Neil Gaiman demystifies writer’s block

Who hasn’t been there? The blank page. The blinking cursor. The author’s horrifically empty torture chamber: writer’s block.

Neil Gaiman  in a snuggly sweater

Well, according to Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of the Sandman comic book series, Coraline and many more super-imaginative works of fiction, writer’s block is just as much a fiction as anything else that pours out of an author’s mind. In this fascinating interview on the Goodreads website, he talks about how his ambition as a writer has evolved over the years and offers these pearls of wisdom about the dreaded you-know-what (shhhh… don’t say it out loud or it might come true!):

Writer’s block is this thing that is sent from the gods—you’ve offended them. You’ve trod on a crack on the pavement, and you’re through. The gods have decided. It’s not true. What is really true is you can have a bad day. You can have a bad week. You can get stuck. But what I learned when I was under deadline is that if you write on the bad days, even if you’re sure everything you’ve written is terrible, when you come to it tomorrow and you reread it, most of it’s fixable. It may not be the greatest thing you’ve ever written, but you fix it, and actually it’s a lot better than you remember it being. And the weird thing is a year later when you’re copyediting and reading the galleys through for the first time in months, you can remember that some of it was written on bad days. And you can remember that some of it was written on terrific days. But it all reads like you. Fantastic stuff doesn’t necessarily read better than the stuff written on the bad days. Writers have to be like sharks. We keep moving forward, or we die.

So on that note, here’s a toast to all the other authors out there: have lots of fun over the holiday season and then sit at your desk and work. Cheers!

Photo credit: Lvovsky via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

The grim reaper. No, not Death – the book editor!

Nice little post about the pain and ultimate pleasure of the editing process, written by fellow Montreal author Alice Zorn. This is something I’ll be facing very shortly…

An environmentally conscious editor on the way to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Bill Gracey / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Slaves to the readers?

Interesting article in today’s Guardian about the Writer’s Manifesto to be presented tonight at the Manchester Literature Festival by Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, among other works.

“She’s putting forward a really interesting question about boundaries,” said Writers’ Centre Norwich chief executive Chris Gribble, “and about what we expect of writers … and what the limits are of being a reader.”

What are your thoughts on this? Are the boundaries between authors and readers becoming unhealthily fuzzy?

50,000 words!

I reached a milestone in book 3 of the Embodied trilogy yesterday. Also got so excited while writing a particularly dramatic scene that I was yelling at myself to type faster!

Ten tips on writing

I just found this great list of writing tips while doing some publishing research while taking a break from writing the final book in the Embodied trilogy while drinking Guinness from time to time. Jandy Nelson, author of YA novels I’ll Give You the Sun and The Sky is Everywhere, just about nails it.

Jandy Nelson’s list of must-do’s for authors

If your writing implement looks like this, you haven’t applied the ten tips properly.

Photo credit: zen / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

 

 

How the mind creates when you’re doing other things

As I’ve mentioned somewhere on this blog before, the name of my last book came to me in a dream. This quick read in this week’s Guardian explores the creative differences between writers who pre-plan their books (such as Michelle Paver) and those who wing it (such as John Boyne). It turns out that no matter which method you choose, your mind is working away in the background like a helpful little pixie. Or maybe like a beaver. Or a colony of termites. Anyway, the bottom line is, when you create, you aren’t really aware of everything that’s going on in your brain. And I like that.

Your brain on termites.

Photo credit: Gnilenkov Aleksey / Foter / CC BY

 

I’m living the dream!

According to this article in yesterday’s Guardian, being an author is literally the most desired job in Britain.

Most authors would rather be fishing.

Vacation over, work begun…

Things have been quiet on this blog recently. A little too quiet.

That’s because I was away on vacation in a land where the internet is almost non-existent. And while I was there I made a ton of notes for the second and third books that follow Silent Symmetry in the Embodied trilogy. “What kind of notes?” I hear you ask. (Yes, I sometimes listen to the voices in my head!) Well, a lot of backstory. Character progressions. Some plot. And a new race of beings that I hadn’t anticipated creating but who may turn out to be more fascinating than the Embodied themselves.

I already outlined my new writing strategy in a recent post. Now that I’m back at my desk, I’m undertaking the planning process for Book 2, Starley’s Rust and Book 3 (whose name won’t be revealed until after the publication of Book 2). That means that I’ll be spending a bit less time writing this blog. Fun though it is to connect with friends and readers, I need to get the work done. It’s going to be a long process and it may be another year before Starley’s Rust sees the digital light of day. There may be some teases and excerpts along the way. That’s the advantage of having the skeleton of both books mapped out ahead of the actual writing – I can rely on the fact that the parts I’ve already written are 99.9% sure to end up in the final version.

In the meantime, here’s a photo as a clue to where I went on vacation. Is it symmetrical? Good question…

Can a flower with five petals be symmetrical?

Photo credit: John B. Dutton

A Symmetrical Strategy

Writing is a novel is super-duper easy. Oh wait, I got my words wrong. Writing a blog post is a breeze. No, that’s not even true. Okay, forget writing for a moment. The other night I was reading a bedtime story to my 5-year-old daughter when I was suddenly struck by the amount of cross-hatching in the illustrations. At first glance, the drawings of a little boy and his bear were fairly simple. I’d read the book several times to her and never paid much attention to the artwork, but for some reason that night I focused in on the cross-hatching, which is the technique for creating shaded areas in a drawing through the use of repeating lines. The length and spacing of the lines determine the amount of shade perceived by the eye at a distance. This drawing of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a straightforward example.

Shakespeare probably just winged it: no planning, no plotting, and no rewrites. Riiiight…

The little bear in the story got lost one night when he was picked up in a swooping owl’s claws. The drawings of the moon, the owl and the bear in the nighttime sky were filled with cross-hatching far finer and subtler than in the Globe illustration here. I stopped reading for a few seconds and marvelled at the amount of time it must have taken the artist to produce such an effect. I thought to myself, I could never, ever have the patience to sit there and draw line after line with no margin for error. Then my daughter elbowed me with an impatient “Daddy!” and I boomeranged back from my reverie, acutely aware that parents aren’t supposed to space out in the middle of a bedtime story.

What does all this have to do with writing a novel? It’s all about the work involved. I sometimes forget that stringing together a bunch of words, then painstakingly going back over them and replacing some of them or changing their order is just as daunting for non-writers as creating a complex illustration would be for me. It’s hard. It’s often kind of annoying. And sometimes you get stuck. (Quick joke: part of my next novel is set in Paris and I’m worried that I might suffer from writer’s bloc.)

What does all this have to do with me writing a novel? Well, I promised I would publish the sequel to Silent Symmetry in “late 2013”. Now I realize that my writing strategy was wrong and I’m going to have to break that promise. Fortunately for my reputation, authors are notorious for breaking promises; we literally make things up that aren’t true for a living.

I don’t mind allowing readers a peak behind the creative curtain, so here’s my new writing and publication strategy for books two and three of the Embodied trilogy. Instead of planning, writing and rewriting book two, Starley’s Rust, then spending the time and effort it takes to publish and market it properly before embarking on the creation of book three, I’m going to plan and write books two and three back-to-back, then rewrite, publish and market book two. Once that is on the Kindles and iPads of a bunch of readers, I’ll rewrite, publish and market book three. This will allow me to more effectively control both the overall flow of the story and each book’s release date. This doesn’t just help me, it will also, crucially, give my readers a more fulfilling experience because, a) the books should be better; and b) readers of book two won’t have to wait nearly as long to read the conclusion of the trilogy.

So what we’re really dealing with here is some delayed gratification. Fortunately, I’m not illustrating my books too, or the delay would be far, far longer than the gratification!

Photo credit: Futurilla / Foter / CC BY-NC

Cory Doctorow’s self-publishing insights

Cory Doctorow is a science-fiction author who has lived his life inversely to me, in the sense that he was born in Canada and moved to Britain. In this recent interview he talks about a range of issues related to self-publishing, including DRM (Digital Rights Management, in other words, file copying restrictions), traditional bookstores, and copyright. Here’s his very interesting take on the definition of self-publishing:

To be self-published is not to prepare a file for distribution, nor to put it in an e-commerce system, it is to have and execute on a theory of how to connect the audiences with the works you are publishing. And unless you can elucidate that theory and test it and act on it and revise it, you are not publishing, you are merely formatting.

Cory Doctorow, sitting at his desk. And presumably working, although he could just be pretending to work so the picture looks good. Photo by Jonathan Worth.

This is a great definition. Writing in a journal every night and locking it in a bedside drawer isn’t self-publishing. Making an ebook and uploading it to Amazon is almost identical to locking it in a drawer, in the sense that no one will know it’s there. That’s why connecting with an audience is the key to self-publishing. There are a thousand-and-one theories out there about how to do that, and my job as a publisher (who happens to be publishing my own works) is to filter through those theories, concoct one of my own, try it out, and see whether it’s working.

Of course, self-publishing might not mean attempting to actually sell any books. For example, I’ve already connected with an audience of thousands with Silent Symmetry through my Amazon free promotional days. But this is all part of a long-term professional marketing plan. Maybe there should be a distinction between the two activities – finding readers and selling books – although “professional self-publishing” is a very unwieldy term to describe the latter. Then again, it’s not as unwieldy as selfpropub or proselfpub or ishouldjustgotothepubinsteadofthinkingaboutthis (though some would say I’m already a pro at the last one of those).

Marketing probably seems distasteful to some self-published authors. These are the types who believe that if they put their work of genius “out there”, fellow geniuses will discover it and they will be lauded and feted and get laid.

This is at best pretentious and at worst simply lazy. In Britain, self-promotion is often frowned upon. Interestingly, the British idiom for showcasing your talent is “to blow your own trumpet”, while in North America it’s “to toot your own horn”. But here’s the bottom line: if you’re a creative individual who doesn’t blow your own trumpet, all you’re doing is sucking on your own horn.