Back from holidays

Just arrived back from two weeks in Ireland to find a small cheque for book royalties and about half a dozen encouraging e-mails and blog entries. Thanks for both! Our time in Ireland was largely centred around a big family reunion, which went well.

Two things relevant to writing emerged. One was that two young men had a chance to read the manuscript of The Infinite Day and were embarrassing in their praise. It seems to work. The other thing was that I began to put down a lot of notes for a new series, which is a sort of spin-off from the Lamb among the Stars. It is tentatively called the Seventh Ship series and as I envisage it, it will run to three volumes. What was happening when I was writing notes was that characters and situations seem to be popping into my mind saying ‘Could you use me?’ or ‘Would I be able to play a part?’ This was very encouraging because I felt I had covered so much ground in the Lamb among the Stars that I was worried I had exhausted interesting scenarios and people. Anyway, it doesn’t look like it: there’s any number of fun plots, heroes and villains. However, I have too much on at the moment to do very much with it other than make odd sketches and outlines. But I am open to offers.

Now back to Ireland. I’m afraid we got badly hit by the weather. The trouble is, we live in a cool, wet, Celtic coastal region and found that we had traded it for something very similar. Having lived in a Mediterranean country, and got used to the warmth of France on previous holidays, we felt the cold dampness didn't help. I was moved, therefore to come up with a few tongue-in-cheek rules on how to know that you are in the wrong place for a holiday if you like the sun. So with apologies to the Irish tourist board (and I’m told last year was lovely), here we go.

You know you are in the wrong place for a holiday when:

• Shops sell more insect repellent than suntan lotion.
• Picture postcards major on waves breaking violently against cliffs.
• Sports outlets are full of wetsuits.
• The area you are in is covered by more lakes and bogs than dry land.
• The guidebooks talk about ‘the luminous light’ and the ‘clean air’.
• Shops sell scarves and waterproofs in August.
• The traditional architecture is low buildings huddled behind hills and stone walls.
• The area has been a centre of emigration throughout history (ever asked what drove them to leave?).
• There seems to be no indigenous word for air conditioner.
• You arrive at a bed and breakfast to find that the heating is on in mid summer.
• Reptiles have given up the unequal struggle and become extinct.
• There are no ‘help us to conserve water’ signs.
• The sheep, plants (or people) are described as hardy.
• Trees lie at an angle to the vertical.
• The tourist brochures describe the landscape ‘cut by the waves, lashed by the wind and washed by the rain.’ Hmmm.
• Notices on beaches talk about the danger of exposure, rather than sunburn.

My take on Harry Potter (and I’m sure JKR is really worried)

That’s it, I’ve had enough. I’m going to retaliate. She-Who-Need-Not-Be-Named made £1 million an hour on Saturday. I have held off on the HP series waiting for the dénouement but now, as my final blog before going on holiday, I shall give my take on HP7 and the series.

Now I have to make a confession. I gave up on the series two books earlier but I was so intrigued by the hype over the last one that I read the Wikipedia summary and then speed-read the last 50 or so pages of the HP7. Sorry guys, but life is short (and art is long and HP7 isn’t the latter). Anyway, if there are great plot spoilers below I apologise for offending the faithful.

Let’s get the praise out of the way first. JKR is imaginative, celebrates some good values, has some clever ideas and err… looks good on pictures.

1) Rowling was never a particularly good stylist, but she appears to have actually got worse. Perhaps now she is a megastar, she thinks she can dispense with editors. The TLS (Times Literary Supplement) review described her writing as ‘barely adequate’. And that’s generous. I know good writing when I read it, and this isn’t it.

2) Linked to this, is the fact that JKR she has no sense of what is best called ‘architecture’. We are running to the climax of an epic series so all the energy should be building up to be released in some final climactic confrontation. Instead, we get … well, she doesn’t deliver.

3) The plot is labyrinthine and often downright confusing. And no, I don’t think it’s because I had skipped about 1,800 pages. The websites seem abuzz with unresolved issues, and possible contradictions and superfluous characters.

4) I’m old-fashioned, but she is too ambiguous. The big question before the book came out was ‘Will Harry die?’ The big question now is ‘Did Harry die?’ I think she wanted to kill him off but couldn’t stomach it.

5) The book is pitched at an odd level. There are signs that Rowling is (sad to say) taking herself seriously and even aspiring to literature. So we get the portentous quotes at the start of the book. Yet the book inhabits two worlds simultaneously; the children’s story of sweets and spells and the black Gothic fantasy possibly saying something meaningful about life are uneasily intermingled.

6) There is an epilogue of unspeakable Middle-Class tweeness. ‘Nuff said.

7) The weaknesses in Rowling’s worldview are now exposed. There were those in the Christian camp who believed she was a Christian writer, albeit a very subtle one. I think that view is now impossible to hold. Those atheists who feared that God was going to walk on stage in the last book are doubtless relieved. He doesn’t: he’s gone missing. It seems plain that if Christianity exists for JKR as a writer, it exists as a set of ethical ideas and images merely to be ransacked for effect. For all the ‘superstition’ in the books, there is no overruling deity or divine powers. Despite the magic (which in most cases is little more than an alternative technology) it’s a bleak atheistic world out there. It’s sad. I had hoped for a clear redemptive death or the ‘Deeper Magic’ but no, it’s not there. Ironically, I think the American religious right were correct, but for the wrong reasons. The books are problematic, not because they promote Satanism but because they promote secularism.

Anyway, I’m on holiday for two weeks in Ireland. I will try and access the web, but I can’t guarantee it. For those who pray, do pray that when the manuscript of The Infinite Day reaches Tyndale on Monday it will be greeted with pleasure and a determination to push the book and the now finished series with all possible power.

Chris

Finished off!

I hope you aren't expecting any great words of wisdom from me today. I am written out – or is it written off? I have just finished the first decent draft of The Infinite Day and my good wife is anxiously reading it as fast as she can. So far, I am encouraged by the way that she tried to read it and eat breakfast cereal at the same time. Anyway, all being well, she will say that it works and that there are no major failings in continuity. And then with a few words here and there and a general tidy up it should be on its way to Tyndale very soon. I have also just written something for Speculative Faith.

I was tempted to write something on Harry Potter this week. You can't seem to escape from him at the moment and I am constantly reminded that I have currently earned about one half millionth of She-Who-Need-Not-Be-Named. (At least in earthly terms; as a Christian I am paid into a bank elsewhere.) I would however mention an interesting article in a Time magazine piece on the books. It is called ‘Who Dies in Harry Potter? God’ by Lev Grossman.

In it, Grossman makes the point that Rowling has broken new ground by having God utterly absent in these books. Someone might point out that Tolkien never uses the word God in ‘Lord of the Rings’. True, but his active presence in events is assumed. It’s an interesting article.

Anyway I am off to clear my desk and find out where the rest of my life has gone.

Have a good week.

The three Cs of rewriting

The good news for my fans is that I have now finished the first draft of The Infinite Day, and with college now over for the summer I am now working full-time on tidying it up. What does this involve? Well as a lay preacher, I tend to see things in threes, all beginning with the same letter. And here I am aiming for the three Cs.

1) Concision

Although we use concise a lot, the noun concision is not an everyday word, which is a pity because it is a useful one. The dictionary defines concision ‘as terseness and economy in writing and speaking achieved by expressing a great deal in just a few words’. Just so: in other words, it is the art of summarising something very complicated in such a way that the reader grasps it in a paragraph instead of having to wade through six pages. In writing things down for the first time you tend to be profligate with words. In rewriting, you try and boil your descriptions and dialogue down to the bare minimum. Sometimes concision requires that a prized bit of writing gets the axe!

2) Clarity

There are all sorts of things here. So, if you are describing a meeting, clarity involves making it absolutely obvious who is saying what. Or, if it’s an action sequence, where more or less everybody is and who does what to whom. The last thing you want is readers to pause with furrowed brow and backtrack for a couple of paragraphs until they are absolutely certain what is going on. (Incidentally, this is the real problem with experimental writing: it’s just too much like hard work.) Fairly obviously, clarity and concision can work against each other. Concision demands that something be described briefly, whereas clarity may require lots of words.

3) Consistency

I could use the more filmic word ‘continuity’. At one level, consistency is very easy, if hard work. It is to make sure that the facts match throughout the book. So at a simple level, it is to ensure that a character who has dark hair at the start still has dark hair at the end. But it gets more complicated. Do people speak in a particular voice? Is that consistent throughout? Or do they have similar mannerisms, likes and dislikes throughout? Or imagine A meets B briefly in chapter 1: the astute reader will spot the mistake if when they meet again, twenty chapters later, they have to be introduced. Needless to say in an epic trilogy such as mine, which must be heading for 650,000 words total, the question is not whether there will be continuity errors but how many will there be. (As another aside, my recollection is that there were a large number of continuity errors in the first version of Lord of the Rings, which were only tightened up in later editions.)

That’s all for this week. Hopefully, the manuscript will be in a fit state to print out and give it to my wife on Monday, who is anxiously awaiting it. Fortunately, or otherwise, the weather is so appalling at the moment that there is no temptation to hanker for the great outdoors!

A reality check

I suspect one of the dangers that professional authors face is of living in the worlds they have created. This is probably a particular problem for those deeply immersive, all-embracing worlds that we fantasists love to conjure up. Has J K Rowling ever been in such a tight spot herself that her first reaction was to try to come up with the right spell? One of the things that authors really ought to do, particularly those who do not get out much from behind the keyboard, is keep an eye on the real world and what happens to real people.

There was a salutary lesson for us in Britain last weekend, with three possible terrorist incidents; none of which occurred and two of which degenerated into farce. In one case, the bomb car was towed away by that most mocked British figure, the traffic warden (eat your heart out, Bruce Willis!). In the other the villains raced their jeep at an airport terminal entrance, only to find that it wouldn’t go through the doors. The end result there was one badly burned bomber and a Glaswegian who has become a folk hero for doing what Glaswegians are so frequently condemned for: kicking the heck out of a stranger. The whole affair was so ludicrous that one paper, in a reference to a long remembered series of British farcical films, called it ‘Carry On up the Jihad’!

What has been interesting, though, has been the reaction to the revelation that the bombers were mostly medical people with intelligence and above average education. This leads to the problem of motivation. In secular Britain, the idea that people can have a religious motivation for acts that will lead to their own death and in the case of terrorism, the deaths of others, is beyond all fathoming. We are so much in love with sex, sport and shopping that we cannot imagine a higher motivation. The prosperity of these people: doctors, hospital registrars and the like, has thrown them. Good heavens, these people could even afford to buy a iPhone!

This undercuts the common socio-economic model for terrorism. You know the sort of thing: they had lost everything and so had nothing to lose by death; they had been so badly treated in life, that they decided to mete out death in revenge. Of course, it doesn’t work. By all accounts, they had been treated well by their host country. I even came across one desperate analysis which suggested that their anger might have been fuelled by the manifest monstrosity of the British NHS which takes doctors from poor countries, and gives them a living here and so deprives less developed countries of skilled medical labour. Frankly, anyone who has worked in the Middle East and seen the way that vast armies of Filipinos, Ethiopians and Sri Lankans are dragooned into what is little more than slavery will find that idea quite ludicrous.

You could of course invoke the brainwashing thesis but no one seems terribly happy about that. Maybe people are just going to have to seriously consider the idea that out of genuine religious reasons, men and women might decide that blowing up people was a good thing.

If the wealth of the would-be perpetrators has thrown some commentators so has as their evident intelligence. Many people believe the thesis of the Blessed Dawkins (who one gathers, would be very tempted to declare himself the ‘Messiah of Atheism’ and ‘God’s gift to the Sceptic’ were there not a few logical problems involved), that you have to be really stupid to believe in God. It ain’t so.

But these events in the real world are a reminder to us all, especially writers, that some of the deepest motivation in the human heart come from the very mixed world of religion. For good and bad.

Tony Blair: a personal reflection on his downfall

My blogs of late have been rather theoretical, related to the fact that I have been preoccupied with finishing The Infinite Day which, God willing, I look as though I’m going to do by the deadline of end July.

As I have commented before in these pages, the problem with writing fiction is that fantasy is often a pale shadow of reality. There could be no greater evidence of this sad truth than the fact that our former prime minister, who must be held in large measure responsible for the bloody fiasco of Iraq, is now some sort of envoy to the Middle East. Anyway, I thought I would brighten things up by telling a true and Blair-related story about how for, the briefest of periods, I worked for the Syrian secret police.

While running a geology field trip for some Americans through the Middle East in 2001, I left Lebanon at one of the more obscure border checkpoints with Syria. Despite its rather agricultural status it had nevertheless more than its fair share of men in military uniform. It fell to me as a partial Arabic speaker to take all the passports and try and get them stamped. They were dutifully taken but some ten minutes later it was obvious that processing them was extremely slow. The problem was plain; the secret policeman (actually, he wasn’t very secret) was inputting the names into the computer but obviously had no real knowledge of a QWERTY keyboard, or I suspect, any language other than Arabic. With the benign lunacy that comes over me at such points in life I asked him if he’d like me to do the typing. I was expecting a brush off but instead he was profoundly grateful.

So within moments, I found myself seated at a terminal whose wires no doubt ended up somewhere in the datafiles of the Syrian secret service. (Actually, that is an oversimplification: there are eight known branches of the Syrian secret service and a presumed ninth branch to watch over the other eight.) Now if my name was Bruce Willis or Matt Damon, I would tell you how I instantly got to the root directory and locked down the entire missile system. Instead, I simply and dutifully (but see footnote) keyed in the passport names. Very soon, I was surrounded by an admiring branch of men in somewhat disreputable camouflage who clearly thought this was wonderful and plainly wanted a foreigner of their own to do their typing. The conversation turned, as it inevitably does when bored secret policeman find themselves in possession of a non-local, to politics. ‘What,’ I was asked, ‘did I think of Blair and Bush?’

You will of course realise that I had now got myself into a difficult position. Conducting political debate in one’s native tongue is hard enough but in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by people who, however apparently charming as individuals, have a professional reputation for sticking sharp objects into orifices, is tricky indeed. One slight mispronunciation of an obscure Arabic verb could mean you have insulted the Syrian president and are going to be eating sand for the rest of your truncated lifespan.

However, seized with an adrenaline-induced inspiration, I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a stick man with a stick dog on a lead. ‘This,’ I said, rising to my feet with the air of a man who has a car to catch, ‘is Bush, and this is Blair.’ And amid universal hilarity and the pinning of the paper on the notice board (where for all I know, it still is), I left with the shaking of hands and expressions of universal and probably genuine goodwill.

And incidentally (here's the footnote) those of you who are concerned about such things may be interested to know that either due to my cunning or my poor typing ability not a single name ended up in the computer without being misspelt. For all I know Syrian intelligence is still looking for a Doctor Chris Malley who entered its territory six years ago and has not yet apparently left.

Good luck guys. With Blair around you’ll need it.

On issues of progress and ugliness

It’s all supposed to be downhill at this point in writing a book. Writers are supposed to surge forwards on a great, liberating rush of words to the finish and enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the loose ends tied up and right restored to the world(s). Well, I’m not sure that I have ever found it to be so, and certainly not with The Infinite Day. It’s a little bit like when you drive a long distance and finally, you can see your destination and rejoice because it is so close. Then suddenly the road bends and you realise there are many turns and diversions before you really reach where you are going. Anyway, we will get there, but it’s a long tiring haul.

One other thing is that this week I have posted again on the Speculative Faith website, which frequently has some very interesting articles; not all mine I have to say.

The one I have done this week includes one of the few discussions that I am aware of as to which parts of Lord of the Rings Adolf Hitler would have liked. It also raises the vexed issue of why we tend to link evil and ugliness. This is actually a tricky one because here the atheistic evolutionists have a neat explanation. They say that it is an essential part of evolution that we seek out mates who are in good shape. In other words, beauty is good and to be sought because it indicates good genes. Ugliness is to be shunned, because it indicates suspect genetic material. I feel there should be a good knockdown argument against this but it eludes me. There are certainly a lot of pretty women married to some jolly ugly men.

Anyway, so the argument goes, it is only a short step for the boundary to be blurred between the physically good and the morally good. You know the devastatingly simple equation: good people are pretty; bad people are ugly. What is more worrying (and really does deserve an act of Parliament to ban it but no one dare propose it), is to assume that all pretty people are good and all ugly people are evil.

One observation here would simply be that this is not an argument the Bible makes. The only real indications we have of Satan’s form are that he can appear as an angel of light. There are no references to Christ’s physical form, only the prophetic hint in Isaiah that he would be disfigured by suffering. God, we are reliably informed, looks on the inside. Would that popular culture did the same.

And now back to The Infinite Day.

On epic battles

Let me tell you a secret about the plot of The Infinite Day. It's this: there is a big battle at the end.

I can't imagine too many of my readers being surprised by that. But it’s worth considering why this is such an unsurprising statement and why I am not guilty of that greatest of sins, spoiling the plot. You see, I have come to realise that it is totally expected – indeed, it is a given – that the final part of the final book of an epic trilogy will have a big battle, in which good beats the living daylights out of evil. I carried out a mental experiment the other day trying to think of what would happen if, in my novel, all the gathering forces simply vanished quietly, without coming together in a great and violent confrontation. I realised I couldn't find a way of doing it that would not lead to a profound sense of anti-climax, and possibly even cries of ‘we want our money back’. The great and final crescendo of violence seems to be more than a cliché; it seems to be something that has to be there.

But where does this demand for a no-holds-barred, final battle in which good triumphs come from? Is it perhaps built into the genre? I suppose you could have epic fantasy without a big battle at the end, but would it still be epic? It’s a little bit like imagining a long and involving account of climbing a mountain that didn't actually have the climbers reaching the summit. That would most definitely be an anti-climax. Does this battle fulfill the same role as that famous and much abused scene at the end of detective novels where the great detective reveals the killer to some assembled group?

You could even argue that it is because in our hearts we know that one day, evil will, in reality, be confronted and overturned. Is it more than coincidence that the book of books, the Bible itself, ends with a climactic battle?

Frankly, I don't know the answer. And actually, my most pressing issue at the moment is not theorising on the origins of such battles or their significance, it is actually describing them in a way that is credible and believable.

But it would be nice to know why everybody expects that, in the penultimate chapter, swords will be drawn, guns will be fired, blood will be shed and good will win.

The shadow of the near future

As I come to the end of writing The Infinite Day I find myself in some ways in the most difficult part of the book. Some of the issues I do not want to go into here because they involve plot spoilers. But there are other things.

One is that I am forced to discuss the near future, rather than the far-future in which the book is set. This is largely because of something introduced in Book 1 and alluded to ever since; the great intervention of God's Spirit in the 2050s and the subsequent rebellion four decades later. This raises a well-known paradox of science fiction; it is far easier to write of a hundred years hence than ten years.

Why this should be is worth exploring. It is not simply that it is safer to write of the far future. You know the sort of thing: “All being well, many of my readers will live to see 2050; none will see the 13th millennium AD so I can happily write anything about it.” (By the way, it also gives you a longer period of time for your work to become a ‘prophetic classic’.)

A hundred years is also a long enough time for technologies to a) be invented, b) be tested, and c) become widespread plagues on society (see, for example, cars, television and the Internet) whereas ten years doesn't really bring too many changes. The result is that we are prepared to believe all manner of strange things may have occurred in a hundred years time; we are less convinced that such things may have happened within a decade.

There is another reason why the near future is problematic. It is that a decade from now things will, no doubt, be a mixture of the predictable and unexpected. So on the predictable: there will be overcrowding, culture wars, environmental disasters. Culturally, there will be Pirates of the Caribbean 14 and Oceans 24 available for digital download in our home cinemas and the Rolling Stones will still be performing gigs somewhere. But it’s the unexpected that concerns us: the world can change very rapidly in a very short period of time and that is hard to get right.

Imagine if, in 1997, Chris Walley had written a book set in 2007. Some things he might have got right: for example, there were growing concerns about the environment, and the unstoppable rise of the digital economy was already pretty much taken for granted ten years ago. But what about the unexpected events? 9/11 for instance exceeded the imagination of the most bizarre fantasist. And who, ten years ago, could have had seen British and American armies mired in Iraq and the widespread dismissal of the fundamental values of justice in Guantanamo Bay and the ‘extraordinary rendition’ procedures? Surely, a dark fantasy, critics would have said. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction.

How to finish a big book

It has been half term this week, and I have been able to really have a good long go at The Infinite Day. And as I come to the end of the week, I’m able to report that the end is literally in sight. Perhaps another 30 pages to go and lots of notes to work from. However my deadline for manuscript delivery is the last day of July and the fact is that I need to go back to the beginning and tidy up the manuscript. So there is still a lot to be done. If you pray, pray on!

For any would-be writers, I offer a couple of thoughts on this matter of finishing books. The first is that you really do need determination. Writing is hard work, and it’s easy to put it to one side and go for a walk, read a book or surf the web. You have to stick at it.

The second is an odd characteristic; it is ruthlessness. I have a cast of many characters, each of whom have their own foibles, problems and concerns. The temptation to pursue all of these fascinating characters and try to deal with their individual fates has to be resisted. If you’re not careful, you end up creating an infinite world, which of course, requires a book of infinite length. So I have had to curtail all sorts of fascinating matter which has to become the literary equivalent of ‘the road not travelled’. Readers will just have to use their own imaginations to decide what X said to Y after three months absence or what exactly lies behind the terse comment on some minor character ‘he was killed on the battlefield’. (I made that up, but you know what I mean.)

Anyway I must press on and get back to the book. Even blogs can be a diversion.

Have a good week.

On the Sun, space vessels and our place in the universe

By accident I came across a remarkable image this week. It is a photograph of the Sun taken from earth by a French amateur astronomer using a big telescope, a good camera and various other bits and pieces. I would post the image on my blog but there are pretty strong legal warnings about doing so.

Before I give you the URL, let me describe it. Probably 99.99% of the photograph is pretty unremarkable. The enormous golden yellow disc of the Sun covers most of the image and there is a narrow frame provided by the blackness of space. Yet it is the tiny remainder of the photograph that is striking. Against the disc of the Sun you can see two miniscule objects: one a single small line; the other a tiny agglomeration of microscopic black rectangles. They are so small that you might feel it could just be dust on the screen of your monitor. But when you stare closer you realise that they are a space shuttle (in fact, Atlantis) and the International Space Station, caught as silhouettes as they transited the Sun. Anyway, either now, or after reading this blog, do take a look at it.

I refer to this not just because it is an awesome and utterly unforgettable image, but because it seems to me to sum up in a single image one of the great paradoxes of the human race. On the one hand, we see a record of our astonishing triumph in creating a lasting structure in space and regularly supplying it from earth. Let's raise a cheer for Homo sapiens! But on the other hand, when you look at the picture in its entirety and you realise that behind these almost infinitesimally small creations is the overwhelming vastness of the solar disc, the overriding emotion generated is that of humility. After all, the Sun is still 93,000,000 miles away and it is but one of an almost infinite number of stars in the cosmos. Yes, we have done awesome things, but on the scale of the Cosmos we are still the tiniest of creatures.

I sometimes think that there is a curious parallelism with the growth of human knowledge and our awareness of the size of the cosmos. When the only astronomical tools the human race had were our own unaided eyes, the universe seemed awfully vast and almost overwhelming. Now, we know so much more, yet somehow with the Hubble telescope and similar instruments, we have found the universe to be no smaller. It is as if the further up the technological and cultural ladder we climb, so the horizon retreats to keep pace. The stars kept our ancestors humble before God, they still do.

Chronicles of wasted time?

I have had a couple of busy weeks in which it has been very hard to snatch time away from the real world for writing; teaching, marking, preaching, elders’ meeting, church weekend away, writing for Speculative Faith: all have eaten into my time. It's not as though I've been doing other things: I think I have watched an hour of television and seen a single DVD in that time.

Now as an amateur writer it is tempting to lament this. It's all too easy to say, if I could have had this time for writing I could have done so much more. I could have deepened the quality of my writing (and even my blogs).

This raises many issues. For instance, would I have used the time, if I had had it? In fact, in my experience even if you have an entire day free for writing, you don't use it all. I find that even under pressure I just can't keep going. Writing drains me and after a while I need to do something else. I think creative writing is particularly draining. Here, writers seem to conjure up the images and pictures and tales from nowhere. It is tempting to assume that because they bring them from nowhere they come at no cost. But all creativity costs. At the risk of sounding blasphemous I am reminded that even God took a break after six days (and no I'm not going to debate how long the days were).

Of course, I would like to have the writer’s life that we all dream of: a year made up of three months research, six months writing and three months holiday. If anyone wants to fund me on this I can provide bank account details. But in reality I am far from sure that the best way to write is to be at the computer or the notepad all day, every day. In fact, I am inclined to think that is actually a good discipline to be with people and away from writing for at least some of the time. If we are to write about people, we need to be with people. If you are isolated from the world I would suspect that your characters and plots tend to acquire an artificial nature. Like many other pursuits, writing needs to be earthed in reality. The danger of self-absorption is certainly true of academia, where many scientists devote themselves to the minutiae of rare academic details to such an extent that they become neither employable nor understandable.

This separation from reality is particularly dangerous in theology. I have, on one or two sad occasions, known keen Christians who have gone on to theological training and come out as real (or pseudo) intellectuals dedicated to proposing questions none of us are asking and then giving us answers that we do not understand.

When we read in Acts 18:3 that the apostle Paul paid his way as a missionary by making tents, commentators say that his motives were entirely financial: he was simply trying to spare the local church from having to fund him. I wonder if there might have been something else; I wonder if he realized that work kept him anchored in reality. If that is the case, then I feel I am in better company.

On writing, and the difference between pragmatism and lack of faith

It’s been an odd week. After about six weeks in which spring has pretended to be summer, our early summer is pretending to be spring. So we are back to rain and pullovers and having the central heating on.

Anyway, some small but significant progress on the book this week. I had an e-mail last week from someone who is promoting the film rights for the books, saying there was some interest and could I provide a synopsis of the last book? So on Monday, a bank holiday, I blasted off a ten-page summary and in the process resolved the three or four little niggling points that were still outstanding. So I now know what happens to X, Y and Z, where and how. And that, frankly, as far as I’m concerned is a major achievement. The land ahead now lies plain before me; I just have to walk across it.

I did however also have the second e-mail of a curious genre, which runs along the following lines. ‘Chris, I love your books. I am doing a project on writers for ABC High School, can I ask you some questions?’ And they trot out at least five or six questions all of which require answering. I presume that She-Who-Need-Not- Be-Named has a team of people who do it for her and a battery of stock answers. Anyway kids, I don't really mind. Better to write about a live dog than a dead lion as the Good Book nearly says but doesn't.

Of course you may say, isn't that exciting Chris about the possibility of film rights? Well yes, except that I am increasingly cautious about such things. Is it cynicism? Is it experience? Is it the righteous and patient faith of a godly man in an evil age? (No, I don't think it's the latter.) I have had experience of Christian publishing from around 1987, which makes it nearly 20 years in the business. And in that time I've had several encouragements that, had I taken them at face value, I’d have gone out and bought a new car. But they all came to nought; or near enough.

The trouble is, I am nagged by the possibility that my cool view on success is actually spiritually defective. Perhaps I should be anxiously and fervently praying without ceasing for the books’ triumph. It's not so much that I want to subscribe to the prosperity gospel; it's that I'm worried I hold to the austerity gospel in which you believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy that you personally will never obtain success. I guess we always need to pray (and never more than when we are about to pray) that God would give us a right view of ourselves and our actions.

Must dash. We have a church weekend away in the wilds of Wales and guess what, it's going to be wet. Oh joy….

In which an old friend turns up and reminds me of the problem with the contemporary thriller

Twice in the last couple of weeks I have been reminded of something that I felt was almost entirely history. In fact, it was so entirely history that when I received a very nice e-mail entitled “Thank you for inventing Henry”, I almost put it in the spam bin straight away. There are no Henrys in the Lamb among the Stars (actually, there is a reference to Heinrich Schütz in Book 1, but I will let that pass). The writer, a charming lady from India, had read the two thriller novels I had written many years ago under the pseudonym of John Haworth – Heart of Stone and Rock of Refuge – and wanted to thank me for them. A nice illustration, if ever you wanted one, that books can have an influence far removed in both time and space from their making.

The letter writer expressed some curiosity as to why I was no longer writing thrillers but had moved to fantasy fiction. A good question. Someone even more cynically minded than me once said, “Always remember that your life may be a warning for someone else.” In the spirit of that gloomy advice let me give you two reasons why you shouldn’t write in such a genre. But please note, here I am talking of the contemporary thriller; in other words, a book that by its very nature seeks to thrill through its treatment of contemporary or near future events. The rules for epic romance or literary novels of war and peace set in the near future are very different. Here we are talking about books whose chief reason for existence is that of telling a thrilling tale soon to be realised in a universe near you.

Now, bearing this in mind, there are two main reasons why such a genre is problematic. The first is that reality has acquired a nasty habit of trumping fiction. The collapse of Communism was one case where God’s plotline superseded anything in literature. The death knell to the genre came, I think, just over a decade later. Utterly overshadowed by the human and financial losses of the day, one overlooked casualty of 9/11 was the contemporary thriller. Do you remember those countless books in which evil Arabs threatened to hijack a single plane and kill a hundred people? How unambitious – even trivial – they now seem in comparison to what really happened!

And the second reason? It is that today, events move very fast. So for instance, it would be perfectly possible to write of a major war between Iran and the West. The trouble is that by the time you finish writing, it’s perfectly likely that a) the economic or political reasons you postulate for the cause of the war will have changed, b) some newer and more troubling enemy will be on the horizon, and c) the dreadful deed will be done and our boys and girls in camouflage will already be trying to get themselves out of the latest military quagmire. (You will have gathered that I am no fan of George and Tony’s Big Adventure in Iraq.) This concept was first brought home to me when suddenly, without warning, the entire Communist world disintegrated and almost overnight that great menacing bulwark of contemporary fiction, the Berlin Wall, disappeared. With its crumbling, a hundred spy novels perished.

The fact is that what is contemporary today all too soon becomes passé and a short shelf-life is bad for sales. It is worth remembering that this rule does not simply apply to books. Preachers and writers of theology books should realise they are faced with a similar problem. What is brave and dashing today and oh so contemporary, all too suddenly becomes retro. As one British theologian said nearly 100 years ago, “He who marries the spirit of the age today will be a widower tomorrow.” C. S. Lewis, talking of much the same thing, made the converse and more positive point: “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

And with that, good friends, I turn to writing a sermon for Sunday.

Being realistic

I have been very busy this week. 'They' have decided to have an internal inspection in college next week, so I decided to do a state-of-the-art, all singing, all dancing lesson on the geology of dams and dam failures. (AS level geology, if you really want to know.) So I started off with the draft of a nice simple lesson then I decided to add a Google Earth section and then a nice little exercise with six diagrams of different dams with potential problems. ‘No sweat’, I said ‘I will dash them off.’

Take this as a piece of advice: you never ‘dash off’ diagrams on the computer. Possibly, if I was using CorelDraw day in and day out, as I once did I might have been faster. But it took hours. Computers really unlock the perfectionist streak in me. You do a diagram and realise that it could look so much better with the rocks angled just a few more degrees. So you tweak and prod and push. And there’s another 10 minutes gone. PowerPoint isn’t much better. You know the sort of thing: you decide to match font size across all the diagrams; then you go for crisping up that slightly blurry image on slide number five and the creation of that really eye-grabbing image on slide eight. And so on.

I mention it here, because this, of course creeps into books, and the writing of them. Because a book is now never entirely cast in stone until that moment when the publisher presses the print button, there is always the possibility of tinkering.

One of the most useful things that I have ever learnt is what I call ‘identifying the point the curve flattens’. I think I learnt it in the days when I had a thing for hi-fi and used to listen and long for various bits and pieces. The idea runs something like this. You get garbage for £200; a modest system for £300 and quite a good one for £400. But at some point the curve starts to flatten out so that to substantially improve on a £500 system takes not £100 but £200. And to substantially improve an £800 system takes another £400 etc. The wisdom goes therefore, that you identify the point at which the curve flattens and purchase there. I have no doubt this wisdom is the basis of some best-selling self-empowerment book.

The principle, though has, I think, a broader application and it’s worthwhile considering in these days when we have so many pressures on us that our precious time is taken away from us. We need to be able to identify the point in any project where it is going to take an awful lot of extra work to achieve anything like a substantial improvement. And that’s the point at which we quit. We give up being perfectionists and aim instead to do the best we can without a ridiculous overspend on time and other things. In a way, I’m sure this is some sort of spiritual gifting: the ability to distinguish the truly and eternally vital from that which is merely temporally – and temporarily – valid. Christians, more than most, are probably inclined to be perfectionists. (Isn’t that why we are Christians? we have failed to meet up to the perfect standard of God’s law. ) It seems to me that perfectionism in a writer is a perilous thing and the bigger the dream , the greater the risk. For us speculative fiction types, with our galaxy spanning visions and casts of dozens, perfectionism is a very perilous matter. To define and describe such created worlds in appropriate detail is a no light task.

I mention it now because all being well, this time next week I will be starting to apply myself to the final book in a great crescendo of activity that ought, God willing, to bring me to its completion by the start of August. And that is only going to be achieved by me taking on what is possible, rather than attempting the utterly impractical. Your prayers would be welcome!

Dealing with demons

It's been a very busy week this week at college, home and church. But I also seem to have ended up preaching twice on Sunday in the middle of vast amounts of marking and preparation. And to make matters worse it's the hottest sunniest April that anybody can remember and I keep telling myself it's really important to get out there and get some exercise.

So, in all honesty, I haven't really been able to give much time to thinking about my own writing this week. But obviously, like everybody else I was appalled and saddened by the ghastly events at Virginia Tech. There have been a few slightly smug comments in the UK that ‘this could only happen in the States’. In the sense of scale, that is broadly true, but we have had our own little massacres, and I don't see any grounds for complacency. My own observation here is far more to do with the pen than the gun. Actually it isn't really an observation, it's more a sort of open-ended cautious comment. The thing is that Cho Seung-hui, the sad and terrible executioner of so many, took creative writing classes in which he expressed something of the hate and turmoil in his own heart.

Now it seems to me as a writer that I – and all of us who write – need to ask whether engaging in the activity of creative writing encouraged this man to pursue his bizarre and ultimately lethal fantasies? It is I suspect one of the earliest questions known to the human race: does thinking about evil, encourage evil? To put it in a crude but memorable aphorism, ‘does writing exorcise daemons or merely exercise them?’ Christians have tended to be rather cautious on creativity. I think the general view has been that there is a general sequence from thought to expression to action and that it is best to stop very early on.

This is, I presume, why most Christians have accepted that there ought to be some sort of censorship. I remember once when I was doing my postgraduate teacher training a lecturer saying, ‘I am not a Christian myself, but I do wonder what Christians have got against creativity.’ I remember thinking at the time that he had really rather overlooked the potential for evil to hijack creativity. Christians do applaud creativity, but we recognize that the world being the sinful place that it is, creativity can be warped. We can do without more creative ways of killing people quickly or rendering cities uninhabitable.

So am I against creative writing? Well, a dramatic case like this is probably not a good basis to generalize from. Nevertheless we surely need to be aware that creativity is not neutral. In the light of this terrible tale I'm glad that those of us who are Christian writers write within limits. Sometimes those limits are irritating, particularly when you really feel the urge to outdo Stephen King in the gore and pain stakes. But maybe there is a wisdom in restraint. Not everything in the garden of creativity is good. Maybe we need courage to say of things that are written: this is not neutral; this is not harmless; stop it before someone gets hurt!

On memorable reporting

I’ve had a busy second week of the holidays, making some good progress on the final book and doing a lot of preparation for teaching next week. I had a couple of nice e-mails, and someone pointed out that there is a small but perfectly formed group discussing my books on a Facebook group. I have also written a longer article for the Speculative Faith website on writing and theology. I should post that on Saturday 14th. Go and seek it out.

In between all this I have started reading Robert Fisk's fat tome, on his thirty years in the Middle East, entitled The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. For those who don't know, Fisk is a British journalist and commentator on the Middle East; the area being the way it is, he is pretty much what we used to call a ‘war correspondent’. For a year we lived about 100 yards away from him in Beirut, and I'd often see him on his balcony. I also once asked him a question about postmodernism at a seminar; as I expected, that topic got very short shrift and my colleagues in the social sciences looked very uneasy.

Anyway Fisk is pretty controversial in some circles because of his appalling pessimism (which in the Middle East tends to be a safe bet) and the fact that he has been very negative about Western intervention and has had some very hard things to say about Israel. Although I mention him here for reasons other than his ‘politics’ it is worth saying that although his handling of the historical facts can be sometimes lax, his descriptions of the events he has witnessed seem to me to be accurate. I lived in Beirut from 1980 to 84 and 94 to 98. Where he recorded events I was close to, I feel he has been truthful. I derive a wry amusement that our paths must have crossed quite a lot: him trying to get close to terrible events and me trying to get away from them.

Anyway, it's a variable book and gloomy enough to drain the smile off the most upbeat personality so I why do I mention it? The reason is that I think this book, and good reporting generally are excellent things for fiction writers to read. You may think that is surprising. After all, surely shouldn't fiction writers read fiction? Perhaps, but don't overlook good reportage. Let me explain why.

In a way, what we are trying to do is tell stories in a manner that involves the reader with an economy of words. Now in the case of what is called ‘speculative fiction’, and I suppose also historical fiction, we are struggling to tell stories of people and events who are distanced from our readers by time, space or alien cultures. Despite this we want people to identify with our heroes and villains. We want to make them, and their plight, seem real. And furthermore, most of us are trying to do it with an economy of words; we cannot afford to spend a page describing a space ship or a castle, we need to move on and tell the story.

It strikes me that reporters, particularly foreign correspondents, face similar dilemmas. In very limited words, they have to tell us about a situation which may be very remote. Most of us do not know what it is like to be an observer of an utterly chaotic firefight or a shabby bureaucratic fix-up in some sweaty, dusty part of the Middle East. Reporters have to make it real. They have to make us care about the Iranian or the Iraqi suddenly face-to-face with death. They have to tell it in such a way that even if we are reading it while eating our cornflakes or waiting for our train, it sticks in our mind. They have to stay fresh and shun clichés. And this is what Fisk is supreme at. Whatever his merits as historian, he is a very gifted observer. With a rare economy of words he can set the scene, portray a character and involve us. Sometimes against our will, he drags us into the shabby, shameful mess of it all.

And here there is another point. Where Fisk gets his morality from I have not yet found. He is no Christian. But the book exudes morality: there a righteous indignation that runs throughout it. You may argue that in places it is unbalanced, or even misdirected, but it is there. And not to be angry about what has transpired in the Middle East in the last 30 years would be a terrible thing. And that's something else that we need more of in our Christian fiction; a burning anger with evil and injustice.

I have a little list

First of all happy Easter to all my readers and may the meaning of the season not be lost in spring cleaning, chocolate eating, enjoying the first warm weather of the year or being nice to Easter bunnies. I spent the first three days of this week tagging along on a university geology trip and it was a profitable and, for the most part, very pleasant experience.

I don't read a lot of popular fiction these days (I just don't have the time) but for this trip I picked up a thick paperback novel. I don't wish to name names (I'm a coward) but it had been a massive bestseller in its native country for two years and came with a various quotes on the front that made you think you were in for a good read. Frankly, dear reader, as the current phrase goes, ‘it sucked’.

Now when I came back I had a nice e-mail asking me about the books that had influenced me which I meant to post on the blog but, in a fit of tiredness, deleted it by accident. Anyway, that prompted my thinking in my usual perverse manner about the bad books that have influenced me. I think the aspiring writer should either read very good books to learn things to imitate or bad books to learn things to avoid. I'm not sure of the merits of mediocre books: I suspect, like the Laodicean church, they are best spat out as being neither one nor the other.

My readers being a literate sort, you are no doubt aware of the splendid song in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado in which the Lord High Executioner sings:

“As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list—I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!”

Well, I have a little list of novels that won't be missed. You may wish to add your own.

Novels that are fourth volume of a trilogy. In other words, the book that really shouldn't have been written because the seam was thoroughly mined out. But the author was desperately strapped for cash so he or she thought they could revisit their wastepaper bin with profit.

Novels that flaunt their writer’s encyclopaedic knowledge. You know the sort of thing, where every alternate paragraph is the author's lecture on how St Ebinot’s church has an architrave that is the high point of 16th century Caruthusian architecture or the gearshift on the Clarkson M20x Mark III has a distinctive notchy feel to it at speed. Yawn.

Novels that display their writer’s total ignorance of the world. I remember one book that talked about the sands of southern Lebanon, and if memory serves me well, had it populated by camels. There is no sand and no camels. None. Someone else wrote “the Mujahideen picked up the rifle”. Sorry, Mujahideen is plural; the singular is mujahid.

Novels that assume that the morals and thought patterns of contemporary Western culture are universal. This is very common. The writer assumes that for all the differences of culture and religion and language they are (or were) ‘just like us’. So in a historical novel set in the Reformation we have a hero or heroine who thinks like an early 21st century Brit or American and treats religious matters as peripheral to their lives. Most unlikely. Or, we have a novel set in the Middle East which fails to deal with the motivation of seeking honour and avoiding shame that runs throughout society there.

Novels that create unbelievable heroes. The classic example is the smartarse (sorry guys but this is a blog)—and it is mostly a hero—who can strip and clean a 9 mm Kwangi semiautomatic pistol with his toothbrush, speaks six major languages fluently and can tell you tell which Bordeaux is the best with venison.

Novels that are derivative. For instance, any fantasy novel that has a motley band of dwarves, elves, halflings and wizards trying to seek/destroy a ring/sword/crown of power/destiny/doom, etc. Sorry, been there, done that and got the mithril shirt. Ditto for the terrible secret that will undermine Christianity.

Novels that toy with spiritual matters. You know the sort of thing. The writer clearly has not the slightest interest in or understanding of Christianity but suddenly in an attempt to claim significance weighs into some theological discussion, where he or she is manifestly out of their depth. Do these people not appreciate that actually theology is a respectable discipline where almost all the big issues have been discussed and beaten to death many times over many years?

Novels that think that weight equals value. The epic eight-hundred page works with a vast array of characters who are so unmemorable that you really do not care in the slightest when they fall to their deaths over cliffs or are eaten by rabid hedgehogs or simply disappear out of the volume.

Oh dear, how long have I wasted with such things? I want my time back!

Rowling, Arthur C. Clarke and the demise of science fiction

The literary high point this week, at least in terms of mention on the web, etc., has to be the publication of the covers of final Harry Potter book. Unless, dear reader, you are a writer yourself, you cannot appreciate how utterly depressing it is that a mere cover (which by general agreement has told us nothing) has attracted so much attention. (BTW an interesting experiment is to ask any ordinary writer about J K Rowling. You will see the lips move into a facsimile of a smile but there will be a strange coldness, if not malice, in the eyes.)

This thought brings me to magic and science. You will no doubt remember Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is, of course, one of the many barbs at religion that Clarke makes: a fact that is not however my concern here. A key part of the definition, which is not adequately expanded, is what constitutes ‘sufficiently advanced’. Perhaps a better expression would be any “insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This highlights the fact that it is a relative effect: there are probably still some remote cultures where a working cuckoo clock would be seen as magic. In order to aid our understanding here I would suggest the creation of a new unit, the Clarke Value. Clarke values measure how little we understand any given piece of technology. The details need to be worked out, but I suggest that one Clarke is the gap where someone says “I'm not sure of the details, but I'm pretty sure I know how it works” and I suggest that 10 Clarkes expresses that point where someone says it “has to be supernatural”.

Now the interesting fact is that Clarke Values of technology are actually increasing. There are two factors: the first is that the technology itself is getting more and more inscrutable. So, for instance, you can go into your local mobile phone shop and find a tiny little pocketable object that will allow you to phone, used a GPS and listen to FM radio as well as play games. That that side of things is inevitable, unsurprising and probably to be approved. But, less happily, rising Clarke Values are also due to the fact that the understanding of science is declining. All the evidence suggests that kids, at least in Britain, find science tedious, and that most damnable of things, “hard work”. Science numbers, in schools are, in most places, declining. They are slightly boosted (hurrah!) because immigrant communities tend to encourage their sons and daughters to become engineers and doctors, both of which for the moment (thankfully) require science.

The impact of these effects is simple: high Clarke Values now abound. Who, for instance, among us can adequately explain how GPS works? Who can reliably inform us how broadband video works? Who can explain how I merely have to type in the words ‘Science’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Clarke’ into Google and, in barely a second, have the quote I need?

Now there is any writing corollary of this. It is that in a world of inadequately understood technology it is easier to write about magic than science. You may as well invoke magic, because most of your readers can't tell the difference between that and science. And magic, as I have said, elsewhere, is much easier. So frankly, the attempts of Britain's fantasy flagship ‘Doctor Who’ to make things scientific are now paper-thin. It might as well be a series about a magician and his apprentice.

It is a source of some irony - but very little satisfaction - that Clarke's rule has worked very at prophesying the demise of the very science fiction that he loves so well. As I said at Wheaton chapel two years ago (there’s name dropping), as a Christian I find no grounds for burning Harry Potter books but as a scientist, well, it’s awfully tempting.

Images, books and a matter of theology

I had a very gratifying e-mail this week from someone who runs an animation studio saying how he and his wife like the Lamb among the Stars books. The company's web site is www.lostpencil.com and it's well worth a browse of some of the animation samples. Rather jokingly, I replied that I would love to see them do animations of the Krallen and Allenix creatures that occur in the series and would be delighted to post them on my web page with due credit. And the answer I got back was the very kind one that if they had time they would try and create them. Many thanks! Now I hope they do manage to produce them because they have the talent to make some impressive renderings. But on reflection, I have realised that this has raised a number of issues, at least one of which has a very important theological consequence.

My main concern is this: whether in their heart of hearts, readers want writers to flesh out their creations with images, even author-approved ones. I wonder. Don't we actually prefer to be given that degree of freedom that allows our minds to create pictures? In other words, wouldn’t we rather to be given hints and intimation, rather than specifics which must inevitably limit our imagination? Isn't this why a good book is ultimately more enriching than even the best film? As a teenager my imagination was enormously nourished by Lord of the Rings and I was quite happy to draw pictures of how I felt Minas Tirith and Mordor looked. My imagination was much less nourished and prompted by the Star Wars films. The imagining was done for me. In films the universe is closed and limited. And although I count Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films as tolerable (they were certainly not the disaster that we feared) I still think the pictures in my mind are infinitely superior and closer to what Tolkien imagined.

In fact it's quite hard to think of books that have had author-approved drawings in other than children's books (for example, Pauline Baines drawings for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books). The Dickens sketches by Phiz and Cruikshank and Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland are some of the few I can think of. In general, hinting seems to be more popular than describing. (As an aside, isn't this the attraction of maps in such books? Instead of telling us what a place looks like, they encourage us to conjure up an infinite number of landscapes and scenes). Is it perhaps better to sow seeds in our imagination than give us cut flowers? So, if I did get my Lostpencil images, I would make sure they were not seen as definitive but as ‘valid interpretations’.

Now, I promised that I would segue this into theology. It is this: in the Old Testament God clearly prohibits images of himself. That is in the ruling at the start of the Ten Commandments. Isn't this related? Making an image of a character is impoverishing because, in essence, it is limiting: it says ‘this is how he or she is’. And when our character is, as God is, unbounded in his nature, character and glory, it is vital there can be no such limits.

On bits and pieces.

No major blog this week, I'm afraid; just various bits and pieces.

Perhaps one of the most significant things this week was that I had an interesting e-mail which I would like to think represents a very positive straw in the wind. A gentleman wrote saying ‘I haven't read your books but I've read the reviews and heard they are quite good. When I have some money, I will be buying them. But I want to say that from what I've read about the books, I have real problems with your theology. How can you possibly believe that …..?' Now I will try and reassure him as best I can. I may perhaps point out that if he thinks I'm heretical, he really ought to have a go at Jonathan Edwards (who held not dissimilar views) and is generally held to be the smartest mind America ever produced. (No snide comments please, Brits.) But this is most encouraging; if there's one thing better than praise for a book it's controversy, and nothing pleases an author more than the sound of a possible witchhunt. (As long, of course, as there is several thousand miles of ocean between you and the pitch forks.) I really don't mind becoming a figure of controversy. Indeed, I am half inclined to fake an Amazon review that says, ‘This wicked book should be banned and the author severed into small pieces, for his disgusting and shameless attempt to undermine biblical orthodoxy. Having failed with the open evil of the Da Vinci code the Devil is now at work amongst the faithful with the more subtle wickedness of The Lamb Among the Stars.' Oh please.

Another slightly encouraging sound sign this week was that I had two responses, to my website from people (or just possibly automated spammers), who really hadn't quite got it all together. The first was from a man who claimed to be have been abused by the son of a long dead author whose name is frequently mentioned in fantasy circles. I am circumspect here because I have no wish to promote rumours. If it is true, it is all very sad, but I'm not quite sure of the cause and effect here. Does writing fantasy encourage paedophilia in one’s children? The second one, which could have been funny if it wasn't blasphemous, was a man who sent me an advance copy of his ‘Inaugural Address from the Great White Throne’. I'm afraid I didn't read very far.

No: the reason for not writing a major blog here is that I have posted a very substantial article on the Speculative Faith website with the slightly bizarre title of ‘Jesus, the Fox, and the niceness of Christian fiction.’ It actually deals with a matter whose importance goes beyond fiction, namely the character of Jesus and has received some interesting comments; most of which seem to be very positive. To take a look and feel free to complain, either there or here.

And the meantime, the manuscript of The Infinite Day grows slowly longer. But unfortunately at the end of a busy week at college, I have not yet succeeded in being suspended on full pay. Memo to self: must pray harder.

On simplicity as a virtue

First of all, thanks to all who read this. Just because no-one posts comments doesn't mean that it's not read. This week, for instance, someone from California and a student in one of my classes, admitted to being regular readers.

Now, this week's observation Often when authors go on about writing, they talk about the big stuff. You know, how to create some wonderful epic spanning centuries or galaxies; how to put meaning into the text or even how to make significance significant. What I want to do today is just go to the other end of the scale and make some points about rather trivial elements of writing. Actually, though, when you put them all together, something rather important emerges.

Hint one: avoid characters with names that resemble common verbs.
In this last book of the Lamb among the Stars series, a character called Luke has an important part to play. But it's a problem name, because you can never say ‘Luke looked pale’ or ‘Luke looked away’. Avoid Luke! Equally, there is a fairly common Arabic name, Said (sometimes spelled Sayed) which is also unusable: you really don't want to have to write ‘Said said’. Of course, you can work around this, but it often looks obvious. There are probably lots of other names with similar problems. I know it's not just a problem with me because I remember reading a detective novelist, bitterly lamenting she had called her protagonist Parker, because she always kept having to avoid ‘Parker parked the car’.

Hint Two: keep names simple.
In the very first drafts of the first book of my series I decided that I wanted everybody to have either a patronym or matronym. If you are unfamiliar with this, it's the sort of thing you get in Russian literature, where the character is, say, called Stephan Borisovitch Tallin or something like this. The Borisovitch means that he is ‘the son of Boris’. It allows the writer to refer to his protagonist as a) Stephan, b) Borisovitch or c) Tallin. It's a nice and atmospheric system, but it doesn't half make for confusing books. So, I dropped it fairly early on.

Rule Three: Avoid meetings with lots of people.
The English language (or possibly language generally) does not easily handle the sort of complex meeting where everybody says things. If you're not careful, it can take several pages for even a relatively simple discussion to take place. X speaks, then Y, then Z and then X interrupts him. And each time you have to explain who is saying what. It's much simpler to have meetings between one or two people. In that case, you can even go for a whole page without having to say who is actually speaking, because it is so obvious from the text.

Rule Four: Try to keep the exotic stuff under control.
In an alien world set far in the future it would be really quite logical to have twelve months, all with totally different names to those we know. And, while we're at it, to have days of the week that are totally different. The effect, of course, would be to heighten the sense of alienness. It would also be to utterly bemuse and confuse the poor reader and have him or her constantly resorting to some voluminous appendix.

The fact is that any writer who persists with writing will soon find out that writing is a very artificial business. You start off by thinking that you are going to try and accurately depict something that is going on, and then you realise that it is far easier to keep things simple. One of the interesting things about fantasy or speculative fiction is that you can simplify worlds and that can help with plots. Sometimes the real world is appallingly complex. To talk of a subject of which I know a little because I was there, I suspect there are probably no more than one or two people in the whole world who could give anything like an accurate account of the shifting loyalties and treacheries of the forty or so militia groups that battled their way through the Lebanese civil war. Were I to try to accurately depict events there all but the most devoted reader would throw the manuscript in away in confusion and dismay.

Ironically, speculative fiction can allow us to simplify things. And sometimes, in order to tell a good tale or make a point, reality has to be simplified. Complexity is rarely a friend of communication.

Tolkien and a changing world

At church on Sunday, someone gave me a copy of a biography of Tolkien (Michael White, Tolkien: a Biography, Abacus) on the grounds that I might be interested. So far I'm about the third of the way through. It's a reasonable and readable stab at explaining the man and his background and several thoughts have emerged as I have read it.

What struck me most of all was perhaps the way in which White has to spend an awful lot of time explaining Tolkien and his world. So matters cultural and historical that I had assumed could be taken for granted are expanded upon. In fact White is right: speaking as a teacher, I now increasingly realise that we cannot take anything for granted. Indeed, let me state Walley’s Rule of Contemporary Education: ‘There is no piece of knowledge that we can safely assume that the modern British schoolchild actually knows.’ Two weeks ago, I had a an apparently well-educated student aged 18 for whom the concept of the water cycle (rain, rivers, sea and evaporation, and round again) was a total novelty. And then she wasn't even ashamed. Another student, albeit at a somewhat lower academic level, displayed a similar lack of embarrassment when when given a blank map of Europe. 'Which way is up?' she asked.

Anyway, White does all the explaining you could wish. And I found it a reminder that the world of Tolkien (and C. S Lewis who so far is coming out very well in the biography) has now all but gone.

Not of course in a physical sense. Much of ‘collegiate’ Oxford is very much as it was then. But culturally, the world has shifted a long way. So for instance, it is very hard to imagine the Inklings; a happy little gathering of vaguely boozy literary men apparently existing without the slightest hint of homosexuality. Or a world in which it was remotely possible for a child at school to be allowed to study Middle English. This sense of distance is heightened because both Tolkien and Lewis were very backward looking people, shunning modern technology and self-consciously aware that they were the dinosaurs that had overstayed their allotted time.

It is undeniable that in the last 30 years there had been changes so fundamental in Britain that one struggles to find parallels. The Norman invasion of 1066? But then, that simply replaced one the language of rule from Anglo-Saxon to French. I doubt many people really noticed; the clergy presumably kept on speaking Latin and the general Christian tone of the culture probably stayed much the same. What has happened here strikes me as much more like the days of the Old Testament when Israel was taken into exile under the Babylonians. It is a wholesale cultural shift, and one of which we have only so far perhaps seen the beginning.

The most significant change is, without doubt, the loss of the Christian consensus. Tolkien and Lewis lived in the twilight of the Christian West. Lewis of course recognised it and ‘railed against the dying of the light’. That loss has led to other losses and with it has come the dissolution of much that was achieved in the 1500 years or so of Christianity's dominance in Britain. Let me just list a few things that, although they may be subscribed to are now being trampled over: the sense of being accountable to God, the value of the individual, the objectivity of truth, the importance of doing right over pragmatism, the absolute nature of evil and the value of history. I could go on. Modernity or post modernity (or whatever we are to title post Post-Modernity) has ploughed under much that was vital.

It is easy to be pessimistic. Yet the curious thing is that the very popularity of Tolkien's work actually gives the lie to much of what modernity proclaims. In reading Lord of the Rings we sense the terrible peril that hangs over Middle Earth, because we do believe that if Sauron were to rule things would be very much worse. We all value and rejoice in episodes of heroism and nobility, and we are all disgusted by cowardice and treachery. Although we may subscribe to cultural relativism, when it comes to Middle Earth we believe in evil and good. The popularity of the virtues and values proclaimed in Lord of the Rings are a reminder that the relativism of the present is likely to be a temporary - if terrible - thing.

A very English mystery and the nature of criticism

I have an interesting mystery story to recount today, and one which has caused me to reflect on the whole business of critics and criticism. But before I do let me institute what I hope will be a recurrent theme, of delivering unsolicited praise where praise is due. I have a local computer shop, who in the four or five years I have known them, have unfailingly delivered the goods, whether it be in repairs or upgrades. This time, they have doubled the speed of my computer, improved its graphics no end and boosted my Mac for a very modest price. If you're in the Swansea area try Swan CD Limited and tell them I say they are a good thing. My only reservation as a conservationist is that their logo looks like a swan being bisected from the rear by a chainsaw.

Now to the mystery. I was planning to write on lots of things this week but then the extraordinary business of Joyce Hatto emerged. Although this is basically a tale of classical music it has given rise to some questions in my own mind about critics and criticism.

The background is this. About this time last year, a number of classical music magazines (including the Gramophone which I have read without fail for twenty three years) started to lavish praise on the piano recordings of one Joyce Hatto. It was an edifying tale of a woman, now in her 70s, who had given up professional public piano playing a quarter of a century earlier on account of cancer. Yet now she was releasing discs through a small record company owned by her husband. And what discs! The critics stumbled over themselves with fulsome praise at this triumph of persistence and talent over illness and neglect. The quality was astonishing: how did an elderly woman, with this thirty year battle with cancer, manage to grapple with the most athletic works in the repertoire? The quantity was also astonishing. At the time of her reported death she had ‘recorded’ around 100 discs. (As will become obvious any mention of Ms Hatto requires much use of the word ‘reported’ and many inverted commas). There was also the matter of the range. There seemed to be nothing in the classical repertoire from Bach to the notoriously spiky Messiaen that she was not able to play as well, if not better than the best. As one critic said: ‘Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.’

Anyway, a week ago the story exploded. You can read it all on the Web and a good lead is the Wikipedia article on her. Someone attempting to put one of her discs on to Itunes found that it was recognised, but as being by someone else. Very soon, the web was buzzing over which of her discs had been copied from which other recording and now there doesn't seem to be a single genuine Joyce Hatto recording known. They appear to be all borrowed - and slightly tweaked - from other discs. It is, we are told, the greatest fraud/hoax in the history of classical music recording. What the motives were (or even who did it) is at the moment unclear. More revelations are promised.

Now, I am a writer, not a musician, but there are aspects of this that have intrigued me. Central to the story are the critics, who are frankly, trying to keep a rather low profile at the moment. They are the ones that told us how great this woman was, how we should buy her discs and how revelatory her playing was.

Here I need to say I have no axe to grind: such critics as I have had, have been kind to me. But several points do arise.

1) The critics were naive to the point of negligence. In hindsight, that there was fraud or something like it, going on should always have been considered possible. One or two comments, should have set alarm bells ringing. It was, we read, very hard to pin down any Hatto style; she was clearly such a modest pianist that she let the music speak for itself. Hmm. And did no one really question where the great works for piano and orchestra that were being released actually been recorded? A hundred musicians do not fit into a garden shed. And why were there no recent accounts of her playing? Why so few interviews? Was it really just modesty? From the Christian point of view perhaps the most revealing comment was something to the effect that ‘we don't expect fraud in the music business’. Sorry guys, sin makes its ugly way everywhere.

2) The critics failed at the task they claim to be best at. They signally failed to notice that the recordings were identical to existing ones. Now if the pirated material had come from obscure Bulgarian pianists, one might have forgiven the oversight. But the ones she/he faked, often aren't obscure. I have a couple: the list of pianists hijacked is starting to look like a who's who in modern pianism (Previn, Ashkenazy, Hamelin to name three well-known names). In some cases, there were only three or four other versions of a piece around. Yet these men, (and it is mostly men), who regularly blind us with detailed references to the record catalogues and intimidate us by their erudition, failed to notice that these were one and the same.

3) The critics appear to be - how shall we say it? ­- inconsistent. A point was reached towards the end of last year, where this lady could clearly do no wrong. Every recording was awarded superlatives. This is now looking very curious, because some of the recordings that were hijacked were not so highly praised when they first came out. The myth had swept objectivity before it.

Now, you may say this has nothing to do with writing. In one sense, that is true. Yet it is undeniable that critics are important to writers. They make careers, they create stars and they live in the reflected glow of those very stars. But in the wake of this debacle for music critics, I am inclined to be a little bit suspicious of book critics as well. They too give opinions, and offer verdicts, and we listen and respect their judgements. Well, I for one, am now minded to take some of their pontifications a little more cautiously. And I do wonder how many musicians, having been mauled by those very critics who lauded Joyce, are now smiling quietly and saying to themselves: 'well they aren’t so all-wise after all'.

I’m inclined to agree.

The perils of being a writer

All in all, it has been a pretty good week. I have had about five nice e-mails on the books, a small cheque from a publisher and mentions from a couple of people that, although they don't comment, they do read this blog. I also published a long and, I hope, very thoughtful article on ‘speculative faith’ on the (wait for it) Speculative Faith website: although some of the themes will be familiar to my readers here, it is all new material. What else? I've got my Macbook up and running with Microsoft Word for Windows using the fun Parallels software. I even had some vaguely enjoyable teaching. But– and here’s the rub – I haven't got the writing done that I would have liked and the reason is simply because I'm a writer.

Let me explain that paradox. By dint of working late and hard during the week I had managed to make Thursday night free for writing on the Infinite Day. However Thursday afternoon, one of my students asked me whether I had a glossary of geological terms I could give him. It was a single sentence request. I thought about it and decided that he and the other students probably deserved something like that as there are no decent textbooks at our level. Anyway, I thought, I can pull one off the Web, they are bound to exist.

So after supper, I set to work to find this glossary on the web and print it. Assuredly, I told myself, a half hour task. I soon found a good glossary pitched at the right level with most of the terms I wanted from a United States organisation with no copyright attached. I downloaded it and pasted into Word. Now at that point I should simply have printed it and got on with my book.

But as I scanned my eyes over the definitions the writer in me took over. ‘Hang on’, I thought, ‘that's not the British spelling’. Then, a moment later, ‘Wait, if these words are included, why don't we also include these others?’ Then after a few more minutes I realised that the style was frequently what I call ‘clunky’; so I set to work tidying the worse paragraphs. ‘Hey’ I said, ‘the kids know I'm a writer and with my name attached, I don't think I can let anything substandard go’. Then I realised that some of the definitions were far more thorough than others and so I thickened up a few of the thinner ones. So, you can imagine what happened. I finally got it done by ten o'clock and a very fine booklet resulted. But I didn't get to work on the book.

What was going on here? I think two things. One was professional pride on a matter where frankly it didn't really matter. The other was that I had found a legitimate displacement activity to stop me from writing. Now here, I don't want you to get any high-flown psychological fantasies about me ‘not wishing to write’. Let's be blunt: writing is hard work and after a long day at work, I preferred something else. Those who are outside the writing business consider writing to be easy and there are times in my writing when it as easy as going downhill on bike. But then there are also times when it's like going uphill into wind on a bike. It hurts and it takes effort. And when faced with that almost anything will seem to be attractive. So if you know a writer then pray for them that their words will come easily. Because sometimes almost anything is preferable to writing: even a geological glossary.

News and a thought provoking adventure

First, I shall be doing a very regular spot once a month on Speculative Faith a really nice website to do with Christian fantasy writing. I will probably recycle some of these blogs with expansions there. Do come and join in.

Second, I have acquired a Macbook. However I am unable to break myself entirely from my PC, which has such things as a nice voice recognition package, and so retain a foot in both camps. My first impression of the Macbook is that, while I would not go all the way with the wild-eyed Mac evangelists, I do think it's got a lot going for it. In particular, and here would-be writers may want to pay attention, there is an excellent writing package called Scrivener, which really does wonderful things for authors. I think, when I start a new book, I will use this. But at the moment, I suspect it is a capital mistake to shift wordprocessing tools midway through a manuscript with a looming deadline.

Third, today, I had an adventure. It doesn't often happen these days; this is Swansea, not Beirut. Basically, Swansea missed the great British snow yesterday, much to the chagrin of all and sundry. So we all went to work today in the predicted rain, expecting more of the same. However, during the first lesson, snow to fall heavily and to everyone's surprise, began to stick. The result was something not unlike the Titanic striking the iceberg. There was soon a notice that some of the college buses would be taking students home early; this was followed within a quarter of an hour by news that all the buses would be going and very soon after, that the entire college would be closing down at twelve. It wasn't quite panic, but it was a pretty feverish evacuation. By now the snow was about an inch thick, which of course, by American terms, is nothing, but in our part of the world without snow ploughs, snow chains, and precious little in the way of gritting equipment it is enough to make a mess of the roads. Especially when, as it did, it arrives without warning.

Anyway, I decided to head home very quickly afterwards and it was soon pretty obvious that driving conditions were atrocious, and getting worse. It was compounded by the fact that very few people here are used to driving in snow, and either take it too fast or in the wrong gear, and that almost everybody had decided to head back at the same time. I had to make some hard decisions about what route to take to get home as both the main possibilities were over winding hills that I suspected (quite rightly, as it turns out) would be log-jammed with traffic stuck on slush. So I slithered my way with a trusty old Peugeot along the road I normally take home and at the foot of two hundred metre hill that that lies at the back of our house parked the car safely on what was now becoming a rapidly deserted road. I acquired a couple of plastic bags from the nearby supermarket and put them over my socks and then set off over the hill on the snowbound minor road.

The road I took is an odd little one that seems to bear no resemblance to the fact that it is within the Swansea city boundary; along much of its length it is a deep, winding, narrow road shaded by trees, with fields either side and you could be in the very heart of Wales. Now, with the snow bending the branches and utterly devoid of traffic it was a pleasant, and almost exhilarating walk. Yet far away over the snow and under the grey clouds, I could hear continuous sirens as the police tried to deal with the crashes and clogged roads.

One of the things I thought about, as I trudged up through the snow, was how very easily a little flicker on the weather systems had taken a routine Friday and turned it into utter chaos for everyone. Within ninety minutes, a city of a quarter of a million people had totally ground to a halt. Perhaps it is a legitimate task of fantasy, or at least a subgenre of fantasy, to remind us in our comfy, cosy worlds that the only grace of God separates us from utter disaster. It was Will Durant who said that ‘civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice’. There are a lot of provisos that I would want to put on that statement, but it doesn't hurt us to be reminded once in a while that things are far more fragile than they seem.

On cosy murders

Readers, I present you a puzzle. I have in my mind the detailed outline of a super series of books which, based on what I now know about publishing, ought to do stunningly well. Now before I come onto my puzzle let me outline the books. They are set in an imaginary but picturesque part of South Wales, not a million miles removed from where I live, in a more or less present day setting. The protagonist is an ungodly university-based geologist, in his early 30s, with more than the usual hangups about life, women and most things but with some sort of traditional morality which stops him from having the language and behaviour that gives a writer problems. He lives in a wonderfully picturesque and rundown cottage given to him (with strings) by his aunt in wooded countryside that runs down to the sea. There he lives alone with a battered Land Rover and a black dog who out of sheer perversity he has named ‘Snowy’. As the book opens we see how, in order to supplement his meagre income, he is forced take on as a lodger an American theological student who has a living faith and a very different attitude to most things.

So we have the 'buddy movie' thing and also the conflicts over belief. During the course of these books it will transpire that our naive right wing American actually, has something going for him. All this, course, is mere background to the murder story that emerges involving a sinister and powerful figure in the science world with a lot to conceal. Book 1 ends with the murder solved, and the murderer dealt with, but hints that there were people who protected him. In book two we are introduced us to our American’s beautiful sister and glimpse more of this sinister group of people who get up to a lot of skulduggery.

Isn't it just wonderful? I could see it running for about five or six books; each 100,000 words longs with only gentle violence, but full of deep and pious comments on life and the universe. (and the dog). Can you imagine the television series? 'Fantastic,' I hear you say, 'what's the problem?' Quite simply, it is this. I just can't get excited about the idea. Oh, if it was between writing these books and being unemployed I’d do them. And if you offered me a million dollars I'd write them. But somehow, I just can't fall in love with the books.

Now it could be this is because, deep down inside me, there is a genuine artistic streak, and I'm not simply a hack writer. My guess is that it's not that, but possibly something related. I think it is that I believe that writing should in some way push against barriers and the job of the writer (and particularly the Christian writer) is, to use the phrase often used of preaching, ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. Interestingly enough, I suspect, the worst and probably most accurate criticism of Christian writing from outside the faith, is that it is simply too cosy.

And even murder stories can be cosy.