19 Conversations Writers Can Only Have with Other Writers

From Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King, Honore De Balzac to Enid Blyton, the introverted Brontes to the quixotic personalities of JK Rowling, Ian Rankin or Neil Gaiman… writers are a weird bunch. It’s something of a trend in amongst the big names and the small names, the full-fledged authors and the still-trying scribblers.

Writers are quite candid about weirdness. Call it egoism (most people do) but we’re happy to acknowledge the quirks that make us quirky. Especially when we’re surrounded by other oddballs who understand a little of what we’re talking about. 

1. When we're with other writers, we know they get us

2. They understand the writing process. 

"Oh my god, I had the best writing day today. Everything I wrote was just so effortless. Like magic. There was a blank page and then there was thirteen written pages. Nothing else matters. Today was amazing."

3. Also: the right way to commiserate.

"Everything I wrote yesterday is complete horse dung - like seriously, I reread it all today and there's nothing salvable. I can't even explain. It's like having a screaming baby attached to your head whilst you paraglide towards a cliff when you realise your parachute is broken." "I'll bring the gin."

4. Talking about writing instead of writing is nerdtastic.

"If his mother comes from a line of more general magic users, there's no reason he wouldn't be able to work with it. He wouldn't have the same facility with it as a human, but he can do it. It would definitely explain his difficulty in grasping the spell and making it work. And Hermes is known for being clever, so that helps, too. So long as his ability to access that magic isn't a go-to..."

5. Even when we're talking about not-writing instead of writing.

"I spent four hours yesterday writing one sentence. One sentence. And then I deleted it because it didn't even make sense so really I spent four hours writing nothing." "Know how you feel. I'm sitting here with my laptop and those cold unfeeling keys are glowering up at me, mocking me with their pitiless QWERTY know-it-all-ness, telling me I'm never going to write another word again."

6. Plus other writers understand our oddities

"Do you think it's creepy that I spent all day listening in on other people's conversations in Starbucks?" "Nah, I stalked a guy through the tube last week because I wanted to figure out how hard it would be to follow someone home."

7. And that the voices in our head can be really annoying…

“Urgh I’m so tired today, I was awake all night long. I had this ridiculous argument with Laras [insert other fictional character name here] about whether or not he’d kill his father with a gun just to spite him or whether they have an epic showdown on the top of a space hanger. He just wouldn’t let me go to sleep.”

8. Ideas can be equally unhelpful with their timing.

“So frustrating, I have an entire chapter plotted out for this week, but I’ve got this new character in my head and I really want to write down her story now before I forget it.”

9. Other writers get that even literary research can be killer.

“Do you think you could come over next week? I’m thinking my villain kidnaps this girl and I can’t decide whether he uses chloroform or Rohypnol, so I think it’s best if I try them both to figure out which symptoms last longest and stuff. Can you help?”

10. That some can really put you off your food...

“I want to figure out what a decaying body would smell like and I heard sausages left for a couple of days outside can give you a good idea… what do you think would be more authentic: sage and apple, or Cumberland leek?”

11. Which explains why we're all paranoid about Google research…

“I’m really nervous about what people would say if they saw my search history...”

12. Even for those of us writing non-fiction it can still get pretty weird…

“This was my editor today: hey can you sub the sanitary towel story? And what happened to that interview you did with the dominatrix last week? Do you want to run that online today or do you want to put it up with the article on the transsexual mother that’s really a father?”

13. Who else can understand why rejection is so terrifying?

"What if they hate it? What if they hate me? What if no one will ever like my book and the paper it's printed on turns to dust and I've just wasted my life?"

14. Why negative reviews are so exquisitely painful...

"Do you even know what he said about my story? He said it was a nice idea. A Nice idea. Nice is what you call your neighbour's grandmother's Millionaire Shortbread. Nice is what you call a curry with no spices. Nice is sex with someone whose feelings you don't want to hurt but who you're never going to booty call again. Nice is people-pleasing and spineless and boring. Nice is the absolute worst."

15. Or why good reviews are the best thing in the bloody world?

"She called it brilliant! She loved my characters and thinks the narrative voice is super compelling! No, no let me read the review to you again... see this bit here."

16. The highs and lows of editing aren't strange to other writers.

Monday: "I love editing. It's so much fun! I forgot how much I love this story." Wednesday: "I hate editing. I'm killing my darlings. Killing. My. Darlings." Friday: "When will it end?!" Sunday: "Ah editing, thank you for letting me procrastinate from writing."

17. Neither is our caffeine addiction

"Tea. Coffee. I don't care. There's too much blood in my caffeine system right now for productivity and it must be rectified."

18. There's no judgement on our need for more books than we could ever finish

"I just loved the first book so much I bought everything ever written by the same writer..."

19.  In other words, it's nice to have a kindred spirit

"I know it's ridiculous but this sentence is just so gooooood... One day I'd like to write a phrase as perfect as this." "I know exactly what you mean. Ooo look at this one - imagine how satisfied Dickens must have been when he wrote that."

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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The Matt Haig Question: Can Men Write A Feminist Novel?

Matt Haig, the award-winning author of Reasons to Stay Alive, was recently lambasted online for wanting to write a book on the ‘perils of masculinity’. Having sent out the concept on twitter, scores of women decided to lampoon his idea as ‘anti - feminist’.

But why?

“How can we effect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?”

In January, Emma Watson spoke of her pride in being part of the HeForShe movement. She told us that feminism is a matter for both genders, and has benefits for women and men. When Matt Haig expressed an interest in writing about gender, however, twitter descended. According to them, there are enough books out there about men written by men. And here was another one, coming along to try and ‘mansplain’ feminism.

To an extent, it’s possible to see where they’re coming from. There are a lot of books by men about men for men, and swathes of articles as testament.

Yet Haig is the writer whose memoir deals so sensitively with depression and the social stigmas surrounding mental health. Having repeatedly clarified his reason for thinking ‘toxic masculinity’ could be an interesting and timely subject matter – sexism benefits men, but also hurts men – surely a similarly sensitive novel would be a boon to feminism?

Put this alongside recent headlines asking why, when Britain leads the world in female entrepreneurship, gender barriers remain in ‘boys club’ industries. Or why, though we’ve seen feminism become a mainstream trend in pop-culture, Mad Max’s more-than-capable Imperator Furiosa was met by scorn and a boycott from Male Rights Activists. As was the Girls Who Code group. And FIFA 16’s introduction of women’s football teams.

Some very interesting thoughts on Fury Road and Feminism. "The Feminist and the Furiosa" https://t.co/tcFx0dxZbI via @ashleylynch

— Blake Clark (@blakiebear1) June 13, 2015

  Surely a novel, a book that would make people acknowledge and challenge the heated subject of gender equality, could only be good?  Stories are, after all, integral to how we communicate and consequently one of the greatest tools of change.   

Let me take a little tangent by looking at two PR campaigns.

Most of us will have seen adverts that deal with modern preconceptions of what it’s like to be woman. Two particularly poignant recent examples are P&G’s Always ‘Like a Girl’ campaign, and Miss Representation’s ‘The Mask You Live In’.    

 In the Always’ ‘Like a Girl’ advert, the director asks a series of pre-and post-adolescent women and men to run like a girl, fight like a girl, hit like a girl. The results are striking in that they show young girls putting their all into each request – they sprint, they punch, they look fierce. Their older counterparts fluff their responses, play with their hair, mock themselves as they act ‘like a girl’. They essentially do what the boys in the ad do. They imagine that girls cannot do what boys do. Cannot be as fast, strong or serious. The question emerges, why can’t ‘run like a girl’ mean winning the race?

When did doing something ‘like a girl’ become an insult?

A year later, the campaign attained a coveted Super Bowl ad-space. Following up on the previous video’s demonstration of the ‘devastating’ effects of being taught ‘like a girl’ is a bad thing, it showed it’s possible to change the narrative. Doing something ‘like a girl’ can mean doing amazing things. On the other hand, 2013’s ‘The Mask You Live In’ looked at the impact of the phrase ‘be a man’ upon how men connect with their emotions. 

‘Be a man,’ they argue, is one of the most damaging things a young boy can hear.

It expresses a lack of value for qualities that have been ‘feminised’. It means not crying. Dealing with problems alone. Not talking about fear or anger or hurt. It’s a problem that run so deep that, as the Guardian’s Owen Jones wrote, it can kill. The key thing here is that just like the ‘Like a Girl’ campaign, the values of ‘The Masks You Live In’ show a polarized narrative. In it femininity is bad, masculinity good. Both have demonstrable, painful, consequences. Because even now, men are still expected to be dominant, to be natural leaders, to be physically and emotionally impermeable. This is not healthy for men – and it’s not healthy for women either as they experience the fall-out.  Importantly, when you see brilliant campaigns like these, you start to think about the bigger problems. You start to talk about them. They take fantastic stories, focusing on how boys and girls grow up in society, and turn them into a call to action. They’re not exactly subtle but they explore the need to communicate about the problems inherent within society in order for change. Yet these are stories told in three minutes.

Imagine how powerful a whole novel might be in addressing some of those same feminist subjects?

Returning then to the twitter onslaught Matt Haig experienced. Like Miss Representation, he considered investigating how masculinity in its current form damages men, and how feminism – the desire for gender equality – would thusly be good for everyone.

The template of what being a man is, is quite small. At my school: football, violent games, no emotion, banter, war films, girls as objects.

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) June 14, 2015

Haig’s plight, it seems, is partly that women don’t want men to lead feminism, which is valid. He wanted to tackle ‘toxic masculinity’ from a male perspective. Considering he identifies as male, this seems sensible since he can draw from his experiences. Moreover, penning a book exploring this issue does not mean Haig or any other male writer (Joss Whedon say) favours a men-first form of feminism.

It just means that he’s talking about the problem too.

A book’s ability to make people think and talk about problems they might not previously even have known is unparalleled.

They start conversations without even meaning to.

They can unravel problems and weave them into a tale, spin many hidden nuances into something terrifying, beautiful and complex.

This is the power of stories.

It’s why the campaigns we remember are the ones that deliver ideas not pitches.

So whilst I don’t want men to lead feminism, I also don’t think that we should begrudge men for wanting to be part of the conversation. They should be part of the solution. Especially when it comes to changing views on masculinity.

As long as there are great stories being told that challenge sexism, there will be conversations that should be valued, not vilified.

The advantage of novels is that they change the world without people even noticing.

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) June 17, 2015

“It is time that we all see gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals.” - Emma Watson

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) June 15, 2015

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Book Review: Pretty Girls, Karin Slaughter’s Chilling New Thriller

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Killer read from Queen of Crime, but is it chiller or thriller? 

Karin Slaughter is one of my favourite crime writers. So when I received a proof copy of her upcoming novel from Dead Good Books I was thrilled.

A new, standalone novel, Pretty Girls revolves around the Carrolls – a family devastated by the unsolved disappearance of eldest sister Julia. Whilst the father never gave up looking, the younger two sisters and their mother tried to move on even under the shadow of not knowing what happened to the family’s ‘golden girl’. Now 24-years since Julia went missing, a missing girl is in the news, and Claire Scott (nee Carroll) cannot help but be reminded of her sister. But when her husband is killed and she is reconnected with her estranged older sister, Lydia, she begins to learn the truth about what happened to her family.

Pretty Girls is different from Slaughter’s other books for a variety of reasons; not least that it is a standalone.

It is also the first full-length novel that’s not a procedural crime thriller. Instead, she turns her talent to a tightly plotted family tragedy told through three points-of-view. In this sense it is chillingly psychological, focusing more wholly on the interior experiences of her characters then her other books have done. For whilst her other novels are undoubtedly interested in the personal perspectives and problems of her characters, in this instance, it is safe to say Pretty Girls takes it to a different level. This is clear from the outset, where a first person narrator – quickly understood to be a diary entry written by her father – introduces the central mystery: what happened to Julia Carroll?

Following from the diarist opening, we are introduced to her leading ladies –the wealthy and well-married Claire, and her ex-addict, single-mother sister, Lydia. Without giving too much away, these two both start their narratives focused on the headline news that a young girl has gone missing. The Amber alert is out, and they are both brutally reminded of the unending horror of not knowing what happened to Julia. We therefore start with all eyes on the past, all voices narrowed on a mystery that is embryonic in its development but still nonetheless permeates every page and every sentence.

Now, there are a trio of things I love about Karin Slaughter’s novels: the characters, the ability to evoke atmosphere, and her attention to detail. These are things I admire, things I somewhat expect.

To an extent, Pretty Girls delivers.

It is a grisly, gory testament to Slaughter’s skilful ability to illustrate unimaginable torture and terror teetering on the edge of sensationalism. The characters have depth; somehow two characters that are exquisitely unlikeable in the initial chapters become fascinating by half way and sympathetic by the end. And of course, each page needs to be turned. The book is an intense thriller. A gritty, action-packed story full of twists designed to keep readers reading.

Yet there is something, a small niggling sense at least, that the novel doesn’t quite work as effectively as some of her others.

Slaughter has always been recognised for her more lurid style. She never shies away from piling on the descriptions in brutal, bloody, detail. This works exceptionally well in procedurals where criminal investigators have to get up close and personal with every tiny scrap of evidence. So for forensics like Sarah Linton and detectives like Will Trent to be confronted relentlessly with the violence and pathos of murder makes sense. It’s something I usually appreciate in her writing.

On the other hand, there are passages in Pretty Girls that feel overwrought in their brutality. This is because of the recurrence of almost identical ‘killing’ scenes. With voyeuristic glee, Slaughter replays the same images over and over, adding further gore with each repetition. Extended through the repeated images of television and video, which act as a metaphor for our insatiable social and personal desires to pry like a contemporised Pandora’s Box, there’s a point two-thirds of the way through where the imagery becomes something of a broken-record. It’s still gruesome. Still terrifyingly violent, but there’s nothing more to add. Yet still it goes on and on.

Admittedly, I can see why she does this from a writer’s perspective: it mirrors the experience of the protagonists. But as a reader, the scenes become desensitised, anaesthetised of meaning, skippable (or at least skim-readable) because there’s no additional clues actually in the barbaric act presented. The clues are after those scenes, in the moments where we return to the internal thoughts of Claire and Lydia.

It’s also in these moments that the suspense, which would normally ratchet upwards, slips. As the scenes recur, and as the images reappear, what should be a twist becomes achingly obvious. If it’s intended as dramatic irony, then that’s fantastic. Presuming this is not what she wanted however, it’s safe to say that other than one mammoth, what-the-hell moment, many of the twists are more like small, beckoning crooks of the finger. Saying that, suspense is a start-stop progress in Pretty Girls, but it’s still compelling reading. In fact, in the final chapters, readers are at serious risk of whiplash.

Another area that felt off – though I’m sure others may see it as the natural difference between stand-alone and serial – is that the characters were not as convincing as Slaughter’s others. This reaches from the under-developed and slightly predictable side characters (mainly police force), to the sisters themselves. Though they start off strong – three distinct voices are heard between father (pointedly told in the first-person), Claire and Lydia. Upper-class Atlanta contrasts starkly against working-class Atlanta between the sisters in the early chapters.

However, almost as soon as they meet their voices elide, swiftly shimmering into each other so that by half way through their mannerisms and individual idiolect vanish into one third-person style. This can make for odd changes in narration, as it’s only helpful but overt guidance from their author that keeps their closeness separate. Whilst not artless, and at times fascinating, compared to the rendering of previous protagonists (especially the love-to-hate ones like Lena Adams and Amanda Wagner), Claire and Lydia lacked distinction.

The same goes for that wonderful, brutal, tragic, deeply Southern landscape readers of Slaughter have learnt to love and fear, and which is decidedly absent. Instead, the novel deals primarily with private spaces and car journeys. Again, we can read this as a metaphor. Here we are dealing with a family saga, a tragedy that has trapped each of the characters in their own small world. Slaughter makes this explicit in the over-egged chorus around how Claire’s house reminds Lydia of a prison. Moreover, we are looking at personal journeys that are reflected in road travel. Yet the character of Atlanta, the one that’s so well-rounded it pulses within her other novels, is missing. It deprives Pretty Girls of vivacity and suspense.

By no means is Pretty Girls a bad read.

Powerful, poignant: it is brilliant though harrowing, and I sat stunned after finishing.

Slaughter’s meticulous detailing and vivid prose will keep most readers gripped – providing they have a strong stomach. For those seeking a psychological thriller you’ve come to the right place, but for Slaughter fans, it’s probably best to be aware that this is a crime master challenging herself rather than her readers.

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter is out in the UK on 2nd July, and in the US in September, published by Penguin Random House. Hardcover Retail Price £20.00; Amazon Prime Pre-order Price Guarantee £13.60; Amazon Kindle £7.47

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