Category: writing

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
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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.

Writerly Support Goes Both Ways

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Some years ago, I struck up a conversation with a young writer at a convention. (I love getting to know other writers, so this is not unusual for me.) One thing led to another, led to lunch, led to getting together on a regular basis, and led to frequently chatting online. I cheered her on as she had her first professional sale and then another, and then a cover story in a prestigious magazine. One of the gifts of such a relationship is not the support I receive from it, but the honor and joy of watching someone else come into her own as an artist, to celebrate her achievements. It’s the opposite of Schadenfreude — it’s taking immense pleasure and pride in the success of someone you have come to care about.

I find such friendships invaluable, and even more so when they shift from “pro/newbie” to one of true peers. Although we may not be in the same place in terms of professional publication, we each bring a wealth of life experiences to the conversation. Often, critical skills develop faster than writing craft, so even a novice writer can provide invaluable feedback. Trust arises from recognition of each other’s strengths.

This happened recently, when I was wrestling with the opening of a new novel. I typed “Chapter 1” and then stared at the blank screen. Everything I could come up with for a beginning sentence was — to put it mildly, just awful. I wouldn’t want to read a book that began that way. But because my friend and I were DMing and she often shares thoughts about her creative process and struggles with various aspects of storytelling in a very different style than mine, I felt safe with her. She agreed that my idea wasn’t very entrancing (she was very nice about it, for she understands that beginnings are vulnerable times and that this is indeed a process, not the final copy on the editor’s desk). Her support lightened the burden of “I’m totally useless and now everyone is going to find out; I’ll never write another decent sentence in my life and I have no idea how to begin a novel!” which we both knew to be not true, but the sort of self-doubt that regularly assails writers of all skill levels.
Eventually, I calmed down enough to remember one of my tried and true techniques for coming up with titles. I write down every one I can think of, quite quickly so that I get through all the really stupid ones first. I give myself permission to be ridiculous — and silly — and quirky — and by this time, I am usually generating stuff that has some potential. I did the same thing with opening lines, and before long I realized I’d become ensnared by one of my perennial challenges: wrong point of entry. By backing up (in this case) or leaping forward, I can find the place that clicks.
I went to bed, having written a page or so, and woke up with: “Yes, and this other thing happens and then she gets thrown into jail (on page 2 or 3) and by the time she gets bailed out, her father has been brainwashed…” Okay, this has possibilities!
Thanks, dear friend, for cheering me on through the discouraging part!

On the Bookish Life

personby Gillian Polack
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I spend two hours a day exercising. This will not make me slender or muscular or fit or fabulous. It will, however, enable me to get out of bed safely, to walk up the street, to cook, to work. On a bad day, I do at least a half hour. On a good day, whenever I need even a 3 minute pause in work, I do stretches. Some bodies require greater effort than others to do the everyday. Mine is one of them. Every day I do these exercises means less pain the next day. Each day I give in and stay sitting at the computer or the television or talking on the phone or lying in bed means that the next day will be … not good.

Why am I telling you this? I increasingly notice a problem with the way people who have invisible disabilities are treated. We need to talk about it. A blogpost is a good way of beginning a conversation when one is limited of movement. This is that post.

I use a walking stick mainly so that the rest of the world can see that I’m not capable of the things they think I ought to do. I can’t run a 100 metres at breakneck speed the way I did as a teen. On a bad day, even walking to the bus is a vast endeavour and it really helps when the bus doesn’t stop 100 metres away from the bus stop. It takes me time and effort to walk that 100 metres and… some buses don’t want to wait that long. If the driver can see the effort by looking at the walking stick, then they will stop where I’m waiting and both the bus driver and myself are happier.

Today I wish that the walking stick principle applied to my letterbox. It was bitterly cold this morning and I entirely understand the post office delivery person wanting to move as quickly as possible, but the card they left me in lieu of ringing my doorbell means I have to walk for over a kilometre to retrieve a parcel. Then I have to walk back again.

The walking stick is a critical piece of equipment, and so are the exercises. I shall do them assiduously every day until I’m able to walk up the street and get that parcel.

Every day is a set of calculations. Can I do this today? What do I need to do in order to be able to that the day after tomorrow? The more I exercise the fewer of these computations I have to make. The more I am willing to label myself as visibly disabled, the more condescending many people are, and the more I am actually able to do stuff.

I don’t get many face to face gigs any more. My writing income is significantly reduced as a result. This is rather annoying side effect of the walking stick announcement. So many organisers begin asking the most physically capable people on their lists for their events. The most physically capable of us get the work, they get the income and they get the book sales. I am still asked for online gigs (sometimes even with money attached!), but face to face in my own locality? Rarely.

It’s not that people hate me. Audiences, in fact, really like me. It’s that a lot of us are described as ‘difficult’ because we can’t do all the things, all the time. My local bookshop made up excuses when I asked them for a book launch two years ago. My audiences are good and my sales are good with those audiences (in one case there were 83 people and all the books sold out within ten minutes) but the bookshop (and writers’ centres, and community centres, and a lot of local community groups) like to organise events with someone who will come to meetings face to face. If you can’t, but can still come to the event, it’s considered not good enough. This is especially true for free events. If I’m willing to give my time but not able to meet all the other demands (“Come in today for a meeting, please”, “Can we do this online?” “No, not really. Besides, you’re local. It’s no effort for you.”) … I’m not asked again.

This is interesting for other reasons. One of the booksellers in question actually told me I should accept reduced royalties because the 50% of the cover price they got wasn’t enough for all their overheads. They were being paid for the function in question: I was not. The function promoted my books and writers are simply expected to work without pay for the vast majority of promotional events. Without pay and usually without meals. If the book launch is during a meal time, I’ve been asked to cook food for the audience, but I can’t eat myself because … it’s a performance and I need to be available to answer questions and explain the book and… all the things.

The disabilities are not the only problem then. The heart of the matter is that writers are expected to have day jobs or other sources of income. Most people see us as kind of serious amateurs, rather than as professionals.

This changes the way we do things. For me, there’s a rather special side effect given by these experiences. Since I worked out why my local income was way less than it should be and my local presence is way less than it should be, I can’t buy all the books I want. I simply don’t have the money. I prioritise what I buy. Where there are two books I want to read and I can only afford one, I will buy the one where the writer faces similar obstacles to me. Or where the writer is from a country where they have to fight an entirely different range of obstacles.

There is a really good side to all of this: my book collection sparkles with exciting work by authors who ought to be well known but are not.

I need to get back to those book posts and introduce you to some of them!

The Rules of Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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All genres of writing have their rules. For example, you can’t put a spaceship in literary fiction (though Michael Chabon could probably get away with it).

In science fiction, one of the rules is that you can’t write about writers.

Some people take this rule very literally. I once wrote a story about a freelance writer in a gig economy who needed to go from Washington, D.C., to Virginia at a time when passports were required between states. Hers had expired, so she had to cross illegally.

(Once again I realize that a story that I never spent much time submitting was ahead of its time and now is so obvious that it doesn’t seem prescient. I mean, we’re now living in a time where states are purporting to prevent their residents from traveling to other states for health care, not to mention one with an economy built on gig work.)

But back to the subject of fiction rules. One of the criticisms I got from my writers group was that it was about a writer and that wasn’t acceptable.

But that’s not what the rule means, really. There’s no reason your character can’t be a writer. The purpose of the rule is to keep science fiction writers from producing the navel gazing stories that revolve around writing.

There are any number of exceedingly boring literary stories and even novels that revolve around editorial assistants who are working on a novel and having an affair with their much older editor boss.

Others focus on creative writing professors in minor colleges and their inability to write and their affairs with their students.

This is the kind of fiction you get when a writer takes that major writing instruction “write what you know” literally. And this is the kind of fiction that the rule against writing about writers is trying to avoid.

I am thinking about this because I just read a couple of positive reviews in The New York Times of books that I can’t imagine being of interest to anyone at all. Perhaps there is a small subset of writers who want to read books about aging writers who can’t produce anything and younger writers who are trying to get some dirt on them to feed their own writing. Continue reading “The Rules of Writing”…

Who Needs Dialog?

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I love to “talk shop” with other writers. I learn so much about my own process and my weaknesses because it’s always easier to see the flaws – and the strengths! – in someone else’s work. Recently, I had the mirrored experience of serving as a beta reader for another writer’s novel and receiving similar feedback on one of my own. The thematic similarities and differences between the two very early versions of the stories are irrelevant. What fascinated me was that we used dialog in diametrically opposed ways in our story construction: my friend’s rough draft read like a screenplay, and mine had comparatively little conversation. We’ll both end up with balanced manuscripts, but we’ve started from opposite places.

Dialog, which is the transcription of what each character says, rather than a summary in narrative, is one of a writer’s most powerful tools. It’s also one that’s easy to abuse, either by using it too much or too little, or asking it to perform functions in the story that it’s not well-suited for. Certainly, it’s possible to tell a story entirely in dialog form, just as it’s possible to write a story entirely in narrative with zero dialog. Most stories fall in the comfortable middle zone, especially if they involve more than one character capable of speech.

When we write prose stories, we can choose to show action in a variety of ways, narrative being one, dialog another. Dialog isn’t very good for showing events at a distance; characters can be discussing those events or relaying them, but both are “off the scene” and hence have less immediacy. On the other hand, if the emphasis is on the reaction of the characters to those events, dialog can be of immense help. One of the strengths of dialog is that if skillfully handled, it can give us a window into a character’s inner state without being in that character’s head. Screenplay writers know this and use dialog to reveal character, to heighten and resolve tension, to create conflict, and to further the plot.

Which brings me to one of the things I saw in my friend’s manuscript. She came to her story with “screenwriter’s mind.” She used dialog not only to convey the content of conversations (relationship building, changing, exchange of information between characters, etc.) but to sketch out the action that she would later fill in with narrative. I’m a bit in awe of this since what little I know of screenplay writing has thoroughly impressed me with what a high-wire act it is to use only dialog and highly abbreviated descriptions of scene and action to tell a story.

I, on the other hand, used bits of narrative as shorthand for the conversations that will be developed in revision. If anything, my rough draft was too focused on the inside on my protagonist’s head, not what she was doing or saying. One of the consequences was that other characters are suggested rather than developed, whereas in my friend’s draft, her extensive use of dialog has done much of this important work.

There isn’t any one right way to weave dialog into a story, any more than there is one single right way to write. The more options we have, the more tools we have in that magic box of tricks, the better we will be at telling a range of stories. So here’s a challenge for your next story project. If you’re like my friend, a writer who uses dialog heavily to set the major blocks of her story, challenge yourself to write that first draft with as little dialog as you can. Can you do it with none? What are the circumstances under which you absolutely have to put it in?

If you’re like me, a writer who puts in just a bit here and there, challenge yourself to use dialog to create the backbone of the plot, to introduce and reveal character, to heighten and resolve tension, without using your normal narrative techniques.

My guess is that either way, the process will be both uncomfortable and revealing. Have you been relying on dialog as a preferred and therefore easy way of transcribing the movie between your ears? Or have you regarded it as a frill, lightweight chit-chat instead of an essential foundation of the story?

The good news is that no matter where we start, whatever our natural propensities and habit, it really doesn’t matter what order we weave in and shift around the elements of narrative and dialog. What matters is that final draft when everything has come into balance and the story shines!

Seasonal Joy

personby Gillian Polack
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I was going to write you a 4 July post, but I remembered in time that in the US, it’s still 3 July. In Australia, we’d take the Monday off and make a long, long weekend. But not this week. Not any week until our next public holiday in fact, which, for Canberra, is in October.

Winter is different in Australia. Some people assume I’m referring to the cold or lack thereof (they think that all Australia is too hot, all the time), but in my part of Australia it’s cold. Not as cold as Alaska, but cold enough for big coats and snow. The main reason Canberra doesn’t get much snow is because it’s too dry. The best-known snowfield in the whole country (where there is snow even in summer… in places) is close.

Winter is different because we don’t have time out. We deal with the encroaching dark and we do not celebrate the incoming light. We have no public holidays and the only way to get time off work is if one has children. All my teacher friends are on holiday this week, and most of them are down the coast, where it’s less cold. Anyone not at school (as a student or a teacher) just has to deal.

I used to deal by experimenting with different recipes for mulled wine and mulled wine equivalents. Those recipes covered 700 years of spicing wine and were most excellent at keeping the cold at bay. Friends would visit to help me drink it. I can only drink a few sips these days and, because I’m COVID vulnerable few friends visit, so there will be no hypocras, no sangria, no mulled wine in July.

Instead, I’m making portable soup. Eighteenth century style portable soup, to be precise. The ancestral stock cube. A soup that you can cut with a knife and that has so much gelatin you could use it as a building block.

In fact, I do use the cubes as building blocks. I can make much healthier sausage rolls or meat pies with a much better flavour and at least as good a mouth feel as the same dishes made using suet or duck fat. I can chop up some vegies very finely and have a delightfully warming beef broth in minutes. I can build so many dishes with the portable soup.

This is appropriate, because I’m writing about building blocks this week. The building blocks I’m writing about are the building blocks of story, though, not of food.

The closest to the midwinter delights northern hemisphere folks talk about and what I actually experience is this particular harmony between what I cook and and what I write.

A few people celebrate what they call Christmas in July here. If friends asked me, I’d join them as I do for any other Christmas, but… I’m still Jewish. There is no reason for me to set up a Christmas celebration for myself. And the only Jewish holy days in July this year are fasts.

July in Canberra is a good month for work and a very bad month for most happiness. As I tell everyone every year, be nice to me, for my sarcasm is close to the surface throughout July. Also, be nice to me because I’m cold. We’re in the warm part of the day and it’s not a cold day and the temperature outside is hovering just above 50 degrees F. This is the weather for sarcasm, just as December in the Northern Hemisphere is the season for joy and mirth and gifts.

If anyone wants to give me gifts to make me merry, I’ll not say no. In the meantime, I will create building blocks and hone my sarcasm.

Some Thoughts on Clarion West and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Clarion West 2023 Write-a-thon

Once again I am participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which means I’m working on getting my own writing done in support of the current workshop participants.

If you want to donate to Clarion West in support of me, you can do it here on my fundraising page.

I do this every year in part as a way of donating to Clarion West — I always support myself and usually contribute in the name of a couple of other people — but I am not good at banging the drum for fundraising.

At the same time, I am well aware that in this capitalist society people have to do something to bring in money, and that includes nonprofits and artists. So I participate and mention it and hope some people get inspired to send them a few bucks.

There are many things I hope to get better at before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but fundraising isn’t on the list.

Writing better is, though, and the only way I know to get better at writing is to do more of it in a thoughtful way. So I am working on the sequel to my 2021 novel For the Good of the Realm and hope that the Write-a-thon process will help me do that.

Supporting Clarion West brings me to the issue of writing workshops, classes, and the like. Some people find these things incredibly useful; some do not. For me, Clarion West was exactly what I needed when I did it. It made me take my writing seriously in a way that I had never done before.

I’m very glad I did it, so I continue to support it because I know it will be useful to some other people as well. And I like the way Clarion West has evolved and continues to grow.  Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Clarion West and Writing”…

Frost and Games

personby Gillian Polack
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I want to complain about the cold again. When frost comes early, as it has this year, I want to complain until it goes away, which will probably be around August. It’s not that I dislike the cold, it’s that the cold frolics frivolously with my chronic illnesses. I used to go to work early purely to crunch the frost underfoot on my way in. That was my twenties, and this is my sixties and it’s as if I’m two different people.

My new self brings some surprises. Someone was respectful to me today. I kept looking around to see if they were talking to someone else, but there was no-one else there. I could get used to respectful.

The other thing I noticed today is that I didn’t instantly want to write a chapter of novel full of crunchy frost and chill air. I used to love taking the weather and telling it strictly to march alongside a novel, keeping my characters and their life struggles company. I used a very hot summer to bring magic ants into Elizabeth/Lizzie/Liz’s everyday in Ms Cellophane and also to make a memorable Christmas. I needed help to make a memorable Christmas because I’m not that good at Christmas.

I still bring weather into my fiction. I love weather and it’s fun to use it to shape moods. The opening of The Green Children Help Out has London weather. That rain isn’t critical to the story, but it helps me remember that most of the story is set in a wetter country than my own. It’s dry outside, and around zero degrees Celsius. We’ve been given a sheep graziers’ warning (spellcheck wants to change this to “a sheep braziers’ warning” or, alternately, to a “sheep grenadiers’ warning” – Spellcheck is quite obviously not Australian), which is a common weather alert up here in sheep country. Although, to be honest, the town I live in has more kangaroos than sheep.

All national capitals should have more kangaroos than sheep. Washington DC would be far more entertaining with mobs of ‘roos staring at the tourists and politicians and public servants. When a mob stares, every single one of them takes the same pose and only their heads move until you’re past. That’s my experience, anyhow.

One Christmas (since it’s cold it must be Christmas – I get this message from films set in the northern hemisphere) we had a work celebration at the restaurant next to the golf course with its full wall of floor to ceiling windows to bring the green into the dining room. We were all a bit drunk by dusk, because, of course, real Christmas is in midsummer. At dusk (again, of course, this is normal in civilised countries) all the kangaroos and wallabies came down and stared at us through the never-ending windows. One group of ‘roos did the mob stare. Drunk public servants wearing silly Christmas hats stared right back.

The older I get the more daft stories I collect. I tell my favourites over and over again. Sometimes I put them in my novels. My novels are littered with tellable moments.

For a full decade I asked readers to guess which moments in the contemporary novels were the real ones. They never guessed correctly.

I found myself blinking in stupid surprise when a reader told me, very seriously, that the real-life incident in Ms Cellophane was me swimming naked in the Murrumbidgee and getting arrested for it. I was wondering how to explain that I’m not very bold… and that I cannot swim. I blinked even more energetically when someone explained to me very sincerely that the series of events at Parliament House in The Wizardry of Jewish Women was obviously fabricated. I fictionalised it enough so that I wasn’t precisely representing the real people, but the events happened. As I love telling people, it’s just as well I fictionalised, given what happened to one of the people whose character I changed. Although I also love explaining to people that if you’re a politician and get a bit grumpy at lobbyists who want to talk, be very careful that none of them write fiction.

For those of you who haven’t played this game before and would like to guess a real incident from one of my novels, go for it. If you’re right, I’ll send you an unpublished short story so that you get something to read before it enters the big world.

Or you could tell me why I was happy to explain that yes, I once caused a Deputy Prime Minister to fall down a mountain (not at all intentionally, I assure you!) but am glad I rarely see politicians these days, because the original person I based a character on is not someone I really want to be introduced to with the words, “This is that writer who put you in that novel.” Guessing correctly who the politician is will also get you a look at the short story. I’ll give you a hint: you don’t need to know a great deal about Australian politics. You do have to occasionally read the news.

What I do in winter these days then is play mind-games. The first three correct answers this week get a sneak preview of a short story. If you don’t want people to see your answers, you can find me on social media and let me know privately. If anyone plays, then I’ll decide if the short story will contain weather.

Charming Synchronies

personby Gillian Polack
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Yesterday I found my research self and my fiction-writing self in perfect synchrony.

My research self is looking at old tales newly told, from a number of angles. I’m focusing very closely on how writers build the world for their novel. One of my favourite techniques is to look at the various roles food and foodways play. There’s not enough work in this field for me to rest on the work of others, so I spend a lot of my time in an alert state, watching different kinds of narratives and checking the role food and foodways play so that I can deepen my research.

Over time, this alert state has given me a lot of questions that need answering. For instance, in K-drama, there are a number of ways people drink and they are connected to different drinks The most formal ‘proper’ way of drinking was easy to determine, but it wasn’t until I obtained flavoured soju and drank some that some of the more casual ways people drank became clearer. Flavour, mouthfeel, level of alcohol all play as much of a part in how characters drink on K-drama as tradition and courtesy.

For my fiction, I begin with recipes and the food itself. Then I start thinking about what the appropriate ways of presenting the food are. This approach was sparked 30+ years ago when a favourite writer had people throw food that would have been dripping with honey, in a social group that has given us no historical evidence for treating food that lightly. Several possible messes entered into my visualisation of the scene: honey everywhere, and the very important personages acting as ill-disciplined overgrown children. I talked to the writer about the scene and she had not considered either aspect. The throwing was in the modern American cultural sense of being light-hearted and the characters were demonstrating how close they were to each other.

This was the first time I discovered just how much of our own culture we place in our constructed worlds and how, unless we consider things really carefully, we echo what we think we know and it is our own way of doing things.

I started to do two things at that point.

The first was to find out what my own cultural nuancing is and where it comes from. How do I assume people eat and drink in various circumstances?

Just like almost every other fiction writer, I draw the worlds for my novels from places I’m always ready a bit familiar with and many of them echo my life and experience. The difference is that I do this while aware. That state of alert becomes increasingly handy. I watch television and go to movies partly to continue this dialogue with myself.

This helps inform the second thing I do, which is research and teach. My most recent research thingie (I hate the words “outcome’ and ‘output’; ‘research monograph’ doesn’t work when the book is available very cheaply to anyone who wants to read it and is written in ordinary English) is, of course, Story Matrices. (At this point I’m supposed to remind everyone that it’s Hugo eligible and to suggest that you think of nominating it. I normally don’t do this, but in the case of Story Matrices, I want people to read it and they can’t read it if they don’t find out about it and the Hugos are a really good way of letting people know a work exists and that it’s worth a look.)

So how did everything come together? The soju and my thoughts about it gave me an ‘aha!’ moment for my research. One of the writers I’m focusing on always gives precise cultural places for drink, another does but they’re historically incorrect, and the third doesn’t at all.

This ‘aha!’ moment made me realise I have not worked on drink for either of the novels that I’m slowly, slowly writing. The novels will be out way after the new research, because the new research takes priority, due to there being income attached. I do love it, though, when they talk to each other while I imbibe someone else’s foodways.