As someone who intends to write stories in faraway lands (e.g. USA), Google Maps and Google Earth are invaluable. Just think about trying to write about someone travelling through a place you have never been to. You have some choices. You can actually go there, at the expense of time and money - though you may get a “feel” for the place while you’re at it. You can buy a map so that you know the street names, schools, etc. You can talk to someone who lives there, if you are lucky enough to know such a person - helps with “feel” and time / expense. But, perhaps the most useful tools to come along in a long time are Google Maps and Google Earth. Much of the planet’s populated areas have been mapped by Google and can be overlayed with satellite imagery. Not everywhere has the same level of detail in terms of maps and imagery, but for most places you will get some idea of the lay of the land. For urban areas, the detail can be extremely accurate. For example, I’m just going to pick a random piece of the USA and describe a car journey….
Ok, I didn’t spend very long putting that together, but it’s filled with several geographical accuracies that I did not have to invent. Someone in New Jersey reading it might think it has an air of reality about it, like I know the place. There are several things I can write about that a map won’t tell me. Like how another golfing community is being built on the other side of Forsgate Drive. How these golfing communities are surrounded by masses of commercial / industrial units, including an enormous warehousing facility. I can talk about my driver passing lakes, rivers, wooded areas, etc. All adds to the realism of the journey. For people living in the area, it’s an air of authenticity. For those who never have been there, the detail sounds convincing.
I have no idea what I was trying to achieve when I wrote the following, but I kinda like it in a sick sort of way… — He drop-kicked his empty cider can off a wall. Not satisfied with the damage done, he proceeded to squash the can with a Doc Martin. Still unsatisfied, he gave the can a good hard kick and sent it spinning over the edge of the pier. He watched as it sank, catching the three-quarter moonlight as it did so. Jimmy O’Leary – One; Corporate Scumbags - Nil, he thought. He peered over the pier’s edge, wobbling alarmingly as he did so. “Fuck you looking at?” he asked of his rippled reflection, then laughed at the absurdity of it all. “Fuckin eejit.” He unzipped himself and pissed into the sea, marvelling at the sparkling splash below. Champagne Madame, he thought, and laughed again. For a moment the water surrounding his urine’s entry point seemed to turn blue, though this was a trick of the moonlight. He was actually pissing blood, but was too drunk to notice or to care. A blow to the groin earlier in the evening was to blame. Madame’s blow. He was careless enough to forget about zipping himself back up, but force of habit at least ensured he deposited his manhood back inside his underpants. He had his dignity after all, goddammit; then he belched loudly. It echoed up the hill behind the pier. A dog barked. Jimmy howled at the moon. The dog did not howl back, but continued barking. “Had one too many friend?” a stranger asked. Jimmy turned, his head lagging behind the rest of his body. He eyed up the stranger, though it took a few seconds to focus his eyes. The stranger was not facing him. “What if I’ve had?” he asked. “It’s nothin to me friend. Nothin at all. Just makin conversation is all,” The stranger replied. Jimmy grunted in reply and turned back towards the sea. For a while they stood silently observing the water lapping against moored boats in the estuary. A small yacht motored by and the skipper waved in their direction. Jimmy did not acknowledge. The stranger did. A little while later, perhaps sobered by the salty air, Jimmy turned to face the stranger. It didn’t take so long now to focus on the stranger’s profile. He was tall, face masked by the shadow of a hood, hands in pockets of his hoody. Still facing towards the sea, the stranger spoke with authority. “Listen now and listen good, friend. If you lack the simple manners to acknowledge the salute of a fellow seafarer, then I don’t think I want much to do with you.” The stranger continued staring out at the waves, now gathering magnitude with the stiffening breeze. Jimmy, a little stunned, composed himself and replied, “What’s eatin your dick off?” “What’s eatin it off? I’ll tell you what’s eatin it off. Dick’s like you pissin on Mother Nature; kickin cans into the sea – you dumb fuck.” He didn’t know what struck him more – the fiercely hurled insults, or the fact the stranger had stopped calling him friend. “Look man, I ain’t done nothin to you and I don’t want no quarrel with you,” said Jimmy. He was a little nervous now. The faceless stranger was an imposing figure and his motionlessness was uneasing. The strengthening breeze, perhaps force six now, did nothing to the stranger other than buffet his hood a little. “Mother Nature’s wonders. Such wonders,” The stranger muttered under his breath. “Look stranger, I want no quarrel. You hearin me?” Jimmy began to back away from the pier’s edge. The stranger did not move. He turned and bolted for his car. Still the stranger did not move. Beep, beep. Car remotely unlocked. Jimmy opened the driver door, slid into the seat and shut the door. Car locked. Sanctuary. His Golf had never let him down to this point and it started instantly. Determined to escape from what he thought might be someone lacking a modicum of sanity, he backed away from the wall he was facing. A loud thud stalled his progress. He exited the vehicle to inspect the damage. Had he hit a bollard? Sprawled on the ground behind the car was the stranger. Unhooded now, face painted by the moon’s reflection, the stranger was no longer so imposing. His eyes were open wide, though his stare was blank. The pool of blood under his skull sold the deal. The weirdo was dead. Technorati Tags: creative writing, short fiction, fiction
I have been given the go-ahead for two more IT articles. It’s not gonna make me rich, but it does keep me in the “professional writer” frame of mind. One article will review BitTorrent clients for the Linux operating system. The other will review some software development tools, again on the Linux operating system.
Well, I had come accross the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests before - both the 0 to 100 and US grade school levels - but I never put them into practice or thought too long about them. But, can it be a useful tool for a writer? I searched the web for some articles where people had applied the tests to their writing to see if they were deducing anything from the results. Flesch-Kincaid: Threat or Menace I found two distinct bands of people. The first band revel in the fact that their work scores highly on Flesch-Kincaid. It’s as if they think their writing must be of good quality if they can only be read by someone at least in the 10th or 12th grade. I’m afraid they have missed the point. The other band are a pragmatic bunch of people who want to be read and would like to make the best-sellers list. These people realise that you need to be aiming your work at the 4th to 6th grades. I think the first band fail to realise that a grade score of 5 means that a 5th grader will just about be able to read the text comfortably, but that an adult will find the text very readable. That doesn’t mean the text is dumbed down, it just means that your work is more accessible tot he average person on the street - people who will buy your book at the airport or at their newsagent. Not academics who will be looking at the “literary” value of your work. I believe they make up less than 1% of your potential market. If you want to be a commercial success, the lower the grade the better (without going too low of course). I applied the metrics to some of my own work and to the entire Moby Dick book, which produces interesting results. 1) An IT article on MySQL Stored Procedures, Triggers and Views published in Linux Magazine, Aug 2006 (see here) Word Count: approx 4,500 Characters per word: 4.7 The sentences are necessarily verbose and technical, so it is to be expected that it would not be that easily read, particularly by children. 2) An unpublished short story I wrote - the first really serious short story I wrote. Word Count: 4,264 Characters per word: 4.2 3) About half of the first chapter of what may turn out to be the first novel I write to a finish. Word Count: 1,600 Characters per word: 4.5 4) A real rough piece of work entitled “Stranger at the pier”, which could be complete in itself, or it could lead to a longer story. Word Count: 728 Characters per word: 4.4 Amazingly 0% passive voice. Now, it’s only 728 words long, but still! 5) Moby Dick, by Herman Melville - downloaded legitimately from the Gutenburg catalog Words: 215,000 Characters per word: 4.57 — So, when it comes to straight fiction, it’s pretty obvious that my readability is consistent, regardless of the style I employ. The more I descend into pulp (e.g. Stranger at the pier), the lower the grade score, and the higher the readability. But, not by too much it seems. If we look at the ideal scores according to James V. Smith, Jr. (courtesy of Burnstein): No more than 4.25 characters per word. Smith deduced these scores from the averages he saw from best-selling authors like Stephen King, Danielle Steele, and John Grisham. Those names won’t feature on the average literary professors top 10 lists, but they certainly will on Average Joe’s. And Average Joe is 99% of the market. Judging by other articles, that 80% readability is a little tough to get, so I would say that 75% might be more realistic. Passive voice reduces the readability of your work. Just read Strunk and White to find out more on that. 5% passive voice is difficult to make, but 6% or 7% will do for me. Maybe the 0% in my shorter piece is an anomoly. I can’t say that the Flesch-Kincaid metrics are the be-all and end-all, but I will certainly measure the readability of my work from here on. One needs to know one’s audience (or readership). Just in case you didn’t know, the readability stats can be accessed in Word. Click on Help and search for readability. Then follow the instructions. Google docs has the stats also. Technorati Tags: readability, flesch-kincaid, writing process, writing metrics
For a while I thought it was just agents that scammed authors by charging “reading” fees, etc. But I came accross a link on Simon Haynes’s web-site that pointed to a forum discussion on PublishAmerica. The discussion is 2 years old, though has some newer updates. Publishers like these are not called vanity publishers for nothing, but when they claim not to be a vaity publisher, that just makes it twice as bad. If you want to see yourself in print, then fine. If you want to aim for the bestsellers lists, avoid. For more dodgy publishers, see the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America web-site… here. Technorati Tags: Publishing Scams, Publishing
As a published writer of anything - whether fiction, non-fiction, journalism, or whatever - there is that feeling of getting your 15-minutes of fame. “Look Mam, there’s my name in this glossy magazine. Look Dad, I actually wrote those words”. It probably sustains you for the next couple of articles (or short stories, poems, etc). But writing can be hard work. My published articles are very technical in nature, requiring a lot of research or product testing. Each article averages around 2,500 words and took several hours each to write. I stopped a while back with 5 of these articles under my belt thinking: Ok, I’ve got my name in print. Tens of thousands of people have read them and may have gained some benefit from them. Yet each article gained me just 80 Euro per page. 80 Euro per page might sound ok to some people, but let me point out that magazine pages are not the same as novel pages. A novel page will average about 250 words per page, but a magazine page will usually be significantly more. In my case, the average was about 700 - 800 words per page. Throw in some pictures and I was getting about 3.5 pages per article. Or, to put it another way, about 280 Euro per article. Not bad for a day’s work by most peoples’ standard, but we are talking about one-off pieces of work here. Believe me, when you have seen your name in print a few times, the stars in your eyes fade pretty quickly. Writing may be an art form, but it’s also a career for many. Far from having some romantic notions about “being” a writer, I am at the stage where I want to see some bucks for my bang - to paraphrase slightly. Sure, being a well known writer is something I would aspire to - but I would trade that in a heartbeat for cold hard cash. That doesn’t make me a Philistine; it just means I would prefer to pay my mortgage from my writing endeavours than from anything else. Technorati Tags: The Writing Process, Career Writing, Getting Published
Several times over the past few weeks I have begun to write what I hope will turn out to be long stories - novellas, novels, or whatever. However, I have found it difficult to commit to a long story once I have gotten about 5 - 15 pages in (when I mention page on this site, I will usually be talking about 250 words - the average novel sized page). What happens is, I start writing thinking this is great, but after a few pages I start getting that feeling of doubt. I start asking myself if the story is going to be good enough to sustain a whole book. Then I stop writing. Then a few days later I will start on something else and usually bin that too. This has led to a sizeable chunk of pages written, each feeling like a dead end. This leads me to ask myself why this is happening. So, here is a possible list of reasons:
The list could go on I suppose. Analysing those reasons, there may be a little of all of them in my problem. One thing I did not mention was writer’s block. For me, writer’s block is just an excuse and is something that covers over reasons like the ones I have listed. One issue I can point at with some degree of confidence is my lack of reading. Many writers giving advice say that it is essential to read plenty of material. I would have to agree with this. It’s not true to say that I never read, but I do not read as much as I would like or would need to. This is something I am changing and have read a lot more recently. One thing is certain from my experience: writing a novel is tough work. It requires great concentration, belief and some stamina. Once those are sorted, the story can follow. I can and I will conquer all of the above and get going - and stick with it to the finish.
Writing is a solitary business. To get anywhere, you need to treat it like a proper profession with a fixed timetable and a place of work. If like me you have a full-time job taking up nearly 40 hours of your week (not to mention the hour spent in the car travelling and the hour spent during lunch time, when you need to rest your brain and your eyes), the time left for writing is limited. Probably most of your writing in this case will be restricted to weekends. In my own case, as I begin to get more serious about my writing, I think leaving a gap of five days between writing is not a good thing. How can things be kept fresh in your mind? This will lead to the laptop being taken out and ideas being typed up and a paragraph added here and there during the week. That to me seems a big higgledy-piggledy. So, to be truly serious about the business of writing, I have decided that I must spend 1 hour each night writing - keeping my continuing story fresh from day to day, not having to revisit what I wrote last week. Weekends are different, of course. For now, two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday will suffice. It should be possible in that length of time to write between 6,000 and 8,000 words per week. Or roughly 24 to 32 pages of the average novel. In theory, reaching that magic 400 pages should take around 14 weeks, or just over 3 months. Then you have to consider the place of work. I am lucky enough to have a whole room to base an office environment in. Complete with a sizeable desk, a bookcase, a PC and laptop, it sounds ideal. But, it’s no good having a great office if you get interrupted or if it’s in a mess. I must admit that my office space is currently full of junk. That’s going to have to change. I just can’t imagine writing in a cluttered office surrounded by boxes of books, broken lamps and the like. So, I’ll pencil in a timetable, stick to it, lock out the rest of the world and write in a vacuum. Sounds easy, huh? As a wise man once said, “It sounds great in practice, but will it work in theory?”
I created a new web-site dedicated to creative writing in Ireland. Originally a site specific to writers in Cork, I expanded the site to target writers in all of Ireland. I’m not exactly sure what I intend for the site. I’m hoping that a community will build up around the site and generate the content organically, rather than me having to keep the site fresh. There are facilities for news (blog style) and forums. The site is available here… http://www.creativewritingireland.com Technorati Tags: creative writing, writing, fiction |