Sarah Alderson's Blog: Writing and all the bits in between - Posts Tagged "fiction"
How to become a better writer
Write for as many hours a day as you can. Write emails, blog posts and bucket lists. Write letters to lovers, to friends, to your grandmother. Write a letter to the person you admire most in the world and a letter to the person you most regret hurting. Write a complaint letter, a condolence letter and a congratulations letter. Write copy for websites, write tweets and write job applications. Write stories and essays. Finish your homework.
If you practised piano two hours a day for five years imagine how good you would be. If you write for five hours a day for five years imagine at the end of that time how accomplished you would be at crafting words.
In the times you are not writing, read. Read incessantly. Read books, magazines, blogs, websites, reviews, scripts, newspapers, political journals, Facebook status updates, interviews with writers, celebrities, politicians and the everyman on the street. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read the greats. Read the truly awfuls. Read poetry. Read the signs in public toilets and on the subway. Read advertising. Read flyers. Read comic strips and newspaper headlines and Wikipedia.
Don’t be a snob. Read everything. Learn how other people speak and write. Absorb beautiful words and turns of phrase. Jot them down. Flinch at bad writing and figure out why you’re flinching. Learn how a journalist’s words differ from a poet’s and how they are the same. Learn the art of an advertising tag line and the craft of a politician’s buzzwords. Read what you’ve written. Out loud. Don’t scrunch it up and throw it away. Work on it. Improve it. Keep going.
Listen. Watch the news, watch comedy, watch drama, watch movies and, whatever you do, watch every HBO series made. Watch Hollywood blockbusters and independent art house films. Watch children’s television and go to the theatre. Watch chat shows and YouTube videos.
This is how you will learn the art of great dialogue, the conventions behind the genres, the archetypes and the power of great storytelling. You might not realise it but you’ll be absorbing the conventions of three act story building, of character development and imagery. You’ll figure out how and when to incite incidents.
Listen on the subway and on buses. Listen to your friends. Listen to your parents and teachers. Listen to strangers at the table next to you and to the person spouting nonsense on the street corner through a megaphone.
Listen and learn the cadence and rhythm of speech. Study accents, slang and etymology. Revel in every new word and expression you come across. Listen and collect stories and names and the funny turns of phrase you overhear. One day that person you walked past in the street, that story you overheard waiting in line for your coffee, that piece of scandalous gossip at the water cooler, might lead to your Pulitzer.
Do all these things and always keep challenging yourself. Don’t just write one genre. Experiment, play, enjoy. Try writing a movie, a kid’s book, a young adult novel, a poem, a short story, a thriller, a horror, a romance, a TV Pilot, an episode of your favourite show. Try writing a haiku or a book blurb or a film poster. Figure out what you’re good at through trial and error.
The blank page is not something to be frightened of. It’s a new adventure waiting to happen. And there’s always the delete button.
Words. Make them your best friends.
*this post originally appeared on www.writingteennovels.com
If you practised piano two hours a day for five years imagine how good you would be. If you write for five hours a day for five years imagine at the end of that time how accomplished you would be at crafting words.
In the times you are not writing, read. Read incessantly. Read books, magazines, blogs, websites, reviews, scripts, newspapers, political journals, Facebook status updates, interviews with writers, celebrities, politicians and the everyman on the street. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read the greats. Read the truly awfuls. Read poetry. Read the signs in public toilets and on the subway. Read advertising. Read flyers. Read comic strips and newspaper headlines and Wikipedia.
Don’t be a snob. Read everything. Learn how other people speak and write. Absorb beautiful words and turns of phrase. Jot them down. Flinch at bad writing and figure out why you’re flinching. Learn how a journalist’s words differ from a poet’s and how they are the same. Learn the art of an advertising tag line and the craft of a politician’s buzzwords. Read what you’ve written. Out loud. Don’t scrunch it up and throw it away. Work on it. Improve it. Keep going.
Listen. Watch the news, watch comedy, watch drama, watch movies and, whatever you do, watch every HBO series made. Watch Hollywood blockbusters and independent art house films. Watch children’s television and go to the theatre. Watch chat shows and YouTube videos.
This is how you will learn the art of great dialogue, the conventions behind the genres, the archetypes and the power of great storytelling. You might not realise it but you’ll be absorbing the conventions of three act story building, of character development and imagery. You’ll figure out how and when to incite incidents.
Listen on the subway and on buses. Listen to your friends. Listen to your parents and teachers. Listen to strangers at the table next to you and to the person spouting nonsense on the street corner through a megaphone.
Listen and learn the cadence and rhythm of speech. Study accents, slang and etymology. Revel in every new word and expression you come across. Listen and collect stories and names and the funny turns of phrase you overhear. One day that person you walked past in the street, that story you overheard waiting in line for your coffee, that piece of scandalous gossip at the water cooler, might lead to your Pulitzer.
Do all these things and always keep challenging yourself. Don’t just write one genre. Experiment, play, enjoy. Try writing a movie, a kid’s book, a young adult novel, a poem, a short story, a thriller, a horror, a romance, a TV Pilot, an episode of your favourite show. Try writing a haiku or a book blurb or a film poster. Figure out what you’re good at through trial and error.
The blank page is not something to be frightened of. It’s a new adventure waiting to happen. And there’s always the delete button.
Words. Make them your best friends.
*this post originally appeared on www.writingteennovels.com
Controlling, psychotic men: The new hot?
The worst thing a writer can do is not say anything.
I have that quotation on a post it note stuck above my desk. Yet I wonder whether it’s actually accurate. It seems to me that one of the worst things a writer can do is to say something that acts in disservice of their gender.
Recently I’ve become more and more aware of the number of books being published, particularly in the YA realm, and by women too, which to my mind are damaging to girls. Books which do more to push back gender equality than any offensive statements by Kanye West, ever could.
I’m talking about books that portray controlling, obsessive, even psychotic boys as hot and desirable because they have a six-pack, cheekbones you could slice salami on, and they kiss really well. Books that portray a healthy relationship as one in which the boy beats the crap out of any guy who so much as looks sideways at ‘their’ girl. Books in which men stalk girls, act out violently, manipulate and otherwise emotionally abuse the girl because ‘they love her’. Yeah, I’m not sure in what world that qualifies as love. And always the girl forgives said boy because she needs him, he’s her soul mate, she can’t live without him…and don’t forget…he’s hot!
Please. Is this what we want to teach teenage girls? Is this what we want for the next generation of women? For them to grow up looking for this in their ideal partner? Is this what we want young men to think is what girls actually want?
Isn't it bad enough that Chris Brown's career sky rockets in the wake of him smashing his fists into Rihanna's face and that she responds by calling him the love of her life? We have awful enough 'role models' in real life - do we have to create them in fiction too?
The thing that gets me most though is that these books are written by women.
(Referring back to the Kanye West comment he made on Twitter, what riled me most was not the comment itself, but the fact that his girlfriend Kim Kardashian backed him up, telling her millions of Twitter followers that it was OK to call a woman a bitch. Again…in what world is that OK?).
Let’s stop betraying our gender girls. We can’t ever expect men to grant us respect and equal rights if we can’t even respect ourselves (Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and all you readers and writers take note!)
As an author and as a woman (and a mother) I believe that I have a responsibility and a duty to my readers (and my daughter) to portray both healthy male and female role models and healthy relationships. Girls who are in control of their own stories, who are smart, resilient and know when a guy is being a total jerk and aren't afraid to tell him. Girls who’d never let a guy control them or tell them what to do. Girls who kick ass and can look after themselves (admittedly, having that hot, intelligent and loving boy as a sidekick). My girls are heroines in the true sense of the word.
I don’t want to paint completely idealised romances either. My characters have flaws – they’re people after all. But mainly I want girls to read my books and feel stronger, feel prouder to be a girl, to come away feeling that it’s OK to not have a boyfriend, it’s OK to feel desire and want sex, but it’s also OK to wait – in fact it’s often a good idea to wait.
I want girls to know that the right guy (and there will be one) is not the guy who likes to beat the crap out of people or tell you what to wear, what to eat and how to dress. But the guy who supports you, is kind, is loving and puts you not on a pedestal, but on an equal footing.
To writers:
Teenage readers are influenced by our words, by our stories. Make them count.
To readers:
Think carefully about what you feed your subconscious. Question the books you read and the messages they are sending. Become a critical reader and shout from the rooftops when you find something offensive or sexist. Let publishers know. But most especially, if you're female, fight back against anything that denigrates women. It's your duty.
To publishers:
STOP publishing these books. Stop running with the trends. Start bucking them. Empower the next generation through the books you choose, don't disempower them at such a critical age. Yours is a position of power, don't abuse it.
I have that quotation on a post it note stuck above my desk. Yet I wonder whether it’s actually accurate. It seems to me that one of the worst things a writer can do is to say something that acts in disservice of their gender.
Recently I’ve become more and more aware of the number of books being published, particularly in the YA realm, and by women too, which to my mind are damaging to girls. Books which do more to push back gender equality than any offensive statements by Kanye West, ever could.
I’m talking about books that portray controlling, obsessive, even psychotic boys as hot and desirable because they have a six-pack, cheekbones you could slice salami on, and they kiss really well. Books that portray a healthy relationship as one in which the boy beats the crap out of any guy who so much as looks sideways at ‘their’ girl. Books in which men stalk girls, act out violently, manipulate and otherwise emotionally abuse the girl because ‘they love her’. Yeah, I’m not sure in what world that qualifies as love. And always the girl forgives said boy because she needs him, he’s her soul mate, she can’t live without him…and don’t forget…he’s hot!
Please. Is this what we want to teach teenage girls? Is this what we want for the next generation of women? For them to grow up looking for this in their ideal partner? Is this what we want young men to think is what girls actually want?
Isn't it bad enough that Chris Brown's career sky rockets in the wake of him smashing his fists into Rihanna's face and that she responds by calling him the love of her life? We have awful enough 'role models' in real life - do we have to create them in fiction too?
The thing that gets me most though is that these books are written by women.
(Referring back to the Kanye West comment he made on Twitter, what riled me most was not the comment itself, but the fact that his girlfriend Kim Kardashian backed him up, telling her millions of Twitter followers that it was OK to call a woman a bitch. Again…in what world is that OK?).
Let’s stop betraying our gender girls. We can’t ever expect men to grant us respect and equal rights if we can’t even respect ourselves (Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and all you readers and writers take note!)
As an author and as a woman (and a mother) I believe that I have a responsibility and a duty to my readers (and my daughter) to portray both healthy male and female role models and healthy relationships. Girls who are in control of their own stories, who are smart, resilient and know when a guy is being a total jerk and aren't afraid to tell him. Girls who’d never let a guy control them or tell them what to do. Girls who kick ass and can look after themselves (admittedly, having that hot, intelligent and loving boy as a sidekick). My girls are heroines in the true sense of the word.
I don’t want to paint completely idealised romances either. My characters have flaws – they’re people after all. But mainly I want girls to read my books and feel stronger, feel prouder to be a girl, to come away feeling that it’s OK to not have a boyfriend, it’s OK to feel desire and want sex, but it’s also OK to wait – in fact it’s often a good idea to wait.
I want girls to know that the right guy (and there will be one) is not the guy who likes to beat the crap out of people or tell you what to wear, what to eat and how to dress. But the guy who supports you, is kind, is loving and puts you not on a pedestal, but on an equal footing.
To writers:
Teenage readers are influenced by our words, by our stories. Make them count.
To readers:
Think carefully about what you feed your subconscious. Question the books you read and the messages they are sending. Become a critical reader and shout from the rooftops when you find something offensive or sexist. Let publishers know. But most especially, if you're female, fight back against anything that denigrates women. It's your duty.
To publishers:
STOP publishing these books. Stop running with the trends. Start bucking them. Empower the next generation through the books you choose, don't disempower them at such a critical age. Yours is a position of power, don't abuse it.
Writing sequels (or the curse of the trilogy)
I am busy in sequel land at the moment (the sequel to Fated just came out) and it got me thinking about the issues that arise when you write a story that continues beyond one book.
How do you plot? How do you sustain story arcs? How do you maintain your readers’ attention? How do you grow and develop your characters? How do you know when to stop? How do you avoid middle book syndrome?
While I write and edit my sequels I’ve also been reading a few other YA sequels and almost invariably being disappointed by them. So, how do you try to avoid the pitfalls when writing sequels?
1. Please remind your reader
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because you know your characters and can visualize them and their back story and all their adorable quirks that your reader is going to remember them too.
Assume it’s been a year since your reader last entered the world of your book, and in between they’ve not been eating, sleeping, dreaming your plot and characters, they’ve been reading other books. Probably lots of other books. Your characters have warped and faded and maybe even disappeared completely from their minds. So you need to remind them who they are, what they look like and what their key character traits are. Also remind them of what happened in the previous book.
But whatever you do …
2. Don’t go crazy with exposition
That basically means don’t spend the first ten chapters or so laying out in painful detail everything that happened previously. Yawnfest right there. You need to scatter the information, and in a way that doesn’t make it seem like you are scattering the information purely for the sake of the reader. Nothing more cringeworthy and eyeball-rolly than exposition.
3. Consistency
Your characters need to remain consistent. Unless of course fifteen years have passed and they’re now on a different life path. What is it with books where the character seems to have undergone a personality transplant in between books? That’s not to say characters shouldn’t show growth, but generally the reader wants to see the growth happening, not be witness to it after the event.
4. Trilogies
Did someone pass a law that every YA book now has to be part of a trilogy? What is that about? My Hunting Lila series is 2 books. My Fated series is going to be 4. I have several standalone books coming out.
Consider what works for your story but whatever you do don’t automatically assume three books is a must. I think a lot of times people just assume they need to write three and then end up with a middle book that sucks because there’s not enough story.
Every single book should be able to STAND ALONE. Someone should be able to pick it up who hasn’t read another book in the series and be able to get into that book without too much difficulty. Each book in a series needs a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle book is not the one where you just fill space until the finale can happen in book three.
5. Endings; to cliffhang or not to cliffhang?
Which brings me to point 5. To cliffhang or not to cliffhang? Generally speaking it’s best not to cliffhang but to wrap things up in a way that ties up most, if not all, the loose ends but leaves the door open for a sequel if you want to write one.
I’ve toyed with this cliffhanging dilemma a lot. In Hunting Lila we end at a peering gently over the cliff point but far from hanging off the actual cliff. In Losing Lila and Fated we’re nowhere near the cliff edge – both books were meant to end there (but leaving the door open just a smidgen in case). In Severed however I changed it up a little. At the end we’re clinging to that cliff with just our fingernails.
People hate cliffhangers as a general rule, but I felt that I could afford to do so because I had enough goodwill in my fans to trust me on it, and also because book 3 is coming hot on book 2’s heels, meaning readers won’t be dangling an entire year to find out what happens.
6. Plotting over books
If you haven’t yet got my point, plot each book to be standalone. But with sequels the major issue is continuity. How on earth did JK do it? I take my hat off to her, because it’s a headache to plot just one book, let alone a whole series.
I wrote all three Fated books before the first one was published because I wanted to make sure the plot was hole-free the whole way through. It took a lot of time and effort to do that (when characters can see the future and there are prophecies involved it sure took some planning).
So my advice? Make sure you do your planning across all the books before you publish the first if you possibly can.
But above all that, before you even begin the daunting task of plotting out a whole saga, ask yourself whether your book really needs a sequel.
(The original of this blog post appeared on the website www.writingteennovels.com which is a brilliant resource for anyone looking to write YA).
How do you plot? How do you sustain story arcs? How do you maintain your readers’ attention? How do you grow and develop your characters? How do you know when to stop? How do you avoid middle book syndrome?
While I write and edit my sequels I’ve also been reading a few other YA sequels and almost invariably being disappointed by them. So, how do you try to avoid the pitfalls when writing sequels?
1. Please remind your reader
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because you know your characters and can visualize them and their back story and all their adorable quirks that your reader is going to remember them too.
Assume it’s been a year since your reader last entered the world of your book, and in between they’ve not been eating, sleeping, dreaming your plot and characters, they’ve been reading other books. Probably lots of other books. Your characters have warped and faded and maybe even disappeared completely from their minds. So you need to remind them who they are, what they look like and what their key character traits are. Also remind them of what happened in the previous book.
But whatever you do …
2. Don’t go crazy with exposition
That basically means don’t spend the first ten chapters or so laying out in painful detail everything that happened previously. Yawnfest right there. You need to scatter the information, and in a way that doesn’t make it seem like you are scattering the information purely for the sake of the reader. Nothing more cringeworthy and eyeball-rolly than exposition.
3. Consistency
Your characters need to remain consistent. Unless of course fifteen years have passed and they’re now on a different life path. What is it with books where the character seems to have undergone a personality transplant in between books? That’s not to say characters shouldn’t show growth, but generally the reader wants to see the growth happening, not be witness to it after the event.
4. Trilogies
Did someone pass a law that every YA book now has to be part of a trilogy? What is that about? My Hunting Lila series is 2 books. My Fated series is going to be 4. I have several standalone books coming out.
Consider what works for your story but whatever you do don’t automatically assume three books is a must. I think a lot of times people just assume they need to write three and then end up with a middle book that sucks because there’s not enough story.
Every single book should be able to STAND ALONE. Someone should be able to pick it up who hasn’t read another book in the series and be able to get into that book without too much difficulty. Each book in a series needs a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle book is not the one where you just fill space until the finale can happen in book three.
5. Endings; to cliffhang or not to cliffhang?
Which brings me to point 5. To cliffhang or not to cliffhang? Generally speaking it’s best not to cliffhang but to wrap things up in a way that ties up most, if not all, the loose ends but leaves the door open for a sequel if you want to write one.
I’ve toyed with this cliffhanging dilemma a lot. In Hunting Lila we end at a peering gently over the cliff point but far from hanging off the actual cliff. In Losing Lila and Fated we’re nowhere near the cliff edge – both books were meant to end there (but leaving the door open just a smidgen in case). In Severed however I changed it up a little. At the end we’re clinging to that cliff with just our fingernails.
People hate cliffhangers as a general rule, but I felt that I could afford to do so because I had enough goodwill in my fans to trust me on it, and also because book 3 is coming hot on book 2’s heels, meaning readers won’t be dangling an entire year to find out what happens.
6. Plotting over books
If you haven’t yet got my point, plot each book to be standalone. But with sequels the major issue is continuity. How on earth did JK do it? I take my hat off to her, because it’s a headache to plot just one book, let alone a whole series.
I wrote all three Fated books before the first one was published because I wanted to make sure the plot was hole-free the whole way through. It took a lot of time and effort to do that (when characters can see the future and there are prophecies involved it sure took some planning).
So my advice? Make sure you do your planning across all the books before you publish the first if you possibly can.
But above all that, before you even begin the daunting task of plotting out a whole saga, ask yourself whether your book really needs a sequel.
(The original of this blog post appeared on the website www.writingteennovels.com which is a brilliant resource for anyone looking to write YA).
Writing and all the bits in between
I have a blog at www.canwelivehere.com which documents my life living in Bali, writing, drinking coconuts, dancing ecstatically and meeting crazy people.
I have a website at www.sarahalderson.com where ...more
I have a website at www.sarahalderson.com where ...more
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