Tag Archives: enjoyment

Camp Twitter vs Camp Facebook

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Ramble, Writers out in Public

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No need to read to the end.  I’ll tell you straight up.  I’ve fallen hard for Twitter.

In the brave new world of social networking it’s a bit of a love triangle, with those of us who want to engage with our readers picking our platforms.  And I’ll freely admit I stuck with Facebook far longer than I should have.  We could have parted company while we were still on civil terms.  But I was too “I don’t get Twitter,” to even try it, so I hung around at Facebook with my personal profile and my author page, trying to engage with the tsunami of information (often duplicated) being uploaded by my peeps.  I’d sigh when the feed rolled out, daunted by the distinction between ‘top stories’ and the others, which were clearly ‘not top stories’ although I couldn’t work out why.  I liked these people.  That’s why I’d . . . liked them, so why wasn’t I getting all their stories?  Why was my feed top heavy with “popular” people.  And who decided who was “popular” anyway?

It was like being back at high school!

Anyway, in the end I just needed some time apart.  You know.  Not breaking up.  Just a break.  I had to open a Twitter account sooner or later because all the authors were expected to, but I had no clue that within a fortnight I’d be spellbound.  I mean, it’s so quick!  There’s no picture-heavy feed to wade through, and every single post is short.  Of course, everyone knows that.  140 characters, right?  But it’s not until you start interacting inside the format that you realise how awesomely fabulous that brevity is.  Refreshing doesn’t begin to describe.  I just felt . . . at home.  Really.  I just relaxed right in.  People found me.  I found people.  It was like being at a convention or a conference where you know “your people” are around somewhere, so you just settle at the bar with a scotch and chat to whoever’s there.  They’re sharing pics of their new puppy (and btw, having a new window open for every link is gold), so you can say, “Aw, check those floppy ears,” or if you’re feeling particularly clever you can say “got a bit of a Yoda thing happening there,” or when you want to slap your connections card down you can say “Oh yeah, Tara’s got a puppy like that.  You know, Tara Moss.  We share the same agent.”

Actually, I have no idea what sort of pet Tara has, but I’m just tossing it in there.  Then before you know it someone else comes along, someone you know and then you’re exchanging info on upcoming book launches or who’s had a new cover arrive, or a book deal, and it’s just so relaxed.  So cool.  So understated.  There’s no try-hard thing happening.  Well, not after the first fortnight.  You’re allowed a few “well I thought it was funny” posts as you settle in.  And it’s easy.  The set up is intuitive.  The posts are quick.  The conversations funny.  You get to meet people.  Really meet them, who they are, what they’re interested in.  Not their ‘author’ persona.  Just them.  Eating raw cookie dough.  First swims of summer.  Kids birthday parties.  Crazy hangovers.  Sleepy goodnights.  Boring stuff.  Funny stuff.  Interesting stuff.  Insightful stuff.

Real stuff.

I don’t know all the techno details about Twitter.  Can recommend Alan Baxter’s blog So you don’t understand Twitter? Read it before you get started.  But do.  Get started.  It’s fun.  You’ll love it.  And if you follow me (I’m @Louise_Cusack)and sit at the bar I’ll shout you a drink.

Promise!

P.S.  Just because Twitter gets the girl, doesn’t mean that Facebook is out in the cold.  I’m hanging in there.  I know there are readers who love it.  But don’t forget Goodreads.  It’s AWESOME too.

Writing in the zone

08 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’m writing in the middle of a thunderstorm.  There’s a coconut palm between me and the thrashing grey ocean, and huge heavy branches are tearing off and crashing to the ground.  Coconut are thudding to earth.  And I’m in my study, tapping on my keyboard, lost in another world.  The wilder the wind gets, the more my characters connect with what’s happening to them, as if my anxiety level about damage is leaking into their reality, affecting their nerves.  And things are happening in the story that might not be happening if I was writing on a tranquil day with a sparkly blue ocean and a Simpson’s blue sky.

What am I to make of that?

I’m a seat of the pants writer so I don’t have a plot to follow.  I have a thread of connection between myself and the characters who’ve chosen me to tell their story.  Some days the connection is so tight I feel as if I am them.  Some days it’s a slippery invisible strand I can only brush against in frustrating glimpses.  But my world is connected to their world.  My emotions are connected to their emotions.  When I listen to Rachmaninoff I “see” their world more clearly.  I have no idea why.  I just do.  So I feel my way through their world, using my intuition and my attention and my emotions to coax their story into my mind and through that into my fingers and onto the screen.

It’s more an act of faith than a carefully crafted technique.  It teaches me to listen and to feel.  And sometimes to remember.  I haven’t always connected to characters through my own stories.  I began connecting with other people’s characters. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was a landmark book for me.  It had everything I’d ever wanted to read in a novel: action, adventure, characters thrust into a strange new world (a continuing theme in my own writing), a love story, and a young central character whose morality was above question, yet whose circumstances tested that morality at every turn.  Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” was the book that gave the sub-genre a name.  It also taught me that I was selecting books because I wanted to read about a character who saw the world with fresh eyes.  I still do.  And the Twilight series affected me profoundly in ways I’m not yet able to articulate.  Bella was a stranger in a very strange land, seeing her own world anew through Edward’s eyes.  That much is clear, but why I felt so ‘connected’ to her world and her troubled love story is still a mystery to me, as I imagine it is to a lot of readers.  But I enjoyed the books immensely.  In all the novels that have affected me profoundly I’ve connected with the main character and felt their journey.

It’s what I want to do for readers of my own novels, and that can only be achieved if I can connect with them first.  So while they have their storm of emotions to deal with, I have a real-life storm happening, and I’m more grateful than I can say for the synchronicity that brought me turbulence at the time when my characters needed it.

Again with the FAITH, but when you have it rewarded again and again it teaches you to trust in it.

Writers, happy for no reason

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’m having one of those rare Squee! days where the sun is shining, the ocean is sparkling, a cool breeze is caressing my skin, the birds are singing and even the plants seem happy.  Stupid grin.  Singing.  The whole Disney deal.  And instead of leaving it alone and just enjoying the moment (or the day if it lasts that long) I have to know what made it happen, because it’s been a very ordinary morning – just editing draft, liking a particular scene I’d written and thinking there wasn’t much to change.  But 9am when I got up I had a spring in my step, was singing on the way to Marcello (my Italian coffee machine), and feeling happy.

Seemingly for no good reason.  My agent hadn’t rung me to say I had a new contract.  I hadn’t won any awards or even received a fan email (which is one of my favourite things, right behind whiskers on kittens).  So I made a coffee, put a load of washing on and went back upstairs to the computer, and by the time I got there I was singing.  “It’s such a perfect day . . .” (Lou Reed), but really channelling the whole Julie Andrews thing.  Surprisingly, unaccountably happy.

All I’d been doing was the same thing that writers do every day.  Putting words together.  Pulling them apart and changing them around.  Swapping some.  Deleting others.  Reading them aloud and changing them again.  But today it made me feel good.  Like a “real writer”, which is weird when I’ve had three books published.  However I know for a fact that seeing my name on the cover of a book doesn’t give me the same stupid grin that crafting a near-perfect scene does.  In fact, contracts, public appearances, reviews, even fan emails all come packaged with performance expectation and anxiety, no matter how many times I’ve delivered more than was expected of me in the past.  They’re exciting, but they’re also marginally scary.  There’s nothing of the pure happiness I feel today in them.

So now I suspect that it’s doing the work, not getting the accolades, that creates happy, and it reminds me of a blog post I read recently by an author I greatly respect: Kim Wilkins who also writes as Kimberley Freeman.

She called her post “The Romance of Work” and in it she says:  When I was a little girl, I read a book that would affect me profoundly. It was Gladys Malvern’s The Dancing Star, first published in 1944, an account of the life of Anna Pavlova, written for children… But it wasn’t the stuff about ballet that affected me so deeply, it was the stuff about work. According to the book, Anna Pavlova was obsessed with dancing. She practised all the time. She did it until her toes bled and she just. kept. going. This notion, that one could work so hard and push through barriers of extreme discomfort, really took hold of my imagination. From that moment on, I understood the incredible romance of work: diligent hours spent on something that mattered to make an outcome appear in the world.

Not only for me, but for a lot of writers, I think that’s the key to happy: “Diligent hours spent on something that mattered to make an outcome appear in the world.”

Doesn’t sound heroic when you say it like that, but devoting a year of your life to a novel you’re not sure will work is an act of faith, and it’s nice to think that the faith is rewarded with moments of pure joy.

That’s definitely something worth singing about.

Enhanced Features for eBooks, help or hindrance?

02 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in The Publishing Industry

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A recent Publishers Weekly article on enhanced eBooks for children has got me thinking about the whole concept of  eBooks which might feature “original music; the story is read by the author and, much like all of these apps, the illustrations—all based on the artwork in the print titles—on each screen can be manipulated to make sounds or animated with the touch of a finger.”

Now these particular eBooks are designed for children and will likely encourage very young readers to keep at it until they understand how to use their imagination to fill in the blanks.  As well as the added features: “All releases will feature dedicated Web sites, interactive games, read-along functionality, animation and many other in-app activities for the young reader.  Adam Royce, v-p, digital content development at Penguin Young Readers, said the apps offered an “enhanced reading experience and interactive features that are true to the reading experience.”

I take issue with that last phrase, and you’ll see why below, but I’m not so much worried about what’s happening for very young readers, I’m worried that these new developments will bleed into adult fiction where publishers are already looking at “enhanced reading experiences”.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m reading (print book or eBook device) at some point I stop being in this world and I get into “the zone” where I don’t even remember I’m lying on the lounge any more because I am the character and I’m living the story.  Inevitably something happens to plop me out of the story and then I remember it’s ‘just a book’ but prior to that I was somewhere else, in the land of the story, using my imagination to hear wind whispering through trees or see sunlight sparkling off water or smell the salt tang of the ocean.  And in fact, if I’d had to stop reading to experience someone else’s idea of what that sunlight looks like or what that ocean smells like, I’d immediately plop out of the story and remember that  it wasn’t real.

Now I don’t know about you, but I never wanted that to happen when I was a kid.  I was desperate to stay in the story (Alice in Wonderland, Magic Faraway Tree, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie), for the characters to be real, and for the magical settings to be somewhere I could inhabit for as long as possible.  I’m sure the same thing happened to kids reading Harry Potter, and I know for sure (because I interviewed a heap of them) that teenager girls reading Twilight lived so thoroughly inside that created world that they’d often get mildly depressed when they returned to ‘real life’ because it couldn’t compare with the sparkle of Edward’s attention.  For the period that they were reading, they were Bella, and he loved them.  I seriously doubt that would have happened if Twilight had come packaged with werewolf howls and assorted interactive buttons.  Maybe as an audiobook, but even then I doubt it would work as well as simply reading the text and letting your own vivid imagination create the sensory experience, with nothing to jerk you out of the story and back to reality.

To me, there’s nothing “true to the reading experience” about adding anything that distracts the reader from being inside the story, because I believe the reader’s imagination is the greatest factor in bringing a story to life – not clever graphics or sounds or even smells and tactile experiences when they work out how to deliver that.  And I’m not a Luddite.  I’m more than happy for eBooks to overtake print if people want to read on a device.  Whatever the reader wants, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of them dropping into the world I’ve created.  And I believe “added features” get in the way, so I’m hoping they stay at the very youngest end of the market where they may entice a bored toddler to keep with a story.  But once a reader grows up, I really just want them to have text on the first run through.

I do love the idea of the dedicated websites with extra features on them, but only to be used after the reader has finished creating the story inside their own mind.  Otherwise we might end up with a generation of children not being able to use their imaginations to fully create the world a writer has sketched out for them.  I’m worried about what that means to their enjoyment of story, and also what that means to the creative development of their brains.

As always, I’m really happy to kick start the discussion with my opinions and see what everyone else has to say!