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slush pile blues

Sobering, yet depressing, news for all up and coming writers: The Death of the Slush Pile.

A choice quote from Rosman’s article:

“Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won’t read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.”

Perhaps its better just to stick your head in the sand and not read this post until one has finished their debut novel.

when did guys stop reading books?

It occurred to me the other day that very few of my guy friends read books.

Has it always been like this? Is there some kind of literary drought going on?

There have been many worrying articles in the newspaper of late bemoaning the lack of innovation in the book industry, with dire predictions of where its going. I remember working as a label boy in a local bookstore chain when I was 19 and discovering the depressing truth of the industry; that book-reading is dominated by females over 50.

Now I don’t have anything against women over 50, but what worries me is that the dominance has probably increased over the years since. I can’t remember the last time I was able to have a discussion about a book with a male friend – the Top Gear episode guide doesn’t count.

Have we males given up? Perhaps reading is now considered too feminine. Or are we so inundated with books intended for older readers that many young males feel left out? I’m not sure of the answer. I just know that there is a large time gap between 20 and 45 – if that isn’t filled by literature, it concerns me what might be filling out male identity in the new millennium.

I know a large percentage of males carry around angst – most of my friends stuck in jobs they despise. There are not many males I know who don’t include Fight Club in their list of favourite movies. So why aren’t we turning the angst ridden pages of books like The Outsider, Catcher in the Rye or A Clockwork Orange to quench our thirst?

Maybe this is just another dull turn in the Australian cultural cringe, one more creative outlet to squash in favour of acting out the corporate dream.

I would love to talk books with my friends. And not talk books in a high brow literary way. I mean talk books in the The Death of Bunny Munro kind of way. When did books fall off the mainstream male “list of things to do”?

Or maybe this is just more of that angst I was talking about earlier. There seems no shortage of male authors, so where are the readers?

researching

11 days in to my 365 writing challenge and so far so good.

The frequency of returning to the page keeps the novel on my mind, which means even when I’m not physically writing, I’m working through things up top, considering plot structures/developments and characters to try in the next writing session. I found this technique worked really well with my last long piece of fiction; being constantly poised and ready to write.

Predictably, my novel is progressing along a series of sharp bends and u-turns. I started the year with 2 very solid ideas for a novel, and for better or worse, both have developed simultaneously, but in completely unexpected directions. I wonder how long you can keep up 2 novels side by side…

This week I find myself researching present day Iraq as the opening of one novel quickly revealed itself to be a set piece located around the American invasion of Baghdad, and in particular, the initial ‘shock and awe’ campaign that Bush promised Hussein.

Am I interested in Iraq? I wasn’t up until a few days ago.

I recently listened to a podcast (Barnes and Noble Meet the Author – a free Podcast available through iTunes) of a reading by Nick Cave of his excellent and perverse new book The Death of Bunny Munro. During the interview/reading a reader asked Cave why he was so fascinated by the role of the traveling salesman; a thankless job belonging to the main character of the book.

Interestingly Cave answered that he wasn’t at all interested in traveling salesman before writing the book, nor did he necessarily feel intimate with some of the themes that came out of the final work. He explained that readers are often too eager to make connections between the fiction on the page and the fact of the writer. Often the two beings are very separate and the creative process very in control.

Cave went on to say that stories more often than not choose the authors. Not necessarily in a spiritual way, but in the kind of way that writers often find themselves writing in directions that feel strange and unfamiliar. Though you try your best to steer the narrative to back familiar shores, the final result is often the product of a creative act far not bound by rational notions of creative ownership.

In a similar way, I would never have imagined writing an opening set in Iraq. This of course might be a bad thing. I know nothing about Iraq. But nor do I know much about many places I have or haven’t been. That is the beauty of fiction I guess. I’m not trying to replicate the real, I’m appropriating various aspects of it to scratch a creative itch.

In order to scratch itches I have no physical experience of, I turn to research. I find one of the best ways to get a feel for a place, if you can’t travel there physically, is to jump on to Flickr and see some amateur photographs of an area. Many of the photographers on Flickr aren’t going to win Pulitzers any time soon, but the ordinary photos of streets and people can sometimes be far more useful to a writer than a choreographed shot. Ordinary photos contain detail that may be irrelevant to a photo journalist, as they are trying to capture a feeling, whilst the writer is often trying to just position themselves in an unfamiliar place.

The realist genre suggests there are certain procedures that a writer can go through to give an impression of the real in writing.  I will never try to recreate Baghdad from the ground up. Instead I hunt the internet for blogs and images that might reveal small details of a place that will ultimately help suspend disbelief for a reader.

For example, I read on the famous Salam Pax blog (for those who haven’t heard the name, Salam Pax is the ‘Baghdad blogger’ – look him up) that even years after the invasion formally ended, night in Bagdad is announced by a chorus of overworked generators switching on as these are used by many homes as their sole source of electricity.

This is what I would call an ‘authentic detail’ – something that readers can latch on to and instantly be rewarded with a sense. So the line in my novel became “…the thin wail of overworked generators pushing through the house…”

Hemingway’s sparse but visually orgiastic prose worked because he realised that authenticity had nothing to do with size.  Instead of collecting and presenting every detail of a place to give a feel of authenticity, he selected a few precise details and let them carry the weight so the story could continue uninterrupted.

As a result, most of his novels are shy of 200 pages and yet deal with some of the most complex human affairs (civil war, life and death). Old Man and the Sea is 127 pages.

Too much detail and the suspension of disbelief is broken. The passage starts to feel like an abstract pulled from an encyclopedia. This kind of thing is fine for non-fiction, but not fiction. A story only works for as long as the reader can forget that they are reading a story at all. Once the edges of the page become clear, a story is revealed as a piece of paper full of lies. I find it amazing how many writer’s seem to forget this and bulk up chapters with town planner like precision, effectively dumping the reader in a different book for a few pages.

Less is almost always, more.

I’ve lost the train of my original post. Research! That’s right. So that’s how I do my research. I plow through books, blogs and photos trying to find those few authentic details that make a place real for me, so I can make it real for the reader. So how do you do your research?

music to write to

Does anyone else look for music to write to? For me, writing is a very emotional act, and as such, I find my best work comes in sporadic emotional bursts. When I’m in the mood, the writing just seems to flow through me. When I’m not in the mood, the sentences drag by.

One of the ways I try to get into the ‘zone’ is by looking for good music to write to. I find with the right music on in the background my ideas come faster and my prose reacts to the rhythm of the music. This, for me, is a good thing as I tend to match the music I’m listening to to the emotion of the piece I’m trying to write.

I may, at times, have to go back and fix the prose a little to make sure it sounds right sans music (not every reader will have my musical taste). But for the most part, writing to selected music usually results in tighter, more liquid prose.

In a recent story I wrote, City of Birds, I was struggling to write one of the final scenes that required fast, punchy prose with a hint of the chaotic. I had a very specific rhythm and emotion in mind for the scene and I wanted the reader to feel pushed along with the prose, slightly asphyxiated by pace and tension.

Whilst I’m sure that the end product didn’t quite meet my expectations (when does it ever?), I chose to write it to a song by The Doors, This is the End, which is featured at the end of the movie Apocalypse Now.

The song has a haunting, murderous melody that picks up pace about halfway through and relentlessly pushes forward to it’s inevitable ear splitting end. At just over 11 minutes long, it’s also not one you have to hit repeat on too many times to last the length of your writing session (that is if you’re like me and write in fits and bursts).

The song helped get me in the mood for the traumatic theme of the story, and also provided pace, chaos and disorientation together with a deep sense of sadness, which I always get from Jim Morrison’s voice.

Film soundtracks in general seem to be a rich hunting ground for music to support the emotional rhythm of my stories.

When I was writing in the post-apocalyptic genre, I listened to Nick Cave’s soundtrack to The Proposition for it’s lonely ballads and sharp, bleating violin chords. For a piece I’m trying to write currently, in which a narrative occurs across multiple locations following each other in short succession, I listen to a range of Philip Glass pieces as his music is popular with films that feature a strong sense of forward movement through the narrative. I need this rhythm to keep my prose in check, to match the ideas I have in my mind.

Part of this habit is part and parcel of my overall approach to writing. I write stories that I see in my mind as movies. Some of my stories I’ve even written first as screenplays, just so I can get a feeling for how the visual aspects fit together. I’m much more in love with visuals (including those in a reader’s mind) than words.

Hence putting music to my writing feels very natural, like a songwriter provides context to words through accompanying music. In much the same way I often read to music. In this way, a piece of music previously played whilst I’ve been reading a book can invoke memories of the reading and the images I had in mind at the time.

They say the book is always better than the movie, so a soundtrack to reading and writing might just be the best middle ground. What music (if any) do you listen to while writing? Or do you prefer silence?

best book promo ever

If only us Aussies got as excited about books as the Kiwis. An impressive promo for the New Zealand Book Council. Certainly makes me wanna go read a book!

365 days of writing

Happy new year! Having completed my first ever resolution last year with my twenty six books challenge, my 2010 resolution list gets underway with extra gusto today with a 365 writing challenge. Continuing on the theme of my Seinfeld Calendar post, I’ll be attempting to write everyday (for at least half an hour) in 2010.

It’s not the most outrageous or ambitious resolution in the world. Many authors will be pulling ten times that amount every day to get their books finished. But this year is about developing good writing habits, and writing everyday, no matter how long or short I sit for, is a habit that’s only going to get stronger and more useful in future years.

My daily writing session doesn’t have to count towards any particular project, the aim is to develop writing discipline and endurance. A continuous half hour is the minimum time I can spend.

To help put some focus around the sessions, I’m setting myself a goal to come out of 2010 with at least 4 pieces of work published (any genre), 3 new short stories/features written, and 5 chapters of my novel completed along with a synopsis. To get this done I’m going to need to wring a little bit of creativity out of each day of 2010, hence the 365.

I’ve got my laminated Seinfeld Calendar pinned up beside my laptop, and a whiteboard marker poised to create the first X.

Below is a video I put together of last nights festivities. I hope you all bid a fond bon voyage to 2009!

twenty six books

One new years resolution I didn’t give up on. A book every fortnight for the year. A varied selection turning up some of the best reads of my life. Not an insurmountable challenge to read a book every two weeks, but alongside a heavy year of thesis writing, I thought it was a pretty good effort.

Will be continuing the trend next year.

last writing meet for 2009

Tonight we had our last writing meet up for the year. With one of our members away on holidays, it was left to me and Daniel to shoot the shit and generally avoid the prospect of writing by talking about it.

Amongst many topics (the state of Australian politics, China’s human rights record and the future of humanity in general) we talked about our respective failures of late to get below the surface of our writing. That we had lost the love of the sentence; that feeling you get when you nail the ‘sound’ of a sentence or passage of writing.

Part of it, I decided, was my inability to devote more than half an hour at a time to writing. Half an hour a night might be a good ongoing practice procedure, but it doesn’t give you any space to get comfortable with a sentence or paragraph. Just one good sentences can take me an hour to get right. My 30 minutes gets me to the surface, and by the time I pick it up again the next day, I have to jump start the whole creative process again.

The culprit: my desktop internet browser icon.

I earn a living as a digital marketer, which means I have picked up some really bad gen Y habits. Primarily, I’ve developed two unhealthy habits for a writer: a short attention span and an expectation for instant returns. I am so used to hitting the net to relieve boredom that the idea of simply using my computer to ‘type on the keyboard’ seems so archaic.

My strength as a digital marketer – the ability to be constantly switched on, reacting and experiencing moment to moment – is turning out to be my biggest writing vice. I can’t seem to take time to just write anymore. I’m back to chopping wood with a blunt axe everytime I attempt a sentence and because I rarely stick at it more than half an hour, I never overcome this initial creative hump. I have too many outs.

Hence, one of my new years resolutions for 2010 is to try and find ways to reduce distractions around my ‘writing place’. Next year I’m taking my writing out of the house and going mobile.

This year I had great success writing at a local cafe on my lunch break; something about unburdening myself from the expectations of a home study really seemed to work. In 2010, I’ll be looking for similar places to write and will be gauging the effectiveness.

If you have had any success in writing out of the home, let me know about it by leaving a comment below.

discover your novel

A novel is a significant undertaking. Having forged a successful, albeit limited, writer’s portfolio of short stories and features in the past, the prospect of carrying an idea for more than 3000 words is intimidating for me.

And yet, presumably a novel is achievable at any skill level. I can write a language, so it stands to reason that physically there is nothing stopping me pumping out writing 60,000 words.  The same simple premise underlies the yearly Novel in November challenge put out by NanoWrimo.

With physical constraints out of the picture, the challenge instead seems more about how to manage the process to achieve an acceptable outcome. After all, every engineer has a project manager, and writing a novel has long been compared to constructing a house or bridge. I can write 60000 words, but what approach and what skills are going to help ensure the 60,000 words don’t fall apart the minute I start probing it with questions of plot and character. For that matter, what approach is going to help me overcome the urge to give up, as the miserable foundations you lay rarely give any indication of the final product.

So to help see me through the writing of my first novel, I have been chatting to some of my past creative writing tutors for advice. Not advice on ‘how do I be a better writer?’,  but what are some worthwhile approaches to a project of such size and scope. What got you through the first draft and how did you keep the novel, and, yourself together? Essentially asking the question: How did you do it?

To start off, last week I had coffee with my one of my favourite lecturers, Liz Byrski, someone who has long been an inspiration to me for her skill as a writer and untapped enthusiasm for sharing her advice on the art and craft of writing. Liz has written 14 fiction and non-fiction novels and has worked more than 40 years in the British and Australian media, so I was keen to get a feeling for her approach to novel writing in particular (of which she was written three).

Over the din of a particularly packed Applecross cafe, I told her of what I perceived to be the greatest weakness of my writing: “I’m no good at filling the gaps.”

By “filling the gaps” I meant that I had always written my stories based on what I called ‘clever ideas’; a blind paraplegic castaway eats his own legs, the death of a shopping centre, an astronaught in a coma, etc. Problem is, these ‘clever ideas’ rarely saw out more than 3,000 odd words. Because of this approach (which by the way, has worked really well for short pieces) I hadn’t developed much of a taste for lengthy exposition, or even for that matter, character development. Instead I constructed my story on a number scenes that worked towards the realisation of one central clever idea.

It is clear to me, especially after recently battling this weakness with my thesis, that this approach did not fit so well with longer works of fiction. A 3000 word idea takes up about 10 pages of a 200 page novel – so what in gods name was the other 190 pages going to cover?

To start with, Liz quickly pointed out that I should stop thinking there is such a thing as worthwhile ‘filler’ in a novel.

“When I begin a novel,” Liz began. “I start with a character I’m interested in, and I put no assumptions on what the character will do in the next scene, or for that matter, the very next moment.”

At this point, Liz explained, she was in the creation stage of writing. “It doesn’t help me at the creation stage to think of typcial creative writing questions such as What style should this be written in? What is the most appropriate point of view? or Should this be past or present tense? This is what drafting is for. If I stopped to think about whether I’m using a consistent narrative voice, I would never get past the first draft.”

Drafting is a key concept in writing a novel, and hence a writer must relinquish some control and instead trust that putting words down for a first draft doesn’t commit them to stone. You must tell yourself: No one is going to read this first draft, and hence it is the only chance you have to explore and fail, and keep explorting. If you don’t allow yourself to fail in the first draft, and fail consistently, you will never create anything unique. Imagine a woodworker building a chair for the very first time, a totally new design. What good would it do the craftsman to play it safe?

In a recent NanoWrimo pep talk, Booker winning novelist Peter Carey offered some sobering advice on drafting for would be authors:

“If you ever read one of my books I hope you’ll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you’ll have to do that too.”

Liz suggested that in first draft mode the only rule is to keep going and explore the story.

“If you have an ending in mind, great. Put it to one side and forget about it. At the start of a story you can’t know if that ending will fit, as you don’t have the characters and situations to fill it yet. If, after writing 60,000 odd words, your original ending still fits, then use it. But don’t be surprised if your characters refuse to accept the ending you dreamt up.”

This makes sense to me. Part of my issue (and I think many writers share this) is that I have a very predetermined idea of what my story is about and how it should turn out. However, my problem is not about characters taking over my story and not doing what I tell them to do, its more that my writing often fails to realise the vision in my head. Plot twists don’t feel as sharp, characters turn out to be cliches. The end result is that I struggle to accept my work in progress, I feel very early on that it is not living up to my expectations.

Expectations are the reason that there are many more ‘wanna-be writers’ than writers. I believe that novels live and die by the author’s ability to put aside expectations and complete a first draft. A terrible first draft for sure, but one that can then be edited, re-styled, re-written even, able now meet the informed expectations of an author who knows the whole story, and not just the clever idea.

What do you think?