L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 36

How Long Should Chapters Be?

“How long should chapters be?” is the proverbial “piece of string” question but I’ve seen writers asking it on writing forums so I thought I’d have a go at answering it. The definitive answer, of course, is that there is no fixed length any chapter should be. It needs to be determined by each individual author and depends on their preference, the type of book being written and how the chapter reads when it’s eventually written.

But there are some identifiable methods that it might be useful to list if you are struggling with this question.

Write the First Chapter and Use Its Length as a Model

Rather than setting an arbitrary target, sometimes it’s easier to begin writing without knowing where one chapter will end and another will begin. By the time you’ve completed the first chapter, you might have had the decision made for you and you can simply continue on using that length as a model.

Set a Word Count Target

Having all chapters roughly the same word length can make for a consistent reading experience, especially for those readers who like to end the day by reading a couple of chapters in bed before turning out the light and nodding off. It also gives you as a writer a number to work towards and provides a structure for your novel.

In my most recently completed novel, Black Spot, I aimed for a chapter length of approximately 1,100 words and I didn’t worry excessively if I went slightly shorter (around 1,000 words) or slightly longer (around 1,200 words). I’ve continued this through into the sequel, which I’ve written about half of. Because the books are aimed at a young adult audience, the chapters needed to be long enough to qualify as comprising a proper chapter book but not too long for the younger members of that young adult demographic.

Set a Page Length Target

Even though setting a page length target might sound a lot like setting a word count target, they can actually be very different. A page that contains dialogue heavy text is likely to have a smaller word count and a page that contains prose heavy text is likely to have a larger word count.

In Trine, the literary crime novel I have half completed, I set a four page target for each chapter. The result is chapters that vary anywhere from about 1,800 words to 2,400 words but it has again given me a very concrete goal to work towards.

Use One Plot Point per Chapter

Allocating one plot point to each chapter means you will have a very evenly structured novel without too much happening in one chapter and not enough happening in the next. If you like to plan all your plot points in advance, this might suit you. If you’re more like me and tend to write and see where it takes you, this option will be less useful.

Use Contrasting Short and Long Chapters for Effect

There’s nothing that says chapters all have to be the same length. In fact, using a combination of short and long chapters can result in a very effective contrast. The shortest chapters I can remember were each one word long, just single months of the year, and conveyed the passing of time while the main character lapsed into an all-encompassing numbness. Combined with longer chapters, I found this extremely effective, effective enough to have remembered it years after I read the book, which was Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon.

*****

Perhaps the most important point is once you have made a choice about the chapter length you are going to aim for, don’t get hamstrung by it. If you need one chapter considerably shorter or considerably longer than all the others, do it. Don’t worry about sticking to arbitrary rules. Using one of the above methods can be a handy tool for starting the process and keeping it going, but it’s only useful as long as it’s working.

So do whatever works for you. And as a lot of writers know, sometimes this means just abandoning every rule ever set down, ignoring the “experts” and doing what feels right.

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Book Review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train was voted the number one book of 2015 by viewers of the ABC’s “The Book Club” television show. I suspect what that really means is it was the book read by most of the viewers of the ABC’s “The Book Club”. After all, you have to have read a book in order to want to vote for it. I’m only getting around to reading it now so obviously I wasn’t one of those people.

But even if I had read it before now, I wouldn’t have voted for it to be the number one book. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how some books can capture the imagination of the reading public, even when they’re not perfect, even when they’re not that original.

Paula Hawkins is a terrific writer and her characters are enticing, flawed and flawless at the same time. But the plot, which I’ve heard so many times promises a twist ending, was like many I’ve read before. I knew who the bad guy was long before the big reveal, so long before the big reveal that I actually expected it to be someone else, thereby providing the twist. But no.

Rachel Watson is the titular girl on the train. She takes the 8.04am to London every morning and at the same place every day the train slows and sometimes even stops, allowing her to spy on Jason and Jess in their backyard that borders the train line. Jason and Jess aren’t their real names, they’re the names that Rachel has given them as she watches, creating a glorious fictional world for them to exist in. One day she sees Jess in the backyard kissing a man who isn’t Jason. And a few days later, she finds out on the news that Jess is missing in suspicious circumstances.

Jess’s real name is Megan. The book transitions between Rachel and Megan’s points of view but while Rachel’s story is told about what is going on now, Megan’s story goes back to a year earlier to establish the events that led up to her going missing. It just so happens that Megan is babysitting the daughter of Rachel’s former husband, Tom, and his new wife, Anna. And so, two lives that should never have intersected start to intertwine irretrievably.

Rachel is an alcoholic and calls herself an “unreliable witness” – sometimes entire chunks of her memory go missing when she’s been drinking heavily – but she goes to the police to tell them that she saw Megan kissing someone who wasn’t her husband. They question the man she identifies – Megan’s therapist – but release him without charge. But she’s convinced he had something to do with her disappearance and involves herself deeper and deeper in the lives of the main players until the police start to think she might not be telling them everything she knows. The night Megan went missing Rachel was in the area Megan was last seen but she can’t remember what happened. She can barely remember even being there.

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.

Megan was still well drawn but she was less open, interacting with unnamed characters, that sort of thing. I think Paula Hawkins deliberately withheld her from the reader in order to lengthen the suspense of the story. The story also transitions briefly to the perspective of Anna, the new wife of Rachel’s former husband, but she’s less convincing as a character and less interesting. Basically, she seems to be given a voice only so the reader can be told that Rachel has spent the past couple of years harassing Tom, begging him to come back to her, stalking the family, and once even trying to abduct Anna and Tom’s baby daughter, all while drunk, of course.

The story is less triumphant – people going about their ordinary and mundanely tortured lives, working, not working, trying to have babies, not wanting to have babies, relationships breaking up, new relationships beginning, baggage, jealousy, wondering, compromise. The underlying theme is trust, those we do, those we don’t, those we shouldn’t. But the book is suburban. It’s not shocking. It’s not surprising. It’s been done many, too many, times before.

Having said all of that, two (writing and characterisation) out of three (writing, characterisation and plot) isn’t bad. It certainly kept me entertained, I don’t regret or resent having read it and I will look out for Paula Hawkins’s future books. But don’t go into reading it thinking it will be the best book you will read all year. You’ll end up disappointed. But if you go into reading it hoping it will engage you for a week or so, it will definitely do that.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 28 December 2015

The Apostrophe Hall of Shame

For over a year now, I’ve had the words “The Apostrophe Hall of Shame” on my blog post ideas board. So why haven’t I written the post until now? Not for a lack of incorrect uses of apostrophes, that’s for sure.

Actually, it’s the opposite. An abundance of not only apostrophe abuse but also poor spelling and terrible grammar consistently inflicted on the content consuming public. I’ve been so overwhelmed by bad examples that I haven’t known where to even start.

The media are particularly bad examples. Journalism was once the bastion of making sure content was written and spoken correctly. At least if the journalists weren’t getting it right, there were editors to correct their mistakes before the content went public.

Not anymore. And as Fairfax Media announces another 120 jobs to be axed in Sydney and Melbourne and their staff go on strike, I’d be concerned for the editors that remained, if I actually thought there were any.

The Age, one of Fairfax Media’s mastheads, used to be a reliable source of well-composed and well-edited writing. Now whenever I look at it (which is everyday online) I will unfailingly find errors. As I write this, there’s a headline proclaiming, “Michelles’ mum launches health plan” when, of course, it should be “Michelle’s mum launches health plan” unless there is a crazy woman out there with multiple daughters named Michelle. (My father, who continues to have The Age delivered daily in its physical format, assures me the print edition suffers from the same problems.)

It’s not just the print media though. I watched Channel Seven’s four o’clock news yesterday and within minutes of each other I’d noticed the following errors:

*“Adeladie” instead of “Adelaide” scrolling across the news ticker at the bottom of the broadcast

*“Quensland Unversity of Technology” instead of “Queensland University of Technology” underneath an academic giving his or her viewpoint on whatever the story was about (I was so distracted by the misspelling of not one but two words in the four word name of the institution – a 50% pass rate – that I have no recollection of what topic the academic was even speaking on or even whether it was a man or a woman)

And driving down the Eastlink toll road a few days ago, there was (and I imagine there still is) a huge billboard proclaiming a school I won’t name is a “leader in boys education”. I couldn’t see it but there must have been an asterisk that read, “Excludes apostrophes” because, of course, it should have said it is a “leader in boys’ education”.

It’s all evidence of the “write and publish” generation. For some reason, nobody thinks to write, review and publish even though it would save the humiliation of looking like children doing the work of adults. Or worse, idiots doing the work of the educated.

It goes further than written content though. A few weeks ago I was watching a television report on Cardinal George Pell and his testimony to the Royal Commission on institutional sexual abuse in Australia. His declaration of a lack of interest in rumours of sexual abuse during his time in the Ballarat diocese brought forth gasps from the audience who had flown to Rome to be in the room when he testified.

Yes, it was shocking. But I was more appalled at the journalist who intoned over footage of him leaving his apartment and getting into a car that there was “no evidence of the heart condition that has prevented him from returning to Australia to testify”. I haven’t heard a single word about it since so clearly nobody else much minded. But what evidence would there be exactly of George Pell’s heart condition? Clutching at his chest as he stumbled towards the car? It’s a heart condition, not a heart attack, and the only way we’d be able to see evidence of it would be with medical devices and lengthy training in order to know what to look for.

It is becoming clearer to me with every passing day that I have entered middle age because I am so hair-tearingly frustrated with the lack of even an attempt to get content right and to have it make sense (so frustrated I might have just made up a word). Yes, I’ve always been frustrated by these things but never has it seemed to be so prevalent before in my lifetime. And, yes, this is a rant. Sorry. I probably should have said that at the beginning of the post but I wanted it to be read.

There are solutions but being taught proper English is apparently less important for primary school students than knowing how to code. Knowing how to compose a cogent argument is apparently less important for secondary school students than knowing how to create an app. And knowing how to think for themselves is apparently less important for university students than learning how to earn lots of money (although with the cost of tertiary education these days, we can hardly blame them).

I weep for our youth. I weep for our language. I weep for myself and people like me who come to seem like nutters because we care about apostrophes and misspellings and misplaced modifiers and singular nouns in an unholy union with plural possessive pronouns.

But I will continue to swim against this tsunamic tide. I don’t know what else to do. I’m not ready to give up. Especially since it’s not that hard. And if the French-speaking nations of the world can go so far as to create an entire organisation to safeguard the French language from Anglicisation (you can read about La Francophonie here), surely we can put a little bit of effort into making them have to work at it.

After all, to paraphrase Mr Wickham in Lost in Austen, “A war between English and French is traditional.” I would love for it to be a fair fight.

Turning Anti-Mantras Into Mottos For Writing Success

Unless you have the world’s biggest ego, you’ve probably suffered at one point or another from an onslaught of anti-mantras. You might have mistaken it for being honest with yourself about where you are and how much time and work you’re going to have to invest in order to get where you hope you’re going, wondering if that’s even possible. In fact, it’s much more likely to be a lie, the devil on you left shoulder simply drowning out the angel on your right.

Tell me if any of these sound familiar.

Maybe I’m Not Good Enough

Writers often have knock back after knock back. Submissions to publishers are met with rejections and sometimes even just total silence. Submissions to competitions end in someone else winning. Self-published efforts receive poor sales or, worse, poor reviews. All of these things, one on top of the other, plant a seed in writers’ minds and then water it until it grows and strangles the self-belief that we might once have had.

But the quality of our writing very rarely has anything to do with getting published and getting read and more to do with getting in front of the right people and then teaming up with a good marketer.

The other little acknowledged truth is that those involved in the creative arts generally only get better. So even if you aren’t good enough yet, you might be one day if you keep going, if you keep practising and keep refining your skill and technique.

So abandon this anti-mantra and turn it into this instead: I improve every day.

Clearly They’re Better Than Me

If there is any field where comparison is pointless, it’s the creative arts. Writing, painting, music, acting, sculpture, dancing. Personal enjoyment of the contribution of others in these areas is extremely subjective. My two Goodreads ratings are a case in point. One one star rating and one five star rating. So comparing yourself and your output with that of others won’t achieve anything. And trying to be something other than what you are tends to produce strange results, like people wondering if you’re “trying too hard”.

What you can do is use the books, paintings, performances, songs and dances of others to learn. Not to copy them. Because there’s no point being the same as anyone else. But to understand their approach and figure out whether it might be helpful to the way you write, paint, compose, act, sculpt and dance.

So abandon this anti-mantra and turn it into this instead: Clearly I’m different and that’s even better.

I’m Not Ready Yet

Upon receiving an email from one of the judges of the Ampersand Project declaring she had read and enjoyed my book, my first thought wasn’t, “Yay!” or “Holy hell!” or “About time!” My first reaction was, “I’m not ready yet.” I was scared and I wanted… well, I don’t know what I wanted but I almost convinced myself in that moment that I didn’t really want to be a published author. I didn’t want to lose the control that a lack of success allows. I didn’t want to do public appearances and radio interviews and book signings and get fan mail and be recognised by strangers when I go to the supermarket in my tracksuit pants. I didn’t want to do anything other than what I was already doing: stay at home and write in anonymity.

The thing about opportunities is that they often look a lot like challenges. They usually exist outside our comfort zones. You’ve done a lot of hard work to get an opportunity and rather than being able to sit back and relax, opportunities generally require even more hard work, sometimes more hard work than you’ve ever had to put in before.

Nobody is ever really ready for an opportunity when it finally lands in their lap. No matter how long you’ve been working towards it, it is still almost always a surprise when it does arrive. The difference between those who grab opportunities when they appear and those who don’t is that they get ready quick smart.

Besides, haven’t you wanted to be a writer, deep down, pretty much all your life? Hasn’t everything up until this point in your life been to get you ready for exactly what it is you want?

So abandon this anti-mantra and turn it into this instead: I was born for this.

*****

What are your anti-mantras? And what are the mottos for writing success you have turned them into?

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Book Review: Jennifer Government by Max Barry

I love Max Barry. He’s one of those writers that makes other writers think, “That’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?” Jennifer Government is the second book of his that I’ve read (the first being Lexicon) and it has only reinforced my perception of him, his ideas and his writing.

Jennifer Government weaves the stories of multiple people into a single narrative. Set in a future I hope we never succumb to, the world is dominated by powerful corporations. The Police is a private company, essentially a for-hire security force, and its main competitor is the NRA, a portrayal of them that is eerily on track in the real world. The Government has been reduced to an organisation that tries to prevent crime but has nothing to do with prosecuting it once it has happened and depends on the financial contributions of victims to track down perpetrators. If you call 911, you have to recite a valid credit card number before help will be dispatched. Oh, and Australia and many other countries are now part of the USA Territories. Scary.

Individuals take on the last name of the organisation they work for, thus the title. Hack Nike is a lowly merchandising officer for Nike. He is visiting the water cooler on a different floor to where he normally works when John Nike and John Nike (don’t worry, it’s not as confusing as it might sound), President and Vice President of Guerrilla Marketing offer him a job. He signs a contract without reading it and without realising what it requires him to do, which is kill ten random people in Nike stores and make it look like a “gang thing” in an effort to increase the desirability of Nike Mercurys, the latest must-have pair of sneakers that cost thousands. Hack can’t bring himself to do it so he outsources the contract to the Police.

Jennifer Government is a field agent who gets wind of the plan. She’s in position to try to stop one of the killings set to take place at the Chadstone Wal-Mart but is shot and thrown four stories, landing on a Mercedes Benz for sale below. While Mercedes Benz sues her for the cost of the destroyed car that broke her fall, she tries to track down the people responsible after the parents of the one of the victims agree to sell their house to finance the investigation.

If it all sounds like a horribly far-fetched dystopian future, it is but it’s probably one that’s not too far away if we all aren’t careful. Barry uses big name corporations to skewer the path of consumerism that we’re on and his publisher was required to include a long-winded disclaimer that the references to real companies are “used simply to illustrate the increasingly important role played by large corporations in the future and not to denigrate them in any way. However, some people (whom we shall call ‘lawyers’) get very uptight when you describe large corporations masterminding murders. So let’s be clear: this is a work of fiction set in the future.”

This novel was published in 2003. Probably the only one Barry didn’t get right was the battle between Apple and Microsoft, where Microsoft is on top. But everything else is pretty spot on. Shell. Coca-Cola. Pepsi, McDonald’s and Mattel run the schools where the children are taught about consumerism and not much else. France is despised because it still has a government as we know it today. Insider trading is rampant and expected. Those who don’t have jobs or money are dismissed as lazy and stupid and deserving of their fate.

It’s a frightening and extreme version of a place the world is approaching. Money is the end goal and there are no limits to the measures to which people will go to get it. Even the good guys in this book are a little too far from doing the right thing.

There’s no happy ending or poetic justice and the world doesn’t change at the end of the book, probably because this version of society is too far gone for it to be wound back. It’s a cautionary tale for us today. And this book should be required reading in high schools so teenagers can see how we see them today. In fact, that’s exactly what this book is. It’s as if an American high school became the whole world.

The ending is a little too Hollywood, where the truly bad guy gets what’s coming to him (sort of), so I’ve given it 4 stars. But that’s two 4 star books from Max Barry out of two I’ve read. He’s very easy to read and his plots are so creative. I read this book in a single day because I had to know what happened and how it turned out. You’ll be surprised by how much it makes you think about the real world. Highly recommended.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 26 December 2015

Developing A Genuinely Scary and Evil Villain

I’ve written previously about anti-heroes and villains and how they seem to be the characters of choice these days, at least the characters that seem to resonate most with readers searching for complexity. So, of course, growing numbers of people are attempting to cash in on that. The problem is that we are being flooded with ridiculous caricatures that are no more scary than me in the morning before I’ve brushed my hair and had some caffeine. Every James Bond villain ever may have something to answer for this.

When we examine the more successful and enduring villains, such as Dracula and Frankenstein (or his monster – depends on which of them you think was the bigger baddie), and some of the more recent but no less memorable, such as Dexter Morgan and Hannibal Lecter, we find people and creatures who scare us but who also exhibit vulnerability, meaning that in some capacity they are scared themselves. They’re at the darker end of the light and dark scale but they’re more deep grey than black. And regardless of their villainy, there’s also something attractive about them, something tempting about them, something that draws you in, even when you know you’re probably going to end up dead if you don’t resist.

If you’re planning to give it a go, here’s a few things to consider to make sure you have readers crying in terror instead of with laughter.

Appearance and Affectations

There’s no need for villains to have metal teeth or knives for fingers or wear full face makeup or masks. The best villains hide in plain sight among us regular folk, holding down jobs, contributing to society and leaving no witnesses to provide police with a description. And if they do, it’s a generic sketch that somehow ends up being ridiculously dark-browed with mere slits for eyes and thin lips that ultimately looks nothing like the villain.

Because of Hannibal Lecter’s education and appreciation for symphonies and orchestral music, it’s almost become a new cliché that villains must love classical music. However, it’s a silly association. On occasion, I listen to classical music and I haven’t killed anybody. When you give your villain an affectation or personality trait or preference, just make sure you’re doing it to make them well-rounded, not because it’s something straight from the “how-to-create-a-villain” handbook.

Dialogue

There’s a tendency these days for villains to be the biggest blabbermouths in the world once their evil plans are discovered. “Aha, curse you for learning the devilish details, but since you have, why don’t I explain it at length and give you time to come up with your own plan to escape and thwart me at the last minute?” All good villains, which means all smart villains, don’t let anyone in on what they’re planning. So there shouldn’t be a lot of dialogue on that topic anyway.

When there is dialogue, it should be natural. It shouldn’t contain obscure words and philosophical musings and formulaic utterances that we’ve heard from villains so many times before that they’re also in the handbook. And when someone discovers their evil plans and asks them why, it’s perfectly acceptable to kill them on the spot and save us all the hassle of hearing words like “curse you” and “devilish” and “thwart”.

Violence

There is a strong level of control shown in the violence exhibited by genuinely scary and evil villains. Don’t get me wrong, they enjoy the violence. But people who let their control slip, who let emotion overtake them, generally make mistakes and generally get caught.

Because of this, there might be a tendency for the villain to consider outsourcing the violence. But this is also a mistake. Minions or mercenaries or devotees or hired help or whatever you want to call them are almost always the path to defeat. After all, if they were smart enough not to get caught or killed, they’d probably be villains in their own right.

Money

A genuinely scary and evil villain usually has no interest in money. The villain will have money (it really helps with executing evil plans, building an evil arsenal and escaping the clutches of law enforcement or van Helsing or whoever they are being hunted by) but generally won’t be motivated by it.

This is why people whose primary goal is to rob a bank or hold the world hostage for a large ransom never make it into the echelons of the genuinely scary and evil. There’s not all that much that is terrifying about a plan where the ultimate goal is to live out your life on a Caribbean island with no extradition treaty drinking margaritas, mojitos and frozen daiquiris. Crime for money’s sake is strictly the domain of small-time crooks.

Intelligence

Of course, in order to have money, villains need to have inherited it or made it themselves. Inherited wealth is more likely to be associated with selfish, snotty kids so all good villains are self-made. They’ve studied hard or worked hard and made it to a place in their lives where they are earning plenty, have invested well and are usually in a position of power or authority or respect (or all three).

Which means they have a level of intelligence that keeps them at least one step ahead of everybody else. Hannibal Lecter is a respected psychiatrist. There are some who think this is because he has first-hand insight into the mind of a serial killer but there have been plenty of stupid serial killers. Dexter Morgan is a blood spatter expert but he’s also a forensic neat freak and has an unbelievable mind.

The truth is that if Sherlock Holmes hadn’t been a good guy, he probably would have been the best villain ever. So make your villain smart, smarter than you and me, smart enough to outwit a room full of other villains while tied to a table naked and surrounded by an acid lake, the world’s most venomous snakes dangling above and only a paper clip to aid an escape.

Power

Power is a state of mind. You don’t have to be president or a police officer or a prison warden to have it. You could be a pig farmer. It’s all about confidence. Confidence is power. Belief in yourself and your skills is power. The ability to influence others without coercing them is power. And all the best villains have it.

But power is not the ultimate goal. It’s simply a means to an end, a way of satisfying the motivation discussed in the next section.

Motivation

Motivation is the most important part of a villain to develop because it’s the question everyone wants answered in relation to everything: why? Generally, there is a defining moment in the villain’s past that set them on the course they are now sailing.

For Hannibal Lecter, it was discovering that the men who killed and cannibalised his sister when he was a child also fed him the broth containing his sister’s flesh. He becomes enraged, biting off the ear of the man who tells him this, the last of his sister’s killers, and thus his journey towards evolving into Hannibal the Cannibal begins. They made him the man he becomes in a journey that turns full circle.

For Dexter Morgan, it was watching his mother being murdered and dismembered with a chainsaw when he was three years old and then spending days sitting in a shipping container full of her blood and body parts. It’s the moment his “dark passenger” jumped on board, refusing to ever disembark again. And don’t forget the influence of his adoptive father who taught him to harness his impulses and turn them into evil for the greater good.

With Frankenstein and his monster, the motivation of the author is almost as important as the motivation of the characters. Mary Shelley had lost her baby and the theme of being able to save her baby, to put a human “back together again” runs throughout the story of a doctor who creates a monster from the body parts of various dead people and runs electricity through him to bring him back to consciousness.

Whatever the motivation, it needs to be good. It needs to be devastating. It needs to be powerful enough to explain a villain’s actions, even if it can’t justify them.

*****

If you give a bit of thought to each of the areas outlined here, you should be able to avoid the stereotypes and hopefully hit on an original villain who scares the bejesus out of every reader who comes across them.

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Books – You Buy Them, You Read Them, Then What?

My little sister is obsessed with op shops (charity shops, second-hand shops, whatever you call them in your location). When we recently happened to drive past one in an area she doesn’t usually frequent, she made me stop and go back, then dragged me in. She went straight for the clothing racks. I went straight for the book shelves.

By the time we left, I had my arms full of books that had been bought and read by someone else, then donated to charity to be bought and read again. Because I’m posting book reviews at a rate of one a week, I’m buying and reading a lot more books in a lot shorter period than I have in the past. It can be expensive, especially if I pay full recommended retail price. But as I perused those book shelves, I noticed book after book with familiar covers, novels that I’d picked up in book and departments stores to consider and put back knowing I couldn’t afford to pay full price.

Many of these books were relatively recent, no more than two or three years since their publication, and you’ve been reading my reviews of them in recent weeks. They include Amnesia by Peter Carey, Sisters of Mercy by Caroline Overington, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent and The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman. There are even more coming in the next few months because I’ve found a lot of books in these charity shops that I want to read.

The book that specifically prompted this post was Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. Because on the back of the first page was a handwritten message to Moppy (I don’t know who from as it wasn’t signed) that read: “This is going to be you! To read on the day bed in our hotel room with our own private pool! I love you! Happy birthday! XOXO”

In a couple of other books, people had inscribed their names on the first pages. In All That I Am by Anna Funder was the name K McLellow and in The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman was the name Jenny Urbaui. Both also had dates next to them.

I am not someone who writes my name in the front cover of my books so I don’t really understand the compulsion to do it. But I am especially confused by the compulsion if you are planning to give the book to charity after you are done reading it. And if anyone gave me a book as a present and wrote a personal message inside the cover, I certainly wouldn’t give it away. I would keep it and cherish it because I think it’s a very special and intimate gift, not the book but the message itself. Moppy clearly didn’t think so.

I have thousands of books. In fact, I have a library to house them all (it also doubles as a study – it’s actually the third bedroom). And every book I buy goes into my library once I have read it. Because for me, a book is for life. I only have one experience of giving away books and I still regret it to this day.

It was when I was living with my grandparents and I was running out of space so I made the ill-advised decision to donate my Sweet Valley High collection to charity. I was in my mid-twenties and I thought I was too old to be holding onto them. I had been addicted to them during my teens and I had a lot of them. What I wouldn’t do to be able to go back in time and change my mind.

I will happily donate clothes, money, even blood when the Red Cross contacts me every twelve weeks, but my books are the one thing that when I die my relatives will be sorting through, muttering, “Why does she have so many?” I frequently go back to books I have read to find passages or information as I write my novels, articles and blog posts. They are an essential reference to me, especially because I have a photographic memory when it comes to books. I can remember how far in, whether it was on the left or right page, and approximately how far down particular pieces of information were located. That kind of ability to remember is useless when it comes to electronic information; it only works for physical books.

Part of the answer to the question of what each individual person does with books they have bought or been given once they’ve finished reading them lies in whether or not they are a re-reader. If you never re-read, then there’s really no reason to hold on to books. If you do, it tends to be difficult to determine in advance which books you will choose the re-read later on so you might hold on to them all.

This is something that might not perplex readers for much longer given the number of books that are now read electronically. Online accounts that provide ongoing access to purchased e-books and music files and their ability to be inherited once the owner dies are currently under debate and consideration.

It’s almost ironic considering how the invention of the printing press allowed the mass distribution of books and ideas. The invention of the internet has allowed for the electronic mass distribution of books and ideas, as long as you have access, of course. The day will inevitably come when a worldwide disaster sends us all back to the “dark ages” – think the end of Battlestar Gallactica when the crew finally finds Earth and has to start all over again. Where will we be then if no one has secretly hoarded copies of all the books like a modern day library of Alexandria? Thankfully, I won’t be around to find out.

Book Review: The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer

I am conflicted about this book. Or perhaps confused. Maybe uncertain is a better word. The one thing I’m certain of is that it’s better than the average book but not by much.

The Shock of the Fall is told from Matthew’s point of view, although towards the end of the book he tells the reader that his name isn’t really Matthew. When he’s nine, his older brother dies in mysterious circumstances on a family holiday (mysterious only because the author chooses not to reveal how and why until later on in the book for no other reason than to keep the reader hanging on) and it’s the beginning of a downward spiral in Matthew’s mental health.

His mother pulls him out of school for a year and that contributes to the spiral, too. She home schools him and is convinced he’s constantly stricken with colds and infections, dragging him to the doctor over and over again when it’s clear there’s nothing physically wrong with him, or at least nothing that every other kid doesn’t go through at the same age. There was a while there that I thought it was going to end up being a story about Munchausen’s by Proxy.

Then Matthew goes back to school the next year where he apparently makes friends by spying on people and stabbing them in the back with implements commonly found in a high schooler’s pencil case. (Literally. He literally stabs a fellow classmate over and over in the back with a compass and then ends up becoming best friends with him.)

My confusion stems from the story beginning when Matthew is nine. Even though we later find out that he’s telling the story as an eighteen-year-old, he never stops sounding like a nine-year-old. And because of the nature of Matthew’s mental health condition, towards the end of the book I started wondering about the reliability of him as the narrator of his own story.

My conflict stems from the fact that the author is a mental health nurse, claims to be comparatively robust in the mental health department and then tries to tell the story of someone who is completely the opposite. While I encourage all writers to explore “the other”, to write about more than “what they know”, the book feels like a textbook example of someone with mental health problems rather than a unique story.

And 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.

The confusion, conflict and uncertainty are all underlined by the fact that he does so many things that are like big neon signs saying, “Severely poor mental health indicator!” but nobody around him acts on them and gets him any help. His brother dies when he’s nine but there’s never any grief counselling. We find out he plays a small role in his brother’s death. Still no counselling. There’s a family history of mental health problems. Nope, nothing. He repeatedly stabs a fellow classmate with a compass. Suspension, yes. Mental health assessment, no. He begins smoking marijuana. His parents don’t like it but still nothing. At seventeen, he drops out of school and moves out of home. He gets a job as an aged care worker despite a complete lack of training. He freaks out at work one day and leaves in the middle of a night shift. But it’s not until his grandmother discovers him building a larger than life ant farm in the lounge room of his rented flat, which apparently has something to do with collecting atoms in an effort to bring his dead brother back to life, that he finally gets some help.

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. Maybe it’s an accurate reflection of the real experience of someone who becomes familiar with death at a young age and is subsequently diagnosed with a mental health condition, but that doesn’t make it great literature.

I suspect this is the kind of book that readers with mental health problems of their own will enjoy or at least think is an important contribution but for those who don’t fall into that category, it isn’t much of an eye-opener. The writing itself is okay but I found myself comparing it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and judging it a little lacking. Several of the reviews on the inside cover of the book call it funny but I didn’t find anything in it to laugh about.

The book was easy to read despite its faults. I just think it needed more focus and perhaps a little more refinement.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 26 December 2015

Project November

Despite the fact that it’s March, I’ve just completed another month of intensive novel writing (which you will all know by now I like to call Project October). I mentioned last year that I would put together some tips for Project November, which is what to do once you’ve finished the first draft of a novel that results from a successful Project October.

There are many writers who bemoan contemplating the blank page as the hardest part of the writing process but I think the challenge of reviewing, reshaping and rewriting can be just as difficult, especially if you are so blinded by the achievement of finishing a first draft that making changes seems almost sacrilegious.

So here are a few suggestions for turning a raw first draft into a polished gem.

Accept That Change Is Required

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an experienced writer with multiple publications behind you or an unpublished author trying to rectify that fact, all first drafts require change. With the average novel between 80,000 and 120,000 words and most encompassing at least a certain level of complexity, it’s a lot of information. I challenge anyone to be able to remember the entirety of their own novel, let alone anyone else’s.

What this means is that your first draft will contain inconsistencies. It will contain plot holes. It will contain dodgy dialogue and descriptions that try too hard to be clever but instead end up looking stupid. It will contain mistakes.

I once read a first draft that had the same piece of description – a whole paragraph of it, in fact – in three separate places in the same novel. The first time I read it, I thought it was flowery. The second time I read it, I thought it sounded familiar. The third time I read it, I was sure I’d read it before.

Writing a novel is hard. And nobody gets it right first time. The need for change is not a commentary on you as a writer. Because there is no such thing as a bad writer, only bad writing. And change is the chance for it to get better.

Ask For Beta Feedback

Once you’ve accepted that change is inevitable, assemble a small group of readers – usually this will be comprised of family and friends or if you’re really lucky you’ll be part of a writers’ group where reading first drafts is a benefit. I think it’s nice if you print out hard copies for them. Surely it’s the least you can do considering you’re going to ask them to read your first draft – this can be hard work, depending on the quality of it – and provide feedback. It also gives them something to make notes on in the exact place that inspired the thought.

I recommend at least three beta readers and no more than six. Too few and you won’t get a wide enough range of views. Too many and you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how to please everybody.

The last time I sent out first drafts for feedback, I also prepared a prompt sheet with a list of questions and concerns I was having about the book. This meant the questions I wanted answered were answered as well as getting feedback about things I hadn’t even thought of.

Walk Away

This next step is absolutely crucial. You must walk away from your first draft. You must put it aside and not look at it. Not even when you are so tempted that you think you might burst if you don’t. Walk away and don’t even think about it for a month. If ideas pop into your head about changes, write it down on a piece of notepaper (or if you’ve followed any of my other advice, on your ideas whiteboard) and file it until the month is up.

Getting some distance from your first draft gives you a break, which if you’ve finished writing an entire novel, you definitely deserve. It also gives your beta readers at least a month in which you aren’t pestering them about how much longer it will be until they finish reading it.

But, most importantly, it will give you fresh eyes when you eventually go back and read it yourself.

Read It Yourself

Once the month is up, read the first draft. Print out a paper copy, sit down somewhere away from a computer and read your novel just like any other reader would. See if you laugh where it’s supposed to be funny, see if you cry where it’s supposed to be sad, see if you sigh where it’s supposed to romantic. If you do, great. If you don’t, make a note on the manuscript of that fact.

This way, you become your own final beta reader.

Give Careful Consideration to All the Feedback

Once you receive the feedback from all your beta readers, look at it all together. If more than one person has made the same comment, consider it a given that it has to be addressed (i.e. changed).

Pay particular attention to suggested changes that you immediately hate the sound of. Go back to the beta reader who made the suggestion and ask them why they think it’s necessary. If you can’t convince them that it shouldn’t be changed, again consider it a given that it has to be. If they have a moment of “Oh, right I get it now”, it probably still needs to be changed because you can’t go around to all your readers and explain it to them personally.

One of the best pieces of feedback I received was to find and eliminate “Louise” words because the character narrating the story the feedback was related to was an eighteen-year-old girl who lived a sheltered life on a farm, not a thirty-eight-year old woman with two writing degrees who had lived in the city most of her life.

Cut, Cut, Cut

It’s now time to cut. While Project October is all about getting that word count up, up, up, Project November inevitably results in the word count going back down, down, down. Cut the waffle. Cut the unnecessary dialogue that we use out of politeness in the real world but that prevents novels from being punchy. Cut scenes that slow the pace of the story, especially if they add nothing to moving it forward. Cut characters that are unnecessary. Cut plot points that make no sense.

In the very first draft of Black Spot, I was determined that it would include a little bit of realism. It’s two characters, a man and a woman, camping in the mountains for a week and no one can hold it for that long. At some point, they would have to go pee behind a tree. So I wrote a short scene where they separated and relieved their bladders before retiring to their sleeping bags for the evening.

It was universally panned by my beta readers who asked why this needed to be included. And when I thought about it, I realised it really didn’t. Fiction is all about skipping the boring bits in life and if going to the toilet doesn’t qualify, then I don’t know what does. The peeing scene was deleted and I have never regretted it.

Add, Add, Add

I always end up adding additional chapters, not a lot but a couple at least because sometimes the instinct to get to certain moments in the story leads me to jump ahead and not set up properly.

Look at the last paragraph of a chapter and the first paragraph of the next chapter, look at the blank spaces between your chapters and see if anything is missing. This can be hard, deciphering what isn’t there, so much harder than looking at something that is there and knowing it shouldn’t be.

Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite

This will be the longest and hardest part. Chapters will be moved. Chapters you’ve already written you will write again from scratch. You will agonise over individual words. You will rewrite the same sentence over and over. You will delete paragraphs, then reinstate them, delete them again and finally use a version that is half old and half new. You will change the plot. You will change the motivations of your characters. You will change the start. You will change the ending. You will change the middle.

And when you’re done, the second draft will be substantially different from the first. And substantially better. If it isn’t, you probably haven’t changed enough. If the second draft is still suffering from the same problems as the first draft, you probably haven’t changed enough. If you ask for feedback again and it’s much the same, then you probably haven’t changed enough.

The most important thing is to be honest (with yourself as much as anyone else), be open-minded and be willing to make hard decisions. If you are, then the second draft might be something very close to good enough to start thinking about looking for a publisher or considering self-publishing.

*First published in Project December: A Book about Writing

Another Project October

Last July, I undertook a month of intensive novel writing with mixed results for a variety of reasons (see the blog posts charting the journey here, here, here, here and here). And last October, I did the same thing.

If you haven’t read the other blog posts, the reason it’s called Project October is that it’s meant to be done in October, which I have discovered over the past few years is my most productive writing month of any year. Something to do with a lack of family birthdays, the end of the football season and weather warm enough to sit up long into the night instead of huddling under blankets.

Of course, the reason you’re only hearing about it now is that I write and schedule my blog posts a few months in advance. But, I hear you ask, do we really need to hear about Project October again?

Hell, yes!

The first Project October elicited only 10,542 words, even though I was targeting at least 14,000 and hopefully closer to 28,000. I consoled myself with the fact that it was 10,542 words and could hardly be considered a failure. I went back to writing my blog posts and scheduled another Project October for the actual month in which it is supposed to occur.

But something happened in the last week of September, which I wrote about in the previous Wednesday’s blog post about competitions. I received an email from a commissioning fiction editor telling me how much she liked my entry to the Hardie Grant Egmont Ampersand Project competition and asking where the next book in the trilogy would go.

The problem with that question was that I’d finished writing the first novel in the trilogy over a year ago and since I hadn’t been able to get any interest from publishers, I had decided there wasn’t much point working on the sequel. I went back to writing another novel I’ve been working on (and being interrupted on) for over three years. The next book in the trilogy had gone straight onto the “to be resumed at a much later date” writing pile.

I answered the email by telling her where I intended the story to go and quickly decided that Project October would be focused on the second book in the trilogy and the other novel that has been so interrupted would have to be interrupted again. And there would be none of these half-measures when it came to targets. It would be a thousand words a day with a final target of 31,000 words in 31 days.

The first day was a spectacular success. I wrote 2,226 words. And then next day I wrote 1,763. So by the end of the second day, I had written nearly as much as I was targeting for the first four days. It was crucial because the very next day I wrote absolutely nothing. I knew it was coming. It was the day of the AFL grand final and I would be out from morning to night with no chance of hitting the laptop. But it didn’t matter because I was already so far ahead.

And that’s how Project October continued. By the end of Week 1, I had written 7,776 words. Not just on target but over target and already 776 words ahead for Week 2.

On Day 9, I had another zero word day but it was also planned as I spent the day looking after my disabled grandmother while my grandfather went for some medical tests. But by the end of Week 2, I had written another 6,395 words. With the excess 776 words I had written in the previous week, I was still on target with more than 14,000 words. And I’d already exceeded the total number of words I wrote in my previous Project October attempt.

Week 3 is usually where the roadblock occurs. But not this time. I wrote another 7,322 words and I was still on target.

And then in Week 4 I was asked to do a couple of days of freelance writing work. And when you’re a writer without a second job, you don’t say no to an offer of paid writing. That first day of work left me exhausted and unable to face any more time sitting in front of a computer so I took the night off. The day after I worked another half day and managed a respectable 817 words to pick up where Project October left off. Then there was a hiccup. Another day without writing a word, although there wasn’t any good reason why. Then two more solid writing days, hitting the daily target, and two more goose egg days with big fat zeros. The Week 4 total ended up being 3,405, less than half what I should have written.

The last three days of the month I got back on track and wrote 3,306 for a Project October total of 28,154.

Damn it, I thought. I had missed my target of 31,000.

And then I thought, Damn it be damned! I wrote 28,154 words. Since I already had 10,000 words of the sequel written and it’s a young adult series of 80,000 words each, that meant I was nearly half way through writing the first draft of a novel I wasn’t even planning to write for a few years. That’s something worth celebrating!

I don’t know when the rest of the first draft will be complete because I’m back to writing blog posts for now but I know where the story is going in much more detail than when I started, it’s gone places I never even realised it would go and I’m motivated to continue writing it and ultimately finish.

It’s even more of an achievement than that because I’ve previously struggled to write sequels to both my completed novels. Not anymore. Sequel struggles are done with.

I’m not sure when the next Project October will be scheduled but I won’t be waiting until October 2016 rolls around. Hopefully, by then, I’ll have done another two Project Octobers or maybe a Project October and a Project November and have another completed novel.