Category: Writing process

As writers, most of us have characters who go off in ways that we don’t expect them to, or even characters who refuse to co-operate when we try to force them to do something that’s out of character. Sometimes we ignore that, and just force them our way anyway.

The result is usually a mess.

Last night I saw Expendables 2.

This is a movie where the actors are more important than the story. So much so that you tend to think of the characters by their actors’ names, rather than the character they are playing. Thus you have Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarznegger, Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and so on. The one exception was Liam Hemsworth, relatively unknown, who we knew by his character name, Billy the Kid.

I’m ambivalent about Expendables 2. It is a spoof. I know that. The movie is based around other characters the actors are famous for, e.g. Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, and exists solely because of those other movies. I enjoyed it, but …

I’m going to talk about specific scenes, and there are spoilers, so more after the fold.

I have spent the last month changing the sex of a major secondary character in one of my novels and rewriting parts of the story to suit.

When I started I agonised over making the changes.  But now that I’m done, and Sherylyn and I are doing the final read through over the dinner table, even I can see that it hasn’t changed the story much at all, and it has definitely made it more commercial.

I got good advice, and am glad I listened.

The first in a two-part blog on writing alpha males

In the romance and adventure genres, in particular, the alpha male is the character everyone seems to want.

The alpha male is a leader. He doesn’t follow others, others follow him. In modern novels he is confident and charismatic. He is also, often, rich. An article over at The Attraction Institute sums it up succinctly:

An Alpha Male is a guy who does what he wants, when he wants it. … [He lives] the life [he] wants, regardless of whether or not other people approve …
How to become an alpha male in two easy steps

Marc ‘Animal’ McYoung over at No Nonsense Self-Defense adds this about them:

… the thing about Alpha males, it isn’t just because you can cut them off at the knees and call them a tripod that makes them Alphas. It is that they can be TRUSTED with power.
Alpha Male in Writing, Part 2, Marc Young

So let’s look at the alpha male in action, and then in part two we’ll see how easy it is to mis-write alpha males.

The alpha male in action

The alpha male’s decisive, top-dog behaviour is there in everything he says and everything he does. Even the little things.

The following is a true story.

I take the train to work every morning. This particular morning the train door wouldn’t open. I had to go down to the next door to get on. As we went through each station I watched others try to open the same door I had, fail, and go down to the next door and enter that way.

As I sat there I studied the door to see what was blocking it. It took four stations, but finally I worked it out.

On the walls of the train we have posters—advertisements, a train map, art. These posters used to be behind glass, but nowadays they’re just printed onto an adhesive plastic and stuck onto the train wall. They stick well, but they’re also relatively easy to peel off, because the posters change on a regular basis.

Someone had carefully pulled off one of these posters and re-stuck it over the sliding door, so that the door wouldn’t open.

Most of us just used the other door and settled into our place as we normally did.

Seven stations in Alpha Male was the man waiting to get in the door. He was immaculately dressed in a mid-grey suit, navy shirt and grey tie. He tried the door, and like everyone else couldn’t get in. He went down to the other door and got on.

Instead of leaving it there, this is where Alpha Male differed from the rest of us.

He came down to look at the door. Not only that, he had worked out what was wrong before the train even left his station. He reached across, loosened a corner, and pulled at the poster with a long, firm pull that ripped it off in one piece.

Problem solved, even as the train pulled away.

This type of see, analyse, act is inherent in every decision the alpha male does, from tiny little things like fixing a ‘broken’ door, to responding to an emergency, to making decisions at work.

As Angela Knight says,

… he knows what’s best, and he’s supremely confident in himself and his abilities. He’s protective, he’s intelligent, and sometimes he can be more than a little ruthless in the pursuit of his goals
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

However, because he is so strong, the alpha male is hard to get right.

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, protectiveness and condescension.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

More about that in the next blog.

I have found something we do worse than fight scenes.

Love scenes.

We often put romance in our stories but we’ve always tiptoed around the edges as it were. In our latest novel*, however, we needed a couple of scenes where the characters needed to go just that little bit further.

We took three days. It’s a public holiday here so it was three solid working days for two scenes. I wrote one draft, Sherylyn fixed that, then I fixed hers, and she fixed mine. Around and around for three solid days. Too much. Too little. Too crass. Too soft.

In the end we managed around 500 words for each scene, and both scenes are getting there, even if they’re not perfect yet.

But boy they were hard to write.

* Our latest work is Kidnap Me One If You Have To, also known by our working title of Edmund. We tend to use working tiles based on the name of our main character, or one of the characters integral to the story.

Because we were worried that our database may have been hacked, when I reinstated this blog I went through each post, got the text-only version, read it to ensure there were no nasty surprises hidden within, and reposted.

One of the things that was fascinating to see was how much both Sherylyn’s and my writing has changed in the five years since this post has been going.

The way we write together has changed.

Five years ago we each wrote a separate first draft, then relied on the other to tighten continuity and add colour and emotion in the second draft.

We still both do our own first draft. I don’t think that’s likely to change. Each of us has different ideas that we’re prepared to carry through a whole novel. It’s what happens afterwards that is different.

I still occasionally re-write parts of Sherylyn’s first drafts, but mostly now I tell her what is not working and she does the initial rewrite herself. As for me, I do more writing and rewriting, and I add a lot more emotion myself than I used to, but I rely more on Sherylyn to tell me whether the story is on track as I’m writing it. If she tells me I’m diverging away from the story then I’ll rewrite it as part of that initial draft.

What it means for both of us is that we have effectively cut out the second draft altogether, incorporating much of it into the first. It’s made for speedier writing, although it still takes six months to get that first draft down. It has also made for better writing.

One piece of advice often given to writers to improve your writing is to ‘read your novel aloud’. I have tried this in the past and not found it much use. I always read what I expected to read, not what was actually on paper. Not only that, I don’t have much of an ear, so I can’t hear rhythms when I speak anyway. I even tried taping myself. That turned out to be a lot of effort for little return.

Then we started reading Sherylyn’s latest work aloud over dinner.

Let me tell you, reading your novel aloud does help you improve it. But you need two people, and you both have to read the same sections.

One reads it first and the other listens. Then the second person reads it while the first reader listens. It’s amazing how much you can improve a story.

Some other tips.

• Don’t read for too long. We find that after around 10-15 pages we’re not as careful about the editing. After that you need to take a break and come back to it
• If possible, both of you see the manuscript. Having two working copies makes for two sets of edits, but if the person listening can see what the other person is reading they see what words the reader skips. As I said, sometimes you read what you want to read, not what is actually on the page. Those words the reader skips usually don’t need to be in there anyway.

It’s hard work. A 100,000 word novel comes out to around 250 pages. At 10 pages a night, you have 25 intensive nights ahead of you.

I say it’s worth it.

I’m a little depressed today. I’ve a cold coming on, a really bad headache and it the whole ‘not working well’ attitude seems to have crept into my writing as well.

My NaNoWriMo novel from last year, which has been progressing so well, is close to completion. I have two scenes to go. The final wind-down scene, plus one other scene that I left out of the original story because trying to write it had stopped me for two weeks. I finally added a note to say do that scene later, outlined what was to happen, and moved on. I haven’t stopped writing since.

So the story is nearly finished. When I’m done it will be 85,000 words, and it’s nice to know that the first draft is done. Six months to write a novel. I worked pretty hard on the novel for all that time, too.

Then I look back and remember that I wrote 50,000 of those words in the first month.

I can’t do a 50,000 word novel every month. I’d be surprised if anyone working full-time can. Not if they want some modicum of life, that is. Right now I can’t even manage 10,000 words, and that’s only one draft. Over the last six months I haven’t taken time to revise any earlier novels. There are two of them sitting waiting for second or third draft revisions. And as for Barrain, I haven’t touched it for even longer.

I should be over the moon. I finished a novel.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back the euphoria.

I have just finished critiquing a fellow writer’s novel. It was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it a lot. But, it was a critique and so I after I commented on the good things, I concentrated on what didn’t work. The main problems with the story were easy to pick. Too much information was conveyed through dialogue. The book changed part-way through, as if the author had finally realised where it was going, but he hadn’t gone back and changed the start. There were some excellent emotional scenes but in other parts of the story there was no emotion at all, and it was just a straight telling of this happened, then that happened and then that.

These are all traits I recognise from my own writing.

If it’s so easy to recognise them in someone else’s story, why can’t I recognise them in my own?

Most authors will agree that time gives distance to their work. Putting a manuscript away for six months definitely shows up many flaws. Yet even so you don’t get them all. You make the novel as good as it can be, but when you get your first beta reader they still pick up a whole lot of things that you hadn’t even noticed, even if it has been months between drafts.

I do a lot of writing with a writing partner. We both work the same way. We talk about what we wish to write and what’s going to happen in the story, but only one person sits down and hammers out the first draft. After that the other writer goes through the text and finds the holes and adds all the things the initial writer left out.

It used to be that this worked brilliantly. The writer who reviewed the first draft gave the same sort of feedback that a writer from a (good) critique group did.

But, I have noticed that as we write more and more together we’re actually becoming blind to each other’s writing mistakes. We know the other person’s writing so well now that it’s getting harder and harder to pick up those mistakes first time around, or even second time around.

We’re relying more and more on other beta readers to pick them up.