All Posts by Bill

Welcome to the new site and the first of its blogs. The reason why it was needed is too tedious to relate and involves those bizarre creatures who get some incomprehensible pleasure from slipping malware into sites and making life difficult and unpleasant for people they don’t even know. But the blog’s not about them. It’s mainly to introduce the site, ask for feedback about what works and what doesn’t, especially from those looking at or listening to the various pages on different phones, tablets, PCs, then ask questions relating to a specific writing ‘problem’ I’m facing.

The main elements of the old site (which have been stripped of the bubonic plague, typhoid and whatever else the hackers injected into them) are still here, the layout is different, and there’s a new page of what I’ve called podcasts. In fact, at the moment they’re all recordings of me reading short extracts from my novels. Gradually, I’ll be adding short stories to them.

But now, this is really where I need your help, especially if you’re a reader or writer of Romantic fiction. The WIP I’ve been living with for ages now is over 70,000 words long and just about to speed into various climaxes. In the past couple of chapters, things have been coming together nicely:

• three of its characters have helped me to devise a much better solution to the crime than the one I’d been planning,
• my heroine has faced the challenge she set herself,
• and opening night for the theatre troupe in one of the story’s main threads is just two days away.

So, with the end in sight, I know all the mechanics of how the various ‘clues’ I’ve spread around about the book’s crime will be brought together to reveal who or what dunnit and why they/he/she/it dunnit. But then I have the final scene to write and that’s where you come in.

In simple terms, the two genres – crime and romance – have clearly different agendas.

In the abstract, their narrative arcs aren’t dissimilar and they share many ingredients (motives, misunderstandings, misinterpretations of actions, obstacles, resolutions). But the detective, carrying the memory of a dismembered corpse and the indelible image of a domestic crime scene might find it hard to share the attitude to life of a couple who have just overcome forces which threatened to keep them apart but whose love has survived to bring them to the edge of a happy future. I know that’s a crude juxtaposition of extremes and it’s definitely not intended to be a qualitative evaluation or comparison of the two genres as literature. But it does help me to put my particular dilemma in context.

I know (or, rather, hope) that the resolution of the crime will satisfy my readers but in my books, I usually add a coda to remind them that it was nasty and that others are being perpetrated elsewhere, so ‘happy ever after’ isn’t an option. But that won’t be the end of this book. The final scene will be between the two lovers.

Their ‘love’ began in The Figurehead and crept up on them (and me) as the book progressed. So much so that one reviewer on Amazon ended her review thus:
“I care about [the characters] and want to know what happened to Jamie the émigré, the falls or fortunes of Anderson the successful Capitalist and, above all, the development of the tantalising relationship between John and Helen. This novel is screaming for a sequel! I hope Bill Kirton will deliver!” (You know who you are, C, Munro.)

And others have said the same thing. So ‘something’ has to happen between John and Helen which satisfies the readers’ curiosity. But what? The year is 1841. Marriage between a rich merchant’s daughter and a tradesman wasn’t unheard of but nor was it easy to negotiate. Moreover, this is a strong-willed young woman who’s just beginning to play a role in her father’s business, and marriage means that she and all she has becomes the property of her husband. They love each other but they’re aware of these things. They’re also aware of the dangers of childbirth, and intelligent enough, too, to know that the rosy glow of love may not be eternal.

My original idea was to steal the ending of the 17^th century novel (one of the first ever novels), La Princesse de Clèves, which, very crudely, goes:

• For social reasons, Princess marries an older, boring man.
• Then falls in love with the Duc de Nemours. (It’s mutual.)
• But she’s honourable and rejects his advances.
• Husband on his deathbed says he knows she really loves Nemours and that’s caused him suffering.
• He dies. Hooray! No obstacles to their love now.
• Nemours presses his case.
• But she feels guilty and says ‘Anyway, our love might die, you might fall for other women, it’s best to preserve it as it is and not spoil it’.
• And she goes into a convent.
• And his love does fade away.

But how satisfying would that be for Ms Munro and the others? I suspect they want the wandering into the sunset scenario or a reasonable approximation of it.

So there you have my dilemma. Can I really suspend disbelief to that extent? Or should they go their separate unfulfilled ways? The only way out seems to be that, the moment they swear their undying love for one another and feel confident that they’ll always be together and love one another with the same intensity, the sun explodes.

But I can’t do that because it was in 1841 and the sun’s still here.

I’m not sure how it works, but it’s happened again.

I’ll explain. It’s embarrassing to admit that my WIP has been IP for ages. It used to take me about 6 months to write the first draft of a novel, but this one’s been crawling forward on and off for 2 years, maybe longer. It’s over the 70,000 word mark but grinding through that particular point has been difficult, and I’ve no idea why.

It’s a sequel to The Figurehead, which is a historical crime novel that also became a romance. Part of the reason why I’ve been dragging my heels is that I’m still not sure how

I’m going to resolve the problems of the relationship between a figurehead carver, John Grant, and Helen Anderson, the daughter of a rich merchant. The novel’s set in 1841, when attitudes to marriage and extra-marital goings-on didn’t leave much scope for … well, anything really.

But the thing that’s ‘happened again’ has, as usual, come out of the blue. As well as the relationship and the obligatory crime, the story’s built around two separate threads: the arrival in Aberdeen of a theatre group which will be performing melodramas at the Theatre Royal; and the determination of Helen, an only child, to become involved in the family business. Without going into any details (which may change drastically through the various drafts anyway), I’ve found that the two threads – coincidentally, because I certainly hadn’t planned it – were reaching a crucial stage at about the same time. I was quite pleased about that, but it was more than just a passive contentment.

The coincidence had me looking at them in a different way, not as the writer but as a sort of analyst of how the various elements were working, what their ‘significance’ was. In a way, I was thinking like a potential critic or reviewer. I don’t mean that I did it consciously; it’s just now, writing this, that I realise that’s the best way to sum up the experience. I wasn’t looking at the situation and wondering where to take each thread next; instead I was aware of what turned out to be pretty obvious parallels between them. On their own, which is how it seemed, these two separate elements had started feeding off one another and were moving closer together.

It’s not magical, there’s no alchemy going on, of course. The two threads are part of my imaginings, belong in the same mental space, they’re bound to inform and affect one another, but that’s at a subconscious level. The effect it had at the conscious level was to help me to understand them better and see how I could use the parallels. As I said at the start, it’s happened before and, like other experiences such as ‘being in the zone’ which I’ve also blogged about, it makes writing very exciting at times.

There’s a secondary motive, however, for choosing this subject for a blog. Apart from introducing me to woodcarving, which I took up as part of my research, The Figurehead allowed me to indulge in a dream I’d always had – to sail in a square-rigger. For just a few days I was a paying member of the crew of the Christian Radich on a voyage from Oslo to Leith. She’s the ship which featured in the old BBC series, The Onedin Line. If you go right to the start of this Youtube clip, you’ll see just how beautiful she is.

Anyway, as well as the self-indulgence of taking turns at the wheel of such a vessel, it gave me the material for a long short story, Death Ship. I tried to make this permanently free on Amazon but it can’t be done. So, if you’d like to know what it was like on the North Sea in a fresh South-Easter (with added murders), it’ll either cost you 99 cents or you can get it free by emailing me.