Writing | Writing Fiction

4April2012

Subject and audience – your audience and your main characters are sometimes very different

April 4, 20121 Comment

Sometimes, reader’s reactions to your stories are surprising. Particularly, I’ve had a couple of experiences when they assume things about my main character or the audience that doesn’t fit with my intentions or thoughts.

The main character is a child, therefore the story must be for children.
I wrote a story about a young boy who has a very bad time. It wasn’t meant to be a YA story but my readers to date have interpreted it as one. To me, a story isn’t for children just because it’s about them. I’m clearly missing some nuance of tone or subject that makes my stories about children also seem suitable for them. (I’m sending the flash version of Liz & Bob around to some YA publications to see if they agree with that judgement. It will be interesting to see what they say.)
I’m female so my main character must be too.
Quite a few of my stories are in the first person. I like writing in first person for a couple of reasons. It allows me to use an observational tone and means I don’t have to describe or explain the narrator too much. The first person also makes it easier for me to visualise the feelings and actions of the narrator. The voice puts not just the reader but also me as a writer inside the narrators’ head. Interestingly, this can cause confusion. Sometimes my narrator is male. If I don’t point that out clearly at the beginning of the story, readers assume that the narrator is female. Because I am.

The subject and the audience for fiction is as varied as the stories themselves. Your audience is not always someone like your main character, though. I’ve still to learn how to pitch my voice so that my readers know who the story is for.

28March2012

There are plots that work…

March 28, 2012Leave a comment

…and presumably there are plots that don’t.

This is the story I told in my 2010 NaNoWriMo project:

A young private detective finds a body, and, investigating the death, makes new friends, including a murder suspect. The investigation touches her own family and she learns things about her mother’s past. She also learns that she can’t always trust old friends. With help from her new friends she solves the murder and realises that her mother is in mortal danger. Meanwhile, the police, who have been doing their own investigation, also solves it and saves the mother. The ex-suspect starts digitizing the family records and life continues much as it was, except that she now has a dad.

How does this plot differ from standard gum shoe stories?

The main issue is that nothing much has changed at the end. The ‘grows up’ part of the plot needs to be bigger. I mean, if what she learns is so unimportant that I don’t even think it warrants a mention in a micro-summary it clearly lacks impact.
The second problem is the parallel investigations. The main character normally works with the police, for example as a consultant. This way, they get access to information and suspects. On their own, they just don’t have all the information they need to solve the problem. Or they start looking into something that isn’t a murder, get embroiled and decide to solve it themselves. That’s more like my plot. Except, traditionally, the private detective confronts the murderer (catharsis). In my version, she figures out the problem, realises that someone is in danger and completely fails to get in contact with them (anti-climax).
Family and friendship is central the story. These are important themes but they need to be more tightly integrated. The sudden appearance of the main character’s estranged dad is too important to be a throw-away at the end. It needs proper handling and introduction.

The novel I’m starting in June uses the same characters and many of the same settings as my NaNoWriMo projects. The plot will be very different. I’m spending the next couple of months working it out but I know that I need more plot than I’ve ever worked with before.

The imaginary strand of wool that is my main character’s journey from beginning to end needs twists, turns and maybe a knot or two. For colour and texture, my other characters needs their own strands. I look forward to messing all the strands up and then, carefully, untangling them again.

22March2012

The gender gap: male and female characters in supernatural crime fiction

March 22, 20122 Comments

I’ve read an awful lot of supernatural crime fiction in the last couple of years to understand its conventions. My main character is a woman so I started by reading books about female main characters. At first, I found a lot of American books with female MCs. (Anita Blake, Sooki Stackhouse, Bella Swan, Rachel Morgan, even Kismet Knight. I’ve read them all.) On the one hand it was great that there was clearly a market for female characters. On the other hand, there was something about them that irritated me.

So I looked further and found a bunch of male writers in, what I thought, was the same genre. Mike Carey, Larry Correia, Ben Aaronovich, Malcolm Pryce, even China Mieville, write super-natural crime stories. They were very different from the first set of books that I read.

The problem was that most of the books with female characters fall in the supernatural romance cross-over genre. When I started my research I didn’t know that there was such a thing. I have some reservations about the genre, or rather, the female main characters. I like my main characters, male or female, to have gumption, agency and self-determination.

Part of the pleasure with the romance stories seems to be that the main character is swept along, unable to or stopped from taking control of her own life. Yes, many of them have agency and show pluck, and there are some areas of their lives they have control of – romance not being one of them – but there there’s all the other stuff that I find tedious and that male supernatural crime fiction heroes are delightfully free of. Silk dresses, for example. Male heroes don’t have to go clothes shopping and never risk popping out of their bras.

More importantly, male characters have to make their own decisions about relationships and sex. They can’t defer that to a much older but still young-looking partner. They aren’t always the most mature but they have to be adults: they chose their actions and take the consequences.

Here’s a table of some of the differences that I’ve noticed. I’m being unfair to both female and male male characters – some women have guns and some men have crushes – but I’m OK with that.

Female Main Characters	Male Main Characters
Spend a lot of time talking about clothes and getting dressed, often by their partners who have better taste and more money.	Don’t care about clothes.
Are more than commonly attractive and have long, shiny hair. And big breasts.	Are nothing special in the looks department but are strong. And clever.
Have a vampire boyfriend who adores her blindly. This gem comes with lots of moolah, an eye for striking outfits, and superb self-control.	Are single.
May also have a werewolf boyfriend or other interesting parties that they want to have, or have had, sex with, which is all very confusing both on a physical and moral level.	Hook up and move on.
Follow.	Lead.
Have psychic super-powers (mind reading is common).	Are equally good with a curse or a gun.

Do the gender differences in these books reflect the interests of the male and female reading public? The books sell and, presumably, to their intended audiences. So, I suppose they must. They don’t satisfy me, though, and I hope that there is room for a different kind of main character: a female who isn’t chasing romance. More of a crime fiction main character, in fact.

The main character of my first novel is a young woman with a psychic super-power. She’s also single, a private detective, of sorts, and neither hard-boiled nor meltingly soft. She’s fairly well educated and runs a business with her mum. Because of who she is and what she does, she’s in a tricky position socially and politically. This informs her behaviour. She’s might be pretty, and have long, glossy hair, but I’m not telling. It’s just not as important as all the other stuff that makes her what she is.

14March2012

Where did the werewolves come from?

March 14, 20125 Comments

I’m not that interested in werewolves but I keep writing about them. I sit down to write something about being a child and listening to adults having a party. Then there’s someone outside the bedroom door, changing. I write about zombies and the punchline is that they’re not werewolves. Someone can’t sleep but when she does, well, she runs in a pack. Where does it all come from?

Yesterday, I remembered.

When I was little, I was afraid of werewovles. Really afraid. I would cry in the night and cower from images of grizzly bears. The fear stayed with me for years. When I was seven, maybe eight, I bought a comic book with a full-page advert of Pez dispensers on the back cover. One of the dispensers was the wolf man. It scared me. A picture of a werewolf Pez dispenser scared me so much that I had to throw the comic away. And throw it away just right so that I couldn’t see the ad in the waste paper basket.

Over the years, the fear went away, but a certain fascination remained. My DVD collection contains American Werewolf in London, Cursed, Wilderness, Ginger Snaps and Dog Soldiers. I watch Being Human and miss George. (George was lovely.) In dusty corners of my bookshelf you’ll find Cycle of the Werewolf, The Werewolf of Paris, Sharp Teeth and so on. Yes. I’ve seen the films and I’ve read the books. Still, if you asked me, I would tell you that I was not interested in shapeshifters.

My conscious mind had forgotten, but the storyteller in me remembered.

Which of them should call the exorsist?

8March2012

It’s, well, dialog needs to be, ehm, not like you speak it

March 8, 20121 Comment

I’ve being interviewing customers for video testimonials. Listening to them, as part of the editing process, has driven home a point about dialog.

Most people don’t speak very well. We hum and haw, we pause, start a sentence in one place and end it somewhere else. If we actually get to the end at all. Some people are more coherent than others and some people are, well, hardly coherent at all. I have friends who could stand up and speak for an hour, without loosing track of where they’re going and I’ve got friends who can’t tell me why they are ten minutes late without taking a detour past their childhood and telling a couple of jokes from a film they watched last week. Most of us, I hope, fall somewhere in the middle.

The middle way of human speech still involves a lot of humming and hawing, cutting off mid-sentence and starting again. Natural speech patterns read really badly. It takes too long to get to the point and the words often don’t make sense. When we listen to speech, it seems that our brains fill in the gaps and turn bad sentences into decent ones. Brains are brilliant. When we read natural speech we don’t correct as much. So we get annoyed and tired, or find humour where it’s not intended.

I’ve never tried writing natural dialog and having listened to myself waffle at my coherent best, I don’t want to. It has driven home to me, though, how important it is that you get the written voice right.

It’s also made me think about how I speak. I want to be completely coherent. All the time. Like. Uhm.

1March2012

Goodbye Martin, it’s time for me to move on

March 1, 20121 Comment

I stayed at my friend’s flat for a few days last summer. (Actually, I stayed a few days in two flats last summer: I have very generous friends.) When I was there, working at a lovely desk in the dining room and enjoying the peace of their oldest son’s bedroom, I had two ideas for stories. They were both based on experiences that I had there. One turned into Neon Tetra Suicides and the other turned into Martin Stays Over. The first of these worked itself out quickly. I wrote it, did a couple of edits and then sent it out. The second one I have had all kinds of problems with.

It’s really a story about being a child and listening to adults having a dinner party. I can’t write that story without something happening, so there’s also some weird stuff. The feedback I’ve had on the story suggests that I got the little boy’s voice right. Really right. I’ve also got the scary action towards the end right. I read that part at Illicit Ink in October, so it has had a lot of work.

The problem is that the two sections don’t fit together.

In the first few drafts, there was too much background before the action. Too much detail and information. When the action came it was completely unexpected and confused some people. There was also no real resolution after the action. It is as if nothing happened yet we know that something did. There were 2,000 words of setup and 1,000 words of action followed by 50 of conclusion. The sections were like blocks of wood, stacked one on the other, not like fibres working together to form a branch.

In the final draft, I swapped sections about so that the action starts on the first line. The setup happens in flashback, as it were, before the big action piece. I also changed a couple of relationships, got rid of a parent, added a slightly unpleasant adult and attempted closure at the end. I tried to stitch it all together into a coherent unit.

Then I sent it out and had it rejected – very graciously – in four days. Voice good, plot and resolution weak.

So what now? I have options.

Send the short story to a flash fiction market.
Send the long story out again, to another market.
Edit the long story again.
Start again.

Option 3 is the only one I refuse to do. I have spent to much time trying to force this story into shape. Writing it from scratch again appeals to me. There’s a freedom in taking what I’ve learned from the feedback I’ve had on this story and applying it to something completely new. But I have other stories that I want to tell too. Spending even more time with Martin takes me away from them.

I need to move on now, walk away, give this one up for dead. Not everything I write will be brilliant. This particular story doesn’t seem to have a point other than that you’re pretty powerless when you’re eight years old. I think I’ve spent more hours trying to make that point than the value of my insight warrants.

21February2012

Outer space comes to Edinburgh

February 21, 2012Leave a comment

Back in October, I did my first public reading at an Illicit Ink event called Monsters Ink. It was good fun and having practiced public reading in Penicuik I’m back for more. At the next event, on March 4th, I’ll be reading a story I wrote for the event. It’s a short story – with 7 minutes running time it can’t be more than about 1,200 words – about a boy and his rocket. Sort of. The theme of the evening is outer space and the event is called When Words Collide.

It’s a good night with a good mix of story tellers, some of which turn up in character. But not me. Oh no, not me.

When and where: The Bongo Club, Holyrood Road, 20:00 – 22:00. (Map below.)

What: short-story readings from a dozen or so local writer, reading their own stories about outer space.

That’s all I have planned for this quarter. If I sign up to any other spoken word events I’ll post them on the Events page.

View Larger Map

16February2012

Sharing what you write: terror and joy

February 16, 2012Leave a comment

When I started writing I told myself, and everyone around me, that it was for my own enjoyment. I lied. I write because I think it is fun, yes, but I edit because I want to be read. If I just wrote for me, I wouldn’t edit. I’d approach my writing as as a teenager: churn out a story, feel pleased, put it in a folder and move on. But I don’t. I get an idea, plan it, write it, read it, edit it, read it again, ask for feedback and edit some more. The stories that I complete are good enough that I dare send them to publishers for their consideration.

Sending out, sharing my writing, is scary. Clicking the Send button on a submission still gives me a nervous butterflies-in-tummy feeling.

For the last 15 years I’ve worked as a technical writer and copywriter. I’ve received a lot of criticism, ranging from constructive to counterproductive. Dealing with feedback from a wide range of people, from managers and clients, people who can write and people who can’t, has taught me to deal with the fact that not everyone is going to like what I write or how I write it. Of course, when you write instructions, personal taste isn’t that much of an issue but when you write fiction, personal taste is everything. Once the grammar, spelling and punctuation is correct (or at least consistent) and the story follows it’s own internal logic, nothing stands between the reader and the story. They can engage with your characters, environments and plots, unless there’s something in your writing that turns them off.

It is OK if not all readers like my stories. They aren’t aimed at all readers. But I want some readers to like my stories and it’s the fear that they won’t that makes me nervous when I send something out. I’m learning to invest myself in my stories differently. Previously, my writing was me until the moment I handed it over to someone else to read. Then the writing was rubbish. Now, a story is something I wrote and if someone doesn’t like it, I can live with that. If they tell me why they didn’t like it, I’ll even be grateful. It’s taken time, but I now only get nervous when I submit to publishers. Sending things to friends, family or writing groups for fun or feedback no longer makes me want to hide behind the sofa.

It turns out that sharing my writing is a little bit like writing itself: it gets easier with practice.

9February2012

The plan, loosely

February 9, 20122 Comments

I have a plan. It’s a five-year plan, sort of, and somewhat fluid, but it helps me figure out where I’m going. For this year, the plan is to:

Submit one story a month, on average, for publication. This part of the plan has been in force since September last year. I’m a little behind but working hard to catch up. I’m not just sending things out willy-nilly, it has to be to a likely market.
Re-submit each story at least twice after rejection. It’s statistically realistic rather than defeatist to assume that some, if not all, stories will be rejected. I’m trying to write for calls rather than find markets for stories I’ve written to try to optimise my hit-rate but still, there will be knock backs.
Start plotting a real novel. I’ve learned that having a plot really helps so to ensure that I build a good story I have to start with the structure. First: develop plot and characters. Then…
start writing a real novel. June seems a good month for this.
Build a platform. That means getting readers for this blog which, in turn, means getting it out there. Sharing it, reading other people’s blogs and commenting on theirs in the hope that they will read mine. Advertise my self wherever I can. Do spoken events. Network. Comment and encourage. Post on blog logs. Join memes. Tweet and Facebook what I’m doing. All that basic marketing stuff. All things I’m too shy to do right now.
Do three spoken word events. (I might up this goal to four since I have one under my belt already and another on planned for early March.)

I’ll let you know how I get on.

26January2012

The mostly silent story telling of Shaun Tan

January 26, 20122 Comments

A few years ago I worked off Broughton Street in Edinburgh. My closest decent café was Artisan Roast, which roasts and serves the very best coffee that Edinburgh has to offer. (Too bad I prefer tea.) One day, I found this book there, The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. It was a tale of emigration and immigration, 128 pages long, all illustrations.

It was amazing.

In The Arrival, a man leaves his family to go abroad and start a new life. Eventually, they will join him, but before they can he has to find somewhere to live, a job and learn to understand the new place he’s in. The beautiful pencil drawings show a world similar but also very different from ours. I recognized the emotions and fears of anyone that has to go somewhere new, be it a new school, job or country. Learning the ropes, making friends, finding a place in a new context takes time and courage.

I have since acquired most of Shaun’s back catalog. His illustrations are beautiful and his words, when he uses them, open new worlds and new perspectives.

Shaun Tan spoke about The Arrival and his other works at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year. He told a story – Eric, a lovely tale inspired by an exchange student – and explained that he writes with a very particular audience in mind. Shaun writes tales that his brother will find acceptable. The story doesn’t have to be simple, but the language must be. This straightforward voice works very well with the other-worldly illustrations.

I’m trying to emulate two aspects of Shaun’s story-telling: the simplicity of his language and the other-worldliness of the world he draws. My writing lacks the lyricism of Shaun’s drawings but I want my stories to take place in a world similar to his. A world very close to ours but different enough that anything can happen. And I try to tell them simply.

Recently, I sent the first story I wrote with the principles of simplicity and other-worldliness in mind to my mother. She really likes it. She likes it so much she thinks I should illustrate it.