Introducing Lankaren

Askar's sequel now has a title - Lankaren - and it is 58,000 words long so far. This is about half of it, I think. It is about what happens in Urkan as a result of the Battle of Lankaren (at the end of "Askar"). How do the various prophesies pan out and how long do Jena and Zarek remain living a happily bucolic lifestyle in Deridea? There are more deaths and quite a few romances but obviously I'm not going to give away details.

A genre book (in this case fantasy saga) is plot driven. Although it has believable characters, and I hope says something about the human condition, the plot is what drives it along. So the first thing I had to do when devising Askar's sequel was plot it quite carefully. Even so I often find I need something in a certain chapter and have to back track to a previous chapter to put it in place. I had this problem in Askar when Galen had to have access to a knife. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how he would actually get hold of it and had to create a scene where he could do this. It wasn't easy. (Was it successful?) So a lot of energy goes into the sheer mechanics of plot.

Also characters can get away on you. On the face of it this doesn't make any sense, after all the writer creates the characters and is surely in charge of what they do. But what can happen is that you invent a character and as you work with him through the plot you get to know him better and begin to understand that the thing you wanted him to do to forward the story he simply isn't able to do. If you force him to do it the book will lose credibility. Say, for example (and this is not in "Lankaren"), you have a character who you plan will murder another character but, as you work with him through the story, you begin to understand that he is not capable of murder and you cannot invent any scenario in which he would do it. You have to change your story into something else. Of course in a literary novel, where character is by far the most important ingredient, changes like this are what make the art. In a genre novel you have to deliver on the expectations of the genre.

This is my trouble at the moment. I have a lovely hero that I want to do something that he doesn't want to do. I'll figure it out, that's what writers do, but it makes for interesting times. (Writers live largely through their work, that's why they tend to be anti-social and a bit peculiar.)

I find myself on a constant quest for the "perfect place to write". Right now I have access to a vacant apartment and that's proving a great boon. Oh that I could have an apartment purely to write in all the time!

I don't care about Tiger's pants

I really don't. I sort of care he's the greatest golfer of all time, but I don't care how many women he's slept with. Why do we have to hear about it, read about it and see it on the media all the time? Not only is it kind of cruel to his wife and family, it's also polluting my life with something that's none of my business.

Likewise that Aussie criketer's girlfriend and her nudie photos. I'd never heard of either of them and cared less until the news started wittering on, and her stupidity and his embarassment were forced into my awareness. (I think her name's Lara Bingle, I've forgotten his, but then I barely know any NZ criketers' names, let alone any Aussies.)


There's lots of other stuff. They think we're really interested in Michelle Obama, so we're actually told more about her than about Bronagh Key (see, how many knew that was our PM's wife's name? Not that I want to know that much about her either). They think we care that Sandra Bullock's husband is a letch - and so that poor woman's misery is everywhere. Maybe they think being rich and famous means Sandra isn't hurt by everyone knowing her business?

And there's the creepy stuff. I don't need to know about a man who kept a girl in his backyard for 18 years and had two children with her in America. I certainly don't need to know about how her and her kids are doing now. I don't need to know about like creepy stuff in Europe. I really don't even need to know about that stuff in New Zealand, unless it presents a threat to me and mine.

You see all this rubbish, the sleaze, the filth and the murk (as well as the nonsense about lost kitties and brave doggies) is stealing time and attention from stuff that really matters. Stuff I feel really fuzzy about - like is the economy recovering? how much is global warming really going to cost me? why is the government doing x y and z? what are the arguments for and against? how is the super city going to work? etc etc. These things are all far more important but ... not so sexy, sleazy, exciting ... what have you. They are BORING. And heaven forbid we should be bored.

Film making is like wine making

One New Zealand novel I love is The Vintner's Luck, published about 10 years ago now. I love it I think because it is so rich in language and theme. It's like fruit cake studded with sultanas and cherries and laced with brandy. A lot of kiwi literature is like gruel.

The Vintner's Luck has a patchwork structure, starting episodically with the annual meetings of the vintner and the angel and gradually expanding into a beautiful poetic evocation of things foreign and in the past. It has very weird theology. The angel is a fallen angel and Satan himself makes an appearance. There's also some very dodgy stuff about the angel being a dry run for Jesus. The gay stuff is not so bothersome. It's certainly not terribly explicit and seems kind of superfluous, especially as the vintner in question also has a wife and a female mistress. I have no particular trouble reading novels with fantasy elements, being quite willing to suspend disbelief or take them to be symbolic in some form.

So when I heard Niki Caro (of Whale Rider fame, a New Zealand movie I love) was making a movie of The Vintner's Luck, I looked forward to it with some excitement, but when it was panned I decided not to see it. I couldn't bear to ruin the book. However, the book's author was so publically outraged by the treatment of her book a few of us (who love the book and hadn't seen the movie) got together to make a send up of the movie (not the book, which we love). The result is The Vintner's Duck (see link below) based on an interview Caro gave defending her movie at the height of the uproar.

For those not in the know the specific points about the movie were - the vintner was played by a Belgian actor, the wife was played by a teenager who was not aged well, the movie was not gay enough for the author, and the director famously compared film making and wine making.

Enjoy!

Foibles and fetishes - how writers write

Which writer regularly wrote stark naked? Which drank all day and pretty much all night? Which had to have sex to get in the mood to work? Which were addicted to narcotics? Which were stark raving bonkers? Which were heavily addicted to caffeine? (The last was Balzac, "the only great writer to drink himself to death with coffee".)

Many readers and most aspiring writers are fascinated with how writers actually write. I think for aspiring writers it's something to do with finding the secret, the trick to it - even if it's Victor Hugo's trick of writing stark naked in a glass walled room on the roof of his house on the highest spot on Guernsey (no helicopters in those days).

I found several titbits of like value in Page Fright (by Canadian writer Harry Bruce), a vastly entertaining read of the gossip page variety, but also extremely helpful for the aspiring writer wanting to find the "trick to it". From the evidence of these pages there isn't one.

A lot of writers turn out to be complete luddites, eschewing typewriters for fountain pens or new fangled word processors for their trusty IBM electric typewriters (this book was published in 2009!) A great many were bonkers, or at least very sad and rather tragic (Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath) but many are completely sane, including a writer I admire very much - Margaret Atwood.

Some were prolific (eg, Balzac) and some very non-prolific (eg, Flaubert). Either prolific or non-prolific they could be junkies (Coleridge) or alcoholics (Fitzgerald). They almost all wrote with drive and discipline, even while continually boozing (Carson McCullers).

The lesson from all this is profoundly encouraging for the aspiring writer - there is no trick, everything has worked for someone at some stage, so just do it. You don't have to be crazy or even write much (see JD Salinger who recently died after years of silence and still achieved extensive retrospective analyses of his work). However, most of them were dedicated to their craft. Whatever else, they wrote.

Bruce also includes a long introductory section about the actual development of writing tools, enlightening me, anyway, about why goose quills were used for writing for so long (until they invented steel metal wasn't springy enough) and how much time it took to keep them fit for writing (continual sharpening).

So if you want to know how many alcoholics have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (5), who was the first great writer to use a typewriter (Mark Twain - he didn't like it), who was an insomniac (Dickens, among many) and which writers had execrable handwriting (most of them) this is the book for you.

Your Bog Standard Fantasy Quest

Our latest trip to the movies involved Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. I approached this with preconceived views of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, none of which were overturned. I had also had preconceived notions of Alice in Wonderland, which is only to be expected of a venerated classic.
First the good stuff - the lead actress, Mia Wosikowska, and an all too short turn of one Marton Csokas as Alice's dad. Obviously there are impressive (3D) computer graphics. But I'm getting over them. Gee whizz does not make up for the formulaic dumbing down of a masterpiece.
(Interestingly my favourite movie of the last few months Where the Wild Things Are contented itself with a bit of work on the monsters' faces.)
When it comes to reimagining classics the question has to be "Why bother?" Alice has been reimagined before and far better (The Matrix) without actually destroying the original story. Tim Burton is trying here for a coming of age parable, however even this was done better in the remake of Peter Pan a few years ago. The aforementioned Where the Wild Things Are was an extension of an original entirely within the spirit of the original with the active cooperation of its original author.
With Alice I found I had to get over Tim Burton's signature gloomy twisted gothic aesthetic (one of the few directors whose films you can recognise simply by their look), Bonham Carter channelling Miranda Richardson's Queenie (from Blackadder 2 - with all the toddler temper tantrums and none of the giggling school girl charm) and Depp stealing the show. Of course he was the above the title star and deserves it, being the best movie actor around. But here he was playing one of his pathetic clown characters which are deeply unattractive and rather difficult to watch (check the creepy Willy Wonka in a previous Tim Burton effort). His was a split personality Mad Hatter (check Gollum/Smeagol - it was that type of movie, where everything reminded you of something else) whose less confused, more deluded personality sported a broad scots accent (why?).
Another thing I had to get over was the nudge nudge wink wink sexuality. There was prolonged preoccupation with clothing Alice, for every time she grew or shrank her clothing refused to likewise change shape. There was also a creepy subtext about the Red Queen's knave lusting after her. As well as the frame story of her being married off to a pompous and weedy aristocrat.
There was also the false parallelism between her having to decide whether to marry the pompous weed and having to decide whether to fight the Jabberwock. (The scenes were almost identical in composition and colour design.) Of course she decides against the first and for the second - they are not the same type of decision. The first is a decision for her own happiness, her own autonomy (and frankly, we cheer her for it). The second is a decision to do something entirely for other people because it is her duty. The film offers no real way of discerning between the two decisions.
So I did get past all that and in the end enjoyed it as your bog standard fantasy quest. Oh how I wish Burton had just made a bog standard fantasy quest and left Alice out of it.

We are living in a material world

Many people believe the meaning of life lies somewhere in the concept of "progress". They believe this both personally - they have goals and ambitions - and cosmically - everything is evolving towards something better. And if the world isn't getting better on its own, it can be made better. This is where causes come in.

While I heartily endorse the impulse to improve the material conditions of people's lives, I do not believe the world is improved by fighting causes. For one thing, while you can feed, clothe and house people, you cannot make them happy - no matter how much money you throw at them. I recently heard of a study which found, given they are adequately housed, clothed and fed, the happiest people in the world are in South America, the most miserable in Western Europe.

However, most people don't get much more involved in causes other than voicing loud complaints that the government isn't giving them enough money because the prevailing philosophy in our society is "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die". So our quest for happiness has led to a headlong competition for stuff - money, possessions, fame, choice, fun, adventure.

At present our local mall displays bill boards of a very photogenic family who are "champion shoppers" - consuming as a family activity. It's not news, of course, that we're a materialist society, but it's a belief that's so ingrained it catches us unawares - "oh, if only I could afford a new dress ..." But we know more stuff doesn't make us happy - just look at the stories in the women's mags - it's just that we have no other answers.

There's a singer I'm kind of fond of who sings biting satire in a little girl cockney voice who sums up this modern dilemma nicely: "I want to be rich and I want lots of money/ I don't care about clever/ I don't care about funny." Lily Allen's "The Fear" is a catalogue of all the stuff a modern young woman thinks she needs: "But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic and that's what makes life so ...ing fantastic" and she finishes with that anathema to the women's movement "Not I'm not a saint and I'm not a sinner/ But everything's cool as long as I'm getting thinner."
So far, so good, but Lily's chorus packs the punch:
"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When do you think it will all become clear?
Cuz I'm being taken over by the Fear."
Maybe she needs a good cause, but I've always found causes kind of naive. They have too much faith in mankind's ability to change.
What's missing here?

Laying track - all about being inspired

I have been engaged in "laying track" across the vast continent that is Askar's sequel. Laying track is the term Julia Cameron uses for writing flat out, getting it all down, worrying about the niceties of craft later. It is a good way to think when addressing the vast blank page or, these days, the vast blank screen. It is the step between inspiration and art, the bit where a writer actually has to work. In the process inspiration can flourish.

Julia Cameron is a creativity guru who addresses most of her books to artists in general, but she is a writer by profession and so her books tend to have that slant. Books written directly for writers are The Right to Write and The Sound of Paper. Her most famous books are more generally on the topic of creativity - The Artist's Way and its sequels. These books do not so much teach you how to write as teach you how to be a writer - how to free yourself up to express your unique voice, how to overcome psychological obstacles to creativity and how to "blast through blocks".
Anyone who aspires to writing should be at least curious about how great writers approach their profession - I have read books by Ursula le Guin, Orson Scott Card and Jerome Stern on the topic. In New Zealand I think Joan Rosier-Jones book So You Want to Write is hard to beat for practical how-to advice (her character building exercises are great). Sarah Quigley's Write: A 30 day Guide to Creative Writing is great for finding inspiration. Celebrated Australian writer Kate Grenville has contributed The Writing Book, which, among other things, shows the development of one of her stories which she went on to publish.
There are great classics in the genre, my favourite of these is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It was published in 1934. Brande addresses the distinct characteristics that make a writer, the sheer need for will power and focus, the daily practice of putting words on paper. Some of her advice is quaint (it is 75 years old!), but mostly it's sound common sense (and some truly great writers have found her advice the best of all).
But I think Julia Cameron is my favourite because she has recognised that creativity is essentially a spiritual exercise. It is a process of tapping into "something" that is larger than ourselves. But her spirituality and mine don't exactly match, so I'm going to turn to my favourite writer (CS Lewis) for a quote about originality and creativity, possibly explaining why in this post modern age "Art" has degenerated so much:
"Applying this principle to literature [our whole destiny to become mirrors filled with the image of a face not ours] we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom." (from "Christianity and Literature" in Christian Reflections first published in 1967).