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Back on the horse…

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There are hundreds of New Year’s resolutions that a writer could make, but they probably all contain the word ‘Back.’

Maybe something dented your confidence, and, like a rider after a fall, you tell yourself to get back on the horse…

Maybe you’ve been a bit unwell and have to accept being back on the medication.

Or (is this the hardest one?) you have to archive a whole lot of hard work that isn’t going to work, and start a new project: back to the drawing board.

[It is highly unlikely you have spent so much time on your books, so much time ignoring your other responsibilities, that your resolution about writing is to Back Off].

Fellow writers, welcome back. I wish you all luck in 2014, and I hope you get the backing of all the readers you are hoping to reach.

Masters of the Universe?

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Previous visitors to the blog will recall that I completed my last MA module in January…  and, officially, finally graduated last month.  But I decided not to do the gown-hiring, hand-shaking thing this time around:  been there, done that, see the old photo every time I visit my Mum’s flat.

Great to catch up with a few of my fellow former MA students for coffee, though.  Check out this link to see some their recent work now on show to the public:  http://rowntreeparkblog.wordpress.com/

I’ve written before that you should choose the right time to start a creative writing course, that you have to consider when is best for you to begin to share and receive feedback on your work.  But when the time is right, it can be great to be part of a little community that shares your interest, shares your passion…  It feels good to restore some writing enthusiasm, to feel that you’re doing something of value.  I came home from the café feeling better about myself.  Not quite Masters of the Universe, maybe, but certainly Master of a Paragraph or two.

 

 

The joy of proof-reading

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How hard can it be to run through a manuscript and check for spelling and grammar errors?  Well, harder than you think; or at least much more time consuming than you think…

A few tips:

1) Save your MS in a different font and a larger size, and look through it again.  Apostrophe and inverted comma mistakes especially show up better in a font like Times Roman compared to Ariel.

2) Invest in a style guide. Do you really know when to put a full stop outside of a closing bracket and when to put it inside?  What is the difference between writing ‘the 1960s’ and ‘the Sixties?’  Look for the answers in something like the Oxford Guide to Style (Oxford University Press).  If you don’t want to buy it, look in your local library or your nearest university library.

3) Make good use of spell checks, but of course bear in mind that the spell checker will not identify an error such as writing ‘there’ when you meant to put ‘their.’

4) If you can afford it, seriously consider employing a professional.  Nothing looks more amateurish than a book full of errors, whether they come from your own manuscript, or from glitches in the typesetting process.  If you can’t afford a professional, get as many very literate friends as possible to help your out.  You and they will discover more errors than you expected!

Be your own publisher…

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… But don’t give up the day job… And think strategically…

Self publishing options are many and varied these days, and a lucky few seem to have made a huge success of it, with blogs going viral, e-books priced to sell in volume, and certain successes crossing over into mainstream best-sellerdom: last time I was in WH Smith, there was a whole wall (yes wall!) for Fifty Shades and numerous copycat offerings.

Publishing your own work is a nice way to feel you are making some progress, instead of being stuck in the months-long queue for yet another agent’s rejection letter. But doing the maths on a short run, high quality paperback product, I’ve worked out that I can only break even on production costs, and will therefore lose money on marketing, and, obviously, earn nothing for the labour of actually writing.

Depressing? Possibly. But then the only way to make money from fiction has always been to sell in large numbers. I’m looking at this as a long term strategy: a series of books, which achieve popularity over time. Readers who buy the whole set. Readers who recommend it to their friends. Check out my sample chapters, or better still, promise yourself that you will buy the books. I hope you’ll enjoy them. And recommend them. And who knows, if my strategy works, your signed copy of the very first edition might end up worth a fortune itself. Which is something no 99p download can ever be.

Theory versus practice…

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Back to the retrospective MA diary, and the question of literary theory.  What use does a wannabe novelist have for the strange philosophies of Structuralism, Postmodernism or Reception Theory, to name but three?  Apart from making rubbish jokes about the so-called ‘Death of the Author,’ of course…

I have to say that I quite enjoyed dipping back into theory as part of my MA, partly because it’s sometimes nice to do something intellectually challenging for a change.  And it sometimes helps to give a different perspective on the practicalities of writing.  Take Wolfgang Iser’s idea that the reader is constantly revising what he thinks of a text because each new section causes him to re-evaluate what he read before, and also to have new expectations of what is still to come. Sounds odd? But think about a reader of a whodunnit, who is working his way through a series of clues and misdirections… And then you start to see what Iser means. So a bit of theory can be quite a good thing, so long as it doesn’t keep you from the hard graft of putting your own words on the page…

Are you naughty… Or nice?

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Or are you NASTY?

Books are like most products in the marketplace – they fall into categories, and the categories fall in and out of fashion.  Bookshops now have whole shelves labelled Cosy Crime, to distinguish the gentility of Agatha Christie with the more graphic images of, for example, Kathy Reichs.  Nice as opposed to…  Well, you get the idea…

So as a writer, you have to consider your market.  Who are your readers?  What else are they reading?  What category do you fit into?  But that’s not to say you should copy others, or run after the latest fashion; if you’re currently working on a TV script set in Denmark, personally I’d forget it (unless you’re reading this on your laptop in Copenhagen, of course, then in may still be worth it).  You are allowed to try to be original, find your own voice, and even subvert a genre or two.  If you can be a bit naughty and play around with the reader’s expectations, that’s likely to be a good thing…  Just be aware that publishers and agents may not be as creative or imaginative as you are.  They may very well just seem obsessed about which shelf your work should sit on.  Make sure you have an answer for them.