Richard Freeborn

I’m currently reading the first volume of Ronald Hutton’s excellent biography of Oliver Cromwell. One of the many things that make this book stand out, not just from other Cromwell biographies, but also biographies of other famous people, is how Hutton balances accepted narrative against the documented evidence. Much of what has been written about Oliver Cromwell, especially after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, either makes Cromwell out to be a saint, or an agent of the devil.

As with most people, I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between, and that is where Hutton takes us.

The reason for mentioning this is that Hutton intersperses the dry narrative with almost fiction like descriptions of the countryside and lands that Cromwell rode through during his time as a cavalry commander in the Parliamentary Armies. The battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) is covered in some depth as are the battles of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) and Naseby (June 14, 1645). It’s Hutton’s description of Marston Moor that caught my attention, and triggered this piece.

The first thing you’d notice, Hutton tells us, is likely the smell. Thousands of unwashed men and horses standing for twelve or more hours, sweating and answering calls of nature and enveloped in powder smoke from the cannon fire. Powder smoke and deposits that get in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and when swallowed act as a powerful and fast acting laxative.

I don’t write many battle scenes, although there’s a couple of projects coming up where that’s likely to change. The points Hutton describes would never have occurred to me to include in the narrative of a battle scene. And it’s not just the British Civil War, think about the Confederate Brigades waiting to charge Cemetery Ridge on the third day of Gettysburg, and breathing the smoke from over 150 cannon bombarding the Union positions for two hours.

It’s these little pieces of information, unpleasant though they may be, that help bring our writing alive and keep the reader engaged. I’ll certainly bear them in mind when I write the next battle scene.

This past weekend I was completing a back up to my portable hard drive when I noticed a folder with the name Compiled Drafts. The name didn’t ring any bells in my memory but I surmised it was the destination folder for when I compiled stories from Scrivener. That made the folder several years old as I changed my whole approach to manuscript generation and storage about three or four years ago.

When I looked at the contents of the folder it was like unwrapping a special present at Christmas.

There were thirty-four files in the folder. Some of the filenames I recognized as stories I’d written. Looking at them, most were partially completed – probably a version I printed out to work out where next to take the story.

Other file names were strange.

For example, the document A Higher Order didn’t even sound familiar. When I checked my stories master list spreadsheet, it wasn’t on there either.

So I opened the document and started reading. The story is about a librarian. And I have no recollection of writing it, although I must have done because my name is on the title page and in the metadata as the owner of the document. There were another six or seven stories like that and I’ve moved them all into my master list and story folder structure.

When I wrote in January about the number of unpublished short stories I had, these few weren’t even on my radar. Now I have more to consider and work with.

That’s the sort of problem I like!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been taking a study course on a very specific area of the writing craft. It’s called the rule of three.

Essentially whenever you describe something in a story, the most effective way is to describe it in a block of three. To use an example from a piece of my recent writing – Judy smelled the smoke now. The bitter tang of burnt wool, seared yarns, and charred wood.

There are some rules around this as well. You shouldn’t chain two sets of three immediately after each other. That becomes a list and readers mostly skip lists. Well, not totally. Research shows you read the first, second, and last items on the list and your eyes just skip past everything in between. Pretty much all the top writers use rule of three in some way, shape, or form.

I was thinking about that as I read through the stories that make up my latest science fiction story collection – Where Infinity Begins. There are six stories in the collection, some of them written four or five years ago before I learned about rule of three. And it shows.

Usually my final read through of the stories in a collection is to check for spelling and character consistency; height, eye color, hair color, that sort of thing. I try to avoid detailed editing for two reasons. Firstly editing like this is my critical voice at work, and secondly, I’d rather be writing new stories than rehashing something I wrote a year or more ago. This time though, probably because of the class, I was very aware of rule of three and where I hadn’t used it, especially in the older stories. So in this editing session I did do more than just correct spelling.

In places I added that third element of description and I think the stories are better for it. That’s only my opinion though. Grab a copy of Where Infinity Begins and let me know what you think.