TIHFU: Book Review (look, it rhymes!)

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print

Amazon.co.uk

I've read quite a few books about writing, and I have to say that this is potentially one of the most helpful and useful. I will quite cheerfully admit to having no idea as to how to go about editing my manuscript properly and professionally, and after the debacle that was the 'Editing' class I went to at the university (don't ask), this was a breath of fresh air. And, dammit, cheaper than that class was, too!

Browne and King not only have an engaging, easy-to-read style, but make their points clearly and succinctly, showing you the different options rather than just telling you (aha!) While they don't dive into the 'bigger picture' aspect of editing - as this would differ hugely between books - they do make many good points that will help with that, as well as fixing all the smaller problems that really niggle with readers when they're left alone.

Many published authors say that they sit with this book by their elbow whenever they start revisions, no matter how many books they've written and sold. I'm perfectly willing to do the same.

Procrastination

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the long period of time since my last post. My non-electronic life got very busy this month, and so writing another entry for this blog kept getting put off and put off until it's been a shameful 25 days since my last post. I'll try to do better.

In that vein, what better topic for a post than procrastination?

Procrastination - the writer's biggest enemy

I don't know about you, but I'm a terrible procrastinator. Given a choice between two things, one of which requires effort and the other of which doesn't, I will, unfortunately, tend to put off the work and do the fun thing instead. Whether that's catching up on my email, or my internet friends, or surfing around google looking at random things, it's all too easy to forget to do any writing at all.

Hence the problem. How can you ever be published if you never finish writing the goddamn book?

Answer: You can't. Nobody will publish half a book (unless, of course, you are F. Scott Fitzgerald, the book is The Last Tycoon, and you happen to die halfway through writing it.)

How do we fight against procrastination? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be poorly for me, at least at the moment. I'm working up to getting myself back into a routine of writing, but it's hard to get back on when you've fallen off the horse. I used to write 1000 words a day, minimum, and keep going until I had done it, because that was the discipline I set myself. And it worked. Now I've just got to do it again.

Try setting yourself a target for each day, no matter how big or how small, and just sit down and do it. It doesn't have to be wordcount - it could be time spent, for instance. Try setting yourself a target of writing for ten minutes every day. It's a small enough amount of time that you should be able to find it in there somewhere, and small enough not to be discouraging.

Let's try to battle procrastination. Let me know if you have any suggestions, too, as I'd love to hear them!

Now, where did I put that game...

Knowledge is Power

(or, at the very least, a potential plot thread)

Remember what I said the other day about how getting different experiences could be really useful for writing? That the more you experience, the more you can use?

It’s the same for knowledge. Who knows when that tiny tidbit of information might get you out of a tight plothole? Or even allow you to build something on it to make your story really work, really stand out and function healthily.

Most of us pick up these pearls of wisdom all the time, just by being human. Someone will say something on a chat show when you’re watching TV, or you’ll be reading a book and think ‘oh, that’s interesting!’ And your brain will squirrel it away like the efficient biological computer it is, ready to resurface when you least expect it.

I already knew what my character’s power was going to be – but why would it work like that? Turns out, I already knew the answer, from my lectures at university. I could supply the biological basis for it, and away we went. Not that I’ve actually written it into the novel, because their society doesn’t have our level of medical knowledge. They would have no idea what it meant. But I do, and it helps me to decide how it works in such a way that the character is much more believable, because I have set rules.

Similarly, I try to base all of my magic on genetics rather than random chance, because it gives everything a certain order to it that makes it more believable.

This applies to research you do for stories, too – don’t put it all in your story, but keep a lot of it running in the background, as it were, to keep everything ticking over smoothly. And for God’s sake don’t get rid of it – you never know when it might be useful in the future, either in a sequel or in another project.

The more you know, the less you have to work to find things you don’t know, or to fill in gaps with explanations, because they’re already at your fingertips. Awesome, huh?

Oops!

Sorry to everyone who got redirected here from my comment about the cellphone that runs on blood, somehow putting in the link and also putting my website address into the comment bar got mixed up and the one became the other... no idea how.

Didn't do it on purpose :(

Here's the real link: http://www.physorg.com/news122819670.html

You could call it work experience, I suppose.

One of my aims in life is to experience as many different things as I can. Go to different places, eat different foods, learn new things.

On the one hand, it's interesting. And on the other, it's a great way to help fuel your writing.

Remember 'write what you know'? Well, the more you know - the more experiences you have - the more accurately and fully you can write, taking advantage of your experience to deepen your prose for your readers.

I'm not saying 'go out and kill someone'. I am saying, if somebody says 'would you like to go to the races?' (this happened to me over Christmas) and you've never been, say yes. Go running in the rain with no umbrella! Eat weird food! Try on dresses you could never afford (Yeah, I know, you do this already :D)

Just go for it, and then put it back into your writing.

Writing Interpersonal Conflict

Crushing your characters’ most important self-concepts (Hit them where it hurts!)


Stories revolve around conflict. Without it, there is nothing to struggle for, to strive against; if Frodo had no trouble just wandering off to Mordor to dispose of the ring, how interesting could Tolkien have kept The Lord of the Rings? There has to be something to work with, to make the reader cheer for your protagonists, and urge them on despite all the obstacles in their path.

There are five classical conflicts accepted by literary theorists, though in modern times man vs machine has become the sixth. The other five are:

Man vs. Himself
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. the Supernatural
Man vs. Society.

Interpersonal conflict revolves around the first two – man vs. himself and man vs. man.

A friend of mine has the unfortunate talent of being able, in the heat of an argument, to say exactly the worst possible thing she could say to whoever she is arguing with to make it really hurt. Whatever that person holds as their most important self-concept is where she’ll hit. Now, in real life, this is not much fun, to put it mildly. But in writing, you can use something like that to create major conflict between characters.

First, think – what is the most important self-belief your character holds? Is the fact that she knows she’s pretty enough sometimes to comfort her? Does he pride himself on being there for his family when they need him? And so – what is the absolute worst thing that could be said to them, to flay that open and make it sting?

What if someone turned around to him and listed times when he had failed his family, voice dripping with disdain and venom? How will he react?

If you can get your character to fighting with himself, then it’s going to take a lot to pull them out of it. Where does that take your story?

Interesting, isn’t it?

What Publishers Want

...is very important if you want to sell your work.

I was just reading literary agent Kristin's blog post No Vampires Please, in which an editor at Random House expresses a desire for sf/f novels that DON'T have vampires in them, and in which the heroine is not a soulless killing machine.

That's not to say that another editor isn't still in love with the genre. But if you were submitting to this editor, you shouldn't send her your Anita Blake lookalike.

Getting the right story to the right editor is very important. That's what a literary agent is for - knowing what the different editors want and like and are likely to leap on like rabid dogs. Putting the right story in the right place at the right time is the best way to get it published.

Writing as Therapy II

I'm flattered to say that I received an email today from Ellen Taliaferro of Writing Practice Prescription about yesterday's post on 'Writing as Therapy', asking if she could use my post on her blog, which is all about writing as a healing process.

I'm a big believer in writing as catharsis, as you may have guessed, so this is really gratifying for me - thanks, Ellen!

You can find her homepage at Health After Trauma, a site whose mission is to "address the long-term medical consequences of trauma and abuse."

Have any of you ever used writing to purge your demons? How did you find it? How did you find your writing changed as a result of it?

Writing as Therapy

Three years ago plus change, my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. It was nobody’s fault – just one of those things that happens sometimes. The next year and a half, everything else went wrong, one thing after another – my sister, already ill with glandular fever, was diagnosed with ME, a chronic fatigue syndrome; both my sister and my father suffered from depression; our dog died; I failed my A-level exams and failed to get into university that year. It set off a long, hard slog to get back to where I wanted to be, and away from where I had been put by circumstance.

You know what? I’m a much better writer because of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I would hand it all back if it would take back what happened to us. But the sheer magnitude of it changed me, and I found that I had to write, was forced to write. All my emotion came out in my writing – angry, painful, sad stories. I wrote my first full-length novel by six months after she had died – that’s around 100,000 words – and kept going with other things, too, just writing and writing for hours on end. Sometimes I would sit at the computer and produce 7,000 words in a morning.

Writing can be fun. But it can also be therapy. It helped me to vent all the things that I was feeling in a safe way. Of course, the sheer quantity I was producing also gave me a lot of practice, and I put a lot of the improvement down to that, too.

Writing still helps me to understand and deal with emotions I’m not sure what to do with, by taking myself a step away from them and putting them onto someone else, someone whose actions and reactions I can observe and understand and use. It lets me go deeper. And, in a strange way, I’m grateful for that.

My writing slowly changed anger into grief, and grief into slow recovery. You can see it in the things I wrote, in the changes in tone and story between works. It is still changing me in subtle ways I expect even I can’t see.

If something has happened to you, and you’re not sure you can deal with it, write it out. Let somebody else deal with it. You’ll be surprised what you come up with.

TIHFU #2 – Books on Writing

Some people will tell you that any writer who takes a class or reads books about writing isn’t a ‘real’ writer, that you can’t learn to be a writer, that you just are or you aren’t.

That’s bullshit. I will concede that you have to have the drive, the imagination, to write in the first place, but everyone has to start from scratch and learn and hone their craft, and why not read the advice of others while doing it? I didn’t emerge from my mother’s womb and immediately know everything there is to know about eyes, I’m studying it by listening to what other people can teach me about them, and reading books about them. I wasn’t born an orthoptist, the same way I wasn’t born a writer.

I love, love, love reading books about writing. Some of that is about absorbing advice, but after you’ve read a few there’s not a lot of difference between them. So why do I keep reading them? Because every time I get a new one and sit down with it, I feel motivated all over again by reading about how to improve my craft and how to use it.

There are some fantastic books out there and there are some crappy ones. And it’s entirely possible that what I dislike works fantastically for others. But I never pick up books with titles like ‘write a bestseller in a year’ or ‘how to make loads of money from your writing’. Because if you ask me, that comes from the quality of the writer, not some formula. Or at least, I want it to badly enough to want to make it through those woods by myself.

I’m going to be attending a course on ‘Rewriting and Editing for Authors’ at the university next month. I’ll let you know how that goes :)

Seriously, go to your bookshop or go to Amazon and pick up a book or two. Even if you feel like you know everything already. Because there’s always something you hadn’t thought of, or maybe it’ll get you all fired up the way it does me. It’s worth it.

On my bookshelf here with me right now:

Wannabe a Writer? by Jane Wenham-Jones
Creative Writing by Leach & Graham
The Way We Write – edited by Barbara Baker (this is a great book – interviews with bestselling authors of fiction, non-fiction, children’s fiction, poetry… you get the idea… about how they write, why, where, their trials and tribulations. Really fascinating reading.)

I have more at home, and loaned out to my friends, but I can’t recall their titles off the top of my head! I have been told that Stephen King's On Writing is very good, but I haven't read it. I've promised it to myself when I finish the first draft of my novel project. Here's to hoping that's soon!