Tracey Sinclair's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

One of the things all writers get used to is rejection; but in today's digital world, you need a thicker skin than ever.

Here's a post I did for Strictly Writing on coping with criticism...

http://strictlywriting.blogspot.de/20...

One of the things all writers get used to is rejection; but in today's digital world, you need a thicker skin than ever.

Here's a post I did for Strictly Writing on coping with criticism...

http://strictlywriting.blogspot.de/20...

I'm a huge fan of blogging, and a keen blogger myself, but in my latest post for Strictly Writing, I look at whether getting the blogging habit is always a good thing for would-be writers...

http://strictlywriting.blogspot.co.uk...

The lovely site LovLivLifeReviews were kind enough to host a guest post on what you need to think about if you're writing urban fantasy, and also gave me a lovely review of Dark Dates - so a big thank you to them!

http://www.lovlivlifereviews.com/2012...

Writing a sequel isn't the same as just writing a novel, there are different issues to consider and different problems to solve. Here are some tips that I learned - often painfully - when working on Wolf Night.

http://www.blog.kybunnies.com/top-tip...

Something I wrote: http://strictlywriting.blogspot.co.uk...

While there are many upsides to being a freelancer – I am writing this in my living room, with the sunshine pouring through open balcony doors, so I don’t expect anyone to be crying salty tears on my behalf – the downside is that, when you’re not busy, it’s easy to give into The Fear that you will never be busy again, that this lull in your schedule is only the first in many, and you will soon find yourself struggling to pay bills. It’s particularly pernicious at this time of year, when you know that you could, if you wanted, treat any downtime as a holiday – after all, it’s summer! Everyone deserves a holiday! But then the Fear reminds you that when you are being bombarded with images of your friends gallivanting off to glamorous locations, they are still getting paid while they do so.

My own business – tied as it is to the deadlines of the legal directories – is particularly susceptible to the summer lull. Last year I barely noticed, since I was full in the throes of my Year From Hell, and my attention was tied up with sorting out my mother’s estate and the endless red tape that involved, and finding somewhere to stay from one week to the next while I was house hunting. Since the one upside of having nowhere to live is you don’t pay any rent, I was able to survive on whatever work I could squeeze in around these two exhausting responsibilities, and even managed to use my time creatively, resulting in my last book, the novella / long short story A Vampire in Edinburgh.

This year, when I actually do have to pay rent and can’t just rely on the other people’s larders for my food, the summer slump seems a far more terrifying prospect, but it’s also one I am determined to utilise properly. I’ve built up my repertoire over the past year, and expanded my client base, so am planning to use the summer to see if I can build on both my range of products and expand my international client base, so that I can balance my schedule more throughout the year. I am continuing my project of getting my books into print (A Vampire in Edinburgh and Other Stories is now available in paperback), I have another novel coming out over the summer and I have a Dark Dates sequel in the works. But I’m also trying to accept that my chosen career will always have fallow seasons, and I need to work with that, not rail against it. I’ve always been terrible at taking holidays – even when I worked in an office, I found it impossible to switch off my BlackBerry. Now, though, I have realised that while that most elusive of things, ‘work-life balance’ is impossible to achieve on a day-to-day basis in my life (when I am busy, I am 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week busy), I can balance out that hectic period with a calmer, more restful season, when instead of fretting about what isn’t happening, I should be taking advantage of the slower pace to tend to all those things that necessarily get pushed aside when work is at full tilt.

Last year, I spent months trying to get my home by the sea – and now I have one, maybe this is the summer I learn to enjoy it.

When I first started writing fiction, it was with a definite ‘literary’ slant. Although I did get a few short stories published in women’s magazines (a market I would heartily recommend, since they actually pay far better than most literary mags), my first book and collection of short stories fit most comfortably in that most vague of categories, which tends to be a catch all for any fiction that isn’t obviously genre-based or mass market.
However, having mysteriously having failed to win the attention of the Booker judges (I know – outrageous!), when I came to write my next book, I fancied a change. As a big reader of genre fiction, I was frustrated at the direction urban fantasy seemed to be taking post-Twilight (ie, drippy, moping women) and wanted to create the kind of book I, as a fan, wanted to read. The result was Dark Dates, and I was thrilled with the positive reception the book – and its follow ups – got from readers who seemed to feel the same way I did!

So it may seem somewhat perverse to be switching genres again, this time publishing what can only be described as a chick lit book. But in some ways it’s for the same reason. Although I can’t stand those snooty critics who loudly decry romance novels as trash (often with an unpleasant tinge of thinly-veiled sexism – look at all those silly women with their silly books!), I did find I was increasingly annoyed by the genre. There are some really talented women putting out immensely readable novels in this field (and writing something that’s easy to read is actually bloody hard) but I got fed up with the same tropes: of the fact that the action almost exclusively seems to take place in London, Paris or New York and involve women who have (or miraculously obtain) jobs in impossibly glamorous professions being wooed by fantastically rich men. There’s a place for fantasy and wish-fulfillment in fiction, obviously (and I have devoured enough of these books myself to recognise how much fun they can be), but as a pasty Northerner who has never had a remotely glamorous job, I would occasionally like something I can relate to.

There’s also, sometimes, a lack of emotional truth in romance books that disappoints me. It’s fun to envision all single women as floating around like Carrie Bradshaw with a plethora of dates – even if they are ultimately unsuitable – but how many single women really have that experience, especially once you hit your thirties and all your friends are married and staying in at weekends? My favourite writers are the ones who address the reality that being single can, in fact, be extremely lonely and boring and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. It’s not anti-feminist to suggest that a lot of single women don’t actually want to be single, and don’t spend their lives in a blissful, giggling frenzy of shopping and cocktails. One of my favourite rom-coms is While You Were Sleeping, because you get a real sense of how properly lonely Sandra Bullock’s character is, which is surprisingly rare: it’s funny that even in a genre that is all about finding love, it’s still taboo to admit that being without it can make you miserable.

So – that’s what I wrote my book about. I wanted to make it funny, I wanted it to feature hot men (because who can resist a hot man?), but I also wanted to write about life as I knew it could be as a single woman who has almost given up on love, or at least worries sometimes that it has given up on her. A woman dealing with the same daily grind most of us face, and a job she only sort of likes, who won’t wake up one day and find an email inviting her to be a columnist for Vogue. A woman, in short, like you or me. Only with a hotter boyfriend, because there are some tropes I’m not willing to abandon for the sake of realism…

So please do check out Bridesmaid Blues and let me know what you think

One of the criticisms of the digital book market is that it puts pressure on authors to constantly churn out new material: that on top of the ‘book a year’ demands of mainstream publishers, authors are now expected to produce digital-only short stories to keep their profile high and, of course, bring in extra income. (Although these are generally priced very low, for writers as popular as Tess Gerritsen and Lee Child – both of whom have successfully embraced this model – a lot of 99p sales soon add up). Short stories are now often used as ‘promos’ for new novels, either priced low or given away free in the weeks before a novel is published (a strategy used by Marcia Clark, for her Rachel Knight novels).

My reaction to this trend – both as a fan and a writer – is a positive one, and I must admit my sympathy for those professional writers complaining about this ‘punishing’ regime is, well, zero. For a start, it’s not exactly new: most novelists will regularly produce content for magazines and anthologies (just look at the Terry Pratchett book, A Blink of the Screen, a collection of his writings that brings together pieces from a surprisingly diverse range of sources). While some writers eventually have enough of this material to be compiled into standalone publications (Kelley Armstrong and Jim Butcher being good examples of this), often this isn’t the case, and fans either have to shell out for anthologies they may not be that interested in or simply miss out on stories by their favourite authors.

Digital has changed all that. New stories can be released as standalone pieces, and old stories that would have been buried in the archives of long-defunct magazines and publishers are now getting new life as digital-only releases. I was recently delighted when I discovered that the Lawrence Block’s ‘Burglar’ series – which the author stopped writing years ago – had a whole series of related short stories that had been published in print magazines over the years now all made available for less than a quid.

As an author, I have also enthusiastically embraced the trend. I had always planned to put out one Dark Dates book a year, but in the gap between the novels, when a couple of ideas for stories occurred to me, I published them as standalone stories. The benefits were multiple: readers got a chance to catch up with characters they had already become fond of, sometimes in very different settings that those of the novel; it was an opportunity to explore relationships that weren’t filtered through the subjective lens of Dark Dates’ first person narrator, Cass, and it helped create a steady stream of reviews and interactions, which helped feed the promotional machine which is so much part of today’s indie publishing world. Later, such a mechanism provided a useful stopgap when I realised I was behind on my schedule: last year a series of personal catastrophes meant I knew there was no way I would get another full length novel out on time, so I wrote a longer short story to, hopefully, keep readers interested in the interim between books.

Planning to do this? Here are some things I have learned...

Short, but not too short: If you’re selling a story as a standalone, it needs to be a reasonable length so buyers don’t feel shortchanged: if it’s only 1,000-3,000 words of so you may be better off just putting it on your website or as a blog post.

Expand your world: If you’re writing as part of a series, this is your chance to really have some fun with the world you created. Write about side characters, delve into backstories, play with perspective (Jim Butcher has done this well: his Dresden Files story narrated by Harry’s brother, Thomas, is a great twist on his usual style and we get the fun of seeing a narrator through someone else’s eyes).

Price it low: Even very successful authors can’t really charge more than a couple of quid for a short story, so you’re best keeping your price point low. If you’re publishing on Kindle, consider doing a free promotion to get attention for your other books.

Have realistic expectations: Lots of people don’t like short stories, and even when they do, reviews can be less enthusiastic than those for a full length piece. Don’t get hung up on this, or it’ll put you off!

Compile them! Once you have a few standalones, you can put these together as one product – this is particularly useful if you’re moving from digital to print. I did this with my three short stories (admittedly, one of these was more of a novella, so combined the book was a decent length) and it was well-received by readers who prefer print books.

Ah, the heady feel of a new year, when you can leave all of last year’s mistakes behind you and emerge as some shiny, productive, improved version of yourself. At least until the second week in January, when it all seems a bit too much like hard work, the weather is bloody miserable, your next holiday is months away and what was wrong with the old you, anyway? So while I couldn’t resist the urge to add to the cacophony of New Year’s Resolution pieces, I hope at least these are some tips that will last you through the year…

Read lots, do little

This time of year you can find a million pieces of advice online about making this the year you write that novel, finish that screenplay, Become A Writer or whatever, and lots of that advice is really useful. But not all of it will work for you – and nothing will crash your good intentions faster than trying to implement a rigorous schedule of multiple new habits all at once. Pick a few small changes to start with – you’re more likely to stick with them and see results. You can always add more later.

Pick the bits that work…

Just because a whole programme or course doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t mean it’s useless. I’ve done The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron several times during my life, and always find it a useful jumpstart to stalled creativity. But I’ve never managed to complete the ‘no reading’ part of it successfully and one of the main components, the morning pages (where you journal at the very start of your day), has never worked for me. While I have learned that journaling is a useful tool, I’ve also realised that, as a chronic insomniac, an extra half hour in bed does me more good than any early morning creative exercises.

But be open to what that might be...

One of the reasons I like books about writing is they often throw up ideas or exercises that I wouldn’t ever think of – and, more than that, that I would normally run a mile from doing. But while you ultimately need to find techniques and habits that suit you, it’s worth at least trying things that might not initially appeal, whether it’s reading your work aloud, or going on an ‘artist’s date’ – the very act of stepping outside your comfort zone can be useful in itself.

Ignore any rules about ‘real writers’

‘Real writers write every day’ is probably the most common, but these come in many hues. ‘Real writers can’t stop writing’, ‘real writers will always find time to write’, blah, blah, blah. When in fact plenty of ‘real’ writers (if you are judging ‘realness’ in terms of success, which is pernicious in itself) only write for part of the year, or take long breaks between books, or find that life occasionally derails them just as much as it does other people.

Don’t wait until you have the time

All of that said, looking at my writer and would-be writer friends, I think the biggest stumbling block is the fallacy that you will be a writer one day, just not now. You’ll do that first draft when you’re on holiday, or when you take a sabbatical, or even just when work gets a bit easier. I wasted three years between books waiting for the ‘right time’: in the end, my next novel was written in 15 minute bursts, time snatched out of busy days in a demanding job. Don’t feel like writing needs a lot of time and ceremony – you really don’t need to put aside hours and hours to do it. Sure, you might benefit from doing a writer’s class or going on a writing retreat, but don’t keep waiting for the perfect set of circumstances to arrive, or you might be a year down the line and still not have written a word.

Stop being scared of the title, ‘Writer’

OK, this is a personal one to me, but it’s my own bête noire and it’s something I am determined to beat this year. Because, despite the fact that I got my first story published over 20 years ago, I have written for a dozen publications, I have won several writing competitions, have 6 books and a play under my belt and have, in one way or another, been making my living as a wordsmith for the last decade and a half, just because I’m not on the bestseller lists I shy away from the word ‘writer’. I get nervous and fumble my answers if people ask what I do, or about my books, playing it down so that they don’t think I am bragging or laying claim to a title that only belongs to more talented, more famous and more successful people. Well, in 2015: screw that. I am writer, hear me roar…

PS: I started the New Year with some exciting writer news – the lovely Zoe Cunningham is doing a one-woman show based on the Dark Dates books. I’ll be posting a Q&A with Zoe later this week, but needless to say – it’s a great start to the year!