Welcome back to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

Sorry for the brief hiatus – as explained on Monday, a big workload coincided with a heavy cold that knocked me out for two weeks. I also needed some time to work on my own novel, practising what I preach and editing the bad stuff out of it with the help of my shrewd and incredibly patient agent.

So anyway, for those of you who don’t know the drill, In The Barber’s Chair is the part of the blog where I take an aspiring author’s first page, submitted by them, and look at ways of making it better. As a reader, you can practise your editing skills by reading through the extract below, deciding what you think works and doesn’t work, then reading my comments in the section called ‘The Cuts’.

If you’d like to submit your first page for perusal on this blog, you can send it via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right. Please make sure you are sending your best work, polished and edited, ideally from a completed manuscript. It can be the first page of a novel or short story, 250 words max – just a title and your name please, no synopsis or explanatory blather. By sending it to me, you’re consenting to my publishing it on this blog forever, and also to my engaging with it in a robust manner. Please read previous Barber’s Chairs to get an idea of what you’re likely to expect.

I’d love to receive more submissions, so please do send them in. If you enjoy this blog, it really helps when you pop a little post on Facebook or Twitter or on your blog, directing folks this way. Thank you very much to all of you who have been doing that. I enjoy writing these posts a lot and I hope they continue to be useful. As always, if you disagree with anything I’ve said or you have something to add, please go right ahead and add a comment below!

Untitled (by Terry)

‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.’

The words consumed the hot stale air all around the balcony. Hypnotic vibrations produced by the megaphones shivered down my spine before a delicate smell of honey and cinnamon rose around me.

‘Whiskey, Mr Flint.’

I turned to see a slender woman dressed in a full white niqab holding a gold tray with a tumbler containing a double measure of whiskey with ice. Her blue eyes as clear as the sky above looked deep into mine.

‘No thank you.’

Sweat flowed from my brow, bringing the sun tan lotion I had applied to the top of my head down with it. The white cotton shirt, even if it was half sleeve, had been a poor choice. As I pinched the shirt to lift it off my sticky skin, I saw 300 metres away, Britain’s finest engineering feat of the last century. Upon the runaway the supersonic bird sat glistening in the midday sun.

I wouldn’t have minded being summoned if that had been my taxi. What did he want from me? Payment hadn’t been transferred until the building be complete but he couldn’t change terms now. We had a contract. He’d bankrupt me if he did. Remember, he is your client and we need his money.

These are the new men of finance and means to make your dreams come true. Just do what he wants even though he interrupted a reunion planned 4 months ago for the officers on board that day. Smile, and be happy you’re here despite the inconvenience.

‘The Caliph will arrive shortly.’

The Cuts

‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.’

Awful, generic opening bid. Congratulations, Terry, you have already squandered my goodwill and desire to continue. Please accept this glazed ham and travel hamper of novelty cheeses.

The central problem of creating lucid, durable art is speaking the truth without stating the obvious.

When writing about a culture not your own (or even your hometown, for that matter), you can’t just stage a trolley dash of local clichés and expect the reader to accept your authority as a guide. We’re looking for the small, surprising, telling detail – the subverting of expectation, the closely-observed object or action or phenomenon so idiosyncratic that it must be true, that makes us – however subconsciously – think ‘ah – this person must have lived there.’

A lot has been written on the problems of exoticism in fiction and I don’t intend to tackle that weighty and important topic here, except to say that, for me, all good writing involves a form of exoticism. If I were writing about walking through the high street in Norwich, I wouldn’t want to write it as a local, blind to my environment from familiarity. I’d want to invest it with that scintillating awakeness, that wonder or loathing or baffled interrogative sifting and hefting that characterises vivid prose.

So I don’t have an issue with exoticism per se (of course you don’t, thinks my reader – as a white middle-class British male you’re habituated to the assumption that the entire world is yours to appropriate and squoosh through a variety of normative filters you’re not even conscious of (to which I respond, fair point – it’s a discussion I’d like to have with someone who vaguely knows what they’re talking about at a later date, but I digress)) as long as it adheres to our maxims of crunchy specificity and engagement of the reader’s five senses.

What I’m saying is that creating a successful fictive universe for your characters to exist within is not a word-association game. I’d wager a tidy sum that if you asked 100 people to list their Top 10 clichéd words or phrases linked with Islam, ‘Allahu Akbar’ would come somewhere near the top, along with mosque, fatwah and jihad. You’re on molecule-thin ice, here.

Opening with your chosen line is like starting a novel with:

‘Ow can I elp you, monsieur?’ asked the pleasant yet faintly aloof waiter, the Eiffel Tower glimmering like a great iron baguette beyond his left shoulder.

Granted, grains of truth may exist amongst the hackneyed tropes. You may even protest that you are writing from experience – it happened to me on holiday! I lived there for ten years! I’m a lifetime resident, Tim, you presumptuous douchenozzle!

Unfortunately, you will not be on hand with your manuscript to browbeat every reader who encounters a succession of lazy cultural clichés and quickly dismisses the ensuing story as utter bollocks.

The words consumed the hot stale air all around the balcony.

‘consumed’? In what way? They might ‘resonate in’ or ‘ring through’ or even ‘stir’, but they’re not sucking it in, anymore than a salmon ‘consumes’ the water it swims through. This is a classic case of picking a verb based on its Wank Quotient rather than its aptness or utility.

‘all’ adds nothing to this sentence. It’s a meaningless intensifier – fluff, in other words. Hunt these little bastards down and expunge them from your prose. They are mouse poos on your seed bread.

Hypnotic vibrations produced by the megaphones shivered down my spine before a delicate smell of honey and cinnamon rose around me.

I feel this sentence has a good heart. It’s trying, bless it. I like the attempt to engage with the reader’s senses – the protagonist’s feeling the words in his body, the specificity of ‘honey and cinnamon’. Even ‘delicate’ is just about pulling its weight as a modifier. It’s teetering on the periphery of abstraction, but it helps to distinguish the subtlety of the smell, as contrasted with the dominant, bone-shaking noise.

A good heart is not enough. This sentence hugged a puppy and did not know you can’t hug puppies that hard, and now it’s sobbing while cradling a lump of fur and bone splinters, moaning over and over ‘the puppy don’t play no more’.

Unless you’re talking about an actual mesmerist or types of tranquiliser medication, ‘hypnotic’ is a pretentious, distracting word. In fact, I’m flatly banning you from using it. You abused the privilege. I get it – you’re trying to evoke this woozy, liminal state, as if he were being hypnotised. That doesn’t mean you can just write the word ‘hypnotic’ and have the reader think ‘ooh, how hypnotic’. It’s like writing ‘Sad tears fell from the widower’s face.’ Show, don’t tell.

‘shivered down my spine’? Oh hell no, dawg. You’re not writing copy for the new Caramel Magnum.

‘Whiskey, Mr Flint.’

I knew the dame was trouble the moment she walked into my office and spouted two hardboiled fiction clichés in three words.

Mr Flint? Seriously? Why not go the whole hog and call him Rock Cannon? Overdetermined character names were tedious and cutesy when Charles Dickens did it and the practice has not undergone a reversal of fortunes in the intervening years.

Why isn’t there a question mark? Is she just identifying it for him, like a stroke survivor pointing at objects trying to remember their names?

I turned to see a slender woman dressed in a full white niqab holding a gold tray with a tumbler containing a double measure of whiskey with ice. Her blue eyes as clear as the sky above looked deep into mine.

My Bulldog Drummond bingo card is an embarrassment of filled squares right now, Terry.

I mean, come on. An exoticised, sexily unattainable foreign woman serving him drinks? (neat liquor on the rocks, natch – the tipple of choice for grizzled assholes who have Seen Too Much)

I don’t want to get into hairshirty self-righteous displays of political correctness, nor parade just how ‘on message’ I am by angrily denouncing you. I’m going to take the charitable position and assume that, in your enthusiasm to create an exciting, vivid world, you haven’t noticed how you’re adopting some slightly dated, possibly offensive and – most importantly of all – probably inaccurate tropes regarding the Middle East and male protagonists in adventure narratives.

Let me make my position absolutely clear.

It is okay to write a story about a sexist D-bag. It is okay to write a story where said D-bag’s point of view influences how we encounter your fictional world. It is okay to include a female character who isn’t a hotshot activist lawyer-cum-Krav Maga champion-cum-installation artist working primarily with reclaimed scrap. The male gaze is appropriate when we’re in the perspective of a heterosexual dude.

Still, the whole strength of the medium you’re working in, the whole beauty of the dialectic of fiction, is the creation and reflection and interaction of competing voices. This woman is the second human being we’re introduced to. What is her narrative function? She feels as much an object as the whiskey.

If the feminist argument seems a bit abstruse to you, then I’ll couch it more straightforward terms. This scene is a cliché. I have no sense of surprise, no feeling of anticipation. You want to communicate to us that the Caliph is powerful and rich, right? You want to build our anticipation and our sense that the protagonist, Mr Flint, is in over his head?

Then why pick cultural indicators that have appeared in a hundred other novels and movies? An attractive woman, some whiskey – so what? Give us a specific piece of weird, opulent art. Give us some insanely beautiful, detailed view. I don’t know – put Flint in some ridiculous, designer chair that was obviously custom-made. You could even have a piece break off in his hand.

My point is, with even the most cursory bit of brainstorming, you could make this scene so distinctive. You want people who’ve read your novel to discuss it with other people and go ‘oh yeah, I liked that opening bit with the chair’ or whatever. No one gives a shit about whiskey on the rocks, not even – I suspect – you.

Sweat flowed from my brow, bringing the sun tan lotion I had applied to the top of my head down with it. The white cotton shirt, even if it was half sleeve, had been a poor choice. As I pinched the shirt to lift it off my sticky skin, I saw 300 metres away, Britain’s finest engineering feat of the last century. Upon the runaway the supersonic bird sat glistening in the midday sun.

See, I like the first two sentences. They make Flint human, they engage our senses, they introduce a sense of urgency. He might be sweating mostly from the heat, but the point is, he’s uncomfortable. I might even be starting to feel invested in his welfare.

‘As I pinched the shirt to lift it off my sticky skin, I saw 300 metres away, Britain’s finest engineering feat of the last century.’

I appreciate the compulsion to vary sentence structure, so your narrative isn’t a succession of ‘I did this, I did that, I did another thing’ formulations, but that doesn’t justify arbitrary and misleading subclauses. Why is Flint’s seeing the aeroplane simultaneous with his peeling his sweaty shirt away from his chest? It makes it sound like he has a supersonic jet parked on one of his nipples.

Surely this plane (Concorde? Or some fictive analogue thereof? I’m no aerospace buff, so I’m not clear if you’re nodding towards something here or not) has been visible for the whole time he’s been in this room. Unless ‘Britain’s finest engineering feat of the last century’ is literally one of his manboobs (and believe me, Terry, I am by no means averse to this as the premise for an entire novel) you need to separate these unrelated clauses. Otherwise, it’s like describing your protagonist taking a dump in Rio while gazing out the bathroom window, and writing: ‘As I clenched my buttocks and strained, I saw a gigantic Jesus with his arms spread.’

Payment hadn’t been transferred until the building be complete but he couldn’t change terms now. We had a contract. He’d bankrupt me if he did.

Well can he or can’t he? Either he’s contractually obliged, or he isn’t. This is slightly dull backstory that you’d do better working into later dialogue. Get the other character in the room rather than circling back to explain the stakes. We should be able to tell from Flint’s body language.

The question of the contract is surprisingly important, too. We want Flint to be a rational, competent actor if we’re to invest in his welfare. If he’s done a really shitty job of drawing up a contract whereby his client can withdraw at any time and leave him up shit creek then frankly he’s an idiot unworthy of our sympathy and doesn’t deserve to be in the business he’s in.

Remember, he is your client and we need his money. These are the new men of finance and means to make your dreams come true. Just do what he wants even though he interrupted a reunion planned 4 months ago for the officers on board that day. Smile, and be happy you’re here despite the inconvenience.

A weird switch from first-person to third-person stream-of-consciousness here. The language here is clumsy and hard to follow:

‘These are the new men of finance and means to make your dreams come true.’

Do you mean ‘they are men of finance and means’? Or do you mean ‘these are men who have the means to make your dreams come true’? Either way, ‘make your dreams come true’ is an unforgivably banal cliché, especially on a first page.

‘Just do what he wants even though he interrupted a reunion planned 4 months ago for the officers on board that day.’

A less ambitious author would have been satisfied with the jarring switch from first to third-person, but you keep things interesting by suddenly lurching from present to past tense at the tail end of this sentence. I think you mean ‘today’, although this sentence is so vague and wishy-washy I can’t be sure and I certainly don’t care.

‘The Caliph will arrive shortly.’

Sadly not soon enough to catch the departing reader. You might as well replace the entire first page with a screen that says ‘LOADING PLOT… PLEASE WAIT’.

Cut all the backstory and speculation and launch us into the actual interaction. I concede a certain amount of anticipatory hype-man work can build our investment in a meeting, but that’s no excuse for filler, especially hacky ‘this was a big deal – if he didn’t get this right, then Consequences’ blather so common to duff commercial fiction. Show, don’t tell. Play the body language right and we shouldn’t need you clumsily stepping in to reassure us that the stakes are, in fact, high.

All of the stories we create as humans are constructed from bits of previous stories. Anyone claiming absolute originality is merely demonstrating ignorance (or possibly brazen dishonesty). Your goal is to steal from as many sources as possible – to create new mashups, to slam ideas together and see what breaks.

This opening is too one-note. It feels too familiar. I’m not advocating that you change Flint into a golem piloted by an avaricious time-travelling gnome (although, again, I would read the shit out of that story) but I do feel you need to roll up your sleeves and do some work on making this story yours, on making it surprising and real, on jolting the reader out of our comfortable genre expectations and giving us something compelling and sustaining to drive us on through the manuscript. Force some restrictions on yourself. Don’t settle for your first idea. Complicate.

Speak the truth without stating the obvious.

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