Morning Coffee Break

I got into a discussion about the method of writing the other day and found that I'm really quite archaic. It came about when a fellow writer on livejournal (I say 'fellow' though he's far more successful than me) lost a few thousand words to a crash or a virus or somesuch. In the old days when the internet was clockwork I began writing by having a 'master copy' of the WIP and writing in a seperate file (chapter one, chapter two and so on), adding chapters to the master copy as they were copleted and backing them onto a floppy disk (remember those?).

I still do this now -- write in seperate chapter files, I mean, not back onto floppy discs. Soes anyone else do that, or do you write into one master copy. Perhaps you use Scrivener or a similar writing program (Does anyone use Scrivener for windows? I tried the trial version and fould it didn't save my files properly).

These days my files are backed up online using the free applications Dropbox which lets you share folders over different computers or with friends and acts as a permanent backup accessable from the internet and sugarsync which keeps a live copy of your documents online.

I'm about until lunchtime -- after that I'm down in London (ugh) for the weekend.

Projects and keeping your mind off things

Good Morning Racers,

Please help yourself to some almond croissants and a bacon and egg mcmuffin while I begin this morning's topic.

So its been a pretty rubbish month or so for me but I've been far to busy to dwell on things.  At present I have a stagnant novel gathering dust in my desk drawer begging for my attention. A few short stories ‘out there’ gasping to make a permanent escape from the confines of the ‘unpublished stories’ folder on my computer. I have just finished and passed a Learn It Creative writing course and am about to embark on an OU course in Creating Writing at the end of October. When I find time I’m entering competitions, blogging and reading whenever I can.

I think it’s important to keep ourselves busy while waiting to hear feedback from agents or editors.

So lets discuss:

1. What projects do you have on the go – are you studying, working on shorties, novels, articles?

2. How do you distract yourself from waiting on feedback from agents/editors/critiques (doesn’t have to be writing related activities)?

Changing Hats

Welcome to rainy Chesterfield ladies and gentleman (Good to see you back Cap'n). I'm skint, so there's tap or rainwater as you wish, and dirt or some raw herbs from the garden to nibble on. Mind the berries -- they're belladonna.

We had a post a week or two ago about writing for different genres and whether you should use a pen name. (I don't as it happens). My question today is similar. How easy do you find it to switch genres? Not having made any sort of impact on the writing world, I generally write for competitions and have poetry, horror, erotica, paranormal, humour and crime fiction storied published, plus a few non-fiction pieces on BDSM and polyamorory. How easy do you chaps find it to switch genre? This week, for instance, I write zombie humour in the mornings, poetry over lunch and horror in the afternoons. Does anyone else do that? How do you switch genres, if you do?

Softly Softly

I have tea, coffee, instant chai latte (please help yourself -- I think it's disgusting) and de-caff tea and coffee and some rather wonderful thyme tea. Also chocolate. The local shop were selling four easter eggs for a pound. No wonder I'm overweight!

In one of the comments last week I touched on 'notecards' as a way of keeping track of characters (and confessed it was something I should do but didn't). What I do, though, is use a variety of noteboarding tools to help me keep track of the plot and subplots.

I regularly use Write It Now and have just started trying Text Block Writer and I've tried a few others in the past.

How about everyone else? Do you use paper? cards? software? or do you keep it all in your head?

Recurring Characters

Tea ? Do help yourself. There's milk or lemon. Left-over easter egg, too.

As a writer I often re-use characters. Even if I'm not writing Harold and Jasfoup I regularly use a character over and over, particularly when I write erotica (of which I've placed a novel, a novella and three short stories this year already). It's because I know the characters; I know how they'll react in a given situation.

When I do have a new character I have to write flashes and drabbles for them. Most recently is Madame du Pardo, a psychic with the unfortunate ability of answering questions with the absolute truth. Does the questioner really want to know the man they love will, in six years, cash in their daughters insurance and college fund to pay for his cocaine habit?

What about you? Do you have recurring characters?

Morning Coughing

There's a selection of teas -- black, greem herbal and decaff -- and instant or filtered coffee and those little packets of 'instant' cappucino. Do help yourself to the French Fancies - they were on offer and only a little bit out of date.

How do you deal with multitasking? Does anyone else do it?

Personally I only like to work on one book at a time, whether that be editing, drafting or re-writing, but I keep up my four blogs daily, two of which are ongoing fiction (Jasfoup and Laverstone) and my poetry (one of my goals for next year will be to start subbing poetry). Then yesterday I had the idea for another on-going story/blog about anouther of my chararcters and I though 'Don't be so so cofus*, Rachel, you haven't the time or the skill or to strength of character to ever get it published'.

Does anyone else have multiple projects on the go?

Also:
Here's one asked on one of the other writing groups I belong to:

If you could ask any one author (living or dead) any one question, who and what?



*Thank you Rowan

Friday Tea (or, "Oops - I forgot")

So sorry - I was tapping away and suddenly wondered where the Friday Coffee Morning post was. Then I remembered i was down for a stint sometime round December and there I was. Oops.

I have tea -- black (Darjeeling, Assam, Lady Grey), green, chai and herbal -- and pecan twists that were on sale at Morisson's at 69p for two. Help yourself.

Mea culpa.

Still, I did about 3K today on the latest unpublishable novel -- I swear I only write for two or three readers -- and Harold's in a pickle again. Nano, of course. I know some of the others here participated. How did you do?

For those that didn't, is writing 50K in 30 days of any use? Is Nano sneered at by the professionals as a bunch of amateurs pounding out purple prose for the sake of it? Has anyone ever published a nano novel? I came close once, but they wanted all the smut removed and I never heard anything again.

Coffee Morning: Distancing yourself

Thanks all for being so welcoming and chatty last week! I really do feel part of the gang now.

I promised something shorter, and different. Here goes....

Everyone* knows that the best thing to do when you've finished writing is to put it away for a good long while to get some distance from what you've written. Then, so the received wisdom goes, you can see your work with a fresh eye. See what works, what doesn't.

For most of us, though I'm guessing it doesn't always work out like that. You start writing with the best of intentions, think 'I'll be finished in plenty of time to submit to that competition' (or 'I'll be done way before that assignment is due in', for those who have done writing courses!). But - then life gets in the way, and you haven't got as much time to put it away for as you'd hoped.

Are there any ways round this?

How do you get distance from your work?**


* Probably.
** I kinda feel like Carrie Bradshaw, looking for the important questions. Hee.

Coffee Break: Introduction and Analogies

Morning everyone. I've been skulking round the back here without being brave enough to actually introduce myself for months now. I blog about writing here and about life in Newcastle here. I also am the main contributor to Newcastle upon Tyne Daily Photo. And the main reason I've never introduced myself is that...

(looks around for an escape route; can't see one)

... I've never decided which of the six novels that I've started (never getting more than a few thousand words into any) I should concentrate on.

I know (hangs head in shame).

So - it's time to commit, else I'll have to drop out and let someone else take my place. I'm B (also known as Beth; best call me that if you meet me in person) and I am writing on a novel around a young man who was abandoned as a baby; his adoptive mother; and his birth mother.

Aaaaah. That feels better.

Now, onto the Coffee Morning part of the proceedings. I have about seven different teas and various flavours of coffee (soya milk available if you'd prefer) and hot chocolate, with a lovely selection of pastries (dairy free available for anyone who wants them)... mmm.

Along with various other novel racers, I've been working on the Open University's Advanced Creative Writing over the last few months (as I'm sure many of you are sick of hearing about now!). One of the things we were expected to demonstrate a grip on was analogy.

I didn't get it. Why it's important. Why it's so hard to get right. Why I should care in the first place.

I started to understand when I likened the thoughts of one of my characters to a CD skipping in my final assignment; my tutor said she could imagine that this was something that was relevant to the character's life, that she could believe in that thought.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my opticians, reading the February edition of Marie Claire. An article about drunk dialling - why you should (or shouldn't) get drunk and phone your ex/parents/whoever. And I came across this sentence:

I spent the next week bright red with shame, like a large, devastated strawberry.

[copyright Tanya Gold; Feb 09 Marie Claire]

And suddenly I got it. This one sentence made me happy. I spent the rest of the day grinning to myself. And I nicked the magazine from my opticians so I could write about it here today. Sorry.

I still don't understand how to get it right every time. But I finally that it can be an really, really useful tool. How it can bring colour (literally in this case, I suppose!) and extra depth to your writing.

Do you use analogy in your writing? Why/why not?

(sorry it's so long. Something shorter, and completely different, next week)

(and Michael Jackson! And Farrah Fawcett! What a strange day.)

How soon is too soon?

Er, it's me again. Hot cocoa like my gran used to make this morning as there's a chill in the air – it might make you sleepy though.

I might be on my own on this one, but in the past I've been guilty of seeking a professional critique of my novels-in-progress long before they're finished. "It'll be good to know where/if I'm going wrong sooner rather than later," was my reasoning, "that way I can put things right before I get too far along." Perhaps not surprisingly those novels bit the dust soon after, and I realised that I wasn't so much looking for validation as confirmation of what I already knew – they weren't working.

I think if you submit your work at the three or four chapter stage, you're probably already having doubts about where it's heading ( the bin.) The danger too is that even if you ARE seeking constructive advice at an early stage the feedback is almost guaranteed to send you off on a different tangent, which may not be a good thing. If you're anything like me it's only when you're further along in your novel that you really get to know your characters and what motivates them, and you start to see for yourself what might need changing in those early chapters.

I now realise that when you know or feel instinctively that your novel's on the right tracks, the need for “proper” reassurance fades. I don't want anyone professional seeing my words until I've finished this time round – they might burst my little bubble and I don't want that because I'm having a whale of a time!

Have you ever sought an early critique and did it work for you, or do you not bother with them at all and trust your gut feeling instead?

Fly me to the Moon

Welcome to my first coffee morning! It’s naturally decaffeinated Fairtrade I’m afraid, as I can’t handle the hard stuff, but I’ve baked some naughty chocolate-chip cookies to make up for it, so do tuck in…

Now, when I started my w-i-p I knew that my character was going to have a swotty younger brother studying physics at Cambridge University. No problemo I thought – despite never having been a) anywhere near a university or b) to Cambridge. That’s what Google was made for.

So far, her interactions with her brother have been at home or on the phone, but in my latest chapter my MC has to pay him a visit at the University, and that’s where I’ve come a cropper. Yes, there’s a wealth of information online about the university (too much probably) but it’s more complicated than I imagined. For a start the place is MASSIVE, with references to Colleges (?) and in relation to studying physics, a department called The Cavendish Lab, but is this bit for graduates only, or undergraduates or…help!

I’ve chickened out for now and had them meet up at a café in town, but as I’ve never been to Cambridge either I’m now wondering, for authenticity’s sake, whether a trip up there would be justified (it’s not like it’s the moon or anything.) And if it is, why on earth didn’t I make my MC’s brother the owner of a luxury spa resort on a remote tropical island reachable only by specially adapted limousine??

Are you able to write confidently about places you’ve never been to, and if so – how?

Coffee Break - The 70% Slump

Good morning! A Twinings variety pack (such good value) of teas on the table, the kettle behind you and a coffee brewing. The weather is sunny but with a very cold wind so I've abandoned meeting in the garden but there are still a variety of cold drinks available.

I've noticed on several of the blogs that people are mentioning the 70% slump, where you have a good proportion of the book written but then lose the oomph for completing it. I have to admit that my current WIP is on 95K with 10K to go and it's become a slog.

Why do you think this happens? Is it because you don't want to finish? You've become bored with it? Some other reason? Are you putting it off by looking to the next story?

How do you get over the slump? Do you have a slump at all?

Coffee Morning Trailers

Good Morning!

A selection of teas available -- The Pu'er is particularly good -- and fresh coffee in the pot. Do try the gluten-free chocolate brownies - a friend makes them and they are exquisite.

I'm about to embark on a short, whistle-stop tour of blogs to promote 'An Ungodly Child'. Something that has been mentioned to me are podcasts and book trailers. Every book trailer I've seen, it seems to me, is very, very similar -- music, stills fading into each other with text (usually the novel's hook) spliced in between. Does anyone else find these a bit samey? How about live action ones?

Personally, I use a glove puppet, but generally I only get a half-dozen views. Does anyone else have success with something different?

What would you want to see in a book trailer? How about podcasts?

Coffee Morning - Want or Chuck?

Good morning everyone. I am currently in a bit of a tizz as I am not yet finished my Christmas shopping. Thursday I managed to do more than I would have done had I been at work but still not managed to get husband his gifts! Oh well, always got tomorrow! 

So next Thursday is the day a lot of us will be celebrating something or other and eating far too much food and drinking far too much drink. I will be celebrating the wonders of commercialism (I am not religious but am a hypocrite and celebrate Christmas) and eating turkey and partaking in a glass or 7 of wine. I have put my requests in with Santa and await with baited breath to see if he gets it right this year. I got a set of knives and some baking trays last year!

Anyway, I am sure most of you will have heard of the game "Marry, snog, chuck off a cliff" where you chose a celeb you would marry, one you would snog and one you would cheerfully chuck off a cliff or other high point. As we are all writers I thought I would do a different take on it for today's coffee morning.

So my questions for you today are these:

1. Which book do you wish you had written?
   
2. Which book do you really regret reading?
   
3. Which author do you admire, either for the wonderful work they have written or the fact they seem to be doing well out of writing total tripe?
   
4. What book would you like to find in your stocking/under the tree this year?
   

My answers would be:

1.  'The Power of One' by Bryce Courtenay for the beauty of the words and the fact I could visualise Africa and the events unfolding clearly in my mind as I read it.
   
2.  'Chasing Harry Winston' by Lauren Weisberger. Didn't like the characters, had no empathy for them and thought the whole thing was rather shallow.
   
3. Dan Brown. I just don't get it. I have no desire to read his books. I have read the blurb on the cover but it just seems to be overrated and over hyped. Doesn't appeal to me at all but he seems to be doing rather well out of it all.
   
4. I'd like Jaime Oliver's Ministry of Food or Alan Carr's book Look Who It is!: My Story
   

And as for the celeb version I would go for: Marry - Michael Vartan, Snog - David Beckham and Chuck Off A Cliff - Jeremy Clarkson

Last of all I would like to wish everyone Happy Holidays and that you enjoy celebrating whatever it is that brings you joy. Me I like shopping and eating so this is like my nirvana!

Coffee Morning - How Do You Do It?

Morning all. This is my first ever attempt at a coffee morning so please bear with me. :)

As it is cold out there (well it is where I am!) I would like to offer you some nice warm drinks. Hot chocolate perhaps? Maybe a latte or a macchiato? Alternatively how about a plain old fashioned tea or coffee? Think of me as a mini Starbucks or Costa Coffee. (I spend far too much time in Costa Coffee and my kids now expect to go in there every time they see one!) Please help yourself to a muffin or pastry too.

Anyway on with the coffee morning. I still feel like a 'newbie' here and feel like I am in the non league when most everyone else is in the Championship or Premier League. (Sorry for the football reference but couldn't think of a better way to explain myself!)

I have yet to be published. Anywhere. However, I do cling to the belief that it will happen one day. I can't let the fear of failure put a stop to things before they even get going properly! I have friends who have always known what they wanted to do. One always knew she wanted to be a doctor and another always knew she wanted to work with bugs. They have both realised their ambitions and are still working on progressing further in their chosen field whilst I still languish below the bottom rung of my chosen career ladder! I know it will be hard work but if I truly want it then I need to work at it. I thrive on the success of you all and when someone announces they have a new book coming out or gets a book deal I get a sudden rush of inspiration a motivation to carry on with my WIP. I do live vicariously through you all sometimes. At the same time I wonder how I ever managed to wangle my way into this group. The beginning is always hard, I realise that, but the first hurdle that I need to jump seems to keep moving away from me. It keeps getting further away or is too high for me to clamber over. I want to write as I enjoy it and it is something I feel I can do. I have started trying to make a real go of it so my children can have a better understanding of me. (The current WIP is quite autobiographical in places.) I don't put myself through this in the delusion that I am going to be the next JK Rowling or sign a million pound book deal. I don't even think becoming a number 1 best seller on the NY Times book list is an incentive for me. I love reading and just seeing someone enjoy what I have written would be a wonderful reward. To make it a full time job would be great but I wouldn't be full of despair if that didn't happen.

So now I have rambled on enough here are my questions for you all.

Why did you start writing and what was your trigger to get going?

How did/do you cope with the fear of failure? (I am assuming of course that everyone has that fear at some point, if not then I may pack everything up now!)

Coffee Break: Learning Lessons

Good morning all! Help yourself to a coffee, tea or hot chocolate (doesn't hot chocolate taste even better on a cold day?).

Today's coffee morning is a blatant rip-off of a topic that was posted in my online writing group but it appealed to me and it's quite relevant as I start to plan novel 2.

The question is:

What have you learned from the novel(s) you've written so far?

I know we haven't all finished our first drafts but those of you still grafting on your first novels will still have learnt a few lessons along the way.

Here's my answer to the question:

1) When friends and family ask you what your novel is about:

a) don't tell them the title (they'll laugh or look at you funny. Well, they did in my case)

b) don't tell them what it's actually about. Instead tell them 'it's a bit like that film [a film vaguely similar]'. That just elicits an 'Oh right' instead of a quizzical look that just screams "That'll NEVER get published!"

2) If you work out what the first 5 scenes and the very last scene are you've got enough to get started. When you hit scene 6 hold the last scene in your brain and head in that direction. You'll get there in the end.

3) Editing takes about 3x as long as writing the damned thing in the first place (and is about a 1/4 as enjoyable).

4) Carry a notebook EVERYWHERE because you'll come up with a scene idea when you least expect it (although do expect to have an idea just when you're about to fall asleep).

5) Write your way through scenes you think are boring. Don't leave them for later. Use an exciting scene as a carrot to get you through a boring one. Who wants to go back and write lots of boring scenes one after another after writing all the exciting scenes?

6) Expect to hate your novel with a passion about 1/4 of the way through. Feel the same way about 2/3 of the way through.

7) Don't google for similar books/plots/titles/films. Chances are you'll find something similar to your 'great idea' which will give you such bad writers block you'll want to chuck the whole novel in the bin.

8) If you don't love your main character, if you don't think about her constantly and hurt when she hurts and laugh when she laughs your novel isn't working and you need to ditch it and start again.

9) Make sure you end each chapter with a hook and start each chapter with something that immediately captures the reader's attention.

10) Which ties in with... Go through the entire novel and check how many chapters you open with the main character waking up. There will be more than you think! Delete as many as possible, someone waking up is boring.

11) If you live alone and spend 2 or 3 days in a row working on your novel and ignoring the telephone/doorbell you'll feel like you've forgotten how to speak when you go to the newsagent and ask for a pint of milk.

12) When you've finished the novel you'll STILL alternate between hating it and loving it and how you feel will be hugely influenced by the comments you receive from readers/critiquers/agents.

I could go on (and on and on) but I'll leave it there for now.

So...what have you learned?

Coffee Morning - Getting Started

You’ve taken the dog to school, put the kids in the garden, loaded the dirty dishes into the microwave, hoovered the lawn, and otherwise cleared the decks. Your favourite beverage is brewing. Chocolate is low-fat granose bars and pieces of fruit are lined up within easy reach. Pencils are sharpened, lucky mascots dusted, kissed and otherwise subjected to whatever rituals you have. Your chair is in just the right position. Your writing day begins.

In front of you is a blank screen/sheet of paper. The keyboard/pencil gleams accusingly from the tenth polishing of the morning. The blank screen/sheet of paper is still there, still just as blank.

At this point, one of two things happens:

1 - You wake in a cold sweat from the nightmare.
2 - You resort to Plan B.

Plan B is the thing that gets you writing, even if it isn’t the project you are meant to be working on. For some it involves dashing off a haiku, for others it is freewriting until your subconscious mind (or, in my case, my unconscious mind) picks up the thread and you find yourself back on track.

My Plan B tends to be one of my other writing projects or the odds and ends of editorial work I have on the go. I often find that if I start sorting one of those and begin to get interested, something wakes up inside my head and lurches about a bit, worrying at me until I find I get back to what I really want to be doing.

What is your Plan B?

Coffee Morning - Books

Good day, fellow racers. Continuing a theme from last week and inspired by Desert Island Discs, I invite you to help yourself from the selection of iced fruit juices, pull up a deckchair and generally enjoy the view (and never mind that ship sinking over there).

Although there are hundreds of ‘How to write a novel/play/bestseller’ books on the market, I find most of them to be tedious and uninformative. One or two have passed on some useful information, but on the whole they give the impression of having been written to fill a gap in the author’s finances. A lot of them are passing off ‘this worked for me’ as ‘this is how it should be done’, which is not very useful if you are not that person, don’t have their agent, and don’t write in their style or genre.

In addition, the whole writing business is becoming a tad incestuous and, as with some (though by no means all) of the creative writing courses, they are far too prescriptive and produce endless clones of what the author/tutor believes to be good writing/subject matter. You can, perhaps, tell that I’m not a great fan.

Yet, given our obsession with writing, books are going to be a major source of inspiration for what we do. So, with that in mind, can you think of four non-fiction books other than ‘How to write’ books that have helped your writing and can you think of four works of fiction that made you sit up and think: ‘I wish I could write like that; I’m going to write like that!’

To start things going, here is my non-definitive list (four books per category is way too short). They probably say more about me than anything else, but I have found them inspirational.

My four non-fiction are:

The Empty Space – Peter Brook. Although about theatre, it is essentially about going into a blank space and creating a story. Short. Insightful.

Finite and Infinite Games – James P. Carse. An interesting (and easy going) work of philosophy that looks at different ways in which people approach life and relationships.

The Comedy of Survival – Joseph W. Meeker. Considered the founding work for the field of literary ecology, this opens up new ways of thinking about some of the basics of literature.

Experience and Education – John Dewey. A concise statement of his educational philosophy, this little book explores how we grow as people (or are otherwise thwarted from growth) through various kinds of experience.

My four works of fiction are:

The Female Man – Joanna Russ. I love all her books, but this handles a multi-stranded moral narrative with sparkling language and apparent ease. Her non-fiction is also well worth looking at (as she taught literature and creative writing).

The Atrocity Exhibition – J. G. Ballard. There were a number of other ‘experimental’ works of this nature produced at the time. They were the flame fizzing down the touch paper, but Ballard was the firework display itself.

Shadow Dance – Angela Carter. As with no other author, I cried when I heard she had died. This is her first novel, one that trampled boundaries into the ground with such vivid imagery. And she just kept getting better.

The Nature of the Catastrophe – eds Jones and Moorcock. A Collection of Jerry Cornelius short stories by Mike Moorcock and others. Ballard was the firework display. This was the acid I dropped before I watched it.