I’m still in the throes of my move, spreading my time between Cumbria and Liverpool. We’ve just moved into a temporary house with a suitcase each. I’m still working fulltime, writing a tech book, and trying to write. I seem to remember this was once about making more time. Maybe when the dust settles.
If I’ve managed little literary in recent weeks, I have at least watched my betters at their labors. In the last week or so Charlie Stross explained the publishing industry (how does he find time to write books, too?), super short fiction made the grade and a longer work hit the wastebin. We reflected on the gap between our potential and the sad reality we keep on churning out. We saw a book cover designed in two minutes. A.L Kennedy got into a fight with her inner editor. It turned out that there are ten rules to writing fiction. Trouble is, nobody’s sure which are the right ones.
Charlie Stross has been even more prolific than usual of late, with a fantastic series of posts on the many misconceptions about the publishing industry. After an introduction he looked in detail at the business of making, selling, and translating books, as well as the reasons behind trends in book length.
The thing about protagonists is that they sometimes need to explain themselves. As Plot to Punctuation reminded us last week, if you’re not all first person mock memoir, then perhaps you need a sidekick. Not only can you bounce your main character off him, he might give you an opportunity for a decent subplot or two.
Anyone familiar with these roundups knows that I lurk around a bunch of blogs in my struggle to avoid doing any work. I was pleased to see at his site that the Struggling Writer placed third in a microfiction contest last week. Then, because the universe works that way, I happened upon a post by at The Literary Lab. It seems he’s steeling himself before rewriting 80% of his novel. It’s a tough business.
Also at The Literary Lab Davin Malasarn posted about a syndrome that lot of us face. He calls it Potential Vision — the sense of one’s own talent, and the sad gap between that potential and the reality of the rough drafts we send out into the world. Davin chose to wring a positive message from this discrepancy. You shouldn’t take criticism too personally, he said, because it doesn’t address the work that will come with effort and polish. Also this gulf should be a prompt to work all the harder. Of course, there is always the possibility for some of us that everything we write is always going to be crap, and we’re just deluded about our potential. Surely not.
In her blog, Alexandra Sokolov specializes in applying screenwriting techniques to fiction. She whiled away a few hours before the Oscars last week, laying out some elements of the first act. The post is an excellent checklist of starting elements, with a whole set of links to related articles on the blog. I hope she gets to the next act soon, though, or I’ll never finish this book.
If Sokolov was all about structure, then fellow author A.L Kennedy took us on a bit of a meander in The Guardian’s Bookblog. Her piece was part how-to-write article, part inner dialogue: “I am going to give you such a slap in a minute. Expo-bloody-sition. Honestly”. Kennedy’s subject was the process of putting one word in front of the other. The meticulous, maddening circularity of it all came through nicely.
Links to links to links this, but io9 reposted a super-speeded up video of a book cover under design. Originally from Orbit Books the video shows Lauren Panepinto’s design of the cover for Blameless by Gail Carriger. Feeling lazy? Here’s the vid:
See? Easy.
Finally The Guardian took their cue from Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, (which they also published in summary) and asked a panel of authors including Margaret Atwood, AL Kennedy, Roddy Doyle and David Hare to name some of theirs. My favorite? Neil Gaiman:
- Write
