Category: On writing

One of our favourite Star Trek media is the Pocket Book, Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly.

It was a crossover novel. Or, if you prefer, a mashup before they had mashups.

As children we both loved the television series Here Come the Brides. As adults, we discovered Star Trek, and Mr Spock was our favourite. It always amused us that Mark Lenard—Spock’s father in Star Trek, was the antagonist in Here Come the Brides.

And then Barbara Hambly wrote Ishmael.

In it, Spock goes undercover to infiltrate the Klingons, is caught, and transported back to 1867 Seattle, where his ever-so-great maternal grandfather (Mark Lenard as Aaron Stemple) has made a deal with mill owner Joshua Bolt to bring out a hundred women as potential partners for his workers. The catch—all the women are to have husbands within twelve months or Bolt loses his mill to Stemple.

It’s a beautiful book. As a Trekkie you get a Spock/Kirk book. As a Spock fan you get Spock with amnesia, trying to fit in to a society that is totally alien to him. Much like Spock in Spock’s own time, really.

As a fan of Here Come the Brides you get to see a totally different Aaron Stemple. One that stayed true to the man, but also peeled away different layers, so you saw the real man underneath.

As writers—although we didn’t realise back then that we were even dissecting the story as writers—the story was satisfying on so many levels. Everything was logical (if we can use that word).

Spock loses his memory because he has nothing in this new world that he can associate with his old life. As soon as he sees a Klingon his memory returns.

He is sent back to 1867 because the Klingons were trying to go back to 1867 and kill Stemple.

The Stemple/Sarek/Spock circle is just perfect.

And, of course, James T. Kirk has been working frantically in the background and arrives just in time.

Leonard Nimoy—as Mr Spock you were part of our life. We thank you for it.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.
Leonard Nimoy (March 26, 1931 – February 27, 2015)

The series arc

Now that we’ve gotten the ‘why’ of writing a series out of the way, let’s talk about some of the things you need to consider when writing it. The first is the series arc.

You can write an open-ended series where each story is standalone. Or you can write an ongoing story that ties everything up in the last book. Then there’s the combination of these two—standalone books that have an overall arc that ties up nicely by the end of the third book.

Everyone has their own likes and dislikes about series. As readers we love the third type ourselves. Stories that finish at the end of a book—it’s so frustrating when you get to the end of a book and the story stops, with nothing resolved—but that work to a bigger picture that becomes clearer as the story unfolds.

As readers, too, we don’t like a series that goes on seemingly forever without important issues being resolved.  Wheel of Time, I’m looking at you here.

I confess that I get tired of a series after about four or five books. As a reader, and as a writer.

I’d rather (we’d both rather) write series’ the way Robin Hobb does.

Three books about Fitz (the Farseer Trilogy). “I’m done. His story is finished.” Or words to that effect. So she goes off and writes Liveship Traders, set in the Rain Wilds, a different part of the same world. With a guest appearance by my absolute favourite character out of the Assassin books. Meantime, she’s been thinking about Fitz and the Fool. “Maybe I do have another story I can tell.”

Yes, please.

And she gives us the Tawny Man series. “I’m done with them now,” and she writes the Soldier Son trilogy, and then another Rain Wilds series (four books this time). And now … another Fitz and Fool series.

As a reader, I love it. She tells the story, she finishes, she moves on to something else.

As a writer I love it too. Imagine if Robin Hobb had written all nine Fitz and Fool books one after the other. She’d be getting awfully tired of her characters, I think, and it would show. Instead, when she has a story she is ready to tell about them, she tells it. And when she doesn’t, she gets to tell other stories.

This keeps the writer fresh, and also means that the story has to finish within the original three book arc. Nowadays, a series usually means three books. We can all point to exceptions, but unless you have an outstanding proposal, it will be three books.

The fourth arc

That means the writer must provide four story arcs. The story arc for each individual book and one for the whole series. And they must keep that overall arc unresolved without leaving too many loose ends.

Writers do it with varying degrees of efficiency. Some writers plan one big story and then seem to chop it into three parts almost arbitrarily. So you really only have one arc, not four.

Me, I find it frustrating to get to the end of a book with nothing resolved. It’s even worse when the story ends on a cliff-hanger. As a reader I like some sort of closure to each book. I also lose a tiny bit of faith with the writer when he/she does that.

If they do too often I tend to stop reading them.

Pantsing it

It’s a smart thing to know the story arc you’re working toward when you write your series.

We’re pantsers, not plotters, but even we see the benefits of knowing the story arcs that we’re working to. Particularly the overall story arc.

It doesn’t have to be set in concrete. It doesn’t need to be long. And you don’t even require it for the first book, especially if you wrote it as a stand-alone.

You need to know it as you work through book 2, though. Otherwise you may end up doing far more rewriting than you planned.

We have a one sentence overall story arc for LINESMAN—which we’re not telling, for obvious reasons—but it’s enough. By the end of book 2 you may not even realise what we’re working to.

You’ll definitely know in book 3 though, because the overall story arc has to tie in closely with the smaller arc of the third book.

Part 3.

You’re a newbie author, trying to work out what to write. Should you write a series, because if you sell the book, chances are you’ll be asked to write two more books, all about the same character? Or do you write standalone books, to give yourself a better range of options when you’re looking for an agent and a publisher?

There’s no one answer to this. What works for some authors won’t necessarily work for others. In the end it comes down to how it works best for you.

We started by writing standalone novels. That suited us. We had lots of stories we wanted to tell, and they were in mixed genres. Fantasy, young-adult, science fiction, and at least one science fiction mystery cross.

Our agent took us on for a science fiction novel. Naturally, we mentioned our other work, and even sent her a fantasy novel we’d written, but she told us very early that she would prefer initially to establish us as science fiction authors.

We were fine with that, especially as the science fiction we had sent her was the science fiction we loved to write.

Be sure that you love the genre and style you are submitting in, because if you get an agent or sell your book, they’ll likely want more of the same.

Ensure that you and your agent have the same business vision for your writing.

Having said all the above, if you write genre there is a good chance your publisher will want a series. That’s usually, but not always, three books.

If you don’t think you can write three books in the series, be honest about it up front.

This was another thing we discussed with our agent. We chose to write another two loosely-related books. That is, two more books set in the same universe but with different main protagonists. We loved the setting and we had lots more stories to tell.

When our agent sold the book, however, the editor wanted three books about the same character.

We had spent considerable time and discussion on the other stories, but the main character was only a secondary character in the new stories.

Be prepared. Be flexible. Understand that what you offer may not be what the editor wants. Don’t say, “Yes,” just to get published. Think about whether you can deliver it. If you don’t think you can, be honest up front.

Because, after all …

You have to deliver what you agree to.

We talked about it, and decided we could write three books about Ean Lambert, and came up with some ideas. We came up with them in a hurry, maybe not the best idea on reflection, but we got our three book contract.

Now, we’re authors who normally sit on a book idea for months, keeping it in the back of our mind, gradually adding other ideas to it as we go. We’d already written book one, we were ready to start on book two. And we hadn’t really thought much about the plot of the second book yet.

Know how you write. Understand the limitations, accept them, and work around them.

I don’t think we could have done it differently to the way we did, but it definitely made book two more difficult to write than book three, which we’re working on now. Book three has had six months to germinate, and as a result it’s a better, cleaner story. We think it will be easier to write too.

The writing itself comes with its own challenges. Keeping track of names, remembering who did what, and trying to give backstory in books two and three without dragging the story down, all the while remaining true to the characters and how they behaved in the earlier books.

But that’s for another post. But first, we have to talk about the series story arc.

We finished revising a major draft of LINESMAN Book 2 recently.

There’s a lot more work to do on it, but this version is essentially complete. We’re at the stage where we’d normally put the book aside while we write the first draft of the next book.

Except this time we don’t have time to do that, because the book is to be delivered on the 1st May. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to write the next book, because we’re starting on that today. It does mean we won’t get Book 3 finished before we have to go back to Book 2.

We’ll give it a month if we can.

But we also did what any sensible writer would do in the meantime, and sent it off to our agent for her to have a look at. (She offered.) Then last night at dinner we sat down over a glass of red wine and talked about the problems we thought she would come back with.

It’s an early draft. We wouldn’t normally show it to anyone yet, but there was something cathartic about sending it away. Just like that, relaxing and talking it over, we were free to analyse the issues we knew were there but hadn’t been able to fix.

We even came up with solutions to two major scenes that had been bugging us for a while. Good solutions. We were tempted to recall the email, rewrite and resend, but that may have been the wine talking.

Getting deeply into the story like this. It’s between you and your co-author, and it’s one of the best parts about writing.

We’re 80% of the way through our second major draft of LINESMAN 2, which has the working title of KARI WANG, named for the secondary point-of-view character.

“What does Kari Wang look like?” I ask Sherylyn.

She thinks for a moment, before she admits, “I don’t know.”

Either do I.

Some writers would shudder to be so far into the story without having a complete view of such an important character in the book. Some writers can’t start if they don’t know what their character looks like.

Not us. We know the important things that make her who she is. Like how she insists on walking even though her legs are too weak to hold her up. That she’s a captain in a military fleet, so she stands straight (when her legs will let her). That her arms are muscled and strong, because she works out on the bars. Not so her legs, which are pale and weak, because they’ve just given her a new pair. That her body is scarred from all the operations she’s had. That she’s good at her job.

We know what uniform she wears, for she’s part of the Nova Tahiti fleet.

But as to the colour of her eyes, or the shape of her chin, or how she cuts her hair. It’s not important to the story yet. It’s not important to anyone in the story. As a result, it’s not important to us yet.

We know she is 20mm too tall to fit comfortably under the bulkheads because that’s something we need to know.

By the time we’ve worked through another couple of drafts we’ll have a good idea of what Kari Wang looks like. We may even put some of that into the book.

We may not, either.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?

I enjoyed Big Hero 6, but there was a moment in the movie—where Hiro is turning everyone into superheroes—where I went, “What, get out of my movie. You’re spoiling it.”

The first part of the movie was everything I wanted it to be. Heartwarming, with smart, entertaining characters and a good story.

And then … Hiro takes all these great characters out of the lab and turns them into common, garden-variety superheroes.

Nooo. Disney, you didn’t need to. Couldn’t they have worked out of their lab? Couldn’t they have simply used their brains instead of putting on klutzy costumes and gimmicky weapons?

I know, of course, that was the whole point of Big Hero 6. It’s a Marvel comic. They’re superheroes. This is their origin story. But still.

That same week I received a novel I’d had on pre-order for months. I’d read the initial excerpt of the book, loved both the story and the protagonist, and was looking forward to reading more. I dived in, only to discover that a quarter of the way in the book turned into a run-of-the-mill ‘lost heir will save the kingdom’ story.

Normally, I love it when an author takes a story in a direction I’m not expecting. And half-way through a story you’ll follow where the author takes you. Most times you enjoy the ride, too.

There will be some people who adore the novel I put down three-quarters read. There will be some people for whom creating the superheroes was the best part of Big Hero 6.

I think that for me, both of these stories were going well until the writers got to where they ‘had’ to be, and then the story fell apart. “Plotline says we turn them into superheroes here. Let’s do it.” Or, “My plotline says he discovers he’s the heir to the kingdom now. Make it happen.”

To be fair to both stories, I don’t think either of them were badly done. It was more that the stories were chugging along nicely, entertaining and refreshing. Then suddenly they seemed to be pulled back into the mundane.

This particular reader/viewer found it jarring.

When people hear that our book will be published under the name ‘S. K. Dunstall’ they nod, and say, “You don’t want people to know you’re women, do you.”

(Those who don’t say that say, “I didn’t know women wrote science fiction,” or, “You don’t look like science fiction writers.”  I mean, what do science fiction writers look like?)

It’s often assumed that authors using initials for their given names are trying to hide their sex. In some genres this is the case, but not necessarily in the ones you would expect.

For example, I would have expected male romance writers to use initials. In my experience, mostly they don’t. They use their own name, or an androgynous or outright female pseudonym. MM romance writers, on the other hand, do sometimes use initials. Not to hide the fact the author is a man, but to hide that the author is a woman.

Some authors use their initials as a second author name. Nora Roberts, for example, also writes as J. D. Robb.

Gut feel, I’d say that nowadays women outnumber men in the initials game.

I don’t know what proportion of authors who use initials chose to do so to obscure their sex so that their readers come to their books without bias. Some do, for sure.

I know that we didn’t.

We didn’t even think of it, in fact, until people started to ask if we had used initials because we were entering a male dominated genre and we didn’t want people to know we were women. For us it was simply a matter of common sense. There are two of us. Put our names together and it’s a mouthful. We want our name large enough to see on the cover.

So when you see an author who uses initials, don’t assume they’re always trying to hide who they are. The reason may be as simple as wanting to make their name shorter.

So Hachette and Amazon finally came to an agreement. That’s good to see.

While the dispute was on I only bought one book from Amazon, and that one had been on order before the dispute started.

Interestingly, I’ve bought more books in the last six months than I have in the last six years. Especially eBooks. The best thing about the purchases is that they’ve all been .epub versions, so I can read them on my favourite eReader, rather than on the Kindle.

A note, two weeks later:

I’ve been thinking about this. I was trying to make a stand by deliberately not buying through Amazon, but it coincided with a general downturn in my interactions with the company outside of the dispute, and it’s all about marketing and targeting to the customer. I don’t read the Amazon marketing mails any more. In fact, I nearly deleted the email telling me the book I had on pre-order had arrived because I auto-delete their mails as soon as they come through. There’s never anything in them that interests me. If I go to their website to browse I have to wade through a lot of junk before I get to something I want. Nowadays, my sole dealings with Amazon seem to be reading book reviews and first pages–and I already know the book title and author before I get there.

Browsing, to buy books on Amazon, it’s just not worth the effort.

Both Sherylyn’s and my favorite holiday is a cruise. And, of course, being writers, we enjoy conferences that teach writing. Not only that, I know for a fact that we get writing done on cruises.

So learning that the Out of Excuses 2015 writing workshop is on a cruise ship makes it very tempting.

We’d both love to do this.Thinking hard, trying to justify it.

As a writer, you learn a lot from the submission process. Reading up on how to query, finessing your letter every time you send it out. Getting to know other writers, finding out what other authors go through—first in getting an agent, and what happens after that.

In fact, early success can cause its own problems through inexperience.

Take this example.

A writer I know netted the interest of an agent on her second query. The agent told her she loved her work and was interested in representing her. They agreed to call a week later to talk about the novel.

The writer was deliriously happy for a week. Then came the phone call. According to the writer,

“She spent fifty minutes trashing my novel.”

There are two responses to that, and it depends how much querying experience you have had as to how you respond.

If you’re new to the writing/querying business then you’ll be sympathetic.

“How awful,” you might say. “You were treated so badly.”

Yet those of us who’ve been querying a while will be thinking (and trying to say, but more tactfully),

“Do you realise what that means? You had an agent who loved your work. She agreed to take you on. She spent fifty minutes on the phone talking about ways to improve your book. Fifty minutes! And you’re insulted.”

Because in that time we’ve spent querying, we’ve haunted the internet, talked with other writers, read about agents, polished up on our queries, polished up our manuscript, and we’ve learned some things we didn’t know when we started out.

Somewhere along the way we come to understand that our book isn’t perfect. That getting the agent is only the first step to getting our novel published. That the agent will want us to fix things before he/she sends it out on submission. The editor will want changes too.

If my writer-friend had been submitting longer, she might have understood this. Instead, she was still too new to the process.

As you can imagine, she promptly parted ways with her agent. Two years on she is still bitter about the whole trad-pub thing and has adopted indie publishing with fervour.

I’m not sure if she’ll ever realise it was her own inexperience that set her along that path.