Girls can and will save the world. Such was the conviction that inspired Chimera, a tale unfolding against the real-life backdrop of anxiety about the disastrous impact of increasingly unhealthy industrial food and the rampant abuse of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, antidepressants and painkillers. The scene set, giving form to Chimera took unexpectedly long. I embarked on the book in February 2014 only to decide, a third of the way through, to retrace my steps and begin again. A tough decision when you have already written over forty-thousand words. In my approach to novel writing, being convinced of the story is key. It is the force that motivates me to continue telling it.
I enlisted the clear-sighted advice of Emjay Holmes about the initial chapters and I am very grateful for her input. A few chapters were read and discussed in critiquing sessions in the Geneva Writers Group. Thanks go to those members who attended and particularly to Susan Tiberghien for chairing the sessions. I finally finished the first version a year and a half later, in September 2015.
Editing the draft was halted by health problems. Heartfelt thanks for their care and attention go to the staff at the Inselspital and Pourtales Hospital as well as Dr Nathalie Calame, our family doctor. Ill-health, however short-lived, brings with it a feeling of vulnerability. It heightened the urgency to make my stories available to readers.
Back on my feet, I set aside the draft of Chimera and prepared In Search of Lost Girls for publication. The writing of five other novels (World o’Tales, Forget Me Not, Stories People Tell, People of the Forest and Local Voices) filled the interim before I finally picked up Chimera again, in March 2019, delighted at what I (re)discovered. Preparation for its publication is now complete and the novel should be available in the coming month.
For more information about Chimera including sample chapters click here.
What is a literary ‘genre’? Simply put, a convenient label that groups together a number of literary works that have common characteristics. Initially descriptive, those labels progressively become explicative and then prescriptive. They carve out literary creation into recognisable chunks and dictate how those can be perceived, marketed and distributed. Literary agents proclaim they are looking for this or that genre. Publishers specialise in certain ‘genres’ and channels of distribution index books according to a rigid set of genres with certain categories enjoying widespread popularity. Many readers gravitate to specific genres and are disappointed by novels that don’t fit the mould. This compulsion to shoe-horn novels into a set of pre-determined boxes glosses over the fact that novels don’t let themselves be so easily categorised. Despite commercial pressure and academic influence, the creative process of writing tends to lead to ambiguity when it comes to genre, if not outright promiscuity.
Identifying the genres of my novels
Identifying the literary genre of any of my novels has always been a pain in the neck. As was the pressure to ‘fit in’. I relish crossing boundaries and toying with ambiguity. Why should that surprise anyone when one of the central themes in my work is gender fluidity? My novels necessarily reflect several genres. Take Stories People Tell, for example. It has affinities to chick lit because it is about powerful young women and their relationships, although it has little of the sardonic humour that often permeates such fiction. It has magical elements and parallel worlds that come straight from fantasy, or rather supernatural fiction, as those elements are not central to the story. The novel has gay romance, relating, as it does, the lesbian relationships of the main characters and the difficulties of the LGBTQ community in society. At the same time, the novel is political in that it deals with democracy and empowerment especially in healthcare in the UK.
In service of telling a story
Revolt is always tempting if not salutary in circumstances involving institutions and set ways of thinking. One avenue, especially for the autodidact, might be to argue in favour of an ‘outsider’ literary category corresponding to ‘art brut’. Where such artistic work is produced by someone not versed in art history or au fait with current tendencies, someone who harnesses the creative force of being free of literary tenets. While thinking ‘outside the box’ is a key ingredient to novel writing, undoubtedly what has gone before is also an essential part of the mix and cannot be ignored. The anger of revolt might blind us to the arbitrary nature of such labels. I suspect the main lesson to take from the exploration of literary genres is not so much the need to align with or fight against the boundaries of a fixed genre, but rather to be able to recognise those elements that make up a recognisable genre so as to better employ them in all manner of combinations in the service of telling a story.
For the second voice I seek to echo, I have chosen a more challenging author, Erin Morgenstern and her debut novel, The Night Circus. There are a number of different approaches in Morgenstern’s work, so I have chosen one, the section entitled, Wishes and Desires (Pgs 160-161), in which Marco confronts Isobel about Celia’s new Wishing Tree. Written in the present tense and the third person, the point of view is omniscient, telling us about both Marco’s and Isobel’s thoughts and reactions. There is a narrator, but little divulges who he or she is, lest it be the confident, knowledgeable voice and the way the information is made known to the reader, but withheld from one or more of the characters.
Isobel’s responses to Marco are both trusting and naive. True. She loves him. But she expresses openly what she thinks, making her vulnerable compared to Marco whose thoughts are disclosed to the reader, but which he deliberately conceals from her. Yet all the same, by revealing his inner thoughts, albeit only half understood by him, he is presented to the reader as vulnerable, not towards Isobel but rather his opponent, Celia.
The Knight’s Sword (359 words)
When the door ghosts open sighing like an vagrant wind, it is Julia who sweeps into the tiny cubicle filling the space with her presence. Martin raises his eyes from the charm he’s concocting and almost swoons at the sight of the young girl.
“I wasn’t expecting a visit,” he stutters, his heart pounding.
“Why didn’t you warn me?” she asks, making no allowance for his evident agitation. She extracts a poster from her satchel and holds it out for him to see. Despite the dimness of the lantern, he discerns a sword impaled blade-down in a rock, the diamond-studded hilt quivering as if an unseen hand had just released it. Unlike the fake blades that often hang limp from the waists of knights on the stage, this one looks real and deadly. It is almost as if he can smell the fresh blood emanating from it.
“The Knight’s Sword,” he whispers, awed. “The dress-rehearsal was a wondrous affair.”
“Now you tell me,” she snaps. “Why didn’t you inform me?”
“It hasn’t opened yet,” he explains, unable to prevent himself from flinching, “and I’ve been so busy with my own performance. What’s more, I wasn’t sure you hadn’t had a hand in it. The illusion is so convincing. It tells a story all on its own. Just like your work does.”
“It’s his,” Julia whispers, half to herself, as she stands absorbed in the poster.
“Are you certain?” Martin asks.
She does not reply immediately. Instead, her eyes devour the sword as if it were a potent draught she could drink.
“I can sense the magic,” she muses. “I feel the power rippling from it. It penetrates to my very core.” She shakes her head. “I imagine a person not versed in deep magic could not perceive that power.”
Dismissing the insult just levelled at him, an idea strikes him, making him feel bolder. “Do you think he can sense your work like you do his?”
His question catches her off guard. She’d never thought of it from that angle. That the other might be aware of her through her work appeals to her. She smiles. (…)
More Notes
At some point, this task ceases to be an exercise and becomes a challenge. Telling the story takes over and ideas come that are no longer in the style to be imitated, additions and improvements that present themselves unbidden. The turning point, I suspect, was when Martin stutters in response to the sheer power of Julia’s presence. As a result, the reinvented story moves away from the near-disastrous, but tender love affaire as portrayed by Morgenstern to a more manipulative, darker tale.
Maud dusted off her husband’s photo and replaced him on the mantelpiece…
In the quest for a better understanding of one’s voice as a writer, Neil Gaiman suggests writing in the style of someone else. So I did. I found the exercise challenging and would willingly have skipped it. While I can recognise the voice of different authors, I have little experience of imitating them, at least not consciously.
I chose Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind, picking a page at random (67). What makes this short passage so typical of her style? The touch is light but intimate. She reveals Liza’s thoughts and feelings for Annie by her acts, by her words. The title functions as a leitmotif, especially in this extract, stressing Liza’s continued preoccupation with Annie. Liza can’t concentrate. She can’t read. And when she tries to listen to music, her thoughts circle back to Annie. She tries to fill her time, knowing full well what she is doing is not necessary. The narrative centres on Liza, her acts, her feelings, her thoughts and very little attention is paid to her surroundings. The words chosen are simple enough. The sentences are often short but vary in rhythm. There’s gentle music to the words.
Maud dusted off her husband’s photo and replaced it on the mantelpiece. Reclined in her armchair, she closed her eyes and wished for sleep, but none came. Instead, memories of their times together drifted through her mind. Unable to silence her past, she flicked through TV channels but found nothing of interest. There never was. He’d always been the one for telly. Not her. She picked up the unfinished scarf from her knitting basket, its colours his favourites, and ran her fingers over the wool then laid it back in its place. Her eyes were too weary to knit. What had he said? “I’ll be with you always.” Maybe I should let you go, she thought not for the first time. She shook her head. I know what you said, she continued, but… She sighed, glancing at her husband watching her from the mantlepiece. Struggling to her feet, she crossed to the photo, lifted it to her lips and planted a kiss on the cold glass. She gritted her teeth. I should move on, she thought, but her hand trembled as she brushed the tears from her eyes. How can I possibly let you go?
It is interesting how, in writing this short piece, the story takes on its own life. Writing ‘you’ rather than ‘him’ in Maybe I should let you go... changes the rest of the narrative. She is addressing her dead husband as if he were present. It suggests the idea of him watching her through his photo. I wanted to end by saying, She lifted the photo to her lips and planted a kiss on his face. Goodbye, my love. Then turned the picture face down and left the room. The passage from Nancy Garden’s novel feeds on the unending yearning of one girl for the other, so I stuck to that lack of resolution.
Alan McCluskey describes himself as an inspirational writer. Rather than following a pre-determined plot, he is the very first reader, discovering the story as he writes. It is the acts of the characters, rather than the author’s intentions, that dictate the direction of the story. The doings of the characters inspire him and drive the story forward. At the same time, he explains that he needs to be reassured that what has been written so far offers a solid basis for what is yet to come. To achieve this, his chapters are increasingly short and he revises them as he goes along. As he puts it, “The trick of inspirational writing is to remain in constant contact with the story while staying confident that the story is convincing and worth telling.”
Undoubtedly the central theme in all Alan McCluskey’s novels is the empowerment of young people, girls in particular. Despite their difficulties, and often as a result of them, his characters go beyond what they thought was possible. That transcendence often takes the form of abilities that might be called magical. However, in his latest novels, Stories People Telland Local Voices, magic has become much less preponderant, leaving more room for such abilities as leadership, comprehending complex situations, expressing thoughts in writing, organising large-scale events, speaking in public or doing creative work. As the author puts it, “The challenge is to make such abilities as exciting for the reader as wielding magic.” This shift away from pure fantasy has gone hand in hand with anchoring large parts of the story in real-life, identifiable contexts rather than an imaginary world. The setting and the reader’s familiarity with it plays a greater role in the story.
Unlike those novels that are based on a unique theme, his work is characterised by the presence of a number of themes that intertwine. “I like to think my novels reflect something of the complexity of the real world,” he says. The fluidity of gender is an example of another theme that traverses his novels. In the Boy & Girlsaga, a young teen struggles with his desire to dress as a girl and in so doing seeks to come to terms with who he is and what he wants to be. The author does not shy away from challenging issues. In the Storyteller’s Quest books, one of the main characters, a young shaman, shapeshifts into a young girl. The ambiguity of his identity obliges him to explore life and sexuality from an unusual and sometimes disturbing perspective.
Beyond the identifiable themes in his writing, it is the story and the telling of stories that is paramount. In his first novels, storytelling vied with formal exploration but as time went by, his focus shifted more and more to telling the story. As part of that increased investment in the story, more attention was paid to the relationships between people as revealed by their words and acts. It was almost as if there was a shift from storytelling centred largely on action to stories in which the action is grounded in relationships.
The Favourite. What a strange film! The story, if you can call this frayed fantasy a story, plays out in a claustrophobic world, folded in on itself, dripping with decay and decline, cloaked in stuffy air, yet run through with violence and rampant sensuality. Naked brutality erupts in the crude words spat from people’s mouths. For all the mad queen’s occasional moments of lucidity, the film is rife with madness, smacking of the queen’s court in the tales of Alice. The courtiers, notwithstanding their political intrigues, are as mad as the queen. Their pastimes and their stilted relationships are outrageous and would be hilarious, were it not for the undercurrent of deadly seriousness. That didn’t stop me from bursting out laughing, laughter offtimes tinged with guilt. Thank heavens the cinema is shroud in darkness. The film director revels in the madness, conjuring up one surrealistic scene after another. We are led to expect the inevitable tragedy, several times, but who knows if the confusion of images that ends it all, brings the relief we were hoping for.
I have just completed the second revision of my latest novel, Local Voices, a sequel to Stories People Tell. It will be published later this year. Here’s a summary of the story.
Local Voices
In her campaign to re-affirm the role of women at the heart of hearthside healthcare, 17-year-old Annie Wight finds herself pitted against Health England, a conservative think-tank backed by pharmaceutical giants and private healthcare providers. Pretexting the defence of the National Health Service, they stop at nothing to stamp out Annie’s efforts. They target not just her but those close to her, wreaking havoc in friendships and affairs of the heart. As part of her response, Annie launches a project to share the stories of those that never figure in the spotlight. By celebrating local voices, the project fights against isolation and disempowerment.
Illustration by Ben Jennings for George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian.
In an insightful article by George Monbiot in The Guardian entitled, Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade, Monbiot points to the ‘spectacularisation’ of the news and the world. “This is a world of make-believe, in which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers”, he says. He talks of all those that are not in the spotlight and the long shadow cast over key issues. He concludes, “The task of all journalists is to turn off the spotlight, roll up the blinds and see what’s lurking at the back of the room.” He urges us to pay attention to “(…) the story of people who live far from (…) the spotlight (..)”
Untold stories are a central theme of my latest novel, Local Voices, where Annie, the young heroine, is championing a drive for people to speak out and tell their stories. One of her friends says, “By empowering people to tell their stories, you empower them to break out of their isolation and take a more active part in society.”
In a lull in the action, a group of young woman are discussing the message behind Local Voices. Annie gets to her feet as if she were about to make a speech and says. “We are more and more cut off from the community and the world we live in. That isolation can be traced to the loss of control over our lives, our work, our politics, our health, our education and more. We have chosen to hand over that control to others to free ourselves from the burdens it entails. But the resulting isolation and the feeling of not belonging, not to mention the impression of powerlessness, are at the heart of many problems we face today: exclusion, intolerance, disrespect, injustice, ill-health, depression, addiction, lawlessness and violence. We urgently need to reconnect to our local community. What better way than by giving voice to the stories of our community and the people in it, those stories that draw us closer together and improved mutual understanding and tolerance.”
Source: The Guardian. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
The Guardian reportsthat French booksellers have called on the judges of literary prizes to ignore self-published books available only on Amazon. What sparked such a reaction? Marco Koskas’ Bande de Français is one of the contenders selected for this year’s Prix Renaudot. The Guardian article states that the book has been self-published using CreateSpace, a print-on-demand service which is a subsidiary of Amazon, ostensibly making it unavailable to bookshops. The booksellers campaign lays bare the cracks in the publishing system.
On the one hand, bookshop owners are angry because Marco Koskas’s book is available only on Amazon, although, as it is printed by Createspace, it could be made available to bookshops. When Payot in Geneva wanted to stock my novel, Boy and Girl, they had no problem ordering copies even though it was printed by CreateSpace. On the other hand, no editor wanted to take Kostas’s book, so self-publishing was the only avenue for the author. Note, he is no beginner. He’s already had a number of books published by the ‘traditional’ channels.
By petitioning to have this book removed from the long list for the Prix Renaudot, bookshop owners are saying that only those writers published via agents/editors should be considered for prizes because including self-published books would be tantamount to granting Amazon exclusive rights to the book (*). First of all, this is not necessarily true. Secondly, commercial models in other industries, like that of films, do have distribution players with a monopoly on some prize-winning films. Just think of Netflix.
What’s more, agents and mainstream publishers, as gatekeepers to ‘traditional’ publishing have a great deal of power already. For example, self-published or indie-published books are generally barred from getting reviews on most specialised websites because they have not been granted the approval of agents and established publishers.
That Kostas chose to use print-on-demand is not a ploy of Amazon. It is a dynamic of the publishing industry in which CreateSpace and Ingrams offer a viable alternative to traditional publishing at a time when that gateway to readers is getting ever narrower. If anything, bookshop owners should be looking to include the best independent books in their selections for customers. That would contribute to providing a rich diversity of books. In addition, it would fuel a demand for quality reviews that would encourage sites to review independent books.
On the other hand, that bookshops want to do battle with Amazon is understandable. Having an independent bookshop, not only as a place to find books but also to attend readings or to meet other readers, is a clear enrichment of a local community. But it’s an uphill battle. The plight of bookshops is also part of the shifting landscape of publishing. Those changes require a rethinking of the role of indie bookshops. One promising avenue might lie in reconsidering the place and role of the bookshops in the local community. How can they offer an enriching face-to-face experience that Internet-based services cannot rival with?
(*) As Matthew Wake, owner of Booksbooksbooksin Lausanne, points out, bookshop owners “… do not want to support Amazon because it poses an existential threat to their livelihood. ‘Amazon…wants to become the market itself by eliminating its competitors, organising unfair competition, avoiding tax and replacing publishers, distributors and bookshops in one fell swoop'” He goes on to say, “As far as I can see they are not questioning the worthiness of the book.” I agree. Unfortunately, the person who gets harmed is the author, who might merit that prize, not Amazon. I question the bookshops’ strategy, not their motives. It is not because a cause is ‘just’ that the methods employed are adequate or have the desired effect.
Article first published in a shortened form on the Geneva Writers Group Facebook page.
In response to the claims of a man on Twitter, a number of women insist male authors can’t create authentic female characters. But is their generalisation right?
Their point of view was echoed in a Huffington Post article quoting a series of Twitter posts in which women authors describe themselves as they imagined a male author would. Here’s an example.
I had big honking teeters, just enormous bosoms, and I thought about them constantly as I walked down the street, using my legs (thick, with big shapely calves), but never not thinking about my enormo honkers,
Talia Lavin on Twitter
For the most part, the examples given appear exaggerated, employing caricature in a desire to drive home a point and get a laugh. So saying doesn’t contradict the fact that a lot of men sadly fit the bill with their limited and limiting depiction of women. Perhaps it is the implicit generalisation that includes all men which needs to be challenged.
That said, the underlying statement that many male authors can’t write from a female perspective had me doubting. I hurried to check my own books and how I wrote from a female point of view. Here’s an example of a seventeen-year-old character in my latest novel, Stories People Tell, describing herself shortly after escaping from a well-known politician who tried to force her to kiss him.
Standing in her bra, pants and socks, she stared at herself in the tiny mirror inside her wardrobe. What could any man see in her? She was neither tall nor short. Ayana, her best friend, told her she was model-size which was probably Ayana’s way of saying she was too skinny and looked odd. She was a late developer she told herself. Her breasts were barely formed and her hips had not filled out like all the other girls in her class. Ayana, in comparison, with her unblemished chocolate-brown skin, her deep brown eyes and her long pitch-black hair, was all curves and didn’t hesitate to flout it,…
Annie looking at herself in the mirror in her bedroom in Stories People Tell.
I had an opportunity to explore the challenge of a man speaking ‘as’ a woman when writing my novel Boy & Girl. In it, a boy, who enjoys dressing in secret as a girl, is startled to find himself in the mind of girl (in another world). He is aware of her thoughts and feelings but has no control over her body. Below is his description of how he experiences her body as she runs through exercises in preparation for combat training.
Her body felt different from his in many ways. He hadn’t noticed before. There was an unfamiliar tension between her feet that were firmly planted on the ground as if they were about to grow roots and the crown of her head that pushed upwards trying to reach the ceiling. When she moved her hips, tracing circular patterns in the air, he felt a freedom of movement that he had never known himself. It filled him with joy, her joy, no doubt, but his too. There were also her breasts, bared now, that had her balancing differently as she stretched up on tiptoes. Even her shoulders moved in ways he had never experienced as she raised her arms sideways and turned her palms upwards…
Peter in Kaitlin’s mind in Boy & Girl
The underlying premise in the criticism levelled at male authors by these women is that men can’t think and feel themselves into the body and mind of a woman. Such a claim is troubling for someone who spends much of his time as an author seeking to do just that. It is as if inherent maleness would irremediably taint the thoughts of any man who attempted to imagine how a woman feels and thinks. And that the male mind is itself tainted by a caricatural vision of women. Such a charge ignores genuine empathy and careful observation, insisting that the very nature of being male overrides any such sensitivity, stamping a sexist male mark on everything. Although many men deserve to be taxed for their stereotyped visions of women, these criticisms, in their generalisation, smack of a similar sexist vision, but of men.
That this ‘fun’ exercise was not quite so innocent is laid bare if you consider the thoughts and feelings of those who were born in a male body but who feel themselves part – if not wholly – female. Of course, for reasons of their own, some men play out a caricature of women in their behaviour and their attire. That is their choice, but it is not the case of most gender fluid people. Are they to be deemed incapable of feeling like a woman and describing those feelings?
My thanks to Joy Manne for pointing to the article on Facebook.
