Talking About Tone

Tone is something that I've meant to write about ever since I started blogging. Somehow, I've never got round to it, and I think my problem with talking about tone is that I'm still struggling with it myself.

Here's what I know – the tone of a book is vital. It sets expectations from the very first page and answers some basic questions your reader is asking:

• What is this story about?


• How is it told?


• Will it be happy? Sad? Funny?


• Who is it for? (in the case of children's books, what is the age range?)


• What genre does it sit within?


• Will it end well?

If the author has set the tone appropriately, you should be able to answer all of those questions from the first page of a book. It sounds fantastical, but try it now – pick up a book you've never read and look at the first page. You'll find a huge amount of contextual information in and around the words themselves. You'll also probably know whether you want to read on.

There's a certain alchemy to setting tone, and I'm not sure I can help you much with achieving the right balance. When the tone of a book is right, we just accept it, suspend disbelief and sit back to enjoy the ride. But when the tone is wrong, it niggles. Tone is like a contract between the author and the reader, an agreement that the writer knows what they are doing and that the reader is happy to go along with them. To master tone, the standard advice for writers applies - you need to read as widely as you can, watch quality TV, seek out good (and sometimes bad) movies. Basically, see how other people approach that tricky balancing act.

So where's my problem in all this? Simple – I love screwing with tone. I love to have a scary scene that bleeds into funny, or a slapstick scene that suddenly becomes serious. I think these kind of tonal shifts are immensely effective for jarring and surprising your audience, indeed the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino is based on this kind of tonal trickery. The problem is that audiences don't always want to be jarred and surprised. I loved the shift from noirish crime drama to goofy vampire splatter in From Dusk Till Dawn, but a lot of people hated that movie.

Another problem about playing with tone is that it is hard. You need an intuitive feel for how far you can bend the rules, and it's always easier to satisfy a mass audience by writing a straight-down-the-line narrative. Not as satisfying, but definitely easier.

An alternative to shifting tone is to try to build an overall tone that feels very personal to you, something fresh and new. William Goldman was a pro at this - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a groundbreaking take on the western and The Princess Bride (both in book and movie form) is sublime. A more recent film that has its own unique flavour is In Bruges, which mixes gangster drama and black comedy with a surreal, almost metaphysical tone. But it works brilliantly, and I think it does so because it gives the audience both what they want (chases and bloody shootouts) and what they don't know they want (oddball character comedy in a medieval walled city). On paper, it shouldn't work, but onscreen the blend comes off, and that is down to the skill of the writer-director and his cast.

There's a section at the end of William Goldman's book What Lie Did I Tell? where he writes a screenplay specifically to show us the process, then sends it to his Hollywood friends for their opinion. Tony Gilroy, the writer of the Bourne movies and director of Michael Clayton is especially scathing about the tone of the piece. He loves to break the rules of structure, he says, but

"Tone scares me."

I can empathise with that. But somehow, I'm just itching to mess with it some more...

Nick.

Apps and the Single Author

One of the great attractions of writing is that anyone can do it. The only barrier to entry is access to a word processor and an email account - a barrier low enough to encourage penniless students and struggling single parents alike (hello, J.K. Rowling). Another great thing is that you can do a lot of the work on your own. In fact, electronic publishing means that you could go all the way from initial concept to finished e-book without involving a single other person (though I wouldn't recommend it).

But now something even newer has appeared on the writing scene - the app. Depending on who you believe, they are either the saviour of storytelling or a frivolous annoyance; as usual, I suspect the answer is somewhere between the two extremes. Someone who tends to the former view is author and agent Xavier Waterkeyn, who wrote an impassioned article for FutureBook last week, about his plans for an app project he is representing called The Chimera Vector. Xavier is not a man troubled by small ideas, and it's clear that the project is as ambitious as they come – the future of storytelling, no less. But once the brainstorming phase was over, the team's plans for a multi-layered socially-integrated transmedia experience hit a significant problem. Cost.

The problem with apps is they are expensive to make. Unless you're hiring an independent app developer, your app could cost anywhere from $20,000 to over $100,000, with an average of $60,000. Apps - like books themselves - rarely even get as far as breaking even.

We realized early on that we couldn't afford to fund this project ourselves. What started as a $20,000 basic app idea soon evolved into a $93,000 app idea that would redefine storytelling, but only if we have the funds to make it.

Wait a minute there. 93,000 dollars? I know that the business model for author-led fiction isn't great. I know that I will probably never recoup enough money to cover the eight years (and counting) that I have put into my craft. But as I've worked full-time throughout that period, the real cost to me can be counted in stuff like SCBWI membership fees, notepads and Bic biros. Probably a few hundred pounds. But if I had been trying to develop an app? Well, I couldn't have afforded even the entry-level $20,000, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

The problem with apps is that they require a team. Developers, graphic designers, scriptwriters, testers, project managers etc. One person in front of a keyboard is going to have a tough time competing with the high production values of mainstream apps, and I'm sure this “Hollywoodisation" of the market can only get worse. Compare that to the experience of writing a conventional book, where I can open up MS Word right now and write a paragraph better than anything Dan Brown has ever produced. Of course, I can't command his marketing and production budget, but I can dream...

By coincidence, I've just started reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian by Stewart Lee. It's a fascinating and very funny deconstruction of the art of comedy, as ambitious a project as anything in the iTunes App Store. Lee has the completely opposite view to Xavier Waterkeyn – he believes that a single person on stage with a microphone has the best chance of reinventing the medium. After the high profile but financially unrewarding Jerry Springer – The Opera, Lee decided to focus on smaller gigs with smaller audiences, reasoning that a loyal fanbase would be much more likely to support him long term. This has given him the freedom to build an act around picking comedy apart, to be a niche artiste rather than trying to appeal to the mass market.

I occasionally harbour grandiose ideas to reinvent the nature of storytelling, although I have to remind myself that the story has been around for a while and is doing quite fine on its own, thankyouverymuch. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that someone with very little to lose financially is more likely to take the risks that will result in Narrative 2.0. Xavier Waterkeyn is nothing if not an idealist, and doesn't really seem to grasp that people who invest money generally want to see a return on that. His pitch seems to be based more on goodwill than actual economics:

We'll be honest with you. [The Chimera Vector] probably won't make a profit.

Well, that's convinced me! The cheque for a hundred grand is in the post.

Nick.

Ghostwriting the Dead

You might want to stand back - I feel a rant coming on. It's all been prompted by my discovery this week that P.D. James has written a historical crime novel. How interesting, I thought, until I saw that it was a crime novel set in the world of Pride and Prejudice. The next thing I knew, I was slapping my forehead and grumbling about the lack of vision by some of our most accomplished novelists. Fan fiction used to be something you wrote as your very first book, not your 22nd. And more than that, there seems to be a veritable trend of franchise-mining going on this Christmas - Anthony Horowitz has written a Sherlock Holmes novel and Frank Cottrell Boyce has penned a sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Perhaps James, now 91, has earned the chance to take a fictional retirement in the worlds that inspired her. But it saddens me that market-leading authors - who could have any book published - have resorted to stepping into the shoes of their dead forebears. I mean, I love Eoin Colfer to bits, but did the world really need another instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The series had gone stale while Douglas Adams was still alive and writing them.

That said, I'm not attacking the quality of these books. Indeed I enjoy the Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and it seems as though Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is a better book than Ian Fleming's original. Writers are often the most voracious of readers, so it's no surprise that they welcome the chance to take on these well-loved characters. But I wonder if they wouldn't mind awfully writing these books and then putting them straight in a drawer. It's not like most of them need the money.

Sometimes, these sequels are written with the best of intentions. Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet was produced to raise extra funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital, one year before the character went out of copyright. But most of these officially sanctioned works are simply feathering the nest of an already very rich author's estate, or the corporations that spring up to manage them. How much, I wonder, has Thomas the Tank Engine earned since the Rev. W. Awdry's death, compared with the amount he saw in his lifetime? I do hope that Terry Pratchett has the legal wherewithal to stop someone producing more Discworld novels after the sad day that he loses the ability to do so.

I'm not criticising the literary metafiction of Jasper Fforde, nor genre mash-ups like Kim Newman's Anno Dracula or Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Hell, even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gets my cautious approval as an experiment in form, conducted by a then unknown author with something to prove. But the mega famous writers of officially sanctioned fan fiction are stifling originality for the rest of us. Every time they succeed with one of these books, the market gets a little more conservative. Please, let the dead lie silent and show us something new.

Nick.

Fellow Travellers

Next Monday, the 2012 Undiscovered Voices longlist will be published. For some the waiting will be over, for others another month and a half of nail biting will ensue as they wait to see if they’ve made the shortlist. For those of us who made the anthology in 2010, a chapter of our lives will quietly come to a close.

Would I offer any advice to the next batch of winners? Not really. I think you need to make your own mistakes and your own discoveries, free from any of my expectations. One thing I hope you’ll discover is a fantastic bunch of fellow travellers. No, not the Communist Party, but the other 2012 winners. Like me, you may hardly know any of them to start with, but if you’re lucky you’ll make some really good friends. Heaven knows, I’ve leaned pretty heavily on the 2010 group at times, and this week has been no exception. They’ve always been there for me: supportive, perceptive and honest (the way good friends should be) but never boastful or hurtful. I’m very lucky to have lots of writing friends, but there’s nothing like having a whole group of trusted opinions right there at your fingertips.

I talked last week about the SCBWI Scene, and the Undiscovered Voices 2010ers are like a scene within a scene, the kind of gang I always dreamed of joining as a kid, but was never brave enough to try. We were thrown together for the first time at the anthology launch party, and had about as much time to bond as a group of Christians about to be thrown to the lions! Yet, that shared struggle has pulled us through, despite our very different career trajectories.

Undiscovered Voices is no kind of magic bullet, and it certainly can’t predict whether you can spin those 4,000 great words into a breakout novel. So while some of us surged ahead, converting that prize-winning entry into a publishing deal, others are still tinkering with it or perfecting a follow-up. Goodwill in the industry will only take you so far and the barriers to entry are getting higher all the time. But if you can perfect the combination – right book, right place, right time – the publishing world is your oyster.

Writers’ careers are measured not in weeks or months, but years. Continents drift and governments fall in the time it takes to write a book, get it through acquisitions and see it published. But there is an upside to that – you have all the time you need to build lasting friendships. Where I work in IT, the average amount of time anyone stays in a job is about two years. So people are always coming and going, which makes it hard to for me to stay in touch with anyone for an extended period. Yet, two years on from UV 2010, my fellow winners are still in touch and still writing. Hallelujah!

Anne Anderson, Dave Cousins, Jude Ensaff, Emily George, Jane McLoughlin, Claire O'Brien, Paula Rawsthorne, Lauren Sabel, Lisa Smith, Abbie Todd and Yona Wiseman – thank you all so much. I genuinely couldn’t do it without you.

Nick.

Making a Scene

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be part of a scene? To be one of the movers and shakers making things happen and overturning the existing order? Can you imagine how it felt to be one of the Romantic Poets or the Bright Young Things of the 1920s? The feeling of endless possibilities and a collective creative purpose must have been so liberating. Mustn't it?

But I wonder if the people in those scenes even thought about what was happening. Perhaps they were simply meeting their friends to discuss their various creative projects. The idea of "a scene" often comes from outside the group, a label bestowed by the media in an attempt to understand cultural shift. The music industry is a particular culprit - I watched throughout the 90s as Melody Maker and NME came up with one manufactured trend after another, in an attempt to group seemingly dissimilar bands. What was Britpop, after all, except a collection of musicians who happened to be British? And as for post-punk? That could apply to any song recorded after 1979!

There's a wonderful film called Dogtown and Z-Boys that documents the birth of modern skateboarding culture. I'd recommend it even if you have no interest in skateboards, because it gives such a clear insight into what it's like to be part of a gang or a scene. The Z-Boys were a group of young men in California who surfed in the mornings but were looking for something to do later in the day. So they bought skateboards and during a drought, took over the drained, abandoned swimming pools in the area. Skating the smooth, curved sides of the pools allowed them to take to the air for the first time, inventing radical new tricks and moves. They weren't looking to change the world, they just wanted to hang out and have fun. But their style and attitude became iconic.

The Inklings were a very different group, but I'm sure they too had no idea - as they met week after week in an Oxford pub - that their members would produce some of the best-loved classics of English Literature. I find it slightly unreal to think that Tolkien and C.S. Lewis actually sat down together and discussed their fantasy worlds. Yet, how is that any different to me sitting down with my SCBWI critique group in an Oxford coffee shop? With three of us published or due to be published, aren't we, in fact, in a scene of our own making?

Let me widen that thought. I am very proud to be a part of "The SCBWI Scene." A dynamic group of young (at heart) children's writers who will profoundly affect what our children read for the next twenty years or more. A group who must navigate a massive technological shift in the world of storytelling and books. A group full of accomplished writers and illustrators who all once felt powerless, but now wield considerable influence. Make no mistake.

We are coming.

Nick.

Creative Refreshment

Something I love about blogging is that you can change direction at any time. I was all set to write a post on a totally different subject (you'll probably get that one next week), when I read this interview with singer/songwriter Leslie Feist. It's been four years since her last album The Reminder, which I loved, despite the fact that her music is really not to my usual tastes. So she must have been doing something right, and the new material sounds great. But my interest was piqued by the following:

Feist took a year-plus break from playing any music at all-- the longest sabbatical of her career thus far. "I almost had a chip on my shoulder about how much I didn't feel like playing," she says. "I wasn't curious anymore."

I've been in a creative low period over the last few months, and I'm sure we've all experienced that feeling of temporarily losing our muse. But to take a whole year off? That's pretty hardcore.

I would try to pick the guitar up sometimes, like, "Hey, remember me?" It was like reintroducing yourself to someone who's got a grudge. But there was this silence. I would put it down and be defeated.

Her idea of creative curiosity is an interesting one. Perhaps she was lucky, in that her last album had been successful enough to provide a financial cushion for her time off. Perhaps because she didn't have to play any music, she didn't feel motivated to try. To be honest though, it sounds like the experience of touring the same material night after night burnt her out - an idea that will be familiar to anyone who has spent too long staring at the same manuscript. Leaving my own novel in the box for two months had definite benefits in terms of stopping me fiddling with it. But because I was thinking about it every day, I'm not sure I really got that far away from it.

The other side of the coin from Feist are people who are prolific artists/writers/filmmakers. Another interview I was reading with Guillermo Del Toro (of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy fame) stated that he was in the habit of getting up at four in the morning, just so he could write a series of novels on top of his producing and directing duties. I am in awe of people like this. There is no way I could match the energy and work rate of someone like Del Toro or Stephen King, even if I didn't need any sleep at all!

As my kids never tire of telling me, "We're all different, Daddy." Everyone has to find the creative pattern that works for them, and overcome the mental blocks that stand in their way. Workaholism isn't generally recommended - it's said that a sitting US president ages at twice the rate of the rest of us. But there's also an argument for making the most of your day in the sun, grabbing every opportunity that success affords. Leslie Feist has deliberately turned her back on that idea, choosing to reject the market in favour of something more personally fulfilling.

I just made something for myself, and that feels better than any Grammy. I did what I wanted to do.

It'll probably still sell like hot cakes, mind.

Nick.

Developing a Thicker Skin

Excuse me for wandering briefly into the realms of management theory, but I wanted to talk this week about business development, because this is something that writers do all the time (whether we realise it or not). Put simply, business development is the creation of new products, services and revenue streams to ensure that a company has long-term viability. Rather than relying on existing work and contacts, a forward-thinking business is always seeking out niches in the market and making new opportunities.

Writers, by their very nature, are constantly creating new stuff. But I think that's often where the comparison to structured business development falls off. We either wilfully ignore the market, or dive headlong into the most crowded area. Nowhere is this more evident than in fiction, where discussion turns daily towards the latest hot trend and how to capitalise on it. We are told by other writers to follow our hearts and write the book that only we can write. But what if that produces work that no-one wants to read or commission? Can man live by creative nourishment alone?

I've done quite a bit of business development in my day job and it usually follows a set pattern, also known as the "Capture Management Lifecycle":

• Pre-bid Phase - This is the process of collecting business intelligence on companies and the market, or identifying existing tenders that the company might like to bid for. In writing terms, I would equate this with time spent researching agents/publishers, looking at the market (Bookseller etc.) or reading books within the sphere you want to write for.


• Bid Phase - This is the process of creating a bid document, outlining how your company would satisfy the tender and crucially, how much you would charge. The bid document is usually very involved and can run to hundreds of pages for a large tender. A bidding company will often make a presentation of their bid and have significant discussions with the customer about it. This translates very closely to the process of writing a book, sending to editors and then meeting them to discuss it. Editors will often be looking for changes to improve a book or target a particular segment of the market. Depending on whether a book has been through acquisitions, money may be mentioned, but it's interesting how that seems to be the last subject of discussion, rather than the first. The gatekeepers of publishing often seem more concerned with the creative merits of a project, rather than the financial cost of acquiring it - unless an auction situation develops.


• Post-bid Phase - The customer analyses the bids and enters into contract negotiations with the winning partner. Once contracted, the winner will supply the agreed product or service. The post-bid phase is a fraught period in business - one company I worked for went under because they were unable to close a particularly important deal. In writing, it is no less frustrating, with verbal agreements lost in the detail of contracts and books suddenly dropped because of financial constraints or the entry of new management.

Anyone who has worked for a book packager will see how closely their process follows the Capture Management Lifecycle. Authors register with the packager's database and indicate the genres and age ranges they wish to write for (Pre-bid Phase). The packager then sends out a detailed synopsis and character breakdown to prospective authors, asking them to submit three chapters (Bid Phase). The packager chooses the sample whose voice best matches the project and engages that author to write the rest of the book (Post-bid Phase).

Ok, so that's the theory of business development. The practice, I feel, is somewhat different. When you make a bid in a business situation, nine times out of ten it comes to nothing. You shrug, feel a little miffed and muse on what you could have done better. Then you move onto the next tender, because most of the time, it isn't personal. But with writing, it's always personal. You have to delve so deep into yourself to produce a book that a rejection can feel like a knife to the heart (even if it's just a business decision for the other party).

I'm interested to hear about how you cope with these issues and your approach (or lack of it) to business development. I know that I could certainly be a lot more dispassionate about the process of writing and submitting my work. But then, would I ever produce anything of worth?

Nick.