Black Gate

This week Will Self, one of the UK’s stars of Literary Fiction, told everybody that the “novel is dead.”  Just seeing the title of his piece was enough to make me bring up Amazon and check… but no, the books hadn’t gone, replaced by app downloads and cheap white goods. So, what did he actually mean?

Reading the actual article, I discovered he meant “the literary novel is dead”, plus — as far as I can tell from what’s a rather long piece that seems to have been savaged by a feral Thesaurus — difficult Art in general:

the hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism.

You might guess that my gut reaction is, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF THE WAR TRUMPETS HANG ON LET ME PUT DOWN MY AXE OMG WATCH OUT! ORK! GOT HIM! Now what were you saying Mr Self?”

What I mean is:

Just as authors have artistic integrity, readers have audience integrity. Sure, you wrote something you think is smart. However, that doesn’t give you a right to other people’s time and brainspace.

The sense of grant-grubbing entitlement from LitFic authors would be distasteful — nay, comic — if it came from any other sector, say, from typewriter manufacturers: “Wah wah, nobody wants typewriters anymore but they’re culturally vital where’s my grant and my tenure teaching typewriter engineering to young people?”

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There’s something about the history – and the legends – of the Templar Knights that catches at the imaginations of historical and fantasy writers alike. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser had his Red Cross Knight, Michael Jecks, write the Knights Templar Books, a mystery series, and, just to give one example from our genre, there’s the fantasy anthology, Tales of the Knights Templar.

Everyone knows something about the Templars, but not everyone knows about their presence in Spain.

The history of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem begins around 1119, when nine Christian knights, settled in the Holy Land after the first Crusade, took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, like any other monks. But unlike ordinary monks, they also vowed to protect the pilgrims who now flocked to visit the area.

Sort of like holy policemen.

Their approach was a popular one, their numbers started growing, and the group received official recognition and papal approval around 1129. Like other official religious orders – the Benedictines, the Dominicans – the Templars started receiving donations of money and land. One of the early kings of Aragon, for example, part of modern day Spain, left the Templars almost one third of his kingdom.

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There are a lot of things I love about writing: the fame, the fortune, the hordes of screaming fans… *cough.* Pardon me as I clean up the soft drink I just snorted through my nose.

Really, writing is both a wonderful and terrible choice for a career, but one of the best parts is an experience so sweet and pure that it truly rivals the other great pleasures in life. No, it’s not the first time you sign a book for your parents.

I’m talking about The Flow.

The Flow is that magical experience when the words come as naturally as breathing, popping into your head like fireworks that seem to type themselves across your screen. When you’re in The Flow, writing seems like the easiest, most blissful vocation on the planet.

I only wish it lasted.

I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to write, it usually takes me a little time to warm up. I don’t bother with pre-game exercises; I just dive in. I read back over the previous day’s work, maybe jot down a couple notes as I try to find the narrative moment where I left off. Within half an hour, I’m typically chugging away. Then comes the make-or-break period. Somewhere toward the end of the first hour, I’ll either snag The Flow and cruise through a productive session or the magic eludes me and I have to fight to make my daily quota.

That’s the magic and wonder of The Flow. It comes and goes. But is it possible to encourage that spark to visit and maybe stick around for a while? Drawing solely from my own experience, I say yes. Er, sorta.

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I’m often asked at book signings and other public events about the process of writing and publishing. How long does it take to write a novel and what happens after you’re done? In this blog, I’ll cover some of the different aspects of the process from my perspective. I’ll start at the beginning: the story seed.

How does the idea for a book begin? It could be anything, an interesting situation from real life, a scene from a movie that gets you thinking, a smell that reminds you of childhood summers, or maybe you read a book and thought to yourself, “I could do something like this.”

Once you have an idea for a story, the creation process begins. I’m not going to get into the specifics of how to write fiction or all the things people say you should do before you start your first novel. If you want lessons to hone your craft, there are roughly fourteen bajillion books about writing on the market. Some are helpful; others not so much. Or check out one of my earlier blogs here on Black Gate (Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats).

So how does that initial spark transform into a living, breathing novel? For me, the first thing is to make sure I’ve got a viable story idea. You can write about almost any situation that humans (or nonhumans) find themselves in, but to hold a reader’s interest for three or four hundred pages is a tall order. Not every story idea can stand up to that. So I daydream. Yep. I sit at my desk and daydream about the idea. I wonder where would be the ideal setting for this story. What kinds of characters would play the lead roles? Most importantly, where’s my conflict? Is it a story about love, honor, war, spelling bees, or horse whispering? As the idea grows, I write everything down. Much of this will get tossed out at some point, but it’s important to record it all now before the magic of the idea wanes.

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