February 24, 2009 by amanda
At the same time as giving Becoming A Fiction Writer a bit of a facelift, I’ve been (finally) doing more than just dipping my toes into social media. Once I noticed that even my husband was finally on Facebook and that I can follow Kevin Rudd, Paulo Coelho and somebody’s cat on Twitter, I figured these were the places to be. Or if they’re not, they’re at least quite fun, and great for a procrastinator like myself.
So if you want to follow my fiction writing life a bit more closely, you can do one of two things. Or both. Let me explain:
Follow Becoming A Fiction Writer on Twitter
Over at Twitter, in 140-character bites (that’s pretty short for me – perhaps it’s good discipline), you can hear about my up-to-the-minute fiction writing conundrums. Just find me at befictionwriter and follow me. Chances are I’ll follow you back because I’m a typical nosy writer who wants to know everybody else’s business.
If you’re not sure what Twitter’s all about yet, have a read of Getting started with Twitter.
Become a Facebook fan of Becoming A Fiction Writer
Yes, give me social media love, please! If you’re a Facebook member (and with 175 million of you around the world, the chances are good that you are), you can become a fan of the Facebook Becoming A Fiction Writer page, complete with embarrassing pictures of the very, very early stages of my reading and writing career. (Yes, that’s the bonus you get for hopping over and becoming a fan).
At both Twitter and Facebook I’ll be letting you know just how the whole fiction writing thing is going, and we’ll get some group action going sometime soon. Of course, I have to remember not to let these activities become great procrastination techniques, and I hope you’ll all remind me of that. Hope to see you all over the web!
Tags: befictionwriter Twitter, Facebook group page, social media
Permalink | Posted in Anti-Procrastination, Headline | No Comments »
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February 23, 2009 by amanda
This is my cat. She’s staring out the window, wondering when all the bird and wildlife action will start. This could be me, staring at my screen, wondering when all the writing action will start. My cat and I have just about the same philosophy on this waiting thing at the moment.
If you’ve met my cat (either of them, in fact) you’ll know that they’re pretty lazy. A lot of resting is involved in their lives, a bit of asking for cuddles and attention, and some eating. That’s about it. As far as action goes, they’re pretty passive about creating it. They just wait.
And the terrible thing is, that’s how my writing’s going at the moment. I have no idea what kind of magical event I’m waiting for, but since I had a great writing burst and got my novel revised and submitted, my fiction writing prowess has gone the way of, well, something that doesn’t exist anymore.
Ideas are still bobbing around in my head, and life is actually not so over-busy that I couldn’t fit in some extra fiction writing time, but it’s just not coming out. This is not writers’ block (I’m not convinced I believe in that yet), this is just fiction writer’s laziness. My current strategy is simply this: if I admit to the world (via this blog) that I’m being lazy about writing fiction at the moment, then I’ll be instantly shamed into starting again. I hope. I’m sure that the inspiration of the coming weekend’s writers festival will get the writing juices flowing too, but I’d like to kickstart them before that. So there you are, now I’m ashamed, and I’m going away to do some fiction writing. (Or cuddle the cat.)
Tags: fiction writers laziness, lazy cats, procrastination
Permalink | Posted in Anti-Procrastination, Featured, Writing Novels | 6 Comments »
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February 23, 2009 by amanda
My search for books of various kinds takes me all around the web so when I come across a bookstore’s website, I know what I like and what I don’t. Now that we have a Borders store here in Perth, I’ve got interested in their books and their style, because I don’t get that sinking “big chain” feeling with them the same as at other “big chain” stores (including the Aussie one I won’t publicise by naming, which doesn’t like little Australian publishers and therefore earns my distinct dislike!).
The Borders UK site is friendly, and cute: it has fun stuff like the “Spookily Accurate Book Suggestor” which claims to give you suitable book suggestions based on books you like (but their database mustn’t be full yet – I got great suggestions for some books but none for others, including Pride and Prejudice); and I rather like the auto-completion stuff which figures out what title or author you’re typing long before you finish it.
I checked for a few of my more obscure favourite books and found them there; they even do text books (I’m no lawyer, but their collection of law books seems pretty large, and not so interesting – unless you’re a student I guess) and of course I’m partial to the section of books about travel guides and travel narratives.
The funny thing is that after my long complaints about having footnotes in novels, especially in Pulitzer Prize-winning Oscar Wao, then Borders includes this as their fiction book of the month. Obviously they can see past the footnotes to the pretty prize slogan across the top. Me, I’m still having trouble liking it.
Disclaimer: Occasionally I’m asked to review various products or websites; this is a paid review, but rest assured I don’t review anything I don’t like.
Permalink | Posted in Reading Fiction | No Comments »
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February 21, 2009 by amanda
Unless you’re reading Becoming A Fiction Writer through an RSS feeder, you’ll have noticed that there have been a few changes. Yes, I bravely upgraded to a new WordPress theme because I’m trying to make this site a bit more user-friendly – during the transition phase, it might be a little bit less user-friendly, but please hang in there. It’s all for the best, of course.
If you have any feedback on the new design (so far) or you find anything broken, do let me know. My skills in this area are just on the limit of do-it-myself versus find-someone-else, but I’m stubborn enough to try everything on my own. Thanks for being patient with me!
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Fiction Tips | 3 Comments »
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February 21, 2009 by amanda
Just a few more sleeps and it all gets started: you might remember I’ve been waiting for the Perth Writers Festival for ages. I’m looking forward to getting a huge dose of inspiration both for reading and writing.
Special events – Some evening experiences
While most of the events of the Perth Writers Festival are free – and I have to say again how fantastic that is, and I hope that never changes – they usually hold some evening presentations, daytime workshops and special events like lunches that require tickets. And that’s more than fair. This year my mother and I will be heading off to three of the evening events (at just A$20 each), starting off on Thursday with an outdoor picnic “book club” with Stella Rimington, then Saturday evening with “Stories of the World” featuring six different novelists, and then finally we’ll be at the closing event on Monday night when one of my new favourite novelists, Sebastian Barry, will be there.
I looked into enrolling in one of the workshops this year, as last year I missed out by not booking ahead of time – but any that I’m slightly interested in are on at the same time as other (free) presentations I don’t want to miss.
Main programme highlights, according to me
There is so much to choose from – for three full days, there are four or five parallel sessions of presentations, panels and writers’ chats. I’m excited just looking at the programme (really, I am – call me a book nerd if you will!). A panel that looks at using parts of your own life in your writing – and the damage it can cause – intrigues me; some travel writing of course gets me interested as well, although I don’t (yet) know the authors involved in that panel (Mark Dapin, Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl); there are several sessions in which Kate Grenville’s taking part, and I’m sure she’ll be fascinating; and having just read Julienne van Loon’s novel set in the Pilbara, the panel looking at novels set in north-west Australia has got a big ring around it from me.
There’s so much more cool stuff to do too – families with book-loving kids must be loving all the sessions with children’s authors (most of them are free too). I’m just getting all excited in advance and will be ready to report back next week – although it might take me a few days to process all the inspiration I get. Last year my brain was shell-shocked for weeks – hopefully this time round it’s grown a little more resilient.
Tags: Perth Writers Festival
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Headline, Reading Fiction, Writers' Festivals | 1 Comment »
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February 20, 2009 by amanda
This is the society I feel the urgent need to start today. Some days I’m just feeling murderous about people who misuse apostrophes or who say “bought” when they mean “brought”, but all of those sins are committed by people who are less able to do something about it. But when a novelist uses footnotes in a novel, they should know better.
The footnotes in novels that are annoying me
The reason I bring this up now is that I’ve been reading Marune: Alastor 993
by Jack Vance. This is the second time I’ve strayed into science fiction recently, but more on that another time. The point is, Marune has footnotes, and I don’t like it. A recent chapter I read had a long footnote explaining how the three suns on this planet give rise to all these different phases of the day, etc, etc, and I read it, because I soon realised that if I didn’t read it, I wouldn’t understand the rest of the novel when they mentioned these weirdly-named phases (as you can see I’m still dealing with my prejudices against science fiction!). My point is: if this information is important to the story, make it part of the story. If it’s not, leave it out.
But let me continue ranting. A few months ago I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
. I read it before it won the Pulitzer Prize and was a little surprised when it did. I already complained back then about the footnotes – and my argument is pretty much the same as for Marune – if the information is important, include it. Why should we all have to strain our eyesight to read footnotes, and strain our brains to decide if they’re worth reading or not?
Can I ever allow footnotes in novels?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there are a whole lot more novels out there with footnotes. Even Wikipedia has a list of novels that use footnotes as a literary device. I guess I could stretch my imagination to think that there could be a place for footnotes in a very, very small number of situations, if they are truly used as a clever literary device to tell another story or give another viewpoint. But in that case, the writer is expecting that the reader will read them, whereas the whole point of footnotes for me – coming from the academic tradition – is that they’re there if I need to check a source or get some clarification about something but I won’t miss too much by skipping them.
Personally, I’m all for making every novelist on earth join my Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels. If you can’t say it in the main text of a novel, then you shouldn’t be saying it at all. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it, and I’m not even going to add a footnote to this blog post to explain it any further.
Thanks to Ruthieki for image via CC
Tags: footnotes in fiction, Jack Vance, Marune, Oscar Wao, Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Reading Fiction | 14 Comments »
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February 18, 2009 by amanda
So my husband invited a few guests to our place for a swim and a BBQ on the weekend. It sounds harmless enough and a typical Aussie summer thing to do. And we had a lovely evening floating around in the pool, eating sausages and barbecued eggplant and demolishing two cakes brought by the guests. But there was a bigger problem later that night: I couldn’t sleep.
Learning lots of new stuff
I didn’t use to be this bad, but recently, being exposed to a lot of new stimulation at once sends my brain quite crazy. One of the families my husband invited were people I’d never met before; the man is a colleague who I’d heard a lot of (good) things about and had been keen to meet, and he brought his wife and their 18-month-old daughter.
Here’s the problem: not only were they really nice people, but they were also very interesting. They’re migrants from Sri Lanka, a country I know little about, and I didn’t even know that the most common language there – which this family speak at home – is Sinhalese. The list of new and interesting facts I learnt about them goes on, and I won’t repeat it here, because my brain already spent several hours in the middle of the night repeating it.
So at around two o’clock in the morning, my husband rolled over and asked me why I was still awake (I was obviously keeping him awake with my tossing and turning). I just said, “New people,” and he understood. Of course, he told me I could think all I like about them in the morning, but my brain didn’t take that on board for a bit longer.
Meeting new characters and plots
I guess the main problem is that my fiction writer’s brain is seeing new characters and new plots in the interesting lives of others. The sleeplessness doesn’t happen when I meet just anyone; they have to be interesting and in some aspect different from my previous experience.
Variants of these kinds of people invariably end up in a story or novel I write – but curiously, as far as I can remember, it takes months or even years before they do – so my brain has carefully tucked them away in some filing system to be retrieved when they best fit the literary situation.
I wonder if I’m a little odd with this overactive imagination thing, or if other writers get stuck thinking over and over about new people and new situations. The same thing happens to me if I travel somewhere new and unique – too many new impressions leave me lying awake trying to process them all. Please help me out and leave a comment if I’m not alone.
Tags: overactive imagination, reasons i can't sleep
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Inspiration for Writers, Writing Fiction | 4 Comments »
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February 16, 2009 by amanda
Something I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages is the Australian national broadcaster’s show called the First Tuesday Book Club. Since it’s only on TV once a month I often forget to watch it at the time (that, and the fact that it’s on at 10pm when I’m usually reading in bed!); luckily you can always catch up on the past episodes on their website. The host is Jennifer Byrnes and there are two regular “book club members” in Marieke Hardy (I love her on Triple J breakfast radio too) and Jason Steger; then there are usually two guest “members” to add to the mix. And it’s great!
First Tuesday Book Club Summer 2008 Special
In any case, I hope to make some regular notes about tips and ideas I’ve gleaned from this great show, and today they come from the second last show, which was actually the summer special from the end of 2008. The guests were incredibly-famous Aussie author Thomas Keneally and also Amanda Keller, who I like even though she works on commercial radio. Here’s the odd collection of useful tidbits I got out of this episode:
- Host Byrne asked Thomas Keneally if he loves all the books he’s written equally (there’s nearly 40 of them) – and he modestly said that he “regrets them all equally” but is going to write a good one, one day! If a Booker Prize winner can say that, then I don’t feel so bad about my own fiction writing – obviously even very successful writers can be very harsh critics of their own work
- Thomas Keneally also won my heart with his harsh words about Dan Brown’s novels (I’m sorry, I just really, really don’t like any of them) – “the characters are two-dimensional, the writing is deplorable, and I wish I’d written it!”
- I finally understood why I’ve felt overwhelmed with new books I wanted to read in the past few months, because on this show I learnt that during the pre-Christmas period – 70% of all the year’s books are published
- And the most important point of all: Marieke Hardy is just like me in that she doesn’t read the back covers of books either. In fact, I utterly detest the people who write the blurbs on the back covers of books. This week I read a fantastic novel called The Outcast
by Sadie Jones. I’d borrowed it from the library on the strength of it shortlisting for several prizes last year, and got over halfway through before I idly read the back cover, assuming that by now I would have read anything it would refer to. No! Part of the story that never really appeared until three-quarters of the way through was mentioned in the blurb, and I still haven’t forgiven the blurb writer.
I’m not 100% sure if people accessing the ABC website from outside of Australia are able to download the shows – I’d appreciate a comment if you try and can’t – but if you’re a book lover like me you can get some great ideas. Being a summer special this episode also featured lots of tips on books to read over (the Australian) summer so you might get some reading inspiration.
Tags: First Tuesday Book Club, Jennifer Byrne, Marieke Hardy, Sadie Jones, The Outcast, TV book shows
Permalink | Posted in First Tuesday Book Club, Reading Fiction | No Comments »
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February 14, 2009 by amanda
Yes, I’m blowing my own trumpet, but I am just a teensy bit pleased that the Best Colleges Online blog decided to list Becoming A Fiction Writer in their list of the Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs. Although I personally would have categorised this blog into the “Aspiring Authors” section, I’m perfectly happy to be in their “Fiction Writing” category too, since this blog clearly is about writing fiction.
The list also has sections on Poetry, Improving Your Craft and Published Authors, and it’s worth taking a look because there are some great blogs listed there – some of my favourites include Inkygirl (I love the cartoons), Write to Done and Men With Pens. There were also a bunch I’m yet to discover, my favourite new one is Apostrophe Abuse because anyone who knows me just a little knows how obsessive I am about correct apostrophes and how much I hate apostrophe errors.
Anyhow, I encourage you all to check out the whole list because you might find some new blogs to love. Just as long as you love mine more I’ll be happy.
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Fiction Comps, Inspiration for Writers | 3 Comments »
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February 12, 2009 by amanda
All writers know the problem of getting hit with an idea and desperately needing to write it down somewhere so you don’t forget about it. My amused husband has got used to my odd nocturnal wanderings to write down an idea (and has also got used to telling me, after writing it down, that now I should shut my brain down and actually get some sleep. He has a point.).
Since a lot of my great ideas come in the shower, I’ve often contemplated a method for making notes there – some kind of pen to write on my shower screen (an easily, but not-too-easily, washable one, of course) and sometimes I even keep a notepad on the bathroom sink when I’ve actually set myself the task of thinking through a writing problem in the shower.
Musicians need to write down ideas too
Well, it turns out us writers are not alone. I guess musicians are a kind of writer – they’re writing music and lyrics, which sounds infinitely harder than a novel – and so they are also hit with ideas at random times. Perhaps their equivalent of my being in the shower is playing their guitars or pianos or whatever – and that’s where this post I just read about Coldplay singer Chris Martin comes in.
He has hit upon a pretty neat idea for capturing song ideas while he’s at the piano. He simply writes them on the piano. Agghh! I hear some of you saying, and surely my mother who would have murdered me if I had written ideas on our shiny black piano (and don’t worry Mum, I haven’t started now that I’ve got the piano here with me). But Chris Martin is a famous man and he’s allowed to write on pianos.
In any case, the bit that intrigues me even more is what he does with the these notes over time. Basically, the piano gets full up, and eventually, he just gets the piano repainted. And then he starts all over again.
I love having scribbles about my ideas all over the place, so I can certainly imagine having a piano covered in them could be quite inspiring. Most of my ideas are tucked into beautiful notebooks, but now I’m imagining creating posters full of my odd ideas, framing them, and making a fortune by selling them when I become famous. I’d better go start making notes.
Because blogging is all about other blogs …
As a sidenote, I clicked over and found this story through a circuitous bloggy route – Darren Rowse of ProBlogger posted on Twitter that Gina Trapani (Lifehacker founder) had started a new blog – I trust him, I trust Lifehacker and so I found my way to Smarterware. It’s a nice looking blog and if you read me because you empathise with my procrastination problem and my to-do list addiction, then you might also get something out of it.
Tags: Coldplay singer, pianos, writing ideas down
Permalink | Posted in Inspiration for Writers, Organisation, Writing Fiction | 5 Comments »
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