At least four of my fourteen novels were written (mostly) using the first person point of view.

I think I make a good job of writing in the first person. It’s not easy, and few writers bother to master it, believing the advantages (immediacy and intimacy with the chance for gut-wrenching action or heat-wrenching tragedy at a very personal level) are not worth the pitfalls (a possibly linear story with a difficulty of developing sub-plots, over-emphasis on one character, only seeing the story from one side, only knowing what the “I” character knows at the time, etc).

Some of these problems can be circumvented with a little thought and ingenuity. A good writer can even have the narrator tell the reader things that they, the narrator, don’t know. In The Aware, the sharp reader could work out the profession of the main male protagonist from what the narrator says long before the narrator herself realises exactly what the man does for a living. And yet her lack of realisation comes across as a believable failure of her acumen, rather than sheer stupidity. It can be done.

Also in The Isles of Glory, the tale was framed by letters of other characters commenting on the main story teller; in addition, it was written as an oral history recorded by an ethnographer, and the “I” could therefore be changed to another character, at different times. In her Assassin trilogy, Robin Hobb had her main character, Fitz, able to see through the eyes of his pet wolf (dog?); at the same time, he himself had access to the spy network of the castle with its peepholes and listening posts—thus he could observe scenes as a non-participating unseen spy. A handy device when telling a first person story.

I chose first person for Heart of the Mirage because I thought it suited the circumstances of the main character. She is set down in an alien society, and sees everything with the eye of a stranger, just as the reader does. Because part of the time she is in disguise, she can’t ask too many questions. As such, the reader rides the adventure inside her head, wondering what is going on, striving to understand along with her. I have, however, switched to third person point of view for Books 2, The Shadow of Tyr and Book 3, Song of the Shiver Barrens, because the circumstances change and the story widens.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to using the first person narrative that is not obvious. There are a stack of people out there who simply won’t pick up a book written that way, on the apparent assumption that they won’t like it. Not just a few, but a surprisingly large percentage. Now I can understand someone saying, “I don’t read chick-lit” or, “I don’t read Westerns”. We all have our preferences. But the books within each of these genres have a lot in common within one another, and it is probably this commonality that is the source of their dislike.

To say you won’t read something written in the first person kinda sounds to me like saying, “I don’t read books with red covers”. First person stories have only ONE thing in common – the first person viewpoint. To say you won’t like it is to banish a slew of stories on every conceivable subject matter and theme, set anywhere on, or off, earth, many of them brilliantly written, and certainly not necessarily particularly simplistic or even linear. They can still have sub plots!

Think of your conversations with friends or family: what happened when Bob broke a leg mountain climbing, or Steve had a flaming row with his dad only to be arrested for disturbing the peace, or how your cousin Mavis, who is a nurse, survived Covid? All first person stories. We listen to first person stories all the time. And mostly, we love them in real life!

Nonetheless, writers should be aware that many readers will be put off your book simply on the grounds of your choice of narrator.

We all know that feeling. You start reading a book, even perhaps a best seller, and after a few pages you think to yourself, ‘How on earth did this ever get into print? I could do better!’

When you’re unpublished, it seems unfair that someone who peppers their prose with exclamation marks and clichés, or poor grammar and clunky sentences, can find a publisher. And when you are published, it seems just as unfair that the author of that same shoddy writing gets millions while you worry about whether you’ll earn out the modest advance you got.

So how come a book like that gets published in the first place? And once published, how come it sells millions? Is it luck?

No, of course not, but it sure helps to be in the right place at the right time for the right person. And the only way you ensure that is by getting your book – the best work you can write – out there to as many people as possible. I am an object lesson when it comes to this.

My first novel was accepted by an agent just after I turned forty-five. It should have been earlier – after all, I was only seven or eight when I decided I was going to be a writer. Well, authoress was the word I used, I believe! So what the hell took me so long? I did write. I even finished books. A number of them. But I never got anywhere with them. Why not?

Because the sheer dogged determination was not there. I was too caught up in all the paraphernalia of everyday life, earning a living, raising kids…you know the story. But in this business you make your own luck by stubborn persistence, and without that drive, my books weren’t out there being seen by enough people. In effect, I wasn’t making my own luck.

Then the kids grew older and my husband took a job in Vienna, Austria. We moved into a smaller house where the housework could be done in one tenth the time and there was no wildlife sharing our living space necessitating constant cleaning (people who live in the tropics will know what I mean!). I had no full-time job so I had time to write; we weren’t earning third world salaries any more and so I had the cash to sent out a manuscript repeatedly. I got serious. I changed my luck.

That poorly written work by the now bestselling author I mentioned above? That may not have appealed to 99% of the publisher and agents who saw it originally – but it hit the right person at the right time, someone for whom the story resonated, or who realised it would resonate with the reading public. Just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean other people won’t like it either.

We have to accept that sometimes good writing doesn’t sell, whereas a good story can sometimes survive poor writing. It’s annoying to those who take care to craft good novels, but hey, this is a business as well as a creative art, and we have to live with it. And the best advice remains: make your own luck.

Be a stubborn son-of-a-bitch as well as a good craftsman.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Thursday, 16 February 2006 (3 Comments).

The action scenes? The dialogues? The beginning? Climax?

Nope, none of the above. It’s those horrible dull bits. Because you’ve got to write them so they aren’t dull.

It’s the bits that, if you leave them out, readers are going to ask: “But how did he get to town when the last scene was back on the farm?” or “But how did she know that the boy was named Martin, when we haven’t read a scene where she was told?”

They are the necessary bits that explain the grounding of your plot, yet are intrinsically dull in their explanation. You don’t really want to have to explain, “Well, first he walked to the main road, then he hitched a ride with the farmer down the road who just happened to be going into town to buy some chicken feed even though it wasn’t market day.” Or, “She went to the dressmaker’s, and while she was there, this woman called Annie came in, and she happened to mention in a passing conversation with the dressmaker that John’s son was her gardener and his name was Martin.”

Leave out the explanation, and you’ll get creamed by your readers; put it in and you’ll bore them the tears. They are the hardest bits to write!

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Friday, 24 February 2006 (5 Comments).

Chuck it.

That’s right – throw it away. The odds are ten to one (or worse) that it will ever be published. And yes, I do know that advice is going to hurt…

I admire anyone who actually finishes a book. It’s not a simple undertaking – it requires perseverance and sacrifice. It’s time you could have spent with your family, or watching TV, or reading, or something else just as attractive. You had the required strength of character, and you finished. And now you want the world to know the result and love it the way you do.

Sometimes it even happens. I personally do know people who did have their very first book published and it has turned out to be very successful too, the start of a prosperous career. However, it is a rare occurrence, believe me. When you press most successful authors for the truth, you will find that most of them threw the first effort away, or never showed it to anyone, or never finished it.

The truth is that no tennis player gets to Wimbleton centre court first time out; no golfer wins the Masters first time around. What you don’t see is the years and years of practice that gets them to that point. Remember those hours and hours of piano practice you did as a kid? Or the band practice in the garage, or the guitar practice in your bedroom with the door shut? Your first book is that practice. And possibly so is your second, third and fourth.

Some of you are now muttering, “No one is that stupid. Write four or five books and never get any published? They should have given up! And if they did do that and weren’t published, they are obviously crap writers and idiots to boot…”

Hey, wait a moment. That’s me you’re talking about. I may be an idiot, but I’m not a crap writer. And I have been published – in five countries and three languages. I now have seven books published or on their way to publication. I’ve been shortlisted for awards. Yet my path to success is littered with unpublished manuscripts – and I’ve lost count of how many.

I finished my first novel when I was twelve, my second and third when I was in my twenties, and so on. Some I never showed anyone at all. Others were read by friends. Most I sent off just the once or twice and then gave up when they were rejected – not knowing how precious the words of encouragement I received were. (I truly was an innocent abroad…)

My advice is: don’t put all your hopes in your first effort. In fact, think very carefully about marketing it at all. Writing is a lifetime career, and you have to learn your craft first. When you have finished your first book, start immediately on the second. You can always come back to that first one again later, and either mine it for ideas, or rewrite it with a new outlook in a few years time.

Daunting? Yes. The question is this: just how much do you want to be a published writer? Are you in it for the long haul? If you know you will write no matter what, then an unpublished MS, or two, or three, is nothing. They were fun to write, after all, weren’t they?

Remember Ursula LeGuin? Asked what she would have been if she hadn’t been a writer, she replied: “Dead.” Well, that’s me, too. And most other writers worth their salt. This is not just a job we do for money, it’s a drive we have to create. It’s the journey that counts. Remember van Gogh? The only paintings he ever sold in his lifetime were to his brother. It didn’t stop him from painting.

So my advice is : Write. Keep on writing. Learn your craft, and one day you’ll probably get there. But don’t, don’t, get too hung up on the fate of your first book. After all, you were just practising…

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Friday, 3 March 2006 (7 Comments).

I watched – with appalled fascination – some of the early trials for American Idol. It was eye-opening to see so many thousands of young people with impossible dreams: all wanted to be stars. There were so many of them that, if all succeeded, there would be no one left to listen. No audience for tens of thousands of singers…

And some of them were beyond terrible, yet didn’t seem to know it. Some were devastated when they were weeded out, as if life was now over. It was both pathetic and frightening. Rather like reading about the poll they did of British school kids some time back, asking them what they wanted to be. By far the most common answer was “pop star” or similar; even, with delicious vagueness, “celebrity”.

That was the sum total of their ambition? Do they have any idea of what they are asking for? Any idea that it’s not the fame that’s important, but the love of music? Any idea of the hard work it normally takes to be that successful? Maybe that’s one of the attractions of American Idol or similar shows – it seems like such a shortcut. Add water and stir: instant fame, without the hard stuff. Unhappily, there are also a lot of writers out there with unrealistic expectations too. Who want the fame without the work.

So, if you want to be a writer, should you hold on to that dream? Because here’s the first unpleasant truth: not all of you out there dreaming are going to make it. Not even those of you who work damn hard. Not even those of you who have talent. Not even one in five thousand of you.

There’s nothing wrong with dreaming. But there is something else that is even more important, and you should never forget it: it doesn’t matter if the dream doesn’t come true. Why not? Because you are loving the journey. Because what really matters is the love of writing. If you don’t have that, then you shouldn’t be doing this. You’ll be like one of those young singers, dreaming not of the song, but of the celebrity.

So how can you make the dream come true?

Here’s step one and it’s the simplest one of all, and the most fun, and yet it is also the most important:

Buy New Books. Read. Teach your kids to read. Read to them at bedtime every night. Buy books for your grandkids. Give books as gifts to your friends and family. Ask for books as presents for yourself. Raise generations of readers.

Huh?
Yeah, that’s right. Publishers are in a business. If they don’t make lots of money, they won’t sign up lots of new authors – of which you might be one. So that’s the first step you can take down the road to being an author.

Told you it was simple.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Monday, 20 March 2006 (9 Comments).

I have just read the perfect chapter, and that made me fall to thinking about what a perfect chapter should have. And here are my ideas:

1. It should advance the plot.
2. As a corollary to point 1, a perfect chapter should also contain something new to the story, something that makes the reader go: Oh, wow. In sff, it should stir that sensawunda.
3. It should advance the development of at least one of the characters. The reader should find out something new about him/her/them.
4. It should contain a mix of dialogue and action and description. (I realise not all chapters can do this – but I am talking about the perfect one, right?)
5. The tension in the dialogue should keep the reader on edge.
6. The action should make the reader read breathlessly, racing to find out what is going to happen.
7. The description should give the reader a picture of the surroundings that they can smell and taste and hear and see – and do all that without boring them.
8. The imagery should make another writer wonder why the hell they didn’t think of that first.
9. No passage in the perfect chapter should tempt the reader to skip a word.
10. The whole package should leave the reader panting for more.

And the perfect chapter I just read? It was in Russell Kirkpatick’s new novel Book 1: “The Path of Revenge” in a new trilogy (not yet published – but what a treat in store). Watch for this book when it hits the shelves. Russell’s name is one you are going to hear a lot of in the future; his first trilogy was just an appetiser – he really gets into his stride with this one.

I’m about to go and commit harikiri because I am not sure I will ever be able to write something as good as this.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Wednesday, 19 April 2006 (6 Comments).

There was an interesting discussion recently (10th April) in the Purple Zone (nickname for the Australian Voyageronline Message Board), on whether published authors were mean – or wise – to tell unpublished writers horror tales about how hard it is to get published.

One writer said, and I have compressed his commentary: Sometimes I wonder at the impartiality of writers advising others not to try competing with them. The cumulative effect of all these well-meaning pieces is to discourage writers. Think of the stories we’re losing because we as an industry pride ourselves on the mass of broken bodies outside the front door!

He has no problem with the majority of the advice offered by writers, but is not convinced that the constant flow of discouraging comments to new writers is becoming to us as writers, or to the industry in general. Sick of all the negativity, his advice is: If you’re planning to write a novel, go right ahead! Be aware that the path to publishing is a difficult one, but by all means have a crack!

Another writer said in reply (also compressed): The easily discouraged and defeated may give up, but those who are determined to break through, come hell or high water, are more likely to take on board the info they need with a “forewarned is forearmed” approach.

She thinks the negative approach is really designed to stop people making stupid mistakes and to educate them about the realities of a very tough process. She feels that, for the most part, the writers who do talk publishing turkey are trying to help, not hinder. She says, I guess the nub of the question is: are they discouraging, or are they being honest about a difficult and unpalatable truth? Getting published is like wanting to be an actor, or a dancer, or a singer. The cold reality is that many many many more people want to achieve the goal than will achieve it. Do I think anyone at all should be told give up, don’t bother? No. I do think that those who wish to pursue the goal should do so with their eyes open, fully cognisant of the pitfalls, the drawbacks and the basic tools necessary for the journey. And if other writers don’t make them public, how else are people going to best help themselves?

It was an interesting discussion, quite a bit longer, with other participants, than what I have summarised here.

I must admit that – having had an enormously long and difficult road to publication in spite of having an excellent agent – I am more of the school that thinks unpublished writers need to be told. They need to be realistic.

To be skilled in anything at all usually takes practice. Usually YEARS of practice. It takes experience. Usually YEARS of experience. It usually involves good advice/teachers/role models/mentors/or similar. You rarely win a game of any kind the first time you try. The unpalatable truth is that most who begin, never win. In the Olympic 100m sprint, there is only one gold medal, one silver, one bronze. Think of how many start along that road and never end up on the winning podium.

I would like to think that my kind of “negativity” is designed to make the best writers more determined never to give up – and to be prepared to do the hard work getting published usually entails. I’d like to think that my story is more inspirational than off-putting.

And, as I have said before, if you enjoy the journey, then your time will never be wasted, no matter what happens at the finish line – because how can a feeling of joy or achievement or satisfaction or pleasure in creativity ever be considered a waste?

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Thursday, 20 April 2006 (6 Comments).

I have to be off to the airport at 5am, so I really ought to be getting some sleep. Instead, Gillian over at gillpolack over at livejournal started me thinking about worldbuilding. She has thought more deeply about the way I do things than I have myself!

For those who don’t know much about writing sff: think about this. If I tell you I am writing a mainstream novel set in London in 2006, you already know a helluva lot about my novel before you’ve read a word. You have a sense of place, time, culture. You could probably make a stab at what my characters have for breakfast without me telling you. If I tell you my main character teaches at a government secondary school, then you already have an idea of his socio-economic position.

But what if I told you my book was set in Sebundancia in the forty-sixth century after the cataclysm and my main character makes corrabuds for a living? You would be none the wiser. A fantasy writer has to build a whole world and make it believable. If they don’t do it well, the whole book flops, even though the plot may be a scorcher and the characters marvellously drawn.

Gillian says: “I am reading Glenda Larke’s work and it strikes me that her worlds are a lot more convincing that those of a lot of other writers. When you get down to it, though, she doesn’t have a great deal more information than many fantasy novels, and she definitely has less than some. Why do her worlds work?”

“…It isn’t the amount of background you add to your novel, though the amount of effort you spend worldbuilding most definitely helps. The important thing is what detail you select. And Glenda chooses her detail with extraordinary care. Her worlds work because she mimics the sense we sometimes get in our own lives: that things are interlinked and complex.”
And : “The detail is *so* telling, that we can infer much more from her hints than is said on the page.”

I was delighted when I read that, because that was the result I was striving for. I have a horror of boring the reader with a myriad of details, for example about what you can order for breakfast in the local inn and how the food actually got there… Yet I don’t want the reader to ever be jerked into a sense of disbelief. (Hey, wait a moment, this inn is in the middle of the desert, how come they have fresh bread and what do they use for fuel to heat the ovens if there’s no trees?) 

I don’t think I do nearly as much written work to build my world as some authors do. You won’t find my study strewn with plans of the economic life of the Gorthan Spit or notes on the details of how the Hub Race affected the social status of the Middling Isles…and yet I do know those things. I could tell you if you asked. So how do I do it?

I spend a year (at least) thinking about a novel before I write it – and most of what I think about is the place. How it is governed and stratified. What the conflicts are and how the economy works. I don’t write this down. I don’t do it in painstaking detail. And I don’t do it as an academic exercise either – I do it through my PoV characters, in the amount of detail that they would understand.

Let’s say Ferria is a chambermaid in Sebundancia and she is one of my main protagonists. She works for the corrabud-maker. I think about her a lot. How she spends her day. What she thinks about, the work she does, where she lives, what her family does. She probably doesn’t know much about how trade is done with the people who live in the neighbouring valley over the other side of the hills, but she will know some things – where those silk sheets on the beds come from, for example, and how much they cost. And that small snippet of info will also mean that there are silk merchants and silk traders and silk caravans, which I will probably mention somewhere or other. And if there are silk sheets on the bed, then making corrabuds is very lucrative…

Gillian says – and she is absolutely right:

“And that is the strongest argument I can think of for thinking about how that world needs to appear in the book at least as much as you think about building your world in the first place. When a writer gets the appropriate detail -the telling detail – and links it closely into plot and people then fantasy and SF reading becomes a whole new ballgame. We feel as if we are entering those strange lands ourselves.”

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 23 April 2006 (5 Comments).

One of the toughest things about writing is getting the language right. I don’t mean style or the order of words – I mean the actual vocabulary.

You work hard to draw your reader into your world, to have them believe in it, and each time you use an inappropriate word, you fling him or her back into the present. The moment someone is jerked out of their belief in your setting and period, you – the writer – have to struggle to regain their trust.

Some things are obvious. You can’t have a man living in a medieval world say “Ok”. But lots of other choices are more subtle. Can you have him say, “Run that by me one more time?” (Not in my book, you can’t. The phrase just sounds too modern.) Can you have someone in your made-up, pre-industrial fantasy world use the word “teenager”? Or does that sound too modern? Can the healer refer to a heart attack? Or a stroke? Or is he more likely to say apoplexy? Did Roman ladies wear “make-up” or is the word cosmetics better? I have just annoyed a reader by using the word “minutes” in a society that uses only sundials to tell the time. Appropriate or not? Not to that reader – it jerked her out of her sense of place, and that’s enough to have me think I shan’t do it again.

And then there’s those foreign words which we use all the time – but are they appropriate? Can you say “deja vu” in your world? What about “run amok”? “An Oedipus complex”? Or “spartan”?

Sometimes it’s the little things that count.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Saturday, 29 April 2006 (12 Comments).

Lucy Sussex has written a very short review of Heart of the Mirage for The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, appearing yesterday (Sunday). I am tickled pink to be in The Age and to have a writer as talented as Lucy say nice things! The review ended with: For those jaded with genre fantasy, Larke provides fare that is fresh, strange and intriguing.

There have been some interesting comments added to my last blog entry on the difficulties of language of a period, and Gillian had some words of wisdom over on her blog. I liked the comment Karen (author of Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duology) made about some things being invisible, no matter what world you are writing about – cows and horses are fine, but the moment you mention something like kangaroos, you’re doomed. You’ve made the place Australia, and nothing is going budge the reader out of that slot.

I think this is one reason why fantasy seems sometimes to be so much the same in setting: oak trees are fine (“invisible”) and so are wolves and generic bears and wild boars and the north being colder than the south. None of those things grates on the reader. Include kangaroos or armadillos or giraffes and all of a sudden you are no longer in a land called “Cavalaria” or “M’grith”. Have your hero fight a battle with a savage tiger during a hunt, and you’ve got to be in India. Have your heroine watch the toucans in the tree outside her castle and you’ll have your reader shaking their heads in despair. You have placed them somewhere real and not at all fantastical in the way they expected.

The challenge is to provide a setting that is different, yet doesn’t carry a load of baggage with it. The aim must always be not to jerk the reader out of your world and into his/her own.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Monday, 1 May 2006 (3 Comments).