People ask, “Why do you write?”

It’s a difficult question to answer, and my reply would more be along the lines of, “How can one not write?” rather than a considered reflection on the reasons I write. I just do. I always have.

Calder and I analyse other parts of our writing in depth. Style and method, the how and the what and the when, but seldom the why. Both of us have always told stories, I suspect we always will.

No-one is forced to write. You can always go off and do something else.  Make pots, take up skiing, go out to dinner, read a book.

People write for different reasons. Some people write because they have a story to tell.  Others write because because they see it an easy way to make money.  (Except in rare cases these people soon find it’s not the case, and go off and do something else.)  Most of us write, I suspect, because we can’t imagine not writing.

Do we outline?

Sometimes. Some stories more so than others. Definitely scripts more than novels.

Isn’t it dangerous not to outline?

Yes, but … you could almost say that our first draft is the outline.

Outlining a story almost always cuts down time to write, and cuts down then number of major rewrites. I suspect it’s a little like making the transition from writing by hand to writing direct to the computer. The process is slower to start with, but the more you do it the more comfortable you become with it, and the easier it becomes.

Most professional writers I read about outline.

For the moment we’re happy to write a very rough first draft, use that as the outline, and expand on that. It’s a long, hard way to write a novel, but it seems to work for us.

I suspect that over time we will outline more, particularly if we ever go professional.

Why don’t we outline now?

Because we don’t really know a story until we finish the first draft. We don’t know what’s happening; we don’t know the characters. We talk about the story a lot while we are writing that first draft. Where it’s going, what’s happening with it.

The main problem with not outlining are the holes in the plot that arise as a result of the story evolving.

A plot thread that was important when you started writing becomes inconsequential. Other, originally minor threads assume greater importance and need to be changed acccordingly.

Outlining keeps you organised, ordered, and sometimes I think that the way we go at a book is a little like cleaning house by moving all the junk from one room to another, cleaning that room, and moving the junk somewhere else, but never really getting rid of the junk until we have cleaned the house.

A lot of words come to mind when re-reading the first draft, few of them complimentary. Words like naive, immature and embarrassing come to mind. Just how old is this story?

Calder never liked the first draft Scott. “He was,” she said, “A self-pitying idiot and all he did was sit around and feel sorry for himself.” Only, of course, she said it a lot more strongly than that.

Scott improves in the second draft but here you can see just how far he has to go to become a believable, likeable character.

He’s not the only problem character. Caid’s denigration of Scott’s abilities are out of character for the Caid we envision. Even the secondary characters—Elna, Storm, Mathers, Tull, Kraa, et al—have a long way to go.

You can tell by the characterisation that I had more to do with the initial draft than Calder did. My characterisation is very weak, and for some reason I really don’t do likeable characters. I don’t know why. I need Calder’s input to make them people we care enough to read about.

As for part two—oh my goodness. All one can say is, “Ouch.”

Part two of this draft falls apart totally. On re-reading this draft I am actually surprised we even revisited the story. The characters are almost different people, albeit equally unbearable. They see-saw between personas. They seem to have no logic behind what they do.

The policemen and the way they race off into the unknown with no back-up, no plan—any self respecting policeman, or woman, would throw out the story in disgust as soon as that happened.

We can see just how far we have come as a writing team, though. While the first drafts we write now (in later novels) are still not good, at least the characters are better. And much more likeable.

So J. K. Rowling intends to kill off a couple of major characters in her Harry Potter series, according to an interview she did with Britain’s Channel 4. In the widely quoted interview, Rowling says that she

… understood an author’s desire to kill off the main character of a successful series.  …

“I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks ‘Well, I’m going to kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels … so it will end with me, and after I’m dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character’.”

Two die in final Potter book, Rowling warns, SMH, 27 June 2006

I don’t pretend to know the reasons behind Rowling’s decision to kill off the two characters she plans to, but this is one subject that both we, and our friends who are readers, are very passionate about, and have been for years—long before Harry Potter arrived on the scene.

Killing off a character in a story is fine, provided it’s a logical and believable part of the story. But killing off characters simply because you are sick of them, or worse, for some belief that in doing so you ensure no-one else can write about them is not only stupidity, it’s breaking a pact with the readers who have supported you by reading your novels.

Arthur Conan Doyle is the most famous author to do this, when he tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes, but he is not the only one.

No author appears to be immune. Even some of our own favourite authors have done so. Ivan Southall, author of the Simon Black series, attempted to kill Simon and Alan off in an unpublished novel Simon Black in Arabia. Peter O’Donnell killed off Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin in The Cobra Trap. (I confess, I’m like a lot of Modesty fans. I haven’t read the story. I don’t want to.) O’Donnell, apparently, was one of those people who did not want others writing about his characters after he dies.

Why bother? Why kill off a character just because you are sick of them?

No-one is forcing you to write. Contracts notwithstanding, you can always stop writing about the characters you have grown to hate and start writing about something else. And if you do have a contract…you knew what you were getting into when you signed that contract. If it’s a long one let’s hope you are well paid for your troubles. You signed, you need to deliver. But if you re-sign again afterwards on a series character you know you can’t keep going with, you need to seriously look at your reasons for doing what you are doing.

A reader who has remained faithful to your characters over a number of novels deserves more than an arrogant kick-in-the-teeth decision of, “I’m sick of this character. I think I’ll kill him/her off.”

Respect your readers. Respect your characters.

Who knows. You may even find there’s another story in them. Robin Hobb did with Fitz and the Fool.  She says herself that,

“Many readers probably recall that at the end of Assassin’s Quest I was certain that I had finished writing about Fitz and the Fool. Then I found out I was wrong.”

Robin Hobb, Is Fool’s Fate the last book about Fitz and the Fool?

Look what a few years break did for her. We got the Tawny Man, our favourite Robin Hobb series to date.

We don’t yet know how much impact turning the second draft into a screenplay will have.

If you have ever tried to turn a novel into a script you’ll know there isn’t much room to move. You cut out most of the sub-plots, and rely on internal characterisation being carried by the actors, rather than your story. Screenplays are often better when they’re made from a novella, or sometimes even a short story, because then the film can do them justice.

What happens when you turn it back the other way?

Movie novelisations generally take a film and transpose it pretty much direct to the page. There is little of the true character building that you get in a full-blown novel, and almost none of sub-stories that make the novel so intriguing. Without the actors to carry the story they’re often unsatisfying. They’re also usually very short.

There is really only room for the major plot and one sub-plot in a movie. In Barrain the major plot is Caid getting back to Barrain and righting the wrong he perpetrated, the sub-plot is Mathers’ chasing the supposed murder of Caid. They both come together in the end (as all good sub-plots do) but there is little room for other stories, such as Elna’s relationship with both men, or Scott’s relationship with Storm.

We started off with 80,000 words in draft 1, and cut it down to under 20,000 in draft 2. That’s major surgery. All we are left with is the bare bones of the main story—pretty much just the outline.

Where do we go from here?

We need to undo some of the undoing we have already done.

Getting in some sub-plots, for a start, and they won’t necessarily be the ones we had in draft 1. Elna will obviously come back into the story more. She likes Caid, believes he would make a good partner. How will Caid cope with that? He doesn’t want the responsibility. What about Scott, who is prepared to take the responsibility, for Storm’s sake, if not for Elna?

The ranger made a passing visit in draft 2. I suspect she will feature more in draft 3, but don’t really know until we get there.

And Taliah (formerly known as Tull). Taliah has been there right from the start, but she’s sneaking her way in, more and more with each draft.

Then there’s the crystal. We don’t know much about the crystal at all. That crystal, or others like it, is going to feature a whole lot more in draft three.

How on earth do we do this from a technical point of view?

This is a blog. Do we blog the whole story? How hard would that be to read.

Besides, we want to talk about more than the novel itself, we want to talk about the process of writing the novel and how each of us contributes to this.

Choice of manuscript

No-one really wants to read a first draft. They’re raw, poorly written and the story usually jumps all over the place. They have holes so big you disappear into them.

Our first drafts do, anyway.

They take months to write.

Who wants to sit through months of a bad story? Very few people, particularly when you have to re-read that story again and again.

So while in an ideal world you would take this process right from the beginning, it’s just not practical to do so.

This leaves us with one story we can use—Caid of Barrain. Barrain is a fantasy novel that crosses two worlds—our own world, and Barrain, a more traditional fantasy setting with  less technology and less people. Barrain has already been through two drafts. The second is actually a script, unusual for us, but hey, that’s writing. It’s on its third re-write.

Manuscipts

A typical manuscript we write gets printed out, scribbled on, the pages rearranged. How do we show that on the blog?

Not only that, our first draft is so old we have the printout, along with the files backed up on disk, but the new computer doesn’t read these backups (Iomega zip drives, great for their time, but well supersed by the flash drives we use to back-up now). We would need to reinstall the Iomege drive—if we could—just to print a copy of the novel. We would probably find our latest version of Word couldn’t even read the files. Nothing for it, but to use the paper copy.

That means scanning it in and converting it to something everyone can read. A PDF file.

Have you ever tried to scan and convert 400+ pages to a PDF? Easy enough to scan if you have a document feeder on your printer, but take a look at the size of the file that is produced. It’s got to be loadable as well. We had to manually convert each page to two colours, so that the chapters came out to a size that could be handled.

This is taking most of our time at present, just getting draft 1 on-line.

Isn’t technology marvellous. When it works, it works beautifully, but when you have to do things manually, it can take a long time.  

Given that draft 1 is a PDF, draft 2 may as well be a PDF as well. That’s easy enough to do. It’s a straight print to PDF. We use PDF 995 to print, mostly because there’s a free version.

We haven’t thought about draft 3 yet. May stick to the PDFs, may choose to load it as HTML. We’ll see how it goes.

Copyright 

What about copyright issues? The internet is a public place, plagiarism is rife. Is someone going to steal our story?

That one we’ll have to take on trust, copyright the page, document and date everything we do and believe that its being so public is a protection in itself.

Oh, and we’ll also register the screenplay (second draft) with the Australian Writers Guild, just to prove it really is ours.

Targets

We’re both pretty busy right now, so we’re not going to set word or page counts. (One page, Times Roman, runs to roughly 250 words). we’ll try instead to post something every week, but that’s about as much as we’ll commit to.

Size of the novel? Can’t really tell until it’s complete. The first draft ran to 80,000 words. Going on past experience that means the finished story will probably run to half as much again.

We write as a team.

Different teams write in different ways. Some share the work more or less equally, others divide it differently. We’re one of those other teams who divide it differently, although we can see that changing over time, particularly if we venture into children’s stories, where Calder will probably do the bulk of the writing and I do the bulk of editing.

At present though, the work is divided roughly along the lines of the following.

The idea

One of us has an idea. It could come from either person, it just has to grab both our imaginations and make us think it has somewhere to go.

We discuss the idea until it clicks with both of us. This can take hours, days or weeks, and some ideas go nowhere because they intrigue one of us but the other can’t get interested at all.

By the time we have something we can both work with the idea has changed completely from the original. The initial idea for Satisfaction, for example, was an adult novel. The story we will end up writing is a children’s cartoon. Even so, the germ of the idea is still there, it’s just not the same story.

First draft

I start writing the first draft.

At the end of each day I hand what I have done over to Calder to read. She reads it off the screen, highlighting any major problems such as bad characters or bad plot lines.

Next day we discuss where the story goes now, and that night I type in the next day’s wordage.

At the end of the first draft we print out the whole story. Calder goes through it looking for major plotholes and problem characterisation. I sit nearby with the computer and note any feedback she gives verbally. (The worse the story/characters, the more verbal the feedback.)

After she has finished we discuss what has come out of it and how we might change any problems.

Second draft

I do the typing, making changes based on our notes and discussions.

There are some major changes between drafts one and two. The story gets moved around, characters are chopped, new characters added. We make a lot of changes to cover plot-holes, and that often takes us in different directions, too.

By the end of draft two we generally have a story. Rough, but pretty much in place.

These are major drafts, I might add. There are plenty of minor drafts in between, and lots of revisions ongoing.

Draft 3

By the third draft we’re looking at characterisation. Fleshing out the characters to make them more rounded, changing their behaviour to make them behave more in character. Would Scott behave this way? How would Blade react to that? and so on. By this time we have a pretty good idea of what makes these people tick, and we can use that to give depth to the story.

I’m very light on some of the emotions, so Calder often comes in here and starts adding ‘emotive’ passages.

Along the way we fill in minor plot holes.

Read the rest of this entry »

The idea …

Often sparked by Calder, occasionally by me.

It’s usually always an event, in association with a character. Potion, for example, came about as an idea Calder had for one of our series characters*. The idea took a life of its own, and before we knew it, we were halfway through the adventures of Alun, Blade and Tegan.

Satisfaction started as a dream I had one night. An adult tale, slightly risque. I took it to Calder, and by the time she had added her ideas and we had a story we could both run with, it had turned into a children’s cartoon. We’ll write this one as a movie script.

The idea for this on-line novel, Barrain, is so far in the past we can’t even remember what triggered it.

Ideas are everywhere, but the idea has to take on a life before you can spend entire novel on it. On its own, it is nothing.

In writing courses you often get exercises to write about–look at this picture and write a story around it; what type of car does this woman drive; take this character and this situation and write a story around it. These are good in that they make you write, particularly if you have to hand something in, (who was it who said that nothing concentrates the mind so well as a deadline?), but they’re not enough to sustain a full novel.

The idea has to obsess you.

When we started this blog I looked around to see if we could use the title ‘A novel idea’. I came across a blog by John Ravenscroft. He had decided to write a novel. In Ideas in the Mist he planned out the characters and his story in what seemed to me a very clinical fashion. I have tried to do this myself and for me it just doesn’t work. I get three chapters into the story and it peters away. Neither of us have ever, yet, been able to run with a story without an idea and a character that grabs us. Good luck to to the man, I thought, because he’s doing it hard.

I kept reading his blog. A couple of months later, he talks about how his novel has slowed to a crawl. One of the reasons he gives is:

“The thing is… I’ve had an idea for another novel. An altogether different kind of novel. And … I’ve been spending great chunks of time that I should have been using to think about (my original novel), doing something else entirely. I’ve been thinking about, dreaming about, wondering about the characters and the situations that could form the basis of this new novel - and getting quite enthusiastic about it.”

John Ravenscroft - A Tortoise Amongst Hares

That’s the novel he needs to write. When you start obsessing about a story, thinking about it all the time, letting it intrude onto other things, then you’re part of the way to being able to live with a story for the length of time it takes to write a novel.

*Series characters. We have some series characters about whom we have any number of stories. The problem with these characters is that they have been around in our lives for so long that they’ve nowhere left to grow, and a story needs to grow and change.

We’re at that stage in our writing where we don’t look at the ‘how to write’ sites any more. We like the sites where writers write about writing. How they work, what they do, the struggles they have with their story, and so on.

Don’t quite know how this idea took root. Maybe it’s because Calder was already writing two blogs; maybe it’s just because as writers, we write. We spend a lot of time thinking about the writing process (I more so than Calder, perhaps), particularly as it relates to two people collaborating on a story and how the two inputs change the story that comes out.

The idea took off from there. Why don’t we write a novel on-line, first draft to finished story, and show the whole process?

Writing a novel takes a long time. Months, often years, of living and dreaming the story, working with the characters, rehashing the plot. It takes effort, determination, dedication. You have to love that story or by the end you can’t stand it.

Over those long months or years the story changes. The story that starts out in our first drafts, at least, is little like the story that finishes up five or more major drafts later. In fact, the first drafts are so amateur they’re embarrassing to re-read.

We like to know how other people write. Maybe you would too. Maybe, when you’re in the depths of your own novel you can look at our early drafts and take comfort from the fact that out of something so bad may come something good. Maybe, as we struggle with this on-line novel, it will help you as you struggle with yours.

Enjoy.