Writing about death

Death is a natural part of life so it should be no surprise that it makes an appearance in a writer’s work. I knew that I was going to have to refer to it at some point in The War Wolf as this is a book about violent events and violence often ends in death; especially when there’s a battle!

There are several approaches that one can take with regards to this subject and it all depends upon the nature of the death that you are writing about. The Battle of Fulford Gate gave me two kinds of approach. The first was a more objective account in which large numbers of men meet in combat and a significant percentage of them died. The removed nature of the account actually results in a kind of distance being achieved between myself and the often undefined characters that I am writing about. I did put in the occasional more detailed account of someone dying horribly on the point of a spear but these were largely cameo appearances.

The more subjective accounts came when I involved the characters that I had defined, moulded and developed. In this instance I actually found the writing more emotionally charged. I don’t know if that came across to the reader, no one has actually mentioned it yet, but for me the scene in which Hereric commits the ultimate act of courage, sacrificing himself to save his lord, honouring his death-oath as a huscarl, meant a lot when I wrote it. I wanted it be heroic and not just another bloody event. When I thought about it I was humbled by what I imagined to be the courage of a man who accepts the price of his own loyalty on a field of battle will be his death. To stand there before your enemies knowing that you will not live beyond the encounter and yet not shirk from it; that is true bravery.

There are other deaths, however, and they are not all as brave. In my new novel Eugenica, a work currently in progress, I wrote a scene where a young girl dies as the result of a severe beating. I found actually writing the scene surprisingly easy, I thought that I might have had a problem with that as I have no experience of visiting such violence on another person, but it flowed from my keyboard. The real emotional response came after the beating when she is rescued by a friend and dies in the company of what few other friends she had. That actually got to me. I remember reading an interview with J. K. Rowling in which she admitted to crying over a death scene that she wrote for Harry Potter, I don’t think that I was too impressed. I was wrong to have that attitude. When you invest time and effort into a character they do come alive and start to live in your imagination, then you kill the off and although they never leave you they are never the same either.

What I discovered was that it was not the moment of the death of the character that I had a response to, it was the impact that that death had on the other characters. In For Rapture of Ravens I had to deal with the aftermath of the Battle of Fulford Gate and one of the characters has to grieve for her husband. I’ve attended my share of funerals so I was able to set the scene well enough, I think, but what came out as I wrote the dialogue surprised me. I think it is one of my better moments of writing but I’m going to have to wait for the book to be published to verify that.

Art imitates life, they say, therefore so should writing. In life the moment of someone’s death can be terrible, painful, quick; slow, observed by a crowd or go unknown. The moment of death is not the part that provokes the real emotional response; that comes as part of the realisation that this person really has died. It is the reaction of one human to the demise of another. We are largely empathic beings and we feel the hurt of another otherwise would a reader be affected by the death of a person who is just a figment of the writer’s imagination?

Subtle Changes

After completing the final manuscript for publication of For Rapture of Ravens I decided to revise the original manuscript for The War Wolf. The idea was to correct some typographical errors and clean up the formatting. However, as I was in the mood to review the whole book I decided to have a look at the cover. The original cover I liked very much but it was not long after publication when I started to notice things that I thought I had got wrong with it. Only little things but as I tend to be my own harshest critic they were knowing away at me. So obviously I saw a chance to put things right. It is not, I think, anything drastic, just a little alteration that is, in my opinion, an improvement. I hope that you like it?

Reviewers Required

Feedback, it is more important than a royalty cheque!
Of course it is always a happy moment to see that royalty payment being credited to your bank account but it is a fact that the size of your royalty also reflects the size of your readership.

Like so many other things in life it could be bigger!

Now one of the proven methods of expanding your readership is getting people to talk about your book and the best person to do that is someone who has read it. We all need someone to right us a review.

For some reason I have found getting a review rather difficult. To date I have sold over 1,200 books on the Kindle platform alone and yet I only have 12 reviews! 2 of these are on Amazon.com and the other 10 on Amazon.co.uk. This is pretty paltry by anyone’s standards, or so I think.

I don’t know what the secret is to getting people to write even a simple review of a book that they enjoyed (these are, after all, the best reviews). I know from my own experiences as an Amazon customer that they do their bit to encourage people to give some kind of feedback, even if it is just a rating of how many stars. The Amazon approach is something of a blanket however, it doesn’t seem to consider what you have bought. For example I bought a replacement iPod lead; does that really need a review? I rated the company because they offered the product that I wanted at a good price and with a speedy delivery, but I didn’t think that the lead itself required any comments. When it comes to something like a book or DVD or a CD, however, I always go back and leave a comment.

I don’t have any reticence about doing this but then I can use words, writing holds no fear for me, which is useful considering what I do! That said I generally do not leave critical essays on books simply because I do not believe that that is what prospective readers want to read. I know that when I browse sites like Amazon I always look at the reviews before buying. I have a habit of looking at both the best and the worst and then scant he others to find any patterns. This is useful because it means that I can discount those reviewers who have just uploaded their personal vitriol, most of which is usually unwarranted. Sadly I find many such examples when looking for books by independent authors.

The point is that reviews are immensely useful to both the author and the reader. An honest review not only give validation to the writer it also helps them discover what they are good at and what they may need to work on. I have certainly found some valuable guidance in the 12 reviews extant on my book The War Wolf, it helped me change for the better, I believe, the text in the second book, but how much more improved might that volume be if more than 1% of my readers had offered their comments on what they had read?

I posted on Twitter a few weeks back that giving an author a review was like giving them a hug. If you genuinely liked what you read then there’s something to that. Books are more personal than iPod leads, they touch our emotions, they take us to fantastic places, they expose us to new ideas, in fact a good book can give an awful lot to the reader; is a review and a star rating too much to ask for in return?

For the Thrill of it All

My next writing project is set in the 1930’s and I thought that it might be worthwhile reading a book from that period, not some literary masterpiece but something more popularist and so I happened on Edgar Wallace. In his time Wallace was a prolific writer with an estimated 50 million copies of his work in existence at one time, though sadly most of his books are now out of print. He specialised in thrillers and colonial adventures, the latter of a dubious character in the light of these more enlightened times. He should perhaps be famous for his largest creation, King Kong¸ he wrote 110 pages of the first draft of the screenplay before dying of a heart attack aged only 56!

The reason why I wanted to read someone like Edgar Wallace is because he wrote for the public and not for critical acclaim. He claimed himself to find no literary value in his own books but clearly he was able to represent a life that many English people of the period recognised and made it more exciting with the addition of murder and mystery. This is what I was looking for, the kind of thing that other authors of the time might not be so interested in.

I picked up ‘Green Rust’, a book that might be termed a ‘techno-thriller’ today. It concerns a not quite so mad genius who believes that he has discovered a means to raise Germany from the dust following the imposition of reparations imposed upon it by the allies after the end of World War I. His weapon is masterful, a bacteriological poison that will devastate the world’s wheat crops, and he has a network of agents ready to act in all the great arable areas of the globe. Only one man, the American agent Stanford Beale, has an inkling of the diabolical plans of Dr Van Heerden and sets out to stop him as the good doctor hatches his plans in an unsuspecting England.

The actual story does not concern me too much, although Wallace’s vision of a Germany rising from the dust was spot on and his prediction concerning the danger inherent in biological warfare is chilling, even more so for the times in which he wrote. I was more interested in how a popular author might represent the social customs and mores of the period in which he wrote. The differences are subtle but important I think. Class consciousness is far more prevalent than I expected but not in an overbearing fashion, as it is often represented in retrospective pieces on the early 20^th century. Etiquette also matters more, along with appropriate dress, occupation and residence.

I can’t say that reading ‘Green Rust’ led to me making and great discoveries in terms of how British society between the wars functioned but that was not my aim. By far the most important element is the ‘feel’ of the times. People spoke, acted, worked and relaxed a little differently. They lacked many of the material comforts that we take for granted and also seemed to aspire to a lot less. There is little reliance on technology simply because it has yet to make the inroads that enjoy. The telegraph is the email of the day, telephones are common but not as quick or as far reaching as you might expect. The same applies to cars and aeroplanes are still exotic toys of the future for the majority of the population.

These are the kind of elements that I am looking to capture. I believe that it is in the small detail of the ephemeral that adds realistic substance to the weave of a historical fiction text. It is difficult to say if reading Edgar Wallace will give me a true feel for the period but doing so takes me closer to my objective. If I have time then I will look to read some of his contemporaries work as well but I think that I have gained a useful insight into a period that is different to our own today in far more subtle ways.