Envy

First:

I’ve been thinking about my moustachelessness and my notable failures in the matter of pipe-smoking. I have resolved to do better.

I shall grow a monstrous, ‘Come on now chaps’, airman’s moustache and I shall be seen at all times to be smoking a briar pipe, even in bed.

Please forgive my earlier failures.

And –

Envy.

I’m sure we all of us sometimes read other people’s books with a kind of envy. You did that. You brought that off. You imagined that. Your sentences always sound like that.

With any really terrific text, it feels like the author wrote without effort. We know that not to be true, of course, but the feeling remains.

You’ll have your list of authors. I’ll have mine. But, enjoy them though we do, there’s also that pinprick of envy. You genius, damn you.

And –

Well, I suppose the conventional advice is that we should learn from those genii, even the pallid, feeble ones who HAVE NO MOUSTACHE. (Glowers over spectacles at Austen, Brontë, Wharton, Woolf, et al.)

And yes, so we should. In my crime writing, I’ve found Chandler and Gillian Flynn to be especially inspirational when it comes to prose style. Who says you can’t aspire to really strong, original prose, if you’re a mere crime writer? Flynn and Chandler say otherwise.

Patricia Highsmith inspires for her willingness to jump waist-deep into psychological complexity.

Stieg Larsson has an audacious scale of vision.

And Sherlock Holmes – well, he’s Holmes, right? The one, the only. That whole world of foggy streets and hansom carriages and people scattering clues with the exact colour of mud on their trousers – pure, enviable heaven.

Knowing that these things are possible makes us (I think) reach for them too. We stretch further, because they’re there.

But –

We don’t get there. I don’t write as well as either Flynn or Chandler, (though dammit, dammit, dammit – I’d like to.) My world’s not as richly knitted together as Holmes’s. There are any number of writers who do more than I can and more than I will.

But only part of the issue here is ability.

I think it also comes down to authenticity.

With every sentence we write, we have to make a choice: say it this way, or say it that way? Or say it some other way altogether?

In the end, I’m always going to choose sentences that come out of me, not ones that are simply Flynn-Chandler-Conan-Doyle pastiches.

That limits us in one way. (Flynn will always write better than me.) But it also releases the personality that readers want from a writer. If Gillian Flynn were to read some of my books, might she not think, ‘Dammit, Harry does X, Y and Z things that I don’t really do in my books. I wish I could get some of that magic juice and put it in mine.’?

Chandler’s writing is sensational – but his character lacks any complex, reflective interiority.

Highsmith’s psychology is uncompromising – but her books can get boggy and slow.

Conan Doyle is Conan Doyle – he’s the king – but no one ever said that his books were masterpieces of either prose or psychology.

So –

Envy. Yes, envy others.

And steal. Whatever you can, whenever you can. Just make it yours.

And in the end: your books will be good in your ways; their books can be good in theirs.

Twirl your moustache. Add some golden Virginian tobacco to your rosewood pipe. And write your way, without apology.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY /

We are relaunching our much-beloved The Ultimate Start course. So, for the next few weeks, we’ll focus again on the assignments there. First up:

Look at your opening 500 words and post in the forum. Ask if your peers can guess your genre from this opening. Post to the forum, then read and comment on the thoughts of at least two of your fellow writers.

Because this email has had an envy & moustache theme, please feel free to add a comment on (a) which author most directly inspired the book you’re now writing and (b) which great author would look best with which sort of moustache. Me, I’d want to see Jane Austen with bushy Hungarian whiskers. Upload your work here.

Til soon.

Harry