Writing Novels and Things #11: Taking inspiration

There are certain things about writing that I find relatively easy, that others find difficult, stuff like starting projects, finding a voice, sending my stuff off to be rejected, sitting down and doing writing, stuff like that. Then there are the things that others seem to have a surfeit of, that are seemingly essential to the creative process, that I lack. One of these things is ideas.

(I am quelling the desire to justify this, so that you don't think I have nothing to say and/or shouldn't be working in a creative field. Have I also just given too much away, admitting as I have that I care what you think? As this paragraph is bracketed, I would prefer if you never mentioned having read this. Thanks!)

If I sit there at my computer and think, 'OK, let's find something for my characters to do,' I will freeze, entirely. My characters will do nothing. They'll sit around an office, or a coffee shop, or a living room, wittily, insightfully, charmingly, gazing into their navels and remarking on the world around them (and this world will, probably, be quite a lot like mine). This kind of fiction is rarely of interest to people who read things. Honestly.

So, I have learned that, for me, I must come to the empty Word document with a hook or concept, lest I write yet another moody coming-of-age tale where nothing happens (which I love, by the way, and will never stop writing). You come up with these concepts by having things called ideas. These can be found all around, and when you get these ideas from around you, it is said that you are drawing inspiration.

Mur Lafferty wrote a good little blog post about ideas and generating them. Essentially, ideas are like a magic penny, hold it tight and you wont have any, but spend it, lend it, and you'll have so many that they'll roll all over the floor. Yes, I just stole those lyrics from a song about God, but I think it works in this regard too. Basically, you're supposed to use all your ideas all the time, and don't save them up for later. You'll think of new ones. Getting the old ones out of your head and onto the page will actually clear room for new ones. This is, I think, Science.

So, in summary, in order to be a good fiction writer, you need ideas. You may well have known that already. The good thing is, prompts for ideas are all around us because we live in a world where there are so many things! One of the first assignments in my masters course was to find a picture and write a story about it. I can't find the original picture, but I'm fairly sure that it was a Studio Ghibli film still with a little girl looking at her reflection in the river. So I wrote a terrible (not in terms of subject matter, in terms of quality) story about that!

It's a good exercise, because it teaches you not to be too precious about your subject matter, and to look deeply into everything around you. If you can create a story sparked by just one little picture, what can you do with a whole world at your disposal?! Write more stories, mostly.

Music is good for that. Just this week, I was very inspired by an Elbow song. I haven't yet turned it in to anything, but it made me want to write a poem for the first time in ages. I then realised, while trying to write the poem, that I had no idea how to write a poem and that copying song lyrics is not the way. However, the first short story I ever got published was based on a song by Air, called Le Voyage De Penelope. It wasn't so much the song as the title; and it was a very literal interpretation. If I tell you that the title of the story ended up being Le Voyage De Lady Penelope, I think you'll get a good idea of where I went with it. I still quite like that story though, which I almost never say, modest bastard that I am.

It doesn't always work. I was fascinated by the painting below for about ten years, I even made a sculpture of it, from wire and black feathers, and have, in my head, turned her into a superhero, but I have never been able to write something about her that isn't, well, a bit rubbish.

 See also: the above Elbow anecdote. they can't all be winners!

Still, this is my advice to all those struggling for ideas: steal be inspired by someone else's! You won't be sorry.

Writing Novels and Things #5: Counting words

Revision continues. I'd previously thought that I'd be rewriting the first five chapters, reducing them to four. This was, unfortunately, an example of Bad Maths. What I actually did was rewrite the first two chapters, expanding them to four.

Most writing advice I've read advises that when you do a second draft of a novel, you should do lots of cutting out. Old Mr Prescriptive, Stephen King, says 10%, maybe more and that seems to be a bit of an industry standard, and almost nobody tells you to add anything in the editing process. So I'm not sure what it means when, so far, I've managed to turn what was 13,500 words into 19,500... do I win?

I'm not worried. I'm not worried at all. There are people who add with revisions (like Mur Lafferty), and I think mostly it comes from being a bit of an excited writer, constantly wanting to get to the good bits and forgetting basic concepts of storytelling and stuff. And so then, on revision, you add the in-betweeny bits! I'm not worried.

I don't know how this happened! When I was at uni, writing an essay was almost exactly as painful as pulling teeth, and went something like this:

Paragraph - word count - paragraph - word count - sentence - word count - word - word count - word count - word count - word - wordcountwordcountwordcount - oh, come oooooonnnnnnn!!!! - word count - pfft! - print, hand in, 2.1

And now I just want to put in all the words! It keeps growing, exponentially, getting longer, wordier and totally betterer. But I can't help but wonder... if keep on rerwiting, is my novel going to take over the world?

Writing Novels and Things #3: Self-Publishing

Publishing is probably not something I should be thinking about right now. I should probably be thinking about all the work I have to do in order to get this novel in any kind of good condition. I should be thinking of ways to make my first chapter more dynamic than just an argument about a pen. In summary: I Should Be Writing.

But, well the media is conspiring against me, you see. The Guardian has only gone and released two interesting articles this week, both on Self-Publishing:

How self-publishing came of age
and
Self-publishing stars

These, coupled with the poisoning effects of listening to successful self-pubbers on the I Should Be Writing (link above) and Writing Excuses podcasts, have made me start thinking (and getting excited) about it. Self-Publishing, not It.

There are all these websites, notably Amazon's CreateSpace, that are designed to help you Self-Publish, and the success stories are very compelling. Authors who do it this way tend to sell the books cheaper, say a couple of pounds, but then get all the profits for keepsies, bar the Amazon royalty. In this crazy Kindle world, people will happily download a cheap book with a nice cover, regardless of who's written it. Loads of people! And you do need loads. People are making money because people are buying their books in bulk. You're probably not going to make much money if only your friends and family buy your books... which actually goes without saying, and has done throughout time. But you do need to get half the internet to buy your book, is what I'm saying.

Which is still all based on the supposition that you want to be successful which of course I definitely do not. Nuh uh. No way. Not me.

Honestly! I like having a job. The attraction to self-publishing is slightly different for me.

My boyfriend is in a band. He gets to make music (beautiful music, I think) and he gets to get up on stage, all with his friends. When they've done a gig, or release something, they get to work together to achieve... together. It must be so nice to have projects with your friends. I mostly work alone. I write alone, obviously. I sometimes go for a whole day without interacting with anyone but my significant other. I'm not lonely, I do definitely have friends, and nice ones, but it would be cool to have a project with them, you know? A reason to band together, for a greater purpose than just, you know, hanging out. And that purpose, my friends, is making money art.

I have a friend who's an illustrator, one who's a graphic designer, and another who's a copyeditor/proofreader (but doesn't have a website yet). I haven't posited this idea to any of them, by the way, so please don't tell them I said this was happening, but I just imagine us all getting together to make this book, with the cover, interiors and content all amazing and... it fills me with warm feelings.

Of course, having said all that, I do already make books for a living, so it could turn into a bit of a busman's holiday. And I do sometimes fantasise about being an editor's favourite writer (I pretty much keep a league table of my authors - and yes, I have relegated). I think, in truth, I want to be published 'traditionally', at least at first. For the validation and stuff.

Cut to me totally self-publishing my first book, fnar fnar!