book-review

Pull them in and keep them turning the page!

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

That is the dream of every writer.

Every teller of tall tales struggles with that concept – the delivery such a subtle art.

Some argue over the power of the opening line – is it the critical event between reader and writer, is it the tantalising appetiser that will keep the reader coming back for more and more and more?

Can a few lines of our scripted prose keep them hooked?

Can an opening line deliver the whole book from page one?

It’s true that my favourite opening line is from an author I’m not really a fan of – I love his stories, just not his style. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

However, for this opening line, Mr Charles Dickens – Tale of Two Cities – take a bow.

This prose has so much going for it, yet it’s also one that today I’m sure would be broken up and lose its magic. 

Who today would get away with a 119-word sentence?

It tells us so little of the time and place, and yet at the same time (with a little thought) it tells us so very much. 

And that is the genius of such prose, it doesn’t talk down to the reader, there is no spoon feeding of anything, your ability to follow the story is taken for granted – and so the opening line works and works so very well.

So, how do you emulate this?

Me, I’ve tried and tried again and again to get the hook suitably baited – for the opening line to be a true aperitif of what is to come.

With Amy Grace and her opening adventure, I tried to set the time (late 1800’s), location – a train from Alexandria to Cario and then a small introduction of peril insofar as the train has broken down. 

“Railways were synonymous with punctuality; they were an accepted byword for engineered Victorian efficiency.  Yet Amy sat motionless in the afternoon heat, in a broken-down train, somewhere between Alexandria and Cairo.  The intended three hours of travel would eventually draw out to become several long boring and uncomfortable ones.” 

Did/does it work – I hope so.

My latest work in progress is a little novel called ‘HIM’, a tale of a man waking up in prison and trying to find his identity. 

“So little liquid, so much potential compressed into it.  It had gone cold, but he still sipped absentmindedly at his expresso.  People came; people went.  Life’s rich tapestry was a slowly changing tableau to his front. He watched but followed little.  He should have been paying rapt attention, but he wasn’t.   He was a middle-aged man in a nondescript jacket and open neck shirt relaxing in a Sardinian pavement café drinking coffee.  He was sat alone, which for this café was unusual, he also had no open laptop, newspaper, or mobile phone competing for his attention, and that if noticed would have struck any viewer as approaching strange.  But nobody appeared to paying attention to anything.  Everything was slow, mañana personified.  The sun was lazily sinking into the sea, the fishing boats half-heartedly bobbing with the lackadaisical tide, even the evening breeze moved with all the speed of a sulking teenager. 

When the guns exploded and the tables were tipped over and the screaming and scattering of feet began, it was all too quick, too out of place for people comfortably slowing into the evening to comprehend.  Light travels faster than sound, but it was sound that dominated everything. 

Blood stained the pale stone pavement, screams of alarm startled the seagulls into flight, while the dead body repulsed the living who pulled themselves in the opposite direction, any direction that was away from the man whose life was spilling into the Romanesque cobbles.

All moved away less one man. 

He didn’t move because he was the designated dead man.”

Does it work?

Again, I hope so.

I hope the reader can taste the story that is to come and that the way that it is written is both acceptable and pleasing to the palate.

Time will tell.

While I obsess on the trivial, worry about the placing of this comma and description (show don’t tell) of that thing, while I do these things, be kind to each other, hug those you love and tell them so.

Follow that!

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

We’ve all been there, cursed by that singular slice of genius prose that we then must follow.    

What do you do, just how do you take your reader from something that is achingly beautiful – do you just stop and leave this tale as one of those unfinished masterpieces? 

No, of course you don’t. 

You stare for untold hours upon uncounted hours simultaneously celebrating and cursing that near fluke collection of words. 

Dam those typing fingers, and NEVER forget that judging your genius, sitting, standing in the wings loudly rolling their eyes is the spectre of Imposter Syndrome, a monkey that clings to your back with a tighter grip than a third animal trying to sneak into the ark…

It’s purely subjective, a beauty that rests in the eye of the beholder.

But surly at one time all writers must lift their fingers from the keys, whistle quietly to themselves and then look forlornly for a third hand to pat them on the back? 

A few times the planets have aligned, and words have just fallen into place as if they were in the writers waiting room already written patiently waiting for me, the poor teller of tall tales to find them and set them free.

I wrote such prose when I was trying to describe the hanging of a young woman for the crime of killing her newborn child.  I’d set the scene, scattered crumbs of doubt that she was guilty, laid the premise that that hanging would be a terrible crime against real justice, but that inevitably that the law that protects men would blindly proceed.

The gallows were new stripped pine, they cried, the trees that surrounded the sad scene pulled at the at the air and created a storm, rain was pulled back into the cold sky to fall as vengeful stones of ice. The little tragic body was rushed away to a shallow hole in the ground, while men with upturned collars retreated from the storm, away from the crime. Hopefully the reader sheds a tear at the cruel injustice of it all.  I did.  I do every time I reread it.  It runs over a few pages, and I am so enormously proud of my association with it.

But, back to the point in hand, what then, how do you follow whatever you consider to be the epoch of your creativity?

In this instance, being a ‘pantster’ came and bit me with a hard unforgiving tearing of soft buttock flesh.  I had no plan, no script as to what was to happen next, I’d written myself in to an emotionally exhausting corner with no apparent way out…

What to do, what to do?

True to form I drank tea, drank tea as if some sort of perverse prohibition were imminent. 

It didn’t help.

And it did.

Time to breathe is invaluable.

I had to follow this scene, so I did.

Compulsion is indeed necessity, and so I wrote what happened next, and then what happened after page 43 and took the reader all the way to page 337, and a suitable ending was created.

Of all the problems that a creative soul can ever suffer, this one is the most joyous cross to bear. 

So, this missive will end on a positive.

ENJOY the ride, you paid the money, you sought out this white knuckled adrenaline experience, best you enjoy it!

In ending, I remind all to hug those you love, tell them as often as you can just how important they are in this life that you have, and above all stay safe and do your very best to remain sane. 

Why?

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Back in the black and white days of yore, when dragons still roamed the land and the internet was dial up, all that time ago, I wrote my first book.

I scribbled words together as a rebuff to that contentious ‘best opening line’ debate.  Many enjoyable books have poor openings, and many a great opening line is the highpoint of an extremely poor tale.

It was and remains ever thus.

However, I thought to myself what if I could write an opening line, and then what if I could take a tale all the way from ‘once upon a time’ all the way to ‘the end’?

My foray, my toe dipping moment was agonised over, written, rewritten, and then rewritten again.

I quickly appreciated just how hard it is to write that killer hook.

My offer was – It wasn’t just an isolated cliché, it was more than that, it was a burst of three hot angry and buzzing 7.62mm clichés that struck him hard fast and square in the chest.  They hurt, they stung, they burnt, and just because they could, they hurt him again.

Now, the merit or otherwise of an opening line, I appreciate, is such a subjective matter that has as much to do with prevailing fashions, audience whims as it does actual artistic merit.

A good opening line, or indeed not, it taught me so many lessons beyond stringing the words together.

From this opening line I created a 45,000-word tale.

The resulting book we named after the punishment given to Sisyphus that had him rolling the stone to the top of the hill only for it to roll back down again time after time after time…  an apt metaphor I thought for the (futile) actions of NATO (et others) in the far away plains and mountains of Afghanistan. 

Sisyphus’s Burden set the precedent for all future tales insofar as it was a true ‘pantster’ creation.  It was a journey of discovery as much for the writer as it is for the reader.  This approach has remained with every other tall tale that I’ve created.  I may start with the vaguest of destinations in mind, but the route to be taken is never known. 

My next offer to the world was the result of a pleasant debate around the visual differences (if any) between SteamPunk and Goth – with a slight detour taken to discuss one of my favourite books (take a bow Mr Stoker) Dracula. 

Is this taking us anywhere?

It is, hold on, this is longer than a tweet, but definitely shorter than a book written for a long Russian Winter, so, yes, back to the plot…

If we’d cracked the opening line conundrum AND completed that oft quoted novel that we all have inside everyone of us, then book two was free of any and all constraints – and so it turned out to be.

Many say, ‘stay in your lane,’ or ‘only write what you know’ or more bluntly NEVER attempt to write from the point of view of a character you are not – i.e. a woman, a minority that kind of thing.  How these folk think fiction works – I don’t know, but these are genuinely touted mantras (shocking isn’t it!).

Never one to really understand or indeed accept the rules my next offering was written about a five foot and two inches tall woman.

I chose to write about a woman, because my setting (the late 1880’s) was most definitely a ‘mans world’ AND I chose my female character NOT to be the busty amazonian in short shorts and tight shirts, or that simpering woman always waiting to get rescued by a man, nope with Amy I wanted to avoid those tropes and cliches. 

She’s my attempt at an ‘every woman’ character, a woman that many could relate to.  She fails, she is cut, she is violently beaten and abused, but she survives.  And this theme of violence against women was one I wanted to get right, not to abuse, not to trivialise or titillate.  Cuts hurt, scars remain, and nightmares come back.

Risks are taken, and real-world consequences paid.

We added into our mix a dash of SteamPunk with an eccentric professor and a gifted flying machine, and we sprinkled this tale with a liberal dose of magic, fairy tales and Irish mythology.

The rules say that such a tale should sit around 80,000 words – volume one sits at 130,000.  You are also told NOT to write a series before you’ve managed to sell book one…  Amy and her adventures are four complete tales with a fifth in the works.

All of this may explain why I’m currently failing to succeed in the traditionally published market – an industry seemingly dominated by cold and timid souls whose idea of risk taking is commissioning yet another ‘Twilight Saga’ teenage romance by numbers missive…

Could be that, or indeed my tall tales are indeed without merit – could be option B.    

So, while we contemplate the many mysteries of the publishing world, while we stare at that knot that ties the oxcart to a wall, while all these things happen, while the sands of life trickle through the timer, while all of this (and long sentences) continues, I wish you all the best that life has to offer – stay safe and hug the ones you love!!!

Pick me (Nigel).

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

If ever there was a pop reference to age me, maybe that one is it!

Still scribbling away, still casting my bait into the deep dark waters without attracting a bite.

Fishing is a game of patience. 

Even when standing shoulder to shoulder along a crowded bank, I still have faith that my hook is more than worthy of a nibble (or two).

Amy is a strong character, she’s interesting, fully rounded, not dependent upon anyone else for validation – she looks at both Bechdel and Mako Mori, nods in acknowledgement and moves ever onwards.

The tale is a wonderful blend of fast paced adventure, revenge, and the struggle to recover, all mixed with the subtle spice of steampunk and Irish mythology.  

The first book is a true standalone project that starts and stops with questions answered, and loose ends tied up nice and neat.  Yet, for those with a taste for this mix the adventure continues for another four volumes… 

As grand as they are (and they are) all those finely crafted words are for naught if they are never read.

Would you pick Amy?

Will Nigel pick me? 

I’m casting my line, loading my bait, and hoping for a bite.

While I patiently wait, stay safe and remain sane.