Coming off the back of the 2011 SCBWI British Isles Conference, it isn't surprising that we've seen a lot of discussion about community. Candy Gourlay's wonderful Crystal Kite acceptance speech talked about how she was "looking for a way of life" as a children's writer, and found it in SCBWI. And it was Candy herself who took the lead in this, creating structures (both social and technological) that helped SCBWI-BI become a community. It's a pattern I've tried to follow – I specifically remember proclaiming: "I want to be the Candy Gourlay of Undiscovered Voices 2010" and I hope I've stayed true to that – though without the Carnegie nomination as yet.
Most writers – even if they work in isolation – are people people. To write well, it helps to have a fascination for the human condition. To write well - as Candy and I discovered - you need the help and support of your peers. Because writing isn't about putting words on the page, not really. Writing is about creating and sustaining the mental attitude that gets you to the page in the first place. Writing is about pushing through the blocks and believing in your own judgement, when so many others would seem to know better. Writing and getting published is a crazy, stupid, wonderful dream.
It's good to find others who share your dream. That stops it feeling quite so crazy.
Many writers, like myself, came from difficult family backgrounds. We crave a certain stability that was denied to us as children. What better way to deal with this, than to build our own support structures? That's what I realise I've been unconsciously doing for much of my adult life – getting married, staying married, having children. I do it in my writing life as well, trying to build groups like the Undiscovered Voices 2010 winners, so I've got someone to fall back on when life takes a wrong turn. Put like that, it sounds kind of selfish. But these groups quickly take on a life of their own.
There is a fragility to the writing community at times, though. Perhaps it's inevitable if you put a lot of people together who are all trying to work out their issues in public. Communication breaks down. Jealousy rages. I've seen a couple of writing friendships wrecked by random, unfathomable, even aggressive behaviour. And that's a scary thing because I wonder if it could happen to me. Could I misunderstand or resent someone enough that I'd want to hurt them in some way? Let's hope not!
By and large, we keep those frustrations at bay in the children's writing community. Perhaps being perpetually looked down on by "grown up" writers helps to give us a sense of perspective. When we come together – at events like the SCBWI conference – it's a joyous, life-affirming thing. I realise I have so many people that I can count on, that I can lean on in times of trouble. I hope they know that they can always lean back on me.
Nick.
Friday, 25 November 2011
Monday, 21 November 2011
You Know You've Been SCBWI'd When...
- You feel too exhausted to write a proper blog.
- You wonder how all these new people could have joined without you noticing.
- The cream of publishing are queuing up to get involved.
- You could do your pitch in your sleep.
- You're too excited to sleep.
- Someone describes their series fiction as "literary crack."
- You wonder if someone else should have got quite so drunk before making an important speech.
- A cake makes you gasp.
- You find yourself carrying too many balloons to fit through a normal doorway.
- Your badge sells out first (yay!)
- An agent says: "You can pitch to me, but I'll need a drink first."
- You have to buy the drink the agent needs before you can pitch to them.
- You have to congratulate Bekki Hill for organising the bestest conference ever!
- You can't imagine how you'll be able to wait a whole year for the next one.
Nick.
P.S. If anyone else wants to do coordinated blogging under the same title, let me know and I'll add the links here.
That Crazy Book Monkey Mark Jones
Julie Fulton
Jeannette Towey
Vanessa Harbour
Rebecca Colby
Friday, 18 November 2011
Gone Conferencin'
It’s the SCBWI-BI conference this weekend, so rather than post today I’ll come back with some kind of retrospective early next week. It isn’t as if most of you would be reading blogs over the weekend anyway*
Who knows, maybe there will be co-ordinated blogging when I return!
Nick.
*With apologies to Nicky Schmidt, who has probably already left a comment telling me to stop going on about the conference.
Who knows, maybe there will be co-ordinated blogging when I return!
Nick.
*With apologies to Nicky Schmidt, who has probably already left a comment telling me to stop going on about the conference.
Friday, 11 November 2011
Transfixed By Transmedia
As we move further into a brave new world of digital publishing, so the number of buzzwords bouncing around the industry can only increase. Buzzwords help make people who understand them look clever and forward thinking, while making people who don't understand them feel stupid and out of date. Transmedia is one of those buzzwords that suddenly seems to be everywhere, but it's also surprisingly hard to find a precise definition of it. Here's a rather wordy one that the Producers' Guild of America have adopted:
Ok, so I'm not sure that's much clearer, although I love the bit about "technologies that may or may not currently exist." Because a transmedia storyline spans many different delivery channels, this does make it hard to categorise. But here's my condensed version:
We live in an aggressively multichannel world. Books used to have to compete with just films and TV, but now there is a plethora of other distractions. And, to be fair, a plethora of opportunities for telling a story. Gone author Michael Grant's new project BZRK is being launched in a veritable transmedia blitz. Much of this is clearly marketing-led, a way of leading tech-savvy readers towards the book itself. But their plans to make money out of the additional transmedia content reflect a publishing industry keen to find new revenue streams wherever they can.
As authors, we need to be prepared for a world where our material can be repurposed in many different ways. This seems to be something especially true of children's books, as this Observer article makes clear. The launch of Pottermore has inevitably changed the landscape in terms of how children will interact with stories and how they will buy new Harry Potter content.
Writing the word "content" there gave me pause, because it's so impersonal. The risk with transmedia is that our words become simply another part of the interchangeable media landscape, another paid-for item that Apple can shove down the digital pipe towards your iPad. A book is a tangible object and it's easy to express what makes it special, what makes it different from a film or a video game. But try that with an enhanced e-book, or a picture book app. Are we moving towards a gloriously mashed-up world of narrative without barriers? Or simply a formless mush of words, images and micropayments?
My feeling here is that the answer lies in maximising the potential of each channel. If you write an app, make it do things that only an app can do. Don't be tempted to make it simply a book with a searchable index or an e-comic that makes KAPOW noises. Equally, enjoy the benefits of the long-form experience that a book provides – don't be tempted to chop it into sections for easy consumption, but instead focus on spinning a deep and involving storyline. Children won't lose the ability to concentrate providing we give them compelling reasons not to. The good news for writers is that our role is just as vital in a transmedia world, if not more so. Because, at some point, every multi-platform franchise was just a vague idea on the back of a napkin.
Nick.
The Guild defines a Transmedia Narrative project or franchise as one that consists of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms: Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.
Ok, so I'm not sure that's much clearer, although I love the bit about "technologies that may or may not currently exist." Because a transmedia storyline spans many different delivery channels, this does make it hard to categorise. But here's my condensed version:
Transmedia is about going where the kids are.
We live in an aggressively multichannel world. Books used to have to compete with just films and TV, but now there is a plethora of other distractions. And, to be fair, a plethora of opportunities for telling a story. Gone author Michael Grant's new project BZRK is being launched in a veritable transmedia blitz. Much of this is clearly marketing-led, a way of leading tech-savvy readers towards the book itself. But their plans to make money out of the additional transmedia content reflect a publishing industry keen to find new revenue streams wherever they can.
As authors, we need to be prepared for a world where our material can be repurposed in many different ways. This seems to be something especially true of children's books, as this Observer article makes clear. The launch of Pottermore has inevitably changed the landscape in terms of how children will interact with stories and how they will buy new Harry Potter content.
Writing the word "content" there gave me pause, because it's so impersonal. The risk with transmedia is that our words become simply another part of the interchangeable media landscape, another paid-for item that Apple can shove down the digital pipe towards your iPad. A book is a tangible object and it's easy to express what makes it special, what makes it different from a film or a video game. But try that with an enhanced e-book, or a picture book app. Are we moving towards a gloriously mashed-up world of narrative without barriers? Or simply a formless mush of words, images and micropayments?
My feeling here is that the answer lies in maximising the potential of each channel. If you write an app, make it do things that only an app can do. Don't be tempted to make it simply a book with a searchable index or an e-comic that makes KAPOW noises. Equally, enjoy the benefits of the long-form experience that a book provides – don't be tempted to chop it into sections for easy consumption, but instead focus on spinning a deep and involving storyline. Children won't lose the ability to concentrate providing we give them compelling reasons not to. The good news for writers is that our role is just as vital in a transmedia world, if not more so. Because, at some point, every multi-platform franchise was just a vague idea on the back of a napkin.
Nick.
Friday, 4 November 2011
Talking About Tone
Tone is something that I've meant to write about ever since I started blogging. Somehow, I've never got round to it, and I think my problem with talking about tone is that I'm still struggling with it myself.
Here's what I know – the tone of a book is vital. It sets expectations from the very first page and answers some basic questions your reader is asking:
If the author has set the tone appropriately, you should be able to answer all of those questions from the first page of a book. It sounds fantastical, but try it now – pick up a book you've never read and look at the first page. You'll find a huge amount of contextual information in and around the words themselves. You'll also probably know whether you want to read on.
There's a certain alchemy to setting tone, and I'm not sure I can help you much with achieving the right balance. When the tone of a book is right, we just accept it, suspend disbelief and sit back to enjoy the ride. But when the tone is wrong, it niggles. Tone is like a contract between the author and the reader, an agreement that the writer knows what they are doing and that the reader is happy to go along with them. To master tone, the standard advice for writers applies - you need to read as widely as you can, watch quality TV, seek out good (and sometimes bad) movies. Basically, see how other people approach that tricky balancing act.
So where's my problem in all this? Simple – I love screwing with tone. I love to have a scary scene that bleeds into funny, or a slapstick scene that suddenly becomes serious. I think these kind of tonal shifts are immensely effective for jarring and surprising your audience, indeed the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino is based on this kind of tonal trickery. The problem is that audiences don't always want to be jarred and surprised. I loved the shift from noirish crime drama to goofy vampire splatter in From Dusk Till Dawn, but a lot of people hated that movie.
Another problem about playing with tone is that it is hard. You need an intuitive feel for how far you can bend the rules, and it's always easier to satisfy a mass audience by writing a straight-down-the-line narrative. Not as satisfying, but definitely easier.
An alternative to shifting tone is to try to build an overall tone that feels very personal to you, something fresh and new. William Goldman was a pro at this - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a groundbreaking take on the western and The Princess Bride (both in book and movie form) is sublime. A more recent film that has its own unique flavour is In Bruges, which mixes gangster drama and black comedy with a surreal, almost metaphysical tone. But it works brilliantly, and I think it does so because it gives the audience both what they want (chases and bloody shootouts) and what they don't know they want (oddball character comedy in a medieval walled city). On paper, it shouldn't work, but onscreen the blend comes off, and that is down to the skill of the writer-director and his cast.
There's a section at the end of William Goldman's book What Lie Did I Tell? where he writes a screenplay specifically to show us the process, then sends it to his Hollywood friends for their opinion. Tony Gilroy, the writer of the Bourne movies and director of Michael Clayton is especially scathing about the tone of the piece. He loves to break the rules of structure, he says, but
I can empathise with that. But somehow, I'm just itching to mess with it some more...
Nick.
Here's what I know – the tone of a book is vital. It sets expectations from the very first page and answers some basic questions your reader is asking:
- What is this story about?
- How is it told?
- Will it be happy? Sad? Funny?
- Who is it for? (in the case of children's books, what is the age range?)
- What genre does it sit within?
- Will it end well?
If the author has set the tone appropriately, you should be able to answer all of those questions from the first page of a book. It sounds fantastical, but try it now – pick up a book you've never read and look at the first page. You'll find a huge amount of contextual information in and around the words themselves. You'll also probably know whether you want to read on.
There's a certain alchemy to setting tone, and I'm not sure I can help you much with achieving the right balance. When the tone of a book is right, we just accept it, suspend disbelief and sit back to enjoy the ride. But when the tone is wrong, it niggles. Tone is like a contract between the author and the reader, an agreement that the writer knows what they are doing and that the reader is happy to go along with them. To master tone, the standard advice for writers applies - you need to read as widely as you can, watch quality TV, seek out good (and sometimes bad) movies. Basically, see how other people approach that tricky balancing act.
So where's my problem in all this? Simple – I love screwing with tone. I love to have a scary scene that bleeds into funny, or a slapstick scene that suddenly becomes serious. I think these kind of tonal shifts are immensely effective for jarring and surprising your audience, indeed the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino is based on this kind of tonal trickery. The problem is that audiences don't always want to be jarred and surprised. I loved the shift from noirish crime drama to goofy vampire splatter in From Dusk Till Dawn, but a lot of people hated that movie.
Another problem about playing with tone is that it is hard. You need an intuitive feel for how far you can bend the rules, and it's always easier to satisfy a mass audience by writing a straight-down-the-line narrative. Not as satisfying, but definitely easier.
An alternative to shifting tone is to try to build an overall tone that feels very personal to you, something fresh and new. William Goldman was a pro at this - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a groundbreaking take on the western and The Princess Bride (both in book and movie form) is sublime. A more recent film that has its own unique flavour is In Bruges, which mixes gangster drama and black comedy with a surreal, almost metaphysical tone. But it works brilliantly, and I think it does so because it gives the audience both what they want (chases and bloody shootouts) and what they don't know they want (oddball character comedy in a medieval walled city). On paper, it shouldn't work, but onscreen the blend comes off, and that is down to the skill of the writer-director and his cast.
There's a section at the end of William Goldman's book What Lie Did I Tell? where he writes a screenplay specifically to show us the process, then sends it to his Hollywood friends for their opinion. Tony Gilroy, the writer of the Bourne movies and director of Michael Clayton is especially scathing about the tone of the piece. He loves to break the rules of structure, he says, but
"Tone scares me."
I can empathise with that. But somehow, I'm just itching to mess with it some more...
Nick.
Friday, 28 October 2011
Apps and the Single Author
One of the great attractions of writing is that anyone can do it. The only barrier to entry is access to a word processor and an email account - a barrier low enough to encourage penniless students and struggling single parents alike (hello, J.K. Rowling). Another great thing is that you can do a lot of the work on your own. In fact, electronic publishing means that you could go all the way from initial concept to finished e-book without involving a single other person (though I wouldn't recommend it).
But now something even newer has appeared on the writing scene - the app. Depending on who you believe, they are either the saviour of storytelling or a frivolous annoyance; as usual, I suspect the answer is somewhere between the two extremes. Someone who tends to the former view is author and agent Xavier Waterkeyn, who wrote an impassioned article for FutureBook last week, about his plans for an app project he is representing called The Chimera Vector. Xavier is not a man troubled by small ideas, and it's clear that the project is as ambitious as they come – the future of storytelling, no less. But once the brainstorming phase was over, the team's plans for a multi-layered socially-integrated transmedia experience hit a significant problem. Cost.
The problem with apps is that they require a team. Developers, graphic designers, scriptwriters, testers, project managers etc. One person in front of a keyboard is going to have a tough time competing with the high production values of mainstream apps, and I'm sure this “Hollywoodisation" of the market can only get worse. Compare that to the experience of writing a conventional book, where I can open up MS Word right now and write a paragraph better than anything Dan Brown has ever produced. Of course, I can't command his marketing and production budget, but I can dream...
By coincidence, I've just started reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian by Stewart Lee. It's a fascinating and very funny deconstruction of the art of comedy, as ambitious a project as anything in the iTunes App Store. Lee has the completely opposite view to Xavier Waterkeyn – he believes that a single person on stage with a microphone has the best chance of reinventing the medium. After the high profile but financially unrewarding Jerry Springer – The Opera, Lee decided to focus on smaller gigs with smaller audiences, reasoning that a loyal fanbase would be much more likely to support him long term. This has given him the freedom to build an act around picking comedy apart, to be a niche artiste rather than trying to appeal to the mass market.
I occasionally harbour grandiose ideas to reinvent the nature of storytelling, although I have to remind myself that the story has been around for a while and is doing quite fine on its own, thankyouverymuch. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that someone with very little to lose financially is more likely to take the risks that will result in Narrative 2.0. Xavier Waterkeyn is nothing if not an idealist, and doesn't really seem to grasp that people who invest money generally want to see a return on that. His pitch seems to be based more on goodwill than actual economics:
Nick.
But now something even newer has appeared on the writing scene - the app. Depending on who you believe, they are either the saviour of storytelling or a frivolous annoyance; as usual, I suspect the answer is somewhere between the two extremes. Someone who tends to the former view is author and agent Xavier Waterkeyn, who wrote an impassioned article for FutureBook last week, about his plans for an app project he is representing called The Chimera Vector. Xavier is not a man troubled by small ideas, and it's clear that the project is as ambitious as they come – the future of storytelling, no less. But once the brainstorming phase was over, the team's plans for a multi-layered socially-integrated transmedia experience hit a significant problem. Cost.
The problem with apps is they are expensive to make. Unless you're hiring an independent app developer, your app could cost anywhere from $20,000 to over $100,000, with an average of $60,000. Apps - like books themselves - rarely even get as far as breaking even.Wait a minute there. 93,000 dollars? I know that the business model for author-led fiction isn't great. I know that I will probably never recoup enough money to cover the eight years (and counting) that I have put into my craft. But as I've worked full-time throughout that period, the real cost to me can be counted in stuff like SCBWI membership fees, notepads and Bic biros. Probably a few hundred pounds. But if I had been trying to develop an app? Well, I couldn't have afforded even the entry-level $20,000, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
We realized early on that we couldn't afford to fund this project ourselves. What started as a $20,000 basic app idea soon evolved into a $93,000 app idea that would redefine storytelling, but only if we have the funds to make it.
The problem with apps is that they require a team. Developers, graphic designers, scriptwriters, testers, project managers etc. One person in front of a keyboard is going to have a tough time competing with the high production values of mainstream apps, and I'm sure this “Hollywoodisation" of the market can only get worse. Compare that to the experience of writing a conventional book, where I can open up MS Word right now and write a paragraph better than anything Dan Brown has ever produced. Of course, I can't command his marketing and production budget, but I can dream...
By coincidence, I've just started reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian by Stewart Lee. It's a fascinating and very funny deconstruction of the art of comedy, as ambitious a project as anything in the iTunes App Store. Lee has the completely opposite view to Xavier Waterkeyn – he believes that a single person on stage with a microphone has the best chance of reinventing the medium. After the high profile but financially unrewarding Jerry Springer – The Opera, Lee decided to focus on smaller gigs with smaller audiences, reasoning that a loyal fanbase would be much more likely to support him long term. This has given him the freedom to build an act around picking comedy apart, to be a niche artiste rather than trying to appeal to the mass market.
I occasionally harbour grandiose ideas to reinvent the nature of storytelling, although I have to remind myself that the story has been around for a while and is doing quite fine on its own, thankyouverymuch. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that someone with very little to lose financially is more likely to take the risks that will result in Narrative 2.0. Xavier Waterkeyn is nothing if not an idealist, and doesn't really seem to grasp that people who invest money generally want to see a return on that. His pitch seems to be based more on goodwill than actual economics:
We'll be honest with you. [The Chimera Vector] probably won't make a profit.Well, that's convinced me! The cheque for a hundred grand is in the post.
Nick.
Friday, 21 October 2011
Ghostwriting the Dead
You might want to stand back - I feel a rant coming on. It's all been prompted by my discovery this week that P.D. James has written a historical crime novel. How interesting, I thought, until I saw that it was a crime novel set in the world of Pride and Prejudice. The next thing I knew, I was slapping my forehead and grumbling about the lack of vision by some of our most accomplished novelists. Fan fiction used to be something you wrote as your very first book, not your 22nd. And more than that, there seems to be a veritable trend of franchise-mining going on this Christmas - Anthony Horowitz has written a Sherlock Holmes novel and Frank Cottrell Boyce has penned a sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Perhaps James, now 91, has earned the chance to take a fictional retirement in the worlds that inspired her. But it saddens me that market-leading authors - who could have any book published - have resorted to stepping into the shoes of their dead forebears. I mean, I love Eoin Colfer to bits, but did the world really need another instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The series had gone stale while Douglas Adams was still alive and writing them.
That said, I'm not attacking the quality of these books. Indeed I enjoy the Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and it seems as though Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is a better book than Ian Fleming's original. Writers are often the most voracious of readers, so it's no surprise that they welcome the chance to take on these well-loved characters. But I wonder if they wouldn't mind awfully writing these books and then putting them straight in a drawer. It's not like most of them need the money.
Sometimes, these sequels are written with the best of intentions. Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet was produced to raise extra funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital, one year before the character went out of copyright. But most of these officially sanctioned works are simply feathering the nest of an already very rich author's estate, or the corporations that spring up to manage them. How much, I wonder, has Thomas the Tank Engine earned since the Rev. W. Awdry's death, compared with the amount he saw in his lifetime? I do hope that Terry Pratchett has the legal wherewithal to stop someone producing more Discworld novels after the sad day that he loses the ability to do so.
I'm not criticising the literary metafiction of Jasper Fforde, nor genre mash-ups like Kim Newman's Anno Dracula or Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Hell, even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gets my cautious approval as an experiment in form, conducted by a then unknown author with something to prove. But the mega famous writers of officially sanctioned fan fiction are stifling originality for the rest of us. Every time they succeed with one of these books, the market gets a little more conservative. Please, let the dead lie silent and show us something new.
Nick.
Perhaps James, now 91, has earned the chance to take a fictional retirement in the worlds that inspired her. But it saddens me that market-leading authors - who could have any book published - have resorted to stepping into the shoes of their dead forebears. I mean, I love Eoin Colfer to bits, but did the world really need another instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The series had gone stale while Douglas Adams was still alive and writing them.
That said, I'm not attacking the quality of these books. Indeed I enjoy the Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and it seems as though Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is a better book than Ian Fleming's original. Writers are often the most voracious of readers, so it's no surprise that they welcome the chance to take on these well-loved characters. But I wonder if they wouldn't mind awfully writing these books and then putting them straight in a drawer. It's not like most of them need the money.
Sometimes, these sequels are written with the best of intentions. Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet was produced to raise extra funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital, one year before the character went out of copyright. But most of these officially sanctioned works are simply feathering the nest of an already very rich author's estate, or the corporations that spring up to manage them. How much, I wonder, has Thomas the Tank Engine earned since the Rev. W. Awdry's death, compared with the amount he saw in his lifetime? I do hope that Terry Pratchett has the legal wherewithal to stop someone producing more Discworld novels after the sad day that he loses the ability to do so.
I'm not criticising the literary metafiction of Jasper Fforde, nor genre mash-ups like Kim Newman's Anno Dracula or Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Hell, even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gets my cautious approval as an experiment in form, conducted by a then unknown author with something to prove. But the mega famous writers of officially sanctioned fan fiction are stifling originality for the rest of us. Every time they succeed with one of these books, the market gets a little more conservative. Please, let the dead lie silent and show us something new.
Nick.
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