How about this for an opening?

[Simon Webb]

Well, honestly, I was intrigued by the premise of the book when I read it-- that JTR was a Catholic, who had confessed to a priest who recorded it in a diary, but, naturally, never told anyone.

As fiction, as opposed to a crackpot theory, I liked it. Maybe if you find an editor who is good with dialogue, and either rethink the "diary only" approach-- you could have a modern frame story involving the person who finds the diary, for example, who could be the great-grandchild of Mrs. Kraski-- or you could study more diaries and letters from the time (there's tons of WW1 stuff), and less stuff that was prepared for publication, you might be on to something. No one's first draft is much good.

I know someone who started out writing something as a faux-memoir, and it ended up being a play, when she realized that she was including too much dialogue than a memoir would really have, so she threw out pretty much everything except the dialogue, and all the characters except the four major ones. It turned out to be really great. It was the first play she ever wrote, and it got produced in a Midwest writers' conference, and then was used in a university graduate workshop. It could still make it to a professional stage someday.

So, don't scrap the whole idea.

I've always been sad that Patricia Cornwell wrote her Sickert book as a crackpot theory, rather than a novel.

I have a modern framework, where I myself discover the diary, but I've put that bit to the end of the book as of course the start (which Kindlers can see for free) is crucial for a Kindle book.

I think what I need to do is doctor some of the language, in narration and dialogue, so it doesn't seem so modern (though I assure you I've written nothing they wouldn't have said or written at the time). What you don't see in this excerpt is that a lot of it, particularly the dialogue, has more of a Victorian feel - it's just that this aspect of the book is patchy. But thanks for pointing it out.

I think my main concern with the book at the moment is that it wanders off JtR at times and goes down side-streets which are more to do with atmosphere and context than with plot. I also cover Whitechapel conditions and the trial of George Chapman in a journalistic, non-fiction sort of style that seems inconsistent with other parts. Basically, I'm naturally undisciplined as a writer and find that sticking to the facts, as in a short non-fiction book, works well for me.

You've really helped - send me your street address & I'll send you a copy of my book on Aaron the Jew of Lincoln, a copy of which by now, it would seem, must be owned by practically every literate person in Lincoln.

SW

langleypress@googlemail.com

ps I should have explained, Mrs Kraski is from a well-established family of converts.

[RivkahChaya]

I just got back to services to see this. I was thinking (during the long parts of the service, which runs five hours, and I have to go back at 7pm), that if you didn't write your book, I had an idea which borrowed some of the more interesting events from my family's past, and added a JTR confession diary.

I have an Irish great-grandfather, whom my great-grandmother was disinherited for marrying, although he converted to Judaism sometime after they were married, as a sort of thumbing of the nose at the Catholic church for excommunicating him, after he helped a friend rescue his daughter from a convent, which she had entered as a postulant. Seems she'd had enough after about six weeks, but they wouldn't let her leave. She slipped a letter to someone during services, who got it to her father, and he and my g'g'father broke her out. They weren't excommunicated for nun-napping, so much as for "borrowing," without permission (even though they returned it the same night) a boat, which they used to get across a river where the convent was located, and then entering the convent without permission, and I guess, entering a few other nun's rooms before they found his daughter.

Also, I just helped clean out my grandmother's (other side of the family) house to get it ready for sale, after moving her to a nursing home, and there're some dusty boxes of family keepsakes. I doubt there is a diary detailing any confessions, but some of these boxes haven't been opened in a while. So far, the biggest treasure was a cache of unused record player needles, but they turned out to be worth some money.

Anyway, I was trying to form some sort of frame story about an American Jew whose family had come from England (which some of my father's family did), who finds, on her grandmother's death a box of possessions of her great-grandmother that include several things which for some odd reason belonged to a Catholic priest.

"What was my great-grandmother doing with a bunch of stuff from a Catholic priest?" would be the first mystery, that originally draws in the reader, and the entries in his diary that detail confessions he heard would come later. I thought the confessions would be obscure; no one would say "I'm Jack the Ripper." They'd be much more personal, so the protagonist would have to do research to try to figure out if any real crime occurred that tallied with the confession.

Five hours is a long service.

[Errata]

I gotta go. RH services, and all (Happy New Year, Errata).

Shana Tovah Rivkah. Tis the season to lay odds on whether or not this is the year that the Shofar gives someone an aneurism.

[Errata]

It's incredibly good & positive of you to go to all this trouble. I see what you mean. I think, given the poor response I've had to this & to my last novel, I should probably stick to my non-fiction, which sells like crazy.

SW

Fiction is all hell to write. I write plays, which is so much easier because you don't have to describe scenery or action, and is a much more collaborative process than a novel. My sister has advanced degrees in it, and she's been writing her great American novel for about 10 years now, and nobody has seen it in all that time. Getting started is the hardest part. Get three chapters in before deciding you hate it.

[RivkahChaya]

Shana Tovah Rivkah. Tis the season to lay odds on whether or not this is the year that the Shofar gives someone an aneurism.

Seriously. Don't forget to take a decongestant, if you'll be sitting in the front. Last year, my cousin and her husband were visiting, and he is a professional trombone player, so he was asked to play-- the person who'd done it the last few years was a high school marching band trumpet player, but he was away at college, and his parents weren't sure he would make it home. It never breaks my heart when RH is on Shabbes. Except that I do like Avinu Malkenu.

[Simon Webb]

Seriously. Don't forget to take a decongestant, if you'll be sitting in the front. Last year, my cousin and her husband were visiting, and he is a professional trombone player, so he was asked to play-- the person who'd done it the last few years was a high school marching band trumpet player, but he was away at college, and his parents weren't sure he would make it home. It never breaks my heart when RH is on Shabbes. Except that I do like Avinu Malkenu.

I just got it - RH is Rosh hashana! (not sure about spelling). I really should have got this sooner, as I work in a theological library with many Jewish resources. Your family sounds much more interesting than mine.

Actually my framing device was based on the idea of the family clearing out an old house in Whitechapel in the 1970s and finding the diary of Chapman's father confessor. I will, however, be completely changing the book now, in line with pretty much everything that's been said on these forums (fora?).

SW

[Errata]

Seriously. Don't forget to take a decongestant, if you'll be sitting in the front. Last year, my cousin and her husband were visiting, and he is a professional trombone player, so he was asked to play-- the person who'd done it the last few years was a high school marching band trumpet player, but he was away at college, and his parents weren't sure he would make it home. It never breaks my heart when RH is on Shabbes. Except that I do like Avinu Malkenu.

I remember when we were about 10 our Sunday school class all had the opportunity to try and blow the shofar, and Alicia took a go at it and immediately shrieked, clapped her hands over her ears and collapsed. She had tubes in her ears and popped them out from the effort. Now I always look at that thing like it's a pissed off bear in a flimsy cage.

Simon- It sounds like an outline is going to be your best friend right now. It will help you streamline your plot and subplots

[RivkahChaya]

She had tubes in her ears and popped them out from the effort.

Not easy to do. I had to have one of those temporarily once, after a bad infection. Stupid camp counselor wouldn't believe I had water in my ear, and needed to sit out swimming until it drained. I ended up blowing out my adenoid and tonsil on that side with that infection, and got a lot of scarring in my eustacian tube. I was subject to my ears just randomly stopping up, for no apparent reason, for years, until I had my tonsils and adenoids removed.

Simon- It sounds like an outline is going to be your best friend right now. It will help you streamline your plot and subplots

A detailed one. For the dialogue, get someone to read it out loud with you, someone accustomed to reading out loud, who does it well. It doesn't have to be a professional actor-- a school teacher, or anyone who did acting in high school, or who does a lot of reading in church, or something. You'll get to hear it, and you'll be able to tell from their reaction how natural it feels to them.

Also, get someone who is experience in reading unedited or non-professional writing, and someone who knows the period. There are people in college English departments who specialize in letters or diaries, and tons of people who specialize in WWI writing. In fact, you can find whole books just on WWI correspondence, and the first draft of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was published a few years ago. It's called Chronicle of Youth, and is a much more personal memoir, with a lot less history, and less deliberate retrospect. I'm glad she went with the second version, because it's just about my favorite book, but Chronicle is still fascinating. A large (and I mean large) collection of letters among her and her three friends and her brother, was published in the mid-1990s.

There's also tons of stuff by Teilhard de Chardin in English, corresponding with his English friends. His English is very good, and he is very chatty and casual about theological matters, then going on about the weather, or the news, and I'm talking about personal letters from before and during the war, not during the time he had his mystical cult following when he was middle-aged. (And trying desperately to will people not to ask him what he knew about Piltdown.)

[Simon Webb]

Not easy to do. I had to have one of those temporarily once, after a bad infection. Stupid camp counselor wouldn't believe I had water in my ear, and needed to sit out swimming until it drained. I ended up blowing out my adenoid and tonsil on that side with that infection, and got a lot of scarring in my eustacian tube. I was subject to my ears just randomly stopping up, for no apparent reason, for years, until I had my tonsils and adenoids removed.
A detailed one. For the dialogue, get someone to read it out loud with you, someone accustomed to reading out loud, who does it well. It doesn't have to be a professional actor-- a school teacher, or anyone who did acting in high school, or who does a lot of reading in church, or something. You'll get to hear it, and you'll be able to tell from their reaction how natural it feels to them.

Also, get someone who is experience in reading unedited or non-professional writing, and someone who knows the period. There are people in college English departments who specialize in letters or diaries, and tons of people who specialize in WWI writing. In fact, you can find whole books just on WWI correspondence, and the first draft of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was published a few years ago. It's called Chronicle of Youth, and is a much more personal memoir, with a lot less history, and less deliberate retrospect. I'm glad she went with the second version, because it's just about my favorite book, but Chronicle is still fascinating. A large (and I mean large) collection of letters among her and her three friends and her brother, was published in the mid-1990s.

There's also tons of stuff by Teilhard de Chardin in English, corresponding with his English friends. His English is very good, and he is very chatty and casual about theological matters, then going on about the weather, or the news, and I'm talking about personal letters from before and during the war, not during the time he had his mystical cult following when he was middle-aged. (And trying desperately to will people not to ask him what he knew about Piltdown.)

Thanks again, Rivkah

Pretty much everything everyone's said on this forum about my book's opening is right (especially you) & most of it also applies to the whole book.

My initial response was resistance, which I guess is part of learning (which may be why it's so hard to be a teacher). My resistance was based on the fact that most of the 25 books I've published to date have met with considerable success, keep selling well & have been featured in newspapers & magazines, etc. I've also had a lot of my own stuff in newspapers and magazines, recently got a very enthusiastic response to a commissioned article, & also this very week got a very flattering commission for another article from a journal for which I have the utmost respect. One of my books also features on zombiehub.

I also felt a little suspicious of some of the negative comments made because they smacked of creative writing courses (and yes I've been on such a course, and even taught creative writing for 8 years). I'm suspicious of such courses because to me the best books are the ones that break all the rules about plot etc.

I'm also the go-to guy at work for people who want stuff proof-read, and I've been asked by local authors to suggest changes to their stuff.

Even my first novel, Gilbert's tale, has had some good stuff said about it and is on sale at Canterbury, where it's partly set. It must be said, though, that Gilbert's tale is about as close to non-fiction as a work of fiction can get. When my local reading group wanted to do a session on it, I told them not to bother because it's basically just a re-working of the sources on Canterbury's saint, Thomas Becket.

I'd like to break into the fiction market but I think my talent might lie in creating very clear and informative illustrated short non-fiction books. Among these, my most successful ones have related to specific places such as Durham, St Albans and Lincoln. The fact is, there is a real market for such books ready to be exploited by independent publishers (we're talking about books for tourists), but the market for fiction is more tricky. People will take a punt on a little book about St Cuthbert that sells for £3.99, but when it comes to fiction they're often looking for something everyone else is reading.

What I'm doing with the JtR book now is making it a sort of third-person book written from the POV of the grandson of the priest who heard JtR's confession. This removes the need for the narrative to sound 1914, and already I'm finding it's setting me free and allowing me to give more depth, as the narrator is rooted in our century. I'm able to work this because the narrator, Thomas Carter, is 92. The idea is that he heard the JtR story from his grandfather in the cellar of their Whitechapel house, during the London Blitz in 1914.

I'm now re-reading some stuff from the early 20th century to help me get the dialogue better, and have ordered diaries etc. from the period from my local public library. This solves one problem I had last week - I couldn't find anything to read!

I'm pretty confident that a lot of the dialogue I already have in place will be OK as I grew up with relatives speaking in something like cockney dialogue, and it wasn't much different from Victorian cockney - indeed some of my older relatives had been Victorian cockneys, born at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. Also some of the dialogue comes straight from transcripts of e.g. Chapman's trial. I personally sound a bit like Johnny Depp in From Hell, which wasn't a bad try at a London working class accent. Mrs Kraski doesn't actually get to say much, and I've taken Arthur Conan Doyle as my model for the conversations between detectives, etc.

As to plot, I think what's in place is good, but I need to cut two sections that don't go anywhere. The structure is basically cutting back and forth between 1888 and 1903, and recounting historical stuff that actually happened. Now there's an extra layer to do with Tom Carter but that's not going to get out of hand.

I'm now determined to finish the JtR book and a science-fiction novel I'm writing, but unless one or both of them takes off I'll then abandon fiction altogether. I've got a pile of non-fiction projects beckoning to me & I did waste an awful lot of time in the 90s writing novels nobody wanted. Believe me, the JtR novel as it stands is much better than any of those.

Funny you should mention Teilhard de Chardin and Piltdown. My zombie version of Macbeth is based on an imaginary Piltdown Quarto, and a steeplehouse priest who attends my Quaker Meeting looks exactly like Teilhard. I mean, exactly. It's uncanny.

Talking about archaeology, they've just discovered a Roman Road just 2 minutes walk away from where I live in County Durham. They're trying to keep it a secret, so you won't find it on the internet. How cool is that?

I may not be visiting these message boards for a while now as I've found it rather traumatic, like any true learning experience. If you'd like to contact me, use langleypress@googlemail.com. Happy new year and thanks for your wonderful messages!

SW

[RivkahChaya]

Thanks again, Rivkah

No prob.

What I'm doing with the JtR book now is making it a sort of third-person book written from the POV of the grandson of the priest who heard JtR's confession.

See? now aren't you glad you posted? If your opening line is something to the effect of "My grandfather, the priest...." you'll get people reading long enough to find out how a priest came to have a grandson.

'Course, means I can't write my book. Grumble....

I personally sound a bit like Johnny Depp in From Hell, which wasn't a bad try at a London working class accent.

I know you didn't accuse Depp of anything, but I feel I need to defend him, a little. He's a really good actor. That film was intended primarily for an American audience, and if his accent had been too authentic, people would have had trouble understanding him.

The actress Jennifer Jason Leigh got into trouble several years ago in recreating a too-authentic drunk and elderly Dorothy Parker. Parker already had an "elocution lessons" accent, the way you hear upper class people speak in very early American sound films, which is becoming less and less accessible to modern Americans, and then, when she played Parker both old and alcoholic, she did in fact sound exactly like she did in her last decade of life (I have heard recordings), which is to say, impossible to understand. After the film ran for test audiences, she had to redub a number of scenes.

I've been in the East End, I think I mentioned before; I did a Ripper tour, and stopped by a couple of places that were mentioned in some books. I didn't have any trouble understanding people who were speaking directly to me, except for one guy, who was drunk, and not picking up on the fact that I was American, I guess. I wasn't deliberately trying to eavesdrop, but there was a lot of conversation on the public transportation, and if I'd wanted to, it would have been hard, because two East Enders talking to each other aren't trying to be understood by Americans, if that makes sense.

That still doesn't excuse Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. If Greedo can shoot first, surely someone can go and fix that dialogue.

By the way, Hugh Laurie? spot on in House. He not only sounds American, he really sounds like someone from inland New Jersey.