Denis Shaughnessy is the author of the Awful Truth series of surreal comedies which introduce a new way of writing fiction. The supposed author, Marco Ocram, seems to be inventing the stories in real time as he appears as a self-invented character, sharing with the reader many of his immediate thoughts about his writing. Since he’s typing the story as he goes, he has no chance to edit anything or to think ahead, so he makes all sorts of mistakes. In this guest post, Denis explains how the books came about.
For years I had been writing fiction as a means of letting off creative steam, until the house began to fill to the eaves with yellowing manuscripts I never did anything with. When I finally decided to have a serious stab at getting published, I started to browse the internet for advice. That’s when the awful truth dawned- I realised I would be one of hundreds of thousands of would-be authors trying to get the attention of publishers swamped by submissions. How would my books stand out?
Heading back to a bleak and forbidding drawing board, I decided I need to write something utterly different, a book that broke all the rules. What if I wrote the world’s worst book, as a joke? As an experiment, I wrote a two-chapter spoof of a book by Joel Dicker- The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair- which had been a popular seller at the time. It was cleverly atrocious, with the best part being that its purported author-cum-character, Marco Ocram, was so dopey that he was actually pleased with the awful prose he’d written.
When I posted the spoof on Amazon, a number of lovely people said how much they liked it and encouraged Marco to write a full-length book in the same style. Since when, he’s never looked back.
Marco has now written three novels, the latest being The Awful Truth about the Herbert Quarry Affair. The surreal premise of the books is that Marco is writing them in real-time while acting them out as his own protagonist. The books are impossible to frame, and different readers interpret them in different ways. What makes them unique is the interplay between Marco’s simultaneous roles of author and character. One moment Marco’s wondering what to write, and the next he’s regretting the crazy situations he’s just written himself into. As he’s typing everything entirely off the top of his head, he can’t see beyond the end of his next sentence, so he has no control of his plot, and he hasn’t any time to correct his mistakes. I like to think his books are a metaphor for life, in which we can’t control what happens and we can’t go back to edit our past.
I can’t guarantee that you will like Marco’s books, but I can guarantee that they will be quite unlike anything you’ve read before, so take a free look inside the first few chapters on Amazon, and please contact me via Twitter or my website if you’d like to share your thoughts about them. Many thanks for reading!
The Awful Truth About The Herbert Quarry Affair
“Marco, I’m jailed day and night with murderous thugs who can’t tell Schiller from Shakespeare. I’m desperate for intellectual stimulus—but you’ll do for now.”
TV personality Marco Ocram is the world’s only self-penned character, writing his life in real time as you read it. Marco’s celebrity mentor, Herbert Quarry, grooms him to be the Jackson Pollock of literature, teaching him to splatter words on a page without thought or revision.
Quarry’s plan backfires when imbecilic Marco begins to type his first thought-free book: it’s a murder mystery—and Herbert’s caught red-handed near the butchered body of his lover.
Now Marco must write himself into a crusade to clear his friend’s name. Typing the first words that come into his head, Marco unleashes a phantasmagorical catalogue of twists in his pursuit of justice, writing the world’s fastest-selling book to reveal the awful truth about the Herbert Quarry affair.
Denis Shaughnessy is the author of the Awful Truth series of novels that send-up bestsellers in a unique way. With a working-class background as one of eight kids raised by a widowed mum in Birkenhead, he was guaranteed to go far, as far as Stoke-on-Trent where he completed a PhD in quantum mechanics. He immediately squandered his talent for physics by working in business development for multinational companies, before escaping to run his own consultancy in 2002. With an innate talent for no sports, an unmusical ear and too little hand-eye coordination for visual art, he has always turned to writing for self-expression. Owing to a series of inexplicable failures of editorial judgement, his has yet to be snapped up as writer of humorous pieces by top magazines. Fervently apolitical, he lives on a smallholding in the New Forest with his lovely wife, Leona, where he devotes his time to an exhaustive study of literature, cats, craft beer and old tractors.
Little is known of Marco Ocram’s earliest years. He was adopted at age nine, having been found abandoned in a Detroit shopping mall—a note taped to his anorak said the boy was threatening the sanity of his parents. Re-abandoned in the same mall a year later, with a similar note from his foster parents, he was homed with his current Bronx mom—a woman with no sanity left to threaten.
Ocram first gained public attention through his bold theories about a new fundamental particle—the Tao Muon—which he popularized in a best-selling book—The Tao Muon. He was introduced to the controversial literary theorist, Herbert Quarry, who coached Ocram in a radical new approach to fiction, in which the author must write without thinking—a technique to which Ocram was naturally suited. His crime memoir, The Awful Truth about the Herbert Quarry Affair, became the fastest selling book of all time, and made him a household name. It was translated into every known language—and at least three unknown ones—and made into an Oscar-winning film, a Pulitzer-winning play, a Tony-winning musical, and a Golden Joystick-winning computer game.
Ocram excelled at countless sports until a middle-ear problem permanently impaired his balance. He has yet to win a Nobel Prize, but his agent, Barney, has been placing strategic back-handers—announcements from Stockholm are expected soon. Unmarried, in spite of his Bronx mom’s tireless efforts, he still lives near his foster parents in New York.
@denishaughnessy on twitter www.theawfulauthor.com
