Author: Karen

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Progress report

Progress report

My little pep-talk of the other day seems to have done me some good. I’m getting back into Barrain, slowly, but steadily.

At present I am I am going back, rewriting earlier bits so that I can continue with the story in its new form. One of the reasons I got stuck is because we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why Kraa was after Caid, we didn’t know why Caid was so important, we didn’t know how Scott was going to get back home, or even why Kraa would be chasing him once he got there. Now we do.

Sherylyn and I talk about the novel, but this work is mine. She can’t do much until I have finished the draft.

You may think it strange that we don’t know important things like this well into the third draft of the story, but that’s how it works for us. And we’re not alone. After all, if it took M. Night Shyamalan five drafts in Sixth Sense to realise his protagonist was dead, and another five to tidy it up we’re up there with some of the best.

People who outline cannot imagine how we work. “All that extra rewriting you have to do.” But it works for us. It’s a bit like carving a piece of wood. You start off with a nice looking piece of timber (the idea), and you have a rough idea of what the end result will look like, but then you come to a knot, and have to carve around that, so your design changes, and then you see that with the changes you have made because of that knot then the design can be made better by changing it, and because you have made those changes you can see other changes, and so on. Until finally, you have your finished carving (novel) and it’s nothing like the original log of wood, or even what you first imagined it would be.

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Writing process

I’m procrastinating

Nothing quite stops my creative juices like a house full of visitors. Particularly at our house, where the office is open to the rest of our house.

I love our open office. It’s a separate room in the centre of the building, with two doorways but no doors. You can’t close it off. It’s also the only room with computers, and the only one with internet access.

At this time of the year our house is an open house, with lots of friends and family passing through. I love that, but it makes it easy to procrastinate about writing. There’s always someone wanting to use the internet, or playing games. If you sit down to write there’s always a child or two peering over your shoulder to see what you are doing. Sometimes I wish I could just shut the door.

Instead, I am using it as an excuse not to write.

Before the end of financial year I had a lot of work deadlines. May and June were total write-offs as far as novel, and even blog, writing was concerned. That’s understandable. The work that pays the bills always takes precedence.

Now, however, I’m just putting it off. I need to get back into the habit, and I’m finding excuses—like visitors—not to do so.

I don’t have to write on the PC. I can write longhand in a notebook if I have to. I have done this often enough when the writing is flowing.

Writing this blog post is a start. Let’s see if I can push myself back into it from here.

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On writing

Reflections on style

I bought a book the other day. I found it by flipping through the fantasy shelves at the local bookshop and bought it because the voice and style were similar to Potion.

It looked to be an easy read.

I don’t know what made me think it was like Potion. Sentence structure and choice of words were part of it, I think.

I started reading. Thirty pages on I was so bored I was almost falling asleep —and I still couldn’t get over how similar this writer’s sentence construction and choice of words was to ours. I flipped the pages. It didn’t get any better.

I went back to Potion. Was our story really as bland as this one?

I don’t think so.

So what was the difference between this writer’s story and ours?

I am honestly not sure. I liked our characters better, but that’s a personal preference. It’s almost impossible to write a novel, and then to continually re-write it, if you don’t like your own characters. I didn’t care enough about the characters in the other book, and couldn’t get interested in them enough to become emotionally attached to them.

I also felt our story had a more interesting plot. The other story was a more traditional fantasy. The plot could almost have come out of a ‘how to write fantasy’ tome. It also had a lot of info dumps. Large chunks of information dropped into the middle of the story.

Even so, put the two novels side by side and you might almost say they were written by the same person.

I’m starting to get worried.

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On writing

Are they the only books out there?

I went to the library today, looking for some holiday reading. I wanted fantasy, good fantasy, that I hadn’t read before.

The back of every book I looked at seemed to have the same plot:

The kingdom of (somewhere) is in trouble. (someone) discovers they have special powers and must use these powers to save the kingdom.

The bookstores had the same. So I went to Amazon to try to buy something different. They had the same, plus some books about boys coming into their powers —Eldest (sequel to Christopher Paolini’s Eragon), and Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathon Stroud), lots of movie spinoffs and some urban fantasy.

I don’t mind any of these books individually when I’m in the mood, but I came away discontented today. Wasn’t there anything different? I wanted something I could pick up and say, “This sounds interesting.”

Worse, I flicked through the start pages of some of these books. They were all very ordinary. There was nothing in the first few pages of any of them that made me want to keep reading.

I think maybe my holiday reading should be writing, instead.

One trend I did notice at the library—there’s a lot more science fiction. A lot of it is reprints too. They had a whole new set of Robert Heinlen in; brand new hardcovers, and lots of newish-looking books with rocket symbols. (Our library categorises their books with stickers. A deerstalker hat for crime fiction, a heart for romance, a dragon for fantasy and a rocket for science fiction.)

Three days later I go back to the library, having finished all the books I had chosen. I picked up ten books I wanted to read in about as many minutes.

I think it’s just the mood you’re in at the time.

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Writing process

Read your novel aloud to improve your writing

In Rework and Edit, in the BBC’s Get Writing section, Barbara Trapido says:

Here is my best advice for editing and revising. READ EVERY WORD OUT LOUD.

Barbara Trapido, Rework and Edit

While the prospect of reading a full 100,000 word novel is more than a little daunting, the advice is sound. It’s amazing how clumsy some word groupings can be.

Even if you don’t read the whole novel, reading aloud just the passages you are having problems with can also help.

You will find you skip words, or say them in a different order, or replace some words with others. If you stumble over words or phrases you will often go back and reword them so that you can say them, which you wouldn’t do if you were not reading aloud.

It’s a good idea to have someone else listening, or to tape your reading, so that they can pick up on things you don’t.

A truly useful exercise.

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On writing

Posting part of your novel on your web site

I reread some old blogs today and noticed an interesting change in my first impressions of posting sample chapters on the website to how I feel about it now.

When I started writing this blog I obviously thought it was not really a good idea. Now, I would have to say I think it is one of the best marketing tools an author can use.

It may just be my familiarity with writing blogs that has brought about my change of mind, but I suspect it is also part of broader changes with entertainment in general. The internet is coming into its own as a valid platform for publishing and marketing.

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Writing process

When do you know your novel is not going to work?

For most us, starting our novel is the easy part.

An idea comes, or old ideas suddenly click together, and you start writing. The first chapter or two is good.

I myself have dozens of novel beginnings that I have started and stopped. Some of them are just waiting for time to complete them. Others are simply dead—sitting in the equivalent of my bottom drawer (the Ideas folder on my PC). At what stage does one realise that these ideas have died?

Even though we write mostly as a team, Sherylyn and I determine the novel rigor mortis factor a little differently.

Sherylyn will write the first few pages and then hand them to me. It’s raw, unedited and very first draft. If I don’t like it she dices the idea then and there. If I do, she keeps writing to see if it’s going to work. We know by around chapter three whether it’s working or not.

My criteria for liking or disliking the story are the characters, first and foremost, and whether or not the idea intrigues me.

As for me, I tend to write the first three to five chapters. By then I know if the story is or isn’t working for me. If it’s not working, it goes into the bottom drawer, Sherylyn unseen.

If it is working, I go back and do a rough first edit before I hand it over. If Sherylyn likes it, we keep going.

Neither method is perfect—Sherylyn had no say in Shared Memories, for example. I just couldn’t stop, and I would have written it anyway. Luckily she likes it. And some of Sherylyn’s ideas that would make really good stories die an unnecessary early death, but that’s what the bottom drawer is for. We can always revisit an idea.

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On writing

Some people can write queries. We can’t

I read sites like Evil Editor, the now defunct Miss Snark, and various others who take reader’s queries and analyse them on line. I’m at the stage where I can see a query that grabs me, but I still can’t write one.

It’s really illuminating to read the comments associated with the sample queries on the above sites. You learn how other people perceive your book just from those few lines, and it’s usually totally the wrong way. I once submitted a query letter that was worded in such a way that everyone assumed the good guy was bad. Nasty bad. How can you do that?

Every once in a while the author posts a comment explaining, “No, that’s not it at all. What happens is …” and in two or three paragraphs explains the whole thing beautifully.

That’s it. The perfect query.

I can see how it’s done. Simply explain the story. Tell it as if you were telling someone else what happens, and do it in a couple of paragraphs.

It’s not that easy.

I don’t ‘tell’ a good story at all. I can’t even tell a joke without messing up the punchline. By the time I have finished explaining the story line …

Scott accidentally gets dragged into another world and has to survive or find a way home. Meantime, back at home, the policeman on the case ….

… it starts to sound as clinical and boring as the original query.

No, for me the best way to hone a query is to get feedback. Not just feedback from Sherylyn, because we both seem to be stuck in the same rut here, but feedback from lots of different people.

The bloggers who analyse queries provide a precious gift.

Categories
Progress report

Progress report

We jumped a big chunk of text with a “fill in here” note.

It feels good, and it’s allowing us to get back into the story.

It’s funny how you can become so focussed on getting a particular scene done that it stops you cold.

It will be interesting, when we are done, to see if we even needed that scene at all. I suspect not.

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On writing

I, We and the grammatical intracies of me writing about us

If you are a grammar guru you probably take one look at this blog and go, “Argh,” and never come by again.

Sherylyn and I were discussing grammar the other day over a bottle of wine. (I know, I know. We both need lives.) Specifically, we were discussing parallel construction. One example Sherylyn used was:

“I went to the beach; we had a good time.”

This should be either:

  • “We went to the beach; we had a good time”, or
  • “I went to the beach; I had a good time“.

I commented that this blog is riddled with that particular grammatical problem, because I often talk about me, the person, and us, the writing team—all in the same post. Often I start off talking about me, and use ‘I’ as the pronoun, but then I get on to writing and switch to ‘we’.

Sometimes, when I’m really conscious of it, I’ll take out the ‘me’ and make it ‘us’, but that’s not really fair to Sherylyn. These are my opinions I am talking about, not necessarily hers. Other times I change the ‘we’ to ‘me’. Again, that’s not fair to Sherylyn, because ‘we’ write, not just ‘me’. So in the end I generally leave it as ‘us’ and ‘me’.

I am sure, because of this, the writing in this blog sometimes comes across as quite poorly written.

So be it.