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How I did

May 29, 2009 //
0

I did crap, that’s how I did. The combination of the week’s break last week plus a pile-up of chores this week meant I only got to writing on a few days, and the writing itself was plodding and dull, the sort of stuff that makes you happy it’s just the first draft…

I do have a good idea of the plot now, so it’s a matter of finding the time and motivation to write it (or anything at all, right now – going through a bad phase). Normally I can talk myself round (the ‘it’s only 500 words’ type pep talk) but not this week.

And not next week either, because I’m away again. Blog on hiatus.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

May 8, 2009 //
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I’m at 12,000 words and feeling fairly comfortable with the shape of the story. I still haven’t gone past the endpoint of those first two dozen pages I wrote originally – that’s how much extra material I’m adding in.

The nicest part is that I’m now already one quarter of the way through Jannin’s arc – he’s narrating the first half up to about 40,000 words. Then Rana will take over for the next 40,000 words, picking up from a point about halfway through Jannin’s narative, and we’ll see what she’s been up to when Jannin’s seen her wandering about the palace hallways soaking wet. She’ll also bring the story through to the conclusion, taking it past where Jannin’s narration stops.

At least, that’s what I think’s going to happen. I only have a series of disconnected incidents in mind to guide me, so we’ll see. But one quarter through one half of the story sounds pretty nice (especially after last year’s effort went to a massive 195,000 words – if I could work out how/where to add in another 50,000 words I could split the damn thing into a trilogy, for crying out loud).

Though I did get more words done than my target, I didn’t work on this WIP every day. Instead, I had another go at the synopsis for the 195,000-word monster. It came out better than the first try, but it still doesn’t really capture the complexity or flavour of the book, or even most of the action. Yeah, let’s you see summarise the plot, characterisation and character relationships, and tone of a 400-page book in a single page…

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Categories The writing life

How I did

May 1, 2009 //
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I’m at 8000 words. Which sounds good, since it’s more than my target 500 words a day. However, I was not able to write every day (including today), and much of the total word count came from the original 20 pages rather than new words – though I am adding to and improving those original initial scenes.

Even on days I did have plenty of time, I could feel myself procrastinating. I know exactly why I do this – I’m worried that once I get past the first few scenes, where I have the original pages and am fairly happy with the way they go, I’ll be out there in the wide open space of the blank white page, staring down 70,000 words and panicking about it…

I know from past experience that the only way to combat this feeling is to just keep plonking away at the keyboard muttering, ‘it’s just the first draft, it can be crappy. Don’t think about 70,000. Think about 500′.

Towards the end of the week, I did feel things begin to pick up. In particular, I’m writing from the POV of Jannin, who was my bad guy in the first book. Not a lot gets told about him or his past in the first book, and now his backstory is beginning to whisper to me. I’m also getting hints about what his arc will be – until now, I’ve been focused on Rana’s arc (she was my POV in the first book and will be again in this one). She has losses to recover from – but so does Jannin, and that’s what’s showing up strongly in these re-written first scenes.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

April 24, 2009 //
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As might be inferred from yesterday’s entry, I have let my writing muscle atrophy over the last four months while I was moving from Libya to Malaysia with a visit home in between. I’ve done a little editing of last year’s work, and written a couple of scenes, but it’s almost May and I haven’t got a new work underway.

This week, finally, was when I felt settled enough in my new home to put my writing routine back into place. Though you’d think it’d be the first routine to be replaced, it was the last: dog-walking and household routines came first. Perhaps I need my safe haven all sorted before I can devote mental energy to writing.

The routine is for afternoon writing [I have learnt over the last few years that I can force myself to try writing in the morning, but I'm not going to get much done, and nothing worth keeping...], 500 words a day.

This week, I only managed it for the last three days (as I had guests earlier in the week, as was just as eager to do some sightseeing as they were, since I’m new to the city too), but did get 2000 words done overall.

It also took me some time to decide what to write – which makes it sound like I’m rolling in ideas. That’s not true, but I did have a couple of options. In particular, my mind has been turning over ideas to do with the characters I was working with last year, but I think they’re too fresh and I need distance.

Therefore, I’ve decided on a sequel to a book that is about to be published. When I finished that book, I immediately jotted down a few scenes for what those characters would do next, and even went so far as to write about 20 pages of the sequel. But as with my characters from last year, I needed time to let them settle before I felt comfortable writing about them again.

So some of the 2000 words was lifted from the original 20 pages, but mostly not verbatim. I followed the layout of the first scene, because it allowed a good re-introduction to the characters while immediately outlining the new problem, but added more depth and detail. I found re-reading the 20 pages that my old problem of rushing developments was alive and well, and also that because I had written it straight after the first book, I did tend to skip over character relationships and descriptions because I knew them so well – not so for a new reader, of course.

It was a slow and shaky start, but I expected that, and was grateful I had early scenes to help me along. I am looking forward to getting my teeth into the story properly next week.

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Categories The writing life

Choosing a title in genre fiction

April 9, 2009 //
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The title is a tough nut: along with your cover, it’s what makes a potential reader pick your book up off the shelf, or click for more information. It generally needs to be short and intriguing, and in some way encapsulate the book (fiction or non-fiction) in a few words. Hah, and you thought the synopsis was hard! Here’s a good article from Writers Weekly on how to approach picking your title, and a personal anecdote about it.

I’ve got a new fiction book coming out in a couple of months, and I thought I would share the brainstorming process with you so you can see just how hard it can be.

Some details: it’s a 85,000 fantasy fiction book, best audience probably YA girls because it is adventure-romance with a female narrator, Rana, and two other female leads, Anura and Amaryths, all teenagers or young adults.

It’s set in a fairytale world, literally in a world where fairytales are true guiding principles and the Fairytale Imperative makes sure that no princess is left for long without her prince showing up to rescue her. Except that Anura’s prince is stubbornly late and a wizard has turned up to murder her – but not if Rana has her way.

The working title for this book has always been ‘Rana’ (I always name my drafts after the lead female character), and the title by which it was submitted was ‘The Frog’s Daughters’ since Anura is descended from the original frog-prince who rescued the golden ball from the well, and the Frog is the guardian angel of this fairytale realm.

However, I’ve never been fond of this title, and my publisher thinks we can do better too. And so…

I started by listing some of the themes, archetypes, and special phrases that spring to mind when I think through the book: wizard, frog prince, fairy tale, crone, Domain [the name of their land], potential, princess, Imperative, light strike [a power Rana has], seeking, puss in boots, spinning wheel, curse, once upon a time, Book, spellbook, enchantment…

The first title that came to me was ‘Rana and the Painted Wizard’. It’s OK. Not too much better than the original title, and if we’re going to give the boys a play in the title, it might very well be ‘Rana and the Wrong Prince’. Plus it implies this is a series, which it isn’t, though I may eventually write a follow-up. In which case, this would be a very convenient title form – this is something genre writers have to keep in mind, what with the trend to hundred-book series these days.

I circled around ‘curse’ for a while: ‘Anura’s Curse’. But a) it sounds like she’s got her period, and b) all three girls are cursed one way or the other, but if any one girl gets the title, it should be Rana. Then there were variations around ‘The Cursed Fairytale’, ‘The Fairytale Curse’, the ‘Curse OF the Fairytale’…but in the end decided the titles around ‘curse’ would give the impression the book is much darker than it actually is. This then is pitching at the wrong audience.

I searched for a long time for something around ‘kiss’, since there are several important kisses in the book and it captures the romantic flavour: ‘The Fairy Tale Kiss’, ‘Kissing Frogs, Hoping for Princes’ [too modern in tone], ‘The Awakening Kiss’, ‘A Kiss for the Princess’. I dislike most of these and just don’t think anything so far has captured the tone.

Another theme in the book is the idea that Anura’s real fairytale has gone astray and she is stuck in this nasty one where a wizards wants to kill her. So I played with notions of ‘lost’: ‘The Lost Fairytale’, ‘The Misplaced Prince’, and so forth, but still didn’t come up with anything I really liked.

I thought for a while about something to do with the Fairytale Imperative or the Light-Strike, but those of these are esoteric concepts that won’t become clear until you actually read the book. They might interest the reader enough to read the blurb, or might turn them off instantly.

Now, Part 1 of the book is called ‘Seeking’, Part 2 ‘Finding’, Part 3 ‘Losing’. So I tried to find something that would feed off that naming theme, and came up with the word ‘quest’. ‘Rana’s Quest’, ‘The Fairytale Quest’. The trouble I am having is that I find all these titles quite dull and generic – there’s a lot of titles every year in fantasy fiction, and I want my title to stand out a bit.

By now I was getting quite frustrated, so I turned to the exceedingly literal title: ‘Rana’s Quest for a Fairytale’. ‘Princess Seeks True Love’. Accurate, anyway.

I tend to have a quite literal approach to titles, but evocative (if sometimes essentially meaningless) titles can work very well in attracting attention. Whoever developed the titles for Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series, The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings did a marvellous job in this regard, though I can vouch from reading the first book that the relationship between title and story was tenuous.

I did use such a figurative approach for my first book (After the Dragon; the only real dragon makes a one-line appearance and the Dragon of the title is really a metaphor). ‘In the Shadow of the Tower’, or ‘Shadow of the Book’ might work, both towers and books being important figures during the girls’ adventures. ‘By the Spinning Wheel’ is another, since this moment is pivotal for Rana. These titles are more interesting to me but I can’t say how attractive they are to others.

In the end, however, I have had to admit defeat. The only title that gave me even a moment of ‘hmmm, maybe’ was the first, ‘Rana and the Painted Wizard’, and the last ‘By the Spinning Wheel’. I’m waiting to see what my publisher comes up with.

So not too useful for me, but I hope this has helped other genre writers explore something of the process of coming up with title: brainstorming based round themes and events in the story and weighing each title for its interest or impact.

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Categories The writing life, Writing tips and techniques

How I did

November 9, 2008 //
6

I finished, that’s how I did! 410 pages; 192,000 words; it’s done, pinned dead the page – well, that’s how it feels right now…

I’d have a glass of champagne, if this wasn’t a dry country. As it is, I’m going to take morbid pleasure in burying the baby for the next seven weeks – I’m not going to look at it again now until the new year. Once I’ve taken that good long break, it will be time to print it out for the first time (sorry, trees) and go through it line by line to make it pretty: catch the typos, straighten out inconsistencies, pluck out the cliches, beef up the flat bits, ruthlessly cut redundancies, and get it ready for its first wobbly steps out in the world ie my first reader.

That’s later. This week I’m going to loll around on the couch reading trashy books and eating chocolate (and tinker; I’ll tinker a little this week, I won’t be able to resist). I’ve got technical work, a bit of non-fiction stuff, and some editing to do, but no new fiction project thought up yet, so this is the last in this series for a while.

p.s. you know you’re in for a bad writing week when you get a rejection from a market you never submitted to, for a type of a story you’ve never written…weird.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

November 2, 2008 //
0

So. Five scenes down, ten to go. You’d think I’d be scenting the finish line by now, but no, it’s a slog and it’s going to stay a slog for the next two weeks (fingers crossed, that’ll be it).

I think most writers will understand what I mean when I describe the actual physical revulsion I was feeling sitting in my chair this week, the physical need to leap up and walk away from the screen because the whole thing is just too hard and unpleasant and draining. This is the feeling that makes people quit.

So for my writing week, every day went something like: three hours of pecking out one line, jumping up to walk away for a while, forcing myself back into the chair to get another line down, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, until finally my body/mind got that we weren’t going anyway till it was done, so I’d get the other 90% of the scene written in the last hour.

To bribe myself along, I gave myself the candy of doing all the ‘easy’ (ie draft or outline exists) Lily scenes, which means I’ve got the old blank page for almost every one of the last ten scenes. Not looking forward to the next two weeks.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

October 26, 2008 //
0

Ah, the best laid plans…last week I was feeling pleased because I’d managed to clear all my chores off so I could have an interrupted week of writing. Hah! Between migraines and power cuts and unexpected – but always welcome – technical work, I didn’t have the clear week I thought I was going to have.

But when do we ever have the time we think we’re going to have, in any endeavour? I ‘made’ more time, by writing in the evening – if unexpected things took my daytime writing time away, unexpected things also added free evenings.

It went agonisingly slowly. I planned to do three scenes, and I ended up doing more than that, but because 1) I was working from existing rough scenes, and 2) I was splitting those existing scenes up into several scenes to follow the chronology of the other POV, I felt like I wasn’t making much true (new) progress.

And then, I realised I need more scenes overall. I had previously cheated in the placement of the Lily chapters by occasionally allowing a Simon flashback chapter to stand in for one of Lily’s (he has twenty years of backstory including the exceedingly relevant war – I don’t put backstory in unless it’s relevant – while she has about three months’ worth), but this messed up the chronology and didn’t allow Lily time where she needs it.

Therefore I had to add in more than the 18 scenes I originally planned for, placed around the Simon flashback chapters. Between splitting existing scenes and making room for the necessary extra scenes, I ended up finalising more than the planned three scenes but still am only three scenes down on the original count of 18.

So this is where I’m at: fifteen scenes to go. I’ve given myself six weeks to do it, but you know what. I think I can do a scene a week-day and get it done in three.

Let’s find out.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

October 19, 2008 //
0

This week was an administration week – I only had two days left to the working week when I returned from holiday plus a build-up of chores, so instead of writing, I used the time to clear the decks: filing, dealing with paperwork and emails, transcribing notes, cleaning the house, running errands, knocking off some contract work etc. That leave this current week free to focus on fiction writing, for my last push to get it done before December 6.

Administrative tasks take up a surprising amount of time, and it’s best to keep on top of them by devoting a block of time each day, or at most each week, to keeping it under control. It’s good time management; it also keep your working area clear, which is conducive to creativity: it’s tough to let your mind run free when you’ve got a pile of bills sitting in the corner of your eye. Having a consistent procedure for how you treat paperwork and filing (eg such-and-such type of paperwork always goes in such-and-such a place) also helps.

My aim this week is to get at least three scenes down for Lily. I didn’t have too much inspiration while I was on holiday but I am feeling positive about her next few scenes, so I’ll see how she goes.

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Categories The writing life

How I did

October 5, 2008 //
0

Writing this in advance because I am now on holiday (Romania). No posting next week.

My plan this week was to do some plotting of the Lily POV. Given that she alternates with Simon, my first step was to work out how many chapters she needed to provide one per Simon’s chapters: 18.

Eighteen! Isn’t it funny that I can write 140,000 words by narrowing my focus on a daily word limit and yet fall to pieces at the thought of writing a mere 18 chapters…Oh, god, it’s too hard. This is why I don’t plot ahead!

OK, the next step was to check my original (mostly incomplete and awful) draft for Lily, and discover I have at least 12 of those chapters already written in some shoddy form or another, with sure knowledge of another three absolutely necessary (in terms of getting her to where she needs to be for the climax) chapters that still have to be written. That means 15 of the scenes are already plotted. That’s not so bad.

Then, reviewing the first two Lily scenes, I realised they would work better as shorter chapters broken up. In other words, rather than trying to match the length of Simon’s chapters, which are generally 10-12 pages long, Lily’s voice – which is introspective, selfish and kind of shrill – works much better in short doses, especially from the point of view of the poor reader. So with an aim of 3-6 pages per Lily chapter, I’m now only looking at 1500-3000 words per each scene. With the breaking up of earlier chapters, now I’m looking at potentially too many scenes for her, rather than too few, which is nice (it means I don’t have to make up unnecessary events just to give her something to do in one of her chapters; I hate it in other people’s books, I’d hate to commit the crime in my own).

It’s intense work writing her, despite the short length of her scenes. Simon does his damnest to stay out of his own head, so it’s all sharp dialogue and movement and externalities with him; he’s fun to write, he’s funny himself and he has funny characters around him. Lily is wallowing in her own head, with little dialogue but lots of sensations and a constant feeling of being overwhelmed (she starts the book unstable with pious guilt and her emotional state only gets worse from there), plus she’s surrounded by the moral high-ground Liberationists who are all earnest and noble and serious and there’s just not a lot of comic relief there. In addition, it’s a very different writing style for me, and feels unnatural – I can’t have an entire two pages with no dialogue! I love dialogue!

On the other hand, her voice is very distinct from Simon’s, which is a nice achievement given this is my first try at interweaving two POVs (I tried it in the book I’m supposed to be editing and yet have not touched for a year, and while the other voice would start off beautifully distinct from Rana (the surviving POV), they would eventually converge: two teenage girls, not different enough. So I dumped one).

I am aiming to do about three scenes a week once I’m back from holiday (I’ve already knocked the first three into decent shape, so that leaves fifteen). This should mean I’ll be easily finished by the time I head home to Australia in early December (Easily? Touch wood / inshallah), and that longer break will be a useful way to make myself put the book completely aside for a while before the last, ‘prettifying’ pass through.

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Categories The writing life
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