Tag Archives: manuscript

5 Day Intensive Manuscript Development Program

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by in Getting Published series, Uncategorized

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Australian fiction writers, I’d like to give you the heads-up about a fabulous opportunity to develop your finished manuscript to publication standard. Romance Writers of Australia are running 5DI, a five day intensive manuscript development program with International best-selling authors as tutors.

t-m-clarkAustralian author T.M. Clark has done 5DI twice and both her novels have sold to Harlequin MIRA.

She said, “I did this 5Di – 5 day intensive – twice, in my journey towards publication. I can’t hold it in high enough regard. By Brother-But-One was my first book that attended, and Tears of A Cheetah (To be publish December 15) was the second. SOOOOOOO worth paying for the help and investing in yourself for the week. Writers – a must!”

Speaking as a tutor, I can attest to the fact that these intensive manuscript development programs really work. Ten years ago I was a tutor for the  EnVision manuscript development program which focused on speculative fiction manuscripts. Over the years I’ve seen many of the EnVision attendees go on to publication, and the quantum leap in writing craft they achieved in that week of intensive learning astonished even the tutors. As I result I’ve advised clients to attended 5DI, and those who have done so have spoken highly of the experience.

These sorts of immersion opportunities don’t come along every week, or even every year. Romance Writers of Australia’s 5DI is for manuscripts “in any romantic sub genre, including mainstream books with romantic elements. This workshop is open to all members of RWA who are aspiring and emerging authors and over 18 years of age.” (Read their conditions of entry for all eligibility criteria.)

Any fiction manuscript with romantic elements (sex, attraction, a love story subplot) should qualify whether it’s a crime novel, a fantasy, paranormal, young adult, etc, and the joining fee for RWAustralia membership will provide you with more writing support and industry information than you can now imagine. You have to qualify to attend 5DI, so do read the entry information carefully.

If you want to take your writing to the next level, I urge you to apply for this opportunity. If you are accepted, I promise you’ll get your money’s worth (and more).

Details are here:

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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 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)


The hidden value of critiquing

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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What can you do if your manuscript has a problem you can’t pin down?  Simple.  Critique someone else’s.

The benefit might not seem obvious, especially when you’re busy and it feels like you’re wasting time helping someone else, but trust me, you’re helping yourself.  Writers are notorious for not being able to edit their own work successfully (let’s face it, that’s why publishing houses pay editors to work on our stories).  But what you might not know is that the easiest way to find your own hidden problems is through uncovering the flaws in someone else’s story.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been doing a manuscript assessment for a client and have been typing on their report something along the lines of “There isn’t enough tension in this scene.  The main character should have overheard that conversation so they could be stressing about the danger coming up.  Then they might make mistakes because of their fear and that would make things even worse for them.”

Remember, Rule Number One for plotting is “Make things worse for your characters.”

So at the point that I’m typing something into a report, I’ve often have a light bulb moment and realised that whatever I’m typing is exactly what’s wrong with a section of my own manuscript that doesn’t feel right.  Maybe I’ve got a character who doesn’t realise the danger that’s coming up, and things would be worse for them if they did.   Alongside this revelation I might even get a flash of insight into how I could fix that, but before you start worrying, its never a ‘copy what I’ve just suggested to the client’ fix.  My subconscious has far too many ideas of its own for that to ever happen, and the fix has to be organic to my own story and believable for the characters who inhabit it.  So a copy fix would never work.  But finding the source of the problem.  That’s gold.

‘Mirroring’ is a concept as old as the Vedic scriptures and as new as modern psychology, where you have an emotional reaction to the trait in others that you can’t see in yourself.  It works with editing as well.  I used to think my light bulb moments were the result of The Universe looking after me, attracting manuscripts that had the same problems I needed to address in my own.  But now I think it’s the work of my subconscious mind.  I find lots of ‘areas for improvement’ in manuscripts I assess, and only occasionally have light-bulb moments, so that tells me that my subconscious is filtering, looking for ways to help me, and I like that!  A lot of bad things are said about the subconscious mind, and many people fear their unconscious beliefs and attitudes are influencing their behaviour.

Maybe that’s true, but there’s also a positive side.  For a writer the subconscious is the seat of creativity.  It’s the magical, thrilling swirl of everything you’ve ever seen or heard or smelt or touched or tasted, every crazy fantasy, every naughty impulse, every skin-bursting moment of bliss.  It’s the left hand of the damned and the kiss of a fairy princess.  It’s the pure adoration of a mother who holds her baby for the first time, and the gut-wrenching grief of loved one’s death.  Every moment of your life is witnessed by this amazing storehouse, and for those of us who create story it’s the pantry where we select the ingredients for our banquet, either with a recipe as plotters do, or using intuition if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer.

Critiquing is another way you can access the intuition/subconscious realm and hone in on your hidden weaknesses.  It works every time for me.  Give it a try.  At the very least you’ve helped someone else.  And remember when critiquing that the rule is to point out two great things for every one ‘area of improvement’, and don’t put on your bossy boots.  It’s just your opinion, after all.  But do remember to have a notebook beside you for jotting down insights about your own work.

You’ll be surprised.

I promise.