Categories
On writing

Do we remove sense of place when we change our novels to match the audience reading them?

It seems that everywhere I’ve been on the web lately people are talking about how a strong sense of place can act as another character in your story, or really make a story more enjoyable.

Around the same time, I seemed to read a lot about how if you want to sell to the US market then you have to ‘Americanise’ your story. In particular, how the first Harry Potter was Americanised (or should that be Americanized) for the US market, while the later stories were changed less.

Some of the changes include:

English US
Philosopher’s stone Sorceror’s stone
Car park Parking lot
Sherbet lemon Lemon drop
Toilet Bathroom
Mum Mom
Dear Harry, (it said in a very untidy scrawl) I know you get Friday afternoons off Dear Harry, I know you get Friday afternoons off,
[written in a handwriting font]

 

Differences in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Harry Potter Lexicon

The changes were minor. Some people who read both version said they didn’t notice the differences.

I can’t say. I haven’t read the US versions of the book. I don’t know how much they changed the sense of place, but to me books that use ‘Mom’ and ‘bathroom’ give me a totally different sense of place to one that uses ‘Mum’ and ‘toilet’.

I know that these are only words to talk about, respectively, a parent and a room in which to perform ablutions. You can argue that this is nothing like the sense of place you get from, say, Carl Hiaasen’s stories about Florida.

You get a stronger sense of place from Hiaasen, but that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter doesn’t also have one. I believe it just means that Hogwarts is more familiar to you. Despite the fact that it’s a fantasy, it’s set in a school environment most readers are familiar with, even if they have never been to boarding school.

Yes, some stories bring place to the forefront and make it a character in the story. Other stories concentrate on the emotional development of the (other) characters and the place could be anywhere.

Even so, if you have written your story well the sense of place will permeate it. It’s there in everything the characters say, what they eat, where they go. And sometimes in what they do as well.

It’s also the differences between life as you know it and life in the book that evoke a sense of place. If you have lived all your life in the city, then a well-written book about life in a dying country town will seem exotic to you and give you a stronger sense of place than one set in a big city. If you are not French then a story set in France will be exotic. Or it should be, if it’s written properly.

It’s the little things that make a difference. Calling your mother Mom or Mum or even Mama.

That’s why I think the trend to Americanise books for the US audience is a sad thing. It takes away some of the strength the book gets from its setting; the thing that makes a particular book what it is.

Most of the time you don’t even need to change it in the first place. Let’s go back to Harry Potter. In the Philosopher’s Stone they changed nearly fifty words to suit their US audience. In Deathly Hallows they changed two words—cot and dresser.

Categories
On writing

Writing the alpha male

Writing the alpha male

Part two of a series on the alpha male, and how writers can get it wrong.  In part 1 I talked about how the alpha male behaves.  In this post I want to talk about how bad it can be when you get it wrong.

Last night I purchased a self-published book from Amazon. The premise was interesting, and even though the preview was a little choppy the price was right and I liked the idea enough to download it anyway.

The book was so bad I ended up deleting it from my Kindle. It’s sitting in my archived items now, and if I could get rid of it altogether I would.

What made it so bad?

The love interest in the story was truly repulsive. The author had tried to write someone strong and protective. Instead she gave us a domineering, arrogant tyrant who had no respect for the other characters at all.

Worse, I could see from the way she wrote that she thought she was giving us an alpha male.

If you haven’t already done so, read Angela Knight’s The Care and Writing of Alpha Males. As well as being an excellent article all round, she makes some valid points about the alpha males of old who were actually the villains of the story, even when they were the hero.

That’s what the author of the story I read last night had created. A villain, even though she didn’t realise it.

It was as if she had taken a list of alpha qualities that and checked them off.

  • Alpha male is decisive. So, alpha male must make the decisions. Always. Even if the love interest has already made a sensible decision. Alpha overrides it with a stupider one of his own because it’s his decision and he decides.
  • Alpha male protects. Love interest is hospitalised with what turns out to be a stress-related ulcer. Afterwards, alpha won’t let love interest do anything (and I mean anything) because she’s just come out of hospital. Even though love interest has had ulcer for months (see money problems, below) and has been doing fine without alpha’s help all this time.
  • Alpha male is rich. The love interest has money problems. Alpha male, naturally, throws money around to solve it. This is a deus ex machina for me, anyway. Don’t we all wish someone rich would come along and save us? But it wasn’t so much the doing it, as how he did it. You have to read to book to see how repulsively it was done. All I can say is if someone walked out on me four years ago, left me to run a business on my own and then came back four years later when I had practically bankrupted the business paying his grandfather’s medical bills and then takes the business out of my hands and runs it himself because he has ‘saved’ it by paying off the debts, I’m not going to stand by meekly and say, “Thank you,” like the love interest did.

Worst of all was the way the character didn’t run true to himself. He had all the characteristics of the alpha male but nothing to bind it together, and without anything to bind it, his behaviour was simply obnoxious, overbearing and totally unjustified.  Not to mention erratic, because it didn’t gel with his behaviour outside these ‘alpha’ scenes.

I mentioned at the start that the book was self-published.  I think that if it had been through a proper editing process, or even a better critiqing process, many of these problems would have disappeared before it went up.

I know from my own experience that when you write you cannot always see how bad a character comes across to other readers.  The trouble with the alpha male is that they’re difficult to write anyway because you do have to tread that

… fine line between confidence and arrogance, protectiveness and condescension.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

And to quote Angela Knight again

…no character can make you slam a book against a wall quicker than an alpha male gone bad.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

Categories
Writing process

The alpha male in action

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.

Categories
Talking about things

Cruising to a novel

I have always wanted to travel the world by cruise ship.  Stopping at various places as I go, spending a bit of time in whatever county we end up in, then jumping on to another cruise and moving along to the next country.

In my dreams of course I’d be writing full time by then.  With my laptop and the internet I could write from anywhere in the world.

Obviously, reality intrudes a little and for the moment I need my day job to pay the mortgage.  But I recently took a cruise and one of my aims for the trip was to find out how practical it would be to actually write onboard.

First, some notes about the cruise.  It was 17 nights, which by cruise standards is quite long and four of us shared a cabin.  I have done cruises in a twin cabin before, so I’ll use that experience as well.

Finding room to write

The ship we were on was a relatively small ship and from my experience of other cruises, quite crowded.

At the start it was hard to bring out my laptop.  There was lots to do and I felt embarrassed taking the computer out in public.  Worse, everyone was so friendly, always prepared to talk, and all I wanted to do was sit hunched over a PC.

The best places to write were the tables in the casual food areas.  The view was perfect, the tables were a good height and the chairs were ideal.  Unfortunately, these tables were used for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes afternoon tea as well.  Seats were at a premium.

It occasionally got quiet.  Like between 4 and 5 pm in the afternoon, and after 9pm at night.

It would have been perfect to work in the ship’s library.  They had nice seats at the tables, with some well positioned to watch the sea while you typed.  Unfortunately, if you didn’t arrive right on opening time then your chances of getting a seat were about the same as your chances of winning the lottery, and you’d probably have a better chance of winning the lottery.

Had I been travelling on my own, or with just one other person I could have written in the cabin .  There was a desk/dressing table in the cabin and it had a good chair.  However, with four of us the desk was always covered as it was the only flat surface.  Not to mention the constant traffic of people trying to get past, and the distraction of other people in the room.

Not only that, the cabin we booked had a lovely big window but if I was sitting at the desk I couldn’t see out the window, which was a waste, given that we were on a cruise.

So I tried for the bars.  There were a few, and some were better than others.  Not to mention that there was always some activity on, or about to go on, in most of them.  Even so, I managed quite well by bar hopping my way around the ship and got to sit by lots of windows staring out at sea.

It’s a lovely ambience for novel writing.

Power

There was one power point in the cabin.  Between the four of us we had two computers, two iPads and four mobile phones.  That power point was in constant use. Sometimes my computer couldn’t be charged immediately.

Finding time to write

I got a lot of writing done on the days at sea, nothing on the days we were in port. After all, if you’re in a new place are you going to sit around writing your novel or are you going to explore?  Me, I’m going to explore.  That’s one of the joys of cruising, going to new places in comfort.

I did most of my writing during the day, going to dinner, bars (to drink this time) and shows in the evening.  I couldn’t write in the cabin at night, because when you’re sharing with others you can’t.

Thus, if you want to write on your cruise, pick one with lots of days at sea.

Health issues

Most bars aren’t ergonomic.  I spent my writing days on low seats with my netbook on my lap.  I’d do this for hours at a time.  Some days when I got up my back was agony.  I learned soon enough to get up and move around and stretch occasionally.  This is basic common sense for any writer, but it’s easy to forget when you’re on a cruise.

Cruises and food go together.  The food is plentiful and for the first few days of any cruise you eat way too much, and often foods that you wouldn’t normally touch. For example, I hardly ever eat dessert at home, but I ate it every day on the cruise.  All this food, plus alcohol, combined with sitting around typing for a lot of the day, can be disastrous to your waistline.

In summary

I would do it differently next time.

First, no more than two of us in the cabin.  Four people in one cabin doesn’t give you any cabin writing time at all.

If I could afford it, I’d get a balcony.  It was beautiful sitting, writing, watching the ocean.  Imagine how much better it would be if you could do that on your own balcony, and on cold days looking through a floor-to-ceiling window to the same.

I would exercise more and eat less.  These are things you don’t have to be on a cruise to think about. Writing is sedentary.  You have to keep moving to keep fit.  Don’t wait for a cruise to do this. Do it now.

I didn’t get as much writing done as I hoped, but by the end of the cruise I had a good schedule going.  By the end I was up to 2,000 words a day, even if I didn’t take part in many ship activities.  I proved I could do it.  Not only that, the sea and the travel and some of the people I met helped add character to my story.

I will definitely do it again.

Categories
On writing

Comparing three local writing organisations

I am a member of three writing organisations*.

  • The Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC) (www.vwc.org.au)
  • Queensland Writers Centre (QWC) (www.qwc.asn.au)
  • Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) (www.romanceaustralia.com)

I’ve been away on holiday. In the mail when I arrived home were the August newsletters for each group as well as emails from VWC and QWC in my email inbox. It was interesting to read one after the other and to compare the three organisations.

I am, unashamedly, a genre writer, and this bias shows. When the various writing organisations ask for feedback, the first thing I say is ‘more genre, please’.

Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC)

The VWC is, in my opinion, the most literary of the three. It has become even more so since they moved to the Wheeler Centre and Roderick Poole became director. I’m not sure if this is a deliberate direction Roderick is taking them, or if I am just noticing it more since the redesign of the website and the magazine. They’re big into poetry, literary writers and into writing festivals (not all literary I might add).

Queensland Writers Centre (QWC)

To me, QWC strikes a better balance between genre and literary. In the August issues both magazines talked about local writing conferences and poetry, but the QWC also had an article on the Australian crime scene and another on writing historical romance.

Both magazines cover a good range of workshops, writing opportunities and competitions.

Romance Writers of Australia Inc. (RWA)

Now we’re really talking genre. While Hearts Talk is nowhere near as polished as The Victorian Writer or WQ, this is the magazine I read from cover to cover. This is industry-specific news and networking. This is the sort of information a genre writer needs to keep them enthusiastic. And I am not even primarily a romance writer but a science fiction/fantasy writer who adds romantic elements.

The August magazine contained an article on creating characters, a note on the response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s criticism of young adult literature being too dark plus Lynne Wilding award nominees for the RWA volunteer of the year, as well as member news and releases.

Obviously, for me, the RWA provides more value for money than either of the state-based writing groups.

I first decided to join RWA after talking to a fellow speculative fiction writer at a VWC workshop. She wrote fantasy, I was writing science fiction at the time. And I think that probably says it all. To the VWC, ‘speculative fiction’ is one small (and sometimes it seems to me, unimportant) type of writing, while RWA is genre-based enough to recognise the different genres within, while always with a view to the romance genre, of course.

Different types of writers will find different writing groups more valuable than others. For me, as a genre writer, the best value for money is in my RWA membership, even though I don’t actually write romance per se. If I wrote, say, literary fiction or even mainstream fiction, I imagine I would get more value out of my VWC membership.

If you can afford it, I think that you should become a member of your state writing organisation. If nothing else, it keeps you in touch with other writers and what is going on in the writing world.

On top of that, join any genre organisation that is suitable.

* I am also a member of the Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (ASFFA) (http://www.asffwa.com/). I can’t speak for them, as I haven’t really had much contact with them.

Categories
On writing

The smirk-factor as sign of how amateur your book is

Amateurs smirk, professionals don’t.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when characters smirk in a story it always makes the story seem just that little bit more amateur. One character, one smirk, is bad enough. But when all the characters start to smirk, one after the other, oh boy.

I’ve been reading a lot of two and three dollar eBooks lately. Some are great stories, others so-so, and some are downright bad.

It’s purely subjective, but for me one of the indicators of how good a story will be is the number of times characters smirk. One smirk is acceptable, but two or more close together early in the book, especially when it’s different characters doing the smirking, usually denotes a book that needed a lot more editing before it went to press. Or, to put it bluntly, self-published books.

When I read about characters smirking in a novel it’s often in a romantic part, where one character smirks to the other just as they’re about to get down and do it. What the writer usually means is that the character is feeling pretty pleased with themselves about something, that they are smiling in a self-satisfied manner.

Except to me, this is not what smirk means.

The Free Dictionary defines a smirk as:

To smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner

Dictionary.com as:

to smile in an affected, smug, or offensively familiar way

Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:

a smile that expresses satisfaction or pleasure about having done something or knowing something which is not known by someone else

Reverso:

a smile expressing scorn, smugness, etc., rather than pleasure

The origin of the word, according to most of the sites cited above, is from the Old English smearcian, related to smer derision; and the Old High German bismer contempt, bismeron to scorn.

It’s not the sort of smile you’re about to give to the man or woman you are having a romantic moment with. Not unless you’re raping or blackmailing them.

Even worse is when the characters always smirk. I mean, how often do you smirk? How many of your friends smirk all the time? I recently read a novel where there were six smirks on the one page, shared amongst two people.

It was Mark Twain who said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug. Smirking is like that. Oftentimes when it’s used, it’s not quite the right word. It always takes me out of a story. And I’m sorry to all you smirkers out there, but most times it makes the writing feel a lot more amateur.

Categories
Talking about things

Amazon bought The Book Depository

So Amazon bought The Book Depository.

That’s business, I suppose, but it wasn’t something I ever wanted to hear.  As Chris Zappone said in the Sydney Morning Herald, online book retailing is about to get a little less competitive.

Categories
Talking about things

How to discover new books

Finding books is hard

When I look at books I like on sites like Amazon nowadays there’s one extra place I always look. The ‘who bought this item also bought’. When I find a book in the list that looks interesting, I read the excerpt, if there is one, then I read the reader’s reviews.

This is where I find a lot of new books nowadays.

Another place I find new books is Suvudu’s Del Rey Spectra 50 Page Fridays.

And of course, there are still the recommendations from my reading friends of books they read and liked.

Even so, as Michael Shatzkin, of the Shatzkin Files says, one problem not really solved yet with eBooks is the ability to find books you want to read.

But the merchandising … leaves a lot to be desired. My shopping experiences are actually a bit of a random walk. I ask my ebook retailer to show me books by category and … I tend to see the same books over and over again, far too many of which I have already read …

Michael Shatzkin, Merchandising ebooks is a problem not really solved yet

The big bookstores aren’t much use

It’s a dilemma, and for me the difficulty of finding new authors hasn’t just started with the eBook revolution. I never used the major bookstores like Borders to find new authors. I only ever used them to buy books.

Why?

Because they only carry the bestsellers and new books. I don’t always want the bestsellers, and I don’t always hear about books when they’re new. When I hear about them they may be six, twelve months old—after my friends have recommended them, or I read a review somewhere.  By then they’re often out of stock at the big chains.

Back in the days when bookshops were more prolific, there were two local science fiction/fantasy shops I frequented all the time. The salespeople in those shops knew their books and they would happily recommend authors or novels based on what you were buying. One thing I really look forward to is the return of these specialist bookstores—which I think is coming, now that the big chains all seem to be going broke.

Online booksellers—both electronic and paper—have improved matters, only they’re doing it in a typical Web 2.0 fashion, putting the onus back onto users to make the recommendations rather than doing it themselves.

Reader reviews

I like reader reviews. I like the ratings they put on books.

They’re different to the reviews you read in a major newspaper’s weekend section or a magazine for two reasons.

Paid reviewers have no real choice in what they read. Well, they do have some choice, but they still need to review the major releases, even if they don’t like them, sometimes even if they don’t read in that genre. So right from the start, they’re reading a book they would not normally read as a reader.

I also find that they’re a lot like film critics in that they review so many books they’re often looking for something different. Anything new, fresh or innovative rates highly with them—even if it doesn’t suit the genre or the story.

But readers, they’re reading books in their genre. They’re reading books they chose to read. When they write a review they’re starting from the same place I am. When they give a book five stars I pay a lot more attention to it that I do to the five stars a professional critic gives it because it means that someone like me read the book and liked it.

I pay a lot of attention to one-star reviews as well, incidentally. You will often find readers give a book one star because of a subject matter that is taboo to them. A book with mostly five-star reviews and some one-star reviews is often a very good book. Read the reviews to find out.

Book sites on the web

Of the booksellers I look at regularly I find that:

  • Amazon has an excellent review system. Most of us know it already and use it
  • Fictionwise has ratings, but no capacity for comments
  • The Book Depository has capability for reviews and ratings but in my experience I find few books that I buy have been reviewed by users
  • iTunes also has capability for ratings. I haven’t used the Apple store much as they still don’t have many of the books I want—or maybe I just can’t find them—but based on the other items they sell I expect these reviews will eventually come to rival Amazon’s.

But you don’t have to just stick with the bookstores. There are specialist sites where you can record what books you are reading, keep a record of everything you have in your library, write reviews and see what other people who like the same books you do read and recommend. Some of the big ones are:

We’ve still got some way to go, but it’s getting easier to find books. Much easier than it was back in the day when the big bookstore chains were all we had. It can only be good for books.

Categories
Writing process

Writing love scenes: it’s not easy

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.

Categories
Talking about things

Apple finally has books as a separate option on iTunes

Hooray.  And it’s even in Australia.

Now I have to decide if I want to buy from Apple or boycott them.  Territorial rights and digital rights management are the bane of my life.  There are so many eBooks I want to buy but can’t. There are so many eBooks I have bought but can only read on one reader.