READING, WATCHING & OTHER INFLUENCES
I once taught a course on an English degree called ‘Six Set Texts’. I decided to choose six works of fiction which, collectively, represented for me a broad canvas of brilliance in prose fiction and – to be honest – simply books I loved.
These are the ones I chose:
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
If I’d had time to teach 6 more, they would probably be:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Accordian Crimes by Annie Proulx
Gilead & Home by Marilynne Robinson
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1984 by George Orwell
And I would recommend the following as damn good reads I could not put down & thus a lesson in fine storytelling:
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
I’m Not Scared by Niccolo Amminiti
The Bonesetter’s Daughter & The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains by Susan Elderkin
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield & Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour: An Introduction; For Esme – with Love and Squalor by J. D. Salinger
Slaughterhouse Five & Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Anything written by Lorrie Moore, short stories or novels.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller (I know, it’s a play and that’s cheating but it’s SO GOOD & so very, very powerful).
The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter (Again, I know, it’s a TV drama, but my word, it’s a work of genius – so many layers: tragedy, comedy, crime, domestic drama, parent/child relationships, sexuality and adultery, pastiche/homage, musical, psychological mystery, war story, childhood memoir, hospital drama etc. etc.)
All these writers have taught me a lot about how to structure plots, how to use voice, how to create memorable and totally real characters and how to charm your socks off.
If you haven’t studied fiction and you don’t read much literature written before, say, WWII, then here are a few major players from the past, some of whom don’t get read much any more and all of whom are cracking novelists and paved the way for the rest of us. My challenge to you is to read one novel by each of these greats – if you haven’t already done so…
Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Richardson
Tobias Smollett
Henry Fielding
Laurence Sterne
Jane Austen (of course)
Emily and Charlotte Bronte (obviously)
Charles Dickens (duh!)
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
Henry James
D.H. Lawrence
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
My other major influence growing up was: STAR WARS.
Around about the age of 7, I went to see the new film Star Wars at my local cinema – I know my brother David was there, because we never stopped talking about it from that moment to this – and it changed everything. Ask many people around my age about their experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time and you’ll get a similar story; it’s nothing unusual. But there was something very deep at work here, something which called to a part of my 7-year old self, namely the Call to Adventure. Much of my childhood was dominated by the imagery, characters and stories associated with Star Wars, largely as a source of escapism and I suppose I never really grew out of it; that sense of wonder sitting there in the dark, being taken on this overwhelming journey, far, far away, following the fortunes of a young hero, the obstacles and gatekeepers in his path, his triumphs and failures, his ultimate reconciliation and redemption. Years later, in my 20s, I found a book called The Magic of Myth by Mary Henderson, all about how Star Wars is structured around the Hero’s Journey.
It confirmed everything that my sub-conscious had already figured out, that there was indeed a deep structure to the Star Wars story, and not only that story, but all the other stories which really move us, the deep ones, the myths and legends and tales which shape our cultures and make us laugh, cry and stay rapt at the screen or keep us turning pages. Later, I found another wonderful book called The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which details this exact structure of the Hero’s Journey in a range of films and stories, and said all the things and much more that I’d been pondering about Star Wars. Let me clarify: not every great novel or movie needs the Hero’s Journey structure to be successful. There are scores of stories which use no such thing, have far more episodic or non-sequitur structures, yet still move us tremendously. But I knew that, for myself, this series of events arranged in this age-old pattern was the one for me. I went on to write a children’s book with this exact structure & it worked pretty well. But since then, I would say that I’ve assimilated the lessons learned from studying the Hero’s Journey and now I don’t think about them consciously as such. When I work on plotting for a novel, the character and her or his needs drive the plot predominantly – what she wants, what he needs; and I listen carefully; there have been occasions where a protagonist has turned around and said to me, “You planned for me to go here and do this, but I’m not doing that, no way. I’m going there and doing that, and if you force me off that path you will always know it was the wrong path and you had your chance to write a great story and you blew it.” You just gotta listen to that, no choice.
Stages of the Hero’s Journey – a mixture from Henderson and Vogler:
The Call to Adventure
Threshold Guardians
The Wise and Helpful Guide and the Magic Talisman
Refusal of the Call
Passing the First Threshold
Hero Partners / Tests, Allies and Enemies
Mystical Insight
The Labyrinth and the Rescue of the Princess
Losing the Guide
Hero Deeds and Dragon Slayers
The Dark Road of Trials
The Hunt
Into the Belly of the Beast / Approach to the Inmost Cave
The Ordeal
The Mystical Marriage
The Sacred Grove
Sacrifice and Betrayal
The Hero’s Return
Resurrection
Monster Combat
The Resurgence of Evil
The Enchanted Forest and Helpful Animals
Descent into the Underworld
Atonement with the Father
Unmasking
Reward
The Road Back
The Resurrection
Return with the Elixir
Final Victory
Vogler also lists a range of useful character archetypes who often crop up in these kinds of stories:
Hero
Mentor: Wise Old Man or Woman
Threshold Guardian or Gatekeeper
Herald
Shapeshifter
Shadow
Ally
Trickster
BOOKS I LOVED WHEN I WAS A KID:
A Book of Magic Animals; Enchantments and Curses; Sorcerers and Spells by Ruth Manning-Saunders
Enid Blyton – anything about magic, fairies or toys especially The Enchanted Wood, The Folk of the Faraway Tree & The Wishing Chair
The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson
Judy Blume & Roald Dahl – anything by these writers
Rebecca’s World by Terry Nation
Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
Pippi Longstocking & Mardie by Astrid Lindgren
Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh
Ursula Moray Williams – anything by her, especially The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie & Bogwoppit
All of the Doctor Dolittle books by Hugh Lofting
The Little Ghost by Otfried Preussler
The Dragon’s Quest by Rosemary Manning
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Hanging Out with Cici by Francine Pascal
Books I’ve taught to kids which are brilliant:
If Cats Could Fly by Robert Westall
Daz 4 Zoe by Robert Swindells
If you are a writer, have a serious think about what your influences are. It can be a lovely nostalgic journey, yet also give you invaluable insight into how you structure your narratives and what makes you tick as an artist.
MY WRITING YEAR
Every writer will have their own schedule, limitations of time and responsibility, and their own rhythm. I prefer to start writing a new book on the first day of the school year in September. I always write best when it’s snowing; something about the absolute silence, a world gone to sleep. But any kind of autumnal or wintry weather will do. That’s the ideal anyway. Before I had my daughter, I had a lot more time to write and, as one does, wasted it. I write far more quickly and economically these days. I write mostly during the school day. Research reading takes place any time I can grab in the evenings and weekends. To date, I work for three months every summer doing seasonal exam marking, so the writing takes a break for a season; then there’s the summer holidays and everything slows down. So September is the ideal time for a new project. The weather turns colder as the novel progresses and the narrative completes as spring comes. It works for me.
My novel writing begins with a seed of an idea, sometimes an image, a character or an event. I jot down notes in a specially chosen notebook for the new novel & add to it as and when the ideas come. I have a box file to start gathering bits and bobs of research: articles, snippets, pictures etc. I sketch out a rough synopsis and the research then begins in earnest. I make lists of areas I need to cover and the books/texts/TV/film/radio resources I will need to look at in order to know those areas well. For example, in THE VISITORS, these areas were Victorian/Edwardian society, Deafblindness, hop farming, oyster farming and the Boer War. In SONG OF THE SEA MAID, these were general C18th history, the age of sail, science in the C18th, women in science in the C18th and the Seven Years’ War, amongst other wide-ranging and bizarre topics, from the sea life of Menorca to what orphans ate for Christmas dinner. I read research books always with a sharp pencil, making notes in the margins and copious underlinings and I always write page numbers at the back and a brief note when something in the book has given me an idea for my own narrative. If I have time, I tend to type up these book annotations, so that I have an A4 copy of all the relevant notes from that book. This provides easy access to the information without having to wade through the pages of the book itself. By the time the research is seriously underway (usually six months or so since the first tentative scribblings) I start amassing files and plastic wallets in a ringbinder, to cope with all the print-outs. I also gather pictures of the places and era represented in the novel and bluetack these up on sugar paper in my study and stare at them from time to time. Around this time, I write an expanded and detailed synopsis and chapter plan. Once the first half of the novel’s research is basically done, it is usually September and time to start writing. I find it works better to do the second half of the research as I’m writing the first half of the book, as once it comes around to writing the second half, the relevant research is still fresh in my mind. Once I start writing the prose, I don’t want to be spending time fiddling about looking up stuff, I just want to let it flow. So that’s why my research is quite well organised, so that I know precisely where to find the fact or date or crucial bit of information I need exactly when I need it.
The choice of voice and viewpoint is an important one and, for me, often quite an early decision. Sometimes, a voice comes to me and then I know that is the right one. But I have got this wrong in the past, as many writers have, and had to rewrite whole swathes of a novel in a different voice. It probably won’t be a surprise to know that THE VISITORS may be my first published novel, but is not the first I’ve written. It’s actually the fourth. So, I’ve had quite some time to practise the structures and techniques I’ve written about on this website, over the past ten years or so. The novel I completed before THE VISITORS was the one which needed rewriting: it had two narrators, both in first person diary entries, and it became clear that one of these narrators worked very well and the other just didn’t. So the latter was rewritten in the third person, which took six months or so. Ho hum. With THE VISITORS, Adeliza’s voice was with me right from the beginning of the research; in fact, I wrote the first couple of lines in a notebook months before the main writing began. She was just very powerfully present and made herself known; the process of writing that novel was a strange kind of channelling. Sounds a bit daft, I know, but it happens to be true. For SONG OF THE SEA MAID, I was well into the research before the voice presented itself. But I wasn’t worried. I’ve been at this game long enough now to know it would come, when it’s good and ready. I tried a few voices before the right one announced itself. And once it did, that’s when the fun really starts, and the magic and the wonder and all that stuff that make writing novels the only job for me.
Here’s a video of me talking about my writing process which I aired through Periscope for Hachette’s #WhereIWrite:
http://www.whereiwrite.tv/rebecca-mascull/
THE NOVEL
I’ll be honest with you. I’m totally biased. I just love novels. Yes, I watch movies and television drama and read the odd short story collection if it’s really, really good, and I love going to the theatre and I admire some poetry and like reading non-fiction BUT for me – and this is my opinion and you don’t have to agree with it – the novel is the top, the summit, the apotheosis of culture and everything fine about being human. I’m nuts about novels and get really angry at novels I think are bad and I do throw them across the room if they are really bad. Because the best novels are, as D. H. Lawrence said and Dennis Potter quoted, ‘the one bright book of life’.
I know I’m not alone. Maybe you feel like this about novels and that’s why you’re reading this. Here’s what some smart people had to say about the novel:
QUOTATIONS ABOUT THE NOVEL:
- Stendhal: a novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
- Thomas Hardy: a novel is an impression, not an argument.
- D. H. Lawrence: If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
- Jane Austen: ‘Oh! It is only a novel…’ …or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
- Gerald Brenan: You can’t get at the truth by writing history: only the novelist can do that.
BUILDING BLOCKS OF PROSE FICTION
These are the things I can’t do without, the stuff I employ and juggle mostly in my sub-conscious, but sometimes – with a pencil and notepad – I sketch out and scribble about to get it right. I believe every novelist has to consider many of these at some point in their planning and writing. (The last one is my favourite…)
- Plot/structure/narrative
- Characters and motivation
- Settings
- Theme/big idea/thesis
- Conflict and resolution
- Time, duration and pace
- Dialogue
- Action and enigma
- Binary oppositions
- Representation of human consciousness and the world
- Style, voice, imagery and viewpoint
- Openings, episodes, set pieces and endings
- Breaking the rules
- Editing and drafts
- A search for truth.
BOOKS ON WRITING which I’ve used and are great for getting you started then developing your understanding and skills:
The Writer’s Journey – Christopher Vogler
Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman
The Seven Basic Plots – Christopher Booker
The Craft of Novel Writing – Dianne Doubtfire
The Art of Fiction – David Lodge
Story – Robert McKee
On Writing – Stephen King
Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
The Forest for the Trees – Betsy Lerner
The Creative Writing Coursebook – ed. Julia Bell & Paul Magrs
How to Write Damn Good Fiction – James N. Frey
How to Write a Mystery – Larry Beinhart
The Crack-up & The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Journals of Sylvia Plath
HOW TO GET PUBLISHED:
Blimey, don’t ask me. Like most writers, I’ve been doing it from childhood. My first serious attempt at a long narrative was a western about a female gunslinger, totally ripped off from the movie Romancing the Stone. The next was a hospital drama about unsavoury goings-on in the x-ray room (I had a crush on the radiologist in St. Elsewhere at the time). I wrote a few short stories in my early twenties. Then I started jotting down ideas for a novel during my undergraduate degree. I attended some super summer schools in Oxford with the wonderful Ann Schlee and a great evening class at Hull College with the brilliant Daphne Glazer. I did an Arvon course too with my partner Simon in Devon and met some lovely people, including fellow novelist Dorothy Judd. I entered a few competitions and didn’t win anything, but got some encouraging feedback. By this time, it was blindingly obvious to me that I was a pretty good teacher, but my heart wasn’t in it. The only thing I wanted to do was write novels, all day, every day, and for the rest of my natural life. Plan B became Plan A. I left full-time teaching in 2001, started an MA in Writing that year and taught part-time. Simon supported me in every way a writer and a person can be supported and thank the stars for him. Over the next eleven years, I wrote four novels and two text books (and had a baby in the middle of it). Each of the first three novels secured an agent, all found in the agent pages of the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book. N.B. I submitted the opening chapters of each of the first three novels to between 30 and 50 agents. It took a lot of time and money and lot of gumption to file all the rejection letters and carry on. From all those submissions, I got one agent for each book who said yes. The first agency changed their mind before submitting; the second submitted to a dozen publishers before rightly giving up; the third novel secured representation by the wonderful Jane Conway-Gordon, who believed in it and – I will be forever grateful – believed in me as a writer, I think. In the meantime, the examinations board AQA asked me to co-write a text book, which I did and this isTeaching Television Crime Drama; it was a lot of fun to do and it was published by AQA and I joined the Society of Authors and went to their summer party for new members and had a ball.
Meanwhile, the third novel was going the rounds of the publishers and – try as we might over two long and frustrating years including a six-month rewrite – could not secure a publishing deal, so Jane told me to get on with the next one. That was THE VISITORS. I sent Jane the manuscript on May 21st 2012. On June 21st, we heard from the marvellous Suzie Doore, Editorial Director at Hodder and Stoughton, that THE VISITORS had secured a deal. One month to the day since the novel was finished and sent off, seven years give or take a month or so since I left full-time teaching to become a novelist. Some people do it quicker, for some it takes longer, and some give up or never achieve whatever their writing dreams happen to be. For me, I wanted a novel of mine to be published by a publishing house, not by myself, and that is what happened for me, after years and years of trying. After that, I wrote my next novel in more or less complete isolation; I had a one-book deal for THE VISITORS and no kind of guarantee that my publisher would like my next book. I didn’t know what they were going to think when I sent it off. It was bloody terrifying! But luckily, Hodder made a two-book offer for that novel – SONG OF THE SEA MAID – and a further book as yet unwritten. And only then did I begin to feel a little bit more like a real writer. Perhaps all writers always feel a bit this way, that they are performing magic tricks and one day some kid will pull back the curtain and everyone will throw rotten tomatoes at them… Well, I guess a little humility does you good.
What will happen next is anybody’s guess. The only thing I know is that you’ve got to put the hours, the months and the years in to get anywhere in this business and beyond that, keep pestering those gatekeepers: let me in, let me in…
