Category Archives: Writing process

Not thinking structurally

Warning: This post is longish, rambling, and possibly incoherent.

I don’t think structurally.1 But most of my novelist friends do. When they talk about the books they’re currently writing, they rabbit on about three and four-act structures, beats, setting things up for the climax, the dénouement and blah blah blah.

I’ve never thought about my books that way. I have no idea what the act structure of any of them is. I don’t know what a beat is. I am an idiot savant novelist.

I suspect part of this is because when I first started learning how to write novels I’d never heard of act structures or outlining so I didn’t use any of those models for writing a novel. I winged it. And thus learned how to write novels by winging it.

Mostly I have no idea where my books are going. I’ll have an initial incident, or sense of the protag, or a setting. Occasionally I think I know how the book ends, but mostly not. In fact, when I think have an ending I find out that I am wrong.

When I’m writing the first draft, I’m very often lost in the sentence level, or going from scene to scene. For a long time, I can’t see very far ahead, which means I don’t have much of a macro view. Not until I’ve written the first draft and can look at the whole thing. When I start rewriting, deleting and moving scenes around, I don’t do it to balance out acts—on account of having no idea what the different acts are—I do it to get the book to feel right:

This bit drags = I delete it or trim viciously.
This bit doesn’t really make sense so early in the book = I move it.

The way I think about structure is most clearly articulated in my post on how to rewrite, proving that I do think about structure, just not in the organised way so many of my friends do.

I wonder if part of this is the winging it versus outlining it school of writing. In order to write an outline you have to start with an overall sense of the structure of your book.2 Whereas I learn what the structure of my book is by writing it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I just realised that the book I’m working on right now has three parts. Could they be three acts? Could I accidentally be doing what I thought I didn’t know how to do? The first part sets everything up, introduces all the characters, reveals the main conflicts. The second part, well, I’m not sure how to describe what the second part’s doing given that there’s not even two thousand words of it. And the third part will, hopefully, bring stuff to a head and then wrap everything up. Or something.

We’ll see.

I defnitely feel that I have a much stronger sense of the structure of this novel and where it’s going at a much earlier stage. I’m about half finished and I’m pretty sure I know where it’s going and how to get there. It is most odd.

I suspect that Scrivener may be at least partly to blame. The way it works has made me aware of the overall shape and, well, structure of my book almost immediately.

I’m also enjoying writing this book a great deal. Something about working with Scrivener has forced me to think about the craft of writing in ways I haven’t before. I feel like I’m being stretched and the book is better for it. Even if I do wind up writing a book with the English-speaking world’s most conventional structure: the three-act structure.3

Whatever. Nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel.

  1. I’ve been tinkering with this post for quite some time. Part of my problem writing it is that because I do not think structurally about my writing I do not really have the language I need to write this post. I borrow other writers’s language, but most likely I don’t use it in the ways they intend, hence the messiness. I’m just feeling my way and thinking out loud. My apologies! [↩]
  2. I once wrote an outline of a book—for Magic or Madness. However, I wrote it in order to sell the book (and trilogy) and once I got stuck into the writing I never looked at the outline again. [↩]
  3. I may have more coherent thoughts once I’ve actually finished it. [↩]

How I finished my first novel

Often when people find out what I do it turns out that they harbour ambitions of writing a novel too. Mostly they just daydream about it. But sometimes they confess that they’ve had a whack at it but not very successfully. “How do you actually finish a novel?” they’ll ask. “Starting’s easy but how do you finish?”

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. [↩]

Very Important Question About Book Writing

Hilary! asked the following:

I have a VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION ABOUT BOOK WRITING!!!!!!!!! My Friend Weslie is writing a book and I’ve been helping her, but she won’t exactly tell me what the plot is, but i feel that since I am helping her with it anyway, she SHOULD tell me. What’s your take on it? PLEASE ANSWER PROMPTLY!!!!!

When you say you’re “helping” her I’m assuming you mean you are critiquing her work. Right? If so then, yes, it’s really difficult to make constructive comments when you have no idea where the book is going.

For instance, say she’s writing a vampire love story (judging from my poll opposite my readers are VERY into vampires) but she only slowly reveals that one of her characters is a vampre. You the critiquer need to know that so you can tell her whether her various clues along the way are too obvious or too subtle. It’s very difficult to critque a story when you don’t know where it’s going.

On the other hand, it might be that she wants to see whether you can figure out what’s happening and will rewrite depending on what you say. I don’t think this works that well unless she’s already written the entire story, in which case you’ll know what the plot is because you’ve got the whole story in front of you.

When I critique friends work-in-progress they always tell me where it’s going (if they know). Scott always tells me what the plot of his novels are before he writes them.1 My comments are much more useful when I have a sense of where the novel is going. Otherwise I’m not sure what to say except at a sentence-by-sentence level.

I’m not sure if I have answered your question. Anyone else got a different take?

  1. Things do change in the writing process, however. [↩]

Another rewriting question

Herenya asked:

One question on rewriting, about when you rewrite. I’ve read things which say you shouldn’t mix writing and rewriting. Write it all first, then rewrite it. I can understand that “creative” and “analytical” hats can be conflicting and that sometimes one has to just write crap first before improving upon it (which is difficult if you’re thinking critically), but I generally find I bounce back and forth between rewriting previous sections and writing more. Is this such a terrible thing to do?

If mixing rewriting and writing works for you then go for it!1

My partner, Scott, spends the first few hours of his writing day rewriting the previous three days work. Once he’s got that under control, and only then, does he move onto fresh writing.

Me, I rewrite (while writing the first draft) only if I’m a stuck on the next bit. On the mornings when I wake up and know exactly what needs to happen next, I dive into it. On the mornings I don’t, I procrastinate endlessly rewrite or go back and fill in the blanks where I have notes to myself like [something should explode here] or [figure out where this conversation’s happening] or [what happened to the quokkas?].

For a lot of writers the difference between the “writing” and the “rewriting” can be blurry. If you work according to Scott’s method then your finished first draft is more like a third or fourth draft because every section has been gone over at least three times. You work according to mine then you’ve got lots of actual first draft but also some second, third, fourth, or whatever.

I know some writers who really don’t read over any of what they’ve written until they’ve got a whole draft, but I suspect they’re rare. I know of one writer who burns2 that first draft and then starts over from scratch. Some writers have gone over their work so many times by the time their “first” draft is finished they don’t need to “rewrite” at all, they’re done.

That’s one of the brilliant things about the intramanets: all the writers’ blogs and essays and interviews online means it’s dead easy to see just how widely varied writing practice is and how contradictory all the gobbets of writing advice.

Whatever works for you is the way to re/write.

Just remember that can change from story to story and from day to day. Sometimes Raymond Chandler’s advice of hanging out in the one room and not having to write, but not being allowed to do anything but write will be just the ticket. Frankly, it’s never worked for me unless I have a heinous deadline and the room I’m in has no intramanets or books or telephone or packs of cards or, well, you get the idea.

  1. As a general rule be suspicious of all writing rules. [↩]
  2. figuratively speaking [↩]

How to Rewrite

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.

“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?” …

How to RewriteRead More »

Scrivener (updated)

Many of my writer friends have recently switched from WordToolOfSatan to Scrivener. Since the always trustworthy Holly Black and Lili Wilkinson recommend it so strongly I decided that I would give it a go.

I’m here to tell you that I am in love. Scrivener is the first writing tool for computers that I have ever fallen for.1

Before you race off to get a copy here are two key points about Scrivener:

  1. It’s only available for Macs. It’s now available for PCs too.
  2. It is not a word-processing program; it’s a program designed specifically for drafting long documents (such as novels).

…

Scrivener (updated)Read More »

  1. I’ve had some really beautiful pens. [↩]

Writing = hard

Fellow writers, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re looking at your manuscript covered with line edits by your editor and you come across something like this:

I could feel felt . . .

And you stare it. Really? Really? I wrote “I could feel” when I could simply have written “I felt”? What was I thinking? Why is my editor a better writer than I am? Gah!

And then there’s this:

I could still feel the warmth of where his thumb had been1

I wrote “the warmth of”? I’m, like, the WORST writer ever. I totally deserve all the paper cuts this stupid manuscript is giving me. Every single one. Even the one across my nose. Maybe especially the one across my nose.

  1. On her forehead, okay? Don’t go thinking rude thoughts. My fairy book is very chaste. [↩]

Sherwood Smith on World Building

Because I am very behind on reading blogs—and pretty much everything else in my life—I missed this lovely riposte by Sherwood Smith. She’s responding to M. John Harrison dismissing world building. He’s not, though, he’s dismissing bad world building. Just like all those people who say that omniscient narration is evil and wrong. Nope, only when it’s done badly.

You should go read Sherwood because what she says is exactly so:

My objection is this, that worldbuilding is one of the ways humans play. Just as reading is a form of play.1 Many people don’t even know they are worldbuilding. Children worldbuild all the time. They will establish with a few quick rules what each item in the yard represents, and play at that a while, testing that everyone’s on the same page, and then someone begins a “what if?” “What if we all turned into ponies?” “What if the ponies fly?” “What if race cars had brains?” My son, at four, who never willingly reads a book, had had the living room converted to a world that was internally laid out–he didn’t tell us what was what. We could only guess by the sound effects he made as he motored about; then at one point he got the pots and pans out of the kitchen, laid them carefully out into a man shape, pointed the TV changer at it, expecting it to come to life. He cried, the world crashed down, and we had to explain where his rules and this world’s rules clashed, but it was clear that that giant robot had had a role in his ongoing story.

What she said. Read the whole thing. The comments are pretty fascinating too.

  1. The argument that reading ought not to be play, but ought to be useful and informative and force one to think is, I believe, just another form of the great clomping foot of the puritan ethic. [↩]

World building

Someone else asked me how I go about world building when writing fantasy or science fiction or historical fiction. (I’ve written all three.) Once again the question made me go all inarticulate and respond randomly and lamely: “How do I breathe?” “How does a butterfly flap its wings?”

Clearly I need to figure out how I go about world building. I’m fascinated by writing process and this is a large part of mine. I have to quit it with the inarticulate spluttering.

So those of you have written novels not set in this world—how did you go about your world building? Or, to refer to a recent discussion on Gwenda’s blog, what story do you tell yourself about your world building?

Making the words good after you already writ ’em

I’ve had a few requests lately to explain how to edit a book once the first draft is done. I’ve started a long and exhaustive post on just that, but it’s not finished, plus Maureen already wrote about it. In the meantime David Louis Edelman has a really useful ten-point guide to line editing:

1. Eliminate unnecessary modifiers. When I say unnecessary modifiers, I’m talking about both “weasel” words that lessen the impact of your prose and useless modifiers that emphasize for no reason. Words like possibly, simply, really, totally, very, supposedly, seriously, terribly, allegedly, utterly, sort of, kind of, usually, extremely, almost, mostly, practically, probably, and quite. Why write “It was quite hot out that day” or “It was extremely hot that day” when the sentence “It was hot that day” accomplishes the same thing? The more clutter you can get rid of, the better your sentences will be.

What he said. Add “actually” and “just” and “though” to that list. But remember there are always exceptions. Like many of those words are dead useful in dialogue for conveying dithering etc. For example:

“Actually, I was totally going to set the zombies on the unicorns. Seriously I was! But I was possibly maybe almost kind of sort of distracted by the troll invasion. They’re really big!”

Edelman’s list—like all such lists—is a guide not a set of rules.

A Partial View (updated)

What makes a character real and believable?

When you describe someone you always leave so much out. Physical descriptions often touch only the obvious: skin, hair, eyes and only broadly. I don’t remember the last time I read a description of the size of pores, the unevenness of the skin colour—nobody is the same colour all over—unless it was of a villian.

But if you were to describe absolutely everything you saw. Your writing would bog down. The aim is to suggest, not catalogue. But even the most cataloguey of writers—like Dorothy Dunnett and her glorious lists—always leave details out. The world’s too infinite to be exhaustively captured on a page.

There are all sorts of conventions that get in the way of describing what we actually see. I once tried to describe a very beautiful woman I used to know. She had very light almost fuzz-like hair all over her face, like a peach. You could only see it in certain lights, but it was distinct. The minute I described her like that no one would buy that she was beautiful. Gorgeous women do not have fur on their faces. But, trust me, she was—and I imagine still is—stunning.

In the 6 August New Yorker Louis Menaud takes some potshots at those who write biographies:

If we think about the laughable mess that is our own life—in which (even with the prevalence of cell-phone cameras) only a sliver of what we do and think and feel gets recorded, and the record that does exist is incomplete, or distorted, or captures states of mind that are transient—we may wonder whether the bits and pieces on which biographical narratives are often strung are not a little arbitrary. William James’s diary entry “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will,” which makes a starring appearance in almost every life of him; Henry James’s dream of a chase through the Louvre, whose Freudian unpacking is given a prominent place in Leon Edel’s celebrated five-volume biography; Dickens’s story, first told to his biographer John Forster, about his experience in the blacking factory—once these “pivotal moments” or primal episodes get established in the literature, they acquire an unstoppable explanatory force. But what if William James decided the next day that free will was overrated but didn’t bother to write it down, or if Dickens later had a really good experience in a bluing factory, and never told anyone about it? All any biographer can hope, and all any reasonably skeptical reader can expect, is that the necessarily somewhat fictional character in the book bears some resemblance to the person who actually lived and died, and whose achievements (and disgraces) we care to learn more about. A biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror.

What he said. It’s also true of fiction. No writer can give a complete picture of a character. And we fiction writers are even more shackled than the biographers because at least readers know that real people contradict themselves on occasion and change their minds. Trying to convey that in fictional characters is hard and if you bugger it up—and sometimes even if you don’t—will lead to accusations of inconsistency. And comments about “not buying that the protag would behave like that.”

In fiction, unlike real life, characters behave in ways that make sense. There are first shoes1 for later actions. Nothing comes out of nowhere. And if it does readers will complain that the book is badly written.

Fiction is more modelled on previous fiction than it is on real life. Readers’ expectations of where a story will go is shaped by how they understand story and how they understand the behaviours of characters in that particular kind of story.

No one’s life divides neatly into three or four acts which is why biographers often have such a hell of a job wrestling their sprawling material into a readable shape.

I guess these are reflections on rewriting. On trying to wrestle my novel into a readable whole that sits properly within story conventions but doesn’t bore me. I do, after all, write commercial fiction. It’s difficult and fun and exhausting.

I have a week left.

  1. Update: Several people have asked what I mean by “first shoe”. It’s a writing term I picked up from Scott and we use it so often I forget there are people who don’t know it. It comes from Damon Knight. Carol Emshwiller explains about halfway into this interview. But basically first shoes are things that happen early in the story that set up something that will happen later. Like if a character coughs early on that sets up their TB death by the end of the book. Or having a gun in a drawer early on means that at some point it will go off and the reader’s just waiting for when. [↩]

Chapter carnage

So far I have deleted five chapters of the Ultimate Fairy Book. Two of them my favourites.

The truly horrifying thing? Afterwards it was like they were never even there. The changes I needed to make in their absence? Almost zero.

Sigh. Makes me wonder why I wrote them in the first place . . .

I enjoy deleting vast chunks of text. It’s the easiest kind of rewriting. Plus it always makes my books better. I don’t miss what I’ve nuked. Seriously I have never restored any deleted passages or chapters. Not once. I always save them but I rarely look at them again.

Am I alone?

Why head hopping is good

Ages ago I ranted against those who say that switching point of views is evil and wrong. I did not give any examples demonstrating when pov switching not only works, but makes a scene a billion times more effective than it would have been trapped in one pov only.

So here is one. And from a fellow Australian, naturally:

There was more talk, more laughter. One moment Arabella thought that he would walk away with the other men. The next Lord Petre feared that she would turn back to the box with Miss Blount, and that his chance would be lost. The chance for what, he could not say. Neither of them heard a word of the conversation; each of them looked for a reason to address the other. They both wished, vainly, that everybody would go away. At last, as the audience began returning to their seats, they found themselves face-to-face. Lord Petre stood mute, looking at Arabella intently. She struggled for a pleasantry to break their silence.

—Sophie Gee The Scandal of the Season

No writing technique is evil and wrong. It’s all about the execution.

Spreadsheets revisited

Off to Paris today. I’m not sure what my intramanet access will be like while there, plus I’ll be busy, so I figured I’d best leave you with a slightly meaty post given as I’m not sure when I’ll be posting again.

For your delectation some thoughts on the efficacy of spreadsheets for novel writing:

A while back I posted a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to write a novel in which I suggested using a spreadsheet. I’m still getting letters from folks telling me what a revelation that was, how it’s transformed the way they write, solved all their plotting problems, and made their teeth whiter.

And I’m still coming across comments from those who are appalled and outraged by the very idea. A spreadsheet! For creative work! The utter utter horror! Spreadsheets are for accountants! The muse is allergic to spreadsheets. What kind of philistine is this Justine Larbalestier? (If that is her real name.)

I don’t get the outrage.

A novel is a large document containing a whole world with a population that can range from one (boring navel-gazing novel about a man trapped inside a unicycle) to billions or more (space opera where the Empress of the universe destroys a whole planet and the reader follows the last day of each inhabitant of said planet). Keeping track of all of that is tricky. The longer or more complicated the novel the harder it is to keep all of it in your head.

I’m sure some writers can do it. Some writers can also write entires novels in their head and produce but one perfect draft.

But pretty much every writer I know has some method of tracking their novel. It might be a set of notes, a wall chart, a spreadsheet, a ouija board, an outline they annotate as they go, index cards, pigeon entrails, their ghostwriter, whatever. They have some kind of a thing that is not their novel that tells them stuff they need to know about their novel.

My first novel is an epic, 145 thousand words long,1 spanning many years, with a cast of gazillions, and multiple point-of-view characters. I wrote the first draft using another word document to note down who was related to who, what the countries were, the different language groups, the seasons, things I needed to change, and etc. By the time I finished the first draft, my notes about the novel was almost longer than the actual novel. I needed another document to keep track of it. And then I needed another one to keep track of the one keeping track of the notes keeping track of the novel. Spot the problem?

My boyfriend of the time (thank you, Geoff!) suggested I use Microsoft Project. I fell in love. It was the first (and only time) I’ve been smitten by any of Microsoft’s software.2 Project was exactly what I needed: I could chart each character in relationship to the other characters over a period of days, months, years, whatever I needed. At a glance, I could see characters who disappeared with no explanation, who remained pregnant for two years, babies who stayed at the baby stage even though five years had passed since their birth.

It made rewriting much easier.

My second novel was much more straightforward, shorter, and told from only one point of view. A very short file was all I needed to keep track. And to be honest I didn’t use it much, which might be why it’s so very bad, and will never ever see the light of day.

My third novel was Magic or Madness, which while not as complicated as my first, had its own challenges, such as being set in Sydney and New York City. Towards the end of the first draft, Scott introduced me to his spreadsheet method, which made it much much much easier to track what time it was in the two different locations as well as the shifts in points-of-view.

I used the same spreadsheet for all three books of the trilogy. It made me happy.

For the Great Australian Mangosteen Monkey Knife-Fighting Elvis Cricket Fairy Young Adult book I also used a spreadsheet, but it served mostly procrastinatory purposes. The book is told from one point of view and is pretty much beginning, middle, end. It woulda been just as easy to write it without one.

So there you have it: spreadsheets neither write your novel for you, nor do they stab the grand muse of writerising through the heart. They’re just this sometimes-for-some-people useful thing, ya know?

And now I believe I have a plane to catch.

  1. For contrast all the Magic or Madness books are around 65 thousand words. [↩]
  2. And, of course, Microsoft instantly stopped producing a Mac version. So I never got to use it again, which is a shame because it is the most excellent instrument of procrastination novel tracking I have ever used. [↩]

Different strokes*

If I wasn’t already convinced that there are many different ways to write novels this quote from Cynthia Leitich Smith would clinch it for me:

it is a regular part of my process to write a full novel draft, print it to read once, and then I throw1 it away and delete the file. Really. It’s my way of just getting to know the characters and their world. If I were to build on those first, fumbling efforts, my stories would have pretty shaky foundations. I’m not saying this is for everyone. Some folks can fully envision their work right out of the chute. But me, I figure whatever survives when I open the new document deserves a fair shot. Whatever doesn’t . . . doesn’t.

Oh. My. Elvis.

And, yet, I can kind of see where she’s coming from. My first drafts are pretty shaky foundations. I just prefer the security of having them to having nothing at all. As I demonstrated in this post, my first drafts are often vastly different to my finished books. They can change points of view, or whether they’re told in first person or third or whatever. Characters’ motivations, names, ages—everything can change. I throw huge chunks away. Not a lot of the first draft survives into the final.

But throwing a whole novel out?

What if I just wound up writing another shaky first draft? Do I throw that one out too? And start over again? Couldn’t that go on forever?

On the other hand, my first drafts are a lot better than they used to be. So maybe if I adopted this strategy, they’d improve even faster?

It also occurs to me that it might be a really good strategy for making my short stories work. I’ve got kajillions of broken short stories. What if I started over from scratch on the promising ones? I’m a much better writer than I was last time I attempted to write one.

Hmmm . . .

Yet throwing an entire novel away? Deleting the file?! My brain it hurts! My eyes they bleed! Gah!

Also what about the historians? What about tax deductible donation of your papers to a library collection? I hear some of them even pay for such things. How do you donate them if you throw them away?! Think of posterity!

Deep breaths, Justine, deep breaths. There are many different ways to write a novel. Also not everyone is into donating their work to libraries. Quit thinking like an historian.

*Am I the only one who finds that expression “different strokes for different folks” vaguely obscene?

  1. I’m sure she meant into the recycling. [↩]

I expose myself

Given that it’s now late February and Magic Lessons is available in a corrected and cheaper paperback edition in the US of A, and Magic’s Child is a mere month away from pubbing,1 I thought I would celebrate by posting the very first draft of the first two and a bit chapters of Magic or Madness:

Chapter One

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.

Compare and contrast with what wound up in the final version of Magic or Madness many, many, many, many rewrites later:

Chapter One: Reason Cansino

My name is Reason Cansino. I was named Reason because my mother, Sarafina, thought it was prettier than Logic or Rationality or Intellect and had better nicknames, too. Not that Sarafina has ever called me anything but Reason. My mother believes in all those things: logic, reason, and the rest, and in mathematics, which fortunately wasn’t on the list of possible names. I’m grateful to have a head full of numbers, but I wouldn’t want to answer to the name of Algebra, Trigonometry, or Calculus.

I have mentioned before that my first drafts are really bad. Now you have proof!

“Reason missed her mum.” Has there ever been a less dynamic first sentence? Or first paragraph? “I miss my mum and instead of doing anything I’m going to whinge.” I’d keep reading that. Not!

I hope this encourages you in your own writing endeavours. The first draft ain’t nothing but the very roughest of beginnings. It exists only to be enbiggened and embettered.

Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t have posted the first draft after all?

Justine backs away slowly from the computer.

These are not the droids you’re looking for!

  1. Two months if you are in Australia or New Zealand. Many more months if you’re looking to score a copy in a language other than English. [↩]

Transitions

A while back, I was reading a biography of Kingsley Amis (what an entertainingly grumpy man he was) in which he mentions that the hardest part of writing is “getting your characters out of the pub and into the cab”.

Oh, yes, indeed. Even though I don’t write the kind of books where characters go from pubs to cabs—or vice versa—they do very inconveniently need to transition from one scene to another. Or from one side of the room to the other. The gall of them! Stupid characters.

Sex scenes are a cinch. Action ditto. Writing the tragic break up? Piece of cake. The death scene? Doddle.

But transitions? Total bugger.

Sometimes I am so stumped by my attempt to get a character to walk from one side of the street to the other—Just walk! Not even walk and chew gum! Nothing fancy!—that I give up and blow them up instead. So much easier. Or, you know, simply cut to the next bit. Thank you, film world, for inventing the jump cut.

And yet if you keep up that approach you run out of characters. Also endless jump cuts get really old really quickly.

So I spend hours writing and rewriting simple transitions: “Leandra Hotshot spied Gertrude Schadenfreude on the other side of the room. She had a red rose between her teeth and champagne flute in her hand. Leandra got out of her chair and nimbly darted towards her friend.”

Gah!

“Leandra Hotshot meandered toward her red rose munching friend Gertrude Schadenfreude. Sometimes the other side of the room seemed so very far away.”

More gah!

“Leandra Hotshot spontaneously combusted, leaving both sides of the room coated in human ashes. Gertrude dusted the light grey flakes from her shoulders, wondering where all the snow had come from. She had never been very bright.”

Ah, much better! Except for the elimination of my central character. But I never liked her anyway.

Stupid transitions.

What do you lot find hardest about writing? For me it’s transitions and deadlines. That and the fact that non-paid writing (like blogging) is so much more fun than paid writing.

What? I’m supposed to be rewriting the great Australian Elvis fairy cricket monkey mangosteen knife fight novel right now? Me? I thought Maureen was taking care of that. No? Really? Huh. Well, that blows. Do you think Scalzi could do it then? Or Cory? They both write fast . . .

More on speedy writing

The comments continue to flow from my post on speedy writing. Many of them here and here. Though my musing out loud seems to have boiled down to books written fast can be good too! Maybe I shouldn’t have called it “speedy writing”.

The main points I thought I was making is that the pace of a writer’s production are influenced by many many different factors. A writer who will appear to be fast when independently wealthy and waited on hand in foot, would be slow if they had considerably less money and a family to look after. The opposite can be true. I have seen writers who wrote in the margins of their life, finding themselves suddenly able to write full-time, freak out and enter the biggest writer’s block of all time.

Sometimes a book that took five years to write had as much writing time spent on it as a book that took six months.

Do I think that book are necessarily good or bad because they were written fast or slow? No.

Do I think that the odds of the book being the best you can make it go up if you get to spend as long as you need on it? Yes.

Do I think some writers spend way too much time making their books the best they can? Yes.

Despite writers’ blogs—and most writers don’t have one—the amount of time a book takes to be written is mostly hidden from the majority of its audience. So judging a book on its perceived speed of production, rather than its actual quality, seems fairly pointless to me.

I’m always reminded of a paper I once heard on Jonathan Lethem’s early novels that assumed that they were written in the order they were published and at the speed they were published, both erroneous assumptions.

I can state one thing with certainty: My favourite writers don’t write books fast enough. Slow lazy bastards. And the writers I can’t stand are way too productive. Sloppy hacks.

Speedy writing

I keep coming across two assumptions about writers who publish a lot of books per year. The first1 is that if a book takes less than a year to write then it can’t be any good. So if a writer can produce two or more books a year they are total hacks.

It ain’t necessarily so. People write at different paces and in different circumstances. Some so-called slow writers are slow because they also have a full or part-time job, because they have a family, because they’re running the household, and their writing is snatched in the time between waking and going to work. Or before the kids come home from school. Or on their lunch hours.

Some writers are just slow because they’re slow. It takes them a while to think things through. They like to get every sentence perfect before they move onto the next. Or they do not know how to let go of their books and would be rewriting them until the end of time if their editor or agent didn’t snatch it from them.

Some writers are fast because all they have to do is write. They’re wealthy and have employees to take care of all the housework and admin. Or they have a wife (or, rarely, a husband) who takes care of all of that.

And some writers are just fast. They can write several books a year even though they have families and jobs and other responsibilities. It’s just the way they’re wired.

Some slow writers turn out horrible books. So do some fast writers. Neither fact on its own gives you any indication of the writer’s quality. And really it’s not like quality is something everyone agrees about. Would you believe there are people out there who don’t realise that Georgette Heyer is a genius? Shocking, but true.

The other assumption is almost its opposite: the idea that writing lots of books in a year is a matter of word counts and thus not that big a deal. A commenter on Miss Snark puts the idea succinctly:

Ok, at the risk of getting majorly snarked, I’m not sure why writing 4 novels a year is seen as an impossibility.

Let’s say you can write 1000 words/day. If you did that for 300 days of the year, you’d have 300,000 words. 300,000/4 = 75,000 words per novel.

You still have 65 days left in the year for polishing, too.

So why is it so incredible?

Writing four books a year is tough because you’re not just writing first drafts of four books, you’re writing second, third and fourth and as many drafts as you and your editor think the book needs to go through. You’re also checking copyedits and page proofs.

Those extra rewrites, copyedits and page proofs always come in while you’re hard at work on the next book. You’re buried in that world and suddenly you have to pull yourself out and turn to a book you haven’t thought about in months. It’s not easy.

Let’s figure out the time for that, shall we?

You’ve only got 65 days left after writing the four first drafts. That means you have slightly more than 16 days to rewrite, go over copyedits, and check the page proofs of each book. And that’s assuming you work every single day. It assumes you do no publicity for your books, and that you have no holidays, no sick days, no nothing.

For most people that would be impossible, or at the very least a recipe for no friends, a breakdown, and/or shingles. All very well if you hate people and love shingles.

I could not do it. I spend at least as long rewriting my books as I do writing the first drafts. It also takes me a solid week to go over copyedits (sometimes longer) and 2 or 3 days for page proofs. While I can write a first draft in three months or less, I need at least that time for everything else. At most I could write two books a year, but as I’ve never done that I don’t know for sure.

And I need days when I don’t write because there are days—many of them—when my brain is broken and I simply cannot write a single word. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not alone in this.

Are there writers who can and do write four books a year? Yes, there are. How do they do it? By writing more than a thousand words a day,2 by writing fewer drafts,3 by secretly having clones, by being really really disciplined, and by other means that I can’t even imagine.

Like every thing else in a writer’s life, it depends.

  1. I see it so often I’m not even going to bother with an example. [↩]
  2. More than 1,000 words a day is definitely doable. I once wrote 10,000 words in a day. But you know what I wrote the next day? Nothing. And the day after that. And the day after that. Several weeks of nothing, in fact. It was a definite case of brain breakage. I can write 2,000 a day sustainably for a few months. But I’m most comfortable and unbrain-breaky between 1,000 and 2,000. But that’s just me. I know writers who can write 5,000 a day for months without breaking into a sweat. I know who others who die if they go over 500. Not to mention the pre-industrial writers who just write until they’re done and then sleep for six months. [↩]
  3. Some people will argue that writing only one or two drafts is the major sign of a crap writer. But there are writers who seem to only produce one draft, but that’s only because they pretty much write the book in their head before committing to paper. Their first draft is clean as a whistle. It’s just a different way of writing.

    Me, I need to work stuff out on the page, so I go through multiple drafts. My first drafts? Um, not clean as a whistle—more in the pig-pen range. Put it this way: No one ever gets to see them but Scott, and he is not very appreciative of the honour. Nor would anyone with functioning eyeballs. [↩]

Paragraphs: the long and the short of it

I just attempted to read a screed that everyone’s been linking to and had to give up because the paragraphs were so crazy long my head exploded. Co-incidentally I’ve been reading a wonderful novel for a friend and it too has lots and lots of endless paragraphs which majorly interfere with my reading pleasure.

Stop it already!

Paragraph breaks are your friend.

White space is gentle on the eye.

Embrace it!

Forget what you were told in school: A paragraph does not consist of one point or one idea. That bogus notion leads to paragraphs that go on for pages and pages and pages as the writer explicates everything they can which supports the one point they are making.

Gah!

In beginner fiction, you see paragraphs that contain every thought that particular character is having about the situation they are in. Or action scenes where everything the character does is in one paragraph. And the next paragraph is everything some other character is doing. This makes for long long paragraphs and an unpleasant reading experience where your eye keeps skipping ahead desperate for some glimmer of hope, ie some white space.

Double gah!

Paragraphs can be any length you want them to be. There is no hard and fast rule on their length. One-sentence paragraphs are fine; whole-page paragraphs can be too. Anyone who tells you to avoid either one is smoking crack. Like everything else—ornate word choice, omniscient point-of-view, adverbs—it’s all about how you use them, not about whether they’re evil. (The only thing that is evil and wrong and should never be written about is unicorns.)

The trick is to vary your paragraph lengths and make them serve the story or argument you are making. If you want to emphasise a point. Go the one-sentence.

It can help drive your point home.

If you’re writing an action scene throwing in a one-sentence paragraph can be like a gun shot:

The blue sparks glowed through the trees again, revealing the silhouette of a great cat raised up on his haunches. The creature was young and eager for a kill, full of the fervor of Samhain. Then Rex spotted a human form just past the darkling: Melissa tossing up handfuls of metal, hurling the bolts and screws that Dess had created into the cat’s face, driving it wild with fury. It let out a cry, swiping a claw at the tiny missiles.

Then it dropped into a crouch, ready to launch itself at her.

Obviously I don’t mean a gunshot as in:

The car exploded!

It’s more gunshot as in your eye gives it more weight. The way your ear gives more weight to the sound of a real gunshot.

So the example above is longer paragraph that is all, la, la, la, something is happening, building up, building up, building up. Ominous, nervous-making, scary, scary scary. It’s non goodness is becoming more and more obvious and thus more and more erky perky and scary scary scary.

And then—short paragraph!—things get even worse.

Long paragraphs can be useful too. Your eye tells you that all the stuff in one belongs together. It’s all happening at the same time. All stems from the one train of thought. Long paragraphs can slow things down when you need them to. They can replicate a state of revery:

She’d seen that happen sometimes with dance floors, especially old ones that had been danced on by thousands and thousands of people over the years. The dance floor absorbed all that crowd magic, began to dance a little itself. Once, in a shoe store in the city, Jay-Tee had taken one step on the old wooden floor and felt it reaching toward her, accommodating itself to the movement of her feet, ready, eager for her to dance. Instantly she’d known it had been a dance floor—people had waltzed, fox-trotted, Charlestoned, jitterbugged, boogied, and twisted across its surface for many, many years. She’d spun, feeling the floor push back, giving her extra spring and lift. She’d grinned. One of the guys who worked there had grinned back, danced toward her. “Isn’t this song great? Just makes you dance.”

I could have broken it up like this:

She’d seen that happen sometimes with dance floors, especially old ones that had been danced on by thousands and thousands of people over the years. The dance floor absorbed all that crowd magic, began to dance a little itself.

Once, in a shoe store in the city, Jay-Tee had taken one step on the old wooden floor and felt it reaching toward her, accommodating itself to the movement of her feet, ready, eager for her to dance. Instantly she’d known it had been a dance floor—people had waltzed, fox-trotted, Charlestoned, jitterbugged, boogied, and twisted across its surface for many, many years.

She’d spun, feeling the floor push back, giving her extra spring and lift. She’d grinned.

One of the guys who worked there had grinned back, danced toward her. “Isn’t this song great? Just makes you dance.”

I felt the second version loses its rhythm and become too staccato-y, which works counter to the fairy-tale, reminscing feel I was going for. Another writer might have made a different choice. It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about what works for you.

I know blog entries are not (usually) professionally written and edited prose, but surely those writing them don’t want potential readers to land on the site, see nothing but one solid block of text stretching as far as they can be bothered to scroll, and retreat screaming to the nearest friendly-to-white-space blog?

I love a good insane screed, so it’s a crushing disappointment to me when I can’t read ’em because they’re so horribly punctuated. Thousand-kilometre-long paragraphs make a person seem even loopier than their rant does.

See how much white space there is in this rant? You’re not thinking I’m crazy at all, are you?

Don’t answer that . . .

How to write a fantasy novel (Updated)

So I was going to write a sequel to my earlier post on how to write a novel specifically about how to write a fantasy novel. There was going to be lots of stuff on world building, on inventing your own languages, not to mention how to build a robust magic system. It would have had all that jazz, but it turns out that such a text already exists.

That’s right, to save me lots of time, effort and typing Diana Wynne Jones has helpfully written the one true guide to writing fantasy novels. That book is called The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and it is a work of unsurpassed genius.

It first came out in 1996, but the recently revised and updated edition published by Firebird books in the US of A is the one you want because it is thing of beauty and surpasses the usefulnesss of the first one a hundredfold.

If you love fantasy you need this book. Because it’s really really really funny. You will recognise every single thing she makes mock of.

If you hate fantasy you need this book. Because it makes mock of everything you’ve ever hated about the genre. You will laugh and laugh and laugh.

If you’ve ever contemplated writing a fantasy novel you need this book. It covers every possible cliche of the genre in long and mocking detail. Once read you will never use any of those cliches. Or if you do you will breathe new life into them. For if you do not Diana Wynne Jones’ mocking voice will leak into your dreams and you will never sleep well again. Trust me, you don’t want that.

And if you’ve never read any of Diana Wynne Jones’ novels then on your bike! I recommend Fire and Hemlock or Archer’s Goon or Howl’s Moving Castle or, you know, pretty much all of them.

She’s one of the best fantasy writers working today and in Tough Guide to Fantasyland she shares all the tricks of the trade. What more could you ask for?

Update: Sharyn November, who edited this edition, reminds me that the original was a Hugo finalist (which means I have something in commone with Diana Wynne Jones! We were both shortlisted in the same category of the Hugos! Woo hoo!) and a World Fantasy award finalist. Sharyn says that the Firebird edition is completely redesigned, has a new map, and Wynne Jones has written additional material.

I’d also add that the Firebird edition is not littered with typoes like the original was. I don’t often notice typoes, but, wow, were there a lot in the original edition.

Delany advice writ little

I’ve just discovered a magical thing that makes my writing go good.

Here’s how my writing days used to go: Read email. Read blogs. Be racked with guilt and read the first paragraph of what I’d written the day before. Reel back in horror. Decide that I need to research exploding magnets. Research exploding magnets. Read two paragraphs of what I’d written the day before. Take out the recycling. Realise that I need to go and buy more toilet paper. Read a wee bit more of yesterday’s horror. Bite my fingernails. Realise that the latest issue of Runaways or Nana or Scott Pilgrim or whatever else has caught my fancy is out. Go buy it. Possibly read it.

Eventually be so racked with guilt that I finish the read through and start writing. The writing goes slowly and horribly: I put words together that have either been together way too often or have never been together for extremely good reasons. If it’s a good morning I will eventually hit my stride and keep writing till I get to the end of the new scene or chapter or sequence of events.

Because I am very very very thick I only recently figured out what my problem is. No, not laziness. Well, not just laziness. It’s the writing till I get to the end of a scene or chapter or sequence of events that’s the problem. It means that every morning I am facing a (sort of) blank page and must figure out how what happens next happens before I can start stringing wrong words together.

Recently my writing day was interrupted as I hit my stride. (Damn the lure of restaurants with their yummy food.) I stopped writing in the middle of a scene. Next morning when I started again I was instantly back in my novel and writing full steam ahead because I knew exactly how to finish the scene. Now, obviously it wasn’t the first time I’ve done that, but it was the first time I decided not to stop writing until I was in the middle of another scene.

That’s right, I deliberately stopped in the middle of stuff.

And then the next morning—you guessed it—writing continued to be easier and less procrastinatory than usual because of not having to begin the day by having to figure stuff out and generate momentum.

This is a minature version of what Samuel R. Delany does when he finishes a novel and immediately starts the next one. I always thought he was a bit mad on account of when I finish a novel all I want to do is drink champagne (or fine Aussie sparkling) and dance in the streets. But doing it at a scene-by-scene level is a fab way to write.

I think part of why I have always doggedly stopped my writing day at the conclusion of chapter or scene or event sequence is because I was afraid that I would have forgotten where I was going next morning. It’s a justified fear as I have a crap memory. I am forever having genius ideas in the middle of the night, which if I don’t write down or wake up Scott and tell him about them, I completely forget. I guess I was afraid I’d forget where the scene was supposed to go.

Also writing to the end of a scene or chapter is somewhere definite to aim for. It’s a natural place to stop. But having to face the (sort of) blank page every morning, having to figure out a cool opening chapter sentence, and how to lay out the scene is an overly gruelling way to start each writing day. For me, anyways.

I’ve been doing the stop-in-the-middle-of-a-scene thing for a week now and it sure is working fabulously. I’m still stringing wrong words together but I’m doing it with a lot less angst. Sometimes writing can be fun!

Chapter titles

To date not one person has said anything about any of the chapter titles of my books. Not my non-fiction tomes, not my novels. There’s me sweating bullets to pick decent ones and not a soul notices. So I decided I’d just skip it from now on. Thus my current novel, the great Australian cricket mangosteen Elvis monkey-knife fighting feminist fairy novel is sans titled chapters.

This was an easy decision to make on account of I’m not very good at titles. Some writers have the title gift.1 I do not. Coming up with a decent title for the whole book just about kills me, I do not need the extra stress of to coming up with one for every bloody chapter. Gah!

But here’s the thing: Untitled chapters make for really tricky navigation. I wind up scrolling through the entire document looking for particular bits because I can’t think of a useful searchable phrase. I can’t remember what happened in “Chapter Six”, but I can remember what happened in a chapter called “Statistical Torpor”.

Yes, you guessed it. I have had to go through and name all the chapters. (So what I said in the first paragraph is now a lie.) Very annoying. Turns out chapter titles are not for readers, they’re for writers. They’re useful little signposts for us to navigate the unruly longness that is a novel. I will never neglect to name my chapters again. The more descriptier the better. Realising that made naming them easier. I forgot all about poetry—seeing as how no one’s going to read them other than me—and stuck to titles that would remind me of what happens in the chapter. Much easier.

Do any of you notice chapter titles? I don’t. I rarely even bother to read the epigrams epigraphs that writers have sweated blood and tears over (I know because I have sweated blood and tears over epigraphs too). My eyes glaze until I get to story. That’s not just me, right?

  1. Samuel R. Delany, for example. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand has to be one of my favourite titles of all time. [↩]

Outlining

Rebecca asks: Do you outline? Or do you just have a general concept of what you’re going to write? I know you do that spreadsheet thing, but do you start out that way, or not until after the first draft? Or something else entirely?

I have outlined. And I prolly will again in the future. But I hates it. There, I’ve said it: Nothing drives me crazier than outlining.

The Magic or Madness trilogy was outlined. It had to be because I sold it as a partial.1 And when you do that the editor wants an idea of what they’re getting. It took me weeks and weeks of round-the-clock work to produce that outline. It was hell. It made me scream and throw things. All I could think was, Why am I wasting my time writing this sketch of the novel when I could just be writing the bloody novel?

Writing that outline was far more painful and agonising than writing Magic or Madness. But I have a sneaking suspicion that part of why MorM was so fun and relatively easy to write was because of that outline. Everytime I got stuck, I pulled it out, had a good old squiz, and hey presto was back on track.

On the other hand, my first (unpublished) novel was written without any kind of outline and I had a lot of fun writing it too. But it was written under only self-imposed deadlines and over many many many many years—I started it in 1988 and finished the first draft in 1999.2

I also wrote the first draft of Magic’s Child without an outline. But the ending kept not working. I rewrote it countless times and it kept defying me, until I had a sitdown with my editors, Eloise and Liesa. For the meeting I had to rough out a new non-crappy ending. That’s right, I had to outline it. Did I enjoy doing it? No. Was it better than rewriting the ending uselessly another hundred times? Yes.

So for me outlines are an occasionally necessary evil. The book I’m writing at the moment seems to be swinging along fine without one, but if I get stuck I may just find myself sketching out the rest of the book in order to figure out what’s going to fly and what isn’t. I imagine it beats writing and rewriting the ending a gazillion times.

I may also find myself outlining my next novel, because it has a very tricky, scary structure and outlining might be the only way to figure it out satisfactorily. But I’ll start writing it first to see if I can wing it and only if that fails will I resort to a yukky outline.

But all of this is just me. I know lots of writers who swear by outlines. And others who won’t even use them to the begrudging extent that I do.

It’s like everything else—if it works for you then do it, and if it don’t, don’t.

  1. A partial is the suggestion of a book. In my case that suggestion included an outline of all three books and the first three chapters of the first book in the trilogy and assorted other bits and pieces. [↩]
  2. Wasn’t being lazy. I got two degrees in that times as well, you know! [↩]

Persons of Interest

In response to some perplexed readers of my previous post who wondered what “omniscient” and “limited third” are, here’s a guide for your delectation:

First Person:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

First person is from the point of view of one person, up close and personal. The implied conceit is that the narrator is also the author of the novel. It’s all “I”, “me”, “mine”, “my” and “myself”.

The vast majority of thinly disguised autobiographical novels set in coffee shops about aspiring novelists are in first person, making it the the pov par excellence for the self-obsessed.

Many beginning writers find it the easiest because you can just write a novel as if you were you, and as you are you, what could be easier? All my first attempts at novel writing were in first person.

Pros: The first person is very freeing. You can go off on tangents, share wild-and-woolly theories about life, the universe and everything. All that could possibly go on in your character’s brain is fair game.

Cons: With first person you are stuck in one person’s head for fifty thousand plus words, which if you are the writer can mean many, many years of enforced visiting with a person you may grow to hate. This is especially bad if your text’s “I” is a thinly disguised version of yourself. But it’s not only writers who can hate first person. I have heard several readers say that it is their most despised point of view and that they won’t read books in it.

Fashionability: Perennial. First person has been with us since novels were first writ and will never go away, but it’s like jeans they’re not exactly in fashion they’re just there.

Difficulty: Deceptively easy.

Second Person:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room.

Second person is all “you” and “yours”. It’s the most maligned of the povs. And yet, when done well ’tis heavenly. Also very useful for delivering rules about writing. No wonder that it’s the first choice of advertisers and dictators.

Pros: it’s an amazing device for writing about love and obsession and psychosis and tourism.

Cons: It is like having to spend many hours in the room with a bossy, obsessive and possible pyscho telling you what you’ll think and what you’ll do. Bugger that! And when writing in second person there’s the worrying feeling that you’re starting to turn into a bossy obsessive psycho. Or possibly the voiceover of a tourism ad.

Fashionability: Never high. The least popular of all the povs. Though some argue that all epistolary novels are automatically second person.

Difficulty: Really High—bugger it up and you lose your readers instantly.

Third Person Limited:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

A telephone was ringing in the darkness—a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Third person is all “she”, “he”, “her”, “his”, “they” and “their”. Third person is the default pov for stories about someone else. Making it limited means that it echoes first person, making you privy to that character’s thoughts. Sometimes it feels like pretty much every novel in the English-speaking world is in third-person limited. Especially the really popular ones.

Pros: It allows you to get into the head of a character without actually going all the way in. Although it echoes first a distance is maintained. Thus third person limited engenders a much less suffocating relationship with your characters.

Cons: You can’t get as close as you can with first person. It’s much harder to go off on entertaining digressions. Scott’s So Yesterday would be an entirely different book if it was in limited third.

Fashionability: The pov of choice of the twentieth century and shaping up to dominate the twenty-first as well.

Difficulty: High, but at least you’ll look like all the other novels.

Omniscient:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

The point of view where the writer gets to be God. What is not to love?

Pros: The narrator can go wherever they want whenever they want. They can deliver digressions. Tell us what’s going to happen and then tease us by not going there immediately. The narrator know what everyone is thinking, even the lad who got tuppence for watching the horses in a few lines in chapter five, “Of Horses and Other Follies Wherein We Learn that Our Heroine is Not All that She Seems”.

Cons: When done poorly the reader has no idea whose head they’re in or why. Can sometimes read as cutesy or trying too hard to be like Jane Austen or Henry Fielding.

Fashionability: The pov of choice of most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Difficulty: Extremely High, unless you were born in the 1700s, or really are God.

They’re just techniques, people!

A friend of mine recently told me that she could no longer read a book if it shifted points of view (or “head hopped” as it is also known) too frequently. More, that she had learned from her writing group that frequent point of view (pov) shifts are wrong and she could no longer write stories like that.

Aaaarggghhh!!!

Using more than one pov in a novel, a short story, even in a paragraph is a technique. There is nothing inherently wrong or right about it. And yet I keep hearing people say that it is a sign of bad writing, especially in the US of A:

Which is to say that head hopping is a more common technique in romance than it is in mystery or SF/fantasy. It is not sloppy style! Besides, it can increase tension to show the different characters having completely different takes on the same situation. So i don’t even buy that it removes suspense.

Joseph Conrad was the master of head hopping. Famously he wrote paragraphs where the pov shifted from sentence to sentence. In one paragraph you get to jump into four or five heads. And he’s such a genius of a writer you have absolutely no problem telling them apart nor do you get dizzy. The only reason it’s not a great idea for a beginning writer to try this is that it’s really, really, really hard. But maybe that’s exactly why a beginning writer should give it a go. Just to see how tricky it is.

The injunction against head hopping is just part of a whole raft of prohibitions I keep hearing about. There’s also the words you should avoid.1 The parts of speech ditto: especially the humble adverb and adjective.

Most of these injunctions, when I press people about them, seem to stem from creative writing classes and workshops and various writers groups. This drives me insane not just because it’s a lazy way to teach but because it’s creating readers who dismiss very fine writing as bad or unreadable because it deploys techniques they’ve been told are wrong.

Let me repeat: no writing technique is bad per se. Sure, it can be done badly, but that’s an entirely different issue. Writing that obeys all the writing workshop rules and deploys not a single adjective or adverb can also completely suck.

When my friend submitted her first piece of writing to her critique group they jumped all over her for the frequent shifts in point of view. Instead of saying, “We were confused and could not tell the various points of view apart. You need to make them more distinct and the transitions cleaner. Or perhaps the multiple povs is getting in the way of your story and you should cut down to only one or two,” they told her that head hopping is bad writing and she should only ever use one. She didn’t learn how to shift povs cleanly; she learned to remove a technique not only from her repertoire as a writer, but also from her set of pleasures as a reader.

That makes me want to cry and not just because she’s a really good writer.

Or it would if I really believed it. But too many people who claim to hate head hopping then tell me that one of their favourite writers is Dorothy Dunnett, or Joseph Conrad. or some other writer who freqently shifts points of view.

“I like clean, spare writing,” they’ll tell me, “without any of those rubbish adjectives or adverbs.” Next breath they’ll be confessing their love for Jane Austen or Raymond Chandler.

  1. The list I cite of Margo Lanagan’s prohibited words is largely meant in jest. Her main point is not that you avoid those words, but that you think carefully about how you deploy them. I suspect that most writing teachers’ list of banned words operate in the same way. Unfortunately, some of their students take the wrong message from the lesson and seriously believe that “corruscating” is an evil bad word that only hacks use. Tell that to Angela Carter. [↩]

Everything dates (updated)

Quite a few writers of books for teens are deathly afraid of producing works that seem old-fashioned and dated within minutes of publication. To avert this dread fate they aim for timelessness and classicness by avoiding slang and brand names and pop culture references. I have good news and bad news for them.

  • The good news is that there are books with dated slang and brand names what remain in print decades after their first printing.
  • The bad news is that all books become dated.

It’s pretty much impossible to write a book without using the language of your time and place. Lots of phrases and words that don’t seem like they could ever date, do. Take “gay”, for example. It used to mean happy and carefree. Remember Cary Grant dancing around Katherine Hepburn’s family house in 1938’s Bringing up Baby, wearing a frilly nightgown and screaming, “Because I just went gay, all of a sudden!” He didn’t mean what you think he means. But who cares? The new meaning of “gay” makes it even funnier. (Update: Walter Jon Williams sets me straight—so to speak.)

Every single one of the movies I love so much from the 1930s and 40s are dated. And yet they’re still widely available and consumed and loved and written and talked about.

Same for the books. Dawn Powell, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are all dated. Very. People don’t talk like that now (if they ever did). The world isn’t the same. Those versions of New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles are long gone. But you know what? The best of their books are still fabulously readable despite their weird forms of address (“doll”?) and the strange way the characters dress (hats at all times for everyone; suits and ties always for the men; gloves for women).

So should you pay attention to advice that says at all costs avoid contemporary slang, avoid referring to things by brand name, and avoid pop culture references?

Yeah, you prolly should, at least, most of the time.

Here’s why. The time when datedness is the biggest issue is in the early days of your book’s lifespan. You have to remember that there’s usually (at least) a year’s gap between a book being finished and a book coming out. A lot can happen in a year. Words that are hip and happening now can be torpid and dated then.

If your characters are obsessed with the hit TV show Dale Susskind’s Food Frolics, but before your pub date the show is cancelled because of the financial and sexual scandal that enveloped Susskind, and “Let’s frolic!” the hip catch-phrase that your characters say a lot has become a reference to a sad and incarcerated man. Reviewers are likely to make note of it and mock you more than somewhat. You better pray your book is good enough for it not to matter.

But in twenty, forty, sixty, two hundred years time most people won’t have heard of Dale Sussskind’s Food Frolics. Your book will no longer create cognitive dissonance for your readers.

Think of it as like fish. There’s the fresh, good-to-eat period shortly after being caught, then there’s the hideous rotting stage, but then—glory of glories—there’s the fossilization phase where the stink’s gone forever. And if your fish was lucky enough to be smoked it stays edible and tasty even longer.

Of course, the bad news is that most books go out of print within six months no matter how fresh they were on publication. But then not many fish make it to the fossilization stage either.

Good writing, bad writing

This whole defying Margo thing has led to much thought (which I usually try to avoid) and several long excellent convos about writing—especially the one I had yesterday with the glorious Holly Black1—about the ins and outs of writing advice, the different aesthetics of writing, etc. etc. So I decided to write a long and elaborate post, but, today I am tired and lazy. So instead I offer my quick and dirty method of becoming a fine writer.

    1. Look at writing you admire. Figure out what exactly is being done that you like so much. Is it the deployment of $100 words? Of adjectives? The way the rhythm of the writing reflects what’s happening? Employ said techniques in your own writing.

    2. Looks at writing you despise. What exactly about it is shitting you? Is it the deployment of $100 words? Of adjectives? The way the rhythm of the writing doesn’t reflect what’s happening? Avoid such techniques in your own writing.

    3. 2 is easier than 1.

Let me know how it goes!

Anyone else got any quick-and-dirty advice?

  1. How come talking about writing is always so much more fun than actually writing? [↩]

Defying Margo Lanagan (updated)

Because Margo Lanagan is one of the best writers I know, and is wonderful in every way, and has written two of the best short story collections ever published (White Time and Black Juice)—I should probably follow her rules of writing to the letter.

But, see, she has this list of banned words and every one of those words sings to me:

    accretion
    amidst
    amongst
    atop*
    corruscating
    crepuscular*
    effulgence
    enervating
    iridescent*
    jasmine
    maelstrom
    obsidian* (Margo says, “only okay when used to describe arrowheads”.)
    pellucid*
    roiling* (Margo says, “must be used with care”.)
    silken*
    ululate*
    whilst

There are heaps more but I can’t remember the rest. Help me out, Margo? Margo’s Clarion students?

Update: *Are Margo Lanagan additions to the list.

Ever since I heard of the existence of Margo’s banned words list it has become my goal in life to use every single one of them whenever possible. (I’m proud to say that one of the chapter titles in Magic or Madness is “Maelstrom”.) I can’t tell you what a difference it makes to have such a noble purpose. It was like being reborn.

Thank you, Margo! You’ve not only given me wonderful works to read, but a purpose in life.

And maybe I can inspire all of you in turn to start accreting wondrous corruscating volumes of words whilst smelling the sweet sweet sweet jasmine that is succour to all us arty writer types . . .

Write well, little angels, write well!

Naming

Someone was telling me recently about a writer who gets astrological charts done for all their characters and picks their names on the basis of that. So they know what year and date their character is born but not what their name is? Huh. Whatever works, I guess.

Me, I just grab the first one that comes to mind. So far this method has worked fine. Reason got her name instantly. It just made sense. Jay-Tee I picked cause it sounded American. I mean who other than Americans call people by their initials? And Tom, well, c’mon, it’s not exactly the world’s most unusual name, is it?

Surnames are marginally trickier. If I can’t think of one I’ll look at my bookshelf and pick whichever surname fits. Sometimes I’ll look through newspapers online and grab ’em that way. I’m dead against having to get out of my chair to find names. (Reason’s family name was stolen from Rita Hayworth.)

I reckon people spend way too much time angsting about names (check out Scott’s latest book for lots of bandname angst). Nine times out of ten whatever name you randomly pick will end up working. This applies to babies, boats and pets as well as characters.

How many times have you thought a band name sounded really stupid? But the more you hear it, the more you get used to it, and the more natural it sounds. Scott always gives the example of the Beatles, which is a pretty dumb name when you think about it. Beetles spelt Beat-les as in musical beat. That’s so cutesie it winds up being completely lame. Or it would except that we’ve all heard it so many times the lameness is now invisible.

So it is with characters’ names. The only important rule (which is frequently ignored) is that if you’re writing a book with lots of names that aren’t going to be familiar to your readers make sure they begin with different letters. Cause you just know that readers are going to think of them as J unpronouncable, K likewise, L even worse and X are-you-insane. If they all begin with J—Jaquanatsuaa, Jatarganta, Juypghert and Jioplikaz, for example—your readers are not only going to be confused, they’ll want to kill you.

How do youse lot pick names for your characters? Or are you lot all as lazy as I am?

How to write a novel*

Ever wanted to write a novel but had no clue how? Having just finished my fifth novel, I am now ready to pass on my accummulated novel-writing wisdom to those what have never writ one but wants to.

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.) …

How to write a novel*Read More »

On Hackery (inspired by Delany’s About Writing)

Samuel R. Delany’s book About Writing will not get out of my brain. I keep thinking about his concept of the usefulness, no, the essentialness of doubt (good! I got plenty of that), about how slavishly following the rules and working hard leads to aesthetic banality (the rules of good writing, not the rules of how-to-get-an-agent/editor—you have to follow those). And about being a hack.

Delany’s book made me feel like one (in a good way). His description of his own writing process, of how to write the absolute best you can, is a recipe for books that go through many, many drafts and take a long, long time to write, books that delve down into every doubt or dream you ever had. These descriptions are sensual and exhilarating and inspiring (if I hadn’t read his book I’d still be working on the draft of M! M! M! O! O! O!). As Delany goes through explaining every word choice, you marvel at not just his brilliance and talent, but at his unerring ability to explain this really, really difficult stuff (how’s that for a word choice!).

The book inspires and it also makes you think seriously and long about your own writing.

I’ve been a freelance writer since 1 April 2003 (excellent day to begin, no?). In that time I’ve sold four books, written four and a half, edited one. Deciding to make a living writing, meant deciding to tell different stories than I would if I had a stayed as an academic. Given that so far it’s earned me about US$1,200, and it took four years to research and write, books like The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction went out the window. I had to tell stories that enough other people wanted to read that publishers who could pay decent advances would want to buy them, and I had to learn to write faster. Much faster. I’m now on a two-books-a-year schedule.1

Every page of Delany’s book made me think about the central tension in my life between writing the best books I can and writing them quickly. How do I not become a hack?

I don’t have an answer.

I’m lucky that I write Young Adult books which are considerably shorter than say, Charlie Stross’ work. Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons are both about 65 thou words. In book form that’s 275 pages with a comfortable sized font and balanced amount of leading. But it’s still 130 thousand words of publishable prose a year.

I’m starting to think that—except for the lucky few—to make a living at writing is to be a hack. The best I can do is to write as well as I possibly can within the time restraints, and hope that one day I’ll be generating enough money that I can slow down. But I temper that hope with the knowledge that most people never do. I’ve already seen any number of writers around me write too fast and burn out. Scott was on a near three-book-a-year schedule and wound up with all sorts of health problems (and also nine very fine YA books). But still: too fast words eat up your body and your brain.

And while on a major deadline crunch—unless you have servants or a traditional wife—the rest of your life is falling apart. Housework doesn’t get done, or your taxes, or any of the other admin, you don’t see your friends, and lots of takeaway and delivery food and ramen noodles are consumed.2 When you finish you really should be turning to the next book before your editor’s notes come back at you. Because that’s one of the worst things about writing more than one book a year: the constant interruptions from the previous book. You do not—as a dear friend of mine imagined—write one book, send it off, and then leisurely write the next. While writing the next you’re also be working on the last. There are rewrites, checking copyedits, proofs, and galleys. I have no idea how those writing four or more books a year cope.

I’m hoping, some day, to have the time and opportunity to write both as slowly and as well as I want. To only go on to the next book when the last one is well and truly finished and as good as I can make it. In the meantime I strive to be the very best hack I can be!

How do all you other hacks manage?

  1. I have many writer friends who are writing many more books than two a year, who consider such a schedule luxury. [↩]
  2. I am well aware that there are much harder jobs than being a novelist. This is the best, most fulfilling job I’ve ever had. Every single day I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to have a go at it. [↩]

Books about Writing (updated)

As I’ve mentioned I recently read Samuel R. Delany‘s About Writing which is seriously very very good. One of the smartest, most inspiring books on writing I’ve ever read. It includes a piece on “thickening the plot” where he shows you precisely how he does it. The many moments where he goes through word by word pointing out exactly what isn’t working in any given passage are gorgeous (as are the pastiches he whips up for dissection). His advice to wannabe writers is harsh and honest and reveals heaps about his own writing life. The introduction—where he discusses the difference between “talented” and “good” writing—is worth the price of the whole book (as is the appendix, “Nits, Nips, Tucks and Tips”). In the intro he sets out the rules of good writing, it’s the usual suspects: “use precise language”, “avoid the passive voice” etc. etc. and then Delany writes

If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eight-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull . . . However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction.

Delany is such an extraordinary writer that reading him musing at length on his profession is beyond pleasure and off into a whole other realm. His book made me realise how far I still have to go to become the kind of writer I want to be. I’m a mere beginner at the published writer game, there’s still oceans for me to learn (especially about punctuating conversation!—see the section on same in the Appendix). A sobering and incredibly useful realisation. How many books force you to look close and hard at what you do for a living? The book has fuelled my own writing and left me hungry for more brilliant books on writing. Books as good as Delany’s.

So far I’m not doing great on finding such a book. Right now I’m reading Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing but compared to the Delany it seems kind of anaemic. I suspect that this is because, unlike Delany’s book, the Stein is aimed at beginning writers and also because what I really want to be reading is more Delany on writing.

I’ve been asking around for recommendations and so far I have From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler, Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford, A Dangerous Profession by Frederick Busch, and The Art of Fiction by John Gardner on my list. Anyone read ’em? Whatcha reckon?

Update: Just to be clear all the books in the following paragraph are books I’ve already read. There’s no need to keep recommending Stephen King’s On Writing!

Other books on writing I’ve read and enjoyed are Flannery O’Conner’s Mystery and Manners, Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Stephen King’s On Writing and Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. The books I enjoy most are not how-tos, but personal accounts of a writer’s relationship to writing. I’d love to hear of more.

PS I know this post should have been all exquisitely writ and that, but I got a book due Tuesday and I’m saving my pretty sentences for Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi!!