By The Sea, the novel I’m writing in serial form on LabLit (you can read the latest instalment here) is now much further along than I’d planned, and this is a Good Thing.
Having submitted up to what I thought was the halfway mark (that’s still three episodes away, for online readers), I took the Story So Far to read on a long plane flight. It occurred to me that I could compress the remaining material from sixteen chapters down to eight, which will heighten the pace considerably. All of a sudden I have cast off a lot of probably unnecessary exposition and am now into payoff territory, which is fun, especially now that the end is in sight. Like the First World War, it should all be over by Christmas.
Compression could, I think, have benefited the opening chapters, too: I was trying to cast the story as Contemporary Gothic, with an English flavour (as distinct from the Maine Gothic of Stephen King, and the rattling good Southern Gothic of my friend Jeff Crook, publisher of the Postcards from Hell).
To this end I set it in a crumbling old museum, overstuffed with weird, ancient and rather spooky specimens and artefacts. The young scientist protagonist who finds herself working here is meant to find the experience overwhelming, and, as we see it through her eyes, so are we. However, some readers have found it overcooked (we’ve been having a fun discussion of it here).
The trick is, I suppose, to evoke the atmosphere without overloading the story with verbiage. As famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft noted in Supernatural Horror in Literature, a critical review of the genre, horror is all about atmosphere. Now, Lovecraft was no stranger to overwrought prose (though I have avoided Lovecraftian archaisms such as ‘eldritch’ and ‘chthonic’) and one might argue that Gothic is not such if not overdone. For example, critics panned Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for just this fault, even though it was almost wholly true to the book – but I enjoyed the film precisely because it was far too long and completely over-the-top – the very essence of the genuine Gothic parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
On the other hand, it could be that I have a problem (not uncommon in trainee novelists) of starting stories rather slowly. This is definitely something that afflicts my first novel The Sigil (although some readers found that the start added to the overall effect, rather than subtracting from it).
As the characters in By The Sea find out, life in North Norfolk can be isolating. Those of us chez Gee who rather depend on the internet have lately been finding this out to our cost, as our DSL service keeps dropping out, a consequence of the fact that telephone lines in Cromer are still made of small pieces of wet bailer twine loosely knotted together. I shall have to install a second DSL service on a different line … and succumb to technology by buying a blackberry as a backup. After all, bailer twine in these parts does treble service – it twines bales all right, and can also do for a belt. And braces.