Stories of a skinned-alive phantom haunting a village in rural Northumberland are ridiculous,
even to journalist ALEX REED working for strange phenomena magazine.
But when a decayed body is uncovered by receding flood waters, rumour suggests a link with the nearby research enclosure. Alex smells scandal and a chance to prove he's more than a sensationalist hack.
Read the full synopsis here
A grim industrial backdrop and a pig-iron bridge across a black canal is the place of Neil Brandon's demise.
I've been looking for a suitably grim place to have one of my A sleeping feast characters horribly murdered, and I found it in Manchester's Timperly district.
I used to work in the area - at a miserable 1960s building where the strip lights shined 24/7 and the people failed to even wish each other happy new year - so I know enough to place this minor character in the area and have him meet his death on a clear night in early March.
Neil didn’t see the blow coming, and the fist landed in his abdomen crushing the wind out of him and causing him to double over. He released a loud groan and fell to the ground. An explosive cough ripped through his throat and pulled contents of his stomach with it. Acid burnt the back of his mouth, replacing the comforting residue of beer, and he spewed a torrent of steaming alcohol onto the pavement. Vomit spilled from his mouth and splashed over his attackers' boots and trousers.
When I study it, it's remarkable, to me at least, how little of a location is needed in the writing to get the scene painted in the readers mind (see reference to Higgins in my last post). And yet I feel much more comfortable having visited a site and taken a few photographs.
As for the canal side, all I use is:
They passed the parked van and took a steep footpath down and to the left.
“What do you want?” Neil coughed up more vomit. He mumbled through the frothing liquid.
“Shut up and keep moving, fat boy. We’re gonna see how you like being experimented on, you shit.”
They came to a towpath. Bushes and trees lined up along their left and a delicate smell of still canal-water hovered between the branches.
Mmm... maybe I'll add a little more scene detail now I've got the place firmly fixed in my head.
Seizing the chance to make good first impression is the job of the opening page, but can you use a switching point of view to capture the reader's interest and get their hearts pumping?
Sol Stein, in his famous book, On Writing, said:
"Today's impatient readers give a novelist fewer than seven minutes."
Written in 1995, it is doubtful if modern readers are anything like as forgiving, and talking about readers looking for their next read in a bookshop, Stein added:
"No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample."
This gives the novelist a problem: how to get the reader past page three? Common wisdom among thriller writers, agents and publishers, is that a book should start with the most mind-blowing, action packed, suspenseful scene of the book - a climax on first entry, if you will. If you can then manage another big hitting climax somewhere near where it's supposed to be i.e. just before the final denouement, then so much the better.
In A Sleeping Feast, my first novel, I used a switching point of view to add both mystery and suspense. Excellent emotions for the first pages of a novel. You will have to judge for yourself whether I have got the reader past the third page by downloading the prologue here: A sleeping feast - Prologue
A Sleeping Feast is my first novel. The hook goes something like this:
Investigative journalist and reporter of strange phenomena, Alex Reed,believes secret drug trials link the death of a fit young man and the disappearance of bodies from a University research enclosure.
Helped by a beautiful forensic entomologist, and certain the pharmaceutical giant involved is playing sinister games for profit, Alex must fight escalating measures and be more than a sensationalist hack to uncover the sickening reality
Currently it's about 80,000 words long and in the process of a fifth draft. Will there always be so many drafts? I hope not, but when ever I review my work I think, bloody hell, I've just got to re-structure that and edit this.
Of course, when a book is unpublished, editing remains the luxury of being the author.
Not only have the opening words of a novel got to interest a reader - to the point where they buy the book, or at least don't put it down without reading a few pages if they were given the book for free - but it has to attract a literary agent and publisher.
No wonder these are the most fraught words you will ever write. They certainly are for me. I can't count how many times I re-drafted the opening to A Sleeeping Feast. Several dozen, at least.
This was the very first opening:
John Ruskin sang to himself as he drove the transit van along a dirt track between rows of maples. “I wandered around and suddenly found somebody who.” His voice soft, conspiring, was melodious with the engine noise as it wavered and throbbed in sympathy with the uneven terrain"
I hate it. The image of a chap singing is sinister, for me, but I failed to put that across - and then there's the dubious choice of character name, he's a famous artist. This wavered and throbbed bit is just rubbish, and it's understandable why no agent ever looked past the first paragraph.
My second attempt was better:
Hope returned. In six months it had faded from bright white to dull grey, but as she watched the police officer get out of the car and walk toward the house, her mouth dried and her shoulders shivered; her body remembered the allure.
This is an nice omen for what is to come, but my writing class - conducted by Dave Peak a fabulous anarchic writer with a great sense of humour - thought "Hope" was a person not the emotion. The first word of a novel and there's confusion. Something to avoid.
Finally, I hit upon the idea that I've kept to date. That of opening with one of the victims of the central crime. The victims are in a coma, but still retain some feeling, senses and sporadic conciousness. The idea of opening with this is to give a taster of the horror to come and tempt the reader with a question: What the hell is going on here? Thinking about it, I worry it's too obscure, and they do say not to open with a prologue - rubbish, where would thriller writing be without prologues?
Here is the current opening then, and just to mention, this has been changed several times too:
At first he heard them scurrying through leaves around his body, acting as if he wasn't there. Burrowing and scraping, they busily ate-out a home for themselves. They tunnelled into his soft flesh and gnawed his bones. Inside his half-buried torso they twisted around like dogs chasing their tails. His senses were numb, but the creatures moved deep within like a swelling bowel.
