Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

Since Wednesday 20th April I have been on leave as part of the Easter break. I have dedicated a lot of this time to writing. My partner, Matthew, is also taking time to write, although he has slightly longer than me. My planned leave was cut short because I have a work conference to go to next week. So he gets an extra week.

I have been working fairly steadily since Wednesday, navigating around various family/social activities. Wednesday was Ellen Datlow’s talk at the University of Canberra and then I stayed on there for my editing class, and did some writing when I got home. Thursday was spent with my mother, where I pushed a wheelchair around a lot. We were celebrating her birthday. On Friday, a bit more writing was to be had around a lunch for my daughter. Saturday I had my nieces around so we went to see Thor (excellent!) and more writing into the night. Although I must admit that I have been falling asleep rather early. Sunday I cooked Roast Pork but got a good day’s work in beforehand. Monday another good day and then today…well let’s say progress is occurring but slowly.

As I missed going to Swancon I wanted to make this writing stint count.

Recently, I have been reading novel submissions for a publisher. This experience as been invaluable, particularly when looking at my own work. This current MS, had the classic mistakes. Okay it was a draft. It is very young at just over 4 months old.

So what have I found and what have I done?

Firstly, the prologue was full of overblown language, trying to be too pretty and slowing things down. It’s got a Victorian era flavour. That’s derivative (I accept that). However, these days there’s not much point trying to write Victorian prose. Given the modern reader, I need the flavour, not an exact replica. So I thinned it out, getting rid of lots of lovely detail I didn’t need. One thing my editing course is teaching me is to look at something and ask what is the purpose of this, what is it trying to say? From a slush readers point of view: what is this author saying? Why do I want to read this further? Can I understand this? Is it relevant?

I did have an interesting twitter conversation about prologues. Particularly I wanted to ask about their purpose and whether people read them or not. I recall reading some in my younger days and not getting them at all. Last year, I read one annoying prologue and went on the read the book, which turned out to be excellent. Some prologues talk about things in the past. Some leave hints about what is to come. Some are the goings on of gods that the characters in the story are ignorant of. In this case, my prologue serves a dual purpose by introducing an event and creating a hook about what is to come.

So if you are reader who bypasses the  prologue then Chapter One is very important. As slush reader I don’t give up on chapter one if it’s not working, but it does set up my expectations. I had about 4 beta readers of my MS say that I got into my stride around Chapter Three or Four and then they couldn’t put it down. Eek! That’s no good. I need to be in my stride from Chapter One. I don’t think anyone will wait that long to get interested, unless they have been duly drugged or bribed.

So what was wrong with Chapter One? Too much back story, too much thinking, not enough forward movement, not enough action. My strength seems to be the dialogue so I needed to clip it down and shape it up. I did this, cutting heaps out, only to have Matthew tell me after I had cut it up that it had too much backstory/infodump. This was quite annoying. I was glad he hadn’t read the first cut. I realised he was quite right and took the plunge and cut the rest.(This had me worried so I checked a novel submission I have out there at a publisher and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw there was no back story at all in that. Phew! This does not mean they will buy the book, just that I didn’t have to feel silly about the submission.)

After cutting it up, I had the scenes flowing quite nicely, allowing me to get to the interesting bit and end the chapter on a high. Here is where some things I set up in the prologue started to gel, and I worked up the hook. What was interesting about Matthew’s feedback was that he felt more from a dialogue  scene than all my clever set up and why we were here stuff. This was encouraging and allowed me to trust myself and hack it out. You know, when you have your favourite sentence or paragraph and don’t want to let it go. When it is not doing what is it supposed to. That’s when you cut it!

The scene Chapter One ends on originally ended Chapter One in the first draft, but got shifted to Chapter Two in the tidy up I did before I sent it to beta readers. I was surprised how well it read without all my quirky character thoughts and observations on her past and the climax definitely belongs there.

Chapter Two required me to restructure the story and bring forward an event that was previously later on and entirely off stage. I had to drag it on stage, twine it around other events and add more hooks. This was true for Chapter Three too. However, the result was that it was much more edgy, clearly gave the flavour of the novel and the types of events unfolding as well as set up more tension and sense of danger. Some important feedback was that my otherworldly hints were so subtle that it could lead readers to think they were reading one thing and then get totally surprised by how it ends up. However, this feedback was split 50/50. I went with my gut feeling on this and upped the hints in the first section. I can trim them later when I finish and find it’s too much.

Then I started to get into the chapters that were flowing well and I tweaked, reread, tweaked more, cut bits, cut paragraphs. I am a bit worried I’ve been too easy on myself but there’s no point in dwelling on it. I needed to move forward. Lucky for me two of my readers were also editors so I had some mark up to help with some little things.

I had to write some new scenes and rearrange others both in these earlier chapters and later. An important point of view was added during the first draft, sort of like an afterthought. A lot of it told in flash back a lot later on the book. Common criticism from my beta readers was that it wasn’t working well. I needed more of him and I needed it to create tension and also balance my lead character. I think I’ve done this so far, but hey I’m only up to Chapter Nine and I have about Twenty all up.

I will be happy to get half way through by Sunday. Though I may get further along, depends. Tomorrow is editing class and I really do have to put in some hard work studying. I am back on deck at work, Friday 6 May, but not mired in work I think until 9 may. I’m hoping to get the bulk  of it done before then because work looks like it will be intense for the rest of the year.

Anyway what I’ve learned is:

• get the story going;
• feather the back story/information in little bits and preferably later;
• hook the reader as early as possible and keep them hooked;
• polish your prose;
• remember the punctuation: (I’m bad at this apparently!) and
• stay focused and keep going to the end.

Glenda Larke sent me this link. It is spot on.

Here

This might all sound obvious. It should be obvious to me. This would be my fifth novel-length MS. I was hoping I had learned something from those earlier works…I have a short memory obviously.