Posts by Sophie Masson
Writers are professional ‘stickybeaks’, as we say in Australia: amongst crowds of strangers we go about eyes on stalks, ears flapping, mind whirring, sniffing out the telling vignette, the odd detail, the weird seed that might one day flourish into a full-grown literary plant. We don’t need to know everything about a real-life situation or person—in fact I think that often too much knowledge stymies things: we just need the intriguing glimpse that might fire the creative brain. And nowhere do you get more intriguing, diverse, fertile and unmediated glimpses into the rich, sordid and simply weird potential of human life and human nature in the all-too often-antiseptic modern Western world than on public transport—particularly on trains. Commuters in a hurry to get home complain of the overcrowding, the discomfort, the slowness of our city rail transport, especially in Sydney; but for a writer, such short rail journeys can be a positively Dickensian cornucopia of bizarre and tragi/comic delights. (And as I’m from the country and only make it to the city sometimes, I’m even less jaded by the experience and so really notice things.) These are just some of the micro-stories I’ve collected along the way.
One day, a man got on my subway train and stood swaying just before me. ‘Can you move over, please, love, I’ve only got one leg?’ I looked at him–he seemed to have two–but moved over, thinking, hey, he looks like he could easily get angry. He was big, burly, with fierce spiked hair, eyes black and still as stones, tattoos on powerful arms. He sat down with a grunt, squeezing in next to me and another person. Then he leant down, rolled up his trouser leg–and there, quite plainly, was an artificial leg. With another grunt, he proceeded to hoist the leg out of its socket, where it joined the stump of his lost limb.
Read MoreFrom time immemorial, human beings have dreamed–every night we go into what one of my sons’ friends once referred to as ‘those brilliant eight hours of free entertainment.’ And from time immemorial, writers have used images or scenes from dreams, or entire dreams, to enrich and expand their creative work in waking life. I’m certainly no exception. My night-imagination has always enriched my day-imagination. Several of my short stories have started directly as dreams, for example, ‘Restless’, a chilling ghost story I wrote recently for a forthcoming YA Penguin anthology, ‘Thirteen Ghosts’, began as a really creepy and unforgettable nightmare. Another disturbing story, ‘The Spanish Wife’, a vampire story set in the 1930’s, which was published in a magazine, started as a dream in which someone said, very clearly, ‘No-one took any notice of him till he brought home a Spanish wife,’ and that turned into the very first sentence of the short story. Images and scenes from dreams have also gone into my novels, and in one case, a very vivid and intriguing dream inspired an entire six-book children’s fantasy series of mine, the Thomas Trew series. It’s not always fantasy or supernatural stories that have sprung out of dream-compost for me, though; everything from family stories to thrillers to historical novels has benefited from it.
Over the years, I’ve learned quite a few techniques on how to best use vivid, scary, tantalising or intriguing dream sequences in my writing, and how to investigate them for best effects. Here’s a short workshop based on some of the techniques I’ve developed over the years:
Read MoreSuspense is what keeps a reader reading—wanting to know what happens. The suspense can be of all kinds, from wanting to know who the baddie is in a thriller to wanting to know whether the heroine is going to choose Mr A or Mr B as her love interest, to—well, just about anything, really! Creating and maintaning suspense is important in any kind of story or novel; it is especially so in the kinds of genres that are built around suspense: mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, fantasy. Here’s some of my tips, honed over years of writing in many of those genres!
First of all, to create suspense you need:
Some background information.
But incomplete knowledge.
That is, from the beginning the author needs to already have something set up—to let the reader know something about a character and their situation, or the suspense won’t happen—you have to care what happens for suspense to occur in the reader’s mind.
You can build towards that or start immediately with a suspenseful mysterious beginning, but there must not be too many clues as to what might happen or the suspense will fizzle out before it’s had a chance to happen. You need instead to build up the tension carefully, making the reader think that something is one way when it’s another. But at the same time you can’t play dirty tricks on them—you shouldn’t for instance at the climax suddenly produce a character that wasn’t there before—either in person or mentioned– as the villain, or the reader has a right to feel ripped off.
In my detective novel The Case of the Diamond Shadow, for instance, the true villain is hidden behind a smokescreen of red herrings—but is there all along. It’s just that nobody even thinks of them in connection with the crime!
Read MoreTherese butting in for a sec with a big w00t for WU contributor Sophie Masson before her regularly scheduled post. Sophie has just won the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature for her book My Australian Story: The Hunt for Ned Kelly. I absolutely loved Sophie’s interview with ABC Sydney after winning this book. Have a listen HERE. Our warmest congrats, Sophie, for taking home this most prestigious award! And now, to Sophie…
I was so delighted by the wonderful response to my post on Mary Stewart that I thought I’d write this month about another great lifelong reading love of mine—Anya Seton and her gorgeous historical novels, especially Katherine.
I was sixteen, about the same age as Anya Seton’s famous heroine, Katherine, when I first encountered her as she set out in that ‘tender green time of April’, on a journey that was to take her from sheltered convent girl to controversial great lady. Though Katherine de Roet, later Swynford, was, I was sure, infinitely more beautiful and gifted than me, though she lived in such a different time and place, I clicked instantly with her, and with the gorgeous book in which she lived and breathed with such intensity.
Like her, I too had spent years in a convent—a rather kind and liberal convent school, in my case!–and like her I was itching to go out into the world, and especially, fall in love. The separation between us—a gap of some six hundred years—seemed meaningless. I was with Katherine every step of the way, from her first introduction to the royal court, where she meets the man who will forever change her life, though she does not know it yet—John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the King’s dazzling third son. It is not love at first sight. But love is kindled between them, and when it erupts, it is a passion as unstoppable as it is overwhelming, one that will bring not just delight, but tragedy, murder, madness, and exile. And the evocation of that grand passion by Anya Seton—particularly in the early stages of the affair, when Katherine and John spend several enchanted days in the remote castle of La Teste, in Les Landes, in Gascony (a region of France I knew well, as part of my family comes from there) was so thrilling to my adolescent self that I must have worn out those pages re-reading them, savouring each time that intoxicating mixture of languor and excitement, of sex and romance, of poetry and passion. This is not an uncommon reaction; lots of readers, and not only female readers, have felt this way—my husband tells me that as a teenager in England, where he grew up, he read Katherine on the recommendation of his sister—and loved it, reading it twice, especially lingering on those passages!
Read MoreThese days, it’s not good enough just to be a writer in a garret, banging away at your books. You’ve got to promote. Present. Appear on radio, TV, newspapers, blogs, You Tube, whatever. Get around and speak in schools, universities, conferences. And literary festivals, which from a modest start thirty or so years ago have now mushroomed into a great big industry with events held in a bewildering variety of places.
Here in Australia, from when festival season kicks off round about March, you could practically go to a different literary festival every two weeks or so. Sometimes they come even thicker and faster than this. There seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for them. And they come in all shapes and sizes, from one-day very tightly focussed modest events to week-long extravaganzas featuring celebrity authors and all kinds of razzmatazz. In my experience the smaller and middling festivals are the most enjoyable for most writers; the big ones, with their star systems, tend to make you feel as though you’re just there to make up the numbers and fill in the spaces between the main events (unless of course, you ARE one of the main events!)
When you get your first invitation to appear at a literary festival, it can be quite a thrill. Or a scary thing, depending on how happy you feel about speaking in public. You tend to agonise over your presentation—very often people prepare formal speeches, not realising that the format for literary festivals, with its archetypal panel format, rarely gives you the chance to expound at length(and that if you do, it won’t be popular with the crowd!) And most people will be asked to speak on a multiple-presenter panel; it is ‘the stars’ who are given their own hour to be ‘in conversation’ with some admiring interviewer.
Read MoreKath here. Butting in to SQUEEEE! Sophie’s book My Australian Story: The Hunt for Ned Kelly has been shortlisted for a prestigious Patricia Wrightson award! Congrats from your WU friends, Sophie! We’ll have our fingers crossed for you. And p.s. Sophie’s donation is up on the auction block this week: a critique of your query letter to a young adult or children’s editor. Click to bid.
No—those are not my words, but the words of British author Martin Amis, notorious both for the size of his advances and his controversial comments. This particular comment was made in a recent radio interview in Britain, and was followed by Amis’ ‘explanation’ that he didn’t like the idea of having ‘constraints’ put on his fiction(as if all fiction doesn’t have ‘constraints’ of one sort or the other!).
Of course this boorish and ill-judged(and it has to be said, pathetic and ignorant)outburst was met with outrage from British children’s writers—though an exception was Jacqueline Wilson, who, knowing Amis personally, said he’d probably not intended the offence but often blurted out things that were intended to be deliberately provocative. But beyond the feeling that Amis’ rude ignorance does not merit being dignified with a response—it got me thinking, once again, about why it is that so many people think it’s quite OK to talk about children’s writers and children’s literature in such a way as to imply we are really defective pretend-adults, most likely the prey of all kinds of babyish hangups, and our books are hardly worth mentioning in the same breath as ‘real’ literature. (In fact, I’ve been asked more than once that very question—’when are you going to write a real book?’ And I know I’m not alone in that!)
Of course partly it’s an extension of adult society’s attitude to children. All adults were children once upon a time—but many of us seem to want to forget it. And not always because our childhoods were bad—rather because it was a time of life when we often felt powerless. Dwarves in a land of giants. Mutes in a country of big talkers. Invisible without invisibility cloaks. Because we had to accept things as they were not as we wished them to be. Because we weren’t sure about the world and what it might contain. Because we felt like anything could happen and yet here we were stuck in a kind of endless home-school-home routine. So many people can’t wait to grow up, to put it all behind them. But within those ‘constraints’ what dreams there were! What amazing adventures in your head! What jokes and ironic asides you made up with your friends about the giants towering above you! How amazing the world could be, unpredictable and weird and terrifying and exciting! What moments of intense pure happiness there could be—including that plunge into a book that completely enveloped you, wrapped you in the likes of a spell that would never come again in adulthood or only very very rarely.
Read MorePreface: A life-long lover of ‘bande dessinees’ (French comic books), I’m at present engaged in a wonderful new project, a web-comic sequel to my graphic novel The Secret Army: Operation Loki (ABC Books 2006). The new project, titled the Secret Army: Order of the Vampire, which I’m creating in conjunction with two wonderful artists, Fiona Mc Donald and David Allan, and talented young musician/composer, my twenty one-year old son Bevis Masson-Leach, will use all the possibilities of the internet to help create a whole new world for my characters. But it’s not the Internet which is at the source of our project: all of us working on the comic are Tintinophiles. So here is a piece in praise of the immortal little reporter!
Tintin is eighty-two years old this year and I’ve been celebrating his birthday not only by co-creating Order of the Vampire, but also by adding to my already extensive Tintin-accessory library. (Of course I have every volume of his adventures, some in French, some in English!) The latest book I’ve bought to go on the Tintin shelf is a gorgeous book of travel narratives and photographs retracing the steps of Tintin and his friends in such countries as Tibet, Scotland, the Congo and ‘Syldavia’, compiled by the French magazine Geo. This curiosity, along with Tintin encyclopedias, dictionaries, diaries and action figures, bookend the scruffiest, most loved-to-death collection of the Tintin adventures, which we never get tired of rereading. The Tintin adventures are the books most often pulled out of the groaning family shelves when any of my kids come home to visit. When anyone’s feeling tired, discouraged, or simply at a loose end, Tintin is the prescribed remedy—a remedy of freshness, fun and escape that never fails to work.
Read MoreIt’s the classic bit of advice that just about everyone encounters at the beginning of their writing career. Write about what you know, you are told, and then your work will really speak. Write about what you know, and then you’ll avoid the land mines that litter the ground where writing angels fear to tread.
But is it true, and just what does it really mean?
As an eager scribbling kid, being told that I should ‘write about what I knew’, felt to me like one of those rules that adults invented to keep children in their place. I didn’t want to write about ‘what I knew’–about school and squabbles with brothers and sisters and trying to avoid parents’ washing-up rosters. I didn’t even want to write about flying across the world to visit our family back in Europe; didn’t want to write about family secrets. Nobody else would be interested, I figured. Heck, I was not interested myself. I wanted to write about princesses and goblins, curses and wishes, criminal masterminds and dashing young musketeers, magic wands and priceless jewels handed down through royal generations.
Read MoreCarrie asked: I’m working on a first draft of a manuscript that’s geared for middle age/young adults. What are the more efficient ways of going about editing and revising a manuscript?
This a very good question, and has as many different answers as there are authors! Indeed, it can get even more complex than that, as very often the same author might adopt different approaches to editing and revising, depending on the manuscript itself.
But here are a few tips, based on my own experience:
I love writing novels. And fantasy in particular, in its big breadth of genre, from epic to urban, magical realism to paranormal romance, sword and sorcery to vampires and werewolves, to name just a few, lends itself to the big canvas. But I love to have a holiday sometimes with the slimmer light(or dark!) fantastic, the short story. Not only can it be easier to sell—some types of fantastical narrative, like the ghost story, seem to work even better in short than long form—there are many more great short stories in that genre than there are novels(the possible reasons why would be a whole essay in itself!) But it’s not just the ghost story that can trip the short fantastic: all kinds of fantasy and supernatural genres can lend themselves very well to the short-story form, even epic fantasy, and here I’d like to pass on a few tips I’ve learned over the years.
Read MoreToday I want to present something a bit different–an appreciation of Mary Stewart, one of the authors who really fired my teenage imagination and helped to turn me into a writer. I well remember the first time I picked up a Mary Stewart book. It was a grey, rainy lunchtime in the school library and I was about 15. I’d been looking for a Rosemary Sutcliff book, but I’d read all the ones that were on the shelf. Suddenly, my eye was caught by a title along the ‘S’ row: Madam, Will You Talk?
What an intriguing title, I thought, and picked up the book. I opened it at the first page, and was immediately hooked:
The whole affair began so very quietly. When I wrote, that summer, and asked my friend Louise if she would come with me on a car trip to Provence, I had no idea that I might be issuing an invitation to danger..
I took the book out, and spent the rest of lunchtime curled up with it, and fretting through the next couple of school-hours till I could go home and get back to the story. I managed to finish the book that night and immediately re-read it the next day, bowled over not only by the exciting story with all its twists and turns but by the sophisticated, graceful elegance of the writing and the vivid, passionate characters. I had fallen in love with the handsome, brooding, suffering hero, who at first we think is a villain, and felt a sense of kinship with his bewildered teenage son. But most of all, I adored the heroine and narrator of the story, Charity Selborne, an independent, intelligent, spirited woman, young and courageous widow of an airforce ace. I longed to be like her, able to toss off witty asides, outracing the hero’s fast car on mountain roads with her own speedster, taking difficult decisions, effortlessly elegant and feminine, with a trace of melancholy and quite without arrogance.
Mary Stewart had cast her spell over me. Over the next few weeks, I read every romantic thriller of hers I could lay my hands on: This Rough Magic; The Ivy Tree; My Brother Michael; The Moon-spinners; Nine Coaches Waiting; Wildfire at Midnight; Thunder on the Right; The Gabriel Hounds; Touch Not the Cat; Airs Above the Ground.. Each of them had those delicious Stewart pleasures: the wonderful settings, lyrically rendered; the dashing, unpredictable heroes; the mystery and danger; a touch of real-world magic; limpid writing and fantastic, vivid heroines. I just couldn’t get enough of it, and her novels filled with life and sunshine many a dull day. Later, I discovered her Arthurian novels too: The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, The Wicked Day: and though I loved them too, it wasn’t quite with the same passion as the romantic thrillers. Those really, really spoke to my passionate teenage heart, craving both the excitement of love and the excitement of adventure, all in one gorgeous package.
It can be a dangerous thing, returning to the novels you loved as a young person.
Read More(Note: After returning from my six-month Paris residency, I compiled a report for the Australian Society of Authors, of which I’m a committee member, on the general authorship/publishing scene in France, which aroused a fair bit of interest. I thought WU readers might also be interested in a condensed version. The report was based on my own research and observations, and a long interview I had with Dominique Le Brun, Secretary-General of the Societe des Gens de Lettres, or SGDL, the French authors’ organisation.)
The SGDL, the authors’ organisation, has a most interesting history; founded in 1838 by such literary luminaries as Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand, (rare daguerrotypes of the first two hang in pride of place in the main reception of the Societe’s offices in the splendid old mansion, the Hotel de Massa), it was recognised as being ‘of public utility’ in 1891, and was instrumental in helping to frame French laws on copyright, fighting for authors’ rights on all fronts, as well as protecting the literary heritage of France. The SGDL also has a really good working relationship with the publishers’ association, the SNE (Syndicat National de l’Edition,)and the Ministry of Culture, and indeed is consulted on all matters relating to books and issues of importance to writers in France. One thing that was stressed to me was that the French Government is very actively committed to the maintenance and flourishing of France’s literary culture.
General book industry remarks:
The book industry is one of the top leisure industries in France, ahead of the video, music or games industries.
Fifty-four percent of French people bought at least one book this year, with 11.5 percent buying 12 or more. However young people read a lot more, with 77 percent of high school students reporting they’d read at least one non-school-enforced book in the last three months, with 36 percent reading than one, and 23 percent reading more than four.
Read MoreBack home now, having swapped an exceptionally cool European summer for a crystal-clear cold Northern New South Wales winter, I’m starting to reflect on my long and rich and amazing six months away. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is how different a travel experience is if you are already deeply immersed in the literary and/or historical traditions of the country or place you are visiting, to one where you don’t know much about either but learn about it on the job, as it were.
That’s how I can contrast my experiences not only in Paris and France which of course I know very well, having been brought up completely bilingual, not only for speaking but reading, so that I grew up with French picture-books, novels, poetry and plays every bit as much as English (and in fact missed out on some English-language childhood classics, like nursery rhymes, because I was five before i was exposed to any English-language stuff—but I grew familiar with them when I had my own children!) But also in Rome, which I felt I knew from the classics, both in books and films, and most especially in Russia, whose literature I have loved since about the age of 12.
In all those places, a thorough grounding in the literature deepened and enriched my experience immeasurably, peopling the landscape not only with the very real people and events I could see before me, but also with a host of characters I had encountered in the books set there. I could see Chekhov’s doomed families sitting at shabby tables in the long grass and frenzy of flowers of a beautiful, tender, so ephemeral Russian spring in the countryside; could spot Dostoevsky’s tormented souls slipping down that narrow alley in St Petersburg, away from the baroque magnificence of the great boulevards; imagine Tolstoy’s generals agonising over sacrificing Moscow. In the faces of people in the street, faces you saw hanging too on the walls of the Tretiakov gallery, I saw characters from a host of novels and plays and poems that I had thrilled to and loved and been puzzled by in equal measure, from Chekhov to Bulgakov, Tolstoy to Makine, Akhmatova to Dostoevsky, and many more. It’s such an atmospheric, extraordinary country, with such a terrible, wild and bloody history, and its literature portrays that, but also portrays the lighter side—the Russian sense of humour, which combines a black cynicism with a gossamer amusement and a deft play on words; the love people have for the countryside, for nature, for simple pursuits like fishing and walking and growing vegetables; the close family ties which are also constantly at breaking point, the love of conspiracy theories, the rich artistic, literary and musical sense(which is all still very much in evidence), born out of long, long winter evenings—and the fatalism. It wasn’t just ‘high’ literature of course, that I’d read—I’ve always been a sucker for anything set in Russia, spy novels, thrillers, adventure stories, comic books, everything.
Read MoreValued contributor Sophie Masson wraps up her writer’s sabbatical in France this month. Enjoy!
Summer in Paris, and it’s really hot at last, after weeks of unseasonably grey and cold weather. Our windows are open on the heavy still air but the curtains are drawn against the sun. You can hear music wafting all up and down the street, but few people are out in it, except a few lost tourists—it’s just too hot. Later, though, in the cool of the evening, after dinner, all of Paris will be out, it seems—strolling along the quays and bridges, watching the picnicking groups of young people who cluster as thick as penguin rookeries on the cobbled banks of the Seine, or the slow boats of gawking tourists click-clicking away on the bateaux-mouches that at this time of the year fill the river like buses in city traffic.
It’s become quite a ritual for us, this after-dinner walk; you always see so much, things to file away, to remember: the blingy wedding group celebrating by the river; the eccentric guy straight out of a Miyazaki animated film, with a collection of strange home-made contraptions and an incoherent political manifesto (only in France!); the homeless men looking with lurching disapproval at the busy ‘penguin rookeries’ that have invaded their usual riverside haunts; police frogmen searching the Seine for something (the imagination ran riot!); the guy in clown costume picking over the bargain bins at Shakespeare and Co; the angelic little girls trotting along in sandals and pink and white dresses with their parents—then when their backs are turned, engaging in a silent but fierce plait-pulling fight; the tall blonde in high heels and sparkly dress, tottering along on the arm of a much older and shorter man (I mean, do they know they’re walking clichés??); the Maserati driver pulling into a forbidden parking spot and being immediately nabbed by the traffic police, and a highly entertaining debate beginning; the fellow ducking down behind a parked car, finger to mouth, as a police van cruises slowly down the street.
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