Gregory Hall's Blog
October 24, 2014
24th October 2014
My blog is intermittent to put it mildly. I see I haven't posted for 18 months, despite my best intentions. I'm still new at the blogging game. Writing takes up time and energy.
I admire writers of the past who kept up a great correspondence as well as writing huge substantive works without the benefit of any technology except pen, ink and paper. Despite the absence of modern tools, things happened more quickly than we think. The post was excellent, with several collections and deliveries every day. Publishing was fast. Books were printed almost as quickly as the author could write them. Dr Johnson's printer had his boy literally grab the sheets out of the great man's hand as he wrote them. Anyone who has had anything to do with publishing now knows that a book takes months to appear. Critical paths and publication dates slow everything down. E publishing has restored something of the old immediacy. Books can go from screen to publication in hours.
I don't have a printer any longer. Everything I write stays on the hard drive and the back-up flash drives. My first novel, the Dark Backward was written on an Amstrad WP in Locoscript using a pack of floppy disks. Loading and saving took ages. You could make a cup of tea while it chuntered away to itself. Printing was even more of a chore. A daisy wheel printer had to be fed by hand. Printing the 600 page ms took all day. But it seemed a miracle of speed compared with the tedious typing, tippexing and retyping of a manual typewriter.
What hasn't been speeded up are the actual processes of writing, the decisions about character and location and plot etc. These take time to get right, if they are ever right. A poem is never finished but abandoned, said Verlaine and the same applies to prose.
It's worth taking the time over these early stages. The decisions you make can be difficult if not impossible to change subsequently. The major decision that has to be taken in writing any kind of narrative is in my view, point of view, that is, who shall tell the story and how it should be told. Classical fiction is often told by what is often referred to as an omniscient narrator, who is not actually a character in the story but stands outside, but knows what is going on in the characters' heads. However all kinds of games can be played with narrators. It's fascinating for a reader but a difficult act for a writer.
Writing my first novel I remember my shock when I realised that the only way to tell the story I had in mind was to use a first person narrator who had to be a woman. When I got down to it, I saw the advantages. Writing is a feat of imagination and one shouldn't feel there are things that you can't write about. I don't at all believe in writing about what you know. Extend what you know into what you want to write about is my motto. Use your knowledge in conjunction with your imagination to create the picture.
To the extent that men and women have different thought processes, you can imagine what those might be. I'm not a woman but I know and knew lots of women. It seemed a good basis to start. Writing as a different sex is subversive and liberating. I've repeatedly done it and I recommend it. The word subversive is one of my favourites. Art should not only delight; it should shock and disturb and question. If it doesn't, it doesn't interest me. If art were banned, it would force every artist to struggle to be heard, which would improve the art no end. The good thing is you don't stop art by banning it. You improve it, you make it more resilient. Think of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. In a society where books were routinely burnt, people learned them off by heart, thus perfecting their knowledge.
Writing as a woman was my own personal contribution to subversion. Women are too little heard, even now. Writing sex as a woman was even more interesting, but I'll save that for another time.
I admire writers of the past who kept up a great correspondence as well as writing huge substantive works without the benefit of any technology except pen, ink and paper. Despite the absence of modern tools, things happened more quickly than we think. The post was excellent, with several collections and deliveries every day. Publishing was fast. Books were printed almost as quickly as the author could write them. Dr Johnson's printer had his boy literally grab the sheets out of the great man's hand as he wrote them. Anyone who has had anything to do with publishing now knows that a book takes months to appear. Critical paths and publication dates slow everything down. E publishing has restored something of the old immediacy. Books can go from screen to publication in hours.
I don't have a printer any longer. Everything I write stays on the hard drive and the back-up flash drives. My first novel, the Dark Backward was written on an Amstrad WP in Locoscript using a pack of floppy disks. Loading and saving took ages. You could make a cup of tea while it chuntered away to itself. Printing was even more of a chore. A daisy wheel printer had to be fed by hand. Printing the 600 page ms took all day. But it seemed a miracle of speed compared with the tedious typing, tippexing and retyping of a manual typewriter.
What hasn't been speeded up are the actual processes of writing, the decisions about character and location and plot etc. These take time to get right, if they are ever right. A poem is never finished but abandoned, said Verlaine and the same applies to prose.
It's worth taking the time over these early stages. The decisions you make can be difficult if not impossible to change subsequently. The major decision that has to be taken in writing any kind of narrative is in my view, point of view, that is, who shall tell the story and how it should be told. Classical fiction is often told by what is often referred to as an omniscient narrator, who is not actually a character in the story but stands outside, but knows what is going on in the characters' heads. However all kinds of games can be played with narrators. It's fascinating for a reader but a difficult act for a writer.
Writing my first novel I remember my shock when I realised that the only way to tell the story I had in mind was to use a first person narrator who had to be a woman. When I got down to it, I saw the advantages. Writing is a feat of imagination and one shouldn't feel there are things that you can't write about. I don't at all believe in writing about what you know. Extend what you know into what you want to write about is my motto. Use your knowledge in conjunction with your imagination to create the picture.
To the extent that men and women have different thought processes, you can imagine what those might be. I'm not a woman but I know and knew lots of women. It seemed a good basis to start. Writing as a different sex is subversive and liberating. I've repeatedly done it and I recommend it. The word subversive is one of my favourites. Art should not only delight; it should shock and disturb and question. If it doesn't, it doesn't interest me. If art were banned, it would force every artist to struggle to be heard, which would improve the art no end. The good thing is you don't stop art by banning it. You improve it, you make it more resilient. Think of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. In a society where books were routinely burnt, people learned them off by heart, thus perfecting their knowledge.
Writing as a woman was my own personal contribution to subversion. Women are too little heard, even now. Writing sex as a woman was even more interesting, but I'll save that for another time.
May 30, 2013
30 May 2013
I recently finished reading George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, seven books to the five parts, comfortably longer than War and Peace, and still not completed. I'm not a great reader of fantasy. A dalliance with Gene Wolfe's Torturer series about twenty years ago was my last. I started on Martin after seeing the TV series A Game of Thrones. I'd never heard of the books, but decided to read the first one to see how it compared with the film version. I got hooked and went on reading. Now like the rest of the fans, I'm waiting for the Winds of Winter.
There are plenty of reviews of these books on Goodreads and I'm not going to add to them. Instead, I'm going to raise a general question which I've always found interesting, which is how one assesses the type of writing of which these books are an example. How does one even classify them? Though fiction, I would argue that ASOIAF is not a novel. It's structurally and thematically far too diffuse. There's no central character or theme to unite the action, and even the group of characters with which the story starts to whom one builds a kind of attachment are either killed off or disappear for considerable stretches of the narrative. It's not quite clear either what the story is actually about. The book is quite different in this respect from what might regarded as its closest predecessor, the Lord of the Rings.
I'm not sure that any fiction set in an invented world can ever be described as a novel. The primary themes of a novel, love, death and money, are classically situated in the real world, amongst a restricted group of persons and thus have universal appeal. Invented worlds give rise to issues which are outside the scope of the novel: geopolitics and war, which are more the concern of narrative histories, but which being invented, can have only a parodic or satiric connection with actual human history.
Obviously novels, particularly War and Peace, touch on such matters, but even Tolstoy doesn't make them the primary interest, rather the impact they have on already established characters.
So, it seems to me that Martin's books are a kind of fictional history, which dips from time to time into novel territory, but without any dramatic resolution of the issues.
This for me, is the weakness of this kind of fiction. As there is no dramatic point at which the story aims - a marriage, say, as in Jane Austen, or the resolution of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as in Dickens's Bleak House - we read on because we want to know what happens next. What happens next is therefore the point of the exercise. I've no idea how many more volumes of ASOIAF there are to come, but there's seems no reason why it shouldn't go on and on, like a TV soap opera into which people are born, get married and die, without there ever being a conclusion, unless the ratings fall.
So although I'm hungry for the next course, I'm almost sure my hunger is not going to be satisfied. There'll always be another conflict brewing in Westeros and another generation of characters to fight it. Impressive as Martin's achievement is, and while there are many good, literary moments in it, it simply doesn't have the power of a genuine literary work, and therefore isn't a contribution to literature. Great works of literature conclude, tragically or happily. Anna Karenina dies. Emma marries. We find out what we want to know. We do not feel compelled to read on and on.
This necessity of ending is inherent in all works of art. Reading Martin reminds one that to write well is not enough. There must be some point at which one is aiming, a resolution which will satisfy, borne on a structure which will support it.
There are plenty of reviews of these books on Goodreads and I'm not going to add to them. Instead, I'm going to raise a general question which I've always found interesting, which is how one assesses the type of writing of which these books are an example. How does one even classify them? Though fiction, I would argue that ASOIAF is not a novel. It's structurally and thematically far too diffuse. There's no central character or theme to unite the action, and even the group of characters with which the story starts to whom one builds a kind of attachment are either killed off or disappear for considerable stretches of the narrative. It's not quite clear either what the story is actually about. The book is quite different in this respect from what might regarded as its closest predecessor, the Lord of the Rings.
I'm not sure that any fiction set in an invented world can ever be described as a novel. The primary themes of a novel, love, death and money, are classically situated in the real world, amongst a restricted group of persons and thus have universal appeal. Invented worlds give rise to issues which are outside the scope of the novel: geopolitics and war, which are more the concern of narrative histories, but which being invented, can have only a parodic or satiric connection with actual human history.
Obviously novels, particularly War and Peace, touch on such matters, but even Tolstoy doesn't make them the primary interest, rather the impact they have on already established characters.
So, it seems to me that Martin's books are a kind of fictional history, which dips from time to time into novel territory, but without any dramatic resolution of the issues.
This for me, is the weakness of this kind of fiction. As there is no dramatic point at which the story aims - a marriage, say, as in Jane Austen, or the resolution of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as in Dickens's Bleak House - we read on because we want to know what happens next. What happens next is therefore the point of the exercise. I've no idea how many more volumes of ASOIAF there are to come, but there's seems no reason why it shouldn't go on and on, like a TV soap opera into which people are born, get married and die, without there ever being a conclusion, unless the ratings fall.
So although I'm hungry for the next course, I'm almost sure my hunger is not going to be satisfied. There'll always be another conflict brewing in Westeros and another generation of characters to fight it. Impressive as Martin's achievement is, and while there are many good, literary moments in it, it simply doesn't have the power of a genuine literary work, and therefore isn't a contribution to literature. Great works of literature conclude, tragically or happily. Anna Karenina dies. Emma marries. We find out what we want to know. We do not feel compelled to read on and on.
This necessity of ending is inherent in all works of art. Reading Martin reminds one that to write well is not enough. There must be some point at which one is aiming, a resolution which will satisfy, borne on a structure which will support it.
May 26, 2013
26 May 2013
Hi. I'm Greg Hall and this is my first blog entry. I live in Bath, one of the oldest cities in England, with a history of settlement stretching back even before the city of Aquae Sulis was founded soon after the Roman conquest almost 2000 years ago. Bath owes its name and its original importance to the hot springs which surface here, creating the only thermal spa in the country.
History is one of my interests. My latest novel, Hot Water, draws on this. It's set in Brimswell, a heavily fictionalised version of my home town. It's a murder mystery, but more edgy, blackly comic and satirical than the traditional British 'cosy'. I've published it as a e-book for the Kindle.
I've written four other novels in the past, as you'll see from my author page. These were all print-published by prestigious houses, but are now, unfortunately, mainly out of print, though still available on Amazon.
Writing for a living is a precarious business. Fashions change and publishers are often keener on the new (and young) than the established author. I was very ill with cancer about ten years ago, and it was by no means certain I would recover but I'm tough and don't give up easily, so I lived to tell the tale - very appropriate for a writer. Recovering from that knocked me out of the picture for a bit, as you might imagine.
Getting back to writing was a struggle, but I was pleased that I hadn't lost my touch. I've various projects on hand at present, which I'll share more about in due course. In the meantime, I'd be delighted to have your comments on Hot Water. I'm not afraid of criticism, just glad to be alive to receive it.
History is one of my interests. My latest novel, Hot Water, draws on this. It's set in Brimswell, a heavily fictionalised version of my home town. It's a murder mystery, but more edgy, blackly comic and satirical than the traditional British 'cosy'. I've published it as a e-book for the Kindle.
I've written four other novels in the past, as you'll see from my author page. These were all print-published by prestigious houses, but are now, unfortunately, mainly out of print, though still available on Amazon.
Writing for a living is a precarious business. Fashions change and publishers are often keener on the new (and young) than the established author. I was very ill with cancer about ten years ago, and it was by no means certain I would recover but I'm tough and don't give up easily, so I lived to tell the tale - very appropriate for a writer. Recovering from that knocked me out of the picture for a bit, as you might imagine.
Getting back to writing was a struggle, but I was pleased that I hadn't lost my touch. I've various projects on hand at present, which I'll share more about in due course. In the meantime, I'd be delighted to have your comments on Hot Water. I'm not afraid of criticism, just glad to be alive to receive it.
