L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 12

The Pros and Cons of Studying Writing

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I am following the careers of two emerging writers who have both gone back to studying at university in their late twenties/early thirties. I did the same thing, studying a master’s degree in writing, starting when I was twenty-seven and finishing when I was thirty. But even though they are both very vocal about writing, publishing and wanting to be writers, they aren’t studying writing. One is studying archaeology and anthropology ten years after gaining a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and the other is studying astronomy after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in criminology.

I find it curious, probably because I’m a literal kind of person. When I decided I wanted to make writing my career, I studied writing. But, of course, there are many paths that can be taken towards becoming a writer. And being a writer while having other specialist knowledge can really expand career opportunities. After all, most writers make most of their money doing things other than writing.

So should you study writing? Should you study something else? Should you study at all? Here are a few things to consider.

Pros

Various Study Options

If you want to study writing, you don’t have to dive in head first right from the start. You can dip a toe in to see if it suits you because there are a variety of levels at which to study writing including:

*Self-education (usually through book learning – buying, reading, learning and implementing the lessons learned)

*One-off lectures (writers’ groups run many of these each year and some libraries do, too)

*Short courses (each tends to focus on one small area of writing at a very basic level)

*Lower-level tertiary studies (Certificate I, II, III, IV and Diploma courses covering the basics across a variety of writing areas)

*Undergraduate degrees at university (Bachelor’s courses expanding on the basics and encompassing classical elements)

*Postgraduate degrees at university (Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma, Master’s and PhD courses that focus on cultural and critical approaches to writing)

Structure

When you study writing, you do a lot of learning by doing. With many courses, it’s expected that you are coming in fresh with little to no knowledge. With a writing course, it’s expected that you’ve been writing for many months, more likely years. The first writing course I ever studied was full of students who were already many thousands of words into writing novels. And by the end of that first year, many of those novels were finished. I’m not saying any of them were worthy of being published. But, boy, did we do an awful lot of writing.

In Novel class, we were expected to come in each week with new chapters of our works-in-progress. In Poetry class, we wrote poems every week. It was the same in every class. Before I became a full-time writer, the most prolific I ever was, the most writing I ever did, was when I was studying writing.

The classes and the work requirements provide the structure to do a lot of writing and for some people, that’s exactly the kind of help they need.

Peers

Studying writing also exposes you to a lot of other writers. You see what others are doing. You give and get feedback from both teachers and other students. You’re amongst people who understand what you are doing and why in a way that you never will be again once you’re back in the real world. You will often find a real sense of belonging.

Publication

Both of the educational institutions I studied writing at offered student publications and the first time I was published (both fiction and non-fiction) was in these. There was no money on offer and when I look back at those small press books now, there’s a sense of mild embarrassment at how raw I was (how raw we all were) but it was nevertheless a thrill. I still have those books.

Qualifications

At the end of your studies, you’ll have a piece of paper that says you’re a qualified writer. It will mean more to some people than others but it means as much as any other type of qualification. It proves you have a skill, it may help you get a job, it might help you get a bit of recognition. But hopefully what it means is that you’re coming out of your studies a better writer than when you went in.

Cons

Costs

No matter what kind of writing study you do, there will always be a cost. Self-education is, of course, the cheapest (the cost of a few books, which, considering that we are writers and also readers, we were going to spend anyway). A master’s degree is the most expensive, tens of thousands of dollars. If you make it to the PhD, you’ll get paid (a small amount) but you still have to get there and that’s usually though the expense of a master’s.

In some countries, education costs are heavily subsidised and/or offered as low interest loans to be paid back later. In others, there are no subsidies and the fees must be paid upfront, putting it out of the reach of many.

It’s an investment. Each writer needs to decide if it’s the right one for them.

Time

All study takes time. One of the drawbacks I remember during my master’s was that I eventually ran out of subjects I wanted to study and was forced to do a couple of units I had no interest in to achieve enough credits. And in some subjects that I did want to study, I had to write things I didn’t want to write. Both felt like wasted time.

Even when it doesn’t feel like wasted time, studies can still be lengthy.

No Guarantees

And then there’s the big one: no matter how much study anyone does, there are no guarantees that it will lead to anything. The goal of my study was to get better and I’ve definitely achieved that. It’s more than ten years since I finished my master’s and I’ve published four books. But I haven’t got a publishing contract and I still have to supplement my income with a non-writing job.

Still, I don’t regret either of the two writing qualifications I have. They are a very big part of the reason I’m where I am today.

There Once Was a Girl Who Looked Like a Horse…

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During the first year of my first writing course, the Novel teacher set us students an in-class assignment to pick a fellow student, write a description of them the way we would if they were a character in our book and then read it aloud. Then everyone had to try to guess which student was being described.

There were a few rules:

*Before we started, we spent an uncomfortable and lengthy minute looking around the room, deciding who to write about and absorbing as much as possible about their appearance as we could but without staring and giving away our hand before we’d even begun writing.

*After that uncomfortable and lengthy minute, we weren’t allowed to look at the person we were writing about again during the creative process in case it ruined the guessing game we were shortly about to play.

*We couldn’t write a description that was too obvious. If there was only one boy in a blue shirt, then it wasn’t going to be much of a challenge guessing who he was.

I’m not now and wasn’t then much good at memorising faces. If I am ever asked to describe a criminal after witnessing a crime, I suspect I’m going to be very close to useless. When I do describe characters in my fiction, the details are so minimal that I mostly might as well not bother. So I made a strategic decision for this particular challenge to write about myself. If I wasn’t going to be allowed to look at anyone else in the room to refresh my poor visual memory, at least I had a pretty good idea of what I looked like. And I wouldn’t be able to break the rules by looking at myself.

I don’t remember much about my description of myself apart from a strange focus on my jagged hairline. It was probably my flaw of the month. I do, however, remember that I wasn’t the only one who chose to write about me.

Another female student whose name I don’t remember and who I couldn’t pick out of a line up if I fell over her now that it’s twenty years later (remember, bad with visual details) read her description. She had written about a long, dark ponytail that resembled a tail as it swished around. She had written about my height (taller than most other women in the course) and the proud arrogance of my posture (something I no longer have, if I ever did – I thought I was just sitting there). She had written about my nose, long and prominent. And then she drew it all together by equating my appearance with a horse. A thoroughbred, she explained. But, yes, a horse.

It wasn’t my most favourite moment ever. I don’t like being the centre of attention on any occasion, let alone one that focuses on how I look. Which is probably why I still remember it two decades after it happened. Thankfully, people don’t write about me very often anymore and never in the context of my physical attributes.

Fictional characters, of course, are far less sensitive about the way they’re described. That probably has a little to do with the fact that in popular literature most of them are supermodel beautiful and a lot to do with the fact that they aren’t real people and don’t do anything that their creators don’t let them do (fan fiction notwithstanding). Few of them look like horses. Few of them have any physical flaws at all.

Descriptions of real people are usually somewhat less flattering, often because the writer is not just capturing the essence of the person but using their personal attributes as a means of attack. Donald Trump is a prime example. While I think there are many other ways of describing him that adequately portray him without referring to his appearance, the most common are related to the colour orange – “Cheeto-dusted”, “carrot cake”, “jack-o’-lantern”, “pumpkin pie”, “Oompa Loompa”, “a rapey can of Fanta”, “a huge lobster”, “a poorly-trained circus orangutan”, “watered with irradiated bat urine”. It’s all very amusing, assuming you don’t like Trump’s politics, but it’s hardly contributing anything important. So he has a bad spray tan. So what? So have a lot of people. Half of women under the age of twenty-five in the UK have a very similar skin tone. But what is it actually adding to the debate around his performance as President of the United States?

Writers need to ask themselves the same question about any descriptions of people they write, fictional or non-fictional. If you’re going to give a fictional character a bad spray tan or point out that a real-life person has one, what is it meant to say? That you want to ridicule them? That they have self-esteem issues? Or that it’s evidence of misplaced priorities? In each case, there are probably better ways of doing it.

If it sounds like my argument is based primarily on never having gotten over being compared to a horse, it isn’t. It was a lot like the time at Year 12 camp in the meals area when the principal called for “everyone at Louise’s table” to come up. I can’t remember why we were being asked to come up; what I do remember is that the only thing I could think was, “The principal knows my name.” In a class of over three hundred people, I thought I was managing to fly under the radar. Just like I thought I was managing to fly under the radar in that Novel class. In retrospect, I can see the literary merits in her description, even if I didn’t really appreciate the attention at the time.

If your description of a person is borderline character assassination or just plain mean, you’re going to have trouble. But if you can justify it on literary merits, then you’ll probably end up okay. Because the best defence against an unhappy recipient is a brilliant piece of writing.

Book Review: The Dry by Jane Harper

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This book has so many 4- and 5-star ratings on Goodreads that I was convinced there must be some sort of extraordinary twist at the end. There isn’t. It’s a well-written but averagely-plotted book. Anyone who has ever lived in a small Australian town where the landscape is brown more often than it is green will recognise the setting and the small-minded residents who think you can never be a local unless you were born there. But anyone who has ever read a crime novel will also recognise the formula. So I’m perplexed as to why there was so much hype.

The main character is Aaron Falk, an Australian Federal Police officer who is returning to the town he grew up in for the first time in decades for the funeral of his boyhood best friend, Luke Hadler, Luke’s wife, Karen, and his son, Billy. Although no one knows why, it appears that Luke has murdered his wife and son. His baby daughter, Charlotte, was spared. There was barely an investigation because it seemed like an open-and-shut double murder-suicide.

Alongside this recent crime is the narrative of a death twenty years earlier. Ellie Deacon was part of a tight-knit group that included Aaron, Luke and Gretchen Schoner. When Ellie was discovered drowned in the local river, everyone was convinced that Aaron killed her, except for Luke who gave him an alibi he hadn’t even asked for. Still, less than a month after her death, he and his father were driven out of town. They haven’t been back since.

Luke’s parents aren’t convinced of their son’s guilt and ask Aaron to look into it. He’s a specialist in following money trails, not murders, so he starts with their accounts. They’re frustratingly uninformative. But Aaron knew Luke and his gut tells him to keep looking. Along with the local police officer who was mostly shut out of the original investigation by detectives from a larger town nearby, they conduct the inquiry that should have been done in the first place.

This is the first point of frustration for readers. Because it’s a plot that relies on the police not having done their job properly so that the heroes can be parachuted in to do all the things that any competent police force would have done as a matter of protocol. It’s also a very slow burn, very subtle, so subtle that it sometimes veers into boring territory. There aren’t any car chases or shoot-outs but there’s a lot of watching CCTV footage and drinking at the pub.

It’s not the kind of whodunit that can be solved by the reader. We can only follow along as the clues are revealed one at a time. There’s also plenty of misdirection. The reveal of the perpetrator of the recent crime is as a result of some good old-fashioned paper- and phone-based police work. The solution to the historical crime is given by the dead girl herself and is only for the readers, not the characters. They will never know what happened. While it works in The Lovely Bones, it doesn’t work here. I found this revelation really annoying. It’s the kind of crime that can only be solved by the killer confessing and yet that doesn’t happen.

There are many similarities between this book and The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham but where The Dressmaker indulges in delicious Australian satire, The Dry takes itself very seriously and becomes quite stereotypical in the process. There’s also a bit of The Husband’s Secret to it but Jane Harper doesn’t yet have the touch that Liane Moriarty has.

The writing is nearly perfect but the plot is average and the characters are dull. On Goodreads, this book is now listed as Aaron Falk #1 but I can’t imagine wanting to read many more books about this character. He just isn’t interesting enough. But Jane Harper is clearly good at putting words down on the page. Now she just needs to get her plots and her characters to match her skill at writing.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 27 November 2017

Do Writers Need to Study Professional Writing Courses to Become Professionals?

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In 2007, I was studying the final subject in my master’s degree in writing at Swinburne University. The subject was The Writerly Self (don’t ask, I have no idea, not sure if I even understood exactly what the subject was about when I was studying it) and the major assessment piece was a writing journal reflecting on my development as a writer. I really didn’t want to do it. It seemed self-indulgent. It seemed like a waste of the 3,000-5,000 words required.

I proposed, was given permission for and began writing several alternatives including an article with the title, “Can Writing Be Taught?” It was and still is a question perpetually asked in relation to professional writing courses.

At the simplest level, of course writing can be taught. We teach writing to children all throughout their schooling years. But the focus of my article was going to be undergraduate and postgraduate writing studies. What better way to reflect on my development as a writer than to look into the proliferation of bachelor-, graduate certificate-, graduate diploma-, master’s- and PhD-level writing courses, their necessity and their usefulness.

It was during the time when these types of writing courses were popping up in what I described as “the most hallowed of educational institutions” and “multiplying exponentially across the world”. And the opening paragraph described “the likelihood of professional success without a university education” as “almost as remote as winning the lottery.” At the time I wrote, “many companies refuse to interview (let alone employ) candidates without tertiary level qualifications. Mathematicians, physicists and even philosophers get nowhere without at least a master’s degree and preferably a PhD. So why do the merits of studies in writing – creative or otherwise – continue to be debated with such fervour and ferocity?”

It’s funny, isn’t it, how much can change in such a short period of time. Almost as soon as I finished my course, I landed a job primarily because of my master’s degree. A decade later, there are now many companies who will interview and employ people who have never attempted tertiary studies, the reason given being that universities aren’t training people in the skills they need so companies prefer to do it themselves without their minds being polluted. And several tertiary educations have abandoned their writing courses entirely (including Holmesglen Institute of TAFE where I graduated in 1999 with my first writing qualification, an Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing).

But nobody employs writers who can’t demonstrate that they already have a high level of writing skill. This is usually demonstrated through a portfolio of writing. But a qualification is also a reasonably good sign of having some ability.

And yet the vast majority of commercially and critically successful writers – the household names of today – never found it necessary to wander down this educational path. Virginia Woolf was entirely home schooled. Ernest Hemingway refused to attend university after high school. John Grisham studied and practised law for nearly a decade before turning his attention to writing without ever feeling the need the head back to university.

But for those who know they want to write without the proof provided by years spent in a different and often unsatisfying profession, undergraduate and postgraduate studies in writing seem a clear way in. A would-be lawyer studies the law. A would-be doctor studies medicine. Why shouldn’t a would-be writer study writing?

“People often seem to think that writers should just be able to do it naturally without being taught,” says Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. “Why don’t people say this about musicians or painters or sculptors? All of us sang at some point when we were children but no one would suggest that a professional singer doesn’t need to train since they already know how to sing! I should think the same would apply to writers, yet people somehow expect writers to write well instinctively.”

In October 2005, Oxford University agreed. The renowned and respected educational institution announced the creation of a Master of Studies degree in Creative Writing. “For the first time talented creative writers will have the opportunity to study for a postgraduate qualification in their craft at Oxford University.” The press release boasted the program would be supported by “leading literary figures… prize-winning fiction writers, poets and dramatists”. They’ve maintained their faith (unlike Holmesglen Institute of TAFE) as the course is still running.

Studying at Oxford University is the pinnacle. And with only thirty places on offer for the hundreds of applicants each year, it’s not easy to achieve. Some would argue it’s entirely unnecessary. Jenny Diski, a prize-winning British writer herself, cynically describes creative writing courses as a “marvellous money-spinner for cash-strapped universities”. She continues, “The dream of the book that could be written seems to be pretty universal… It’s always been the case that people will find a way to cash in on daydreams. What’s new is that educational institutions are ripping off their students – customers, these days, like any other business.”

Here in Australia there are mixed feelings regarding the postgraduate writing courses. Literary agent Lyn Tranter once said they were “churning out people who are led to believe they are going to be published”. Fellow agent Jenny Darling agreed, complaining those employed to impart wisdom upon impressionable young (and sometimes not-so-young) minds “seem to have no idea of what’s publishable”.

Jenny Sinclair, an Australian former journalist and primarily non-fiction writer, confessed that she “enrolled in a university writing course to give a socially acceptable face” to her compulsion, even as she railed against the proliferation of “writing courses, writing workshops, writing weekends, writing holidays” and the armies of half-wit graduates.

Even I have previously commented that so many writing courses seem to be filled not with writers but hobbyists (based on my own experiences so it’s anecdotal evidence at best). Years and even decades after I first studied, I’m hard pressed to find many of my fellow students have ever been published. No, it’s not the be all and end all of being a writer but I wonder if the reason I can’t find them is because they’re still plugging away quietly somewhere or if those hobbyists gave up when they realised how hard it actually is. Certainly, there’s no evidence of them ever becoming professionals.

The truth is that it’s not a requirement to have studied a professional writing course to become a professional writer. There are just as many who do compared with those who don’t. If you have a genuine talent, then you’ll probably make it even if you don’t study.

I had a genuine talent (I’m happy enough to admit that without feeling arrogant) but I will also admit that the two writing qualifications I studied made me even better. They forced me to practise. They forced me to network. They forced me into areas of writing I would never have attempted otherwise. They gave me real knowledge about writing and editing and the publishing industry that I might have eventually figured out on my own in later decades by learning it the hard way. But I’m really glad I didn’t have to wait that long.

But that’s not to say that the same choice will be right for you. Check out next month’s post on the pros and cons of studying writing and make up your own mind.

How Much Lived Experience Do You Need to Create Diverse Characters?

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“There’s a quote from Julius Caesar at the start of Area 7. I made it up. It says fiction on the back. A lot of the books – I stopped it in Scarecrow for the sake of pace – have the prologue at the start. Advantage Press doesn’t exist. W.M. Lawry & Co. He was a cricket guy. There are gags in there if you look closely enough. But it says fiction on the back.”

Matthew Reilly in Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame by James Phelan

*****

Truth in fiction seems to be a big debate topic these days, at least some truths. Nobody seems to mind when Matthew Reilly makes things up in his books or when George Lucas writes about an epic resistance and the religion at the heart of it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But when a writer wants to explore a real race or a real culture or a real disability that they have no lived experience of in a piece of fiction, it seems to be more and more of a problem. Verisimilitude, or the ring of truth, apparently isn’t good enough anymore. Some writers of those races or cultures or with those disabilities don’t want you to read a piece of fiction informed by imagination and (hopefully) a decent chunk of research. They instead want you to read their piece of writing about the same topic (whether fictional or not) so that you can read “the truth” or at least a piece of writing informed by their truth.

I’ve heard the expression “lived experience” plenty but the first time I saw it in relation to fiction was in a review of the book Wonder by RJ Palacio. It’s the story of a boy with facial deformities who joins a mainstream school for the first time in the fifth grade after being home-schooled previously and the challenges he faces, particularly bullying. The review didn’t dwell on Palacio’s lack of lived experience in relation to facial deformities; in fact, it almost seemed more like it was just something being mentioned in passing. But it gave me pause.

Why? Because the writer is also an adult female but there was no mention of her lack of lived experience as a male child. Why then, in a piece of fiction, which is by definition entirely made up, was the writer’s lack of shared characteristics with one of her characters worth mentioning?

I’ve written books with characters who are kidnapped, who get shot, who lose their memories and who are home-schooled, none of which has ever happened to me. They have a variety of jobs that I have never worked in including weapons designer, FBI agent, CIA agent, marine, farmer, doctor. They have a variety of medical conditions including depression, agoraphobia, amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder, none of which I suffer from. I’ve done a load of research to try to get as many of the details right as possible. Sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve failed. Some people have liked my books. Some people haven’t. But nobody has ever commented on my lack of lived experience with these things.

It seems to be different when we’re talking about lived experience of race and culture and disability, the things we are rather than the things we do. I don’t know why and possibly that’s attributable to the fact that I’m a white, able-bodied, fifth-generation (at least) Australian. My only minority status is as a woman and even I admit that being a woman in Australia is a pretty great thing. So I understand the advantages that I’ve had.

Still, could you imagine telling a man that he couldn’t write a female character? Could you imagine telling an adult they couldn’t write a child character? Could you imagine telling a human they couldn’t write an alien from outer space? Now envisage telling a disabled writer that you found their imagining of an able-bodied character offensive. It’s unthinkable. So why is the vice versa situation any different?

I think that what writers with lived experience of particular races or cultures or disabilities really find offensive is bad writing about their races and cultures and disabilities. We can all get on board with this because every writer finds bad writing offensive. But personal attachments to these things that are being poorly depicted understandably make their offence even more intense.

The problem with any type of lived experience and making any part of fiction writing contingent upon it, of course, is that it really limits the things that a writer, that any writer, can write about. And in the end it amounts to censorship.

So what should writers do? Here’s a little checklist:

*Whatever you want – it’s your right as a writer.

But if you want your writing to be respected and your mental health to survive, here’s a slightly longer additional checklist:

*Make sure the race or culture or disability you’re writing about is essential to your characterisation and your story – if it’s interchangeable, then you really need to ask yourself why you’ve chosen that race or that culture or that disability.

*Research, research, research – it’s the only way to get the facts right. And while truth will be debated until the end of time, facts are unarguable.

*Prepare for the fact that no matter how much research, how much consideration, how much sensitivity you use in your approach, there will always be some readers that just don’t like what they consider “appropriation” – it’s their right as a reader.

Why Do Some Writers Hate Adverbs?

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“The hatred of adverbs amongst writers, and specifically teachers of creative writing, has become so commonplace, so unquestioned, and so unthinking, that it ranks only with ‘show, don’t tell’ as the most ubiquitous cliché in writing advice.” Colin Dickey

*****

The thing about clichés is that many of them are accurate. It’s how they become clichés. “Show, don’t tell” is essential writing advice. It is how “He went here, he went there, he did this, he did that” becomes “The crowded train to the edge of the city was oppressive but the only alternative was to take the bus since what he was heading to was the mechanic’s workshop holding his car hostage until he paid the enormous repair bill. And the only thing he hated more than mechanics was buses.”

But the ongoing campaign against the use of all adverbs isn’t helpful at all. So whenever anyone says that writers shouldn’t use them, I want to scream, “Stop telling me what to do!” No adverbs in that sentence so they shouldn’t be too offended unless the screaming puts them off. But oops! One has snuck in. (Don’t see it? It’s the “too”.) Does that little modifier render everything I’ve written here unreadable? I don’t think so. Apparently some do. Uh oh, there’s another! (“Apparently.”)

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” said Stephen King in his book On Writing. “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’. To use an adverb this way (or almost [The Elements of Style, well known as the writers’ bible, felt the same way. It’s a lofty group of writers. But does their loftiness make them unable to be disagreed with?

Of course not. Because all parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, clauses, phrases, gerunds, objects, subjects, etc) have their place in language. If they didn’t, they would never have been invented in the first place and so widely used ever since. Much like a healthy diet that remains interesting to the eater, the key is to use everything in moderation. The fact that the above hyperbolic advice fails to recognise is that there’s a difference between the use of adverbs and the abuse of adverbs.

There is so much iconic writing we’d never have had without adverbs. A great example (and a piece of writing that breaks more than one “rule”) is “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. (Oh my goodness, it uses an adverb and splits an infinitive!) And Shakespeare was a fan of the adverb; he invented the word “ceremoniously” (and about two thousand others). I think if we put him on one side of a set of scales and put Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and the authors of The Elements of Style on the other, it would balance up fairly evenly. So there’s no consensus.

However, one area that most agree really benefits from avoiding the adverb is dialogue attribution. Why write “he said loudly” when you could write “he shouted”? Why write “she said quietly” when you could write “she murmured” or “she whispered”, depending on how quiet the volume of her speech was? Why write “they said unclearly” when you could write “they mumbled”? Thomas Jefferson said, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do” and dialogue attribution is the perfect case in point. But using an adverb can also prove this point. “Will you be there?” she asked. Is it better to answer “It is possible” or “Possibly”? Depends how big the stick up one’s ass is. Or if it’s the queen speaking. Or if your fiction is set in historical times.

There are always reasons to break the rules and since not using adverbs isn’t even a rule but a preference for some but certainly not all writers, you shouldn’t feel too bad about ignoring this advice. If removing adverbs makes your writing better, then do it. If leaving adverbs in your writing makes it stronger, then do that. The one real benefit of having this discussion is that it raises awareness. It provides writers with another way to assess their writing and possibly improve it even more. It’s why writers should never accept or dismiss any advice out of hand but give it due consideration and then make the decision that is best for them.

Book Review: Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

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Liane Moriarty is Australia’s ‘it’ author at the moment on the back of a string of terrific books and the success of the Hollywood adaptation of the New York Times bestselling Big Little Lies. And there’s a reason for that. She takes the ordinary and usually manages to make it extraordinary. But despite the readability of Moriarty’s writing, Truly Madly Guilty starts out ordinary and stays that way.

Erika and Clementine have been friends since they started high school, not because Clementine wanted to but because she was forced to by her social worker mother. Erika was awkward and quiet and usually alone in the playground and even she was surprised when Clementine sought her out that day.

Fast forward decades later. Clementine is married to Sam and has two little girls. Erika is married to Oliver and lives a streamlined, sterile, almost perfect life. Erika and Oliver need Clementine’s help to make it perfectly perfect so they invite the family over for afternoon tea. But when their neighbour, Vid, finds out about the gathering, he hijacks it and instead everybody goes to Vid and Tiffany’s house for an impromptu barbeque but not before Erika and Oliver make their huge request of Clementine. It’s a bit of a shock. And as a result, everybody is a little bit distracted and drinks a little bit too much. Then something happens that none of them can ever forget or forgive themselves for.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective and jumps backwards and forwards in time from the day of the barbeque to the present day several months later. From the point of view of wanting to keep the secret just a little bit longer, it makes sense but it does get a little confusing when from one chapter to the next it jumps to different characters and different time periods. I had to keep reminding myself that a particular chapter led on from another chapter about six chapters ago.

The standard template for Moriarty’s books is to take a bunch of ordinary suburban people, establish their ordinariness and then throw them all into a massive plot twist that takes the reader’s breath away. This book starts out that way but the twist, when it comes, isn’t massive. It’s barely a twist at all. And the characters are just a little too ordinary. They’re boring. They’re not people we really want to be reading about.

At 509 pages, the book is way too long. It takes too long to establish the characters, it takes too long to build up to the promised shocking event and then it takes too long to get to the end of the book. By about half way through I was ready for it to be over. Moriarty uses a writer’s trick that she’s used extensively before, holding back the secret from the readers that all the characters already know for no other reason than to build tension.

In this book, though, the secret isn’t much of a secret. It’s all just a lot of misplaced guilt and within four months of the event, everybody is pretty much back to the way they were before it happened. There’s some socially awkward character habits thrown in for some of the minor characters like alcoholism, hoarding, kleptomania and former embarrassing careers but the way they are used feels a lot like a missed opportunity to say something more important.

When reviewing books by authors I’ve already read, I judge them in comparison to their other works. Having read The Husband’s Secret (4 stars) and Big Little Lies (4 stars as well), Truly Madly Guilty just doesn’t live up to them. It has all the same elements but it just isn’t as good. Yet Moriarty is clearly a talented writer and people (including me) generally respond positively to what she does. This book hasn’t put me off reading more of her work and it’s not bad, it just isn’t her best.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 17 November 2017

What Happens to Your Unpublished Writing After You Die?

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In March 2015, Terry Pratchett, the British author of over seventy books and creator of the Discworld series, lost his battle with early onset Alzheimer’s. He was just sixty-six years old. In June and September 2015 respectively, The Long Utopia and The Shepherd’s Crown, his two final completed books, were published. In 2017, the manager of Pratchett’s estate used a steamroller to flatten a hard drive containing all his unpublished, incomplete works and tweeted a picture of the destroyed device. It was Pratchett’s wish fulfilled.

Pratchett’s estate and heirs were in an enviable position. With seventy-odd books already published, the royalties will be flowing in for many years to come so their decision to respect his dying wish was, it would seem, a relatively easy one.

However, it doesn’t always appear to be the case. Despite her immense success, after Virginia Andrews’s death in 1986, her estate hired a ghost writer to keep penning works in her name. Some of them were begun by Andrews but not completed before she succumbed to breast cancer at the age of sixty-three.

And seven years after the publication of his last “standalone” novel, Tom Clancy began collaborating with a variety of other authors, publishing five co-authored books. Since his death in 2013, six novels have been written using the characters he established and with his name the most prominent wording on the covers. Three more are already planned (at the time of writing). Also at the time of writing, Clancy’s widow has filed a lawsuit to have ownership of the character of Jack Ryan clarified. She believes it belongs to the estate of Tom Clancy. The personal representative of the estate disagrees.

It’s unclear whether Virginia Andrews had any preferences regarding her unfinished writing at the time of her death but Tom Clancy seems to have embraced the commercialisation of his characters and his name (even if the legalities could have been a little bit clearer).

Anne Frank is perhaps the most famous of all posthumously published writers. The writing was her own – intimately and perfectly so – but when her diary was first published in 1947, certain details and entries were omitted to avoid offending the conservative moralities of the time. These deleted components were reintroduced in subsequent editions. But Anne always intended for her diary to be read by others (although it is unlikely she suspected it would be posthumously). An entry dated 20 May 1944 noted that she had begun redrafting her diary with future readers in mind after hearing a radio broadcast in which the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science called for the preservation of ordinary documents such as diaries and letters as a testament to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation.

These are some fairly famous examples but the options for what happens to your writing after you die appear to be as follows:

*It is destroyed – this probably isn’t anyone’s first choice if you’re not Terry Pratchett. Writers work hard to put words into an order that elevates them from language to art and the idea of all that effort going to waste is generally unpalatable. (Whenever I plan what to save in the event of a house fire, it’s always cats first, hard drive containing all my back-ups second. Of course, life is what happens while you make other plans. When I did have a house fire in 2009, I saved the cats and forgot all about the hard drive. Luckily, the fire was contained to one room and didn’t get anywhere near my computer.)

*It languishes in obscurity – this probably isn’t anyone’s first choice either. The majority of people who write, just like Anne Frank, do it to be read. Languishing tends to suggest it’s ready to be read but isn’t anywhere accessible that would allow it to be.

*It is published by your family/estate – an interesting proposition. This means that someone found, read and thought your writing worthy of going to the effort of putting it out there. Sure, you won’t get final book cover approval but hopefully they’ve given your writing the respect it deserves by doing justice to the editing, designing and publishing processes. It’s what most writers dream of, dead or alive.

*It is completed and then published by your family/estate – a more problematic proposition. I’m currently 85,000 words into writing a novel with about 25,000 to go and I have no idea how I’m going to finish the book. I made some notes several years ago when I first started writing it but since then I’ve decided that I don’t like the ending I initially came up with and I’m not going to use it. But if I die before completing it, someone might find those notes and think I still intended to use those plot points. It’s also still in first draft format. Of the three books I’ve published so far, two of them were onto the third drafts when I published them and the other was on the fourth or fifth. I suspect my family/estate wouldn’t be prepared to put in another two, three or four drafts of my incomplete works because they’re not invested in my writing the way I am.

And then there’s one last option that has nothing to do with your writing and everything to do with money:

*Your family/estate slaps your name on something you had little or nothing to do with – I don’t know about you but I find this a little distressing. Either you’re forever associated with something that is simply a poor imitation or another writer who has expended time and energy writing something great is denied proper recognition for their work.

I suppose the answer is, as much as it is within your control, to write and publish as much as you can while you’re still breathing and to leave clear instructions about what you want done with your incomplete or unpublished writing when you do depart this earth. There are no guarantees, of course. But if it bothers you, remember this: you’ll be dead, unable to do anything about it and likely completely oblivious. Besides, if one of your legacies is to provide a source of income (no matter how small) to the loved ones you leave behind, it might just be worth it.

Just Write, It’ll Be Okay! (No, It Won’t – Writers for Hire Need a Brief)

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I think I’m safe enough making a general statement here: most writers would love to be in a position to simply write what they want when they want. Unfortunately, having to earn a living that lifts you above the poverty line often means writers either work a non-writing job or offer their services to write things that under normal circumstances they wouldn’t give two hoots about. Non-writing jobs result in equal parts financial independence and resentment but being a writer for hire can just as often be a minefield. There are lots of reasons for this but there’s one that has stood out for me in several writing requests and that’s being asked to write something but not being provided with a brief.

It won’t come as a shock to anyone with even a small amount of common sense but professional writers aren’t mind readers. We don’t have some sort of sixth sense that allows us to automatically know what needs to be written. So when we’re asked to write something that we aren’t specialists in or aren’t particularly interested in, we need instructions that comprise more than just one sentence.

Anyone with an interest in a positive outcome on both sides of this writing equation will understand. After all, writing is a job like any other. Would we ask a plumber to plumb but not let on which appliance needs attention? Would we ask a doctor to treat us but withhold a description of the symptoms? I suppose we could but it would be just as pointless as asking a writer to write without providing a brief.

On all of the occasions on which I’ve been asked to write something and not provided with a brief, even after requesting one, the results have been just okay. And it’s hardly surprising given how difficult it is to write well when you have no idea if you’re heading in the right writing direction.

But there’s something else that each of these experiences have had in common and that was the almost sociopathic nature of the person requesting the writing. Since I’m not a sociopath, I don’t understand the motivation of deliberately hiring someone in order to see them fail or at least not do the best they can do. But I can see now in retrospect that’s exactly the kind of people they were.

If you’re a writer for hire or thinking about offering your services as one, you should insist on a brief for any piece of writing you are asked to write and these are the things that should be included:

*The intended audience – a writer needs to know whether what they’re writing is for teenagers, CEOs, mothers, current clients, potential clients or even a general audience in order to either tailor a piece of writing or ensure it isn’t tailored in a way that will alienate one or several demographics.

*The purpose – a writer needs to know what the piece of writing is intended to achieve; it might be sales, it might be a demonstration of leadership, it might be a demonstration of knowledge but each will result in a different piece of writing.

*The topic – usually this is a given but it needs to be reasonably specific, reasonably detailed; after all, being asked to write about meat is very different to being asked to write about how to make polish sausages.

*The key points – I’m sure the process for making polish sausages is relatively simple once you know it but unless the writer for hire is also a sausage expert – and this is going to be reasonably unlikely – then the basics will need to be outlined. (At this point, it might sound like the person hiring the writer could have just written the piece themselves but the whole point is that they can’t – or at least that they can’t do it well. They might, however, have the knowledge the writer needs and part of the writing process may be conducting an informal interview in order to get it out of them.)

*The preferred writing style – the intended audience may partially dictate the preferred writing style but sometimes a client wants a corporate or conversational or academic tone that isn’t necessarily associated with the expected readers or the proposed topic, which is why it needs to be explicit.

*The length – not only does the required length of the piece of writing allow you to estimate your investment of time and quote your fee, it also prevents you from wasting your time by writing too much or embarrassing yourself by writing too little.

If any person attempting to hire a writer doesn’t know or refuses to provide the answers to all these questions, then either they aren’t ready to hire a writer or they’re one of those aforementioned sociopaths looking to waste your time and make themselves feel better by making you feel bad. Neither is the kind of client a writer for hire wants or needs.

A long time ago when I worked as an admin assistant for an accounting firm, I remember the partners talking about how they had clients who took up an inordinate amount of time but provided few financial rewards and how they had chosen not to provide accounting services to those clients anymore. I can’t imagine it’s a comfortable conversation for the about-to-be-former clients, being dumped by your accountant, but there’s a lesson to be learned from the choices those accountants made. Regardless of the industry you work in, whether it’s accounting or writing or something else entirely, everyone has the right to choose the clients they work with. And although the financial imperative sometimes makes writers think we have to take on every client who asks for our services, it’s in our best interests to vet them first, especially if it saves us from the heartbreak of working with a sociopath.

Preparing for People Who Won’t Like Your Writing (and How Not to Take It Personally)

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I’ve written before about how writers seek criticism when what they really want is praise. Who doesn’t? Everybody wants their endeavours – regardless of what those endeavours are – to be validated. But no matter how hard a writer works on a piece of writing, there will be people who won’t like it. Not necessarily because it’s bad but just because. That’s life.

A writer can solve this problem by choosing not to release their writing. But it smacks of cowardice and self-perpetuating redundancy. Most people who write want to be read. So we find the courage from somewhere while reminding ourselves that universal popularity just isn’t possible. Because for every person or book or movie or decision that seemed to have plenty of admirers, there will always be a group of people who vehemently dislike or disagree with them or it. Their dislike or disagreement may be valid. It may have carefully considered logic behind it. But it may also simply be a reflection of personal prejudices or specific preferences.

I know I’m in a very small minority of people who find Brad Pitt and Jude Law not attractive but smarmy and a little bit creepy. Possibly there’s some long repressed episode in my past that explains why. But let’s not get side tracked. Here’s a more literary example. I’m not really a fan of the Harry Potter franchise. I’ve read the first book and wasn’t inclined to read any more in the series. I’ve seen the first movie and fallen asleep multiple times trying to watch the second so I haven’t bothered with any of the others. It’s not that I hate Harry Potter. I don’t have a problem with the fact that so many other people love him. He’s just not my cup of tea. I don’t think JK Rowling would have any problems with me expressing that sentiment (and if she did, I expect her hundreds of millions of dollars in income from all the people who love Harry Potter would really help soothe any pain).

Readers aren’t under any obligation to like what a writer has written. And still it will be hard for a writer to be confronted by the evidence of this. So here are a few things to remember when it does eventually happen that might soften the blow.

Target Audiences

Certain storylines, characters, genres and styles of writing will have a clearly defined target audience. Romance is more predominantly read by women. Christian fiction is more predominantly read by Christians. Young boys are more likely to be the primary audience of books with “underpants” and “bum” in the title. So when a man reads a romance or an atheist reads Christian fiction or a thirty-something woman reads The Day My Bum Went Psycho, the likelihood is that they aren’t going to respond to it as favourably as those target audiences will.

As a writer, you will rarely know who your readers are unless they reach out to you. You’ll get a royalty statement listing the platforms you’ve been sold on and the quantities and that’s about it. It can be frustrating as hell. Even when your books are reviewed, a Goodreads or Amazon account name or a Twitter handle aren’t going to tell you much. And knowing something about the people who haven’t responded to your writing the way you had hoped they would won’t achieve anything anyway. You just have to remember that you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Genre Snobs

Whenever I review a book in a genre I don’t particularly enjoy, especially where I haven’t enjoyed that book specifically, I always start my review by stating that. I think it’s only fair to the author and other potential readers to let them know that my personal preferences may have contributed to why I feel that way. I don’t think I’m a genre snob – I read pretty much everything apart from erotica – but fantasy isn’t my favourite, I find romance a bit repetitive and steampunk a little strange. However, I still read them occasionally.

Some people, though, really don’t like reading outside of their preferred genres. And when they do, instead of being able to objectively assess what they’ve read, they can only look at it subjectively. They didn’t like it and that’s that.

Just like being read by those outside of your target audience, you’re not likely to know anything about those reading outside of their preferred genres. Perhaps your marketing was good enough to tempt them to cross the boundary, so that’s something to console yourself with. But it’s far more important to please those who like reading the genre you’re writing in.

Trolls

Once upon a time, trolls had to invest the time to write a physical letter and the money for a stamp in order to be mean. And a quick-thinking manager could weed them out before they got to the author. Now it’s as simple as opening a browser and finding a target and their abuse immediately hits home. There’s not much I can say about trolls except that they are sociopaths who don’t deserve to be acknowledged.

The best course of action is to report them to the administrators of whatever online platform they are harassing you on, block them if possible, report them to local law enforcement if it becomes threatening and move on knowing you are in some very good company. Often it’s the best and the brightest who are trolled.

Reading Your Own Reviews

A lot of famous people advocate not reading reviews for the sake of maintaining mental health. So should you? On the one hand, it’s a way of potentially improving. On the other, it could be a long dark slide into depression. It can depend on whether you take criticism well or not. It can also depend on whether you can differentiate between what should be taken on board and what should be ignored entirely. (Most platforms like Goodreads and Amazon have rules about what is appropriate and mechanisms for flagging inappropriate reviews for removal. Of course, a bad review isn’t necessarily inappropriate.)

The problem with ignoring reviews is that you end up ignoring the people who liked your writing as well as those who didn’t. Maybe you can get your partner or your mum or your friend to preview them for you and help make the decision. Maybe you’re brave enough to do it on your own. Maybe you can make a “mean tweets” segment out of it.

Even if you’re determined to avoid your own reviews, it’s likely you’re going to come across them at some point so it’s best to be prepared. Take the fawning adoration as well as the bitter hatred with a grain of salt and focus on the thoughtful reviews that fall somewhere in the middle. But don’t take any of them – good or bad – to heart.

*****

The most important thing to remember is that you are not your writing. Yes, your writing is intrinsically linked with who you are, it’s great when it is liked and it sucks when it isn’t. But there is no correlation between talent (or a lack thereof) and your worth as a person. Reviews and reactions from the general public should recognise this, too. If they don’t, this says more about them than it does about you. And if you can manage not to take it personally, you’ll go a lot further with your writing than somebody who lives and dies with every reaction from the reading public.