Working with Editors

This is a touchy subject. You're not allowed/supposed to criticise your editor out loud (or on a blog) because it's bad manners or bad form or plain bad karma. A well-known romance writer did it a couple of months ago and was criticised roundly for it. If she didn't like the way her publisher and editor were treating her, then she should have talked to them, not whined to the whole world (was the general opinion). There have been occasions where a writer doing this has ended up being dumped by their publisher, but I suspect that the public whinge was only the tip of the iceberg.

On Friday, I attended a day for teachers of Professional Writing & Editing in Victoria (well, actually I organised the darned thing too, which is why I have more grey hairs this week). These days are always wonderful, and we always say "Why don't we do it more often?" but it does take a lot to organise because people are teaching or committed to other work things. This time we had teachers from several hundred kilometres away who made the effort to attend, which was terrific.

Our guest speaker was a supervising editor from Lonely Planet (who, if you haven't heard of them, are one of the largest publishers of travel guides in the world, and they happen to have their head office quite close by). She was a great speaker, and talked all about what they look for in editors, what the application process is - it includes a very hard editing test - and how the company works. She also told us how to become a LP author, which sounded very enticing! But the two skills she emphasised for their editors were project management abilities and being able to have a good working relationship with the authors.

Our students are learning excellent project management skills - this year, they are publishing two collections of writing (Lizard magazine and the student anthology) and in my class, ten of them are creating their own book, magazine or website. They've had to work out a production plan and timeline, and they have deadlines that I give them big nudges about, to check they're up to speed. We're having a multi-launch in 3 weeks.

Working with authors is another skill that we work on with them, but are about to do a lot more in this area. There's a tendency to think the author-editor relationship is adversarial - the editor says Do this and the author has to defend herself. In some cases, it can be exactly like that, which is a great pity, because it often leads to a bad book. A too-defensive author can dig his heels in and become extremely difficult, and foster a reputation for it so that editors actively avoid working with him. On the other hand, an overly-pedantic editor can also be detrimental to a book, forcing changes that might adversely affect voice and style, if nothing else.

The same is true of an agent - many agents these days are expected to act as first editors for their clients, but I've heard of one agent who persuaded a client to rewrite, and then the publisher preferred the original version! It's tricky, there's no doubt about it. As authors, we spend hours and days and weeks and months and years on a book, and having someone pull it apart and tell us which bits aren't working can feel like they're ripping out our guts. But the bottom line is - once it leaves the cosy safety of your home and goes on a journey out into the real world of readers, editors and critics, it has to become the best book it can possibly be before it gets glued irrevocably into a glossy cover, ready for sale. If it's not your best, it won't survive. And maybe neither will you (bad reviews make people want to open veins).

Your editor should be your working buddy, the person who is on your side, the person who wants to help you make your book fantastic, and is probably the best person to see its weak spots. It's very likely you won't be able to! So cultivate your editor, work on the relationship from your side as well, and hopefully it will be constructive and inspiring. And if you have an editor you hate? Don't diss them in public. Don't even diss them to friends unless you trust them. Work on that book, and move on.

Collaboration

One of the most obvious forms of collaboration is the picture book, where one person writes the text and another illustrates it, although the usual situation is that the two don't meet, and the illustrator takes the text and interprets/illustrates with their own ideas. The editor is the go-between. There are famous collaborations in fiction - Nicci French and P.J. Tracy, for example (NF is a husband/wife team and PJT is a mother/daughter team) - where two people work together to write a novel. It's an interesting question. Who does what? Do they take turns writing chapters? Does one create the plot and the other write the words?

My writing group has been working on a novella together. It started as maybe a long short story, is now sitting on around 33,000 words and will probably end up about 50,000 words, the rate we're going. Or more. We originally thought we'd do it as a different way to create a group anthology (the Victorian FAW has a yearly award for writing group anthology), but the characters and story have kind of taken off, and we are having a load of fun.

First step was to come up with a situation that could involve a number of characters, and put them in conflict with each other. We settled on a family funeral (like weddings and Christmas, these occasions bring out the worst in some people). Each of us writes one of the characters, in first person, and there are some other characters who appear in the story too but don't have their own voices.

The best part is the plotting. We sit around the table and throw ideas around about what might happen next. What will X do? Why is Y behaving like that? What will happen when Z finds out the truth about ...? Having plotted out the next few scenes and decided from whose point of view each scene will be shown, we go away and write, then bring back our bits and read them out. Often our characters will throw in something new (that just came out of nowhere in the writing!) which makes everyone else say, "Wow, that's great, that takes it in another direction. Now, how about ..." And we start the next round of plotting.

Some characters are behaving badly and so the feedback might be, "You need to show why he's doing that", or "Your character has been observing - now she needs to act and stir up trouble". We've introduced an unexpected romance, and someone else who thought they were in love is about to realise they were wrong. Other characters are getting desperate, or looking for reconciliation. It's all inspiring and energising, and feeds into our other writing as well.

What will we do with it? Well, we are over the word limit for the award so we'll rethink that, but probably we'll make it into a book and print enough copies so we can all have one each and some for interested friends and family. We're not expecting it to be published commercially - it's going to be too short, for one thing. But mostly we're going to continue having lots of fun!

Hollywood, Why Do You Bother?

I've just been to see The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and found it very disappointing. It's one of those movies where they've tried really hard but it hasn't worked. The warning signs were in the first few minutes, where we are shown various things to ensure we know this is an American family in the depths of England (this is not in the book) - the flashing around of iPods and mobile phones was weird, and they're not seen again. The main actor has been to the Daniel Radcliffe School of Acting (show all emotion with wide eyes and slightly open mouth), and he's fourteen. In the book, Will is eleven, and that age is significant.

There are other things I won't go into - suffice to say that the movie felt insubstantial, and tried to make up for it with special effects and scary music. Instead of recreating the feel of ancient England's steady encroachment on the present, the movie seems to try to stay in 2007 and then jump suddenly into sets that look like leftovers from a 1950s horror movie. I remember the books as having depth and real creepy suspense. In the book The Dark is Rising, for example, there is another character called the Walker, who appears as a dirty old tramp. He creates tension for Will right from the beginning. He's not in the movie. I'm now going to go back and read the books again - I'd resisted until I'd seen the movie - and am starting with the first one, Over Sea, Under Stone, which has entirely different characters.

It's strange how a book can affect you so strongly, and then the movie is so shallow. I thought the same about The Bridge to Terabithia, that the fantasy element they introduced wasn't necessary. Maybe there are just some books that will never translate to the screen and evoke the same emotion that you have when you read them. It's something I talk about with writer friends now and then - is it better to have read the book first or seen the movie first? Because I hate knowing the ending, I prefer to read the book because then all the anticipation is still there. If I see the movie later, it doesn't bother me so much to know how it ends if the journey is interesting.

I only re-read books when I've forgotten how they end! Or if I am looking at something in particular, such as dialogue or setting. I rarely watch a movie more than once, unless I've forgotten how that ends too. But I know a couple of people who, once they've read the first few chapters of a book, will read the ending before they continue. Maybe that's why I love poetry - it's not about the ending. And I can read a poem many times and see more things in it each time. My husband says that's why he watches movies several times, because he sees new things. Just as we all like different kinds of books and movies, we also seem to get different experiences from them.

My Block and Your Block

Writers talk a lot about writer's block. How you get it, how you get over it, what it means (deep down), whether it's about fear or laziness or trauma, who's had it the longest, which famous writers have suffered from it... but really, for every writer, their block is their own. No one's is ever like anyone else's. If you really want to write, but you can't, it can be hell. You sit at your desk and nothing happens. Mostly, you don't sit at your desk if you can avoid it, because then you really know nothing is happening, whereas if you are busy doing chores or school work or housework, you don't have to admit you're blocked. You're just very busy.

Writers who are gaily writing pages and pages of stuff heap scorn (even if only privately) on writers who say they are suffering writer's block. "Just write anything" is common advice. "Free writing works" is another, because if you're free writing, even if it's awful, you are at least writing. There's a belief among some people that there is no such thing as writer's block. If you are a writer, then you write. If you have a book due on 31 December, then you write. If you have two articles due next week, then you write. Writer's block? Rubbish!

To some extent, this is true. If you are a writer, then you write. Do you hear of plumbers having plumber's block? "No, I'm sorry, Mrs J, I can't fix your toilet today. I have plumber's block. Can't tell you when I'll get over it. You know how it is." My own theory is that it often has to do with confidence. Writer's block is not about not being able to write - after all, you only need to pick up the pen and start scribbling and technically you are writing. Writer's block is about believing you can't write. And that's a whole different issue.

What does can't mean? It may mean "I can't write anything good so I might as well not try." It may mean "Everyone rejects what I write so I may as well give up." Plus some of these: "I never have any original ideas", "My husband/mother/teacher says I'm not a good writer", "I sit down to write and my mind goes blank", "I try to write but only garbage comes out". None of these are actually about writing, they're about what the writer thinks their writing should be.

It should be (pick one or any): brilliant, publishable, approved of by everyone I know, inspired, full of wonderful language, totally original, perfect, prize-winning, exhilarating. The truth is that none of these things occur in a first draft. On rare occasions, you might get close. Those almost-perfect first drafts are a gift to be treasured, but not to be constantly emulated. It's not possible. The more you expect that your writing will be wonderful and perfect and amazing in the first draft, the more you are setting yourself up for disappointment and disillusionment, and yes, probably a case of block at some point.

The one thing I've learned over the years is to keep writing. It's why I often do the writing exercises that I set for my classes. This year, along with my Poetry 2 students, I've written about 100 poems. Many in class, more outside of class because I'm "in the habit". But I have to admit that over the mid-semester break, apart from poems, I did very little writing. And I realised that the reason was I was waiting to start a new novel. I'm not quite ready yet, so I wrote nothing else, despite the fact that I have other projects to work on, or rewriting to do. I just plain avoided it because I was waiting for the perfect moment to begin.

There is no perfect moment, except for right now.

Put Your Eyes Back

On my friend's blog (Speculating about Fiction - link to the right), she has been talking about a few grammar things that bug her, where people use the wrong words without checking their meaning. I've mentioned some here in the past, such as I thought to myself - unless you're writing about someone with telepathic powers, who else would you think to?

But I have recently noticed a physical tag that is absolutely being done to death. It's in everything I read, not just YA, and it's starting to annoy me big-time. It's the eye rolling thing. OK, it can be hard to show emotion, especially sarcasm or exasperation, rather than telling - it's the rule we have hammered into us, over and over. Show, don't tell. But I'm here to tell you - stop the eye rolling!

I've just finished Kathy Reichs' new book Bones to Ashes, and if Tempe Brennan rolls her eyes one more time, they'll pop right out of her head and disappear under the bone table. Next day, I'm reading a feature article in the weekend newspaper and someone starts eye rolling in that too. Is nothing free of the eye rolling phenomena? Is this a new disease that no one told us about? Or have writers everywhere slipped into using it without realising it's about to become a huge, fat, horrible CLICHE?

What They Said

The other night, on the ABC, there was an interview with Yvonne Kenny, who is a famous Australian opera singer. When asked about her early life, especially when she was first starting out trying to be a singer and win roles in operas, she said the family would often ask her when she was going to get a "proper job". It's only now, after many years of being a professional singer, performing all over the world, that she seems to be able to look back on her accomplishments and laugh, and say, "See? I followed my dream."

I've talked to several writers about what drives us to write. Or more usually, what drives us to write for publication. Anyone can write journals or diaries or poems to amuse themselves, but there comes a point where you step over the line and start sending your work out. For many, the first few rejections are enough to stop them. For some, it proves to them that it was "only a silly idea" and they go off and do something else. I often warn students that once they graduate from the course, they are on their own, and that's a hard thing to come to terms with. No more deadlines, no more feedback or workshopping - quite a few now form their own writing groups.

Sometimes writers say they want to be published to be validated in some way, and it's amazing how much of that "validation" is about family - whether it's mother, father, sister, or someone along the way (often a teacher at school) who has poured scorn on the desire or the dream. Getting published is a great way to say "Now you can go and get ***". Sometimes the validation is simply about self-worth, and with publishing being the way it is these days, that's a rocky path to tread.

Lots of new writers that I meet have trouble with the idea that publishing is a business. They point to people like Raymond Carver, who had an editor who helped to shape his early work, or someone like Frank McCourt, who wrote about his terrible childhood and made a million from it. But Carver and McCourt aren't famous because a publisher thought their book was "worthy". They're famous because they wrote something so good that people would pay money to own a copy and read it.

When I was a kid, I was, of course, extremely well-behaved and quiet (not). My mother's favourite saying, when I got too much for her, was, "Stop creating!". (Mother translation: stop carrying on or you'll get a thick ear.) My mother is no longer around to tell me to stop anything, but she was a voracious reader, and a writer of diaries, and I can't help wondering sometimes if she was still alive, what she'd think of me now. Stop creating? Not likely, Mum.

Final Edits (the hate phase)

Rewriting is vital - we all acknowledge this, even those who resist it. It would be wonderful if every piece of writing came out perfect first time, but that rarely happens, and with a novel, probably never. Some writers revise as they go, working backwards and forwards, not creating the next pages of new words until they're happy with what's already there. Others (like me) prefer to finish the whole draft before beginning the rewrites.

There are some novels that I have completely rewritten two or three times - by this, I mean putting the draft aside and starting again from scratch, without referring to the earlier version at all. Some novels demand this - they demand that you re-vision the whole thing, not just fix bits of it. Usually I am cutting as well as rewriting. I say too much, too obviously. But I'm also adding - deepening character, motivation and description. I hate the idea of padding though, so anything added has to be necessary.

Past all of that, you eventually reach the final editing stage, the nit-picking stage. At this point, I read and re-read, looking for anything that niggles. If it niggles, if it stops me reading, even if I'm not sure why, I mark it and come back later to rework. The nit-picking is important, but it drives me crazy. My own words all start to sound ridiculous, overblown or pathetic. I keep thinking - who is going to want to read this rubbish? But I keep going with it, knowing it only takes one clunky sentence or wrong word to pull the reader out of the story.

Finally, I hate the story with a passion. I never want to see it again. I believe if the editor asks me to change one more thing, I'll run off screaming, never to be seen again (but I don't - I do what is asked, if it's right). Sometimes people ask me if I read my books again after they've been published, and apart from reading them to kids on school visits, the answer is no. Why on earth would I want to do that? But I also avoid it because it's almost inevitable that I'll see something that I missed, that I wish I could change. Too late now!

Give the Eyes a Rest

Today I drove about an hour out of Melbourne to Lancefield (I spent several hours looking at a large range of native plants, including several orchids and lilies - tiny ones - and learning how to identify weeds) and had to take a photo of the canola. Several farmers have planted vast fields of it and at this time of year, when it flowers, the vivid yellow is startling. I love coming upon a paddock of it around a corner, like this one, and being bowled over by the colour.

No writing today. Three hours of trekking through the bush was fun and was fascinating. I came home to look up exactly what a bandicoot looks like! (in case I see a live one) And I did stop off in a local cafe for lunch and sat quietly, working on my current rewrite. And I resisted entering the new local bookshop across the street - but I can recommend it. Red Door Books in Lancefield. Don't miss it if you're up that way! But after staying up until 11pm last night to finish The Off Season, my eyes are stinging and I need an early night.

Besides, I've been invited to a Trivia Night on Friday, where the trivia topic is pirates. I have to get plenty of rest...

True Beginnings

The mid-semester break is allowing me to wade my way through the pile of books I've been saving, and I'm getting down to some that have been sitting there for several months. I bought quite a few books in Tucson because, well, they were cheap! Something that I'd pay $18 for here in Australia, I could buy in the US for half that price, or less. Writing books are particularly expensive here, and not just because many of them are hardbacks. T and I were looking at one the other day that was $49.95, and many paperbacks are $35-45.

At the moment, I'm writing material for a new unit called Story Structure, and was attempting to create some intelligent, clear thoughts on how to write a good beginning. I remembered a Tucson purchase that I'd skimmed, but hadn't got around to reading properly. Hooked by Les Edgerton, which is all about beginnings. You might ask, how do you write a whole book on beginnings? But Les E. makes a very good point: a story with a great beginning very often signals that the rest of it will be worth reading. If someone doesn't understand how to start a story effectively, then the rest of it hasn't got much hope.

This may sound harsh. I've heard many writers complain about editors who admit they only read the first 2-3 pages. How can you possibly judge how good the novel will be if you only read 3 pages? You can. Totally and absolutely, you can. You may not be able to judge how the character will change and grow, if the plot will work (that's what the synopsis is for) or if the ending pans out, but 3 pages is enough to gauge if a writer has what it takes to write a terrific novel. A competent, pretty good novel doesn't cut it these days.

Les E. also talks about writing courses that teach students how to write in bits (character, setting, dialogue, etc) and yes, we do this. But we also do Story Structure - how to put the whole thing together. How to plot and outline. I make students write an outline or synopsis. It's the most hated assignment in a novel writing class, and the one that I get the most feedback on (in terms of "I didn't want to do it but I am so glad you made me because ...").

But back to beginnings. Les E. says, "A good quality story beginning is a microcosm of the work entire. If you capture the right beginning, you've written a small version of the whole." I'm not sure I agree with that 100%, but I have to say that in two semesters of a novel writing class, 97% of students don't end up writing more than 4-5 chapters. There are many reasons why, including workload in other subjects, and discovering the novel they started isn't the novel they want to spend 3 or more years on. So to approach those first chapters, or even Chapter One, in terms of it being a microcosm for the whole novel ... that's worth thinking more about.

What I won't think any further on, because it was so pathetic, was England's performance in the Rugby World Cup against Tonga. If all they can do is rely on JW's field goals and sneaky tries ... I'll be quiet now.

Writers and Language

In my previous post, I went on quite a bit about writers (or writers aspiring to publication, i.e. our students) and how they need to be able to use the English language properly, including correct punctuation. It's a funny thing, but there are always students who insist, either openly or with quiet mutterings, that punctuation isn't that important, and the "brilliance" of their story and their writing will overcome any silly prejudices that an editor might have about the grammar stuff. And no matter what you say, they don't believe you.

So here it is from the horse's mouth! Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe Publications has a blog on their site, and his latest post talks about unsolicited manuscripts and how they deal with them. This excerpt is part of how they read what comes in:

"Second, once we’ve asked for sample material, we pay careful attention to the covering note and to the quality of the writing of the sample chapters, as well as to the content. Just as individuals notice and respond to body language when meeting somebody for the first time, an editor will immediately register how language is used by a new author. Punctuation, syntax, grammar, and tone all tell a story, for better or worse."

They sure do. Usually, bad punctuation makes a piece of writing simply unreadable. Those commas and fullstops control flow and sense - if I can't understand what a sentence is saying, how can I become truly involved in the story? I recently gave a talk on Plain English to a group of professional credit managers, and what interested me was that clearly some of them had never thought about their "audience" and whether that audience clearly understood what was being conveyed in their letters and notices. In some ways, there's not that much difference between wanting someone to pay their bill, and wanting someone to enjoy your story. You have to tell it to them in a way that is clear and engaging.

Can Creative Writing be Taught?

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked this question (and $10 for every time there's been a newspaper or magazine/journal article about it) I could retire. Of course, as someone who teaches creative writing myself, in a Diploma level course, I'm going to say Yes, it can be taught. I wouldn't be doing this job if I didn't believe that. But there are always going to be arguments. I have a quote on my desk that says something like "A creative writing course can't teach someone how to write, but it can teach someone how not to write." To me, that's step 1.

We select students for our course. That means we read their folio of writing pieces, we make them sit a grammar and punctuation test (because we've discovered the hard way that someone who has no grasp of how to use the language will fail our course, and we do fail people, especially in the editing subjects, but it affects every subject they do), we make them do more writing after the test, and then we interview them. Does that make it sound hard to get in? It is. We have 25 full-time places, and we get about 120 applicants. So to be offered a full-time place, you have to show some kind of talent, a good grasp of the English language and a commitment to writing and reading.

I say "a good grasp of the English language" because far too many applicants coming out of Year 12 in high school have appalling grammar and punctuation skills. So we can't and don't expect applicants to be perfect in that area - that's why they have to do a whole year of grammar, punctuation and sentence construction, plus some editing. And why a commitment to writing and reading? Because if you want to be a writer and you aren't writing on a regular basis (even a journal) and you don't read, you're not on the right track. Maybe you should be something else.

So if step 1 is teaching people how not to write, what is the rest of it about? Teaching them to read like writers is step 2 for me. Asking 'what is this writer doing? how are they doing it? what can I learn from it?' is a huge, ongoing learning process. I'm still doing it myself after 20 years of writing and publishing, and I expect to be doing it forever. I want my students to do it too. We teachers aren't going to be at their shoulders after the course is finished.

Step 3 is writing. Lots. Not just the novel, or a short story or two, or a picture book or two. Writing every day. Writing many things. Writing in different styles. Writing background material and backstory in order to create a work that has depth and complexity. Writing poetry to increase language skills and appreciation. Writing scripts to improve dialogue (or if you want to write scripts, writing character backstory to improve how your characters speak). Writing to deadlines, because why shouldn't you learn to write under pressure? And editors expect you to meet deadlines in the real world. Creating your own deadlines and making writing contracts with yourself, so that you are writing thousands of words every month.

Step 4 is revision. Not just a little polishing and editing, but re-visioning the whole work, if it needs it. Learning how to 'see' your own work with a critical eye. In the course, we do a lot of workshopping and critiquing. In first year, everyone is more tentative, more fragile, and the teachers are firm but encouraging. In second year, I'm tough, and I expect everyone to toughen up. I'm not mean and nasty (and neither is anyone else allowed to be) but if something is not working, then the writer needs to address it fully and rethink what they're trying to achieve. Fiddling around the edges and changing half a dozen words very often is pointless. I try to teach students to be brave about their rewriting, and also to be tough on themselves. Many stories only truly find their full potential through the re-visioning process.

There are other things we teach - mostly to do with craft and how to write better, how to develop aspects you are weak in, how to outline and plot so your novel doesn't fall in a hole - but what we also teach is the industry. How publishing works, how books get accepted, what happens next, what marketing is all about, how to market yourself, how to be professional at all times. And how to stay motivated and set goals.
And after this long post, I still feel like there are a million more things I could say about what we teach in our course, but I'll stop here.

Reading Gluttony

It's mid-semester break, and I admit to several sneaky visits to bookstores and BigW to stock up on holiday reading. The pile grew and I did wonder guiltily if I'd overdone it, then Friday arrived and I grabbed the "most wanted" first - Exit Music by Ian Rankin. Maybe I was suffering from immersal-reading deprivation (also known as "sinking totally into a book and forgetting the real world exists" deprivation) but I thought this was one of the best Rebus books I'd read in a while. It did occur to me that there weren't that many murders, and the story was more strongly character-based so maybe that was why I enjoyed it so much. Not that I'm averse to blood and guts...

It's Rebus's last week on the force, with retirement looming and no idea of how he might fill the years ahead, so he makes plenty of trouble for himself and others in his remaining days. My friend G and I talked about how some characters in crime novels (especially series) don't undergo great change, at least not in the character arc/growth/revelation kind of way. What we enjoy is recognising when they're being themselves in spite of opportunities to change! Who wants Rebus to undergo character rehabilitation at the end? Not me.

The next book I picked up was Lost It, a YA novel by Kristen Tracy. This was a book that I picked up in the US and hadn't got around to reading for a while, so I think I bought it because it seemed to offer a humorous view of a girl losing her virginity. It doesn't really. It does that thing where the big moment (losing it) happens near the beginning of the book, and I think any story that does this has to work really well in other ways to create tension and anticipation in the reader. This didn't quite do it for me, and a lot of the humour fell flat because I think the main character is meant to be naive and also confused about her crazy parents, but often she comes across as just plain stupid. As I loathe Kath and Kim for that very thing (concentrated, incessant stupidity), I guess it was never going to be my kind of book. (Sorry, all you K&K fans, but I'm a Cheers kind of girl!)

So now I've launched into Mark Billingham's new book, and I noticed yesterday that Val McDermid has a new one out... The holidays just won't be long enough.

Black Holes in the Mail Universe

Once upon a time, mail delivery was a ritual. The postman with his bike and whistle, the big red post boxes, the letters that went all the way around the world on a boat... I still can't get over the way postmen in the UK actually push your mail through the letter slot in your front door! (Maybe that doesn't happen any more?)

Then more and more people used mail for other things, like trying to sell you stuff, and advertising things you didn't want, and sending a million Christmas cards. The postal service suffered overload and efficiency went down. Or did it? Maybe we just expected too much. Letters were lost. Parcels went astray. But not always. I still remember a birthday present my grandmother sent to me in Sydney years ago - in the days when I moved around a bit - and I think it went back and forth across the Tasman Sea four times before I finally got it, covered in crossed out addresses and new attempts to find me.

I live in an area that seems to have a sub-post office. This means that if someone in the delivery area is running late (most days), my area has to wait for the next day. I complained. Huh! I've got used to receiving things a day later than everyone else. But my postman has been on the job for years, so wrongly-addressed letters often still get to me. The thing is - letters still go astray, even important letters. A few years ago, I sent 150 pages of a manuscript that I'd edited back to a writer friend. Admittedly, she was in Queensland at the time, but at a legitimate address. She never received it. Recently, an edited manuscript sent to me never arrived. Where on earth do these things go? It's not as if they're in small envelopes!

But woe is you if you think email is any better. By my estimates, at least 3% of my emails either never reach their destination, or I never receive those destined for me. When it's someone asking if I've read a review in the weekend paper, I'm not likely to notice. But there have been significant occasions in the past year where I have not received important emails (telling me something has been accepted for publication, for instance - calamity!), and also where my emails have not reached people at crucial times.

Ticking the Receipt Requested box on my email doesn't work. Most people I know ignore this. The only way to solve it is to ask the person, in my actual email, to send me back a quick Yes to say they received it. And hope they do.
Why am I rabbitting on about this? Simply because a number of US publishers have now decided that they will only respond to your submission if they are interested in reading more or offering publication. Zap!

Now that would be an entirely fair and reasonable way to go about dealing with the slush pile. Except ... how would you know if they received your submission in the first place? Delivery of snail mail or email is not 100% certain. By my calculations, not even 98% certain. It's a quandary indeed. All we writers can do is persevere, and hope Australia Post and the US Postal Service do the same.

More to POV than 1,2,3

In wrestling with a rewrite this week, I had to think long and hard about why my character behaves the way she does. Because I had to explain it to someone else, and I also think I'm going to write it all down for myself. I know it inside my head, but inevitably writing it out on paper helps to clarify and identify inconsistencies. I've heard many students explain their character actions by saying, "That's just what she's like, that's all!". When that is justification for why a character can be a snivelling wreck one minute and then launch into battle the next, I'm never convinced.

Why does a person hold everyone at arm's length? Why do they hate dogs? Why do they love their grandma but hate their mother? Why can't they drive a car? Why does the scent of roses make them sick? Why do they misbehave in class? Why, why, why? The answers to these questions always lie in their backstory, all the things that happened to them before your story started. The answers also lie within personality. Some people don't drive cars because they are committed greenies, some because they were too lazy to study for a licence and had Mum and Dad to drive them everywhere, some because they were in a bad car accident and are now too afraid to drive. How a person reacts to bad things also will determine future behaviour.

As a writer, concocting this person and trying to make them real, you have to know all of this. It ultimately influences point of view more than anything else. Simple POV is about whether you tell the story in 1st or 3rd person. Real POV is about how your point-of-view character sees the world, the particular attitude they have to themselves and the world around them, and how/why that attitude developed. How does a person become so lazy that they can't even be bothered to get a car licence? What has happened to make a person hate their mother? What makes one man a master at fixing small machines and another a poet?

So this is my task today - to fully explain to myself (first) who my character is at the beginning of my story and how she got that way. What has happened to her in the last 8 years or so to make her the way she is now? What happens in my story will change her too, as it will in any good story. Change and growth in our characters are two key things that will keep readers caring about them and wanting to know what happens next. It's in my head - now it needs to be on paper.

No Child Left Behind

Over the past five years, on my visits to the US (and in between), I've met a lot of people who are either school teachers or have friends or family who are school teachers. So I've heard a lot about No Child Left Behind. And it's all been bad. I've listened to dedicated teachers who say they are no longer allowed to read aloud to kids in the classroom. That reading books is bottom of the list of activities. That inspectors come into classrooms and check up on what the teacher is teaching. That the school curriculum is now designed to train kids to pass tests, so the school can get their funding. That some desperate teachers try to find ways to "fudge" the test results. That lots of great teachers are giving up in despair and finding other jobs.

When our Prime Minister started spouting about bringing in something similar here in Australia, my blood began to boil. If you don't know what NCLB is about, do some research. You think you hated school when you were a kid - try being a poor kid in a poor school coping with NCLB. And if you want to read about a dedicated educator in the US who is doing his damnedest to make a difference (Congress is due to review NCLB soon), then read his blog. I tried to read the comments on his post and had to give up because so many of them were either off the point or downright stupid.

Proof Reading - Perfection (almost) Impossible

Tonight in Poetry 2 we read a long poem from Blue Dog magazine - an interesting poem that I wanted to use as the basis of a writing exercise. I was surprised to note several errors in the poem, and wondered where they came from. Did the editors of the journal use the poet's electronic file and not check it before going to print? Did they typeset it from hard copy and introduce errors? I've never met a poet yet who didn't have either a quiet or very loud hissy fit over typos in their poems. When The Age prints a poem with an error, they republish the whole poem.

As editors of Poetrix, we often come across errors in contributors' poems. No matter how closely poets read their poems before sending them in, errors creep in. We are our own worst proof readers. Sometimes the editorial committee debate about a word - was it an mistake, or did the poet really mean to use this strange word? An example is using gripe when they meant grip. If we're not sure, we try to contact the poet and double-check what they actually meant to say.

We've had the occasional poet who has used terrible punctuation, and insisted on keeping it that way, even when we point out that it detracts from the poem. (To be honest, a really badly punctuated poem usually gets rejected - a poet needs to pay as much attention to punctuation as line breaks, stanza breaks and white space.) We use our style guide for formatting (e.g. we use M rules instead of dashes) and the Macquarie Dictionary for many of our decisions about spelling.

The worst issue was one where we tried to scan the contributors' poems to save typesetting, which introduced so many mistakes that it ended up taking longer to fix everything! We try really hard to produce each issue with NO errors at all, and I think so far we have succeeded. It helps to have five proof readers. I still remember a writer years ago whose children's book came out with a blurb where heroine was spelt heroin. Oh dear. And our guest speaker yesterday (K.S. Nikakis, talking about the publication of her first fantasy novel The Whisper of Leaves) said when she got her first copy of the published book, the very first page she opened it at contained an error. But she wouldn't tell us where it was!

Aha, But Do You Love Your Villains Too?

Good question. If we don't "love" our villains, how can we make them into real people? Fantasy writers are prone to working the good vs evil idea, with the evil being incarnated as evil wizard, evil overlord, evil dwarf, evil something-that-is-only-represented-by-a-picture-like-an-eye, etc. (There's a whole web page devoted to Fantasy/SF Turkeys to avoid.) But character motivation is as important for the villains as it is for your hero. Perhaps even more so, because the whole story arc of a hero/villain scenario is surely that until the last moment, the villain is winning. If not, the story is over. Hero 1, Villain 0. Done and dusted.

Why would someone want to rule the world? Why would someone want all the money, or all the magic, or all the girls, or all the ... whatever? If that desire is not concrete, if it's not understandable, if it's not believable - then you end up with a cardboard villain, and no real conflict in the story.

OK, so I'll use the Deaver example again. Villain is a people smuggler from China, ruthless, with a lot of contacts that he's paid for, either with money or threats. He's also very intelligent, and street-smart. He has that sixth sense about danger. He can think on his feet. He is a strong foe, almost unbeatable. He also has a history - a family of parents and brother who were killed during the Mao revolution - and a driving thirst for revenge. No one gets away with anything with this guy, no matter who they are. He will pursue those he wants to kill with everything he's got. So we have desire, motivation and intelligence. Hard to beat in a villain, really!

This is the other side of putting your most-loved characters in danger - having a villain who is not only ruthless enough to fight to the end (and hey - this is true even when you're writing a YA novel about girls competing for the same guy), but with enough layers and complexity so that the reader understands where that villain is coming from and feels, despite themselves, a little bit of pity or empathy. Now you've got a conflict that's cooking, not just for you, but also for your reader.

When is real life ever one-dimensional? When is it simple? You lie about who took the last piece of chocolate layer cake - it was you. Why do you lie? Not because you're evil (well, your kids might think so!) but because you are on a diet and feeling deprived, because you couldn't stop yourself (even though you've been preaching self-control and sharing), because you were pissed off with them not tidying their rooms like you asked, because you cooked it, and darn it, why shouldn't the last piece be yours? Lots of reasons. That's what everyone in this world is like. Mixed feelings. Mixed motivations, all at once. That's how you start to create believable characters and villains, and then you zero in on that one driving force that overrides everything else. And your story is born.

Loving Your Characters 2

The second biggest problem with loving your characters too much is that you find it hard to make bad things happen to them. I'm forever telling students - raise the stakes! Make your character suffer. Sometimes we do an exercise where I get them to write down the absolute worst thing that could happen to their main character, other than death. They do as I ask, and come up with assault, bankruptcy, betrayal, severe injuries, etc. Then I tell them that they have to try to make that terrible thing happen to the character in their story.

They are usually horrified. And try to find all kinds of reasons why that wouldn't be possible. In fact, for one or two, the catastrophe wouldn't be possible, but for more than 90% it is not only possible but it would give their story the drama and conflict it often needs. I don't force them to do this, of course, but I want to at least raise the idea and let them think about it.

I have the same problem. Many of us do. Our characters cruise too easily through their lives, and the result is low tension levels and a reader who says "so what?" In a middle grade novel I've been rewriting again, one of the things I've struggled with is the knowledge that I don't love my main character. I like her, I like writing about her, but I don't love her. It's caused me problems in terms of moving her close to the reader, and feeling as if I am inside her head (mostly solved by moving into first person), but as it's a suspense/mystery story, I've had no trouble putting her in danger and injuring her!

One of the things I liked in the Deaver novel I read recently (where the main character is Lincoln Rhyme, the paraplegic investigator) was the way in which the other major character, Sachs, was tricked and nearly died as a result. Rhyme's ability to analyse the information in connected crimes saved her. Right up to the last minute, I thought that this time she would die, and this was because the villain seemed invincible. That's the other side of tension - a truly dangerous foe, not a cartoon baddie.

Do You Love Your Characters?

I read an interesting post this morning (while trundling around the net, procrastinating about marking assignments) that talked about "liking" and enjoying your characters, especially your viewpoint/main character, rather than being "in love" with them. The writer said she thought being in love with your character can blind you to how you are writing about them - you might be having a wonderful time, getting them to do all sorts of enjoyable things in the story, but actually end up writing drivel. In other words, fun for you but what about the poor reader?

It's an interesting thought. How often are we told we must love our main character, know them inside out, want to tell their story, etc etc. Writers talk about how the characters "just took over the story and I had no control over them", and that certainly does happen, but I do believe your subconscious comes into play at that point. Your own suspension of disbelief (i.e. these are not real people) allows you to fully engage in what is possible for them. If you hold the characters at arms-length and manipulate them on the page, the "taking over" is not possible.

For me, the idea that being in love with your character can blind you to bad writing rings true. When I know a character well, but am not in love with them, I can see their flaws as well as their good points. I also like writing in order to find out more about them. Sometimes this happens in the novel, but often it happens in the extra writing. If I feel I'm not getting to grips with a character well enough, I'll free write about them, ask them questions, let them answer in their own voice. Free writing unlocks the subconscious element of character creation far better than the actual novel does, because you are not constrained by story. And it's the subconscious part that reveals things about the character that you didn't know you knew.

OK, so all this subconscious stuff sounds weird, or at least a bit suspicious. Try it for yourself. Free write a scene where you sit behind a desk and your character enters the room and sits on the other side. Ask them questions, and then free write their answers. The key is in the free writing - you do it fast, without stopping, without editing, and you keep going for at least twenty minutes. If you've never tried free writing before, make sure you stick to the rules. If you want to know more about it, Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg is a great book.

The End of the Week

It's been a long week. And today, Friday, has been "anxious day". After 3 days in a training course, I now have a long list of things to catch up on, things to do, payments to make, assignments to mark, cats to kick (oops, didn't mean that, but if they don't stop bugging me for food ... grocery shopping is on the catch-up list). I hate feeling like this because what it does, more than anything, is stop me writing. I get so twitchy about THE LIST that writing drops right to the bottom of it. But nevertheless, a major item was a final little polish on a manuscript that I was supposed to email to an editor, so I made it the priority. And it's done. And I feel better now.

I've mentioned Clive James here before - he seems to be the most quotable person around at the moment. His latest quote was about critics. He was actually quoting Miles Davis, who said, "If I don't like what they say, I climb into my Ferrari and drive away." Obviously Mr Davis can afford a Ferrari, as probably can Mr James. I tend to imagine climbing into our old Holden Ute, cranking over the engine a few times, despairing at its failure to fire, finally getting it going and then hitting the gatepost on my way out of the driveway. Doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

A few months ago, I added a couple of new blogs to my regular reading (I had to, since Miss Snark retired), and one is Paperback Writer, aka Lynn Viehl. She has a great blog with lots of extras - in particular, links to useful free software for writers - but she also runs a few competitions. The kind where you can post a comment and be in the hat for a prize. I was lucky to win a book a few weeks ago, and even luckier when she said it was no problem to post it OS to me. I have dipped into several times already, and it's a goodie. "The New Writer's Handbook" edited by Philip Martin (Scarletta Press). It even has poems in it, and the piece on how many writers does it take to change a lightbulb is funny. The book is a combination of how-to-craft and how-to-keep-going articles, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

I also like A Newbie's Guide to Publishing by J.A. Konrath. He's posted some interesting stuff recently (and before that too) about branding and marketing, from the point of view of someone who's tried all kinds of things. His posts are straightforward, no-nonsense, and very informative.

The internet often leads you places you hadn't quite expected to go. I thought I'd see if my old high school in New Zealand has a website, and it does, but it also has a link to one of those sites where you can find old schoolfriends. So I took a look. It was fascinating, because all the people I had expected to be on a site like that, weren't, and a number of people I never would have thought would sign up, had. My school is having a 50 year reunion in 2008. That is a scary thought.