Learning to Write

Every book that I've written has taught me something valuable about my writing, and it's usually a lesson learned after I've finished the 'script to a point where I consider it "complete". (Quote marks required; is a book ever truly finished? I don't think so. There's always something that you could do to make it better but if you insist on holding back for perfection you'd never finish a book. There comes a point where you have to say that it's good enough, and move on.)

Pavonis taught me that I need to work harder on endings and pacing (and self-publishing it taught me that there is a whole lot more to self-publishing than many people think, and also that I'm terrible when it comes to marketing - but that's another story). The Artemisia Chronicle taught me the importance of reviewing and refining storyboards before beginning the actual writing. Gunn & Bohemia has taught me... well, let me go into this one a bit more.

As my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Ealing) will be aware, I submitted Gunn & Bohemia to Xchyler Publishing late last year and that resulted in a contract offer (woohoo! Still can't think about that without my pulse going up).

However, it's resulted in much, much more for me. As part of the process I had to assess the 'script as objectively as possible, putting myself as far as possible into the boots of The Reader. It's difficult, looking at your own work like that, but I did find several deficiencies that I really hadn't seen up to that point. Lesson 1: in future I'll be adding a self-assessment like this to my process and applying it to every new 'script I write, probably right after finishing the first draft.

One thing this assessment made plain was something that I already sort-of knew but hadn't really acknowledged to myself, and that is that my character building is weak. So at this point I'd like to thank Penny Freeman for making an excellent suggestion that has become Lesson 2: be your characters. By that I mean that you have to get to know them, understand the way they act and think and speak. Penny suggested writing diaries in first person from the point of view of each major character. After a while of doing that you find the characters, grow them, learn everything about them. Once you've reached that point you can speak for them - you have their voices.

(I should say that I've had a lot going on at home over the last couple of weeks and haven't been able to spend as much time on writing as I'd like to have done. Things are getting back to normal now and I'm getting back into my old routine.)

Actually having written the diary for one of my protagonists I took a slightly different tack for the others. It occurred to me that I don't want to know so much how they'd write about themselves; I needed to know how they talk, their mannerisms, what they look like. And so I changed this a bit. Instead of writing a diary, I considered myself to be transcribing a video diary in which they speak in their normal voices, run fingers through hair, pace about, avert their eyes (or not) at embarrassing admissions (note: put those actions in the transcript!). It seems to be working, at least for me. I really feel that I'm getting to know my characters - what they'll do in a given situation, how they choose their words when they speak, the painful secrets that they don't like to think about but that affect the way they behave.

For all 'scripts that I create in future this is going to be an official step in my process, probably after I've got the story fixed in mind but before I turn that into a scene-by-scene storyboard.

Talking about my process I'm thinking of writing up a blog post all about it, in detail. It might be useful to other writers, and it would certainly give me a handy reference. For now, though, I'm out of time and I have (paying) work to be getting on with. Better get to it. Later on I'll get back to some writing - at the moment I'm splitting my time between those character-building exercises and continuing work on Smoke & Mirrors; working on that one keeps me sharp. Until next time...