How to write a novel: following the strange – guest post on Writer.ly

Have you ever filled in one of those questionnaires that’s supposed to tell you what your ideal job is? Whenever I did, I usually found them desperately disappointing – but then they probably weren’t meant to send people to precarious, impractical occupations like writing. Except that one day, I filled one in that did. And it did it with one excellently judged question: ‘do you value the strange’?

Not only did this prove there is only one job I’m really fit for, it also summed up what drives me to write.

Today I’ve been invited to Writer.ly, who asked me to describe how I develop my novel ideas. Expect a lot of head-scratching, thinking, running, shopping – and writing of notes that no one will ever see but me. Come on over… and tell me if you also value the strange …

 

 

Reading revolutions: serialising a novel – interview at the Malaysia Star

You really know you’re in a world wide web when an email arrives from a journalist on a newspaper in Malaysia. Elizabeth Tai contacted me for a series she was writing called reading revolutions. She’d seen that I had originally released my first novel, My Memories of a Future Life, as a four-part serial on Kindle, and wanted to ask me how that worked and why I did it. We talk about pros, cons, cautions – and tips I’d give to anyone considering doing the same. Come on over…

And in the meantime, tell me: where’s the furthest-flung place you’ve had a surprise email from about your work?

7 stages of writing a book – video discussion at IndieReCon

Do you need help to get your novel started or finished? Four of us experienced scribblers talk about how we stay creative through the tough times and reveal our secrets for drafting, fixing and finishing, not to mention keeping our confidence. Solutions include running, composing music, meditation and lying on the floor scribbling on sheets of A4 using the hand you don’t normally write with.

My co-conspirators are Orna Ross (who is the author of Go Creative, several literary novels and leader of the Alliance of Independent Authors), Kevin Booth (who’s a translator as well as an author and trained as an actor before he took up writing), and Jessica Bell (who runs the Vine Leaves Literary Journal as well as having a parallel career as a singer-songwriter, which you might well know already from her appearances on The Undercover Soundtrack).

We’re forming the creative posse at IndieReCon, a free online conference for writers at all stages of their publishing careers. Do come over – and check out the other terrific events in the line-up. There’s info from all kinds of experts in publishing, writing and marketing.

Anyway, here we are, wrong-handed and full of ideas.

Writing: a journey in music – guest post at Helen Hollick

You may recognise Helen Hollick as a recent guest on The Red Blog, where she stirred up a storm with raging seas and black-hearted doings, all devised with the music of Mike Oldfield, among others. She’s also a bestselling author who’s hit major charts with her pirate novels, so that’s probably a better reason why you might know her.

After she guested for me, she was curious to find out more about how I use music and how I developed the idea of The Undercover Soundtrack into a blog. Especially as it’s been going for more than two years now – and contributors are now lined up into July!

Some of you NYN old-timers might have heard this tale before, but in case you haven’t, or you want a brief intro to my fiction, or you want to see where Helen lives on line, head over to her blog …

Why I like to write science fiction… my first interview about Lifeform Three

I think this is the first interview I’ve done about Lifeform Three. I’m at the blog of Chele Cooke, whose name you may recognise because she was an Undercover Soundtrack guest a week or so ago. Chele is holding a sci-fi festival at her blog this month, and has invited along a number of authors who’ve written in the genre, from epic fantasy to chrome-plated mind-voyages. The awesome Hugh Howey is coming tomorrow, so I must be warm-up for him!

Chele made us all answer the same questions. How we developed our stories, what our distinctive takes are and who we’ve been influenced by. Personally, I think of SF as the classic genre of the imagination, one of the finest ways to ask questions about humanity that can’t be asked any other way. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Come over for the rest.

Writing mentors, writer’s block and the Wife of Bath – guest post at Jon Winokur’s Advice To Writers

In some ways, I have Chaucer to thank for all this. At school I wrote an exam essay in which I speculated about the plots you could make from the Wife of Bath, based on her character. I also have to thank my English teacher. If she’d been like the other staff, she’d have told me off for not answering the question. Instead, she urged me to take writing seriously – long before I thought that was possible.

Today, I’m guesting at Advice to Writers, a blog by Jon Winokur. Jon is co-author of a biography of Rockford Files star James Garner, and that makes him exceedingly cool and me very honoured. We do discuss more up-to-date concerns than Chaucer, though, including how you get from a theoretical dream to words in a reader’s hands. We’re talking mentors, writing routines and writer’s block – do come over.

 

Could The Undercover Soundtrack help you reach readers? Post at the Alliance of Independent Authors

You know The Undercover Soundtrack? The Alliance of Independent Authors got curious about it and asked me to write a post. Why did I set the series up? What do I get out of it? What do the participating authors get, aside from a singular blogging challenge and another place to get their work seen?

I’m musing on these questions and others at the ALLI blog today.  And if you’ve been wondering if you dare ask for a spot, I talk about that too. Do come over. (Or if you’ve wanted to ask but are shy about doing so in public, email me on rozmorriswriter at gmail dotcom…)

Dialogue special part 1: how do we get characters talking?

This weekend I guested on John Rakestraw’s Google writing hangout. He sent me a bunch of questions about dialogue, and I wrote so much in preparation that I got an epic post. Then when we got nattering on air with his co-conspirators, we delved off into other questions anyway. So I thought I’d run a dialogue special in the next few weeks. If you’d like to watch the hangout the link is at the end of this post.

(That pic is not Mr Rakestraw and friends, BTW. Tis Husband Dave at the BBC, pretending to read the news with his writing partner Jamie Thomson.)

Meanwhile, here’s today’s topic -

How do we get the characters talking?

Some manuscripts I see have no dialogue, or very little. There will be plenty of description, back story and even action, but the writer won’t have allowed the characters to step out of the narration and express themselves and interact with others. If there are conversations, they will mostly be reported instead of shown ‘live’ -

‘he told her that the best thing he’d ever done was to buy that log cabin in the woods – especially now they needed somewhere to hide until the stalker stopped watching the house’

Of course, sometimes there are good reasons to report a conversation. It’s by no means forbidden. But if all or most conversations are reported it can feel like the characters are being shepherded by the book and never acting independently – and so they don’t seem as real.

Dialogue makes characters real

Dialogue scenes let characters come to life. We see them acting, responding to other humans, experiencing events. For the reader, it’s like the difference between reading a report and being an eyewitness. They feel a personal, vivid connection with the moment.

And it’s a rich connection. Dialogue scenes allow you to demonstrate human complexity – what the people feel about each other, what their innate responses are according to their personality. (This can often create trouble for the writer, as I’ll discuss in a moment.)

What about first-person narration?

First-person narratives might need less dialogue because we already feel the character. Every piece of description, back story or other prose will be seen through the filter of that person’s psyche. So will their encounters with other people. But it will seem odd if there are no scenes where other characters are allowed to breathe, act, emote and be real.

Readers often look for dialogue before they decide to buy

Some readers flick through a book and are put off if there isn’t a good proportion of dialogue. Dialogue is easier to read than screeds of prose. But that’s not just because the paragraphs are more spaced – it’s because good dialogue is vivid.

So why do writers find it hard?

Some don’t of course. And if you’ve been reading this with a halo of confidence, could I ask if you find non-dialogue prose difficult?

This difference is usually where the problem lies.

Writing dialogue requires a specific frame of mind. When you’re in the flow of setup, action, back story or description, it’s tricky to switch to dialogue. In every other kind of narration, you control the camera, the voice of all the in-between stuff. For dialogue you have to let other minds in. That’s quite a gear-change. Especially if you have to inhabit several people, with different agendas and personalities.

Sometimes you realise, as you put yourself in their shoes, that they don’t see things the way you do. The lines you want to give them feel false. Or they run away with the story because of their responses. You have to let them find their own way, and maybe adapt what you wanted them to do. You realise a plot event is impossible because the characters won’t do it and you can’t work around it. This sense of frustration rarely happens with other types of scenes.

How to get your dialogue scenes running smoothly

Write dialogue scenes on different days from narration. Give your brain time to adjust.

Don’t put too many characters in the scene. In novels, it’s hard to manage more than three people who are all talking and responding. In fact, three’s a crowd because someone usually has to take a back seat. I’ve often seen writers try to emulate the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs where seven characters are sitting around a table. In the movie it works, but in prose it usually becomes an unmanageable mess.
Be prepared to rework a dialogue scene over and over. I’ve often had to spend several days on a dialogue scene, trying to get it truthful and authentic (not to mention interesting). Some characters can be particularly stubborn; Gene Winter in My Memories of a Future Life was exciting to use because he was unknowable and unpredictable – but this made him a devil to handle. He sounded wrong until I found something he’d agree to do. This struggle, of course, made me write better scenes.

This is the great challenge and reward of dialogue. Because you’re taking a step into the characters’ psyches, you find out what they’re really made of.

Next post: dialogue is more than talking. Watch the full discussion with John Rakestraw here.

Thanks to Budd Margolis for the pics of Dave and  Jamie

There are more tips on character creation, character voice and dialogue in Nail Your Novel: Bring Characters to Life 

Do you have trouble writing dialogue scenes? How do you approach them?

Whatever your writing dreams… post at Women Writers

I always feel a tad self-conscious when I get asked to write about what I’ve been up to. Post an entire piece without trying to help, inspire, solve problems…? Can’t I turn it into advice, just a teensy bit? No, said Women Writers, just write what you’ve been doing. Once I started, it turned out I had quite a bit to report for the past few months, so here it is….

And since we’re sharing news, tell me … in the past year, have your writing dreams become a step more possible?

PS WordPress informs me this is my 500th post. Which must indicate somethingorother about progress!

Reincarnation, future lives and ghostwriting – a couple of guest apparitions

I’ve got a couple of slightly apparitional guest spots around the web today. I’m at Candace Austin’s Tumblr blog, Past Life Ponderings. Her novel is about past lives and she collects other authors who play with those ideas. She’s also keen to know about our own claims to former lives … come this way…

Still with the theme of shadows, I’m also at The Write Life Magazine. This time I’m talking about ghostwriting – how I started, what it takes to do the job and how you might break in. The Write Life is an online magazine, downloadable as an app or on PDF. There is a sign-up form but don’t be put off – it’s free and you also get essays about writers’ life-changing experiences, an interview with New York Times Bestseller Ingrid Ricks and a Q&A with memoirist Susan Shapiro. And it’s very pretty…