Jack Whyte and Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

Continuing our quest for a publisher for Obelisk Seven, our thriller, Loraine and I attended the Surrey International Writers Conference.

The conference had arranged a superb roster of presenters, and the quality was of a high order. Then on Saturday night, at the close of an interesting evening, a brooding Scot with a deep, deep voice made his way to the podium, while five hundred expectant writers and aspirant writers suddenly hushed themselves, and watched the slight figure expectantly.

Jack Whyte was born in Scotland in 1940, and migrated to Canada in 1967, where for twenty years he earned his keep as a professional singer, an actor, a musician, advertising man and an entertainer, including a one man show on Robbie Burns, which he took on tour throughout Canada.

In 1978 Whyte figured out the mystery of the sword in the river, and from that came a desire to write about King Arthur. This lead to the Knights Templar Trilogy, and more than one million books sold, just in Canada  alone!

Jack inherited his stubborness and determination from his father, who was blinded in the Second World War and told that he was only fit to weave baskets – his father disregarded this advice and wound up as a successful physiotherapist.

As for Jack, he is a disciplined writer, as Fiona Morrow wrote in a 2009 Globe & Mail article:

Hallie Ephron on Pacing your Novel with a Pacing Table & Dotty Pictures

Hallie Ephron

I was lucky enough to attend the presentation by Hallie Ephron at the Surrey International Writers Conference (SiWC) on how to pace your novel. 

Raised by screenwriters, author of six acclaimed novels, crime fiction reviewer for the Boston Globe, and author of the how-to book, Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style, Hallie sprinkled gems during her lecture.

One thing really grabbed my attention: her use of a Pacing Table for analysing the pacing in a novel, along with a graphical representation of the creation and release of tension.

The Pacing Table has three columns.

Look who else was rejected! Some lessons for Writers from The Drunkard's Walk

Can a drunkard give you hope? The answer is Yes!

Scratch the surface of any writer and you'll uncover a deep fear of rejection.

Your lot as a writer seems to depend on others, and every single day you think of the high odds against you, and of the next rejection – by an agent or a publisher.

But there is some good news for you, if you are prepared to learn some lessons from The Drunkard's Walk,  Leonard Mlodninow's magnificent book on how randomness rules our lives.

Leonard makes the point that we "habitually underestimate the effects of randomness". And his dissection of the impact of random events on our lives should give every writer who wants to break into the Big Time hope.

Take this obeservation from his book:

Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct? Is your novel unsellable?

Loraine and I just love his reference to a manuscript about global warming – that man is psychic, make no bones about it!

Leonard goes on – and writers the world over should memorize these words and recite them as a mantra every time they wake up, look in the mirror, and fear rejection:

Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our nevel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks?

J.K. Rowlands

He goes on to give a list of published authors who were rejected, with some quotes from the thank you but no thanks letters.

Sylvia Plath was rejected for lack of enough genuine talent.

George Orwell was rejected because animal stories would not sell in the U.S.

Tony Hillerman was rejected by an agent and advised to get rid of all that Indian stuff in his manuscripts.

John Grisham had one manuscript rejected by 26 publishers, and 27 publishers rejected the first book of Dr. Seuss.

Even J.K. Rowland had her first Harry Potter manuscript rejected by 9 publishers before she got that all-important Yes.

And now for the kicker – Leonard's conclusion on your chances of getting published and winning fame and fortune.

His good news? You do stand a chance:

There exists a vast gulf of randomness and uncertainty between the creation of a great novel ... and the presence of huge stacks of that novel ... at the front of thousands of retail outlets. That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set – the set of people who don't give up. A lot of what happens to us – success in our careers, in our investments, and in our life decisions, both major and minor – is as much the result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work.

As a writer clutching a just-finished manuscript in your hot hand, you probably need to learn how to become a Happy Loser, as Clotaire Rapille, the noted archetype psychoanalyst and ethnographer, calls successful sales people:

Salespeople sometimes say to me, "I don't like that you call me a loser." But that's not what I mean. Happy losers are people who see rejection as a challenge. If 95 percent of the time you are rejected, you have to ask yourself, "Why did I choose this kind of life?" The happy loser likes it because 5 percent of the time, he wins. And all those times he loses, he sees as getting to the win.

 

Thelma Toole

This lesson from The Drunkard's Walk came too late for author John Kennedy Toole, who lost hope and committed suicide at the age of 31 on an isolated road outside Biloxi, Mississippi, by connecting a garden hose from his idling car to his cabin; his mother kept seeking a publisher for his manuscript and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published – testimony to a mother's unwillingness to give up.

My Next Novel: Born in a Crowded Basement

Where do the ideas for a new book come from?

Are there Book Fairies who float around, like Tooth Fairies, circling around those seeking ideas for a new novel, and swooping down to tap them on the nose with their wands?

If there are, there must be a flock of Book Fairies living in the crowded basement of what must be one of the most wonderful bookstores on the face of the earth.

That bookstore is Macleods,  on Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Macleods, Vancouver, BC, Canada

From the outside it looks rather drab, with its entrace facing a city parking lot, and its windows barely keeping the books lined up behind them from bursting out into the street.

But step inside and an organized madhouse greets you.

Set up in 1982 by owner Don Stewart, there are more than 220,000 books inside – crammed into floor to ceiling shelves, piled helter skelter in the aisles, flowing along the sides of the stairway leading down into the basement.

One day I made my way downstairs, and stood stunned.

Every shelf was full. And in the centre of the open spaces between the various groupings of bookshelves were huge piles of books, pyramids rising five or six feet high.

A book lovers dream come true. Thousands and thousands of second hand books, just waiting to be picked up.

At the bottom of the stairs I turned to the right, and ducked down to check what was on the lower shelves.

It was the section on the Second World War, and soon I was clutching a slightly battered copy of Munich: The Phony Peace, by Henri Nogueres, published in 1963.

On the bright red and white cover were four separate photographs of Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French President Daladier: each man had a pen in hand and was signing what came to be known as The Munich Agreement.

I took it home with me and was lost in it – 423 pages later I put it down with a satisfied sigh.

Diana & Unity Mitford

From knowing vaguely about Chamberlain's trips to cut a deal with Hitler in 1938, I was now more familiar with every meeting and every manufactured crisis of those desparate days.

I fell in love with the tension that crackled through the words on the pages of the book, feeling myself drawn into the incredibly strung danger of the times.

The thought was born: could I wrap a thriller around these three meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain?

I dived into some research about the times and the people involved, and when I came across a black and white photograph of two of the Mitford Sisters giving the Nazi salute, I was won over.

I had the setting, and some of the characters. Now what I needed was a plot, a hero or two, and a villain or two.

Thank you, Macleods.

The Dissection of Silent Lips by Anne Perry at the Surrey International Writers Conference

The doorway is guarded by two SiWC volunteers, and you need to show them your "passport to pitching" to get into the large hall.

Inside, agents and publishers are seated at small tables on the left and right sides, waiting for hopeful writers to make their pitches.

The writers sit at the front of the hall, in two lines, waiting for their ten minutes.

Anne Perry

At the back of the hall are the Blue Pencillers. These writers and agents are there to give you advice on the structure of whatever you have brought – a few pages of a novel, a handful of poems.

Anne Perry waved me to a seat and held up her hand to stop me passing her the few pages I had selected from an old novel, stuck in a dusty drawer for a little over a decade.

I don't read segments in these sessions, she explains. Talk to me about what your novel is about.

I launch into a discussion of The Silent Lips. Title taken from the famous poem by Emma Lazarus on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Before being shipped to New York in 1885, parts of the statue were exhibited in Paris.

The words that gave me the title for this old novel of mine are stirring:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

 

Statue of Liberty head 1885

The story in my thriller Silent Lips is set in a New York which has had a ring of steel thrown around it to stop the spread of a disease that sprang from one man's experiments to save his friend from sickle cell (using himself as a test tube, and crossing the species line by using chimpanzees).

Frantic experiments take place in the ParkLab as scientists – flying in on one-way tickets to help the stricken city – try to find a cure.

They overstep boundaries in their desperation,  lead by the military commander of the ParkLap, while B52 bombers trace lazy contrails in the sky above, waiting for the order by the President to solve the problem.

What causes you concern about your story structure, Anne asks.

The flow, I answer.

She leans forward, and talks for several minutes. Your risk is that your novel might sound like a documentary. You might want to personalize it more.

Take your lead character and see if you can make the story more about him/her, and drop any details you do not need.

I sit back, thinking.

Ten minutes with a highly skilled professional, and an uncanny insight given to me which solves a niggling problem I had – a problem which lead to The Silent Lips being thrust into the back of a drawer and hidden out of sight for so many years.

Time well spent.

I leave, and another hopeful author takes my seat at the small table. Anne Perry leans forward, waving aside the proffered pages.

Speak to me, she says ..