Lian Tanner's Blog, page 14

Writing workshops for kids

For those of you in Tasmania, the various Lincs/libraries are running some writing workshops in the July school holidays. These are designed to tie in with the 2016 Young Creative Writers Award, which is run by the Commissioner for Children.

There will be workshops in the North, Northwest, West and South for various age groups. I’ll be running two at Rosny Linc, one for 12-14 year olds and the other 15-17 year olds. We’re still working out dates and times, but I’ll have them by next weekend and will post them then.

Also at Rosny, Julie Hunt is running workshops for 5-8 year olds and 9-11 year olds. There will be various other authors around the state.

You can read more about the Young Creative Writers Award here, and a little bit more about the workshops here.

 

 

A new toy

Some people plot their novels at great length before they start to write, some don’t seem to do it at all. I’ve always been an enthusiastic pre-plotter, mainly because whenever I’ve tried to write a book without a detailed plot it has fallen into a big hole that I couldn’t dig myself out of. And besides, not having a good solid structure makes me way too anxious.

But I’m just discovering the benefits of plotting halfway through the process, rather than at the beginning.

I’ve said before that I’m writing the first Bodyguards book differently from anything I’ve ever done before. I did a bit of plotting before I started, but that soon gave way to writing the discovery draft, which has been a lot of fun.

Now however, I have to make sense of that draft, which is a hodgepodge of half-cooked ideas and less-than-half-cooked characters.

This is where the mid-way plotting comes in. And the new toy.

Up till now, I’ve either plotted by hand in my notebooks, or used Word, neither of which are much good. But now I have Curio!

[trumpets please]

I’ve been playing with this very nice bit of software for the last couple of days, making collages for my main characters. Here’s the one I did for Duckling:

And here’s the beginning of the plot:

[Notice how I very cunningly took a photo of this rather than a screenshot, so you can’t see the details.

Duelling scars

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, in Germany and Austria, a duelling scar was seen as a badge of honour and courage. It was also called a ‘bragging scar’.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that this is still happening. Groups of young men, usually students, face each other with razor-sharp blades, determined to come out of the fight with one of those honourable scars. It’s happening in Berlin. It’s happening in Tasmania. I have proof.

Yes, Harry came home last night with a bragging scar. I was appalled. He was smug. I have no idea how his opponent is faring.

Apart from the whole duelling thing, it’s been a strange week. For the first couple of days the book was coming along so slowly that I almost fell asleep at the computer. I felt stuck. I felt as if the story needed to break out in some way. Take a heroic leap. Spring from the very top diving board with amazing and unlikely grace, then do a double flip in mid air and hit the pool, just as everyone watching thinks it’s going to go splat on the concrete.

So I arranged for Lord Rump to get kidnapped.

Lord Rump was dreaming of slommerkins, those terrifying creatures that once roamed the coastal plains of Faroona.

He had never actually seen a slommerkin, of course, because they had been extinct for at least three hundred years. But when he was a small boy, half-starved and living on the streets of Lawe, someone had told him about them.

They had roamed through his nightmares ever since.

He dreamed that he was being chased, and that when the slommerkin caught him – which it would do very soon – it would roll on him to soften him up. Then it would eat him.

‘Help!’ he cried, in a voice that sounded far more like a homeless boy than an old man. ‘No! Please! Heeeeelp!’

To his relief, that last cry woke him. He lay there for a moment, thinking that he was in his bed in the back streets of Quick, and that he must have been eating oysters, which nearly always brought bad dreams.

I must give them up, he told himself. Though I do love them.

But when he opened his eyes, he discovered that he wasn’t in bed at all. He was lying fully dressed across a table, in a room he had never seen before. Scraps of closely written parchment were scattered across his chest and belly.

He was very cold.

So that got things moving again.

And to top it off, it rained! Yes, really. Rain, that mythical substance that no Tasmanian child under the age of ten years six months has ever seen. What’s more, it rained for a whole day, and a bit of the next, with a gorgeous sunrise in between. ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’

What makes for a good week’s writing?

I’ve been asking myself this question for the last couple of days without coming up with a clear-cut answer. But I finished last week feeling so pleased with myself that I’m still asking it. Mainly because I’d love this coming week to be just as good.

I think it’s mostly to do with the way I’m writing this book. With all my books up until now I’ve worked out a rough plot first, then written a very quick discovery draft. And only then have I gone back and sorted out motivations and other important things.

That didn’t quite happen with this book. I got frustrated writing the quick discovery draft and started to dig deeper – turning it into a slooooow discovery draft. And I’m finding it hugely satisfying. I think the main difference is that I’ve got time to really think about character motivations – why everyone is behaving the way they are. And where the conflict is and what they’re going to do next.

Sometimes the things they decide to do surprise me, and I do a double-take and think, ‘Okaaay. I’m not sure where this is going, but I’m willing to try it.’ Those often turn out to be the best bits.

The other thing that helps is not losing momentum. It’s way too easy to get sucked in by a bit of research or suchlike and waste half a morning.

So for example, in the following section, I didn’t want to get hung up on exactly what sort of astonishing things Grandda had seen in the last three years, because that would have slowed me down too much, just when I was discovering some intriguing things. I chucked in some reminders in ALL CAPS, and kept going – so this is what the text looks like at the moment:

When he was shocked, Duckling’s grandda looked remarkably like a guinea pig.

It didn’t happen very often. In the last three years alone, Grandda had witnessed three (ASTONISHING EVENTS), two (EVEN MORE ASTONISHING EVENTS) and an assassination without so much as raising an eyebrow. He was the most unshockable person Duckling had ever met.

But he was shocked now. His eyes bulged. His mouth quivered. His whiskers looked as if they were trying to escape from his chin.

Duckling skidded to a halt in the middle of the room. I’m too late. Pummel’s told him.

No, she realised. It’s even worse. He’s shown him!

Pummel leaned against an armchair, still catching his balance. His nose was bleeding. His face was white. He had that not-quite-sure-where-I-am look about him.

I’ve got to get him out of here, thought Duckling. And stop him making any promises to Grandda.

I’ll sort out exactly what those ASTONISHING EVENTS were in the next draft, but right now they don’t matter. Far more important is how Duckling is going to get Pummel out of the room, and what Grandda is going to do, now that he has seen what Pummel is capable of.

So yes, it was a good week.

Note: this is not actually a picture of Duckling’s grandda.

Researching quills

I was reading a self-published novel a while back where the hero was dashing across the country on his horse, on a moonless night …

Um – right.

There was a reason why country people used to hold dances at the full moon, in the days before cars and electric torches. It was so they could see to get home.

Years ago, when I was working for the Salamanca Theatre Company, we were on Flinders Island, north-east of Tasmania. We’d just finished a performance in the school gym, and because I like being on my own, I decided to walk back to the hotel rather than go in the car with my fellow actors. Being a city girl, I hadn’t taken account of the fact that I was out in the country with no street lights and no moon. It took me two hours to walk what was really quite a short distance, mainly because I kept straying off the road and into the ditch on either side of it.

I couldn’t see ANYTHING. Not a single thing. The only way I knew I was still going in the right direction was because I could feel the road under my feet. (Except when I was in the ditch.) By the time I got back to the hotel they were just about ready to send out a search party.

So, dashing across country on a horse? Nope. You’d break your neck before you’d gone a mile, and so would the horse.

Which of course brings us to research.

Like most fantasy authors, I’m constantly writing about things that I know nothing about. Submarines, ice breakers, brizzlehounds. So I do a LOT of research. Not necessarily at the beginning of the process, because it’s no use spending hours researching something that I might cut out in a later draft. But somewhere along the way, I need to find out the details of whatever it is I’m writing about.

And not just the technical details about wind turbines and dive wheels. Researching sense details is just as important, if not more so. What does it feel like to crawl through long grass? What do the iron steps of a ship’s engine room sound like under my feet? What does wind feel like on my face, and hail and sleet?

This past week my research has led me towards quills. So I made one out of a magpie feather and practised writing with it. It was harder than I expected, and messier. Someone who used them regularly would probably be a lot neater, but that’s fine, because Duckling has never used one before either.

The ingredients of a novel

Things have changed with the first draft of the Accidental Bodyguards this last week. Up until now I’ve been writing it in a scattered sort of way, working on scenes here and there, and hoping they’d end up fitting together at some point. I didn’t really know why I was doing it – it just seemed to be the only way I could write this particular story.

Now I’ve realised what the problem was. (At least, I think I have. I might realise something completely different next week.)

It’s all to do with ingredients. Up until now, I knew certain things about the world of the Bodyguards, but I didn’t know enough. That’s why, whenever I tried to write the story in sequence, everything seemed blah. Boring. Bland. So the scattergun thing was an exploration, a way of casting my net (lots of mixed metaphors here) far and wide until I caught whatever it was I needed to catch.

At the beginning of last week, I caught it.

It wasn’t anything huge, just an idea that clicked beautifully with a whole lot of other stuff, as well as making life much more difficult for the characters. But it seems to have been the final ingredient that I needed, because all week I’ve been writing in sequence and things are starting to make sense at last. And the ‘guff’ scenes, the ones where nothing changes, are falling away with a pathetic whimper that is not at all hard to ignore. And the strong scenes, where something definitely changes, are multiplying.

Slowly.

Meanwhile, Allen & Unwin are planning to re-release the Hidden series with a new cover design. I’ve always loved the original Australian covers, but it’s also exciting when a series gets a whole new look, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

It’s still in the very early stages, but because people are always fascinated by the cover design process, they’re going to do a series of blog posts about it over the next few months. I’ll share them when I get them – I’m fascinated too!

 

No two books are written the same way

You’d think I’d have learned this by now, after seven novels and two completed trilogies. But I still struggle with it every time. I can’t help looking for those sensible rules that will lay the process out step by step, so that all I have to do is fill in the boxes.

Except that would be really boring after the first couple of books, and the result would be boring too, so I guess it’s just as well things are the way they are.

I’m not saying everything’s completely different with each book. There are certain parts that stay reliably the same – the self-doubt is one of them.

This current book, which aims to be the first in the Bodyguards series, is refusing to be written in sequence. I’m not sure why, but every time I try to do it in sensible steps, from one scene to the next, the whole thing gets stuck. So now I’m just plucking scenes out of mid-air and writing them, and that seems to be working fairly well.

At some point I’m going to have to put them together, of course, not to mention filling in the holes and fixing all the contradictions that are building up. But for now it’s keeping me happy and the word count is growing apace. And as long as I keep calling it a pre-natal or experimental draft I don’t have to worry about the fact that it’s an awful mess.

I think most of it is to do with finding the story. I mean, I do start with a story in my head, and a fairly detailed plot. But it’s not necessarily the right story or the right plot. Because this is the first book with these characters and this setting, I’m discovering things as I write, and the things I discover next week will affect the things I wrote last week. There’s already a completely new character, Arms-mistress Krieg, who I wasn’t expecting at all but who is turning out to be rather important.

And one of the characters from The Keepers also seems to want to play a major part in the story.

So, what I’m really trying to say is, I have no idea what I’m doing from one day to the next, but it’s fun so I’ll keep doing it for now.

Getting stuck. Again.

Starting a new series is hellish. No, hang on, that’s not quite right. Starting a new series is exciting – and hellish. There are too many possibilities, that’s the trouble, and for every decision I make, something is both gained and lost. And the lost bits sit on the pages of my notebook gazing up at me like a heartbroken puppy and saying, ‘Are you sure you don’t want me? Really?’

But these decisions have to be made. And sometimes they’re the wrong ones …

I got stuck last week. Horribly impossibly stuck. I’d sit down to write and creak out about five words – then start to doubt them. Aaaaargh! Such a horrible state of mind. I remember it from when I started the Hidden series – the agony of it, the stumbling around for the real story, the uncertainty, the stuckness. I’m beginning to think it’s a necessary part of starting a new series.

Anyway, last week I got to the point where I just stopped trying and gave myself the rest of the week off. Which was clearly the right thing to do, because yesterday morning new ideas started to sidle into my mind – ideas that made sense of the things that had been bugging me. So I’ve been taking notes all weekend, going for walks with bits of scrap paper and a pencil, waking up in the middle of the night and fumbling for the notebook I keep beside the bed – and hopefully the stuckness is gone.

Today I’m going to make some notes on what people want. Tomorrow I’m going to replot. See where it takes me. Fingers crossed. I’m liking the fact that I don’t yet have a contract for this series. Makes all this messing around not quite so fraught.

Tomorrow …

Happy New Year, my dears! I hope 2016 has started off well for you, and that you have interesting and exciting plans for the months ahead. Or the day ahead. *ahem*

Because of course tomorrow (Jan 4th) is publication day in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a bit hard to have a grand fanfare at this time of year, because the trumpeter is still sleeping off her New Year’s haggis, and the rest of the brass band disappeared some time in the early hours of January 1st, dancing off into the distance behind a troupe of performing monkeys. So you will just have to imagine the fanfare – and the red velvet curtains slowly sliding open – and the gasps of astonishment from the watching crowd –

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Fetcher’s Song, the final book in the Hidden series. Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

Did I say it felt odd having a book out at this time of year? I’ve barely recovered from the haggis and the monkeys myself, and am still eating leftover Christmas chocolates. But tomorrow I shall gird my loins, drive into town and talk to Ryk Goddard on ABC radio about the new book. The program is called National Afternoons, which suggests it’s going nationally. But it’s on your local ABC. If that makes sense. Just after 1.00.

Then, next Sunday, I’ll be signing books at the Hobart Bookshop.

So if you’re in Hobart or nearby, come along and say hello.

What else is happening in January? Well, I’m swimming a lot. Gardening. Trying to persuade Clara that her eggs really work better if she puts shells on them. Bottling apricots and whatever else is around. Walking on the beach. Reading. (I don’t really need to say that, do I? It goes without question, like ‘breathing’.) Visiting friends. And getting back into the new series, which has had some interesting developments (in my head) since I last worked on it.

Current Aus/NZ timeline for the first book in the new series is that I hand it in October 2016, and it comes out October 2017. So there’s going to be quite a gap between the end of the current series and the beginning of the next one. And the timeline may change, of course – it’s not formalised yet. But it’s nice knowing I’ve got a big chunk of time between now and October to work on it. Short deadlines make me nervous, which doesn’t help the writing one bit. But October – phooey – I can’t even see it from here.

Counting down to ‘Fetcher’s Song’

I just checked the calendar, and the release date for Fetcher (January 4th) is two weeks and one day away! Usually by this time of the year it’s all done and dusted – we’ve had the big launch and I’m starting to get feedback from readers – so this feels really odd.

Because of the timing (Tasmania pretty much closes down for all of January), we’re not having a launch this year. Instead, I’m going to sit in my favourite bookshop for a couple of hours on the afternoon of Sunday 10th January and sign books. And chat to whoever comes to visit. (And read and eat chocolate if no one comes.)

The thing about the launches is, they are huge fun, but they’re also an enormous amount of work and I never get the chance to actually talk to people. I’m too busy making sure things happen when they’re supposed to, making speeches, trying to stop Chief Engineer Albie kidnapping my guests, etc. So I really like the idea of being able to just sit and talk to whoever comes, without any great pressure.

And of course now (because my author copies arrived a couple of weeks ago) I have TWO WHOLE SERIES finished. I feel very odd when I look at my bookshelves and see them there – odd but deeply satisfied. Sometimes I imagine holding them up in front of my eleven-year-old self and saying, ‘See? This is what you’re going to do.’ (My eleven-year-old self is VERY impressed.)

When I visit schools, one of the things I talk about is how writing a novel is a bit like doing a jigsaw – except there’s no picture on the box and you have to go out and find all the pieces in obscure and difficult places. Well, this week just past, I found a new piece of the jigsaw for the Bodyguard series. It’s a big piece too, that changes everything – in a really good way. So I’m feeling quietly excited, and looking forward to seeing how this works out in the story.

But for now – Merry Christmas to you all! I hope you have a joyous time, wherever you are, and that your days are filled with love, good books, good friends and wild flights of imagination. Merry Christmas from Harry to all the cats and dogs and guinea pigs, as well!

xxxxxx