Glenda Larke

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).

1. A character who looks in a mirror (shop window or whatever) so that the author can then describe them. So done to death.

2. A dream sequence where the reader is misled into thinking it is real, only to have character wake up and “Oh, it was all a dream.”

3. Women characters who all seem to be weepy and incompetent in a crisis. Geez, women have kept the human race alive through the worst of times – very few are hysterical in a real crisis.

4. Rip-off plots. Books written to coast along on in the wake of a bestseller. You know, Da Vinci Code look-alikes. Someone writes a bestseller about being a drug-addicted, one-armed juggler living on the streets of London with a pet giraffe, and next thing you know there are dozens of books about drug-addicted, one-armed ju…

5. A mass of truly horrible characters none of whom I can empathise with, doing truly horrible stuff, none of which I can sympathise with. You’ve gotta offer me something better than that to keep me reading.

6. Women characters who, when together, never talk about anything but their relationships with men and clothes/fashion.

7. Male heroic figures who never care about all the killing they do.

8. Villains who have no purpose to their villainy except to be villainous. Why? What’s the pay-off ?

9. A character that is too like me. Please, I wanna read to get away from it all…

10. I don’t mind books that make me think. I don’t mind books that leave me up in the air to draw my own conclusions about how everything turned out. But I do loathe books where I simply don’t understand what the hell is going on and where I don’t have enough clues so that I can even guess. And no, I never did get past the first page of Ulysses…

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Wednesday, 10 May 2006 (7 Comments).

Years ago, when I was a hopeful, unpublished writer – and thought I was a great deal better than I actually was – I started to shop my work around. Rejections followed. And no matter how often you are told never to take a rejection personally, of course you do. Your work is your baby. You’ve spent years burping it, cleaning it up, dressing it in the best finery you can find. You think it’s beautiful and that it deserves to grow into a fine book with a snazzy cover sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble or Dymocks. You dream of lunches with editors in Manhattan, or signings in London, or your name on bestseller lists as the creator of this marvellous child, whose name – of course – is on everyone’s lips.

I eventually threw some of my early babies away. Well, on to the top of the wardrobe anyway. I believe they collect dust there still. Sometimes I might disembowel one for an idea or two to use elsewhere.

Finally, though, I found an agent in the UK (I was living in Austria at the time). I did it by consulting the list of agents in the Artists’ and Writers’ Yearbook 1990, and selecting one who said she took sff. She had once been an editor; she was married at the time to a well-known writer; she represented published authors. She accepted me as a client in January 1991, and told me what other authors she represented.

I didn’t pay her a penny. She suggested a few minor alterations to the MS, which I happily did, and then she started to look for a publisher for me. (That first book is now The Aware. I envisaged it then as the first in a series, set in the world of the Isles of Glory.)

I was already writing the next book: now called Heart of the Mirage, set in a different world. When that was finished, my agent started to offer that around as well. She’d had no luck with The Aware, but she didn’t give up. The feedback was always positive, a number of times it seemed one of the books would sell – but somehow it never quite happened. Do I blame my agent? Of course not! I saw how much she did on my behalf; I read the comments of editors who read my work.

How much had I paid my agent by this stage?

Nothing. Not a penny. Not a cent. Lord, I hadn’t even taken her out to lunch.

She had done all this work for me – sending out the book again and again, talking about me to publishers – for nothing. I even had meetings with editors in London, which she arranged for me, but somehow the contract never materialised. And still it had all been free for me.

I sat down to write to Havenstar. And finally, I had a book that sold. It was published in 1999.

Look at those dates. 1991 and 1999. Would you work that long for someone for nothing? My agent did! Is it any wonder I worship the ground she walks on? She has gone on since then to sell seven of my books – including those first two – around the world and in different languages. It took 13 years to see The Aware published, and 15 before I held a published copy of Heart of the Mirage in my hand! Every time I earn money now, so does she. And I am delighted that at last she is getting some return for her faith in my writing. That is what an agent should be. (Dot, I think you rock.)

So what’s my point here?
I want unpublished writers to know what an agent can and should be, instead of being scammed by the unscrupulous.

Read the latest posts over at Miss Snark’s blog or at Making Light to find out what can happen. There are ratbags like Barbara Bauer who run so called Literary Agencies, scam unpublished authors out of their money, and then have the gall to object when they are unmasked. Long live those with enough guts to protest.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Saturday, 27 May 2006 (4 Comments).

Which or that?

The problem arises when either of these two words is used as a relative pronoun (if you really want to know the name).

{What’s a relative pronoun? Well, it’s a word that introduces a clause and refers to an antecedent. And if you don’t know what the heck that means, it really doesn’t matter, because the examples below make it clear what a relative pronoun is.}

All you have to do is remember one simple rule:

that defines what goes before
which doesn’t, it just gives you a bit more info about what went before.

Look at these 2 examples:

The river, which here is brackish and tidal, is of vital importance to shipping.
The rivers of the region that are tidal are of vital importance to shipping.

In the first sentence, the bit between the commas just gives you more info about the river. It doesn’t tell you which particular river. The writer is assuming you already know what river s/he is talking about.

In the second sentence, the words “that are tidal” actually tell you which rivers we are talking about: the tidal ones. The others are, by inference, not of importance to shipping.

Here are some more examples:

1. The team, which consisted of boys under sixteen, won handsomely.
(Which team won? The one that I was talking about!)
2. The team that consisted of boys under sixteen won handsomely.
(Which team won? The {only} one that consisted of boys under 16!)

3. The team that I bet on won handsomely.
(Which team won? The {only} one that I bet on!)
4. The team, which I bet on, won handsomely.
(Which team won? The one that I was talking about!)

The above 2 sets of sentences are all grammatically correct, but the sentences in each set don’t mean the same thing.

In sentence 1, you already know which team I am talking about. Then I give you more info – they are under-16 boys.
In sentence 2, you don’t know what team I am taking about , so I have to tell you: it’s the one with the under-16 boys.

In sentence 3, I am defining the team – it was the one I bet on.
In sentence 4, you already know what team – but I am giving you more info.

Note the commas in the which sentences, and the lack of them in the that sentences. Why? Because in sentences 2 & 3, the subject of the verb is the whole shebang.…(The team that I bet on…)and you can’t divide it up with commas and cut it off from its verb. Don’t try.

Look at this sentence:

There will be a split in the Labour Party over this war, comparable to the split in the Liberal Party that occurred on the question of taxation, which everyone seems to have forgotten.

More complex, but the same principles still apply.

In this case, “that occurred on the question of taxation” defines the split in the Liberal Party.
“which everyone seems to have forgotten” is just extra info about the split in the Liberal Party.

Note that the sentence could be organised a different way:

There will be a split in the Labour Party over this war, comparable to the split in the Liberal Party, which everyone seems to have forgotten, that occurred on the question of taxation.

I wouldn’t advise this rewording. The “that” clause is separated out from the words that it defines, which is never a good idea if you can avoid it!

Easy, huh?

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Saturday, 3 June 2006 (6 Comments).

I wish there was a formula.
Do this, so that, and there you are.
But alas, there are as many different ways of writing as there are authors, and each author may not stick to the same method for each novel.

I would love to say that I’m ultra-organised – that I know exactly what I am going to write before I put fingers to the keys, that I have a chapter by chapter synopsis written, that I know how long each chapter will be, and indeed, how many chapters there will be..

There are authors that do it that way. I’m not one of them.

Here’s how it starts: I get an idea. I start mulling over it, usually while I am still writing the previous book. I think about it in the car, under the shower, while exercising or washing the dishes; any spare moment, in fact. I don’t write anything down at this stage.

Here’s how it worked for Heart of the Mirage. I read something about the Disappeared Ones in Argentina – the people who vanished during the Argentina military junta. And that connected with what I knew of the Lost Generation of Aboriginal Australians. And I started to wonder what it would have been like for the young children who were ‘disappeared’. How would they grow up? What sort of adults might they be?

So that’s the first idea. A single idea doesn’t make a book, though; only a short story. Gradually I add a whole lot of other ideas. And then gradually it starts to take form. I build a world and a story – in my mind – to put the ideas in. By the time I am ready to start writing, the basic book is there. I have the fantasy elements, I have a handful of main characters, I have the land, the beginning, the end and a couple of key scenes in between. I’ve jotted down a few key points.

Notice what’s not there: no minor characters, no minor sub-plots, no idea of how I get from the beginning to the next main scene. As I say, I am really disorganised. What I do have at this stage (which is at least a year from when I had the initial idea), is a detailed beginning. I know who is there and what they look like and how they feel. I know all about where they are, and why. I know their weaknesses, their motivations, the tensions between them. I know what they are going to be doing or talking about. I have a good idea of what the next major scene is, but very little idea of how I am going to get there.

That’s when I start writing.

It’s not a method that is going to work for most writers – it is far too unorganised. And yet it seems to work for me. As I begin writing, so much seems to immediately become clear. The characters are so real to me, that they seem to know what they are going to do, or say, all by themselves. They even surprise me sometimes.

It’s a method that has pitfalls. I often have to go back and rewrite bits in, or swap scenes around, or change something because I later realise that the plot needs its underpinnings tweaked before I proceed further. And it has a major advantage.

More about all that tomorrow.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Thursday, 8 June 2006 (7 Comments).