Michael - Thursday
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| NO! Not this one. |
Stan and I have just finished what we very much hope are the
final edits for our stand-alone thriller Dead
of Night. No doubt you’ll be hearing more about the book here in due
course, but for the moment I want to talk a little about the writing. This is
mainly because my head is still too full of the book to talk coherently about
anything else.
With this book we deliberately set out to do something
different. We wanted the challenge, and we wanted to see if we could appeal to
a wider audience by a change of scene and characters. So we (temporarily)
shelved the Kubu series, and took on a new setting, a new protagonist, and a
new writing style. Specifically, most of the book is set in South Africa with
sections in Switzerland and Vietnam, and the protagonist is a woman, Crystal
Nguyen, from Minnesota who was born in Vietnam and came to the US as a refugee
with her parents after the Vietnam War. The feature that is common with the
Kubu books is that it has a backstory relevant to modern southern Africa—in
this case the poaching of rhinos and the smuggling of horns to Asia. And what
can or should be done about it.
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| Yes, this one. |
We found a lot of challenges. Could we write a female as the
main character? Culturally, Crys is a Minnesotan—she grew up there—and Stan has
lived there for most of his career, and I’ve visited often for extended
periods. But some of her makeup is Vietnamese. That’s a culture we don’t know at
all well. Could we pull that off? Oh, and did I mention that it’s written in
first person? I should have mentioned it’s in first person.
From the word go we had two big problems. The one was
understanding our new character—what motivated her, what her background was,
how she came to be passionate about wildlife
and journalism. It was a big enough issue that Stan wrote what started as a
novella about her life in Minnesota and ended up as a novel in its own right.
That was written in first person present. (Dead
of Night is in past tense.) I’m sure you’ll learn more about that book here
in the future, too. When we tried to both write her, we found it much harder
than writing Kubu. Kubu appears from different perspectives in different
scenes; he is consistent, but we don’t view the whole story from inside his
head. It’s hard to fit two people into one head at the same time!
We realised right from the start, of course, that everything
in the book has to be seen or heard about by Crys, and we realised that put
constraints on how the story could be told and its style. You can’t write how
anyone else feels or what he or she is thinking. Crys can only deduce that from
body language and what they actually say. This was much harder than we expected, or even realised when we finished our first draft. One danger is writing third person in first person i.e. having Crys think about what we would want to narrate. She wouldn't do that. A bigger risk is that the story ends up without the
emotional depth that third person narration can provide. The editor had to
educate us to that, and we even toyed with rewriting the whole book in third
person. (Briefly. Very briefly!) In the
end we added nearly twenty per cent to the book to address those aspects more
deeply after a lot of editorial input.
In the end, we are really happy with the result. But, of
course, in the final analysis, it is the readers who will decide how successful it actually is.
But I’m not sure we would want to try another first person
novel, although we've learned a great deal. And learning is always fun and
worthwhile, if somewhat painful on occasion. I’d certainly love to hear what
other people think about the first person/third person dichotomy, and if you’ve
tried writing both, which do you prefer and why? And which do you prefer reading?
In the meanwhile, back to the relative safety of the younger
Kubu finding his feet in his first week in the Botswana CID...
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MICHAEL STANLEY EVENTS
We’ll be at CRIMEFEST in two weeks (May 17- 20 in Bristol) moderating
panels and appearing on one with Charles and Caroline Todd. We’re greatly
looking forward to that one in particular!
THURSDAY, 17 MAY
14:40 – 15.30 Panel: Climate Change: Cold Crimes and Hot Homicides
Quentin Bates, Kjell Ola Dahl, Lilja
Sigurðardóttir, Robert Wilson
Participating
Moderator: Stanley Trollip
FRIDAY, 18 MAY
16:00 – 16:50 Panel: Writing Pairs: Is Two a Crowd?
Michael
Stanley (Michael Sears & Stanley Trollip)
Charles
Todd (Charles & Caroline Todd)
Moderator:
Karen Robinson
SATURDAY, 19 MAY
14:50 – 15:40 Panel: Getting Personal – Private Lives of
Characters
Kjell Ola Dahl, Mari Hannah, Priscilla Masters,
Jeffrey Siger
Participating Moderator: Michael Sears
