Glenda Larke

So there I am, on the bus, discovering the route as I journey. Sometimes it all goes far too slowly to please me; at other times I race along at over 3,000 words a day. [I think the most I’ve ever written in a single day was 5,000 words]. Sometimes it feels as if I am out on the road pushing the bus; at other times the speed of the journey is exhilarating.

And then I am there, at the end. Wow. Break out a bottle of wine and celebrate!

That point can come in as little as five or six months, depending on how much my other job intrudes. But it’s only the first time I’ve driven the route, and boy, did I make some mistakes along the way. I deviated when I shouldn’t have; I failed to take some side routes that I should have explored. Some of the passengers were too quiet; others too chatty; some I forgot about and went sailing past while they waited at the bus stop. [In Gilfeather, I remember, I forgot about the dog for half the book and didn’t realise, until I reread, that he’d inexplicably vanished halfway through the book!]

As we progressed, I had attended to some of these problems, and even backtracked to solve them, but mostly I was far too anxious to reach my destination.

Now, however, I have to go over the route and again and again. How many times? Hard to say. there are parts where my driving was perfect first time around. There are other bits that get rehashed countless times – twenty? thirty? – who knows. I just do it till I get it right.

Many authors – especially new ones – tend to overwrite [i.e. say too much/repeat/over-explain] and it is at this stage that they re-route the bus, slashing out the unnecessary deviations and repetitive bits. And yes, I do that too. Overall, though, I was too anxious to reach the terminus and I always tend to underwrite. The first major rewrite often results in another 5,000 to 10,000 words being added!

Finally though, I have a story that looks good.

Is that the end it? Not by a longshot. I haven’t even looked at the fine tuning, the polishing.

More about that another day.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Friday, 23 June 2006 (3 Comments).

I had my first two novels published without even being aware that there were such people as beta readers. Oh, one or two family members had read the books, or versions of them – but my family members are far too kind to be beta readers (or far too wise).

The only real feedback I had was from my agent and editors. I am wiser now: I know there are wonderful people out there who actually like reading books in progress and providing the feedback that helps you to make it a better book.

This was especially valuable when I was writing “The Shadow of Tyr” recently (to be published in January). For a time, the book just would not go right. And I couldn’t work out what was wrong. A couple of my beta readers came along and put their finger on the problems – to the extent that when I finally showed the MS to my editor and agent, they both asked, Huh? So what was the problem? And my copyeditor said the book was “truly magic”!

So here’s to my beta readers – you rock.

Here are a number of things that a writer must remember about this process:

• As an author, you MUST divorce yourself from your work – a crit of your book that says, “Hey this is crap. I found it boring and repetitive,” is not a description of you. You have asked for critical feedback; when you get it, swallow your pride and accept it. Don’t ever then sit down and write back a long justification of your work and why your beta reader is wrong. If you do, you’ve just lost yourself a beta reader and made yourself look ridiculous.

• Choose your beta readers carefully. I am told there are some destructive people (usually unpublished and embittered) out there who like nothing better than to tear other people down. I haven’t actually suffered from this myself, but I have heard of other authors who have. You need someone who can tell you what it was that was wrong, and why – (but not necessarily how to fix it – that is your job, although they may be able to help you, especially if they are fellow writers). Any beta reader who attacks you, not your work, needs to be discarded immediately.

• Choose beta readers who are familiar with the genre and who read widely. That way, they lnow what they are talking about. They know bad when they see it.

• Here’s what should happen. Your beta reader says: I thought Chapter 12 dragged. There was too much telling, not enough action. Too much boring dialogue. By the end, I was yawning. Now you, as author, know that there is a lot of valuable info in Chap 12 that the reader must be told – it’s now up to you to work out how to make it more palatable. A really superb beta reader might make a suggestion: Why don’t you pep this up by having Tom there, asking silly questions and Alice losing her temper… but don’t expect a beta reader to give you the solution. All they should do is tell you what doesn’t work for them and why.

• Should you always take notice of the advice? Not necessarily. Beta readers can be wrong. They can even say contradictory things. But generally, if you have chosen them wisely, it pays to think very, very carefully about what they say. If two of them say the same thing, then you know you should really sit up and take notice!

• Different beta readers are good at different things. That’s why it’s great to have a few of them. Some are plot hole finders. Others go after lousy grammar. Others home in on continuity mistakes. Some just look at the bigger picture. Bless them all.

• So where do you find a beta reader? I am exceedingly lucky that one of my book group who lives a couple of streets away is also a sff fan and an editor – she is invaluable. She is a treasure. But she is also a working girl, and it is cheeky to ask someone who does this sort of thing for a living to do it for free! So we have an understanding – she does it to the degree that it is still fun for her. The moment she is pressed for time or it starts to be a chore, she’s gotta stop and say, Sorry. Not this time. And that’s always the way it should be, even with someone who is not in the industry.

My other beta readers, I found through the internet. I belong to a message board over at Voyager Australia, and I met authors and readers there who volunteered. Some of them are fellow authors – and they are wonderful. They are also enormously busy people, and it can be an imposition to ask them to do something as time-consuming as this. One is a bookseller. One a copyeditor. One a writer and editor, with her own unpublished books on the burner. One of them I still have never met.

And they all rock. I am eternally grateful to everyone of them. And I have done beta reading for many of them, in turn.

• If you are an unpublished writer and want a published writer to beta read for you, you should probably forget it. Unless they are a good friend, it is unlikely to happen. Most authors don’t have time, and are especially reluctant to help people they don’t know for fear of later being accused of pinching their ideas.

And this pix has nothing to do with beta readers. It’s just a water monitor that lives around our apartment block – and it is 5′ long – a metre and a half. Click on it for a good look.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Wednesday, 12 July 2006 (7 Comments).

Patty had a second question: Is there ever a chance you’ll like your second and third books better than the first? It seems to me there is such exhilaration at finishing the first, it has to stay your favourite for a long time 😉

With me at least, it is a little hard to answer this because of the muddle of my books.

I finished my first book aged twelve, so I really can’t remember how I felt! I wrote a few others that I never tried to market after that. And then I finally got serious.

I wrote The Aware and had it accepted by an agent (who is still my agent), who then started showing it around in UK and USA. So the exhilaration of that was fantastic. But then it became more like a roller coaster ride, with lots of sinking feelings in between the highs as editors refused after initial nibbling…
The Aware at this stage was being offered as the first book in a series, rather than Book 1 of a trilogy.

I wrote The Heart of the Mirage in the meantime. Why? Because it seemed to be a bit silly to do another book in the Isles of Glory world if I couldn’t get the first published. Once again Heart of the Mirage was offered as a first book in a series in UK and USA. Again, a roller coaster ride. It came very, very, very close several times, but something always went wrong.

Meanwhile I was off writing Havenstar. It was taken up almost immediately as a launch book for a new imprint in the UK. The day I heard that was just two days after my mother died. So as you can imagine, my feelings were really mixed. I couldn’t help wondering why it hadn’t happened just a few days earlier so I could have told her. Then just as sales were taking off into the stratosphere, the imprint failed. So my emotions about my first published book became even more mixed…

I wrote another book which my agent didn’t like and has never been offered anywhere. In the end I pilfered it heavily for another book, so it never will be published.

Then I started writing Drouthlord. I never finished it because in the meantime The Aware was sold and I had to sit down and write Gilfeather and The Tainted as books 2 & 3.

Heart of the Mirage was then sold, and I had to write The Shadow of Tyr and Song of the Shiver Barrens.

Now I am back working on Drouthlord. In the end, it all became so muddled that I don’t think I have a soft spot for any book based on the particular thrill I got out of it…

Now my focus and passion is always fixed on the one I am writing. It becomes my favourite by default. I’d be interested to know, though, what other authors feel about their own works.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 8 July 2007 (4 Comments).

This should actually be called “world building when you don’t have a clue” although I’m not talking about general world creation [a la god], but something perhaps of more of value to all writers – what do you do when you want to include something in your novel that you don’t know too much about?

I was prompted to think about this because someone asked me about ships. He saw that I had written The Isles of Glory and wanted to know where I got the info on sailing ships that I put into the 3 books.

I’m not a sailor. I used to paddle a homemade canoe on the Canning River as a kid. I loved all the Swallows and Amazon books and read every one multiple times – which did teach me words like “sheet” and “tack” and “cleat” and all that nautical stuff. Not enough to make me able to write a book that included trips on 18th or 19th century sailing ships!

[Word of caution, though: learning facts from fiction books can be hazardous…who’s to say that the writer knew what he or she was talking about?]

I once took a day trip sailing on a schooner to a couple of islands, and once spent a few days sailing with friends from Phuket to Ko Surin and Ko Semilan, none of which qualifies me as a sailor either.

So…how did I do it.

Well. firstly I made darn sure [I think] that I didn’t make mistakes. If I mentioned a particular type of ship [schooner, brigantine etc], I made sure my description of the ship had the right number of masts, steering system, and so on. Not good to put a tiller into a ship that steers by means of a wheel! All this can be checked from internet sites. The moment you make a mistake, you lose your knowledgable reader. And unfortunately it will be what he remembers most about your book.

[Caution 2 : anything taken from the internet is not necessarily correct. Double and triple check everything.]

Secondly, I don’t try to be too smart and include a whole bunch of stuff I don’t know too much about. Rather I take the small details and make them true and visual – those are the things that give the atmosphere, the feel of being there. And it helps if you remember interesting bits and pieces from your own experience. For example, we have a chest-of-drawers in my family that came out from England with my ancestors. When you have a 6 month journey ahead of you, living out of a chest, what sort of a chest do you want? One that opens with a lid? Nope. You can’t put things on top of it then. One that actually has drawers is much better – with nice inset brass handles that you won’t bruise yourself on when the ship heaves…

Here are some examples from the three books of the Isles of Glory – from large to small vessels and with different first person narrators…

The ship came in under sail and bumped against the dock as gently as a rowboat on a jetty. A typical piece of Keeper seamanship; there was very little the Keepers did badly. Just a look at the vessel was enough to know that they were special: the woodwork gleamed, the sails were unpatched, the ropes were neatly coiled, the brass shone, there were rat-barriers on the hawsers. A greater contrast to the shabby, foetid slaver tied up beside them couldn’t have been imagined.

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We had drifted further out to sea and were in among the fisher fleet. Their lanterns gleamed only dimly now as the sky lightened. The golden paths across the water had gone. I could hear the sound of voices and laughter coming to us from the fishermen as they hauled up lines, pulled in nets. I lay back, to look up at the mast just visible in the pre-dawn light. A bird was sitting on the crosstree, a creature too small to be one of the usual seabirds. I eyed it uneasily; it looked like that pet of Flame’s. I wondered how long it had been perched there. It cocked its head to one side and I suddenly felt very naked. I pulled the blanket up over my body. ‘Scram,’ I said. ‘Go tell her I’m all right.’

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It was a close call, but we made it, slipping out on the tide with just minutes to spare. We would never have managed it if the whole of Rattespie had not taken it as a challenge. This was the first local ship to set sail for weeks; it meant money in the townsfolk’s coffers and they weren’t about to waste the opportunity. Chandlers bustled, farmers appeared out of nowhere with fresh produce, sailors signed up, longshoremen came looking for work loading the ship, shipwrights recaulked part of the deck where timbers had dried out and shrunk.

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As I pen this in my cabin aboard the R.V. Seadrift, I find myself wondering: is this really I, Anyara isi Teron, here on board a ship bound for the Isles of Glory? Freckled, prosaic, undistinguished Anyara, embarking on an adventure most men could only dream about – it’s not possible, surely! And yet I, an unmarried woman, find myself untrammelled by family, with the shores of Kells rapidly dwindling on the horizon and empty ocean ahead…adventure indeed.
From where I sit, if I glance over to the wall under the porthole, I see my two sea chests, now stacked on top of each other to make a chest-of-drawers with polished brass handles; all I have to do is open that top drawer and the documents are there for the reading. And yet I hesitate to hurry through the papers. I have months ahead of me, and I must ration my reading. Perhaps this evening I will dip into the first of the papers. Just a few.

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A few words, that’s all it takes to convey the size of a ship, or a cabin; the uncertainty of sailing into the unknown; the work involved in getting a ship ready for a long sea voyage. A writer doesn’t need to know everything to say enough.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Tuesday, 25 July 2006 (3 Comments).

Patty made a comment yesterday that prompted this post…thanks, Patty.

Let me start by saying that there is something that does remain a mystery to me, and that’s how authors – some of them, anyway – seem to know exactly how long a book is going to be before they even start if. They plan it meticulously, plan what they are going to say and what the characters will do chapter by chapter, and lo and behold, then they finish it looks just as they thought it was going to. I am much more haphazard. I know the ending, but I have no idea how many words it will take me to get there.

When I say that the present book will be 180,000, I mean that’s the aim. But we will see. I don’t want to sacrifice story coherence, and I certainly don’t want to pad, in order to reach that magical number. In fact, it isn’t magical at all…it’s just an estimation of how many words it will take to get this particular story written.

So how long should a book be, really, word-wise?

First of all, it depends on the genre.
Fantasy tends to be longer than Science fiction.
Historical fiction probably comes next in length, although sometimes it’s up there with the fantasies…

Far behind, comes mainstream and Young Adult and other genres. Many – perhaps even most – of these are under 100,000 words. Why?

Basically, it’s because with fantasy in particular, and to a lesser degree with historical and science fiction novels, the writer has to expend a large number of words telling the reader about the world. In a present day novel, you can say: Mary drove her dog to the vet’s because it needed its shots, and in twelve words you have told the reader that we are talking about a woman who has access to a car and has a pet that she cares about. If the writer says, Illusa-zerise laid a hand on Korden’s arm. ‘He is your Mirager, Magori,’ you have no idea of what is going on unless the world has been well-portrayed during the course of the story. (That’s a sentence from Heart of the Mirage, by the way.) You don’t even know if the people mentioned are male or female.

However, anything over 180,000 starts to get a bit unwieldy and presents publishers with a bigger cost. Unless they are very, very sure that you are a rising star in the publishing firmament, they are likely to tell you to cut down the verbiage. If you have already proved your self with your large sales figures they will smile happily because they know the reading public is going to be delighted to see a lengthy book from their favourite author.

Here are the approximate lengths of some of my books:
Havenstar (standalone and the first published book): 156,000
The Aware (first book in Isles of Glory trilogy) : 126,000
Gilfeather (second book) :146,000
The Heart of the Mirage (first book in Mirage Makers trilogy): 143,000
Song of the Shiver Barrens: 163,000 (Third book)

I can’t remember the others, but I think they were in the 140-150,000 range. As you can see, I don’t have a set number!

So what is the right length for an unpublished author?
The answer is:
1) Take a look at the length of the genre/type of book you are aiming to write, especially those written as first books.
2) Don’t skimp and don’t pad.
3) When you come to the end, if you think it is too skimpy, then consider rewriting scenes or characters at greater depth.
4) if you think it is too long, go through with your red pen. Look at unwieldy passages – can you say it more simply? Look at repetitions – especially of the kind where you show the action and then have characters discussing it, or worse, you the author pontificating on it.

Here’s what agent Kristin on her entry for July 2nd had to say over at Pub Rants:

Some writers have an annoying habit of restating (via a thought their main character has) what has already been made apparent by the scene or the dialogue.

It’s amazing how much you can tighten up your writing and improve your book, simply by cutting down on the unnecessary.

So what is the right length?
Answer: There is none. What counts is how good your story is, and how good your writing.

But for someone trying to break into the field, I’d be cautious about doing something too far outside the norm lengthwise.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Wednesday, 29 August 2007 (3 Comments).