I was on the hunt this week for some Horror Bloggers. You’d think that would have been an easy kill: Scoot through a few websites, do a quick search on Twitter etc… but I wasn’t looking for the tired and repetitive. I was looking for something more. I am afraid that yawning is my primary response to subjects such as apocalyptic zombies, or YA tales of demons in love, or gore-fests where the horror is purely visual and has no cerebral element. Horror, to me at least, is only partly about the visuals. In the main, good horror is a sort of mental anguish within the reader, born of anticipation, psychological manipulation and, ultimately, a sense of the book being real.

However, back to the hunt for horror bloggers.

My search threw up an oddity: A blogger who had retired from blogging. Worse, the retirement seemed to be due to the sheer weight of the reviewing process. I have to admit, I am terrible at marketing my own work and I can count on one hand the number of people I have approached over my writing career asking if they might review a novel of mine, but I am in the minority on that. Most self-published writers are always pushing their work, and certainly the marketing machines of the mainstream publishers are paid to do nothing else… so why should my interest have been drawn to a reviewer who quit reviewing? After all, like water in the bomb craters of World War One, a hole, when made, is quickly filled in this business.

Well, the blogger in question ran the site known as “The Hat Rack”, and the reason I was surprised was because of this comment he made in his farewell entry of August this year:

“I have lost much of my faith in fiction. The idea of finding some sort of Truth between the pages of a fantasy has been receding farther and farther from my reach…. For months, perhaps even longer, I have been trying to ignore this, assuming that my old love would snap back into place if I just kept trudging on. Instead, the act of reviewing has grown to seem like a chore, and perpetually forcing myself to analyze what I read in the hope that profundity will be reborn has just strangled the enjoyment I used to get from stories”.

What an awful thing. Reading is meant to be an escape. It is a distinctly private and personal pastime, shrouded in intimacy and imagimotion (the combined effect of imagination and emotion). If a person subsequently seeks to share that experience with others by placing a review then it is us, as potential readers of that particular work, who owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewer… but if the review process ever over-shadows the joy of reading – or we find ourselves reading with a review in mind as opposed to reading for the sheer enjoyment of it…. well, it is then that nature twists out of balance, planets grind out of alignment, and we miss our morning bus to Normalville.

If a review doesn’t come from the heart it is meaningless. For it to come from the heart it has to have been the very last thing in the reader’s mind during the reading process. I fear that too many are losing their balance on this, and the drive to eat through large numbers of books and comment as they go sometimes has the side effect of morphing them into a living example of the Hungry Caterpillar. Always hungry. Never satisfied.

So my message this week is embodied in the last words of The Hat Rack blogger: 

“I plan to try and read without the pressure, to rediscover what it means to read for the pure joy of the tale and the prose”.

Amen to you, brother. I take my hat off to you.

(the archives of The Hat Rack blog can be found
at: http://evilhat.blogspot.co.uk/

I would also be obliged if horror fans might consider visiting the following blog: http://littleblogofhorror.wordpress.com/ )

For crime writers and readers who missed the first episode of BBC1’s new drama, The Escape Artist, I would urge you to seek it out this weekend on BBCi-player ahead of the next episode on tuesday. It really is a masterpiece of TV crime writing, with leviathan-esque performances courtesy of a talented cast.

Much of the credit for the success of this new drama has been attributed to David Tenant, whom I agree is an actor with impressive skills, but I would like to give a mention here to another David: David Wolstencroft. Wolstencroft is the writer behind this latest drama and the reason for me blogging about him is because his latest offering raises important questions for writers everywhere. Those questions boil down to two fundamentals: (a) How fast does your story move? and (b) How do you deal with the obvious predictability of what you have written?

The first point, pace, is of increasing importance these days. My last brush with a literary agent, (the wonderful and extremely superb Camilla Wray at Darley Anderson), taught me a fantastic lesson about the importance of pace which essentially made my novel, The Scarlet Tessera, what it is. (Frustratingly, I remain unrepresented as a writer and eventually self-published the novel via the Indie route, but that is a different story for a different day…). Pace is very much a commercial demand these days in crime writing, and you ignore it at your peril. The Escape Artist is an unbeatable example of story pace, even though it is a visual drama as opposed to a book based experience.

The second point, about dealing with the reader’s ever-increasing skill at predicting story-lines, (and therefore desperately wanting to be proven wrong and surprised), is the true mark of a talented writer. To be able to present a compelling opening, to set up questions that the reader urgently wants answered, and then to either answer them in a surprisingly and satisfying way, or, more effectively, to deliver those answers so quickly that the reader’s mind is overrun and they are dragged into a space where they cannot foresee what comes next… well, this is the Holy Grail for all writers. David Wolstencroft has given a masterclass in that with his latest TV work.

So how does he do it? What can we, as writers, learn from this? Well, the answer is as simple as it is difficult: He writes himself into a corner and then lets his main character get him out of it. Easy, right?

Well, in reality, no, because what stitches great writing together is character, and what generates a compelling and believable plot is a set of actions that spring naturally from those characters. You will know you have a great story under your pen when you find that you are not writing it all - but your characters are by their sheer individual and unique competing interests and desires.

If you do nothing else this weekend as a writer I would urge you to (a) watch episode 1 if you haven’t already, and (b) have a quick read through this interview with David Wolstencroft http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/escapeartist/wolstencroft.html

Lastly, the single most impressive skill that sets writers apart is the ability to set the bar high with a dramatic work whilst still ensuring that the end is satisfying. On that particular point, the jury is still out…. until the next two episodes, obviously!!