Alison Ripley Cubitt's Blog, page 14

Series 3 The Killing – Plot Tension

If you haven’t seen Episodes 5 and 6 of Season 3 of Danish noir series The Killing– look away now.  I don’t want to spoil it for you.  If you aren’t planning on watching or have caught up – the storylines in this series, which I’ll call the A, B and C stories are: the kidnap of a little girl, a prime minister seeking re-election and the relationships within the police force.  It is the latter that I want to focus upon – particularly the relationship triangle of Sarah Lund and Mathias Borch – a former colleague and love interest when they were training at the police academy. Borch is now a senior officer with special branch in their national security division.  The third character in the triangle is newly minted CID officer Asbjørn Juncker.

In Episode 6 Lund lets her guard down and risks putting the operation in jeapordy by getting far too close to Borch.  While her heart is ruling her head, Juncker sows the seeds of doubt in Lund’s mind.  He warns her that Borch questioned a suspect earlier and pumped him for information – and Lund can’t help but question what Borch knows about the murder of a young teenage girl some years before.  The two cases are linked as the kidnapper had family ties to the murdered teenage girl.

What is Borch trying to hide?  There’s a moment in the episode where Lund seems to be asking herself whether there is any possibility that Borch may have killed that first girl – or alternatively be covering up for the killer.  Juncker calls Lund on her phone to warn her as he seems convinced that Borch does know more about the first murder than hes letting on.

Lund though faces the problem head on and demands answers from Borch – about what he does know about the first murder.  Borch turns it into a domestic and accuses Lund of being emotionally repressed – that she just won’t let anyone get close to her.  And all the while they’re bickering like an old married couple, they seem to have forgotten that what they’re meant to be doing is trying to track a serial killer on the loose.  The serial killer hasn’t suffered from the same amnesia and the end of episode hook is that he seizes the opportunity to lock Borch and Lund inside the workshop of an abandoned shipyard in the middle of nowhere.

It would be sad for Lund if Borch did turn out to be the bad guy, the way that her police partner and love interest in Series 2 did.  It’s no wonder that Lund is such an emotional cripple. Lund is damaged goods, for sure but in her line of work the men she meets aren’t exactly well-balanced either.

What this does for the plot is to create another layer of almost unbearable tension – which only adds to the cat-and-mouse game currently being played out by the killer.  And to up the ante even further, what does Lund really know about the background of Juncker, the young detective.  What if he’s lying, trying to pin the blame on Borch.  Sadly we have t wait another nail-biting week to find out.

Just in case you were wondering how to up the tension in your thriller plot, do whatever it takes to bag yourself the box set of Series 1 or 2 and marvel at the way that series creator and lead writer Søren Sveistrup manages to so grippingly hold our attention.

Getting the thing written the NaNoWriMo way

Having just emerged from 26 days of NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month), like a mole, appearing from its burrow, blinking at what passes for sunlight at this time of the year, I’m still not sure how I managed to write 50,000 words.

You see, I am inherently lazy and lack the self-discipline that other, less work-shy novelists seem to have. You know the ones I mean – they’re on to their thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth book and from time to time, feature in the lifestyle section of the weekend newspapers. When I read a piece about the prolific Alexander McCall Smith, who, on a good day, can write 10,000 words, my first reaction, I am afraid to say is, I wish he wouldn’t! Call me shallow, but that seems to me to be super human!

I’d far rather read about a writer that faces the same struggles that I do, like Jennifer Saunders, who admitted in a piece in The Observer that she too finds that there are too many other distractions: ‘even if it is only watering the geraniums or taking the dog for a walk.’ Her solution is to keep work and home separated and has an office where she goes to write. Even if I could afford to rent one, I can’t see it working for me: I know I would invent any number of procrastinating excuses not to go there. Or, perhaps because I escaped a demanding day job in television, but I’ve always thought that the words ‘office’ and ‘creativity’ never went together.

I would be worried that when I got to my office I would feel that I was under pressure – that I had paid to rent the space and was there ‘to write.’ But what would I do if once I got there, I found I had nothing to write about? If there’s one thing I have learned from the NaNoWriMo experience it is that if you are consciously thinking about writing instead of writing, trying to squeeze out the words is exquisite torture.

On those (rare) days where I was able to somehow transport myself into that trance-like state where the words just seemed to flow, where once I would have knocked off when I’d reached that day’s target, I kept going for as long as the zen-like state lasted. “Just another 100 words’ became my mantra. And the funny thing is, if you do it for long enough, soon 100 words turns into 1000 and before you know it, you are one step closer to the finish line.

On the bad days, when I wasn’t able to shut out the rest of the world, I would cheer myself up by planning all the things I would do once I’d hit my target – even if they were as banal as taking the car to the car wash. In a previous post I told you that it was the first weekend where I really struggled. I did manage to tell that negative voice in my head to shut up and go away and did manage to increase my word count target – to 2000 words a day. I wrote when I was tired; I wrote with a fuzzy head; I wrote with tennis elbow; I wrote with a cold; I wrote in my office at home; I wrote on the train; I wrote on the sofa; I wrote on the kitchen table; I even wrote in a spare ten minutes in the changing rooms at the gym.

Yet here I am, 26 days later, still none the wiser on why, on some days it’s a joy to write when on others, it’s as though the words were stuck together with treacle and I had to laboriously lift each letter out, one by one and rearrange them. One thing’s for sure, if I ever do unlock the secret of achieving that zen-like state of mind, where writing, rather than procrastination gets done, I’ll bottle it and sell it!

I decided to tell others that I was taking part in NaNoWriMo, in the way that someone taking part in a marathon might do. It’s a good trick, as when you do that, getting to the finish line becomes a matter of pride. You could argue that the fear of looking foolish is essentially a negative motivating force but, negative or not, it worked for me. And the other external motivators were very simple ones: the NaNoWriMo word count and the end of November deadline. And for no other reason than I had a lot on, I decided that instead of the end of November, I would try to finish by the middle of the third week.

So to sum up – my advice to anyone who wants to get anything done – whether that is writing a novel, screenplay, report, or even painting your house, and that is to give yourself external motivators: Tell everyone you are doing it and to give yourself a deadline.

By the way, if you have any other tips on how to get more done – whether it’s writing related or not, I’d love to hear them!

What I’m Working on Now – The Next Big Thing: Blog Circle

18.11.12

By Alison Ripley Cubitt, co-writing as Lambert Nagle

It’s day 18 of NaNoWriMo.  There are ten left to go.  Although I’m not writing at the Overlook Hotel and therefore not yet at the stage of Jack in The Shining, typing: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again, I’m not all that far off!

So I was very pleased when fellow author Sharon Robards, http://sharonrobards.blogspot.com.au was kind enough to tag me in the online game, The Next Big Thing:  a blog circle where writers get the chance to let the world know about their current works in progress/what they’re currently working on now.  So here it is:

Next Big Thing:

 

What is the working title of your book?

Nighthawks

 

What genre does your book fall under?

Conspiracy thriller

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a film version of your book?

Irish actor Colin Farrell as the protagonist and British actress Romola Garai as the antagonist.  She was the young Briony Tallis in the Oscar nominated film, Atonement and is currently starring in the BBC drama, The Hour.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Whoever said crime doesn’t pay can’t have been doing it right.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s still very early days for Nighthawks. It won’t be sent out to agents until it has had input from beta readers and been copy edited and polished to perfection. Writing a book is relatively easy, writing a good one is hard!

The advice we received from a leading U.K. agent who read the manuscript of our debut indie-published political thriller, Revolution Earth,told us that it’s an even harder sell now to the big six publishers (five since the Random House-Penguin merger.)  One of the things we learnt from our first novel was that what we thought was ‘finished’, in needed considerable refining and polishing.  I come from a screenwriting background and I’m used to re-writing. Screenplays are made in the re-write and can go through umpteen drafts.  I feel the same way about the novels we write.  It might seem like a huge amount of thankless hard work, but in the end, submitting work too early does you no favours.  A first novel has to be exceptionally well-written in order to be taken up by a U.K. agent, given the recent changes in the publishing industry. But the good news is that the agent who gave us this advice has invited us to submit Nighthawks.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am hoping it will be completed in a year and the rewrites and edits will take another year.  Revolution Earth took six years to write but that was because we moved house four times and country twice.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m talking up our book here but a novel we would love to emulate is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A trip to Rome where we were the victims of two scams, one of which was so clever I couldn’t help but admire the blatant cheek of it. You’ll have to wait for the novel to find out what it is….

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Pity the poor cop up against a criminal in Italy.  Poorly paid (compared with the criminal fraternity), the Italian police officer will have spent years gathering evidence only to see the case dragged out in the courts for so long that the case is dismissed.  And the bad guy is free to enjoy his big house, his pool and drive around in his Maserati.

If you want to be tagged to join in the game, it’s not too late to play!

Message for the tagged authors and interested others:

Your post should be up by Tuesday of next week–(11/20) Tuesday 20th November.  I hope you all have fun with this, and thanks for joining me.  I’ve pasted the “rules” below: Please tune into these blogs the week of November Tuesday 20th and check out their posts!

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Rules of the Next Big Thing

***Use this format for your post

***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)

***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

While you’re waiting for those new posts next week, be sure to visit Sharon Robards who tagged me, as well as any other participants in The Next Big Thing.

Have questions about our current work in progress, Nighthawks?  Feel free to leave them in the comments!

Have you Tried Grammarly?

Putting Grammarly Creative to the Test

This week we were debating the pros and cons of using computerised grammar checking software when writing fiction, over on the Facebook page of ALLIA, The Alliance of Independent Authors.

One traditionally published (and award-winning) author put the first three paragraphs of her professionally proofed and copy edited novel to the test and was not impressed. So, curious to see how I would fare I did the same for the opening section of Revolution Earth.  Grammarly doesn’t like dialogue, apparently and the novelists who use it to check their work ignore anything the program suggests in relation to dialogue– unless it is to do with missed quotation marks.  The excerpt, which you’ll find at the end of this post  is purely descriptive, with no dialogue.

With the Grammarly setting on: ‘creative’ (there are five settings to choose, from ‘academic’ to ‘casual’ – whatever that is), Grammarly came up with 14 writing issues – including, wait for it, one of plagiarism!  There were three for spelling, nine for grammar and one for punctuation within a sentence. But more worringly were the 48 ‘enhancement suggestions.’

I forgot to tell you that although I may be guilty of wonky syntax and confusing modifiers, (I’m a visual thinker and that’s why I chose film to tell my first published stories), my co-writer, with 10 non-fiction academic titles published by the likes of Macmillan and MIT Press, ought to know a thing or two about how to construct a decent sentence.  And so too does our copy editor, the very thorough Mary McLaughlin of Little Red Pen who gave the first half of our manuscript a line edit.

Annoyingly, you can’t follow up Grammarly, unless you sign up to a free trial.  And so, in the interests of finding out whether or not we had indeed been guilty of stealing another writer’s work, I signed up.  Incidentally, this is rather a bold accusation – and not one to be taken lightly – but presumably, a computerised program that accuses you of copying another writer’s work can’t be challenged in court?

As far as fiction is concerned we were evenly split, with one group a fan of using Grammarly to check their work first, before it was sent off to a professional copy editor or proof reader.  One novelist in the ‘pro’ camp remarked that she had been praised by her copy editor for her ‘clean copy’ and that she had been able to off-set the annual fee of US$149 /£94 (mid-market exchange rate today) for Grammarly in return for a reduced professional copy editing fee.

For those of us, rather more circumspect about using a computer to check grammar and spelling (and a US one at that) for our fiction, we did see that Grammarly could be useful for students in their academic writing, particularly if English is not their first language or if they are dyslexic. 

Writing fiction is a painstaking business – it’s easy to do but difficult to do well and the hard bit, for me at least is the number of re-writes and the endless polishing of the prose, to make it shine.  And this is where I do question the use of grammar checking software because, surely, the final polish stage is where you eliminate all the grammar nits?  Despite the 14 issues, Revolution Earth did score 75 out of 100, which is a bit of a relief! But seriously, though, is Grammarly worth the £94 annual fee? What do you think?

Because I do a bit of proof-reading and copy editing, as well as write a blog, I am going to make the most of that free trial and test out Grammarly for non-fiction and will let you know how I go and will report back here.

The excerpt that was analysed by Grammarly:

Revolution Earth

Prelude

Kakadu, Northern Territory, Australia

The sky is immense tungsten blue. It is his ocean and he floats like a diver in its depths. He feels this land where his people have stood for four hundred centuries, the winding of the river, the rising of the cliffs, the spirits that made it, the men who inherited it, the ancestors whose bones are the dust at his feet. Stamp. He makes his mark in the sand and knows that, like every other human artefact, it will disappear in the winds of time, the endless friction of world and air, evanescent as the sound of foot on ground. Stamp. But there is something new here. An unseasonable moisture. He looks down at the sudden mud under his feet. Carefully wiping the damp from his sole on a gnarly patch of grey-green grass, he moves away with long strides that roll his hips, a man who has walked many miles in his life and knows he has many more to travel.

Chapter 1 Love Lies Bleeding

Soho, London, Tuesday, 2.45pm

There’s a cadence to riding at speed that whirs with a logic that’s half human, half clockwork. A rhythm that comes from travelling the city hour upon hour, day upon day — over broken paving, potholes, and storm drains, the trainers pushing firm in the toe-straps, a wary familiarity with every venerable cobble that bumps its way up through the tarmac into the grimy sunshine of Soho. Up from the pitted streets stir physical memories of jarring and jouncing. You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bicycle? There’s more. Things you never realised you knew, like the best route to swing across from this loose paving stone to avoid that broken drain. Your body never forgets. When those feet press down one two one two, tendon-taut memories steer the bike. Hands on the handlebars, flick of the gears, the momentary judder of chain on cogs, skitter of speed, woman, bike, world.

She is at one with herself, the exhilaration of her blood and muscle, yet intensely aware of the ever-present danger of traffic and crowds. Bone, steel, and rubber, wrapped in the punch of music that hits the same beats as the pump of blood and the jab of the down thrust, a kind of meditation undertaken at 25 miles an hour down the cluttered streets. Between the parked cars and the randomly braking vans, with oblivious citizens stepping into the road, Jonie weaves through traffic like a movie extra threads through the jungle. To ride is to be, there in the moment, alert as a bird, a still point in a turning world.

Jonie hurtles through the chaos of Soho two blocks north of Shaftesbury Avenue with the poise of a bodhisattva raised on adrenalin and rock ’n’ roll. Sinuous tracks she makes in the permanently greasy surface of London roads disappear in her wake. Her eyes are sharp to what’s coming, to the Volkswagen rocking on its clutch on the corner, the midday hen party drunks teetering on white heels, the bald guy in the parked Mazda checking his wing mirror before he throws his door open, London caught for microseconds in perfect detail in the perfect here and now. What she doesn’t see is the black Mercedes-Benz GL500 SUV that rams into her hipbone and upper thigh, throws her to the ground, splits her plastic and polystyrene helmet open, flattens the side of her head on the grey tar.

The last of her energy spins the back wheel, slower and slower. The buckled front forks have jammed the front wheel against the brake pads she had been meaning to change at lunchtime. Deeper red than wine, sticky and heavy, her blood spreads a ruby pool into the colourless oily dust, gluing her tawny hair to the ground of which, scant seconds ago, she was the speeding queen.

Think you don’t have the time to write a novel?

Think again

When you start the second novel you bring with you the determination not to repeat the same mistakes of the first. The enthusiastic, first-time novelist is so thrilled to have finally completed her labour-of-love that she remains blissfully unaware that she might be guilty of breaking any of the writing ‘rules.’  It sounds naïve, but as someone freed from the prescriptive constraints of writing screenplays, I thought that writing a novel was liberating – that you could do just about anything you liked.  I didn’t even know what ‘head-hopping’ was, or why too much narrative summary might be a problem. I knew the principles of ‘show not tell,’ – it sounds so deceptively simple in theory, but is oh so much harder to achieve in practice.

As I began to work on the writing of this new novel I was keen to do things a little differently the second time round.  Fortunately for me, just as I was starting to struggle, The Guardian published an extract from Karen Wiesner’s book, First Draft in 30 Days.  It is a schematic plan for writing a novel, with work sheets to guide you step-by-step through the process.

Although a structured method might not work for every writer, it must have worked for Wiesner: she’s had 90 books published in the past 14 years.  As someone who has taken six years to write their first novel, that seems like an incredible achievement.  I would dearly love to write more quickly and after reading through the extract from the writing book, I couldn’t help but think that Wiesner might be on to something.

I kept Wiesner’s booklet for reference, thinking that it would be useful – but I was yet to commit to such a tight writing deadline.  And then as luck would have it, I was sent a reminder email that NaNoWriMo was due to start in November and was I up to the challenge?

The NaNoWriMo challenge – in case you don’t know, is ‘thirty days (and nights) of literary abandon’ in which you are required to write 50,000 words of the first draft of a novel in the 30 days during the month of November. That works out at around 1700 words a day, every day.

Although you might be a little late now to start on NaNoWriMo – unless you can write fast, you can start the 30-day method at any time, and the worksheets can be downloaded from: guardian.co.uk/how-to-writesign-in.

I don’t mind admitting that I’ve found this first weekend a struggle. The little voice in my head kept saying, ‘come on, it’s the weekend.  Everyone needs one day off a week.’ I told that little voice to shut up and go away – for now.  So I intend, if I can, to try to write a few more words every day in the next five days and build up some ‘word credits’ so that I can stockpile them in case of a lapse in will-power over the next three weeks.

During the challenge life goes on and meals still have to be made, food has to be shopped for and houses have to be cleaned. Children, partners and pets still have to be cared for as well and even though you’d rather be writing, there’s the day job to go to.

What has impressed me most though is the dedication of so many of the NaNoWriMo challengers, who are prepared to do what it takes to get the work done, whether that means getting up long before it gets light, or burning the midnight oil.

No-one is pretending that you can write a completed novel in 30 days as the first draft, in the NaNoWriMo example, is one where no editing is done until after the challenge finishes.  You can take the competitive side of it as seriously or as lightheartedly as you like.  I like the challenge as I find that knowing that so many other people are taking part motivates me to strive that little bit harder, in the same way that a group exercise class does.

What I like too is that the 30 day time scale is relatively short and it challenges assumptions that puts off many would-be novelists, who say that they can’t possibly write a novel as they don’t have time.  What’s humbling about NaNoWriMo is that nobody else really has the time either – but instead of using that as an excuse they just get on with it.  I don’t know about you but I find that very inspiring.

A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted

Understanding the Global Financial Crisis, (GFC) courtesy of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

If there was ever an argument that the works of Shakespeare are timeless, that notion was borne out by the packed house at the National Theatre in London at Nicholas Hynter’s production of Timon of Athens.

Timon, you see, is wealthy ‘old money’ and generous to his friends, but lives way beyond his means.  He’s rather like Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey or like any other member of the ruling elite who thought that the banks would always be there to bail him out.  He’s a patron of the arts and revels in the fawning and gravitas that this confers.  His Getty-like status ensures that there’s even a Timon Room, named for him, at a major gallery.

In the 90s, Timon would have been a heartbeat away from bankruptcy, raiding the pension fund, or buying multiple houses on borrowed money, then using them like cash points in a rising property market.

And Timon, in this production is no longer of Athens, which is fair enough, as setting the play there would have implied that it was the Greek people who caused the GFC – handy if you want a scapegoat, but not entirely true. So Timon is now of the Square Mile, the West End, Mayfair and Kensington – and flashes the cash to various characters – from bestowing one with jewel’s and paying another’s dowry.  But, to parody the title of that Beatles song, Money Can’t Buy Him  Love and Timon’s world collapses when his banker buddies refuse to give him any more credit and ask for their debts to repaid.

Whether or not you buy into Timon’s downfall depends on whether you see him as a victim, or merely a fool.  One reviewer called him a cross between Robert Maxwell, Gordon Brown and ‘Fred the Shred’ Goodwin.  I’d add the Bank of England to this list.

Oh Timon, if only you’d listened to journalist Robert Peston, who warned us all back in 2006, about what would happen to those of us who borrowed when times were good, you wouldn’t have got yourself into that financial mess.  But Timon’s fall from grace is as swift as it is understandable, (and made swifter still as Hynter has edited out 250 lines from the First Folio text of 1623, which, according to the programme, ‘is not believed to be a finished script for performance.’)

Good is what I say to that, because as much as I love this play (and I do, even though it is unfinished) and I have always been prepared to forgive the last two acts, as the first half is so astonishing.  As a writer, there is plenty to learn from the play’s flaws  – it has characteristics of both tragedy and satire, but unlike other Shakesperean tragedies – we don’t really find out what befalls Timon as his death takes place off-stage and also, rather unsatisfactorily, there is no catharsis for the main character at the end.

If I’m going to spend money on a theatre ticket I prefer works that help me  try to make sense of the world I live in.  And this play, where the military invasion of Athens is replaced by a takeover by the Occupy Movement, made me question why the world’s financial markets collapsed in the way that they did.  It’s as relevant today as Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, also revived this summer, written in the wake of the Big Bang de-regulation of the financial markets during the Thatcher era.

The irony isn’t lost on me that the only reason I could get to see this play on a £12 Travelex ticket was due to the generosity of a money-changing company – as well as all the other corporate sponsors – including both Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan – the latter facing questions over its role in the Libor rate-rigging scandal.  Corporate sponsorship is nothing new – there would have been no Renaissance art were it not for the Medici family – so I’m not going to lose any sleep over which companies subsidised my ticket. Instead, I am immensely grateful that I am lucky enough to be within striking distance of the National, to take advantage of these astonishingly good value tickets.

But lest you think that the National Theatre is merely the stomping ground for the privileged, think again.  For Timon of Athens is to be recorded and transmitted as live to a cinema near you on November the 1st.  It’s a play that’s so rarely performed that this might be your only chance to see it.  If there’s one thing that we excel at in the UK, it is that, despite the recession we have a thriving theatre culture that, compared with New York or Sydney, one that won’t cost you an arm and a leg to go.  And in these gloomy economic times, that’s surely something to celebrate?

Unforgettable Characters

In the first part of the chapter on creating character, here are some tips on writing a character biography and a couple of exercises that can be done on the commute to or from work.  Let me know what you think….

Creating Unforgettable Characters

Of the last ten books you read how may plots of those books can you recall? Now try the same exercise again, only this time think back over the last few years.  What makes a novel memorable? Is it the setting, the language, the writing or because it was the most hyped book of the year? There is no doubt that it is these elements will greatly enhance your enjoyment of a book but they soon fade away once you become engrossed in a new novel.  More than likely it is the characters that stay in our minds long after we have forgotten the plot details.

Lee Hall, perhaps best known for writing Billy Elliot is adept at making young voices heard.  He created a character, a young girl with autism, who was dying. To bring such a character to an audience required a tremendous amount of highly sensitive, and I imagine, harrowing research.  Spoonface Steinberg was originally broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4.  The public response to the monologue, performed by a gifted child actor was immediate.  One lorry driver had to pull his vehicle over to the side of the road; so moved was he by what he was hearing. Other listeners reported that instead of going to work, they sat in the car park just so they could hear the end.

So how do you go about creating characters that tap into our psyche to such an extent that even grown men reach for the tissue box?

 

Building a character outline

Choose a person you know well and try to describe them. Your description might include information such as their height, age, hairstyle, or even the colour of their eyes. Then you might want to add in details about their profession, the kind of car they drive or the house they live in. This, though hardly reflects their personality and could apply to any number of people.  But then you recall a laugh or a certain mannerism or even an attitude or belief that makes that person as individual as you are.  That is, in summary how you go about creating a character.

 

People watching exercise – creating a character

Who hasn’t tried to guess what a random stranger does for a living from their appearance? Take that concept a little further with the following exercise:  It is important that the person you choose is unknown to you.  How old do you think they are? What line of work do you think they might be in? Are there any visual clues that could assist you here? Look at their clothes. What type of a house do they live in and what kind of car they drive? What are their hobbies or interests? What issues do they care about?

 

Consciously or not, our characters grow from real people we have met. That is not to say that you will base a character on any one person in particular, rather they may well be a composite, drawn from any number of people you have met.  Each social occasion you attend gives every writer the chance to observe human behaviour.  An eye for detail is important as it is the little quirks that make a character credible.

 

Character biography

If you have a great many characters in your novel, and have to write a number of character biographies, one way of livening up the process is to assume the role of the  character and that you are being asked a list of questions by an interviewer.

Here are some questions you might try:

1 As you are now

What age are you? What gender are you? Your name? What do you look like? Where do you live?

 

2 Family background

Where were you born? How many siblings do you have and what is your position (eldest, middle or youngest)  in the family you were born into? What social and economic group were you born into? What did your parents do for a living? What kind of education did you have? Were you brought up in the city, suburbia or the country? What kind of background did your parents have? Were they born in the same place or did they move here?

3 Professional life

What kind of job or career do you have? Are you happy in your work or are you planning a change?

4 Personality

Are you an ambitious person or are you the kind who is content with what they have? An adventurer or a home body? Are you a perfectionist? Introvert or extrovert? Are you someone who is able to coolly weigh up each side of an argument or are you a hothead, the type that jumps to conclusions and speaks out before thinking the matter through? What are your desirable characteristics? Loyalty, discretion? What are the undesirable ones? A poor time keeper, a complainer who enjoys moaning but who won’t do something about their problems?

5 Likes and dislikes

What drives you to distraction? What kind of hobbies and interests do you have? Are you conservative or open to change? What makes you laugh? What makes you cry?

Don’t forget that it is the attitudes, emotions and beliefs that provide us with the clues to a character’s behaviour.  Even for minor characters, their physical characteristics are less important than what they think, feel and believe.

Everything But the Girl – Review of The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

This reminds me of those thrillers that you sit through at the cinema which have such a brilliant third act that you will put up with an hour of tedium first. This vast, sprawling 750 page monster is less easy to forgive and could have done with a good edit.

For the first time ever in a Larsson book, I became disengaged at the point that it became a conspiracy thriller because to explain his theories on the Olof Palme assassination and the corruption at the heart of the Swedish security services, Larsson felt the need to introduce a seemingly endless array of characters: cops, spies, government officials and gangsters.

I don’t know about you but there comes a point in a book like this where you want to put your hand up and say, enough with the characters! I don’t know what half of them are doing here, whether they’re good or whether they’re bad, and what was their name again? And now you want to introduce more?

All I wanted to find out about was what was going to happen to a somewhat diminished human being called Lisbeth Salander. When Lisbeth finally does come back into the story that’s when the story really takes off… When Salander does reappear, she is like the Salander of the first in the series – a real, complex and dysfunctional character, unlike the cyborg of the second book.

When Mikael Blomkvist, the author’s alter-ego, has a fling with a super fit female cop, who encourages him to get out and get fit it, that’s when it feels a little sad, almost a foreshadowing of the author’s own death; as though he knew what an unhealthy lifestyle he was leading and that he really needed to do something about it.

Others have noted the rather heavy-handed one page asides about female warriors. I could have forgiven him for those, but it is the unnecessary sub-plots that I felt detracted rather than enhanced the main story. For instance, Berger’s stalker and Salander’s financial advisor, both of whom are pretty dull, and who therefore, and don’t deserve an inner life or a back story.

But these relatively minor points aside, Larsson was still one of the most original thriller voices in his all too brief life and it felt sad to say goodbye to Salander in this final instalment.

Promoting your Book

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been so absorbed with re-working my new non-fiction e-book that I have scarcely had time for much social networking but when I did finally come up for air, a blog post, written by Dean Wesley Smith, on what he refers to as bad promotion, has stirred something within me, too. Dean doesn’t pull any punches and he has strong opinions, including writing lists of DO NOTs in capital letters – something I find amusing.

Since the euphoria of the spike in sales after the KDP Select promotion has now worn off, I decided instead, to get on with the next book, heeding the advice that we hear from indie published authors who have more than one book to their names.

As well as reading Dean’s post, and in particular the advice where he says:

” DO NOT post more than once a week, at most, about your new book on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media site. All you will do is annoy your friends. And then post only if you have something interesting to report.”

This comment underscores what I’ve been observing, for some time now, that the same authors with the same books, keep popping up on the various Amazon threads that I subscribe to. I’ve been tempted to ask these authors whether or not they consider that they have had increased sales from regular postings on these forums, as I must confess that when I see the same names popping up, I not only tune out, I unsubscribe to that thread.

I think though, that if you are a newly published indie author still finding their feet, that it’s easy to get swept up in the novelty of seeing your book published and all you want to do is tell the world about it – again and again. What can happen though, is, that as you spend all your spare time marketing, if the results do not immediately match the effort, it’s easy to get downhearted.

I think too, that you have to love marketing in order to do it successfully. It’s taken me a few months to admit to myself that I don’t much enjoying pimping my book and I would much rather market a book indirectly, by writing; whether that’s a blog post or on Twitter or, working on a new book. Now that I’ve been able to admit this to myself I have become much better at juggling my writing and promoting. For a while there I was marketing 100% of the time and now, thankfully the balance has shifted to writing 95% of the time and promoting 5%. And it comes as a relief, now that my writing life is back on a more even keel.

Writing Tips for Novelists & Screenwriters

I’ve just posted the first 10,000 words of my latest e-book, a non-fiction instructional work-in-progress, called Writing Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters onto the critiquing website, Authonomy, http://authonomy.com/books/47847/writ... where I am looking for feedback and peer review.

Now that I’ve written both a novel and a number of screenplays, I realised that there are many more similarities than there are differences, particularly for writing genre fiction. I realised that the process of writing a novel as opposed to writing a screenplay is not so very different. Both require an ability to tell a story and a way to assembling the story into a particular order, in other words a plot, characters and characterisation, dialogue and above all an understanding that a first draft is not a finished product. Equally as important as the building blocks to create the work are the personal qualities needed to complete the work in the first place. A writer needs to have the ability to deal with constructive criticism and not to take this personally.

Long pitch: This is my attempt at bringing together everything I have learnt from my teaching and my own writing in the hope that you will find some of the tips and examples in this book to be useful in your fiction.

Illustrating the teaching points are examples from films and TV drama from classic screenplays such as Casablanca to modern classics such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Star Wars Episode IV and The English Patient.

There might be thousands of would-be writers out there dreaming of writing a novel or screenplay but it takes a special sort of person, like you, to see the project through to the end. This book is for you.

Alison Ripley Cubitt Winchester 2012

Your feedback needed

This is aimed at emerging writers and I’m particularly interested in receiving feedback from those of you who write genre fiction – particularly those of you that write fantasy, thrillers and romantic fiction. It is very much a work-in-progress and I know that it needs editing and that’s why I’ve chosen to ask the Authonomy community for their assistance.

List of Contents

Getting Started

Motivation and How to Keep Going

Creating Unforgettable Characters

Character Functions

The Antagonist in Fiction – Villains and Bad Guys

Dialogue

Genre Fiction – Love Stories to Mythic Storytelling

Story and Plot

Pace and Structure

Rewrites and Editing

How to Give and Receive Criticism

Troubleshooting

How to Market a Screenplay

References & Further Reading