Howdy groovers,
on this week’s blog I’m giving away part one of a Robocop fan fiction story I wrote last year.
Go to my store to download A Dollar Badly Spent, Part One: Bixby’s Story.
Hope you enjoy it. If there’s any interest I’ll publish the second part in a couple of months’ time.
astro, x
I recently published my first novel on Kindle and paperback. And between 2010 and early 2012 I published two shorter books, Ayla’s Journey (a dark and surreal illustrated children’s book) and Dark Things (short dystopian stories, some of them flash fiction). This experience has led me to giving advice to other authors about self publishing, which I thought would be useful sharing with a wider audience. So here we go – an Idiot’s Guide to Self Publishing.
Part one – Preparing your text
1. Make sure you have a complete text you want to publish. By complete, I mean it’s been properly proof read for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation and formatting. There are a number of ways of achieving this. Read it yourself in different formats: I recommend printing it, going somewhere different to your usual writing environment, taking a red pen with you, and running the nib of the pen over the paper as you read. You will pick up different problems to reading on the screen (which if you only edit on paper, you must also do). Then ask someone else to read it. You should be doing this anyway – texts that want to be published are as much a product of the writer’s imagination as they are of the reader’s. So have a couple of friends read the text, and ask them to circle all of those errors, as well as give critical feedback on the story, its characters, those all important opening paragraphs, page and couple of pages, and how satisfying the conclusion is.
We’re not quite finished with the text. A few little prescriptive things:
a) Font. You might have a favourite font that you use. But is it readable once printed? If you’re going to publish as an ebook only this isn’t so important, because you can change the font on your device. But if you’re publishing to paper you need to choose your font. There’s a good guide to choosing fonts on the self-pub.net website. I would avoid Times New Roman (it looks amateurish in print), and stick to a font like Book Antiqua or Bookman Old Style (note the hint in the font title).
b) Page layout. For this section we need to pick up a book and open it to the first chapter. I’d like you to look at how paragraphs are laid out. Note that the first paragraph of a section is aligned with the page margin, while subsequent paragraphs are indented, like this:
First paragraph in line with margin.
Subsequent paragraphs start indented.
This is industry standard, and you must also follow it. This might mean re-formatting your entire book. Sorry, it’s necessary if you want to be taken seriously.
c) Section breaks. Some writers like to put an asterisk or other symbol between sections within a chapter. The standard is to use a single line break. It’s up to you. Most texts will look better with a single line break, unless your text is in a particular style (like a Gothic horror) and the symbol adds something to the atmosphere.
d) Font size and line spacing. Tricky. On ebooks you can adjust it on the device, so there’s not much to worry about. In a print book there’s only one way to tell if your print size and line spacing look good on paper: print and be damned. That means going right through this process, ordering a copy of your book and seeing how it looks. For guidance, I’d advise 1.5 line spacing and a font size of around 11. However you should also check the typesetting information in printed books you own, which sometimes describe the font and size.
2. Still here? Now you need a cover design. Some people are lucky enough to know artists and designers who they can ask to create book covers. There are also freelance book cover designers (find them through internet search engines).
If you’re creating an ebook, you will need your cover image prepared.
If you’re publishing on paper only, you can use the self publishing site to create a book cover.
3. We’re still in preparation mode aren’t we? So let’s go back to your book text because there’s a few things it needs: legal information, acknowledgements, copyright notice, contact information and page numbers.
a) For the legal information, simply copy the text from the front of an already printed book. I advise slightly amending any wording that isn’t about legal things to make it your own, but as a minimum you want to say something like: “Copyright © Your Name 2013 The right of Your Name to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her/him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.”
b) Acknowledgements are those thank yous that you want to give to whoever helped you write the book or encouraged you along the way. You don’t have to put them in. You might have noticed that they’re sometimes at the end of the book (my preference) instead of the start. It’s up to you if you include them.
c) Copyright information. You’ve already shown your copyright in the legal information. Now you need to say how and when your text can be copied, re-distributed, transmitted and so on. You’ll find this in the legal information text in the front of most books. Like I said, I recommend just copying the text from a book – you should notice that they’re pretty standard paragraphs across different publishing houses.
d) Contact information: these days being a self-published author is all about building an audience, and that means people need to be able to contact you. You don’t have to, of course, it’s simply advised. There are a number of ways to achieve this. Set up an email account specifically for your writing (do not use your own email address), set up a Twitter account, Google+ or Facebook page, or create a blog which has feedback options.
e) Page numbers. If you’re not sure how to insert these into your document, you can either click on the Help option inside your word processor, or in most word processors, you can use a drop down menu called something like “Insert” or “Edit”, and then an option like “Fields” or “Special”. In OpenOffice go Insert > Fields, and in Microsoft Word go Insert > Page Numbers. These instructions work for PCs; I don’t know much about Macs, sorry.
4. We’re still in preparation mode. We’ve done a lot to the text and the contents, and we’ve started thinking about the cover. You might have made a lot of changes. If so, rest your text for a week or so, come back to it with fresh eyes, and read it through again with a red pen. Self publishing is all about polishing and polishing and polishing. Now make a cup of tea, you deserve it.
Part two – Registering with self publishing sites
1. This is probably the bit most want to know about. You’ve heard of other people self publishing, but you’re not sure how you do it yourself. Let’s manage your expectations right now: this is going to take a while. You can save your progress and come back to it, if you’re pressed for time. Just be prepared for this to be easy, even while it’s time consuming and laborious.
2. We’re going to use Amazon as our self publishing site. Once you’re up to speed with using Amazon, you can use other sites, like Lulu or Nook or Google Books. So, go here https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin and create a user profile. This site is called “Kindle Direct Publishing” or KDP. It’s going to be your central resource for getting an ebook out.
3. Now you need to set up a different user profile on a different site for the print version of your book, so go here: https://www.createspace.com/ This is called CreateSpace. If you have a central Amazon account, you should find that the KDP and CreateSpace accounts are automatically linked together.
4. Later, you can register on Lulu.com for print and ebook if you want. I prefer Lulu for printed books, because the book creation process is a little easier to use. But for the moment, let’s concentrate on the Amazon facilities.
5. Go back to Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. Once you’ve registered, you should see a screen like this:
To start the process of publishing your ebook, click on that yellow button “Add new title”.
Step three – Creating your ebook
1. Click on that button! You’re taken to a page which is headed by Your book, and then there’s probably a box underneath about enrolling your book in something called KDP Select. Ignore this for now, you can come back to it later.
2. Start filling in the details for your book. That’s how easy it is: you’re just filling in boxes. But now comes a tricky part. You’ve been asked for a Description. This is the short paragraph that people will read when your ebook is listed on Amazon, which should grab their attention. Rather than spending hours trying to think what to write, go to a successful book’s page, say Life of Pi, read the text, and adapt the style to suit your own book.
For example, the Life of Pi text says this:
One boy, one boat, one tiger …After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent years.
To adapt this for your book, break it down into the elements, and include your own book’s details. So let’s assume you’ve written a book about a family at war over several generations.
One family, three generations, one deadly secret. [See how we get a quick description with very short elements.]
When Arthur graduates from college he expects a bright future. [Now we have a male lead, and we have something to gain and lose: a bright future.]
But his attempts to leave behind his working class background bring him into conflict with his parents. His struggle to move on with his life brings out a secret hidden by his grandparents, which threatens to tear apart the entire family. [Now we have a problem establishing, conflict, and a hint at the consequences.]
Spanning three generations, Arthur’s Kitchen Sink explores the tensions at the heart of every family and how love can tear us apart.
Anyway, you get the idea. Use the hook, give us the context and then create the conflict and what’s at stake for your character. Then finally place the book in its genre: scifi, fantasy, literary fiction, thriller, etc.
3. When you get to section 2. Verify Your Publishing Rights, you should click the following:
a) This is not a public domain work… Most authors will use this option. It means the work is yours and belongs to you.
b) This is a public domain work… If you’ve taken works that are out of copyright you have to choose this option. For example, some people collect old versions of The Brothers Grimm stories originally published in the 1800s and now out of copyright, and publish them as collections.
4. Now you need to upload your book cover. Fortunately we covered this in Part one – Preparation, and you have a file ready. Make sure it’s saved as a .jpg. Once you’ve uploaded your image, you should see it appear on the page behind the upload box. Now just click the little [x] in the top corner to get rid of the upload box.
5. Upload your book file! You can upload a .doc, but I recommend something first. Open your word processor and then open your book file. Now we’re going to save it as a different file format. If you’re not used to doing this, it’s really easy, and here’s the step by step guide:
a) Open your file
b) Click on the File menu
c) Click Save As (note: do not click “Save”, you must click “Save as”).
d) Now you have the save window on your screen. Look near the bottom and just below your file’s title is an option saying “Save file as type:”. Click on the little arrow on this box.
e) Go through the file formats and click on HTML or HTM. Now click SAVE.
f) When you upload your book, look for the .html version. It makes the file conversion a but easier for KDP.
6. Now you’ve uploaded your book you can preview it online. Finished? Almost there. Click Save & Continue.
7. Now we’re into pricing. This requires a little bit of thought.
a) Click Worldwide rights.
b) Choose the 70% royalty rate if the book is your original creation. If it’s a collection of other out-of-copyright works, then click the 35% royalty rate.
c) Choose your prices. KDP gives you minimum prices. It’s up to you what you choose, but some advice first. If you have no audience, no public profile, no previously published works or reputation, setting a price at book store levels will work against you. Try setting a price of USD $3.50, and click the boxes for the other territories saying “Set price automatically based on US price.”
8. Done that? At the bottom is a little box you need to check saying you’ve read the Terms and Conditions. Click it and press Save & Publish.
9. Well done! You think you’ve published your book. Not quite. First Amazon needs to check that you’re not publishing porn or anything illegal. If all is well, within 24 hours you’ll receive an email telling you that your book is now available for sale. You’re a published author! Brilliant. That’s the end, right. Right? Well, it could be. Or it could be time for…
Step four – Marketing your book
1. First we need to understand “marketing”. If you think it means “advertising” you need to read this. If you know what it means properly you can skip forward.
2. Marketing is about making your product visible, attractive, interesting, desirable and of forming a connection with your potential audience and purchaser. Advertising is a part of that, of course. If it helps, imagine you’re in a physical market, surrounded by market stalls, each selling foods and clothes and consumer goods. There are hundreds of them. How do you know which stalls even exist? Which stall do you choose? Do you even know what you’re there to buy? Now consider it from the market stall holder’s point of view. You’re selling clothes, but everyone else is selling similar clothes. How do you make yours stand out? Even worse, your stall is stuck down in a corner behind 100 other stalls. This is where marketing comes in.
3. First you need people to be aware of your product. We do through that different forms of advertising. This can mean using Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, or through more advanced measures like having our books reviewed in magazines or by well known new book blogs.
4. So people have followed the direction signs and are looking at your stall (your book). Now you need to create and maintain their interest. This is where the product description and the cover image help. People are a sucker for a pretty picture. That’s not cynical, it’s just true. Many decisions to buy a book are based on the cover. But they also want a book that’s suitable for them. If it says “scifi” on the cover, you’ll hook the scifi fans and lose the romantic fiction fans. That’s fine. Know your audience and market to them. The book description you put into KDP when you were creating your book helps here. What else helps? Well they’re on your page, and they’ll want to read reviews to see what other people though. Never underestimate the power of social recommendation. It is not acceptable to write your own reviews. But you do need 1 or 2 to start you. Go back to the friends who read your book and ask them to write a quick review.
5. By the way, we’re following the classic marketing model called AIDA here. It would be worth your while reading the Wikipedia page about it.
6. You have their awareness, you’ve grabbed their interest, and you’ve created some desire. Now you need them to commit and buy. Price is important here. Your readers need to feel they’re not risking too much money for what is still an unknown quantity. But you don’t want to appear cheap either. That’s why we’ve set the book at USD$3, above minimum but not greedy. I’m no marketing expert, so from here on in I advise using a search engine to look up ideas on marketing your self published book.
7. A final comment. Be prepared for the amount of work marketing needs. You need a presence on Twitter where you’ll find a large community of indie authors. You need to advertise it constantly – one tweet on Twitter won’t do it. One post on Google+ won’t don’t do it. It needs several per day over the course of several months. It needs time and commitment if you want it to sell.
That’s it. Well done, you’re finally a published author. You’ve taken your first step into a wider world. I promised to include details on CreateSpace and publishing to printed books. That information will appear here in the next couple of weeks when I have some spare time, so check back in early February.
If you have any tips to share or want this blog post updated with extra information, then please leave a comment below, and I’ll look into editing and improving it.
This blog is part of the “next big thing bloghop”. It’s a self interview format, which anyone can use. Within the self interview, we amateur authors are supposed to also tip some up and coming authors’ blogs for other people to visit.
The point of course is so one writer can raise awareness of another writer and so on. (I’ll blog separately about building community soon. This is a key component of getting writing.)
The interview
It’s full title is planetfall: All Fall Down. I’m quite particular about “planetfall” being all in lowercase, although for convenience I write it with a capital P when I advertise the book. Why am I particular? It’s both a visual aesthetic thing and a quotation thing. If you look at “Planetfall”, the word looks unbalanced. There’s that capital P and it looks really heavy over on the left, with the thin t, f and ls afterwards. If you write “planetfall” you reduce the weight of the left hand, and also get a nice symmetry with the down stroke of the p and up stroke of the ls at the end. The other reason is because “planetfall” was a word I pulled from the middle of a sentence and realised was a useful double entendre for the story series.
The idea for the book came from a writing exercise I set myself in 2007. I wanted to write a first person perspective piece that was full of restrained emotion and was no longer than one side of A4. That original piece was about a Mexican man who had been a soldier at the Alamo, or some other Mexico-American conflict in the 19th century. In the original exercise he was talking to his young son about what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a soldier. He was also teaching his son to shave, but to leave his moustache as it was the “mark of a man”.
From there, I wondered what it would be like to be the son, and to look back on that moment. The poignancy of the following exercise intrigued me. Somehow that grew into an expansive idea about a soldier in the middle of an enormous war, and his humanity gradually breaking down.
It’s scifi, and more specifically space opera.
I sent the book to several agencies, and had some very good feedback on it. A few wrote back and said they liked it, that it had a “big scifi feel” that was “missing from the current market”. Unfortunately this worked against it. Agents are conditioned by publishers and sellers to be risk averse. Sellers go to publishers asking for books similar to what sold well last season. Publishers go to agents looking for the next big thing that was like the last big thing. And so a market becomes risk averse.
Because planetfall is my first novel, and I essentially taught myself to write novels using it, I’m not as confident with the writing quality as maybe I should be (I certainly think my 2nd novel, Backpackers, has better writing, and planetfall book 2’s writing is better yet). I was always happy to self publish this novel, though I won’t be as happy if I end up self publishing Backpackers.
The main character, Kate, is about 36 years old, with red hair. Maybe Jewel Staite, who played Kaylee in Firefly & Serenity, would be a good choice. Daoud needs to be someone with north African or Middle Eastern looks, who’s thin. I can’t think of anyone useful right now. I know I would want Chiwetel Ejiofor for the character Djembe, though.
Years. I think I finished my first draft in early 2011, which was 3.5 years after I started. I thought that was it, and it didn’t need any changes! I’d edited it as I went along, so I’d re-written, chopped out sections, included new bits and so on. But I soon learned why more experience authors talked about being on their second, third, fifth, tenth draft.
The breakthrough in having subsequent drafts was sending the manuscript to a well known scifi agent, John Jarrold. He was kind enough to write me a long email about what I’d submitted to him, even though the material wasn’t up to publication scratch, and I will forever think kindly of him for it. His feedback made me go back to the first draft and start making some improvements to meet what he said. And that made me think more and more and more…
“Military Intelligence is called in to investigate the death of a scientist, but can they uncover a plot to make first contact and start a war before it’s too late?”
I’m so out of touch with scifi that I have no idea. I spend most of my reading time on literary fiction or New Scientist. However, I would hope that people would recognise its influences, which I happily make apparent: Dan Simmons, Iain M. Banks, George Lucas, Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert.
I had always wanted to write, and in my teens I wrote some horror short stories. I even won a school award. But I gave up. In my mid-30s I came across two thought exercises when going through some life coaching: (1) “Imagine you’re on your death bed. Who’s there, what do you want to tell them you did in life, how should they feel about your passing?” and (2) “Imagine you have to write your own obituary. What is it going to say?” As you can see, they’re very similar, and what they both have in common is making you think about your life from the end, looking back.
After thinking about those questions, I realised that one of the things I wanted to say was, “Yes, I wrote that novel I’d always wanted to write.” And that of course leads to the question, “When did I write it? When I was dying? Not possible. When I was old and infirm? Not likely. When I was bringing up kids? No time. Well, when? Ah, the best time is now.”
planetfall: All Fall Down is the start of a trilogy. The story in book 1 – that of a scientist dying, and General Kate Leland slowly discovering a plot to start a war – is a mash of cyberpunk, space opera, thriller, murder mystery and psychedelia. It features the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. The main character is female, and there is a strong female minor character who plays a much larger role later on (and I have 6 books drafted out for her which I’ll never get round to writing!) I like writing about lead female characters. I think it comes from always playing the female character in computer games. Maybe it’s a repressed form of transvestisism. Female readers are getting back to me and saying they love Kate and Sophie, the supporting character.
Book 1, All Fall Down, is really more of a prequel, as the story I originally wanted to tell starts in book 2. But I couldn’t tell the story of book 2 without setting out the background story. All Fall Down goes quite odd in parts where it’s strongly influenced by William Gibson.
Now it’s my time to tag writers that I feel could be “The Next Big Thing”.
There are three authors I want to push, though two have no significant online presence as far as I know. (And they’ll probably never see this, either, but please remember their names.) The third has a massive presence which is also very useful for writers.
Tara Basi – he writes dark science fiction, urban fantasy and satirical radio plays. He’s been a big influence on my writing in the last year, and I was fortunate enough to edit his book “Blocks” in early 2012.
Peng Shepherd – like Tara, I met Peng on a writing course at London’s City University. For me, she’s this generation’s Haruki Murakami. She has a ‘plain’ way of writing, that’s full of atmosphere and magical realism. She’s gone to study a Master of Fine Arts in New York, and is currently editing her first novel. She’ll be on best seller lists by 2025, I guarantee it. Read one of her stories: Free Cake.
Lucy V Hay – Lucy runs the writer and scriptwriter support site, Bang2Write. It’s chockful of useful articles, and her Twitter feed (@ Bang2write) is essential for up and coming authors and scriptwriters. She also has a book out, currently in German only as far as I can tell, called Bauchentscheidung. It’s Young Adult Fiction.
I hope you enjoyed this “Next Big Thing” blog. If you’re a writer and it’s helped you, then please copy the format and put your own answers in. Drop a link in my blog reply area so that I can have a read!
As usual, good luck with your own writing projects.
astro x
Don’t write, just write. But don’t write, because you’re not good enough.
Like many amateur writers, I follow a number of online writing tips websites. I’m sure you have ones you like. Some of the better ones that I know about include DIYMFA and Bang2Write.
I mention these two because they’re high quality, and give writing tips from different perspectives. DIYMFA from a writer’s perspective, from someone who’s been through a Master of Fine Arts programme (hence DIY MFA); and Bang2Write from someone in the industry who makes decisions on scripts, as well as being a writer.
The good thing about both of those is that, generally, they give this advice: just write. That’s all you need, really. After that, everything is style.
But some writing tips websites almost go out of their way to stop people writing. Which seems a bit bizarre. They say things like:
Don’t write prologues unless you’re highly experienced.
And
Don’t write cliches unless you’re a really good writer and make a really good job of it.
Have you ever seen this kind of advice? It’s nonsense. In the first one, how would one get to be “highly experienced” if one didn’t write with low experience? And how can one use a cliché in writing and make it brilliant, if one doesn’t use clichés in their rubbish form and learn why they’re bad? They almost say to a budding writer, “Don’t write, you’re not good at it. Leave it to the professionals.” And then off we trot to find out how the professionals became good, and their interviews says, “Just write. Make mistakes.”
planetfall update
More work on planetfall book 2 this weekend. I’m about 24,000 words in now, which is about 80 pages. It’s already shaping up to be an action-centred book, where the first one was more thriller-esque. The theme of revenge is strong, and I’ve somehow managed to set up four storylines (one major story, three sub-plots) in that time, which I’m pleased about.
My writing approach with this book is a nice mixture of planned and organic. I know, have known, the overall story arc, and roughly where each of the characters needs to end up by the book’s close. So starting with the end in mind it’s now a case of letting the characters explore their personal space and their narratives, and seeing what crops up. Undoubtedly I’ll be editing things out, putting new parts in, treating what I’ve written so far as guide text and adding more exposition and so on, but for now, it’s going very well.
Regarding book 1, it’s still out with agents, and I’m waiting for feedback from about 10 of them. I think I said that I’d received feedback that it “has a big sci-fi feel”, which isn’t seen much these days, but that agents are looking for different kinds of books for current market conditions. (That’s the same feedback I received for my other book, Backpackers – market’s looking for different kinds of stories.)
I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Drop me a line.
Years ago I started writing this little book and called it “planetfall”. And I failed. I failed to write it. I failed to make it happen, I failed to conceive of a decent story. I failed to have the ability and find a way into it.
But I learned from the failure. planetfall was supposed to alternate between two stories – how a war started, and the war itself. But writing from two different perspectives, with completely different characters, soon proved too much. I decided to split the story into two, and write ‘how a war started’ first. It took me just over four years.
Finishing that first book, which I’ve since named All Fall Down (though it remains Book One of the planetfall series), took a massive effort. I’ve blogged before about how much I taught myself and learned from others about plotting, character, editing and so on.
In the summer of 2011, with a finished draft of All Fall Down brimming with pride on my laptop, I sat down to write ‘the war itself’. And failed again.
So I wrote another book, called Backpackers. And a book of short stories, called Dark Things. I took a creative writing course at London’s City University. I joined a writing circle. I wrote an 8 minute film script, and then a 30 minute pilot sitcom script. And started a fanfic novella about Robocop.
Phew. I was busy last year, between Aug ’11 and Aug ’12. But then I was unemployed, so it was a good time to really improve my writing skills and achieve something.
Over that year I occasionally went back to ‘the war itself’ and tried to make it work. Occasionally I would have a little breakthrough. An idea for a scene. A line I’d edit which would work really well. And sometimes there’d be a big breakthrough, like finding the narrator’s voice. That, really, was the hardest part to get right – his voice, his view of the world.
“Voice” is an interesting concept in writing, and it’s not one that many amateur writers come across until they go on creative writing courses, hang out with writers more experienced, or really delve into the amazing writing tips websites now available.
Trying to get into the mind of a person and speak from their point of view, to find their voice, is difficult. And that’s what kept bringing me back to that original story, and sending me away. I kept coming back because if it was difficult finding this character’s voice, then it must be a prize worth achieving. And I kept leaving the material to rest so that I could develop my writing skills in other media, try writing in different voices, and bring them back to this original idea I had in 2007.
A couple of months ago I sat down and re-wrote the opening 15 pages of the original planetfall. And I found a voice. In truth it wasn’t so different from the one I started with originally; the changes really were that it had more hope in it, less misery, it had a pinch of vulnerability, but it was also confident. It was angry, remains angry, but there’s a sense, I hope, of it building to something. This soldier has a mission.
A few weeks later, though, still unsure if this re-write was working, I re-wrote the first 5 pages from a completely different point of view: 3rd person, near (or 3rd person, limited, as it’s also known). This worked, and I had a voice in that, too. And of course a quandary: I now had two versions which worked, one in first person and one in third. What to do?
At this point I was just finishing my sitcom script, which follows two characters whose lives cross early on, and keep crossing despite neither of them wanting to. A thought struck me: I needed to pick up the events of book 1. I’d always intended any reference to book 1 coming through from the first person narrative, a very narrow point of view (POV). But writing the sitcom, where the viewer would need to know more than a single POV, gave me an idea. What if I could go back to my original idea? Write a first person narrative with the voice I’d found, and write a third person narrative which followed other characters, so that necessary plotting could be picked up there.
It’s a risky decision. It essentially means the chapters go like this (example text):
Chapter One – My team died that day, and it made me angry. Three months later, I died. And that made me angrier still. I vowed revenge.
Chapter Two – Kate was alone on the planet when the ship came to get her. After twelve years, her solitude was over, and like it or not, she was going to be plunged back into the war.
Chapter Three – …and so on back to first person…
So how’s it working out? Is it another failure?
From my perspective, it’s working beautifully. The change between points of view has unlocked so much of the story, and made it so easy to write, that I’ve gone from 15 pages to 65 in a matter of days. The third person narrative brings the events of All Fall Down into the new book, providing continuity for the story and reader. The third person narrative brings something new. It places the reader in two parts of the world: a god-like part, where plot unfolds and great events move forward; and a personal part, where we feel what it’s like to be on the frontline of the war, narrated by a soldier.
It is a risky approach to telling a story, and I’ve never tried swapping POV like this – or rather, I did, once, in 2007, and I failed miserably. And five years of writing experience has given me the ability to achieve my original ambition. From failure came a number of successes.
As writers, we need failures. We need to write crap and tear it up. We need to write awful dialogue and curl up with embarrassment when we read our work aloud when we vocally edit. And we need, importantly, to learn from those mistakes and failures.
I’d be interested to know what failures you’ve had, and what you learned from them.
This week I returned to my completed novel Backpackers and re-wrote the prologue and first chapter.
It seems like a strange thing to do, considering I had strongly believed it finished and in its best possible form. I have sent it to a score of publishers. Oops.
Rather predictably I have fallen foul of the lesson that we all need to learn as writers – rest your material before you proclaim it finished. I knew this, but I was so intent on finishing the book and getting it to publishers before I went back to full time work that I blinded myself.
Lately, on my long commutes to my new job, I started running the book through my head, thinking about it, testing parts of the story. And I realised that the opening chapter was letting it down. The changes I’ve made aren’t enormous – it essentially amounts to a re-structure of the material, to bring some of the tension and conflict at the end of the chapter right up front, and cutting out 6 pages, and writing in 6 pages of fresh material.
The material I cut out was a “darling”. Most writers will have heard the editing advice, “kill your darlings”. My darling was the original short story which spawned the entire Backpackers novel. I had kept it in for a year, because it was the seed, and it helped set out part of Cath, the protagonist’s character. She’s a story teller, a mischievous fun loving party girl. What I realised was that the diversion into the short story (which is presented as a story that Cath tells) diverts the story from establishing the conflict it needs. The reader is set up with too many stories to think about.
But! Not wanting to lose it, I thought I would upload the material here and allow people to download it for free, specifically so that writers can compare the kind of material I cut out, and see how that applies to their own writing.
Here is the Backpackers – old opening file.
Last night I went to see The Dark Knight Rises at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo, London. I hated it.
I started my writing career by writing film, book and music reviews for the BBC Collective website (see portfolio). It takes a very different approach to writing than does fiction, but it shares enough in common. You need a point and you need structure. And the whole thing has to flow. I learned a lot by writing reviews. And after watching The Dark Knight Rises, or rather, enduring it, I came out so upset by the film’s failures that I wanted to write a film review again, for the first time in 6 years.
But a tirade of negativity just isn’t me. What’s the point in raving at walls? And then I thought… What if something positive could come out of it instead? What if rather than just slating it, we could learn from it? So let’s do that. Let’s break down the film and find out why it was rubbish, and how any writer can learn to avoid the same mistakes.
[Note: contains spoilers. But then who cares, there was so little tension in this film – indeed one friend fell asleep watching it – and it’s so crap, that I don’t care if this is full of spoilers. Batman falls in love with Catwoman and they live happily ever after at the end. There’s your first spoiler. You don’t believe it, do you?, because it’s so unlikely given the first two films. But it’s true. The last shot is the two of them acting young and free in Florence. What a crock of shit.]
A. The story
This has to be where it starts, with the story. I’ll recap and then break down why it doesn’t work.
Bruce Wayne has lived in exile for eight years. Batman has not been seen since Two Face died, and is accused of his murder.
Bane, a hulk of a man who wears a mask over his face kidnaps a nuclear physicist and then disappears for ages.
A board member of Wayne Enterprises wants to take over the company. He steals Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints, and has Bane place most of Bruce Wayne’s money on the stock market in a lot of dodgy deals. Bruce is penniless, his body broken, his will to be Batman at a low. The board member is then primed to take over the company. Except Bruce asks another board member, Miranda, to stop him. Apparently she does, though we don’t see any of this. It just happens, as if by magic. Then the evil board member is killed by Bane. Just like that.
Bane steals a fusion reactor that promises clean energy for everyone. He turns it into a neutron bomb. And then does not much with it for a while. Batman comes back for a bit. Bane faces off against Batman, and defeats him after a minor punch up. We jump to somewhere unspecified (somewhere in the Middle East by the looks of it) where Bruce is put into a dark pit. We are told there is no escape from this pit, and that only one person has ever done it. We are repeatedly told that it was Bane who escaped. Bruce has his back stretched, does a few sit ups, and then escapes. And somehow, without money or a passport, gets back to America. Oh and into Gotham, which has been closed off to everyone. But we’re not shown that. Perhaps it’s by magic?
Batman tackles Bane, who ends up dead. The bomb is still around somewhere. Miranda turns out to be the baddie, and runs off with the neutron bomb. Batman stops her vehicle, she dies. The characters stand around for a bit while the neutron bomb counts down to some supposedly tension-inducing final couple of seconds. And then stand around a bit more, snogging. Because you’d do that. Eventually Batman flies the bomb out over the sea, where it blows up in a big mushroom cloud. Everyone is saved, and some children look at the mushroom cloud and don’t appear to be upset by it. Bruce Wayne hooks up with Catwoman (oh yeah, Catwoman’s in this. But don’t worry, she’s not a character, just a plot device, so you missed nothing from the story synopsis). The end.
And, er, that’s it.
What’s wrong with the story?
What I described above is a sequence of events. Batman and Bruce Wayne are no more. Someone wants to blow up the city. Batman comes back and defeats them. Fine. The basic structure is there: a character has fallen low, there is a great threat, the character has to overcome their own limitations before they tackle the great threat. The character is triumphant. And so what? All stories do that. That doesn’t get you any points, for following Story Telling 101. So why does it fail as a story?
Let’s go into reverse a bit. “… the character has to overcome their own limitations…” Let’s start there, with some:
B. Character motivation
Your characters need a motivation, a reason to be doing something. Let’s go through the main characters and see what their motivations are:
Bruce Wayne / Batman
Bruce is bored and a recluse. He responds to a threat to Gotham because… because that’s what he does. Even he doesn’t really know. Then he keeps going because there’s a bomb that will kill people. There is none of the personal story of Bruce Wayne and his battle with his darker side here. It’s even exposed in the film. “You don’t fear death,” says one character. “That’s right,” Bruce may as well have replied, “I have no flaws. I do things because they’re right, I’m at peace with myself, and I’ll overcome these challenges after a bit of a rest.”
Bruce Wayne is perfect. He has no serious flaws any more. But that’s not what an audience needs. It wants a flawed hero. That’s what he is in the first two films. Flawed by the darkness inside him, flawed by his conflict with loving someone, flawed by his struggle with friendship. In this film he’s… Well, he’s come to terms with all of that. Even at the end when he hangs up his cape, it’s with no regret, no difficult parting, no tortured struggle within his being, his very soul. He just sods off to Italy, apparently now with some money (after losing everything in the film), and is very happy, thanks.
Where is Bruce Wayne’s struggle with his dark side? Where is his fight against adversity?
Bruce says to Alfred, “If Bane’s a hard nut, I’ll just be harder still. That’s what I always do.” And with that he completely undercuts any tension, any “will he / won’t he?” that might have followed. Bane captures Batman in Gotham, then suddenly we’re in the Middle East (I assume, there’s no explanation of how the characters get from Gotham to this mysterious place, they’re just there), and Bruce is put in a deep pit from which no one has ever escaped (* see Bane section below).
Bruce lies around for a bit, and we’re told that he’s going to have his soul tortured. That he will never escape, and will see his beloved Gotham destroyed. We don’t see any of this soul-torture. Bruce talks to Tom Conti, who does a bit of chiropracty on him, then he does some sit-ups, and is much better. And that point arrives where he could become flawed again, where the internal conflict could come back and make things interesting.
“You do not fear death,” says a handy character. “To escape, you must.”
At that point it could have become interesting – plunge back into the fear he spent so long escaping. Bruce climbs a wall to escape the pit, and he has to take a leap of faith. Which on his 3rd attempt, he does, and he makes it. At no point does the struggle look difficult for him. And this climb out of a pit into the light is supposed to be juxtaposed with his fall from perfection. Darkness should re-enter his soul, the ultimate irony: he should fear death and mortality just as he emerges into the light. And does it? No. He’s magically back in Gotham, and fights and defeats the baddies.
Let’s summarise the character journey here: he’s happy with the world, he has no flaws, he does things because they’re right, he’s captured, he has to become afraid (not face his fears), he escapes from a pit with no real challenge, and then wins. No struggle, no tension, no valedictory triumph. Where is the “Dark” Knight? This is a “Shining” Knight.
Writers: Learning point number 1: your hero needs to be flawed, they need to go on a journey and overcome a great challenge within. That challenge can be externalised – in Star Wars, Luke must face Vader, not just his greatest fear, but later, we learn, his father. Luke must face his own fears and strike down his own father. Now that’s a journey to go on. In this film Bruce has to be… perfect. “I’ll be harder still,” says Bruce and lo – it came to pass, as we knew it would.
2. Bane
What’s Bane about? He’s the baddie, right? Oooh, scary big man.
Nothing, except that he looks cool and gives Tom Hardy a chance to create a bonkers character. Credit where credit is due – Tom Hardy is enigmatic on screen. And this is especially hard given that Bane hardly moves, you can’t see his face, and you can’t hear or make out half of what he says. There’s a physicality to Tom Hardy’s acting that draws you in. It’s just a shame it’s so wasted.
Bane is the baddie of the film, until he isn’t. He stomps around looking angry. He appears to have a plan. He wants to grab this fusion reactor and turn it into a bomb and kill everyone. Except he doesn’t want to kill everyone, he wants to free the people from their rich rulers and their legal oppressors (the police, upholding the rule of law). Except he wants to kill everyone, because the bomb can’t be defused. But he also wants to free everyone from their oppressors. But he’s killed the only man who can defuse the bomb, so everyone’s going to die. But he wants to free… Hang on a minute. Let’s skip this and get to the proper point.
What is Bane’s motivation? If he’s successful, what does he achieve?
…
…
…
Well, we’re never told. That’s right. Bane wants to free people (and kill them) for the purpose of… Um. Er. Nope, no reason is given.
He’s the film’s main antagonist. He’s set up as Batman’s nemesis. At one point, when he captures Batman, he says that he wants to make Batman suffer, that he is going to torture his soul. There isn’t really any reason given for this.
Both Bane and Batman are products of the mysterious League of Shadows. Batman left, discovering they were a bit mental. In the first film, where the conflict is really driven by Batman’s internal conflict (his dark side vs his desire for love and affection) we find the League of Shadows pop up in Liam Neeson, who wants to spread disorder and bring down Gotham’s rulers. There’s no real reason given there, either, and it’s the weakest part of the first film. But it wasn’t so important, because that story was about Batman and his struggle. The League of Shadows was incidental. It wasn’t the point of the story. It was the cause of some bad things happening (Arkham, the Scarecrow and so on) but it wasn’t the major plot device.
Here, well. Let’s leave it there for the moment. We’ll come back to it in a moment.
The other thing with Bane is that he’s just a monster. There’s nothing sympathetic about him. We learn that he’s a protector for the Miranda character when she was young. We’re encouraged to believe that he’s in love with her. But by the point we learn this, there’s no space left for sympathy for him – the misdirected lover, brought into a world of evil by his over-riding love for a woman? No. By the time we learn this, he’s a man in a mask who’s killed loads of people. We don’t like him, and he’s about to die. The opportunity to create a sympathetic monster has been lost. If we’d learned earlier that he was tortured, that he’d followed Miranda into the League of Shadows to continue protecting her, having been blinded by unrequited or promised love, we could be better terrified by his monstrousness. All of that intelligence and might, which could easily have been used as a force for good, channelled into anarchy and hatred. The conflict which lies within us all, the monster we could all have become, and so on. But instead he’s just a monster.
Let’s look at a different aspect of Bane: his face mask.
He wears a mask and characters keep asking why. “A-hah!” you think, “the mask will be important later.” And it is, so let’s find out why.
In story telling if a character in a story has a “thing” – a trick, a knack, something different – it has to be because it serves the story. Continuing with the comparison to Star Wars, Darth Vader is trapped inside his suit and breathing apparatus because it serves to remind us of a couple of things: one, that he is vulnerable, the suit keeps him alive; two, that he was once fully human but has become “more machine now than man” – we know that somewhere inside there is a human. This is underscored by Luke’s assertion that, “There is good in him.” It creates a tragic character. Terrifying to look at, but vulnerable, human, and in secret conflict. And three, because at the end Darth Vader chooses to sacrifice himself. He could survive after killing the Emperor, but he asks Luke to remove his face mask at the point when he needs it most. He completes his journey, his redemption, and sacrifices himself for the greater good. Darth Vader wears a mask – has a thing – because it serves the story.
Bane wears a mask, and people keep asking, “Why?”. We learn the reason behind it – it is some sort of pain control device. Fine, but what’s the point of it in the story? At the end, Batman aims to punch off Bane’s mask (despite the leads coming out of it which you could easily pull out… but let’s gloss over that). And he succeeds! Ah, so now we’ll have some struggle with Bane. Now Bane is in pain, and he’ll battle against his sudden weakness and still try to defeat Batman, driven on by his rage only. He will… Oh no, Batman has him defeated. But Miranda turns up and, with a knife plunged between Batman’s ribs (which he conveniently forgets about a few moments later), plugs Bane’s mask in again. This is where the purpose of Bane’s mask is revealed, the reason it’s important to the story. Let’s change characters to find out why.
3. Miranda
Just as Batman has Bane on the floor, mask compromised, Miranda turns up. She plunges a knife between Batman’s ribs (not sure how she got through is body armour, but let’s gloss over that…) and with Batman immobile, she painstakingly plugs in the two loose leads on Bane’s mask. The sort of job that takes 5 seconds, but we’re entering exposition time.
She spends three minutes explaining what’s actually been happening for the past 2.5 hours. Yes, instead of creating tension at the start, by setting up a goal for the bad people, something we want to avoid happening, it’s explained right at the end.
“Hi,” she may as well have said, “I’m actually the baddie. Surprise! So, you know that bomb and all the carnage that Bane’s been going on about? See how you never knew why he was doing it? It’s because of me. I’m the daughter of Liam Neeson’s character. What’s that? There would’ve been more tension if we’d learned this earlier? Oh shush now. Yes, so he was my father. Both me and Bane were in the League of Shadows, but Bane was kicked out, so fuck knows why he’s trying to carry on their work. And I was too, I think. I’m a bit vague on that, really. I mean, I was, but I don’t appear to know any martial arts or anything. But also, have I talked enough yet? No, let’s carry on a bit more then. Oh yes, Liam Neeson was my father. But he rejected me. So why am I carrying on his work of blowing up Gotham? Um, why do I need a reason? I just am. Ha ha ha! What? Blow up another city? But I want to blow up Gotham because. Well, there isn’t a because. I just do, OK? Have I talked enough yet? Still not? OK, let’s draw this out a bit longer. Yes, I just thought I’d free the people from the rich rulers, like Daddy wanted. Oh, I’ve no idea what I’ll do after that. That’s right, thanks for the reminder, I’ll blow them up. I mean free them. Blow them up. Oh dear, I’m just as confused as Bane on this one. But hey, guess what! Bane said that the bomb’s trigger had been given to an ordinary person. That was because the power to control one’s destiny has been taken from the ordinary people and placed into the hands of the rich. And I hate the rich rulers of Gotham, even though I’m one of them. So guess what? As a very rich board member of Wayne Enterprises, I have the bomb trigger. That’s right. And I will explain away this contradiction by saying that “I’m a normal person, too.” And don’t point out how that means that the rich rulers are also normal people, because that completely undermines the point of removing the rich rulers. And stop asking why I want to remove the rich rulers. I DON’T NEED A REASON, OK? And I will free the people by killing them, and I don’t a reason for that either. Oh look, I’ve talked for three minutes. Now I’ll run away. Thanks.”
4. Bane (a slight return)
With your big baddie, you want there to be a struggle with the hero. In the ultimate fight, the baddie must almost win, until the hero finds that last ounce of strength, or makes that major internal breakthrough which allows them to rise up and defeat the baddie.
Here the resolution to the Bane/Batman fight is a Raiders of the Lost Ark lie. Catwoman turns up and shoots Bane mid-fight. We see him fly across the floor for about 0.25 seconds, and then – whoof! – we cut away and he’s never mentioned again. Talk about an anti-climax.
And what in the end was Bane’s motivation for killing so many people? We’re led to believe it was for the love of Miranda. Not that we see any compassion between them. At the end, when she runs away to get her precious bomb, she looks at him and says, “Goodbye old friend.” Ouch. Straight into the friend zone. What should have happened after was this:
BANE PAUSES
BANE
What did she just say?
BATMAN
Dude, she put you in the friend zone.
BANE
Bitch. I want my Blink 182 CDs back. BRB Batman. LOLZ!
BANE RUNS AFTER HER. THEY STRUGGLE OVER CONTROL OF THE BOMB. IT EXPLODES AND THEIR ANARCHY IS ULTIMATELY SELF DESTRUCTIVE.
That would’ve been interesting. But instead Bane doesn’t blink. He just tries to kill Batman, until Catwoman turns up – somehow knowing just where to find Batman – and shoots Bane dead, so ner! Is there a lingering camera shot over Bane, a remorseful comment like, “Love can blind even the best of us?” No, he flies across the floor, and before he even comes to a stop (or perhaps I blinked in that 0.2 seconds of screen time) we cut away and he’s never seen again.
Writers: the learning tips here are: even your monsters need a sympathetic side. A flawed bad person is just as interesting as a flawed good person. A “that could have been me in other circumstances.” And if there is a terrific, final conflict between your baddie and hero, make sure of two things: a) don’t stop the conflict half way through to explain what’s been going on for the last 500 pages of your novel, filter in that exposition throughout your story, and b) let the baddie’s defeat be satisfying. Let the hero fight and be on the point of losing, but then find some hidden strength they didn’t realise they had. Oh, and if your monster has a trick, a knack, a thing like a breathing mask, don’t give it to them because it looks cool, make it serve the story. If it’s their weakpoint, make the hero struggle to reach it.
5. Catwoman
I wasn’t going to bother with anything on Catwoman, but she serves a useful point for writing. If you have a character, make sure there’s a reason they’re that character.
Catwoman serves one purpose only: so Batman can find Bane.
Now, any character can do that. It could’ve been a junkie, one of Bane’s crew who had a crisis of conscience, even a remote controlled bat-drone-camera flying down a tunnel. A device would have done it.
If you make the character apparently central to your plot, like Catwoman appears to be, give them some depth, some of their own conflict, and a compelling reason to be there. In this film Catwoman is completely one dimensional, until she experiences a very strange conversion near the end (or perhaps doesn’t, which I’ll explain in a sec).
Here, Catwoman is a thief, and unrepentant. That’s what she does. She sells out Batman for what she can get out of it. Her character is caught in a bizarre trajectory of committing larger and larger crimes, none of which she’s indicted for, so she can get a computer program to wipe her criminal record, so she can stop committing crimes. She’s not a tragic character, just a stupid one.
At the end, she is ready to flee the bomb. “You’re better than that,” says Batman. “I’m not,” she replies. Flip forward a few minutes, and with no hint of internal conflict, she turns up to kill Bane.
What a strange conversion. No hint of conflict at all. But then there’s the end. In the closing few shots, we see Bruce Wayne and Catwoman apparently in love, and carefree. There is no hint of this through the film (or if there is, it is poorly acted and represented on screen, and not developed), until right near the end when Catwoman kisses Batman for no good reason whatsoever. Then that end shot, of them carefree. Perhaps she hasn’t changed, perhaps she just smelled money on Bruce Wayne, and decided to steal him to end her life of crime? Or… Nah, that’s too deep.
6. Other characters
Commissioner Gordon spends most of the film in a hospital bed, looking relieved to be out of the film. At the end he has some action, but looks bored and confused.
A police man keeps turning up at the right place and the right time during the film. He serves no use to the story, except that at the end we find out he’s called Robin, and he discovers the Batcave. So, you know. Franchise. Oh, and he knows Batman is Bruce Wayne, because as a 10 year old child he worked it all out and everything, so there.
There’s a police commander who gets very confused. Bane has just killed lots of people at the stock exchange and driven off with live hostages. He’s hacked into the stock exchange, for what reason no one knows – but as it’s a stock exchange, you have to accept the risk that it could bring down the global economy. One of the minor characters even says so. And with this as a backdrop, what does he do? Send all of the police to catch Bane and halt the story 30 minutes in? Nope. Batman turns up, so he chases after Batman instead. You know, with Bane having killed everyone and potentially causing global economic collapse. Because that makes sense.
Alfred’s in it, and Michael Caine steals every scene he’s in. What a wonderful actor. Only Alfred leaves about 30 minutes in, when it all starts crumbling into a dreadful film (well done, Michael Caine). We leap from Alfred exhorting Bruce Wayne to wake up to himself, through a very weird edit, to the two of them suddenly shouting at each other on the stairs, and Alfred saying he’s leaving. Just like that. He turns up at the end to preside over Bruce Wayne’s grave stone and see Bruce in Florence, all loved up with Catwoman. Because happily ever after is what happens to Batman.
Writers: if you have a character in a story, make sure they’re there for a reason. Catwoman could easily have been a drone, a tracking device, a Star Trek guy in a red shirt. It was inflated to a lead role because… Because you need a lead female character who looks hot in a catsuit? Surely Christopher Nolan can leave that kind of scripting to Transformers? And if you have returning characters, like Commissioner Gordon, so well portrayed as a troubled, layered personality by Gary Oldman in the first two films, then give them the same role if you bring them back. If Gary Oldman was too busy to shoot the film, then don’t put the character in. Ask yourself as a writer: why is this character here? If it’s “so the bad guy can escape”, then make sure letting the bad guy escape is within the character’s normal behaviour – a second in command police commander who goes chasing Batman when there’s grand larceny, murder and kidnapping going on isn’t a good example of this.
C. Editing
The Dark Knight Rises falls prey to George Lucas disease, which is increasingly affecting Hollywood. Combat scenes are drawn out and receive long camera shots and a lot of screen time. Exposition and story telling are reduced to micro-scenes, savagely cut and presented on screen in a series of disruptive lurches. The flow of character development and story telling in this film is awful, and some of the editing cuts scenes so far back that they have no room to breathe. It’s almost like there’s an editorial decision of “ARGH! STORY! Get it off screen as quick as possible!”
There’s always a tension in writing. Writers often want long descriptive scenes – Umberto Eco does it particularly well – whereas audiences want to be entertained. But sacrificing story for the sake of explosions isn’t the way to do it. If your audience (has been forced to believe that it) needs some action every 36.7 seconds (or whatever), then use the action to push forward the story.
At one point we have a great opportunity for some deeper, darker character development, when Bruce Wayne is cast into a pit. Tom Conti turns up and starts helping him (we aren’t told why). The sequence is essentially reduced to a montage of training, and is all the worse for it. Important parts of Tom Conti’s role are chopped up and spliced throughout the rest of the film, when placed together in a slower, intense sequence, they could have given Bane and Miranda some real character depth. A love forged in the dark and shadows, become tragically twisted by the rejection of Miranda by her father. But no.
Writers: pace is important, of course it is. Heavy exposition scenes (“Let me just explain my master plan, Mister Bond,”) can feel forced. It takes practice, and it needs feedback from your audience. Go by what Kurt Vonnegut said: “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.” Don’t leave the important information out, and don’t leave it so late in the story that no one cares any more. And don’t compress your character development scenes as if they’re annoying. They may need editing for pace, but they don’t need sacrificing for explosions.
D. Some other things while I’m ranting
In the film, a Special Forces team turns up to help the people of Gotham. They are killed immediately. So why have them in? Useless.
Bruce Wayne walks with a stick in the first part of the film. We even see him get a device which goes over his knee to help him walk. Then he’s thrown into a pit, wearing just rags. And… he can climb walls and walk just fine, thanks. Um.
We’re set up to care about some characters, like Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). Near the end we see him struggling to escape a chamber being flooded and… Um. What happened to him? Apparently he escaped, because he pops up later, but otherwise, we don’t see his struggle to escape. He just gets to a ladder and looks a bit panicked.
Gotham is threatened with a neutron bomb. This is later confused with an atom bomb. The two things are different. A neutron bomb would kill all the people, but leave the buildings standing. They are banned by international agreement because their purpose is to specifically kill people, rather than destroy infrastructure to impede an enemy. I don’t want to get in a discussion about arms control, but the reason a neutron bomb is used in the film obviously had some relevance at some point. It’s never drawn out, though. Maybe this is what the League of Shadows wanted? To kill everyone in Gotham so they could take over the buildings. But then… how would they do that? Oh yes, it’s never explained, because Bane and Miranda have no reason for doing what they’re doing, other than that Liam Neeson tried to do it in the first Batman film. You know, you kinda want to send them back to How To Be A Bad Guy School and have a conversation with them:
TEACHER: So, Bane, Miranda, which of you wants to tell me what your plan is for Gotham?
BANE: We want to free the people.
MIRANDA: That’s right. And blow them up.
BANE: Oh yeah. Blow them up.
TEACHER: I’m sorry, kids, you can’t free them and blow them up. Try again.
MIRANDA: Free them, then.
TEACHER: Good, and how will you do that?
BANE: By giving them control of a bomb that will blow up anyway, regardless of what they do?
TEACHER: Let’s go back again. What is it about these people that shackles them?
BANE: Um, oppressors. The police.
TEACHER: Good. And what do the police do?
BANE: Put rapists and murderers and thieves in prison?
MIRANDA: We want to free them of the rich people, stupid.
BANE: Oh yeah. We want to kill the rich. Miranda, you’re pretty.
TEACHER: Let’s stay focused. Once you’ve freed the people of the rich people controlling them, what do you want to happen?
BANE: Um. We kill them?
TEACHER: Sigh.
MIRANDA: I want my daddy.
Writers: Final point. If you write a script like this and it gets made into a Hollywood blockbuster, then well done you. Enjoy your big house and gold-plated pension. But if you want to keep your audience and be respected in the longer term, don’t write a script like this. It’s fucking terrible.
“You’ve lost me,” I said. I pressed HOME on the Kindle, a few other buttons and deleted the book. I felt bad, but then no one would ever find out.
Except – then I decided to blog about it. But why?
On Sunday just gone, I read the start of a book by a self published author. I picked up on the author from Google+ (which by the way is an amazing social media platform). Interested in their posts and the occasional link to their writing, I investigated, which led to a free sample of their book from Amazon.
Because their posts were lucid and well written, and because they talked about the publishing industry, I settled into their book with positive feelings. Here I could learn from somebody.
The book started with description, it described a scene. A quiet scene, and by the end of the first page, when nothing much had happened except the scene establishment, I was starting to waver. Don’t get me wrong, it was well-written, it’s just… nothing was happening. But I’d been reading this person, this author’s posts on Google+ for some time, so I wanted to like it. I persevered.
Finally there was some dialogue between two characters. Ah, was this going to lead somewhere? Would it give us the all important inciting incident? That thing which happens which is the cause of the story.
No. It was a minor exchange, which was probably meant to be tense, but because of the scene establishment – all rather bucolic, thank you very much – the dialogue came across as incidental. The scene moved on rather pleasantly and ended. And then we were somewhere else, where not much else was happening, other than a list of things in a different scene, and some one-sided dialogue in which a character listed things incidental to any story.
I ploughed on for a couple more pages, still hoping, and still nothing happened.
Which is when I decided to stop reading the sample and delete it from my Kindle. The writer had lost me. Or perhaps in retrospect it’s fair to say they’d never found me. I wandered, waiting to be found, but remained lost.
I used to do the same thing. It’s not always natural to start a story with an inciting incident. Sometimes as a writer you want to create the world first, so that when your reader finally gets to the story they get it. I mean, they really get it, in the same way the writer does in their head.
But here’s the rub: “…when your reader finally gets to the story…“. That’s what the reader’s there for, the story. Writers need to get to the story quickly. Pick up a book and read the first two pages. When does the story start? When is that all important inciting incident?
There is a great story about Ernest Hemingway setting a challenge to write an emotionally affecting story in as few words as possible. He came up with, “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” (And from there we get the game of “six word novels”.)
Bang! Those final two words out of six suddenly reveal the full horror of the story. We are set up by the first two words, “For sale:”. This is the inciting incident – something has been put up for sale. It’s the cause of the story. The middle two words give us some description, “Baby shoes”. At this point we don’t know why they’re for sale, but we know that the story has started – something has been put for sale by someone, and we are interested in what. Then we know that it is baby shoes for sale. These two words open up the reader’s emotions, making them vulnerable to the story. Babies are cute, babies are sweet, babies are delicate and need protecting, and babies can sometimes be annoying. So where are we going? We’re waiting for input, ready to invest ourselves in what comes next.
The final two words say everything that’s needed. “Never worn.” We don’t need any other description. We no longer need a description of the “for sale” sign, where the advert was placed, what the baby looked like. We don’t need to be told anything. We don’t have to know who wrote the advert, or when or in which country. Those two words, “Never worn” finally make our open minds do all the work in the story. We fill in from our own knowledge of the world.
Knowing when to give and leave out description comes from experience, of course. And some readers like more description and some less. Writers also have preferences with description. I prefer to give as little as possible and leave the reader to fill in the blanks so that the literary world becomes personal for them, whereas other writers are sumptuous in their scene descriptions. Eventually it comes down to a matter of taste and some compromise. Description is needed occasionally, and it has to be relevant and well written.
But regardless of where we lie with description – colouring in the universe in which our story is set – we still need the story. And stories need to start.
I’ve made the same mistake myself. My first novel, planetfall (currently with agents under the name All Fall Down) started with a couple of pages of slow description, where I tried to re-create a cinematic shot I could see playing in my head. It was sweeping, it was visual, it was beautiful. But there was no story in it. The story started, eventually, about ten pages in. That’s a lot to ask of someone, to read through pages of world creation without giving them a story.
So what can we do about this? If we’re amateur writers, and we want people to be interested in our stories, then how do we start our story, while also creating a world that people are interested in?
The best thing is to benchmark our approach with those already successful. I’ve just pulled four books at random from the bookshelf here. I’ll quote the inciting incident from them, and tell you where it is in the story:
James Joyce – The Dubliners: the very first line of the book. Here’s the first few sentences to show that the first line is the inciting incident
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true.
So we know that someone has died, there is a change in the quality of light, and that this had long been predicted. But we don’t know why, yet. There is some tension to be resolved.
Christos Tsiolkas – The Slap: a little tricky this one. It’s not as immediate as The Dubliners, but we are drawn into a world with tension from the first page. Here’s why:
…Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good. Aish was up.
We already know in the first three lines (as printed on the page) that Hector is happy to wake up alone. Then we build further down the page,
Sweet young cunt. He’d spoken out loud.
Connie.
At the thought of her, sleep surrendered its grip on him. Aish would think him a pervert if she had overheard him.
Now we know something else. This man, Hector, slowly waking, has said “Sweet young cunt,” out loud, and thought immediately of another woman, Connie. And we know that Aish, the woman he’s glad wasn’t in his bed when he woke, would think him a pervert. We are setting up dramatic tension. The inciting incident is established – Hector has woken, his private thoughts have leaked out, he is thinking of another woman, and he is suddenly glad his wife, Aish, isn’t with him in bed. We are now just before the end of the first page.
AS Byatt – Possession: this starts by quoting a poem, and then by establishing a scene. But buried on the first half of page is the inciting incident:
The librarian handed [the dusty book] to Roland Mitchell… It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no.5
In the opening lines we are in a world where books are locked away, rarely seen, and handed to people. The transfer of knowledge is the inciting incident. The opening of a book will let us – and Roland Mitchell – learn something. Over the next few lines we learn that this dusty book
sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland recognised the handwriting with a shock of excitement.
The world is established. Secret knowledge has been locked away, the librarian, the keeper of the secret knowledge, has handed it to Roland, and the book has sprung open, eager to disgorge what it contains.
Iain Banks – Espedair Street:
Two days ago I decided to kill myself.
Bang, straight in with Mr Banks.
Here we have different examples of inciting incidents: A light in a window showing that someone has died; a man waking alone and thinking of another woman; a book being passed over and springing open; a man deciding to kill himself. They all start on the first page and are fully established within two pages. Some start without description (Iain Banks), while others are prose-like (AS Byatt).
If you’re writing – short stories, novellas, novels, reports, articles – read over your recent works and try to establish if your inciting incident is captured within the first page or so. And if it is within the first page or so – is it obvious to the reader? Does it create some kind of dramatic tension, to which we need resolution? Who has died and why is it important? Why has Hector woken thinking of another woman, and who is Connie? What is in the book and why is it important to Roland? Why did the man decide to kill himself, and was he – or will he be – successful?
Try a few different versions of your inciting incident, and see what works for you. And importantly – ask someone to read your opening few pages, and ask for some feedback. Good luck.
The previous blog post was all about editing. How I have several editing passes, which includes typing up from written notes, reading on screen, printing out and going through with a red pen, and the final vocal edit – reading the work out loud.
I think I also wrote about going back to some more character based blogs – about specific characters from planetfall book 1. I will go into those in the next week or so. However, while it’s on my mind (actually, on the desk in front of me) I want to go back to storyboards.
For anyone new to the blog, I draw out a storyboard which describes the overall story structure: key points in the plot. I have no idea what happens in between. As I write I feel my way between those plot points, and that’s where the fun is.
I also write in long hand quite regularly, in Moleskine notebooks. Every time I start a new notebook, I copy the storyboard into it, so that I always have it inside the current notebook to refer to. Sometimes when I’m copying I realise that small details have changed within the storyboard. Sometimes these changes are large, sometimes they are incidental.
Tonight I was copying the storyboard into my current Moleskine and realised that, as I’d been writing from my memory of the storyboard and writing what seemed natural to the story, I’d drifted slightly from the storyboard I’d established some months ago. Here is a pic showing the difference between the original (left) and new (right) storyboard for a particular key plot point:
Original and new storyboard frame
Now let’s tackle one issue first: I can’t draw, and you shouldn’t expect to understand exactly what you’re looking at! So let’s describe this slightly. In both pictures you see a figure falling through the sky (the shared stick man figure). You can even see some sort of animated speed lines (the two lines going up, with cross hatching across them). This much is the same. So what’s changed?
This scene is key to the books. It shows the “planetfall” which the main character in book 2 takes, and from which planetfall takes its name. (And so for me there is huge pressure to get this scene right.) Originally, on the left, the protagonist was to fall over a verdant planet, swathed in grasslands and prairies, with a river glittering below, a blue snake across the landscape. You can see hints of this in the curved shape in the left hand panel’s upper right area. Small squares along the river’s side are suggestions of buildings, conurbations.
In the right hand panel this is gone. As I wrote, as the protagonist approached this planet, as it made planetfall, the river, the grasslands, the buildings all disappeared. Now there is a crashed ship (the black blob, with the broken lines behind it a gouge in the planet’s surface) to which the protagonist is making planetfall.
This changes things.
The subsequent panel in the storyboard shows some issues around the buildings identified in the left hand panel. Now this has to go. The action has to transfer to this crashed ship.
But can the action remain the same? What was supposed to be in those buildings? Whose buildings were they? Alien or human? And the ship, whose is it? Again, alien or human? Why is there no river now? If there are no buildings, does that mean there is no oversight? If there is no oversight, does that change the scene’s dynamics?
There are consequences to the decisions made in writing. Not all of these decisions are deliberate – the writing often decides where it’s going.
Now I have to follow this path and find out where it goes. As I copy up the rest of the storyboard, I have to think about how it changes. Does it change? Should it change? Does a small change in this panel have any effect beyond the subsequent panel? Or is it a wrinkle that will be smoothed by the overall story structure?
More, perhaps, soon…
(And next time, I promise to get back to some character-based blogging.)
The last blog post was a little light relief, a short description of the pens and notebooks I use when I write. (But hey, you got some photos with it.)
This blog post follows up on that, and will lead back to the technical issues of writing creatively. I’ll get back to writing about particular characters in planetfall after this blog post.
I normally start writing long hand. Not always, but most of the time. I do this for several reasons. First, writing can be quite lonely, and writing long hand is best done in a cafe where I can be surrounded by people (ha! and look mysterious and author-ly). Second, when I’m trying to find those first few words, the mechanical nature of moving my hand back and forth across the page feels more interactive than having my fingers hover over a keyboard, watching that blinking sentinel of a black cursor on a white laptop page glare at me. Third, I like to draw.
Now let’s explain this drawing thing. I can’t draw like an artist. There are no secret sketch books filled with pen-and-ink compositions waiting to be discovered. No, in that sense, photography is my creative, visual outlet (see my photography on Flickr). Ever since I was a teenager writing in English Language classes, I have doodled first before starting to write. I’ve written previously about storyboarding planetfall, which combines my habit of doodling with my approach to starting writing.
When I start to write a sentence in a fresh writing session, I often sit and doodle. But these days, in my Moleskines, I doodle without touching the page. I wave the pen nib over the paper and sketch invisible patterns. I see blank lines form traces over the yellow-ish page of the Moleskine, and as quick as they’re formed, they fade. This, combined with the hubbub of background chatter, forms a sort of audio-visual white noise, quietening competing thoughts and dimming distracting inner eye pictures. At some point while waving this pen-as-magic wand, the nib will be attracted to the page, the doodling loops will form the recognisable sigils of letters, I will see the scene in my head, and it will download to my hand and onto the page.
It is because of this process that I prefer to start writing stories and each fresh writing session by hand. I can get to a similar point on a laptop, but it takes a while. It’s generally only after having typed for some minutes that I can see through the laptop screen – well, let’s get this right, that I stop seeing the laptop screen and letters appearing one by one – to the movie playing out in my head, and can access that download sensation.
Which brings me onto editing.
Once I’ve written in long hand, I return to my flat and type up the writing. This allows me a first pass at editing. While reading the long hand and stumbling with my fingers over the keyboard, I notice missing words, clunky sentences, half-completed thoughts, uncompleted cross-references, areas where the scene is sketched but not coloured in. It is this process which acts as a first edit and a first chance at re-writing.
The second pass at editing comes in a couple of different forms, and neither is my preferred second option. The first way is to have a day or so’s break and re-read recent text on the laptop. This I generally do if I’ve written a new long hand scene knowing I’ve jumped a little bit, and need some filler sections. In those circumstances I will need to re-read the last couple of pages to get back into the scene and what’s come already, so I can properly fill in. Sometimes this fill in can be a line, a paragraph, or several pages. The second way, which I do for everything I write, is to print it and read it like a book, with a red ink Uniball gel pen to hand. I make editing notes as I go along. Quite often the editing notes consist of lines through entire sentences or paragraphs: deleting previous writing is a shame, but it is absolutely fundamental to producing the final text. Often I will change words or phrases, pick up my punctuation (I over-use commas) or write new sections. I deliberately chose red pen as it links back to those early days in school, and allows me to occupy another version of me, a separate, slightly more objective version, one that is modelled on teachers and is expected to criticise.
The third and final pass at editing (before the writing goes to other people to read) is the most critical and also the most painful.
I read the material aloud.
Every single word, every single sentence and paragraph and page.
This is a very powerful tool for self editing. I find it painful for two reasons. First, I don’t like my voice. Second, when I read my work, I can get a pretty good sense of how it would sound to someone else (with my voice included). The presumption of embarrassment of someone hearing nonsense is very strong. Yet this is a strong feedback loop. Once you hear your work out loud, you get a very different feel for it. You can hear the sounds, the rhythm, the way different words rise and fall and complement each other. You can finally hear the tone of your work, which can be fundamentally different to how it sounds in your head.
When we edit by reading, we use a limited number of senses. There is the look of the words on the page, and there are the sounds heard by our inner ears (by which I mean, the mental constructions of our internal monologues) and the spatial feel of the words and story in our head: the space it creates and the form that takes.
When we add real sound to this, coupled with the tangible, mechanical feel of our jaws and tongues moving, we add extra dimensions. The story comes alive (or fails to…) in different ways.
A poet would use the process to match sounds to each other within the metre of their verse. I do some of this, sometimes, if it feels important, although I am no poet and do not always have a sense of lyrical sounds in the text.
The simplest thing I get from reading aloud is how difficult it is to read the words. If my tongue really stumbles over certain word combinations, then it will be harder for someone else to read with their internal monologue. If I can smooth the sentence aloud, I know it will read more smoothly to someone else when they read to themselves. (I have had this direct feedback, unprompted, from a friend who proofread part of planetfall book 1: “It reads like someone’s reading it to you,” she said.)
The process is also important for creating a visual environment. Stories have an oral/aural history. The sagas of old were told around camp fires and in huts and caves in the dark. They had to create an inner, visual world for the listeners, both as distraction from the nightmares that stalked the night outside the protected circle, and also so that as many senses were utilised to help the listener remember the tale. I have a tendency to be a very visual writer, to rely on visual creations of scenes to transmit the story to the reader. If the work isn’t read out loud, if I don’t check how it hooks into those feedbacks between our sense of sound and sense of vision, then it will fail to make the final leap: to evolve that internal silent movie on the cinema screen of your mind, into a talkie; a moving picture with original soundtrack.
Editing is a very important process in writing. The writing starts – for me – with a connection between movement and inner vision. When I type I exploit the same mechanism. When I edit I edit visually. But when I do the toughest edit, I combine as many senses as possible – I add sound to the movement and images. This whole process always leads to significant changes to the text, and most authors at some point have spoken on this. To finish, here are two quotations from people deeply involved in (and far better than me at) the writing process:
Harry Shaw: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”
Michael Crichton: “Books are not written – they’re rewritten.”
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