Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 52
June 3, 2011
RETRO-FRIDAY - "If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
Hello, dear readers! Congratulations on having survived the week this far. Today I once again bring you a beautfully aged morsel of wisdom, unearthed from the archives of July last year, in the form of:
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
My title today is a quote from Oscar Wilde (possibly the most quotable writer that ever lived). And I agree with him completely. I'm a dedicated re-reader. Any book that I enjoyed reading will get re-read at least once - books I loved will usually be re-read again and again throughout the rest of my life. No matter how cleverly written a novel is, if I can't imagine myself re-reading it then it has failed for me on a crucial level.
Since I first read it in 2005, I've revisited The Curse of Chalion
by Lois McMaster Bujold around once a year, and each time I learn more from LMB's mastery of subtle and complex plotting, and her ability to create bone-deep empathy for her characters. I usually re-read the entire works of Jane Austen
once every two years, and, again, each time I learn more from Ms Austen's superb craftmanship and control of language. Despite the fact that I first discovered Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
when I was about eight, when I re-read it again recently (probably for the twelfth time) it still made me laugh out loud - and stop to think deeply about the puzzles within.
That's how good those books are. And that's one reason to re-read; to learn.
However, when I recently re-read Garth Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy
(a favourite of mine from when they were first published) I found myself pulling the books to pieces in a way I never had before. While I still enjoyed them, I realised with some astonishment that my own skills as a critical reader (and possibly a writer) must have grown since the last reading around three years ago, and that knowledge pleased me deeply.
Another reason to re-read; to measure your own growth.
The received wisdom on this topic is that writers ought to read each book twice - once for pleasure, once to learn. Which is fine advice for writers. But I also think that, as a reader, no matter how good your reading comprehension is, how subtle your insight or how quick your grasp of facts, there's just no way anyone can get everything from a book on the first try. Not unless the book is completely one dimensional. You have to realise, as a reader, that the scene you just read in ten minutes may have taken the writer months to craft. Each painstakingly chosen word, each carefully placed punctuation mark, the rhythm of the sentences, the tone, the hidden meanings, the obvious meanings - those consumed the entire mind and imagination of the writer for hours at a time. Their words are telling you more than you realise. If you only read once, you're short-changing yourself out of all those extra layers of meaning.
The third reason to re-read; so that you experience the actual entirety of a book, rather than just its surface.
So why, these days, am I seeing so many young writers saying - nay, boasting - that they don't bother to re-read? I'll be pootling along, reading a fun blog entry about favourite books, and suddenly I'll come to a screeching halt as the writer proudly announces that a certain book was so good that they 'actually considered reading it more than once'. WHAT?
If you love a book, why in the world would you banish yourself from its world and characters forever once you've read it? If you admire the author, how can you imagine that you've managed to grasp the full depth of their creation in only one read?
How can you possibly learn from books if you only read them once?
And it doesn't matter to me if you're a fast reader or a slow reader. It doesn't matter to me if you've got an amazing memory and you can quote whole pages of dialogue three years after reading the book. Because any book that's worth reading once is worth reading twice. Any book that you enjoyed reading twice will probably repay further readings too. So although I normally hate to make sweeping generalisations or judge people, I'm going to go ahead and take a stand here. It is flat out stupid to only read books once.
I want to force these writers to go and pick up that book they blithely listed as a favourite and force them to read it again and see if they even still like it, five or ten years after the original reading. And if they do, can they possibly deny that somehow, since they last entered that author's world, it has magically and inexplicably changed?
This is the fourth and perhaps most important reason why any book worth reading is worth reading twice. Because our interpretation of every line, scene, event, plot twist and character is coloured by who we are. Books are subjective. They come to life in the writer's imagination, but it is the reader's imagination that resurrects them when they open the pages. You cannot read a book without bringing yourself to it, without the spark of life within you transferring to the characters within the story. And if you're human, you're changing all the time. I'm an utterly different person now than I was two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago. If I met twenty year old me now I'd probably want to strangle her. Which means that when I pick up a book I read two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago, I'm not just re-reading it. I'm reading it for the first time as the me I am now. In a very real way, it's a whole new book.
A book I will never get the chance to read if I arrogantly dismiss it as old news, just because I've opened it before.
My plea to you, young writers: re-read. Please. Do it today. Pick a favourite, a book you remember fondly, and give it another chance. You might love it, you might hate it, you might barely recognise or remember it. But you'll never know if you don't pick it up again.
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
My title today is a quote from Oscar Wilde (possibly the most quotable writer that ever lived). And I agree with him completely. I'm a dedicated re-reader. Any book that I enjoyed reading will get re-read at least once - books I loved will usually be re-read again and again throughout the rest of my life. No matter how cleverly written a novel is, if I can't imagine myself re-reading it then it has failed for me on a crucial level.
Since I first read it in 2005, I've revisited The Curse of Chalion
by Lois McMaster Bujold around once a year, and each time I learn more from LMB's mastery of subtle and complex plotting, and her ability to create bone-deep empathy for her characters. I usually re-read the entire works of Jane Austen once every two years, and, again, each time I learn more from Ms Austen's superb craftmanship and control of language. Despite the fact that I first discovered Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones when I was about eight, when I re-read it again recently (probably for the twelfth time) it still made me laugh out loud - and stop to think deeply about the puzzles within.That's how good those books are. And that's one reason to re-read; to learn.
However, when I recently re-read Garth Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy
(a favourite of mine from when they were first published) I found myself pulling the books to pieces in a way I never had before. While I still enjoyed them, I realised with some astonishment that my own skills as a critical reader (and possibly a writer) must have grown since the last reading around three years ago, and that knowledge pleased me deeply.Another reason to re-read; to measure your own growth.
The received wisdom on this topic is that writers ought to read each book twice - once for pleasure, once to learn. Which is fine advice for writers. But I also think that, as a reader, no matter how good your reading comprehension is, how subtle your insight or how quick your grasp of facts, there's just no way anyone can get everything from a book on the first try. Not unless the book is completely one dimensional. You have to realise, as a reader, that the scene you just read in ten minutes may have taken the writer months to craft. Each painstakingly chosen word, each carefully placed punctuation mark, the rhythm of the sentences, the tone, the hidden meanings, the obvious meanings - those consumed the entire mind and imagination of the writer for hours at a time. Their words are telling you more than you realise. If you only read once, you're short-changing yourself out of all those extra layers of meaning.
The third reason to re-read; so that you experience the actual entirety of a book, rather than just its surface.
So why, these days, am I seeing so many young writers saying - nay, boasting - that they don't bother to re-read? I'll be pootling along, reading a fun blog entry about favourite books, and suddenly I'll come to a screeching halt as the writer proudly announces that a certain book was so good that they 'actually considered reading it more than once'. WHAT?
If you love a book, why in the world would you banish yourself from its world and characters forever once you've read it? If you admire the author, how can you imagine that you've managed to grasp the full depth of their creation in only one read?
How can you possibly learn from books if you only read them once?
And it doesn't matter to me if you're a fast reader or a slow reader. It doesn't matter to me if you've got an amazing memory and you can quote whole pages of dialogue three years after reading the book. Because any book that's worth reading once is worth reading twice. Any book that you enjoyed reading twice will probably repay further readings too. So although I normally hate to make sweeping generalisations or judge people, I'm going to go ahead and take a stand here. It is flat out stupid to only read books once.
I want to force these writers to go and pick up that book they blithely listed as a favourite and force them to read it again and see if they even still like it, five or ten years after the original reading. And if they do, can they possibly deny that somehow, since they last entered that author's world, it has magically and inexplicably changed?
This is the fourth and perhaps most important reason why any book worth reading is worth reading twice. Because our interpretation of every line, scene, event, plot twist and character is coloured by who we are. Books are subjective. They come to life in the writer's imagination, but it is the reader's imagination that resurrects them when they open the pages. You cannot read a book without bringing yourself to it, without the spark of life within you transferring to the characters within the story. And if you're human, you're changing all the time. I'm an utterly different person now than I was two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago. If I met twenty year old me now I'd probably want to strangle her. Which means that when I pick up a book I read two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago, I'm not just re-reading it. I'm reading it for the first time as the me I am now. In a very real way, it's a whole new book.
A book I will never get the chance to read if I arrogantly dismiss it as old news, just because I've opened it before.
My plea to you, young writers: re-read. Please. Do it today. Pick a favourite, a book you remember fondly, and give it another chance. You might love it, you might hate it, you might barely recognise or remember it. But you'll never know if you don't pick it up again.
June 1, 2011
READER QUESTIONS
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the blog on this lovely Wednesday. I can actually see blue sky from my window this morning, which already makes me feel overjoyed. Maybe the UK will have a summer afterall? *Knocks on wood*
Time for some questions submitted by readers!
First, an email from Borko, who comes from Bulgaria (oooh!) and says:
"I write a book (fiction) and the problem is that I can not describe unfamiliar things. For example, animal - I cannot say: It looks just like a dog, but is ten times greater and no tail because the action takes place on another planet, and it sounds silly."A very good question! This is a unique issue that challenges all writers of epic (that is, Other World) fantasy or science fiction at some point. When you move the action to an invented landscape you lose the baseline of 'normal', which allows readers to make assumptions about the world of the story without description. And you not only need to describe everything, from the colour of plants and sky and the smell of air, to the number of arms and legs a character has, but you often also have to develop a new vocabulary to describe everything, since your characters, as you point out, may never have seen a dog.
The thing you need to decide is this: are your characters as in the dark about the world of the readers, as the readers are about the world of the characters?
What that means, is that just because your readers come to the story blind, without any frame of reference for your imagined landscape, it doesn't mean the characters in the book have to. If they've arrived on Planet Smeerp from earth, they WILL know what a dog looks like, so why not use that as description? Or if they've never seen earth, haven't they been educated about it? Read books, seen videos? In a fantasy, if you have a creature that looks like a dog, sounds like a dog and fulfils the same function as a dog, just call the thing a dog! Making up fantasy names for familiar things is a waste of effort. Concentrate your imagination on describing the truly unfamiliar elements of your landscape, and don't make life unnecessarily tough for yourself.
On the other hand, if your characters really have never seen a dog, and if such a thing as a dog does not exist within their experience - why would you create a creature for them to encounter which is 'like a dog'? Especially 'like a dog, but ten times bigger, with no tail'? I mean - that's boring, Borko! If you're giving yourself completely free range to invent fantasy creatures which have no basis in reality at all - creatures which are like nothing any human has ever seen - then DO that. Go wild!
Describe the interesting things about your invented animals, not the familair ones. Give your alien beast shining scales the colour of flame, stunted vestigial wings, foot long teeth and frondy, waving antenna. Why limit yourself to descriptive terms which reduce the wonder of the new world and things your characters are seeing? Consign such pointless terms as 'like a dog' to the dustbin and have fun! Then the problem of describing imaginary creatures and worlds stops being a problem and becomes a pleasure instead.
Next, also via email, is a question from Delaney (hi, Delaney!):
"I'm a bit scared of plagiarizing someone accidentally. I can't go around and read every single book in the world and make sure mine doesn't copy one. I probably sound really weird and paranoid, but it has just been bothering me. Have you ever felt this way? If so, how did you move past it."Delaney, let me give you a piece of information which will hopefully make you feel much better:
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAGIARISE ACCIDENTALLY.
Literally impossible. Plagiarism is a crime whereby one person deliberately takes the actual words another person has written and tries to pass them off as their own. If you were to take THIS sentence and post it into your blog, and say that you wrote it? That would be plagiarism. Plagiarism is just a fancy-pants word for stealing.
If, on the other hand, you decided to write a post on your blog tomorrow about plagiarism which made all the same points as I'm making here, but in your own words? That is NOT plagiarism.
I mean, it's kinda a skeezy thing to do. But it's not a crime.
And if you were not to read this post today, Delaney, but instead go off and do some research and write your own post about plagiarism based on that research, and post it tomorrow? Then you would have done nothing wrong, either morally or ethically. It would be nothing more than a coincidence, and would get no more reaction from me than a smile. Really.
The same thing applies to books. If you copy and paste a chapter someone else has written into your story and pretend you wrote it, you've committed a crime. If you take someone else's ideas and write them up in your own way, you're stunting your imagination and being rather unfair to the author - and other people will figure it out and laugh and point at you, and you're highly unlikely to get published - but technically there's no copyright on ideas and no crime has taken place.
If you happen to write a book on the same topic as another author? Or happen to create a character similar to other author's characters? Or use the same fairytale as your basis? It is NO BIG DEAL. It happens all the time. It's impossible to avoid doing it, to some extent. There are only a very limited number of stories, archetypal characters and plot twists in the world, and since humans have been creating stories since they first crawled out of the swamp and said 'Ugg', trying to create some wildly original idea that no one could ever have thought of before will just cause your eyes to bleed.
How do I know this? Well, let's take a look at one of the best known book series in recent memory: J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. They are often called 'derivative' - which is to say that many other children's writers have used the same kind of ideas in different books before J.K.R did. When I initially read the first Harry Potter book, I remember saying 'Hey, this stuff is just like Diana Wynne Jones' books!' I was not the first person to say this, and I was not the last either. But no one's suggesting that J.K.R. actually stole or copied ideas. It's just that the ideas - wizard school, scarred hero, chosen one - were fairly common and unoriginal.
Did that stop anyone loving Harry Potter? No. Did it stop J.K. Rowling from selling enough books to build her own private island? No. Did it get J.K. Rowling in any kind of trouble? No! In fact, every time that someone has tried to say the writer copied from them, not only have their cases been thrown out of court, but the whole world has mocked and laughed at them for their attempts to cash in on Harry Potter's success.
Write the books you want to write. Tell the stories that you love and believe in. Create the worlds and characters that make your heart sing. If anyone ever accuses you of plagiarism you smile and shrug it off, because you know that a) they don't actually understand what the world means and b) it's not true anyway.
I hope this post was helpful for you! As always - if there are anymore questions, email me or leave a comment and I will do my best to answer. If you recently left a comment with a question and I *haven't* answered it, let me know, as there have been problems with Blogger swallowing comments lately and I may not have seen it.
Over and out!
May 29, 2011
BIG SECRET PROJECT TEASER #2
Hello! Monday again - and for those of you not in the UK, you're back at work or school. Commiserations. For the UK-ers, it's a Bank Holiday, which means we get the day off. Unfortunately most of the British Isles is cloaked in thick clouds and pouring rain right about now. Which means none of us is probably feeling all that cheerful.
What's that, you say? You really need something exciting to brighten your gloomy Monday up?
Something never before seen on the internet?
Something exclusive to this blog?
Well, maybe today is your lucky day after all! Because today I bring you a tiny teaser from Big Secret Project. I hope you like it - tell me what you think!
**********
P.S. Two very interesting links for you to check out.
First: I was interviewed by the lovely Clover at Fluttering Butterflies for her Awesome Women feature. How cool is that?
Also immensely cool - favourite writer Jaclyn Dolomore, author of Magic Under Glass
, read and reviewed Shadows on the Moon! Whoot!
What's that, you say? You really need something exciting to brighten your gloomy Monday up?
Something never before seen on the internet?
Something exclusive to this blog?
Well, maybe today is your lucky day after all! Because today I bring you a tiny teaser from Big Secret Project. I hope you like it - tell me what you think!
**********
"What's that?" Kylar asked.
"Part of my costume," I said.
"It's her mega-ultra-samurai sword!" Jack said, doing jazz hands. "I can't believe I forgot. It's like, a thousand year old family heirloom."
"A real samurai sword? Oh my God, I have to see this," one of the other girls said. "Come on, get it out!"
"I...I can't," I stammered. The loose, relaxed feeling turned to anxiety as I saw the number of eyes fixed on me. "It's dangerous.
"She's right. If you want to see it you need to get back and give her some room," Jack said bossily.
I know she thought she was being helpful, but honestly? I could have brained her with Shinobu just then. Everyone scrambled back and the next thing I knew there were twice as many people staring, all trying to figure out what was going on. Someone snapped on the overhead light, making us all blink.
Just flash them the sword and get it over with. What's the big deal?
Sick, irrational panic churned in my stomach, but I forced myself to get up and pull Shinobu out of the shinai carrier. The light flashed over the brilliant shine of the black lacquer and the gold flowers on the saya. The music was too loud for me to hear an ooooh, but I could sense it.
A sneaking feeling of pride helped to soothe my uneasiness, and slowly I drew Shinobu from the sheath. Light flashed along the curve of the blade like the sharp white smile of the crescent moon.
"Holy crap," someone said.
"You are so hot right now," Kylar said, moving a little closer. "Angelina Jolie hot."
Jack snorted. "Dude, that's not a compliment."
"Anyway," a boy called Simon interrupted, "she looks more like that girl from that vampire film, you know the one who had the leather pants."
"That was Angelina Jolie," Kylar said, annoyed.
Sarah from my tutor group shook her head. "No, it wasn't. He's talking about the one who was in the lipstick adverts. She's Bulgarian, I think."
Okay, well, that was less dramatic than I'd been bracing myself for.
I slid Shinobu back into his saya and the saya back into the shinai carrier, then settled him onto his place on my shoulder again. By the time I looked up, everyone was so busy trying to work out the name of the girl from the lipstick ads that they all seemed to have forgotten Shinobu completely. I was relieved, and then irritated at myself for being relieved. Why was I being so freakish tonight?
I turned to Jack to suggest more drinks – and saw the shadow coming out of the wall.
A dark stain unfurled against the bright terracotta wallpaper, tendrils whipping from the centre and hardening into claws as it dragged itself through the bricks, into the room. I gagged on the stink of it, wet animal, greasy fur, something long dead and rotting.
The seething mass dilated like the pupil of an eye, spreading up onto the ceiling, clawing across the plaster, leaving black streaks wherever it touched. Thick, glistening globs of liquid, like half congealed blood, dripped down onto the people below, staining their hair and clothes and spreading across their skin. No one seemed to notice.
The thing twisted, and suddenly – horribly – I could see a face in the black. A face that could have been human, except for the eyes. Yellow, cat eyes, with vertical pupils.
The thing blinked slowly, searching. Its gaze fixed on me.
It surged across the ceiling towards me.***********
P.S. Two very interesting links for you to check out.
First: I was interviewed by the lovely Clover at Fluttering Butterflies for her Awesome Women feature. How cool is that?
Also immensely cool - favourite writer Jaclyn Dolomore, author of Magic Under Glass
, read and reviewed Shadows on the Moon! Whoot!
May 27, 2011
FRIDAY ROUND-UP
Hi everyone! Happy Friday, and congratulations on making it through the week this far. Since the last few posts have been, frankly, whoppers, let's go with something short and sweet today. A little status update for you.
The News: I've been speaking with my US editor, and she's told me that the Candlewick Press edition of Shadows on the Moon
will hopefully be out in April 2012, which is actually really fast. Normally they wait a year after the UK release. So I'm delighted by that, and I hope you US readers are too. I've also had a sneak at some early cover artwork, and it's beautiful. I'm not allowed to say anymore about that, since it isn't final, but I'm really happy. Hardback editions are so fancy.
In Other News, I am hard at work on the Big Secret Project, and just about managing not to spill all the juicy details to anyone who'll listen. Just. But it's hhaaaarrrrd.
Yesterday I wrote the 101st page and broke thirty thousand words. That's a big milestone for me, as it means I am officially past The Beginning. I believe I have around another sixty thousand words to go, so that's two hundred more pages. My progress metre looks like this:
30242 / 90000 words. 34% done!
Dandy, ain't it?
Normally this is the point where I freak out and start getting stuck, but Big Secret Project is bucking the trend so far. I just love it so much - so, so much! - and I get so excited even thinking about it, that my enthusiasm is carrying me along so far.
Now that I've said this, of course, I'll probably get stuck for two months.
But no matter! Big Secret Project will prevail! And you may - MAY - get another tiny teaser to chew on next week. Stand by.
In Other Other News, we are approaching the one year anniversary of this blog. Which is a very exciting thing, since I had doubts, when I started, that I would manage to find something to blog about for one month. I'm planning unprecedented levels of awesomeness to coincide with this momentous occasion, and will reveal more when the time comes.
Finally, today I am drinking tea out of my lucky red mug, and wearing my lucky tiger t-shirt. I have also braided my hair. Let's hope these mystical preparations serve to leap me over the Middle Muddle and directly into Big Secret Project's good stuff. See you on the other side, kids!
The News: I've been speaking with my US editor, and she's told me that the Candlewick Press edition of Shadows on the Moon
will hopefully be out in April 2012, which is actually really fast. Normally they wait a year after the UK release. So I'm delighted by that, and I hope you US readers are too. I've also had a sneak at some early cover artwork, and it's beautiful. I'm not allowed to say anymore about that, since it isn't final, but I'm really happy. Hardback editions are so fancy.In Other News, I am hard at work on the Big Secret Project, and just about managing not to spill all the juicy details to anyone who'll listen. Just. But it's hhaaaarrrrd.
Yesterday I wrote the 101st page and broke thirty thousand words. That's a big milestone for me, as it means I am officially past The Beginning. I believe I have around another sixty thousand words to go, so that's two hundred more pages. My progress metre looks like this:
30242 / 90000 words. 34% done!
Dandy, ain't it?
Normally this is the point where I freak out and start getting stuck, but Big Secret Project is bucking the trend so far. I just love it so much - so, so much! - and I get so excited even thinking about it, that my enthusiasm is carrying me along so far.
Now that I've said this, of course, I'll probably get stuck for two months.
But no matter! Big Secret Project will prevail! And you may - MAY - get another tiny teaser to chew on next week. Stand by.
In Other Other News, we are approaching the one year anniversary of this blog. Which is a very exciting thing, since I had doubts, when I started, that I would manage to find something to blog about for one month. I'm planning unprecedented levels of awesomeness to coincide with this momentous occasion, and will reveal more when the time comes.
Finally, today I am drinking tea out of my lucky red mug, and wearing my lucky tiger t-shirt. I have also braided my hair. Let's hope these mystical preparations serve to leap me over the Middle Muddle and directly into Big Secret Project's good stuff. See you on the other side, kids!
May 24, 2011
TAKE A DEEP BREATH...
Okay, so this post was inspired by Megha, a regular commentor who left a comment on Monday's trail which betrayed that she was feeling just a liiitle stressed. Why? Because she did not feel inspired. And not in the 'Oh, I have to wait for my Muse to pop in the window with scones and tea before I can write' way (in which case, we would be applying a butt-kicking) but in a freaked-out 'I have no ideas and I don't feel creative what's wrong with me arrrgh!' kinda way.
This provokes our deep sympathy, my beloveds. For writers, who usually have story ideas hitting them all day and every day until they can hardly keep up with them, to find yourself suddenly drying up and realising that you don't have anything to write about - and even worse, that you have no idea what you WANT to write about - is...well, frankly it is terrifying.
I've been there, guys. Back when I first decided I wanted to write YA fantasy I got so excited that I went through (and discarded) about six million ideas that I wanted to write - and suddenly THERE WERE NO MORE. It's like looking straight into a black, bottomless abyss and realising there's nothing there at all. Nothing to catch you, nothing to catch onto. You call down into it and there isn't even an echo. It's just empty. If you have nothing to write about, no ideas, no spark of inspiration...are you even a writer anymore? Cue self of sense collapsing, tearing out of hair and curling up into a tiny, whimpering ball.
This happens to all creative people in all fields sooner or later, I reckon. I think it's a product, sometimes, of trying too hard. It becomes so important to have a project on the go all the time that we rip through dozens of ideas, moving too quickly, discarding them because none of them were really ready and they feel immature and thin. Your brain suddenly gets sick of it and applies the brake. The subconscious Little Voice (which I talked about here) shuts up. And it turns out that it's pretty lonely in your head all alone without it.
The first thing to remember when this happens is - DON'T PANIC. No, okay, that's impossible. You're going to panic. But don't let the panic take over because I promise, take my oath, pinkie-swear, that this is not forever. The ideas are going to come back. You can't stop them coming back even if you want to. Your brain can only shut them out for so long. So what you need to do now is...
Take a deep breath.
Count to eight.
Now let it out.
And another.
Count to eight again. Breathe out.
One more. Deeeeep breath.
Count to eight. Let it out.
Right. Now that we're feeling a bit calmer, we need to take a bit of a leap.
Forget about ideas. Forget about books. Forget about writing stories. I know - Le Gasp, right? But I'm serious. Take a step back from being a writer for a little while, and you will be taking a step back from the crazy. I know it's easy to define yourself completely by your identity as a writer, but you're a person too, and you aren't going to die if you give your writing hand a rest for a bit.
Now, give yourself permission to do something else. Read a new book, or re-read an old favourite that you've been meaning to get to for a while. Sketch or paint. Take a few slow, wandering walks. Go shopping. Visit a museum or go on a trip with family or friends. Watch a great film or an awful, cheesy one that makes you snort with laughter. Listen to your favourite music - and spend an afternoon on YouTube or iTunes listening to new songs and finding new favourites. Do any or all of the things that you somehow never quite find the time to do normally because you're wanting to write. Do your homework, kids (and education is a priceless thing)!
If you get any little flickers of ideas while you're watching that cheesy movie or looking at the wind moving through the trees, or hanging out with your friends? Very calmly pull out your notebook and make a note and leave it. Don't pounce on the idea and kill it before it's ready. On the other hand, if you feel a sudden, burning urge to write a song or a poem - go nuts! Spend all day doing that if you want, and have fun. I used to write about three poems a day when I was a teen, and I loved it (and I was pretty good at it too).
I guarantee that under this gentle, non-pressurised treatment in which you shower your brain with lots of new/rich images and fun and emotional stimuli and not freaking-the-heck-out, your imagination will bloom once again. That doesn't mean that the moment it does you should go back to what you were doing before, mind. This is a warning from your brain. Chill. Stop focusing so much on results and enjoy the journey a little more. Let your ideas mature. Play around with new styles. I know I've talked about Neverending Stories, but it honestly doesn't matter if you mess with sixteen different stories at once and five of them are paranormal romance and six are high fantasy and two are contemporary and one is a murder mystery and the other four are dystopian - so long as you're having fun.
Eventually, an idea will come along that you love and adore and want to kiss and hug and make out with. Well, all right, maybe that's just me - but what I'm trying to say is that eventually The One True Idea will come along, and you'll know because you'll stop messing around and find yourself wanting to work only on that one story. Just like True Love, really. But this can't happen if you're stressing out, worrying, and making yourself miserable.
Writing is supposed to be fun, guys. Yes, it's hard work at times, and requires patience, perseverence, craftsmanship and dedication. But if it's not FUN, at the end of the day, you might as well go and become an accountant. Right?
I leave you with three things which I personally find very inspiring, in different ways.
Spooky Mysterious Castle by the Sea
Go forth, my lovelies...and breathe.
This provokes our deep sympathy, my beloveds. For writers, who usually have story ideas hitting them all day and every day until they can hardly keep up with them, to find yourself suddenly drying up and realising that you don't have anything to write about - and even worse, that you have no idea what you WANT to write about - is...well, frankly it is terrifying.
I've been there, guys. Back when I first decided I wanted to write YA fantasy I got so excited that I went through (and discarded) about six million ideas that I wanted to write - and suddenly THERE WERE NO MORE. It's like looking straight into a black, bottomless abyss and realising there's nothing there at all. Nothing to catch you, nothing to catch onto. You call down into it and there isn't even an echo. It's just empty. If you have nothing to write about, no ideas, no spark of inspiration...are you even a writer anymore? Cue self of sense collapsing, tearing out of hair and curling up into a tiny, whimpering ball.
This happens to all creative people in all fields sooner or later, I reckon. I think it's a product, sometimes, of trying too hard. It becomes so important to have a project on the go all the time that we rip through dozens of ideas, moving too quickly, discarding them because none of them were really ready and they feel immature and thin. Your brain suddenly gets sick of it and applies the brake. The subconscious Little Voice (which I talked about here) shuts up. And it turns out that it's pretty lonely in your head all alone without it.
The first thing to remember when this happens is - DON'T PANIC. No, okay, that's impossible. You're going to panic. But don't let the panic take over because I promise, take my oath, pinkie-swear, that this is not forever. The ideas are going to come back. You can't stop them coming back even if you want to. Your brain can only shut them out for so long. So what you need to do now is...
Take a deep breath.
Count to eight.
Now let it out.
And another.
Count to eight again. Breathe out.
One more. Deeeeep breath.
Count to eight. Let it out.
Right. Now that we're feeling a bit calmer, we need to take a bit of a leap.
Forget about ideas. Forget about books. Forget about writing stories. I know - Le Gasp, right? But I'm serious. Take a step back from being a writer for a little while, and you will be taking a step back from the crazy. I know it's easy to define yourself completely by your identity as a writer, but you're a person too, and you aren't going to die if you give your writing hand a rest for a bit.
Now, give yourself permission to do something else. Read a new book, or re-read an old favourite that you've been meaning to get to for a while. Sketch or paint. Take a few slow, wandering walks. Go shopping. Visit a museum or go on a trip with family or friends. Watch a great film or an awful, cheesy one that makes you snort with laughter. Listen to your favourite music - and spend an afternoon on YouTube or iTunes listening to new songs and finding new favourites. Do any or all of the things that you somehow never quite find the time to do normally because you're wanting to write. Do your homework, kids (and education is a priceless thing)!
If you get any little flickers of ideas while you're watching that cheesy movie or looking at the wind moving through the trees, or hanging out with your friends? Very calmly pull out your notebook and make a note and leave it. Don't pounce on the idea and kill it before it's ready. On the other hand, if you feel a sudden, burning urge to write a song or a poem - go nuts! Spend all day doing that if you want, and have fun. I used to write about three poems a day when I was a teen, and I loved it (and I was pretty good at it too).
I guarantee that under this gentle, non-pressurised treatment in which you shower your brain with lots of new/rich images and fun and emotional stimuli and not freaking-the-heck-out, your imagination will bloom once again. That doesn't mean that the moment it does you should go back to what you were doing before, mind. This is a warning from your brain. Chill. Stop focusing so much on results and enjoy the journey a little more. Let your ideas mature. Play around with new styles. I know I've talked about Neverending Stories, but it honestly doesn't matter if you mess with sixteen different stories at once and five of them are paranormal romance and six are high fantasy and two are contemporary and one is a murder mystery and the other four are dystopian - so long as you're having fun.
Eventually, an idea will come along that you love and adore and want to kiss and hug and make out with. Well, all right, maybe that's just me - but what I'm trying to say is that eventually The One True Idea will come along, and you'll know because you'll stop messing around and find yourself wanting to work only on that one story. Just like True Love, really. But this can't happen if you're stressing out, worrying, and making yourself miserable.
Writing is supposed to be fun, guys. Yes, it's hard work at times, and requires patience, perseverence, craftsmanship and dedication. But if it's not FUN, at the end of the day, you might as well go and become an accountant. Right?
I leave you with three things which I personally find very inspiring, in different ways.
Spooky Mysterious Castle by the SeaGo forth, my lovelies...and breathe.
May 23, 2011
READER QUESTIONS
Hi everyone! Happy Monday to you all - I hope you had wonderful weekends. Today I'm tackling a couple of questions from readers again.
First of all is nineteen year old Ray, who contacted me via email. He's just about to finish his science fiction novel, and says:
The problem is that once the writing is over and we send our book out into the world - the world where it will be judged by agents, editors, readers, critics - we are completely kissing goodbye to control. You can't influence the way anyone reacts to your work, or their emotions as they read it, in any way other than by writing the best book you have in you. Some people will love it, others will be indifferent, and some will hate it with a fiery passion. Worse, many people will misunderstand it, and attribute motives and ideas to you, the writer, based on that misunderstanding. It's enough to drive anyone right up the wall and out of the chimney.
The only way to survive with your stomach lining intact? Admit to yourself that there's nothing you can do about it. I'm serious. It's the only way.
What you're focusing on here, Ray, is the aspect of publishing that you have the LEAST control over. Yes, once you've gotten published you can promote your work, offer yourself to your publisher for events or arrange these yourself, get 'swag' items made up, do contests online, blog - but I think it's been proved fairly conclusively at this point that none of this really makes a difference. Writers who suck the marrow from their own bones to promote often enjoy only modest sales, and writers who do nothing at all find themselves shot to stardom through word-of-mouth. Fantastic books that deserve to be bestsellers sink without a trace, and badly written, derivative ones end up being translated into fifty languages and turned into smash hit movies.
There is nothing you can do about it.
So, in summary: Your worries are completely normal. But they are also the kind of worries which will only hurt you as a writer and a person, because obsessing over things outside your control is a leading cause of stress and unhappiness. Try to put these negative thoughts to the back of your mind and just write the best book you can, and cross your fingers. That's all any writer can really do.
Okay - onwards! The next question comes from Rebecca, via the comment trail. She says:
Generally I make an internal decision on what sort of names I want for any particular country or race that I'm making up. For example, in Daughter of the Flames
I decided that the names of the Rua people would come from India and Africa, and that the names of the Sedorne would come from Romania. This fit the massive cultural divide between the two invented peoples in my head. Then I went onto my favourite site
Sometimes names immediately 'chime' in my head and become associated with a character (like Deo and Mira or Robin and Hugh). Some names I pencil into my story outline in the belief that they're perfect, but as I get to know the character more I realise it doesn't work, or that the name would be better elsewhere. Rashna was originally called Kapilla, but that name really suited a certain minor character, so I swapped. The heroine of Shadows on the Moon
was originally called Miyako, because that name had a certain meaning I liked, but it just didn't work for her, and so I went back to my lists of Japanese names and found the perfect one - Suzume.
And sometimes I'm forced to admit to myself that there is no name exactly right for the character, and so I play around with the real names I have until I find a variation which feels right - like Zira and Zahira. Those are not real Indian or African names, but they worked.
Sometimes a character will pop into my head fully formed with a name attached. I don't know where these guys come from and similarly their names might be made up or names which turn out to be real. Examples of this are Abheron in DotF (that name is completely made up) and Akira in Shadows on the Moon (Akira is a real Japanese name).
Sometimes I cannot find the right name for a character and it annoys me and annoys me and eventually I give up and give them a 'placeholder' name, something that will do for now, just to let me get on and write about them. Usually if I do this, the real name will make itself known to me somewhere in the middle of the story, like Gabriel from The Swan Kingdom
- I sat bolt upright in bed one night and shouted 'GABRIEL!' and that was that. Sometimes, however, the real name never does make itself known, and then I'm forced to put up with the placeholder name.
I also like to play around with symbolism and hidden meanings in the names I give my characters wherever I can, and this is another reason I like to use real names, instead of making them up. Branwen is the name of the main character's mother in The Swan Kingdom
- but it is also the name of a doomed, tragic queen in Welsh mythology. In
Shadows on the Moon
, the heroine transforms three times and each new transformation has a new name with a new meaning that symbolises who she has become. Sorin's name in
Daughter of the Flames
means 'sun' which is perfect for his character.
As you can probably tell from all this, Rebecca, finding names for characters is one of my favourite things! If you find it a challenge (and I have to admit that I do too, occasionally) try using real names, searching for ones with hidden meanings that will add depth to your world. Or, pick a placeholder name and feel free to change it as often as you want - this is what the 'Find' and 'Replace' functions in MS Word are for! Get yourself some baby name books, or bookmark
I hope this has been useful. As always, if anyone has any more questions about writing or publishing, email me through my website or drop me a line in the comments and I will do my best to get back to you. See you on Wednesday!
First of all is nineteen year old Ray, who contacted me via email. He's just about to finish his science fiction novel, and says:
"I'm scared. I'm scared that my book will just flop and not sell. Is that normal? I mean, I want at least a few copies to sell once I publish it. What do I do if they don't sell? Did you ever share this fear? Sorry if I'm being a nervous Nettie; it's just that I am. Nervous, that is."Welcome to the club, Ray. Being a Nervous Nettie seems to be an inescapable part of being a writer. I seriously don't know a single one who doesn't struggle with obsessively worrying about some part of the process. And I think that's because the reason most of us are writers (especially science fiction and fantasy writers!) is that we are, to a greater or lesser degree, control freaks. Making the transition from avid reader to writer is all about control. We want to invent our own worlds and characters and become a kind of god over our own creations. Nothing wrong with that! It's natural, and what's more, FUN.
The problem is that once the writing is over and we send our book out into the world - the world where it will be judged by agents, editors, readers, critics - we are completely kissing goodbye to control. You can't influence the way anyone reacts to your work, or their emotions as they read it, in any way other than by writing the best book you have in you. Some people will love it, others will be indifferent, and some will hate it with a fiery passion. Worse, many people will misunderstand it, and attribute motives and ideas to you, the writer, based on that misunderstanding. It's enough to drive anyone right up the wall and out of the chimney.
The only way to survive with your stomach lining intact? Admit to yourself that there's nothing you can do about it. I'm serious. It's the only way.
What you're focusing on here, Ray, is the aspect of publishing that you have the LEAST control over. Yes, once you've gotten published you can promote your work, offer yourself to your publisher for events or arrange these yourself, get 'swag' items made up, do contests online, blog - but I think it's been proved fairly conclusively at this point that none of this really makes a difference. Writers who suck the marrow from their own bones to promote often enjoy only modest sales, and writers who do nothing at all find themselves shot to stardom through word-of-mouth. Fantastic books that deserve to be bestsellers sink without a trace, and badly written, derivative ones end up being translated into fifty languages and turned into smash hit movies.
There is nothing you can do about it.
So, in summary: Your worries are completely normal. But they are also the kind of worries which will only hurt you as a writer and a person, because obsessing over things outside your control is a leading cause of stress and unhappiness. Try to put these negative thoughts to the back of your mind and just write the best book you can, and cross your fingers. That's all any writer can really do.
Okay - onwards! The next question comes from Rebecca, via the comment trail. She says:
"I really enjoy writing and developing my characters but I sometimes struggle with names for them. How do make up names for your characters?"Honestly? I don't! I hardly ever make up names at all. I usually borrow names from the real world. I find that this helps me to avoid that typical fantasy tendency to create ridiculous, over-the-top words that drag the reader out of the story trying to figure out how to pronounce them.
Generally I make an internal decision on what sort of names I want for any particular country or race that I'm making up. For example, in Daughter of the Flames
I decided that the names of the Rua people would come from India and Africa, and that the names of the Sedorne would come from Romania. This fit the massive cultural divide between the two invented peoples in my head. Then I went onto my favourite site Sometimes names immediately 'chime' in my head and become associated with a character (like Deo and Mira or Robin and Hugh). Some names I pencil into my story outline in the belief that they're perfect, but as I get to know the character more I realise it doesn't work, or that the name would be better elsewhere. Rashna was originally called Kapilla, but that name really suited a certain minor character, so I swapped. The heroine of Shadows on the Moon
was originally called Miyako, because that name had a certain meaning I liked, but it just didn't work for her, and so I went back to my lists of Japanese names and found the perfect one - Suzume. And sometimes I'm forced to admit to myself that there is no name exactly right for the character, and so I play around with the real names I have until I find a variation which feels right - like Zira and Zahira. Those are not real Indian or African names, but they worked.
Sometimes a character will pop into my head fully formed with a name attached. I don't know where these guys come from and similarly their names might be made up or names which turn out to be real. Examples of this are Abheron in DotF (that name is completely made up) and Akira in Shadows on the Moon
(Akira is a real Japanese name).Sometimes I cannot find the right name for a character and it annoys me and annoys me and eventually I give up and give them a 'placeholder' name, something that will do for now, just to let me get on and write about them. Usually if I do this, the real name will make itself known to me somewhere in the middle of the story, like Gabriel from The Swan Kingdom
- I sat bolt upright in bed one night and shouted 'GABRIEL!' and that was that. Sometimes, however, the real name never does make itself known, and then I'm forced to put up with the placeholder name.I also like to play around with symbolism and hidden meanings in the names I give my characters wherever I can, and this is another reason I like to use real names, instead of making them up. Branwen is the name of the main character's mother in The Swan Kingdom
- but it is also the name of a doomed, tragic queen in Welsh mythology. In
Shadows on the Moon
, the heroine transforms three times and each new transformation has a new name with a new meaning that symbolises who she has become. Sorin's name in
Daughter of the Flames
means 'sun' which is perfect for his character. As you can probably tell from all this, Rebecca, finding names for characters is one of my favourite things! If you find it a challenge (and I have to admit that I do too, occasionally) try using real names, searching for ones with hidden meanings that will add depth to your world. Or, pick a placeholder name and feel free to change it as often as you want - this is what the 'Find' and 'Replace' functions in MS Word are for! Get yourself some baby name books, or bookmark
I hope this has been useful. As always, if anyone has any more questions about writing or publishing, email me through my website or drop me a line in the comments and I will do my best to get back to you. See you on Wednesday!
May 20, 2011
RETROFRIDAY - NEVER ENDING STORIES
Hello all - and happy Friday! Today I bring you another oldie post dredged up from the perilous depths of the ZT archive, which I hope you'll find useful whether you're re-reading it, or seeing it for the first time. Without more ado:NEVER ENDING STORIES
I had an email the other day from a young (extremely young) lady called Regan the other day. She's a very enthusiastic writer and reeled off a list of about six or seven story titles that she's working on, some of which were up to seventy-five pages long. She was mainly writing to me for advice on how to handle it when her family, teachers etc. dismiss her writing, so referred her to my TOP TIPS post and my website, where I talk about that a lot.
However, she made a throwaway comment which caused my Writer Senses (like spider senses, but with less webbing) to tingle. She said that before she could finish any of her stories she always ended up getting an idea for another one. Her stories weren't getting finished.
This is an issue which is close to my heart - and probably to the hearts of many reading this blog. For a lot of young and not-so-young writers, the problem of actually managing to complete a story/novel crops up again and again. If you want to learn more, read on. I warn you - this post is long. Very long. It may have developed its own gravitational field by now...
The thing is, it doesn't sound difficult to finish a story. In fact, you'd think it would be the most natural and easy thing in the world. You start it, then you do some noodley bits in the middle, then you write The End and you've finished. Yeah?
Nooooo.
For many years, whenever I told family and friends that I was starting a new novel their response would be a long-suffering sigh and mutters of 'If only you could FINISH one...' At first this didn't bother me much. Because, of course, the story that I'd just abandoned at three chapters was lame and pointless, but this new story, well, this was the perfect story, it was awesome and of course I was going to finish it, right? Oh, Young Zolah, how very wrong you were. Because three chapters into that awesome new story, somehow all the new and awesome had always drained out of it, and there would be MUCH better idea lurking in the back of your mind waiting to pounce.
I loved writing. I always have. I'm a writing geek. I play with words constantly, steal parts of overheard conversations, note down news headlines, and have new stories, characters and worlds constantly crowding into my head. Which is supposed to be a good thing, isn't it? Having so much love for writing should have made it easy for me to finish lots and lots of stories. But it didn't. By the time I'd hit my teens I'd gotten to the point where I couldn't even finish a three page story for an English class. That was okay at school, because I usually ended up writing twelve pages instead of three, and the teacher would be so impressed they'd overlook the lack of ending. I wasn't overlooking it, though. I'd started to get this creeping, icy sense of anxiety. Maybe there was something wrong with me. Maybe I couldn't finish stories.
Maybe I never would.
When I was sixteen I decided I wanted to write category romance (Mills and Boon for those of you in the UK, something like Harlequin Romance for those in the US). I was reading these non-stop at the time, mostly because they sold ten for a quid in the local charity shops, and were available by the thousand in the library. They were so plentiful that I could read about ten in a weekend and still have twenty left to keep me going throughout the week. No other genre in the publishing industry could keep up with me. I did some research. I found out that the ladies who wrote these books could make a really good living from it. I did some more research and wrote to the publisher for a set of their guidelines. This set out exactly how many words each book could have and what sort of storylines you could use. It was almost like an essay assignment at school. Armed with all my facts and figures, I set out to write one of these books.
AND I DID IT.
Somehow, the fact that I had been given a word target and a fairly narrow list of requirements, combined with my in-depth knowledge of the genre, made it possible for me, in between school and homework and TV and the rest, to bash out a 50,000 word romance novel in about four months.
You can probably imagine my triumph. I'd beaten the jinx. I'd proven I could really be a proper writer. I don't think my feet even touched the ground for about a week after typing The End.
On a roll (so I thought) I submitted the novel to Mills and Boon. And the inevitable happened. I was summarily rejected. Looking back, I can only thank the God of Writers for his unexpected kindness there, because that book STANK. At the time, though, it was a huge blow.
I carried on trying to get published with category romances for a couple more years, but my old problem had returned. I couldn't finish them. Instead I would write three chapters and a synopsis, send it to the romance publishing company, get rejected and move onto a new story.Then when I was eighteen, through various coincidences, I found the genre which was to become my perfect home. YA Fantasy. Just like always, I began to read voraciously in my chosen field, digging out old favourites and discovering new ones, until I had, once again, become an expert in my genre. Once again, I did my research, found out what sort of word target I needed to aim at. Once again, I checked out submission guidelines on publisher's websites. Then the idea for Blood Magic came to me.
By this time I was working full-time in an office, but that didn't stop me *living* inside that story for months. I remember putting customers on hold for a minute so I could scribble ideas on odd bits of paper. I remember leaning on the concrete wall of the tea-room, jotting down dialogue while colleagues stared. And I can remember thinking: I WILL COMPLETE THIS BOOK. I loved it - the story, the characters, the fictional world - so much that I just had to. I had to find out how it finished!
I drew up a little chart of how many words I should write a day, and gave myself a target, about nine months away, for completion. Unlike with previous stories I didn't go back and revise previous chapters, because I was always too busy writing the next one, and as a result I smashed my target, completing the book six months early, because I just couldn't stop writing.
Although Blood Magic was never destined to be published, writing it was the best thing I ever did for my YA writing career. When I submitted it to (and was rejected by) Walker Books, I came into contact with the gentleman who was later to become my first editor. After the book was rejected he called me up to tell me how much he liked my 'voice' and to ask me to send him anything else I wrote. A year almost to the day after submitting Blood Magic, I sent him The Swan Kingdom . Within a couple of months I had a publishing contract - and an agent too.
So, what is the point of this rambling story? Well, let's have a look at the facts here. Just like many of you, I couldn't finish stories. Except that I COULD - with the right conditions. I proved that with my romance novel and later with Blood Magic (and the books that came after). So, what are the right conditions? How do you go about writing a story in such a way that you will be able to finish it?
RESEARCH: Read widely in your chosen field! Glory in it! Devour everything you can get your hands on. Read books you love and books you hate. Re-read both kinds and learn from them. In short, become an expert. Because that way you will be filled with a sense of confidence that you know exactly where your book fits in - that your ideas are original and interesting, and worthy of their own book - and this confidence will propel you forward to complete it.
TARGETS: Decide how long you want your book to be (look at other books in your genre and look at publisher's guidelines if you can find them). Decide what date you want to complete it by and how many words you should write a day or a week. Be reasonable, but do stretch yourself. Remember, even if you only write 500 words a day - two typed pages - that would be 182500 words by the end of the year! Enough for two or three books! Then do everything you can to stick to those targets. You won't always be able to manage it. The original word target for Shadows on the Moon was 65,000 words and the original completion target was April 2009. Instead, the first draft was 130,000 words long and I didn't complete until October 2009. But having targets will give you a sense that you're working on something that can and will be finished one day.
PASSION: Don't write the first idea that pops into your head. Don't be distracted by every fleeting, glamorous image in your brain and launch into writing without really thinking your story through. Don't read someone else's book, get 'inspired' and end up writing fanfic disguised as original fiction, telling yourself no one will notice. You need to be in LOVE with your story. Cherish it, think about it deeply, live inside the characters and love or hate them. Give all your imagination to one idea and let it grow and mature within you. Let it become something so special and unique, filled with so many of your own deepest values and feelings, that no one else on the planet could write it but you. Then when you come to put it down on paper, nothing will be able to tempt you away, even when things get hard, because nothing in the whole world will be as exciting to you as the story you're working on RIGHT NOW.
MOMENTUM: Just write. Keep your eye on the target and keep pushing forward. Don't give into the temptation to keep going back and revising those first pages or chapters. Maybe they suck, but so what? You can fix anything in revision - once you've finished the book. You can't fix it right now. In fact, it's pointless trying to revise an unfinished story, and you know why - because you get caught in the death spiral of doubting yourself and the story and never finish it. So just think about that glorious, heart-rending, funny, sad, change-your-life forever ending that you're going to create. Believe in that ending. Reach for it. And somehow, before you know it, you really will be writing it.
May 18, 2011
WRITER'S KRYPTONITE
Hi everyone - congratulations on making it through the week this far. It's been tough, but the worst is over now, right? We can totally survive until Friday. Totally. Right? Probably. Heh heh. Ahem.
Why the patently false cheer, you ask? Weren't you all over the moon and full of optimism and energy just a few days ago? Weren't you about to start work on your beloved Big Secret Project? Shouldn't you be, like, HAPPY and stuff?
Well, that was the plan, dear readers, honestly it was. But little did I realise that something insidious, inescapable and invidious (check your thesaurus) was lurking for me within the pages of Big Secret Project. Something called...a transition. Otherwise known as Writer's Kryptonite.
*Gaspshockhorror*
You see, I had already written the first three chapters of BSP for my agent at the beginning of this year, and, as authors are wont to do, I had paused just as a moment of high tension left the characters on a cliff-hanger. So when I revisited the book, I happily churned out the second part of this exciting action scene, and checked my synopsis only to find a section a little bit like this:
"Something interesting happens. The police arrive and insist on taking the characters to the hospital to be checked out. After they have both seen a doctor, and have evaded the police's questions, the girls are about to head home when something even more interesting happens."
(Warning - events have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty)
Writers often pepper their outlines with lines like this. They pop out of our brains as easily as fungal spores pop out of mould, and it never occurs to us that they will cause us untold pain and suffering later on. It would never occur to ANYONE reading the outline, probably, that such a line would make a working author freeze in their tracks, and sit with their head in their hands, groaning, for days at a time.
Just what is the problem? Well, everything between the first interesting event and the second interesting event is what we call a transition. A bridging scene, if you will. A section of writing in which nothing particularly important happens, no characters change or develop, nothing new is introduced into the story, and the plot does not move forward - but which nevertheless must be written in order to preserve narrative flow and a sense of consequences and reality within the story.
This particular transition calls for the arrival of the police on the scene, their reactions, and then either a short section taking place in the back of a police car and another one in a hospital, or possibly a little time skip and then a longer section in the hospital. We need to see that one of the characters has a few minor injuries, and that the characters realise they can't tell anyone about the interesting events they've seen. Some other pieces of information need to be scattered here too, cunningly, so that readers can come to their own conclusions about the way stuff in the story is going to work.
It doesn't sound hard, does it? But it is, dear readers, it really, truly is. Writing a transition scene like this is probably the hardest thing that I have to do. Transitions are like my kyptonite. I only have to catch a glimpse of one and I get weak and sick. I'm supposed to get my characters from A to B in a way which is brief, interesting, and which conveys the necessary information, and yet, nothing actually HAPPENS here. I have NO IDEA HOW. None. How in the world am I supposed to keep readers from throwing the book down in disgust and boredom when they come across these pages? How?
The temptation is always to skip these little scenes. To simply jump forward in time within the story and start the next scene in the middle of the action - or to write straight from one exciting event to another. But it doesn't work. Trust me, I've tried it. What happens is:
a) You end up with a series of short, choppy scenes which don't feel anchored in the story world and which distance the reader from the reality you're trying to create.
OR:
b) You avoid the first transition but find that there's an now inescapable need for one in the next scene because you HAVE to convey the information and the sense of time passing somehow. So you keep pushing forward trying to avoid THAT transition. But then you really need another one. Before you know what you've done, you have a dragging, lagging, soggy midsection in which plenty of stuff happens but none of it's the slightest bit interesting because it's all happening one thing after another with no sense of any of it actually linking together into a story, and pacing went out the window.
Transitions, dude. They're a b***h.
But wait! Before we all give up on writing forever because the mere thought of writing a bridging scene is enough to send us fleeing to a dark corner to rock and make strangled moaning noises - there IS a way to make transitions interesting and worthwhile! It's just really hard, that's all.
Basically, you have to find what I call 'a way in'. That is, a way to approach the House of Transitions craftily, through a side door or a window, so that you can convince yourself and your characters and hopefully the readers that it's not actually a transition you're walking through here at all.
Example? Well, let's say that in the above mentioned transition, we see the police cars screech to a halt and have our characters exchange apprehensive glances. Then we skip forward in time and join our main character in the waiting room of the hospital. She's been separated from her friend because the friend hit her head and needs some x-rays. The police are peppering the main character with questions about the interesting event which she can't answer because she knows that they'll think she's lying or insane. Let's make her feel a bit tense and frightened during this, especially since she's all alone. The way she reacts will be a good illustration of her character. And let's use the questions the police ask to make it clear what her friend has said, so that we know the friend is also denying all knowledge - that's an efficient way of getting that across to the reader.
But the scene is still a bit bland, because it's too familiar and too uneventful. What if we dig a bit deeper into the main character? Let's say the last time that she was in the hospital was when a close family member that she loved a great deal passed away. Let's say that was a very traumatic event for her, and that remembering it also makes her remember a lot of other bits of information which the reader will need to know sooner or later too, about the character's family set-up. And what if the character glancing over these fragments of memory also hints intriguingly at future events in the story? Now we can not only have a scene which illustrates the main character's personality, but which illuminates her past and foreshadows her future too.
Yes, this is still a transition scene. But now it's also a scene in which so many other things are going on that the reader can't help but be interested. The writer can't help but be interested!
It's not always as straightforward as this. Sometimes the way in can be the realisation that the scene needs to take place on a frozen lake, with the characters sliding around and hanging onto each other and laughing the whole time, or that one of the characters is furious but trying to hide it, or that the transition you're writing now needs to mirror one that's coming up in another three chapter's time. Like I said, its tough. But it is worth it in the end. And the reason I know this?
Because when my editor emailed me to tell me she had loved the new version of FF, she singled out two particularly powerful points in the story - and one of them was a transition scene which I HATED writing. I'd tried so hard to make that transition worthwhile that I came out the other side and turned it into a pivotal scene.
That's basically like Superman laughing in kryponite's face, guys. Awesome, right?
So what's your writing kryptonite, and how do you deal with it?
Why the patently false cheer, you ask? Weren't you all over the moon and full of optimism and energy just a few days ago? Weren't you about to start work on your beloved Big Secret Project? Shouldn't you be, like, HAPPY and stuff?
Well, that was the plan, dear readers, honestly it was. But little did I realise that something insidious, inescapable and invidious (check your thesaurus) was lurking for me within the pages of Big Secret Project. Something called...a transition. Otherwise known as Writer's Kryptonite.
*Gaspshockhorror*
You see, I had already written the first three chapters of BSP for my agent at the beginning of this year, and, as authors are wont to do, I had paused just as a moment of high tension left the characters on a cliff-hanger. So when I revisited the book, I happily churned out the second part of this exciting action scene, and checked my synopsis only to find a section a little bit like this:
"Something interesting happens. The police arrive and insist on taking the characters to the hospital to be checked out. After they have both seen a doctor, and have evaded the police's questions, the girls are about to head home when something even more interesting happens."
(Warning - events have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty)
Writers often pepper their outlines with lines like this. They pop out of our brains as easily as fungal spores pop out of mould, and it never occurs to us that they will cause us untold pain and suffering later on. It would never occur to ANYONE reading the outline, probably, that such a line would make a working author freeze in their tracks, and sit with their head in their hands, groaning, for days at a time.
Just what is the problem? Well, everything between the first interesting event and the second interesting event is what we call a transition. A bridging scene, if you will. A section of writing in which nothing particularly important happens, no characters change or develop, nothing new is introduced into the story, and the plot does not move forward - but which nevertheless must be written in order to preserve narrative flow and a sense of consequences and reality within the story.
This particular transition calls for the arrival of the police on the scene, their reactions, and then either a short section taking place in the back of a police car and another one in a hospital, or possibly a little time skip and then a longer section in the hospital. We need to see that one of the characters has a few minor injuries, and that the characters realise they can't tell anyone about the interesting events they've seen. Some other pieces of information need to be scattered here too, cunningly, so that readers can come to their own conclusions about the way stuff in the story is going to work.
It doesn't sound hard, does it? But it is, dear readers, it really, truly is. Writing a transition scene like this is probably the hardest thing that I have to do. Transitions are like my kyptonite. I only have to catch a glimpse of one and I get weak and sick. I'm supposed to get my characters from A to B in a way which is brief, interesting, and which conveys the necessary information, and yet, nothing actually HAPPENS here. I have NO IDEA HOW. None. How in the world am I supposed to keep readers from throwing the book down in disgust and boredom when they come across these pages? How?
The temptation is always to skip these little scenes. To simply jump forward in time within the story and start the next scene in the middle of the action - or to write straight from one exciting event to another. But it doesn't work. Trust me, I've tried it. What happens is:
a) You end up with a series of short, choppy scenes which don't feel anchored in the story world and which distance the reader from the reality you're trying to create.
OR:
b) You avoid the first transition but find that there's an now inescapable need for one in the next scene because you HAVE to convey the information and the sense of time passing somehow. So you keep pushing forward trying to avoid THAT transition. But then you really need another one. Before you know what you've done, you have a dragging, lagging, soggy midsection in which plenty of stuff happens but none of it's the slightest bit interesting because it's all happening one thing after another with no sense of any of it actually linking together into a story, and pacing went out the window.
Transitions, dude. They're a b***h.
But wait! Before we all give up on writing forever because the mere thought of writing a bridging scene is enough to send us fleeing to a dark corner to rock and make strangled moaning noises - there IS a way to make transitions interesting and worthwhile! It's just really hard, that's all.
Basically, you have to find what I call 'a way in'. That is, a way to approach the House of Transitions craftily, through a side door or a window, so that you can convince yourself and your characters and hopefully the readers that it's not actually a transition you're walking through here at all.
Example? Well, let's say that in the above mentioned transition, we see the police cars screech to a halt and have our characters exchange apprehensive glances. Then we skip forward in time and join our main character in the waiting room of the hospital. She's been separated from her friend because the friend hit her head and needs some x-rays. The police are peppering the main character with questions about the interesting event which she can't answer because she knows that they'll think she's lying or insane. Let's make her feel a bit tense and frightened during this, especially since she's all alone. The way she reacts will be a good illustration of her character. And let's use the questions the police ask to make it clear what her friend has said, so that we know the friend is also denying all knowledge - that's an efficient way of getting that across to the reader.
But the scene is still a bit bland, because it's too familiar and too uneventful. What if we dig a bit deeper into the main character? Let's say the last time that she was in the hospital was when a close family member that she loved a great deal passed away. Let's say that was a very traumatic event for her, and that remembering it also makes her remember a lot of other bits of information which the reader will need to know sooner or later too, about the character's family set-up. And what if the character glancing over these fragments of memory also hints intriguingly at future events in the story? Now we can not only have a scene which illustrates the main character's personality, but which illuminates her past and foreshadows her future too.
Yes, this is still a transition scene. But now it's also a scene in which so many other things are going on that the reader can't help but be interested. The writer can't help but be interested!
It's not always as straightforward as this. Sometimes the way in can be the realisation that the scene needs to take place on a frozen lake, with the characters sliding around and hanging onto each other and laughing the whole time, or that one of the characters is furious but trying to hide it, or that the transition you're writing now needs to mirror one that's coming up in another three chapter's time. Like I said, its tough. But it is worth it in the end. And the reason I know this?
Because when my editor emailed me to tell me she had loved the new version of FF, she singled out two particularly powerful points in the story - and one of them was a transition scene which I HATED writing. I'd tried so hard to make that transition worthwhile that I came out the other side and turned it into a pivotal scene.
That's basically like Superman laughing in kryponite's face, guys. Awesome, right?
So what's your writing kryptonite, and how do you deal with it?
May 16, 2011
SAVING THE WORLD, ONE BOOK AT A TIME
Hello and happy Monday, dear readers. Today, I need to address an excellent question which was put to me by faithful commentor Alex, who said:
Write the Change you Want to See in the World by the ever-amazing Sarah Rees Brennan
I believe that SRB is 100% right. Writers can make the world a more awesome place. We have the power to do that, and it's a heavy responsibility sometimes. There have been times (recent times!) when I've caught myself following the Path of Prejudice, entirely unconsciously, in my own writing, and had to stop and give myself a swift bitch-slap to re-align my work onto the Path of Awesome instead. And I talked about that in this post here:
Wake Up and Smell the Real World by slightly-less-amazing but trying-hard Zolah
But what's even scarier and more weighty than the impression writers can make on the world, perhaps, is the impression they can make on individuals. The right book at the right time can save a life. Literally. And a lifetime of right books can change the course of a life. I know that because that is what happened to my life. So I thought I would dig out this speech which I made to an audience of trainee teachers at the Write to Inspire Conference in 2007 (under the aegis of Nikki Gambles's Write Away organisation). Bear in mind that I had to read this aloud, so the format is slightly different than a normal blog-post!
I've just been to a talk by the living legend that is Jane Goodall and afterwards I started to question the value of being a professional author, which I, like so many other people, aspire to. [...] How does being an author help the world? What's its value?This is a great question, but also a very tricky one to answer in an original way because so many other great authors have weighed in on the topic. I'm going to post this link here before I go any further, because I <3 this essay and it's great to have an excuse to direct you all do it:
Write the Change you Want to See in the World by the ever-amazing Sarah Rees Brennan
I believe that SRB is 100% right. Writers can make the world a more awesome place. We have the power to do that, and it's a heavy responsibility sometimes. There have been times (recent times!) when I've caught myself following the Path of Prejudice, entirely unconsciously, in my own writing, and had to stop and give myself a swift bitch-slap to re-align my work onto the Path of Awesome instead. And I talked about that in this post here:
Wake Up and Smell the Real World by slightly-less-amazing but trying-hard Zolah
But what's even scarier and more weighty than the impression writers can make on the world, perhaps, is the impression they can make on individuals. The right book at the right time can save a life. Literally. And a lifetime of right books can change the course of a life. I know that because that is what happened to my life. So I thought I would dig out this speech which I made to an audience of trainee teachers at the Write to Inspire Conference in 2007 (under the aegis of Nikki Gambles's Write Away organisation). Bear in mind that I had to read this aloud, so the format is slightly different than a normal blog-post!
"As the theme of today's conference is Hearts and Minds, I thought I'd talk about how books captured my heart and mind when I was young, and a few occasions when reading really made a difference to my own life and the way I grew up.
When I was young, I was not a good reader. There was no particular reason for this, because I came from a family of book lovers, and I'd always been exposed to books. I liked being read to a lot. But reading to myself was something else. I thought of it as something by turns boring and scary: scary when teachers made you do it aloud, boring when you were trying to do it on your own.
I still remember my father practically having to force me to stumble through a chapter of one of those early reading series books, which was about a girl called Wendy and her playhouse, and which struck me even at such a young age as mind-numbingly tedious. I knew I had to learn to read and write, just like I had to learn to tie my own shoelaces, but it never occurred to me that it was anything but a chore. No teacher would have picked me out as one of the brighter kids in class. There was nothing about me that hinted that one day I might become a writer, and make words my trade. In that way, I was probably exactly the same as countless children that you've met in your own classrooms.
But one thing I did have going for me as a kid was a vivid and active imagination, and like most imaginative kids, I was very good at frightening myself.
I used to be terrified of my bedroom at night. I'm not sure precisely why, but I wonder now if that room was haunted or something, though my sister telling me that wolves lived under my bed probably didn't help. My mum was aware that I was having terrible trouble getting to sleep, lying awake in the bedroom with the light on. She decided to gave me a book to read, so that if I couldn't get to sleep, or woke up feeling frightened, I would have something to take my mind off my fears. The book was The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton.
As I said, I wasn't a very good reader at that point. It must have taken between a month and six weeks to read that one little book. But the sense of pride and achievement when I finished it is something I can still remember today. I tore down the stairs, waving this battered paperback, shouting "I've finished!"
My mum said, "Well, I suppose you liked it then? We'll have to get you the next one." And I said, "There are more?"
And that was it. I was a different little girl than the one who had first opened the book weeks before. I had realised - without realising how - that there was some kind of magic in books. I fell in love. I was a Reader.
From that moment, I never went to bed without a book tucked under my arm – and my mum never had any problems getting me to go to bed either. What happened on the page was so real to me that it made my own fears and nightmares seem completely transparent. I carried on reading everything I could get my hands on. I became pretty good writer too, with a wide vocabulary and a good grasp of spelling and grammar.I hope this gives you something to consider, Alex! Thanks for inspiring today's post. See you all on Wednesday.
Those weren't skills that I had been born with, or which had come naturally to me – just like many of the other kids who struggle with reading and writing in your classes. I had learned them because I wanted to, because they were important to me. The willpower and determination that a child can bring to learning is absolutely astonishing, if they're learning things that they care about. I cared about reading. The Magic Faraway Tree had changed my mind.
A few years later, my teacher Mr Denford chose to read his class a book called The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden. I don't know if any of you have come across this book before, but it's really an extraordinary piece of writing for children. I haven't had the chance to read it for years, since it's out of print, but I still remember every detail about it. It's about a girl called Kezia – Kizzy for short – who is half gypsy, and who, after her gypsy grandmother dies, is forced into the care of strangers, some cruel, some well-meaning. In the course of the story, Kezia is subjected to terrible treatment by other children of her own age who are offended and frightened by her differences.
I liked the story so much that I went home and asked if I could have my own copy, so that I could read it myself rather than listening to it at school. It turned out we had one in the house, and I read it several times, despite it being rather damp and very smelly.
It was not long after that, that a new girl came into Mr Denford's class. We'll call her Jane.
She was at a disadvantage first because she had what we all considered to be a screamingly funny surname, and next because she'd had meningitis as a baby which had effected her cognitive functions. She found it hard to speak sometimes, and her co-ordination was bad. The teachers all told us very carefully that we should be nice to Jane, which was practically the equivalent of stamping a target on her forehead.
For the first few weeks most people restrained themselves from doing much more than excluding Jane from games, or sniggering about her name. But once she'd been around for a while the bullying got worse. One girl 'accidentally' pulled a chair out from under her. Another spilled paint all over her pictures. They'd pinch her or fluster her so that she'd stammer or say the wrong words.
I'd never been one of the popular kids, or one of the leaders of the class. In fact I'd quite often been picked on myself. A small part of me was glad that the mean kids now had someone else to focus their meanness on, so they'd leave me alone. A small part of me even wanted to join in, to blend into the crowd, which would give me even more protection.
But a bigger part – the part that had been in tears reading The Diddakoi – realised that what was happening to Jane was exactly the same. And that it was wrong. And that being part of it would be a terrible thing.
I still didn't have the courage to get involved at first. I felt terrible, but I didn't know what to do. Then one day I heard a group of girls whispering about a plan – a plan to catch Jane on her way home and 'get her'. This was in the days before the school run, and we all walked home. Now, I'd been 'gotten' a time or two myself, and it was pretty awful. But I was a fast runner and my house was nearby. I'd always gotten away in the end. But Jane couldn't run very well, and her house was not nearby. So I went to our teacher and told him what I had heard.
There was a huge fuss, a lot of people got into trouble, and at the end Jane was more of a pariah than ever. So was I. And I'd love to say that us two ended up being fast friends forever – but we weren't, because I don't think either of us was brave enough to team up with another person who was the focus of so much bullying. But faced with that decision again today, I'd probably do the same thing. Reading The Diddakoi made me the sort of person who can't just stand by and watch other people be hurt. It changed my heart, for the better.
These are examples of just two times when reading has changed my life. How is it that books can have such a huge impact on an ordinary child and transform them in such a way?
A book isn't like any other kind of media. It doesn't provide music at key moments to tell you when you're supposed to get tearful or an actor mugging to tell you to laugh.
The images in your head come from you as much as from words on the page. When you're enjoying a book your imagination races ahead of the words, creating an inner landscape which we people with our own actors, scenery and music.
People sometimes assume that reading is a lonely act, which isolates us from other people. But at the very base of it, opening a book is an act of communication between reader and author. When you open a book, you place your mind and emotions at the service of someone else's characters and ideas for however long it takes to finish the story.
And that's the vital point.
What makes a person different to dog? Or a horse? Is it that we've developed language? Opposable thumbs? No! It's that human beings know they're mortal. They can imagine that one day, they will die.
So it's not just that imagination allows us to feel compassion, and empathy. It's not just that without it, there will be no more stories to read. It's that without imagination, there are no humans. Only clever apes with clever fingers.
If there is such a thing as a soul, it might be housed in the heart or the mind, but its lifeblood flows from the human imagination. And when you teach a child to love books and stories – when you teach a child to read – you're not just providing them with a life skill that will allow them to write essays or get a good job. You're teaching them what it is to be human.
That's the most precious gift that any of us can receive. And for that, I thank you all, in advance."
May 13, 2011
DISASTER/TRIUMPH
Hi everyone! I'm sooo sorry for the delay in Friday's post - this was due to Blogger totally wiping out, with no warning. If anyone's been on Twitter today, you'll have seen the raft of infuriated comments about this. I'm very glad that I don't tend to draft posts in advance, because apparently many people have lost things that they had saved but not posted. A lot of bloggers lost comments too (this may have been what happened to you, Isabel, since this nonsense has been going on all week). Blogger is not popular right now.
Luckily I didn't have an mega-long or important post planned for you this Friday. I really just wanted to give you all an update on my progress.
Regular blog readers will remember that, back in February, I posted about attempting an ambitious and controversial storyline in my fourth book FrostFire...and failing. If you missed the original post, it's here: I Thought I Could Fly...So Why Did I Drown?
Basically, my editor was forced to reject the book because it didn't work. And it wasn't just the controversial part. My editor - very kindly, but very firmly - pointed out that in my intense desire to write a gay high fantasy, I had left a lot of other things, like characterisation and plot, on the wayside. I was devastated - a lot more than I could let on, even in that sadsack, emo-toast post right there (yeah, I know). But I had a ray of hope. My editor did like a lot of things about the story, and she was willing to work with me on revisions. And by revisions, I mean, completely re-writing the book FROM SCRATCH.
Based on my lovely editor's detailed comments, I wrote a new synopsis for the book encompassing major structural and character changes (including switching the genders of everyone in the story except the protagonist and one secondary character). My editor read the revised synopsis super-fast, and by late February I was armed with an even more detailed set of notes. I made the decision to change the POV of the story from third person to first, because I realised that although I had found a decent 'voice' for the story in third, I had never really gotten into my main character's head (this was a lesson to me, because before I hadn't realised that first person was so vital to me creating fully realised characters).
Between then and the end of March I wrote around 60,000 new words, crafting an entirely new beginning and middle section. I then re-wrote the end of the story and blended it into the new material. By April I was revising and polishing. I finished up with a manuscript of just over 100,000 words, which was 20,000 longer than the original version. I literally had no idea of the worth of the new manuscript. On one hand, I felt, deep down, that my editor's notes were good, and I had done my best to squeeze every bit of value out of them. On the other, I had re-read and revised every page so often that the thought of looking at it again made me groan. I'd reached the stage where I couldn't even recognise trees anymore, let alone figure out what a forest should look like.
I submitted FrostFire Mark Two to my editor in late April. And waited.
I've never felt so uncertain about the reaction a book was going to get since I sent The Swan Kingdom to my first editor back in 2005. I spent half my time convinced that my editor would be forced to reject it again, and the other half that, if I was lucky, she might be willing to give me more time to work on it some more.
What I didn't consider was that she might email me less than a month later (this Tuesday, in fact, in the afternoon) to tell me that she had picked the manuscript up the day before and read it practically non-stop, and that she loved it. LOVED it.
If you want to know what pure relief feels like, this is the kind of situation you need to get yourself in. I've never felt anything like it. I actually came over a bit dizzy and thought I might be sick. Then I starjumped and airpunched my way around the house for about half an hour before having a quiet sit-down with a mug of tea and some biscuits (this is the glamorous writer's life, I tell you).
And during that quiet sit-down, in the calm left behind by weeks of worry and hard work, I thought about FrostFire. I thought about that original draft, and about all the radical changes that came out in the second pass, and I realised that somehow, with my editor's help, I had now written the book I meant to write in the first place. Even though I'd gotten lost in trying to prove a point along the way, and messed up, and forgotten why I wanted to write this story, FrostFire Mark Two was the book it was meant to be. The terrifying, challenging, brilliant spark of story + character that originally flamed to life in my brain back in 2008 when I was working on the beginning of Shadows on the moon, had never really died. It had just banked its fire patiently and waited until the moment I was finally paying attention to burst forth again.
That, my beloveds, is what they mean by triumph born from disaster.
We'll be working on polishing and tightening FF up a bit more over the next couple of months, and hopefully FF will keep it's original publication slot in July of 2012. I'll be working on Big Secret Project too, to fill up the time - I'll tell you more about that when I can, but it might be a while.
In the meantime...anyone fancy starjumping with me? One, two, THREE!
Luckily I didn't have an mega-long or important post planned for you this Friday. I really just wanted to give you all an update on my progress.
Regular blog readers will remember that, back in February, I posted about attempting an ambitious and controversial storyline in my fourth book FrostFire...and failing. If you missed the original post, it's here: I Thought I Could Fly...So Why Did I Drown?
Basically, my editor was forced to reject the book because it didn't work. And it wasn't just the controversial part. My editor - very kindly, but very firmly - pointed out that in my intense desire to write a gay high fantasy, I had left a lot of other things, like characterisation and plot, on the wayside. I was devastated - a lot more than I could let on, even in that sadsack, emo-toast post right there (yeah, I know). But I had a ray of hope. My editor did like a lot of things about the story, and she was willing to work with me on revisions. And by revisions, I mean, completely re-writing the book FROM SCRATCH.
Based on my lovely editor's detailed comments, I wrote a new synopsis for the book encompassing major structural and character changes (including switching the genders of everyone in the story except the protagonist and one secondary character). My editor read the revised synopsis super-fast, and by late February I was armed with an even more detailed set of notes. I made the decision to change the POV of the story from third person to first, because I realised that although I had found a decent 'voice' for the story in third, I had never really gotten into my main character's head (this was a lesson to me, because before I hadn't realised that first person was so vital to me creating fully realised characters).
Between then and the end of March I wrote around 60,000 new words, crafting an entirely new beginning and middle section. I then re-wrote the end of the story and blended it into the new material. By April I was revising and polishing. I finished up with a manuscript of just over 100,000 words, which was 20,000 longer than the original version. I literally had no idea of the worth of the new manuscript. On one hand, I felt, deep down, that my editor's notes were good, and I had done my best to squeeze every bit of value out of them. On the other, I had re-read and revised every page so often that the thought of looking at it again made me groan. I'd reached the stage where I couldn't even recognise trees anymore, let alone figure out what a forest should look like.
I submitted FrostFire Mark Two to my editor in late April. And waited.
I've never felt so uncertain about the reaction a book was going to get since I sent The Swan Kingdom
to my first editor back in 2005. I spent half my time convinced that my editor would be forced to reject it again, and the other half that, if I was lucky, she might be willing to give me more time to work on it some more.What I didn't consider was that she might email me less than a month later (this Tuesday, in fact, in the afternoon) to tell me that she had picked the manuscript up the day before and read it practically non-stop, and that she loved it. LOVED it.
If you want to know what pure relief feels like, this is the kind of situation you need to get yourself in. I've never felt anything like it. I actually came over a bit dizzy and thought I might be sick. Then I starjumped and airpunched my way around the house for about half an hour before having a quiet sit-down with a mug of tea and some biscuits (this is the glamorous writer's life, I tell you).
And during that quiet sit-down, in the calm left behind by weeks of worry and hard work, I thought about FrostFire. I thought about that original draft, and about all the radical changes that came out in the second pass, and I realised that somehow, with my editor's help, I had now written the book I meant to write in the first place. Even though I'd gotten lost in trying to prove a point along the way, and messed up, and forgotten why I wanted to write this story, FrostFire Mark Two was the book it was meant to be. The terrifying, challenging, brilliant spark of story + character that originally flamed to life in my brain back in 2008 when I was working on the beginning of Shadows on the moon, had never really died. It had just banked its fire patiently and waited until the moment I was finally paying attention to burst forth again.
That, my beloveds, is what they mean by triumph born from disaster.
We'll be working on polishing and tightening FF up a bit more over the next couple of months, and hopefully FF will keep it's original publication slot in July of 2012. I'll be working on Big Secret Project too, to fill up the time - I'll tell you more about that when I can, but it might be a while.
In the meantime...anyone fancy starjumping with me? One, two, THREE!
