Everyone needs tools

I work occasionally on Lulu’s LiveHelp desk, and one of the questions that people are asking more and more is, ‘What software do you recommend for writing?’

Of course this is a tough one because a number of factors come into play: What hardware set-up do you have? How much can you afford to spend? Are you writing fiction or screenplays or stage plays?

I’ve spent a long time trying out various demos of downloadable software and, in doing that, have come to some conclusions about what I need from a writing software package:

1. It has to have a good word processing function. Although I might not use all the bells and whistles, I want italics, bold, word count - for chapter and book total - and spell check.

2. I have to be able to Save As … or export to a recognised word processing format, either Word.doc or rtf. As I’m writing fiction, there’s no need for drawing or image functions to be included. I’ve tried packages in the past that will only allow you to print from the software, with no ability to translate your document into another format. As the formatting functions are often minimal on this kind of package, that’s hopeless.

3. The ability to make character and scene notes, and to jot down ideas where necessary (that is, when they occur to me!) is essential. I used to keep box files full of hand-written notes - nowadays, everything’s in the software, searchable and close to hand.

4. Finally, the function that I took a long time to recognise I needed - the ability to shuffle events on a time line. Some packages enable you to outline your story - with varying degrees of detail - but not all of them allow you to switch them, like shuffling note cards. When I discovered a program that would allow me to do that, I was in heaven.

And the winner is?

Well, typically, I haven’t found one package that does all of these things. But I have discovered two that enable me to work relatively seamlessly.

The first is a suite of software from Anthemion Software, called Writers’ Cafe: www.writerscafe.co.uk/ In particular, I use the Storylines program from within the suite for the outlining process. It has what appears to be a cork-board, on to which you attach your story-threads. On each of these threads (which are like your main and sub-plots) you then attach virtual notecards containing your individual scenes. These can be dragged and dropped at will, and contain as much or as little information as you like. When you’re plotting something complex, it’s great to be able to see the story graphically like this, instead of just having a linear, text-based description.

The other program I use is called WriteItNow, from Ravenshead Services. With this package you can store ideas, create characters (it includes a couple of psychological models in its character-creation options), even invent plot events. Best of all, its word processing function allows you to create individual chapters, then export them to rtf format, which opens automatically in Word if you have it installed. Each chapter is formatted according to rules that you determine, so that you have a complete book ready for printing at the point at which you click Export. Also included are the spell check and word count functions that I use all the time, plus a thesaurus and a readibility index.

I liked these two programs so much I actually spent money buying them and I keep them upgraded. It would be hard for me to write without them now. Demos are available on both sites, so give them a go. (Incidentally, I have no financial relationship to these businesses!)

Take it like a man

OK, I’m getting the feedback.

I sent out copies of my latest book - The Secret Place - to a number of readers in order to get feedback. That feedback is beginning to come in, together with thoughts and comments from people who weren’t on the list but who have read it anyway.

It’s grit your teeth time. All the advice is to give your manuscript to people who a) read a lot; and b) read in the genre which you’re writing in. That has largely been true of the people to whom I’ve sent the book, but not exclusively. A couple of them don’t read private eye or thriller novels. However, each and every one of them does read extensively, so that’s a bonus.

So my book is the second in the series of thrillers about my PI, Sam Dyke. Most of the beta-readers have read the first book too, which is an advantage. The consensus seems to be that The Secret Place is better than Altered Life, which can only be good. It’s allegedly more pacy and more gripping.

Which doesn’t mean it’s perfect, of course. Criticisms have included, ‘It starts really well but then doesn’t fulfil its promise’; ‘there are inconsistencies in the plot-line’; and ‘It’s obvious you’ve never been to some of the places you write about … ‘.

All of these are true, to a greater or lesser degree. So the fascinating thing is, how do you respond to them? Some people, I know, have the response of, ‘Oh my god, you’re absolutely right, how could I have been so stupid not to have seen that? I should shoot myself right now … ‘ While others shrug their shoulders, say ‘Meh,’ and get on making the corrections.

I’m kind of in the middle. Despite planning to the nth degree, there are still inconsistencies … how could that be? I thought everything through, didn’t I? All the implications of every action of every character. But still character A says this on page 10 and this - completely contradictory thing - on page 20. Doh! This happens when you make things up on the spot. It seems natural and almost ‘inevitable’ at the point at which you write it. But you conveniently forget that you said the opposite thing only 10 pages previously. Because those 10 pages might have been written 5 days apart … so why would you remember something that was created spontaneously, just in order to add ‘depth’ to a given character?

The harder things to cope with are where your readers tell you that the pace slackens, or a scene was unnecessary, or a scene that was actually essential doesn’t appear to have been written … this means more serious re-writing. Not just re-wording, but actually adding scenes and maybe even characters. So more research! More creativity! Just when you thought you’d done the hard stuff, you have to do more of it.

In the end, I guess what you have to do is consider that you’re trying to make the book be the best book it can be. Yes, it’s tedious and hard work to alter and re-write extensive portions of the book. But if you don’t, you’ll always have those voices playing in your head: ‘It could have been fixed. It could have been better.’

And that’s a lot, lot worse, than the trivial pain of rewriting.

Keith
Altered Life

How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?

… Two. One to change it, and the other to offer a well-reasoned critique as to how it could have been done better.

Writers are a strange bunch. On the one hand we’re often self-critical, worrisome, uncertain and as apt to cross out a line as to write one.

On the other, we can be very dogmatic about what is right or wrong about any given piece of prose - especially when it’s written by someone working in the same area or genre as ourselves.

I guess I’m writing this in a state of apprehension, because I’ve sent out copies of my latest book to a group of beta-readers (a phrase I found on a Lulu forum) and soon I’ll be getting the feedback. All but one of them writes extensively themselves, and the one who doesn’t keeps a very active and entertaining blog, so is used to putting virtual pen to paper albeit in a different form.

I have mingled with writers a little - after all, I did a degree in Creative Arts, including creative writing, and I’ve been to a few writers’ workshops elsewhere - and my impression is that we can be quite cagey. My sense is that unlike the general impression of writers as larger-than-life Hemingway-esque characters, who grab life in a bear-hug and don’t let go, many of us are quiet, inward-looking folk who use words to explain how we’re feeling. Writing is, after all, a solitary experience for the most part. I’m still haunted by Isaac Asimov’s description of himself sitting in a small room facing a blank wall for most of 40 years - including weekends - while he produced his 400+ books … And I think, is that how I envisage myself? Well, I don’t sit facing a wall. But I am in a small room facing a screen …

Also, we veer between confidence in our belief in what we’re doing, and fear that it’s not up to snuff and other people are doing it much, much better, so why would anyone listen to little ole us … ?

When you’re with a bunch of writers a kind of friendly distance can settle around the table … people assessing and weighing up others. Gore Vidal nailed it, I suppose, with that famous line of his: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” That edge of competition I suspect is there in all of us who are competing for readers.

Which is not to say that writers can’t be enormously generous, too. The Lulu forums - and other writing websites - are full of people generously giving advice and energy - and even free reading-time! - to other writers. There are some folk who are just gregarious, I guess, and want to be part of a group that does well.

So pardon me while I dip in and out of these two modes: self-imposed solitary confinement, complete with deep-circled eyes and a snappy dismissal of books I dislike; and open-hearted, friendly, concerned and interested fellow traveler down the writing path, willing to critique and offer a helping hand where possible …

Don’t try to work out which one I’ll be at any given time, because I’m damned if I know.

Joe R Lansdale’s East Texas adventures

Do you ever have sudden enthusiasms for writers?

You come across a book - perhaps remaindered, or in a second-hand shop, and therefore cheap - and you buy it because you like the look of it. It hangs around for a while on the bed-side table, untouched … and then you run out of other stuff to read and pick it up. And it blows your socks off. You race through the book and immediately start scouring the bookshops for other masterpieces by the same writer.

This happened to me with Vonnegut, with Gore Vidal, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos … hell, a lot of my current favourites. And then you discover that these guys have been around for years, and you’d never heard of them before. What happened? How could you have been so dumb not to have known of them?

Well that’s just happened to me again with Joe R. Lansdale. I found a book called Mucho Mojo being recommended in a book shop, and it was reduced in price, so I looked at the back cover blurb and it seemed interesting so I bought it.

Wow, what a revelation! Lansdale has been around for years and written at least 21 novels, 12 collections of short stories, 5 anthologies and two non-fiction books. How could I have been so dumb?

The Lansdale books I’ve come across and am slowly working my way through are in the series of semi-detective stories set in East Texas, and starring Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Hap is intelligent, knows martial arts, is loyal to his friend Leonard but just has no real ambition. He works at a series of dead-end jobs that barely pay the rent, but do give him the opportunity to get involved in plots that don’t need him to hold down a profession or career.

Leonard is a one-off in crime fiction, so far as I know: a middle-aged, black, gay martial-arts expert who has a series of relationships with guys that are handled sensitively but without being sanctimonious. Between them, Hap and Leonard get involved in stories that are funny, tough, violent and tremendously well-written. Here’s the first paragraph of Bad Chilli:

“It was mid-April when I got home from the offshore rig and discovered my good friend Leonard Pine had lost his job bouncing drunks at the Hot Cat Club because, in a moment of anger, when he had a bad ass on the ground out back of the place, he’d flopped his tool and pissed on the rowdy’s head.”

How could you not carry on reading a book that begins like that? Lansdale writes with verve and insight, giving a real sense of the slightly run-down part of East Texas in which Hap and Leonard live. The relationship between the pair is also handled beautifully - they fight, they argue, they spend days when they’re not talking to each other … but they’ve always got each other’s backs.

And Lansdale also handles the action perfectly as well. The fights are described with panache and real physicality, but without the brutality of some writers in the genre. They remain realistic even in extremis.

I’m on my fourth in the series so far, with at least two more to go afterwards. I’m beginning to regret already that soon I’ll have read all of them. That in itself says something about this fantastic writer.

Joe Lansdale
Altered Life

The development of a scene

I thought it might be interesting to look at how a scene develops in the writing process. I guess many non-writers think that a writer sits down each morning and writes out the scene that’s next in the book. Then finishes and goes to lunch.

For most of us, that’s not the case. Sometimes we have a clear idea of what happens in the scene, and to whom. Sometimes we have a vague notion that - to fulfil plot requirements - ’something’ needs to happen, with a particular outcome.

This scene is from the book I’m working on at the moment, called The Secret Place. It’s a follow-up to Altered Life, the book that introduced my private investigator character, Sam Dyke. Altered Life was narrated exclusively from Sam’s perspective, while in The Secret Place I’ve opted to try out a technique several PI writers are using now - slipping into the close 3rd person point of view of a different character.

The scene is part of a chapter in which we see the ‘bad guys’ for the first time. They’re the Wilder twins, Little Jimmy and his older brother, Pete. Ostensibly they’re builders in Liverpool, while in fact they’re hard-nosed gangsters with a number of scams going on. When I first outlined the scene, it began with them arriving at a building site they were running, and their intention was to use a laptop to track down the position of a ship that was sailing from South Africa with contraband on board that they were awaiting. But I couldn’t find a way to start. When I got to that point in the writing, this is what came out:

(Arrive at site. One man standing around. No work being done. Piles of bricks and timber in a corner, under tarpaulin. Ground muddy. Half erected building to one side. They go into a Portakabin, then through another door into a back room. Pete locks the door and Jimmy boots up a laptop.When it’s booted, he loads the Leocate software, enters his username and password and tracks the shipment coming from SA.)

I then went straight into dialogue.

For an outline, this is fairly specific. I seem to have ’seen’ the situation - the man standing around, the piles of bricks, the half-erected building. I’d even done my research and found the ‘Leocate’ software, a kind of GPS system that could be used to track items worldwide. But all this was displacement activity because I found I didn’t want to describe the physicality of the scene - the prose wouldn’t come. It was easier to get into dialogue than describe the set-up.

Two months later, and I’d managed to get into the scene, like this:

The site was empty. They walked on the planks that crossed the muddy ground and went up the steps into the Portakabin. Pete had the key and he looked around before opening up. That was him - always secretive. Jimmy followed him inside and shut the door.
‘Fuckin cold in here.’
‘Put a jumper on.’
They grinned at each other - that was their mother’s saying whenever the gas meter ran out and they didn’t have any money.
‘Get ‘er going,’ Pete said, and Jimmy pushed past him into the cubicle at the back. He unlocked the cabinet and took out the laptop, then booted it up and navigated to the tracking web site. He zoomed into a section of the ocean north of Africa.

So the single man on site has gone - it would have led to complications about what exactly the twins were up to on site, so it was better to ditch him. I’ve given some detail about the muddy site, but not mentioned the piles of bricks or the half-erected building. Also, the Portakabin doesn’t have two rooms, just a locked cabinet. I’ve also taken out the reference to Leocate because by this time I wasn’t sure it would do what I wanted it to do.

The other thing that’s happened is that I’ve taken the opportunity to build the relationship between the twins by mention of their mother. The scene immediately prior to this shows them arguing in the car as they’re driving to the site, but I thought it would be natural for them to have forgotten that and to be able to share a family moment through the use of the mother’s phrase. So even while doing one thing - showing the twins looking at the position of their contraband - it’s possible to use the scene to do something else - build their relationship. It also showed the poverty they’d come from - to have a gas meter into which you had to feed coins. It says something about their social situation as children.

The latest re-write looks like this:

The site was empty. They walked on the planks that crossed the muddy ground and went up the steps into the Portakabin. Pete had the key and he looked around before opening up. That was him - always secretive. Always worried about what might happen if it went wrong. Jimmy followed him inside and shut the door.
‘Fuckin cold in here,’ he said.
‘Put a jumper on.’
They grinned at each other - that was their mother’s saying whenever the gas meter ran out and they didn’t have any money.
‘Get ‘er going,’ Pete said, and Jimmy pushed past him into the cubicle at the back. He unlocked the cabinet and took out the laptop. Pete didn’t want it kept in either of their houses, just in case. Jimmy booted it up and ran the Automatic Identification System software. Every ship over 300 tons was required to broadcast its location, speed, status and other information. This information was picked up by different tracking systems worldwide and made available to interested parties, usually for a fee. Jimmy had felt really cool when he learned this. Something he could do that his brother couldn’t. He zoomed into a section of the ocean north of Africa.

Here there’s another line about Pete: ‘Always worried about what might happen if it went wrong.’ This is to emphasise his paranoia as Jimmy sees it. Jimmy is far more of a risk-taker and sees his brother as an unnecessary worrier. Also, I’ve added in the information about the Automatic Identification System software. Further research had directed me to this information, and I’ve expanded on it because again it helps characterise Jimmy by comparison to his brother - he can do something his brother couldn’t, and felt good about it.

This will probably be the final version, though I’m still considering how much information about the AIS software to leave in. Does it add credibility to the scene? Or does it read like research that’s been shoe-horned in to show off? I’m still unsure.

The interest for me is to learn how a scene can develop over a period of about eight months. More experience as a writer tells you that you don’t have to get it all right first time. Putting in a ‘place-holder’, in brackets, was good enough until I could see my way through to write the scene properly. And even then it changed as more thought went into it. So what I’ve learned is to have more confidence that things will become clearer to me, as the writer, in the same way that they will become clearer to the reader. Getting it right first time isn’t always possible, so long as you put in the work to get it right eventually.

Keith Dixon
Altered Life

It’s the little things, stupid …

Worse than journeying into the land of Mordor is the voyage through the Swamp of Rewrite Hell.

Example 1: You’re on page two of rewriting and you suddenly realise that a minor character’s motivation - that you hadn’t given any thought to a year ago - suddenly becomes very important. Why would he be doing what he does now, when later in the book what he does is … ohmigod, the alarms go off. You scurry through the text, looking for every appearance of this character - what does he say? Does he compromise the plot? Does he make sense any more?

Example 2: On re-reading the description of a character’s relationship with his brother, you see that you’ve seriously undersold that relationship. The way the book has turned out, you need to beef up the conflict between them … while at the same time making it clear that there is a profound feeling between them that never gets expressed. All you’ve done in the book as written is to maneouver them around the plot, enabling them to interact with your protagonist but not actually developing them as individuals in their own right, and with a relationship to each other that turns out to drive the conclusion of the whole story.

These are examples from only the first six chapters of a 46 chapter book, and show how difficult it is to construct something that is logical, compelling and makes sense at even a superficial level. Well, difficult for me, I should say.

This book was the result of the most lucid and complete planning process I’d ever worked through … and still there are flaws in the motivations of characters. Partly this is because of the fact that as you write, the story continues to develop. Better ideas occur to you than did when you were in the planning stage. Or writing a character brings them to life in such a way that they begin to drive the story in a different direction to that which you’d planned.

I knew all that, and was ready for it.

But what I’ve learned is that not only must you have the direction of each scene planned - the way in, the conflict, the outcome for the protagonist - but you must also examine the motivation of each character in the scene. Why are they there? What do they want? How did they get themselves into this situation and what will they do as soon as they leave this scene? Obviously this is important for you to know about your protagonist and your major characters. But I’m realising you also need to know these things for your minor characters, too. Otherwise, a year down the line, you start to re-read and suddenly find yourself saying, ‘But that doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? Given what happens later … ‘

Actually, this isn’t Rewrite Hell. This is the part I like best. Fixing it. Spotting the inconsistencies. Bottoming out the characters. Tying together the plot points so that they’re evident to the reader as well as to me.

But it’s frightening when you come across something plainer than the nose on the Wicked Witch’s face, and you didn’t spot it two years ago. In the immortal words of Jay Leno, ‘What were you thinking?’

The sense of an ending

I’m reaching the end of my second Sam Dyke book, and it’s strange and exciting in the same breath. Strange because it’s been 2 years in the writing. Exciting … because it’s been 2 years in the writing.

My books come to me in flashes - a beginning, an end, maybe a scene from somewhere in the middle. Nowadays I write according to quite a strict outline, whereas in previous years I’ve just written away from a beginning towards a middle, then away from a middle towards an end. The scenes in-between have come as necessary to fill the gaps. With an outline, though, all the thinking is done in the planning stage and the writing does become easier. It’s a kind of structured inspiration. I use the creative flashes in putting together a structure, and then I stick to it.

But an odd thing happens as you get closer to the end of a book. All of a sudden you start to have yet more ideas. The plan you had for the end seems flat when there are so much more interesting ideas out there. But if you follow that new idea, does that affect what’s gone before? Without intending it, your perfectly structured ending goes out of the window as new possibilities open up. And new ways of rewriting what you’ve spent 2 years writing …

So the end becomes a potential new beginning. And you begin to wonder whether what you’ve been doing for so long is in fact working. Is the reader going to care what happens to your characters? Is she going to be able to follow the subtleties of the plot that you’ve cleverly built in … or are they so subtle that in fact no one could follow them?

The tendency is to rush the end. To get it all down as quickly as possible. To conclude the story line, wrap up the characters, and write THE END. So of course that’s exactly the time you have to slow down. Stretch out the ending. Take longer over the action. Put in more introspective moments at just the point that the action is heating up. Add dialogue between your main characters to help them understand what has gone on beforehand. Describe in more detail the precise facts surrounding the events that conclude your story. Because if you don’t, you get to the end of the tale before the reader is psychologically prepared for it. They bring with them everything that has gone before - the storyline, the characters’ development, the prospect of a future beyond the end of the book. And if you cut them off too short, they feel let down and deprived. The story has been ripped from them before they’re ready for it, and they’ll feel disappointed rather than sated.

This is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in many years of writing stories and novels: your readers have a sense of an ending that will be right and appropriate. You have to give that to them, or they’ll never forgive you.

Altered Life

Vonnegut’s legacy

Like many people, I guess, I’ve felt a special attachment to Kurt Vonnegut since the first time I read anything by him. That first book was probably Slaughterhouse 5, and I read it because they made a film in the early seventies that looked interesting and vaguely science-fiction-ish. Which was a plus.

So that was about 1972, and over here in Britain they started publishing or republishing all of his early works. So I was able to scarf up The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, Player Piano … all leading to the publication of his ‘birthday present to [him]self’ - Breakfast of Champions, in 1973.

So what was it that attracted people to him? What did he do, as a writer, that made the books resonate?

Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan are, to some extent, fairly straightforward science-fiction. Except that the latter is very funny, cleverly structured, and speaks with an individual voice practically unheard in 1950s science-fiction. By that I mean that you have a sense of a real person writing the words. It’s there in the first few paragraphs, and if you look closely you can see how he does it: simple phrases, homely words, familiar metaphors. Like this:

“Gimcrack religions were big business.” …
“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward … It flung them like stones.”

The use of “gimcrack”, “big business” and “like stones” tell us that this language is going to be the kind of language we all use. It’s not “literary” or difficult. It’s slightly ironic in tone but the irony of the common person, the person who regards large institutions with suspicion and who uses language to describe exactly what he or she sees, without fancy metaphors: “like stones.”

Reading The Sirens of Titan now, it actually feels quite literary compared to the later books. There are long sentences, quite a few descriptive passages, and lots of characters and situations. Later, Vonnegut refined his technique further - fewer characters, shorter sentences, less description. It was as if we began to understand Vonnegut-world and he didn’t have to describe it to us any more. What became important was the depth of his insights and the simplicity with which he began to express them.

At one level, this is perhaps why his novels became less successful even as his essays and other writings became more popular. He no longer needed the excuse of fiction to talk to us - he could use his essays and recorded speeches. I was sorry about that, because reading The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle for the first time is a lesson in how to have your head expanded to take in new fictional possibilites. For example, the use of drawings - created by himself - to punctuate and illustrate his books; or the introduction of himself as a character in Breakfast of Champions, pre-dating similar tactics by Martin Amis, Philip Roth and Douglas Coupland by a few decades. (He actually introduced himself as a character, though briefly, in Slaughterhouse 5, as someone excreting his brains … always the comedian!)

I spent a couple of years studying Vonnegut for a Ph.D. thesis, and later went on to teach Cat’s Cradle to college students. Despite these circumstances that are guaranteed to cool your ardour for any author, I ended up admiring him even more as a writer. To the extent that I found my own writing was beginning to lurch towards sub-Vonnegutian aphorisms and brevity. Unfortunately for me - or perhaps fortunately - I hadn’t suffered the same way he had: his mother committed suicide on the eve of Mother’s Day, the day Vonnegut returned home prior to being shipped abroad to fight in WW2; and his sister, Alice, and her husband, both died in one week in 1958 - she of cancer, he in a railroad accident two days before. All of these events, together with the well-publicised circumstances he endured during the fire-bombing of Dresden, gave him a perspective on the brevity of human life that was hard earned.

So Kurt has been there somewhere in the background for me for the last 35 years or so. Even as I read his later works with less and less enthusiasm, my admiration for the man as a humanist and someone who saw things clearly grew. Now it seems like there isn’t anyone out there who’s going to call us to account. My other favourite living author, Gore Vidal, is declining as a literary force, and his playful, if biting, comments more often sound left-field rather than right-minded. Too many disappointments seem to have clouded his judgement.

In these days of Bush, Blair and Bin Laden, we needed Kurt Vonnegut. Shame he had to go.

RIP

Your instrument …

At the same time as I’m working on my second novel, I’m also learning to play the guitar. I started about a year ago and progress is slow, largely because I’m teaching myself in a very haphazard fashion.

It struck me the other day that one of the reasons it’s hard to learn an instrument (at least a stringed instrument) is because there are several things you have to learn at the same time.

First, you have to train your body to complete manoeuvres it has no intention of completing of its own accord: fingers need to stretch to reach a span of notes on a fretboard; arms need to bend over the guitar body and under the frets, leaving you with aching shoulders; your back needs to be held upright even as you’re sitting on the edge of a chair.

Secondly, you have to do different things with your hands at the same time - fret chords with the left, pluck or strum strings with the right.

Thirdly, you may have to learn to read music - or at least the tablature that guitarists mostly read.

Fourth, there’s pain! Your fingers have to build calluses, and this can take months. Until they’re hard, your finger tips are grooved with painful lines, meaning you can only play for minutes at a time before having to shake your hand and utter a few choice words.

Fifth, if you play an electric guitar (which I don’t), you have to build a body of knowledge about electronics and amplification.

Why am I listing all these? Well, using one of those far-fetched analogies of which preachers are fond, it suddenly seemed to me that learning to play the guitar is a little like writing a book …

First, you have to train your mind to complete manoevres it has no intention of completing of its own accord: for example, you probably have to be more organised than might be usual for you - for instance, keeping track of the colour of characters’ eyes, or the timeline of events in your book, or the past history of your heroine. You also have to have the discipline to write, sitting at that table for hours every day, developing carpal tunnel syndrome, short-sight and (if you’re unfortunate) haemarrhoids.

Secondly, you have to do different things with the right and left parts of your brain - the creative and the structured. You have to follow a plan, an outline, a rough mental sketch - whatever system you’ve found suits you - but at the same time be open to the unexpected flash of intuition that takes you along a completely different path. Many writers seem to have nailed one but have trouble with the other!

Thirdly, you may have to learn grammar and spelling. Don’t be fooled that these will be fixed by an editor. Your work won’t even reach an editor if these two systems of notation aren’t reasonably well mastered.

Fourth, there’s pain! Mental anguish as you begin to believe you can’t do it, the words won’t come, the characters aren’t really alive, the plot is dull … why did you bother starting in the first place? You just have to build the mental calluses, the tough-mindedness that says, Write it, then Re-write it. You can’t do the second without the first, so just get it down on paper.

Fifth, if you use a computer (which I do!), you have to build a body of knowledge about word processing, filing, back-ups, formatting and printing.

Maybe these elements just happen to be part of the act of creation. Maybe for anything good to be formed out of thin air, you need to have developed mental and physical toughness, creativity and organisation. Maybe to use your instrument to the best of its abilities, you have to suffer pain, too. What a comforting thought!

Keith
Author of Altered Life

On or off the bus?

In the early 60s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters toured America in an old bus, promoting the use of LSD as a way of revolutionising society. People who thought of themselves as ‘Pranksters’ were considered to be ‘on the bus’; if not, you were ‘off the bus’.

I feel somewhat the same about Print on Demand publishing. I have a novel that I’ve self-published, Altered Life, and I’m proud that it’s out there and being bought, gradually, by people I don’t know.

By the same token, I know that I’m off the bus - I haven’t gone through a process of being chosen by an agent, sold to a publishing house, edited by a professional editor, proof-read by a person wearing thick glasses … I’ve done all these things myself. So part of me feels slightly like a second-class citizen, faking it, pretending to be an author when I’m actually someone with a lot of persistence and chutzpah.

Yet out there in POD-land, I come across many folk who consider themselves writers because they’ve put themselves in print, and people are buying their books. And I can’t decide what I think about this - and about their claims (and my claims) to be published authors. They show diligence, self-belief, marketing awareness and the ability to project manage. Some of them can even write a bit. But if you’ve not gone through the commercial publishing process, are you really a writer - or just a self-publicist?

For example, I have an acquaintance who has published a book through a large and well-known publishing house. I’ve read the opening pages … and that’s as much as I’d care to read. The reviews on Amazon.com have been mixed - some poor, some good. Yet the book is still 270000th on the hardback sales list (compared to my humble 1.4 millionth in paperback), which will be almost entirely down to the marketing clout of the publisher and the fact that the book is on bookstores’ shelves. It’s not, I believe, down to quality.

So are we PODders deluding ourselves? Just because a book is nicely printed by our publishers, doesn’t mean it would cut it in the commercial world. Are those of us who call ourselves writers just people who can string a sentence together but don’t have anything to say that would interest a commercial editor or publisher? I guess it comes down to what criteria you’re using - commercial acceptance or personal achievement. I suppose I view ‘writers’ as those who’ve managed the first of these. To publish by POD is certainly the second, and not to be sneezed at. But is it enough? I’m not sure.

I want to be on the bus, but I have a feeling I’m actually off it.