Seeing our writing as others see it

O wad some power the giftie us

To see oursels as ithers see us

It wad frae monie a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion

I feel a bit sorry for the woman in Robert Burns's poem 'To a Louse.' There she is, minding her own business in church, and not only does she have a headlouse viewing her as nothing more than his next meal, but there happens to be a poetic genius around to immortalise her decision to wear a nice hat. Still, I suppose nits and poets can happen to anyone. They like clean hair, apparently.

Wouldn't it be useful to be able to see our writing as others see it? Such an ability would have saved me a lot of angst over the years. I could check at a glance whether my work made sense; whether it was cringeworthy; whether a naff simile was actually original to fresh eyes; whether I used semi-colons when commas would do. The clarity would enable me not only to avoid the blunders, but perhaps to stop mucking about with the good bits too.

Heaven forbid that this ability should be innate, however. It would have to have kicked in when I was at least 25 and had been round the writer's block a few times, because if I had possessed such a talent during my teens, I would probably never have written another word. Awareness of our own failings might be an admirable state, but I reserve the right for my teenage self to churn out as much woeful adjective-filled tut as possible, and to be pleased with herself for having done so. If you can't have a few foolish notions when you're 16, when can you?

When I wonder what it would be like to view my writing from another reader's point of view, my first instinct is to want to spot any technical failings. On a practical level I do try to make my writing look as unlike my own as possible, by changing the typeface or converting the file to PDF. (Turning things into PDFs immediately makes them look better for some reason – maybe I should try this for my face!)

Technical details, however, are not what I'd really like to know about how other people view my fiction. I don't ask readers what they think of my book because I firmly believe it's none of my business. They have every right to like it or not like it – and if they reckon it's lousy, there's not much I can do about it anyway. But out of pure nosiness, the thing I'd find fascinating is to know exactly how people picture my characters and settings. It would be amazing to see photographic images of someone else's perception – how different would the characters be from the way I see them? Would they be clear or indistinct? Would they look like people the reader knows, or would they be purely imaginary? Would they change the images I hold in my own mind and make me see my work in a new light?

If you could see your writing as others see it – what's the first thing you'd want to know?  

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Is your writing ready to party?

Do you remember the trend for 'Come As You Are' parties, where the host would round up all their friends without warning and drag them away – curlers, bathrobes and all – for prawn cocktails, cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, LSD and whatever else they had back then?

No, neither do I, thank God.

Such events are (I hope) a thing of the past, only surviving as the source of much contrived hilarity in vintage sitcoms. The thought has occurred to me, however, that if my writing were invited to a 'come as you are' party, I would want it to step straight out the door looking effortlessly glam, not to hide behind the sofa afraid to be seen with greasy hair and an egg-stained string vest.

Where is this dodgy analogy leading? Well, as I approach the fine-tuning stage of novel 2, I want to make sure each sentence is the best it can be and ready to sparkle if suddenly invited out by an agent or publisher.

Buried somewhere in a 100,000-word manuscript, perhaps a sentence can afford to slob around, hoping that the pace of the narrative will distract the reader from the fact it's not up to scratch. But there's only so much one can get away with – become too complacent and the substandard bits soon add up to a congealed cheese fondue of tedium.

So I'm trying out a new editing trick. I scroll through my manuscript and stop at random. Then I pick the first sentence I see, and write it out longhand on a blank page. Then I look at it critically. Does it still shine, without the story to hide in? Is it flabby or clichéd or even redundant?

If I had to post it online without changing anything, would I be embarrassed? Would I feel compelled to explain that the rest of the book is much better, honest guv – it's just this bit that needs work? Would I be prepared to read it out to an audience... or would I cringe and search for a better example?

I want to end up with work I'm proud to send out in public, and this method shows up weaknesses that I might otherwise skim over. It does, of course, rely on the structure, characterisation and plot being all worked out – if they aren't in place then there's no point going into detail. For the final stages of editing, however, isolating sentences can be an illuminating exercise.

Perhaps one day they'll get that unexpected call and become the life and soul of a publisher's party.

Thank you to Cole Henley for the photo of a scrumptious hedgehog

Don't just be yourself

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

If Robert Burns' suggestion came true, there's a danger that we'd all jump off a cliff and there wouldn't be anyone left in the world.

But what if it were our writing that we could view through another's eyes? Some of us might be horrified and some pleasantly surprised, but either way we'd have a revolutionary editing tool.

A famous writer (who might have been Bernard Cornwell or Stephen King, but I can't remember and might possibly have imagined reading this somewhere) tells of a discovery he made while faced with the despair of reading over his own work. He took a favourite book by an author he admired, and typed out a few pages on his own typewriter. Transformed into something that physically looked just like his own writing, he realised that he judged it more harshly than he did when it looked like a 'proper' book.

This tactic can work the other way round too – when approaching the home straight of editing, I want to gain emotional distance from my work, and be as tough – or, indeed, as lenient – as I would be if it were written by someone else. I've tried the following ploys to gain that distance, and it's surprising how well a simple practical change can show up the clunky bits.

1. Reading it aloud – all right, all right, I know it's a crappy cliché of interweb writing advice, but it really is useful for finding out whether dialogue sounds like something a real live person would say. Reading aloud is easier said than done – it can be a bit of an eye-opener as to how little privacy is ever available – but if I get the opportunity, I don't just read aloud but record it too. The microphone becomes an 'audience' that means I have to persevere through the cringeworthy bits rather than keep breaking off to groan, weep etc.

2. Listening to the recording after a few days and pretending it's a proper audiobook. Humiliating and illuminating in the same go.

3. Changing the font, preferably to something you’d find in a published book, but you could use Comic Sans or Papyrus if you want to make the whole experience even more disheartening.

4. Changing the background colour of the page – I'm told this is good for reducing glare while writing too.

5. Changing the page setup to A5 and printing two pages to one sheet so it's closer to the size and layout of a published book.

6. Converting the file to PDF. This is such a simple change and yet I find it has a great distancing effect.

7. Printing it off on Lulu – I’d want to be sure the book was pretty much ready to go before shelling out for this, but seeing a story in book form can expose whether it could really compete with whatever's next to it in Waterstones. (I tend to get shelved next to Ayn Rand... thanks a bunch, alphabet.)

Do you try to see your work as others might see it? What are your practical tips?



(UPDATE: Sorry this post disappeared for a few days - a combination of Blogger problems and me not having web access to fix it. Thank you very much to those who had left comments - unfortunately I haven't been able to retrieve them.)

Synopsising: The act of trying to write a Synopsis.

The definition is simple: (n.) A general view, or a collection of heads or parts so arranged as to exhibit a general view of the whole; an abstract or summary of a discourse; a syllabus; a conspectus.

So, it’s a précis, right? A condensed version of that book you’ve just written. And what could be easier than just saying in 500 words what you’ve already said in nearly 100,000? I mean, if you’d thought at the very outset of this whole ‘writing a book’ kerfuffle that all you had to do was deliver a nicely-rounded 500 words story, then you could have done it, right? Right! So then – tah-daaaaahhh!

This is the Fifth time I’ve been faced with a Synopsis. And although it doesn’t feel any easier and I still get a severe attack of the Dreads, I have to admit the way I handle them IS slightly less traumatic. Like everything else I do, if I think about it too much I prevaricate until it starts to grow green mould, so I bash it out feverishly and then sit back, exhausted. If it goes over to a 2nd page (single-line spaced) then I change the margins by 1cm. Oh, I’m a master of illusion, me! Then  I read it through again. And if it's STILL too wordy, then...

Well, this is where cunning comes into play. If I’ve used two or three words, where ONE has to exist, then that’s used instead. And, using another little trick I like to call ‘Extreme Hyphenation’ -if it can be, then it is. Hyphenated I mean. And now a hyphenated word eludes me. Bugger examples…

And then I let some other nice person(s) read it. Someone who doesn’t actually know what the story is about, and if they get to the end and it all makes sense then that’s basically that. BUT if they start to turn the paper over looking for more information on the other side, then scratch their heads AND frown, there’s going to be a bit more editing to do.

‘So why did she go to the graveyard and what happened to the guy who got shot in the street?’ you might be asked. And that’s when you have to start deciding what’s important and what’s not. Does an Agent really need to know that the MC mistakenly went to the graveyard (like you do) – even if it DID turn out to be one of the funniest/heart-wrenching/prosaic scenes of your whole novel… well, do they? Is it really integral to the plot? And why on earth haven’t you mentioned the really important part when the anti-hero gets what he deserves?

This is SO not a time to protect either your darlings OR your ‘little darlings’. There must be no airs of mystery about your synopsis.  You can't be shrouding it in silk and fine, tempting danglies.  This is where Gok Wan would have you stripped to your cellulite with a mirror at angles you didn’t even know you needed angled mirrors for; where your bottom lip starts quivering and you know you need to start shaving – words off I mean. It’s cold turkey time and there’s no getting out of it.

Girrrrl-friend!

I leave mine to simmer for 24 hours. Seriously, when I came back to my Synopsis earlier on, after my own day of rest, I was deleting darlings, adding flashes of brilliance and even started to realise the whole story had  deeper meanings and sub-texts  I never even noticed before.

That’s either what a crap night’s sleep will do for you; a day spent doing paid non-rocket-science-based work (aha… Extreme Hyphenation!) or angrily making pastry using the rubbing-in method when it’s flippin’ well Valentines Day!

But you get the idea. Right?

Love Story

Today, for the first time, I hadn’t a clue what to write about when it came to this post. I’ve spent the last few weeks huddled in my garret editing book two, pretending I know what I’m doing. Result? I’m stuck in such a rigid ‘surgical’ mode where I wasn’t sure I could write anything freely. I sat down, completely clueless, idea-less, doodled away….Interestingly the doodles were puddles, hearts and flowers? Answers on a blog reply please?

So in the absence of divine inspiration, I moved away from the desk, sat on the sofa with a cup of tea, closed my eyes and allowed myself to think of my next book. I allowed the characters to have an informal meet and greet in my head. I allowed myself to allow them to be a big part of the process, maybe take the story where they want to – allowed them to live from the folds of my brain. I found myself transported into a world that five minutes before I’d only ever had rough notes on. I could see where they lived, who liked who and why and where the conflicts may arise. I rolled the title round and round in my head and felt a surge of excitement that’s been missing for months.

My immediate instinct was to find my notebook, write it all down – quick! But I stopped myself, terrified that if I let myself get too carried away with book three, that the final hurdle of book two will suffer. And I’m on page three hundred and sixty one of three hundred and ninety seven pages. Nothing can interfere with that. I put the cup in the dishwasher and sat in front of the laptop, the manuscript for book two staring at me. Waiting.

Then a strange thing happened. Cal and Chrissie started talking in my head. They started talking about something which is important, based on a pivotal crisis in book three. They had a full conversation, Cal and Chrissie. I dived for the notebook, riveted at the scene playing out in my head. I wrote it down, made another cup of tea and found myself grinning stupidly, grateful to Cal and Chrissie for potentially solving a problem I didn’t even know I had! And Cal and Chrissie? Well, they hadn’t even featured in my cast of characters ten minutes earlier on the sofa. They do now and note to self – may have to ‘murder a few darlings’- as Stephen King so succinctly put it, in order to make room for them. They’re important now, Cal and Chrissie - my new best friends for at least the next six months.

I guess this brings me to what I think this post may be about? Aren’t we lucky, we writers? It’s not often we write about the tiny spurts of excitement we feel as a result of what we do. Too often, certainly from my own point of view, I moan about the submission process and how hard it all is. But I love what I do and I’m blessed to be able to do it. I’m not sure I do it well enough for market, but today, that doesn’t matter. Today, I’m still grinning at the joy of meeting two interesting people when I was least expecting it. And I’m grinning because I made them up, made them ‘real’.

Now, back to book two's manuscript for that last surge. There are other characters that need a final massage before I kiss them goodbye like an old lover, knowing I have a new exciting love affair waiting in the wings.

Working On My Dreams

I'm a lucky girl. I've just been to see 'The Boss' aka Bruce Springsteen in concert in Dublin. Those who read my blog already know I'm a somewhat obsessed fan. Not just of the man, you understand - he is after all nearly sixty - but his music and particularly his lyrics.

So, there I was on Saturday night in the pouring rain, as close to the mosh pit as my freezing, aging bones would allow. I listened to the man with his E Street band and remembered fondly my stint as a lyricist when I used to dream that someone famous would sing my words. It proved to be step one on a steep learning curve that is my writing journey, a journey laden with many more amazing dreams.

Step two was to write my first novel. After it had been written, edited, sent off on the submission trail with a little kiss, the result was some encouraging support, two full manuscript requests – but alas no agent chomping at the bit. What? Learning my craft, working hard on it daily and willing my dream of publication into being wasn't enough?

Afterwards, finally accepting I was still on the early sector of the learning curve, I tried to figure it out. Both agents who read the full manuscript loved my writing, loved the themes but weren’t convinced enough in the plot. This forced me to question in even more depth exactly what was involved in the writing of a novel - and re-visit plot and theme when attempting book two.

Last week, eighteen months later, I began the edit of my second novel. I asked myself again - what is the theme of this novel? I wrote the answer(s) down, again and again, reminded myself, hammered it into the folds of my brain, mantra like:
‘The theme of this novel is …………..Other sub themes in this story are………’
I now have that piece of paper stuck on the wall beside the desk bearing the manuscript. Beside it, is another piece of paper with a plot outline, notes on all the characters, the events that move the story forward, the conflicts.

This time around, maybe now a tiny bit higher on that curve, I feel I’m better equipped. Emotionally, I’ve got the support of the most wonderful writer friends that the internet has introduced and practically, I’ve got my two sheets of paper stuck on the wall for reference. I’m taking the manuscript page by page, step by step. Each scene I ask myself the following questions:
Does this belong in the book? Are the characters vital? Does the scene either move their character or the plot forward? Is there conflict and action? Does the flow support the theme? Is there authentic dialogue? Is the chronology right? Is the prose full of adverbs or other ‘weak’ words?

I have a titan edit ahead of me, which both scares and thrills me. It thrills me because I know if I can get it right, I could possibly turn a good story into a great novel. It scares me because I'm really not convinced I know what I'm doing. Seat and pants and flying come to mind. Dreams of agents and bits and chomping come to mind.

When it's finished, after I've edited it to the best of my ability, I then have to make a stand and will one of my favourite dreams into being. The one where I run my hand along Waterstone's book spines and stop at mine. I have to have faith in myself as a writer - enough to convince others to read it, to value it, to take on the publishing world and WIN.

Yes, it's hard. Some days it feels like it's just too hard. But yesterday, on that rainy day in Dublin I was reminded with the following words, that whatever point of the curve, whatever junction of the journey I'm on - this is what I want to do. This is my dream.

'I'm working on a dream
though sometimes it feels so far away
I'm working on a dream
and how it will be mine someday.'

(C) Bruce Springsteen 2009