writing – Page 2 – amo vitam

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? Part 3: How to Write the Thing

[Cue sonorous voiceover] Previously on “So You Want to Write a Book?”: Part 1, How I got started; and Part 2, Other Ways of Writing a Book: How to write a book by just sitting down and writing it, or, conversely, how to plan, plot, and plunge deeply into the story before you begin writing, a five (or more) step process. Spoiler alert: Both methods work.

Part 3: WRITE THE THING

If you’ve skipped ahead to this part because you couldn’t wait to find out how to actually write that book, here’s a quick recap of Parts 1 and 2:

You can write a book by just sitting down and writing it with no previous planning.
Or you can do some plotting first, in as little or as much detail as you like. Here are five steps to doing so:
Step 1: Ideas
Step 2: The Overview
Step 3: The Rough Outline
Step 4: The Full Outline
Step 5: WRITE THE THING

This is where we are now, at Step 5. This is where you actually articulate the story. Where you tell what happens, describe the setting, make the characters talk. (Incidentally, if you’re pantsing your story, you’re starting the process here, without any of the previous steps. It works. So does plotting. If anyone ever tries to tell you that there is only one way of writing a book—their way—they don’t know what they’re talking about. Stop listening to them, and go and cast them as the villain in your next story.)

Incidentally, I’ve talked about all this with regards to story, i.e. fiction writing, but writing a non-fiction book is pretty much the same process: decide what it’s about, make an outline of what’s in it, then write it.

So, here we go! Take out your official fancy leather-covered storywriting notebook and your fountain pen (if you’re Neil Gaiman), or boot up your computer and start a new document in your favourite word processing or writing software.

And then start writing.

Where in your story should you start? Begin at the very beginning and go on to the end? You could—and personally, that’s my own preference; I’ve never done it any other way. But I know of plenty of people, some of them bestselling writers and Creative Writing profs, who jump around in the story. They write their favourite scenes first, the ones they see in their heads most vividly, which might be Chapters 3, 4, 15 and 27 in the final product, and then go back and fill in the gaps. It works too—so do whatever floats your boat.

The way I like to use my notes and outlines from Steps 1-4 is that I refer back to them: “I’m in Chapter 5,” I’ll say, “and here’s what my notes say needs to happen.” Then I make it happen on the page. I’ve done that with anything from a one-sentence description (“X meets Y”) to an outline that’s so detailed, it had every line of dialogue already written out like a stage play, and all I had to fill in was the speech tags and descriptions.

And so you write, and write, and write. Maybe you find yourself going back to Steps 3 or 4 or 5 or 7, adding more details to or refining your outline, before you go back to the text—that’s totally fine, this process is not linear.

This part of writing is the fun part, but also, the “hard work” part. It’s where the real craft of writing comes into play: drawing images with words, conveying your thoughts to the future reader so they can see what you’ve seen in your head and can think as you have thought. Show, don’t tell; write with sensory detail; get into your characters’ heads—all those great pieces of advice that any good book or class or YouTube video on “How to Write” will teach you. (Go look them up, there’s millions of them.)

Oh, one more thing: Spelling and grammar don’t matter at this point. Let me repeat that: SPELLING AND GRAMMAR DON’T MATTER AT THIS POINT. Do NOT keep going back to “fix” your “mistakes”. All that you’ll achieve with that is to break your momentum. Don’t do it.

In fact, do not go back to “fix” anything on this story right now. Editing is for later. Right now, you need to write. Just write. Get those words down. Lock up your inner editor (another NaNoWriMo phrase), turn off the automatic spell checker, and keep writing. If you can’t stand looking at what you wrote yesterday because it’s so bad and you just must fix it, then don’t look at it. I’m serious. At this stage of the game, what matters is getting the story down on paper (or screen).

And once you have it on paper, keep it there—don’t throw away or delete anything you’ve written until the story is finished. If, by any chance, you find there’s something you really can’t live with that absolutely drives you crazy—say, you’ve written something in Chapter 3 that flatly contradicts what you’re about to say in Chapter 10—then hide it from yourself for the time being. In a notebook, you could paperclip or tape together the pages with the offending passage; on a computer, highlight the section and change the font colour to white (if you’re writing on a white background). Voilà, you no longer need to look at it.

The point of this somewhat silly exercise is that when you’re in the depth of a story, your judgement is less than reliable. In fact, it’s possible that it’s completely out of whack. I’ve had times when I’ve sat at my keyboard, typing away to finish the story, all the while saying to myself “This is awful this is terrible this is horrible this sucks so bad,” but continuing because I needed to get the words down. And then later, I re-read it and discovered that the passage wasn’t nearly as awful as I thought and I could use quite a bit of it. I’ve also had the reverse happen: I wrote passages that I thought at that moment were brilliant, and later I found they, well, weren’t.

So, don’t trust your judgement in the midst of writing, and keep everything you write until you’re done. If on re-reading you find that your writing is, in fact, just that awful and completely unusable, you can always throw it away then.

So, you write and write and write and write. And then you do it again. And then, to vary it up a bit, you write. And write some more.

And then finally, one day … you’re done!
You have written a book! Hurrah!! Congratulations!!

You could leave it at that, and I know quite a few people who do just that. They’re happy they’ve written a novel, and are content to let it sit on their hard drive or in their desk drawer forever. That’s totally fine.

But you don’t have to stop there, not if you want to actually get your book to a point where you can share it with others or even hold a printed copy in your hands. So what happens next? This and a few other tips on how to facilitate this whole “Writing” thing shall be found next time when this post is…

…TO BE CONTINUED…

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? Part 2: How to Plan a Book

[Cue sonorous voiceover] Previously on “So You Want to Write a Book?”: Part 1, How I got started. Detailing in great, umm, detail, how a particular writer went from “I’m not ever going to be ‘a novelist’!” to being, well, just that. And how said writer wrote their first novel by sitting down and starting to type on a chilly November day in 2011.

Part 2: Other Ways of Writing a Book – How to Plan a Book

So, as I said last time, I didn’t even set out to “write a book”, because I didn’t know I could. But I could sit down and start typing, and tell myself a story I liked.

That’s one way of writing a book: sit down and start writing.

However, that’s not the only way. There are other options, possibly even better ones. And the rest of this post is going to be dedicated to telling you about one or maybe two others.

The option outlined above, the just-sit-down-and-start-typing one, in the NaNoWriMo community is knows as “pantsing”: writing by the seat of your pants. The other option is its exact opposite, and it’s called “plotting”.

It’s pretty much what it sounds like: planning your book before you start. Like a wily housebreaker plotting their crime, you plan how your book is going to unfold.

Hah, that’s an easy thing to say in one sentence. Doing it is a whole other matter. There are so many different ways of approaching this, people get whole MFAs and PhDs in this stuff, and there’s been reams and reams of books written about it. So, this is just to let you know that what I’m going to tell you next barely scratches the surface of this topic, and that if you enjoy learning about this, hurrah! You have a lifetime of fun ahead of you. (Just, for example, go to YouTube, type in “Outlining a novel”, and I’ll see you back here in about three months.)

And, another point: pantsing and plotting are not an either/or, they’re more of a continuum (yes, NaNoWriMo has a term for a point in the middle, too: “plantsing”). You can plot anywhere from just a little bit down to the tiniest detail. It’s all valid and it all works.

So, how to start?

Quite simply: a book has to be about something. You need someone who is somewhere doing something, and that something has to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

That sounds utterly obvious—but actually, I’ve just given you six different ways to start on your story.
Say what?
Let’s break it down:
–Someone: the main character or characters (Who).
–Somewhere: the setting, i.e. place and time (Where/When).
–Something: the plot or events (What)
–Beginning: how it all starts
–Middle: what’s going on
–End: how it finishes up

Any of those six points is a place to start your story. Maybe you know who your character is (Frodo Baggins, a hobbit). Maybe you know where and when it takes place (Middle Earth, the Third Age). Maybe you know what happens (there’s an evil magic ring that needs to be destroyed). Or maybe you have a beginning (“Netherfield Park is let at last!”). Maybe you have the middle (a botched proposal scene). Maybe you have the end (a wedding).

So, I suggest you get yourself something to write—pen and paper or a notebook, a laptop with word processing software, whatever. This is only the preliminary tool, not the one you’ll be writing your book in, so I’d recommend a paper notebook—much quicker to boot up than a computer.

Here are the steps to writing your novel:

Step 1: Ideas. Start making notes. Just jot down whatever comes into your head. Do you have a person in mind? An event? A setting? A scene, a few sentences of dialogue, an image… (C.S. Lewis started The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from a picture of a faun with an umbrella standing under a lantern in a snowy woods.)
Write down anything and everything to do with your story that you think of. Even if it’s silly. Especially if it’s silly. Write it down even if it contradicts what you just wrote down before. Make lists of what you could possibly write about. Or if you already know where you want to go with the story, write that down too. Write down whatever you know about the characters, or the setting, or the plot. If you’ve got a big system of elvish lore and language knocking around in your head, write it down. If you know that your main character has a mole on their left shoulder blade, write it down.

Step 2: The Overview—fill in the first three points. By which I mean, decide on the Who, Where/When, and a single sentence of the What. If in Step 1 you’ve decided on a character, now find them a place & time to be in and something to do. If your starting point was a plot event, find the people who act it out and the place they do it in. If your starting point is the setting, find characters and a plot.

Step 3: The Rough Outline. In other words, the next three points: What’s the beginning, middle and end of the plot? What happens first that starts the story, what’s the central problem and how do the characters tackle it, and what’s the solution?

Step 4 (and possibly 5, 6, 7, and 8): The Full Outline—refine the rough outline (and refine it more, and more, if you want). This is where you decide section by section, and/or chapter by chapter, or even scene by scene (your choice), what happens.

Step 5 (or whatever comes next): WRITE THE THING. This is where you actually articulate the story. Where you tell what happens, describe the setting, make the characters talk.
But there is too much to be said about that than fits into this post.

…TO BE CONTINUED…

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK? Part 1: How I Got Started

Note: When I started this series I thought it would be one post, maybe two. It turned into six. So I’ll be posting one of these every day this week.

Part 1: How I Got Started

A friend and I were talking the other day about things one could do with one’s life.
“Is there anything you really want to do?” I asked her. “Something you’ve always dreamt of?”
She didn’t even pause to think.
“Write a book!” she said.
Well, you know what my reaction to that was bound to be.
“Do it!” I shot back at her.
“But,” she said, “where would I start?”

I think there’s a lot of a people who have that dream in their life: “One day, I want to write a book.” Oddly enough, I was never one of them. Not because I didn’t always love books, but because it never occurred to me that someone like me could write one. To write a book you have to be really special, don’t you? You have to have some inner drive that makes you pick up the pen, that forces you to write or you’ll burst. You have to have the talent that just, I don’t know, crystallizes into a story. Writers are born, not made…

Or so I thought. But then I switched schools during my undergrad, and my new university had Creative Writing classes. Well, why not? I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. And it didn’t. I did well and had fun, and found that I’m not a bad writer. In Creative Nonfiction class, in particular, I found my voice, and not long after that I started a blog. However, the class that was aimed at teaching us to write novels left me with the conclusion that I was never going to be “a novelist”—I didn’t have what it takes. I didn’t have the stamina to complete that long a manuscript; I’d lose interest by Chapter 4. But more to the point, I didn’t have anything to say; the stories I had in my head were too boring, too silly; nobody would want to read them. Real writers write literary fiction. (Just to be clear, this wasn’t a prof telling me these things; I discovered them all on my own. Because I’m smart that way.)

I got my BA in spring of 2011. The previous year, I had heard about this NaNoWriMo thing—National Novel Writing Month: crazy people who sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I already knew that I wasn’t a novelist, but I had some time on my hands, and once again I thought, Why not? All you have to do to win the challenge is write 50,000 words in 30 days. Nobody said anything about it being good words, let alone quality writing anyone would want to read. Maybe I could do that. It might be fun.
So I signed up. “Write 50,000 words, and have fun”—that’s all I aimed for, that first NaNo I participated in. I started with only a vague idea where I was going. “It was the blue bowl that started it all…,” I typed on November 1st.

And I kept typing, and typing. Telling myself a story I enjoyed, about a young woman who gets sucked off into another world and how she copes. Typing and typing. There’s a cute baby in it, and descriptions of cooking in an open fireplace, and a potter who makes pots on a kickwheel, and a bit of gentle magic. Typing and typing.

By November 30th, I had 50,000 words. I’d had fun. And, to my surprise, I had a novel. I went back and read it from the beginning, and, what do you know? I enjoyed it. As a novel. And then, wonder of wonders, I handed it to a couple of other people (notably among them Lee Strauss, who had just published her own first novel), and they enjoyed it too!

I had written a novel. A real, honest-to-goodness novel.

But this story isn’t quite done yet. That particular year, Createspace, which was Amazon’s print-on-demand arm, offered NaNoWriMo winners a coupon for five free print copies of their novel, which you had to redeem by the end of June. So I got my rear in gear, proofread this unexpected novel manuscript (then proofread it again), got help with making a cover from one of the Offspring who knows their way around Photoshop and has a knack for graphic design, and less than a year from that November 1st, I had in my hands five printed copies of a book that I had had no idea I’d be able to write.

I had written a book.

It didn’t stop there. The next November, I went back and wrote the sequel to Seventh Son. It was much harder that time, because not only was I in grad school by then, but I was invested: I had this novel planned and plotted out; it had to be a novel, and it had to be good—as good as the first one. I couldn’t just waffle on as I had the first time, this time it mattered. But I struggled on, and again I finished; that novel was Cat and Mouse.

The year after that, I’d learned my lesson (namely that trying to do grad school and writing “a real novel” is a little bit insane, or rather more so than NaNoWriMo is already), so when November rolled around I decided to write something simple that didn’t matter so much—I grabbed one of my favourite Grimm’s fairy tales, “Puss in Boots”, and retold it to the tune of 50,000 words. And again, I got a novel. That one became Martin Millerson, or: Something With Cats (because it has a whole bunch of extra cats in it, not just the booted one).

I kept doing NaNoWriMo, and wrote Checkmate, and Star Bright, and then a number of other novels that will see the light of publication eventually (I hope). Yes, novels. I’ve written novels, plural. I didn’t always “win” NaNoWriMo, and didn’t even do it every year since, but I call myself a novelist now.

Why am I telling you all this?

It’s because of my friend’s question: “Where do you start?”

This is the story of how I started. I didn’t even set out to “write a book”, because I didn’t know I could. But I could sit down and start typing, and tell myself a story I liked. And after a certain number of days of doing it, and then doing it again, and again, and again, I had a book.

That’s one way of writing a book: sit down and start writing.

However, that’s not the only way. I would say that’s not even the best way. There are other options…

…TO BE CONTINUED…

PS: NaNoWriMo 2023 starts this week – you still have time to sign up!

Introducing (drumroll please!): Martin Millerson!

That’s right – we have a new book out!

I wrote this one quite a number of years ago; it was one of my first NaNoWriMo novels. Just for fun, because “Puss in Boots” is one of my favourite fairy tales. I mean, what’s not to like about a story of a cat who wears boots and bosses around a young miller’s son, and in the end gets him his fortune?

In case you can’t remember the details of the story, I won’t give you any more spoilers than that. But I’ll just say that this book follows the Grimm’s outline rather closely, except that there are a few extra characters added, several of them with four legs, or paws, as it were (and one with three).

Cleo and Johnny, to whose memory the book is dedicated. They were the live models for some of the extras in the story.

Until quite recently, this book lived in my files under the title Something With Cats – because, you know, when someone asked me what I was writing all I knew was that it was Something With Cats.

So, without further ado (but one small added drumroll: drrrrrrrrrummmmmm), here it is. Introducing, for your reading pleasure:

Martin Millerson, or, Something With Cats: a Retelling of “Puss in Boots”!

You never know what will happen when you buy your cat a pair of boots…

Martin Millerson is a dreamer who would rather write verse than work in his family’s mill. Still, he is bitterly disappointed when the only legacy he gets from his father is a cat. But then the cat starts to talk. And ask for a pair of boots. And everything changes.
Can Martin, his friend Walter Shoemaker, Nicolaida the new Town Witch, and Mafalda the King’s Daughter work together to rid the town of the menace beyond its gates? Or will it take the cunning of a cat—

A Cat in Boots?

You can get it at your favourite online bookstores:

-on Amazon for Kindle and in print

-on Kobo or Nook for epub readers

-on iBooks and other vendors

-on Smashwords in most Ebook formats (including Kindle)

So, hie thee to an (electronic) bookshop, and get thyself a copy!

Life, the Universe, and MARTIN MILLERSON! Let me know what you think of it.

News from the Writing Trenches, January** 2023 Edition

Steve says it’s time I gave y’all an update. (Side note: I like that word, “y’all”. It’s quite fascinating how the dialect of the Southern United States has created a new second person plural, which takes the place of what the word “you” used to mean. Back in the day of The Bard and the King James Bible, “thou” meant “you, the single person”, and “you” meant “you, the several people”. Nowadays, regular English only has “you”, as in, “you one” and “you many”. But Southern US English has re-invented a plural, so there you can say “you one” and “y’all many”. I wonder if it’ll ever make it into formal, written language? End of digression.)

So, yes, update. No, I’m not getting sidetracked, why would I? It’s not like I go on guilt trips about how much I have, or haven’t, written in the last while. In fact, I was going to (but didn’t) write a blog post on that: “The Year I Failed NaNoWriMo”.

Because, that did happen last November. I failed NaNo—dismally so. I only got a few thousand words done. But then, I’d set myself up for it. I wanted to see if I could write a novel and do regular work, as well. So I booked several editing jobs during November, as well as having some volunteer work to do (and never mind starting Christmas preparations), plus a trip to the coast for some family stuff in the middle of it. On top of it I was a NaNo ML (Municipal Liaison, i.e. regional leader or cheering squad), which brings a bunch more work with it. I know, I know, laugh all you want.

In fact, setting myself up for failure was a useful experiment. I once knew someone who set himself up to fail a university course: he signed up to the class with the full intention of failing, just to teach himself the lesson that it’s okay to fail. I wouldn’t quite go that far myself; for one, university courses are blinkin’ expensive—there are a lot of cheaper ways of failing. But I started NaNoWriMo 2022 with the idea that I probably wouldn’t finish my 50,000 words. I’d done it ten times in a row before, pushed myself to the finish line, got it done. So I knew what it takes for me to do it. I’ve seen others win NaNoWriMo “on the side”, though, while holding down full-time jobs or looking after young children, and I wondered if there was any chance of me doing so. Answer: No. I didn’t even get a part of a novel written. Which was no surprise, but still stressful.

I did learn a couple of useful things. I’m not a very fast writer, I’ve known that all along. Word sprints and word wars are useless for me. It’s not that I can’t type fast, but I can’t think fast, can’t craft sentences very quickly, so my word count per minute has never been high. Some of my friends can crank out 2000 words an hour without breaking a sweat, and I’ve always wondered how they do it and why I can’t. This time, during one of our online write-ins, I decided to just write stream-of-consciousness drivel, nothing whatever to do with any story I was writing, just to see how fast I could put words on screen. And what do you know, if all I’m doing is typing without trying to make sense, let alone paint a word picture, I can rack up the word count with the best of them! However, it’s a word count that nobody would ever want to read. There were words, even mostly-spelled-correctly words making somewhat-puncuated sentences, but they were utter dross, not a story. And I didn’t enjoy the process. So, it’s not that I’m a failure at writing, it’s that I have a different writing style from the one that cranks ‘em out fast*. I’m a Slow Writer. Which, given the fact that I’m into Slow Culture as a whole (Slow Food, Slow Textiles, etc.), is kind of a good thing. And like other aspects of Slow Anything, it means you (or rather I) have to take time for it, have to set time aside, or it won’t happen.

So! Now you know that I did not write a new novel last November. However. I do have a whole bunch of novels sitting around on my computer in varying states of completion. A few are finished, critiqued, edited, polished. Some are finished, i.e. completed novels, but need rewriting; one needs a whole different ending. And one is only half done, and I need to write the second half and get ‘er done. Also, there are some short stories kicking around that I’ve been submitting to contests, and/or might turn into a story collection, or expand into a novella or even full novel.

All that to say, Writing? Why yes, Steve, I have been writing, thank you very much. You can stop giving me censorious looks. And something might even come out of it, very soon.

That’s Life, the Universe, and News from the Writing Trenches in January** of 2023. I’ll let y’all know when there’s more to tell.

*Footnote: I’m not saying that people who write novels fast write dross; far from it. Just that their brains work differently from mine. I can only write really fast if I write drivel; if I want to write anything worth reading I have to take my time. And that’s okay.

**Edit after posting: I just noticed that it is, in fact, now February, not January. Which tells you where my brain is at. Ah well…

#FridayFragment: 20.01.2023

MAGIC POTION

The first sip tasted revolting. Bitter, burnt. I made a face.

“That’s normal,” he said. “Just keep drinking, it’ll get better.”

I doubted it. The second, third, fourth, and fifth sips were no better. I put the mug back on its coaster.

“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t care how much magic is in this, I don’t think it’s for me.”

He stared at me, his blue eyes wide with astonishment.

“You can’t be serious,” he said. “Everyone likes coffee.”

On Cambridge and Friendship and a New Book

Anyone who says that online friendships aren’t real friendships has obviously never had one.

Louise Bates and I met a lot of years ago. If I remember rightly it was via the blog of another writer (Lee Strauss, to be precise, who had just published her first book). Both Louise and I were in our early days as bloggers and writers, and had yet to publish our first pieces. Her comment on Lee’s blog post caught my interest—who was this E.L. Bates person? She sounded like we might have a few things in common.

So I toddled over to her blog and checked it out. Would anyone be interested in beta reading a couple of short stories she’d written, she asked on the blog; umm, sure? I said. Not that I had much experience, I gave her to understand, but I could read the stories and tell her my opinion. Which I did. And then I sent her my fairly recently completed first novel to read (“I just want to know if it’s any good…”), and she gave me her opinion in return.

And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

We found that we loved each other’s work, and had very much the same approach and attitudes to writing and to literature. And then we started talking about everything under the sun. Homeschooling, life, religion, parenting, society, food, books, knitting—and always, always writing. The emails flew back and forth. Big changes happened in our lives, all of which we shared with each other as they happened. I went to grad school and got my Master’s degree; Louise and her family moved to England for her husband to study for his PhD at Cambridge, and then moved back to the States to take up their life there again. On the way, we published our first books. And then the second, and third, and fourth. We kept blogs, and changed blogs, and got our very own websites. And both of us went into business as professional editors.

Our friendship is as real as they come, even though we’ve always been separated by at least the width of a continent and for a while even an ocean as well. We always talked about how much we’d love to meet in real life, by preference in England where so many of our favourite stories are set. Just for fun, we’d sign our emails with “Some Day In Great Britain!”

And then one day that wish became reality. Planning a trip to Germany to visit family, I realized that it was cheaper to fly via London than to go to Germany directly. Well—it was the sensible thing to do then, wasn’t it? And while I was on English soil, I might as well make it a longer layover, and take in the sights. It was practically a duty. A day or two in London, and then—Cambridge!

A short 45-minute train ride from King’s Cross Station, I made my way to the Royal Cambridge Hotel, and Louise and her family came to meet me. I still remember going down to the lobby, and there she was, just as she looked in her photos. “There you are,” I said, “it’s you!” (or something equally profound and erudite), and about five minutes later it felt like we had known each other in person for years.

We proceeded to spend the most marvellous day and a half together. They took me to King’s College Chapel for Matins and to Jesus College for Evensong; we walked through the ancient streets of Cambridge and watched punts getting snarled on the River Cam by the Mathematical Bridge; we had a proper British cream tea in a café and supper in the pub where some famous scientists used to have a pint after making their famous discoveries (I can’t remember now what they were, but they were famous, yup).

Being in Cambridge with Louise was an experience I will never forget.

Not the most flattering picture of either of us, but we were so busy having a great time together we neglected to take any others.

And now (drumroll please!) she’s written a book about the place!

I got to read the very first version of this story. But that was before February of 2019, before I had seen Cambridge. It was a good story (all her stories are), but it didn’t resonate as much with me then. She put the manuscript aside for quite some time. But then not long ago she took it back out, and completely re-wrote the story. Now, it’s suffused with Cambridge. It’s her homage to the place, and it’s a wonderful, fun, profound story.

Death by Disguise came out today! It’s Book 3 in Louise’s “Whitney and Davies” 1920’s Magical Mystery series—like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers with magic.
“The walls of Saint Dorothea’s College in Cambridge hide more secrets than simply the existence of magic …” Are you intrigued? Of course you are. So I’ll stop talking at you. Go get a copy of the book, and dive into the world of E.L. Bates’ Cambridge—it’s magical all in its own right.

Life, the Universe, Friendship and Cambridge and Books. You’re in for a treat.

What I Learned at the Writers Conference

Finally, after three years of absence (one due to holidays, two to You-Know-What), this past weekend Steve and I got to go to a real-life, in-person Writers Conference again. People! Writers! Books! Workshops and conversations about plot and character and publishing and writing software and essays and food writing and the difficulties of switching genre and getting things done and how weird it is to be, well, as weird as we are… It was glorious.

What did I learn, you wonder? Well, aside from all the stuff I really can’t summarize in a little blog post—you had to have been there, that’s what we take those workshops for—there are two thoughts I came away with. Neither one of which should have been news, but they kind of were.

Thought #1: Writers don’t look like their publicity photos. Well, okay, some do; they’re just naturally handsome and photogenic and we all hate them for it. But several times that weekend, when a writer was introduced and walked up on stage, I had a little “Oh!” moment. As in, “Oh, they actually look like a normal person! They’re older/larger/less perfectly groomed/more grey-haired/whatever than I thought!” With some of them the “Oh!” moment happened when they started reading from their work: in their writing, they’re so eloquent, so polished, so poised—but on stage, there might have been a slight stammer or a lisp, or they read their work with less expression than it deserved, or their hands were shaking just a bit.

Writers, I realized, are just normal people. Even those “big names” with multiple published works and bestsellers to their credit, whom I look up to with a tinge of envy. Reading the eloquence of their writing, and looking at their attractive and polished photos, I got intimidated; then I saw them in the flesh, and they turned out to be—well, real. Actual human beings. I haven’t lost one iota of my admiration for them, I’m just not intimidated by them personally anymore (well, not as much). I can be inspired instead.

Thought #2: There is more than one way of doing things. “Thou shalt outline!”—“I can’t outline my novels, I have to write several discovery drafts and throw out the first three until I figure out what happens.”—“Write a synopsis first and work from that!”—“I don’t know what the book is about until I’ve written it.” All of those statements came from successful authors with several published books to their credit. Directly contradicting what the last successful author with several published books to their credit had said.

That there is more than one way of doing things is a revelation that I had about more than one creative field in the last couple of years. I wrote about it with regards to knitting (and life) two years ago, and just a few months back, I realized it about pottery: I was taught one particular way to throw on the wheel, and I was getting frustrated because I wasn’t doing very well with it. I concluded that it’s because I didn’t know the right way to do it. I started watching online videos, and several of the instructors were quite dogmatic about how it’s supposed to be done: Never, never use a sponge to pull up—no, always use a sponge to pull up! Wedge every piece you throw and make sure you put it on the wheel the right way around—no, just smack it into a ball, it doesn’t matter which way it lands on the wheel! This is the only right way to do it—no, this is the only right way to do it! The more online videos I watched and books I read, the more different ways of doing it I saw. And all of these people produce beautiful work.

It seems that that also holds true for writing (which, in case you missed the point, is my revelation du jour). Plotting, pantsing, structured, unstructured, according to a map, discovering as you go—what it comes down to is that you need to do what works. What matters is that you get the thing written. It’s irrelevant if you’ve outlined or inlined (I just made that up), as long as you get a piece of writing out of it. There is not just one way of doing things, and the really exciting thing about that is that because there are so many ways of doing things, you always have another option—if this doesn’t work for you, try that instead.

That’s what’s so wonderful about events like Writers Festivals: so many opportunities to learn different ways of doing things! And as exciting as it was to get back to an in-person conference, the Pandemic [ugh!] has actually had a good effect here. If you can’t make it to a real-life festival (either because you can’t afford it, or you live too far away, or, which is a perfectly legitimate reason, you’re not comfortable being physically close to so many germ-breathing strangers yet), the number of online options have proliferated in the last couple of years. You can attend festivals and learn from those amazing pros from the comfort of your own personal computer chair, finding out all about novel structure or how to plot a mystery, or, for that matter, how to sculpt a ceramic camel using newspaper as armature.

And I can tell you that the learning experience in an online conference can be just as intense; you need just as much time to recover from it as from a real-life convention (i.e., you spend the day afterwards collapsed on the couch, trying to let your poor brain recover from all the input). Speaking of which, I think Steve still hasn’t got over this one; he’s gone missing. I know he came home with me—here he is in the kitchen perched on the stack of books we brought home—but I haven’t been able to find him anywhere since. Well, I’m sure he’ll resurface once he’s had a long nap and revitalized his woolly brain.

Life, the Universe, and a Writers Conference. Writers are normal people, and there is more than one way of doing things.

#FridayFragment: 29.04.2022

They came around the corner, and there it was in front of them. The blossom, enormous like a vast bowl, more than six men could span. The soft pink of the petals had a velvet sheen to it; in the centre, the golden richness of the stamens beckoned.
“The Giant Water Lily of Medulisan!” Mardrom breathed, once again exercising his proclivity for stating the obvious.

#FridayFragment: 11.03.2022

She took the lid off the sugar bowl and absentmindedly reached in for a sugar cube. She’d really have to get herself some sugar tongs.
“Oy!” cried an indignant little voice from the bowl. “Do you mind?”
She gave a startled glance into the sugar bowl. A tiny man stared up at her from under a pointy blue hat, clutching a sugar cube in front of him which was unsuccessful at hiding the fact that he was butt naked.
“I beg your pardon!” she said politely. “I didn’t realize you were using my sugar bowl for… for… What are you using it for?”