Writing | Writing Fiction

16January2013

New year, new plans. They clash.

January 16, 2013Leave a comment

The last new year’s resolution I made was not to make resolutions I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep. That was over ten years ago: I don’t make resolutions anymore. I do make plans, though. This year, I have a lot to do. We want to move and have written a list of what we need to do before we can sell or rent the flat. It’s a long, long list and we want to do the work ourselves to save money. A glorious, airy new place that is, most importantly, in a completely different area. The current estimate suggests that we need to put in 30 man days to get the priority 1 items done. We’re going to be very busy over the next three or four months.

When I’m busy doing all that stuff – what is sugar soap, anyway? – I won’t be writing or reading. That’s a problem. I don’t want to take three months off writing when I know that August and June (or whichever month ends up hosting my summer holidays) will be wordless months. Two months off writing a year I can plan for. Five I can’t.

I haven’t quite finished my first novel but have made good inroads on the plot for novel two and three. It’s not very clever, I know, to plan the next project before you’ve finished your current one, but they are contiguous so it feels more like a continuation, an extension, of my current project, than a new one. Same characters, different situations. But I really have to finish novel number one. That’s my first priority.

At this point, I don’t know how to manage all the things I need to do this year. Something has to give, but what?

24December2012

Merry Christmas!

December 24, 2012Leave a comment

I wrote a story for an end of the year flash competition but it was rejected very quickly. Instead of sitting on this until next year and trying to hawk it then, I’m sharing it here. As you read this, I’ll be warm and cosy in the house that inspired the story, talking to the families I borrowed for the characters and, occasionally, looking out the kitchen window to the lake below. It’s covered in snow because the below is a work of fiction, not a true story.

Too bad.

Continue Reading “Merry Christmas!”

6December2012

Writing is a lonely business: writing friends help

December 6, 2012Leave a comment

You write on your own. There are writers who collaborate, but most of us sit on our own at our desks, doing what we do. We write, of course, a lot, but we also think a lot and do a good amount of research. These are not social activities. Hamish, a writer friend of mine, maintains that writing is a selfish activity and that you have to be single-mindedly selfish to find the time to write when you’ve got a full-time job, family and friends. I think he’s right. Writing’s an obsessive occupation and obsessions are all about the self.

Personally, I don’t think I could take myself seriously if it was just me, all alone in a creative sea, swimming in whichever direction I fancy that moment. I need feedback and support, some kind of direction.

Enter writing buddies.

Continue Reading “Writing is a lonely business: writing friends help”

24November2012

The Next Big Thing: Salanntùr and The Seven Wonders of Scotland

November 24, 2012Leave a comment

The talented Lynsey May kindly asked me last week if I wanted to pick up the baton and share my Next Big Thing. Over the last few weeks, writers have written about what they’re doing next and asking other writers to do the same. The resulting blog posts make for inspiring reading! I couldn’t turn down a chance to brag a little, so here goes.

1. What’s the title of your latest story?

Salanntùr. It’s one of seven stories in a collection called The Seven Wonders of Scotland.

2. Where did the idea for the story come from?

Birlinn put out a call for submission for an anthology of stories about imaginary Scottish wonders that said something about Scotland as she is today, or what she might be tomorrow. I’d been reading an article about an idea for slowing global warming: kilometer-high salination towers floating around the Faroes. It was in part based on research done at the University of Edinburgh. I though “what if that worked? What if we’d been working towards that solution for decades – how would that affect Scotland, and what could it mean for the world?”

3. What genre does your story fall under?

Literary fiction.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie?

The main two characters are Janet, a journalist from Glasgow, and Arthur, a not so nutty professor. In my mind, Janet looks something like Fiona Bruce but she’s not an actress. Hm. Let’s pick Kelly Macdonald for that role, though she’s a little too young. Arthur is tall, tweed-clad, and ageing gracefully in the salty air of northern Scotland. I need someone distinguished who can make us believe him when he flips from warm to cold. John Hurt would be perfect.

See? Don’t they look great? Now imagine them wind-swept and covered in salt. (Images from Wikipedia.)

5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your story?

It’s Scotland’s greatest gift to the world – a kilometre high tower that will float around the world’s oceans to spray a thin mist of salt water into the air, reflecting sunlight out towards space, cooling the earth – but it is a controversial gift because of how the building of it affects the local environment.

6. Will your story be self-published or represented by an agency?

Neither. Salanntùr is part of an anthology, The Seven Wonders of Scotland, and launches at Blackwell’s Bookshop, in Edinburgh, 18:30 on November 27th. Come along! Kirsti Wishart, Gavin Inglis and I will read from our stories. Gerry Hassan, the editor, will be there too.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft?

I should know that to the minute, but I don’t. I wrote the first draft in stages to get it in to review with my writer’s group. The first version they saw took maybe four hours to put together and was a magazine article and a long list of bullet points. (The one that said “Epiphany here” got a good laugh.) I think I spent another six or eight hours filling in the gaps before I had something that can be called a first draft. It was way too long so I spent some time whipping it into shape.

8. What other stories would you compare it to within your genre?

The format – split between the first-person article that the journalist writes after her visit to Sallantùr and a third-person account of her experiences there – feels well established but I can’t think of a particular story that I’ve read that uses it. Books often use that structure but then the introductions are proportionally shorter.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this story?

My friend Helen Jackson told me about Birlinn’s call – I wouldn’t have know anything about it if she hadn’t mentioned it. Then I played with different ideas. The salt spraying tower came to me quite quickly, but in its first incarnation, it was a bone-white, 150 meters tall, 2,000 year-old salt-spraying tower that rose from the middle of Loch Ness. Imagine that long valley, dusted in salt, sparkling dully in the sunshine: black water, white, white ground and a spire, straining towards the sky. It was a nice image, but rather too baroque for what I was trying to say.

10. What else about your story might pique a reader’s interest?

It has everything you might want in a story: strong characters, evocative environments and science. I’d like to visit Salanntùr, it’s an intersting place. It’s a pity it’s fictional.

Now, I’m passing the Next Big Thing baton on to Gavin Mcmenemy. Gavin’s was my first writer’s group (it was a small group) and writes great stories, often, but not always, with in the sci-fi genre. He has a story in the Diamond Light Source short story anthology Light Reading. The cover art is, in fact, an illustration for his story. So, what’s next? Take it away Gavin!

11October2012

Being a professional and what it takes to make money from fiction

October 11, 2012Leave a comment

In recent weeks, I’ve come across two blog posts that gave me food for thought. One made me feel good about my approach to writing, the other made me feel a little naive. (There’s been a lot of that going around recently.)

The post titled The 9 Warning Signs of an Amateur Artist makes some very good points about what pursuing a creative career is all about: taking yourself seriously, entering the community, and having realistic expectations. I approach my creative writing career in much the same way as I approached my technical writing career. There wasn’t as many applicants, so to speak, for the tech writing jobs as there are for the fiction jobs but the principle’s the same. Get good at what you do and keep applying.

How to Make a Living as a Writer chimes a note I recognise: don’t give up the day job. I’d like to, not because I don’t enjoy my day job but because I enjoy writing fiction more. But as everyone tells me, fiction doesn’t pay. It does if you’re one of the top ten sellers, but for most of us, it just doesn’t. There are two options: give up now or keep writing and submitting work. Sitting back and sulking doesn’t get you anywhere.

This is what you need to do: write stuff, read stuff, seek feedback and submit stuff. Repeat.

3October2012

Three sci-fi writers, one interesting Google Play hour

October 3, 2012Leave a comment

Last week, I found this hour-long, interview with Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton. I’m always interested in questions around idea generation and methodology but I also enjoyed the way this was recorded. Everyone’s in a different place, in front of a laptop, and people from all over the world are invited to ask questions. This was my first hang-out: it’s a nice format.

I leave you with Iain Banks on whether writing gets easier or more difficult with time (it starts at 39:58):

I think writing is like anything else, the more you do it the better you get – up to a certain point, extreme old age or something – and maybe there’s partially a confidence thing as well: you learn to trust your own abilities.

26September2012

Progress: writing, writing, writing in September

September 26, 2012Leave a comment

I set myself a target of writing 60,000 words in September. A week in I realized how ridiculously over-optimistic that was and took the estimate down to 30-40,000. At the time of writing I have written 30,524 and there’s still time to get another few thousand words in. Overall, good progress.

But then there’s the but.

But.

Despite knowing better I expected to write in a linear fashion. That would mean that by now, I’d have 54,000 words taking us neatly from the beginning to just past the middle of the novel. Instead I have the first third kind of done, and a whole bunch of scenes arranged loosely in chronological order. I have clear ideas for the end, but am a little lost on the middle third.

I also have a long list of things I need to do, from research I need to carry out through decisions I need to make to notes on changes. Some of the notes are in the text, some are in a separate note-book I keep for lists and thinking out ‘loud’. My list of characters has grown, the family tree has fallen to pieces, and I keeping forgetting what we know, what has happened and what the point of it all is. The chapter plan, and its associated word counts, no longer has any resemblance to the text. I’m flailing and need to take a step back to see if I can fit things together before I make the next great push.

And that, I understand, is entirely normal. This is how novels are written. I knew it was hard work: I didn’t know it was so much like wandering about in the dark, bumping into walls and feeling like an idiot.

Ultimately, I’m progressing according to plan. Not according to my structured plan, but according to the overall plan, the one that says “write a novel”. I hold on that thought, tightly.

19September2012

The Importance of Being Edited

September 19, 2012Leave a comment

Editing is the part of writing that takes your flabby text and trims it into something that works. If the original idea is good enough, editing makes it shine.

Some people, like my friend Hamish and writer Gail Carriger, enjoy editing. Drafting is a rough activity, like cutting a form from a block of marble. Editing lets you file off the rough edges, polish surfaces and make your prose shine. Unfortunately, I don’t like editing much. It’s slow. It reminds me of planning dinner parties: I want to come up with the menu, do the shopping or cook the food – not all three. It’s like having the meal three times over. I lose interest. (In the food, not the dinner party itself.)

Editing is inevitable, however. At first, when I realised that I spend two or three hours editing for every hour I spend writing, I thought there’s be a way of cutting down on editing. If my first drafts were better, editing would be faster. If my ideas were more thoroughly thought out, my first draft would be better. The conclusion to my thought experiment was that to edit less, I needed to write less. On the one hand, that is true: less text, fewer changes. But on the other hand, writing less means producing fewer stories and not learning the lessons that each teaches me. My aim is to write more, not less.

Fiction writing is very different from the technical writing I’ve been doing for years. There, the structure is everything. You work out the structure, do the research and fill in the words. It’s easy. To me, writing fiction is still difficult. There are so many possible structures, voices and approaches, so many different words to choose between. Editing helps me pick the right ones.

I might not much like the process of editing, but I do like the effect it has on my text.

11September2012

Writing, writing, writing in September: what a ridicilous goal to set!

September 11, 2012Leave a comment

I look at last week’s post and laugh. It’s not a bitter laugh, but a fond one. The person who set my goals last week was a naive fool, but one with enthusiasm and a level of optimism that I find endearing.

This is what I’ve learned:

I can be quite prolific, but when I’m trying to write something that makes sense, I can only go for so long before I need to take a step back and think. I knew this once, but I’d forgotten.
Plans change. I had a chapter progression and it was good but not perfect. Last week I wrote things that showed that I needed to change the order of events. Some planning and thinking is needed.
I can only hold so much information in my head at once. I can remember two, maybe three chapters at a time. Not a complete 100,000 word novel.
Ideas that don’t relate to the ‘big work’ can still be worth looking at. Last week I wrote a piece of flash that had nothing to do with the novel. It was rather invigorating.

I didn’t meet my word goals last week and I won’t this week but that’s OK. I’ve learned things and am willing to cut myself some slack. Last week, I wrote 12,500 words. That’s a good chunk: I’m almost a third through now. If I continue like this I might still write 40,000 words this month but I’ll settle for 30,000. I’m trying to write the right words and that takes time and thought.

As I say goodbye to the sweet optimist I was last week I wonder what I’ll learn this week.

4September2012

Getting down to it: writing, writing, writing in September

September 4, 20122 Comments

Sch! It’s September. Don’t talk to me, I’m writing.

I have a novel to write. I was supposed to start it in May, but got delayed. June didn’t get me far, and July and August were complete write-offs with regards to writing. (Note to self: don’t think you’ll write during the festivals. You won’t.) So September is it. I’ve set a target of 60,000 words for the month. That’s an average of 2,000 words per day. Easy, right?

No, not really. It would be, if I could write 2,000 words, steadily, every day of the month. Of course, that’s not how the world works. Although I’m mostly not socializing this month, I do have a long weekend away, and a couple of nights out. And writer’s group. And book quiz.

To get the book written I needed to plan. So I planned. I have, next to me as I write:

A chapter listing (incomplete) of what happens in which chapter.
A character list with all my characters’ names, brief bios and their relationship to each other and my main character.
A one-page calendar for September with events and daily word count targets clearly marked.
A draft family tree.

All set. Here goes.