Tag Archives: literature

Workshop Wednesday: Memoir Writing

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series, writing tips

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I’ve been contracted to do manuscript assessments on quite a few memoirs lately, so it’s probably timely for me to clear up any confusion over what a memoir actually is and how to create a good one.

We can all look back over photographs of ourselves and see how we’ve changed as a person, but how do we bring those changes to life in an engaging and compelling way for readers? A good memoir is so much more than an extended CV, and for that reason I’d like offer advice on how to create a really memorable memoir! First let’s start with:

Definition: “A memoir reads more like a novel than an autobiography. While an autobiography often covers a long time period and provides many details, a memoir deals with events related to a specific theme. Examples of topics for memoirs may include recovering from an eating disorder, dealing with an abusive spouse, or what it’s like to live with a chronic illness.” Diana Harris

Difference between a memoir and an autobiography: “A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” Gore Vidal

Purpose of a memoir: To make meaning of life experience and in the process, inform and entertain a reader.

Format of a memoir: Usually told in first person by a narrator who writes with complexity and layered thought – not just telling the events along with the accompanying emotion, but analysing them in retrospect.

Okay! Now that we’ve got the academic stuff out of the way, I’d like to put on my writing teacher hat and pretend you’re at one of my workshops. These are some of the things I’d share with you as being important in the development and drafting of a good memoir:

Memoir overview

  • Facts are not as important as the emotional truth of the scene and how you felt about it.
  • Memoirs are written less formally than an autobiography, conveying the “voice” of the author, whether that’s humorous, eloquent or blunt.
  • They are usually always written by the subject of the memoir.
  • They encompass only a portion of your life – focusing on the theme of the memoir.

Ways to generate ideas for your memoir

  • Go through your photo albums and let them trigger memories. Write notes of interesting events and what theme they might come under: romance, career, mental health, sexuality, etc
  • Read your diaries or journals if you kept them. Visit family or old friends and get them reminiscing.
  • Go to a school reunion.
  • Read your work CV and let that trigger memories of what was happening around your career.
  • Go through your mother’s cookbook if it’s still available or write a list of foods you ate back then. That will trigger memories.
  • Write a list called “Seasons” where you write every memory you have for each of the four seasons – sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures.
  • Make a list of ‘family stories’ that were handed down (struggling to find food during the depression for example)

Planning your Memoir Structure

  • The beginning should grab the reader’s attention.
  • The middle of a memoir shares important actions and details about the experience.
  • The end comes after the main action and needs to show what was learned
  • There should be enough information to make the reader care about the characters who feel real, but not so much that they’re bogged down with backstory or boring everyday details of meals, dressing, showering etc.
  • All scenes in the memoir should pertain to the theme.
  • Most authors will write in chronological order to build characterisation, momentum and tension, but examples of other plot structures are: writing in two time lines, skipping back and forth from childhood to adulthood, or writing an amnesia memoir backwards to the event that caused the amnesia.

Writing your memoir in draft

  • Show don’t tell. Use descriptive words and phrases, incorporating all the senses to make the reader feel like they were present when the action took place.
  • Include dialogue that shows feeling. In this case, less often means more. Include only the most important dialogue that has the most impact.
  • Feature a beginning that catches the reader’s attention. Hook your readers immediately. A few ideas include starting in the middle of the action, having the characters talk, beginning with a surprising statement or fact or giving some important background information.
  • Add sensory details. These are words or descriptions that appeal to one of your senses. Sensory details provide a complete look at the story and make your memoir more interesting.
  • Share thoughts and feelings. This allows readers to understand how the experience affected you, and what you were going through. Thoughts and feelings help build a connection to the narrator.
  • Reveal why the event was important. Writers share what they learned from this experience, building a connection with the audience. Writers want to evoke an emotional response from the reader.

As a writing teacher, there is naturally more I can say on the subject, and I’m happy to share that as part of my mentoring service (via Skype or phone) helping writers who need more intensive advice constructing or editing their memoir. I also offer a manuscript assessment service for memoir and most fiction genres, and this is a great way to find out what’s working and what could be improved in the manuscript you’ve already completed.

So whether your memoir is as intimate as a family heirloom or as public as a bestseller that inspires thousands, I hope I’ve helped you along the way in making it as engaging and memorable as it can be!

Kindle Scout: Reader-powered publishing

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in Getting Published series, The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized

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If you’ve never heard of Kindle Scout, don’t feel bad. Until last week, I hadn’t heard of it either, but it’s shaping up to be a game changer for indie authors, as well as traditionally published authors who have a book they just can’t sell, like my unpublished novel SILK (above). SILK is book one of a fantasy romance series that I’ve been trying to sell for years, and I’d love to see it gain a wider readership than I can manage with self publishing, so I’m giving Scout a shot.

HOW SCOUT WORKS: Any Amazon customer can go to the Kindle Scout website (you can see my book on their website here: https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/GDATHRYHT8YR) and without needing special logins beyond their normal Amazon account, they can scroll through lists of unpublished books that authors have uploaded and nominate any three. If a book that they nominate is selected by Amazon for publication, the reader receives a free copy as a bonus for supporting the author.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR AMAZON: Publishers are getting savvy about ‘author platform’ and a great book is often not enough to get you a publishing contract. In the Kindle Scout model,  Amazon is not only assessing the popularity of your book excerpt and cover, they’re assessing your social networks (which should equal new readers for them if they publish you). In the “campaign stats” for your book, you can see where the page traffic is coming from. Here are my stats at day 4 of my campaign:

campaignstats5dec2016

I’ve got over 1000 Facebook friends on my personal page, and I called in favours to get shares of my post about SILK there. I also have a Facebook Author page with 1200 Likes, so I’ve boosted that post on Facebook over the next few days to those followers who I hope will take the time to check out the book and nominate it. So my traffic from Facebook is looking good so far. I imagine that as my campaign progresses, the traffic from Kindle Scout will slow as all the habitual ‘scouts’ have looked at SILK and either chosen it or not. However, for all I know there could be hundreds of new ‘scouts’ turning up on the Kindle Scout website every day, so I look forward to assessing that as I go.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU: The end result of your 30 day campaign is that if your book is wildly popular, Amazon may offer you a 5 year contract with a $1,500 advance and 50% eBook royalty rate for worldwide publication rights for eBook and audio formats in all languages. (Authors retain all other rights, including print.) You’d also receive ‘featured Amazon marketing’ which I’m guessing will make your novel far more visible on the Amazon website!

HOW DO AMAZON DECIDE? No one’s quite sure at this stage, but is seems clear that the number of  nominations you receive and the breadth of your social networks play a role, as well as the feedback readers have given on your book when they nominate it (screenshot below):

telluswhatyouthought

HOW DO YOU SUBMIT? The website is simple and the upload is easy but read all the instructions before you start. You’ll need certain answers beyond the blurb and bio, so I found it easier to create a document to list all my answers so I could cut-and-paste them during the submission process. That helps ensure your answers don’t go over the character count limit because if they do, they’ll be cut.

You need to submit a proper book cover as well as the completed and proof-read manuscript in Word format (even though only the first 5000 words are shown to readers). My 5000 words ended 87 words short of a cliffhanger, so I emailed and asked if they could extend the sample that much and they did it immediately, which was great customer service.

Once you’ve uploaded all your bits and pieces, Amazon takes up to 2 days to decide if your work is of sufficient quality to be accepted. If it is, they email you with details and a link to a preview of your campaign page so you can let them know if there are any details you’d like changed (as I did with my excerpt).  Your 30 day campaign usually starts within 48 hours of that acceptance email, so that gives you time to get your “Please nominate me” emails and Facebook posts ready to go. Once your book is live on the Kindle Scout website, you can go to town, calling in all favours and trying to get your book into “Hot and Trending” for as many hours a day as you can manage! Here’s how mine went in the opening days:hottrending5dec2016

Pretty good so far, but 30 days is a sustained effort, and I’ll be away from my computer over Christmas, so I’m giving it my best over the next fortnight and hoping momentum will sustain it after that.

So, that’s where I’m at with it so far. If you’d like more info on Kindle Scout or how I’m going, please feel free to email me mail@louisecusack.com or pop a comment in below about your experiences with Scout if you’ve already tried it. If you’ve got a book in the bottom drawer gathering dust, it could be a good option for moving it forward!

 

Procrastination. Don’t go there.

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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Writers want to write. Our heads explode if we don’t (or other messy things happen, trust me). But for some reason, when we get time to devote to our passion, this often happens:

WRiteTheBookWhat’s the answer?

Set an appointment.

Every day at an appointed time, work on your novel. If you’re writing draft and are suddenly not sure what to actually write, go back to your plot and character notes and do some What If-ing with a notepad to get back on track.

Half an hour a day can accomplish one page of 300 words. If you can do that five days a week for 50 weeks of the year (take a fortnight’s holiday on me!) you can write a 250 page manuscript of 75,000 words.

Most people fail to finish a novel because they waste time editing the opening. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard an unpublished writer say “I can’t go on unless the beginning is perfect!” I’d be holidaying in the Seychelles right now! Published writers keep writing until they get to The End, and then they edit.

So, my “take homes” for today are:

  1. Write every day
  2. Don’t start editing until you’ve finished the book in draft

Arguments, insights, tweaks? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

A short dream workshop with Sophie Masson

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

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I’m excited to be inviting Aussie fantasy author Sophie Masson to share some writing tips with us today. But first a little about Sophie:

Sophie portrait blue and redBorn in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in Australia and France, Sophie Masson is the award-winning author of more than 50 novels for readers of all ages, published in Australia and many other countries. Her adult novels include the popular historical fantasy trilogy, Forest of Dreams (Random House Australia). Sophie has always had a great interest in Russian myth and history, an interest reflected in several of her books for younger readers. Her latest Fiction novel is TRINITY: The Koldun Code (Book One)

Sophie is also a teacher of writing, and her book By the Book: Tips of the Trade for Writers is full of practical and entertaining tips on the craft, business and inspirations of writing. From using your dreams to craft great fiction, to writing dream outlines to attract the attention of publishers, from knowing how to make the most of literary festivals to understanding how magical characters tick, from coping with reviews to being inspired by fairy tales, By the Book is bursting with practical, entertaining and illuminating tips on the writing life. Written by an author whose career spans more than twenty years and more than fifty books published, this book offers advice for writers both new, and not so new.

Sophie has very kindly offered to share an extract from the book:

A short dream workshop by Sophie Masson

From time immemorial, human beings have dreamed–every night we go into what one of my sons’ friends once referred to as ‘those brilliant eight hours of free entertainment.’ And from time immemorial, writers have used images or scenes from dreams, or entire dreams, to enrich and expand their creative work in waking life. I’m certainly no exception. My night-imagination has always enriched my day-imagination. Several of my short stories have started directly as dreams, for example, ‘Restless’, a chilling ghost story I wrote not long ago, began as a really creepy and unforgettable nightmare. Another disturbing story, ‘The Spanish Wife’, a vampire story set in the 1930’s, started as a dream in which someone said, very clearly, ‘No-one took any notice of him till he brought home a Spanish wife,’ and that turned into the very first sentence of the short story. Images and scenes from dreams have also gone into my novels, and in one case, a very vivid and intriguing dream inspired an entire six-book children’s fantasy series of mine, the Thomas Trew series. It’s not always fantasy or supernatural stories that have sprung out of dream-compost for me, though; everything from family stories to thrillers to historical novels has benefited from it.

Over the years, I’ve learned quite a few techniques on how to best use vivid, scary, tantalising or intriguing dream sequences in my writing, and how to investigate them for best effects. Here’s a short workshop based on some of the techniques I’ve developed over the years:

*Think of a dream you’ve had. Any dream. It doesn’t have to be anything exciting or unusual. Go back over the dream-scenes, as if you were a police witness being asked to remember an event. Who was in it? What did they look like? What were they wearing?

Were they people you knew or strangers? Were there any animals in it? What sort? What was the setting like? Indoors, outdoors? What could you see? Smell? Touch? Hear? Taste even? What were you in it—a participant, a helpless observer, a godlike figure?

*If you did something supernatural, like flying, what did it feel like, physically? (I’ve often had flying dreams and in them I feel a strong pull in the chest, arms stretching. Once I even woke up with what felt like an actual slight ache in the arm muscles—very spooky indeed!)

*Were there any machines in your dream? If so, what sort?

*Did anyone speak, and if so what did they say? Many dreams in my experience are like silent movies, with thought-subtitles and maybe some music, but a few have dialogue, even if it’s often minimalistic and quite enigmatic.

* Knowledge: Do you know why you were in that particular place, at that time? If you had some supernatural ability, did you know why? If there are interesting objects or gadgets in the setting of your dream, do you know what they can do, and why, and who made or used them? Backstory is very often missing in dreams, but is very important in a story, even if you only spend a few lines on it.

*Now, once you’ve written down as many descriptive details as you can about what was there in the dream, think about what wasn’t there, and write that down. While you were dreaming, did you know for instance why you or other people were doing things(even if it was a kind of weird dream-logic?) Did you understand the sequence of events? Was there a sense the dream was moving towards some conclusion, or just randomly jumping about? Motive, continuity and plot—all very important in actual stories—are often missing from dreams.

*Think of your own self in the dream, however you appeared in it: did you recognise yourself? Did you feel it was fully you or something that was only partly you, or a stranger? Did characters behave randomly? Character development is usually absent in dreams too though it very much needs to be present in a story.

*What about the setting? Were there things missing: for instance, if you were in a house, were there doors? Windows? Furniture? If you were outside, was anything odd: for instance trees growing upside down, or a wall of water appearing out of nowhere?

*Now put those two things together—the things that were there, the ones that weren’t—and you have the beginnings of a real story framework, where the wild imagination of the night and the more disciplined one of the day cross-fertilise and turn into something amazing and wonderful.

bythebookcoversmall_1Thanks Sophie! I’m so looking forward to putting these tips into action. If you’d like to buy a copy of By the Book by Sophie Masson, you can source it here:

Australian Society of Authors or via Amazon if you have a kindle eReader.

You can find Sophie Masson here: Website  Facebook  Twitter

And if you’ve every turned a dream into a story (as I know Stephenie Meyer did with Twilight) I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Happy writing!

Transition: you’re not delivering a baby, you’re writing a book

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve had a revelation, and it’s going to resonate with mothers who remember that totally confusing moment during delivery called transition. It comes before you’re ready to push, and it feels like your brain just isn’t connecting with your body properly. You’re uncomfortable and confused and restless, but aren’t sure how or where to move. At this point, even the most circumspect woman can swear or grunt or do things that don’t seem to be under her control.

Believe it or not, for some writers there is a moment in drafting the story that feels like transition. I had one today. Instead of sitting quietly and writing, racking up word count, I kept getting up and going into the kitchen, not knowing why, making coffee I didn’t want, going out and checking if the washing was dry. I even found myself in the front garden with scissors, apparently getting flowers for the house. I have no idea why.

I am now in the study with the door shut (to keep myself in) and instead of writing draft I’m writing to you. But I didn’t want to lose the epiphany.

I’ve suddenly realized that this moment in the story that I’m about to ‘birth’ is what hangs everything together, and I’m just about to get it. If it was a conversation, I’d say, It’s on the tip of my tongue. I can’t see the words yet, or the actions my character is about to take, but they’re momentous. I’ve suddenly realized the whole book turns on this scene, and I had no idea until I got into it. Intellectually, nothing has changed. The hero still knows he’s going to have to kill the heroine to save his world, and he’s determined not to fall in love with her. They’re about to have sex for the first time and he wants it to be bad for her so she won’t like him, so there’s no chance she’ll get affectionate, because that’s his best chance for keeping her at arms’ length emotionally.

As the author, I knew all that and so did my hero. What I didn’t know, what’s clear to me now, is that the way he treats her when they make love will change everything between them. Not the plot. That will play out as relentlessly as duty commands for them both. Not even the romance which is also destined to follow a certain course because of their attraction and respect for each other. What will change is the dynamic between them, the nuanced and very human relationship that two people form when their lives are dependent on each other and things are complicated!

As the author, I’ve waited for this moment and dreaded it from page one. The characters in this novel are more ‘alive’ than any I’ve written in the past, and while part of me is elated to be pushing them into dangerous territory, another part of me dreads that I won’t be able to keep them who they are meant to be, who they were ‘born’ in my mind to be.

My revelation was realizing this was exactly the same way I felt before each of my children were born – dread and unutterable thrill warring inside me, pulling my mind one way and my body another.

SitAndStayI know I have said “Sit and stay!” in the past, encouraging writers to develop a consistent writing routine by showing up and being ready for the story to download through their fingers. But there are also times when you simply can’t stay, when the turbulence shows you that a story’s pivotal moment is about to be born.

Respect that. Give it the space it needs. Grunt if you need to. Swear. Cut flowers. Put the kettle on three times and forget to get out the coffee cup. At some point that ‘uncomfortable in my body’ sensation it will funnel into an imperative. The need to push.

The need to write.

Mine’s here now. I’m off! Wish me luck…

Perseverance: One Writer’s Journey

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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I’d like to introduce a client of mine, Alison Mather, who’s recently signed with a prestigious literary agency in the UK. She’s had an interesting journey (to say the least) and has agreed to share it with you. I think you’ll find it inspiring:

Perseverance. It’s a word most commonly used when telling a person’s story of triumph, after they’ve triumphed – which is all well and good and serves as a reminder that your goal can be achieved, but is utterly horrible when you’re actually trying to do it: being perseverant. At least it is to me. I find it very much akin to what I imagine being lost in the wilderness to be like (without the constant threat of sudden death). What direction should I take? How do I know if this step is the right one? What if I’m just going around in circles? Why are the signposts so damned hard to find?

Okay, so that’s where the analogy ends because most people know that the best thing to do if you are physically lost is to stay still and that is absolutely, positively the worst thing you could do if you ever want to be a published author.

During my own journey as a writer I have asked all of these questions every step of the way, and a heck of a lot more. The results can be stultifying and very damaging to your chances if you are the sort to give up easily.

I am one of ‘those’ people who took time off to write. I am very lucky to have an extremely supportive spouse who encouraged me to do so. If you are now thinking that means I’ve had it easy, think again. Six months into writing my first manuscript I was diagnosed with thyroid disease, my husband was retrenched from his job and a 24 foot tree fell on our house during the big Brisbane storms. Add to that, I received nothing but rejection letters to every single query I sent out to publishers and agents. Things were not going to plan and it was very, very hard.

Somehow, though – and here is where the perseverance bit comes in – I managed to write a second, and much better, manuscript and tried again. Now, five years later, I have just signed with a literary agency and am starting work on editing the story – for what feels like the billionth time – in the more real hope of interesting a publisher.

Not the ideal journey to becoming an author, perhaps, but here’s what I’ve learned:

Your writing is key – do everything possible to ensure it is the best it can be, and I don’t mean asking your family. They will always be on your side and that’s not what you need. Join your local Writer’s Centre and find a manuscript assessor. I edited my own work three times and then hired Louise to edit it again. Is it really worth the expense? I sent my work, edited by me, to every publisher in Australia and it was rejected. I paid for professional advice and now I have an agent.

Listen to everything that’s being said to you by the people who know. I was rejected by a tonne of agents earlier this year but one actually took the time to write a personal letter of explanation suggesting that I was aiming at the wrong age group. I was so cut up about the rejection that I almost missed the significance of that particular crumb of advice. And they will be crumbs and you have to fall on them like they’re nuggets of gold, even if all you can hear is the criticism.

Cast a wide net – as in global wide.  My agent is in London. By all means go local to begin but understand that there are a handful of publishers and agents in Australia and a shedload of writers – unless you’ve written that must-have story in which case I’m struggling with my resentment. I smashed the internet doing research and you really have to look. I strongly recommend the following websites: www.literaryrambles.com for agents that rep in your genre, www.writersdigest.com for new agents alerts – you have far more chance with agents who are looking to build their lists, Sarah’s blog at www.greenhouseliterary.com for tips on query writing and many more that I can’t fit in here.

Remember, I was totally green, I knew nothing about the industry that I was hoping to carve a career in, but I dedicated myself to it utterly and I’ve made it this far. You can too.

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Alison Mather signing her agency contract

Writing success really is one part inspiration and ten parts perspiration. Keep at it, and if you’ve got any tips on how to keep motivation up while persevering, do share them with us below. Cheers! Louise

Getting Published Part 4: Using critique to hone your manuscript

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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When you’ve finished writing your manuscript and have edited it to the best of your ability, you need to make a judgement call about whether it’s ready to submit to publishers/agents. This is a particular challenge for writers because it’s very difficult to be objective about your own work.  We can all use some critique to give us perspective. Fresh eyes can pick out things we’d easily miss, particularly when we’re so close to the story.

Macleay Island Inspirational Writers critiquing each other’s work

WHO TO ASK: This is important.  Don’t trust just anyone with your manuscript. There are other writers out there who will savage your work so they can feel better about their own, and they don’t even realise what they’re doing.  Make sure you know and trust the writers you give your baby to. Also don’t ask family/friends who have a vested interest in making you happy (or miserable as the case may be). They can’t be objective, and in many cases aren’t even readers of the genre you’re writing in, so their opinions might muddy the water. If you want to impress them, wait till you have a finished product to put in their hands!

Writing support/critique groups can be fabulous (either face to face or online) in developing a support network. Wait a while before you ask for critique – that gives you time to find other members who are writing the same genre as you, and also allows you time to see if they’re going to be able to take their ego out of the equation. Try trusting them with a chapter to critique first, and see if you feel that they’re being objective.

WHAT TO ASK FOR: Being critiqued isn’t a passive exercise. You don’t just hand over your baby and hope for the best. You have to work out what you want to achieve from the process and ask for the sort of feedback that will most suit you at that time. If you’ve just written a rough first draft and aren’t even sure if it’s working, you can ask for generalised comment on the interest level of the plot, whether there were any boring bits, and if there were any characters / situations that weren’t engaging and interesting. It’s also helpful to ask for the critiquer to specify what they loved about the story, so you’ve got something emotional to hang onto while you embark on your edits (“At least I know I got that right!”). You might have a particular area you feel weak in (perhaps dialogue or characterisation), and you might want them to particularly hone in on those areas in their critique. If you’re pretty sure you have the structure right and want line/copy edits (grammar, punctuation etc) perhaps in preparation for submitting to a competition or agent/publisher, be specific about that, giving the critiquer permission to point out ‘every little thing’ that’s a glitch for them.

HOW TO RECEIVE IT: It’s easy to feel defensive when someone is telling you that your baby is ugly! Resist the urge. This isn’t a suggestion. This is a commandment. If you start pointing out why you wrote it that way and why the person critiquing didn’t understand what you meant, you’ve negated the whole point of critiquing. When your book is published you can’t run after each copy and wait until the reader gets to page 94 so you can lean over their shoulder and say “What I was trying to do here was…”. The book must speak for itself. So if a crit buddy didn’t get what you were trying to do, it’s your job to say “Thanks so much for pointing that out” and then when you get home look at how they might have misunderstood what you were doing and how you can fix that. If you’re convinced that 99% of readers would be fine with it, then leave it. But don’t be precious. You asked for crit, so listen and be grateful! Don’t justify yourself, just keep saying “Thanks so much for pointing that out.”

HOW TO GIVE IT: Make sure when it’s your turn to critique someone’s work that you understand exactly what sort of critique they want (see above), and do only that. You might mention in passing that you think the viewpoint needs looking at too, but if they didn’t ask for comment on that, don’t detail it! Also, frame your critique as ‘areas for improvement’ rather than ‘things that are wrong’.  Remember, this is just your opinion, and many books that were rejected by influential editors have gone on to make millions. You are not an expert. You are just another writer trying to be helpful.  Above all, praise what’s working. I can’t reiterate enough how helpful it is to get ‘positive strokes’ when you’re learning your craft. If a particular line of dialogue sparkled or you had an emotion surge through you while you were reading a section, mark that on the manuscript. Let the author know they moved you. They need to find out what’s working beautifully, as well as the areas for improvement.

THE BENEFITS OF CRITIQUING: 1: It’s free! 2: Picking areas for improvement in someone else’s manuscript will hone your editors eye so you can see those problems in your own work. 3: You form emotional support networks with other writers which will help you through the submission / rejection / acceptance process.

THE DOWNSIDE OF CRITIQUING: If your crit buddy doesn’t know any more about the craft of writing than you do, it could end up being ‘the blind leading the blind’.  So if your crit group have done the best they can and you’re still not finaling in competitions or are still receiving form rejection letters from publishers, it might be time to bite the bullet and invest some cash in your writing career with a manuscript assessment or mentoring.

BETA READERS: If you know readers (non-writers) who adore books in the genre you’re writing, ask them if they’ll give you feedback on your manuscript. They notice completely different things to crit buddies and might say things like “This is where I thought he was the killer,” or “I got such a shock here, I didn’t see this coming,” which is really helpful in gauging the success of your plotting.

Well that’s my advice for this week on how to move towards publication. We’ll be back to Workshop Wednesday next week with best-selling crime author and multiple Davitt Award winner Katherine Howell who will be discussing how to create suspense. See you then!

There are more Getting Published blogs to read, and if you’d like to share your experience of being critiqued or critiquing, please drop that in as a comment below!

Workshop Wednesday: Deep Point of View

11 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized, Workshop Wednesday series

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Welcome to Workshop Wednesday where I invite other writers to share their areas of expertise with you.  My first guest is Australian erotic author Kylie Scott whose debut novel Flesh will be released by Momentum/PanMacmillan in October.  Here’s a little about Kylie:  I write erotic romances set in gritty worlds. Sometimes with Zombies, sometimes without. First book (with Zombies) is due out late 2012 with Momentum. I live in Queensland with my two kids and wonderful, long-suffering husband who wishes I’d turn off the computer and put down the iPhone more often. I read lots and eat white chocolate. Coffee is my drug of choice.

And here’s a teaser about her upcoming release Flesh:

Ali has been hiding in an attic since civilisation collapsed eight weeks ago.  When the plague hit, her neighbours turned into mindless, hungry, homicidal maniacs.  Daniel has been a loner his entire life. Then the world empties and he realises that being alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Finn is a former cop who is desperate for companionship, and willing to do anything it takes to protect the survivors around him.  When the three cross paths they band together; sparks fly, romance blooms in the wasteland and Ali, Daniel and Finn bend to their very human needs in the ruins of civilisation.  Lust, love and trust all come under fire in Flesh as the three band together to survive, hunted through the suburban wastelands.

I can’t wait to read it!  So welcome Kylie, and tell us about Deep Point of View because I know that’s a strong feature of the novel you’ve just sold:

Kylie Scott: To me, Deep Point of View is writing from within the character’s head. Sound a little freaky? Don’t be afraid. No brain-transplanting required, and yet—that’s kind of our aim. We want to give your reader an experience they won’t forget. To hook them and drag them deep into your wonderful story.  To submerge them within your character’s minds. It’s about more than making them privy to your heroine’s thoughts and feelings though; it’s allowing them to experience the story with your heroine as the conduit.

First up, let’s look at what it’s not…

Rebecca sat in the Doctor’s office. She was a bundle of nerves. These places always made her feel awkward and uncomfortable. She thought they were always so cold and clinical. She watched the receptionist like a hawk and waited desperately for her turn.

Now, let’s try giving that sterling piece of narrative a Deeper Point of View…

Rebecca perched on the edge of the sofa and resisted the urge to wrap her arms around herself. Or better yet, to grab her handbag and flee. Her fingers fussed with the hem of her skirt and twirled her wedding band around and around. They wouldn’t sit still. Her mother would have been appalled.

She was rife with goose flesh. The air-conditioning in the Doctor’s office was freezing and every wall was painted arctic white. Not a single picture in sight to brighten the place up. Not a splash of colour. It didn’t help the state of her nerves and nor did the lingering scent of bleach.

How much longer? It had been an hour already. She had to be next. The slick receptionist avoided her eyes with practiced ease and continued to tap away at her keyboard.

Okay, so I still don’t think it’s some of my best work but we’ve added more detail. Note how we’ve threaded in some of the five senses. We’ve layered the piece to give it depth. What is she thinking? What is she feeling? Are there any smells, sensations, memories etc that we can weave in to the writing to really make our reader experience the moment through Rebecca.

What we are taking out is also important. My watch words are these: Rebecca…

Thought, felt, watched, smelt, tasted, remembered, gazed, imagined, touched, etc.

Got a feel for it? Because every time we write ‘Rebecca saw the gerbil escape its cage…’ as opposed to ‘the gerbil scurried from its cage…’ we are putting a barrier between our reader and Rebecca. We are getting in the way. Because while we as the writer need to think deeply about what Rebecca thought, felt, tasted, touched, imagined, remembered etc, what we don’t want to do is spoon feed the reader these facts. We want to give the reader the experience of them. In other words…

If you’re inside Rebecca’s head, the one thing Rebecca is not thinking is ‘Rebecca thought of the gerbil’. She’s just thinking it, period.

Thanks for that, Kylie.  I love seeing examples in a tutorial because they help relate the topic to your own writing.  For a masterclass, read Kylie’s novel Flesh when it comes out in October – available where all good ebooks are sold.  It’s a fabulous example of Deep Point of View.  Do you have a favourite novel whose Point of View sucked you in so completely you felt as if you were the viewpoint character?  I’d love you to drop a comment below and let us know so we can read it too.  And don’t forget to tune in to next week’s Workshop Wednesday where journalist and Young Adult writer Cheryse Durrant discusses Writers Working with the Media.  You can subscribe to this blog using the links on the top left.  Cheers!

Getting Published Part 3: Editing your fiction manuscript

08 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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This photo on the left shows what editing used to look like (quite some time ago).  After I’d finished a story in draft and typed The End, I’d drink an embarrassing amount of celebratory alcohol.  Then it would be time to edit.  In a perfect world you would have a good long break away from the story and come back to it with fresh eyes.  Often, however, you just had to find a way to look at the story from a different perspective because time wasn’t on your side.  My way of doing that was to print the manuscript out and look at it in hardcopy.  That always read differently to the screen.  It also allowed me to paperclip chapters together, spread sections across the floor, stick post-it notes on sections then replace them if I changed my mind, and scribble lots of ideas down on butcher paper.  In other words, it allowed me to pull myself away from metaphorically bumping up against bark (writing draft) to rise up and see the shape of the forest.

The first two questions I’d ask myself were: Whose story is this? and What’s their GMC: goal / motivation / conflict?  If the answer to both wasn’t 100% clear by the end of the story, I had a lot of work to do.  For those unfamiliar with GMC, another way to look at it is:

This is a story about………………………………………(CHARACTER)

Who wants…………………………………………………..(GOAL)

Because……………………………………………………….(MOTIVATION)

But………………………………………………………………(CONFLICT)

Each of these elements is vital in it’s own way, and must be crystal clear to the reader.  Structural editing is about making this GMC obvious to the reader, and clearing away anything that’s clung onto it (like barnacles) while you were sailing down plot river.  I’ll talk more about GMC below, but I’d like to clarify that in tightly plotted genre novels everything in the story needs to relate to the GMC – which means every element you’ve introduced should either help or thwart the main character in achieving their goal.  If, by the time you’re at The End, you realise you’ve got a cute subplot that didn’t actually impact on the GMC, this is the time to toss it.  Kill your babies.  Mercilessly.  Your readers will thank you.

But back to GMC, the character’s goal is important because that’s what drives the plot forward.  Once the reader knows what the goal is (to find a missing person, to fall in love, to quest for a magical sword, to be free) they know where the story is heading and you’ve caught their attention.  Don’t spend chapters waffling on with set up.  Let us know what the character wants and why they can’t have it in the opening chapter.  Also vitally important is the character’s motivation for attaining the goal.  As the going gets tough for the character, the reader has to believe that they’ll keep hanging in there (and not give up and go home), so the character’s motivation to achieve a goal must be a strong, believable one.  Make it clear to the reader what’s at stake: what will happen if the character doesn’t achieve the goal.  If the answer is ‘nothing’ then why should the reader care?  Make sure there’s a consequence to not achieving the goal.  Then there’s conflict – either internal (fears, doubts, insecurity) or external (villain, storm, the ‘other woman’, car crash) which stops the character achieving their goal instantly.  You want the character to make some progress, but one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back will keep readers turning pages.

There’s a saying that a lot of writers have on their desks – Make it hard. Then make it harder.  This is talking about conflict.  Make things hard for your character.  Then make it harder.  What’s the one thing your character never wants to have to do?  Make them do it.  Who’s the one person they rely on?  Take that person away.  Readers should always be worried for the character, wondering how they’ll solve their problems and achieve their goal.  There’s no space for ‘downtime’ in modern fiction.  If the reader stops feeling tense their attention drifts, they might skim pages or worse, put the book down.  Make sure there’s something on every page to keep them tense, to keep them intrigued, to keep them reading on.

Check that you haven’t given viewpoint to characters who don’t need to have it – the lion’s share belongs with the main characters, and a strongly held viewpoint is your best tool in developing characterisation.  Readers like to identify with the main character, and editors are always looking for “an interesting story with characters I care about”.  The best way to get an editor to care about a character is to give the character lots of viewpoint, so we’re inside their head a lot.  (Next Wednesday I’m starting a series called Workshop Wednesday which opens with an article on Deep Viewpoint, so look out for that!)  But back to editing: check also that you haven’t summarised information that we need to see shown as scenes.  Remember the writing maxim Show, Don’t Tell.  All the important turning points in the story must be shown, not mentioned in passing.

When you’re confident you have the structure solid, then and only then is it time to do line editing (or copy editing as it’s also called).  Check your grammar, spelling, tenses, clarity of sentence structure and punctuation.  When that’s done, you’re ready for some critique, and that’s the subject of the next section in this GETTING PUBLISHED series.  Happy writing until then!

(Links to Getting Published Part 1: Making the Commitment, and Getting Published Part 2: Doing the Work)


Getting Published Part 2: Doing the Work

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized, Writer's Self Sabotage

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As a writing tutor, mentor and manuscript assessor, I meet a lot of writers who want to be published.  Unfortunately a proportion of them spend far too much of their creative time putting the product (book) before the process (writing) by researching publishers and asking questions about how to submit a manuscript or how to publicise it through social networking and blogs, before they’ve even finished their first draft!  This behaviour might sound grandiose, but in fact it’s a procrastination technique that’s very often caused by a lack of confidence.

The bottom line is that unless you’ve written several novels and are assured of your ability to complete the book and edit it into something publishable, my advice is to delay talking to publishers or agents until you have a finished product to talk about.  I’m a big advocate of thinking about what you want (and not what you don’t want), but you have to be practical.  You have to do the work.  The bald truth is:

Writers write.

It sounds impossibly simplistic to say that, but it’s the most important thing I can teach writers.  Write.  Make notes about your characters, your settings, your plot, write character diaries, and when you have enough momentum, write scenes and chapters and push the story forward relentlessly until you get to The End, resisting all procrastination urges and any unhelpful perfectionism that’s telling you to go back and edit for grammar and flow, or stop to research that insignificant minor detail that will probably end up being edited out of the finished manuscript anyway.  Keep the flow going.  If you’re stuck on a plot point then leave a hole and leap forward because there’s a good chance that what you write next will help you discover the missing piece.  If that doesn’t help, stop writing draft and go back to character diaries and backstory.

But stick with your characters and keep writing about them in whatever form you have to until you can get back to your draft.  Rack up word count.  Flex those writing muscles until you can’t stop thinking about your characters and they invade your mind while you’re hanging out washing or driving kids to school.  Allow your first draft to come out imperfectly, so long as you capture its essence.  As Anne Lamott says in her beautiful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.” and “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

Unfortunately most writers have the perfectionism gene, and from what I’ve seen it’s the #1 reason that we procrastinate.  Subconsciously we get a dialogue happening that says, If I can’t do it perfectly on the first attempt, I mustn’t be a real writer.  I’ve even had clients who’ve been so paralysed by perfectionism that they can’t write a thing, and all because they’re comparing their first draft to a book they bought and read the week before.  As if there’s no such thing as editing!  The reality is that a first draft is edited several times by the author before the manuscript is submitted, then several more times by the publishers.  It’s like comparing a pile of self raising flour to a gourmet mudcake from a boutique bakery.  Crazy.  Yet writers do this to themselves.  Completely unrealistic.

Concert pianists, in comparison, are well aware that they must practise the scales for years, getting their fingers nimble and laying down those pathways in the brain that say This finger placed there produces that sound.  Writers are no different.  We need to write so we can lay down pathways that say This word combination represents the experience I want to convey.  Our job is to take our vision of the story and to translate that into words on a page which a reader’s imagination will then recreate into a similar vision in their own mind.  It takes years of practice to get the right word combinations to create the right experience for the reader, and this is what’s called developing the craft of writing (completely different to natural talent).  There’s no getting around it, you have to write a lot to develop your craft.  And you have to stop beating yourself up if you don’t get it ‘right’ on the first draft.  Remember: The art of writing is rewriting.

Sure, you need information (how-to books and workshops) so you know how to write, and you need feedback (manuscript assessment and critique partners) so you can hone your skills, but the vast majority of a writer’s time, no matter where they are in their career, should be spent doing the work: writing.

So my advice this week is to write.  If you really do want to be a published author, you must set aside time to practise.  And if perfectionism is a problem for you, watch this video and see if it inspires you to let it go, at least while you’re writing first draft!

 
 
 
 
Have you ever been plagued with self doubt?  Thought your writing was utter rubbish (when it wasn’t)?  I’d love to hear how you overcame it.
 
 (Link to Getting Published Part 1: Making the Commitment)