Bookish Bamboozlement

So, I spent most of the weekend reading.

Even though this looks extremely uncomfortable, I still want to do it…
Image: lifedev.net

No surprise there, really. What was surprising, though, was the effect the books I chose to read this weekend had on me. You might expect euphoria; you might expect joy. You might also expect something like total absorption and utter devotion, because – of course – this is normally how I describe my reading life. There’s very little I like doing more. Reading, for me, comes a close second to breathing.

But, this weekend, I was irritated. I was annoyed. I was left disappointed and somewhat disillusioned at the end of my long and weary struggle to finish reading the books I’d chosen. I don’t like giving up on a book, so I kept going till the bitter end, but I’m being honest when I say that both these reads were a challenge (and not in a good way.) I’m not going to name the books, because I don’t believe in doing that – plenty of other readers have, clearly, loved these books, so who am I to criticise their taste? – but let me just say that the books I read were ones written for children, and they had received great reviews. They were both written by authors with long and successful careers (though not as children’s authors – one writes for adults, usually, and the other is more involved in the film industry.) They’d been given excellent cover ‘blurbs’ from established authors I admire, and both of them promised wonderful things, if their back covers were anything to go by. They were enticing enough for me to pick them up and buy them, at least.

Reading them, however, made me feel like this:

Image: teachingchildrenmanners.com

Both these books were long – in the region of 500 pages. Both were epic, sweeping stories, the first (apparently) in their respective future series. One was slightly better than the other in terms of being in touch with how real children speak and think and act, and featured a group of siblings fighting for survival in a fantasy world that seems to change and twist at random (even though it’s plainly obvious what’s happening to any reader with a speck of intelligence); the other was written in language which no child since Shakespearean times has used, and it was filled with long monologues of exposition, in which characters explain things to one another. This doesn’t just happen once or twice, in which case it’s excusable – it happens all the time.

The following paragraph isn’t, of course, taken from the book. It’s taken from the pit of my imagination. But it may give you some sense of what the book was like:

‘Humphrey, as you’re aware, when the moon and Venus, planet of beauty and love, reach a particular alignment in the heavens, the Gods of the West Wind will be so enraged by their intimacy that they will unleash a storm of fearsome and unprecedented force upon us poor weaklings here below.’
‘Why, yes, Gerald! Every child, from their earliest sparks of understanding, is taught the story of the Jealous West Wind at their mother’s knee. But surely you don’t mean…’
‘Yes, Humphrey! Yes. We must face it. Look upon the sky and tell me what you see.’
‘Why, a raging red mist, spreading from edge to edge along the horizon. What can it portend?’
‘The storm, Humphrey. The storm! It is coming!’
*cue alarms, distress, swords clanking, etc.*

Oh, really?
Image: jannawqe.com

Very little irritates me more than the Huge Monologue, where characters get up on their soapboxes – much like I’m doing here, funnily enough – and rant on about something or tell one another things which could have been uncovered through adventure and storytelling instead. Another thing which annoys me in children’s books is the use of coincidence – oh, look, we’re being chased by the bad guys with swords, so let’s race for our lives down to the docks and hop on the first boat we come across which of course happens to be the one which contains the magical cargo we need to get to our destination (sorry, I’m running out of breath); or – wow, how cool is this – the one person we come across in the course of our adventuring is the only person in the world who knows exactly what we’re looking for, how to find it, and is willing to bring us for a reasonable fee.

Don’t worry about that sound you’re hearing – it’s just me, grinding my teeth.

This book – the one I’m not going to name, with the ridiculously complicated and old-fashioned and tension-free monologues in it – was also packed full of coincidences. The protagonist (I hesitate to call him a hero, because he doesn’t actually do very much. For example – by the time he comes back from his quest, the reason for which had nothing to do with the conclusion of the book, the people of his home city had – in his absence – arranged to overthrow their despotic leader. Yet, somehow, when it comes time to give credit for their victory in battle, our protagonist is responsible for all of it) was continually running into people who were falling over themselves to help him, or finding things to give him a hand along the way.

I needed to take a few deep breaths by the time I was finished reading this book. It was either that, or fling it against a wall.

The book read like it was written by someone who doesn’t read children’s books. In fact, both of them did. They were both too long – the book about the siblings felt, to me, like someone had taken every single thing they thought would be cool to include, and flung them all, regardless of sense or interest or plausibility, into the plot just for laughs, and don’t get me started on the other one – and could have been edited to make them far more crisp and exciting. I found my attention wandering, my eyes sliding off the page, and my brain being strangled by the sheer tedium of sentence after sentence after sentence.

I am a person who reads. I am used to it. I am a person who loves and adores and lives and breathes children’s books. I didn’t find the books hard to read because they were written for kids. Reading them, however, has made me want to read something totally different for my next book, in order to try to re-set my brain, and I think that’s sad.

But the thing that upset me the most about this weekend’s reading?

Both these books are published, have been successful, and – to my mind – break every ‘rule’ that children’s books are supposed to have.

It’s almost enough to smash one’s tiny, tiny heart.

Image: colourbox.com

Happy Monday! Onwards and upwards from here, chums.

The Long Game

I’m starting to realise that writing is one of these ‘lifelong learning’ things, and that peskily, it’s something at which it’s always possible to improve. At the same time, it’s something most people will never perfect, not because they’re not talented, but because writing can never truly be perfected. Due to its very nature, and the subjective reality of its reception by readers, I don’t think there’ll ever be a piece of writing that is considered the definition of sublime accomplishment by every single person who comes across it.

In some ways, this is comforting. In others, it’s infuriating beyond measure.

The more of it you do – writing, that is – the better you get. At least, this is the slender hope upon which my existence hangs. This means that, while your chances of writing success are pretty poor at the beginning of your writing career, it’s possible to imagine that your best work is always ahead of you. There is, undeniably, something exciting about that.

Image: coaching-journey.com

I am learning, every day, what writing is all about. I’m learning that having an idea is a vastly different thing to making something out of it, and I’m finding out the truth of the maxim ‘an easy read is a difficult write.’

So. Here follows a short list of some of the things I’ve learned recently about writing, and how I do it, and what works for me.

Don’t be overly descriptive

This might seem strange, and wrong, and horrifying to some people, readers and writers alike. What makes a work come alive more keenly than acutely observed detail, you might say? What’s the point of reading a book if nothing is described? Would it be a book at all?

Well. Let’s think about it a bit more, shall we?

Descriptive language is something that can turn me off a book, without a doubt. I am all for describing just enough to give the reader a sense of something, and then letting their imaginations fill in any gaps. Books, in some ways, should be interactive: they shouldn’t be a closed system, complete in and of themselves, and completely sealed off from a reader. How alienating is that? I think a book should give a reader’s experience enough breathing room to bring a story to life, and overdoing description can kill that vitality in its tracks.

Also, it depends on what you’re writing. If your book is set on a distant planet seven centuries from now, then you’ll have to think carefully about your descriptions, and also about your comparisons. There’s no point in saying ‘her hair was the colour of a beautiful sunset’ in a book like that, for instance – while ‘a beautiful sunset’ might mean something to a present-day reader, it might mean nothing to a character in the year 2813. Do they live underground? Is the sky full of a steel-grey cloud from centuries of pollution? Do they even have eyes, or do they navigate their planet using sonar? Do people even have hair any more? You get the drift. If you describe something in terms that would be meaningless to your character, then you’re dragging your reader out of the world you’ve created and ruining the spell of your novel.

This is really easy to forget and all too easy to do, and it can be disastrous for your writing. Of course. Nothing in this game is ever easy.

Also, don’t describe everything in exhaustive detail, particularly not things which can safely be assumed to be familiar to a reader, like the smell of grass or the taste of a common foodstuff or the feeling of sand underfoot or whatever. There are things which need lots of elaboration, and things that don’t. If you describe everything to the nth degree, a reader’s eye will start to skip, and they’ll get bored. You don’t want that.

Don’t be overly proscriptive

This is the flip-side of the first point, in some ways. If you over-describe, then you close off a host of ways of thinking to your reader. Don’t prohibit your reader from bringing their own experience and reality to what you’ve written, and don’t deny them the ability to make it real for them, in their terms. Once you make a piece of writing public, you allow a reader to make what they want of it, no matter what it is you meant by it, or what your artistic vision intended.

Make clever use of dialogue and exposition

Something which irritates me in books is exposition which isn’t handled properly. This can happen when a character explains something to another character in a way which is clearly designed to do nothing but give information to the reader, or when a character simply addresses the reader to give them a Vital Plot Point. When I read dialogue between characters in which they tell one another things which they really shouldn’t have to – i.e. things that, in the world of the story, they should know without having to be told – it really makes me grind my teeth. This is clearly a ploy to bring the reader up to speed, and it should, where possible, be avoided. I also hate characters describing themselves to a reader by looking in a mirror or at a photograph of themselves and bemoaning their freckles/curly hair/straight hair/lack of teeth, or whatever the case may be; I’d much rather not know what a character is supposed to look like, and bring my own imagination to bear on the matter, than have it described to me like this.

Until yesterday, I had a whole chunk of clumsy exposition in ‘Tider’, at a point where our heroine is explaining to the reader what, exactly, her father does for a living (hint: it’s bad); it existed as a big monstrous lump of direct explanation, and it had always bothered me. Yesterday, I turned it into a piece of dialogue between our heroine and her best friend. Now, not only is there a hint of humour in there, but also a sense of the depth and importance of their friendship, and a subtle pointer towards the development of the best friend’s character, too – which came to me, naturally, as I wrote their dialogue. Conversations have a tendency to do that, I guess – develop organically, and go in all manner of unforeseen directions. This is why they’re brilliant, if they’re used properly in fiction. Make sure to have the characters ask one another questions which are sensible and intelligent, and which they wouldn’t already know the answers to; not only will this help to advance your plot, but it will also add another layer to your characters.

Oh, and – I managed to get as much information about my heroine’s father across in this piece of dialogue as I had done in the big, ugly, clunky, irritating paragraph that had been there before. It just looks and reads a whole lot better now.

As a writer, you’re always learning how to improve, and the beauty (and pain) of the job is there’s always improvin’ to be done. The only thing a person really needs to be aware of as they’re starting out in this wordsmithing game is that improving enough to please yourself can take a lifetime.

If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right… and for the rest of your life.
Image: sodahead.com

The Wavy Green Line of Death

I am tired today. I worked until midnight last night, because my husband went to bed early (like a sensible person). Instead of seeing my abandonment as an opportunity to perhaps read a book, or watch some TV, I grabbed the WiP and edited until my eyesight began to fail.

Image: someecards.com

But, in a way, it was worth it.

Yesterday’s editing was brutal – it was a merciless slaughter of words. Line after line of useless text fell beneath the blade of my Green Felt Pen. (In fact, my word-thirsty Green Felt Pen may need to be replaced with the even mightier Blue Felt Pen later today, because I’ve nearly worn out the nib on Green the Destroyer, such is the swathe it has cut through the excesses of the WiP.) And, surprisingly, I’m learning that it actually feels good to edit. It feels good to re-read a paragraph or a page after I’ve cut lumps out of it, and realise that it now says exactly the same as it did before, but in fewer words and without doing all the work for the reader.

It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention (that is, if you’re a regular reader) that this edit is my seventh. Seventh. And I’m still finding things to fix. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve read the manuscript of this novel about ten times at this stage, and it’s only becoming clear in this edit that I’ve made a huge amount of rookie mistakes. Thank goodness for the all-powerful Green Felt Pen of Doom, then! Maybe the power is in the pen – that would explain a lot, actually.

Anyway. Let’s do a little round-up of Things I Have Done Wrong, in the hope it’ll help other writers:

Item the First: My book is narrated in the first person. This can pose tricky problems for me, because all I have to go on is my protagonist’s viewpoint. Yet, at regular intervals through the book, my protagonist describes for the reader how other characters are feeling. This, of course, is a no-no. It’s only striking me now how silly this is, and how badly it reads. People can make guesses at how others are feeling, of course, based on body language, tone of voice, and so on – but for a first-person narrator to say something like: ‘He looked at me, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He was so anxious. His heart was racing,’ is plainly ridiculous. (I have to point out that the sentence I’ve just used is most definitely not taken from my WiP – I wasn’t as silly as that. I’m just trying to give an illustrative example!) So, anywhere I’ve noticed my protagonist making assumptions about other people’s feelings which are not based on very clear physical cues, the Green Wavy Line of Death has been employed, and those needless words have fallen. And hurray to that.

Item the Second: I’ve also realised that my protagonist describes things in too much detail sometimes. If she encounters a machine, or a vehicle, or a piece of technology, she tends to go on and on about it, describing every last dial, switch, and piece of tubing. She’s not a particularly enthusiastic engineer, and she’s not a machine-nerd. These things are not out of place in the world she lives in. So, I ask myself, why does she go on about them for half a paragraph? It’s equivalent to someone in a modern novel taking fifteen lines to describe a washing machine, or a refrigerator. Unless the refrigerator in question was powered by a meteorite and made from solid diamond, or the narrator is a freshly-arrived alien, there’s no need to do that. Of course. What I’ve done – as, I’m sure, will be clear to you – is I’ve mixed up my own voice with my narrator’s. That is a shocking mistake to make. I’m fascinated by the machines and technology in this world, and I’ve thought deeply about them. I’ve done some research into steam-powered engines, and condensers, and propellers, and so on. So, when someone in the book enthuses about something which should be totally ordinary from their point of view, it’s actually me speaking, not the character. I’ve slapped myself on the wrist for this already, don’t worry. And slash slash scribble goes the Green Felt Pen of Doom.

Item the Third: One of the things I was most proud of yesterday was condensing six pages (or, approximately 3600 words) of descriptive exposition with a bit of dialogue into about 2.5 pages (hopefully, fewer than 1000 words) of pure dialogue, with a tiny bit of exposition. It was a scene which had bothered me for a while, but until yesterday I had no idea how to fix it. Eventually, I just ended up rewriting the entire thing. It’s an important scene, because in it, our Fearless Protagonist is learning things about her family, and realising how little she understands about them and what they do. But, as I’d written it up until yesterday, the scene was basically a lecture given by one of the other characters, both to the reader and my protagonist. Now, it’s more like a discussion – she engages more, puts things together herself (without having to be smacked across the head with things that are, actually, obvious), and I don’t feel the need to expand on every tiny detail. As before, with the overdone descriptions, I’ve sketched around things that would be clear and unremarkable to the character, and allowed them to gradually reveal themselves to the reader.

So, basically, this is what I’ve learned (the hard way): Don’t give your characters knowledge they couldn’t possibly have; Don’t confuse your enthusiastic, nerdy voice with theirs; and Don’t allow Captain Obvious to visit your manuscript and explain everything in minute detail. Smack him with the Green Felt Pen of Death.

I hope this has been helpful, and mildly diverting. Do let me know if you have any other editing tips, or if you disagree with anything I’ve said here. It’s all about the discussion, people!

Have a wonderful Thursday.