Nearing the End of the Year

No time to catch up on all the blogs I missed while I was away (other people's, that is) so have skimmed a few and discovered that we are coming up to the Dead Zone in publishing. Agent Kristin Nelson says she is madly submitting this week because after that, most editors are off on early Christmas breaks or trying to clear their desks. Useful to know, if you are about to submit something yourself.
Where I work, we are madly interviewing new applicants for 2007, and it's a very interesting process. These are people who want to be writers or editors or something like that (we once listed 34 different jobs our students could do after completing the Diploma, and novel writer was only one), but we have learned the hard way that we need to screen more effectively. So we created a grammar and punctuation test. One page long, three short sections. Some people still manage to make more than 20 errors. We have also learned the hard way that these people do really badly in our course and often either fail or drop out.
The bald, unvarnished truth is - if you want to be a writer or an editor, you have to know how to use the English language, how to make it work to its ultimate best, and if you can't punctuate properly or keep your verb tenses consistent or spell reasonably well (and know how to use a dictionary for the tricky ones), you haven't got much chance.
I sometimes feel very lucky to have gone to school when all that stuff was taught - I see young people coming out of high school who didn't get the early grounding and have very little idea of even where to put a full stop and end a sentence. I've come to believe that if you don't get it early on, it's five, or even ten, times harder to learn it later on. I have seen a few who have managed it, but not easily.

Hong Kong Pics

Fish shop in Wanchai on the left- most things are still alive (and moving - if something isn't moving, apparently you bargain for a cheaper price). And the other photo is of Tai O, a fishing village on the south end of Lantau Island. I caught the fast ferry to Lantau - a half hour trip - and then the local bus to Tai O. The village is famous for its shrimp paste.

All Business?

Have returned from Hong Kong, and Melbourne seems quite sedate. I had to do grocery shopping today at my local centre (mall) and found myself greeting people and being very friendly - a HK hangover, as everyone there is so polite and helpful, even if you are asking dumb questions (such as "where is the tram stop?" and they point just behind you).
We packed in a huge amount while we were there, running a wide range of classes and seminars, building our "client base" (feels strange saying that - I still think of everyone as students or fellow teachers or trainers - the difference between business and education, I guess, but don't get me started on the new university culture where business takes precedence over education).
We had classes at the YWCA, training sessions in editing and writing with Women in Publishing, more training in creative writing with secondary students with Chinese-school teachers, I had a great day with the Grades 4, 5 and 6 at Peak School and another inspiring day writing with kids in Repulse Bay. Also spoke to SCBWI members one night. Time off? Well...
One day in Shenzen, shopping in the madness that is Wo Lu - a building filled with five floors of little shops, all with sales people who follow you and tug at your arm while trying to persuade you to buy something (and offering lower and lower prices the further you go from their shop). We had a shopping guide book that helped us to find our way around what must have been at least 1500 shops.
Another day at Hong Kong Park in the huge bird aviary (and by the turtle pond), then over to Kowloon to look at clothes, ones which I was more likely to afford. The branches of Gucci, Versace, Chanel etc were avoided.
One afternoon at Stanley Market, which was a welcome change as no one pursues you down the street and you rarely need to think about haggling. I think only the strong and the brave can endure more than two full-on haggling days.
My favourite place was Wanchai, where our hotel was - lots of lanes filled with the local market stalls selling everything from live fish to dried seafood, all kinds of vegetables and fruit, and live chickens beheaded and plucked while you wait (no, don't look, Sue!). Once again, I ate many bowls of noodles and drank my favourite ginger tea with black honey.
My last night was spent at the Happy Valley race track with the EMB social club outing. All my chosen horses did dismally, so I came home with a lighter purse but a happy heart.

Missive from Hong Kong

Have now been here nearly two weeks and am getting ready to return to Australia. It's been a long haul this time, with lots of training and meetings and discussions. Too tired even to read most nights! And although I did discover a local cyber place, I can only come here in school hours as after school, the place fills with screaming teenagers playing online games.
The Blogger site is in Chinese so I'm not sure how to use it - am guessing most of the time!
The weather has been mostly grey with a bit of rain. Everyone keeps telling us how unusual it is, and we should be having cool sunny days. Hmmm. And the pollution is a huge issue. I went out to Lantau Island yesterday (climbed the 260 steps to the big Buddha, with lots of rest stops) and it was so hazy you could hardly see two kilometres. Apart from the fact that people living here are starting to think about leaving, and some big companies are looking at relocating so they don't get sued by sick employees, they will kill tourism if they don't do something. No point going up the Peak if you can't see a thing.
A lot of Hong Kong-owned factories have apparently relocated into China and the pollution is coming from there where there are few emission controls.
But Hong Kong itself is as lively as ever. I'm staying in Wanchai and have wandered through the local markets a few times, staring at live fish in tanks, meat being cut up and displayed on the street, huge piles of dried seafood and flower shops that sell a bunch of orchids for the equivalent of AU$1.20.
The tourist markets are the same - lots of Americans here this time, and not just because the Kittyhawk is in the bay and sailors are everywhere (you can tell them by the really short hair). I have become used to eating noodles nearly every day, haven't missed coffee at all, and haven't been brave enough to try duck tongues or pig's knuckles.
Bought a collection of Chinese short stories but haven't read them yet. I've been deep in Louisiana, reading James Lee Burke's new Robicheaux novel. As always, fantastic description and a good story with lots of flawed characters that make you think about who is who in the world, and how do we really know the inner workings of most people.
Food for thought.

Blogging in Chinese

Hmmm how to use Blogger when all the instructions and labels are in Chinese? You guess and hope the right buttons are in the same places.
Cyber cafes where a million kids and teenagers playing online computer games and smoking and shouting and shooting each other via the computer doesn't make for concentration or focus.
Two days of seminars and thick pollution so far - can't see the Xmas lights across the harbour because of the fog/smog.
Not enough sleeping hours. Hotel sends wake up call 6am first morning - good. Leave it in the system. Second morning 6am again. No sleeping in here.
TV viewing - a documentary on plastic surgery of film and pop stars. Horribly riveting.
Dinner beckons. Smoke in here is awful. Gotta go.

Launches, Reviews and Grey Hair

This is what you like to see at a magazine or book launch - the magazine arrives and everyone dives for a copy and is engrossed for the next ten minutes (ignoring the wine and food!). This is the launch yesterday of our new magazine "Lizard" - not a fiction and poetry mag but a collection of great articles about teaching and learning. You might think it sounds a little boring, but there's all sorts of topics - exchanges, the Clarion South workshop, model cars, the oldest student in the world, immigrant students experiences, just to name a few. And terrific images from our graphic arts students. By "our" I mean Victoria University. The launch was at Iramoo on our campus - Iramoo is where we have a sustainable environment precinct with 35 hectares of protected grasslands and also where we have a number of live-in lizards - the endangered legless lizard to be exact. Those people who have been to Building 10 on the campus will remember the strange yellow and brown exterior which is meant to represent the lizard also. And that's why the magazine is called "Lizard". If you live in Australia and would like a copy (yes, free!) just email Sue at profwritingtafe@vu.edu.au

Onto other bookish things - not surprisingly (to me) "On the Jellicoe Road" has just been favourably reviewed in the latest edition of Magpies, a journal of books for children/YA. The reviewer said, "Taylor's story is interspersed with out-of-sequence excerpts from Hannah's manuscript, weaving together the events of past and present - an effective technique that foreshadows events and builds reader interest." See - told you it was just me! The reviewer was obviously far more on the ball than I was ... no, actually I stand by my original comments.

And when I read a book like "Dairy Queen", which I did in one night this week (could not put it down!), I know that there are still books out there in the world that will capture me and hold me fast and give me huge pleasure and excitement to read. Quick synopsis - DJ lives on a dairy farm and is doing nearly all the farm work because Dad is injured. She's failing high school, feeling pretty unhappy (but not in a whiny, "why me" kind of way, which is why the voice works so well) and then Brian arrives. An arrogant football player from the neighbouring town who is sent to work on the farm as a test. DJ ends up training him in spite of herself, and discovers she is really good at it, and good enough at football to try out for her own school team. The only girl. Sounds unlikely? Catherine Gilbert Murdock makes it work, through the character and the voice, and also the details of farm life and footy training. Loved it. 5 stars.

I'm now reading Ian Rankin's latest, "Naming of the Dead". It was my bribe to get me through all that marking of student work. Nothing like Rebus waiting at the end of a million hours of reading, commenting and grading. I then dyed my hair to cheer myself up (hate to think how many new grey hairs I got from all that terrible grammar and punctuation) and dived into the Rankin novel. I mean, how hard is it to punctuate "I hate bad punctuation," she said. In case you're wondering, if I had a dollar for every time I saw a full stop after punctuation instead of a comma... and then, of course, Word gives she a capital S - She. Grrrr.

Am I writing? A new draft of a picture book - Draft No. 17 but who's counting? All that marking does give me a very critical eye to take back to my own manuscripts, if nothing else!

Jellicoe Road etc

I finished "On the Jellicoe Road" a few days ago, and the second half (thankfully) was much better. Then I thought about my earlier comments - had I started reading it at the wrong time, and therefore wasn't concentrating properly? (I read the first 30 pages while waiting to go in for a small operation, but I don't think the anaesthetic was the problem.)
So I went back and re-read the first few pages again, and decided it was a bit of both. No, I hadn't really been giving the book 100%, but I also felt the author could have made it so much clearer what was going on. For those of you contemplating reading this book, here are some useful clues:
1. The parts in italics are not the main character dreaming or talking or writing something. They are actually a novel written by another character about things that happened 22 years ago. I'm not spoiling the story by telling you this - I'm ensuring that you don't get totally confused.
2. The main character is in a boarding school for kids no one wants. One of the school girls is from the nearby town. Nobody else in the school is.
3. The whole basis of the action in the story is this kind of wargame between the boarding school kids, the town kids and another bunch of boys on cadet camp. Why 18-year-olds would be playing the kind of game that 12-year-olds get off on was a bit beyond me. That's my main "credibility gripe".
4. The main character, even though she seems to be the "dead loss/hopeless case" of the school, is somehow made the head honcho of all the kids (by vote). Another credibility issue.
I have no doubt that lots of readers will disagree with me on this book, but I really don't see what is the point of not making simple things clear to the reader.
Enough grumping and groaning. I've just finished last year's Newbery Award winner, "Kira-Kira" by Cynthia Kadohata, and totally enjoyed the voice and character of Katie. The story is mostly set in Georgia in the 1950s, and Katie is the younger daughter in a Japanese family. Mum and Dad work in the chicken factories, saving for a house, and the older girl, Lynnie, is Katie's idol. The voice is terrific - naive but genuine - and Katie's journey to understanding how to survive in a difficult world is gentle but profound. Good example of 'less is more' - very little overwriting (if any).
Marking? About 60% achieved so far. 30 short stories to go. It's a little like being a magazine editor, only instead of rejections or acceptances, I have to give feedback on what I think is or is not working. The kind of thing we secretly wish all editors would do for our submissions.
In the last class, I gave the students something I had written about getting published, what it means to write or just call yourself a writer (there's a big difference), how to improve, how to survive after you give up the support of classes and constant, immediate feedback, what perseverance really means - all that stuff. I might put it up on my website, if I can work out how to create my circles diagram in Word.
And in response to someone in the newspaper recently who criticised the use of the word "stuff" - it's a very handy word, useful in all situations. A bit like "thingy" - right, Sue?

Something Happens to Someone

It's coming up to that time of year when I have three classes worth of writing assignments to mark and give comments on. Around 100,000 words worth of short stories, about 100 poems (which can take as long as stories to comment on), and probably 30-40,000 words of children's chapter books.
We've been through the workshop mill. Each student has workshopped their piece and received comments. But what happens in the rewriting? It can be difficult to sort out which comments are useful, and sometimes people go off in the wrong direction. I often think the purpose of workshopping/critiquing is simply to develop your gut instinct - that thing that tells you when a story or part of a novel is not working.
John Marsden said once that he reads through a draft quite quickly, marker pen in hand, and just highlights anything that doesn't 'feel right' as he goes. He doesn't stop to analyse, but comes back later and looks at each marked sentence or paragraph (or even word) and tries to work out where the 'not right' feeling came from. It's a good way to work on your own.
I have a couple of students who are having to start their stories all over again. Editing and fiddling is not going to fix the central problem, which is nothing happens. We all do it. Get carried away with the writing, the character, the voice, the pleasure of putting down lots of words. But the story still needs to be about something, it still needs movement forward, in most cases it still needs plot and story questions to keep the reader engaged.
I talked to the class a little about epiphanies and revelations, and it seems to me that many short stories these days focus on those two things. Not only 'something happens to someone' but whatever happens leads to an epiphany for the main character. It may only be a small epiphany, but that's what the story hangs on. Even genre stories can work this way, weaving revelation/realisation into plot.
I have finished reading 'Leadbelly' - the book about the doings of Melbourne's underworld crime figures. A scary book. With scary photos. But it did give me good background information and ideas for something I'm working on.
At the moment, I'm reading Marlena Marchetta's new book 'On the Jellicoe Road'. And I just can't get into it. I'm up to page 100 and ... and ... I keep thinking it must be me. Maybe I'm not paying attention so that's why I don't understand half the time what is going on, who the characters are. I feel like she has been so deliberately mysterious that she's left me almost completely in the dark. I will persevere (because I paid $$ for this book) but by page 100 I expected more!

The Whole Research Thing

Recently there was an article in the weekend newspaper about Kate Grenville and her novel "The Secret River" - apparently she has upset some historians by claiming her book is a new kind of history. One comment focused on how Grenville used a small anecdote from Governor Phillips' diary and transposed it 25 years ahead to give it to her main character.
The historians seem to hate this kind of "licence" that fiction writers take. The other end of this spectrum is James Frey and his ilk who present their writing as the truth and then are caught out in a big way. What is truth in fiction? To me, a fictional world is "true" when the writer makes it so for me. I read Michael Connolly's books set in LA and the city comes alive in my head. "The Secret River" was the same, especially as I had been up the Hawkesbury River and could then imagine it 200 years ago through the book.
A good way to consider this issue is to think about the difference between historical fiction and historical fiction. The first is fiction set in a historical time and place - the author researches that era, and tries to make the setting as accurate as possible (to create the world of that novel), but many of the characters are made up, and some things may be changed to make the story better.
The second is history related as a story - all of the characters were real people - so it's reality via a narrative. This kind of historical novel requires a bibliography when used in schools (or at least the publisher requires a bibliography to ensure the writer got it right).
But let's face it - no matter how well researched a book is, how can you ever prove one way or another that people back then spoke, behaved and thought like that? That's fiction!
And no matter which end you start from, there is a huge grey area in the middle where anything can happen, where a good writer can work without rules and boundaries and create a terrific story.
The critics come later.

Rebus and Rankin

If you like Ian Rankin's Rebus crime novels, try this site:
http://www.publishingnews.co.uk/bookbeat/orion/rebus/exclusive.asp?#
(You might have to add the ?# yourself - it won't go in the URL here). There's a little video of Rankin plugging his new book, but what is much more interesting (especially for writers and long-time readers of Rebus) is an audio recording of Rankin talking about his first Rebus book "Knots and Crosses" and how it was written. I especially liked how he talks about his writer's diary.
I've tried to get students to write a reflective writer's diary - it's interesting to hear Rankin relate what he wrote in his back then.

Horses for Courses

I've been trying to read a Martha Grimes novel, "The Blue Last". It's not doing it for me. Slow. A thousand seemingly irrelevant sub-plots (no doubt she'll weave them in sooner or later but I skipped a whole chapter to avoid one sub-plot I thought was stupid and pointless). A main character who seems to be the world's most dithering, inactive policeman, and whose idea of investigation is to put his friend, Lord Something-or-other, on the property (undercover) as a forelock-tugging gardener.
I talk to students about credibility in fiction - the gardener thing was the last straw. Back to the library it goes.
And thank heavens for libraries where you can try out authors before you buy!

RSI never went away...

Another day of procrastination on the rewriting. Instead I did my tax. I must be getting desperate.
I have been spending a substantial amount of time and money lately visiting an osteopath. This came about because of neck problems (and shoulder problems, and lower back problems) and I finally decided it was time to take action.
Turns out that one of my significant problems is a knot of fibrous stuff on a muscle that, funnily enough, is the muscle most likely to be used when ... clicking a computer mouse. About 15 years ago, I managed to get RSI when I was working as a typesetter for a small printing company. A lot of rest, exercise, strength building, and care about keyboard use meant that the RSI has subsided to nearly nothing. Except ... now because I use the mouse a lot more for things like clicking on internet sites, email, online courses, discussion boards etc, I have managed to develop another problem.
And I've known for a long time that I tend to get "computer scrunch" which is generally caused by laptop use (bending the head forward over the keyboard while squinting at the screen). That cliche - all the chickens come home to roost - is taking on new meaning.
So now I will go and read my books on back care and Buddhism (because my stress/tension issues are making things worse), and then I will read my book on wombats (because we have one in the bush - poo piles are the evidence - and because I have a picture book about a wombat that I am working on).

Floods of Words

I think I'm having a mental revolt against rewriting. I have at least two things I need to be looking at seriously right now and rewriting, and I can't bear to go near them. Not that the rewrites are necessarily that difficult (especially when you have comments to help you along) but I just feel like I have spent nearly all of this year on rewrites. So I keep launching off into new stuff.
Finished a short story for the 'Age' newspaper short story competition. This is big deal stuff here. Writers who win this competition get asked by publishers for their (unpublished) manuscripts. Entry is free. The 'Age' is getting more and more secretive about advertising the closing date, hence this year they had to extend it because nobody knew about it.
Then a couple of different friends sent me information about a fantasy publisher in the US who is open to submissions of pirate short stories (for adults) for an anthology. I went to check out their website and discovered that they have another anthology/competition open right now, closing 15 October. I happened to have a short story that fitted their category guidelines, only it was barely half-finished. It had been sitting on my laptop for 6 months or more. Aha! I could surely write the other 1500 words and finish it in time?
Certainly could. Except when I started writing, it grew ... and grew ... and finished up at nearly 8000 words. Luckily their word limit was 10,000 - and I made the deadline!
Aren't deadlines wonderful things?
Now someone needs to give me deadlines for those rewrites.
On Saturday I ran another Children's Writers' forum at the uni where I work. We had 28 writers come along to listen to Lorraine Marwood talk about writing children's poetry (and teaching it), Carmel Heron from Harcourt Educational Publishers, and then a Picture Book Slam. That's where writers stand up and have three minutes (not a second more) to read their picture book to an audience who then vote for the winner.
It was a lot of fun, and was also a very interesting session.
The notes from Carmel Heron's talk will be up soon at our website:
www.staff.vu.edu.au/profwriting
Follow the links for the forum - other publisher's notes already up from previous days.
At the moment, for a little bit of research, I'm reading a few different books about Melbourne's underworld crime scene. There's a never-ending series called "Underbelly" by John Silvester and Andrew Rule, as a starting point. They cover other crimes as well as the "Melbourne mafia" stuff. I have to say the books are not nearly as well-written as the feature articles that both writers publish in the Melbourne newspapers. Makes me wonder if they've "dumbed down" the books for some reason.
However, they're perfect for taking into my Short Story 2 class as examples of straight non-fiction writing as compared to "creative non-fiction" and personal essays, especially in terms of style and language.

What is Good/Bad Writing?

In 2002 I went to a summer school at California State Uni at Fresno. It was two weeks devoted to children's writing, with tutors such as Janet Wong, Bruce Coville and Pam Munoz Ryan, among others. A fabulous two weeks, during which I learned much and was inspired to later write my first verse novel for children.
I also wrote 7,500 words of a YA novel while I was there, and workshopped some of it. The greatest surprise to me was when Alexandria LaFaye, the course leader, told me, "You write well but with not enough variety and style - look at the actual words and sentences you are using." So my next question was - how? How can you do that using a method that will then change and enhance your own writing?
As a class, we did some close reading, examining two pieces of writing, word by word. I have since researched this more and developed it into a method I use with my second year classes. But I also worked out a method of how to use it on my own writing, and do this also with classes. Each time, I test a piece of my own writing and am always very interested to see what comes out of it.
I'm reminded of all this by a post on a blog called Lit Agent X, where X lays out the common elements of bad writing, i.e. writing that is not yet publishable.
Go to http://raleva31.livejournal.com/ and have a look at the entry "Not ready for representation...?"
I plan to show this to my students, as it's a really good list of the kinds of stuff we see all the time, yet find it hard to "pin down". Although maybe that's because we see it over and over, and just haven't had the time to compile it as a list. Whereas this agent has offered information that cuts to the core of what is going wrong.
Thanks, Agent X!

Celebrity Picture Books

First Madonna, now Kylie. And this latest from Publishers Weekly (4/10/06):

'Terrell Owens, the troubled wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, is the latest celebrity to stamp his name on a book for children. BenBella Books, the four-year old independent publisher in Dallas, has scored his series, dubbed T.O.’s Time Out, and is crashing the first title, Little T Learns to Share, to reach stores on November 15, the height of football season.
Little T Learns to Share, which is co-authored by the television writer Courtney Parker, depicts the travails of Owens as a boy learning to share his new football with friends. The initial print run will be 10,000 copies, with a $20,000 publicity budget. IPG is distributing the book and handling publicity. "

I'm sorry, but Little T Learns to Share? In Australia, our version would have to be Big Famous AFL Footy Player Learns Not to Assault a Member of the General Public (Especially a Female).
All of you writers who've been told over and over not to write moralistic stories for kids? Obviously if you're famous, you get to tell anyone you like how to be a "good" person.
Hmm, it's Friday. You'd think I'd be in a better mood, wouldn't you?

Spring in the Australian Bush

Australian bush is mostly gum trees (in central Victoria, anyway). These photos are taken at Lancefield, about an hour north of Melbourne. Despite the green stuff, the government has just declared the bush fire season is off to an early start, and yesterday was our first total fire ban day.

The top photo shows you why gum trees suddenly keel over and land on stuff (including people) without warning. Inside the trunk, insects have been solidly at work. I could draw an analogy with writers in garrets, but I won't. Instead I have posted below about Voice.

When Your Voice Changes

Voice in fiction is a strange thing, almost nebulous. You hear editors say, 'I'm looking for a strong voice,' but they can't define exactly what it is. I've tried to define it in an article I wrote - needless to say the article is still in draft form because I'm not happy with what I came up with.
Some would say it's a combination of tone and style. Yep, OK. But it's deeper than that, I think. It brings in elements of the writer's own voice as well. Some writers deliberately change their voice in each work - others don't worry about it because it becomes part of how readers recognise them. And when you are writing in first person, in particular, how do you separate the narrator's voice from the voice of the writing? Can you?
Our obsession with first person these days both muddies the water and adds to the possibilities of what voice can do. What if you can't change your voice through style and tone? Can you change it via a different kind of narrator?
A novel gives you a lot of time and words to experiment with voice, and a lot of space in which to be inconsistent if you haven't nailed your character well enough. In short fiction and poetry, one story or poem can have a very distinctive voice. It's when you put a lot of them together that problems might arise. The following is a comment from a review of Cate Kennedy's new collection of short stories (Kennedy is well known here in Victoria, if nowhere else, for winning nearly every short story competition, including the Age twice, over a period of 2-3 years):

This is the problem with collections. Placed together, stories can rub together to create chemistry and a cumulative sense of ‘life’, but the risk is that their proximity can reveal shared flaws.

This is from a review by Delia Falconer which you can read at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Sept06/Falconer%20review.htm
You may be very accomplished at writing short fiction, but when a bunch of stories are read together, what can sometimes happen is a 'sameness' of voice emerges. In poetry, it tends to be a sameness of phrasing, chosen words, similar subject matter rehashed.
What originally led me to think about this was reading 'Just In Case' by Meg Rosoff this week. Like many others, I really liked her first novel 'How I Live Now'. In HILN, the point of view is first person and the story is being told by a narrator looking back. The language is often lovely in its descriptions, and emotion is created with a tight rein that makes it more effective. 'In 'Just In Case', however, Rosoff has apparently decided to change horses and gone for omniscient POV, moving between characters' thoughts and emotions yet always keeping the reader at arm's length. This may well have been a sensible choice, as the main character, Justin, dives into madness and first person POV could have been both smothering and unbelievable. But it left me feeling disgruntled with the book, quite distant from the characters and the story and often tempted to put it down and give up. I'll be interested to read reviews of it, especially after the first book was very positively reviewed by all except those who objected to the narrator having an affair with her first cousin!
A writer friend is currently struggling with the new Barry Maitland crime novel, quoting sentences which are truly awful to read, despite the precise punctuation (Question: how many clauses can a writer fit into one sentence and still make sense? A: depends - if you're Annie Proulx, as many as you like). I, on the other hand, found a Maitland I hadn't read in the library book sale for 50 cents, and thoroughly enjoyed it, up until the last thirty pages. Then the author seemed to suddenly decide he was short of a plot twist or two and piled in two more that seemed rather ludicrous, and then a character who proceeded to do the 'now, dear reader, here is the explanation of how it all happened'. Tsk tsk.

Talking Dialogue

Dialogue is one of those things that gets newer writers in a knot. "I can't write dialogue," they say. I don't get it. If you have ears and you can eavesdrop, you can begin to work on your dialogue. Eavesdropping tells you a few things - how people really speak (repetition, half-sentences, ums and ers, more 'likes' than you can poke a stick at, cliches, rambling) for one. So you learn not to write dialogue like this (no, not even if you have a mentally deranged character - readers will only put up with so much stylistic rubbish like that - get on with the story!) But you can get some great story ideas from those half-heard, half-unspoken conversations. The writer in you just fills in the gaps.
Listening to daytime soaps will also teach you about dialogue - how to be boring and repetitious and explain everything three times. That's the job of dialogue in soaps. It's not what you do on the page, because a reader who fell asleep and missed a bit can just flick back a couple of pages and read them again.
Watching movies with lots of silence in them - that's often very useful. Why? Because usually when there is some dialogue, it's packed with meaning and subtext.
Dialogue has a lot of jobs to do. I think that's why people freak out about it. It has to show character, provide information, move the story along, show emotion (so you don't need all those adverbial tags) and create action/reaction. And more. One way of looking at it is to think, Wow, dialogue is such a great tool. I can use it for all that stuff and I can avoid the dastardly disaster commonly known as [telling].
Why am I thinking about dialogue this week? Because this novel I'm playing with seems to have an awful lot of dialogue in it, and the suspicious, editorly part of me is shaking its head and saying, You need to watch that - remember how you complained about Jonathan Kellerman's last novel (Rage) because it told too much of the story through the characters chatting to each other?
Not to worry. I've run out of things to write for now, so I'm going to let that bit of fun and frivolity sit and contemplate its own toenails for a while. And go back to working on a rhyming picture book, just to make myself feel creative (not).
Finished Kathy Reichs (very enjoyable, apart from a bit at the end where the sheriff did a big explanation/info dump so us readers would know what happened - clunky). Am now reading "Fragrant Harbour" by John Lanchester. I've had it there for ages - lost under a pile of other stuff, like many things in my house - and suddenly found it the other day and thought Hong Kong! I have to read this. Because I am going back to HK in November to do more things with our new training business (writing and editing mainly) and would really like to know more about the history of the place.
How are my Mandarin lessons going? Very good (hen hao) thank you (xiexie). In last week's class I learned how to ask where the ladies' toilet is. And I know how to order two beers. Two vital sentences.
Maybe I should write my picture book in Mandarin. It might improve it.

Problem Child Novels

When do you abandon a novel, or a story, or a poem? A poem is easy to let go - and by let go I mean give up on it and put it away, probably forever. There are many poems that I write just for me. Sometimes they are warm-up poems - I might not have written any for a little while, and I need to write a couple of awful, cliched ones to get back into the language and the rhythms. Then I'll write one that I'm happy with, that I'll keep reworking.
Short stories take more time. Often with a story what I will have is a beginning, and the abandonment happens because I can never come up with the rest of it - the middle and the end - in a way that satisfies me. If you read enough short fiction, you come to see how much has been done before and I find now that unless I can create a story that feels different to me in some way, that is at least new for me, it won't hold my interest long enough to be completed and reworked.
The other problem story is the one that starts well, moves into the middle, then launches off into something that threatens to become a novel and I can't figure out how to rein it in. Or if I want to. That kind of story (I have one that's been sitting on my laptop for about six months now) becomes "I'll tackle that one tomorrow".
But what to do about the problem child novel? If it's not working because you don't care about it enough to wrestle through the problems, it's easy to put away and forget about.
It's when you've written six or eight drafts of it, the story still won't leave you alone, but you believe that you've done everything possible to fix whatever is wrong with it - and somehow it still is not working ... What then?
One solution is to put it away for a couple of years. Then read it and decide if it's worth another draft.
Another solution is to re-vision it - make it into something else entirely so you can see it with new eyes. This might mean changing from first to third person (or vice versa), changing the POV character, changing the genre, taking out the first three chapters and starting in the middle. What is sometimes needed is a huge shift in how the novel is going to work. A huge shift in the writer's own perception of it. Not always possible.
A novel contains a huge number of words, a huge investment of time. You look at the pile of pages and remember all the hundreds of hours you spent on it. How can it not be "right"? It must be, you think. It's just little things that another edit will fix.
But your heart and/or your gut tell you that it's something fundamental, something that maybe is not fixable. The voice is not convincing, the concept is laboured or boring or been done a million times before, the characters never really come to life. These are major problems. The kind that cause abandonment.
Hmmm, that all sounds very heavy and depressing for a Saturday morning.
On a lighter note, a writer friend and I have been discussing, via email, two stories recently published in the New Yorker. One is "Black Ice" by Cate Kennedy (an Australian short fiction writer whose first collection is just out) and the other is "Kansas" by Antonya Nelson. We've had opposite reactions to both stories! Email comments such as competent but not totally engaging, too much telling, characterisation too obvious, have been really interesting - and a good reminder of how everyone engages with stories in different ways. This often happens in class. A story can divide everyone down the middle, sometimes into hate and love!
I've just started the new Kathy Reichs novel, and am very relieved that she's moved away from the current obsession with religious artefacts and "what they really mean". Ergh. Wasn't the Da Vinci Code enough for anyone's lifetime?

What Else I Do

Ah, the holidays. Time to dust off the pile of books waiting to be read, put up my feet and read, read, read.
If only. In fact, I have been writing, but it's a letter to a planning officer about an application, and it's one of those things you have to psyche yourself up to, because it has to be diplomatic, direct yet polite, clear and concise - and all the while I just want to have a screaming hissy fit about it. But I guess that's one of the things that's good about being a writer - I can usually use words as my swords - the death of a thousand paper cuts. That's probably a cliche (two cliches, but who's counting?), but it fits.
I've also been finalising my tax (always a joy), and then having a little splurge at the wine supermarket to celebrate when all the icky, boring, stressful things are finished.
Writing? Yes. An adult novel. Just for a complete change. I have no expectations of it, I just like the main character, I have a good plot idea as a starting point (with a novel it's always just a starting point) and I am seeing where it might go. No pressure, just words when I feel like it. If I get stuck, I leave it alone for a while until a new idea emerges or the next scene develops in my head.
Unlike a certain other middle-grade novel of mine that a very kind, very experienced writer has just read for me and confirmed what I knew in my guts - start again.
But I have been reading - a book I have been meaning to get to for ages, ever since I heard its author, Kate Grenville, read it at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival. Only took me a year. It is as good as I thought when I heard her read an excerpt - "The Secret River". Of course, it's already won tons of prizes but that's not something that makes me want to read something urgently. It was the words I heard last August. Fabulous language, strong voice, great description. A historical novel that totally captures the time and the people.
I am also still thinking about the Elizabeth George novel I read last week - "What Came Before He Shot Her". It is not an Inspector Lynley novel, so at first I thought, Huh? But once I got into it, it was amazing. Such an eye-opener about life in London in North Kensington - if I ever get to London again, I'll make sure that's one place I avoid. When a book and its characters stay with you for weeks afterward ... what more can I say?