A Writer

Ken McLeod on how to write:

It was while I was writing my second novel, The Stone Canal, that I was shown a very good trick. It's a difficult one to learn for yourself but once you've been shown it it's very easy and you can then do it for other people. The way I learned it was this. I was working at Edinburgh University and I had one novel published and I noticed that the writer in residence, Andrew Greig, was a poet whose work I had much admired. So like any shy student I took a sheaf of poems I'd written over the years and left them in his pigeon-hole, pencilled in an appointment for about a week later and tiptoed away. When the appointment came round and I met Andrew Greig I found he was a sound chap and he quite liked my poems. The longest and most pretentious of them you can find in last year's Novacon special, I'm sure Rog Peyton can sell you one later. More importantly it turned out that Andrew Greig lived about ten minutes walk away from where I live and about thirty seconds walk from the local pub. You can see where this is going. I introduced him to all my skiffy friends and he introduced us to the Scottish literary mafia. And to Shirley Manson, which impresses a lot more people, which is why I take every opportunity for name-dropping.

Anyhow, one evening in the pub I showed Andrew a few pages from Chapter 2 of the manuscript of The Stone Canal, and he read through them and showed me the good trick. He took a sharp pencil and worked over a few paragraphs, crossing out phrases and sometimes whole sentences. He called this removing the fluff. The effect was indeed like removing fluff from a record needle. (If you don't know what that means, ask someone older.) Once he had shown me how to do it I could do it for myself, and since then I've shown other people how to do it.

Another good trick was what he called the massacre of adverbs. You go through your text and take out as many adverbs as possible. You can drop them or you can replace the verb with a more precise one. 'He ran quickly.' No, it's: 'He sprinted.' If you have a word processor, you just use 'Find' on ell wye space ('ly ') and ell wye stop ('ly.'). This works. There are entire genres where people don't use these techniques, you know. There's some minor character in fiction, I forget the novel, but the character is a novelist and she writes historical romances 'full of rapes and adverbs.' Imagine an Arthurian fantasy novel with the fluff removed and the adverbs slaughtered. It would more like Chandler than Mallory. 'That Morgan dame was fey.' 'Down these mean glades a knight must ride.'

As it happens, one of the books I read partly for pleasure and partly for research for The Stone Canal in fact does read like a historical novel written in the hard-boiled style. It's called Njal's Saga. Here's how it begins: 'There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red. Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver plains. He was also a very experienced lawyer [...]' The femme fatale of this saga is a woman called Hallgerd. Here are the descriptions of her. At the beginning she is a little girl her playing on the floor, and: 'she was a tall, beautiful child whose hair hung down to her waist.' A little later:

'We now return to Hallgerd, Hoskuld's daughter, who had grown up to be a woman of great beauty. She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-Legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her whole body. She was impetuous and wilful.' Somehow that last bit doesn't come as a surprise.

Later still, Gunnar meets her at the Althing:

'Hallgerd was wearing a red, richly-decorated tunic under a scarlet cloak trimmed all the way down with lace. Her beautiful thick hair flowed down over her bosom.' These six sentences are all the description you'll get of her. And from them you quite understand why two of her husbands have already been killed and why there are a lot more men murdered before the story is over.

You could definitely take advice from someone worse.