The problem of simile

Simile: a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose".


Similes are useful as a descriptive shortcut. They rely on the reader understanding what qualities a rose has that might be applied to a woman. Is it that she is a particular colour? Capable of photosynthesis? Thorny? Possessed of exquisite and delicate beauty?

In fiction there is a further level of assumption, not only that the reader knows what qualities the simile is eliciting, but that the characters have that understanding too. In science fiction and fantasy simile becomes a problem. Do roses exist in your world? If you're writing fantasy set in an earth-like world there probably are roses and you can use them in simile without trouble. If you're writing space opera set in a time and place far away from comtemporary earth then you're going to have to give it a bit more thought.

In something I was reading lately, a space opera, a character visiting an alien world and culture describes an animal as resembling the komodo dragon from old earth. This character doesn't come from earth. She is a second or third generation (at least) colonist. The planet was colonised by descendants of the original colonists who set out in a generation ship about one hundred years in the future. If komodo dragons still exist on earth what are the chances of this character having the first idea what they look like? The effect is that the reader's immersion in the world of the novel is disrupted.

So, if I can't rely on simile for creating a picture in the mind of the readers, what can I do? Well, one solution is to get better at description. It seems to me similes are the lazy option. Taking the time to describe my worlds without using references to things my readers would be familiar with will add greater depth to my stories.

The other option is to create similes that work within the world. This is something that could be derived from effective description. Characters would naturally compare things to other things, but only to things with which they are familiar. The trick is creating that familarity with the reader. This definitely seems like a more challenging solution but one which might lift my writing a bit above the ordinary. If I can pull it off.

Hemingway vs. Austen

Writer Unboxed has a recent post on warm versus cool writing which made me rethink some of the things that I've heard and read about writing.

Cool writing, as illustrated by the work of Ernest Hemingway, is dominated by 'showing, not telling'; action and narration are prominent with the reader left to infer what the characters are feeling.

Warm writing is the other end of the spectrum, delving deeply into the interior worlds of the characters and focussing on emotion. It is the style used predominately in the romance genre and is illustrated in the article by the work of Jane Austen.

The Writer Unboxed post asks who is the better writer. I don't think I could honestly say who was the better writer, given that they are separated by time, geography and subject matter. I enjoy the works of both but I prefer Hemingway, which indicates that I am a writer on the cool end of the spectrum and could use some warming up.

The spectrum of warm to cool is an interesting way of looking at different styles of writing that gets away from arguments about good and bad writing. I think the next time I read a romance novel I might have better insight into the style of writing.

A-Z blogging challenge: J is for Job

Have to have a job to pay the bills, but it's far away and I spend three hours a day commuting. J is for Job in the sense that I don't get paid for writing and I like to have nice stuff.

But there's also an element in which having a job meets some emotional needs that writing doesn't. A couple of years ago I gave up my day job to focus on writing for a little while. It was amazing and fulfilling and as soon as I get the chance, I'll do it again. However, when I went back to work I realised there had been something I'd missed. A job offers the opportunity to see the results of your labours quickly; it offers tangible results clearly linked to specific actions. The pay-off on a writing project takes a lot longer and sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of your gains.

A-Z blogging challenge: H is for Help

I've been stuck on H for ages. When I originally made my list, I thought I might talk about health, about whether your health is good, bad or variable and what impact that has on your writing. But the more I thought about the content of the post, the more it felt like whining. So, I abandoned that idea and looked for another H word. Turned out to be a bit of a struggle. Heroes? Happiness? Hump? Hurdles? Meh.

And then, help. Help, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to blog about. I don't know how to make what I want to say sound interesting. What do you do when you need help?

When I get stuck in my writing, I have a few places to turn to for help. The first is my extensive collection of books on how to write. Which can always be supplemented by buying more books. This is particularly useful when I know what I need to do, I just don't know how to go about it.

Or I can turn to either of the writing groups I'm involved in. I can get lots of different perspectives on the problem, which helps open up potential solutions. Most useful when I don't think I've fully got to grips with what the problem is and I need help seeing it from other angles.

And of course, there's always the interwebs. Opinions and advice galore! It takes time to filter it and you often have to wade through a load of shit in order to get to what you need, but on the plus side, I'm quite likely to find myself going off a tangent and finding something new. I love following internet trails to find out where they go.

Where do you go for writing help?

100 Books in 2011 Challenge: The Prodigal Daughter

Jeffrey Archer is an easy target. He's a best-selling author that a lot of people think is a dreadful writer. So, given that I read in order to improve my writing skills, it seems to make sense that I should read some of those novels and authors that are widely considered to be bad. I can see why they are bad and learn from that. In some cases, they actually aren't bad, they're just popular and successful.

In the case of The Prodigal Daughter by Jeffrey Archer, it was bad. It was bad enough to make me angry. It spans about sixty years and is the story of a woman who inherits a massive hotel chain and then becomes president of the USA (whoops, spoilers).

Archer starts with her birth, then shows selected highlights from her childhood, educational career, she runs away to marry the son of her father's sworn enemy and builds up her own really successful chain of high-end designer clothes stores, her father dies and she inherits his hotel chain, she runs that for a while until she gets bored and then goes into politics.

For the first two thirds of the book my problem was the style of telling the story. Given that there is so much time to cover there has to be a lot of narrative, interspersed with scenes of pivotal events. The narrative is often clumsy and expository. There's an awful lot of telling and it's not handled well. The scenes don't really show the protagonist's character (which is what they are meant to do) rather Archer tells us and doesn't match his action with what he's trying to get across. The dialogue is clunky. The protagonist is not very likable, mainly because she's perfect and everything just falls into her lap. She has a couple of 'set-backs' but they're not real reversals or challenges, just opportunities for Archer to show that she's even more perfect than he'd already told us.

I had mixed reactions to the last part of the book. To start with, I felt more positive about it. This is the part of the book where she's entered politics and is trying to get a seat in Congress, then campaigns for the Senate and then to be the Democratic party nomination for President. It also covers her transformation from dove to hawk which is irritating and feels like polemic. However, it is a detailed and interesting look at the American electoral process and is more action-orientated than much of the rest of the book. There are moments of tension, even though you know the protagonist is going to win everything eventually because she always does. Then as she campaigns for the Democratic Party nomination, she gets well and truly screwed over by her opponent. It's probably the best bit of the book. She becomes the Vice-President, with a promise that he will step down after one term and support her. Once he has the presidency he sidelines her in favour of his former running mate, now Secretary of State. Then there is a nuclear missile crisis. The President is visiting his mistress and is uncontactable and the Secretary of State crumbles under the pressure. Our protagonist saves the day and is a big hero. Then the President announces he is stepping down and publicly gives his support to the Secretary of State.

That's not quite the end and I wouldn't normally describe the plot in such detail, but it brings me to the point that offended me most about this book. At this point, I thought, wow, she's really going to have to fight for this, that'll be good. But wait, there's only a few pages left. What's going to happen? What happens is a deus ex machina. The President dies of a heart attack and our protagonist automatically becomes President. The End. What, Archer, you couldn't be bothered to write any more? You'd made your word count so you decided just to leave it there? Rubbish.

This, I think, is a perfect example of a writing breaking their promise to a reader. Not only was the book badly written and quite boring for most of it, but at the end, Archer cheats. He cheats the reader and he cheats his main character. Avoid like the plague. And I still don't understand how he's managed to sell so many books.

Writing isn't easy

I'm not sure where I picked it up but I had a belief that if you had a talent for something, then it should come easily to you. If you were good at art, then drawing well and finding things to draw would be a snitch. You'd sit down at your easel and knock off sketches and pictures feeling happy and joyful because you were doing something you loved and were good at. The energy would be high and you'd be really productive and you'd always want to do art instead of everything else.

Sometimes writing's like that. But more often than not it's really hard work. It's a struggle to get anything down on the page, nevermind something good. It's hard to say what I really want to say while making my characters come alive. What's on the page rarely seems as vibrant and solid as what's in my head.

Does that then mean that if I find writing hard sometimes, that I'm not very good at it? And if I'm not good at it, then do I have to give up on my dream?

It's not that simple. I also have beliefs around needing to work hard to get something I want, in order to deserve it. I have beliefs around not being good enough, in general, for anything. And I'm self-sabotaging and have poor self-regulation. But you know what? I know all this stuff and therefore I can make it work for me rather than against me.

I'm going to write this on a piece of paper and stick it up over my monitor.

"Sometimes writing comes really easily and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes what I've written is good and sometimes it isn't. These things are not related."

Sometimes when the writing flows, what I produce is great and sometimes it isn't. The same is true when I really have to grind it out. The same is true for rewriting. Sometimes I immediately hit on exactly what I want and sometimes it takes me an hour to get a sentence right. Sometimes I let the resistance and fear discourage me but I'm working on that.

A-Z blog challenge: E is for Emotion

Writing prose with emotion is hard for me. I start off with scenes that are flat and emotionless. My characters are acting and talking as if what is happening isn't touching them emotionally. It's as if they don't care and are just shrugging it off. Are they fighting for their lives against a winged demon? Oh yeah, it's just everyday stuff, whatever, blah, blah, I'm so bored.

This should be a moment of terror. The character believes they might die. But it's terror tempered with determination to live, the will to push themselves mentally and physically beyond what they've ever done before. Maybe there's a little elation in the mix. In an action scene like this the character's adrenalin will be high and that complex cocktail of feeling has to come off the page and raise the reader's heartbeat.

What I want is overblown drama on an operatic scale. I want to leave my reader exhausted and wrung out. But it's hard to push myself to get there. I've learnt to moderate my emotions and I'm afraid that, instead of being moved, the reader will think I'm ridiculous. I don't want to make a fool of myself so I draw back and I contain the emotion. I let it out in tiny little drips that people barely notice. And, for real life, that's ok.

It's like a tap. For real life, I want a gentle trickle. For my writing, sometimes I want a torrent. But the tap is stiff with disuse and I struggle to fully turn it on. When I do manage it, I feel embarrassed. I'm working on that by practicing writing pieces that are as emotionally laden as I can make them. These are just practice pieces that will never see the light of day and so I don't have to worry whether a reader will find them ridiculous. I can learn to control the emotion tap in private and when it comes to writing scenes in my work-in-progress then I will have the skill to get the emotional balance right.

How do you feel about writing with emotion? Is it easy or difficult? Are there some emotions you find harder than others?

A-Z blog challenge: D is for Distraction

Oh, there's just so much of it! The things I could spend my time doing:

Watching tv
Playing video games
Messing about on the internet
Hanging out with friends
Getting a master's degree
Playing with my cats
Dancing
Reading non-writing related blogs and news
Watching butterflies
LOLcats


And of course there are the things I think I should be doing:

Cleaning
Decorating
Hanging out with friends
Keeping up with my correspondence
Exercising

But instead I'm writing. At least in theory. I don't have a lot of spare time at the moment so everything that I could do I have to think 'will this take time away from my writing?' The answer is almost always yes because I can't reduce the hours I work (which is not all that many to be fair) or reduce my commuting time, so there's nowhere else for the time to come from. If the answer is yes, then 'is this something I'm willing to give up writing time for?' If I'm honest, in the past, I often have given up writing time - because I'm tired, or because it's hard, or because I didn't believe in myself enough, or because I didn't feel I could say no to friends or family or other obligations. But I've reached a stage in my writing where the answer is going to be no much more often.

Oh look, a butterfly. Being chased by a lolcat. What was I doing again?

A-Z blog challenge: A is for Analysis

I like to analyse stuff. This week I have some time off from my day job and I am working on my novel. For me, this means looking at the 65,000 words of scenes that I have and trying to work out in what order they should go. So I have scene cards and a spreadsheet, and I finally worked out what the damn thing is about, and I'm trying to get it all together.

Writer-friends of a less analytical bent say I should worry less about this kind of detail and just write and then everything will just fall into place. Not for me it won't. Or at least, it might, but it won't be as effective as it will be if I do it deliberately. Analysis leads to mindful practice. To learn how to write you need to write. I read a little while ago that you need to write a million words at least. And that is probably true but, like training to become better at anything, it will be more effective if you are mindful of what you are doing. You could write a million words and will be a little better at writing at the end of it without giving it any thought. But if you pay attention, and analyse what you're doing, the million words will work harder for you and you'll be much better by the end.

To analyse writing I read loads of 'how-to-write' books. Some are fantastic and have some really helpful stuff in them. Some are not that helpful at all. Others are incomprehensible - which for me are those ones about The Hero's Journey or the three act structure (more on this in a later A-Z post). I read widely and try to work out what makes a good book good. I ask for the opinions of my writers' groups. I read loads of blogs about books and writing. And I filter everything through a series of questions:

Who said it? What qualifies them? What do I think of their opinions? What biases do I know them to have?

How do I feel about what has been said? If I have an emotional reaction of any kind, but especially a negative one, then this is something to look at very closely.

How does it fit with what I already know/believe? Is it something that deepens my understanding? Is it something that challenges my understanding?

How can I use this information/feedback/idea? Is there enough detail here for me to apply it? How would I change my writing to accommodate it? What direction will it take me in and is that where I want to go? How will this help me improve?

I also do critiquing for other members of my writing groups and I realised a couple of years ago that the person really getting the benefit from the exercise was me. Looking at the work of a fellow unpublished author, noticing what was working and what wasn't, along with the discipline of trying to suggest how it could be done differently, gave me a great opportunity to understand what I was doing with writing. Naturally, when you come across a passage that isn't working you think about how you would have written it. This may or may not be useful to the person being critiqued, but it is certainly useful to the critiquer.

My favourite question is why? It always has been and is true in all the spheres of my life. Why did something happen? Why did a person behave like that? I need to know. And I guess that's why I write - to pose the question and explore the answer.

Respecting the art of writing

Over the years I've been involved in writing groups I've found myself in conversations about how much technique matters. It appears there are two schools of thought.

On one side are those who think it doesn't matter much. They argue that worrying about correct spelling and formatting kills the creative flow and it's much more important to get the story out. Punctuation and other such tedious matters can be sorted out by the editor/agent you will definitely get once you've finished your novel.

The other school believes technique does matter. If you don't master the basics of technique and present your work in a professional manner, it won't even get looked at. No-one will be able to enjoy the genius of your story if they have to read every sentence three times to work out what you mean.

I'm on the side of technique. I care very much about the correct use of commas. I think understanding sentence structure helps you make your point clearly. There are twenty eight books on my shelf on the subject of writing and there were some I read that I chose not to keep. I read blogs on writing. I critique other people's work so that I can improve my own. I read as many novels as I can and try to analyse the technique, although sometimes I forget if I'm enjoying the story. Some of the most fun I can have is talking about books and writing.

For me, technique supports storytelling. The two are intertwined. The most beautiful, perfectly executed writing can't make me enjoy a story I don't like, but I can appreciate the craft. The most interesting story can, however, be lost under poor writing. I'm not really talking about the odd spelling mistake or confusing you're and your; these are small things that don't interfere with understanding what the writer meant. More confusing is random placement of commas, running dialogue in with narrative, malapropisms, and poor paragraphing. Short sentences that start with the same words nearly all the time get boring, no matter how much I liked the idea of the story.

When you're writing your first draft, it doesn't matter. Just get the words down. Worrying about presentation at that stage isn't productive. But when you rewrite technique is what will make your story come alive. Knowing how to finesse your words will get your great story noticed.

I think, in life generally, how you do what you do matters as much as what you do. Attention to detail makes a difference to the result. That's what makes something great as opposed to good. I do agree that perfectionism can be used as procrastination and my working life has taught me that a perfect product not delivered on time (or at all) is not perfect. Getting the task done is more important in some circumstances. So, I'm a recovering perfectionist learning to love good enough. Caring about technique doesn't necessarily mean you're a perfectionist; it means you want to do the best job on your story that you can. Good enough doesn't mean 'oh whatever, that'll do'; it means the best you can achieve in the time you have.

And I think I've always found it hard to express what I feel about how technique supports and enables storytelling. So when I read Editors on Editing: Respect Your Art on Women's Memoirs, I thought that is exactly what I mean. Sloppy technique shows a lack of respect for your art. Writing technique is the equivalent of stretching your canvass and choosing the right thread and needles.

Blogging Q&A

Via From Sand to Glass.

1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously so that you could be anonymous now?
I started off blogging anonymously and I had two reasons. Firstly, I was a little nervous of what reaction I might get. I wanted to get settled into my blogging voice before I went public about it. The second reason was that I have a presence on the web related to my paid employment and I wanted to keep the two separate. I still use BoudicaM as a pen name for some things but it is less anonymous than it was.
 
2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side.

Inner stubborn side? My stubborn side is quite outer, thank you. And it most often shows itself when people tell me what or who I'll like. As in "you must see this film, you'll love it". Oh rly? I think not. I think you love it and want me to validate your opinion.
 
3. What do you really see when you look at yourself in the mirror?

Umm, I see me. Which is too much to explain in a couple of sentences. And I'm over the self-hate that makes you see a monster in the mirror (and it took a lot of work).
 
4. What is your favorite summer cold drink?

Diet coke. With ice and lemon. All year round.
 
5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

I write. I play computer games, watch movies, read, meditate. Look at LOLcats on the interweb. I take a lot of time for myself. And I want MOAR.
 
6. Is there something you still want to accomplish in your life?

Oh gods yes. I want to publish a novel. And then another one. And then some more. I want to read all of the books in the world. I want to perform Raqs Sharqi. I want to learn how to use a broadsword. I want... to do so much. And I'm sure there's stuff I don't even know about that I will want to do when I find out about it.  
 
7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?

School. Loved the learning, hated the socialising. I was the unpopular academic overachiever who never quite did as well as everyone thought she would and was rubbish at sport. I've never wanted children, but in the alternate universe where I did have them I am homeschooling.
 
8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?



Poignant: a keen sense of sadness or regret. Yeah, there are few things. I don't want to share them here.
 
9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?

It's not easy. This is a writing blog, not a personal blog, and while I like to do the occasional personal piece because, well, writing is pretty personal, that's not what this space is for. Having said that, I think I have become more personal in my writing style (I guess that's what voice is) over the time I've been blogging.
 
10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

Read a book! Because it's more better than most things. And I have phone fear. But actually, it depends who the phone call is with, and when I last spoke to them, and what mood I'm in.
 
Your turn! Leave me the link in the comments if you do your own.

The problem of naming characters

I submitted a short story to Electric Spec yesterday (keep your fingers crossed for me!) and one thing I had to do to get it ready was re-name all my characters.

I have such trouble picking names. I've managed to get past it enough to write first drafts, on the basis that I can pick any name and fix it later. But then at some point I have to pick names for the characters that aren't silly, obvious or cheesy. That's where I struggle. I find it really hard to just come up with names, whether they are mainstream, fantasy or science fiction type names.

So what makes it so hard? Partly it's because I think many of my original choices are derivative. I'm easily influenced by what I've been reading lately, especially if it's Iain M Banks or something. And some times they are just naff sounding. I also tend to pick names that begin with R, G, S and T, and have either one or two syllables. There is definitely a lack of variety.

In the end I do get to change them and with the help of a few random name generators I usually end up with names I like. How do you all pick names for your characters?

Learning from reading

A lot of the posts on this blog are about the books I've read and what I'm learning from them. But it would be true to say that I don't do this in any systematic way, other than thinking about it and making some vague notes on this blog.

Then I read a post on the Querytracker.net blog on learning from the masters. The idea is that you fold up the pages where a passage strikes you as being particularly effective. Simple, no? Except I've always believed that writing on books is sacrilege, and while I'll fold down a little corner to mark my place and break a spine to read it more easily, the idea of folding over half a page seems less like turning a small corner and more like scibbling notes. Of course, when I write it out like this it sounds like the nonsense it is. So, folding up the pages is on.

The next steps are to transfer the passages that you marked into a dedicated notebook, then analyse them and look for patterns. So that's what I'll be doing. I've got a couple of books marked up already and just waiting for transfer into a notebook. What do you think?

I Write Like

I Write Like is an hilarious widget which analyzes your writing and gives you a comparison to a famous author. I tried it a few times and my results were:

• paragraphs from a business email - H.P. Lovecraft. I may have to think about how I'm writing to my colleagues!
• paragraphs from the brand new opening scene of my work in progress (which I think is pretty good) - Dan Brown. Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand he sells loads, so yay. On the other, lots of people think he's not that good, but I haven't read so can't comment. On balance, I think I'll take it as a compliment.
• paragraphs from the first draft of a fantasy short story I wrote a couple of months ago - James Fenimore Cooper. Well, I loved Last of the Mohicans.

Very amusing. What do you get?

Online Etymology Dictionary

Under the category of things that I love is the Online Etymology Dictionary. It tells you where words come from and when they were first used. With words that have several senses, it lists when the word first acquired each meaning.

I always have in mind that Bernard Cornwell said he tried to only use words that would have been in use in the early 19th century when he was writing the Sharpe novels. Large parts of my work in progress are set in the 18th century and if a word sounds quite modern to me, then I'll check it.

Besides, I just love words :-)

The ten books that mean the most to me

Identify ten books that have meant the most to you over your reading lifetime. These are not necessarily great literature or important or best-selling, just the one's that have stuck in your mind and won't let go. Mine are (in no particular order):

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
The Misplaced Legion by Harry Turtledove
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
My Sweet Audrina by Virginia Andrews
Jerusalem Fire by R M Meluch
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin (technically this is a series)
The Hammer and the Cross by Harry Harrison
Posession by A S Byatt
Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock

There are others that might have made it on to this list: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel; The Player of Games by Iain M Banks; The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (another series where it's hard to say a single book had an impact on me that the others didn't); A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter; and The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell. They didn't but it was a hard choice. And there are many, many other books that I've loved.

Most of these books (not all) I read when I was a teenager and I have wondered if their hold on me was because I read them at such an emotionally charged time. However I've re-read Wuthering Heights and Elric of Melnibone recently, and their power is not rooted in time. It is in the books themselves. I fell in love with them all over again.

This is an exercise from the excellent Novelist's Essential Guide to Creating Plot by J Madison Davis. The point is to see what the plots of these books might have in common and thus discover what kind of plot you might be good at writing. While I go off to do that, what are the books that are most important to you?

Thoughts on reading: The Hard Way

Plot. I have issues with plot. I have a mental block when it comes to getting my characters from one big event to another via smaller events. Perhaps it's just a confusion, a lack of being able to see the big picture, and the plot really is there and I just can't see it. If it is there, it won't be because I did it deliberately.

With this in mind, I picked up The Hard Way by Lee Child. It's heavy on plot, one of those thrillers that's all plot and not much else. In actual fact, it's more of a detective novel with the emphasis on gathering the little clues and interpreting them to fnd out what really happened. The ending is sufficiently explosive with Jack Reacher dispatching the bad guys at a breakneck pace that makes it rather exciting.

Characterisation is on the light side. This is the second Jack Reacher novel I've read and I don't think I know him any better than I did after reading the first one. The rest of the characters are fairly thin. The bad guys are bad and several of the seven-man crew have only names and a couple of physical features to describe them. Reacher hooks up with an ex-FBI agent turned PI, who is a woman in her fifties given an active role and is the love interest, so kudos to Lee Child for a positive, powerful representation of an older woman. Unfortunately, her role is limited to being a foil for Reacher and at the end she is tied up waiting to be rescued.

It is good to see that there isn't a high body count amongst the female characters, and a theme of strong sisters fighting for their families runs through the book. It is done rather unsubtly but is a nice touch in a genre that is often misogynistic. There is also a drop of social commentary on the privatisation of the defence and security industries. It's not great literature, but it is fun and is better than several thrillers I've read recently.

In non-fiction I turned for help to The Plot Thickens by Noah Lukeman. I got this because it was mentioned by a panelist at alt.fiction 2010 and I have been worrying about plot lately. It has some useful suggestions in it and a couple of things I hadn't read before, so it was worth it's purchase. What I didn't like was the highly gendered use of pronouns when talking about characterisation techniques. At the beginning, Lukeman says he will use he as a generic term, which is lazy at best, but ok. Except that's not what he does. He sometimes uses he and sometimes uses she. If he had just alternated that would have been ok, but he doesn't. He only uses she when talking about things that are associated with women in traditional gender stereotypes and never uses she outside of talking about children, attractiveness and domesticity. Grating, and enough to spoil the book, especially as it was written in 2001.

Reflections on alt.fiction 2010

Wow, what a difference two years makes. I've just got back from alt.fiction 2010 and it was thought-provoking and inspiring.

I went to alt.fiction 2008 and it was a fun event. I met some people and learnt some things about writing and getting published, but it wasn't such an amazing experience that I was keen to come back again. The organisation and sessions had an amateurism that doesn't appeal to me. I have some experience in professional event organisation, which may make me harsher than others, and the little things are important to the overall impression of the day. We all have our quirks, right?

2009 didn't happen. I know what the reasons were; I think it had to do with funding and logistical support. Given an extra year, and the fact that I have friends in Derby, I thought it would be fun to go again. I wasn't expecting too much.

This time round both the organisation and panels were better. The event seemed smoother and there were plenty of helpful staff on hand to keep things under control. The panellists (many of whom were the same as 2008) stepped up to the smarter venue and better organisation. The disucssions were erudite and intelligent and I was inspired by the conversations. It reminded me that there's nothing that's more fun than talking about books and writing, especially specultative fiction.

I couldn't attend every session. From what I did attend, this is what I'm taking away with me:

• Writing can be a career. You have to decide what you want from it and treat it in the same way you would any other career.
• A web presence is essential.
• Chasing the market doesn't work. Write what you need to write - the market will catch up with you.
• I have so much reading to do...

I'm definitely going next year. Maybe by then I'll have worked up the courage to talk to a publisher about my novel.

Does lots of sex scenes mean bad books?

I was reading 'The "Tyranny of Sex" in the Saudi Novel over at MuslimahMediaWatch today and it got me thinking about sex and writing, or more specifically, writing sex scenes. While the MuslimahMediaWatch article is more focussed on reflecting on Saudi society, this caught my eye:

It was government cultural head Mahmoud Al-Watan who complained of "the
tyranny of sex in the Saudi novel," saying it falls to those without talent to
slap some sex on to the page and "call it a novel"

Which got me thinking about Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins and the bonkbuster novels of the eighties that I devoured. Now, I'm not going to argue that these books were great literature - that would be too contrarian even for me - but I do think they occupied an important place at an important time.

Most of us don't have that many sexual partners according to my highly unscientific analysis of all the people I've ever known that have told me anything about their sex lives. Either you are sexually adventurous (caveat: this includes all varieties of motivation, postive or negative) or you tend to have had roughly the same number of partners as you've had relationships, and
for most people that number seems to be between five and fifteen.

My point is that most of us don't learn about sex by doing it with lots of different people. For me, reading glamourous, sexy novels as a teenager was exciting and a large part of that was reading the sex scenes. Proper erotica just seemed too daunting: too hard to get hold of, and harder to defend if someone were to question your choice of reading material. So Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins et al were a window on to the adult world of sex without the danger of getting into something you couldn't handle.

It gave us an idea of what good sex could be like. Despite raunch culture and the ever-present sexual objectification of women, there is still an undercurrent of socialisation that insists women don't and shouldn't enjoy sex; that sex is really for men. Bonkbusters can be an antidote to this where they show women enjoying sex. They showed us how amazing it could be how good it could feel. Having had sex of varying qualities, I don't think these depictions of sex were unattainable or fantastic. Sex can be as fun, exciting and fulfilling as the novels. And maybe more men should read them...

Storytelling is the way we share our interpretations of the world we live in. If Saudi novelists are writing about sex that's because it's vital to life and maybe it's a little bit because it is reflecting how their society is changing.

The quote above rolls out the stereotypical connection between bad writing and lots of sex scenes. While it may be true that much erotica is poorly written, and it may be true that a thin plot can be padded out with sex scenes (not that I've ever done that myself, you understand), it is undeniably true that writing sex scenes is difficult. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award annually proves that all sorts of writers - the good, the bad and the indifferent - flounder when it comes to describing sex on the page. There is a lot of potential for getting it wrong.

There are also lots of writers getting it right. There are stories which have moments when having sex is absolutely the thing that your characters would do, and showing it to your reader demonstrates something about their relationship that is important. I can think of a number of books I've read recently in which the sex scenes were great. So, no, lots of sex scenes doesn't equal bad writing.

Plotting with the Snowflake Method

Yesterday I spent the day on the work-in-progress which now, for the first time ever, has an ending. It also has a new front-runner for the title.

I've been writing quite a bit of new material and had reached a point where I needed to get organised and put all my stuff in order. As I've mentioned before, the fact that I struggle to plan stories bothers me. I'm a planner. I like planning for things and I feel much happier if I know I'm prepared. I enjoy planning so much that sometimes I plan things I've no intention of actually doing. But I can't plan a story. Maybe it comes from a totally different place in my brain. However, writing by the seat of my pants leaves me with a pile of material that is overwhelming and then I don't know where to go next.

So yesterday I decided to get myself sorted out and that meant googling a method of plotting. How do you do a plot? What does that look like? No idea. The first link I clicked on was the Snowflake Method, which I had heard of before, and came with quite detailed instructions. I spent the day writing several summaries, first generally and then for each of my three main characters. Clearly articulating in this way really helped and in the course of doing it I discovered what the ending of the novel needs to be.

This is no small matter. From the start I've had no idea how it would end. There have always been options and at some point I narrowed it down to three possible endings. Naturally, the right and perfect ending that I found today is not one of those three options. I feel like lots of things have slid into place today. As added bonuses I have another idea for the title (I find titles so hard to come up with) and I have a good basis for a query letter when the time comes.

The Snowflake Method has been very helpful. I don't think I could do it cold. Yesterday I was able to say what my characters wanted, were motivated by, and what got in their way only because I've spent so much time writing about them. But this hybrid of planning and seat of the pants writing seems to be working itself out. I only hope the next one doesn't take as long.