Becoming A Fiction Writer
One girl, one dream … and a whole lot of procrastination
November 15, 2010 by amanda

So I’m totally old-fashioned when it comes to writing correctly

I have tried to stay young and hip. I still listen to Triple J radio here in Australia which gets marketed as “youth radio”. I use abbreviations like LOL and smiley and frowny icons when I’m texting my friends and heck, I actually get paid to teach people how to use Facebook and Twitter. So I really don’t think I’m an old fogey and just complaining about “what young people do today”. But, I’m going to complain about what young people do today.

What young people don’t do today, some of them at least, is write correctly and appropriately. There is a time and a place for LOL and :-) icons. There is also a time and a place for a short email that includes salutations and say, something like the name of who wrote the email, right? I’m complaining because this week I had to find new tenants for a small unit I own in the city. I advertise online and ask people to email me (this has turned out to be a great way to get new tenants, as well as being easy to manage). This unit (apartment for my American readers!) is basically well-suited for young people who are happy to live close to pubs and clubs so it is usually Generation Y people who contact me about it. The worst of the replies from this round – and I remind you that this comes via email, not a text message – was this one:

Can I come c It tnite???

Um … No! You can’t! What you can do tonight is sit down and learn how to write a basic email. Especially one where you want the person reading it to get a good impression of you so they’ll pick you to live in their valuable investment.

Each time I’ve advertised in the past couple of years, perhaps a quarter of the replies have been this bad. Suffice to say I have never chosen one of these people to be my tenants. What bothers me more than the question of whether these people ever find a place to live is – well, to sound like a complete old fogey – what is the world coming to?! Are we headed for a world where nobody will be bothered reading a novel unless it’s written in the shortest way possible? Does nobody care that we might want to actually spell some words correctly now and again? Don’t even get me started on apostrophes.

I am absolutely, positively sure that there is still an important place in the world for correct spelling and good grammar. And that conventions like including a salutation in an email do not need to disappear. And I’m pretty scared that if there are so many people who disagree with me coming through in future generations, then perhaps the novel and other beautiful forms of writing might start to suffer a steady demise. Please, teach your Generation Y pals to write.

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May 14, 2010 by amanda

Novel writing tips: One formula too many for me

As I mentioned last month, I’ve been doing a bit more reading lately on how to write fiction – looking for a few good tips that will make my novel writing life that bit easier (because let me tell you, in case you don’t know, it’s definitely not easy!).

Unfortunately, I find it hard to find how-to books that suit my writing style. I’ve had two out from the library, hanging around on my desk and, well, to be honest all over the house, and I keep picking them up and trying to get something out of them, but just not clicking. The two books in question are From First Draft To Finished Novel: A Writer’s Guide To Cohesive Story Buildingby Karen S. Wiesner and Revision And Self-Editingby James Scott Bell, from the Write Great Fiction series. And they’re by no means bad books, they just don’t suit me.

Wiesner’s From First Draft to Finished Novel sets up the writing process in four layers. Well, there are kind of five, but the fifth is the proposal (I think that’s separate from writing), and the second layer is split into Parts A and B, and … yeah, it seems a little clumsy, doesn’t it?

Basically all her tips fit together to encourage writers to follow her blueprint for creating a novel – the second half of the book is full of Appendices of worksheet-style pages to help you plan and plot your novel, create character sketches, make “formatted outline capsules” and – well, you get the idea. Maybe this appeals to you, if you’re a particularly orderly type. I’m not, and it doesn’t. It might sound like you though – worth having a look.

Bell’s Revision and Self-Editing seemed like exactly what I needed when I first picked it up – I had just completed a novel draft and was ready to attack in again. But I got bogged down in Bell’s acronyms and lists and techniques and … well, all this really good stuff that might suit some other writer, but not me.

For example, he suggests using his LOCK technique for making sure you’ve got a good story: LOCK stands for Lead (a great lead character the reader will bond with), Objective (what the character wants, badly, that drives the story), Confrontation (which is just, well, conflict, right?) and Knockout (the final battle or final choice or whatever makes up your great ending). Personally I don’t think there’s anything original in this concept (maybe Bell isn’t claiming there is), and perhaps it works for some, but I just think it’s reinventing the wheel when the wheel is already doing okay.

Having said all that, Revision and Self-Editing uses a lot of interesting examples and even has exercises to try (with answers, where appropriate) and is worth a flick through to see if it grabs you.

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May 2, 2010 by amanda

Novel writing tips: Review of “Novel Shortcuts” by Laura Whitcomb

Now that I feel like I’ve got a lot more experience writing fiction, I find reading books about how to write fiction a lot easier – partly because there are a lot of things I already know so I can skip over some bits, and partly because when I find a useful tip, I can immediately think of a situation in my own writing where I can apply it.

Novel Shortcuts: Ten Techniques that Ensure a Great First Draftby Laura Whitcomb was a book I wasn’t sure about at first. In fact, my mother saw it lying on my kitchen table and raised her eyebrows a little at the title – and it’s true, Novel Shortcuts does make it sound like it’s some handbook on how to cheat and write a bad novel really fast. Fortunately, that’s not actually the case – Whitcomb’s premise is simply to give you some stuff to think about before you start writing so that your first draft may not be as terrible as it otherwise would be (and I know I’ve had some extremely terrible first drafts. Salvaging them is difficult; getting them “more right” the first time would be great).

Anyway, some of Whitcomb’s ten techniques are good; some are a bit fluffy. Just the same, I wanted to keep them in mind, so to summarise, her advice goes like this:

  1. Figure out the core of your novel – try writing the jacket blurb to do so.
  2. Decide on stuff like point of view, voice etc before you start.
  3. Think about crosshairs moments – the pivotal moment of the book, and the pivotal moment of each chapter – and write toward and away from them. I like this idea and will go back and look over some of my stuff with this in mind.
  4. Think in scenes. Seems obvious but I often forget and have “half scenes” or odd transition things going on. Whitcomb has quite a detailed technique for planning scenes with quite a lot  of pre-writing – not really my kind of system but worth having a look at.
  5. Get the balance of scene, summary and reflection right. I think I do this intuitively but I should have a detailed look at something I’ve written and see if that’s true.
  6. Outline and plot before you write. Not much new here.
  7. Get ideas and inspiration from similar passages in other novels. This totally wouldn’t work for me. If I’m reading anything too inspiring while I write then I end up copying that style entirely and having to go back and rewrite it.
  8. Put deep emotions into a novel by using music and pictures around your workspace for inspiration.
  9. Fix problems – Whitcomb has a long list of common problems with character, setting, theme and so on, with advice on how to fix them – it’s a useful list.
  10. Set goals and celebrate your milestones. Mostly pretty fluffy, but I quite like the idea of planning the party to celebrate your first published novel!

Anyway, I definitely got a few ideas out of this book, but it would be even better if you were just starting out.

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April 21, 2010 by amanda

Internet research tools that make fiction writing more factual (and easier)

There’s nothing worse than reading a novel and coming across a factual error.

I’ll always remember reading a book-I-won’t-name where the narrator explained about where my hometown, Perth, was situated, and what you would reach if you travelled in each direction, as the crow flies. For some reason, the narrator had us hitting the west coast of Africa instead of the east, and it bugged me so much – I re-read the section three times to be sure I had understood correctly – that it tainted my opinion of the whole book.

Now, when I’m writing novels, I’m (so far) setting them in factual places, and places that I know reasonably well but not like my hometown. It’s really important to me that I get the details right, because I don’t want a reader to have the experience I’ve just described above. Of course, I have no doubt that something will be wrong – and I don’t want to become obsessive about it, either, and sometimes you want to use a bit of poetic licence so the place fits the story, anyway … but my point is, with the wonderful world of the internet, these days it’s much easier to get things right anyway. Tools I use all the time while I’m writing include:

Google Maps: My character’s going to drive from Poprad to Kosice, how long should it take? Just ask for directions in Google Maps and I can check that my estimation of a couple of hours is just right. Another character is driving down to Croatia for a summer holiday and needs an overnight spot to stay about half way. Pop into Google Maps and I can pick a reasonably-sized town for them, no worries.

Wikipedia and Wikitravel: So I figure out where the character is going to spend the night, but how do I give the town some local flavour? Hit the web. I also use these sites constantly to double check facts that I think I know, like historical incidents, population figures, famous people, etc.

Google Earth: To be honest, I don’t need an excuse to play around with Google Earth, but to supplement my own experience, memory and photographs, Google Earth is a great way to check the landscape, or go down to Google Street level to see some individual buildings. Love it.

Flickr: My visual imagination is not always perfect, and if I want to describe something accurately and beautifully it sure helps if I can see it “in person”. The great collection of photographs on Flickr pretty much always have something to help me write a good description. I’m pretty sure the photographers who put their photos there didn’t have my purpose in mind when they hit “upload”, but I’m still grateful to them.

Over to you: What internet sites can you simply not do without while you’re writing? I’m hoping to get some good tips! Let me know in the comments.

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February 19, 2010 by amanda

Fellow writers, do you get bored? I don’t …

“Are you bored yet?” This is the most common question that people have been asking me since I’ve become a bit housebound thanks to some pregnancy dramas. At first, I was a little surprised to be asked. Then it kept happening, and I realised that obviously a lot of people think they would be bored if they were in my situation, “stuck” at home.

Of course, I’d much prefer to be still at work teaching, and also able to get out of the house a bit more (although I don’t miss the supermarket too much!), but I’ve never for a moment felt like I could get bored. I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s just my personality type, and/or how much it is related to being a writer.

My current theory is that writers very rarely get bored. In my case, if I find myself in a boring situation, I find a way to make it interesting or useful for me. For example, last year I was “trapped” in a cinema having to watch a really bad, boring movie because it was part of a compulsory school excursion, and obviously the teacher can’t leave – but she can do something else! I had a notebook and pen in my bag (as always) and in the dim light coming from the movie screen, I made some notes about a story I was writing. Admittedly they were a bit difficult to read later, but thinking about that story stopped me from being bored.

Similarly, now that I’m home most of the time, I really can’t imagine getting bored. I have so many things I want to write, and on top of that, a million books I want to read. And that works out pretty well, because I need to make sure I don’t spend too long doing any one thing – I can’t sit, stand or lie down for long periods of time. Being forced to change tasks quite regularly is even better and keeps my writing fresh. And bored? I don’t have time to be bored.

So now I want to know what you think. Do you get bored? If you’re a writer, in particular, do you get bored less than other people? I’m curious. Please let me know in the comments.

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February 11, 2010 by amanda

Kazuo Ishiguro says I’m about to enter my peak as a novelist

Listening to an interview with one of my favourite authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, recently, I heard him say something fantastic:

What I want to emphasise is that for novelists … I think that your peak is likely to be somewhere in your mid 30s to your mid 40s. A few years after footballers!

But then the pressure came on …

You have to really go for it when you’re in your 30s, and you have to ignore older people who patronise you as though you’re some kind of little chick that’s about to hatch. Historically, that’s when you’re most likely to do your best work, so go for it.

He went on to give plenty of examples of famous novelists who really had published their best novels in their mid 30s.

So, there’s good news there: I’m about to enter my mid 30s, so I figure this is a positive sign for my future novel writing potential. Of course it would help if Ishiguro could share his theory with all the publishers likely to look at my work, then I could really milk it. But the bad news seems to be that it’s getting close to crunch time. If I’m going to make it, I have to really get on with it and make it soon!

It’s nice to daydream about a future where I really am a published novelist (I mean, I actually do believe it will happen one day – I just don’t know when). However, being a novelist is one thing that I’ve always thought is much less age-dependent than pretty much every other occupation. I mean, sports stars and film stars mostly start young; sports stars generally finish young, too. But plenty of novelists don’t start until they retire from their “real job” and they still do well.

Okay, to summarise my thoughts: I would love to be a published novelist in my 30s, but I don’t think this will be my peak. Perhaps if I’d studied writing at university and had really spent my 20s practicing my craft, it would be possible, but I still think I have far too much to learn. But is what Ishiguro says, in general, true? I don’t know, but I’d like to turn that question over to you, readers:

What’s the peak age for a novelist? Let me know your opinion in the comments section.

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January 2, 2010 by amanda

Learning from lyrics – A New Year writing tip

I wonder if other writers have this in common with me: when I think about the music that I like, a big reason I might like a particular song or artist is because of the lyrics. Others might remember a band for a great drum beat or an excellent guitarist, but pretty much all I remember of music is the lyrics; I’m guessing that’s because I’m so focused on words.

Down here in Australia we have a fantastic public radio station called Triple J (you can stream it from anywhere by going to the JJJ website), a station I’ve grown up on and still listen to (it calls itself “youth radio” and although I’m not exactly sure I fit this demographic anymore, I still love the music they play and the lack of ads, and the often intelligent conversations you can hear, too). Every year Triple J runs the Hottest 100 contest and plays the best 100 songs of the year over the Australia Day long weekend at the end of January – it’s an Aussie institution.

I’ve just voted in the Hottest 100 for 2009 and wondered how my song choice might have changed over the years – and what I can learn from that, especially from the kind of lyrics I like. Now, I should warn you that Triple J plays a lot of alternative music and lots of new Australian stuff, so there may be a few songs on my list you haven’t heard of, but for what it’s worth my voting list looked like this (in no particular order):

  1. Mumford & Sons – Little Lion Man
  2. Bloc Party – One More Chance
  3. Eels – That Look You Give That Guy
  4. Jonathan Boulet – A Community Service Announcement
  5. Kasabian – Where Did All The Love Go
  6. Little Birdy – Brother
  7. Seth Sentry – The Waitress Song
  8. Washington – Cement
  9. Weezer – (If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To
  10. Whitley – Head, First, Down

What surprised me a little is even genres like hip-hop are starting to creep into my lists each year. That is, it surprised me a little until I thought about the reason why – and it’s because Australian hip-hop in particular seems to be all about great story-telling and interesting lyrics. No wonder I like it! Take a simple song like Seth Sentry’s Waitress Song, and I hope he won’t mind me borrowing the first verse to demonstrate:

There’s a place I go for breakfast every afternoon
The coffee’s rubbish and the bacon’s always hard to chew
And the toast is always soggy, but I hardly notice
And the food takes such a long time to get made
Even when I’m the only person in the cafe
And my table’s always wobbly, but I hardly notice

And so on. Ordinary but well-observed, it tells a story (and the rest of the song continues the story) and paints a vivid picture. Just like good writing should, and that’s my tip for you: if you’re a music lover, think about the songs you really like and take a closer look at the lyrcis. Analyse what you like about them and you’re bound to find something useful to remember when you do your own fiction writing (or whatever kind of writing, really). I’m going to take a closer look at a few more of my favourite songs and do the same.

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October 13, 2008 by amanda

Enjoying editing my novel with someone else’s eyes

Pat me on the back, please, because I have finally got past my read-it-in-one-sitting procrastination problem and am now editing, bit by bit, my first novel manuscript.

If you’ve been paying attention over the past year or so you will know that this poor novel has already seen quite a few incarnations. It began as the scrappy product of a frantic NaNoWriMo experience in November 2007 and then got brushed up and rewritten with a few additions (at one stage, five extra chapters) for submission to a couple of contests. Each time I felt like I was cheating myself a little bit, because by writing to a strict contest deadline I wasn’t rewriting as much as I felt the novel deserved.

So now I’m really going for it. I’ve had a couple of sessions with a cup of fruit tea and a pen, sitting on the couch with my printed manuscript open in a ring binder on my lap. Editing away from the computer is really a lovely thing and I’m enjoying it so much.

As I edit, I’m scribbling all kinds of notes all over the place. Enough time has passed that I feel quite detached from this manuscript and am seeing it with really quite fresh eyes, and am able to cheerfully add question marks and notes to reconsider various parts of the text, as though I’m telling a friend rather than myself. Curiously (for me) I’m often not solving these problems on this first read-through, just marking them as questions – “Is this OK or …?” kind of questions – to think about again later.

Thanks to Stephen King I am also ferociously deleting adverbs. Well, except for ferociously. But seriously, in my manuscript I am taking out nearly every adverb I see (and I’m happy there are less than I would have expected) and either using a stronger verb or just letting the rest of the sentence stand for itself. It makes sense. I’m also remembering his rule of deleting 10% of a manuscript between drafts. I am cutting ruthlessly. (Damn, there’s another adverb). And I don’t feel so bad about it.

It’s early days in this extensive edit – I’m only into the second chapter – but it is really a lot of fun. Fixing up everything after I’ve finished the edit might not be quite as fun, but I know that the end product will be a novel that’s eminently (!) more readable and is something I think I’ll be able to start shipping round to agents.

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September 26, 2008 by amanda

Re-learning from Stephen King’s “On Writing”

I didn’t really mean to, but I’ve been having a feast of writing how-to books passing through my life lately. Usually I try to ration that kind of stuff out – because the one thing that’s a whole lot better than reading writing how-to books is definitely just WRITING – but the writing’s been in a bit of a lull and a bunch of how-to books that I’ve had on reserve at the library for ages just all arrived at once.

Which means this week I’ve been devouring Stephen King’s On Writing again. I read it once on loan from some foreign library (in Japan? or Germany?) but I couldn’t remember much about it. It’s lovely. It’s utterly readable and interesting and didn’t make me feel there are a million rules to follow when I write; but at the same time it gave me a bunch of reminders of how I can improve my writing. So for my own good more than anyone else’s, here’s a list of reminders I need, courtesy of my interpretation of Stephen King’s:

  • no adverbs. Well, almost no adverbs.
  • no passive voice. Ditto.
  • watch dialogue attribution. Usually, stick to “X said” or better still, nothing at all.
  • King writes 2,000 words every day. I should write something every day.
  • keep your first draft private. Don’t let other people’s ideas interfere with yours until they’re on paper.
  • story is everything. Characters come next. Other stuff doesn’t matter.
  • good description makes the reader participate.
  • make dialogue honest.
  • 2nd draft = 1st draft minus 10%
  • nail down the symbolism and theme after the first draft, then enhance them
  • re-read 1st draft after (minimum) 6 weeks, and all in one sitting if possible.

A lot of these reminders will frame what I now go back and do with the draft of my first novel, which I hope to make a start on this weekend (a long one, thanks to our Queen’s Birthday holiday).

And also this weekend, the next Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest is on and I’m signed up again. It’s on Sunday (my time) so send some creative energy my way, please.

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September 21, 2008 by amanda

I’m a spelling and grammar monster, but …

This is a post of two extremes. To start with, I have to rant and rave about published books that include spelling or grammar errors. I hate that. I really hate that. This week I’ve been reading two books that were both self-published – one a novel, one a non-fiction book – and both are riddled with errors. I’m not talking just the odd missing apostrophe or one or two misspelt words, but the kind of errors that would leave the pages obliterated in red ink if I was doing an editing job on them.

I know some people who’ve read the same novel, and the errors didn’t bother them. It’s possible I’m a bit over-the-top about spelling and grammar, a combination of working as a proofreader and editor in the past, and being an English teacher and writer now. I admit that I’m a tough judge. But it’s a BOOK! If we’re not going to have correct punctuation, spelling and grammar in a book, where will we? (Having said that, I read just two articles in The West Australian newspaper this morning and found two errors there, too). I’ll groan over a missing apostrophe in an email but I can live with it. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of publishing a book, is it not too much to expect that finding a decent proofreader is something that is fairly obligatory?

Now, before you take a magnifying glass to this blog and point out all my errors, I apologise in advance. Nobody’s perfect, but I think my spelling, grammar and punctuation are above average. I even know the difference between “its” and “it’s”. My spelling might vary between American and British usage – I do confuse them now since I write for both markets – but it’s more or less correct.

So here’s the other extreme of this post, and it’s all about spelling. The other week I caught the end of a “grand final” show of some Aussie TV programme which followed a spelling contest for Australian primary school children. I think the kids were between 10 and 12 years old and they’d worked their way through several rounds to get to the final, spelling a lot of tricky words in the process, I guess. But none so tricky as some from the grand final, which I absolutely admit I couldn’t have got correct, like these:

  • stanchion
  • bougainvillea (at least I know what this one means, but I’d have only a 50-50 chance of getting the spelling right)
  • syzygy (I think. Even my spell check doesn’t know this one).
  • staphylococcus (a ten-year-old boy spelled this correctly. Wow!)

When these kids self-publish their books, I’ll probably be able to read them without grimacing.

I feel better for getting this out of my system. I know I’m in a minority of society, the people-who-get-aggressive-about-wrong-apostrophes group, but am I alone? Please let me know in the comments if you’re a spelling monster like me or if you can ignore all the mistakes and just read what a writer is trying to say.

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