Category Archives: Novel writing

April 28, 2013 · 7:46 pm

There is a world elsewhere

What is true of life is also true of the world of novels.

An effective story world is key to engagement. Create a convincing one, and readers will want to live in the world of your book. They will want to stay there long after the last page is turned and the back cover closed with that final snap. It will remain in their thoughts and subconscious, popping up at odd times, taking them by surprise.

Life is very much the same. Create a buzz around your life, and people will flock. Sometimes, without even knowing why: they just want to be part of another world, one which is separate in some way from reality but close enough to offer them membership. I can think of several people who do this thing really well. They create feel good factor in the way that a good story world does. That’s one of the reasons JK Rowling did so well.

We all want to be part of a world elsewhere.

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April 23, 2013 · 11:57 am

My top 10 for World Book Night

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In honour of #WorldBookNight, here are the authors who have written my favourite books of all time:
1.    Milan Kundera – for the philosophy of identity
2.    Franz Kafka – for the thought provoking symbolism and questions posed regarding morality and the nature of existence.
3.    Michel Faber – for his creation of Isserly, and fantastic build up of atmosphere and suspense
4.    Paulo Coelho – for the ability to use paired down language and universal concepts to connect with a wide range of people.
5.    John Fowles –  for his thriller ‘The Collector’ for his vision of the world as having a double reality and exploration of a psychotic mind, mental ill health.
6.    DH Lawrence – for ‘The Rainbow’ and his depiction of sexual desire and reproduction as a powerful, spiritual and transformative force
7.    Albert Camus – theatre of the absurd, philosophy, the idea of suspending reality and the question of what reality actually is.
8.    Jonathan Franzen – for characterisation
9.    George Orwell for 1984 – for dystopian story world
10.    Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s tale – a dystopia which, when applied to some other parts of the world suddenly no longer seems so far-fetched.

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· 11:23 am

Self publishing in an authorpreneur’s world

I was interested to see that the talk of the London Book Fair this year was the relatively new concept of authorpreneur.

The big question which vexes us all is: to self-publish or not self-publish?

I’ve heard it is still true that there is a lot more money to be made by following the traditional route to publishing. In the UK this is: find an agent, agent finds publisher. To the majority of writers, this is probably never going to happen. Harsh but fair.

Happily authors can now follow a self-publishing route, although the term self-publish only tells about a tenth of the story. If you decide to follow this route, what you are also doing is signing up to all the marketing and publicity work a publishing house would normally do for you. Sounds like a full time job to me! Hence the aptly named ‘authorpreneur’ title.

As a digital communications person by day, this gets my brain working on all kinds of exciting tangents. The first and most important of which, is to get the actual product right for digital – in my view, and given that word of mouth is the most important marketing tool in any publishing arena, this must represent the lion’s share of the work needed in order to sell online. Once you have a book you think people will like, there are a few other things I think could be quick wins. These are my top three:

  1. Choose a title which works online. We now have google and a vast array of forums (such as goodreads and authonomy, but also nanowrimo and others) to help us test drive different titles for our work. Use them.
  2. Think about how people read in a digital world. Make the first 10 per cent count – more than ever before. Even books that were written five years ago had more leeway. I got my teenage son to read the first few pages of a few books to test this theory. He’s widely read and will stick with lots, but I was horrified at the number of books he just put down with the words ‘no, I’m bored already’. Look at the readers of the future. Think Hollywood movies. Think distractions of modern living. You have about 30 seconds to get my attention. That’s it.
  3. Mobile devices – I’ve seen the stats in my day job. No matter how much you may want to deny that your audience will ever go near your books on a mobile device (including tablets), be sure that they will. And you’ll need to be ready for that. How does your book read on a mobile device? Does it still flow as you envisaged?

Will I self-publish? Probably, yes. Am excited at the thought of doing what I do in my day job for my own product? Well – ish.  SEO, adwords, social media presence and interaction all take incredible amounts of work to get right. Running my own book tour and writing press releases? Sounds pretty full on to me. Let’s see.

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April 22, 2013 · 12:12 pm

Reading for writing

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King tells us he has a well defined routine. He writes in the morning until about 11am and reads in the evening. Every day of the year, without fail. He also says this:

 ‘If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.’

And I agree.

I’ve also heard it said that novelists should aim to write 2,000 words and read 2,000 words a day. I liked this so much I took it upon myself to try and stick to it, but in the end I had to go with write 1,000 words and read about 3,000 a day – I’ve changed the ratios a bit whilst keeping the discipline.

Either way, the message is clear – if you want to write well, you need to be a voracious reader.

As an aspiring novelist, reading widely helps me to emulate writing I admire and
It helps widen vocabulary and access recurring themes which fascinate me. When asked to compile a list of my favourite books recently, I was interested to see how many of them shared themes. This was not something I was consciously aware of, having considered myself an eclectic reader!

When I’m working on a project, reading within the genre I write in is particularly useful. At the moment I’m lapping up Gillian Flynn’s books, but also Dan Brown’s! Both have something to teach me about pace and intrigue. I’ve also returned to Kafka and Kundera for philosophical undertones and Nabokov for wonderful descriptions. Murakami’s IQ84 is a new discovery which I am devouring, word by word. The list goes on. The reading goes on.

Just when I feel like I’m up against a writer’s block, I’ll read something… amazing. And I off I go again.

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April 17, 2013 · 9:57 am

Ten editing tips

…which helped me transform my writing.

Two manuscripts, one nanowrimo and one Faber Academy writing course later, and this is my tried and tested editing checklist. Some people say it’s all in the edit. I’d say, not quite, but I like to think of a creative writing project as a statue which starts off rough and needs to be hewn into intricate detail.

My top 10 manuscript edits:

  1. Play adverb bingo – get them all out. Once they are gone, I see how to strengthen the lone verbs which are left
  2. Get rid of all repetition (ALL!)
  3. Ensure all scenes are consistent with their point of view (ie written in the voice of the character – go forwards and backwards in the manuscript to ensure the character sounds the same throughout
  4. Repeat #3 for speech
  5. Get someone else to read it (no matter how cringeworthy). It’s amazing how the threat of this focuses the brain
  6. Look at the physical shape of the language in the page – is there too much speech or long passages if prose? What does the average sentence length look like? Is it varied. Is there a good balance between action, dialogue and description?
  7. Basics – spellcheck, grammar check
  8. Print off and edit. Send to Kindle (or other electronic device) and edit
  9. Check synopsis still matches up with what you’ve written – if not, why not. Is the story changing or have you written in scenes which don’t really belong there?
  10. Read it out loud

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