Does your life feel like a well-planned series of events, or more like a sort of organised chaos? Mine definitely tends towards the latter! In my working, writing and home life, I feel like someone spinning an endless collection of plates. There I am now, hurriedly running around giving each a nudge, to stop it slowing down and smashing on the ground.
Part of the problem is a lack of priorities. In my job, I have to manage several development projects at once, all for different people, which means that they each think theirs is the most important. Outside of work, should I spend time on my book, or writing blog posts or networking on social media or attending to SCBWI tasks? And where do my family fit into all this?
I was talking this week to an author who’s under contract, and they were saying that they live with the fear that it will all turn out to be a terrible mistake, that their editor is suddenly going to ring them and say “Sorry – we thought you could write this book, but we were wrong.” And I could empathise with that, because I constantly feel like I’m about to make the one mistake that will bring the whole dinner service crashing down.
Maybe this is just the way it feels to be an adult? There was a musical in the 1960s called Stop the World - I Want to Get Off, and I’ve always thought the title was a great metaphor for the way my life seems to spin around, with little respite from the blur of tasks and responsibilities.
Perhaps the answer to this anxiety and stress is to make my life less complicated. There have been a few blog posts recently (specifically this one) that have been encouraging authors to cut back and concentrate on their core activity – writing fiction. But that’s not so easy if you also have a full time job, etc. I really enjoy the activity of blogging and I’m not sure how I would feel if I left it behind.
Currently, I’m averaging one new book a year. Perhaps if I gave up blogging and some of my other activities, I could boost that to a book and a half, maybe two? But there’s still no guarantee that those books would get published, and my online presence would virtually disappear. Is it better to have a couple of books a year that only get read by a handful of people, or one book and a hundred blog posts (here and on Words & Pictures) that would attract a much wider audience?
I don’t have an answer to this conundrum, because answering it requires me to address the broader question: “What do I really want to achieve from my life?” And that’s a deeper meaning-of-life type problem that I probably need another twenty or thirty years to answer. So for now, I guess I’ll just keep on spinning those plates and trying to do a bit of everything.
Nick.
Friday, 27 September 2013
Friday, 20 September 2013
No-one Ever Really Dies
I've blogged about story franchises before, but they've been very much on my mind again this week. As I'm sure you've seen, J.K. Rowling is undertaking some franchise extension of her own, by screenwriting a Newt Scamander movie for Warner Bros. Although there's technically already a book version of this, it sounds like the film will be significantly different, and it's interesting to speculate that Rowling - who, let's remember has already made a ton of cash from book sales - sees movies as the real money-spinner.
Anyway, to wander back to the point, I watched two of the big summer franchise movies this week (I'm not going to name them to minimise spoilers) and in both of them, a major character dies at the climax of the story, thus motivating the protagonist to battle with and defeat the antagonist at the final showdown. But in both films it was blindingly clear to me:
So, what to make of this bit of apparently lazy screenwriting within two actually pretty good films? Well, I think it demonstrates a major weakness of the story franchise model - it's the characters that audiences get attached to, not the plot. So in order to keep stoking the fire and rolling out new product, those characters must be present in each new adventure. As a result, the element of surprise is lost and with it, crucially, the jeopardy that comes from not knowing who will be alive at the end of the story.
This isn't a new problem - we've all known for fifty years that James Bond could never die. But at least every other character was up for grabs (see Skyfall for proof of that). If you look at a big ensemble movie like Avengers Assemble though, you could pretty much predict that all of the superhero characters were going to make it through, because they each had their own films to go back to. And the only key character they did kill off is being resurrected less than a year later in the SHIELD TV series.
For all this, however, there's something weirdly addictive about these story franchises, as each installment digs deeper and deeper into a fictional world. And the writers do manage to fill them with tension and excitement, despite the artificial limitations of the form. But overall, perhaps this is a moment to feel glad that you're writing children's books and not screenplays for blockbuster movies. And if you want to follow that thought into action, why not kill off your favourite character in a horrible way and never, ever bring them back to life? That'll show everyone you mean business!
Nick.
Anyway, to wander back to the point, I watched two of the big summer franchise movies this week (I'm not going to name them to minimise spoilers) and in both of them, a major character dies at the climax of the story, thus motivating the protagonist to battle with and defeat the antagonist at the final showdown. But in both films it was blindingly clear to me:
- That they were going to resurrect the fallen character before the end of the movie
- How they were going to do it
So, what to make of this bit of apparently lazy screenwriting within two actually pretty good films? Well, I think it demonstrates a major weakness of the story franchise model - it's the characters that audiences get attached to, not the plot. So in order to keep stoking the fire and rolling out new product, those characters must be present in each new adventure. As a result, the element of surprise is lost and with it, crucially, the jeopardy that comes from not knowing who will be alive at the end of the story.
This isn't a new problem - we've all known for fifty years that James Bond could never die. But at least every other character was up for grabs (see Skyfall for proof of that). If you look at a big ensemble movie like Avengers Assemble though, you could pretty much predict that all of the superhero characters were going to make it through, because they each had their own films to go back to. And the only key character they did kill off is being resurrected less than a year later in the SHIELD TV series.
For all this, however, there's something weirdly addictive about these story franchises, as each installment digs deeper and deeper into a fictional world. And the writers do manage to fill them with tension and excitement, despite the artificial limitations of the form. But overall, perhaps this is a moment to feel glad that you're writing children's books and not screenplays for blockbuster movies. And if you want to follow that thought into action, why not kill off your favourite character in a horrible way and never, ever bring them back to life? That'll show everyone you mean business!
Nick.
Friday, 13 September 2013
Taking Stock
Apologies for another cookery pun (see my last post), but a week has passed, I’ve had another rejection and I haven’t written a single word of my difficult fourth draft. All of this would normally cause me great melancholy, and yet I feel vastly more confident about the book than I did a week ago. This counter-intuitive turn of events is partly due to getting some help from the excellent Jane McLoughlin and partly because I now know exactly what to fix in the novel and how to fix it.
What’s changed? Well, I got out my copy of Novel Metamorphosis (as mentioned last week) and forced myself to fill out the “Novel Inventory”. This is a chapter by chapter breakdown of both the outer and the inner action of the story, so you can see the plot and emotional arcs side by side. It also asks you questions about the conflict and climax of the story and helps you to identify what is strong and weak about your work in progress.
There are plenty of other tools similar to the Novel Inventory out there - the book mentions an alternative condensed spreadsheet view of the chapters and The Golden Egg Academy uses their own Book Map to guide authors. But despite knowing about these tools, I often avoid them (to my cost). Part of the reason is fear, the fear that I’ll discover something dreadfully wrong with my novel that requires me to completely rewrite it. The other aspect is the surprisingly large time investment required to compile the inventory, time that seems wasted when I‘ve set myself a tight timescale to produce another draft. I tend to just plunge in and then have an inevitable panic about a third of the way in when I realise I don’t know what I’m doing!
The objective of the Novel Inventory is to catalogue the book you’ve written, rather than the book you think you’ve written. I’m normally pretty good at keeping a whole novel in my head and identifying where I need to rewrite for added impact as I go along. However, I’ve realised that this rewriting has been predominantly plot-focused, so (thanks to the Novel Inventory) I’ve found quite a few sections of the book where the voice and emotional impact could be stronger. Once I’d identified this phenomenon, I discovered I could actually predict which scenes would be the most problematic as I went through, where before I wouldn’t even have known to look for the problem.
Finding out what we don’t know or don’t do well is an essential (albeit painful) part of growing as a writer. It’s why an external eye is so important when revising a manuscript and also why (I admit) it’s worth taking some time to plan and assess before you begin your revisions. Hopefully, next week, I will start laying down some words again!
If you want to use the Novel Inventory, I think you have to buy Darcy Pattison’s book, but her website does include tons of useful tips and information on manuscript revision.
Nick.
What’s changed? Well, I got out my copy of Novel Metamorphosis (as mentioned last week) and forced myself to fill out the “Novel Inventory”. This is a chapter by chapter breakdown of both the outer and the inner action of the story, so you can see the plot and emotional arcs side by side. It also asks you questions about the conflict and climax of the story and helps you to identify what is strong and weak about your work in progress.
There are plenty of other tools similar to the Novel Inventory out there - the book mentions an alternative condensed spreadsheet view of the chapters and The Golden Egg Academy uses their own Book Map to guide authors. But despite knowing about these tools, I often avoid them (to my cost). Part of the reason is fear, the fear that I’ll discover something dreadfully wrong with my novel that requires me to completely rewrite it. The other aspect is the surprisingly large time investment required to compile the inventory, time that seems wasted when I‘ve set myself a tight timescale to produce another draft. I tend to just plunge in and then have an inevitable panic about a third of the way in when I realise I don’t know what I’m doing!
The objective of the Novel Inventory is to catalogue the book you’ve written, rather than the book you think you’ve written. I’m normally pretty good at keeping a whole novel in my head and identifying where I need to rewrite for added impact as I go along. However, I’ve realised that this rewriting has been predominantly plot-focused, so (thanks to the Novel Inventory) I’ve found quite a few sections of the book where the voice and emotional impact could be stronger. Once I’d identified this phenomenon, I discovered I could actually predict which scenes would be the most problematic as I went through, where before I wouldn’t even have known to look for the problem.
Finding out what we don’t know or don’t do well is an essential (albeit painful) part of growing as a writer. It’s why an external eye is so important when revising a manuscript and also why (I admit) it’s worth taking some time to plan and assess before you begin your revisions. Hopefully, next week, I will start laying down some words again!
If you want to use the Novel Inventory, I think you have to buy Darcy Pattison’s book, but her website does include tons of useful tips and information on manuscript revision.
Nick.
Friday, 6 September 2013
Getting in a Stew
I've started a fourth draft of my current novel this week, and it’s proving to be tough going. Some of that is psychological, I’m sure, because I keep saying “wow, this is difficult” to myself. But a lot of it is because I’d written a third draft that I was very happy with, and it feels like I’m pushing against that as I make further edits. So why change it at all? Well, a couple of my very knowledgeable critique group members have fed back, suggesting ways that the book could be a deeper experience for the reader, and this draft is about adding that depth. But it’s a tricky process.
Let me use a cooking metaphor to illustrate. When you’re making a stew, you put a lot of ingredients together with a little flavouring, and if the quality of the components are good, it’s not too hard to come up with something that’s very palatable. But how do you take that perfectly edible meal and make it into a dish so rich and flavoursome that every bite is a pleasure? The difference might only be the addition of a single ingredient or just a change in the ratio of the others. It sounds simple enough, but it’s also possible to make the thing completely inedible by, say, adding too much cayenne pepper.
I want my book to be a richer, more emotional experience for the reader, but I also fear over-seasoning. As my writing style has evolved, I’ve become ever more technically precise, moulding my sentences for maximum impact with minimum word count. But I have to accept that sometimes I can go too far, so this fourth draft is almost entirely about adding words, not taking them away. It’s been an uncomfortable realisation for me that I'm much better at editing through subtraction than addition, and I feel somewhat out of my comfort zone as a result.
In principle, I’m in favour of stepping outside your comfort zone once in a while, in practice ... well ... it’s a bit scary! I remember how I slaved over each scene originally, balancing the flow of action and dialogue, which makes shoehorning in something new without disrupting the rhythm a difficult process. It’s possible I may end up completely rewriting some of the scenes where the additions can’t be inserted cleanly, but I hope not (though that might be quicker than me agonising over it!) At least I have a deadline – I want to get this draft finished before the SCBWI Agents’ Party (3rd October) and I’d like to add no more than a thousand words to the book, if possible.
I have a very good book called Novel Metamorphosis by Darcy Pattison, which is specifically about the process of adding depth to an existing draft, and shall be consulting it in times of hair-tearing crisis. Apart from that, all I can do is write my way through to the end (and go easy on the cayenne pepper).
Nick.
Let me use a cooking metaphor to illustrate. When you’re making a stew, you put a lot of ingredients together with a little flavouring, and if the quality of the components are good, it’s not too hard to come up with something that’s very palatable. But how do you take that perfectly edible meal and make it into a dish so rich and flavoursome that every bite is a pleasure? The difference might only be the addition of a single ingredient or just a change in the ratio of the others. It sounds simple enough, but it’s also possible to make the thing completely inedible by, say, adding too much cayenne pepper.
I want my book to be a richer, more emotional experience for the reader, but I also fear over-seasoning. As my writing style has evolved, I’ve become ever more technically precise, moulding my sentences for maximum impact with minimum word count. But I have to accept that sometimes I can go too far, so this fourth draft is almost entirely about adding words, not taking them away. It’s been an uncomfortable realisation for me that I'm much better at editing through subtraction than addition, and I feel somewhat out of my comfort zone as a result.
In principle, I’m in favour of stepping outside your comfort zone once in a while, in practice ... well ... it’s a bit scary! I remember how I slaved over each scene originally, balancing the flow of action and dialogue, which makes shoehorning in something new without disrupting the rhythm a difficult process. It’s possible I may end up completely rewriting some of the scenes where the additions can’t be inserted cleanly, but I hope not (though that might be quicker than me agonising over it!) At least I have a deadline – I want to get this draft finished before the SCBWI Agents’ Party (3rd October) and I’d like to add no more than a thousand words to the book, if possible.
I have a very good book called Novel Metamorphosis by Darcy Pattison, which is specifically about the process of adding depth to an existing draft, and shall be consulting it in times of hair-tearing crisis. Apart from that, all I can do is write my way through to the end (and go easy on the cayenne pepper).
Nick.
Friday, 23 August 2013
The Amazing Rejectomatic
Are you fed up of spending:
Well, help is here at last, with the Amazing Rejectomatic! Simply enter a few details below about yourself and your book (even if it’s only an idea you had on the bus this morning) and within seconds you’ll have your very own personalised rejection letter! Print it, frame it, burn it – whatever you like and in just a fraction of the time!
Your personalised rejection letter will appear here.
Please note that our agents and editors reserve the right to completely change their minds whenever it suits them. Try the Amazing Rejectomatic again, and you’ll probably get an entirely different response!
Only one thing is for sure, it’ll never be a yes.
Nick.
P.S. I'm taking another week off, so expect the next post on Friday 6th September.
- 6 months writing a book
- 3 months revising it
- 2 weeks writing a synopsis and covering letter
- 2 hours tailoring your submission according to the agent’s instructions
- 6 to 10 weeks waiting for a reply
Well, help is here at last, with the Amazing Rejectomatic! Simply enter a few details below about yourself and your book (even if it’s only an idea you had on the bus this morning) and within seconds you’ll have your very own personalised rejection letter! Print it, frame it, burn it – whatever you like and in just a fraction of the time!
Your personalised rejection letter will appear here.
Please note that our agents and editors reserve the right to completely change their minds whenever it suits them. Try the Amazing Rejectomatic again, and you’ll probably get an entirely different response!
Only one thing is for sure, it’ll never be a yes.
Nick.
P.S. I'm taking another week off, so expect the next post on Friday 6th September.
Friday, 16 August 2013
Submissianxiety
It's official - I have submissianxiety. The symptoms are there for all to see: inability to settle to a task, compulsive checking of email, nervous fiddling with the synopsis, unrealistic expectation of publishing response times and frenzied sequel planning. I may have missed the condition off my list of common writing disorders, but that doesn't make it any more manageable.
I wanted to write a blog about something else today, anything really - the price of stamps, shark dentistry or even Martian cheese farms. But my submissianxiety wouldn't let me do that. It's all because I got so excited about finishing the manuscript and sending it off to people, and now I have all this extra adrenaline running around my system with nowhere to go. Of course, I tell myself, I'm being ridiculous - good things take time, and I should be patient and wait for everyone to get back to me. But somehow that reassurance isn't doing the trick!
OK, time for some deep breaths. Clearly, my submissianxiety needs some careful management, lest I go raving mad. Here are some things I might be able to do about it:
Nick.
I wanted to write a blog about something else today, anything really - the price of stamps, shark dentistry or even Martian cheese farms. But my submissianxiety wouldn't let me do that. It's all because I got so excited about finishing the manuscript and sending it off to people, and now I have all this extra adrenaline running around my system with nowhere to go. Of course, I tell myself, I'm being ridiculous - good things take time, and I should be patient and wait for everyone to get back to me. But somehow that reassurance isn't doing the trick!
OK, time for some deep breaths. Clearly, my submissianxiety needs some careful management, lest I go raving mad. Here are some things I might be able to do about it:
- Stop checking my email so often. This is an easy one. I don't need to look at my personal email more than two or three times a day, so I should keep to a schedule - maybe at the start of the day, after lunch and 5 or 6 in the evening.
- Leave the book alone. The couple of people who've fed back on the novel so far both made the same suggestion of how it might be improved. However, that would be a lot of work, and would also move the book away from my original conception of how I wanted it to be. Anything that would make the book better is worth strong consideration, but I feel I need to stop tinkering and wait for a wider spread of opinion before doing anything rash. It is hard, though, to resist the idea of constantly revising the book until someone likes it. This was the thing I liked best about having an agent, because there was usually only one person telling you what to change.
- Tell myself that no-one is ever going to want this book, so there's no point getting my hopes up. This is the pessimist's approach to the problem. I've often seen this mentioned by authors, but always in the context of: "I sent the book off not expecting anything to happen and two weeks later I had a squillion dollar deal." I've yet to see the more truthful version: "I sent the book off expecting everyone to hate it and nine months later it was pretty clear they all did."
- Get immersed in something else. This one's easy to suggest, but harder to achieve. Part of the nature of submissianxiety is that it hovers behind one shoulder, constantly reminding me not to get too involved with a new project, lest someone suddenly require me to completely rewrite the novel I have on submission and churn out a couple of sequels by Wednesday week. It's fair to say that this has never happened to me yet, however! I do like the thinking that I've seen writers use elsewhere, the idea that they will just devote two or three weeks to a speculative project and see what happens. Maybe it's time for me to look at writing a 7-9 book?
Nick.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Would Like to Meet...
I received my first rejection on the new book this week, and was surprised by how much it stung and by how much self-doubt was churned up in its wake. It was a prompt and kindly response (full of useful feedback), but a rejection all the same. I felt like an unhappy singleton who had just dipped a toe back into the dating market, and then had a disastrous first date with someone who they desperately wanted to impress. In my mind, I’d love to be the person who flounces away, saying “well, they’re clearly not worthy of me,” but I’m actually the type who’d be sitting at home with a tub of ice cream howling “what’s wrong with me?”
The more I looked for parallels between dating and looking for an agent/editor, the more appeared. We go out tentatively, with our hearts on our sleeves, looking for a connection with someone we barely know. It’s gruelling, off-putting process and rejection goes with the territory. I imagine someone sat in front of an internet dating site, discounting possible dates on appearance alone – “too old”, “too fat”, “too funny looking” – and then see that same person looking through a slushpile, making similar assessments: “too slow”, “too fast”, “too much like all those other books”.
But then I found differences too, because finding someone who loves what you do isn’t the same as finding someone who loves who you are. It’s possible to have a very satisfactory business relationship with someone in publishing who has little in common with you personally, but who adores your work. Equally, I’ve been happily married for seventeen years, but I know my wife would much prefer it if I stopped writing these new-fangled children’s novels and came up with something a bit more like the books she read as a child. As a writer though, I think it’s easy to conflate the two states and see a rejection of something you’ve made as a rejection of your whole self.
I certainly found the aftermath of my departure from my agent was a lot like a really bad break-up. I seemed to spend months in a directionless haze, starting books and then giving up on them almost immediately. I’d also lost confidence in the book I’d completed, and I stopped submitting it to insulate myself from further rejection. I’m sure what I should have done was get immediately back in the game and send out a submission to every children’s agent in the country, but it seemed safer to retreat into my shell.
But here I am a year later, new on the scene and apparently still a little “emotionally vulnerable.” However, failure is not an option this time – I’m going to keep sending this book out until everyone in the literary world is heartily sick of it. People will run away from me at parties, mouthing “Oh God – don’t let him see me.” Either I’ll grow a thicker skin or get arrested. Maybe both!
Nick.
The more I looked for parallels between dating and looking for an agent/editor, the more appeared. We go out tentatively, with our hearts on our sleeves, looking for a connection with someone we barely know. It’s gruelling, off-putting process and rejection goes with the territory. I imagine someone sat in front of an internet dating site, discounting possible dates on appearance alone – “too old”, “too fat”, “too funny looking” – and then see that same person looking through a slushpile, making similar assessments: “too slow”, “too fast”, “too much like all those other books”.
But then I found differences too, because finding someone who loves what you do isn’t the same as finding someone who loves who you are. It’s possible to have a very satisfactory business relationship with someone in publishing who has little in common with you personally, but who adores your work. Equally, I’ve been happily married for seventeen years, but I know my wife would much prefer it if I stopped writing these new-fangled children’s novels and came up with something a bit more like the books she read as a child. As a writer though, I think it’s easy to conflate the two states and see a rejection of something you’ve made as a rejection of your whole self.
I certainly found the aftermath of my departure from my agent was a lot like a really bad break-up. I seemed to spend months in a directionless haze, starting books and then giving up on them almost immediately. I’d also lost confidence in the book I’d completed, and I stopped submitting it to insulate myself from further rejection. I’m sure what I should have done was get immediately back in the game and send out a submission to every children’s agent in the country, but it seemed safer to retreat into my shell.
But here I am a year later, new on the scene and apparently still a little “emotionally vulnerable.” However, failure is not an option this time – I’m going to keep sending this book out until everyone in the literary world is heartily sick of it. People will run away from me at parties, mouthing “Oh God – don’t let him see me.” Either I’ll grow a thicker skin or get arrested. Maybe both!
Nick.
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