Chapter One … again

On the fourth of March I posted that I’d finished Chapter One of Juniper Brown rewrites. I can now categorically tell you why Neil Gaiman didn’t make a blog until after he’d finished American Gods. There’s this constant back and forth, and when you go back over your posts you start to think that you’re getting nowhere fast.

I bring this up because I’ve rewritten Chapter One again, this time I would enjoy making it past Chapter Three because I have a great love for this novel. When I finished the chapter I was practically jumping for joy. Although the first song I listened to reminded me of how the book ends. That song is I Can’t Break it to My Heart by Delta Goodrem, I have a great admiration for the artist and wish that I could write songs as well as her.

The song starts about halfway through, but the first song is amazing as well.

I chose to rewrite Chapter One for a number of reasons. The first of these was that I killed off a major character and I didn’t want to kill them. I love the character and feel sorry for them, and I realised that the reader was unable to feel the same way because they hadn’t had long enough to get acquainted with them. I’m slowly gaining some help from books, the writing group and a set of critique partners and friends that are second to none.

Tea has helped me a lot. I think that without tea I wouldn’t have made it through rewriting it again. I have this feeling that I’ll never get anywhere if I keep rewriting and yet I know that I must. I’m a writer who must edit as I go along. If I don’t do this I get this niggling sensation that practically kills me and I’m unable to do anything about it. So I change things, remove characters, change words, edit dialogue. It’s how I work.

Now I can sense you writers out there yelling, ‘You only made it to Chapter One, you eejit! Get on and write!’ So here’s to Chapter Two, no doubt you’ll read about it here first.

Until next time, that is all.

EDIT: Also watch Natalia Kills:

Blocked and not in the Nice Internet Way

Once again I have been riddled with writer’s block.

I am unable to fully comprehend what my problem is. I have been thinking that it’s because I wrote Chapter One and now I’m rewriting it before I continue so that the storyline moves along smoothly. However, I know that on my laptop there’s a chapter that I loved only a few weeks ago. Surely, then you’d tell me to turn away from the laptop and write the chapter long-hand. I have to admit there is something cathartic in
scrawling across a page with a pencil, not caring about the words until you go back over them. (That last sentence comes courtesy of receiving a burst of inspiration last week and writing the end of the novel. – I must add that I love these last few pages, to me they’re filled with emotion.)

However, when it comes to making the book live up to these last few lines, all I can think is, ‘was that it? Is that my inspiration soaked up?’ I’m currently reading The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, and I must say that it’s been helping me; although I will not be able to make my quota of ten books this month, although I did just reach fifty, so by rights, I’ve caught up with myself.

I’m asking for cures for writer’s block since my  usual cure didn’t work: this cure consists of moving away from the laptop, walking across the room and drinking a cup of tea. I mull over the novel and consider it, so much so that I’ve decided that a character cannot die in the first chapter, two characters must be thrown together and my antagonist is a bitch. Yet I can’t write the novel, I can’t bring myself to actually put pen to
paper, or press my fingers against the keys and create magic on the screen.

I want this book to be everything I love about prose; I want it to be dark and seductive. I want my characters to be loved at some points and hated in others. I’ve been considering one of my characters over the last few days a lot as well. Is he being controlled or is he doing something for his own means? Questions keep arising and I debate whether I’m able to write my novel.

Some writers seem to find it easy to write a first draft, but if something niggles me I go back and fix it immediately. I wonder whether my problem stems from writing a first draft over a year ago and seeing it as nothing but problematic. In the beginning my cast of characters was huge! Seriously, I’d bring in new characters all the time and they’d be exactly the same as other characters.

A beautiful critiquing friend of mine, carraka.wordpress.com, told me that the same problem was rising in the rewrite. I’d realised this problem
and decided to fix it. I am not killing my babies, I’m completely slaughtering them. Characters are being cut left right and centre. There are only three characters left that were in the first draft; two MCs and an antagonist. Or they could all be antagonists – Juniper Brown could be the ultimate anti-hero! She’s not, but she could be.

What’s also amazingly humorous is that I can sit here and write a blog, I can exalt my characters and my drafts, but I cannot for the life of me write.

So please, please, please, if you’re reading this, help me with my writer’s block. Give me your wisdom, or your kind words. Offer to send me boxes of Yogi Licorice Tea because it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever tasted.  Just, please, help me.

Until next time, that is all.

Black Swan Rising ~ A Rant

 

This is not a review, it may have some small semblance of being a review but at the heart of it, it isn’t. I have wanted to read Black Swan Rising for a few months now, not only was the cover amazing, but it was urban fantasy and sounded like it could be amazing. When I found it at the library, I was beyond happy, I borrowed the book and went home.

This happened yesterday, and from my tone I think you can tell that I was disappointed. Beyond disappointed. I didn’t understand how such a promising book could have such flaws. I’m only going to discuss the first chapter and part of the second at the moment because I have a few nit-picks and haven’t yet finished the book.

Let’s begin with the constant emphasis on location. It seems the authors are trying to launch the fact that its set in Manhattan down our throats, on the first page alone they say, ‘I knew the village like the back of my hand. I grew up in a town house in the West Village.’ ‘lower Manhattan in a daze’, ‘Hudson River’, ‘West Village’, ‘Tribeca’, ‘Canal Street’ and the ‘Hudson’ again. Of course, location is important to a book, but from this first page I was disinterested as the reader. It was nice that the authors understood the importance of location, but it wasn’t required every few lines.

Another problem with this first page is that the authors make everything plainly obvious. Once again I use the line, ‘I knew the village like the back of my hand,’ before resorting to telling us on the next page that she doesn’t know where she is. How convenient for the storyline, (it’s also convenient that in the next chapter she types ‘Symbols.com’ into the search bar and discovers a symbol immediately.) Garet doesn’t know where she is, go into the shop and reveal things about yourself to a strange old man, and he just happens to offer you $1,000. And you’re in debt! Even more convenient.

From here we move onto the info-dumping, grotesquely-long descriptions:

 ‘It was an antiques store, that much was clear from the contents of the window – Georgian silver, sapphire and diamond rings, gold pocket watches – all beautiful, but a bit too precious for my taste. Peering through the glass door, I saw that the shop itself looked like a tiny jewel box, the walls panelled in dark wood, the sparkling glass cases lined with garnet-coloured velvet, a curtain of wine-coloured damask hanging behind a polished mahogany counter carved in sinuous art-nouveau curves.’

 And later on in Chapter Two:

‘I lifted the box, still in its velvet sack, out of my bag and carried it over to my worktable, which stood at the far end of the room near the floor-to-ceiling windows under the slanted sky-light that faced the garden. In the daytime the light poured in through the south-facing windows, making it the ideal workspace. An old secretary desk fit into a small alcove to the right making supplies and the scrap metal I collected for my metal sculptures. One of those sculptures, a six-foot long dragon crafted of junk metal and chain links, hung from a hook in the ceiling. In the daytime his red headlight eyes caught the sun and gleamed mischievously, but tonight he cast a looming shadow against the rain-speckled windows that made me feel vaguely uneasy.’

The description here appears clunky and out of place, the writers should space out their descriptions, placing it within the sentences, so that the reader doesn’t have to feel like they’re wading their way through tar. This description is an info-dump and the reader doesn’t need to know all of this information. It’s great that the writers understand what their character’s house looks like, but there are better ways to show this information.

Another problem I have is with the lack of showing the characters emotions, I don’t care that this is the first person, we should be told how Garet feels about the debt. Everything I’ve read so far reads as though the writers are being completely self-indulgent – regaling us with a synopsis of what’s happened in Garet’s life.

Plus the first two chapters are filled with clichés. Garet’s mother once told her, ‘A rare bird on earth, very much like the black swan. That’s what you are, Garet, a rare bird. Unique. Don’t ever let anyone make you think you have to be the same as everyone else.’ Who doesn’t enjoy a nice bit of cliché-fuelled drivel that’s so cheesy you’re practically vomiting? So Garet’s special. A Mary-Sue! How brilliantly amazing!

Then she meets the antiques dealer who just happens to have a box with a symbol that matches her ring, but he can’t open it, perhaps she, as a jeweller, could do so. He’ll pay her $1,000 to do so! Convenient and cliché. Every problem is too easily fixed and never seems like a problem.

I just hope this book gets better, and I’ll continue to post as I go along.

More of a rant than a review really.

Until next time, that is all.

A Rant

I am fed up.

Completely and utterly fed up of arrogant writers who believe they’re the best thing since sliced bread. I am annoyed with writers who think that they don’t have to give a shit about their work, that if their work is shoddy it doesn’t matter because ‘that’s what editors are for.’ How can someone think they’re going to get anywhere with their writing if they think they can get by with lame excuses like, ‘If I edited it, it wouldn’t read as naturally.’ Bull shit! Absolute bull shit.

I care about my writing. I care so much about Juniper Brown’s story that I’ve been going over the first draft since December. I’ve been picking out things that don’t work and rewriting whole sections. I’ve cut characters because they were only there because I liked them. There are whole scenes that don’t move the plot forward. I mean there are three chapters that practically end with the same sentence. So I’m knuckling down and fixing these problems.

All right, I’ve said to people that I don’t like redrafting, I’ve admitted it, but I know that it’s something I’ve got to do before I even think about sending it off to agents. When I write, I change things as I go along. I rewrote Chapter Twelve of the original draft about seven times before it worked. Now, after rewriting and replanning several times, I’ve come to the decision that I need to switch a character because this isn’t their story.

I know people who send their work off to magazines and received a reply telling them that if they slightly change something, then they’d be happy to print their story. The magazine believed there wasn’t really a resolution, but this didn’t matter to the writer, they decided that the magazine didn’t appreciate their artistic talents and didn’t make the changes. Even when they kept sending it off and getting the same reply, they decided that no one would appreciate them.

If you haven’t provided some resolution at the end of a story then you’ve not done your job as a writer, in my opinion. Your reader shouldn’t feel cheated and you shouldn’t think that you can cheat your readers. I’ve said before that at the present moment I’m writing for myself.

If when I’ve written a chapter I enjoy it, that’s okay, but I will always have a critical eye. Eventually, I know, that I’ll start sending my work off to agents, and I’ve managed to cope with rejection letters before. I have the dream of creating either a t-shirt or a bag out of rejection letters; it’s something I look forward to because I’ll be trying. If I’m told how to best repair the writing through these rejection letters then I will accept these criticisms. I will not say that they clearly didn’t understand my writing.

It’s the old adage: if at first you don’t succeed try try again.

Although make sure you investigate your agents well, if you don’t you may end up following my path and sending your work to an agent who’s been dead a while. That was an extremely bad move, trust me.

Until next time, that is all.

A Room Somewhere

This post is being written by someone who should know better. I am supposed to be finishing coursework that I’ve yet to begin even though it’s due in tomorrow. All right, so I’m lying, I’ve begun my coursework, it’s currently on my laptop in a haphazard mess of Word files and scrawled plans that I may or may not have doodled extraneously upon. (Yes, I did type ‘extraneously’ without knowing what the word meant. I’ve decided it fits quite nicely, and dictionary.com can kind of agree with me.) I do plan on finishing my coursework, it’s just that I had this sudden urge to write a blog post to let you know that Charlie is still here, he’s still sat in the green armchair in the corner of the living room, with a bottle of water and a dog who doubles as a desk.

I wanted to talk about where you write. Seriously, do you have somewhere special that you get down with your characters and mingle over adjectives, angst and cool phrases?

I don’t. Personally, I find this completely annoying. I want my own writing room, I want to have a desk fitted into a bay window where I can gaze across the countryside and have thoughts. I want to have things I can look at and be like, ‘I bought you because I wanted something to throw at the wall when my characters drive me insane.’ I want a room in which to write so that I can read aloud my work and think to myself, ‘Yeah, that character’s a bitch, but I love her.’

No. I just have the green armchair that I’ve broken because I haven’t used it as a chair. I’ve sprawled myself into some awkward position until it’s been forced to transform into some misshapen bed. It’s my home for writing in, but it’s also incredibly difficult to write in because I procrastinate. I don’t know whether it would be any different if I had my writing room, but it would feel better.

I also need a room for Fred.

He came into the charity shop a few months ago and has since been sat on top of the television. I brought him to put on my desk, but I don’t have a desk, and I have nowhere to put one. Needless to say, I do think frogs are amazing, so I’m still rather happy to have acquired Fred.

If you were wondering, also in the photo is a dog’s side, we believe she’s pregnant. If not, she’s rather fat. And my father’s elbow. Perhaps you can create a story about Fred the frog, Lucky and my father’s elbow. Perhaps you’re looking for a new children’s show. Either way, you’ll surely find more inspiration in this photo than my good self.

I do want to know about your writing spaces though because I believe they can be important. They’re a place for you to express your thoughts, you’re going to create something splendid, and until it feels right, it may become difficult.

Please, don’t be a stranger to the comment box.

Until next time, that is all.