, this process follows nicely for Frodo. He gets a ring. The ring must be hidden, then it must be taken to Rivendel, then it must be destroyed: and at each point the task becomes more and more difficult and the ring goes from a clever ring to a symbol of terrible power, then to a source of corrupting power in itself. In this way the stakes are ratcheted up. Imagine if Frodo had got to Rivendel and someone took the ring off him, or if someone said, oh - this ring is not so dangerous - then the story would have ended there. What could have happened next? Where could the story have gone?

Think of the Hobbit, for example: the majority of the book is about a journey ('There' in which the plot structure repeats itself even more obviously) where there is danger. The same journey is taken at the end of the book ('...and back again') but there is little danger after the defeat of Smaug and the goblins, and so this journey is dealt with in a much more succinct manner.

The Lord of the Rings, especially The Fellowship of the Ring is surprisingly generic: the plot repeats itself almost chapter by chapter. The hobbits face a challenge (black riders, the Old Forest, more black riders [who get increasingly close to the hobbits - till they break into their bedroom], the barrow downs, black riders again - and then the black riders stab Frodo with a magical knife that starts to burrow through his flesh to his heart.

If you go through this chapter by chapter, Tolkien was re-using a similar chapter structure of increasingly difficult challenges. And I think that it's important to realise as a writer that the reader will accept a certain amount of repetition, as long as that is interesting and exciting and informative. And repetition in that manner will not seem so apparent. The key is to getting the events that happen to the characters interesting and exciting.

Sometime on Friday afternoon I created a new character, who seemed to solve my problems. Not because he did anything particularly special, just that he allowed me to take some of the pressure off the main character by switching between their view-points and story lines, and I altered the timing of some of the scenes, and a chapter that had me tense and cranky suddenly seemed to work.

There's a lesson in here for me: that a problem that appears as difficult and impossible to cross as a brick wall can actually have an easy solution. I spent the week getting scratched knees and sore fingers, only to find a secret doorway that allowed me through to the other side.

When I finish a chapter I set myself a signpost to head to for the next chapter. It's like looking at a sea of mist, and seeing a tree in the distance, and walking towards it. These signposts often come to me just after I finish my writing on Friday, and I scribble them down and come back to them on Monday morning, and set off towards them. I'm reminding myself that I have to raise the stakes for my character: so that the forces against him grow in strength and threat. It's a hard balance to strike.

Getting started in the morning.....

2007-08-28T20:15:00.001-07:00

Pst! It's past 11 and I've been here since 9 and I'm supposed to be working....

Work avoidance is fine when someone else is paying, but no one pays writers to cruise the internet; writers don't get overtime, and if you don't prduce books then you're not really a writer.

But what to do on mornings, like this, when life has just knocked the artistic creator out of you?

It's good to have little ceremonies that you associate with your writing, not because you need them very often, but at times like this, you need something to bring your mind away from bills, and deadlines and personal crises, and all that other stuff, and just bring you back to the book.

Here are some of the things that kick me off:

great music

a good cup of tea

notes and pictures

something that smells good

something completely different

revising previous pages

brainstorming characters, plots, emotions

and then just picking up the pen

Experience vs Imagination

2007-08-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

I remember writing an essay at school about how writers had to experience things to write about them truthfully. My teacher wrote on the bottom of the essay 'what about imagination?' and that sentence has stayed with me since: and I'm still curious about where imagination and truth blend in fiction.

I think my essay was more of a personal ambition to break out of the confines of my York upbringing. I was impatient to escape childhood and break out into the world; reading was a free pass to the adult world. In my early teens I read a surprisingly adult collection of books including Icelandic sagas, histories, middle English poetry, and essays on Old English. I wanted to sail the North Sea in a longboat; carry a sword and a cloak and a shield; stand on the black Icelandic beaches; herd sheep from horseback; smoke pipeweed in the Shire. And that ambition to taste life stayed with me, and the conviction that it was only through drinking deep would I somehow find the material to become a writer. The armchair imaginer I would not be, I decided, and although I had not discovered them yet, I decided early on that I would devour life with the same energy as Hemingway, like Orwell, I would immerse myself in the dirt and grime and poverty.

That was how, I found myself in a rural Chinese town at the age of 21, with barely a word of Mandarin. In the next five years I drank deep: I was arrested by the Chinese police, played basketball with Tibetan monks, drunkenly toasted the Dalai Lama, pushed myself to the peak of physical fitness, almost died of dysentery, was evacuated from my home when Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war, felt the nervous prickle of a civilian listening in a city being bombed, and lost my father to suicide.

Of all the experiences, I think it was the last that had the most profound effect, and was the most unsought. At the time I remembered a line from Oscar Wilde, that the best thing for a father to do for his son is die young, and I tried to see the benefits of being fatherless. I am still coming to terms with that loss, or rather, I am still playing with the idea in my writing, and the relationship between fathers and sons is more relevant to me now that I am a father myself.

But I still feel the same as my 12 year old self: that life and experience is the kernel of imagination. But how does this leave the novelist when they try to recreate - say, Dark Age England, or contemporary China. People think that this is a big problem, but it's not something that anyone should be challenged by. I heard an interview with (black) crime novelist Dreda Say Mitchell, when she said that people asked how she could write a white lead. I had a similar experience when I wrote The Drink and Dream Teahouse, a novel in which all the characters were Chinese, at a time when Westerners uniformly included a Western character to hold the readers hand. Strangely enough, it wasn't Chinese people who said this to me, but a British reviewer, who asked what right Westerners had to 'ventriloquise the Chinese'.

It seems an incredibly racist idea that a white person cannot imagine what it would be like to be black, or a black person imagine what it would be like to be Chinese. That would say that each race is so unique that their minds are intrinsically different: and once you believe that they you on the slope towards apartheid. This sentiment is most commonly applied to Chinese than any other nation: they are inscrutable, the stereotype runs, although I have never found them so. They do have a different culture - and what is culture, ultimately, than a set of rules and understandings that govern our everyday interactions and relationships - but we are used to this. In the North Riding of Yorkshire we regarded people from the West Riding as a little odd, and so the people from the East Riding and the Wolds.

Body language is almost universal: the smiles of Amazonian Indians are as transparent to us as the tears of African flood victims, and I doubt they have changed much since Dark Age England. Because at the heart of all stories are characters and their experiences. We are interested in their stories. This is how a writer interests readers. Give readers characters that they can take an interest in, and you move them through the tapestry of life: with all its ups and downs and middling moments.

Aristotle started a debate about plot vs character way back in the BC years, but for me stories are all about character, and plot, as someone said, is just the footprint of characters in the snow.

1066, Viking longships, treens, and all that....

2007-08-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Danes reinvaded Ireland last week, which was all wonderfully topical for the novel I'm working on, which is involved in the run-up of the events that led to 1066 and the Battle of Hastings.

It's great how much material there is on the web now that can help with research: youtube is one place, and I saw another video this week, of treen-turning, which I thought deserved a mention.

http://www.robin-wood.co.uk/turnframe.htm

It's interesting because in the 1930s, a young English war-veteran and journalist, HV Morton wrote a bestseller 'In Search of England' - and came across the last bowl turner in England: George William Lailey, who:

'turns bowls exactly as they did in the days of Alfred the Great... to say that eight hundred years seemed to have stopped at the door conveys nothing. The room was an Anglo-saxon workshop! The floor was deep in solft elm shavings, and across the hut was bent a young alder sapling connected to a primitive lathe by a leather thong.'

Morton was an unashamed romantic: but he happened to be right, that Lailey's hut was a Saxon construction.

After Lailey died, in 1958, his lathe was taken to the Museum of Rural Industries (see here) and his workshop was photographed and recorded before being demolished.

Michael Wood, in his 'In Search of England' describes how eight here was an inner and outer chamber, with eight rough-hewn oaken posts holding up the roof. Inside were two chambers, an inner and an outer chamber, and the inner chamber, where the workshop was, was sunk three feet below the ground, with its sides lined with elm boards nailed to staves. The hut conformed to a type of hut called a Grubenhauser, a sunken hut that are found in fifth-century England - which the Anglo-Saxon migrants brought with them from the continent.

The sunken part of Lailey's hut was so packed down with decomposting elm shavings, that the decomposition served to heat the place.

I suppose I'm putting this in, because it shows just how much there is on the internet to educate and inspire the writer. My novel is currently taken up with events in Sussex, in the South of England, an area I have only loose knowledge of: but through the Victorian County Histories online, and Google Earth, it allows me to follow journeys and see how the elevation changes, and find places.

The other reason I mention this is that in our computorised, globalised world, we're only 50 years from the death of a man who turned wood with a pole pathe, in an Anglo-Saxon hut. Until 1974, England was still organised by Shires, a system set up by Alfred the Great and his sucessors, and often based on existing geographical units. This is all relevant because our national identities are more important now than ever before.

As Britain fragments into it's constituent nations, Scots and the Welsh have had the English to define themselves against, and it's the English who seem to have lost themselves most within 'Britishness'. 'British' as an identity is anacronistic. As a Spanish friend observed, the only people who describe themselves as British are old people and Northern Irish protestants.

Englishness was already a concept when Bede was writing, in the 8th century and there are many answers for us in the past. As we move forward into the globalised world its time to celebrate and redefine Englishness, and what it means to us.

Desperate Solutions

2007-08-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

So: I sat and thought about the book, and it seemed to me that there were real problems with the main character: that he hadn't developed into a big enough/interesting enough character to carry the story.

Time for desperate measures: print it out and give it to my wife to read. I say desperate, because this is a tough moment for both the writer and the reader, made much more tough if that reader is also spouse. Too harsh a commentary and it'll send me straight to the office in a frenzy of words and storylines as I struggle to make the story work. Too bland 'oh it's wonderful darling' and I'll be left with nothing to work on and just as stumped as I am now.

What I'm looking for is a strange blend of support, encouragement, insightful input: and thank god, my wife came up trumps. She ticked the good bits. Noted the paragraphs where the story stalls for a moment. And when i asked her about the journey of the main character and my concerns, we worked out that part of his emotional journey was missing, and identified the point in the narrative where he could think and work out some of the challenges facing him.

I say all this, because yesterday (monday) i worked on the notes from that saturday night reading, and only added about 500 words: but it is startling how differently those 500 words make the story read. But it might have just been 50 or 100 words.

Readers pick things up as subtle as body language, as unspoken as feelings. Many writers make the mistake of not trusting their readers: and readers can smell an unconfident writer in the same way that dogs smell fear.

frustrations

2007-08-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

Aghh! So, I ended this week with 1,500 less words than I had last week, and have spent most of the time trying to work out how to move the story on in an interesting way. I haven't found a solution and I'm probably going to be gumpy all weekend, until I can get back to the computor on Monday morning and try and work out what I'm doing.

To make matters worse, this morning I read the first page of a novel my editor sent me (also about 1066 - which is vaguely the point at which my novel is heading to) and it seemed so much more lyrical than my own writing - which opened up another load of worries about my writing. Am i a good enough writer?

The weekend's arrival meant I had to give up on the novel as it was, and sat on the ferry and read a book: and it gave me all kinds of ideas for how to push on through this problem. I seem to remember the other novels being like this, higher and harder hurdles to keep jumping, which challenge you in all manner of ways, and some of the jumps you make, and some of them you have to keep taking run-ups to. And some of them you have to just give up on, and come back the next day and see if there is another way round. Giving up and reading another book does seem like a great way through problems - because there's no other option than to work out a solution.

I suppose the other solution is to give up, and this has always struck me as the difference between published and non-published writers. Published writers dont give up. And heh, we all start off as amateurs.

The problem is I have a pet theory that our strenghts and weaknesses as a writer stem from our strenghts and weaknesses of personality: which then lands me in all kinds of personal angst when I'm feeling my writing is inadequate.

Notes to self:

Create some scenes for the minor characters: which will hopefully take some pressure off the main story line, and also give me some alternative storylines to explore, as well as adding depth to the canvas the main character is on
Go back and brain storm motivations for the characters at this point in the story. What is their greatest fear at this point?
Landscape: try and tie these in more closely to the mood and the subtexts in the plot
Prise out interesting conflicts: is my list of main characters too limiting?
Read Renault for inspiration from a master
re-read the whole book so far
read something inspirational! (*the green knight or heaney's beowulf)

Notes to self when finished this draft:

Explore character's motivations and add as much flesh as possible
titivate
Read Thomas Hardy's poetry

Note to self when reading other people's work:

how to make characters empathetic
how to convey a sense of love/affection for home and people and country

II

2007-08-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

Last night my children set up a little shop selling ‘hot tea’ and ‘ice cream’. The tea and cones were all blocks of wood, but they ate and drank each one, and when they gave them to me and my wife we ate them as well and handed them back to be turned into cakes.
It’s the first time we’ve eaten wooden blocks, but the little fantasy was the most enchanting moment of the day. It drew us all in, and it made me think of writing, and how all writing works by creating a world within which we can imagine.
Fantasy is often described as a bad thing, as if it somehow implies escapism; and ‘fantasy’ as a genre is often mocked as a hide-out for those who are unable to relate intelligently to the world we live in. I disagree with this, storytelling is one of the oldest human art forms, where as they were once spoken over the embers, now they are read or written, or filmed or broadcast. All storytelling involves entering a fantasy, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that is talked about in theatre circles.
I say all this because I think the child’s ability to imagine is something we should all cling to, like a lifejacket.
This is all a roundabout way of talking about last week’s entry, which ended with the idea of taking my character’s hand as you would a child, and walking with them into the world.
That image stayed with me all through last week, when I sat and scratched my head and stared at the screen, and thought what next? – I reminded myself that my job was to sit down and take the character’s hands and walk with them through their stories. It puts the characters at the centre of the story, which is where I believe they have to be. Plot, someone wrote somewhere, is just the footsteps of characters in the snow.

I had a good week writing last week, but naturally enough I worry about all the work I did: too much action, enough varying of pace, is the story accurately showing what would happen, are the characters remaining true to themselves?
I spent most of my time moving the last chapter earlier into the book. The reason I did this was because it was my first kissing scene, and I was fascinated to find out what would happen next, and it’s a great tip to remember that when I get interested, then my reader will too.
But storylines are difficult things to balance. You adjust one item and it’s like moving a crate across a raft, which immediately is thrown off balance, and it’s a long task to go back to try and rebalance the storyline again.
I think this is the whole novel-writing process: loading your raft and then reorganising it until it sits well enough that you can push it out from the shore and watch it drift away into the distnace and leave it for readers to judge for themselves.

I

2007-07-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

It’s an odd thing writing a novel. I always start off with a vision of the book, that is as exciting and compelling as a medieval vision of an angel hanging in the daylit sky: so profound and brilliant and beautiful that it drives me back into the office, and on to the end of the first sentence, paragraph and page – and then back to the familiar process of produce and edit, and cut and produce.
I have high standards for my first pages: mainly because they have to do my excitement justice. But it gets harder from then on, because now there are story lines and threads to manage, action and pace to balance out with description and beauty. And the doubts, of course. The many doubts.
It is alone that the writer faces their demons, as Beowulf waited in the dark. Who will read this book. Will my editor like it. Will my wife like it. Will someone else write a better book on the same topic and release it just before mine. Will the marketing department like this book. Will it sell. Am I over the hill, have I used up all my talent, is my best already written.
I imagine all writers have these voices in their heads, slowly nibbling at the foundations of their confidence, and this is probably the hardest thing a writer must deal with – agents and editors are small fry when compared to the doubts that come – sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, and inevitably at times – in overwhelming floods. But one of the marks of a published writer is the ability to listen to them, and hear them or ignore them and to push on.
I’m on my third novel at the moment. Not long ago I felt I was near the beginning of the novel, but now, at about 50,000 words I’m into the story and excited about what the characters will do next.
I only ever wanted to be a writer, so writing sentences like ‘I’m on my third novel at the moment’ should bring me a thrill, but I see the reality, that this is only my third time struggling with a story, which makes me a novice, by most calculations. My third time riding a bicycle, my third time driving, my third time making love.
The first novel was like a passionate affair. It was quick and brief and intoxicating, and I went into it with all the naivety and enthusiasm of the novice. The second novel I was wary. I had been out into the desert and I knew that there were periods of drought and hunger and loneliness, and I tried to prepare myself with what I had learnt from before, loaded up my rucksack with all I thought I would need. But this desert was a different place. It was tricksy, there were hollows and detours that led my left and right, and I followed them for thousands of words, tens of thousands at times, before having to back track to the beginning and return to the point I had been a month or two before. The vision I had seen began to feel more and more like a mirage, and there were many times I had that doubt – perhaps the hardest for a writer to ignore – that I had chosen the wrong book.
Other book ideas came to me, glimmering in the noon sun, late at night, or in the supermarket, or on a journey. Like beautiful strangers, they all had the wonder of possibility. At home – familiar and unsurprising – my other novel waited.
It is good to bring these thoughts to mind at this point in my latest novel, because I forget so many aspects of writing. And I suppose, for me, this is what this blog is for, is to remind myself of the many things about writing I do know, and also to force me to confront the problems and joys of writing so next time I will be a little better prepared.
I wrote a note to hang above my desk one morning: I write because I love it.
I even sat one night in bed and wrote that sentence down a sheet of paper. Of course it seemed a little odd, like I was reading a self-help book. But it also made me laugh and smile. Because I dont write books for my editor, or his marketing department, or even, really for my wife. I write for me, I write the kind of books I want to read, and it was good to get back to the reason I write, to get to the essence of my inspiration.
I write because I love it is a shield against many of the worries that come. I love writing and I love reading, and it is a joy to sit down each morning and face those demons down and take your character’s hands – like a child’s hand who wakes in the morning – and to walk with them, again, into the world that you have created.