Tag: Writing

On Writing: Look!

Posted on by Neal Asher

Jack looked across at her with a pensive look on his face.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.
‘It looked like a ghost,’ she replied, then looking past him she cried, ‘Look out!’

I was about to write that the above is a huge exaggeration of my long-time love affair with the utility of the word ‘look’ but, having spent some time editing The Parasite, I’m not so sure it is. This was one tendency of mine that my editor Peter Lavery picked up on, and it’s one that displays the differences between the three vocabularies. You have your reading, writing and speaking vocabularies which, respectively, are in descending order of size. There were of course many words other than ‘look’ I could have used. All of them were sitting there in my reading vocabulary, but I just wasn’t using them.

It seemed to come as a revelation to me that someone might ‘peer, gaze, glance, stare or peek’ at something, or that they might ‘watch, study, observe or regard’ something, or that there were alternatives to ‘look like’ or ‘looked like’. I could go on and on but any of you reading this in the hope of picking up a tip or two are all probably using Word and have access to a thesaurus. Highlight ‘look’ and take a look at scrutinize the many alternative words that are available.

But of course that is not enough. Words like this are those we are often blind to, so we need to either pore over our work anew, or have someone else take a look at it examine it. Our words need to be closely inspected, contemplated and studied. ‘Look’ is useful, but does it have the nuance of meaning of the alternatives? Does it have the gravitas of ‘regard’, the brevity of ‘glance’, the myopia of ‘peer’ or the analytical inference of ‘study’?

Note: Generally you don’t have your character ‘peer’ at the one he’s deeply in love with, or ‘gaze’ at the plans to the bank vault he’s about to raid, and he doesn’t ‘examine’ the view … unless of course you’re trying to twist and tweak something, or maybe work in some character-building. The half-blind lover might peer. The inept bank robber might gaze (probably with bafflement) at those vault plans. And the cold military commander might examine the view.

Here’s a suggestion: take a paragraph of your work and go through it word by word checking it against your thesaurus. I bet you will find at least one word you would like to change – one word that adds meaning by simple replacement.

Jack gazed across at her, his expression pensive.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.
‘It seemed like a ghost,’ she replied, then glancing past him she cried, ‘Watch out!’

My Hidden Shallows

Posted on by Neal Asher

Huan Tan put me onto a discussion about me over on this bulletin board. There are some nice things being said about my stuff there but also some of the usual ‘it’s not literature’ and ‘it’s not high-brow’ and ‘it’s a bit pulpy’. In a general sense I don’t particularly have a problem with these descriptions, since ‘literature’ and ‘high-brow’ are usually defined by literary snobs and ‘a bit pulpy’, from what I know about the pulps, is something of an accolade. However, I do get bugged by their condescension and that attitude of, ‘I enjoy reading them but don’t want to be seen reading them’.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to change any time soon. I don’t want one of you reading this to one day pick up one of my books, ready to relax into some sensawunda, weapons porn, weird monsters and high-tech violence, and end up scratching your head because I’ve decided to explore the deep social implications of cock-transplant technology – as seen by a miserable can’t-get-laid psychology student living in a garret.

But I do wonder if I’d started out claiming to write deeply meaningful socially relevant stuff about the effect of technology on identity, the meaning of death when its borders are blurred and the drawbacks of immortality, if the memes about me would have been different. Perhaps, for example, in interview and so forth, I should have focused on how with the Prador I was exploring the implications of a social structure based on utterly alien biology, rather than on their tendency to eat people and blow stuff up? Perhaps I should have pontificated about the subjective contraction of time in the mind of an immortal, rather than on how an old captain can rip off your head?

Now, removing my tongue from my cheek, I wonder if perhaps it is the case that if I fob people off with, ‘Nah, I’m just about the explosions, mate,’ many of them won’t explore my hidden shallows any further?

What do you think?

On Writing: The Short Sentence.

Posted on by Neal Asher

The short sentence (or just one word with a full stop) is a useful tool that can be effective during action sequences or can drive a point home. One of my favourite examples of its power was in one of the Stephen Donaldson books of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In the particular section I’m talking about he describes the opening of a door into the land of the dead. He describes the surroundings, the reactions of those present, the intense, powerful, terrifying atmosphere of it all, and how this character stepping out is recognized:

Kevin.

Those of you that haven’t read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, or read the books and didn’t enjoy them, will probably emit a small titter at this point. However, when I was reading them I was utterly absorbed and so I knew that Kevin wasn’t a spotty geek with a bad dress sense and a problem with BO. He was Kevin Landwaster who performed the Ritual of Desecration to annihilate an entire land.

Effective.

Short sentences can be the choice of those who haven’t quite got to grips with double, multiple and complex sentences, or learned how to use co-ordinating conjunctions. They can be the choice of those aping Hemmingway or Chandler and failing to get what those writers were about. And they can be heavily over-used.

I’ve read published books where this over use is prevalent. The writer is driving his words into your head like nails into a block of wood: bammity bammity bam, de bam de bam de bam. After a while you get a headache. Yeah, I get it, stop with the hammering already. I’m got a brain here between my ears that can turn your words into images; that can model your story in my head. Your story doesn’t change just because you’re putting the words there with a literary machine gun.

To sum up, the short sentence is similar to the word ‘fuck’. If you use it occasionally it has an effect; use it a lot and you just become irritating. Light and shade, people. Light and shade.   

Use short sentences sparingly.

On Writing: The Contents File

Posted on by Neal Asher

Every so often I will take a look at the work of writers who want to get their feet on the first rungs of the ladder leading to publication. But first let me make a distinction here. These are not wannabe writers since they are actually writing. They are not those who say, ‘I always wanted to write a book about so-and-so,’ to which the reply must always be, ‘Then why aren’t you writing it?’

Sometimes those who contact me are those in love with being a writer more than writing itself, though that is no barrier, just so long as they actually do write. Sometimes they are those trying to learn the secret handshakes and arcane rituals that will lead to publication. There aren’t any – you have to be stubborn, persistent, prepared to learn and take a lot of knocks, and in the end you have to write something a publisher thinks will make money.

I will look at a sample of the work these people produce if I am not right in the middle of something, if I happen to feel so inclined, if they are not rude and pushy and if I get some sense that they’re actually looking for advice, rather than praise. Sometimes I get that last one wrong, tear someone’s work apart, and know by the affronted response that they have learned nothing.

So what am I waffling about here? Having recently taken a look at someone’s work (Hi Khaled) and tried to ape the Peter Lavery scary pencil with a red pen, I thought it might be a good idea to start doing some posts here on what I see as the nuts-and-bolts of writing. As and when something occurs to me on that subject I’ll do a post here under the label ‘Writing’ to slowly build up what I hope will be a useful resource.

Today I’ll ramble on about a contents file:

A book is a large chunk of text. Now I know I’m stating the obvious but how, unless you have an eidetic memory, do you keep track of it all? Here’s my method. Generally my books are about twenty chapters long, each chapter broken into sections that can be just one or as many as six pages long. Each of these sections is written from the point of view of just one character. Let me digress for a moment:

To my mind a common mistake I see is the switching of POVs sometimes from one paragraph to the next. This is confusing for the reader. It can also cause the reader to fail to engage with the characters.

Continuing… I keep track of a book by first bookmarking each of my chapters as I write them. After I’ve written a couple, I then open another file with the pages (usually about two) switched to two-column mode. In the case of Gridlinked, for example, this file is called ‘gridcontents’. In this I list the chapter number followed by a very short description of each section in that chapter. If required I’ll add timings. This is useful for keeping track but it’s also handy because I am writing down what happens in each section. If I can’t sum up ‘what happens’ this probably means I’m waffling and the section might be better cut, or the useful elements of it distributed elsewhere. Here’s a sample from ‘orbuscontents’:

Chapter 7.
U-space Missiles
Vrell hunts mutations.
Prador kamikazi
Orbus to hunt Vrell
Golgoloth to Oberon
Jain starts to wake

There’s something further to add here. As many of you know, I don’t particularly do a lot of planning before writing a book, so I don’t produce a summary or synopsis beforehand. However, after I’ve handed the book in and as it heads towards publication, my publisher wants to get people interested and give them some idea of what it’s all about. At this point, with the book finished, the contents sheet comes in useful for writing the synopses. I copy the contents sheet, get rid of column mode, then work through turning each short description into a paragraph or so. Next I take that and begin melding it; losing some of the straight-line chronology to focus on the story, on what it is all about. This usually results in about six pages of single-spaced text. After that I’ll make a couple of abstracts – one at about half the length and one summing it all up on a page.

The art of précis is well worth learning.

Here endeth today’s lesson.