Category: On writing

Novelists often look to history and geography to help with their writing, but they shouldn’t forget science, even if they’re not writing science fiction.

Some ideas stand the test of time, others come and go out of fashion, or are superseded by other ideas.

The idea of electrons in an atom orbiting in discrete paths around the nucleus like planets around a sun, for example, is now considered obsolete, replaced by the wave structure of matter.

Other ideas do stand the test of time. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, is still as valid as when Garret Hardin proposed it back in 1968. Likewise, in her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came up with a model of the five stages of people go through to cope with death or terminal illness.

The stages are:

Denial – The “This can’t be real” stage.: “This is not happening to me. There must be a mistake.”

Anger – The “Why me?” stage.: “How dare you do this to me?!” (either referring to God, the deceased, or oneself)

Bargaining – The “If I do this, you’ll do that” stage.: “Just let me live to see my son graduate.”

Depression – The “Defeated” stage.: “I can’t bear to face going through this, putting my family through this.”

Acceptance – The “This is going to happen” stage.: “I’m ready, I don’t want to struggle anymore.”

Definition of Kubler-Ross model in Wikipedia

The model is as valid today as it was back in 1969 when Kubler-Ross proposed it.

I have to say that everyone I know, myself included, who has gone through a grieving process, goes through these five stages. No exceptions.

People move through the stages differently. One person may spend months grieving, another years. The stages also overlap. There is no, “I have stopped denying it, now I’m angry,” moment. It’s more a gradual realisation that you have moved from being alternately disbelieving/angry to angry/bargaining.

So how can we use this in our writing?

Any character who loses someone they love will go through this grieving process. Even your story characters.

Obviously, you don’t want to do grief-by-numbers scenes in your novel, but character-wise, you know some things will happen.

• There will be a period of disbelief
• At some stage the character is going to feel angry that their beloved has died
• They should eventually come to accept it.

What you put into the story is up to you, but if your bereaved character doesn’t respond to the death in a manner the readers expect, then the readers will lose empathy for the character. You don’t have to be predictable. Let’s take the following (admittedly cliched) scenario.

Your heroine is the queen of a small country at war. Her husband, whom she loves very much, is mortally wounded in battle. She sits by him as he dies and they tell each other how much they love the other. The king asks her to finish the war. She vows to do so, for his sake.

The rest of the book covers her struggle to win the war.

If she doesn’t spend part of the book missing her beloved. If she doesn’t even get angry with him for going off and leaving it all for her to do, then I won’t think much of her as a protagonist.

“But,” you might say, “She hides her grief by concentrating on fighting, so she doesn’t have to think about it.”

For a whole book?

No way. That grief will spill over occasionally, and where she is in the grieving process at the time dictates how she will react.

We all know there is no copyright on ideas. You can take an idea —any idea —and turn it into a story.

How many books have been written about the search for the holy grail, for example? Or King Arthur and his knights? How many stories are based on myths and legends and folk stories from around the world? How many stories do you know about elves? Thousands.

At the other end of the spectrum you can’t create a fast action military man called Schofield with scarred eyes and nickname him Scarecrow. Matthew Reilly owns Scarecrow. Likewise untouchable is Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy’s military historian. Both these authors would probably sue you, and win.

It’s fairly clear at each end of the spectrum as to what is copyrightable, and what is not, but there is a big grey area in the middle.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy is legendary. So many writers base their fantasy novels on the worlds Tolkien created, even if they have different names and different characters. Even the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons is based on fantasy novels

(The creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary) Gygax added a few of his own innovations as well. A long time fan of pulp sword & sorcery writers like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, and Jack Vance, Gygax shamelessly cribbed from the worlds that had been created by those authors. The most obvious inspiration was the “Vancian” magic system (sometimes called “fire and forget”), in which wizards have to re-learn their spells every time they use them. In an odd side note, though, Gygax himself claims that one of the biggest fantasy authors ever didn’t have much influence on the development of Dungeons & Dragons.
“I’m not a big J.R.R. Tolkien fan,” Gygax said, “though I really enjoyed the movies. I pretty much yawned my way through The Lord of the Rings.” Still, minimal as it might have been, the Middle-earth influence is certainly present, even at the beginning. Halflings were called Hobbits in the original rules—until Tolkien estate lawyers wielding +5 Notices of Copyright Infringement stepped in.
Magic & Memories: The Complete History of Dungeons & Dragons, GameSpy, August 2004

The other day I read the first pages of an unpublished novel. The story was set in a world similar to our own, with a few extras, like elves and halflings.

It was an excellent story, I’d like to have read more. I remember thinking at the time though, this sounds like something from Forgotten Realms. And it was true. If you discounted the modern setting, the elf and the halfling could have come straight from the pages of any Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) book (of which Forgotten Realms is a line).

I don’t know whether the story stayed true to the characterisation of these characters or whether they branched off into something a little different. I do recall thinking at the time that if I was writing this I would really want to check out the Forgotten Realms site to ensure that I wasn’t violating any of their copyrights.

When we start writing we often borrow from other books, even without realising it. The story I mentioned above was really good. I’m just not sure that if I was an editor I would touch it without a few fairly major changes.

I went to the movies today—we saw Ratatouille, which I enjoyed, but so many people had oohed and aahed over this movie that I went in with very high expectations.

At the theatre every second poster seemed to be advertising fantasy movies. Beowulf, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, The Golden Compass, Stardust.

I think most people would agree that this current rush of fantasy movies began with the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter. I think most of us would also agree that we’re probably at the end of the cycle. [By fantasy here I’m talking traditional fantasy that started with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and continued with through to the J. K. Rowlings, not the Shreks or the Toy Stories of Pixar.]

I’m enjoying it, going to every fantasy movie I can while the boom is on. I know that after the feast comes the famine. But at least there will always be books. Or I hope there will always be books, anyway.

One thing I do know is that after a run of films like this, a lot of people are going to be inspired to write fantasy novels.

Some of these people may even sell their books, but many of them will not. Some of these people may ‘discover’ fantasy from these films and go on to read and love it as a genre. Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of people writing in the genre because it is popular, and they think that therefore it will be easier to sell their book.

That’s the wrong reason to be writing a novel, particularly if you are an unpublished author.

Fashions in films and novels come and go, but in most cases you are going to spend at least one year, maybe more, working on this thing. It shouldn’t be a chore. It should be enjoyable. We all know the stats. How many writers get published, how little most of them get paid.

Writing is one of the few things you choose to do. Okay, some of us might argue that we have to write, we can’t not, and I would be one of those. But that doesn’t mean that you should just write anything. If you are happy to write just anything to order, it’s smarter to become a technical writer or something similar—it’s a form of writing, even if it is writing to order, and compared to the income most novelist make, it’s well paid.

I can’t see any point in devoting all that time and all that effort to work on something you don’t truly love, just because you think you have a better chance of getting published.

Not only that, by the time most people realise that fantasy is a trend —i.e. when the films come out—the trend is waning.

Why do so many writers of science fiction persist in creating worlds set far into the future and making it exactly like the one we have now?

One thousand years ago:

• The once mighty Byzantine empire was falling apart
• The Song Dynasty was unifying China, creating a central bureaucracy and paper money
• The Vikings had raided and explored most of Europe, and parts of Asia, Africa and America
• Western Europe was entering a period of rapid population growth in the middle ages
• The Aztecs were searching for a home.

Life was considerably different, and a lot of things have happened in the intervening time. The great civilisations of that time no longer exist. As Hamish McRae says:

Go back 1000 years and Asia … accounted for two-thirds of world GDP. Africa accounted for nearly 12%, much more than western Europe …

Empires rise and fall while the economic wheel keeps turning. The last millennium saw the west gain ascendancy—but our decline is inevitable.

1000 years of globalisation, Hamish McRae, November 2001.

Why then, do some science fiction writers persist in setting their novels 1,000 years into the future, and then creating a world based on a Western civilisation almost exactly the same as we have today?

One thousand years has a nice ring to it. It’s far enough into the future to permit anything to happen, to allow all sorts of wondrous technology to be invented—genetic engineering, humans living forever, space travel. You name it, we can achieve it by then.

But don’t tell me the United Nations is the primary ‘peace keeping’ force in the world or the universe. Don’t tell me that the hero of the story, from the most technologically advanced race on the planet, is from one of the current ascendant western civilisations such as the United States of America or Western Europe.

Western civilisation will be history, the United Nations lucky if they make it as a footnote on the page.

Over at the Rejecter’s blog she makes some interesting observations about the future of books.

She says Print on Demand (POD) is the way of the future. She believes that

• Bookstores will still exist, but rather than warehousing immense numbers of books, the customer will buy the book and it will be printed in under an hour while the customer waits
• Audio books will become more popular still
• eBooks don’t really work (and implies that they’ve had their day, although she doesn’t explicitly state this).

I sort of agree with the first point, definitely agree with the second, and totally disagree with the last.

It made me think about the future, though, and it’s interesting to ponder the way things are going.

My first question is … is there a place for bookstores as we know them in the future? Many of the specialty bookshops have closed their doors already, and the proprietors work from home or warehouses. Slow Glass Books, the last of the specialty SFF bookshops I purchased books from by physically going into the store, closed its doors back in 2002, but I can still order books through mail order.

I also buy a lot of books from Amazon nowadays —not because I love Amazon (and the postage is a killer when you buy only one or two books) but because often it’s the only place I can buy specific books.

Print on demand in the format the Rejecter talks about would work well for these people. I imagine the cost of a decent printing press would be huge, but say Slow Glass Books gets an order over the internet (they use snail mail now) in the morning. They could forward this order on to a publisher in their area who prints the book for them and has it back to them in time to catch the post that night. Customer gets the book next day. Everyone’s happy. Customer gets an overnight delivery and the bookseller doesn’t store any more books than is ordered.

I could also see a big market here for personalising books this way.

What happens to the big bookstores though? I don’t see them going away, or not really. I think there will be less of them, and they will not hold as much stock. If they sell one book they might re-order the same (or might not), through POD to replace the one they sold.

Ebooks though … I think that as soon as you get a decent reader (and there are some good ones coming) ebooks will arrive with a vengance. There’s a whole generation now who are used to reading off the screen, and we’re a whole generation on more familiar with computers. I don’t think a non-paper format will bother as many people as it might have 10 or 15 years ago. Not only that, it’s instant. Instead of having to wait for a book to be printed, you can download it immediately.

No matter what happens, I think there is one positive thing about the future of publishing. It has to be better for mid-list authors than it is now, because so many of the high overheads that make midlist books so unprofitable will disappear.

Unfortunately, with that comes another burden. Marketing books. Authors can no longer rely on the publisher to do all their PR for them. It takes a different type of person to be new media savvy, and that might mean the difference between selling and not selling. Those of us who can network on the world wide web might have a better chance of doing something to sell our own stories.

We haven’t done a lot of work on Barrain lately. Most of our writing work has been on Shared Memories, a novel we had completed previously, that is currently going through the draft process.

There is one section left to re-write in Shared Memories, and that’s another major draft finished.

Barrain has suffered in the interim. Progress is slow, almost non-existent. We’re up to 18,000 words at present.

Why start one story and move on to something else?

Over Christmas Barrain was hard going. Sometimes, when you are stuck, you just have to take a break from the story that is giving trouble and work on another.

It’s always good to have more than one project going.

But … I don’t mean start a new story every time. Have works at different stages—one in first draft, another that just needs a polish.

When you get bogged down creatively, switch over to the other book and do some nuts and bolts editing.

• Don’t work on two creative drafts at the one time
• Don’t juggle too many projects—two is about all we can manage
• Don’t use it as an excuse to drop what you are doing and start something else.

Persevere until you absolutely sure you are stuck. Sometimes, when a story isn’t working all you need to do is take a couple of days off. Only occasionally does it need the more drastic action outlined here. Ensure that you don’t put the novel away until you have really tried—and I mean really, really tried—all other options to get back on track.

Lastly, when you have finished the other project, go back to the book you put away for the interim. You may be surprised at how much enthusiasm you have for it when you are ready.

In some ways, writing Barrain is like flogging the proverbial dead horse.

Why?

Because the material is out-of-date before we start.

The term ‘bird watching’ is now obsolete, replaced by the term ‘birding’. The use of ‘bird watching’ as a term for guys looking for girls is even more outdated.

The original draft of Barrain would be close to 15 years old. When it was written, bird watching—for guys looking at girls—was losing favour, but still common enough for us to use.

To continue with the equine analogies, that horse has long since bolted from the starting gate. No-one uses it now.

Yet in Barrain, the protagonist is only dragged into the story because of ‘bird watching’. If we didn’t have that, Scott wouldn’t be around to be carried to another world, and so on.

Can we save the story?

I’m not sure yet. Or rather, of course we can, but how much work will it take, and is it worth it?

How might we fix it?

We would need to rewrite the start of the novel to give Scott an excuse to join Caid on his bird hunt.

A different start is unlikely to involve a bunch of enthusiastic elderly birdwatchers, so Elspeth and the others will probably go, replaced by a younger set. Melissa’s relationship with Scott—if Melissa survives the transition—will be different.

Why then, if these major changes will happen anyway, don’t we just do them now?

Because we wouldn’t finish the story.

If we have to rewrite so much we will put the novel to one side as too hard, and never touch it again.

Little steps at a time, and every rewrite we do polishes the rest of the story. Besides, we haven’t quite given up on a less drastic solution yet.

I have mentioned before what I think about writing courses, and how my experience to date with universities hasn’t been much good.

This year Sherylyn started a part-time writing course at the local TAFE. From what she has told me, it sounds pretty good.

She chose three subjects:

• Writing and editing
• Photography for writers
• Web design.

In ‘Photography for writers’ she learns how to use a camera and take photos for articles. She also has to write the articles that go with the photographs. They will be marked on the article as well as on the photography. After all, this is a professional writing course.

Likewise with ‘Web design’. Here they are asked to create web pages, and put content on them. Again, they will be marked not just on their ability to create the web pages, but on the content they include. After all, this is a professional writing course.

So far, I’m impressed.

Last week I talked about doing your family and friends a favour by not asking them to read your novel, but as a writer, even an unpublished one, there comes a time when another unpublished writer will ask you to read their novel.

What do you do?

If it’s a novel you think you might like, then by all means say yes. But what if you don’t know that? What if you’re not sure?

I would like to say, “Don’t read it,” but that’s not always possible.

Here are some strategies that might help if you ever find yourself in this situation.

Timing

It is generally more beneficial for an author’s writing if you don’t review the manuscript hot off the PC.

The author needs time to distance themselves from the work.

Immediately after they have finished a draft is not the best time to give feedback. They don’t want to know about the flaws then. They simply want you to tell them that the work they have slaved over for the past two years is a masterpiece, perfect in every way. Flaws? They just don’t want to know.

Six months on they’re going to look at that novel in a totally different way.

Even so, I recommend that when you receive a manuscript you read it fairly quickly.

Firstly, it’s polite.

More importantly, the longer you put it off the more the author will hassle you, and the more guilty you will feel.

What type of feedback can you give if the predominant feeling is guilt?

What you need to encourage the author to do is to wait before they give it to, and to re-read it before they do hand it over. That’s no easy feat.

Read the complete novel

When the story is truly bad you may be tempted to read the start and end, and skip most of the middle.

Don’t.

There are two reasons to read the whole book.

Books generally improve. Many novelists don’t get into the swing of writing until well into the book. You may find a gem of a story lurking behind some badly written first chapters.

The other reason not to skip the read is because novelists are obsessive about their story, and expect readers to be the same.

You will be grilled.

Your credibility is at stake.

The author will ask you about people and events in the story. What you thought about particular characters, how you felt the plot flowed, and so on.

It is also difficult to give valuable feedback if you haven’t read the full story.

Authors, particularly beginning authors, do weird things with their characters and plot. It’s far better for you to be able to say, “This was really Zoe’s story, but you didn’t introduce her until half-way through the book,” than, “Zoe. I don’t remember her. I must have been tired when I read that part.”

If you do skip parts, be honest about it.

“I couldn’t read the rape scene, it was just too graphic.” Or, “I skimmed the battles. They were so gory, and there were so many of them.”

Give good feedback

There’s an art to giving feedback on a novel that needs a lot of work. Take the advice of some of the good online critique groups like Critters—check out Critiquing the wild writer: it’s not what you say but how and The Diplomatic Critter, for starters.

Remember, when you are giving feedback:

• There will always be something positive to say. Anyone who has written a full-length novel will have something good in it. Guaranteed.
• Say something good about the story first.
  Don’t start with the bad stuff, start with the good. Otherwise you put the author offside, and they become defensive and not prepared to listen.
• Never attack the author. Don’t say, “You can’t spell.” Say something more like, “There seemed to be some typos (or spelling errors) there. You might want to run it through a spell checker.”
• Don’t let your personal opinion about the type of story colour your response. “I hated the book. I hate whodunnits, and this was typical of the genre.”
• Be honest, but do it politely.
• Above all, give them helpful feedback.

Encourage them to seek opinions outside family and friends

Lastly, if the author is serious about writing, encourage them to join a writing group.

This helps them to be better writers, but also helps them to accept and get value from feedback. It’s a two-way thing. You get a better novel to read, and they get some feedback on how to improve their writing.

Four of us went out for a long, lazy afternoon tea yesterday. Sherylyn, myself and two of our closest friends. The subject came around to books, as it is wont to do when we are together. Both friends work in public libraries, and are extremely well read.

We meandered from books in general, and shopping for books, on to novels in particular, and then on to writing novels.

H., one of our friends, had been asked to read an acquaintance’s unpublished novel. “Because she worked in a library and read lots of books.”

She’d had it for six months and still hadn’t managed more than the first two chapters.

“It was very heavy,” was the only way she could describe it. “Extremely personal, and really difficult to read.”

We discussed whether the writing was the problem, or the subject matter. The book was a personal memoir, not something any of us read by choice. We finally decided that her reluctance to read it stemmed from a combination of:

• It was a first draft, and messy in the way first drafts often are, with typos and a story that was all over the place
• The style of writing was heavy and hard to read. Not a style she normally read
• It was extremely personal. Although it was a novel it was obviously autobiographical, and far more intimate than she ever wanted to become with a casual acquaintance.

Someone who read mainstream novels may have enjoyed the book, but H. was like the rest of us. While she reads widely, she reads a lot of genre, but little literary or mainstream fiction and she wasn’t into slice-of-life stories.

It wasn’t the first unpublished novel H. had read. We had given her Potion (Draft 4), and she said she had enjoyed it, even asked when the second book would be out. (Another one on our to-do list, waiting for us to finish some of our current projects.)

H. is a close friend. We think she would be honest enough to say she liked the book if she did, in fact, like it.

But we will never really know for sure.

You should never ask family and friends to read your newly finished novel. Especially not that first draft you are so proud of.

Polish it first. And then take it to your writing group, or an impartial bystander, or even a writing tutor if you are doing it as a school assignment.

Just don’t ask your friends and family to read it and then expect valuable feedback from it. Not unless you really trust them to be honest.

They don’t want to hurt you.

Most of them don’t even want to read your book, but you force it onto them until in the end they feel obligated to take it.

Chances are they’re not going to like it. Particularly if it’s a first draft. Particularly if it’s your first novel.

What can they say to you when you ask them what they thought of it?

“I’m sorry, but your novel stank.”

Of course not. They will mumble something polite and try to avoid the subject. Or put off reading it.

They probably glanced at it, and read a couple of chapters when they first received it, then put it aside to read later, when they have the time. Like H. did with the novel she was asked to read.

Now, you tell me. As a reader, if you read the first two chapters and it’s a really good read, are you going to put it down and forget it for six months? Of course not. You will keep reading. So if your family or friends have put off reading your novel for months, even years, what does that say?

They don’t want to read it, and they don’t want to tell you they don’t want to read it.

Do your family and friends a favour—don’t ask them to read your novel in the first place.

Unless, of course, they offer.

That’s a whole different ball game.

Accept with alacrity. Be grateful they offered, and polish your draft before you hand them a copy.