Peter (husband) Lucy (daughter) and me (me) went to see Invictus last week in which South Africa win the Rugby World Cup. Wow. Now Peter and Lu are complete rugby fans. Lucy was all for going but Peter demurred. “Why should I,” he demanded, “want to see a film about South Africa winning? England winning the world cup now, that’s different.” And I could certainly see his point of view. No one (no English no one, anyway!) who saw it will forget that breath-taking moment in 2003 at the end of the game when, with the scores at 17-17, Jonny Wilkinson kicked the dream of a drop goal and won the game. (“Wilkinson! Kicks it high, kicks it straight, kicks it over!” yelled the bloke on Radio Five Live.)
But, urged by his daughter and wife, Peter came along. And he was glad he did. Sport, as a subject for drama can be a bit of a curate’s egg. Whereas it’s gripping to watch a game unfold (i.e, England’s world cup victory above) sport has to be tweaked to make it a good story. Anyone who’s ever read any horse or motor racing fiction, for instance, will know that the favourite nag will never get to the starting line without seeing off a couple of kidnappings and a doping attempt and the chances are there’s more assorted murder and mayhem on the way. If it’s by Dick Francis, the hero’s lucky to escape with all his limbs intact. No car ever gets to the track without International Crooks (a useful bunch) stealing the new formula, sawing through the clutch cables or drugging the pit crew. Sugaring the petrol is almost de rigueur. If crime is eschewed, then the really good sports films tend to be about how sport changes, strengthens and moulds a character, such as the Rocky films. If you don’t feel good by the end of it, you’ve got a heart of stone or were having forty winks.
Invictus shows how not one man, but a whole nation was transformed by rugby. It’s about far more than sport, of course. I remember that nervous time when Nelson Mandela was released and the world held its breath, waiting for the inevitable blood-bath in South Africa. And it didn’t happen. Yes, OK, Invictus simplifies things, but such a huge story has to be simplified to make it watchable. The essence of the truth is there, though. The black South Africans loathed the Springboks, seeing the green-and-gold of the national side as a symbol of oppression. Mandela, who’s brilliantly played by Morgan Freeman, argues against changing the name and the colours. He wants to give the Afrikaners the reassurance that their treasured Boks are still theirs – the difference being that now the Boks represent the whole country and not just one race.
One of the best parts of the film is when an understandably nervous Francois Pienaar, (and he’s brilliantly played too, by Matt Damon) the Boks captain, is asked to afternoon tea with Mandela. They talk about inspiration, which is where Invictus comes in. Nelson Mandela was inspired by the poem, Invictus, in prison and Pienaar takes it to heart. Honest to God, if you didn’t know this was a true story, you wouldn’t believe there could be that much restraint, that much magnificent forgiveness (from Mandela) that much willingness to embrace new ways (from Pienaar) in the world. The last quarter of an hour or so, where the Boks are up against the hitherto invincible New Zealand All Blacks are electric. Cape Town is stilled, and in a wonderful thumbnail of the nations coming together, a little black boy comes closer and closer to where two white policemen are listening to the game on their car radio. It ends with the little boy being lifted on their shoulders as the Boks follow Pienaar’s command to “Believe!”
I went for the tissues. The script, by Anthony Peckham from the book by John Corlin is fantastic – not a wasted word - and the direction, by Clint Eastwood, is razor-sharp. Quite simply, it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Invictus, by the way, is Latin for unconquered. It’s an image of battle and Invictus is about the best battle ever – South Africa’s war that never was.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Battlefield Tour
It was half-term last week and, as always, you have to at least nod in the direction that the kids are on holiday from school and do something. A couple of years ago we went round the Somme and Ypres battlefields en famile. That was a surprising successful trip. We went by coach on a tour run by Leger’s, which is, unless you have a very particular aim in view, is a terrific way to get to know the lie of the land. Our guide, Peter Williams, was absolutely ace and a mine of information about the war, and, of course, it’s nice to have other people to talk to. Most visitors were there to see a particular relative’s grave. The graveyards are very dignified and peaceful and – as you’d hope – beautifully maintained.
There was a great national debate after the war about what the graveyards should look like. For the British, with their national obsession with gardening, the idea was to create the atmosphere of a garden and, even in a chilly February, it works. The stones are all white and uniform in design. For those soldiers who are unidentified, there’s an inscription written by Rudyard Kipling: “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God.”
Heaven knows what it cost Kipling to write that simple message; he loved his children. Somewhere or other I’ve got one of his short stories where his little girl, who’d died, touches his hand as he sits remembering her. Okay, that sounds dead creepy, but it’s actually really touching. John, or as he was always known, Jack Kipling, was desperate to get into the war, but his eyesight was poor and he needed glasses. Rudyard pulled every string he could to get Jack into the army and, of course, it ended not only tragically but quickly. In his excellent book, Mud, Blood and Poppycock, Major Gordon Corrigan talks about the danger of letting a man who’s sight depends on spectacles onto a battlefield. One bump, one knock, and his sight’s gone and his liability to himself and to his comrades. Poor Jack Kipling lasted about two days before he, too, became a “Soldier of the Great War, known Unto God.”
Kipling and his wife spent years looking for any trace of Jack. They never did find any, but later he wrote the line; “If any ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied.”
The German graveyard we visited was especially poignant because, in one of those terrible ironies, it’s only really the British who go. Peter Williams, the aforesaid guide, told us that in five years of running the trips, he’d only once met a party of Germans there. The First World War, as I understand from my German friend, (Professor) Beatrice Heuser, is virtually forgotten in modern Germany, and, of course, thee was so much disruption in the Second World War, that families were scattered and lost. There were lots of Jewish graves in the German graveyard; it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what happened to there descendants. The atmosphere was peaceful but very different from the British graveyards. Trees have a huge place in the German psyche and the idea they wanted to conjure up wasn’t so much a garden but a woodland glade.
I’d recommend anyone with the slightest interest in the First World War to make the trip; being there is different.
It was half-term last week and, as always, you have to at least nod in the direction that the kids are on holiday from school and do something. A couple of years ago we went round the Somme and Ypres battlefields en famile. That was a surprising successful trip. We went by coach on a tour run by Leger’s, which is, unless you have a very particular aim in view, is a terrific way to get to know the lie of the land. Our guide, Peter Williams, was absolutely ace and a mine of information about the war, and, of course, it’s nice to have other people to talk to. Most visitors were there to see a particular relative’s grave. The graveyards are very dignified and peaceful and – as you’d hope – beautifully maintained.
There was a great national debate after the war about what the graveyards should look like. For the British, with their national obsession with gardening, the idea was to create the atmosphere of a garden and, even in a chilly February, it works. The stones are all white and uniform in design. For those soldiers who are unidentified, there’s an inscription written by Rudyard Kipling: “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God.”
Heaven knows what it cost Kipling to write that simple message; he loved his children. Somewhere or other I’ve got one of his short stories where his little girl, who’d died, touches his hand as he sits remembering her. Okay, that sounds dead creepy, but it’s actually really touching. John, or as he was always known, Jack Kipling, was desperate to get into the war, but his eyesight was poor and he needed glasses. Rudyard pulled every string he could to get Jack into the army and, of course, it ended not only tragically but quickly. In his excellent book, Mud, Blood and Poppycock, Major Gordon Corrigan talks about the danger of letting a man who’s sight depends on spectacles onto a battlefield. One bump, one knock, and his sight’s gone and his liability to himself and to his comrades. Poor Jack Kipling lasted about two days before he, too, became a “Soldier of the Great War, known Unto God.”
Kipling and his wife spent years looking for any trace of Jack. They never did find any, but later he wrote the line; “If any ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied.”
The German graveyard we visited was especially poignant because, in one of those terrible ironies, it’s only really the British who go. Peter Williams, the aforesaid guide, told us that in five years of running the trips, he’d only once met a party of Germans there. The First World War, as I understand from my German friend, (Professor) Beatrice Heuser, is virtually forgotten in modern Germany, and, of course, thee was so much disruption in the Second World War, that families were scattered and lost. There were lots of Jewish graves in the German graveyard; it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what happened to there descendants. The atmosphere was peaceful but very different from the British graveyards. Trees have a huge place in the German psyche and the idea they wanted to conjure up wasn’t so much a garden but a woodland glade.
I’d recommend anyone with the slightest interest in the First World War to make the trip; being there is different.
It was half-term last week and, as always, you have to at least nod in the direction that the kids are on holiday from school and do something. A couple of years ago we went round the Somme and Ypres battlefields en famile. That was a surprising successful trip. We went by coach on a tour run by Leger’s, which is, unless you have a very particular aim in view, is a terrific way to get to know the lie of the land. Our guide, Peter Williams, was absolutely ace and a mine of information about the war, and, of course, it’s nice to have other people to talk to. Most visitors were there to see a particular relative’s grave. The graveyards are very dignified and peaceful and – as you’d hope – beautifully maintained.
There was a great national debate after the war about what the graveyards should look like. For the British, with their national obsession with gardening, the idea was to create the atmosphere of a garden and, even in a chilly February, it works. The stones are all white and uniform in design. For those soldiers who are unidentified, there’s an inscription written by Rudyard Kipling: “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God.”
Heaven knows what it cost Kipling to write that simple message; he loved his children. Somewhere or other I’ve got one of his short stories where his little girl, who’d died, touches his hand as he sits remembering her. Okay, that sounds dead creepy, but it’s actually really touching. John, or as he was always known, Jack Kipling, was desperate to get into the war, but his eyesight was poor and he needed glasses. Rudyard pulled every string he could to get Jack into the army and, of course, it ended not only tragically but quickly. In his excellent book, Mud, Blood and Poppycock, Major Gordon Corrigan talks about the danger of letting a man who’s sight depends on spectacles onto a battlefield. One bump, one knock, and his sight’s gone and his liability to himself and to his comrades. Poor Jack Kipling lasted about two days before he, too, became a “Soldier of the Great War, known Unto God.”
Kipling and his wife spent years looking for any trace of Jack. They never did find any, but later he wrote the line; “If any ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied.”
The German graveyard we visited was especially poignant because, in one of those terrible ironies, it’s only really the British who go. Peter Williams, the aforesaid guide, told us that in five years of running the trips, he’d only once met a party of Germans there. The First World War, as I understand from my German friend, (Professor) Beatrice Heuser, is virtually forgotten in modern Germany, and, of course, thee was so much disruption in the Second World War, that families were scattered and lost. There were lots of Jewish graves in the German graveyard; it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what happened to there descendants. The atmosphere was peaceful but very different from the British graveyards. Trees have a huge place in the German psyche and the idea they wanted to conjure up wasn’t so much a garden but a woodland glade.
I’d recommend anyone with the slightest interest in the First World War to make the trip; being there is different.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Grumpy Old St Valentine's Day
Today, Sunday 14th February, is St. Valentine’s Day. Why is it – and this is a plea straight from the heart – that’s is so outrageously difficult to find a Valentine’s Day card that doesn’t imply the recipient is some sort of fluffy toy (rabbit, teddy, small, cute dog or whatever) with the mental ability of a broken cuckoo-clock or, conversely, some sex-crazed maniac who’s gagging for it? I mean, even if your tastes do lie in that direction, it’s a card, right? It’s going to be on the mantelpiece. Couldn’t it ever be just a little embarrassing (“More tea, Vicar?”) to have a house decked with invitations to carry on in a way that would raise the eyebrows of the court of Katherine the Great? It is possible to find a card that indicates love and affection, but you don’t half have to search hard.
The original St Valentine was a Roman martyr. Actually, there seem to have been a few Valentines (then, as now, it was thought dead cool to have more than one Valentine) but they all seem to have made the dodgy career move of getting on the wrong side of whichever Roman Emperor was handy. And if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that Roman Emperors didn’t have a sense of humour; not a bit. Even the most liberal of them seemed to think that bringing someone on as a tasty snack for lions (the original Lion Bar?) or smothering the unfortunate object of ire with pitch, lighting a match, and then complaining that These Saints Don’t Burn Like They Used To merely opened proceedings. I can’t help thinking that the various Valentines had enough to put up with without lumbering the poor beggars with the responsibility for wads of terminal cuteness or a whole raft of Goings On.
The page proofs for A Hundred Thousand Dragons arrived this week. Yo! It’s exciting (OK, maybe I should get out more) to know that it’s getting closer and closer to publication. D-Day is the 27th May. For some reason, all my books have been published on the last Thursday of the month. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining.
I do hope, though, that there’ll be copies out in time for CrimeFest on the 20th-23rd May. If you don’t know CrimeFest, look it up on t’internet (as Peter Kay would say). It’s at the very nice Marriot Hotel in Bristol and is a great way to meet people and authors (sometimes they’re the same thing) and talk books and writing for a long weekend.
At this stage, proof reading is mainly trying to catch punctuation errors and howlers so they don’t wriggle through onto the printed page. So far, so good, but imagine, say, you have a character called Frances. Just think of the unintentional hilarity that would be caused by a missing comma in the line of dialogue, “Has the doctor seen her, Fanny?” Actually, you’d probably be better, so low are most readers’ minds (my mind hits rock-bottom dead easily) to leave Fanny’s name out altogether. And you do have to watch the order of words, too. I’ve just been on a Finnish wildlife and fisheries website (D’you know, I really should get out more!) where it says the first people arrived in Finland about 9,000 years ago looking for “fur-bearing animals and fish”. Wow. Furry fish? Are they, like, Mink(y) Whales? (Honestly, I not making this up; take a look on www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~finwgw I don't see why I should be the only anorak in town. )
I think my favourite howler, though, was perpetrated by a hapless schoolboy in an English Literature exam who wrote, "Wordsworth often answered the call of nature." So that's not daffodils, then - more like sweet peas!
The original St Valentine was a Roman martyr. Actually, there seem to have been a few Valentines (then, as now, it was thought dead cool to have more than one Valentine) but they all seem to have made the dodgy career move of getting on the wrong side of whichever Roman Emperor was handy. And if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that Roman Emperors didn’t have a sense of humour; not a bit. Even the most liberal of them seemed to think that bringing someone on as a tasty snack for lions (the original Lion Bar?) or smothering the unfortunate object of ire with pitch, lighting a match, and then complaining that These Saints Don’t Burn Like They Used To merely opened proceedings. I can’t help thinking that the various Valentines had enough to put up with without lumbering the poor beggars with the responsibility for wads of terminal cuteness or a whole raft of Goings On.
The page proofs for A Hundred Thousand Dragons arrived this week. Yo! It’s exciting (OK, maybe I should get out more) to know that it’s getting closer and closer to publication. D-Day is the 27th May. For some reason, all my books have been published on the last Thursday of the month. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining.
I do hope, though, that there’ll be copies out in time for CrimeFest on the 20th-23rd May. If you don’t know CrimeFest, look it up on t’internet (as Peter Kay would say). It’s at the very nice Marriot Hotel in Bristol and is a great way to meet people and authors (sometimes they’re the same thing) and talk books and writing for a long weekend.
At this stage, proof reading is mainly trying to catch punctuation errors and howlers so they don’t wriggle through onto the printed page. So far, so good, but imagine, say, you have a character called Frances. Just think of the unintentional hilarity that would be caused by a missing comma in the line of dialogue, “Has the doctor seen her, Fanny?” Actually, you’d probably be better, so low are most readers’ minds (my mind hits rock-bottom dead easily) to leave Fanny’s name out altogether. And you do have to watch the order of words, too. I’ve just been on a Finnish wildlife and fisheries website (D’you know, I really should get out more!) where it says the first people arrived in Finland about 9,000 years ago looking for “fur-bearing animals and fish”. Wow. Furry fish? Are they, like, Mink(y) Whales? (Honestly, I not making this up; take a look on www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~finwgw I don't see why I should be the only anorak in town. )
I think my favourite howler, though, was perpetrated by a hapless schoolboy in an English Literature exam who wrote, "Wordsworth often answered the call of nature." So that's not daffodils, then - more like sweet peas!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Editing Your Manuscript
I finished my new book this week. Not A Hundred Thousand Dragons which is out in May – that’s sitting safe and sound in Severn House – but the one after that. Phew! As anyone who’s ever written a book will know, there’s a huge, yeasty feeling of benevolence to all mankind at this point. That’s because the really hard work of making the damn thing up is over and I can get stuck into the editing. I say editing rather than re-writes, because the word re-write makes me feel depressed. It’s as if all the work you’ve done has to be done again, whereas with editing you’re building on what’s already there.
If anyone’s unpublished and sending their book out, don’t skimp on the editing. Don’t skimp on it anyway, but particularly if you’re unpublished. I did read a How-To book by an American author who advised sending it to a professional at this point. Hum. They charge an awful lot of money and the advice isn’t always good. However, it can sometimes help to have a fresh pair of eyes, so if you’re tempted to go down that route, why not look out for a Writers’ Conference which offers one-to-one consultations? And you’ve got a lot of fellow writers to go to the bar with afterwards, which is always a plus.
So how do you go about editing? Well, in one way it’s very simple. There’s continuity errors to be picked up, for instance. If your hero has brown eyes on page 12, he’d better not (unless it’s a plot point) have green eyes on P212. He doesn’t have to be like David Attenborough and always wear a blue shirt and white trousers, but I read a book (publisher and author nameless) where a baby changed its sex, name and nationality. As this particular baby was quite important to the plot, it was bewildering. Someone should have cared about this poor infant; it was definitely a case for a literary version of Childline.
Editing allows you to pick up on the more breathless coincidences (or, at least, conceal them better) and make sure the hero doesn’t suddenly possess physic abilities (like, how does he know Aunt Augusta hid her will under the loose floorboard in the haunted house? Meredith Maltravers was in the next room/down the pub/studying penguins in Antarctica when Juanita and Gertrude thought they’d seen a ghost and heard the creaking floorboard but really it was Mr Nasty, the Hidden Hand of Surbiton, creeping round the aforesaid haunted house to alter the will and replace it so that Aunt Augusta’s short-sighted lawyer will be convinced that she’s left her entire fortune, plus the cats, to a man she’s never met.)
Most of all though, editing allows you to look at your pride and joy, your very own book, with a reader’s eye. However, this reader has a blue pencil and attitude. Is it boring? Take it out! Why is Meredith so long-winded about penguins? Does he think he’s Ernest Shackleton or someone? Shut the man up! Does the story flow? Does it hang together? If think it was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who said, “Murder your darlings,” (he was talking about literature not family life) but I really don’t see why you should. If a passage works, then that’s fine. If it doesn’t, then it has to go, but it might fit better somewhere else.
And look at the first page. On the wall beside my desk is the mantra, Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? Answer those three questions in the first sentence and you’re off to a good start.
If anyone’s unpublished and sending their book out, don’t skimp on the editing. Don’t skimp on it anyway, but particularly if you’re unpublished. I did read a How-To book by an American author who advised sending it to a professional at this point. Hum. They charge an awful lot of money and the advice isn’t always good. However, it can sometimes help to have a fresh pair of eyes, so if you’re tempted to go down that route, why not look out for a Writers’ Conference which offers one-to-one consultations? And you’ve got a lot of fellow writers to go to the bar with afterwards, which is always a plus.
So how do you go about editing? Well, in one way it’s very simple. There’s continuity errors to be picked up, for instance. If your hero has brown eyes on page 12, he’d better not (unless it’s a plot point) have green eyes on P212. He doesn’t have to be like David Attenborough and always wear a blue shirt and white trousers, but I read a book (publisher and author nameless) where a baby changed its sex, name and nationality. As this particular baby was quite important to the plot, it was bewildering. Someone should have cared about this poor infant; it was definitely a case for a literary version of Childline.
Editing allows you to pick up on the more breathless coincidences (or, at least, conceal them better) and make sure the hero doesn’t suddenly possess physic abilities (like, how does he know Aunt Augusta hid her will under the loose floorboard in the haunted house? Meredith Maltravers was in the next room/down the pub/studying penguins in Antarctica when Juanita and Gertrude thought they’d seen a ghost and heard the creaking floorboard but really it was Mr Nasty, the Hidden Hand of Surbiton, creeping round the aforesaid haunted house to alter the will and replace it so that Aunt Augusta’s short-sighted lawyer will be convinced that she’s left her entire fortune, plus the cats, to a man she’s never met.)
Most of all though, editing allows you to look at your pride and joy, your very own book, with a reader’s eye. However, this reader has a blue pencil and attitude. Is it boring? Take it out! Why is Meredith so long-winded about penguins? Does he think he’s Ernest Shackleton or someone? Shut the man up! Does the story flow? Does it hang together? If think it was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who said, “Murder your darlings,” (he was talking about literature not family life) but I really don’t see why you should. If a passage works, then that’s fine. If it doesn’t, then it has to go, but it might fit better somewhere else.
And look at the first page. On the wall beside my desk is the mantra, Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? Answer those three questions in the first sentence and you’re off to a good start.
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