Recommendations?

A few weeks ago, I blogged about learning lessons from screenwriting for writing fiction. Then, a couple of days ago, someone pointed me to J.K. Rowling’s wonderful (if enigmatic) handwritten plot spreadsheets for The Order of the Phoenix.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should start outlining my stories more. Maybe not short stories, but novels, certainly.

I’ve always told myself that I don’t work well with outlining, that my best stuff comes when I writing blind and in the moment. And to a degree that’s true. But I’m also more prone to hitting brick walls or having to backtrack, or just sitting there wondering where the hell the story should go next.

I think part of my reluctance is because I can get caught up in being a little too mechanistic, sometimes, in forcing my story in directions it shouldn’t go in order to fit a preconceived idea, and then having to do a lot of work to unpick it. I worry that outlining will make that worse.

But I don’t think it has to. Not if the outline has room for shift. And maybe if I do outline properly, I’ll solve those issues before I even come to them.

So, I’m going to try it, but I need your help! Or your recommendations at least. If you outline, do you have a particular method? What kind of things do you include or leave out? Can you recommend any particular books on outlining (screenwriting or novel writing, I don’t mind)?

I’d really appreciate any suggestions. Otherwise my whiteboard will remain empty for a very long time. ;)

Today's journal entry...

... is not happening today, due to various family illnesses (flu, tonsillitis, etc.; nothing majorly serious). Sorry.

Hopefully later in the week.

Popular fiction

You know that thing that authors do from time-to-time? Where they take a short story they've written and expand it into a novel? And it never turns out to be a good idea? It just doesn't. Because the idea that can make a brilliant short story rarely can be stretched into a whole novel. Sometimes short stories (or novellas) are just the right length, and anything else is padding.

Take Flowers for Algernon, for instance, by Daniel Keyes. This is a quite brilliant short story. (If you haven't read it, you must.) The novel, however, isn't. It's not bad, by any means, but it comes nowhere near the brilliance and impact of the short story. Daniel Keyes might have been better advised to leave it as a short story and write something else for his novel.

Which brings me to this blog entry. Actually, this blog entry isn't about short stories or novels, nor the adapting of one into the other. In fact, it's about something else entirely.

But it is the blogging equivalent of turning a short story into a novel. I'm writing a blog entry that is based on a couple of tweets I twitted yesterday. The fact that I summed up my thoughts succinctly in a couple of tweets isn't going to stop me turning it into a blog entry.

A couple of days ago, a pompous fool desperate for publicity was quoted in the Guardian laying into the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Now I don't really care whether he's right or wrong about her being a bad poet. I'm not qualified to judge as I rarely read poetry.

What really bugged me was the 'defense' in one of the comments, which basically said that we shouldn't worry too much about people reading Duffy because they would probably go on to read other stuff.

This is a really old, and really condescending, 'defense'. It's the 'literature as a gateway drug' argument. I see it used over and over again, for fantasy and science fiction, for romance, for children's books, for thrillers, in fact, for anything popular. Don't worry about them reading J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer or Stephen King or any of a thousand other popular authors, because after that they might go on to read something 'better'.

Better, in this case, always seems to mean something more literary, about big, intellectual, philosophical issues. Something inaccessible and difficult.

The only value of popular fiction, the argument goes, is to hook readers onto the hard stuff.

Well, it doesn't work like that.

Popular fiction is worthwhile by and for itself. Fiction doesn't exist only to interrogate intellectual problems. There is nothing wrong at all--in fact there is enormous value--in writing for entertainment (and that much-derided word 'escapism'), rather than dry, intellectual stimulation. There's nothing wrong at all (and much to recommend) being accessible and easy to read. Being inaccessible is not a merit in and of itself.

Storytelling has always included a high degree of entertainment, right from the very earliest recorded stories. The lessons in those stories, the models for living lives, were delivered through the medium of entertainment, and that is what popular fiction does. And even if it only entertains, there's nothing at all wrong with that.

So, please, don't defend popular fiction as a gateway drug. Don't say 'at least they're reading something, and they'll eventually go on to read something better', because it's not true. Popular fiction is worth reading. It's not there to lead you to something else. It's there for itself, whether the pompous fools like it or not.

Writing and screenwriting

I started to write a blog entry the other day, saying some critical things about a couple of TV shows. In particular, I was criticizing how the shows didn't seem to be able to make up their minds about what kind of shows they were. They would go in one direction for a while (dark, adult, for example) then suddenly switch course (comedy, for example). I was saying the writers didn't have enough belief in their shows.

But you know what? That's not this blog entry. I trashed that one. I trashed it because of a DVD extra that I watched from Angel, season 3. The extra is called 'From Page to Screen', and it covered pretty much what you would expect: the whole process of coming up with an episode of a show from conception to finished product.

The writers on the show have (if they are lucky) a week to write a 42 minute episode of a show. A week. Sometimes less. And this is the way they have to go about it:

1. Someone pitches an idea and it gets structured it, point by point, in a writers' meeting
2. One of the writers takes that away and writes an outline
3. They return the outline and are given notes on it
4. Take the notes away and write the script
5. Get notes on the script and rewrite it

A week to write it. Sometimes for or five days. For 22 episodes in a year.

I realized that I, as a short story and novel writer, am in absolutely no position to criticize a few inconsistencies in a show when that's the process they have to go through so quickly just to get a script.

And I can't help but think that many of us who do write short stories and novels can be just a little bit too precious about our writing. 

I have writing sessions where I come away only having written 50 words. Sometimes nothing at all. If I was a screenwriter, that just simply wouldn't be an option. People would be waiting for the script, and they would have deadlines too. Short ones. 

If I was a screenwriter, I wouldn't be able to complain that I wasn't inspired or that I had no decent ideas that day or that I or that I was too tired or that I couldn't work from an outline. I wouldn't be able to wait two months between drafts to clear my head. I'd just have to do it. Right then. No matter what.

I wouldn't have the luxury of whining about an editor wanting to change that one little line that I loved. Everything I wrote would be torn up, mercilessly, if necessary, to make the episode work.

Now, I'm not saying that what is produced by a screenwriter working like this is necessarily better than that which a novelist working for a year or five years on a single book produces. (Nor vice versa, for that matter.) I'm not even saying that the forms are the same (fiction writing is a much more solo activity; screenwriting is more collaborative).

But I do think there's a lot we can learn from this type of process. About stripping away the chance for excuses. About not being overly precious and resistant to suggestions for changes. About planning and outlining and redrafting. About being accountable and about other people relying on you deliver something of quality on time, no matter what. About buckling down even if you're exhausted or uninspired or stressed. And that's what this blog entry always should have been about.

Being a writer

You’ve all been in this situation before. You meet someone for the first time, in a casual acquaintance type of way. It might be at a party or it might be meeting another parent when you’re picking your kid up from school. Whatever. And they ask you what you do.

Here’s the thing. When people ask me, I never say I’m a writer. Not ever. I say I’m a web designer.

And I am a web designer, of course. I love that part of my life. Building websites is great. It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s stimulating, it’s satisfying, and I’m good at it. But it’s not the thing I’m most passionate about. It’s not the thing I dreamed about from, oh, the beginning of high school. (The web didn’t exist back then...) What I always dreamed about was being a writer.

But the truth is, I’m embarrassed to say I’m a writer. I figure that if I do, people are going to ask what books I’ve got out, and I haven’t published any books. I’ve only published short stories. Most people never read short stories. I think that if I call myself a writer, people will think I’m deluding myself. They’ll think I’m full of it.

When someone does get out of me that I’m a writer (usually because my wife tells them), I say I “just” write short stories (or “only short stories”, like I realized I did in the paragraph above), as though somehow they’re not worth mentioning.

But the truth is, I’m damned proud of those short stories. I worked long and hard at them. Editors were willing to pay money for them and print them in their magazines and anthologies. Some of these are really good stories.

If I add up the money I’ve been paid for my short stories, it comes to at least the same amount as the average advance for a first novel, probably more. My stories have reached far more people than most first novels ever do.

And here’s another thing. By not saying that I’m a writer, I’m deprioritizing my own writing. I’m telling myself every time that the writing is not the most important part of my career. I’m telling myself that the time I have for work should always be for web design, and that if I spend some of it writing, I’m doing the wrong thing. That writing time is wasted time.

So, I’ve decided to make a new New(ish) Year’s resolution: I’m going to start saying I’m a writer when people ask what I do. I’m going to say I’m a web designer too, but that’s not all I’m going to say, because it’s not all I do.

And maybe, just maybe, that’ll make me give the writing the priority it deserves.

Complicating things

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working (on and off) on a couple of short stories, one of which was a kind of YA fantasy (with relatively little fantasy content) and the other of which was (I thought) an adult fantasy with much more fantasy content.

They were pretty different stories, and the only thing they really had in common was that I didn't quite know where either of them were going, and I was kind of stumped.

Well, I'm not someone who likes to make life easy for myself (well, I actually like it; I just rarely do it). So, I stuck the two stories together, almost unchanged, just alternating the points of view.

And the funny thing is, I do actually know where the combined story is going now. It's going to be tough to fit everything together and make it come out well, but it at least it has a purpose and direction.

Back when I was at Clarion West in 2001, I remember Nalo Hopkinson saying that every scene needed two things going on. It's the same for every story. There have to be (at least) two things going on that can play off against each other, inform each other, head off and rejoin each other, twist around and complicate. 

Neither of the stories had that before. Now they both do. How they'll finally work out, I can't say. But at least they have a chance now.

Book Review: Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch

Note: This book is titled 'Midnight Riot' in the U.S.

Ben Aaronovitch obviously has a thing for London, and Rivers of London is a book which revels in a sense of place and history. Even if there wasn't a fantastic story in here, you could read it for an exuberant tour of London.

But there is a good story, and a quirky, original take on urban fantasy.

When probationary police constable Peter Grant encounters a ghost during a murder investigation, he is recruited by Chief Inspector Nightingale, the force's only wizard. Before he can come to terms with his status as the an apprentice magician, he finds himself investigating a series of horrific supernatural murders.

And if that wasn't enough, he has to negotiate a truce between the fractious Genii Loci - the local gods - of the Thames.

The nearest comparison I can come up with for Aaronovitch's book is Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, although Carey's books are darker and more noir, where Aaronvitch maintains a lightness and humour (which doesn't always quite come off).

Aaronovitch has written screenplays and tie-in books before, but this is first purely solo novel, and this shows slightly in the earlier parts of the book, where a bit trimming would have helped certain scenes, but once the book really gets going, I soon forgot this, and by the time it reached its climax, it was utterly gripping.

This is a modern, urban fantasy, but it follows its own path, almost unaware of, and certainly unaffected by, the cliches that creep into some urban fantasies.

Recommended.


Note: The sequel to Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, has already been published in both the US and UK.

On Writing

Back in … oh, quite a long time ago now; let's say about 2002 … I read Stephen King's fantastic On Writing. If you haven't read it, you certainly should.

One particular piece of advice stuck with me, but for completely the wrong reason. In fact, I'm kind of embarrassed to say it here, because just about everyone will probably look at me and say, "Duh. We could have told you that."

Anyway, the piece of advice was that you should cut 10% of a book's word count during revision. I read that, and I thought, Are you crazy? I can't do that. When I revise, I thought, my books get longer, not shorter. There's absolutely no way I could cut 10% on revision.

Obviously (I thought; feel free to laugh at me here), Stephen King's first drafts are very different from mine. He writes too much; I write too little. And, like all smugly ignorant wannabes, I left it at that.

Fast forward to this year, and I get feedback from an editor on my novel. She loved lots about it, she said, but it was too long. Could I cut it by 30% and send it back.

30%! The mind, briefly, boggled.

But, actually, for some reason, 30% seemed more doable than 10%. 30% says be ruthless. Be cruel. I set about rearranging scenes, removing certain unimportant side plots, figuring out different ways that other things could happen.

At the end of this attempt, I'd cut about 20% of the book. After that, I wasn't giving up. I gritted my teeth, remembered Stephen King's advice, and went through, word-by-word, line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph and deleted everything that didn't absolutely need to be there.

Now, I'm going to add a word about what 'absolutely need to be there' means. Because it's tempting when in mega-cutting mode to think that everything that either doesn't advance the plot or produce character development isn't absolutely necessary, but that isn't true. Books need colour as well as purely mechanistic progress, and those little bits of description, quirky dialogue, and incidental events are what make a book. That's not what I was cutting.

By the time I'd finished getting rid of all the really unnecessary stuff I had cut another 10% of the book, and I had realised something important: I use too many words in my writing. I repeat things that I don't need to repeat. I go on too long.

(And, incidentally, it made me realise another thing: if a scene or paragraph isn't working and I can't get it to work, it almost always needs to be cut; the book works better without it.)

I made a resolution at the end of that process: no matter how good I feel a book is, no matter how tight and how polished, my workflow will now always include a stage where I go through and cut 10% of the book before I let it go out the door, because no matter how much I think it doesn't need it, it does.

A final addendum: this book had been revised multiple times and read by several professional writers before it reached this particular editor's desk, and none of us had picked up on the bloat. We all thought it worked. And this is why books need editors, even (particularly!) self-published books. No matter how much work you put into it and no matter how many friends or other writers read and critique it, it needs professional editing to pick up the things the rest of you aren't seeing.

On Choosing Ebooks

I've been thinking once again about ebooks, self-publishing and traditional publishing, after reading this post by author Richard Parks.

This time around, I've been thinking about ebooks from the point of view of a reader. I think it would be fair to say that I'm an occasional reader of ebooks, but I still do most of my reading on paper.

I want to read ebooks. I really do. Every surface in my house is covered in books. The garage is completely full of boxes of them, and I can never find the one I want.

But here's my real problem:

I don't know how to choose ebooks. I don't know how to find good ebooks in the vast and deepening electronic sea.

Obviously, there are two largely different classes of ebooks: self-published and traditionally-published.

Traditionally-published books, produced by a commercial, non-independent publisher, have well-established channels. They often turn up in bookstores. They get reviewed in established venues. They have, to some degree, at least, a basic guarantee of quality, if not of matching my particular taste. I can find them in libraries.

Now, I know there are plenty of traditionally-published books that never see a review, never see a bookstore shelf, never get near a library. But nonetheless, I know how to find a traditionally-published book that I will like, and I can easily find the ebook version.

I don't know how to do the same with self-/indie-published books, and I guess I am not alone.

Gatekeepers

The problem is, there are no gatekeepers in self-publishing. 'Gatekeepers' is often seen as a dirty word, and undoubtedly some great books are never published because there are too many 'gatekeepers' in the publishing industry.

But having gatekeepers gives the reader a certain security: someone, somewhere (probably several someones) whose job relies on them getting it right, believes that this book is good enough. I might not like that book. I might not agree with them. But my chances are higher with a traditionally-published book.

When it comes to a self-published ebook, I have two issues:

• How do I know it will be any good?
• How do I know there is a decent chance I will like it?

A part of a solution?

One solution is something that traditional publishers could and should be doing, but by-and-large don't.

That is branding of lines.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm using another swear word. First gatekeepers, now branding. Ugh.

I'm not advocating authors turning themselves into 'brands'. Personally, I hate that. I'm simply talking about a way of identifying books beyond genre or author. The 'brand' here is simply a way of saying essentially "if you like book X, here are some similar books". Similar in terms of genre, style, type, whatever.

Some publishers do this. Look at the Harlequin bookstore. There are dozens of very clearly branded lines. The SF Masterworks is an effective branded line of books. Baen by itself is close to a branded line of books.

But there could be a lot more of this. That there isn't is a failure on the part of traditional publishing. The closest most seem to come is simply cover-style (YA paranormal romances, for example, seem to have almost interchangeable covers, as do many thrillers).

However, if traditional publishers aren't doing this, there's no reason why self-published authors can't.

By getting together with other self-published authors, it should be easy to set up branded lines of books, allowing your readers to find other books. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

And back to those gatekeepers...

Of course, this is where the gatekeepers reappear. For any kind of branded list of books, someone has to make sure that the books actually fit the 'brand' and that they are of high quality. If they don't or they're not, that brand will fail and readers won't trust it.

That means, I guess, being picky about the authors involved, and setting up clear guidelines about what books fit the 'brand' and which don't.

Right now, from the perspective of a reader, self-publishing in ebooks seems a bit too wild west. It seems to be every person for themself. And I get that. But it's a barrier to new readers, and I'd love to see it evolve.

Five Reasons Every Author Should Have a Website

A week or so ago, author Anne R. Allen posted:

That’s why a website you have to pay somebody to update for you isn’t as useful. People want to connect with you—not your web designer. The difference between a website and a blog is the difference between putting an ad in the Yellow Pages or personally giving somebody your phone number. Blogs are friendly. And if you have a blog, you don’t need an expensive website. Here’s what Nathan Bransford said about formal websites:

“The thing about author websites is pretty simple, in my mind. They're expensive. Are they worth the return on investment? I don't know. I can't think of a time I've ever bought a book based on a visit to an author's website. But I have definitely bought books based on author blogs. I know I may not be the average reader, but I still have a hard time seeing how it's worth the investment unless the website is really spectacular.”

So, naturally, I don't agree.

Let's skip over the "That’s why a website you have to pay somebody to update for you isn’t as useful". Of course, this would be true, but there is no reason why you should pay anyone to update your website for you. Modern systems make it as easy to update a website as post a blog entry.

Here are 5 reasons why authors should have websites:

1. Full control
   Blogger is great. It really is. You can customize your blog design enormously, add pages, change the background, and so on. But there are limits. If you use Blogger (and even more so if you're using wordpress.com or LiveJournal), you'll still only be able to do a limited set of things with your website. What if you want to promote your brand new book, as author Lia Habel does on her website, liahabel.com:
   
   
   
   
   
   For that, you need a real website. You need the flexibility to highlight different things in different parts of the website and different parts of pages: books, events, competitions, news, and so forth.
   
   Same goes for the design. A blogging system like Blogger is flexible, but only to a degree. A full website can contain or be pretty much anything.
2. Full Information About Your Books
   At some point, you're going to have more than one book out. You'll have a back-catalog, forthcoming books, maybe a bunch of different editions. Your readers and potential readers need an easy, quick way to find out about these, because once they're read one, you want them to read more.
   
   You'll want info about the books, you'll want extracts, you'll want reviews, you'll want easy links to buy, you might want bonus material. Doing all that on a blog and keeping it easy to find would be nearly impossible.
   
   Add to that info for the media, the events and so on, and no one is going to find it all on a blog.
3. Not Everyone Likes Blogs
   Shocking, I know. I like blogs. You probably like blogs. But not everyone does. If all you have is a blog, many potential readers aren't going to spend the time trawling through your daily thoughts. They want the bare information about you and your books.
4. A Website Doesn't Have to Be Expensive
   You will always get the best result by hiring a professional designer who really knows what works and how people use websites, and who can give you a website that will meet your aims, whatever they are.
   
   But not everyone has that kind of budget, and you have to balance the cost against the returns. Luckily, that's not the only way to get a decent website. You can buy high-quality templates (either as a WordPress theme or as plain HTML/CSS website) from places like themeforest.net for around $35.
   
   In addition to this, you'll need to pay for web hosting (a few dollars a month) and a domain name (web address - about $10 a year). That's it. A professional quality website for a very reasonable cost.
5. A Website is Low Maintenance
   If you want a successful blog, you need to post regularly. How regularly is up to you, but all the successful blogs I read have something new at least once a week. If you're working full-time and have a family, you may only have a lunch break to do your writing. Do you really want to sacrifice that for blogging?
   
   By contrast, you only need to update a website when there is something key to add, like a new book. You can have a great website that you only update twice a year, or one that you add stuff to every day.

Of course, a website and a blog don't have to be either/or. If you add an 'about me' page to your blogger and a page listing your books, you already have a website. And many people who run their own website integrate a blog into it.

Your blog is your chance to talk on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis to an interested community of people, many of whom may never actually read one of your novels. Your website can be a more static collection of information about you and your writing specifically for readers or potential readers of your books.