Does size matter? #writetip

Veronica from Marbella has a problem with her novel being too long: I’ve been told by many people (and seen it on countless websites) that publishers won’t look at debut novels that are too long. I’ve been told mine, a story set in the days of the French Resistance, should be between 70,000 and 90,000 words. I’m only about two-thirds of the way into it and it’s already over 85,000 words. What should I do? Should I cut out one of the characters? Change the plot slightly? Take out one of the subplots? Please help, because I can’t bear the thought of spending all this time writing a book and then being told it’s too long to be published.

First of all, the thing to bear in mind about word count guidelines is that is all they are – guidelines. If a stunning novel landed on an agent or publisher’s desk that they simply couldn’t put down, there is no way it would be rejected as being too long, even if it was well over the standard word count!

Secondly, you have said yourself that you haven’t even finished the book yet, so there is no way of knowing what should be cut, if anything.

A first draft is just a way of getting your thoughts and ideas down on paper. When you go through your first rewrite you will automatically cut sentences, paragraphs, maybe even entire scenes, because they don’t fit. You may find that you have two or three minor players who could be morphed into one stronger character, which again would affect the word count.

On second, third, fourth and fifth drafts, you’ll tighten dialogue, cut out all the padding and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.

By the time your novel is ready to be sent anywhere, it will be a much smoother, sleeker beast than the one you are currently wrestling with. Get the words down and leave the worries about length and publishing needs until you’ve polished your baby so that it gleams. If it does that, no one will care if it’s a few thousand words more than the guidelines say it should be.

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Ailsa Abraham muses on aging disgracefully @ailsaabraham

I have a wonderful guest post today from Ailsa Abraham, whose novels are currently on special offer, so don't miss out.

Hello, Lorraine, and thanks for inviting me over. I thought I'd just have a muse about ageing today.

 

The warning there is real enough. I don't suppose any of us can resist giving our characters some traits that belong to people we know, or ourselves. I freely admit that the female lead in the Alchemy series, Riga, is modelled on a very much younger version of me. We can all think of male novelists who are obviously living out their fantasies through their work with heroes who can fly planes or helicopters, sail anything that floats, climb, ride horses and achieve everything perfectly. They may also be experts in various fields which would have taken two lifetime's study to gather.

This got me thinking. Suppose I were to write realistically? I would love to break into the crime genre because most of my life I have been involved with the police. No, I'm not a hardened criminal or drug baroness. My parents were both in the Metropolitan Police and met in training school where my father was mother's class captain. He eventually went on to Scotland Yard while she resigned her “wooden-top” job as a married woman. As he died when I was four, we were constantly visited by the local coppers making sure we were lacking nothing and often taking me for a ride in their police cars.

Even over here in France I managed to become an official interpreter for the gendarmes and customs. I must have “police family” in invisible ink on my forehead!

So if I were to re-cast myself as a detective would it work? Well...no! As I am a very honest person, going through the requirements of a successful character in that genre, I don't fit the bill.

Detectives are usually leaders of a team and popular with their colleagues. My Bipolar Condition would mean that I would be a big hit on some days and a pain in the proverbial when throwing hissy fits all the time on others.

Mental agility? No. Many bangs on the head have left me with enough brain damage to ensure that if I DO have a flash of inspiration, I must remember to write it down before I forget it. Chief Superintendent Abraham would need a full time PA to follow her around taking notes.

Powers of deduction? That would depend on how much distraction there was around. The same brain damage renders me incapable of thinking with more than one source of noise near me, for example, while trying to write this piece I have the TV on beside me and my Old Feller trying to talk. Cannot concentrate on any of them.

Instant availability? No, I can't just dash off to another country or district at the drop of a hat. It's the dog and cat, you see? They have never been away from us in their lives and it would kill me to put them in kennels. Jumping on planes to the States is out of the question.

Chasing baddies across roofs or jumping from boat to boat in a harbour? Come off it! Nearing my old age pension and recovering from various accidents and illnesses, I can hardly move some days. I don't think using Texas Ranger, my Walker would look too good in a pursuit scene.
 

I'd suggest that I might be an armchair old lady detective but Miss Marple has already been done... Miss Marple on a motorbike with a penchant for dressing up as a pirate? What do you think?

Bio and links

Ailsa Abraham writes under two names and is the author of six novels. Alchemy is the prequel to Shaman's Drum, published by Crooked Cat in January 2014. Both are best-sellers in their genres on Amazon. She also writes gay male romance under her brother's name, Cameron Lawton.

She has lived in France for over twenty years and enjoys knitting and crochet and until recently was the oldest Hell's Angel in town . Her interests include campaigning for animal rights, experimenting with different genres of writing and trips back to the UK to visit friends and family. She runs an orphanage for homeless teddy bears and contributes a lot of work to Knit for Africa. She is also addicted to dressing up, saying that she is old enough to know better but too wise to care.

Web-page

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Help! I'm Blocked #writetip

One of my regular readers is suffering from something many writers have faced. He writes: I have a problem and I need some advice. I have a crippling writer's block that I can't get rid of. I have some ideas but when it comes to writing the story, nothing. What should I do? Would enrolling in a writing course help in any way?

Enrolling in a writing course might well be the answer to your problem, but I doubt it. If you have ideas already, but can’t bring yourself to write them, being on a course might add to your woes, rather than easing them.

There are as many reasons for writer’s block occurring as there are suggested ways of dealing with it. As I don’t know you on a personal level, I will have to put forward several things for you to try. I hope one or more of the following will do the trick for you.

Have a set time to write

Whether it’s first thing in the morning, an hour when you get home from work, half an hour during your lunch break, set aside the same time every day. It doesn’t matter what you write. The important thing here is to train your mind to accept that this part of the day is writing time.

Another trick under this heading is changing the time you’ve set aside to write. If you have already made the decision that mornings are your writing time, but it no longer works for you, change the time. Write in the evening instead.

Relax and stop looking for perfection

Don’t read what you’ve written so far. Just get on with the next bit. Turn off your internal editor. Many people stop writing because they cannot produce perfect prose in a first draft. Nobody can! Don’t allow the fear of imperfection to get between you and your writing. There will always be time to polish that imperfect prose. Get it written and edit it later – much later!

Don’t write

Sounds like a contradiction, I know, but maybe your brain needs time to formulate the ideas properly before you settle down to write. You might have so many ideas in your head that you aren’t able to decide which one you want to develop. Go for a walk. Take a train journey. Spend an evening with friends. Forget about writing for a while. You’ll come back to it refreshed and raring to go.

Read more

Reading helps the creative juices to flow. I find reading in a different genre to the one I write in is beneficial, but you might find you get better results if you read material similar to that you want to write.

Set deadlines with a writing buddy

Find a friend, online or in real life, who also wants to get back into writing on a regular basis. This works well if you lay out some ground rules first. Decide how many words per day, week or month you will each write. Then set deadlines for exchange of material. It’s a bit like running with a friend, or going to the gym. It’s easy to backslide when you’re on your own, but much harder to drop out if you’ve committed yourself to a word count and deadline with someone else.

Work on more than one book, story, article or poem at a time

This doesn’t work for everyone, but some writers find it easier to switch between works, depending on what moves them for that day.

Writing exercises

I’ll be honest, writing exercises for the sake of it isn’t something that would work for me, but I have been told that many writers swear by it as a way to overcome writer’s block.

However, there is one thing that I do, which could be considered a writing exercise. Try interviewing the characters you want to write about. Put together a series of questions and then write up the answers as if you were the character. I find characters come to life if I allow them to answer for themselves. Believe me, once that happens, your characters will live in your head, nagging nonstop until you write their story.

Make sure your writing space works for you

Is your desk covered in scraps of paper? Do you feel hemmed in and uncomfortable? If your work area doesn’t make you feel creative, it will stifle the urge to write. Spend a bit of time making your writing area somewhere you want to be.

Remember that writing is fun!

This is the biggie, for me. Most of us write for pleasure. It’s fun. We create worlds and people to populate those worlds. Then we make life difficult for them so that they have to overcome obstacles in order to succeed in whatever we have decided they should do. We have the power to make them fall in love, fall out of love, go to war, lose a battle, find a friend, betray a colleague, become a saint, sup with the devil, rise like a star, fall into despair. How can we not enjoy ourselves?

Let go of your inhibitions – write and have some fun.

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Website woes

If anyone has sent me an email and not received a reply over the past few days, please could you resend? My service provider was offline, which meant no website and no emails! I felt as if I'd been removed from the world.

Not to worry, the whole sorry saga will provide good material for a future Notes from the Margin column in Writing Magazine.





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Jennifer C Wilson guest post @inkjunkie1984

On the 4^th February, 2013, I was glued to my computer screen, getting annoyed by phone calls, emails and frankly anything at all which threatened to distract me from what I was trying desperately to focus on. Happily, it was a quiet day. Because this was it. Months after a certain skeleton was discovered in a certain car park, we were finally going to hear (for certain) whether it was or was not King Richard III. I actually found myself holding my breath.

Despite trying very hard, I still cannot put my finger on when my obsession with Richard III started. He’d appeared as a footnote in a couple of Tudor history books I’d read, and I knew vaguely about the Wars of the Roses, but gradually, I began working backwards, and became increasingly interested in this (to my mind) misunderstood monarch. As a fan of Macbeth, I suppose I sympathised with another king Shakespeare had plagued with a twisted reputation. By the time the dig in Leicester had started, I was, you could say, ‘keen’ on the notion of finally finding his body. After all, how could we have lost one of our most famous kings?

The dig itself started on the morning of the 25^th August 2012, and according to Mathew Morris, Site Director for the University of Leicester, it took six hours and 34 minutes to find the king. Of course it wasn’t that simple. Having found part of a human skeleton (a leg bone), work had to halt whilst appropriate licences were obtained, but finally, on the 4^th and 5^th September, the skeleton was revealed. Male. Curved spine. Battle injuries. It really couldn’t be that easy, could it?

As newsreaders reported the findings, I couldn’t quite believe it. They explained the various tests which would now be undertaken, the dating of the bones, the DNA analysis – all very twenty-first century techniques, deployed to prove or disprove whether this was indeed the man himself.

I tried to write, but nothing worked. I was desperate to capture something, anything, of the history, the science, the thrill of the hunt, but not one thing seemed to flow properly.

And so we arrived at the 4^th February.

Armed with headphones, I onto the news website, listening to each announcement as it was made. I was very tempted to ignore my phone, but wasn’t convinced my colleagues would understand…

With the final conclusion that they were certain it was, indeed, Richard III, I was almost crying. Ridiculous, surely? I mean, nobody was expecting to find him alive, and yet, seeing the images of his skeleton somehow felt sad. Happily, things soon turned themselves around; there were more documentaries, articles, and books than you could possibly keep up with. Richard III was firmly back on the scene.

I visited the grave-site, beautifully-presented, but even there the words wouldn’t flow. Then, thanks to a competition for ghost poems, I spent more time on it. If Richard’s ghost was hanging about, then surely, with all this publicity, he’d be a bit more active? I got thinking that if they Richard and Anne Boleyn were to meet as ghosts, they could have a lot in common; both lost their lives to a Henry Tudor, after all. And so it began.

The poem was awful, but that November, through NaNoWriMo, I managed 50,000 words. I loved the writing process, finding snippets here and there which could be expanded, developed and eventually turned into some kind of plot. The editing process was long, but in January 2015, I had an amazing stroke of luck, which gave me the final shove I clearly needed.

 

Sat in Leicester Cathedral, in my ballot-allocated seat at the Service of Compline for Richard III (on the front row, of all places – it pays to arrive earlier than requested…), I knew I had to buck up and finish it. So I did.

Kindred Spirits: Tower of London, was released by Crooked Cat Publishing in October 2015. This week, I’m happy to say it is reduced to 99p/c as part of Crooked Cat’s special paranormal themed week. If you take a look, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Mini-bio

Jennifer is a marine biologist by training, who developed an equal passion for history whilst stalking Mary, Queen of Scots of childhood holidays (she has since moved on to Richard III, clearly!). She completed her BSc and MSc at the University of Hull, and has worked as a marine environmental consultant since graduating.

Enrolling on an adult education workshop on her return to the north-east reignited Jennifer’s pastime of creative writing, and she has been filling notebooks ever since. In 2014, Jennifer won the Story Tyne short story competition, and also continues to work on developing her poetic voice, reading at a number of events, and with several pieces available online. Her debut novel Kindred Spirits: Tower of London was released by Crooked Cat Publishing in October 2015.

Kindred Spirits: Tower of London Blurb:

A King, three Queens, a handful of nobles and a host of former courtiers…

In the Tower of London, the dead outnumber the living, with the likes of Tudor Queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard rubbing shoulders with one man who has made his way back from his place of death at Bosworth Field to discover the truth about the disappearance of his famous nephews.

Amidst the chaos of daily life, with political and personal tensions running high, Richard III takes control, as each ghostly resident looks for their own peace in the former palace – where privacy was always a limited luxury.

With so many characters haunting the Tower of London, will they all find the calm they crave? But foremost – will the young Plantagenet Princes join them?

Key links

Blog: https://jennifercwilsonwriter.wordpress.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/inkjunkie1984

International Amazon link: http://authl.it/B016TRKU2A

Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/586365

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