S. K. Dunstall

I’m sorry to hear that Miss Snark is putting away the blogging pen.

Her site was useful and entertaining, and she dispensed a lot of good advice to unpublished writers out here in net space. I have a special fondness for the Crapometers, particularly the last one.

All of us have read fiction that changed our life in some way, whether it just be that we read them at a particularly impressive age, or whether the theme resonated with us. But what about the non-fiction, the ideas and articles you may have come across that have a profound influence on what you write and how you write it?

What writing and other ideas influence your own?

Our own influences range, but they include:

• Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland—technically this is fiction, but we treat it as a non-fiction. The don’t do’s for writing fantasy.
• The Tragedy of the Commons—we apply this in world building and character building
• The stages of grief—there are five distinct stages in the grieving process. We use this for character building.
• The idea that a population will crash when the food runs out—comes from basic science experiments; we apply this for world building
• Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves really makes you aware of the power of the comma.

There are dozens more.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The Tragedy of the Commons was written back in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. If you don’t want to read the whole article, it’s summarised in Wikipedia,

The article itself is about population control, and basically it says that

… there is no foreseeable technical solution to increasing both human populations and their standard of living on a finite planet.

Wikipedia, Tragedy of the Commons

The idea is:

(Hardin uses) a hypothetical example of a pasture shared by local herders. The herders … wish to maximise their yield, and so will increase their herd size whenever possible. (Adding extra) animal(s) has both a positive and negative component:

Positive : the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional animal

Negative : the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal

Crucially, the division of these components is unequal: the individual herder gains all of the advantage, but the disadvantage is shared between all herders using the pasture. Consequently, for an individual herder weighing up these utilities, the rational course of action is to add an extra animal. And another, and another. However, since all herders reach the same conclusion, overgrazing and degradation of the pasture is its long-term fate.

Wikipedia, Tragedy of the Commons

NaNoWriMo aims for a 50,000 word novel in a month. That’s not quite 1,700 words a day. In their frequently asked questions they explain:

Why 50,000 words? Isn’t that more of a novella?

Our experiences over the past seven years show that 50,000 is a difficult but doable goal, even for people with full-time jobs and children. The length makes it a short novel. We don’t use the word “novella” because it doesn’t seem to impress people the way “novel” does.

NaNoWriMo FAQs

Once upon a time I would have said, “Working full-time and 1700 words a day. No way.”

On a good day of solid, eight-hour writing, I used to manage 2,000 words. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manage any more.

Funnily enough, if I only wrote for four hours I could still do 2,000 words.

It seemed an invisible barrier I couldn’t break. 2,000 words a day (eight pages) was the maximum I could do, and that was it.

Writing at night I could only ever manage a maximum of 500 words (two pages).

These were my personal bests, mind you. I normally didn’t write that many.

How much can other people write?

Two blogs linked to my site are C. J. Cherryh’s Progress Report, and Eugie Foster’s Self Indulgent Musings. Both of them include word counts.

Cherryh writes full time and has many novels published. Between 16 February and 16 September this year she wrote almost 50,000 words. That’s around 250 words per day. (Assuming she writes all day, every day. One would expect that she takes days off, and the average is really closer to 350.)

Cherryh writes from an outline, but by the sound of it her work is pretty polished by the time it’s written. Not like us, with our messy multiple draft system.

Eugie Foster is currently working full time. Over a period of ten days this month she wrote 2,500 words (8-18 October) on a short story. That averages out to 250 words a day too.

My own current average is pathetic. I’m up to 12,800 words so far on Barrain, which averages out roughly at 150 words a day. Not good, and no-where near the 1,700 words NaNoWriMo requires.

My writing speed has improved. I don’t know how I broke the 2,000 word barrier. I think it was simply perseverance. Not that long ago in a full day’s writing I wrote over 5,000 words.

That’s obviously not a common occurrence. There are good writing days and bad writing days. Some days you just can’t get anything done. But even now, on a good night I can manage 1,000 words.

NaNoWriMo’s 1,700 word goal doesn’t seem so hard after all.

How much does your personal mood affect your writing?

When you are depressed, are your characters depressed too? When you are happy, do your characters sing and dance and do happy things?

There are two types of mood when writing. Your own personal mood—are you happy, sad, grumpy, and your characters’ moods—are they happy, sad or grumpy? The two don’t always mix.

The second mood is the one you need to attain.

When I, personally, am down, my writing tends to be worse. The people in the story become more self-pitying, often dropping out of character altogether. If I am writing non-fiction it tends to be negative and critical. The writing is sloppy, with lots of unnecessary adjectives.

When my characters are down my own mood becomes more melanchony, but it’s a pleasurable kind of sadness. [Melancholoy to me has always evoked a more enjoyable sadness. An overcast day gloom, rather than desperately unhappy.]

But … writing is a cathartic process. The very act of writing can change your mood, and usually does, in the same way that reading a good book can turn depression into pleasure.

It doesn’t matter that what you have just written is rubbish. You can go back and change it. That’s what editing is for. Nothing is set in concrete until the book is published.

Really good writing comes from getting into the mood of your characters. It sounds really strange, but there’s nothing better than writing a sad part of a novel and howling all the way through it. You are feeling what your characters are feeling.

That is magic.

Forget about Apple and Suri, what about R’shiel and Lorandranek (Medalon, by Jennifer Fallon), or Barak and Ce’Nedra (David & Leigh Eddings).

Fantasy novelists, as a collective, are probably the worst namers of characters you are likely to come across.

Why do we do it, and how do we come up with the names?

I think we choose names to make our worlds different, more exotic, more fantastical. To make it seem like somewhere else.

A fantasy with John and Sarah and Andrew as the main characters comes across as mundane. We are less likely to lose ourselves in the world that has been created because the characters are so ordinary. [This is not counting those fantasies that start in our world of course, and move over to the fantasy world in the course of the story.]

Names help us to create a sense of the world.

A world with names like Polgara and Belgarion (David Eddings, Belgariad) evokes a different world to one which contains Dutiful and Thick (Robin Hobb, Tawny Man series). This is different again to a world with Legolas and Galadriel (J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings).

Some of us do go overboard with names. I have read novels where the names are all exotic and so similar that I have to keep re-reading sections to work out who is doing what.

You wonder how people come up with them. Maybe they make them up, or use fantasy name generators such as Rinkworks, Squid or Seventh Sanctum. (Seventh Sanctum also allows you to create planet, realms and tavern names.)

Others choose foreign names because they are exotic to us, in our own native language. You need to be careful with this, as a name that might sound foreign and exotic to you may be common in another language. I confess I like foreign names myself. I could populate a whole novel just with the names of people I work with.

Some authors name their characters after flora, fauna, seasons and so on. In that world, the fantasy equivalent of Peter might be Rock. Robin Hobb takes it a step further in the Tawny Man series with Dutiful and the like.

Mis-spelt names. Not quite a made-up name, because it has a phonetic equivalent. Carrell, for example, instead of Carol. (Carrell to me looks masculine. If I named a character in a novel Carrell, he would be male.)

Baby books are a source of inspiration, particularly for some of the older names that have fallen out of use. A quick look at Baby Names, under ‘M‘ gives me a list Magali, Maeryn, Maeve, Mahesa, Mahola, Mariska, Morella, Moss. I could keep going.

This begs another question. Should you be a language purist. Magali is French, Maeryn is Celtic, while Mahesa is Sanskrit. Can you put all three names into the same noevel?

Purists would say no, names in your world should sound as if they are the same language, which means you should base them on the same language too.

I’m not a purist. Yes, you probably shouldn’t have Angharad and Grr’chk as siblings, but outside of that almost anything goes for me.

I get my names from anywhere and everywhere. I’m not proud. Suri and Apple, by the way, both fit perfectly into a fantasy novel.

The second of two articles on querying agents. Click here if you want to read the first blog.

At what point is it okay to submit the same novel to an agent.

Sometimes, it’s obvious.

If an agent or publisher writes back and says, “Sorry, I’m going to pass on your book, but if you fix up the major plot hole in the middle I’d be interested to see it again,” then naturally you can resubmit the same novel to the agent —after you have fixed the plot hole in the middle of the book, of course.

You would send it off with a polite note saying, “You said you’d take another look at this if I fixed …, and I have. Please reconsider.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum you don’t spam the agent or publisher either.

Putting the manuscript back in the mail unchanged, and sending it back to the same editor the day you receive the form rejection from them is a no-no as well.

But what about the in-betweens?

If you believe in a story that an agent rejected, say, two years ago, is it permissable to resend it after such an interval?

Is it acceptable to resubmit if you have changed the story and/or query letter so much that it’s a dramatically different novel.

Is it ever acceptable, or is it something you never do?

To use an extreme example—I sent Barrain Draft 1 off to Wizards of the Coast. I still cringe when I remember that. It was so bad. The story is improving. It has a few more drafts to go, and will improve with each draft. Can I resend it to Wizards of the Coast‘s next open call, or am I obligated not to, by the very fact of my having already submitted it once.

This is an extreme example. The original submission was so long ago, and the story has changed so much that it probably doesn’t matter.

What about Potion though? It has done the rounds of a number of agents. We are always re-writing the query letter. Recently we changed the query and synopsis quite dramatically. At the same time we cut a number of pages from the front of the novel. Does that mean we can resubmit the story to the agents we submitted it to two years ago?

Blogging agent Miss Snark says this about resubmitting queries for re-worked novels after a couple of years has gone by:

If your work was rejected at the query stage, you’ve got a clean slate now. Enough time has gone by no one will remember you at all.

If anyone read a partial or a full, and you’re querying them again, you need to mention you’ve significantly reworked the ms, incorporated suggestions for change, and learned from experience.
Resubmitting Queries, Miss Snark

Her comment seems reasonable, particularly if at the time the initial query letter didn’t get past a form reply.

I am not a fan of killing off characters unnecessarily.

The recent ‘news’ that Disney planned to drop Will Turner from the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie illustrates what I was saying.

The reason given for killing him off was money. Disney supposedly wanted to save money on the fourth movie.

The general feeling among fans we polled* was betrayal. Some people felt Will Turner was integral to the story, and should not be killed off for that reason, others felt more betrayed by the reason Disney was killing him off. As one of our surveyees said, “I can understand if there was a reason to kill him, but not just to save money. That’s a stupid reason.”

As it turns out, Disney have since denied the rumours.

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* It wasn’t a scientific poll, more a ‘What do you think about …” among people we knew who liked the movie.

The first of two posts on query letters.

There are hundreds of books and internet sites that tell you what to put into your query letter. Even the manuscript guidelines for most agents cover briefly what they want it it.

I’m a person who likes to see examples. If I can see what other people do, what is wrong and what is right with their queries, then I am a lot better prepared to write my own.

Here are some web sites that can help you with this.

Miss Snark

Marathon effort from literary agent, Miss Snark, with her Crapometer #3. She analysed 110 query letters, along with the first page of the novel being queried. She did this over a period of four days.

If you send query letters it’s a must-read, not just to find how to improve your query letters, but for an insight into how an agent works.

Rachel Vater

Not long after this, over at Live Journal site, Rachel Vater began workshopping queries and first pages, explaining what was wrong with them and how to improve them. The workshopped pieces must then be submitted to ten markets after this, and the writers report back on the results.

It will be fascinating to see what happens.

Jacqueline K. Ogburn

Jacqueline Ogburn shows us a couple of sample query letters for children’s books and outlines what is wrong with them.

Preditors and Editors

Preditors and Editors has a sample query letter.

SFWA

Lynn Flewelling has put her query for Luck in the Shadows onto the SFWA Writing site.

The second post is here, if you’re interested.