The Emerging Writers Festival takes place in Melbourne next weekend 10-11 May 2008. You can catch me at two panel sessions.

Everyone wants to hear what I’ve got to say . . .

So how are writers getting their work out there? Looking at the various innovative ways writers can use to get their work out as well as better ways of accessing the traditional methods.

Featuring Julian Fleetwood, Alice White, Karen Andrews & Benny Walters. Hosted by Simon Groth

10:00AM - 11:00AM
Sunday 11th of May
Yarra Room, Melbourne Town Hall
2nd Floor, Cnr Collins & Swanston Sts, Melbourne

Competing for attention

Why do writers enter competitions? Are they worth the effort or just a convenient way to set yourself a deadline? This session will also discuss the judging of the Arts Hub Reading Room. Learn why judges choose the way they do.

Simon Groth, David Blackman, Ella Holcombe & Samuel Wagon-Watson. Hosted by Benny Walters.

1:45PM - 2:45PM
Sunday 11th of May
Yarra Room, Melbourne Town Hall
2nd Floor, Cnr Collins & Swanston Sts, Melbourne

Best of all, the tickets are cheap! See you there.

In preparation for the Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne radio 3RRR will host a discussion among festival people (including me) on their retro-titled show Max Headroom.

For people a long way from the Paris End of Collins Street, you’ll be able to stream the show directly from the 3RRR web site.

The show will broadcast on Thursday 8th May at 7:00PM.

Who better to provide help with writing a synopsis than a bloke who, despite his widely accepted genius, has still been dead for 53 years?

The title of this post is not just a time, it’s also a job. Twenty entries make up the long list in the Emerging Writers Festival Reading Room Competition. I have copies of each and my job is to take those twenty and reduce them to ten. In the best reality TV style, it’s time to cut the fat.

The job of a competition judge is a peculiar one, especially when you’re assessing completely different styles and forms as in this comp.

I’ve judged competitions before, most notably one of those 100 words competitions where I was one judge of about six or seven. The job there was to bring a shortlist to the judging meeting and start arguing. I wasn’t quite prepared for the depth of conviction everyone had for their selections and how hard each would go in to bat for their picks. I had to attempt to convince the others to agree with my choice. I don’t remember who won, but I think my pick scored runner up.

The Reading Room is a little different. I still don’t have the final say, but, being half way up the East Coast of the country from the action, I won’t be entering lock down with the other judges. In fact, I’m not even sure who else is judging. That’s electronic communication for you.

I’m already beginning to lean towards a couple of pieces, but I’m taking my time with this. I mean, how exactly do you equitably compare short stories with poems with visual art? Maybe I should go with Oscar® type categories: Best use of white space, Best exclamation in a single word sentence, etc.

When I first started blogging the creation of this novel, I plucked a name out of thin air to describe it: The End Credits. I have no idea where it came from or why I thought it would apply to the story.

It didn’t last long and I immediately began casting around for a more appropriate title for the piece.

I’m hopeless at titles. This novel is my third book length manuscript. The title for each of my previous pieces I can attribute to either friends or family. My first novel, Here Today had a working title Happiness. I don’t know what you think, but Here Today does the business in a way Happiness never could.

And so the tradition continues. When the protagonist of the current novel began composing a song, I thought I might as well make it a real piece of music. I chose a song I wrote with a mate of mine back in my band days called Crooked Lines. The song itself is delicate and acoustic with some cool vocal flourishes that sadly the text in the novel will never quite live up to. Anyway, it seemed like the kind of song my character would write and the lyrics fit the story reasonably well. Well enough, in fact that I thought Crooked Lines seemed like a perfectly good title for the whole novel.

And here’s the rub. The part of the song I wrote was actually the music, my friend wrote the lyrics (although I have the vague recollection that the suggestion of “crooked lines” as the title was mine). And we didn’t know at the time that the Go-Betweens wrote a song by the same title. Now that I do know, I don’t really care. The title stays, at least for the song.

That’s the other thing. At some point a few weeks ago, I decided that identical titles for both novel and song might cause confusion all round. I thought the novel should take a bigger chunk of the song’s lyrics for its title to distinguish it, even if just a little, from the song.

Plus I’ve never really done long titles before, so there’s a novelty factor.

Anyway the title now is None Of The Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines. And, of course, by taking a larger chunk of the song lyrics, I have absolutely held with the tradition that my titles come from other people.

At least the title of this blog is my own. That must count for something.

Writing a novel is not easy, anyone will tell you that for free. But what those same people might not know is that, compared to the synopsis, a novel is a breeze.

This is my second crack at a synopsis and this one is even harder than the first. Not only do I know the story better, but for reasons I’m not at liberty to indulge, this new one is also shorter, around a hundred words.

In case you didn’t already know, after you’ve written a story that takes 70,000 words to tell, cramming the whole thing into something that fits onto a postcard is not an easy task.

So, in order to get everything ordered and sensible, one is inevitably forced into an awkward adjective dance with long and breathless sentences, desperate to squeeze every last drop out of the letters before flopping back on the couch, exhausted.

Well, that’s my experience of it anyway.

And it’s still not finished.

This year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival is being held 9 - 11 May in Melbourne. A full program will be released this Friday, but in the lead up to the festival, I’ll be judging entries to the associated Reading Room competition.

The competition calls for entries responding to a stimulus image that you can see on this page.

Submissions must fit on a single A4 page. They may be, but are not limited to, short stories, essays, reflections, poetry, scripts, cartoons, street art or song lyrics. All submissions must include text.

Entries close on the 14th of April.

So, to all you writing readers, get cracking.

http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au

I was reminded last week of a little piece of good advice about writing: Always park on the downhill.

The message is, don’t round your writing off neatly before calling it a night. That may make it difficult for you to pick up the thread of your piece when you go back to it the following day. Instead of hitting the keyboard, you spend ages mulling over what the next bit is supposed to be and how to go about writing it.

Instead you should leave your work knowing exactly what the next sentence will be, allowing you to dive straight back in and get working without all that faffing about.

It’s good advice, and advice that I usually try to stick to. The end of my work in progress is usually littered with a bunch of scraps: dialogue or narrative bits that I want to use for tomorrow’s work. The process has only one small problem. It doesn’t always work.

Yes it’s always good to pick up your manuscript and hoe into it without delay. But sometimes that process only postpones an inevitable bout of faffing when you finally hit a section that you’re unsure about. All the rough sketches and handwritten notes in the world don’t prevent one of those coming on, regardless of when in your writing day it occurs.

The bit I’m working on now requires a fair bit of craftsmanship, possibly beyond my abilities in a first draft. Right now it just feels like hack work, hardly the intellectually stimulating and inspirational stuff one might imagine fiction writing to be. It’s all a bit like wading through mud until you pass through it and spring into the next section that you have worked out far better.

That’s the theory.

Regardless though I’ll likely still park on that downhill again tonight. Old habits and all.

A work night tonight. My task now is to cut my previous draft into pieces and reassemble, filling in the blanks that emerge as I go.

The blanks can get pretty big.

The piece I’m working on right now concerns itself with a tabloid television story and one of those famous combative interviews. It’s not an easy thing to pull off in a believable way. You may scoff, but I’ve actually turned to clips of Corey Delaney (thankyou Crikey!) to get a feel for how an interview can really head South (although I can’t employ that schoolmarmish interviewer technique).

It’s the kind of thing that seems like a good idea when you throw it down in notes, but bloody hard to get the final language perfectly nuanced. Words like nuanced, for example, are complete anathema, as would be anathema.

I’m not huge on throwing newly minted text up here, the urge to immediately rip it back from the blog is too great, but I’ll think about throwing this part up, at least to get an idea of the anatomy of a scene like this: switching between a narrative of two people watching TV and the stuff that is actually airing.

I don’t like to make things easy for myself, obviously.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you find yourself taking photos of yourself to stop yourself falling asleep at 12:15 on a Thursday morning. For some reason you’re wearing a hat. Then you upload the photo to your blog for the rest of the world to see.

And then, and only then, do you think: “What in the fucking hell am I doing?”

But, you know, it still takes two weeks for you take the picture back down again.