Which character should we love?

That was the question Feola asked at the Richmond Writer's Circle last night. It isn't the first time she's asked it either. Gerry said much the same a week ago. He wondered why I was 60,000 words into a story and still wasn't sure who my protagonist was. They have a point. My plan so far has been to get through the first draft - which in plot terms is mainly coming from my subconscious and then sort everything out with the re-writes as I've described before. This problem though, if it turns out to be a problem may take more to fix. So far I have been doing what I think of as ensemble writing. But having the gentlemen rankers and the Kensington Gore Croquet Club in the same story does make it a bit crowded, it is true. And is also true that agents and publishers do want to see a story with a clear protagonist. My plan is still to plunge on to the end though. That might be a mistake but if it is it will have to be one I learn from.

Feola gain read for me last night - brilliantly again. We had an influx of new people - in the case of the RWC three is an influx trust me. For the most part this is good, of course. When there are more than nine people reading though it is hard to do justice to everyone, Less than nine people on the other hand doesn't meet the rent. Writer's Circles are on a bit of a knife edge from that point of view. I'm glad Susan was back to relieve me of the moderators baton.

The Aether Guild of Writers on Steampunk Empire

This is the best place I've found to post for my type of writing

Here http:Aether Guild of Writers

I think I'll repost things from here to there

Getting the language right

I got to thinking about The Countess of Vintage's (From the Aether Guild of Writers on Steampunk Empire) comment about vocabulary. At first, I wasn't sure if she was talking about vocabulary in the usual sense or in the broader sense of 'memes'. Anyway, thinking at the moment of words, and bearing in mind that everything I suggest is only what I think works for my writing and need not necessarily for anyone else's, here are some thoughts.

First, people in the era in which I write - the Edwardian – talked much the same as we do. There are as many (or as few) differences as there are in British regional speech today. I try not to let words get in the way of the story. From time to time I might use a word (say 'golly' or 'gosh' that raises an eyebrow when I read at the Richmond Writers' Circle. For these though, even when I am right (both words could have been used in 1904), I have to consider making a change because, if the RWC are distracted from the story by a word, then everyone else might be too. It is possible perhaps to use a strange word with a footnote explaining it. George MacDonald Fraser does this quite often, especially with foreign words such as Indian words used frequently by British soldiers. In G MacD F's case, this is more justifiable, as he purports, in the story, to be the editor rather than author. (To digress a bit, nearly half the American reviewers of the book thought it was a genuine autobiography.)  So I try to only use unusual words where the reader can easily guess their meaning or if the meaning is known but the word rarely used. For example, my grandmother, born in that era, would use 'hark' more often than ‘listen’. Another example, again G MacD F, is his use of the term 'the earlies' to refer to the period around 1830. This is a rare term but, in context, easy to make sense of without breaking rhythm.  At one stage, I was thinking of using, for fun, some of the slang used by the upper reaches of British society in the late Victorian era. This was more or less a childhood invented language of the Wyndham sisters that spread, as they married into various families. It would have required footnotes on every page so I ditched the idea.  A more difficult case is that of words such as 'intrigue'.  This was raised at a recent presentation by Lynn Shepherd, D.E.Meredith and Essie Fox. They are published authors of Victorian thriller / crime novels.  Apparently, Intrigue in the sense of conspire was used in 1904 but not in the sense of 'create interest in'. I should never have known this and assume that there must be many other examples where I shall put my foot in it.  These three intelligent and articulate women were pretty clear that such mistakes are to be avoided. In similar way, one of them noted that if an author gets the hansom cab fare for a journey wrong, some reader somewhere will know this and write to them. I am not quite sure how much consternation this should cause me.  I think I would spend all my limited time researching rather than writing. I should be interested in what others think. Returning to writing authentic speech for the fin de siècle, I think it is more in tone than language itself. There is a touch more formality than we use today. This can be taken too far though.  As examples of the era where first party narrators chat to the reader in lively tones, much as we would now, consider: Allan Quatermain in the first few pages of King Solomon’s Mines, J in Three Men in a Boat or Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda. From memory, there are no words used in these that are not common today.

Political correctness

This is a line from my story (set in 1904). It is not an important line and could be cut but it did make me think a bit.

"An American Negress was leading a cakewalk chorus to the mechanical rhythms of a honky-tonk piano. The lyric told of a shooting by a woman of her lover. No one seemed too sad about it though, thought Gwendolyn." 

It isn't relevant to this post but I was thinking of Ma Rainey, pictured here.

I looked up the word Negress (to check if it should have a capital N) and the Wictionary definition said:

(dated, literary, now considered offensive or ethnic slur) A black female.

Now to me, age 65, Negro is a dictionary definition. I didn't know that it was offensive.

To digress here, it makes me remember that I was born a little more than four decades after the period that I'm writing about. Compare that to the six and a half decades that have elapsed since my birth. In terms of my formative years. I'm as close to then as I am to now.

Now, I would certainly not wish to cause gratuitous offence. George MacDonald Fraser's (one of my favourite authors) character: Harry Flashman, freely used the word "nigger". To write anything else would have been completely out of character and dishonest. Compare this to Allan Quatermain, as the first person narrator of "King Solomon's Mines", who in the first few pages muses over the word "nigger" and decides that it is an offensive term that he will not use. Rider Haggard published that in 1885 so that is what liberal people were thinking at the time. I have no doubt that some of the characters that I write would use the word but I haven't yet put them in a situation where they would and would avoid doing so or at least modify what they said. I think this is justifiable, Unlike Flashman they are by and large fairly decent people and I am wtiring an adventure not a social history.

To look at it from a slightly different angle; my story is written in the third person but not in the third person omniscient.

To digress again; this has made me think about the third person omniscient a bit. To be truly omniscient the voice needs to be outside time. We tend to assume we can do this by offering the voice of our time - the early 21st century.    The reader will accept this, of course but we need to have some care, I believe. 

For my purposes anyway my third person voice is not omniscient and is rooted in the early twentieth century. So I'm sticking with "Negress" (unless, for whatever reason, I cut the line altogether). I'll just hope I'm not causing offence to anyone.

JK Rowling, my hero!

I rarely mention JK Rowling to anyone without being told that she isn't a very good writer. Actually, the people who tell me that - the ones that write anyway - are hardly DH Lawrences themselves and I've yet to work out how giving reading pleasure to millions of people can come from  bad writing. But putting these things aside good writing is not the reason that Ms Rowling is my hero at the moment.

Here I am, retired mind you, moaning about how hard it is to find time to write so I can keep up my 2,000 words a week. (I.e. about as much as I can read at the Richmond Writers Circle without trying their patiences beyond reasonable endurance.) And I know that Ms Rowling would have no trouble in juggling her life to fit in that  paltry effort. Actually, I suspect that most women who can balance jobs home and family would do better than me.

So I'm just going to have to get better at snatching moments from the day and learning to be inspired to order. (End of self slap on wrist)

Rewrites and Stewart Ferris

A while ago I saw this at the Saltaire Bookshop in Bradford and didn't buy it because I thought I'd be able to pick it up anywhere. I couldn't. So I was jolly pleased it was still there when I went back last week. The reason I wanted it was because I was attracted by the approach it offered for re-writes. I'm a person who needs a very structured approach to follow and Stewart Ferris offered a ten step one which appealed to me. At the moment I'm on the first version of his scheme. The full list is:

1 An approximation of the whole work

2 Tightening the structure

3 Development of the characters

4 Improving the dialogue

5 Working on the language and imagery

6 Restructuring parts of the work

7 Adding layers of conflict

8 Improving the crucial opening passage

9 More work on character development

10 Proofreading

The danger is, of course, that there is an inevitable tendency to put off things to a subsequent re-write that should be done now. But, if I guard against this, I think that it will keep me focused on the immediate task. At the moment it is to grind on until I have a story to work on. I hope when it comes to the next rewrite I shall not have such a mess with the plot that the task is too herculean. So far I don't think it is too bad but there is no doubt it gets harder as I go. 

I'm going to use the above numbering system for my scene structure first digit, so it helps there too.

Once more unto Dorothea brande

Actually it's going quite well. More says then not over the last two weeks or so I've woken at 7.00 with my vacuum of coffee, done a brief meditation and started writing. I usually manage about 45 minutes before the urge to check emails and such becomes too great. I'm not sure I'm getting more in tune with my subconscious but I do write. I'm going to try and keep it going for a while longer and see what else Dorothea has to say.

Another go at Dorothea Brande

I gave it a good try this morning. I remembered to try and do some introductory meditation exercises. I used ones from Brain States by Tom Kenyon. Also I was try to see how I close I could get to Anthony Trollope's speed of writing. He set himself a target, apparently, of 250 words every 15 minutes.

The result was, that I started Chapter 5 Scene 4. I was doing as prescribed by the Sydney Writers' studio. That is I was trying to let my subconscious take over and just write willy nilly without correction or editing as I went.

It is quite a complicated scene to describe - essentially a pole vault before anyone quite knew what a pole vault was. Women didn't do it all.

I just about got up to Trollope speed but ran out of steam after about 20 minutes in which I got 300 words written. I don't feel it was altogether a success. On the hand I DO have 300 words of the scene on paper I suppose. I'll try and revise those a bit later and try again with this approach tomorrow,

Plot planning

I started out with a synopsis, well the beginning of one really. It didn't last long. Almost as soon as I had written the first couple of scenes I had to keep changing it. I do try and plan the structure of scenes. This is a version that will not last too much longer. I am sure it helps but the truth is I shall not have a plot that I can shape properly until I have worked my way through to the end of the first draft and can look back. My fear is that when I get there the task will be too daunting.

Dorothea Brande again

For the last week I've been trying as well as I can to follow the Dorothea Brande approach. That is to say I have been setting the alarm for 7.00 making myself a vacuum flask of coffee and hitting the keyboard as soon as the PC powers up without venturing onto email or anything else. Probably I should try a few minutes meditation first but I haven't yet. I'd say that I'm still undecided. It certainly means that I start the day with a few hundred words written, that's true. On the other hand I feel half dead when I wake up. Does everyone feel that way? I never know. It is getting better though, I think. I can't say that it really helps me better tune into my subconscious. On the other hand the ideas seem to come as well as they do at any other time. I can't really say whether they're better or not. I'm going to keep trying for a while longer.

A fun app

I thought I'd share this fun app called 'I write like'. You copy and paste a chunk of story that you have written - say a few pages - and it tells you who it calculates you write like. It turns out that I write like Lewis Carroll. Which is a suppose about as good as I could hope for although I would have preferred George MacDonald Fraser (who I don't suppose they have).
Anyway that's all I know about it.  Good luck!

Link to 'I write like'

Readability meaures

Now I've posted all the first draft of Chapter 1, I thought I'd share a useful tip from this book by Jim Smith. It is one of the best practical guides I have seen.

One of the things it suggests is to keep track of readability statistics. These can be calculated by, for example, Microsoft Word.

Look at the table below. The Flesch score is a measure of how hard a piece of text is to read. Higher is better. The Fleach - Kincaid measure is an indicator of American school grade at which students can be expected to follow the text. I really only use the former. Smith recommends staying higher than 80. This tends to give a bit of a 'cat sat on the mat' feel to a story. It conflicts with those who tell us to write elegant sentences that involve semi-colons and such.  I have decided to stick with Smith's advice at least until I have a first draft. Although you will see that the scenes in the first chapter don't always succeed in this.

Probably more importantly, Smith recommends a pacing of the rhythm of the story.  You will see how the two halves of Scenes 3 and 4 pick up pace as they work towards the end of the scene.Also the final scene picks up pace and the start was with a bit of a bang.  I was quietly pleased with myselffor those bits.

Scene	Version	Words	words per sentence	characters per word	Flesch	Flesch / Kincaid	Passives sentences
1	1.3	517	8.0	4.2	85.5	3.3	3.0%
2	1.0	803	10.6	4.4	79.1	4.7	1.0%
3.1	1.0	1,526	nc	nc	73.6	5.6	7.0%
3.2	1.0	1,222	nc	nc	80.4	4.7	4.0%
4.1	1.0	1,431	nc	nc	71.4	7.1	4.0%
4.2	1.0	1,177	11.0	4.2	81.7	4.5	1.0%
5	1.0	1,464	15.7	4.4	76.0	5.2	2.0%
6	1.0	1,223	nc	nc	75.8	6.0	3.0%
7	1.0	1,362	nc	nc	79.7	4.7	0.0%
8	1.0	1,201	8.7	4.1	85.0	3.5	5.0%

nc = not calculated

Getting down to writing

Since the only writing class I have done (At the Sydney Writer's Studio) I have believed that writing is an interplay of the subconscious and the conscious. So I immediately took to "Becoming a Writer" by Dorothea Brande. *See below - I don't seem able to copy a book cover without the Amazon - 'look inside' - never mind) It makes sense to me that the conscious has to serve and protect the unconscious. The creative comes from the latter and the craft from the former. So far well and good. Her prescription though is a bit harder. I know that writing as soon as I wake in the morning is the right thing to do - it's just that it's so easy to fiddle around reading news on the internet. Goodness knows that I should find explicit time to write each day.  I mean how hard can it be! I'm retired. But so often it seems anti -social when my partner is around.
When I actually start writing and get into the zone (whoever thought of that phrase - it is a good one) it all works find - my mind just focuses and nothing else seems to matter. Indeed I really don't think of anything else - only the writing.

Anyway, I shall try again tomorrow, I have made my pot of coffee and set my alarm for 7.00. All I have to do is put the coffee on the microwave and tap at the keyboard, Wish me luck! I'll report how I go.

Learning on the job

Seeing as how I am learning on the job I read as I go books on how to do it. There are a lot of them. Many are worthy without being special. But a few I really have found helpful - I think this is a personal thing. One I am enjoying at the moment is Louise Doughty's 'A novel in a year'. This is a gentle 'let's have a cup of tea and talk about it' approach with some well thought out exercises. And yes I do wish I had done the exercises before I started! (I did do some of them, mind.)