This fascinating post by GOB once more sensibly points people in the right direction with regards to writing (e.g. away from the word processor and towards a social life).

It takes as its chief example the decision about whether a budding writer should take the decision to attempt to get published by one of the major global publishing firms. The answer, unsurprisingly, is under no circumstances.

This is kind of ridiculous. Publishing houses are not supposed to be a last resort they are supposed to be a first choice.

Well, they’re not, rightly or wrongly.

I think the amount of time people working within that industry spend telling people that doing anything else is a “waste of time” or “vanity” gives the impression that unlike amateur commentators like GOB, Mr Lindsay and myself they have not run the numbers. All this despite the fact that a couple of blogging agents clearly have run the numbers within the past couple of months.

And yet they are blind to the fact that no aspiring writer with any sense would take time or trouble to put their manuscript under their noses.

I think too many people still consider the publishing behemoths to be the only game in town and that’s got to stop.

They’re not. They’re not even the best game in town of the available choices. There’s considerable evidence to say that they are, in fact, the worst game in town.

Go figure.

The Book: Within: Confinement by Colin Hamilton

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: In a future where the human race has become bloated and overconfident over the entire Sol system, no one questions the government’s discreet disposal of criminals. Having very much committed a crime herself, Alyson Valentine find herself enduring the harsh reality of her new home, the Longboat class prison ship Rigor Mortis. With no idea where the ship is heading, Alyson finds the issue of trust most valuable yet desperately unattainable in a world where no one is innocent, and everyone has secrets. A dark, unsettling survival story focusing around a group of prisoners whose only relation to each other is to survive against all odds. Psychotics, prison guards, an alien monstrosity and the very demons within themselves they must escape to survive, lest the darkness take them.

Preview Available: The nice lulu one. Very presentable.

Why buy this? On the strength of a competent prologue which showed promise.

The Product: A nice Royal format PBack with a bespoke cover and an effort to produce some front matter. Proofing not always consistent, nice serif font, indenting haphazard, dialogue assignation often woefully executed.

The Nitty Gritty: A little poking around unearths an ominous fact about Colin J. Hamilton. He’s young. Not as in “a young writer” which is the category I crawl towards as I clock up 32 summers. No. He is young as in “early 20s”. It doesn’t take long before the inevitable signs of the arrogance of youth start to rear their ugly head.

The arrogance of youth is a by product of the ignorance of how to do things properly and the lethargy towards putting in the requisite effort. I know this because it is precisely the things that defined the limitations of my own early efforts. My second novel was certainly no better nor worse than this one but then I’m not asking people to shell out to buy my second novel. In fact the first novel of mine that’s available to buy Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey was my fourth. Further its status, I would say, is “there if you really want it” but it’s not something I’m pushing by any means.

Why for? You may ask.

Well, the thing about stories that are difficult to finish is that they went wrong in the start. And this baby totally goes off the rails very quickly. The problem comes at the moment of rising action. You may have been writing away quite happily up until the point that one person shoots another but the actual moment of the shooting presents a unique mental problem for a writer.

All you can write is:

Murdoch pulled the trigger.

Or similar. Somehow four words don’t seem enough to convey the weight of the situation. But as writers it’s all we have. As writers it’s all about a long bit asking what if this happens. Something happens. And then it’s all autopsy.

Once we’re in the grip of that we can write better. Until then we often falter at the point where the action is supposed to be happening and stretch out the moment in writer’s bullet time finding ourselves, somehow, unable to commit to the end of the action and leaving us, therefore, unable to consider the fallout.

This happens in Within: Confinement so many times I lost count. It leads to some hyperbolic prose with words misused and also to some situations which seem to the observant reader to be ridiculous. The idea of a co-ed deep space prison ship where the chief penal tool is boredom is kind of bizarre. Conditions on board ship are basic but I’ve heard of tourists who’ve been kept in worse conditions.

The thought not devoted to the exact mechanism and logisitics of deep space penal servitude seems to have been poured into considering some very badly explained emotional wrangles between the main character Alyson and her cellmate Viggo. I was reminded constantly of how much more fun I had reading Harry 20 in 2000 AD in the early 80s and how if Hamilton had read it too then he could have busked the prison life bit by robbing it all from there.

But no instead for about 100 pages of the 300 odd the novel consists of Alyson and Viggo are bored and have boring emotional problems. After that the ship crashes, but we’re already bored and we don’t care. As the prisoners struggle to escape we struggle to finish the next sentence. Some rather tedious things occur and then the story ends.

I was pulling for this story. The prologue shows some potential. I wanted to be into it. I want to be into every book I buy. I’m so not into this it’s unbelievable. As the prose gets toward the end you can read the improvement in Hamilton’s style but that’s not good enough. We’re already lost in not caring about these dull people and their weird hang ups.

I think authors who are considering the publication of a very early work really need to leave it in a drawer for a year or two and then get some dispassionate advice on what’s wrong. Then they need to wonder whether the juice of publication is worth the squeeze of reworking. It probably won’t be.

The sad thing is Hamilton will have to work super hard to get me to consider another of his publications and I don’t think that’s the calling card he wanted to be leaving.

JM Patterson… Come On Down!
Till Noever… Come On Down!
Misti Rainwater-Lite… Come On Down!

A recent paycheck has mounted you onto the lulu POD carousel of fate and your precious treatises: Darkling, Continuity Slip and Mordiscado will be in my hands within the next 10-14 days! This means that you have one (1) meagre revenue figure added to your balance and are one step closer to that elusive $20 threshold for actually receiving a royalty cheque. Woo!

Reviews to follow.

Which means that I have to crack on with the end of Within:Confinement.

A school librarian writing in the Washington Post bemoans the loss of the attentive reader from the ranks of youth. Two words for you: Harry Potter. What is a single defining snowballer of this particular phenomena? Well, any parent will be glad to tell you that they love Potter because he got their intractably illiterate offspring hoovering up the written word because it was “cool”.

Of course we hardened cynical veterans of the great rejection slip war of the early millenium may pour scorn on Wizard Potter. We rightly berate his adventures for being written in pedestrian quasi-Mary Sue-esque prose. We have a right to feel bitter thant he was elevated above the norm in sales merely by the whims of fad. Nevertheless he is still given gratitude by parents for appropriate reasons. Unless you’re a natural born reader, or brought up in a reading environment, or living in a reading environment, you tend not to read these days.

I used to read a bunch when I was a child because my dad’s a writer, my mum’s an English graduate and I was bored without TV or PlayStation for long periods of time. Do not underestimate the power of boredom and frustrated hanging about in shifting book units. I don’t really have time to read anything much any more fictionwise or indeed non-fictionwise. I have a book that I quite enjoy reading and one that is a bit of a pain on the go at the moment and I can’t find the time. I just can’t.

Between work, games consoles, sharing time with Mrs Monkey, watching The Lost Room, watching the DVDs Lovefilm send me, going to the Cinema to justify my subscription pass, buying food and writing my own stuff there isn’t much time left to bury my nose in a book. No wonder airport bookstores do so well, and books are sold as holiday reading and so on and so forth. The amount of time the average person gets to sit around doing absolutely nothing and having no other means of entertainment is very small. It was one thing when there were only four tv channels but now there are dozens and the times when there is absolutely nothing on, although relatively frequent, are fillable with other pursuits.

This is not because reading is a low-priority, high-overhead activity. The accepted wisdom is that reading is brain-tiring and less exciting that the technicolour vistas of the moving image. These myths were mostly propogated by people trying to sell you moving images. In fact, when I sit down to read, if what I’m reading is to my taste, I find it very hard to stop reading it. The reason I avoid reading is the same reason I avoid RTS world building games. Not because I’m bored by them but because I’m waaaaay too interested. I could spend days clicking around on Theme Sim Organisation Tycoon with Roller Coasters and like a lotus eater I would starve my body because I would be too caught up in the wonderful dream. This is the source of that reviewers shibboleth “unputdownable”. Reading is not difficult because it’s a prestige activity for brainy people. It’s difficult because if an author speaks to you it’s very hard to stop listening.

Mr Washington Library Worker seems to have run into the hard end of the phenomenon known as “everything is a minority taste”. It doesn’t matter how many million people tune into the end of Celebrity Big Brother the majority of people simply don’t give a flying one. If you’re a librarian it will always seem that readers-for-pleasure are a dying breed because reading is a pastime that most people simply don’t give a flying one about either.

You can have a television on as a passive noisemaker. It burbles on about DIY and celebrity gossip unaware that you are actually doing the washing up or wiffling away on a mobile phone or doing a sudoku or filling in a job application form. A book is a much more demanding companion. You cannot passively let the book get on with reading itself in the background.

Were it as difficult to watch television as it is to read no doubt less people would do it. As a great example of this look at cinema attendance. For a while back there it looked like cinema was dead. Only by creating “event” movies did the film industry keep its head above water.

The unfortunate fact is that given any wholly cultural artefact the majority of people on the planet won’t give a crap about it. This applies right the way from some anonymous garage band’s demo right up to major world religions. No one has a controlling share in any viewpont or opinion of any kind on this planet at least 7 out of 10 people queried on point x didn’t know what the hell all the fuss was about.

This doesn’t stop the betterment worker predicting doom and preaching a kind of intellectual survivalism for writers everywhere. The fact is the changes in technology open up new avenues but the people at the end of the avenues are the same apathetic, self-obsessed idiots who feel just as victimised as you but in a slightly different way that they ever were.

That’s not news.

If we are to have any hope for the future it is hope for ourselves any tiny piece of luck we get is, in the grand scheme of things, a gigantic boon. In some ways people who start with hundreds or thousands of readers and go up to millions if they’re lucky are missing an important piece of information. In my world every individual reader counts and I write for them. If I’d started with an audience of hundreds I might never have thought about them as individuals at all…

Courtesy of The Rejecter

If your writing is good, it doesn’t matter at all if you have no past experience in publication.

With the following caveats:

1) “Good” is not a standardised and empirical metric.
2) What may be considered good will change on a day to day basis based on arbitrary and unfair criteria such as mood, length of queue at coffee stall, no. of arguments participated in and anything else that is bugging the reader on the day of submission.
3) Could be great writing actually but there are only so many hours in the day and on the off chance that your great writing cannot be confidently placed in one of those available hours it will still be rejected.
4) By the way did I mention that as an agent even if I do agree to represent you that doesn’t mean your book is sold.

I’m tired of everyone pretending that quality has all that much to do with acceptance.

As Susan Kelly once pointed out people sometimes use the apparent quality of your prose to give you the old heave ho.

Thanks to Gareth for that one.

Now could we call a moratorium on that particular unhelpful and crappy piece of writer’s mythology.

Please.

After a bewildering number of recommendations from the most unlikely of people the better half and myself went to see Miss Potter on Saturday night hoping for something to touch us after The Pursuit of Happyness left us less than impressed earlier in the week.

I am pleased to say that Ms. Zellweger and co. did the trick. The film made comments about so many things that it is really no wonder that everyone comes away from it with something. One of the things it said to me, for example, was about the business of writing (what a surprise).

The film opens with Miss Potter making her way round the publishers of London trying to find a home for her children’s book. Oh how times have changed. To sit down with the people who run the press and be told that your work is not for them in person, immediately. What is so disheartening is that a century later you have to get told to go away by the automated compliment slip of a third party months after the fact. Obviously the world is a different place now but it was quite funny to think that not so long ago people met with publishers face to face.

More wry humour could be extracted from the scene in which the young and enthusiastic Ewan McGregor runs through the most optimistic forecast of Miss Potter’s likely sales pattern that any writer today could wish to hear. Mr. McGregor’s character makes the naive assumption that a book’s selling rate will be constant throughout the book’s shelf life and in perpetuity. Whilst Miss Potter’s books may, indeed, have reached a happy plateau at this time most writers, publishers and agents of the past half century will curl their lip in a patronising smirk at this notion. At one point within the relatively recent past it was thought that a book’s sales in the first 8 hours of release were crucial to determiing whether a book was worth stocking or not.

For those who wish to be reminded that once upon a time there was a gentler age and who wish to ignore the possibility of all that literary talent squandered below stairs in turn of the century Britain Miss Potter’s an interesting biopic of the original female children’s author.

Betterment Worker points me in the direction of an article by Zadie Smith that reminds me why it is I am not that keen on literary fiction. It’s that smug way that it has a subtext of “hey everyone look at me I’m probing the state of the human condition!”. Whenever a lit fic author then writes non-fiction such as essays this tendency transfers from the implicit to the explicit which is 0.128965% less irritating.

This marginal advantage is immediately lost when one starts navel gazing over the nature of writing and authors and fiction and makes any kind of comparison between writing and furniture design and assembly. Now don’t get me wrong, I am totally guilty of the former but not in order to diagnose some self-obsessed neurosis regarding the human condition or the state of one’s own existential health. My use of this introspection is entirely mercenary. I want to know how to be better at what I do.

I don’t consider my duty to the reader except that people should be neither confused nor bored nor both by what I write. I don’t wonder how much my ego impinges upon or corrupts my ability to write, possibly it does but technically speaking it shouldn’t too much bearing in mind what it is I write.

Thing is, I don’t write, or attempt to write literature. I write generic fiction trading in classic archetypes. If I say anything about the human condition then it is by accident. I don’t think if you sit there and try to write some treatise on the essential ability of power to corrupt and disguise it as fiction you will necessarily enjoy success. You’re trying to tap into something spiritual intellectually. That’s my belief. That’s why I stick to genre, the old style, the ancient. Look into that particular abyss and if you’re lucky that abyss looks back into you.

Possibly.

Navel gazing over. Pubguy shares with us an interview with R.W.Ridley who tells us his first novel has sold 700 copies. If any of mine ever sell anything like that I will consider my career to have reached its zenith. Disclaimer: actually I will probably just write another and hope to sell 800 but anything over 100 seems to be in the realms of impossibility at present.

We find out that Mr. Ridley is someone who used to work in marketing who is married to an editor… hmmm.

And what would a round up be without a word from Mr. Lindsay which rather succinctly tells us who really controls the careers of authors who are published via the traditional route. Sad but true.

Enjoy Monday folks.

It seems Grumpy Old Bookman has been experimenting with Lulu. Way back about March/April last year I wrote up my first timer’s progress with publishing Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey but the system has been significantly tweaked since then so maybe with my next effort I’ll rewrite the guide.

I have to say that for someone so au fait with the near impossibility of getting published the usual way he dismisses the meagre sales an author of fiction may make through lulu out of hand rather quickly. 8 people I don’t know personally have bought copies of my books. That’s 8 more than could have bought them sitting around in some slush pile. My only review so far seemed quite positive. I’m calling the canon a success on this evidence.

The reason for this? Well, to return to one of my favourite examples, when I started reading Stephen King where did I begin? Carrie? Oh no. The Shining? Nup. Christine? Salem’s Lot? No and no again.

I started reading King with The Dark Half. And then burrowed with some little glee through the back catalogue. If I was to pick outstanding King books to start off with The Shining, It, Desperation and Eyes of the Dragon would have to be great picks. After that you can sit through the rest of his stuff maybe forgiving the flakier parts (It, for example, gets very very flaky towards the end) but the point is that the way into an author’s canon is rarely if ever on a publication by publication basis. If there’s one thing I’ve learned the splash doesn’t come until you’ve been churning stuff out for years, if it comes at all.

I also felt it was a bit short sighted to state that people just don’t buy from Lulu direct. Well, no, today they don’t. In the great self-publishing battle, however, Lulu seem to be securing their place as “the name” in online self-publishing. From business ethics to value for money lulu are scoring high and that means that one day people will know that if you want to find a self-published book lulu is where you will go.

There I go again, taking the long view.

Betterment Worker is coming off like some long lost cousin of Sean Lindsay in his latest post. Although he does try to end his rant against the cliched ego-driven writer with an encouraging endorsement to “get good”. In the interest of balance I would like to say that while writers with a fundamental talent should hone it and discipline themselves to know the likelihood of their failure, there are those who would be much better off finding a new hobby.

I think the rule of thumb here is that if you are compelled to write despite all the very good reasons why you shouldn’t and people haven’t taken you aside and told you that your latest opus might, uh, benefit from a few revisions (i.e. it sucks) then you are probably okay. Otherwise give up now.

Here was my moment of realisation that I was probably okay. I gave a copy of a book in Word format to the man who later became my copyright lawyer (he stores my evidentiary copies in case anyone tries to rip me off). He took it home and everything went quiet for about a month and a half. Then one day he came up to me and said:

“I started reading your book.”

“Oh,” I said. I’ve found it discourages people to cling to them begging for feedback. Playing it calm often gleans better results.

“I have to say,” he said, “I was quite relieved.”

“Relieved?” I still didn’t know where this was going.

“Well,” he said. “It reads like a proper novel, you know, like a book. There was this guy I shared a flat with in college and he wrote a book and gave it to me to read. It wasn’t even in English as far as I could tell… I mean, the words were English but they didn’t make any sense. So when you gave me yours I was kind of scared because I like you a lot more than I liked him and I was worried that this might be the same kind of thing. Then I would have had to be polite about it. And I didn’t really know how. As it happens I don’t need to because I’m actually really enjoying it. Which is a weight off.”

And that’s all the endorsement I ever needed. People telling you your work is “very good” is nice but how do you know if they’re bullshitting? People saying that as it happens your book is readable and they were afraid it might not be is a whole other bag of fish.

And so finally to our weekly reminder of why it is we should all pack up and go home from the previously mentioned Mr Lindsay. Now I know that this was the most yellow and brittle of straw polls but if you believe in chaos mathematics (that any small iteration of a chaotic system is just a reduced shape image of the larger system) then you can see that 88% of any given sample is likely to not even be actively buying books to read at all. Only 3% of that sample are apt to give new authors a chance.

I’m sure that with a more accurately designed poll and a larger sample we could add a decimal point and three or four decimal places to those percentages. But the general picture is gloomy indeed, as if we needed telling.

The question now uppermost in my mind is exactly how many random commentators, respected literary pundits, and workers in publishing do we need shouting at the casual and illiterate amateur before they’ll give up and start working on their “X Factor” auditions.

Could I just take a moment to hurl vitriol and invective at those people who dismiss self-publishing with the notion that:

If your book is good enough it will probably find a publisher.

This is bollocks. If you want to know why, well, scroll down a way and you will have all the evidence you need to take such a statement out of “sketchy” and into “just wrong”.

About three times today I have encountered the specious intelligence that “self publishing gives an author an unrealistic expectation of success relative to the orthodox publishing field”.

No.

Authors give authors an unrealistic expectation of success. Orthodox publication does guarantee more sales of a first effort than self-publishing but with an important caveat. Taking into account the prejudices of this author and also those of the referred author I point you to Betterment Worker who puts the case in point rather succinctly.

Essentially getting that first fiction sale is about the crappiest prize you could ever hope to win. Excuse us self-published types for eschewing it in favour of something less exploitative.

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

Now that NaNo 2006 is but a dim and slightly uncomfortable memory it seems like a good time to refresh the writing tips section. Last time I promised that this article would return to looking at archetypes.

Before we begin a couple of caveats.

1) This is divergent from the continuous exercise we have been carrying through thus far. It’s a bit of an info dump so there probably won’t be any cheerful friendly exercises for you to do.

2) This is all based upon aspects of Jungian psychology and also the work of Joseph Campbell to a certain extent. I have slightly modified some terminology to be gender neutral.

Basically this is going to be a bit of a think piece.

There are those who would say that looking at the wiring under the board is entirely pointless. Why analyse why you tell stories? they ask. You should be concentrating on the story, not the psychological underpinnings of stories, they admonish.

Maybe they are right.

However, when I was 17/18 years of age and embarking on my first “proper” novel (which will never see the light of day *shudders*) I was filled with that rhetoric of the young. Do something new! Do something radical! Break all the rules!

Now I’m not for one second claiming that had I done some thing old, safe and followed the rules my first work would have been any better. It might have been slightly less embarrassing though. Besides, it is, I’m afraid, monumentally arrogant to try to start your career by defying convention and breaking the rules. If you don’t know what the rules are it’s also a bit sad and, indeed, stupid.

Maybe one day I will return to the task of trying to freshen up people’s minds by defying convention and trying something terribly avant-garde. Or I may come up with some ingenious new twists and tricks to keep my writing fresh. For the last five years I have been re-schooling myself to learn rules and to understand them before I go breaking them again.

Apart from lessons on grammar and style, and there will be an article on that later on in this series, I also learned how stories were put together and what happens in a person’s mind when they write or read a story.

I don’t know whether it will be of benefit to anyone else but it certainly won’t do any harm. It’s actually of major use to me in resolving examples of “the doozy” (see previous articles) because if you deconstruct your story and its characters you’ll often find that the doozy comes about from the not uncommon dilemma of having a story with a logical psychological conclusion which is not pleasing to the author.

In my case once I’ve worked this out I have three options. Change the story, stick to the rules, break the rules. However in the case of the latter I would caution any writer that you will probably be able to sense why the most obvious rule break would be in some way “wrong” or “not feel satisfying”.

It could be that you find this information of no use whatsoever. I don’t know. I’m the only writer I ever encountered who took it to these lengths.

So first of all let’s get it straight what an archetype is. Well, basically archetype comes from Ancinet Greek and loosely translates as “Original Model”. It has long been used to describe certain commonly recurring characters in stories, later Jung used them as a tool in analysing psychological disorders.

Of course as the term originated in the world of storytelling and migrated to psychology where work was carried out with the concept that work inevitably found its way back to the source. Leading many people to psychoanalyse stories.

Not least among these was writer and academic Joseph Campbell who proposed the idea of the “monomyth” the one story upon which all other stories are merely reflections.

Depending on your exact definition of “story” there are many other popular numbers for how many basic stories there are, or even the number of stages in your basic plot, for example The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations gives one guide or the 20 basic plots but this article from The Straight Dope pretty much sums up how much weight you can give each of these theories as “authoritative”.

I would, however, pay some special attention to Campbell’s monomyth because the amount of research that was done to establish the theory gives it a little more rigor than some of the other “finger in the air” guides. In the end though it’s of limited use to think that all you’re doing is telling the same story over and over. It’s more a diagnostic tool than an inspirational one. If you want inspiration go higher. The 36 dramatic situations should be food for thought.

For now though, we are interested in the diagnostic. After all you wouldn’t be reading an article about writing if you were happily writing away.

So reassuring thing #1. You are just going through the monomyth somehow. So that’s alright then. There’s security in knowing you’re treading where people have trodden before.

More importantly, you are using archetypes in your story. If you can find them then you can tell how orthodoxy would say they should be behaving and you can see if there’s some sort of a problem in that. (There usually is in my experience if you’re feeling “stuck”.)

Jung, and most people who base their work on Jung, split their archetypes into “male” and “female”. I always find this irritating as it can lead to you wondering if your characters are even the right sex when that shouldn’t be the concern. After beating my head against this particular brick wall for some time I began to realise that the solution to the problem was to come at it backwards.

“Female” archetypes are often characters whose preoccupation is emotional and whose issues stem from emotional troubles.

“Male” archetypes are often characters whose preoccupation is active or logical and whose issues arise from physical/logical challenges.

So when we say “male” and “female” we may as well say “thought” and “emotion”. Then a male character can adopt a “female” role and vice versa without tedious explanatory paragraphs.

For example the “young martial arts initiate in a foreign land” translates a certain emotional spirituality into the usually masculine role of “warrior”. Often these heroes are “feminised” with elaborate costumes, shoeless feet, long hair blah blah. I got halfway through that concept and got bored. See, a male character is a male character and if he happens to have emotional motivations that does not make him “feminine” or “female in man’s clothing” or whatever. It’s precisely these lazy trends in thinking that make stereotypical characters in movies such a bore.

If you just laid it down, this is a man with an emotional concern, from the get go it liberates you from having to think too much about whether a man would do this or that or whether a woman would or what have you. There will be cultural factors of course but these should only ever, I believe, be represented as impositions on a character by other characters. They can’t be viewed as stemming from the character’s sex.

So we have “logical” and “emotional” archetypes.

Drama emerges from conflict and hence the axis around which any story will turn will be a conflict between the protagonist and the other characters. The amount of conflict between one character and the next is the degree to which each character is a friend or an enemy of that protagonist.

The protagonist is the person who will determine what all the other characters in the story end up being about. You will, of necessity have to bind that character up with some archetypal characteristics so get used to it. So those characteristics can be listed fairly easily.

Is the protagonist’s main problem emotional or logical?

Is the protagonist’s nature to be more logical or more emotional?

Is that problem or nature at odds with the cultural perception of the role of their sex?

Is the protagonist young or old?

How much power does the protagonist wield?

What is the protagonist’s role within their family?

These questions are absolutely vital in finding out about our character. I said I wouldn’t really be using the Arturo Gatwick story here but we can apply these questions easily to Arturo and find out a bit more about him and what other characters might fit well into a standard story about him.

Is the protagonist’s main problem emotional or logical?

Remember that Arturo’s main problem is that he finds himself heir to a possible magical inheritance left to him by his grandfather. This is a question of what to do about a situation and is typically therefore a non-emotional concern, in the main.

Is the protagonist’s nature to be more logical or more emotional?

Well from the fact that Arturo’s main problem, the thing that put him in the story in the first place, was finding a lock for a key to fit into we’d probably regard his nature as quite logical. He’s not primarily trying to resolve his feelings for his grandpa he thinks he’s just trying to find a keyhole.

Is that problem or nature at odds with the cultural perception of the role of their sex?

So no to both.

Is the protagonist young or old?

Well he’s no spring chicken he’s probably in his mid thirties or early forties. This means that there will be a mixture of characters younger and older than him all around. If he was very young most other characters would be older than him if very old vice versa and these have implications for the type of story that ends up being told.

How much power does the protagonist wield?

Not much. The average for a normal human being in the modern West. Although that’s just in this universe. The problem is in the other universe there is potential for so much more.

What is the protagonist’s role within their family?

Well we know Arturo as “The Grandson” so despite his age he is actually seen as something of a young stripling with his life in front of him as far as family roles go.

So if we were to describe Arturo’s archetype he is actually a relatively inexperienced (lifewise) but mature, logical thinker with the potential to wield much power in another world.

So what we want to do is create characters who will provide Arturo with conflict. Arturo’s grandfather supplies several clues as to his likely role just by existing. Arturo is a man and Arturo’s grnadfather is his male line ancestor. In psychological terms this makes it likely that the grandfather represents what Arturo is in secret, or what he may become.

Now, grandpa was a magician of great power in the other world, but in this world he was a normal man with a normal life. Arturo has only ever experienced himself as a normal man with a normal life and so the opportunity to assume great power is made even more attractive by the fact that he would be following in the footsteps of his grandfather who is like a blueprint for Arturo himself.

Remember though, grandpa failed and fell from grace into this world. He also serves as a warning to Arturo. Should Arturo fail he may end up dead, or just stuck in this mundane world. So although grandpa is mostly reasurring there is also something somewhat ominous about grandpa’s story. Grandpa failed to face up to a great evil and now Arturo is somewhat expected to set right what went wrong in grandpa’s life.

In the usual run of things a protagonist needs to be set against an antagonist. In the story of Arturo Gatwick that antagonist is Darkling Stansted an evil magician from the other world who now rules there. We assume that he is a cruel and heartless man.

Although obviously he doesn’t have to be… that would definitely be unusual given the way these things generally are set up. This is one of those rules that you might not want to break before you’ve followed it.

The Protagonist/Antagonist continuity in Jungian Terms is the progress from self to shadow self. The self is the realised ultimate form of a person, their shadow self is the “hidden part” of a person those parts which are weak and stunted. To a story teller the antagonist is always more shadow than self and tries to attack the protagonist’s weaknesses.

All we really know about Darkling Stansted is that he is another magician, like Arturo’s grandfather, but that this magician has grown in power and status in the other world whilst Arturo’s grandpappy lived out a quite life on earth.

Of necessity this makes him as old or around the same age as Arturo’s grandfather. The two were peers in the past.

Because Darkling Stansted succeeded where Gatwick Snr. failed but is not Arturo’s relative in any way we can see that Darkling represents the likely consequence of not stepping up to the plate. If Gatwick doesn’t win, someone else will.

At its very core we can see that even in the interplay between Arturo, Gatwick Snr, and Darkling Stansted we have an allegory for the protagonist’s own fears and concerns about success or failure in life. Does one have to remain meek but unsuccessful as in the case of Gatwick Snr? Does power corrupt inevitably? Is it worth the bother? If Arturo fights Darkling and wins will he merely become another Darkling?

Of course in my last draft of the story Arturo doesn’t care about any of these concerns and just goes back to work. Although this speaks volumes about Arturo’s likely mental stability and life experience it does rather betray the person who, consciously or unconsciously, was just gearing up for precisely the debate the story instigates.

There are those who say that a writer of fiction should concentrate more on the fiction and less on the allegorical aspects of the craft. Tell the story, they say, let others worry about what it means.

To which I would reply:

If you are feeling that the work ahead of you is without direction; if you don’t know what to type next; if you have no idea why you even started this bloody writing thing in the first place, wouldn’t you take any help you could get?

Jung and a host of other anthropological and psychological luminaries would have us believe that all of our stories are psychological allegories at some level. If knowing that helps unstick something or offers a way forward then why not?

Breaking your story down into archetypes and then analysing what it is those archetypes generally do could be just the shot in the arm your novel needed.

To take examples from my own work (available to purchase of course in the shop) one where I just plugged away at the thing until it was finished and then again where I more consciously tried to write something a little bit more “traditional”.

Firstly let’s look at The Confessor’s Tale. I wrote this story at the end of my undergraduate degree in 1998. Part of the dissertation work I had been carrying out involved getting quite into all this Joseph Campbell monomyth stuff and it was while having these ideas floating around in my head that I sat down to write this book.

So let’s examine the dramatis personae and make some quick notes about their archetypal heritage.

Paul “Duffy” Duffield - Archetype: The Angel/Everyman, Features: Young hero, mid twenties, average life, acquires cosmic supernatural power.

Heather “Q.T.” Turner - Archetype: Tart (with heart)/Love interest, Features: Young, pretty, seemingly parentless, in a state of moral decline and decadence.

Marchosias - Archetype: Demon, Features: Looks pretty but made of evil.

Todd Marion - Archetype: Dark Father, Features: Unemotional, calculating, rich, powerful, amoral

Birdy - Archetype: Angel/Helper, Features: Appears young, dispenses gnomic wisdom, wields great power.

Fortune - Archetype: Dark Rival/Demon, Features: Another young, parentless character. Does evil out of fear.

The problem with this story is that people aren’t just metaphorical angels and demons they really are angels and demons in many cases. This takes away a comfortable moral relativity that often lends realism. The demon is not “good” in any way he is, by definition, “evil”. I mitigated this by stealing plays from Milton’s book. A human might not see evil straight if its wrapped up pretty.

Duffy is our protagonist and ranged around him are the archetypes of rivalry and assistance. The story is filled with father figures, brother figures, rivals and in the centre Q.T.

Q.T. is, in fact, one of only three female characters in the whole book. One of the others is like a first draft of her and the last is Q.T.’s friend. Essentially Duffy spends less time in the book engaging with the issues of femaleness and more with lofty cosmic concerns centring around the nature of father figures, friends, enemies and personal perception and morality.

He is a man who is also an angel but his wings seem to help him fulfil only the task of deciding what it is a man should be. This is all well and good and I’ve had some positive feedback regarding it. My appetite to turn the standalone into a sequel tells me I’m not happy with the final product and looking at it in this light tells me why.

Figure of the Sorcechanic on the other hand was written to fit into a particular simple shape and trajectory with certain well defined archetypal figures.

Dean Matheson - Archetype: The Young Hero, Features: Preoccupied with the death of his brother, artistic, thoughtful, courageous.

Neil Matheson - Archetype: The Ghost, Features: A source of both comfort and grief for Neil, is dead, was courageous but not as artistic or possibly as thoughtful as Dean.

Elzbyth Mathral - Archetype: Helper, Sister, Heir, Features: Heir to a quest although not to a throne, culturally defined in some quarters as second class by male characters, driven, orthodox thinker, fighter.

Laine - Archetype: Rogue/Helper/Trickster, Features: Pursued by some mysterious heavenly authority, appears to be evil but essentially good, challenges established modes of thought, strong, powerful, independent.

Vanir Shol - Archetype: The Evil Wizard, Features: Insubstantial, commands power over shadows, lives in remote tower, commands a power of physical imitation.

This was actually a pretty straightforward story to tell. Dean is preoccupied with the image of his dead brother, Vanir Shol is a master of illusions and misleads. Parallel to Dean discovering that obsession is illusion while grief can be real is a story in which Elzbyth Mathral learns to accept things at a level deeper than face value. In a way this comments upon Dean’s own acceptance that to be like one’s brother one does not have to accept the brother’s doom.

But then I knew that from the start. My desire to turn this into a series of books stems merely from the enormous fun I had writing the first one.

Anyway. That’s some examples of how symbols and ideas can be reflected in characters and thus turned into a story. In the next article I’ll be coming at the same theory the other way round to flesh out a more thorough plan for the story of Arturo Gatwick and the magical kingdom of Harroo.