Tag Archives: writing

May 7, 2013

Craft v Platform

By J Michael Melican

There is a tension in some, it would appear, between two apparently opposing forces: the practice of one’s craft, and the building of one’s platform.

I’ve discussed this before, but really, I have never thought of this – what I’m doing here – as ‘platform’. The concept that blogging, maintaining a site, setting up a page, being active on twitter, attending cons… that all of that could be merely some effort to ensnare potential readers, that always struck me as slightly nefarious. Dishonest at worst, a mistake of priorities at best.

I always figured on doing all those things because I like doing them. I like here tapping away and throwing my words out into the churning void of bandwidth and opinion that is the internet. I liked going to Genrecon and meeting a community of people who shared my passions, or gave me new insights into passions related but different, or even new insights into my own. I like interacting with people on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever else it might be. So I hadn’t really felt the tension between these things and the craft of writing, other than the obvious mismanagement of time that could occur.

But Jane Friedman’s post on Writer Unboxed got me thinking about this tension anew last month, and as a result I went away from the website here, I left neglected my Facebook Page, I went away from Twitter… ok. That last one’s not true. Twitter is a difficult thing to shake. I did though take a more passive role on twitter, allowing those I follow to guide me to links and such, but not tweeting (much).

What then has been gained from this month of social media ‘sabbatical’? What gained from a month devoted to craft rather than the building of ‘profile’?

  • I finished writing my draft of Old Man Madigan. It comes in at 10,000 words and I’m wondering now whether I submit it to a market which may be prepared to serialise it, or whether I go in hard with the editing shears and cut.
  • I started expanding some ideas for other short stories, tentatively entitled: Pareidolia, Watchers, Melange. They run a gamut of weird urban/psychological, scif-fi futurism, alt world Fantasy.
  • I wrote a draft of ‘The Witch Way’, a Fantasy short story  at 5,000 words and in need of an edit.
  • I completed a draft of ‘Leaving the Farm’ which had been kicking around in my head and on my computer for years, never really having much structure or purpose. It’s 2150 words and not really genre fiction at all to be honest, straight up Lit Fic with a rural bent.
  • I did a heck of a lot of reading: Chuck Wendig’s Bad Blood, Shotgun Gravy, Bait Dog, Blackbirds, and Mockingbird; Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country; Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns (and currently reading King). Reviews to come.
  • And I sent out a query email for Exile, in the hope that an agent may be interested.

An agent was, and requested chapters, and so I’ve sent them now. I’m cautious and nervous and excited and apprehensive and uncertain and hopeful and worried and blasé… all at once or vacillating between the states. In one sense it’s not a step I haven’t reached (and stumbled upon) before, but I feel it’s progress. The last time an agent requested chapters it was on the basis of a face-to-face meeting, not so in this case. The agent currently considering my submission asked to see more based solely on the few paragraphs into which I distilled my novel. So that’s a good thing, to know that the query email worked, to know that I can pique the interest.

All in all a productive month, especially as I look back on it now. So what’s in store for this month? I hope to edit those two stories that are complete drafts, and to send them out. I have a list of markets to which I can submit (thanks Peter M Ball and  Alan Baxter) and I intend to put that list to use… and of course to check my emails obsessively, in the hope of good news.

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October 8, 2012

… and continue…

By J Michael Melican

So I’ve got more than 50,000 words which have survived these revisions (in fact 53,300-ish).

That’s the good news. It represents 18 chapters of the novel and I’m hitting the point where the narratives are becoming quite divergent so there will be (I’m hoping) some chapters upcoming from POVs or in locations which are only minimally affected by the necessary changes.

I’m on page 177 of the word document (out of 633) and the total is still hovering on 195,000 words (so I’m more than 25% of the way there – kind of). I’m thinking I’m going to have to cut a whole scene, or perhaps whole characters / sub-plots to really get this thing down the the lean piece of writing I think it needs to be.

Big job, but I accepted the challenge, and if I’m going to go around calling myself a writer I’d better be doing some writing to justify the tag.

If deep cuts helped Cormac McCarthy produce Blood Meridian then who am I to puff out the chest and insist all my words are worthy of being spared?

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September 26, 2012

The revisions continue…

By J Michael Melican

I’m struggling to find an appropriate metric to evaluate my progress on this project at the moment, so let’s just deal with raw figures.

I have 93 pages of completed (revised) manuscript. Currently that equates to about 30,000 words (I’m being really rough here).

The total word-count on the document is 197,698 words. That means I only have 167,698 ish words to revise in the next five weeks (when Genrecon arrives).

That’s the road ahead. The road behind though is a little more encouraging: that 197,698 figure is down from 240,141. If my maths is not mistaken (by which I mean my ability to operate the calculator app on my phone) I’ve cut 42,443 words. That’s a good chunk of writing gone. The original Word page count was 766. Now it’s 638. I’ve cut out 128 A4 pages of 12 point Times New Roman.

It also means that of the (approximately) 75,000 words I’ve reviewed through this process 56.6% of them are gone. More than half! In a way that’s liberating, but in another way it’s terrifying. Yet I have faith in the process. I must have faith in the process.

This manuscript was flabby and lazy. For year it had built up its corpulence until it was too sluggish and stubborn to fight back, but now I’ve come to whip it in to shape and by November I want it mean, lean and undeniably impressive!

Five weeks. 167,000 words. 545 pages.

*cue ‘Gonna Fly Now‘

Challenge accepted.

 

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August 13, 2012

The need for (safe) risk taking

By J Michael Melican

I have always been more a solitary writer than one who actively seeks a community of the like-minded. The reasons for this are manifold:

Firstly I haven’t found a strong community of like-minded writers. Possibly (almost certainly) this is a bit of a chicken/egg argument, as I haven’t really actively sought one out. When I have, and I was for a short time part of a group of writers, the ‘like’ in like-minded was quite strained – incorporating everything from Hard SF to Paranormal Fiction to Epic Fantasy – and didn’t really fit within the genre niche I was carving for myself.

Secondly I have (until recently – more on that to come) been quite guarded about what I was doing. It was really only when I finished the ‘Exile’ manuscript (I’ve posted excerpts from the prologue here before) that I felt I had something I wanted people to read. Sharing scenes, excerpts, even chapters felt a bit false because they were so de-contextualised.

Thirdly, and perhaps most tellingly, I was just in an utter state of fear that it would all be rubbish. I had this thing I’d been building and crafting and drawing forth from my own creative energies for years (over a decade). How could I risk putting it out there and having it savaged? How could I risk being told that all that time and effort was wasted? Wasn’t it safer to keep my work of genius locked safely away from the harsh judgements of those that would seek to judge it?

No.

Of course not.

And yet it was a prevailing mindset. I recognise it sometimes when I think of my boys growing up. My eldest is off to school next year and I’m excited for him, but at the same time some part of me wishes I could hold him back – hold him locked in time – so he wouldn’t have to go out there and get bullied and fail at things and have his heart broken and risk all the myriad tragedies and tribulations of a life lived. That’s fair enough isn’t it? I’ll just keep him here in this happy (mostly) state of early child-hood where I can enjoy the beaming smile I get when he sees me and he will never tell me he hates me and storm out, and no one will be able to say a bad word about him?

No.

Of course not.

 

We know lives need to be lived, despite – or perhaps because of – all the inherent risks in the living. Books need to be read for the same reasons (I just compared my manuscript to my son. How droll. Forgive me.).

So I sent my book out to some (highly) trusted readers. Close friends. Family. People who have read and enjoyed the books I believe inspired me in the writing of ‘Exile’. The feedback I got was positive, and in some ways and in some cases constructive, but really it was a comfortable and familiar blanket in which to wrap myself. I mean no disrespect to my readers in saying that – they performed their role perfectly. My point is I needed someone to play another role.

I needed the harsh, but fair, critic. I needed the bald-faced truth. I needed someone to cast aside the flatteries and the positive reinforcement and to go straight to the heart of anything in the novel which didn’t work. I needed a critical eye to find the faults I had been denying to myself: the faults I most needed to fix before I pitch this tale.

And I found my man, and recently he gave me what I needed. I’ll give you all more detail on what that is in a series of subsequent posts. It’s a work in progress. Suffice it to say that some fairly drastic cuts are recommended and some significant changes to characters and characterisation. That in itself doesn’t amaze me (though to be honest I was amazed by the extent of the recommended cutting). What amazed me most was how well the advice I was getting struck those loose nerves that I had been soothing over. Almost everything which was identified for me aligned perfectly to some sense of uncertainty I’d been feeling, or some concern about the manuscript which I would occasionally glimpse and turn away from. It had become a ‘wilful unseeing’ of the faults in my work, and I’d gotten so fixated on looking at words within a scene that I hadn’t asked myself ‘does this paragraph need to be here?’ ‘does this scene?’ ‘does this chapter?’ ‘does this character?’.

I feel the answers may be difficult to nail down, and maybe all these alterations will take something away from the manuscript which will be lost forever. This is the risk involved in following these recommendations, but I’m at least now at a place with my writing that I have the courage to take the risk.

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August 6, 2012

The Narrative Present

By J Michael Melican

After writing my last post I was curious to see that I had, without making any conscious desire to do so, framed the narrative in the past tense. This I assume is, of itself, unremarkable. But I later found in telling the tale, and writing it down elsewhere that as the event became more distant in the past my narrative voice shifted from past-tense to present.

Instead of ‘the car sped through the intersection I am suddenly telling people that ‘this car speeds through the intersection’. I’m describing the driver, I’m reporting the dialogue with the woman in distress, I’m explaining that ‘she just walks off’ after she denies the need for further assistance. All this in the present tense, as if it were happening as I spoke. The astute among you may have noticed that I’m doing it now in recounting these past tellings of the tale.

This is not a new, nor even entirely unexpected phenomenon, but it was one of which I was not even conscious.

Literary theorists would describe this as the Narrative Present Tense, but linguists might be more likely to describe it as the Historical Present Tense, and it’s use has been becoming more common, to the point that in 2010 The Guardian ran an article on its prevalence in that year’s Man Booker Prize nominees and Phillip Pullman’s apparently scathing rebukes (Pullman later responded).

The Historical Present Tense is quite rightly used in non-fiction – such as for accounts of history, or in journalism – such as in headlines. In conversation and other spoken modes we seem quite at ease slipping into the Narrative present to tell stories and relate anecdotes of our day.

‘So I’m walking past the shops when suddenly this guy jumps out and he asks me for a lighter…’ or some such. Note the verb forms: ‘walking’, ‘jumps’, ‘asks’. This type of story telling conveys the action as something immediate and ongoing. This is not a completed event, relegated to memory. This event is suddenly alive again. It is being played out ‘in real time’ as it were.

But does it have a place in written fiction?

The narrative present does bring the past back to life. A ‘revivification of history’ as it were. It can also mark a change it the narrative, using changes in tense to separate different segments, such as a character in the narrative relating dialogue in the narrative present. It can provide a ‘now’ – a present moment in the ‘life’ of the text – which separates that particular scene from those that come chronologically before or afterwards.  All of these things are useful, and if skilfully used will add to the quality of the writing, but as Pullman warns its overuse can denude the writing of the desired effect. By striving to be expressive, we rob our writing of the variegations of expression.

The Editor’s Blog has a good discussion on the pros and cons of both the past and present tenses as they apply to longer narratives (such as novels).

In the end, the important thing is to write good fiction and write it well. If the tense helps to make your fiction more powerful then so much the better. If it makes it seem that you are constantly shouting for attention, then you have a problem. Of course knowing the problem makes it that much easier to solve.

For my part I tend to prefer the past tense for extended pieces, but I’m playing around with the present for flash length fiction and shorter stories. The most important thing I’ve found (and most will agree) is to be consistent. Perhaps I’ll be able to polish something up into an example of how to make the narrative present  work for your readers.

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June 10, 2012

Quotes on writing

By J Michael Melican

Having now submitted my short stories to the contests and having little else to do (in a writing sense) than to sit a wait I’ve gone back to the completed manuscript of my novel ‘Exile‘ and started filtering through my drafts for my urban weird novel project.

Not a lot of progress to report per se, but it got me thinking about the rules I try to follow when writing. Many of these are quotations, aphorisms or apophthegms which I have, for better or worse, committed to memory and practice.

Whenever I am struggling with the muses, or more likely their absence,  I call to mind William Faulkner saying “I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.” He also said “I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” These quotes remind me that if I am to seriously consider myself a writer it must be a craft at which I work, not a whim I indulge in the name of inspiration. ‘Writer’s Block’ is, paradoxically, both a nonsense and a default state.

I haven’t actually read any of E.L. Doctorow’s work, and I usually shy from quoting authors with whom I’m unfamiliar, but this sums it up quite well: ”Planning to write is not writing. Outlining–researching–talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” It is as if he knows me, or perhaps as if my procrastination is not unique – nor even uncommon.

I know a lot of writers advocate a daily routine of writing several hundred, or thousand, words each day regardless of circumstances. I’m not quite there yet, but I am thinking it likely has merit. Routines often do. Leonardo Da Vinci warned that “Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.” To be a writer then is to write. That ‘writer’ is a noun is just a semantic or syntactic necessity. The writer can no more be removed from the act of writing than Nietzche’s lightning can be removed from its flash.

So once something’s down and it’s not at the standard I like to flatter myself I am capable of, what then? Margaret Atwood has said “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” Jung believed that “perfection belongs to the Gods…” I think of this and Nick Hornby‘s advice about accepting one’s own ‘badness’ when I go back over something that last night was brilliant and now is utter drudge. It is these quotes which convince me to work through my horror at what a terrible writer I am and to remember that only by creating material can it be polished and refined until it is a thing of beauty (or perhaps just a thing of minimal ‘badness’). Sometimes of course it can be too tempting to hold on to a particularly fine turn-of-phrase or lyrical waxing, and in overcoming the temptation to keep it at all costs I loop back to Faulkner’s advice. “Kill your darlings…”

And when it is done I generally find that I have an overwhelming urge to hide it away where no other person will ever see it or submit it to judgment, and simultaneously a completely contradictory urge to have someone, anyone, read it and validate it with praise. The fear is paralysis. For years I was under its power, and at times I still am. In those times I turn to a certain professor of biochemistry who has published 500 titles and has works in all ten categories of the Dewey Decimal system, arguably the biggest of Golden Age Sci-Fi’s ‘Big Three’

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.” Isaac Asimov

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May 8, 2012

Awards

By J Michael Melican

So I’m juggling a few projects here I know, but I’m adding more:

The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre is in WA and runs annual competitions. One of which is specifically Speculative Fiction and entries close later this month.

The Australian Book Review runs  the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and it too closes for entries later this month. In this case it is not Speculative Fiction per se. The past winner describes her genre as Farm Lit, or Rural Romance. I’m not so much a writer of Romance, but I agree with her that writers should have the imperative to write about sheep if they wish. I’ve written about the rural life myself, so I’m treating it as open to some of the less obviously Fantasy pieces I’ve written.

So if I’m a bit quiet I’ll be working on my entries to these competitions. I’ve got some projects in the pipe-line I am polishing for the purpose.

Other than that I’ve experienced renewed vigour for my follow-up to my manuscript novel, and I’m still spending some time with my Urban Fantasy draft.

I suppose it’s about finding that balance between my writing and building this platform.

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