It might seem rather incestuous - today's guest blogger Teri Terry is basing her blog on a talk I gave in Birmingham last week. As I always do, I bashed on about how it's not about writing what you know but writing who you are (not an original thought, unfortunately - I read it in Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell).I also read in Story by Robert McKee that Stanislavski used to ask his actors
My friend Jeremy is nine and is DEFINITELY going to be an author when he grows up ... or when he gets published, whichever comes first.
His idea of a cool website is
Thesaurus.com and I managed to score some points with him by showing him how to access the thesaurus on Microsoft Word.
Write Your Own Fantasy Stories (by SCBWI's own
Tish Farrell) is his current bible, although he is quick to tell me that there are other genres available in the series.
He agreed to make this video with me in exchange for my revealing the ending of my unpublished adventure book
Ugly City. I think I got the better half of the deal, don't you?
I was awarded the One Lovely Blog Award by Lucy Coats over at Scribble Central and by Mary Hoffman at Book Maven. For which, thank you so much!
Now I must pass on the lovely happy feelings to other blogs - I don't think I'm allowed to repeat those on Lucy and Mary's lists but no worries, there are so many great blogs out there and here are some of them!
1.
The Book Thunker by 10 Year Old Boy Living in London
2.
The Noisy Dog Blog by Sue Eves
3.
Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish
4.
Asia in the Heart by Tarie Sabido
5.
Tall Tales and Short Stories by Tracy Ann Baines
6.
Bewildered by Margaret Carey
7.
Almost True by Keren David
8.
The Bookette by Becky
9.
Shoo Rayner's Blog10.
Sue Hyams' BlogOh! I forgot to mention I just discovered this cool blog
The First Novels Club - what a great idea for a blog! I wish I got it first!
Is this scene essential?
If it’s not actually essential, cut it.
Look at your first two paragraphs. If it is designed to give information, cut it.
This was the first task
Sara O'Connor (pictured right), senior commissioning editor at
Working Partners, handed attendees at
SCBWI's Fantasy Fiction Master Class last Saturday.
I looked at the chapter I'd taken along.
Sure enough. My very first sentence was a total info download.
Cut.
And that was pretty much the recurring theme of Sara's master class.
Cut 20 words from your first page.
Now cut 20 more.
Now look at your chapter outline. Cut a chapter. Cut another.
Slash, burn, chop, chop, chop. Kill those darlings. To say it was a little bit bloody is an understatement.
"Be tough on yourself," says Sara. "
Where most fantasies fall down is in loading up the back story at the beginning."
Tough is a good way to describe it.
Fantasy covers a gamut of story - from Tokienesque wizards to Westerfeldian dystopias ... anything with an alternate world. And building a world is all about back story: setting, past action, orientation, context.
How do you do that without long tracts of explanation? How does one write fantasy without putting the reader to sleep?
The secret, says Sara, is to "show, show, show" -
- This world has always been there and is not new to those who live in it.
- They wouldn’t sit there and describe it to themselves.
- Or they don’t know it and they learn about it piece by piece. In neither case are long paragraphs acceptable
- There is absolutely no room for explanation in dialogue whatsoever ... that kind of download is a big turn-off for agents and publishers
Here's a useful rule of thumb -
Sara's 1 to 20 ratio: Only state a fact or have non-active description ever 20 lines. I had a look at my text. AAAAARGH! Suddenly all my clever weaving in of information within the first few paragraphs screams AMATEUR at me!
It's all about what's essential, Sara says.
Think Backpack. Any information you impart to the reader is something they will have to carry for the entire course of the book.
So before you load the reader up, ask yourself,
is it essential? Is this paragraph essential? Is this scene essential? If it’s not actually essential, cut it.
Apart from the Slash and Burn, you have to ask yourself: is this exceptional enough?
"A lot of what's out there is derivative," says Sara, "the world must be aspirational and inspirational. Build a world I would want to live in. Build a world that draws me in."
She quotes
Sarah Davis, agent extraordinaire of the
Greenhouse Literary Agency:
Approximately 50% of the 150-200 submissions that we receive every week involve some kind of fantasy element – from slightly magical to dark paranormal to full blown high fantasy. We get shape-shifters, yet more vampires, girls coming into powers at a certain age, fallen angels, dark fairies, hot dead guys, prophecies, etc.
It’s very hard to show me something I haven’t seen before. Authors often think they have hit on something original but I’ve seen it three times already.
Ultimately it isn’t about the genre. I am looking for something that’s wonderful. There are no rules, just make it exceptional. Weave magic with your language. It’s the glorious writing that is the x factor and that is the hardest thing to achieve, and the hardest thing to find!
Looking for fabulous: my fellow attendeesInevitably you will find yourself writing within fantasy conventions "prologues, prophecies, dragons, a sword, wizards, vampires, werewolves, wizened old ,men, new races of people, all-powerful objects, not knowing about your powers" ... Says Sara: "It's not that you have to avoid (conventions) but you have to be extra skilled to stand out."
General tips on how to be fabulous:
- Set up expectations that you must deliver eg. Hints of the magical-ness in the story
- Start in the most exciting part of your story
- Embrace revision: big to little – don’t do little (line editing) the first time you revise. See that things are working big picture before you do little picture
- Don't let the world take over your plot.
- Sympathy only gets you part way there (with characters). You need action to really make a character engaging.
Someone mischievous organised the Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children panel for the Edinburgh Festival.
Fine, who was children's laureate from 2001 to 2003, famously lambasted Burgess in 2003 when his book
Doing It was published, denouncing his publishers for -
... peddling this grubby book, which demeans both young women and young men? It will prove as effective a form of sexual bullying as any hardcore porno mag passed round. Read Anne Fine's 2003 Review of Doing It
I remember the review created a vociferous debate in the then nascent children's book blogosphere, with bloggers divided between supporting and resisting Fine's points of issue.
This is what Anne Fine is quoted as saying:
Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism. But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children ...
To be fair, I have read a number of children's books, especially for teens, that made me wonder at the bleak, hopeless vision of the author. There are some books I would not recommend to my teenage friends. So I can see where Fine is coming from.
But I have read far more books that, while set in the grit and pebbledash of realism, radiate with a shining something that resists the generalisation.
The fact is, thanks to the New Media revolution, our child readers are far more aware of the darker side of life than their predecessors in Enid Blyton-reading times. And while there are still plenty of us who write the fantasy and adventure that can remove them from reality, we are still beholden to create stories that tap into our readers' experience and world view.
But it's a tough world out there. And I agree with Anne Fine: for children, books must be a haven, a place where there is hope.
One of the most resonant pieces of advice I came away with was actually given to a colleague who had written a gritty novel about a deprived, self-harming teenager. I think my colleague had a conversation with Melvin about how you couldn't just dish out a relentlessly grim story. You had to temper it with something.
Melvin told her (and I paraphrase here inaccurately) that the important thing in such a piece of writing is to make sure the human spirit shines through.
Human Spirit.
Driving back from the course for three and a half hours on the M1, we were so inspired by the idea, we couldn't stop discussing it. What is human spirit? Does our writing have it? Where does it come from? How do we make sure it shines through in our stories?
Human Spirit. That's where the hope is.
--------------------------------
Some "realistic" books I have read that for me strongly evoke the human spirit (in no particular order).
... do add your own books in comments - i can think of more but I'd love to hear yours.
I often write about digging deep — about scrounging around deep down to find you know, that essence of who you are, the thing that will make your writing really ring true, really sing.
Well, this week I dug deep and found that my heart was elsewhere.
In my native Philippines, it's been a traumatic week.
Corazon Aquino, the former president, died and there has been a great outpouring of grief and a mass recollection of the tumultuous revolution that catapulted this housewife (who looked remarkably like my mother) to power. She was a woman forced into a role she did not choose, inheritor of the shambles left by a 20 year dictatorship, a president of many imperfections. Her enforced leadership was no gift to this shy, unassuming woman.
My beloved former editor, Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, sent out a message to all us former staff writers now scattered across the world to send in our recollections of Aquino.
Living here in London as I do, I found it difficult to summon memories of that period. Was it the passage of time? Or had my brain grown fat in this country where freedoms are taken for granted, hunger is a concept, and people speak in complete sentences? It's all very well to talk about digging deep to my fellow writers. I had not kept a diary. What if I dug deep and found nothing?
My journalist friend Elizabeth recently wrote a piece for Granta on the conflict between memory and reality in her experience of the Tiananmen Square massacre
We take fragments of memory and weave them together into patterns as best we can. We darn or embroider any holes with threads of things that happened in our readings, in our conversations with others who really were there, in our dreams.Those then become part of the fabric of our storytelling, so that soon enough it is impossible to say what was remembered and what was embroidered. Read her essay here
I searched my photo albums and mementoes of the days leading up to and after the
revolution of 1986. One thing is for sure, I took no photos. I had no film. I experienced history with an empty camera. And none of my photographer friends could risk their supplies and spare me a roll.
In the many photos, of the crowds, the journalists chasing the personalities of the day, I know where I am. I was standing on the other side of that tank as the nuns cowered under its tracks. I was on a balcony watching the helicopters descend on the military camp. I was sitting on the bridge as the people stormed the palace. But no, I cannot find myself in any of the pictures. It's as if I was never there.
I did keep the front cover of this magazine, not because of any historical significance but because smiling in the crowd was the face of my future.
But of myself and of my role, I have kept no mementos.
Except ...
The events of 1986 were a coming of age for me and though I forget so many of the details, I only have to reread the stories I have written, revisit the characters I have drawn, to realise that the story of Cory and the 1986 revolution are all there. In my writing.
The girl who yearns for her mother. The boy who realises that what he wants has been there all along. The burden of a wish come true. The blessing that turns out to be a curse. Love, loss, the struggle to understand what is right and what is wrong - the memories I thought I had forgotten are imprinted in my soul — and manifest in my storytelling.
This is what I find when I dig deep, and it all comes from the growing up I had to do in the era of Corazon Aquino.
I also found this:
I took this photo of a woman sitting on the steps of the Post Office in downtown Manila, after one of the frequent anti-government rallies of that time had dispersed.
She was quite mad, holding a plastic rose in one hand and singing in a strong alto
Bayan Ko, the song that was to become the rallying anthem of that period.
She was somebody's mother, lost and unnoticed by the crowds.
In 2005, I did a radio programme about the migration phenomenon in the Philippines that has left so many families without a mother. The programme was called
Motherless Nation.
I think the photo captures how many of us Filipinos feel now, after the death of Aquino, after all the things that have come to pass these last 22 years.
A nation, motherless.
I was fascinated by blogging literary agent Rachelle Gardner's observation that lately, there have been some rather fine examples of writing craft on her slushpile. Sadly, story doesn't quite live up to technique.
In fact, just this week I read some sample chapters from a newbie writer, and I was impressed with the technical excellence. Nice dialogue, perfect POVs, showing not telling... But the story itself involved a hackneyed plot, a totally uninteresting protagonist, and major predictability. It felt like it was written by a computer program, and it made me sad. I want to teach writers to not only learn the craft, but to also write from their heart. Write with authenticity, write from the depths of personal experience. Read more
Interestingly, this is echoed by author
Kathleen Duey (I just read her book
Skin Hunger ... oola la, what a fabulous read!) in an interview on the
CWIM blog --
Competent novels are harder and harder to sell, in large part because of SCBWI’s wonderful resources, more and more people can write pretty well. But I think too many of us learn the rules—which are far more “teachable”—and lose the spark—which is more “discoverable”. Read more
This
past week I attended a residential writing course with authors
Malorie Blackman and
Melvin Burgess. M&M put us through three or four (THREE OR FOUR!) timed writing exercises everyday - at first giving us five minutes to write but eventually cutting back to just three minutes.
They wanted us to shoot from the hip - no time to think, no time to compose, no time to even contemplate failure. Just write with your guts.
I didn't think I could do it the first time they announced how it was going to be. But I was pleasantly surprised at how it seemed to shock the rust out of my writing gears. Boy, how we wrote! It really helped that Malorie could not resist calling out "one more minute!" just seconds into an exercise.
The exercises all had to do with character, plot, dialogue - approaching each item from every angle you can think of.
I can't share everything I wrote because the thing about not having time to think is you put down stuff that is personal at the very least and at its most dangerous, probably libellous. So rather than get sued by my close friends and relatives here arethree of my least offensive attempts:
Describe navy blue to someone who cannot see ...
You know navy blue, you know it. It sort of swishes underneath everything, dark and wet but warm. It makes other colours look better. Yellow, yellower. Red, redder. It’s not shy but it doesn’t try to step forward either. It’s like an old husband, there, in the background, outside the lamplight, and yet a perfect fit.
Describe rock music to someone who cannot hear ...
It gets behindyour eyeballs, rock music. Like one of those headaches that start at the base of your skull, throbbing behind your eyes. Except that it’s pleasurable. Most of the time anyway. It seizes you by the heart and squeezes, squeezes and it’s like your blood is pumping harder and harder and your brain is going to explode. It’s so hot and yet its so cool.
... And this next one probably set up a few of us for a life-time of therapy, when we were finished, we were all emotionally exhausted from exploring our regrets:
Write up an argument between yourself today and your younger self ...
(In which Now me blames Young me for wasting so much time)
Now me: Why didn’t you start earlier? Why didn’t you do the writing courses, read the books, actually WRITE for goodness sake? Why is it down to me to play catch up, to spend sleepless nights studying and reading and writing – being rejected, suffering the slings and arrows ---
Young me: You don’t remember do you? You don’t remember how hard it was?
Now me: You could have done some writing. There was time. It’s not as if you had to get that A in trigonometry. I can inform you now that I have never had to do cosines and sines and those equations of never letting go ... not once in my lifetime.
Young me: I didn’t have time. Remember M? She needed me ...
Now me: She didn’t. Look at how she’s turned out. She was always going to need you. She was never going to be satisfied all those if only you could do this for me, and if only you could do that for me. She never had any intention of making anything happen. Is she happy now?
Young me: Are you saying it didn’t matter? Looking after the boys, cooking and cleaning and spending al that time at home helping out . None of it mattered? I should have just let all that go and started writing?
Now me: Well, you could have given me a bit of a headstart.
Young me: I did. What are you writing about now? Are you writing about how you started writing earlier? No, all this stuff about belonging ... about loving ... about ... that’s all me. It’s not about YOU. It’s about ME.
Having said that, one of the most memorable lines from this exercise came from my colleague who was just 17 in which her Now Self chided her Young self: "You're just a child!" To which her Young Self replied: "So are you!"
This painting of Lumb Bank was hanging in my roomJust got back from
Ted Hughes' house on Lumb Bank five days with 16 other writers interested in writing for teenagers - 16 rather GOOD writers, I hasten to add. One of my fellow students was 17 years old, still a teenager herself, possibly the next Zadie Smith if she decides this is her thing.
I thought Lumb Bank was in the Yorkshire Dales but it turned out it was just East of Manchester, up the M1 and turn left, through Halifax and up some hilly bits.
Miriam drove (thanks Miri!).
We were told to look out for these benches at the top of a little lane
We stopped for pictures before winding our way down the hill.
This was the bit of the house looking down a hill at a magnificent view, with disused mills, woods, and a river.
I had room number one at the top of the stairs.Our tutors for the teenage writing week were Melvin Burgess (
Junk,
Nicholas Dane) and Malorie Blackman (
Noughts and Crosses,
Double Cross)
Malorie and Melvin.Melvin and Malorie alternated mornings teaching us about plot, character, dialogue with writing exercises that started out at 10 minutes each and by the last day was reduced to three minutes each ... they didn't want to give us the chance to think, to resist, to give up. We submitted samples of our writing to M&M and had one-on-one meetings with each of them in the afternoon to discuss our work and prospects in publishing.
We sat around a massive table
View outside door as we worked on a rare sunny day.Malorie made ALL of us read, recalling one tutor's sage words in the early days when she was reluctant to share
her work :
Tutor: Malorie do you want to be a writer?
Malorie: More than anything else in the world.
Tutor: Well You’ve got to shit or get off the pot.
The sunshine on the day we arrived turned out to be a red herring. The heavens poured throughout the week. On the few hours when there was no rain, some of us managed to go for walks and visit the nearby village of Heptonstall where Sylvia Plath is buried in a sad, untended plot adorned with tacky souvenirs from her fans.
A rare sunny day.
The Village of Heptonstall.
Ancient tombstones laid out in the churchyard.
Sylvia Plath's headstone. (my camera mysteriously switched to monochrome)It was a heady week for me. I'd been deep in the mangle of making a living and writing had not been coming easily. Melvin and Malorie opened my rusty tap and allowed the words to flow.
Here's a lovely New York Times article waxing lyrical on the joys of the semi-colon and the elegance of correct punctuation. The piece is marred only by the correction that appears at the bottom:
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)
How Youth Changed America in the 60's
Laban Carrick Hill
Little Brown 2007
Finally. Now we're getting somewhere.
In an amazingly clear and concise 175 pages or so the history and influence of the Boomer generation is laid out for a young adult audience. Starting with the post-war population boom and suburban expansion, the book focuses on the various key elements and movements that brought
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) is reported to have deplored the gritty realism of modern children's books. I wasn't there so I can only point you to the reports in the 
).
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by Sally Nicholls
Teri, I really empathise with you here. The idea that you need to change who you are because the themes that resonate with you aren't as palatable in story terms, is a hard one. And maybe you're right, dystopias are the way to go. I'm sure you'll work it out and manage to draw out the parts of your vision and personality that work best on the page.<br /><br />For me, things have
Great blog, Teri. I've always believed that, in terms of personal qualities, our greatest strengths are the same as our greatest weaknesses.<br /><br />I think characters are at their most likeable when they're completely opened up to the readers scrutiny, no matter what their qualities may be.<br /><br />And by the way, every time I read something of yours it blows me away!
Write what you know, write what you are, and here's a good one: write what you feel!
Hiya<br /><br />WOW! I've just worked out who I am!<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid<br /><br />(thanks to Sara O'C for the link)<br /><br />Teri
I found this post fascinating, Teri, because my kids grew up (until ages 11 and 7) as expats - in Amsterdam.They went to an international school where there was great emphasis on getting them to think of themselves as global citizens, otherwise known as third culture kids. It's not the easiest thing to be, but now we're back in our 'home' culture (which neither of them feel is
Teri, I really appreciated this post. I haven't gone through anything like the number of moves you have, but even just bouncing around the US and the UK has been enough to make dislocation a common theme in both my life and my writing. <br /><br />I also empathize with how hard it is to find a solution for a character when you've saddled them with issues that are hard to resolve in your