Becoming A Fiction Writer
One girl, one dream … and a whole lot of procrastination
February 10, 2009 by amanda

My novel’s finished, but will never be finished

As I did my recent big edit of my first novel, I kept a list of ideas and thoughts of things I might like to change in the story or stuff that I thought might still be able to be improved. Because I was finishing it up with a deadline in mind (to submit it to the ABNA contest), then the list still exists. I didn’t do every single thing I’d thought of.

Will my novel ever be finished, really?

That’s a very good question. Some of the stuff on the list is mere speculation – could I include some extra description here or there for a character or setting – stuff I would need to sit down and really consider if it improves the novel in any way or not; just ideas that I had as I went along, basically.

Other points on the “still to do” list are about character development – could I go through the novel again and smooth out the development over time of the main characters a little bit more? The main reason this is still on the list is that I tried to do this, and couldn’t. I simply couldn’t read with “new enough” eyes to figure out what a normal reader would understand about a character through actions and description as the story moves along, and therefore I was unable to really plot the development of the characters. Perhaps this is something I could do if I set the novel aside for another couple of months and came back with fresh eyes again; perhaps it’s something I’ll get better at doing with more experience.

Are any novels really finished?

After much angst, I realised that my husband is the same with his paintings, and I felt a little better. There are dozens of his canvases that were considered good enough to bring all the way here from Germany, but most of them are in a pile in the wardrobe because they’re unfinished. What’s more, the paintings that hang on our wall – that everyone who sees them, including me, assumes are finished – mostly also belong to the “unfinished” category, according to the artist.

A while ago I heard an interview with a novelist – I just can’t remember who it was – who said that she never reads her published novels again if she can help it – because she always finds things that she would change. That gives me still more reason to think I’m not insane here but perhaps even a little bit normal.

Can anyone help me out here? Whatever your artistic endeavour, do you actually reach a point where you’re happy with it and truly believe it’s “finished”? Let me know in the comments.

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February 4, 2009 by amanda

15-day challenge and Amazon contest: success!

No doubt some of you have been wondering how I went with my 15-day creation challenge and my goal of getting my novel ready for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The good news is: I did it!

Procrastination overcome by short-term goals

I really have to shout out a huge thank you to Zoe at Essential Prose for coming up with this 15-day challenge. The goal was to choose a project and work on it for an hour a day for 15 days. I’m actually pretty amazed at how well this worked.

Perhaps knowing that this intensive work would only last for 15 days helped me to keep doing it night after night – because I nearly always worked on my novel last thing at night, after all my paid work had got done – and having picked a project that I thought I could finish within the 15 days really helped. I think there were only one or two days that I didn’t do a full hour of work on my novel editing, but in each case I had done closer to two hours the day before so I didn’t feel too bad.

When the Amazon contest opened on Monday (Sunday night in the States, but that was 2pm on Monday here – right when I was in the middle of class and had to nervously wait a couple of hours and hope the first 10,000 entrants hadn’t already got their novels in) I was ready to go. And I was pretty pleased with myself, I have to say. Again, this is not a contest I expect to get anywhere in, but the motivation to complete my big edit in time to enter was perfect. (And given that entry was free, it’s been a great motivator all round).

What’s my next 15-day challenge?

Since this 15-day creation challenge worked out so well, I’m already thinking of what my next one will be. Since the rewrite I’ve just done goes a long way towards satisfying my second goal for 2009 I think I’ll concentrate on making progress towards the third goal instead, which is to get my second novel ready to submit in May. So my next 15-day challenge will be related to finishing the draft of that novel. I’ll have to take a closer look at how much I’ve done – and I seem to recall I have quite a lot of outlining done – and see if finishing the draft in 15 days is realistic, or a sub-goal of that instead. Stay tuned – and try the 15 day thing yourself if you feel like it will help! Let me know if it does. Or share your own anti-procrastination tricks, too.

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Permalink | Posted in Anti-Procrastination, Featured, Goals and Motivation, Writing Contests, Writing Novels | 5 Comments »

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January 29, 2009 by amanda

Taking the time line flaws out of my novel

Nearly a year ago, I took my initial draft of my first novel and decided to completely rearrange it, something I did with the help of a pack of orange cards and one of my cats. Moving scenes around to make the story more interesting, provide peaks of interest and hanging endings on chapters and to generally make the story flow better seemed to work quite well. Or so I thought.

Swimming in winter and other time line problems

During my recent “big read through” to start another major round of editing, I started making notes about the seasons and other timing elements throughout the story. When I had a chapter-by-chapter list of these notes in front of me, I realised I had my characters going to an outdoor water funpark in the middle of winter and going skiing in summer! I was truly annoyed at myself. Any reader paying even only half attention to the order of events would realise that the time line of my story had been completely messed up.

So some extra rearrangements became necessary. In some ways, this discovery was a good thing. I had already made some notes for a new scene that I wanted to insert somewhere, and using the new scene to extend the time line a bit and push the skiing into winter looks like it’s going to work out well. My other solution is a bit more drastic, and I’ve swapped some elements of two major scenes around so that the outdoor swimming fun now happens in summer – I had two scenes with a similar set of characters and have managed to have them get the same points across just with a different setting and events.

Other inconsistencies and hoping I haven’t missed any

I can see that it’s a big danger for writers that your novel can be inconsistent – the old problem of a character having dark hair in one chapter and fair hair in the next, with no visit to the hairdresser or the dye bottle in between. It’s really hard to be aware of such inconsistencies yourself, when you are so overly familiar with the characters or setting and so on, and it’s obviously one of the big reasons why you need an editor. But of course, before that stage I’m still hoping to make my novel as good as possible so I’m trying to find all the other odd clashes I could before it goes into another contest or agent.

So, another thing I’ve done during this edit is to make some character notes (now I understand why some people do this first – but I still think I couldn’t and won’t – they would just change as I wrote) so that I can be sure characters don’t get some characteristic that changes oddly halfway through the story. I also want to work on the arc of their development, but I’m struggling with that – that might be a whinge for another day. And I’ve also been double-checking on what facts are “assumed” at each stage, and checking that the reader should be aware of these things, or adding a quick detail that makes it clearer.

Help me again, please – are there are any other big traps I could be falling into? Leave me a note in the comments if you have experienced any strange flaws in your own writing (or reading!).

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January 27, 2009 by amanda

Struggling with style for my novel

I can string words together well. I can make good sentences, I have a large enough vocabulary to make said sentences sound reasonably interesting, and I can even use apostrophes in the right place. All of this, however, is not enough to make me a good writer, or at least not a good novelist.

Has my writing got style?

With my novel rewrite, I’ve been trying to focus (among other things) on making the writing sound “beautiful”. I don’t have a good definition for what I mean by this, but I want it to sound like it could be written by nobody else but me, and it should flow and have rhythm and, well, beauty.

But what I get just sounds like one boring sentence after another. Okay, it’s not dead boring, but when I read my novel again (and again, and again), there doesn’t seem to be any special “zing” to the words. Is this because they are my words, so I can never really read them in a way that makes them sound special? Is that only possible when you’re reading something for the first time, something written by someone else in a style that’s different to yours?

Do I even have a style? Do I have something I “do” – short sentences, or long sentences, or something rhythmic within the sentence? How come pretty much every other novel I open up sounds different, and mine just sounds bland?

Convincing myself that I do have a style

Obviously, feedback from others is one way of figuring out if I my writing has a style of its own or not. I just looked up the feedback I received from the Writing Show’s first chapter makeover contest. I submitted the then-current version of the first chapter of this novel that I’m editing, and the judgment came back that (in my words) it wasn’t bad enough to need a makeover. In fact, part of the feedback included the phrase, “The writer has great style”. Hmm. Nice to hear, but I’m not yet convinced. Even feedback on my recent cry for help with my novel’s opening seemed to suggest that I have a style. But I think I’m still working on it.

Have you got style?

Fellow writers out there: Do you have the same problem? Does your writing seem “bland” to you, while everything else you read is beautiful? What do you do about it? All suggestions welcome.

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January 24, 2009 by amanda

Opening my novel: I’m going crazy with bad possibilities

It’s a while ago that I looked at opening sentences, but since then I’ve paid a lot of attention to the first lines of novels. The problem is that all this concentration on “what works” doesn’t seem to have made me any better at writing my own. As part of my novel rewrite, I decided I hated the original opening line, one I came up with almost a year ago.

The thing is, I think that the topic of the opening chapter works for my story, and the right characters are introduced at the right time, and the content of this first chapter does give you enough hints about what is to come, and so on. In other words, it’s not altogether too bad. I think. But what I just can’t get happy about is the first line. I revised it again this week and moved a few paragraphs around and I think part of the problem is these are all words that I have seen and read far too many times now, and I don’t have any perspective.

Help me, please! You know I’m not good at sharing my fiction writing, but I’m going to show you all the first few sentences. Be brutally honest and tell me what impression they give you. Would you keep reading? What would you expect to read? What do you think the story will be about?

It was Yoko’s turn to share a prediction from the list she had written down in her notebook. “In 2050, I will walk down the street with my grandchildren.”

Lisa smiled at the simple answer, an honest one compared to other students who dreamt of becoming pop stars or astronauts. She turned to Takahiro, a middle-aged man who had introduced himself to the class as a salaryman.

“In 2050,” Takahiro said, with less than perfect pronunciation, “I will be the Prime Minister of Japan.”

Lisa compared the student’s hair with the Mozart locks of newly-elected Prime Minister Koizumi and concluded it possible. “That’s great, Takahiro! I’ll watch you on television and tell everyone that I knew you before you were famous.” The students giggled while Lisa glanced at the lesson plan in front of her. The title said “Future tense: Using ‘will’ for predictions,” and she’d borrowed the activity from her training the week before. Without even a day’s teaching experience in her life, a three-day crash course had given Lisa the basic skills for teaching English to foreigners, and she was now sitting in a classroom with four polite Japanese students.

Okay, there you have it. This makes me nervous. But don’t be kind, just tell me what you hate about this opening. I need to fix it, before it drives me insane!

Just for the record, the 15-day creation challenge is going along superbly – I’ve been spending at least an hour per day editing my novel and feel like I’m making great progress. Watch this space to see if I get finished before February 2.

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January 19, 2009 by amanda

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award also has a February 2 deadline

I guess I should start getting less surprised that everything in my life seems to happen for a good reason, and often with great timing. It was just yesterday that I made a commitment to have a beautifully-edited version of my Japanese novel ready by February 2, as per the 15 day creation challenge set by Zoe Westhof.

This morning I sat down at my computer with the fresh eyes and stimulated brain of a Monday morning. (Oh, that might sound odd. My Monday morning, the first day of my working-from-home days, is probably different to yours, if you’re hitting the office for the first time for the week, bleary-eyed and unenthusiastic.) Anyway, I checked on my to-do list with the aim of getting this blog a bit more action, and saw that I had an overdue task to blog about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Perfect timing: My novel will be ready for Amazon Breakthrough

I’ve had my eye on this contest for ages, but let it drift off the radar recently. It seems that there is no entry fee, and the way it works is they accept only the first 10,000 entries starting from February 2. I have no idea how long it will take them to get 10,000 entries, but I remember reading a tip from Hope Clark at Funds for Writers which said we should have our manuscripts ready to go from the first day to be sure we didn’t miss out.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have seen the lovely synergy here. According to the 15-day challenge, my novel will be ready on exactly the same day as the contest opens. That’s surely a sign, isn’t it? Now, since this is only the second year that the Amazon Breakthrough award has run, it’s hard to know too much about what they’re looking for – last year’s winner was a fairly thrilling-sounding mystery, but others that did well included quieter storylines that might match mine.

A good pitch gets you into Round 2

The key thing seems to be that the pitch must be fantastic. The first round of culling, from 10,000 down to “up to” 2,000, is based solely on the 300-word pitch that you send in. Three hundred words? To describe my 60,000-word novel? Eeeeek!

Amazon’s explanation of a pitch in their FAQ doesn’t make it sound any less daunting:

The pitch is more than just a summary, it needs to be a well written explanation of what the book is about.  Talk about your novel’s strengths with respect to how it is being evaluated; Think about the elements chosen on which to judge your novel for the purpose of this contest; its overall strength, plot development, character development, originality of idea, and writing style or prose.  Take the time to study your intended market and make sure your pitch demonstrates that you understand how your book fits within this market and how it will identify with your audience …  The Pitch should be a concise explanation of your book and why the reader would want to read your novel.

I’ll have to dig around the site a bit more, as there are two videos to watch about preparing your novel and about writing the pitch, plus a discussion forum to go with it. As you all know, I love working under pressure – or more accurately, I actually get work done under pressure, rather than when life is easy – so I’m hoping this contest and the 15-day challenge actually net me a beautiful, complete novel.

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January 18, 2009 by amanda

A 15-day creation challenge is a good kick up the bottom!

Not only did I start 2009 a lot later than others, I just can’t seem to get back into my fiction writing. I think being away from my computer over the holidays was something I quite enjoyed, so now that I’m back home I get my paid writing done – the “must” part of my writing life – and then get as far away from the keyboard as possible – often, I must admit, into the swimming pool.

Editing my Japan-based novel

Since an important goal of mine this year is to start getting my novel out to prospective agents and/or publishers, it’s going to need a very good edit. I’ve started this, worked on it in dribs and drabs (and even pulled it out twice this week for half an hour at a time) but I really need to devote some serious time to getting it done. Doing it over a long period of time is proving impossible. I quite often read things and am not sure if they’re consistent with something earlier in the story, or if a character has already been mentioned before, and so on, and because it’s been so long in between each editing attempt it takes me ages to look back and find out, or, more commonly, I’ve just been writing margin notes that I need to check it out later. It’s driving me crazy.

Essential Prose’s 15 Day Creation Challenge

And so, just a few hours after worrying about this, a great post came up from Zoe Westhoff: she proposed a 15 Day Creation Challenge to encourage people just like me to actually finish something they start. Zoe sounds like she’s not unlike me in having trouble getting down to the creative side of her writing work, even though, like me, it’s the part she really loves. Silly, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’ve decided to “enrol myself” in this 15-day challenge. My goal is, as per Zoe’s rules, to spend an hour per day working on editing this novel, so that by 2 February I should have a new version of my novel. Editing at least seems easier right now than actually writing something new so I hope that this will give me the creative kick up the bottom required to make some progress on my 2009 fiction writing goals. Stay tuned for a progress update.

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November 30, 2008 by amanda

Confessions of a NaNoWriMo failure

Uh-oh. Anybody see the date today? It’s November 30, or in other words, the last day of NaNoWriMo. And my novel so far only consists of 17,069 words, a long way short of the NaNo goal of 50,000 words in a month.

I think we can all safely assume that I’m not going to come up with 32,931 words in the next twelve hours or so. So this year, rather than being a NaNoWriMo winner as I was last year, I guess you’d have to call me a NaNoWriMo loser!

So where’s your list of excuses for failing NaNoWriMo?

I guess the traditional post here should include a long list of reasons (also known as excuses) for why I wasn’t able to achieve this goal this time round. And trust me, I have a really long list of excuses in my head. But I’ll spare them from you and look to the future instead.

First of all, there’s not law that says you have to finish your NaNoWriMo novel during November. Well, I don’t get any pretty badges for my website, but I still have a third of a novel and lots of ideas on how to continue writing it. I did a few calculations and found out that if I continued writing it at the same rate, I would reach 50,000 words in another 39 days. That’s not so terrible, really, but since the next 39 days includes a two-week holiday over east I’ll be generous with myself and set a new goal: to finish this draft by 31 January, 2009. That still gives me four months to edit and revise it if I decide to enter it in the Australian/Vogel award in May next year.

Second, it should be said that I’m happier with the quality of this draft than with last year’s NaNoWriMo draft. There are a lot more passages of “beautiful writing” in it (well, at least half way to being beautiful) and I felt a lot more creative while writing it. In fact, I think this had a spin-off effect into many other areas of my writing and I’ve got new and creative ideas running all over the place for different kinds of writing that I’d like to get stuck into soon.

Maybe there are no NaNoWriMo losers

Everyone’s a winner! There are just different kinds of winners. Some people are winners because they completed their 50,000 words during November. Others are winners because they found friends on the NaNoWriMo forums who they can talk to about their writing. And others are winners because they’ve got a good start to a novel and tonnes of other creative ideas. (Yeah, that last one’s me).

PS: Last week Dustin at The Writer’s Technology Companion posted an interview he did with me about NaNoWriMo. One of my answers in this interview probably gives another good reason for falling short on NaNot his year, when he asked me how I managed my time during November and I answered – “badly”! Still true this year too.

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November 27, 2008 by amanda

My novel’s not an award winner, but here’s useful feedback

Remember how I insanely finished my novel to enter the TAG Hungerford contest? I knew that a last-minute finish was a bad thing for that novel, but the value for me of actually getting something finished to enter the contest far outweighed the inevitability of not getting anywhere with the contest. But now that the award procedure is almost over (there are three shortlisted novels now, although the winner won’t be announced until February 2009), I’ve got even more value out of the process.

I recently received a “thanks but no thanks” letter from the Hungerford crew, but with it came something very interesting – a judges’ report on the process. Not on my manuscript in particular, but a general overview of how the judges felt, and a few of the points they made were especially interesting to me:

  • There were 28 entries. Apparently this is less than the previous couple of years, but not a bad number. I was surprised it was so low. There are some two million people living in Western Australia now, and the only requirement for entry is that you have not previously published a book. But perhaps it’s really not that common to get a full-length novel ready for submission. Anyway, it’s almost encouraging that there might be less competition out there than I thought.
  • Most of the entries were “realist fictions”, a category into which my manuscript would also land. The judges mentioned that many seemed to be written based on personal experience (yes, some of mine falls in this category too). Trying to write further away from my personal experience is something I’ve been trying to do with this NaNoWriMo novel and it’s been quite freeing. But it’s not easy – after all, doesn’t every writing class say, “Write what you know”?
  • Major problems including careless plotting, poorly-constructed characters, badly-handled dialogue and bad spelling and punctuation. My passion for apostrophes and their relatives rules me out of the last one, I’m fairly confident, but the first three problems – well, I probably still need practice with all of these. But apparently so do lots of other writers!

Future novel contests for me

So, practice, practice, and more practice is needed, I think, to improve my writing skills, and a whole lot of editing too. But entering these kinds of contests – respectable ones that could lead to a “big break” for a writing career – is an important goal of my writing, so I’d like to keep the future contests in mind:

  • The TAG Hungerford contest is running every two years at the moment, so presumably my next deadline there is June 2010.
  • The Australian/Vogel award, which is for writers under the age of 35 (a couple more years!), is usually held every year, so I hope to have a novel ready – no, I will have a novel ready – for May 2009. And May 2010. And I think I still scrape in for May 2011, but that’ll be the last one.

Know any more good novel contests? Please let me know in the comments.

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November 19, 2008 by amanda

More than half way through November, and my NaNo draft’s in danger

So I got re-started with NaNoWriMo and then I had another few days where I just didn’t get the fiction writing thing happening. And then today I read the Quiet Rebel Writer’s confession that this year she’s a NaNoWriMo dropout. Not quite what I was hoping to read about.

What can I say? The big problem is I broke my promise to myself about writing my novel before I wrote my paid writing. When push comes to shove, and I have just a little time, then I just have to do the paid writing first or my editors will get mad and (importantly) I won’t get paid.

However, I’ve been so organised this week that I’m way ahead of schedule on my paid writing and now I really have time to continue my novel. There are no excuses. Just the usual procrastination.

This week a friend of mine asked me, when I’m writing fiction, how much of the time I actually enjoy the process. I thought this was a really interesting question. I think the answer is that nearly all of the time I’m enjoying it, or I wouldn’t be doing it. Even when I’m feeling a bit under pressure for word count and the race of NaNoWriMo, I still enjoy it. Heck, I enjoy nearly all of the writing I get paid to do, too. I even like reading what I write (most of the time). It’s a funny thing, and impossible to explain, though I guess most writers feel the same way. My husband described me yesterday as a “real” writer because, from what he’s heard from me and my family, I’ve always written. I just have to write. And it’s true, there’s been barely a time in my life when I didn’t have some kind of writing project on the go, even though I can’t even really give a reason for it. I just enjoy writing, both for the process of it, putting words together in ways that sound good, and having a finished product.

Perhaps this argument is convincing me to get back to my NaNoWriMo draft. One more thing – I’ve been wanting to make it all “better” writing than last year’s NaNo draft – “beautiful writing”, so to speak – but one of the main points of NaNo is just to “get it all out”, as fast as possible, and then work with it later. In a way I’ve been trying to make my life easier later by writing it “better” now, but that might be holding me up. So back to the NaNo draft it is to write things however they come out and to focus on reaching the finishing line with some semblance of a novel draft in place. I know this works well for me because otherwise it’ll take me a decade to finish a first draft. Here goes.

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