I have been reading Anne Mini’s Author! Author! blog a lot lately.  Anne has some useful, practical advice on writing.  She has a number of articles on self editing, which I particularly enjoy. 

It’s funny though, how someone else can point out the obvious far better than you can read it in your own work.

In The Screen Goes Wavy she writes about factual redundancy.  The old, “As you know, John, my father died 20 years ago in unusual circumstances.”

Mini gives an example that starts with:

Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning, revisiting in his mind his last encounter with Cardinal Richelieu, two months before, when they had shot those rapids together in the yet-to-be-discovered territory of Colorado. Despite moments of undeniable passion, they had not parted friends. The powerful holy man was known for his cruelty, but surely, this time, he would not hold a grudge.

…

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. “Tobacco had not come to Europe in your time.” He shook two out of the pack and stuck both into his mouth. “And barely in mine.”

He lit the pair and handed both to his erstwhile lover …

The Screen Goes Wavy, Anne Mini

Fairly obviously, from the example, the relationship between these two men is important.  Yet in the rewrite, she cuts most of it out.

Marcus Aurelius paced the room, frowning. The powerful holy man before him was known for his cruelty, but surely, he could not still be holding a grudge about how they’d parted in Colorado. “Please tell me, Armand. For old times’ sake.”

Richelieu laughed brutally, but with an undertone of affection. …

The Screen Goes Wavy, Anne Mini

Why does she do this?

As she says, if the Colorado episode is important to the story to make a difference here, then you, as the author, should have told the story in its entirety when it happened. What happened in Colorado changes how Marcus and Richelieu view each other, and makes Marcus believe that Richelieu will treat him differently.

The reader needs to know about it when it happened.  You can’t bring things in out of the blue like this.  If you wrote the scene well enough the reader will remember it when they get to this one, and you don’t need all the unnecessary flashback.  It makes for much cleaner writing.

If the incident wasn’t important enough to have its own scene, then it shouldn’t be included at all.

Mini says that you can eliminate most of these flashbacks by a well-placed scene (or scenes) earlier in the novel.

It’s obvious when you see it illustrated the way she has done in her article, but sometimes we forget.  I’m going back to read Shared Memories now, to see if I can get rid of a couple of flashbacks.

I was reading through our research notes for Barrain earlier today.

Some people say you do not need to research fantasy novels. Others say you need to research thoroughly before you can write. 

We research some things. For Barrain we researched a little forensic science and some police procedures.  After all, we have a body that has been dead for some time—we need to know what the corpse would be like.  Also, given that it’s fantasy, we need to know where we are going to deviate from the standard dead body.  Not only that, we need to know what the police will do and how they will do it.

Barrain is set in Australia.  There is no reason for this, except that we are Australian. Here is the local police information about forensic science.

Here’s a summary of what they say about forensic investigation in Victoria.

The duties as shown on CSI are a combination of three different positions as performed in Victoria … A detective … is really the investigator in a case.  The detective will … process the scene by taking notes and photographs and then collecting any items for analysis and submitting them to the Forensic Services Department.  [Detectives also call out the crime scene examiner if required.]  … The forensic scientists are specialists, not experts in every field, i.e. there are separate specialists for flammable liquid residues, DNA, Drug Analysis, Documents, Fingerprints, etc. … there are no jobs available in Australia like those depicted on CSI.  It shows a combination of duties performed by Crime Scene investigators, Forensic Scientists, detectives and others.
Victoria Police, Forensic Science 

We checked on this months ago, and have it in our research file. 

Yet what did we do when we wrote the forensic science portion of Barrain?  We forgot this, and made it more like something out of CSI than something our local police would have done.

I think we watch too much television.

How do writers keep track of who’s who in their novels?  What about timelines?  How complex do their notes need to be?

Some people write complex biographies on their major characters before they start writing.  They know where their characters are born, whether or not they have a mole on their back, who they grew up with and each lover they have had. Others never record anything about them at all.  These people rely on memory, or re-reading their novel. We come somewhere on the lighter side of in-between.

We do not start off tracking characters.  We begin with an idea, a character in a situation, and start writing.  We’re lucky when we start if we even know what our character looks like.

In Barrain, for example, we had a vague idea of Scott as one of those trendy young people with blonde hair and modern clothes.  Caid had large green eyes—a cross between a cat and an elf—and that was about it.  We started writing with that.

We’re a quarter of the way through the story now, and have so many characters and locations to keep track of that we need to do something about it.

We need a list.  We do this in a Word document (if I start it), or in an Excel spreadsheet (if Calder does).  It’s a simple table, and it’s very basic.

The list must be in alphabetical order.

It’s a simple list, very basic, and we don’t go into any real detail.  Personal appearance is noted where it is important.  For example, the colour of Scott’s eyes compared to Caid’s (and the other Barrainers) is important, so that is noted, but we don’t mention Mather’s hair colour, because it’s not.

Around the same time we start implementing a timeline.  This is usually a spreadsheet, with the timeline across the top, and people along the left.

Time increments depend on the time frame of the story.

I have simplified the timeline here, but you get the gist.

To date, these simple character lists (people, places and things) and the timeline have worked for us and as we go on through the story and the drafts they become invaluable.

After my last post you might think that I don’t agree with writing classes where the teacher comes in with an object such as a photograph, or a handbag and contents, and tells the students to write about the person in the photo or the owner of the handbag.

I don’t think they are bad.  They seldom produce outstanding writing but I do not believe that producing a literary masterpiece is the object of such an excercise.

The aim is to make you write.

When you write you can’t sit around waiting for inspiration. Inspiration seldom comes while you wait for it, and your writing muscles atrophy from lack of use.

As a beginning writer you know that you want to write, but don’t know where to start, or even how, so you join a writing class.  There in the class you come across other people who don’t appear to have the same problems as you.  They can all write.  They scribble constantly, even when the teacher is talking.  You feel intimidated. Your confidence plummets.

The teacher puts a photograph onto the front desk and says, “I want you to write about the man in this photograph. 3,000 words.  Bring it in next week.”

Nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as a deadline.

You sit around for six days and stress. You can’t think of anything to write. The deadline looms. It must be in tomorrow.  Finally, the evening before the next class, you write.  Anything, it doesn’t matter, just to get it done.

It gets easier.

By the end of the term you have learned the habit of writing to order.  Good training for when you start your novel, if you haven’t already done so by now.

The other thing this type of writing does is encourage you to explore different ideas.  The what ifs, the maybes.

I’m not really interested in this woman and her handbag, for instance, but that lipstick holder reminds me of the one my grandmother used to have. 

I remember holidays at Gran’s. Her home creaked with the wind.  We used to think it was haunted, and were terrified when Mum made us stay with her for two weeks when she had to go into hospital.

The story you turn out in this case is the story of the ghost, only peripherally connected to the handbag by a contrived ending involving the owner of the house finding the lipstick holder.  It’s the best story you turn out all year.

You have finally learned to use your imagination to control what you write, rather than someone else’s.

I always wanted to be like Jaime, in Martha Grimes’ novel Foul Matter.

Foul Matter is about authors, editors, egos and contracts in the publishing industry.  The authors in the story include best selling writer Paul Giverney, who is between contracts at the moment, literary writer Ned Islay, and Jamie.

Jamie churns out four books a year under various pseudonyms, and is the only writer in the group who actually makes a living from her books.

I realise now that I will probably never be a Jamie, simply based on the speed at which we write (and remember, there are two of us), the length at which we write, and the genre we write in.  It’s a while since I read Foul Matter, so I don’t remember exact details, but I always imagined that Jamie wrote mystery and romance.

I tried to write a romance once.

This was many years ago now.  I have learned and written a lot since then, and gained a writing partner as well.

My reasoning was similar to that of many other novice writers.  Given that romance is one of the largest selling genres in the world, surely it would be an easier field to break into.  (In my defence, I had devoured Mills and Boons as a teenager. I knew the market had changed, but at least I was familiar with the genre.)

It was hard, hard work.  I persevered for 20,000 words before I gave up.

I found that old novel the other day.  The writing wasn’t too bad, and the characters were okay, but the story failed to spark.  It was boring.

It felt like one of those writing class exercises where the teacher brings in a series of objects—say a handbag with contents spilling out of it—and says, “Write about the owner of this handbag,” and you feverishly write, because you know you have to present something at the next class, but frankly, the owner of that handbag does not inspire you.

The most important thing writing that novel taught me was that one has to be able to live with a book for the whole of its life. If you can’t love it for the whole of that time you are making the writing process hard, and taking away everything that is enjoyable about it. It becomes a chore.

Then writing stops being fun.

Why choose a career that takes so much of your effort, of your time, if it’s not fun?

That’s why I’ll never be a Jamie.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and it’s true.

If you see a sign like this on a box:

you know that:

• The package is fragile
• You need to handle it with care
• You need to carry it upright.

If you had chosen to write the warning instead, what would you have written?  Maybe something along the lines of:

This package contains glass.  Contents are easily breakable. Handle with care.  Always carry right side up.

Which conveys the message better?  The picture or the words?  The picture.

Why write words when pictures convey the message so much more simply?

Words themselves are becoming simpler.  We have come long way from Chaucer’s middle English:

Oones ayein ich must demaunde yower pardoun, for many dayes haue passid syn ich haue poosted heere

(Taken from the modern-day post “Whan that Aprill” Weekend on the Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog blog site.  I’d credit your name, sorry, but I can’t actually work out who you are.  Great blog site, by the way.)

But we have also come a long way from what we recognise as modern day usage as well.

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. ,,,

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

While some people do still attempt to write like Charles Dickens, most of us have simplified our language, so that it is doubtful if a book with such heavy language would get past the agents enough to be recognised as the good story it may be.

The words have become simplified.  “Ich must demaunde yower pardoun” from Chaucer’s time becomes “I must demand your pardon” in Dickens’ time, and “I am sorry” nowadays.

Even spelling is being simplified.  “Colour” is slowly becoming “color”, no matter what we English spelling purists think, ”Programme” is now generally “program”, and so on.

Yet in all of it, a picture beats words, almost any day.  Do you have written instructions on your mobile phone, or do you have a picture for each function?  You have a picture.

If we follow the trend to simpler words, and then on to images replacing words, what do we end up with?  Iconised images and very simple words as the major form of written communication.

I wonder what an archeologist 5,000 years in the future will think, digging up our civilisation from the ruins of whatever has grown on top of it.  Will they think us a simple people, with only the rudiments of written language, because we work mostly with pictures and simple words?