Russel D McLean Archives

Who Killed the Chauffeur (and who cares?)

Chauffeur, loose ends, Raymond Chandler, Russel D McLean, russel's fancy new website, The Sopranos Comments Off

Aug 102012

Russel D McLean

Check out Russel's new website (and blog) at www.russeldmcleanbooks.com

In The Big Sleep, there’s a great moment when Marlowe is called out to the murder of the Sternwood family Chauffeur. It’s a great scene and one that serves to move the story forward, but rumour has it that when Howard Hawks was filming the movie, he called Chandler and asked,

Who killed the Chauffeur?

And it’s a fair question. No one really knows. And the rumour is that Chandler himself responded quite blithely that he didn’t either, making it just another instance of his maxim that when the plot slows down you have a man walk through the door with a gun*

It’s a massive plot hole, or at least certain readers may consider it as such. But you know, I like it. I like it a lot because it makes me think of life.

In life nobody knows everything.

And nobody gets to know everything.

I like to leave a few loose ends in my novels. Of course, given that I’m writing a sequence in the McNee books, one or two of those get picked up later. A few questions from The Lost Sister will be answered in Father Confessor (but yet a few more might be raised), but sometimes there are things that you don’t need to know. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. And its more fun if you can argue or conjecture about what really happened.

Moving up to the modern age (ish), one of my favourite ever episodes of the Sopranos (me and ten million others) was the one where Paulie and Christopher take a Russian out to the woods to kill him. He escapes, they think they shoot him in the head, but then they can’t find the body. They get lost in the woods. They go through real bad times. But they don’t find the Russian. They don’t know if he’s dead or alive. But the point of the story is not the Russian, but how they cope with being lost in the cold and alone with each other. Oh, and by the way, if you have never watched the Sopranos here is your spoiler alert.

Lots of people spent the rest of the series conjecturing whether the Russian was really dead, and what might happen if he returned. But he never did. And nothing ever came of the fact they killed this guy. Because it didn’t matter. And because, well, why would anything have come of that? It’s a fine dramatic line between thematic webs and daft coincidence. And the fact that we never really did know about the Russian was brilliant. Because it felt real. Because sometimes in life, you do things, or you see things, and they don’t come back to haunt you in some ironic way or have any real impact on anything again even if, in a made-up, all-the-dots-connect-world they surely should have.

Now I’m not saying I do anything as well as either of these examples, or that I use such extremes, but I do believe that sometimes you don’t have to know everything for a story to work. In fact I’d rather not be told everything and be able to imagine a world that continues beyond the confines of what I’ve seen of it.

And, really, I don’t care who killed the Chauffeur, but I do care that it got Marlowe to the right place at the right time to answer the bigger questions. And that while we never found out who did it, it didn’t feel forced or unnatural. In fact, it felt real.

*metaphorically speaking

Five Paragraphs of Russel

bandwagons, fifty shades of gray, rambling, Russel D McLean Comments Off

Jul 202012

Russel D McLean

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY is the book of the moment. Love it or hate it, its there and its not going anywhere very soon. People will talk about what it means in the cultural zeitgeist and try to make more of it than it really is (its a naughty book - there have always been and will always be naughty books, and most of them will be written with the same regard for the English language as SHADES, and that's fine) and others will decry or mock it. But the fact is that people are reading it so let's have a genuine cheer for Ms James and her success. Its what we all want and its what very few of us will get, so let's feel good for those that it happens to.

No, my problem with SHADES is the inevitable bandwagon. Publishing always does this. Something becomes an unexpected phenomenon (ie, THE DA VINCI CODE or Steig Larrson in general) and publishers scarmble to find something "the same" but "different". They rejacket books with tangential similarities so that readers will be confused. They retitle books so that they sound the same (SIXTY DAYS OF YELLOW or THE SCHOPENHAUER SECRET*). They struggle to find the initial spark, but they don't realise that the books in question are lone freaks of nature. They exceptions. They are popular because they are the right book in the right place at the right time. And sure there might be a long tail for some of the imitators, but the fact is that the buying public don't really want the imitations. Sure they want "the same" so they claim, but what they really want is the same *feeling* they had when they read the book. They don't actually know the specifics of what they want. They only know the emotional connection or the feeling of surprise that they had reading that particular book and that's what they want to rediscover, even if they can only artticulate that feeling in terms of the one particular book that sparked that emotion.

Books (and yes I include ebooks here - they are now another delivery format, so get over it and shut up) and entertainment cannot be driven by markets in the same way as other products. They connect with readers on a very different level, on an individual level. The minute they are marketted according to what other books are doing, that sense of surprise and connection gets lost. Publishing is a risky business. It always has been. But its being shortchanged every time it tries to grab the maximum number of readers rather than simply the most passionate readers (which is always the smaller number).

FIFTY SHADES is an incredible success story and one worth learning lessons from. But the lesson here is not that "we should all be writing erotica". Its that "you should write book you want to write and maybe, just maybe, other people will love it, too". The more publishers who jump on the erotica badnwagon, the more of them (and consequently the more authors) are going to get burned when readers cotton onto the fact that what made them love FIFTY SHADES wasn't simply the erotica or the underlying story or even Mr Gray himself, but merely an odd and unknowable moment of connection with a work of fiction that cannot be mass replicated or reproduced by going through the same motions over and over again.** Publishing is at its finest when it is about passion and not money, and sometimes I wonder if the modern world is making us forget that, is letting us slip in the real business of books and entertainment.

*I don't know if these titles are real, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were.
**Go on, insert your own dirty joke here

With Great Power Comes Great… oh, you know this already…

amazing spider-man, films, origins, Russel D McLean, Spider-Man Comments Off

Jul 132012

By Russel D McLean

Those of you know me, know that I’m a bit of a geek. So you can guess that this week (The Literary Critic passed on this one, surprisingly) I was off to see The Amazing Spiderman.

There’s a lot to like in the movie (and a couple of bits – yes, corny and inexplicably coincidental crane operators, I’m looking at you – that’s maybe not worth liking so much) and Garfield gets Peter Parker in a way that Tobey Maguire never really did. And for all that his motivation was paper-thin, I kinda dug Rhys Ifans as The Lizard, and really liked the way they shied away from some of the really obvious stuff (like immediately adding major villains or throwing in J Jonah Jamieson before he was really needed).

But here’s the thing – rebooting the series or not, did we really need another origin?

We all know the story of how Spiderman became Spiderman. And a lot of critics of the movie are asking why we needed to go through the whole thing again, even with some tiny twists to make things a bit different this time out (such as Pete’s dad running away due to the Very Bad People wanting to use his scientific discoveries, or Spidey not doing his wrestling schtick before Uncle Ben died).

It’s a fair question – why do we need another origin? Don’t we get it already? Couldn’t we just start with Peter all Spideyed out?

Well, we could have. After all, Tim Burton successfully managed to avoid an “origin” in his Batman movie. But then the more I thought about it the more I realised why, when reintroducing a new take on a popular character, origin stories may be necessary as much for the “reimagineers” as for anyone else.

You see Origin stories – especially superhero origin stories – provide a great template for conflict, rising action and all that good stuff that actors, directors and, yes, writers, love getting their teeth into. We get to see a protagonist go through a period of intense change. And we, as the audience, get to root for that change. We want to see Peter overcome his own nerdiness and indecision to become the hero we know and love. We want to see him come through the grief over his uncle’s death and become the guy in the red and blue suit who’s always on hand with some webbing and a quip. We want to see how he grows into his powers. And we want to be wowed when he finally realises his potential.

Of course, the story after all of that is still interesting. But its more difficult to paint in dramatic terms. When a guy’s already a hero, you have to start creating bigger and more absurd obstacles for him to face. When this happens, you quickly find yourself in a Batman and Robin or a Spiderman 3, where suddenly nothing matters anymore except the spectacle and the cheap straw men lined up against your hero. When you root for the hero only because you know he’s the hero, its more difficult to wring drama out of the situation. Especially when you’re not writing a weekly or monthly serial and you only have the audience’s attention for two hours every three or four years.

After all there comes a point where character development gets tricky. The last go on the Spiderman franchise resulted in two somewhat interesting films about a man trying to find who he was and a third film that jumped through hoops to try and give us something our hero couldn’t handle, ending up unbelievable and more than a little daft.

My point is that I’m as irked as anyone that they just went straight back to retelling the story of Spiderman from the beginning, but from a dramatic standpoint, I understand why they did. Just look at any long-running character and you’ll realise that their most interesting moments were in the early days, when they were developing and changing. Fiction has to be about change. But there comes a point when your character cannot continue to move forward and cannot be subject to the same kind of rapid and interesting conflict that he came across in the early days.

And when that happens you have three choices:

You either keep going and let the character go a little stale knowing that you’ve already bought the audience loyalty.

You end the series.

Or you reboot.

Sometimes in subtle ways – the comics, after all, are always tinkering with origins or changing the rules through some insane narrative devices.

And sometimes, as with The Amazing Spiderman, in ways that are utterly unsubtle but perhaps, for the creative team to feel comfortable, entirely necessary.

Location, Location, Location

adaptations, Lawrence Block, location, Matt Scudder, Parker, Richard Stark, Russel D McLean, Slayground Comments Off

Jun 292012

By Russel D McLean

Scudder was so drunk. he thought that 'tache was cool

Are some characters wedded to their surroundings?

I watched the 1986 screen adaptation of Lawrence Block’s superb Matt Scudder novel 8 Million Ways to Die the other week. I knew from people who had seen it that there would be problems, but the idea of adaptations intrigues me and I love to see the way film-makers approach novels, often finding that those who have a strong vision produce the most interesting works that don’t always have to be note-perfect adaptations.

However, it always intrigues me when they move characters out of their natural surroundings.

And that’s exactly what they did here with Scudder.

The plot of the film is fairly inconsequential in many ways. It marries together a few different elements from the Scudder books and very quickly sets up his alcoholism after softening (just a touch) the mistake that got Matt fired from the police. Now, what the film has in its favour is Jeff Bridges. Even now he’d be my first choice for Scudder (although the recent announcement that Liam Neeson is to take on the role is not one that I’m opposed to), and here he does a fine job of playing the asshole with the unshakeable sense of responsibility. He’s great struggling with the bottle and acting against his better instincts. But something feels off.

And I realised that its nothing to do with Bridges or the character of Scudder.

It’s the fact they moved him to LA.

LA, the town that has so many personalities it never feels entirely cohesive. LA, where the sun shines and the city sprawls.

Matt Scudder does not belong there. Even the way the script portrays, you know that he is New York man, that he belongs in the crowded, occasionally dirty, always edgy city that is New York. Matt Scudder does not belong near the beach or the houses of the Hollywood stars. He is dirty, grungy, hard-bitten. He is New York. And New York is not LA.

And that’s where everything falls apart. Matt is so out of place in this new location that everything else begins to feel wrong. No matter how good Bridges’ performance is, it never feels right. And let’s not even talk about some of the odd narrative jumps or the strange, hallucinogenic way he gets involved in his “case”. It often feels like we’re missing half the narrative that was meant to explain some of the characters’ motivations here.

Oh, and Andy Garcia’s little pony tail is hilarious. As is his weird accent “Hello, Mr Scooder,” he drawls, pretending to be all Latin American and sleazy.

Following this, I watched SLAYGROUND, an adaptation of the Richard Stark novel of the same name. His character, Parker, is something of a drifter. He does where there’s a job. He’s not wedded to one place, but he is wedded to a country. Which is why it strikes me as odd that they took a book whose sole purpose is to trap Parker in one location (an abandoned fairground) and then move him all the way across America before – for no good reason – suddenly sending him to England where he gets to team up with Mel Smith in a finale that seems almost an afterthought to that great title.

It was bad enough watching this poorly made, poorly conceived adaptation while Parker… sorry, Stone… blundered across America displaying none of the professionalism that we had come to expect from the character in the novels. But when they moved him to the UK, suddenly everything felt deeply, sickly, wrong. The entire mis-en-scene was screwed. The character and his story did not belong there. And there was no strong reason to move either there, other than the script seemed to say it happened.

Location can make a massive difference to character. But not always. Take the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which does not suffer in the slightest from moving to the states after the novel was set in the UK. Why? Because Hornby did not wed his characters to place. He did not create them to be English so much as he created them to be geeks.

Its just something that struck me, especially with these two movies, that some characters are integral and part of the place they come from. They become unstuck when moved, somehow lesser. And the more I think about it, the more we do associate certain characters, especially in crime fiction, with place. Marlowe with LA, Hammet with SF, Rebus with Edinburgh (and look what happened when he moved to London – it really didn’t work), Holmes with London… I guess what I’m saying is, a movie needs a strong reason to move narrative location and has to work twice as hard to make us believe in the change, especially when its characters are not part of that location but come and are a product of somewhere else entirely.

First Impressions

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Jun 222012

By Russel D McLean

This week, I have finally been indulging properly in the first seaosn of Boardwalk Empire, over a year after everyone else managed to see it. But, hey, I've never been one for keeping up with the zeitgeist.

What initially impressed me - before anyone uttered a word - was the incredible opening sequence. There was a feeling for a while that opening titles were going the way of the dodo. And after years of generically bland "introduce the characters" titles, a-la CSI, you could see why. A spot of soft rock. A bunch of shots of the main cast with their name underneath. Job done.

But opening titles, when done well, are masterpieces unto themselves and introduce you completely to the tone of the show. Boardwalk Empire's music is perhaps a little anachronistic, but the great, sweeping shots of all those bottles of booze and Buscemi on that beach are just brilliant

The opening credits of a TV show have to put you in the right frame of mind. In the case of Dexter, the juxtaposition of such odd shots of everyday life put you right into the mind of a central character who doesn't see life in the same way that we do. And of course all that blood (and keptchup) reminds you of the basic tent of the show, with Dexter being a blood spatter analyst moonlighting as a serial killer (or is that the other way round?):

But its not just the most recent shows that had great opening sequences. The opening credits of Crime Story, from the 1980's were quite brilliant, but then that show still has, in many ways, a massive influence on modern TV:

And of course, I won't post them all here, but THE WIRE, went a great stage further with its opening credits, changing them from season to season to highlight the different themes involved. By changing the artists recording the main title track, they managed to ensure that each season felt utterly different from the last and yet somehow connected:

I guess you could say that the opening credits of a TV show are something like the cover of a book: they are the first thing the reader/viewer sees, and they sure as hell have to give an idea of what the books are about. And while many of them are generic, those that are unique or truly inventive, tend to stick in the mind.

What’s In A Name?

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Jun 152012

By Russel D McLean

The Good Son.

The Lost Sister.

Father Confessor.

I honestly didn’t mean for this to happen. The McNee books weren’t really meant to have that whole family connection, but it became more and more clear as I wrote them that they did. I have an obsession with families in my writing. In what makes and doesn’t make a family. In whether families are about blood or something else. It runs through a great deal of what I write. Don’t ask me why. Ask my psychiatrist.

And while you’re at it, you can ask what my obsession is with older characters and violence. From David Burns to a 75 year old attempted assault in a McNee short story to the determined oldsters of Angel of Mercy, I have a thing about old people bringing the pain.

Again, ask my psychiatrist.

But the title thing intrigues me. I hate titles. Right now I’m trying to name a potential standalone and every title I use is taken or too associated with other things. And of course I’m naming the fourth McNee which has something do with mothers. But its tough to name it (although fellow DSDer Sandra Ruttan may be able to work out – four years after the fact – what name that she suggested is currently acting as a placeholder).

Titles can be great things. Or they can be dull. They can have rhythms in a series or not. Say what you like about James Patterson, naming those early Alex Cross books for children’s rhymes was kind of inspired, given that they tapped into all kinds of fears and anxieties in the reader. After all, we’re easily scared as children and as adults we’re easily scared for them, so using those kinds of titles (Big Bad Wolf, London Bridge, Along Came A Spider) tapped into all of that and primed the reader to be on the edge of their seat and unnerved. Much more so than when he finally just started calling the books, Cross, Double Cross etc etc.

By that point, the titles imply that the books have become routine. But that can be just what readers want, too. The promise of familiarity can be enticing. And of course there are only so many nursery rhymes in the world.

Doug Johnstone tells a story about how he had a great title for his book, but the publishers changed it to the very literal “Hit and Run” for publication. While I think the original title (which I now can’t remember) was more appealing, the use of a simpler title actually works. The bluntness is effective and in terms of genre, thrillers seem to work best with punchy titles. Look at thriller powerhouse Jonathan Kellerman who these days only uses one word per title.

But long titles, too, have their place. I adore the titles of Philip K Dick:

Do Androids’ Dream of Electric Sheep?

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale

In Milton Lumpky Terrtitory.

And yes, that last one is the name of one of his non SF, more literary works.

Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder Mysteries had some great, lengthy titles too:

A Long Line of Dead Men

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

The Devil Knows You’re Dead

When The Sacred Ginmill Closes

Often the longer titles have the feel of a reference or quotation. Many times that’s what they are. But that’s great, because if the reader gets the connotation, they’re ready and set up for what awaits them.

A good title sets you up. It gives you an idea about the book. It lets you know what to expect. Which is why they’re damn hard to get right. And why they’re one of the parts of the process I enjoy the least when it comes to creating them.

And let me say, that just for the record, despite some waggish suggestions that have come by email, the title of the fourth J McNee book will absolutely, definitely, posilutely, not be,

Mother F***er.

Re-Post: Writing and Research

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Jun 082012

This post originally appeared over on shortbreadstories.co.uk in support of the Million for a Morgue Short Story Competition. Russel is reposting here as he is still in the midst of redrafts. Normal service will resume shortly.

The best crime fiction – the best fiction – creates the illusion of reality. That is, the writer throws in just enough real life to distract from the bits he made up.
I suppose that’s what you call artistic licence.

Realism is rarely real.

But a good writer is always aware of what he is doing, and knows just how much reality he can allow to intrude on his fiction. After all, if all crime fiction were “real”, there’d be a lot more internal investigations and far too many scenes of filling out forms for us to care. Also, if crime fiction were an accurate reflection of reality, then no one would go out of doors for fear of the pervert serial killers who live at least three to a street in the fictional world of many crime fiction writers.
So to offset all the unreality of what we do, crime writers have to ground their work in some kind of reality. Val McDermid, of course famously uses the expertise of Dundee’s own Dr Sue Black to assist in upping the realism of her investigative procedures. By melding her own gothic sensibilities with the rigors of Black’s knowledge, McDermid creates a world that is at once artificial (the killer is generally always caught, Tony Hill never quite succumbs to a full and crippling breakdown that would mark the end of the series, the killer always has razor-sharp motivation for their crime) and utterly real (her knowledge of the terrible things that can be done to the human body, as well as her razor-sharp psychological insights, allow the reader to buy into the fiction).
Sue Black is, of course, one of the driving forces behind Million For a Morgue. If you don’t already know, Dr Black and the team are looking to raise 1 million pounds to fund a “centre for excellence” in forensic research. With the full force of the aforementioned Val McDermid and 12 other bestselling crime writers to back them up, this is one serious fundraising effort. The Morgue will be named for one of the 12 crime writers. And its research will have a global impact, assisting law enforcement around the world.

Not only that, but no doubt a knock-on effect of the project will be to inspire crime writers, and perhaps even present them with new challenges. As research improves on current forensic techniques, many crime writers will have to consider how their novels are to straddle that line between reality and fiction.

While it is possible to write a crime novel with little research, you will be caught out by eagle-eyed readers if the research basics aren’t even considered. It’s a lesson I learned early when I sent out first drafts of my novel, The Good Son, to trusted professionals in the industry. I found that I’d managed to confuse Scots and English criminal law and procedure. In fact, the first print run of the book includes a reference to a job that exists only in English law. That mistake was subsequently altered for future editions.

I did not have to worry much about forensics for my first couple of novels. Or police procedure. I was writing a private eye novel, and thought at first that I could get away with making it all up. But I soon discovered that this was impossible. Making my character an ex-policeman meant he had to know certain things about the law. And while PI’s are unusual heroes in UK crime fiction, they still exist in this country. Check out the Assiocation of British Investigators, and you’ll discover the profession is alive and well. During research for The Good Son, I found myself calling on the assistance of one of the UK’s senior eyes to help me get a sense of the world he saw every day. I remember the first time I phoned him, I got very excited when he had to hang-up mid-sentence due to being on a stakeout and needed to follow a suspect. I think, for him, it was routine. For me, it was a momentary adrenaline rush. I never did find out who he was following or why. But of course, that’s standard: even private eyes have to maintain a client confidentiality.

A great deal of research can now be done online, which is perhaps why it has become so important. If Joe Q Reader can look up some basic blood spatter information, then you should be able to as well. And you’d better, or the reader will call you on it and start to disbelieve further aspects of your work. But of course, you only want to include as much of your research as necessary in the book. If you put too much on the page, you slow the plot, and lose the reader just as much as if you’d made the whole thing up.

Research, then, is key for any crime writer. You don’t have to put it all down on the page, but you have to know enough to make your world ring true. You have to put in enough fact to disguise the outright fantasy (or, as its more generally known, “dramatic license”). As well as helping forensic research and law enforcement agencies across the globe, a project like Dundee’s Centre for Forensic Excellence will likely affect the way that crime writers approach their work. Its discoveries may change the way we look at criminal investigation and in order to keep their work plausible, crime writers like myself and the 12 bestsellers who have backed the project will have to work hard to keep our stories “real”.

Preview: FATHER CONFESSOR

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Jun 012012

By Russel D McLean

I'm redrafting folks, going through copy edits on FATHER CONFESSOR which, you know. is released in the UK this September. I know you're as excited as I am about this book, so you're going to want to pre-order from your preferred retailer.

So in lieu of actual content I present a little rough cut sneak preview of the opening page of FATHER CONFESSOR. Those of you who know the series will know that I start every book with a little teaser, and this book's no different.

So here, for the first time (since I read an early draft of this last year at Blackwell's bookshop), is a brief excerpt from book number the third:

I wasn't there.
    If I had been, things might have turned out different.
    I’d like to believe that.
    Some would argue, of course, that I’d only have fucked things up.
    For months afterward, I would spend the hours past midnight – the hours when I couldn't sleep, when the guilt of the past always seemed at its strongest and when I felt at my most powerless and insignificant – thinking about what had happened that evening.
    Seeing events through his eyes.
    Trying to imagine what it must have been like. Trying to think about the chain of events that ended in a moment of blood and fear and pain.
    As I tried to imagine how he felt, my heart would pound as his must have. A surge of adrenaline. An expectation.
    He must have known that he was going to die.
    One way or the other. He must have known how things would end.
    Maybe he had come to terms with that idea.
    Looking back over his last few months, talking to friends and colleagues, I think they all knew that something was wrong with him. They had sensed his growing unease. They had noticed that he was more tense than usual. Most put this down to pre-retirement nerves. After all, he was due to quit the force in the next year. And like any good copper, he had a lot of unfinished business.
    So I can imagine how he felt that night.
    Walking into the warehouse, he might have called out. Perhaps listened to the echo of his own voice, heard it come back to him. A ghost-like echo. As though he was already dead. His own footsteps – polished shoes striking hard concrete – would have bounced and echoed around the wide space and made it appear as though there were others walking alongside him.
    Those for whom he was responsible.
    Maybe he was thinking about why he was here. The reasons he was alone in this warehouse, meeting a man he must have known could kill him.
    He would be thinking about his career. And his daughter.
    His daughter who was under investigation for possible criminal conspiracy. His daughter who had always been the centre of his world, who had idolised her father so much she followed him into the force.
    I would wonder what he was thinking.
    How he felt.
    And I could never know for sure. But I had to pretend, to try and gain some insight the hard facts could never uncover.
    I do know that he took the stairs to the mezzanine slowly. His shoes clanking off the metal grille, his hand running up the banister. A feather touch. More for reassurance than balance.
    But then, maybe his grip was tighter than usual. He was afraid of falling away. Of losing his grip.
    Maybe he came knowing that he faced death.
    He would do that on his own terms.
    The idea makes me feel better in a way.
    There had been no signs of a struggle when the coppers arrived on the scene. He did not fight back. He did not try to run.
    On the metal walkway high above the main floor, he would have been confronted by the man with the shotgun.
    Did they speak?
    Did he understand why the man was there to kill him?
     I don't know. I wasn't there.
    And I wish I had been.
    Some nights I wish it had been me and not him.
    The impact of the shot knocked him over the safety rails. Did he have time to register what was happening?
    Did he say a prayer as he fell?
    I wonder about his final thoughts. What he saw. What was revealed to him as he lay crooked on the floor of the abandoned mill, his blood pooling around his hand, his limbs twisted.
    Did he think of his killer?
    Of his daughter?
    I would have been the furthest thing from his mind. But if he felt a small twinge of disappointment, perhaps he was remembering me and the last time we spoke, the things I said to him.
    But I don’t know any of that.
    I just believe that I could sleep easier if I knew what he was really thinking in those last moments.

Redaft (that’s not a typo)

Publishing, push button, rant, redraft, Russel D McLean Comments Off

May 252012

By Russel D McLean

Bit of a short one this week, folks. That's because I'm smack bang in the middle of redrafting... something (I don't like to talk about works in progress, often because they change so completely by the time I'm actually done that I feel like a liar when the finished book comes out).

But I've been thinking about the art of redrafts in the age of push button technology. What really got me going was a post from an indie (or self-published, depending on your favourite term) writer on facebook that was, in essence (because I'm not online just now):

“Just away to post my new book to Amazon. Don't worry folks, I always read through once before publishing!”

Read.

Through.

Once.

That is not a redraft. And yet to many would be authors, it really is. I have done work as a freelancing critiquer of manuscripts for certain organisations. They send me (anonymously) work by new/would be authors and my job is to help them make the work better.

But what I find is that in ninety percent of cases no matter what the covering letter says, the author has gone through the book once, maybe twice, and decided that that is enough. Even with THE LOST SISTER, which had to be written fast, I went through five complete and thorough re-writes before I was anywhere close to happy. With FATHER CONFESSOR I have used the extra time I gained in writing (there were a few contractual hold ups that delayed publication) to really root around and make that sucker as good as it can be. In fact, better.

Redrafting is not about reading through once you've finished and correcting typos. It is about seriously examining the guts of a novel and rigorously checking whether its as good as it can be. It is not a quick, easy or mechanical process. It is tough. It is painful. It sometimes means that you have to rethink ideas you previously believed to be sacrosanct.

This project I'm working on now has been gestating in one form or another for five years. It has changed direction so many times that it is not the same novel I believed it would be. It is better. It has been rigorously, fully redrafted. And the truth is even when its published I'll still probably think of things that could have been better, but by then I'll be wise enough to leave it alone and let it stand. But I'll know that I put the work into it.

The temptation, however, when I finish that first draft to just push a button and send the book out in the ether will be overwhelming. Because we live in the age of instant gratification and even I am not entirely immune to that (I'll push the button on this sucker maybe three hours after I'm done). But I am glad that the publishing process gives me the time to carefully consider the book what I wrote. I understand that writing a good novel takes time. And patience. Because if you don't make it the best you possibly can, what's the point? And because the novel you're so excited about in the heat of writing “the end” may need a cooling off process before you can realise exactly what you can do to make it the novel it should be.

Entertain me..

rambling, Russel D McLean, world book night Comments Off

Apr 232012

By Russel D McLean

Today is World Book Night.

Yeah, who knew?

I’ll be out there hosting a pub quiz on behalf of Million for a Morgue, while other book events will be happening up and down the country (I think its happening in the US as well although I am not aware of the penetration to the public consciousness there), as people give out free copies of 25 publicly voted books.

It’s a great idea, although some might say its one with a few flaws. Not that I’m here to talk about those today, because I’d rather we had a flawed idea to get people reading than none at all. And having already seen changes in the approach from last year, I can see that the organisers are looking to adapt and try to improve year upon year. This can only be a good thing.

My major concern with people who talk about reading is that it is often seen as “self-improving” or “a good thing to do” rather than a fun thing to do. People who will readily discuss movies and TV shows in depth are afraid of discussing books in case they somehow seem stupid. Which is odd given that a great many books currently published are dumber than TV shows like THE WIRE or DEADWOOD or JUSTIFIED*.

Here’s the thing: you should read because you love stories. Its just another delivery method. There’s nothing challenging about it. Sure, you might need to change the way you use your senses, but in the end, the mechanics of storytelling are exactly what you’re used to with TV or film. The stories are still good. You don’t need to worry about what other people think about what you’re reading in the same you generally don’t worry about what people think about the films or TV shows you watch. Believe me, there’s a book – and generally more than one – out there for everyone. Find the ones you enjoy. Search in the same way you would for films or TV. You don’t like a book, you put it down and find something else that’s more up your alley.

The people who do the most harm to books are the people who talk about reading like it’s a duty. This usually starts in childhood, of course, when we’re told to “stop watching TV and do something smarter like read a book”. The idea of reading being harder than other forms of storytelling is as much about societal attitudes as anything else.

Waterstones right now have a leaflet out for parents talking about reading to their kids. The booklet is written in part by Julia Donaldson. In one part that struck me, she talks about how you shouldn’t make out that books are improving or in some way more “valuable” than other kinds of entertainment. And that’s right. Because books – fiction books, at any rate – are just another delivery method for stories and entertainment. Whether we read them on a screen or on paper, they’re no more challenging than any other form of entertainment. And the more we read, the less challenging books will seem, the more we’ll come to welcome the more complex works, because our brains will not be resistant to the preconceived ideas.

World Book Night is a great idea. If you’re a Giver, one of those handing out free books, I applaud you. But please don’t tell those you talk to that the book will “improve” them. Just tell them its entertaining, that it’ll make them laugh, it’ll make them cry, and they’re going to have a ball reading it. Because I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons you’re giving that book away is because it did exactly that to you.

*Yes, that one’s based on a series of books. But its it’s own beast.

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