Posts by Sophie Masson
Last month I wrote about the major, extreme types of fictional characters, the heroes and villains. Today I want to briefly make some observations about the minor kinds of characters known as ‘sidekicks’ (often used to denote good characters, but sometimes neutrally) and ‘henchmen'(used only to denote minor bad characters).
Firstly though it’s important to note that a so-called ‘sidekick’ type may in fact be a major character who is too modest to think of themselves as a hero(this happens principally with the Type Cool Heroes I described in last month’s post). In this case though the character, especially if he or she is telling the story in the first person, isn’t a sidekick at all in terms of the story, just of minor importance apparently to the other characters in the story, as their heroic status isn’t apparent yet. I’ve used this trope myself in several of my books, and its a lot of fun. But this isn’t the kind of ‘sidekick’ I’m profiling here today.
So here’s a few things I’ve observed from both my writing and my reading:
*Sidekicks are often interesting in their own right; henchmen rarely so. Sidekicks think for themselves, whilst obeying in general terms the hero or villain. So often they can be funny, brave or alternatively comically not brave; they can be touching, pitiable, engaging. But henchmen are usually no more than walking armour plate, who don’t think for themselves. They are often described in physical terms only. They can be pitiable—but only after they’ve been knocked out! Sidekicks can also be turned around: one working for a hero may go over to the dark side, for instance; one working for a villain may be redeemed if they do the right thing(especially if they die doing it!)
Read MoreHeroes and villains–they’re of course at opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of characters, but they share more than might be obvious at first glance, and if you’re in the business of writing fiction and creating such characters, it can be useful to think about those things.
Of course, the principal element that heroes and villains have in common is their function in terms of the story: it is their interaction which determines the main action of the plot. At its most basic, it is either that the hero is being specifically targeted by the villain, or the villain has general nefarious plots which the hero sets out to foil.
But a common function in the plot isn’t the only thing these two extreme types of characters share. They are leaders, not followers, and they also share high doses of intelligence, imagination and determination, all of which are neutral qualities to be used for either good or bad. (I’m talking here about major, central heroic or villainous figures, not the minor characters, good and bad, who line up behind them). And I also think of heroes and villains as blowing hot or cold. What I mean by that is that I think major heroes and villains can be each basically divided into two broad sub-categories, Type Hot and Type Cold. Of course these are only very broad generalisations; traits will often bleed into each other. But basically:
Read MoreAs readers of Writer Unboxed probably already know, fairytales are a big inspiration for me, and elements of fairy-tale creep into a good many of my novels. However, it’s been a while since I’ve written a novel that was very firmly in fairy-tale territory, based directly on a famous fairytale, and doing so has made me fall in love all over again with Once upon a time! Moonlight and Ashes, which has just come out (Random House Australia, print and e-book) is based on what you might call one of the uber-fairytales: Cinderella, versions of which you find all over the world.
I’ve always been fascinated by the tale and particularly by the differences in the three versions I know best: the classic French version Cendrillon, ou la pantoufle de verre (Cinderella, or the glass slipper) as written down by Charles Perrault in 1697, the English Tattercoats, collected by Joseph Jacobs in 1894, and the German version collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, known as Aschenputtel. Despite their variations, each of these consists of the basic Cinderella story of a young girl, oppressed, abused and neglected, who, through magic of one sort or another, eventually triumphs over her oppressors and gets her happy ending.
Several years ago, I wrote a novel called Cold Iron that is based on Tattercoats, but for Moonlight & Ashes, it was Aschenputtel that provided the direct inspiration. I’ve always loved how, unlike in many of the other versions of Cinderella – including the French and English versions – Aschenputtel is not a passive character, but one who is independent and who takes her destiny into her own hands, albeit with the help of magical gifts. Using this as my inspiration, I worked on pushing my story and my Cinderella-figure, Selena, to go even further.
Read MoreChildhood books are so powerful. They can imbue us with a passion for something unexpected, but whose effects are lifelong. And sometimes, when you look back, you can see the precise moment when it happened, the exact story that turned you on to something deep and important.
I was thinking about that recently—I’m in the middle of writing a wonderfully intense and involving YA fairytale novel, Scarlet in the Snow, inspired by the Russian version of Beauty and the Beast (known as ‘The Scarlet Flower’) and I got to thinking about my enduring fascination for all things Russian, and how it all began. It was with a book my father gave me for my eleventh birthday, a book he himself had loved as a boy, and his father before him: a novel by the classic French writer Jules Verne, simply called Michel Strogoff . (In English, it was published as Michael Strogoff, Courier of the Czar.)
It’s not well-known in English, but the French consider it to be Verne’s best novel. Historical adventure rather than science fiction, it’s full of exciting action, vivid descriptions, thrilling romance, dark secrets, an engaging touch of humour, great characters, especially the young, brave, honourable Siberian hero, Michel Strogoff, and his beloved, Nadia; and above all a sense of a land as vast as it was dramatic. When I first read it, aged eleven, I already had a few images of Russia, drawn from fairytales I’d loved, such as the Tale of Prince Ivan, Grey Wolf and the Firebird; Fenist the Falcon, Masha and the Bear, The Frog Princess and so on. I was drawn, too, because of my parents’ interest in Russian music and Russian icons, which meant we were familiar with both. But Michel Strogoff turned what had been a liking into a passion.
I read the novel I don’t know how many times, swept away by the grandeur of the story, the fantastic adventure, with its wolves, bears, bandits, iced-up rivers, cruel torturers and traitors. I thrilled to the love I could see developing between Nadia and Michel, both equally brave, each in their own way, and I was swept away too by the description of the journey, which starts in Moscow and ends in Siberia—an exhilerating journey over water and through forest and mountain. Basically, it’s a chase novel, and it has the breakneck pace of that, culminating in an especially unexpected and satisfyingly resolved twist. But it is also beautifully written, as tight and clever as Around the World in Eighty Days, and much more moving. No wonder French critics reckon it’s Verne’s best!
Read MoreLike most writers, whether new or established, I have folders—physical and electronic—filled with stories that either never quite got to publication but that your instinct tells you are still worth something; or else were published long ago and whose details might be a bit dated, yet whose core is still strong. These aren’t dead stories, not the kind that started off with what seemed like a good idea at the time but expired before they could even be properly born, because they never even got finished. The ones I’m talking about are simply in suspended animation, waiting to be breathed back into life. And though I might have had lots of books published and have more in the pipeline, I don’t like to give up on the potential of any complete story. I hate the waste of it! Reshaped and rethought, polished or even plundered, these transformed stories-in-amber can spread their wings at last and take flight. And by the way, when I say ‘stories’ I mean both short and long form fiction; short stories, novellas and novels. But this can also be applied to short or long form non fiction, plays, poetry, and so on.
I’ve cut and pasted more Sleeping Beauty stories like that than I can remember; changed beginnings, ends; merged stories into each other, rethought points of view, recast the atmosphere. With stories that have already been published, and thus edited and proofed, often it’s a simple matter of refreshing some minor details(for instance, a character listening to music on his Ipod instead of records or even CDs), and sometimes a little plot nip and tuck here and there. But occasionally it’s been more radical recasting that goes on, a chance to totally make-over your story.
Or I’ve used the existing story as a kind of model for one set in the same world, or taken a minor character from it and expanded their role. With stories that nearly got published but through no fault of their own fell between the cracks through circumstances beyond your control—like a publisher going under, or being taken over by another, who doesn’t like the book, and also with stories that have never been published, but that have gone out to publishers and been knocked back for such reasons as ‘not commercial enough’ or ‘too niche’, but otherwise praised, it’s a matter of looking at the manuscript with fresh eyes and deciding whether it still stands on its own. If it does, then we can make the next decision: send out to mainstream print publishers once more, or look at the opportunities now available to us authors with the advent of e-books, both with small-press digital-only publishers, and do-it-yourself-publishing?
I had a lovely experience recently with a book I’d loved dearly for years and totally believed in, but which had been regretfully passed over by publishers.
Read MoreI want to do something a bit different today. My new book The Boggle Hunters, a fantasy adventure novel for kids aged 8-12 has just come out this month in Australia (Scholastic Press Australia) and I want to talk about the sheer magic of creating this book and the fun I’ve had creating a new updated form of such traditional motifs as fairies, the granting of three wishes, supernatural beasties, and the like. I’ve always had a great love of traditional fairy and folk stories and have been steeped in them since my earliest childhood, and I always recommend them to writing groups and individual beginner writers as a wonderful source of ideas. But I’m also a great fan of refreshing and updating those traditional motifs, and I thought describing a little my experience with this book may be a helpful, concrete way to demonstrate how you can do it.
The Boggle Hunters began with one of those truly magical moments when all of a sudden something comes to you out of the blue, and you just know it’s something you want to follow! I was in Sydney, walking down a street near the big central railway station, in an area that’s rather shabby, when I saw a little shop that had been closed for some time—the window was very dusty, there were dead flies in the corners of it, it looked very unpromising, down at heel, even a bit seedy. At that moment just as I was passing a stray ray of sunlight hit the window and there were all these glittery little motes of dust dancing in the air and suddenly, I saw it as a Fay hang-out—in fact, those were the exact words that came to my mind, this is a Fay hang-out, even though I didn’t know what the Fays were yet, exactly, I knew they’d be magical beings. But as I walked up the road, there they were taking shape in my mind like forms appearing out of the mist. And there too were the Grays, their enemies (it’s an update in a way of the ‘seelie’ and ‘unseelie’ fairy courts of Scottish folklore) and I thought, yes, there’s a kind of secret war going on, always has been, these rival magical tribes battling it out in the human world over hordes of supernatural pests, the boggles (the name’s taken from folklore, but I’ve greatly expanded their nature and forms). And there too were the boggle hunters, human allies of the Fays who are kept very busy tracking down and capturing the hordes of boggles bred by the Grays and released into our world. And opposing them are the sneaks, who work for the Grays and try to frustrate the efforts of the boggle hunters..
It was so weird, like the idea had just been waiting for me to pass that shabby shop-front and for the ray of sunlight to hit, and suddenly, like a magic wand had been waved, there it was, a whole world unfolding in front of my eyes! (I might add that caught in the grip of this exciting idea, I walked blocks and blocks past my actual destination and had to retrace my steps!)
Read MorePrologue:
Eureka moment, inspiration strikes. A new idea! Great excitement. Connections made in head, some scribbling in notebook. Floaty yet intense feeling, like being in love. Can’t think of anything else. Tingles up spine, gooseflesh, daydreams as the idea grows from little spark to fast-burning fire. Weird looks from people as novelist goes about muttering, laughing to herself on occasion.
Act 1, scene 1:
The big day has come. Screen opens on new document. Excited writing of title of book. Hey, it looks serious now, gone from bright idea to reality being born on the page, with its own name and all! Take a deep breath. Insert page break. Write ‘Chapter one.’ So much fizzing inside, it’s going to be easy. Write first line. Look at it. No. It’s no good. Delete. Write first line. Look at it. No. It’s no good. Delete. Write first line again. Aagh. No good. Delete. Try again. Panic. It can’t be done! Then remember old trick from childhood–pretend you’re Sheherazade and your life depends on telling a story straight off, without even thinking. Anything will do. And oddly, there it is, the first line, born with a rush and a yell, and from there on, the first chapter catches fire.
Act One, Scene 2:
First few chapters down. All flowing well. Characters doing what they’re meant to. Novelist feeling on top of the world. This one’s so easy!
Lulled into a sense of false security..
Act 1 Scene 3:
About to reach the middle. Everything still going well, but is there a slight slow-down? Are the characters showing the first signs of rebellion, the prose beginning to lose its puff? Ignore all that. That happened last time. But nah, no way, it won’t happen this time. This one’s different.
When you’re an author for children and teens, school visits are an inescapable part of your year. Sometimes they come singly, most often in clumps at various key times: here in Australia, Children’s Book Week in August sees a little army of writers banging the drum for books and writing in classrooms and libraries all around the nation. But there are plenty of other times too when school visits dominate your time, and last week was one of those for me, when I had to visit eight schools in three days, turning myself from quiet writer at her desk with a head full of mind-adventures into extrovert entertainer persuading a class of rowdy kids that hey, reading is actually, y’know, cool!
And though a heavy program like the one I had last week makes me feel that rather than banging the drum for books, I’m actually turning my own poor aching head into a drum, and my throat is packing up as though it’s staging a protest against the sound of my own voice, and the whole ‘isn’t reading fun, folks?’ thing is beginning to pall just a little, the fun stories I’ve prepared feeling like some kind of irritating recorded message to my ears, still I enjoy it. It’s not just getting the chance to connect with your actual readership, and to spin stories to a generally appreciative audience who unlike me has never heard those stories before and just laps them up. It’s not just the pleasure of having it confirmed that despite what many adults believe, children read just as much as ever they did, and in pretty much the same patterns as when I was a child.
That is, a minority read heaps; a majority read sometimes; a minority never read unless they’re forced to. But it’s especially question time which to me is the best, most enjoyable and unpredictable part of a school visit.
Read MoreThe proverb says, Don’t judge a book by its cover, but whoever dreamed that one up can’t have been working in the publishing industry. It might be an indictment of human shallowness, but you can’t help first impressions. You will not judge a book by its cover once you’ve read it, of course; but first you have to be enticed to pick it up in the first place. Always, and not just in modern times, publishers have known this and expended great effort on making their books look attractive at very first glance.
Ideas of what constitute attractive of course have varied over the ages but it is interesting to see some themes are recur again and again. Gold-embossed titles, for instance; we might think of that as a modern phenomenon but in the 19th century every self-respecting book had gold embossing. Fancy typescript’s another. One thing that has changed a lot though, at least in English-speaking countries, is the changing attitudes towards illustration on the cover. Nineteenth-century books are often profusely illustrated inside but the cover is mostly patterns and designs, often sumptuously presented on fine leather binding, with gold embossing and all. But the only covers that were illustrated with actual scenes or people were the cheap throw-away jobs printed on flimsy paper—penny dreadfuls and chapbooks, and the like. In the early to mid twentieth century, illustration on a cover was still often associated with cheap—with pulp fiction, if you like. If you wanted literary, you had to go for fairly plain covers. Elegant, maybe, but plain. This is something that is still quite a common thing in some countries, such as in France, where novels reckoned to be literary are still published in restrained wrappers, on very good stiff paper(not hardback, though) with little decoration, except maybe a border, and the author’s name and title of the book in elegant typescript. But in English-speaking countries, that rule has quite gone out of the window, and bookshop shelves are a push-and-shove gallery of the bold, the beautiful, the soft-focus, the looked-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time and the frankly lurid. Drawings, paintings, photographs, graphics of all kinds jostle for our attention. In fact the restrained unillustrated cover is so rare these days that it’s commented on as though it were a quirky experiment!
For a writer, that first impression readers get when they see your book is of course vitally important too. But there’s another even more important consideration: what does the cover say about your book? Not just its Pick me, Pick me qualities, but whether it expresses what you feel to be the essence of your lovingly-crafted work. There’s nothing worse than being handed a cover which clearly demonstrates that the designer has no idea what your book’s about, or its emotional tone: and if that’s the case, that’s probably because the publisher has either not briefed them properly, or worse still, has completely missed the point about your book. Fights over covers are very common! (As well as secret dismay that isn’t expressed until it’s too late.)
Read MoreIt’s the time of the year when a trip to the mailbox means finding a cheerful bundle of Christmas cards from family and friends all over the world. And it’s this time of the year that I most miss an annual ritual: receiving a Christmas cat card from my dear pen-friend Lloyd Alexander, the great American children’s writer. This will be the fifth Christmas the Christmas cat won’t come, for Lloyd passed away in May 2007. And so in this post, I want to remember him, and what a delight it was to know him.
It’s not always true that a great writer is a great person, but when the two coincide, it’s pure magic. That was certainly the case with Lloyd. From the very first letter he sent me, in January 1997, in response to the enthusiastic missive I’d sent via Cricket magazine(with whom he was associated), after my children and I had finished reading The Chronicles of Prydain, you could tell that here was a generous, warm, intelligent and modest person, a real gentleman in the very best sense of the term. Finding we had a good deal in common—writing, France, music, Celtic myth, travel, and much more—we continued to correspond, and sent each other signed copies of our recently-published books. Lloyd always replied to letters promptly, typing or handwriting on his own distinctive pale yellow letter-paper, with his own drawing of a cat playing the violin(thereby combining two of his great loves, as well as indulging his sense of humour). The elegant envelopes postmarked ‘Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania’ were always welcome arrivals in our mailbox!
Lloyd was always ready with a kind word and a friendly remark, and his generous and perceptive understanding of my own books heartened me enormously, and meant a huge amount to me, as did the warm and intelligent quotes he provided for my publishers when my books started to be published in the USA. Over the years, we shared snippets of information, and exchanged news of family and of friends. He was tickled pink by the knowledge that two of our friends had been inspired to name their kids after him and his characters—one’s friend youngest son was called Taran, another’s eldest son’s two first names were Lloyd Alexander! And we exchanged Christmas cards every year—his featured his own delightful coloured drawings of a fantasy cat world, from the poshest drawing-rooms to the rumbustious tavern, with each year a new scene.
Read MoreI was brought up in the very rich French comic-book tradition of bandes dessinées which includes such great classics as the Tintin series, the Asterix series, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs and tons, tons more. The French tradition is one of the three great comic-book traditions of the world, with the Japanese and American traditions being the other two. Andt five years ago, my first graphic novel, The Secret Army: Operation Loki, illustrated by Anthony Davis, was published. I always wanted to do more, but it’s not easy to get publishers to commit to what can be a pretty expensive undertaking.
But times have changed and thanks to e-publishing, we have many more possibilities than before. With that in mind, I decided that the sequel to my first book would use all those possibilities to create something magical and different, using words, pictures and music. And so, with myself as scriptwriter, two illustrator friends, David Allan and Fiona McDonald, as pictorial creators, and my musician/composer son, Bevis Masson-Leach as musical creator, we set out to create The Secret Army: Order of the Vampire.
I really wanted with this one to have a style firmly set in the French tradition of ‘ligne claire’ (popularised by Tintin, but also by many others, it is THE classic style there.) It’s also great for the period in which our comic is set, the 1930’s. It’s been a very exciting project, but also exhausting and difficult, and I can’t speak too highly of the enormous talent, patience and perseverance of my co-creators in what must at times seem like the maddest project ever! We are working in a very new area, and having to learn ‘on the job’ all the time.
We’ve been working on it on and off over several months, in between other things, and don’t expect to finish till some time late next year. We don’t know yet whether we’ll go the indie route and publish it ourselves on a dedicated website(David, who’s a website designer as well as artist, is the genius there!) Or perhaps to save ourselves all that work, we’ll try for one of the new digital comics publishers. Whichever way it goes, anyway, it’s going to be great!
We’ve already learned a great deal over the year we’ve been beavering away at this, and today I’d like to pass on some notes for anyone interested in having a go at this amazing genre themselves. The notes on script and pictures apply to ‘traditional’ print comics just as much as to digital and multimedia comics, of course.
Read MoreFantasy and speculative fiction generally is traditionally associated with lots of characters, detailed settings, rich texture, complex ideas developed slowly over great long novels. But there are forms other than the novel suitable to this most magically expansive of genres, and I’ve had a lot of fun over the years going on potted excursions, as it were, into other worlds through short stories and articles with a fantastical twist. Some kinds of ides are better explored in short form, anyway: the ghost story is a case in point. It’s an interesting fact that there are many more great short stories in that genre than there are novels. But many kinds of fantasy can lend themselves very well to the short-story form, even epic fantasy.
The fantasy article is perhaps rarer than the short story, but you can build up your writing profile very successfully that way if you are interested in the fantasy genre. Such articles can be offered to the specialist speculative fiction press, in print or online, but it can also be one of the few ways to attract attention in the mainstream media, which rarely accepts short stories, but may well be interested in a fresh, intriguing look at an unusual subject. This form of writing can include interviews, extended reviews of books and films, essays, and exploration of fantastical themes of all kinds.
Here are some of my tips for the fantasy short story:
Read MoreIn an idle moment a few months ago,when I was between novels and feeling at something of a loose end, I finally got around to doing something I’d been thinking about for a while: start my own blog on food and all sorts of culinary matters, with a French-Australian slant. I wanted it to be much more than a mere collection of recipes or restaurant reviews or anything like that. This was to be a space for memoir, for musings, for dipping into literary culinary classics, for showcasing the seasons in our very productive vegetable garden and orchard, for culinary travel, for giving tips, shortcuts, and yes, recipes, my own, my family’s, and those I’d gleaned from all kinds of weird and wonderful sources.
And so A la mode frangourou was born.
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