Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "novel"

I guess I’m not the only person here working on their first novel. In terms of the target I set for completing a first draft, I’m well ahead of schedule. Now, here’s the strange thing. Because I have a background in psychology and linguistics, I imagined my characters would be deep and my language scintillating, even if I sometimes lost the plot. Yet the opposite is happening. My inner critic tells me that the characters are shallow and the language ordinary, though the plot skips along nicely. It turns out I am primarily a storyteller. Should I be happy or distraught?

Would you fancy a honeymoon during the world’s coolest revolution? Take a trip through time and space to Portugal 1974, and enjoy this extract from my novel in progress. http://www.thewriteroomblog.com/?p=1999 Comments welcome.

The undersigned is pleased to announce the birth, at 4.45 pm, Central European Time, today, 19 June 2014, of the first draft of his first full-length novel. The labour was long but the baby was delivered prematurely. Both father and baby are doing well, although the father is unusually tired and the baby is unusually quiet. It will now undergo a period of intensive care.

My friend Marta Merajver-Kurlat (http://www.martamerajver.com.ar/marta...), author of Just Toss the Ashes and Why Can't I Make Money?, among other works, kindly invited me to participate in this blog hop tour and answer four questions about my writing process.

1) What am I working on?

My first novel. Its provisional title is Revolution Number One. Usually I write short stories, which I set in an imagined future in order to write more freely about the present. The novel, in contrast, is set in Portugal back in the 1970s, where a young English businessman struggles to survive and thrive during the world’s coolest Revolution. I’ve just finished the first draft, so I guess that the real work is about to start.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Well, in the novel, I use the past to write essentially about the present and the future. I don’t read enough historical fiction to know how different that makes it.
Most of my work, though, is set in the near future. It’s really too low-tech to be true science fiction. My philosophy is that the problems of the near past, the present and the near future are similar: what is important is how we deal with them, irrespective of technology. Perhaps a better descriptor is social science fiction.
Whatever the setting, I hope to write literature first and genre fiction second.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I like to set my stories in places where I have lived and worked, like England, Italy, Portugal and China, but to move away from the present in order to get a clearer perspective on it. I have always been future-oriented, but advancing age has successfully tempted me to look backwards as well.

4) How does my writing process work?

Writing a novel changed this. Before, I would write a short story or poem on paper. Then I would type it on to the computer, print it out and revise it several times using pen on paper, before keying in the changes to leave a final version on the computer.
For the novel, the first version of each chapter went straight on to the computer, and so did some of the revisions. That saved time and sped me towards the goal of a completed first draft. I have reached that particular target way ahead of schedule, so I’m prepared to spend a great deal of time turning it from a finished novel into a good novel - if I can.


The wonderful Andea Buginsky is taking up the baton next week and explaining her writing process, on Monday 7 July.

Andrea Buginsky is a freelance writer with a BA in Mass Communication-Journalism from the University of South Florida. She has always wanted to be a published writer, and decided to try to write children's fantasy books a few years ago. The Chosen is her first book, and was released on December 14, 2010, to her delight.
Andrea has written three more books since:
• My Open Heart, an autobiography of growing up with heart disease.
• Nature's Unbalance: The Chosen, Book 2
• Destiny: New Avalon, book 1, a YA fantasy

She is currently writing the second book in the New Avalon series and editing the third book of The Chosen series.

Andrea lives in Kansas with her family, which includes her two precious puppies.
You can visit Andrea on her website or Google+. Her blog is at: http://www.andreabuginsky.com/.

A year ago, I decided to set myself specific quantitative goals for my writing in 2014. I came up with these:

- publish more poems in one year than ever before;
- produce the first draft of my novel;
- double my e-book sales/downloads to date.

How did I do?

In the event, the first goal went by the board as I concentrated on the other two. I would have had to publish 29 poems to break my record from 2012, but I only managed two.
In contrast, drafting the novel proved to be a doddle. I worked on it steadily and finished the first draft in August.
The target for e-books required securing as many sales/downloads in 12 months as I had in the previous 18 months. It was never really on the cards after Sony pulled out of the e-book market in March, though a late flourish in December helped me to achieve a respectable 89% of the target.

This year, I intend to play things by ear, not by numbers. Keeping stats can be fun, but it can also become compulsive. I think I have enough discipline not to need quantitative goals, but maybe not enough to keep them in their place. This year, I’m going for quality.

Amis's prose is always a joy to read, and sweetens the company of the grotesques with which he populates his tales. Yet "Martinland" is a bitter place, where only the weak can be strong, and their strength is never enough to protect them, especially not from themselves. Be careful when you laugh, for the wind will certainly change. Now, which of his works to relish next?

A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.

Where does the real revolution take place – on the streets or in our heads?

Portugal, 1973. Ed Scripps has left his homeland to seek his fortune. After a promising start to life abroad, Ed loses his business to a political revolution, his wife to a sexual revolution, and his best friend to a spiritual revolution. As turmoil rages around him, Ed must outwit drug barons and a killer cult if he is to live, never mind win his wife back and save his best friend. Can he survive and thrive as the world around him turns upside down?

Revolution Number One is a fast-paced, engaging novel that lets you experience the world's coolest revolution through the sharp eyes of a not-so-innocent abroad.

You can find it here: myBook.to/zin

You’re a writer. Your novel has a protagonist. Let’s call him or her “Chris”. You can’t let Chris die before the end, or your novel ends prematurely. If you write genre fiction, you may not even be able to allow Chris a cosy or bitter retirement. I’ve had fun with this trope here: http://www.thewriteroomblog.com/the-o...
The traditional answer is to invent ghosts, haunting and other flights of fancy. In his latest novel, “4 3 2 1”, Paul Auster, who rejects supernatural slight-of-hand, hits on an effective writerly solution. He has four chronological sections, and one chapter in each section is devoted to a specific protagonist,, in the same order. When Auster bumps off one of his protagonists, he nevertheless keeps his place in the next section, but his chapter consists only of the heading and a blank text – a stark reminder of the character’s death and all the unfulfilled potential that has died with it.
It is a masterful ploy, even when Auster repeats it, though it has less impact the second time. When he kills his third protagonist, he uses a contrasting strategy, letting you imagine him merely falling asleep, until, in the final pages of the novel, the authorial voice tells you the character had died in his sleep. This leaves you just with the fourth, most Austerial protagonist, who is, to me, the stodgiest and least interesting of the quartet.
You can see a brilliant visual way of refusing to forget the dead in Richard Lester’s satirical film “How I Won The War”. You may remember it for featuring John Lennon as a non-singing actor. It shows a bedraggled band of British soldiers on a mission toward the end of WWII. Every time one of them is killed, a wraith-like version of him, not intended as a ghost and not haunting anyone, still appears in the line-up, reminding us of his premature death and its enduring importance.

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The 21st Century Witchfinders will have a field day with this novel. The identity politics brigade will excoriate Updike for presenting characters who express casual racism without a second thought or apparent disastrous consequences, whereas the Creative Writing graduates will be horrified by his breaking of Mr King's commandments: all those adjectives and adverbs, as though they added meaning, as though they were a valuable part of the English language! Like the witches of old, he will be found guilty where there is no guilt, no witchcraft. In this age of new, improved puritanism, it is the devil's own job to have satire understood, never mind appreciated. If only there were an afterlife, so that we might catch the sound of the author's spirit cackling fiendishly.



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