Tag: writing

Interesting perspectives on indie publishing

I came across two interesting pieces about indie publishing on agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford’s blog.  The first is by Nate himself:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/05/why-i-chose-traditional-publisher.html

The second is a guest post by Tracy Marchini, self-published author of  Pub Speak: A Writer’s Dictionary of Publishing Terms (a guide to the publishing industry) and  Hot Ticket (a novel):

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/05/real-skinny-about-indie-publishing.html

It was interesting to see both Nathan and Tracy discuss the amount of work involved in self publishing.  For me, that’s one of the main reasons why I’m NOT going the indie route.  Writing is enough of a time sink by itself.  I think I’d go insane if I had to assemble my book and do all of the marketing for it, too.

Revisions, revisions

I’ll be honest: revising a novel after a beta read is probably my least favorite part of the writing process.  Compared to the adventure of coming up with a plot and writing the first draft, post-beta revisions tend to be something of a chore.  By that point, you have your plot and your characters pretty well nailed down, so most the changes you’re making are mundane tweaks and typo-fixes.  And, vital as they may be, it’s hard to get fired up about moving commas and adding dialogue tags.  True, you do get to write the occasional new scene, but such creative bursts are usually few and far between at this late stage.

I think I may have figured out a way to make the revision process a little bit less of a hassle though.  Since most of my beta readers made their comments using Word’s track changes feature, it occurred to me that I could merge all their changes into one master document.  This makes things a lot tidier since you don’t have to have a gazillion documents open at once.  Also, since Word allows synchronous scrolling when you’re viewing two documents side-by-side, it’s easy to keep track of the line-by-line comments.

Some of my beta readers made their comments in a separate document instead of using the track changes feature and I ended up having to go through and add them to the master list manually.  For simplicity’s sake, I think that from now on I’m going to request that everyone make their comments alongside the text itself.

Now that everything is set up, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to move quickly through the revisions.  With any luck, they’ll be done within a week to ten days.  Then I will probably have a very limited gamma read, largely for the purpose of hunting down the last remaining typos.  Once that’s done, it will be time to declare the writing process finished and start sending out query letters.

On infodumps

One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors clutter their work with excessive background information.  Few things irritate me more than having the flow of a story broken so the narrator can regale me with a mini-lecture on Egyptian temple decoration, the lineage of the High Elf Lords of Fantasia Minor, or the sewer system of Paris.  Even if I’m actually interested in the subject material, I resent having it dumped on me in that fashion.

Part of the problem is that these infodumps are almost always done by the narrator.  For me, narrators work best when they’re unobtrusive and it’s hard for them to be unobtrusive when they’re yammering on about  beekeeping in the Roman Empire.  Some writers try to avoid this by putting their infodumps in the mouths of their characters, but that gets dangerously close to “As you know, Bob…” territory.

Writers of historical fiction need to be especially wary of falling into this trap.  We do not have the luxury of writing in worlds that are readily understandable to our readers, so we’re always going to have to make more of an effort to set the scene properly.  But while it’s fine to spend some time explaining things that modern readers might not be familiar with, that doesn’t give us license to cram so many historical tidbits into our work that it looks like it was written by an 18th century antiquary.

Regular readers of my blog may wonder how I could enjoy Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell since it contained copious amounts of background information.  She could get away with it because she was deliberately imitating the style of 19th century authors.  As anyone who’s ever read Victor Hugo or Anthony Trollope will tell you, info dumps were all the rage back then.  Clarke also tended to confine her background information to footnotes, so if you didn’t want to read it, you could easily skip over it.

What do you think?  Do extensive background infodumps detract from a story, or do they make it richer?

Rebecca Black, self publishing, and the rise of the eBook

Many of you have no doubt heard about Rebecca Black, the thirteen year old singer whose debut song “Friday” has become an object of near universal mockery on the Interwebz.  With lyrics like this:

Fun, fun, think about fun

You know what it is

I got this, you got this

My friend is by my right, ay

I got this, you got this

Now you know it.

it’s not hard to see why some people are calling “Friday” one of the worst songs of all time.

Black’s parents paid $4,000 for her to make a video with ARK Music Factory, which makes “Friday” the musical equivalent of the many self-published books churned out by vanity presses like iUniverse and AuthorHouse.  Since these companies get their money upfront, they don’t have to worry about pesky things like quality or marketability.

Recently, it has become something of a fad within the publishing world to forecast the imminent demise of literary agents and traditional publishers.  Pundits point to people like Amanda Hocking (who has become a millionaire by selling her self-published eBooks through the Kindle store) and claim that authors will eventually self publish all their work in eBook form.  It’s not hard to see why some authors find self publishing platforms like the Kindle to be an appealing alternative to traditional publishing.  Not only are you free to publish your story exactly how you want it without any editorial interference, but you can also get royalties of up to 70%.

While  eBooks will eventually relegate paper books to the status of collectors’ items, literary agents and traditional publishers still have a valuable role to play in ensuring some basic level of quality.  They’re actually making an investment in the author, so they have a vested interest in making sure that the author’s work is good, or at least marketable.  Granted, Amazon doesn’t charge you anything to publish via the Kindle, but they’re not exactly making an investment in you either, which is why they’ll still accept almost anything under the sun.  A traditional publisher also provides basic publicity services to help market your book.  If you’re self published, you have to do all that on your own and, contrary to what some people seem to think, social media isn’t a magic wand that you can wave and guarantee your book a vast readership.

As long as self publishing continues to be associated with the literary equivalent of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” there will be a place for traditional publishers.  The switch to eBooks may provide a second chance for authors who were bypassed by traditional publishers, but easier distribution won’t automatically level the playing field.

First person narrators

I’m not really a fan of stories told by a first-person narrator.  I know that, to some people, they make the story seem much more personal, but I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to accept a narrator who can somehow remember the ins and outs of every single conversation he/she has ever had.  There are a few books where the story is so compelling that I’m willing to overlook the first-person narration: N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles are the ones that spring immediately to mind.

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m not really a fan of H. P. Lovecraft.  But I don’t see his frequent use of the first person as one of his problems.  In fact, he’s usually able to pull it off a lot better than other writers because he doesn’t use a lot of dialogue, so his narrators’ reminiscences seem more believable.

What do you think of first-person narrators?  Am I alone in my distaste?

Plotting

The other day I stumbled upon a photo that purportedly shows a page of J. K. Rowling’s plot notes for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Her spreadsheet approach makes it very easy to keep track of how the plot develops from chapter to chapter without getting bogged down in a bunch of details.

It’s been my experience that nothing is more fatal to the writing process than excessively detailed planning.  When I first started writing, I tried to compose meticulously detailed synopses.  But they take forever to do, which delays the writing process.  Also, I’ve found that stories tend to take on a life of their own once you start writing them.  There’s nothing more frustrating than lovingly crafting a series of scenes only to throw them out because you’ve changed some aspect of your novel.

Nowadays, I usually keep my synopses brief and just focus on the major plot points.  The only downside is that, because I write them in narrative form, it can be difficult to keep track of plot development.  I’m tempted to try the J. K. Rowling approach and see if it makes life easier.

Fun with synopses

This has been the sort of day where I wish I’d just stayed in bed, curled up under the covers.  Between the sudden death of my cell phone and a mysterious water feature that started cascading down from my bathroom ceiling, it’s been an eventful day to say the least.

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to work on my synopsis for A Theft of Bones after I’d ordered my new phone and the landlord had been by to stop the ceiling fountain.  Let me tell you, you haven’t had fun until you’ve condensed a 400 page manuscript into five double-spaced pages.  It seems like it should be a piece of cake.  But it’s not.

At least I have something to show for my pain and suffering.  After hours and hours of fussing, I have a decent five page summary of the novel.  I might send it to some of the Beta Readers to get their opinion.  I might even send it to one or two people who haven’t read the novel  just to see if it can hold up even without any prior knowledge of the story.

I’m not quite done synopsizing.  Some agents want a mini-synopsis of no more than two pages.  Now, the real fun begins!

The joy of worldbuilding

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours dreaming up imaginary civilizations and writing their histories (I stumbled upon one of these histories recently and noticed that, in its unfinished state, it was just a little bit shorter than my Master’s thesis!).  I would take bits and pieces from the real world civilizations I was reading about and combine them into fantastic shapes.  It would be scant exaggeration to say that I spent most of my childhood immersed in these fantastic realms.

All that ended up being good practice for fantasy writing.  Even though my stories are all set in the ‘real world,’ the presence of magical elements allows me to do a lot of worldbuilding.  Usually, it’s in the form of a system of magic or the backstory that shapes the events I’m writing about.

While worldbuilding is a lot of fun, you have to be careful because there’s always a strong temptation to fill your writing with all the delicious details of the world you’ve created.  An egregious example of this would by H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness.  The story is chugging along fine (at least by Lovecraft standards) until the protagonists enter the ruined Antarctic city of the Old Ones.  Then, the reader is forced to endure pages and pages of the narrator telling you about the history and society of the Old Ones, as gleaned from their wall decoration.  (The idea that human scientists could divine that much information about the Old Ones from their wall carvings strikes me as ludicrous.  We have a hard enough time interpreting ancient Egyptian art, let alone the art of an alien civilization!)  It’s not even that the material is necessarily boring; it’s just that such a lengthy digression dissipates the atmosphere of suspense.

J. K Rowling, on the other hand, is much better at working her worldbuilding into her writing.  She does an excellent job of hinting at the details that underly the story without going off on tangents about the parliamentary procedure used in the Wizengamot or the relationship between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw during the interwar years.  Rowling realized, unlike Lovecraft, that you need to keep the story going without bogging the reader down in endless minutiae.

What I’ve been up to

Sorry for the lack of updates recently.  For starters, I’ve been having lots of issues with my internet connection.  Although the signal quality is always good, there are periods where there’s no connectivity.  I get my internet access through my apartment building, so I suspect there’s a problem with their router.   I’ve brought this to the management’s attention, so with any luck it’ll be fixed soon.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a number of short stories set in the ancient Egyptian ‘universe’ I’m developing.  I’m really pleased with them so far.  My previous attempts at ‘short’ stories ended up being way too long (but never long enough to turn into a novel or even a novella).  Happily, I’ve managed to keep these five stories to a manageable length.  I have a bit more tinkering to do, but I should be ready to submit them for publication in the next few weeks.

The devil is in the details

As preparation for my next writing project, I’m working on a short story involving the novel’s main character in his younger days.  I’m having a blast with it, but it’s turning out to be one of the most challenging things I’ve ever written.

For starters, it’s not always easy to decide when events in Egyptian history occurred.  My story is set against the backdrop of the tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings.  I’ve been using James Breasted’s Ancient Records of Egypt as a source, and he dates the particular trial I was using to year 19 of Ramesses IX.  The trouble is, modern scholarship gives Ramesses IX a reign of only 18 years and the trial itself is now dated to the reign of Ramesses XI.  I ended up having to use a totally different trial as the basis for my story.  Thankfully, I hadn’t gotten so far that I had to do a major rewrite, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

The other problem I’ve encountered is that the Egyptian way of life was so radically different from ours.  I have a scene where the main character goes into a tavern and orders lunch, but, once I’d written it, I realized that I had no idea how he’s going to pay for his meal.  The Egyptian economy was based on bartering and I’m not quite sure how one would purchase a meal in a tavern under that system.  It’s not like he’s going to be carrying a bunch of stuff to trade.  That little problem forced me to hit the books to come up with a solution (the tavern lets him run a tab).

Compared to this, writing the Andrewverse is a cakewalk!