The Writing Cycle

To Read or Not to Read?

2011-09-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

At the start of each teaching year, I ask my new students about their reading habits and am constantly amazed at some of their answers:

I don’t read poetry [said in a poetry writing class]

I only read fantasy [or literary fiction or any other genre]

I don’t read in [genre] because I don’t want to be influenced

I don’t read

Some of these answers have a sort of logic, though it is flawed. Yes, they will be influenced by what they read. That’s the whole point. The great masters learnt their craft and art from copying the masters before them and then moved beyond what they had learnt. The great musicians learnt the music of those before them. Even great athletes started off trying to be like their heroes before finding their own style, their unique way of playing. (I can say this from training in and teaching martial arts many years ago.) Why is it that in literature people think they can write well without knowing anything about the art form they practise?

Notice I said ‘write well’. What I am pointing out in this post does not apply to those who wish only to write for themselves and maybe for their family. However, those who come to tertiary classes wanting to learn to write poetry or fiction do so because their aims are generally higher than family praise. They wish to write well enough to be published. So, I am puzzled how students who don’t read in their chosen genre/mode still expect they will be published. How do they know what has gone on before? How do they know the conventions of their genre? How do they know the craft elements of their genre? Only by reading. And by practising. They will learn some of the ‘tricks of the trade’ during their classes, but if they don’t see how those tricks have been used before, they won’t know how they work or why. In other words, they won’t learn how to apply the rules of their trade nor learn when to break those rules. Often they break the rules without realising it. And often they are using the clichés of their genre without realising it, and wonder why they keep getting rejected. Essentially, if what they are saying, and how they are saying it, has all been done before, then their work, no matter how sincere, is likely to be rejected.

As for those who read only in their genre, a different problem arises. Such writers may know the conventions of their genre, but that’s all they know. While I admit some writers have so absorbed their particular genre that they can make a living out of regurgitating the plots, settings and characters (for example, the three Ms of many fat fantasy trilogies: medieval, monsters, magic), I would guess that many of these writers have had experience of other genres and have made a conscious decision to concentrate on one. For those who have not had experience of other genres, I ask, how do they expect to enrich or enliven their genre if they can’t bring something new to it? The New Wave movement in science fiction came about through writers bringing to the old pulp movement their knowledge of literary fiction, and science fiction was the better for it.

The students that puzzle me the most are those who claim not to read at all, or who barely read. Why do they want to be writers? Most writers and poets I know, and know of, were captured by the texts they read as a child, wanted to emulate their favourite writers, were passionate about reading and later about writing. Those who don’t read, I suspect, want to be writers because of a mistaken belief that there lies fame, fortune and sex, or some variation of these. As with those who become famous for being famous, but without doing anything of significance, without working hard at something, such writers expect success without doing much more than write a few words a day. Of course I can write, they say; I’ve been doing it all my life. Well, I’ve been running all my life, too, but I don’t expect to be a champion runner without extensive training and the right set of talents. If I were in a race with champion athletes, or in the ring with a top martial artist, without my having done the requisite training, I would be well beaten. And so it is with those writers who don’t read. Their prose is awkward, vague, even nonsensical at times, or their verse is simplistic, cliché-ridden, and filled with clunky rhythms and rhymes, the forms and shapes used being rough versions of those learnt in school years before.

So, what do I say in class to my students, both those who do read and those who don’t?

Read in the genre you wish to write in and read widely in that genre.

Read not for enjoyment, but for knowledge: read with attention to what is being done in the text, so you can understand how things are done and why, and then replicate the effects you have found enjoyable. That way you can learn the genre’s conventions, its tradition, and how others have used the rules, or broken them, to produce the effects they wanted.

Read outside your genre, so you can find other effects you might enjoy and can bring to your genre.

Happy reading and writing.

Cheers
Earl

Writers, Readers and Fans

2010-09-23T06:06:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago I attended two very different writers' festivals. The first was the 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival. The second was the 68th World Science Fiction Convention. I had a fantastic time at both of them: catching up with friends, seeing interesting writers, and learning a few more things about writing and the publishing industry. Yet, though both events featured writers and readers, they had different emphases, and this wasn't because one dealt with mainstream fiction (however that is defined) and one with a particular genre fiction.

I’ve been attending the MWF for over twenty years, and have only missed it once or twice. The first time I went, when it was held at the Kino Cinema, I didn’t know a soul and every time I finished a session I sat on my own, had a coffee and wrote up my notes. Over the years I met more people in the Melbourne literary community and the festival became a chance to see some of them, meet new local and international writers, and discuss the general state of the industry. The heyday of the festival, for me at least, was during its tenure at the Malthouse Theatre complex. Full theatres. Everybody crowded around the bar. Every opportunity to talk to writers I admired or had been impressed by at a session. A community buzzing with creativity and deals and wit and gossip. Yet this high-energy atmosphere slowly changed. As the years rolled on, the festival became more for readers and publishers than for writers. The famous guests were surrounded by their minders, from before they atttended their panels/readings to after they signed books bought by their readers from the well-stocked saleroom. The beginning and developing writers in the audience, who wanted to learn more about the ‘craft or sullen art’ of writing, as Dylan Thomas put it, were being swamped by those readers who were more interested in the juicy lives of the writing celebrities or the upcoming exploits of their characters than in writing habits and influences and the mechanisms of the publishing industry. The tone had changed, had become more commercial. The divide between writer and reader had widened, with the writers becoming like the gods on Olympus and the readers their worshippers. And I have a feeling that the current venue, Federation Square, isn’t helping the matter. Events are held in widely separated rooms and buildings and there’s generally little chance to develop a sense of intimacy, and certainly very little chance to be standing at a bar and finding someone like Isabel Allende or Paul Muldoon ordering a drink next to you.

The recent Worldcon was the fourth Australia has hosted, all of them in Melbourne. I missed the first one, Aussiecon, in 1975, which had as its GOH (Guest of Honour) Ursula Le Guin, but have been to the other three: Aussiecon Two (1985, Gene Wolfe), Aussiecon Three (1999, Gregory Benford) and Aussiecon Four (2010, Kim Stanley Robinson). The divide mentioned above does not seem to exist in the speculative fiction community. The Worldcon is a great big party, where everyone is your friend, or soon will be. Writers who have finished a panel discussion are likely to appear in the audience for the next session. There are no publisher minders. Fans can be also writers, either amateur, semi-professional or professional, and writers were, and often still are, fans. There is a warmth, a camaraderie, at a five-day science fiction convention I haven’t experienced at the MWF, except when I join a group of my friends in a corner for an afternoon of coffee, drink and discussion. The speculative fiction community, possibly because for many years it has been battling for acceptance within the wider literary community, is one big family (though with all the feuds and affairs and alliances that implies) and conventions are like a family reunion. Even though I have drifted in and out of the SF world over the years, I always feel welcomed when I attend a convention, a prodigal son returned, I suppose. The Melbourne Writers’ Festival doesn’t give me the same sense of community. At times it feels more like a business meeting than a place where people are thrilled by the ideas and the discussions and the chance of not only meeting some of their heroes, but also having a long discussion with them, over a drink or during a room party, about their books, the books of their own favourite authors, the canals in Venice or the landscape in Norstrilia .

I suppose one reason for the difference between these two events is the type of organiser involved. SF conventions are organised by fans for fans and for their favourite, yet down to earth, writer heroes. Festivals like the MWF often feel as if they’re organised by publishers to put their wares on show and move as many units as possible. Though I can attend both types and learn much from them, for both my teaching and my writing, I prefer the type where I’m not treated as a customer, but as a participant in an evolving community of imaginative, like-minded souls.

Enjoy your writing.

Cheers
Earl

The Secret to Writing Success

2010-03-05T01:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, when I was taking a break from editing my speculative fiction novel, I flicked through the channels and came across an episode of Criss Angel Mindfreak. The show was almost at an end, so I didn’t to see many of his stunts and street magic tricks. What did interest me, though, was a comment he made just before he hopped into his fancy sports car and the credits rolled in. He said something along the lines of there being three factors to obtaining the type of success he has:

You must have a dream
You must have passion
You must work hard

As I went back to my study, I keep thinking about how true his words were. Suddenly I remembered an article I’d read in Writer’s Digest many years ago. I don’t recall the name of the writer being interviewed (and if anyone can help me with this, I’d appreciate it), but one piece of advice she gave has stuck with me and is one I use in my classes. The interviewer said there are three elements to being a successful writer. The first is Talent. (Notice Criss Angel doesn’t mention this.) The second is Luck. (Again, not mentioned.) The third is Perseverance. As she pointed out, whatever talent we have we were born with and so is not something we can do anything about. We also can’t, by definition, do anything about luck. The only thing we have control over is our level of perseverance, how much we persist in our writing and everything associated with our writing. This means, as far as I can see, applying ourselves to learning the craft of writing, which allows us to use whatever talent we may have. It also means doing those things that belong to that stage of The Writing Cycle I call Business. The more we get our work out there and promote ourselves (‘Wiggle our bums’, as a friend of mine says), the more we may be able to make our own luck. So, of the three elements, the only one that matters is the third one, Perseverance. Yet, by persevering, the other two elements come into play and we’re likely to succeed in finding the audience we deserve.

How does this fit in with Criss Angel’s list? Obviously, for writers the dream is already there: to be a successful writer, whatever that means to each of us. His other two factors, Passion and Hard Work, are related, for we are unlikely to put hard work into something for which we don’t have a passion. Also, these two factors are related to that interviewee’s third element: Perseverance. Hard work is just another name for perseverance. We keep learning the craft, we keep writing, we keep submitting because we have a passion for what we do and, in a strange way, the hard work, the persistence at our passion, at our dream, doesn’t actually feel like hard work. Well, not often.

Thomas Mann once said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. And Juliet Marillier echoes what most writers feel when she says, ‘I write because I can’t not write’. These two writers are indicating that writing is difficult and yet, for a true writer, is unavoidable. And what Criss Angel and my unidentified interviewee suggest is that to be a success at the writing dream requires us to work hard and to keep working hard till that success, however it is measured, comes.

Enjoy your writing.

Cheers
Earl

Secondary Composition

2010-02-26T01:04:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I am on a ‘writing sabbatical’. One of the projects I’m working on is the verse novel I wrote as the creative portion of my PhD in Creative Writing. Though the novel was good enough for the examiners, some of their comments, as well as those of friends who had read it afterwards, led me to believe I should tweak it before submitting it to publishers. I put the manuscript away for several years, while I worked on other projects and on making a living, but at the start of this year I decided I needed to finish what I had started. I needed another round of Secondary Composition.

Secondary Composition is my name for the third stage of the Writing Cycle. I have taken this phrase from Robert Graves, who in an early essay talked about ‘the secondary phrase of composition’. In another essay, he quoted Dr W H R Rivers from his book Instinct and the Unconscious:

In this comparison of the poem with a dream, one fact must be emphasised. The poem as we read it is very rarely the immediate product of the poetic activity, but has been the subject of a lengthy process of a critical kind, comparable with that which Freud has called the secondary elaboration of the dream...[my emphasis]

Conflate these two phrases and we get Secondary Composition. I find this term extremely useful for describing the critical and creative processes that occur after the initial white-heat first draft. I had been looking for such an all embracing term, because I found in my teaching that most students were using such terms as Redrafting, Rewriting, Revision, Editing in the belief that they refer to the same thing, when in fact they don’t. This confusion is something I plan to expand on in a future entry.

So, for the past two months I have been engaged in Secondary Composition work on my verse novel, which is titled The Silence Inside the World. Over the New Year period I had the opportunity for a writer’s retreat, which involved looking after the country property of some friends. The peace and solitude was what I required, and I spent the two weeks reading through the manuscript, making notes on it and using a piece of software called Snowflake Pro to help me clarify character motivations and plot points. The software is available from www.advancedfictionwriting.com, and can be used for the planning of a novel or, as in my case, as a diagnostic tool for an existing draft. Essentially, for those two weeks I was engaged in structural editing. I saw holes in motivation, plot and structure that needed addressing and gained more insight into the story I was trying to tell.

When I came home I was caught up in admin and teaching commitments right up to the moment of my long service leave kicking in. Since then, I have been a full-time writer and will be for almost another four months. For the past four weeks I have taken what I discovered on my writer’s retreat and been applying it to a line edit of the verse novel. This sort of editing is trickier than for a normal novel, as it involves more than the usual rearranging, condensing, deleting or adding of words and sentences that prose writing involves. I not only have to check syllable counts and rhythms for each line, but also have to make sure I keep scenes and actions in the three line stanzas I have been using. If I get rid of a line, I have to juggle the lines around them to retain the stanza form. Such story and editing demands are enough to drive a person to his or her favourite ‘comfort’ substance, demands I’m sure T S Eliot had in mind when he wrote the following lines in his Four Quartets (actual format unsupported by Blogger):

Words strain
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
'Burnt Norton, V'

Yet it is our job as writers, during our raids ‘on the inarticulate’, to keep trying ‘to learn to use words’.

What I can report is that, as of yesterday, I have virtually finished this round of Secondary Composition. The Silence Inside the World is now a verse novel of 8,589 lines, 64,141 words. I say ‘virtually’ because I will put the manuscript aside for several weeks, so that when I read it through again I will bring fresh eyes to the changes I made, some of them major. Only then will I be confident the manuscript is the best I can make it and is ready for the next stage of the cycle: Publication.

That’s a story for another entry.

Keep learning and keep writing.

Cheers
Earl

Blog Reboot

2010-02-18T22:55:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone. My apologies for the long delay in adding material to The Writing Cycle. As I’m sure has happened to you at times, life ‘got in the way’, even with the best of my intentions : teaching duties, project deadlines, family commitments. Some of these issues have now settled down and I find myself with a little more time.

So I suppose you can consider this entry as a reboot of the blog. I now hope to contribute to it on a weekly basis and make it a worthwhile experience for both you and me. As to what I intend to talk about, the topics will be a mixture of explanations and explorations of The Writing Cycle, plus those items of general writing interest that may not fit into a particular element of the cycle.

As I indicated, I have more time than I did last year. In fact, I am currently on long service leave from my teaching job. When I tell people this, the usual question they asked, Are you going on a trip? My usual answer is No; however, I've come to realise that I will be travelling, though in places those people would have been considering.

I have taken this time off to work on two major writing projects. The first is a final edit of the verse novel I wrote for my PhD, so I can start submitting it to publishers. The second is a rewrite of a rough draft for a science fiction novel that I wrote in 2008, when I attended The Year of the Speculative Fiction Novel workshop at the Victorian Writers' Centre (http://vwc.org.au/). I also intend to work on new and existing poems and short stories. The trip I am going on, then, is through the worlds of all these texts, a trip through imagination. The details of how I am going during this ‘trip’ will be one of the things I plan to share with you in the next few months.

I would like to leave you with an insight I gained recently. My wife, Jo, and I were having dinner with two good friends, both of whom are involved in the music business, as practitioners and as teachers. We were discussing the relative merits of several Australian musicians and they brought up the idea of a ‘music triangle’. In effect, they are suggesting that to be a good musician requires ability in three areas: musicianship, music knowledge and heart. By ‘musicianship’ they meant that the instrumentalist (which includes voice) knew his or her instrument inside out, knew how to play their instrument well, was a good technician. By ‘music knowledge’ they meant that not only did the musician know how to read music, but that he or she had knowledge of music theory and music practice, both in their chosen field and in the wider field of music in general. As for ‘heart’, they seemed to be referring to the emotions that the musician brought to their playing and could evoke in their listeners through their playing.

Immediately I could see a corollary with writers, a ‘writer triangle’, if you like. This triangle would be composed of the technical, the knowledge of literature, and ‘heart’. To be a good writer, whatever the genre or form, a writer must know the craft of their chosen field, which includes the basics of grammar as well as that field’s conventions; must have an appreciation not only of the history of their field but also of literature in general; and must have an ability to infuse emotions into their work so that others can experience them.

So, what do you think? Does the Writer Triangle make sense? If so, how would you rate yourself on each of the factors? What are you doing to improve each of these areas?

I hope you have enjoyed this taster of what you can expect in future instalments.

All the best with your own writing projects.

Cheers
Earl

Introduction

2008-06-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

I have been a writer for over 30 years and have published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in various magazines, journals and newspapers. I have also published one book of poetry (Further Than Night, Bystander Press, 2000), and completed a MA in Creative Writing (involving the writing of a 70,000-word novel) and a PhD in Creative Writing (an 8,000-line verse novel). I have been the editor of a print journal and am the current editor of an online journal. I have judged writing competitions and won a major poetry competition. I have also taught writing for over 15 years (having earlier taught martial arts).

From all this experience I have developed a model of the writing process that I call The Writing Cycle. There are five stages to this cycle:

1. Preparation
2. First Draft
3. Secondary Composition
4. Publication
5. Business

In subsequent blogs I intend to explain the model and explore its usefulness for different genres of writing. I hope you enjoy what the model and this blog has to offer and I look forward to engaging in a dialogue with you about benefits of this process.