Book, launch, media, new, digital
It’s been a busy few weeks and there is little sign of things slowing down any time soon, so allow me to wallow in that desultory refuge of the most vile corporate hacks: the dot point.
- Off the Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press is available now in all good bookstores. Check the web site for details on where to get it online or walk into your favourite independent bookshop and demand it on the shelves in great quantity.
- We are holding an official book launch with John Wilsteed of the Go-Betweens as the official book launch launcher. It’s at Avid Reader in West End on Wednesday 10 November at 6:00pm. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to book with Avid Reader.
- We had a great discussion with Richard Fidler on ABC Brisbane last week. You can listen to it here.
- A new novel exists in a rough-as-bags 20,000 word draft. I can guarantee it will include a Hofner bass, a car named Cedric, and a C90 mix tape.
- I’m about to get even more insufferable on the topic of digital publishing because I have just taken up a new post as the manager of if:book Australia.
Title hunt
So, I’m in the final stages of drafting what I can safely call the manuscript for a new novel. It is now both novel-sized and novel-scoped (as opposed to previous drafts that were a little more sketchy) and I think it’s looking pretty good. I suspect there’s more work down the track (there always is), but for now it’s nice to sit back a little and review the net result of your labour. Tomorrow, I may even print it out and admire the slab of paper.
Usually, I speed up at this point in a draft, often because of a deadline for an awards entry or something. This time, there’s no such external deadline, so I am deliberately taking my time to finish the story and tidy up all the loose ends and flesh out the newer ideas I had along the way. It’s nice to write an ending that’s not frantic.
As usual, I have no title yet. Nothing has emerged from the manuscript itself yet. The story partly concerns itself with hereditary diseases and often uses two-up references to describe genetic probability, so Come in Spinner might have been a possibility if it wasn’t so cliche. Other than that, I’m kind of stumped. Something might emerge on the next reading or maybe afterwards when it goes off for some love from an editor.
Any and all title suggestions are welcome, even if you don’t know what it’s about. Kurt Vonnegut subtitled Slaughterhouse Five with The Children’s Crusade on the whim of an acquaintance who was mortified that he was writing a book about war. He promised her the book would not glorify war and offered up the title The Children’s Crusade as proof, though the title had nothing to do with anything that actually happens in the book. So if you’ve got a title that bears no relationship to the content of the novel, lay it on me.
Read MoreMore synopsis joy
I seem to post here a lot about the synopsis. There’s good reason for this.
Authors are frequently called upon to reduce their 60,000-odd word novel to a page, a paragraph, even a pithy statement.
My pithy statement for this book? Bad TV talent shows and narcolepsy, together at last.
So it is I’ve been asked to write yet another synopsis for my novel None of the Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines. It’s probably my third or fourth attempt at this and it’s never an easy task. Hell, it took me nine words to title the damn thing.
Read MoreWell, there goes the manuscript
Okay, the novel is finished. Sort of.
The last few weeks have been a blur of activity including the obligatory trip to OfficeWorks to have the title of your manuscript scrutinised by a pimply geek with a lisp, the last minute panic as you realise you’ve forgotten to give the final chapter a title, confusion over where the change in tense happens, the increasingly annoyed family members who suffer through the obsessive tunnel-vision of final manuscript preparation, and the ignominy of carrying five copies of the manuscript in a sudden shower (what the hell are those water restrictions for again?).
So blogging has been low on the priorities. I have my final set of notes ready to scan when I can be arsed to do so. The thing is, I’m kind of bummed. I’m dissatisfied with the big picture stuff — the way the story hangs. At this (completely subjective) vantage, the whole thing seems like little more than neatly strung together bits of random crap. I was kind of going for a random feel, although preferably without the crap part.
This is why everyone says you should stick your manuscript in a drawer for a while before you prepare it for submission. You need time to see the manuscript with a clear head.
Yeah well, some of us don’t have that time. Some of us need to submit a manuscript with a completely muddled head.
It’s entirely likely that this is just the rambling of a tired writer, sick to death of his own creation, and (it must be said) sick of being a bloody writer for the moment. I’ve spent the last week catching up on an old friend called television.
Couch potatodom is a welcome relief. It’s like living an old cheesy sit com clip show.
Read MoreOpening a novel
I’ll reproduce one of my recent essays from the ‘virtual world tour’ for the release of Coda by Vignette Press as I think it has some relevance to this blog as well. Plus it means I’m able to post something simply by cutting and pasting. This allows me to get on with the important business of watching a documentary on SBS.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story called Harrison Bergeron which begins like this: ‘The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.’ This is typical of his style. I remember reading somewhere that Vonnegut preferred this kind of opening, that he was able to shortcut a lot of establishment by simply stating the facts baldly. I must admit, with an opening sentence like that, you know exactly what you’re going to get.
Although I shamelessly pilfer much of Vonnegut’s technique, I’ve never once opened a story in this fashion. Something has always bugged me about announcing the year in the first sentence of a story. Nobody does that in real life. I didn’t start this essay with: ‘The year is 2007 and I am sitting on the couch.’ Harrison Bergeron was originally published in 1961, so maybe times were simpler back then.
Let’s try it again. The year is 2007, it is now the day after I wrote the last paragraph and I am on my lunch break.
Nah, it’s still not working for me.
Like the authors I venerate, I cut my teeth writing short stories and, unlike them, only recently graduated (if you want to call it that) to novels. So far, my technique for introducing a longer work is no different from the shorter form. I’ve never been one for holding the reader’s hand. The example below is from my short story Coda, recently released in ‘Mini Shot’ form by Vignette Press, but it is very similar to the opening paragraph of my first novel, Here Today.
Martin Finn rolls his eyes at me. Two seconds into my first patient here and I’ve put my foot in it. How is he? He can’t move a muscle in his body! How do you think he feels, Astrid?
This is my kind of opening. It makes very few direct statements, but tells you a lot about these people, their surroundings, and the situation in which they find themselves. Astrid’s voice is also established here as well as the first inklings of what kind of person is telling this story. Crucially, it also establishes a tension – a gentle tension I’ll grant you, but a tension nonetheless. Immediately you may begin asking yourself questions about how Martin ended up in this state, or how Astrid will recover from making such a clinical faux pas. The other thing I like about this opening is that you enter immediately after the dialogue. You know what was said, or at least you can make an educated guess, but you didn’t ‘hear’ it. You didn’t need to. For me, an opening should draw you in, not by neatly establishing the facts, but by intriguing you, by dropping you into a scene with no preparation and no expectations.
It can be incredibly effective in getting a story running from the first sentence (essential for short fiction), but it is also a delicate balancing act.
The line between intriguing a reader and annoying them is extremely fine. Set up a mystery, by all means, but find some quick early resolution so the reader can continue without being completely baffled. In some ways, this is where short stories come into their own. You can entertainingly baffle a reader for 2,000 words, but anything after that and they’ll stop reading. In the example above, I don’t immediately resolve the reason for Martin’s condition, but I do further establish that we are in a hospital, that Astrid is an occupational therapist, and that the faux pas is nothing more than her misunderstanding of Martin’s means of communication.
Is there a name for this technique? I’m sure there is, but I don’t have much use for nomenclature. Suffice to say that, while it’s not the only and perhaps not even the best means of introducing fledgling readers to your magnum opus, it does establish tension and, done well, compels further investigation. It’s playful, a knowing nod from author to reader that they will have to think. There won’t be any spoon-feeding here. Of course the trick then is to follow it up with something equally compelling and engaging. That’s where the writer’s work really begins.
The year is 2007 and I’m already thinking about what I need to do this evening for the new novel. It doesn’t make for much of an ending either.
Read MoreThe Books
