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On writing

Common writing mistakes 1: Omniscient first paragraph

The first in an occasional series on common writing mistakes by unpublished writers.

I’m no ‘expert’, but I do write, and I am a reader. (I am also unpublished.)

I know that we, as writers, say there is a lot of garbage out there in published book land, but that writing has been generally been polished and many of the story flaws removed. And yes, I am sure you can pick out five published books right now and show me truly bad writing, but I’m talking in general here. In general, published books aren’t bad.

There are some brilliant unpublished books out there too. I can point to three novels that I know personally that are better than many published books (and no, I don’t mean ours), and another dozen that are nearly there. But in general (again), you do find more writing problems in unpublished novels.

I read a lot of unpublished novels, and the same mistakes come up again and again.

One of these is the ‘omniscient narrator that segues into a protagonist point-of-view’ start.

It starts of something like this:

The man stood at the top of the hill. Below him the port town sparkled with the last rays of the setting sun—the fabled Port of Kings, gateway to the world of the others. Of course, the man didn’t believe it.

Jed sighed, fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

Okay, it’s bad, but you get the gist. Jed was the man at the top of the hill. The rest of the chapter is solely from his point-of-view, and probably the whole book too.

It’s particularly common in prologues, although I notice some writers start each chapter with it.

Some writers switch between omniscient narrator and third- (or first, or second) person point-of-view and it works. So why is this so bad?

The problem here is that the omniscient point-of-view is very short, usually one or two paragraphs at most, and the point-of-view switch is totally unexpected.

It also makes for a weaker start to the story.

You don’t have long to hook the reader. The sooner you can get them into your protagonist’s head the more likely they are to stay with the story.

And it doesn’t even take much to change.

Jed crested the hill and stopped. The fabled Port of Kings below spread out below him. It sparkled in the last rays of the setting sun.

Gateway to the worlds of the Others, or so they said. Jed didn’t believe it. He sighed, and fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

It has another advantage too. Even as a writer I almost added extra detail about how he felt (gateway, pah—he was here to buy a rare coin; the descent—he was tired and cold and hungry), because I, too, was already more inside Jed’s head.

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On writing

Fashions in modern fantasy

It’s an old truism that if you hold onto your clothes long enough they will come back into fashion. They might be different colours, or made in different fabrics, but they’re still basically the same style.

You wouldn’t be seen wearing the ‘new’ fashions, of course, but your kids love them.

It’s the same with books.

If I had to pick a fashion in the science fiction world at the moment I’d say steampunk. If I had to pick a fashion in the fantasy world, I’d say urban fantasy. Werewolves and vampires reign supreme, and have done for so long now that we’re ready to move on to the next big thing.

When we first came up with the idea for Potion, high fantasy was at its peak (and yes, this story has taken a long time germinating). Epic journeys, heroes, quests and discovering new powers were the order of the day. By the time we had finished it, high fantasy was well and truly on the wane.

We put the novel onto Authonomy, and the reactions fell into three broad groups:

  • Traditional fantasy readers who liked the story.
    This was a small group, and sometimes the comments were tempered with, “Despite that fact that this story (has elves, is done to death, etc.) “
  • Traditional fantasy readers who didn’t like the story.
    These were the people who were so over elves, journeys and bar-fights that they automatically hated it. There were quite a few more in this group.
  • People who don’t traditionally read fantasy but enjoyed it anyway.

(There was also a fourth group, those people who flat out won’t read fantasy, but I’m not considering them here.)

I fall somewhere between the first and second groups. I read fantasy. Every time I pick up a fantasy novel I want it to be good, and I want it to be different. While I don’t mind a traditional fantasy, there are a lot of stories I pick up nowadays and don’t get that far into because I know the story. I’ve read it dozens of times before, in one guise or another, and I’m sick of it. It only needs one thing to keep me reading, mind you—a quirky or interesting character, something slightly new in the way the story is written, or even a new take on an old idea —but so many of these books are so similar they run together for me. That’s when I put the book down.

The second group took us to task for writing a traditional fantasy that wasn’t ‘traditional’. Our language is more modern, and faster paced than your traditional fantasy. Our writing style is fast, whereas many traditional fantasy novels are considerably slower. Even so, our story is probably as traditional as they come—swordsman and mage hire on as bodyguards on a rescue mission. There’s lots of fighting, evil enchanters, magic, and so on.

It was the third group that really interested me. Their comments were almost all along the lines of, “I don’t normally read fantasy, but I like this.”

Their feedback reminded me of an agent’s comment on a query for a fantasy novel. (I think it was on Miss Snark’s now defunct blog, in the Crapometer series.)

I read the query and thought, “No way, this story has been done to death”. The agent, however—who did not represent fantasy—said really positive things about it. “This idea sounds interesting, I like it,” and so on. I was surprised, and I have always remembered it because at the time it made me realise just how important it was to get an agent who knew the genre you wrote in.

Other than the fact that it tells us that we’re probably targeting our book to the wrong audience, I wonder if it means the next new fashion in fantasy will be a return to epic fantasy.

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On writing

Copy-editing is hard

Sherylyn spent the last two weeks copy-editing a partial manuscript. Partial, that is not even a full manuscript.

I spent some time helping her out. It was hard, hard work.

On a first reading everything looked good and there didn’t seem a lot to change. But then you re-read the manuscript, and re-read it again, and by the time you had finished the third read there were red pen marks all over the page. (That’s right, red pen. I always thought editors had blue pencils, but in our part of the world they have red pens. Very fine red pens—0.1mm—because you can write more.)

Then you re-read the manuscript again, and you found even more things to change.

This was a non-fiction piece. There was a lot of work checking facts and generally cleaning up the text. Sherylyn also had to cut 10% of the content and tone down some of the more sue-able quotes, all while trying to keep the author’s distinctive voice.

It was harder than I expected. I have a renewed respect for copy-editors and the work they do.

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On writing

One dimensional characters: A perfect hero should never be perfect

I am half-way through another book where characters are one-dimensionally good or evil.

Over dinner with Sherylyn—my writing partner —I spent half the night talking about it. I think I was just disappointed with the way the characters were turning out. (I know, I need a life.)

Sherylyn, who’d already read the story, said, “It was a first book. Besides, how can we talk? Look at Potion. You can’t get anyone more pure good than Alun, can you?”

She stopped me cold. There is a special place on our bookshelf for first books. They’re what we call ‘dream books’. They’re usually first novels.

When you look back on an established author’s writing, you can often pick their first book just by the content and style, long before you look at dates and publication history. They’re fairy tales, pure and simple. Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree is a good example.

Good things happen to the people, seldom bad. And the characters are often nauseatingly perfect. If they’re good at something, they’re really good.

Now, to Potion.

Potion is a classic fantasy journey story. An enchanter and a fighter take work as bodyguards for for a man—Alun— who travels to a hostile land to rescue his aunt. In our story, Alun is pretty good. The fairest of the fair folk, the best enchanter—you name it, he’s got it, ad-nauseum. He is not the protagonist, but the whole book revolves around him. He’s the catalyst for everything that happens, and continues to be the catalyst for change throughout the book.

Our protagonists—the two bodyguards—are no slouches either. One is a powerful enchanter in her own right (not the most powerful, of course, because that is Alun) , the other is a legendary swordsman who was coaxed out of retirement for the job.

Alun is so pure he’s almost a caricature.

We know that. We believe that because he’s not the protagonist we can get away with it.

But Tegan and Blade are no slouches either. And this is where the problem lies.

They’re downright good at what they do—magicking and fighting —not to mention they’re ‘good’ people too. They don’t do ‘bad’ things.

So here am I, complaining about a set of characters being one-dimensional, when my own appear to be exactly the same.

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On writing

What your characters eat on their epic journey in your novel

I love reading about the practicalities in writing fantasy, like how far horses can really travel in a day.

Gillian Polack has done a similar thing with food in her guest blog Food is Just Fantasy Without Substance over at Voyager Online. Gillian talks about carrying pots and pans, and what travellers might eat along the way. Interesting stuff.

I know that even when I pack food for a long car trip how tedious it is and how much extra planning is involved. I do a 500km round trip roughly once a month to see my mother, who lives in the country. I love to take my own food, but the effort it requires to prepare and pack, and then remember to wash everything when you get home adds considerable time to the trip. Many times I just can’t be bothered, and buy food on the way.

After she talks about packing and cooking on the road, Gillian goes on to mention stews at those deserted way-out inns that our travellers always seem to land at, and how it just won’t happen. And I agree with everything she says.

Notwithstanding that, the poor old stew gets a pretty rough run in fantasy novels. It is generally considered capital ‘B’ Bad, and the sign of an absolute novice if you make your characters eat stew.

Is it really so bad?

I think of what I feed people here when I have a house full of visitors, and it’s generally some form of pot meal that I can cook up and serve out as required, particularly if people aren’t all eating at the same time. Stew is good, or pasta with a sauce I can leave heating on the stove.

So in a busy inn where lots of people drop in for food at various times, stews could be appropriate. They’re quick, because they’re keeping warm by the side of the stove. They’re easy, because there’s no extra cooking required, all you have to do is serve it onto a plate. They’re convenient, because you can cook them early before the crowds of drinkers arrive from their long journeys looking for beds.

So yes, the humble stew is not a good traveller, although you can use it under certain circumstances. Meantime, I might pop over to Gillian’s site and ask for that cubed soup she mentioned. It sounds fun. Like an old fashioned stock cube.

And for our next fantasy when the characters do a journey—they’re taking a frying pan, a billy and a (not very big) bag of flour.

Categories
On writing

Some examples of draft writing

I started this blog I because I thought it was a unique idea and that while there is lots of information about how to write, there is little physical evidence of the actual process that writers go through to change their work.

Not so. Brandon Sanderson, who has written a number of books but is currently famous for picking up Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, has a lot of information about the writing process, deleted scenes, commentary on chapters and so on. It’s a great read. Settle in for the afternoon —or maybe the weekend, as there’s a lot there. It’s a real treasure trove of the writing process.

I actually got his site from a post Robin Hobb did on sff.net/My Space. Readers asked her how her draft process works, so she explained some technicalities with how she does her drafts. After which she posted portions of a sixth and seventh draft from the prologue of Dragon Keeper, her new book.

Both these sites are worth looking at.

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Progress report

Another progress report

I have writer’s block with Barrain right now. I’ve gone through the first 35,000 words and done a major tidy up of what’s there (until the next draft). Now I’m onto new work, and I am procrastinating. I can’t seem to get started.

My solution.

Skip the next 10-20,000 words and leave them for Sherylyn. That’s one of the beauties of writing with a partner.

I don’t normally leave such a big chunk of writing for her when I’m writing the first draft (or in this case the third). She’s a macro and micro-type person, fixing overall problems (plot holes, continuity) or otherwise getting right down to paragraphs and words. But I am stuck, and I need to move forward.

Who knows, we may find that we didn’t need those words anyway.


p.s. Where to put the apostrophe in writer’s block elicited good discussion in this writing household, and we’re still not sure.

Categories
Writing process

Writing fight scenes

All writers have strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is dialogue. I can write a whole novel in dialogue. (I know, they’re called scripts, but my stories sprawl so much the end result would be longer than a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.)

One of my weaknesses is emotion. Sherylyn goes through the stories after I have finished the first draft and adds emotive moments throughout. Another weakness is fight scenes.

I can’t write fight scenes.

I can picture the fight in my head as I’m writing. I know what happens, but getting it down on paper is another thing altogether. The first draft is a wire-frame outline pulled totally out of shape The fight has no excitement, no emotion, and not much happening, and then suddenly it’s over.

So I rewrite it with more description and it turns into one long boring ‘he did this’ and then ‘she did that’ and then they did it all over again. The fight takes forever, and any urgency is lost. Not only that, I still can’t get past the ‘he did this’ text for what is actually happening.

At least my scenes are realistic by then, if somewhat boring. I have a writer friend who specialises in the impossible fight. You know the ones. Where the antagonist has his back to the protagonist and then she (the protagonist) shoots him between the eyes. Or the physically impossible contortionist scene where she’d have to be Elastagirl to pick up the weapon the bad guy dropped.

Another writer friend suggested we could both benefit from taking a fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie and trying to describe it.

I think I might try it.

Expect our next few books to have kung-fu-style fight scenes.

Categories
Progress report

Progress report for Barrain

So it’s back to Barrain after a long time away.

37,000 words so far and this is what we call draft 3, although by our usual standards it’s more like an earlier draft.

The first thing to do is read what we have so far. I wince at the start—our starts are always bad—and read on, fixing up typos and cleaning up as I go.

One thing that strikes me reading on is how like One Man’s Treasure it is. (One Man’s Treasure is the workshop novel I have just finished a draft of.)

The main character promises to find another character’s killer (or presumed killer).

In Barrain it’s:

I will get your killer, Mathers silently promised Caid. You saved my life once, it’s the least I can do for yours.

While in One Man’s Treasure it’s:

I will find who did this and …

Hmmm. Problems already. I’ll leave that for the moment and let it percolate. It may fix itself as the story goes on. Right now I have other things to fix.

Like birdwatching. The whole kick-off point for this story is dated. No-one uses ‘bird-watching’ any more to talk about guys looking at women. And even the birders don’t do bird-watching any more. They go birding. We may have to re-write the start. It’s a pity, because I’m quite attached to the start. (A sure sign we should ditch it.)

Even Sherylyn’s okay with the bit where we introduce Scott.

I can see a huge plot hole already. Why didn’t Kraa send Taliah in to save Caid? I know where the story is going, and I know that Kraa wants Caid, not just the crystal. A dead Caid would set Kraa’s plans back 20 years. But he just sits there and watches Franz and Jacob try to kill him.

Not only that, I’m only up to chapter four and there are typos and omitted words everywhere.

Chapter five is one big info dump.

Many of the secondary characters are stereotypes (as are some of the main characters). And so on.

It’s lovely to be able to see just how bad the writing is and what needs to be fixed. The time away has given me good distance. Unfortunately, the story is only half written. If we were up to a genuine third or fourth draft here it would be perfect, because we can see the flaws so clearly.

Up to chapter 11 now. I’m reading faster and noticing less errors. I should either stop and come back to it at another time, or the story is genuinely getting better. I can’t tell which, so I stop reading for the day.

Categories
Writing process

My netbook has increased my writing time and made writing fun again

Buying a netbook computer has boosted my writing output considerably, and it has given me a renewed enthusiasm for writing.

Even though it looks as if I haven’t written much for the last 12 months, I have. I have written a lot. I just haven’t been doing it on a computer because my writing time is away from home—travelling to and from work and snatched during lunch hours. I have been writing by hand.

I filled around 30 notebooks. I have written lots of blogs. Most of them are still in my notebook. Some of them are obsolete now because they are no longer relevant.

I also wrote 30,000 words of my workshop novel.

30,000 words. 120 pages. Ten pages a month, and they weren’t even good pages.

Writing by hand comes with its own particular problems, of which I’ll blog about separately (the blog’s written, I just have to find which notebook it’s in) but the main problems for me were:

  • It’s incredibly slow
  • I don’t re-write hand-written text as I go because the re-writing slows me down. I do rewrite on the PC, because it’s easy to do. This means the handwritten text is less polished than the typed
  • I have terrible handwriting. By the time I transfer the it to computer I can’t even read half of it, and I have no idea what I meant by the cryptic notes I made for myself at the time.

I know a writer who writes all his first drafts by hand. He wouldn’t do it any other way (and it’s not an age thing, because he’s younger than me). But I can’t write at that speed forever. I would only finish one novel every ten years.

Two months ago I bought a netbook computer. As a writer I had some specific requirements.

  • A keyboard that I could type on
  • Microsoft Word
  • At least 1 megabyte of memory (so that I could run Office programs easily) and with more than one open at a time
  • It had to fit into my handbag and be light enough for me to carry with comfort if I decided to, say, walk home from work

Things like wireless access and price were important, but not deciders.

I spent a lot of time in computer shops typing “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, that all demo computers are at least two months old? In all the time that I looked I never saw one computer where the Microsoft trial was still running.)

Some computers were just too small. The Asus Eee PC, for example, was cute, but I simply could not type accurately. Some computers had good keyboards but when I picked them up they weighed a lot. Who wants to walk around with the equivalent of a bag of sugar in their bag? Not me.

I finally settled on the Acer Aspire One. The price had come down, it was being sold with XP and it had 1MB of memory so I knew I could put Word onto it. I specifically wanted Word so that I could update the document from either my desktop PC or the netbook, depending on where I was at the time. And it was the smallest keyboard that I could type with relative accuracy on.

It took courage to take it out in public the first few times. I felt really stupid. The first week I just carried it around in the bag. Then one morning I got brave, sat down in my local McDonalds with a coffee and muffin, and forced myself to use it.

It was a month before I would take it out every day and considered it normal. But now I do it over a coffee in the morning and in a small cafe over lunch. (You need to pick your lunch spots carefully. Choose quiet ones that are never full, and do later lunches, if you can. And don’t stay forever. There’s a backlash right now over people with computers who hog tables for hours over one coffee. My own etiquette rules are: always buy food as well as a drink, and never use the cafe’s power, only your battery.)

It’s costing me more in food (and I think I’m gaining weight) but the writing benefits are well worth it. Since I’ve had the netbook I have completed my workshop novel (another 30,000 words) , and written a second draft.

Not only that, I have more enthusiasm for writing. I didn’t realise how much writing by hand was holding me back.