L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 32

Eulogies: The Hardest Writing Any Writer Will Ever Do – Part 1

I am not good with death. Perhaps no one is good with death, although doctors and funeral directors must deal with it so often that they develop coping mechanisms. I haven’t developed any yet. Possibly (and luckily) because I haven’t been exposed to it too often. That was until the last few years.

In 2012, my cousin Scott died unexpectedly. In 2013, my second cousin Zac died unexpectedly as well. And this year, my 89-year-old grandmother Betty died. It wasn’t unexpected – at that age, it can’t be. But it doesn’t seem to matter if it’s unexpected or not. All types of death are equally difficult to comprehend, to accept.

For the funerals of both Zac and my grandmother, I was asked to write eulogies. Normally a writer is so pleased to be asked to write anything. But normally you don’t cry through every word as you type it on the page. Normally there’s a happy ending. Or one of your own choosing anyway. Nobody would choose this. Nobody who had a choice would choose death.

These are the times when I wish I wasn’t a writer. So nobody would ask me to write a eulogy. Because there are no words. Nothing that can make it right. Nothing that can do justice to who they were when they were still alive, nothing that can do justice to how perfect they were in their imperfect lives.

But both my second cousin and my grandmother are worth celebrating. So today, here is the eulogy I wrote for Zac. And on Friday I will post the two eulogies I wrote for my grandmother (yes, two, but that story will keep for a few days). None of them are good enough. Nothing ever could be.

*****

Zac and I had three things in common:

Family: we were second cousins
Football: we were Collingwood fanatics.
And stories: we were the writers of the family.

I’m also a trained editor and when Zac finished writing his novel called “Heaven and Hell” in 2012, he asked me to do an assessment. When I agreed, he tweeted:

When he finally got my assessment about a month later, he tweeted:

Despite my brutally honest assessment of his novel and his overwhelmed response, Zac was a genuine writing talent. As part of my assessment, I recommended that he focus more on short stories while he developed. He’d already been writing short stories, of course, but as they started coming through to me, I realised his was a truly unique style, which he was well aware of. Zac once tweeted:

Zac had just started studying professional writing and editing at RMIT this year. He had a twitter story published by One Forty Fiction in December last year and a short story published in February this year called “Francis the Brave”.

He had an eye for the quirky. He tweeted:

He had an eye for the unusual. Zac tweeted:

And, strangely, he had a liking for telling the stories of old men including:

An old man who voyeuristically painted portraits of widows seen from an apartment window high above opposite a cemetery
An old man who obsessively maintained the length of his lawn with scissors
And an old man who mediated between his two daughters, one a soldier, the other an ardent anti-war activist

Zac himself tweeted:

Another theme in Zac’s writing was the casual bystander. Although he often wrote from the first person perspective, he was often narrating the story of someone else from the sidelines. He was a natural observer of the banal, the beautiful and the heartbreaking aspects of life.

When the Melbourne Writers Festival asked via Twitter who people’s favourite short story writers were, I immediately tweeted back:

And his short story called “Death: Oil on Canvas” confirmed everything I had come to suspect. After he sent it to me in January this year, I told Zac, “You have the makings of a top-notch short story writer – your talent for these sorts of unusual concepts, which are a must for stories this length, is undeniable.”

This is an extract from Zac’s short story called “Death: Oil on Canvas”:

“A gentle breeze is blowing my father’s fine white wreath of hair about. In the absence of noise I step around the room and admire pictures of my mother; a few are of her younger years, faded around the edges, the sepia centre as strong as her gaze in the distance; others are coloured, only a few years old, her hair shiny and white and her eyes beaming with unsuspecting joy; there’s a stroke on the horizon.”

Zac, I was unsuspecting in the end, too. But in a short, too short, amount of time, you enriched my life immeasurably. I will miss you, I will miss your tweets popping up in my Twitter feed, I will miss your short stories arriving in my inbox and I will always wonder what the number one bestselling book you had in you somewhere would have been about.

In February this year, Zac tweeted:

Collingwood and Hawthorn play next Sunday afternoon at the MCG and I invite everyone to go along and celebrate Zac just like he asked.

And if you like a book and people ask why, tell them it’s because it’s better than kittens. Zac thought that was a damn good line.

Book Review: Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

This is another book that I’ve already seen the movie of before reading it, before I even knew it was an adaptation, before I even knew there was a book. The more I read, the more I worried I was going to be left unsatisfied by it because it was exactly like the movie. The adaptation had been very faithful to the text. Usually that’s a good thing. But because I was reading the book after having seen the movie, I was looking for the differences, the details that can’t be replicated or demonstrated on film. I wanted a different experience, not the same one I had while watching the movie.

I got that and so much more. It’s not a perfect novel (it could be called slow) but it is so close that I can’t give it anything other than 5 stars, which anyone who reads my reviews and ratings will know is not something I do often. I’m a hard marker but this is a great book. This is a book that should be and will be read for decades to come. This is a book that should also be used as a teaching tool for all others wanting to write a book.

Smilla, the main character, is half Greenlander, half Dane. After the disappearance (and presumed death) at sea of her Greenlandic mother, who was a traditional hunter and lived a nomadic life with her children, Smilla is taken by her father to Denmark where she struggles to adapt. She runs away several times, making it back to Greenland twice, but always her father finds her and brings her “home”.

The story begins when a young boy living in the same apartment building as Smilla, who is now 37, jumps to his death from the roof of a local Copenhagen warehouse. The official explanation is that he fell while playing. But Smilla knows he would never have been playing on the roof. He was afraid of heights. And she also knows snow (hence the title). The tracks in the snow lead straight off. No child plays by running in a straight line, she reasons. The only reason he would have been up there was if he was being pursued by something or someone he feared more than his fear of heights. And Smilla can’t rest until she knows why the child was driven to his death.

The writing is languid and the pace is unhurried. Though the book is described in some places as a thriller, I think the pace is too slow for that description. Instead, it’s more of a mystery, not just the mystery of why the boy died but also the mystery of why Smilla is so determined to unravel it. Smilla as a character is revealed just as slowly as the pace, like an onion’s layers being peeled back with breaks in between to wipe the tears from your face and steel yourself to deal with the next layer.

One of the great triumphs of the book is the sense of Greenland, the knowledge of Greenland, the impression of what it is to be a Greenlander that seeps from every page. Having read Burial Rites by Hannah Kent not that long ago, which is set in Iceland, I realise that what Peter Høeg has achieved here is what Hannah Kent was trying – and failed – to achieve: to establish a sense of place on the page. The only things I really knew about Iceland and Greenland before was their oxymoronic names because, as the saying goes, Iceland is green and Greenland is icy. Now, because of this book, Greenland is fixed in my mind so vividly despite the fact that I’ve never been there. Iceland, despite having read Hannah Kent’s book, remains unknown.

I read the English translation and in some places the writing feels stiltedly formal but after a while it feels like the style of the writing rather than a flaw. It contributes beautifully to the fact that Smilla is a hard character to know.

There are some convolutions in the plot and Smilla always seems to be able to find someone in her life who just happens to know or know of the key players in the mystery and provide important insights. And quite a lot she is able to progress through the story simply because those pulling the strings allow it without any particularly logical reasons. The ending also consists of the villain capturing our hero and explaining all the parts of the mystery that she wasn’t able to learn for herself, instead of refusing to and killing the hero, thus leaving himself open to being thwarted.

But 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. I’m going to quote it here in its entirety because it doesn’t give anything away but I hope it intrigues and makes others want to read the book if they haven’t already, just to get to that last paragraph and let it blow their mind the way it did mine.

“Tell us, they’ll come and say to me. So we may understand and close the case. They’re wrong. It’s only what you do not understand that you can come to a conclusion about. There will be no conclusion.”

Pow! Straight between the eyes!

Read this book and judge all other Scandinavian fiction by it. In a word, in all senses of the word, imperative.

5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 9 February 2016

The Lost Art of Letter Writing: What Else Are We Losing?

“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.”

Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra, 3 January 1801

I can pinpoint the day I last wrote a letter (actually it was an email in the form of a letter). It was 16 December 2003. Between 2001 and 2003, I corresponded with an Alaskan woman I met in a chat room. We bonded over being writers and a mutual jealousy of being in a faraway location. Her name was Jessica.

We did actually write each other letters. We mostly sent emails but between those, we would write letters, lots of them, package up a bundle and then send them via snail mail across the ocean. I guess it was just for a change, something different. Sometimes we sent other things, too (I introduced her to a pack of Tim Tams).

Jess and I wrote each other so much that I started printing out copies of our emails and photocopying the letters I wrote to her in long hand so that I had a proper record of our correspondence. It felt important. At the time, I’m sure it was.

When I thought about writing this blog post, I pulled out the folder where I stored the emails and letters and started going through them, thinking maybe I could publish one that I’d written in conjunction with this theme of the lost art of letter writing.

I’m going to save you the whiny, self-indulgent ramblings of my coughtwentysix year old self. But let me summarise. I was still living with my grandparents, my relationship with both of my parents was in need of some patchwork repairs and I was working a job that frequently allowed me to open my letters to Jess with the words, “I am at work and it is just after lunch. I am so efficient that I have finished all the day’s work during the morning. So now I have time to write to you.”

I did a lot of complaining. About things that when I am reminded of them twelve years later seem hugely insignificant and I wonder why I let other people get to me so much instead of just living my own life. Jess complained about similar things, so we were obviously a good fit for each other.

At the start of 2004, Jess frequently started going on radio silence. She didn’t have a computer of her own anymore or access to one and the last email I had from her assured me she was fine and promising to tell me all about it very soon. In June of that year, I received my last communication from her. A postcard without a return address telling me she’d moved to California to live with her father and try to repair her extremely fractured relationship with him. There was a blog address (now long inactive) and a short message to say her story was too long for a postcard and that she’d tell me about it someday.

I never heard from Jess again.

Chat rooms are a thing of the past and in the meantime, social media seems to have taken over as the platform for keeping in touch with friends, family and acquaintances wherever they may be. We don’t need to write long letters because everybody already knows everything about us from what we reveal on those social media platforms (sometimes way too much).

But when I did write letters, it wasn’t in the form of the “true art” that Jane Austen described, expressing “on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth”. More often than not, it was the things I couldn’t say out loud to everyone else in my life. I am always more witty and considered on paper and that’s because of the time spent refining, a skill I don’t have when I’m speaking.

I own a beautiful Folio Society edition of Jane Austen’s Letters and reading through it, which is where I found the above quote, what struck me most were the things she didn’t say, not the things she did. Many of Jane’s letters were destroyed and the collection is of only those that remain. The letters that were destroyed perhaps painted a picture that her friends and relatives didn’t want to be public, the real Jane Austen, someone with a quick wit and a sharp tongue but also someone with very strong views that weren’t commonplace at the time. Her family and her estate felt they had to protect her image.

The letters between Jess and me paint a very distinct picture of a period in my life but before my death I think I will probably destroy most, if not all of them. Because they don’t reflect how I feel now and I would hate to think of them as a legacy I would leave. I would hate to think of people reading them and passing judgement on me or my parents (who I have a terrific relationship with now) or the minutiae of my pre-moving-out-of-home life.

I’ve said before that I don’t ever want to write an autobiography and reading those letters after all these years confirmed it for me. Instead, I’d rather be remembered – if I’m remembered at all – for my public volumes of writing.

And to Jessica Spurgeon, formerly of Anchorage and last known address somewhere in California, I hope your life turned out alright because despite all that complaining, mine did. I hope you’re still writing and that you’re happy. And maybe, one day, we’ll stumble across each other on a social media platform like we did all those years ago and resume some form of correspondence.

The Unlikelihood of Happily Ever Afters in Writing: Why We Should Enjoy the Moment

I’ve mentioned a couple of times now that I entered the 2015 Ampersand Prize, a writing competition for young adult and children’s writing, and managed to attract the attention of one of the judges. I’ve also mentioned that I failed to win or even be shortlisted, despite attracting that attention.

The likelihood of happily ever afters in writing is, as it has ever been, very small. The numbers of people who win competitions or simply succeed in getting published are comparatively low and the numbers just keep getting lower as you add the extra elements of happily ever after. Good reviews. Good sales. Awards. Subsequent publishing contracts. Financial security. Fame.

So this is me enjoying the moment as I share with you parts of the correspondence I received from that Ampersand judge. Sure, the moment is long over but the memory of that moment is still a glowing ember – blowing on it gently brings it back to life and casts it in a warm light like an orange sunrise breaking over the horizon.

*****

Monday, 21 September 2015

Hello, Louise.

I hope this finds you very well. I’m getting in touch because I read Black Spot in one sitting over the weekend and found it utterly engrossing (despite the fact that the sun was shining like crazy and I really should have been working on my vitamin D levels). I wanted to share some thoughts with you about the manuscript, and hopefully also learn more about you and your writing process.

I thought Black Spot was tremendously well written with a strong, deeply intimate voice and a firm sense of place. Livia Black was such an intriguing protagonist for me – frustratingly sheltered and yet compulsively, if cautiously, curious about the world around her – and I was on the edge of the couch while reading, desperate to unpack the mystery of her memory and of “the before”.

I hope you’ll forgive this outpouring of feedback – this is usually a good sign from my perspective, as it means the manuscript has struck a chord, but I can imagine it might feel torrential to be on the receiving end. Essentially, I’d just like to know where you’re at with Black Spot and where you’re planning to take it next.

We are still whittling down our Ampersand shortlist as we’ve had a huge number of entries this year, so any insight you can give me into your process and perspective on Black Spot would be helpful. I really look forward to hearing from you, Louise!

All the best.

*****

When I received this email, I forwarded it to the woman who is basically the reason I wrote Black Spot.

*****

Monday, 21 September 2015

Holy crap! I know I’m going to screw this up with my response email but I wanted you to be part of the amazement and excitement and overwhelming butterflies in my tummy that I’m having for now![image error]

*****

With her assistance, I composed a response email responding to the queries and issues the Ampersand judge had raised, resulting in this:

Friday, 25 September 2015

Hi, Louise.

I’m sure these sorts of emails are very overwhelming to receive, but I appreciate your thoughtful and prompt response. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of reading to get through, but I’m going to share Black Spot with my colleagues and start putting our shortlist together. I hope you can bear with me while we get ourselves sorted in here.

It probably goes without saying, but please keep this exchange on the down low for the time being – I’ll be in touch as soon as I can with an update and whether I need anything else from you. (Sorry to be so cryptic – it’s part of the process!)

Speak soon.

*****

I like to think I did keep it and still am keeping it on the down low – I didn’t tweet the news or anything like that. I only involved one person without censorship, the woman I mentioned above. But I did tell my mother, my stepmother and a writer friend – without mentioning the specifics of the competition or the judge – about the fact that I’d been contacted by the Ampersand judge and how exciting it was.

It took more than two months for the next correspondence and by that time the excitement had died down and the information contained in the email was expected.

*****

Thursday, 26 November 2015

Hello, Louise.

I’m just getting in touch with an update on Black Spot, as I’m sure you’re wondering what the outcome of this year’s Ampersand Prize is going to be. In the end, I’m afraid we’ve decided not to shortlist Black Spot for this year’s prize, but it remains highly commended in my eyes. I wish you all the best in finding a home for it and I hope you’ll keep me in mind for your future projects – I think you’re certainly a writer to watch.

All the best.

*****

It would be easy just to see the negatives, wouldn’t it? Didn’t win the prize, didn’t even make the shortlist.

I prefer to see the positives. The moment I received that first email was like a shot of adrenalin straight into my heart. A book I wrote remains highly commended in the eyes of a commissioning fiction editor, who wants me to keep her in mind for any future projects and who thinks I’m a writer to watch. And between receiving the first email and the last, I wrote nearly 30,000 words of the sequel (just in case), which actually helped me clarify some of the plot points in Black Spot as I undertake final rewrites.

Eventually, I’m going to get a happy ending. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. Maybe it will have nothing to do with winning competitions, getting published, good reviews, good sales, awards, subsequent publishing contracts, financial security and fame. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the moment. And when the next moment comes along, I’ll enjoy that, too. And, hopefully, life will be what happens while I’m busy enjoying the moments.

Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

This is a book for a very particular time. That time is the years after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. Published in 2005, the backdrop of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is 911. The story spans the course of a year as nine-year-old Oskar Schell finds a key in his father’s wardrobe and then spends another year looking for the lock it belongs to.

Unfortunately, more than ten years since it was released, the fact of 911 isn’t enough to make it “heartbreaking”, “tragic” and “intensely moving”. The fact of 911 has faded into recent history (as all events do), but history nonetheless, and so we must look at the story and the writing itself for whether the book will stand the test of time. I have doubts.

It is actually two stories interwoven, two stories that had very little to do with each other, two stories that could be separated without the other story losing much at all. The first story is Oskar’s. He’s distraught after the death of his father who was in the first Twin Tower that collapsed and looking for ways to keep him alive. He’s clearly on the autism spectrum (this will be the last book I read with a main character on the autism spectrum for a while – it’s so common it’s almost a genre in itself now). When he finds the key in an envelope marked “Black”, he looks up everyone named Black in the phone directory, all 400+ of them, and then visits them one by one to ask if they know anything about the key.

The second story is his grandparents’. Victims of the bombing of Dresden during World War II, they move to America separately and reconnect in a New York bakery. He was her sister Anna’s lover but her sister (and his unborn child) died in the attack. He marries her instead. There appears to be little love in the marriage – really, all either of them are doing is trying to hold on to Anna. So when she falls pregnant, he can’t cope and he leaves. He never meets his son who is, of course, Oskar’s father.

The blurb on the back of the book talks about how Oskar “inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years”. Except Oskar never gets anywhere near finding out the story of his grandparents. And it’s irrelevant anyway. Nothing to do with the key or the lock he is looking for. Nothing really to do with his father because he never knew the story either.

The structure of the novel is not straight prose. Oskar’s sections are, but they also include letters he writes to famous people, the responses he receives, pictures he collects, business cards (his and those of people he meets), transcripts of telephone messages, things he imagines, things he invents (nonsensical things that keep him calm while he is trying to fall asleep). Oskar’s grandfather’s section is written in long, long, grammatically incorrect sentences with lots of commas and not enough full stops that make you read it in long, breathless, uninterrupted, tiring bursts. Oskar’s grandmother’s section is written in short sentences with extra spaces breaking them up, perhaps to make up for the lack of space in her husband’s section, although she never sees what he has written.

When you consider it rationally, with the distance of time allowing a separation from the events of 911 that impacted everyone who lived through it, even those of us who lived through it from the other side of the world, the plot is actually a little convoluted, a little nonsensical. There are moments in it that are wonderful, in both positive and negative ways. But then there are other moments that rely on misdirection and misunderstanding and the belligerence of a nine-year-old child and the puerile revenge of an ex-wife that are ultimately frustrating.

I think this book is more important as a snapshot of a particular moment in history than it is as a piece of literature. It’s a fine piece of literature but I suspect many people reading it confused why they thought it was a fine piece of literature, thinking it was for the second reason when a later reading like I have done might have them reassessing and realising it was the first.

I suppose all books and the way we feel about them are influenced by where we are in our lives and any given point in history. Perhaps I’m just unlucky not to have read this when it was first released, when the spectre of 911 still loomed so large over everything and would have made this book seem more important than I think it is now. What a shame.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 30 January 2016

Project December style guide

In my book Project December, I recommended using a style guide or style sheet to note formatting, spelling, capitalisation and stylistic choices for easy reference instead of having to leaf or scroll through the manuscript to constantly remind yourself. This is the style guide I put together for Project December itself and I thought I’d share it so you know exactly what I was talking about.

A

Advanced Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing

ah but ahhing

airconditioning

B

blog posts – reference to Single White Female Writer blog posts encased in quotation marks

bullets – black circles at 0.5 cm and following lines indented 0.5 cm, line space after bullets are completed

back-story

book titles in italics

bestseller

blow-by-blow

C

chapters – each chapter starts on a new page

cliché

catnaps

copy edit

copy editor

D

double-edged

discoloration

E

ebook

F

firsthand

free rein NOT free reign

forgo (give up) NOT forego

foreign language phrases in italics

G

Google – noun and verb

H

headings – initial cap, all lower case following words unless proper nouns

heads-up (early warning)

I

initials of names – no full stops between letters e.g. JK Rowling, EB White

M

master’s degree in writing

Master of Arts (Writing)

movie titles in italics

N

numbers within text – spell out if under 100, over four digits use commas to separate thousands and millions e.g. 1,000 and 1,000,000

numbers when used as bullets – Arabic numerals followed by a full stop at 0.5 cm and following lines indented 0.5 cm, line space after list is completed

nazi – lower case “n” in “grammar nazi” context

O

old-fashioned

P

part time – I work part time

part-time – I’m a part-time worker

page-by-page

problem-solver

pear-shaped

periodical titles in italics

parts – each part heading is labelled with its part number and given its own page

poem titles in italics

practise – verb

practice – noun and adjective

paragraph formatting – first paragraph after heading has no indent, subsequent paragraphs 0.5 cm indent first line only

Q

quotation marks – doubles NOT singles

S

stepmother, stepbrother – no hyphen

sure-fire

Scooby-Doo

symbol to break up paragraphs – ∞, no indent in paragraph following symbol

T

table of contents – no leader lines or page numbers

television show titles encased in quotation marks

to-do

tiptoe

U

um but umming

upfront

W

willy nilly

writer’s block

well written – it was well written

well-written – it was a well-written book

word – where the expression “the word ‘example’” appears, use quotation marks, not italics

Project December

This is the titular chapter from Project December: A Book about Writing, the one that hopefully makes it clear why I called my book Project December.

*****

So if Project October is all about the first draft and Project November is all about editing, rewriting and polishing your manuscript, then Project December is about what to do when you finally have a completed book.

I’m certainly not an expert on the publishing process – I’d probably be a lot more successful, wealthy and famous if I were – but I’ve learned a few things along the way through publishing my own books. This is what I know.

Copy Edit

Have someone else do a proper copy edit on your completed manuscript. I’m not talking about suggestions on how to make the book content better. If you’re at this stage, then you’re beyond that. You’ve already done that. What I’m talking about is someone who will find all the misspelled words, the missing punctuation, the unnecessary punctuation, the incorrect grammar, the random capitals in the middle of a sentence, the proper nouns missing their initial capital, the words spelled correctly but used incorrectly, all the things that despite your best efforts and all my lecturing on how to do it right that you’ve still done wrong.

It’s actually really hard to copy edit your own work because of your familiarity with the text. Instead of reading what is on the page, authors see what they think is on the page and skip words subconsciously. It’s not uncommon for all readers to do this, in fact. Studies have shown that most people reading will skip small words on the page because their brains can fill in for them what the word should be so that they don’t need to read it. It’s a great tool for speeding up the reading process. Unfortunately, when we’re looking for mistakes, such as places where we’ve accidentally used the word “on” when we should have used the word “of”, then this skill become a nuisance, a hindrance, the exact opposite of what we need our brains to be doing.

If you’re also a trained editor and feel confident doing your own copy edit, then go ahead. I copy edited both of my books (therefore all mistakes are my own – although hopefully you won’t find too many). But if you’re not, it’s really important to get someone else to do it. If you know someone who isn’t a trained editor but is as much of a spelling, punctuation and grammar nazi as I am, and they’re willing to do it, this could be a low-cost option. But if you don’t, it’s really worth spending the money and engaging the services of someone who is obligated by the fact that you’re paying them to do a good job.

Don’t just choose the first editor you can find. Look around. Get quotes that outline exactly what will be included and how long it will take. Ask for references, other writers you can actually call and speak to and whose books are published so you can look through them to see if you can spot any mistakes. Look online to see if anyone has reviewed their services (everybody shouts it from the rooftops – or an online reviewing site, the modern-day equivalent, when they don’t get good service these days).

And don’t just choose the cheapest. It’s a one-off cost (once per published book anyway). So weigh up everything and make a reasonable choice. I know most writers aren’t exactly flush with money but you have to be smart about choosing where to spend the funds you do have. This is one of the best places to spend. Because if you don’t, everyone who reads your book – even those who aren’t especially fussy about spelling, punctuation and grammar – will stumble, fumble and trip over passages that are poorly spelled, badly punctuated and grammatically incorrect. They might not know why. But they will know it made for a more difficult reading experience than it should have been.

Competitions

There are a lot of writing competitions out there these days. It’s worth doing some research and finding out which ones you will be able to submit your manuscript to. Some of the benefits of winning include cash prizes, publishing contracts, generally being celebrated as the winner, marketing, widening your network of contacts in the industry and broader sales. Some of the benefits even if you don’t win include widening your network of contacts in the industry, getting your work read by the judges and reading the winning piece of work to be able to compare what it was the judges were actually looking for and how far your work is from being at the same standard.

I don’t recommend entering every competition out there. For one thing, it can become quite expensive as many competitions have entry fees. (If they don’t, enter as many of those as you like.) For another thing, it can become quite time consuming and eat into the time you should be spending doing other things like writing, revising, planning your marketing strategy, executing your marketing strategy, etc.

Also, when you look into the details and whittle it down, you’ll find that you won’t meet the criteria of most competitions and there’s nothing more likely to guarantee you won’t win than trying to reshape your manuscript at the last minute.

Agents

If you can get an agent, then they will make the whole process of getting your book published a lot easier. They know all the publishers and the editors who work for them. They know what genres publishers specialise in. More importantly, they know what genres they have no interest in publishing. They know what’s going to be published in the next year and if your book will stand out on a list or disappear under the weight of a dozen other books that are all much the same. They know about contracts and territory rights and advances.

Agent are not, however, editors or manuscript assessors. If your book isn’t up to scratch, they don’t do intensive work to help you get it there. They might point you in the direction of editors and manuscript assessors they routinely recommend or engage for their clients, but that’s it.

They also don’t ask for any money upfront. An agent’s decision to represent you is an investment in you and a sign of their belief in your talents as a writer. They get paid when you get paid by taking an agreed percentage of your earnings from the publisher when and if they ever come. If an agent asks you for money, then they aren’t really an agent and they aren’t working in your best interests.

In Australia, there is the Australian Literary Agents’ Association and all members must abide by a code of practice. You can go to their website to find out what this code entails and a list of their members is freely available to determine whether any potential agent you are considering signing up with is part of the association. This list is also a great source of information for simply finding out who the agents are and how to get in contact with them.

Traditional Publishing Versus Self-Publishing

Almost all publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts these days. So if you want to be traditionally published (and who doesn’t?) and you don’t have an agent, this is a great way to get your book where it needs to go. However, you will be one book in a very large electronic slush pile, so the chances of getting noticed are not great.

I recommend submitting to traditional publishers as a first step. Most will let you know within a reasonable time frame whether they have any interest in your book. If you don’t get any interest from publishers after this, then consider self-publishing.

Self-publishing is so easy these days. That’s why so many people do it. But few people do it well. Many self-published books are trite efforts, littered with errors and with no obvious attempt to produce a book that is of a publishable standard. (If you haven’t been able to attract the interest of any traditional publishers, perhaps you should also consider whether your book is at a publishable standard yet. If in doubt, pay for a manuscript assessment. Yes, I know it’s yet more money being outlaid but this is what serious writers do.)

If your book is of a publishable standard and if you do choose to self-publish, there are a few options. Physical books, print on demand, ebooks, audio books. The costs associated with each vary. Physical books can cost thousands while ebooks can cost nothing. Do your research in order to determine which way you want to go.

Self-Publishing an Ebook

There are a few out there but I’ve self-published ebooks on two platforms: Amazon KDP and Smashwords. I’m going to limit myself to talking about the two I know.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is surprisingly easy. You need an Amazon account but who doesn’t have one of those already? Download the “Building your book for Kindle” reference and follow the instructions to prepare the file that will become your ebook. Then simply upload it with your separate book cover, select a few options and publish. The downside to KDP is that the file format only works on Kindles or the Kindle app. I have the Kindle app on my laptop but reading a novel this way is annoying and might limit your reading audience.

To get around this, I also published with Smashwords when I released Enemies Closer. Preparing the electronic file for Smashwords is a little more complex but there’s a reason for that. When you’re done, it will be suitable for and distributed to multiple platforms including iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and basically everything else that isn’t Amazon.

ISBNs

If your book is being published by a traditional publisher, they will source an ISBN (which stands for International Standard Book Number) for your book. They can be purchased in bulk, so your publisher will have one ready to go when you need it.

Many ebook publishers will allow you to self-publish your book without applying for an ISBN. But it’s such an easy process that everybody should do it. You simply apply online, provide a few details about your book, pay a relatively small fee and you are assigned an ISBN, which you can then include on the inside front pages of your book as its unique identifier. Apart from anything else, it shows you are serious about your book.

In each country, the purchase of ISBNs is administrated by different organisations. In Australia, Thorpe-Bowker is the only official ISBN registration agency. To find who to purchase ISBNs from in your local jurisdiction, visit the International ISBN Agency website.

You can also purchase barcodes through the agencies so if you are planning to publish a physical copy of your book, this can be included on the back cover to make scanning at the checkout simple when your book is being bought. The Thorpe-Bowker website is actually a great source of services and information related to book publishing. I highly recommend all Australian writers take the time to check it out.

Note that you will need separate ISBNs for every edition of the same book. When I published with Amazon’s KDP and Smashwords, I needed two ISBNs because they are technically two different books. The fact that their content is identical is irrelevant. You can purchase ISBNs in bulk to save money when you need more than one.

Cover Design

This is another one of those areas where I highly recommend having someone else do the work to make sure it is done properly. A great book cover can be the difference between the interest of a potential reader and the dismissal of a potential reader.

All my book covers are designed – or at the very least prepared according to my instructions – by Jessica Vigar, a graphic design and marketing specialist. You can give your designer a brief on what you would like or you can give them free rein. Either way, unless you’re a graphic designer or book cover designer yourself, it’s best to delegate this important part of the process.

Marketing

Once the book is ready and released, then comes the hard work. Marketing is a very difficult skill and shouting at people on Twitter to “buy my book” is not a very effective way to differentiate yourself and your book from all the other books out there.

Prepare a marketing strategy so you know exactly what you will be doing and when. An initial announcement is a good place to start. Facebook seems to be where everything is announced these days, so try that. Twitter as well. Instagram. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Any social media platform. But it’s not just good enough to say your book is out and ask people to buy it. You have to sell it. You have to sell them on the idea of your book. You have to make them want to buy your book.

Try local media. Try state media. Try national media. Try your school newsletter. Your school and the one your kids go to. Your university (they like to see alumni publishing). There’s an announcements section in my local writers’ organisation’s bi-monthly publication and I see authors announcing their new books all the time. Prepare a book trailer. Send copies of your book to bloggers and ask for reviews. Announce it on your blog. Publish excerpts. Tell everyone who will listen. The man on the street. The women in front of and behind you in the queue. I once chewed a guy’s ear off at the football talking about my writing and he was a complete stranger but we got to talking and he showed an interest.

I’m probably the last person who should be offering advice on marketing. I’m only good at it when I’m marketing other people. But when it comes to marketing myself, I’m often struck down by a severe case of the humbles.

If you’re as bad at marketing yourself as I am, it’s a good idea to get some professional help on this, too. Yes, it’s potentially more money being outlaid but this is where you can get a really good return on your investment.

*****

There are no guarantees when it comes to publishing a book. Why some books do well when they are clearly bad and why others don’t when they are clearly good is a mystery. It’s less of a mystery if the book you put out is sloppy or the cover is badly designed or you neglect to tell anyone about it. To give yourself the best chance, you need to invest time, effort and money. Then pray for a little luck.

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Book Review: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

This is the second in my series of reverse reviews, reading books I’ve seen and enjoyed the movie adaptations of.

Postcard from the Edge is the story of Suzanne Vale, a Los Angeles-based actress struggling with drug addiction and a so-so career. When we meet her, it’s day one of her thirty day stay in rehab and she’s keeping a diary at the suggestion of one of her counsellors. Through Suzanne’s diary, we also meet the other people she’s undertaking rehab with at the same time and none of them are all that important to the overall story.

On day fifteen, Suzanne’s diary entries start being interspersed with the thoughts of Alex, who doesn’t know it yet but on day sixteen will be admitted to the same rehab facility. His sections are really hard to read – they made my brain hurt because I felt compelled to read them fast and I had a sense of the downward drug spiral he was on, especially when he left the facility without finishing his rehab to go on a massive bender.

After Suzanne leaves rehab, we leave Alex (thank goodness, I couldn’t have taken much more) and are thrown head first into twenty-six pages of dialogue – literally just dialogue. We aren’t told who’s speaking but it seems as though they’re on a date and the only attribution is “he said” and “she said” before it moves into “she” at a therapy session talking to her therapist, then “he” at a therapy session talking to his therapist, then the two of them on another date.

From this point the novel returns to a more standard narrative form as Suzanne goes to work on her first film since being released from rehab. This is where the majority of the story that someone who has seen the film will recognise it has come from. Then Suzanne runs some errands and goes to a party that leaves her in a major depressive funk. Then she spends nine days in bed. Then she accompanies her friend Lucy to an appearance on a late night talk show where she meets Jesse in the green room, who is an author whose book has been optioned and is being turned into a movie. And that’s pretty much it.

This is not a plot driven novel, it’s very much a character piece and it’s very much a novel of the eighties – existential angst of the privileged and drugs abound. For fans of the movie, it is almost unrecognisable. When Carrie Fisher wrote the script for the film, she was very selective in what she took from the novel (I’d estimate less than 20%). The movie is better for it because while I give the movie 5 stars, I can only give the book 3 stars and I wonder if I would have given it 2 stars if I hadn’t seen or wasn’t so fond of the movie. I applaud Fisher’s ability to recognise the limitations of her novel and turn it into the film that the novel should have been.

This book is a contradiction because it is easy to read and hard to read at the same time. I read it over the course of two days but the way Alex’s thoughts and the dialogue only section were written was really challenging so I pushed through them, wanting them to be finished.

I’m torn over whether I want to read any more of Carrie Fisher’s work based on this effort. I’ll probably spend a few months or more likely a few years making that decision. In the meantime, I can watch the movie (again and again and again).

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 17 January 2016

My own Project November (hell)

In my book Project December and in a March blog post, I outlined what I call Project November – how to approach a rewrite after finishing the first draft of your novel. To briefly recap, the steps were:

• Accept that change is required

• Ask for beta feedback

• Walk away (AKA take a break)

• Come back at least a month later (AKA read it yourself)

• Give careful consideration to all the feedback you receive from your beta readers

• Cut, cut, cut

• Add, add, add

• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite

I’m now doing Project November for Black Spot, which I’m planning to release later this year.

I’ve accepted that change is required. After receiving some initial interest from a publisher who ultimately decided not to proceed, I accepted that it’s a good story that just needs some good, old-fashioned, hard work.

I’ve asked for and received beta feedback from four different people – two of my sisters, my honorary manager and a former manuscript assessor my honorary manager just happened to be working with at the time (bonus!). I was also lucky enough to have an actual fiction editor working at a publisher read the manuscript when I entered a competition and she provided some limited remarks, too.

I’ve walked away (for much longer than a month – it’s actually been about eighteen months because I was submitting to competitions and publishers and then writing a blog and two other novels). And I’ve come back. I’ve read it myself and asterisked all the areas I think need attention.

I’ve given careful consideration to all the feedback I received from my beta readers including removing “Louise” words (words that I would use but that the characters wouldn’t), removing a scene where the characters pee in the woods (what was I thinking?), making the town in which they live a character in itself (and thus bringing it to life), adding some more romance (smoochies!), removing words of uncertainty (maybe, perhaps, sometimes) because I was vastly overusing them. And I’ve acted on all this feedback.

I’ve cut, cut, cut – sometimes I’ve cut huge paragraphs, consecutive paragraphs, although I haven’t cut out any entire chapters yet. I don’t think I will, mainly because I feel the structure is good and it’s the smaller stuff that needs work.

I’ve added, added, added – I’ve included some screen shots of the first ten pages below with the changes tracked so you can see how much I’ve added (red means added for those not familiar with how Track Changes works).

And I’m rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. When I was reading it myself, I felt the first fourteen pages were too prose heavy, so I rewrote them with more dialogue, a little more showing and a little less telling.

In fact, in some cases I’m even rewriting what I’ve already rewritten. Why? Just because I’m making changes doesn’t mean I’m making the right changes. Reading back some of the changes I was making, I realised it wasn’t working any better than the original draft. And, luckily, I was able to identify a few things that it’s important for everyone undertaking Project November to remember.

A Fence Does Not Equal Suspense

When I did my reread, I felt the text could do with a little more suspense, a little more of the reader being suspicious about what’s going on. And for some reason, I decided that erecting a huge fence topped with razor wire around the farm the main character lives on would achieve that. And then I added some barns where a secret crop was grown and only the main character’s father knew what went on in there. Ooohhh, spooky, right?

Hardly. Apart from not upping the suspense level one iota, it was a total tangent from the original story and completely unnecessary and it also interfered with an important element of the plot, which is the main character and several others coming and going from the farm whenever they wanted and mostly unnoticed.

The fence did not equal suspense. Neither did the secret crop. So after writing them both in, the next day I wrote them both out again. I’m still looking for a way to up the suspense level but I haven’t found it yet. Sometimes the answers aren’t obvious.

Jokey McJokerson

I love witty characters. I love witty dialogue. And when I was rewriting the first fourteen pages to include more dialogue, there were jokes, jokes and more jokes, as well as some kidding around. But it made no sense. The main character, who has long-term amnesia, is visiting her team of medical specialists and it was a key part of the relationship that she felt quite disconnected from them. So why would she suddenly become Jokey McJokerson? Why would she be like that when she isn’t like that in any other part of the book? Why, especially when her disconnection from them is an important plot point?

Because I love witty characters and witty dialogue. It didn’t matter that it made no sense when I was writing it. I was having fun writing it.

Of course, it was less fun having to take it all out again.

Change still needs to be consistent with the plot and consistent with the personality of the characters you are writing about. Witty dialogue can be great. But if it’s out of character, then it’s just going to push your next draft further away from where it should be.

Overexplaining

I am guilty of this in real life, just as much as I am in my writing sometimes. Generally it’s a problem I experience when I am writing first drafts and a good edit with a red pen will take care of it. But because I was adding, adding, adding – essentially writing the first draft of new sections – there was a real sense of overexplaining.

“She went here and did this for this reason and then went there and did that for that reason.” And there were some more reasons, and a sprinkling of back-story, and some things that could have been left unexplained for the reader to puzzle over but I didn’t leave them unexplained.

When I reread the sections the next day, I realised what I’d done and did some judicious editing. Sometimes rewriting your rewrites is just as important as the rewrites themselves.

Change for Change’s Sake

Just because you’re undertaking a rewrite does not mean that everything needs to be changed. I’ve had positive feedback from all five of the people who’ve read the first draft of my book. That’s the proof that not everything needs to be changed. They liked it. If I changed everything, it wouldn’t be the book they liked anymore.

If the feedback you get is more negative than positive, then perhaps a lot does need to be changed. But it’s important to specifically identify what needs changing, not just to make change for change’s sake. Every change should have a reason behind it. You should be able to explain to yourself, and others when they ask, why you changed something.

If you can’t explain it, then it probably doesn’t need to be changed. In fact, you might be changing the positives and neglecting the negatives, making your book worse instead of better.

I’m only 80 pages into my current Project November – 170 to go – but I’ve deleted about 2,000 words and added another 3,000, including brand new chapters (that’s significant in a book that’s only 80,000 words long). It might not even be the final Project November for Black Spot. I might need to do another. It’s hard. And the thought of doing another is why it’s my own Project November hell at the moment. Fingers crossed I’m on the right track.

Work experience, first jobs and eventual careers: how did we get here?

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a lawyer. At least, I thought I did. Yes, I was writing poems and novels in my spare time but when anyone asked, I insisted I wanted to be a lawyer. “A lady lawyer,” my great aunt Violet said to me. “No,” I replied in my youthful feminist beginnings, “just a lawyer.”

In support of this, I did Year 10 work experience at a legal firm where my mother knew the owner. I don’t remember much about that week except for a couple of things:

I spent a lot of time in the archives doing filing.
I accidentally drew with a red whiteboard marker on the white shirt the receptionist was wearing because I was holding it out and she walked a little too closely past me.
I was mistaken for a criminal when I accompanied one of the lawyers to the court to observe what he did. (One of the clerks asked me if my case was up next and I was mortified. Clearly my work experience wardrobe was on a par with that of someone who commits crimes in their youth, gets caught and has to appear in court.)

I recognise now that I was extremely lucky not to have to venture back into the workforce for another seven years as I completed high school, my first university degree and then immediately followed it up with a two year writing and editing diploma, finally realising I was destined to be a writer. But it took just two weeks from the day I completed that diploma to land my first job.

I thought it was a dream job. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I thought it was going to be the first step towards a glorious career. (I’m sure you can see where this is going.) The job was executive assistant to an American film producer who had come to Australia to set up a film and television production company. He also had an executive administrator and they were both live-in positions. I moved into an apartment with him, his girlfriend and his executive administrator on the twenty-second floor of the Republic Towers in Melbourne. I had made it.

Of course, it didn’t quite turn out the way I was hoping it would. It was three months (I quit the job and moved out of the apartment after three months, not necessarily in that order) of watching a con man scam writers into thinking he was going to produce their hard work and scam investors out of their money. I didn’t actually know that’s what was happening at the time (I was young and completely lacking in real world experience) but for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I started to feel uneasy about working for him. There was a lot of flash and little substance. I needed some “honest” work so I asked my sister, who was managing a little Italian place in a shopping centre food court, for a job.

If you Google the name of that American film producer and the word “scam” now, there are lots of results. He went from scam to scam to scam (never was a genuine film producer that I can tell) and seems to be able to keep doing it, relieving unsuspecting people from their hard-earned money. There are a few websites devoted to informing anyone prepared to do a little research that he’s not what he seems. I wish there’d been one back then.

So instead of the administration role I should have begun my career with to get some experience, I spent three months being jerked around and then a year working for my sister before finally landing my first proper office job eighteen months after I finished my studies.

Now, all these years later, I wonder about where taking the other option in my own personal Sliding Doors choice – declining that executive assistant role – would have led me. Would I still be in roughly the same place I am today after spending time in the financial services, not-for-profit and mobility industries? Would I have embraced being a full-time writer more quickly? Or would it have taken longer? I could spend years trying to figure it out.

In the meantime, I’d love to read your comments about where you thought you wanted to go, the first step and if you ever got there or went in a completely different direction. Maybe we can help someone on the verge of their first job to avoid making the mistakes we have. Or maybe it’s just something everyone has to go through for themselves.

*First published on LinkedIn 17 January 2016