Collaborating

I've been a bad blogger recently - when I started this blog I intented to write every week, but I've only written one post this month, and it's already the 25th. But I have a legitimate excuse: I have been busy collaborating with some friends on a script for a modern day YouTube series of Les Mis. Whether or not we will ever finish this and convince anyone to film it aside, it is an awful lot of fun. So that other people can appreciate the fun of collaboration, I have made a list of hopefully helpful thoughts. Or perhaps even instructions. Really not sure.

1. Find some people who are ridiculously enthusiastic about something you are ridiculously enthusiastic about.
   In our case this was Les Mis. And also shameless shipping. But it could be a genre, or a premise, or a character. If you're not all really excited about the idea one person will forever be dragging the others along, or nobody will care at all. If you are all really excited, basically, it will be really exciting.
   


2. Choose a way to communicate and share your work.
   I loathe to say it, but Facebook groups are good. They have a file sharing function which allows you to upload revisions and make sure everyone is looking at the same version of things. Googledocs is probably better, because there's a lot less scrolling down and click 'Older Posts', and there is also a useful search function. There is, however, essentially no formatting, which can get awkward depending on what you're writing.
   Of course, you could just collaborate in person. But you still need a way to record what you've come up with, and make sure you all have access to it.
   


3. Make sure everyone has the same copy of the work
   Like I said, this is easy to do on Facebook. It's also easy to do on Googledocs, beacuse what you're writing will all be in the one document, and you'll all see edits as they happen. But if you're e-mailing documents back and forth, you need to make sure that you're all working on the same thing, or people will end up wasting their time working on things that have already been written, or already been cut.
   


4. Plan. Or at least plan how you're not going to plan.
   The first collaborative works I ever wrote were stories told in letters with my sister. The first person would write a letter - usually on the premise that they had to have a pen-pal as a school English assignment - and the second person would write a reply, knowing nothing other than what they'd read in the original letter. Basically, there was no planning required beyond deciding to write something together.
   If you don't have a format like this, you need to make a plan. That can mean laying out a full plot plan and delegating scenes, or it can just mean deciding who is going to write the next chapter, with no actually decisions about what will happen in the chapter. It really depends how much you want to be surprised by the plot, and how much control you each want to have over what happens. Either way, you need to have some idea of some combination what is being written, who's writing it, and when, or no writing will get done.
   


5. Write down your ideas.
   This applies to all writing, not just collaboration, really. If you're having a conversation with your co-writers, or just come up with a brilliant idea by yourself, write it down. You might think you'll remember it, but you won't.
   The first comments in the Facebook group of our collaborative script at the moment go something like:
   "Quick! Write down all the brilliant ideas we had before we forget them!"
   "Um. Um. I DON'T REMEMBER. Probably I will remember once someone jogs my memory, but."
   And then there is a lot of frantically flailing while everyone remembers things. The moral of the story is, if you have a three-hour conversation about what you're writing, and nobody takes notes, then it will be bad.
   


6. Share all your ideas
   Unless the premise of your collaboration relies of surprising your co-writers with plots, this is always a good idea. Before I started writing this collaborative script, I was working on something similar by myself. And basically, because I had the good ideas of one or two people, rather than five or six, it was comparitively mediocre. But now, even if I have what I think is a good but unworkable idea, rather than just disregarding it, I tell everyone, and they make it workable. This is the great thing about collaboration, and you should definitely appreciate it.

Thanks for reading! Do you have any tips for collaborating on writing projects?

Researching Historical Fiction

As well as failing to regularly update my blog, on account of holidays and the need to read the entirity of Les Mis in the two weeks before the movie comes out, I have been writing fanfiction of sorts about Cicero and Enjolras solving crime. Unexpectedly – yes, I didn’t see this coming – this has led me into the realm of historical research. I was intending for it to be a small writing project that I didn’t have to think about seriously, but of course, things never stay that way. I spent several hours the other day reading up in great detail on Cicero, to try and gauge how he would respond to being called a patrician. My several hours of reading the works of Cicero, and then any other writings I could get my hands on on the internet about Cicero left me with nothing but a throw-away line that will be read in under a second. But it did raise the question – how much research is too much?

I’m sure this is a problem that plagues anyone who tries to write historical fiction, and much more so those who try to write legitimate fiction that some bizarre sort of fanfiction mash-up, but nonetheless, it’s a problem. Is it really worth three hours of reading to get one line that doesn’t reveal anything at all? On the one hand, I did learn that Cicero was horrible arrogant, but also very witty, and that I’ll have to study Oscar Wilde before I can write proper Cicero fanfiction. It definitely helped me to get my head around his personality, as well as the setting.

On the other hand, it means that rather than write several pages – or at the very least one page – in a sitting, I’ve been moving at about a sentence a day. Even though I’m writing what I plan to be a short story, this could take me a long, long time.

In search of answers, I headed off into the blogosphere. I found advice ranging from “do the most research you possibly can” to “find a happy medium” to “you can write your story and then do the research”. The first raises the obvious problem that if you do the most research you possibly can, you will wind up a very old academic expert, with no historical fiction to your name. On the other hand, if you write before you research, your story might inadvertently hinge on something that couldn’t possibly have actually occurred, and the whole thing with fall to pieces. And as for finding the happy medium – it’s a great piece of advice, but where? and how? Beyond suggesting that you have to get your head around vagaries of speech and dress, nobody seems to have any idea.

I don’t have a solution to this problem yet, so I’m mostly writing this post in the hope that someone will comment with a magical answer. I don’t think there is one, but I like to pretend there might be. Does anyone have an answer? Have do you find the balance between research and writing?

Reports from the No-Longer-Novelling Front, and a Book Review

Nanowrimo

So I’ve given up on Nanowrimo. Turns out that having done Nano four years running does not qualify you to do a double-Nano. Some people have this kind of stamina. I do not. I will know this for next time, because it really isn’t worth the effort. I probably ought to have just made up my mind on one novel at the start of the month, accepted that I could write the other one at a later date, and moved on. And then, feeling overwhelmed by trying to write two Nanos and an essay on Livy, I decided to take a few days off. On the plus side, I learnt a valuable Nanowrimo lesson:  I should never take days off. Especially not when there is good weather, and I end up sitting outside, thinking thoughts like ‘Why would I want to go inside and write a novel?’ and ‘Ceebs.’

 Surprisingly, something else which I think may have potentially been a problem is the fact that one of my novels was meticulously planned, down to detailed scene lists. I think I felt less motivated to write because I already knew what happened, and so my characters will never be stuck in awkward limbo where no-one ever finds out how they resolve things. I know how they resolve things, and I wasn’t interested enough in exploring it in more detail. I hadn’t actually predicted this negative outcome of planning, but there you go. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong. Perhaps planning just isn’t a thing for me. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it may just have been the fact that my plan was so detailed that it was stifling anything unexpected. There is probably a nice balance I can find.

Honestly, though, it’s not all bad. I’m not exactly lacking in first-draft manuscripts that seriously need editing. One is hiding on my computer not being looked at, one is in the middle of becoming a second draft, and one is waiting to be converted into a musical. and then there’s a screenplay waiting to become a web-comic. And a half-finished novel about uber-talented artistic prodigies at boarding school. It don’t think I actually need Nanowrimo to make sure I write things at this point. Things get written. Now they just need to be made good.

And then, of course, there was the curse that strikes so many Wrimos – I had a brilliant idea for another story, that would be so much more fun to write. I call it ‘Cicero and Enjolras Solve Crime’. It will be amazing.

And now for a book review…

The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz

I’ve been meaning to read this book since I first learnt that it was going to exist. It’s a new Sherlock Holmes novel, authorised by the Conan Doyle Estate. They don’t usually go around authorising things, so this is all very exciting stuff, for fans such as myself.

Like most – though sadly not all – Holmes stories, this one is written in first person, from Watson’s point of view, opening with this lovely sentence: “I have often reflected upon the strange series of circumstances that led me to my long association with one of the most singular and remarkable figures of my age.”

As one can see, from the very beginning, Horowitz does an excellent job of picking up Watson’s voice, even managing to get in the important Watsonian adjective ‘singular’, of which the man is ridiculously fond. In fact, the opening chapter or two are so well-voiced that I was starting to feel a peculiar sense of having read them before. Luckily, the plot itself is original enough that this isn’t a problem, and by the time I was in the middle of the novel, I had completely stopped worrying about things like the authenticity of Watson’s voice. Also in terms of voice, Horowitz’s Watson is more introspective than Doyle’s ever was. This is explained by the fact that the novel is supposedly written by an old Watson after Holmes is long dead, whose remaining joy in life lies in reminiscing about his time with Holmes. It felt to me a little out of character for Watson to go off on as many reflective tangents as he did, but given the legitimate explanation, I’ll give Horowitz that one. Overall, in the sounding-like-Watson stakes, it was a job well done.

I was very impressed, too, with how Horowitz dealt with Watson’s wife – or rather, conspicuous lack thereof. It’s always been one of those problems in Sherlock Holmes novels – Watson gets married, probably several times, and yet his wives just kind of disappear, fading into the background to his adventures with Holmes. Horowitz addresses this early on, getting the wife out of the way on a long visit to an old employer. Conan Doyle could have tried this easy plot device, and saved many readers a lot of  “But wait, Watson, aren’t you supposed to be married right now? Do you ever even mention your wife?”

The story itself starts and finishes quite Holmesianly (yes, it’s a word), but a large chunk of the middle is oddly – not meandering as such, but tangental to what one would have expected. In a vague, non-spoilery way: Holmes and Watson start off solving one crime, which leads them to discover the next crime, which leads them to the next crime, and so on and so forth. So for a long time you’re just jumping from mystery to mystery, and you never actually go back and find out what the solution to each one is until the very end. It’s a little bit disorienting, and – as Watson kindly puts it within the novel – “I found it hard to make the necessary connection, which is to say, I was quite lost as to how [spoilers] could possibly have led us to our present pass. Here was a paradox indeed.” Yes, it was. I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to keep all the facts straight in your head and solve the mystery yourself as you go along, you’re in for a trying time.

All in all, I enjoyed the book immensely. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as the best Holmes short stories (‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’, anyone?), but then again, I always thought Holmes and Watson were more suited to the short-story format than the novel. As a Sherlock Holmes novel goes, it’s definitely the up there (and far superior to the Mormon chapters of A Study in Scarlet).

Reports from the Novelling Front: Day 14

Come Day 14, and I don't even want to think about how far behind Wordcount (yes, with a capital W) I am - albeit I do mean behind my double-wordcount of writing two novels in a month, but that only makes it worse.

In my defence, unlike for all those lovely Americans out there, for whom November is that month when things don't happen and the weather isn't that great (sort of like an Australian July, I imagine), November in Australia is the months of exams. On top of my 3334 words a day (yes, I know, what was I thinking?) I have had to write some 6000 words all-up of assessments. All in all, this seems like a bad idea.

In terms of the actual novels, they are not actually progressing poorly, wordcount. Yes, the Fantasy novel has descended into something which I would refer to as 'self-fanfiction': I have been writing one-shots about my characters' childhoods, cute little stories about their future children, and other things that will never serve any purpose. On the plus side, this adds to wordcount, and is more fun than stressing about plot (what is this...plot?). On the minus side, they have nothing to do with the novel, which is becoming something like a series of loosely connected vignettes. But I'm sure it can be salavaged, and by the end of the month it will have presented me with a whole host of interesting ideas, which may be turned into a novel, one day.

As for the Dystopian novel, I have been presented with a problem, which I saw coming a mile off. It was meticulously planned, and in planning, it's very easy to kill of your characters. You just write, "Arthur dies," and there you have it - Arthur is dead. In actual writing, you have just spent 13 days with Arthur, and you're far too attached to him to just kill him off. I have a feeling my novel will end up with a whole lot less deaths than I originally intended, simply because I'm a wussy writer who doesn't want to kill people. We shall see how that progresses.

Conclusion is that writing two novels may have been overreaching myself, just a little. On the other hand, it may still be salvagable, after I hand in my final essay come Friday, and then have two weeks of frantic novelling stretching before me. I have seriously considered just giving up on Nano, looking at my thirty-something-thousand words with pride, and then taking up a series of short stories in which Enjolras and Cicero solve crime instead. But I've found that I can't do it. After four years of successfully completing Nano, I don't want to break my streak. I really like those little purple badges that sit on my profile and make me feel incredibly smug. So I'm not giving up yet. I am just taking a break. I want that purple badge.

I hope the rest of you Wrimos out there are feeling more motivated than me, and also finding yourselfs burdened with less essays on the moral decline of the Late Roman Republic. Happy novelling! (If you're not doing Nanowrimo, and are feeling left out, I promise you a post later this week, written by my lovely sister, on why Nano doesn't have to be everyone's cup of tea. Watch this space.)

Reports from the Novelling Front: Day Six

This will be short, because I am behind inevitably behind in my Nano, and it is late. But here is a brief update on how things are going at the end of Week One of Nanowrimo.

I am writing two novels

Yes, it is true. No, I don’t know why I am doing this to myself. Well, I do know why, but I don’t know why. I started writing the first one – a fantasy novel  - and I just felt like it wasn’t working. So then I started writing a dystopian future instead. But then someone critiqued the excerpt I’d posted for the first novel, and I realised that one wasn’t so bad. So now I’m doing both. Surprisingly, it’s not as bad as all that – although admittedly I am a thousand words behind in one, and two thousand behind in the other. But I’m actually finding it pretty easy to get out at least two thousand words a day. I think it’s because when I get sick of one Nano, I can just switch to the other, and I’ll still be adding to my wordcount.

Planning is crushing my characters

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on how beneficial it is to plan before you write, and how much easier it makes it easier to fix problems such as plot-holes and flat characters. But now I have discovered an unexpected downside. I planned both my novels this month, and the reason I originally tried – and failed – to drop the fantasy one was because my characters were feeling incredibly flat. Because I have a plan, I feel like they are carrying out their actions because that’s what it says they do in the plan, not because they are motivated by their personality or experiences. For example, I find myself giving them lines that they probably wouldn’t say otherwise, because I know they have to say that at this point in the plot. Their characters have become secondary to plot, and so they’re really failing to develop distinctive personalities.

In my other novel, the dystopian future, my character’s personalities are doing fine. I planned this one too, but I spent a lot more time on character and character development when I did, which I think has actually made a huge difference. (I’m usually very cynical about planning characters, so this surprised me.) In future, if I plan a novel, I’m going to make sure I make it very heavily character based. Because I know my fantasy characters have personalities – I just can’t find them under all the plot.

Outside of that, I think having planned my novels is making me write a lot faster, since I never have to spend time staring at my screen wondering what should happen next, and if I skip a scene, I know exactly where to skip to, and what happened in the part I skipped.

So those are my two thoughts from Nano so far. How are you other Wrimos going?

Worldbuilding Resources

Nanowrimo is only 25 days away! At the expense of all other writing ventures (read: as procrastination from editing, which is not nearly as fun as it should be), I have been plotting my novel for Nano. Since I'm writing fantasy, I've been doing work on world-building, and I've discovered a fun fact – it's way easier to build a world when you actually have a plot in mind. In the past, I have made the mistake of worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. I've sat down at my computer and said, “I'm going to create a fantasy world today.” I don't deny that this was fun, but it definitely lacked something.

 

This time, however, I had the good sense to begin with a plot, and a 'gimmick', as it we, for my world – the idea of souls as a commodity that can be extracted through dance (this sounds much tackier when I write it down like that). Once you have something to base your worldbuilding off, you discover all sorts of unexpected things – do you realise that if dancing can steal your soul, you might have trouble passing on oral history? Nor did I, but these are the things I've ended up thinking about over the past few days. The lesson I have learnt from this is that your world needs something to set it apart from other worlds, and to fuel ideas about the culture of your people. (I'm not so interested in the geographic and map-making part of worldbuilding at the moment.) The thing I most dread is when you ask someone what their setting is and they answer, 'You know, it's like, a medieval fantasy world, with elves and dwarves and stuff.' Originality is, I believe, the key to rewarding worldbuilding.

 

While I was on the topic, I thought I should share some of the resources I've been using.

30 Days of Worldbuilding

This is – as the name suggests – a thirty day tutorial which takes you all the way through geography, climate and history to different plot points you might use in your story. The format makes it perfect for use during October, so by the time November rolls around, you will have a well-formed world for Nano! Yay! It includes discussion of the 'What if?' of your world – the speculative element that will set it apart from other worlds, and guide your worldbuilding to an extent, which is good, because when I first encountered this, I hadn't realised that having your own unique 'What if?' was really necessary. There's also a lot of focus on the mood of your world reflecting the mood of your story right through, which is good for creating more effective setting.

 

The only problem I found with this was that there was a lot of geography, map-making kind of stuff, which I got bored of, and am mostly not bothering too much with for this year's Nano. But if you're into map-making, go for it.

Patricia C. Wrede's Worldbuilding Questions

This is an extensive list of questions covering pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about your world, and some things you'd never even thought of. They're even sorted into convenient categories and sub-categories, so that if your world is going fine, but you just don't know what to do about transportation and communication – BAM! and Patricia C. Wrede has the answers.

 

Working through these questions from beginning to end can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many of them, and they do go into an awful lot of detail. They're probably best for fleshing out the bits of your world you've neglected, or your brain might explode. But definitely worth a visit.

Fantasy Art Resource Project

This one is oddly Biblically themed, working through the creation of your world in seven days, each on the theme of what God created on that day of the week – day four is Astronomy, for example, because that's when God created the stars.

There are a lot of very useful questions, but also information that you will need to know what building a world – for example, in the section of fashion, there is a whole list of the different factors that can effect fashion, and how they can do so. The tutorial also works through the different 'stages' of economic development, starting with the barter system and finishing (interestingly) at Communism (I don't think he was actually going for linear development from least sophisticated to most sophisticated here, but it did come across that way...), so you can work out where you want your own society to fit in without just staring at a page and going “Oh God oh God economy?!” which is probably when I would have done if anyone had asked me in depth about how economy in any society I was designing worked.

Liljenberg (the author) divides society into priests, warriors and workers – the Three Estates, if you will. While this is horribly simplistic, it's not a bad way of getting a handle on the basic values of the society you're designing, and how things will change depending on which 'Estate' is the most powerful.

One of my favourite things about this site is that several of the 'days' come with handy worksheets – one for animals, one for solar systems (if you're writing sci-fi) and one for cultures – so you have an easy way to record information. After all, who doesn't want a sheet with tick boxes for your society's familial structure, and a line to fill in their drug of choice?

This site is my personal favourite at the moment, but all three are worth visiting, and there are many more which I am yet to try out. I could be at this a long time. How is everyone else progressing with Nanowrimo planning?

The Pros of Planning

With Nanowrimo coming up in a mere 7 weeks, and having just entered the ‘100 for 100’ challenge over at Go Teen Writers , I have been thinking a lot about planning novels. I’m not usually a planner. I much prefer to come up with a premise, maybe a few scenes that I want to take place, and then start writing. Talking with my sister, I tried to justify my lack of planning with the following argument: 

If you plan a novel, you know that something exciting is coming up soon, and so you’re not too worried about every individual scene, so much as ‘slogging through the boring bits’ to get to the exciting plot point you know is around the corner. Whereas if you don’t plan, you never know what’s going to happen, so you have nothing to look forward to, and you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting.

Unsurprisingly, she shot my argument down like a fish in a barrel, pointing to several examples of novels which were clearly not planned, which had very dull middle sections. And she was right – when reading a novel, you can usually tell whether the author planned it before they wrote it, or whether they just say down and wrote, and tried to tighten it up afterwards. I struggle to get through the latter kind. Justine Larbestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy was like this for me, as was Libba Bray’s Rebel Angels. Books like these have good premises, good characters, and even good plot points, but they wander. I often feel like the same events happen over and over again. As my sister pointed out: if you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting, that’s just the problem. No scene is more exciting than the rest. There’s no rising tension, there’s just a sense of plodding along through the same plot points, until you get to the end.

Against all the odds, I am beginning to see the merits of planning. I returned this week to the novel I began planning back in July using the Snowflake Method (thoughts on that over here), and I discovered something very useful – my main character, Ink, was boring.  Whereas the other characters had backgrounds that connected them to the conflict of the plot, and motivations rooted in complex backstories, Ink was described (and I cringe to write these words) as “a vaguely dissatisfied teenager” who wants to “change the world” although she “has the potential for a secure job”. It doesn’t sound like compelling reading.

So I cut her. Ink is banished to the dustbin of novel-writing forever, to be replaced with (hopefully) much more compelling characters. And you know how long it took me to cut her? Under a minute, since I realised this in the very early stages of planning. And how much time had I wasted on a boring character? Maybe an hour, at most. By comparison, several years ago I wrote some thirty thousand words about a girl named Katie who could be described with nothing more than the tags “ordinary teenager” and perhaps “flaming red hair with a temper to match”. When I realised she had no emotional connection to the other characters, and was perhaps most kindly described as “sociopathic”, I scrapped the story, because there wasn’t much I could do when all thirty thousand words were first-person, from her point of view. Had I realised my main character lacked pretty much everything except a name and a hair colour during the planning stage, I could have remedied it then.

The moral of this story is: planning isn’t all bad. The only thing I have ever written which has made it to second draft was written with no plan, but I think I have to accept that that might have been a once off. It looks like planning could save me a lot of time and a lot of effort, as well as producing better results. This revelation makes me sad, and won’t stop me from sitting down in front of a blank screen and writing down the first words that pop into my head, but it might make me stop to think before I write thirty thousand more of them.

Has anyone else had a revelation like this? Do you find planned-out novels are better than others?

(Also, the latest report on the Snowflake Method is that it can be quite a bit of fun, if you skip steps 5, 6, 7 and 9.)