The Night of Writing Dangerously

Saturday night two of the Egoboo crowd made it to the Rockingham version of the Night of Writing Dangerously, generously organized and provided by the Rockingham Council and run by Lee Battersby.

Satima and I ended up at far ends of the room, probably a good thing as my laugh carries! Over twenty sponsors donated time, memberships, books, magazines, and flyers to help make the Write-In awesome.

When we walked through the door, we were greeted by a table full of packed bags and a sign-in sheet, and to the right tables of tea, coffee, and huge stacks of prizes. Over fifty odd writers joined us for the wild ride of talking to professional authors (Anna Jacobs and Bevan McGuiness) and settling in for some serious wordcounts.

I made 3250 during the night. Not words I am in love with, but they are words to work with none the less. Various partners in crime wrote between 200 words through to 4000, and given the number of people there, possibly even more!

Anna Jacobs was a delight to listen to. Not only does she have fifty five books published, but she is a Pantser. She does very little planning, but lots of research, and has no idea what is going to happen until it does. She stressed the important of learning how to write in ways that suit YOU and only YOU, and that there are no solid rules other than your writing must be gripping, interesting, and drag the reader along for the ride.

Bevan McGuiness was enthusiastic and energetic, bouncing around the desk to talk about how he balances writing and full time work. He talked about finding sources of inspiration to help us maintain the creative flow, and developing his works around trying to capture the feel of the inspiration source.

Once the authors had had a bit of a chat with us all, we settled in for the first round of writing. I think on our table, the bulk of our words were written now. Fire and energy ran through our veins; though I will point out it was rather disconcerting to sit next to Heidi Wessman Kneale, who hammered her keyboard so fast I thought I saw smoke.

Is this what people think when they sit next to me? I have had numerous comments about typing like a machine gun, for example. Just because I learnt on the old fashioned type writer, I may be a little hard on the old board, and having been an IRC junkie for a while, my keystrokes might be on the high side...

I managed about 1700 words in the first hour (I think) and then after that I was pulling teeth. I got a cup of tea; I gossipped with Lyn Battersby, I chatted with people.. and then we had dinner, courtesy of Subway. It was really wonderful to be in a space with so many other creatives hammering away, and food was a simple "walk up and get it" rather than a "plan, remove children, start cooking, remove children, eat and clean up, remove children..." type of affair.

All in all I found the experience amazing,  validating, and inspiring. I'm hoping I can make a few more writing nights happen through sheer force of will before the end of November, unfortunately much smaller ones, and ones with planning and children and cleaning involved.

Regardless, I would say my big lesson with this year's Nano is learning how to talk to other writers.
:)

Once again, I'd like to say thanks to Lee Batterby for running the event, and also to Ace Cinemas; Adventure world; Asgard Games; ASIM; Australian writers Marketplace; Coeur De Lion Publishing; Cosmic Comics; Fablecroft Publishing; Fremantle Press; Fun Station; Harper Collins Australia; Island Magazine; Meanjin Magazine; Peter Cowan Writers Centre; Rockingham Shopping Centre; Serendipity MediSpa Baldivis; Sterling's Office National; Twelfth Planet Publishing; Walker Books and White Dwarf Books.

The prizes were very much coveted! I will definitely be keeping an ear out to see if this will run again next year.

Sarah P

Yes, Virginia, you do need an editor

The chance of any wannabe writer being published by one of the major houses is very low indeed. About one of every hundred manuscripts sent to an imprint of, say, Harper Collins or Hachette Livre, will actually become a real book in a real bookshop for real people to buy.

The one in a hundred figure would include works from all authors, not just newbies, and would include both fiction and non-fiction. So the situation is far worse than I'd thought. Glenda Larke has pointed out that figures she read some years ago from one big publishing house indicated that two books are published from every 5,000 fiction manuscripts received from new writers, and that would include those sent by agents.

Seeing these odds (and they are getting worse, not better!) more and more discouraged writers are turning to self publishing or vanity publishing just to get their books out there. Many of these writers think their work does not need editing.

They are wrong. All books need editing.

The manuscript pictured at right (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons) is the original proof copy of À la recherche du temps perdu (known in English as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust. Although this one is a galley proof, with Proust’s own notes on it, it looks pretty much as any manuscript looks after an editor has worked on it. Friends who are published by major houses have sometimes shown me their manuscripts when they come back from the first edit, and truly, that is how they look. And they will usually be accompanied by a dozen or more pages of notes.

Now, if your favourite author gets his or her manuscripts back looking like that, what do you think yours would look like if an editor had a go at it?

Robert Sprackland PhD, a colleague over at Linked In (you can find Robert at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/robert-sprackland-ph-d/7/25b/2a1) paraphrases Benjamin Franklin (himself an author of note) who once said, "A man who represents himself in a court of law has a fool for a lawyer and an idiot for a client." Robert suggests that Franklin’s words could be paraphrased as, "An author who does the final editing has a fool for an editor and an idiot for an author."

And he’s not wrong. Books need editors as crops need rain.

We grow too close to our own manuscripts to see their faults, and even though most writers – and published authors, too – have reading circles or critiquing groups, an editor brings a fresh pair of eyes to the work. A pair of eyes, moreover, that has seen many manuscripts and is familiar with current usage and style. It’s not just vocabulary, grammar, syntax and spelling, although their importance should not be under-estimated. Many agents and publishers simply won’t consider a manuscript that does not come up to scratch in all those areas. But editing is also about structure, about seeing where the high and low points of the plot occur and suggesting changes if they are in the wrong places. It’s about understanding point-of-view and character development. It’s about knowing where to prune and where to delve into the details.

Authors who are published by the major houses may moan and groan about the extra workload, but when a manuscript comes back from editing there’s nothing for it save knuckling down to make the necessary changes, which occasionally amount to major rewrites. Yet when the final edit is done, the author is almost always delighted with the result – and filled with gratitude for the editor.

A book that is published commercially will always be a joint effort, involving the author and at least one, and more often two, editors. That’s because the final copy edit is normally done by an editor who specialises in finessing the details. The copyeditor provides another fresh pair of eyes, because after several months of working with the author on a manuscript, the first editor may well have grown just as blind to its faults as the creator! And errors do creep in as changes are made during the first and second edits.

I have seen quite a few self-published books that were not edited, and I’ve also seen many that were supposed to have been edited and weren’t. Sadly, these have usually been subjected to the not-so-tender mercies of a vanity publisher.

Vanity publishing is certainly one way to get your book out there, especially if you only intend to share it with family and friends. You will need quite a few dollars in the bank, for the services of vanity presses are not cheap and they will charge you extra for editing. For a few hundred dollars, your manuscript will get at least a bit of attention – but usually not enough. I have seen some vanity-published books that the authors had paid good money to have edited come back from “editing” at a standard no higher than a serious author’s first draft, and oftentimes worse.

Your work deserves kinder treatment.

Personally, I think that rather than going to a vanity press, you are better served by learning how to be a real self publisher, which means registering a business name and then engaging your own editor, layout person and printing house, and paying them individually. If you shop around, it may be no more expensive than the average vanity press. You can find the names of experienced, trustworthy people through your state’s Society of Editors. Some editors are willing to act as Project Managers, finding graphic artists and printers for you and overseeing their work. Get quotes from several different people, and compare their offerings closely. The cheapest is not always the best, but nor is the dearest. Be prepared to learn as you go by listening to other people who have gone down this path before you.

It may be a long, slow, challenging job (allow at least six months, and a year is better) and it may be expensive, but you will have a better book at the end of it – and the satisfaction of knowing you did your very best to present your book as professionally as possible. Surely your precious manuscript deserves no less?

~~~~

Links to Societies of Editors within Australia:
# Society of Editors ACT

# Society of Editors NSW
# Society of Editors QLD
# Society of Editors SA
# Society of Editors TAS
# Society of Editors VIC
# Society of Editors WA

Words, words, glorious words!

I’ve spent over sixty years wallowing in words. As a child, I used to amuse my family by coming out with words way beyond my years; words I’d only read and therefore mispronounced. As a four year old, I once pointed to a sign on a public toilet and loudly asked my mother, “What’s gentlemen?” I pronounced it gent- (with a hard g)-lemon with the accent on the le. Mother (and several bystanders) thought this very funny. Thereafter, Mother continually embarrassed me by repeating the story to every family member, neighbour and friend who stayed long enough to listen.

Like most children of my generation, I adored Enid Blyton and devoured her books so fast the family budget couldn’t cope. (It was about that time I discovered libraries.) I wanted to write stories just like hers, and I would tell anyone who asked that I wanted to be a "children's authoress" when I grew up.

Relatives, knowing my weakness for the printed word, supported my addiction by giving me books for birthdays and Christmases. As well as Blyton, I gobbled up Kipling, Ransome, Sutcliff and innumerable books of fairy tales. From Sutcliff I expanded to encompass other historical writers such as Elizabeth Goudge, and from there it was only a short step through historical and folkloric fantasy (Mary Stewart) to high fantasy (Tolkien, of course!). A few years later, marriage to a man who loved science fiction brought me to the masters of that genre – Asimov, E.E. (Doc) Smith, Moorcock and others – and for several decades I read little else.

Then I discovered Zelazny’s Amber series.

I was approaching middle age by then, and looking for new directions. I had a gut feeling that I could write this stuff, too. OK, maybe not as well as Zelazny or my other favourite authors, but I sure wanted to try. There was one rather tiresome problem: I didn’t have any stories. Over the years, I had written a little poetry and even had some published, but the muse of fiction writing seemed uninterested in me.

Frustrated, I concentrated on non-fiction writing instead. I’d long been involved in the performing arts, and when I was invited to write the dance column for Music Maker magazine, which later became Arts West (now sadly defunct) I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. This led to work for other magazines and newspapers, and for several years I set my novelistic aspirations aside.

In my early fifties, fresh out of a divorce, I did what more sensible and organised people do in their teens and twenties – I packed up my household and set off to backpack my way around the world. I visited Thailand, Nepal, the UK and the USA, then back to the UK to work and earn money to fund more travel. It was in Devon, while working at a hotel that resembled Fawlty Towers, that I was finally muse-struck.

I was “Executive Housekeeper”, a grand title for a general dogsbody who races around carting linen hither and thither. By the end of each day I was exhausted. Night after night, I would return to my room and collapse in front of Coronation Street and East Enders, too tired for any kind of social life. But one night, just as I was about to turn on the television, a sentence popped into my head. To be left a widow at the age of twenty-one may sound like a tragedy, it ran, but to be honest, I felt liberated by Reyal’s death. I knew at once that it was the start of a novel, and I sat down to write it.

I had no idea where the story would take me, although I knew from the start it was about a girl on another planet who set out on what was to be an around-the-world trip and was sold into slavery en route. Wryly, I realised that this was a reflection of my own situation. Like my heroine, Kryshli, I had little notion of where I was going or what I’d be called on to do next. Every evening the story meandered a little farther, showing me Kryshli’s world and its people, and every evening I couldn’t wait to sit down with my notebook to learn what happened next.

Kryshli’s Story, of course, turned out to be a hopelessly unstructured tale with little in the way of plot or characterisation, an awful lot of telling and not much showing, and far more adverbs and adjectives than any decent writer would include. But nevertheless, it was, albeit a poor thing, mine own. It took me seven years to finish (I was amused to find that if I set the story aside for a few weeks or months, I would discover on my return that a similar time period had elapsed in Krishli’s life) and although I realised the novel’s shortcomings I could see that it was not entirely without merit.

Maybe I was a fiction writer, after all.

Not long after my return to Australia, I heard about the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in the hills outside Perth, Western Australia. I joined groups there and soaked myself in learning. When I found that one of my favourite authors, Juliet Marillier, was going to run a novel writing course I couldn’t wait to sign on. The course was called Tough Love, a term that describes the kind of criticism a budding author needs.

That was in 2003, and since then, other authors, including Michèle Drouart, Dave Luckett and Glenda Larke, have also contributed to my learning process. I am continually amazed at how generous published authors are in sharing their expertise with aspiring writers.

Through courses and workshops at KSP and elsewhere, I learnt how to write better. Through various critiquing groups, I also learnt to take tough criticism on the chin and profit from it. I now belong to several writers groups and feel I have reached the stage at which I can help others who may be just starting their journeys into the wonderful world of speculative fiction writing. I can, I hope, give and receive peer group criticism in a professional and compassionate manner.

And now the journey continues with Egoboo. Through this blog, the five of us – Carol, Helen, Jo, Sarah and myself – hope to share some of the joys and woes of that journey with our friends. Please feel free to add your comments to our posts and take the opportunity to share your own journey, whether or not it involves writing, with us. Happy trails, my friends!