There are two things this post made me think about. One is that I really, truly, undeniably love books. My husband often teases me about how many books I have (it is a lot, I must admit), and no doubt the root of the teasing is that he really cannot understand why anyone would want so many books. Not want – need! I can’t really begin to explain why I need to have so many books around me, apart from the obvious answer that I love to read them, but that’s not enough – then I could just borrow everything from the library (though I do an awful lot of that too). I guess in the world there are just book people and non-book people, and I clearly belong in the book person category. I love to touch them, hold them, turn the pages (you can see my resistance to eBooks there) and it makes me happy to see them sitting on the shelf. Now that I’ve got a little boy to raise, there are new shelves to fill with children’s books and that’s another special joy altogether. (And who says four-week-old babies don’t care for books? I’ve been training mine since birth and now as a four-month-old I’m quite certain he loves our nighttime bedtime book as much as I do. No comments disputing this from child development experts, please!).

The second thing is that I really can’t imagine life without books and, with apologies to many of my friends and acquaintances who manage to go years without turning pages, I have a little trouble understanding people who don’t read regularly. I accept that everyone has different interests and so, in theory, I understand that not everyone I know will love reading. But just think what they’re missing out on! All that excitement, or new knowledge, or drama, or beauty, or whatever else you might get out of a book.

So to conclude: there’s really not much I would give up books for. For my son, yes. But – and this might be hard for some of you to believe – if someone offered me a choice between no chocolate for the rest of my life or no books, I’d wave goodbye to the chocolate. It’d be difficult to do, but I can’t imagine a life without books.

What would you give up to keep books in your life? Let me know in the comments.

Since this contest fell on a day when I had nothing else planned (although all other new mothers will also laugh at the idea of having “nothing else planned” – that doesn’t mean we actually have any time), I decided to take a chance, sign up, and beg my husband for a couple of free hours while he looked after our baby boy.

This worked, but a couple of hours is not much time when I still had a million other things to get done. But the great part about having to look after a baby is that you really have to make the most of your writing time. This meant that while I was “sshh-ing” him to sleep this morning, I was thinking of plot ideas. When we went for our after lunch walk (designed to put him to sleep, although it failed again), I was trying out different plot twists. I managed to get both of us back alive but I did notice myself snapping out of my plotting daydreams a few times to realise that I didn’t quite remember walking from one side of the park to the other – fortunately my pram seems to know the way itself these days.

This evening, baby in bed, husband fed, cats curled up next to me, I sat down and hammered out my 950 word short story as fast as I could. Having spent much more time than usual thinking about it seemed to help. Usually, my habit is to do a lot of brainstorming in front of the computer, recording lots of different ideas as I go. Thinking about it on the go instead seemed to narrow down my ideas as I could only manage to remember the best ones. Whether or not this meant I got a better story is debatable, but I’m happy with the one I’ve got, especially considering it was done in a relatively limited time. Another good lesson for me on how it’s possible to write, even when you don’t have any time.

Yes, I’d bought this cute little T-shirt thinking that it’d be sweet to show the world what I think of him – that he’s Mr Perfect. But the universe, a slightly oversized T-shirt, his squirminess and one letter hiding under the armpit all combined to make him Mr Erfect instead. And that’s what reminded me: it’s okay to be erfect. Perfect is a lovely goal to have but it is pretty damn hard to achieve.

If you’re a regular reader here you might think I’m sounding like a broken record, and you might be slapping your forehead and saying “Amanda! You know this already! You’ve said this already!” but the fact is, I still have two draft novels sitting there, slyly being slipped into the odd contest here and there but otherwise sitting there, languishing, because I don’t really believe I can make them perfect enough to send to an agent.

And that’s the key difference, and the thing that Mr Erfect really brought home to me the other day. Sending a novel in to a contest says “This is the best draft I could produce before the closing date of the contest.” Sending a novel or a query for a novel to an agent (or indeed a publishing house if you’re so inclined) says “This is the absolute best version of this novel I know how to produce.” There’s a huge difference between these two thoughts, right?

Mr Erfect seems to be suggesting that I need to adjust this second thought a little bit. There is probably never an absolute best version of a novel to be had. I have found myself re-editing bits of my novels – the first chapter of Bratislava, for example, has been edited half to death – and feeling quite certain that I’m changing some stuff back to how it used to be, and basically just going round in circles with my thinking for what is the perfect way to say something. And I’m still not happy with it!

If you have struggled with perfectionism, letting go and the thought that agents or editors might laugh at your attempts at a novel (yes I honestly think that!) then please let me know what you’ve done to deal with it. I’m at the point where I can see the need to be erfect instead of perfect, but I don’t quite know how to draw that line in the editing process.

So as you know I’ve now got a baby, and it probably won’t surprise you at all to hear that this means finding time to write is trickier than ever. I seem to be getting a few windows of opportunity at the end of the day but these windows seem to be quickly filled with doing the writing that pays the bills (necessary) and feeling extraordinarily tired (unavoidable). But rather than waiting until my little boy has grown up – although that sometimes seems the easiest solution to the “when to write” dilemma – I would really like to get a new writing routine going.

I’ve been trying to come up with some good times to get going on my third novel. You may recall I mentioned plotting out a novella and I’m thinking that in fact, it’s probably big enough to become a proper novel instead. Of course, I’m thinking that without even going back and reading all the notes I’ve written because I just don’t have time, but that’s the current thinking. And I’m excited about the ideas within it. For short, let’s just refer to it as my Trans-Siberian novel, but that’s really leaving out a whole lot of important ideas – you’ll just have to wait though, dear reader!

For thinking, plotting and brainstorming, I think there are quite enough moments in the day, as long as I don’t need to write anything down at the time. Out walking while I’m pushing the pram, for example, is quite a relaxing time and probably ideal for brainstorming. Surprisingly, when I’m trying to calm down a crying baby, I also sometimes feel like I’m in a bit of a trance and thinking about something quite removed from the actual crying – sometimes I suddenly notice that my little boy is almost asleep in my arms and I kind of missed what happened in between, being so deep in thought about something else! So why not make this something else my next novel, I figure.

But for actual writing, that’s a bit trickier. Night time is not my creative time, so I really don’t think I can make that work, even if it is the easiest time of the day to find a few spare minutes. I’m thinking cafes. That’s why there’s the very cute hot chocolate picture at the top of this post, although my friend had a latte with a fish on top which was even more impressive. (All at the John Street Cafe, if you’re interested). My plan would go like this: get a parking spot quite far away from one of my favourite cafes. Walk my baby all the way there in the pram so he falls asleep. In the noise of the cafe (curiously, and apparently many babies are like this), he’ll probably stay asleep. I can get a hot chocolate and some writing time. Some very civilised writing time.

This is my current plan, and I just need to schedule a moment to actually do this. I’m surprised how busy life is when you’re not going to some kind of face-to-face employment – I still have a hard time fitting in appointments. But I feel I just need to treat writing like an appointment and then get the momentum going. Otherwise I really won’t get to my next novel draft until my boy is off at school. What do you think? Do you write in cafes or other public places, and how does it go? I’ve never really tried.

And don’t think I’ve forgotten the first two novel drafts, and the need to revise them finally and get them off to agents. I haven’t, but I just haven’t come up with a good plan for that yet. I think half the problem is my usual procrastination, and the other half is probably fear. Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. Baby steps. Get it?!

I thought I’d try it out with my Bratislava novel draft. Given that I’ve tried really hard to have three different voices there, with alternating chapters narrated by three different characters (three very different characters, I had hoped), what I wanted to see is that each of the chapters “sounded like” a different writer.

So did they? Yes and no. Being a bit of a research-head, I didn’t just try one extract in the “I Write Like” analysis, but several, from different parts of the book. For each character I sometimes got a different writer: James Joyce, Bram Stoker and Dan Brown (! Oh no! I think I probably have it on public record that I think Dan Brown is a terrible writer!!). But for each of the characters, and then also with the synopsis I wrote, one name kept coming up: Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut? Really?? Didn’t he write weird science fiction stuff? Um, I actually have to admit I don’t remember reading any of his novels although I have a feeling I was meant to read Slaughterhouse Five at uni. Well, I’m intrigued now and must go away and read some of his stuff and try to figure out why this odd little bit of software would say I write in his style. Eek.

Having said that, I did Wikipedia him (has Wikipedia become a verb yet, like Google? It has for me!) and found something good. Vonnegut has created eight rules for writing a short story that may help me when I head back to that form at some stage:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Sounds like mostly good advice, and I love the idea of cockroaches eating the final pages, even if I’m not sure I agree with that final point. And now I’m off to track down some Vonnegut books at the local library. Once I pay my overdue fines, that is.

The good news is that my beautiful time-drainer has just hit three months of age and is sleeping a lot more consistently, to the point where in these first couple of days of July I’ve read half a book already! So things are looking up on the fiction front.

Without further ado, the book of the month for May and June is … After the Fallby Kylie Ladd. Granted, there was no competition, but it was nonetheless a great book. Kylie Ladd is an Australian author (remember, I love Aussie writers) and I “met” her on Twitter somehow recently, which inspired me to get her book out of the library (sorry Kylie, I know I should have bought it, but I have post-birth-of-baby budget issues!).

After the Fall was particularly interesting to me because it uses chapters written from the point of view of different characters, much like my Bratislava novel draft but with even more characters and no systematic rotation of them. I have to admit to being a little confused at first, because I couldn’t get the names of the characters straight in my head, but that’s probably because I only had a chance to read just a short chapter or two at a time. By the end, that was no problem. I enjoyed seeing how different characters interpreted the same situation differently, a technique I’ve tried to use in Bratislava as well.

And to complete the monthly update, yes, I did actually do some writing in June. And a tiny bit in May too. I finished up this round of edits on Bratislava and submitted it to the Allen & Unwin/Vogel award. Yay! I was desperate to enter this year as I’ll sadly be too old next year. Oh and you may note I say “this round of edits” because even during that process I had some new ideas of some more tinkering I could do. I really hope some publisher will take pity on me someday and just publish all my draft novels so I’m not continually tempted to “fix” them, as I’m sure not all the changes are for the better!

Stay tuned for the July update which I hope will be more a productive month. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I’ve actually been getting a little editing and rewriting done. The writing gods really blessed me this year by moving the closing date of the Allen & Unwin Vogel award – it’s a contest for Australian novelists under the age of 35 – from 31 May to 30 June. It’s been the end of May for as long as I can remember, but thank goodness they gave me an extra month or there’s no chance that I would have some small revisions of Bratislava ready.

Having a baby is better than putting your novel in a drawer – rather than just forgetting bits of the novel, the upheaval of a first baby means I have utterly lost any knowledge of my novel and as I re-read it now, it’s truly like somebody else wrote it. I’ve also had my trusted reader-friend go through it and as usual her feedback has been invaluable (thanks, Claire – I owe you!). Over the past few weeks, bit by bit, I’ve been revising a chapter or two at a time and I’ll soon be ready to submit it for the Vogel. Oh, the other piece of luck there is they’re now accepting electronic submissions – last time I entered two years ago you had to send in a printed copy of your manuscript which obviously a) takes me longer to prepare and b) takes longer to arrive at their offices. Since this is the last year I’ll be young enough to enter I’m glad for all these mercies which will mean I (fingers crossed) can get my entry in on time.

So, my big tip for achieving a better rewrite, by getting “fresh eyes”, is to write your novel, put it away and have a baby, then go back to it. Obviously this would limit the number of novels you could rewrite in your lifetime, and probably is a bit tricky for men, but just so you know, that’s my piece of advice for today. Let me know if it works for you!

I recently reviewed Peter’s new edition of The Thinker’s Thesaurus, and invited him to write a guest post here at Becoming A Fiction Writer to defend his suggestion that we writers should use more sophisticated words. Here ’tis – well worth reading. You might change your mind. Oh, and the pic’s of Peter (my idea not his), so you’ll know who you’re hearing from.

My vocabulary is perfect; yours is pompous or deficient

As a group, those who read the blog posts on this website are about as linguistically elite as they come. Therefore, one would think that the introduction to an unfamiliar word would be cause for pleasure and present a welcome opportunity to look up the word in a dictionary. And yet, even among this group, I doubt this would be the reaction. Rather it would be something to the effect of: “That writer is pompous!” Among less erudite readers, that reaction is even more guaranteed.

People don’t realize how frequently hard words are presented to us because the natural inclination of most people is simply to glaze over them, as if the word doesn’t even mentally register.

Consider the following from a recent editorial in a Pittsburgh newspaper. It related to the fact that Pennsylvania gubernatorial hopeful Tom Corbett released a newsletter announcing that he would join the lawsuit by other State Attorney Generals against the new health care law. Joe Hoeffel, also running PA governor, lambasted Corbett for his reference to “Pennsylvania’s sovereignty.” “We fought a civil war to uphold the issue of federal supremacy”, Hoeffel said. In criticizing Hoeffel for criticizing Corbett, a recent editorial in a Pittsburgh paper said: “The fact that Hoeffel views [state] sovereignty as a four-letter word is absolutely sciolistic. Back to school, Joe. Google Article I and 10th Amendment.”

The word “sciolistic” means a pretense to scholarship. It was absolutely the perfect word choice for the occasion. But how many readers of the article either knew that word or, more importantly, would stop to look it up? Very few? I bet it would be the same with readers of this blog, even though it is hard to imagine a group more likely to appropinquinate 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT’s.

Is the use of the word “sciolistic” offensive to you? Should I have used a different word than appropinquinate? Whether or not they would admit it, most people would answer yes to both questions. This is so for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that we live in a linguistically correct world where “my vocabulary is perfect while yours is deficient or pompous.” In other words, we each subconsciously set ourselves up as the barometer for what words are reasonable and what words are not reasonable–we are each the proverbial “reasonable man (or woman). So, if I question a word you use, you may scoff at my limited intellect. But if I use a word you don’t know, you may sneer at my pompousness.

As William F. Buckley once stated: “We tend to believe that a word is unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar to us.”

Another factor for our trend towards the “lowest common denominator” is that, for decades now, our English instructors (and editors as the case may be) have drummed it into us to “keep it simple!” What this should be taken to mean is simply to write well. What it has been taken to mean is an admonition not to use any words which may not be familiar to the entire audience.

Hard words can be beautiful things. It is true that there are some hard words which are basically exact equivalents for easier words. For example, an ecdysiast is a stripper. Most of them however take the place of a number of simpler words and thus are more economical and more powerful. They grab the reader’s attention.

In a recent edition of The New York Times Book Review, Miranda Seymour was reviewing a book by Dominque Browning discussing her life after her magazine House and Garden was closed down in 1997. She wrote: “While waiting for a misconceived blind date dinner to run its slow course, she devises innumerable strategies to endure its longueurs.” (longueur: tedious passage).

In a recent issue of Newsweek, managing editor Jon Meachem, in discussing the magazine’s financial troubles, stated: “We are not Planglossian about the issues at hand.” (Planglossian: blindly or naively optimistic based on Dr. Pangloss, the optimistic tutor of Candide in the novel of the same name, by Voltaire).

A big topic in Philadelphia recently has involved a man named William Barnes who shot a police officer in 1966. The officer was paralyzed from the gunshot and died several years ago. Although Barnes had already served a lengthy sentence for the shooting, he was just arrested again and charged with murder because, as stated in a local paper, the officer’s death “was a sequela of the actions of Barnes”. (sequela: secondary consequence or result).

How about this one–in last week’s New York Times, in an article about the number of friends people have on Facebook, the author wrote that Jeffrey Toobin “credits (or blames) the electon of 2008 for his Brobdingnagian list.” (Brobdingnagian: very large).

Note that these are all examples which have appeared just within the last few days. Could the authors have possibly used words other than sciolistic, longueur, Panglossian, sequela or Brobdingnagian? Perhaps. But, not only is there no single word that could have been used instead of any of these words and those alternative words would be boring.

If we are to avoid a permanent shrinking of our collective vocabularies, we must get away the mindset that the use of hard words by others is simply a poor reflection on the people that sue them. The presentation of hard words ought to give each of us the chance to expand our vocabularies. After all, if a word is in the dictionary and not listed as archaic or obsolete, then it is a legitimate word entitled to the same respect as any other word. We cannot engage in a “hierarchy of legitimacy” with respect to words. Otherwise, we become dumbed down to the point where many of us develop McDonald’s vocabularies.

My little effort to combat the trend of our shrinking vocabularies is “The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Synonyms for Common Words”, published this month by Norton. It is intended to bridge the gap between, on one hand, conventional thesauruses, which tend to offer synonyms which are just as common as the base word (did you really need to be reminded that “large”, “huge”, and “enormous” are synonyms for “big”?) and which have no way of dealing with nuances in words, and, on the other, hard word books, which are simply lists of hard words alphabetized by those words and thus cannot be used as reference tools.

Now and again I’m asked to review a book on this site; sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t (because sometimes the books sound really bad. Even if I don’t like them, I still have to read them!). When I was asked to review Peter Meltzer’s second edition of The Thinker’s ThesaurusI agreed immediately because it sounded interesting, but also because I was a little bit skeptical, a combination which normally makes for a balanced review, right?

I remember as a child having a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that my mother or father had handed down to me. When I’d got it, I’d been excited about how I could use a lot of different words when I wrote a story. I think I opened it about twice. That experience, along with advice I received from teachers along the way, made me the kind of writer that only uses a word that I would use in a conversation. Well, sometimes I guess I write using slightly more complicated words than the vocabulary I reserve for general conversation, but not much.

And that’s why, upon receiving my hefty copy of Meltzer’s Thinker’s Thesaurus, my immediate reaction was that while the concept – “sophisticated alternatives to common words” – was a nice enough one, and it might be good for people attempting to complete crosswords, it was something I would never use for my own writing. Delving in at random to find alternatives for words I sometimes struggle to replace: for “nice”, the suggestions are “sympathique” or “prepossessing”. As in that’s a sympathique dress? Prepossessing weather today?

Okay, I’m being facetious, but I’m just trying to illustrate my feeling at the start. The fact is, 90% of the words suggested as alternatives are words that are beyond my vocabulary. Now, I’m pretty well-read, and pretty highly educated, so I don’t think my vocabulary is particularly bad. That means if I used these words in my writing, the vast majority of my readers wouldn’t understand them, and to me that didn’t sound like a very desirable state of affairs. But then I read more of the blurb at the front of The Thinker’s Thesaurus and well, it got me thinking. Is it necessarily a bad thing to sparingly use some words that few people know – as long as the context makes it clear? Now and again I do come across words I don’t know in books I read, and it doesn’t get me down. It actually interests me. Of course, if such words came along every sentence I’d stop reading the book, but discretely used when they offer a suitable alternative to the word you would otherwise be overusing? I’m still not sure but I am at least open to the possibility of using “sophisticated alternatives”. And if I ever get into writing poetry this book would be the first thing I’d pick up. So while I’m not yet a 100% convert to the use of The Thinker’s Thesaurus by fiction writers, I’m open to change – and if nothing else it’s truly an interesting book to thumb through.

We’ll feature a guest post by Thinker’s Thesaurus authoer Peter Meltzer shortly – in which he gives us another good reason why the world needs a few more difficult words to be in use.

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.