How to tell the world your novel is the bee’s knees

By Roz Morris | March 4, 2010
 

I highly recommend my unique writing voice bzzz Photo:Trounce/Wikimedia Commons

Crime thriller writer Leigh Russell has emailed with a question. ‘I’m quite happy to tell the world about all the great reviews my first book, Cut Short, has received, but it’s very hard to plug your own book in your own words. How can I describe myself as ‘a powerful new voice in crime fiction’ or ‘highly recommend’ my own ‘gripping’ writing? It sounds conceited and silly.’

Too true. Years ago the London Evening Standard advertised its colour supplement ES as ‘a magazine with a brilliant standard of writing and printing’. It wasn’t a quote from a review or an award; they wrote it themselves. They were the evening paper in London; as much of an institution as the BBC, yet that slogan made them sound like lame amateurs. My gut reaction was ‘don’t tell me you’re brilliant. Tell me why and I’ll make up my own mind’. (Along with, why do I give a toss about the printing?)

When you’re writing a piece to promote your book, you can’t tell readers it’s brilliant, hilarious or deep. Even if you’re the Evening Standard. Instead you have to find what you can say that will make people take notice, and want to give you a whirl.

You can’t comment on the quality of your writing. But you can be specific and say ‘I paced my literary novel like a thriller because I love the way a good plot gets hold of me and won’t let go’. Or ‘I’m fascinated by how crimes are points of no return for the people who have committed them, and what they do afterwards’. (Hey, that sounds fun, maybe I should write it.)

Notice how other writers talk about their work and how they get your interest. For instance, Alice Sebold: I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it’s not unusual. I see it as just part of life. Can you explain what drew you to your themes, the story, the characters? And demonstrate what will be unique about the way you write it?

Identify anything that’s original about the way you’ve tackled the story. Here’s David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas: I read ‘If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller’ by Italo Calvino – an experimental novel in which a sequence of narratives is interrupted but never picked up again… I wondered what a novel might look like if a mirror were placed at the end of a book like Calvino’s so that the stories would be resolved in reverse.

 And another David, David Nicholls, on his novel One Day:

 I first became interested in the significance of anniversaries after reading ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. I thought this passage was a good starting point for a story; to take the day on which an event happens, work backwards and then forwards again. … To show two people’s lives over twenty years – only ever showing one day… I liked the idea that someone you meet in 1992 as a secondary character could become massively important by 2001. And to delve into events not always looked at by writers. Rather than births, marriages and deaths I thought it would be fun to write about what it’s like to babysit seven months after you’ve had the baby. Or show someone writing the wedding speech rather than show the wedding.

 Nicholls’s passage is rather long for the standard pitch, but it shows how much you can probably say about your novel once you get going.

 If your novel is based on personal experience, that’s worth mentioning. It makes you that bit more qualified to write from the heart. Judy Blume says of her YA novel Tiger Eyes: ‘It’s about the sudden, tragic loss of someone you love. I lost my beloved father suddenly, when I was 21. He died, not as the result of a violent crime, but of a heart attack at home. I was with him.’ 

 Notice that Judy Blume shows she has done more than write a memoir – like Alice Sebold, who famously drew on her own teenage rape to write The Lovely Bones but has woven a literary world with its own distinctive rules. I also like this interview with novelist, journalist and poet Blake Morrison, whose inspirations are high-profile murders. What makes a story unique is what the writer does with ideas and experience – and this is at the heart of what you are selling.

 Take-away points

  • You’re selling yourself as a storyteller – so tell a story about the story.
  • Make it as personal as possible. Even if the novel is not based on your actual life, make readers feel that what inspired it matters to you – then they are more likely to think it will matter to them.
  • Show not tell – not just within the pages of your story, but in everything you say and do about it. Think of it as a mantra for your whole writing life.

Expect to take a long time over this letter. But once you’ve got going, you may find it rather fun. And what about the quality of the writing? That has to speak for itself.

Thank you, Leigh, for provoking this post – I hope it’s helped. And guys, tell me – how easy do you find it to plug your writing? Do you have any tips to share?

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Why do I find it so hard to summarise my novel?

By Roz Morris | February 28, 2010

You’ve got to write a synopsis to sell your novel. But how do you get 100,000 words into a few hundred – without leaving it dead on the page? 

I used to hate it when people asked me this question. ‘What happens in your novel?’ If I could tell them, I wouldn’t have needed to write 400 pages.

A novel takes the reader on an intimate and involving journey. Events bond you with characters, but narrated in isolation they might look trivial and hollow. The setting is more than ‘the place it all happens’, it’s a textured, resonant landscape.

Your synopsis, though, will leave you little room for anything but the bones of what happens and where. You might well feel like you’ve ripped out your story’s heart.

Here’s how to put it back.

A couple of weeks ago KM Weiland posted about a great exercise: write the perfect review. Imagine someone has read your novel and totally clicked with your story, themes and characters – and write how they would review it. Katie intended it to be used during the writing process to strengthen your story – but it’s also a great tool for writing a sizzling synopsis.

To get you into the mood, look at reviews of novels you’ve really enjoyed. Notice what gets your pulse racing:

  • A reviewer would describe the novel’s events in a way that excites other readers.
  • They give broad strokes about the characters, saying one or two distinguishing things but not getting sidetracked by details.
  • They are specific too: instead of ‘Emma is lonely’ they would say ‘Emma is 34 and about to face another Valentine’s day alone’.
  • They would home in on the novel’s most powerful conflicts and what kept the reader turning just one more page.

Add all this to your stripped version of your story – and show what makes it special.

Of course, in order to write a synopsis, you have to be clear about your novel’s message, themes and story. If you’re still struggling, do you need to do more work on the manuscript?

Do you hate writing synopses? Have you got any secrets for making them come alive? Have you found that writing a synopsis has exposed weaknesses you hadn’t seen before?

 A step-by-step guide to writing a synopsis can be found in my book Nail Your Novel. You can buy a hard copy here for £5.99 or download the ebook from here – and the ebook is still totally FREE!

Posted in The writing business, Writers' Emergency Rescue | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me

By Roz Morris | February 25, 2010

I have the great honour to have been given the Sunshine Award and the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, both by Catherine Andrako of A Thousand Clapping Hands. Catherine, thank you! Catherine is an artist and a former dancer, creative to her last twirling atom, and I urge you to check out her site of ‘Art, Letters, Visual Delights and Strange Coincidences’.

 As with most awards, there must now be speeches and games. For the Sugar Doll I have to tell you 10 interesting things about myself.

I once volunteered for an experiment in ESP. I sat in a room and was told to close my eyes and think of nothing while someone in another room beamed thoughts at me. A researcher put wires on my head to record my brain patterns and see if any communication was taking place. To help me zone out he put a swirly mandala on the wall and played me white noise through headphones.

Honestly, I tried to think of nothing but it was just like an episode of The Avengers. Brainwashing, EEGs, far eastern symbols; and all in a leafy suburb of London.

With some difficulty, I locked in on the husky hiss in my headphones.

After a while I began to hear voices. Inside my head. Very faint, but definitely people talking.  

Eureka, was this ESP? I heard the crackly whisper of a jingle, and then … was that Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer? It was Radio 1. Being picked up on the 30 metres of unshielded headphone cable from the white noise generator in the next room.  

 And so I went on for half an hour. Trying not to notice things that would obviously spoil the game, being sucked into busy diversions and then remembering I was meant to be relaxing. When my time was up, the researcher showed me my results unhappily. ‘This is what your brain waves should have looked like,’ he said, and pointed to some sleepy undulations along the bottom of a graph. ‘And this is you.’ He showed me a frantic jagged line like a seismograph about to freak.

‘You know your equipment is picking up Radio 1?’ I said.

 ‘No one else has heard it,’ he muttered, and I was out on my ear.

 This probably tells you a few interesting-ish things about me.

1. I simply can’t ‘think of nothing’.

2. When I was a child I wanted to be in The Avengers, getting up to peculiar derring-do in leafy parts of London.

3. At college I was in a band. So I know that long cables can pick up the radio.

4. I love using things for an unintended purpose, which is why I remember things like #3.

5. I can never resist an adventure to add to the writing diary, which is why I answered the advert to take part in the ESP experiment.

6. I like living in London because it’s the best place in England to find these sort of adventures. Although I have tried not to ruin anyone else’s experiments.

7. My best adventure was the time I turned up for a dance class at Pineapple Studios and found a film crew holding auditions.

8. I’m not good at right and left. And I took up dance just four years ago. But I decided what the heck.

9. To my utter astonishment I was hired. For two weeks of night rehearsals in a deserted station, I was a professional dancer.

10. As with all properly given awards, there should now be a musical interlude. This is what my friends were all scrutinizing, trying to spot me. Honestly, I’m there somewhere.

Speeches done. Now there’s the serious business of the onward nominations. I’m going to pass both awards on together, as Catherine did. I have to nominate 12 recipients, which isn’t nearly enough as I want to thank all of you who comment, encourage and spur me on, and the even wider circle whose blogs I regularly enjoy – as evidenced by the list on the right. But here goes – and don’t forget to leave me a comment with a link to your 10 answers, if you have the energy to do them.

 Cat Woods at Words from the Woods

Paul Greci’s Northwriter

Natalie Whipple’s Between Fact and Fiction

Suzy Hayze’s Tales of Extraordinary Ordinariness

John Simpson’s Running After My Hat

Darcy Pattison’s Fiction Notes

Janna Qualman’s Something She Wrote

KM Weiland’s Wordplay

Jon Paul’s Where Sky Meets Ground

Maribeth Graham’s Writing Like Crazy

Jane Kennedy Sutton Jane’s Ride

Catherine Ryan Howard’s Catherine, Caffeinated

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Solve the enigma that is blocking your story

By Roz Morris | February 21, 2010

From wikispaces.com/Enigma

Sometimes I feel as though my WIP's been typed on one of these - an Enigma machine, courtesy of wikispaces.com/Enigma

If you’re stuck, is there a layer of your story that you haven’t yet understood?

I’ve just finished reading Robert Harris’s Enigma. In the acknowledgements he thanks two special people, ‘neither of whom ever lost faith in the story, even on those occasions when it was a mystery to its author’.

How those words resonated. Enigma, about code-breakers in World War II, is a great read – and yet there was a point at which the author felt deeply lost. Which made me think, especially as I’ve been feeling lost myself.

My MC had got to a crisis point but it wasn’t gelling. I came up with something that would definitely be shocking but it looked desperate. A clumsy attempt to play the sympathy card.

Finally, it clicked. I hadn’t understood what the real story was, where Act One was leading. My horrifying event wasn’t germane to the true problem the MC faced – his journey to discover who he really was. The most appalling thing to the reader would be for him to give in to the pressure around him. Surrender his spirit by deciding to be like everybody else. That would be much more powerful than doing something violent, say.

In fact it was one of the options I’d thought of earlier on and discarded – because I hadn’t understood what the real story was. But now I realised it was perfect.  

(Frankly, I wish my subconscious would be a little more explicit, instead of letting me waste time with guessing games.)

You may know what the characters are doing and the quest you set up for them. But these details are superficial. Story events and characters’ urges are often code for something deeper, and that may be what is making the real connection with the reader. If you haven’t cracked that code and figured out what it is, you may remain blocked or make choices that feel hollow and wrong.

Have you felt, like Robert Harris, that your story is still a mystery? Did a realisation like this help you move forwards with it?

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Genre pass notes – five key points on writing historical fiction

By Roz Morris | February 17, 2010

Like any genre, historical fiction has expectations and pitfalls. How much detail should you include? If the characters talk and behave differently from the way we do, how will you make that relatable? I put these thorny questions to KM Weiland, author of the medieval novel Behold the Dawn and historical western A Man Called Outlaw.   

1. Obviously one of the attractions for readers of historical novels is immersing themselves in the details of that world. But clearly you can’t overload the text with too much detail. How much historical detail do you include, especially of world affairs?

 At its heart, historical fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction. The rules of description and backstory that apply to contemporary fiction also apply to historical fic. Love of history or no, historical readers aren’t likely to have the patience to sit through pages upon pages of pontificating about Roman politics or Napoleonic battle tactics or Regency etiquette. They want what every reader wants: a ripping good yarn. The history is just icing on the cake.

 So you include only those details that are necessary. Unless your Roman character is interested in or affected by politics, you don’t need to explain Senate procedures. If the Senate procedures are important to the story, then by all means slap them in there. But never flaunt your research in your reader’s face. Give them only what they need to know and make it matter to the story.

 2.       How much explanation would you give for the small details of everyday life – eg if a character made a cup of tea or brushed their teeth?

The small details are actually some of the most interesting to include, both because they are often little-known factoids and because they contribute so beautifully to the verisimilitude of the story. Fiction is in the details. But, just as with sweeping historical context, you have to be careful to contain your details—your drinking of tea and your brushing of teeth—to what’s pertinent. If you can work in strange and interesting details, it’s often an excellent opportunity to add originality to your scenes. But if the cup of tea is in there merely to show readers how tea was brewed in the early 1700s, it’s extraneous and will only serve to bloat your story and slow it down.

 3. How do you find an appropriate idiom for the characters’ dialogue while still sounding natural?

This is a delicate balancing act, since the speech patterns that were acceptable in times past now sound stilted and even pedantic to modern readers. For instance, back in Charles Dickens’s day, contractions were used only by the lower classes. But to write dialogue sans contractions nowadays sticks out like Ebenezer Scrooge at the office Christmas party.

It’s important to develop a good ear for the rhythm and flow of period dialogue, by reading extensively in period literature. Some people have had excellent success mimicking period dialogue (Patrick O’Brian comes to mind), but usually it’s best to find a happy medium. Give your dialogue just enough of an “antique” flavor to keep the reader in the period without bogging him down in alien speech patterns. For example, in the time period in which my recently released medieval novel Behold the Dawn is set, modern-day English was almost entirely unknown, so I had to find a speech pattern that would be intelligible to readers while still grounding them within the setting.

4.       With characters’ behaviour and culture, how do you make characters who modern readers can relate to, but don’t behave anachronistically?

Social mores have a way of evolving and devolving in some pretty crazy ways. What used to be perfectly acceptable would now be considered barbaric. Much of Behold the Dawn centers around the tourney games. These gladiatorial mock battles, which were wildly popular at the turn of the 12th century, are shocking in their violence to us in the 21st century.

And yet the wonderful thing about history is that no matter how much the world changes, the basic elements are always the same. Willa Cather wrote, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened.” So human nature, in all its tragedy and triumph, remains essentially the same in every time period. We can still find depravity and integrity, guilt and redemption, disappointment and hope—and these elements can translate even the most foreign of situations into something we can all understand.

5.       You write fantasy as well. How has writing historical fiction helped?

 My first fantasy novel Dreamers Come (due out in 2012) featured a society with a medieval basis, so I got to use much of my historical research as a launch pad. Having taken meticulous notes during my research period for Behold the Dawn, I understand the power of precision in my descriptions of places and battles. But it was an interesting experience being freed of the strict timeline of a historical period. In fantasy, I’m free to create my own timeline, which was both liberating and a little bewildering. I have several ideas for future stories that incorporate fantasy elements into actual historical periods, so I look forward to the melding of the two worlds!

 Thanks Katie! As well as writing historical and speculative fiction from her home in the sandhills of western Nebraska, KH Weiland blogs at Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors and AuthorCulture. She also has an incredibly useful e-book, Crafting Unforgettable Characters: A Hands-On Guide to Bringing Your Characters to Life, available on her website totally free.

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Developing a strong writing voice

By Roz Morris | February 12, 2010

Voice is the elusive x-factor about your writing, the make-or-break for most agents and publishers. What is it and how do you develop it?

From my earliest days at school I wanted distinctive handwriting. It was my rebellion against wearing a uniform and having to write exactly what I was told. Not for me the small unobtrusive hand approved of for its neatness, the classical copperplate or the clear print. Why would I want to write like everyone else? I made my writing big and bold, adopted unusual letter forms. Whenever I saw words written with passion and style I studied their shape and slant, what gave them that feel. I had a mission – what came out of my pen would not be dull and ordinary.

Usually I couldn’t keep the new hand up for long. The adopted characteristics slipped away – but not completely. Traces of the experiment would remain, no longer a disguise for their own sake – now a good fit for the way I wanted to express myself.

This is like developing a writing voice. Your voice is you – your literary signature and unique to you. The elusive ‘it’ factor. You can study craft, you can be the most ingenious plotter or incisive characterizer. But the way you tell the story is make or break. A compelling voice crackles with life, it draws the reader in and makes them feel everything is going to matter.

Literary agent Rachelle Gardner has been talking about this on her blog Rants and Ramblings and says voice is ‘the expression of you on the page—your originality and the courage to express it’. She also says when she falls in love with a manuscript, the deciding factor is usually the voice.

What makes a good voice? Should it be invisible and not get between the reader and the story? Should it sing in beautiful language? Should it comment and prod the reader? Certainly, a voice has to be a good fit for a story and genre. But most of all, it has to be confident – and for that it must be a good fit for you.

Some people have a strong, individual voice from the start. Others struggle for many years to find it.

And writers are not alone in this search. People in all creative disciplines talk about the quest to find their own way of doing things. I was talking the other day to a singer, who said she spent many years imitating others before she had the courage to just ‘sing like herself’.

Everyone’s journey is different. In my case, I started by copying other writers I adored, with greater and lesser success. If I look at pieces I wrote years ago I can see which writers I was in thrall to. A very visible Graham Greene phase, then Vita Sackville West, then Jack Vance, then Gavin Maxwell. When I read those writers I could think of no more perfect way to express a story. I tried to be them on the page.

I could mimick their rhythms, their sentence structure, the types of things they would notice – all of which gave my writing faculties a new and daring workout. But like the handwriting experiments, these voices were a strain to keep up. What operated these writers was not the same as what operated me. I would know it for sure when I fell for another voice and started all over again.

One day I realised I didn’t feel I had to imitate any more. I could write something as me and that was okay. That doesn’t mean I am no longer poleaxed by Graham, Gavin, Jack or Vita, or all the other thousands of writers in whose company I take very great pleasure. And certainly, small shadows of other writers still creep into my writing.

I still learn from them, all the time. But I no longer feel the need to eradicate my own voice and start again.

If you feel you haven’t found your voice yet, or don’t know if you ever will, keep going. Keep studying what makes the work of other writers so compelling to you; imitate and experiment. Try the bold and unusual; see which sticks. Your voice is as unique as your handwriting. But to find one you are comfortable in takes time.

What was your journey to find a voice like? Are you still searching? What writers have helped you break through?

Posted in Inspirations Scrapbook, The writing business, Writer basics 101 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

One pair of boots at a time – how to get all the things in a scene right and not go mad

By Roz Morris | February 8, 2010

You can only wear one pair of boots at a time. Most people can’t write great dialogue and description in one go. The secret is to have several runs at a scene.

 I’ve had an interesting email from Jonathan Moore, who’s in the thick of a first draft. He says: If I start a conversation I find it really hard to switch back to description. The dialogue runs, script like, until the scene ends.  If I try and switch back to description it seems impossible to think of any details that would be relevant. I’m aware that normal prose manages this, but is it as effortless as it reads or does everyone feel the gear stick crunch as they force their pen back to describing what’s going on in the room?

The answer, Jonathan, is yes they certainly do – and you’ve described it rather well. When you’re in the characters’ shoes it’s hard to concentrate on anything but what they’re saying and doing. To write relevant, resonant description as well requires another complete run at the scene.

 So forget about description when you’re concentrating on what characters are saying and doing. Let the pacing be sluggish while you weave the right mood. Stride through it again to shape the structure.

Which you do first is a matter of taste, but usually I dive into the dialogue and action, then go back and fine-tune the atmospheric details including the physical setting. But sometimes I find it helpful to set the structure first and work within those straits.

Jane Espenson said that when she was writing fight scenes in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, she would think about which emotional beats the scene should hit – what the characters were talking about or trying to do while they slugged hell out of each other. Once she’d got that right, she slotted in the nitty gritty of who got hit and how. Some of the other writers preferred to approach their fight scenes the other way round. (If you want to know more about fight scenes, you might like this post by Dave Morris.)

The crucial point is, dialogue, story beats, structure and description are all different ways of experiencing a scene and you can only wear one pair of boots at a time. Or most people can.

Do you separate the elements of a scene like this? Do you have a preference for which you tackle first?

If you want a helping hand with writing and polishing your novel, there are plenty of tips in my book, Nail Your Novel. You can buy a hard copy here for £5.99 or download the ebook from here – and the ebook is still totally FREE!

Posted in Rewriting, Writer basics 101 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Is your scene cluttered with irrelevant blather?

By Roz Morris | January 31, 2010
 

Mirabilis_Year_Of_Wonders_Ep8_p5

Idle chatter?

It’s easy for a scene to be too sparse, but have you added too much idle chat or inconsequential noodling?

Darcy Pattison’s been talking about dissecting a scene to make sure it has a function and structure, and meanwhile husband Dave (that’s Mr Morris, not Mr Pattison) has had an interesting catastrophe. He discovered that one page of his graphic novel Mirabilis had gone up on the web without the dialogue.

He was just about to howl blue merde, then realised the sequence worked pretty well on the strength of the pictures alone. Which he greeted with mixed feelings as he’d written plenty of precious dialogue for it. (Judge for yourself with the pics above – and if you hop over to his site you can rub it in by telling him which you prefer.)

Of course graphic novels don’t work the same as prose because the pictures are there to tell the story, but the whole escapade got my spider sense tingling.

Often when we’re writing a scene we can embellish it too much and obscure what’s going on. We might give our characters a lovely bit where they’re doing one thing and chatting about something completely different. For instance, removing a dead body and reminiscing about the time the hearse ran out of petrol in the middle of Scotland. Or talking about what to do about the errant husband, while brutally grooming the poodle. The contrast can be funny, lifelike and even powerful, but only if the reader can see which are the important story details.

When you do this, ask yourself – can you still see what’s happening amid the oblique chat? Have you given the emphasis to the husband or the poodle? Removing the body or the expedition to Scotland? If you cut the poodle or the Scotland anecdote, does it still work just as well?

Now I’m not saying you should prune all the life details out of a scene. But it’s easy to add a lot of blather that gets in the way. Instead of dressing the set, you clutter it.

But one person’s clutter is another’s well chosen decoration. Writers who do dress the set cleverly do it with dialogue or action that seems to be oblique but is thematically resonant. For instance, the dialogue at the end of Terminator, which appears to be talking about the weather – ‘there’s a storm coming’. And Woody Allen is a master of thematic set-dressing – in Cassandra’s Dream the two reluctant killers are waiting in the victim’s flat and hear the victim’s mother leave a message on the answerphone saying she’s looking forward to seeing him. It makes them feel even worse about what they’re planning to do.

If you’re going to add something to the scene to bring it to life, can you make it enhance the scene instead of being largely throwaway?

Have you enhanced a scene in this way? Can you suggest other good examples you like?

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Has your idea already been done?

By Roz Morris | January 26, 2010

Ideas for a novelCan you ever have a new idea? What makes an idea yours?

I came across this picture the other day. It’s the items that were on my dressing table when I moved house a few years ago. A belt I found in a vintage shop. A box from an MCM scarf; a gift, which I filled with odds and ends. A black and gold bracelet with expired elastic, unwearable but kept because I bought it when I first moved in with Dave. A trinket box acquired on a forget-about-it getaway after my horse had a catastrophe. Just visible in the right-hand corner is a Ganesh mask I was forever going to hang somewhere. Some of these things I haven’t seen since this photo. But they are what I used to see every morning.

 I get this same feeling when I go back to my books after a break, both the published ones and the works in progress. Behind the plots, characters and settings I see reminders of what was going on in my life at the time, what was happening to friends, what I was working on, what I saw every morning, like the contents of that box. It wouldn’t be apparent to anyone but me, but this cocktail of detail seeped into the book, coloured the take I would have on an event, influenced the voice and narrative drive.

 Why am I bothering you with all this? Well, a recent post by Jennifer Roland was tackling the thorny issue of original ideas. One of her questions was, what if you find out someone else has had a similar idea to one you want to explore?

A pretty demoralising discovery. What do you do?

It all depends how the idea is used – by the other writer and by you. Generally once you’ve had an idea, you work on it and what you end up with is as individual as the collection of items on someone’s dressing table.

However, there is an exception: if your mutual brainwave is the ending. An end is usually some form of surprise, and if yours is the same as someone else’s… well, no surprise. No one will sit up and smack their forehead if the villain turns out to be the hero’s father. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd is a good read but has a twist that any cinema fan would recognise. If you find out your big payoff has been done before, you must change it. Yes, it’s painful, but if you’d known earlier that someone else had used it you wouldn’t have, right?

You don’t necessarily have to take it out altogether. If you really want to explore that idea, try putting it much earlier – for instance, the first plot point where something changes. Or even the beginning. Then sketch out what it might lead to. You never know, it might be the best thing that ever happened to your novel. After all, the initial spark of an idea is just the start of a long journey.

And of course, I’m not talking about stealing ideas. There are people in this industry who say ‘there is nothing new under the sun’, usually to justify ripping off someone. Possibly they never have ideas, do not understand true creativity and arrogantly assume we are all copying each other. One of my current dressing-table items is a pair of boxing gloves and when I hear the word ‘homage’ I want to use them.

As writers, we want to entertain and enthrall our readers. Readers don’t mind if you tackle the same idea as another writer, if you mine an idea and make it unique to you. But they really don’t like it if it looks like you’ve stolen an idea. Just as you have to know when to replot because your story is weak, you need to be aware of when your reader might say ‘they did that in such-and-such’. We revise for all sorts of reasons, and this should be one of them.

This is why there is plenty new under the sun, if you look. Even if circumstances force you to rework.

(If you like collections, check out artist Catherine Andrako’s A Thousand Clapping Hands, whose post Caretaker of the City of Lost Things inspired this one.)

Have you ever found that one of your ideas had already been done by someone else? What did you do about it?

Posted in Inspirations Scrapbook, Rewriting, Rules, The writing business, Writer basics 101, Writers' Emergency Rescue | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

How to tell your friend their novel stinks

By Roz Morris | January 21, 2010

Oh no, not lexical repetition too!

Giving an honest critique is easy if there’s plenty you can praise. But what if it’s a real mess?

If a friend shows you a novel they have been working on, it’s an act of great trust. This work has been their most private companion, in their heads and in their souls, for many months; perhaps even years. If you are one of the first people to share it, that is a privilege. If you are asked to comment, that is very special.

Those of us who work with critique partners know this already. And we also know the job is easy if the novel is good. We can praise with enthusiasm, reward the trust and all is well. Very often it won’t be perfect, because all writers have blind spots and every novel is a leap in the dark. That’s fine, we can cope.

But what if it’s a total stinker?

Even a novel that looks dreadful will have good points – and not just the amount of dedication that has gone into it. But the good points may be very hard to see. A flaw such as wooden characterisation or an off-putting tone can make a novel such hard going that it looks unsalvageable. Often when I’ve read manuscripts that look like disasters I find – with relief – that some aspects work well. So to be a useful critic you need to compartmentalise your responses. Consider each of these in isolation – plot, pacing, story arcs, inventiveness and so on.

Now you probably have something nice you can say, and it’s genuine. What’s more, it is not just to sweeten the negative comments; it is useful feedback. Don’t forget that a writer needs to know what does work as well as what doesn’t. 

And do emphasise this. If you have a lot of criticisms the writer will tend to focus only on how crushed they feel, and not hear the positives. If they’re new to this game they may even have felt the novel was finished – and now you are telling them it is not.

So now you know how to make them feel better, how do you tackle the real problems?

First you must understand what the writer is trying to achieve. Don’t tell them how you would write the book; that will make them feel brutalised. Take time to discover what kind of story they want to write, what effect they want. They may not know this yet, and you can ask questions that could help them clarify.

At this stage, you may need to consider if you are the right person to empathise with the writer’s aims. Suppose you prefer thrillers but your writing buddy has written a sensitive portrait of a marriage. When they seem to be focussing on slow details, will that irritate you? Conversely, if your friend has written the thriller, will certain requirements of the genre – such as devoting an entire prologue to a character we are never going to see again – look to you like clumsy writing?

Then it’s important how you make your comments. If you tell your friend that parts of their novel are bad, that’s a sure way to make them defensive. They will probably feel you’re judging the murky parts of their psyche that invented the story and characters. Focus instead on what has been made from the material.

What I do is talk about elements that don’t work yet and explain the effect they’re having – because they certainly do something, just not what the author intended. Then I can discuss possible ways to make them work better.

You don’t necessarily have to prescribe solutions to the problems. Writers often resent this anyway, unless they’re unclear about what you mean or they’re really lost. They would rather come up with something that’s true to the spirit of their book and their vision. And don’t expect them to do it on the spot, they’ll need to mull it over. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to be both honest and sensitive. The answer is to be truly useful. Find out what the writer wanted to do, help them to see how to do it. This might be with their current manuscript or with something else – possibly not even a novel but some other creative form. But then you will really have helped them.

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