If you’ve read this blog before you will know that I’m not a big fan of prologues.

A good prologue gives you information that is not part of the main story but that is important to know. It is often set in a different time to that of the main novel, usually earlier, and it generally has a different protagonist. The classic prologue that comes to mind is Tolkien’s explanation of how the one ring to rule them all came about. (I’m thinking the movie version here.)

Another use for a prologue is as part of a series, where it’s a précis of what happened in previous books. I might add that most of my favourite series don’t have prologues and don’t need them.

Unfortunately, many people who write fantasy novels seem to think that their story isn’t a real fantasy if it doesn’t have a prologue, so they put one in, when really what they have written is chapter one of their novel and they should just have started the main story earlier.

Their prologue deals with events that happen to the person who is the main point-of-view character of the novel. These events often happen only days or—or even in one case, minutes—before the story proper. They’re often narrated in a distant, omniscient voice. If you read the prologue at all you just skim it, then you turn over to chapter one and start reading it and bang, you’re right in the middle of the aftermath of what happened in the prologue.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a story that starts in the middle of the action, but even a story that begins with action needs a place where you, the reader, can begin. That’s usually at the start of chapter one.

I believe that you should be able to read a whole book without the prologue and still understand and enjoy it. The prologue should add further information and enrich the story, but it shouldn’t be part of the story. Going back to Lord of the Rings, the
story of the making of the ring had nothing and everything to do with the story of how and why Frodo and company set out to destroy the ring. That’s the ideal prologue.

In my latest novel I thought I had written—horrors—a prologue. It was set prior to the main story. It was told from a different point-of-view, and the narrator was first-person while the rest of the story is third-person. What happens in the prologue is the trigger for the whole story. You could read the story without it, but you read it differently because if you read the prologue first you knew what was going on and why things had happened.

So be it. If my story had to have a prologue it had one.

And then just a little over half-way through the story the same first-person narrator pops up again. It wasn’t conscious. More a, “Hey, here I am and I want my turn now,” type of writing. Three-quarters of the way through back he pops in again. This time he joins up with one of the protagonists and travels with them for the rest of the book.

So he’s not a prologue any more. I’m not sure what he is yet.

One thing I do know is that he has a totally different voice to the main character. If you pick up my story and start reading it based on that non-prologue you may not like it when you get to chapter two, because it’s a totally different story.

I haven’t quite worked out how to deal with that yet. Or whether I even need to.

I have just finished critiquing a fellow writer’s novel. It was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it a lot. But, it was a critique and so I after I commented on the good things, I concentrated on what didn’t work. The main problems with the story were easy to pick. Too much information was conveyed through dialogue. The book changed part-way through, as if the author had finally realised where it was going, but he hadn’t gone back and changed the start. There were some excellent emotional scenes but in other parts of the story there was no emotion at all, and it was just a straight telling of this happened, then that happened and then that.

These are all traits I recognise from my own writing.

If it’s so easy to recognise them in someone else’s story, why can’t I recognise them in my own?

Most authors will agree that time gives distance to their work. Putting a manuscript away for six months definitely shows up many flaws. Yet even so you don’t get them all. You make the novel as good as it can be, but when you get your first beta reader they still pick up a whole lot of things that you hadn’t even noticed, even if it has been months between drafts.

I do a lot of writing with a writing partner. We both work the same way. We talk about what we wish to write and what’s going to happen in the story, but only one person sits down and hammers out the first draft. After that the other writer goes through the text and finds the holes and adds all the things the initial writer left out.

It used to be that this worked brilliantly. The writer who reviewed the first draft gave the same sort of feedback that a writer from a (good) critique group did.

But, I have noticed that as we write more and more together we’re actually becoming blind to each other’s writing mistakes. We know the other person’s writing so well now that it’s getting harder and harder to pick up those mistakes first time around, or even second time around.

We’re relying more and more on other beta readers to pick them up.

This is the second in a (very) occasional series of common writing mistakes made by unpublished writers. (Note, I am not a published writer, but I do write, and I do read.)

This is one I know I am guilty of myself and I’ve read quite a few published novels that do exactly the same thing. Especially first novels. It’s the rushed ending.

It goes like this. You’re reading a novel. You love the characters, you’re caught up in the storyline, you’re really enjoying the book. Then you get around 80% through and suddenly the whole thing goes off the rails. The end whizzes up on you so fast that you’re left going, “Huh? How did they get from there to here?”, and sometimes, “I don’t get what just happened here?”

Then, instead of going back to the author and being able to say, “This was a great story, I’d read anything you wrote,” you have to spend two days trying to work out what went wrong, and how.

We’ve analysed our own writing and for us it comes down to two things:

• We just want to finish the book. We’re so close, and we’ve been working on it for so long and we can see that we’re nearly there so we just go and go and go. And when we’re done we’re finished. We don’t go back and edit because we’re drained. And we’re finished. There’s no more to do. We don’t want to touch it until the next draft. Besides, we have other ideas percolating and we want to do them now.
• As we write we re-write. When you starting writing for the day you re-read what you wrote the day before (usually) and fix any problems. We also regularly go back over the whole story, re-reading, fixing things. Thus the first part of the book gets a lot more rewrites than the second.

  (Logically this means that the first part of the book should be better than the anything else, but usually it isn’t. My theory as to why not is because it takes time to get onto a roll. When’re you’re around 20-30,000 words into the book you’re into the story and into the habit of writing, so the writing from there on flows much better.)

There’s an easy way to fix this. Drafts. Drafts 2 and 3 (for us) are where we attempt to fix up that hurried ending, where we expand it and explain what we knew in our minds but forgot to tell the reader first time round because we were in such a hurry. But it takes time and distance for us to even admit that the ending doesn’t work. If we wrote our next drafts immediately after we wrote the first one I’m not sure we would see that as clearly.

Buying a netbook computer has boosted my writing output considerably, and it has given me a renewed enthusiasm for writing.

Even though it looks as if I haven’t written much for the last 12 months, I have. I have written a lot. I just haven’t been doing it on a computer because my writing time is away from home—travelling to and from work and snatched during lunch hours. I have been writing by hand.

I filled around 30 notebooks.  I have written lots of blogs. Most of them are still in my notebook. Some of them are obsolete now because they are no longer relevant.

I also wrote 30,000 words of my workshop novel.

30,000 words. 120 pages. Ten pages a month, and they weren’t even good pages.

Writing by hand comes with its own particular problems, of which I’ll blog about separately (the blog’s written, I just have to find which notebook it’s in) but the main problems for me were:

• It’s incredibly slow
• I don’t re-write hand-written text as I go because the re-writing slows me down. I do rewrite on the PC, because it’s easy to do. This means the handwritten text is less polished than the typed
• I have terrible handwriting. By the time I transfer the it to computer I can’t even read half of it, and I have no idea what I meant by the cryptic notes I made for myself at the time/

I know a writer who writes all his first drafts by hand. He wouldn’t do it any other way (and it’s not an age thing, because he’s younger than me). But I can’t write at that speed forever. I would only finish one novel every ten years.

Two months ago I bought a netbook computer. As a writer I had some specific requirements.

• A keyboard that I could type on
• Microsoft Word
• At least 1 megabyte of memory (so that I could run Office programs easily) and with more than one open at a time
• It had to fit into my handbag and be light enough for me to carry with comfort if I decided to, say, walk home from work

Things like wireless access and price were important, but not deciders.

I spent a lot of time in computer shops typing “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, that all demo computers are at least two months old? In all the time that I looked I never saw one computer where the Microsoft trial was still running.)

Some computers were just too small. The Asus Eee PC, for example, was cute, but I simply could not type accurately. Some computers had good keyboards but when I picked them up they weighed a lot. Who wants to walk around with the equivalent of a bag of sugar in their bag? Not me.

I finally settled on the Acer Aspire One. The price had come down, it was being sold with XP and it had 1MB of memory so I knew I could put Word onto it. I specifically wanted Word so that I could update the document from either my desktop PC or the netbook, depending on where I was at the time. And it was the smallest keyboard that I could type with relative accuracy on.

It took courage to take it out in public the first few times. I felt really stupid. The first week I just carried it around in the bag. Then one morning I got brave, sat down in my local McDonalds with a coffee and muffin, and forced myself to use it.

It was a month before I would take it out every day and considered it normal. But now I do it over a coffee in the morning and in a small cafe over lunch. (You need to pick your lunch spots carefully. Choose quiet ones that are never full, and do later lunches, if you can. And don’t stay forever. There’s a backlash right now over people with computers who hog tables for hours over one coffee. My own etiquette rules are: always buy food as well as a drink, and never use the cafe’s power, only your battery.)

It’s costing me more in food (and I think I’m gaining weight) but the writing benefits are well worth it. Since I’ve had the netbook I have completed my workshop novel (another 30,000 words), and written a second draft.

Not only that, I have more enthusiasm for writing. I didn’t realise how much writing by hand was holding me back.

I have been extremely busy at work lately, so much so that when I get home I just flop. I turn on my computer to read my emails, but that’s about it. I defintely don’t have time to open the word processor and start typing the next segment of my novel.

But that doesn’t mean I have stopped writing. I have a note book and I’m writing on the tram and bus on the way to and from work. I’m writing in coffee shops at lunchtime. I pull it out any time I have a spare few minutes. At the hairdresser, waiting for friends. Anywhere I have enough light and somewhere to rest the note book.

I have filled about ten notebooks already. Last Saturday I sat down and typed up the contents of the first one. 7,000 words. A week’s worth of borrowed writing time and I still managed 7,000 words. I was pretty happy.

It has changed how I write, however.

I usually type directly onto a computer when I can. It was hard to do at first, but I am pleased I stuck to it and forced myself to do it. In fact, two technical skills I would urge every writer to learn is touch typing, and writing directly onto a computer without writing it by hand first. If you can do this it eventually frees you up to write faster, and you have less retyping to do.

(I should add a third skill once that’s done. Backing up your work on a regular basis.)

Going back to writing in a note book has made things harder.

• I can’t write as fast, so I have this horrible habit of leaving bits out as I write. I think, “I’ll put that in when I type it up,” but of course, it never happens. I have no idea what I was thinking of by then
• I don’t work on the prose as much. On the PC I would work on a sentence over and over to get the meaning I wanted. On paper, once I’ve made a few crossouts and put other words in, I can’t even read what I meant. Sometimes I rewrite the whole section, but by this time I’m rushing ahead and I think to myself, “I’ll fix that when I type it up”. If I need to make major changes I just rewrite the whole thing, and don’t even refer back to the original. I end with two similar sections. I then type up both versions, which makes an aboslute mess
• Until I started writing on paper I didn’t realise how much I moved around in the manuscript. Writing by hand is sequential and so that’s how I type it up. My story timeline is an absolute mess, so bad that I need to write out a sequence just to get my own head around it.
• I don’t edit. When I am working on the PC, the first thing I do is re-read what I wrote the day before and fix any major problems. In fact, there have been days where I just polish the previous day’s work and don’t type up anything new

There are lots of things I plan to fix when I type it up, but come type-up time I don’t do any of that. I type straight from the notes without changing anything.

As a result, the work I produce from my handwritten notes is a lot rougher, more of an outline, with lots of things that need to be filled in. If I wrote like this all the time the story would need an extra draft to get it to its usual second-draft state.

I can’t wait till I get back to the keyboard.

I started this blog I because I thought it was a unique idea and that while there is lots of information about how to write, there is little physical evidence of the actual process that writers go through to change their work.

Not so. Brandon Sanderson, who has written a number of books but is currently famous for picking up Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, has a lot of information about the writing process, deleted scenes, commentary on chapters and so on. It’s a great read.  Settle in for the afternoon—or maybe the weekend, as there’s a lot there. It’s a real treasure trove of the writing process.

I actually got his site from a post Robin Hobb did on sff.net/My Space. Readers asked her how her draft process works, so she explained some technicalities with how she does her drafts. After which she posted portions of a sixth and seventh draft from the prologue of Dragon Keeper, her new book.

Both these sites are worth looking at.

All writers have strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is dialogue. I can write a whole novel in dialogue. (I know, they’re called scripts, but my stories sprawl so much the end result would be longer than a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.)  One of my weaknesses is emotion. Calder goes through the stories after I have finished the first draft and adds emotive moments throughout.  Another weakness is fight scenes.

I can’t write fight scenes.

I can picture the fight in my head as I’m writing. I know what happens, but getting it down on paper is another thing altogether.  The first draft is a wire-frame outline pulled totally out of shape  The fight has no excitement, no emotion, and not much happening, and then suddenly it’s over.

So I rewrite it with more description and it turns into one long boring ‘he did this’ and then ’she did that’ and then they did it all over again. The fight takes forever, and any urgency is lost. Not only that, I still can’t get past the ‘he did this’ text for what is actually happening.

At least my scenes are realistic by then, if somewhat boring. I have a writer friend who specialises in the impossible fight. You know the ones. Where the antagonist has his back to the protagonist and then she (the protagonist) shoots him between the eyes. Or the physically impossible contortionist scene where she’d have to be Elastagirl to pick up the weapon the bad guy dropped.

Another writer friend suggested we could both benefit from taking a fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie and trying to describe it.

I think I might try it.

Expect our next few books to have kung-fu-style fight scenes.

In my latest story my character has a noise inside his head.  It’s continual, and he doesn’t know what it is.

I know exactly what it sounds like. It’s the noise that you get when you sit next to someone who has their iPod up too loud and you are swamped with a white noise that’s half static, half beat, beat, beat.

I can describe it well enough using today’s terms, but my character lives in a pre-technological society. He’s never heard of static. He’s never heard of iPods. I have to describe it in natural terms.

I’d been stumped for days, but then I started writing this post and suddenly, for no reason at all, natural analogies just popped up.

For the underlying noise I might start with the sound of a seashell when you hold it up to your ear, or the the wind whistling around the shutters on a stormy night. Or even the sea itself.

For the static, add the crackling of resinous logs on the fire.

And the beat? It’s a rhythm like the drums of the distant watchers, or the seasoned pounding of the butcher chopping up meat on his slab.

I’m sure I can come up with more.

The thing is, once I stopped trying to describe it and let it percolate in the background, my subconscious came up with a whole stack of ideas.

How different are the names of characters in your novel?

Progress on Barrain has come to a standstill at present as I am concentrating on the novel for my critiquing group.

I gave Calder the first 30,000 words to read last night.

It’s a difficult story to write in that I am trying to hide the true identity of one of the characters, to keep the reader guessing who it is until the end of the story.

“Well,” Calder said at the end. “I know it’s not Vas.”

It wasn’t Vas, but I was trying not to give away who it was, so I asked, trying to sound surprised, “Why wouldn’t it be him?”

“Because of the name,” she said. “You would never name a hero Vas.”

She went on to remind me that we had a character named Vasst in Potion,  a spineless group leader who turned traitor. We also have Vlad the Impaler in a story idea we have yet to write.

“Which leaves Hanna and Julan as the only two people it can be,” Calder said. “And I don’t think it’s Julan because Julian was the bad guy in Shared Memories, so it must be Hanna.”

It was Hanna, in fact, but I had gone to a lot of effort to make Julan feisty and likeable, so that most readers would think it was her.

Flabbergasted is probably too strong a word to describe how I felt, but it did make me pause.

“Arrax is a hero, of course,” Calder said. “Because his name starts with ‘A’. A lot of your heroes have ‘A’ names.”

Arrax is the hero. And yes, in prior books, both Alun and Aled have been heroes too.

I made a list of names and characters in our stories.

Calder did have a point.

There were other similarities. Lots of ‘n’ and ’l’ sounds in the names. One or two syllable names, particularly for the good guys. And definitely a trend to bad guys with names starting with ‘V’.

I have to rethink some character names.

Calder asked me, the other day, how I ’saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it. 

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there.  It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking.  He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie—I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s.  I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Calder though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.