Tag Archives: writing

Apologies for the gap in posts. I was on holiday in Athens. More on that in a later post.

For the moment, though, you might have noticed while I was away that Penguin have decided to rewrite some Jeeves and Wooster books. The right wing press are up in arms about this.

Regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised about the rewrite. I talked about just such a thing a couple of months ago in this post.

I guess I should update this post while I’m here: Three Times I Predicted the Future

See you next week.

I wrote my post last week knowing that Eric Brown had died. As the news had yet to be released I didn’t like to say anything. I’d like to speak about him now.

Eric and I met at Eastercon in Glasgow in the year 2000. We discovered we lived quite near each other and so arranged to meet up for a drink and chat when we got back home. Eric was an established writer, I was just beginning, and I valued his advice. When Eric moved first to Cambridge and then to Scotland the pints were less frequent, the chats took place over the phone or, later on, on zoom. Eric was a great friend.

But I’d like to talk about his writing.

Eric was a prolific writer. His method was to sit, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by his books, and to write. You can read how he did it here: https://tonyballantyne.com/how-writers-write-eric-brown/.

He was natural story teller. His SF worked because he knew that it wasn’t the technology but the characters that made a story work.

Others have talked about Eric’s humanity, and that of his characters. I’d like to give an illustration of what this means.

I was delighted when Eric asked me to collaborate on a story as part of his Kethani series. I took great pleasure in setting up a vicar as the protagonist. Matthew was a sympathetic character, his faith troubled by the alien Kethani bringing people back to life. I was being deliberately awkward, setting up a situation where conflicting beliefs clashed. I couldn’t see a resolution, and I must admit there was a smile on my face as I hit send on the email, sending the MS to Eric.

He replied within hours. He resolved the problem in one elegant sentence, a line that left the dignity of all characters intact. The ending was a masterclass in storytelling.

Eric Brown was a great writer. More than that though, he was a great friend.

I’m currently reading Queen Camilla by Sue Townsend (paid link).

The book is a follow up to The Queen and I, in which the Royal Family are moved to a social exclusion zone in an ex-council estate. (No matter what they say about the genre, every mainstream author ends up incorporating SF into their work.)

Given the recent news about Princes Andrew and Harry, the public perception of the Royals will have changed a lot since this book was written. But I find it interesting how Townsend shaped her characters based upon images presented in the media at the time.

Even more so, its the way she does it. Sue Townsend was an excellent writer. Look at this scene where characters are revealed by which biscuit they chose.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Charles, choose a bloody biscuit.’ Andrew grabbed a chocolate digestive and crammed it into his big-jawed mouth. Edward looked at his wife, Sophie. She said, ‘Have the wafer.’ He obediently took a pink wafer and nibbled at its edge. Sophie held the flat of her hand up and turned her head as Anne proffered her the tin.
Anne said, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Sophie replied, ‘It means that I do not want one of your biscuits, Anne. The last time I had one of your biscuits, it was covered in dog hair and I was ill for a week.’ When the tin was held out to Harry, he said, ‘I’m cool.’ Anne said, ‘We all know you’re cool, Harry, but do you want a bloody biscuit?’

I love her writing, spare, funny and razor sharp. Like every expert, she made it look so easy…

I always think you can map a book to two axes: focus and travel.

The more you move along one axis, the less you move along the other. So if your story is packed full of excitement and plot twists (travel) there is less time to explore character (focus).

Ann Tyler’s books provide a good illustration of this. While many books mentioned on this site contain a cast of thousands and a span of light years and centuries, her books have a much narrower focus.

I love Ann Tyler’s books, though I haven’t read one in a long time. I started reading Redhead by the Side of the Road (sponsored link) on a long journey last week and finished it in two sittings. The story deals with one man living in a basement apartment. It rarely moves beyond that setting, and that’s a necessary part of its charm.

It’s all about breadth v depth. Both are worth exploring when writing. Both lead to fascinating books. But don’t try and do both at the same time.

Speaking of Roald Dahl, I’ve been re reading some of his short stories following the rewriting debate. I’d forgotten that he’d written SF. I’m thinking of stories such as Royal Jelly and, more topically, The Great Automatic Grammatizator which goes some way towards predicting the effects of software such as ChatGPT.

What I’m particularly noticing is a marked difference in his regular style and that of his SF stories. These have more in common with the SF that was current when he was writing (certainly the SF that I was reading when I first encountered Dahl.)

In those days SF tended to be about people solving a problem: why did the robot behave in a such a way? Why did the people on the planet disappear? There is this element to Dahl’s SF stories: a premise is extrapolated and then unravelled by the hero.

But compare this with Dahl’s regular stories. In these the protagonist is more likely to take risks. They create the problems, rather than solving them. They jump off a ship to make it slow down so they can win a sweepstake. They use identical dogs to raise the odds at a greyhound race. In these often macabre stories the tension is built internally to the protagonist, rather than externally.

There’s a very different feel to these stories, one that I’ve been thinking about over the past few days as I write myself.

I’ve never had someone change my stories in a way that I disagree with.

My work has been edited – of course it has. Editors have suggested many many changes to my work. They’ve clarified sentences that were hard to understand, they’ve cut boring passages and moved other passages around to make them more interesting.

No one has ever forced me to write something I don’t believe in.

So I’ve been wondering what I would think if an editor asked me to change the description of a character from fat to enormous. They might feel that the story was implying that to be fat was to be greedy. As I don’t believe that to be the case I’d probably want to change the word to avoid misunderstanding.

I mention this because of the recent news about Roald Dahl’s books being rewritten.

When I first read the above article I was against the idea of rewriting books, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if I’m really upset about the feeling that it’s my childhood that’s being rewritten. When I take the time to consider, many of the changes listed in the article seem quite reasonable. Language and attitudes change over time.

Rewrite is an emotive word. Is it a rewrite if the sense of the text isn’t changing, or is it just a judicious edit?

By way of illustration, I’ll quote my daughter. I bought her a collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories for Christmas. This is what she said:

“Dad this book you’ve bought me has so many iterations of the N word, and the climax involves him getting into black face.”

Should that text be edited to change the N word, should the climax be rewritten? Or should it be left as it is? I have my own opinion on this, but that’s for another post.

Something like don’t forget the pasta, and I found myself just looking at the words.

I was thinking about all these things that we write, all these words that we scribble with a pen or tap out on a keyboard or thumb onto a phone and then think nothing else of them. And yet those words were important enough to write at the time, and the fact of writing them lends them a certain permanence.

I type up so many words – emails confirming my attendance at a meeting or messages thanking a friend – and those words are backed up and the backups backed up to three generations and then those words reside on servers probably never to be seen again. All those words that were important enough to put down at the time and are then forgotten.

Words like this blog post. I like to think it’s interesting enough to read now, I’m under no illusions that people will be looking at in 100 years time.

I’ve been looking at ChatGPT – the AI writer. It’s very impressive, but there’s no intent behind the words, no history or provenance or web of interactions that led to its words being written in the first place.

For that reason alone what ChatGPT writes will always be less interesting than something written by a human.

My advice to would be writers: start blogging.

Why? Because blogging once a week helps instill the discipline necessary to becoming a writer. It forces you to actually publish your work rather endlessly revising it. If you’re lucky somebody might even read what you’ve written: treat that as a bonus.

I’ve given this advice many times: it’s rarely acted upon.

Even by myself.

My writing juddered to a halt around 2018. Family circumstances slowed me down, then Covid finished me off. Spending up to fourteen hours a day at a computer in my day job as teacher meant I had no wish to sit down afterwards and write. The ideas kept coming thick and fast, I’d just lost the urge to knit them together.

And then last year I finally followed my own advice. The discipline of posting here once a week has been enough for me to start writing properly again. I’m now 60K into a novel (that’s probably about a third of the way, see here for why) and I’m working on short stories again.

Thank you to all those who’ve given feedback here. Your encouragement has kept me blogging which has got me writing again.

I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s biography. (sponsored link). There’s a passage in there on the effect that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had on him. It was a passage I recognised. I first encountered Hitchhikers in the 1981 BBC TV version ^[1] [2] and I thought it the cleverest and funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

Like all wannabe writers I wanted to do the fantasy version, but I could never get the ideas to fly. When I picked up the first Discworld book I realised that this was it, the book we had all been trying to write. Terry, of course, did it far better than I could. 

My children never appreciated Hitchhikers anywhere near as much as the Discworld, but that’s probably to be expected.

As Douglas Adam’s himself said about inventions…

1 . Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I’m sure something similar applies to books and music. 

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Footnotes

1. When I was at university we all claimed to have heard the original series broadcast on Radio 4 in 1978. I suspect it wasn’t just me lying when we made this claim. I’d have been 11 or 12 when the program was first broadcast and probably too young to understand the humour. And of course I didn’t listen to Radio 4 in those days. 
2. As this post is about Terry Pratchett it seemed appropriate to include footnotes.

I took a parcel to be returned to Amazon to the shop around the corner and I realised I’d predicted this in Recursion. It might not seem that big a deal, but when I wrote my first novel a communication shop seemed a pretty good extrapolation of the world at the time. Back then if you wanted to return a parcel you had to go to the post office.

Better than that, though, is when I thought people lying in bed sending text messages in the middle of the night. This is was in my story Restoring the Balance, Too, first published in Interzone. Texting was a new thing, and it occurred to me that people feeling lonely in the night might speak to their friends in this manner.

Lots of other people had the same idea, of course, but it was original to me at the time and I got really quite excited by the possibilities.

All of this sounds pretty mundane, I’m sure.

And all of this is pretty irrelevant. SF isn’t there to predict the future, but to extrapolate the present, and getting it right doesn’t make a good story. Still, there’s a quiet sense of satisfaction on getting it right slightly ahead of every one else.

The third time I predicted the future was when I wrote about the robots on Penrose, but you’ll have to wait a couple of hundred years to see that one come true.