L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 18

Developing a Genuinely Tense and Scary Scene

A few weeks ago, I woke up from a dream – more like a nightmare – frozen in place, unable to move from the fear it had evoked. And in true writer form, the first thing I thought was, “I must remember this feeling so I can put in it into a novel.”

As with all my dreams, it was fairly nonsensical. I arrived at my grandparents’ place and noticed a man standing in the street with a gun in his mouth. I went inside where my grandparents, one of my cousins and one of his daughters were unaware of what was going on outside. As I explained to my cousin what I’d seen, he went to look out the window and suddenly the man in the street noticed he had a house full of people at his mercy. He took the gun from his mouth and pointed it at the house.

We all rabbited to a bedroom at the back of the house but the hallway that runs the length of the weatherboard provided a clear view out into the street. Inexplicably, the man was suddenly on the roof of the house across the road and the gun that had been small enough to fit inside his mouth was now a bazooka that had to be carried on his shoulder. Then he was running down the driveway and had found our hiding place. There was nowhere left to run…

Thankfully, that’s when I woke up. But it had all the elements of a genuinely tense and scary scene. To frighten the pants off your readers, here are the individual components.

A Scary Villain

If you haven’t read my post on developing a genuinely scary and evil villain, go do it before continuing any further here. In a nutshell, it’s all about avoiding the clichés. But for the purposes of developing a genuinely tense and scary scene, the villain doesn’t have to be a person. It can also be a natural disaster, a man-made disaster, an animal, a robot, an alien… You get the idea.

The scare comes from the unpredictable nature of each of these things. And in the case of disasters, it also comes from the fact that it is physics and not morality (whether bad or good) that decides what happens next. Ultimately, neither an evil person, a natural or man-made disaster, an animal, a robot nor an alien can be reasoned with.

Loved Ones/Vulnerable People in Peril

It’s generally not enough for just a macho main character to be in the line of fire. After all, Chuck Norris, Lara Croft, John McClane, Ellen Ripley, The Rock – these people can all take care of themselves. But as soon as you add loved ones – wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, parents, children, pseudo-children – to the mix, it ups the ante. Because it’s one thing to take care of yourself. It’s another entirely to have to take care of yourself as well as someone or a group of someones who don’t have years of martial arts, military and/or law enforcement training.

The main character can be one of those vulnerable people in peril. Think Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett in The Net. She’s virtually a hermit, her mother doesn’t remember her, the people who do have all been murdered and the police think she’s a prostitute and car thief. Even though she’s the vulnerable one, she has to figure out a way to help herself.

Someone Challenging or Embracing the Villain Recklessly

In Die Hard, it’s the coke-snorting Ellis. In Daylight, it’s Roy Nord, the rock-climbing entrepreneur sure he can beat the collapsing Holland Tunnel. There’s always someone who thinks they can outsmart or outwit the villain. And they almost inevitably become the cautionary tale for not showing enough respect.

Whether it’s stupidity, arrogance or just showing off, it never ends well. And despite the stupidity, arrogance and showing off, it’s usually also someone we care enough about to be horrified both by the manner of their death and the reinforcement of the evilness of the villain.

A Complete Lack of Control

Regardless of the amazing skills of the people in the genuinely tense and scary situation, even they must be convinced of their inability to control or extract themselves from the situation. They must face their mortality, they must expect to die, they must make their peace with it or break down completely. In its simplest form, this is the “peeing their pants” moment.

Being Trapped

Usually, the complete lack of control is combined with being trapped. In a house, in a forest, in a prison, in a conspiracy, sometimes even a character may be trapped within themselves (catatonia). It’s the straw that breaks the trapped camel’s back.

It may also involve the villain realising they have some leverage because of the presence of loved ones and a choice between the lesser of two evils.

A Clever Solution to Escape

Unless you’re writing the next instalment in the Saw movie franchise where nobody ever seems to get away, somebody, usually the main character but sometimes an important supporting character, will come up with a solution to escape. It must seem to be almost plucked from nowhere but it must also make total sense. No deus ex machina, divine intervention endings. You’ve put your readers and your characters through hell and the payoff must be worthy of both them and you.

Some Sort of Loss Nonetheless

Regardless, there will be some sort of loss because nobody ever gets away scot-free. The loss of the reckless villain challenger doesn’t count. It has to be something or someone that when they meet their demise, the reader never saw it coming and is devastated. The end of Pitch Black starring Vin Diesel is a great example. I won’t give it away for those who haven’t seen it.

*****

If you combine all these elements with just the right amount of each, you’ll have a tense and scary scene that will leave your readers simultaneously breathless and begging for more.

How to Know If You’re a Bad Writer

Earlier this year, I posted a discussion on what to do when you’re a bad writer with a good story. PopCultureGrinch read the piece and asked a follow up: how do you know when you’re a bad writer?

I responded wittily, “There’s a reasonably famous quote that says there’s no such thing as a bad writer, only bad writing but maybe that’s just to make us all feel better about ourselves.” It’s a little ironic because in that moment, I was a bad writer. There is no such quote, at least not a famous one. I guess it’s my quote now. The quote I was actually referring to is by Oscar Wilde, who said, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Which just goes to show that being a bad writer isn’t a static state. Someone who has previously been a bad writer can become a good writer. And someone who has previously been a good writer can lapse into moments (hopefully not too many) of being a bad writer. (I hope that it’s not something I suffer from all the time and is more closely related to my laziness in confirming that the quote existed anywhere outside of my mind rather than my general ability to write.)

PopCultureGrinch also asked, “Is the quality of the writer based upon their output or their work ethic?” This is easier to answer. It’s all about output. Because you can have the worst work ethic in the world and still produce writing of quality. And you can have the greatest work ethic in the world and never produce any writing of quality if you don’t have at least a little bit of natural talent.

I think bad writing is a bit like bad art – I know it when I see it. But coming up with some generic rules to identify it is a little more complex. There’s also that pesky problem of beauty being in the eye of the beholder – that is, something that I think is bad writing might be someone else’s idea of good writing.

Here’s an example of something I think is poorly written:

“The usual ‘oohs….aahs’ of ours were obvious from the confines of our lonely 4WD parked in the middle of nowhere, with us as co-habitants in way outback. Here we were slap bang in the middle of the lowly occupied Wet Season, miles from anywhere and anyone, in total darkness and dreaming of our near departure from this Heritage Gazetted, Wilderness Park.”

Out of respect, I won’t name the writer. After all, I’m writing this post to help writers identify ways to get better at writing, not to target and ridicule those who haven’t achieved that yet.

So why is it bad writing? I think it’s because the writer is trying to write something evocative and is getting tangled up in an attempt to integrate a bunch of fancy words instead of keeping it simple. I see this a lot with people who aren’t “natural” writers. They want it to sound impressive and instead it ends up sounding nonsensical.

Let’s start with the “usual ‘oohs….aahs’ of ours”. “Oohs” and “aahs” aren’t generally usual. They’re rare. That’s what makes “oohs” and “aahs” an expression of something wonderful going on. And when the writer talks about them being “obvious”, I think what they actually meant was that the sounds stood out against the quietness of the remote location they were in. But that isn’t what was written. The “lonely 4WD parked in the middle of nowhere” is repetition. If the 4WD is lonely, the reader understands the implication that there aren’t any other cars or people around. Then “co-habitants”? Co-habiting is something you do in a house, not a car. And “in way outback” is repetition again. Awkwardly constructed repetition.

“Slap bang” is a cliché. It’s not the wet season that is “lowly occupied”, it’s the place in the wet season. After that comes the “miles from anywhere and anyone”, which is more repetition. In “total darkness”? If so, how can they see anything? And the reference to the “dreaming of our near departure” is confusing. Are they wanting to leave, which is what “dreaming” suggests? Or would they actually rather stay? Each of these individual points contributes to it being considered bad writing. Assessed as a whole, it’s extremely and unnecessarily wordy, which just adds more weight to the way the reader already feels.

(The poor punctuation and random capital letters are not evidence of bad writing, just writing that hasn’t been edited yet and there are plenty of people considered good writers who need good editors to maintain that reputation.)

It’s very difficult to recognise whether you are a bad writer by yourself. That’s usually when it’s a problem because it’s up to somebody else to tell you. Cue hurt feelings if it’s not done right. It’s strange because I know I’m not a good cook or a good artist but I don’t get upset if someone tells me so. Writing, like so many other artistic endeavours, is one of those things that everybody wants to be good at. And because most know their alphabet and the basics of construction, they think that translates into the ability to write. Unfortunately, sometimes, it doesn’t. That’s why it’s important to have honest beta readers, I guess, people who are prepared to tell us the truth about our writing, not just our mums telling us how clever we are.

However, if you’re prepared to attempt a self-assessment, here are a few things to look out for:

*Waffle – good writers get to the point.

*Ranting – good writers don’t just vent to make themselves feel better.

*Lack of research – good writers support their statements in non-fiction with facts and reasoning and their creations in fiction with authenticity that comes from having at least a vague idea of what they are talking about.

*Poor construction – good writers work hard to make their writing easy to read. (Most people won’t go to all the trouble of analysing a piece of writing to understand why it’s bad, like I did above. They will simply understand it intrinsically because poor construction makes it hard to read.)

*First drafts – good writers don’t inflict first drafts on their readers. Multiple rewrites are essential to make sure your writing is as good as it can be.

*Unwillingness to consider viewpoints other than your own – good writers understand that they are not gods, that they can’t know it all and that the viewpoints of others may be just as valid. Actually, good people in general understand this. Consider the opinions of others about your writing, even if this means playing devil’s advocate against yourself.

The most important thing to remember is that bad writers can get better. Even if a currently bad writer isn’t naturally talented, investing the time and effort in learning the basics, practising a lot, asking for feedback and acting on the advice received will really help in becoming a better writer and maybe even eventually a good writer.

Book Review: Girl in the Dark by Marion Pauw

There is a touch of The Girl on the Train in this story, unreliable witnesses, plenty of selfish motivations, interesting characters, great writing. But the plot isn’t mind-blowing and that makes it, like The Girl on the Train, another okay mystery. And there’s starting to be a very big pile of three-star books just like it. It needed a moment that punched the reader in the face unexpectedly but it just didn’t have one.

Iris is a single mother and part-time lawyer. Ray is in a hospital for the criminally insane. When Iris’s mother goes away on a holiday and asks Iris to house sit, particularly to look after the large saltwater aquarium full of fish in her home, she agrees. It takes nothing more than one of the fish dying to set the unfolding of this mystery in progress. The meticulously kept logbook of the aquarium’s conditions has the name “R. Boelens” on it and Iris’s mother’s maiden name was Boelens. Suddenly, Iris can’t rest until she knows who R. Boelens is.

It turns out he’s her much older half-brother. Convicted of murdering his attractive neighbour and her small daughter, he’s been in prison and a hospital for the criminally insane ever since. Still, Iris is intrigued, mostly because her mother never breathed a word of her brother’s existence. She goes to visit him at the hospital and offers to look into an appeal against his conviction, although mostly to find out exactly what happened. He agrees.

The chapters alternate between Ray’s viewpoint and Iris’s viewpoint and while hers are almost exclusively in the present, Ray ventures back into the past about half of the time to show us the events of his childhood and early adulthood that lead him to where he is today. It’s not a happy reflection on the treatment of those who are different.

Originally published under the name Daylight in the Netherlands, which is a reference to Ray, the English version’s title, Girl in the Dark, is a reference to Iris. Ray is a simple man. He calls himself emotionally delayed. Elsewhere he’s called autistic. He doesn’t understand feelings, not others, often not even his own. It’s almost ironic then that it was his story, told from his perspective, that I enjoyed reading the most. Iris is a little annoying and that is only offset by the waste of oxygen client she is dealing with, nicknamed Pissing Peter for gross reasons.

I did figure out who the killer was before the big reveal, mostly because it didn’t seem like there were that many genuine candidates. But it wasn’t an amazing plotline or a smart investigation that helped Iris unravel the true mystery in the end, just a ridiculous amount of persistence that eventually makes the killer decide she needs to be killed off because of how annoying she is. I almost couldn’t blame them.

Iris questions the killer relentlessly (not knowing they were the killer yet), the killer refuses to tell her anything and then right at the end the whole story comes spilling out. It’s very close to the “I’m going to die, tell me everything about your evil plan before you kill me” plea when the hero gets momentarily caught. The hero then spends the length of time it takes to tell the tale planning their escape and the villain is foiled again! Unsurprisingly.

And then there’s a Hollywood ending with a happy family playing on the beach. In the hands of someone like Minette Walters, this book could have been much better. But Marion Pauw relies a little too much on sentimentality instead of story here.

I’d still be interested to read some of her other books to see if she is able to step it up a notch. Because she’s got nearly all the ingredients to be a good, if not great, writer.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 April 2017

Why Writers Should Hire Editors

I was reading an article recently about Donald Trump that basically said the explanation for the way he behaves is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Wikipedia describes the Dunning-Kruger effect as “a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is” – which basically means that he’s so stupid, he can’t recognise his own stupidity.

Now, I’m not a fan of Donald Trump pre- or post-election but I’m also not a fan of name-calling. I didn’t finish reading the article. But I was fascinated by the idea of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the article contained a link to another article in the Pacific Standard by David Dunning of Dunning-Kruger effect fame called “We Are All Confident Idiots”.

It’s a long article but it was a terribly interesting read, basically saying that we – all of us – are so afraid of appearing stupid in relation to things we aren’t knowledgeable about that instead of admitting our ignorance, we play along and hope nobody realises we have no idea what we’re talking about. Everybody’s ignorance is about something different and even traditionally smart people can suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect – after all, nobody can know everything. Those with academic smarts often lack street smarts. Those with an aptitude for writing can struggle with mathematical concepts. The right side and the left side of the brain control different abilities and most people favour one over the other. As Dunning puts it, “Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.”

It got me thinking, particularly when I came to this: “To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent.” Dunning was simply using grammar as an example but it struck me right between the eyes. Why? Because I’ve written a lot of posts trying to offer advice for writers on how to edit their own work. I like to think I’ve been able to provide a lot of good suggestions. But those suggestions rely on a writer knowing the rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax – the things that make up language – or at least a willingness to learn them. If they don’t know these things and aren’t prepared to find out yet still try to edit their own work, then either they aren’t going to make much impact on the things that need to be edited or they could end up making their writing even worse. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. The more you try to get back to the original configuration, the worse trouble you get yourself in and the harder it seems to be.

The closer I get to middle age (and I’m much closer now than I generally like to admit), the more I realise I don’t know. I have specialist knowledge in a few areas but not nearly as many as I would like. I wish I understood cars and engines – but I don’t. I wish I was more visually artistic – but I’m not. I wish I knew the secret to great financial wealth – but it hasn’t come to me yet. It’s certainly a very different mindset from my early twenties when I was sure I was close to knowing it all.

So is it possible that my earnest endeavours to help writers become their own editors have all been for nothing? Is it possible that I’ve been asking the impossible of them? Maybe. I can’t lump all writers into one group. After all, I’m a writer but thanks to my pedantic, language-loving nature, I’m also an editor and thanks to my training, I’m qualified to give myself that title. I can’t be the only writer who has the skills to edit their own work.

But it’s also likely that writers who can edit their own (or anyone else’s) work are a limited group in the same way that writers who can market themselves are fewer and farther between than we would all like.

“How can we learn to recognize our own ignorance and misbeliefs?” Dunning asks and offers the following answer. “For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favoured conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls ‘considering the opposite’. To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure.”

The problem with this as a solution for writers is that it doesn’t help improve editing skills. If you don’t have the knowledge you need to edit, then you aren’t going to suddenly acquire it no matter how much soul-searching you do. If you don’t seek out the knowledge you are lacking and commit to learning it, then you will remain ignorant as well as ignorant of your ignorance.

Dunning recognises this. His final instruction? “Seek advice.”

I whole-heartedly agree with him. At some point, every writer should seek advice from an editor. A good editor, an ethical editor, will edit a sample chapter without charge to demonstrate their abilities. If you’re really lucky, the editor will return the sample chapter without any changes and a recommendation that you probably don’t need their help, giving you the confidence that you really can edit your own work. If it comes back with dozens and dozens of tracked changes and only once the errors are pointed out to you do you see how necessary they were, then it’s probably in your best interests to hire that editor and pay them in order to bring your work up to a publishable standard.

Yes, hiring an editor costs money, often more money than a struggling writer will have it within their means to pay. But it’s an investment in your writing. In the same way that writing courses are an investment. In the same way that a manuscript assessment is an investment. In the same way that hiring a book cover designer is an investment. Either you’re serious about your writing or you aren’t. Hiring an editor and getting the basics right shows that you’re serious. And that readers should – and can – take your writing seriously, too.

A Story about Designing a Book Cover

If you’re anything like me, when it finally comes time to design your book cover, you have a rough idea of what you want but none of the skills necessary to accomplish it. I’m lucky because I once worked with someone with a boatload of design and marketing skills and she has been my book cover designer ever since. She’s less lucky because I’m a bit of a control freak (okay, a lot of a control freak).

When I eventually finalised the manuscript for my latest book, Project January: A Sequel About Writing, I contacted her to to ask if she would do the cover for this one as well and she agreed. She had also done the cover for Project December: A Book About Writing, which looked like this:

[image error]

The photograph on the cover is a selection of books from my personal collection that I styled to look interesting. I styled and sent my designer another photograph of a different selection of my books, assuming the cover for Project January would be much the same as the cover for Project December. After all, I reasoned, when you publish a sequel, you want the two books to look like they belong next to each other on a shelf.

So I was a little bemused when this book cover draft arrived in my inbox:

[image error]

The accompanying message read, “OK, so bear with me here… I really wanted to have a stab at a different feeling cover. Something a little more modern. I have kept the typography very similar. Feel free to tell me to go shove it and stick to the original design, but just thought I would try.”

She also sent me a text message saying, “I’ve been doing some research into book cover design. I have read that strong, bold colours with contrasting graphics are good for catching the eye. And blues and blacks encourage dependability, trust, authority and intuition.”

I actually liked the alternative design and I liked the fact that she’d put so much thought and effort into it. But my designer was at somewhat of a disadvantage in that she hadn’t read the book and I hadn’t told her anything about it except that it was a sequel to my previous book, which I don’t think she read either.

I responded, “It might be a bit too bold and modern. Doesn’t really suit the whimsical, conversational nature of what will be between the covers. It looks quite legalistic, especially the anonymous books. If I had to choose between this and the original design, I’d choose the original.”

She wasn’t bothered and happily went about producing a version that matched the Project December cover. This is the ebook cover of Project January:

[image error]

And this is the paperback cover of Project January:

[image error]

Normally, that’s where the story would end. I ordered five copies of the paperback version (one for me, one for my designer as a thank you, one for my grandfather who the book is dedicated to and two for a couple of giveaways I was planning) and waited the estimated two to three weeks for them to be printed and arrive in the mail.

But when they did, they looked like this:

[image error]

In case you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong, the covers are black and white. It even took me a moment to realise they weren’t right. But when I did… arrrggghhh! When I contacted the printers, they apologised profusely and assured me this was a rare aberration and five replacement copies would be in my hands within a week via their expensive expedited shipping.

They were as good as their word. I thought they would ask me to return the defective copies but they didn’t (perhaps because the printers are all the way across the other side of the world and they didn’t want to spend any more money on books that would ultimately end up being pulped). I wondered what to do with them.

In the end, I decided to call them “collector’s editions”. I wrote pithy messages inside the front covers, autographed them and delivered them to various members of my family. One of my sisters wasn’t home when I called past so I left her copy propped up against the front door. A few days later, she called to thank me and I explained why it was a collector’s edition.

“Oh, really? I think the black-and-white cover looks fantastic!” Which makes three different preferences of three different covers from three different people.

Well, that’s my really long-winded way of getting around to a few pieces of advice when designing a cover for your book:

*When you’re ready for a book cover, find a designer whose previous work you like

*If you know what you want your cover to look like, tell the designer

*If you don’t know what you want your cover to look like, explain what the book is about and ask for a few options

*Trust your designer – if you’ve chosen a good one, then they will have good design instincts

*Ask a few family members or friends what they think about the various options the designer has provided

*It’s your book and ultimately you must be happy with the final design

*The book cover is your “Director of First Impression” – make sure it’s a good one

Memoir versus Faction versus Fiction

When I enrolled in a master’s course at university to study writing at the postgraduate level in my late twenties, it came as something of a shock to me that almost all of my fellow students were retired or much older people interested in writing just one thing: their own story. Perhaps it was my relative youth and my correlating lack of life experience that meant I didn’t really understand why. After all, nothing much had happened to me at that point. (In fact, it’s over a decade later and nothing much has happened to me even now.)

But it wasn’t just that I’d stumbled across a rare collection of people focused on telling their own stories. These people, I’ve since discovered, are everywhere. And since there are just as many – probably a lot more – people wanting to read the real life stories of others, it makes sense that so many people pursue this avenue of writing.

But it’s not just as simple as putting it all out there. Writers who want to tell their own stories have plenty to consider.

Memoir

Memoir: a record of one’s own life and experiences

In most cases, people wanting to tell their story also want the credit for it, both as the writer and as the person who has lived the events that comprise the story. It’s easier to get people to read your memoirs if you already have a profile of some sort – politician, businessperson, sportsperson – or if you’ve done something outrageous, courageous or almost unbelievable.

Most of those people in my master’s course weren’t famous. They were just ordinary, everyday people who thought their story was worthy of being told. The advent of self-publishing has certainly contributed to the ease with which people without profiles can write and produce their memoirs, although publicising the existence of the book remains a source of difficulty without a traditional publisher’s backing or some specialist marketing knowledge.

Some memoirs are written and published anonymously, usually when the exploits contain sexual elements or explorations. Writing under a pseudonym, Belle du Jour published The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl, the inspiration for the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. But it seems as though even if you do publish a memoir anonymously that readers can’t stand not knowing who the author is and do just about anything and everything to figure it out. Belle du Jour later outed herself as Brooke Magnanti, a child health scientist who supplemented her income during her doctoral studies by working as an escort, only revealing her real identity when she thought she was going to be exposed anyway.

One thing – one very important thing – to consider when writing your memoir is how much you end up revealing about the people in your life, both those close to you and those on the fringe. These people often haven’t chosen for their stories and their secrets to be revealed but in order for you to tell your story, sometimes you have to tell a part of theirs. These people may resent you for exposing them without their consent.

In 2016, I helped John “JJ” Jeffrey to write and publish his memoir, Paula & Me. In the introduction, he wrote, “Of course, the story of my life is – for the most part – the story of my life with Paula. We were married for forty-two years and together for more than forty-five…” His wife had passed away earlier that year but for those whose stories encompass people still living, their feelings about how they are represented in the story have to be a consideration. JJ partially resolved this issue by naming only family and friends and leaving anyone who may have had a problem with their inclusion unnamed.

Faction

Faction: blending fact with fiction in creative writing

This is a term I’ve only recently become familiar with from reading Glenice Whitting’s Something Missing. Glenice and I studied writing together in the late 1990s and as I was reading her latest book, I realised it was a thinly veiled story of her own life. Later, when I read an interview she’d done, she used the term “faction” to describe what she’d written.

I wondered why she didn’t just a write a memoir. Perhaps it was because she’d already established herself as a fiction writer with her first book, Pickle to Pie. Perhaps she thought her story wasn’t quite interesting enough and needed just a dash of fiction to bring it up to publishing standard. Perhaps she wanted to hide behind the altered names. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

There are a number of advantages in this type of writing. You don’t need to do a significant amount of research or creation, meaning you can really focus on writing beautiful prose. You can disguise your significant others if the inclusion of their roles in your life might cause them distress. And you don’t need to convince a publisher that you’re important enough for your story to be published because it’s ostensibly fiction, despite the number of included facts that your family and friends will recognise.

But there are also a few potential dangers in choosing to write faction. Readers who don’t know that the story is essentially the real story of the author may want to critique the plot and writers might take offence that it has been deemed lacking. After all, the “plot” is their life. Also when editors suggest changes, the author’s inclination may be to respond, “But that’s not what really happened.” It’s a valid objection in a memoir but not necessarily in a work of faction.

Faction is very popular these days, particularly using famous historical figures (although writing faction that involves others – instead of yourself – requires huge amounts of research to get the story right and to make sure the fictional components are consistent with the factual ones). But it’s always exciting, especially to me, when new types of writing come along. It just goes to show that we haven’t quite reached the point of endlessly recycling the same stories in the same ways as is sometimes alleged.

Fiction

Fiction: imaginative narrative, especially in prose form such as novels or short stories

You don’t have to be a writer or even a reader to know exactly what fiction is. It might be inspired by real life events and people but it is writing that is primarily invented, imagined, made up, not true and not intended to be taken as anything other than the work of a creative and fertile mind.

For most writers, our lives aren’t anywhere near interesting enough to commit to writing either faction or memoir so we indulge in the wonder of imagining other lives, other people, other worlds, other narratives to come up with a story. And when we do include elements from our own lives, they are usually just starting points that end up completely unrecognisable in the end. I fall into this category. And they have to be unrecognisable. I spend what feels like ninety percent of my life tapping away on a laptop and nobody in their right mind would want to spend an entire book reading about that.

For those wanting to fictionalise their life story, it usually involves sticking somewhat closely to the events as they happened but adding a lot of imaginary elements to increase the levels of excitement. It also usually means that when an editor suggests a plot change and assuming the author agrees that it makes the story better, there’s less resistance to the alteration. Comparatively anyway. When Stephen King advises you as a writer that you need to be prepared to “kill your darlings” in fiction, it’s a metaphor, not something that we’re also expected to do in faction or memoirs.

*****

I used to be very much against the idea of ordinary people writing memoirs. I thought it was self-indulgent. And I hated being forced to read them in high school (given I’m more of an action-adventure, thriller and mystery reader, it makes sense). But I’ve come to realise it’s no more self-indulgent than any other kind of writing. Me wanting to tell my fictional stories is self-indulgent. So good luck to anyone who can find an audience for anything they want to write. That’s one of the ultimate determinants of the worthiness of telling your story.

But it’s useful to consider the faction and fiction alternatives as a means of presenting your real life in writing in the same way that it’s useful to consider a screenplay as an alternative to a novel. Identifying the right format for you and your story is one of the keys to doing it justice.

Book Review: An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

I first read this book in high school because it was one of many on that year’s reading list and it was chosen by the powers that be as one of four all students in my grade would study. I didn’t have great memories of it or any memories really and having read it again, I know why: it’s one of those books that make teenagers think they hate reading when really what they hate is poorly chosen books.

An Imaginary Life is a fictionalised version of a short period in the life of Ovid, a Roman poet who was exiled from Rome in AD 8. According to a note at the back of the book from the author, very little is known about Ovid and David Malouf relied heavily on two lengthy poems the poet wrote while in exile to construct the details of the imagined story.

However, the title may also refer to a child Ovid encounters during his time in exile in the village of Tomis. He first encounters the child when he is a child himself and since almost fifty years has passed before the next encounter, it’s unclear whether it’s the same child (and therefore imaginary) or a different child who reminds him of the child from his youth. Either way, the child appears to be wild, potentially raised by wolves, and he lacks language and social skills.

Because Ovid is so consumed by the boy’s existence, he and the villagers capture the boy and take him back to their village where Ovid attempts to civilise and educate him. They get off to a rocky start. The child drinks his ink, refuses to wear clothes or eat and masturbates in full view of others as a self-soothing mechanism. Eventually they come to a silent agreement to co-exist, perhaps because they are both outsiders and the villagers trust neither of them. But when the village leader’s grandson falls sick, the superstitious villagers know exactly who to blame.

I really struggled to get through this book. It shouldn’t have been hard because it’s only 154 pages long but I fell asleep seven times while reading it. There are multiple reasons for that. The writing is flowery, unbelievably flowery – which sort of makes sense since it’s supposedly being written by a poet – but instead of coming across as poetic, it was instead slow, boring, repetitive (in both the use of specific words and descriptions of individual incidents) and, in some places, contributed to a complete lack of understanding of what was going on. There are huge amounts of description, so huge that by the time the description finished and returned to the actual story, I could barely remember what the story was and why that description had been necessary.

Ovid’s decision to capture the boy also rankled. Maybe it was a commentary on how people in authority or positions of admiration or power always think they know how others should live their lives or maybe it was a metaphor for trying to recapture a happier time in his life, but from the first moment the boy is taken against his will into the village, it’s clear that it’s a pointless exercise. The boy remains unhappy for the duration of his stay and is prevented from being who he is, simply because he is different, and the effect is to drive a further wedge between Ovid and the people of the village.

There is almost no dialogue in this book, just page after page of dense prose, and again it makes sense since Ovid doesn’t speak the language of the villagers and they don’t speak his, but it also makes for such a difficult reading experience. No breaks, no white space, no let up.

I understand why it’s the kind of book that would have been chosen for a school reading list – because it’s full of things that pretentious English teachers can ask students what the author really means underneath the veil of the flowery language – but it lacks the three basic things that readers are looking for: interesting plot, complex characters and good writing. All I can say is that I hope it’s not still being chosen for high school English classes. After all, if students are going to being studying literature to see both what’s on the surface and the hidden depths, can’t we start at the top with Shakespeare and forget these pale imitations in order to encourage them to love reading instead of scarring them for life?

In a word: tedious.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 13 February 2017

The Importance of a Searchable Platform

As much as we might like it to be otherwise, being a good writer – even being a great writer – generally isn’t enough to become a successful writer. And in this day and age, when the first instinct of many people is to Google something or someone in order to know more about them, if you aren’t on those first few pages of results, you might as well not exist at all. Unless other people are already talking about you and your writing, having a searchable platform is one of the keys to this.

When I Google my name (at the time of writing this post), six of the first page results are about me and my photo is the first image that appears. (It’s a very long way from when I used to really value being a nobody and would Google my name to make sure it didn’t appear – obviously before I began publishing my writing.) And the first two results are the two platforms on which I control my content, those being LinkedIn (where I’ve published twenty articles) and this blog (where I’ve now posted over three hundred times).

Apart from making me searchable, they also make my content searchable. Every day when I check my blog statistics, there is a fairly consistent 25% and 75% breakdown between fresh content being viewed and old content continuing to rack up new readers. It makes sense. Just because I’m ready to write and post something doesn’t mean people are ready to read it. And, after all, I do a lot of writing. I’d be very, very surprised if anyone was ever ready to sit down and read it all in one go. So it waits there on my platforms until they are.

My LinkedIn articles are a great example of this. Two of them really help to demonstrate the importance of keeping content available online. In September 2015, I published an article entitled, “Three books women in their thirties should read about misinformation, motivation and motherhood” and for reasons that have never been explained to me, it was chosen to be featured in the Professional Women feed. I’m not complaining – I have no doubt that’s the reason it garnered over 9,000 views within eight weeks of being posted. In the year since those 9,000 views, it’s had less than one view each day, which tends to confirm my suspicions about its initial popularity.

Compare that to an article I published in October 2014 called, “Nine reasons you didn’t hear back about that job application.” In the first year it was up, it had less than five hundred views. But for some reason – again I have no knowledge of why – in the second year, it has had over 4,500 views. And when I checked it today to get those figures before I wrote this post, it was still averaging over 100 new views every day. So far 5,047 people have read it and that number continues to climb – more than two years after I first wrote and published it.

I create a lot of new content every week – mostly because I don’t know how not to – but even if articles, blog posts and other shorter pieces aren’t the sort of writing you want to focus on, a searchable platform is still important. I recently helped a friend of my dad’s edit and publish his memoir and he’s admitted it’s likely it will be the only book he will ever write. Still, he recognised the importance of setting up a website so that when people go looking for it online, it won’t be an almost impossible search amongst the millions, possibly billions, of other times the words “Paula and Me” appear on other websites.

We hear a lot about the overnight successes but that’s usually because of how rare they are. For the rest of us, it can take months, years and even decades. But having a permanent platform will help you build your profile in the meantime, give you a place to publish content when you want to and make you very easy to find when the one person who wants to give you a shot at the big time finally comes looking for you.

Noah Webster and His Hainous Korus of Grotesk Syllables: How British English Became American English and the Main Differences

Noah Webster has a lot to answer for. A prolific American writer and editor, he was also dedicated to the reformation of English spelling. He compiled several dictionaries over his lifetime, including spellings that more closely matched how the words were pronounced instead of the traditional compositions. In most cases, he didn’t originate these revised spellings but he was responsible for popularising them and many of the “reformed” spellings gradually became standard throughout the United States, the reason we now have significant differences between British English and American English.

Without any academic study to back it up, I have often thought that Americans frequently do things simply to be different from the British and in reading up about Webster, I discovered this to be true in relation to his spelling changes. Yet again, we discover the US is the source of a bloody annoying and unnecessary set of circumstances.

Some of his revised spellings didn’t catch on. If they had, I beleev wimmin (and men) would be spewing forth a steddy and hainous korus of grotesk syllables from their tungs, creating a nightmar for the masheen I’m now typing on. (The Spell Checker is going to have a field day with that sentence.)

As much as I would clearly like to, we’re not going to be able to wind back the changes that did catch on. But what we writers and editors should do is make sure that when we edit, we pick one variation of English and stick to it. This will largely be guided by the location of the primary audience.

There are lots of differences between British English and American English, far too many to go into here. But here are a few highlights to help begin the process and ensure consistency.

Spelling

There are a few one-off spelling differences – in British English, tyres and kerbs get cosy when sceptics park and in American English, tires and curbs get cozy when skeptics park. But there are a lot of words with the same structure that follow the same rule for changes.

-our versus -or

Savour, saviour, honour, colour, neighbour, humour, rumour, glamour and favour become savor, savior, honor, color, neighbor, humor, rumor, glamor and favor.

-ise versus -ize

-ise endings (for British English) and -ize endings (for American English) are on the end of many, many words and even more can be created by adding the suffix (although William Strunk Jr and EB White, the authors of The Elements of Style thought many of them were unnecessary “abominations”). The great thing about this rule is that there aren’t any exceptions. Examples include realise/realize, recognise/recognize, militarise/militarize, harmonise/harmonize, summarise/summarize and the list goes on and on.

-re versus -er

In British English, we are the centre of our own universes, go to the theatre and fibre is a crucial dietary component. In American English, we are the center of our own universes, go to the theater and fiber is a crucial dietary component.

-mme versus -m

There are only a couple of examples of this – “programme” and “gramme” in British English become “program” and “gram” and American English. This is probably one area where American English is winning because other English variations are adopting it as well, particularly Australian and Canadian English. Whichever one you choose to use, add it to your style sheet and be consistent in using it.

-ae versus -e

“Encyclopaedia”, “paedophile” and “anaesthetic” in British English become “encyclopedia”, “pedophile” and “anesthetic” in American English.

-nce versus -nse

There are lots of words that legitimately end with -nse in British English like “sense”, “cleanse” “condense”, “response”, “expanse”, “expense”, “immense” and there are lots of words that legitimately end with -nce in American English like “sentence”, “mince”, “prince”, “convince”, “chance”, “fence” and “once”. In fact, both variations of English share these spellings.

But there are words like “offence”, “defence”, “pretence” and “licence” in British English that become “offense”, “defense”, “pretense” and “license” in American English.

Punctuation

Punctuation is one area that both British and American variations of English are reasonably similar. There are some differences (full stops/periods after condensed titles, the position of the day and the month in dates, the usage of quotation marks and a few others) but the main one is the Oxford comma. In British English, “me, myself and I” only requires one comma but in American English, “me, myself, and I” requires two and the final comma is known as the Oxford comma.

Vocabulary

You say, “Potato,” I say… well, I say, “Potato,” too. But in British English, they say autumn, boot, bonnet, biscuit, pavement, holiday, lift, full stop and in American English, they say fall, trunk, hood, cookie, sidewalk, vacation, elevator, period.

Make sure you use the correct vocabulary so your readers know what you are talking about. And it’s just as important to make sure the same words with different meanings are used in their appropriate context. The best example of this is “fanny” but if you don’t know why, I’ll let you have some fun figuring it out on your own.

Sayings

In British English, the saying is “I couldn’t care less” and in American English, the saying is “I could care less”. No, the US version doesn’t make sense but that’s the Americans for you. And there are lots of examples like this.

*****

It’s hard enough to edit in your own variation of English, let alone an entirely different one. But if you’re a competent enough editor, whether of your own work or the work of others, then it’s very achievable. If you are going to do it, make sure you have access to references to confirm you’re doing it correctly (there are plenty online) and do it well with an eye for consistency.

But also remember that it’s not necessary. In the age of global information, we read content from all parts of the world (or at least I do and I think I can reasonably assume that many others do, too). And I can’t say it bothers me (or that I notice it at all really) whether I’m reading British English or American English or Australian English or Canadian English or New Zealand English. Although I would certainly notice if someone tried to implement all of Noah Webster’s changes that weren’t adopted, mostly because they looks like the efforts of someone who can’t spell and closely resemble the English language of five hundred years into the future imagined in the excellent film Idiocracy. It’s probably Webster’s utopia. But it’s an English lover’s worst nightmare. Make sure your writing doesn’t end up falling into that category.

Book Review: The Insult by Rupert Thomson

What a strange, strange book this is! It suffers from many problems but the biggest is that the blurb in no way resembles what it ends up being about.

It opens in a medical clinic where Martin Blom wakes up to people telling him he’s been shot in the head and he is now blind. His neurosurgeon tells him that one of the potential complications is hallucinations as his brain adjusts to its inability to see. Then one evening as he’s wandering through the gardens of the clinic, Martin realises he can see in the dark. He’s completely blind during the day but the darker it gets, the better his eyesight is.

This is where the book’s first problem becomes obvious. The neurosurgeon has told him that he might hallucinate but Martin is convinced that what he’s seeing is real. So the reader is torn between wanting to believe and struggling to. The unreliability of the narrator is a constant concern. And when Martin’s paranoia kicks in and he starts to believe he’s actually part of a high-level experiment, you really don’t know what to think.

When he’s finally released from the clinic, he breaks up with his fiancée to spare her from simply being his carer, briefly moves in with his parents before running away, and then sets himself up in a rundown hotel in the seediest part of town. He sleeps all day and wanders the streets at night, meeting an array of strange characters and seeing many strange things, things that others don’t appear to see. So we scratch our heads. Is this actually happening or is it all in Martin’s head?

About a hundred pages in, Martin meets Nina. And this is where the story actually begins. Because it really doesn’t matter that he’s been shot or that he’s blind. In fact, that element of the story could have been completely left out without detrimentally affecting the plot. Because we never find out why he was shot or whether he is hallucinating or has some limited visual capacity. Instead, his relationship with Nina, their break-up and her sudden disappearance, which brings the police to his door, is the new plot.

The Insult feels a lot like two entirely different books slapped together. And when a new narrator, Nina’s grandmother, takes up the story, we go back four generations and get the entire family history as a long, slow, disturbingly Virginia Andrews explanation for what has happened to her granddaughter. Martin disappears for over a hundred pages and then returns briefly for a horribly unsatisfying ending.

The book is a mishmash of genres and about twice as long as it should have been, which makes sense given that it feels like two different books slapped together. Martin is not at all interesting and it’s almost as if Rupert Thomson has forced him into Nina’s story, although I can’t for the life of me figure out why. He’s a totally unnecessary character in what is ostensibly his own story.

The structure of the book is completely wrong, the story is told from the wrong character’s perspective, there are so many easily eliminated characters and it takes too long to get to the actual plot. There’s conspiracies, mobsters, circus folk, incest, disabilities (both mental and physical) and so many tangents that it ends up being a convoluted mess. It didn’t have to be. You can see the possibilities hiding within it, the potential, which is no doubt how it got published but it’s a good two or three rewrites away from being the book it should have been.

This book clearly demonstrates that Rupert Thomson can write but his plots and his characters are so far beyond implausible that no amount of terrific writing can make up for them.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 26 March 2017