How funny. The last review I had on this loved Garnet but thought Harry was a bit pompous. This reviewer loves Harry but thinks Garnet is a bit of a pest. I’m not at all surprised – the pair of them are such opposites it’s hard to like them both. I do, but then I’m their creator, and I can’t imagine writing a character I didn’t like even a little bit.
The reviewer also liked the lack of sex, to which I say “huzzah!” (Not because I want all books to be sex-free, but because I like the thought that you ought to be able to get the same range of sweet to hot in m/m as you do in m/f. I object to the thought that m/m has to be erotic by definition, as though it was somehow more shocking than m/f in its essence.)
http://geoffwhaley.com/2013/02/11/blessed-isle-alex-beecroft/
If your heart doesn’t flutter even a bit, you’ve got a dead soul! Of course you don’t, but me in my hopeless romanticism found these notions completely swoon-worthy.
Thanks Geoff!
(The idea butterfly)
(Seriously, its’ scientific name is “idea idea” – how cool is that?)
Your notebook is open to a blank page and your pen poised. Your wordprocessing file is open to a blank screen and your fingers pressed to the keyboard. You have set aside an hour to write, and have the appropriate amount of noise/company/solitude/silence for your liking. What now?
Possibly you’re one of the lucky ones, whose desire to write a novel has turned up complete with an idea that you want to write about. You don’t just want to write a novel, you want to write that were-cuttlefish romance with a kraken villain which will break the mould of formula romance forever and ensure the whole world has to fan itself whenever they look at ink in the future. If that’s the case, you can proceed straight to the “filling your idea out” section.
But don’t think you get off scott free! What happens when you’ve written this idea? Will another one just be waiting for you? Or will you too be left looking at the untrodden snow of a fresh page and wondering how on earth to get over it?
If so, join us too while we think about where to get ideas.
Assuming you’re not one of those people with more ideas than time to write them, how do you come up with an idea strong enough to support a whole novel?
As with all writing, this depends very much on what sort of a personality you have. You may want to test yourself. When you’re reading someone else’s books, do you often think “pah! That would never happen!” Or “Ridiculous, a dragon wouldn’t fill a person with warm fuzzy feelings like that. It would be more likely to turn its rider into a ruthless, cold hearted marauder.” Or “why don’t they ever ask the eagles to fly them to the mountain?” (Tolkien gives a good answer to that one btw, at least in The Hobbit.)
If you catch yourself doing this, note these reactions down in a notebook. Each time you disagree strongly with an author’s premise is a time when you obviously have a better idea, even if it’s buried deep down. Each of these is the germ of a story idea.
I don’t tend to find this happens to me with other author’s books. I don’t generally get inspired by other author’s fiction. But it happens to me often when I watch film or TV. I’ll see a character I find fascinating who (in my opinion) is wasted. (Generally it’s a sidekick or spear carrier or non speaking part who gets killed in the first act.) And I’ll want to pick him out of there, figure out what makes him so interesting and give him a story of his own. Or I’ll do that same disagreeing thing I’ve mentioned above with some point in the plot. Or there will be a visual – of a city, of a location, a special effect or a hero shot – that makes me want to tell a story about a city like that, or people with a ship like that etc.
If neither fiction nor TV nor movies pose any questions you want to answer, you could look through still pictures on the stock photo sites, on Deviantart and other artists’ sites, on Pinterest etc. Find a picture that speaks to you somehow and ask yourself questions about it. What is it a picture of? How did the scene in the picture come about? Who are the people and what do they do? Who lives in that house/on that mountain? What threatens them? What are they doing and why?
I also find that non-fiction is a brilliant source of ideas. Pick a historical period you know nothing about but think sounds interesting and read up about it. The chances are that many of the things they did or believed were quite bizarre, and bizarre things are often a good jumping off point for Fantasy or Historicals – why did they do that? What if the bizarre things they believed were actually true? What difference would it make if it was? What strange and interesting things would happen?
As you can see, the key to this process is asking questions, and refusing to believe the answers that other people may have given before.
Filling out your idea
Once you have the germ of a story idea, asking questiona and answering them is also the way you test it to see if it can be expanded into a plot that can keep a reader gripped.
Let’s go back to that idea that bonding to a baby dragon would cause humans to become colder and more ruthless (rather than full of confidence and warm fuzzies.) It’s barely a factoid at present. To expand it into a novel we start to ask questions about it, and to answer them. Where have these dragons come from? (Were they bred to replace cars, when petrol ran out and a post apocalyptic situation set in on earth?)
Why are humans being bonded to them to start with? (Were the first few dragon riders test subjects to see if the process was viable? Maybe when the bonding took with them, they decided they were now superior beings and broke out of the test centre with a view to propagating themselves as a new species?)
Do they only breed among themselves, or do they recruit riders from the surrounding populace? What do the dragons need to eat? How do they support themselves? (Maybe the dragons demand only perfect humans as riders, so they practice eugenics among themselves and also kidnap the best children from their surroundings? Maybe they force all the normal humans to grow vegetarian food for their riders and farm cattle for the dragons to eat?)
What would the non-dragonriders think of this? I can’t imagine they’d like it, but what could they do against a bunch of psychopathic fascists armed with dragons?
(Maybe one of the stolen children can think of something to do? Maybe one of the dragonriders resists the draconic influence and tries to undermine his society from the inside? Maybe it’s one of each and they team up?)
But the dragonriders aren’t just going to allow it, are they? How will they try to stop our heroes? Who has the most to lose of the riders? He’ll be your main villain.
If an idea is viable (as I think this one is), you’ll find that each question starts a cascade of new questions and answers, and now you only have to pick out the most interesting ones and put them into some sort of order.
Here we have an idea for a story in which innocent young people are pressured into a fascist cult by being bonded with ruthless reptiles. The rest of the world are being held in subjection as a food source and a baby farm. This bad state of affairs is going to be changed by a main character who is one of the kidnapped children, and a second main character who is a rider with a conscience. (Maybe she lost one too many children to the eugenics programme and wants to rescue this one to replace them.) They will be menaced and opposed by a villain among the riders who has a whole lot to lose.
Very soon, we can start filling in the details of the characters and the plot. But before we get onto that there’s one more preparatory step to go – to decide what sort of length you’re aiming for.
That’s what we’ll tackle next week in Write On – Size does matter.
February 11th,2013
writing | tags:
idea,
write on |
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I don’t know why, but I appear to be primarily inspired by pictures (and TV/movies) rather than by other people’s books. This is probably a good thing! At any rate, I thought I’d share a few of the images that have inspired me over the years. This one (along with the hazy memories of a glorious summer holiday) was part of the inspiration behind Shining in the Sun, my Cornish summer holiday romance.
It’s perfect for the wild, untamed spirit of joy that Alec takes Darren for when he first sees him.
Oh for heaven’s sake! I have only just read about this http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/06/space-marines-and-the-battle-of-tradem-ark/
It seems that the enormous corporate RPG giant, Games Workshop, is suing MCA Hogarth, an indie author for whom I have the greatest respect, because she heinously published a book called “Spots the Space Marine.” The charge? That GW owns the phrase ‘space marine’ and she’s therefore infringing on their copyright.
I might have some respect for GW if they’d chosen to test the strength of their case on someone like Robert Heinlein, who has also written about space marines. But no, they decided to take their multi-million dollar hammer against an indie author writing to pay for teaching materials for her daughter’s education.
I might have some respect for them if they chose to protect the copyright of a phrase they had created themselves, but ‘space marine’? That’s like a marine, in space! What else would you call them? Will they try to copyright ‘space ship’ next?
MCA Hogarth writes a damn fine tale, and also provides regular useful business advice on her blog/LJ. I have no hesitation in recommending her work to anyone who enjoys thoughtful SF with gorgeously intricate world building. I would suggest that you snap up a copy of Spots the Space Marine while they’re still there to be found. But if the worst comes to the worst and she has to take it down, her Kherishdar stuff is wonderful too.
By concentrating on writing to the exclusion of everything else, I’m managing to write 3,000 – 4,000 words a day at the moment. Having just finished an epic Fantasy, I thought I’d see-saw back into short m/m romance territory, so I now have 15,000 words of an intended 30,000 word novella, set at an unspecified date in semi-mythical Romania.
There was a large lack of consensus as regards The Crimson Haiduc as a title (one person saying it sounded like a waterfowl reciting Japanese poetry.) So it remains a temporary title only.
Here’s a quick quote from today, in which – fortunately – what I actually wrote turned out to be a great deal more exciting than the plot plan:
The point caught Mihai under the shoulderblade, lifted him off his feet. The speed drove a foot and a half of ash shaft into the wound before Eugen could no longer hold up the weight. He let go. Mihai fell so hard he broke the lance under him, and he did not get up.
But Vali had seen something worse. The thing twisting in agony behind the windows of the hall was the missing child, Iulia, altogether ablaze. He hammered the lock of the shutters with his sword hilt until it shattered and she tumbled out, screaming, one great candle of a child.
He let the sheepskin fall from his arms, wrapped it firm around her, picked her up and – praying the shock wouldn’t kill her – dropped her straight down the well. Pausing only to grab the rope neatly coiled beside the bucket, he jumped after. And oh God. Oh, God it was cold, but the little splashes and the whimpers said she was alive and swimming. Fumbling, because his hands were numb already and this dark was the profoundest yet, he managed to get a loop of the rope around her chest beneath her arms. She clung to him, breathing like one who is afraid to cry out loud – so fast they learned these skills. He didn’t have to say “Ssh. Don’t say a word or the bad men will get us.” She knew it already, better than he.
Getting Started – the tools of the trade.
Hoards of people want to write a novel. Just as doctors find that everyone they meet tells them about their ailments, authors find that everyone tells them about the novel they intend to write. Authors generally nod politely, say “oh, how interesting!” and go home secure in the knowledge that about 99% of the people who ‘want’ to write a novel will never put pen to paper because they don’t really want it at all.
It’s only when the partygoer/man on the bus etc says “I am writing a novel” that it’s worth while rolling up a trouser leg, exchanging the secret handshake of writerdom and settling down to talk shop. Like winning the pools, owning a dream house, being famous, going on Britain’s Got Talent, meeting [movie star of your choice] and dazzling them with your wit, for most people writing a book is one of those ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ things that will never come to pass.
The people who enjoy dreaming about being a famous author – of looking seriously out of a window while the sun floods over their manuscript and somewhere in the distance an influential reviewer is overwhelmed by their profundity – are probably better off not considering the reality of the thing. This is advice for the other people, the ones who want it enough to actually do something about it.
So, you’ve never written anything before, and you want to become a published novelist. There is no reason why you shouldn’t succeed in this goal. It’s not like my desire to go and live in Rivendell – a resolution hampered by the fact that the Last Homely House is sadly fictional. Becoming a published author is entirely in the realms of the possible, providing you’re willing to put the work in for as long as it takes.
How to start?
Writers are very fortunate. The tools we need to begin writing professionally are very simple. At their most basic they are even very cheap. You can go from aspiring writer to Writer using nothing more than a pen or pencil and a piece of paper.
Writing in longhand in a notebook has the advantage that a certain degree of slowness is built in. It gives you lots of time to think as you work. If you’re starting to write fiction from a basis of never having done anything of the sort before, a pen and notebook can seem less intimidating than a computer. Plus it’s more private and more portable than all but the smallest net books.
If you’re going from zero to novel, it can be helpful to do a lot of your initial character and plot roughing out in longhand. However, I really wouldn’t recommend writing out your entire novel in longhand if you have another choice. You can, if you honestly can’t afford a computer. But then you’ll have to send it off to be typed by someone who does have one, because no publisher takes longhand manuscripts. In fact, most publishers will only accept emailed manuscripts in electronic file format these days, so there’s no getting out of it. Just the researching, marketing and networking opportunities of the internet make it worthwhile alone.
So, a computer with word processing software ought to be down there as one of your necessities. In the short term it will make the mechanical act of getting the words down easier. In the medium term, the internet connects you to beta readers, advice, publishers and agents, submissions calls and places where you can begin to establish yourself as a voice to be heard. And in the long term your publishers and editors will need to be able to contact you by email and send your edits back and forth with tracked changes attached.
In short, you can learn the craft of writing using pen and paper but once you’ve done that, if you mean to write for publication, you’ll need a computer.
I should probably just assume you have a computer already, shouldn’t I? After all, how else would you be reading this post?
Assuming you have a computer, you also need some kind of word processing software. In the long term, most publishers will require you to have Microsoft Word, because that’s what they use, and it has the nifty Tracked Changes ability which editors use extensively. You may also end up using a dedicated programme for writers, such as Scrivener. I can’t get along with it, but many writers seem to swear by it.
In the short term, I recommend LibreOfficeWriter. I do all my writing on this. It’s completely free, it does almost everything Word does, it even opens Word docx files which my version of Word itself won’t do, and once you’re finished it can save its files in a doc format indistinguishable from that made by Word, so nobody knows the difference.
OK, we have pen, paper, a computer, a word processing programme and the internet. What else?
The final things you need to get hold of before you can write are time and space.
It’s finding these things which proves so difficult many people don’t even start. Anyone can buy a pen and some software, but ordering your life so that you can have time to write is a sure sign of being sufficiently committed to actually succeed.
What you need is a place where you can achieve a deep state of concentration, and enough time to use that state for something productive. Finding this place and time varies from writer to writer according to their individual circumstances. In my case, I began writing when I was at home all day with the baby. The baby would sleep for approximately one and a half hours in the middle of the day. I would put her down, tuck her up, switch the computer on and write until she woke up. This meant sacrificing all of my “Oh, thank God, peace and quiet and space to be an adult” time, but it was worth it.
If you’re lucky enough to be someone who can concentrate in a crowded room, you may find you can write for half an hour every day in the coffee shop on your way home from work. You could take the laptop to the library at lunch time. When I had two children with asynchronous sleep cycles I booked an exercise class at the local gym, put them in the creche and typed for two hours in the cafe instead.
If you’re a person who can’t concentrate without solitude and silence, you may have to go to more extreme measures, such as getting up half an hour early every day and locking yourself in whichever room in the house the rest of the family are unlikely to disturb when they wake. Or even taking a camping heater down to the garden shed and typing until your laptop battery runs out.
Going to the effort of building writing time into your day is a good litmus test of how serious you are about this writing lark. Much of what separates the writer from the wannabe comes down to how much effort you’re willing to put in. So finding the time to actually do it is the most important step of all.
The next most important step is finding something to write about, and that’s what I want to talk about next week, in Getting Started – What’s the Idea?
Well, I’m going to have to stop being all passive-aggressive about RT now, as I have found out that not only have they been reviewing m/m romance for a few months now, but that this month they chose Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon as one of their top picks. Huzzah!
Firstly, thank you to Kaetrin for this lovely review of Blessed Isle
http://www.kaetrinsmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/blessed-isle-by-alex-beecroft.html
Their story is full of adventure on the high seas, personal sacrifice and joyful love, in a time when they could not be open about it, where, if caught, they would face death by hanging. It was bitter that they could not be free even in Rio about their relationship, but sweet that they found in each other, someone worth the risk.
I’m so glad that people are liking Harry and Garnet, and that the slightly experimental format of interactive diary-writing seems to be going down well, rather than putting people off.
Secondly, ring out those bells, ring out those celebratory bells, for the first draft of The Glass Floor is finished at a respectable 135,870 words. I know there are things to add in the second draft – how Frank’s father knew to get to Istanbul on time, why Mirela decided to go home, when Nabih got the anti-mind-control charm to the sultan, whether Frank managed to rescue Protheroe’s notes or the bandits got them, what happened when Ecaterina’s beauty spell failed the first time – so it’s probably a good thing that it’s a Fantasy, where a length of 150,000 is my upper limit.
But still, before I start on the edits, I owe it to myself to write a couple of novellas now, just to decompress with something that isn’t going to take half a lifetime to finish.
Is The Crimson Haiduc a laughable title for a future novella? I love the word ‘haiduc’ (or hajduk, or hayduck) but partly because it does sound rather ridiculous. A haiduc is a Romanian outlaw/freedom fighter with all the glamour of a Robin Hood, and somehow neither ‘bandit’ nor ‘outlaw’ has the same romance.
This was not the post I was looking for:
http://betweenfactandfiction.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/happy-writers-society-love-lists-by.html
The one I remember reading, which made me think “I must do that for my WIP!” was a different post which I can’t seem to find any more. And I clearly remember the title wrong, because when I googled it, this was the one I came up with.
But no matter! This one has much the same gist to it. That being that it is both fun and motivational to make a list of the things that you love about your current WIP.
My current WIP has just reached the end of the final climax whereby the heroes all got to save each other from certain death by their martial prowess, magical badassery, ability to look like an elderly Islamic saint and sure hand with a bottle of perfume, respectively. So there’s only the winding down to go now – arranged marriages to be solemnized, fathers to be reconciled with, tortoises to be illumined etc.
So I’m at the stage where I’m pretty damn motivated anyway. Another week or two should see the first draft finished.
But then there’s editing, so I may need the extra push for that. Here’s my list then, of things that I love about The Glass Floor
Radu: He looks like this http://pinterest.com/pin/44402746297416457/ and he’s everything I love in a character – rude, arrogant, isolated, violent, raised by monsters. But then I found out that he’s also a closet extrovert, poor man. He really likes people, he just hasn’t the faintest idea how they work.
Ecaterina: I do like the bolshy ones! When I started off, I thought Catia was going to be a bit of a wimp. Her magical talent is to be supernaturally likeable. I thought she was going to be all floaty and nice & I’d struggle to think of things to do with her. Instead she told me that since she was likeable by magic she didn’t have to waste her time trying to do it the old fashioned way. So I should skip that nonsense and get out of her way while she founded Romania’s first university of magic.
Romania: Here’s a country I knew nothing about before I started. I had impressions from Dracula, and far from being disappointed, I’m very glad to say that it seems to me that Bram Stoker got it all wrong. The place is much more interesting than he made it out to be. Did you know that the name Wallachia is related to our Wales? Both coming from Wealh, the Saxon for “foreigner.” Well, OK, that makes me geek out, but is possibly not so interesting to everyone else.
Istanbul: Why are you so complicated yet so terribly romantic?
Zayd and his bucket of jellyfish. Zayd and his awesome mum and auntie.
Nabih, who started off as a walk-on-character entirely there for plot reasons, and ended up as the guy who’s so holy nobody is surprised when he becomes a saint.
Cezar – noooo, don’t say I’m going to have to kill him. Except that I am. I want to hug him and possibly ship him with Radu, but important plot reasons suggest he ought to die instead.
Mirela: Sort of the opposite of Ecaterina. I was sure, going in, that she was going to be so cool, but then all the scenes where she was supposed to do stuff didn’t actually happen. I wondered for a while if I should cut her out. But then she came good in the end. Huzzah!
~
Oh, Frank. Why are you not on this list? Step 1 in the editing, I think – Figure out a way to make Frank more loveable without getting rid of his essential characteristics of being ornamental and insecure.
Lillian Francis tagged me to do this meme, saying that as I’d already done one for The Glass Floor, maybe I could do it for one of my other books. Actually, she tagged me ages ago, but things have been somewhat dire over the new year and I’ve only just started catching up. So here’s proof that I wasn’t ignoring you, Lillian! I was just flailing.
As I’ve done one for The Glass Floor, here’s one for the Under the Hill books instead. So it’s more a case of The Last Big Thing.
- A Rural Fantasy with elves and WWII bombers
What is the title of your book? Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon & Under the Hill: Dogfighters
How did you come by the idea? I had just finished writing Shining in the Sun and thought I would cleanse my palate with a short fantasy novella before starting to do another long historical novel about WWII. I was listening to Steeleye Span, I think, and thought it would be easy to do a gay version of the story of Tam Lin. Then, when I started to write it, it just kept growing, and before I knew it I had such an enormous novel on my hands that it needed to be split in half to be printed economically.
What genre does your book fall under? Contemporary Fantasy? Magic realism? It’s not High Fantasy, is it, because that’s always set in a different world. It’s certainly a sub-genre of Fantasy, but that’s as far as I can go with certainty.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters if it were a movie? Do they have to be still alive? If not, Tom Hardy for Chris, Rik Makarem for Ben, Errol Flynn for Geoff.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? The elves at the bottom of the garden are coming back – with an army.
Will your book be self-published or traditional? Published by Samhain Publishing.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? It’s hard to tell. I didn’t make a note of it, and there were holidays and edits for other things in the middle of it. Maybe 9 months? Something like that.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? There are a lot of similarities to Violetta Vane and Heidi Belleau’s The Druid Stone, without them being at all alike.
Who or What inspired you to write this book? It wouldn’t have been the book it is if I had not been inspired by the heroism of the Lancaster bomber crews I was reading about for an entirely different project. That project may never actually see the light of day, but UtH would be poorer without it.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? Amusing amateur ghostbusters! Battling Faerie Queens! Dragons fighting WWII planes! Morris dancers versus elves! The vicar wears red Doc Martins. It’s all very English and stiff upper lip 🙂
(The idea butterfly)
