Becoming A Fiction Writer
One girl, one dream … and a whole lot of procrastination
January 31, 2010 by amanda

January’s book of the month, according to Amanda

It’s the end of January so it’s time to look back on the reading I’ve done this month – this year I’ve decided to pick out a book of the month each time. That’s partly to remind you all of the ongoing reading list I’m keeping, and partly to remind me about the great books I’ve read, since I have a bad habit of not remembering books too well unless I actively think back on them.

So, to sum up quickly, these are the 13 books that I read during January:

  1. Spielby David Sornig
  2. Legend Of A Suicideby David Vann
  3. Prochownik’s Dreamby Alex Miller
  4. Millennium Peopleby J. G. Ballard
  5. All This Belongs to Meby Petra Hulova
  6. The True Story of Butterfishby Nick Earls
  7. To Light Attainedby Morris Lurie
  8. Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest
  9. Secret Assetby Stella Rimington
  10. Skylight Confessionsby Alice Hoffman
  11. The Vagrantsby Yiyun Li
  12. She Played Elvis by Shady Cosgrove
  13. Illegal Actionby Stella Rimington

And the winner is … well, Lurie’s To Light Attained impressed me with its extraordinarily poetic writing … Miller’s Prochownik’s Dream had a great topic for me and read well … Li’s The Vagrants and Hulova’s All This Belongs To Me both were interesting because they were set in unusual places (China and Mongolia) which I’m really keen to know more about … but in fact the clear winner for my January book of the month is David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide. It was so shocking, and yet so calmly written; so page-turning and yet it wasn’t even a novel, but a series of interconnected short stories. Its darkness might not be for everyone but I still thoroughly recommend it.

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January 29, 2010 by amanda

Writing Antarctic literature – Now that’s got to come from experience

You know I love travelling, but one continent I suspect I may never get to is Antarctica. It fascinates me, of course, but those cold temperatures are not as high on my list as many other places, and since I just finished a great novel set in Antarctica, I am doing a fairly good job of imagining it for myself anyway. That’s thanks to Robyn Mundy who wrote The Nature of Ice, and reminded me of another great novel about a modern Antarctic experience from one of all-time favourite writers, Nikki Gemmell, who wrote Shiver.

If you’re even just the slightest bit curious about what a stint in Antarctica would be like, I’d highly recommend these two novels – one told from the point of view of a photographer, and the other from a journalist, so they’re not your typical science-based Antarctic non-fiction. In fact, both books are beautifully written, particularly from the point of view of explaining both the landscape and the reality of everyday life in a continent that most of us know little about.

“Writing what you know”, Antarctic style

No doubt you’ve heard that writing teacher’s adage, “write what you know”, and although I would edit that to be “write what you know, or can reasonably accurately find out about”, I do concede that I will not be writing any stories set in Antarctica in the near future. What I’m trying to say is that these Antarctic novels really brought home to me how effective it is to write about your own experiences – both Mundy and Gemmell have had their own experiences in the deep, deep south – and especially so when your experiences are somewhat unique.

I guess that’s where a lot of my ideas for novels come from, too. While I haven’t had the amazing chance to hang out in Antarctica, I have been able to live and work in countries as diverse as Japan, Slovakia and Germany (not to mention my homeland of Oz), meeting lots of different local people and learning heaps about the cultures. The reviews for the draft of my first novel, Kanako’s Foreigner, often mentioned an appreciation of the details of Japanese culture, so I guess I was doing something right.

Some of the ideas I have for future novels – I could give up the day job now and write full time for a hundred years just to get them all written – are starting to verge away from what I know towards the “what I could find out about”. It’ll be interesting for me in the future to figure out how much I can do that, and how well I can pull it off. I know it annoys me if I’m reading a novel and there’s an obvious error of fact, or at least it’s obvious to me because I have some special experience. Something to ponder.

Over to you: What’s your take on “write what you know”? What do writers do who don’t have such a breadth of experience to draw on? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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January 27, 2010 by amanda

A summary of my Bratislava novel

Well, the deadline has arrived, and I haven’t even procrastinated too much, because I have already submitted my entry for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2010: the novel now titled Bratislava. Three cheers for me! Interestingly, in the process of my revisions I went through a folder I had labelled “Bratislava novel” and found a most interesting file which seemed to be the very first idea I ever had for the novel, and it went like this:

I’m not quite sure what, but I really want to write a novel set in Bratislava. I think it would be one of those slightly chaotic stories with lots of different characters whose stories eventually all intertwine. I guess because Bratislava seems to me a chaotic city with so many stories and different histories.

Now that’s exactly how it ended up, with three characters telling their own stories which eventually intermingle, but to be honest, I had no idea why it was like that: now I know! And I still agree that it’s an appropriate way to tell a story set in Bratislava.

Some of you have been wondering aloud about what the novel’s actually about, and since I have had to write a short summary as a pitch for the ABNA contest, I thought I might share part of it with you here:

Bratislava: A Novel

It’s a decade after the demise of communism and three young people stand in the town square of Bratislava: a Slovak, a Korean and an Australian. Bratislava follows the story of how they met, what this multicultural friendship means to them and how it helps them to find their next steps in life. With fried cheese lunches, art gallery excursions to Vienna and shirtless tram drivers, this mainstream fiction novel reminds us that cultural differences are no barrier to friendship, and that regardless of where you come from, people face the same challenges in life.

Bratislava is set in the Slovak capital of Bratislava while the country is trying to find its Western feet, in the years after the Berlin Wall fell. This unique setting of a city being invaded by Western companies provides the impetus for the arrival of Rebecca, an English teacher helping Slovak employees get up to speed with a language only slowly replacing Russian in their curriculum, and Hyun, a Korean student who is lured to Bratislava by a girl, but stays after falling in love with the Slovak language. Raised in eastern Slovakia, Alenka moved to Bratislava to pursue a teaching career, but abandons this when the salary makes it impossible to pay the rent. With alternating chapters told by Rebecca, Hyun and Alenka, Bratislava follows their journeys as they battle with the usual questions asked by twenty-somethings about settling down, finding the right career and dealing with the ups and downs of love.

Let me know what you think: would you want to read this novel if you read this summary? I really hope so!

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January 24, 2010 by amanda

Choosing a novel title: Procrastination or lack of imagination?

Snow outside my building in Bratislava

I’ve had a lot of trouble choosing a title for my current work in progress, the one I simply refer to as my Bratislava novel. But I finally have, and I thought I’d share how it came about, although it’s nothing to be particularly proud of and you probably won’t learn any great tips from this story: although you might empathise, perhaps. Here goes:

Choosing a title is both an important and a nonsensical business. As I understand it, publishers change the title of a novel to one of their own choosing extremely frequently … but it’s still important to have a decent, memorable title in the meantime. I was really struggling with this and here is the true, slightly embarrassing story of how I came to pick the current title. For the ABNA contest, I needed to submit a 300-word pitch explaining the novel, and of course, the pitch includes the title several times. I wrote the pitch using my dumb “Bratislava Novel” working title as a place holder. My pitch came out to 303 words. Three too many. I tried to edit other bits of it but I liked it as it was. I realised if the title, mentioned four times, was just a one-word title, I’d be fine.

Yep, that’s one of the reasons this novel is now simply called Bratislava. It was a convenient choice. But I didn’t just settle at that. First, I stopped over at the Lulu Titlescorer and keyed it in – Bratislava scored a 45.6% of becoming a bestseller (according to their algorithm), which is nearly as good as Kanako’s Foreigner and heaps better than lots of actual bestsellers. I mean, it can’t be too bad a title. And finally, when I stopped and thought about it, and re-read my pitch too, the actual place of Bratislava is important, almost like a character in this novel, and so it’s really quite appropriate. That, and nobody else has called their novel Bratislava yet, well not that I can find anyway.

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January 22, 2010 by amanda

Discovering that Shakespeare was more important than I thought

Recently I was listening to a series of radio broadcasts that Bill Bryson made a couple of years back, bundled together with the title Journeys in English – it’s fascinating stuff about the development of the English language, and interesting for me both as a writer and as an English teacher. (Yes, I recommend it!)

Anyhow, while any number of interesting points remained in my mind after listening to the programmes, one fact stuck out that I felt I should have known already. I kind of knew that Shakespeare had invented a few words, but somehow in my head these were more along Jabberwocky lines – interesting, but not very useful. Turns out I was wrong.

You may already know this, but just in case you don’t, Shakespeare was responsible for introducing a whole bunch of rather important words into the English language. From this list of words he invented, just a few that I both like and use regularly include:

  • suspicious
  • generous
  • frugal
  • premeditated
  • amazement

And ol’ William was responsible for a bunch of phrases too, including:

  • method in his madness
  • it’s Greek to me (by the way, it’s fun to ask speakers of other languages for the matching phrase)
  • break the ice
  • be all and end all

I confess to only tolerating Shakespeare in high school – I liked the storylines, but the language was really not that fun for me. Somewhere in my bookshelves is a complete works of Shakespeare, but I haven’t been back to look at it for many a year. Perhaps I should when I need some solid literary inspiration, or even just a few new words.

Any Shakespeare fans out there? Let me know which play I should read first when I finally pick that hefty book off my shelf.

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January 22, 2010 by amanda

Creative couples: Having a partner who understands your creative itch

I just read an interesting post at Christina Katz’s Prosperous Writer blog about creative couples – husband and wife/partner teams who are both working in a creative area. Christina mentions that her husband also works in a creative area (in theatre) and they’re able to provide each other with mutual support, which is pretty important.

Which made me reflect that I’m lucky, too. My husband actually works as an engineer (some might argue they make some creative building decisions, but he would definitely not say that it’s a particularly creative job) but he also trained at art school and contemplated life as a painter. He decided that the career prospects were too shaky and that life as an artist might rule out other normal aspects of life like having a family (and if I’d been around at the time, I would have debated that, but in some ways he’s probably quite right), and chose to keep painting as a hobby and work as an engineer.

However, even if he’s not a full-time artist, he totally gets the creative process and that’s a big help for me. He still paints semi-regularly, and when he does it tends to be in day-long bursts where I know there’s no point interrupting him – although in fact I never want to, because I’m always happy to see him at his easel. This means that if I’m working on finishing a novel or something, he’s also very understanding about the time it might take up for a while.

We also get to have a lot of interesting conversations about how creative people think. They tend to start off with something like, “This person at work said/did/thought this, how is that possible?” and when we break it down, it often turns out that as a non-creative person, their priorities and philosophies are just really different to ours. Having a creative purpose in life, which for both of us is more important than many other purposes, makes us different from the people who seem to be focused on making money or retiring early or whatever, and sharing this view certainly helps both our relationship and our creative endeavours.

If I was married to a “straight engineer” who didn’t have a creative outlet, I think my writing life would be a lot different. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing my writing would be looked at as “my little hobby” and I’d be really struggling to prove myself. As it is, my husband believes even more than me that I can be a successful published writer, and that belief certainly helps me move forwards. I guess a picked a good one!

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January 20, 2010 by amanda

The novel is drafted, the revisions have begun

Two weeks ago I told you I was on a roll with my Bratislava novel draft; before that I promised to finish this novel to enter it in the Amazon contest soon. Well, it looks like I’m well on track. It’s been finished for a bit now, and I’ve got into the revisions and editing, and although another month or two would be great, I think I can still make it with a pretty decent version of the way I’ve always imagined this novel turning out.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but better late than never – as part of my revision process I made a checklist of stuff I wanted to do. The list includes these tasks:

  • Double-check the timeline. Especially with one of the characters, I got a bit muddled as I wrote as to how long events had taken, and how long he’d been in Bratislava, and whether it all adds up. I have to check this again.
  • Do a proper scene listing (sometimes I might have scenes that merge together or should just be cut, etc.) and check that there’s some kind of conflict in each scene. In general, check for sufficient conflict. Maybe between the main characters there should/could be more?
  • Make each of the three  voices more consistent. You  might remember I have three main characters, and they each take turns to tell the story, chapter by chapter, all in first person. I’d like the reader to be absolutely clear about who’s “speaking” without having to check the name in the heading of each chapter. One of the characters is distinct and clear, but the other two, I fear, have merged a little. I want to go through and read only all the chapters from one character, and try to fix their “voice” a little, then do the same for the other one.
  • Add a bit more poetry. Not in an arrogant way, I hope, but I was sometimes over-focused on getting the plot out, and not doing it so beautifully, and you know I love “beautiful” writing.
  • Check the dialogue for redundancies, for dumb tags (“she exclaimed”), for too many tags, for too natural, for not natural enough, for voice, and so on … yes, dialogue concerns me, and there’s a lot in this novel.
  • Put some more of the setting into the story. The setting, Bratislava, is an essential part of the story. Way back when, I got a bunch of my photos from Bratislava printed and intended to hang them up where I could see them as I wrote (including the one above – the view from my flat, which actually looks into Austria and Hungary! I always thought that was pretty cool.). I want to dig them out and see what else is important from the setting to add to the novel.
  • Check the arcs of the character development for each of the three main characters. I didn’t plot this out beforehand (I’d like to, next time) but I have a hunch that the development is more or less “naturally” there, but I need to take a closer look.

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January 18, 2010 by amanda

Flashback to my thoughts on why I write

I’ve always had the urge to write, at least as long as I can remember. I used to have a spiral-bound notebook, covered with magazine pictures of cats, that I would take around with me on the weekends. In particular, I remember riding my bicycle along the side of our house, down to the street and around, all with this notebook in the basket on the front. Every time an idea struck me – which was pretty often – I’d put on the brakes, lean forward and pull the notebook out, and write the idea in my notebook.

Back in 2001, when I was involved with some early writing websites, I wrote a piece about why I write. It’s a bit gooey and sentimental in parts, but the highlights are still absolutely true today:

Why do I write? I write because it’s better than not writing. Simple, really, but perhaps it deserves some further explanation.

So, try to imagine not writing. No creative outlet (unless you’re one of those most irritating people who have multiple talents and can paint or dance or sing if they choose not to write). No true freedom of expression, where you really can say what you want. No chance to put all those different words together in any way you choose, to create the most incredible multitude of emotions, understandings and debates.

Writing is being alive. In fact for me, it’s incredibly hard to really explain why I write because it is something I have always done and always wanted to do. It was not a conscious decision like “I want to play the clarinet” (something I tried but didn’t have as much success with as writing). Instead, it is much more like, “Breathing is a sensible thing to do to stay alive.” I guess I’m saying, writing is breathing.

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January 15, 2010 by amanda

Writing a novella: The short story/novel compromise?

I’ve mused before about whether writing short stories is really something I want to do. I’m not usually especially thrilled by reading them, and the main reason for this is that, well, they’re short. Just as I’m starting to like (or loathe) a character, and get into the story, then it stops. I think I can safely say that at least as my tastes stand at the moment, I’m really a novel reader.

But – there’s always a but – I recently found the information about an interesting novella contest. It’s being run by the online journal Fail Better (love the name!) and it’s their 10th anniversary novella contest. Free to enter, a $500 prize, but most importantly, the incentive to write a novella before the closing date of May 15, 2010. You know how I love a deadline!

I’ve never really contemplated writing a novella before, I must admit. But the idea definitely intrigues me, and with all the different ideas for novels that I have floating around in my head, I’m sure that once I examine them a bit more closely, there’s bound to be one that is better suited to a novella. For the purposes of this contest at least the Fail Better people are defining a novella roughly like this:

Length is obviously the main criterion, i.e. the thing should be longer than a short story, and not so long as a novel … one could argue—as have certain critics, whose names we wish we remembered—that a novella, in order not to be a novel, should focus on one story and one set of characters, not spending appreciable time on others, of either. In order not to be a “mere” short story, it should go into more depth, about both.

Perhaps the definition is what sparked my interest, because going into more depth about characters and story fixes the problem I have with the short story, but the length means that it’s more manageable than a novel. So, my goals are:

  1. Sit down and brainstorm all the ideas for novels I’ve had – this is useful just of itself, to prevent me losing a few that I’ve probably never written down anywhere.
  2. Figure out which of these ideas is best suited to a novella. That is, I guess, which one is concentrated solely on a relatively small set of characters. The contest guidelines also say it should be a novella that can be readily serialised, so I’ll need to think about the plot lines for that.
  3. Make a plan of how much to write and when, so that I have plenty of time to finish it before the deadline and still have a chance to edit it well.
  4. WRITE IT!

    5. As usual, I’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, I’m curious to know if any fellow writers out there have written novellas, and how was the experience? Was it significantly less painful than writing a novel, or much the same? Please let me know any experiences you’ve had with novellas in the comments.

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January 12, 2010 by amanda

Quiet early mornings and a good view inspire my writing

We recently spent a couple of days staying with my father at his property about an hour and a half away – way, way out of the city. Being a much earlier riser than anybody else there, I usually had about two hours of free time in the morning before anybody else in the house got out of bed. This was perfect for some uninterrupted writing time – and this is the view I had to enjoy while I did it. Complete with birds, (unwanted) rabbits and lizards to observe, this inspiring view out the window certainly helped keep my writing fresh. I wonder how much writing I could get done if this was my view every morning? Perhaps I’d get sick of it. It does make me want to freshen up my pin-up board with some more inspiring pictures, though.

Do any of you writers out there have a fantastic view to enjoy while you write? Please share in the comments if you do, so we can all get jealous!

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