January 27, 2010 by amanda
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!
Tags: ABNA, ABNA contest, Bratislava novel
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January 24, 2010 by amanda
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.
Tags: Bratislava novel
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Fiction Comps, Headline, Writing Contests, Writing Novels | 4 Comments »
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December 31, 2009 by amanda
Oops. I just looked back at the writing resolutions I made for 2009. There were just four of them, and in any average year I think they would’ve been pretty achievable. But this wasn’t such an average year, as you’ll guess by my dropping out of the blogosphere for half of it.
Just the same, I did manage to partially achieve some of my 2009 resolutions. The second goal was to finish revising Kanako’s Foreigner and submit it to agents; well, I finished revising it, submitted it to the ABNA contest and got into the top 100 – which attracted the attention of one agent, who emailed me to ask to see the full manuscript. She passed on it, but certainly didn’t criticise it heavily, giving me the confidence that it’s worth submitting some more (after I revise it, again!). So, that’s about all I achieved out of 2009′s goals: what should I do for 2010?
First up, I have to be clear that 2010 will be a year of surprises. For those of you who haven’t heard, we’re expecting our first child in April, and while I know plenty of writers who actually manage to pump out a tonne of writing while looking after a child – more sometimes, because they keep strange hours which can be good for writing – I’m not going to assume that this will be the case for me. Of course, I hope it will be! So, here are my writing resolutions for 2010, certainly more than loosely based on last year’s, and given with the proviso that I just can’t quite crystal ball gaze the year ahead that accurately:
- Complete my Bratislava novel to submit to a contest – ABNA or Vogel, depending on when I finish.
- Finish revising Kanako’s Foreigner and submit to agents.
- Increase readership of this blog, Becoming A Fiction Writer.
- Plot and complete my third novel – which involves choosing from a multitude of ideas first.
Now, I see that last year I promised to give a monthly update on how my goals were progressing, which of course is a great idea to make me have some accountability. I failed to do that, but this time I have already programmed it into my To-Do list (I use Remember the Milk – ever tried it? I love it) so the chances are a lot better that I’ll really do this. If not, give me a nudge.
On that note, Happy New Year and I hope all your writing dreams come true in 2010.
Tags: New Year's resolutions
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December 23, 2009 by amanda
You can see one of Bratislava’s most prominent sights in this picture: the Novy Most, or “New Bridge”, built, as you might be able to guess by its appearance, by the Soviets during the communist era. They’re also responsible for the monstrous collection of bland apartment buildings across the other side of the river (which is the Danube, by the way). You’re seeing a picture of Bratislava because I’m in the middle of writing what I keep calling my “Bratislava novel”, since an actual title hasn’t made itself known to me yet.
I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on how my progress on writing this novel is going. I’ve been mentioning it on and off for a while, mainly because I keep starting and stopping. But with my chance for a second attempt at the ABNA contest drawing near, I’m really keen to get it finished as soon as possible, and hopefully have enough time to give it a good edit before the due date. If you’ve read this blog much at all, you’ll know I’m a great procrastinator and best motivated by deadlines, and that seems to be working again now.
I’ve set myself a goal of writing a minimum of 1,300 words per day, which should give me enough time to get the rest of the novel done and still allow sufficient time for revision and edits. (Well, not quite sufficient, but better than nothing.) And for the past four or five days, I’ve been exceeding this goal. Woo-hoo! I’ve been wondering why I’m on such a roll with this writing, and have come up with a few reasons:
- I have a chapter-by-chapter plan for this novel. The plan is not very detailed – just a few sentences for each chapter – but when I sit down to write, I know where it’s going. I’m adding and removing quite a lot of the plan as I go, but then adjusting things later on in the plan, and it certainly seems to be making things easier. Being aware that I don’t have much revision time, following a plan like this really seems to be helping.
- I love the characters. This novel has three equally-shared main characters, and each of them is very different, but I really like them all. Each chapter is told in turn by a different character, so every few days I’m changing perspective, but that’s working well.
- I’m writing in the first person again (but from the three different perspectives). I struggled over this issue with Kanako’s Foreigner and ended up changing the entire novel from first to third person, but this time it seems to be working out better, perhaps because of the three different personalities.
It’s still a fair way to go before I can say this has been a successful novel completion attempt, but with the holidays ahead (and not much to do during them other than relax) I’m feeling reasonably confident. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Tags: Bratislava novel
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December 14, 2009 by amanda
In my continuing effort to read outside my preferred genres – and also because Stella Rimington was a special guest at last year’s Perth Writers Festival, and I really liked her (and she appeared outdoors in the sunken garden, pictured above) – I’ve just finished reading her first novel At Risk
. Rimington was the first female head of MI5 (the British Secret Service, basically) and after she retired she turned to writing spy novels – which are especially interesting because you know she writes from the voice of experience. It’s a real page-turner, yet it doesn’t feel scrappily-written or trashy, as those typical buy-at-the-airport spy stories have always seemed to me.
Now, to the relevance of a spy novel to what I’m writing: I have a new theory that every good novel needs to be a bit of a spy story. Perhaps not a spy story, but a mystery. In other words, a really important part of a modern novel, even a very literary one, should be that there is information that not everybody knows. It’s something I’ve been working on with my latest novel outline (more thoughts on that in another post).
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m trying to pay more attention to getting the plot right in my novels. And in particular, leaving parts of the plot open or unknown to some or all of the characters, and sometimes to the reader, and so on. This is something I think I’m not very good at. Not all literary fiction does this, of course, but certainly the novels I end up enjoying the most do. Everybody loves a good surprise.
The big problem I have with getting the plot right is that it seems to involve knowing the plot in advance. I’m not so good at writing in this way; sometimes spontaneous works a lot better for me, but the main difficulty I have is that whenever I try to plan a novel, I get half way through the planning stage and really don’t know exactly how things are going to happen next. Of course, I have a good idea of the broad arc of the story, but often not enough of the details to be able to plot in twists or turns or information revelations, because these seem to arise out of exactly what the characters do, something I can’t predict more than a few chapters ahead.
Any other writers out there have some good tips for me on getting my plots right in advance? I really want to capture readers the way I get captured by other novels; sure, you can capture them simply with interesting characters and a story where they want to know the ending, but I really like the idea of spreading out the information across the plotline. Will I ever be able to plot my novels completely in advance? (Allowing, of course, for brainwaves and alternative inspirations during the writing process). I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Tags: novel plotting, spy novels, Stella Rimington
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Headline, Reading Fiction, Writing Fiction | 1 Comment »
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December 1, 2009 by amanda
Back in Germany, I taught English to a lovely Italian student (pictured above with an Aussie flag!) – he spoke Italian and German beautifully, but was a beginner at English. Despite knowing virtually no English grammar and guessing at vocabulary by trying out English-sounding versions of the German and Italian words he knew (quite a successful strategy, actually!), Antonio managed to tel me long stories and keep me entertained for most of our lesson time. Unfortunately that meant his English probably didn’t get much better, but I remember one day he taught me a lesson about writing and story-telling, quite by accident.
At the time, Antonio was planning a holiday in Spain with his family. They would stay at an apartment belonging to a colleague, the same place they had stayed four summers earlier. And he told me that one of his biggest hopes for the trip was that he would find his favourite sunglasses. (Ah – the hook!). “Why?”, I asked, of course. He went on to tell the story (not his exact words …):
Last time I was there, we went to the beach one day when there were big waves. Now, four years ago, my big daughter Viviana was not 12 years old, she was eight. And Vanessa was not nine, she was five. And so we went into the water, and I had one daughter on each hand.
We were jumping in the waves, and then far away I could see that there was a mini tsunami coming. And I didn’t want my daughters to be scared, so I turned them around, so they couldn’t see it. When the wave came, we did a big jump all together. The water washed over the top of my head and then it ran out again. I checked on my left hand, I still had one daughter there, and on the right hand, I had my other daughter. But then I looked up, and something was different. Everything was suddenly very bright.
That’s when I realised my sunglasses had been washed off my head. We looked everywhere but we never found them. But this year when we go back, I think I will find them somewhere on the beach.
Almost anybody else would simply say, “I lost my sunglasses last time when a wave went over the top of me and my daughters”. Antonio did perfect “show, not tell”, he kept me in suspense, and he made me laugh. All that with very little English. When I’m trying to write a good story, I have to remember this and avoid fancy words or complicated sentences – a great story can be told very simply, you just have to tell it in Antonio’s way.
Tags: story-telling
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November 24, 2009 by amanda
If you know me even just a little, you’ll probably be aware that I’m renowned for having a messy desk. Well, I’m a bit of a mess in general, but these days usually I manage to contain most of that to my own office area, under threat from my husband of him eating all my chocolate if I don’t. I actually love having a neat, tidy desk, but somehow it doesn’t seem that easy. I often tell people the story of my university days when I lived together with my father; when dinner time came around, he and I would both spend a few minutes moving our piles of books and papers off the dining room table (onto the floor) so we could eat, then move them back to the table when we’d finished. You see – a messy desk is genetic, it’s not my fault.
And furthermore … a messy desk might just be essential to my fiction writing abilities. In Andrea Goldsmith’s novel Reunion, there is a character named Ava who is a successful novelist. And about her, Goldsmith writes:
Ava was proof that if one is too much in thrall to everyday demands the imagination, for want of quiet and unfettered energy, becomes dormant. Her clothes were unpressed, her room was a shambles, her desk was a mess. Almost daily she would riffle the layers for a lost page, a lost pen, a phone number, and with mounting impatience would pledge to keep a tidy desk, a tidier life, but she never did. [My italics!]
My first feeling when I read this was relief; my second instinct said it might just be Goldsmith’s way of apologising for her own untidiness (I have no proof that she is untidy, but it would seem a lovely way to deal with it – spread the belief that the creativity of a novelist requires it, and she has the perfect alibi). So what do you all think – which of you writers out there have a messy desk at the moment? I’ve admitted mine in the picture above, although this is one of its tidier moments. Now I’m off to be imaginative.
Tags: untidiness, writers' desks
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November 15, 2009 by amanda
You may have noticed I haven’t stopped by this blog for a lil’ while. Sometimes life does get in the way of writing, no matter how hard you try to stop it, and that’s sure what happened this year. While I’ve kept up my paid blogging more-or-less, finding the mental space and the physical time to be creative hasn’t quite been there, for a bunch of now-not-so-important reasons that I might go into later.
What I find interesting, and wanted to share today, is the process of how the need and urge to write (creatively) comes back, or at least how it came back for me. There was no watershed moment, it really trickled back one little bit at a time. First, I found myself looking back at old blog posts, and checking that my log-ins still worked (and re-setting all my forgotten passwords in the process).
Then I started reading more, after slowing my usual crazy rate of getting through books. I also found myself re-reading some of the books I’ve always found most beautiful, like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with incredible, eloquent prose that simultaneously makes me jealous, and makes me want to get writing again. I started up writing freelance travel articles again – the kind where I get to be creative, and not have to make a point in the space of a short blog post – and have started posting at my Not A Ballerina blog again. In early morning classes, before any of my students arrived, I started stealing time to make notes about the next novel I want to write. And thus, the inevitable conclusion to this process was to start blogging again here at Becoming A Fiction Writer. Welcome back, me!
I have lots of plans for posts and topics over the next few months, and I look forward to connecting with old and new blogging and writing friends. I’ve got so much to tell you – my experiences with a literary agent, my ideas and plans for new novels, and hopefully, my journey as I try to write more of everything, and hopefully, finally get something written by me onto a shelf in a bookshop.
PS: Inspirational (for me, anyway) landscape is from our mid-year trip to the Flinders Ranges, South Australia.
Tags: writing again
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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
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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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