3 x When Computers and Writing Don't Mix

After my posts on index cards, I was interested by some of the comments about rewriting and plotting on computer. Now, I'm a dinosaur and always choose for the lowest tech approach possible, but I know there are lots of people out there for whom computers are a more natural way of working. However, there are three circumstances when I think computers really don't work.

1. Re-drafting

You've written your novel, and if you're technically minded you might have used something clever like a spreadsheet to develop it. At this stage I'd say dump the computer. Rewrites HAVE to be a time when anything goes, when you're shuffling the cards around and anything could end up anywhere. If you use a spread sheet, you're changing one element a time. It doesn't have the same 'suck it and see' facility. There's an organic fluidity about using the cards: Take this one away, what does the novel look like? Put this one here, not there, or what about over there? This needs to happen before that - or does it? It's harder to experiment when it's on the computer, it all looks so neat and tidy and well organised. But it's got to get worse before getting better.

2. Editing

For some strange reason, when we edit on the computer screen we miss stuff. Print it out and mistakes and typos screech at you, practically circling themselves with red ink. Always, always, always print out your manuscript to do at least the final edit on paper.

3. Note taking

OK, this one has caused me grief because I really really really want an iPad and taking notes was one of the ways I was going to justify it to myself. But I know it doesn't work like that. A bit like re-drafting, notes are an organic form, the imaginative part of the brain working, not the technical bit. Snippets of info get saved - ideas for titles, snatches of dialogue, plot ideas (and shopping lists). Now you can put them all neatly into your computer, but I bet you won't get round to looking at them. Whereas, what could be simpler or more absorbing than flicking through one of your old notebooks and seeing a ragbag of information?

Computers are wonderful tools and incredibly useful. But writing is an imaginative act, so don't get sucked into using them for everything.

What To Call An Agent

It sounds really simple. You put together your first three chapters, your synopsis, your covering letter ready to send round to some agents. But then you have the problem of what to call them. Dear Ms Smith? Dear John Smith? Dear Jane? How formal, or informal, should you be with someone who you probably haven't met but are hoping to enter into a close business relationship with?

The simple answer, is none of the following. Andrew Lownie, of the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency, has come up with a list of some of the ways he has been addressed by would-be clients....

Hi there!

Dear Respectful One

Dear Potential Partner

Dear Sir Andrew

My dearest

Dear Mr./Mrs.

Dear Mr or Mrs Agent

To whom it may concern

(You can find the complete list at his website). I'm seriously hoping you're laughing at this rather than blushing guiltily, but how should it have been done?

Dear Andrew Lownie

That's it. It's correctly spelt, and there isn't a title. This is particularly important when writing to women because of the whole Mrs, Miss, Ms business. A Mrs may be deeply offended at being called a Ms. A Miss may prefer the anonymity of Ms. They may be married, but use their maiden name at work, or vice versa. I was once told rather huffily by one editor that she was married so she certainly wasn't a Ms or a Miss, but she chose to use her maiden surname professionally so she wasn't Mrs maiden name either.

Another problem with titles is playing guess which sex as there are several names that can be unisex, like Val, Nick, Jo. And some names can catch you out. Leslie for men, Lesley for women you might think. But my middle name is Leslie, because I'm named for my grandfather and my father didn't know there was a female version. I've met another female Leslie in publishing, spelt that way for exactly the same reason.

So, no title is the best policy. And check, and re-check, the spelling. Is it Carol, or Carole? Katherine, or Catharine? Get the name wrong and your submission goes straight onto the 'no' pile.

Perhaps all this sounds too fussy. Perhaps you feel that agents are putting themselves on a pedestal way up above everybody else. In which case, why not just stick to my favourite from Andrew Lownie's list: Dear God's Elect. That should do the trick.

Creating Convincing Dialogue

I get Google Alerts so I know when my name gets mentioned on the internet. The only trouble is, my name is hardly unusual so I get alerts for a photographer, a legal big cheese and a Texan volleyball player, among others. I see the first two lines of the relevant post. This came into my inbox yesterday...

Sarah Duncan walked 4.46 kilometers in 51 mins. It was VERY cold & windy. Another neighbor came with us and she walks slower so we could not walk as fast as ...

I imagine she's about fortyish, with ash-blonde streaks because she's going a little bit grey. She likes to wrap a big scarf around her neck and dig her hands deep in her pockets, along with a tube of Lipsalve and tissues still in the packet. She wears sea colours: mid blues and greens. Her husband told her when they were dating that they brought out the colour of her eyes. That was more years ago than she cares to mention. Since January she has been walking with her friend from across the road - Patty - to try to get fit and lose some weight. They're doing OK, they've been surprised at how easy it is to build up their times over the distance. When they finished the walk, the neighbour wanted to join them again, and they smiled and said they'd let her know, but knew they wouldn't.

That's all made up. For all I know, she's a lapdancer with dark hair snaking down her back. But not to me. My version comes from those few lines and the clues: the precision of the distance, the capitalised VERY, the sentence construction - particularly the 'she walks slower'. I'm busy constructing a whole persona from those clues.

So as writers, we need to make sure the clues are there. The problem is, I don't think you can construct the voice to fit the character - at least, that's not how it works for me. I hear the voice first. I hear how they speak, their intonation, their sentence construction, their accent, if they use jargon, or a particular vocabulary. I hear them, and from what they say, I work out how they look and how they are.

Writing this post, I realise that's the same process a reader goes through. They read/hear the dialogue and pick up clues, just the same way I did for speedwalking Sarah Duncan. I don't know if other writers do it the same way, but it seems a good way to create convincing dialogue - hear it first, then write it down.

PS Absolutely nothing to do with writing, but my lovely daughter Isabel is entering for Miss Bath! She needs people to vote for her, so if any one felt inclined to do so, text 11Isabel to 84205 - the downside is it costs 60p per text.

Plotting with Index Cards

A couple of queries have come up about exactly HOW I use index cards.

I don't do anything complicated like plan out scenes using Excel, I start with three or four plot points and write to join them, making notes as I go along. After about 80,000 words and much gnashing of teeth I reckon I've scraped my way to the end.

That's when I use the index cards. I print out the novel, single spaced to save paper, and go through scene by scene. It's a scene per card, regardless of length - a scene could be just a paragraph, or 25 pages. (However, trying to squeeze all the info from 25 pages onto one little card might give me a clue there and then that I need to divide that scene into two/three/four separate scenes.)

I reckon there are about 50-100 scenes per novel. The set of cards I've just done, I started with lots of little scenes, but they've been rationalised into some meatier scenes ie I went from approx 100 cards to about 60 (I'm guessing the numbers). Some scenes have been completely cut, and new ones imagined.

On each index card I write the major points from the scene - it could be action, information, anything. When I first started doing this they were very neatly written. Six novels in, and it's all pretty much a scrawl. Still, I know what I'm on about, and they're a tool for me, not anyone else.

Then I sit down at the computer with a stack of cards beside me. I save the draft as Draft 2, and go through the cards until I get to the end. I move stuff I don't need to the very end of the text rather than cutting it, and I make notes to myself as necessary along the way marking them with XXX so I don't miss them at a later stage. Then I do the whole thing again. And again. 16 times for Adultery for Beginners (my first novel), 4 times for A Single to Rome, 3 times for Kissing Mr Wrong (but I was pushed to make my delivery date and did another complete re-write after my editor had seen it).

What I don't do is divide it into chapters - I won't do that for ages, it's the very last thing I do before sending off to my editor, although I'll have an inkling of where some of the chapter ends may fall.

Apples and Pears - Markets for Short Stories

When I started writing I wrote short stories, and it became very clear that there were two sorts of short stories: those that won short story competitions and those that were published in the women's magazines.  

They were not the same thing at all, as different as apples and pears.

When I started teaching I had a student who was determined to crack the women's magazine market because it was the only one that paid.  This is true.  He'd come to my class because he was getting rejected. He suspected a female conspiracy against him because he was a man.  Not true.  A good story is a good story, regardless of the sex of the writer.  

What became clear was that his inclinations were to write literary short stories, apples, if you like.  But the women's magazine market wants pears.  It makes no difference if you've got a juicy Braeburn, a crisp Cox's Orange Pippin, or a woolly Granny Smith - they're not pears.  

He refused to accept this, and stomped off in a huff. 

The same is true the other way round - if you're writing pears, they won't get placed in a literary short story competition.  Another student was having great success with the womags - hardly a week went by when she didn't report another sale - but yearned to win a short story competition.  It didn't happen for her, although she worked very hard at her writing.  

If you want to write short stories then you need to know your market.  How? Easy - read. Read, read, then read some more.  Apples?  Or pears?  Work it out, then apply to your own work. 

Character Arc

When you think about it, what I've been writing about most of this week has been character arc, although I've put it in terms of plot.  Of course, character and plot are inextricably linked, and I expect now I'm going to talk about character, it'll end up being about plot.  Still, here goes.

A character arc is the development that takes place in a character's emotional life over the course of the story.  They start emotionally at A and end up at B.  With luck, they've also been through C, D, E, F, G etc on their way to B, but put simply, by the end they have changed.  Usually they have learned something about themselves and/or the way the world works.

Take The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, the narrator, comes East.  He's from the Mid-West, and thinks his cousin Daisy is wonderful with her rich husband and glamorous Eastern lifestyle.  Mid-Western values of honesty, hard work, thrift etc are forgotten as he gets sucked into a more sophisticated way of life.  But by the end he has changed.  He returns home, disillusioned by the East, emotionally scarred and generally sadder and wiser than when he started. That's his character arc.  

Isabel in Adultery for Beginners starts out as being entirely dependent on her husband, not just financially but also emotionally.  By the end, she is reaching towards financial independence, she is taking responsibility for her own life and actions, she is making her own future instead on relying on others. She has learned about self-reliance and self-determination, and when she establishes a new relationship it will be as equals.  

Often, when the novel starts we see our main character as having this virtue, that fault.  Over the course of the story we usually learn why they have those virtues/faults.  We learn what are the problems created by those virtues/faults.  We learn how they're going to overcome those specific problems and crucially, how THEY are learning not to make those mistakes again by recognising their virtues/faults and changing. 

In Adultery for Beginners, my editor said she wanted only a hint that Isabel and Adam were going to get together, rather than a full blown passionate embrace, explaining that readers could fill in the gaps for themselves. She didn't explain further than that - she may not have known why it was deep down the right thing to do.  Neither did I; I just accepted the situation and amended it.  

In retrospect I know why it was right for Isabel. Isabel at the beginning of the novel is impetuous; she behaves like a child wanting things now.  She rushes headlong into a relationship, and gets badly burned. But by the end she has grown up.  She has learned not to do that again.  She will take things with Adam slowly, and let the relationship develop at its own pace.  

I believe that one of the reasons we read fiction is to discover how other people deal with change.  Without change there is no point to reading.  In a novel the character will change on many levels, in a short story there will usually be space for only one or two changes.  But change there will be.  

Plot, Plot, Plotting!

I've been struggling a bit with my current book.  It hasn't been coming together in the way I hoped despite several drafts and sessions with the index cards.  But I've just done another mega card session and - cross fingers - I think I'm there.

I posted earlier about one of the earlier plotting sessions and how I couldn't decide whether to start earlier, or feed that story through the plot as scenes of flashback.  Well - surprise surprise given my oft-stated aversion to flashback - I've decided against that.  But it still wasn't right.  The index cards were laid out on the table yet again and I stared at them until my eyes hurt.  It wasn't working.  Characters were having to make abrupt emotional about-turns - I love you, oh no I don't, I love you instead. (Sort of - I paraphrase.) Plus, there was a lot of misery and moping, which I don't like writing much.

Then - ping! - lightbulb moment.  Time was going to come to my side. Time, the great healer.  My story was going to spread over several years, not several months.  Characters had time to meet, change, do whatever they were going to do.  Suddenly it all fell into place.  I didn't have to explain how A had met B in the past - I could show them meeting.  I didn't have to explain how C once looked after D - I could show it.  When F behaves badly, it was because F was young and foolish, not older and more calculating.  When G gets taken in, it was because G is young and naive, not older and, frankly, a bit dim.

I looked at the cards again.  Same scenes, but now a very different flavour pervades the book.  And I'm happily re-writing again.