Posted on

the time it takes

There’s this moment in the writing of a story, when you’ve written and rewritten, revised, edited, taken out all the extra words, and given your characters a few more things to do other than nodding their heads, shaking their heads, smiling and shrugging; there’s this moment where you think you have finished. Yay, you wrote a story! So you give it one more go over, correct your spellings, and send it off into the world.

About a year and a half later, you read your story again, and see all your clumsy sentences and all your mistakes. You realise that there is a way to resolve that nagging plot problem. You suddenly understand why that character does what she does. You see how easy it would be to rewrite that section of prose and make it say exactly what you failed to say the first time around.

Unfortunately, by this point, it’s very likely that you are reading your story in some magazine or book, which you have also encouraged all your friends and family to buy. Cringe-a-rama!

If you’re still holding on to that story – perhaps you couldn’t sell it, or maybe something didn’t feel quite right, and you never tried – you are now the luckiest writing piglet in the world. You get to revise the hell out of it, make it beautiful, and correct all those terrible mistakes you had no idea you were making at the time.

As much as we want to get published NOW and have people reading our stories RIGHT NOW, patience and slowness make stories better. I suspect this goes double or triple for novels, where there are so many more elements to fuck up, and so much more impatience to get the damn thing over and done with.

It’s reassuring to know how much we improve as writers, simply by continuing to turn up and write as often as we can. Even when you feel completely stuck, you are processing all that experience into wisdom, so that one day you can say to yourself, wow that is really a crappy story I wrote. I could write it so much better now.

Posted on

death and taxes and death

I really want to moan about doing my tax return: how hard it was; how utterly clueless I am; how I berate myself for not keeping neat and tidy records; and generally BOO HOO HOW I HATE MY LIFE YOU INLAND REVENUE OINKS. But I suppose complaining about doing your tax return is the same sort of thing that makes people laugh/spit when writers talk about ‘hard work’ and ‘labour’ and ‘toiling in the hot sun for hours on end with no water and just a crust of stale bread to chew on’. Which is more or less what I put under the earnings column.

I’d love to get an accountant to look after my tax return for me, but given the paltry amount of money I earn as ‘Georgina Bruce: Writer’, an accountant’s fee would probably sink me into some kind of reverse negative income debt spiral which ends with me, ten years down the line, arrested for outstanding payments of thousands of pounds, and carted off to the clink in tears whilst cardboard cut-out faces of tax accountants spin around my head in a hallucinatory circle, mocking smiles on their faces, the sound of their fiscally competent laughter ringing in my ears.

I did my tax return online. Every time I entered a number in one of the little boxes, no matter how I had checked and calculated and added it up, my heart was in my mouth. It seems eminently possible that one could commit some kind of grand fraud simply by clicking the wrong button. Really, they ought to add some extra options – as well as ‘yes’ and ‘no’, there should be ’50:50′ and ‘phone a friend’.

Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue makes the process just that bit more terrifying by providing ‘help’ pop-ups which are written by the same people who do the instruction booklets for self-assembly furniture. On Betelgeuse. When space-beings from another dimension recover the remains of our civilisation sometime in the distant/parallel future, the ‘help’ information from HMRC online filing will be used as evidence for some smug space-historian’s thesis that human beings were MONSTERS who completely deserved the terrible fiery destruction of their planet.

 

Posted on

words words words

I’m a few thousand words into the second draft of my novel. It’s amazing to me that it has taken approximately 100,000 words to get to the point where I am ready to start actually writing the story. I’ve realised that the first draft was more or less just a very detailed outline. From that, I got a structure and plot. But it wasn’t until I started rewriting that I found the voice of the story.

Even apparently basic decisions, such as what tense and pov to write in, eluded me until now. And basic aspects of characterisation and  setting were also very muddy. It’s made me realise that the first draft is really just to get the bones of the story down, and it’s this draft where I feel that I am actually writing.

When I wrote the first draft, I was churning out thousands of words every day – I think about 10,000 was my highest word count for a single day. But now my words per hour have dropped drastically to about 600 – 700. That is about half what I would normally expect to write in an hour on a story. But I can see why it’s so slow: I have to be careful now, to stay in the voice of the story. Every word must speak the story.

I still don’t know some basic things, like whether or not it’s going to be worth reading in the end. I don’t think I’ll be able to know that until this draft is finished. I still want to write it, and I am still interested in it, so I’ll take that as a good sign.

And so to work!

Posted on

damn the dark, damn the light

Writers love to talk about writing. More than that, they love to talk about writing with other writers. Most of all, they love to give other writers advice about writing. I have some opinions about that.

First, writers who take other writers seriously are fools. All writers are full of shit, especially when it comes to writing.

Secondly, writers who give advice are usually only doing so as a way to avoid the problem of not taking their own advice.

I don’t give advice about writing, mainly because I think it’s pointless. The only knowledge worth having is that which you’ve gained through your own effort and through the long slow process of writing practice. Nothing else will make a difference to you, no matter how wise or insightful it may be. Therefore, in my opinion, seeking and giving advice is a waste of time.

So my advice is to ignore advice and just do whatever suits you, whatever fits in with your routine, whatever works for you personally. As long as you are developing your writing gift, in whatever way you can, then you’re doing all right.

And… that’s all.

Posted on

they’d have to open a window, to let out all that light

Interesting times, my friends. Interesting times. The first few days of 2012 have been full on, to say the least. (And can we please call it twenty-twelve, rather than two thousand and twelve? This is the future, after all.)  I am here, as promised, fulfilling my blogging duties. This week I have four and a half mini reviews for you to ponder, and one long one linked at the end.

The first is a bit of a cheat, as it is a review of a story I wrote, which is published in Fantastique Unfettered 4. I don’t know if you can get this zine in the UK yet, but if you want a copy (why wouldn’t you?) let me know and I will see what the score is. (ETA: NO IT’S TRUE IT’S ON AMAZON, PEOPLE.) Lois Tilton reviews FU4 for Locus Online, calling the zine ‘a labour of love’ and generally showering it with (completely deserved) praise. Here’s part of what she wrote about my story:

Weird, fractured narrative may take some work to follow, but there is a real, nightmarish story here.

Okay, it’s not exactly effulgent praise, but compared to previous reviews I’ve had from this source, this is LOVE. Read the rest here.

So far this year, I’ve read three novels. The first of them was Genevieve Valentine’s steampunk-apocalypse-circus story, Mechanique.  It was strange in beautiful in all the right places. I loved it nearly as much as I loved her Circus Tresaulti spin-off short story in Fantasy Magazine last year – really, if you like fantasy/steampunk/sad beautiful things, you should read this writer.

Beside the Sea is a much hyped novella by Veronique Olmi.  I’m sorry to say I found it kind of grim – too much desperate sentiment and not enough real emotion. The translation seemed a bit dodgy in places. Some turns of phrases were awkward, idioms used incorrectly here and there – could have been intentional but I suspect not.

I enjoyed Next World Novella, by Matthias Politycki, very much. It was even amusing in places, which I did not expect. I did wonder what more he could have done with the material had he been willing to stray into fantasy a little more – something quite wonderful, I suspect. But the writing itself is beautiful. Consider this, from the opening paragraph:

From the far end of his room autumn sunlight came flooding in, bathing everything in a golden or russet glow – the chaise-longue in the corner was a patch of melting colour. They’d have to open a window to let out all that light later.

Even the author knows that’s a good line – he finds an echo for it later on. Gorgeous writing.

I am currently reading Visitation, by Jennifer Erpenbeck.  It’s so good. It’s hypnotic and brilliant. I love this novel. I wouldn’t normally recommend a book I hadn’t finished reading, but this is so good, even if the rest of the book is rubbish, it’s worth spending your cash for the first few chapters alone. They are exquisite.

Oh, and finally, here’s the review I wrote for The Future Fire of Maureen McHugh’s story collection After the Apocalypse.

I’ve started rewriting one of my novels from last year, so expect to hear a lot of moaning and complaining from me next time about how a writer’s life is so terrible and blah blah blah.

How’s your new year reading and writing going?

 

 

 

Posted on

i can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible

Yeah, bye 2011. Apart from the last couple of months, you were rubbish.

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, because the truth is that I’m constantly resolving to do better and change things in my life. But this new year has fallen at an auspicious time for me, a time when I am already in the process of making big changes. So that whole ‘fresh start’ thing is a nice boost.

Amongst other things, I resolve to blog more often. I mean, at least once a week. If you don’t blog once a week, then you can’t really call it a blog, can you? So there’s a public declaration of intent… feel free to kick my butt if I fail on this one.

I’ve got a load of writing goals this year, the main ones being to finish what I start, and to get these damn novels written. I have three, in varying states of unfinishedness, and I need to whip them all into shape. Apart from that, there are various other goals, some of which will remain secret, and some which are just too pedestrian to recount here. But 2012 is going to be the year when my writing career starts kicking into gear. At least, that’s the plan.

My word for the coming year is COURAGE. I often lack it, and I need a lot of it. Sometimes it takes courage just to sit down and write something, ignoring the terrible voices that seem to have a lot invested in the idea that I can’t, or shouldn’t. It takes courage to do simple things, make big decisions, ignore petty people, stay focused. I know I will have a lot of challenges this year, and I hope I’m courageous enough to do what I need to do.

And as for you in 2012? May your neurons fire without fail; may your dendrites be stimulated; may your chemicals remain balanced; may your body support all your mind’s plans; and may the mysteries descend upon you.

Posted on

the reason

I keep forgetting I have a blog. I’m sure I read somewhere that one of the first rules of being a blogger is to remember you have a blog. I expect there are lots of other rules, too, such as updating blog on a regular basis, being interesting about a variety of stuff, telling funny stories about my (non-existent) cats and so on. But I imagine the main rule about blogging is that you’ve got to blog.

A bit like writing in general, then. The big difference for me is that I have gone for most of my life without blogging. (In fact, for the best part of my life, there were no such things as blogs. There weren’t even computers for the first few years. I vividly remember wondering what the hell this ‘world wide web’ thing was that everyone was going on about. For me, blogging is a futuristic activity that makes me wonder why I’m not wearing a jet pack and eating my meals in tablet form.) In the entirety of my pre-blogging existence, I never once wished that there was a way for me to share my personal experiences and private thoughts with every single person in the whole wide world.  I was more of a heavily-padlocked-diary-hidden-under-the-loose-floorboard-guarded-by-dragons kind of a person. Blogging is a whole new world for me.

Writing, on the other hand, is central to my existence and always has been. I feel like I was born knowing how to read and write. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing both every day. If I don’t write much for a while, I get symptoms. My mental and physical health deteriorates rapidly – I become ill and unhappy and more or less want to die. It’s not an exaggeration to say that writing is the activity that gives my life meaning and purpose.

And yes, I realise that blogging is a form of writing. It’s not one that I feel completely comfortable with yet. There is something alienating about writing directly to a reader. When I write fiction, notes, poems or anything else, I’m writing for myself. Even when I’ve got a potential market in mind, the thought of sharing and selling my work is not foremost in my thoughts. It’s just me and my imagination. Unlike a blog, where I have to think about the reader and what is and isn’t appropriate to say to you, in my writing I am free to say everything, no matter how bizarre or humiliating or painful or even boring it might be.

Which is not to say that I love writing all that much, either. When the ideas and the words flow through you, it connects you up to the universe and fills you with joy. But that is rare, and the rest of the time? Not so great. I sometimes see quotes about how writers are supposed to adore writing above all things and how if you don’t spend every waking minute obsessed by writing then you’re not a real writer. And then I worry that I’m not a real writer, because I do have other interests and loves, and quite often I have to force myself to sit down and write when there are several million things I would rather be doing instead. I don’t know if I’m a real writer or not. I wish that I loved it more, that I was less lazy, that I didn’t have to keep kicking myself into action. I’m jealous of writers who have a constant passion for writing.

I don’t know if my passion is constant. I only know that when I don’t write, my life is meaningless. So that’s why I do it. So that I don’t die.

Why do you write? Do you make a distinction between ‘writing’ and ‘blogging’, or do you think that’s just a transparent attempt on my part to divert attention from the fact that I’ve neglected this blog for weeks on end? Have at it in the comments.

Posted on

dead girls don’t cry

I will say upfront that I’m not really a huge fan of ‘urban fantasy’ – that genre which mainly consists of sparky young heroines with tattoos going about their everyday business only to discover that their local cupcake parlour is run by a whimsical faery. Or something. Okay, I may be slightly prejudiced by a particularly awful example of the genre that it was my misfortune to read last year. But even so, fairies and cupcakes and elves and family prophecies and late-blooming magical powers? Not really my thing.

So it may be that I am entirely the wrong person to take on this subject, and perhaps in ‘urban fantasy world’, all of what I am about to say would be considered ridiculous nitpicking about nothing at all.

But.

If someone is dead – I mean, dead – If a character in a story dies and is dead, and the author kind of bangs on about how weird it is to be dead because you don’t have to / don’t want to / actually can’t:

a) sleep

b) eat

c) urinate

d) crave a crafty fag

If this is the basis on which a character is dead, then how the hell can said character have their breath knocked out of them? How can they cut themselves and BLEED? What the whatty-what, people?

I can just about suspend my disbelief to accept that a dead person could still have a body that is a projection of their spirit or a handy visual aid/symbol of their former life. It would be awkward to be dead, yet still be conscious, and unable to walk around and do novelly stuff. I guess I can accept (even if for no other reason than I’m a willing reader and literary convention demands it) that desire and fear and other basic, bodily emotions can survive in a person who no longer has a body with which to feel these things. It’s a bit rubbish, but if an author writes about someone’s spirit continuing and being able to feel emotions and think and stuff, I can go along with it for the sake of the story.

But don’t tell me, Charles de Lint, don’t tell me that a person has no need to eat, drink or do any of the other things that sustain a physical body, and yet that person can still somehow bleed. How is she bleeding? How is her body making fresh red blood, when she no longer eats or drinks? How is she breathless, when she no longer breathes? How does her body heal from the cut? How come she can feel pain, but not hunger? How does she make tears?

And this bleeding thing. It’s not like it was just some throwaway line I could ignore. It was the engine that powered the resolution of the entire plot.

‘The Mystery of Grace’ was certainly not the worst book I’ve ever read. In places it reminded me a bit of Jonathan Carroll’s writing. I kind of liked the sparky heroine with tattoos. And I’ll even admit that there was one hell of a good idea buried in there. But this dead people bleeding thing is just STUPID.

Am I wrong? Obviously not. But feel free to disagree if you can.

 

Posted on

the city and the city

For some reason, my book love has grown huge again of late. It may simply be a symptom of my gradual return to decent health after a few years of battling with various conditions that left me depressed, depleted and utterly exhausted. My brain has started to work a bit, my neurons are getting sparky, something is going on… and I have more excitement and enthusiasm about reading than I’ve had for years.

At the same time, some of the authors I’ve clung to with fierce loyalty over the years now seem a little… well… Dull. Jejune. Unoriginal. I’ve always read widely and in all genres, but it’s still been difficult at times to find books I really care about. Books that I want to live in and eat and make clothes out of. But right now (thanks to your recommendations) I’ve got a stack of eight new books in front of me and I’m excited about all of them.

One of them is  Un Lun Dun by China Mieville. I have high hopes for this novel, mainly because I just finished reading The City and the City. Which blew my mind. Talk about a book I want to live in! I found it such a startling and remarkable idea, such an extraordinary metaphor for what it is to be human. How we unsee and unhear and unsense that which doesn’t fit comfortably with our understanding. How we live in fear of ‘breaching’ the standards of normal behaviour, going too far. And how almost everything interesting and meaningful in life happens in the interstices, the places inbetween. The setting is the story in this novel, in a very direct way, and if you haven’t read it, I don’t want to give too much away. But you must read it. It is wildly brilliant.

It made me think a lot about setting in story, something I’ve blogged about before. In The City and the City, the story could only happen in that particular setting. In other words, the setting is integral to the plot, characters and narrative, and provides much of the imagery and language of the novel. A genuinely well thought out setting can do all that and more. In this case, it delivers a profoundly satisfying and coherent narrative. Although I felt the novel had some faults, some boundaries it wouldn’t breach, so to speak, it still worked beautifully, meaningfully, on every level. I found myself thinking about it for days, captivated by the oddness of the ideas, and wondering how on earth it would unravel. That was all because of the extraordinary setting (and, of course, Mieville’s great skill and talent at putting it to work.)

I think that setting is a rather under-appreciated element of storytelling, and one that we ignore at our peril. I am inspired to try a story that depends on its setting for every aspect of plot, character and language. It’s something I’ve got close to before, but this time I will be making sure that the story is a direct product of the setting – something that could only happen then and there.

What about you? What are you reading at the moment, and what is it teaching you about your own writing/art/life?

Posted on

don’t you want me, baby?

Everyone wants to be loved. Everybody wants acceptance. Everybody wants to succeed. But if you are a writer, these three things – love, acceptance, and success – may at times be in very short supply.

Rejection, on the other hand, appears to be drawn from an inexhaustible well, one that keeps right on giving throughout a writer’s career. I have not yet reached the dizzy heights of three-book publishing deals and my titles on posters in Waterstones, but I am pretty sure that if I should ever get there, rejection will still be a significant part of my life. And it will still hurt.

Editors who don’t want your stories, critics and readers who write bad reviews, friends and family who think you’re nuts for even trying, peers who try to cut you down and undermine your achievements… These things are never okay. They are always going to cause you pain and frustration. Even the good and lovely things that happen cannot make up for the pain of being told you don’t cut it as a writer.

It hurts so much because what we write is personal. Stories come through us in revealing and strange ways. When you write something, it is like going on a journey (one which may take you to some sinister, frightening places), and bringing back this odd prize, this story.  Now you hold it up to the light, trying to reflect its unusual beauty – and rejection is people telling you it wasn’t worth the effort.

I once read a review about one of my stories that was so scathing, so unkind, that it stopped me writing for months. It made me frightened to write anything else, scared that more scorn and bile would be poured over my creations, terrified that this person might be right. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this critic had some kind of personal axe to grind, but at the time, I was deeply affected.

Ultimately, however, that guy did me a favour. Up until that point, I had been pretty lucky. I had heard mainly good things about my writing, and even the few rejections I’d experienced had been, at worst, neutral. Suddenly I was forced to look rejection in the face, and deal with it. It made me realise that I had to get tougher. Either I could wither under the scornful gaze of those who disliked my work, or I could say, ‘I don’t care,’ and carry on regardless. It took me a while, but eventually I chose to stop caring so much and to keep writing the things I wanted to write.

Rejection hurts, but at some point, you have to stop caring about it. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, but these days, rejection is something I don’t dwell on. The fact that you are getting rejections, bad reviews, jealous swipes from peers – these things can only happen because you are submitting stories, getting published and read, and causing people to take notice. Getting rejected means that you’re in the game, you’re playing – winning some, losing others, but you’re taking part. Even when it’s horrible, it’s still way better than being a spectator. Spectators may never get told they’re not good enough, but that’s only because they don’t have the courage to play.