100 words a day

Oh gosh, is that the time? For the last couple of months I've been thinking, 'I must do a blog post, I should just sit down and write a few words . . . oh stuff it, I'm too busy.'

Yes, between getting shingles (unpleasant), finishing my writing course, looking for work, coping with Christmas, and lying on the beach for a week, my writing has suffered a little. And as of next week I have a full-time job, which is good for the bank balance, but perhaps not so good for the novel.

So my belated new year's resolution is to write 100 words a day. It's not much, but hopefully it's achievable, and it adds up to 700 words a week, which is more than I've been doing lately! I was inspired while catching up on my blog reading after the aforementioned week on the beach - Lindsey at Dangerous with a Pen has resolved to do 100 words a day and kindly offered this button to anyone else looking to commit:

If I have time after grinding out my 100+ words a day, I'll be jumping on blogger to brag discreetly about my word count.

Happy new year everyone, hope it's a fruitful year for writing!

How to open a door

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to make you feel insignificant, it's automatic doors that won't open for you. You know the feeling: you're wandering up to the supermarket entrance, green bag in hand; you step up to the glass sliding doors...and nothing happens. You're left loitering on the outside, like the little match girl, watching the happy, warm shoppers inside loading up their trolleys with imported garlic and 2-for-1 chocolate bars, until finally someone with more presence arrives and you can sneak through behind them. As happened to me this morning.

Maybe it's the way I approach the doors. Perhaps I'm too self-effacing, or I sidle too much. Usually it happens when I'm caught up thinking about something so I don't even notice until I've nearly run into the stupid things. (I'd like to say I'm caught up thinking about plot developments or character arcs or how to solve global warming, but it's more often things like What is dust made of?)

Maybe I need to practise striding in at a precise right-angle to the door. Head-on. Looking the sensor thingo dead in the eye as I do so. Or just find somewhere to shop with manual doors, to save myself the humiliation of being ignored by a machine!

Anyway, to add insult to injury I just discovered that apparently Australia is the 'dumb blonde' of the world! (And apparently it's still acceptable to call blondes dumb.)
Have a bonza day everyone.

Fact or Fiction

The thing I like about writing fiction is you can't just make stuff up. (I know, look at me opening with the counter-intuitive statement.)

It's true: every work of fiction has (should have) its own internal logic, and once it's been established, the author has to work within it. In non-fiction, you don't have to justify the events that occur. You simply say, 'It's a true story - it happened to my aunt/grandfather/neighbour's gardener.' If the reader thinks the story is unlikely, that it didn't happen, the author's response is 'Well, it did.' End of.

In fiction, that's not a good enough explanation though. Readers won't swallow wild coincidences or sudden changes in characters' personalities, even though this technically happens often enough in real life. But they'll swallow all sorts of impossibilities as long as they happen logically.

For example, my novel involves one instance of time-travel. 'Time slip' I think is the term for it. It happens once; it's just a plot device to get my mc into a different period. But I was workshopping some of it in class the other day, and the whole discussion got hijacked by the mechanics of time-travel.

'But how does it work?' they wanted to know.
'Er...I dunno,' was my incisive reply.
'Well is it a wormhole? A space-time rip?'
'Um. Maybe. Ok. Yes... a wormhole.'

What I wanted to say was, 'Who bloody cares? It's not important. Do I look like a physicist? What's important is what happens afterward.'

I didn't, because once I thought about it, I was fascinated that what I hadn't thought of as more than a plot-device other people saw as part of the plot. They wanted the logic of it, even though time-travel is, in real life, impossible.

But then I realised my book is not at all sci-fi-y, and there are no physicists in it to explain how the time-travel works, so I changed my mind.

'Um, actually, it's not a wormhole, it's magic.'
'Oh, ok then.'

See? It might be impossible, but as long as it's justified, readers are happy.

The Organisator

I’ve blogged before about writing softwares and whether they are useful/necessary. I think my verdict earlier was ‘no’, but now that I’m 25 000 words in, and my hard drive is littered with Word documents called things like ‘The bit where mc gets homesick’ and ‘scene describing the town’, I wonder if there might be a use for some kind of organising program. 

One that’s been recommended to me is yWriter, but unfortunately it doesn’t work on macs.

I like its simple approach: ‘yWriter is a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes. It will not write your novel for you, suggest plot ideas or perform creative tasks of any kind. It does help you keep track of your work, leaving your mind free to create.’

No frills. However, so far I can achieve the same effect by using the document Navigation pane in Word, as long as I label all my scenes with ‘headings’. I’d like to do a comparison with yWriter, to see if it’s more effective than Word alone, but will have to wait until it becomes available on Mac I suppose.

In the meantime, my favourite tip for making software work for you is using the Autocorrect function to enter characters’ names. I can’t remember where I picked it up, but it’s pretty handy when one of your major characters is called ‘Aunt Honoria’. Just open the Autocorrect options menu in Tools, and add an autocorrection: Replace ‘aun’ with ‘Aunt Honoria’. Easy! And it saves me 10 keystrokes every time Aunt Honoria pops up in a scene. I can't imagine how I got by without it.

Are there other shortcuts you use? What else am I missing out on?

Working from home

It's everyone's dream, right? Be your own boss, work when you feel like it, play whatever music you like as loud as you like..

When my old work asked me if I'd like to do some editing work for them and I didn't have to come in - I could Work From Home - of course I jumped at the chance. I could save money and psycological damage by avoiding the commute to work, and I had visions of sitting in a cosy cafe hunched over my laptop.

Alas, I don't think I'm cut out for working from home.
At home, there is no-one there to look at me disapprovingly if I turn up at my desk well after 9am. There's no-one to raise an eyebrow after I leave for my tenth cup of tea and perusal of the fridge. And there's no-one to tut-tut if I spend two hours on lunch, or get distracted by email, by (ahem) blogger, or even, perversly, if I start doing my homework instead (when homework becomes a procrastination tool, I know I'm in trouble).

In short, I am the least self-disciplined of people and I make a terrible boss.
On the up side, I've made quite some headway with my novel...



Any tips for working from home would be most welcome.

Tomorrow, when I start my essay

Yesterday, I went and saw the new film version of Tomorrow, When the War Began. Yes, I have an essay on symbolism in Robert Drewe's The Drowner due in two days, but TWTWB is an Australian YA classic, and I wanted to see how they'd gone making a film of it.

It was ok I suppose. They've axed a couple of sub plots, and Ellie was too pretty and didn't look tough enough, but overall it stayed true to the book. The funny thing is, in one scene, one of the girls is reading a copy of My Brilliant Career. Ellie, the heroine, comes over and asks her how the book is, and the other girl replies, 'It's not bad--better than the film.'
'Yeah, books always are,' says Ellie.


A nice ironic touch there? I guess the producers knew what they were risking, taking on a favourite of Australian teens since 1993, so they got that in early, but it sounds self-defensive to me. If your audience really is sitting there thinking, 'this isn't as good as the book,' why underline it for them? Why not just get on with the movie. 
A bit strange, but I still enjoyed the movie, even if, um, it wasn't as good as the book.

Be nasty

Some Sunday morning reading in The Age from John Birmingham on a universal truth: good drama requires a writer to be a bit nasty to their characters.

It's something I struggle with, because I'm one of those people who just wants everyone to get along! I don't like it when my characters are mean to each other, but who wants to read 50 000 words or more of people being nice? Bor-ring.

So I work really hard at remembering to make my antagonist as vicious as a tiger snake. Whenever I write a scene with him in it, I think 'tiger snake'. Aggressive, kind of handsome, and poisonous.

Does that sound crazy, or do other people work this way?!