Speakeasy

There is a fun video floating around the blogs at the moment from a writer on how they used to imagine the writing process working. You can see it here. Oh, if only it were that easy.

What’s the first line of your manuscript? Go on, have a look, I can wait. Look at it with objective eyes - is it flashy? Quietly interesting? Foreboding and suspenseful? Maybe it’s something you slaved over, or something you wrote without thinking, but your first line is the first impression a reader will get of your manuscript. (Okay, first after your cover letter and synopsis, if we’re at the submission stage, but still. It’s important.)

It’s like a handshake. ‘Hi, I’m a romance novel’. ‘I’m a textbook.’ ‘I’m a beautifully-written book about nothing in particular.’ It’s all about introducing yourself.

Science fiction blog io9 has collected a bunch of first lines from science-fiction novels, a genre which by definition can travel the scope of weird, intriguing ideas. As such, the first lines of these books have the room to be completely odd, but looking at the different ways each writer gets going can tell you quite a bit about the book to come:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." From Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries." From A Deepness In The Sky, by Vernor Vinge.

 "In the summer of his twelfth year — the summer the stars began to fall from the sky — the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell East from West with his eyes closed." From Axis, by Robert Charles Wilson.

io9 does a great job analysing each of them; I recommend checking out the article.

Found via Westerblog.

For those of you out there writing for businesses, churning out corporate documents, letters, professional emails and all of that, how much attention do you pay to the language you’re using? Do you find yourself using twenty-five words when ten would do? Have you been using ‘utilise’, ‘elucidate’ and ‘price points’ for so long, you’ve forgotten words like ‘use’, ‘explain’ and ‘cost’ exist? Have you been using ‘action’ as a verb??

This post is for you! I’ve been looking around for resources for professional and technical writers, and I’ve come up with quite a few good links.

First, one of my favourites is weaselwords.com. Spawned by Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant & Management Jargon, by former political speechwriter Don Watson, this site collects some truly impressive examples of obfuscating, irritatingly waffling language. I can also recommend his book Death Sentence, which is basically a really entertaining rant about the decline of the English language.

Another book to take a look at is The Professional Writing Guide: Writing Well and Knowing Why, by Roslyn Petelin and Marsha Durham. It covers spelling, punctuation, grammar and sentence construction, includes letter templates, guides to writing emails and memos, tips for formatting professional documents, and advice on creating a style guide. Petelin and Durham also advocate plain English over weasel words, and there’s lots of examples to help you work out how to apply their advice.

I found quite a few links via Manage Your Writing, to jargon dictionaries, websites extolling the virtues of plain language, and a whole textbook about technical writing. There’s also The Cluetrain Manifesto, which isn’t a writing guide as such, but more a book about the internet and online marketing. It’s a bit old-school, created in 1999, but the chapter I read was really interesting.

I also came across 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers, which includes links to writing software, online dictionaries and references, and heaps of other useful little tools and bits and pieces. Check out the organisers that can help you track your submissions and who you’re waiting to hear from, the dictionaries you can add to your desktop, and the handful of alternatives to Microsoft Word. They’ve got links to screenplay formatting programs,  organisers for non-fiction citations, and even a program that will help you track storylines in a long piece of writing.

Over at Justine Larbalestier’s blog, she’s been ruminating on the different ways writers write. In a post entitled ‘Other Writers Are Crazy’, she marvels at the writers who need to know every kink of their plot before they put pen to paper (figuratively speaking). She goes on in another post to analyse a few different types of crazy writers - take note, and avoid these behaviors!

How do you do it? Do you plan out every chapter with detailed lists of plot points and character developments and specific scenes you’ve come up with, and only start writing once you’ve filled a 120-page notebook? (I know at least two well-known writers who do it this way, mostly because they do a lot of research and have facts to include). Or are you at the other end of the writerly spectrum: do you write without planning, in a constant stream of creativity, without re-reading and editing until the first draft is completely done? (Editing, in this case, can sometimes entail cutting 300,000 words down to 100,000 or something similar; going back through the initial draft and picking out the bones of the story.)

I think it’s just a matter of how the brain works. Some writers need the structure of a solid plan, of knowing where the story goes, and knowing that while they might need to be flexible with sub-plots and things, they’ve got a good solid story structure going for them. And the other lot just lets it all stream out onto the computer, and is capable of cutting extraneous matter later on.

Personally, I think I’m somewhere in the middle (a lot of people are, I’ve decided, and it pays to be flexible). I usually have a beginning, middle and end worked out before I start, but the story I end up with is never anything like what I imagined. I don’t always work in a particularly linear fashion, either. As I finished my most recent story, I realised I had actually just written part two of something a lot longer. So I backtracked and wrote part one, and I’m about to get going on an unanticipated part three.

Like I said before, how do you do it? Working out what works for you can save a lot of time, and there’s really no point listening to someone tell you there’s a particular way you should do it. Take advice, take criticism, try out new stuff, but to tell the truth, there isn’t really a right way to write.

Reeeeeeeally interesting interview with Benjamin LeRoy, founder of Bleak House Books, a US publisher of crime and dark literary fiction. Not only does Mr LeRoy talk about books in a way that makes you think he really loves them, he offers a no-holds-barred analysis of what he expects from an author. For example:

As soon as I see awkward prose on page one, I reject a book. You wouldn’t trust a clumsy surgeon with a scalpel. I don’t trust authors who aren’t in complete control of their environment. Sloppy work is sloppy work. Doesn’t matter the profession, I don’t want it.

When I read this, I thought, wow, he’s a hardass. But with the glut of badly-written fiction around, and believe me, there is so much out there, isn’t it refreshing to know there’s someone out there not publishing any old trash? And when I thought about it some more, I wondered why on earth a writer would expect to send ’sloppy work’ to a publisher and expect to get anywhere with it.

If you’re thinking, but writing can be edited, right? I think you need to step back and ask yourself exactly what you’re doing. If you’re sending your stuff out there with the expectation that it’ll be polished up by someone else, think again. Never, ever send out a manuscript you haven’t pored over with a fine tooth comb. You might as well send out your first draft. (And please tell me you haven’t been doing that. NEVER submit a first draft anywhere. First drafts are always awful.)

How do you tell the difference? How do you know if your work is ’sloppy’ and ‘awkward’? Compare and contrast. Read read READ! Read authors you admire, authors other poeple admire. Try to pick apart what’s so good about their writing, but it’s amazing how much you’ll pick up by osmosis. And, worst case scenario, take a refresher course in grammar and punctuation, to make sure your comma usage and sentece structures are being all they can be.

You see, writing is a job. It’s something you have to work at. To excel at it, like in any other job, you have to commit to it, and take professional development courses, and study what’s going on in your field. Sure, it pays a hell of a lot less, and you’ll probably have to work hard, but that’s what it takes.

The first letter you write to an agent is unbelievably important. It’s your first impression, and your chance to convince them of the following:

a) You can form a sentence and punctuate correctly. Oddly, these are important skills for writers, and most agents are turned off by a cover letter with spelling mistakes.

b) You can describe your work in 50 words or less - a coherant summary usually indicates that you’ve thought carefully about the plot, which is usually a good thing.

c) You’re polite, because you’re asking them to consider your work and hoping they have time to enjoy it. This is instead of arrogantly assuming you’re entitled to their valuable time and they’d be lucky to have you as a client (save this attitude for when you’ve sold more books than JK Rowling).

d) You’re not completely insane (this is the follow-on from the ‘don’t be more arrogant than God’ bit above). An agent won’t agree to represent you if you manage to come across as completely nuts in a 200-word letter. Try to hide this aspect of your personality for as long as possible; don’t open your very first communication to them with ‘may all your camels be bountiful’. And FYI, jokes don’t come across too well in letters. Neither does sarcasm.

The key thing to remember when approaching an agent is that you’re trying to convince them to go into business with you. You need to be polite, professional, a little bit creative, but ultimately, you have to look like a good investment. Hence the ‘don’t be crazy’. You might think it’s all just wacky fun, and that they’ll appreciate your zany personality as much as your drinking buddies do, but seriously, try to keep a lid on it. Would you go into business with you, if you met you in a bar? Didn’t think so.

Anyway, the point of this post was to direct y’all to a Query Letter template thing that Nathan Bransford’s put together. He’s an agent with Curtis Brown, San Francisco, so he knows query letters. And have a look around his archives, for more tasty tips on approaching an agent.

 PS. Locus reminded us of another good point. Many, many people who work in publishing are women, so beginning your letter with ‘Dear sir’ is a bad idea unless you’re totally sure you’re writing to a man.

We came across this great article at website Agent Query at the end of last week. It’s packed full of everything you need to know about writing good, effective query letters, from the hook and synopsis to your bio and more.

Well worth a read.

A couple of days ago, the Guardian Blog posted on a particular question that seems to come up quite a bit: should writers plan their novels, or rely on spontaneous outpourings and worry about structure later? The writer of the article doesn’t like the idea of methodically laying out a story, plotting it down to the last chapter before the first sentence is even written. But I have to wonder, without enough plotting, wouldn’t a novel get a bit waffley?

We asked around, and opnions seem to come out at around 50-50 for each side. Some writers plan, some don’t. Some writing teachers will tell you to plan, some will tell you not to. And there’s a whole bunch who do a bit of planning, have a general idea of where their story is going, but jump into the first draft pretty quickly.

Like someone has said in the comments on the Guardian, it pretty much comes down to personal preferences. Figure out which method works for you, and go for it.

More on the study of literature with this interesting piece in The Australian over the weekend by Rosemary Neill about the rise of University ‘Creative Writing’ courses versus the decline in students studying Literature.

In 2006 33 of the 38 Australian Universities offered Creative Writing courses or modules and their popularity was in direct contrast to falling enrolments in Literature. Whilst many academic circles view this with concern, what is clear is that though we may not think that we want to read as much (the Under 25 age group has often been accused of being a generation of ‘reluctant readers’), we do want to write, and even be published.

And of course a good writer also needs to be a good reader. Any published author will tell you that one of the most important things in managing your career is to read, read widely and read often.  As Neill asks in her article, ‘Do creative writing courses lead students to literature, or prove a distraction from it?’ The answer seems to be that students will read, will have to read, literature of relevance to their own writing, they need to know the context and history. And it may even be that the new courses are attracting people to ‘Literature’ who previously would have run a mile.

UK’s The Guardian has an interesting article on characters in novels; it essentially outlines the different schools of thought on ‘how to write a good character’, and the writer looks at a few of the heavyweights from classic English literature, finally reaching the conclusion that there isn’t really a formula for writing a successful fictional character (tell us something we don’t know).

But what I found really intriguing in this article was the sheer variety of characters and the ways they’ve all been formed. When you’re reading a novel, you don’t always pay attention to the way the words on a page merge to form the impression of a person, or a few different people, but this article has really interesting things to say about the ways this has been done. It’s all a little too complex to summarise, so you’ll just have to read it!