Posts by Juliet Marillier
I hate structural editing. I think I’m quite a lazy writer. In my ideal world I would finish the manuscript and find that the only editing required was a quick trawl through to pick up clunky style, repeated words etc. Because I am a planner par excellence, and because I edit so much as I go, I should be able to achieve that with no trouble. Sometimes I have.
My work in progress is a young adult novel, the first in a new series called Shadowfell, and I’ve been aiming at a word count somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000. Past experience suggested I’d finish closer to the upper figure. My critique group has been reading a couple of chapters a month and providing very useful feedback as I progress, and I’ve been working in my usual way, continuously revising the earlier chapters as I add new ones. About a month ago, at around 70,000 words, I saw a structural problem looming.
Read MoreIt’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve travelled to Wellington for New Zealand’s national science fiction and fantasy convention, then to Melbourne for the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, AussieCon 4. This major international convention comes to Australia once every ten years.
AussieCon 4 did not include writing workshops this year. There was a bewildering choice of activities and an impressive line-up of international authors and artists, but no apparent opportunity for those authors or artists to present practical workshops. There were a few craft panels, including Writing Your First Novel, in which I was a participant. Questions from the audience revealed a thirst for advice from professionals. I do understand the nightmare logistics of running a writers’ program as part of a big international event like this – the difficulties in previous years have been well documented. But I’d love to see it back again in future Worldcons.
The much smaller Wellington convention was a different matter.
Read MoreBy the time this gets posted, I’ll be on a trip to attend two speculative fiction conventions, Au Contraire in New Zealand and AussieCon 4 in Melbourne. I have a busy schedule at both, appearing on panels, giving a workshop and fronting up for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, for which my novel Heart’s Blood is short listed along with an interestingly diverse collection of other novels by New Zealand writers.
However, at the time of writing this post my mind is on the roller-coaster of publishing success and failure. I have plenty on the plus side of the ledger, with several books currently under contract, an international award earlier this year, and the Vogel short listing. But I’ve been feeling despondent about my writing career recently. It’s not lack of confidence in the current project, which is bubbling along nicely. It mostly has to do with my backlist.
I hate putting bad publishing news up on Writer Unboxed. I suspect it’s not sound business practise to parade one’s failures in a public forum. On the other hand, the WU community is one where honesty is valued, I think, and where we can all learn from each other’s ups and downs.
In the last year or so I’ve had several bumps on the publishing road.
Read MoreCaption: West Highland White Terrier
Ye didna expect Ah’d reet a whole post in bad Scots, did ye noo? How lang wull ye persevere wi’ that, Ah’m wonderin’?
Not long, I’m sure, so I’ll revert to my usual voice! I’m writing a novel set in an imagined version of ancient Scotland. It’s much closer to fantasy than history, which is the reverse of the way I usually tell my stories. However, it has a strongly Scottish flavour, and much of the content has grown from my love for and knowledge of traditional Scottish lore.
When I reached a certain point in the narrative I introduced a big cast of uncanny characters, and immediately they all started talking like extreme versions of Billy Connolly. It was great fun to write and helped the characters spring to vivid life. I was happy to keep writing that way for pages and pages.
Then I cast my eye over the passage and realised how hard it was going to be for the average reader with all its dinna’s and canna’s. In particular there were loads of apostrophes. The first glance would be enough to put a reader off. While I could hear the voices very clearly, it would not be the same for a reader who hadn’t been brought up on all things Scottish including the accent. Yet I wanted to do it. It felt quite wrong for these characters to speak standard English. Besides, some of my favourite passages from my favourite novels make use of dialect. Iain Banks captures the flavour brilliantly without going over the top. And what would Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander saga be without the soft Scots voice of Jamie Fraser?
On the other hand, I could remember getting rather bogged down in The Secret Garden as a young reader because of the Yorkshire voices of nature boy Dickon and his sister. As an adult I can see the charm of those voices, and how beautifully they contrast with those of straight-laced Mary, reared in colonial India, and the sickly, isolated Colin. As a child, I found they slowed me down.
I sought advice from the Dialect Queen: Kate Forsyth, versatile author of novels for adults and young adults. I remembered a lot of Scots in her Witches of Eileanan series, and a variety of different dialects in The Starthorn Tree, a novel for young adults. Like me, Kate is of Scottish ancestry but lives in Australia. I asked her how she felt about putting dialect in her books, and what was the trick to doing it successfully.
Read MoreI’ve been reading a lot of expert advice lately, both here and elsewhere, about writing your first draft quickly and not allowing yourself to become stalled too early by niceties of style, structure or character. Get the rough and ready bones of the book down, people say, then worry about polishing them and giving them flesh and fine clothing. It makes perfect sense. So why don’t I work that way, and why am I unlikely to try it?
The thing is, one size doesn’t fit all where writing a novel is concerned. Firstly, we’re split into planners and pantsers, plus everything in between. Neither approach is ‘correct’ – they are simply different, and each can lead to a brilliant and original piece of writing. Secondly, we’re divided on our editing and polishing methods. Some novelists will write that quick and dirty first draft followed by three, five, ten other drafts; some, like me, will really only produce one draft, but will polish and refine it as they write. My gut feeling is that planners tend to be ‘one main draft’ writers, while pantsers are more at home with the multi-draft method, starting with that rough first draft.
I’m a planner. I need to know where I’m going and how I’ll get there. I work out the whole novel in some detail before I begin on chapter one. Once I start writing, I stop every three chapters or so and revise everything written to date. Not just the new bit, all of it. That means by the time I reach page 500 and write The End, a good part of the novel has been edited and revised multiple times. I can’t identify anything as belonging to a particular draft, because the process is continuous and organic.
Read MoreFor the three years it took me to write my first novel, and for the four years or so following, while I made the transition from newbie to full-time established writer, I don’t think I opened a single book on the craft of writing or visited a single craft-oriented website. It was only once people started asking ME for writing advice that I realised delving into resources of that kind might be useful. Now I do it fairly often. It’s great to read other writers’ tips for success and to share their struggles with all things writing-related, from technical elements to ergonomics to the heart-and-soul matters of the profession.
It never occurred to me to seek out the advice and opinions of experienced writers during my journey to initial publication. I’ve never studied creative writing and, until the last few years, did not belong to a critique group or attend events at our local writers’ centres, which routinely run writers’ groups, workshops and talks by visiting authors. Why didn’t I feel the need for this, and how did I manage without it?
Education: I may not have studied creative writing, but my education gave me some essential foundations for a novelist. I’m of a generation that learned spelling, grammar and syntax as part of the primary school curriculum. At high school we studied classic literary texts – a Shakespeare play each year, novels by Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, poetry, journalism and essays. We also looked at works by our local New Zealand writers such as Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield. At university I studied music (I’ve written elsewhere about how useful this was in developing my awareness of balance and flow in writing) and foreign languages (these give you an insight into the vocabulary and structure of English, and open up your cultural horizons – especially handy for a historical fantasy writer.)
Reading:
Because of my illness I made only one public appearance as a writer in 2009. I’m trying to make up for that in 2010. Last weekend I attended my first ever romance writers’ event, a one-day conference organised by Romance Writers of Australia, where I was a guest speaker.
Although I was thrilled to be invited to Romancing the West, I had some misgivings. I wondered whether what I had to say would be relevant to what romance writers wanted to learn. I wasn’t sure whether attendees would want to do writing exercises, which I was including as a major component of my two workshops. I knew this event would be different from speculative fiction conventions, which tend to be based around the interests of fans (and not necessarily book fans) not those of writers. And it would not be like mainstream literary festivals, which tend to be thin on genre writers here in Australia. I prepared as thoroughly as I could, finding it a little daunting that course handouts had to be provided two weeks in advance so they could be bound into a book for participants.
I expected efficient organisation from RWA, and we got it, with sessions starting and ending on time, timely and tasty meals, and technology that worked as required. The busy schedule meant I was only free to attend one other speaker’s session, and I chose Fiona Lowe, who writes medical romances for Harlequin Mills and Boon. Fiona’s presentation was called Finding the Zen of your Back Story. She talked about building internal conflict between the hero and heroine based on what they believe about themselves, life and love at the beginning of the story. Fiona was brave enough to read us the opening pages of the first manuscript she ever submitted to a publisher, before she learned that you shouldn’t include the heroine’s entire back story in the first chapter. She used the movie The Holiday, and in particular the Jude Law / Cameron Diaz romance, to illustrate effective drip feeding of back story.
I presented two workshops, one on voice and one on research for historical fiction. I was also on an authors’ panel. It was a long day’s work and I had to drink black coffee at 9pm so I’d be sufficiently awake to drive home after the conference dinner. I took away a lot of good observations:
Read MoreI’m saying goodbye to my manuscript again, though not for ever. March was revision month, during which I attended to my Australian and US editors’ joint report on Seer of Sevenwaters.
This is the first time I’ve received an editorial report that seemed kinder than the ms deserved! On re-reading I found many flaws, especially in the sections I wrote while sick last year: slow pacing, repetitiveness, just plain clunky style. Add those to the points picked up by the editors, and the result was a very busy month indeed. It’s worth noting that I had revised the ms extensively before it first went off to the editors, so these were weaknesses I hadn’t been able to identify even when I thought the book was finished and polished. As I’m always telling people, time out from your ms (a few weeks at least) allows you to see it through fresh eyes.
Neither of the editors had any issue with the dual first person point of view in the novel, nor did they have a problem with one narrator using present tense and the other past tense. I wasn’t asked to make any structural changes. The edits were mostly to do with pacing and character development. Sometimes quite subtle alterations to the way a scene is written can speak reams about the relationships between the characters. I worked hard to improve the pacing, cutting some favourite scenes that dwelt on the old, well-loved Sevenwaters characters rather than developing this book’s protagonists or advancing the action. Although the novel is part of an ongoing series, it must be strong enough to stand alone as well.
My editors also identified
Read MoreOne of the most often asked and most annoying questions for writers is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ My answer depends on the circumstances. If the questioner is, say, a talented twelve-year-old, I explain how everyday experiences can provide fodder for the writer’s imagination, and how the more widely a person reads, the bigger the worlds that open up within his or her mind. But if the question comes from an ill-informed adult, the kind who tells me she may write a book some day when she has the time, I simply reply that I get my ideas from real life. If the person is puzzled as to the relevance of my real life to, say, a magical version of medieval Ireland, so be it. If I told this person that human behaviour transcends boundaries of time, space and culture, and that the biggest themes are universal, I’d probably get the response, ‘Yeah, right.’
I’ve had some professional self-doubt recently, partly thanks to reading a Review From Hell. This reminded me that a WU contributor, in response to a post from me last year, suggested I should consider writing a memoir about my cancer experience. I remember my sharp mental recoil when this entirely reasonable idea was put forward. I know real life provides the raw material for a writer’s creativity. I understand that such an account might be helpful to other women. And in fact I made notes while I was sick, especially in the earlier part of the year when I hadn’t been knocked flat by the treatment. I was able to blog about it; I had made my diagnosis public fairly quickly, so there were no secrets. But when I thought about a book-length work based directly on my personal experience I encountered a mental barrier. It was big, solid, and hung with KEEP OUT notices.
Read MoreCOMPETITION:
To celebrate the re-release of my Bridei Chronicles in a lovely new Australian paperback edition, I have two complete sets of three signed books to give away. Make a comment on this post by Feb 12 to be in the draw – winners chosen randomly.
A Year of Learning
Today I send off the manuscript of Seer of Sevenwaters to the publishers. This is the novel I’ve been writing before, during and after seven months of cancer treatment. It’s been a time of considerable learning for me: learning my strengths and weaknesses, learning about breast cancer, learning about other people and how different their attitudes can be to something like this. I’ve also gained plenty of writing insights.
This book has a dual first person narration, with each chapter split between the two voices. Previously I’ve always used either a single first person narrator for a whole book, or tight third with a very limited number of POV characters. I experimented with dual first person in a novella I wrote early last year and was pleased with the result. I used both past and present tense in the novella, and I’ve done the same in this novel – one narrator uses past, one present. I love the immediacy provided by present tense. I also like the way it puts a cap on my natural tendency to wordiness.
I do still have doubts about Seer of Sevenwaters. That’s normal – this is novel number thirteen and I don’t remember thinking any of them was flawless at any stage! In fact, the manuscript in which I had the most confidence was the one that got the most critical reception from my editor. That galling experience taught me to expect absolutely anything.
The dual first person narration lets the reader see into the thoughts of the male protagonist, who has lost his memory at the beginning of the story and takes a long time to recover it fully. Allowing him a first person narrative makes him an interesting individual from page one. He lies in bed and hardly speaks for the first few chapters, and refuses to talk about his past for the next few. If we’d only seen him through others’ eyes he would have been not only a complete enigma, but boring.
Present tense seemed perfect for a character with memory loss, who must live from moment to moment. In creating his voice I took the following into consideration:
Read MoreOne of the hardest elements to explain to aspiring writers is voice. It’s not enough to say ‘voice is how you tell the story’. In fact, where voice is concerned, it’s easier to show, not tell, and the most effective way to show is by reading aloud. Most of my favourite writers are outstanding users of voice.
For the purposes of this piece, I tried to list everything I believe goes into creating an effective voice. Not so easy. My own best writing comes intuitively, not by means of a conscious intellectual process. Voice emerges from characters and story. Still, here goes:
1. Point of view (first, second, third – tight third, looser third, omniscient narrator – other, such as diaries and documents, visions, dreams)
a) one POV
b) different POVs for different sections
2. Tense (present, past, other)
a) one tense throughout
b) more than one tense
3. Vocabulary / language
a) limited or extensive; does it depend on the POV character?
b) formal or informal
c) modern, archaic, historical
d) idiom – perhaps particular to a character
e) dialect
f) characteristic turns of phrase
g) dialogue vs narrative – different?
4. Sentence structure
a) short, long, varied
b) complete or incomplete sentences, fragments
c) other stylistic quirks, eg preferred punctuation
5. Paragraph length
That all looks a bit bald and dry, but those are some of the elements you’ll use to create the voice (or voices) for your novel. And boy, does it make a difference when you do it well! Getting the voice right is critical to producing a story that leaps off the page and, in particular, to making characters real. Expertly used, the right voice can create a whole world.
A flair for voice can lift your work from competent to great. A writer who has the gift can grab us from the first paragraph. Here are some examples:
Read MoreHow to get out of a writing rut? I’m not talking about a small blip along the way, the kind of thing that can be surmounted with the aid of a cup of good coffee and a quick brainstorming session. I’m talking the serious downer many of us encounter at some point in our creative process. Somewhere in the production of your bug-whomping epic fantasy / romance / thriller / mystery, you lose faith in some aspect of your own writing – the characters suddenly don’t seem real, the plot feels as if it’s meandering, or someone gives you feedback that causes you a severe case of self-doubt. This can happen when you’re halfway through, when you’ve completed the first draft, or when you’re rewriting in an attempt to fix those very problems. It often happens when you start to share your work with others – friends, relatives, critiquing buddies – and the feedback is less positive than you’d hoped for.
Of course, we all aim to filter critique wisely. Ideally, we take on board what is genuinely helpful and set aside what we know we can never believe in. We then analyse the feedback, make a new plan of action and get straight back to work.
Sounds easy; perhaps too easy.
Read MoreI blogged last month about myths, legends and fairy tales: the wisdom they contain and how they can be a wellspring for all kinds of storytelling. This month I’ll talk about building my new novel, Heart’s Blood, from the structural framework of my favourite fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast.
First up, I had no intention of re-telling a traditional story. I wanted to write a novel about acceptance: learning to see beyond a person’s exterior to their inner qualities; learning to accept yourself, flaws and all. My characters would go on a journey through which they would learn that lesson. Along the way they’d make mistakes, endure trials and come close to losing everything they cared about. With its theme of loving the apparently unlovable, Beauty and the Beast already held the kernel of that idea.
Writing a book begins, for me, with a fairly fluid ‘ideas’ phase, when there’s a lot of stuff swimming around in my mind: themes, settings, character development, and if there’s a fairy tale element, how I want to use it. After a lot of thinking, I start making notes and doing research.
Visitors to this blog will know that I am one of those writers who must have a framework in place before beginning to write the story. Once the plan’s in place, I start on page one and write sequentially to the end, editing a few chapters at a time as I go. For me there’s no such thing as a first draft. There’s one continuously evolving draft up till the time when I submit the manuscript.
My plan interwove Beauty and the Beast – a love story – with three other threads: a historical story, a ghost story and a dark family saga. Beauty and the Beast is wonderfully romantic, but its basic form would not satisfy today’s reader as the plot of a novel. I knew straightaway what would go into the Keep, Discard and Change baskets.
Read MoreSophie Masson posted an eloquent piece on this topic a few weeks ago, after a reader sent us this quote from an agent’s rejection letter: ‘…Nor do I think harking back to one of the oldest fairytales of all time … is right for contemporary fantasy readers.’ Since my new novel Heart’s Blood is structurally based on a very well known fairytale, Beauty and the Beast, this is a topic dear to my heart. I’ve based two previous novels on fairytales, and all my books include tropes and motifs from fairytale, myth, legend or folklore. I am a totally unashamed dipper into the cauldron of story.
Before I talk about why traditional stories are so important, I should acknowledge that an agent can have all sorts of reasons for accepting or rejecting a manuscript.
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