S. K. Dunstall

We haven’t done a lot of work on Barrain lately. Most of our writing work has been on Shared Memories, a novel we had completed previously, that is currently going through the draft process.

There is one section left to re-write in Shared Memories, and that’s another major draft finished.

Barrain has suffered in the interim. Progress is slow, almost non-existent. We’re up to 18,000 words at present.

Why start one story and move on to something else?

Over Christmas Barrain was hard going. Sometimes, when you are stuck, you just have to take a break from the story that is giving trouble and work on another.

It’s always good to have more than one project going.

But … I don’t mean start a new story every time. Have works at different stages—one in first draft, another that just needs a polish.

When you get bogged down creatively, switch over to the other book and do some nuts and bolts editing.

• Don’t work on two creative drafts at the one time
• Don’t juggle too many projects—two is about all we can manage
• Don’t use it as an excuse to drop what you are doing and start something else.

Persevere until you absolutely sure you are stuck. Sometimes, when a story isn’t working all you need to do is take a couple of days off. Only occasionally does it need the more drastic action outlined here. Ensure that you don’t put the novel away until you have really tried—and I mean really, really tried—all other options to get back on track.

Lastly, when you have finished the other project, go back to the book you put away for the interim. You may be surprised at how much enthusiasm you have for it when you are ready.

In some ways, writing Barrain is like flogging the proverbial dead horse.

Why?

Because the material is out-of-date before we start.

The term ‘bird watching’ is now obsolete, replaced by the term ‘birding’. The use of ‘bird watching’ as a term for guys looking for girls is even more outdated.

The original draft of Barrain would be close to 15 years old. When it was written, bird watching—for guys looking at girls—was losing favour, but still common enough for us to use.

To continue with the equine analogies, that horse has long since bolted from the starting gate. No-one uses it now.

Yet in Barrain, the protagonist is only dragged into the story because of ‘bird watching’. If we didn’t have that, Scott wouldn’t be around to be carried to another world, and so on.

Can we save the story?

I’m not sure yet. Or rather, of course we can, but how much work will it take, and is it worth it?

How might we fix it?

We would need to rewrite the start of the novel to give Scott an excuse to join Caid on his bird hunt.

A different start is unlikely to involve a bunch of enthusiastic elderly birdwatchers, so Elspeth and the others will probably go, replaced by a younger set. Melissa’s relationship with Scott—if Melissa survives the transition—will be different.

Why then, if these major changes will happen anyway, don’t we just do them now?

Because we wouldn’t finish the story.

If we have to rewrite so much we will put the novel to one side as too hard, and never touch it again.

Little steps at a time, and every rewrite we do polishes the rest of the story. Besides, we haven’t quite given up on a less drastic solution yet.

I have mentioned before what I think about writing courses, and how my experience to date with universities hasn’t been much good.

This year Sherylyn started a part-time writing course at the local TAFE. From what she has told me, it sounds pretty good.

She chose three subjects:

• Writing and editing
• Photography for writers
• Web design.

In ‘Photography for writers’ she learns how to use a camera and take photos for articles. She also has to write the articles that go with the photographs. They will be marked on the article as well as on the photography. After all, this is a professional writing course.

Likewise with ‘Web design’. Here they are asked to create web pages, and put content on them. Again, they will be marked not just on their ability to create the web pages, but on the content they include. After all, this is a professional writing course.

So far, I’m impressed.

Last week I talked about doing your family and friends a favour by not asking them to read your novel, but as a writer, even an unpublished one, there comes a time when another unpublished writer will ask you to read their novel.

What do you do?

If it’s a novel you think you might like, then by all means say yes. But what if you don’t know that? What if you’re not sure?

I would like to say, “Don’t read it,” but that’s not always possible.

Here are some strategies that might help if you ever find yourself in this situation.

Timing

It is generally more beneficial for an author’s writing if you don’t review the manuscript hot off the PC.

The author needs time to distance themselves from the work.

Immediately after they have finished a draft is not the best time to give feedback. They don’t want to know about the flaws then. They simply want you to tell them that the work they have slaved over for the past two years is a masterpiece, perfect in every way. Flaws? They just don’t want to know.

Six months on they’re going to look at that novel in a totally different way.

Even so, I recommend that when you receive a manuscript you read it fairly quickly.

Firstly, it’s polite.

More importantly, the longer you put it off the more the author will hassle you, and the more guilty you will feel.

What type of feedback can you give if the predominant feeling is guilt?

What you need to encourage the author to do is to wait before they give it to, and to re-read it before they do hand it over. That’s no easy feat.

Read the complete novel

When the story is truly bad you may be tempted to read the start and end, and skip most of the middle.

Don’t.

There are two reasons to read the whole book.

Books generally improve. Many novelists don’t get into the swing of writing until well into the book. You may find a gem of a story lurking behind some badly written first chapters.

The other reason not to skip the read is because novelists are obsessive about their story, and expect readers to be the same.

You will be grilled.

Your credibility is at stake.

The author will ask you about people and events in the story. What you thought about particular characters, how you felt the plot flowed, and so on.

It is also difficult to give valuable feedback if you haven’t read the full story.

Authors, particularly beginning authors, do weird things with their characters and plot. It’s far better for you to be able to say, “This was really Zoe’s story, but you didn’t introduce her until half-way through the book,” than, “Zoe. I don’t remember her. I must have been tired when I read that part.”

If you do skip parts, be honest about it.

“I couldn’t read the rape scene, it was just too graphic.” Or, “I skimmed the battles. They were so gory, and there were so many of them.”

Give good feedback

There’s an art to giving feedback on a novel that needs a lot of work. Take the advice of some of the good online critique groups like Critters—check out Critiquing the wild writer: it’s not what you say but how and The Diplomatic Critter, for starters.

Remember, when you are giving feedback:

• There will always be something positive to say. Anyone who has written a full-length novel will have something good in it. Guaranteed.
• Say something good about the story first.
  Don’t start with the bad stuff, start with the good. Otherwise you put the author offside, and they become defensive and not prepared to listen.
• Never attack the author. Don’t say, “You can’t spell.” Say something more like, “There seemed to be some typos (or spelling errors) there. You might want to run it through a spell checker.”
• Don’t let your personal opinion about the type of story colour your response. “I hated the book. I hate whodunnits, and this was typical of the genre.”
• Be honest, but do it politely.
• Above all, give them helpful feedback.

Encourage them to seek opinions outside family and friends

Lastly, if the author is serious about writing, encourage them to join a writing group.

This helps them to be better writers, but also helps them to accept and get value from feedback. It’s a two-way thing. You get a better novel to read, and they get some feedback on how to improve their writing.

Four of us went out for a long, lazy afternoon tea yesterday. Sherylyn, myself and two of our closest friends. The subject came around to books, as it is wont to do when we are together. Both friends work in public libraries, and are extremely well read.

We meandered from books in general, and shopping for books, on to novels in particular, and then on to writing novels.

H., one of our friends, had been asked to read an acquaintance’s unpublished novel. “Because she worked in a library and read lots of books.”

She’d had it for six months and still hadn’t managed more than the first two chapters.

“It was very heavy,” was the only way she could describe it. “Extremely personal, and really difficult to read.”

We discussed whether the writing was the problem, or the subject matter. The book was a personal memoir, not something any of us read by choice. We finally decided that her reluctance to read it stemmed from a combination of:

• It was a first draft, and messy in the way first drafts often are, with typos and a story that was all over the place
• The style of writing was heavy and hard to read. Not a style she normally read
• It was extremely personal. Although it was a novel it was obviously autobiographical, and far more intimate than she ever wanted to become with a casual acquaintance.

Someone who read mainstream novels may have enjoyed the book, but H. was like the rest of us. While she reads widely, she reads a lot of genre, but little literary or mainstream fiction and she wasn’t into slice-of-life stories.

It wasn’t the first unpublished novel H. had read. We had given her Potion (Draft 4), and she said she had enjoyed it, even asked when the second book would be out. (Another one on our to-do list, waiting for us to finish some of our current projects.)

H. is a close friend. We think she would be honest enough to say she liked the book if she did, in fact, like it.

But we will never really know for sure.

You should never ask family and friends to read your newly finished novel. Especially not that first draft you are so proud of.

Polish it first. And then take it to your writing group, or an impartial bystander, or even a writing tutor if you are doing it as a school assignment.

Just don’t ask your friends and family to read it and then expect valuable feedback from it. Not unless you really trust them to be honest.

They don’t want to hurt you.

Most of them don’t even want to read your book, but you force it onto them until in the end they feel obligated to take it.

Chances are they’re not going to like it. Particularly if it’s a first draft. Particularly if it’s your first novel.

What can they say to you when you ask them what they thought of it?

“I’m sorry, but your novel stank.”

Of course not. They will mumble something polite and try to avoid the subject. Or put off reading it.

They probably glanced at it, and read a couple of chapters when they first received it, then put it aside to read later, when they have the time. Like H. did with the novel she was asked to read.

Now, you tell me. As a reader, if you read the first two chapters and it’s a really good read, are you going to put it down and forget it for six months? Of course not. You will keep reading. So if your family or friends have put off reading your novel for months, even years, what does that say?

They don’t want to read it, and they don’t want to tell you they don’t want to read it.

Do your family and friends a favour—don’t ask them to read your novel in the first place.

Unless, of course, they offer.

That’s a whole different ball game.

Accept with alacrity. Be grateful they offered, and polish your draft before you hand them a copy.

I recently read Lynn Flewelling’s Tamir Triad (The Bone Doll’s Twin, Hidden Warrior and The Oracle’s Queen).

My absolute favourite character was Tharin, the protagonist’s (Tamir’s) father’s best friend. The man who looked after Tamir when she was a child, and stayed with her as she grew into adulthood.

Now, here is the silly thing. Even though I adored Tharin as a character, I couldn’t get his name straight for the first two and a half books.

Even as I sat down to write this blog I still had to stop and think. “Is it Tamil? No. Damir? No. Thamir? No, not that either. Damn, I have to go back to the book again to get his name. Tharin. That’s right, it was Tharin.”

This is my favourite character in a series I liked enough to read in one sitting.

He wasn’t a point-of-view character, but he was a major minor character. I should have been able to remember his name. Unfortunately, I got bogged down with all the names in the book with combinations of T, M, N and R in them (Tamir, Tobin, Tharin). They all blended together.

Fantasy and science fiction writers often come up with weird names to make the characters sound more exotic, but there are a lot of other things we do to names that confuse the reader too.

One thing you are often taught in the ‘how to write fantasy’ courses is to make names of people of the same race or tribe similar, to give a sense of history and place. Thus in Lord of the Rings you have Elrond, Glorfindel, Arwen and Galadriel, all elves, all with L, N and D sounds in their names.

Lynn Flewelling had a lot of characters whose name started with T or A.

In her defence, Ms Flewelling could well argue that Tharin wasn’t a major character. That the main characters were clearly delineated —Tamir/Tobin, Ki and Arkoniel. Can’t complain about names there.

Now, I don’t say that you should deliberately go out of your way to give your characters wildly different names just so the readers can tell them apart. There does have to be resonance with names, and a language and a people. And even though it does make the story more confusing to the reader, it’s not the worst naming sin of all.

One of the worst, in my opinion, is the word you use as a name that has a totally unrelated meaning, particularly when you know what that meaning is.

I have been following the Rejecter’s disillusionment with her MFA (here, and here) with interest, because I went through a similar thing when I did a Master of Arts in Professional Writing.

With one exception, my course was a waste of time. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing I learned (outside of that one exception) was that if you wish to write commercially, don’t go to university.

Why not?

Because many of university lecturers had no experience outside academia. They had no idea of what was commercial, and by commercial here I mean business writing as well as fiction.

The one exception was the professor who taught screenwriting. He had been a screenwriter for 30 years before he took up teaching, and it showed in what he taught and how he taught it.

I learned more about screenwriting from him in one semester than I did in the rest of the course.

Sadly, he died in my first year (vale Peter, you were fantastic). The new screenwriting professor had spent his life in academia, and it showed.

The individual professors I had were lovely people, but they really needed some practical experience if the real world about what they were teaching.

My experience was not unique, as the Rejecter’s blog shows, but others have done such courses and got real value out of them.

Interestingly enough, the university I originally contacted to do my MA recommended I try elsewhere, as they didn’t have anyone on the faculty who wrote in the genre I like to work in.

So what makes a good writing course?

I was reading some of Sherylyn’s writing today. Her style is a lot different to mine.

As I read I tried to work out what made her style so different. After all, we have written together for so long you would think our writing would almost be interchangeable.

In the end, the only description I could come up with was that her writing is more ‘removed’ than mine. I think she would write great literary fiction, the detached observer type.

Now I know that you can’t confuse style of writing with storytelling, but given that her writing is so much more removed from the reader, what makes her so much better at characterisation than me?

Why aren’t her characters distant too?