Speculating about fiction

What makes a great poem?

2011-05-22T22:12:00.011+10:00

Without subscribing to any kind of cultural cringe, I have to admit to sometimes looking at the American poetry publishing scene with envy -- poets like Ted Kooser and Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and Maya Angelou, who write amazing poetry that's brilliantly conceived and executed and yet easily accessible to most readers. Where are Australia's great poets writing in this vein? Yes, they are out there. We do have fantastic poets like Peter Bakowski, whose poems are gifts to the rest of us. As an editor of Poetrix, I am privileged to read the works of many amazing women poets, poets whose work I love like Asuncion Pritchett and Connie Barber. But we still don't have the breadth of great poetry that they have in the US, which I suppose is not surprising given we have a much smaller population base. It's to be expected. But is that all it is?

Peter Bakowski came into one of our poetry classes the other day and spoke to our second-year poetry students about his philosophy of the art and craft of poetry and his life as a poet. As always, his talk was from the heart (just like his poetry!) and informative -- packed with great advice. Bakowski spoke about the importance of clarity in poetry writing (something both Kooser and Collins advocate), and how reading obscure poems makes him either angry or tired. I know how he feels. If I read a poem and my first reaction is "huh?", I might put it down to tiredness. If I then take a walk or a break and come back to it fresh, reread it and think about it and my reaction is still "huh?", I don't think it's a successful poem -- at least not for me. I want to get something out of every poem I read, and ideally I'd like to get something on a first reading. That isn't to say that I don't enjoy poems that give me more, that unfold their secrets on deeper thinking or subsequent reads -- I do -- but I should at least get something on that initial read. I should know what the poem is about on a superficial level at least.

Last weekend, my friend Sherryl and I went to the Booktown weekend (Back to Booktown) at Clunes. So many bookshops! I think we both almost melted with pleasure on the spot. While she attended a masterclass on crime writing, I went bookshopping (note, I use that as one word because bookshopping is far superior to any other kind of shopping and deserves its own word!). Later, when she went bookshopping, I attended a panel on biography writing. One of the speakers was well-known poet and biographer, Peter Rose. I've heard Rose speak before -- and every time he speaks candidly about his experience as a biographer, I come away thinking I must read his book (Rose Boys). I am interested in football (go, Tigers!) and families, and I own one, maybe two, of his poetry collections, and from what I know of the story, from what I've heard him say, and from the reviews I've read, I expect Rose Boys to be a powerful read: elegantly written, insightful and moving. But I have to say he astounded me with what he had to say in this session -- not so much on biography writing, which did nothing to change my intent to read his biography, but on poetry writing.

Rose said that a biographer has to take the audience into his confidence (so far so good), which was a new experience for him. He said it was the exact opposite of what he was trying to do as a poet -- and at this point I sat straighter in my chair -- that a poet's job was to be as obscure as possible. What? Of course, I've read obscure poems published in prestigious places -- they always leave me shaking my head and wondering whether I really need to read such prestigious journals -- but to hear someone actually say this . . .

The audience laughed. And Rose laughed too, and called it the poet's badge of honour. I wasn't sure whether the latter was tongue-in-cheek or not, whether he was surprised by the audience's reaction, whether the laugh was a bit self-deprecating. I still don't know. Taking the audience into his confidence -- as I've said he said nothing that put me off reading his biography, but his thoughts on poetry writing did leave me thinking deeply on the state of Australian poetry.

Of course there are all sorts of readers, and as writers we need to celebrate this, because if we all liked the same kinds of stories, the same kinds of poems, we wouldn't have much need for as many writers as we have. Some of us love the elegance and strong characterisation of literary writing, while others find the lack of plot leaves them bored. Some of us love the fast action and pace of genre writing, while others consider it hack writing and a waste of time. Some of us no doubt love obscure poems -- although I sometimes wonder if it really is about the flip-side of that "badge of honour": no-one wants to admit they can't understand an obscure poem.

But look at poetry sales. They're hardly what I'd call scintillating. I have lots of friends who don't read poetry. At all. Ever. When I ask them why they don't like it, they usually shrug and tell me they don't understand it. I always suggest they try different poets -- try Bakowksi, try Kristin Henry -- but persuading them to give it another go isn't so easy. Not when it comes to spending hard cash. I have writer-friends who say the same thing about poetry writing. They don't like it because they find it incomprehensible. There's a lot to be said for clarity, I think.

The poems that I love usually have a strong focus on imagery, but sometimes it's a clever turn of phrase or an unusual metaphor that strikes me. They might give me new understanding -- put me into someone else's shoes or challenge my beliefs. They might make me laugh or cry or speak to me on a personal level about something I care about. They always communicate an idea to me -- something I can hang my understanding of the poem on. That isn't to say that they're simple poems, although they may be, but more usually they're not, and I'll be rewarded for thinking more about them. I subscribe to the inverse way of writing complex ideas -- that the more complex an idea is the more simple the expression needs to be to make it understandable. I do, after all, want to communicate something to my audience -- if I didn't, I don't think I'd bother to write.

But I'm interested in what others think -- what do you think makes a great poem? And how do you feel about obscure poetry -- is it clever or does it leave you cold? I'd love you to share your thoughts with me . . .

The itinerant blogger

2011-04-15T14:43:00.002+10:00

I sometimes wonder what happened to my good blogging practice -- why I have been so itinerant over the last few years, and then I realise that several things happened. One was I started teaching online, and with the time spent on my online classes, which I have to say I really enjoyed, and time spent on emails and other online stuff, I became resentful of the time the internet was taking from my life. Time spent blogging could be time spent writing -- and while I have friends who manage to productively do both, I don't seem to be one of these. Not when I'm also trying to teach and run a rather chaotic family.

The other thing that happened was a change to my living circumstances that sees me without internet access for part of each week, and that part just happens to be the time of the week when I did most of my blogging. And living without internet is interesting as we're so used to having it there, handy, when we want it. On the other hand, we seem to be at its beck and call. The ping of the email program. The call to surf. Or go on Facebook. Or whatever.

I am going to endeavour to be a more regular blogger again -- but I'm not making any promises. At the moment, I'm working on my novel and that will always take priority. And so, back to it! And the great beauty of that is working in WordPerfect on a computer that has no internet access, so no pings will disturb me!

Con report day 4: part 2

2010-10-02T11:24:00.000+10:00

"Editing the novel" with Simon Spanton, Zoe Walton, Jean Johnson and Ginjer Buchanan.

Buchanan said that Jack [I'm thinking Dann, but it wasn't specified, or if so I didn't record it] once turned in an 800-page book, and she told him to cut it because it was 200 pages too long, which he did, but when he tells the story he says that she said there's no 800-page book that wouldn't be better as a 600-page book. She couldn't remember saying that, but it seemed she still agreed with it.

Spanton said he had one book he was editing that was too long and so he took two lines off every page and made further suggestions for cutting and returned it to the author, and the second draft came back 10,000 words longer than the first. [I'm glad I'm not the only writer who is capable of that!] He reminded us editors in the audience that he never has a better suggestion for fixing a problem than the author's -- that editors are not there to be creative alongside an author but to shift an author's creativity. I've never quite thought of it that way.

Johnson had a similar story of an author lengthening a book they were supposed to be cutting, whereas Walton said as a YA editor she was often looking for ways to make a book chunkier.

Buchanan talked about the other ways to finesse length: smaller typeface, adding lines to page lengths, running-in chapters etc. She has one author who always writes over but doesn't like rewriting, but rather than leaning on the author, she tells the agent that that's fine but the paperback will cost so much extra. The agent will then say they can't have that and will get the author to make the changes. Sneaky! But good.

Spanton talked about using big margins to make a book fatter. He said this can be advantageous because readers feel like they're getting through it more quickly, and therefore it must have flowed well and been a good read. [And I was sitting there thinking: and that may be so, but I always feel ripped off!] Buchanan added that editors aren't doing authors a favour in saying the book needs another 10,000 to 20,000 words if the story doesn't need it.

Spanton discussed how different parts of the market have different requirements -- he'd given a writer a brief for a book with economically drawn characters in a complex plot that really shifts, but some reviewers said not enough happened, there wasn't enough worldbuilding, so he let the writer fill out the later books, which didn't actually feel longer.

He also talked about there being no ideal book or style of writing and the need to wear different editing hats for different books in terms of what you're looking for. Buchanan commented on the advantages for continuity of having the same editor across a series, especially in terms of deciding what information needs to be imparted again: that not all readers will have read all books. [This is tricky, isn't it. It isn't something I've had to face as an editor, but I have had to face as a writer -- but I think there might be enough material in that for another post.]

Johnson said that as writers, you want five people to edit your books before you sent them out, and you should be specific about what you want them to look for.

There was some discussion about how people edit, and all do their editing onscreen, which surprised me. I have certainly done some of my editing wholly onscreen, sometimes using Track Changes, but when I did Cranium that was done in Filemaker Pro, and involved copying and pasting -- I was never allowed to touch the original text. I still prefer to edit on paper though, especially if I'm working on fiction. Johnson did add, however, that she edits short stories on paper, and that she does pick up more errors on paper than on screen. I second that. She also reminded everyone that editors need to read through for comprehension as well as errors. She has had authors who will just write "stet" against the whole manuscript, but the readership always complains.

Spanton, who is a structural editor, can't resist copyediting as he goes. Oh, I understand him completely! He uses a different method for each author: for some, all they need is a half-hour phone conversation; others need five to ten notes on every page. He does most of his editing at home because he doesn't have time at work. [Bit like all that workshopping and marking that we writing teachers do. But writers should take note of that -- imagine someone who puts in all this unpaid time trying to improve your manuscript: they've certainly earned the right to have every change considered. Not necessarily agreed with or accepted, but considered.]

He doesn't mind that he takes the extra time to copyedit, because it's hard to get good copyeditors and there's not enough time to spend on manuscripts anymore. [Or really enough money to pay someone to spend enough time to copyedit properly.] He said [and I like this] the copyeditor's job is to make the structural editor look stupid, and the proofreader's job is to make the copyeditor look stupid, but sometimes readers make them all look stupid. [Of course, I didn't like that end bit quite so much!]

Walton said she never wants authors to agree with all of her changes, but she hopes they will say we don't agree because ... and be able to suggest something else. Spanton also talked about how it is the author's work so although he may suggest strongly for changes it is the author's call, and everyone will live with the consequences. An unhappy author may hide resentment, but it if it's there it will come out.

Buchanan said that authors you've been working with for years need very little, and this gives you more time to work with other writers.

Johnson had three rules for writing:

(i) start your book

(ii) finish your book

(iii) know how much editing is enough and then let it go -- put it out there.

Another long report, so I'll leave it there for now.

Con report: day 4: part 1

2010-09-30T10:39:00.004+10:00

I took in five panels on my final day of the con, so here's the rundown.

"The series question: big books chopped up or small books glued together" with Ian Irvine, David Cornish, Kate Forsyth, Lara Morgan and Mif Farquharson (although, looking at my notes, I haven't written down anything she said so it may be she was very quiet, or perhaps she wasn't there. I can't remember now.).

Cornish said the most disconcerting thing for a writer is to have readers not just waiting for the next book to come out but the next book with a better plotline. Hmm, we hear a lot about second-book syndrome, but this would really put the pressure on! In a discussion about the problems with continuity over such a large work, he said he leaves questions at the end of all his ideas so he has room to change things. And he said he couldn't tell whether an idea was a short story or seventeen volumes until he'd written it.

Irvine said his first book went through twenty-two drafts over twelve years, which gave him time to tweak the plot. His research and worldbuilding were so extensive he even had charts of moon phases. He talked about how many viewpoints were reasonable to handle (few can handle six to eight well [note to self ...] -- that each time you add a viewpoint character you dilute the reader's investment in the other characters.

For Forsyth, continuity is part of the enjoyment. She charts the time of year against the main character groups, what they are doing and where they are. She also writes timelines for each character and wrote an encyclopaedia of several hundred pages for Eileanan -- each country had an entry of eight to ten pages. Wow! I thought I had quite good worldbuilding, but mine looks paltry next to that. She constantly updated hers and kept it open on her screen as she was writing so she could constantly switch back and forward. With Gypsy Crown, she made sure she'd written all six books before it was published because she found with her first series there were things she would have liked to have changed when writing the latter books, but she couldn't because the first books were already published.

She said that every book in a series needs a sense of completion, resolution or something achieved, and that this along with paying attention to the structure of each story would help avoid sagging middles or the weak second book. Each book is part of an overriding arc and each book must increase in tension and importance -- something it is easy for writers to forget this as they could get bogged down in the subplots and characters. She added that she likes to make subsequent books bigger and brighter as a reward for readers for returning. Isn't that a nice idea!

She said her imagination had an epic grandeur about it [I like that!], so she couldn't write small and didn't like short stories, but she always knows exactly who she's writing for. She also talked about being completely absorbed in what she's currently writing, dreaming about it, thinking about it all the time, and so her favourite book is always her current one. Before cons, she always does a brief refresher course on her past books so she can answer reader questions.

Morgan, in her trilogy, gave each book one big event to keep them all exciting. She killed off characters because she realised she had too many and although she cried while writing these scenes [or this scene?], she said the book was better for it.

In fact, that was such a long report, I might just leave it at that.

Con report: day 3

2010-09-27T10:31:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I feel like I live on a slightly different planet than anyone else -- it arises from that novelist's thing of spending too much time immersed in my own head. It hit home when I was a writing student in class years ago, when one student asked what a gantry was. Another student tried to explain it in terms of railways and railway lines, and I became frustrated with the explanation, which was taking too long, and said something along the lines of: "Oh, there's a far easier and more commonplace explanation than that: it's what an astronaut walks across to get into the spaceship." More commonplace? In my world, yeah, but maybe not in everyone else's. Clearly not judging by all the faces.

And so I was reminded again when I turned up at the double session workshop on "Write the fight right workshop" with Alan Baxter. I thought it would be sword-fighting. We're at a con, right? SF people. Fantasy people. It's got to be sword-fighting. Right? Wrong. It never even crossed my mind that it might be anything else, but when I got in there it was about boxing and brawling. Okay, I figured, that's relevant too -- and in fact a lot of what was said would be relevant to the sword-fight as well.

My least favourite part was when we had to get up and act things out -- but that doesn't mean it wasn't useful because it was. In fact, in retrospect, it probably should've been my favourite part. I learnt a lot in this workshop. An awful lot. [Note to self: go look over all fight scenes and rework!] Lots about techniques and the type of language to use when writing the fight scene (ie not the tech terms we were discussing). The main thing to remember is that no-one comes out of a fight unhurt. (Yep, I remember my father's story about hitting and flattening his brother, and when he went home his father demanding to know what he'd hit him with. And my dad showing off a very swollen hand.)

I liked that Baxter had prepared a handout for us -- handouts are always good -- and yet I still managed to take lots of notes. In between the acting out stuff. (There wasn't really too much of that.) Good movies to watch for realistic depiction of fighting: the Bourne movies. And, surprisingly, Bridget Jones's diary -- a great depiction of a fight where neither character knows what he's doing.

This was a fantastic workshop, and after that I should have had a break and some lunch, but I wanted to keep going. I did six panels in a row (counting this as two), but the rest of the day I felt tired and washed out, and everything else was an anticlimax.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Guest of Honour speech was next, which was interesting, but I wished it was more about writing. (Another friend later told me he wished it was more about mountaineering.) Robinson said the book he's most proud of is The years of rice and salt, which I have, so I'll have to read it now!

My next panel was an academic one: Laurie Ormond on "Studying fantasy fiction as genre: magic and violence and generic convention in Sara Douglass and Fiona McIntosh". Now, the first thing I noticed was that Fiona McIntosh was in the audience. I wondered whether the presenter realised this, and if she did the effect this had on her -- I imagine it would have really played on my nerves had I been her. It reminded me of that panel way back in Aussiecon 3 when J Michael Stracinzky destroyed two fans he was on a panel with because he totally disagreed with their views of his TV show ("Babylon 5"). It's something I never want to witness again. But this case was different: McIntosh was quiet and never drew attention to herself. Ormond made the point that fantasy fiction has taken up feminist concerns, but avoids showing characters exhibiting the disintegration of self. Okay, interesting. I wonder why not.

The second part of this panel was Narelle Campbell on "The sky and the cave: differing representations of the God and Goddess in Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry". Campbell talked about the long history of femme fatales dating back to Eve, Guinevere and La Belle Dame sans Merci. She mentioned how Kay's societies are definitely patriarchal, and that the imagery associated with the God (sky) and Goddess (cave) are very telling. She also said that Guy's females want to jump into bed with every man around, and that Kay says he hates books that give females broadswords because they're ahistorical, but that he's happy to ignore the lack of contraception . . .

Then I went to "Finding the right voice: accents and speech patterns" with Karen Miller, Jack Dann, Deborah Kalin and Kaaron Warren. Good examples to study: The road, Huck Finn, Kipling's short story "Gloriana", and Australian writer Andy McCrae's short stories. [Go, Andy!] Poor Andy looked suitably embarrassed at all the attention. Dann said conveying about one tenth of a dialect was about right. I've never heard anyone put a figure on it before. They talked about various things: techniques to tell whether it's working or not, eg having someone else read it aloud. I sometimes tell my students to do this, but it's particularly important in dialects because you can see where someone else stumbles over what you've written and more accurately judge whether it's awkward or not.

Con report: day 2, part 2

2010-09-22T20:45:00.000+10:00

My third session was Shaun Tan's Guest of Honour speech. I'd pretty much heard this before at a SCWBI session a few years earlier, but it was well worth hearing and seeing it a second time. One of the things I found most interesting was that an earlier version of The arrival had a small amount of text, in terms of letters being written home. But Tan discussed how when there's words we read too quickly, that we rush on to the next set of words. Isn't that an arresting thought? He wanted to slow down the reader's experience so he took the words out. I would've thought that was the opposite to what would happen, but that was my thinking on a superficial level. If I put myself in the reader's shoes, I can see he is right. (He also said that the letters would have been in English, and that would have been too culturally specific for the effect he was trying to create.)

My fourth panel for the day was more of a chill-out-and-enjoy rather than you'd-better-concentrate-because-you-might-learn-something panel: "Eowyn and Sam: unappreciated heroes in LotR" with Laurice Mann, Helen Lowe, Rose-Marie Lillian and Alison Croggon. This panel covered some interesting ground with thoughts such as Aragorn had been feminised in the film. [What?] That Faramir is the character the film let down, that what they lost was the possibility of pure honour that Faramir embodied. He had to be far more human in the movie, but in the book he was both. So there was speculation that this was because Aragorn was humanised more in the film, and they had to differentiate him from Faramir so Faramir also had to be humanised more.

An audience member posed the theory that had Eowyn been male, she may have been cast as a traitor as she abrogated her responsibilities of looking after the people, but the panel thought perhaps not because a) she was royal and b) she was successful. One decided that in the military she mightn't be branded traitor but probably would have beeb court-martialed. Another said the book does make a point of it being wrong, but another panelist disagreed and said it was a very English attitude that you should do what you're told rather than take action, which brought in the audience member again with the rejoinder "But she abandoned her post!". So, even this left me with something to think about.

My final session was a double session -- a workshop on map-making with Russell Kirkpatrick. This was the session in the whole con that I most wanted to go to, but I did go in feeling guilty that I wasn't at the Clarion get-together, which I also wanted to attend.

Kirkpatrick had us looking at maps in new ways -- starting off with why we shouldn't put borders on our maps. (They constrain people, whereas he wants them thinking about what's beyond the border.) We looked at cadastral, thematic and topographic maps.

He talked about fantasy maps needing to include things that aren't in the story -- about the need to suggest a bigger world. And about whether maps need to be accurate or not. About how things are deliberately left off maps.

He said one of the main reasons for fantasy writers doing maps was not so much for the publishers as for the writer to feel like their world is real. And his advice on drawing maps: don't draw the coastlines first. [What? That's always where I start!] He said it's too constraining. He said and showed us a lot more of course, and it made me wish I could go and study cartography at university, so I was very glad I'd done the panel, despite what I'd missed out on at the same time. Oh, if only there weren't so many compromises.

Con report: day 2, part 1

2010-09-19T22:50:00.000+10:00

First session I attended was "Keeping pace: maintaining momentum in fiction" with Peter Brett, Jay Lake, Howard Taylor and Carrie Vaughan. Taylor talked about how every character and setting has an arc. I always give my characters arcs, but I hadn't thought about settings and how they might be changing (well, beyond the obvious seasonal changes). But it hit home because my husband came home the other day after three days away, and one of the houses in our street was gone. I'd seen the bulldozers and cranes, but all he got to see was the vacant block, which rather startled him. Something more to think about. My characters go away on a journey, a quest, so what has changed when they return? I'll be certain to make sure some things have.

Taylor also talked about getting his readers to read and highlight places they think he has made a promise to the reader, and that sometimes they'll come up with something he thought was a throwaway line. I'd never thought about this -- but what he says is important, especially given that his readers had different ideas to him about what had been promised.

Taylor also talked about using chapter endings to control pacing -- that one friend has cliffhangers all the time to keep readers immersed, but another, who writes epic fantasy, designs his chapters so readers can come up for air.

And he talked about using POV to give further character penetration, for instance by comparing things to things in a character's past, but that this should still inform the story. It's like everything -- the more multifunctional it is the better.

I liked his analogy for remembering that we meet a character for just a small portion of their lives, that we have to remember they had a life before the story started and will have one after it ends: that a story is like looking through a keyhole at a character as he or she walks past. The character was doing something before and after they passed by, but we only got to see that brief fragment of time.

Vaughan talked about the list of questions she asks herself about her scenes. Many of them were ones I already thought about -- scene purpose, character goals etc. But one she asks that I hadn't thought about is what keeps readers invested in these characters? (So what keeps them turning the page?) Because, of course, readers must care about what happens to characters or the book won't move them, and we, as writers, need them to be moved. It's something I will take back to my scenes: I've set up reasons a reader should care, but what reinforces those? What will keep the reader caring?

She also talked about the counterintuitive effect of suspense -- that to increase suspense you slow down the pace, which you can do by layering in description. Ah yes -- just imagine how excruciating that can be for the reader who can't wait to find out what happens. Some may cheat, but that's their business; others will keep at it till the end. (And I've always loved Miss Snark's take on suspense, which was something along the lines of: want to know how suspense works? I'll tell you tomorrow.)

Lake talked about the difficulties associated with using multiple viewpoints, and then about how he got two characters into a difficult situation that he couldn't see a way out of, so he did it with a transition. Three days later, having fixed their insurmountable problem... (my words, not his). Wow, you wouldn't want to do that more than once in your career. It reminded me of a favourite author who did something similar and nearly lost my readership. He said that surprisingly he hadn't had one complaint about it, which surprised the other panelists.

Brett talked about how description can be a character, but that if two characters are sitting on a mountain enjoying a magnificent view and what's interesting is their dialogue then description of that view is just getting in the way of the story. Just so. I think those of us who love description can sometimes lose sight of that, and conversely those of us who eschew it can leave it out when it is crucial to the story. One of the best examples I've seen of setting being crucial to action is the accident at the beginning of Nicholas Evans's The horse whisperer.

Overall, a fantastic session -- one that I nearly didn't make, because I started in a different session and realised I'd completely misread the title. (And it was about the only panel in the program guide that didn't have a description.)

My next panel was "Foundlings and orphans" with Mur Lafferty, Sarah Parker, Delia Sherman, Gillian Polack and Mary Victoria.

One thing that came out of this panel was a discussion on the orphan state and how it is treated by many writers as a blank page when it shouldn't be. The prime example was how Harry Potter, given his upbringing, should have been a complete worm. This was not a criticism of the books per se (well, I suppose it was) but it was also put out there that they are amazing adventures, and I suppose would have been far less entertaining and completely different types of books had he not been the feisty character that he is. Although I hadn't thought of this before, I think it's true. One writer spoke about the subconscious effect of growing up without one of her parents and how this had coloured her fiction writing -- something someone else had pointed out to her.

Discussion revolved around how the central relationship -- the central romance -- in a children's story is with the family, and how kids with one or no parents feel adrift. The fantasists then use this to show kids that they too can go out and kill a dragon. This led to an appreciation of why the orphan story tends to be YA -- after this age, the protagonist isn't trying so hard to find out where they fit in to the world, and absence/presence of parents makes less of an impression. This led to a definition that a quest story is about finding out where you come from, and a non-quest story is about finding out who you are. The someone said that girl protagonists traditionally don't save the world -- that their problems are smaller-scaled and more domestic, but ultimately they end up saving their own world.

The final discussion rounded on a theory that cultural differences might explain the popularity of the orphan/foundling trope -- that Pokemon, which is of course hugely popular, is about a ten-year-old who goes out and fights monsters, but in Western society this wouldn't be allowed. Parents wouldn't let their children go and do this -- so it's a matter of how different cultures view the child alone.

Plenty to think about in this session too -- stuff that would make me approach this kind of story in quite a different way than I otherwise might have, which means it was worth every minute that I spent in there.

Con report: day 1

2010-09-15T21:21:00.000+10:00

The first session I attended was in the academic stream -- a talk by Gillian Polack on Writers and their history: how writers use and view the historical aspects of their settings. Polack is a historian, and I've attended her sessions at other cons, and they're always well informed and interesting, so I knew I had to see this one.

Polack talked about why fantasy and historical writers draw on the Middle Ages, and then the different ways that fantasy and historical writers approach and use history. Of course the fantasy writers felt more free to take liberties than the historical writers, but even the fantasists said they would move the time period of their novels if the historical credibility of their stories would be challenged. It's interesting because to me the setting comes first -- I have to imagine the world and how the people fit into it, so I'm not sure I could just move time periods, which is not to say that any of these writers have ever actually done that. They were responding to questions in an interview situation. Perhaps if you imagine the time period first, really imagine it, and come up with a world that is internally logical and cohesive, you won't have this problem. (And maybe this is my way of thinking because my novel isn't set in the past but in the future, in a medieval-type society, which is to say a pre-industrialised society, but so I am free to move away from historical accuracy as long as I don't stretch the reader's disbelief. So I have still had to go and do research, and I'm resigned to the fact that I can never do enough -- if I did I'd be forever researching and never writing.)

I was so caught up in all of this that I was wishing I had sat in on Polack's interviews so I could hear the whole story and ask questions myself. But the other major point that Polack made was that all the writers agreed that modern perspectives had to be taken into account -- that in the end readers need a good story, and that's more important than anything else.

This point was reinforced by Alice Davies who presented the second half of this session: The stories we tell ourselves: myth and history in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Thermidox. The fascinating thing I took out of this paper was the point that historians use pattern recognition when deciding which facts to include and which to exclude, which sources to listen to and which to ignore. Now, that's an interesting idea -- and I wondered if I could extrapolate this to work with the few of my students who struggle with the idea of which details to put in and which to omit in their own writing. Pattern recognition -- I suppose that if you go and read the classics, the books that you really admire for whatever reason (page turners, well written etc) and study them, read them as a writer, then you are employing exactly that. I do tell my students to do that, but I've never called it pattern recognition before . . . I think it's worth a try -- sometimes it's that slight change in phrasing that can be the difference between someone getting an idea or not.

The second session I went to was called "Steal the past, build the future: new histories for fantasy", with Kate Elliott, Amanda Pillar, Catherynne Valente and Jonathan Walker. The most interesting aspect of this session for me was thinking about how we view past cultures -- that we view them through modern-day filters, interpreting how people behaved, using our modern-day sensibilities. Is there any way around this? Is there any need? After all, our readers have these same sensibilities and, as someone pointed out, we mightn't understand the behaviour of past people at all. (Makes me think of Annie Proulx's short story "People in Hell just want a drink of water", which has one of the most arresting beginnings of all times. It's set in the early twentieth century and the actions of the woman in the story would stretch credibility today, but her motivations are clear and understandable. Yes, it's not quite the same point, but makes me think of it anyway!) The bottom line, again, is that the needs of the story are paramount.

The panelists talked about the telling detail -- something I often discuss with my students -- but the fascinating thing was hearing Valente's story about 1816, the year without a summer, what the telling detail was for her, and how another friend wrote about the same time period but omitted the one thing that Valente thought was crucial to the time period. Writers -- we're all different!

Walker said the telling detail must have imaginative as well as conceptual power, that it must attract us to it, which was something I hadn't thought of before.

Pillar, who was an archaeologist, spoke about how Ramases perpetuated the myth of what had been a giant stalemate as a victory, and she raised the question of how he could have done this when all of his army knew it wasn't a victory. Really makes you think about the differences between then and now -- in the days of CNN that could never happen. Or could it?

I was then going to a session on creating zoological lifeforms, but the previous session was so interesting we needed to go and discuss it, so that was the end of panelling for day one. (The con only ran for half a day.) Already, I was fired up, ready to go home and write, which is the great thing that happens when you attend these sessions. And why I'd really really recommend attending cons to anyone who's working in the spec fic area. And they're a great way of meeting new people and networking too!

Worldcon report 1 overview

2010-09-09T20:31:00.000+10:00

Well, Aussiecon 4 has been and gone, and though I only attended four of the five days (had to work the fifth), I'm left with nearly 110 pages of notes from the panels I attended, and more importantly a sense of fellowship with my fellow writers, a sense of belonging to a strong and vibrant writing community. Over the next few days or weeks (depending on how diligent I am), I'm going to try to summarise the sessions I went to. Not 110 pages worth, but the highlights, the lowlights (were there any?), my observations.

I didn't get to as many sessions as I marked. I never do. Things interfere at home, and I arrive later than I want. Happens every con. Or I get panel-exhaustion, and something that had seemed a must-see when I first sat with a highlighter and mapped out my con experience (or wish list) suddenly doesn't seem as enticing as spending time with friends over hot chocolate. Or should I call that networking? It's an essential part of the con experience. And in fact the only three sessions I didn't enjoy as much as others were three back-to-back sessions that were my fourth, fifth and sixth consecutive panels on one day. Sometimes that break is a freshener -- just the way a fast-paced novel needs occasional slower, reflective scenes so the reader can take a breather. In fact, I didn't go to one dud panel. Usually, at the smaller cons where there's not as much choice, I'll find that something I was really looking forward to isn't that great, and something else that I've gone along to without great expectations has been fantastic.

When you've been to lots of panels on writing, read lots of books on writing, attended lots of courses and masterclasses etc the way I have, you often hear the same things over and over, so if I go to a panel and get one really new insight or hear something couched in a way I never have before then I feel I'm doing well. But even if I don't, I'll usually enjoy myself because I love to hear other writers talk about their craft and what inspires them or troubles them or whatever.

And sometimes the really memorable panels aren't the ones on writing but the more atmospheric (in terms of my own novel) panels: some remarkable ones have been on sword fighting and weaponry, blacksmithing, medieval music, cartography and forced marches. Oh, and watching the final episode of "Babylon 5" on a big screen (just before it had been aired in Melbourne) after J Michael Straczynski spoke about it was amazing. This time it has again been mapping and one on writing fight scenes right.

What I missed this year was the night life. Where was that exactly? I didn't get to one room party. There just wasn't the same sense of where things were happening at night -- things were more spread out. I believe some things happened at Crown, though the only one over there I actually got to was the HarperCollins Voyager party, and that was half over when we arrived. I did get to the bar a few times and hung around with my SuperNOVA buddies, and I did get out to dinner with some of them and a couple of HarperCollins writers. Don't know what happened after the Hugos, as I didn't get to attend these, or the masquerade, or the nightmare ball. But, oh well. I had a blast, so I'm not complaining!

And the next thing will be finding out when the next con is -- local con as I don't have the funds for overseas travel, and am envious of my friends who are talking about attending the next World Fantasy con. The trick with cons is to book early because the price rises incrementally as the con date gets nearer and nearer. So, I must off and do some research!

MFW and Aussiecon 4

2010-09-02T00:12:00.000+10:00

Almost every year for the last ten or more years, I've been attending the Melbourne Writers' Festival. I love going to sessions and listening to what the writers have to say -- especially when it's about writing. (Can't say I'm as enthralled with all the political-type ones that seem to have been increasing in favour over the last few years.)

This year, the MWF overlaps with Aussiecon 4, the world science fiction convention. My first ever convention was Aussiecon 3, and it was there I first met one of my best friends, Ellen. We were both in a writing workshop together on the first day, and I spent much of the rest of the con with Ellen and her friend Simon. Since then, I've been to at least one convention every year -- all of these, bar one, have been in Melbourne. Since that first one I've built up a reasonably large network of people I know in the SF community, some through conventions, some through attending Clarion, some through attending the MSFC (Melbourne Science Fiction Club) albeit briefly, and some through my writing group SuperNOVA. But I still spend most of my con time with Ellen as we share a lot of common interests and are both keen panel-goers. But this will be the biggest con for us both since that first one, so it will be interesting to see how it differs. I do remember being surprised at my second con at how small the program seemed in comparison (understandable, of course), and how intimate it all seemed. Now I'll be experiencing that in reverse.

So, consequently, it doesn't look like I'm going to make it to the MWF this year, which is one of the great shames that they overlap (although the MWF is on the weekend before too). On the positive side, they have been able to share some guests. (The con date was booked years ago -- at the time I think the MWF started a week earlier than it currently does, so there would have been no overlap.) If life at the moment weren't so chaotic, I could've made both -- I'm sure some of my friends will -- but I'm saving my energies. I'll need them: five days (well, four for me because I have to work Monday) of wall-to-wall panels -- writers talking about writing. Lots on fantasy writing. It's SF writers heaven!

The two panels I'm most looking forward to are both workshops: one on mapmaking and one on writing fight scenes right. Stay tuned for the con reports!

What you learn on trains . . .

2010-08-09T20:35:00.000+10:00

I was travelling by train the other day -- something I don't do that often because I love driving -- when I heard two teenagers or early twenty-somethings talking about their university courses. As a TAFE teacher, my ears instantly pricked. I'm always interested in what's going on in the trenches -- even if they're not exactly our trenches.

So, one of the students was talking about having to do a compulsory online subject. Seeing as I teach (or, rather, moderate) online subjects sometimes and am involved in their design, my ears pricked further. This I wanted to hear.

The main thing I picked up was that the student thought his online subject was great because he was paying his sister $10 to do all his assignments for him. Hmm. Apart from the fact that she was charging far too little in my opinion, I was also struck that this was one of my great fears in online teaching. How can we verify that a student's work is their own -- how do we know they're even engaging with the content?

Well, we can tell that they've been online -- how long exactly, how many files they've looked at, how many sessions they've had, when the first and last time they logged in was -- all sorts of stuff. (And don't I love the student tracking device!) What we can't ascertain is that it's actually them on the other end of the computer. Maybe they should have their webcams on -- might make for some interesting viewing of those who like working at midnight in their PJs!

Ultimately, though, university (and TAFE) students are supposed to be doing a course because they want to do it -- places are competitive. Not everyone gets in. Of course, it would be naive to think that that means they all do want to be there -- some are there because of parental pressure and for all sorts of other reasons.

What I wanted to ask this student was whether he had thought about why he was doing this subject. Most probably he would have told me it was compulsory, and that he didn't particularly like it, and that's why he was paying his sister, in which case I would have asked him why he thought it was compulsory. Subjects usually are for a reason, and that reason has to do with skills -- essential skills.

As well as novel writing, I teach editing. Novel writing is not a compulsory subject, and generally I know my students enjoy it. Editing, which involves the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation -- before they get onto the more exciting stuff -- is what lies under good writing. I'm not saying all good writing has to be grammatical -- it doesn't -- but if someone's going to break the rules, they'd better understand them first. Many of my students don't enjoy the subject -- well, not at first, anyway. Some grind their teeth all through the year, whereas others learn to appreciate it, or even to love it. (I was one of those.) By the end of the year, even those who haven't particularly enjoyed it have learnt a grudging respect. They understand why they have had to do the subject. I've even had a few who haven't enjoyed it but who have sacrificed a Pass to do the subject again because they know they haven't yet quite mastered it. (After all, if you score 50%, realistically you know about half of what you should know.)

So those students who cheat, ultimately cheat themselves. They might think they've come out on top, they might feel they've outsmarted their teachers and the system, but the only person they've truly outsmarted is themselves. Kind of sad, really.

Currently reading

2010-03-07T10:18:00.000+11:00

Student first chapters and outlines -- a great way to get a feel for what my students are going to be working on this year, though sometimes one will change horses midway through, but that's okay.

Trouble is that most of them have been together for a year already and know each other's novels intimately, whereas this is the first time I've seen them. It's more work for me, of course, but well worth the time and is always interesting to see where they're coming from. I've also had them talking about their novels and filling out a questionnaire, so hopefully I'll have a good handle for where they're coming from.

One of the worries that someone will always have is what if what they're writing isn't my thing. I'm a genre fiction writer, which their first year teacher wasn't, so the genre writers are always happy to discover that. (And it's a great balance to have.) But even so, there can be that persistent niggle. And really it doesn't matter. There will always be books that aren't quite my thing, but it doesn't mean I can't look at them objectively to see whether they're working, how well executed they are. I'm more interested in the craft than whether something rings my particular bells.

One of my pet peeves in workshopping is the workshopper who says they can't comment on something because it's not their genre. What a cop out. I was in a workshop once where someone had written a magic realism story and every workshopper except me and the workshop leader used that line. It was hardly fair to the poor writer who had made detailed comments on everyone else's stories even though they weren't in the same genre as what she was writing. Anyone can comment on craft, and, really, one of the great pleasures of teaching writing is the variety of projects we get to work with, so students shouldn't worry about such things but should rejoice in the fact that they're writing something only they can write.

Currently watching

2010-03-06T09:37:00.007+11:00

Over the last few weeks, my husband and I have been watching a series of motivational talks on TED.com. We've watched all kinds of things, including a fascinating talk on statistics. Yeah, I know. Go figure.

The TED site has heaps of great content and is well worth a browse. A lot more than a browse, actually. This is a site you could lose yourself in for days if you have time!

Here's today's (for us) by James Cameron, good not just for the Avatar-mad lot (like me), but all those of us who are creative, artistic or imaginative in our endeavours. It's called James Cameron: Before Avatar . . . a curious boy.

I'm going to pin his parting quote near my computer, so I can look at it when I'm wrestling with my novel: "Failure is an option, but fear is not." Go listen to the talk for the context. It's well worth the seventeen minutes that it takes.

Online teaching (and face-to-face)

2010-03-05T19:44:00.006+11:00

The last two years I've taught a class online, but this year because I was dropping back from 0.5 to 0.4 to get more writing done, I decided to forego my online class. My other two face-to-face classes are two I've been teaching for a while, and still feel passionate about. I've enjoyed teaching online, but have found it seriously impinged on my desire to keep my blog going. I've also joined Facebook, but haven't really got in the swing of it yet, perhaps because my kids are always on, and we have to share the computer with internet access and so I never seem to get on.

Anyway, back to the point of this post: so, there I was dropping back my time fraction, but then found out that my contract was set at 0.5 until December, so decided to run with it. Only I decided to take on another face-to-face class, a repeat of one I'm already teaching, which would free up my home time to write, rather than to teach. But you know what? I'm missing the online class. It was fun. (Which is not to say the face-to-face classes aren't, because they are.) I suppose what I'm really missing is the Discussion Board, where I got to read what my fellow writers thought about all sorts of things writerly. We had some really in-depth discussions on the Discussion Board.

On the other hand, I've had some great discussions in my novel class this year already. But it's different reading it online. More people contribute. (Though I can't complain about that with this year's class: they're a talkative bunch, with lots of interesting stuff to share.) Online, people have time to think about what they want to say, to formulate a response. They often get to a deeper level of engagement, just because they can take the time to think about it. In class, they're on-the-spot more, which doesn't mean they can't come up with some terrific ideas, because they can.

Sometimes, when we teachers get together and think about how much unpaid work we do (and believe me, with all the workshopping and marking of assignments in teaching writing, there's a lot), and think about all the admin stuff that's driving us crazy, we forget just how lucky we are. Some of the class discussions, both online and in class, are energising. I come out thinking, wow, that was a great class, and I remember how I loved being a student.

The other great thing is that every year is different: every class is different. Each year has new challenges and new rewards, and these aren't always easily apparent, especially not at the beginning of the year. But they make the job interesting -- there's never a feeling of same-old, same-old, because it's never the same.

Currently reading

2010-03-03T14:04:00.000+11:00

Submissions for the Ada Cambridge Award. Great to see so many high quality stories. I reckon the authors are doing what they should: getting hold of previous anthologies and studying them, reading the judges reports, learning. It makes the whole judging process more enjoyable!

Punctuation point: comma use in reasoning and consequences

2010-02-26T21:19:00.000+11:00

In my last post, I had the following two sentences in succession:

(i) And this is where I grumble about droughts that necessitate four minute showers, because I used to do some of my best thinking in the shower.

(ii) These days epiphanies are fewer because I'm under the water a lot less.

When I'm reading over my blog posts (which, I'm rather ashamed to say I don't always do), I'm reading as an editor and thinking about my grammar and punctuation. So when I got to these two lines, I noticed that I had a comma before "because" in the first, and no comma before "because" in the second. A flag went up in my head because both sentences were similar, yet punctuated differently. Was this correct? Yes, it was.

Both sentences begin with a main clause (which expresses the main idea in the sentence) and are followed by a subordinate clause (which cannot stand alone). The first "because" is introducing a clause that explains a consequence of the action in the first clause. In the second, however, it's introducing a clause that shows the reasoning behind the first clause.

This difference is seen more readily when two main clauses are linked together with the word "so". Here's some examples:

Just before five pm, I went to the post office so I could pay my bills. (The reason why I went -- no comma.)

Just before five pm, I went to the post office, so I didn't get to the bank. (The consequence of my going to the post office; this one takes a comma.)

Here's another example:

Mrs Jones's dog has a muzzle so it can't bite. (Why it's wearing the muzzle, the reason she has muzzled it -- no comma.)

Mrs Jones's dog has a muzzle, so it can't bite. (Ah, now it's not why it's wearing the muzzle, but a consequence of its wearing the muzzle -- that comma changes the reading of the sentence.)

I know I'm anal about such things -- that's the editor in me -- but I have to say I love this kind of nuance I can give just by knowing the rules. Of course many readers won't get the fine distinction, but some will. I can't determine exactly how readers will read my writing, but I can make it as clear as possible so that those who can get it will.

The recalcitrant scene

2010-02-25T21:04:00.002+11:00

On and off for the past year or so, I've been wrestling with a difficult scene. It was one that initially caused me writer's block, but then I told myself to get over it -- that if I couldn't write that scene there were plenty more I could write. So I did those instead. But I kept coming back to this one.

At first, I thought it was that I didn't know what my character would do. That surprised me, because it's a character I know well. Eventually, I wrote the scene, but I wasn't happy with it. It didn't feel right, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then one day, in the shower, I had an epiphany. (And this is where I grumble about droughts that necessitate four minute showers, because I used to do some of my best thinking in the shower. These days epiphanies are fewer because I'm under the water a lot less.) The reason the scene wasn't working was that I had my character doing what the plot needed him to do, not what he would really do. I had forced his hand. In my head, where he ended up was where I'd envisaged him ending up right from the start. And the truth is -- he didn't want to go there. That's why I had so much trouble in the first place. It wasn't that I didn't know what he would do -- I did know, but it wasn't what I (or rather the plot) needed him to do.

Okay, easy enough. Scrap the second half of the scene and rewrite it. The more I looked at the scene, though, the more I liked what I had done, the emotional journey he'd gone on, the reasoning he'd used. So I put the scene aside again. I reread it. And reread it.

Then I thought that maybe I could just cut and paste some of the old scene and rewrite a new bit in the middle. I did this and now suspect I've ended up with a mishmash of what the scene had been and what it should be, but I have something I can work on now and refine. I'm excited. I love the refining process. I love writing! I'm going back to it right now.

Book launch: Solace and grief

2010-02-21T20:41:00.003+11:00

Yesterday, Foz Meadows, one of my SuperNOVA writers group, launched her first book Solace and grief. I'm a great believer that we all feed each other as writers, that we all grow from reading each other's work and from critiquing -- not just from the comments that other people make on our stories, but as much from the comments we make on theirs. However, we didn't have any input into this book -- it was written and perhaps even accepted before Foz joined SuperNOVA. (If not accepted, then this followed shortly after, but the book was certainly already with the publisher.) But none of that stopped us coming out in force to help Foz celebrate.

Finishing a draft is a huge thing, so is whipping the book into publishable shape (or finishing the redrafting process) and getting it out there, and having it accepted and published is the hugest of all. Each stage should be celebrated because each is a success. And we should take joy in the success of our peers. One writer whom I was in a workshop with once, both as unpublished novelists, signed a seven-figure deal awhile ago. I'm ecstatic for her. Such success helps all local writers -- it opens doors for all of us.

Every so often I hear of writers, often published and successful writers, who hear of somebody else's success and get their noses put out of joint because they see that as a success they've missed out on. There are many different readers and many different books to meet those differing tastes -- to hear of someone else's success and see it as a loss for you is not only likely misguided but a path to self-destruction. Such small-mindedness harms you.

It astounds me that people are so competitive in this sort of pursuit. You have control over what you do in terms of perseverance, you have control over how much reworking you do, how exacting you are, you have control over whether you research a publisher to make sure you're giving your book the best chance, but you have no control over whether that publisher will take on your work or not -- whether the editor who reads it falls in love with it enough to go out and bat for it. That's what you need -- and it's not easy to find, so rejoice when you find it, and rejoice too when your friends do.

Foz's launch was unusual in that it was the first book launch I've been to where the books weren't actually out yet. Don't get me wrong: they were there. I've been to launches where there were no books because they hadn't come back from the printers, and to launches where there was no author because of illness. But this was the first preemptive book launch I've been to. Anyway, Foz, I hope it's strike is long, hard and successful! I look forward to the launch of the sequel! (And in a side-note, I haven't been able to lay my hands on it for reading yet -- my daughter took one look at it and said, "You must've been reading my mind. I want that book. And she's had her nose in it ever since.)

Nonfiction reading

2010-02-19T21:39:00.000+11:00

I'm not a great nonfiction reader. Actually, I say that thinking about books. Give me a novel any day! But I do read the newspapers (though not every day), and I read Time magazine, and sometimes rail about the Pacific edition being full of US news, especially if there's an election on. I mean, I'm like most writers in that I read whatever is in front of me at the time -- I'll eat my cereal while reading the back of the cereal box if there's nothing else at hand. And it's not that I mind the back of the cereal box as much as that I've read it several times already. All right, more than several.

At the moment, though, I do seem to be on a bit of a nonfic drive. Last year I read Captain James Cook: a biography by Richard Alexander Hough and A short history of the 20th century by Geoffrey Blainey, both books that I enjoyed. I'm currently reading Blainey's A very short history of the world, and then have a book lined up about how the barbarian invasions shaped the world. I've been dipping in and out of other history books -- one a pictorial history of the twentieth century, one about history's greatest hits, and really enjoying the experience. I suppose it's not that unusual for a fantasy writer to be reading history, but this is more recent history than the timeframes I'm writing about.

I'm also marvelling at Avatar: a confidential report on the biological and social history of Pandora (James Cameron's Avatar) by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison. It's staggering to see how much worldbuilding Cameron did. I suppose it helps to have the kind of resources he has behind him. I can't pay someone to develop a Myrad language the way he was able to do for his Na'vi. On the other hand, I respect that he went to that effort. Not everyone would have. Tolkien did of course. But as I say to my classes, it's the whole tip of the iceberg thing -- that you show your readers the tip of the iceberg, but you have to know the whole thing. (I kinda like that I can include an iceberg reference in the same para I'm talking about Cameron's masterpiece!) You can't do too much worldbuilding. Unless of course that's all you end up doing -- there comes a time when you have to say enough and actually start writing. You can always do more as needed.

The other book I'm dipping in and out of is The art of Avatar: James Cameron's epic adventure by Lisa Fitzpatrick, James Cameron, Peter Jackson and Jon Landau. All right, this one I'm not reading so much from a writerly perspective but because I still can't get enough of Avatar. I was the same with Star Wars. Bought the Art of for that as well. And the script. Hmm, I haven't seen that one on the shelves yet . . .

Copyright and greed

2010-02-13T12:42:00.003+11:00

Let me say first off that I am not a copyright lawyer and don't fully understand all the complexities of copyright law. Working from time to time as a freelance editor, I've come up against copyright issues and have spent some time, therefore, perusing the Copyright Council's wonderful website and reading their free fact sheets, and have once or twice spoken to their lawyers about some of the trickier aspects.

As a writer, I'm a great believer in copyright and the protection it gives me. I think if someone borrows something from someone else, they should get permission and perhaps pay for the privilege. As an editor, I have sometimes sent writers scurrying off for permission, or advised them to remove something that I think is an infringement. They are often astounded that I could think it so -- but it's only two lines of a poem. Yeah, I know, but it's not about quantity: it's about quality. About how much craft went into something. And if that something is a poem or a song, then it might be a lot of craft for a few words.

Copyright protects all of us. It means you can't just take my short story, put your name to it and publish it somewhere else. Think that kind of thing never happens? Think again. It does. (Well, I haven't heard of it with short stories, but I have heard of a poet in the US who fortuitously discovered some of their poems published by someone else; I also know of a rather notorious Australian writer who plagiarised someone else's whole article and put their name to it and got caught out. Astounding, isn't it? Why would you do it?) It also means that you can't take that page I've reworked several times and drop it into your story without my permission. I may choose to grant you permission or I may decline. It's entirely up to me.

Having said that I've also heard of writers who've applied for permission and been asked an astonishing amount of money. Several hundred pounds for the reproduction of a couple of lines, for example. The writer decided not to use them. The owners were within their rights -- but, really, does that sound fair? It sounds somewhat excessive to me.

So, what has set me on this train of thought is the copyright battle that has been playing out in the music industry. Men at Work and their iconic song, and that other iconic Australian song "Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree". I'm not going to comment on whether or not I think there was a case to answer to because my opinion is irrelevant and in any case a judge has made a decision. What I am astounded by (all right, I've used that word already, so let me say appalled by) is the amount of money that the plaintiff's have been demanding. One newspaper reported it as sixty per cent of the profits. Sixty per cent! The more the better, I read that their lawyers had said. Is that attitude really about fairness or about greed? (Yeah, I know. Wake up and face the real world! The real world runs off greed. And some professions seem to embrace it more than others.)

Part of deciding whether copyright has been breached includes an assessment of how much work went into the original -- perhaps part of the consideration of recompense for a breach should include an assessment of what percentage the infringement makes up of the new work it appears in. I'll be waiting with interest to see what amount is awarded. I hope I'm not astonished.

Currently reading

2010-02-08T22:10:00.001+11:00

Short story and poetry entries for the Friends of Newport and Williamstown Library literary competitions. I love seeing the inventiveness of children's writing. It reminds me of the fun we forget to have as adult writers when we're trying hard to be literary or serious. Or even sometimes when we're not. That's what I loved about ... Oops, almost dropped the A-word, and I promised I wouldn't do that!

Travels in the land of my imagination: the beaches

2010-02-05T23:15:00.000+11:00

My characters don't spend a lot of time at the beach, but there are a few beach scenes, all at a place called the Forgotten Beach, which I largely modelled on the beach at Tidal River, Wilson's Promontory, but with whiter sands -- something like Denison Beach, near Bicheno (below). It could otherwise have been the bottom picture, which is on the Southern Ocean. When I was at the prom (in Victoria), I walked part of the beach blindfolded, to see whether it could be done, because one lot of my characters have to walk the Forgotten Beach in almost total darkness. As well as finding out whether it could be done, I wanted to experience their sensory deprivation, to experience the cold mauling on my ankles the way they would, so did this walk late in the evening.

I've always lived near the sea, but on a bay, not the ocean. I know its moods, its scents and sounds. I know the birds that wheel overhead. It's amazing to me when I go somewhere like Squeaky Beach at the prom, or Denison Beach in Tassie, to hear the different sound that the sand makes, that sharp squeak on the ball of my foot. Or to go somewhere like Perissa Beach in Santorini, and feel just how hot black sands get -- quite different to the paler sands I'm used to.

I've never seen a beach with the sand rippled the way it was in the picture taken near Strahan (below). This was an estuary with day-tripping cruise ships moving up and down it, their wakes causing the rippled effect.

Visiting places gives you those telling details that you might not have otherwise imagined. I remember one of the surprises for me was walking on Corfu on a hot day (say 40ish degrees), and the hot wind (which I'll always think of as a north wind, because in Melbourne our hot winds come from the north) bringing the scent of eucalypts -- a startling smell that made me nostalgically homesick. Had I never travelled, I don't think I could have imagined this as something I might smell in Greece. You really do need to get out there.

One day, I'm going to set a novel in Delft in Holland. My father's from Holland, but not from Delft, which is somewhere I haven't been. Yet. But if I do write that novel (have to finish the current and next trilogies first), then I will be going -- going to track down its sounds and scents, its colours and textures, all the things that make it unique.

Honeymoon Bay, Freycinet National Park

Honeymoon Bay, Freycinet

Nine Mile Beach (near Swansea)

Denison Beach (near Bicheno)

Tessellated Pavement, near Port Arthur

near Strahan

Travels in the land of my imagination: the forests and mountains

2010-01-30T11:20:00.000+11:00

I live in the city, but I'm not writing about city or suburban life -- I'm writing about a land that's been partially terraformed by humans and is essentially a medieval-type landscape and society. My characters are riding around on horseback, through forests, on beaches; they live in castles and in underground homes. In my imagination, I dwell in these places while I'm writing, but it helps to remind me of what that means by researching, by visiting places that are as close to the ones in my novel as I can find.

Perhaps one of the most famous writers maxims is to "write what you know". To me that doesn't mean I have to write about suburban life, but that I must try to capture emotional truths. I know what it is to be frightened, to feel horror and loathing and joy and love and embarrassment. Frustration is often a parrot on my shoulder. I know these things, and I try to give them to my characters: I try to write my characters from the inside out.

Visiting forests, walking through the leaf-litter and hearing the soft pad underfoot (not so much the crackle of leaves because of the dampness), feeling the cool air lace fingers through my hair, smelling the dankness, experiencing the quiet, the sense of being alone in the world, in a world that could be medieval helps me to know my setting too, to bring it to life (I hope) for my readers.

We've just come back from a family holiday in Tasmania, where I got to inhabit quite different forests to the Victorian ones I'm more used to. Below are a few of my holiday shots, all of which could be part of my novel. They remind me of what it was like to be there, what it's like for my characters, and help me enter that place in my imagination where I do know what it's like to be a soldier or a king or any other thing I want my characters to be.

Freycinet National Park

Looking across to Freycinet

near Strahan

Dove Lake & Cradle Mountain

Enchanted Walk, Cradle Mountain National Park

En route to Cradle Mountain

Contemplating the holidays' end . . .

2010-01-23T12:06:00.000+11:00

It's that funny thing when you work in teaching that half of me wants the holidays to go on forever (who doesn't, right?), and yet the other half is excited about starting new classes with new students, wants to see how many students we'll get at enrolment, who will be in my classes.

Our course is more hands-on between year's end and beginning because we do so much work on student selection. Oh, in some ways, I envy the courses that just look at TER (Tertiary Entrance Rank). This is the least of our concerns; we do consider TERs, but only as part of a much larger package. We also get a statement of why students want to do the course, a folio of work, which we have to read and appraise, we get them in for an interview, we get them to do writing on the day, which we read and appraise, and we give them a short grammar skills test, which we then have to mark. Only when we've done all of this can we make our selections. The extra work is worth it because it helps us weed out those who won't be able to cope with the course.

But back to the end of the holidays -- the thing I love best is not having to live my life by a timetable: not having to get kids off to school, not having to be at work early to make sure I get a car spot, the more relaxed atmosphere in the house (ie not having to nag kids about homework, which I know doesn't work, but I find I can't help myself), not having to work and think when it's stinking hot. I'm less social and more family orientated in the holidays, and we do so much more. This holidays the theme has been Avatar, which I'm sure you've noticed! Last year it was "Spooks" -- we watched the first six seasons, averaging two or three episodes a day. We also do a lot of swimming. The kids play computer games, and I write. And read. I have this funny relationship with reading because I love doing it -- and really I read all the time, but not in extended bursts like I do over the holidays -- and I know I need to read lots as a writer, but I feel guilty if I sit down to read a book. It must be my mother's voice in my ear, telling me to clean up, or the writer telling me I should be writing! But in the holidays there's time to do both. (Note, I didn't say all three. My mother's voice is still in my ear!)

The last post on Avatar -- I promise (I think)

2010-01-17T09:26:00.000+11:00

A recent article I've read on Avatar is all about how some people have become depressed and suicidal after seeing the movie because the real world now seems dull in comparison. Someone even wants people to get together and start our own Na'vi tribe. Does that mean we all have to grow a metre and a half and turn blue? How bizarre. (I do note the attractiveness of the Na'vi though -- tall, slender to the extreme, muscular, large eyes . . .)

It's been interesting looking at the criticisms levelled at this film. One said they hated the film because the theme was, basically, as long as you have one US soldier with you, you'll be right. ?Another said they hated the film because it was fundamentally just another attack on the US military. Did they both see the same film?

The Vatican has given the film the thumbs down because it says Avatar turns environmentalism into neo-paganism.

The Russians (or at least a few of them) are saying that Cameron took his ideas from Russian writer Strugatsky, who came up with the planet name Pandora and a race called the Nave (Cameron of course has the Na'vi). Hmm, I have a Hell's Gate Woods in my novel, which will feature a lot in the third book, but I came up with that all on my own. I note that Hell's Gate is the main human camp in Avatar, but that doesn't mean I drew on the film. I had this name years ago. I mean, Pandora's box -- hello? Sound familiar. I did like the rather hilarious adaptation of the summary of Pocahontas though, to make it sound like Avatar. Yes, lots of similarities in the premise but the delivery is quite different. There are only so many stories around (though the number varies -- sometimes it's as few as three, sometimes in the twenties).

A science fiction site says the film is an allegory for the fight between science fiction and fantasy, and fantasy always wins because people prefer utopias over dystopias, and in the end we have our utopian happy ending. On the other hand, in the article I read about the Russians, the film was described as being anti-utopian.

The racist comments -- that the Na'vi have to be saved by a white American male, I think are silly. I mean couldn't you also argue that the white "American" male can't become heroic until he gives up his white American ways -- until he abandons what most of his people stand for? (It's not black and white enough to say "his people" because the scientists do not embrace the corporate greed but the quest for knowledge.) And it wouldn't be "racist" as much as "speciesist" -- we are not the same race as the Na'vi. (And, remember, all of humanity is one race.)

One thing I've loved reading is a comparison of the original script and the final script. In the original, Tsu'tey lives but has had his queue cut off so can't commune with nature anymore, ride any beasts, or even mate. He begs Jake to kill him, and Jake does. I'm rather glad this was cut -- I'm not sure about the message behind that: that man who has escaped (rather than overcome, I suppose) his disability kills one who has become disabled because he understands the frustrations? Hasn't Jake found something worthwhile to do with his life? Mightn't Tsu'tey? I hope they do bring him back. I thought he was a great character -- he delivered one of the most moving moments for me, when he finally agrees to fly with his long-standing adversary who has now exceeded anything he (Tsu'tey) has ever dreamed of achieving. I could imagine all sorts of potential conflicts about leadership if he's around. Also, if he were to have broken his back or suffered the loss of his queue, there's lots of conflict potential there too, both for him or Jake. (But please don't have Jake kill him! Jake might stop other clan members from doing this or fail to stop them and then have to deal with his own demons.)

Having seen it multiple times, I can't tell you how many people I've overheard saying, "That is the best film I have ever seen!". It was about my third go when I decided that. People can criticise the plot and characters all that they are like: the bottom line is that this film is moving a lot of people. Part of it may be the special effects, but I think it's more than that -- I think that this is a film that has a great heart beating beneath the spectacle. It has great heart.

A short one on Avatar

2010-01-11T11:30:00.002+11:00

Yeah, enough already, I hear you say.

Just a quick thought -- I've been following the box office success of Avatar and noted in the lists of SF movies, District 9, which I saw earlier this year. I saw this movie twice -- because it was interesting, and I wanted to think more about it. But it was so ugly -- perhaps the ugliest movie I have ever seen. Twice was enough. Not sure I'll buy it on DVD. Maybe, when it's cheap. In comparison, Avatar is probably the most beautiful movie I have ever seen. I've told The Gadget Man that once it's out on DVD we're buying a home theatre system. (Similarly, when Gladiator came out, I bought the DVD even though we didn't have a player. When TGM pointed that out, I said that, yeah, we'd have to do something about that.)

And another one . . . hype

2010-01-05T10:29:00.000+11:00

My mother won't see Avatar. She hates that kind of movie, she says. I know this is true, but I'm trying to convince her to see it anyway. I think it's worth it -- I think the three-D is done so well it's a game-changing movie, much as the first talkies must have been, the first colour movies. I think it's that good. However, I've heard a few people, including a girl we took the other day, say that it gave them headaches, which is a shame. Maybe it won't be game-changing if that's the case. If they can iron that problem out, which is what I think they tried to do with the new 3D-camera, then it will be game changing. Absolutely.

As for my mother, she steadfastly refuses, and I know I'm not going to win this one. I often wonder how she can be my mother when she hates SF and I am so into it -- and Avatar conflates my two loves: science fiction that includes space ships (I love space opera) and fantasy. Yeah, there's no magic in this, but I'm talking about the feel of it, and all the bits with the Na'vi, apart from the battles with the humans, feel like fantasy.

I have other friends whose responses to this movie perplex me more than my mother's -- my friends who love science fiction, but refuse to see this one, who say it looks stupid or cartoonish. Now, to me, those Na'vi were completely real. I'm not that into animation either, but I didn't see any in this film. I was there, on Pandora: those people were as real to me as the humans in the film. I wonder if my friends' responses have anything to do with the hype. This film is getting lots of hype, even from me! I can't stop talking about it.

I've read that way back in the 1970s, James Cameron went to see Star Wars and was seriously pissed off. This was the film he should've made. And so off he went and made movies and wrote a script for his Star Wars (yes, Avatar), but which he had to shelve until a time that technology could reasonably cope with it. I too went to see Star Wars, but a bit reluctantly -- because of all the hype! My brother had seen it and said it wasn't that good, and I remember going with a few friends and warning them about what my brother had said. They all said they'd heard it was fantastic. Somewhere in the movie, probably in the first thirty seconds, I went from doubting to loving it, and they went the other way. They were all lukewarm when they came out, whereas I was raving. I went back to my brother and said, "What about this . . . ?" and "What about that . . . ?" and he kept saying, yeah, that he'd forgotten that had happened. By the time I'd finished, he was as convinced (or almost as convinced) as I was that it was the best movie ever. I couldn't get enough of it and saw it more than thirty times in the cinema. (Admittedly, in those days, films weren't on in as many cinemas and had longer runs. Star Wars ran for over a year, something impossible to imagine for any contemporary movie.) The hype had put me off initially, but once I'd seen it I was on the bandwagon. Star Wars was unlike anything I had ever seen, and the battle to destroy the Death Star had me on the edge of my seat, in a way very few movies have (in fact the only other movie that did this to me was Gladiator, in Maximus's first contest at the Coliseum.)

There have been several other movies along the way that I've seen many many times, though none quite that many. There's finally a movie I could see that many times, if time allows. For me, Cameron's quest to make his own Star Wars has been a success. This is the first movie that has excited me to the same degree. (These days, however, I prefer The empire strikes back to what is now known as A new hope. But I didn't at the time. I like that there's a lot more character development in Empire, but at the time, notwithstanding that blood-chilling moment when I first discovered Darth Vader was Luke's father, I was disappointed in the ending as it felt unfinished. Because it was. It was much more part of a trilogy than stand-alone, whereas Star Wars did stand alone.

My other really major movies:

Alien -- I saw the opening session in Melbourne and was completely freaked out. I have never been more frightened than I was seeing that movie, and seeing it over and over in no way diminished the fear.
Battlestar Galactica -- yes, it had a cinema release, and I went about seven times, then had to content myself with seeing it on TV. While it wasn't quite a Star Wars in terms of movie experiences it still held me captive.
Excalibur -- the film that turned me from science fiction geek to fantasy geek. I have loved everything Arthurian ever since, though these days have moved away from wanting to write my own King Arthur novel, maybe because I'm addressing aspects of this story in my own -- just things like the triangle of lovers, which is a stalwart in fiction, anyway.
The right stuff -- my goodness this was an amusing movie (even though many others didn't seem to notice). Very, very clever. And tapped right into my love of rocketry. Yeah, rockets make me go all gooey. Nothing phallic in that, I assure you.
Capricorn One -- did I say that rockets make me go all gooey? Yeah, so does all that NASA chatter -- "We have Outboard Engine cut off." "Roger that, OBECO at ten minutes after the hour . . ." (It's cool to be a nerd these days, right?)
Gladiator -- completely swept me up, the politics, the unfairness of it all. And, as I've said, the first film since Star Wars to have me literally on the edge of my seat. (Alien had me jumping out of it!)
Lord of the rings trilogy (especially The Two Towers). I'm not sure I needed all the endings in the last film, and there could never be too much Aragorn, but these were beautifully realised films, and I loved them. Love them.
Avatar -- yeah, but I think you've gathered that already.

Which brings me back to my mum. When Star Wars came out, I argued and argued to get her to see it and eventually succeeded. She slept through the first half. Was asleep (it was a hot day, and we were on holidays) before the movie even started -- though how anyone can sleep through all those explosions is beyond me. By the time she woke up, she had no idea what was going on and so declared the movie stupid. I tried to get her to see it again, but failed. And so not even Star Wars was able to change her mind. I know if I get her to Avatar she'll hate it, but I still think she should see it and see if we can maybe expand her boundaries a little bit. Maybe I'm just crazy?

More on Avatar: three similarities to Titanic

2010-01-01T09:55:00.001+11:00

Yes, I know I've already done a post on Avatar, but it's still very much in my mind at the moment (probably because I keep going to see it), so you might just have to put up with this for a while.

I know that Avatar has more in common with Aliens than it does with Titanic, but there are three notable similarities between Cameron's last two blockbusters, aside from the one piece of music that always sets me to thinking that the ship's about to hit an iceberg (it's in "Scorched earth" for anyone who has the soundtrack).

(i) the defining image. Both films have one image, above all for me, that encapsulates the unfolding disaster and that will forever remain in my memory. Both images do not include any of the main characters from the film, but are absolutely striking and absolutely beautiful, yet convey a real sense of horror. In Titanic, it is the image of a drowned girl or woman, splayed out underwater, her dress moving gently about her. In Avatar, it is the image of a pa'li (or direhorse if you prefer the English) on fire and galloping through the burning forest. Neytiri is observing this, but she's not in the frame. This is a nightmare image, yet slow-mo turns it into one of strange and compelling beauty. Beautiful and terrible at once.

(ii) in both movies, one of the main characters (two in Avatar) is (are) bound and trapped as the disaster unfolds all around. In both cases, neither really deserves to be there. Jack is handcuffed below decks for stealing a necklace, when in fact he has been framed. Jake is tied up -- for what exactly? I think it has more to do with Eytucan's being angry that Jake has distressed his daughter, and a general anger at the skypeople than anything Jake has done personally. Unless it is just a case of wanting to shoot the messenger? Or because he has withheld information that he wouldn't have been allowed to deliver and wouldn't have been believed? He has, in fact, betrayed them through his reports, but they don't know that. (And for him it wasn't a deliberate betrayal. I imagine he had forgotten, if he were ever aware, that Quaritch was looking at these as well has his official reports, which had become a lot more guarded.) In both movies, someone has to rescue the main character rather than their being able to get themselves out of trouble.

(iii) something big falls! Yeah, this is kind of obvious, I know, but it still leapt out at me -- hometree almost trembling in the air, as did Titanic, then canting sideways and going down -- both achieving the same kind of "splash". Maybe it's just the cinematography -- not sure -- maybe it's just that it is the same type of event!

Post script: For the record I'm an Alien (Ridley Scott) rather than Aliens (James Cameron) girl -- much prefer the suspense than the action-shoot-'em-up kinda thing in those two, and yet here I am absolutely loving Avatar . . .

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T11:19:00.003+11:00

After enjoying the Victorian State Singers as part of yesterday's "Carols by Candlelight" on Channel 9, we've been listening to their "Nine Lesson Carol Service" while unwrapping presents: a new King Arthur novel (never can get enough of those), and the soundtrack to Avatar -- some fantastic writing music. Lucky Cat Sparks isn't here -- I know I drove her mad with the Return of the King soundtrack while at Clarion, and I'll be the same with this one: playing it on loop while I write. Beautiful!

Anyway, here's the link in case anyone else wants to listen to some beautiful Christmas music. (VSS is a youth choir in Melbourne, led by Doug Heywood. They're centred in Williamstown (in Melbourne) and looking for new members, so if you're 30 or under, love singing and live in or around Melbourne, here's their website!)

Avatar -- 3D

2009-12-20T22:38:00.006+11:00

Mild spoiler alert . . .

Tonight, my kids and I went to see Avatar in 3D. As I walked out of the film, I heard a man lean across to his wife and say, "This is the best film I have ever seen." Princess Sleepyhead said to me, "That's a keeper", meaning it's one we have to buy the DVD for, and I said, "No, that's not a keeper, that's a let's-go-and-see-this-again film, as in right now." The film reminded me of the passion I used to feel for Star Wars (known these days as Star Wars: Episode 4: A New Hope or just A New Hope to some of the younger generation). I saw Star Wars more than thirty times in the cinemas, could hum the entire soundtrack in order and recite the whole movie. My friends thought I was a freak; my parents thought I was a freak. Well, not really, but it's in their interests not to believe that seeing as I had to inherit such freakiness from somebody. To me it was a passion -- and it's the same thing I get from my writing, or perhaps take to it.

I came out of Avatar tonight at 8.40, and the next session was at 9.00. I said to the kids, "Do you wanna see it again? We could go to the 9 o'clock session", and Princess Sleepyhead nodded yes, and grabbed my arm and said, "Really?", whereas Sir Talkalot tilted his head to the side and said, "Are you joking, because I can't tell whether you're joking or not?" I assured him I wasn't, and only then did he give me an enthusiastic endorsement.

Now, unfortunately for all of us, I didn't have a mobile to contact my husband and tell him what we were doing, so we went out in search of a public phone box. There were some inside the shopping centre we were at, but it was already shut. We found one nearby, but someone was in it. Can you believe it? We headed to the nearest large train station, and I was so busy spotting the two there that I didn't notice the traffic island in the middle of the car park and straddled it neatly with all four wheels, crunching the undercarriage of the car, much to my own horror and that of the bystanders. Whoops! No damage done to anything luckily, but by then I was too shaken up to do anything but drive home. The repeat will have to wait now until Tuesday as we have something on tomorrow, and I have a solstice party tomorrow night.

The 3D aspect was interesting, especially the breathtaking views of the planet and spaceships. OMG, was I in heaven, or what? But there were some scenes where the effect was ruined by the painted backdrop. These were only occasional though, but it did effect suspension of disbelief. Sometimes this is noticeable in 2D films, but the effect was more marked in 3D, but aside from that -- I *love* this movie. (My one other critique was I wanted a little more on Trudy's motivation to make her role completely believable for me, just a little more . . . And also Avatar # 3, whose name I don't remember, seemed to disappear for a lot of the film. I thought he hadn't made it to the Na'vi camp, but he was there at the end.)

So, what exactly do I love about it? The story, the world, the characters -- all of it. Also the soundtrack, the special effects. In many ways the Na'vi (alien race) remind me of my own Myrads, except my Myrads are neither as tall nor as elegant. (And there are no romances between my aliens and humans, nor are they capable of having sex -- they're too anatomically different. This isn't a criticism of the film -- after all the Na'vi are interacting with avatars that are anatomically the same as they are, not humans. Whether or not such unions could produce a viable offspring isn't addressed in the movie, so there's no stumbling block there in the science for me. Not that this is a big part of the movie anyway -- it's not.)

I completely bought into this film and was swept up by it and its splendor. James Cameron's wait for the technology to catch up with his vision so that he could do this film was worth it. I believed in the Na'vi in a way I could never believe in the Ewoks. To me the believability is all in the eyes of the character, and whether they can use their eyes to express emotion. The Na'vi could. Chewbacca could. The Ewoks had buttons for eyes. Go figure.

I have the website open as I'm writing this, listening to the soundtrack. I can tell already that I'll be buying it in the next day or so: it's good writing music -- my last four writing albums were the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Gladiator (oh, and also "More music from Gladiator"). This is similar and different, just what I'm looking for. Already some of the leitmotifs are embedding themselves in my brain.

Okay, so see the movie already. This one has shot up into my top ten favourite movies of all time, and that's saying something considering I've only seen it once!

EndoWriMo

2009-12-01T22:05:00.014+11:00

Day....Written....Wordcount

1..........0..................0

2..........0..................0

3..........4209...........4209

4..........227..............4436

5..........1802............6238

6..........0..................6238

7..........0..................6238

8..........3439...........9677

9..........0..................9677

10........0..................9677

11.........0..................9677

12.........0.................9677

13.........0.................9677

14.........0.................9677

15......... 3193...........12870

16.........0.................12870

17.........3061...........15931

18.........0.................15931

19.........0.................15931

20.........4133...........20064

21.........1944...........22008

22.........0.................22008

23.........6422...........28430

24.........0.................28430

25......... 2626...........31056

26.........0.................31056

27.........8239...........39295

28.........0.................39295

29.........8015...........47310

30.........7439...........54749

So, here's the summary of my NaNoWriMo stats, taken from my official NaNo stats on the site -- three big days at the end. This table isn't quite accurate (although two of the last three days are), because I was NaNoing on a computer that doesn't have internet access, which saves me being interrupted by the ping of emails landing in my inbox, a great distraction, particularly if the writing's not going so well. So, for example, the first three days I wrote every day. Most days I did something, though sometimes it was only a couple of hundred words. The stats are also out because sometimes I updated after midnight. I mean, really, when does a session end at midnight? I did have a couple of days where I wrote till I was so tired I didn't make sense anymore -- one time I realised my sentences were no longer coherent, and another they were individual coherent sentences but had no bearing on the sentences before or after them, so I had a sequence of sentences with not only no logical progression of thought but no one thought in common! At this point I left them and they were included in the day's count, but then deleted the following morning, so there were words I had to make up. (And, yes, the NaNo rules are you don't edit or delete, but I always do. I know I'm not alone in that. Horses for courses.)

So, the crazy month is over, and I'm left feeling excited and very much "in the zone". That's what I love about NaNoWriMo, sometimes I hate it, and it's hard, and I ask myself why am I doing this crazy thing to myself, but when I get to the end, I have something substantial to work on, and it's amazing to have done it and been part of it. But some days . . . some days, to use a cliche, it really is like getting blood out of stone. Some days the blank screen is god and it dictates there shall be no inspiration, but countering that is the NaNo dictation: thou shalt write regardless of whether thou feels inspired or no. And so I put my head down, bum down, and plough on, plough the most rugged of fields, hating every moment, every word that comes out mired in crap, hate it, hate it, hate it. Less often are the gifts: days when inspiration is there for the taking and the story flows. I could have wished for more of these, but it's good for all of us to know we don't have to wait for them. I always remember hearing John Marsden talk about the days when the writing was agony and the days when it was gold (not his words, but I can't remember exactly how he put it), and I asked if he could tell the difference in quality between the two, and he thought about it for a little while and then said that no there was no difference in quality. That was a particularly enlightening and liberating moment for me.

The whole NaNo thing -- the loving and the hating it is my relationship to writing really. Sometimes I love the first draft, but mostly I don't. Mostly it's hard work. For me, the pleasure is in the rewrites, the editing passes. The reimagining. The redescribing. The fleshing out and the cutting back. NaNo gives me something to wreak my pleasure on! To take my pleasure from. It's hard but exhilarating and hard and fun and hard and hateful -- look at all those zeroes -- and hard, most of all, but it does say something about the power of deadlines. At least my stats do. There were times when I thought I wasn't going to make it, but I remember last time I did it, two years ago, when I really had to pull some big numbers and thought that I could do it again if I had to. And I did have to. More often. But I did it, and never mind that my husband had to cook dinner every night and no cleaning got done. Writing got done, and that's the main thing.

The unlikeable character

2009-05-27T08:20:00.000+10:00

It's always hard having an unlikeable character as your protagonist. After all, you want your readers to keep reading, right? So if your character is unlikeable, you've got a harder task to keep your readers interested -- if they don't like the character, why should they care what happens to him or her? And if they don't care, what's going to compel them to read on?

There is more than one way to get around this. You can write brilliantly so that there's other things going on with the musicality of your prose, its sheer poetry, to keep readers interested (which won't work on all readers). You can make sure your character is at least well rounded (as all protagonists should be) and that there are enough good characteristics to keep readers on-side. You can start with the good and gradually reveal the bad. Or you can trick your reader and suddenly reveal some abhorrent characteristic that totally puts the reader off.

Okay, I don't really recommend the last, but I've just had that experience as a reader, so clearly not all writers agree with me. Two thirds of the way into a book I've been reading, and the main character has done something that has left me so cold I'm not sure I want to continue. I liked this character. I empathised with him completely, but any empathy vanished with that one cruel act. It's something that was foreshadowed, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was led to a point where it seemed unavoidable and I was spared, so I relaxed and, then, when I wasn't expecting it: bang.

It's unusual for me to have such a strong reaction. But then this particular action was always going to be difficult for me to get over. Leaving it so late -- well, I feel manipulated. Two-thirds of the way in, I don't really want to abandon a story I was enjoying, but now I don't want to stay with this character at all. I suppose I will finish it -- my son asked me to read it because he wants to discuss it with me (and, no, it's not one of his school texts). He says it's one of his favourite books, and I mull over what's just happened and think, how can it be? But we're all different readers -- we all want something different, something we writers have to bear in mind.

Currently reading

2009-05-18T10:44:00.004+10:00

It used to be that I would only ever read one book at a time. I'd start one, and if it were any good, might have it finished in a day or two. And if it were not good, I'd pick it up and put it down, but would stay with it until I'd made a conscious decision (rarely) not to stay with it. This might mean that I would be stuck on one book for several weeks, perhaps longer. There are few books that I have abandoned, and it's usually because of a sludgy writing style -- think too many adjectives, too many adverbs -- rather than a lack of things happening. Sometimes it might be because I don't empathise with the characters, but most often it's to do with style and my own desire to take a blue pen and start paring these books back.

These days, however, I seem to have multiple books on the go. I might pick one up that someone has left somewhere and read a few pages. Next time I'm looking for something to read, it may be that book again or something I can more easily lay my hands on. We're constantly hearing talk of how our attention spans these days are shorter, that the TV age and computer age have made us almost illiterate for longer works. I don't really subscribe to this theory -- well, not in total, anyway -- I can easily believe we have shorter attention spans, but I still enjoy long books. Length is a bonus -- I get to stay with characters I love all that much longer. And yet here my own reading pattern has changed.

I'm currently reading a YA book, a biography, a genre novel, two literary novels and one classic. And I'm having no problems at all jumping from one to another. Interestingly enough, though, I still can only work on one writing project (happily) at a time. I've included "happily" as an aside because I am capable of doing more than one, but I love best just immersing myself in my work in progress, sinking through its layers. I wonder if that too will change with time.

Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo

2009-05-10T11:30:00.005+10:00

Last week we had Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, come in and speak to our students. As someone who entered (and won!) NaNoWriMo the year before last, I was keen to hear his insights.

NaNo was hard for me. I started well by going on a writing retreat to Phillip Island with my good friend Ellen for several days. Although Ellen wasn't doing NaNo, we both wrote furiously, and it was wonderful having time away from family and its constraints and interruptions, and emails. It made me realise just how distracting emails can be -- you're writing away and that ping sounds to tell you something has landed in your inbox, and you have to go see what it is in case it's something important. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyway, after a brilliant start, things dribbled off. I returned home to a series of crises (which seems to be an ongoing feature of my family life, but then I have teenagers...) and the writing dried up. But I was determined not to fail, and so, slowly, I picked up the writing again, but it was a bit sporadic. By the end of week two I was way behind schedule, but things weren't looking impossible. By the end of week three I was chasing about 20,000 words, till finally I had several days where I had to pump out in excess of 5,000 words. And I did it. It was daunting and scary and hard and fun, and it felt good to finally scramble those words and send them in for verification. And to see the confirmatory message that I'd won.

Chris Baty talked about tackling NaNo as a series of different weeks. He called weeks one and four the champagne weeks: week one, you're on fire and the words are pouring out, weeks two and three are the slogs, and by week four you're near the end and can see the finish line. Hmm. I'm not sure that quite describes my experience of week four, but I concede it's probably like this for most people who have paced themselves better than I did. I'm sure I couldn't see the finish line because of the burning of all that sweat from my forehead, dripping in my eyes. Never mind.

The great thing about guest speakers such as Chris is that they're usually so inspiring. Chris was no exception: filled with enthusiasm for a concept that's pretty exciting when you think about it. All around the world, all these novelists set aside a month where writing becomes their number one priority. And it did -- with 1660 words per day, every day (or 5000+ towards the end), there's not a lot of time left for frivolous socialising. NaNo is growing -- and I could see the infectiousness of that enthusiasm in our students. Few had heard of NaNo before, but most were keen to try it afterwards and were lamenting the fact that November was so far away.

Chris originally started NaNo with a group of friends, who would take their laptops to cafes and write together. I must say that, having been on several writing retreats where we've all sat around writing, I know that writing socially like this works really well for me. There's something about being there with others that keeps my bum glued to that seat. I can't sit and distract myself with a few games of Spider Solitaire because I'm stuck. I can't get up and wander around the house, pick up a book and start reading. I can't take my dogs for a walk or ring a friend or anything. There's me and the public conscience: I have to write. We all have to write.

The NaNo site was great too. I loved the word tracker and the fact that I could watch how my friends were progressing. There were great bulletin boards where I could go to discuss problems (plot problems, ideas, characterisation) if I had any -- but for me these proved to be a really interesting source of distraction, so I tended not to spend too much time there.

Last year I didn't attempt NaNo. I was still teaching in November (whereas the year before I had finished), and had too much marking to do. This year I'll be finished again (apart from late assignments), so will probably give it another go. The trick will be to get a more regular work pattern than last time. I must confess I haven't gone back and read what I've written, but will have to do that at some point. And after hearing Chris talk, I have to say that like my students I can't wait!

Vale JG Ballard

2009-04-30T15:58:00.003+10:00

Earlier this month (19 April, to be exact), something happened that escaped my notice -- JG Ballard died. I don't know how I missed this news -- probably busy with my head in a book -- but it's something I should've taken notice of. It was only this morning, reading Time magazine over breakfast, that I saw a tribute to Ballard by Bruce Sterling. Sterling writes: "...the orderliness of his personal life allowed him to create a surreal, visionary fiction that was often frankly pathological".

If you've read Crash, it's easy to agree with this. Ballard is, no doubt, best known for this and for Empire of the Sun. Although I own the latter, I must confess to not having read it yet. Or have I? The more I think about it, the more I think I have. In any case, I did enjoy the movie. On the other hand, I've definitely read Crash, a disturbing book, but haven't seen the film. But it was neither of these that spoke most loudly to me. It was one of his short stories: "Billennium".

"Billennium" is set in an overpopulated future, where humankind has solved the problem of feeding its burgeoning population, so that the main problem now facing humanity is the lack of space. It is the story of a man who lives in a cupboard under a staircase (hmm, sound familiar? Ballard visited it first!), but who discovers a secret room, a large room, which he can have all to himself. Or can he? He gives up his cupboard and moves in, and the story goes somewhere unexpected but completely inevitable. It's one of those stories that left me thinking, and thinking. And a few days later, still thinking.

Ballard wasn't a discovery of my early science fiction years, but of my middle ones. In my early years I read mainly Asimov and Clarke and Hoyle.

I loved Fred Hoyle's The black cloud as a teenager. Years later, I read it again and it felt dated -- not so much in the science but the way all the characters were always smoking, which annoyed the hell out of me. (I had this gripe about Nevil Shute's On the beach, too -- another book I otherwise loved.) I read some of Hoyle's other books, mostly co-written with his son Geoffrey, but these didn't grab me quite the same way -- though I do remember a wonderful scene where someone skated down through Jupiter's atmosphere... Going a bit hazy there.

In my early days, I was a purist who preferred Clarke to Asimov -- mainly because of Clarke's ideas. Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favourites, but I also particularly enjoyed Childhood's end. And then of course there was the esoteric film 2001, which intrigued me (and I enjoyed "The sentinel, which it was partly based on, and loved the idea of Michael Collins considering telling Houston he'd seen a big black rectangle on the farside of the moon -- if only he had!). You know, though -- I think I preferred the less intriguing, more traditional 2010, at least at the movies. I can't remember which book I preferred. I do remember going on to read 2061 and perhaps even 3001. Did I finish it? I can't remember. I do remember that I found the lack of characterisation difficult to deal with, and these last two signalled the end of my reading Clarke.

Asimov grew on me first with a robot -- R. Daneel Olivaw -- in The caves of steel and The naked sun, but then even more in the Foundation series. Until then, I think I had mainly read his short stories, and I never liked any short stories as much as novels -- mainly because I always bought them by accident, and then would do the work and just be getting into them when they would finish. I've since learned to appreciate the form.

Then I made the discovery that the unsophisticated but fast-paced Lucky Starr books I'd read when I was younger were by Asimov too, writing under the pseudonym of Paul French.

But the Foundation series -- initially, just three books -- really blew me away. What a concept! How amazing. And then R. Daneel turns up in the Foundation series, tying this series with the robot series. More, more, more. Give me more. Eventually, I think I read the whole Asimov canon, and was amazed at how he'd set all his novels in the same universe -- in his universe. It was so cool. Later, after he died, I tried to read some of the follow-ons to the Foundation series, written by other authors. Greg Benford's was just too dry to engage me. I almost wept with disappointment.

Strangely, both Clarke and Asimov had their own three rules, though Clarke's were more about writing (apart from no. three), and Asimov couldn't count because he cheated and snuck in a Zeroth Law, which seemed totally right and necessary when reading the later Foundation novels. I imagine most people would be more familiar with Asimov's laws of robotics, and I confess I'm more aware of Clarke's third law -- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- than his other two.

The purists may prefer Clarke to Asimov, and indeed I've heard many of them snigger about Asimov, but to me Asimov's writing had a warmth, a human interest that I just couldn't find to the same degree in Clarke's books. It was this factor that I found in abundance in fantasy, which was why I responded so well -- and indeed shifted my allegiances -- to this genre.

Bradbury, as I think I've posted about before, was my first induction, and I will be forever grateful to him for the two seminal stories that changed my life: "A sound of thunder" and "The scythe". But the discovery that they were by the same author was for the future -- at that time I read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and liked it, but didn't feel the need to dip any further.

Then I entered my middle years -- which involved Ballard and Larry Niven through his wonderful story "Neutron star". I have these two in a book of ten SF stories everyone should read, but these were the two that resonated. (And I loved Asimov's footnote about how he said to Niven that he could have written "Neutron star" because he'd written a paper on the idea behind the story. And Niven had replied that he knew -- he'd read the paper and it gave him the idea for the story! Asimov said he was kicking himself.)

My later years gave me back the terrific Bradbury (with an 800+ page book of his short stories! Just heaven.). And with his more writerly Zen in the art of writing. A great book every writer should read. But in the meantime, I'd found fantasy.

So that leaves me with Ballard, who has just died. Such was his influence that a word was coined after him: Ballardian. It probably doesn't need explaining. Orwell is the only other author I can think of offhand (I am pretty tired) with his own adjective! Perhaps you'd like to remind me of the ones I missed.

Movie and live show reviews

2009-04-20T10:15:00.005+10:00

Well, I've been a bit remiss here and haven't posted for a while -- partly because my wrists are sore, and I'm trying to give them a break from so much typing, and partly because it's been school holidays, and I've been busy editing a book for a small press publisher, leaving my kids to take over this computer.

I have seen a number of movies in the last couple of weeks and one live show, so I thought it might be good to review them here, as much to sort out my own thoughts as a writer, which is how I always look at things now. It's been a spec fic bonanza for me, as three of the five films have been spec fic, and so, I guess, has the live show. Perhaps I'll start with that.

Wicked is the prequel to The wizard of Oz, and tells the story of how the Wicked Witch of the East and Glinda the Good met, and of course subverts all the well-established conventions of just who the good gal is. I loved this show: it's big, bright and boisterous, though I could've done without Glinda's whiny stage voice (part of her character, not the actress playing her -- I did love her one truly operatic moment, however).

But I have to say I thought there was a little too much subversion -- it's rather like reading The mists of Avalon and comparing it to every other book on the Arthurian legend. Or seeing how Sara Douglass reworked her characters in her second trilogy of the Axis series. In the case of Wicked, I was happy to have things changed around -- and, after all, that adds to the story's freshness -- but I'd like more shading, more darkness in Elphaba's character. After all, she made a truly terrifying antagonist in The wizard of Oz, and I came away from Wicked finding it difficult to reconcile the two. Glinda's character was easier.

But, for all of that, it's a satisfying story and entertaining. We bought the soundtrack afterwards, and my daughter seems to have it on a permanent loop! My favourite song is "For good", though I wonder if I'm biased because my daughter and one of her Victorian State Singer friends were singing this together for a performance that never eventuated. It's a beautiful song, heartfelt and moving. But my daughter seems to have settled on the more uplifting "Defying gravity". Well worth a listen, and worth seeing. (The soundtrack and the show, that is.)

The reader is a story of seduction and its consequences -- a young boy is seduced by an older woman who later abandons him, and then, at a Nazi war criminal trial, he learns more about her than he ever wished to know.

I wish I had taken my kids to this film. After the movie, we could have sat down and had an in-depth discussion about morality and ethics, the type of discussion I love to have with them. On the other hand, the first half of the film is so steamy that I'm sure I would've been squirming in my seat had they been there: my son would have been leaning forward in his seat to make sure he never missed a second, and my daughter making gagging motions behind her hand.

This is a deep and complex film: slow moving but compelling. Kate Winslet is a stupendous actress and at the top of her form here; she is mesmerising on screen, beautiful and ugly at the same time: a terrific performance. The reader is a movie I'm still thinking about -- on many levels -- and will be awhile yet. It's one I'll have to buy and watch with my kids later -- when they're older, perhaps, so I can have that discussion I so want to have. This is must-see cinema.

Race to Witch Mountain is an action film on steroids. It's go-go-go with barely a breather anywhere. The action starts right at the beginning and never lets up, which makes for breathless viewing. That's great if you like this kind of movie (and I do), but not so much if you want something deeper. This wasn't a film that left me thinking. Plot -- two aliens, being chased by the government, co-opt the help of a taxi driver in their endeavours to return to their crashed spaceship and escape. It's a fun film for kids and those who love an action movie. (And funnily enough, there was a reference to The wizard of Oz in this one.)

Inkheart is the story of a man who can read characters out of books (can I borrow him?), and the consequences. I must say that having seen the trailers for this film, I thought part of the story involved our real-life characters entering into the world of the book -- that there was some kind of portal that they crossed, but that wasn't the case at all. Rather, the characters who had come out of the book brought their own little world to life in the real world. While this made more logical sense, given the film's premise, I was disappointed as I wanted to see the real-life characters enter the world of the book, giving this world a larger canvas. Perhaps that's just my own thwarted desires as a writer coming to the fore. And I did spend part of the film wondering what would happen if I were able to meet my characters, but I've already explored such things in a short story I started once about where book characters go after a reader finishes reading them.

Aside from my expectations, which is not the fault of the writers but whoever made the trailers (and this isn't nearly as bad as it is for the comedy film you go to see and realise you've seen every funny gag already in the trailer!), I found this film both fun and interesting. It was meatier than Race to Witch Mountain, but had enough action to satisfy those who like a fast pace. (And it too contained a Wizard of Oz reference -- they seem to be following me.) Well worth a watch.

Knowing is the story of a mathematician who "inherits" a piece of paper that has been buried in a time capsule for fifty years and that predicts accurately every disaster that has happened in the last fifty years, and a few more that are about to happen. The paper is written in code, so we track his unravelling of this code, his disbelief, his trying to convince others. This was a solid spec fic premise, so the writers had me from the beginning.

My son had auditioned unsuccessfully for a part in this film -- he was a bit too old anyway, and always has looked older than he is, which is not a benefit for a child actor -- so we felt we had a personal connection to the film. This was intensified when I was speaking to a friend who is friends with a girl who did get in (and she was very good!). And I have to love an apocalyptic image of the end of the world happening around the State Library of Victoria. Very reminiscent of On the beach. (I'm sure Ava Gardner would have found that appropriate! Or perhaps not. And isn't that disappointing to learn!) Anyway, I've digressed...

I loved this film. I always like Nicolas Cage, and it was funny seeing some American city with the West Gate Bridge in the background (another touchstone for me), and there was a great mixture of intrigue and darkness and action and fear. It ends with Biblical symbolism, which may colour the response of some viewers, but didn't bother me. This will be another I have to buy.

Duplicity is the story of two ex-spies (CIA and MI6) who get together to organise their own corporate sting. I have to say it's a very brave screenwriter who puts together a movie where nobody has any idea what's happening for the first third of the movie. And I mean no idea. I went in prepared to love this movie, but by the time I realised it was a puzzle I had to put together, I'd already lost interest. My son said this was the first film he'd ever considered walking out of. It wasn't quite that bad for me, but I felt all of its length (unusual for me), and, while it did end well, this wasn't enough of a save for me to ever (and I mean ever) want to watch this one again.

After my summer of "Spooks", I was really disappointed not to be gripped by this. Once the pieces start to come together, it does become more interesting, but as I said it was way too late for me. The first fifteen minutes are meant to establish what type of movie it is, what it's going to be about, the characters, the tone and atmosphere. And I was just sitting there wondering where all this was leading and whether I'd missed something crucial. I hadn't come in late, had I? The first hint that something more was going on was a repeated scene -- the dialogue repeated but in a different location, which piqued my interest, but I still had no idea what the hell was going on. Some time after that, I did have an inkling, and had put the whole story together by the end, but it annoyed me to be in the dark for so long. Be warned. See this one at your own risk!

Not settling for the first thing

2009-04-09T08:38:00.004+10:00

The other day I was watching a film with my children, one none of us had seen before, and I said, "Oh, I know what's going to happen next. He's going to . . . and then . . ." And sure enough, he did.

My kids looked at me and asked how I knew that. And I said I just knew. "Actually, no, it's more than that," I said. "It's because that's how I would've written it."

I never used to be able to do that. Or only very occasionally. But the longer I've been writing, the more I have my prediction-meter turned on. At some point in the TV show, or movie or whatever, I'll just know.

Of course, I'm not always right, and the best films and shows are the ones that don't end up where I've predicted, that subvert my expectations and surprise me. I'm not talking the old-fashioned twist ending here, but an ending that grows out of the characters and the story.

The best writers don't settle for the predictable. They toss away the first idea that comes into their heads and explore other options. The best way to do this is with the "what if?" question. What if this happens? Plot out the likely chain of events. What if that happened? What about something else? Each time you ask that question, you'll move into more original territory. We shouldn't settle for the first idea, but nor should we for the second or third either.

The further we push, the deeper we explore, the fresher and better our writing will be. If we're scriptwriters, we won't have audience members like me who've worked out the plot halfway through the movie. If we're novelists, we may still have people who flick to the end of the book (there's no getting away from them), but they'll see it doesn't end where they thought and so will still need to read on to see how we got there. But the best part of all is that we'll have something we know is ours and is good, something we can be proud of.

Responding to criticism

2009-04-02T15:31:00.002+11:00

The dynamics in class workshopping or in a writer's group's workshopping is always interesting to note. My number one rule of workshopping is that you (the writer) should only ever put up your best work. If you know it's not working, but it's as good as you can get it, then fine. But if you know there's a problem, and you know how to fix it, then you should fix it before you give it to anyone else to critique.

If you know your punctuation has been sloppy, but your friends are ace at fixing it so you think you don't have to bother, then that's just disrespectful. Everyone's time is important. Aren't you busy? Do you have loads of time to write? Or do you squeeze your writing in around a hundred other things the way most of us do?

So, you might think you haven't got time to check the spelling of that difficult word -- and, hey, you know there is a verb "curb", and you've seen the noun "curb" in the latest book you just had sent out from the States, so it must be right, right? Not if you're living in Australia (or Britain for that matter). In Australian usage, the noun is "kerb". You mightn't have time, but if you don't do it, you're taking up your workshopping buddies' time. Some of them are going to have to look the word up. It might take you an hour to fix the punctuation, but if you have ten friends and they're all spending an hour on it, it's not very fair, is it? Trust me: their time is just as important to them as yours is to you. And, if they're not busy looking at all the stuff you know how to fix, they might just have the time to see something more in your story that they otherwise might have missed -- the forest for the trees, and all that sort of stuff!

But what about when you're in the workshop. In the typical Clarion workshop (and many other serious workshops), the person being workshopped is not allowed to speak until everyone has said their piece. There's a good reason for this. There's nothing worse than someone who argues with every point that you make. (Yes, you've swapped hats now.) If people don't want criticism, they shouldn't put up their stories for workshopping. They shouldn't feel compelled to defend every word their written. After all, it's been put up because they want feedback on how to improve it, right? Not because they want their egos stroked. Well, that's the theory. The trouble is that some people do put up their stories so they can be told how brilliant they are.

I remember spending a lot of time workshopping a story that I thought needed a lot of work, and then the author very smugly telling me and the rest of the group that the story was already published. What a waste of my time. Not just disrespectful but rude as well. Did that mean we all didn't know what we were talking about? Not at all. I'm sure we've all read published stories we thought could have been better. Perhaps the writer (who was new to our group) had no trust in our abilities as workshoppers, but from that point forward we had no trust in her as a serious writer who was making good use of our freely given time.

A good workshopper will give specific, rather than vague comments. So, not: "This sucked big time, and I hated it..." but something more along the lines of: "I thought your setting and characterisation were great, but your POV was all over the place, and all that head-hopping made me dizzy..."

Good feedback will point you in the direction you need to go to get things working more effectively. Good feedback is constructive, not destructive -- with any negative comments justified and a balanced reporting of what works in the story as well. This is important, not just to help preserve the writer's faith in their story, but because someone else might have knocked the very thing that you loved, and the workshopper needs to know that you did love this aspect -- that it did work for some readers.

I'm currently going through reader comments on my novel, and trying to address a saggy middle. As I'm reading through the chapters, I keep seeing opportunities to expand, expand, expand. (Add more characterisation here, put a few more thoughts in there...) I'm working through, looking at scene purpose, commenting on how well I think the scene is working and how I can address any problems. I thought by now I'd be distant enough to be able to see these problems manifesting themselves, but I'm struggling. What should I do? Consider that I'm right and my reader is wrong? This could be the case -- it is always something you need to think about -- but sadly and happily for me, I don't think this is true. Why sadly and why happily? Sadly, because I know dealing with the problem is going to entail more work, and I'm going to have to keep wrestling with it, but happily because I also know the book will be stronger when I emerge out from under it. And really that's exactly why I asked my reader to read it.

The scope of your novel and POV

2009-03-25T10:21:00.014+11:00

The other day, my friend Ellen blogged about POV in the first chapter of her novel, and her horror when someone suggested she was writing in [third-person] omniscient when she thought she was writing in "intense third person" (or what I would call third-person intimate, or subjective or limited). And I've added the bit in the square brackets because there actually is also a first-person omniscient, but it's extremely rare as you would imagine.

I've read Ellen's opening chapters, and there's no way I would call them omniscient. For a start she has one person per scene, and she doesn't slip into anyone else's viewpoint, and writes firmly from inside her characters' heads.

K's justification of why Ellen's novel started in omniscient was to do with the characters thinking about their past in order to deliver backstory. K said that we don't often sit around thinking about our pasts in a coherent fashion, and she does have a point. But does that make the POV omniscient? I don't think so.

In an omniscient viewpoint, anything goes. The writer can move from head to head at will -- of course this should always be done for a reason, or the reader can end up dizzied or confused. But the reader *does* move heads throughout a scene. The author can jump in and give an insight that none of the characters know, for example: What none of the characters knew was that everything was about to change...

Or the writer can jump forward into the future and point out something that would happen at a later date. The author can address the reader: Dear reader... This is called "authorial intrusion" and is a perfectly legitimate (if dated) device in an omniscient viewpoint, and one that I cannot stand! When I'm reading, I become the main character; I am in the story; I am experiencing it: all those terrible things happening to the main character -- well, they're happening to me. Authorial intrusion reminds me that I am not the main character, and in fact that I am the reader, and I'd better damn well stay on that side of the page! It completely interferes with my enjoyment of the story.

The other thing to say about all of this is that the way we represent thoughts on the page is not really how thoughts are in our head. I know sometimes mine are an almost incoherent jumble, as my thought-trains switch tracks, derail, get overtaken and stall. Thoughts on the page are a representation of what the character is thinking, and while K's representation may be closer to the truth, it's still a representation of how we think thoughts are -- just in the same way that dialogue is not the same as how we really speak -- it's more like how we think we speak.

Ellen saw what she'd done as a judgement error rather than POV error. I agree that it isn't a POV error. A POV error is when you slip into someone else's head when you shouldn't. Or when you move outside the perspective that you're writing in -- so if you are writing in an intimate viewpoint, where you are inside your character's head (as in third-person intimate, or first person), you can't say that your point-of-view character had a beatific smile on his face, because he can't see his own face. You could of course say that if he were looking in the mirror, but that's cheating. You can say he smiled. Or that he felt beatific -- even better, you can show it.

Ellen is writing a story with a big scope. She has parallel plots, so is tracking the journey of two main characters. If she were to use the type of very close POV that K favours, where thoughts are detailed and go on for paras, instead of a 120 k novel, she might end up with an extremely intimate account that spreads over 250 k and that is imminently unpublishable just because of its length. (Yes, publishers do occasionally publish books of this length, but rarely rarely rarely first time authors just because it's prohibitively expensive and the risk on a new author isn't worth it.)

The scope of our novels do, to a certain extent, dictate just how close our POV can be, as does whether a story is plot or character driven. If you're writing a literary short story where not much happens, you can afford to have pages and pages of thoughts -- in fact, stream of consciousness stories are exactly this. I can't say I particularly enjoy these, but it's horses for courses. Some people love them.

In the end, the labels we give things like POV don't really matter, but they are a way for us to check that what we does works, a way for us to understand why doing this particular thing (showing the beatific smile) doesn't work, and why we should change it.

What we say and imply

2009-03-22T08:43:00.003+11:00

Among my other reading, I'm currently reading a book on myths and legends, and the story I'm reading at the moment is called "Chimaera", though so far it's not really about the chimaera, but about Bellerophon and Pegasus, and his attempts to capture the winged horse. Now he has, and they're about to go fight the chimaera.

The story was going along nicely, when I came to a sentence that stated that they were flying so high that the earth looked to be about the same size as the moon. Now, I know this is a fanciful tale and doesn't involve anything scientific, but a comparison like that completely suspends disbelief for me. If it said they flew 10 or 20 km, even 100 km or 1,000 km (remembering Mt Everest is 8.85 km, and already the air there is thin enough to make breathing difficult), I could accept this. Sure, there would be no breathable air (a space shuttle flight often has an average altitude of 300 km), but having those numbers I wouldn't necessarily imagine them past the space shuttle's stalking ground. I'd just go, yep, okay, and move on. But even if I paused to think about the numbers, I'd still imagine them attached to the planet. (Mind you, this might be a sticking point for other members of society, particularly those more familiar with the numbers than I am.)

The moon is about a quarter of the earth's size (the mass is a lot less, but we're not concerned about that). So, for the earth to look a similar size to the moon, they'd need to be four times further from the earth than the moon is. (Admittedly, the story says "hardly bigger", but that is "hardly" an ameliorating condition.) For the size of the earth to be even four times the size of the moon, our adventurous couple would have to be the distance of the moon away! (Remember, it took the Apollo astronauts about eight minutes to leave the atmosphere, and three days to reach the moon.) Considering, Pegasus is doing this as a joy flight, he's one very fast winged horse! But we're actually talking four times further away. I don't think so.

Unfortunately, with a comparison like that, I am going to stop and think about it. Rip. I'm out of the story.

Funnily enough, I also had problems with the next sentence, which has a much more subtle problem for me. The next sentence talks about how they [Bellerophon and Pegasus] amazed people in far off lands, who thought that the pair "must have come down out of the sky". I immediately stopped and thought, but they did!.

Although it doesn't say it, that sentence implies to me that they thought [mistakenly] that the pair had come from the sky. Maybe I'm reading more into this than other people would (and maybe you need to see the full context), but I had no doubt that that was what the writer was implying. If I'm wrong in the implication, then why would we need the sentence at all? Why state that the people thought they came from exactly where they did come from? What does that add to the story? In any case, it's another strike against the story, one as equally dangerous as suspension in disbelief, because like that one it shakes my faith in the writer.

As writers, we need to hold onto our reader's trust. We do this by setting up the rules of our story in the story opening (whether that's as simple as "this is the normal world, and the normal rules apply" -- done without our necessarily giving any conscious thought to what we are doing). We do this by then not violating those rules. So we can have a winged horse and strange creatures, but unless they have SRBs (sorry, Solid Rocket Boosters -- I love those NASA acronyms!) attached to their underbellies, chances are they're not going to go skipping from planet to planet -- unless we've set up this possibility.

We also do this by writing to a professional standard, employing a professional standard of spelling, punctuation and grammar because all of these things give the reader faith in the writing, faith that the writer knows what they are doing, faith that the writer is in control. And if there is one thing the writer must have, it's control over their own work! (And while some might argue that the editor can fix all of this, you must first convince an editor that you are a professional writer, professional in your approach and intent, and you can hardly do that if you don't approach your work professionally, if you don't embrace the rules of your own trade.)

Best laid plans

2009-03-21T21:53:00.005+11:00

This week, I'm having the week from hell as far as time goes. I have two lots of marking to do -- something I try to avoid as far as I can. And indeed I'd staggered these assessment tasks so that one was coming in last week, but then Higher Ed called a strike and, because they'd be picketing the gates, I pushed back the assessment task a week. Now that's the shortened version of the story, but close enough for the purposes of this blog as to why it was moved.

Fine, I was going to have a big week marking. No problems. I'd finished my Ada Cambridge shortlisting, and was waiting for a manuscript I'm supposed to be editing for a small press publisher. All I had to do was be focused, not waste a second, mark, and I ought to be able to write as well.

Tuesday, I worked all day -- got home at ten thirty pm, only to find out I had to go to a funeral on Wednesday. Normally, I'd have writing group, so some of this time wouldn't have been spent marking anyway, but it did mean driving over the other side of town (an hour each way). But I'm not complaining. I had to go. I wanted to go. Sometimes these things happen, and part of living a writer's life is living a life, and that involves commitments and family time and all of that. (And, anyway, I had spent the morning marking.)

Thursday, though, I spend the day in hospital, taking my son to a fracture clinic. This involved several lots of waiting, casts being taken off and put back on, Xrays, the works, and by the time I got home in the late afternoon, I felt flat. What I didn't know was I was getting sick.

So, I spent Friday laid up. No, that's not exactly true. I spent the first couple of hours ferrying around my son, but that's a long and irrelevant story. Suffice to say, by the time I got home I had a fever and was aching all over, so that was really it for the day. I rarely have sick days, so shouldn't complain -- but couldn't it have been another week?

So, today, I'm marking like mad. Tomorrow too. Monday is class prep, perhaps workshopping. Perhaps more marking?

Somewhere in the next two days I might also need to hop back over to the other side of town, as another family member is desperately ill. And I don't use that adverb lightly.

And I have to do some writing. I have to squeeze it in somewhere. I could put it back a few more days -- I haven't done any since Monday, so what's the difference? The difference is that I'll rise further and further out of our story. I've just blogged about my writing process on our student blog and talked about how important immersion is for me. What I don't want is to emerge from the story, and I will if I don't get back in, quick smart.

I still come back to hearing Robin Hobb speak at one of the SF conferences in Melbourne a few years ago, and she said that we would never have more time to write than we have now. It's a sobering thought, and a true one. Life is precious. And it's short. And as busy as Flinders Street Station. Whenever you have free time, you have a million things that want to fill it, that want to cram out every writing moment. At least I do. I listen with envy to people who say they are bored. How does anyone get time to be bored? I mean, really. Boredom -- what is that? A luxury, I say, to those who have computers and want to write.

Missing brunch

2009-03-16T00:24:00.002+11:00

Damn it! I missed our SuperNOVA brunch meeting this week. It was scheduled a week earlier than usual, for various reasons, and this suited me perfectly. On Tuesday I have assignments due for my novel class, and a test for my editing students, so I'm going to be busy marking next week. Plus I've just accepted a commission to edit a novel for a small press publisher, and it's on a rather short timeline. (I had thought I was going to be busy on it this weekend, but as things have turned out, I haven't received the manuscript yet. I do try not to take on editing jobs as editing time replaces writing time, but usually my jobs have been nonfiction, and fiction is where my heart lies, so I thought I should take this on. Plus it's good for me to keep my hand in. I like to do at least a job a year, and I didn't do one last year, so it was time.)

Instead of brunch, I spent the day sitting in a hospital waiting room with my son. He'd hurt his arm the previous Thursday, but hadn't been too fussed by it. It was nicely bandaged up, but I was getting suspicious by the fact that a few spots were tender, but most movement was okay, so I didn't think it was a sprain, but perhaps a fracture. Sure enough, a bone is broken, and he's now sporting a cast, and I'm feeling like a heel for not having it attended to earlier. But I suppose I walked around on a fractured pelvis for three days too, till I told my mum it was hurting badly enough to warrant a trip to the doctor's.)

Instead of talking writing with my SuperNOVA friends, I got to do some reading, some people watching and thinking about issues (mainly to do with hospitals, funnily enough). Perhaps it was important to my son that I gave up my brunch (which he knows I value) for him. Too often he makes the accusation that I put my work (whether it's my teaching or my writing) before him. This time he was first. It's often a matter of priorities. If I have to have student papers marked, I have to have them done, and I'll stay home to do them rather than attend the family picnic. It's just the way I've been brought up to be: my dad's working class work ethics: work hard and never take a day off sick unless you're nearly dying. But family is important too. We have to make time for them.

When I was early on my journey of taking my writing seriously and with small children, some of my friends would tell me to always put my family first, that I'd never regret it. My impatience didn't allow me to always do this. But I've never put it so far in front that it sidelines my family either. Both are important to me. I don't always strike the right balance, but I try. That's all any of us can do, really.

Currently reading

2009-03-15T23:19:00.004+11:00

1. Poetrix submissions

2. Ada Cambridge entries (biographical writing) for shortlisting judging with my Novel 2 class

3. Student first chapters and synopses

4. Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) -- within a few pages of the end

5. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) -- about 1/3 way in and stalled because I can't find the book

6. Love in the time of cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) -- about 1/4 way in and stalled because I can't find the book

7. The secret river (Kate Grenville) -- read this before, but am teaching it so am rereading it with my class. About 1/4 way through, currently.

8. The enchanted wood (Enid Blyton) -- it was around. I couldn't resist -- can never resist a book with Dick and Fanny as the main characters. (And of course that's far funnier in Australia than it is in the US.)

9. Emotional structure: creating the story beneath the plot: a guide for screenwriters (Peter Dunne). All right, I'm not a screenwriter and have no aspirations to be one -- I like my narrative too much -- but there are a lot of great books on how to write screenplays that have heaps of useful info for novel writers too.

And you have to love a book that has this on its opening page: ". . . you can only be a writer on the days you write. On the other days, the days you decide not to write, you will be something else. However, there is a caveat. On the days you decide to be a writer and you write, even if it's for only an hour, you get to be a writer for the other twenty-three hours, too. Pretty good, huh?"

I love it. Love the voice. Love what he's saying. I'm there. In for the long haul. Although, rather than read from beginning to end, I'll probably dip in and out, which I do with all my writing books. I'm constantly trawling through them. (And having done my tax the other day, I realised I'd spent over $700 on writing books in the last financial year. Eek! Husband is not happy. Admittedly, I did teach a new subject so was busy acquiring both textbooks and also compilations (of poetry) to draw on for my reader, especially given that Fair Trading means I'm quite restricted in how much I can use.)

What I'm looking forward to reading next:

World without end (Ken Follett). I bought myself this for my husband to give me for Christmas. I loved Pillars of the earth: so rich, so gripping, that I had to have the sequel.

The series beginning with Kushiel's dart (Jacqueline Carey), which comes to me highly recommended as fantasy that's completely different. I have perused it -- looks like it's going to be a -- er -- let's say racy read!

The Farseer Trilogy (Robin Hobb). Truth be told, I've dipped into this once before -- after I'd read the follow-up series The Liveship Traders, which I absolutely loved. I found I just didn't want to slip into first person -- and where were Althea and Brashen? -- but it was a cursory look that no doubt didn't do the series justice.

The time traveler's wife (Audrey Niffenegger), which was highly recommended by a student of mine. The concept sounds intriguing, and I've just been watching the rather funny "Lost in Austen" about a modern day girl who crosses through a time and I guess dimension (to do with the real and fictional worlds) portal into Pride and prejudice, so I'm ready for something in this vein.

I've always felt like I haven't read enough of the classics, but I've been focussing on addressing this a little over the last few years to the detriment of my genre reading. Now it's time to get back to some of the stuff that I love to read. (Though I've loved many of the classics too.)

Casting my novel/Computer games

2009-03-04T17:48:00.006+11:00

One thing I've sometimes talked about with my writing group friends is who we'd cast if we were in a position of casting the screenplays of our novels. For me, it's particularly important because I'm not visual. I don't carry an image in my head of what my characters look like; I carry the ideas of them, and so it is really important to see the embodiment of these ideas.

I know I've had this discussion with several groups of friends, and we get excited when we see an actor who fills the part. I first saw Arinka, the protagonist of my novel, when I was going to a poetry reading at Montsalvat. I don't know who he was -- he wasn't an actor -- he was just someone in the crowd, someone whose looks stopped me in my tracks because I thought: that's him. That's Arinka.

Well, okay, obviously it wasn't him. But it was the right look. The right hair colour, the right eyes, the right shaped face, the build, a certain way of moving.

In my one storyline, I have three characters I've always wanted to cast: Arinka, his sidekick, Millyon, and the thorn in his side, Lieselle.

Arinka has been through a series of actors since I first saw that unknown young man. First was Keanu Reeves, but then I spent too long writing and rewriting and he became too old. Then, for a while I thought about James Franco, more as he appeared in Tristan and Isolde than in Spiderman. But he was a bit too sulky in the film, and a bit too well built. Then I thought about Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian), but he was too good looking. Finally, I've settled on Tom Ward ("Silent witness"), and he's just got the best voice...

Millyon has been easier: Rupert Penry-Jones ("Spooks" and Persuasion), though he should have hazel eyes, not blue. No-one is ever quite perfect for their roles -- and how funny that I'm assembling a cast of BBC actors.

Lieselle. Hmm? Who? Jennifer Connelly is too old, but is the right sort of look.

Then the other day, I was watching You Tube videos of various songs my daughter wants to sing, including clips of "Don't cry for me Argentina", when I noticed a Karen Carpenter version. As most versions were sopranos, and she has a rich, dark voice, I thought it might be an interesting contrast. How strange then to find myself watching an anime film clip from a computer game called Final Fantasy VIII. How much stranger to find Lieselle there -- as the character of Rinoa. And, even, in a way Arinka in Rinoa's lover Squall. Well, Squall has the wrong eye colour and is too good looking, but the build's right -- the comparison to her is right. And funnily a photo of a real person, modelling a Squall outfit could be Arinka. I'll have to get the game! (Though it's disturbing that in this game is a dance sequence that could come out of my second book. Still, there's still a rewrite of that one coming up...)

Actually, buying the game could be disastrous. I do remember my addiction to The Sims, and how I made it much worse by buying an expansion pack (Living Large) that allowed me to build castles. Then I modelled my sims on my characters, and that was the worst thing, as all I wanted to do was play with them all day, and playing is not writing.

I've had students who've told me they can't write because they're busy playing World of Warcraft. For days on end. Or friends who distract themselves with Solitaire. I do still play computer games, but more the Solitaire-type that aren't too addictive. I'll play them when I'm blocked, a game or two, no more, and then return to the white page. While I'm playing, I'm thinking. What I won't do is spend hours playing, days. Such distractions do not help me as a writer.

In the meantime, I now have printouts of my newest cast members -- something to look at, to inspire me -- and they will inspire me much more successfully than any computer game ever will. Computer games are stalling tactics, nothing more.

Unexpected pleasures

2009-02-23T23:41:00.004+11:00

Last Saturday, we had our SuperNOVA monthly novel group meeting. This group is largely the love child (can I say that?) of Ellen, who for years kept thinking she wanted something more or something different to our crit group. Now, the crit group is a really valuable thing in itself, but for me, who already belongs to another crit group and who is doing critiquing every week for students as part of my job, I just found that it was too much. I came to resent having to spend hours and hours on other people's work, and because I was working on a novel, I didn't really have anything I wanted critted, and so I'd stopped going. But I also fretted about the loss of contact with the others, who were one major part of my network of writers.

Ellen's idea was that the novel writers of the group could come together once a month (as the crit group does, but not on the same day, obviously) and talk about their novels and novel writing in general. We would meet for brunch, get inspired and all go home early in the afternoon to write lots. Ellen's vision has largely come about, except the bit about all going home early to write lots, and that's because we tend to hang around for most of the afternoon. Sometimes lots of writing-based discussion takes place and sometimes not so much -- largely because we're all friends now as well, but there's always some at least.

Some members attend both the crit group and the novel group, and others (like me) just attend the one, whichever best serves their interest. Mostly, but not always, the novel group tends to be women.

I tend to come and go a bit. Like another of our members, I have children I'm often ferrying around, so sometimes I have to come late or leave early or can't make it at all. But I hate missing it. It's become dynamic and fun and inspiring, everything Ellen thought it could be. Last Saturday was a particularly good meeting, very much writing focused.

And then as if it wasn't a great enough day, Ellen commented that she was going off on a writing retreat for three days and, to cut a long story short, two of us decided we could go for part of the time, and so I went off in late afternoon to pack for an impromptu writer's retreat (even if I did have to spend one day on class prep!). It all sounds too easy, but there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing while I checked that this was okay with my husband. Still, he's pretty cool about such things and let me go, so that was all fine.

The scary part for me was realising that most of the writing I did last year was while on retreats. I had realised how much my work commitments, and the increased time fraction I'd worked last year, were encroaching on my writing time and have cut back on work, so this is my year for my balance, to keep things chugging along. And when they are chugging along, I'm not spending a day of each retreat re-immersing myself in the world of the novel, but instead can hit the keyboard flying!

The promise

2009-02-21T20:53:00.005+11:00

In my last post, I touched on not meeting reader expectations, something I wanted to explore further because it's something that is really important. And really it's all about the promise we make to the reader in the beginning of our stories.

The opening of a story sets up the type of story we are writing. It sets up the genre: whether it's action, fantasy, crime, science fiction, romance, literary, mainstream, whatever. It does this on several levels if it's all working properly. It does this through how we start, whether it's with a description setting up the world of the novel, action, dialogue, characterisation, situation. It does this through word choice, the sound of the language, the tone of the piece, the voice.

The story opening has to do several things: engage the reader (hook them in!), establish the story problem, introduce the main character/s. I know as a writer I often think about these things. Am I setting up the story problem well enough for the reader? After all, this is something that needs to keep them interested for the whole book. Will they know what the book is about by the end of chapter 1?

I don't really think about the promise I'm making to my reader -- because it seems so obvious. Imagine you are the reader: you've picked up this nifty looking murder mystery -- the front cover is dark with a slashing blade and splash of blood. You're ready to be thrilled. The first chapter has you hooked -- there's been a murder, a grisly murder in a lonely alleyway. It's the third in a series of brutal attacks. You want to find out what happens. Then in chapter two the main character, a female PI, meets the son of the murdered man, and fancies him like mad. All her hormones are raging. The next twenty-six chapters (if you get that far) detail her attempts, unsuccessful and successful, to drag him into bed. The sex scenes are raunchy, but there's so much angst. And, er, what happened to the murder? Oh, yes, it's now become a subplot. Your gripping crime is really a romance in disguise. You throw away the book, disgusted. (I'm not having a go at romance here: you'd be equally disgusted if you were snuggled up on your couch with the latest romance novel, only to find it was really a crime novel, far more dark and violent than anything you normally like to read.)

Okay, if it's so obvious, then why am I banging on about it? Probably because it's not obvious to everyone. We all have things we don't need to think much about in our writing: for some it's their brilliant dialogue, for others it's their complex and fascinating plots, or bigger-than-life characters who leap off the page. And not all examples are as obvious as that one. Sometimes it's the formality of language, the type of diction, a particular POV. If you are going to start with first person and then jump to third after the first two pages, set these off and call them a prologue. Better still: ask yourself whether you really need to do that. Whether what you're trying to achieve offsets the likely discomfort or confusion your readers are going to experience. Usually, you're better off not being so "experimental".

If you've never thought about the promise, then it is worthwhile reading over what you're writing and thinking about it. Dig out your favourite novels and have a look at these. Could you tell what type of story they were going to be right from the beginning? My bet is you're going to answer yes.

Launch of new short story collection

2009-02-19T23:30:00.008+11:00

Sherryl and I have just been to the launch of Scribe's New Australian stories (ed. Aviva Tuffield), mainly because one of our past students, Demet Divaroven has a story in it. And isn't that a fantastic thing for a teacher: going to see your student successes!

Aviva spoke about the health of the short story, which is always a concern for short story writers. I have to admit that before I started writing seriously, I hardly ever read short stories. I've learnt, over time, to appreciate them -- and perhaps part of the problem for me, originally, was that most times when I'd encountered them it was in buying science fiction books that I thought were novels. I'd be all set, engrossed in a story, and then it would end. (Truth be told, many of these were probably novellas rather than short stories.) I'd always be so disappointed when they finished, and felt ripped off. I'd become emotionally engaged with these characters and was ready for the long haul, only there was none, and I do love the long haul! I thought I hated short stories. Really, I don't think I did -- what I hated was not having my expectations met. This is a concern for all writers, or should be. But that's for another post.

These days when I read short stories, my expectations are for a different type of experience. I love the short story form. Many believe they're easier to write than novels, but I don't think so. Shorter, yes. Don't take as long. But not easier.

They're often talked about as the training ground for a novel, and they really can be this. This is not to say that all novelists write short stories. They don't. Nor do they need to. Nor is it any kind of slight against the short story or implying that the short story is, in any way, inferior. It's not. It's just that the short story form, because it is shorter, can teach you a lot about structuring fiction. In the time that you write one 80,000 word novel, you can write many short stories, learning how to get in and get out of the story, how to show rising tension, a whole host of factors. This gives you time to improve, experience. To get that same amount of experience in structure, you'd need to write several novels. Many novels. That's going to take longer. So the short story is like a short cut to gaining useful writing experience.

One thing Aviva spoke about, which I'd never really thought about, was how the publishing of short stories has changed. In the past, new writers often began with a short story collection and then graduated to novels, whereas these days most short story writers need a successful novel or, better, a few successful novels published before they can get a short story collection published. I knew both of these things, but somehow I'd never quite juxtaposed the ideas and thought about that change. (And of course there are exceptions to this, particularly with small press publishers, but there are also publishing houses that never seem to touch the short story.)

These days, we're more likely to read our short stories in literary (or genre) magazines. The mass market magazines do publish a few, but some will only take these through agents. But if we all do want to see more short stories published then we have to let the publishers know this in the one way they really care about: book sales.

Heckling at The Bank

2009-02-15T22:42:00.004+11:00

Yesterday, my friend Sherryl and I went to a poetry reading at The Bank restaurant in Yarraville, a few suburbs from where I live. The reading was part of the Yarraville Festival, which I didn't really know much about, but also part of our Rotunda nights -- a series of sessions we've (Professional Writing and Editing at Victoria University) had with well known writers, mostly at the Toniq Bar at our Footscray Park campus. We've had a great turnout both from students and from the general public, and the atmosphere at these nights has been buzzing. (And that's largely thanks to our fabulous organiser Bruno Lettieri, who is just a dynamo on legs!)

So, we're at The Bank, part of a large crowd, which is partly composed of genuine audience members and partly of the lunchtime dinner crowd. I wondered how they felt about the reading: happy to have had some extra entertainment, or pressured to stay silent. Hopefully, the first.

Anyway, all was going well -- we were onto our third reader when he just happened to mention that one of his poems was based on or inspired by one of Rumi's poems. He read the poem, and then two audience members arced up. One started by saying that it was nothing like a Rumi poem. But so what? The poet hadn't said it was his intention to copy Rumi's work or emulate him in any way, just that that had been his leaping-off point, his inspiration.

The poet was pretty good about it. He just smiled and said, "Thank you for your opinion."

But of course that wasn't the end of it. The second one got going, getting more and more vitriolic by the minute, and finishing up with: "That was a load of shit."

Again, the poet thanked her. Fortunately, her partner, perhaps embarrassed at how far the little exchange he'd initiated had gone, shut her up. But it left a sour taste in my mouth. Why do people have to act that way? It can be hard enough for most of us to stand out there on a limb, airing our most private thoughts and being judged, without this happening.

The day before the reading I had bumped into another friend of mine who is shortly to appear on a panel at a library with some other well-known writers. I know he hates public speaking. I told him just to be himself, and that I think a lot of times this nervousness arises out of our feeling that we have to be someone -- someone impressive -- rather than just ourselves. Why do we do this to ourselves? That kind of pressure is crippling.

Most people want to see us do well. They don't want to hear us stutter and fail; they want us to succeed. One of the poets yesterday made a few little slips and kept apologising, something I'm aware I do when I read. I know that I'm better off to just move on -- it disrupts the flow of the poem far less -- but apologising is instinctive. I do it without even thinking. So the trick for me is to keep my brain engaged (or at least hitched to this idea) without freaking myself out. I'm getting better at it -- it's like anything: it needs practice. Practice and dignity -- and that's what yesterday's reader had: plenty of dignity. Good for him!

Black Saturday

2009-02-12T23:15:00.007+11:00

Really, I've been divided about whether to blog about Black Saturday or not -- there has been so much media coverage that it feels like there is nothing left to say. And yet it is still a preoccupation I can't move away from, a tragedy I'm nursing inside. I have read more articles in the newspapers and on the web, have listened to more radio news and watched more television news this week than I have since the opening days of the Gulf War, which was streamed live to us nonstop for weeks. (I remember I was in Sydney for a three-day training camp on a new piece of lab equipment we'd just acquired -- the first time I'd ever been sent, and I just couldn't concentrate on training at the time.)

Black Saturday was a phenomenal day in every bad way imaginable: 46.4 degrees in Melbourne, 47.9 in Avalon, which is less than an hour from here, with gusting and searing north winds. We ran the evaporative cooler and kept braving outside to jump in the pool and then beat a hasty retreat inside. We couldn't stay in the pool: the wind was smashing grit into our faces and made staying there very unpleasant. But being wet and back inside with the evaporative cooling was almost comfortable.

Outside was like standing in front of an angry dragon: the air was scorching. I could almost smell the brimstone. So how those poor people who were trapped in it felt -- how those firefighters faced up to it . . . I've always been afraid of fire, of dying in fire, and to see this conflagration was the stuff of nightmare. Trite, I know, for what was truly tragic and unimaginable and horrific and awe-inspiring and awful and fearsome and a hundred other adjectives, a thousand other adjectives that describe hell itself.

I suppose I'm lucky in that I don't personally know anyone who has been affected --it's more of a three degrees of separation thing. The closest I've come is with the death of Brian Naylor, the Channel 9 newsreader. We grew up with Brian Naylor in our houses -- a generation who remembers what it was like when "Brian told me so". He was one I wept for, but there were many more. I could recount some of them, but they're not my stories to tell. Not often a writer feels like this.

Such tragedies bring out the best and the worst in us. I've been moved to tears several times, listening to stories of selflessness and courage. And to see Australia's (and some other countries') response/s also moves me. Then there's the other side: the looters, those who've stolen collection tins, and the firebugs themselves. Bad enough those who lit the fires in the first place, but after such carnage, such loss of life, how could people light more? How? I just don't understand, and I'm not sure I want to. Humanity has both its great side and its repellent.

In the meantime, we're left with smoke haze, the smell of burnt eucalypt, and spectacular sunsets. (Here's one I've added later, from 13 February. Reminds me of the Tim Winton novel That eye, the sky -- well, not so much the novel as the title. It is like a large baleful eye, looking down on us, on the disaster unfolding around us.)

Words and white space

2009-02-06T11:15:00.003+11:00

A couple of days ago, my daughter picked up the novel I'm currently reading and began leafing through it. She's just begun studying English Lit at school, which will challenge her because prior to this Christmas all of her reading was either Dr Who, Star Wars, the Twilight series or the Eragon series. Just before Christmas, she read Jane Austen's Persuasion, which she quite liked, and which gave me hope that she may be ready to expand her reading range.

So, anyway, she picked up the novel and read a couple of paras, and said, "Oh, this looks interesting. What's it like?"

I told her I liked it, but that it was a dense read.

"Dense?" she said. "What do you mean by dense?"

Indeed -- what did I mean by it? It's something that I recognise as soon as I see it, but it can be due to any combination of a number of things. Not much dialogue. Long sentences. Complex vocabulary. Complex ideas. Long paras. Long chapters. Not much white space. A slow turning of pages. (Not boring, just slow.) Lots of detail. Not much happening. Lots of words on the page.

Dense reads are often a slog, but a rewarding slog. I rarely begrudge the time I have spent on them. They feel profound, full of gravitas. I think of books like Cold mountain and remember the surprise that I felt (and that my teacher felt, I think) that no-one else in the class liked it. It was bleak. Very bleak. And dense. A book to wade through as you might wade through the mire of the battlefield, but one that you would come out of with your mind whirling -- a book that would leave you thinking for days after it. A book that you have Experienced. (Yes, with a capital E.)

Dense books are sometimes lyrical, sometimes not. They're rarely plot-driven -- and the pacing is so different from most genre novels, most popular novels, that perhaps it's no surprise that people struggle with them. We've become a world of ten-second grabbers -- we want everything now, and everything fast. Onto this, get through it (or don't) and then onto the next thing -- no time to luxuriate, to wallow in a dense book. And yet they have their appeal, for rarely are worlds so well realised as in dense books. I am there: immersed in sensory details -- the headiness of frangipani, the glide of fingers over marble, the iron-rich tang of blood on a tongue, the cold shawling my shoulders.

It's funny, then, that the psychological effect of white space is so strong. I can pick up a book, flick through the pages -- and if there's no white space, if there's only two or three paras on a double-paged spread, I'm likely to put it down again. I have to be in the right headspace for a dense read. Holidays are good -- not too much on my mind. Perhaps it has to do with knowing that the plot is unlikely to have me tearing through the book to find out what is going to happen. Dense reads do take me a lot longer (but then there are more words to get through, right?) than another book of similar length, and it's easy to walk away from them if you haven't been at them for a couple of days. Language, no matter how beautiful, isn't enough to hold me.

My own writing isn't dense. Sometimes I feel it should be more so -- things that aren't dense can feel shallow. On the other hand, editors have said it is well paced, and to flesh things out more is to compromise that fast pace. But isn't that partly the beauty of writing -- finding the balance for each individual project?

Playing with cameras

2009-02-03T23:54:00.005+11:00

One of the great beauties of an SLR (single-lens reflex) camera is the control over your shots. For years, I used a manual OM1, which I loved. Nothing was automated -- I controlled aperture, shutter speed, and hence depth of field. One day, thousands of photos after purchase, my old SLR packed it in. I had it repaired, but it came back with a part missing, and I tried to get it fixed again, but I ended up leaving the body at the store, because the bill to fix it was worth more than the camera -- which I wouldn't have minded had they been able to fix it properly, but they couldn't, so it was then only good for parts.

For a few years, I was cameraless, which was hard with young children. I'd borrow my mum's for a while, and then give it back. I did find that one of the beauties of not having a camera was that I got to live the moment, rather than trying to capture it. But one cannot live without camera forever -- especially one like me who has no visual memory. Photos *are* my visual memory.

So, I bought my first digital camera: a two megapixel instamatic, and found I loved the ability to just snap away. Later, I could decide what was worth keeping, rather than being frugal in what I was taking. Brilliant! Then that camera was stolen, and after waiting awhile I bought a five megapixel camera. A Canon. Now what I really loved about that camera was the ability to take 16:9 format photos. Sure, I can crop an image to this size, but I'd much rather do my work when composing the photo. I'd rather not play with the photos afterwards at all: get the colour temperature right, the horizon where I want it, the right depth of field and go.

Now, at last I have a digital SLR, and aren't I loving that? Back to my old stalwart, Olympus. A beautiful camera. My one regret is that I no longer have that 16:9 option, but I do have a panorama feature, which I'm starting to play with. Here's a small example: three photos knitted together. It's not perfect: you can see the joins, especially the left-hand one, but it's still better than I used to do with scissors and glue.

What I've learned that they only work in one direction -- shooting left to right. I completely bamboozled the software by shooting a few right-to-left. What a waste. I've also learnt not to use too short a focal length: that fish-eye effect is disconcerting when it makes the horizon look like a series of hillocks in a multiple-photo (eight) stitch.

Spiflicating

2009-01-30T12:18:00.004+11:00

So, second day back at work yesterday, 43 degrees outside, and the airconditioners packed up. We were trying to concentrate on what we had to do: meetings, interviewing prospective students, admin duties, the usual stuff, while the temperature began the climb through the thirties. Most unpleasant.

In my mother's words: we were spiflicating. This is a word she always uses for when she's absolutely boiling. I always thought she'd made it up because it seemed an unusual word, and I'd never heard anyone else use it. But it was common lingo in our home.

So, I was surprised one day to come across it in the Macquarie -- only it doesn't mean "boiling hot", does it? It (spiflicate) means: "to destroy utterly; hurt, punish, or damage; destroy or kill". Hmmm. Maybe I'd misunderstood her meaning. Maybe she'd meant the heat was damaging us. That we were hurting.

So I rang her up.

"What does 'spiflicating' mean?" I said, as innocently as I could.

"Really hot," she said, "boiling. You know, when you think you're going to expire from heat."

Well, perhaps she didn't say "expire". That's more my type of word, but you get the drift. And that's how I felt yesterday. I was hurting. I felt close to expiring. (Yeah, yeah, I'm being dramatic, but it was a dramatic kind of day. And is again today.)

I know now that I shouldn't use "spiflicating" in this way, but I kind of like it. I'm tempted to put it into one of my character's mouths. "I'm spiflicating," one might say out in the desert. I'm tempted to try to spread the word and hope that like other words and phrases (it's all good, for example) it catches on. I mean it's all very well to argue that I've got the meaning wrong and shouldn't be using it incorrectly (yes, the editor in me shudders at the thought), but I'm too attached to the word -- and who ever uses it in it's real sense anyway? It's a spiffy word that should be out there more.

Anyway, language grows through misusage, even if some of that growth annoys the hell out of me. After learning that "alright" should really be "all right" -- my Webster's labels "alright" as "substandard usage", and several of my other dictionaries don't list it at all. One of my style guides says we should preserve "all right" as the correct spelling and never, ever use "alright"; another says that we should get with the times and not be so stuffy. I always use "all right". Even worse, for me, is the use of "disinterested" (meaning "unbiased") for "uninterested", but this meaning is becoming more acceptable and is listed in the latest Macquarie as being acceptable. Yuck. No, no, no. But "spiflicating" -- now, there's a word. Merriam Webster require three citations from diverse sources before they'll consider adding a new word (or neologism, another cool word) to the dictionary. How many do the Macquarie people need, I wonder. So here it is: spiflicating, spiflicating, spiflicating. Go out and use it. (If Ellen can have her interrobang, then I can have spiflicating = bloody hot, boiling.

Which brings me back to how I felt yesterday. You know, I actually didn't mind it too much till I went downstairs and realised how much cooler it was. Enrolments were happening there, and the cynic in me wondered whether that part of the aircon that had broken down serviced our part of the building, or whether someone somewhere decided to divert what aircon there was to where the enrolments were happening. It would make sense because there were a lot of people there. I'm a cynic because this used to happen when I was a scientist. When the temp got into the high 30s, the good people who maintained the aircon would turn our aircon off and divert all power to the operating theatre. Now, I can understand that the surgeons need to be cool, but we were up there spiflicating in our lab coats (me crouched over my Bunsen burner). And the biochemists -- half their tests wouldn't work, and then we'd get irate phone calls from doctors demanding results right away, and not wanting to listen to us say that we couldn't do it, not until things cooled down or we got our aircon back. Of course they never offered to give us a greater share of the aircon they were enjoying...

Writers' rooms

2009-01-28T00:34:00.007+11:00

Before I went away I was reading a blog (I think) about writers' rooms -- the different rooms that famous writers wrote in. And it made me think about my two writing rooms, and the other rooms I've written in.

In my old house, my computer sat before my study window, which was framed by a herb garden where rosemary and lavender flourished, basil struggled and parsley was always going to seed. Beyond the herb garden were red and grey pavers and a lovely Hannah Ray (bottlebrush) with velvety greeny-grey leaves and spectacular red flowers in autumn and spring. Sometimes, I'd daydream while looking out the window.

The walls were lilac, the carpet grey, the curtains a fantastic bubbly material with greys and pinks and purples, in a subtle zigzagged pattern. In that room, I belted out my first draft.

In my new house, my computer is along the wall that houses the window, but is offset so that if I'm looking straight ahead, I'm looking at the wall. The window, slatted with wooden venetians, looks out onto a lush tropical-looking garden that's more drought-resistant than it looks. Palm trees form the backdrop and a small pond forms the foreground, though this is more often dry these days than wet. It's a restful garden.

When I first moved into this house, I had great visions of writing on my deck -- taking my laptop outside and sitting overlooking the swamp. I tried this once or twice and found I spent the entire time gazing out at the swamp, watching the pelicans and swans, rather than writing. The deck (on a windless day) is great for workshopping or marking, but never for writing. For writing I'm serviced best by a blank wall and my own imagination, so while I might dream of having a room with views like these two, taken from a lookout in the Mimosa Rocks National Park (in NSW), I know that such views are best left to dreams.

Planning to write

2009-01-27T23:48:00.010+11:00

Weather is a funny thing. Or perhaps it's not so much weather as foreign weather -- weather in a space that isn't your own, that doesn't behave as the weather you're familiar with. And seeing I'm from the city that's famous for having four seasons in a day, I thought I was used to everything. (Well, everything except rain, of course!) Wrong.

But let me explain. We've just been away on holidays, and part of my holiday experience always includes writing, whether I'm camping and away with a notebook (the paper kind) and jotting notes and poems, or somewhere more upmarket (ie with electricity) where I can take my laptop and happily plug away on my novel.

Holidaying with the family isn't quite the writing experience that going on a writer's retreat is. Obviously, it's much poorer writing-wise because you have to spend a lot of time with family doing family-type things, whether that's sightseeing, playing cards, bushwalking, swimming or whatever. At least I do. (And we did all of those this holiday.) So writing time becomes a precious precious thing -- something you have to budget for.

Very diligently, I planned out my writing time. Trouble was that one of my kids had borrowed my laptop and played games and flattened the battery, which didn't bother me too much as I prefer to work plugged-in with a brighter screen. So, the appointed time came, and I was faced with a thunderstorm. No drama. I switched off the computer and waited till it had passed, by which time I was booked up to do something else.

Meticulously, I planned out writing time the next day. After all, where I live, we rarely get thunderstorms so I wasn't likely to face another one, right? Wrong. Next day, same thing. And the next and the next. For five days out of the nine we were away (and the first and last days were spent driving -- so, really, we're talking five days out of seven) we had thunderstorms for part of each day. Although where we visited was sub-tropical, it certainly felt like tropical weather.

This meant writing time was much scarcer than I'd hoped for, because I also wasn't game to leave the computer charging while we were out. These storms just rolled in when we least expected them. One minute it would be sunny and hot; the next indigo clouds would be rolling in. We saw cloud formations I'd never seen before -- strange bubble-like patterns, dimpled like the surface of a mattress.

On the other hand, I did do lots of reading, and I found myself thinking about my novel -- always easy to do, but interesting when you're in the type of setting that your characters are inhabiting for at least part of their journey. All the smells and sounds and textures are there for you to experience. I love it! And there's no point getting too frustrated at how many more hours you could have been writing (I did squeeze in a few) because you're doing that other thing that writers should be doing: getting out there and living!

Who do you write for?

2009-01-16T23:10:00.002+11:00

I'm a great believer in writing your first draft for yourself -- not getting hung up on who your audience is, whether your protagonist's age is going to be more suited to children's fiction or YA, whether your audience is going to prefer first person, present tense; third person, past tense; or some other combination. The first draft should be for the story -- and if you're lucky enough to write in that white-hot streak of creativity where the words are pouring out, then you should let them pour. Don't hold them up with some internal editor. Let that come later.

When the draft is finished, it's great to have a gut read: a quick read where you mark passages that aren't working, logic problems, places where the pacing sags. This isn't a fine line edit -- in fact, I don't allow myself to hold a pen when I'm doing a gut read. If I have a pen in my hand, then I'll be tempted to correct those little typos, the missing apostrophe, and I'll lose the impetus of the story. I'll do my gut read with a highlighter and just put a vertical line alongside the parts that aren't working. Then I'll come back later and look at these passages more critically, more analytically, but not during the gut read -- this is just time to note the problem and move on.

Then comes the next draft (and the next and the next). If you're writing for publication, then this is the time when you need to start thinking about your audience. Who are you writing for? Is this story suited to your target audience? Is it too complex for children? Too unsophisticated for adults? Too boring for teenager? Is the language appropriate? What about sentence structure and length? Are the paragraphs too dense? Too long? Is there a good mix of narrative to dialogue? Are you showing rather than telling? Are you opening up enough story questions for your reader to want to keep reading? Is there enough conflict? Does the tension escalate? There are lots of things to think about.

If you're not writing for publication, then you don't have to worry about these questions. You're writing for yourself so you can just do what you want. There's nothing wrong with not writing for publication, as long as you are clear that this is what you're doing. Most serious writers, however, do want to be published, and if you do want to be published then at some stage you need to think about your market and what that market wants -- what the gatekeepers (editors) who select the stories that will be published want. What are they publishing? Why? Go take a look at their recent releases -- are they like your book? How? How are they different? If they're not at all like your book, are you targeting the right publisher? Research is the key.

Some writers write for different audiences and use different pseudonyms so that the reader is clear about what type of book they're buying -- for example, Megan Lindholm writes urban fantasy but epic fantasy as Robin Hobb. Iain Banks writes mainstream fiction, but science fiction as Iain M Banks. Some children's writers will write erotic fiction using a pseudonym to protect their identity. It's all about meeting reader expectations. I know writers who love Robin Hobb stories but not Megan Lindholm ones, and others who love only the Megan Lindholm ones. It helps if you're a reader to know which books are which, and it helps as a writer to know this too, as it dictates your approach. Knowing your audience isn't about shutting doors, but opening them -- helping you to get your book through the doors you want to get it through.

City of Ember

2009-01-14T10:35:00.002+11:00

City of Ember was the other film I have seen recently, though it was several weeks ago now, so I'm not going to go into any great detail.

Ember is a film with a spec fic premise -- Ember is an underground city, built so people could survive a nuclear disaster on the planetary surface, and now the power generator is failing, and the inhabitants need to return to the surface. The city planners had, of course, left instructions on how to do this, but these have been "lost" along the way. Introduce our two main characters, two teenagers who are just both beginning their careers in the workforce. Let them make some discoveries, and send them on a chase for the missing information.

This certainly feels like a children's film, not just because the protagonists are so young, but because it lacks sophistication. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Personally, I would've preferred more sophistication, but then the film would've been less suited to its target audience. There were a couple of things that happened a bit too easily along the way, but it was a rollicking good ride for most of the film, and atmospheric as well. A good one for the kids.

Slumdog Millionnaire

2009-01-14T10:07:00.003+11:00

My mother dragged me along to see this film yesterday -- she asked me the other day if I were interested, and I said no. So she read me the spiel. Nope. Not really. But it had excellent reviews, so I thought, why not?. (It's either a feast or famine with me with films, and at the moment I'm feasting!)

Slumdog Millionnaire is the story of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who does extraordinarily well on "Who wants to be a millionnaire" and is then accused of cheating, and so the story is structured using a series of flashbacks as he is interrogated and taken through the questions, then thinks about how he knows each answer.

Slumdog is a culturally rich film: gorgeous, uncomfortable, colourful, pungent to the eyes (and, yes, invoking other senses for me). There were times I sat in my seat squirming -- part of the torture scene at the beginning (be warned), but also sometimes with the TV show host's snipey comments, and the audience's consequent laughter. (I hate seeing people humiliated.)

I was totally caught up in the story. My mother and son both found it a bit slow in the middle, but I was too intrigued. I had no problems with pacing, but it is a slower film in the way that many arthouse movies are. Still, the setting is so fascinating that there was always lots to look at, and there's plenty of action in parts too.

Unless you're a purely action-adventure film lover, put this one on your must-see list!

The curious movie of Benjamin Button -- possible spoilers

2009-01-12T10:21:00.005+11:00

This was one of those must-see movies for me -- mostly because of the premise. I haven't read the F Scott Fitzgerald short story that it's based on, but the premise -- a man being born old and growing younger -- sounded fascinating. It sounded a strong spec fic premise, and indeed spec fic is how I'd classify the movie (the old what if scenario), but I was sure that the way it was being presented many viewers wouldn't realise that's what it is. My mother, for example, who hates science fiction and fantasy and doesn't understand my attraction to all that "weird stuff", was very keen to see this. And certainly didn't see it as that type of movie.

The reviews were excellent so I had great hopes of enjoying this movie, but then I went out with a writer friend a few days prior to seeing it (a spec fic writer friend), and he said he walked out in the middle of it, that it was too schmaltzy for him. Hmm. Okay. So I cranked down my expectations a couple of notches, though I'm not too averse to a bit of schmaltz if it's done well.

When the story began with an aged Daisy (Cate Blanchett) in bed in a hospital in New Orleans, my heart sank. A frame story. I'm not a great one for frames because 95% of the time they add nothing to a story. And while this technically wasn't a frame, because it dipped in and out of the hospital all the way through, it worked more like a frame story than a parallel plot. It was a device used to tell the main story -- so we have Daisy's daughter reading Benjamin's diary out to the ailing Daisy. Nothing much actually happened in this storyline, and to me it could have been cut without any loss -- in fact with great gain. Sure, there was a small surprise that came out in this storyline, but it was so predictable that I guessed it within minutes of the film beginning. Yawn.

Benjamin Button's story itself was interesting, but I felt the movie's length. Very rarely do I do that -- I sat through all three Lord of the Rings movies, other longer movies like Gladiator, The Right Stuff, Australia totally caught up and entranced, not noticing how time passed. In this one, I would've been glancing at my watch had I been wearing one. It just seemed slow. Beautifully shot, beautifully made up, beautifully acted but slow. Perhaps if the frame story (yes, I'm persisting in calling it that) were cut . . .

I also got caught up in the logic of his physical appearance -- if we accepted the story's premise (which I did). He was born an old-looking baby and died a young-looking baby. I would have expected him either to be born as a little old man (and as his mother died in childbirth this would have been easy to achieve) or to die a very babyish looking old man. The physicality, the way it was presented, didn't quite work for me. Why I should get hooked up on such things is perplexing -- perhaps it's just the spec fic writer in me wanting a world with its own internal logic, which I didn't quite get here.

It is an interesting story, one worth seeing, but not one I'd hurry to watch again or hurry to buy on DVD. It's that book I buy that I long to take my blue pencil to, that I sit through interested but never fully caught up and engaged. Perhaps I should go dig out the short story and see how it compares.

Spooks

2009-01-07T12:15:00.005+11:00

As we were watching "Spooks" yesterday (the BBC series), we discovered a doco on the US version of the show, which is called "MI5". What I found most interesting was that the BBC DVDs are 59 minutes in length, the international versions (presumably what we get here in Australia) are 50 minutes, and the US versions 44 minutes. Of course this means that sometimes whole subplots have to go, which we just couldn't imagine. The shows seem masterfully plotted, with plenty of twists and turns. Also, someone was talking about how in the BBC version often the characters will talk about doing something and then go out and do it, whereas in the American version they cut the talking and just show them doing the action, and as a consequence the audience has to work harder.

Of course this is what we do in writing too -- the old "show, don't tell" -- or sometimes even more relevant to this is when writers repeat something in the narrative that they've put in the dialogue, or vice-versa. In writing, this drives me crackers. Just get on with it, I think. I must say that in the TV show, I hadn't noticed the characters doing this, and wondered whether the show would be harder to follow -- whether sometimes, because I'm not British, I needed more information to "get it". That can't be so or neither the Australian nor American versions would be successful, and I've followed this show just fine on TV.

When I think about it, whenever I've watched it on television, I've had to concentrate. It's rather like watching "The West Wing", where you can't afford to miss a minute. I'm not sure I require the same level of concentration with the DVDs, so that, I guess, answers my question.

After watching the doco, my kids and I discussed the episode we'd just watched, which had a couple of subplots. One seemed to me much more essential to the main plot, but my son reasoned that the episode wouldn't have been the same without both. No, perhaps not, but I could see that the second subplot didn't really add to the main plot or to my interest, particularly. It did give the characters a bit more stress, but an audience wouldn't have noticed this if it were missing. In actual fact, both could have been cut without too much detriment as far as understanding goes, but the first made the show a lot more enjoyable for me.

It's interesting to discover these facts and contemplate them (particularly as I'm facing some major cuts to the middle of my novel). I think each episode now we'll be talking about how different the other versions might be, which is me thinking as a writer, and my kids starting thinking about how stories are structured, as well. They learn, and we all get more from the shows -- if that's at all possible.

Almost a perfect day

2009-01-07T11:53:00.006+11:00

Yesterday was an almost perfect day for me. It was good exercise-wise (which I'm usually not so good at, but which we, as writers, do need to think about because writing is such a sedentary job), I had fun, and I was productive! What more can you ask for?

I started out by taking my dogs for a long walk (or amble really) along the beach front (in an off-lead area), so they had lots of swims and socialising. It was just a tad too warm for my liking, which is why we went early. I came home and did some emails and stuff, rang a few people (all business related) and then took one of my kids bowling. The other hadn't struggled up yet (though it was now lunch time). We won one game each (we're both pretty hopeless), so it was nice and even.

Came home and got to work on my novel and spent a very productive couple of hours going through reader comments. The major thing I did was trim a three and a half page scene down to two and a quarter pages, and it was much better for the cut. I have a tendency to have my characters gab too much, so it's largely a matter of seeing what dialogue I can cut -- thinking about why I have included each piece of dialogue. Is it there because it's advancing the plot or adding to character? Is it showing character motivations or character interactions? Is it giving a feeling of a larger world? Is it adding to atmosphere or helping set the tone? Is it doing more than one thing?

After getting off to a false start where I took out one slab and then realised it was essential that I keep that, I put it back in and thought some more and found something less essential. I'll often show a lot of the conflict through the dialogue, but it can't be pointless bickering -- the conflict has to escalate. Anyway, I felt it was all very successful: the scene is zippier because it's more focused and still has plenty of dialogue to keep it moving.

Then I cooked dinner (something easy), went for a swim, stewed a whole lot of apricots and watched some television with the kids.

We're currently ploughing through "Spooks" and enjoying it immensely, which was a great way to wind down at the end of the day.

Movies: Twilight

2009-01-01T15:29:00.004+11:00

Now, I have to confess: I haven't read the books. My daughter loves them. Several of my students have been engrossed -- I can tell because they're still reading when class starts. I have dipped in and sampled bits of the first chapter and think I *could* read these books. But I have others on my pile, a lot of others on my pile, that I want to read first.

I've also read a very negative review of the books/film that looks at the subtext of the novel and says it's a terrible message to send our children -- that women should be meek and submissive, and, after all, Bella doesn't get herself out of trouble: she has to be saved. In most great stories, the hero or heroine saves themselves through use of their own wiles (if not strength or courage or talent) -- an essential part of the hero's journey. Go read Joseph Campbell and see what he says about it.

The casting was interesting -- Edward, who was supposed to be more beautiful than any human had a right to be (from what I've heard) didn't strike me as beautiful at all. Sorry, but he just didn't do it for me. He looked nothing more than anaemic, perhaps not unexpectedly so for a vampire, and -- well, just not human. And I don't mean that in a good way. I mean his contact lenses, or something about his eyes, just made him look freaky in a bad way -- in an unbelievable-as-an-Ewok kind of way. Who gave them buttons for eyes, anyway? (All right, as far as Edward goes, that's an exaggeration, but that's all it is. He is cast of the same mould -- just a more-dilute version of the unbelievability-factor for me.) They made me doubt him as a character. I couldn't relate to him because his eyes didn't look real. I couldn't see any soul in them -- again, maybe this is meant to be. Orlando Bloom managed to carry off the contacts as Legolas, but then I prefer his real eyes. I could imagine a younger Orli carrying off Edward -- to me, he is "beautiful" in an ethereal kind of way.

I did like Bella. She had a humanness and vulnerability I could warm to, and I totally bought her character.

The whole subtext-thing is a conundrum -- does this mean we can only write characters who are feisty? I keep coming back to Anne Elliott in Persuasion, who strikes me as a character who has not taken charge of her own destiny. Instead of getting out there and living, she has sat back and pined and moped because Frederick Wentworth is out of her life. And then when he's back, she sits back and doesn't tell him how she's feeling. And he's no better. He does the same thing. But then neither of them are modern characters -- not modern, but still great characters.

It's all right to argue that Bella should have been cast more in the Buffy mode, but then wouldn't we be criticising the writer for ripping off "Buffy"? Especially as she also has vampire connections.

Most modern women characters are go-getters, but is it right to say they're sending bad messages if they're not written this way? Aren't we then in danger of making a new stereotype?A new cliche? We are not all hewn from sterner stuff, much as we might like to imagine ourselves as so. I know I'm not.

So, did I enjoy this movie? The truth is that I liked it, but I didn't love it. It's not one I'd have to see more than once, though I can't get that song "Supermassive black hole" out of my head. I felt the same ambivalence about the first Harry Potter movie, but I thought they improved as they went on (and got darker). Maybe the same will happen here. We shall see.

Reading: nonfiction

2008-12-24T22:18:00.005+11:00

As much as I like to tell the nonfic teachers that I work with that all I love to read is fiction, it's not exactly true. We have a lot of good-humoured banter about which is better: fiction or nonfic. The nonfic teachers see theirs as the professional side, and therefore more important; we see ours as the artistic side, and therefore more fulfilling. (My first instinct would've been to write "creative" there, but I know that nonfiction can be just as creative as fiction.)

I read nonfiction in a different way to how I read fiction. Usually, I will start a novel on page one and read it sequentially until I get to the end. If it's a gripping read, that might be a day or so. If it's one I'm enjoying but that hasn't gripped, then it might be a matter of months, because I'll put it aside and pick up something else. I will get back to it, and that will frustrate me because then I'll have to browse or skim it to reaquaint myself with the story.

Nonfiction is more like reading a book of poetry. (Maybe that's just the type of nonfiction I read -- on the rare occasions I'll read a biog, then it will be from page one to the end.) My weekly reading includes some newspapers, which, like most people I'll dip in and out of, and Time magazine. The newspapers I don't read every day -- we only get The Age once a week, and I'll usually read several local papers, and sometimes the MX if my husband brings it home, and I'm in the mood for something light.

Next year my daughter will be studying twentieth-century history, so I've been busy collecting some extra books that she might like to look into to get a bigger picture of what it was all about. These have included a set of two books on World Wars I and II (with pictures, lots of stats and stories), a pictorial history of the century (with lots of photos and brief stories), a book of history's worst decisions (amusing) and history's greatest scandals (amusing), and history's greatest hits (events we should know more about is how it's marketed). The latter three embrace a much larger timeframe than the last century, but they're all great for dipping in to. I can sit when I have a few moments and read a story, just as I might read a poem.

The war books are of particular interest. I feel I have a connection to both wars, even though I lived through neither of them. My great grandfather had something to do with the first war -- I think he went overseas but am not sure he was actually in any battles. He died when I was twelve, but I remember I felt connected to this war through him, and so it always held a great fascination for me. And my father was a child and teenager in Holland through the occupation of Holland in WWII and tells lots of stories of his time there and his interactions with the Nazis. His family very briefly helped shelter a couple of Jews and helped them escape the country. (My Australian grandfather escaped the war because he was a firefighter, which was deemed an essential service. He died when my mother was a child, so I never got to meet him.)

These latter books are inordinately interesting and great fodder for the imagination -- I can't help but get fired up with ideas for short stories as I'm reading. At the moment, though, I'm in novel mode, and that's where my priorities lie. But perhaps when I've finished my novel, I might pause and bang off a couple of short stories, and I know just the place to turn for inspiration. On the other hand, I might just leap straight into reworking the second book. I know that's where my heart will lie.

Movies: Australia

2008-12-17T13:46:00.004+11:00

Australia is an epic, and I'm very fond of epics, and been a great Nicole Kidman fan ever since seeing her in "Bangkok Hilton" many years ago, but I'd heard mixed reviews of this movie, so I went along with some trepidation.

In the first few minutes of the film, I was struck by the over-the-top, slightly overacted, almost cartoonish feel, but then I remembered this is a Baz film, and settled right into it. After all, look at Moulin Rouge, a great favourite of mine. Australia is over the top in much the same way, but just as much fun too. (At several points in the film, my kids and I were almost rolling around in our seats with laughter -- all of it genuine.)

Usually, when watching a movie, I will be "in the film" -- I become one of the characters, just as I do when reading a book. I am immersed, swept up, part of it. Baz's films, because I'm noticing the cinematography or direction or acting or whatever, distance me a little from this experience but give me another kind of experience. It's not a greater or lesser experience, just a different one. It's set up from the beginning so isn't an issue. And it's great to see a director with balls enough to have his own vision, to do something different, something away from what everyone else is attempting.

The parallel when I'm reading is the second-person addresses (as authorial interruption). I don't mind these if they're part of the experience. What I can't abide is when I'm in the middle of a story and suddenly the writer addresses me and rips me out of my immersion. If I'm aware from the beginning I won't be immersed in the same way, so it doesn't happen. I'm not reminded that I'm reading because I'm already aware, in a way that I'm not in a "straight" novel. Maybe it's to do with the way I read (conceptually rather than visually) -- I'm not sure.

I do have to say that past the first few minutes, I stopped noticing the style of the movie and just got swept right up in the story.

Australia is part iconic old droving movies like The overlanders, part love story a la Titanic and a ripping good yarn. I can see why Oprah told Nicole and Hugh that it was the movie we need to see. I didn't notice the length at all. And in the dark moments when I think of my book and despair at how the structure isn't a classic beginning, middle and end but rather seems to embody several stories, I can take heart that it does so in much the same way that Australia does. In my novel it's a military coup -- and that could be a novel in itself -- and the parallel to that in this movie is the droving story. But that's not where the film ends -- it then takes up life on the station and the bombing of Darwin; in my novel it's the quest story. It's amazing what movies can teach us -- even if only to sit back and chill out!

So would I recommend Australia: you bet. Especially if you like cows and horses, the gorgeous Hugh and Nicole and landscape, action, adventure and romance.

Writing retreat

2008-12-06T18:40:00.009+11:00

2008 seems to have been the year of writing retreats for me. I've been on several with SuperNOVA, and this last weekend I've been on one with Elizabeth, one of my SuperNOVArian colleagues. (2008 is also the year where I've needed more writing retreats as sanity-savers!)

There's something very relaxing and very stimulating about going away with other writers, though my mother treats such trips with deep suspicion and tells me I shouldn't be jaunting off on holidays with my friends while my husband is stuck home with the kids.

"We do work," I say, while she's eyeing me cynically. "It's not a holiday."

And that's true. We do. Often I'll pour out thousands of words in a weekend. Last year, over Cup Weekend, I set-up my NaNoWriMo run in great style, with the fantastic Ellen, who always keeps me on track.

I must say that I really needed to get away this time, to catch my breath after finishing off the last (almost) of the late assignments, and of the heavy year, and to reaquaint myself with my novel. That's the hardest thing about having a break -- you do lose touch, especially with a multistranded novel, that you've done numerous drafts of. And though Elizabeth and I weren't perhaps as productive as we would've liked while I was there (Elizabeth had a few more days after I left, and wrote about 12,000 words, I think, in this time), I reimmerse myself in the world of my novel and get back into dealing-with-reader comments mode.

Movies: Quantum of solace

2008-11-26T11:20:00.004+11:00

Ah, the teaching semester is over, and that means I get to go to the movies. Not that I don't during the semester, but I get to go a lot more when I'm not teaching. I love the movies. And I've been a big Bond fan since way back.

When I was travelling overseas in the 80s (yes, showing my age, I know), A view to a kill was newly released, and I used to listen to the soundtrack on my Walkman (big clunky thing that it was!). And then when I was on my Contiki tour, possibly the most fun two months of my life, for a few short days we had Papillon, one of the Bond girls from A view to a kill, on tour with us. (She was the girlfriend of the Contiki photographer who came on board for a few days to shoot some photos of the more photogenic of us.) Of course, I wasn't one of the cool kids, so she didn't hang out with me, but she seemed nice enough. My cassette of the soundtrack was later stolen when my car was broken into when I was back home in Melbourne.

I was always more of a Connery girl than a Moore girl, but liked both. Watched some but not all of the Brosnan films, though I thought he was a very good Bond. (I think I missed the later ones because I was busy dating The Gadget Man, who is not at all a movie goer.) But Craig -- I just love Daniel Craig's interpretation -- it's so much more human, so much more emotional than any of the others. And, strange as it is, I love that they've retained Judy Dench to play M, even though it means she's gotten older as he's gotten younger. A paradox, but an enjoyable one nonetheless.

I do have to say the name Quantum of solace is an intriguing one -- because what does it actually mean? Did I miss something -- because I saw the film, and I'm still not sure. Well, I suppose I do get it -- it's just that it's such a mouthful.

Sir Talkalot and I discussed the opening sequence -- he saw the film initially with friends who all complained that the audience was too close to the action, that it was hard to follow what was going on. He loved that. And so did I. I felt like I was right there in the middle of it. And yes, unlike Life of Pi, it does begin in media res. No doubt about that. Things are happening!

It is very much a modern way of showing a car chase though. I think of the earlier, seemingly fast-moving car chase scenes in other movies, and they seem slow in comparison. But it's that modern day snatch of images that is often blamed for the shortening attention spans of our kids (and why modern day readers tend to like shorter chapters and have vast impatience with any guff).

My one regret is that I hadn't sat down to rewatch Casino Royale, because there were a lot of references back to that film, and while I remembered most of the thrust of it, I may have forgotten some of the finer details. It's the first time I remember two Bond films being so closely linked, but that's something else I rather like too!

Living a writing life

2008-11-23T23:38:00.002+11:00

This year, I increased my time-fraction at work from 0.4 to 0.6 (two days a week to three). Now, the number of days a week I work is a bit laughable really -- it's teaching, and that means lots of marking and in our cases workshopping at home. Some people are able to do some of their prep/marking at work, but we have to do admin work like answering phones and student enquiries and various other things, so we almost never get this luxury.

As well, I've taught a new subject, which is always a heap more work -- lots of extra unpaid work for sure, but work that is rewarding, nonetheless, as we research our subjects, looking for great writing exercises, better understanding, in-depth explanations or whatever. So, while it's a bind, it's also very rewarding.

Also, in second semester I've taught an online subject, which means my time-fraction has effectively been 0.8. I feel like my whole life has become teaching.

On the one hand it's been great. The Gadget Man was out of work for much of last year, and we ate up all our savings and then some, so it's been nice to have a bit more income and try to catch up on debts and stuff. The worst part about it has been the effect on my writing, which has really fallen away, especially as the semester progressed.

There is one thing writers do, and that's write. Well, there are a lot of other things too, but writing is the main one. And there is no better time than the present -- we will, none of us, ever have more time than right now. It is a truth among writers, universally acknowledged. (See, all that Austen is rubbing off!)

And yet . . .

And yet sometimes the things we do, the choices we make, affect more than just the amount of time we have for writing. The amount of headspace is also affected.

Teaching is not the ideal job for writers. A lot of our creative energy goes into our students, into their work. We're left scrabbling with what's left over. (Neither, as my friend E will attest, is writing (nonfic) the best job for fiction writers. Again, all that creative energy is poured out into the daily grind. Not the most conducive for going home after work and settling again in front of a computer.)

The year before I started teaching, I was writing about 30,000 words/month. My best month was about 50,000. In one of my early years in teaching, I wrote a short story in January and another in December and nothing in between. Signing a writing contract with my students has helped keep me more honest than that, but this year has been particularly hard. And has left me with a decision. Do I keep with the higher time-fraction or drop back?

There are no correct answers to this question. Commitment is something I often talk about with my students. How much you commit is all a matter of what's right for you. The best writers are often selfish with their time -- and perhaps you don't want to be.

It's the same in any field of art -- I remember watching an interview with Bill Cosby and his talking about his selfishness in his early years of acting and how he regretted the time he lost with his family, but his acknowledgment that he wouldn't have been where he was without that.

No-one has the right to decide our priorities for us. It's something each of us must do for ourselves -- weighing up what we want out of life and how much we're prepared to pay for it, in terms of what it will cost not just in terms of dedication and hard work, but also in sacrifices.

After long discussions with my family, I've decided to cut back on my hours. The person I am when I'm not writing is an angry, frustrated person: one I don't like very much. I'd much rather be less well off financially and more whole spiritually, because that's what writing does for me.

Reading: Life of Pi

2008-11-19T08:50:00.002+11:00

I'm currently reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which is interesting, coming off Jane Austen and thinking about literary novels and how they differ from mainstream and genre novels, and about things like beginning in media res and using conflict etc, things this book doesn't do.

I'm at page 60 and so far the story hasn't started. I mean I've read the blurb on the backcover -- which tells me I'm expecting my main character to be in a boat sometime soon, but so far he's not. So far we've had his ruminations on zoos and on religions and various other things such as his name (a very humorous chapter), and I'm learning a lot about the main character, but nothing is happening. Nothing. I'm not seeing his interactions with other characters. There's little dialogue -- and mostly what it is is remembered dialogue presented through his ruminations. (And my one complaint is that I would expect a zookeeper's son to know that a platypus is not the only egg-laying mammal -- let us not also forget the echidna! But of course Aussies are likely to be more in touch with our monotremes than most other people.)

I suppose that's the thing about literary novels. If the writing is good enough, a book can hold your interest even if it flouts the cardinal rules about conflict. The bottom line, or perhaps the first rule of writing fiction, is to be interesting. So is this book interesting? Yes, to a point. (And, after all, it's a Booker Prize winner.) But if something doesn't happen soon, I may be putting it down and picking up something else. Other literary novels are able to combine story with beautiful writing -- take books like fellow Booker Prize winners Possession (AS Byatt) and The bone people (Kerri Hulme) -- in both of these I've been caught up in the story well before page 60.

Some of the reviews of Pi talk about the wonderful storytelling -- great! I'm looking forward to experiencing it. If I last that far... And truth be known, I probably will. There are very few books I'll abandon. And often I'll do this in the first few pages, in a rage at purple prose, or because the beginning absolutely positively hasn't hooked me and doesn't show any promise of hooking me. So, 60 pages in is a good sign, I guess!

Online teaching

2008-11-17T08:04:00.006+11:00

This year, I've taught my first online course, which has been quite a different experience to teaching a face-to-face class. I've been prepared for this by first studying as an online student and doing courses on e-learning and course design etc. I think it's important to begin as a student, so you have a good feel of the types of problems (not just technical) your own students might encounter.

A few years ago, my friend Sherryl and I signed up to do a Diploma of VET (Vocational and Education and Training) online with a number of colleagues from our university. We were the only two who managed to complete all the units. Many never made it online. This astonished me. These were fellow teachers, committed to upgrading their quals. There's a very important lesson about motivation in that for any would-be online facilitator.

Sherryl and I worked on the course design of this course together, and we structured it to reflect as well as we could those things that work well for us in the classroom. This meant there are plenty of writing exercises, analysis, discussions.

I had also been involved in the development of another subject, but my input had been mainly "teching" -- taking the writing and getting it ready for the web. That subject was more self-directed where students could plug away at their own pace -- complete the whole course in a week (a very intensive week) if they wanted. Ours was much more interactive, requiring students to log on each week (at their own time), and interact both with the teacher and with each others. I suppose each way of doing it would have its own fans and detractors, but I must say I think the second method is far more rewarding -- both for the teacher and the students.

The plus-side of online teaching is that there's very little prep (though I did have to read or reread all the set stories for discussion), that I don't have to travel in to the university to teach my class, that I can do it in my own time. I do have to log in most days of the week, so students feel I'm around and available. And it's fun! And you have students from all over the place -- so this year I had one in outback Queensland and one in Hong Kong as well as the local students. Also, you get to know the students in a different way -- as with all things online, people will often reveal more about themselves than they will in the real world, which can be a rewarding and interesting thing.

The minus-side is that I have to log in most days of the week, and that the workshopping seems so much more onerous to do online. I'd much rather be able to scribble on a typed manuscript than use Track Changes (Word's editing feature) and Insert Comments. There's also the inadvertent misunderstandings that happen when one person writes a comment, perhaps in fun, and someone else misinterprets the tone of the message. That's when the facilitator sometimes has to facilitate, and not let things fester. This didn't happen very often, fortunately. For me, the other downside is that I felt much less like attending to my other online "duties", such as emails and blogs.

I'm not sure I'd like to do all my teaching online -- I value my real-life interactions too much -- but it's a great way of adding some variety to your teaching. It's a different experience but a rewarding one. And, although I still thing the face-to-face classroom is better (with its instant feedback), this is a close approximation and offers some things the face-to-face classroom can't -- for example, feedback on in-class writing exercises is written rather than verbal and hence more permanent.

Teaching and learning

2008-11-14T16:14:00.007+11:00

A few years ago, I taught for one semester in another course, in an area that was new to me, so it was always a scramble to stay ahead of the class. I took the gig to fill in for someone who was going on long service leave, and she very helpfully sat me down ahead of time and went through how she taught the class. I tried to mimic what she did, and it was a struggle. I was hating the class, and they were hating me. About a third of the way through the semester, I realised this really wasn't working for any of us and sat down to think about why.

I love teaching in Professional Writing and Editing, so I wondered at first whether it was the fact that I wasn't as familiar with nor as passionate about the subject matter. No, I decided, it wasn't that. I was definitely interested in the subject matter, and was working alongside another teacher, who was driving the course, and she was most helpful and prepared stuff for me, which I then went away and researched so I knew what we were talking about.

Okay, if it wasn't the subject matter, perhaps it was the students. They were definitely different from the PWE students, being much rowdier, more multicultural, less literate and -- hmm, dare I say "serious"? But they were a vibrant lot -- I didn't really think that was it either. (And, in fact, later I learnt it definitely wasn't that.)

Then it hit me. I was trying to be this other teacher who was on long service leave. I was teaching the course her way, not approaching it the way I approached "my" classes. Sounds silly but that was a momentous discovery to make and a real turning point. That week I threw out my class plans and started again from scratch, and the next week, the students didn't know what had hit them. The first thing I abandoned was the thing they (and I) hated most, so they were very receptive to the change.

Within weeks I was loving the course and loving them, and they were obviously enjoying it a lot more. I found they were a lot more serious about their studies than I had thought -- once they started getting more out of it, they settled in and knuckled down. Or perhaps it was just that I had won their respect. I don't know. I do know the course evaluations were very positive -- something I don't think they would have been if I'd continued on the way I had been going.

It's so much easier, though, teaching something you love. And so it is for me with my writing and editing subjects, and though I sometimes get burned out from workshopping, and find I'll do almost anything to avoid doing it outside work, I love the fact that teaching enriches my own writing, through my research, through my interactions with students and hearing them discuss other people's work. Sometimes I think that to teach writing is to be truly blessed. (But, of course, that's not how I feel right in the middle of those big assessment weeks when my eyes are bugging out, and I'd do anything to get to my own writing . . .)

What we call ourselves

2008-11-08T09:46:00.005+11:00

Terminology is a funny thing, isn't it? I often wonder how many jobs I have really had compared to how many names the jobs I've had have had. That sounds confusing, right? Wait: it gets worse.

When I first finished my science degree I was working as a medical technologist. That was what I'd put on my tax forms. A few years later, I was still doing the same job but was then classified a hospital scientist, and a few years further on I was a medical laboratory scientist, which is how I still think of the profession, and the title I prefer. A technologist is different to a technician, by the way, because a technologist does diagnoses and is more highly qualified. But many people (including those in ancillary fields) didn't recognise this difference, and I suspect that's why the qualification first changed its name. It's all about snobbery! I do, however, think "medical laboratory scientist" is a good descriptor: we were working in the medical field (usually attached to a hospital, but I did work in one private practice that wasn't) in a lab as a scientist. Perfect.

I'm no longer working in the field, so it could be that I'd have a completely different name now. (And, you know, when we graduated the whole class graduated as having a Bachelor of Applied Science in Medical Technology except for one student who'd already hopped onto the Medical Scientist label. That was rather odd.)

In that time I worked as a microbiologist and a haematologist, but as a scientist, rather than a doctor. For the uninitiated, it's all very confusing. So the haematologist you have a consultation with in a big public hospital is going to be a doctor, not a scientist. The scientist-haematologist is the one who'll do your blood work up, who'll look at your blood film and tell the doctor what's wrong. Both are called haematologists.

Now I'm a teacher, I don't find the terminology is any better: I can be labelled a teacher, a tutor, a lecturer (though I tend to think of this as more a Higher Ed than TAFE thing) and, now we're teaching online units, a facilitator. I probably like the term "facilitator" the least, as to me it seems to have little to do with "teaching" per se. I think it pays more homage to collaborative learning, though, which is a technique we do use a lot in the classroom through workshopping, and I have to say I'm a great believer in collaborative learning. But we still do "teach" -- it's what the students want, what they recognise us as. We facilitate as well, but we do more than this.

Even in writing there is the difference between a "writer" and an "author". (Or authoress, as my mother seems determined to say. I point out that this term is now considered sexist, and she tells me that I'm out of my mind. I could talk about the linguistic distinctions, and how the suffix is dependent on the male word to determine its meaning, but her eyes would glaze over. Such things excite me, though. It's the editor in me!)

We had great discussions about the difference between a "writer" and an "author" in my online course. I see the two as completely interchangeable. But for others an author was more serious, or was published, or had a book or number of books published. To me, the distinction is once again a snobbish thing. A writer writes. Does an author auth? If you've written an unpublished and unpublishable short story, aren't you still the author?

Me: I'll go for "writer". I think I'll always prefer the plainer, more simple descriptor.

To NaNo or Noto

2008-10-30T16:53:00.004+11:00

This time last year I was about to embark on NaNoWriMo, but this year has been a different prospect for me. Last year, I was teaching two classes, both on a Tuesday, and as the first Tuesday in November (our final class) was a public holiday, I'd finished teaching by the beginning of November (though I still had late assignments to mark). This year, I'm teaching the same two, and have a Monday class and an online class, which has meant I'm still teaching into the first week of November, and have lots of marking to do.

That was my first strike against doing NaNo this year, because really it is about commitment, a big commitment. Last year I got myself off to a great start by going on a writing retreat with my friend Ellen and was flying, but once I came home that soon tailed off, and by the end of November I found myself with about 5000 words/day to write for three or four days. But I did it. Nothing like a deadline, right?

I still might have embarked on NaNo if I were in writing mode, but I'm currently in the middle of an edit. Or rather the tidy up after the edit -- going through reader comments. I want to get this done and off to my agent, rather than putting it aside and churning out another 50,000 words (as rewarding as that is!). I haven't even read over last year's yet -- that's a job for when this edit's finished. Nor have I worked out how to put my NaNo winner sticker on my blog.

Constancy is the trick to NaNo -- staying on top of the word count, rather than having days off and ending up with a big chase at the end. Constancy is the trick to novel writing full stop! It's much easier when you are immersed in the story: you are thinking, dreaming, breathing it. The cogs are oiled and spinning; the words flow. It's such a magical feeling. Those are the days when it's hard to understand how anyone could not want to write. The counterpoint is the time when the words are mired in mud, when the rejection letters are forming a pyramid in the letterbox, when everything you write seems to be crap. (In hindsight, it doesn't mean they were crap -- it's just a function of the self-confidence rollercoaster that many writers seem to ride.)

So this year I'll have to live NaNo vicariously through Luke, one of my students: the type of student who has sheer the determination and enthusiasm to get him through. I hope he finds it as rewarding as I did -- and maybe next year we can compare word counts as we go. In the meantime, go, Luke!

Persuade me

2008-10-20T10:05:00.004+11:00

Each summer, as the semester winds down (or after it finishes really), I go into reading mode. That's not to say I don't read all year round -- I do. During the year, though, I don't read as much for the pure pleasure of reading. I do read the novels we're studying in class, submissions for Poetrix, student work, the papers and Time magazine, the back of the cereal box, texts on writing, blogs, poetry, the occasional novel or short story -- all sorts of things. But I don't get to devour novels the same way I do on holidays.

The last two summers have been themed. Two years ago it was Dan Brown. I had been determined not to read The Da Vinci Code because of all the hype. Rarely does the book (or movie or whatever) live up to the hype. But then a student subbed the first chapter (prologue really) with an analysis as part of an assignment, and I was hooked. I went out and bought the book (the lovely illustrated version) and read it in about 24 hours. My eyes were bugging out of my head. Then I went on a Brown hunt.

Last year, it was Matthew Reilly. (Hmm, I can see a plot-related theme running here -- both writers are masters of tight plotting with lots of twists and turns.) I had similarly avoided Reilly and thought it was time I gave him a try. I started with Ice station and had to follow this up with the other Scarecrow books. I'm not sure I'd start on his other books -- there are just so many writers out there that I likewise should dip into -- but if he writes any more Scarecrow ones, I'm there. And I'm sure his others are a great read. Don't study him for characterisation (there's not a lot), but do study him for plot because he's brilliant at it.

This year it's Austen. So, I've moved away from plot into character, into literary. And the thing that persuaded me to do this was the 2007 BBC version of Persuasion. Do I love that show, or what? The funny thing is that I was watching it on the ABC, and it was only when I got to the scenes on the Cobb in Lyme that I thought, I've seen this before. I remembered having loved it, but hadn't remembered what it was called. Obviously, what I'd seen before was the 1995 one.

Earlier this year, I had a Pride and prejudice obsession, having fallen in love with the Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen film. So, everyone else, you can keep your Colin Firths. I liked him as Mr Darcy until I saw Macfadyen and the vulnerability he brought to the role. Now, the old BBC series seems a bit overblown (though not the all-too-brief appearance of Tom Ward, of course!).

And now it's Rupert Penry-Jones (Adam in Spooks) as Captain Wentworth, and Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot, who is not a modern hero in any sense of the word: not feisty but calm, reserved, angst-ridden, not proactive in getting what she wants. But perhaps she's more like me than Knightley's Elizabeth Bennet is, and so I can relate. I don't know. I do know that I've finally read Pride and prejudice and am now firmly ensconced in Persuasion. Already, I can see the writers have taken some liberties, but I have no problems with that (and in one sense they've made it a more modern telling by making things harder on Anne -- she misunderstands the situation surrounding Louisa's wedding far longer in the show than in the book, for example).

A film adaptation is an adaptation and works best when people don't try to hold too religiously to the book. They're different media, so writers and fans shouldn't become overly precious or we might miss out on masterpieces like Lord of the rings, or the most modern adaptations of both Pride and prejudice and Persuasion.

And as far as my reading goes, I've got Emma lined up as well, and am thinking I must get Northanger Abbey and Sense and sensibility.

Idyllic retreat

2008-10-14T23:17:00.004+11:00

We're coming up to crunch time -- the end-of-semester marking spree, and never have I had more subjects to mark, so I can't say I'm looking forward to it. For a few weeks, it means I have to live, eat, breathe and sleep marking. I have had years where I've stayed up till 4 am and then got up again at 6 for another burst. Can't say it's very conducive to good health, but the mountain has to be scaled.

It also means my own work is pushed to the side. For a few weeks of the year, I barely even think about it, and I can feel myself get toey about it. So, with all this in mind, it was fantastic to get away with a few members of the SuperNOVA novel writing branch for a writers' weekend.

My mother tells me off when I go away like this. "You've got a family," she says. "It's selfish to leave them behind while you go on holiday." She's missing the point. This isn't a holiday per se: it's a chance to spend intensive time working on your novel. We do write. Or edit. And we do do it for most of the day. And the evening. And well into the night.

When I've been out with Western Women Writers, half the group wants to spend the whole time writing (I'm in that half), and half wants to spend half the time writing and half socialising. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Balance is a good thing -- if you're not too time-pressured. I relish the time to be focused. And I get a lot done.

There's something about being away with other writers -- we all inspire each other to write lots. Procrastination is frowned upon. My friend Ellen is the task-master and gently keeps us all in line. Like me, she's not there to muck around. We measure success sometimes in words, or sometimes in more esoteric terms -- the feeling of having reconnected with your novel after time-out, or of nailing that difficult scene.

The worst part, always, is having to come home, and this weekend was a particularly short one, because of traffic concerns. But it's wonderful to have had dedicated time to spend with dedicated people -- something every writer needs.

Back to the novel

2008-09-28T23:48:00.004+10:00

The best way to write is to write a little every day. There are a thousand excuses we can find not to do this, and I have times where I seem able to exercise them all. But the hard truth is the writing flows best when we are at it every day -- it is then that the juice oozes. The words come easier, and the ideas zing.

I would like to say I'm capable of writing every day, and that I manage to achieve this, but it would be a lie. I invest a lot of time into my students -- into workshopping their work, into preparing classes -- and this year, teaching a new class (always a big time consumer), and this semester doing double my workload is really taking its toll. It leaves me thinking that next year I have to cut back my hours: after all, I'm a writer, and I want to write.

James N. Frey talks about this in his book How to write damn good fiction. One of his chapters is on the seven deadly mistakes a writer can make, and one of these is leading the wrong lifestyle. He tells of the advice he gave a would-be writer whose husband was an obstacle between her and the writer's lifestyle, and that was to get a new husband! While I do think that extreme, we do, in the end, have to decide on our priorities: what it is we want to achieve and what we're prepared to pay for that. There are no right and wrong answers -- only answers that suit you and your circumstances. What if your job is interfering with your writing? It's up to you to decide what to do. I've known people who have been in a position of having to choose and who have gone with their job. Sometimes, they've admitted to a great sense of relief on having made that decision. That's all right. They might come back to writing one day, and they might not. The world has enough writers; what it needs -- what we all need -- is more readers.

Think about it. The writing life is a hard one. There is little financial gain for most of us. After all, how many hairdressers can make a living out of hairdressing in this country? How many writers? Even of the best writers in the country, most have to supplement their income. And we're already talking only of those in the top echelon who get published. Much easier to be a hairdresser. Or bank-teller. Or anything really. It's a life full of rejection (unless you're one of a very elite few like Isobelle Carmody, who has never had a rejection letter), a life of harsh criticism and pulling yourself together and getting your work out there again and again and again.

But we have to do it.

We are driven.

And those who do give it up often come back to it. Writing is the nectar that feeds us.

Those struggling to find time, do find ways of carving out a niche here or there. Or don't.

I know when I'm not writing, I feel angry and frustrated. I am filled with self-loathing at my own patheticness. But when I finally unstopper that testube, then the creative potion fizzes up, a flood of it. In the meantime, I keep it ticking in my head. I think about my characters; I play out scenes in my imagination -- even scenes I've already written. I flesh out backstories, and sometimes, sometimes, I get fired up enough to find the time I need to write.

Reading and writing

2008-09-19T23:59:00.006+10:00

Sometimes we get students who apply for our course who hardly ever read a book. They seem surprised that we expect them to read. I mean why would we? Being a writer who doesn't read is rather like being an architect who never looks at the buildings around you, who never browses the latest in the architectural magazines. If you were hiring an architect, wouldn't you want someone who was up with what was going on, who felt inspired by the amazing things that other architects were doing, who wasn't just peddling the same old, same old? I know I would.

Some writers use the excuse that they don't want to be influenced by what other people are doing -- as if they would have no control over what they were doing and might be impelled to copy ideas or plagiarise actual phrases or sentences. That's a rather naive attitude. Ideas sometimes seem to have a currency -- there's nothing worse than finishing a short story or a book, feeling that satisfaction, then picking up a new book for relaxation -- and there's your idea! What a gut-sinking moment. Only, you know they didn't copy it from you, because your version isn't even out there yet. And you didn't copy it from them, because you hadn't read this book before.

Still, if the book's been published, people might think you've copied whether you have or you haven't. So aren't you better off being aware what's out there so that you can make sure yours is different? How else are you going to become aware of the cliches of your genre?

Fine, so you should read widely in the genre you're writing in -- and I maintain you should write in a genre you know and love, not one that you don't respect but think is easier (is there such a thing?) or that is more likely to make you money. If you don't have absolute respect for the genre, it will show through in the writing. Fans will sense the disrespect and respond to it -- even if they can't put a name to it. But is reading widely in your genre enough?

No.

You need to read widely to teach yourself how to write well, and if you are already writing well, to keep raising that bar. Different types of fiction will teach you different things. Want to know about suspense? Go read some crime. What about language use or characterisation? Look at lit fic. Plot? Try a thriller. Experimental fiction might help you take risks you'd never even thought about. Who knows where you might end up? But if you don't read, you won't ever know.

My sessions at the Writers' Festival

2008-09-01T23:47:00.003+10:00

I booked for five sessions, but because of a family crisis ended up missing one. Still, four isn't too bad.

The first of the sessions I attended was on creating worlds -- I was particularly looking forward to hearing Margo Lanagan speak, as I love her short stories, particularly the sublime "Singing my sister down". If there is one short story I wish I had written, that has to be it. This was a good session, except that a fair portion of the time was spent in writer readings, which I'm not a big fan of. I'd rather read the book myself, and have the extra time hearing the writers talk about their craft or their processes. I caught up with my friend Ellen, who I was meant to be spending the afternoon and attending an earlier session with but, regrettably, that was the session I missed.

The next weekend I had three sessions.

My second session was on love. Now, there was a separate session on the philosophy of love, so I was expecting this one to be on the craft of love scenes, but it wasn't. It had a philosophical bent and included the love of writing as a major component. I love how I go along to these sessions, and they're often different to what I'm expecting. Some (a few) disappoint, and some are unexpected gems. This was one of the latter.

My third session was two writers (David Malouf and Michelle de Kretser) talking about the books they loved as kids: the books that inspired them. This also involved readings, but readings of passages from other authors that they loved, and I really enjoyed hearing them talk with such passion and enthusiasm. What I didn't enjoy as much was the introduction by the past editor of a highly esteemed literary magazine (which I won't name) who talked about the uselessness of writing courses. His take was they don't work, and he's in a position to tell because graduates of these courses used to send him stories, and most of these stories were unpublishable in his magazine. Okay, that predisposes that most of graduates want to write that kind of story. Most of our writers are not writing literary fiction, and really why would I encourage them to if it's not their passion? At book length, it's not as marketable as mainstream or genre fiction -- and, interestingly, in a conversation I was having with a book publisher last year, she told me how great it was that we had such strong stories coming out of our course. So, yes, publish in a lit mag with an erudite but low readership, or publish more widely to a less-educated audience? I have nothing against literary fiction -- I think there are some brilliant lit stories out there -- but I do believe that writers should write what they like reading -- I've had other writer friends who were doing courses receive low grades on genre fiction stories that ended up being published and winning awards. What a shame they weren't writing "literature" -- we have no such snobbery. This isn't to say that perhaps the said graduates hadn't done their research, but then there are always the people who send off something inappropriate anyway, but have it picked up because an editor wants to try something new. Go figure. Okay, rant over.

My fourth session was a reading. Let me fall over right now, because I never normally book in for readings, but this was a poetry reading, and I particularly wanted to hear one of the poets. I won't add details, but it's someone who's highly esteemed, and I don't get why. And, really, this didn't change my mind. I don't get it. All right, I don't get it. So, it was worthwhile going just for that... But I did enjoy the readings (most of them) anyway.

I must say the move to Fed Square has me looking forward to next year's festival!

Melbourne Writers' Festival at Federation Square

2008-08-31T14:26:00.002+10:00

The last two weekends, I've been attending the Melbourne Writers' Festival at Federation Square in the city (Melbourne). This is the festival's first year at Fed Square, and I've had some debate with writer friends about whether we think it will be a better or worse venue than the Malthouse Theatre, which is where the festival's been held in the past.

I've been firmly in the camp that it will be a much better venue, for two reasons: commuting and space. The trouble with the Malthouse is trying to get a park -- hard enough in itself, but trying to get one for any length of time... More than once I've missed part of a session because I was out moving my car, joining the half a dozen other sharks doing the circle, looking for spots. And as for space, the Malthouse between sessions was sardine city. Literally, pushing through people to breathe, let alone move.

Fed Square means I can catch a train in, because parking in the city -- well, forget about it. It can be done, but be one minute over (or three as my husband found out the other day) and you'll find yourself ticketed.

So, what have I found? Fed Square is certainly more spacious, with more seating in the theatres, and a choice of coffee shops and, as a bonus, a second-hand book sale as well as the festival book shop. What I hadn't expected though was the fragmented feel. A lot of the people at Fed Square aren't there as part of the festival, and festival goers are spread all around the place. I can't even tell who's a festival goer and who's not. It's meant that I've felt far less sense of community, and I think that sense of community is something we all need. It's probably something I have more than many writers because I'm teaching writing and surrounded in my day job, therefore, by writers. And because I belong to two writers groups I'm mixing with writers outside my work hours as well. Over the years, I've gradually whittled away most of my non-writer friends -- something that saddens me, but that's just how it is. Given the choice of shopping with the girls and working on my novel, sorry, but the novel's going to win out every time.

But even so, my writing life can feel a bit insular. Attending writers festivals gives a broader picture -- small fish in a big sea stuff. Usually, at the MWF, I see a number of people I know -- people I've done courses with or been students with or whom I've met through other writers. This year I saw only two (other than my friend Ellen, who'd I'd organised to go with): Kate Eltham, Clarion organiser extraordinaire and representative of the Qld Writers' Centre, and Kathy, one of our students, but not one I'm teaching. It was lovely to catch up (no matter how briefly) with them both.

So, better venue or not? I'm currently undecided. But my loathing of the parking at the Malthouse is such that I've often chosen not to attend, whereas now I'm much more excited about going back next year. Perhaps that's all I need to reflect on!

The hardest but most important word for writers

2008-08-08T23:07:00.004+10:00

I'm one of those people who hate saying No to people, so I hate it when people come asking for favours. Often it's because I work part-time -- so obviously I have a lot of free time on my hands. I don't. I'm currently teaching 0.6, but have taken on an online subject, which I guess makes me 0.8. When I was 0.4, my husband reckoned I did the same work as a full-time worker, which some weeks would be an over-exaggeration, but on marking weeks would be an under-exaggeration. I go to a writing group one afternoon a week and have stuff I have to do for them. I have home commitments (as most of us do), and writing commitments. Other people don't get that.

Writing commitments -- what are they? Surely, writing is that stuff you squeeze into your spare time -- and other people see their pulls on my time as more important than anything squeezed into spare time. Sorry, but they're not. Today, I had an email from someone who wanted me to look over a chunk of manuscript. Writing related, sure, but I had to say no. It made me feel rotten -- truly -- but I'm not getting enough time for my novel at the moment, and that *has* to be my priority.

For others, other people (or tasks) demand time for less writerly reasons. It might be the neighbour -- whose concerns and needs are genuine. It might be a mother or father, a cousin or aunt. It might be the man in the butcher's shop, or the girl you see by the lake. In the end it's up to us: we have to decide whether we want to write or not.

A few years ago, Robin Hobb spoke at a Melbourne SF convention. In her Guest of Honour speech she said something along the lines of: you will never have more time to write than now. If you put off your writing until you retire, or until your neighbour moves out or whatever, you won't write because there will always be new demands on your time. If I got nothing else out of that con, it was worth going just to hear that. It's one of the great truths of writing. Write it down and stick it by your computer and then think about what you want to be at the end of day. Do you want to be a writer or not? If you do, you need to make time, not excuses.

The value of communication

2008-07-24T00:34:00.002+10:00

Awhile back, I had a short story published. Nothing so unusual in that. I agreed to the terms of the contract, which were fairly standard fare, and then I waited for my cheque to arrive. Only it never did. Then I hummed and hahed about what to do next because I hate chasing up money. So I emailed a friend who had had a story in the same collection, to see if she had been paid. Perhaps I had just been overlooked, right? Wrong. She hadn't been paid either. As far as she knew -- she was a bit woolly about this.

So, being a professional, I had to do something about this. I sent a polite query letter off via email (as all our business had been done electronically) but didn't get any response. Now, at the moment, I'm having a few email issues -- the day before yesterday I came home to over 40 messages, most of which were failed-to-send notifications, so there is some chance that this email was never received. So, I sent off another polite query. This one did get a response -- an apology to say that things were difficult, but that the editor was endeavouring to pay all the contributors.

Some months later there was still no payment, but a mass communication arrived, apologising to all the authors and assuring payment would be made. Some time passed. A lot of time. I began to write the story off, with a note to self not to send to that market again. This week another missive came, again apologising and begging our indulgence, with a promise of payment soon.

Others might rail at this communication, but I must say I was relieved. Relieved to know I hadn't been forgotten. Relieved to know that our contract was being honoured. Relieved to know that it wasn't only me.

As an editor of a small press magazine (one that only pays contributors only in copies), I know how hard it can be. I still remember all that catering we did to provide seeding money for the magazine in the first place. It sucks for the writers, but the reality is that small press publishing in Australia is done on a shoe-string budget because the market is so small. We do all our editorial work -- hours and hours of it -- for the love of it. So I'm prepared to wait. I know it's absolutely not a matter of the publisher sitting back rolling in all the money while his starving writers are hard at it in their garrets. The small-press publisher is starving too!

Elizabeth George's THADs

2008-07-23T23:54:00.003+10:00

Have you ever been accused of writing dialogue that is just "talking heads"? I must confess my earliest fiction was probably guilty of this a lot of the time -- something an agent told me once before declining my book (and telling me she thought it would be published!). I think she was the first person who had pointed this out -- that my characters were just like disembodied voices chatting away. Sometimes things like this come as a giant wake-up call, and we wonder how it is we never saw this before. Or how it is that we weren't aware of this type of problem. We all have our own types of problems. For one of my friends, it is plotting -- something that has always come naturally to me. But she is brilliant at description and characterisation!

But back to the talking heads: since then I've always been conscious of trying to avoid this scenario, though sometimes a scene does slip past me, which is why it is helpful to have readers going through a manuscript before it gets sent out. We're always blindest to our own errors. I can spot talking heads from a thousand km in a student's manuscript, but sometimes overlook it in my own.

How to address such problems? Research. There are several ways of doing this: talk to other writers and see what they do, read other writers and see what they do (i.e. read as a writer, paying attention to the craft), read books on writing. As a teacher, I read a lot of books on writing. But even before I was a teacher, I always read a lot of books on writing. I love reading books on writing. My friend, Sherryl, and I could start a very decent bookstore with our writing books -- if either of us could bear to part with them, which we can't. (I think being a teacher has just given me justification to buy more and more and more writing books without having to feel too guilty about it -- something my husband hates!)

Often, these books say similar things, but sometimes one comes at something in such a new way that it's almost an earth-shattering moment. Sometimes it's not so much that the insight is new as the way that it's put strikes a chord and gives me a real WOW moment. So it was with Elizabeth George's Write away: one novelist's approach to fiction and the writing life and her discussion of what she calls THADs -- Talking Head Avoidance Devices.

A THAD is something you get your characters to do in a scene that would otherwise consist solely of dialogue. As well as fleshing out the scene, this can show character, be a metaphor or reveal information. She talks about knowing she has the right THAD when she feels a surge of excitement. I know what she means. I felt it last night.

Last night my students were doing an editing test. Usually, while they're doing a test, I have workshopping to do, but we hadn't yet started workshopping in my novel or poetry classes, and I had forgotten to bring in anything else to do, which is the first time I've done that in eight years! So, I was sitting wondering what I should do, when I started thinking of one scene that my reader had pointed out was talking heads. And as I contemplated a few different things I could do in the scene, I hit upon the perfect THAD. How did I know? That surge of excitement. I wanted to leap from my chair, get to my computer and get working! All around me, my students were sweating their test, and I was so infused with enthusiasm that I felt guilty for not having more empathy with them at that moment. I haven't tackled the scene yet -- am still thinking it through, but still think it feels exactly right for the scene!

Want to know more about THADs? You'll have to buy the book. (It's published by Hodder & Stoughton and is highly recommended! After all, every teacher has to love a book that has a chapter titled "The value of bum glue" -- and, trust me, every writer needs a book with a chapter with that title.)

Dennis's book launch

2008-07-16T20:33:00.008+10:00

Dennis McIntosh launches his book at Readings, Carlton

Sherryl's already blogged about our mate Dennis McIntosh and his booklaunch the other day, so rather than rehash what she had to say (which you can read at the Books and Writing link), I thought I'd put up what I had to say. Dennis asked me to speak at the launch -- just for a few minutes. I was following another friend, Margaret Campbell, so sat down that morning to think about what I wanted to say. (I hate public speaking at the best of times, but teaching has made it a bit easier. But this isn't a post about that. That's for another post.) And so I wrote a speech.

And here it is. It's not what I said verbatim, because I didn't read it. (Mind you, it was very handy that I had it in my pocket, seeing as I went blank about halfway through. Not one of my better moments, but I just sallied on anyway.)

I first met Dennis in 1996 in Sherryl Clark’s TAFE poetry class. Dennis was the only male student with his own harem of girls, following him around, and I guess I was one of the harem. Being the only male might’ve daunted a lot of students, but not Dennis. He revelled in it.

One day he asked me to read something for him – a book he was writing for his daughter’s 21st – Nicole’s Story. I’d just started editing so he thought perhaps I could edit it for him. Even back then two things were immediately clear about Dennis and his writing: the first was that he had a story to tell, a big story and one he was passionate about, and the second was that he had a voice. Now, the non-writers among you won’t necessarily appreciate what a fantastic thing that is, but it’s something that can’t be taught, something that each writer has to find somewhere within themselves, and Dennis’s writing was oozing with it. But the other thing that struck me at the time was his lack of spelling, grammar and punctuation skills – I was left thinking, does this guy even know what a sentence is. And the answer, probably, was no.

Dennis has come a long way since then. Many of you probably know that he used to be a swimming coach and trained elite athletes. In writing, getting a book published is the gold medal at the Olympics. I think all that coaching probably taught Dennis a lot of what he needed to know – and maybe he already knew these things. He knows about persistence, perhaps the most important thing. He knows about wanting to improve, wanting to achieve a “Personal Best” – since our days as students together, he’s studied editing under me at TAFE – even repeated the subject, not because he needed to, because he did pass first time around, but because he thought he had more to learn. He’s gone through university, honours, a masters, finishing with first class honours. Along the way, at different points, he’s been told to give up, he’s not good enough. Many people would have hung up their goggles, but not Dennis. He just squares his shoulders and says, “I’ll show them”. And he has. He’s shown everyone. I’m sure he would’ve gone on and done his PhD and blitzed it, if he felt he still had something to prove, but clearly he doesn’t.

So, if you ask me am I surprised, given his early work, to be here at his book launch, I’d have to say no. I’m not surprised. Dennis always was determined, and that uniquely larrikin voice set him apart from everyone else. But I am proud, immensely proud, of all he’s achieved. I hope his book is a great success, and I’m really pleased to be here helping him celebrate his launch. Mate, you’ve done a great job, and I hope it’ll go on to be an award-winner and a bestseller! You deserve it.

I know I forgot to say the goggles bit, and did say a little more about his memoir: Beaten by a blow: a shearer's story, which for the record is a great read, with a really strong, unique voice. It's honest, brutal, evocative, gripping, often harrowing and uncomfortable -- a total immersion for the reader into the life of a shearer.

Progress: my rant about technology

2008-07-08T23:33:00.002+10:00

At the moment, I'm wrestling with my printer, trying to convince it to print out my novel. It's old. A laser printer -- 300 dpi, and it cost me $1100, an awful lot of money at the time, which tells something about how old it is. I'm guessing about 15 years, and it's served me well. Very well. I've never done any maintenance to it, never had any problems -- up till now. (Can't say the same about our inkjet we bought six months ago -- same brand, which is clogged and not working at all.) Now, the paper feeder on the old laser is worn, and every few pages the paper misfeeds, and I have to unjam the printer, ending up with two mangled pages, half a page of wasted toner, and then more and more and more misfeeds. It's enough to make a writer tear her hair out.

My solution would seem easy -- buy a new laser printer, except that I'm using my old computer and Windows 98. This computer's no longer on the internet, and I'm sure it won't have drivers for any new printer that I get, and they won't have drivers compatible with such an old dinosaur.

My problems don't end there. Most of the novel was written using WordPerfect. Can I tell you how much I love this program? Let me say two words: "reveal codes" -- the one thing that gives me so much more control than I seem to be able to get in Word. I love the way WordPerfect looks, I love the little arrows on the toolbar that let me zip backwards and forwards to find the same word, so I can quickly check that I haven't used it too often in too short a space. I love that there's a little window there all the time that acts as a thesaurus, and that I get about four times as many choices as Word's thesaurus ever gives me. And "reveal codes" -- have I mentioned that? Oh, yeah, I did, but it's worth mentioning again. When I'm laying out Poetrix, I can adjust letter space and word space if I need to, I can rotate text ninety degrees to get a shape poem on the page. Trying to do such things in Word would give my brain a meltdown. There would be much yelling in the house. And some swearing.

But, alas, WordPerfect is also starting to meltdown. Now, when I do a table and print it, it comes out in a lovely checkerboard pattern. Nice if that was what I wanted, but it inevitably is not. A waste of ink. And hard to read. Then WP took a disliking to my novel. Whenever it got to a certain page it crashed. In the end, I did what I had to and saved it as a Word file and began working on it in Word, which led to other sorts of problems. I'm using underlining for italics, as all good editors and most good writers do, and, as I've chosen to show my telepathic conversations with itals, I sometimes had successive paras beginning and ending with itals. And what did Word do? Very helpfully underlined all the indents. They were not underlined before. Grrrr. Don't get me started on Word...

Really, it's a sad day for all of us that WordPerfect is not a viable option anymore. I'm using Version 8 -- a beautiful program -- but XP on my laptop doesn't like it at all and now refuses to open it. And you can't get it for Macs at all anymore. If you subscribe to conspiracy theories, there's the suggestion that Bill Gates paid Corel a lot of money not to make a Mac-compatible version anymore. I hope that's false. Lack of competition is not good for anyone, least of all us monkeys at the bottom of the equation. In the past, Word and WordPerfect fed improvements to each other. Competition's good, right?

One of the other great things about WordPerfect (that Word could've learnt about) was compatibility. Ever since one of the really early versions, all the new and old versions have been able tol talk to each other. How neat is that? Just ask my version of Word what it thinks about the new docx format. That could be another rant altogether...

Draft's finished

2008-07-07T23:39:00.004+10:00

So this was my plan for the holidays:

2 weeks: working on novel and finishing draft (included going in to work one day for staff meeting)
1 week: stuff for classes
1 week: R&R -- movies, bowling, walking, reading, reading, reading

This is how it's panned out:

3 weeks + : working on novel (and reading one and a half books)
rest: doing the rest of the stuff, which I suspect means very little R&R. Never mind.

This editing pass has taken a lot longer than I expected. The rewrite started at 195 k approx, and finished at 185,663, which was my starting point for this editing pass. It's finished at 178,285. There's something nice about being in the 170s. It's still not quite as low as I'd like, but it's a big story, and I had a horrible thought that I was adding words rather than cutting!

And today it's finished, other than some minor adjustments (I hope) after I get it back from my readers. In the end I cut two-thirds of the words with general tightening -- things like getting rid of prep phrases, cutting repetitions etc. But there were four things I cut at the end that took out a couple of thousand between them:

(i) a scene from the POV from someone whom I'd taken out as a viewpoint character -- so how did this slip through? I think in the end, I'd decided to keep it because it was towards the end of the novel, and he is a viewpoint character in the second, and so it seemed like foreshadowing. The trouble with not using him was that the one viewpoint character in that scene was now dead, and so couldn't convey the scene. In the end though, there was nothing in the scene that was essential to the plot. Wholesale cut. Easy solution.

(ii) cut the guts out of another scene. This was a scene involving a telepathic conversation, where the main character reveals something she's about to do (at the beginning of the next book), which is going to have serious repercussions. I really liked this scene. It seemed like good foreshadowing of the trouble that was to come. The characters she's conversing with used several techniques to get her to change her mind, all to no avail. Heaps of conflict. Snappy dialogue. Fast paced. Working well. Only, when I looked at it again, I thought -- she wouldn't tell them. And she wouldn't. And that was that. It had to go. All of it. All those lovingly crafted words. Gone. A scene has to serve the story, and while the foreshadowing was good, the characters have to be true to themselves. Absolutely. One hundred per cent. And she wasn't being. Really, too, readers are going to get that the consequences for her are going to be dire. They're quite good at picking up the hints -- and we writers have to be good at leaving them room to work!

(iii) and (iv) two nice moments between two of my main characters -- the first from one's point of view, and then a reflection on what had happened from the other character's POV. Neither of these were huge -- a couple of paras each, but this whole idea contained within was no longer relevant after other changes I'd made to them and their relationships with one another. Or not at this point. I may rejig this to reflect something else and use it in the next book. I'm not sure at this point. I do like the idea of what went on, but it just wasn't necessary. Zap. Gone.

On the other hand, there was an earlier scene where I'd cut out a half-page incident between the two of them when I was doing the rewrite, and when I came across it again, I was really sad that I'd done this, so I put it back in the editing pass. Not wholly the way it was. I didn't dig out that earlier draft -- just captured the essence of the exchange in a quarter of the space. It's not essential to the plot, but is a nice character moment for them both, helps define the shifting dynamics of their relationship.

So, as much as I've not had the chance to have that R&R, I have a great sense of satisfaction at having completed this draft. It really is a great feeling!

Making the changes

2008-07-03T11:50:00.004+10:00

I'm a bit light on blogging at the moment because I'm fully immersed in my editing pass over my manuscript. The rewriting's finished, and I'm two-thirds (three-quarters?) through the edit, and I'm loving it. The process, that is.

Some days are better than others though. A few days I got to a scene that just wasn't working for me -- too passive, too much telling of things after the event. The fix wasn't too difficult. I moved the scene backwards in time so that I could show the events as they were unravelling. It's not an action scene, but it feels a lot more active now. Of course it meant I added about 400 words, at a time I'm desperate to cut words. That said, I've eliminated nearly 3000 at about the halfway point, so I'm on target. (Well, I would've liked to get rid of 10-15k, but realistically that was never going to happen because I'm also trying to add some characterisation and some non-plot related thinking.)

The day before yesterday, though, I came across a different kind of hurdle. Let me backtrack... When I started the edit pass, I had a brainwave about how to increase one of the main character's motivations so wrote a new scene that I banged in at the start of her story, and have been editing along the way to take this into account. It was all working beautifully until I got to the midway point and realised that I'd undermined one of the basic tenets that I'd based my alien culture's society on. Oh, dear. What to do? In the end such decisions can only be made when taking into account what will most benefit the story. And this time having the stronger motivation is a definite plus, so I've had to rethink that aspect of their society. It took me most of a day to sort that out, so I felt frustrated at the end of the day with how little progress I'd made, but the main thing was that I had made progress, and that I'd ironed out what could've been a problem further down the track. And in fact it still might -- but I'll be looking for it as I continue editing and will be able to fix it as I go. Bring it on!

Unfinished sky

2008-06-24T21:01:00.003+10:00

My mother said the other day, "You know, I thought once you were working part-time, we would be able to do things together, but it just hasn't happened. You're always busy."

That's the trouble with teaching -- if I'm not in class, I'm at home doing class prep, or marking, or workshopping. And the trouble with being a writer, because if I'm not doing that, I'm writing. And she doesn't get that at all. "How can you write," she says, "when your house is in a mess?" Or "You should do the dishes before you sit down to write." No. No writer should do the dishes first (unless of course they distract him from writing because he's worrying about them).

Now, as it happens, she levelled her complaint at me just before we went on mid-semester break. So, I said, "You know what: I've got the next two weeks free. I can give you one day each week." I actually thought this was pretty generous, because I still have writing group commitments, and one day of work, and writing to do. Lots of writing. I have to get my novel finished and out to readers, and back to my agent.

So, Mum says great and that we'll go see some movies together. Then she says, "And I can come on another day, and we can sort out your wardrobes and start getting rid of the old clothes." Hmm. Suddenly she was trying to wheedle her way into two days.

So I said no, and then after a brief hesitation (because what she's proposing is my idea of hell) I backed down and said, "Well, fine, we can do that -- if that's how you want to spend the one day that I can give you."

She quickly backed away from that one.

As it transpires, she was busy the first week, but this week we went to see Unfinished sky, with William McInnes and Monic Henrickx. I had no idea what we were going to see, but I like most movies (with the exception of the stupider type of comedies). So I went along with no expectations.

Where did this little gem come from and why hadn't I heard about it before? Unfinished sky is a well acted, gorgeously shot and interestingly written film. My first thought was why wasn't it a mainstream cinema release? Surely it would have mainstream appeal? But perhaps not. To not give too much away: it's the story of an illegal immigrant who is escaping a bad past and happens on the farm of a reclusive farmer who is still coming to grips with the death of his wife. She doesn't speak English -- and this to me is what would probably preclude it from a mainstream cinema release, but it's utterly watchable and compelling. (Perhaps the other stumbling block is the unlikeability of the main character at the beginning, but you soon begin to warm to him.)

If you have an arthouse cinema nearby, chalk this one onto your list of must-sees.

Writer as celebrity

2008-06-23T17:08:00.003+10:00

Today I was in a bookshop browsing the aisles while waiting to see a film. Nothing like multitasking -- while browsing, I was listening to the person behind the counter talking to someone else about a writer he had just seen in conversation somewhere. Apparently, the said writer was not a good public speaker, and he was justifying this by saying that of course a lot of writers aren't great public speakers, and in fact often the best writers are the worst speakers.

It is a conundrum for the shyer writers among us. And, yes, I'll put my hand up here -- which is not to say I won't do public speaking engagements because I will. That's part of the territory, part of the professionalism, but it doesn't mean I have to enjoy them. For example, I'm speaking in a few weeks time at a friend's book launch. But I've digressed...

I don't think it's a matter of people who aren't great speakers being drawn to writing, necessarily -- that this is a venue for them to get their message out. Rather, it's just that writing often appeals to shy people. There's the whole romantic notion of the starving writer in her garret -- it appeals in its solitariness. (Of course, these e-days, that solitary writer is just as likely to be checking emails and engaging in online gaming...)

Some of us are more at home in front of an audience than others, but the reality is that it is what's expected of us as writers. One of the books on writing I own talks about this being the age of writer as celebrity. And that's why some writers write. Some come to classes with stars in their eyes and talk about which publishers they would and wouldn't let publish their books, as if the publishing world is going to lie down at their feet in awe of this great, as-yet-undiscovered talent. I try to break the realities of the publishing world to them gently, try to disperse the spectres of seven-figure advances coming their way. Sure, such things can happen, but they don't happen to most of us. Most of us plug away, honing our craft, because we love to write, because we are driven to write, because it's a passion -- even if it's a passion that's going to make us face up to our fear of public speaking! We write our first drafts for ourselves, and then craft with a mind to an audience because we want to be professional writers -- or at least published writers.

It's not just novelists who have to suffer this. Poets are expected to front up to readings, to share their work with an audience that might be judgmental. Some of course revel in it: a great reading can lift a mediocre poem just as a crappy reading can shoot down a great one. Short story writers often read at conventions and other places -- the last con I was at, one of my friends despondently told me that he'd had a really small audience for one of his readings, and I was able to say that that may have been the case, but he'd obviously made a big impression on someone because I'd heard someone discussing his reading as being the highlight of the con, that that reader had found a new favourite writer. It's all about getting the word out, and then of course this flowing on to book sales.

Like it or loathe it, most of us have to face the audience at some time. There are a few reclusive published authors, but this is a strike against them. It makes it harder for the PR wheels to turn, harder for the cash registers to ring, so their books have to be so much better than everyone else's.

For me, the key to public speaking is preparation. I need to plan out in advance what I'm going to talk about, or if it's a reading have several dry runs. I do remember Jack Dann's advice to do schtick, which works for him, but I think I'd founder in a blubbing mess of ums and ahs if I tried to wing it. Maybe that ability will come in time because public speaking is like anything else: it gets easier with practice.

The importance of the right word

2008-06-15T08:02:00.002+10:00

The importance of the right word -- poets know about this more than anybody. Le mot juste as the French would say. Not just the right word but the perfect word. We scrabble around for it. Cross out "cross out" and replace it with "strike through". Hmm, not quite. Perhaps "erase"? "Delete"? We think about the word's denotation and then what other words or ideas it connotes. Then there's the rhythm of the word, the sound of it, how it feels in our mouth. Words give our writing flavour and texture. The combination of words gives a writer style.

But what about when words go wrong? When they go wrong at the most basic level there can be a comedic effect. Take, for instance, my son. Yesterday, we were driving him off to an exam, and he was talking about the history assignment he had just submitted, which was to make his own newspaper (or at least the front page). Anyway, he was telling us he called it The daily brothel, and then finished with: "What exactly is a brothel anyway?"

Hmm. Too funny. His face, when we told him, was a study in mixed emotions: amazement, embarrassment (okay, more mortification than embarrassment), disbelief -- various other things, no doubt.

I like his newspaper title. I imagine a gossipy mag, with a mishmash of articles all mixed in together (obviously drawing on the messy house as a brothel simile/metaphor). But of course this is not how he sees it. And the lesson here is that we should all check meanings first. "Body" and "cadaver" are not interchangeable. A cadaver is a body, but a body is only ever a cadaver under certain circumstances. Not sure which -- then don't use it without checking the dictionary. The same with "horse" and "pony". All ponies are horses but not all horses are ponies. (And then there's the "galloway" in between...)

I love my dictionary. I live in it when I'm editing. Less so when I'm writing. But if I am writing and my brain supplies that word that I'm not a hundred per cent sure of, then I'll hit the dictionary. Doesn't mean I won't ever get it wrong -- there may, of course, be that word I am one hundred per cent sure of that doesn't mean exactly what I think it means. There are no guarantees against that. And of course meanings shift. I'm a great believer in preserving the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested", but it doesn't mean the dictionary supports my view. I sometimes think that dictionaries are too permissive in what they allow, but they do aim to reflect current usage, so perhaps I just need to get over it. In the meantime though, I'll be running my finger down the columns, looking for that word, and only ever using my thesaurus with a dictionary alongside it!

New movies

2008-06-12T23:50:00.003+10:00

Well, the marking isn't quite finished, but last weekend I took some much needed R&R time and went off to see a few movies.

The first was Sex and the city. I was a fan of the television series, though it wasn't must-see television for me. Translation: I really enjoyed it and would watch it whenever I was home, but didn't tape it if I were going to be out. I'm not into fashion, but I loved that Carrie was a writer, and I loved that the show was bigger than life in the same way that "Desperate Housewives" is bigger than life. And that I kind of related to these girls. In "DH" I see myself as halfway between Susan the ditzy but loveable nutcase (not that I'm implying I'm loveable!) and Lynette, the harassed housewife, struggling to balance motherhood and career.

In Sex and the city I suppose I'm a blend of Carrie (but really only from the writing viewpoint), Charlotte (whom I feel I'm most like in a lot of ways -- except when she runs and when she's so anal. No scratch that. Anal editor person speaking here!) and Miranda. I'm least of all like Samantha. Not at all like Samantha. Are we even from the same planet?

So I enjoyed watching their characters interact, the ripostes from one to another. Such clever dialogue. (Though, going back to the TV series: why Carrie threw over Aidan for Big was always beyond me!)

I enjoyed the movie very much. And the surprise for me was Charlotte. I thought she had a couple of huge moments with Big -- considering one of the reviews I'd read said she (Kristin Davis) didn't really have to do any acting! I thought she was brilliant! Fans of the TV show will love the movie, because it's stayed true to the show. I've seen other TV shows made into movies and wondered how the writers could get it so wrong. (The first Star Trek movie was an example of this -- not a bad movie in its own right, but not true to the feel of the TV show for me. It was only the later ones that captured this.)

The beauty of Sex was that I went along with my mum and two of her friends, and of the three only one had ever watched the TV show, yet they all enjoyed the movie. That, IMHO, is great writing! It's like a poem where everyone can get something on an initial reading, but that some readers will draw further and deeper meanings from. (And it's why I never minded when actors from one show appeared in another playing their characters from the first -- as long as they "worked" in their own right.)

Movies can be great food for the writer's soul, and the second movie (all right, all right, I admit, I saw it twice in two days!) was one such movie for me. Prince Caspian, which I enjoyed so much more than The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Perhaps it helps having a character who reminds me physically of the main character of my novel. Yes, I'm always looking for him, even though I've settled on Tom Ward as the most likely candidate. But perhaps it's the grittier battles. I do love a gritty battle. The heavy thwacks of swords on metal. The grimness of stone walls. Ruins. Some beautiful coastal scenery. Horses. (Of course, horses. I'm far less fussed about lions who come along and save the day.) Men in armour.

Interesting to note how much cross-pollination was going on between Tolkien and Lewis, and one of those vagaries of being in a writing group together. I've never read the Narnia books. Probably a bit inexcusable for a fantasy writer, but then I came at Tolkien late (in my mid-twenties, and wondered about how I'd missed such a masterpiece!). The lion, the witch and the wardrobe didn't inspire me to read the book, but this one has. Though I'll probably only read that one unless I love it. If I love it I'll go back and start at the beginning and hope it's as good. That's not always the case.

I've got a book called The last legends of Earth by AA Attanasio, and it was one of the most amazing books I've ever read. If you like SF, and time travel, and disasters, and apocalyptic visions, go out and read it. Trouble was it was fifth in a series of linked books. I wouldn't usually start at number five but someone gave it to me, so then I had to go back and get number one and start from there. I hated number one. It was boring and didn't draw me in. I persisted, and it just never got better for me, and I didn't get that at all. How could that happen? So, yes, assuming all books in a series will be as good as each other can be quite fallacious. But I'm digressing. The blogosphere seems always to encourage me to do that. Friends write coherent posts, and mine ramble. But then I see this as a very different kind of writing (for me) than if I were writing, say, an article or a movie review. I'm perfectly happy to let it ramble!

But back to Prince Caspian... Highly recommended if you like battle scenes. Some violence but nothing to make you too squeamish. Others I'm looking forward to: Indiana Jones. And perhaps one or two of the new horror offerings. And Mongol, I think it's called! Seems like a few good movies coming up!

Into the end of semester

2008-05-26T23:18:00.004+10:00

I'm likely not to be posting much over the next few weeks as I move into full-on marking mode. Today, I've been collecting up major assignments, and will get more tomorrow and more next week. As well, I'm currently reading a friend's novel, plus reading an anthology (and proofing) for another friend, and reading short story competition entries. But where does that leave my own work? On hiatus unfortunately. The only writing I'll be doing this week will be an editing test. Not exactly the stuff that feeds the soul. On the other hand, the course I've been writing is almost finished. Soon, I'll be at the end of semester break, and then it will be full-on novel. I'm hoping to get my draft finished in the first week and get it out to a couple of readers. How exciting is that? This is the worst time not to be writing -- so close to the end. So close I can smell it, and there's no better incentive.

What I have been happy with is that I've started implementing some of the changes (ie transferring them from paper onto the computer). I was hoping to cut 15,000 words in the editing pass, but every time I looked at how many words I was adding, I was worried -- really worried -- that I was going to add 15,000 words. Happily, I am actually cutting. Not as many as I'd hoped, but definitely cutting. Oh, let me at it: I long to be finished!

Writing the novel

2008-05-19T08:56:00.003+10:00

I had a discussion with a student last week about how many projects a novelist can work on, because our students who are taking multiple classes that involve novel writing are expected to work on different projects. Of course, there's no correct answer to this question, and I've always said that you've got to find what works for you. Only this last year I've found that that's not necessarily the case.

Up until recently, I've always thought I was a one-project-at-a-time person. Even when it comes to short stories.

I get an idea and think about it, and that's where my focus is. It's one of the reasons I don't write many short stories -- because mostly I'm focused on my novel. It's a lovely, indulgent, obsessive thing, writing a novel. I don't get that same pleasure out of short stories or poetry -- but they do offer their own pleasures and satisfactions, especially the satisfaction of finishing something!

Some people have bags of projects on the go -- they swap and change depending on their mood or deadline, even working on several in the same day. My friend, Sherryl, is like this, and it's always made me shake my head in wonder. But writing our group novel this year has taught me that I can work on more than one project at a time, and the longer I've been doing both the easier it's becoming.

At the beginning, it would take me a few weeks to reacclimatise -- I'd have to sink back into the depths of whichever project I was working on. Being in the writing group and doing the plotting or reading out what we'd just written and discussing it made it easier to get back into this. But there was the unfamiliarity of what others had written -- I say unfamiliarity because clearly I had heard their portions and discussed them, but they weren't integrally part of me the way the parts I'd written were. I know the details of my character's background, for example, in far more details than I know of their characters'.

The challenge with my own novel has been different. I've been working on this book a long time, so I'm very well acquainted with it. But it's a complex story with multiple viewpoint characters, and worse than that, multiple drafts. I say worse because the problem is that when I've been out of it awhile I forget which things belong in which draft. I might remember that A does this, but it might be something that I've taken out of the current draft for whatever reason.

Paradoxically, I've found that the thing I thought I needed (time to reimmerse) has been the thing working against me. It's actually easier to work on multiple projects if they're all on the boil at once, if I'm working on both in the same week, rather than having that gap between them. This works really well in that I can do whatever the mood takes me. If I'm in a writing mood, I'll head off to the group novel. If I'm in an editing mood, I'll work on my own -- which also requires some slabs of writing as I make changes that I've decided on. This week's change, for example, is in a background scene that my main character remembers. When he was a small child, he found his sister hanged, and that change has been to make him find her a few minutes earlier, when she was dying and imploring him to help her when things went wrong (knot on the wrong side of her neck so that she was strangled slowly). This secret he has kept. Everyone else thinks he found her dead. It's all about making the worst thing possible happen to your characters. This doesn't have a great effect on the story as a whole, but does strengthen his motivation for doing the things he has to do, and is perhaps something I'm thinking more about because I'm busy writing the other novel, putting my character there through the wringer. Honestly, you have to love writing!

Speculating about fiction

What makes a great poem?

The itinerant blogger

Con report day 4: part 2

Con report: day 4: part 1

Con report: day 3

Con report: day 2, part 2

Con report: day 2, part 1

Con report: day 1

Worldcon report 1 overview

MFW and Aussiecon 4

More on reading . . .

What you learn on trains . . .

Currently reading

Currently watching

Online teaching (and face-to-face)

Currently reading

Punctuation point: comma use in reasoning and consequences

The recalcitrant scene

Book launch: Solace and grief

Nonfiction reading

Copyright and greed

Currently reading

Travels in the land of my imagination: the beaches

Travels in the land of my imagination: the forests and mountains

Contemplating the holidays' end . . .

The last post on Avatar -- I promise (I think)

A short one on Avatar

And another one . . . hype

More on Avatar: three similarities to Titanic

Merry Christmas

Avatar -- 3D

EndoWriMo

The unlikeable character

Currently reading

Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo

Vale JG Ballard

Movie and live show reviews

Not settling for the first thing

Responding to criticism

The scope of your novel and POV

What we say and imply

Best laid plans

Missing brunch

Currently reading

Casting my novel/Computer games

Unexpected pleasures

The promise

Launch of new short story collection

Heckling at The Bank

Black Saturday

Words and white space

Playing with cameras

Spiflicating

Writers' rooms

Planning to write

Who do you write for?

City of Ember

Slumdog Millionnaire

The curious movie of Benjamin Button -- possible spoilers

Spooks

Almost a perfect day

Movies: Twilight

Reading: nonfiction

Movies: Australia

Writing retreat

Movies: Quantum of solace

Living a writing life

Reading: Life of Pi

Online teaching

Teaching and learning

What we call ourselves

To NaNo or Noto

Persuade me

Idyllic retreat

Back to the novel

Reading and writing

My sessions at the Writers' Festival

Melbourne Writers' Festival at Federation Square

The hardest but most important word for writers