S. K. Dunstall

In my latest story my character has a noise inside his head. It’s continual, and he doesn’t know what it is.

I know exactly what it sounds like. It’s the noise that you get when you sit next to someone who has their iPod up too loud and you are swamped with a white noise that’s half static, half beat, beat, beat.

I can describe it well enough using today’s terms, but my character lives in a pre-technological society. He’s never heard of static. He’s never heard of iPods. I have to describe it in natural terms.

I’d been stumped for days, but then I started writing this post and suddenly, for no reason at all, natural analogies just popped up.

For the underlying noise I might start with the sound of a seashell when you hold it up to your ear, or the wind whistling around the shutters on a stormy night. Or even the sea itself.

For the static, add the crackling of resinous logs on the fire.

And the beat? It’s a rhythm like the drums of the distant watchers, or the seasoned pounding of the butcher chopping up meat on his slab.

I’m sure I can come up with more.

The thing is, once I stopped trying to describe it and let it percolate in the background, my subconscious came up with a whole stack of ideas.

Well, we did it. NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words (in Sherylyn’s case, 60,000) of two novels that have some promise.

Both of us did it easier than we expected. It was mostly a case of bums-on-seats and don’t talk to anyone until we had finished our allocated words. Due to other commitments on the first weekend we both got behind. Sherylyn took a little over a week to catch up, and I took most of the month but, even so, it wasn’t too hard. If we were writing full-time we figure we could both manage 50,000 words a month on a first draft without any stress.

This is the first time we have ever done any real writing together that wasn’t on the same manuscript. Our writing styles turn out to be quite similar in that neither of us do much planning, we let the story take us where we want to go and let our subconscious work on it when we’re not at the keyboard. (Although I have to say my consciousness was not as sub as Sherylyn’s. I did envision scenarios more rather than just let the whole story percolate the way she did.)

Sherylyn turned out to be a much faster writer than me, which surprised both of us. I don’t know why, but we both expected me to be the one to waltz through the process with ease. It physically takes me longer to write the same amount of words.

I got one story out of it which I like a lot, although it’s nowhere near finished at 50,000 words. Sherylyn got a story which she’s busy revising now, plus she also got an idea for a second story (which I love) which she’s writing in between polishing bits of her NaNo novel.

All up, it’s been fun and tremendously productive.

November is nearly here and that means NaNoWriMo.

Write a novel in a month. 50,000 words. It’s a big job.

For the last few years work deadlines have stopped me entering NaNoWriMo. November for my company is always a busy month as major projects go live then, trying to get them out the door before everything slows down for the summer break. We spend long hours at work, working weekends and late into the night if necessary.

This year August, September and October have been hectic, but November looks to be quietening down. I may be able to fit in a novel.

I’m going to try, anyway.

Sherylyn’s going to do it too. She also starts a new job in November.

I suspect we’ll both be highly stressed and hardly have time to talk about our other works in progress, including Barrain, which is coming along fine, although this draft will not be finished before November.

And to all you other Wrimos out there—may the words come swiftly, may the plot unfold without effort and may your writing time be plentiful. Chookas.

In the first instance, we try to sell our novels to the American market.

Why would we do this when the Australian market for fantasy is so good at the moment?

The Australian market is extremely difficult to break into. I’m not saying it’s impossible—we’re still trying—but it’s a very small market. Once you have pitched to the small number of agents who accept submissions, and to the even smaller number of publishers who do, you have nothing left.

As Australian writers though, just how much should we change our work to suit the American market?

I’m not talking tone here, but the little things that are different between countries that may make an American reader go, ‘Huh?’. Or the spelling, or even the size of the paper we submit on.

In Barrain Melissa goes around to the boot of the car to get the backpack Scott takes on the hike with him.

If we pitch this story to US agents and publishers, should we make this a trunk?

What about spelling. Australian spelling favours English spelling rather than American. Colour rather than colour, grey rather than gray, and so on. Or as jeeagle-ga, one poster on the google answers site puts it, “gray is a color, grey is a colour”.

I also tend to favour ‘ise’ endings, rather than ‘ize’.

Even that paper size is a question. If I am trying to sell to a US market, how much do I damage my chances by using A4 paper?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much difference any of these things make to trying to make a sale.

We don’t bother worrying about these things when we write. Before we submit something to the US market we run it through a US spell checker, but that’s about all we do.

If I found out that the paper size really harmed our chances, I might order in some letter size paper, but haven’t done so to date.

As for words like ‘trunk’. I’d probably leave them for the agent or editor to tell us to change before we touched them.

The first in an occasional series on common writing mistakes by unpublished writers.

I’m no ‘expert’, but I do write, and I am a reader. (I am also unpublished.)

I know that we, as writers, say there is a lot of garbage out there in published book land, but that writing has been generally been polished and many of the story flaws removed. And yes, I am sure you can pick out five published books right now and show me truly bad writing, but I’m talking in general here. In general, published books aren’t bad.

There are some brilliant unpublished books out there too. I can point to three novels that I know personally that are better than many published books (and no, I don’t mean ours), and another dozen that are nearly there. But in general (again), you do find more writing problems in unpublished novels.

I read a lot of unpublished novels, and the same mistakes come up again and again.

One of these is the ‘omniscient narrator that segues into a protagonist point-of-view’ start.

It starts of something like this:

The man stood at the top of the hill. Below him the port town sparkled with the last rays of the setting sun—the fabled Port of Kings, gateway to the world of the others. Of course, the man didn’t believe it.

Jed sighed, fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

Okay, it’s bad, but you get the gist. Jed was the man at the top of the hill. The rest of the chapter is solely from his point-of-view, and probably the whole book too.

It’s particularly common in prologues, although I notice some writers start each chapter with it.

Some writers switch between omniscient narrator and third- (or first, or second) person point-of-view and it works. So why is this so bad?

The problem here is that the omniscient point-of-view is very short, usually one or two paragraphs at most, and the point-of-view switch is totally unexpected.

It also makes for a weaker start to the story.

You don’t have long to hook the reader. The sooner you can get them into your protagonist’s head the more likely they are to stay with the story.

And it doesn’t even take much to change.

Jed crested the hill and stopped. The fabled Port of Kings below spread out below him. It sparkled in the last rays of the setting sun.

Gateway to the worlds of the Others, or so they said. Jed didn’t believe it. He sighed, and fixed the pack tighter on his back and started the steep descent. If he was lucky he would reach the port before the gates closed.

It has another advantage too. Even as a writer I almost added extra detail about how he felt (gateway, pah—he was here to buy a rare coin; the descent—he was tired and cold and hungry), because I, too, was already more inside Jed’s head.

It’s an old truism that if you hold onto your clothes long enough they will come back into fashion. They might be different colours, or made in different fabrics, but they’re still basically the same style.

You wouldn’t be seen wearing the ‘new’ fashions, of course, but your kids love them.

It’s the same with books.

If I had to pick a fashion in the science fiction world at the moment I’d say steampunk. If I had to pick a fashion in the fantasy world, I’d say urban fantasy. Werewolves and vampires reign supreme, and have done for so long now that we’re ready to move on to the next big thing.

When we first came up with the idea for Potion, high fantasy was at its peak (and yes, this story has taken a long time germinating). Epic journeys, heroes, quests and discovering new powers were the order of the day. By the time we had finished it, high fantasy was well and truly on the wane.

We put the novel onto Authonomy, and the reactions fell into three broad groups:

• Traditional fantasy readers who liked the story.
  This was a small group, and sometimes the comments were tempered with, “Despite that fact that this story (has elves, is done to death, etc.) “
• Traditional fantasy readers who didn’t like the story.
  These were the people who were so over elves, journeys and bar-fights that they automatically hated it. There were quite a few more in this group.
• People who don’t traditionally read fantasy but enjoyed it anyway.

(There was also a fourth group, those people who flat out won’t read fantasy, but I’m not considering them here.)

I fall somewhere between the first and second groups. I read fantasy. Every time I pick up a fantasy novel I want it to be good, and I want it to be different. While I don’t mind a traditional fantasy, there are a lot of stories I pick up nowadays and don’t get that far into because I know the story. I’ve read it dozens of times before, in one guise or another, and I’m sick of it. It only needs one thing to keep me reading, mind you—a quirky or interesting character, something slightly new in the way the story is written, or even a new take on an old idea —but so many of these books are so similar they run together for me. That’s when I put the book down.

The second group took us to task for writing a traditional fantasy that wasn’t ‘traditional’. Our language is more modern, and faster paced than your traditional fantasy. Our writing style is fast, whereas many traditional fantasy novels are considerably slower. Even so, our story is probably as traditional as they come—swordsman and mage hire on as bodyguards on a rescue mission. There’s lots of fighting, evil enchanters, magic, and so on.

It was the third group that really interested me. Their comments were almost all along the lines of, “I don’t normally read fantasy, but I like this.”

Their feedback reminded me of an agent’s comment on a query for a fantasy novel. (I think it was on Miss Snark’s now defunct blog, in the Crapometer series.)

I read the query and thought, “No way, this story has been done to death”. The agent, however—who did not represent fantasy—said really positive things about it. “This idea sounds interesting, I like it,” and so on. I was surprised, and I have always remembered it because at the time it made me realise just how important it was to get an agent who knew the genre you wrote in.

Other than the fact that it tells us that we’re probably targeting our book to the wrong audience, I wonder if it means the next new fashion in fantasy will be a return to epic fantasy.

Sherylyn spent the last two weeks copy-editing a partial manuscript. Partial, that is not even a full manuscript.

I spent some time helping her out. It was hard, hard work.

On a first reading everything looked good and there didn’t seem a lot to change. But then you re-read the manuscript, and re-read it again, and by the time you had finished the third read there were red pen marks all over the page. (That’s right, red pen. I always thought editors had blue pencils, but in our part of the world they have red pens. Very fine red pens—0.1mm—because you can write more.)

Then you re-read the manuscript again, and you found even more things to change.

This was a non-fiction piece. There was a lot of work checking facts and generally cleaning up the text. Sherylyn also had to cut 10% of the content and tone down some of the more sue-able quotes, all while trying to keep the author’s distinctive voice.

It was harder than I expected. I have a renewed respect for copy-editors and the work they do.

I am half-way through another book where characters are one-dimensionally good or evil.

Over dinner with Sherylyn—my writing partner —I spent half the night talking about it. I think I was just disappointed with the way the characters were turning out. (I know, I need a life.)

Sherylyn, who’d already read the story, said, “It was a first book. Besides, how can we talk? Look at Potion. You can’t get anyone more pure good than Alun, can you?”

She stopped me cold. There is a special place on our bookshelf for first books. They’re what we call ‘dream books’. They’re usually first novels.

When you look back on an established author’s writing, you can often pick their first book just by the content and style, long before you look at dates and publication history. They’re fairy tales, pure and simple. Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree is a good example.

Good things happen to the people, seldom bad. And the characters are often nauseatingly perfect. If they’re good at something, they’re really good.

Now, to Potion.

Potion is a classic fantasy journey story. An enchanter and a fighter take work as bodyguards for for a man—Alun— who travels to a hostile land to rescue his aunt. In our story, Alun is pretty good. The fairest of the fair folk, the best enchanter—you name it, he’s got it, ad-nauseum. He is not the protagonist, but the whole book revolves around him. He’s the catalyst for everything that happens, and continues to be the catalyst for change throughout the book.

Our protagonists—the two bodyguards—are no slouches either. One is a powerful enchanter in her own right (not the most powerful, of course, because that is Alun) , the other is a legendary swordsman who was coaxed out of retirement for the job.

Alun is so pure he’s almost a caricature.

We know that. We believe that because he’s not the protagonist we can get away with it.

But Tegan and Blade are no slouches either. And this is where the problem lies.

They’re downright good at what they do—magicking and fighting —not to mention they’re ‘good’ people too. They don’t do ‘bad’ things.

So here am I, complaining about a set of characters being one-dimensional, when my own appear to be exactly the same.