(Edited to include link to the graphic for email feed)
In addendum to yesterday’s post: I keep finding more crazy-amazing stuff on Google Maps. Just for instance, and for your delectation, here’s a Photo Sphere image of the Great Hall of Nymphenburg Palace (click your mouse inside the image and drag it around for a 360° view):
In case I hadn’t mentioned, it’s NaNoWriMo, which means I’m in the throes of novelling – and novelling, for me, always involves copious researching.
The current story (not a Septimus series book, a standalone) is partially set in Munich, so I’ve got Google Maps permanently open to a map of the city. But not just a map – Google Street View is amazing. I’m constantly hopping back and forth between map view and panning around the streets of the city.
I’m also going back to my photos from last year’s trip, and among my pictures was one I took of a painting in the Neue Pinakothek: A view of the Residenzstrasse in Munich looking towards the Max-Joseph-Platz, painted in 1826 by Domenico Quaglio. Now check it out side by side with a screen shot of Google Street View of the same spot:
Is that cool, or what? I love how the basic line of the street really hasn’t changed much.
Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you. And if you spend the next three hours armchair sightseeing in Munich, don’t blame me. (Actually, yeah, I’ll gladly take the blame. Check out Nymphenburg Palace, for example, on Street View. It’s fabulous.)
Life, the Universe, and Google Street View. The more things change…
An interesting post by Helen on her experience with NaNoWriMo. Although my experience with NaNo has been somewhat different than hers, I very much relate to what she says about NaNo teaching us to be writers. I can honestly say that without NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t BE a writer. What started as “Let’s just try this thing out, for fun,” became “Hey, I can write a novel! Who knew?” and from there, “This is who I am.” I’m totally sold on NaNoWriMo – I owe it, big time.
(Oh, and not to repeat myself or anything, but check out Helen’s new book. It’s great.)
We had a meeting of our local NaNoWriMo group this morning. We call it a Write-in, but it’s really more of a Yack-in. It’s just exciting to get together with a whole bunch of other crazy Wrimos and jabber on about how insane this is, and how difficult to find the time, and “Did you get your word count so far?” and “What are you doing about an outline – are you a plotter or a pantser?” And of course, the big question: “What are you writing this year?”
And in the course of that latter discussion, one of us coined a new term. They’re writing fantasy, and we asked if it was set in a classic medieval-style fantasy world. And they said, “Yes, cobblestone fantasy.”
Bam, on the nose! That’s such an awesome term, it needs to be put in the dictionary of genres. “Cobblestone Fantasy: n., fantasy fiction set in a traditional medieval world.”
That’s what a lot of my stories are. See, there is, just to mention a few flavours, “Urban Fantasy” (think Twilight or maybe even Harry Potter – fantasy in a modern setting), or “Steampunk” (generally set in an alternate-reality Victorian-type age), and then there’s the big classic of them all, “Sword & Sorcery”, which is the Lord of the Rings style of fantasy with a pseudo-medieval European setting.
But my books, as a rule, are generally not set here & now (at least not as a whole); they don’t deal in Victoriana; and they have no swords and practically no sorcery. But they do have cobblestones. Almost every single one has cobblestones in it somewhere, if not actually described, then implied. Cobblestones, and open hearths, and horse-and-carriage travel; porridge for breakfast and stew for dinner, cloaks and gowns and market days with vendors in market booths (on a cobble-paved market square, of course).
So, next time someone asks me what I write, I’ll tell them: “Cobblestone fantasy!” Because that nails it.
Life, the Universe, and Cobblestone Fantasy. We’ve coined a new term.
NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us – in fact, as I write this, across a good chunk of the globe the clock has already ticked over the magical line of midnight to November 1st, when you get to shoot out of the starting block and race down the novelling track towards that elusive goal of getting 50,000 words on the page. So I thought this would be a good time to squeeze in another post on the writer’s craft, because of course we all have our heads in our stories and are aiming to make these the best novels yet. Right? Right.
The thing I want to talk about is that most hackneyed piece of writing advice, the one you can’t escape if you’ve taken any kind of creative writing class anywhere: “Show, don’t tell!” It’s a piece of advice that’s being handed out so freely, you’d think it wouldn’t need explaining any more. But from what I’ve seen as reader and editor, it appears that you actually still do. So I’ll put on my pontificating-editor hat (which is the hat of the pontificating editor, as opposed to the pontificating editor hat, which is the pontificating hat of the editor – the latter would probably look something like the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter movies, with a mouth at the brim, pontificating away) and waffle on about it for a minute.
Just to refresh your (and my) memory on what “Show, don’t tell” actually means: in fiction, when you’re describing something, don’t just state as fact that something happened (“telling”), but let the reader see it through sensory detail, dialogue or implication (“showing”).
Telling: “The orchard looked pretty.” Doesn’t give you the picture, does it?
So, for example:
“Joe got to the office building at 6:00 PM, stopped the car and went in.”
TELLING!! Now, how about this:
“The early evening sun caught the golden hands of the big church clock as Joe’s car rattled over the cobblestones of the market square. ‘Like a dagger,’ Joe thought, twisting his head around to maneuvre into the tight parking spot in front of the tall brick facade of Bemelman’s Law Offices, ‘that clock hand jabbing at the six looks just like a bloody dagger.’ He squirmed out of the narrow driver’s seat of the Smart, tugged down his suit jacket and ran a finger under his shirt collar. The gears of the church clock took their whirring breath to strike the hour just as he pulled on the wrought-iron handle of the old building’s front door.”
That’s saying the same thing – but so much more, as well. We know that it’s six because he says the clock hand points at it and it strikes the hour. We know it’s six PM, not AM, because it’s early evening light, not morning. We know that he’s going to an office – it says so – and that he’s stopping the car and going in. But we also know, from this short passage, that he’s in Europe (not many cobbled market squares with church clock towers in America, for example), and that he’s not happy to be there – the squirming, twisting, tight shirt collar and car seat, and thoughts of jabbing daggers tell you that he’s feeling rather anxious at the moment. Oh, and we know that it’s sometime around summer (because the sun is still shining at 6:00) and that it’s a sunny day.
But you didn’t need me to explain all that to you – you already had it figured, because you’re smart that way. See, that’s part of the reason why fiction writers need to show, not tell – because us readers ain’t stupid. Some writers don’t quite believe it, so just to make sure they double up – they do show, but then they also tell: “Joe ran a finger under his shirt collar, which felt tight because he was anxious.” Nope, nuh-uh, don’t do it. Show, don’t tell. Just don’t.
Unless, of course, you’re a reporter, not a fiction writer – then you need to reverse this piece of advice; you need to tell, not show. In fact, that’s how, in Grade 6, I got the first F of my school career. We had just moved, and in my new school they were working on writing “factual reports” in language class. I’d always been good at writing stories, but didn’t know about this “factual” stuff. So when we were supposed to write a mock newspaper report on some guy nearly drowning in the river, I threw in all these visual descriptors of the scene, and how the guy was feeling. Nope – FAIL! Not objective enough. Stick to the facts, girl, tell what happened, don’t show it! I’m still smarting from that F some 30-odd years later. But now I’m taking revenge on that failed factual report by letting my imagination run riot on the page. I’m showing ’em!
Now, if you need some help and inspiration on how to do this “showing” gig really well, go over here and take a look at Jodie Renner’s most excellent post on how to use verbs to make a passage sing. In fact, bookmark that page and keep going back to it, and then do yourself a favour and buy a copy of Jodie’s book, Fire Up Your Fiction, which is stuffed full of superb advice like that. (And no, I have no commercial connection with Jodie; I’m just advertising her because I think others could benefit from her excellent work, too.)
Incidentally, doing lots of showing rather than telling is also a really good policy for NaNoWriMo purposes. With NaNo, you want the greatest possible word count. The “showy” passage about Joe, above, clocks in at 111 words, vs. an emaciated 16 in the “telly” sentence. What’ve you got to lose, other than dry and dusty prose?
Life, the Universe, and Showing vs. Telling. Go give me the picture!
I’m still knee-deep in researching 19th-century Bavaria. It’s a little disconcerting when inside your head, you’re surrounded by ladies in towering hairdos or spaniel curls, wearing great big swoopy gowns; gentlemen in top hats and tail coats; steam trains and horse carriages – and then you look up, and the realities of 21st-century life are staring you in the face. The writer’s dichotomy…
But anyway, there was something I ran across in the course of my research rabbit-trailings. Have you ever wondered why there is such a proliferation of princes and princesses in fairy tales? I have. But I think I may have found the answer.
One of the things that I was looking up was the German titles of nobility, and to my surprise I found that “prince” is ranked below “duke”. In the English system, “prince” is the highest title you can possibly hold, short of “king” or “queen”, and princes and princesses are in quite short supply. As far as I can see, only the immediate offspring of the monarch get that title, and even then it seems to be restricted to the male line. According to Wikipedia, there’s all of seventeen British princes and princesses living today; and the list of all princes and princesses since 1714 is short enough to fit inside two Wikipedia articles (here and here).
A real-life prince: Ludwig I, Crown Prince of Bavaria. Painted by Angelica Kauffmann, 1807.
In the German system, on the other hand, “prince” or “princess” doesn’t necessarily denote “child of king”. Yes, it does mean that, too, but it can also be a translation of “Fürst”, which is a lower-ranking title of ruling nobility than “Herzog”, i.e. “duke”. So a “prince” can be a ruler of a – wait for it – principality, a small realm that doesn’t qualify as a kingdom, so its ruler isn’t a “king”. Germany, up until 1871, was a patchwork of those small principalities and duchies (unlike England, which has been one large kingdom for more than a thousand years). Add to that the fact that among the German nobility, all children get the title – not just the eldest son – and you have more counts, baronesses, marchionesses, grand dukes and what-have-you than you can shake a stick at. And yes, princes and princesses too.
So, seeing that most of the well-known fairy tales of the Western tradition originate in mainland Europe, that would explain why we can have so many princes and princesses wandering in and out of fairy land. They were pretty normal, as far as blue-bloods go. And even when they were rulers, they didn’t necessarily reign over vast island nations like Our Gracious and Noble Queen, but maybe just a little postage-stamp realm, next door to another equally minute patch of principality.
That’s how you can get princes like the one from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Swine Herd”: “Once there was a poor Prince. He had a kingdom; it was very tiny. Still it was large enough to marry upon…” In fact, his kingdom is so tiny, at the end of the story “the Prince went home to his kingdom, and shut and barred the door.” That ending always tickled my fancy as a child – a kingdom so small, you can shut the door on it (and leave the bratty, stuck-up princess outside, as she deserves).
So there’s one mystery solved. You might get a prince – there’s enough of them around – but his kingdom could be kind of tiny. However, if you’re proper princess material, you won’t mind that. At least so long as there’s no peas under the mattress.
Life, the Universe, Princes and Princesses. Mine’s the one in the blue tunic, thank you.
Some months ago, my writer friend Helen Jones of Journey to Ambeth was asking if anyone wanted to beta read her latest book, A Thousand Rooms. Yes, please, I said. So she sent it over to me, and I have to say, it’s one of the best indie books I’ve read. And as of yesterday, it’s published! So, in honour of that event, Helen has come over and written a guest post for us here. One of the things she and I have in common is that we’re both Europeans who’ve done a fair bit of travelling, so I asked her to talk about how the things she has seen in her wanderings inspire her writings. Over to Helen:
‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.’ St Augustine
Recently, a writer in a group I’m part of commented that she was feeling short of ideas, the stories that used to come to her so easily tapering off. The group response was unanimous. ‘Go outside.’ ‘See the world.’ ‘Come back to real life.’
As writers we create, our stories born of inspiration. But where do our ideas come from? I realise that writers need an interior landscape to plunder – after all, the Bronte sisters lived quite sheltered, shy lives, yet were able to write stories of deep passion and emotion. As I’ve said before, you don’t have to live with dragons to write about them. Yet they were no strangers to love and loss and emotion, and that is the landscape they chose to wander with their words, creating tempests from what, in their own lives, may have been more like gentle breezes. We each of us have our own unique life history, our own moments seen and experienced, and each of those moments can be the spark for a story. However, as we told the writer in our group, sometimes you need to step away from the desk and look for ideas elsewhere, or take yourself somewhere where ideas might come and find you. As writers, by nature we are observers, and we pull detail from the world around us wherever we are. I’ve written a short story sparked by an unusual outside light I saw on a walk in my neighbourhood, and another one inspired by a spate of leaks in our newly purchased home.
On my Instagram profile, I describe myself as a traveller. I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of this planet, though there are many places I’d still like to visit. But travel is not always about moving through space – in recent years I’ve wandered worlds within imagination, stories taking me to places beyond anywhere I’ve seen.
And yet, they still hold echoes of real world locales, a gleaming palace on the California coast transplanted into the magical gardens of Ambeth, a castle in Wales, favourite childhood haunt, now holding a secret that could change the world. And a dead girl roaming the streets of Sydney, her erstwhile home my old apartment, her old office the same one where I used to work.
My latest novel, A Thousand Rooms, was inspired by a real event. When I lived in Sydney I used to walk to work and, one sunny morning, came around a curve in the road to see a woman lying on the pavement under a blanket, two police officers crouched next to her. The accident hadn’t happened long before – there were no other emergency services there yet, and the bus that had hit her was pulled up to the kerb a little further along, the driver sitting on the verge with his head in his hands. The area wasn’t cordoned off, either – I walked right through the group, past a young woman on her phone in tears saying ‘she’s dead, she’s dead’, past the police officers and the dead woman. As I passed her I looked down. One of her arms was sticking out from under the blanket, the skin smooth and unmarked, adorned with a silver charm bracelet. I remember thinking that she’d got up that morning and chosen that bracelet along with everything else she was wearing, not imagining she’d be dead before lunchtime.
Then I kept walking. I had a busy day ahead, there was nothing I could do to help and I needed to get to work. I made it through the day but that evening, when my now-husband and I were driving somewhere, I made him stop the car, opened the door and threw up. Reaction hit me hard – even now, fifteen years later, I still feel sorrow for that unknown woman and her sudden death.
In A Thousand Rooms my protagonist, Katie, like the woman on the road that morning, dies suddenly. And then nothing happens. No angels or relatives appear, and she doesn’t feel any different – she just remains Katie, wandering around Sydney, unsure what to do next. As I wrote the story it unfolded from that initial event, research taking me through different afterlife mythologies, imagination adding characters and twists. But without that first spark of inspiration, who knows whether I would have written the book at all.
Of course, you don’t need to travel far or be part of dramatic events to find inspiration. When we told the writer in our group that she needed to see the world, we meant only that she needed to find a different outlook, whether that was in her garden, or farther afield. You don’t have to go far to find stories, but you do have to go outside, once in a while, and help them to find you.
Helen Jones was born in the UK, then lived in both Canada and Australia before returning to England several years ago. She has worked as a freelance writer for the past ten years, runs her own blog and has contributed guest posts to others, including the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists site.
When she’s not writing, she likes to walk, paint and study karate. She loves the idea of finding magic in ordinary places; as a child she and her grandmother used to visit the woods on Midsummer’s eve to look for fairies – whether they found any or not, is a story for another time.
She now lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and daughter, and spends her days writing, cleaning, thinking, and counting cats on the way to school.
And yet another good post on detective fiction, from Christa at Chorister at Home (it must be the day for it). Her musings shed some light on my own preference for British detective stories over American ones.
My friend E. L. Bates just wrote this quite excellent piece on the value of detective fiction. I agree with everything she says – and her point about the timeliness of detective novels is an interesting one. Check it out and see what you think.
I just got a review of Cat and Mouse on Smashwords. So exciting, right? Wrong. What it said was, “It’s supposed to be Cat & Mouse, but it’s just another copy of Seventh Son.” Aaaaaargh!!!
So what happened was that back in July, I uploaded a “new file” to Smashwords (which sends the files to Kobo, Nook, iBooks, etc etc), which had a teaser for Checkmate in the back. But obviously, I grabbed the wrong file. So very embarrassing…
Needless to say, it’s fixed now, and I put a post on Twitter to that effect, to let people know. I guess there’s some advantage to the fact that I’ve not been getting much sales; there won’t be a lot of readers (other than the one who kindly pointed out the mistake) with the wrong file on their e-readers. But still, I feel terrible. I screwed up. I made a big, public mistake. I’m awful, I’m a failure…
I was just going to post another tweet to that effect, how bad I feel about having messed up. And then this popped up in my feed:
Helen Jones was born in the UK, then lived in both Canada and Australia before returning to England several years ago. She has worked as a freelance writer for the past ten years, runs her own blog and has contributed guest posts to others, including the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists site.