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My cop-out blogs are getting more and more blatant. This one, in fact, is lifted straight from my old blog and dates from June 2009. But I have a good excuse. This weekend (Saturday 26 and Sunday 27), the Kindle version of my novel The Darkness is free in the USA here  and the UK here   and I remembered writing specifically about its genesis and about how a significant part of my reason for writing novels seems to be revenge. This is what I wrote back then.

Recently I was one of several writers pitching their new books to some readers in a lovely wee independent shop in Glasgow called Lost in Fiction (sadly long-since defunct). Anyway, my three-minute pitch went like this:

The question we’re always asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ In the case of The Darkness, it’s central to how I wrote the first version and how it developed into this one. Many years ago, I was having dinner with my wife and friends at a restaurant just outside Aberdeen. The waiter serving us had a West Country accent – English West Country. I said to him ‘You’re a long way from home’. He said ‘Yes, I needed to get as far away as possible’. I asked why and he told me his wife and two young daughters had been killed by a drunk driver. He’d been caught, sentenced to eighteen months, but got twelve months off for good behaviour. As the waiter said, ‘That’s two months for each life’.

I felt so sorry for him, and the story stayed with me. I wanted revenge on his behalf.

The first version of The Darkness was exactly that. My agent sent it to Piatkus. They liked it but didn’t want a stand alone thriller at that time but said they’d be interested if I had any police procedurals. So I wrote one. They bought it. And I wrote some more.

I started thinking about making The Darkness part of the series, but it was crude. It was me, red in tooth and claw. My own vigilante tendencies bother me. When it comes to capital punishment, imprisonment and so on I’m a liberal, I’ve corresponded with a prisoner on Death Row, and yet I know for a fact that if I could get my hands on some of these paedophiles and so on, I’d do very nasty things to them. And I’d do it knowing it was wrong, but I’d still do it.

So, in the end, I wrote and rewrote The Darkness over and over again, exploring the balance between the law and justice, revenge and compassion. The motives and the personnel changed. It’s now the third Jack Carston novel and it’s taught me so much about my characters and the whole business of crime and punishment that, before I send off the next two, which are already written, I want to change them. Then, there’ll be just one more. I already know its plot and structure and it’ll have an even darker ending than this one.

Given what I’m claiming for the book, it was nice to read in one of the reviews that ‘When you read The Darkness be prepared to be manipulated and have your moral compass reset’. And the same review ended by saying ‘get yourself a copy of The Darkness and ask yourself this; what would you do?’

OK, that was my spiel – and I meant it, and it was true. But yesterday, reading an article about books being made into movies, I suddenly remembered reading First Blood, which is the first of the Rambo stories. I haven’t seen the movies and have no desire to, but that was a well-constructed thriller and a good escapist read. At the end, though, I felt frustrated and cheated by a choice the protagonist made. It was about revenge. But his ‘failure’ to exact the full revenge, while morally ‘correct’, was out of character in the context of the story. This isn’t a criticism of the writing, it’s just my take on the morality involved. I won’t reveal the specific incident to which I’m referring because some people may not have read it so I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for them.

The point, though, is that it made me want to write a novel in which the revenge impulse was allowed its full scope. I imagine that many if not most people experience the visceral eye-for-an-eye urge and it doesn’t do to pretend that it’s not there. I’m not proposing a free-for-all, but it’s honest to acknowledge that it’s a factor, even in the most liberally-informed debates.

All of which is a pitch for you to go and pick up your free copy of The Darkness this Saturday or Sunday.

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This is yet another cop-out blog, and it’s been prompted by three things. First, a FaceBook friend tagged me to post 7 lines, starting at the 7^th line of the 7^th page of my Work In Progress. I actually have three WIPs at the moment, except that the IP bit has been somewhat stalled for a while, so I chose the as yet untitled sequel to The Sparrow Conundrum. (The other 2 are a sequel to The Figurehead and what will be the last in the Carston series.) The second reason is that the character it features was born because of my curiosity about the frequent photos, again on FaceBook, featuring men with unfeasibly well arranged ridges and bumps beneath their sterna (the plural which I prefer to the equally correct sternums because it’s more pretentious). Since the main purpose of Sparrow (and its sequel) is (will be) to be funny, such a character seemed to offer clear possibilities for merriment. Finally, this may (NB MAY) serve to make me get back to writing the thing or risking being proved the fraud I secretly know I am. So there you have my reasons, and here you have the relevant introduction to the character of the Highlander Hamish Dirk.

 

Hamish Dirk pushed the fingers of his left hand through his thick auburn hair and leaned back against the cartwheel, his right thumb hooked into the open sporran that hung over his groin. His kilt was the red of Royal Stuart and his shirt hung open to display the traditional sculpted six-pack. His previous outfit had been a pair of Beck & Hersey Red Label jeans and they’d been slung low enough for the female behind the camera to feel a certain dampness as she clicked away. Moving to his more familiar incarnation as a Highlander did little to lessen the effect he was having on her professionalism.

Hamish Dirk wasn’t his real name, of course. His father, a stand-up comedian, had laboured unsuccessfully for years in the clubs until he decided to change his name by Deed Poll from Brendan Dilly to Brian Pharte. Almost immediately, his career took off and when his firstborn proved to be a son, he decided, generously, that he should anoint him with the same success right from the outset. Thus, the puckered, squealing, red-faced  new-born was dubbed Brian Pharte Junior. It was a name which, naturally enough, made his schooldays a continuous nightmare, one further deepened by the fact that another of his dad’s legacies was an IQ which barely crept out of single figures. His academic efforts gave his put-upon teachers plenty of scope to depart from the usual ‘Satisfactory’ or ‘Could do better’ clichés and deploy their inner Wildean  selves. His biology teacher wrote ‘We can only hope that no one breeds from Brian’; his English colleague remarked that ‘Intellectually, Brian would be out of his depth in a saucer’; and the careers master regretted the demographic shift from rural to urban communities because it meant there were fewer villages seeking idiots.

Then, one Saturday, the young Brian Pharte Junior made a decision that would equip him to overcome these congenital handicaps and carve out his own brand of success. He was 16 and he’d asked 14 year old Sally McKendrick to be his prom date. He knew that the likelihood of her saying yes was slim but he wasn’t really prepared when what she actually said was ‘You must be joking. Fuck off’. It hurt and in the quagmire of his brain a sequence of slow thoughts formed and led him to determine to do something to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

So he took up weight training.

Now, eight years and thousands of press-ups, biceps curls, squat thrusts and bench presses later, Brian Pharte Junior was six feet two inches tall, weighed a sleek, shining 200 pounds and appeared frequently on the covers of novels with titles such as Bad Man at Midnight, Desire and Dirt and Lust in the Gloaming. His face wasn’t special but he had thick hair, tight pectorals and an abdomen designed for fingers to stroke, lips to kiss and various secretions to drip onto.

And, following in his dad’s footsteps, he too had changed his name. The abysmal Brian Pharte had morphed into Hamish Dirk, the envy of all who possessed a Sgian Dubh..

If you read that title aloud in polite company, it could be embarrassing but, in fact, it’s simply my brother Ron’s choice of title to elucidate a fascinating set of facts of which I, at least, was previously unaware. His post proceeds as follows:

If you want an authoritative description of the Reticular Activating System (RAS), don’t read on, but do an internet search where you will find echoes of Bill’s last blog in sentences like:

“The main function of the RAS is to modify and potentiate thalamic and cortical function such that electroencephalogram desynchronisation ensues.”

For me, those words are the equivalent of a “danger of death” sign on a power line: surely no good can come of me ‘desynchronizing someone’s electroencephalogram,’ so I’m inclined to keep well clear. That would be a mistake, however, because I think awareness of the RAS can offer the writer a useful working tool.

Put simply, the RAS is a filtering system that limits the amount of stimuli coming at us in our daily lives. We cannot fully attend to the millions of bits of ‘data’ that assail us every second, so we need a way of selecting those bits which are essential to our survival or useful to our achieving a particular purpose. In writing this, for example, I don’t need to watch or listen to the sparrow outside my window or notice the texture of the wood on my desk, so my RAS blocks those channels, leaving me to focus on the keyboard and the ideas I’m trying to convey. Without these natural filters, I’d be in a constant state of excitement, stimulated by a stream of information and events but without the ability – or perhaps the time – to interact with any of it: it would all be of horribly equal significance. The interesting and – from a writer’s point of view – useful thing about the RAS is that we can interact with and customize it.

Here are a couple of examples of the RAS in action. If I asked you what proportion of cars on the road were Audis, you would only be able to take a very general guess. If, however, you customize your RAS and give yourself permission to notice Audi cars over the next few days, you will be able to give a much more informed estimate. What you will have done is ‘tell’ your RAS to open an Audi channel: cars that were previously just a part of the general scene are given a new significance and register in a more dynamic way. It will feel like a series of self-created coincidences. (Incidentally, I don’t have to absolve myself from any blame for the number of accidents caused by drivers concentrating on cars’ radiator grilles rather than traffic lights over the coming days: you will not be distracted by having to look for Audis; the process is automatic and effortless.)

Similarly, you might decide to take a break in Paris and, within hours, you have found a forgotten guide book on your shelf, Paris weekend breaks advertised in this week’s local paper, a rough guide to Paris in a charity shop, a Eurostar feature on TV. They were all there ahead of your decision but now they flood into your consciousness like a stream of happy coincidences.

So, how – you ask – can writers exploit this faculty? Self evidently, they already do in their planning, research and subsequent absorption in their subject. That extreme act of attention a writer initiates in setting out her words is an act of sharp, conscious filtering from a mass of original possibilities. Well, yes, and yet I suspect it’s also useful to put more trust in the unconscious, ‘secretarial’ nature of the reticular, freeing up some of your other writing faculties. Let me offer a local example.

When Bill was writing The Figurehead, alongside his practical, hands on experience of wood carving and the focused research he was doing into the craft, he will have – apparently coincidentally – discovered loads of previously unnoticed examples of the carver’s art in his environment, heard references to wood carving on the radio and television, perhaps ‘found’ a tool shop which was always there. And all this, not simply because his research led him to these resources, not just through a conscious immersion but via a literally open-minded approach to his subject, trusting his reticular to let in the relevance which was, and is, always there. Without any conscious intention, serendipity is almost guaranteed. So, if you are anything like as lazy as Bill pretends to be, open up that portal, sit back and let your RAS do some of the work..