The Read Aloud Edit

Yes, I’ve been doing this with Babel and in one day got almost half way through it. It can of course make you throat very dry. It made my eyes go funny. But it is incredibly worth it. You notice so much more than when you read silently, for example:

• missing punctuation
• superfluous punctuation
• misspellings
• words missed out
• words added in
• clunky language
• repetitions
• lack of continuity between paragraphs
• ugly language
• darlings that still haven’t been killed
• overall flow

There is only one more edit after that – the copy edit, and in fact the reading out loud one partly does that anyway.

Writing Novels for Young People

I really enjoyed my session yesterday with this group. They are a Level 6 (second year) group of very motivated students. We are in our second week. Last week’s task was to create two characters, one of them the main character of the proposed novel and one of them the friend, the mentor or the enemy. They have to really know their characters well – physically, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and they must also know the motivation that this character has in the story they have created. I was pleased that although not all that many students had written their scene, they had given considerable thought to the characters they had created. There was also some discussion about the characters needing to be rounded. Rounded and whole.
We then looked at several story theories. The first thing they need to do is put their story into a sentence – two lines maximum. Then they need to give their story a shape. The Robert McKee structure is a good starter: inciting incident, growing complexities, crisis, climax, reversal resolution (epilogue). Then they can look at other complexities- Freytag’s or Melrose’s, or my own plot pyramid. There are also the various hero’s journey theories Joseph Campbell, Vladimir Propp and Christopher Vogler. Add in also a handful of Jungian archetypes.
We discussed the character and the plot shapes in their set books.
They’ve been sent away to write their opening scene and work out their plot. I have great hopes for next week.

Hot News - Bridge House, Richard Adams, 100 Stories for Haiti

Hot News
What a weekend!
Friday was a great day. My research day. A day when I can stay at home and mainly write. Other days, when I have the time, I rarely have the energy or the brain space.
So, Friday was great and was going to get even better: my friend Debz, publicist and editor at Bridge House was coming for the weekend and we would be having a partners’ meeting that evening and would be travelling to Whitchurch in Hampshire the next morning to meet Richard Adams and finalise some details for his contribution to our anthology Gentle Footprints.
But then the phone started ringing. It was Greg McQueen. Or rather it was Debz telling me that Greg had been trying to get hold of me. I eventually managed to speak to him. His original publisher for 100 Stories for Haiti had had to drop out. I had been in contact because I found it odd that the books would not be sold in bookshops – even though the book would have an ISBN.
Well, it suddenly became the first item on the partners’ agenda. And we agreed to do it. Martin, our designer, is now rapidly putting the book together and we’re launching on 4 March.
The partners’ meeting was magic. Four partners now, probably. We have such plans. Bridge House is blossoming and taking off. Watch our spaces.
The meeting with Richard Adams was even more magical. “So, are you going to include my story?” he asked, almost as nervous as a first time writer. What does he think! This is the man who disrupted my PGCE year with the publication of Watership Down - we were all reading it instead of getting on with our work. And that book is still selling as well as it was just three years after it came out. What a question!
Having my good friend Debz for company for a couple of days was another bonus.
What a way to go!

Postscript Coping with Rejections

Walking For Water Here it is now:

Coping with Rejection

Coping with Rejection
I once read of a mid-list writer who seemed to be living the life that many of us dream of. She writes in the mornings then does marketing in the afternoons. This includes giving talks to groups. She also has a family life and a dog she walks to give her thinking time - and she still gets rejections. She calls them rewrites. A healthy attitude, I think.
Rejections cause huge emotional upheavals no matter how used you are to them. I don’t just mean the initial rejection. There’s also the editing process and then the reviews afterwards. At that point, you can’t rewrite. You can learn lessons for next time, though. And don’t we learn all the time? In my case to the extent that I can hardly look at work once it’s published. My own words can make me cringe because I’m so much a better writer now than I was when I last tinkered with the piece.
I’m absolutely furious about a recent rejection – so furious that I’ve almost got the voodoo doll and the pins out. In fact it isn’t even a rejection – the editor has not had the courtesy to let me know. My own publishing company does not behave that way. We accept unsolicited and we look at every single one. We let every single author know.
Yet even this time there is a quite creative solution: I’ve submitted it elsewhere. Immediately. I’ll actually know later today whether that submission has been accepted or not. If it is, I’ll market it furiously. The anger can be useful. It sharpens the determination.
What would I advise?
Don’t be too reasonable about the anger. It’s useful energy. But try and get some distance from your text before you actually react. Revisit the text anyway – even if you’ve not had constructive criticism. Send it out again. Keep your ear to the ground. Look for the opportunities. Spend a long time on your own craft. But above all, remember the joy.

Blog Experiment Started

I set up the blog experiment with our MA group yesterday. We’re using Blogger despite the current problems. Blogger is really such an easy platform to use – despite the pesky way it won’t let you copy and paste Word documents any more. We’re tying it up with something we do later. The scenario is that we are aliens on a tour to earth and are finding everything strange. It will be interesting to see how far we can push that.

Students are also getting familiar with the way this blogging platform works, the way we create a fictional blog, how we can use Web 2.00 to promote our work and even to publish our work.  

Within the scope of the fiction we’re creating, we’re really trying to see our own lives objectively. Later in the semester we’ll be working on creating a new world. There are considerable difficulties in getting beyond our own. It’s almost as difficult as imagining a colour you’ve never seen before.  

See: Our Time on Earth

Web 2.00

I’m delivering an MA session this evening. We are looking at some more forms of writing. – using blogs, Twitter and Second Life. I obviously use blogs myself. But I’m not just talking about what I’m doing right now. I mean fictional blogs, where you actually try to create a story through a blog. www.blogger.comThere are also applications for this in Second Life and on Twitterwww.twitter.com. You can also tweet about the blog and take it into Second Lifehttp://secondlife.com/?v=1.1 .

These work really well also for collaborative projects.

These three platforms also are good for your networking in your life as a writer. You can post about events and books coming out. You can add your collected wisdom to the various debates.

In the end, they’re also about ways of being published. There are lots of opportunities for making your voice heard. There is little quality control however. Some good material fails to rise to the top of the pile. Some poor material does because the focus has been on promotion and marketing rather than quality.

At least, though you can get your work out there. You can even earn money for it if you go to sites with advertising or get your own AdSense account. It’s only a trickle, but rivers grow from collections of trickles.        

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