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I write about books I read, being a writer and a teacher of writing. Mostly my posts focus on the craft of writing, with comments on the world of publishing, and the writer's life in general.
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Recently, two writer friends and I went to the movies and saw "Love, Rosie" (when you have been doing 14 hour days and working really hard, it's amazing how much a fluffy movie can brighten you up). Of course, we all came out of the theatre picking apart the plot! But we also stayed to the end of the credits to find out where the movie was filmed because certain scenes didn't "feel right".
The location scout would probably be disappointed in us. After all, he/she found wonderful locations to film in Toronto and Ireland. The only problem was that the key scenes were supposed to be in Boston and on the coast of England. We stayed to check out of curiosity, me especially, because I've found over and over that despite Google maps and street view and all the photos and videos on the net, actually being in a place makes a huge difference to how you write about it.
For one thing, you get smells and sounds when you are there. You get action, people and what the place looks like in different seasons. But you also get to simply sit and immerse yourself, or walk and explore. How long does it take to walk down that street or across that moor? What does it feel like in the rain, or the burning sun? What does it feel like to walk in a thick fog, or complete darkness?
So when it came to this movie, there was something about the dark green of Ireland, the old rock wall, and the house-hotel that didn't feel like England. OK, I'm being picky, but that last part of the movie was significant - it was where the main character finally followed her dreams so the setting was as important as the dialogue and action.
Of course, some movies do this location thing wonderfully. Think Lord of the Rings in the South Island of New Zealand, or Gladiator (this quote from Wikipedia - "The opening battle scenes in the forests of Germania were shot in three weeks in the Bourne Woods, near Farnham, Surrey in England.. When Scott learned that the Forestry Commission planned to remove the forest, he convinced them to allow the battle scene to be shot there and burn it down.") On the other hand, I cannot imagine the Mad Max movies being shot anywhere except in the outback of Australia!
Setting is often the last thing that writers think about when they're in the first draft. It comes later, as the story is rewritten, but it's the choice of details that's telling, that shows you whether the writer really understands what's at stake. You have to help the reader feel as if they are there, and even more, you have to help the reader believe the character is there, seeing and understanding and reacting to that setting in ways that only they could. So maybe part of that being in your setting is also imagining yourself as the character and asking what they see, and how they feel about it.
So it may well be that in the next ten months, I'll be out near Broken Hill, or in the New Forest, or Chicago. All in the service of better writing!
(One day I'll figure out where to put this - below - in a story.)
YA fiction is 'hot' this year, with studies showing more than half of readers are not actually teenagers. There have been articles decrying adult readers as juvenile, and others defending YA fiction as 'telling great stories', ones that people obviously want to read. So I thought I'd write a little about three recent novels (and yes, I'm a keen YA novel reader, and also a keen MG reader!).
Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass - Meg Medina
Yes, I bought this book because of the title, but also because I had heard lots of great things about it. In a nutshell, it's a book about bullying, but it's not at all a 'do-good' story in the sense that these kinds of issues stories can sometimes be. The characters are mostly Latino, and the setting is a poor district high school. The main character, Piddy, has been forced to change schools when her mother moves them to a better apartment. When Piddy is greeted one day with 'Yaqui Delgado wants to kick your ass', she's flabbergasted. She doesn't even know who Yaqui is - but she is about to find out.
This is a story that takes bullying to a new level, the kind that frightens all of us. A girl who is obviously out of control and possibly psychotic decides she hates Piddy and becomes obsessed with beating her up. It reminded me of stories of women being stalked by an obsessive man - no matter what the woman does, he won't give up or listen to reason - and when reason fails, what are we left with? Nearly all of the characters in this story are female, and this is as much about Piddy's relationships with her mother and her friend, Lila, as the bullying. Piddy is a smart girl but when faced with personal violence, she is at a total loss. Of the two males in the story, one is an absent father (so absent that the mother refuses to mention his name) and the other is a boy whose own father is a monster. Medina weaves all of these threads together successfully, and the book kept me hooked all the way through.
The Impossible Knife of Memory - Laurie Halse Anderson
Anderson never flinches from telling the hard stories. Speak was about rape, Wintergirls was about anorexia, and now this story is about a teenage girl, Hayley, living with her war veteran dad, who is suffering severe PTSD. Hayley's mother died, and when Dad's relationship with Trish broke down, he took Hayley on the road with him for several years. Now they are back in his home town, living in the family house, and she is at high school, struggling to cope.
As Dad moves in and out of 'episodes', Hayley is finding it harder and harder to deal with him. She is so caught up in caring for him that she fails to see that he is steadily getting worse. Her whole life is about protecting him and making sure nothing sets him off. She begins a relationship with a boy at school, the only one weird enough to 'get' her, as her friend says, but even he can't be allowed to get involved with her dad in any way. When Trish returns, Hayley tries to blame Dad's worsening condition on her. Eventually, of course, things come to a head.
Although this is a story specifically about the father's PTSD, as do many strong novels of this kind, it speaks to a much wider range of issues. Mostly I thought that Hayley gives us a really good idea of what happens when you are caught up with 'enabling' someone's condition because you are in so deep you can't see what is happening. It could apply just as well to alcohol and drugs. It's also a frightening depiction of a world in which the adult is no longer capable of being the caregiver and it all falls to the child. Despite sounding depressing, the story is well-balanced by Hayley's relationship with Finn - their funny dialogue serves to lift the darkness at just the right moments.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
Even though I read this several months ago, it has stayed with me. I'm not an avid Neil Gaiman reader, like some people, but I liked the sound of this and so I picked it up. I'm not sure it's even YA, but Gaiman says it is definitely not a children's book because of the bath drowning scene. I would have to agree. He has said it is his most autobiographical book, set in the place where he grew up, with the family of Hempstocks who live at the end of the lane.
In an appearance at Symphony Space, he said, “While I was writing, it was like I was there. There’s a scene where our hero has to climb down a drainpipe to escape, and I was talking to my sister, and she said, ‘you know, we’ve got a photo of you on that drainpipe…’ And that’s the back cover of the book now!”
It's a story in which the boy is caught up in bizarre, almost-mythical events, things that terrify him and only Lizzie Hempstock is there to help. The pond is an ocean that holds terrors and monsters. But in the way that Gaiman often writes, it is the things going on in the family home that are more frightening. In a very different way, he raises the same question that Anderson does - what can a child do when his or her parent won't see reason and take care the way they are supposed to?
I can recommend all three of these books - they won't make you feel comfortable but they will catch you up and give you plenty to think about.
Recently I went to a poetry workshop with Simon Armitage. While he said a lot of useful things, the one that was still ringing in my ears a few days later was this: “I might redraft a poem 12 or 15 times, and by the final draft usually every word that was in the first draft has been changed – to a better word.” He explained that he wasn’t talking about the words that join everything (and, but, the, etc) but the ones that are doing the work.
It reminded me of another event from a few years ago – four magazine editors talking about what they do as editors and what they publish. One, who had been writing and editing for many years, said when she first started, a lot of people were writing competent or very good stories that would get published. Now, competence or “very good” is not enough. You have to be a “stand out” in terms of character and plot and theme, but also in the actual writing, the craft.
These days a lot of people write and most of them want to be published. In a Brisbane Writers’ Festival session I went to yesterday, Isobelle Carmody said, “Lots of kids and teenagers write. They write whole books. So do lots of adults. But you get published because you rewrite and rewrite.”
So I think the question that comes out of all of this is – what do you do if you are writing and rewriting, and still not getting published? How do you work out what’s wrong, what part of the craft is still lacking? It’s too easy to say there will be an editor out there somewhere who loves your novel, because that means you disregard all those other editors who have said “not ready yet”. A lot of people also say that editors are wrong, or don’t understand what they’re trying to create, or only care about blockbusters, and so they self-publish.
Nothing wrong with self-publishing. If you do it for the right reasons and know what you’re doing (and paying some “publisher” $10,000 to publish your book is NOT self-publishing – you are getting scammed!).
But the question I’m trying to answer here is about what is lacking in your writing that means you are “competent” or “very good” but not yet publishable. You may not want to examine and change every word like Simon Armitage, but then again, maybe you should. Over the years, I have read many, many chapters of novels and some full manuscripts, sometimes for critiquing and often because they are students’ work for assessment. Sometimes it’s a plot issue (there isn’t a plot or it doesn’t hold together), sometimes it’s poor characterisation. But overwhelmingly what I see is a lack of craft at sentence and word level.
This might mean repetitions, redundancies, vagueness, bad grammar. But those are editing fix-ups. What pulls writing down into being something tedious to read are things such as:
· * all the sentences are the same length
· * the characters all sound the same
· * the writing and POV character have no “voice”, no rhythm, no cadence
· * the writing is boring – no imagery, no metaphors, no fresh expressions
These things are harder to fix. They take a lot of awareness about the problem existing and acknowledging it is a problem (which is where the writers who realise it head for a good freelance critique or edit). Then they take a huge amount of work. Work at the word and sentence level, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. They take a revision where you might have to replace more than 50% of what you had originally written.
The bonus of this kind of hard work is that you will learn so much along the way that your writing will never be the same again (and it shouldn’t be – who wants to be just competent?). For me, every novel is about learning how to write that novel. Create that voice. Use that particular language, choose those particular words. The work I do won’t magically make the next novel easy, but it will help. And every novel that teaches me more about my own writing will make my writing better. I still think I have a long way to go with that, but the challenge keeps me interested, not just in the plot and characters, but the act of writing and then revising.
I am currently 3 days from the end of the most intense fortnight of writing that I have had in a very long time. I’ve had a
May GibbsFellowship this year, which has meant four weeks in a small, quiet apartment in Brisbane, far away from work, telephone, cooking meals and other daily distractions. For several reasons, I chose to take my four weeks in two lots, and the first fortnight included writing workshops in schools.
While I’ve done a lot of creative first draft writing (in both fortnights), this time I also had a major revision on a YA novel to do. Eight pages of detailed notes from a very good editor to contend with first (I think every writer knows that feeling of panic when you see notes like these and think, I can’t do all that!). Then it was head down, and total focus. Most days I have done at least four hours and sometimes six or more. There is no way I could have achieved this level of intense work and concentration at home.
A major character I added into the second half of the novel in the last draft? Gone again. Several large plot holes? Filled and expanded. Background world building and technology? Expanded and developed more deeply. Character arc? Carefully finessed. Then it was another pass of the manuscript for more polishing. Hour after hour after hour, right inside the world and the story and the characters I had created. I went out for walks to help my aching back and stiff neck (taking my main character with me) and coffee (taking a notebook to make more notes and write down new ideas and thoughts).
Now I’m done, for this draft at least. I’m sure there will be more redrafting to come. But I feel a bit lost, a bit … adrift. I’m looking forward to getting back to my new project, but first I have to reshuffle the headspace, tidy up, put away that world for now. It can be hard to change gears, from picky revision to free-wheeling first draft.
But I have several good ways to help that along. I can read a great novel in a different genre. I can write some poems or do some free writing. Or I can go and see a thought-provoking movie. I’ll miss my May Gibbs time! When I go home, I want to really try to maintain that sense of focus and keep the distractions away. Right now, I might just celebrate a completed new draft.
This blog has been sadly neglected this year, but for a good reason (well, good for me, anyway!). I'm studying again and the course work has consumed my every waking hour, almost. Between that and the reading for my topic, and working to pay the bills, even my recreational reading has suffered. It seems that gone are the days of reading 2-3 novels a week!
But I'm gradually returning to the world of reading and creative writing and imagination and story, and what has really helped is going out and simply listening to other writers talk about their craft. Last night was the best possible example of how inspiring it can be to hear a writer talking honestly and in depth about what and why they write. It was our VU Writers in Conversation event with Helen Garner.
You may not know Helen's work if you live outside Australia, but she is reknowned here for both her fiction and nonfiction. It seems that everything she writes causes controversy, and yet when you listen to her talk about her works, you wonder why. It's because of the depth of her writing. She tackles subjects that other writers might shy away from, and does it with such intensity that I think people shy away from what she reveals.
Her most recent novel I have read is "The Spare Room", which is about two women, one of whom, Nicola, is dying of bowel cancer and comes to stay in Helen's spare room. Nicola is pursuing alternative therapy and Helen ends up getting quite angry with her for a number of reasons. It's quite a confronting book about death and choices and the effects of both of those things. I think you would have to read it to understand why some readers reacted so negatively to it, but for me the key is Helen Garner's unflinching portrayals of characters.
When it comes to her nonfiction, she has again caused furores over both "The First Stone" and "Joe Cinque's Consolation" (do a search on either or both to see what I mean). Regardless of what you think of these books, Helen's nonfiction is as deeply affecting as her fiction. She talked last night of the experience of writing "Joe Cinque's Consolation" and how close she became to Joe's parents. Her re-telling of a huge literary lunch in Sydney, to which she took Joe's mother, was heart-stopping.
And her ability to then put these events into words on the page is astounding. She also spoke about
meeting a Turkish man on a railway platform who showed her photos on his phone of his brand new baby, and how she ended up talking to him and becoming friends with him and his wife. It was hardly a surprise when she confessed to the audience that she "has no boundaries" and that maybe this is a fraught thing, but I think it's why she is able to write the way she does. She doesn't hold back, she doesn't hold people at arms-length.
All the same, we were fascinated to hear that her new book, out in August, is about Robert Farquharson (follow
this link to read a summary). She has spent eight years on it, which is a monumental task. I came away from listening to Helen feeling inspired and in awe. I plan to read "Joe Cinque's Consolation" as soon as I'm able, but I know I'll be thinking about many of the things she said for some time to come.
Week 2 of my May Gibbs residency. This week I’m going out each day to do writing and poetry workshops with kids in schools. I’ve been out near Ipswich, up towards the Sunshine coast and learned to work a TomTom navigator! (If you’re not going to be the driver, then the next job is navigating, of course.) Rather than stop me writing, this makes me more determined to write as soon as I get back to my retreat apartment.
It’s great to work with the kids – many of whom “hate” writing because they don’t know how to do it – and give them a bunch of tools for both poetry and story writing. Get past those initial blocks and we start having fun. And producing a lot of writing. I’ve mostly been working with Grade 6 and 7, and been glad to see plenty of volunteers busting to read their writing.
As for my own, I started keeping a writing diary, for several reasons. One was that I didn’t want to get home and think – what on earth did I actually write? So I know that as of today (Day 11) I’ve written about 11,000 words of two different novels, about 18 poems and a picture book. More importantly, I’ve done a lot of thinking, staring out at the church roof next door and the buildings in the distance. I’ve also done a fair bit of walking, to counteract the effects of writing on a laptop.
A retreat is definitely worthwhile considering. I know writers who book themselves into a motel or hotel for a weekend or a week, or go and stay at a friend’s holiday house. Others go away with fellow writers and use each other as “prods” to keep writing. Anything that takes you into a writing space is worth doing.
Life is over-full. For those of us who communicate for a living, the very things we use every day – the internet, email, phones – become the things that intrude into all our leisure time, the time we might use for writing, and suck it away. I’ve been internet-connected while here, but it has been so much easier to turn it off, to turn the phone off, to give myself quiet time with nothing else to do but create.
If you’ve been wanting to take some time out to write, now is the time to plan it. It’s funny how when you are on a May Gibbs retreat/residency, every time you explain it to someone, their eyes light up and they wish they, too, could do this. Well, all I can say is – do it. Find a place to stay for a week or a weekend, book yourself in, plan ahead with your writing project and GO!
When I think of a writer’s retreat, I have this place in France in mind. It’s on the side of a hill overlooking a valley, the village is medieval and full of old stone buildings and painted shutters and pots full of brightly flowering plants (you know the kind), and the sunlight and fresh air and ambience lead to me writing these amazing novels in no time at all.
Hmmm. Anyone who writes knows even an inspiring French village doesn’t necessarily lead to outpourings of words and masterpieces. But all the same, the idea of a retreat is entrancing. It means you get to go somewhere that is not your home, and you get to shut yourself away from the world. You may not write thousands of words, but you are there to write, so stuff happens.
I am on Day 6 of my writing retreat in Brisbane (warm Brisbane while my home city shivers in early winter freezes) and to be honest, every day here has been different. Every writing day, I mean. The idea that I would come and sit in my chair every day for 8 hours and churn out words has not happened. But that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. Plenty has.
It took me a couple of days to get used to it. The peace and quiet, I mean. But also the idea that I had nowhere to be, no one to answer to, nothing urgent to do for other people or work. It was just me and my imagination and my laptop. I had taken the advice of someone else who had done this retreat* and brought several projects. The one I really wanted to finish? Done on Day 1. I’d spent the last two weeks trying to find the time and headspace to write that last chapter and suddenly, in one day, I was finished. I was a bit stunned.
So what next? I thought. I spread things across my large table and dabbled here and there, but mostly I just sat and thought. Words came, slowly. One project is a verse novel I have been working on for two years. It’s a big challenge, this one, and it’s been going very slowly. This week I’ve clipped pages and notes to the slat blind in front of me, and that has helped – to see it in note form all around me.
I also had some picture books in mind, and worked on one the other day, without much success. Then I went to an amazing exhibition called Falling Back to Earth and suddenly something entirely new and different emerged. I’ve also been working on something new and experimental. This is normal for me – to have several projects going at once – but usually at least two of them are in “resting” mode. At the moment, all of these things are spread around me, and I work on whichever one is rolling around in my head and wanting attention.
Because this is what a retreat can do. Suddenly, instead of a head crammed full of other stuff with a tiny space for writing, it’s like this empty hall with a dusty floor and sun beaming through the high-up windows, waiting for dancers to come and dance, or practise, or do some pirouettes and grand jetes maybe. You put the music on and invite them in, and your head is full of dancing.
*This retreat is a
May Gibbs Fellowship, and every year children’s writers in Australia can apply to have a residency in another city in order to have time to write.
Five days until the
Beaconsfield Festival of Golden Words and today's Q&A is with poet Tim Thorne. He's a multi-award winning poet with more than a dozen collections published.
1. What is your latest book? Tell us a bit about it.
The Unspeak Poems and other verses, published by Walleah Press. It consists of the title group of poems, based on Stephen Poole's concept of "Unspeak" (a real-life version of Orwell's "Newspeak") along with other poems I've written over the past six years. It includes some light verse.
2. What is your best time of day for writing? Why is that?
It used to be very late at night, but as I get older I get tired earlier, so now it tends to be afternoons.
3. What books would you recommend to a new poet starting out?
Any of the technically great poets, both for enjoyment and to learn from. Plath and Keats are the first I'd list, but the important thing is to read as widely as possible.
4. What is the strangest question you have been asked by a reader? What was your response?
"Why did you write about my life?" This from a complete stranger after I'd read in a pub in Orange. She'd wandered in from another bar and heard a poem about a homeless teenager.
5. What do you enjoy most about literary festivals?
Hearing other poets read/perform their work. I'm not a great fan of panel discussions. I do have a poem sequence in my new book called "At the Literary Festival" which is pretty much my take on the phenomenon.
The Beaconsfield Festival of Golden Words - never heard of it? That's because it's a brand new literary festival for Tasmania, taking place 14-16 March!
Today's Q&A is with Christina Booth, a children's writer and illustrator, who will be appearing at the festival.
1. What is your latest published book? Tell us a little about it.
My latest book is called Welcome Home. It is a story about a boy and a whale. Inspired by an event that happened in my home state of Tasmania, the story follows a whale as she swims into a river and tells her stories to a young boy. The stories are both joyful and sad. The young boy learns of the history of whaling and why the whales were driven away. He wonders if he can make amends for the past and encourage her to stay. 'Sorry,' he tells her but she swims away. Then in the early dawn people gather on the shore and watch as she swims and plays in the water, but not on her own.
I have always wanted to write a book that looks at the issue of whaling. It is a gruesome and violent topic and quite political and very difficult to approach appropriately in a book for young children. When a southern right whale swam into Hobart's Derwent River and had a calf, the first born in what was once a thriving whale nursery in nearly 200 years I knew I had a story. I have approached the effects of whaling from a historical perspective and asked myself, how did the whale know it was safe to come back? Do whales tell their children stories like we do? Can a whale forgive us? I like to start my story writing with a question.
2. What research did you have to do for it? Is research different for illustrators? If so, in what way?
I researched information about southern right whales and the history of whaling during the early European settlement of Australia and New Zealand. I watched a lot of documentaries, read books including journal entries of whalers from the time and looked at a lot of pictures of whales. I collected as many images of whales as I could and researched about their behaviour and anatomy. I visited a few museums and researched quite a bit online.
My research is very much the same as an illustrator as it is for my writing though I do have to collect and study a lot of visual aspects, not just to have descriptions right in words but to have certain important aspects correct in my illustrations. If you understand the anatomy of the animal you are drawing and painting, even if you are simplifying it or morphing it in some way then you will capture the essence of what makes that animal unique. A lot of my illustration research is spent doing studies and sketches of animals to learn how to make them move and sit, stand etc, in certain environments and situations. I am inspired by the way Beatrix Potter studied to draw her animal characters. She drew them anatomically correct and then she dressed them. My whales aren't dressed though!!
3. What is your best time of day for illustrating? Why is that?
I have a crazy life, lots of people coming and going in my house which is where my studio is. I find that once I have settled into the studio and focused then any time is the best time. Sometimes I go up to turn off computers for the night and find myself distracted and working again. It puts me into a time bubble and before I know it everyone else has gone to sleep and hours can pass by. Because I am a mum the best time to work is any time I can grab to do so.
4. What is the strangest question you've ever been asked by a child reader? How did you respond?
Not many odd ones but one child wanted to know what language we spoke in Tasmania. I answered with a question that had the group chatting for a bit about what they thought (they were quite young and lived on what I affectionately call the 'Big Island').
5. What do you like most about literary festivals?
I love festivals, the word itself engages the essence of fun and celebration. I love literary festivals because they celebrate what I love to do and offer the opportunity for everyone to engage with the idea of using words and pictures to tell stories. We hear from the great writers and also from the potentially great and we learn from each other. Humans are naturally designed to tell stories and to gather together so when I attend a writing festival I feel very at home and love listening, telling and doing. I love having the chance to meet new people, my audience (they are not a figment of my imagination, hooray) and to share any skills I have with others and learn new ones as well. I love to learn.
Next week is the Beaconsfield Festival of Golden Words. Tristan Bancks is one of Australia’s most active children’s authors, and an advocate of the internet as an essential writers tool. In demand at schools and libraries around the country for his exciting writing workshops for youngsters, Tristan is leading two of his story safaris and his popular Imaginarium session at the Festival.
1. What is your latest published book? Tell us a little about it.
TWO WOLVES, out 1 March. It’s a crime-mystery novel about two kids, Ben and Olive Silver, who are ‘kidnapped’ by their own parents. They are told that they’re going on a holiday but, after a couple of run-ins with the police, they realise that their parents have done something wrong. They need to become detectives within their own family and work out what their folks have done and what they are going to do about it.
2. What research did you have to do for it?
I read lots of articles on abducted kids and criminal parents. I learnt how log rafts are built and what rabbit hunting is like and I learnt about Norfolk Pine trees and police car antennas and I re-read My Side of the Mountain and Hatchet and White Fang and other wilderness novels that I love. Lots of details that I tried to get right. I took five years to write it so I take full responsibility for any discrepancies.
3. What is your best time of day for writing? Why is that?Definitely mornings. I am clear-headed and energised and ready for action. Afternoon is much better for logistical stuff. Then a late-night burst of ideas if I allow it. (Often no sleep afterwards.)
4. What is the strangest question you've ever been asked by a reader? How did you respond?‘Do you like pie’? I, of course, responded in the affirmative.
5. What do you like most about literary festivals?Interacting with kids, meeting other writers and illustrators who invariably have an interesting take on the world. Telling stories verbally is fun and bringing them alive with images, video, anecdotes etc. It’s a nice excuse to stand up occasionally, too. Writers sit for waaaay too long each day / month / year.
Thanks, Tristan! I know what you mean about too many hours at the computer.
Two Wolves looks great - can't wait to read it.
To celebrate the Beaconsfield Festival of Gold Words, which is on in Tasmania (near Launceston) next week, I'm running a series of short blog posts featuring Q&As with some of the writers who will be there.
First up is Nick Earls, whose books have long been on my favourites list.
1. What is your latest book? Tell us a bit about it.
My latest book for adults is Welcome to Normal, a collection of stories and novellas, each of which look at the idea of ‘normal’ in some way, and at what might lie beneath the surface. My next book for adults, a novel called Analogue Men, will come out in July.
2. What research did you have to do for this book?The research for Word Hunters was huge, and one of the best bits. I had to test out the etymological paths of literally hundreds of words to see which had interesting stories, or stories that could take the characters to interesting places. Then I had to find out what they’d wear in each place, what it looked like how it smelt, etc.
For Welcome to Normal, a few of the stories involve travel or happen a long way from here, so I took to Google Earth and Google Street View and spent days driving the roads to see precisely what my characters would see (or at least what they would have seen, had they been in the Google car that day).
3. What is your best time of day for writing? Why is that?
My best writing time is after I’ve dropped my son at childcare, bought the groceries and despatched any urgent emails. The decks are close to clear then, and they’re not clear often. Lately, my best shot at writing has come on planes and in hotel rooms, with the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door.
To write a first draft of a novel, though, it’s more about best time of year than best time of day. I have to block out a slab of my diary, say no to events and other requests, and write. I only get a few months a year like that, and those few months need to yield a draft of something.
4. What is the strangest question you've been asked by a reader?Quite a few of the strange questions are about the writing of He Died With a Felafel in his hand, made extra strange because John Birmingham wrote it, not me. But people talk to him about Zigzag Street regularly, so honours are even.
5. What do you like most about literary festivals? They make me lift my eyes from this keyboard and screen. They bring me back into face-to-face contact with writers and readers, and into conversations.
Thanks, Nick. You will also see on his website that he gives away some of his stories for free, so if you haven't read his work before, here's your chance!
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The continuing story …
In every publishing venture, especially in self-publishing where you are juggling everything, something is sure to go wrong. Usually it's somewhere in the printing. Deciding to use a local Melbourne printer (just over the Westgate Bridge from me) was worth it, and I think now that dealing with a printer in China or Singapore to save a few hundred dollars would have been a mistake. I had a pretty trouble-free experience with Trojan Press, and they were really helpful.
Publishers who print overseas have a lot more experience than me, and are able to explain exactly what they want and couch it in printing terminology. Whereas to get the book size, I was there with the ruler and counting millimetres!
Having had books traditionally published, though, there were aspects that I understood were vital – the cover design, for one. The correct front and back matter, the imprint page, the ISBN, the barcode (which the printer organized), and then the book data. I had to redo the book data four times in the end because some of it (like the release date) kept mysteriously changing in the online databases.
Also, because this book had been published in the USA, with a different ISBN, I had to contact a number of online booksellers and library suppliers to make sure they knew the correct ISBN and had information about the book. This particular advice came from a session at the Independent Publishers’ Conference, which happened in Melbourne in November, at just the right time for me.
Another thing that I heard at the conference was the frustration felt by review magazines and editors over people who send books for review the week they come out. A review can take up to 3 months, by the time the book is sent to someone, they read it, write the review and then it’s published. So I had my books in my hot little hand by the end of October and immediately began sending out review copies.
It’s not a simple process because quite a few blogs and journals require you to contact them first. I guess they are tired of being sent every book in existence! But several places I took the time to email were responsive and agreed to take a copy. That doesn’t guarantee a review, though. (Again, I already had reviews from the US publication that I could use in my marketing.)
So here is a list of all the things I embarked upon as part of my marketing:
- · Review copies
- · A special book page on my website where I could link to reviews, as well as provide extra materials
- · Extra materials – teaching notes, an author interview, first chapter to download, links to reviews, a book trailer
- · Facebook page for the book where, instead of just hoping people would buy the book, I wanted to provide images (everyone seems to love images, hence Pinterest) related to the book
- · Tweeting about the book (only a little bit – I hate it when people’s tweets are just one endless sales pitch)
- · Launches – one at a great children’s bookshop, The Little Bookroom
- · The second “launch” is part of me giving a free talk about hybrid publishing at my local library, and I have how-to guides on self-publishing to give away
- · Approaching some schools I had been to previously and offering school book launches (my traditional publisher did this a few years ago with a book of mine and I had done it with a keen local school with another book)
- · Two guest posts on blogs that are read by teachers and librarians, as well as other writers
I’m sure there are other small things I’ve been doing but those are the main ones.
I have also been incredibly lucky in that the son of a friend of mine offered to make me a book trailer, and it was just fantastic. He did an amazing job and even found a German Shepherd dog to star in it. The trailer is very spooky! You can see it here.
Other things? well, I did think about having a German Shepherd at the book launch but the bookshop is small and I started imagining what might happen if someone stood on the poor dog’s foot and … you get the picture! So scrap that idea.
Now the book launch is just a week away, and I have to start thinking about cooking cakes for the celebration, and how I will keep the wine chilled if it’s a hot day, and where to park so I don’t get a parking fine.
And then I will have school visits and more photos to put on the FB page and reviews to brace myself for, and then I have to decide if I am going to enter the book for any awards where it’s eligible. I think I will be busy for a few more weeks, at the very least. Finally, if I am lucky and all of this effort leads to good sales, I might be in that happy position of having to decide on a reprint.
Writers often self-publish because they can’t find a traditional publisher for their book. I found myself in this position in 2013. It wasn’t that I had never been traditionally published – by then I had nearly 60 books published, several of which had won or been shortlisted for awards. So why was I in this position? Had I written a book so awful that no one wanted it? Or so contentious or weird or unmarketable? No. But the book I wanted to see published in Australia had already been published in the USA, and so overseas and e-rights were not available. While a few Australian publishers might have said no because they didn’t like the book, finally one was able to tell me it was the rights issue that led them to turn it down.
Now, with some of my books I might have thought – I had it published in the US so I’ll be happy with that. But this book was different. It wouldn’t leave me alone. I just felt in my heart that it was worth pursuing here, hence my constant nudging of my agent to try another publisher. But when I finally realised it wasn’t going to happen, I woke up one morning and decided to try it alone. My first option was to import a large number of copies from the US publisher, but the discount wasn’t enough to allow me to distribute it here without incurring big losses. Also I would have to pay high freight costs. The other option was to self-publish the book. Which, I discovered, would make me a hybrid publisher - one who is both traditionally and self-published.
I think the crucial difference at this point for me was my track record. If I’d only had a few books out, and wasn’t reasonably well known already, I might not have bothered. Or I might have printed 100 copies (as I have done with two of my out-of-print titles) and just sold them during school visits. This “reputation” turned out to be crucial indeed. It meant the distributor, Dennis Jones, immediately agreed to take at least 1200 copies with a team of sales reps to back this up. I had been considering using Lightning Source as a printer, having heard someone from there talk at a small press conference, but Dennis recommended a printer not far from where I live. A quote from Trojan Press showed they could match Lightning Source, and their proximity would make things easier for communication. Trojan also were happy to amend the cover for me. I negotiated with the US publisher, KaneMiller, to buy the cover files as Dennis Jones thought the original cover was excellent and worth using.
From my earlier reprints I already had a block of ISBNs and could immediately allocate one to Dying to Tell Me’s Australian edition. It also helped that I have been self-publishing for years. Initially it was a series of community publications, including two oral histories, then a women’s poetry magazine for 20 years. I’d also written a book on self-publishing (1997) and taught classes, and kept up with changes in technology. All the same, I was looking at a 1500-2000 print run, which filled me with fear. That was a lot of money to risk! The turning point was when my agent contacted Australian Standing Orders on my behalf, and after looking at the book and the teacher’s notes I had written, they agreed to take a firm order of 700 copies. Again, my reputation and track record of previous books was a vital element. (Standing Orders companies have schools as “subscribers” and supply a selected box of books every month of the school year.)
Ultimately, distributors and standing orders companies take your books at a high discount. With a distributor I will have to deal with returns, like any publisher, so I wasn’t out of deep water yet! But it was looking hopeful for maybe covering my costs. And that was what I went into this with – the aim of covering my costs, or not making too big a loss.
Then came work on the actual book. Much as it would have been convenient to use the US text, when I read through it again, I realised that there were too many words that had been changed. Strangely, they hadn’t changed Mum to Mom, but most of the spelling was American, and many other words had been altered, e.g. all measurements were in yards, feet and inches instead of our metres and centimetres. So my task then was to go back to the original Word file and change everything. I also made the decision to change the double speech marks to singles. Some things were able to be fixed with global changes, others not. And this is where I almost came undone. Or sent myself and my interior designer/typesetter, Daniel, crazy!
Because I proofread the novel on screen. In hindsight, I was probably trying to save paper and time, but it was a mistake. I ended up proofreading the text four times, and every time I found more errors. In fact, I found errors that the original US publisher missed (the dad’s name changed between Chapter 2 and Chapter 16!). Each time I found more errors, Daniel had to go back and change them on the Word file, then re-convert into PDF to check pages and formatting. We also had a preferred page limit, and a last-ditch-final page limit (because books print in multiples of pages and if you can stay within a multiple, you save money), and Daniel managed to keep the book under the preferred page limit, even though at the last minute we had to change the font size for readability. Daniel is my hero!
By the end of September, I was waiting on proofs from the printer and a decision from another standing orders supplier before committing to final figures for the print run. Meanwhile I was making lists of places to send the book for review, ways to publicise the book before and after publication date, and working on some new marketing ideas. All of this was going to take time and more money, but this is what a self-publisher has to take on board.
You can see part of my marketing efforts on the Facebook page for Dying to Tell Me. The book trailer is on YouTube here - more about all that in the next post.
And the book is up as a giveaway on GoodReads for the month of February - put in an entry!
This week my new novel took a wrong turn. How did I know? I had to stop writing. I kept resisting writing any more of that chapter. I kept thinking about why it didn't "feel right". And what does "feel right" mean anyway? Was it the novel and the plot, or was I just finding a new way to procrastinate? Finally, during an hour-long car trip, I set myself to thinking about what I'd written and why, and why it wasn't working.
I managed to work out that I'd given a character an action that was wrong on several levels. It didn't fit who he was at that point (and I hadn't done a lot of background work on him, either, but I did know that), and it gave him away too easily as the "villain". I'm writing a MG mystery and red herrings and clues are important. Any awake reader would twig straight away.
So back to the manuscript the next day and two pages got deleted. Luckily I had listened to my gut and stopped before I got too much further along. It can be a lot harder to delete whole chapters, or even half the book. What usually happens is the writer can't bear to waste all that writing, and they hang on like grim death to the mountain of words that they've created, thinking there must be a way to fix it later. It inevitably leads to a flawed story, and sometimes one that can't be fixed.
Here are some other instances of "something's not right" that you should listen to:
- A character doesn't feel real, or you have them do something that doesn't fit with who they are (usually so the plot will work).
- You've got so many characters you have to keep a list, and then you start to wonder how a reader is going to keep track (and you hate character lists in the front of books).
- Dialogue feels stilted or inconsequential. It might be giving the reader plot information or showing character, but is doing nothing much else. You kinda like it (it's how you talk, or your friends) but you keep reading over it and ...
- You can see the setting in your head but you're starting to wonder if a reader will be able to.
- It seems like there is a lot of action going on, but the story itself doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.
- You think about reading your first chapter aloud to an audience and cringe.
- You have finished a revision of your novel and you desperately want to start sending it out and querying, but ... something holds you back.
There are lots more examples of this, but you get the idea, I'm sure. If something in your manuscript is niggling at you, it's a sure sign that you need to rewrite, even if you don't know why. I recommend a long car trip or a long walk!
I’m currently reading Best Australian Poems 2013. Every night when I get into bed, before I pick up my current novel, I open up BAP and read half a dozen poems. I do this with poetry a lot. I might have a Billy Collins or Ted Kooser collection handy, or Mary Oliver, or Maxine Kumin (some of my favourites). Or I might be trying out someone new. I don’t read poetry all the time – but sometimes I need that different, lyrical input into my heart and brain.
But this year’s
BAP is annoying me. Here’s why. A few years ago, a friend went to a session on writing where Australian poet, Peter Rose, said, “A poet's job is to be as obscure as possible.” At the time, she and I discussed this proposition in depth and both of us disagreed with him (her blog post on it is
here).
When I think about poetry I enjoy, and which gives me an immense amount of inspiration and food for thought, it is invariably poetry that is mostly understandable on a first reading. A really good poem always offers more, but if someone reads a poem and their response is “Huh?”, and they turn away from it, to me the poem has failed the reader. Why would you deliberately want to exclude and alienate your readers? Why would you want to write a poem that pushes the reader away and makes them feel stupid?
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say they hate the poems published in the Saturday Age, I could fund a poetry publishing company! The Weekend Australian also publishes poetry, and it’s always accessible. Not always easy, but accessible. (And yes, the poetry editor is responsible for what is selected.) Once upon a time, Billy Collins was accused of writing poetry that was too “easy” to understand, as if that was some kind of crime. Then he became America’s Poet Laureate and some people had to eat their words.
While he was Poet Laureate, he created
Poetry 180, a project whereby 180 poems were collected and put on the LoC website so that every day of high school, a teacher could read a poem to their class. Not all of the poems are readily accessible, but they were all chosen to offer something to their readers – high school students who might never have read a poem (even though they hear them in songs and rap probably every day). This is what a Poet Laureate is about – not making poetry so difficult that even fewer people read it, but giving old and new readers poems that sing to them, that offer them insight and inspiration and ideas.
So back to Best Australian Poems 2013. I am about halfway through, and already impatient. So many poems that feel meaningless, that are a conglomeration of words strung together to look clever but instead act like a wall between me and what the poem is about. I don’t ask for “easy” poems, but I do ask for poems that make sense (there, I said it). So many times I read a poem and thought – I wonder if the poet even knows what that’s about? In fact, I wanted to be able to sit them down and say, “OK, explain this poem to me, line by line.”
As a writer, I know there are often parts of a poem that I can’t quite explain – a line or phrase here and there that comes in the creating and seems just right, all the same. But a whole poem like that? It just makes me shrug and turn the page. The
SMH/Age reviewer, Andrew Reimer (who is a very good poetry reviewer), said this about
BAP 2013: “But the purpose of many of these poems - as far as purposes may be discovered - lies elsewhere: in a world of abstraction, of random associations, sometimes merely in a world of typographical conceits. They do not yield sense in conventional discursive or grammatical terms.” He also used the word “impenetrable”. Full review
here.
I’m sure for some poetry readers, this is all rubbish and they love
BAP 2013, but to me it’s yet another reason for people (especially young people) to keep turning away from poetry and putting it into the “too hard/I don’t get it” basket. And honestly, another collection of “Australian classic poems” is likely to make me throw up. That won’t help either.
This week I tried an experiment on Facebook (borrowed from a piece in Publisher’s Weekly). I put a Billy Collins poem up as a post and said that if anyone clicked Like, I’d provide them with a poem to read. Each poem I then gave was a link to a poem on a website. Already, people are enjoying poems and poets they weren’t aware of, and sharing their own. It’s giving me ideas…
My Hamline friend, Debra McArthur, invited me to Blog Hop, so here are my answers.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I'm back writing poems for my verse novel, The Dangerous Kind. After writing a critical thesis last year (for my Hamline MFA) on verse novels, I started to see all the different ways you can write a verse novel, and how adventurous you can be, thanks to reading writers such as Helen Frost and Allan Wolf. I'm being quite experimental - for me - although others might not think so. It's challenging and great fun when I get a poem to work. I'm also writing short personal essays for a blog I haven't opened up for reading yet.
How does it differ from other works in the genre?
I'm not sure the verse novel differs a lot from what Frost does, but it's certainly different from a lot of other verse novels I've read. I dislike vns that are basically truncated prose, and so this almost goes to the other extreme, with form poems and lots of different voices.
The voices are very important to me, as is finding ways to show them through language and line breaks.
Why do you write what you do?
Once I get an idea that really excites me, I can't let it go. Sometimes I think it would be so nice to write the same kind of book all the time and know publishers and readers will be avidly waiting for the next one, but I just can't do it. I have to go where the idea leads me, whether it's into a historical novel, a verse novel or a picture book.
It's that excitement that keeps me going, too. A novel can take a really long time to write, and then there are the rewrites. If I'm not still committed to the story and characters after all that, the revisions are painful and not productive.
What's the hardest part about writing?
For me, it's the revisions. I love the first draft, but I've had to learn to love revision, too, and see what it can add to a book. Mostly, it's about deepening the characters and plot. I have to remind myself that the first draft was just for me, and now I have to work out what the reader wants, and what is still in my head and not yet on the page.
This is where a good reader or workshop group is so valuable (thanks, Big Fish!). When you have a group who will read chapter after chapter for you, and make good comments, it really helps you to see what is missing. I tend to be a bare bones writer, and then have to fill in the "meat" on second and third drafts, and also learn to cut the stuff the reader doesn't need.
What are you working on now?
What are you working on now?
What are you working on now?
At this time of year, anyone who writes and also has a job (to pay the bills) is hanging out for the December-January break, because that's the time when you can read and get fully back into writing. That's if you don't have a million family commitments. If you teach, this also tends to be the one time of the year when you can stop filling your head with other people's writing and focus on your own.
BUT. It's not that easy. Nine months of other people's writing has done more than fill your head and sap your energy. It has, in the words of a Hamline faculty member, Jane Resh Thomas, drained the well. Like many writers who teach, Jane has experienced what it means to have a well of creativity that gradually runs dry. After all, you're not doing your teaching job very well if you hold everything at a distance and treat grading and feedback like a multi-choice performance review. But when you put your passion into teaching and other people's writing, you pay.
I'm not complaining about teaching writing. I love it, and always have. So do the other writing teachers I know. But we also know that when it comes to the well, by December it's pretty well at rock bottom. Just a few inches of dry dust down there ...
So how do you re-fill the well? Here are some ideas:
- Reading. I save books for the end of the year, books that I'm too tired to read up till now, books that are pure escapism, books that I know will feed my creative brain. One year it took me all 12 months to work up to The God of Small Things but was it ever worth it! This year I have a stack that includes Junot Diaz, Ron Rash, Amy Espeseth, Ransom Riggs and even a Jonathan Franzen.
- Poetry. Every writer should refill their well with some poetry. I'll be re-reading some old favourites, but I've re-signed to receive a Poem a Day, and I have some anthologies saved up, plus I will probably buy Best Australian Poems for this year.
- Free writing and journalling. It's great to start a new project or get back to work on a novel or project you've had to keep putting aside all year, but taking time to get in touch with the joy of simply writing, with no outcome other than "oiling the cogs", will benefit all the other writing you do.
- Find a couple of writing blogs to inspire you and make you feel less alone and more "in tune" with the writing world again. One of my favourites is Writer Unboxed, simply because every post is different and yet helpful. I also like Kristen Lamb's blog - I like her honesty and sense of inclusion. As she says, We are not alone.
- Stay in touch with fellow writers like yourself. If you need to feel re-inspired and get writing again, have a coffee with someone who feels like you - not someone who never writes or who spends all their time complaining and making excuses. You know who the valued writing friends are - get together and talk writing and books!
I haven't been teaching this year but I have been studying and writing full-time, and my well is a bit dusty, too, from finishing two completely different novels. I need some time-out before I start the next one, so I've been doing the one other thing that makes me feel creative and industrious again (goodness only knows why!). I've been spring cleaning my office! Apart from creating large piles of rubbish for the bin, I've also been finding poems and stories that are ready for another draft, notebooks and random pages of ideas, and more books that I'd put away to read later. I'm starting to feel re-inspired already.
It's always good to have extra recommendations for gifts at this time of year, and books are the best of all! I try to buy every child in our family at least one book, and sneak books into other people's parcels, too. And of course if someone asks me what I'd like, I have a handy list of half a dozen titles to give them.
If you have someone who's about to start school next year, you can't go wrong giving them
My First Day at School by Meredith Costain. Ari, Amira, Zoe and Zach experience their very first day, with all the trials and tribulations, as well as the fun. First day can be scary (I can still remember the disgust I felt at being made to take a nap after lunch!). The story delves into reading, drawing, pasting, eating and whether they'll make it to the toilet in time. (Ah, it's all coming back to you now, isn't it?) The illustrations are very cute and little kids will love all the faces and actions.
I think the best YA novel I've read this year would be a dead heat between
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell and
Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys. I'd heard a lot about
Eleanor and Park and it lived up to the goss. A novel that startles and enlightens at the same time, and totally engaging and interesting characters. One of my good Hamline friends lent me
Out of the Easy (sorry, I still have it!), which I would never have come across otherwise here in Australia. It's set in 1950, in the French Quarter of New Orleans where Josie works in a bookstore and struggles with having a mother who is a brothel prostitute. Lots of atmosphere, danger, secrets and hope.
I've read lots of crime fiction (probably more than I should!) but I think my No. 1 spot has to go to Michael Robotham's
Watching You. Joe O'Loughlin is a clinical psychologist who gets involved with Marnie, a woman who is convinced someone is watching her. Meanwhile, she's also trying to deal with a husband who has been missing for over a year. There are plot twists in every chapter and the book was impossible to put down. Also on my list for "goodies" was Peter James's latest,
Dead Man's Time and
Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George.
Finally, since I was just about the only person in the world who didn't like
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, I approached my review copy of
The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones with wariness (because it spruiked
Gone Girl on the cover). There are quite a few characters in this novel but they're easy to remember because they are all so different and well-portrayed. There's a body in the gully that seems to move around, and people who may or may not be missing - in other words, lots to keep you guessing without being tricksy. The creepiest character for me was thirteen year old Emily - the kind of kid you'd expect to find in a Stephen King novel!
It’s a question I get asked over and over (as many writers do, I’m sure), and I was asked again recently. “How do you get your ideas?” There’s actually no easy answer, but I always remember something I was told years ago – “Ideas don’t usually come knocking on your door. You have to go out there and hunt them down.”
There are quite a few myths about ideas. One is that there is a limited number and if you get a good one, you have to hang onto it and make it work. I see lots of people in my classes who cling doggedly to what they think is their one and only idea and work it to death, and then wonder what happened.
Another is that a really good idea can’t possibly come from a writing exercise. Some writers regard that as a kind of cheating, as if the idea somehow belongs to the person who gave them the writing exercise. Some of my best poems and stories have come from exercises. Then there’s the myth that a great idea will come in a huge flash like a revelation, so all those other ideas you might have are not as “worthy”.
It’s true that writers do get amazing ideas in an inspired moment, but those moments are few and far between, especially if that’s all you are doing – waiting for it to happen. It’s far more likely that the brilliant idea will come because you have been working on ideas all along, and coming up with lots, and then something clicks (because the brain is a wonderful, mysterious thing) and bang! You have a great idea!
I think the trick to coming up with good ideas is a combination of things. The key element is practice. I’ve just done Picture Book Idea Month for the first time and, I have to admit, I quailed a little at the challenge. One picture book idea every day for 30 days? But as with Nanowrimo, you have to put aside all notions of judgment and go with it. I found that the more ideas I wrote down, the more I came up with.
That’s another myth – that you will run out of ideas if you do something like this. I have found that the more you “hunt down” ideas, the more your brain will work to help you come up with them. It’s as if you’re engaging your ideas gear, but being non-judgmental is important. If you are prone to dismissing ideas with a “oh, that’s just stupid” before you even get them onto the page, you will certainly stifle yourself.
Some things that have helped me over the years with ideas (and these are the tips I give kids when I do school talks, as well as adults in my classes) include:
- · Carrying a notebook with me to record every single snippet of an idea I see, hear, notice, think of.
- · Collecting material that spark something in my brain that might bear fruit later – including pictures, cartoons, news items, articles, stories, quotes.
- · Reading lots of different books and materials and being open to ideas that leap out from things I’m reading (it happens especially with poetry).
- · Setting myself a challenge (like PiBoIdMo) to come up with a whole bunch of ideas over a period of time.
- · Doing writing workshops and exercises, either in a class or group, or from a book (there are some great books of writing prompts).
- · Understanding that one idea is usually not enough, but if I keep it and ponder on it some more, sooner or later another idea comes along and creates enough sparks to lead to something exciting.
What works for you?
In the way that these things sometimes do, writers who have decided to stop writing has come up as a topic several times in the past few months. I don't mean writer's block. I mean writers - some of them very well published - who have decided they've had enough. One of the most eloquent about it was Sonny Brewer who apparently announced it to his friends on Facebook. As his blogger friend says, "I’ve talked to Sonny many times on the phone, but I’ve never heard such bone-tired exhaustion in his voice as he told me about his new job in construction.
He’s sixty-five.
Sonny’s published books fill a long shelf in my loft—yet writing’s not paying his bills."
This is a guy who has devoted his life to books and writing, and sometimes worked as an editor, but at 65, he's had enough. In case you think this is an anomaly, I've talked to several older writers recently who have decided they've had enough of battling publishers and trying to be noticed "in the marketplace". A couple have even said they don't think they'll write at all anymore, not even just for fun.
I also know younger writers who have been writing for a long time and feel they are getting nowhere. They feel as though to get noticed you have to have an angle or something "hot" about you, or your book has to stand out in some way. Or you have to spend hours on FB and Twitter and your blog to show you're out there, being noticed. Even publishers talk about "discoverability". There are just so many books being traditionally published, let alone those who are going it alone. You might slave over your book for five years and it gets published and disappears from sight in three months, never to be heard of again.
The disappointment that comes with this experience can be crushing.
Are writers doomed now to always having to have a Real Job? Who is actually making a decent living from their writing, enough to stay home and write fulltime? Mainly genre writers, I have to say. It seems as though the accepted scenario these days is that if you want to be a fulltime artist, you have to get used to the idea of living a life of poverty. In the US, you'll have no health insurance or retirement funds. Here in Australia you will get the aged pension at 60-65, which will also allow you to live in poverty. Yay.
If this sounds like a whinge, it's not. But it raises questions for me about how we value our literary culture, about how we value (or not) the work of people who create books. If writers were paid more in royalties, would this change anything? How can we expect writers to create works of value after they've spent 8 hours of their day expending energy and brain power and creativity on trying to earn money doing something else? So many writers teach, and yet as the saying goes, "You are trying to draw more and more water from the same well, and it's dry."
Mostly I've been thinking about this because a writer friend told me recently she is going to stop writing. A big part of the reason is because it's not enough to just write a good book anymore - you have to do all that other stuff and she doesn't want to. She just wanted to write. And now she doesn't.
What will we lose? A unique voice. Terrific poems. A view of the world that no one else I know could describe in quite the same way. Years of experience and craft put onto the page. You could say this is an age thing. It's not. Or only partly. Maybe it's about the fact that we've always been told, over and over: "Write from the heart." And now that doesn't seem to matter much anymore, unless it's a heart that will appeal to thousands of readers in the "marketplace".
I have no idea what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is one. But it makes me sad all the same.
Australian politicians and education departments are in a tizz. Despite NAPLAN and MySchools, despite throwing laptops at high school students, despite everyone claiming the war between phonics and whole reading is over - our kids are still way behind where they should be (according to world standards stuff). It's all very well to test the heck out of kids, but when all that does is take the fun out of learning and show that kids are less able to read and comprehend, you have to wonder.
This postcard is sad but so true. I teach in a writing course, and probably 25-30% of our students are less than average at grammar. No doubt it's the same or higher in other courses. It's not their fault. They just aren't learning it at high school, or even primary school. They also have poor listening skills, and when I researched how to teach these skills, I discovered they were supposed to be taught in Grade 5.
Yes, learning grammar can be boring, but it's a lot easier at primary school to learn the fundamentals, a bit at a time, over a few years, than it is as an adult to have to learn it all in one year (which is most of our first year Editing unit). If you don't know how to construct a decent sentence and punctuate it clearly, you can't be a writer. (If you can't serve the tennis ball well and get it in the court, you can't be even a decent tennis player. Extrapolate that to any profession you like.)
The experts (our current Education minister, Pyne, seems to consider himself one, too, without any experience or qualifications) all have their own theories on what will "fix" this falling standards problem. I recommend they consult a writer friend of mine who also happens to be an 8th grade science teacher, who told us on FB the other day: "
Since I've started taking my students to the library every two weeks I have two success stories-really it's their success story. One student has now checked out and read more books in the past two months than the prior 8 years of school. Another student who hated to read now has a positive attitude abut school and loves to read. It is true. There is a book for every child. It just takes time to find what the child likes and make reading fun-don't attach any tests, reports, etc. to it." Yay for her!If a child can read, and if they enjoy it enough to keep reading (without being turned against it by not only tests and reports but also adults hassling them and parents expecting "progress"), I think this is the one thing that can make a crucial difference. Being able to read fluently means confidence, ability with language (it's no coincidence that our students with poor skills don't read much), higher comprehension of material and a whole host of other connected skills. If you read a lot, you can tell when a sentence isn't "right" - when the verb tense is wrong, or even that the full stop is in the wrong place. You can tell when a word is spelled wrongly because it also doesn't look "right". Reading well leads to this skill which then means you can fix your errors.
A person with poor language skills can't even write a decent application letter for a job. A person with poor language skills knows it. You don't have to be dumb or stupid to have poor language skills. You just have to have been put off reading at an early age, for one reason or another, and then been left behind. My theory (if Pyne can have one, so can I, and I bet I know more than him about it!) is that if we can get more than 90% of our kids to enjoy reading from their first years in primary school, and to keep that enjoyment going, with whatever books and materials we can, we might go a lot further in solving the slipping standards issue.
Add in those early grammar lessons (I'm not saying I enjoyed them, but they stuck, and I did always love reading) and we're on the way. And every time the issue comes up, we are always told to go and look at what Finland is doing. Here's one article about how they do it. It's clear they're doing exactly what my writer/teacher friend is - taking the time to find what works for each kid. That means letting teachers do their job instead of filling out another round of reports and justifying every thing they do with more paperwork.Here in Victoria the government (Napthine and Liberal mates) seems to think the solution is to demonise teachers and make us believe they're all a bunch of rotten eggs who don't deserve any pay rises. The myths about teaching and teachers that they want to feed us are appalling. I think every politician who thinks he knows something about education or has a role in making up these fabrications should be made to go and teach in a Western Suburbs state school for a whole week. And do all the pointless paperwork!
Three days ago, I wrote a poem. For those who write lots of poems, all the time, the response would probably be - so what? But for me, after completing a first draft, it was a moment of - what took so long? How could I have gone more than a month without writing a single poem? For those who write no poems, the response would probably be - what's the big deal? But it set me thinking about how poetry really is always in my life, even if sometimes it goes off on a holiday for a while.
I've been writing poems since I was 18 years old. I can pinpoint that as my starting year because before then, I had no idea what poetry was. I went to a high school where we studied no poetry AT ALL until 6th form (now equivalent to Year 11). In that year, I only remember two poems we read in class - one about a girl running away through the woods, and one by Robert Graves, but I don't remember which. I do know it was enough to send me off looking for more by him, and discovering "Love is a migraine".
When I first dared to write my own, they were awful. Full of angst and terrible rhyme. I kept the rhyme and later, when I was travelling, I would write funny rhyming poems to make people laugh. I still remember the first poetry class I ever did with Bev Roberts, where I wrote a 4-line free verse poem about autumn (a writing exercise) that she liked, and she told me it had a great metaphor in it.
My response? What's a metaphor?
I laugh now, but at the time it was like having my eyes opened to a magical world of language and images, where I could write whatever I wanted, about whatever I felt or saw or experienced, using language in new and different ways to anything I'd ever done before. It was the world of free verse.
Since then, I've probably written hundreds, if not thousands, of poems. I've written four verse novels. I've written free verse, forms such as villanelles and sestinas, and prose poems. I've taught poetry writing to hundreds of people, from kids to teens to adults.
Still, at the heart of all of this is language and expression and "getting things off my chest and onto the page". Maybe when I don't write much poetry, I'm not aware enough of the world to find a subject. More likely, I don't write much poetry when I'm working hard and deep into a novel, as I am right now. But when I stop and pop my head up, often a poem or two arrives to greet me.
What does poetry do for me? Self-expression, as I said. For every poem that gets reworked and perhaps published, there are usually four more that stay in my notebook. But more importantly, poetry feeds into all of my writing. Reading poetry makes me aware of what language can do, what I can create with language myself. It makes me aware of how important it is to try new things, new ideas, look for new horizons. It reminds me that there are lots of fellow poets out there, doing as I do, because it's important and valuable and meaningful to them, too. Reading their poetry shows me what is possible, and often sparks new ideas for me.
Writing poetry feeds into my prose writing - it flexes my language muscles, provokes me into better imagery, stronger rhythm, more precise word choices. It reminds me of sensory details, of the telling detail, of voice and cadence. Writing poetry reminds me I am a writer. It allows me to focus on a moment, an image, an idea, with complete and utter attention.
This is why I am always going on to people about the importance of poetry to children and teenagers, about how much we lose when we don't have poetry in schools. We don't have to "teach" poetry. That, in unskilled, uninterested hands, can kill poetry forever in a child. But we should at least be reading poems to kids every day or every week, putting poetry on the fiction shelves in libraries instead of away in the 800s, and making good poems available at every opportunity. I'm sure that if I'd been given a whole pile of good contemporary poems to read in high school, it would have made a big difference to me. The few I did get still resonate with me today.
What about you?
We've been inundated with post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels for quite a while now (well, it seems like a long while but I guess the vampire years seemed endless, too), so in the wake of The Hunger Games, it's hard to stand out from the crowd. Initially I heard a lot of good things about The 5th Wave (by Rick Yancey) and then some not so good things (i.e. nothing new, weak characters) so I put it on my "read later" pile, mainly because I was writing a SF novel at the time and didn't want to be distracted.
Then I picked it up. It's hard to read this book without mentally referencing every other novel and movie you've read or seen, that's for sure. I kept seeing pictures in my head of scenes from
Independence Day at first, but I did eventually get past that. I don't think the opening line helped:
Aliens are stupid. It's the kind of first line designed to snag you in, but is actually misleading. Never mind. I kept reading.
The first point-of-view character is engaging, a girl who ends up alone. One of the few who are immune to the plague that came with the 3rd wave (spread by birds). The waves that the aliens unleash on the world are logical ways to get rid of billions of people, as long as you're happy to wait out the rotting process in your space ships in orbit. The premise of all of this mostly worked for me. What didn't work quite so well was the change of POV narrator, flagged only by a page that said: II - Wonderland.
Took me several pages and some re-reading to work out that I was with a entirely new character. I have to admit I'm likely to get snarky about this in any novel. It's not so hard to signal that to the reader, truly. You're not spoiling anything! There are lots of interesting elements in the novel, including armies of child soldiers and the notion of aliens watching Earth for decades before moving in (not new). Mostly what kept me engaged were the characters. I will say, though, that I suspect if this book ever makes it to the big screen, they'll focus on the special effects and ramp up the Katniss-Everdeen-type female character and the big battles, and a lot of the more interesting stuff will be lost. We'll see.
The Green Glass Sea was an unknown - one of the reasons we still love bookshops. You wander, you browse, you pick up things that look interesting and you take home something you might never have discovered otherwise. Thus I found this book in Chicago and thought - a historical novel set around Los Alamos and the development of the nuclear bomb - from a child's point of view. Great!
Dewey Kerrigan is eleven and her sole parent dad is helping other scientists to build a "gadget". She moves to Los Alamos and lives on The Hill, which is the compound where all the families live while the parents work on the bomb. The second narrator is Suze, who just wants to be friends with the "it" girls and resents having to share with Dewey, who is weird and gets stuff from the dump and builds things. Part of the tension of the story comes from us as readers who know the bomb not only worked but was used on Japan.
But we also know that the testing took place with far-reaching ramifications - the long-term effects of radiation on the environment and the families who picnicked while they watched the bright light and mushroom cloud. We also worry for the kids - what will this mean to their families, their parents, their lives? In any enclosed, isolated community, strange things can happen. The author,
Ellen Klages, seems to mostly write science fiction, but this is not SF - it's a terrific historical novel that will bring all the realities of the atomic bomb and its use alive for kids (and adults, I think).
One of my fellow Hamline students, Michael Petry, is doing his critical thesis on maps in novels this semester, but what intrigued me was the huge map Mike has created on his garage floor! So of course I had to ask him more about that, and maps, and writing and stuff...
Where did your interest in maps come from? Is it only maps in books (like fantasy novels) or all kinds of maps?
My undergraduate degree is in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. The founder of Landscape Architecture was Frederick Law Olmsted. He designed New York City’s Central Park and many other wonderful parks and cities as well. My interest in maps grew from there although if I think about it I’ve always been fascinated with knowing where I stand. Maps in novels to me are a wonderful bonus. Some books would probably be just fine without them but with them we know where the story is taking place and how that character moves through his environment. I really like all kinds of maps.
I’ve spent seven years as a civil engineer. I’ve drawn maps of new roads, sewer systems, water systems and storm drainage systems. The coolest part of doing that type of work is that these maps or plans have been built and people use and live in them today. Why do you think writers and readers find maps so interesting? Maps ground us, they give some sense to what lies ahead. Maps give both the writer and reader a sense of the setting. Are we near a river or a seaside, in a mountain valley or the Dead Marshes found in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings? Personally I love to know the path that a character has made through a map and if there is a map with a novel and the story mentions places that are not on the map it can be a bit frustrating.
Do you think maps are always necessary in fantasy novels? What other fiction books have maps? I don’t think the maps are a necessity in fantasy novels. Like Ron Koertge mentioned this summer at Hamline, they can aid in the writing process and help move the plot of the story forward. I’m not one hundred percent sure but the more I have thought about this the more it seems to make sense. If you have a character in your story that moves through a space that he/she interacts with, more than just passing through, then a map is needed to get the writer to be consistent. This deals with a sense of scale as well too.
I just finished reading Patrick Rothfuss’s King Killer Chronicleswhere Kvothe spends a great deal of time at the University. Patrick drew up the University. These smaller scale places like a University or Hogwarts tend to be three dimensional. Often the main character explores and gets to know these spaces much more than any flat character would ever dream of. For example, Kvothe goes to classes just like the rest of his schoolmates but he spends time on the roof tops of the University buildings and spends time below in the sewer ways and steam vents and finds running water and tunnels his way into places that are off limits to him. Harry Potter does the same thing at Hogwarts. These places and the maps that are either quickly sketched up or meticulously drawn out become part of the stories’ characters.
What benefits are there for a writer to create a map, even if it doesn't go into the final book? First and most importantly they are fun but maps will map the writing process out. If you know that Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and his dragon Saphira are traveling with some dwarves and an elf on the eastern edge of the map from the Beor Mountains down the Az Ragni River eventually to end up in the elf city of Ellesmera in the Du Weldenvarden forest you have much of the plot laid out for you not to mention all the cool setting that they get to travel through. All kinds of cool adventure can happen but you know that your character will start at point A and end up at point B, aiding in moving your plot forward.
What inspired you to create the map on your garage floor? Can you tell me about it - where, when, what, how?
My Critical thesis is what started it really. I’ve wanted to create a place away from my wife and three daughters that I can call my own, to write and be inspired by my surroundings. The cool thing about what I drew up on my garage floor is that it isn’t any place just yet. I have a coast line, some mountain ranges, some swampy areas, and dry arid climates too. I think that the when is the question I can answer right now, I’m jumping head first into my critical thesis and surrounding myself with maps.
Anything else you want to add?
Oh my name implies my interest too, Michael Adam Petry (MAP) kind of cool huh.Thanks, Michael! I think your garage floor is amazing!
Recently, I was asked to teach a poetry workshop on longer works, specifically sequences and verse novels. It gave me a chance to pull out all the terrific books, collections and verse novels I’d read over the past few years, in order to share them with the group. Everything from Dorothy Hewett’s “Upside Down Sonnets” to picture books such as Janet Wong’s Night Garden and my own Now I Am Bigger to verse novels by Helen Frost, Karen Hesse, Sharon Creech and Allan Wolf.
I like to think of a poetry sequence as a mini verse novel, although not all sequences work this way. But where a sequence tells a story, I think it can. It means you can write ten or twelve poems (or more) that have a narrative behind them, and start to consider the other elements that a verse novel has.
These include voice and character, for a start, but also a sense of progression. Where are you taking the reader? Are you simply showing them different aspects of the same thing? A short example of this is Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, where each small poem is numbered. I would call this a “poem in parts” – you could stretch it to a sequence. I’ve seen poets who write, for example, a series of poems about their father or mother, or about a childhood or life event. Again, those poems fit together because they are about one thing, but they still would not be a mini verse novel to me.
A mini verse novel may well be the short story equivalent to the novel (of the novel?). It means you don’t have to write a book-length work, but you can still explore a narrative through poetry. Think of it as a short story in poems.
So these are the elements I think are important in a mini verse novel:
- · A balance – too much poetry or not enough narrative and it doesn’t work – you end up with chopped-up prose, or poems with no connections.
- · Poetic elements of figurative language and keen attention to line breaks and stanzas
- · It needs to be a story that will tell better in poetry, and it does need to have the elements of a story in terms of beginning, middle and end
- · A story that needs a lot of explanation or setting or dialogue etc generally won’t work
- · Rhyming the whole thing may kill you if you are not proficient at rhyme and form (look at Helen Frost’s work if you want to see it done really well)
- · Read, read, read what other verse novelists are doing – and learn to read critically – don’t accept that everything that says it is a verse novel actually is
- · Outlining will help but if you need to work by instinct, do – just be prepared to throw some poems out later
- · And be ruthless in revision
- · Recognise that much of the story will lie in the white space and you will need to learn how to use the white space as well as the language.
· When it feels like you have enough poems, stop. Give it some time, then go back and ask yourself what is the story you want to tell, and which two poems will start and end it. Those are your lighthouses.
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Hi Sherryl,
You offer a really useful way to think about a short story in verse. I've been leading workshops for teens on the subject I think I'll now bring them 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird to see the form in miniature.
Thank you
Terry Farish
Terry, it's a great poem to use as a model. I've seen so many variations over the years, both funny and serious!