I’m very nervous about the prospect of writing serial fiction, because I’ve never really done it before; or at least, certainly not to a set schedule, or with an overarching plot rather than a series of afterthoughts tacked on with increasing clumsiness. I’ve already harangued Lee Barnett (Week Ending for the BBC) and Kieron Gillen (Phonogram, Journey Into Mystery) about how best to divide up the plot and maintain a level of appropriate tension and release, and just about restrained myself from filling up the ask box on Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr with whiny entreaties for some kind of explanation as to how the hell one writes serially.

Possibly as an antidote to this, and because it’s the one part of the story that doesn’t require as much research, I’ve written the introduction. I may well rewrite it – in fact, I will almost certainly rewrite it – but in the interests of Showing My Workings like we’re all still in school, here’s the opening to The Advent Chronicles:

The aliens came to America at the change of the century. It was a hot night in late May, and as a portent of doom they were early and kinda not what anyone was expecting.

No one knew what they wanted, but it turned out they wanted what every other schmoe washing up on the land of liberty wanted: the chance to make something for themselves. Well, we couldn’t deny ‘em that. Back then we didn’t have the quotas in place.

And at first they didn’t cause no trouble, so we let ‘em go. Just making a living, like all of us. It wasn’t ’til 1910 that it started leaking out of the ghettos and the ditches and the railway bridges – y’know, all the places where people people who ain’t got no one like to hang out – that there were something to be afraid of.

Now we know the word “ovipositor”, even the working girls know it, though they can’t spell it. Dr Hamidullah Lal of the NYPD tells me he’s seen it writ down any way you care to think. He’s a goddamn expert in deciphering the “talisman of violation” from the shaky handwriting of some impoverished sonofabitch’s worried buddy.

My neighbour Raymond, he lost his son that way. Not to the egg, but to the river. Too afraid to think straight, Raymond Junior didn’t go to his pa or Dr Hamidullah Lal. He went to the river and he jumped. Sergeant Gilgun’s men pulled him out bloated and discoloured. Raymond Senior thanks God Almighty he’s been blind these thirty years.

There’s all sortsa shadows that spell the end for girls in this city, but I guess when Fleur du Mal came to us up in the office and said something terrible had happened to Tiny Baby Anastasia, our minds went right to that word: ovipositor. The worst thing that can happen.

We weren’t expecting her to be dead.

It’s out of keeping with my usual, much more florid writing style, and it’s in first person, which I hardly ever write. With any luck Advent Chronicles will continue to be a challenge enough to keep me interested, but not so much of a challenge that I get completely put off! It’s a fine line to walk.

For A-Level Theatre Studies, many moons ago (I’m not sure how many moons, but it was upwards of ten years), I saw a great many plays, and thanks to my unorthodox education I saw a great many performances of plays and ballets during secondary school, too (in fact this is how I first came to visit the Globe, not long after it first opened). One of the discoveries I made as a result of this glut of theatre trips was that theatres, no matter how plushly decorated or comfortable or well-lit, are after a few minutes just a dark box with a lot of people in them.

This is well and good when you’re working in them: the busy-busy-busy of cast and crew, front of house and concession keeps one far too occupied to begin any sensation of being contained. In the audience, with little to do but lose yourself in the performance, it’s often uncomfortable to be jerked out of your reverie and reminded that you are hunkered down with strangers watching a pretence unfold.

Happily, having had the dubious privilege of growing up in the West Country, I’ve also been familiar with the solution to this problem for some time: as a child, and later an adolescent, I saw several performances by Kneehigh Theatre.

There are few things quite as exciting, to my mind, as open-air theatre. Everything has an element of risk involved: it could rain at any minute (and indeed at last summer’s performance of Dr Faustus at the Globe the heavens opened and the clouds rumbled and I was blue-lipped and shivering by the time the eponymous doctor was dragged to hell), the outside world stops for no man, and while the immersion may seem incomplete as a result I’ve always found that it feels more like theatre that way. There’s a sense of being involved in a very long theatrical tradition, pre-dating the establishment of permanent theatres, an odd connection to the history of the art form and the history of the story being told, as well as the story itself.

For example, some time in the late 90s or very early 00s, I had the opportunity to watch a performance of Arabian Nights put on by the Kneehigh theatre company, by torchlight, in the ruins of an 11th century abbey. Needless to say, it was an atmospheric and captivating performance; likewise when a friend of mine attended a staging of Macbeth at the incredible Minack Theatre, and the weather obligingly added further special effects in the form of a thick fog that engulfed the actors and left the audience isolated with the witches.

Principally the real charm of open-air theatre is the feeling of luck. One might have a thoroughly miserable time, weather-wise (as I did during Dr Faustus and my adventures with hypothermia) that is redeemed by an excellent and sympathetic cast who incorporate the vagrancies of meteorology into their performance (“By this sign, I know the sorcerer to be near!” cried Benvolio, off-script, as the heavens flashed lightning above our heads, and followed his ad-lib with thunder. The audience tittered as they had hooted and snickered at every mention of the sea, rains, or waters all afternoon. He paused. “Back to Marlowe!”). One might end up with a feeling of camaraderie with the remainder of the audience in the face of hardships endured, even making friends.

I hasten to explain, I don’t think all forms of theatre are suited to this particular medium. Open-air theatre works best for plays which were written for open-air theatre, not for those written for Stanislavskian realism, Brechtian dislocation or any other sort of self-conscious theatrical movement. The kind of play that requires two people staring rigidly at each other wrapped up in private torments fares badly, and so Pinter is also right out.

Old stories suit this kind of theatre best, old stories and strong stories. Folklore, myths, fairytales, Biblical accounts, lyrical words and vast ideas. The works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Petronas, and later the anonymous Beowulf, the sublimely-authored Canterbury Tales in any adaptation, and of course the works which have drawn me back to the South Bank to receive sunstroke, hypothermia, and a crick in my neck: Shakespeare’s. They were made to be called out over a rustling audience outside a bow byre, standing on a barn door, accompanied by a persistently out-of-tune mandolin. They were written to be declaimed around a stone depression in a cliff face. These are strong words which have survived centuries of use because of their rhythm and the tenacity and universality of their stories (and perhaps somewhat because certain cultures went tramping around the world inflicting them on other people, although the Ramayana‘s performance continues, too).

This could easily be staged outside.

Which is not to say that more modern plays cannot be made to fit the form; I believe that Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead would both play wonderfully not only open-air but in situ. Performances have been put on in the cells of old prisons and in the car-parks of nightclubs, and I love the shady feel of that, the idea of theatre as illicit and somehow dangerous to experience, something you huddle around to listen to.

What is my conclusion? My conclusion is that even living in the middle of a city which has an absolute embarrassment of music halls, theatres, and pubs with stages upon which to enact its dramas, I’m still afforded the opportunity by the Globe and the Regents Park open air theatre to relive the parts of my youth I spent wrapped in a blanket, plonked down in a bush, enraptured as three men and a woman wove an entire world out of a handful of props and some battered instruments.

When a 40-year-old cold case opens unexpectedly on a sleepy island, John Hennessey (perpetually-on-the-brink-of-being-fired) finds his past comes back to haunt him, too. This unconventional tale is told in the first person to an unseen reporter, and through the eyes of a not-wholly honest observer.

Already available in print and EPUB format, now that I’ve got the hang of Kindle Direct Publishing a little better this unusual mystery story (that isn’t really a mystery) is also available for Kindle for £2.64; I promise it doesn’t contain as many Bergerac references as the Lulu.com tags may make it look like.

Another morning you woke to death
on the news, and there was death
walking in the streets, and death
leapt in front of the commuter train, death
clutched her chest in the office, o death
followed you everywhere, a parade of death
grinning emptily as a skull as more death
flooded out of the subway exits, all death
as far as the eye could see, the cat’s death
in the gutter just another meaningless death
as you stopped on the pavement where death
had mown down a branch of flowers, in death
still beautiful, and found a bee, death
not quite clinging to her, her little death
held at bay by your warm palms as you, besieged by death
held life in your hands.

For more poetry, why not buy Know Your Words (with Al Kennedy & Amy Kreines), For the Love of a City, or Year of the Ghost (also available on Kindle).

What I’m saying is, this post nearly didn’t happen. And probably shouldn’t have. I was asked by a friend after the “Show, Don’t Tell” and “What Is Litotes” posts if I could explain the “don’t write in the passive voice” advice meted out by the great and the good. Or the noisy and time-rich.

The problem was that at the time, I couldn’t. I know enough to avoid using it, but not enough to be able to adequately explain it, or even to explain what the “passive voice” is. This Language Log essay is doubtless very informative, but you do have to have a grip on the jargon of linguistics first. This post by Grammar Girl about the Active Versus Passive voice is easier to digest.

The Grammar Girl post says:

Another important point is that passive sentences aren’t incorrect; it’s just that they often aren’t the best way to phrase your thoughts. Sometimes passive voice is awkward and other times it’s vague. Also, passive voice is usually wordy, so you can tighten your writing if you replace passive sentences with active sentence.

which I think covers well what I would say: using the passive voice isn’t necessarily wrong, and in fact has a place in political speech-writing an awful lot (when someone wants to imply that no one was at fault. In other languages, where there has to be an actor in an action, it’s a little harder to do this. English at least allows for “the vase was smashed” without any suggestion that the smashing might have occurred as the result of someone doing something). It’s also useful in lab reports: “the solution was stirred vigorously”.

The passive voice also has a place in poetry, I think, and in certain situations in fiction. Perhaps what’s important is to use it when you know what you want to achieve with what you’re saying (or the passive, “with what’s being said”, which just removed the responsibility from you).

For example, the sentence people hate John.

Now, there are circumstances where this is the preferred form. If you want to make it sound as if John’s innocent in all this, for example, or that the hatred is the province of “people”, a group which can be inflated or contracted to avoid including the speaker, use this active sentence. People hate John. John is the one being done to. People are the ones doing the hating. There is action (hate), actor (people), and acted upon (John, who I’m sure isn’t that unpopular really!).

There are other circumstances where what you’re trying to communicate is different. Perhaps John’s kind of a bastard. Perhaps John inspires hatred so completely that it’s almost how you’d identify him. Perhaps there is a gravitas to his experience of others’ hatred that gets lost in the active clause. Perhaps you want to emphasise the degree to which he is hated by mirroring with first the passive clause and then the explanatory active: John is hated; people hate him.

John is hated takes away the actor and leaves John the sole inhabitant of the clause. What is important is John, and how he is hated. It doesn’t matter who hates him (and so we lose the weak, flexible “people”), only that he is hated. It becomes a title: John, the hated.

So there are circumstances even in fiction in which passivity is to be encouraged (voila!).

Why the injunction against it?

Because most of the time, in narrative, you want there to be an actor performing the actions you’re writing about. There should be someone or something doing something, as well as someone or something being done to. The active voice pins responsibility onto the actor, and makes sure that actions don’t occur devoid from a motive force.

But why should fiction be about that?

Because human minds are mad keen on intentionality. As observed by Dr VS Ramachandran and various others, the mind looks for actors in even actorless events. We ascribe intentions to inanimate objects and forces: the weather is against us, the trees are our friends today. There is a sound evolutionary suggestion for this, better-described in Phantoms in the Brain than I could ever hope to manage, as well-observed as the human tendency to look for faces in anything we see.

The active voice enforces a sense of personality and continuity, and strengthens the reader’s identification with the situation you’re describing.

The Grammar Girl post also notes:

A recent study suggests that less educated people–those who dropped out of school when they were 16–have a harder time understanding sentences written in the passive voice than those written in active voice. I only had access to the press release, not the original study, but the results made it seem as if you should stick with active voice if you’re writing for the general population.

So if you’re writing Young Adult or children’s fiction especially, it’s better to stick to the active voice at all times and not leave your readers potentially confused as to what’s going on and who is doing what to whom!

When the passive voice in fiction is pretty cool:

The passive voice is also, incidentally, useful in situations where an object with no internal life is the focus of the story, scene, sentence, or clause.

The passive voice, then, isn’t so much verboten as “not always appropriate”, like almost any optional element of writing. It’s useful for making the distinction between things you’d like the reader to believe happened by accident or without motivation, and things which you’d like the reader to believe were intentional. It’s not so much a “no-no” as a “know when to use it”.

Year of the Ghost: Collected Poems 2011 is only available in electronic format for the foreseeable future. Naturally, if a print edition comes out you’ll be the first to hear about it!

These visits ran to gift shops in the absolute extremities of scale, and in the tradition of shaggy dog stories and comedies everywhere, I shall begin with the grandiose.

I didn't actually go to both of these on the same day

The British Museum

 Number of gift shops: 4 (two large, one small, one book shop).

The British Museum is, of the gift shops I’ve reviewed so far, the most sprawling and grandiose. The book shop (which is actually smaller than the book section of the main gift shop, and which I only ever seem to find by getting lost) is stocked with books both relevant to the museum and generic Folio Society Editions of classic literature, but the main attraction as far as I was concerned after a long walk around the museum was the rather comfortable browsing seats in the corners.

Outside the bookshop, opposite the cloakroom, is the first of three gift shops. It is modest, if a little anaemic, and its primary focus is iconic British Museum branded goods – Rosetta Stone printed umbrella and so on – with some ornaments, souvenir cartouches, and no exhibition-specific or “swank” goods.

While in other museum gift shops so far on my bizarre pilgrimage have only segregated their “posh bit” to a section of the shop often containing merely jewellery and the odd bust, the British Museum takes this to its logical conclusion in the glorious Victorian pomp to which the great institutions of the city often owe their existence. Put simply: it doesn’t have “some” jewellery, it has several cabinets full. It doesn’t have “a few” busts, it has several shelves of them, and a full-body statue. There are rugs, jackets, perfumes (I rather liked the idea of solid state perfume presented in aged watch casings but alas none of the perfumes were to my taste), painted boxes, and the whole of the “posh” gift shop fairly reeks of people with money to waste. One day, when I am rich…

The main gift shop is intimidatingly large; it extends around most of the central column in the main court, and appears to contain most of the produce of several factories. There are entire walls of postcards of the permanent and temporary collections; a book section which is larger than the book shop (my pick was a large photo-heavy book about Lawrence of Arabia, of course,  but I was also tickled to find there was an entire book on indigo dye and on previous visits have picked up books on a diverse range of subjects including popular linguistics); two large sweets stands which I’m sure having nothing to do with the acquisitive nature of the British Empire towards other culture’s artefacts but which are very nice despite being overpriced; plates, bowls, frankincense, prayer beads and prayer mats which I assume were all associated with the current exhibition about the Hajj; and a children’s section which is larger than many museums’ entire gift shops.

The children’s section has some recognisable crossover with the children’s section in other museum gift shops, notably the apparently ubiquitous wooden swords (with which Misha and I had a brief but determined re-enactment of the cliff-top duel from The Princess Bride), and rather unusually features children’s clothing as well.

I’m beginning to speculate that it wouldn’t be entirely impossible to outfit an expedition to the North bloody Pole from the British Museum gift shops, but don’t quote me on that.

The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons

The museum itself is cunningly hidden upstairs

The other end of the scale is the Hunterian Museum gift shop; the museum itself is wholly fascinating if you, like me, like looking at bits of dead things in jars for ages. If you don’t it is intensely creepy. The gift shop is effectively an alcove by the entrance/exit full of the kind of things you can get in toy shops, with some of the college’s branded goods – surprisingly cheap silverware, scarves, etc – thrown in for good measure.

The totality of my review of the Hunterian Museum’s gift shop is that on my way out (the place was closing, and Fiona and I were being ushered swiftly towards the exit) I spotted a book which looked very interesting and gloriously specialist. It was A History of Limb Amputation, and it was priced at £100.

Therefore this is my review of the Hunterian Museum gift shop: they sell A History of Limb Amputation, and it costs £100, and this tickles me right down to the very organs they have floating in jars just beyond that shelf.

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

By Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon’s palpable sense of responsibility for and determination to protect (above all others) the men/boys under his command is something that permeates his writing far more than any concept of his own mortality. He places himself effectively outside of harm’s way by painting himself as only an observer of events. He addresses “you”, the reader, and writes about characters and caricatures, but rarely if ever includes himself, letting his bitterness and sorrow speak as his avatar throughout the verses.

He uses simple, rhythmic (often marching) rhyme schemes and clear, unmuddied language – often without complex metaphor or non-war imagery – and does not crowd his message. The result is that while Owen and Rosenberg create dark, bleak, Gothic masterpieces which effectively convey in frontal terms the horrors of war, Sassoon provides an ugly cartoon which seems at first to be a depiction of an innocent scene but reveals itself to be a description of suffering.

Rather like Maus, this supposed softening through simplicity or even childishness (as in WS Lyon’s I Tracked A Dead Man) draws out a further sense of disquiet through the jarring of form and content. This juxtaposition of the upbeat, easily-read, singsong poem and what it contains pushes the content far farther into a mind which has not prepared itself for defence against future disquiet with the usual pointers of tragedy.

Happily I also finished reading an excellent book recently, so let’s talk about that instead!

In lieu of romance, let’s talk inspiration. I was recently leant a copy of Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch by one friend, after a few other friends had recommended it to me; most of my remaining friends that I raved at about it had already read it and raved back at me and the others had already heard about it and were planning to read it.

I'm showing you the UK cover because the US one is ugly

Ordinarily something that smells suspiciously of hype would put me off, but this was passed on to me by the discerningly brilliant Holly Yagoda, who has an excellent hit-rate when recommending books, and so I let this skip ahead over all the other books on my impressively and embarrassingly full “to-read” self.

I’m extremely glad that I did. Ben Aaronovitch’s work here is – I use this word sparingly at best – inspiring.

The plot and characters can be gleaned from reviews elsewhere, and a potted summary can no doubt be found on Wikipedia. I would much rather point out the skill with which both are drawn: Aaronovitch’s characters have weight, warmth, humanity (even the ones who aren’t strictly human), and a reality which made them seem as if they had walked in off the streets of London and into my head as I read.

His rendering of London, too, is exquisite. As an annoyingly committed transplant to London, it always pleases me when someone manages to capture the complexity and the patchwork nature of the city; Aaronvitch casually strews the history and social make-up of the place in asides that his protagonist has only just himself picked up, and in another context this might seem clumsy but in this, as Peter Grant (hopeless constable, charming fellow, not quite Joe Average and not quite special) struggles to explain both how he’s ended up in this unnatural situation he drags in every kind of explanation.

I am, too, pleased by the positive attitude towards modern policing; nods are made to the failings and to the things which still need to change, but unlike a lot of crime dramas Rivers of London doesn’t fantasise about a glorious past in which coppers were their own gang. In fact it demonstrates the importance of conflict resolution training even as the protagonist gently mocks it, which is priceless.

The very, very London nature of the book is inherent in the humour which buoys up an otherwise dark story; the grimness and the grimaces part of each other in what ought to be grandly theatrical grittiness but which feels much more like the London I know and love.

I think part of this is down to the genuinely intelligent way in which Aaronovitch observes. His spot-on descriptions of things like the estate in Kentish Town where Peter’s parents live; Dr Walid’s office and the institutions of London; the kind of man Seawoll is; the strange atomic dance of bicycle couriers and the specificity of their haunts. He outlines only the details that are necessary to let the rest of the image flourish in the mind’s eye, bringing familiarity rushing in with it, a kind of cartooning with words.

It may not be immediately evident that this is high-quality writing because of the cheerfully pedestrian approach of the narrator, the unpretentious use of language and ease with which you can cut through chapter after chapter, but I would argue that is the point. It is astonishingly easy to read; absolutely nothing jerked me out of the book, and I am a finnicky, picky, fussy, whiny reader. I complain, moan, and bitch about books. I throw them out of rooms if I’m not enjoying them.

Ben Aaronovitch’s light-but-precise observational touches, warm and human dialogue, likeable protagonist, and solid plot with highly professional pacing (I was not surprised to discover he was also a television writer after reading this; there was such exact timing and acceleration of plot beats that it was clear he’d learnt about the constraints of timing in a stricter medium than the lax environs of novel-writing) make for a deeply enjoyable read, and I’m looking forwards to getting my hands on Moon Over Soho and Whispers Underground.

Best of all, it has inspired me with one of my own projects.

I do however have one question:

left: US marketing, right: UK marketing

I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don’t think I’d buy a book called Midnight Riot and featuring a stereotypical armed man-with-magic-light on it, because I would expect this (spoiler-ridden covered) book to be trash. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do read supernatural detective trash, John Connolly’s “Bird” books, which are egregious rubbish designed to cater to my desires for exhaustive background material, my desire for bickering gay side characters, and my desire for inventively gruesome serial murderers. But Rivers of London is not trash, and the idea that the genre determines the trashiness here is null.

Yes it is a supernatural detective novel; no that does not mean it is the same as trash. People looking for trash who pick up Midnight Riot aren’t going to have their need for trash fulfilled (I would definitely recommend the “Bird” books if you are looking for trash), and people who might otherwise seriously enjoy Rivers of London aren’t going to pick up Midnight Riot if they think the book consists of a Bad Ass Cop Shooting People and Doing Magic.

Poor marketing decision there, presumably made by someone who either didn’t read the book, or didn’t understand it.