I wrote Florence and Giles as a thriller/chiller, which was a new departure for me and so I was gratified when press reviews and reader feedback started to come in. People were using words like ‘gripped’ and ‘held’ and a significant number of readers and bloggers mentioned they’d felt compelled to finish the book at one sitting with many saying they’d stayed up through the night to do so.
Of course I was pleased – any writer would be, the highest compliment anyone can ever pay a book is to say they couldn’t put it down. But because this was my first attempt at a suspense/thriller I was doubly thrilled that I seemed to have got the plotting right.
Lately though, I’ve begun to suspect that the book’s grip on readers has been assisted by something else. I was reading a biog of the American poet Emily Dickinson when I came across a reference to a particular way she has of playing with words that has a measurable effect on the reader’s brain. I realised that Florence and Giles does the same thing, but to a much greater degree, because it happens throughout the whole book.
In my book, 12-year-old orphan Florence has been banned from learning to read but has secretly taught herself how and devours books in secret in the abandoned library of the rambling old house where she and her brother Giles live. Florence has ambitions to be a writer and has invented a private way of talking to herself (and narrating the book), which she’s derived from Shakespeare. Shakespeare is credited with inventing more words than any other writer in the English language. Often he does this by altering the way in which words were used. Verbs become nouns and nouns verbs. Florence derived ‘Florencespeak’ in the same way.
So, for example, Florence says ‘I downstairsed’ instead of ‘I went downstairs’ and the neglected library is ‘unfootfalled’ and ‘a dustery of disregard’. This usage, at first strange, but after a couple of pages very easy to read and follow, becomes especially powerful when using, say, a noun as a verb creates a strong metaphor. For example, this is how Florence, who finds herself in a life-or-death struggle to save her little brother from the evil intentions of his governess, describes her intention of thwarting her enemy’s plans: ‘I’ll wasp her picnic’.
The first publisher the book was offered to rejected it because although they loved it, they feared the reading public (publishers always regard readers as dumber than themselves) would find it difficult. Immediately it was published, the reverse proved the case. Readers found the language totally addictive. I was inundated with messages from readers which nearly all made an attempt to write in Florencespeak – with varying degrees of success!
People told me they found it so pleasurable to read it gave them the kind of feeling they got from a drink, a good meal, or even sex!
It was only after reading the Dickinson book that I discovered what I’d done with words had been researched (at the University of Liverpool) and had a name, appropriately, ‘Shakespearing the language’. The physical effect upon readers of coming across verbs used as nouns and vice versa had been investigated using brain scans. And it was discovered that each time such a usage was encountered it created a ‘surge’ in brain signals. The explanation is that verbs and nouns are processed in different parts of the brain. Nouns are much simpler and require much less processing. A thing is simply a thing. But the brain has to consider so many more things with a verb, like who or what is doing it, when they’re doing it, past present or future, to whom or what. Encountering ‘Florencespeak’ the brain is brought up sharp and has to go back and work out exactly what has happened to the word in order to make sense of it. This creates the surge and the suggestion is that new synapses or brain links may be created as a result. This was presumably why people became more and more adept at reading ‘Florencespeak’ as they progressed into the book.
The process is also extremely pleasurable to the brain. It gives it the same kind of kick as solving a puzzle. It’s possible it actually improves language skills. And because Florence and Giles uses the technique throughout the book (so far as I know the first novel ever to do so) and not just sporadically like Shakespeare and Dickinson, it’s logical to assume effect upon the reader is so much the greater.
As one blogger put it (on readitswapit):
‘I gave up smoking on 8th December 2008 and I must admit that I occasionally miss that nicotine kick but every now and then a great book comes along which replicates that surge to the brain! Florence and Giles is such a book.’
I don’t know who the anonymous lady blogger is, but it seems she may unknowingly have hit the nail right on the head!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Florence-and-Giles-ebook/dp/B003ATPQWK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM&qid=1307631497&sr=1-1
