Posted by Ben in writing advice, writing life, writing process | 3 comments

raison d’ecrire

I’ve finished my first (and second and third) draft of my novel. The first draft took me about 3 years, the next two a few months, and I know I’m not there yet, I’m not at that finished product that I would feel confident in submitting. In fact, I may not be able to get there at all.

I’ve written YA novels before and found that, right or wrong at the time, I didn’t need to redraft a lot. I wrote them, I sent them off soon after, worked with an editor and they were done. Short, sharp, satisfying. For a while. Now, I look back and wonder if I spent enough time on them, if I couldn’t have worked harder on redrafting to a standard that will keep me content to look back at those books and be happy with them. Or is that a pipe dream? Am I always going to look back and see the errors, inconsistencies and literary solecisms in my work ?

This time around, with a manuscript the same length as my previous three novels combined, redrafting is essential. Quite frankly, I’ve overwritten the beginning and underwritten the ending in my rush to finish it. I know what the problems are, I’ve had some feedback from readers that ranges the gamut from compelling mastery (yes, that was from family) to finding it difficult to read (someone more objective). The problem is, and will always be, resisting that intense urge to finish it, wrap it up in a bow and send it off right now. Common advice publishers, agents and established authors give aspiring writers is to rewrite more; you’ve spent all that time writing the first draft, so why not spend a little bit more and polish it up?

So, looking down the barrel of three years of working on a single project, I start to wonder if it’s even of a standard that will be acceptable in a professional market, even after the rewrites. What if it isn’t? Can I accept that it was something that I used to further hone my skills? Can it be a stepping stone to (fingers crossed) future success? To be honest, that’s bloody hard to accept. I don’t have that many books in me and this one took a lot out. To think that all those hours won’t result in a shiny new novel in my hands is very hard to take. And I’m not talking about money (not only). I’m talking about the recognition and reinforcement and validation that comes from having your work accepted by other professionals. It’s easy to say that I write for writing’s sake, for the story, for the act of creation, for the achievement, but I don’t. I write to create stories that others will enjoy. Money may follow, but it hasn’t yet, and may never, so I can dream of it, but I think I have proven to myself that I’m not writing for money.

These are common themes for authors, I would guess. And for artists of all kinds. They are the core of why writing novels can be so demanding. It’s easy to see the final version of a story and be in awe of an author being able to write something so good. In reality, he or she probably didn’t. It was built up, a layer cake of work that resulted in the final version.

So, on that note, in an attempt to aspire to a certain level of quality, I redraft.  

Read More

Posted by Steph in writing life | 1 comment

Respect your booksellers

I was originally going to write a different post this week, but this story came up at the bookshop yesterday.

The shop was hosting a signing event for a couple of different authors. One writer, who shall remain typically nameless, but who is locally very well known and has his own television programme, arrived and went to the tables the booksellers had set up for him, with his books on display, and immediately started rearranging things to his liking, which included spreading the books out onto tables reserved for the other guests. He then decided to leave an hour early than previously agreed, and stood by and watched whilst the store’s manager, a very small, very slight woman struggled to load a trolley with his remaining books on such short notice, and then left. The booksellers were left to tell customers who came in later to look for him that he had departed – sadly, not in the Martin Scorsese sense of the word.

If you need a moral for this story, it should be clear: do not do this. Don’t be a diva. It confounds me as to why some authors have no sense of etiquette or respect for the people who are working to support them. Not all authors are like this, of course, but publishing being the competitive industry that it is, you’d think that none of them would be. One writer we hosted, an internationally renowned actress, was particularly and personally rude: a bookseller who was in line to get her copy of the book signed was told that she (the actress) was going out for a cigarette with some friends and that they should start packing up now. The bookseller never even got to ask for a signature.

The bookselling community is actually a very small one. Word gets around, and what that word is can mean the difference between a bookstore ordering no copies and ordering 20. Or refusing to you up for another event. Or leaving your books to rot under a shelf. Or returning the entire order as damaged. Potentially. I’m just saying. Respect your booksellers.

Read More

Posted by Steph in writing life | 0 comments

Writers have the strangest browser histories

I’m not a poet. I’m going to say that outright. I have nothing against poetry. Some of my closest writer friends are dedicated poets, and their work, if I’m allowed to say it without sounding like a git, is amazing. But they mostly don’t write prose. Poetry and prose are two different languages – some people speak both, but it’s not a case of one begetting the other. There’s this wide assumption that being a writer means you do everything – plays, novels, short stories, poems, advertising, journalism, letters – when really, it’s all, as I like to say (paraphrasing Margaret Atwood), it’s all brain surgery. A subject for another post, I’m sure.

So I’m not a poet, but I’ve recently been inspired by a poem I came across. Printed it out, pinned it to the wall above my desk, re-read it every couple of minutes, looking at the way the words are arranged on the page, memorising the rhythm of the words. And I recently got my first “commission” – from some other friends of mine who work on a magazine, but hey, a commission nonetheless – and I wanted to write a poem.

The poem I write begins its life being about mirrors, and somehow turns into a exploration of cellular memory. I know, right?

And on the way between point A and point B, I’m frantically looking up (because being the good person that I am, I’m running up to three hours before the – extended – deadline) things like top international windsurfing sites and heart transplant survival statistics.

There’s a Cory Doctorow short story about a near-future society where Homeland security is detaining people based on the ads that show up in their gmail accounts based on the contents on their emails, which is a scary enough thought on its own. If you’re the kind of person like I am, who occasionally has found the need to Google the leading non-accident causes of death for young people in Australia, and what the appropriate word is to describe the way blood dries on bed sheets (“congeals”) – well, you can see how it might give people the wrong idea.

Read More