Writing process

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Where do you get your ideas?

I must be a writer. I’ve been asked The Question. If you’re a writer, you know all about The Question. If you’re not a writer, you might have asked a writer The Question. You know which question I mean. It’s up there in the headline to this blogpost.

Where do you get your ideas?

Neil Gaiman says that The Question is an occupational hazard, like being asked for an on-the-spot diagnosis if you’re a doctor, or for legal advice if you’re a lawyer. (Read his answer, and his exploration of that answer. It’s superb.)

Every part of the process (and ideas are only the starting point) takes practice. In an earlier post, I talked about the story games I play with children. Here’s another one; a perfect way of exercising the idea-generating mechanism.

On Facebook, a friend has been posting images as a jumping point for a story. A picture, a paragraph of setting, and a question or two. How do they feel? What happens next? I’ve been looking at paintings by Victorians who were reinventing the Regency through their own romantic filters. They’re great for prompting stories. Do you want to have a go? Just tell me in the comments what you think is happening in the picture. Here are some questions to get you started. What did he ask? What did she answer? How did the things get on the floor? Whose dress is on the couch? How does he feel?

renunciation

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Embracing the darkness

Regency hussarI do enjoy writing villains. I got a fan email yesterday. (Yes; I know. So exciting.) The writer said: “I loved everything except the super vile Lady Norton!!!!… I loved hating her and her brother!” I loved writing her. And I loved creating the villains in Farewell to Kindness, especially the super creepy Baron Carrington, who — as one beta reader said — was so bad that she felt sorry for his nasty, horrible wife.

Now I’m into the second novel, and the villains are just crawling out of my keyboard. What does this say about me? I’m consoling myself with the thought that the darkness is better out than in!

Here’s the scene I wrote on the train this morning, where my heroine has a close encounter of the nasty kind with one of a gang of five so-called gentleman. (Prue is working undercover as housekeeper in the house of a courtesan. Her assailant is a hussar.)

Prue, deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, retreated up the stairs. As she passed the first floor and continued upwards, she heard someone bounding up behind her, and on the next landing, the soldier grabbed her by the waist, spun her around, and shoved her firmly against the wall, trapping her with his body.

Before she could react, he had ripped at her neckline, popping buttons and exposing her corset and the curve of her breasts.

“Well, well,” he said. “You are a delicious little thing, aren’t you?”

Prue managed to keep her voice calm and level. “If you’ll wait downstairs with your friends, Sir, I will let Lord Jonathan know you are here.”

“Oh, let the others wait. I’ve an appetite, and you’ll do to satisfy it.” He was pulling her skirts up as he spoke, and the hard shape pressing into her belly left no doubt about his intentions. “You’ll do very nicely.”

“No, thank you, Sir,” Prue said. “That is not part of my duties.”

“Don’t think about it as duty, little darling. Think about it as pleasure,” then, as she tried to twist sideways to escape him, “No, no, no. Naughty. Keep still or I’ll have to hurt you.”

“Let me go, Sir, or I’ll scream.”

“You think the whore will care? I’ve had her maids before. She growls a bit, but what’s she going to do? Serves her right for teasing us all and only diddling Selby. And that bumptious squirt Gren. She brings it on herself. Now keep still.”

Prue had been keeping her hands flat against the wall, not wanting him to immobilise them. Now she stilled her body as commanded, but let one hand creep carefully towards the cap that covered her hair.

She would need to be quick. He had her skirts bunched almost to the top of her thigh and was fumbling at his pants buttons with his other hand. If he noticed what she was doing… no, he was looking down, focused on the mounds he had exposed..

There. She found the long hat pin, a sharp pointed skewer made to her own specifications for occasions such as this. In one movement, she swept it out of her hair and in an arc, flipping it in her hand on the way, jabbed it point first into his buttocks.

With an eldritch shriek, he let go of her, and she twisted under his arms and retreated up the next flight of stairs, facing him from that vantage point, her weapon at the ready.

“You bitch! You stabbed me!” he shouted.

The weapon he had intended to use on her, disclosed by the unbuttoned flap of his pants, had not yet been discouraged by the sudden attack. She gestured at it with her hat pin.

“One step closer, and this goes into that.”

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Epiphany moments

epiphanyToday we celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany (actually 6 January, but the New Zealand bishops have Sundayised most of the liturgical feasts). Just for fun, I went looking for articles about literary epiphanies. You know. Those moments when the character suddenly realises something that changes their whole life from that point forward; often something that has been obvious to the reader for some time. ‘I love her.’ ‘The man is a villain.’ ‘I shouldn’t be here.’ ‘I’m at the top of the ladder and it is against the wrong wall.’

In Author Magazine, I found a discussion of the difference between epiphanies and character arcs. Epiphanies, the writer says, are:

…moments when a character suddenly realizes something about herself. Those are moments of deep significance in your book because they foreshadow changes in how the character will think and act.

Contrast this to the writer’s definition of a character arc.

A character arc is the cumulative effect of a series of epiphanies.  It’s where the character ends up after multiple experiences of increased self-awareness and personal change.

So epiphanies are used to move a character to self-awareness, and therefore need to be built into the plot from the beginning.

An article in the Atlantic points out that self-awareness is hard to achieve, and the clarity of an epiphany moment is often followed by backsliding.

In other words, these conversion experiences don’t stick—or they don’t stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

Fiction Notes talks about where to put the epiphany (near, but before, during, or after the climax), and six ways that writers get  the epiphany wrong. Number 4 particularly irritates me in a story.

“I Haven’t Mentioned This Before, But. . . .” An epiphany has to be a natural outgrowth of the story and not tacked on. Instead build in a cause-effect relationship; the stories events cause the epiphany.

And Just about Write explains the difference between epiphany and revelation. The article starts with the reason for having an epiphany.

Fiction yields a transformed character. Let’s face it. If the protagonist hasn’t changed by the end of the story, it will lack the excitement necessary to keep the reader interested. Without that interest, the reader may want to put the book down and walk away, never to take it up again.

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Beginning to think about edit for Farewell to Kindness

A_Quiet_Read_by_William_Kay_BlacklockI asked those beta-reading my novel to come back with feedback by the end of December, but I’m already beginning to get some responses. What amazing people those beta readers are. I’m getting lots of affirmation, but also some really useful advice. Thank you so much, you wonderful people.

If I’m to have Farewell to Kindness up by 1 March for pre-orders, I have a great deal to do in January and February–and I just worked out yesterday that Encouraging Prudence will need to go to beta readers in mid-May to give the same kind of timeline. So the pressure is on, and the excellent feedback from the beta readers is going to be really useful in helping me focus my attention in the final edit.

Because I work in a writing business where everything must be peer reviewed before it goes to clients, and because my commercial writing is for people who ‘own’ the content, I’m used to accepting reviews. But serving the criticisms with a healthy dollop of praise certainly helps!

I absolutely love that each reader so far has become engaged enough with the characters to discuss their motivations. And every single one has commented on the death of one of my hero’s buddies in the final showdown.

K.M. Weillard has written a useful post for beta readers and authors. My beta readers so far have not needed any of her tips, bless them, but I’ll certainly follow her pointers for authors.

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I don’t do stress

BookcoverCCC2Candle’s Christmas Chair is almost ready to be uploaded. I’ve written the front and back matter, finished the formatting, proofed to the halfway point (which took just over an hour – so I’ll finish that after work tonight), received my ISBN numbers, read everything Smashwords provides about publishing on their platform, and created an author profile on Amazon.

If I upload today or tomorrow, it’ll be ready for the launch on Saturday (Sunday my time).

By the way, Amazon won’t let me offer Candle for free on their Kindle Direct Publishing platform, so I’m putting it up at their cheapest rate, which is 99c. However, I’m told that they will price match, so do me a favour would you? Once it is available on iTunes and Barnes and Noble for free, ask Amazon to price match?

By the end of the week, I need to have written my blog post for the Blog Hop. I’m planning a short story set at Christmas in Avery Hall in 1804.

And by Sunday, I need to send some brief details about me and my novella to Mari Christie, who has offered to feature it on her blog on 23 December. Thanks, Mari.

I’ve also volunteered to be a team leader for the 10 Minute Novelists 365K Club, a year long challenge to write an average of 1,000 words a day. We kick off with a chat a bit later this morning.

I have several tight deadlines at work, with around 50 hours of work to do before the office closes next Tuesday.

On Friday night, I’m bringing three grandchildren home with me for another craft day (same script as last weekend, different cast).

And I’ve promised to help prepare the church overheads for the Christmas masses.

No need to panic. I can do this. Breathe. Just breathe.

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If you annoy me, I just might have to kill you

I'm a writerIn each of my two current works-in-progress, I’ve created a negative female character. It was great fun investing each one with characteristics of people who have upset, annoyed, or hurt me over the years. One of my beta readers sent me a lovely email about the book, which she has just finished. When she said, “I hated Lady Carrington,” I felt a great sense of satisfaction.

I quite agree with the research that has found that writing – even in a journal or blog:

leads to strong physical and mental health benefits, like long-term improvements in mood, stress levels and depressive symptoms.

Wounds, both physical and emotional, heal faster if you put them down on paper. Writers, the article concludes, after quoting several research studies, are doing something right.

So be warned. If you annoy me, I just might have to kill you.

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Judging a book by its cover

BookcoverCCCIn less than a month, I’ll have a cover out there in reader land. And I’ve been reading a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

If you google using the search term ‘creating professional book covers,’ you’ll find heaps of superb advice. I particularly liked Sherry Thomas’s article about the process Courtney Milan took her and other authors through when they were creating Midnight Scandals.

It’s fascinating to read, and raised issues I’ve never thought of. How would my covers look in greyscale? How about in tiny, tiny format on a Goodreads ‘What I’ve been reading’ post?

If you’re creating a cover, read the post. And here’s an article from Courtney Milan about typography on book covers. And here are 300 fonts that work for book covers, divided by genre.

Meanwhile, I have five book covers on my books page. I’ve asked for permission to use the photo on three of them, and I intend to do a photo shoot to get the right photo for the two Redepenning books, but I think the typography is moving in the right direction. What do you think?

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Candle’s Christmas Chair – in which our hero and heroine meet after 3 years

Bath chairFirst few 100 words from WIP – a short story I want to give away for Christmas.

‘”Tha’ wants to talk to Min about they chairs,” said the man in the office, and directed Candle Avery  to the far corner of the carriage-maker’s yard.

Candle strode through the light rain, dodging or leaping the worst of the mud and puddles. Min. Short for Benjamin, perhaps? Or Dominic?

No, he concluded, as his eyes adjusted to the light inside the shed. The delightful posterior presented to his eyes belonged to neither a Benjamin nor a Dominic. The overalls were masculine, but the curves they covered were not.

She was on a ladder, leaning so far into a bank of shelves that lined the wall opposite the door that her upper half was hidden, but he had no objection to the current view–said delightful posterior at his eye level and neatly outlined as she stretched, a pair of trim ankles showing between the top of her sensible half boots and the hems of the overalls.

“Botheration.” Whatever she was reaching for up there, it was not obliging her by coming to her hand. Perhaps his lofty height might be of service?

“May I help, Ma’am?” he asked.

There was a crash as she jerked upright at the sound of his voice, and hit her head on the shelf above. As she flinched backward from the collision, the ladder tipped sideways, spilling its occupant into Candle’s hastily outstretched arms.

The curves were everything he thought, and the face lived up to them. A Venus in miniature, black curls spilling from the kerchief that held them away from the heart-shaped face, that quintessentially English complexion known as peaches and cream, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes.

Grey eyes that had haunted his dreams for three long years, ever since she had bedazzled him at a house party for the amusement of her friends, and then left without saying goodbye.

Grey eyes that turned stormy as he held her a moment too long. He hastily set her down.

“Miss Bradshaw.”

“Captain Avery. No, it is Lord Avery, now, is it not? My condolences on the death of your father.

He bowed his acknowledgement, his mind racing. Bradshaw Carriages. He hadn’t made the connection. Had he known when he was courting her that she was a carriage-maker’s daughter? He didn’t remember anyone mentioning it.

But he did remember that her friends called her Minnie. Miss Minnie Bradshaw. Min.

#*#

Lord Avery was broader than she remembered. He’d been little more than a boy at that horrid house party, but even then the tallest man she had ever met. Isolated and nervous in that crowd of scheming cats who only invited her to humiliate her, she’d believed him when he claimed to care.

With him at her side, she’d braved the crush at the ball. Short as she was, she usually found such occasions overwhelming. People looked over her, bumped into her, ignored her. But Lord Avery – Captain Avery he’d been then – kept her safe. She’d even, for the first time in her life, been enjoying herself at a ball. Right up until she overheard his best friend explaining that Avery despised her common origins and was only courting her for her money.

That had been Min’s last venture into the aristocratic world her parents had educated her for. She’d come home to Bath, and told her mother that she would marry, if marry she ever did, in her own class. But none of her suitors had ever measured up to the tall red-headed guards officer who even now, standing here in her workshop, turned her knees to jelly.

What was he doing in her workshop? Why would he tracked her down?

“Can I help you, Lord Avery?” She couldn’t do much about the colour that pinked her cheeks, or the way her heart pounded. But she could, and did, keep her voice level and and her tone cool.

He was immediately all business. “I am after a chair, Miss Bradshaw. It is still Miss Bradshaw?”

She nodded, seething. How dare he comment on her marital status. She wanted to tell him that she’d refused five proposals in the last three years. But he was continuing:  “The Master at the Pump Rooms told me that Bradshaw’s makes the best chairs in Bath, and the man in the office sent me here.”

“I see. And what sort of a chair do you require?”

His brows drew together. “An invalid’s chair. That is what you make, is it not? What your father makes, I mean?”

He might as well know the whole of it. She was not ashamed. And if his eyes turned cold and scornful, what was that to her? She was, no doubt, just imagining the warmth she saw. As she had imagined his admiration so long ago.

“You were right the first time, Lord Avery. I design the chairs. And I make each prototype for my assistants to copy.”

“I say,” he said, “good for you!” And he smiled at her. She remembered those smiles. And, though her mind knew he couldn’t be trusted, her foolish heart didn’t believe her.

Excerpt 2 posted on 25 November.

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Candle’s Christmas Chair

bath chair#2In Farewell to Kindness, Lord and Lady Avery are at the assembly where Alex comes a cropper in his Bath chair. Lady Avery rushes up to inspect the pieces. It transpires that she was the chair’s designer.

How, I wondered, did Viscount Avery come to marry Minerva Bradshaw, Bath chair designer and daughter of a Bath carriage maker?

Candle’s Christmas Chair is the result. I have my plot outline, and one and a half character sketches. I should begin writing this weekend.

I plan it as a short story or novella. If I can stick to the plan, it’ll be out for Christmas (just). Five weeks? We’ll see.

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When you break eggs, make omelettes

I’ve set myself a challenge in the epilogue of Farewell to Kindness. My secondary character David, who is hero of the book I plan to write next, is reported to be missing. No-one has heard from him for four months.

I don’t know where that came from. It was in the plan to send him searching for his heroine, known in Farewell to Kindness as Mist. But four months? Where did she go? Where did he go? What is holding them up and why? I have absolutely no idea. And I don’t know how the answers are going to affect the already plotted chapter outline of Encouraging Prudence.

I started Farewell to Kindness thinking I was a planner. And I am. But the bits of the book that excite me most are the ones that came out of nowhere and insisted on changing all of my carefully structured plans. My main villain turned out to be someone quite different to who I intended, the book ended a month earlier than intended and in a different locale, and several characters that weren’t even in the first draft demanded their own place in the 3rd.

I’m tentatively learning to trust my subconscious. When I find I’ve dropped a whole heap of eggs all over my plot, I’m learning to give a cheer and enjoy the ensuing omelette.

I came across this article by Juliet Marillier that talks about characters taking overeggs. What she says rings true to me:

So here I am, getting to the pointy end of this manuscript with my characters in increasing peril from external sources and at the same time beset by internal conflict (there’s a strong thread in the Shadowfell books about conscience and responsibility – can lies, deception and violence be justified if they’re the only way to achieve a greater good?) I know already that my two protagonists can’t come out of the story without significant psychological damage. And now one of those protagonists has started making choices I didn’t plan for him. Awful choices. Crazy, unwise choices. What’s going on?

I find while I’m writing the last part of a book, the part where I ratchet up the tension and present my characters with impossible choices, I sleep fitfully, dream vividly, and think about the story and characters most of the time, often to the detriment of whatever else I’m supposed to be doing. I get a lot of ‘brain churn’, a not-especially-helpful overload of story details bubbling around in my mind. I become quite disturbed when my characters have to face terrifying situations or sink into a mass of dark thoughts. Perhaps that’s because their stories, though fictional and including fantasy elements, are not so different from the situations some people still face in our world, in places where tyrannical regimes use terror as a tool of control. Or perhaps it’s because my protagonists feel like real people to me, and I, the author/God of this creation, have chosen to subject them to hell on earth. Now one of them is challenging me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.Go on, push me. Push me to the edge. See how much more I can take before I jump.

Characters don’t exist independently, of course, however real they may become to us. They are indeed all in our minds. If another writer came to me for advice on the situation outlined above, I’d say keep writing, let the character have his head, finish the novel, then go back and rewrite that section if you’re not happy with it. If a character seems to be pushing or pulling hard, chances are that’s the natural direction for the story to take. If the guy is in your head all the time, urging you on, what you write may well be inspired.