Tag Archives: memory

Book launches with benefits

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers, Writers out in Public

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What makes a book launch memorable?  Well I’ve been to more than I can readily remember, but the ones that stand out in my memory were the ones where the writer included their family and friends in their celebration (because a book launch is as much about WooHoo! as it is about selling books).  I went to a great one last Friday night at Dymocks in Bundaberg.  We were helping launch Sandy Curtis‘s new thriller “Fatal Flaw”, and here’s a pic of romance author Helen Lacey and I holding our copies with Sandy – tiny dynamo she is.

While I was lining up to get my copy signed I had the chance to chat to Sandy’s grandson Alex, who was thrilled to be at the signing table, and Sandy’s own mum (great grandma) was seated nearby enjoying the glow of her daughter’s success.  It reminded me of my very first book launch a decade ago.  My mother is a seamstress and she created a gorgeous black velvet cocktail dress for me because the venue was going to be a recently renovated heritage building in Brisbane city – quite glam.  In the lead-up, while I was stressing about invitations and copies arriving on time, she was nervous about what to wear, never having attended a launch before.  After checking her dress would be suitable and, it being night-time, whether she’d need gloves, I remember her saying in a tentative voice, “So, a hat?”  I’m ashamed to admit that I couldn’t help laughing, or saying, “It’s not mother-of-the-bride, ma!” But she’d never been to a launch before.  How would she know?  To her it was the glamorous culmination of a decade of my hard solitary labour.  For all she knew, there might be paparazzi!  Clearly, she knows better now.

I didn’t recognise it at the time, but my family had been endlessly supportive without ever really having a clue about what I was doing, or how all that coffee consumption in a room with the door shut could possibly end up as a real book in a real bookstore tucked between real writers like Michael Crichton and Clive Cussler.  For them, the launch was their only window into my career, their only chance to show publicly that despite being astonished, they were proud of me.  I’m glad now that I wasn’t so overwhelmed by excitement that I left them out of it.  They were all there on the night, acting as hosts, mingling, making people feel relaxed, sharing embarrassing stories about me.  But then my family and friends have always been the rock that my stability is based on.  When you spend a third of your life inside a world that doesn’t exist, you need to be anchored when you step away from the computer.

Seeing the anchors around Sandy on Friday night reminded me that my own family and friends are still the most important thing in my life, a fact eloquently shared by an Internationally successful author friend who, at the birth of her first child said, “If something happened and I could never write again I’d find solace in my family.  But if something happened to my child, I’d find no comfort in my writing.”  I can only echo those thoughts, and feel unutterably grateful that I have it all: family, friends and career.  But to put that in perspective, when my daughter gave me a scrapbook for Mothers Day the year she moved out (a poignant year for me) I knew I was holding in my hands the most significant and meaningful story I’d ever created.  In the ‘brag’ section of my bookcase where my own published novels sit, it holds pride of place.

Society holds some writers up as being ‘special’, imagining their contribution to literature is more important than the children they’ve raised, the parents they’ve lost or the friend’s they’ve loved.  But as a writer myself, I know for a fact, the people I love will always be more important than the books I create.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Having said, that, book launches are one of the few opportunities in our lives where we can celebrate both.  And that’s what makes them so memorable.

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.

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.

Filling the creative tank: Why writers need time out

12 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by in Understanding Ourselves as Writers

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What I’m about to say might seem like a no-brainer to writers, but I’ve got a hunch that for some readers it’s going to be fresh news:

Writers can’t create in a vacuum.

Time and tools are not enough to create good fiction.   Writers need input if they are to create meaningful output, and let me give you a personal example.  The other day I went to an orchestral concert.  I could have been writing.  I’m currently ‘in the zone’ and story is falling out of me, so it was a wrench to pull myself away from that and be out among people, but now that I’m living in regional Queensland orchestral concerts are few and far between – it’s go now or wait a month.

So I deliberately got there late to miss the milling around at the beginning, but I still had to suffer intermission, and that was jarring.  When you’ve dragged yourself away from a fantasy world, a roomful of ‘normal’ people feels like being in an aviary of chattering lorikeets, and none of the conversation you overhear seems pertinent.  I’ve got an entire empire hanging by a thread and the people next to me in the coffee line are complaining about the price of fuel.  My fault, not theirs.  So I try to focus on being an observer (always a good fallback for writers who are still half in their own world) and resume my seat as soon as I can, because I know it’s worth it to hear the music.

For those who don’t attend concerts, let me assure you there’s something magical about being in a auditorium of live music where you can actually feel the swell and grumble of it vibrating through your chest.  You experience it kinaesthetically as well as aurally, and I love that.  Then there’s the emotional reaction.  The Bundaberg Symphony Orchestra played Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World” and I welled up.  I love that song, but hearing it played through me triggered tears, and there’s more than a momentary emotional reaction happening here.  When I close my eyes and let the music swirl around me and through me I can feel the creative tank I draw from filling up.  Exactly the same thing happens, to a more limited degree, every afternoon when I walk along the esplanade and hear the waves crashing onto volcanic rocks and smell the salt spray.  It fills me up somehow.

Jennifer Cruisie calls it “feeding the girls in the basement”.  Anything that creates an emotional reaction fills that tank, and not just happy things.  Some of my strongest emotional moments have come from pain, the tragic death of a parent or holding your friend’s hand while they cry.  It’s all emotion, and writers need that input, they need to fill the tank because if they don’t they’ve only got dust to draw on when they’re trying to animate their characters.  I’m completely convinced that when writers get impossible deadlines and they have to put their lives on hold to concentrate solely on output, their work suffers.  In fact, I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d heard a reader complaining that an author they loved is just “churning books out” and the quality is suffering.  There will always be exceptions to every rule: writers like Nora Roberts are prolific, satisfy readers and seem to do nothing but write!  The rest of us, however, need to take time to ensure our creative tanks are full.  Unfortunately when authors do that, they’re sometimes the brunt of reader dissatisfaction for taking too long to deliver.

Guy Gavriel Kay discusses this in his 2009 article: Restless Readers go Bonkers where he relates fantasy author George R.R. Martin’s problem of readers not wanting him to have a life: George R. R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor of an ongoing, seven-volume fantasy series called A Song of Ice and Fire. Four books are done. The first three came quickly, then there was a five-year wait for the fourth. The first indicated publication date for the fifth installment, fiercely awaited, was 2006. That has rather obviously been missed: Martin is still writing it. The natives are restless… Seems some of his loyal and devoted readers are savagely attacking him for taking holidays, for watching football in the fall, for attending conventions, doing workshops, editing a volume of short stories, even for being “sixty years old and fat” … the implication being he might drop dead before fulfilling his obligation to do nothing else but finish the damned series.

That fifth novel was recently delivered and readers are more than happy with it, but how long will the satisfaction last if it takes another couple of years to deliver book six?  Will readers again complain the moment George walks away from the desk?  Unfortunately, the days when writers could lead anonymous lives is over.  Publishers push authors to be active across social networking platforms, but even writers who guard their privacy aren’t safe from cyber stalking.  Readers can now search across blogs, tweets and Facebook updates for an author’s name to monitor their movements as reported by others, which is downright scary.  The upside of social media is that writers are more accessible to readers, the downside is that they’re being made accountable.

How will writers manage that in the future, particularly when eBooks can be processed in a matter of months, as opposed to the 12-18 months it takes to release a print novel?  No idea.  But one thing I do know, despite reader expectation: Input is vital for most writers to produce quality.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  As a reader, do you get frustrated waiting for authors to deliver books?  As a writer, how to do ‘fill the tank’?