Mark Forsyth and the art of rhetoric: the chapter on alliteration

Never mind The Elements of Style. I've been feeling a bit burned out lately, so I decided for some reason that what I needed was Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase.

The first chapter is on alliteration, but since everyone knows what that is, I amused myself by hunting down other rhetorical patterns in Forsyth's writing. My plan is to see how many I can catch him using in advance of his introducing them officially.

1. Tell the punters what they believe so you can tell them why they're wrong. I hate, loathe, detest this tactic when it's used crudely, as it all too often is in the media, but Forsyth's 'Of course, as we all know...' is a bit more subtle than that.

The standard work (on history) was Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, but Plutarch wrote in Greek, and, as Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson later pointed out, 'thou hadst small Latin and less Greek'.

All this to tell us that he used a translation of the same work by Plutarch instead.

2. Be flippant. Refer to Shakespeare as a thief (not forgetting to drag the image out quite a bit) and draw our attention to the fact that 'Full fathom five thy father lies', is exactly the same as telling us 'the exact depth to which a chap's corpse has sunk'.

3. Ask rhetorical questions, e.g. 'Who needs sense when you have alliteration?' Like #4, this is often best done with a fake-innocent expression on your face, seeing as it's so damn obvious. What it can often do, on the battlefields of serious debate, is get you out of addressing the issue.

4. Conceal your irrelevant and unsupported value judgements by leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous while acting all innocent about it. For instance, you might choose to do this in your selection of examples. Even better you might let yourself be a bit obvious about it, in which case you have humor and people will go along with that because they like it.

He (Charles Dickens) knew which side his bread was buttered, as had those who came before him, like Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), and those who came after him (Where's Wally?)

5. Toss out some old familiar cliche, then turn it into an object of curiosity by expanding on it. Although Forsyth certainly does this, he's upstaged in the art by Charles Dickens.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

(Cue detailed discussion oF the exact deadness of door-nails.)

6. Use tricky words to make yourself sound clever. Not too often though, and always make it look like you've got an excuse:

So muddled was he (Thomas De Quincey) that he decided to add a footnote apologising for his paroemion (that's the technical term for excessive alliteration).

7. Segue cleverly between one subject and the next, making it look as though the connection is self-evident.

'Agent' seems a strange substitution for 'friend'. But he (Quincey again) probably had to do it as he couldn't change 'farewell farewells'. It's much too clever to use a word as an adjective and then a noun. In fact, the trick has a name. It's called polyptoton (the subject of the next chapter).

I'm waiting to see if it's Forsyth's modus operandi to shift between chapters with a quote containing an element from both the current chapter and the next.

8. Make bold assertions of dubious validity: see emphasized sentence above. In the next installment, I get to see whether Mark Forsyth can actually convince me that polyptoton is the bee's knees.

When a character changes personality half-way through a story

Often enough in a story, the personality of a character develops in a gradual process. Or they may undergo very sudden emotional or lifestyle transitions which leave their basic personality unchanged. But what about characters who undergo a sudden and radical change in personality?

I was trying to solve this problem for one of my characters when I happened to read Terry Pratchett's YA novel, A Hat Full of Sky. In it, eleven-year-old Tiffany Aching is taken over by a hiver and well... she changes. She (that is the hiver) keeps all of Tiffany's memories and her goals. It 'thinks' it is Tiffany, while the real Tiffany becomes a tiny shred of personality buried deep inside it. So, I made a list of all the things Pratchett does to convey this:

• Before the hiver takes Tiffany over there is plenty of foreshadowing, so we know what has happened, we just don't know how it will manifest itself.
• Right from the start, we learn that Tiffany feels different - better actually. Later on, we see that all her negative thoughts, while they aren't entirely new, have become more extreme. She is more self-confident but also harsher towards other people.
• She starts making little behavioral choices we had seen the real Tiffany reject not long before - nothing very important at first, but her new choices are generally more shallow.
• Soon, the false Tiffany shows a willingness to engage in rude, arrogant and even violent behavior she would never have contemplated before. As with her thoughts and feelings, these are entirely foreign to her. Instead, they are the most extreme manifestation of the little ambitions and resentments she had previously repressed. The hiver Tiffany no longer has any moral boundaries at all.
• While the humans around Tiffany don't notice the change at first, the spiritually sensitive goats and poltergeist know and don't want to be around her even before her behavior changes.
• Her reflection sometimes shows her the hivers past identities, including prehistoric animals. At times, the memories associated with these identities threaten to take her over.
• The real Tiffany finds a way to fight back and manifests herself.
• Eventually, the narrator gives an explicit explanation of what is happening to hiver-Tiffany and real-Tiffany.

We only see hiver-Tiffany in action for two chapters out of fifteen and it's a rather intense experience. I wondered how long it's possible to keep up this kind of wholesale personality change before the reader's relationship with the 'real' character becomes compromised or replaced with a new relationship. Interestingly enough, my alternate personality character, Anat, is also present for about an eighth of a book and I was glad when the old one returned, even though the new one was, in some respects, a better person.

In other respects the way I manage Anat's change is quite different. She doesn't experience a possession, rather she undergoes a kind of controlled amnesia. She foregoes her memories, substituting a memorized record of her life, much as we might learn the life of another person from a very detailed biography or diary.

• As with Tiffany and the hiver we see this process getting set up, but as with Tiffany, we don't know how it will manifest itself. 
• Because Anat is the narrator, I had more opportunity to show change by altering the narrative voice. The old Anat constantly reveals the depth of her memories in the way she sees the world, through metaphor, allusion and story. I tried to show the relative shallowness of new-Anat's experiences by paring the imagery down to a minimum.
• The new Anat has excellent recall of her past, but she's less biased and quickly understands things about her companions while remaining less affected by them than she would have been. Considering the old Anat is quite morally ambivalent at times, the new one has a greater tendency to think in moral terms rather than through her own feelings and reactions.
• The new Anat experiences time quite differently from the old Anat. She moves through it faster for one thing, and with none of the tendencies to digress into memory, fantasy, or expectations of the future which the old Anat had.
• Changes in Anat's magical abilities reflect these changes in her personality in ways that move the story along. The old Anat could see into the spirit world but paid little attention to everyday people. The new Anat has no visions, but does have an interesting ability to 'hear' people's stories, whether they were planning on telling them or not. This reflects her less biased, self-centered nature as well as the loss of depth.
• Since it's important that Anat's change is never discovered by her companions, there had to be a lack of obvious changes in her behavior towards them.

Described like that, my alternate character feels a lot more subtle than Pratchett's but in both cases, the change is a logical consequence of what has happened to change her. Many differences stem from the fact that my character is the narrator and Pratchett's is not, but they also come from the fact that my character is very much living a double-life and needs to retain it, whereas Tiffany's identity and abilities are fully integrated into her social world. Oh, and the real Tiffany is distinctly 'good' whereas hiver-Tiffany is very bad indeed. With my character, these tendencies are less extreme, but they're also reversed.

I'll certainly be interested to hear what my beta readers think of the old-Anat, new-Anat change.

Specious editing tip for novelists

I plowed my way through the whole 2nd quarter of The American Dream this week - all 30,000 words of it! Now, I feel like I should be doing anything but staring at a computer screen which is cool, 'cos I'm done. I'm spending the afternoon taking my daughter to the dentist and repairing the washing machine. Don't you just love Fridays!

Anyway, the week has left me with an editing tip, based on the fact that I hit a roll yesterday. This turned out to be because that section of the middle was once the beginning. And you know how it is: everyone works harder on the beginning, everyone returns to it when they need to get back into things. It automatically ends up more polished than the middle and the end. So, if you want to have an easy time editing, here's what you do. During the drafting process, give EVERY section of your novel a turn at being the beginning! No, seriously...

Can I read other books while writing?

There was this discussion on Goodreads today about whether people find it possible to read other books while writing. I pounced on it, thinking it was a fascinating topic and that I might even have so much to say about it, I would write a whole blog post.

Later, after some reflection, I decided that whatever reading is to writing, it's not different from having other tasks and responsibilities, spending time with friends and family, or going on holiday. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's disruptive, and you can't usually tell which in advance. I like the total immersion of my little writing retreats, during which I don't read, exercise, talk to other humans, eat or sleep, but I've discovered I can keep that up for about 9-10 days before I crack.

The two things I've found I should consistently avoid reading before I get my writing done for the day are: 1) the news; 2) blog posts. Unfortunately, if I misguidedly allow myself to glance at either of these two forms of literature, the day just flies by and there I am at the end of it, still Putting the Internet to Rights. Have you ever noticed that however much you Put the Internet to Rights, it never gets any better? 'Nuff said.

Reading resolutions for 2015

Last year I let Goodreads lull me into setting myself the challenge of reading 100 books in a year. Looks like my eyes were bigger than my brain! I scraped in at a miserable 72 books. Admittedly, I had a really draining end to the year where I just couldn't fit cope with any added drama, even fictional, but more importantly, I learned something about myself: reading books I don't like puts me off reading. This year, I'm going to do things differently.

Resolution 1: be more choosy in my reading. Always read the previews first, and toss aside any books I don't actually like.
Resolution 2: set the reading challenge for a more sensible 52 books.

I've been lucky in my first choice of the year. I'm reading Jonas Jonasson's The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden and loving it so far.

Specious mathematical encouragement for NaNoWriMoers

So I just did an experiment to see how fast I can churn words out, so long as I'm not being at all particular about the quality of said words. And the answer is:

• 39 words per minute or 2337 words per hour

To be honest, I wasn't even trying hard. I kept taking sips of coffee, then using up my word count by moaning about how cold it was getting. But never mind that. These figures mean it should be possible - again, being totally unfussy about content and quality, to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November in any of the following ways:

• by investing a couple of hours every Saturday and Sunday (+ a little bit)
• by spending 45 minutes writing for each of thirty days
• by giving the task one hour for every day of the working week

That all sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? Doesn't it????

Okay, so the problem is that I would like to have something usable at the end of all this, not a bunch of disjointed garbage interrupted with coffee rants.

Preparation for Book #2: Roughing out the plot

While I gather my notes for Book #2, I'm also beginning to muse on the plot. It would be false to say I don't have a vague idea of what will be happen in it. I have lots of ingredients:

1. The original inspiration - core scenes which have been in my head since the very beginning.
2. Since my series of books is designed around an exploration of the world: an itinerary, which for practical reasons will be based on my own travels though there is definitely room for flexibility.
3.  Since the series is also designed around an exploration of human culture and history: a range of themes to cover. I've already researched most of the ones I intend to use though I may add more if the plot requires it.
4. Stuff inherited from Book #1, not only the main characters, but the inevitable development of the situation on which Book #1 ended (I hate cliff-hangers at the end of books, but I still planted a lot of what will eventually turn out to be foreshadowing).
5. The knowledge of where I want my characters to be by the time I hit Book #3.

That's a lot of information, but it's not a story. What I hopefully also have is more experience of what I need to turn it into one, and a minimum standard in the shape of Book #1.

Right now, I'm messing with the bits, sorting them, fitting them against various plot structures, diving into my bag of stories and mythologies for anything that might be useful, pinning bits together when I detect resonances between them and so on. It's a bit like building Frankenstein's monster: at the moment I have one leg and a head and a terrible feeling that I might end up having to sew them together for want of anything else. Eventually, I need something that looks fully-formed, smooth and inevitable. It will take a while but I do have the definite sense that it's going faster than Book #1.

Preparation for Book #2: Gathering notes

Book #2 is set in Oceania: the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Even when a novel is set in the real world, world-building applies and mine relies heavily on notes and photographs I've taken during my travels. 

Unfortunately, the ones for Book #2 were made at least three years ago (+ a few stories from a trip ten years ago). All of them are now scattered and mixed up with other stuff, across numerous files on a laptop which is breathing its last, and all over the Internet. My first long and grueling task is to bring them together and sort them out. When I'm done, I expect to have 20,000 to 25,000 words, none of which will be usable directly, but most of which will eventually get recycled into the story.

Writing tips in practice: get the support of your nearest and dearest

In my family, support doesn't take the form of a cozy cocoon of unconditional pink fluffy stuff. It's more of a training ground for real life experience. Yesterday for example, my dear husband carried out the following support activities:

1. Asked for the n-thousandth time when Manuscript in Progress will be finished so we can go on holiday with the proceeds of the book sales! No pressure of any sort, right? I showed him the eBook I made for my own purposes, to prove that there is indeed a book.
2. Spent five minutes criticising my choice of title. To prove I had good reason for choosing it, I showed him the blurb I'd written a few days earlier.
3. Started reading through the blurb, got interrupted by two phone calls and stopped half way through. Asked the meaning of the latin expression I thought had passed into common speech. On discovering the reason behind the title, questioned whether I was really writing about what I said I was writing about. This has to be a pretty good match for the real world, doesn't it?  AND - it's an important 'and' - at least the blurb made him laugh a couple of times. Yay!
4. Complained that I was going away to work on Manuscript in Progress instead of staying home to keep him company, after one of the phone calls informed him he won't have clearance to start his new job for another few weeks.

I'm afraid I did it anyway. I wonder how I'm going to cope all by myself...

Getting back into writing #2 - Make an explicit plan

I'm still not writing, I'm in the throes of Back-to-School organisation. All I did is make a bit of time to look at my manuscript and decide what to tackle first.

This is what Manuscript in Progress looks like at the moment:

1st 'quarter' - c. 20,000 words, finished
2nd 'quarter' - c. 30,000 words, finished except for some details at the very end
3rd 'quarter' - c. 30,000 words, needs serious editing, especially a central scene
4th 'quarter' - c. 16,000 words, rough draft stage

I decided to work backwards from the end, hopefully bringing the 4th quarter up to 20,000 beautifully polished words. At the same time, I'll be working on that central scene of the 3rd quarter which is a very big deal in many ways and may expand well beyond 5,000 words. I don't plan to let the 3rd quarter grow beyond it's current size. Instead, I'll be editing and rewriting ruthlessly, not because I'm fixated on some artificial word count issue but because the 3rd quarter has special needs which haven't been met yet. There's a) the dominance of that central scene, b) the speed at which things move, c) some major but temporary changes in my narrator's voice and d) the insertion of an external document. I've got it all in draft form, but it's a tough writing proposition and I need more time to mull it over. Here is a quote by Nicole Kornher-Stace from Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook, which illustrates how I feel about the 3rd quarter:

I wrote 150 pages when I was too inexperienced to do justice to a project as complex as a 17th-century unreliable narrator novel with three parallel storylines and a complete five-act play embedded in it.

My hope is that by the time I've finished the 4th quarter I'll be much more experienced! Yeah... So, I'm working from the end, which means I particularly need to make sure I remember everything that comes before. I really need that re-reading project now. I should probably even make notes while I'm doing it - a far more useful activity than mindless editing!

Getting back into writing #1 - Remembering What I'm Supposed to be Writing About

Subtitled 'OMG, I Just Created an Ebook!!!'

After three weeks of not writing, my first and biggest problem is to get back into the story. I have a really hard time recapturing voice but I also forget important things about the story shape and lots of little details I should know. And here's the crunch: if I start reading it in Scrivener, I'll get caught up in editing. You know the kind of editing where you sit around altering the shape of a sentence, then put it back again, then try a new shape and so on, and on, for hours. I just won't be able to stop myself. I could easily blow the whole of September just editing what I wrote so far. Since my levels of self-discipline are inadequate to the task of stopping myself, I really need my draft in a format which just won't let me do that. I'm astonished at how easy it turned out to be.

PREREQUISITES

There's more than one way of doing this, but in my case, I started with Scrivener on my computer, containing the Manuscript in Progress, OverDrive on my iPad, containing a bunch of library books, and a Dropbox account.

STEP 1

I followed these instructions for compiling an ePub document in Scrivener. Well actually, I followed about 10% of these instructions, since I didn't care how dirty my new book turned out to be so long as it was readable. It was so easy, I couldn't believe it.

STEP 2

I saved my new eBook in my Dropbox account and waited for it to sync. Yeah, it's kind of slow around here.

STEP 3

I followed these instructions for getting my new eBook into Scrivener. Basically, all I had to do was navigate to my Dropbox account in Safari, click on the ePub file and choose 'Open in OverDrive' when asked.

STEP 4

And there was my book, sitting around in OverDrive next to a bunch of fancy real books with well-known authors! I opened it, and it looked good. Surprisingly good. Who knew it could possibly ever be so easy? I seriously thought it would take me all morning to figure this out!

RESULT

Now I'm all set to read Manuscript in Progress on the train without any possibility of tweaking it. That will be a new kind of experience for sure!