For those of you haven’t read it you really really really do not want to look at the comments below. Go here to see my arguments as to why you do not want to be spoiled. You should also avoid reviews.¹

Liar is a book that even people who normally ADORE spoilers have said they were very glad they weren’t spoiled before they read it. Like Tim Pratt for instance who said:

I’m one of those people who isn’t bothered by spoilers and sometimes seeks them out . . . but, yeah, Liar is much better unspoiled, I must admit. A real whiplash-inducing reading experience.

Listen to him and me. Read the book first and then come back here.

Are we clear?

Okay then: let the spoiler thread commence!

Update: I won’t be taking part in the discussion. You gets to play amongst yourselves without the bossy author intervening. If you have any questions for me take them across to the Liar FAQ.

1. You should especially avoid the Horn Book review of Liar because it’s so outrageously spoilery I cried when I read it. Though if you’ve read Liar you should definitely check it out because it’s a very interesting take on the novel.

I am working on organising my writing process posts so that they’re more accessible. In so doing I discovered that there are several different writing posts I’ve promised, but haven’t gotten around to. Someone wanted me to write about the differences between being a full-time published writer and being a part-time writer. (More deadlines!) Someone else wanted advice about writing proposals. (Accept that you must suffer!) Someone else requested that I explain how to write dialogue. (With more ease than I write anything else. Honestly, it’s the non-dialogue bits that are hard.)

I will write more detailed answers to those questions this month.

I was also thinking of posting about how to get started, on characterisation, and how to push forward even when your plot has died. Any takers for those topics?

Do any of you have other requests for posts on writing or questions you want answered? Any aspect of writing that you particularly struggle with? Now’s the time to ask. I will leave this post at the top of the blog for the whole month so you can come back to it when a question occurs to you. Yes, even though this post is at the top, there are new ones below. Nothing can stop me blogging every day!

To avoid asking quessies I’ve already answered check my writing faq. I also have a post on How to Write a Novel and How to Rewrite.

Remember that it’s only five years since I sold my first novel. I’ve learned a tonne in that time, but there’s still lots I’m learning. I may not be able to answer all your questions. And for definite my answers won’t always work for you. Every writer finds different solutions. All writing advice should be used as needed and ignored otherwise. There’s no one way of doing anything in the land of writing.

I await your questions!

Happy new year!

I cannot tell you how many novels I started but did not finish before I finally managed to complete one. Not because I don’t want to tell you, but because I honestly don’t know. On the hard drive of my current computer there are fourteen unfinished novels. But there are others that didn’t make it to this computer. Not to mention many notebooks that are lost or in storage. I started my first novel before I was twelve, started many more in my teenage years, not to mention my twenties, but I kept stalling.

Every. Single. Time.

I could write beginnings. Some of them are corkers. I could even get some of the middle stuff happening. But I could not get to the third act. Hell, I couldn’t even finish the second act.¹ None of my unfinished novels get anywhere near the climax, let alone the actual ending.

There were lots of reasons why. My short attention span was definitely part of it. I’d think of some other shiny shiny idea and start on that instead. Or I’d get bored with the work in progress and go read a book instead. Or I’d get stuck and have no idea what happens next. Or I’d decide the whole thing sucked and realise I could never show it to anyone else because of its hopelessness and give up. It could also have been the absence of a deadline—I find they concentrate the mind quite fabulously well.

I also suspect part of my problem was that I never had a clear idea of the whole book. I’d just start writing a conversation, or describing a scene, and figure out who the people were and what was going on as I went. I had never heard of outlining so it never occurred to me to do so. Maybe it would have made a difference and I’d have finished a novel much earlier. I’ve always imagined that writers who figure out the plot ahead of time, who know who their characters are and what they’re going to do before they start typing have a much easier time finishing their first novel.

Left to my own devices I suspect I would never have finished. I’d still be an academic. Or possibly a rabbit farmer. Or a stringer for National Enquirer.

But one fateful day I got talking with an acquaintance, who happened to work at a book shop in Sydney where I fed my book habit frequently bought books. I’d been going there for years. We’d chatted many times but didn’t really know each other. On this occasion we both confessed that we were wannabe writers. I remember how embarrassed I was by the confession. How stupid it sounded. But she was embarrassed too, which encouraged me to admit that for all my ambitions I’d never managed to finish a single thing. Turned out she hadn’t either. Somehow we ended up agreeing to read each other’s stuff.

Once every one or two weeks we’d meet, swap pages, have lunch, talk about what we’d written, offer (very gentle) criticism, and cheer each other on. Within six months I’d finished my first novel. Or the first draft of it anyways. A novel I’d started in 1988 was finished in 1999. Greased lightning!

I could not have done it without her. Writing can be a lonely, frustrating business. Having someone who’s in it with me made a huge difference. Because back then I had no idea whether I could finish a novel. And not knowing if that was possible made finishing really really difficult.

Now when I start a novel the fact that I’ve already finished six makes me pretty (not wholly) confident that I’ll finish this one too. Even if it is turning out to be longer than expected.

1. Possibly because I have never thought of my books in terms of acts. But whatever.

I just shared my list with a bookseller friend and we agreed as to the unadvisability of ever blogging them.

So here they are:

1. The unpublished writer who can barely string a sentence together yet is convinced that the reason they are not published is because of a conspiracy. “Those evil New York publishing houses only publish crap, deliberately keeping me from being published! They are fools and cannot recognise my genius!”¹

2. The newly published writer who believes they have the keys to the kingdom and know everything there is to know. “I am published! I am real! I have met my editor and thus acquired all publishing knowledge ever! All bow down to me!”²

3. The midlist writer whose career is not where they wish it was and blames it on everything and everyone in the entire world. Especially all those foreignors who are gobbling up all their publisher’s attention and winning all the prizes that are rightfully theirs.³ When in fact success or failure in publishing is almost always a matter of luck. This is the most common form of madness simply because success in this game is such a crapshoot. If by success you mean “can make a living at it” then not that many published writers are a success. Maybe five per cent of them. Tops. If you mean “has written a book that they’re proud of” then many writers are a success. Guess which definition I prefer.

4. The super successful writer who believes that they are so important and such geniuses that they should never be edited again. Or questioned. And that their fans should lay down at their feet as if before a god. In fact, so should everyone.⁴

Of course, there are all sorts of temporary insanities that hit every writer. Not just crazy outlining and writing books backwards and burning the first version of the book, there’s also:

• Amazonomancy⁵ the obsessive consulting of the Amazon tea leaves to see if your book is selling despite knowing that Amazon tells you nothing. Absolutely NOTHING.
• Furtive facing out of your books in bookshops when the clerks aren’t looking in the largely mistaken belief that they won’t notice and that in the fifteen minutes it stays like that your book will sell.
• Conviction that your book is tanking even though it’s only been out for a week and the only evidence you have is Amazon numbers and a note from someone in Delaware/Dubbo saying they couldn’t find a copy in their local bookshop.

There are many many more. Seriously, I could go on forever listing them.⁶

In fact, I would argue that attempting to make a living writing is a sign of total insanity, which may be why the part-timers tend to be much more stable.

1. I definitely suffered from this one during my twenty years of not being published. How could they publish HIM and not me?!
2. I confess that I went through this stage. I’m so sorry!
3. This is where I’m headed. Best to buy LOTS of copies of my next book to prevent me from winding up there. I’m just saying . . .
4. Let’s all hope this never happens to me for I would be a MONSTER.
5. The term comes from the briliant Hal Duncan
6. You may have noticed that I am a big fan of lists.

I get a lot of beginning writers asking me how to rewrite. This post is aimed squarely at them: the ones who are unsure how to fix a story they have written from beginning to end. Which is my way of saying that any experienced writer is going to find what I am about to say obvious, boring, and un-useful. You folks should go read Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing or, you know, get back to work.

(It’s also a really LONG post. Hence the cut.)

“How can I learn to rewrite?” is an incredibly hard question to answer. It’s sort of like asking a pro tennis player (or coach): “How do I improve my tennis?”

The answer, of course, is practice. Practice A LOT.

But how useful is that to the person who writes all the time but doesn’t seem to be getting any better? Who can’t figure out what to do to improve a story once they’ve written the first draft? How do you practice rewriting?

It’s almost impossible to improve your rewriting skills without doing lots of rewriting. But if you don’t know how to rewrite it’s very hard to, you know, rewrite.

How do you learn?

Most people need to be taught.

I didn’t learn to rewrite until I started to have my work critiqued regularly by people who knew what they were talking about.

I remember my first real critique. My manuscript was handed back to me defaced with red scrawl. There were no smiley faces, no praise, just endless comments on everything I’d done wrong. It reduced me to tears. So did the next dozen (probably more) critiques. But with each one I learned a little bit more about how to (re)write a half-way decent novel.

I was blind; other people had to teach me how to see.

Very few people learn to rewrite alone.

There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. Most beginner writers get caught up in sentence level changes. They go over their manuscripts deleting and switching words around (what’s called line editing in the biz). They do this before they’ve learned how to fix the structure. The result is lots of shifting around of deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.

Structural rewrites are the kind that change the genre of your story (this would be so much better with a vampire), the order of events (wouldn’t it make more sense if the quokkas were stolen in the first chapter?), the relationships of the characters (if they were brother and sister it would be way more intense), the setting (have you actually been to Sydney?—I’m not buying the ease with which your character walked from Surry Hills to Dural), what point of view it’s in (you know Hans is kind of boring but Greta rocks—why don’t you have her tell the story?), whether it’s told in past or present tense (if the narrator is telling the tale from beyond the grave putting it in present tense makes no sense), and so forth.

To demonstrate, let us take a bad movie, say, Snakes on a Plane, and think about how to make it better.

My first big structural change would be to delete the tedious opening where you learn why the tedious white boy character is in witness protection. He witnesses a murder, is pursued by baddies, and taken into protective custody by FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson and then waits at the airport to get on the plane. At this point the other characters are introduced. This whole section is unnecessary and deadly dull. We know the title of the movie. Skip to the snakes on the bloody plane already!

I’d begin with the FBI commandeering first class for their precious witness, while the flight attendants are stuck dealing with the results of that as the plane is boarded, and down in the bowels of the plane the snakes begin to stir. The scene is set much more efficiently and you don’t have to wait forever for the snakes to show up.

Deleting the opening is a common edit.¹ Lots of writers start their tale too early and go into too much detail. For instance, my first (unpublished) novel started about ten years too early and involved introducing the cast of zillions one by one, enumerating what they look like, who’s related to whom, and where they fit in the story. Riveting stuff. Cut!

This is not to say that a leisurely beginning can’t work. Sometimes it’s the exact right way to tell a tale. See any number of nineteenth century novels none of which begin with anything blowing up. However, in the case of Snakes On A Plane nothing new is added by those opening scenes. The vast majority of viewers can figure out what the situation is within seconds. No backstory or flashbacks needed. There’s a dude and the bad guys have put snakes on the plane to get him. Proceed!

The film’s other major structural flaw (other than its witless dialogue) is that there’s very little tension. And what tension there is gets wiped out by the snakes invading the passenger cabin en masse (the progression from one snake to millions is almost instantaneous), and the hero (Samuel L.) being fearless and impervious to harm. If there’s nothing at stake for the protag then there’s nothing at stake for the viewer.

In one scene Mr Jackson has to go down into the snake-infested part of the plane to flick a switch and save the plane from crashing. But it’s all too easy and he returns unscathed. Boring!²

I would have introduced the snakes more gradually and would have had Samuel L. bitten by one with a slow-acting venom very early on to make the whole movie a bit more DOA. Can he save the whole plane and himself? Will there be an anti-venom waiting for him if the plane arrives?

On the other hand, it may still have sucked.

You can do this same exercise with books. Take a book you thought was crap. Read it again. Note the boring bits, the bits that made you roll your eyes and go “as if”, the bits that were confusing, and the bits that were flat out insane. How many changes would you need to make it work?

Do you have friends who’re also learning to write? Critique each other’s stories. Every time you’re confused or bored note that down. Note down the bits that work too.

Now do the same to one of your own stories. Not as easy, is it?

The problem is that you know what you were trying to do—or trying not to do—and sometimes when you’re reading your own stories that’s what you see rather than what actually wound up on the page. I have a mortal fear of overwriting; my most frequent editorial comment is that I should spell things out and be less subtle. Yet when I read what I’ve written it seems plenty spelled out and totally unsubtle.

That’s why it’s so important to have as many different people as possible read your work and tell you the ways in which it ain’t working. Ask your teacher what they mean exactly when they say your essay/poem/story is broken. Make them point out the crappy bits and tell you why they think they are crappy. Perhaps a writers’ group or workshop will work for you. There are plenty online that you can join if you live somewhere without many writers. But don’t worry if a writer’s group isn’t your kind of thing; there are lots of writers for whom they are anathema.³

Most likely everyone will say different things. “Lose the bridge explosion!” “What are quokkas? They seem boring. Get rid of them!” “I didn’t like Hans.” “Why is it in past tense? Past tense is boring.” “Hans is the best thing about the book. I hated Greta. You should make her a cat. Preferably Siamese.” Some of them will say insane things. But if enough people are pointing at the same bits of your work chances are there’s something broke there (or thereabouts). Your job is to figure out what it is and how to fix it.

It is not an easy job.

Occasionally you’ll get lucky and have a genius critiquer who will tell you how to fix it. But that’s rare and is why great editors make the big bucks.⁴

Reading through what you have written with all those contradictory and annoying comments scrawled in the margins will most likely fill you with despair. Don’t worry: Despair is an integral part of the rewriting process. Your despair will deepen. When you’ve been over a manuscript four or five or twenty or a hundred times you’ll know the true meaning of despair.

Scott says I have a moment (or two) with every rewrite where I declare the whole thing irreparably broken. “Why don’t I write normal books?” I wail. “That make sense! That someone in the world—other than me—would have a faint interest in! Why am I such a horrible writer? Why haven’t I quit and become a rabbit farmer?!”

Scott will roll his eyes. “You always say that,” he will tell me. “Every time. Just like you always have characters open their mouths to say something and then close them.”

“Really?” I’ll ask between sobs. “I really always do that? Wow. I better do a search on ‘mouth’ and get rid of that crap.”

Which leads me to sentence-level rewriting. This is what I was talking about in this post. The process by which this sentence:

I could still feel the warmth of where his thumb had been.

becomes

I felt warmth where his thumb had been.

Just as with large structural changes, knowing what to change at the sentence level is partly a practice thing and partly a need-editorial-help thing. As I said here I saw nothing wrong with that first version until my editor pointed it out. I’d already rewritten the book a billion times before she made that edit. I’ve been writing full time for more than four years and I still miss lots of horrible sentences.⁵ I know people who’ve been writing professionally for decades who ditto.

But even if you don’t have a professional editor to help you, there are some mechanical tricks that will improve almost anyone’s sentences. Lots of writers keep lists of words and phrases they know they overuse. I have a list of words I always search for. The list changes from book to book though there are some perennials:

eyes
glance
good
had
head
just
look
mouth (open, close)
nod
raise
eyebrow (raise, lift)
really
seem
shrug
sigh
slowly
smile
so
still
stood
suddenly
then
very
walk

None of these words is evil.⁶ It’s just that I use them too much. For example, my “eyes” problem is that I fall back on describing them (“narrowing”, “rolling”, “tightening”, “widening”) too often especially when I’m giving characters something to do in between dialogue. Rather than searching on “narrowing”, “rolling”, “tightening”, “widening” I search on “eyes”. “Nod”, “eyebrows”, “shrug”, “smile”, and the dread “I opened my mouth to say something and then I closed it” also fall into that category. As in:

“Jessica’s finally gone.” He rolled his eyes. Some red thread clung to the front of his T-shirt. “Hey, were you asleep? Did I wake you? Sorry. But it is three in the afternoon. Do you normally sleep during the day?” Before I could reply he continued, “Wanna hang? You seen much of Newtown yet?”

I shook my head, trying to wake up and follow his volley of questions. I stepped out on the balcony, shutting the door behind me. I’d just remembered the almonds, didn’t want him spotting them.

“We could go swimming.”

My eyes felt gritty. I wiped the remaining sleep away, rubbing my hands on my shorts. “Yeah, I fell asleep. Didn’t sleep so good last night. New place, you know?”

Tom nodded. “Aren’t you used to that, but? Travelling around so much and all?”

I shrugged.

In this short section of Magic or Madness I’ve used “eyes” twice, Tom and Reason shake and nod their heads, and for good measure I threw in a spot of shrugging. This is the final version after I’ve already gotten rid of gazillions of “eyes” and “shrugs” and “nods”. Can you see how characters doing all of that over and over can be a problem?

A good way to come up with fresher ways of describing what people do while they’re having conversations is to look at people talking and watch what they do then figure out ways to describe it that have not been used a million times before. It’s that easy! (Yes, I am rolling my eyes.)

When I’m rewriting at the sentence level, I look for tedious (as opposed to good) repetition, sentences that are clunky or make no sense, cliches (“flat as a pancake” etc), and redundancies (see the “thumb warmth” sentences above). For instance, I have a tendency in first drafts to say the same thing half a dozen times. Like in this deleted paragraph from Magic or Madness:

Reason missed her mother. She lay on her new bed in her new home missing her mum, Sarafina, so much it hurt. It was her first day in her grandmother’s house. She should get up, explore, do things, but all she could think about was how much she missed her mother.

You know what? I think she might miss her mother . . .

That one was easy to spot because I didn’t even bother with a synonym for “miss”. But the exact same thing can be written over and over without repeating too many words:

It was dark. She could not see. There was no light to guide her. She felt as if she had gone blind. All was obscured from her vision.

Or when a character thinks through every possible consequence of an action they may or may not undertake:

What should she do in this darkness? Should she try to find a light? Or maybe a window or a door? But what if she opened it and it was still dark? Would that mean she really was blind? Would it mean the world had ended and she was the only one left? Or maybe there was a pillow over her head she hadn’t noticed? Would the darkness ever end? Should she move?

Here’s an example of too much unnecessary information:

Fiorenze saw me looking at her and came and sat opposite me

Much better is this:

Fiorenze sat opposite me

The reader can take it as read that if Fiorenze’s come over and plonked herself down next to the protag it’s because she saw the protag there. Especially if she commences talking to the protag. Also “came and” is very often redundant. It’s the kind of thing you type when writing in a hurry. My first drafts are often written at breakneck speed. I then spend a lot of time deleting all the guff I wrote cause I was writing too fast. Time saved by writing the first draft fast: negative six weeks.

A good question to ask yourself is whether a word or phrase or clause or sentence or paragraph or chapter needs to be there. If deleting it doesn’t affect the flow of the story then why is it there? Kill it! This is my favourite kind of rewriting. Pressing the delete button is easy and fun.

Another common result of writing too fast is not varying your sentence structure. I’ve read quite a few first drafts that have pages of Subject-Verb-Object sentences. This can get old fast. Especially if the Subject is the same.

I saw a tree. I touched the tree. I could tell from touching it that it was a good tree. I felt the tree speaking to me but I could not tell what it was saying. I was hurt by the tree when it exploded because I touched it. I was angry at the tree.

As you can see it really stands out in first person when every sentence starts with “I”.

I saw a tree and put my hand out to touch it. It felt like a good tree. For a moment I thought the tree was speaking to me, but I could not tell what it was saying. The tree exploded. Possibly because I touched it. Stupid tree.

It’s still not a good paragraph but it’s less tedious than the first version. Maybe I should have written it from the tree’s point of view?

You may have noticed that rewriting is not a science. Even with a list of tired words and phrases you still have to make decisions. “Just” is a frequently overused word but sometimes it’s the exact word you’re looking for. Rewriting is about achieving the effects you want to achieve. Only you, the writer, know exactly what that is.

For instance, dialogue can be less grammatically correct and fragmentary than description. But it depends on what kind of a story you’re telling. If it’s written in very close third or first person then the whole thing can be more conversational and thus be littered with “just” and “like” and “you know” in ways that don’t kill the story.

I don’t start seriously polishing my sentences until I feel like the overall structure of the whole novel is working. Otherwise I spend way too much time making perfect sentences that end up being nuked. But I often think I’ve nailed the structure when I haven’t. Thus I wind up polishing a lot of sentences that I delete. Saying “structure first, sentences second” is kind of simplistic seeing as how the structure is sentences. Plus the better the sentences the easier it is to see the underlying structure.

One of my editors once told me that I turn in very clean manuscripts. She meant that my first drafts (from the editor’s point of view, not mine—I’ve rewritten my book at least four or five times before any editor sees it) read smoothly. There are few obvious mistakes, or typos, or grammatical errors etc. She said that made it much easier for her to pinpoint all the problems and write me ten-page single-spaced letters about them.

On the other hand I’ve read some manuscripts that are so smooth and polished that it’s distracted me from figuring out what’s wrong with them. That happened to me when Scott was reading the first draft of Extras to me. I was enjoying it but something was bugging me, but I didn’t figure out what it was until Scott suggested that maybe he should write it from a different point of view. Bingo!

Can you see the chicken-or-egg-ness of it? Sometimes well-crafted sentences make it easier to see what’s wrong with the structure; sometimes they make it harder. Sometimes you can’t fix the structure until you’ve fixed the sentences; sometimes vice versa.

I hope at least one of these suggestions helps. Keep writing and reading and critiquing other people’s work and have them critique yours. A major part of learning to rewrite is learning to read your own work critically.

It ain’t easy, but it beats shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

1. Go here to see the changes between the first and final draft of the opening of Magic or Madness. The two versions have little in common.
2. This is just the beginning of how I would rewrite the movie. It also needs a new cast: I’d keep Samuel L. and ditch pretty much everyone else.
3. I’m one of them, which I will write about in a later post.
4. I kid. That sentence really reads: “Why great editors SHOULD make the big bucks.”
5. As this completely unedited-by-anyone-but-me post proves.
6. Well, not that evil.

I promised some friends that I wouldn’t blog about the business of writing for a while and I haven’t in ages so, um, you two? Avert your eyes.

Recently some dear friends of mine sold books for the very first time. A small round of applause for their hard work and good fortune! Yay, them!

And as you do (and as I did) they’ve started planning how to spend their advance money (such that it is). They were suffering from the missaprehension that they would be seeing the money sometime soon. I disabused them.

Now I would like to disabuse you.

Before I begin two things:

1. I’m only talking about publishing payment practices in the US of A and I’m only talking about mine and my friends’ experiences of them. I have never worked in publishing. I’d be grateful and interested to hear about varying experiences both here and in the rest of the world. And I’d love to hear from those who pay as well as those who receive.

2. I suspect some of you are hazy on what exactly an advance is. (I was.) An advance is a sum of money that is paid (or advanced) to a writer by a publisher against the future earnings of a book. So when a writer is made an offer of money for their book that offer is an advance.

I sold my first book (not a novel) to Wesleyan University Press for US$1,000. I got to keep that money no matter what happened, but I didn’t get any more dosh from Wesleyan until the royalties (a percentage of each book sold, can vary from 5% to 12% depending on format) on the book exceeded the $1,000 needed to pay Wesleyan back.

Here’s what happens when you sell a book:

A choir of angels sing and fairy dust descends from the air

Once you have accepted an offer on your book the nitty gritty of the contract must be negotiated. This is tricky to do and involves things like “escalation clauses” and “sub-rights” and is why it’s a stupendously excellent idea to have an agent do it for you. Believe me they earn their 15%.

How long that process takes depends on whether your agent already has a specific pre-negotiated contract with the publishing house or not. When I negotiated my contract with Penguin USA for the Magic or Madness books it didn’t take very long because I had no idea what I was doing and said yes to pretty much everything. Ah, the perils of negotiating a contract agent-less.

Once that’s done the contract has to be drawn up. How long that takes depends on the publishing house. Once it’s done your agent checks it. Believe it or not, sometimes there are things in the contract that shouldn’t be there, items that have specifically been negotiated out. This is another reason it’s such a great idea to have an agent.

One of the items specified in the contract is not just how much you will be paid, but how you will be paid. Typically (but definitely not always) your advance is split into thirds. The first third you get upon signing the contract, the second upon delivery and acceptance of your manuscript, and the third upon publication.

If you have a three-book deal of say $15,000 a book¹ your total advance is $45,000. Thus you get $15,000 up front as the third on signing because you are signing for all three books. Then you get another $5,000 when the first book is delivered and accepted because that is a third of the $15,000 advance for that book. Then another $5,000 on the publication of the first book. And so on for the second and third book. Your $45,000 winds up being spread over at least three years, but sometimes more than four or five. This depends on how long before your first book is published.

Back to the contract:

Once your agent approves it, you sign it, and the contract is returned to the publishing house where the department that handles payments issues a cheque. I have seen the gap between signing the contract and receiving the cheque be anywhere between two weeks and a year. Any of you had a quicker turnaround? Slower?

The gap between accepting the offer and the contract being offered can also be many weeks. So it’s not only possible but usual for it to take at least six weeks between the intial offer and your cheque showing up. And, frankly, six weeks is fast.

And remember that’s just the first third. The other two thirds will come to you in third of a third parcels over the next few years. It means that your writing earnings could well look like this (minus your agent’s 15% which I haven’t taken out on account of my mathematical ability is not up to it):

2007: $20,000 (payment on signing, delivery & acceptance of 1st book)
2008: $10,000 (publication of 1st, delivery & acceptance of 2nd)
2009: $10,000 (publication of 2nd, delivery & acceptance of 3rd)
2010: $5,000 (publication of 3nd)

It will especially look like this if, like me, you didn’t know enough to make sure that your three-book deal wasn’t joint accounted. I sold my trilogy in 2003 and although the first two books have already earned out their advances I have not seen any royalties. Nor will I until the third book earns out as well. That’s what joint accounted means: The accounting for all three books is tied together.

It’s also increasingly unusual for a book to come out that quickly. I have several friends who sold books last year that aren’t scheduled for publication until 2009 (or in one case 2010). In which case their spread could look like this:

2006: $20,000 (payment on signing, delivery & acceptance of 1st book)
2007: $5,000 (delivery & acceptance of 2nd)
2008: $5,000 (delivery & acceptance of 3rd)
2009: $5,000 (publication of 1st)
2010: $5,000 (publication of 2nd)
2011: $5,000 (publication of 3rd)

Obviously living on $5,000 a year is tricky. Most full-time writers I know are getting bigger advances than that, or writing more than one book a year, or doing other kinds of writing, or all of the above. Scalzi did a recent breakdown of his fiction writing earnings over the past few years.

The more salient point: Most writers I know have a day job.

Each one of those payments comes less quickly than you think it will. I naively thought that my payment on delivery & acceptance of my first book would come automatically as soon as my editor had accepted the manuscript. It did not come until I asked for it. Or rather several weeks after asking.

This is not unique to publishing. It is, in fact, the lot of the freelancer: No matter who you work for, no matter what the industry, the gap between doing the work and getting paid is a LOT longer than we freelancers would like.

Hope this has been helpful.

Do please fill the comments thread with criticisms, questions and accounts of how it works in other places. I’m all ears. (Or, you know, eyes. Whatever!)

1. That’s an above average advance for most genres I know about. I chose it because it’s easier to do the maths with an advance of $15,000.

Here is the complete, full and unexpurgated guide:

First of all you need a computer. (Yeah, yeah, I know in the olden days they made do with quill, ink and paper, and typewriters—aargh! don’t get me started on how creepy and scary typewriters are—plus, whatever, this is not the olden days.)

On that computer you need a word processing program. If you want to be compatible with the publishing industry it should be microsoft word. If you want a program that doesn’t make you froth with rage it should be anything other than microsoft word. (Sadly, I have gone with the rage-frothing option.) You’ll also need some kind of spreadsheet program which needn’t be compatible with anything else—it is for your eyes only.

If you want to write your novel relatively quickly and productively, it should have no access to the interweb thingy, also no games, or anything other than the two aforementioned programs. If you can’t write without easy access to endless forms of procrastination, sorry, I mean, research tools, then by all means be connected to that gateway to hell the intramanet.

Once you have your equipment set up in a suitably ergonomic way (that’s right, I’m with Scalzi on the efficacy of coffee shops—that way lies bad backs, soul-destroying one-night stands, and caffeine-stained teeth) open up your wp program and type in the title of your novel.

Do not spend a lot of time on this. The novel I am about to be currently working on is called The Fairy Novel which is shorthand for The Great Australian Feminist Monkey Knife-Fighting Cricket Elvis Mangosteen Young Adult Fairy Novel. It’s a working title, which means the crappy title I came up with while waiting for my agent, editor, or marketing, or someone, to come up with something better. Untitled is another excellent working title (Sean P. Fodera explains in the comments why Untitled is actually a terrible working title). Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi! has also worked well for me. Maybe Go! Little Novelist, Go! might work for you.

Sometimes working titles wind up being the actual title (Snakes on a Plane, anyone? Or how about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?) but mostly not. The title at the top of the page is purely there for psychological reasons. So that even before you’ve written the first sentence you’ve still got something, and not just a little something, but the title! The beating heart of your novel!

Make sure you make it a bigger and fancier font than your novel proper, underline it, too. Making it red or blue or some other colour can also be very motivating. You could even create a funky animated title so that Untitled bops across the top of the page and waves at you. Though that might be a little distracting.

Once you have your title, in a font you like, at the top of the page, a choice lies before you:

Do you just start the novel or do you outline?

Hang on, what am I saying? This is your first novel! Under no circumstances should you outline first. Outlining is something you’ll figure out whether you need later on, after you’ve written a few novels. First novels should be written by the seat-of-the-pants method: make it up as you go along.

If you have no particular story to tell, then borrow one from someone else. This has worked pretty well for Shakespeare and pretty much every other great writer. The bible is good for plots, as are myths, fairy tales, legends, ballads, pop songs, and crappy movies that didn’t quite work (rewrite them so they do).

If you’re worried about your plot being a bit too recognisable, set it somewhere completely different, and change the sex, age, race, ethnicity and religion of all the characters. You can further cunningly disguise it by mashing two or three plots together. It’s about time someone wrote Romeo & Juliet plus The Hustler plus The Ramayana.

I’m not going to tell you what your novel should be about except to say that it must not be about a first-time novelist working in a coffee shop. Also stay away from unicorns, dragons, butterflies and washed-up alcoholic salesman (though possibly combining all four might work).

Whether you write your novel in first, second, or third person is also up to you. Just know that currently third is considered the most invisible, and second the least. Just muck around until you find which one suits you (or this particular novel) best.

The first sentence should begin with “The” or “Once upon a time”. You can change it later, but those are the sure-fire sentence starters that’ll get the novel up and running lickety split.

You may get stuck along the way, and have no idea what your characters should do next. Raymond Chandler says that’s when it’s time to send someone in brandishing a gun. Sending in a vampire also works. Or you can set something on fire, have a long lost relative or best friend show up, have your protag lose all their worldly goods, or discover that the lovers are actually siblings (ewww!). I.e. if you get stuck, throw something into the mix and see what happens. The more stuff you have in your pot the less likely you are to run out of momentum and things to write about.

Once you’ve written the first 20 thousand words it’s time to crack open your spreadsheet program and start mapping your novel. This is a handy trick taught me by the old man. Here’s what my very first spreadsheet (ss) looks like:

At a glance I can see which pov was telling what chapter, what day it was, where they were, and who was getting the lion share of the novel. You can also have a content column that lets you know whether it’s a sitting-around-talking chapter (“) or a sitting-around-and-thinking (‘) or an action-packed chapter (!) or somewhere in between (^) or one with sex (*).

If your content column (cc) looks like this

!
!
!
!
!
!
!

then you might decide that after all that running/shooting/jumping/giving birth, it may be time for a wee spot of (“) or (‘) or (*) or (@), so as not to exhaust your reader. Mix ‘em up. See what happens.

If you’re worried that your protag has a tendency to be a tourist, you can also have a column for whether they’ve done anything. Put an x if they have, and nothing if they haven’t. It’ll soon be clear whether you have sleeping-beauty issues or not.

The full utility of the ss does not reveal itself until you’ve finished the first draft and are ready to start rewriting. Then the ss functions as a mini-map, instead of scrolling back and forth frantically trying to find who done what where, you can have a squiz at your ss.

You may be tempted to start shifting chapters around and inserting extra (!) or (“) before you’ve completed your novel—resist that temptation! I have a friend who has been rewriting and rearranging their brilliant-but-unfinished novel for many, many, years now and they’re still no closer to finishing it. That way lies madness. (Or, you know, a novel that takes ages to finish.)

Which doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it along the way. Why not reward yourself at the end of each chapter by adding it to the spreadsheet? You can even invent new symbols to describe its content. Or find some other thing that must be mapped. See? Procrastination is yours even without the intramaweb thingie.

The really hard work of novel writing begins after you complete the first draft. Then, and only then, can you start figuring out how to make that which is broken way less broken. In order to do that you should give yourself at least a week off after completing said first draft. Walk away, go play, dance, juggle. Sleep for a week. But do not so much as think about your novel during your time off.

When you’re ready to get back to work sit down and read it from start to finish. Most people find it easiest to do this by printing out the ms. and scribbling comments in the margins. Try not to get bogged down by proof reading, keep your eye out for the big stuff: Mark the boring bits, the confusing bits, the incomprehensible bits. Think about how to fix ‘em. Scribble your ideas down.

When you’ve gone through the whole ms. it’s time to implement all your changes. Each change will spark a whole bunch of others. Keep at it until you think your novel’s in pretty good shape. Don’t forget to keep track with your ss to see how the balance of (!) and (“) and (*) and (‘) is going. Make adjustments accordingly.

When you truly think you’re done it’s time to send it out to first readers.

Who should your first readers be? you ask. Who do you know who reads a lot, and talks about what they’ve read in smart and interesting ways? Do you know any other writers?

Send it out to everyone who agrees to read and comment on your work of genius. The more people you send it to the greater your odds of getting feedback. I promise to read books for friends all the time and frequently fail to keep my promise. (Sorry, everyone! I am a bad friend.) I send my first drafts out to ten or more people; I rarely get more than five responses.

When you get the feedback rewrite accordingly. Once you’ve done so to your satisfaction then congratulations! You’ve written a novel! It is now time to begin your second novel.

To sum up:

• computer
• title
• borrow plot
• type
• spreadsheet
• rewrite
• first readers

And that’s all there is to it. Good luck! It’s as easy as falling off a log and into a secret hidden portal into John Malkovich’s brain. Or something like that.

*This guide was written to supplement Maureen Johnson’s genius post about writers and deadlines.

NOTE: The above is not a description of how I write novels.

My only quibble is with this: “Promoting your books is part of a writer’s job.” No it’s not. Writing is a writer’s job. The rest of it is optional and depends on your personality, aptitude, and energy.

As the equally fabulous Ellen Kushner said in the following comment: “Would that it were so!”

I mean how fab would that be? If all a writer had to do was write their novels? My brain is exploding with the blissful joy of it.

In my experience the job of writer includes many things, some of which can be outsourced (there are writers who outsource the writing), some of which can not. And some of which can be avoided at least for some of the time:

• research
• writing
• rewriting
• more rewriting
• checking copy edits, proofs, final copies (of hardcover, paperback, and various other editions)
• negotiating deals (though, thank Elvis, you can get your agent to do this)
• checking contracts (again all praise to your agent)
• checking royalties (agent)
• publicising your books (if you can afford it—and seriously how many writers can?—you can hire a PR person, but tragically they tend to just come up with more stuff that you have to do, you could hire an actor to do said stuff, but sadly actors are notorious for not reading, and not being that bright)
• answering fan mail and etc.
• blurbing other writers

(I’m sure there’s more that’s escaping me right now and I’m leaving out the stuff that goes with any job: taxes etc.)

Mr Nielsen Hayden says the publicity is optional. Tell that to the writers who get heavy pressure from their publishers to do book tours etc. Sure they can say no, and so can their publishers reduce the budget for promoting them.

The more common flipside of this is all the writers who are desperate for their publishers to send them on any kind of an appearance, who are willing, ready and able to do whatever they can to promote their books, but who find their publicists more than a little, shall we say, elusive. When your publisher isn’t behind your book then it’s even more important that you do what you can to draw attention to it, in a desperate attempt to postpone the journey into remainderdom (sad truth: being remaindered is inevitable).

Yes, there are writers who are shy or otherwise temprementally unsuited to going on the road to promote their books. There are writers that publicists don’t want to send on tour because of their talent for turning lifelong fans into mortal enemies (no, I’m not going to name any of them). Not good. Fortunately publicity encompasses a wide variety of activities, many of which don’t involve leaving your abode. You can sign books and bookplates to be posted, run your website, your blog, do online chats, email interviews and etc. Some argue that online promotion is more effective than offline.

But there are very few writers who can get away without doing any self promotion. Just as there are very few writers who can get away with hiring ghosts to do the writing for them.

Update: To be crystal clear—writing is absolutely the most important part of a writer’s job by a factor of a gazillion brazillian zooadillion.

The simple answer is no. When you submit a query letter to a publisher or agent you don’t have to tell them how old you are. You’ll be rejected or accepted on the quality of your submission.

Being young can be an advantage in getting published. I was first published when I was nine. A short poem in The Newcastle Morning Herald (now The Herald). My mother sent it in and it was published with my age listed. While the poem was clearly a work of genius, odds are that if I hadn’t been nine, it wouldn’t have been published. As it happens I was more embarassed by the publication than I was proud. The kids at school teased me to buggery for the rest of the year. Happy days.

Up until I was 15, I had a number of other poems and stories published. Without motherly intervention even. Every one of them with my age beside my name. After that, nothing of mine was published until I was in my thirties.

What happened?

Another simple answer: I started competing with adults. I stopped listing my age and started sending to more grown up venues. My work was not as good as that of the grown ups. I didn’t find my way into print again until I was way past my child prodigy days.

The teenage me was cast into deep, dark despair by this. On my seventeenth birthday I had a midlife crisis. There I was seventeen years old and still no novel published! I was a complete and utter failure! What was wrong with me?

Another easy answer: I wasn’t good enough yet and I wouldn’t be good enough until I’d learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. Until I got past thinking my first drafts were perfect and that rewriting involves a wee bit of chipping at the surface of a story. It’s much, much harder than that. And, I’m belatedly learning, more fun too.

If you’d have told me back then I wasn’t good enough and had a lot more to learn about writing I would not have believed you. Actually come to think of it, people did tell me back then. But they were polite about it saying that I had a "great deal of promise" and a "bright future ahead". Blah, blah, blahdy blah. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to be published immediately! Before I hit twenty-one or, worse, thirty and was too decrepitly old to enjoy it.

Now, of course, I’m incredibly grateful that no one did me the disservice of publishing me back then. I’ve kept a lot of my juvenilia and, well . . . it shows promise.

I have a couple of friends who were not so fortunate. They were first published in adult venues when they were still teenagers. Both of them are horrified that their learning and growing as a writer has been done so publicly and that there’s nothing they can do to make all that evidence of early missteps go away. They both wish they’d spent more time honing their craft and less time desperately trying to get into print.

But how do you hone your craft?

Read a lot. Write a lot. In that order. There are very very few good writers who aren’t also good readers.

Never send off a first draft for publication. Even though the temptation to do so is enormous. I mean you wrote a complete draft! A whole poem/story/novel! It has a beginning, a middle and end! The sense of accomplishment is enormous you can’t wait to show your work of genius to the rest of the world.

Resist that feeling.

Wait a few weeks after writing something, then reread it, rewrite it (and I don’t mean just fixing typoes), then give it to some people you trust for comments. (Not your parents. Most’ll just tell you it’s wonderful no matter what.) If you have friends who read a lot give it to them. Or to a teacher you trust. Give it to as many people as you can think of. Trust me, most of them will not get back to you with comments.

Ask the ones who read it to tell you when they got bored. Ask them to tell you the plot. This is a great way to figure out if your readers are reading what you think you wrote. It’s amazing how often they aren’t.

When they get back to you with all their comments, rewrite it again. Many of the comments will be intensely annoying and boneheaded and will make you want to end the friendship with the idiot who said them. Resist your urge to do so. Resist the urge to tell them how moronic they are. Also resist the urge to cry (I still haven’t quite mastered this one). Instead look for parts of your story/poem/novel that all readers had problems with. Figure out how to fix it. Most likely the solution you find won’t be the one they suggested. (Later on when you’re published you’ll find this also applies to your editors.)

Learning to take criticism is one of the major prerequisites of being a professional writer. Once your work is accepted for publication, your editor will criticise what you have written and ask you to rewrite it. Usually many, many times. And after it’s gone through all those rewrites she will often forget to tell you good it is. There will be few gold koala bear stamps. Your editor’s primary concern is to get rid of that which sucks. It should be yours too.

Just as important: don’t get too caught up in the praise your readers offer you. If your readers only have good things to say about your manuscript, enjoy it, but then be suspicious. Very few pieces of writing are perfect first go. (I rewrote this essay several times and then gave it to Scott to read and it could still stand a bit more rewriting.)

Once you’ve made your manuscript as good as you can possibly make it—if it’s a novel that should take months, maybe even years—then and only then do you send it out for publication.

But how do you get a novel published?

With great difficulty. Getting published is very, very hard no matter how old you are. Most novels never find their way into print. Even really good ones.

Ian Irvine outlines the whole process in his essay, The Truth About Publishing (the link’s in the menu on the left). I strongly advise reading the whole document through to the end. It’s depressing, but it’s also very very useful. I wish I’d read it back when I was fifteen.

Good luck. Do not despair when you are rejected. Welcome to the club. There isn’t a writer in the world who hasn’t been rejected. Many, many times.

New York City, 13 August 2005

The Hebrew translation is here.

For those young writers who are angered by this please read my clarification.

I decided it was time I provided these questing souls with the answers that they seek, so I did a (very) little research. I emailed a bunch of people I know who have sold a novel and asked them what they got, half-expecting them to instead tell me where to go. Every single one answered—some within nanoseconds. Writers very much want to tell you what they got, no matter how little. I also emailed a few editors with the same question and heard back from none of them. (In their defence it is Christmas time and they may be on holidays and possibly haven’t seen said email yet. Still, interesting, eh?)

However, before I begin, I suspect some of you are only hazy on what exactly an advance is. An advance is a sum of money that is paid (or advanced) to a writer by a publisher against the future earnings of a book. I sold my first book (not a novel) to Wesleyan University Press for US$1,000. I got to keep that money no matter what happened, but I didn’t get any more cash from Wesleyan until the royalties on the book exceeded the $1,000 needed to pay Wesleyan back for this advance.

So what’s a royalty? It’s a percentage of the book’s sale price. In this case every time a copy of Battle of the Sexes sells I get 7.5% of the total, that is, about $1.50 a unit for a $20 book. Only after those $1.50 cuts added up to $1,000 did I start getting more money from Wesleyan. The royalty money comes (once or twice or four times year, depending on how the publishing company does their accounting) in the form of a royalty cheque. Given the peculiarities of the publishing industry (such as the returns system) it can take a long, long time (years) for royalty cheques to start wending their way to your home. A big fat advance up front makes a writer’s life a whole lot easier!

So to first novel advances: I asked fellow Aussies, folks from the UK, Canada and the US how much they got for their first novel. Because the majority are USian I’ve translated everything into US dollars. Here are the answers with year of sale. I have not adjusted for inflation because it kind of tells it’s own tale, doesn’t it?

1962: $1,000
1965: $3,000
1970: $10,000
1976: $700
1982: $7,500
1984: $7,500
1985: $2,500, $8,000
1989: $3,000
1990: $15,000
1995: $4,000
1996: $4,000
1997: $7,500
1999: $2,500
2002: $6,500
2003: $13,500
2004: $350, $10,000

Average advance: $5,920

Ah ha! See the pattern? No? Nah, me neither. Someone in 1970 got the exact same amount as someone in 2004. Except they didn’t, did they? According to the American Institute for Economic Research’s cost-of-living calculator, the lucky sod in 1970 received the princely sum of US$48,659.79 in today’s dollars. Ten grand went a lot further in 1970 than it does now.

The thousand-dollar advance in 1962 ($6,251.66 today) went to Samuel R. Delany for The Jewels of Aptor, the long half of an Ace Double. At the time Chip was paying "56 dollars a month, for a four-room 2nd floor apartment on the dead-end of East 5th Street on the Lower East Side." So his first novel advance paid for almost a year and a half’s rent. Scott Westerfeld’s $4,000 advance for his first novel Polymorph in 1996 was enough to pay four and a half’s months rent on his two-room apartment a mere three blocks (and thirty years) away from Chip’s old flat. (In the meantime that section of the "Lower East Side" had become "the East Village" and the rents had gone up and up). Nowadays, of course, getting a four-room flat in the East Village for less than $2,500 a month is a miracle of the first order. The larger of the two advances in my table from 2004 would cover four months’ rent for such a place, the smaller, 0.14 of a month (also known as four days).

The advances listed above were paid in four different countries and by a variety of different publishing houses. The $350 advance from 2004 was paid by a small but prestigious press, who offset their tiny advances with higher royalites, in addition to keeping none of the media or foreign-language rights. One of the authors wrote, "I’ve heard that in London at least, low advances for new signings have made a comeback in the last decade, but I don’t ask, and folks don’t usually tell. For your inquirers’ benefit, and in case they were even wondering, getting a low advance is a Very Bad Thing, and anything the publisher says to defend it, they are lying. Always ask for more money, just to see what happens. It’s counter-intuitive, but this is the only demand that never gives offence."

Another writer told me that "publishers will pay as little as they think they can get away with. I was royally screwed on my first sale and not just with the paltry sum offered: I was left with no subsidiaries either. Got myself an agent quicksmart after that."

The other thing to remember about these advances is that with one exception they were all paid for genre (fantasy, sf, YA, horror, children’s, crime) books, mostly by genre imprints. Everything I’ve read and heard tells me that mainstream novels still get more money than genre novels. And non-fiction gets more still (university presses like Wesleyan aside). One of my correspondents also writes non-fiction. Their first non-fiction advance was $20,000, considerably more than their fiction advance, indeed more than any of the advances listed here. An agent has told me that the average advance for a non-fiction book amongst the big New York publishing houses is more like $30,000.

Of the 18 people I asked, only seven are full-time writers (no, Samuel R. Delany is not one of them, he earns his dosh as a university professor) and of those only two of them are doing fine writing fiction (New York Times‘ bestseller, Shut-up! or I’m-getting-the next-round advances fine—definitely no longer worrying about where the next cheque is coming from). The rest are in their words "scraping by" or "barely comfortable" and depend overly much on their credit cards, except for Mr Scalzi who is smart enough to also make money writing non-fiction. The good news is that almost everyone got more money for their second novel than their first.

So my sage pieces of advice to someone contemplating a career as a novelist who begins by trying to find out what the average advance is? First I’d like to congratulate you—if you’re in this game for the money it’s a good idea to find out as quick as you can that there’s not a whole lot to be made writing novels. Find another way to make dosh. Personally I’d recommend plumbing.

For those who’ve just sent out their novel to the hard cruel world and are wondering how much dosh to expect. Well, gird your loins, expect rejection, not money. Because that will come first and more often. Scalzi has some choice words (scroll down to no. 7.) on the subject.

For the poor lass who just got the insultingly low offer? Well, I think the table above demonstrates that you’re in good company. My advice? Ask for more. If they offered $1,000 ask for $10,000. If $5,000 ask for $15,000. If $10,00 ask for $20,000 and so on. They won’t give you what you ask, but they most likely will give you more. But, if at all possible get yourself an agent. They know how to do all this stuff, how to make sure you don’t give away your subsidiary rights (that is, the film and TV rights, audio book rights, translation rights, graphic novel rights etc., etc.), how to protect you from selling a series of books that are joint accounted (that is, that all the books you sold have to earn out their advance before you get any royalties. This takes long enough when it’s one book at a time).

And there you have it: The life of a novelist is, financially speaking, a mug’s game. Enter at your own peril. And don’t ever give up your day job (scroll to no. 10)!

PS I plan a followup musing, if anyone wants to comment, tell me what their first novel advance was etc., email me at the address below.

Sydney, 24 December 2004

UPDATE (25 Dec): there’s a fascinating discussion of this topic to be found at metafilter.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Cricket is dead easy to understand. Like the world’s greatest board game, Go, the principles are simple, but the variations endless. Anyone can learn to understand, enjoy, and ultimately, love, cricket. Quite simply it is the world’s greatest spectator sport.

Plus you have me, the mistress of easy (er, but not in that sense) to teach you how.

Cricket, of course, is not for everyone. Those readers who have zero interest in spectator sports should stop reading now. Run off to your yoga class, go walk your dog, turn back to that book you were reading. This musing is not for you.

For the rest of you here are the basics of cricket:

Cricket is a team sport. The team which scores the most amount of runs, and gets the other team out, wins. Nothing simpler.

There are two forms of the game:

1) Test cricket—which takes place over five days. Think of it as akin to the novel with all the running dramas, climaxes, anti-climaxes, intrigues and counter-intrigues of that artform. Test cricket is the original and only true form of cricket.

2) Pyjama or One-Day cricket—the shortened form. It is to test cricket as a bad TV advertisment (wheredyagedit?) is to a superb film. Loud, noisy, predictable, wholly lacking in subtlety and eye-jarringly colourful. To be watched only if there is no test cricket available.

For obvious reasons, I will largely be discussing test cricket.

Cricket is played on an oval. A large expanse of green grass usually surrounded by a white picket fence. The grass is kept at a specific height by the groundsman. In the centre of the oval is the cricket pitch (or wicket) which is a strip of paler grass. The wicket (or cricket pitch) is also carefully presided over by the groundsman, but once the game begins grass is left to grow and the wicket to deteriorate. Thus the conditions for playing change over the five days of a test. The condition of the oval and pitch has a large effect on whether the cricket played on it will be high or low-scoring. Some afficionados argue that the groundsman is the most important person in cricket. I think this is going a tad too far.

At either end of the cricket pitch (or wicket) are the stumps (or wicket). The stumps are a wooden constuction of three stakes (Buffy would have plenty of weapons available should she have to deal with a nest of vampires while attending a cricket match) impaled in the ground, with two smaller pieces of wood, known as the bails, balanced on top. In front of these stumps (or wicket) at either end is a white painted line which marks the crease.

Two teams of twelve people play (though the position of the twelfth man is that of gofer. They don’t actually play unless one of the fielders needs to leave the oval for a short amount of time). The two teams take turns fielding and batting. In test cricket each team has two innings. In pyjama (or one-day) cricket they have one innings each.

The team batting has the job of protecting the stumps (or wicket) and trying to score runs. Two batsmen at a time are on the field (unless one of the batsmen is injured in which case they have a runner and there are three batsmen on the field). One batsman is at either end of the cricket pitch (or wicket) defending the stumps (or wicket) and trying to score runs.

Runs are scored by hitting the ball (made of cork covered with red leather) with a cricket bat (traditionally made of willow—thus the expression "the glorious sound of leather on willow" which sound dirty if you’re thinking of a certain character from Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and running up and down the cricket pitch (or wicket). Although only one batsmen can hit the ball at any one time, both must run and get safely behind their crease. If the ball is hit all the way to the boundary (typically a thick white rope, not the fence) it is deemed to be four runs. If it is hit over the boundary it is six runs. The batsmen need not run for these boundaries.

Once a batsmen has run safely from one end of the cricket pitch (or wicket) to the other they have scored one run for themselves and also for their team. The batsman who is facing the bowling is said to be on strike. You do not have to hit each ball. You do not have to run if you do hit the ball. Hitting the ball to the boundary is the most efficient way of making runs because you accumulate runs faster and you don’t have to exhaust yourself running.

Getting fifty runs is good for an individual batsman, getting one hundred (or a century) is better, and getting more still is even better. The most amount of individual runs ever was 380 scored by the Australian Matthew Hayden. (Update 13 April: it’s now Brian Lara with 400 not out. Woo hoo!) The highest ever career average for a batsman is that of Donald Bradman (also an Australian): 99.94. Of course cricket is a team sport and individual feats and statistics are rarely mentioned and of little importance.

The job of the fielding side is to get the batsmen out and prevent them from scoring runs. This is achieved by standing in positions where the team captain thinks they are most likely to get a catch or prevent runs. Only one of the fielders, the wicket keeper, wears gloves to help catch the ball (unlike, say, baseball). The wicket keeper stands behind the stumps (or wicket).

All fielding positions have specific names that indicate their relationship to the batsmen on strike. A deep position is one that is a long way from the batsman and closer to the boundary. A short or silly position is one that is closer to the batsman. Leg or on side positions are closer to the back of the batsman’s legs. Off side positions are closer to the front of the batsman.

When a batsmen gets out they leave the field and the next batsman in the batting order comes out to replace them. The batting order usually runs from best batsmen to worst (the exception being the nightwatchman). There are cricketers who are specialist bowlers, cricketers who are specialist batsmen, as well as that rare beast, the all-rounder, who is good at both. Regardless of batting ability every one on the team (save the twelfth man) must bat.

There must be two batsmen for play to continue so once the tenth batsman is out the innings is over.

The Play

The game begins when the captain of each side walks out on to the oval and a coin is tossed. The winner of the toss decides whether they want to bat or field first. Their decision is based on the weather, the conditions of the pitch, what they know of their opponents and of their own team.

Test cricket play typically commences at 11AM and continues until 6PM, with scheduled breaks for tea and lunch and unsceduled breaks for drinks. It continues for five days, or less, if there is a result sooner.

Results of a test match are win—your team scores more than theirs and gets theirs all out; lose—your team scores less than theirs and is all out; draw or no result—one team scores more than the other team but fails to get them all out; tie—both teams get the exact same score and are all out (exceptionally rare—this has happened only twice in test cricket history).

Once the matter of who bats first has been decided, the two umpires, the fielding team and the two opening batsmen (or openers) walk out onto the oval. The batsmen take up their positions in front of the two sets of stumps.

Opening batsman is a specialist batting position given to the two batsman on the team who are good at accumulating runs, not prone to throwing their wickets away, and work well together. It is essential that the openers have a mutual understanding of when to run and even more importantly when not to run.

At the same time, the fielders take up their positions: the wicket keeper behind the stumps (or wicket) of the batsman who bats first, the opening bowler at the other end of the cricket pitch, and the rest of the fielders in positions determined by the captain and the bowler which they deem to be best for getting this particular batsmen out and preventing them from scoring too many runs.

Some of the factors they take into account when determining these field placings are: whether the batsman is right or left handed, whether the batsman is known to be fond of particular strokes, how the batsman proceeds to bat in this particular innings, and how fast or slow the wicket (cricket pitch) is.

The opening bowler, usually a fast bowler (or quick), bowls an over from one end of the oval. Usually the two ends are named for their geographical locations. At the S. C. G. (Sydney Cricket Ground) there is the Paddington end and the Randwick (or University of New South Wales) end. One of the ends at the ‘Gabba (the major cricket ground in Brisbane) is known as the Vulture St end which has always seemed remarkably ominous to me.

An over consists of six legitmate bowls. If the bowler bowls a ball the umpires deem to be illegitimate (a wide or a no ball) the bowler must bowl another ball and the over ends up consisting of more than six balls (and thus more than six opportunities to score runs for the batsmen). Some overs wind up being 17 or 18 balls long, but this is uncommon. Each time there is an illegitmate delivery the batting team is given an extra run. These are called sundries.

If the batsman hits the ball and gets a run, the two batsmen change ends and the bowler finds themselves having to reset the field (change the positions of all the fielders) to accommodate the new batsman. If each ball results in a single run the batsmen will change end six times, resulting in frequent changeovers of the field.

After the first over is finished a second bowler bowls an over from the other end. At the completion of that over the ends change again and the first bowler bowls another over. The two bowlers thus rotate the bowling until they begin to tire, or bowl badly, or annoy the captain, who replaces them with a different bowler. A bowler can only be replaced once they have completed an over.

In order for a batsman to get out they must be dismissed in one of the following ways:

Bowled. The bowler bowls a ball which goes past the batsman and hits the stumps (or wicket), dislodging the bails. Common.

Caught. The batsmen hits the ball (or it comes off their gloves) into the air and a fielder catches it before it hits the ground. Common.

Handled Ball. The batsmen picks up the ball. Uncommon.

Hit Ball Twice. The batsmen hits the ball, it doesn’t go anywhere, so they take a second swipe at it. Uncommon.

Hit Wicket. The batsmen hits their own stumps (or wicket) dislodging the bails. Uncommon.

Leg Before Wicket. The batsmen does not offer a stroke to a ball that would have hit their stumps were their pads not in the way. Common.

Obstructed Field. The batsman deliberately tries to prevent a fielder either taking a catch or throwing down the stumps. Uncommon. I’ve never seen this happen.

Run Out. The batsman fails to make it back behind the crease before the opposing side has dislodged the bails with the cricket ball, either thrown or held in the hand. Common.

Stumped. The batsman steps out of their crease to strike the ball, misses, and before they can step back the wicket keeper dislodges the bails with cricket ball in hand. Common.

Timed Out. The batsman fails to come out to bat within three minutes of the fall of wicket. Uncommon. I’ve never seen this happen.

In addition to being caught, bowled or any of the other possibilities listed above there must also be an appeal. An appeal consists of the fielding team leaping in the air screaming "howzat?" and staring at the umpires with a fierce expression that generally means "you’d have to be barking mad not to give the bastard out". If the umpire agrees they will raise their index finger. If they disagree they will do nothing, or shake their head. Umpires are universally known not to be intimidated by the antics of the fielding team and their decisions are always just and fair. Particularly those of Steve Bucknor.

Once a batsman is given out by the umpire they slowly trudge off the field looking miserable (particulary if they have scored a duck [no runs]). Batsmen never look happy getting out even if they have scored a double century. Someone would say particularly if they have scored a double century, because they were deprived of the chance to knock over the world record for number of runs scored. Though of course cricket is all about the team and not about individual statistics.

The score is represented thus: number of wickets taken followed by a forward slash, followed by the number of runs scored. If one wicket has been taken and 23 runs scored the score looks like this: 1/23 which is read as "one for twenty three" (except in England where for some bizarre reason they do it like this: 23/1 or twenty-three for one). As more runs are scored and more wickets taken the score changes. However you will never see 10/ because once ten wickets are taken the innings is over.

The next batsman then comes out, jogging up and down on the spot and generally giving the impression of being raring to go and ready to knock every delivery far, far out of the ground. That is if the next batsman is still an actual batsman and not a bowler masquerading as a batsman. In that case they will walk out somewhat unsteadily holding the bat as if they aren’t quite sure what it’s for or how to hold it. They will stand at the crease and stare up the other end at the fast bowler who is hurtling towards them faster than Phar Lap and they will valiantly try not to panic and run.

Such a batsman is known as a tailender. My favourite spectacle in cricket is when there is only one genuine batsman left and they are in the position of having to stay on strike and thus protect the tailender from getting out and possibly injured (in that order).

Because the strike automatically changes at the end of every over (or every six balls). The real batsman tries to end the over by hitting a single thus ensuring that they keep the strike and the tailender doesn’t have to deal with that scary red thing hurtling towards their body and/or wicket (stumps). This leaves the good batsman in the awful position of sometimes having to resist hitting a boundary for fear of handing the strike over to the incompetent, afraid-of-the-ball, not-quite-sure-which-end-of-the-bat-is-up tailender. Meanwhile the fielding side is doing everything it can to give the tailender the strike so that they can then get them out. Mostly by terrifying the poor bastard into treading on their own wicket. It is most gratifying to watch.

Once the tenth bastman is out the innings ends. The innings total consists of the combined total of all the individual batsman plus all the sundries (illegitimate deliveries) conceded by the bowling side. Let’s say for example that the first side to bat, who we’ll call Australia, score 456 and still aren’t all out. The captain might decide that 456 is a very solid, good, defensible total and declare. A declaration means that the captain has decided to end their team’s innings before they are all out.

The new batting side, let’s call them England, will be aiming to get that much and hopefully two hundred or more besides. So that when Australia bat again in their second and final innings they will have a difficult target to achieve. (Second innings totals are almost always smaller than first innings totals.) If Australia are all out before they reach England’s first innings total then England has won (and pigs would start to fly).

A much more likely result is that England would go out for their first batting innings and tragically (though predictably) make only 123 runs and fall well short of Australia’s first innings total. This means that Australia has a choice: they can now go out to bat and make an even bigger total for England to get in their second innings or they can enforce the follow on. The follow on means that Australia postpones their second batting innings and forces England to bat twice in a row, gambling that they can get England all out before they reach, or get very much further than, the first innings total of 456.

Australia does this and gets England all out for 234. Sadly the two totals 123 + 234 is still less than Australia’s first innings total and England lose by an entire innings and 99 runs. Not an unusual result for either side.

And there you have it. Enough cricket knowledge to allow you to follow a test match without any difficulty. Before long though you’ll find yourself thirsting for more so you can follow the intricacies of the game and not just these bare basics. Don’t despair! Coming soon:

The Slightly More than Beginners’ Guide to Cricket. To be followed shortly after by the Moderately More than Beginners’ Guide to Cricket, and not long after that, by the Substantially More than Beginners’ Guide to Cricket.

San Miguel de Allende, 16 February 2004

At the time I had never been dumped (neither had she) and was entirely persuaded by her reasoning. I, too, had never gotten sufficient sympathy. Ending a relationship hurts. True, it was a relationship you were tired of, that was driving you nuts, that you were relieved was over, but you still had fond memories. Worse still, you had to return all the cool stuff you’d borrowed (most of which was a present from you in the first place), mutual friends weren’t speaking to you, you’d had to find a new hairdresser, a new favourite café, and worst of all: not one person felt remotely sympathetic about your suffering just because you weren’t walking around swollen eyed, beating your chest and moaning. Dreadfully unfair.

Then I was dumped.

What a load of cobblers the above is. There is no comparison between being dumped and dumping someone. It’s the difference between stabbing someone and being stabbed. Even if your fingers were cramped from gripping the knife too tight, or worse case scenario, you were dumb enough to let your fingers slip on to the blade, you’re still not the one with the sucking chest wound, vital organs falling out willy-nilly. At worst you have a couple of sliced fingers. Boo-bloody-hoo.

Nothing makes it better. You were just about to dump them. Nope, you feel even worse. You never loved them anyway. Nope, not feeling less pain. You’re better off without them. Nope, bastard didn’t give you the chance to figure that out for yourself. They are now going out with the biggest whore/bastard in the known universe. Nope, cause what does that make you? Did they upgrade or downgrade?

I blame romance.

I lay the blame for the ridiculous amount of pain on the idea—reinforced by insane amounts of propaganda every single day of our lives—that without a life-partner (let’s all take turns to shudder at that neologism) you are nothing. If you’re not in a couple you’re nobody.

Life, we are taught, is about growing up. A grown up does not live with their parents, or flat with friends. A grown up has a means of support (most often a job) and a partner. But for some reason it’s the partner that’s the main bit: a person with a job who lives alone is somehow pathetic, not quite grown up—even if they’re getting laid when they want to, have thousands of friends, are world leaders in their field—they’re not complete and won’t be until they find The One.

Being a grown up is all about romantic love, but a very narrowly defined version. Romantic love is exclusive, sexual, between two (and only two) individuals. To be a true grown up you have to find your soul mate, move in together, and then reproduce. Find The One, have babies, die: that’s life.

So how come so few of the couples I know (married and unmarried) stay together longer than a year or two? How come so many of the ones that do are miserable? How come so many single people I know are happy, at least that is until they’re reminded that they’re single: "Oops, sorry, forgot, mate. Yup, you’re right. I’m miserable. Life alone is like a fish without a bicycle. A prison without walls. Sorry, miserable. Yep, that’s me, totally miserable."

How come the majority of the longest relationsionships in my circles are between good friends? That’s right "just" good friends. People who have known each other for years and years and years, have loaned each other money, helped rear each other’s children, read each other’s books, shared houses, shared jobs, but who aren’t in a sexual relationship with each other. How come the myths of our potential lives are centered around romantic love instead of friendship?

Who is this One that we’re all supposed to be waiting for? In the very few cases when The One comes along, doesn’t The One turn out to be your best friend who you just happen to find sexually attractive and enjoy living with? All the happy sexual relationships that I’ve seen last were built around close abiding friendships.

I see friends in relationships with people they don’t much like, because somehow that’s more grown up than being single. I see friendships destroyed when friends become lovers and it doesn’t work out and somehow the friendship dies in the process. I see single friends, otherwise perfectly happy, beating themselves up because they haven’t found the mythical One yet.

And "single"? What does that mean? How can someone with thousands of friends whose whole life is dominated by their relationships to their family, friends, colleagues. How can they be described as single?

I know people in couples for whom the term "single" is better suited. Totally focussed on each other, erradicating virtually every other connection they have in the world. They work together, eat together, finish each other sentences. Until finally one of them goes barking mad, the relationship ends, and then, suddenly, they each remember about friendships, communities, the existence of other people.

Why do we live in a world where one model of happiness is set up as the ideal for every one? What if one day it were decreed that we must all love chocolate? After all, the majority of people love chocolate, why shouldn’t everyone? And if you didn’t spend your whole life consuming vast amounts of the stuff your life would be viewed as a waste and a failure.

Absurd. But no more absurd than expecting everyone to want True Love with The One.

To return to my point of departure: Why is being dumped worse than dumping someone? Why do so many worlds crumble when the person you’ve talked yourself into believing is The One leaves?

Because so many of us have bought the romantic lie that all our happiness—that our very claim to a fulfilled adult life—is predicated on our success in romantic love. If it’s you ending it, you’re in control, you have hope of better things (or, if you’re crafty, you already have the next One lined up). You’re ready for what’s going to happen next.

The dumpee has made no contingency plans, is still wrapped in the warm glow of the delusions they’ve fed themselves about the relationship. Now they have to divest themselves of those delusions, find someone new who’ll be The One, not another Wrong One. A whole new bunch of delusions to weave. Or scariest of all—they must face the possibility that they may never find The One.

The truly delusional dumpee may not have any friends to turn to—not even a cat or dog—wrapped as they were in the ludicrous idea that you only need one person in your life.

That’s why being dumped is so much worse.

There is one compensation: the dumped always get sympathy. Another of the perks of a world dominated by the myth of romantic love is that people know you’re in mourning and will treat you nice.

Not so if a friendship ends. No matter how devastating, once you’re out of high school you’re supposed to be grown up enough to deal with that sort of thing on your own time. But as we all know the end of a friendship can be every bit as dreadful and destructive as the end of a romantic relationship.

Console yourself with the knowledge that it was only your lover of the last six months who dumped you, not your best friend of the last fifteen years.

Sydney, New York City & San Miguel de Allende, 10 Oct-31 Dec 2003