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On writing

Reflections on style

I bought a book the other day. I found it by flipping through the fantasy shelves at the local bookshop and bought it because the voice and style were similar to Potion.

It looked to be an easy read.

I don’t know what made me think it was like Potion. Sentence structure and choice of words were part of it, I think.

I started reading. Thirty pages on I was so bored I was almost falling asleep —and I still couldn’t get over how similar this writer’s sentence construction and choice of words was to ours. I flipped the pages. It didn’t get any better.

I went back to Potion. Was our story really as bland as this one?

I don’t think so.

So what was the difference between this writer’s story and ours?

I am honestly not sure. I liked our characters better, but that’s a personal preference. It’s almost impossible to write a novel, and then to continually re-write it, if you don’t like your own characters. I didn’t care enough about the characters in the other book, and couldn’t get interested in them enough to become emotionally attached to them.

I also felt our story had a more interesting plot. The other story was a more traditional fantasy. The plot could almost have come out of a ‘how to write fantasy’ tome. It also had a lot of info dumps. Large chunks of information dropped into the middle of the story.

Even so, put the two novels side by side and you might almost say they were written by the same person.

I’m starting to get worried.

Categories
On writing

Are they the only books out there?

I went to the library today, looking for some holiday reading. I wanted fantasy, good fantasy, that I hadn’t read before.

The back of every book I looked at seemed to have the same plot:

The kingdom of (somewhere) is in trouble. (someone) discovers they have special powers and must use these powers to save the kingdom.

The bookstores had the same. So I went to Amazon to try to buy something different. They had the same, plus some books about boys coming into their powers —Eldest (sequel to Christopher Paolini’s Eragon), and Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathon Stroud), lots of movie spinoffs and some urban fantasy.

I don’t mind any of these books individually when I’m in the mood, but I came away discontented today. Wasn’t there anything different? I wanted something I could pick up and say, “This sounds interesting.”

Worse, I flicked through the start pages of some of these books. They were all very ordinary. There was nothing in the first few pages of any of them that made me want to keep reading.

I think maybe my holiday reading should be writing, instead.

One trend I did notice at the library—there’s a lot more science fiction. A lot of it is reprints too. They had a whole new set of Robert Heinlen in; brand new hardcovers, and lots of newish-looking books with rocket symbols. (Our library categorises their books with stickers. A deerstalker hat for crime fiction, a heart for romance, a dragon for fantasy and a rocket for science fiction.)

Three days later I go back to the library, having finished all the books I had chosen. I picked up ten books I wanted to read in about as many minutes.

I think it’s just the mood you’re in at the time.

Categories
Writing process

Read your novel aloud to improve your writing

In Rework and Edit, in the BBC’s Get Writing section, Barbara Trapido says:

Here is my best advice for editing and revising. READ EVERY WORD OUT LOUD.

Barbara Trapido, Rework and Edit

While the prospect of reading a full 100,000 word novel is more than a little daunting, the advice is sound. It’s amazing how clumsy some word groupings can be.

Even if you don’t read the whole novel, reading aloud just the passages you are having problems with can also help.

You will find you skip words, or say them in a different order, or replace some words with others. If you stumble over words or phrases you will often go back and reword them so that you can say them, which you wouldn’t do if you were not reading aloud.

It’s a good idea to have someone else listening, or to tape your reading, so that they can pick up on things you don’t.

A truly useful exercise.

Categories
On writing

Posting part of your novel on your web site

I reread some old blogs today and noticed an interesting change in my first impressions of posting sample chapters on the website to how I feel about it now.

When I started writing this blog I obviously thought it was not really a good idea. Now, I would have to say I think it is one of the best marketing tools an author can use.

It may just be my familiarity with writing blogs that has brought about my change of mind, but I suspect it is also part of broader changes with entertainment in general. The internet is coming into its own as a valid platform for publishing and marketing.

Categories
Writing process

When do you know your novel is not going to work?

For most us, starting our novel is the easy part.

An idea comes, or old ideas suddenly click together, and you start writing. The first chapter or two is good.

I myself have dozens of novel beginnings that I have started and stopped. Some of them are just waiting for time to complete them. Others are simply dead—sitting in the equivalent of my bottom drawer (the Ideas folder on my PC). At what stage does one realise that these ideas have died?

Even though we write mostly as a team, Sherylyn and I determine the novel rigor mortis factor a little differently.

Sherylyn will write the first few pages and then hand them to me. It’s raw, unedited and very first draft. If I don’t like it she dices the idea then and there. If I do, she keeps writing to see if it’s going to work. We know by around chapter three whether it’s working or not.

My criteria for liking or disliking the story are the characters, first and foremost, and whether or not the idea intrigues me.

As for me, I tend to write the first three to five chapters. By then I know if the story is or isn’t working for me. If it’s not working, it goes into the bottom drawer, Sherylyn unseen.

If it is working, I go back and do a rough first edit before I hand it over. If Sherylyn likes it, we keep going.

Neither method is perfect—Sherylyn had no say in Shared Memories, for example. I just couldn’t stop, and I would have written it anyway. Luckily she likes it. And some of Sherylyn’s ideas that would make really good stories die an unnecessary early death, but that’s what the bottom drawer is for. We can always revisit an idea.

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On writing

Some people can write queries. We can’t

I read sites like Evil Editor, the now defunct Miss Snark, and various others who take reader’s queries and analyse them on line. I’m at the stage where I can see a query that grabs me, but I still can’t write one.

It’s really illuminating to read the comments associated with the sample queries on the above sites. You learn how other people perceive your book just from those few lines, and it’s usually totally the wrong way. I once submitted a query letter that was worded in such a way that everyone assumed the good guy was bad. Nasty bad. How can you do that?

Every once in a while the author posts a comment explaining, “No, that’s not it at all. What happens is …” and in two or three paragraphs explains the whole thing beautifully.

That’s it. The perfect query.

I can see how it’s done. Simply explain the story. Tell it as if you were telling someone else what happens, and do it in a couple of paragraphs.

It’s not that easy.

I don’t ‘tell’ a good story at all. I can’t even tell a joke without messing up the punchline. By the time I have finished explaining the story line …

Scott accidentally gets dragged into another world and has to survive or find a way home. Meantime, back at home, the policeman on the case ….

… it starts to sound as clinical and boring as the original query.

No, for me the best way to hone a query is to get feedback. Not just feedback from Sherylyn, because we both seem to be stuck in the same rut here, but feedback from lots of different people.

The bloggers who analyse queries provide a precious gift.

Categories
Progress report

Progress report

We jumped a big chunk of text with a “fill in here” note.

It feels good, and it’s allowing us to get back into the story.

It’s funny how you can become so focussed on getting a particular scene done that it stops you cold.

It will be interesting, when we are done, to see if we even needed that scene at all. I suspect not.

Categories
On writing

I, We and the grammatical intracies of me writing about us

If you are a grammar guru you probably take one look at this blog and go, “Argh,” and never come by again.

Sherylyn and I were discussing grammar the other day over a bottle of wine. (I know, I know. We both need lives.) Specifically, we were discussing parallel construction. One example Sherylyn used was:

“I went to the beach; we had a good time.”

This should be either:

  • We went to the beach; we had a good time”, or
  • “I went to the beach; I had a good time.

I commented that this blog is riddled with that particular grammatical problem, because I often talk about me, the person, and us, the writing team—all in the same post. Often I start off talking about me, and use ‘I’ as the pronoun, but then I get on to writing and switch to ‘we’.

Sometimes, when I’m really conscious of it, I’ll take out the ‘me’ and make it ‘us’, but that’s not really fair to Sherylyn. These are my opinions I am talking about, not necessarily hers. Other times I change the ‘we’ to ‘me’. Again, that’s not fair to Sherylyn, because ‘we’ write, not just ‘me’. So in the end I generally leave it as ‘us’ and ‘me’.

I am sure, because of this, the writing in this blog sometimes comes across as quite poorly written.

So be it.

Categories
On writing

Literary fiction is just another genre

At a function the other night started talking with someone about books and reading.

“I read a lot,” he said.

I am always interested in readers, and what they read. “Oh, what type of books do you read?” I asked.

“I only read literary fiction,” he said. “I don’t read genre at all.”

It was early in the night, so I just smiled and said something polite and we moved on to films. (He watched arthouse films. Are you surprised?)

It depends on my mood as to what I reply when someone tells me they ‘don’t read genre, they only read literary fiction’. That night I wasn’t up for an argument but pick me at a time when I’m in the mood I will say to you, “If you read literary fiction then you do read genre, because literary fiction is just another genre, really.”

Genre, by its definition, is commercial fiction. Many of these people who never deign to read genre fiction are actually saying they don’t read commercial fiction. Yet many of the writers they place on literary pedestals were actually the popular writers of their times. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens.

Jim McCarthy puts it well over at the Dystel and Goderich’s Literary Agency blog in Jim McCarthy on Literary and Commercial fiction.

Wikipedia describes literary fiction thus:

a term that has come into common usage since around 1970, principally to distinguish ‘serious’ fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction. In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more on style, psychological depth, and character, whereas mainstream commercial fiction (the ‘pageturner’)
focuses more on narrative and plot.
Wikipedia entry for Literary Fiction.

I didn’t realise that literary fiction was so ‘new’ a genre (or a style of fiction, for those who wish to argue).

Or, as one blog commenter once put it (and sorry, whoever you are, but I didn’t record your name, or where I read it):

In literary fiction the character’s journey is internal. It’s about the way a character grows or changes.

The very fact that it can be described in seven words says to me it is just another type of genre.

  • Literary fiction—focuses on style, psychological depth, and character
  • Fantasy—stories set in fanciful, invented worlds or in a legendary, mythic past
  • Romance—feature the mutual attraction and love of a man and a woman

and so on. All these definitions come from Wikipedia, by the way.

Look at the novels in your nearest large bookstore. You will find a science fiction/fantasy section, you will find a mystery section, you will find a romance section. You will also generally find a literary section.

I rest my case.

Categories
On writing

A good beginning is only the start

Like most writers, we are too close to our own work to really critique it well. The writing we do usually sounds trite unless we let it sit for six months. When we come back then we usually think, “Okay, this writing isn’t as bad as I thought it was,” or, “This is terrible. How could we write anything so bad?”.

I can’t pick a bad beginning in our own writing, especially not if I have written it. Sherylyn is a little better, but for both of us it takes ages to write something that isn’t bad. One thing we both do agree on is that while we can’t tell our own good or bad beginnings, we do know what works when we read it elsewhere. It’s a pity that what works for one doesn’t always work for the other, but when we both agree on a story that starts well we usually both read the novel and enjoy it.

One on-line forum that I am a (not very active) member of allows writers to post excerpts of their work.

A sidenote here. This is one of the first forums I joined. I was not long out of Critters, and even though I lurked for a couple of weeks, I jumped into the feedback section of this forum way too early. Posters on this forum did not want serious critiques of their story. What they wanted was praise. I gave a fairly detailed critique of a story I read. It was too detailed. What I should have done —and what I notice others do —is praise the story if it has promise and not add any comments if it has none. Occasionally someone adds a couple of high-level suggestions, but that is all. Moral of the story —it is important to understand what the posters want before you add critiques. Not only that, you need to know just how serious you are about getting feedback. If you want real feedback, don’t use a forum like this one.

But back to my tale.

I couldn’t write yesterday. I procrastinated by flicking through the stories on this forum. Some of them were typical high fantasies that began with a prologue told in omnipresent point of view, others began with a long exposition to set the scene. Some wrote in an archaic, “Here there be angels” type of way, others with lots of descriptive three-syllable words. For most of them I skimmed the first two paragraphs and then move onto the next one, because the openings were rather ordinary.

And then … an opening paragraph that made me sit up and read. This was good, really good. Right from the first two words. It opened with a bang, and kept going the same way. This story showed real promise and it packed a lot into that first chapter. Had I been in a bookshop, I would have bought the book right then and there.

It was so good I promptly scanned the rest of the forum for anything else she had written (and I’m fairly sure it was a she, both from her forum name and from the way she wrote). I found chapter two of the same story. Bliss. It was just as good as chapter one. And chapter three. These were strong, beautifully drawn characters with a story that pulled me in, and she hinted at so much back story that I lay awake for two hours last night thinking about it. The back story hadn’t slowed down the main story at all, but the author had hinted at so much, and made me want to know what was going on and what was going to happen.

This girl was good enough to be published.

Sad to say, she stopped at three chapters.

She had two other stories posted. One went to five chapters, the other to three. Both of them were good. The other two were not as good as the first, and all three needed some work but the stories and characters in all three books were compelling.

I admire any writer who has a voice that strong and good, but she had started three great stories and then just stopped.

Now I understand that she may have decided not to go any further with any of the stories. We ourselves find that if a story is not working we often know around the end of chapter three. But I don’t think that was the reason this writer stopped writing, and some of the comments on the earlier posts implied that she had done this before (older posts were archived). I think she’s just not in the habit of going any further.

What a waste.