Category: writing

My Worldbuilding Weekend

personby Gillian Polack
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(2008-09-07 10:23)

Folks must be writing New Ceres’ stories – I’m getting asked lots of stray questions about the universe.

For the record, Matt’s questions are the best [New comment: Matthew Farrer – whose story was published in the New Ceres anthology.] This is partly because he understands the nature of shared universes so deeply and respects them; it’s partly because he is such a good writer; and it’s partly because he pays attention. The worst questions (and I won’t name names) are from someone who wants a high tech story and wants to superimpose it on a static backdrop and even some of the physical fundamentals of the world are expected – in this particular writer’s mind – to change to fit plot needs.

This made me think.

This is hardly the first time I have had lots of people ask me about universes and worldbuilding. I get Medieval questions all the time, in fact. I’m doing a Sydney workshop on the stuff of the Medieval imagination in October, which just shows this sort of question is a regular part of my existence.

Each and every writer who talks to me brings with them a set of assumptions. Some of these assumptions are about the way research fits with writing. Some are about the way a given society works.

Some of them are about the story line and characters. The writers who frustrate me are the ones who assume that they can twist everything to fit. That static backdrops make for perfect fiction.

Why bother attempting proper world-building, whether it’s for historical fiction or speculative fiction, if your attitude is going to undermine your writing (and your world building) before you begin? Because that attitude does undermine the believability of the world. It carries through to the reader, always. [New comment: the problem is that New Ceres wasn’t designed for static backdrop, not that static backdrop is never suitable for fiction. In using the world as a painted cartoon background, the world would have been shifted from something dynamic and tarrying to something for pop adventure ie New Ceres was colour, not part of the fabric of the story.]

The reason for good worldbuilding and asking the right questions and understanding the answers is the reader. In an ideal book, they have enough clues to the world on enough levels so they are able to accept it and its implications and enjoy the book. So that there’s no “Well, it was OK, but something niggled.” Or so that they don’t have to race to check out “Could that really have happened.” It’s a trust thing.

Reader trust is built up with little clues and with the approach to the writing as much as it’s built up through getting ‘facts’ right. There are other ways of creating that trust than by using solid worldbulding, if your writerly soul can’t deal with solid worldbuilding. Read Alice and Wonderland again and you’ll see one approach. Most fiction, however, of any genre (including literary) has a consistent universe lying beneath it, reinforcing what it says and making it more convincing for the reader. The reader can immerse themselves in it for the duration. It’s one of the reasons I love reading – it takes me to other places and other times (tonight I might visit Alaska, tomorrow, Narnia).

Sometimes, it’s hard to convince writers of this, especially if they’re at the stage where they’re moving from short stories to novels. I don’t know why this is so. If the person was writing fiction set in a media tie-in universe, I would say “You know, making Darth Vader Luke’s son won’t work, don’t you?”

At the level of settings (and without making gratuitous Star Wars jokes), this sort of thing is harder to explain. Bringing the wrong approach to your world building questions can produce a high level of discomfort in a reader. A reader may not realise that the reason why they didn’t enjoy a New Ceres story as much as they ought was because the etiquette used was modern or that the sunlight had different effects in this story to all the other ones they’d read, but the feeling of “I just don’t like this story as much” still remains.

It’s even more complicated with Medieval settings. With any historical setting, in fact. New Ceres has solid world building behind it (you should see the files on my computer!), but, compared with actual human history it’s infinitesimal.

Think of how much we each lived yesterday. Think of all the humans in history having a full lifetime of yesterdays. Then think, if you’re writing about all those yesterdays, how do you choose what you need so that you can convince the reader everything is real, without convincing the reader they need a nap rather than finishing your book? I might choose the bit of my particular yesterday where the symptoms of cutting down cortisone hit because it was funky and funny. If I were writing it as fiction, I’d emphasise how jumpy I was and how exhausted and I’d tell it in such a way as to betray some of my secrets. I’d use it to bring a character to life, not as a straight description of a day.

Then there’s the matter of the notions of history we carry with us. I just discovered that a pop article I wrote on those notions (as applied to modern Arthurian fiction) has been put onto an undergraduate reading list in Germany. Not something I would have expected to happen, but it does highlight that finding out how we package our thoughts and how other people package their thoughts is terribly important.

If I want to use background to betray a character’s private longings and fears or to give a particular emphasis to an action scene (heighten the action, or enhance its significance, perhaps) then the shoddy “I’ll just add this to my story – I know what I’m doing” approach is just not a good idea. A writer might be strong enough to carry off a generally convincing story without that extra level of understanding, but they’re still undercutting their own taletelling on other levels.

A good writer takes a lot of care with words. They make sure that those words reflect the deep and precise meaning they need to convey and that those words link to other words and add to their meaning as well. Words are more than the sum of their parts: we all know this. World building, too, is more than the sum of its parts. This is all old hat.

I find it entirely fascinating that it’s possible to tell just how effectively a writer will use a world from the type of questions they ask subject experts. The type of question helps elucidate a universe that can underpin a whole novel – or undermine one. This, for me, is new hat.

Ghosts

personby Gillian Polack
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(2008-02-23 19:10)

My mind is dwelling in deep places today. I’m thinking about issues of trust and how far you can let someone into your life before expecting them to take some responsibility for their actions in relation to you. It struck me that this is something I need to write about and it might belong with my ghosts. This is either going to be a very funny novel or a deeply pensive one. It might end up both.

I’ve been on the verge of writing it for over a year. I’ve done most of my worldbuilding (all those map-thoughts for Canberra, exploring cinema food in the 40s – all that stuff) but even when I had a good idea of my characters’ lives, they hadn’t come alive for me. When that happens I sit back and I wait.

The first thing that happened when I sat back this time was that I changed one of the main point of view characters. I need someone with ghosts for a whole part of the narrative stream, otherwise the ghosts my characters meet are only interesting supernatural beings and are in danger of being plot devices. I need ghosts to resonate more deeply than that.

We all carry particular burdens and some people carry the burdens of the deaths of others. I don’t mean that these people are murderers, I mean that they live with a constant feeling of work unfinished, or of missing someone, or of not having done something when the time was right, or of being observers at a time when distance hurt. I think the only ghost I carry of someone who I was able to say a proper goodbye to is that of my father. This is why I want to write about ghosts, to be honest: I need to understand my own.

The trust thing is a different matter, but it is most definitely related to the fears that bring forth ghosts for some people. As you have probably realised, I’ve been thinking for a long time about racism and sexism and how the disabled can be victimised or made helpless, and how people with mental health conditions are often excluded from perfectly normal decision-making and activities. One of the big barriers for any of these groups (and for a bunch of others) is trust. How much can they tell people about who they are, and still be treated as themselves and as full human beings? Think of Showboat, and the complete change to a couple’s existence when the woman has to admit to being of mixed race.

Trust honoured and used well is one of the biggest gifts a human being can give another, and trust abused is one of the most frightening.

That trust abused doesn’t have to be on a grand scale to be frightening. It can be someone making a decision for someone else because of an unexamined assumption that the person isn’t capable because they’re in a wheelchair or on medication. I see that a lot in my work. I get it a bit from my health conditions. At the heart of it is an assumption about what society is and how people ought to work together. When societies become scared, this type of trust is one of the first victims.

One of the reasons I have done the activism thing is, in fact, because of the biggest cause of fear and hurt in society usually being trust abused. I feel very strongly that it’s the responsibility of each and every one of us to find out where we’re going wrong and to deal fairly with others. A higher level of trust in a society means a lower level of fear and hatred. It’s that simple.

There are ways in which abuse can be minimised – through education, through legislation, through enough money to provide neutral assistance for people with physical disabilities so they’re not dependent on friends or neighbours for everyday needs. I know I retired from all this because of my health, but I keep thinking that the issues are too important and that one day I’m going to have to go back. Maybe this novel is the beginning of me going back.

Right now, though, I want to examine those issues at a very personal level. Not my personal: my characters’. What happens after divorce, or instance? Do the changes in life you experience when you retire mean you have to learn how to defend yourself against well-meaning invaders of your quiet places? What happens to a 12 year old girl when she is thrust out of the family circle of caring? When can you admit to being different without friends thrusting you away or making decisions for you or reading the life you’ve always led as suddenly unstable?

Trust issues at a personal level lead to judgements. We all make judgements. How far do we let people into our lives? How far can an individual abuse that acceptance into our lives without doing anything they feel is wrong?

I don’t want to go down the heavy racism path. I want to think about less well-trodden ground. I won’t go into it here – I need to work out just how far any character will let anyone else into their life and what the effects are. I feel incredibly mean, because this is going to hurt them. The ghosts are going to be fun and delight by comparison with death by a thousand needling doubts.

So I have my stable of ghosts. And I have some very big issues for my main characters to deal with. Now I have to be patient and let it all come together. I can’t write until it has all come together. If I do, then the book will be all about issues and not about telling a story. Waiting – for me – is what shines enough light in the deep places so I can find the stories there.

Q & A On NaNoWri Mo

personby Deborah J. Ross
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In which I interview myself on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

What are you doing National Novel Writing Month* this year, Deborah?
Cheering on my friends. I’ll be finishing up revisions on the next Darkover novel, Arilinn.  Revising is a very different process from drafting. I find that drafting goes better when I do it quickly, so I don’t get caught in second-guessing myself or editing as I write. Both are recipes for disaster and paralysis. Revising, on the other hand, does not reliably produce any measurable result in terms of pages or words. I dive into it and call it quits every day when my brain won’t function any longer.

How does NaNoWriMo compare to real writing?
Writing is writing! Every writer does it a little differently, and I think most of us change from project to project and also over the course of our careers. Challenges, whether novel-length or short-length, can be fun or oppressive, pointless, or a marvelous way to jump-start a new story.

Doesn’t it bother you when hundreds of thousands of people every year turn your career, the dream job you’ve worked at for 16 years, into some kind of game?
You say “game” as if it’s a bad thing. If some aspect of writing isn’t fun — and there are wonderful professional writers who hate to write but love to have written — then why do it? The community-building that happens during NaNoWriMo is one of its more attractive aspects. Writing is a solitary activity, so it’s wonderful to have those “hundreds of thousands” of compadres cheering you on.

Sorry. Do you think it’s possible to write a good novel in 30 days?
Yes and no. Some writers can produce a solid first draft in a month, so that’s the yes part. On the other hand, I’m skeptical of any first draft, no matter how long it takes, being “a good novel.” I suppose some writers do so much planning and so much reflection on each sentence that their first drafts-on-paper are really third-drafts-in-the-mind. In the end, though, the goal is not to produce a good novel but to write quickly and and consistently and to push through to the end.

Isn’t the emphasis on quantity over quality a bad thing, teaching participants to write crap?
Most writers don’t need to be taught how to write crap. We do that very nicely all on our own, thank you. However, writing challenges can teach us to get the story down on paper (or phosphors), which is a necessary first step to a polished final draft. The rewards of actually finishing a novel draft, no matter how much revision it will need, should not be underestimated. Even if that novel is indeed crap, it is finished — the writer now knows that he or she is capable of completing it. That in itself is worth celebrating.

Another thought on crap. If you aren’t writing it and you never have, you aren’t doing your job. You aren’t taking chances or pushing edges or just splatting out what’s in the back of your semi-conscious mind. You are allowing your inner critic to silence your creative spirit.

Eric Rosenfield says NaNoWriMo’s whole attitude is “repugnant, and pollutes the world with volumes upon volumes of one-off novels by people who don’t really care about novel writing.“
I seriously doubt that what is wrong with this world is the surfeit of aspiring novelists. And I can’t imagine why anyone would put herself through NaNoWriMo if she didn’t ‘care about novel writing.’ Good grief, if you want to be irate about Bad Things In The World, there are plenty of issues out there, things that actually impact people’s health, liberty, and lives. Too many one-off novels is not one of them.

Well, what about Keith DeCandido’s post, wherein he says NaNoWriMo has nothing to do with storytelling; it teaches professionalism and deadlines, and the importance of butt in chair?
Can storytelling be taught? I’m not sure. Yep to the other parts.

Fine, what do you think NaNoWriMo is about?
Why is it about anything than a community of people hell-bent on crash’n’burning their way through a short novel in a month? That makes more sense than it being a nefarious conspiracy.

Any last words of advice, Ms. Very Important Author?
I’d love there to be a parallel track for those of us who have other deadlines, such as revisions or finishing in-progress novels. Certainly FiMyDaNo (Finish My Damned Novel) fits the bill, and I encourage anyone in mid-draft to jump in. Revisions, at least mine, mean taking notes, cogitating, making flow charts of structure, correcting maps, ripping out chunks and shoving them around, not to mention generating piles of new prose. These all count. The thing with revisions is that sometimes a lot of thinking and a small amount of actual wordage change — if it’s the right change — counts for a solid day’s work. It’s exhausting, too. So maybe the goal is, “I will think about my revisions every day this month.” 


Okay, Ms. Interviewer, if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo, what are your goals for this month?

*November 1 – November 30

National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo is a month-long creative writing challenge that takes place every November. During the month participants from all over the world are challenged to write a 50,000 word first draft of a novel.

Where the past comes to my aid…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’ve had my COVID update jab today. This means I’ll be clear in a few weeks and can maybe be a bit social. Unfortunately, I’m also one of those people who are COVID-vulnerable and who has a charming long and painful reaction to the vaccine.

Instead of a real post this week (and maybe next week and the week after, it depends on how long it takes to get through this) I thought you might like something from my past. Three things, in fact. If you scratch below the surface you’ll see a suggestion about how I approach the terrible things happening this month. The posts aren’t about that, however. The posts are about what I was thinking 15-16 years ago. The novels I was writing then were “The Time of the Ghosts” and “Poison and Light.” Both of them are still in print (“The Time of the Ghosts in its umpteenth edition, and “Poison and Light in its first) and the cover of “Poison and Light” contains artwork by Lewis Morley, who entirely understood my thoughts and dreams about the world of the novel. For a change, instead of saying “This book may be out one day, if I’m lucky” I can send you to the exact stories I wrote about, way back then. There aren’t many advantages to getting significantly older, but this is one of them…

(2007-11-26 21:45)

I need to tell you a story.

Once upon a time I was still active in the Jewish Community. At work on Friday afternoon I answered the phone and at the other end was a frantic community leader. “Gillian, you have to come to synagogue tomorrow, it’s very important.” He couldn’t tell me why. All he knew was that he had received a phone call from a well-known Melbourne rabbi (who had never met me) saying that Gillian Polack had to be at synagogue on Saturday morning. The rabbi knew I didn’t usually go to Shul, too, and he had said very firmly to “make sure she’s there”.

I couldn’t arrange a lift, so I hopped on my two busses very early and walked the half mile or so at the other end and found the Progressive Service and looked around for any reason I might have been summoned.

In front of me was a visiting cantor (but visiting from overseas – no links with me or mine), the backs of heads of the usual congregants, and about thirty aging pates. The usual congregants kept sneaking back to me to find out why I was there “Is there something happening this afternoon that wasn’t advertised?”

I whispered a question about the thirty heads to one of them and he whispered back “visitors from Melbourne, doing a tour – nothing to do with the cantor.” Somewhere in that crowd of heads probably lay my answer.

The service ended. Everyone stood up. The visiting group turned round to survey the back of the hall. I heard a woman’s voice cry, “There she is,” and one elderly lady ploughed out of the mob and towards me. The others all followed, like sheep. Some of them knew me, most of them were simply following their natural leader.

Valda is a friend. Except that it’s now “Valda was a friend”. I don’t believe it yet. Mum told me about her funeral just fifteen minutes ago.

She was nearly ninety and we just got on well. We snarked together at conferences and we stirred her kid brother (a close friend of my father’s and another friend of mine – the two of us have stood to the side at parties and brought down the tone of the proceedings since I was a teen) and we did a lot of very good volunteer work together. She died in her sleep, her life a resounding success.

I will miss Valda for a very very long time. And I will always remember how many people went into operation to make sure we got to chat when she was in Canberra. She could have rung me or she could have told my mother, but Valda simply told everyone she wanted to see me and – because it was Valda and we all loved her – everyone made sure it happened.

I will also never ever forget that horde of touring retirees descending on me. I was a whistle-stop for the Canberra part of their bus trip. And I bet Valda knew this when she called out “There she is.”

For the record, the questions were mostly about my Melbourne family. Also for the record, I asked in response “You’ve been away for a week and you miss them?” Valda hasn’t even been away a week and already there’s a hole in my life.

Is Literary Fiction Dead?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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According to a recent essay in The Nation by Dan Sinykan, an English professor, literary fiction might soon be dead.

I’m probably one of many who will be glad to dance on its grave. While it is certainly true that not all fiction is great literature, the implication that only “literary” fiction is the truly good stuff made me furious long before I started writing science fiction.

Sinykan defines literary fiction as “fiction that privileges art over entertainment.” I find that definition ridiculous, given how much art I have found in science fiction and other work relegated to “genre” and how little I have found in some supposedly literary works.

I mean, are you really going to say that Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t create art? Or, for that matter, Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler?

And while F. Scott Fitzgerald had a lovely way with words, his subject matter was less than enticing. I remain unimpressed by The Great Gatsby, though I suppose the struggle between grifters and the more established rich is still a ripe subject for exploration.

When I was at Clarion West, Chip Delany told us that literary fiction was just another genre. It was a revelation. Of course, Chip’s work certainly reaches the standard of art.

I began to read science fiction at about the time literary fiction became a term – which Sinykan says happened in 1980 – because so much of what was supposed to be good fiction back then was boring the hell out of me. Continue reading “Is Literary Fiction Dead?”…

Talks and ducks and coots and swans

personby Gillian Polack
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I writing several talks this week. I didn’t used to write talks: I used to simply deliver them. Because of the health issues I have, though, I can’t guarantee that, on the day I give a talk or when the talk is recorded for later delivery (this latter is what happens this evening) I will be able to think effectively and to speak cogently. Most of the time, now, then, I write things down. So many people want to read it as a written word, too, that I often have a small audience (this month through Patreon) that wants to see what I say.

I have two pieces for finish today. One is an academic paper. My academic self is quite different to my fictional self when it comes to talks. The academic self is more intense and only sometimes includes bad jokes. The paper is about where the history comes from in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver and is for a conference in Melbourne on Monday. I need to complete the overheads today and to do that, I need to know what I’m going to say, so it’s wise to finish the whole paper.

I have written almost all of the paper (and it’s already in the hands of someone who won’t be at the conference on Monday, but who needs to see it). All I need to do today with it is finicky finishing and the Powerpoint presentation. Academic work always contains much finicky finishing.

To do these last bits, I read the written word aloud, over and over. Each time I read a sentence, I listen to discover it makes sense in its place and whether words need switching or the sentence needs moving or if the whole thing has to be crossed out and replaced with something more sensible.

This is why most of my academic papers relate closely to my current research. I used to deliver more entertaining papers, but then I realised that the closeness of the editing for a good paper advances my thought on the research. Often it’s subtle advancement, but it’s always useful. My papers are less fun, but way more useful.

After the conference, I’ll take the paper and compare it to the chapter it relates to and the chapter will suddenly make a lot more sense. Editing today, then, means editing next week and the week after. This is a good thing.

What about the talk? The talk is for Octocon, which is in Ireland over the weekend. On my Monday morning I will technically be in Ireland having delivered the talk and in Melbourne, delivering the paper, mere hours apart. This is why my talk is being pre-recorded. I will have pictures for the Octocon talk, and these I still have to find and put in order. Mostly, though, with the talk, I need to make it make sense for people who have not read the books I’m talking about (by Tolkien, by Australian writer Leife Shallcross, by Irish writer Peadar Ó Guilín, and by Naomi Novik), who haven’t studied the subject I’m talking about and who want a bit of lyricism or humour to entice them to keep listening. The subject is how space and boundaries are important to fantasy fiction. Right now there’s too much lyricism. It’s easy to wax lyrical about forests and rivers and borderlands. However, I don’t want the words to ripple and flow and to create an abstract design: I need them to make sense. I have 800 words to add, then the rest of this talk lies in the edits. More reading aloud. More making things make sense to people who don’t live in my brain.

At 10 pm tonight, I have a long meeting with someone in Montreal. She will walk me through the tech side of Octocon, sort out all the tech issues related to the talk, record the talk and… my day will finish early tomorrow. Tomorrow I have 2 meetings (one for work, one for fun) and need to finish the first draft of another talk. I have five conventions/conferences this month, only one face to face. I’m short on time because all this is as well as my research. It’s work I love, but it’s not paid, also, so other things have to happen to keep me in food and electricity. This fortnight those other things are my research (for which I have funding) and Patreon.

Also, if anyone thinks that chronic illness and disability disappear in weeks like this… they do not. This week is a very exciting juggling act. Furthermore, most of this work is not paid. It’s just part of the life of a writer. Each of us have different things we do. Because I’m partly an academic (mostly unemployed, but not entirely) and partly a writer, much of my life is spent explaining awesomely interesting subjects, but without the support of an academic salary. It’s not always terribly easy.

Welcome to the life of many writers. Some of us are ducks, some of us are coots, some of us are swans, but we all paddle madly just out of sight in order to stay afloat. Many of us (me, for example) battle significant everyday issues as well. Every book of ours you buy, every Patreon you support or Ko.Fi you buy, makes the paddling a little less frantic.

The Authors Guild Class Action Against OpenAI

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Authors Guild and a number of well-known writers have brought a class action against OpenAI and its various subsidiary corporations and partnerships alleging violations of copyright law in its use of materials to develop its large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT.

For eight years I made my living as the primary legal editor of a publication that covered class actions and while that was some years back, I still know a lot about the subject. So I read through the complaint — you can find it here in PDF form — and have some thoughts.

Here’s the court record if you want to look up more information.

First of all, this action was brought by a very sophisticated and prominent firm of class action lawyers, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein. Headquartered in San Francisco, the firm has been a major player in complex litigation since 1972, handling among other things some of the major tobacco cases, litigation over the Exxon Valdez, and other major product liability and class actions.

The other firm in the case, Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, is very experienced in copyright and technology law, according to their website.

Secondly, the case was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Given the number of publishers located in New York, that’s an obvious place to bring an action related to copyright. It’s assigned to Judge Sidney H. Stein, who was appointed by Bill Clinton.

A quick google search indicates that Judge Stein has handled a number of copyright cases.

Thirdly, this suit is only against OpenAI (in its many legal forms) and over ChatGPT and the other versions of that software. Given that there are other companies doing the same thing, I have no doubt that more suits will follow.

Fourth, this case is strictly over violations of copyright law in using work by authors of fiction. The proposed class includes works of fiction covered by registered copyrights that have sold at least 5,000 copies and that were used in programming the LLMs.

Again, this leaves out a lot of copyrighted materials that could be the subject of other suits, including nonfiction and books that sold fewer copies but were still used in developing the software.

And fifth, because they’ve restricted the case to books with properly registered copyrights, they can seek statutory damages based on violation of copyright law. That allows them to get around a major problem in class actions of a huge number of class members with very different actual damages. Continue reading “The Authors Guild Class Action Against OpenAI”…

Turning problems into plot

personby Gillian Polack
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This week my post is for writers. This post is just as handy for readers (since, by reading this, you are a reader and yes, this is a day for bad jokes) but if you want to think of it from the reading perspective you need to look backwards to translate. We see the results of all these writing decisions as readers. This post is about those decisions themselves. It’s like taking a picture of a mountain and imagine you’re standing on that mountain looking down, rather than standing below the mountain taking its picture. Right now, I am sitting in a room at the foot of a mountain and typing. I can’t see the mountain, but I know it’s there. How I see it is the critical question. What view am I describing for my readers?

The view of characters changes depending on where we stand. But that’s not the only discrepancy. What do we know about the private lives of the characters we  invent? How do we explain them when we write? Are there any discrepancies between those private lives and their public selves? And how do we see and interpret all of this, as a writer? I’m not talking about personality. Your character might be a raging genius in public and terrifyingly incompetent around the home. That’s fine. But not today’s subject. What I want to think about today is the difference in culture between someone’s culture in the home (idioculture, private and personal and only really shared properly with people who belong in that small group – think of the Brontë children and their private invented worlds and secret shared language) and how they share or don’t share or are not permitted to share with the rest of a community.

This is as much about privilege as privacy. Where one’s private life matches public expectations of that private life, for good or ill, people know how to interpret it. That’s privilege, because, even if that active interpretation is unkind, we know we’re going to have to deal with it so we can develop tools to deal with it. Knowledge about such things is power over one’s life. Your character can benefit from being treated well because they live like someone important and are seen as someone important. This enables them to fight the racism and prejudice they see, if they see it. Your character might become a suffragette or fight for access to modern washing machines if they know that the vote or the machine will improve their life.

Most people face invisible prejudice, and this is harder.  Think of a character who uses a wheelchair. They might be left out of group activities because of the assumption that people in wheelchairs cannot enjoy them. Or think of a character who faces bigots and is being attacked (quietly, privately) by others. There are no simple ways of explaining what’s wrong because, from the outside, they look helpless or angry and the attackers are playing the long, slow, quiet game. Everyone seeing this from outside tangles things and turns bad to shockingly worse because they assume the victim is the problem. Then there are cultural differences: where your Australian Muslim character has far more in common with everyone else than the Christian characters think, but said Christian characters invent differences anyhow.

This kind of everyday (and it is everyday – some of it is literally my everyday, some of it is the everyday of friends) is really handy for plotting and planning a novel. It can explain why the reader knows and understands something, but other characters don’t. It can give a reason for betrayal, for social activism, for rebellion.

Know the discrepancies between your character’s home life and how they are seen in public and your story blossoms.

Auntie Deborah’s Writing Advice

personby Deborah J. Ross
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What would you do if you found out that someone had stolen your idea for writing a book and published it under their name?

First of all, ideas can’t be copyrighted, but I must add—with emphasis—that there are vanishingly few original ideas. What makes a book uniquely yours is what you do with that idea. The vision and skill in execution that make it personal.

So what would I do? I’d cheer them on for having a great idea and for having gotten it in print. And then I’d write my own interpretation.

The best short story rejection I ever received was from a prestigious anthology. The editor loved my story but had just bought one on the same theme (mothers and cephalopods, although mine was with octopodes and the other with squid)—get this, from one of my dearest friends, a magnificent writer. Did I sulk? Did I mope? No, I celebrated her sale along with her! And then sold my story to another market.

In other words, be generous. If you do your work as a writer, this won’t be the only great idea you get.

 

 How can you tell if a book needs an editor or a proofreader?

It does. Trust me on this. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the story is or how many books you’ve written. None of us can see our own flaws, whether they are grammar and typos or inconsistent, flat characters or plot holes you could drive a Sherman tank through. Or unintentionally offensive racial/sexist/ableist/etc. language. Every writer, for every project, needs that second pair of skilled, thoughtful eyes on the manuscript.

 

 How do I get a self-published book into libraries?

If your book is available in print, the best way is to use IngramSpark and pay for an ad. Libraries are very reluctant to order KDP (Amazon) print editions. Same for bookstores.

If your book is digital only, put it out through Draft2Digital (D2D), which distributes to many vendors, including a number that sell to libraries.

Submit review copies to Library Journal. Consider paying for an ad if your budget allows.

Now for the hard part: publicizing your book to libraries. Besides contacting local libraries, assemble a list of contact emails for purchasing librarians (there may be such a thing already, so do a web search). Write a dynamite pitch. Send out emails with ordering links.

 

Is it better to title my chapters, or should I just stick to numbering them?

There is no “better.” There are conventions that change with time. Do what you love. Just as titles vs numbers cannot sell a book, neither will they sink a sale. If your editor or publisher has a house style, they’ll tell you and then you can argue with them.

That said, as a reader I love chapter titles. As an author, I sometimes come up with brilliant titles but I haven’t managed to do so for an entire novel, so I default to numbers. One of these years, I’ll ditch consistency and mix and match them. Won’t that be fun!

 

Old hobbies, new joys

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I have a new essential oil.

I used to make perfumes as a hobby and every now and again I save up a bit of money and get new fragrances for my bath. No-one around me asks about my perfumes and I think everyone’s forgotten them. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I still love creating fragrances just for me. Not perfumes any more. Scents for my home.

As I change with time, the scents I like change, too. I used to love the sophisticated and the swanky, but now I love to be reminded of the bushwalking I also used to do or for my body to be reminded that it’s fine to put tension and pain aside. It’s hard to bushwalk when walking to the shops is beyond me on most days, but it’s easy to lie back in a hot bath and smell tea tree and lemon myrtle and kunzea. It’s also very good for arthritis, when combined with magnesium salts.

The new essential oil is may chang (litsea cubeb). I mistook it for cubebs when I saw it in the catalogue, but the moment I smelled it, I knew it was perfect for me. Cubebs are one of my favourite peppers for cooking, which is why I bought something I wasn’t sure about. Cubebs is still one of the best peppers for cooking. It is properly peppery and has a delightfully fresh aftertaste. And may chang is perfect with lavender and just a drop of diluted Bulgarian rose for an hour away from the world.

Now I have a favourite cubeb for a scented bath and one for cooking and they’re not related at all. The same applies to mint. My favourite mint for cooking is… most mints. My favourite mint for the bath isn’t a mint at all, it’s a prostanthera, a native Australian plant that smells of mint and just a touch of eucalyptus. When I was a child I had a favourite native mint bush which I always used when I needed mint tea. On the essential oil bottle it says “Bush balm mint” but it is still the perfect mint tea bush from my childhood.

Some of my oils help this illness or that (especially the muscle aches and joint aches that are my everyday), but mostly I like to feel as if I’m in an English country garden, or in the local bush or, in this case, I don’t know where, but the new scent is the best ever.

I also use the oils in teaching writers how to built sensory worlds for their fiction. Or I used to. I developed my scent teaching from my hobby of perfumerie, and taste from my food history background (with some help from a sister who is a wine and olive oil judge). The others were easy once I had techniques that worked to teach two of the senses. I also taught writing family history and personal memoirs, which gave me an excuse to bring home-cooked food and favourite family foods and food memories into play, because they use all the senses. The university I taught at closed most of its outreach courses and so I was suddenly unemployed and I’ve not yet found anyone who wants to learn these things.

It’s a real treat to return to my fragrant past and to remember that just because no-one is interested in learning how to write the senses from me any more, that doesn’t mean I have to lose the cool aspects.

I still look at most novels and analyse the writer’s background from how they use their senses. Australians are my favourite, largely because I am Australian. We love using sight, but also use sound to a degree. It’s quite hard to find an Australian writer of fantasy or science fiction who uses all the senses effectively. Historical fiction writers are more courageous in this, especially the ones who want to communicate the grunge and grime of everyday life. If an Australian writer wants to bring a unique touch to their work, learning methods of incorporating the other senses would do it for so many of them.

I so miss teaching this! It was good for my writing as well. Teaching is very handy for skills maintenance. So, it seems, are hot baths.