15: Developing a Readable Manuscript for Your Own Use

Newsletter 15:Thursday 28th May 2015The Writing Process: Developing a Readable Manuscript for your own Use
 

Hello again.

 

I recently wrote on my blog about the need for a writer to retreat to a different place to refresh and develop her writing and her writing strategies. I am wondering whether it can happen in a day. I am looking forward to Rachel Cochrane’s Day Retreat at our beautiful AucklandCastle. What I like about it is that it is just a day to write

– not necessarily to workshop, share, network or any of the other things writers are pressed to do these days.

I was thinking that the key to making the most of such a day is preparation. This could be writing a note what you want to achieve from the day. The notes might simply say.

-          Fifteen hundred words on the current novel or novella!

-          Or Draft the short story about the woman who began painting at the age of sixty.

-          Or Draft prose to fill the gaps in my existing narrative.

-          Or it might just be Write poetry or prose inspired by the castle setting...

In my case I intend to produce for the day a perfect manuscript copy of the work up to date on my next big project – novel set in the days following World War 2.

I have about 20,000 words – some still in draft, some transcribed and edited and amended. I keep this in a plastic box alongside crucial resources to drive on the story: maps, books, research notes. A particular treasure in the box is a book of poems written by the man who inspired me to embark on this story.

So today and tomorrow I will assemble my writing so far into a single coherent document that meets all the criteria for a manuscript that you could submit to an editor or an agent or one of your first readers- so important these days. You can do this at any stage of the writing after – in my view – about 20.000 words. This might be a quarter of a novel. It might be half a novella. It might be five short stories towards a collection

Doing this refining exercise on your own first pages makes you simultaneously think of your work in detail and as a whole. It allows you to begin to see your novel though the eyes of an outsider – crucial part of the creative process.

So, as part of my preparation I thought I would put down here some thoughts on creating your manuscript to a presentable level.

In the history of publication, we may find examples of scrappy, ill-typed manuscripts on flimsy, tired paper wrapped in tatty packages, which ended up being published and lauded as great works.  Daphne du Maurier was said to send her editor scrawled, untidy half-legible manuscripts. Thomas Wolfe, too, needed his agent Max Perkins to sort out the jumbled pages of his great American novels. (Wolfe wrote standing up, leaning on the top of his fridge. But that’s another story.)  

But they were different days, of patient editors and forbearing agents and leisurely publishing.

In these more urgent times, a new writer – with more technological resources - needs to optimise her or his chance of being read carefully by presenting an immaculate, business-like manuscript. To do this, the writer needs to ensure that there is no barrier of poor presentation to blind the sight of the hard-pressed publisher’s or agent’s reader.

And nowadays this applies now to creating your own high level working manuscript before putting it through an independent publishing process. You can include some of the features which will make it easier to upload to one of the publishing platforms.   

If you develop your manuscript to meet the following basic points regarding your interim manuscript will set the pattern for a good clear manuscript that eventually will appear professional to an agent or editor. It will also provide the foundation manuscript for you to upload if you take the road to independent publication.

-        
Basics

	-          Use good-quality white paper. It’s more likely to survive being passed from hand to hand. Or for your own use on-page edits and notes.
	-          Select a simple, clear typeface in black – no fancy work. Calibri or Arial are good. I like Garamond for my independently published novels. I read recently that Time New Roman looks old fashioned and could lead to your manuscript being labelled as such. -          Use 12 pt. character size and 1.5 or 2.00 line spacing and only ever use one side of the paper. -          Consistent numbering – top right hand is my favourite closely followed by bottom centre. -          Collate together in loose pages and put them in a single card folder to work on. (Numbering is crucial here. You could get the pages out of order.) Layout -          Clear margins all round – widest on the right, for your own and others’ comments. -          Set your ruler to ten inches which will fit in to up loading criteria e.g. for Createspace -          New chapter means new page, -          Begin new chapters six spaces down -          You can number and/or title each now chapter.
	-          In continuous text. indent the line  to indicate new paragraphs -          No extra line-spaces between paragraphs. unless you want to indicate a change of time or place in the narrative,
-	-

 So today and tomorrow I have briefed myself to assemble my

drafted and transcribed sheet into this more refined form so that on Sunday, at Rachel’s Castle Retreat. When I am there who knows?

  -          I can get my notebook and draft a new 1500 words
-          I can make notes about gaps in the existing narrative
-          I can think about this novel as a whole thing and make notes about further structure.

 

In that free creative atmosphere in the castle I will go where the fancy takes me. It's all down to the preparation....

Happy Writing, Happy Reading

Best, Wendy

The Writing Process: Faces and Fiction

Newsletter 14:Thursday 21st May 2015

Hello again.

Brilliant that you have returned to my Newsletter If this is your first time, you are most welcome.

The Writing Process: Faces and Fiction

One useful thing as we write is to think how we refer to the face in our prose. Clearly the term face is already loaded with metaphor and ulterior meaning.

Consider: putting a good face on it; facing someone down; facing it; facing up to things; being two faced; facing the consequences 

The physiology of the faces has its own message system: We refer to the eye being the

window to soul; hollow eyes; haunted eyes; shadowed eyes; bright eyes; folded lips; wide smile; rigid jaw.

We use faces in our prose to indicate feeling, drama and action.  

His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human. Carson McCullars  

Aspects of the face are part of the action in our prose 

Is there an art in finding the mind's construction in the face? Frowning, raising eyebrows; smiling widely; grinning, winking, smirking, winking, leering, sneering, glowering, eyes narrowing. Every micro expression has meaning that you may use.

Of course the face is a work in progress. It tracks the passage of time: faces seem to remain the same yet alter through time: plain faces become handsome, distinguished with time; pretty people become plain with the passage of years. Faces are the place where the act of living maps your experience: he had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.  P G Wodehouse. 

A child's face is hard to paint and hard to write. How do you paint or write a blank canvas? Even great painters have problems with children, Look at the work of Van Gogh! We can portray children more through their emanations and actions, their wriggling and rolling, their screaming and chattering.

Distinctive genres do use direct description to establish the character so that we know very quickly the appearance of the hero/ine so we can  fit them into the shorthand stereotype of handsome hero, surly but good-looking  detective, beautiful maiden, sultry temptress, dark but handsome villain; or/burly but attractive action man. Guidelines for purely genre fiction assert quite rightly that we need to see our main characters early in the novel. Straight description can be very efficient for this kind of fiction.  

My own preferred way is to use the face in the process of the story-telling. I prefer not to describe directly but to allow the reader to infer indirectly as the narrative develops. What happens in the face is part of the gradual unfolding package of the novel as we get to know the characters, their age and demeanour, their motivation, their transitory meaning as part of the ongoing narrative.

What different things happens in your characters’ faces as they speak to someone they love, they hate, they despise, they admire, they desire, they need?  What happens when your character focuses on a particular task? e.g. the tip of my tongue shows when I am concentrating on drawing or writing My comfort is that old age, that ill-layer up of beauty can do more spoil upon my face                                                        Shakespeare. Of course the face can tell lies. God has given you one face and you make yourself another. Here’s Shakespeare again: False face must hide what false heart must know and  I never see thy face but I think on hellfire.

And one from JG Salinger: - She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

Of course we don't have to make our characters gurning, grinning puppets but the use of the mobility of the face to indicate character, drama and action is available to us and if we use it artfully and with restraint it will add vivid layers to our prose.

To illustrate: here are some words from The Pathfinder my very newest title  

'... He spoke to them in the old tongue but both brothers answered in Latin. Kynan grinned at Magnus’s surprise. ‘Our father had us spend two seasons in the house of a merchant in Rome, an agent who sold our lead right across the great inland sea...'

(In the context of the narrative the word  grinned has much more meaning here than said. See also the significance of the face for the cover design. W)

New Title On Amazon

(In the context of the narrative the word 'grinned' has much more meaning here than the baring of teeth,..,,)

The War Between the Pen and the Machine

Newsletter 13  

Thursday 14^th May 2015

Hello again.

Thank you for returning to my Newsletter 

If this is your first time, welcome.

Stop Press:

 Further note on The War Between the Pen and the Screen 

Sharon (see below)  Sent me a card originating in Te Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge a sheet from the Thomas Hardy manuscript for Jude the Obscure (see below) with the note  Now wouldn't this have been so much easier on screen?

Thank you dear Sharon for further illustrating my point.  Messy as it is, this document  is infinitely more creative and interesting than  a bland, neutral PC file.

Here we have the hand of the genius who wrote this iconic nove  and the tentative direction of his creative  thought process. (I see his original title was The Simpleton...) 

I am now even more compelled to think that 'easier' is not always 'better'.

*******

Now back to this week’s newsletter where I return to the theme of beginning your writing project by drafting in long hand. Here on my Newsletter and in my workshops I encourage writers – new and experienced to write their first draft by hand –preferably in ink or a very soft gel pen.

However my good friend, the Northern Echo and EDP columnist Sharon Griffiths, rather disagrees with me.

I think of Sharon as the Voice of the North and the East. She has written witty, informed and insightful columns and features in the redional and national press on every subject under the sun - from family issues, through local and national politics, through consumer and moral issues for many years.

And in the middle of all this  Sharon has fitted in two  well-received novels  of contemporary life.

 As a consequence of our discussion on the virtues for the creative writer of the computer as opposed to pan and notebook Sharon has to offer a comment on this for my Writing Process Newsletter. 

Looking at her words, which demonstrate as  intuitive and creative process as I would wish, and have advocated in this newsletter. It’s just that her computer is her vehicle of choice.

I also feel that as well as having this brilliant mind Sharon is the ultimate multi-tasker. We ink-pen-wielders are a weaklings beside her magnificently confident take on the creative process of writing.

And I feel sure that there will be many writers out there who will totally agree with her.

Sharon has called her piece 

'SUPER SCREEN'

‘There is something gloriously sensuous about ink from a fountain pen flowing into words across a page – a physical as well as mental delight.

But good grief, it’s an awful waste of time and effort and energy. Not to mention trees.

 Why on earth would you want to write stuff out in longhand just to type it all up all over again?  You might just as well wash clothes by hand before putting them in the machine.

The computer screen has liberated us from such tedium.  No more scrawled notes, arrows, queries, crossings out, insertions and illegible or inexplicable notes to self, or overflow notes on other pages or random scraps of paper. Not forgetting the doodles of daisies all around the margins.

Instead, for more than thirty years I have written directly onto a screen, thousands of words each week so that the keyboard feels almost directly linked to my brain. Maybe it’s all that practice that makes it seem so easy.

Even so, what goes on the screen is rarely the first draft.  I write first of all in my head.  All the time. Everywhere.  I never stare at a blank screen but instead go for a walk, make the beds, cook supper.  I swim every morning, mentally writing columns or chapters as I splash up and down.

 Once I type them up, I edit them as they go – I can draft and re-draft, rewrite a sentence, shift the emphasis, add another thought, all instantly in seconds. The screen is a constant shifting image of blue as I cut, paste, delete, save for later.

It’s so easy! I can move text around instantly – its instinctive now - far quicker than those squiggles and scrawls and arrows and much more legible.

The other joy of writing directly on the screen is that you can see your work immediately as a finished product.

This makes it far easier to see the flaws.  Words on a screen are not as forgiving as those in a notebook.  They look more professional so expectations are raised.   They are already distanced from me and so I immediately judge them more harshly and dispassionately than those written in my own familiar scrawl. 

On top of that, they have to cook.

Because everything is so quick and easy and instant, I have to build in time for reflection, for second thoughts, time to read almost as an outsider.  I call that cooking time.

So unless deadlines are screaming, I always leave a column for a few hours before sending it.  A book written on screen needs to cook for at least a month before its final edit.

But at least in that time I can be doing other useful and interesting things – not peering blearily at scribbled chaos. Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

Sharon Griffiths.

 (In answer to your last question, Sharon,  I would say ME! Wendy)

I think you have heard enough from me in earlier posts here on the subject of hand drafting. As you know this is my method and I would advocate it.

So I thought I’d quote another point of view from an interesting piece by Lee Rourke in the Guardian. 

His article mentions writing implements as ‘fetish objects’ which exactly matches my view of them. Although Sharon might say ‘Good grief!’ and mention the fate of trees.

Rourke says: ‘In longhand, the hand moves freely across the page in a way no amount of computer jiggery-pokery can muster. I think the economy of writing longhand is to do with its pace.’

He quotes Alex Preston. "I think each writer, and each novel, has an inherent pace," he says. "It's important to find a tool that matches the pace of the writing. I composed my first book in a computerised blur; for the second, I wanted to be more scrupulous, more thoughtful. This is the pace of longhand. Writing with the fetish objects – the Uni-ball pen, the Rhodia notebooks –and watching the imprint of pen on page reminds us that writing is a craft. If everything is done on keyboards and fibre-optic wires, we may as well be writing shopping lists or investment reports."

And  Rourke goes on: The whole process keeps me in touch with the craft of writing. It's a deep-felt, uninterrupted connection between thought and language which technology seems to short circuit once I begin to use it.

So there you are!

Some of you, on reading Sharon’s words, will be clapping your hands with delight and reaching for your keyboards 

Others might be regretting that – at my urging - they abandoned their laptops in favour of a notebook and a gel-pen.

Still others will still be delighted at finding their voice at last  through the visceral medium of pen and paper

I have to say that there is room in our Writing Process Palace for all-comers whatever their methods. All you have to do is to love your writing, enjoy your intuitive creativity and finish that damned book!

Do you have a view on this? I’d be interested to know.

12 Writing Process - History, Empathy and Intuition

Wendy’s NewsletterThe Writing Process

Newsletter 12 

Thursday May 7th 2015

Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.If this is your first time, welcome. 

Another set of crucial decisions for you as a creative novelist are those involving the issue of timing within your narrative. These decisions need not be hard and fast: like the early creative stages, these too can have an improvisational, intuitive element to them.

In the early stages you eventually come to know just when your novel begins, in terms of time. If  you see your novel as  contemporary  - perhaps  now or in the last fifty years = you need to be just as precise with your research as you would be with a novel set in – say - the time of the Tudors, or any part of Victoria’s reign or,  the mid-Twentieth Century.

The purpose of a novelist’s research , in writing a story based at a certain point in history – contemporary or historical - is get caught up in a web of that time. This web is formed by threads of information emerging from the time context of your novel.  Details count.  In every decade during the last fifty years, the time-contexts - the politics, the fashions, and the social and cultural assumptions - have been changing year by year and surging on at an increasing pace.

The cultural and political contexts of the year 2000 are different to 2004, are different to 2006, and are different to 2008 and so on. An election year is different to a non-election year. An Olympic year is different to a non-Olympic year. A novel beginning on July 7^th in London in 2005   would be qualitatively different from a novel beginning the month before. Even if you don’t mention the bombings you need to know that this incident will be buried somewhere in your characters’ minds ever after. Even if such events are not mentioned in your narrative, your own essential awareness of them will filter through in your intuitive writing.

Although I lived through the 1960s I re-researched those times for my 1960s novel Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvel Cooker.  For this novel I reconsidered the very different aspects of work and leisure, travel and fashion, student life and home life which were part of the taken-for-granted life in those days.

I had not realised how I had embedded in this novel the social and interactive role of smoking cigarettes until I read one reviewer’s comment that, ‘I had forgotten how much we smoked in those days.’ Such things can strengthen the authenticity of the world view of the characters and the narrative set in a particular time.

I course, in researching the time-settings of your novel, you will only ever get to a partial truth in historical terms. One thing I tend to do, with fiction set in the Twentieth Century, is to build into my historically based time-web threads of – knowledge about - contemporaneous art.  films, novels, radio, documentaries, magazines, photographs and newspapers. Such sources are there for us to absorb a fruitful time-based feeling sufficiently strong to write freely and intuitively.

 I am currently researching a World War 2 novel. The conventional historical sources – so many of them – are easy to access, fascinating to read. But as well as that I am reading post-war memoirs of wartime exploits: William Moss’s  Ill Met By Moonlight the anecdotal memoir, the source of the eponymous, iconic film about wartime exploits on Crete; I am also reading Abducting a General, Patrick Liegh Fermor’s more poetic , possibly more informed, but equally gung-ho take on those same events.  The fact that these two young men were bosom buddies and shared these adventures makes it good to read them in tandem. As well as this the biography outlining the post-war Fitzrovian life of Elizabeth Frink is on my reading table.

As well as this I am reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel. The Heat of the Day:  a beautifully written, highly personal novel reflecting her own high octane experiences in wartime Britain.  

Unexpected things can happen in this process of empathetic research. Once, researching for another wartime novel I checked the documented radio programming for 1941.  Radio was crucial during the war. I wondered what else my characters would be listening to, apart from news from the war front.

 On the pages of the Radio Times I discovered– around the time when I myself was born -   the very first broadcast performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.  My own mother would certainly have listened to that. The name Wendy had not existed before J.M.Barrie invented it.

 So, in my research for my novel Land of Your Possession - although she never told me - I discovered the reason why my mother decided on this odd name for me, her

third child. Lizza, the young pregnant mother in the story, lives through the Blitz on Coventry and the novel follows her adventures in surviving it. And Lizza, too, listens to the radio and hears the play.

All well and good, we creative writers will say. One writer friend, however, recently pointed out to me that there was a problem in using such sources as a key to empathising with the world contemporary to one’s novel. What, she said, if one looked at today’s art, novels, magazines and media to absorb true feeling to write a story set on present times? Think about the extravagant perfection of Interiors Magazines, the excesses and omissions of News media both in newspapers and on the Net. Consider the cloud cuckoo-land of celebrity magazines. Think of the rash of erotic novels, of slash moves.   How ‘real’ is all this for some future writer who bases her novel on the year 2015?

Would such sources give a true reflection of our age for a writer to build the time-web of her novel so she can reflect her characters’ lives in 2015? And then I have the thought that we need to remember that there would be a different time-web for each class, for each region, for each year.

(One thought. Perhaps writing future fiction - very popular now - is a much clearer, simpler project.)

Of course there comes a time when you must roar STOP! And go and sit in a quiet place for a week or so to let all this stuff sink in to the point of empathy and the level of intuition, before returning to the free-flowing  creative processes of writing your fiction that I proposed in my earlier Newsletters.

But this is an exciting point in your writing process, isn’t it? This is when the further development of your novel will be informed by truly empathetic creative intuition which will allow your novel to sit well in its historical frame and still be relevant to your readers in the present day. Wx.