{"id":6133,"date":"2020-03-27T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/in-palaces-treason\/"},"modified":"2020-03-27T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T12:00:00","slug":"in-palaces-treason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/in-palaces-treason\/","title":{"rendered":"In palaces, treason"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Strange times, old buddies, strange times.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s sort of nice to be at home with the children. We live on the edge of a village with tons of green space in every direction, so we don\u2019t have any of that cooped-up \/ stir-crazy feeling that so many people must be having now. And the infection rate in our part of the world is low. Plus people round here are being very damn sensible with their precautions.<\/p>\n<p>So in many ways we\u2019re fine. And in other ways? Well, the news has become kind of odd, hasn\u2019t it? And the impact of covid on the business side of Jericho Writers is like its own little whirlwind of destruction. Not nice. We\u2019re doing emergency rescue work where we can. We\u2019ll grab some loans if we need to. We\u2019ll survive.<\/p>\n<p>(And oh, if you fancy a manuscript assessment or the like, now would be a very good time to seek it! Do look in the PSes to see if anything there takes your fancy. We\u2019d be much obliged.)<\/p>\n<p>But in all of this, one thing that has struck me very forcefully is the metaphorical power of huge global forces.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, I mentioned that King Lear was written (probably) while Shakespeare was in quarantine. Theatre-goers would have encountered the same kind of year that he\u2019d had. And they\u2019d be hearing the echoes loud and clear \u2013 a sense of end-times, things being split asunder:<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left:20px;\"><em>\u2026 Love cools,<br \/>friendship falls off, brothers divide: in<br \/>cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in<br \/>palaces, treason \u2026<br \/>\u00a0We have seen the best of our time:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But you don\u2019t have to be Shakespeare or be writing poetry to grab the same kind of effect from the world outside. Some of the most obvious examples of the technique from 20th century literature would include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Great Gatsby<\/em>. Prohibition is just central to that book. It\u2019s the flipside of all the prosperity and flash of the Roaring Twenties, the vicious little secret behind it all. You couldn\u2019t have Gatsby without Prohibition. The actual historical facts of the era effectively deliver the moral, metaphorical tapestry of the book itself.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Spy Who Came In From the Cold<\/em>. Le Carre\u2019s spy fiction is all about love, trust and betrayal. Those are his themes and how better to play those out on a massive canvas, than adopt the entire Cold War espionage struggle as his emblem? If he had taken the exact same story \u2013 who loved who; who betrayed who \u2013 and played that in a totally different setting (boy\u2019s boarding school, Kansas dairy farms), the story would never have felt as urgent, as necessary, as colossal.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Plague (La Peste)<\/em>. Camus\u2019s 1947 novel tells of an epidemic sweeping the French-Algerian town of Oran. There was some historical underpinning for the book \u2013 Oran did indeed have a history of plague \u2013 but no reader in 1947 could read that book without thinking of Nazism and the great darkness that had come over Europe. Without that instant and obvious metaphorical connection, the book would have been half what it was.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And what is all this to us?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it\u2019s just a way of suggesting we look up and out for metaphor, not just down and small. It\u2019s not something you can force into a book. It\u2019s just something that, if offered by your story and its setting, you should grab with both hands.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, you\u2019ll just walk straight into the centre of the Big Thing. So Hilary Mantel took a story of power and ambition and set it in the heart of the Tudor court. Everyone knows that Tudors are box office. Result: a trilogy of global bestsellers that far exceeded any of Mantel\u2019s previous work in sales. It wasn\u2019t that her writing had got better. It\u2019s that her canvas had got bigger, the scale of everything was greater.<\/p>\n<p>Equally, you could walk straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis or the American Civil War or the Battle of Britain. Any story set in the heart of those things would effectively matter right away, because you\u2019re just grabbing history as your story.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re writing SFF, the same thing, except you\u2019re making up your Big Thing. One Ring To Rule Them All plus Mordor plus all that went along with those things \u2013 result: the seminal work of epic fantasy. It wasn\u2019t the writing; it was the scale. It was the ambition. Same thing with <em>His Dark Materials<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>But you don\u2019t have to walk into the heart of things to get the same effect. Suppose your story was a kind of Godfather-style mafia tale set in New Jersey or New York. If you got your story to play out, at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis was playing out, you\u2019d get instant depth, instant authority, instant echo from doing just that. It\u2019s like the \u2018great times, great decisions\u2019 feeling about the actual historical facts would bleed downwards into the pages of your novel. You wouldn\u2019t need to do much more than dripfeed the historical drama into the pages of your fictional one. The reader\u2019s own brain will do most of the rest.<\/p>\n<p>And \u2013 well, we\u2019re living in strange and overwhelming times at the moment. For what it\u2019s worth, this covid epidemic doesn\u2019t speak to the writer in me. I don\u2019t get itchy fingers when I think about it. (Whereas \u2013 godfather-type story plus Cuban missile crisis? Yes, I could start writing that one tomorrow.)<\/p>\n<p>And you? Maybe your Great Theme is covid. Or the Cold War. Or something completely else. And of course loads of great books are written without some great backdrop of that kind. But as a technique to use, when the circumstances are right? It\u2019s a no-brainer. You get instant depth and gravity. You get sales.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s just about it from me. Do take a look in our PSes. But also do remember that we have a free membership offer for y\u2019all too. We\u2019ve had way over a thousand people take the offer up already and have had amazingly positive feedback too. We\u2019ll be ending the offer soon, so grab it now:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/members.jerichowriters.com\/bazaar\/full-membership-14-day\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"bx-link\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Access My Free 14-day Membership Here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s it from me.<\/p>\n<p>Stay safe. Stay happy. Stay writing.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>And what do you think? Reckon that <\/em><\/strong><strong>King Lear <\/strong><strong><em>is overheated codswallop? Are you already at work on the Ultimate Covid Masterpiece? Are you safe and well? Or going stir crazy? Or, heck, do you have a great internet meme to share. Put your glad rags on, mosey down to the comments, and let&#8217;s all have a Heated Debate.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Strange times, old buddies, strange times. It\u2019s sort of nice to be at home with the children. We live on the edge of a village with tons of green space in every direction, so we don\u2019t have any of that cooped-up \/ stir-crazy feeling that so many people must be having now. And the infection<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Jericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/in-palaces-treason\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In palaces, treason &#8211; Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Strange times, old buddies, strange times. 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I've published trad &amp; self-pub. Love both. Best known for my Fiona Griffiths crime series. Oh yes, and I'm the capo di tutti capi at Jericho Writers.","url":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/author\/harryjericho\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}