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Progress report

Novel progress report

We are now a quarter of the way through the novel, and this weekend finished our first major read-through to ensure we are on track and know where we are going.

The changes we are making to this draft are major, more like a second draft that a third, but that’s writing, I suppose. Unpredictable.

In this sort of read we cover everything from major plot queries:

“I know we said the body was in stasis, but surely it would have started decomposing by now. If it hasn’t, we had better explain it far more clearly than we have.”

to minor things like:

“How many bottles of water? Ten 1.25 litre bottles is heavy. Could you even carry them?”

We will consider these and rewrite them before we add too much more stuff.

This tidying up is important. Little changes here may impact the story later. If we don’t change them now these changes turn out to be major rewrites in the next draft.

Progress overall has been slower than I would like. It has taken almost 12 months to get this far. Let’s hope the next three quarters of the book don’t take anywhere near as long.

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On writing

Where has all the good graffiti gone?

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.

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On writing

Three moderately good stories are better than one truly great story

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.

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On writing

You’re a writer: go home and write

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

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On writing

Setting up a presence on the web as a 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.

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On writing

Writing a fantasy novel: what language do your characters speak?

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.

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On writing

Remember when writing scenes: show, don’t tell

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.

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On writing

Unrealistic urban fantasy: the vampire who never grows up

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.

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On writing Writing process

Novel progress report: forgotten research

I was reading through our research notes for Barrain earlier today.

Some people say you do not need to research fantasy novels. Others say you need to research thoroughly before you can write.

We research some things. For Barrain we researched a little forensic science and some police procedures. After all, we have a body that has been dead for some time. We need to know what the corpse would be like. Also, given that it’s fantasy, we need to know where we are going to deviate from the standard dead body. Not only that, we need to know what the police will do and how they will do it.

Barrain is set in Australia. There is no reason for this, except that we are Australian. Here is the local police information about forensic science.

Here’s a summary of what they say about forensic investigation in Victoria.

The duties as shown on CSI are a combination of three different positions as performed in Victoria … A detective … is really the investigator in a case. The detective will … process the scene by taking notes and photographs and then collecting any items for analysis and submitting them to the Forensic Services Department. [Detectives also call out the crime scene examiner if required.] … The forensic scientists are specialists, not experts in every field, i.e. there are separate specialists for flammable liquid residues, DNA, Drug Analysis, Documents, Fingerprints, etc. … there are no jobs available in Australia like those depicted on CSI. It shows a combination of duties performed by Crime Scene investigators, Forensic Scientists, detectives and others.

Victoria Police, Forensic Science

We checked on this months ago, and have it in our research file.

Yet what did we do when we wrote the forensic science portion of Barrain? We forgot this, and made it more like something out of CSI than something our local police would have done.

I think we watch too much television.

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Writing process

Keeping track of people and places in the novel

How do writers keep track of who’s who in their novels? What about timelines? How complex do their notes need to be?

Some people write complex biographies on their major characters before they start writing. They know where their characters are born, whether or not they have a mole on their back, who they grew up with and each lover they have had. Others never record anything about them at all. These people rely on memory, or re-reading their novel. We come somewhere on the lighter side of in-between.

We do not start off tracking characters. We begin with an idea, a character in a situation, and start writing. We’re lucky when we start if we even know what our character looks like.

In Barrain, for example, we had a vague idea of Scott as one of those trendy young people with blonde hair and modern clothes. Caid had large green eyes—a cross between a cat and an elf —and that was about it. We started writing with that.

We’re a quarter of the way through the story now, and have so many characters and locations to keep track of that we need to do something about it.

We need a list. We do this in a Word document (if I start it), or in an Excel spreadsheet (if Sherylyn does). It’s a simple table, and it’s very basic.

Partial list of people in Barrain, with level of description

The list should be in alphabetical order.

It’s a simple list, very basic, and we don’t go into any real detail. Personal appearance is noted where it is important. For example, the colour of Scott’s eyes compared to Caid’s (and the other Barrainers) is important, so that is noted, but we don’t mention Mather’s hair colour, because it’s not.

Around the same time we start implementing a timeline. This is usually a spreadsheet, with the timeline across the top, and people along the left.

Time increments depend on the time frame of the story.

Basic timeline

I have simplified the timeline here, but you get the gist.

To date, these simple character lists (people, places and things) and the timeline have worked for us and as we go on through the story and the drafts they become invaluable.