Author: Karen

Music is important to me when I write. It helps set the mood for the story and makes it easier to start writing. It’s part of the routine of writing. I find I write better when I have music to listen to.

It has to be a particular type of music though, and the music is different for each novel. I know one novel I wrote way back when (one of those under the bed, never to see the light of day) was written to a combination of MeatLoaf’s Bat Out of Hell and seemingly the whole Chris de Burgh back catalogue. Another one had a lot of Carmina Burana in it.

Changing the music spoils the mood. No matter how much I think I can listen to something else, I have to introduce new music to the collection gradually, because if it doesn’t fit it spoils the writing flow, and then I have to get back into it.

One of the things I like is when a writer says in the introduction to their novel what music they listened to when they wrote it. Just for fun I thought I might list my own current writing music. This is for two novels —Barrain and Shared Memories, because we’re writing different drafts of these at the same time.

• Va Pensero, the Ten Tenors, from Bravo Act II
• Hoki Hoki Tona Mai, Yulia, from Bravo Act II
• Anthem, Anthony Warlow, from Chess
• Conquest of Paradise, Vangelis, from 1492
• Any Fool Could See, various, from Paris
• What Could Go Wrong?, Trevor White/John Parr, from Paris
• Trust in Your Heart, John Parr, from Paris
• Just Show Me How to Love You, Jose Cura/Sarah Brightman/Andrea Bocelli/LSO, from Time to Say Goodbye
• The Medallion Calls, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• One Last Shot, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• He’s a Pirate, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• If Only, Original cast, Whistle Down the Wind
• Lakme H2O (Flower Duet), Opera Babes, from Beyond Imagination
• Silk Road, Kitaro (but I like the LSO’s version too), from Kitaro’s Silk Road Suite)
• Hymn to New England, John Williams, from An American Journey
• Just When I’d Given Up Dreaming, Ronan Keating, from Bring You Home

Some writers create elaborate worlds before they start writing their fantasy or science fiction novel. These writers create maps. They know of every creek and hilltop, the world history back to ten generations, particularly the lineage of their protagonist.

Other writers let the world evolve as they write the book.

We fall into the second category. We start with a character and a situation, and discover the world along with the story. We do this even with stories like Rainbow, where the world is so integral to the story it is almost a character in itself.

It has some problems.

Shared Memories started out as fantasy and morphed into science fiction. That took some world changes we were still fixing into the third draft. It also made it very soft science fiction (as distinct from hard science fiction, which has heavier doses of technology).

Given that we don’t plan out the world in advance, we then have to do it as part of the draft process. It’s usually part of draft two, closer to the start of the rewrite than the end.

Once we have a story we go through it and plot the locations on a map.

With Barrain, we would only map Barrain, not Earth.

We start the map with two points. Elna’s village, and Demon City. Elna’s village is in the mountains. Mark in some mountains. Demon City used to be known as the City Between Sea and Mountain —that makes us think it’s close to the coast, but also close to a mountain. Place it near the coast, but not on it, near more mountains with a narrow hinterland.

It takes weeks to get to the city. Do they walk the whole way? If so, how far can we walk in a day? These people are fitter than us, and younger, so they will walk maybe twice as far. (Right now we are horribly unfit.)

Multiply the kilometres walked per day by the number of days on the road and we get an idea of the scale.

We fill in other bits of the map from details of the journey as per the novel. Once we’re done we might fill in blank bits of the map if we feel like it, but mostly we don’t.

And that’s pretty much it. Our world map. We stick it in front of the draft and that’s the master, and only copy.

It was hand written on one of the Moving Poetry posters on the train. Wedged in between a poem about football parents and another reflecting how their home town had changed since they left it.

Ticket inspectors
you yearn for my ticket.
I yearn for your heart.

Anon

So perfectly placed in between two other poems of the same form (rooku, an Australian variant of haiku). So appropriate in the context. It was on a train; ticket inspectors patrol the trains; they are often accused of being heartless.

Nowadays most graffiti is modern art or tags, whose only function is to mark territory, much like a dog marks territory by lifting his leg at every lamp post.

Not much written graffiti survives, and what does is usually of the dial a sex service form.

The witty, entertaining social commentary is gone, except for the occasional hold-out like the one I saw on the train this morning.

It’s a sign of the times. We communicate in pictures now, rather than words. Furthermore, rather than providing social commentary, today’s graffiti seems to be created mostly to draw attention to the creator.

If you want to read the rooku Moving Poetry, you can find it here.

I was rereading some of the Wordplay Hall of Fame posts last night and came across this little gem from Seth:

Metaphorically speaking, an agent is not a fairy godmother. An agent is a virus. They are opportunistic parasites with no ability to survive without the presence of a host organism – namely you …

… So if you’ve got one blindingly good script and I’ve got three reasonably good scripts, chances are good I will get more notice than you … One big rock does not a career make – an agent needs to know that if he takes a pickaxe to you you’re likely to come up with a few more gems in the rough.

Seth, Stop acting like a diamond and start acting like a diamond mine, on Wordplay.

Love the analogy, love the message he was trying to get across. Agents rely on writers to make them money. No matter how good your one story is (Seth was talking about scripts, but it applies equally to novels), it just isn’t enough. You have to keep producing. Otherwise your agent will jump hosts.

There’s a well-known story about students who paid big money to attend a famous writer’s screenwriting class. The famous writer gets up at the start of the class and says, “You want to write screenplays. What are you all doing here? Go home and write.”

I don’t know if this story is true, or just a myth passed on by people like me who hear it from other people, who heard it in turn from other people. Still, it makes a valid point.

Everyone has times when writing has to take second place, but it’s what you do with the precious minutes you can spare that count.

This is the difference between someone who finishes a novel and someone who says, “One day I want to write a novel,” but gets nowhere.

For family reasons Sherylyn and I clocked up 700km for each of the last two weekends and will do it again for the next two.

I am working full-time at present, Sherylyn is studying three days per week. In the same two weeks she has had two major assignments to complete, plus a mid-semester test.

What did we do in our spare time? Sherylyn played Runescape while I read novels.

Neither of us did a scrap of work on any of our writing projects.

That’s fine, if we only do it for a week or two, but if we keep doing it for the whole month we need to take a long hard look at our writing habits and our writing dreams.

We will never get anywhere if we don’t continually make the effort to write. As Angela Booth says in a 2003 article on writing …

“You must practise … Use it, or lose it. Sports people know this. So do pianists, ballet dancers and artists.”
Angela Booth, Five easy ways to become a confident writer

If you have been reading the same sites I have, you will notice that as a writer, eventually you will need some sort of presence on the web.

It seems that even for an unpublished writer trying to get an agent a place on the web is a good thing.

Be warned, however, that a bad web presence can often be worse than no presence at all, so if you are going to do it, you must make an effort.

For a writer, this includes:

• A site that looks professional. A gaudy site with lots of flashing things on it is the equivalent to turning up to a business meeting in a tatty old track suit
• A site that has few or no typos, spelling or grammatical errors. We all make these, it’s just that as writers people expect us to have less (or preferably none). We need to be more diligent.
• A web site that is up-to-date. Even if your website does not include date specific information, ensure it still looks topical by keeping the copyright notice current and removing obsolete references or dead pages.

Despite all this, you decide to go ahead. What else do you need to think about?

• Cost. Do you want to pay for your own web site or do you want to use something free, such as Blogger, My Space or Live Journal?
• Can you afford, or even do you want, to pay to have your web designed
• How much time can you afford to maintain it?
• How much effort do you want to spend on it?

All these questions need to be considered when thinking about a web presence.

Even if you don’t want a web presence yet, at least think about buying your author domain name. It’s relatively inexpensive, and you don’t have to do anything with it, it just saves it for when you do need it.

If you were suddenly transported to another world, as first both Caid and then Scott are in Barrain, what do you think your major difficulty would be?

Once you got over the initial disbelief of being somewhere else, your immediate concern would be communication. What are the chances people in the other world will speak the same language that you do? It’s not likely at all.

Maybe the world you go to has magic, which you can use to understand each other. Maybe it has a universal translator.

Different writers cope with the language issue in different ways.

In Barrain, we have chosen to ignore it.

It’s a calculated risk. We ask readers to believe this is possible, but there is always a chance we will lose them at the start of the book because of it.

It’s a big ask.

I have been reading Anne Mini’s Author! Author! blog a lot lately. Anne has some useful, practical advice on writing. She has a number of articles on self editing, which I particularly enjoy.

It’s funny though, how someone else can point out the obvious far better than you can read it in your own work.

In The Screen Goes Wavy she writes about factual redundancy. The old, “As you know, John, my father died 20 years ago in unusual circumstances.”

Mini gives an example that starts with:

Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning, revisiting in his mind his last encounter with Cardinal Richelieu, two months before, when they had shot those rapids together in the yet-to-be-discovered territory of Colorado. Despite moments of undeniable passion, they had not parted friends. The powerful holy man was known for his cruelty, but surely, this time, he would not hold a grudge.

…

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. “Tobacco had not come to Europe in your time.” He shook two out of the pack and stuck both into his mouth. “And barely in mine.”

He lit the pair and handed both to his erstwhile lover …

The Screen Goes Wavy, Anne Mini

Fairly obviously, from the example, the relationship between these two men is important. Yet in the rewrite, she cuts most of it out.

Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning. The powerful holy man before him was known for his cruelty, but surely, he could not still be holding a grudge about how they’d parted in Colorado. “Please tell me, Armand. For old times’ sake.”

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. …

The Screen Goes Wavy, Anne Mini

Why does she do this?

As she says, if the Colorado episode is important to the story to make a difference here, then you, as the author, should have told the story in its entirety when it happened. What happened in Colorado changes how Marcus and Richelieu view each other, and makes Marcus believe that Richelieu will treat him differently.

The reader needs to know about it when it happened. You can’t bring things in out of the blue like this. If you wrote the scene well enough the reader will remember it when they get to this one, and you don’t need all the unnecessary flashback. It makes for much cleaner writing.

If the incident wasn’t important enough to have its own scene, then it shouldn’t be included at all.

Mini says that you can eliminate most of these flashbacks by a well-placed scene (or scenes) earlier in the novel.

It’s obvious when you see it illustrated the way she has done in her article, but sometimes we forget. I’m going back to read Shared Memories now, to see if I can get rid of a couple of flashbacks.

When you write a novel the basic premise must be believable, or otherwise you lose the reader. It only takes one major flaw to lose the reader.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about story logic lately. Barrain has at least one flaw where I know we can potentially lose readers at the beginning of the novel, and that is in the language (another blog on this soon). But we’re not the only ones who do it.

Vampire novels are big at the moment. Everyone seems to be reading them; everyone seems to be writing them. They are popular in both adult and young-adult fiction.

Werewolves are popular too.

One young-adult story idea that seems to crop up a lot is the 12-15 year old who got turned into a vampire or a werewolf a 100 years ago. The story revolves around how these ‘children’ fit into normal school life of today.

Leaving aside the impracticalities of vampires attending a day school, what is the obvious flaw in a story like this?

These ‘children’ are 100 years old.

They will not have the same angst and dramas of the average 12-15 year old. They are long past that.

I have come across three stories (unpublished) in the last two months that base their whole premise on this exact scenario.

‘Six year old’ Claudia, from Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, is probably a more realistic representation of what someone like this would be like, at least, the bad guy version of someone like this, anyway.