In some ways, writing Barrain is like flogging the proverbial dead horse.

Why?

Because the material is out-of-date before we start.

The term ‘bird watching’ is now obsolete, replaced by the term ‘birding’.  The use of ‘bird watching’ as a term for guys looking for girls is even more outdated.

The original draft of Barrain would be close to 15 years old. When it was written, bird watching—for guys looking at girls—was losing favour, but still common enough for us to use.

To continue with the equine analogies, that horse has long since bolted from the starting gate. No-one uses it now.

Yet in Barrain, the protagonist is only dragged into the story because of ‘bird watching’. If we didn’t have that, Scott wouldn’t be around to be carried to another world, and so on.

Can we save the story?

I’m not sure yet. Or rather, of course we can, but how much work will it take, and is it worth it?

How might we fix it?

We would need to rewrite the start of the novel to give Scott an excuse to join Caid on his bird hunt.

A different start is unlikely to involve a bunch of enthusiastic elderly birdwatchers, so Elspeth and the others will probably go, replaced by a younger set.  Melissa’s relationship with Scott—if Melissa survives the transition—will be different.

Why then, if these major changes will happen anyway, don’t we just do them now?

Because we wouldn’t finish the story.

If we have to rewrite so much we will put the novel to one side as too hard, and never touch it again.

Little steps at a time, and every rewrite we do polishes the rest of the story. Besides, we haven’t quite given up on a less drastic solution yet.

Novelists often look to history and geography to help with their writing, but they shouldn’t forget science, even if they’re not writing science fiction.

Some ideas stand the test of time, others come and go out of fashion, or are superseded by other ideas.

The idea of electrons in an atom orbiting in discrete paths around the nucleus like planets around a sun, for example, is now considered obsolete, replaced by the wave structure of matter.

Other ideas do stand the test of time. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, is still as valid as when Garret Hardin proposed it back in 1968. Likewise, in her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with a model of the five stages of people go through to cope with death or terminal illness.

The stages are:

Denial - The “This can’t be real” stage.: “This is not happening to me. There must be a mistake.”

Anger - The “Why me?” stage.: “How dare you do this to me?!” (either referring to God, the deceased, or oneself)

Bargaining - The “If I do this, you’ll do that” stage.: “Just let me live to see my son graduate.”

Depression - The “Defeated” stage.: “I can’t bear to face going through this, putting my family through this.”

Acceptance - The “This is going to happen” stage.: “I’m ready, I don’t want to struggle anymore.”

Definition of Kübler-Ross model in Wikipedia

The model is as valid today as it was back in 1969 when Kubler-Ross proposed it.

I have to say that everyone I know, myself included, who has gone through a grieving process, goes through these five stages. No exceptions.

People move through the stages differently. One person may spend months grieving, another years. The stages also overlap. There is no, “I have stopped denying it, now I’m angry,” moment. It’s more a gradual realisation that you have moved from being alternately disbelieving/angry to angry/bargaining.

So how can we use this in our writing?

Any character who loses someone they love will go through this grieving process. Even your story characters.

Obviously, you don’t want to do grief-by-numbers scenes in your novel, but character-wise, you know some things will happen.

• There will be a period of disbelief.
• At some stage the character is going to feel angry that their beloved has died.
• They should eventually come to accept it.

What you put into the story is up to you, but if your bereaved character doesn’t respond to the death in a manner the readers expect, then the readers will lose empathy for the character.

You don’t have to be predictable.

Let’s take the following (admittedly cliched) scenario.

Your heroine is the queen of a small country at war. Her husband, whom she loves very much, is mortally wounded in battle. She sits by him as he dies and they tell each other how much they love the other. The king asks her to finish the war. She vows to do so, for his sake.

The rest of the book covers her struggle to win the war.

If she doesn’t spend part of the book missing her beloved. If she doesn’t even get angry with him for going off and leaving it all for her to do, then I won’t think much of her as a protagonist.

“But,” you might say, “She hides her grief by concentrating on fighting, so she doesn’t have to think about it.”

For a whole book?

No way. That grief will spill over occasionally, and where she is in the grieving process at the time dictates how she will react.

Last week I talked about doing your family and friends a favour by not asking them to read your novel, but as a writer, even an unpublished one, there comes a time when another unpublished writer will ask you to read their novel.

What do you do?

If it’s a novel you think you might like, then by all means say yes. But what if you don’t know that? What if you’re not sure?

I would like to say, “Don’t read it,” but that’s not always possible.

Here are some strategies that might help if you ever find yourself in this situtation.

Timing

It is generally more beneficial for an author’s writing if you don’t review the manuscript hot off the PC.

The author needs time to distance themself from the work.

Immediately after they have finished a draft is not the best time to give feedback.  They don’t want to know about the flaws then. They simply want you to tell them that the work they have slaved over for the past two years is a masterpiece, perfect in every way.  Flaws? They just don’t want to know.

Six months on they’re going to look at that novel in a totally different way.

Even so, I recommend that when you receive a manuscript you read it fairly quickly.

Firstly, it’s polite.

More importantly, the longer you put it off the more the author will hassle you, and the more guilty you will feel. 

What type of feedback can you give if the predominant feeling is guilt?

What you need to encourage the author to do is to wait before they give it to, and to re-read it before they do hand it over. That’s no easy feat.

Read the complete novel

When the story is truly bad you may be tempted to read the start and end, and skip most of the middle.

Don’t.

There are two reasons to read the whole book.

Books generally improve.  Many novelists don’t get into the swing of writing until well into the book. You may find a gem of a story lurking behind some badly written first chapters.

The other reason not to skip the read is because novelists are obsessive about their story, and expect readers to be the same.

You will be grilled.

Your credibility is at stake.

The author will ask you about people and events in the story. What you thought about particular characters, how you felt the plot flowed, and so on.

It is also difficult to give valuable feedback if you haven’t read the full story.

Authors, particularly beginning authors, do weird things with their characters and plot. It’s far better for you to be able to say, “This was really Zoe’s story, but you didn’t introduce her until half-way through the book,” than, “Zoe. I don’t remember her. I must have been tired when I read that part.”

If you do skip parts, be honest about it.

“I couldn’t read the rape scene, it was just too graphic.”  Or, “I skimmed the battles. They were so gory, and there were so many of them.”

Give good feedback

There’s an art to giving feedback on a novel that needs a lot of work. Take the advice of some of the good online critique groups like Critters—check out Critiquing the wild writer: it’s not what you say but how and The Diplomatic Critter, for starters.

Remember, when you are giving feedback:

• There will always be something positive to say. Anyone who has written a full-length novel will have something good in it. Guaranteed. Make sure you give the positive feedback first.
• Say something good about the story first.
  Don’t start with the bad stuff, start with the good.  Otherwise you put the author offside, and they become defensive and not prepared to listen.
• Never attack the author.  Don’t say, “You can’t spell.” Say something more like, “There seemed to be some typos (or spelling errors) there. You might want to run it through a spell checker.”
• Don’t let your personal opinion about the type of story colour your response. “I hated the book. I hate whodunnits, and this was typical of the genre.”
• Be honest, but do it politely.
• Above all, give them helpful feedback.

Encourage them to seek opinions outside family and friends

Lastly, if the author is serious about writing, encourage them to join a writing group.

This helps them to be better writers, but also helps them to accept and get value from feedback. It’s a two-way thing. You get a better novel to read, and they get some feedback on how to improve their writing.

Writing time is scarce this time of year. Lots of family visiting, lots of friends to catch up with.

Four of us went out for a long, lazy afternoon tea yesterday. Calder, myself and two of our closest friends. The subject came around to books, as it is wont to do when we are together. Both friends work in public libraries, and are extremely well read.

We meandered from books in general, and shopping for books, on to novels in particular, and then on to writing novels.

H., one of our friends, had been asked to read an acquaintance’s unpublished novel. “Because she worked in a library and read lots of books.”

She’d had it for six months and still hadn’t managed more than the first two chapters.

“It was very heavy,” was the only way she could describe it. “Extremely personal, and really difficult to read.”

We discussed whether the writing was the problem, or the subject matter.  The book was a personal memoir, not something any of us read by choice.  We finally decided that her reluctance to read it stemmed from a combination of:

• It was a first draft, and messy in the way first drafts often are, with typos and a story that was all over the place
• The style of writing was heavy and hard to read. Not a style she normally read
• It was extremely personal. Although it was a novel it was obviously autobiographical, and far more intimate than she ever wanted to become with a casual acquaintance.

Someone who read mainstream novels may have enjoyed the book, but H. was like the rest of us.  While she reads widely, she reads a lot of genre, but little literary or mainstream fiction and she wasn’t into slice-of-life stories.

It wasn’t the first unpublished novel H. had read. We had given her Potion (Draft 4), and she said she had enjoyed it, even asked when the second book would be out. (Another one on our to-do list, waiting for us to finish some of our current projects.)

H. is a close friend. We think she would be honest enough to say she liked the book if she did, in fact, like it.

But we will never really know for sure.

You should never ask family and friends to read your newly finished novel. Especially not that first draft you are so proud of.

Polish it first. And then take it to your writing group, or an impartial bystander, or even a writing tutor if you are doing it as a school assignment.

Just don’t ask your friends and family to read it and then expect valuable feedback from it. Not unless you really trust them to be honest.

They don’t want to hurt you.

Most of them don’t even want to read your book, but you force it onto them until in the end they feel obligated to take it.

Chances are they’re not going to like it. Particularly if it’s a first draft. Particularly if it’s your first novel.

What can they say to you when you ask them what they thought of it?

“I’m sorry, but your novel stank.”

Of course not. They will mumble something polite and try to avoid the subject. Or put off reading it.

They probably glanced at it, and read a couple of chapters when they first received it, then put it aside to read later, when they have the time. Like H. did with the novel she was asked to read.

Now, you tell me. As a reader, if you read the first two chapters and it’s a really good read, are you going to put it down and forget it for six months? Of course not. You will keep reading. So if your family or friends have put off reading your novel for months, even years, what does that say?

They don’t want to read it, and they don’t want to tell you they don’t want to read it.

Do your family and friends a favour—don’t ask them to read your novel in the first place.

Unless, of course, they offer.

That’s a whole different ball game.

Accept with alacrity. Be grateful they offered, and polish your draft before you hand them a copy.

I read Lynn Flewelling’s Tamir Triad (The Bone Doll’s Twin, Hidden Warrior and The Oracle’s Queen) over the Christmas/New Year break.

My absolute favourite character was Tharin, the protagonist’s father’s best friend. The man who looked after her when she was a child, and stayed with her as she grew into adulthood.

Now, here is the silly thing. Even though I adored Tharin as a character, I couldn’t get his name straight for the first two and a half books.

Even as I sat down to write this blog I still had to stop and think. “Is it Tamil? No. Damir? No. Thamir? No, not that either. Damn, I have to go back to the book again to get his name. Tharin. That’s right, it was Tharin.”

This is my favourite character in a series I liked enough to read in one sitting.

He wasn’t a point-of-view character, but he was a major minor character. I should have been able to remember his name. Unfortunately, I got bogged down with all the names in the book with combinations of T, M, N and R in them (Tamir, Tobin, Tharin). They all blended together.

Fantasy and science fiction writers often come up with weird names to make the characters sound more exotic, but there are a lot of other things we do to names that confuse the reader too.

One thing you are often taught in the ‘how to write fantasy’ courses is to make names of people of the same race or tribe similar, to give a sense of history and place. Thus in Lord of the Rings you have Elrond, Glorfindel, Arwen and Galadriel, all elves, all with L, N and D sounds in their names.

Lynn Flewelling had a lot of characters whose name started with T or A.

In her defence, Ms Flewelling could well argue that Tharin wasn’t a major character. That the main characters were clearly delineated—Tamir/Tobin, Ki and Arkoniel. Can’t complain about names there.

Now, I don’t say that you should deliberately go out of your way to give your characters wildly different names just so the readers can tell them apart. There does have to be resonance with names, and a language and a people. And even though it does make the story more confusing to the reader, it’s not the worst naming sin of all.

One of the worst, in my opinion, is the word you use as a name that has a totally unrelated meaning, particularly when you know what that meaning is.

Rainbow is an old story of ours, sitting on the PC waiting to be rewritten. It has a fantastic premise and some great characters (our opinion, of course). I was learning German when we wrote the original draft, and I named one of the characters ‘Tur’. Tur means door in German. Tur is a major minor character—about the same importance to Rainbow as Tharin is to the Tamir Triad. Anyone who knows Germarn is going to say, “What? They called this guy Door,” and they’re going to be distracted throughout, just by the name.

We have named other characters for physical objects—River, Summer and Crystal in Potion. This was deliberate and the reader will judge whether it works or not. Sometimes names like this work, sometimes they don’t. It works brilliantly, for example, in Robin Hobb’s Assassin/Tawny Man series. I cannot imagine The Fool or Dutiful as anyone else.

Needless to say, when we re-write Rainbow, Tur won’t be there.

Another major name blooper we have fixed, sort of, is Braycarlia, in Potion. He started off as Bradycardia, just because we liked the sound of the word. We knew what it meant, but never thought that anyone else would pick it up. Sent it off to Critters and the first comment that came back, “By the way, are you aware that the word ‘bradycardia’ means a really slow heartbeart?” After a couple of comments like these we changed the name to “Braycarlia”, which still has the same rhythm but doesn’t mean anything, so far as we know.

Potion is the first novel we completed. Many of the names here are the more traditional made-up names so common in fantasy. We won’t do that in future novels.