Write about something you DON'T know about. Go on. I dare you!

This post was so popular on Authors Electric earlier this week that I thought it would be worthwhile reblogging here, on my own blog, for anyone who might have missed it.

Many years ago, I was asked to judge a writing competition for local schools. I was never very sure – and neither were the schools apparently – whether the competition in question involved creative writing or factual non-fiction, but most years the subjects, set by a committee rather than by me, allowed the primary schools to be creative while demanding that the older kids were restricted to factual essays. Let’s leave aside for a moment the iniquities of restricting to non fiction those secondary pupils who might have wanted to write stories. But the younger children were at least allowed to indulge their imaginations. Supposedly.

The first year was a pleasure, albeit rather a mixed one. It was clear that either some kids were prodigies – which was possible, I suppose, but so many in such a small area? – or they had had considerable parental help. As a general rule, though, most of these beautifully constructed, highly polished efforts were lacking in imagination. Long before that person in the US banned the use of excellent words like ‘said’ these kids had got the message. People exclaimed or interjected. They bellowed and screeched. Nothing was ever simple and clear. But so much of it was as dull as the proverbial ditchwater. Duller, really. Ditchwater is generally teeming with life.

There were, however, one or two misshapen but beautiful pearls among the pebbles: little stories full of energy and imagination, stories about space-men and monsters, about dragons and unicorns, about witches and warlocks when Harry Potter was perhaps only a glimmer in J K Rowling’s fertile imagination. The handwriting may have been as erratic as the spelling but there was a vigour about these that it was impossible to fake or fault and one eight year old’s effort stood out above all the rest: imaginative, enthusiastic, engaging. I can’t now remember whether it was about monsters or pirates. Perhaps it was about monster pirates from space. All I know is, it was wonderful.

But at the prize giving, I became aware that I had chosen the wrong child. Oh, I didn’t regret it for an instant, and it was a popular choice with the audience. His mum and dad and granny and grandad and various aunties and uncles were there and it became clear that he wasn’t a child who normally won things. But the teachers didn’t look very happy and nor did the parents of the kids whose perfectly crafted efforts hadn’t reaped the expected rewards.

The following year, I was asked to judge the competition again. But this time, instead of all the entries, warts and scribbles and all, I was presented with a ‘final selection’ presumably made by the teachers: a dozen essays with very little imagination between them. I courteously declined to judge under those circumstances, and asked them to find somebody else to do it.

I’ve been thinking about all this recently, and wishing that whoever first told writers to ‘write about what they know about’ had been throttled with typewriter ribbon or possibly – since it must have been a long time ago - choked with a piece of parchment and buried at a crossroads with a quill pen through his heart.

I used to - mea culpa - give this advice myself. Then I varied it by saying ‘write what you know about but you know more than you think,’ which was better. Now, I think I’d say write what you don’t know about, but write with avid curiosity. Write to find out.  Research if you need to and then climb inside somebody else’s mind, visit other times, other places, other worlds, other lives.

Historical novelists do it all the time. I’ve never lived in 18th century Scotland unless it was in a previous life, but I’ve certainly been there. In fact I've spent years there. Those who write fantasy do it too. Has China Mieville ever 'known'  Railsea in the conventional sense – a world where water has been replaced by earth, where shipping routes have become a network of railway lines, and where strange and far from friendly creatures lurk beneath the surface? Biding their time? Well, perhaps in dreams but he sure knows how to tell us all about it. And once we've been there too, we'll never forget it.

Then there’s crime. Do all crime writers have to commit murder in order to write about what they know about? And science fiction. And adventure. All we need to know is what it is to be human. Or even, come to think of it, what it is to be not quite human, or even downright alien. We need imagination and bravery and empathy and the ability to visualise, to take the leap and lose ourselves in a world of our own creating. All you have to remember is that if you are going to build a new world, it has to work on its own terms; it has to be consistent, stick to its own rules, however strange those rules may seem. It's inconsistency not oddity that pulls readers out of their willing suspension of disbelief. Mieville's overlapping and mutually invisible cities in The City & The City may tie the reader's head in knots - but for me, every last word of the novel is enthralling and believable because it is entirely, mind-blowingly consistent, so even while you're enjoying the story, some part of you is admiring the brilliance of the concept as well.

Some years ago, I was attending a Scottish writers' conference where I was giving a workshop, when a novelist who was later to become a good friend, but whom I then didn’t know at all, walked off with pretty much all the prizes for fiction. I was sitting behind her and I remember in particular her winning YA novel, which, the judge told us, was about fairies. I wasn't the adjudicator, but as soon as the novel was described, as soon as some of it was read out, I could see why she had won. These were not fairies as Blyton would know them but the ancient Sithe – the ‘rebel angels’ of myth who inhabit a world parallel to ours but who can also move between the two. The books - a whole series - are imaginative, savage, sexy, exciting, and original, an evocation of worlds that seem at once familiar and surprising, often moving, always believable. The writer in question, Gillian Philip, went on to forge a very successful career. Among her many novels, the Rebel Angels series is published by Strident. If you haven’t read these, then I can recommend them, whether you’re a young adult or any kind of adult at all.  Begin with the extraordinary Firebrand, Book 1 in the series.

But whatever genre you want to write in, be bold and inventive. Write, in order to find out. Write about what obsesses you, even if you don't know much about it ... yet. Or about something you're immersed in, but want to look at from a completely different perspective.
In short, write what you want rather than what you know.

Go on. I dare you.

A binge on the backlist - who I'm reading right now!

When I find an author I love, I’m a binge reader. I’m reading my sixteenth or seventeenth Phil Rickman novel at the moment. I’ve lost count. I began with the Merrily Watkins series as recommended to me simultaneously by a couple of friends. This was before the television series, which I didn’t watch, because by the time it was shown, I had very definite ideas about the characters and I didn’t want to interfere with them. I enjoyed them all, although they did grow very dark towards the end of the series, almost too dark for me. And Jane, Merrily’s daughter, sometimes irritated me to the point where I wanted her to meet with a sticky end. But these were minor matters and I was never going to stop reading. From there, I moved smoothly on to Rickman’s backlist, novels written and published in the 1990s, big, meaty books, right up my street: earth mysteries, witchcraft and the supernatural, folklore, custom and belief, the occasional murder, but all told brilliantly – what a wonderful storyteller this author is!

I find myself racing on, late into the night. And I’ve been reading these books at the same time as I’ve been writing a fairly hefty and demanding new novel myself. But they’ve been just what I’ve needed to take my attention away from my own obsessions. I generally read in the evenings, or – especially when I’ve been writing late into the night – in bed for an hour or so before falling asleep. Every time I go back to one of Rickman’s books it has been a sheer pleasure, the kind of excited anticipation that you only get with a good book.

Once you’ve come to the end, you just want to move smoothly on to the next.

The thing is, though, that I would never have been able to do this without Amazon. Well, I would. But it wouldn't have been easy. I’ve read all of these books on my Kindle, and with the exception of a single short story that I ‘borrowed’ with Kindle Unlimited, I’ve bought them all, steadily, one after another and sometimes two or three at a time.

I checked in one of my local bricks and mortar bookstores last week – I love this bookstore and visit it and buy from it – but they had only one or two Rickman novels in stock as far as I could see and none of that dense and wonderful backlist. I know they could have ordered paperbacks for me but that would have been an expensive business and I would have rationed myself. Or I would have thought better of it and moved on to another author. The simple fact is that we can't all afford to spend as much as we would like on books. 

Most of my purchases were made in that frame of mind where you’ve finished a great book and want more of the same and you want it NOW. They were made late at night when I had come to the end of one novel, heaved a sigh of satisfaction, clicked on that little cart on my beloved Paperwhite and bought a couple more, just to be on the safe side.

I don’t blame the bookstore for this. They only have the shelf space to accommodate the backlist of a handful of starry authors. I still love them, still browse and buy from them (and drink the occasional coffee there as well). But when I’m absolutely addicted to a writer and want to binge, it’s Amazon I’m going to turn to. And when I think about that as a professional writer, I would be crazy if I didn’t want other people to do something similar with my own work - even though I have nothing like Rickman’s amazing backlist.

I don’t know which book to recommend most. I liked Night After Night best of all, but it's the second or third book involving a few of the same characters. You don't have to read them in order, but it's more satisfying if you can. Rickman clearly becomes fond of certain characters (so does the reader) and continues them into new and different series and mini series. The novels are scary, but not revolting in the way some crime novels are revolting – or at least I don’t find them so. The supernatural elements are well handled and believable. The characters are likeable and the villains suitably villainous. The landscapes sing off the page. You’ll want to visit these places if you don’t already know them. And he really knows his stuff where folklore, custom and belief are concerned.

So I can recommend them. But unfortunately, the end is in sight. I've almost read them all. He has a new novel coming out soon. Will my backlist binge last until the new book is out? Well, probably. But after that, I’ll have to move on, find another writer to satisfy the urge. 

I seem to remember that I had a mini binge on China Mieville some time ago. Then I got distracted. But I see that there are a lot of his novels I haven’t read yet. Which cheers me up no end. And a television series of The City & The City - one of the best novels I have ever read - is planned, which doesn't cheer me up at all, because I can't understand how anyone could ever squeeze that amazing novel into the constraints of television. I'll probably stick with the novel. 

So tell me - what books do you binge on? And whose backlist have you found irresistible? 

The City and The City - Miéville's Masterpiece

I've joined the Reading Between The Lines Review Collective and will be posting regular reviews here on my Wordarts blog of  'new books, old books, loved books, neglected books'. And if you remember where that quote comes from, you may well be even older than I am! I won't be discriminating against eBooks or self published books, but I'll be adding plenty of other books into the mix, and they won't all be new or even in print. In short, I'll only be reviewing what I like, when I like.

This week, I'm reviewing a book I like very much indeed.
I'm ashamed to say that the first time I became more than peripherally aware of China Miéville was when he delivered a keynote speech at last year's World Writers' Conference in Edinburgh, to which I was not invited, but a lot of which I followed online. You know how it is. You know about a writer, without knowing too much about what they write and keep adding them to the 'to be read' list.  If you want to know what he said about the future of the novel (raising a few elitist hackles in the process), you can still find it online here.

I loved what he said and have been quoting him ever since, especially this assertion: 'You don't have to think that writing is lever-pulling, that anyone could have written Jane Eyre or Notebook of a Return to my Native Land to think that the model of writers as the Elect is at best wrong, at worst, a bit slanderous to everyone else. We piss and moan about the terrible quality of self-published books, as if slews of god-awful crap weren't professionally expensively published every year.'

So after that, I just had to investigate his work. A younger friend and Miéville fan made some recommendations. The City and The City was my first taste of what he had to offer. It didn't disappoint. It is the most disturbing, exciting, moving and engrossing book I've read for a very long time, one of those magical novels that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to go away. One of those books you want to tell other people about, hoping against hope that they will appreciate it too.

Where to start?
It begins with a murder. The body of a young woman is discovered on a piece of waste land in the Eastern (ish) European city of Beszel. And you think it's going to be a detective story, a police procedural in an interesting foreign setting.
Well, it's that. But there's more. So very much more.

The narrator - we get to know him rather well and like him a lot as the novel progresses - is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel. He's thoughtful, intelligent, moral, attractive in the sense of being a character with whom you can identify. You find yourself liking him. And that's just as well, because he is about to be your guide through a thoroughly disturbing world. I don't want to give the game away. And please don't plough your way through all the multitude of reviews on Amazon, if you want to enjoy this in the way the writer clearly intended. Although some of them are excellent and illuminating. But read the book first. For this is a novel like no other. It will stretch your brain. I read it far into the night for several nights. It's a long book, fortunately, because I didn't want it to end. I dreamed about it a lot, bizarre, disturbing dreams. Not nightmares, just immensely complicated dreams, indicative of my brain's repeated attempts to come to terms with the world the author has created. I would wake up again in the early hours and carry on reading, anxious to get back to the story, but perhaps even more anxious to get back to the world of Beszel and its neighbouring city of Ul-Qoma.

Is this Science Fiction? I don't know. It seems real. Ordinary in the sense that it's easy to imagine yourself there. A real place. Or then again, perhaps not. There are frightening, possibly supernatural elements. But they too are utterly credible. Is it dystopian? Maybe. It's dark at times. But most of all, it's a stunning evocation of a world which is so believable, so firmly lodged in the realities with which we are familiar, so manipulative of language itself, utilising the 'almost familiar' to explain new concepts, that it defies any easy categorisation. I have never struggled so much to do justice to a book I loved.

The writing is dense, rich, intricate and occasionally ragged in no bad way. It has to be. He plays with words, with ideas. He plays with your mind. Reading The City and The City made me realise just how many modern novels are edited to within an inch of their lives. So many widely praised books these days seem to have been edited until they are thin.  I'm not talking about popular fiction here. I enjoy popular fiction a lot. At its best, it's a well made blueberry muffin, or a light-as-a-feather croissant with jam, and there are times when that's exactly what I want to eat. But there are other times when I fancy something much more rich and strange. Unfortunately, you get the feeling that so many novels which began as something complex and strange and rough around the edges in the mind of the author, have been processed smooth by assiduous editors until they all seem curiously similar: bland, correct, predictable mush. You finish them, and you think 'Is that it then?'
Whatever you feel about The City and The City, you won't feel that!

The unease begins early on. Tyador has been at the crime scene, discussing the case with a constable named Lizybet Corwi, and then speaking to a group of journalists gathered at the edge of the waste land where the body has been discovered. He turns away from them, and quite suddenly, there it is.
'As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrasz, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance, I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself and looking.
With a hard start I realised that she was not on GunterStrasz at all, and that I should not have seen her.'
At that point, with that small, seemingly unimportant - but oddly disturbing - encounter, you start to ask yourself why? Why should he not have seen her? Why was she not on GunterStrasz?

The answer - gradually revealed, always consistent - is complex and mind-bending: a realisation of the nature of the world in which Tyador lives and works. But not once, as I read this novel to its inevitable and satisfying, but unguessed, conclusion, did I ever stop believing in the truth of it, even while my brain struggled to encompass it. It's not an easy read. Don't blame me if you don't like it. Don't blame Miéville if you don't like it. Just acknowledge that it isn't for you. But if you do like it, you may also find that your perception of your own world won't ever be quite the same again. You'll dream about this book and go back to it, and be intrigued by it months later. I found myself desperately wanting to talk to people about it, which is why I'm reviewing it now. I've read very few novels in the last ten years which have filled me with such excitement - even in retrospect. I'd be interested to know what other readers think!

The City and The City was published by Pan in 2010 and is available on Kindle as well as in paperback.
You'll find it on Amazon UK and Amazon US.


Catherine is part of the Reading Between the Lines Review Collective a group of professional writers committed to writing good reviews about great books!