Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories

Good writing

Wonderful, wry, funny, real . . . these stories are little gems. Shelved.

Sessha

Amazing read, love the pace and the way it unfolded. Like the use of vioce for the student, and the body language you decribed. Great twist as well. Very Well written!!
If you get a chance, would love to know what you think of my book "twisted Harmony"
kent

I have just read both of these stories, and frankly they are amazing. I have no more to say.

Read both stories...the first one disturbed me quite well...it was well written, the story unfolding awesomely....i can't say I liked it or that I enjoyed because that may make me seem strange...I'm definitelly thinking its good - I hope you understand what I'm getting at.
Didn't get the second story at all...was totally confused by it, ill have to come back at some point and reread it to see if I can get into it.
Sta xx

I really appreciate your craftmanship, this is superb. In a funny kind of way I feel there's a little bit of flannery O'connor in there somewhere. Cheers, Chuck

Wow! Pierre, thanks. I am opening myself to the universal muse in hopes that I be gifted with an idea for a novel that I can write--given my sensibilities. Your advice is sound. I look forward to putting it into action. The novel is definitely my next challenge.

Marcella, thank you. Without even looking back at the manuscript I understand your criticism and agree. "Rahen" was very difficult for me in terms of how much and what to put in and to leave out. I tried to strike that delicate balance, but a part of me definitely agrees with you.

Dear G Winston,


I admire your profile, sir. I wish I could write like that, but I am very slow and not prolific at all.

Shaming the Devil is on my revolving bookshelf. I read Rahen.

This writing is good. Very good. I cannot find fault. Accomplished. Entertaining and engaging.

Curiously, as I was reading I saw Mark Twain at work. And I also thought of Harper Lee. And what about Joe David Brown with little Addie Pray?

Just your line. You have the experience to write novels that compete with their work and that’s what I urge you to do. I have been published (although I’m trying again) and there are loads of notes below on what I have found out.

With admiration for your work, sir.

Over the past five months I have spent three hundred hours providing page-long critiques but can no longer keep up with the volume.

So I’m trying another way of passing on information.

I will attempt to do better than critique your work by indicating how you might judge it yourself. Rather along the lines of give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for life. You may or may not agree with everything and I admit I do not always stick to these thoughts either.

What I have set out below are guide-lines based on what I myself have learnt from being published.

The pitch is critically important as among the book-lists which editors scan, your pitch stands alone with no support from the synopsis. I write the synopsis first, because a key sentence there is usually appropriate for the pitch.

A synopsis is not a dust-jacket advertisement. Aimed at a professional editor, it is a no-nonsense summary of what happens in the novel, including how the novel ends. Don’t leave the editor dangling and don’t ask her questions. Tell her.

Somerset Maugham said, ‘There are three rules for writing a successful novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’

Correct. There are no rules for creativity. Think of Richard Bach’s Jonathon Livingstone Seagull. So way out, so creative it was rejected over a hundred times. Then it became a best seller.

There is one criterion though……. entertainment. Our writing must entertain from the very first sentence. There is no other reason for story-telling whether around a camp fire or in print..

I have struggled nine years to write three novels. Each written three times. One published, one lying fallow, Fig Tree currently in the process of being rewritten for the fifth time. Two literary agents requested the full manuscript but threw it back at me for narrative story telling. So I am rewriting, converting narrative to dialogue.

Based on what has happened to me, these are my thoughts on what editors want from us…………….


Plunge directly into the story. Do not set the scene or back-story first. When we go to a play and the curtain rises, we don’t see stage hands putting the props in place. The stage is already set. Likewise our opening paragraphs to the reader, the actors should immediately get on with it.

I have found that our opening chapter isn’t necessarily the first one we write. It might only occur to us when the novel is completed.

Let our characters drive the story-telling via dialogue, interplay and direct action. It’s stupid (although I am guilty of this) to have a stage set and silent characters frozen, while an off-stage narrator bores the audience with what is supposed to be happening on the stage.

Write minimal words because research shows that our readers’ brains race ahead of our words, visualizing the scene themselves, anticipating how our sentences end…… four times faster than they are reading. They become bored and frustrated by our overwriting, over description, unnecessary information. (I have been hauled over the coals for this.)

Write tight, sparse, lean, stark, bare bones. Adjectives and adverbs are for people who need a crutch to support their unimaginative nouns and verbs. As far as possible, always seek the appropriate noun and verb.

(Read John Steinbeck’s field notes Journal of a Novel which he jotted down while he was writing East of Eden. He edited out as many adjectives and adverbs as possible, finding the appropriate noun or verb instead.)

And yet, in my rewrite I am horrified to find superfluous words, adjectives, adverbs and general waffling which I am getting rid of. I am embarrassed at my own work.

My vocabulary is poor, so I use Roget’s Thesaurus which is a treasure. A real work-horse and a delight to use. It’s a companion that provides thousands of alternative words. Appropriate nouns and verbs are there for the picking.

Don’t write your scenes. Live them. Experience them. Meditate. Daydream yourself into them Watch what is happening. Listen to what the characters are saying. Smell the sweat or the aroma or whatever. Touch what the characters are touching. What do you feel? Taste the bile, the coffee, or the skin of the lover.

All communication is made through our five senses. I wear earmuffs when I write, to help me leave this world, experience the emotions and the senses and disappear into another universe which is the scene I’m trying to paint.

Are we stirring the emotions of the reader? Feeling is critically important. This can be achieved through good dialogue. Speak your dialogue aloud to hear what it sounds like. Is it natural? Do people really speak like that? Is it too formal? In the real world, we often don’t speak complete sentences. So dialogue can be truncated too to make it more natural.

In my opinion a novel must generate its own momentum, so readers experience it rather than read it. This can be achieved by dreaming it, experiencing it, living it, rather than writing it.

To avoid clumsiness I edit out the past participle ‘had’. I change ‘he had done it’ to ‘he did it’ It seems to make the action more immediate and more relevant.

I also dump words ending in ‘-ly’……. seemingly, clearly, obviously. actually, strangely, finally, eventually………. and all the others. Somehow they weaken our writing and make it vague.

And I am finding that much of the dialogue reads better if the ‘he said, she said’ is deleted.

Taking words out of our sentences and taking sentences out of long narrative paragraphs, in my opinion, is the secret to better writing. I can easily cut my stuff between 20% and 50%.

I learnt this when a literary agent demanded I delete 40,000 words from my first novel of 120,000 words. I was shocked but I cut it back to 80,000 words and the novel was published.

Fig Tree has already shed 16,000 words and I am currently rewriting it for the fifth time, changing the dialogue, cutting the narrative and tightening the writing as much as possible. I might dump another 6,000 words.

You may be interested in The Video Inside Our Heads, which is part of a confession I made about my idiocies in attempting to write. See, ‘How I Wrote and Sold My First Novel’ in Forum’s Writing section. It’s quite insane and you’ll probably laugh at me but it did work and I suppose that’s what matters..

I trust this is better than a critique and provides a bit of food for thought..


Kind regards,



Pierre Van Rooyen.

The Little Girl in the Fig Tree.

Tyler, thank you. That is very high praise. I take my writing and revision VERY seriously and am a bit overjoyed when I feel (based on feedback) as if I've done something right. Please do buy the book. The one thing I can promise is that you will not be bored, and will likely be a little uncomfortable at points. But that's not a bad thing, right?

G

I feel inadequate trying to critique this in any way. You take the call to "show" not "tell" the story to a very high level. As I read these two stories, I felt that I was walking the canvas of a painting which was your writing - absolutely breathtaking!

I definitely have to shelve this, and then go buy myself a copy.

tyler

1BigFoot, thank you so much for this note, though you scared the pants off of me. The "halls" typo I could deal with without feeling utterly ashamed of myself (LOL), but the "know" one just about had me sweating. I ran back to the manuscript. In fact, "know" is correct on that line. The sentence--in proper English--would have read, "I didn't know." The word "ain't" is used in various ways (somehow) in urban slang--sometimes to substitute for "am not" and in this case, "did not" as in "I ain't do that!"

I fear that there are other typos lurking in my text, and know that they will rear their ugly heads soon enough. I believe there is a misplaced quotation mark somewhere, but it has been very effectively hiding from me. Thank you for being willing to report the good, the bad and the ugly.

G.