One of the aspects of writing (and being published) that has struck me a few times is that as a writer it’s difficult to know which stories will find an audience. When I’m writing a story I may have a feeling that it’s a good story; that there’s something about it which sets it apart from the others. I suppose what I’m saying is that I have my favourites.
But what surprises me is how often my own idea of what is a good story is turned on its head when it comes to taking them to publishers. Quite often my favourite stories go out and come back, go out and come back, and it often seems that they’ll never be published. In comparison, there will be stories I write that I don’t have any strong feelings for (they’re not bad, let’s just get that out there now – the bad stories don’t make it out the door) and it seems that these usually get snapped up by the first editor I send them to.
It might be that I’m overly sensitive to this and actually the “favourite” stories fare no better or worse than the “okay” stories, I just pay more attention to them.
My latest round of musing on this subject was brought about because earlier in the year I wrote a piece of flash fiction at a Derby Scribes writing session. I think it’s great. I love it. The story immediately entered into the chart of “favourites” and maybe that is its damnation. I entered it into a writing competition but, because the competition was free and you could enter as often as you wanted, I wanted to submit a different story as well – one that wasn’t genre and was lighter in tone than my first piece.
So which one got shortlisted? Well you can guess the answer otherwise this blog post would have no point. My favourite story was passed over and the one I wrote “off the cuff” made it onto the shortlist.
I can’t explain this, and I’m not going to try. Maybe I’ll just pass it off as one of those quirky “well that’s how it goes” things.
If you’re interested – the story that was shortlisted for the competition, “Dads’ Race” is available to read on the Writing East Midlands website. And the irony? For a fiction story – most of it is true, I’m just not going to say what part!
In my last post I mentioned that I was aiming to write a novella. There will be more about that in the future, but one of the members of the Derby Scribes writing group asked me why I wanted to write a novella.
I can’t even remember now how I answered, but afterwards I started to think that I hadn’t properly explained the reason for my current novella-fixation. So here it is - another one of those “someone asked me…” questions and responses.
So why a novella? To be honest, why aim to write a piece of fiction in any specific format? I’ve heard it said that the story dictates the form - that a novel is a novel, it doesn’t matter if you want to write a short story, if the idea is a novel then that’s what you’ll end up with. If that’s the case then it seems futile, and almost artificial, to try and “write a novel” or “write a novella”. I have some sympathy with that idea, but I don’t think I buy into it.
For me the reasoning behind writing a novella relates to where I am with my writing at the moment. So a quick precis: “Bloodie Bones” is currently out with a number of agents courtesy of The Literary Consultancy. I have about eight short stories due to be published during this year. I have a short story to be published as part of a five author collection (really a novellette, as it’s 8,000 words). I have a novel typed and ready for editing (“The Lost”) and another written in long-hand waiting to be typed up (“The Ancestors”) and a children’s horror book (8,000 words so I’m loathe to call it a novel) edited and ready to go to market. And I’ve had enough short stories published (about 30 by the end of this year) to make the idea of a short story collection a reasonable proposition.
So lots of potential there but I don’t want to move forward with some of the projects whilst Bloodie Bones is still going around. At the same time I can’t sit around waiting for something to happen. That’s where the novella comes in - short enough to focus on for 4-6 weeks and not such a commitment that I’m locked into it. Part of me is itching to start a new novel (I can pitch you a couple of ideas right now if you’re interested…) but the pragmatic part of me knows that this isn’t the right thing to do at the moment, so a novella allows me to scratch without getting myself into trouble.
Now I just have to see if I can write one (or two… maybe two…)
In a previous post I discussed the idea of doing things differently in order to learn new skills, and so that’s what I’ve been doing for February. I have to confess at this point that I’ve had mixed results.
Starting with the positive: earlier in the month I recorded a short story to be broadcast by Erewash Sound. The story I read had to be appropriate for daytime broadcast and no longer than ten minutes - which translates to about 1,500 words. Given the genre in which I write and the length of what I write (4,000 is closer to the norm but 6-8,000 is not unusual) that was a challenge.
Then I had to go to the studio to be recorded. Part of me was delighted by the idea that I could put a message on Facebook and Twitter that I was “going into the studio” although I did manage to resist adding, “…to cut a track”. My boyhood rock star dreams made good after… well, after a few years.
I was actually more nervous about the recording than I had expected. I’ve read a number of times – notably at the World Horror Convention and Fantasycon, so the experience of reading out my work is nothing new or particularly intimidating, but there was something about the piece being captured and so repeatable that I found unnerving. In the end the Technician/Engineer/Producer was great and hopefully when it’s edited and all my fluffed lines are removed it will sound fine.
My other challenge in doing something different was to write a novella. There were a couple of reasons for wanting to aim for something of this length and I’ll go into them in more depth in my next post, but I was somewhat blasé about the idea of 25,000 words. After all, I’ve just finished a 120,000 word novel in December and by comparison it was just a few weeks’ writing.
I started the novella on the 4 February and at the moment I’ve passed my expected completion date and it’s languishing in the bottom of a folder on my flash drive. It isn’t dead, but it is taking a rest. I’m about 14,000 words into the story – so not bad but certainly well short of where I expected to be. I put the story away after some heart-searching on whether I was doing the right thing and with a real fear that if I didn’t continue it might never be picked up again.
I was intrigued as to why I struggled so much with the novella – the word count doesn’t phase me and I think the concept is strong enough to warrant the length. 14,000 words might sound like a fair attempt but to be honest writing much of the work after about the 5,000 word mark was like wading through thick mud.
Almost as soon as I accepted my decision to put aside the novella I understood why writing it was such hard work – I’d written the story the wrong way around! My 14,000 words are actually towards the end of the story, they say what happens to the main character as a result of… well, let’s just hold that thought, but the problem I was facing was that there was nowhere for the character to develop. I resisted the temptation to pick up the laptop and plough in with a new version. Instead I’ve left it aside a little longer and have written a short story I’ve been asked to write for an anthology coming out later in the year. The first draft of that story is now finished (all 9,000 words of it and so much easier than the novella..) and so I’ll probably pick up the novella again in a week or so.
So did it work? February as the month of writing differently? Until I re-write the novella it’s impossible to say. But I can only try.
Einstein said that a definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Now I don’t want to contradict a man with a hairstyle as wild as that but I do have to take issue with that idea. I think many people would counter that statement by suggesting that by doing the same thing over and over again what you are aiming to do is improve, whether that’s about kicking a football, driving a car, or writing. What do they say: Practice makes perfect.
Neatly side stepping the concept of perfection when it comes to writing, I think there is a lot to be said about the fact that you need to write, and write lots, in order to improve.
That said, at the same time I think there is room in writing for the principle of doing different things in order to learn new skills and push oneself.
I’ve just finished writing an 8,000 word ghost story. Now I’ve written 8,000 word stories before, and I’ve written ghost stories before – and I probably have written an 8,000 word ghost story before, but in this case I knew how long the story needed to be (it was for a competition, so the word count was set) and I knew the subject. Trying to write the actual story was more challenging that I had anticipated; because it was no longer a story on my terms, but rather a piece I had to accept came with limitations. I had the idea for the story before I decided to write it, but I think without the restrictions of the concept and the word count I would have written a very different tale.
Equally, I’ve been invited to submit a short story for a five author collection. (by Hersham Horror:) This is a huge opportunity but again it comes with a pre-determined subject. Now in this case I most definitely wouldn’t have written the story I am going to submit – and I can say that with confidence because I still don’t know what the story is going to be. Instead of waiting for an idea to come and find me, I’m out hunting ideas that fit the criteria.
In both cases what I’m getting at is that by accepting limitations, by undertaking my writing in a different way to my “usual” manner (think of a story, consider the most appropriate format, write the story, find someone who wants to publish it), I can push myself a little further and hopefully learn something and develop my writing in the process.
So maybe Einstein was at least partly right when he suggested there was a benefit to be had from doing things differently.
Next blog post: let’s see if I can name-drop Isaac Newton!
When someone asks me how I write my novel, I say “124 words at a time.”
Okay, if I’m being truthful that’s not quite right as nobody has yet asked me how I write my novels. When someone learns I write their first question is more typically “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and when I say “It depends how much horror fiction you’ve read” their response is usually to look around the room for an Accountant or an Estate Agent or a Hedge Fund Manager… anyone, really.
But let’s live in the land of make-believe just for a moment. If someone does ask me how I write my novel I will say “124 words at a time” and then they’ll look blankly at me and I shall explain:
It’s like this. A novel is a lot of words - the first draft of “The Lost” is likely to come in somewhere around 120,000 words. It was written in two “sessions” (separated by the edit of Bloodie Bones) and for each of those sessions I wrote about 8,000 words a week. Some weeks I wrote more (hurrah!) some weeks I wrote less (boo!) but over the piece it averages out somewhere near 8,000.
That isn’t a coincidence. When I write a novel I try and plan out my time to enable me to hit that target of 8,000 words a week. And each day I chip away at the 8,000 words so that hopefully by the Sunday night I know I’ve done my week’s work. It might be that without that target in mind I would still write 8,000, but I don’t think so. I think I would probably write 7,500, or maybe 6,000, maybe even 5,000. 8,000 words each week is a stretch and sometimes I’m not quite there - which is where my 124 words comes in (you’d thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?).
Because I know what I’m aiming for that number is there in the back of my mind. Last week I was 124 words away from my target for the week. Not a lot, but after all my planned writing sessions I was still short, and I knew I was short. Those 124 words nagged at me until I was able to find a few minutes to write them (and, as it turned out, a few hundred more words as well). As soon as they were written I could relax.
Until the next week, and the next 8,000 words.
So that’s how I get to the end of a novel - 124 words at a time.
And just a quick plug reminder: in between these blog posts you can visit my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk for my erratic postings on the 10 novels that shaped me as a writer.
I had a short story accepted recently and it made me think about what it takes to succeed in writing. I think I can distil it to three requirements:
Imagination – which I believe is as much the ability to *identify* the potential for a story as it is the imagination to create the world, the characters, the situation etc.
Technical skill – the ability to write in an engaging way that communicates what you’re trying to get across.
Persistence – a stubbornness to keep going when everything (the rejection slips, the industry gloom, the fact that getting a publishing deal is only slightly more statistically likely than winning the lottery, and a lot less lucrative) tells you that it just isn’t worth pursuing.
Now me, I’ve got bucket loads of persistence (that sounds much better than stubbornness) as people who know me will happily testify to. I hope I have imagination and technical skill too, otherwise I’m sunk, but today I thought I’d look at persistence.
I recently hit a bad patch with the current novel I’m writing, “The Lost”. 65,000 words in and it felt like I’d lost the thread of what I was writing. There are a couple of tricks of the trade to overcome this – skip to a different section of the book and start writing there, spend a while plotting out some more of the book to try and identify where I was going wrong, or ‘write through’.
By ‘write through’ I basically mean grit your teeth and pull out each word one at a time. Sometimes it feels like trying to cross a muddy field on stilts, but each step forward (word written, if you’re following the analogy) is a step closer to the other side, and at some point during the walk I tend to find the ground gets firmer and you can throw away the stilts and start to run again.
Running! That’s why I write. That sensation when it feels like you’re not writing a story, you’re telling it. When the words flood out.
I’m not quite there with “The Lost” yet, the ground is definitely still a little soggy underfoot, but I feel like I’ve got through the worst patch, and as I nearly have two thirds of the novel complete I suspect there aren’t too many more sticky patches to navigate before the end.
And back to that story acceptance. Sometimes it’s the ability to keep writing when it feels like every word has to be pulled from you, and sometimes it’s the ability to keep submitting and damn the rejections.
There’s a mantra in writing called “Heinlein’s laws” (after Robert Heinlein, the Science Fiction author who wrote ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’) and it goes like this:
You must write!
You must finish what you write!
You must refrain from editing
You must market your story
You must keep it on the market
You must start something else
I think you need to take the “refrain from editing” with a pinch of salt (they were written in 1947 so rewriting was probably more of an effort than it is now) But that, my friends, is the secret to writing success. (Only $2.99, send your cheques and postal orders to…)
The story I just had accepted had been passed over by fourteen other editors before it reached the one that it accepted it. It isn’t that it’s a bad story (I try not to let those ones out of their cage) and in fact a couple of times it got to second and even third readings at publications. It just wasn’t right for them. So as important as that initial idea and the craft needed to imagine and then write the story, is the tenacity to keep it out there until it finds a home.
That’s all for this week. At the moment I’m alternating these blogs with my list of “novels that influenced me as a writer”. Which you can read on my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk.
There are no fat pigs in sight but there was a fat envelope when I sent “Bloodie Bones” off to TLC. But this was where I came unstuck as I sent the first three chapters and calculated I had a couple of weeks to type up the last few amendments before anyone would be close to asking for the rest of the novel. How wrong I was! Within a day TLC contacted to ask if I could send the full typescript.
Cue a frenzied couple of days when every spare minute was spent typing up the changes I’d hand-written on the manuscript. Even now that it’s done (and I can sleep again!) I’m not sure in hindsight if it was a good thing or not. At least I’d already done the amendments and the request from TLC required me to get it sorted and out instead of tinkering again and again with the text.
So now it’s done. I understand from TLC that they’ve already been in discussions with agents and have got two lined up to read “Bloodie Bones” which is great news as just getting someone to open a submission labelled horror can is tough.
I’m trying to be realistic about this. The agents are going to look at “Bloodie Bones”, that’s as far as the deal goes. No promises, no commitments, definitely no guarantees. But having the novel put in front of an agent who has already agreed to read it is a big step forward.
At this stage I know I should sit back, rest on my laurels, wait for the bidding war to start.
Yeah. Right.
So instead I’ve moved onto the novel I started writing in April and then put aside when interest in “Bloodie Bones” picked up in July. It’s tentatively called “The Lost” and it’s currently about 45,000 words in length. I read through the opening section at the weekend (mainly to remind myself what the story was….I knew the big picture but the details were lost) and it actually reads very well for a first draft (IMHO).
So here’s my big tip for anyone out there who’s finished a novel and it’s out there in the big wide world looking to hook an agent. Write something else. It would be easy to focus on “Bloodie Bones”, wondering whether anyone has read it, what they think about it. Immersing myself in “The Lost” takes the edge off that.
A little bit… I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have those thoughts and maybe check my email box a little more frequently than usual.
I haven’t blogged for a while as my work on Bloodie Bones has been low profile (editing, editing and more editing) but now I’m coming to the end of that I thought I’d better explain what I’ve been doing.
I have just returned from a weekend at “Fantasycon” in Brighton where authors of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror meet. I’d never attended Fantasycon before (I don’t write Fantasycon, so it was a no-brainer, right?). I finally saw the error of my ways when an anthology which had one of my stories was being launched at the conference.
I did a reading of my own work (Last Respects – a short story being published in an anthology by Derby Scribes next month, and the first chapter of Bloodie Bones) and then a reading to support the anthology being launched, called Alt-Dead.
The readings were great and I met lots of authors from all the genres, with a particular bias to horror. On the Saturday I took part in the book launch. I watched as people came, bought the book, and then went along the line of authors having their books signed. It has to be one of the most surreal experiences I have ever had. I’ve attended enough signings as a reader but to be present on the *other* side of the table as a writer was very odd. It was great to meet people who are actually going to read what I’ve written. In the past I’ve had stories accepted in publications, but I haven’t met the people who buy the magazines and read my work. Having that direct connection to readers was a great experience.
So now I’m a Fantasycon convert and the date for next year’s event is already in my diary. On a more immediate level, I’ve just finished tidying up Bloodie Bones and TLC has offered to take it out to agents on my behalf. So tomorrow the first three chapters go into the post and then I’ll spend a couple of days typing up the amendments I’ve made to the rest of the typescript. Once that’s completed then I’ll pick up where I left off with my other novel, “The Lost”, and hope to finish that before Christmas.
At the moment Bloodie Bones is taking a rest while I wait for the response from the second reading to come in from The Literary Consultancy. So I could kick back and catch up on some TV and books. Nah
I started my new novel and I’m roughly 1/3 of the way through (32,000 words) after a month. Now comes the tricky part. In my experience the opening of a novel is fuelled by the white heat of creativity; the ideas are flowing, the characters are blooming into life and as a result the pages almost write themselves. But somewhere around the 25-30K mark that initial burn fades away, a bit like a shuttle blasting into space. Now is the time for booster rockets and the closest I ever get to plotting.
I have a good idea what the novel (tentative title: The Lost) is about (always a benefit, I find) and I have a rough outline in my head of what’s going to happen, but to get through the next 30,000 words I need something a little stronger.
I expect the next 30k to be a harder slog and take longer to write. That said, I’m still looking to finish the new novel by mid-August.
I think what I’m happiest about with the new novel (apart from being back writing a novel again. I mean, I don’t do this for the pay-check do I?) is that I’ve managed to grow it whilst still working on other things. I’ve edited a couple of short stories, including re-writing one at the request of an editor, wrote and presented a session for Derby Scribes, kept up with submissions and got into the swing of writing critiques for Critters. This feels sustainable. At the same time I’ve seen a couple of short stories published - one in the Derby Evening Telegraph and another in Morpheus Tales - Urban Horror Special. (My first in an anthology!). This also sees the first of my short stories to be published under the pen name “Richard Farren Barber”. (Remember, you saw it here first!)
The challenge now is to maintain the balance between writing the novel and keeping all those other plates spinning.
I spent an afternoon in York with Mark Morris reading through Bloodie Bones. After four hours in a pub poring over 600 pages of manuscript my neck ached, my eyeballs ached, my heart ached, but I had a much better understanding of where Bloodie Bones sat in the great scheme of things.
I would recommend the process to any writer. Having someone else read through my entire novel, someone who understands novels and the genre, was fascinating and immensely helpful. During the four hours I saw the same mistakes appear time and time again in my writing and while I may have identified them (with help) over a shorter piece of work it made a huge impression on me to see the same errors. Most of them were such small things and, now that I know to look out for them, easily spotted and resolved.
At the same time I had to do some soul searching about Bloodie Bones. Was it the novel I had expected it to be? (Well no, they never are!) Was it as good as it can be? Would it find a place in the market? I knew I had some reservations about Bloodie Bones: concerns about the structure of the narrative and whether it would work for a reader.
The short answer is that there are flaws in Bloodie Bones. Some flaws I had already suspected and others that came to me unannounced. With more work Bloodie Bones could be a better book. But could it be a published book? The horror market is in a strange place at the moment; it’s still very much below the commercial tidemark (go into Waterstones and look at the horror section… you get extra marks for actually finding it without asking for help…and then discard all those authors who have been publishing since the 1980s. Consider what you have left. There are some new authors there, I grant you, but then do the same trick over in the crime aisle. Get the picture? Now step away from the crime aisle, they don’t need your money.) The short answer is I don’t know. I have the feedback from Mark on Bloodie Bones’s strengths and weaknesses and I have some ideas on how I could improve it and resolve the issues identified. But could it be published? I know that ultimately the only way to find out is to do the amendments and then take it round publishers and agents. For now, I have Mark’s feedback and at the end of the month I’ll receive the feedback from TLC (which will mark the end of my period on the mentoring scheme with them) and at that point I’ll take a hard look at Bloodie Bones and decide where to go with it.
I left York with my head thudding (and not due to any excess of alcohol from the BFS open evening, I hasten to add!) with the dilemma about what to do with Bloodie Bones. I knew my time with Mark had taught me at least one key lesson, the importance of improving my skills at critiquing my own work and also having my work reviewed by others. With that in mind I set myself the task of finding a suitable online critiquing group. I signed up with Critters and I’ll give it a few months to see whether this takes me in the right direction.
And in the meantime. When I got home from York I started writing Chapter One of my new novel: The Lost.
