Last day of NaNoWriMo. Had I been participating I would have failed spectacularly. Congratulations to all of you who participated.

Calder’s opinion of Barrain so far…

This draft is definitely better, but Mathers simply would not do what he was doing. Mathers is not a ‘bad’ policeman. He would not overlook the obvious.

He might start out believing the dead body was Caid, but if all the evidence—and that’s every single piece—points to that being impossible, why does he continue to insist he must be right?

This is where the value of the co-writer comes in.

Left to myself I would have Mathers insist on the body being Caid’s all through the book, but I can’t do that now, my co-writer won’t let me.

I can already see some flow-on consequences.

Mathers’ relationship with his partner will definitely change. They’ll be more buddies than antagonists, working together on a case that doesn’t make sense, rather than at loggerheads all the time.

His relationship with Scott will change too. Scott changes from being a suspected murderer to a victim.

This changes every police scene from here on.

It’s becoming a markedly different story.

This story is like pulling teeth at the moment.

If it was a first draft we would probably stop here.

We usually give a first draft up to 100 pages. If we lose interest before then we stop writing. The story doesn’t have enough legs to carry us through to the end.

If we get to 100 pages we generally don’t hit a slump until three quarters of the way through the book (300+ pages). We hit a real down here, always hard to get past. (Refer to an earlier blog, the Mid-novel Writer’s Block.)

If we stick to the story enough to complete a draft, however, we try to complete any further drafts we start.

This is our third draft of this story. Sometimes it feels more like the first, but we’re going to stick it out.  All the way. The block has just come earlier this time.

One thing most of us new writers who post on the web worry about is copyright. We worry that someone will steal our story.

We go to a lot of trouble to ensure that our copyright is protected; sometimes we even go to extremes. But are we protecting the right thing?

Copyright protection varies from country to country, but many countries have similar laws, and most are parties to the Berne Convention. Search on “copyright” on the web and it will direct you to the appropriate government department for your country. Effectively, your work is copyright from the moment you create it, and most times you don’t have to do anything more

Plagiarism appears to be rife on the internet, but the plagiarism is more for non-fiction, rather than fiction. This blog entry, for example, is more likely to be ripped off than our novel, Barrain, which is posted here. Many times the theft is unintentional, due more to ignorance than to deliberate wrongdoing. We do what we can with copyright notices and the like, but in the end we have to rely on people’s honesty

It’s a little like locking your car when you leave. You lock the car to deter the opportune burglars, but you will not stop the professional car thieves.

Theft of writing does happen, although it’s not as common in fiction as most of us believe.

What we—the new writers, often don’t realise—is that we are really protecting the wrong thing. Once a story is written, it is automatically copyright. We may have to go to court to prove that someone has stolen our story, but we own the rights to it.

Terry Rossio, from WordPlay wrote a great article about this very subject. It’s called Steal This Column. In it, he talks about meeting a writer who showed him an old version of a script.

“I’m curious,” I said uncertainly, “why I’ve just been given the bad version.”
He gave me a sly look. “I really don’t know anything about you. If you decide to steal this, then at least I know you’re stealing the version that sucks.”
Terry Rossio, Steal This Column

The writer also talked about the next great script that he was going to write, a murder mystery plot involving identical triplets. As Terry says,

The screenwriter who gave me the ‘bad’ version of his script to read was making a classic error. He got it exactly wrong. He was being overly protective of his screenplay — and openly forthcoming with his story ideas. Remember his pitch, the murder-mystery involving identical triplets? According to him, that was his next project, his next best idea. It also happened to be unregistered, unprotected and undocumented. There is no record of our meeting on it. And he didn’t even follow up with a letter stating, “Thank you for allowing me to present my concept concerning the triplets murder mystery.”
This suspicious fellow left his best idea just sitting there, ready for the taking.
As a writer, you should know that your concepts are far more vulnerable than your screenplay. Because really, nobody in Hollywood steals screenplays anyway. It’s usually easier to just buy the damn thing.
Terry Rossio, Steal This Column

As Lewis Purdue and Michael Baigent and others have found with the Da Vinci Code, simply having the same idea does not automatically mean your work is the only one that should stand on the subject. There is no copyright on ideas. Two or more people can write about the same thing (in the case of the Da Vinci Code and the other books it was Jesus and Mary having a child) and they do not infringe the copyright of each other.

People are far less likely to steal a story than they are to steal an idea.

Remember, there is no copyright on ideas.

It takes a lot of work and a long time to finish a novel.  I have heard it gets faster (months rather than years), but it’s still a lot of work.  Some days you are overcome with enthusiasm and can write forever.  Other days all you want to do is throw the whole thing in. How do you maintain the enthusiasm over the months—years—that it takes?

There are lots of techniques people use to keep writing.

Writing with a partner has to rank as one of the best techniques I know.

Other people join writers’ circles or critiquing groups. The continued stimulation of having to produce for the group keeps them on track, and being around other people who are doing the same things you are (writing a novel) adds extra encouragement.

Deadlines help. If you are lucky enough to have a contract to fulfil and a date to deliver to you might have other stress-related problems, but you definitely have a reason to write. As the famous quote goes, “Nothing concentrates the mind quite so well as a deadline.”

But what if you are a solitary writer, trying to hold down a full-time job, balancing life and family, trying to find time to write. How do you keep writing? How do you maintain the enthusiasm.

Nowadays, many people turn to the internet.

The web is a great tool. It allows you to reach out and talk to other people like yourself. You may be the only person you know writing a novel, but you can find dozens of them online.

How do you find these sites?  Here are some suggestions:

• Use a search engine like Google to start with.  Search on every logical word you can think of.
• Read blogs like this and follow the links. The links in the blog posts themselves, and the links on the sidebar. That’s how I get many of my favourite sites.
• Look up your favourite authors, see if they have sites, and check out any links they include
• Look up the big book publishing sites. They often have links and forums.

That’s just a start.

This allows you to join the web writing community.  The important thing is to not let it take over your life, so that you spend so much time with the community your writing loses out.

Back in the days when workplace personality tests were the go, my work arranged for a woman to test our profiles. The test, and results, were similar to the Meyer Briggs, in that they pigeonholed you into a personality type, but this woman had her own variation on them. It was all about colours and keywords. We had to pick words that best described us. It was an eclectic list of seemingly unrelated words such as artist, musician, steady, impulsive, cheerful, angry. Then we had to chose the one word out of the list we had picked that we felt described us best. This word, along with some other tests, defined what type of people we were.

After this, we separated into the various groups to work together. I ended up in the intiuitive, big-picture (yellow) group. For most of us in this group, it was a good fit. Except for one man, who was a methodical, detail person, always concerned with the intricate minutiae of his work. He was very good at his job, but he was definitely not a big-picture type person.

Why did he end up in this group? Because he defined himself first and foremost as a musician.

We compared other words we had chosen with those he had chosen. Not a single other word matched.

The word ‘writer’ was not on the list, but had it been I would have defined myself as a writer, above everything else.

I read a blog post over at Dear Author recently. The post was called “Should Authors Shut Up and Write“—interesting enough in itself, but one of the comments in reply to the post reminded me of that personality test.

“I think there’s a substantive difference between someone who sees themselves as writing books and someone who thinks of themselves as a writer. The first is something you do, but the second is something you are … Anyone … can author something … but when someone thinks of themselves as a writer, when writing is literally part of their sense of personal identity, I think the work is informed from somewhere deeper, somewhere more personal and personally authentic. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that any writer is a *good* writer, but I think it does communicate a certain passion that comes from the place where one feels *compelled* to write.”

Robin, in a comment reply on Dear Author post “Should Authors Shut Up and Write?” 7 November 2006; at Dear Author

I think it’s true. If you define yourself as a writer, or as a musician, first and foremost, your writing (or music) does come from a different place.

(Minor spoiler alert … Lydia Joyce’s Whispers of the Night)

I have been reading Should Authors Shut Up and Write, a post over at Dear Author, with interest. It’s a discussion about whether authors should publicly slam either their publisher/editor/agent and/or their readers. While I don’t intend to get involved in whether they should or shouldn’t, it does bring up the question. What do you do as an author if a reader doesn’t ‘get’ your story the way you intended it?

The example given was Lydia Joyce, talking about her romance novel Whispers of the Night, where Ms Joyce comments on a reviewer not understanding why the heroine ran away. The reviewer appears to have said something to the effect that rather than run away the heroine should have faced the hero the following day and had it out with him. Now, I haven’t read the review, nor have I read the book, and it’s not clear whether the reviewer felt the running away was cliched, out of character, or whether the reviewer just didn’t like the way the story happened.

Ms Joyce defends her character, explaining why the character would have run away, given the circumstances.

Now, I’m not picking on Whispers of the Night here. As I said, I have not read it. It does, however, raise the question—if you, the author, have to defend your character’s actions to the readers, does that mean that the characterisation is automatically poor? That the writing is poor?

Sometimes, yes, it does.The best example I can think of here is when you hand out a story to be critiqued and everyone comes back with the same, “I just can’t see Simone running away. It seems so out of character. She would stay and face her accusers, or more likely do …”

There are other stories when some people ‘get’ it, but others don’t. I know a lot of novels (and films for that matter), which I have discussed with my friends where I go, “But I don’t understand why he did …”, and they say, “Well, of course he would, because …”. They got it, I didn’t.

Then there are stories where the reader brings a perspective to the story that the author has no control over. These are characters they love so much, and they desperately want them to behave a certain way, and are disappointed when they don’t.

So many people were disappointed when Fitz took up with Molly at the end of Fool’s Fate. They wanted Fitz and the Fool to stay together. But Fitz going off with Molly was very in character.

Another example is Jack Sparrow (sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow), in Pirates of the Caribbean—Dead Man’s Chest. Jack spent most of the movie running away. Some people didn’t like that, they felt he should have been the hero and done heroic things. But it’s not in his nature to do that. Okay, he does the right thing in the end, but he is a rogue, out for himself, and that’s his nature. It’s the sort of thing he would do.

Love this third type. These are the types of story we aspire to write.

It’s nervewracking the first time you put your writing in front of someone else.

What you need from that first person is a balanced analysis of your work. What you want (and expect) is praise.

When you are looking for praise, the last thing you want is an honest assessment of your story. Any negative comments are taken personally—as criticisms against you, rather than against your story.

You defend yourself—your story—rather than listen to the feedback.

If you want honest critiques of your story, get over the initial hurdle of your ego. Otherwise it’s a waste of time asking for critiques.

If you ask for feedback, accept it graciously, or don’t bother asking for it at all.

Over at the Future Boy blog, Future Boy has installed Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 to write (or should I say, speak) his NaNoWriMo novel.

It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Myself, I can’t ‘tell’ a good story. I have always been one of those people who ruins a joke when they tell it, and as for pitching … no matter how good the idea is, it sounds like drivel when I speak it aloud.

I suspect it could be a great tool to speed up writing first drafts, if one could learn how to use it.

Today, Tuesday 7 November, is Melbourne Cup day.  Of course I stopped to watch it. Everyone does. Delta Blues by a nose to Pop Rock. (If you’ve never been in Melbourne at cup time, you should try to come, at least once.)

Took a long weekend, and have been pecking away all four days among doing other things. A 100 words here, another 100 there. Not a lot to show for it, but I realise now I am out of a slump I didn’t even know I was in. Feel like I’m picking up momentum.

A lot of writing is like that. Slow, then speed up, slow down again, then speed up.

We fantasy writers come in for a lot of stick. Sometimes we deserve it, and some of the books you read do have that certain ‘clone’ feel. Almost as if each story had been stamped out of the same mould, just given differerent names. J. R. R. Tolkein has a lot to answer for.

Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide To FantasyLand is a tongue in cheek guide to the stereotypical guide of how not to write a fantasy novel. I have mentioned this book before. It’s one of my favourite references. It’s a novel (sort of), but I always treat it as non-fiction.

As one reviewer said

“People who don’t read fantasy because they think it’s all dreck should probably avoid this book, because it will only confirm their worst fears.”?
Cosma Shalizi, The Bactra Review.

Recently I found another one to add to my collection. Ian McFadyen’s—he of The Comedy Company and Let The Blood Run Free—How to write a best selling fantasy novel covers similar ground. I particularly like point 8—skip the hard parts.

… simply have the hero suffer a wound and lapse into unconsciousness: e.g

“… then suddenly his head exploded and a mist enveloped him and he felt himself falling down into an ethereal tangible blackness … The sound of the battle was suddenly a long way away but just as he closed his eyes and the black cloud engulfed him he thought he heard someone crying from the grassy knoll, “The Toasters are coming. The Toasters are coming.��?

… Next thing our hero wakes on a white alabaster slab in the Healing Room … and, Guess what? They won! Result: you’ve saved 50 pages of intricate military description
Ian McFadyen, How to write a best selling fantasy novel

Read the whole thing. It’s great.

He’s also got a companion piece, Australian Television Drama for Beginners. That’s worth a read too.  [Sorry, but this link seems to have since disappeared off his page. Ian’s home site is http://members.ozemail.com.au/~imcfadyen/.]