Writing Lessons From CS Lewis

Peter, the other half, was at a business dinner this week and – bless him! – took the opportunity to tell the people he was chatting to that I had a new book out.  (Trouble Brewing – brilliant stuff!) Here's Minou, the cat, "helping" me sign some copies.

Now, what should have happened (this is the dream scenario, you understand) that everyone there should have whipped out their smart phones and ordered a copy.  Yeah, right.  What actually happened was that they all stood round and said how they couldn’t imagine how anyone actually made this stuff up and where did you start and how hard it must be and then moved on.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?  I mean, how do you – and me, for that matter - make the stuff up?  Almost anyone can come up with a few ideas, but putting it all together is another matter.  Books on writing, funnily enough, don’t seem to be much help.  I’ve read loads and they all stress the importance of character (tick) of setting (tick) getting a theme (half a tick) and then wander off into chapters entitled something like:  Make it Come Alive!  How to write believable dialogue!

Hang on a minute.  This sort of stuff might help you wrote isolated scenes, but I can’t believe for a minute that anyone you’re not related to would ever want to actually read them.  So where does the story come from?

If you’ve got an idea, what you want to know is how to translate that story into a coherent narrative.  And the best way to learn how to do that is to put all the How-To books to one side (you can refer to them later) and pick up a book that you love and know well.  Any book will do, but it has to be one you know.  Then, with pen in hand, write down what actually happens.

Let’s take The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe for instance.  CS Lewis recorded how he’d had the picture in his mind for ages of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels by a lamppost in a snowy wood.  So how does that turn into a story?

Well, it’s clearly not the world as we know it, so it’s another world, but allied to ours.  The lamppost tells us that. The faun isn’t the quite scary faun of Greek legend but, with his umbrella and parcels, rather an attractive, cosy figure.  Or is he?  Question one.

Fauns should be in Greece, among hot sun and shady woodland.  Something – the snow – has obviously gone wrong with the faun’s world.   What? Question two.

Who’s seeing the faun?  He has to interact with someone, and that someone is – it’s a children’s story -  is Lucy, the child from our world.  How did she get there?  Question Three.

So from that one image, there’s some backstory.  There’s questions to be answered, about the Faun’s motives, the world he lives in and where Lucy comes from.

As it’s a magical world. there’s clearly something magical wrong with it, which gives us the villian, the White (snow) Witch. A villian has to have a hero to defeat them.  Who’s that?  The kids, yes, but they could do with some magical help and that’s where Aslan comes bounding in.

Lewis was writing in 1949 and, with the war fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s only natural that the war should inform his imagination. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are evacuees from the London Blitz but the war is happening in Narnia, too.

Narnia is occupied territory under an oppressive regime, complete with a Secret Police, random killings and disappearances, and Peter, Susan and Lucy have to be wary who they can trust.  When Edmund becomes a traitor, he’s seduced by sweets, a nod to how rationing sharpened everyone’s appetite for luxuries.

All these ingredients and many more, such as Lewis’s vivid Christian imagination, go into the story but, if you’re struggling with the idea of how to covert ideas into narrative, just – pen in hand – read the book, seeing how one idea leads to another.  It’s a cracking lesson in how to write a story.

Trouble Brewing

There’s nothing here, he told himself.  Not here.  Not with the roar of the Tottenham Court Road traffic at his back.  Not in the very heart of London.  It couldn’t be here.

With shrinking reluctance, he walked to the window and looked into the room.  There was nothing in the room but the oddest moving black shadow in the middle of the floor.  And then he realised there was no light to cast a shadow; and the pool of darkness was composed of innumerable, languid flies.



Sorry about the slightly gruesome beginning, but that’s one of the big moments from the new book, Trouble Brewing. I wanted to start the blurb with that passage but the publishers preferred the more matter of fact approach of saying what the set up was.

Mark Helston, the rising star of Hunt Coffee Limited, was successful and popular, with plenty of money and everything to live for.  Yet at half past seven on the evening of the ninth of January 1925, he walked out of Albemarle Street flat and disappeared.

Desperate to know what happened to Mark, his uncle, old Mr Hunt, appeals to Jack Haldean.  Inspector Bill Rackham of Scotland Yard thinks it’s a thankless task.  Perhaps, says Jack, but why should Mark Helston vanish?  And the Jack finds a body…



And the rest of the book is so much more mayhem and confusion, as you’d expect.  As you’d also expect, Jack sorts it all out in the end, but only after being brilliant and incredibly brave, bless him.

The idea(s) for Trouble Brewing came from a few places.  One, there’s my love of coffee.  I love tea, too, as any Mancuinian worthy of the name does, but I do like my coffee and it grows in South America, which (to quote Noel Coward in Nina From Argentina) is exotic.  I’d just read Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure which is a terrific book and hugely recommended.  Anther spur was a half-remembered throwaway line in a Sherlock Holmes story which says that some bloke or other walked out of his house and vanished.  (My private theory about that one was that he got caught in a tractor beam from the Starship Enterprise on one of its frequent trips back in time, but that’s another story.)  Another inspiration was the student hall I lived in years ago, on Gower Street in London.  I absolutely loved the place and I had a definite twinge of guilt about putting a body there.  Ho hum.

Anyway, if you heard a popping sound during the week, that was me taking the cork from a bottle of champagne.  Trouble Brewing has arrived and, although I suppose I should have celebrated with coffee… well, there’s other drinks, aren’t there?  It’s out in bookshops and on Amazon now and, if you fancy a signed copy, just pop onto the Book page of the website, click the Buy A Signed Copy button (this applies to US readers too) and I’ll leg it down to the Post Office for you.

Cheers!

The Woman In Black

I celebrated Easter Monday by going to see The Woman In Black. Good grief, that’s as scared as I ever want to be in a cinema!  The interesting thing is that’s there’s no gore, no revolting sights, just good old fashioned creaky chairs and the sense of Something behind every door.

Lucy, Elspeth and myself spent the entire film wrapped round each other trying not to go Eek!  The director says it’s his attempt to revive the old Hammer Horror genre (of which I have very fond memories) but I can’t honestly remember Hammer Horrors ever as being as scary as this.  The great thing is that there’s a lot of hoary old clichés in the film, such as the Old Deserted House in the marshes, a hero who will insist on investigating noises (instead of prudently ducking underneath the bed-covers) an unfinished story that needs completion – all of which could die the death because we’ve seen them so many times before.  Believe you me, all the elements spring into vivid life and it all adds up to a really nerve-wracking film.

I do wonder, though, if it’s a bit too nerve-wracking.  The wonderful old Dracula films with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee touch a very soft spot with a lot of people my age and the conventions they set up (such as no matter how many times Van Helsing sees off Dracula, he’ll find a way of popping back) are oddly endearing.  Terry Pratchett’s vampire, Otto, owes a lot to the daft conventions of the Dracula films.  Otto is a photographer for the Ankh-Morpork Times and every time his flashgun goes off, he disintegrates into a pile of dust, to be revived as the little vial of blood he carries round his neck hits the ground and smashes.

I can’t think of laughing lightly at The Woman In Black. But it’s really good.

Trouble Brewing

Happy Easter everyone!  I hope, despite the pretty dodgy weather we’re having here in glamorous Manchester, that the Easter bunny called.

I had a nice surprise just before Easter, in the form of an email from the publisher, Severn House.  The US Library Journal has picked seven Severn House books (if you see what I mean) out of the nine historical mysteries they’re recommending as hot summer reads.  And (der, der) Trouble Brewing, Jack’s latest, is amongst them.

Wow.

Trouble Brewing is out at the end of this month in the UK and in August in the US, but if any American reader fancies a copy before then, you can order a copy from the “Books” section of the website.

What I really want to tell you is that it’s a brilliant book, dead clever with a knock-out plot and ace characters, one of whom is a real Bentley Boy, all fast cars and life-on-the-edge, madly glamorous and incredibly good looking, but that sounds a bit like blowing my own  trumpet.  Ah well.

Here’s the link to the Library Journal list for the nine books:  Historical Mysteries.

And this is what they said about Trouble Brewing.

Gordon-Smith, Dolores. Trouble Brewing. Severn House. Aug. 2012. 256p. ISBN 9780727881694. $28.95.

Appropriate title: Mark Helston has made a success of himself at Hunt Coffee Limited. Then, in January 1925, he vanishes after leaving his Albemarle Street flat, and, Scotland Yard’s shoulder shrug be damned, his uncle asks series regular Jack Haldean to find him. Instead, Jack finds trouble—and we’re not talking competition from Starbucks.

Fairly Odd Measurements

Lucy has arrived home for the Easter holidays from Leeds Uni, bringing with her, amongst other things, such as a suitcase full of laundry, Rang and Dale’s Pharmacology (Sixth edition) a weighty tome full of must-have information for the earnest enquirer into vancomycin, endocannanonoids, presynaptic modulation and other words I have to have prior warning of before I attempt to pronounce them.  (When I say it’s a weighty tome, I’m not joking; it turns the scales at just shy of five and a half pounds) It’s the last place you’d think of looking for comic relief.

However, the section on General Principles of Bioassay occurs a note on standard measurements.  Quoting J.H. Burn writing in 1950, Rang and Dale say:

Pharmacologists today strain at the king’s arm but swallow the frog, rat and mouse, not to mention the guinea pig and pigeon.  Burn was referring to the fact that the king’s arm had been abandoned as a standard measurement of length, whereas drug activity continues to be defined in the dose needed to cause vomiting in a pigeon or cardiac arrest in a mouse.

Leaving to one side the picture of a laboratory stocked by hurling pigeons and expiring mice, Rang and Dale then weigh in with a footnote worthy of Terry Pratchett.

More picturesque examples of absolute units that Burn would have frowned on are the PHI and the mHelen.  PHI stands for “Purity In Heart” index and measures the ability of a virgin pure-in-heart to transform, under appropriate conditions, a he-goat into a youth of surpassing beauty.   The mHelen is a unit of beauty, one mHelen being sufficient to launch one ship.

However, it was the Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who said Helen had a “face that launched a thousand ships,” whereas, according to Homer, the Trojan fleet consisted of 1,186 ships. That means Helen herself measures 1.186 mHelens of Beauty. Shakespeare had a crack at a beauty index but, in a defeatist sort of way, immediately gave up the task as hopeless. (“Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day?  Thou art more lovely…” etc.)  Which means what could be called the S.D. index never took hold.

Clive James, when considering the work of the futurologist, Herman Khan (ie, Kahn told us what was going to happen in the future) proposed that Herman Khan’s favourite measurement of time, an auto-extruding temporal unit (As in, “This is gonna happen fivetenfifteentweenytwennyfive years from now”) should be called a Hermie, a  measure that ensured by the time it was fivetenfifteentweenytwennyfive years from now we’d have all forgotten what Hermie had said so Hermie could carry on predicting without anyone harshly pointing out that Hermie Got It Wrong.

This is a game anyone can play.  I’ve got two standards of measurements of my own.  One’s the W.I. (not the Women’s Institute) but the Wodehouse Index where, granted that PG Wodehouse’s books are infinitely re-readable, a book can be assessed on the W.I. scale.

Harry Potter is 10 on the W.I., as is Agatha Christie.  I was chuffed to bits when a critic for The Historical Novel Review gave Off The Record 1 on the W.I. by stating, in cold blood in print, that she’d enjoyed the book so much she’d re-read it. The Hunger Games, which I’ve just finished, is a roller-coaster read but scores zero on the W.I.  Now I’ve got to the point where Katniss is living in a sort of peace, I don’t want to do the journey with her again.  Much too exhausting.

The other Standard Measurement I’ve got was evolved with the kids on the school run, as A Diversion, as Legolas memorably says in Lord Of The Rings.  (That’s about 6 W.I.’s, incidentally).   It’s the K.O.C., or Kittens Of Cuteness Index, one kitten = one measure of cuteness.  For instance, a wriggly King Charles’ Spaniel puppy winding its lead round its owner’s leg is 3 K.O.C.’s, whereas a little girl in a sticky-out raincoat, carrying an umbrella   and sloshing through puddles is 10 K.O.C.’s.  Aw.