One has to wonder why these people didn’t simply write a fictional book in the first place - surely making stuff up is better than lying…

Earlier this year, a Belgian woman revealed she had invented her tale of survival as a Jewish girl searching for her parents with a pack of wolves in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Monique De Wael, who adopted the pseudonym Misha Defonseca, admitted she was not Jewish and had lived in Belgium.

And a memoir by a white woman that claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a Los Angeles gang was also exposed as a lie after her sister contacted the publisher.

Margaret B Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, actually grew up in a well-off area of California’s San Fernando Valley.

Meanwhile James Frey, another author championed by Oprah Winfrey, admitted he “embellished” his bestselling memoir about his battle with drug addiction, published in 2003.

You can read the full story here: Holocaust ‘Love Story’ Was Fake

Matt

…blog more often!

Here’s one:

Thanks to Mark Gibbons for pointing me to this news item:

Robert Downey Jr ‘to play Holmes’

Anyone whose reaction to this news is ‘oh, wow, that’s going to be great!’ might prefer to stop reading now. Actually, no, what am I saying? It’s exactly those people who should continue reading…

Apparently the Ritchie version is going be ‘less stuffy’ than previous versions, which no doubt means Sherlock Holmes will be an irritating cockney twat. Why on Earth you would even try to make Sherlock Holmes less stuffy is beyond me; the character just ceases to be Sherlock Holmes if you do that. The whole point is that he’s completely relentless, single-minded and consumed by the need to solve the mystery. The success that brings him as a detective is mirrored by his loneliness and isolation (yes, there’s Watson, but in the original stories, Watson is only a temporary lodger, who marries and moves out before too long, leaving Holmes as something of a recluse who Watson does his best to drop in on from time to time). Is this new Holmes going to be a playboy with a string of super-model girlfriends to his name, as well? Bollocks.

I suppose the argument for making him less stuffy is that the modern audience can’t empathise with him, but that’s nonsense – whether or not an audience can empathise with any character is down to the skill of the depiction.

There’s just enough humanness in Holmes to show that he is capable of feeling the loneliness that his obsession brings him - there’s a moment in one of the stories where he thinks Watson has been shot and he explodes with rage; there’s the sort of weird mixed, emotion he displays at Irene Adler, the woman who manages to actually deceive and outwit him; and there’s one or two victims for whom Holmes shows moments of genuine sympathy or fondness - but that’s it; it’s just enough to show that he’s human, and that he obviously is capable of feeling something, which hints at the possibility of loneliness without making him an unfortunate character. If you fiddle with that - either by taking away his feelings completely, or, as Ritchie seems likely to do, making him more human - then he just ends up tediously perfect where he’s supposed to be a flawed genius. He’s a cocaine addict for crying out loud - are they going to glamourise that and make it part of his bad-boy cool?

Why people insist on meddling with characters like this, I don’t know. There’s always the trite argument about ‘doing something new’, but that’s plainly just bollocks - it’s not new, it’s just inferior to the original, and completely misses the point. Do something new by all means, but doing a shit version of Sherlock Holmes certainly doesn’t qualify - they’ve been doing that for years.

The same is true of a great many well-known, archetypal characters – Tarzan, for instance – something about these characters, perhaps the lack of ownership an adapting director or writer feels over the character, seems to fill them with the desire to tinker to no good end.

It astonishes me how awful, by and large, any attempts to film characters like these have been. They’re not hard stories to adapt - in the case of Sherlock Holmes, they’re recounted in exactly the manner mysteries are depicted on screen, and they’re heavy on dialogue; you could virtually film them off the page, but for reasons I can’t understand, successive writers, directors and producers insist on making life hard for themselves by trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place.

There are some reasonably good adaptations of Sherlock Holmes of course, but even those are often spoilt by completely needless (and frankly nonsensical) tinkering, like placing them in a contemporary period or relocating them to the USA while leaving Holmes as an Englishman. Basil Rathbone always seemed to me to have a good version of the character, for instance, but the stories are somewhat wayward and oddly chosen, to say the least - Nazis in a lot of them, I see to recall.

The thing that makes me laugh is that, what with this tendency to tinker with characters like Sherlock Holmes, those involved would actually stand more chance of seeming like they were doing something ‘new’ if they just did it straight up. It’s sort of gone full circle in that regard. If you did a straight adaptation of one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, complete with all the details and nuances that have dropped out of the less subtle archetype we’ve got now, then people would probably be astonished. I bet a lot of them would have a hard time believing half that stuff was in the stories in the first place.

So, to give this some broader relevance, I’ll sum up by saying if you’re aim is to do something new, don’t confuse it with the aim of trying to restore an old favourite to prominence. Both are laudable aims, but not to be combined. Restoring the fame of a once-loved character is a question of reminding people what was there to love in the first place, not replacing it with something you’ve decided they’ve come to love instead in the meantime. Whatever it was that made the character popular or worthy of attention in the first place will, by simple fact of its long absence, seem new in itself; nothing else is needed.

Incidentally, I’m led to believe that the three most filmed characters are, in order, Holmes, Dracula and Tarzan. Oddly, they all seem to suffer from the same curse in adaptation - perhaps that’s why studios continue to adapt them so frequently. All of them are characters which, given how ubiquitous they are, you’d think there would have been a definitive, comprehensive treatment of years ago, but there really just hasn’t been. Guy Ritchie won’t be the one to manage it for Sherlock Holmes; I would wager much on that.

Matt

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You can’t go wrong with a word with three wyes in it (syzygy – see? Great). You can, however, go wrong with using synonyms, so here’s my advice.

A synonym is, as you doubtless already know, a word with a similar meaning to another word. Two such words are synonyms of each other. Almost every word in English has a whole raft of synonyms. To take one example at random, we find the following synonyms for red: bloodshot, bloody, blush, blushing, brick, burgundy, cardinal, carmine, cerise, cherry, claret, color, commie, coral, crimson, erubescence, fiery, glowing, inflamed, magenta, maroon, pink, reddishness, roseate, rosy, rouge, rubescence, rubicundity, rubious, ruby, ruddy, rufosity, rust, scarlet, solferino, titian, vermilion.

I’ve just culled that list from thesaurus.com to serve as an example. A thesaurus is, of course, the ultimate source of synonyms, and many people (myself included) will from time to time refer to a thesaurus whilst writing in order to find a suitable synonym. However, knowing exactly when, why and how to use synonyms (and, indeed, the thesaurus itself) to best effect can be difficult. My advice in short is this:

• Don’t use a synonym just because it’s a more complicated or longer word.
• Don’t use synonyms for variation (or to avoid repetition).
• Use a synonym when you wish to be more specific.

I’ll go through these prescriptions and proscriptions in some more detail.

Don’t use a synonym just because it’s a more complicated or longer word
This is an easy one - being more complicated than you need to be can confuse or perturb your reader; simple as that. It’s not big, it’s not particularly clever (top marks for a big vocabulary, but looking it up in a thesaurus is nothing special, and anyway, clever is knowing how to use it). Long, complex words have their place, as we shall see shortly, but they offer nothing when used simply because they are long and complex.

Don’t use synonyms for variation (or to avoid repetition)
Synonyms are often used to provide variation, and that in turn is often to avoid repetition. As sensible and obvious as this use may seem, I think it’s a mistake. If you find yourself with repetition in your writing, rather than reaching for the thesaurus and using a synonym to disguise it, the first thing you should do is ask why has the repetition arisen. Is it simply because you’re using a very simple word - black, red, tree, water - which necessarily occurs often? If so, repetition may not be a problem at all; such simple, common words have a tendency to fade from view when read as part of a larger piece, and so multiple uses of the same word may not be a problem at all (this is somewhat akin to the principle of Said Bookism).

Repetition may also occur because of a poorly structured sentence or paragraph, or problems with the narrative. Is the repetition occurring simply because you are saying the same thing more than you need to? In this case, all that use of synonyms will do is conceal the basic fault in the writing. Don’t do it; much better to address the structural problem than simply plastering over the cracks. If the same word occurs in two nearby sentences, can you actually combine those sentences into and reduce duplication and redundancy? Is the repetition there because you’ve made everything look and feel the same? Don’t use synonyms to hide this, expand your ideas, try to bring greater variation to the descriptions you’re writing (and I mean genuine variation, not simply saying the same thing two different ways).

There are also questions of style. Are you using the repetition to stress a point? In this case, sometimes use of synonyms is helpful (you’re not concealing your repetition, you’re actually strengthening it) but you should also consider using adjectives, adverbs or intensifiers to create the same stress. If you are using synonyms for stress, be careful that the actual, precise meanings of those words you use are compatible without simply being identical. This is akin to the next point…

Use a synonym when you wish to be more specific
This absolutely has to be the main reason for using a synonym. Sometimes using the word red is fine, but if you want to insinuate the bloody tone of the colour in question, maybe crimson is better. The trick here is to be absolutely clear of your own meaning. I often find myself with a vague idea of what I’m trying to say, but with the feeling that there’s probably a word with a more accurate, more precise meaning out there to be found. In such cases, I tend to mark the word I’m unhappy with in square brackets and come back to it later. So I might simply write [dark], knowing it’s not really quite the right word, and after some consideration and consulting a thesaurus (and then a dictionary to check the exact meaning of the words in question) I’ll change it to tenebrous.

The point here is that you only change to a synonym when the word you have doesn’t quite suit your meaning - if you mean dark, write dark, leave it as it is; but if you find yourself feeling dark doesn’t quite capture the feeling you have in mind, then go looking for a synonym by all means - just be sure to find the right one. I can’t stress this enough: when choosing a synonym make sure the meaning is accurate and represents what you’re trying to convey; don’t choose it just because it’s a longer, more obscure or more complicated word. Use a dictionary to check the precise meaning of all the synonyms you’re considering - remember, synonyms have similar meanings, but they’re not identical. It’s too easy to overlook the subtle change in meaning brought about by use of a synonym. Be wary of this, it leads to imprecise writing, and it won’t do anything to persuade your reader that what they are reading is the work of someone with a clear meaning in mind. Clever use of synonyms allows you to be both more descriptive and more specific; be sure that in using them you are achieving exactly that.

I’ve just finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Like many of you reading this, I thought I was familiar with the story - I remember reading the book when I was at school, and in any case so much of the book has entered the common, collective memory that it’s virtually impossible not to have heard of Lilliput, its diminutive inhabitants or the Little Ender and Big Ender factions they divide themselves into.

In truth, however, the book presented a great deal I was completely unfamiliar with. In hindsight, I think I must previously have read only the first two parts (where Gulliver encounters the tiny Lilliputians, and then the giant Brobdingnagians) and it was approached very much as a children’s book. In actual fact, the book contains four parts, and I thought that the third of those - Gulliver’s voyage to a floating island populated by a bizarre astronomer-elite - was far and away the best part. Whether you think you’re familiar with Gulliver’s Travels or not, if you haven’t read it within the last few years - and if you can’t, for example, recall the difference between a Struldbrug and a Laputan - read it. It almost certainly contains more than you remember.

Of particular interest to me on this reading, though, was its narrative style. Three points stand out in particular:

• It has no real plot as such.
• It has almost no dialogue, perhaps two or three lines in the entire book.
• The narrator (Gulliver) ‘tells’ us everything, while the author ’shows’ almost nothing.

Strictly speaking, Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, and as such could be considered as distinct from a novel, but either way the point stands - it doesn’t have a conventional narrative, and doesn’t adhere to the form of what we’d call a novel in the modern sense. And yet, it’s one of the best-known written works there is. When I type ‘Lilliputian’, the spellchecker doesn’t underline it as an error, because the word has entered the dictionary (worryingly, it does however underline the word spellchecker). The word Yahoo is also taken from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is so well known that many more people are familiar with it than have actually read the book (doubtless in part thanks to the various adaptations for film and television over the years, as well as various derivative works, but also due simply to the extent to which the book has permeated the cultural fabric). An unconventional format, then, is certainly no barrier to success, or to popularity.

Furthermore, Gulliver’s Travels actually serves as an example when this kind of disregard for supposed ‘rules’ of good writing - such as ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ - is highly desirable. Everything about the story’s characters, setting and events is told to us in an incredibly plain fashion. Indeed the contents pages contain short summaries, repeated at the head of each chapter, which invariably spell out events before we even read about them. There’s certainly no attempt to construct an unfolding plot. The narrator’s stated mission in most cases is simply to describe to us factually the places and peoples he has met. All this is ‘telling’ of the very most blatant kind, but what it does it ’show’ us something else - something about ourselves, something about the folly of our ways, the preposterousness of our pretend logic, the dubiousness of many of our long-standing arguments, the inaccuracy of our assumptions, the misguidedness of our prejudices, the irrationality of our beliefs and the failings of our institutions.

It seems to me that the theory of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is prevaricated upon the notion that the only thing a book is trying to ’show’ us is the story. That’s just not the case. Books can show us a lot more than that, and if they tell us something along, there’s certainly no crime in that.

Matt

An amusing observation on what it would be like if there was no punctuation…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ0mb8ihFks&hl=en]

Matt

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog. This blog is predominantly intended as an archive of my various book reviews, articles and other writing, though will also allow for occasional blog posts, should I feel so inclined. More information can be found on the About page.

This is my first post, though I’ll try to update reasonably frequently with new reviews, articles or blog posts. To begin with, you’ll find a review of Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel in the Review section and an opinion piece on H.P. Lovecraft and the so-called Cthulhu Mythos in the Articles section. More will follow soon, but for now I hope you enjoy these paltry offerings and please feel free to leave a comment.

Matt