Writing – the (not so) lovely endeavour

by Anna Jones Buttimore

The lot of a writer is one of long hours hunched over a keyboard in a dimly lit room with nothing but a cat for company. Shut away from the real world we pull faces and make hand gestures as our characters do, mutter dialogue to ourselves, and live in a strange environment peopled entirely by creatures of our own imagination. Alone we face the frustrations of edit after edit, and the crushing disappointment of rejection after rejection of our precious offspring. It’s little wonder that many of us seem to be a little eccentric, if not downright mad.

As least, that’s how it used to be. These days writing is no longer the lonely and solitary profession.

• Today Hellen is coming to my house to work on her novel. She’s coming partly because I have a spare desk and she won’t be tempted to do housework in my house (although I’ve told her she’d be welcome to), but also for the company. And once in a while she can ask me, “What’s that word that means..?” or “How would you describe the smell of..?” Hellen and I have written a book together, and writing in the company of others is a lot of fun.
• Years ago when my first novel was printed my editor put me in touch with a fellow author I admired, Kerry Blair, and she in turn “virtually” introduced me to several other authors, most of whom I have now met in person. For many years we emailed each other frequently with messages of support and encouragement. We congratulated each other on books accepted and published and commiserated on rejections. We cooed over baby photos and offered support in times of illness and despair. Most of all, though, we shared the experience of writing, its rewards and its difficulties, and we were there for each other. We email less frequently than we once did, but we do now share a blog.
• Hardly a day goes by without me receiving an invitation via Facebook to a book launch party; probably because around half my Facebook friends are writers. I also belong to many writers groups on Facebook where I find discussions on editing, naming characters and every and any aspect of this strange craft of ours.
• I belong to two writers’ groups (Writebulb and Rayleigh WINOS) and thus two Saturdays a month are spent writing flash fiction, undertaking challenges and setting goals with other writers. It’s a really wonderful opportunity. One Writebulb member pointed out “We learn far more in two hours than we could at any creative writing class”.
• Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month – November) sees groups of writers meeting together in libraries for “sprints” on their laptops, badges popping up all over Facebook, and a real sense of solidarity as thousands of writers struggle to write 50,000 words in just one month. I’ve only done it once, and I failed due to poor planning (got 20,000 words in and realised I had no idea where the book was going and needed to do some major research) but I’m going to try again in this year.

Writing may once have meant working in glorious solitude, but it doesn’t have to any more. We authors can support and encourage one another, get together and share our experiences and goals, either online or in person. Even if, at the end of the day, we like to retreat to our dimly-lit attic room with our laptops to immerse ourselves once more in the worlds we create.

 

Why I Prefer Traditional Publishing

by Anna Buttimore

 

The ebook revolution is upon us, and with free publishing now available to everyone the landscape for writers has changed dramatically over the last ten years. Anyone, anywhere, with any level of skill can now write a book and publish it, at no cost to themselves, and it will be indistinguishable from a book published by a large, established publisher, like Penguin, HarperCollins or Macmillan.

Many authors, including established authors with traditional publishers, are celebrating and embracing self-publishing. Some are putting out their out-of-print back catalogue in ebook format, while others are eschewing traditional publishing altogether and going for the bigger royalties percentage promised by self-publishing.

And yet I continue to send my work out to agent after agent, publisher after publisher, again and again. I have now clocked up fifty-seven rejections for my sci-fi magnum opus, Emon and the Emperor, and despite the regular assurances (often on the rejection slips) that publishing is a very subjective business and someone else may love my work, it’s hard not to become disheartened and lose confidence in my own abilities.

So the obvious question is why? Why do I continue to chase that elusive publishing contract, or enthusiastic agent, when I could just spend an hour on Kindle Direct Publishing and have Emon and the Emperor for sale around the world by this evening?

I have experience of both types of publishing. My first five books were traditionally published by small presses primarily serving the American midwest. My first two were very successful and even made me a nice bit of money. The next three, not so much. By that time the number of available books had grown considerably (partly due to the self-publishing revolution), but the number of readers hadn’t, and the amount of promotion the publishers did had dropped to almost zero, so the royalties didn’t break the £1,000 mark.

My sixth book, co-written with Hellen Riebold, was self-published because of its controversial subject matter. Royalties from that, so far, are zero. Well, not quite zero, but Amazon only send you a cheque once your royalties reach a certain level, and we’re not there yet.

So if I make no money from either my traditionally published or self-published books, again the question has to be why am I still holding out to get my next effort traditionally published? Why not just self-publish it?

I’d like to say it’s because I like getting my book professionally edited multiple times as part of the package. I like having professional cover designers, typesetters, etc., make my book look as good as it possibly can. With my first two books I really liked seeing them in catalogues, end-of-aisle displays, and on posters in bookstore windows. I like not having to do any complicated stuff, and having a team of professionals make my book as good as it can be, then send me twenty free copies. I like having my book actually appear on real shelves in real bookstores where people can browse through it and maybe even take it to the cash desk. (And that aspect shouldn’t be underestimated – my books have all sold far more copies in stores in paperback than they have as ebooks online.)

Those things are all very nice. But actually the reason I like traditional publishing best is because of the validation. I like knowing that someone believes in my work enough to invest in it. I like imagining that industry professionals think I’m good at what I do. I like being taken seriously as an author: when anyone with any level of talent (or none) can put out a book, I like being set apart from them and recognised as someone whose work was actually put into print based on its own merits.

I love this book. Ultimately I believe it is good enough to be traditionally published and to be a success. But I really need someone in the business to agree with me. So I will keep on sending Emon and the Emperor to agent after agent, publisher after publisher, until I run out of agents and publishers to send it to. With fifty-seven rejections already, that might be quite soon.

 

 

Writing and composing

by Ian Wilson

In the half term break, my wife and I were faced with the problem of how to get a seventeen-year-old to take a family holiday with us. We hit on the idea of a trip to Manchester so that we could look do the university tour and consider the music department as a place for him to study. Wandering around the campus together, we were congratulating ourselves on our insight into teenage psychology when my wife noticed this plaque:

My first reaction was one of surprise. Who knew that the writer of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was also a composer? When I got home I decided to explore his work. To my astonishment, I discovered that composition was Burgess’s first love and that he’d written well over 250 works. Apparently, he spent much of his life unsuccessfully trying to gain recognition for his music, only managing one-off, unrecorded performances at literary events. I thought I’d have a nose round the internet to see if I could find something to which I could listen and found he’d written ‘A Manchester Overture’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Jo-4AlOaY) to celebrate his time in the city. I was struck by its invention and the quality of his orchestration. Why wasn’t this music better known?

This made me think about whether it is possible to be a successful polymath. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Omar Khayyám notwithstanding, most famous people are only recognized in one field. Does our need to pigeonhole people prevent us from appreciating their broader contribution to culture? Or is it that we are too narrow in our understanding of creativity?

I have been a composer for some time (http://www.thechoralagency.com/composers.html) but it has only been in the last year that I have turned my attention to writing. Trying to put a young adult novella together has been a steep learning curve for me and has made me consider the similarities and differences between the process of writing and that of composition.

The most important similarity that I’ve found is the need to constantly revise my work. I find it so easy to settle on an idea before I have had the chance to consider other possibilities. At one song writing workshop that I attended, the leader stressed the need to write lots of potential verses so that the best ones could be selected for the final lyrics. I have often used internet forums to ‘road test’ initial versions of my songs so that I can get extra pairs of ears on them before honing them to their final forms. When I wrote a song cycle for the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, I had to revise the work considerably after the first performance because they found it so hard to play, as you will hear if you follow the link (2 mins 11s into the video on the front page of http://dunblanechamberorchestra.org).

It is a great comfort taking the same approach to the ‘terrible first draft’. Author Anne Lamott claims that her first drafts are so bad she worries about getting into a car crash and dying as she’d never want others to see her work before she’s had a chance to revise it. I used the Beta Read service from Eagle Eye Editors (http://eagleeyeeditors.me/beta-reading/) to get someone else to sample my writing efforts. Alison DeLuca, an author of young adult novels, read my book and gave helpful feedback which I am now trying to apply.

The second similarity that I have found between writing music and writing fiction is the need to develop your themes. At university I was taught how Beethoven explored simple ideas (such as the ‘knocking on the door’ theme from his fifth symphony) to the full limit of their potential. In my writing, I am trying to achieve the same clarity of expression, ensuring that I know what central ideas I am following and how they might be developed coherently.

Am I labouring in vain, like Anthony Burgess appears to have done when wearing his composing hat? Almost certainly, but I’m having a lot of fun on the way.

 

The Problems of A Pantser

by Hellen Riebold

As we all know there are two types of writers, the careful, methodical ‘planner’ who knows who all their characters are, what’s going to happen to them and how the book is going to end. Then there are the ‘pantsers’ who live a life of fear, not knowing from one word to the next what their characters are going to say. I am most definitely a pantser.

It took me a long time to discover I was a pantser, or even that they existed, mostly because people who write ‘how to’ books can’t make much money from saying ‘just write’ so only publish books for planners. The truth didn’t dawn on me until I read a protracted interview given by a multi-million selling author who spoke about being a pantser, about just writing and using the editing process to work on the kinks. This information freed me completely and has allowed me to complete three books in eighteen months.

This past month, however, while writing my fourth, I came across a big problem. A married couple in my book had an argument and the wife ran off into the woods to sulk and didn’t decide to go home until it was getting dark. That was a problem because she had been in the area for less than 24 hours so she would have no way to know her way home and she couldn’t just find a road because they are being sought by the authorities. How on earth was I going to get her out of the woods?

For two weeks I was stuck. I couldn’t think of a single way to get her out and my friend, who is also a pantser, really wasn’t as helpful as she had hoped when she told me about a time she had two characters stuck on a beach for ten years while she tried to think of a way off for them. Actually it made me panic slightly. This book couldn’t wait ten years, it was a sequel and I have people waiting for it.

For days I sat staring at the last sentence on the page, then, one wonderful day, it came to me. It wasn’t actually dark, it was getting dark, therefore my character could see where the sun was setting, which meant she could work out east from west. If I also made her remember seeing the sun rise in the living room of the bungalow, looking out onto the road, then she’d know which way to head. Bingo. She was free. Hooray! Phew.

So will this experience make me more of a planner? No, it’s just not in me, but it does make me marvel at the problem solving power of the brain. If I had planned out every detail of my story then I wouldn’t have had the joy of realising I’d finally worked it out, and I wouldn’t have missed that feeling for the world.

No, a pantser I am and a pantser I’ll stay.

 

Strengths and Weaknesses

by Anna Buttimore

In writing, as in so many areas of life, we all have strengths and weaknesses. Even a really good writer will have elements of the craft that he or she is not particularly good at. Tolkien, for example, wasn’t very good at battle scenes, and the film-makers charged with bringing his books to life for the big screen reported that they relished the opportunity to fully create a dramatic and authentic fight because there was so little to work with in the books.

A friend of mine is currently editing a book. She says that the writer is extremely good at writing interpersonal relationships and she is often moved to tears as she read these powerful sections, but is very poor at creating a fully visualised and relatable setting.

I’m not particularly good at characterisation or dialogue, but readers of my books have said that they like my descriptive scenes. I’m also a bit of a horror for writing myself into a corner. I’ll have my character say something like, “I’ve got a brilliant idea for a prank we can play on him to get our own back for what he’s done” and then have to spend the next few weeks trying to figure out what brilliant idea she might have had. Yes, really. That is actually the current situation with my work-in-progress, and I have resorted to asking random people “what’s a great prank to play on a guy on a cruise ship?”

When I was writing Honeymoon Heist I had my characters hide out on a beach. And there they stayed for ten years because I couldn’t figure out how to get them safely off that beach, so I gave up and started working on other projects instead. (If you want to know how I eventually had them escape their sandy prison, you’ll have to buy the book.)

Even the greatest writers have areas they’re not quite as good at, and other things they do really well. Maybe part of being a great writer is learning to work with what you can do as you work on what you can’t.