Book talk
Revenge is a powerful motive..
Delighted to be part of this fantastic new anthology
Sneak peek–with the permission of Paul Collins at Ford Street Publishing–at a fantastic new YA anthology, Rich and Rare, coming out in October. The anthology features an amazing roll-call of some of Australia’s best writers and illustrators for young people, and I was honoured to be chosen to write the foreword. Don’t you just love the fabulous cover, created by the great Shaun Tan?
Interview with Peter Higgins about the Wolfhound Century series
One of the discoveries–and pleasures–of my recent reading life has been the extraordinary, genre-busting Wolfhound Century series, by British author Peter Higgins. Set in the Vlast, an alternative world inspired by the history and culture of Russia, where dying angels, giants, rusalki and forest spirits exist alongside revolutionary terrorists, mad scientists, rocket ships, spies and secret police, this magnificent trilogy(made up of Wolfhound Century; Truth and Fear; and Radiant State) is breathtaking in its ambition, scope, dazzling and sensual use of language, gripping and twisty plot–and sub-plots!–and wonderfully depicted array of characters. With its mix of thriller, alternative history and fantasy–both urban and quest–it’s simply the most exciting, assured and original debut I have read in a long time and in fact ranks high amongst the very best speculative fiction full stop. I’m not the only one who thinks so incidentally, as this review in The Guardian indicates!
The trilogy has recently concluded with Radiant State, and after finishing it I contacted the author and had the good fortune to interview him.
Interview with Peter Higgins
The Wolfhound Century trilogy is your first published work, is that right? Can you tell me a bit about your background and how you first came up with the idea for the books?
I had some short stories published before I started on Wolfhound Century, but these are my first novels. I was always a reader and wanted to write but for a long time I didn’t know how. Then I happened on a book in a junk shop by Joan Aiken (whose stories I love) called The Way To Write For Children and it was a revelation. She didn’t just tell you what a good story needed, she told you, quite simply, how practically to go about writing one. How to collect and store material, ask questions of your ideas, build them up bit by bit. Some people write a different way, or they just naturally fall into the process, but I didn’t. I needed that book.
Even then it took me years to work out what kind of stories I could write: I love the freedom and energy of fantasy, but I also love researching and evoking the atmosphere of historical periods and other places. It finally came together when I started building a fantasy world out of the materials of history. It’s very much the kind of thing that Guy Gavriel Kay or G R R Martin do, I guess, but I decided to use the twentieth century, and draw on that dark and strange and luminous and cruel experience in Europe and Russia, rather than look to some more distant period. And that’s how the Wolfhound Century series started to come together.
The series immerses the reader in a richly dark, complex and layered world of magical alter reality. I am not at all surprised you chose the extraordinary history, folklore and culture of Russia as the inspiration of the Vlast, imaginative world you created, but can you tell me how you went about bringing it to life?
When I’m writing I work on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, I immerse myself in the materials I want to work with: twentieth century history, spy novels, Russian literature and art and film and folklore, anything that grabs my attention. And on the other hand, at the same time, I’m planning the story, building characters, working out the plot, the themes, what’s at stake. And out of all that, basically, I grab what I want. Sometimes I come across something in my ‘research’ that really excites me, and I try to figure out how to bring it in to the story. Sometimes the story needs something – a setting, a particular kind of character – and I look around for what would be good.
If I take something from my research, I usually twist it, change it, mix it with something else, make it magical or fantastical, to bring out what I think is important. It’s about building an interesting, different world with compelling characters and situations, a world that has a kind of atmospheric resonance. It’s a very instinctive process.
I’m struck by how seamlessly you have managed to evoke different periods of Russian history–from the late Tsarist period through the anarchist and Bolshevik period and full blown Stalinism–yet have telescoped it within the world of the series in a way that feels coherent. How difficult was that to achieve?
One way I found of making the whole thing hold together as a coherent story was to make it a thriller. Writing a thriller is a fantastic discipline: it cranks up the narrative pace, brings in mystery and conflict and danger, and makes you keep the characters moving. The story has to stay focused on the main event. As a writer, I found the thriller form very liberating, because there are clear principles and rules about plot and structure that other writers have worked out before you, which actually work. It gives you a solid framework that you can use to support the weirder and the wilder flights of imagination without losing the reader or yourself. Also, I’m a huge thriller fan, from John Buchan to Lee Child and Martin Cruz Smith.
Alongside the thriller plot, the telescoping comes from the sense, which becomes increasingly apparent as the trilogy unfolds, that time is subjective and moves at different speeds for different people and in different places. The presences from the forest, for example, the giants and so on, live long, slow lives. And the capital city of the Vlast, Mirgorod, is layered with traces of different times; it’s a kind of haunting. When Josef Kantor becomes the dictator Papa Rizhin, he’s able by sheer force of will to drive the Vlast to great social and technological changes very rapidly, but where his influence is weak time passes more slowly: people get caught in the past, trapped by memories or resentments, their lives get out of kilter, sometimes the dead wake and walk. I think the twentieth century was like that: huge and often disastrous advances driven fast by urgent necessity (the Manhattan project; Stalin’s industrial transformation of the Soviet Union; Mao’s Great Leap Forward) but people and places left stranded, trapped by history, recycling traumas, or simply refusing to share the common story.
I love the way too that you have used Russian myth, folklore and language to conjure a world that feels both strongly rooted yet wonderfully strange. Can you expand on that?
I grew up with the idea that Russia was a very strange, fascinating, dangerous place. During the Cold War the Soviet Union was, for me, a huge imaginative presence – inaccessible, threatening, vast, oppressive, but also the place where fantastic art and literature and folklore came from; the place of endless forests and oddly fairy-tale architecture alongside prison camps and concrete tower blocks. I felt it was the scary looking-glass world that was really there, behind the iron curtain. That’s the kind of feeling I wanted to capture in the Wolfhound Century series.
One of the many things I loved about the series too was the feeling that it was influenced by many other books and writers–Russians, of course, principally, but also I wondered if Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Robert Holdstock’s The Hollowing had been influences? Any others as well?
That’s uncanny. Those are three of my favourite authors. The collision between Conrad’s murky, compromised city of anarchists and policemen and Holdstock’s ancient, endless, subconscious-made-real forest is in a way the starting point for the Wolfhound Century trilogy. And Alan Garner was my first really exciting private reading discovery: I found The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath in the library, and read them both over and over. I haven’t thought about The 
Owl Service for years, but now you’ve mentioned it, I see there’s certainly a connection to my books: the electric, mysterious, mythic presences in the natural world reaching out and entangling the characters in a dark story larger than themselves. We did it at school and I remember seeing it on TV, and it spooked me a lot both times. I haven’t been back to it since but it seems to have been working away, below the surface.
Another huge influence for me is Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. I don’t think I write particularly like him, or about the same things, but I discovered The Book of the New Sun at a time when I really didn’t know what I was trying to do, and it hit me right between the eyes. That book opened up for me just how ambitious and adventurous and unlimited fantasy writing could be: the endless inventiveness, the ambition and the seriousness of his writing were a revelation. I realized I needed to try and write something that at least entertained the possibility of being that good.
Your characters aren’t only human but also superhuman and non-human–angels, giants, forest spirits and more. You have poignantly and grippingly evoked their steadily-diminishing world. How did you go about it?
It’s about looking at everything that the Russian and central European imagination has produced – the folklore, the forest, the visionary paintings of an artist like Chagall, golems and rusalkas and talking wolves, as well as the revolutionaries and the state police and the prison camps and the mass hunger – and taking it as if it was all equally real and tangible and actually happening. The driving idea of the series is that an over-dominant state – any such state, it doesn’t have to be the Soviet Union particularly, the one in these books is called the Vlast – wants to impose a single way of thinking, wants to make everybody see the world the same way and be part of the one collective story, and uses its oppressive power to drive out and silence anything that doesn’t fit with that. But everywhere in the Wolfhound Century world things are alive and percipient – sentient rain, thinking rivers – and there are giants and spirits and intelligent shape-shifting wolves. For the characters this generates a lot of tension: how much reality do you accept? what do you close your mind to? It’s not ‘good natural world’ versus ‘bad government’: the wider, deeper world, like the individual human psyche, isn’t particularly morally good, it’s just unavoidably there; and much richer and more alive than any one way of organizing things will allow.
Josef Kantor, later Papa Rizhin, feels like a mix of Lenin and Stalin by way of the People’s Will anarchists. Is that a fair comment?
Yes, Stalin in particular. Kantor isn’t a portrait of Stalin, any more than the Vlast is a portrait of the Soviet Union, and some of the events surrounding him and the things he says and does are drawn from Lenin and other revolutionary writers and activists, but Kantor’s character and story – which in some ways is the spine of the whole trilogy – is largely built from aspects of Stalin that I think are particularly compelling.
Stalin’s journey from being Josef Djugashvili, revolutionary, poet, bank robber to being Stalin the Steel Man, terrorisor of the people and even his own supporters, then victorious war leader, then hugely-dominant avuncular dictator, is strange and oddly gripping. You can see in early photographs of him that he was very alive and engaged, very human, someone who might have been a good person. It’s as if something alien and appalling got into the machine, or something dark came out of the psyche.
Vissarion Lom and Maroussia Shaumian, the two heroes of the series, grow and change a great deal during the course of the three books. Can you expand a little on that?
Lom starts as an investigator in the political police, serving the Vlast in an obscure provincial town, and when we first meet Maroussia she’s working in a factory making uniforms. Both of them get unseated from those niches and driven to embark on a kind of exploratory journey/quest. Maroussia is the main ‘quester’, the driven Frodo-figure: Lom has to work hard to keep up with her and figure out what’s going on, what the bigger picture is. And there’s something magical, perhaps not entirely conventionally human, about Lom, which he doesn’t himself understand but grows into. That’s the spine of it. But a large part of what I was trying to do is to show them both unfolding under the 
pressure of what happens to them and what they discover, opening up more and more to the world around them, becoming increasingly perceptive, connecting with what’s coming out of the endless forest, unlocking closed areas of the unconscious, extending the capacity of what people can do and perceive.
I felt that the ending of the third book, Radiant State, is left a little open–is there going to be more exploration of the world of the Vlast, or are you looking in other directions now?
Part of what I love about fantasy and science fiction is the feeling that the worlds the books build don’t stop when the books end. The particular struggle has come to a conclusion, the characters have changed in some fundamental way and so has their world, but nevertheless the world continues. It’s still there, somewhere. That’s the feeling I wanted to leave at the end of the trilogy. Maybe, possibly, I’ll revisit the Vlast one day, though I’m working on something else now. When I look back at the trilogy as a whole, I feel there’s a completeness to it, that I’ve done what I wanted to do and if I added more it wouldn’t be better.
Peter Higgins’ website is at http://www.wolfhoundcentury.com/
On writers 5: Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie as a young woman.
The latest in my republished series on favourite writers.
A celebration of Agatha Christie
Something odd is going on. In her home country, the writer who, death, J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown notwithstanding, is still the world’s most popular author, is disregarded by the literary establishment, if not by ordinary readers. Agatha Christie’s classic status is surely no longer in doubt, with two billion copies of her books still in print thirty years after her death, but in Britain it’s not enough to save her from being patronized – even by her literary-world fans – as a mere creator of ‘cosy’, ingenious puzzles, whose work ‘lacks art’. Sometimes it seems that if you are a self-respecting member of the modern British literary world, you should hide a predilection for Christie, or at the very least, apologize for a taste for ‘slumming it’, not in the mean streets, but in – these days – much more despised bourgeois ‘cosy’.
Across the Channel in France, however, it’s quite a different story. There, she is highly respected, not only as a writer of consummately clever detective stories, but as an artist of rare gifts and distinction, worthy of serious study and acclaim. Not only do Christie’s books sell four times as many copies in France as in Britain these days, but her work is championed by intellectuals and writers. Controversial writer Michel Houellebecq – who considers Christie to be one of the finest writers of the 20th century – is only the latest to do that; others have included the late philosopher Roland Barthes and the French-American doyen of literary criticism, Jacques Barzun. Pierre Bayard, a professor of literature at the University of Paris, typifies the French approach to Christie in his 1998 book, Qui a Tue Roger Ackroyd? (published in English in 2001 by Fourth Estate as, naturally, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?). In a daring jeu d’esprit worthy of Christie herself, Bayard re-examines Christie’s groundbreaking novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and asks if Poirot could have got it wrong. This is the trigger for an unusual exploration of reading, and a detective story on the art of the Christie detective story itself: a fitting tribute to the intellectual brilliance and pleasurable artifice of a genius of popular art.
What can possibly explain this disjunction between French and British reactions to Christie as an artist? First, it is clear that the French, like the Americans, have always taken popular art much more seriously. Whether it’s, say, the work of Tintin creator Herge, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, or the books of Agatha Christie, the French have always been well ahead of the critical game. Second, Christie’s distinctive combination of gifts – her light touch, plotting unpredictability, clarity, playful intelligence, sense of the ridiculous, economical but elegant style, the lightning vignettes of social comedy coupled with a paradoxical, underlying macabre sense of dread – appeal particularly to the Cartesian mind. French critics don’t seem to resent the way she springs surprises, as all too many British critics seem to; the French expect the author to be cleverer than her readers, and delight in the intellectual challenge. Third, and perhaps most important in the context of our time, it seems to me that current British critical dismissal is very much a product of a shift in middle-class cultural attitudes. Far from reflecting a cosy, insular Little Englander mentality, as all too many British critics seem to imagine, Christie’s work actually reflects a confident, middle-class cosmopolitan sensibility, more common in Britain before, say, the 1960s, than now.
These days, in Britain, cosmopolitanism has long been replaced by earnest multiculturalism, which is not at all the same thing. Multiculturalism in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not popular in France, where it’s perceived as a threat to the one and indivisible French republic. But cosmopolitanism has long been something the French intellectual has prided himself or herself on, since at least the time of Voltaire. And so France has, willy-nilly, retained a kind of sensibility which to modern British eyes may well seem ‘old-fashioned’.
Agatha Christie as a child
In her personal life, Christie was far from being insular – her American father, frequent stays in France, other European countries and the Middle East, and her second marriage to a cosmopolitan intellectual, saw to that. She certainly knew far more about the world than her critics like to admit. Of course, in her fiction she does indeed play with ‘Englishness’ but in rather more surprising ways than English critics generally give her credit for. It’s true that the ‘Englishness’ of her books – the slightly fantastical, stylized, larger-than-life, never-never world she creates – is exotic and charming to foreigners. But in the past, especially pre-1960s, British critics seemed to enter into the fun; they did not seriously entertain the idea that the world Christie created was meant to be social realism. They understood it was an artifice, a kind of modern fairytale setting, but with all mod cons, as it were. But modern British critics, brought up with more literalistic expectations of the realism of detective fiction, wince at what they take to be an ‘old-fashioned’ view of both the English and foreigners and, keen to promote other, more politically correct or expedient views, want to dissociate themselves from it.
Moreover, it seems to me that the ‘Englishness’ of Christie is very much overstated by embarrassed English people. The author actually casts a very cool eye indeed on her own culture, and her own people. This is especially so in the Hercule Poirot novels. There is a common view in Britain that Poirot represents a caricatured English view of the French, or at least Francophones, remembering Poirot’s Belgian origins. But in my view, this could easily be turned around: what to an English eye might look like defects may very well, to a French eye, be seen as qualities. In fact, if Poirot is to be seen as a type at all, he could very well represent an archetype beloved of the French themselves. He is worldly, sophisticated, highly intelligent and logical, with a Cartesian clarity of thought. Fastidious and elegant to the point of dandy ridiculousness, but also a bon vivant who greatly appreciates good food, comfortable surroundings and beautiful women, he has a superb Gallic self-confidence, even braggadaccio at times. He also has a touch of melancholy – he is essentially solitary – and a touch of the mysterious, almost otherworldly. Yet he is very much of this world: his name itself holds that paradox, with the mythological Hercule juxtaposed with the solidly bourgeois Poirot.
David Suchet as Hercule Poirot
Above all, Poirot is cosmopolitan. He does not try to ‘blend in’ but enjoys his status as a foreigner long resident in England – both outsider and insider. He is often derided as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘a mountebank’ but always puts egg on the faces of the tweedy Little Englanders who do not take him seriously. We see England through his eyes as much as he is seen through English eyes; and it is he who unerringly goes to the heart of the matter, and never his English detractors. How delicious it is for French-speaking readers that it is the ‘little grey cells’ of a Francophone detective that should solve all these knotty cases and totally rout all these English criminals and English bigwigs and policemen!
But it’s not just the fun elements of Christie, as relaxing and pleasurable to the mind as a Gershwin song, or a Baroque harmony, which appeal to French readers. In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platform, the narrator, also called Michel, spends two pages describing the ‘Dickensian sense of wonder’ and the ‘magisterial portrayal of despair’ which Christie evokes. Houellebecq takes seriously her exploration of human character. This goes against the grain of received British wisdom, which consistently mocks her characters as being ‘cardboard’.
But French commentators rarely criticize Christie’s characterization, whether because they believe, like Jacques Barzun, that the traditional ‘bourgeois novel of character’, with its emphasis on ‘Protestant’ struggles with conscience and inwardness, is a poor, indeed, dangerous model for detective fiction (which Barzun considers essentially to be an art form of its own, away from the novel), or because, like Houellebecq, they actually think Christie gets her characters right. They like Christie’s understated, minimalist approach to characterization, which gives the reader an airy space in which to construct their own understandings. Coming from a Christie, one can feel suffocated by the sheer humourless mass of psychological and other detail in the work of many of the most admired detective fiction writers these days.
It’s not that Christie isn’t interested in character. Character, to her, is everything, in fact – it is what elucidates the mystery of why, as much as who, or how. But her fiction is animated by the deep-seated conviction that ‘all the world’s a stage’ – that people play roles, in life as much as in art. Her characters seem like types because they are playing roles, conventional roles. Murder disrupts not ‘order’, as British critics patronizingly assume, but the roles people play. The detection reveals the evil hidden under the reassuring mask of respectability, the suffering hidden under the careless manner.
Agatha Christie in her later years
Like Hitchcock, Christie believes that the Devil is in each of us – and that he may well find the whited sepulchre of hypocrite convention a more congenial abode than most. But also like Hitchcock, she never lectures you about it – she lets you draw your own existential and metaphysical conclusions. It’s a restrained approach that goes down well with French critics, who love the opportunity that’s thus opened, to speculate endlessly on the philosophical meanings and unpredictable possibilities of the Christie canon – right up to asking, like Professeur Bayard, as to whether the author herself was tricked by the real murderer of Roger Ackroyd!
In praise of Tintin
A piece of mine I’m republishing, having just been reading some Tintins again!
Tintin of the ageless quiff and boundless enthusiasm, from the gorgeous comic books by the Belgian author and illustrator Herge has turned eighty-six this year ! Of course I have every single volume of his adventures, some in French, some in English, as well as quite a few associated books, including a gorgeous book of travel narratives and photographs retracing the steps of Tintin and his friends in such countries as Tibet, Scotland, the Congo and ‘Syldavia’, compiled by the French magazine Geo. This curiosity, along with Tintin encyclopedias, dictionaries, diaries and several figurines of Tintin and his friends, action figures, bookend the scruffiest, most loved-to-death collection of the Tintin adventures, which we never get tired of rereading.
The Tintin adventures are the books most often pulled out of the groaning family shelves when any of my kids come home to visit. When anyone’s feeling tired, discouraged, or simply at a loose end, Tintin is the prescribed remedy—a remedy of freshness, fun and escape that never fails to work. And when I canvass many of my writer friends as to favourite childhood reading, Tintin comes up again and again.
Translated into the world’s languages, over the four generations and more since his birth in the pages of an obscure children’s journal, Le Petit Vingtième, the immortal little reporter has proved remarkably adept at transcending all kinds of barriers of nationality, culture, religion, class, race, sex, ethnicity, age, whatever you will. The brainchild of the renowned Belgian cartoonist Hergé(his real name was Georges Rémi—and his pen-name comes from the phonetic French rendition of RG, his initials spelt backwards), Tintin’s now reached an iconic status. You rarely hear anymore the snobby, narrow-minded assertion that it’s not right for kids, because it’s—shock, horror!– a comic. Yes, some of the early work is very dated and patronising (my least favourites, for this reason, as well as incoherent story, are the early Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America). But mostly, the Tintin corpus has aged remarkably well, because at the heart of Herge’s work is a realistic, amused but compassionate view of human nature, and a strong feeling for justice. Along with the social comedy and the crisp dialogue, there is also a horror of cruelty and bullying, and a tenderness for the ‘ordinary’ aspects of human life, as opposed to those who would have us valuing ideas over people.
Hergé very much kept up with what was going on in his times, something that is clear in the Tintin adventures. Yet it’s a curious fact about the Tintin stories that they’re both timeless and very much of their time. With consummate artistry, in both gorgeous pictures and crisp words, Herge managed to both document the realities of the twentieth century, and create his own world. The archetypal characters, social comedy, jaunty pace, inventive language, extraordinary command of line and colour, exciting, suspenseful plots, and clever dialogue of the books are all handled with the lightest of touches that belied the author/illustrator’s painstaking care with his work, both visual and written, and the immense amount of research he did to create such a seemingly effortless, pleasurable result. He combed dictionaries for words that could be used for the ever more colourful and bizarre invective of Captain Haddock; read umpteen atlases, books of science, folklore, geography and history to get exactly the nuances of the various places Tintin explores. Like Shakespeare, he did not visit the places he set the stories in, preferring to document himself in libraries and museums, but his own city of Brussels features anonymously many times at the beginnings of Tintin adventures.
The Tintin books have been highly influential in pop culture. Writers and film-makers have been greatly inspired by them. When I was compiling a series of columns for a book magazine a few years ago, on the favourite childhood books of several prominent children’s writers, Tintin came up many, many times as a major influence. Tintin has also helped to make the extraordinary art of comic books acceptable to a wide range of people(incidentally the massive success of such European books clearly shows that it’s certainly not just the US that calls the cultural tune).
But the Tintin alchemy has not yet been totally successfully distilled into decent film versions—of the abortive 1970’s cartoon series, the less said the better(indeed Herge himself, who had had no control over them, hated and despised them). The recent Steven Spielberg film was okay, but no more. It doesn’t matter We Tintinophiles have all those gorgeous stories to read again and again; a mixture of cinema and storytelling right there in front of our eyes, in a perfect blend of word and image.
Writing journals
Just a small selection of my writing journals!
Writing journals: not all of us use them but many of us writers keep them, in one way or another: whether as a specific writing journal, as a diary, a notebook, or other. At various points I have kept, and continue to keep, all of these. I have diaries stretching back decades, amongst which is one dating from when I was 12. Amongst all the stuff about school and food(my mother is a fantastic cook and I was always writing down stuff about the cakes she’d made!) I also mention writing projects I’d undertaken, such as ‘The Twins’ Highland Holiday’ which I don’t remember at all but which sounds very much influenced by Enid Blyton! Meanwhile, a tattered exercise book dating from around age 16-17 has notes and research as well as the first few chapters of a massive fantasy novel, never finished. Travel journals kept at various points have also included vignettes of scenes, ideas for stories, as well as observations of things I saw around me, many of which fed into stories later; while there’s piles of notebooks filled with often indecipherable scrawl about plots, characters, themes, sudden ideas, observations on chapters I’m working on, and more.
And in 2007, after having been given a gorgeous notebook by one of my publishers, Random House ![WP_20150612_004[1]](https://firebirdfeathers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/wp_20150612_0041.jpg)
Australia, I decided to start a different kind of writerly journal, which I call The Literary Life. This journal, which has now run into six volumes, is a chronicle of the literary life–my own, and within the wider literary world–and is an honest and unvarnished portrayal of life as a writer: the public and private, the festivals, launches, meetings with other authors and illustrators, publisher meetings, struggles and excitements of writing, challenges and pleasures of the publishing industry, emotional highs and lows, ![WP_20150612_007[1]](https://firebirdfeathers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/wp_20150612_0071.jpg)
talk about literary groups and news and yes a little gossip too! Though it isn’t strictly speaking a writing journal, keeping it has not only helped me to vent frustrations and express observations, it’s also helped to clarify my own writing trends and re-reading the journal’s back issues, as it were, has enabled me to reflect back onto projects I have worked on in the past.
Thinking about all that made me also curious about other people’s practices in this regard, so I emailed a few writer friends, asking them these questions:
Do you keep a writing journal? How long have you kept it? What medium is it in–hard copy or on screen? And how useful do you find it?
Here’s a selection of answers.
Yes, I keep a writing journal … in that I keep a journal and all I really write about in it is my writing! I’ve kept my diary since I was 12 years old, and have always recorded my hopes, my dreams and daydreams, my disappointments, my ideas, my inspirations, my writing process … I use it to work out problems, to make lists of things to do, to scribble down flashes of inspiration, to keep a record of the creative process. I write longhand in a notebook, and have about 60 volumes – I average 3-4 diaries a year. I also have a notebook for each novel, in which I keep a work every day as I’m writing – I stick in or draw pictures, maps, diagrams – keep a record of my research … write character outlines … record word counts … all dated so I can see how long it takes me!
How useful do I find them – my diary and my notebook? I could not live without them, let alone write!
I have recently begun keeping a writing journal, just over the last six months or so. I have found it to be invaluable, especially in terms of reviewing my frustrations with time, what is hanging me up, and in terms of keeping track of some story possibilities that I might other wise lose. My journal is a hardcover, lined paper variety, which I much prefer to the computer for ease of reference. I also find it almost therapeutic to be able to put pencil to paper sometimes; writing longhand is its own form of creativity, I think.
I haven’t kept a journal for many years, though I think it’s an excellent thing to do. I stopped when I felt I didn’t need it any more … but it was my great salvation during my long, long period of writer’s block. After I’d failed to finish every piece of fiction I started for five or so years, I realised I had to write SOMETHING! So I began to keep a journal, setting myself not less than one page per day (but no maximum – some entries were 15-20 pages). Everything went into it – dreams, events, thoughts, self-analysis, pieces of description. I began it when I came to Australia – a new life in more than one way – and continued for ten years, plus a few shorter bursts after that. It didn’t see me out of my period of writer’s block, which went on for several years more, but it kept me sane and it kept me writing.
I don’t keep a journal now, but I do make notes on all sorts of ideas and experiences. Because I’m always planning books far far ahead, I can see where they’re going to find a fictional home by and by. So I’m not so interested in them as MY experiences – and although the kind of fantasy I write draws ultimately on feelings I’ve been through myself, it looks nothing like a memoir. Plus journal-writing takes so long! I need to give all my time to producing final stuff (after my 25 years of producing nothing at all)!
So, do I keep a journal now? No. Do I recommend keeping a journal? Yes, very definitely.
I don’t keep an actual writing journal, but I do have small notebooks – usually a few on the go at a time – where I jot down any random book-related thoughts. These tend to have to share space with other sorts of writing, though – generally of the domestic type, shopping lists, addresses, quickly dashed off school absentee notes etc. I also use the notes function on my phone. It’s great for those moments when brilliant ideas arrive unexpectedly – usually late at night when I’m about to drift off, and it’s too dark to write anywhere else. I’m waiting for a waterproof phone — so many good ideas lost in the shower, or while swimming.
I don’t keep a writing ‘journal’ but have several notebooks for different projects on the go at the same time. I write longhand in them but they are also full of post its, images, sketches, and random thoughts. Also loose pages and paper clips as I sometimes find I have the wrong notebook…In addition I have an ideas ‘file’ on my computer. New ideas are jotted down so they can form an orderly queue…
I’ve done this for two years or so, and began doing so after going to workshops where several writers explained how useful they were.
They were right! I find them very useful both as a reference if I get stuck, or just to write longhand in. I find my style is a bit more relaxed using them in this way than it was writing exclusively on computer.
Kyle Mewburn on dragons and dinosaurs and boys who don’t read
Kyle Mewburn is the author of over fifty titles including two bestselling junior fiction series. Dinosaur Rescue – about the only evolved boy in a neanderthal tribe who joins a talking T-rex on a mission to save the dinosaurs from extinction. And Dragon Knight – about a shape-shifting dragon boy who wants to go to Knight School. Originally from Brisbane, he now lives in a grass-roofed house in the deep south of New Zealand.
I met Kyle in person a couple of years ago, at the ASA Writers’ Congress–Kyle and I are both on the Boards of our respective authors’ organisations in Australia and New Zealand–and we’ve kept in touch ever since. On Facebook recently, he made some observations about boys’ reading which I found interesting, so I asked if he might like to write a guest post on the subject.
Welcome, Kyle!
Of dragons and dinosaurs and boys who don’t read
by Kyle Mewburn
Boys don’t like reading! Boys are falling behind! The sky is falling! Almost every day there’s another gloomy study, one more grim report and another grand theory on what we might do to avert catastrophe. Yet, when I recall my own childhood and the reading experiences of my peers, it always begs the question – was it ever any different? For some boys, reading was always a struggle. While for those like me, it was a wondrous escape – a delight.
As a writer of two successful junior fiction series broadly targeted at so-called reluctant readers, I think engaging this readership is akin to getting them to eat their vegetables. Take my mother. She was no Masterchef. She used to boil almost everything. For hours, sometimes. My lasting impression of broccoli was a slightly sulphuric-smelling mush with the consistency of gravel. She nearly put me off vegetables for life. If I hadn’t fallen in love with a talented, enthusiastic cook, I may never have recovered.
For lots of kids, especially boys, reading can quickly become something comparable to eating badly cooked vegetables. It’s something they’re supposed to do because it’s good for them. When I visit schools I’m regularly appalled by the diet on offer. Too often they are the literary equivalent of boiled-to-death cabbage.
In my experience, reluctant or struggling readers are by no means slow. And they’re certainly not dumb. More often than not the reverse is true – there’s a hell of a lot going on in their heads and their lives. If they only read under duress it’s often because they’ve got way more interesting things to do. Offering up trite, dumbed-down stories will turn them off reading for life.
Writing for this readership isn’t rocket science. Though a few rockets and some science never go astray. But nor is it as simple as some people think. Ever since my series Dinosaur Rescue came out, 
I’ve had lots of offhand comments saying basically – “If you want to appeal to boys all you have to do is add some fart jokes. They lap that stuff up.” Or “boys love anything with dinosaurs in it” – as though that explains everything.
That attitude really annoys me. For one, it suggests writing successfully for that readership is simple. Worse, it implies that readership, especially boys, are one-dimensional and an easy target.
All my stories are seat-of-your-pants stuff. I don’t actually have any idea what’s going to happen until I start writing. I think it’s important to retain a sense of spontaneity. My general theory is if I don’t know what’s happening next, then the readers can’t guess what’s going to happen either. That’s what keeps them turning the page – which is vitally important at that age. If they lose that momentum, their attentions can quickly wander off in other directions.
The series DOES contain a degree of scatological humour and some pretty gross stuff besides. I don’t make any apologies for that. It’s something most kids, especially boys, find funny. But stories with complex inter-personal relationships, especially friendships, are equally, if not more important.
In the end, re-readability is the key. The story has to be complex enough to sustain multiple readings. And it can only do that if it uses complex language, has multi-dimensional storylines, and various layers of meaning. A kid will only re-read a story if there is something new to discover with each reading. There needs to be thoughts and ideas which challenge them, with comprehension the reward for the effort of re-reading. If I can make them wet their pants laughing in the process, all the better.
The first Australian blockbuster: an interview with Lucy Sussex
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Fergus Hume, was Australia’s first blockbuster, selling out its first run almost at once, and in world terms too was a massive success, predating the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon and writing itself into the annals of detective fiction. Well over a hundred years after its first publication in 1886, it’s still in print–in many different editions, including worldwide–and the subject of a very successful ABC TV series. But its author, who due to an unfortunate decision, did not get to enjoy the fruits of his book’s success, is less well-known–until now, when Lucy Sussex’s new book, Blockbuster: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (Text) lifts the veil on the untold story of both author and novel. The book is released next week, and as a great fan of Hume’s novel, I caught up with Lucy recently to ask her about it.
Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical, shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider. Lucy has five short-story collections, including My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty and Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies. Her latest book is Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. She lives in Melbourne.
What first drew your interest to the story of Fergus Hume and his bestselling novel?
Hume said he ‘belonged to New Zealand’ but when I grew up there I never heard of him. That happened when I worked as a researcher for Stephen Knight’s history of Australian crime fiction. But I read the book then, and was intrigued—not least in the resonance it still had, and how people responded to it. For instance the 2012 telemovie was sparked by a Radio National program on the book, for which I was one of those interviewed. John Barnett of South Pacific Productions heard the program, bought a copy, read it on the way back across the Tasman, and decided to film it (with Ewan 
Burnett of Burberry Productions). Clearly there was life in the old Hansom Cab.
It happened I was working with Meg Tasker at Federation University on a research project about Australian and NZ writers and journalists in London at the turn of last century. We had a file on Hume, who moved to England in 1888, in the wake of Hansom Cab’s success. One day I started following digitised links re Hume across the web. It became very clear there was a book to be written on the Hansom Cab alone.
How did you go about researching the book?
The problem with Hume is that he left no diaries, there are few letters and the most relevant publishers’ records do not survive. Those who knew him are all dead now. I did use some archives, mainly in Dunedin, where his father ran the madhouse. But there was more than enough material using digitised newspapers—Papers Past in New Zealand and Trove in Australia, mainly. What was unclear in one source could be explained in another, across the Tasman.
And was there anything you discovered that surprised you?
Well, the people who kept asking me if Hume was gay! Which led me to queer theory, the history of rent boys in Sydney, and Little Buttercup from Gilbert and Sullivan, as performed in drag.
Another surprise was the rarity and value of first editions of Hansom Cab: only four survive, and even imperfect they go for five-figure sums. Go investigate your Granny’s attic!
The Mystery of A Hansom Cab predated the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, and some 
critics have said that Doyle was influenced by Hume’s book. Does your research support that?
A Study in Scarlet was not published until after Hansom Cab’s great English success in late 1887. Doyle read Hume’s book, and jealously wrote to his mother “What a swindle ‘The Mystery of a Hansom Cab’ is. One of the weakest tales I have ever read, and simply sold by puffing.” [hype]. The evidence is that he and Hume had been submitting to the same publishers, around the same time, and both suffered rejections. What happened was probably synchronicity, not uncommon in crime fiction: a literary idea whose time has come. But the Hansom Cab helped create the market for Sherlock Holmes. Without it the Sherlock story might have ended with A Study in Scarlet.
I have read that Hume was inspired to write his book by the success of Emile Gaboriau’s novels–but was he also inspired by Wilkie Collins’ groundbreaking The Moonstone, published nearly 20 years previously?
He certainly read Wilkie Collins, but a bigger influence is Mary Braddon, Collins’ great rival and contemporary. She, not Collins, is cited in the Hansom Cab.
What happened to Hume and his book makes for salutary reading. Can you describe the process that led to his selling his copyright?
Fergus Hume
Hume wrote the book to draw attention to himself as a playwright. Although he wrote it with care and flair, he didn’t really take it seriously, career-wise. So he only registered the copyright months after the Australian success. Whether we believe the sales figures cited—25,000 copies in the Austral colonies alone, a huge figure for that time and market—the Hansom Cab was drawing attention from overseas. Thus the Hansom Cab Co. was formed to publish the book in England, and at that point Hume sold the copyright, disbelieving it would be successful outside Australia. He had taken the cultural cringe too much to heart. What he did hold onto was the dramatic rights, because that was what he thought would be more important. And yes, the play of the Hansom Cab was successful, but not in the phenomenal way of the book
Not much has previously been known about Hume and his personal life. What was your impression of Hume himself, based on your research?
I said to my initial Text editor, Mandy Brett, that he would have been fun to know. Apart from him being so utterly on the make, she replied. From various accounts he was witty good company. He liked women, supported their rights, wrote often for actresses, but there was never any suggestion of romance.
And the Melbourne–and global–literary/publishing scene at the time?
Melbourne was a major centre for reading, with high literacy, numerous bookshops, and a population with disposal income and an appetite for fiction, particularly crime. Hume networked furiously, but couldn’t establish himself as a literary man until after the Hansom Cab. When he got to London he was a literary lion, in social demand. It would have been very difficult for him not to meet Oscar Wilde, for instance. But to his annoyance people wouldn’t take him seriously as a writer because he was associated with pulp.
Do you think that the odyssey of the book’s publication, from semi-self publication onwards, has parallels in today’s changing publishing climate?
Not really. At the time you could publish in three ways, firstly by subscription, getting money from friends and the well-connected and going to a printer. Vanity publishing in our terms. The book publishers themselves used two business models. Commission was where the author paid for initial printing costs and the advertisements. If the book was a success, any profits would be shared with the publisher. Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility was published in this fashion. The alternate model had the publisher buy the copyright, taking the risk, but also, if the book sold well, all the profits. Such was the publishing fate of Pride and Prejudice and Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.
For the first Australian edition Hume didn’t have subscribers, not for a book with disreputable crime content. 5000 copies were allegedly printed, a huge amount, when most colonial books had print runs of 200 or less. He needed a large amount of money to do so, thousands in our terms. It came from playing the stock market, with advice from a friend, Alice Cornwell, a budding gold mining magnate, the C19th equivalent of Gina Rinehart.
But Hume didn’t really self-publish. Frederick Trischler, who had worked in publishing in Australia and the US, had the business initiative and nous, and ran the Hansom Cab operation, using a Melbourne printer, Kemp & Boyce. After he and Hume quarrelled Hume wrote him out of the book’s history. But Hansom Cab couldn’t have succeeded without Trischler, who was an advertising and marketing genius.
Trischler saw the overseas potential of the Hansom Cab, and formed the Hansom Cab Publishing Co, with some enterprising but also dodgy local capitalists. Financier Jessie Taylor bought the copyright from Hume. In London the company did spectacular business: 25,000 copies a month were printed and sold for fourteen months. But it wasn’t crowd-funded—more like bank robbery!
What do you believe is the place of The Mystery of A Hansom Cab, in Australian literary history–and in that of the English-speaking world?
It was the first book from Australasia to become a global publishing phenomenon. It awoke English publishers to the potential of local writing. It also showed them the gold in detective fiction, and helped consolidate crime writing as a major publishing category.
The translations were worldwide, and still happen, with a recent Chinese edition. Hume was among the first Australasian writers to be translated into Chinese.
I might add, to finish off, that THE HANSOM CAB, in its initial Melbourne appearance, shows how an author can get everything right: researching his market, writing a very good and commercial book, encountering someone who believed in it enough to hazard a large print run, producing a good-looking product, timing its appearance carefully, and conducting an effective word-of-mouth campaign. They had very little money for advertising, but they did what they could, ie hiring a hansom cab to deliver the books to bookshops.
The subsequent story shows how an author can get things VERY wrong.
Review of James Patterson’s Writing Masterclass
Recently I was approached by the people from Masterclass, a brand new online learning hub which features courses in different areas of the arts and sport, taught by world-famous masters of their craft–such as Dustin Hoffman for acting, Serena Williams for tennis–and James Patterson for writing. Masterclass asked if, as an experienced author, I’d be interested in checking out the course and seeing what I thought. I did some research, discovering Masterclass to be a start-up based in San Francisco that had debuted only a month ago–in May–and that it was themed around the concept that some masters in their field are also great teachers, and love to impart the knowledge and experience they’ve gained. I liked the idea and was also, I admit, curious to hear what the world’s highest-selling author had to say about his ways of working, so using the gift code provided, (the whole course costs $90 US normally, which seems very reasonable considering what you get) I set up my account, logged in and began exploring.
First of all, I want to write about how the course is structured, and then move to a discussion of whether it works, and for whom. There are four parts to the course: firstly a series of 22 videos in which James Patterson talks about different aspects of the craft of creating fiction: raw ideas; plot; creating characters; successful outlines; research; writing dialogue; building chapters, how to write good endings, editing, and much more, through to post-creation issues such as titles, marketing–and of course getting published! There are also a few more personal themed-videos: one where the author recounts his own personal journey to publication and success; one where he rather amusingly recounts his brushes with Hollywood; and one on the experience of working with co-authors. The videos vary in length between 3 and 14 minutes, depending on the complexity of the theme, and all of them feature James Patterson talking directly to the camera, in a chatty, conversational style, truffled with anecdotes, examples, tips and pithy sayings(a favourite of mine: Passion and habit are key to a successful writing career). Secondly, there is a 72 page downloadable and printable workbook which is designed to complement and expand the videos, recapping on each theme, and providing practical exercises for students to complete on their own. The workbooks come in two versions: one which includes the very comprehensive outline Patterson wrote for his novel Honeymoon(which can be used in assignments) and one without the Honeymoon outline. Thirdly, there is a section called ‘Office Hours’ where the author answers questions video-recorded or written in by students(of course these are selected as otherwise it would be all too easy to become overwhelmed). Within this section also is a series of video critiques by Patterson looking at selected class assignments and how students have handled them–for example, he looks at a whole lot of potential book titles that have been sent in, and says whether he thinks they work, and why they do or don’t. Finally, there is a discussion facility on each theme, where students can interact with each other based initially on a moderator’s discussion question(he’s called a ‘community builder’ on the site) and exchange ideas, opinions and experiences.
So all in all, a very comprehensive structure. It’s well-thought out, very well presented and produced, easy to access and streamlined to work through. James Patterson has a direct, lively and unpretentious manner on camera which is very engaging, both in the main videos and in the critique snippets, and he’s generous with his practical tips and advice. As well, the workbook is thorough and has plenty of interesting exercises, and it’s also easy to download and print. As a self-directed course, it is worked through at your own pace, and it’s clear from the discussion boards that students have approached it in different ways, with the majority watching each video one at a time, and working on each associated exercise one at a time, while a few others report watching the whole series of videos right through, then going back and working through each individually. It’s also clear from the discussion groups and comments that it is mainly unpublished, aspiring writers who are taking the course–which of course is not a surprise–and the atmosphere seems friendly and collegial. As you might also expect, given the fact this is a very new course, there are lots more comments on the earlier videos than on the later ones.
So, that’s how the Masterclass is structured. Now,to the issue of whether it works as a creative writing course. Continue reading
Feathers of the Firebird 