If there was one thing that came out of the UK Meet for me (and actually there were several) it was the importance of voice. Let me say that again, because I don’t think I used enough emphasis. It was the importance of an author’s VOICE. Aleks Voinov speaking on behalf of publishers everywhere, and Jenre, speaking on behalf of reviewers, both emphasized strongly how much, when they cracked open a new book, they were looking for a unique voice.
It’s all very mystical, and possibly vaguely amusing in an ironic kind of way. Because the internet and ‘how to write’ books appear unanimous that the way to good writing is an adherence to action verbs, and a willingness to pare down ones adjectives and adverbs to the absolute bare minimum. Cut, cut, cut, people say. Make your language transparent, so that it doesn’t get in the way of the story. You don’t want to throw out your reader’s suspension of disbelief every other sentence with a gorgeous phrase or a word they need to look up in the dictionary. Have good characters, have a story hook in the first paragraph, keep piling on the tension, break for a black point three quarters of the way through and set everything on its head at the half way point.
If this is advice on ‘voice,’ this is the advice to write like everyone else.
How can you write like everyone else and still have a unique voice? You can’t.
When I listen to this advice about paring down your words to the minimum, I think about the writers whose books I love and it applies to none of them. Tolkien, with his chapter-long descriptions of scenery and his insistence that you had to spell ‘dwarfs’ ‘dwarves’ because obviously it was formed on the same principle as ‘loaf’ and ‘loaves’. That if you spelled it differently, you denied it its history. Tolkien who taught me what a hythe was, and gave me the gift of finding out that ‘gore’ isn’t only blood, or a triangular panel in a skirt, but it’s also a spear-head shaped piece of land. Tolkien who never flinched from a right word just because nobody but him remembered what it meant.
Patrick O’Brian, with his rampant, laughing lists of 18th Century words, and his puns and his sometimes-roaring, sometimes sly delight in combinations of phrases that make you chortle.
China Mieville – oh Lord, I just finished reading ‘Kraken’. There’s another man who loves his words when they’re decked out in carnival costumes and on the trapeze:
“Subby Subby Subby,” whispered Goss. “Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we’re silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.”
You may not particularly like any of these writers but, lets face it, they are incredibly successful, critically acclaimed and widely regarded as being at the top of their respective genres. And none of them are writing stripped down transparent, zero-added-value prose. They all have VOICE (imagine that said in a Doctor DOOM tone. I know I do.)
It doesn’t mean that your voice as a writer should be like their voice. If you don’t like obscure words and you don’t feel strongly about how to decline ancient nouns, don’t rush to use them because you think you should. Voice is about being you, after all. But I find it comforting to think that so many writers who’ve said ‘fuck you’ to the transparent-prose-style-gurus, so many writers who’ve reveled in the language they’re using, dived in and splashed and played with words, should have reached so high and done so well with it.
Partly this pleases me because I like to see the internet pundits proved wrong. But mostly it pleases me because it gives back to every writer the chance to do what the hell they like with their own voice. Maybe you like stripped down prose, where a very few perfect descriptors give the effect of a splash of colour in a minimalist white house. Good for you – do that then. Ursula LeGuin does something like that, although she also makes sure the rhythm of her sentences sounds like poetry. I love her stuff, but don’t have the elegance to write like that myself. I’m just glad to know that I don’t have to try to. I’m free to discover whatever it is that I want to do with my words instead.
When I tell my words how high to jump, I want them to ask “d’you want me to be wearing the sparkly skirt with that?” Not to worry about how other writers do it. They’re my words, after all.
To quote Terry Pratchett (another top hatted master of the three ring word circus): “If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.”
? Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Heh, or perhaps it just feels like that. I’m still struggling with Frankenstein’s computers, but in keeping with the spirit of the month I’ve managed to do a post about vampires. Appropriately enough, this is an undead post, which had to be resurrected in pieces after the upstairs computer died from exhaustion and confusion due to having to run the WP interface.
http://lgbtfantasyfansandwriters.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/october-is-for-bloodsuckers/
Now I’m off to stand on the roof and shake my fist at the oncoming lightning while laughing maniacally. Currently, laughing maniacally sounds like a damn fine idea, possibly with a glass of flaming absinthe in the other hand.
Gah, I hate this laptop. It’s OK as a temporary thing the family can take on holiday when the PC has to be left behind. It’s marvellous as a temporary emergency replacement for the PC when the PC is broken. But the keyboard stinks – when I type, I brush the trackpad with the heel of my hand and make all sorts of random and annoying things happen. It gives me RSI in my fingers and palms. It’s got none of my files on it, so I can’t access my pictures or my address book or the Gimp. It has none of my cookies, so I have to sign in afresh everywhere – which means trying to remember passwords I last used three years ago – and I can’t remember what happened to me last week so I have no hope there.
But the biggest thing is the typing. Basically I’m avoiding using it for anything that involves typing – which means avoiding using it for making blog posts, or twitter, or commenting on other people’s stuff or… anything useful, social media wise. And I have a blog post to write for the Fantasy blog for tomorrow – and am not entirely sure how I sign on to it to post it on this computer anyway. I miss my PC!
Anyway, enough whining. Perhaps I can start using the Unix computer in the spare room for blogging instead. In fact, why didn’t I think of that before? Oh… it was because I try to keep that one separate from the social media and sociability aspects of my PC, so I know if I’m on that one it’s to write. Needs must, though, because I can’t type on this one. It’s too annoying, and it hurts.
On a more positive note, I started writing on the Glass Floor again yesterday, now that the new plot is ironed out. 6000 words in September isn’t good at all, but it’s been a traumatic month and I hope, now it’s over, that I can go back to 6000 words a week or more. I am at least excited about the new plot, and it now ties in with the AoS fantasy I mentioned, so we have a potential shared-world series! Woo! (Not a big deal for people who habitually write series, but something I’ve never managed before.)
OK, ouch. That’s quite enough of that. This has officially been upgraded to ‘a problem I need to solve, rather than just endure.’ I am off to investigate whether I can use the strange, Windowsless machine upstairs instead. Watch this space 🙂
The UK Meet was brilliant this year, better than last, I think. I very much appreciated the constant flow of coffee, and the fact that there was fresh fruit to snack on all day long (though I was greatly tempted by the curly-wurlies.) I had been all ‘goodie bags? Who the heck cares about getting a whole load of promotional tat you’ll only throw in the bin straight after anyway?’ but was pleasantly surprised by finding lots of things in there I wanted to keep. The UK Meet USB stick in particular has been in my pocket on my car keys ever since, and Jo Myles tin of boiled sweets did us proud in keeping us awake in the car on the way home. (And I’m keeping the tin to use when making tinder.) Whoever it was who made the chocolate truffles which were on the tables in little bags, they were gorgeous. Well worth breaking my diet for. Thank you!
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel opening panel. 150 words is very short, and yet when they were read out you could tell almost instantly if you wanted to carry on with the story or not. I’ve never encountered a better proof of the truism that your opening paragraphs are vital. I didn’t quite believe it, before. I do now.
Next was what, for me, was the stand out panel of the day, and the thing that made the trip worthwhile on its own. That was the ‘what about the other letters?’ panel, which was more of a discussion than a talk. Why, after all, do we avoid writing the other letters? Many of us in the room identified as Q, and yet nobody was really writing genderqueer characters. It was challenging to be asked why not, and very affirming (for me) to realise that the only reason to avoid it was really just the internalised sense that no one will want to listen, no one would understand or care. Cameron Lawton and I shared what seemed like a moment of revelation when we realised that, other than ourselves, no one was stopping us from writing whatever kind of characters we wanted to.
Beside all that, it was just nice to be in a room full of people who could understand a sentence like ‘I write m/m because at least part of me is m. What would I do with myself if I couldn’t let it out that way?’ I’ve never really felt able to say something like that before, because it’s usually accompanied by baffled demands for further explanation. Here it was accompanied by nodding. It was wonderful!
(Putting revelation into practice, the Glass Floor now has gay, straight, bi and genderqueer characters and I feel fine. I could even make Mirela lesbian, though she doesn’t have a romance plot at all so it would be largely irrelevant, and as she’s already a genderqueer CoC it might smack of tick the box tokenism.)
Oh no, I’ve forgotten that I was on a panel about fanfiction. This was not, I think, an enormous success, if only because we ended up reverting to talking about fandom things – interesting in themselves, but not really relevant to a pro-fic conference. Possibly that was a point that could have been made – at some point after you’ve published pro-fic, you do start looking at the world of writing differently.
Then there was a panel on tropes which I went to because I wanted to ‘keep the genre honeymoon fresh.’ But I’ve never really got along with tropes. I’m sure I’ve written some, but if I have it’s been through ignorance. Nothing really stirred me at the thought of ‘cowboys’ or ‘May to December’ or ‘slave-boy’ tropes. I don’t think I really work that way.
The perils of publishing panel gave us a salutary reminder not to be unprofessional on line and to do our taxes and read our contracts carefully. Then Jordan Castillio Price gave a keynote speech highlighting how far the genre has come in such a very few years since she first started publishing on CD. She pointed out that we have the choice now whether the genre will calcify and become only another subset of Romance, with all the formulae that implies, or whether we will continue to evolve into many other new things. I like the idea of the second. Perhaps what that future will be like will be more visible next time we meet, in Manchester for UK Meet 2013. I’m looking forward to it!
September 22nd,2012
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I am still around after the UK Meet, but I got home to find my computer, which had been finding it hard to get started in the morning, was now thoroughly kaput. It’s still not mended, as the motherboard and cpu bought to put in it are not willing to talk to each other, but my DH has managed to repair an old laptop for me, and I thought I should celebrate by posting something.
Eldest’s first week in uni has been misery – three days of her phoning up to cry at us incessantly and confess that she was so unhappy and stressed she couldn’t keep any food down. Finally yesterday the counselling service decided yes, she was honestly in need of a place in halls, and I’m hoping I’ll get a call from her later saying she’s got the keys and has moved in. Once that happens I will be able to relax a little and stop freaking out myself and continually texting her. I think I was getting on her nerves, as her phone is off this morning. (I hope that’s all it is, and nothing terrible has happened – she lives a good 15 minutes cycle ride from the uni atm and was probably heading back there drunk at 4am this morning. It’s not just her nerves which will be soothed once she’s in hall!)
With all of that going on, writing has had to take a sideline, though I’ve done the usual thing of taking everyone’s advice to write the AoS fantasy, and gone off to work on the Glass Floor instead. The new plot is shaping up, and making me feel excited in those brief moments when I’m not preoccupied by worry. Tomorrow, provided she phones to say she’s safe and in halls today, I hope to start work properly again. Though sadly not yet on my own PC.
September 20th,2012
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So, Too Many Fairy Princes is finished, and I love it. It’s one of the few things I’ve written to which I would quite like to do a sequel. (Maybe where Drake keeps killing people and our heroes get caught up in the police investigation.) But it has no sex scene in it. It has a love story, an awful lot of UST, quite a bit of kissing, and a fade to black ending, but no sex.
I’m torn. I’m sure it would be more widely acceptable to publishers and readers alike if it had a final sex scene, but I don’t want to write one, and I don’t really think it needs one. In fact, as it’s pitched – mood wise – around the level of a Dr. Who story, I think it’s almost suitable to be classed as Young Adult, and a final sex scene would be out of keeping with the rest of it.
Rather than angst about this, I guess the thing to do is to ask my agent for her advice. Can a writer get away with fade to black romance, these days? What do you think?
Other excellent news – the cover art I did for Erastes’ Junction X is a finalist in this year’s Rainbow Awards
I’m gobsmacked by how high the standard for covers has become in the last few years. I started making them at a time when cover art was pretty dire, because I thought ‘I can do better than this.’ But now I’m thinking of hanging up my Gimp (yes, I know, don’t say it) for good, because I don’t think I can keep up with this rapid advance of excellence.
Right. UK Meet is coming up this weekend. I suppose I should go and write my talk!
that Riptide Publishing have accepted “Blessed Isle” for republishing as a stand alone novella. It’s going to get an editorial sprucing up from the amazing Sarah Franz, a new cover, and come out in time for the new year. Hurray!
I’ve spent most of today (well, the part not spent on the second draft of Too Many Fairy Princes) updating my website with the new information. And it’s just occurred to me that I still need to change my LJ and Blog sidebars to match. It’s surprising how much non-writing this writing life involves.
I’ve always been very sceptical about the idea that a blog helps sell your books, but I’ve now had it proved beyond a doubt. When editing a scene in which the Queen offers Dave a nice cup of tea and some Garibaldi biscuits, checking the spelling of Garibaldi biscuits lead me to this wonderful place:
http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/
Having spent far too much time since reading every article, I’m definitely getting the book.
I’m still not quite so convinced about the ‘If you read my non-fictional blog, you will of course want to read my fiction too’ correlation. If I enjoy your non-fictional blog, surely it’s only logical that I’ll want to read your non-fiction? Bounding from ‘wow, great writing tips’ to ‘I must buy your steampunk fetish mystery’ is one giant leap too much for me.
I had intended to say some stuff about Authorial Voice again, but then it got late and I forgot what I meant to say. It was probably just something on the lines of ‘stop overthinking things and write,’ anyway. So, not helpful.
The summer holidays are almost over, hurray! They won’t actually be over until Eldest goes off to university on the 16th of September, but the end is in sight.
I’ve managed to get my weight back into the target zone of 10st 10lb – 10st 4lb (10 and a half stone plus or minus 3lb.) After a week in Cornwall eating whatever the hell I liked – crisps, pizza, ice-cream, cream teas, bombay mix, pasties etc – and several days at airshows eating donuts, and an anniversary dinner eating chocolate chip cookie dough, this didn’t take quite as much doing as I had feared. At 10st 9lb, I’m a bit on the heavy side of that range, though – going to lose a bit more just to have a bigger margin for error in future.
I’m still, after two years of Slimming World, chuffed and impressed at the level of control it gives you over your weight. Decide to put on half a stone over the summer holidays? No problem – I know that I can take it straight off again. (Though, as a rule of thumb, the weight takes three times as long to lose as it takes to gain.) It’s the first time in my life that I’ve felt that I was in control of my body, rather than the other way around.
Onto the writing part of this post:
I have yet to start on the second draft of EPQ, but if I start on it today I should be able to get it done by the 16th.
What do you think of “Too Many Fairy Princes… and Dave,” as a title? I want something that immediately says ‘fun fluff’ and does not lead you to believe that this book contains deep reflections on the meaning of life.
After which, I turn my mind towards what I’m going to do next. The Glass Floor has suddenly undergone mitosis, and is continuing to evolve into greater complexity as we speak. Which is great, but means I need to do lots of research. It is also a vampire story, despite the fact that my agent tells me that vampire stories are really hard to sell at the moment due to overTwilightification of the market.
So – given that The Glass Floor has gone back to the drawing board, I could just as easily start something completely different. I have an idea for another Age of Sail story with a twist. I can’t decide which one to go for. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi! What do you think?
a) Vampire historical
b) Age of Sail Fantasy
c) Something else (Please give details below.)
You can tell I’ve been helping Youngest with homework recently, can’t you?
OK, there may not be such a word as ‘bewonderment’, but I’m sure there should be. In this case I’m using it to mean ‘a state of wondering about’ my works in progress.
I’ve finally re-read Elf Princes’ Quest, which seriously still needs a better name. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I laughed aloud in parts, and I stayed up reading late into the night because I wanted to find out what happened in the end. This is always a good sign.
The trouble is that it’s nothing like the kind of book that I might write. It’s the light-hearted elvish rom-com that Under the Hill was meant to be before UtH swallowed Bomber Command and turned into a two volume epic. It’s… it’s a meringue of story, where I normally make fruitcake. Meringue is a lovely thing, crisp, light and sweet, but when I’ve only ever offered heavy and rich before, people coming to me for Christmas cake are going to be disconcerted to get pavlova instead.
Enough with the comestibles! To speak more plainly, I mean that normally I do serious, earnest stuff, with themes and everything, whereas EPQ is a tongue in cheek romp with no deeper meaning at all. I am thinking that perhaps the thing to do is accept that it’s nothing like an Alex Beecroft novel and publish it under a different name.
The Glass Floor is just rubbing EPQ’s strangeness in, because The Glass Floor is doing my much more normal thing of ramifying beneath my hands: “But muuum, I don’t want to be a novella! Muuum, I want to be a trilogy. I want you to learn everything about the Balkans in the 18th Century. Why can’t you become an expert on the Ottoman Empire in a couple of weeks? They can visit the Sultan! There could be a cool scholarly antagonist who was a Turkish physician, and the second book could be from his POV, so we see that he’s a hero too….”
Radu doesn’t want to be the hero of some petty little domestic drama, he wants to FREE HIS PEOPLE FROM CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION. He’s decided that Dracula is his role model after all, and he’s somewhat peeved that he got named after Vlad’s passive, syphilitic little brother. (I keep telling him it’s only because I thought it was a cool name – you may have noticed that I like saying it whenever I can – but he’s not happy.)
Naturally, this means a complete re-plot. But I can handle that. I’m encouraged, in fact, as it’s very typical of my longer novels. To go back to the baked goods metaphor, it’s like adding yeast to bread dough and letting it rise, knocking it back and kneading it and letting it prove again. If a story doesn’t swell in the telling, I’m never quite sure if it’s properly alive.
In all the excitement of getting our eldest’s A level results and confirming her place at university (and immediately getting to work trying to find her somewhere to live, because the halls of residence were already full) I forgot to mention that I was guesting on Jessica Freely’s website today.
http://www.friskbiskit.com/2012/08/guest-post-alex-beecroft.html
In which I am – as usual – contrary on the subject of cliches. That is, I am often contrary, and this time I’m being so about cliches. Note to self: champagne is detrimental to coherence (but possibly worth it.)
Do come and visit me over there, and possibly win a copy of Bomber’s Moon 🙂
