Category: On writing

Dear Author

Please do not preach to me.

I know your character is nice to dogs and little old ladies. I know he helps everyone in his apartment building. He’s the go-to man for all things plumbing and carpentry and even loans until payday. I know he’s kind to homeless old Pete and slips him money once a week so Pete can buy himself a decent dinner.

I know your character had a hard life; the youngest child of a father who was head of a gang that dealt mayhem in the streets. His childhood was spent avoiding the inevitable all-out gang wars that erupted frequently. I know he was ashamed of his family and all they stood for. That he couldn’t wait to leave home and now he’s a self-made man who is proud to look at himself in the mirror every morning.

I know all this and I don’t care.

In fact, I’m hanging out for the younger child who wants to take over the gang. He’d be a lot more interesting to read about. And maybe Pete as one of those junkie beggars always asking for money who spits at your character when he offers Pete the sandwich he has just bought himself for lunch.

I know, too, that there genuinely are people who have picked themselves up out of bad situations and done well for themselves. They are kind to little old ladies, and little old men (and not so old people), and to animals and a whole lot of other things.

But I don’t want you to tell me that.

I especially don’t want you to tell me that in a two paragraph info dump close to the start of the book.

Evan stared into the mirror as he knotted his tie. This interview today was important. He’d come a long way since he’d cowered behind the rubbish bins in the meanest part of town while his father and his gang fought another turf war. He couldn’t wait to escape, and as soon as he’d turned eighteen he was off.

(It’s interesting that these people always wait until they’re eighteen to leave, by the way. If he hated it that much surely he’d have gone a lot earlier. Eighteen is a very middle-class age to leave home.) Then, a few paragraphs later.

Irene, from apartment two, knocked at the door. She wore an old dressing gown that came to her knees. It was saturated. “Evan, thank goodness you’re here. My kitchen taps have gone crazy. I can’t turn them off, there’s water spurting up to the ceiling.”

Our hero Evan good-naturedly goes to help her, even though he has an important interview, which he’s now going to be late for. After he’s changed his suit—he’s sopping wet by now—he goes out into the sunshine where homeless Pete has set up a cardboard box in the alley beside the apartment block.

Evan was always conscious of those who had less than him and tried to help them where he could. He handed over ten dollars. “Why don’t you get yourself some breakfast, Pete. You look as if you could do with some.”

“Bless you, Evan. You’re always so kind.”

You know Evan’s problem(s)? (He’s got lots of them.)

• He’s the author’s soapbox—this man must be good because he’s had such a hard life but still managed to rise above it
• He’s the author’s guilt trip—my main character must be a ‘good’ man
• He’s a lazy way to build character—a stereotype who ticks all the right boxes. Hard life, yes. Kind heart, yes. Against the odds, yes.
• He’s got no personality. He’s a nothing man
• Decent traits do not automatically make decent characters. Even Hannibal Lecter was charming.
• He has no redeeming features. I don’t like him.

“But,” you say from your authorial distance. “He’s good, he’s kind. I just told you he was.”

That’s right. You told me, and you know what they say to writers. Show, don’t tell. Think how much better that first paragraph would be if you put some more colour into it and took out some of the telling.

Evan knotted his tie with care. This interview today was important.

He was a long way from the boy who’d cowered behind the rubbish bins in the meanest part of town while his father and his gang fought another turf war. Not that he remembered the gang wars as much as he did the aftermath, when his father, all smiles, pulled out hundred dollar bills and sent Evan and his next older brother down to the pizza shop to buy pizzas and beer, while at home Dad added the new notches to his gun.

He’d left the day he got his license. He told people his father and mother were dead.

Suddenly Evan’s getting a personality. I like him better already.

So please don’t give me a sanitised cardboard cutout who I know is a ‘good person’ because he has all these redeeming features (and because you told me he was). ‘Good people’ like this make terrible characters.

Yours
Your no-longer-so-devoted reader

I recently read Daniel Abraham’s A private letter from genre to literature over at SF Signal.  I enjoyed the article, and the comments with–I love it when the commenters comment in the spirit of the writing.

I hadn’t read any books by Daniel Abraham before.  But based on that one article I’m definitely going to.

One thing writers are told is is in order to be a writer they must have an online presence. And most of them do. They have a website, and a Facebook account, and maybe a Twitter account.

But there are other places online where people see your work.

One place is guest posts on other blogs, like Abraham’s.

Another place is the forums.

I get a lot of my ‘to read’ authors from comments they post in reply to other works.  I’m a member of (not very active) some of the GoodReads groups, for example.  GoodReads has a surprising number of authors in their lists.  Or maybe that’s not surprising, given that authors are also readers.  I’ve picked up a lot of new authors from there, mostly because I like the comments they make in the group.

Another place was the old Harper Collins Voyager Online site. It gets very little traffic nowadays, but before I arrived there I didn’t realise many Australian (and New Zealand) authors actually wrote fantasy. I’d pick through the comments in the forums–most of whom were authors, and a goodly proportion of them published–and choose the ones I liked based on the comments they made.

Of course, you can hide yourself under a different name and never the twain — the author and the commentor — shall meet, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. These comments are another another way for you to get your name out there.

If people know you are a writer and like your comments, they will look you up.

I do.

 

I’m a fan of Lee Lofland’s The Graveyard Shift. If you want to write mystery this is one site you should have bookmarked, and if you’re serious about writing police procedurals, I can’t think of anything better than to attend their Writers’ Police Academy.

Today, for a bit of light-hearted fun, Lee has a post called Cooking with Cops: Crime Scene Yams.

It has some memorable descriptions, like:

Place 4 large yams … side-by-side like corpses at a mob murder scene

and

… should be still slightly firm to the touch—not quite done, but
almost. You know, like when a body is two hours into rigor

Lots of fun, and the recipe sounds like it tastes good too.

Writers are often told they should know their characters intimately before they start writing.

Physical characteristics such as height, weight, colour of hair, shape of chin, right down to the scar on her left knee that the character got when she was six, and spiked herself on the new bicycle she got for Christmas.  Identifying habits, such as the nervous tic she gets when speaking in front of audiences, the way she likes to eat ice-cream on cold days, and how she loves to dance in the rain; that she likes wearing pink lipstick with red shoes.  Emotional make-up, like how her father leaving her mother when she (our protagonist) was ten years old meant that she was brought up in a household that hated men.

This, writers are told, makes for a well-rounded, three-dimensional character.

I have a confession to make.

I don’t know what most of my characters look like.  I definitely don’t know at the start of the book, and sometimes I don’t know much more by the end.

Jens, from my latest work-in-progress, is small and dark, shorter by a head than his older sister.

That’s about it as far as physical characteristics go, and I’m close to the end of the book.  I think he has grey eyes, but I don’t specifically mention it anywhere, and if the reader wants to give him blue eyes—or green eyes, or brown eyes—they can.

Gunnar, the other point-of-view character, is tall, blonde and muscled, around the same age and build as Jens’ father.  He may or may not have long hair. I alternate on thinking he does.

That doesn’t mean that by the end of the book I don’t know my characters well.  I do.  I know exactly how they’ll react in any given situation.

I know that Jens was accidentally locked in a safe when he was five years old, and nowadays hates to be in enclosed spaces. I know that he’ll do what he thinks is right, even when he agrees to follow orders and is told to do something else.

I know that while Gunnar doesn’t have time for pampered people who try to run his expeditions for him, and that he’ll refuse to work again with someone who endangers any expedition he is in charge of.

Put either of them in a room  or a situation and I know exactly what they will do or say.

But I still couldn’t give you a full description of either of them.

Self-published novelists still make the same mistakes

Ten years ago, if you self-published your book people knew that you did it because you couldn’t get published any other way.

With the advent of ebooks, the internet*, print-on-demand, and the changing face of publishing in general, self-publishing doesn’t have the same stigma any more.

Even so, when someone tells me they have self-published their book, I smile and say, “That’s nice,” but in my mind I’m praying, “Please don’t ask me to read it.”

Why?

Because most self-published books are poorly edited.

Let me be blunt. You, as a writer—and by ‘you’ here I mean me, too, because I am a writer—cannot see problems in your own work. Yes, you can fix up most of it, and you should, because that’s where you need to be before you can even send it out to an agent, but once you have sold your book what happens?

First, it goes to a story editor, who picks holes in the plot and tells you things you didn’t want to hear. Like how the heroine you thought was so wonderful is a whiny, unlikeable creature, or that there was no way the hero could get from London to New York in fifteen minutes to save the day, and so on.

Okay, so I’m being a bit stupid here, but it’s amazing the obvious things you don’t pick up.

After you have fixed all of these, the copy editor comes in and red-pencils all your typos and grammar errors. Even after numerous edits it’s amazing what still needs to be fixed.

Thus most writers, even when they turn in what they consider to be a polished final draft, still have a lot of work to do once the book has been acquired.

Self-published authors don’t generally do this work.

I buy a lot of eBooks. For authors I don’t know, I read the excerpt provided and if I like it enough I buy it. Unfortunately, it’s got to the stage where if I know (or even suspect) that the author is self-published then I just won’t buy the book.

Why not?

Because they’re not polished. They’ve got plot-holes and typos and all the other problems I mentioned above. Because they’re amateur.

I don’t want to pay for half-finished work. I can get that from my online writing group, and at least I know what to expect from them.

Sometimes I think it’s because these authors are too close to their own work to see that their story isn’t finished. Sometimes I think they know it’s not but don’t care anyway. Occasionally they do care, but have calculated that what they will earn from new readers outweighs what they will lose because they don’t build up a following. This last happens a lot in niche markets where the reading audience is so eager for stories in their niche that they will buy anything, and works until the market becomes saturated.

The cost of editing

If you are determined to self-publish, then you should seriously consider working with an editor. Unfortunately, that doesn’t come cheap.

How much does it cost? You may as well ask how long is a piece of string.

Check out the suggested rates over at www.londonfreelance.org. Think about how long it would take you to do a story edit, halve it (because they’re going to do it faster than you) and multiply the number of hours by the hourly rate. You’ll find it’s a lot.

I know of  a published writer who used to charge $2 per page (250 words) to do a story edit. Think about it. That’s $800 for a 100,000 words and you still need someone to do a copy edit as well.

I have no idea how much a good editor charges but I can tell you this much, based on my own experiences as a technical writer. Editing is different to tech writing, but the principles apply for both.

• Good, experienced technical writers [and editors] charge more but they don’t take as long to do it, and their work is generally better
• It always takes longer than you think it will
• If I can’t make a living out of it, I’m not going to do it.

That last one is important. I have to live. I love my work but if it won’t pay my bills then I’ll find a job that does.  Editors have to live too.

Think about that when you consider the costs of getting a good editor.

One thing I am watching with interest is Dystel and Goderich’s (D&G) foray into ePublishing. See their announcement here, and Victoria Strauss, from Writer Beware‘s thoughts on it here. Read the comments, they’ll give an interesting insight.

In D&G’s model I don’t know what their 15% covers, or whether the author has to still fork out for editing costs. I expect they will. But some agents do fairly comprehensive edits on stories anyway. If you get a good agent who does that already, and if the agent is reputable (as D&G appear to be), you might get away with just the costs of a good copy-editor instead.

As I say, I don’t know their planned model, but it will be interesting to see what happens.

The other traps

It’s not just the cost of editing you have to think about.

Beware of rip-offs. The publishing industry is filled with scams. There are a lot of people out there who say they are editors and will take advantage of you.

You need a reputable editor.

Not only that, you need an editor compatible with your writing. There’s no pointing taking on an editor who loves literary and looks down on genre if you want them to edit your science fiction romance.

Respect your editor

Lastly, one thing that getting you book published through a commercial publishing company does is make you listen to the editor. You have to. There’s a book contract relying on it. You won’t agree with everything the editor says, but you’ll pick your fights.

When you’re self-publishing you don’t need to do that. If an editor makes a recommendation you don’t like you can ignore it. Sometimes you’ll ignore things you shouldn’t.

If you ignore too many recommendations, then it’s one of two things:

• You’ve chosen the wrong editor for your book, or
• You’re not ready to accept criticism.

Either way, you have wasted your money.

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* Why the internet? A lot of bloggers, in particular, have developed a strong enough platform that they become known as an authority in their field. They then publish eBooks on their topic and sell them from their website and make some reasonable money from it.

It seems that everywhere I’ve been on the web lately people are talking about how a strong sense of place can act as another character in your story, or really make a story more enjoyable.

• A strong sense of place, Cally Jackson
• Let’s think about place, Stacey Kendall Glick, Dystel and Goderich
• And even Popular strong sense of place books over at GoodReads.

Around the same time, I seemed to read a lot about how if you want to sell to the US market then you have to ‘Americanise’ your story. In particular, how the first Harry Potter was Americanised (or should that be Americanized) for the US market, while the later stories were changed less.

Some of the changes include:

English	US
Philosopher’s stone	Sorceror’s stone
Car park	Parking lot
Sherbet	lemon Lemon drop
Toilet	Bathroom
Mum	Mom
Dear Harry, (it said in a very untidy scrawl) I know you get Friday afternoons off	Dear Harry, I know you get Friday afternoons off, [written in a handwriting font]

 

Differences in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Harry Potter Lexicon

The changes were minor. Some people who read both version said they didn’t notice the differences.

I can’t say. I haven’t read the US versions of the book. I don’t know how much they changed the sense of place, but to me books that use ‘Mom’ and ‘bathroom’ give me a totally different sense of place to one that uses ‘Mum’ and ‘toilet’.

I know that these are only words to talk about, respectively, a parent and a room in which to perform ablutions. You can argue that this is nothing like the sense of place you get from, say, Carl Hiaasen’s stories about Florida.

You get a stronger sense of place from Hiaasen, but that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter doesn’t also have one. I believe it just means that Hogwarts is more familiar to you. Despite the fact that it’s a fantasy, it’s set in a school environment most readers are familiar with, even if they have never been to boarding school.

Yes, some stories bring place to the forefront and make it a character in the story. Other stories concentrate on the emotional development of the (other) characters and the place could be anywhere.

Even so, if you have written your story well the sense of place will permeate it. It’s there in everything the characters say, what they eat, where they go. And sometimes in what they do as well.

It’s also the differences between life as you know it and life in the book that evoke a sense of place. If you have lived all your life in the city, then a well-written book about life in a dying country town will seem exotic to you and give you a stronger sense of place than one set in a big city. If you are not French then a story set in France will be exotic. Or it should be, if it’s written properly.

It’s the little things that make a difference. Calling your mother Mom or Mum or even Mama.

That’s why I think the trend to Americanise books for the US audience is a sad thing. It takes away some of the strength the book gets from its setting; the thing that makes a particular book what it is.

Most of the time you don’t even need to change it in the first place. Let’s go back to Harry Potter. In the Philosopher’s Stone they changed nearly fifty words to suit their US audience. In Deathly Hallows they changed two words—cot and dresser.

Writing the alpha male

Part two of a series on the alpha male, and how writers can get it wrong.  In part 1 I talked about how the alpha male behaves.  In this post I want to talk about how bad it can be when you get it wrong.

Last night I purchased a self-published book from Amazon. The premise was interesting, and even though the preview was a little choppy the price was right and I liked the idea enough to download it anyway.

The book was so bad I ended up deleting it from my Kindle. It’s sitting in my archived items now, and if I could get rid of it altogether I would.

What made it so bad?

The love interest in the story was truly repulsive. The author had tried to write someone strong and protective. Instead she gave us a domineering, arrogant tyrant who had no respect for the other characters at all.

Worse, I could see from the way she wrote that she thought she was giving us an alpha male.

If you haven’t already done so, read Angela Knight’s The Care and Writing of Alpha Males. As well as being an excellent article all round, she makes some valid points about the alpha males of old who were actually the villains of the story, even when they were the hero.

That’s what the author of the story I read last night had created. A villain, even though she didn’t realise it.

It was as if she had taken a list of alpha qualities that and checked them off.

• Alpha male is decisive. So, alpha male must make the decisions. Always. Even if the love interest has already made a sensible decision. Alpha overrides it with a stupider one of his own because it’s his decision and he decides.
• Alpha male protects. Love interest is hospitalised with what turns out to be a stress-related ulcer. Afterwards, alpha won’t let love interest do anything (and I mean anything) because she’s just come out of hospital. Even though love interest has had ulcer for months (see money problems, below) and has been doing fine without alpha’s help all this time.
• Alpha male is rich. The love interest has money problems. Alpha male, naturally, throws money around to solve it. This is a deus ex machina for me, anyway. Don’t we all wish someone rich would come along and save us? But it wasn’t so much the doing it, as how he did it. You have to read to book to see how repulsively it was done. All I can say is if someone walked out on me four years ago, left me to run a business on my own and then came back four years later when I had practically bankrupted the business paying his grandfather’s medical bills and then takes the business out of my hands and runs it himself because he has ‘saved’ it by paying off the debts, I’m not going to stand by meekly and say, “Thank you,” like the love interest did.

Worst of all was the way the character didn’t run true to himself. He had all the characteristics of the alpha male but nothing to bind it together, and without anything to bind it, his behaviour was simply obnoxious, overbearing and totally unjustified.  Not to mention erratic, because it didn’t gel with his behaviour outside these ‘alpha’ scenes.

I mentioned at the start that the book was self-published.  I think that if it had been through a proper editing process, or even a better critiqing process, many of these problems would have disappeared before it went up.

I know from my own experience that when you write you cannot always see how bad a character comes across to other readers.  The trouble with the alpha male is that they’re difficult to write anyway because you do have to tread that

… fine line between confidence and arrogance, protectiveness and condescension.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

And to quote Angela Knight again

…no character can make you slam a book against a wall quicker than an alpha male gone bad.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

I am a member of three writing organisations*.

• The Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC) (www.vwc.org.au)
• Queensland Writers Centre (QWC) (www.qwc.asn.au)
• Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) (www.romanceaustralia.com)

I’ve been away on holiday. In the mail when I arrived home were the August newsletters for each group as well as emails from VWC and QWC in my email inbox. It was interesting to read one after the other and to compare the three organisations.

I am, unashamedly, a genre writer, and this bias shows. When the various writing organisations ask for feedback, the first thing I say is ‘more genre, please’.

Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC)

The VWC is, in my opinion, the most literary of the three. It has become even more so since they moved to the Wheeler Centre and Roderick Poole became director. I’m not sure if this is a deliberate direction Roderick is taking them, or if I am just noticing it more since the redesign of the website and the magazine. They’re big into poetry, literary writers and into writing festivals (not all literary I might add).

Queensland Writers Centre (QWC)

To me, QWC strikes a better balance between genre and literary. In the August issues both magazines talked about local writing conferences and poetry, but the QWC also had an article on the Australian crime scene and another on writing historical romance.

Both magazines cover a good range of workshops, writing opportunities and competitions.

Romance Writers of Australia Inc. (RWA)

Now we’re really talking genre. While Hearts Talk is nowhere near as polished as The Victorian Writer or WQ, this is the magazine I read from cover to cover. This is industry-specific news and networking. This is the sort of information a genre writer needs to keep them enthusiastic. And I am not even primarily a romance writer but a science fiction/fantasy writer who adds romantic elements.

The August magazine contained an article on creating characters, a note on the response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s criticism of young adult literature being too dark plus Lynne Wilding award nominees for the RWA volunteer of the year, as well as member news and releases.

Obviously, for me, the RWA provides more value for money than either of the state-based writing groups.

I first decided to join RWA after talking to a fellow speculative fiction writer at a VWC workshop. She wrote fantasy, I was writing science fiction at the time. And I think that probably says it all. To the VWC, ‘speculative fiction’ is one small (and sometimes it seems to me, unimportant) type of writing, while RWA is genre-based enough to recognise the different genres within, while always with a view to the romance genre, of course.

Different types of writers will find different writing groups more valuable than others. For me, as a genre writer, the best value for money is in my RWA membership, even though I don’t actually write romance per se. If I wrote, say, literary fiction or even mainstream fiction, I imagine I would get more value out of my VWC membership.

If you can afford it, I think that you should become a member of your state writing organisation. If nothing else, it keeps you in touch with other writers and what is going on in the writing world.

On top of that, join any genre organisation that is suitable.

* I am also a member of the Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (ASFFA) (http://www.asffwa.com/). I can’t speak for them, as I haven’t really had much contact with them.

Amateurs smirk, professionals don’t.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when characters smirk in a story it always makes the story seem just that little bit more amateur. One character, one smirk, is bad enough. But when all the characters start to smirk, one after the other, oh boy.

I’ve been reading a lot of two and three dollar eBooks lately. Some are great stories, others so-so, and some are downright bad.

It’s purely subjective, but for me one of the indicators of how good a story will be is the number of times characters smirk. One smirk is acceptable, but two or more close together early in the book, especially when it’s different characters doing the smirking, usually denotes a book that needed a lot more editing before it went to press. Or, to put it bluntly, self-published books.

When I read about characters smirking in a novel it’s often in a romantic part, where one character smirks to the other just as they’re about to get down and do it. What the writer usually means is that the character is feeling pretty pleased with themselves about something, that they are smiling in a self-satisfied manner.

Except to me, this is not what smirk means.

The Free Dictionary defines a smirk as:

To smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner

Dictionary.com as:

to smile in an affected, smug, or offensively familiar way

Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:

a smile that expresses satisfaction or pleasure about having done something or knowing something which is not known by someone else

Reverso:

a smile expressing scorn, smugness, etc., rather than pleasure

The origin of the word, according to most of the sites cited above, is from the Old English smearcian, related to smer derision; and the Old High German bismer contempt, bismeron to scorn.

It’s not the sort of smile you’re about to give to the man or woman you are having a romantic moment with. Not unless you’re raping or blackmailing them.

Even worse is when the characters always smirk. I mean, how often do you smirk? How many of your friends smirk all the time? I recently read a novel where there were six smirks on the one page, shared amongst two people.

It was Mark Twain who said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug. Smirking is like that. Oftentimes when it’s used, it’s not quite the right word. It always takes me out of a story. And I’m sorry to all you smirkers out there, but most times it makes the writing feel a lot more amateur.