On-line writing forums are great, but if you don’t manage them carefully they can become a black hole that absorbs all your writing energy, leaving you no time for writing.

I know from personal experience.

Some danger signs, and how to avoid them.

Logging on to the forum before you do any writing

I used to do this to get into the mood for writing, and for a while it worked. But then I found I was spending so much time on the forums I had no time left to write.

Nowadays, I do my writing first and visit the forums later—if I’m not too busy writing to bother.

If I ever do pop into a forum before I start, I watch the clock, and try to get out within the hour.

The dead end relationship

Any forum loses members through natural attrition. People drop out, or get other interests.

In my experience a forum that has shrunk to a dozen or less active members, all of whom know each other intimately (on the web, at least), and whose posts can really only be understood by the other regular posters, is not worth it.

If you find that you are one of those last half-dozen posters on a site, and that it has become a general purpose chat session rather than specifically about writing, maybe it is time to jump ship.

Most forums have a finite life. Sometimes it’s kinder to let a dead forum go than to hang on to the bitter end. (The bitter end being when the person hosting the forum pulls the plug.)

If you really like the people in the forum, then by all means keep in touch, but if you’re in it for the writing don’t hang around simply out of loyalty.

The too scared to post forum

Everyone should lurk a little in a forum before they post.

Like any other social setting you need to know the do’s and don’ts before you start blasting away with your own opinion. 

Once you know the etiquette, however, you shouldn’t be afraid to contribute.

If everything you post gets savaged, find another forum. You are not doing yourself or your writing any favours by sticking around.

(Inappropriate posting is a totally different matter—worthy of a whole subject to itself. I am amazed at the number of writers who ask people to review their work, for example, on forums that clearly state they do not do this.)

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Used properly, online writing forums can be a great tool for a writer, but choose your forum carefully and beware of the traps mentioned above.

Deadlines, extra work. I am so tired I feel sick. Haven’t touched Barrain, or any other writing (outside of work), for days now.

It’s my own fault. On the one free day I had, when I could have been writing, what did I do? I picked up Lynn Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows, and then, of course, I had to read the second book, Stalking Darkness.

These two books stand alone, but there is a third with the same characters. The question now is do I find the third book, or do I wait until we have finished writing this draft of Barrain?

I try to not read books while we are writing the first major drafts. I find that no matter how hard we try, the book influences me.

For example, I remember re-reading Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy while writing an earlier version of Shared Memories.

Weeks later, going back to do the edits, we find that Roland grins wolfishly and does other wolfish things.  If you’ve read the Farseer trilogy you’ll know where the wolfishness comes in.

The thing is, Roland is about as unlike a wolf as you can get.  He’s not a grinner either.

There were two chapters of totally out of character behaviour. It took a while to clean it out.

It’s great when a book has so much impact on you, that you can’t help but carry it over into your story. However, it’s not a desirable thing to do.

After that we decided not to read and write at the same time. Not for any of the major drafts, anyway.

In the first instance, we try to sell our novels to the American market.

Why would we do this when the Australian market for fantasy is so good at the moment?

The Australian market is extremely difficult to break into. I’m not saying it’s impossible—we’re still trying—but it’s a very small market. Once you have pitched to the small number of agents who accept submissions, and to the even smaller number of editors who do, you have nothing left.

The US and UK markets are bigger. We chose the US market.

As Australian writers though, just how much should we change our work to suit the American market?

I’m not talking tone here, but the little things that are different between countries that may make an American reader go, ‘Huh?’. Or the spelling, or even the size of the paper we submit on.

In Barrain, Melissa goes around to the boot of the car to get the backpack Scott takes on the hike with him.

If we pitch this story to US agents and publishers, should we make the boot a trunk?

What about spelling. Australian spelling favours English spelling rather than American. Colour rather than color, grey rather than gray, cheque rather than check, and so on. Or as jeeagle-ga, one poster on the google answers site puts it, “gray is a color, grey is a colour”.

I also tend to favour ‘ise’ endings, rather than ‘ize’.

Even paper size is a question. If I am trying to sell to a US market, how much do I damage my chances by submitting on A4 paper?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much difference any of these things make to trying to make a sale.

We don’t bother worrying about these things when we write. Before we submit something to the US market we run it through a US spell checker, but that’s about all we do.

If I found out that the paper size really harmed our chances, I might order in some letter size paper, but haven’t done so to date.

As for words like ‘trunk’. I’d probably leave them for the agent or editor to tell us to change before we touched them.

Finally made a start on rewriting the first chapter (formerly known as the prologue). It’s patchy, but I think it’s better. It’s been bugging me ever since I wrote it.

A question related to “Why do you write?” but slightly easier to answer, is “Why do you write novels?”

Because we can’t write any shorter.

I read numerous writing advice where they say, “Start off with small steps. Start off writing short stories, and then graduate up to novels.” Sound advice but I, for one, have never been able to do it. Every short story story we have ever written is sitting in our “Story Ideas” file, waiting to be turned into a full-blown novel. The characters in these shorter works have stories just waiting to be told, worlds we need to write about, ideas we want to explore. Way too much information to go into a short story.

It’s a pity, because I think becoming known as a writer of short fiction would definitely help us to sell novels—both to an agent and to the general public.

From my own personal experience, I will buy a novel written by someone whose short works I have enjoyed. Having read Connie Willis’ Firewatch and A Letter From the Clearys (okay, Firewatch was a novella), I went out and bought her novel, Lincoln’s Dreams. True Names (another novella) introduced me to Vernor Vinge’s writing.

It’s not just short stories. Any writing will do. I bought Nancy Kress’ books based on her monthly column in Writers’ Digest. I admired her writing there, liked what she wrote, so when I came across Beggars in Spain in a bookshop one day I bought that.

Outside of this, I tend to discover new writers at the library, rather than buy books on spec.

If you can write short stories then do so. Not only does it hone your writing skills, but you have a much better chance of selling a shorter work than a full blown novel, and the credits you get from that short story sale may just help you sell your novel.

Still a straight copy from the script. Trying to put Scott’s thoughts into the mix.

A few problems translating from present tense.  When we re-read what we have written a couple of days later we find that every so often we have slipped back into present tense. Don’t see it when we’re writing, need the distance of time to notice it.

Outside of that, the story is going well.

Not every idea turns into a fully fledged novel. Some of them die after three chapters.  Others sit in the ideas box, waiting for time to write. Still others sit in the ideas box waiting for another idea or character to click with before we can use it.

Ideas and characters are everywhere, but it takes a combination of things to decide to write a story about them, and other factors to decide to write that story now.

The third chapter death

I usually find that if you can’t write past the third chapter, you don’t want to tell this story, or at least you don’t want to tell it right now.

This often happens when one of us doesn’t like the idea.

It also happens on those rare occasions when we decide to write something for commercial reasons. Analogous to the “Everyone can write a romance novel, let’s do it.”  We don’t quite do that, ours is more, “We read lots of mystery novels, why don’t we write a whodunnit? They’re half the size of a fantasy and we’re more likely to sell it.”  Maybe one day we’ll do it, but I can tell you now that at the rate we’re going our whodunnit is also going to be a science fiction (Rainbow) and it will likely run to well over 100,000 words.

Whilst you can keep up the enthusiasm for pretty much any story for a couple of chapters, I find that you usually know by the end of the third chapter whether or not you are prepared to live with the story for the next couple of years.

The ‘I want to write it now’ great idea

Ideas don’t wait until you get to the end of the current book. You might see something, overhear something, dream something. You can’t just say, “Hold on. I don’t want to know about you until the middle of next year. I’m writing a different novel right now.”  You’d forget it.

We write the idea down, and add it to our list of story ideas. If it’s a truly persistent idea that comes fully visualised (a la Satisfaction) we’ll write a rough version of the idea that’s demanding to be heard, and put that into our ideas box as well. We have the first ten or fifteen pages of a script for Satisfaction, plus lots of notes on who, what, why and how. It’s all handwritten in one of our writing notebooks, and it’s not going any further—and definitely won’t be typed up—until we get to it. Unless another part of the story demands to be told, of course, in which case we’ll write that down in our notebook as well.

We have a number of great story ideas where we have the start written down, plus some rough notes about where it is going. Stories we’d love to write, when we get the time.

Sometimes too, these demanding ideas are just procrastination. You hit a block in the story you are currently working on, and rather than fix the problem you come up with all these other stories you could write instead. There’s no easy way over that except to recognise the procrastination for what it is, and somehow, if you can, get back on track with the current story. 

Just don’t let yourself start writing that second story properly though. You need discipline to write a novel. As soon as you start being lenient on yourself you make it harder to finish.

If you hit a slump half to three-quarters of the way through a novel (and we always do), try at least to finish the draft before you throw it away. If you liked the story enough to get that far, you’ll probably find that once you get over the hump you’re able to continue with enthusiasm.

The really great idea that isn’t a story yet

You need more than one idea to make a story. These ideas seldom arrive all at the same time. You might start with an idea or a character, but he’s going nowhere without somethng happening to him

The origins of Barrain, our on-line novel, are hazy now, but I do know that long before Scott arrived on the scene Jacob was there (only he wasn’t called Jacob then), watching Caid—a member of his own team—saying to his companion, “Such a pity we have to kill him.”

We have some great ideas tucked away in our ideas box. Right now that’s all they are. Ideas. A single idea is not enough to build a story on.

If you start writing these ideas too early the story peters out, and you have a third-chapter graveyard for what could have been a truly great story if you’d given it more time.

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We go through the ideas once or twice a year. We dice an occasional one that was obviously a fad at the time, but most of them we put back into the box. (It’s a figurative box, not a real one. A pile of notebooks, and a directory on the PC.) It surprises me occasionally, how enthusiastic I get just reading some of the ideas. I want to write about them.            

It’s an interesting thing, though, that it’s never the ideas box that sparks the final decision to write a particular novel. The ideas are obviously there, and we choose one or more of them, but I don’t know what it is that makes us say, “This is the time to write this story.”

I am going to add here, that I had a lot of comments the other night while reading the draft of Shared Memories, but Cab Sav was on the phone (family IT Helpdesk stops here).  I had to store many of my comments, and my memory is not the best.  So, by the time Cab got off the phone—I had long since finished reading—I could not remember a lot of what I had been going to say. The difference between reading off the screen and reading a hard copy. With a hard copy, I would have written down the comments. With a screen, I make the comments and Cab Sav writes. Easier for me, until I am asked to slow down. Will have to take a notebook and note down my comments as I go in future. As long as I remember to add the page number.

Finished a major draft of Shared Memories last night. I’m sitting here now with pen in hand while Calder reads it through, waiting to write down her comments as she reads.

• She doesn’t like the start.
  That’s normal. She never likes the start of our books. This one has already been re-written about five times. We replaced it with a different start for a while, but just recently reinstated the old one.
• Then she starts on the holes.  “Kym wouldn’t not have gone through his bag that first night, particularly if she thought there might have been drugs there.”
  Hmm. This one is a problem, as Kym’s going through the bag two days later is important. If she finds the map any earlier it loses impact. Unfortunately, Kym is a professional. She would check the bag that first night.

More holes, all the way through the novel. They get worse (because the first part of the book has been re-written so many more times than the second half), and Calder’s comments get more and more honest, especially if we’re doing this over a glass of wine, which we often do.

By the time she’s got to the end it’s:

• “… and the poor Wyverns, they just come charging into the room and make straight for Roland and try to kill him.  They’ve had plenty of time to do it before, but they don’t. But no, they go out of the room and then come back in and immediately go racing over to kill him … and they don’t even succeed. They can’t even slash his throat with their claws. I mean, they should have been able to. Then Roland’s father comes in behind them and what does he do? Absolutely nothing.”

It’s quite funny, and very honest. We have a great time.

Some people think it’s too honest. We had a friend staying one night (they were staying a lot longer than that, otherwise we wouldn’t have been working on our novel that particular night). She was horrified that Calder would be so brutally honest.

“CabSav has gone to a lot of trouble to write this,” she said. “The least you can do is give her positive feedback about what she has written.”

She didn’t understand that we didn’t need praise, we needed an honest assessment of what was wrong.

When you’re critiquing for a writers group—such as the excellent Critters, for example—you need to say positive things about the story as well as telling them what doesn’t work. Firstly, it’s polite. You don’t know the writer, and a writer puts a lot of him/her self on show when they put a story up for critting. It’s up to you to respect that they have done so. (Not to forget that Aburt will boot you out of Critters if you are not polite.) These writers need to know what works, as well as what doesn’t work.

But Calder and I, we have been writing together a long time now. I know the story must be working on some level or she wouldn’t stick with it through all those rewrites. Not only that, when she says something works, she really means it works. When she says, as she did for this review, “The bit where Marco and Hamill talk about his son is much better. You have really improved that,” she means we have really, really improved it.

I was reading a thread on the SFF writing forum about whether or not people prefer to write in first, second or third person.

The preferred style of writing appears to be third person.  This is our own preferred style too.  One poster said

First person is probably the easiest to write in, there’s something comfortable in sitting yourself inside the narrators head and just writing them.

Posted by Murrin in the SFF writing forum thread The different Persons on 21 July 2006.

and it made me think about how I visualise stories, and characters in stories.

As a teenager I know that I used to imagine myself as the hero or heroine of the story.  If I ever made up stories about characters from other books, I was that character. I saw through their eyes, spoke through their mouth, any actions were those character’s actions.  Stories I wrote were mostly in the first person.

Over time that has changed.

Now I write in third person, and when I imagine what is going to happen in the story I imagine it as happening to the character, rather than being the character and having it happen to me.  I get into the character’s head for some of the emotions, but that’s all.

It’s a very close, personal third person, but it’s still third, and it’s very visual.

For example, in chapter one of this novel in progress—Barrain—Scott and Melissa argue as they drive along to Scott’s rendevous with the bird watchers. 

I see the car speeding along the road.  It’s as if it’s on film.  I’m watching from a distance, and can see what’s going to happen before it does.  I see that Melissa is going to go out and pass the slow-moving vehicle, I see the car almost do a 360 degree turn as Melissa slams on the brakes to take the side road. I see them eat dust as she rattles up the dirt road, the car almost sliding into the side of the road every so often because she won’t slow down.

I’m watching from outside, but at the same time I’m in the car, sitting between Scott and Melissa as they argue, feeling Scott’s anger at the stupidity of Melissa’s argument, too annoyed to even be really scared about how badly she is driving.  These are Scott’s emotions, not mine.  I know they’re his, I know what he is thinking but I am not thinking them.

When you are younger you react to situations emotionally. Your whole life revolves around how you feel. Somewhere along the way you start to analalyse those emotions. You start stepping back and saying, “I did this because …”, “He said that because …”.

Life is a lot like writing. That’s exactly the same sort of analysis you do for characters in a story.