WHY WRITING IS A MUG'S GAME

I wrote this in a fit of depression. It was a good fit having been with me since birth. This is why you you should never, ever willingly become a writer,

Old Enough to Know Better but too Old to Care

I’m thinking of declaring a jihad against actuaries.

Bastards.

My theory is that they’re in league with the government to stop me retiring. I’m getting to feel like Tantalus: every time the fruits of a pension come within reach they change the pensionable age and I’m back to square one looking for something to do that will provide me with three square a day.

And then, of course, when you could actually use an actuary – professionally rather than carnally that is – there’s nary one of the buggers around. And, boy, the day I decided it would be a good idea to write a novel was sure as hell one when I could have used some advice of a statistical nature.

Gotta tell you, if deciding to write a novel is a dumb idea, then deciding to write one when you’re sixty is a really dumb idea.

Sixty is a funny age. It’s the Wednesday of your lifetime: too far from the fun-packed weekend of your youth and too far from payday ever to stand a chance. It’s the age – as Leonard Cohen so pithily reminds us – when we begin to ache in the places where we used to play. It most certainly is not an age to embark on novel writing. But then I suppose there’s no good age to start writing because it is – both actually and actuarially – a stupid occupation.

Okay, you need to be stupid to start writing a book. But read any guide to ‘writing a book’ and the word ‘determination’ features prominently, this being the trait considered necessary to finish writing a book. But in my case you can substitute ‘determination’ for ‘enraged naivety’. I was prompted to write ‘Dark Charismatic’ after watching the travesty of a re-imagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story that was the BBC’s ‘Jekyll’. Now although I love and revere Stevenson’s tale I nevertheless accept that like many things approaching their one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday (me, for example) it could certainly handle a wash and brush up. Unfortunately as wash and brush ups go the BBC’s effort was more akin to a really good sand blasting in that it stripped all the good things away and left...well, not much actually. And like many before me, as I sat there aghast watching this twaddle, the thought crossed my mind, ‘I could do better than that’.

Fool! Such hubris!

So I sat down and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote. Two hundred and twenty thousand words to be exact, each word of them carefully, lovingly and laboriously crafted. And the final two were ‘The End’.

Now here I pause to proffer my first statistic, namely, the one regarding how many books once commenced are ever completed. My guess – and I suspect this is an amazingly generous estimate – is that no more than one in a hundred neophyte writers ever stagger across the finishing line. Around the country there must be millions of first, second and third chapters gathering dust in drawers or languishing forgotten on laptops (and long may they remain there; who needs competition). And as support for this contention I am willing to bet, dear reader, that you too are the proud possessor of an unfinished novel.

So remember that statistic: only one in a hundred books is ever finished.

Having written the bloody thing I was troubled by a rather belated thought: what do I do with it now? And the answer is, of course, get an agent. Oh, you can do it yourself, sending your unsolicited manuscript to publishers directly but you might as well spend your time attempting to roast snow. Believe me, nobody in the publishing world will touch unsolicited manuscripts. They’re the tsetse fly of the literary world: everyone’s heard of them but no one wants to come in contact with them. So I googled ‘agents + science fiction + fantasy’, chose the three I though most receptive – that is they had kind faces – and sent off the first three chapters of my magnum opus. And waited...and waited...and waited. One outright (or is that outwrite) rejection in the form of a platitudinous standard letter, one rejection because ‘the end of the book was obvious’ – the guy must be prescient or something because I didn’t know what the ending was until a week before I sent it off – and – hurray! – one acceptance.

So back to those statistics. In later conversation with my agent (get me: ‘my agent’) he advised me that during his time in the business he’d received something north of six thousand submissions from would-be writers and as he’s currently got a stable (or should that be a pen) of forty-three authors that comes out at a newby having something like one chance in a hundred and fifty of securing an agent.

Remember that: you’ve one chance in a hundred and fifty of finding an agent.

So ‘Dark Charismatic’ was sent out...and every publisher and his father rejected it. The general feeling was that there was too much sex in it. My fault: in retrospect what I’d written was an over-long aide-memoire, something to refer to if Alzheimer’s kicked in and I found myself with some free time on a Saturday night. So what do I do now? As I’d just spent a year wasting my time, writing unpublishable crap and earning precisely zip, the answer was obvious: I’d write another book! I think this sort of behaviour is classifiable under Obsessive Compulsive Disorders. Anyway, thus was born ‘The Demi-Monde’. Another year drifted by but this time when my agent pitched the book it was taken up by a publisher.

Remember that: there’s only one chance in two of your agent being able to find a publisher for your book.

Okay, so you’ve got a publisher now, so let’s have a look at the sales prospects for your master work. Somewhere between seventy thousand new fiction titles hit the bookshelves every year in the UK and the average sales of each are somewhere between one thousand and three thousand copies. That’s average, folks, so there are some seriously shit sales needed to compensate for the stellar success of such literary luminaries as Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson. No matter, these average sales, by my calculations, will net the author between £500 and £1,500. That’s after two years bloody hard work (and don’t forget you’ll also have to go through the publisher’s editing process which can be enormously time consuming, especially if your grammar is as rotten as mine...or, possibly, mine is): that works out at about 10p an hour. Minimum wage it ain’t. It makes misdirecting customers at B&Q look like a gig from heaven.

So what are your chances of your book generating something approaching a reasonable return on your investment of time – say £30,000 a year? My guess is that maybe two and a half thousand titles turn that sort of profit for their authors: one in thirty.

Remember that: one book in thirty turns an okay profit.

If I recall my statistics – and those lectures were a bloody long time ago – the chance of you finishing a book, finding an agent, having it published and turning a reasonable profit is about one in forty thousand. Or about the same chance you run of being struck by a renegade meteor...on a Sunday...in Slough.

That’s why, in my humble opinion, the chief quality needed by a would-be writer isn’t determination, or creativity, or style, or a wonderful plot idea...it’s stupidity. No matter how you slice it, writing’s a mug’s game.

But to paraphrase Lloyd in ‘Dumb and Dumber’: ‘One chance in forty thousand? So you’re telling me I’ve got a chance’.

What do actuaries know anyway?

Rod Rees is currently writing the fourth volume of ‘The Demi-Monde’ saga and reports that the psychotropics are working wonderfully.

THE DEMI-MONDE:SPRING

Just sent the re-edit of the second volume in the Demi-Monde series off to Jo Fletcher at Quercus. I got the typeset version back about a month ago and it was obvious that I'd over-written the thing. Not having read it for a year it seemed flaccid and ponderous so I decided to slim it down. So I've been working flat out culling the thing so that's it's gone from 191,000 words to a little over 150,000 (the same length as 'Winter' which was always my target). I've ditched three set-piece scenes which didn't really move the action or the plot along. A couple of characters have gone (including Botnikov, who I liked a lot) but I think they died in a good cause. I've also invented a new form of intra-Demi-Mondian communication which I'm pretty pleased with.

All-in-all it is I think a better book. It's simultaneously lighter and darker than Winter so it'll be interesting to see what Jo thinks of it. Now all that's left is to tweak 'Summer' to reflect these changes and then to dive back into 'Fall'. The end beckons!!!!!

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Really delighted to be able to write that a French publisher, J'ai Lu, have taken all four of the Demi-Monde books with the first one hitting the streets in Autumn 2012. J'ai Lu look like a first-class outfit - they've actually assigned the DM a marketing budget! - and it's great to be on the same label as Neil Gaiman.

Funnily enough I'm just finishing the edit of The Demi-Monde: Spring where a lot of the action takes place in Paris. God only knows what the translators are going to make of Burlesque Bandstand's Franglais!

SCRIPT-TEASE, OR THE ART OF THE SLOW REVEAL

I’ve been asked to think about the ‘blurb’ that will go on the back cover of the paperback edition of ‘The Demi-Monde: Winter’ and as these invariably include quotes from reviews I had a quick trawl through the ones the DM has garnered. And one aspect of a couple of these reviews that was particularly noticeable was how impatient readers are.

For instance, one queried how the technology in the Real World was so much more sophisticated than our own when the setting of the Real World was only eight years distant from our own. Because the reason for this wasn’t spelt out, the reviewer automatically assumed it was because I had being rather naïve in my extrapolation of present day technology … that I’d screwed up. He didn’t trust me as a writer to have done this for a reason and was so linear in his thinking to be incapable of conceiving that there might another rationale for this apparent anomaly.

Another couldn’t understand why the Dupes were dependent on blood, putting this down to an aberrational quirk of yours truly.

What these reviewers were forgetting was that this is a four-book series, with the story developing gradually. Each book will peel back a few more layers of the fictional onion that is the Demi-Monde … what I call ScriptTease. Hopefully as each book of the series comes out there will be readers kicking themselves and saying ‘Of course!’.

I suppose if I wasn’t an SF debutant readers would be more inclined to trust me as a writer to resolve and to explain … eventually. But, hopefully, over time, out, readers will learn – I hope! – to rely on me and my storytelling.

THE DEMI-MONDE: BUILDING A BESPOKE WORLD

I've been working on an article to explain how I built the Demi-Monde and this is my first pass. It's a bit long for a blog but what  the hell.

THE DEMI-MONDE: BUILDING A BESPOKE WORLD

 

Funnily enough I began ‘world building’ without realising that this is what I was doing but then being a novice writer I suppose I started the whole of the writing process without realising what I was doing.

No matter.

World building is the term applied to the exercise undertaken by all Science Fiction and Fantasy writers involving the creation of a believable and coherent backdrop – be it an alien world, a dystopian future or an alternative reality – to dress the stage upon which the writer’s fictional thespians can perform. And its purpose is just the same as scenery; to allow the audience to more easily suspend disbelief and willingly to enter the counterfeit world of the writer’s imagination, a world (hopefully) made so speciously plausible, so consistent, so logical, and so precise that the reader is persuaded to think...well, why not.

The counterfeit world I built is the Demi-Monde. Most of the action of my book ‘The Demi-Monde: Winter’ (and the subsequent books in the series) takes place in a virtual world - the eponymous Demi-Monde - built for the US Military to train their neoFights – grunts – in the arts necessary to survive and triumph in an asymmetric war environment. The Demi-Monde itself is a circular, sealed world divided into five mutually antagonistic and disparate Sectors – disparate in terms of race, religion and religion – the whole realm locked, technology-wise, into a Victorian mindset. One other wrinkle: I’d seeded into this world what I call Singularities, these the digital duplicates of some of the most vicious and evil characters from history – Heydrich, Beria, Robespierre, Shaka Zulu, to name a few – the intention being that these psychopaths would provide each Sector with suitably perverted leadership.

So far so improbable.

Okay, so how did I begin my world building career? By drawing up a map. Maps are essential both to orientate both the author and, more importantly, his or her readers through this world of the imagination. In my case I wanted a sealed world – a closed system – in order that I could explore certain ideas I had about the deterministic nature of the human condition, so I fretted long and hard about what shape to make the world. The circular world thingy had been done before but because I wanted my world divided into five Sectors and because I had given it a militaristic cast I was drawn to having it pentagonal in shape (the Pentagon, geddit?). It soon became obvious why the round shape is so popular: depending where you stand on the circumference the external borders of a polygon are at differing distances from the centre and this can be confusing, especially for someone as non-spatial as me...I could get lost in a one-way street. So finally, reluctantly, I opted for the cliché – but geometrical convenience - of a circular world.

Right, map drawn, now I needed to ensure that the physical parameters of my virtual world were consistent and coherent. In my book the Demi-Monde was created by a publicity-shy corporation called ParaDigm CyberResearch so I had the idea of replicating the brochure ParaDigm used when it was first pitching its product to the US Military. This turned out to be a Good Idea. As these sort of documents can’t be woolly and vague the act of describing the cyber nuts and bolts of the Demi-Monde really crystallised my thinking. I had to define how the rivers of the Demi-Monde flowed, what the weather was like during the various seasons, how the waste and sewerage created by my Dupes was collected and disposed of, in fact all the minutiae that is needed to make an make-believe and somewhat unbelievable world, well, believable.

The other great benefit derived from this exercise was that it obliged me to decide what would be the ‘Areas of Tension’ built into the Demi-Monde that would provoke the five Sectors to be continually at each other’s throats, after all, for a war simulation the last thing the designers wanted was peace breaking out. And the Areas of Tension I chose were those I thought would be simultaneously the most fun for me as a writer to explore and the most provocative: to paraphrase Mr Bennet, what are the foibles of the human race for, if not to be made sport of. So I finally decided upon to make the inter-Sector antagonisms to stem from differences in race, religion, gender and sexual orientation...and the greatest of these was religion.

The religions I developed for the Demi-Monde - UnFunDaMentalism, ImPuritanism, HerEticalism, HimPerialism, RaTionalism, nuJuism and Confusionism - are merely the religions of our world stretched and distorted to breaking point, my belief being that only by showing a belief system in extremis is it possible to see it as it really is. Reductio ad absurdum and all that. I’d love the Demi-Monde series to be remembered for its satirical aspect. Satire is the way a belief system is stress tested. It is essential, if a society is to flourish that it is open, free of censorship and one in which everything and everyone can be criticised in a rational manner; the concept of a loyal opposition is one I subscribe too. Of course, for a writer this is treacherous ground, as Jonathan Swift, said, "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.'

But I digress.

Finally, I my world building brought me to the selecting of the historical characters I would use to flavour the Demi-Monde, my psychopathic Singularities. And reading about them the one thing that struck me about these high-performing über-psychopaths is how stone cold evil they were; totally without empathy, without compassion and without remorse. Unfortunately our PC-world refuses to accept that there is such a thing as undiluted wickedness – nowadays everybody has to have some redeeming feature, has to possess some humanity - but I wanted to write about these bastards as they actually were, flat-out evil. Okay, that might make them, to modern folk, a little pantomime-esque but, folks, that is how they were.

So now I had my stage, my script and my players...enough to write my book, but in today’s internet-driven world that ain’t enough and this, I suppose, is the real purpose of this essay. Thanks to the internet, factual reality (if that isn’t tautology I don’t know what is) and fictional reality (a wonderful contradiction in terms) are merging. BI (Before Internet) the imaginary was distinct and readily distinguishable from the real. AI (After Internet) this separation is blurring. For instance some individuals operating on the web take the names and personae of celebrities (living and dead), so much so that it is almost impossible for the veracity of the real celebrity’s cyber doodlings to be accepted or even established. And as even the most spaced-out wacko has the same ability to spout his or her nonsense on the web as do 'normal' people everything on the internet has to be taken with several grains of salt, because everything has a veneer of cyber-credulity. Consider Wiki, the most used reference resource in the world. Wiki has become so adulterated by mischievous editing that every time you use it you have to question whether what you are reading has been infected by nonsense.

The result is that as time has passed - as the Internet has becoming increasingly all-pervasive - fantasy has begun to merge with reality. On the Internet reality and surreality, fact and fiction, rumour and truth have to co-exist but they can’t do this without contaminating each other. The result is sort of nu-reality - a faux-reality - which is simultaneously truth and lies. There was a nice phrase in a recent article in the Sunday Times by Camille Paglia about Lady Gaga (‘What’s Sex Got to do with It?’) which said ‘In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away’.

Oh, the idea of reality and make-believe become malleable and interchangeable is not new (Orwell explored this to great effect in '1984') but what is different today is that it is so easy to do. The real world and the cyber-world are becoming increasingly intertwined, creating a Gordian Knot of competing realities which are often impossible to disentangle.

And this process of merger has hardly begun.

In the future fact and fiction will become increasingly indistinguishable and this change has profound implications for writers. As I see it in the future, not only will truth and fiction conflate but so will all media, coalescing into one enormous cyber-continuum, the distinction between films, videogames, comic books, music, images and the written word blurring and finally disappearing. Even now there is an enormous overlap, this driven by the fact that now the audience has come to join the players on stage. Thanks to social networking, the audience is now part of the creative process.

And the implications of having the audience as a creative partner are profound: my suspicion is that today’s proto-reader is - and increasingly will be - looking for an altogether more immersive (dare I say, a more visceral) experience than one which can be found within the covers of a printed book. They will want to explore the backgrounds of their favourite characters, be able (especially with the SF and fantasy genres) to make a deeper, almost forensic examination of the world the writer has created, they will want to interact with the characters and with each other, they will want to see the writer’s visualisation of his or her book and, most importantly, they will want to become involved. This nuReader will want all his or her senses engaged and like it or not it will become incumbent on writers to create worlds and characters which transcend the printed word. This will be the only way they will be able to persuade a cyber-savvy generation to suspend disbelief.

Of course, appreciating this doesn’t make it any easier for a writer. My own modest step was the creation of the Demi-Monde website (www.thedemi-monde.com), this designed to allow my readers the opportunity of immersing themselves more fully in my virtual world and to better understand the nuances and detail that can only (because of considerations of pace and length) be alluded to in the book.

One small step, but an important one ‘cos if you don’t embrace the revolution that is upon us you’ll be in danger of being swept away by it. Just as the lust for spectacle engendered by Cinemascope ramped up the cost of film-making which in turn reduced the number of films Hollywood churned out and just as the need to promote bands on MTV made a costly-to-make video essential to the launch of a band and hence fewer being signed, so the need for a book to be transformed into an eye-popping e-book (paper is so last year, darling), this accompanied by an all-singing and dancing web-site, a film tie-in and a computer game down-load will ultimately mean less and less money will be available to finance new writers. Marketing will become king in the publishing world.

For world builders, life is going to get a lot tougher...and a lot more interesting.

RENEGADE WRITERS: 2ND MARCH 2011

I hadn't been to Renegades for a couple of weeks - Kit had a gig I needed to attend and what with Nell being away... - but I managed to get there yesterday. I suppose I was a bit distracted - I've still kinda wired after the Big Push on editing Spring - so everything that was read I just sat there thinking about how I would edit it.

I've come to the conclusion that every sentence you write has got to do one of three things:

• help with exposition, and this has got to be the absolute minimum required to keep the reader's belief appropriately suspended;
• push the plot along; or
• describe some action or thought which is pertinent to the development of the character or the plot.

Everything else is just padding. Now I'm sure there's some learned tome out there which will tell me that this is bollocks but certainly for the type of action-centred books I write it's valid. What I've been guilty of is writing stuff that I think is kinda neat and clever but which is simply ballast - the sort of stuff a reader skip-reads. But no more: you are looking at a leaner, meaner writer now!

Back to Renegades and the reason for my digression. Misha brought another chapter of her book about Brunel and the Clifton Suspension Bridge and it read very well but I think she falls into the same trap as me...she over-writes. And as her book is aimed at 9-12s I guess she's got to be very parsimonious with her words. The good thing is that even now the story has got good pace - and believe me you can't buy good pace - so I think with the use of a red pen it's going to be turbo-charged and this I suspect is what kids want from a book.

I read a canto of my Eddic of Loci which will form part of the poem inscribed on the mysterious Column, the Column being my McGuffin in Spring. I'm not really much cop at poetry - the nearest I got before was writing lyrics for Nell when she was in chanteuse mode - but I was quite pleased with how it sounded and the comments from the rest of the Renegades were useful too.

Interesting evening.

BACK IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING

The last few weeks have been difficult. Nell is away in Russia and I got the first edit of The Demi-Monde:Spring back, so it's been very hectic.

It's amazing how you change over the course of a year. When I submitted Spring twelve months ago I thought it was pretty good but when I got it back it just seemed bloated. So ... I decided it needed slimming from 191,000 words to as near as I could get to 150,000. It's a difficult task knocking out so many words because if you're not careful you can destroy the plot. It took me 120 hours of solid, concentrated work to achieve it. I'm finally down to 156,000 and the book is all the better for it. Now all that remains is a final read-through and then it's off to Quercus.

One thing's for sure I'll never ever over-write again!