Category: Writing process

I’m sitting on the train, on my way to work, editing one of our own stories, when I get to a sad part. I start to blink, and then sniff. My eyes are watering, my nose is running and I don’t have a tissue to hand. Then, as the train stops at the next station, out of the corner of my eye I see one of the guys from work. He gets into my carriage.

What do I do?

Normally I’d say hi and we’d sit and talk for the rest of the journey.

I pretend I don’t see him, engrossed as I am in whatever I’m ‘looking at’ on my computer. Which, by now is nowhere near the sad part. I don’t look up.

I find a tissue—at last—and wipe my eyes surreptitiously and blow my nose as I get off the train.

I lie. “Why, hello Michael. I didn’t realise you were in the same carriage,” and I blow my nose again. “My hayfever’s bad today,” I say, in an effort to explain the red eyes and runny nose

Later that night, when I finally get back to editing that part of the story, I don’t cry at all.

I don’t mind. Earlier, just for a moment, I had managed to invoke in a reader the emotions we were trying for when we wrote that piece.

There’s a noticeable pattern to our first drafts.

For a 100,000 word novel the first draft usually comes in at around 80,000 words.

What happens in the first 50,000 words generally remains the first half of the book in the final version, even if it doesn’t happen the same way or in the same order. The last 30,000 words are the second half of the book. We race through this, leaving lots to fill in. But it ends up mostly as fill-in, not rearranging.

This first draft is missing lots of detail from the back end, but it’s also got no colour. It’s mostly a ‘this happened then that happened’ telling of events, with occasional flashes of in-depth colour and point-of-view. For example:

Siavash the demon looked around the long library filled with books, at the fire burning hot and green at one end of it, at his worktable with its neatly ordered crucibles and rare minerals.

The library had taken fourteen centuries to collect. In it he had records of the history of every major civilisation that had risen over that time. Most of them were gone now. Even other demons envied his library.

He looked at the neatly labelled bottles on his workbench. The rare minerals had taken almost as long to collect.

Siavash should have been content. Instead he paced the shelves, picking up scrolls and vellum at random, putting them down again unread. He set out the makings of a rare, intricate spell that would take two years to build, then swept the ingredients together into a heap and tossed them into the hearth.

This excerpt is from Wizard, an experimental project we’re writing in our spare time. (By spare time I mean writing downtime, when we’re stuck on our current story and need a break from it.) It’s pretty boring, isn’t it. It’s pure telling. Description only.

So we add some description, more storyline, and some thoughts. For example, this part of Wizard becomes:

The tiny rock fiend spat pieces of gravel out with his words—which was normal, because he was a rock fiend, after all—but he spat them all the way to Siavash, twice as far as he generally did.

Not to mention he would never dream of spraying Siavash with gravel under normal circumstances. Siavash endured the spray and tried to work out what the little creature was saying.

“No more eating rock.”

“Are you saying you refuse to eat any more rock for me?” The rock fiend had indentured to Siavash for 200 years. Only 45 of those years had passed.

“No more.”

“You’ve another 155 years of your contract to go.”

“I know.” The last was a wail, followed by something that sounded suspiciously like, “How will I feed my family?”

If he didn’t break his contract he’d be able to feed his family perfectly well for the next 155 years. If he did break his contract Siavash would see to it that no-one indentured the little fiend ever again. His family would starve.

“I fail to see—”

The fire blazed up green and hot from the end of the long room. “He’s trying to tell you, Demon-for-brains. He’s run out of rock to chew.”

Continue reading “Analysis of a first draft”

What’s wrong with this?

The tub and hot water Brianna had paid an extra copper for arrived promptly. Gods be praised. She couldn’t wait to be clean. She stripped quickly, dropping her filthy tunic on the floor in her eagerness to get to the water.

Afterwards, she lay back in the tub and washed her hair. It floated like a halo around her face, the blonde reddened by the dust of three weeks on the road that now coloured the water.

So what’s wrong with it?  Apart from being a rather ordinary tale of a traveller in a fantasy novel, that is.

Have you ever bathed in a tub of water?

Tubs of the type an innkeeper might carry up to a room aren’t that large. They don’t even contain a lot of water. Sure, you can bathe in them, but the usual way you do it is as follows:

• You soap yourself down first
• Then you get into the tub
• You can’t sit with your legs out straight. You have to pull your knees up. All the way up to your chin if you’re one of those long-legged, muscular heroes that authors (like me) love to write about.
• You wash the soap off.

Washing your hair?

Not by laying down in the tub, that’s for sure.

If you’re small, and the tub’s big enough, maybe you could scoop some water to pour over your head. It’s not going to be a good wash.

More likely you’ll do it out of the tub. Use the pitcher to scoop up some water, lean over the tub and pour the water over your head. You could dunk your head in the tub if you like, and let the hair float around you then.

But you’d have to be a contortionist to lay back in the tub and wash your hair at the same time.

Building worlds in science fiction and fantasy is immensely satisfying. Yet sometimes it’s the little things that we take for granted in our own time that trip us up. Those of us who write fantasy know nowadays that we can’t gallop our horse for days on end. We know how impractical stews are to cook on the trail.

Our characters, too, don’t normally think of everyday ablutions unless something is different. As an author you can’t draw attention to the things a character wouldn’t think about. For example:

Brianna soaped herself down quickly, and stepped into the tub. She was so tall and lanky her knees came up to her chin. Gods but she hated these tiny tubs.

gets the message across, but it doesn’t work for me. Not unless she bathes elsewhere most of the time and we’ve already established that.

Brianna stepped into the tub, wincing as she put her full weight on the injured leg. She stopped. She couldn’t bend her knee, and the tub was too small to lower herself into it one-legged.

She was damned if a twisted knee would stop her getting clean. She raised her voice. “Trantor.” Trantor was the strongest of her team, even if he wasn’t the largest.

The deep laughter outside the room stopped.

“Get in here.” She grabbed at the side of the tub as her leg threatened to give way. “I need some help.”

Works better, and it has the added advantage of moving the story forward too.

Microsoft and their ‘cloud’ have managed to overwrite my work with old files two days this week.

Not happy, Jan.

It’s like the Longfellow poem. When it’s good it’s very good indeed, but when it’s bad it’s horrid.

When it works Sherylyn and I can work on the same document at the same time and it’s very nice. But if you open the wrong document first, or fail to save in the right order, or you are connected to the internet on one PC and not the other (or the stars aren’t aligned, or maybe your karma is bad, or maybe the computer has no idea) you’re stuffed.

Like I said, not happy.

Update 24 November:
Thank you, Richard Gailey, from TechFleece – How to recover deleted or overwritten files or folders in your skydrive account.

You saved my sanity, and a lot of work.

Lately it seems I’ve come across more and more people who love science fiction, yet their total exposure to the genre is through film and television. They’ve watched every episode of Star Trek, seen more Star Wars movies than I have, they’ve seen Farscape, and Torchwood and Firefly. (Every single one of them adores Firefly.)

They have never read a science fiction novel that wasn’t a spinoff from a television series or a movie or a computer game.

These people love science fiction as much as I do, and most of them are far more fanatical. They go to conventions, they join forums to talk about their favourite shows/characters, and they meet up with fellow aficionados. Some of them are even writing novels. Good novels.

I just wish there was a way to steer them toward science fiction books. There are some stories out there they’d love.

I wouldn’t steer them toward the grand masters from the golden age of science fiction. They were good for their time, but that time isn’t now. I’d start them with what they’re enjoying at the moment. Light military science fiction. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, Tanya Huff’s Confederation series, maybe even Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. Then I’d go on to some of the more modern day classics. Some early Connie Willis. Finally I’d move on to some of the more thought-provoking or deeper science stories. Vernor Vinge, Paolo Bacagalupi, Elizabeth Bear and others.

Except, no matter how much I coax, I can’t convince these fans to read them.

Fantasy doesn’t seem to have the same problem

People who are introduced to fantasy via the movies, however, often graduate to other books.

I wonder if this is because a lot of fantasy you get on television and film comes from books anyway. The three most obvious being Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire.

Many fantasy readers start off with the movies, graduate to the books and before you know it they’re waxing lyrical about Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie.

Don’t jump in at the deep end

Unlike fantasy, science fiction created new stories for the new media. There are a few standouts that came the other way, like BladeRunner, but I’m generalising here. And let’s be honest, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the story that spawned Bladerunner) is probably not the first story you would give someone to introduce them to science fiction as a novel. You need to ease into it gently.

Easing into it is important. Not everyone wants heavy science in their fiction, at least, not at first. If you ask the people who have been introduced to sci-fi through media-related material what they like about it, I’m sure that most of them would say the characters, the action and the humour.

They need stories with those same characteristics.

There are dozens of stories just like that in novels that these fans would love.

If only they would read them.

To all of you who plan on doing NaNoWriMo this year. Have fun, and may your words flow fast.

One month to GenreCon 2013. We both had such a good time last year we’re going back. We even blogged about it (here and here).

The things that stay in my mind twelve months later aren’t the things we blogged about. What I remember now are the little things, like the young waiter serving drinks the night of the cocktail party who asked, “Are all these people published writers?”

“Some of them are,” we told him. “Some of us aren’t yet, but we want to be.”

Seriously, that young kid wouldn’t have taken much encouragement to become a writer himself. (Sherylyn planned to blog about incidents like this before we go this time, but she’s busy, busy, busy doing tax. Never get in the way of a lady doing her tax return, especially not when she’s helping me fill out mine as well.)

Like I say, we’re both going back. It was lots of fun, and we met lots of interesting people all interested in the same things we’re interested in. What more can you ask?

If you’re going, we’ll see you there.

Rossi, Rossi, Rossi. What are you doing to us? You’re taking over our story.

It’s not your story.

It’s Acquard’s story. And Tommy’s story. Plus a couple of side tales about Professor Gryffdd Tan and your old boss, Leo Rickenback. You remember Rickenback, don’t you? The man who sold your contract to the enemy. You hate him. At least, you’re supposed to. And he did reputedly try to poison you, even if you yourself said he wouldn’t have the balls to do it.

I repeat. It’s not your story.

So what are you doing taking over?

It’s not even the first time you’ve tried it. You did it before, in our first book in this series.

I’ve got news for you. No-one liked you. They skipped over your parts. We kept chopping you down, again and again. In the last edit we took out nearly 10,000 of your words. By the end of that rewrite you were just a shadow of your former self.

Now you’re doing it again.

We have already chopped out 20,000 of your words in this novel, and I can see another 20,000 going, maybe more.

I say again. This is not your story.

Let me tell you some facts.

You’re arrogant and opinionated. You’re the master of the verbal put-down. You’re politically ambitious and don’t care who you trample on your way to the top. You have an extremely high opinion of yourself and your abilities. In short, you are not someone we want to spend a whole book with. And let’s be honest, you’re so full of yourself you really have nothing to say. You’re only in this book because Acquard needs a linesman and you’re the only one around.

I don’t know how you manage to weasel your way into where the action is, but you’re always there.

We definitely don’t want to hear about it from your point-of-view.

Sorry Rossi. But you’re going. Again.

Microsoft, I’m a little disappointed that you seem to have forsaken your prime customers to chase the fickle home consumer dollar and the cloud. Do you think so little of your corporate and power users that you’re ready to dump them to chase the great consumer god Apple? Or do you take us so much for granted that you assume we will fall in line just because we have to?

I have an iPad.  I love my iPad.  I use it for reading books, playing word games and occasionally to surf the internet. I don’t use it for real work, because it makes hard work of work.

When I use the main computer I always have a number of programs open—SQL Server, Dreamweaver and a browser for work, and Word and OneNote for writing. Plus of course staples like Outlook for mail. I switch between them. When I am writing, for example, every time I introduce a new character in my work in progress I hop over to OneNote and add that character, which is a lot better than going through the story at the end and trying to work out who’s who.

Imagine if I had to do that on the iPad. I’m writing in the word processor, come up with a new name, click the button at the bottom of the iPad, open OneNote (or an equivalent), tap out the details, close the app, open the word processor app again, open the file and continue typing.

It makes hard work out of a one click task I can do in Windows.

Which is great, until Windows 8 comes along and assumes that you want that iPad/Android experience. John Scalzi says it a lot better than I could.

No Microsoft. We don’t want Windows without windows. If we wanted that we would use our iPad or our Android tablet.

I second the commenter in the post who said, “An incomprehensible design decision.”

Karen and I went to GenreCon, a genre writers’ conference held in Parramatta. Karen has blogged about her experiences, I am adding my two cents worth.

GenreCon 2012. Where romance met horror, space crossed with crime, and fantasy and paranormal danced together. From the first drink on Friday 2nd of November to the last fun-filled debate between the plotters and the pantsers on Sunday afternoon two days later. Where brinklies—those almost there—met with published authors—those who are there—agents, editors and everyone in between.

The program was full. No free time and too many sessions to choose from. I wanted to go to all the workshops and talks but had to choose one of three each time. Lucky there were two of us so while Karen went to one session, I went to another.

Two workshops I attended were Writing Popular Fiction with Helene Young and Getting Your Characters Moving with Karen Miller. These were informative, reinforcing what we already worked with. Good information given by successful writers.

The panels were great as well. The repartee between the panellists livened up the sessions. I particularly enjoyed After the First Draft with Jodi Cleghorn, Sarah JH Fletcher and Bernadette Foley, chaired by Irina Dunn.

The Pistols and Parasols themed banquet on Saturday night was fun and we were with a great table of people. I wasn’t one of the those who partied on afterwards. I hear the normals—racegoers in this instance—and convention goers clashed as to who had rights to the bar. The normals lost.

For me, the highlight of the conference was Ginger Clark talking about The Future of Agenting and I thanked the god of writers out there that we have our own wonderful, uber agent, Caitlin. I think she deserves every cent she earns from her clients. She is more than welcome to her job. I’ll stick to writing, thank you.

But I can’t finish without mentioning the great debate. All debaters—Kim Wilkins, LA Larkin, Narelle Harris, Anna Campbell, Lisa Heidke and Daniel O’Malley—put on a great show for us all. What I got from the debate, apart from a lot of laughs? Plotters know what they are doing and are much more organized, but the magic, unexpected moments come from the pantsers. Let’s hope I have a bit of both in me.

Thank you Meg Vann, Peter Ball and all the ninja’s, plus anyone I should have mentioned but didn’t. A great job. I am looking forward to GenreCon 2013.