Holiday exercies! - better late than never?

A standard plot introduces an outsider to a community - each shakes up the other. The community can be as small as a family or as large as a small town. Introduce a stranger to your community. What impact will they have, who will they influence - and will it be beneficial or detrimental?

This is as true for life writing, of course, as it is for fiction. What has happened in your own family when strangers have come into it. The strangers could be birth parents, in-laws, spouses, adopted children or foster children. For some people the stranger could even be a new baby.

Go on an artist's day - or do something new this holiday. Something you have never done. This could be as simple as eating a food you've never eaten, or learning a new skill. Even going to a new place can be refreshing and energising. Make a firm decision to refresh your writing self!

This holidays I made glass beads with my son - he bought a beginner's lampworking kit after watching people use them on YouTube. We went to my mother's place - she has the largest shed in the world - and learnt how to melt the glass around a thin steel rod coated with bead release. We learnt how to roll the glass in fritt (spelling?) and roll the bead on a graphite pad to shape it. It was so much fun doing something completely different. And, of course, it's a skill I can pass on to a character!

When you've done your new thing - write it up. If it's something new you've eaten, write about what it tasted like, what it smelt like and the texture. Think about the colour. How did you eat it and who, if anyone, was with you? Describe the setting. If you go somewhere new, do the same thing.

If you learnt a new skill, write it up twice - first notes on the skill - technical notes, so that if you ever do give it to a character, you're speaking with authority. Then write it up imaginatively - again, using all your senses. You might choose to do this by passing it on to a character.

Happy holidays. Oh, and check this out!

Isabel Allende

Has just published a new book - Island Beneath the Sea. 'With the violence, the mad wife and the torrid sex, the ingredients are all in place for a bosom-heaving blockbuster, but Isabel Allende brings to her storytelling another dimension altogether.' Dianne Dempsey, The Age.

Note if for your holiday reading if you enjoyed The Sum of Our Days!

new book

I've just read Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream: the Process of Writing Fiction. He's got great chapters on writing from the cinema of the mind and sensory detail, one of which I'll photocopy for next semester's resource book. Terrific book if you happen to see it on your local library system. I'd particularly recommend it to anyone contemplating novel writing or the advanced writing project.

Limited Third Person explained (hopefully!)

A lot of students managed to establish their limited third person viewpoint without taking advantage of that. Once you’ve established a viewpoint character, even if you’re going to alternate viewpoint character from chapter to chapter, you can give your reader direct access to their thoughts and feelings. This avoids unnecessary repetition of pronouns or your character’s name. It also leads you to less telling and more showing.

Here’s an extract from Christos Tsiolkas’ Slap. It’s told from the viewpoint of Rosie, the mother of the child who has been slapped. See how Tsiolkas establishes the viewpoint character and then speaks directly from her voice. Can you also please notice that this is told in the simple past but we it read as the fictional present. The immediacy is created in the writing, not by the tense.

…Hugo had already watched it [Finding Nemo] right through earlier in the day. It had become his favourite over the last few weeks and now she too almost knew it by heart. Sometimes she would pretend to be Dory to his Nemo. She wished he could be in the bath with her (except it would be too hot for him, the little fella). They could pretend to be Dory and Nemo, under the water, in the pretty sapphire world underneath the sea. She’d pretend to be Dory, forgetting everything he told her, trying not to giggle as Hugo got more and ore excited and frustrated.

Her eyes flung open. Damn. It was around lunchtime that she received the letter, just after she had come back from the park with Hugo. Rosie had gone pale as she read the dry words stating the date and time for the hearing to be held at the Magistrates Court in Heidelberg.

Submitting work

I am amazed at the number of students who don't actually read the assignment submission information and are still submitting work as .docx rather than .doc. If this was a magazine requesting submissions, you do realise that no matter how good your work was, it would simply not be opened by the editor and therefore not looked at, let alone considered, for publication.

I can't begin to emphasise how important it is for new, emerging and established writers to be able to read simple instructions. If you were applying for grants, for example, you would need to read the submission information very carefully - maybe twice. If you were unsure of any detail in that information, you would have to go to the grant website and see if it was available in a more comprehensible form. As a last resort, you might decide to phone the grants officer - but only as a last resort because you wouldn't want to look unprofessional.

If you are still unsure of how to submit .doc, rather than a .docx do what you would have to do as a professional writer - read the instructions and then, if all else fails, use an internet search engine so you can solve your problem!

Common errors made by new writers.

Sentences that begin with gerunds are often weak sentences as they are frequently in the passive voice:
check out this lesson in gerunds:
Check out dialogue tips and punctuation here.
Repeating monotonous sentence structures - there's a good example here of Stephanie Meyer's monotonous sentence structure.
Joining two independent clauses without using correct punctuation or sentence modifiers - here.
Over-reliance on adjectives and adverbs rather than verbs, which are the muscles of writing - this is simply a matter of going through your own work and highlighting adverbs and adjectives and seeing which ones you need.

Do go through your work with these problems in mind. Happy Easter!

Patrick Ness

I've just got back from hearing Patrick Ness talk at the local library. He is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy which has won such great acclaim, particularly in the world of young adult fiction. The first book of the Trilogy is The Knife of Never Letting Go.

There's a great review of the book here. Interesting, too, what Boyce says about cross-over fiction.

Thoroughly enjoyed watching another author strut his stuff. There were two school groups there and Ness engaged them with an easy, laid-back talk on writing and a clever demonstration on just how much life experience we all have that can be turned into fiction.

This reminded me of my Great Big List of Everything I Know exercise. Grab your writer's journal and begin a list of everything you know - start with at least fifty things:
I know how to be a daughter, a mother, an only child, a wife, a girlfriend. I know how to be betrayed and how to betray. I know how to ride a horse and a bike, and how to ride pillion on a motorbike. I know how to spin yarn, knit and crochet. I know how to sew. I can darn socks. I can make soup, bread and pasta. I can throw a pot on a wheel. I can say I love you in French and sweetheart in Spanish. I know how to train a dog and how to look after tropical fish. I know how to get my own way, most of the time. I know how to go camping, if I have to. I know how to mix a good cocktail. I know how to make risotto. I know how to make a pizza from scratch and how to make a pizza oven. I know how to send a child overseas without crying at the airport. I know how to say goodbye to someone who is dying. I know how to be a step-mother. I know how to give birth and how to sit in a hospital with a sick, maybe dying child. I know how to argue - with lovers, husbands, children as well as people I don't know. I know how to surrender. I know how to write a haiku. I know how to juggle finances and overspend. I know how to pack books for a move. I know how to pack up an entire house for a move, but I never do it properly. I know how to price secondhand books and how to sell them. I know how to put together a rare book catalogue. I know how to research and all that entails - footnotes, bibliographies, tumbling piles of books on the library desk and hours spent chasing tails down the rabbit hole that is Google. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a bad friend. I know how to end a friendship. I know how to be loyal. I know how to tell a lie that will go undetected.

Wow! What a lot of material I have that I could use in my own writing! (Pity I'm not doing any at the moment...)