Self-promote? Moi?

This my ‘permitted’ introduction of me and my stuff. Trouble is, self-promotion doesn’t come easily to Brits – well, not to this Brit anyway. Especially as it’s all been done elsewhere. I mean, if anyone were interested in me or my work they’d have checked out my website and blogs already. So, while I can’t summon up the hyperbole that’s usually the norm for pushing books and self, I can – very quickly – sketch out the basics.

I was a university lecturer (in French) before taking early retirement to concentrate on writing. The decision to do that was easy since I was already writing commercial and corporate things (websites, videos, PR materials, brochures, ads, etc.) so I knew I wouldn’t be destitute. In the early days, I wrote radio plays and the BBC were great patrons – but the organisation’s changed so much and their filtering system is so weird that the impulse to send them stuff has all but gone.

My stage plays (for adults and children) have been performed here and in the USA. I also have an Equity card and have presented TV programmes, acted in and directed all sorts of plays, and I wrote and performed in several revues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I won a prize for a verse translation of a Molière play and have been invited to the USA on several occasions as guest artist and associate professor.

I’ve been a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at three universities – Robert Gordon’s in Aberdeen and the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews. I co-wrote Just Write, a book aimed at helping students to research, structure, write and edit essays and other written works.

I write short stories and like to vary my output. I’ve written for children, have had stories selected for the Crime Writers’ Association’s annual anthologies and, most recently, have had a sci-fi thriller anthologised. Three of my police procedural novels have been published here and the first two have also appeared in US editions. They are Material Evidence, Rough Justice and The Darkness. This summer, I have a historical novel, The Figurehead, appearing in the USA in ebook and paperback.

Those are the facts. The only thing to add is that my latest crime novel, The Darkness, has gone through many stages, changes of personnel and structure. It began life as a pure, bleak revenge story but I wasn’t satisfied with the Daily Mail editorial aspects of it and I wanted to find a more challenging approach to vigilantism, revenge and compassion. As a result, it’s taught me more about my central character and I now need to rewrite books four and five of the series (which are already completed) to accommodate that new narrative thread. I also know the plot, the structure and the uncompromising ending of what will be the sixth and final one.

And, since promotion is allowed this time round, I’ll repeat a couple of sentences from a review which please me because they pick up on my central aim. The review was published in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and told potential readers ‘When you read The Darkness be prepared to be manipulated and have your moral compass reset by this master storyteller’. And the review ended with ‘Get yourself a copy of The Darkness and ask yourself this: what would you do?’

The commercial break is now over.

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Writing on the move

We’re experiencing a storm in Britain. I’d just embarked on a cycling tour from Chester to Gloucestershire visiting writerly friends en route, and enjoyed the hills and encounters including talking over hedge tops and dodging tractors on the minor roads I am obliged to use.

Fed up with transcribing my notebook scribbled words to computer on my return I’ve found a small laptop that slips into my cycle pannier. Staying overnight at youth hostels or B&Bs I exercise fingers in the evenings while my legs rest and steel themselves for the next day. My 2000 word-a-day target doesn’t always get met if the hostel has convivial company, but my stories’ characterization usually receives a fillip! Yes I could do without the extra weight especially yesterday when I cycled up to Bridges Youth Hostel in the Shropshire hills, but like other addictions, the glow of the screen later in the evening made the effort worthwhile. Luckily, I can also make the effort pay when I sell cycle tour articles to Cycling World magazine. What I refrain from is doing my paid-for editing while on the move. Adding to shorts and novels has added value when I revise later and smile at the memory of the location. For example, I’d written a humorous short story, Camera Shy, at an outside café table on the Place de Concorde in Paris. The story is based there and not only was my bicycle leaning against a railing in reality when I wrote the draft but I used it in the story. (published in the magazine, Delivered, March 2008.)

Other advantages of carting around a small laptop is that the memory stick in my digi camera can be uploaded to the computer and so free up space. When I cycle into a town I can usually find a free wifi hot spot, such as a Starbucks café, and so delete the accumulated spam in my email and respond to urgent posts. In theory I could also use the internet access to turn on my heating so there’s enough hot water for a bath when I cycle home, but my son hasn’t shown me how to do that yet.

Writing on the move? Yes, it is a little like working on holiday, but it is more pleasure than grind, so let it roll.

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Writing: culture clash

The US and the UK have a lot of things in common, including (more or less) a language. But now and then you trip over something where the culture is so wildly different that people on one side or the other may not even be able to grasp how utterly different the other culture is. That can be a significant issue in writing for an audience on both sides of the Atlantic, because you can end up leaving one half of the audience scratching their heads and thinking your writing is sloppy, when what they see as a plothole is an accurate reflection of the culture the story is set in.

It’s particularly bad for Brits writing for an American audience, because a British audience usually has some familiarity with American culture through exposure to American tv and films, while the reverse situation can’t be assumed. I ran into an example of this a couple of weeks ago, in connection with my ongoing episode-by-episode review of Torchwood. After writing the draft I would have a look round at other people’s comments on an episode to see if there was anything I’d meant to talk about but forgotten — and noticed something. There was a very consistent complaint from Americans about how unbelievable it was that the audience viewpoint character, Gwen, initially didn’t know how to use a gun. She’s a police officer, so they couldn’t understand how she could not be trained in firearms, even if she had never had to actually use one in anger before.

These are Americans who have actively sought out a British show. They’re more likely than the average American to know something about the UK. And it never occurred to any of them that the police in the UK might not be like the police in the US, that what was shown was an accurate depiction of life in the UK. Even though “British police aren’t armed” is one of the things that often shows up on “hey, those Brits, they’re weird!” coverage.

What do you do about this situation? You can’t just slide over it and never comment on Gwen using a gun, because the British audience will wonder why on earth an ordinary bobby is firearms-trained. Ordinary uniformed beat police in mainland Britain do not carry guns. Not only do they not carry guns, they are not normally trained in the use of firearms. Nor are they likely to have gun knowledge from their private life, because private ownership of handguns has been effectively non-existent since 1997, and was unusual before that. Gwen immediately handling a gun with no problems would break suspension of disbelief for the British audience just as effectively as showing her as untrained did for the Americans.

This is just one example, but there are a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle ways something like this can happen. The first problem for the author is of course to be aware of the difference. Since I write for an American publisher, my editor will generally pick up on things that need to be clarified. The second problem is to find a way to make things clear, at least from context, to both audiences. It can sometimes be a tricky balance, putting in enough information to let one side pick up what’s going on without it being a boring and obvious infodump to the other side. Sometimes there simply isn’t any way to reconcile it, and I think that the Torchwood example is probably one of them, although I think they might have been able to do a little more explicit “I’m a beat bobby, remember, not a detective constable” to key people in. But it’s always worth considering what you can do to write around situations like this. It’s a part of the world-building process in contemporary fiction, just as much as details of an unfamiliar setting would be in genres like historical romance or science fiction.

[This post is about handling cultural differences when writing for multiple audiences. It is not about whether there is a right side and wrong side in the specific example used. If you wish to discuss the latter, please do so elsewhere.]

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Just a quick hello!

From the Britwriters 🙂

This is the new and currently slightly bare blog of a group of British writers. All of us are published mainly in the USA, so our daily lives are lived in two countries, with a foot in both cultures. Most of our peers and most of our readers are American, and this makes life fascinating, rewarding and occasionally perplexing. We banded together just in order to have friends and colleagues who understood what it was like. But once we did, we thought ‘this is an interesting position we find ourselves in. Why not blog about it?’ Hence the Britwriters blog.

This will be – we hope – an interesting blog to match. We’re aiming to talk about writing – our own personal novels, our experience in the hectic world of publishing and the art of writing itself. But we’ll also be posting about British and American similarities and differences. We’ll have tips on how – if you’re an American writer – you can make a novel set in Britain sound authentic, whether that’s for contemporary or historical novels. We may even hold question and answer sessions 🙂 I’m sure there will be at least one post on the fraught subject of spelling! And we’ll probably be posting about where we went and what we saw at the weekends, because there’s a lot of local colour out there to explore, and you never know what might be your latest inspiration.

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