L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 29

How Long Should a Novel Be?

I’ve previously written about how long a chapter should be because I saw someone asking the question in a writing forum last year. When I saw someone asking how long a novel should be in the same writing forum recently, I thought it was an excellent follow-up. My answer to the question of chapter length was the same as my answer to the question of novel length is now: how long is a piece of string?

As a general rule, a novel should be only as long as is required to tell the story. That may be much shorter or much longer than any publishing house rule length, which can sometimes seem arbitrary. But it’s important to stay true to the story. Padding a novel to make it longer will not make it better. Cutting key scenes to make a novel shorter will not make it better. In fact, both padding and cutting for that reason will almost always make them worse.

But there are some things to consider and some general guidelines for particular types of books.

Children’s Books

Also referred to as chapter books (because they tend to be the first books children read that are long enough for chapters), stories for children can be varying lengths that tend to depend on the very specific age group that the story is being written for. Obviously children read more slowly than adults and are still learning language, which –in addition to actually enjoying it – is hopefully why they are reading.

The numbers I’m about to put out there are very rough and obviously the capacity of each individual child will determine what they read, regardless of their age. But since when I was researching this blog post, I came across an author who had just finished her 200,000+ word novel for children, hopefully this will help us all to remain realistic.

The first chapter books for children will be anywhere up to 5,000 words and will mostly be read by children in the first half of primary school or in elementary school (depending on where in the world you are). For children in the second half of primary school or early middle school, between 10,000 and 12,000 words is generally considered a reasonable length for a book. And for children in the early years of high school or the later years of middle school, books should be starting to inch up around the 40,000 word mark.

The thing about children’s books is that children are always looking for books that will help them achieve the next level with their reading abilities. So, of course, they don’t go straight from reading a 5,000 word book to reading a 12,000 word book. They slowly graduate with novels in between – a 7,000 word book and then a 9,000 word book. And the topics and the words gradually get more mature, too. When you write a children’s book, you are helping to educate. It’s an awesome responsibility.

After this, children are generally old enough to move on to young adult novels.

Young Adult Novels

Young adult novels have undergone something of a revolution in the past decade as many of them have become what the industry refers to as “crossovers”. That is, books that fall into the young adult category but have been so widely read across so many age groups that they can also be considered mainstream. Twilight and The Hunger Games are perfect examples.

Again, as young adults transition from the 40,000 word books they were reading as older children into this category, it leaves some room for variation in the word count. But around the 80,000 word mark is a pretty good goal. A little less won’t have an editor casting aside your manuscript and neither will a little more.

Romance Novels

The length of a Mills & Boon or category romance or shorter romance novel (however you prefer to refer to them but you know the sort of books I’m talking about) is generally between 50,000 and 70,000 words and most tend to be closer to 50,000. Mills & Boon are very specific about length depending on which type of Mills & Boon you are writing and because they are publishing to a very specific formula, that makes sense. They want a man and a woman and they want them to fall in love and get together without making the reader wait too long for satisfaction.

Longer romance novels will have more in common, length wise, with mainstream fiction novels. They are less formulaic in some respects and just as formulaic in others. But the experience of reading them when it comes to the investment of time will be more like a general novel. I remember being able to get through two or three shorter romance novels in a day when I was still reading them. I never read much longer romance fiction but two or three in a day would be virtually impossible.

Mainstream Fiction Novels

This is such a huge category that applying word limits could be dangerous. But here goes anyway. If a writer aims for somewhere between 80,000 words and 120,000 words, it should prevent a book being considered too short or too long.

The more successful writers become, the greater leeway they will be given to write to pretty much whatever length they want. However, if you’re not successful yet, it’s best not to overdo it or underdo it because if you’re lucky enough to attract the interest of a publisher, your editor is likely to simply send you away to make cuts you don’t want to make or add scenes you don’t think are necessary. If it all possible, allow an editor to make these sorts of decisions independent of the length of your book by making it approximately the “right” length.

Literature Novels

Literature is one of those areas where the author can get away with pretty much whatever length he or she wishes to write. Because the category of “literature” is so broad and so much more focused on the quality of the writing, the length is less of an issue.

Having said that, those writing literature might want to have some consideration for the potential reader. Unless you’re writing the best book ever written (which although we hope we are, we generally aren’t), then most readers will get to a point where they wish the book were coming to an end. If you go significantly past that point, then it will contribute to a series of reviews complaining the book was too long.

On the other hand, I haven’t read too many reviews complaining about books that were too short. I’ve read plenty in which the readers wished the book was longer because they loved it so much, but that’s not really a complaint. It’s more of a compliment.

Here’s a great example of why length should be a consideration. About six months ago I purchased Eleanor Catton’s book, The Luminaries, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2013. I also purchased a number of other books at the same time. When I came to decide which to read first and which to leave until last, one of my main factors in making that decision was noticing that The Luminaries is 250,000 words long.

That’s not just a long book, it’s a commitment of a significant portion of my reading time. It might be a terrific book and winning a prestigious award tends to indicate that. But I still don’t know because I haven’t read it yet. Instead I’ve been reading a succession of books that require much less of a commitment from me.

I’ll get around to reading it eventually. But the simple fact of its enormous length has pushed it a long way down my to read list.

*****

Remember that these are very rough guidelines and some publishers will have their own very specific requirements that have to be met. But if your book is good enough and they are interested, then they will work with you to get it to the length they require. It’s important not to get too fixated on length. After all, this isn’t university and we aren’t being policed by a grumpy old professor who won’t read past the upper word limit. Ultimately, it’s the story and not the length that will sell your book.

Book Review: Kill the Possum by James Moloney

I was in the middle of reading another book – a long, dense, important but mentally draining book – and decided to take a break and read Kill the Possum, knowing it would be a shorter read, something I could get through quickly. But if I was hoping for an easy read, I was sorely disappointed. This was a hard book to read. Not because of the writing but because of the story. This is every blended family teenager’s worst nightmare.

Dylan Kane is fifteen and has a crush on Kirsty Beal. They’ve been on a few dates and he’d like a few more. So one Sunday afternoon he decides to drop in on her unexpectedly. But he couldn’t have chosen a worse time. Sunday afternoons are when Kirsty’s ex-stepfather, Ian, drops her half-sister, Melanie, home from her weekend access visit. And while he’s there, Ian terrorises the Beals, including Kirsty’s little brother, Tim, and her mother, Ian’s former wife.

The abuse has been going on for years – physical, emotional, sexual – and Ian gets away with it thanks to his powerful policeman brother and his twist-everything-you-say-in-court lawyer. Tim, barely even a teenager, drinks to cope with it all. His mother takes sedatives. And Kirsty tries to stay strong, hoping that one day it will simply all end and Ian will get tired of his power games.

But the more Dylan sees, the more he wants to help. So he and Tim come up with a plan to steal Ian’s rifle and shoot him in his bed while he sleeps. But killing a man is difficult, morally at least. When Tim insists he be the one to kill Ian, Dylan tells him to practise by killing a possum he’s trapped. But Tim can’t. How can they kill a man, Dylan reasons, if they can’t even bring themselves to kill a possum?

Kill the Possum is a young adult book but it’s not for children or even younger teenagers. If I found it hard to read in my late thirties, I can only imagine how disturbing it might be for young minds still getting a grasp on right and wrong, especially those going through similar situations themselves.

The book is simple and at the same time powerful, intense, moving and with a shock ending that I didn’t see coming. I feel like I really should have seen it coming but I didn’t and that’s a credit to the author. There are quite a few typos, spelling and grammar issues that should have been picked up during the editing process and weren’t and that’s a discredit to the editor. Considering the book is meant for a younger audience, I would have hoped that a focus on these things was paramount as an example. Pretty unusual for a book from a publishing company as reputable as Penguin. But there’s not too much else wrong with it.

The book is also a commentary on parenting, particularly fatherhood. Kirsty’s real and much beloved father died a decade ago. Dylan’s father walked out on him and his mother before his first birthday and hasn’t seen him since then. Dylan hates his father with a passion for his absence, his irresponsibility, and particularly the fact that he has a new wife and three other children now. But is Dylan’s father’s crime as bad as the one that Ian is perpetrating on the Beals? Wasn’t he supposed to be their father figure? Isn’t he failing on a much grander scale by staying in their lives and making them perpetually afraid?

Read this book but be prepared. This isn’t a fairy tale or a morality tale or a fond look back at the innocence of youth. It’s gritty realism. And there is no happy ending. But there’s an honest ending, one that will stay with the reader forever.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 5 May 2016

Things I’ve Learned about Writing from Writing Book Reviews – Part 2

On Wednesday I posted Part 1 of the things I’ve learned about writing from writing book reviews, which included:

*There are three universal things that make a great book (plot, characters and the writing itself)

*Sometimes being great at one of those things is enough (if you do it so well that a reader is mesmerised)

*Sometimes it’s the little things that will stay with the reader (those moments that make us sigh or gasp or cry and make us want everybody else to have the same reaction)

*Don’t use writers’ tricks (because readers might not know that they’re writers’ tricks but they know they don’t like them)

Here’s a few more to round out the list.

Bodily Fluids and Functions Do Not Equal Great Literature

“Contemporary writers of literature are a peculiar breed of writer who seem to think certain topics make their writing realistic and gritty. The reality is, however, that readers wonder why it is necessary to include them. Those topics include pooing, peeing and masturbation. Normal, everyday occurrences but also often distasteful, boring and unnecessary to the story being told.”

From my 2 star book review of Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

“Maybe it’s the time period, 1829, with no running water and a real lack of attention to hygiene that kept making me want to take a shower (there seemed to be a lot of peeing of pants and a strange focus on urine and faeces – what is it about ‘literature’ that the authors have to describe it in such detail?).”

From my 3 star book review of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Not once in my entire reading history have I ever read a scene in which a character goes to the toilet (for either number ones or number twos) or indulges in a little self-love and thought to myself, “Wow! That was fantastic! And so important to the narrative.” Instead, most of the time when I read these things, the internal count in my head that adds up what a book’s final star rating will be keeps subtracting points.

I’ve previously written about the one and only time I wrote a peeing scene into the first draft of one of my books. The two main characters were camping in the middle of nowhere and I just thought it was unrealistic to have them hold it the whole time. But my beta readers were very quick to slap the scene down. They didn’t care about realism; they didn’t want to read a toilet scene. So I just as quickly took it out.

I’ve also written previously about the “realism” genre and how it is an idealised version of real life. If a novel was written that accurately portrayed real life, it would be a very boring book. We read to avoid the real, the banal, the boring bits in between the excitement in our lives. Even biographies leave out days, months, years in order to get to the good stuff. Novelists should do the same.

Linear or Non-Linear, the Story Still Needs to Be Understandable

“My uncertainty stems from the narrative jumping around, back and forth between time periods, so I was never really sure about when everything was happening. I found myself continually thinking, “So is this before or after?” The sequencing was jumbled and while this might have been for effect, the ultimate result was merely muddled. There’s nothing wrong with a linear story. Conversely, there’s nothing wrong with a non-linear story as long as it’s written in a way the reader can clearly understand.”

From my 3 star book review of The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer

“I sometimes think when disjointed narratives like this are used it is because the story isn’t strong enough to exist in a linear format. I definitely think that was the case here. The confusion it causes helps to mask the defects for a while, but once the reader has figured it out, it’s not enough to cover for what is lacking.”

From my 2 star book review of Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

Linear stories are so twentieth century, right? So passé. So done to death. Yes, they are classic. But often the reason things become classic is because they work so well. So if you decide to write a non-linear story, you have to ask yourself why you want to write it that way.

The best example of a non-linear story format is the film Memento. But it still requires a lot of commitment and concentration from the audience. And, ultimately, the audience can find the linear story within its non-linear presentation.

If a reader struggles to identify the linear story in the non-linear presentation, then regardless of whatever reasons you have used to justify presenting it in this way, you will have failed in what you are attempting to do.

Don’t Try to Do Too Much

“The problem with this book is that it can’t decide if it wants to be dystopian fiction or romance fiction, so it tries to be both but it fails at both. The genre confusion is compounded by a story that isn’t interesting or original. In the acknowledgements, Howey apologises for his Y chromosome but the fact that he’s a man isn’t an excuse for being bad at writing romance. Nicholas Sparks certainly doesn’t have any difficulties.”

From my 2 star book review of The Shell Collector by Hugh Howey

“One of the downfalls of this book is that it tries to cover too much. Is it about grief? Is it about mental health issues? Is it about family? Is it about peer pressure? Is it a coming of age story? It tries to be about all of these things and ends up not addressing any of them adequately.”

From my 3 star book review of The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer

Readers want to read good books. That’s it. Simple enough. So if a writer tries to write two books in one or gives the character within that book more than any one human can possibly cope with, the likelihood is that it will derail at some point. And not just derail but come off the tracks and plunge engine first into a canyon instead of carrying on over the bridge like it should have.

Readers don’t want to pull a book out of one category in the book store only to find when they get it home and start reading that it’s another genre entirely. If you try to do too much, readers will resent it. Simplify. Ask yourself, “Does that really need to be in the story?” And if the answer is, “No,” then get rid of it.

It’s Okay for Characters to be Ordinary – In Fact, Sometimes It’s Preferred

“I’m not sure why authors need to imbue their main characters with unique talents – it’s very reminiscent of this era in which all children are being brought up and told they are special and can do and have anything they want in this world. Honestly, I’d like to start reading more books about people who have reasonable talents and have to compete with many others who have the same talents. I’d like to read more books about people who achieve something but fail just as often, having to watch others succeed ahead of them without it being the end of the world (literally). There are several times in the book when characters are threatened with losing their powers and being reduced to amaurotic status, which means just being a normal, everyday human. Oh, no! How could this be tolerated? Well, the rest of us manage it okay. The “special” people should try it sometime and realise it’s easily tolerated. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with actually having to work hard to have a skill instead of just being born special.”

From my 2 star book review of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

In this day and age of comic book superstars with their superpowers and their supercars dominating everything, sometimes it’s nice to read about characters who don’t have these things, who aren’t special, who don’t have a destiny, who live interesting but normal lives and don’t have everything just fall in their laps.

It’s important for writers to find some balance and a place for the normal people. After all, which is more powerful? The pre-destined leader or the average Joe (or Jane) who has to become a leader even though they don’t really want to. Let’s ask Katniss Everdeen what she thinks.

It Has to Be about the Writing

“In Chapter 4 he takes a very obvious pot shot at the former Californian Governor and actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (without actually naming him), about using his authority to provide executive clemency to a political ally’s son, who was convicted of killing a man. The pot shot is over a page long and I actually stopped reading the book and Googled the anecdote to see if it was true or part of the plot. It was true. I agree with Connelly that it hardly paints Schwarzenegger in a good light but it was so poorly done on Connelly’s part that it loses its power. And instead of being angry with Schwarzenegger, I am angry with Connelly for including such disruptive paragraphs. If he were anyone else, I doubt his editors would have let it through because it completely throws the reader off and actually has nothing to do with the story.”

From my 3 star book review of The Crossing by Michael Connelly

“The author is himself a renowned expert on the perpetration of frauds with a side interest in writing and has spent significant periods educating the public on how to avoid becoming a victim but I think I would have preferred if he were an expert in writing with a side interest in frauds.”

From my 2 star book review of Chasing the Ace by Nicholas J Johnson

“The events are also a cautionary tale for writers. Because once they publish, they will forever be associated with their writing. Harold Stewart and James McAuley were never able to shake their tags as the authors of the Ern Malley poems and they ended up resenting it. Perhaps they would have faded into obscurity without Ern Malley. Perhaps they would have gone on to develop reputations independent of him. But they never got to find out.”

From my 4 star book review of The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward

In the end, it has to be about the writing. Readers don’t want to be lectured. They don’t want education masked as entertainment. And whatever a writer publishes will be forever associated with them. You can’t wind back time, especially in this online age where the internet seems to be permanent and even if you delete something, someone somewhere will have taken a screen shot and then written about what you posted to keep the story going.

So when you do publish, when you do hit that button, make sure, make really sure that you are happy to be associated with it forever. Because that’s how long you’ll be associated with it as long as we have access to search engines. At least until an EMP wipes out everything electrical and technological. And who knows how far away that might be?

Things I’ve Learned about Writing from Writing Book Reviews – Part 1

I’ve always been a big fan of the notion that writers must read (see my previous post on The Importance of Writers Who Read OR Why There Are Book Reviews on this Blog) and I’ve also discussed the concept of writers writing book reviews (see my previous post on The Review from the Top: Should Published Writers Write Book Reviews?). I read a lot and I’ve been writing book reviews for four years now. The more of them I wrote, the more I realised that I was continuing to learn about writing and having things that I’d already learned reinforced with practical examples.

So here, using excerpts from some of my book reviews, are a few things I’ve learned from writing them.

 

There Are Three Universal Things That Make a Great Book

“The big three things readers look for in books to make them great are the writing, the plot and the characterisation. Plot is completely absent. Characterisation is absent as well. The book wasn’t hard to read, so there is something to Salter’s writing, but the style is pretentious, like it is trying to be literary and instead ends up inexplicable.”

From my 2 star book review of All That Is by James Salter

“So glad there is a writer of this quality in the world today creating books that tick all three boxes when it comes to producing a novel: writing, characters and plot. Tick, tick, tick. I’d hate to be the book that comes after it. For a while, at least, everything else must surely pale by comparison.”

From my 5 star book review of The Fault in our Stars by John Green

“As I read and came across plenty of spelling and grammatical errors, I was taking points off in my head but I can’t give this book anything other than five stars. Because the story is perfect. The characters are perfect. The writing is perfect. The editor was responsible for everything else and I can’t blame the writer. I don’t want to punish her or this book because of those errors, which can be easily fixed. I can’t say the same about a book where the story, the characters and the writing are just okay but it’s all done with perfect spelling and grammar.”

From my 5 star book review of I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington

I’ve read plenty of books with great characters and terrible plots. I’ve read just as many books with great plots and terrible characters. I’ve read well-written books with terrible plots and terrible characters. I’ve written a few of them myself. But the only books that get 5 star ratings from me are the ones that have it all. Which is why so few of the books I read get 5 star ratings.

In my experience, most writers are better at one of these things than the others. I think characterisation is my strong point and my writing is okay so when I am creating a story, I always try to give extra attention to the plot. The days when I don’t do any writing and just sit around thinking about the story, those days are almost always about joining the plot dots in my head – is it interesting, is it exciting, does it make sense, are there plot holes?

Being good at only one or two of these things and ignoring the other might still give you a good book. It might be published and it might be read. But it won’t be a great book until the plot, the characters and the writing are all working together and working well.

 

Sometimes Being Great at One Thing is Enough

“The writing is lovely, also a reflection of a different time. It is unhurried (something of an achievement in a book that is only 90 pages long) but it uses no more words than is absolutely necessary to convey the story, a genuine skill that I wish more writers – myself included – had today.”

From my 4 star book review of The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis

“This book is full of wonderful characterisation. Rachel is drawn so well that despite the fact that she is constantly drunk, often falling and sometimes vomiting, I liked spending time with her. She tries to give up drinking but her life is such a disaster, even before Megan goes missing, that she finds it impossible. She needs a drink to get herself through difficult moments, which basically constitute her whole life, and once she starts, she can’t stop. She was once a functioning alcoholic but she isn’t anymore. She doubts herself constantly but as a reader I never did. Even when she was vomiting on the stairs and leaving it there for her roommate to find, I didn’t want to stop reading. Rachel is the triumph of this novel.”

From my 3 star book review of The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Even writers who end up writing great books don’t write only great books. They suffer from writing the occasional good book as much as the rest of us do. And sometimes doing one thing really well is enough. Absolutely stunning, beautiful writing might be enough for a reader to look past an okay plot and so-so characters. A really well-written and evocative character might be enough to cover for a plot that’s been done before and a plain writing style.

I’m certainly not advocating just giving up on aiming to get all three things right but as writers we should all play to our strengths in the same way sportspeople and musicians and doctors do and celebrate the things we can do really well.

 

Sometimes It’s the Little Things That Will Stay with the Reader

“In the thirteen years since I first read this book, there was one phrase that stuck with me because it was such a unique piece of description, pronouncing random beautiful people attending a party as having ‘star spangled smiles’. Sometimes it’s just the small moments that make all the difference for individual readers and that small moment did it for me. It was worth reading nearly four hundred pages just for that.”

From my 3 star book review of Ninety East Ridge by Stephen Reilly

“The final paragraph of the book is perhaps the best final paragraph of any book I have ever read. As a writer who struggles with writing endings, I am envious. In fact, it’s an ending that could have been tacked on to the end of many, many books, if any of the authors had thought to write it.”

From my 5 star book review of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

Sometimes writers are so focused on the big picture that the little things get overlooked. But I’ve read a lot of books that are if not saved entirely, then at least redeemed from a book review mauling by one tiny moment – in the case of Ninety East Ridge, literally just three words out of tens of thousands.

This is why we write draft after draft after draft. Or at least why we should. Because it is often moments, not chapters, not even the entire book, that will be more important to readers, that will stay with them long after they finish reading, that will make them encourage others to read just so they can get to the same moment and sigh over it together.

It’s hard to write a perfect book – you could spend your whole life trying – so if you can write a perfect moment instead, that might be enough.

 

Don’t Use Writers’ Tricks

“After Cecilia finds the letter [containing the eponymous husband’s secret], she asks her husband about it when he makes his daily phone call home. He tells her he wrote it after the birth of their first child and that it’s just him rambling on about how much he loves his family. Even though Cecilia finds the letter in the very first chapter and thinks he’s lying about its contents, she agrees to his request not to read it and doesn’t until nearly 150 pages in. Because it takes so long for her to read it, it becomes clear Moriarty is using writers’ tricks to string out the suspense. She does this in order to give the reader a proper insight into Cecilia’s normal life before turning it upside down but she could have done that by having her find the letter later, thus shortening the gap and preventing my frustration.”

From my 4 star book review of The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

“I’ve written previously about books that use writers’ tricks and there’s one on prominent display here. Gaby Baillieux doesn’t appear until page 127 when chapter 24 begins. She sticks around for exactly one chapter and then disappears again, not re-emerging until chapter 38 on page 370 – which is the second last chapter. And she’s not in the last chapter either. Throughout the rest of the book she appears only on cassette tapes being listened to by Felix Moore as he attempts to construct her biography from his subject dictating her life.”

From my 2 star book review of Amnesia by Peter Carey

Even though I clearly liked The Husband’s Secret a lot more than I liked Amnesia, they both had a similar flaw – writers’ tricks. In the first book, the trick was revealing the existence of something that the reader really wanted to know about and then not telling them what it contained for a long, long time afterwards. The writer did it in order to create suspense but instead ended up creating frustration.

In the second book, the trick was an almost non-existent main character, who appeared in exactly two chapters. I think it was meant to make her mysterious but, again, all it did was make me was frustrated. I bought a book to read about the character outlined in the blurb and then was forced to read about somebody else wasn’t nearly as interesting.

There are a lot of writers’ tricks out there so I can’t possibly list them all but as soon as you see one, you will know it for what it is. Which is almost invariably linked to poor plotting. The sooner we can all recognise them in our own writing and do a rewrite quick smart, the better off all our readers will be.

*****

Look out for Part 2 on Friday.

Book Review: The Shark Net by Robert Drewe

This is a book that relies on a fudged blurb to draw readers in. “Aged six, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the world’s most isolated city – and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquillity and friendliness. Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew.”

The murder happened when the author was already a fully grown man working as a journalist and the boy who was murdered was also fully grown by that stage and about to embark on a veterinary science course. The murderer was someone who had worked for the author’s father and occasionally made deliveries to the family home but who had long before been fired for theft. And it was a full nine months between the murder and the murderer being identified and arrested, during which time the author had no knowledge of who the killer was.

The memoir is actually 233 pages in before the story gets around to the man he knew murdering a boy he also knew. Everything before that is a well-written memoir of a very ordinary life. Most everything after that is as well. So I felt a little bit cheated. I thought perhaps it was going to be a fifty/fifty split between a memoir of the author and a history of the killer. It was more like ninety-nine/one split.

There are so many memoirs of ordinary people these days that offer insights into particular periods in history but lack any important historical reason for having been written. Yes, the murderer the author vaguely knew was the last man executed in Western Australia before capital punishment was outlawed. But so what? The author’s connection was tenuous. My cousin once dated a man who would later go on to murder his mother and stepfather and it has never once occurred to me to write and publish my average life story on the pretext of that connection.

Other than these gripes, The Shark Net is a perfectly fine memoir. The author writes well and conveys perfectly a sense of what it was like to live in Perth during the 1950s and 1960s as a child. But it’s nothing more than that.

If you like reading memoirs, and specifically the memoirs of people who aren’t famous or accomplished or important historical figures, then you’ll no doubt like this book. But if you’re looking for a book about someone who made an impact or changed things or was important in and of himself, then this isn’t it.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 April 2016

When You Don’t Want to Write Anymore

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a child. There were some casual flirtations with other career options during my teenage years: lawyer (I did work experience at a suburban law firm), political operative (I studied Australian and international politics as part of my Bachelor of Arts degree when I was 17, 18 and 19) and strangely even a hairdresser when I was in primary school (I think there may have been some peer pressure involved with this one).

But most writers don’t earn enough to just write so even after finishing my Bachelor of Arts and going on to finish a two-year writing and editing qualification and start a master’s degree in writing, I forged a career elsewhere. I started in administration (isn’t that where everyone starts?) to get some office-based experience and wrote in my spare time. I moved into an editing role in the same industry that I gained my administration experience and continued writing in my spare time.

And then finally I got my first writing job. A corporate job in a sales and marketing department in a new industry, writing tender responses and sales proposals for corporate clients as well as a variety of other types of content aimed at convincing people to hand over fistfuls of money. And I stopped writing in my spare time.

Maybe it had something to do with the amount of writing I was doing. After all, I would go to work and write, then come home and write, then sleep, then wake up and go to work and write, then come home and write some more. It was a lot of writing.

Maybe it had something to do with my social life. I was in my late twenties, early thirties and I didn’t want to be stuck at home every night, refusing invitations. I wanted to be out there mingling, eating, drinking, dancing and generally having a good time.

Maybe it had something to do with finishing my first novel, sending it to every Australian publisher out there and getting zero responses, not even a courtesy “thanks but no thanks” rejection letter.

Whatever the reason or reasons, my creative writing output dwindled to zero. I just didn’t want to write anymore. It wasn’t about motivation, it wasn’t the world’s longest case of writers’ block, I just didn’t want to write anymore.

Four years passed. I enjoyed my corporate writing job. I enjoyed my social life. I enjoyed not being rejected by publishers. I enjoyed not working two jobs at the same time.

But in 2012, I started enjoying my corporate writing job less. I didn’t want to go out all the time. And while I didn’t want to be rejected by publishers again, I wondered what it might be like if I started writing novels again. Maybe I wouldn’t be rejected. Maybe they would be interested in my new material.

It might sound a little strange but I can trace beginning to write again to a small, seemingly unconnected act. I bought a Kobo. A friend had a Kindle and I was attracted by the lightweight portability of the device (I hadn’t stopped reading, after all). And once I had it, I realised it was a new way of being published. One that didn’t rely on getting my novel in front of the right person.

I spent some time revising the novel I’d finished in 2008 and self-published it as an ebook in November 2012. People read it and liked it. And it was as simple as that. It was as simple as beginning that revision. I was writing again.

That was over three years ago. Since then, I’ve finished another novel, written half of two more, started a blog and posted on it over two hundred and fifty times, quit my corporate writing job and spent more than a year writing full time. And I want to keep writing.

That could change again. I could get another job – related to writing or not – and immerse myself into it so deeply that I once again don’t want to write anymore, or at least need to take another four year break. So in the meantime I’m doing as much writing as I can. And loving it. It’s still hard work but I’m loving it. Hopefully you are, too, because this blog is the recipient of a lot of that hard work.

Who knows how important that break might have been? Maybe it was entirely necessary to get my writing mojo back. After all, writing is a job like any other. You can burn out. Maybe I did. Maybe one day you will, too. The important thing is to take that break and then work your way back to writing at a pace that ensures you’re mentally ready. Too soon and you might relapse and convince yourself that writing isn’t really for you at all. And wouldn’t it be a shame? Especially if it isn’t true?

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Problematic Advice to a Jobseeker

I know how lucky I am. By choice, I’ve had a year out of permanent work, spending that time writing, doing some more writing, writing a little more, publishing a book I wrote, and being choosy about which freelance roles I accepted.

But now that I’m looking to return to full-time work, I’ve had a number of interesting pieces of advice on how I can do that more easily. Some of them are interesting. Some of them are downright terrible. Some might seem unethical. But if everybody else is doing them, am I just losing out by not doing them, too?

Lie

“You could easily be a Social Media Manager,” one of my brothers-in-law said to me recently.

“I could easily do it but I don’t have any experience doing it professionally,” I responded, “and recruiters all seem to be looking for professional experience.”

“Just lie,” he advised. “Everybody else does.”

I don’t doubt he’s absolutely right. And I know I’m one of those idiots who never learned the value of little white lies, the ones that are only lies until you have that day, week or month of training or experience that means they’re not lies anymore. But I’ve also read lots of articles about employees who lied about their experience and were either exposed when they tried to do the job or it came out in other ways and they were fired anyway even when they were doing a good job. We’re not supposed to lie.

But if everyone else is doing it, if it’s how people get their CVs on the Yes pile while mine languishes on the Maybe pile, am I just being an ethical and idealistic moron?

Dumb It Down

Apparently the fact that I’ve worked hard, advanced my career and studied at the postgraduate level is the reason I’m not able to land a job immediately (or so my job agency has implied). In order to secure work (not appropriate work, just any work), I’ve been told I might have to dumb down my CV. Once I do that, my job agency told me, they can easily get me work packing boxes in a factory.

The problem is that once I take out my white collar work and tertiary qualifications, all I’m left with is some now out of date fire warden, fire extinguisher and chief fire warden training. It’s not exactly compelling. And surely an empty CV isn’t going to get me any further than my actual one? Either way, in fact, I think there would be hundreds of people with box packing experience who would get the job before me. I think I’d rather be perceived as smart and unemployable.

Don’t Include a Picture on your CV

Several years ago, I had a professional portrait taken to use in book and social media marketing (which is also my LinkedIn profile picture) and since then I have included it in my CV. But recently I was told by a recruitment specialist to take it out in case “someone doesn’t like the look of you”.

But sometimes I think we forget that our CVs can be a way of weeding out places we don’t want to work. And surely an employer who judges people simply on the way they look would qualify as one of those places?

Who am I to quibble? I did as I was told. But it hasn’t made a skerrick of difference to the number of responses I’m receiving to my enquiries.

Don’t Bury the Lead

I know, I know, it’s ironic that I haven’t put this at the top of the article. But unlike in a CV, in an article, you need to finish with a bang. So here it is.

Despite having quite a few more than a handful of recruitment professionals look over my CV recently and offer nothing more than advice to “remove the photograph”, I finally stumbled across somebody who had a piece of advice I was willing to follow: don’t bury the lead.

“A HR person who doesn’t have anything more than a cursory understanding of the job they are trying to fill will spend only twenty to thirty seconds reviewing your CV. So make sure any information you want them to see is on the first page. And make sure that includes a summary list of your experience with job titles, timeframes and companies only. Once your CV is on the Yes pile, the person who actually makes the decision will spend more time reading it to get the in-depth details.”

Finally, advice I am happy to follow without wondering whether I’m doing something unethical or counterproductive.

*First published on LinkedIn 17 March 2016

Book Review: The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson

Billed as “contemporary noir” with rapturous praise from authors like Dennis Lehane and Mark Billingham, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart is Peter Swanson’s first novel, developed and extended from what was originally a novella. You can tell. It’s one of those novels that is short and yet still feels too long. The writing is uninspired, the main characters are dull and the plot, which is supposed to be an homage to old-fashioned, Maltese Falcon-type detective stories, is instead a poor imitation.

I suspect the title of this book was a deliberate attempt to reel in the readers of books like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. It obviously worked with me. As the book progressed, I began to wonder how the title was going to be justified. And then suddenly, quite close to the end, there it was: a description of the main female character as a girl without a heart, with a clock in its place. But rather than being the payoff it should have been, instead it felt like it had been dumped there without much thought simply to pacify people like me. A more apt title would have been “The Boy with a Penis for a Brain”, because the main male character basically lets his libido make his decisions for him and it should come as no surprise that they all turn out to be the wrong decisions.

George Foss is rapidly approaching middle age without much to show for it. He’s had an on-again, off-again girlfriend for over a decade. He’s the business manager at a dying literary magazine. He lives in a stifling attic apartment with his cat, Nora. And he’s never really gotten over his first love, Liana, who he hasn’t seen for more than twenty years because she’s been on the run from the law that whole time. When he spies Liana sitting at the bar of his local drinking establishment, he’s not sure that it’s her. But as soon as she gets up and walks to the bathroom, his uncertainty disappears.

Liana tells him that she’s in trouble. She’s stolen half a million dollars from her boss and she wants to return it, to set things right, but she’s afraid to face him. Will George do it for her? she asks. He’ll be safe, she promises. After all, it’s her that her boss is angry with. He agrees (penis decision #1). After Liana’s boss is murdered soon after George delivers the money, the police arrive on his doorstep and penis decisions #2 through #10 unfold rapidly. He lies to the police. He lies to his on-again, off-again girlfriend. He lies to the private detective hired by the niece of the murdered man. All because he wants to see Liana again (she’s disappeared by now). Not because he thinks she couldn’t have had anything to do with the murder, but because he’s sure she wouldn’t have just dropped him in the middle of this mystery and left him to be a fall guy.

This book feels very much like a paint-by-numbers effort. All the ingredients are there – the pining man, the woman with a past, the treasure, the heavies, a liberal sprinkling of sex, the police who aren’t sure whether the pining man is guilty or stupid, the other woman who gets beat up to make the pining man feel responsible, the not-quite-poetic poetic ending – but instead of being carefully measured and lovingly combined, they are all thrown into the mix at once and beaten to death, then baked at a high heat instead of being hard-boiled like all good detective thrillers are.

The film rights have been acquired so we may or may not see a movie version. It might lend itself more to the silver screen if it’s in the hands of a good writer and director who know how to strip back all the eye-rolling moments.

But it’s unoriginal. The femme fatale was as appealing and intriguing as a Raggedy Ann doll and the leading man was more like a following boy. I’m trying to find a redeeming feature but I’m really struggling. It was like reading a first novel that should have remained in the bottom drawer of the writer’s desk while he refined his technique, learned how to properly portray and develop interesting characters and imbue his story with genuine thrills and spills.

This was one of the more disappointing books I have read in quite some time.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 25 March 2016

Archetypes, Stereotypes and Completely New Types

“Story is about archetypes, not stereotypes.”

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

Robert McKee was talking about his book but his assertion holds true for stories in general. Archetypes good, stereotypes bad. But there’s also a third option: completely original types of characters.

Most writers just write without consciously deciding which types of characters they will use, although I suppose we all hope that our characters will be completely original types, even if it almost never happens, or at the very least archetypes.

But being able to recognise them when you move into the review, revision and rewrite phase is crucial to whether you will have characters that readers can relate to, characters readers will wonder where they’ve seen them before or characters who will blow readers’ minds with their originality.

Archetypes

“Archetype – a typical, ideal, or classic example of something”

Macquarie International English Dictionary

Archetypes are classic characters that appear and reappear throughout literature and history. According to MH Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, they “reflect a set of universal, primitive, and elemental patterns, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the reader.”

Some examples of archetypes include heroes, villains, mothers, jokers, virgins and teachers. James Bond is an archetype hero. Dracula is an archetype villain. Mary, mother of Jesus, is the archetype virgin, not an archetype, the archetype from where all other archetype virgins have descended.

Archetypes will often be copied by other writers – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously – because they are such great characters to have populating a story.

Stereotypes

“Stereotype – an oversimplified standardized image of a person or group”

Macquarie International English Dictionary

Stereotypes often have an offensive element without any suggestion of complexity or variety. Although many stereotypes are based on anecdotal evidence, they attain a comprehensive grip on certain characteristics and refuse to let go.

Let’s take two groups: rich Mexicans and poor Mexicans. A stereotypical rich Mexican character would be a drug lord. And a stereotypical poor Mexican would be trying to cross the border into the US and having made it, would work illegally as either a domestic servant or a farm labourer. Otherwise they’re crossing the border back and forth transporting drugs for the drug lord.

While these two types of characters certainly exist, both in literature and in real life, to continually perpetuate them suggests a writer who hasn’t made much of an effort, either to create interesting characters or to avoid offending Mexicans who don’t fall into one or the other category. There are 123 million Mexicans in Mexico alone and they can’t all be drug lords or undocumented immigrants.

It can be hard to spot a stereotype in your own work because the things we stereotype tend to be those that we consider the “other”, the things we don’t have firsthand knowledge of. A good beta reader should be able to point them out. But it’s better – and less embarrassing – if we can learn to identify them and weed them out of our writing before anyone else ever sees it.

Completely Original Types

Every once in a while, a writer will come up with a character type that no one has ever seen before. It’s rare but when it happens, it is so wonderful that it usually gets a lot of attention.

The thing about completely original characters is that once they gain some recognition, every man, woman, dog and grumpy cat will have a go at a version of them, which tends to turn them into a stereotype. Which is why it’s so important to be the writer creating them.

Once upon a time, Dracula was a completely original type of character. Yes, vampires had been around for years in folk tales but Dracula is not a vampire, he’s the vampire. Thus he evolved into the archetype vampire. Not a single vampire since has been able to dislodge him – not Angel (of “Buffy” fame), not Edward (of Twilight fame). In fact, neither Angel nor Edward would ever have existed if it weren’t for Dracula and his long-lasting archetypical popularity.

So it would seem that over a long period, one character can actually be all things – completely new, then evolving into an archetype, then being done to death with homages and copies and parodies until it becomes a stereotype. Stick to the original or the iconic and avoid lazy labels and you should be just fine.

Back to Basics: The First Choices When Writing a Novel

When we decide we want to write a novel, however sudden or lengthy the development of that decision, there are some very basic choices writers must make about how the novel will be written. Some of these choices will be an evolution of the story and characters but sometimes writers forget that they have a choice in these matters at all.

Writing often begins from random thoughts, which turn into scribblings, which turn into notes and all of sudden there’s a first sentence and then more sentences. The choices – which are choices, regardless of whether or not the writer is conscious of them – might have already been made without any great thought as to whether those choices do a disservice to the writing.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about tense, I’m talking about point of view and I’m talking about perspective.

Tense

There are plenty of different types of tenses in the English language (past, present simple, present continuous, present perfect, conditional, conditional perfect, conditional perfect progressive, future, etc) but for the purposes of this discussion there are only two I’m going to address: past and present.

Consider the following two sentences about the same thing in these two different tenses:

Brian picked up the clock and saw that the deadline had passed. (“picked” and “saw” – past tense, “had passed” – using a past auxiliary verb (had) to create a past perfect tense that indicates an action also in the past but having occurred prior to the other past actions)

Brian picks up the clock and sees that the deadline has passed. (“picks” and “sees” – present tense, “has passed” – using a present auxiliary verb (has) to create a present perfect tense that indicates an action in the recent past)

I hope I haven’t confused anyone with the above explanations because you really don’t need to know or understand auxiliaries or perfect tenses to understand past and present.

Often the tense you choose to write in is a matter of comfort or preference. I’ve written in both. My first published novel, Enemies Closer, is written in the past tense. But my next two novels, Black Spot and Trine, are both written in the present tense.

For Enemies Closer, it was less of a choice. Many, if not most, commercial fiction novels are written in the past tense and I think I was simply emulating that. I didn’t give it a great deal of thought. But when I started writing, that’s the tense in which the words came out on the page.

For Black Spot and Trine, it was a very deliberate choice. The main character in Black Spot has amnesia so it made no sense to me to write about a character who couldn’t remember her past in the past tense. Someone without memories would surely spend a lot of time just being in the present. And Trine is set in a very specific two-week period with a main character who lives for the present, very focused on her routines without any consideration of the future and running from a difficult past. I thought that the present tense gave a sense of immediacy, the here and now, to the story.

Whichever one a writer chooses to write a story, the most important thing is to continue in that tense. There is nothing more annoying and sometimes confusing to a reader than a text that moves from past to present to past tense when there is no reason to.

However, a good reason to switch is flashbacks. If you are planning a story that contains a lot of flashbacks, then writing the current day story in present tense and the historical components in past tense is a simple way of demonstrating to the reader which scenes belong to now and which scenes belong to then.

Point of View

There are three kinds of point of view:

*First person – written from the internal point of view of one person (I picked up the clock and saw that the deadline had passed.)

*Second person – written from the internal point of view of one person who isn’t the main focus (You picked up the clock and saw that the deadline had passed.)

*Third person – written from the external point of view (He picked up the clock and saw that the deadline had passed.)

There are benefits to each point of view but there are also limitations. Obviously if you choose to write in the first person, your story can never reveal anything more than that one person knows. You can’t write a scene in which a bomb is ticking away underneath a car that person is sitting in without that person knowing the bomb is there, which would make them a pretty stupid person unless you write it as “I didn’t know it at the time but…”, which would also make it necessary to write in the past tense.

Second person point of view is relatively rare but a good example of it is We Need to Talk about Kevin, where Eva writes letters to her husband in the wake of their teenage son’s mass killing spree at his local high school. Second person point of view is often half first person point of view as well. Yes, Eva writes to her husband and reminds him of things he did (“You did this, you did that”) but she also writes about herself (“I did this, I did that”). It’s hard to write exclusively in the second person point of view because at some point either the writer wants to reveal the narrator or the reader wants the narrator revealed.

Third person allows a broader story to be told but can still reveal all of those internal thoughts of the main character or characters. I wrote Enemies Closer in the third person but I wrote each chapter from the different third person perspective of a variety of characters. While I was writing from the perspective of one person, I only allowed them to describe what they could see of the other characters, not what the other characters were thinking. If I wanted to reveal that, I had to wait until a chapter from the other character’s perspective came around.

Perspective

And then there’s perspective. You can choose for your narrator to have only a limited perspective, you can choose multiple narrators who each have limited perspectives (but together provide a more complete story), or you can choose for your narrator to know everything. When it’s a narrator who knows everything, it’s often an unseen, uninvolved, godlike third party with an omniscient quality. This perspective means you can reveal parts of the story that the characters themselves don’t know like that previously mentioned bomb ticking under the car. It raises the tension for the readers, who fear for the safety of the oblivious character.

Choosing a limited perspective, however, allows for the readers to experience the same emotions – surprise, shock, disgust, fear – as they discover things at the same time as the characters do.

Again, once you’ve made this choice, you have to stick to it. You can’t have a story with limited perspective and still tell readers things your characters don’t know. It’s illogical. And unless you want to be accused of massive plot holes (“The main character couldn’t have possibly known that and yet suddenly, for some reason, he does.”), logic is important.

*****

To readers who aren’t writers as well, these might seem like very small choices to make but when the wrong decision is made, the important of these choices become obvious. Spending a little more time considering the alternatives might prevent a terrible mistake and a lengthy, painful rewrite.