Category: Writing process

I’m juggling so many unfinished manuscripts at the moment I’m starting to wonder how I going to do it. Guess which one suffers. Barrain of course, because it’s more in the line of a blogging hobby than serious writing.

I have:

• Shared Memories—science fiction, 120,000 words, now into it’s third draft. There’s lots of feedback and notes from Sherylyn’s last read but it’s up to me to do the next major revision. The opening is still weak and the end needs considerable work but I’d say we’re 80% there.The writing style on this is a little different to our other stories. On a recent re-read I noticed a lot more commas, and sentences that I would normally either split or join with an and. I haven’t quite decided whether it works or whether the story just needs a really good line edit.All through the second draft I’ve been trying to write a query for it but it’s just hopeless. Everything I write is just icky.
• Mathi’s Story—fantasy. This is my NaNoWriMo novel and I’m really pleased at how this has come along, particularly given that I was writing fast (for me) on a story that didn’t get a lot of editing. It’s still only 55,000 words (I have written around 2,000 words since November). I think this story will end up around 80,000 words.I don’t know what happens in the main storyline yet, but I know my subconscious is working on it. Every couple of days another little piece of the puzzle drops into place. The subplots just wrote themselves.This is the first novel where I’m happy with the start. I think, when I have finished, the start will be almost exactly as I wrote it, sans a few line edits.
• One Man’s Treasure—science fiction, 80,000 words. The first draft is completed, and Sherylyn has done a first read-through. I was up to adding feedback to her edits when NaNoWriMo got in the way.I haven’t read this one for a couple of months now, so I can’t say how much work draft two will take, and I can’t even recall how much work it will be to fix. There are the usual problems for our writing—the start needs fixing, and the last quarter of the book needs work, but otherwise it’s okay, I think.
• Barrain—fantasy. And, of course, there’s Barrain. The story that started this blog and the story that keeps getting pushed to one side when all the other writing interferes.We’re up to 41,000 words on Barrain. Even though the version we posted on the website is 5,000 words less the next draft I’d like to post is the full draft 3, completed (around 80,000 words, I think) although that looks like being a while away yet. When we’re done with draft 3 I imagine that for this story it will be the equivalent of a draft 1 for any other story we have written.

As I said, lots to juggle, lots to do. In all, though, 2009 was a productive year for me, and for the writing team of Sherylyn and me, and I’m looking forward to having a couple of stories we can attempt to market by mid-2010.

Busy NaNoWriMo’ing. Every spare minute is writing time.

All writers have strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is dialogue. I can write a whole novel in dialogue. (I know, they’re called scripts, but my stories sprawl so much the end result would be longer than a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.)

One of my weaknesses is emotion. Sherylyn goes through the stories after I have finished the first draft and adds emotive moments throughout. Another weakness is fight scenes.

I can’t write fight scenes.

I can picture the fight in my head as I’m writing. I know what happens, but getting it down on paper is another thing altogether. The first draft is a wire-frame outline pulled totally out of shape The fight has no excitement, no emotion, and not much happening, and then suddenly it’s over.

So I rewrite it with more description and it turns into one long boring ‘he did this’ and then ‘she did that’ and then they did it all over again. The fight takes forever, and any urgency is lost. Not only that, I still can’t get past the ‘he did this’ text for what is actually happening.

At least my scenes are realistic by then, if somewhat boring. I have a writer friend who specialises in the impossible fight. You know the ones. Where the antagonist has his back to the protagonist and then she (the protagonist) shoots him between the eyes. Or the physically impossible contortionist scene where she’d have to be Elastagirl to pick up the weapon the bad guy dropped.

Another writer friend suggested we could both benefit from taking a fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie and trying to describe it.

I think I might try it.

Expect our next few books to have kung-fu-style fight scenes.

Buying a netbook computer has boosted my writing output considerably, and it has given me a renewed enthusiasm for writing.

Even though it looks as if I haven’t written much for the last 12 months, I have. I have written a lot. I just haven’t been doing it on a computer because my writing time is away from home—travelling to and from work and snatched during lunch hours. I have been writing by hand.

I filled around 30 notebooks. I have written lots of blogs. Most of them are still in my notebook. Some of them are obsolete now because they are no longer relevant.

I also wrote 30,000 words of my workshop novel.

30,000 words. 120 pages. Ten pages a month, and they weren’t even good pages.

Writing by hand comes with its own particular problems, of which I’ll blog about separately (the blog’s written, I just have to find which notebook it’s in) but the main problems for me were:

• It’s incredibly slow
• I don’t re-write hand-written text as I go because the re-writing slows me down. I do rewrite on the PC, because it’s easy to do. This means the handwritten text is less polished than the typed
• I have terrible handwriting. By the time I transfer the it to computer I can’t even read half of it, and I have no idea what I meant by the cryptic notes I made for myself at the time.

I know a writer who writes all his first drafts by hand. He wouldn’t do it any other way (and it’s not an age thing, because he’s younger than me). But I can’t write at that speed forever. I would only finish one novel every ten years.

Two months ago I bought a netbook computer. As a writer I had some specific requirements.

• A keyboard that I could type on
• Microsoft Word
• At least 1 megabyte of memory (so that I could run Office programs easily) and with more than one open at a time
• It had to fit into my handbag and be light enough for me to carry with comfort if I decided to, say, walk home from work

Things like wireless access and price were important, but not deciders.

I spent a lot of time in computer shops typing “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, that all demo computers are at least two months old? In all the time that I looked I never saw one computer where the Microsoft trial was still running.)

Some computers were just too small. The Asus Eee PC, for example, was cute, but I simply could not type accurately. Some computers had good keyboards but when I picked them up they weighed a lot. Who wants to walk around with the equivalent of a bag of sugar in their bag? Not me.

I finally settled on the Acer Aspire One. The price had come down, it was being sold with XP and it had 1MB of memory so I knew I could put Word onto it. I specifically wanted Word so that I could update the document from either my desktop PC or the netbook, depending on where I was at the time. And it was the smallest keyboard that I could type with relative accuracy on.

It took courage to take it out in public the first few times. I felt really stupid. The first week I just carried it around in the bag. Then one morning I got brave, sat down in my local McDonalds with a coffee and muffin, and forced myself to use it.

It was a month before I would take it out every day and considered it normal. But now I do it over a coffee in the morning and in a small cafe over lunch. (You need to pick your lunch spots carefully. Choose quiet ones that are never full, and do later lunches, if you can. And don’t stay forever. There’s a backlash right now over people with computers who hog tables for hours over one coffee. My own etiquette rules are: always buy food as well as a drink, and never use the cafe’s power, only your battery.)

It’s costing me more in food (and I think I’m gaining weight) but the writing benefits are well worth it. Since I’ve had the netbook I have completed my workshop novel (another 30,000 words) , and written a second draft.

Not only that, I have more enthusiasm for writing. I didn’t realise how much writing by hand was holding me back.

I have been extremely busy at work lately, so much so that when I get home I just flop. I turn on my computer to read my emails, but that’s about it. I defintely don’t have time to open the word processor and start typing the next segment of my novel.

But that doesn’t mean I have stopped writing. I have a note book and I’m writing on the tram and bus on the way to and from work. I’m writing in coffee shops at lunchtime. I pull it out any time I have a spare few minutes. At the hairdresser, waiting for friends. Anywhere I have enough light and somewhere to rest the note book.

I have filled about ten notebooks already. Last Saturday I sat down and typed up the contents of the first one. 7,000 words. A week’s worth of borrowed writing time and I still managed 7,000 words. I was pretty happy.

It has changed how I write, however.

I usually type directly onto a computer when I can. It was hard to do at first, but I am pleased I stuck to it and forced myself to do it. In fact, two technical skills I would urge every writer to learn is touch typing, and writing directly onto a computer without writing it by hand first. If you can do this it eventually frees you up to write faster, and you have less retyping to do. (I should add a third skill once that’s done. Backing up your work on a regular basis.)

Going back to writing in a note book has made things harder.

• I can’t write as fast, so I have this horrible habit of leaving bits out as I write. I think, “I’ll put that in when I type it up,” but of course, it never happens. I have no idea what I was thinking of by then
• I don’t work on the prose as much. On the PC I would work on a sentence over and over to get the meaning I wanted. On paper, once I’ve made a few crossouts and put other words in, I can’t even read what I meant. Sometimes I rewrite the whole section, but by this time I’m rushing ahead and I think to myself, “I’ll fix that when I type it up”. If I need to make major changes I just rewrite the whole thing, and don’t even refer back to the original. I end with two similar sections. I then type up both versions, which makes an absolute mess
• Until I started writing on paper I didn’t realise how much I moved around in the manuscript. Writing by hand is sequential and so that’s how I type it up. My story timeline is an absolute mess, so bad that I need to write out a sequence just to get my own head around it.
• I don’t edit. When I am working on the PC, the first thing I do is re-read what I wrote the day before and fix any major problems. In fact, there have been days where I just polish the previous day’s work and don’t type up anything new

There are lots of things I plan to fix when I type it up, but come type-up time I don’t do any of that. I type straight from the notes without changing anything.

As a result, the work I produce from my handwritten notes is a lot rougher, more of an outline, with lots of things that need to be filled in. If I wrote like this all the time the story would need an extra draft to get it to its usual second-draft state.

I can’t wait till I get back to the keyboard.

In an effort to get more writing done, I’m switching to fortnightly posts on this blog.

As you know, we’re trying to sell novels here. If you read much about writing on the internet then you will also know that that a lot of agents now accept email submissions. This is great for us down at the bottom end of the world because it saves a lot on postage*.

Like a lot of authors I have my favourite agents. Those who sell a lot of books in the genre we** write in, and who sell books that we both love to read. There are even a couple of really special agents who were encouraging with the last manuscript and they’re the first ones we’re going to send to the next query too, when the book is polished enough.

One of these agents is prefers snail-mail queries but one is happy to take email and I have queried her before via email.

Last night, as I glanced through my junk email folder prior to deleting it, what do I see? The agent’s name against a letter touting miracle pills for the male of the species (you know the ones).

That was fine. I understand that we all end up caught by spammers stealing our email addresses, and although it infuriates me I know that there is little I can do about it. Most of the time the poor innocent victim doesn’t even know their address has been spam-napped unless they get an undeliverable mail message back about an email they didn’t even send. What I normally do is add the victim to my junk-mail list and their emails are automatically routed to the junk mail folder.

I caught this one, so I said, yes, agent was a ‘safe’ person and all was right with the world.

Except … these spam mails seem to go around and around among the users on the list until the spammer gets sick of it, or we add most of the other users to our junk mail list. It’s fine for me, because I do run my eye down the list of senders of junk mail before I delete them, and I can recognise important names. Like the agent’s.

But it doesn’t work back the other way.

This agent has by now probably received spam mail back from me. She doesn’t know me. What’s she going to do? If she’s anything like me she’ll already have clicked on ‘add sender to blocked sender’s list’. Which means that next time I send my carefully crafted email query to her, with its extra line mentioning that even though nothing came of it, she had asked to see a full for the last novel, that email will go straight into her junk folder, or will be deleted, unseen.

Sob.

*A quick note on postage. The internet has been a boon for us trying to sell our work, and not just because we can email queries to prospective agents. It’s great for the snail mail too. Why? Because it’s so easy to order postage stamps from other countries. Those of you who remember international reply coupons (IRCs) will probably agree with me that they were hopeless. But now I can order postage stamps, and even correctly sized postcards, and include them with the query. It’s fuss free for both me and the agent. I love it.

** The constant switch between I and we is deliberate. See I, we, and the grammatical intricacies of me talking about us.

Sherylyn asked me, the other day, how I ‘saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it.

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there. It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking. He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie —I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s. I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Sherylyn though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.

The critique group I joined is changing the way I write my novel.

More story, less spontaneity

I am forced to plan out the story more. This is good in that I have a more solid idea of the world, who the people are, and what made them that way earlier than I would normally. It is bad in that as a result my writing is not so spontaneous. It’s no longer a journey of discovery, I’m working to an outline and it’s starting to feel like work. (I’m a technical writer by day and I do outline for this.)

I’m writing to a different audience

I have always written to an audience—Sherylyn and myself—but now I’m starting to consider what my critique group wants as well.

If I’m not careful the story will go in a direction I hadn’t planned. I know what the group likes by now; I know that the next part of the story won’t suit them at all. There is a real possibility that I will take the story in a different direction because of this.

That could be good, it could be bad, but right now it’s uncomfortable, like someone is hijacking my story.

Best value is from continuity crits

The best critiquing I get from the other members is comments about continuity.

For example, I have two characters looking at a dead body. Two paragraphs later, one of them removes the sheet that covers her. But they were already looking at her.

Another example. The protagonist is seated, working, when a young girl comes in and tells him he is needed at the hospital. Next thing we know, the girl is skipping to catch up with his longer legs—however, he never moved from his seat.

Minor details, but very important. We may have caught them in the last draft, but sometimes we don’t. So far, this is where the value of the writer’s group is coming into it’s own.

Here’s a dilemma I never expected to have. All our books are starting to sound the same.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but I am noticing aspects of one book creeping into other books.

Take Barrain, for instance. As part of the rewrite for this draft we introduced a substance called bloodleaf, so named because it reacts with the blood and that reaction is important to the story.

In Potion we gave a substance called bloodstone, so named because it reacts with the blood. That reaction is important to the story.

In Barrain Caid is a nice guy but most people think of him as cold and distant, initially at least. In Potion, Alun is a nice guy but most people think of him as cold and distant at first too. Both of them have heavy responsibilities.

These two stories are different. One is a rescue mission, the other is the story of a man who is stranded outside his own world.

And yet, how different are they really? Sometimes I find myself writing things Scott, in Barrain, says that I know could equally well be said by Blade, the point-of-view character in Potion.

Are we writing the same book over and over? I don’t think so.

Are we using the same main characters over and over? That I’m not so sure about.

In the next draft of Barrain we will really have to look at Scott’s and Caid’s characters to ensure that they are unique, and not just badly formed clones of Blade and Alun.