Photos taken in November 2020
Silent Sunday: Yellow, Orange, Silver
Wordless Wednesday: Fading Beauties
Photos taken in November 2020
New Site: Writers Supporting Writers
I’m delighted to announce a new WordPress site for writers.
Writers Berthold Gambrel, Mark Paxson, S.K. Nicholls and Audrey Driscoll (yes, that’s me) have joined forces to share our thoughts with other writers. Stop by and have a look around.
Writers Supporting Writers may be found HERE
Silent Sunday: Smoke Bush
Photos taken in November 2020
Twenty Years a Writer, Part 7: Unwritten and Unrealized
Some writers say their characters come alive during the writing process and even push the story in unexpected directions. But do we owe anything to characters we’ve thought up but whose stories remain unwritten, stuck halfway through Chapter 3? Or languishing in an abandoned notebook?
A while ago, in a discussion among several indie authors, I declared that I had no unfinished works. That’s actually true, although She Who Comes Forth stalled at page 17 for months before I found my way back to completing it. But I do have a complete novel that’s been sitting around unpublished since 2008.
Winter Journeys is literary fiction unrelieved by any genre fiction attributes. Moreover, it grew out of my obsession in the early 2000s with Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. And said obsession was due in part to my experiences of rejection while trying to get my first few novels traditionally published.
The twenty-four songs that make up Winterreise follow the wanderings of a man who has been rejected by a young woman and her family, and who finally rejects the world. I turned that story arc into a novel about a woman who goes through a similar trajectory in the present time, while she becomes fascinated with a particular recording of Schubert’s music.
I hesitated to publish Winter Journeys myself, first, because literary fiction doesn’t sell unless boosted by the forces of Big Publishing, literary prizes, and being made into movies. And second, because I had an intention to send it around to Canadian publishers. They do publish literary fiction, with the help of arts and culture grants from the federal government.
But since entering the realm of self-publishing, I’ve totally lost the mindset and desire to submit. (I actually hate that word, even.) So this novel continues to lurk in the shadows, although I’ve designed a number of cover images for it. Here are two of them…
2028 will be the 200th anniversary of the publication of Winterreise, and incidentally, of Schubert’s death. I think that would be the right year to publish Winter Journeys.
In the meantime, I’m getting psyched for writing a sequel to She Who Comes Forth, provisionally titled (what else?) She Who Returns. (You read it first here, folks.)
This is the final post in this series. I hope reading about my writing journey has been informative, interesting, or at least diverting. Here’s a link to Part 1 if you want to read it again. Links to all the other parts are there.
Well, fellow writers, do you have any stories languishing in unwritten or unpublished limbo? Do you feel you have an obligation to give them life?
Twenty Years a Writer, Part 6: Don’t Forget to Justify!
When I published Tales from the Annexe, I had to go back and correct some infuriating mistakes in both the ebook and print versions. The most obvious was forgetting to justify the text for the print version. There I was, admiring the formatted document and thinking formatting had been relatively easy this time, when I realized something. The text was left-aligned (like this post). Unless I justified it, my book would have ragged right margins.
Aargh!
A book with ragged right margins is perfectly okay — except it looks self-published. Some potential readers will reject it for that reason alone, even if the story looks interesting. Unfortunately, self-published book = crap is still a thing.
So I had to justify. And pay attention to other niceties of formatting, even for ebooks. Ebooks don’t need page numbers, headers, or footers, but hard page breaks after the title page and between chapters, or the stories in a collection, are a nice touch. When I first uploaded the ebook document to KDP, it lacked those page breaks. (Now it has them.)
Formatting a Word document so it may be turned into a print book boils down to this: set the margins for your trim size, justify the text, add Section Breaks (odd or even), add Footers (page numbers), add Headers (title, chapter or story title, and/or author). For headers and footers, the crucial thing is Link to Previous. If you want the header/footer to be the same as in the previous section, you leave this alone. If not, you click to turn it off and then make your changes. Look at a traditionally-published book to see which pages need headers or footers.
Always take a good look at your files before you publish. KDP provides online previewers that show exactly how a book (e-version or print) will look. They are definitely worth using. Even so, I overlooked the details I’m talking about here.
Like the print cover image, for example. Only after I uploaded it did I realize that part of the title was ever so slightly off-centre.
Aargh!
At first, I told myself these details didn’t matter; no one but I would notice the ragged right margin, the lack of page breaks, the off-centre title text. But of course some potential readers would notice and might conclude that the contents were probably crap. And those deficiencies would always be the first things I saw when I looked at the book. My book. And because it’s so easy to upload corrected files, I had no excuse not to do it.
So I went around the mulberry bush a few more times — added the page breaks, fixed the cover image, and justified the text, created new PDFs, downloaded and uploaded, and waited the extra days for the book to go “live” again.
Now it’s perfect. Or as close as it needs to be.
Fellow writers and publishers, how much trouble do you take with formatting? Do details like these matter to you?
Tales from the Annexe is a free download from Friday, November 27th until Saturday, November 28th, (midnight Pacific Standard Time)
AMAZON: US UK CA AU
Final part next time: Unwritten and Unrealized.
Twenty Years a Writer, Part 5: Editing Process
Writers frequently talk about their writing process. Editing needs a process too. In the early stages, some call it “rewriting,” reserving the term “editing” for polishing prose and correcting errors.
At first, I had no editing process; I simply read my manuscript, starting at the beginning (again and again), and tweaked in an unstructured way, fixing typos in paragraphs I would end up deleting next time around. Then I joined a critique group and had to figure out how to deal efficiently with feedback from other writers in a way that would improve my work-in-progress.
Eventually, I worked out a process. I can see progress from one session to the next, which wasn’t the case when I was just flailing around. Even more important, I know when I’m finished. Now I find editing much less demanding than the brain-to-text process of the first (or “proto”) draft.
Some writers prefer to print their manuscripts for editing. I actually dislike printing, but I do find it useful to make a copy of the document and mark it up with different colours and notes to myself.
Sometimes, I’ve found, editing is not so much a matter of adding or deleting stuff, as re-ordering it.
I’m always surprised by how much text I move around early in the editing process. Sentences and paragraphs — even entire scenes — go in different directions and end up far from where they started. Some paragraphs get taken apart and the parts moved to different places. Is my thinking that disordered at the first draft stage?
Actually, yes. At that point, I’m intent on turning ideas into words and getting them down. I don’t revisit what I’ve written until the whole thing is finished and typed up with a word processor, which is when I start editing. In the hurly-burly of writing the proto-draft, it’s not surprising that I often overlook the optimal order of occurrence. (Look at all those o’s!)
Order of occurrence is important, not only for physical events but for characters’ thoughts and emotions. Something has to happen before a character reacts to it. Sometimes, story elements that belong together get separated and must be reunited, unless they’re really two instances of the same thing, in which case one of them should be deleted.
Because of what I think of as “word count anxiety,” I crank out a lot of words at the proto-draft stage, so I have to lots to delete at the editing stage. When it comes to sentences or whole paragraphs, I sometimes edge up to deletion by first highlighting the problematic text and adding a note, in all caps so it’s hard to miss: IS THIS NECESSARY? (See image above.) When I revisit that spot later, I move the highlighted stuff to the bottom of the document. If what’s left works without it, I blow that material away or put it into a separate “Deleted Stuff” file. (Torture your darlings before you kill ’em. Or put ’em in jail so you can torture them later.)
I make several passes through the manuscript, targetting specific problems. First I look for plot problems and order of occurrence issues. Then repeated material. Then the list of my personal problem words. I work from big issues to niggly details, leaving the final check for typos, omitted periods, quotation marks, and question marks to the VERY END.
A sad truth is that many small errors are introduced during the editing process. That’s why it’s best to deal with the fiddly stuff (typos, extra spaces, missing punctuation marks) AFTER operations that involve adding, moving, or deleting chunks of text. To borrow a simile from woodworking, there’s no point in polishing something that still needs to be shaped or sanded.
I suggest following something like the following steps, in this order:
- Structural stuff: deleting or adding scenes, moving paragraphs and sentences
- Continuity stuff: finding and fixing plot holes and inconsistencies with names, physical characteristics, and similar details.
- Polishing the prose: finding and fixing clunkiness, repetitions, awkward phrases, sub-optimal words, etc.
- Finding and fixing grammatical errors, punctuation errors, and typos
- Final detailed proofreading, paragraph by paragraph, starting at the end and working backwards. (That forces you to see the words and punctuation marks, rather than reading the story.)
Some of my first manuscripts were created before I trained myself not to follow periods with two spaces, and before I started using proper em-dashes. Word’s Find and Replace function is great for hunting these out and fixing them.
In fact, the Find function can be really helpful when searching for many of the infuriating small errors that hide until after a book has been published, and leap out cackling wickedly as the happy author is perusing their newborn. Author and blogger Virginia S. Anderson has compiled detailed tips and suggestions for using Find in several posts, the first of which can be found HERE.
The only word I always search for is “that.” It’s amazing how often it can be removed without harming anything. I wouldn’t do a global search and delete, however; sometimes “that” is just what you need. And each of my works has had its own set of “pet” words, like “glow,” “mutter,” “forces,” or “ultimate.” They’re useful, but are also memorable enough to annoy readers if they turn up too frequently.
Fellow writers, what is your editing process? Methodical or improvised? Do you enjoy editing or think of it as torture?
Next time: Don’t Forget to Justify!
Twenty Years a Writer, Part 4: Reasons to Write and Reasons to Publish
Now that so many writers are also publishers (of their own writings), publishing seems like a natural outcome of writing. First you write, and then (after a few other operations) you publish. A no-brainer, right?
No. Writing and publishing are two completely different actions. While many pieces of text are written in order to be published as soon as possible, many others are not.
Reasons to Write
- Inspiration: you can’t not write
- Declaration: a statement you must make
- Exploration: you want to see if you can write
- Reminiscing: capturing the past for yourself or others
- Figuring Out: solving a problem by putting it into words
- Revelation: truth-telling
- Explanation: recording knowledge
Reasons to Publish
- To share ideas
- To amuse and delight
- To reveal something to the world
- To test your ideas
- To test your writing
- To make money
- To become famous
We write for personal reasons. We publish to share our writings with the world.
It stands to reason that we write more than we publish. We scribble down notes and ideas. We write multiple drafts and versions, we have false starts that go nowhere, we abandon pieces half-written when inspiration runs out. We write for practice, or to solidify ideas. We write out of frustration or rage or grief. Many of these writings are never intended to be published.
Writing does not equal publishing, no matter how easy it is to publish.
Freedom of thought is fundamental. No thought is forbidden, but not all thoughts need to be put into words and published. Any thought may be written, but some are best followed by shredding, burning, or deletion, rather than publication.
Then there are all those “rules” we keep reading about — never do this, always do that, don’t use these words, etc. Rules don’t matter if you’re writing with no intention to publish. Worrying about rules can hobble the mind and fetter the fingers. Beginning writers may think they must master the rules before they write anything, which likely means they won’t write at all. Forming thoughts into words can be freeing, healing, or motivating. No one should stifle the impulse to write because they haven’t learned the rules.
But before a piece of writing is published, it must be readable. That’s the time for attention to rules. If the words are to be out in the world and read by others, the writer must ensure they are effective vehicles for the thoughts they embody.
Fellow writers, do you always know when you write something that you will publish it? Do you ever write things you will never publish? Or regretted publishing something?
Next time: Editing process.
Silent Sunday: Hosta’s Exit
Photos taken November 1, 2020
Twenty Years a Writer, Part 3: Writing From the Inside or the Outside?
There’s a lot of advice for writers on how to structure a piece of fiction from inciting incident to crisis and conclusion. How to create conflict and build up tension. How to make relatable characters. To me, that advice often sounds like the writer is looking at their work from the outside, standing apart from it, assembling pieces and fastening them together.
I prefer to write from the inside.
It’s like I’m creating the structure from within and living in it with my characters. I’m right there with them as they interact, experiencing their conflicts and struggles. It’s like making a burrow, digging into the substance of the story and shaping its hollows and passages with my hands and body.
Writing from the inside is writing in first person or using what’s called “deep POV.” That is an extremely close third person point of view, just one remove from first person. The narrator doesn’t speak as one of the characters, but is pretty much joined at the hip with them, close enough to hear their inner thoughts. It’s as though that character, the writer, and the reader are one. A drawback of this device is that other characters’ thoughts must be conveyed in dialogue or by some other means.
This inside/outside thing reminds me of Emic vs Etic — a concept in anthropology that distinguishes between ways of describing a culture. An outside observer’s account (“etic”) is scientifically detached but possibly coloured by his or her own culture. That written by a member of the culture (“emic”), while richer and more detailed, may be obscured by assumptions not available to all readers. For example: “The group demonstrates an animistic religion,” vs. “I honour the spirits of sky, water, and stone.”
I won’t say that one approach is better than the other, but working from the inside feels right to me. All my novels and many of my short stories are in first person. Of the fourteen stories in Tales from the Annexe, nine are in first person. Those with a third person point of view are, in my opinion, a bit less intense and immersive.
With my eyes useless, I explored my darkness. Like a trapped insect, I crawled inside the walls of my skull, revisiting memories of sight. … I remembered the weight of the glass cylinder filled with the drug, the small resistance as the needle punctured living tissue, the faint grating of glass on glass as I dispensed death.
(From “The Night Journey of Francis Dexter”)
Writing from the outside may be the preferred method for writers who do detailed outlines and other preliminary work before they begin to write. Working from the inside may be favoured by those who plunge in and splash out a messy first draft with the intent to shape it later, in effect writing first from the inside and then from the outside. And maybe those who start from the outside need to do some work from the inside after they’ve created the framework.
Or maybe it’s about Thinking (inside) and Doing (outside). Introspective works may be best served by first person or extremely close third person. For action-packed thrillers, close third person may be effective, possibly switching between or among characters. Epic fantasy, on the other hand, with its intricate plots and many characters, demands third person omniscient. And first person or deep POV may be used for specific scenes to add intensity.
Whichever approach a writer takes, it’s helpful to do it consciously and methodically, so as to maximize the impact and avoid confusing the reader.
All this reminds me of something I read about how beavers build their lodges. First they pile up a huge mass of sticks, and then burrow inside it to shape their living spaces from within. Then they plaster the outside with mud to make it weathertight. There is something beaverish about us writers, isn’t there?
Fellow writers, do you distinguish between writing from the inside and the outside? Which approach works best for you?
Next time: Reasons to Write and Reasons to Publish
