Posts Tagged "E J Swift"

• Not just a pretty cover

  Cover Art

  Books are visceral things. If you’re browsing in a store, or online for that matter, the first thing that catches your attention is going to be the cover. As a writer, this is your book’s chance to make an impression, and you want it to be the right one. The question is: what is the right impression? Your vision of the book is by no means going to be the way everyone else sees it, or indeed how the publisher chooses to market it. Readers will have strong ideas about the way a character or place looks, regardless of how detailed the writer’s description; think of the upset generated by the casting of film adaptations. Personally, I don’t like the reissues of books with a cover image from the film adaptation, and always choose to buy a neutral edition instead. But I don’t mind drawings or illustrations of characters in the same way – perhaps because an illustration seems less concrete, and more of an interpretation, than a photographical portrait.

  

  Cover for OSIRIS - I was dead chuffed with this.

  When I first told people that OSIRIS was going to be published, one of the most common responses was: I wonder what the cover’s going to be. Speculation was particularly avid amongst the House of Swift, where we have long discussed the potential covers of my potential books (my dad having worked in animation and graphic design, we’re an opinionated bunch about such matters). The other question I got a lot was: Will you get to choose the cover? Doubtless for highly successful authors, there must be an element of control, but as a debut novelist, you can only hope it comes close to what you imagine. And actually I feel really lucky with the cover of OSIRIS. When I was sent the artwork my first thought was, wow, someone has come up with that vision from something I wrote… it was a very exciting moment. I thought that the artwork captured both the scale of the city and its claustrophobic atmosphere. But my mum, for example, was convinced it was going to be a blue-toned design, and seemed more surprised by the choice of yellow than anything else. (more…)

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• How do you like your villain?

  Villains

  This week we are considering villains, in particular how bad should your villain be. I love a good villain. Like most things when it comes to writing, the how much question comes down to the story you’re telling, and the perceptions of those characters within it. What constitutes a villain to one person may be a hero to the next. A character may have utterly reprehensible attributes, but in other ways be entirely charming (the classic example here would have to be Humbert Humbert in LOLITA). Villainy comes in many forms. It can be extremely dark but extremely funny. A villain can be a person, or a landscape, or it can be the dark side of a character’s nature.

  So how bad? It depends on the tone of your story. On the protagonist of your story. Here are just a few examples of excellent villain archetypes:

  1. The villain you kind of love.
     Example: THE ANUBIS GATES by Tim Powers. Deliciously zany villainy in the form of Horrabin (demented clown conducting sick and vicious experiments on people in the sewers of nineteenth century London, with a little assistance from Egyptian sorcerer Doctor Romany). Villains who are undeniably bad but despite their despicable actions, thoroughly enjoyable. This is the type of villain you know will eventually get their comeuppance – and the joy is all in finding out how it shall be delivered. (more…)

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• The life of a writer, now with added Panda Face

  Managing promotion vs. writing vs. your personal life.

  In a utopian world, the writerly life would involve lie-ins and leisurely mornings, perhaps commencing with a perusal of the world news in order to inform yourself, alongside a perfectly brewed double espresso or three before retiring to the Shed (because there would, of course, be a theoretical Writing Shed in the theoretical garden of the theoretical house). This world would contain no day job. Instead each day (wait – each weekday, for there would be weekends, in which fun things were done) would involve Actual Writing, conjuring up sentences and stories and plots and characters and dialogue and ideas and getting them down on the page.

  Alas, sadly this remains, and doubtless shall remain for some if not all time, the trappings of fantasy. Like many other writers, I juggle a day job with the creative side of writing and the business side of writing. And if you’re going to be a professional writer, the two go hand in hand. The creative side hardly needs explaining; but perhaps the greatest consensus on writing advice is to write often, and it’s not easy to carve a piece of time out of every day.

  

  Roald Dahl's writing shed - what every writer needs

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• The question is why

  Comics: Tights vs. existential angst

  I have to put my hands up at the start of this post and declare that my credentials to talk about comics stand at approximately zero (the credentials for existential angst I feel I can claim to be somewhat higher). Of the superhero film franchises, I’ve seen a few but by no means all, but I’ve never got into comics as a visual medium. Of what I have seen, I think it’s fair to say that both tights and angst feature strongly. There’s an aesthetic in these stories which is appealing – the masks, the paraphernalia, the exclusive powers, the generally cool stuff. And then there’s what makes those characters tick, which for me personally is the more interesting bit.

  If there’s one book that should be mentioned in reference to comics, it has to be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s a few years since I read it and my memory isn’t good enough to talk about it in detail, but quite apart from the (quite epic) journeys of its two brilliantly realized central protagonists, Sammy Clay and Joe Kavalier, Kavalier & Clay is a wonderful exercise in both the history of comics and what, at a particular point in history, they strove to achieve. Sammy and Joe, in discussing the hero of their own new comic book superhero (will he be a hawk? A lion? A tiger? They can’t decide), pinpoint the issue of what drives a superhero thus: (more…)

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• Everything is autobiographical and everything is fictional

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.

  This week’s topic is writing on cultures that are not your own, a subject which, rightly so, generates debate. Certainly writing on cultures not your own, as with writing anything that is not a direct personal experience, needs to be approached with care. Personally, I would love to write a novel set in Japan. Japan is a country I’ve wanted to visit for a long time; I’m intrigued by the culture and I studied the language for several years at school (sadly all I can remember now is a few hiragana, and that’s about it – I keep promising myself one day I will learn again). I’m drawn to books set in Japan – Murakami’s works being the obvious example, but another all time favourite is NUMBER9DREAM by David Mitchell (who lived in Japan for some years), set in Tokyo. But for me to write about life in Japan, or about any other culture which is not my own, I would naturally worry about getting the details right, and writing in a way that didn’t reinforce the stereotypes that are automatically embedded in any one culture viewing another.

  In this theoretical project there are some obvious things I could do to mitigate potential blunders – research being the first point of call. I would want to do my research thoroughly. Ideally I would like to visit the place I was writing about, but for most writers, financial concerns are going to limit the feasibility of travel. Fortunately, we are in a unique position compared to the vast majority of writers who have come before – for now we have the Internet. And with the Internet comes such a wealth of information available in the form of visual media, personal narratives, online magazines and podcasts and interactive maps and blogs – that there is no excuse for not doing your homework. (more…)

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• How do you like your heroes?

  "Anti hero" doesn't mean "bad guy"!

  Anti-hero is one of those terms that seemed really obvious when I looked at this week’s theme – taking it quite literally, the antithesis of heroic – but then I started thinking that it depends what you define as heroic, and I found this definition: “the central character in a play, book or film who does not have traditionally heroic qualities, such as bravery, and is admired instead for what society generally considers to be a weakness of their character”.

  The first part of the above is self-explanatory – the second part I found much more interesting in considering what makes a hero or anti-hero, because it argues that the perception of what is heroic, or not heroic, is down to the society in which you, or your characters, are living. The culture I’m part of traditionally idealises traits such as bravery and strength – the hero who fights for his or her castle/country/planet/children/lover, often making personal sacrifices to do so, and generally acting for altruistic reasons. When it comes down to big budget film industry, Hollywood is dominated by heroes who run around saving the world, sometimes in tights, sometimes in a fighter jet, sometimes in court. These characters might be heroic from the start, or they might discover heroic qualities within themselves along the way, but with the hero narrative you know by the end they are going to ‘come good’ and perform their world-saving destiny with suitable panache. (more…)

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• It’s okay for kids’ books to be fantasy – why not adults?

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  One of my first Saturday jobs was in the local library, and the best days were those on which new books arrived and would need to be opened and labelled and put out on the shelves. Unashamedly, I loved reading all the children’s picture books. Not only were they beautiful objects in themselves, but the illustrations conjured up such marvellous worlds, be it of the ocean (Rainbow Fish), small night-thief cats (Slinky Malinki, one of literature’s most excellent cats) or bigger cats (The Tiger Who Came To Tea). Those pictures are still ingrained on my mind. Of course, the wonderful thing about reading is that as you progress through the library shelves, the fonts grow smaller but the illustrations don’t disappear, they just move to inside your head.

  Growing up I was a voracious reader. 25 Summer Book Challenge? Check, and the rest. (Now if I manage 25 books in a year, it’s an achievement, and the tottering to-read pile grows ever more precarious.) There was the era of adventure stories, the Secret Sevens and the Nancy Drews; of fantastical stories, Ethel the Worst Witch and Narnia (though I was disappointed when I discovered Aslan was more-than-a-lion) and later there were brilliant young adult writers to discover: David Almond, Malorie Blackman, Garth Nix and Eoin Colfer. David Almond’s Skellig is a wonderful example of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. The alternative reality of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses is blisteringly heartbreaking. I love the Artemis Fowl books for their criminal mastermind antihero; the perfect antidote to Harry Potter (I read all of those too). And I’ve previously spent an entire post talking about my admiration of Philip Pullman.

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• The ones I wish I’d written

  Envy: Do you experience it as a writer? If so, how do you handle it?

  There’s that feeling you get when you finish a really amazing book and you think, damn that was good. And there’s that feeling you get when you finish a really amazing book and you think, damn that was good and I wish I’d written it.

  The answer to this week’s question: do you suffer envy as a writer, is of course an overwhelming YES. Who doesn’t? If there are writers out there who don’t suffer envy, I’m envious of them! There’s nothing worse than that feeling where you finish something and think, oh great. Why do I bother, because clearly I’ll never be able to write like that. Or where the writer appears to do effortlessly the things you struggle most with. So you sit around feeling morose for a while and maybe go and inflict your misery on some unfortunate relative or friend (But I will never be that good! you cry. Never! If they’ve got any sense they’ll send you away with a mandate to write at least 1,000 words by nightfall, preferably in silence.)

  Conversely, however, I think envy also spurs you on to write better. True, you may never attain the virtuoso, chameleon style of Margaret Atwood, or the maddeningly rich yet absolutely precise vocabulary of Cormac McCarthy, but you can at least try to do what you do that bit better.

  Coming back to the first point, I think there is a difference between the books you read and simply admire for their brilliance and the books you read and wish you had written. It doesn’t mean one is better than the other. The latter, for me, is the books that tap into something very close to your heart. Maybe it’s a subject you feel passionately about, or a particular character who resonates with you, or the depiction of a world you’d love to inhabit. (more…)

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• What if all the male characters posed like the female one?

  Dolls or action figures? Gender roles in popular culture.

  And so we come to gender roles in popular culture, about which many things could be said, but my housemate (a man) sent me the image below to get the ball rolling. I’ve seen a few variations of it kicking about the internet, but this one was especially pertinent given that it depicts comic book heroes.* And it does serve to highlight the general ridiculousness, and narrowness, of how women are portrayed in the media and popular culture.

  

  Gender roles is a topic that comes up over and over in conversation with friends, but it feels like it’s been more prevalent than ever in recent months (or perhaps that’s the influence of Caitlin Moran’s deeply excellent How To Be A Woman, a must-read for everyone, wherein she speaks upon Brazilians and the size of knickers amongst other things. In fact, if I could just quote from Caitlin Moran for the rest of this post, it would make life easier. She also makes me feel better about using copious quotas of exclamation marks).

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• If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need

  The Politics of Science Fiction: Eco-tastrophy.

  The ever inspirational Maria Popova (@brainpicker) today tweeted this gem, which inspired the title of my blog for this week. And today, with tributes flooding in for Maurice Sendak, it also seems an appropriate day to think about the call of the wild things.

  Aged seven, I intended to be a vet. In view of a general aversion to anything involving gore, this was always destined to be a distant aspiration, but me and my best friend of the time harboured strong delusions of becoming the next David Attenborough and walking the planet in search of Amur leopards and the like. I would still like to walk the planet in search of Amur leopards, but I’ve realized that a life of surgery, even upon cute furry things, is not for me. I have however become a gardener, and it’s a constant surprise how much enjoyment it brings me.

  

  ... the local wild things also like hanging out in the garden (any excuse for a cute fox picture must be taken)

  Yesterday the folk over at Pornokitsch put out a call for favourite childhood reads, and I cited The Animals of Farthing Wood – a story about a group of animals who have to band together and seek a new home when their habitat is destroyed. This also got me thinking. I might have added Watership Down, but the tragedy of furry rabbit deaths makes it too heartbreaking a book for a favourite. I wouldn’t define myself particularly as a writer of eco-tastrophy, but considering the evidence, it does seem inevitable that I would end up being influenced by environmental issues. (more…)

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