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It’s April Fool’s Day, and in honour of general foolishness, I thought I’d finish off my blog theme of working life with a quiz. Take it and find out if you’re foolish enough to be a novelist! I’d like to point out, of course, that I love being a writer, and that this quiz is not intended to imply in any way that my colleagues in the writing biz are fools. But it does take some unusual qualities – and priorities – to make a person take to penning novels!
And finally, a big shout out to my friend Kate Gordon, whose absolutely amazing novel Thyla is released today. (Kate is nobody’s fool. Although I suspect that, like me, she wouldn’t be averse to wearing a hat with bells on it …)
1. Someone hands you this. How do you see it?
A. Glass half full
B. Glass half empty
C. Glass might be poisoned … or magical!
2. Which cafe would you choose to frequent?
A. The one with the really hot waiter / waitress. Who cares about the food?
B. The one with the best food and quickest service. Who cares what the staff look like?
C. The one with the table in the back corner where you can hear the staff discussing their fascinating personal lives.
3. Which work-related moment would make you happiest?
A. Your colleagues telling you how pleased they are that you got that big promotion.
B. Getting a huge pay rise.
C. Receiving a box full of brick-shaped paper objects with your name printed in shiny letters on the front.
4. You show a friend a painting you were planning to enter in an art contest. They tell you that, to be honest, it sucks. How do you react?
A. You’re a bit hurt, but whatever. It’s not like you thought you were the next Van Gogh.
B. You tell them that they just don’t appreciate true art and enter it anyway.
C. You hide the picture under your bed and go around feeling depressed. When you can finally bear to, you take a look at the painting, heave a sigh and start again from scratch.
5. Your brother gives you a jester’s cap, complete with bells, as a jokey birthday present. Do you wear it?
A. Yeah – it gets a few laughs at your party. Then you put it in a drawer in case you’re invited to a fancy dress event some day.
B. No. You wouldn’t be seen dead in something so embarrassing.
C. Yes. But really only when you’re working at the computer. And at fantasy conventions. And medieval fairs. And while shopping, if you’ve forgotten to take it off.
If you got mostly A’s: You’re one happy, well-balanced person! You probably enjoy socialising and thinking positively about life, which means you’d have lots of joy to bring to your writing. But before thinking about becoming a novelist, you might want to ask yourself: do I really want to spend months at a time shut up alone with my computer, stressing over character development and overused adverbs?
If you got mostly B’s: You’re an extremely sensible individual. Even though you might enjoy a good book, you’d probably rather have a career that pays well and offers stability. And fair enough – someone has to do all the non-wordy jobs around here!
If you got mostly C’s: You are the quintessential Fool. Get out that cap and bells and fire up that netbook, because only someone as foolish as you would choose to become a novelist! You’ll probably never be rich or powerful (heck, you may never even get served, sitting over there in the corner), but if you can bear all the redrafting, agonising over plot holes and reading of gut-wrenching reviews, you just might have the chance to live in worlds of your own creation and share those worlds with thousands of people. What more could you ask for?
Writers draw inspiration from all sorts of places. Some people think that writers sit staring into space, waiting for their muse to inspire them. I guess that can happen (I’ve been known to stare into space from time to time, but this usually means I’ve become distracted and am thinking about manga or chocolate). For me, though, most inspiration comes from the things I’m doing a lot and the things I see and hear in my everyday life.
I thought of the basic premise for Dangerously Placed several years ago, when I was still at Step 4 on the Novelist Career Path. I’d had a kind rejection letter from an American SF magazine editor, telling me he liked my style and that I should keep submitting. The magazine’s website said that they were after ‘locked room’ murder mysteries for their next issue, so I tried to think of one. Because I’d been playing a lot of Animal Crossing on the Gamecube at the time my mind was full of the beauty of computer game worlds, and I began to imagine a virtual world where someone could be in contact with lots of other people in a computer-generated sense, but in a locked room in reality. When I was looking for an idea to follow up Mishaps with I took the short story I’d written about that out of its virtual drawer (okay, I looked it up on my old hard drive) and used some of the concepts for my new novel, adding in ideas that came from the many places I’d been and strange things I’d seen over the years.
If you need inspiration, look around you – it could be anywhere! The novel I’m working on right now is full of characters and situations inspired by everyday weirdness: the muscle-bound work experience student who followed my gym teacher into our Chickfit class and couldn’t keep up with all the middle-aged ladies; the stretch Hummer I saw get stuck on a roundabout the day I was having my author photos taken; the documentary about Sting playing the lute I stumbled across while on holiday. Find your everyday weirdness – it may just find you a story.
In yesterday’s post I talked about becoming a writer. So what’s it like when all your efforts finally pay off and you’re officially a published author? Well, it’s a dream come true, of course. At the same time, it’s not all glitz and glamour. And naturally, writers have different ways of going about their job. For me, the process of writing a novel goes something like this.
Firstly, I have to come up with a basic premise for the novel (tomorrow I’ll blog about how that happens). Once I’ve thought of it, it’s time for planning, which I do longhand in a sugarcane paper notebook. I use a mechanical pencil, so I can rub things out if I decide to change them. (Last year I found myself without a pencil for a couple of days and had to plan in horrible, unerasable pen. I’m still shuddering at the memory.) I plan the overall plot in rough outline, the first chapter or two in detail and the names and major traits of the characters I want to include. I also jot down ideas for sight gags, cheeky remarks and ridiculous situations I think might be fun to include somewhere.
At this point I’ll start typing the actual manuscript. Stephen King says that the scariest moment in writing is just before you start, but I really love the excitement of writing the first chapter of a new book. Every chapter or so I go back to the planning book and plan the next chapter or two in detail before I return to the computer. The scary part for me occurs in the middle of the manuscript, when I suddenly wonder how on Earth I’m going to tie it all in to the ending I’ve planned. Fortunately, experience has taught me that if I just keep going I’ll get over the horrible feeling that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Mostly.
Eventually I have a complete draft. Hooray! Time to kick back and relax? Heck, no. Time to get my editors and my husband to read it, scary as that is. Next I need to take their suggestions on board and redraft (often several times), which can mean chopping out huge chunks, rewriting the missing bits completely and trying to weave them neatly back into the story so that no one can see the gaps where I cut them out. There’s also a structural edit, where my editor reads the manuscript again and points out all the bits that still don’t make sense or sound clunky, so I need to work on those too. And finally there’s checking the page proofs for any more errors (which is fun, because I get to see my manuscript all printed out like it will be when it’s made into a book).
So where is all the glitz and glamour? Well, there certainly are a lot of dizzyingly exciting moments in a writer’s life. Getting your first copy of a book you’ve written and spotting it in bookshops wherever you go is an amazing feeling. Visiting your editors in their big, shiny office is awe-inspiring. Attending writers’ events like the World Science Fiction Convention makes you feel like you’re part of something really extraordinary. And people being excited that they know a ‘real author’ is great (although also kind of bemusing when you don’t feel all that famous!) The bulk of being a writer, though, is sitting at the computer, dressed in slobbish clothes and shut off from the rest of the world (well, except for the Internet, obviously – no one wants to be shut off from that!) Glamorous? Not exactly. But I wouldn’t swap it for any other job!
One of the things writers are frequently asked is: ‘How did you become a writer?’ So here’s a 10-step guide to becoming a novelist. This is just what happened in my case, but it might help if you’re wondering whether the path to becoming a novelist is one you’d like to take too. (If you are, you might want to put on sturdy shoes. It’s a long hike.)
Step 1: Spend a year or so writing a novel manuscript. It will be awful. Take care not to realise this too early on, or you will never get to Step 2.
Step 2: Get someone who knows good writing to read it. Experience crushing self-doubt after hearing that it’s not the world’s greatest work of fiction.
Step 3: Realise that, even though your beloved first novel sucks, you are now addicted to writing. Spend a lot of time working on more awful manuscripts. Make sure you ignore the obvious stupidity of this move.
Step 4: Write lots of short stories in an effort to make your writing CV look like something an editor would take seriously. Get a couple of stories published in magazines and win a few awards. Start to think you might actually be able to make it as a novelist one day.
Step 5: Send your next manuscript for a professional assessment. Get it back. Decide you were overly optimistic about making it as a novelist.
Step 6: Work on all the problems your assessment highlighted. Get your manuscript assessed again. Make sure you happen to have written the right thing at the right time to attract the attention of a literary agent (yeah, okay – this one is pure fluke.)
Step 7: With the help of your agent, submit your improved manuscript to awesome editor at major publishing house. Wait. (For how long? Until you’ve given up running to the mailbox the moment the postie arrives every day – it’s a well-known fact that a watched-for manuscript never returns.)
Step 8: Get manuscript back, along with kindly-worded rejection letter from awesome editor that suggests you send your next manuscript.
Step 9: Write yet another manuscript. Revise and polish it (with lots of input from your family, friends and agent) to within an inch of its life. Submit it to awesome editor.
Step 10: Awesome editor accepts your manuscript for publication. Run around in delirious joy: a mere 8 years after you started step 1 you will be a real, published author!
So, what are you waiting for? That awful first manuscript won’t write itself!
My new novel, Dangerously Placed, is about work experience. Not the kind of work experience I did when I was in Year 10, though. I spent a week at the local radio station, where I had the thrilling job of bringing out and putting away the song cartridges for each session (this was 20 years ago – they didn’t even have CDs yet!) I also did a week at a high school down the road from my own, which was entirely unremarkable, apart from the morning when my mentor didn’t show up to class and I decided to teach Year 7 English by myself. (I was told later that this was the wrong decision. If you’re ever in the same situation, remember that the correct thing to do is to leave the students throwing stuff around the room and go off to notify the senior staff, not to read short stories aloud and engage the kids in literary discussion.) It wasn’t exactly mind-blowing stuff.
So when I decided to write about a highly sought-after placement in a cutting-edge virtual office, I gave it all the things my own work experience stints had lacked. Glamorous locations! Important, exciting tasks to do! Hot guys! (Well, I guess the radio station did have that copywriter with the ponytail who used to dance around every time they played Turning Japanese.) But I also let some of my memories of work experience help me: things like being stuck in the photocopy room, realising you’re dressed like a complete dork, barely daring to open your mouth in front of the boss … and discovering that work experience can actually be thrilling. While I was off quizzing twelve-year-olds about character development that year, one of my classmates went to a TV commercial studio in Melbourne, where he helped make a fast-food ad that involved creating fake grocery items out of latex and then blowing them up with explosives. The ad was aired nationally not long afterwards, to our class’s complete awe. It was my inspiration for another character’s work experience in Dangerously Placed, and every time I see a really good special effect these days I wonder if that guy was behind it.
What was your work experience like? Was it totally tedious, utterly exhilarating, or something in between? And if you haven’t been on work experience yet, what would your dream placement be?
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