Tag Archives: writing

Lymond 3: love is cryptonite

Lymond has fallen in love. It was possibly the best fictional moment ever.

Some thoughts about how the most superior, restrained, unreachable character I have ever read managed to fall in love believably. (And this is a useful thing to look at, given how often a great, tortured hero is made void by falling in love.)

I had no idea how Dunnett would have him fall in love with Philippa, given that he is superior to everyone he meets – and they always want him more than he wants them, which always gives him the upper hand.

It seemed to be a two-armed approach – though I’m sure the beast really has at least ten arms, and I’m just missing all the subtleties, as usual.

1. Philippa doesn’t give in to Lymond’s bullying, where everyone else in his life, at some point or other, does. The worst threat he can hold above her is to deny himself the friendship of she and her mother, which he can’t afford to do (as this halves the friends he has in the world, poor old Lymond). And even then she won’t be turned aside.

2. She is as inquisitive as him, quicksilver intelligent, and courageous in a human, error-filled way that he is not. So whilst the fact that she can stand up to him has some fascination, it is tempered by the way that her brain sparks his alight, and by the ways she surprises him – and most of all by the fact that she made him laugh.

Here is a brilliant moment: Dunnett has spent five books plumbing the depths of Lymond’s restraint and, particularly in the fifth book, paring away all the human sentiment in him that holds him back from greatness. And then Philippa makes him laugh, by hitting him with a costume axe.

Then, when the realisation that he’s in love strikes, he walks around in a daze all evening, not aware of what’s going on around him.

It reminds of an anecdote an old boyfriend told me: He saw a guy jump the curb on a skateboard. The skater didn’t land the jump and stood there, staring at his board, for a whole minute. By the fact that he was so put out by misjudging such a simple trick, said boyfriend knew he was a pro.

So here’s how I think Dunnett pulls off the ultimate anti-hero in love: With his great powers of intellect and restraint, he doesn’t let that knowledge affect his life, or the way he conducts his life. But he is unable to control his actions quite so well as before, and an element of unpredictability has entered the life he is used to controlling down to every last expression.

I have some thoughts about heroes and their heroine-as-kryptonite that you can read here.

method writing

I’m not a huge one for research. Mostly because I’m lazy. I justify this by thinking: “I’m a writer. I’m meant to use my imagination.”

Last night we had a family picnic down by the lake and I got to sit and watch the sun set over the water. I had forgotten how still you go inside when you watch something that beautiful.

My hero, at this very moment, is struggling with the deathly quiet of the countryside, and how it’s making him face himself, which he has spent a lifetime avoiding.

Sitting and watching that sunset last night made me really get what that’s like for my hero right now. Not just being in the quiet countryside and coming to terms with it, but experiencing for the first time the space that a huge sky can give your insides, and the way that the outside quiet seeps inside, and the transitory nature of such peace.

Imagination = good. An imagination with enough oxygen to combust = better.

Lymond 2: show don’t tell…except when you do

I mentioned in my previous post that there’s a moment in the Lymond books when you find out what’s actually been going on the whole time, and it retrospectively changes the narrative.

The wonderful thing about this moment is that whilst it’s unexpected, once the revolution of thought happens, it makes sense. Dunnett plants the “real” series of events in the narrative so that as a reader you pick up on the markers subconsciously and all the dots join, backwards, once you have the key pieces of information.

The way she does this in The Disorderly Knights (book 3) is absolutely brilliant, and a great lesson in writing.

Unfortunately, I can’t really go into this point in depth without some spoilers, so if you haven’t read it yet and think you might, don’t read on!

The Turkish corsair Dragut tells Lymond a cautionary anecdote. I don’t have the book with me and can’t quote it in full, but the message is this: If you want to know the truth of someone’s intentions, don’t listen to them – watch their hands!

This is the key to how Lymond discovers Gabriel’s true, evil intent, and also the key to how Dunnett both fools and informs the reader at the same time.

We are constantly told how magnetic Gabriel is – how he draws men to him, how glorious and humble and worthy he is. We see other men affected by him; we see them listen to and respect him.

But I suspect that, like myself, most readers are left with an odd feeling that something’s not quite right – he just doesn’t seem all that amazing.

Lymond sees his true nature where no one else does, by looking at his hands, not listening to his words. If he were truly everything he is supposed to be, says Lymond, then why isn’t he the Grand Master of the Order of St John? Why hasn’t he achieved greatness?

I think this is what confounds the reader as well, but in a subconscious way before we are shown the true nature of Gabriel. And the way Dunnett does it is by using the sacred Show Don’t Tell rule against us.

She tells us that Gabriel is glorious and she shows us that he’s not. We believe what we are told, but our senses and logic are being shown something else. There is a hollowness to just being told something, which is why writers are warned against it in the first place.

There’s a lesson in here for all writers, I think – that you can flout rules bravely and with intent, and create a series of expectations in a reader of which they aren’t even aware, until you give them the key to what they already, somewhere, know.

Lymond 1: the anti-hero and the witness

to people who are more clever than I (but see how clever I am! I even use correct grammar!) this may be obvious. To me it was not.

It is very, very difficult to write a successful anti-hero if you allow the reader inside his head.

This answers a lot of questions as to why bad-boy romance heroes are so often nauseatingly noble and misunderstood. Or rather, why the fact that they are noble and misunderstood is nauseating.

We are inside their head, we are privy to their struggle and their real motivations, and the things driving them that no-one else can see or know. Unless done with a masterful touch, being inside their head bursts the bubble of cool around them.

Dunnett’s incomparable anti-hero, Lymond, is almost always seen from the outside. We are not privy to his motivations or his plans. This distance creates the tension at the heart of the books:

His actions from the outside look villainous, cold and destructive; we see him as his world sees him. As the narrative draws to its climax the two versions of Lymond become mutually exclusive – one must give way to the other. It is then that we’re let in on the master plan that retrospectively reshapes the whole narrative, and transforms Lymond into a hero – albeit a dangerous, complex and self-destructive one.

In being kept distant from him we long for access, as the people around him long for access, and this slavish devotion to a character who won’t share himself, no matter the cost, lies at the heart of the series.

And how does she keep us out? Enter the Witness.

Each novel takes a different kind of witness: a person who falls in with him, and tries to make him out, and fails. In Queen’s Play, Lymond even becomes the witness to himself as his disguised self begins to take over his true self. In carefully choosing what these witnesses want from Lymond, and by what ideology they order the world, Dunnett is able to show Lymond in whatever deceptive light she choses.

The final element that I think makes this such an effective technique – the hero misunderstood by the witness – is that Lymond never feels compelled to defend or explain himself. He allows himself to be misunderstood because common opinion is not important to him. His actions speak for him, the man who can speak circles around any subject on earth.

Lymond

I came back this year promising Lymond and have so far delivered none…. so here goes:

An infamous man returns to sixteenth-century Scotland. Six years previous he sold secrets to the English that almost destroyed the Scottish army, and rumour hints at darker and worse.

The first thing he does on his return is to nick all his brother’s silver and set the house on fire – with the mother he hasn’t seen for six years still inside.

So begins the story of the best anti-hero I have ever read.

Lymond is charismatic and intelligent – he comes complete with obscure literary references for any and all occasions – and incredibly cold. This uncanny self-possession that encases the mind and soul of a genius is just as compelling to a reader as it is to his various followers and detractors.

It isn’t an easy to series to get into, because within the first pages you encounter that odd sensation of having to really think, just to figure out what’s going on. As Lymond and his Machiavellian schemes unroll with stunning precision, so the reading experience becomes a quest to connect the dots and apply your mind to the riddle of the subtext.

Two characters have an ordinary conversation. One reacts in an extreme way. Stop. Rewind. What the hell were they actually talking about?

This happens to me all the time, reading Lymond.

Because Dunnett is a genius for plotting and for inscrutable, irresistible characters, I’m going to follow up with a series of posts trying to figure out how the hell she does it.

1st v 2nd draft

It just occurred to me the other day that I should put some info about what I’m writing up on the blog, just so’s the stuff I go on about – strong, virginal throats, for instance – makes some sense.

I’ve created a new page, romance in progress, and posted some thoughts about writing the novel/how I started writing it etc.

I’ve also posted the blurb and first chapter for the draft I’m working on now, and the blurb and first chapter for the first draft [I’ve now removed these pages; 2/04/11]. It’s quite amazing actually, to look at them both, so some thoughts about the differences:

The major turning point in my huge rewrite/redraft (see, until this point I actually thought I was already up to draft 3!) was Susannah Taylor’s feedback. Her main critique was that whilst the story was fun, it fell too far on the side of farce – i.e. the reader’s just along for the situational humour, not to see the characters progress in an emotional way.

This is immediately obvious in the title of my first draft: The Three Loves of Miss Beatrice Sutherland. Doesn’t that just sound like a Regency romp? (Which is a great thing – the title prob. quite inspired by Quinn’s The Secret Diary of Miss Miranda Cheever. But she had emotional intensity set up from the beginning. I didn’t.) Oh, and in the fact that my hero’s hiding in a linen box, letting his lover protect him.

Which brings me to ST’s other major point: he’s a hard sell as a hero.

My new and improved Roscoe, who suffers panic attacks and is seen in chapter one totally owning the toughest, deadliest Scot that side of the 20th century, comes whole and perfect from my old Roscoe.

Everything he is, I teased out of his predecessor – from things I’d written into him that I wasn’t even conscious of at the time.

One interesting difficulty that arose out of making him more alpha, was that he was suddenly much less attractive and much more awkward in a dress. Roscoe1 was up for anything, and as long as he was being entertained and extreme, he was happy. He was so supremely confident that it wouldn’t even occur to him that he should be uncomfortable. Roscoe2, in being a Machiavel, and aware of every little nuance of every little action he takes, makes the dress a much more conspicuous piece of scenery.

Hopefully it’ll be a little bit fun for you to see a snippet of what I agonise over so much.

Enjoy!

the Non-submission

so it turns out that mine eyes/brain have deceived me, and it was actually Suzie Townsend – another agent I’ve queried in the past (who according to The Rejection Book was very personable, but not the most tactful) – who is actively seeking submissions.

I considered submitting to Susannah Taylor anyway, as I plan to do it sometime, but my own experience of premature submissions has cautioned to wait until I feel that I’ve poured absolutely everything into the redraft.

 

the Resubmission

The way I’m saying that in my head is like the sinister title of a psychological thriller…

no but seriously.

I have been doing a lot of work re-imagining/re-inventing/re-creating my novel, and the direction I took with the redraft is largely due to Susannah Taylor’s rejection letter (see here for the whole story).

I saw on a loop today that she’s actively seeking submissions, so I put the question to Valerie/fairygodmother: are my first few chapters ready for a re-query?

She said go for it.

So here go my heart and nerves again. I don’t think there’s another huge overhaul of this book in my future, so this is sort of it.

It’s scary and it’s a feeling like I’m alive and forging ahead.

the adjective chestnut

did I just use ‘adjective’ as an adjectival noun? You betcha!

Last year, as I have said before, I had good writing habits instilled in me, and things like adjectives bred out of me. I then revolted and decided to put all the passionate expression back. At least to begin with.

Today I may or may not have taken that too far.

My hero was watching my heroine and noticed her ‘strong, virginal neck’.

I do not know how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I think it does convey something of what he’s feeling in that moment, and how he feels about her. ‘Virginal’ describes her clear, upstanding integrity, as well as the covetous desire he’s starting to feel for her.

On the other hand, it’s the first hint I’ve had from my subconscious that a person’s neck could change after they have sex for the first time.

I will think on it.

hiatus ends – Lymond begins

six months into my arts degree one of my lecturers, at wits’ end how to get through to us, said: “Stop. Read the question. Now think about the question.”

It was the first – and last – time anyone challenged me to think in the whole three-and-a-half years I was at university.

Reading the Lymond Chronicles is a lot like that moment. Which makes it difficult to write about in my usual slap-dash, unconsidered way.

Thinking is hard work.

Because thinking is hard work, I am reluctant to even begin on the incredible Lymond Chronicles. But because they have somewhat hijacked my whole imaginative world, it’s probably inescapable.

I tackled my plot, trying to create a poor, anaemic shadow of Dorothy Dunnett’s complexity, and whilst it took a good hour just to sort through one problem, applying my brain…worked.

It makes me wonder where else I’m just not thinking in my life.

What an exhausting thought!

So the long and the short of it is: I’m back, and you’ll be hearing a lot about Lymond, considered or otherwise.